attests to the fact that from July 2011, when the first peace process was terminated with the resumption of violence until March 2016, the end of my active journalistic career in Turkey, I wrote around 250 op-ed pieces on the Kurdish issue alone. That is roughly one piece a week. These were not products of an intellectual whose residence was an ivory tower of newspaper offices or academic centers. Most of them were written while reporting on the ground and through field experience. I have stepped foot on almost every inch of the territory that Kurds of Turkey and Iraq inhabit, and have also resided in Syria and Lebanon.
During the past decade, I have attended very many conferences, workshops, and seminars on the Kurdish issue, Syria, and Middle East politics from İstanbul to Diyarbakır, the city perceived as the political center of Turkey’s Kurds, from Beirut to Doha, from Erbil and Suleimaniyah to Baghdad in Kurdistan Region and Iraq, and from Brussels to Washington in the Western world, at respected academic institutions from Harvard to Oxford and the London School of Economics.
When my forty-year professional journalism career came to a halt in March 2016, eight months after the Kurdish peace process collapsed in Turkey, I decided to move on to the academic field to do further research and work on the failure of the peace efforts. This obviously was not alien territory for me. For a decade, I had lectured in the capacity of adjunct professor for the senior classes of several private universities in İstanbul on the Modern History of the Middle East, the formative period of the troubled region post-World War I, which held the origins of almost all the current intractable problems, ranging from the Palestinian question to the Kurdish issue.
When I began my research in May 2016 on “Turkey’s Failed Kurdish Peace Processes” at the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies as a “Distinguished Visiting Scholar,” I was confident to take the challenge.
My self-confidence was reaffirmed reading the new introduction that Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans wrote for the 2018 edition of E. H. Carr’s classic What Is History?, which has always been my guide on the philosophy of history and historiography. Evans began his introduction by familiarizing the reader with E. H. Carr:
E.H. Carr (1892–1982) was not a professional historian in any sense of the term that would be acceptable today. He did not have a degree in History. He never taught in a History Department at a University. . . . He did not take a Ph.D., nowadays the conventional route into the academic profession. On graduating in 1916, he went straight into the Foreign Office, where he remained for the next twenty years. . . . When in 1936 he resigned from Foreign Office to take up a Chair at Aberystwyth University . . . [he] spent increasing amounts of time practicing journalism while employed by the University. He became Assistant Editor of The Times in 1941 and wrote many leading articles for the newspaper until leaving his post in 1946. . . . Carr thus approached history from the angle of someone who had spent his life working for the Foreign Office and for a national newspaper. These influences and experiences strongly colored his views about history and how it should be studied.3
As an amateurish historian who does not hold a PhD, like my source of admiration and inspiration E. H. Carr, and a journalist who practiced the job for a period three times longer than his, writing the story of Turkey’s war and peace with the Kurds was a challenge I thought I could undertake.
The experience of my decades-old involvement with the issue, my direct relationship with the main protagonists—a cast ranging from former President of Turkey Turgut Özal, to the current one, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his predecessor Abdullah Gül, the late president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, the first president of Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Masoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey and the source of inspiration for Kurdish self-rule in Syria, Abdullah Öcalan, and the legendary guerilla leader of the Kurds, Murat Karayılan—provided invaluable insights in shaping my views on the road to peace and keeping an account on the war.
Providing exclusive information of historical value that I have been privy to throughout my experience, which has never been published or spoken anywhere publicly will, I hope, make the book unique. The content supported by anecdotes in my records and memory, again, are of historical value and importance as they are about my intimate encounters with the historical figures in defining the future of Turkey and the Kurds. As such, the book has the ambition of contributing to the historical record.
III
In 2010, I was entrusted to write a report on how to proceed to resolve Turkey’s perennial Kurdish question, entitled “‘Leaving the Mountain’: How May the PKK Lay Down Arms” and subtitled “Freeing the Kurdish Question from Violence.” The 114-page report was recognized at the time as the most comprehensive report to date, and it remains so. It was written at a period when hopes for a peaceful resolution of Turkey’s Kurdish question were high. The Arab Spring, disseminating optimism for a promising future for the troubled region of the Middle East, had just blossomed, including in Syria where turmoil had just begun, raising expectations for benign change for all the deprived segments of its population, and above all the Kurds.
The task was to provide a workable blueprint to the decision-makers for the resolution of Turkey’s decades-old Kurdish question by disavowing military means that had proved ineffective, thereby offering a way out of a seemingly intractable conflict without using means that further exacerbated it. The knowledge and awareness of peace talks between the belligerents, the Turkish state, and the insurgent organization the PKK waging an armed struggle against the former had inspired and guided this effort.
In the report’s foreword dated June 2011, I wrote:
There is nothing that has not been said or written to date on the Kurdish Question and the ways to solve it. During the various readings I undertook for the preparation of this report and during the one-on-one interviews I conducted with tens of people extending from the Presidential Palace to the Qandil Mountain, I arrived at the same conclusion. As a person who has been living with the Kurdish Question for the last forty years, it was a reinforced confirmation of a conclusion I had drawn so many times before. Therefore, this report does not reinvent the wheel when it comes to the resolution of the Kurdish Question. . . . The historical period ahead of us gives ample opportunities for removing violence from the Kurdish Question.4
If the report were to be reprinted, I would refrain from keeping the preface of 2011 as it was written. The report deserves a whole new introduction. The wheel, it seems, needs to be reinvented for the resolution of the Kurdish question. The historical period in which we found ourselves in the second half of the 2010s greeted us with more ambiguities than opportunities to end the violence related to the Kurdish question. The experience taught me to be more prudent in reaching hasty conclusions and making generalizations in writing history.
IV
It was early October in 2012, in İstanbul. When we met after not having seen each other for more than two years, Barham Salih, an old friend with whom I had labored to promote good and close relations between Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds, opened his arms wide and approached to hug me, shouting jovially in English, “Cengiz, the Kurdish moment has arrived!” Barham, who would become the president of Iraq six years later, with a beaming face spoke as the harbinger of a long-awaited outcome. From the Gulf War in 1991 on, thanks mainly to the developments in Iraq, Kurds had managed to establish self-rule in the northern part of the country, and in the wake of the controversial War on Iraq waged by a US-led international coalition and the eventual removal of the Arab nationalist totalitarian regime of Saddam Hussein, they had established a quasi-independent state. Their influence had extended to the center of power, to Baghdad, where the portfolio of presidency of post-Saddam Iraq was reserved for them. The epic Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani filled the post for the first time from 2006 to 2014, to be taken over by one of his aides, Fouad Masum, and later his disciple Barham Salih in October 2018.
I generally shared the optimism manifested by Barham in the fall of 2012. In numerous conferences, symposiums, and panels
