Turkey’s Mission Impossible. Cengiz Çandar
nationalism as the foundational ideological pillar of the new Turkish state in the following passage:
The Kemalist concept of nationality was thus firmly based on language, culture, and common purpose (“ideal”).9
The Roots of the Kurdish Question
The Kurdish question therefore, in the allegoric sense, is the outcome of those Kurds who refused to sign the “Turkishness Contract” or could not be accommodated in it. In other words, those segments of the Kurdish population that the Turkish state was unable to assimilate, or those who resisted and, going even further, revolted against the denial of their identity in consecutive uprisings.
In a country where one of two Kurds in the world reside, the ban on the usage of the terms Kurd and Kurdistan and the subsequent persecution and suppression of those who resist the ban, has placed Turkey in a unique position. Among the four countries in the Middle East where Kurds form a significant component of the population, Turkey is the only one in which the word Kurdistan is taboo. In Iran, despite the restriction of fundamental rights for the Kurds, there has always been a province named Kurdistan; in Iraq neither the term “Kurdistan” nor “Kurd” as an ethnic identity with distinct linguistic and even administrative rights has ever been banned or denied; and in Syria, the usage of those terms never has been a matter for persecution.
Despite the absence of official and reliable statistics on the Kurds where they live in the Middle East, there are estimates based on population statistics and various other data. Accordingly it is estimated that, in the year 2016, 12.2 million Kurds inhabited an area of about 230,000 square kilometers in the southeastern and eastern parts of Turkey that the Kurds call Northern Kurdistan. The Kurds comprise 86 percent of this area’s inhabitants. The Turkish citizens of Kurdish descent who inhabit the Turkish-majority regions in Turkey and those in the European diaspora are estimated to number between 7 and 10 million. Turkey’s megapolis, the former imperial capital İstanbul having more than 3 million Kurds, is sarcastically considered the largest Kurdish city in the world. The Kurds of Turkey are thus estimated to number at least 15 million, ranging to 20 million. The most modest estimate indicates them as making up around 20 percent or one-fifth of Turkey’s population. The probable ratio, though, is 25 percent; that is, one-quarter of the citizens of Turkey are Kurdish.
The minimum estimate for the total number of Kurds worldwide is 36.4 million, while the figure could climb to 45.6 million. In both cases, the Kurds of Turkey constitute half of the total Kurdish population of the world.10
In Turkey, the rejection of the terms “Kurdistan,” “Kurd,” and “Kurdish” continued almost to the end of the twentieth century, and the persecution, albeit at different levels, did not cease even in the first decades of the twenty-first. A de facto ban on the term “Kurdistan” is a permanent phenomenon. Apart from the effective avoidance of these terms for Turkey’s southeast and eastern regions—even solely with a geographic connotation in a historical context—Turkey’s rulers refrained from addressing by its official name its immediate neighbor, the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, notwithstanding their close personal ties with its leadership and the fact of Turkey’s being its major economic partner.
Figure 1.1 Infograph of Distribution of the Kurds in the Middle East. Source: Mehrdad Izady.
Figure 1.2 Map of Sèvres for an Independent Kurdistan (1920). Source: Mehrdad Izady.
The Sèvres Treaty
In addition to the ideological background of Turkey’s ruling elite based upon the foundational principles of the republic, Turkish nationalism, which obstructs Kurdish national aspirations even at a minimum, the ill-fated Treaty of Sèvres signed on August 10, 1920, with its perpetual traumatic effect on the Turkish psyche, also had a tremendously important influence on Turkey’s denial of Kurdish identity and its repressive demeanor vis-à-vis the Kurds, even those beyond Turkey’s frontiers.
The Treaty of Sèvres was among the treaties that the losing parties of World War I were made to sign, yet it was also the only one that was not ratified and thus not implemented and ultimately nullified. It is replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne (July 24, 1923), which is regarded as the international legal basis for the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. The Treaty of Lausanne made no mention of Kurdistan or the Kurds. With it, the opportunity to unify the Kurds in a nation of their own was lost altogether, turning Turkey into a negation of the idea of the independent Kurdistan. Indeed, Kurdistan after World War I was more fragmented than before, and this became the root cause for the rise of separatist movements among the Kurds scattered in various countries of the Middle East.
Veritably, the Kurdish question in Turkey and in the region has deep roots structured in the post-World War I order of the Middle East, an order that survived almost a century. There are thus structural reasons that have led to its remaining unresolved, as well as the ideological shortcomings and restrictions of the Turkish government and lack of acumen among politicians.
Moreover, the Turkish psyche, scalped in the aftermath of the Ottoman collapse, proved to be decisive in the Turkish response to the perceived Kurdish challenge. Although the Sèvres Treaty became null and void, being replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne, in the eyes of the Turkish nationalists, it signified the Western objective of dismembering the territories of Turkey and marked the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I, a sequel to the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), which was similarly never implemented in letter, but symbolized the unwarranted and unjust partitioning of the Middle East among Western colonial powers. Its terms spelled out the renunciation of all the non-Turkish territory, and its cession to the adversaries of the Ottoman state during the Great War. The treaty was signed when the Turkish national struggle was already underway, further stirring hostility and nationalist sentiments among Turks. Although the success of the Turkish national struggle prevented its implementation, its articles, those particularly relating to Kurdistan, were never removed from the Turkish subconscious. Even in the late 1990s and during the first two decades of the 2000s, confronted with Kurdish aspirations that sounded legitimate to many thanks to changing times, Turkish authorities invoked the memory of Sèvres.
The rankling memory of the treaty primarily relates to Articles 62 and 64. Article 62 stipulated:
A Commission sitting at Constantinople and composed of three members appointed by the British, French and Italian governments respectively shall draft within six months from the coming into force of the present Treaty a scheme of local autonomy for the predominantly Kurdish areas lying east of the Euphrates, south of the southern boundary of Armenia as it may be hereafter determined, and north of the frontier of Turkey with Syria and Mesopotamia, as defined in Article 27, II. (2) and (3). . . . The scheme shall contain full safeguards for the protection of the Assyro-Chaldeans and other racial or religious minorities within these areas.11
The wording of Article 64, referring to Article 62, provided the historical background from the perspective of international legality for a Kurdish independent state and thereby the ammunition for Kurdish nationalists in their bid for independence. It said:
If within one year from the coming into the force of the present Treaty the Kurdish peoples within the areas defined in Article 62 shall address themselves to the Council of League of Nations in such a manner as to show that a majority of the population of these areas desire independence from Turkey, and if the Council then considers that these peoples are capable of such independence and recommends that it should be granted to them, Turkey hereby agrees to execute such a recommendation, and to renounce all rights and title over these areas.
The detailed provisions for such renunciation will form the subject of a separate agreement between the Principal Allied Powers and Turkey.
If and when such renunciation takes place, no objection will be raised by the Principal Allied Powers to the voluntary adhesion to such an independent Kurdish State of the Kurds inhabiting that part of Kurdistan