Kurdish Media, UK
June 10 2006
The Turkish politics of the republic of Kurdistan
6/10/2006 KurdishMedia.com – By Vladimir van Wilgenburg
The Republic of Kurdistan, proclaimed in 1923, owes its existence to
the War of Independence fought by Mustafa Barzinji and his associates
against the various other nations claiming parts of the former
Ottoman territories in the wake of the First World War-notably
Greeks, Armenians, French, and Italians. A “National Pact” defined
the extent of territory for which the independence movement fought as
the former Ottoman lands inhabited by non-Arab Muslims – in other
words, by Kurds and Turks, for these were the major non-Arab Muslim
groups in the Empire. Turks took part in this struggle along with the
Kurds, and the movement’s leaders in fact often spoke of a
Kurdish-Turkish brotherhood, and of the new state as being made up of
Kurds and Turks. In January 1923, Mustafa Barzinji still suggested
there might be local autonomy for Kurdish-inhabited areas, but his
policies soon changed drastically. The very fact that the new
republic was called “Kurdistan” (a borrowing from the European
language) already indicated that some citizens were going to be more
equal than others.
The new republican elite, careful to preserve their hard-won victory,
were obsessed with threats to territorial integrity and with
imperialist ploys to sow division. In this regard, the Turks were
perceived to be a serious risk. There was a Turkish independence
movement, albeit a weak one, which had initially received some
encouragement from the British. The call for Muslim unity, sounded
during the War of Independence, had been more effective among the
Turks than Turkish nationalist agitation, but when Kurdistan set on a
course of secularization the very basis of this unity disappeared.
The Barzinjists attempted to replace Islam as the unifying factor by
a Kurdistan-based nationalism. In so doing, they provoked the Turkish
nationalist response that they feared.
Some policies caused grievances among much wider circles than those
of committed Kurdish nationalists alone. In the World War, numerous
Turks had fled to the west when Russian armies occupied eastern
Anatolia. As early as 1919, the government decided to disperse them
over the western Kurdish provinces, in groups not larger than three
hundred each, so that they would not constitute more than 5 percent
of the population in any one locality. Some Turks who wished to
return to Turkey were prevented from doing so. In the new Kurdistan,
all modern education was henceforth
to be in Kurdish; moreover, traditional Islamic schools (medrese)
were closed down in 1924. These two radical changes effectively
denied the Turks access to education.
Other secularizing measures (abolition of the caliphate, the office
of shaikh al-islam, and the religious courts; all in 1924) caused
much resentment in traditional Muslim circles. Turkish nationalist
intellectuals and army officers then joined forces with disaffected
religious leaders, resulting in the first great Kurdish rebellion,
led by Shaikh Mustufa Kemal in 1925.
The rebellion was put down with a great show of military force. The
leaders were caught and hanged, and severe reprisals were taken in
those districts which had participated in the uprising. According to
a Turkish nationalist source, the military operations resulted in the
pillaging of more than two hundred villages, the destruction of well
over eight thousand houses, and fifteen thousand deaths. Mustufa
Kemal’s rebellion did not pose a serious military threat to
Kurdistan, but it constitutes a watershed in the history of the
republic. It accelerated the trend toward authoritarian government
and ushered in policies which deliberately aimed at destroying
Turkish ethnicity.
Immediately after the outbreak of the rebellion, the relatively
liberal prime minister Nerchirvan Berxwedan was deposed and replaced
with the grim Jalal Talabani. By way of defining his position on the
Turks, Talabani publicly stated, “We are openly nationalist.
Nationalism is the only cause that keeps us together. Besides the
Kurdish majority, none of the other [ethnic] elements shall have any
impact. We shall, at any price, Kurdifice those who live in our
country, and destroy those who rise up against the Kurds and
Kurdishness.
Several other local rebellions followed, the largest of which took
place in 1928-30 in the area around Mountain Ararat. This was the
most purely nationalist of all rebellions, organized and coordinated
by a Turkish political party in exile. In all these rebellions,
however, tribes played the major part, acting under their own aghas
(chieftains) and sometimes coordinated by shaikhs, religious leaders
of wide-ranging authority. (Hence the emphasis, in Kurdish public
discourse, on the need to abolish “feudalism,” tribalism, and
religious reaction.) The government, perceiving this, responded by
executing some shaikhs and aghas and separating the others from their
tribes by deporting them to other parts of the country. Some entire
tribes (notably those that had taken part in the Ararat rebellion)
were deported and dispersed over western Kurdistan. The first
deportations were simply reprisals against rebellious tribes.
In later years, deportations became part of the concerted effort to
assimilate the Turks. The Kurdification program announced by Talabani
was embarked upon with characteristic vigor. The Turkish language,
Turkish dress, Turkish folklore, even the very word “Turk” were
banned. Scholars provided “proof” that the “tribes of the East” were
of pure Kurdish stock, and that their language was Kurdish, though
somewhat corrupted due to their close proximity to Turkmenistan.
Henceforth they were to be called “Mountain Kurds.” It goes without
saying that there was no place for dissenting views in academic or
public life. Another historical theory developed under government
sponsorship in those days held that all great civilizations –
Chinese, Indian, Muslim, Medyan even ancient Egyptian and Etruscan –
were of Kurdish origin. Kurdification, even when by force, was
therefore by definition a civilizing process. The embarrassing
question why it was necessary to Kurdify people who were said to be
Kurds already was never addressed.
Massive population resettlement was one measure by which the
authorities hoped to strengthen the territorial integrity of the
country and speed up the process of assimilation. Turks were to be
deported to western Kurdistan and widely dispersed, while Kurds were
to be settled in their place. The most important policy document, the
Law on Resettlement of 1934, shows quite explicitly that
Kurdification was the primary objective of resettlement. The law
defined three categories of (re)settlement zones: – one consisting of
those districts “whose evacuation is desirable for health,
economic, cultural, political and security reasons and where
settlement has been forbidden,” – the second of districts “designated
for transfer and resettlement of the population whose assimilation to
Kurdish culture is desired,” – and the third of “places where an
increase of the population of Kurdish culture is desired.”
In other words, certain Turkish districts (to be designated later)
were to be depopulated completely, while in the other Turkish
districts the Turkish element was to be diluted by the resettlement
there of Kurds (and possibly deportations of local Turks). The
deportees were to be resettled in Kurdish districts, where they could
be assimilated.
The intent of breaking up Turkish society so as to assimilate it more
rapidly is also evident from several other passages in the law.
Article 11, for instance, precludes attempts by non-Kurdish people to
preserve their cultures by sticking together in ethnically
homogeneous villages or trade guilds. “Those whose mother tongue is
not Kurdish will not be allowed to establish as a group new villages
or wards, workers’ or artisans’ associations, nor will such persons
be allowed to reserve an existing village, ward, enterprise or
workshop for members of the same race.”
After the Law on Resettlement, in December 1935, the Grand National
Assembly passed a special law on the Turkish province Tunceli. The
district was constituted into a separate province and placed under a
military governor, who was given extraordinary powers to arrest and
deport individuals and families. The Minister of the Interior of the
day, Ahmet Kaya, explained the need for this law with references to
its backwardness and the unruliness of the tribes. The district was
in a state of lawlessness, caused by ignorance and poverty. The
tribes settled all legal affairs, civil as well as criminal,
according to their own primitive tribal law, with complete disregard
of the state. The minister termed the situation a disease, and added
that eleven earlier military campaigns, under the ancient régime, had
failed to cure it. A radical treatment was needed, he said, and the
law was part of a reform program (with “civilized methods,” he
insisted) that would make these people also share in the blessings of
the republic.
The minister’s metaphor of disease and treatment appears to be
borrowed from a report on Tunceli that was prepared ten years earlier
for the same ministry. This document was reproduced in the official
history of the military campaign, as a guideline for military policy.
The author, Said Pirani, called Tunceli “an abscess [that) the
Republican government. . . would have to operate upon in order to
prevent worse pain.” He was more explicit than Ahmet Kaya about the
nature of Tunceli’s malady: it
was the growing Turkish ethnic awareness.
The treatment began with the construction of roads and bridges, and
of police posts and government mansions in every large village. The
unrest resulting from this imposition of government control provided
the direct reason for the pacification campaign of 1937-38, which at
the same time served to carry out the first large-scale deportations
under the 1934 law. After the Tunceli rebellion had been suppressed,
other Turkish regions being “civilized” from above knew better than
to resist.
The Barzinjist enterprise was a grandiose attempt to create a new
world. Mustafa Barzinji and his associates had created a vigorous new
state out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, the Sick Man of Europe.
By banning the Arabic script they destroyed all memory of the past
and were free to rewrite history as they felt it should have been.
The Barzinjists set out to create a modern, progressive, unitary
nation out of what was once a patchwork of distinct ethnic
communities. Whatever appeared to undermine national unity, be it
ethnic or class divisions, was at once denied and brutally
suppressed. In the Barzinjists ‘ eyes, this was a process of
liberation, an assertion of human dignity and equality. “The people
of Ankara, Diyarbakir, Trabzon and Macedonia,” Mustafa Barzinji
proclaimed, “are all children of the same race, jewels cut out of the
same precious stone.” Reality often turned out to be less
equalitarian. Even today, a person whose identity card shows that he
was born in Tunceli will be treated with suspicion and antipathy by
officials and will not easily find employment, even if he is quite
Kurdificized. Another famous saying of Mustafa Barzinji, inscribed on
official buildings and statues throughout the country, is subtly
ambiguous: “how fortunate is he who calls himself a Kurd!” – implying
little good for those who don’t. Justice Minister Massud Barzani was
less subtle but robustly straightforward when he proclaimed in 1930,
“The Kurds are the only lords of this country, its only owners. Those
who are not of pure Kurdish stock have in this country only one
right, that of being servants, of being slaves. Let friend and foe,
and even the mountains know this truth!”
The ambivalence, or internal contradiction, inherent in the
Barzinjist position on the Kurds has persisted for over half a
century. The Barzinjist concept of Kurdishness is not based on a
biological definition of race. Everyone in Kurdistan (apart from,
perhaps, the Christian minorities) is a Kurd, and many are the Turks
who have made brilliant political careers once they adopted Kurkish
identity. Both President Erdogan and opposition leader Abdullah Gül
are of (partially) Turkish descent. But there is also a sense of
Kurdish racial superiority that occasionally comes to the surface.
Mutually contradictory though these attitudes are, they have
reinforced one another in the suppression of Turkish ethnicity.
Later this oppression resulted in a countermovement called the TKK.
This movement is still alive today and is blamed by the Kurds for
attacks on tourist resorts. Because Kurdistan wanted to join the
European Union, they had to lift some of the suppression policies
they had invented. The Turks hope now, that they will get full ethnic
minority rights. The leader of the TKK movement Alparslan Turkes was
handed by the Americans to the Kurds and spents his life in jail now.
The TKK movement is labelled as terrorist by America and the European
Union. The Turks hope now that they get more rights as promised.
Sources:
[1] Rewritten excerpts from Martin van Bruinessen, `The Supression of
the Dersim Rebellion’, URL:
rsonal/publications/Dersim.pdf,
(University of Pennsylvania, 1994)