and Syrian Kurds formed a cult of personality, made statements on their firm commitment to its success. No initiative in the Republican Turkish and therefore Kurdish history had kindled expectations as strongly as the peace process that ended in July 2015.
The developments related to the Kurdish issue following the year 2015 illustrated that scrutiny on the causes of the failure of the peace processes could and should not be taken in isolation. Any analysis disregarding the regional and international developments would be unforgivably flawed.
Thus, the scope of the book expanded from being merely a study on the failure of peace processes into an analysis of the issue in its entirety, with its past, present, and future.
VI
Working on Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds raised some fundamental questions, the most important of which was the methodology to be used in taking up the subject. I grappled with specific theoretical questions. The paradoxical issue of simultaneous subjectivity and objectivity came to the fore, as I have been an active participant in the story that I would narrate and analyze in the book. It could not be written in the format that a non-committed and uninvolved scholar would employ in revealing the results of his research conducted in libraries and archives.
There are no universal norms and even generally accepted principles on the issue of objectivity and subjectivity in the writing of history. There was a legitimate question I asked from the very beginning: Why would having a role in the resolution of the Kurdish question cast a shadow of subjectivity on my assessments, more so than a respected armchair scholar working only from alleged primary sources? My personal experience during many twists and turns of the Kurdish conflict has been the primary source for this research per se. The value of these experiences as direct testimonies to historical junctures and their first-told narratives can, I believe, easily contest the supposedly objective, yet a distant take of an academic bystander who writes in the comforts of education institutions and misses many details that make the history what it is. The latter would be an easier and more comfortable choice for me yet would lack the excitement of onsite discovery and firsthand experience.
The other theoretical issues that preoccupied me in the writing of the book were concepts of historiography like causation and chance, the role of the individual, free will and determinism, and whether history runs through laws that lead us to inevitability. Is there anything like historical inevitability? The responses to these questions, naturally, would frame the subject matter of the book and eventually its conclusions. These were serious questions, most of which E. H. Carr had discussed in his immortal classic, What Is History?
Contemplating the role of chance in history, I queried: If, as a Turk, I had not involved myself in the most existential question of Turkey with a perceived and staunch pro-Kurdish stance that put me always in trouble with the security establishment of my country and produced threats on my life, how different would the trajectory of my career have been? As an orthodox researcher and academic scholar, I would still choose to work on the Kurdish conflict but with a fundamentally different life than I have had. Would that make me more objective and more scholarly, or more subjective really? The logical follow-up to this question was just another one: If I had not played an intermediary role between Turgut Özal and Jalal Talabani (later including Masoud Barzani as well), which broke what had been a taboo since the 1920s, would the trajectory of the events between Turkey and Kurds have been? If I had not known Talabani in 1973 in Beirut and despite the irreconcilable differences in our upbringing and ideological backgrounds, besides the generational difference, if I had not taken the unexpected pro-Özal position in the overwhelmingly hostile Turkish mainstream media in 1990, would I have been able to play the role I played? Supposedly, the principle of causality in historiography and the element of chance or coincidence cannot survive.
I tried to surmount the paradox—not to solve the problems—by bringing my anecdotal experience into Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds. As I argued earlier, these experiences are my primary sources. I thought this was compatible with what the founder of modern source-based history, Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), would demand. Ranke, in E. H. Carr’s description, is a “talisman for empirical historians” and a titan of historiography who left a powerful mark on history writing in the nineteenth century. For Ranke, the task of the historian was to study, research and then to show “how it really was”5 or as he phrased it in German, “wie es eigentlich gewesen.” He did not believe in the philosophy of history as Hegel did, or in general theories that cut across time and space. In his historiography, he used quotations from primary sources.
For me, my anecdotal contributions in the book were somewhat like taking refuge in Ranke’s gargantuan authority. I knew that Ranke’s dictum “wie es eigentlich gewesen” had attracted extensive criticism from the great historians of the twentieth century whom I also admired, notably E. H. Carr and Fernand Braudel (1902–1985), the great French historian and leader of the Annales School in historiography. They both challenged Ranke. Carr opposed Ranke’s ideas of empiricism as outmoded, and underlined that historians did not merely report facts, they chose which facts they used. Facts and documents are essential to the historian, but they do not by themselves constitute history, according to Carr. The historian’s selection of the facts makes what history is. He argued brilliantly that Caesar’s crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of Rubicon by millions of other people before or after Caesar interests nobody at all, and wrote, “The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy.”6
Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), the renowned Italian historian, philosopher, and political activist, carried that understanding to new horizons. For Croce, “All history is contemporary history, because history consists essentially in seeing the past through the eyes of the present. . . . The main work of the historian is not to record, but to evaluate; for, if he does not evaluate, how can he know what is worth recording.”7
The element of subjectivity, therefore, is not only unavoidable for writing history, but is an inherent condition of it. Carr’s friend but at the same time his fierce critic, Sir Isaiah Berlin, influenced by the experience of the Holocaust and the totalitarian practices of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union, in his famous essay “Historical Inevitability” brings up the argument that “human beings are unique by their capacity of moral choice” and accords “moral responsibility to the historian” in history writing. Thus, Berlin carried the element of subjectivity to further horizons: “There is always a subjective element in historical writing, for historians are individuals, people of their time, with views and assumptions about the world that they cannot eliminate from their writing and research, even if they can hope to restrain it.”8 This observation was entirely valid in the writing process of Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds.
Delving into the passionate debate among the great historians presiding over more than a hundred years to dig out the methodology for Turkey’s Mission Impossible has not only been an amusing and thought-provoking exercise but also a constructive one. The research taught me that until recently, alongside many from my generation in Turkey, I have been guided by a primitive understanding of Hegelian determinism and Marxian materialism in looking at history, tropes that have injected a linear directionality into our view of history. History was seen through the lens of an inevitable progress toward our ideologically preferred objectives. Of course, to neither Hegel nor Marx can be attributed the responsibility for this, but in writing Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds, I consciously refrained from adopting historical determinism as the sole tool of my analysis. Instead, I wanted to make use of all the available tools in the rich arsenal of historiography, in an eclectic manner. If “how it was” and “what really happened” had precedence in Ranke’s historiography, it
