the book I wanted to write could not be carried out in Turkey. The content and the leitmotif could easily be criminalized. This is not an aberration. Among my close friends and colleagues with whom I had taken part in certain activities regarding the Kurdish issue, many are jailed including some without indictment.
Despite the deserved appeal of Britain’s highly prestigious higher education institutions, the Brexit decision to move away from the European Union, which came a month before the coup attempt in Turkey and its giant step toward autocracy, meant that Britain was looking precarious to me. The permanent unease I would feel due to the situation in Turkey, combined with the restrictions Brexit might entail, would deprive me of the peace of mind that was an essential element for what I would be working on. For that, I needed freedom; not only freedom of the mind, but a vast space of free movement. Continental Europe and its larger Schengen area extending from Portugal to Greece, from Iceland to Malta, would provide me with that freedom.
Sweden, a member of the European Union, is in continental Europe. It is admittedly somewhat remote from Europe’s nerve centers, but at the heart of Scandinavia and immersed in Nordic mystery and tranquility, it has considerable appeal in many respects. Its natural beauty and the serene friendliness of its people make it even more attractive for souls exhausted by the conflicts and turmoil of the Middle East. Modesty and honesty shine as social characteristics of the Swedes, and the liberal atmosphere and cosmopolitan texture of the uniquely beautiful city of Stockholm provided the essential ingredients for the writing of this book.
A Turkish friend of mine who has been living Stockholm for an extended period, said to me one day, as if consoling me for being so far from my homeland, “You know what, the best part of living here for you is that it is an ideal place to write books. So tranquil and easygoing, just what you will need.” It was true. It is not by coincidence that for many decades, it has been the favorite residence for the Kurdish political and literary elite in exile, who in time were followed by tens of thousands of their kin. Living in Stockholm I have encountered numerous astute Kurds from Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria who have transformed into loyal and responsible Swedish subjects fully integrated into their adopted country, while keeping strong attachment to their ethnic identity and commitment to their homelands. In Sweden, they freely exercised the ethnic and civil rights of which they were deprived in their home countries; in this way, they became good Swedes while preserving their Kurdishness. I encountered the same sentiments even more strongly in the Syriac-Chaldean and Assyrian Christians who have emigrated to Sweden in tens of thousands from the southeastern part of my country, Iraq, and Syria—that is, Upper Mesopotamia.
Their presence in Sweden, their warmth, hospitality, and excessive manifestation of solidarity they displayed to me—typical of our Sharq (East), contrasting with the reserved demeanor of the Nordic people—has been an additional input to facilitate my life and my work. To my astonishment, there were instances when I was also recognized by Kurds who were not my compatriots. I met with bus drivers who introduced themselves as Iranian Kurds and expressed their gratitude to me for my advocacy of Kurdish rights, and invited me to their homes. That was very moving indeed, at a time when my homeland had developed into a brutal setting with no rule of law, where many of my colleagues and friends were suffering, either behind bars or at large.
Being surrounded by these people in Sweden became a constant reminder for me to accomplish the task of writing this book as a permanent reference about our shared history and collective saga.
In time, I also conceived that ironically there could be no other place more interesting than Sweden in which to write a book on a perennial war atmosphere and subsequent peace efforts. It has been over 200 years since Sweden was last at war. This country, which espoused neutrality during a century stigmatized by two devastating wars on a global scale, has taken the lead in mediation of international conflicts some of which are thousands of miles away. From Folke Bernadotte who was assassinated by a terrorist gang in Jerusalem four days before my birth while trying to mediate between the Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem, to Dag Hammarskjöld, the secretary-general of the United Nations, who died in Congo on his road to stop the bloodshed in the central African nation, Sweden has been a country whose best children have fallen martyrs to peace. Its historical personalities like Prime Minister Olof Palme and Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, both friends of the Kurdish people and the oppressed of the world, were assassinated at the heart of peaceful Stockholm, which was and still is deservedly considered a very safe and secure city. That is a paradox indeed, and one that made it attractive to me, as a Turk, to undertake the mission of writing a fair and accurate account of the conflict between my state and my Kurdish compatriots, under the paradoxical title Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds.
Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds was written wherever I have been during the past three years, on the Greek islands in the Ionian Sea or in my beloved Aegean; or even on the road, on trains in Sweden and the United Kingdom, onboard airplanes over the skies of Europe, and across the ocean to the United States. Yet it was mostly in Stockholm and Berlin, my two domiciles other than İstanbul, that the final touches were made.
Stockholm and Berlin (October–November 2019)
NOTE
1. Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 134.
The preamble of the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 stated: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.”1 Similarly, since the aftermath of World War I, the specter of the Kurdish question has haunted the Middle East, and Turkey more than anywhere else. All the new states of the postwar Middle East—Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria—established an unholy alliance to exorcise this specter, irrespective of their regimes.
Yes, a specter has been haunting Turkey for almost a hundred years—the specter of the Kurdish question. Ever since its foundation as a Turkish Republic over the debris of the Ottoman Empire that could not survive World War I, Turkey has been vacillating between war and peaceful settlement of the problem with the Kurds. Throughout this rather long period, it stood closer to war than to peaceful resolution of the conflict.
It can equally be asserted that the specter of the Kurdish question has been haunting the region of the Middle East ever since the imposition of the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement dividing the Ottoman territories in a way that ultimately led the Kurdish subjects of the Ottoman Empire to find themselves subjects of the Turkish nation-state, which is mostly situated in Asia Minor, the Arab state of Iraq in Mesopotamia, and another Arab state, Syria, in the Levant in the postwar regional order. Including Iran, where they have constituted a sizeable population, the Kurds were dispersed in four major countries in the region of the Middle East.
Among the four states with significant Kurdish populations in the post-World War I regional order, Turkey is a special case. Almost half of the Kurds in the world are citizens of Turkey. Despite the absence of official and reliable statistics on where the Kurds live in the Middle East, there are estimates based on population statistics and various other data, mainly provided by the Kurdish Institute in Paris. Accordingly, it is estimated that in 2016, 12.2 million Kurds inhabited an area of about 230,000 square kilometers in southeastern and eastern parts of Turkey that the Kurds themselves call Northern Kurdistan. The Kurds comprise 86 percent of the population in this area. The Turkish citizens of Kurdish descent who inhabit the Turkish-majority regions of Turkey and those in the European diaspora are estimated at between 7 and 10 million. Turkey’s megapolis, the former imperial capital İstanbul rather sarcastically considered as the largest Kurdish city in the world with its more than 3 million Kurds. The Kurds of Turkey thus are estimated to have a population ranging between 15 and 20 million. The most modest estimate indicates
