Turkey’s Mission Impossible. Cengiz Çandar
to the alleged documents and the “the press conference of Atatürk in İzmit, in January 1923.” He distinguished Mustafa Kemal from the other Turkish leaders and spoke and wrote positively about him, in general. In my long conversation with Murat Karayılan in November 2010, as the PKK’s politico-military leader at large, he emphasized that Öcalan always exempted Mustafa Kemal “from the sins committed against the Kurds” and put the blame on the Unionists (İttihatçılar) and their remnants among the Kemalists.
İsmail Beşikçi, a Turkish scholar and sociologist who spent seventeen years in prison for his research on the Kurdish issue, made a distinction concerning the stance of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) toward the Kurds. In his article entitled “Mustafa Kemal, Atatürk ve Kürtler” (“Mustafa Kemal, Atatürk and the Kurds”) published in October 2013, he wrote, “The sentiments and thoughts of Mustafa Kemal Pasha and Atatürk regarding the Kurds are very different. Mustafa Kemal Pasha connotes the year 1919 and the 1920s while Atatürk connotes the 1930s”23 He proceeded to illustrate, in chronological order, how Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had deviated from his initial stance and changed his position on the Kurdish issue.
Kurdish Autonomy: Forever Impossible
Whether Mustafa Kemal ever signaled considering autonomy for the Kurds is still up for debate. But even if he did, it perhaps should be understood in the context of his wit and pragmatism under the most challenging circumstances of the national struggle. Indeed, these qualities were indispensable in forming alliances and gathering as much support as he could against formidable adversaries. As the goals that he had set were surmounted and achieved, he left his temporary and tactical alliances, dictated by the imperatives of the national struggle, behind. There was nothing to suggest that Mustafa Kemal had any ideological background to acknowledge self-rule in the Ottoman territories to be salvaged. Autonomy for Kurdistan was, of course, no exception.
For Jonathan C. Randal, the celebrated American journalist, a prominent expert on the Kurds, “Atatürk’s hallowed interest in the French revolution helped to explain Turkey’s unending penchant for Jacobinism, the belief in a centralized lay state uniting disparate peoples in the cult of the nation even at the expense of their own cultures, languages, religions, and other particularities.”24 Randal asserted, “Only a state as slavishly faithful to the ossified letter of its founding dogma could have backed itself into a corner as totally as Turkey did.”25
Erik J. Zürcher, in his seminal work entitled The Young Turk Legacy: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey, argued that the modernization project of Mustafa Kemal and the new leaders of the Turkish nation-state left no room for Kurdish self-rule:
In the debate about Westernization, Kemal and his circle belonged to the radical wing of the Young Turks. . . . In their eyes. . . only a nation state could give Turkey the coherence needed to compete with the national states of Europe. . . they opted for secular Turkish nationalism. This of course precluded any idea of Kurdish autonomy.26
Ryan Gingeras, an American historian and an imaginative mind on the late Ottoman, early Republican Turkish history, has a similar view. Following the publication of his book Fall of the Sultanate: The Great War and the End of the Ottoman Empire 1908–1922, in an interview in May 2016, almost a year after the disheartening end of the Kurdish peace process and during a period of revived war with the Kurds, he voiced a striking observation on the parallels between the late Ottoman and Turkish perceptions on Kurdish autonomy. His interviewer made the following remark, “As I read about various nationalist movements breaking off from the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, I kept being reminded of the Kurds. Even the language used is similar: Decentralization, greater autonomy, and independence. It is another example of echoes from a century ago resonating today.” To which Gingeras responded:
I find strong parallels in the core premise that was established decades before the Ottoman Empire’s final collapse: Only a state governed centrally, and uncompromising in its treatment of regional centers of opposition, can survive. This is a lesson that gets drawn by leading Ottoman and later Turkish officials: Any time a provincial group demands some sort of renegotiation of the way the government works where they live, it is just the first step that eventually leads to rebellion or separatism and has to be clamped down on. Otherwise, essentially the state is committing suicide.
With Kurds in particular, it’s clear that at the end of the Ottoman Empire there’s no one single Kurdish politics. Politically, the Kurds were fragmented. There was a political ambivalence among many different segments of Anatolian society regarding the future of the state. Between 1914 and 1922, society was totally devastated in all the places where Kurds lived. There was simply not much incentive to debate heady ideas about the future of government when people are just trying to survive. When we finally see a debate about the future of Anatolia on the part of Kurds and Kurdish nationalists, the response within the Turkish elite has already been programmed that this is something that cannot be tolerated: Federalism, decentralization, and provincial autonomy are bad words and cannot be tolerated.27
With regard to the Kurdish question, the aftermath of the year 2015 could be seen as a recurrence of the early 1920s. In Mustafa Kemal’s “New Turkey” that replaced the defunct Ottoman Empire in the first half of the 1920s, the idea of “Kurdish autonomy” was no more than a delusion. Almost a century later, when Tayyip Erdoğan declared his “New Turkey” in the second half of the 2010s presumably to replace the Kemalist Turkey, the idea of Kurdish autonomy seemed, once again, an illusion. That was because, some aspects of novelty aside, Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey was less of a break from the Kemalist Turkey than a continuity concerning the cardinal issue of the country: the Kurdish question.
NOTES
1. Ethnic Greek Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire and later, the Republic of Turkey. The term “Rûm” distinguishes them from the Hellenes of the mainland Greece. It means “Roman” in old Turkish, with reference to Byzantium, the East Roman Empire.
2. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Talaat Pasha-Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide (Princeton & Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2018), 259, 261.
3. Barış Ünlü, Türklük Sözleşmesi-Oluşumu, İşleyişi, Krizi [Turkishness contract: Its evolution, working, crisis] (Ankara: Dipnot Yayınları, 2018), 14–15.
4. Ibid., 254, 255.
5. Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 149.
6. İsmail Beşikçi, Cumhuriyet Halk Fırkasının Tüzüğü (1927) ve Kürt Sorunu [The constitution of the Republican People’s Party (1927) and the Kurdish question] (İstanbul, 1978), 83.
7. Sami N. Özerdim, Atatürk Devrimi Kronolojisi [Chronology of Atatürk Revolution] (Ankara, 1974), 75.
8. Tarih IV Türkiye Cumhuriyeti [History IV Republic of Turkey] (İstanbul, 1931), 182.
9. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy, 233.
10. The Kurdish Population, Fondation Institut de Kurde de Paris, January 12, 2017. https://www.institutkurde.org/en/info/the-kurdish-population-1232551004.
11. David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 464.
12. Ibid., 464, 465.
13. M. Philips Price, A History of Turkey from Empire to Republic (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), 32.
14. Bilal Şimşir, İngiliz Belgeleriyle Türkiye’de Kürt Sorunu (1924–1938) (Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 1991), 58.
15. Gerard Chailand, A People Without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan (London: Zed Books, 1980, 1993), 56.
16. Hüseyin Nihal Atsız, “Konuşmalar-1” [Speeches–1], Ötüken Dergisi, April 1967.
17. Hüseyin Nihal Atsız, “Kızıl Kürtlerin Yaygarası” [Red Kurds’ Brouhaha], Ötüken Dergisi, June 1967.
18.