Turkey’s Mission Impossible. Cengiz Çandar
force undertook a permanent action against the bases and redoubts of the Kurdish insurgents of Turkey in that region.
In January 2018, Turkish armed forces entered the northwestern Syrian Kurdish region and dismantled the Kurdish rule that had been in force for more than five years. A year later, Turkey declared its resolution to terminate the Kurdish rule, stretching along the frontier with Turkey, in northeastern Syria east of the Euphrates. On October 9, 2019, the fateful war of Turkey against the Syrian Kurds was launched. Turkish Army with its Syrian proxies comprising mostly Salafi thugs attacked the predominantly Kurdish Autonomous Administration in northeastern Syria. American military personnel abandoned the region abiding by the decision of President Donald Trump. The developments reverberated across the world as the Kurdish question acquired a global dimension. Russia replaced the United States, and emerged as the new kingmaker in Syria. Thus, the intertwined nature of Turkish and Syrian Kurdish issues had drawn Turkey into the Syrian quagmire with the potential to seal its destiny during the unprecedented historical period of transition of the Middle East in the post-Cold War international and regional order.
Following the developments across the region, I began to be overcautious in prognosticating the prospects for the Kurds. I told my Kurdish friends, some of whom are well-known names in international society, that although facile comparisons are too risky to be accurate, the analogy of the developments of the last years of the Ottoman Empire during World War I might provide an unpleasant but a useful compass to navigate the present and in the future.
The developments following the collapse of the peace process in the summer of 2015 also spelled an incontrovertible departure of Turkey from its fledgling democracy to a nationalist authoritarianism, reminiscent of the final decade of the defunct Ottoman Empire.
The prospect of eternal peace and stability in the Middle East and in Turkey looked increasingly evasive. Fears of new bloodshed, deportation, displacement of populations, and aggravated human agony and misery were rekindled. At this crossroads of history, I was interested in writing a book about why Turkey’s Kurdish peace processes failed, what went wrong, and what can be done to avoid the mistakes of the past and make the peace initiatives of the future more successful. My research thus initially focused on the failures of the Kurdish peace process.
V
The richest experience concerning the Kurdish issue, and one that must occupy a very distinct place in the historical record, took place in the following years, from 2011 to 2015 and from 2015 to 2018. The year 2011 witnessed the violent collapse of the most significant enterprise for the peaceful resolution of the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey. That phase was marked by secret talks that took place mostly in Oslo, Norway. Any research on these talks leads to the information that they were held between the intelligence officials of Turkey and the PKK delegation, half of whom had come all the way from the organization’s redoubt in Mt. Qandil on the inaccessible frontier zone between Iraq and Iran, therefore suggesting a third-party and international involvement. The PKK’s uncontested leader Abdullah Öcalan, who is serving life imprisonment on a prison-island in the Marmara Sea near İstanbul, indirectly participated in the endeavor. The talks in Oslo continued from 2008 to 2011 following a preparatory phase that goes back to 2006.
This most crucial period pertinent to reconciliation between Turkey and the Kurds has not sufficiently been scrutinized and therefore has not taken its deserved place in the annals of history. This is why it was a personal obligation for me to address the issue comprehensively in Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds.
In the aftermath of July 2011, an interlude marked by the eruption of violence between Turkish and Kurdish belligerents, the peace process was established once again in the last days of the year 2012. Unlike the Oslo talks or perhaps more accurately the previous process that extended from 2006 to 2011, this process was homegrown and coincided with momentous developments in the Syrian conflict that saw effective establishment of control by the PKK’s Syrian Kurdish affiliates on the other side of Turkey’s longest frontier. The second peace process, as it should be correctly termed, as well as being homegrown, was unprecedented, being centered on negotiations with the PKK’s leader Abdullah Öcalan on his prison-island. The quadripartite effort involved Öcalan; the PKK’s political-military leadership in their Mt. Qandil redoubt in Iraqi territory; members of parliament from the pro-Kurdish party BDP (Peace and Democracy Party, banned by verdict of the Constitutional Court in 2012) and then from the HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi–Peoples’ Democratic Party which succeeded the banned BDP); and the Turkish government. In contrast with the previous process that was secretly run, this one was relatively transparent. It continued under the careful public eye, and was observed and reported extensively by the then relatively free Turkish media. More importantly, it aroused hopes for the ultimate resolution of the Kurdish question, “the mother of all the questions” of the Republic of Turkey, which was founded in the 1920s over the debris of the Ottoman Empire. The two dominant leaders, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s prime minister who later became the first president, elected by popular vote in 2014, and Abdullah Öcalan, around whom millions of primarily Turkish and Syrian Kurds formed a cult of personality, made statements on their firm commitment to its success. No initiative in the Republican Turkish and therefore Kurdish history had kindled expectations as strongly as the peace process that ended in July 2015.
The developments related to the Kurdish issue following the year 2015 illustrated that scrutiny on the causes of the failure of the peace processes could and should not be taken in isolation. Any analysis disregarding the regional and international developments would be unforgivably flawed.
Thus, the scope of the book expanded from being merely a study on the failure of peace processes into an analysis of the issue in its entirety, with its past, present, and future.
VI
Working on Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds raised some fundamental questions, the most important of which was the methodology to be used in taking up the subject. I grappled with specific theoretical questions. The paradoxical issue of simultaneous subjectivity and objectivity came to the fore, as I have been an active participant in the story that I would narrate and analyze in the book. It could not be written in the format that a non-committed and uninvolved scholar would employ in revealing the results of his research conducted in libraries and archives.
There are no universal norms and even generally accepted principles on the issue of objectivity and subjectivity in the writing of history. There was a legitimate question I asked from the very beginning: Why would having a role in the resolution of the Kurdish question cast a shadow of subjectivity on my assessments, more so than a respected armchair scholar working only from alleged primary sources? My personal experience during many twists and turns of the Kurdish conflict has been the primary source for this research per se. The value of these experiences as direct testimonies to historical junctures and their first-told narratives can, I believe, easily contest the supposedly objective, yet a distant take of an academic bystander who writes in the comforts of education institutions and misses many details that make the history what it is. The latter would be an easier and more comfortable choice for me yet would lack the excitement of onsite discovery and firsthand experience.
The other theoretical issues that preoccupied me in the writing of the book were concepts of historiography like causation and chance, the role of the individual, free will and determinism, and whether history runs through laws that lead us to inevitability. Is there anything like historical inevitability? The responses to these questions, naturally, would frame the subject matter of the book and eventually its conclusions. These were serious questions, most of which E. H. Carr had discussed in his immortal classic, What Is History?
Contemplating the role of chance in history, I queried: If, as a Turk, I had not involved myself in the most existential question of Turkey with a perceived and staunch pro-Kurdish stance that put me always in trouble with the security establishment of my country and produced threats on my life, how different would the trajectory of my career have been? As an orthodox researcher and academic scholar, I would still choose to work on the Kurdish conflict but with a fundamentally different life than I have had. Would that make me more objective and more scholarly, or more subjective really? The logical follow-up to this