Turkey’s Mission Impossible. Cengiz Çandar
of the world, exist in contrasting aspirations. That phenomenon makes the study of Turkey’s conflict with the Kurds ever essential and exciting, as the Middle East is the leading geopolitical region of the world with strong impact on global peace and conflict.
II
Writing a book at this particular historical conjuncture was incumbent upon me because of my lifelong involvement with the Kurdish issue and active participation in the quest for the peaceful, political settlement of the conflict. My involvement with the Kurdish issue in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq goes back forty-seven years. The relationship I had with Turkish Kurds, Syrian Kurdish leadership in the early 1970s, and most importantly with late Jalal Talabani (1933–2017), a historical figure and the first president of Iraq after the downfall of Saddam Hussein, led me to play a role in the establishment of relations between the Turkish state and the Iraqi Kurdish leadership in 1991. Those relations became iconoclastic and landmark developments in the history of Turkey and the Kurds. I was the intermediary between Turkey’s then president Turgut Özal (1927–1993) and two Iraqi Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani in 1991. Talabani served as the president of Iraq from 2006 to 2014 and the latter as the first elected president of the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq (KRG) from 2005 to 2017. Upon Turgut Özal’s invitation, I acted as an advisor to the President of Turkey, mainly on Kurdish affairs, from 1991 until his death in 1993; a status that enabled me to take initiatives as President Özal’s envoy for the reconciliation between the Turkish state and Turkey’s Kurdish insurgents. Including Abdullah Öcalan, the undisputed leader of the PKK (the Kurdish acronym for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party [Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan]), I have had the opportunity to have face-to-face contacts with leading Kurdish personalities of different political creed in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, as well as with almost all the Turkish policymakers since the 1990s on, to exchange views on the Kurdish question.
In March 2009, President Abdullah Gül of Turkey conveyed through me the message about the reconciliation on the Kurdish issue that was kept secret until that date. He invited me to accompany him on his official visit to Iran, which he chose as an opportunity to disclose what would later be called the “Kurdish Opening,” the initiative of the Turkish government to resolve the ongoing conflict via political means. The Kurdish Opening was inaugurated publicly at the end of August 2009 at a meeting with a group of intellectuals, chaired by the then interior minister who was entrusted to be the official coordinator of the Opening. I was among the group, and before the meeting I had a private one-on-one session with the minister upon his invitation. Thus, since the early 1990s, I was involved, at a certain level, in almost all stages of the efforts to resolve the Kurdish question of Turkey.
From 2011 on, I have been a member of the Council of Experts of the Democratic Progress Institute (DPI) based in London. My colleagues in the Council, including Jonathan Powell, chief of staff of former British prime minister Tony Blair (1997–2007) and chief British negotiator on Northern Ireland, consisted of people with expertise on conflict resolution who had taken part in peace talks extending from the ETA-Basque case in Spain to Colombia and the Philippines. With the DPI, I have participated in the initiative to bring parliamentarians of the mainstream political parties, leading public intellectuals, journalists, and academicians in Turkey on fact-finding visits to comparative conflict resolution cases, such as South Africa, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, to analyze their possible relevance and find inspiration in resolving Turkey’s perennial Kurdish question.
Figure I.1 Iconoclastic Meeting in Ankara, 1992. Turkey’s President Özal (fourth from left) receiving anti-Saddam Iraqi opposition delegation. On his right and left, the Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani. Author was the architect of the meeting. Source: Author’s Personal Archive.
I was also among the founding members of the Contact and Dialogue Group initiated by Osman Kavala, leading peace activist and philanthropist who was jailed by the Turkish autocracy in 2017 and remained in prison without any indictment for a long period. The Contact and Dialogue Group, which brought together prominent names in Turkey with diverse views and political affiliations, was particularly active and functional during the interregnum when violence related to Kurdish conflict had erupted once again in 2012. It tried to resume the dialogue between the belligerents, the Turkish state, and the Kurdish insurgents and their affiliates.
Eric Hobsbawm, in the preface of his autobiography Interesting Times, wrote, “When, having written the history of the world between the late eighteenth century and 1914, I finally tried my hand at the history of what I called The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, I think it benefited from the fact that I wrote about it not only as a scholar but as what the anthropologists call a ‘participant observer.’”2
In these lines, I found the perfect description of myself as the author of Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds: participant observer!
Thanks to my exclusive, extensive, and unique experiences concerning the Kurdish question over decades, I am privy to information on this sensitive issue that has never been brought into public knowledge, and am therefore in possession of invaluable anecdotes.
It is public knowledge in Turkey that I, along with my intimate friend and fellow journalist Hasan Cemal, have been the most prolific writers on the Kurdish issue, peace process, reconciliation efforts, and the daily developments related to Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. The archive attests to the fact that from July 2011, when the first peace process was terminated with the resumption of violence until March 2016, the end of my active journalistic career in Turkey, I wrote around 250 op-ed pieces on the Kurdish issue alone. That is roughly one piece a week. These were not products of an intellectual whose residence was an ivory tower of newspaper offices or academic centers. Most of them were written while reporting on the ground and through field experience. I have stepped foot on almost every inch of the territory that Kurds of Turkey and Iraq inhabit, and have also resided in Syria and Lebanon.
During the past decade, I have attended very many conferences, workshops, and seminars on the Kurdish issue, Syria, and Middle East politics from İstanbul to Diyarbakır, the city perceived as the political center of Turkey’s Kurds, from Beirut to Doha, from Erbil and Suleimaniyah to Baghdad in Kurdistan Region and Iraq, and from Brussels to Washington in the Western world, at respected academic institutions from Harvard to Oxford and the London School of Economics.
When my forty-year professional journalism career came to a halt in March 2016, eight months after the Kurdish peace process collapsed in Turkey, I decided to move on to the academic field to do further research and work on the failure of the peace efforts. This obviously was not alien territory for me. For a decade, I had lectured in the capacity of adjunct professor for the senior classes of several private universities in İstanbul on the Modern History of the Middle East, the formative period of the troubled region post-World War I, which held the origins of almost all the current intractable problems, ranging from the Palestinian question to the Kurdish issue.
When I began my research in May 2016 on “Turkey’s Failed Kurdish Peace Processes” at the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies as a “Distinguished Visiting Scholar,” I was confident to take the challenge.
My self-confidence was reaffirmed reading the new introduction that Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans wrote for the 2018 edition of E. H. Carr’s classic What Is History?, which has always been my guide on the philosophy of history and historiography. Evans began his introduction by familiarizing the reader with E. H. Carr:
E.H. Carr (1892–1982) was not a professional historian in any sense of the term that would be acceptable today. He did not have a degree in History. He never taught in a History Department at a University. . . . He did not take a Ph.D., nowadays the conventional route into the academic profession. On graduating in 1916, he went straight into the Foreign Office, where he remained for the next twenty years. . . . When in 1936 he resigned from Foreign Office to take up a Chair at Aberystwyth University . . . [he] spent increasing amounts of time practicing journalism while employed by the University. He became Assistant Editor of The Times in 1941 and wrote many leading articles