Turkey’s Mission Impossible. Cengiz Çandar
his personal contacts with Kurdish leaders and his willingness to assist Turkish government initiatives to pursue a negotiated resolution, he has been eyewitness to what he aptly terms “Turkey’s mission impossible.” Indeed, Çandar reveals in this book details of the Turkish-Kurdish peace process that have never been related before. Starting with his first initiative under President Turgut Özal in 1993, Çandar takes the reader into heart of the Turkish-Kurdish labyrinth.
Taking the Turkish-Kurdish conflict as his most important life’s work, Çandar opens his book with a concession of defeat. Yet in reading his text, I sense frustration more than defeat. Indeed, writing this book is a means of preserving the good that was achieved in nearly three decades of hard negotiations. We the readers are implicated in an issue that, a century on, remains unresolved. Our job is to keep our governments from letting Kurdish rights slip from the agenda, and to press for the peaceful resolution of their legitimate demands. In that sense, I wish for this book the widest possible readership.
Eugene Rogan
Director
The Middle East Centre
The University of Oxford
Notes on Spelling and Transliteration
I have translated all of the quotations that I used in the book from Turkish to English. For the Turkish and Kurdish names, I followed modern Turkish spellings for the most part. For instance, since the official name of the city in Turkish is İstanbul, I preferred to use the capital İ, instead of Istanbul as it is written in English. In Turkish, both letters i and ı exist, as do g and ğ. The surname of the president of Turkey is Erdoğan. In the quotations from original English sources, I left it as Erdogan, but whenever I referred to him, I opted for Erdoğan. I applied the same rule for the name Talât in Turkish. In quotations from English-language sources I quoted the name as Talaat, while in my references, I used its Turkish form, Talât. Also for names that include the letters c and ç, as in my own name and surname, I stuck to the modern Turkish spellings instead of clarifying them in English as dj and ch. In some English sources, the name Cavit was spelled as Djavid, and I retained this spelling when quoted. I applied the same rule for the Turkish letter ş. Instead of writing sh, I kept ş as in the name Şahin.
For the Kurdish names, I used the Latin alphabet for the Northern Kurdish language (Kurmanji) developed by Jaladat Bedirkhan (Celadet Bedirhan) in 1931. For the Syrian Kurdish town, I preferred to use Kobanê, instead of writing Kobani as it is written in Turkish. However, there were specific cases like the name of the city of Sulaimaniyah in the Sorani-Kurdish speaking part of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Its inhabitants use the Latin transliteration of Sorani-Kurdish, Sulaimani, yet it is registered as Süleymaniye (in Turkish) as a former Ottoman town. Thus, various spellings such as Sulaimaniyah, Sulaimaniya, and Sulaymaniyah are alternately used, as I did in the book.
Writing Turkey’s Mission Impossible
It was February 2017 in Beirut. I was delivering a speech at the Institute of Palestine Studies, the respected research center where I had enjoyed the privilege to speak on Turkey’s Middle East policy several times in the last decade. My talk was entitled “New Turkey: A Revival of the Ottomans or the Last Phase of the Ottoman State?” In front of an audience comprising the Lebanese and Palestinian political and cultural elite, I commenced my talk with a self-criticism that would not normally be anticipated from me. It was almost half a year since an autocratic regime had begun to establish itself in Turkey, and the peaceful settlement of the Kurdish question had already turned into a pipedream. With these two developments, my decades-old career had seemingly ended in failure.
“I concede my defeat,” I said, and reminded them of the myth of Sisyphus in ancient Greece. Sisyphus was the heir to the throne of Thessaly in central Greece, yet he was condemned to eternal punishment for his offenses against the gods. He was doomed to roll a massive rock up to the top of a steep hill. His efforts were always in vain for whenever Sisyphus neared the top, the rock would roll all the way back down and Sisyphus had to start all over again. “The lives of myself and many in my generation connoted the task of Sisyphus. We tried to roll up the rock, and every time we were near the summit, it rolled down and we obstinately started from scratch all over again.”
“But this time,” I continued, “it is different, because I have neither the energy to push the rock back uphill, nor the time left for it.” Notwithstanding with the futility of our efforts and our refusal to surrender completely to the bitter facts, I said, “I can find consolation in the truth that, at least, we tried. That will be our legacy for the future generations.”
If before my Beirut talk I had read An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japanese-British novelist who won the Nobel Literature Prize in 2017, I could have modified my introductory statement. Ishiguro wrote:
A man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than the ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions. . . . If one has failed only where others have not had the courage or will to try, there is consolation—indeed, deep satisfaction—to be gained from his observation when looking back over one’s life.1
What Ishiguro had written is a better description of me and many people of my generation than what I tried to depict with the myth of Sisyphus.
Taking courage from his portrayal, writing this book, Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds, is in a sense an effort to keep trying.
Although this is by no means a literary work, I found many commonalities between my book and Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels. His novels, for example, often times end without a resolution, and the issues that his characters confront are buried in the past and they too remain unresolved. Thus, Ishiguro ends many of his novels on a note of melancholic resignation. Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds, I must say, has a similar spirit, follows a similar pattern, and arguably ends in a similar way.
Ishiguro’s characters accept their past and embrace what they become, typically discovering that this realization brings comfort, and an end to mental anguish. That also, partly, explains my motivation for writing this book. I too accept my past and who I have become. Writing becomes therefore a sort of obligation to myself, to bring at least relative comfort and resolution of my anguish.
An Artist of the Floating World is an examination of the turmoil in postwar Japan, seen through the eyes of a man who is rejected by the future and who chooses to reject his own past. This served as an excellent metaphor for my book: peace with the Kurds is rejected by the future, and they (the Kurds) and we (all those who have wanted to resolve the conflict through compromise and in human dignity) have chosen to reject the past. That rejected past was shaped by the war with the Kurds.
Yet, Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds could never have been written, at least in its current form, if there had been no coup attempt in Turkey on the night of July 15, 2016. The coup found me in Stockholm where I was busy with my five-month residency at the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies. Two months later I was to begin my one-year residence at the Middle East Centre of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. Prof. Eugene Rogan, director of the Centre and a brilliant historian of the Modern Middle East and late Ottoman period, had sponsored my participation. I had encountered Eugene Rogan’s name for the first time in 2010 while visiting Blackwell’s, the legendary bookshop in Oxford. It was inscribed over a brick-thick volume entitled The Arabs sitting solidly on the shelf. The publication was brand new and I was fascinated by a quick glance through its seemingly endless pages. I purchased it without any hesitation. A few years later what, for some, would be his magnum opus, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920 was fresh on the market. Probably I was lucky enough to be one of its earliest readers when by mere coincidence I discovered it on its first day in Berlin’s famous bookshop Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus, in 2015. I avidly consumed it over a couple of hours.
With this background, I could not have been happier when I received