Turkey’s Mission Impossible. Cengiz Çandar
left its mark on a global scale cannot be understood without reserving a special place for Erdoğan alongside M. Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, and Abdülhamit II, the legendary Ottoman Sultan.
With a nod to the everlasting historiography debate, chronicling the rupture and continuity in Ottoman-Turkish history necessitates the inclusion of these three larger-than-life political names, Abdülhamit II, Atatürk, and Erdoğan. While the narration of history and its crucial episodes certainly features its outstanding individuals, however, I kept as my permanent reference point E. H. Carr’s cogent argument:
What distinguishes the historian is the proposition that one thing led to another. Secondly, while historical events were of course set in motion by the individual wills, whether of “great men” or of ordinary people, the historian must go behind the individual wills and inquire into the reasons which made the individuals will and act as they did, and study the “factors” or “forces” which explain individual behavior. Thirdly, while history never repeats itself, it presents certain regularities, and permits of certain generalizations, which can serve as a guide to future action.11
Moreover, the sine qua non of historiography, “historians should try to rise above their personal prejudices when writing history,” accompanied me throughout Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds. I consciously observed this principle, and therefore I am reasonably confident that objectivity (but not neutrality) in that respect has been achieved in this work.
VIII
I was also lucky to call on the help of some extraordinary historians, my contemporaries, who supplied me with invaluable assistance in terms of information, angle, argument, and empirical data. The leading two names in this respect are, interestingly enough, historians whom I have never met or communicated with. Their books and works, some in long article format, played a tremendously important role in the writing of this book. The Dutch historian Erik J. Zürcher and the American historian Ryan Gingeras have been with me from the very first days of the research period, without knowing it at all.
I have never sympathized with official historiography irrespective of the country it is dedicated to. The so-called historians in the service of the official ideology, for me, are propagandists, not historians. I have always sympathized with, been interested in, and been impressed by what is called, depending on the location, context, or period, the revisionist or new historians. The unorthodoxy that they harbor in their essays and books, the creative thinking that they reveal, the challenging new approaches that they bring to the history of a specific country and period have always been thought-provoking for me besides opening up new horizons and filling my treasury of knowledge with invaluable facts that they provide. Regarding the late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish history, Erik J. Zürcher and Ryan Gingeras excel among all the others of no less importance, to whom I also owe much. In 2018, Swiss historian Hans-Lukas Kieser, with his work entitled Talaat Pasha Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Armenian Genocide, and the revolutionary historiography that he proposes, stepped into the pantheon of historians who have helped me to understand what happened, and why it happened in the way it did, in Turkey in the last 100–150 years. I benefited immensely from reading his revolutionary book and found confirmation for some postulates of mine for interpreting the modern history of Turkey. The closing chapters of Kieser’s book are devoted to the controversial issues of the “Deep State,” “New Turkey,” and the prospects for Turkey’s future, and therefore the Kurdish issue. With their unique and robust arguments relying on valuable empirical data, Zürcher and Gingeras equipped me for Turkey’s Mission Impossible with concepts essential for my hypothesis on the configuration of power in the “New Turkey.”
The spirit of unorthodoxy that I treasure in history writing, along with the strong encouragement garnered from the oeuvres of Erik J. Zürcher, Ryan Gingeras, and many others, has inevitably made its mark on Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds. That was what I cherished in writing the book.
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The Herculean challenge confronting me has been how to achieve a time-resistant book, which would remain valid as a source of reference in a rapidly and permanently changing world, especially regarding the fluid political circumstances and constantly shifting sands of the Middle East. Unlike in previous decades, the world and above all, the region of the Middle East seem to have entered into an age of uncertainty. When I was close to completion of writing the book, a young Swedish diplomat who had spent some of his career in Turkey and knew about my mission asked me how I saw the possibilities for settlement of the Kurdish conflict in the near future, and whether the book would have a happy ending.
I reminded him that the book discusses a number of questions: What is the true nature of the Kurdish question? Is it intractable? What went wrong in the peace processes that continued for almost a decade and ended with failure producing devastation and tragic consequences in the world’s most volatile geopolitics? Can Turkey survive the Syrian conflict? Will the aspiration of Kurdish independence come true or remain a pipe dream? What will the future Middle East look like in comparison to the Sykes-Picot order of post-World War I or the seventeenth-century Westphalian order in Europe that followed the Thirty Years’ War? It has certainly been my aim to investigate likely answers to these questions. Yet, I recognized that we were passing through a period characterized above all by uncertainty. Consequently, Turkey’s Mission Impossible does not offer any facile or happy ending. Alongside its ambitious aims, it humbly acknowledges the peculiarities of this unprecedented, unique episode of history: the period of uncertainty.
NOTES
1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Classics, 2002), 2.
2. Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times (London: Abacus, 2003), xiii.
3. E.H. Carr, What is History? (London: Penguin Classics, 2018), ix, x.
4. Cengiz Çandar, Leaving the Mountain: How May the PKK Lay Down Arms? Freeing the Kurdish Question from Violence (İstanbul: Tesev Yayınları, 2011).
5. Carr, What is History?, ibid., 5.
6. Ibid., 8.
7. Ibid., 17.
8. Ibid., xvii.
9. Ibid., lxv
10. Ibid., 48.
11. Ibid., xviii.
Historical and Ideological Background
Turkey has the distinction of being the only country that has denied the existence of the Kurds for decades—although it is home to one of every two Kurds in the world. Turkish official denial of the existence of a distinct Kurdish identity goes back to the foundational period of the republic in the aftermath of World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman Turkey, the predecessor of the Republic of Turkey, as an empire was thus in essence a multi-national and multi-ethnic entity. Its successor state was constructed on those former territories of the Ottoman state that could be salvaged from partitioning by the victors of the World War, primarily Britain and France, or from acquisition by the allies of those victors. It was designed to be a Turkish nation-state.
The “New Turkey” of the 1920s that replaced Ottoman Turkey was the logical outcome of a formative phase, the years of the Balkan War (1911–1912), World War I (1914–1918), and the war for national independence (1919–1922) where Muslim nationalism had predominance as an ideology. Creation of a Turkish national state could be achieved by demographically de-Christianizing Asia Minor to be inhabited as a refuge for Ottoman Muslims, and as a cradle for a modern state where the upper identity would be Turkish, a notion used synonymously for Muslim. The