Turkey’s Mission Impossible. Cengiz Çandar
and left, the Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani. Author was the architect of the meeting
The Kurdish question emerged from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I. A century later, it remains one of the most intractable problems to arise from the postwar partition of Ottoman lands.
A distinct ethnic community in the multinational Ottoman Empire, the Kurds were a fully assimilated part of the Ottoman body politic. Their cultural rights were respected, with Kurdish recognized as one of many national languages in the polyglot Ottoman state. In their majority Sunni Muslims, the Kurds fully shared in the dominant religious culture of the Ottoman state and recognized the Sultan as both a temporal and, in his role as Caliph, as a spiritual leader. While Kurdish intellectuals began to argue for a distinct national identity within Ottoman society, there was no separatist movement among the Kurdish communities before World War I. Instead, Ottoman Kurds fought to preserve the Empire and their place within it.
All was to change with Ottoman defeat in the Great War. In October 1918, the Kurds confronted a post-Ottoman world. Like other distinct national communities in the Middle East (the Arabs leap to mind), the Kurds began to consider the possibility of national independence, as well as the risks of falling under European colonial domination. Yet the European Powers had other plans for the Kurds.
Throughout the four years of the war, the Entente Powers had negotiated the partition and distribution of key Ottoman territories to Russia, Britain, and France. With the Entente’s victory, Britain and France sought to conclude their territorial gains as war prizes. Bolshevik Russia, for its part, disavowed all prior claims staked by the Tsarist regime. In spite of this Russian concession, relations between the Bolsheviks and Russia’s wartime allies were tense.
The British, in particular, were determined to create a buffer between Russia and French positions in Syria as well as Britain’s claims in Iraq. Toward this end, the British supported the creation of a Kurdish autonomous zone in Southeast Anatolia as part of the postwar settlement.
The international community formalized the establishment of Kurdistan in the Treaty of Sèvres, signed by the Entente and the Ottoman Empire in August 1920. Section III of the Treaty called for “a scheme of local autonomy for the predominantly Kurdish areas lying east of the Euphrates, south of the southern boundary of Armenia . . . and north of the frontier of Turkey with Syria and Mesopotamia.” Article 64 of the Treaty gave the Kurdish people the right to apply for independent statehood after just one year of autonomy in both Turkish Kurdistan and “that part of Kurdistan which has hitherto been included in the Mosul Vilayet”—that is, what would now be called Iraqi Kurdistan.
As we all know, the promise of a Kurdish state was never realized. Kurdistan fell victim to the Turkish War of Independence. Aside from the Dersim insurrection (in modern Tunceli) in which Kurdish militias fought against the Turkish army, the Kurds chose neutrality or to side with Kemalist forces between 1920 and 1922. When Ismet Inönü went to Lausanne to negotiate a new peace treaty with the Entente, he ultimately secured the whole of Thrace and Anatolia, including the areas allocated under the treaty of Sèvres to the Kurdish autonomous region, as Turkish sovereign territory in the Treaty of Lausanne. Turkey and Britain referred the Mosul question to the League of Nations to resolve, and in the end, the League awarded Mosul to the British mandate of Iraq. The hope of national independence lost, the Kurds found themselves divided between four new states: Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Persia (modern Iran).
The new Turkish Republic abandoned the old Ottoman tolerance for Kurdish language and culture. In a bid to forge a unified Turkish culture, the government passed laws in 1924 to ban the teaching and public use of Kurdish languages. The government forcibly resettled influential Kurds in Western Turkey disperse their influence. So long as Kurds spoke Turkish and assimilated, their place in the Turkish Republic was assured. But any bid for Kurdish cultural rights was rejected as potential separatism and an existential threat to the Turkish Republic within its Anatolian frontiers. Challenges to these rules—the Sheikh Said Revolt of 1925, or the Dersim Uprising of 1937–1938—were suppressed by the Kemalist state with overwhelming violence.
For decades, the Turkish state held Kurdish aspirations under firm control until August 1984, when a sustained Kurdish insurgency broke out in Eastern Turkey headed by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Since then, the Turkish government has alternated between forceful suppression of the Kurdish uprising and diplomacy.
It would be no exaggeration to say that the Kurdish issue has been the most important domestic story for the Turkish press