Kurdish Ethno-Nationalism versus Nation-Building States: Collected Articles 9781463229863

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Kurdish Ethno-Nationalism versus Nation-Building States

Analecta Isisiana: Ottoman and Turkish Studies

47

A co-publication with The Isis Press, Istanbul, the series consists of collections of thematic essays focused on specific themes of Ottoman and Turkish studies. These scholarly volumes address important issues throughout Turkish history, offering in a single volume the accumulated insights of a single author over a career of research on the subject.

Kurdish Ethno-Nationalism versus Nation-Building States

Collected Articles

Martin van Bruinessen

The Isis Press, Istanbul

0ûr0ÎaS preSS 2011

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright© 2011 by The Isis Press, Istanbul Originally published in 2000 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of The Isis Press, Istanbul. 2011

K-

ISBN 978-1-61143-105-6

Reprinted from the 2000 Istanbul edition.

Printed in the United States of America

Martin van Bruinessen is IS1M professor of the comparative study of modern Muslim societies at Utrecht university, w h e r e he also teaches Kurdish language and culture and Kurdish and Turkish history. He carried out extensive fieldwork in all parts of Kurdistan during the years 1974-75 and has since then made numerous shorter research trips to the region. He is the author of Agha, Shaikh and State (1978, 1992) and numerous articles on the Kurds, some of which are reprinted here and in the companion volume Mullas, Sufis and Heretics: The Role of Religion in Kurdish Society (2000). He is also an expert on Indonesia, where between 1982 and 1994 he spent altogether nine years, doing research and teaching. He published four books in Indonesian on various aspects of Islam in Indonesia.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A. Ethnic identity and ethnic diversity 1.

"The ethnic identity of the Kurds", From: Ethnic groups in the Republic

of Turkey, compiled and

edited by Peter Alford A n d r e w s with Rüdiger Benninghaus [=Beihefte zum Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients, Reihe B, Nr. 60|. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert, 1989, 613-21 2.

"Diversity and division among the Kurds", From: Warreport, bulletin of the institute for war and reporting HI (November-December 1996), 29-32

3.

"Kurds, Turks and the Alevi revival in Turkey", Published in abbreviated form in: Middle East Report (Summer 1996), 7-10

peace

#200

B. State-induced nation-building, Kurdish ethno-nationalism, and the modalities of its suppression 4.

"Kurdish society and the modern state: ethnic nationalism versus nation-building", From: Turaj Atabaki and Margreet Dorleijn (eds), in search of ethnic identity.

Kurdistan

Utrecht: Department of Oriental

Studies, 1991.24-51 5.

"Genocide in Kurdistan? The suppression of the Dersim rebellion in Turkey (1937-38) and the chemical war against the Iraqi Kurds (1988)", From: G e o r g e J. A n d r e o p o u l o s (ed), Conceptual historical

dimensions

of genocide,

and

pp. 141-170. University

of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. [Copyright © 1 9 9 4 University of Pennsylvania Press. Reprinted by permission] 6.

"Genocide of Kurds", From: Israel W. Charny (ed), The widening circle of genocide [= Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, vol. 3], pp. 165-191. N e w B r u n s w i c k , N Y : Transaction Books, 1994

6

KURDISH

ETHNO-NATIONALISM

C. Kurdish uprisings in Iran: tribal, religious, ethno-national and inter-state factors 7.

8.

9a. 9b.

"Kurdish tribes and the state in Iran: The case of Simko's revolt", From: Richard Tapper (ed.), The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan. London: Croom Helm, 1983, 364400.

125

"Nationalismus und religiöser Konflikt: Der kurdische Widerstand im Iran", From: Kurt Greussing (Hg.), Religion und Politik im Iran \=Mardom nameh, Jahrbuch zur Geschichte und Gesellschaft des Mittleren Orients], F r a n k f u r t a.ML: Syndikat, 1981, 372-409

157

"The Kurds between Iran and Iraq", Appendix: "Major Kurdish organizations in Iran and Iraq", F r o m : MERIP Middle East Report #141 (July-August 1986), 14-27

197

D. The Kurdish movement in Turkey since 1960 10.

1 1.

12.

"The Kurds in Turkey", From\ MERIP Reports #121 (February 1984), 6-12

225

"Between guerrilla war and political murder: The Workers' Party of Kurdistan". From: MERIP Middle East Report #153 (July-August 1988), 40-46.

237

"Turkey and the Kurds in the early 1990s: Guerrilla, Counterinsurgency, and Emerging Civil Society", Originally published as "Historical b a c k g r o u n d and Developments since Newroz 1993", in: Violations of human rights in Turkish Kurdistan. Report of a fact-finding mission of Pax Christi and the Netherlands Kurdistan Society to Newroz 1993. Amsterdam: Netherlands Kurdistan Society, 1996, pp. 1-8 and 22-33

249

TABLE 13.

14.

OF CONTENT S

7

"Turkey, Europe and the Kurds after the capture of Abdullah Öcalan", Revised version of an article originally published in German as "Die Türkei, Europa und die Kurden nach der Festnahme von Abdullah Öcalan", 1NAMO, Informationsprojekt Naher und Mittlerer Osten, Nummer 18 (Sommer 1999), 9-15. ...

277

General Bibliography

289

PREFACE

The articles in this volume represent another aspect of my research ori Kurdish society than those covered in my Agha, Shaikh and State (1978, 1992), which dealt primarily with "traditional" social structure and its interactions with the surrounding states, and the first volume of collected articles, Mullas, Sufis and Heretics (2000), which focused on religion. 1 Most of the articles in the present collection deal more explicitly with the Kurdish ethno-national movement or with individual Kurdish uprisings. Whereas during my fieldwork of the mid-1970s I had cautiously avoided any but casual contacts with political activists, not wishing to arouse their or the various intelligence services' suspicions, such contacts developed quite naturally in the following years, primarily through my involvement with political refugees. Once my first writings had been published and noted by Kurdish intellectuals, it became easier to win the confidence of persons actively involved in politics, and during field trips to the various parts of Kurdistan (in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria) in the late 1970s and 1980s I could conduct numerous lengthy interviews with politically active Kurds and observe the relations between political movements and the wider society. The articles in the third and fourth parts of this volume owe much to those field trips. During the 1980s and 1990s I wrote numerous papers and articles about contemporary developments in the Kurdish movement. Many of them, evidently, lost their usefulness due to later developments and the observations in them were superseded by later writings by myself and others. In this collection I have only reprinted those articles that I believe to be of more than ephemeral value even though they may be dated. Those in sections C and D document developments among the Kurds of Iran and Turkey, respectively, and contain much that may not easily be found elsewhere. These articles do not, of course, add up to an overall history of the Kurdish movement. For the wider view the reader is referred to David MacDowall's book, which is the besi general work, and to the study by Henri Barkey and Graham Fuller, which is the best-informed and most judicious study of the Kurdish question in Turkey (which is less adequately covered by MacDowall). 2 1 believe, however, that the

Martin van B r u i n e s s e n , Agha, Shaikh and Slate: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan. London: Zed Books, 1992; Martin van Bruinessen, Mullas, Sufis and Heretics: The Role of Religion in Kurdish Society. Collected articles. Istanbul: T h e lsis Press, 2000. ^David MacDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds. London: I.B. Tauris, 1996; Henri J. Barkey and G r a h a m E. Fuller, Turkey's Kurdish Question. L a n h a m etc.: R o w m a n & Little Field Publishers Inc., 1998.

KURDISH

10

ETHNO-NATIONALISM

observations in these articles remain valid and important f o r understanding present developments. Although I would say certain things differently now, I believe that my analysis in these articles still stands. Occasionally I have added references to later developments or more recent relevant literature in a footnote; such later additions are placed between square brackets. The articles in the first and second sections do not have the Kurdish movement itself as their primary focus but questions of ethnic and religious identity and the nation-building policies of governments determined to reduce the importance of or to destroy Kurdish ethnicity, respectively. These topics are closely related, in that it commonly is in response to the political situation (which includes government policies) that a person chooses to emphasise (or de-emphasise) one particular identity out of a number of (partially overlapping) possible identities. An awareness that all identities are ultimately socially constructed not only belongs to the received ideas of contemporary sociology but has also in various ways underpinned government policies towards the Kurds throughout the century. Nation-building in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria has often involved the suppression of Kurdish culture and efforts to assimilate the Kurds to the dominant ethnic group. At other moments the particularistic identities of sub-groups among the Kurds (such as Yezidi and Kaka'i in Iraq, Ahl-i Haqq and Shi'i Kurds in Iran, Zaza and Alevi in Turkey) were officially promoted in an effort to weaken the appeal of Kurdish nationalism. Of the various aspects of Kurdish history and society that I have written on, it is the passages dealing with the Kurds' cultural diversity (in

Agha,

Shaikh and State and a number of later articles, including the ones reprinted here) that have been quoted most frequently — though often out of context. Various circles have believed that insisting on the Kurds' diversity and lack of unity could serve their political interests. In T u r k e y , the official ban of Kurdish and denial of the existence of the Kurds as a people distinct f r o m Turks, Arabs and Persians was in the 1990s replaced by the propagation of the view that there are so many Kurdish dialects that there is no single Kurdish language. This argument has repeatedly been used to reject the very idea of allowing the use of Kurdish in school education and in the electronic media, as the European Union demands. My work has been referred to in support of such arguments. It is therefore perhaps appropriate to repeat here a less often quoted observation, to be found in the same passages of my work. In spite of the great linguistic and religious diversity, there has for centuries been a strong awareness, among the Kurcs as well as their neighbours, of an overarching Kurdish identity — as is well attested in Ottoman sources f r o m the 16th century on.

PREFACE

11

T w o articles carry the term lgenocidei in their titles. They were written in response to invitations to take part in theoretical and c o m p a r a t i v e reflections on the subject. When 1 began my research for these articles, I was convinced that the concept of genocide (which I understood to refer to the deliberate extermination of an entire people) was not applicable in the Kurdish case. I soon had to revise my understanding of genocide, however, and admit that its legal definition (as enshrined in the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide) includes massacres of m o r e restricted scale. The essential elements in this definition are that members of an ethnic, religious, etc. group are killed ias sucht and that the killings are premeditated. This brought the concept closer to my sociological concern with the construction of identities and nation-building. The massacres in Kurdish history that I identified in these articles as the most relevant for comparative purposes remained in my view borderline cases, and I refrained from giving a final verdict (but I have later gradually shifted to the view that these were in fact cases of genocide). Whether constituting genocide or not, the massacres discussed in these articles were deliberate, and they were the ultimate consequence of a particular style of authoritarian modernisation and social engineering adopted by the countries concerned. Not all aspects of nation-building were that violent and destructive, of course. Mass education, improved communications (roads, radio, television) and economic integration were altogether benign methods and might have been very effective if they had received priority at an earlier stage. A s it was, too little was done and too late, resulting in an acute awareness of unequal treatment. It was, however, especially the counterinsurgency measures of the 1980s and 1990s, in both Turkey and Iraq, that caused a massive disaffection with the state and gave the Kurdish nationalist movements the mass support that they had so far lacked. Stages of this process are documented in the various articles in this volume.

Utrecht, August 2000

THE ETHNIC IDENTITY OF THE KURDS IN TURKEY

M o s t K u r d s in T u r k e y h a v e a s t r o n g a w a r e n e s s o f b e l o n g i n g to a s e p a r a t e e t h n i c g r o u p , d i s t i n c t , e s p e c i a l l y , f r o m the T u r k s and f r o m the C h r i s t i a n m i n o r i t i e s l i v i n g in their midst. T h e r e is, h o w e v e r , by n o m e a n s unanimity a m o n g them as to w h a t constitutes this ethnic identity and w h a t the boundaries of their ethnic g r o u p are. T h i s m a k e s it necessary f o r m e to state at the outset p r e c i s e l y w h o m I m e a n w h e n in this article I use the ethnic label " K u r d s " . F o r p r a g m a t i c r e a s o n s I use a rather l o o s e and w i d e d e f i n i t i o n , i n c l u d i n g all n a t i v e s p e a k e r s o f d i a l e c t s b e l o n g i n g to the Iranic l a n g u a g e s K u r m a n j i o r Z a z a , as w e l l a s those T u r k i s h s p e a k i n g p e r s o n s w h o c l a i m d e s c e n t f r o m K u r m a n j i or Z a z a s p e a k e r s and w h o still ( o r a g a i n ) c o n s i d e r themselves as Kurds. M o s t Kurdish nationalists w o u l d agree with

this

definition (a minority w o u l d find it too narrow still); in practice, m a n y K u r d s implicitly use m u c h narrower definitions, a s will be s h o w n b e l o w . E v e n this simple definition invites some obvious questions: should, for

instance,

persons w h o g r e w up as K u r d s , but w e r e in later life voluntarily assimilated to the T u r k i s h m a j o r i t y , be c a l l e d K u r d s or n o t ? O r t h o s e m e m b e r s o f the C h r i s t i a n m i n o r i t y g r o u p s w h o h a v e f o r m a l l y e m b r a c e d I s l a m and

have

b e c o m e k u r d o p h o n e but still retain a m e m o r y o f their p r e v i o u s i d e n t i t y ? M y definition w o u l d e x c l u d e the f o r m e r and i n c l u d e the latter. B o t h p r o c e s s e s o f assimilation will h o w e v e r be considered b e l o w .

W h e n a s k e d to s p e c i f y w h a t c o n s t i t u t e s their i d e n t i t y , m o s t K u r d s w o u l d mention l a n g u a g e and religion first. K u r m a n j i and Z a z a are both Iranian languages,

grammatically

quite different f r o m Turkish, although

their

v o c a b u l a r i e s contain many l o a n - w o r d s f r o m A r a b i c and T u r k i s h . F e w , if a n y , K u r m a n j i s p e a k e r s understand Z a z a , but m o s t Z a z a s p e a k e r s k n o w at least s o m e K u r m a n j i . V i r t u a l l y all Z a z a s p e a k e r s c o n s i d e r t h e m s e l v e s , and are c o n s i d e r e d by the K u r m a n j i speakers, as K u r d s . T h e y d o h o w e v e r constitute a distinct s u b g r o u p (or rather a n u m b e r o f distinct s u b - g r o u p s ) that still tends to e n d o g a m y and d i f f e r s f r o m the K u r m a n j i s p e a k e r s in s e v e r a l o t h e r cultural features. F o r instance, their agricultural and horticultural techniques are on the a v e r a g e more d e v e l o p e d , and w h e r e they are tribally organised their tribes tend to be s m a l l e r than those o f the K u r m a n j i s p e a k e r s . T h e s e d i f f e r e n c e s are h o w e v e r not p e r c e i v e d as s i g n i f i c a n t . T h e s e c o n d criterion, r e l i g i o n , is e v e n less apt than l a n g u a g e to set all K u r d s (as d e f i n e d by m e ) apart f r o m other e t h n i c g r o u p s . M o s t K u r d s , it is true, are S u n n i M u s l i m s f o l l o w i n g the S h a f i ' i mezhep.

T h i s neatly d i s t i n g u i s h e s t h e m f r o m the Shi'i A z e r i s and

Persians as w e l l as f r o m the Hanefi T u r k i s h and A r a b S u n n i s (and, o f

course,

KURDISH

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f r o m their Christian neighbours). A stranger is frequently asked what his mezhep is, as a cautious way of finding out whether he is a Turk or a Kurd. M a n y Alevis, however, speak K u r m a n j i or Zaza dialects and c o n s i d e r themselves as Kurds, and there are still pockets of (Kurmanji speaking) Yezidis, a non-Muslim sect living among the Sunni Kurds. In Iran and Iraq, moreover, a considerable number of Kurds belong to the orthodox Shi'a, and a smaller number to the heterodox Ahl-i Haqq sect. Many Shafi'i Kurds, in fact, refuse to consider the Alevis and Yezidis as Kurds. Intermarriage between these religious groups is extremely rare, much rarer than between Turkish and Kurdish Alevis or even Turkish and Kurdish Sunnis. It might, in fact, be more apt to consider the Kurds not as one, but as a set of ethnic groups (for instance, Sunni, Alevi, Yezidi), a l t h o u g h even then the definition of boundaries would not be easy. The Kurdish rebellions of the early years of the Republic showed how little unity there was: §eyh Sa'id's rebellion (1925) remained largely restricted to the Zaza speaking tribes along the Murad Suyu, and in the Dersim revolt of 1937 only Alevis (both K u r m a n j i and Zaza speaking) participated. Nationalist leaders tried in vain to exhort others to join in. During the 1970s, the Kurdish nationalist m o v e m e n t b e c a m e quite influential, even in the villages, and it seemed to create a stronger sense of oneness among the Kurds. The economic and political developments of that decade, however, tended to exacerbate rather than alleviate the long-standing tensions between Sunnis and Alevis, and to revive the importance of religion as a symbol of identity. The difference between Shafi'is and H a n e f i s is insignificant when compared with that between these Sunnis and the Alevis.

A third criterion, rarely explicitly mentioned but often implicitly used, is that of affiliation with a Kurdish tribe or one of the Kurdish "great families". A person descending from a well-known Kurdish family or tribe is always considered a Kurd, whatever he claims himself to be. This criterion, however, does not define an ethnic boundary: many persons w h o consider themselves, and are general y considered, as Kurds do not belong to a tribe or great family. Other, secondary symbols are even less apt to define a boundary: "Kurdish" dress, music, folklore, cooking, etc. show great regional variations, while the similarities with those of other ethnic groups in the same region are sometimes striking. These symbols of separateness have since the late 1920s been suppressed by the republican Government, which paradoxically made it possible for the nationalist movement of the 1970s to promote a re-invented, more unified Kurdish tradition, that appeared to be strongly influenced by that of the Kurds of Iraq. This does, however, not seem to have had a lasting impact. Some other symbols of identity, stressed by Kurds themselves as well as by non-Kurds consist of differences in degree rather than in kind: the (Sunni) Kurds have on the whole maintained more of the traditional Islam than

ETHNIC

IDENTITY

OE T H E K U R D S

the other M u s l i m e t h n i c groups: the medrese

IN

TURKEY

did not entirely d i s a p p e a r as

elsewhere in Turkey but (clandestinely) survived into the 1960s, and there are still m a n y §eyhs (associated with the Nak§ibendi or Kadiri tarikat) w h o wield great influence. T h e c o n c e p t of h o n o u r ( n a m u s ) and the institution of blood revenge associated with it still play a quite central role in social life. A n o t h e r traditional institution (although not an I s l a m i c one), the p a y m e n t of a high bride-price, is still widely adhered to, and the m o d e r n o n e of birth-control is w i d e l y d i s a p p r o v e d of. T h e position of w o m e n is, on t h e w h o l e , a m o r e subjected one than a m o n g other ethnic groups. N o n e of these cultural features, h o w e v e r , nor a c o m b i n a t i o n of t h e m , d e f i n e s an ethnic b o u n d a r y b e t w e e n K u r d s and n o n - K u r d s . T h e y are at least to s o m e e x t e n t a corollary of the e c o n o m i c b a c k w a r d n e s s of the region, and e a c h of them may be encountered a m o n g different ethnic groups in other backward areas as well. Several of these features sharply distinguish the Sunni f r o m the Alevi Kurds: a m o n g the latter, medreses

and $eyhs

(apart f r o m a single Bekta§i §eyh)

are conspicuously

a b s e n t , as are, in m o s t Alevi villages, m o s q u e s . M o s t of t h e s p e c i f i c Alevi religious traditions h a v e virtually died out as well, so that it is rather the a b s e n c e of visible religious s y m b o l s that s e e m s to c h a r a c t e r i z e the A l e v i s . M a n y , t h o u g h by no m e a n s all, A l e v i s o c c a s i o n a l l y drink a l c o h o l , and the relations between the sexes are f r e e r than a m o n g most Sunni K u r d s — t w o features that the latter disapprovingly stress and perceive as m a j o r differences. T h e r e is a lower incidence of blood feuds a m o n g Alevis, and if there is a brideprice, it t e n d s to be m u c h l o w e r than a m o n g the S u n n i s ; w o m e n h a v e a relatively m o r e importanl role in social life. W h i l e d i f f e r e n t i a t i n g the Alevi f r o m the Sunni K u r d s , these f e a t u r e s unite t h e m with the T u r k i s h A l e v i s . A p a r t f r o m t h e language, the Kurdish and Turkish Alevis are culturally very similar, and intermarriage a m o n g t h e m is relatively f r e q u e n t (although there is still a tendency to local and tribal e n d o g a m y ) . T h e y m a y be considered as o n e ethnic group, the cultural variations being regional rather than between the linguistic s u b - g r o u p s . A l t h o u g h m a n y y o u n g K u r d i s h A l e v i s b e c a m e active participants in the K u r d i s h nationalist m o v e m e n t of the 1970s, this did not lead them to stress their d i f f e r e n c e s with the T u r k i s h A l e v i s ; rather, the latter w e r e perceived as a sort of Kurds w h o h a p p e n e d to speak T u r k i s h but were very d i f f e r e n t f r o m the d o m i n a n t Sunni T u r k i s h majority. A n d , in fact, s o m e Turkish Alevis t h e m s e l v e s started claiming that they were really K u r d s , w h o had in the past been turkicised.

There is, then, no u n a m b i g u o u s ethnic boundary separating K u r d s f r o m non-Kurds, and in the course of even recent history the boundaries as perceived by various g r o u p s h a v e shifted. L a r g e n u m b e r s of p e o p l e h a v e m o r e o v e r purposively crossed w h a t they perceived as the m a j o r ethnic b o u n d a r y , not only individually, as is w o n t to h a p p e n virtually e v e r y w h e r e , but in m a n y c a s e s c o l l e c t i v e l y . A s h o r t historical s k e t c h m a y b e a p p r o p r i a t e h e r e to highlight s o m e of the c h a n g e s in ethnic (self-)definition.

16

K U R D I S H

E T H N O - N ATI ONALI S M

Though some Kurdish intellectuals claim that their people is descended f r o m the Medes, there is not enough evidence to permit such a connection across the considerable gap in time between the political dominance of the Medes, and the first attestation of the Kurds (as Cyrtii). 1 This is not to deny that there may have been some continuity in the population of the area as a whole. Although politically dominant for some time, the Medes may not have constituted a numerical majority in the area at any o n e time. Cultural variations between the various regions of Kurdistan, as well as the existence of two culturally distinct social strata in several regions, seem to indicate that the present Kurds have incorporated quite heterogeneous ethnic elements. It is not clear when precisely a distinct Kurdish identity emerged. The ethnic label "Kurd" is first encountered in Arabic sources f r o m the first centuries of the Islamic era; it seemed to refer to a specific variety of pastoral nomadism, and possibly to a set of political units, rather than to a linguistic group: once or twice, "Arabic Kurds" are mentioned. By the 10th century, the term appears to denote nomadic and/or transhumant groups speaking an Iranian language and mainly inhabiting the mountainous areas to the South of Lake Van and Lake Urmia, with some offshoots in the Caucasus. If there was a Kurdish speaking subjected peasantry at that time, the term was not yet used to include them. The arrival of sizeable groups of Turkic nomads, from the 11th century on, had a considerable impact on the Kurdish tribes of those days. In the western parts of the Kurdish-inhabited zone, Turkish and Kurdish nomads joined forces to establish huge tribal confederacies, and a new brand of pastoral nomadism e m e r g e d , with long-distance seasonal migrations between the A r m e n i a n highlands and the Syrian plains. 2 The cultures of the two nomadic peoples mutually influenced each other. M e m b e r s h i p of a tribe is, in spite of the genealogical ideology, ultimately a matter of political allegiance. M a n y Kurdish speakers joined Turkish chieftains and vice versa, and it is highlylikely that members of other ethnic groups (Christians as well as subjected Muslim peasants) were occasionally recruited into these tribes. Conversely, tribesmen, because of impoverishment or conflicts, may have settled and gradually merged with the subject peasantry.

A sharp distinction between the Sunni and Alevi varieties of Islam did not yet exist among these tribes. Even if nominally Sunni, their beliefs were strongly coloured by veneration for the Shi'i imams and for Muslim saints, and by messianistic expectations. T h e popular mysticism brought f r o m Central Asia and Iran by the Turks found acceptance among the Kurds too, and the many Christians w h o were assimilated and islamicised maintained, and even disseminated, man\ of their previous beliefs and practices of popular worship. It was only when the Ottoman and Safavid empires were competing

'Minorsky (1940) and MacKen/.ie (1961). DePlanhol (1968).

2

ETHNIC

IDENTITY

OF THE K U R D S

IN T U R K E Y

17

for control of the area and attempted to impose orthodox Sunni and (initially) heterodox Shi'i Islam respectively, in order to strengthen political loyalties, that distinct Sunni and Alevi groups emerged and gradually came to perceive themselves as ethnically distinct. This process, however, took a long time. During the 16th century, major tribal groups switched their political loyalties and accordingly their religious affiliation -which is reflected in the fact that chieftains gave their sons typically Sunni or Shi'i names according to their political allegiance of the day. 1 Around 1600 AD, too, we encounter the first written expressions of a Kurdish ethnic awareness. The poet Ahmed-i Khani (Ehmede Xani) lamented in the prologue to his famous epic Mem u ZTn (1105/1694) the dividedness of the Kurds, which had caused them to be dominated and ruled by Turks and Persians ('Ajam, which referred to both Persians proper and to the Safavids, and the speakers of Azeri dialects in general). He contrasted the Kurds with Arabs, Turks and 'Ajam, apparently using a combination of linguistic and political criteria. The ruler of the autonomous Kurdish emirate of Bitlis, Sharaf al-Din Khan, composed a history of the Kurds, Sharafnama (1005/1596), in which he compiled detailed information on Kurdish dynasties of the past and all tribes of his day. He included Sunnis and Yezidis as well as Alevi Kurds, and the speakers of Zaza as well as of Kurmanji dialects, and even such groups that would not be considered as Kurds today, such as the Lor and Bahtiyari in Iran. Both authors paid little attention to the lower strata of society; where they spoke of Kurds they seemed to mean the ruling families and their tribal followers only. Not all tribesmen, it should be stressed, were pastoral nomads or transhumants. There were also sedentary tribesmen, who were free cultivators or had become townsmen. In many places the tribesmen dominated a subject stratum of peasants and craftsmen, whose position was often not better than that of serfs. Many of these were Christians (Armenians, Jacobites, Nestorians) but there were also many Kurdish speaking Muslims among them. It is not clear whether the two authors mentioned included the latter among the Kurds; half a century later, the great Turkish traveller, Evliya £elebi, definitely did. For him, everyone who spoke Kurdish was a Kurd, irrespective of class or religion. Evliya explicitly included Zaza among the Kurdish dialects; Kurdish Alevis, however, he often brought together with their Turkish co-religionists and the Safavids under the label of "Kizilba§". This inclusive, democratic definition of Kurdish ethnicity was, however, an outsider's. Until the beginning of this century, Kurdish leaders themselves seem not to have thought of the subject peasantry as Kurds proper.

This becomes abundantly clear in the history of Kurdish tribes and emirates, S h a r a f n a m a , completed in 1597 A. D., by the Kurdish emir of Bitlis, Sharaf al-Din Bidlisi. For a more detailed discussion, see Bruinessen (1981).

18

K U R D I S H

E T H N O - N A T I O N A L I S M

From the 17th century on, then, there existed a clear awareness of Kurdish ethnic identity; the political stability brought by Ottoman supremacy tended to consolidate the ethnic boundaries. There continued, however, to be cases of entire tribes crossing these boundaries within a time span of a few generations. This usually coincided with a crossing of political boundaries. The Dumbuli (Dumbeli), for instance, are mentioned in the Sharafnama as a Kurmanji-speaking tribe, originally Yezidis but later converted to Sunni Islam. Part of the tribe hav ing moved from the mountains south of Lake Van to the area of Khoy, their chieftains allied themselves with the Safavids, and were rewarded with high positions. In Sharaf al-Din Khan's time, at least a part of the tribe had become (heterodox) Shi'i. During the following centuries, the Dumbuli continued to play a prominent role in regional politics, gradually Turkicising. At present, all Dumbuli are turcophone Twelver (ithna 'ashari) Shi'is. An example of the reverse development is the Karake§ili tribe, seminomads living on the slopes of the Karacadag mountain to the south-west of Diyarbakir. They are kurdophone, but according to local tradition they were originally Turkmen from Western Anatolia, who had been settled in this region by Sultan Selim 1 after the Ottoman conquest. Sections of the Karakeijili who stayed behind in Western Anatolia retained their Turkmen identity; the ones settled on Karacadag gradually Kurdicised, as a result of intermarriage and the incorporation of Kurdish allies into the tribe. This process must have been completed before the middle of the 18th century, for the descendants of a section of these Karake?ili who moved to Haymana (South of Ankara) around that time also continue to speak Kurdish. 1 From the last decades of the 19th century on, increasing numbers of Armenians, whose positior was becoming more precarious, adopted Islam (especially in its Alevi variety) and the Kurdish language, and gradually merged with their Kurdish neighbours. 2 After the Armenian deportations and massacres this process was speeded up, and minor groups of the other Christian minorities followed suit. In the provinces Siirt, Van and Hakkari there are small pockets of people who claim to be Kurds and Muslims but retain a clear memory of their previous identity as Armenians or Jacobites. They still tend to marry amongst themselves, and are distinguishable by their superior agricultural techniques and crafts, but are generally recognised as Kurds by their neighbours

' "Notes on Kurdish tribes (on and beyond the borders of the Mosul vilayet and westward to the Euphrates)", Baghdad: Government Press, 1919. Probably compiled by Major Noel. Enclosed in Public Records Office file 1919: 44A/149523/3050. C. Tiirkay (1979), pp. 32, 9 9 , 4 7 6 . G. Perrot (1865), pp. 607-631. ^Probably the first to mention this process was Molyneux-Seel (1914), w h o noticed that many of the Kurdish Alevis he met in Dersim had not so long ago been Armenians.

ETHNIC

IDENTITY

OF THE K U R D S

IN T U R K E Y

19

Soon after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, its government embarked upon a radical programme of nation-building. Ethnic diversity was perceived as a danger to the integrity of the state, and the Kurds, as the largest non-Turkish ethnic group, obviously constituted the most serious threat. They were decreed to be Turks, and their language and culture were to be Turkish. All external symbols of their ethnic identity were suppressed. Use of the Kurdish language was forbidden in cities and towns. Turkish teachers were despatched to Kurdish villages with the teaching of Turkish as their chief objective. Distinctive Kurdish dress was forbidden. Personal and family names had to be Turkish; later, village names, too, were Turkicised. The closing down of medreses and the ban on the Sufi orders (tarikat), though not exclusively directed against the Kurds, were felt as major blows to Kurdish culture, in which these traditional institutions had a prominent place. In the 1930s, after the first Kurdish rebellions, large numbers of Kurds were deported to Turkey's western provinces, while other ethnic groups (Circassians, Laz, and muhacirs from the Balkans) were settled in the Kurdish districts: all attempts to speed up the Turkicisation of the Kurds. These assimilation policies were backed up by a new historical doctrine according to which the Kurds were really Turks originally, but had by historical accident lost their language. There was no official discrimination against those Kurds who agreed to be assimilated: they could reach the highest positions in the state apparatus Those who refused, however, often met with severe repression. Publicly proclaiming oneself to be a Kurd has often (though not always) been treated as: a major offence, an act of separatism. The assimilation policies were not without effect. Many individuals have for all practical purposes been Turkicised and do not consider themselves as Kurds any more. Most of the Kurds who migrated to the big cities up to the 1960s were rapidly assimilated., and their children do not know Kurdish any more (during the past decades, Kurdish migrants have been too numerous to be assimilated). In several rural areas, too, Turkish has to a considerable extent replaced Kurdish, at least outside the family situation. In much wider areas, Kurds began calling themselves Turks, and it has long been hard to see how serious they were about it. In the relatively liberal atmosphere of the 1970s, when Kurdish nationalism flourished, it became apparent that this Turkicisation was only skin-deep. From the late 1960s on, Kurdish nationalism, which in Turkey had until then remained restricted to a limited circle of intellectuals only, suddenly found itself a mass base. The military and political successes of the Iraqi Kurds under Barzani constituted one of the major influencing factors; large-scalc migration to the cities, the increasing number of Kurdish students, and the weakness and division of the central government combined to make the

20

KURDISH

H T H N O - N A T ] O N A LI S M

emergence and growth of a nationalist movement possible. This is not the place to discuss the history of that movement; 1 the relevant fact is that it revivified or created symbols of Kurdish ethnic identity that affected the way many Kurds saw themselves. Books on Kurdish history were published, and a large number of Kurdish literary, cultural and political magazines appeared. Due to the ban on the Kurdish language, it had long not been able to develop in accordance with the needs of the day. For political discourse, for instance, it w a s quite inadequate, and most discussions were still held in Turkish. Moreover, the differences between the various dialects were so great that c o m m u n i c a t i o n was often difficult. Nationalists set out to remedy this situation: there were attempts to create a unified Kurdish (Kurmanji) language, and many neologisms were coined. This modernised Kurdish was disseminated through a variety of journals and many (clandestine) Kurdish literacy courses. A Kurdish national music was re-invented, and became rapidly well-known and popular through the cassette recorder. People started wearing Kurdish clothes again in many cases a fancy dress, based on that worn by the Iraqi Kurds. Kurdish folklore was also re-invented, including the celebration of

Newroz,

Kurdish New Year, which few remembered as ever having existed in Turkey, but which was the Iraqi Kurds' national holiday. The nationalists stressed the ethnic unity of Sunni and Alevi Kurds; and in fact, Sunnis and Alevis worked together in all Kurdish organisations without much friction. Towards the end of the 1970s, it seemed that this nationalist movement was changing the self-perception of a considerable section of the Kurds. People who had long called themselves Turks started re-defining themselves as Kurds; youngsters in the cities, who knew only Turkish, began to learn Kurdish again. T h e s e d e v e l o p m e n t s were cut short by the military take-over of September 1980. The military authorities have taken tough measures against the Kurdish nationalist movement and have reverted to a rigorous policy of forced assimilation. The successes of the Kurdish nationalist movement may well prove to have been ephemeral only. It remains to be seen, however, whether the present government's efforts will be more successful in changing the ethnic map of Eastern Turkey.

' C f . Bruinessen, 1984.

ETHNIC

IDENTITY

OF THE KURDS

IN

TURKEY

21

References: B r u i n e s s e n , M. van, "Kurdischer N a t i o n a l i s m u s und religiöser K o n f l i k t " , in: Religion und Politik im Iran. Berlin/Frankfurt, 1981. [reprinted in this volume] - ,

" T h e K u r d s in T u r k e y " , MERIP

Reports,

no. 121 ( 1 9 8 4 ) , pp. 6-12.

[reprinted in this volume] MacKenzie,

D. N . ,

Philological

" T h e O r i g i n s of

Society

Kurdish",

Transactions

M i n o r s k y , V., " L e s o r i g i n e s des K u r d e s " , in: Actes International

of

the

1961, pp. 68-86.

des Orientalistes

du

XXe

Congrès

(1938), pp. 143-152. L o u v a i n , 1940.

M o l y n e u x - S e e l , L., " J o u r n e y into D e r s i m " , Geographical

Journal,

44,1

(1914), pp. 4 9 - 6 8 . Perrot, G., "Les K u r d e s de H a ï m a n e h " , Revue des deux mondes

55 (1865), pp.

607-631. Planhol, X. de, Les fondements T ü r k a y , C., Osmanli Istanbul, 1979.

géographiques

Împaratorlugunda

de l'histoire Oymak,

A§iret

de l'islam. ve

Paris.

Cemaatlar.

DIVERSITY A N D DIVISION AMONG THE KURDS

There is little apparent unity among the Kurds, and the fact that Kurdistan has been divided between four countries — or even more, if we take the Kurdish enclaves in the Transcaucasian republics into account — is only one of the reasons. Differences in religion, language and other aspects of culture mean that Kurdish society is itself highly diverse. But the effects of the political separation by state borders — and thus in formal education, military service, state radio and television and participation in different political systems — have made the Kurds of Iran, Iraq and Turkey more different from one another than they had been before.

Countless Kurds Some of the simplest questions about the Kurds are among the most difficult to answer. The question of how many of them there are, for instance. Different sources give estimates varying from less than 10 million to 40 million, apparently reflecting the degree of sympathy for the Kurdish nationalist cause more than anything else. There are no reliable figures based on actual census-taking. Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, which have (in this order) the largest numbers of Kurdish citizens, have attempted to assimilate them, though not all with the same degree of coercion, and they have commonly refrained from counting them. Turkey has been the most consistent, and long the most successful, in its suppression of Kurdish identity. Until recently, the very existence of the Kurds as a distinct group was officially denied, and the Kurdish language was declared to be a corrupt Turkish dialect — but nevertheless banned as a threat to Turkish unity. In the late 1980s it became possible publicly to mention the Kurds, and in 1991 the government lifted the ban on publications in Kurdish. The late Prime Minister (and from 1989 until his death in 1993 President) Turgut Ozal. to whom this liberalisation is generally attributed, also was the first public person to speak of the demographic importance of the Kurds. His estimate of 12 million (i.e., almost a fifth of the total population) may in fact have been a little on the high side and was probably meant to convince his countrymen oi the seriousness of the Kurdish problem. However that may be, since Turkey has recognised that it has a considerable Kurdish population, there have also

KURDISH

24

KTHNO

NATIONALISM

been efforts to emphasise and strengthen existing divisions a m o n g them. Some members of the Alevi religious minority as well as some speakers of Zaza, a language closely related to Kurdish, have started organising themselves separately from, and in opposition to, the majority of the Kurds. The Kurds of Iran number at least 5 million or 6 million. Kurdish is related to Persian, and the Kurds have at most times been better integrated in Iran's political and cultural life than has been the case in Turkey or Iraq. Most of the Kurds, in Iran as elsewhere, are Sunni M u s l i m s , which sharply distinguishes them from Iran's Shi'i majority. There are also Shi'i Kurds, however, in the southern parts of Kurdistan. In Iran, the Kurdish movement has only found significant support a m o n g the Sunnis. The Shi'i Kurds appear to identify themselves more strongly with Iran than with the idea of a Kurdish nation; the Islamic g o v e r n m e n t has f o u n d il easy to m o b i l i s e t h e m a g a i n s t the K u r d i s h nationalists. Unlike its neighbours, Iran has at most times refrained f r o m systematic oppressive measures against the Kurdish population as a whole. It has allowed some limited room for Kurdish cultural expression but acted decisively whenever demands for autonomy were voiced. It has successfully marginalised the Kurdish movement by systematically assassinating its most effective leaders, in most cases on foreign soil. Iraq is the only of these states that has always recognised the existence of the Kurds as a distinct component of its population, and its Constitution explicitly mentions them as one of the country's two peoples (although a later paragraph has it that Iraq is at the same time an integral part of the greater Arab nation). Most of the Iraqi Kurds live in the former Ottoman province of Mosul, which after the First World War remained contested. Both Turkey and Iraq laid claims to it, and some British officials briefly toyed with the idea of making it a semi-independent Kurdish buffer state between those two. Only in 1926 did the province of Mosul definitively became a part of the Kingdom of Iraq. At that time, the Kurds constituted almost a quarter of the country's total population. Iraq's troubled history of expulsions (Jews, Kurdish and Arab Shi'is allegedly of Iranian descent) as well as of genocide has affected many other groups besides the Kurds, and they probably still represent a similar proportion of the population, or in absolute n u m b e r s some 4 million. T h e absence of census data is not the only reason for the widely divergent estimates of the number of Kurds. Another reason is that it is often not possible to establish unambiguously w h o is a Kurd and who is not. Sunni Muslims who have Kurdish as their first language are a clear case, but as a

DIVERSITY

AND DIVISION

AMONG THE KURDS

25

result of assimilation and of intermarriage with other ethnic g r o u p s there are, especially in T u r k e y , n u m e r o u s people of Kurdish descent w h o have Turkish (or Persian or A r a b i c , in the o t h e r c o u n t r i e s ) as their first l a n g u a g e . M a n y y o u n g p e o p l e w h o in the

1960s c o n s i d e r e d t h e m s e l v e s a T u r k s

have

"rediscovered" their Kurdish roots and n o w d e f i n e themselves in the first place as Kurds. On the other hand, there have also been K u r d s who, w h e n migrating to another part of the country, m a d e efforts to hide their Kurdish b a c k g r o u n d s in o r d e r to be m o r e e a s i l y a c c e p t e d . Finally t h e r e are v a r i o u s religious and linguistic m i n o r i t i e s in K u r d i s t a n , w h o in certain s i t u a t i o n s m a y d e f i n e t h e m s e l v e s as K u r d s but riot in others, such as the Z a z a s p e a k e r s and the Alevis in T u r k e y , t h e Kaka'i and Yezidi religious minorities in Iraq. T u r k e y f a v o u r s t h e view that the Z a z a s p e a k e r s are n o t K u r d s ( b o t h used to be considered as distinct Turkish ethnic subgroups). T h e Iraqi regime defines the Kaka'is a n d Y e z i d i s , like all o t h e r religious m i n o r i t i e s in that c o u n t r y , as Arabs, and the Yezidis' refusal to accept that designation appears to have been the chief reason w h y part of the c o m m u n i t y w a s rounded up and apparently executed in 1988, in t h e aftermath of the genocidal Anfal

campaign.

The Diaspora T h e vast m a j o r i t y of K u r d s used to live in the r e g i o n traditionally k n o w n as K u r d i s t a n , r o u g h l y c o n s i s t i n g of the m o u n t a i n s and h i g h l a n d s s e p a r a t i n g A s i a M i n o r a n d M e s o p o t a m i a f r o m the I r a n i a n p l a t e a u a n d i n c l u d i n g t h e n o r t h e r n e d g e s of t h e M e s o p o t a m i a n p l a i n s . T h i s r e g i o n c o m p r i s e s most of T u r k e y ' s east and south-east, parts of n o r t h - w e s t e r n and north-eastern Syria, northern Iraq, and the a d j a c e n t parts of w e s t e r n Iran. It contains m a j o r cities like D i y a r b a k i r a n d V a n (in T u r k e y ) , D u h o k , Erbil, Kirkuk and Sulaimania (in Iraq), M a h a b a d , S a n a d a j and K e r m a n s h a h (in Iran) but its e c o n o m y used to be p r i m a r i l y b a s e d on a g r i c u l t u r e a n d animal h u s b a n d r y , and m o s t of the K u r d s used t o live in v i l l a g e s . S i n c e 1970, a considerable proportion of the K u r d s have left this region, voluntarily or under coercion. T h e oil b o o m and rising e m p l o y m e n t opportunities in cities outside: the region on the o n e hand, and the mechanisation of agriculture on the other, caused a m a s s e x o d u s f r o m the villages. T h e Kurdish c o m m u n i t i e s of Tehran and B a g h d a d , Istanbul, Izmir and A d a n a increased rapidly, and the first Kurdish communities in western Europe emerged. Iraq d e p o r t e d K u r d s f r o m the o i l - p r o d u c i n g districts of K i r k u k anc! K h a n a q i n and replaced them with A r a b peasants. In a later p h a s e , all villages; in a w i d e " f o r b i d d e n z o n e " a l o n g the I r a n i a n b o r d e r w e r e e v a c u a t e d and destroyed — a measure designed to prevent Kurdish guerrilla fighters crossing

26

KURDISH

E T H N O - N A T I ON A M S M

f r o m or into Iran but which largely failed to have the intended e f f e c t . In the 1980s, the "forbidden zone" w a s e v e r f u r t h e r e x t e n d e d , until 4 , 0 0 0 villages were evacuated and destroyed (out of a total of 5,000). S o m e of the e v a c u e e s were deported to the south of the country but most ended u p in closely guarded large resettlement c a m p s in the region. This policy of destruction culminated in the chemical arms-assisled Anfal operations of 1988, in which all districts t h a t had been u n d e r g u e r r i l l a control w e r e s y s t e m a t i c a l l y

razed, their

i n h a b i t a n t s driven off to collection points, and s o m e 100,000 of the m e n despatched to firing squads and mass graves. In T u r k e y , s y s t e m a t i c village e v a c u a t i o n s and destruction b e g a n in 1991, with the obvious aim of cutting the Kurdistan W o r k e r s Party ( P K K ) off f r o m the village population and d e n y i n g its guerrilla fighters f o o d and other logistical support. B e g i n n i n g in the regions close to the Iraqi border, w h e r e hardly any villages are left but those of pro-state militias ("village guards"), there have been successive waves of village evacuations further inland. At least tens of thousands of f a m i l i e s were forcibly evicted; m a n y times that n u m b e r f l e d the region b e c a u s e the w a r c o n d i t i o n s m a d e n o r m a l life p r a c t i c a l l y impossible. T h e population of cities in eastern T u r k e y such as Diyarbakir has tripled or quadrupled in a few years; between 1 million and 2 million have left the region f o r southern and western T u r k e y , most of t h e m e n d i n g u p in the vast slum districts surrounding the big cities.

Different creeds and tongues Linguistic and religious distinctions a m o n g the K u r d s also served as divisive factors. In Iraq, which is d o m i n a t e d by Sunni A r a b s , Shi'i K u r d s h a v e tended to d e f i n e themselves as K u r d s first and h a v e taken part in the K u r d i s h m o v e m e n t w i t h o u t b o t h e r i n g that the m o v e m e n t was d o m i n a t e d by S u n n i K u r d s . In Shi'i Iran, h o w e v e r , they identified t h e m s e l v e s primarily as Shi'is and, as noted, the Islamic g o v e r n m e n t could recruit m a n y Shi'i K u r d s actively to f i g h t the nationalist m o v e m e n t . In Turkey, the difference between the Sunni M u s l i m s and the heterodox A l e v i s ( a m o n g both of w h i c h there are T u r k s as well as Kurds and m i n o r linguistic groups) is p e r h a p s even sharper that that between T u r k s and K u r d s . Alevi K u r d s , m a n y of w h o m m o r e o v e r speak Z a z a , which is quite d i f f e r e n t f r o m ordinary Kurdish, therefore have ambivalent attitudes towards the Kurdish m o v e m e n t : s o m e play active and even leading roles in it, others prefer to stay aloof or even perceive it as a threat to their distinct identities.

DIVERSITY

AND DIVISION AMONG THE

KURDS

27

T h e secular Turkish elite has welcomed the e m e r g e n c e of a strong Alevi self-awareness during the past d e c a d e as a potential ally against both M u s l i m fundamentalism and Kurdish nationalism. Not surprisingly perhaps, the fiercest c o n f r o n t a t i o n s between the Turkish a r m y and the K u r d i s h P K K o v e r the past t w o years have taken place in the z o n e inhabited by Alevi K u r d s , in and a r o u n d the province of T u n c e l i , w h e r e both are f i g h t i n g f o r the people's loyalties. E v e n within K u r d i s h proper, t h e d i f f e r e n c e s b e t w e e n the n o r t h e r n ( " K u r m a n j i " ) and southern ("Sorani") dialects are m o m e n t o u s ; t h e s e dialects are n o t m u t u a l l y i n t e l l i g i b l e . W i t h i n e a c h d i a l e c t g r o u p t h e r e is a g a i n considerable variation, and attempts to d e v e l o p a c o m m o n standard l a n g u a g e h a v e been only partially successful. In Iraq there exists an accepted f o r m of standard Sorani that is generally understood, but the suppression of Kurdish in T u r k e y has prevented the e m e r g e n c e of a widely accepted K u r m a n j i standard. Both the Iranian and Iraqi state radio and television broadcast p r o g r a m m e s in a variety of K u r d i s h dialects, in what appears to be a deliberate e f f o r t to prevent the emergence of a c o m m o n standard for Kurds. It has often been observed that the t w o Iraqi Kurdish parties that h a v e been at each other's throats during the past years, the Kurdistan D e m o c r a t i c Party ( K D P ) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan ( P U K ) , receive the majority of their s u p p o r t f r o m the K u r m a n j i - s p e a k i n g northern part of the K u r d i s h region and the Sorani-spcaking southern part, respectively. It would be wrong, h o w e v e r , to r e d u c e the c a u s e s of t h e c o n f l i c t to this r e g i o n a l - l i n g u i s t i c difference, if only because previously each of the parties also had considerable support in the other region. It is probably m o r e correct to say that the political conflict has had the e f f e c t of opening u p a gap between the K u r m a n j i - s p e a k i n g and S o r a n i - s p e a k i n g r e g i o n s , even t h o u g h t h e battle lines n e v e r precisely coincided with the linguistic boundary.

Different loyalties T h e really d i v i s i v e f a c t o r in K u r d i s h society is not its cultural a n d linguistic heterogeneity but the lasting importance of tribal structures. Kurdish tribes, which m a y c o n s i s t of t h o u s a n d s to tens of t h o u s a n d s of f a m i l i e s , are based on (a belief in) c o m m o n descent and loyalty to a traditional chieftain. E a c h tribe is associated with a distinct territory, f r o m a f e w villages to entire valleys, and its internal cohesion is strengthened by rivalries and conflicts with neighbouring tribes. N o t all Kurds belong to tribes, however, and migration to the cities has loosened u p tribal loyalties. U r b a n nationalists h a v e c o m m o n l y considered detribalisation a n e c e s s a r y c o n d i t i o n f o r the e m e r g e n c e of truly national loyalties.

28

KURDI S 4

E T H N O - N A T I O N A LI S M

In times of armed conflict between central governments and the Kurdish movement, however, the tribes have time and again emerged as decisive forces. There had long been conflicts between the family of Barzani, to which the charismatic leader of the Kurdish movement belonged, and some neighbouring tribes. Throughout the 1960s, the Iraqi government paid and armed these tribes as

pro-government

militias

( n i c k n a m e d jash,

"donkey foal" by the

nationalists). T h e Kurdisn m o v e m e n t itself in turn also b e c a m e more dependent on tribal support, especially in the northern part. A s the scope of the conflict enlarged, the number of tribes recruited by one side or the other increased. The great amounts of money and arms thus entering society strengthened the position of the chieftains (who were the recipients, and who could redistribute them as pleased them), shored up tribal coherence and fanned conflicts between neighbouring tribes. The alliances of the tribes with the government or with the Kurdish movement were a matter of expedience and always temporary. By the late 1980s, a majority of the m a j o r tribes had become jash. In 1991, following Iraq's defeat in Kuwait, it had been precisely these jash tribes that started the large Kurdish uprising against the central government, and later most of them allied themselves with one or the other of the Kurdish parties without, however, cutting all their ties with Baghdad. Several jash chieftains have become regional warlords, only nominally subservient to one of the parties. The latter, unwilling to repudiate these militarily powerful allies, have been unable to discipline them. Depredations by these warlords have repeatedly unleashed new rounds of fighting between K D P and PUK guerrilla units. In Turkey too, the tribes have acquired a renewed prominence due to state intervention. Since 1985, the g o v e r n m e n t has recruited ever m o r e tribesmen as "village guards" to fight against the P K K , some voluntarily, others under threat of eviction from their villages. The total number of these village guards by now appears to exceed 60,000. A s in Iraq, these militias remain under the command of their own chieftains, through whom they receive their payment and arms; this has obviously greatly increased the power of these chieftains. As a part of the counter-guerrilla forces, the village guards have been able to kill and steal with impunity. This has sharpened tribal conflict and revived tribal solidarity, with a corresponding decline in security. The P K K , it should be noted, has not come to depend on tribal militias of its own, as the Iraqi parties have to some extent. Many if not most of its guerrilla fighters may be of tribal origins, but they operate under strict party command.

DIVERSITY

AND DIVISION

AMONG THE KURDS

29

Inter-state Rivalries Iran, Iraq, T u r k e y and to s o m e extent Syria have similar p r o b l e m s with their Kurdish populations and therefore, one would assume, a c o m m o n interest in suppressing Kurdish separatist tendencies and hopes f o r independence. The}' h a v e at t i m e s a s s i s t e d o n e a n o t h e r in c o u n t e r i n g the t h r e a t of K u r d i s h nationalism the p r e v i o u s p r o - w e s t e r n d e f e n c e alliances, the S a a d a b a d Pact (1937) and the Baghdad Pact (1955), in which the first three took part, enabled them to develop c o m m o n Kurdish policies, and the Kurds constitute the m a j o r topic of discussion in the regular tripartite m e e t i n g s between T u r k e y , Syria and Iran. W h e n there w e r e m a j o r clashes of interests between these neighbours, h o w e v e r , they h a v e a l s o repeatedly s u p p o r t e d uprisings a m o n g each other's Kurds. All Kurdish political parties have, at one t i m e or another, perceived the n e e d f o r s u p p o r t by a n e i g h b o u r i n g state, a n d m o s t h a v e b e c o m e highly d e p e n d e n t on it, to the extent that m a j o r policy decisions w e r e influenced (or e v e n dictated) by their f o r e i g n sponsors. F r o m 1963-75, Iran g a v e increasing financial and military support to the Iraqi K u r d i s h m o v e m e n t led by M u l l a M u s t a f a Barzani. T h e n the Iraqi regime m a d e important c o n c e s s i o n s in a longstanding border conflict, a f t e r which Iran obliged Barzani to give up. S o m e of the Iranian Kurdish leaders, meanwhile, lived in exile in Iraq biding their time; they returned during the Iranian revolution and reorganised their party. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq supported various Iranian Kurdish parties and groups, and Iran allied itself with the Iraqi K D P then led by M u l l a M u s t a f a B a r z a n i ' s sons to the e x t e n t of carrying out j o i n t military o p e r a t i o n s against Iraq. T h e s e alliances at times also led to a r m e d c o n f r o n t a t i o n s b e t w e e n Iraqi and Iranian Kurds: thus in 1968, w h e n Barzani's P e s h m e r g a fighters helped the Iranian g o v e r n m e n t suppress a radical guerrilla m o v e m e n t in Iran, and again in the early 1980s, w h e n the Iraqi K D P f o u g h t side by side with Iranian troops against the Iranian sister party. Both Syria and Iraq depend f o r their w a t e r supply to a large extent on the E u p h r a t e s and T i g r i s , and t h e y feel s e r i o u s l y t h r e a t e n e d by T u r k e y ' s a m b i t i o u s S o u t h e a s t A n a t o l i a P r o j e c t , w h i c h d i v e r t s m u c h of t h e w a t e r of these rivers f o r irrigation purposes. Syria m o r e o v e r has a territorial claim on T u r k e y ' s province of Hatay, which has a large A r a b population. T o put pressure on T u r k e y , Syria has been almost o p e n l y supporting the P K K , which since the early 1980s has had training facilities in the Syriancontrolled south of L e b a n o n and a p p e a r s to e n j o y f r e e m o v e m e n t in northern Syria. ( T u r k e y in turn s u p p o r t s the m a j o r Syrian o p p o s i t i o n m o v e m e n t , the M u s l i m Brothers.) T h e P K K appears to be allowed to enlist the support of

30

KURDISH

KTHNO - NATIONAL] S M

Syrian Kurds, but it has also been accused of acting as an extension of the Syrian state in suppressing other Kurdish movements in Syria as well as northern Iraq. Since 1991, a large part of Iraqi Kurdistan has been de facto semiindependent under international protection. Besides the various Iraqi Kurdish parties (and those of the Assyrian and Turcoman minorities), the Iranian K D P and the PKK also have their bases here. All f o u r states of the region have been much concerned about the effects this semi-independence could have on the other parts of Kurdistan, and all have made great efforts to extend their influence there. T h e Turkish armed forces have repeatedly invaded northern Iraq and maintain a low-key presence in the territory, allegedly to wipe out the PKK bases there but probably as much to impose its will on the Iraqi Kurdish parties and to prevent Iran and Syria f r o m extending their influence. Iran has supported the Iraqi Shi'i opposition and the Kurdish Islamic parties for ideological reasons, and it has had various strategic alliances, first with the K D P and later with the PKK. Last summer it carried out a raid far into the region in an unsuccessful attempt to capture the oppositional Iranian Kurds living there. Syria has been projecting its influence both through the PKK and through a balanced patronage of the Iraqi parties. One important reason the fighting between the Iraqi Kurdish factions has been so persistent is that each of these neighbouring states (as well as the Iraqi regime) has attempted through this conflict to change the balance of power to its own advantage, and has sabotaged peace negotiations that could cost it crucial influence.

KURDS, TURKS AND THE ALEVI REVIVAL IN TURKEY 1

Until a few years ago, Kurdish nationalism was the only movement in Turkey that openly defied the official doctrine that Turkey is a homogeneous nation-state. Informally, people would freely apply ethnic labels to their acquaintances; everybody was aware of the rich ethnic variety of the country, 2 but it was thought undesirable to acknowledge this and most people were reluctant or afraid to define themselves as anything but Turks. In the 1970s, Kurdish nationalists had begun challenging this official view, and in 1979 a cabinet minister caused a political scandal by calmly remarking that he too was a Kurd. 3 The military regime of 1980-83 made a last-ditch attempt to silence those Kurds who wished to be different, but its oppressive measures had the opposite effect of what was intended; they strengthened the Kurds' sense of their distinct identity and resulted in massive sympathy f o r the separatist PKK. By 1990, the Turkish government realised that further efforts to impose uniformity would probably be counterproductive and that they would moreover hamper closer relations with Europe, where the protection of minority cultures had become an important political issue. In a sudden reversal of policy, the government in 1991 repealed the law banning the use of otherlanguages than Turkish in publishing. 4 This relaxation allowed not only an upsurge in Kurdish cultural activities. T w o other ethnic groups, the Laz and especially the Circassians, also began publishing and organising. These activities were stimulated both by the Kurdish e x a m p l e but perhaps even more by developments in the (former) Soviet Union. The Laz live in the region bordering on the republic of Georgia and their language is related to Georgian. The Circassians (called Cherkes in Turkish) originale from the northern Caucasus; the name is in fact

' [ W r i t t e n in the spring of 1996 and published, in slightly abbreviated f o r m , in Middle Report 200 (Summer 1996)]. 2

East

A recent study, Peter A. Andrews' Ethnic groups in the Republic of Turkey ( W i e s b a d e n : Reichert, 1989), enumerates 4 7 distinct ethnic groups in Turkey, and the choice of another sei of criteria for ethnic identity might have yielded an even higher number. 3 T h i s w a s §erafettin El?i, then minister of public works. A f t e r the 1980 military coup he was sentenced to two years imprisonment for this remark. 4 T h i s law was a product of the 1980-83 military regime. It violated several international agreements on the protection of minorities to which Turkey was a party. See C. Rumpf, "The Turkish law prohibiting languages other than Turkish", in: Documentation of the International Conference on Human Rights in Kurdistan, 14-16. April 1989 (Hochschule Bremen, 1989), pp. 6 8 - 8 9 a n d the s a m e author's "Das S p r a c h e n v e r b o t in d e r T ü r k e i unter b e s o n d e r e r B e r ü c k s i c h t i g u n g ihrer völkerrechtlichen V e r p f l i c h t u n g e n " , Orient 30 ( H a m b u r g , 1989).

32

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a blanket term for various related North Caucasian peoples, primarily Abkhazians, Adighe and Ubigh, and occasionally Chechen and Ingush are also included. There are hundreds of thousands of Circassians in Turkey, most of them the descendants of refugees who left their homelands when these were occupied by Russia in the mid-19th century. 1 The devolution of the Soviet Union caused a reorientation of young Turkish Circassians towards their ancestral homelands, and some actually went back. The recent struggles in Abkhazia (1992) and the war in Chechnya (1995) have not made remigration an attractive option, but they have had a strong mobilising effect on the Circassian (and Chechen) communities in Turkey. T h e same period also witnessed a sudden resurgence of the Alevi identity. The Alevis, a heterodox religious minority, began manifesting themselves very much as yet another ethnic group. All over the country, as well as among the migrant communities in Europe, Alevi associations sprang up. Alevi intellectuals and community leaders set out to define the Alevi identity, Alevi tradition, Alevi history. Between 1990 and 1995, more books were published in Turkey about the Alevis than about any ethnic group, the Kurds included. Both the Kurdish movement and the government courted the Alevis, and both did their utmost to prevent the other from making inroads among them. Both, but especially the government, were handicapped in these efforts because they depended on Sunni majorities which had always been hostile to the Alevis. The police, which after 1980 had been purged of leftwing elements, was in many places dominated by conservative Sunnis or right-wing nationalists, and there were a number of major incidents in which the police took part in murderous violence against Alevis, causing renewed alienation between the Alevis and the state. The most shocking of these incidents were the firebomb attack on a leftist-cum-Alevi cultural festival in Sivas in 1993, in which 37 people were killed, and the riots following a terrorist raid on Alevi teahouses in the Istanbul neighbourhood Gazi (district Gaziosmanpa§a), in which policemen deliberately fired into the crowd of protesters, killing more than a dozen persons. Both are briefly described below. Of a different nature, but not unrelated, was the violence directed at the (Alevi) villages in eastern central Turkey, where the Kurdish war began spilling over into the Alevi-inhabited zone.

' S e e B. Ozbek, "Tscherkessen in cier Tiirkei", in: P. Andrews, Ethnic groups in the Republic of Turkey, pp. 581-90; M. Bjedug & H. Taymaz, "'Siirgun' halk Cerkesler", Birikim 71-72 (MarchApril 1995), 118-24.

KURDS,

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ALEVI

REVIVAL

In the autumn of 1994 and again throughout 1995, the Turkish army carried out large-scale counter-insurgency operations in the mountainous province of Tunceli, resulting in the (partial or complete) destruction and forced evacuation or around a third of the villages there. 1 Tunceli, which is almost exclusively inhabited by Kurdish Alevis, 2 had a long tradition of resistance to government authority, but had not earlier been a stronghold of Kurdish nationalism. The military operations indicated that the Kurdish struggle in Turkey had entered a new phase. The radical Kurdish movement PKK (Workers' Party of Kurdistan) was making inroads among the Kurdish Alevis, who had long been considered as constituting a sort of buffer between the Kurdish provinces proper and Central Anatolia. In early 1996, Turkish public opinion was shocked to discover that similar operations had also taken place in the (largely Turkish) province of Sivas, to the west of Tunceli. Dozens of Alevi villages here, Turkish as well as Kurdish, had been evacuated under strong pressure from the military. Alevi representatives spoke of 'ethnic cleansing' in this religiously mixed province.

Who are the Alevis? Just as is the case with such ethnic groups as the Kurds and the Arabs, estimates of the number of Alevis in Turkey vary widely, from around 10 percent to as much as 40 percent of the total population. Censuses have never registered Alevis as a distinct category; and even if they had, the outcome would be unreliable, for the Alevis, fearing religious and political discrimination, have often attempted to hide their identity. Mixed (SunniAlevi) marriages and the slow but steady process of assimilation of substantial Alevi communities to (secularised) Sunni Islam make all statistics inherently ambiguous. The name of Alevi is a blanket term for a large number of different heterodox communities, whose actual beliefs and ritual practices differ much. Linguistically four groups may be distinguished. In the eastern province of Kars there are communities speaking Azarbayjani Turkish and whose Alevism differs little from the 'orthodox' Twelver Shi'ism of modern Iran. The Arabic: speaking Alevi communities of southern Turkey (especially Hatay and Adana) are the extension of Syria's 'Alawi (Nusayri) community and have no

See the report Forced evictions and destruction of villages in Dersim (Tunceli) and the western part of Bingol, Turkish Kurdistan, September-November 1994 (Amsterdam: Netherlands Kurdistan Society, 1995). 2 I use the term 'Kurdish Alevis' as a shorthand for 'Alevis whose mother tongue is Kurdish or the related Zaza language'. My use of the term does not imply that I consider all these people as essentially Kurdish; in fact, a considerable number of them prefer to identify themselves not primarily as Kurds.

34

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historical ties with the other Alevi groups. Like the first group, their numbers are small and their role in Turkey has been negligible. T h e important Alevi groups are the Turkish and Kurdish speakers (the latter still to be divided into speakers of K u r d i s h proper and of related Z a z a ) ; both a p p e a r to be the descendants of rebellious tribal groups that were religiously affiliated with the Safavids. T h e religion of these Alevis, though to some extent Islamicised, differs considerably f r o m Sunni Islam. Prayer ( n a m a z ) , the fast in R a m a d a n , zakat and the hajj are alien practices to most Alevi communities. Instead they have their o w n religious c e r e m o n i e s ( c e m ) , o f f i c i a t e d by 'holy men 1 ( d e d e ) belonging to a hereditary priestly caste, at which religious p o e m s (deyi§ o r nefes) in T u r k i s h are sung and (in s o m e c o m m u n i t i e s at least) m e n and w o m e n carry out ritual d a n c e s ( s e m a h ) . A s a m o n g other e x t r e m i s t Shi'i groups, Ali and the Safavid Shah Isma'il are deified, or at least considered as superhuman. Many more elements of pre-Islamic Turkish and Iranian religions have been retained than a m o n g Sunni M u s l i m s , and pilgrimages to sacred springs and mountains are especially c o m m o n . Instead of a d h e r e n c e to the shari'a, Alevis profess obedience to a set of simple moral n o r m s ; they claim t o live a c c o r d i n g to the inner (batin) m e a n i n g of religion rather than its external (zahir) demands. 1 T h e m a j o r concentrations of Turkish Alevis used to be found in central Anatolia, but there are important pockets of Alevi villages t h r o u g h o u t the Aegean and Mediterranean coastal regions and in the European part of Turkey as well. Kurdish Alevis were concentrated in the north-western part of the Kurdish settlement zone, with Dersim (approximately the present province of Tunceli) as the cultural centre and with important pockets further south, east and west. An arc of ethnically and religiously mixed districts, stretching f r o m Gaziantep and Kahramanmara§ in the south through Adiyaman and Malatya to Sivas in the north, constitutes a zone of transition f r o m T u r k i s h Kurdistan (the Southeast) to the rest of the country . It was in this z o n e that during the 1970s the most serious clashes between S u n n i s and Alevis took place. T h e Alevis, T u r k s as well as Kurds, used to live in m o u n t a i n o u s and relatively isolated villages, reflecting their history of persecution in the Sunni O t t o m a n Empire. Only f r o m the 1950s on did they start leaving these villages in large n u m b e r s to settle in the towns of the region or migrate to the large cities in the west.

' T h e r e is no satisfactory description in English of Alevism as a religion. Most useful are: S. van Rensselaer Trowbridge, "The 'Alevis", The Moslem World 11 (1921), 253-66 and I. Markoff, "Music, saints, and ritual: sama' and the Alevis of Turkey", in: G. Martin Smith & C. W. Ernst (eds.), Manifestations of sainthood in Islam (Istanbul: Isis, 1993), pp. 95-110. T h e only systematic study presently available is in German: K. Kehl-Bodrogi, Die Kizilbas/Aleviten (Berlin: Schwarz, 1988). (Two recent volumes in English redress this shortcoming: K. KehlBodrogi, B. Kellner-Heinkele, anc A. Otter-Beaujean (eds), Syncretistic religious communities in the Near East (Leiden: Brill. 1997); T. Olsson, E. Ozdalga, and C. Randvere (eds), Alevi identity: cultural, religious and social perspectives (Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute, 1998).!

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35

Emancipation and politicisation T h e secularisation of Turkey made the gradual emancipation of the Alevis possible. It is not surprising that during the first great Kurdish rebellion of 1925, which had a strong (Sunni) religious colouring, Kurdish Alevi tribes actually fought against the rebels. It is true that there also were, in 1920 and 1937-38, rebellions of Kurdish Alevis against the Kemalist movement and the Republic, 1 but at no time until the present did Kurdish Alevis in significant n u m b e r s join forces with Sunni K u r d s against the Kemalist regime. By and large, Kurdish as well as Turkish Alevis were supportive of the secular and populist ideals of Kemalism; many Kurdish Alevis voluntarily assimilated to Turkish culture and c a m e to identify themselves as Turks rather than as Kurds. Secularisation did not, however, bode the end of the widespread Sunni prejudices against the Alevis (who, like heterodox groups anywhere, are c o m m o n l y accused of sexual licentiousness and other immoralities). The Alevis' gradual integration into the wider society — migration to the towns, education, careers in public service — brought them into closer contact, and sometimes in direct competition, with strict Sunnis, f r o m w h o m they had remained socially separated f o r centuries. This caused growing tension, especially in the towns of the ethnically and religiously mixed zone mentioned above, but also in the large cities further west. Recent immigrants from the villages tended to cluster together with people of the same backgrounds, so that there emerged more or less distinct Alevi and Sunni neighbourhoods. The political polarisation that began in the 1970s exacerbated the situation. The radical left, perceiving in the Alevi rebellions of the past protocommunist movements, saw the Alevis as its natural allies. T h e extreme right (the fascist Party of Nationalist Action but also religious right-wing groups), on the other hand, concentrated its recruiting efforts on the conservative Sunni Muslims of the mixed regions, by fanning their fear and hatred of the Alevis and provoking armed incidents. Spreading rumours that Alevis had bombed a mosque or poisoned its water supply was an unfailing method of mobilising Sunni reaction and drawing the Sunnis towards the extreme right. A series of violent Sunni-Alevi clashes culminated by the end of the decade in anti-Alevi pogroms in Malatya, Kahramanmara§ and f o r u m . The local police, already infiltrated by the extreme right, did little to protect the Alevis, resulting in a growing alienation of Turkey's Alevis from the state.

On these rebellions see: H.-L. Kieser, Les Kurdes alevis face au nationalisme turc kémaliste. L'alévité du Dersim et son rôle dans le premier soulèvement kurde contre Mustafa Kema! (Koçkiri, ¡919-1921) (Amsterdam: MERA, 1993); M. van Bruinessen, "Genocide in Kurdistan?: The suppression of the Dersim rebellion in Turkey (1937-38) and the chemical war against the Iraqi Kurds (1988)", in: G. J. Andreopoulos (ed.), Genocide: Conceptual and historical dimensions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 141-170 |reprinted in this volumef

KURDISH

36

E T H N O - N A T I ON ALI S M

T h e years 1950-80 had seen the gradual decline of K e m a l i s m and the return of Islam in public life. The anti-Alevi p o g r o m s appeared to indicate that both secularism and populism had failed to take root. T h e g r o w t h of a strong t h o u g h divided Kurdish m o v e m e n t and of a radical l a b o u r m o v e m e n t also a p p e a r e d to signal the end of K e m a l i s m . Political polarisation and violence, left and right youth m o v e m e n t s bringing entire urban n e i g h b o u r h o o d s under their control, threatened to divide all of society. T h e military t o o k o v e r in 1980 to reverse all these trends and to re-establish K e m a l i s m . A d e c a d e and a half later, it is clear that, m e a s u r e d by t h e s e o b j e c t i v e s , they w e r e at best partially successful — although this is no doubt balanced out by such other a c h i e v e m e n t s as the o f f i c e r s ' vastly i m p r o v e d e c o n o m i c c o n d i t i o n s , a high military budget that no civilian politician dares to cut, and a lasting influence on g o v e r n m e n t policies. T h e military succeeded in decimating the radical left and preventing the e m e r g e n c e of a n e w generation of left radicals. Their brutal suppression of the Kurdish m o v e m e n t , howev er, resulted in the e m e r g e n c e of a s t r o n g Kurdish cultural and intellectual m o v e m e n t in European exile and in the e m e r g e n c e of the radical and violent W o r k e r s ' Party of Kurdistan ( P K K ) as the strongest political

m o v e m e n t of

Turkey. T h e P K K g a i n e d a m a s s i v e d e g r e e of

popularity a m o n g T u r k e y ' s Kurds that it w o u l d never have a c h i e v e d w i t h o u t the army's senseless harassment of Kurdish civilians. T h e fascist right, though its leader Tiirke§ w a s briefly j a i l e d , w a s co-opted and to s o m e e x t e n t e v e n integrated into the state a p p a r a t u s . Y o u n g r i g h t - w i n g h o o d l u m s n o l o n g e r carried out terrorist raids against 'leftist' tea-houses but b e c a m e p o l i c e m e n and s c h o o l t e a c h e r s , and the real R a m b o s a m o n g t h e m w e r e r e c r u i t e d into the 'special teams' sent to Kurdistan on counter-insurgency missions. A p p a r e n t l y e x p e c t i n g thus to steal a m a r c h on f u n d a m e n t a l i s t Islam, t h e military in f a c t actively f o s t e r e d S u n n i I s l a m . R e l i g i o u s e d u c a t i o n , although of a secularised variety, w a s reintroduced as an obligatory subject in s c h o o l s ; the D i r e c t o r a t e for R e l i g i o u s A f f a i r s , which is a n s w e r a b l e to the p r i m e minister's o f f i c e , was strengthened, and n u m e r o u s n e w m o s q u e s w e r e built at the state's expense. T h e Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, a c o n f u s e d doctrine c o m b i n i n g fervent Turkish nationalism and M u s l i m sentiment, that w a s first f o r m u l a t e d by a small g r o u p of

right-wing

intellectuals as an a n s w e r to

s o c i a l i s m , w a s virtually elevated to t h e s t a t u s of o f f i c i a l i d e o l o g y . 1 T h e military thus refrained f r o m a return to the classical Kemalist attitude t o w a r d s religion and deliberately strengthened c o n s e r v a t i v e Islam as an ally against both the left and radical Islam.

' S e e B. Toprak, "Religion as state ideology in a secular setting: The Turkish-Islamic synthesis", in: M. Wagstaff (ed.), Aspects of religion in secular Turkey (University of Durham, Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Stucies, 1990), pp. 10-15; Feroz A h m a d , "Islamic reassertion in Turkey", Third World Quarterly 10 (1988), 750-69.

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37

These developments directly affected the Alevis too, and were perhaps in part intended as measures against the Alevis' flirt with left radicalism during the 1970s. The government built mosques in numerous Alevi villages, Alevi schoolchildren were obliged to attend Sunni religion classes, and the police and many other state services in the mixed regions came to be dominated by conservative Sunnis even more than before. There was one important positive change, however: throughout the 1980s there was much less physical violence directed against Alevis than there had been in the 1970s, and no pogroms al all. It did happen f r o m time to time that Alevi villages or urban neighbourhoods were raided by the police and the inhabitants harassed, but this usually was in pursuit of left radicals and did not appear to reflect a specifically negative attitude towards the Alevis. One effect of the changes in the 1980s was a renewed interest, among the Alevis themselves, in Alevism as a religion. Whereas in the 1970s most of the young Alevis had completely rejected religion as nothing but ideology and had only taken pride in Alevism as a democratic social movement, the failure of the left movement in Turkey made many reflect on Alevism as a cultural and then as a religious identity. On the one hand, some of the radical left movements that in the 1970s had found a measure of support all over the country (although perhaps somewhat more among the Kurdish Alevis than elsewhere) by the late 1980s had lost most of their non-Alevi supporters. Having thus practically become non-religious Alevi movements, they could not help but taking part in the debates on Alevi identity. 1 On the other hand, there was among Alevis of all generations also a strong reaction to the previous flirt with left radicalism, which expressed itself in a desire to know more about their own religious traditions. The imposition of Sunni Islam by the state no doubt was a major factor contributing to the Alevi revival as a reaction. When in 1989 the ban on organisations (which had been total after 1980) was somewhat relaxed, Alevi associations sprang up all over the country. Under the sponsorship of these associations, Alevi rituals (cem), which like the rituals of the Sunni Sufi orders had been practically banned since 1925, were publicly performed and houses of worship (cemevi) were opened. There was a sudden tidal wave of publications by Alevi intellectuals, purporting to explain history, doctrine and ritual of Alevism and to define its relation to Sunni Islam. Some of the books engendered heated polemics within the community on such questions as

'This is notably the case of the TKP-ML (Communist Party of Turkey/Marxist-Leninist) and its various splinters.

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whether Alevism is a sect within Islam or an essentially different religion (and whether this different religion is of Iranian or Turkish origins). 1 These developments marked an important change in the nature of Alevism, the transition from a secret, initiatory, locally anchored and orally transmitted religion, which it had been for centuries, to a public religion with formalised, or at least written, doctrine and ritual. Most of these Alevi authors did not belong to the priestly caste that had always held a monopoly of ritual competence and claimed superior knowledge of the tradition (and the f e w authors who did hail f r o m such a family were not themselves practising as dede). They all have a modern education, and their books reflect their mentalities of educators, all very much in the Kemalist mode. The way they reformulate and (at times even literally) invent Alevi tradition is highly reminiscent of what goes on in nascent nationalist movements. The Alevi revival received encouragement from secular elements in the political establishment, who had always considered the Alevis as their natural allies against the rise of political Islam. 2 The growing influence of the P K K a m o n g Turkey's Kurds, by the late 1980s increasingly also a m o n g Alevi Kurds, gave the authorities m o t h e r incentive to allow and even stimulate the development of Alevism as an alternative 'ethnic' identity. In the early 1990s, the state began to publicly support Alevism, among other things by officially sponsoring the annual festival commemorating the Alevi saint Haji Bektash. 3 Some of the more conservati ve Alevi leaders were courted and it was attempted to co-opt their associations in the pursuit of strengthening T u r k e y - b a s e d nationalism. At the same lime, suspicion of the Alevis with their relatively liberal values and their past tendencies towards leftist politics remained strong among many of the same authorities, and the police and certain government departments were in fact filled with elements that distinctly despised Alevis. Many Alevis were only too happy with the degree of recognition implied in co-optation by the political establishment. It was attempted to turn Haji Bektash, after whom the major federation of Alevi associations was

' A n excellent overview of this recent flood of books on Alevism, understood as part of the process of construction an Alevi 'ethnic' identity, is given by Karin Vorhoff, Zwischen Glaube, Nation und neuer Gemeinschaft: Alevitische Identität in der Türkei der Gegenwart (Berlin: Schwarz, 1995). 2 T h e Alevis vote has always been divided over the whole political spectrum, but the political party closest to the Alevis w a s the Social Democrat Populist Party (SHP), which had several vocal Alevi deputies. In 1991 the S H P became a junior partner in the government coalition with the True Path Party (DYP), led b> Süleyman Demirel and later Mrs. f i l l e r . •^This festival, celebrated for the first time in 1964, had become the country's m a j o r left-wing cultural festival during the 1970s, was depoliticised during the 1980s, and received government patronage in the 1990s. Politicians of all parties now put in appearances in order to show how much they like the Alevis.

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REVIVAL

39

n a m e d , into a s y m b o l f o r loyalty to the T u r k i s h state. 1 A n o t h e r g r o u p of a s s o c i a t i o n s n a m e d itself a f t e r a d i f f e r e n t Alevi saint, the p o e t Pir Sultan A b d a l , w h o was believed to have rebelled against the state and to h a v e been h a n g e d f o r his religious c o n v i c t i o n s . A l t h o u g h g e n e r a l i s a t i o n s a b o u t the A l e v i s are h a z a r d o u s , it s e e m s safe to say that the r e l i g i o u s - m i n d e d and t h e relatively c o n s e r v a t i v e a m o n g the A l e v i s tended to drift t o w a r d s the f o r m e r associations, w h e r e a s in the latter o n e f i n d s a higher p r o p o r t i o n of f o r m e r leftists.

New outbursts of violence against Alevis T h e first serious o u t b u r s t of violence against A l e v i s s i n c e 1980, an event that not only disturbed the process of a c c o m m o d a t i o n between the state and the Alevis but that in m a n y quarters created anxieties a b o u t the possible dissolution of T u r k e y , occurred in t h e town of Sivas in 1993. Sivas is one of the p r o v i n c e s with a c o n s i d e r a b l e A l e v i p o p u l a t i o n in the villages (both K u r d i s h and T u r k i s h speakers), but t h e t o w n s are d o m i n a t e d by conservative Sunnis. T h e Alevi rebel saint Pir Sultan A b d a l w a s f r o m B a n a z , a village in this province, and he w a s executed in the city of Sivas. In J u l y 1993 t h e Pir Sultan A b d a l a s s o c i a t i o n o r g a n i s e d a cultural festival in Sivas, to which n u m e r o u s p r o m i n e n t authors and other artists were invited. O n e of the a u t h o r s present w a s the a g e d A z i z N e s i n (not an A l e v i , incidentally), w h o had recently provoked the anger of m a n y Sunni M u s l i m s by a n n o u n c i n g his intention to publish a translation of Salman Rushdie's Satanic V e r s e s . T h e festival w a s protested by a large g r o u p of v i o l e n t r i g h t - w i n g demonstrators, w h o w e r e clearly intent upon killing Nesin. T h e y also attacked and destroyed a sculpture representing Pir Sultan A b d a l that had been erected o n the occasion of the festival. E n c o u r a g e d rather than c a l m e d d o w n by a speech by the m a y o r of Sivas ( w h o belonged to the right wing of the Muslim W e l f a r e Party), they laid siege to and attacked the hotel w h e r e the participants of the festival w e r e lodged. A f t e r t h r o w i n g stones through all hotel w i n d o w s , the demonstrators succeeded in setting fire to the hotel. Thirty-seven people in the hotel died in this fire. 2

Historically, the Bektashi Sufi order had played a role in integrating heterodox and insurgent groups into the Ottoman fold. In the war of independence, the order had given Mustafa Kemal's movement significant support, and in the early years of the republic word was spread among the simple Alevis that M u s t a f a Kemal was no less than a reincarnation of Haji Bektash. Around 1990, this theme was revived, the journal Cem proclaiming Atatürk "a new Haji Bektash." Other Alevi authors presented Haji Bektash as a proto-nationalist, some even calling him an iilkucii ('idealist', a term monopolised by the extreme nationalists and fascists of Tiirke§' party). The most accessible reports on the events (all in Turkish) are in: Ali Yildirim, Ate§te semaha durmak (Ankara: Yurt, 1993); g e t i n Y i g e n o g l u , §eriatfi jiddet ve ölü ozanlar kenti Sivas (Ankara: Ekin, 1994); and, by a prominent Alevi intellectual w h o narrowly escaped the fire, Lütfü Kaleli, Sivas katliami (Istanbul: Alev, 1994).

KURDISH

40

ETHNO-NATIONALISM

The events in Sivas differed from the pogroms of the late 1970s. There was no massive attack on neighbourhoods inhabited by Alevis this time; the primary target of the demonstrators was Aziz Nesin and the other, mostly Alevi, intellectuals and artists who had come to Sivas for the festival. The Pir Sultan statue was another, highly symbolic target, but Pir Sultan was not so much a symbol for Alevisrn as one for the rebellious and 'leftist' tradition in Alevism. The degree of involvement of the police and local authorities was perhaps the most shocking aspect of the Sivas events. The police, although it had advance warning of the demonstrations, had taken insufficient measures to protect the festival (which had been authorised by the provincial governor) and it did not make any serious attempt to disperse the demonstrators or to keep them away from the hotel (apart from a police cordon in front of the hotel). While the hotel was under siege, Aziz Nesin and friends succeeded in reaching vice prime minister Erdal inonii by telephone and requested him to order measures for their protection, inonii told them that precautions had been taken, but whatever orders had been sent from Ankara, the police remained passive. In a video film of the events taken by the police and later leaked to the press one can actually hear orders being given over the police radio not to intervene when the demonstrators were already attacking the hotel. Most of the police simply looked on as the hotel caught fire. 1 The clashes between the police and Alevi demonstrators in the Gazi neighbourhood of Istanbul, in March 1995, were if anything more threatening even than the Sivas events. Gazi is a poor new neighbourhood with a high proportion of Alevi inhabitants. In the evening of March 12, u n k n o w n gunmen in a stolen taxi drove through this neighbourhood and riddled five teahouses with bullets, killing one and wounding numerous people. The police was remarkably slow in taking action, and the rumour soon spread that the local police post might ha\ t been involved in the terrorist attacks. 2 Young people of Ga/.i neighbourhood took to the streets in protest, and they were soon reinforced by groups from elsewhere who had heard the news on local television. The demonstrators directed their anger at the police post, which was believed to be manned by extremely right-wing and anti-AIevi policemen, and where not long ago a young detainee was said to have been

There were, however, individual police officers w h o did make efforts to save people. O n e of those saved, ironically, was Aziz Nesin, w h o was not recognised at first. Once they realised w h o m he was, some firemen and a policeman started beating him up, but others protected him and rushed him to hospital. 2 T h e actors were never caught, but according to the press the raids were claimed by a radical and violent Muslim organisation. IBDA-C, which had carried out numerous terrorist acts before, and by a more shadowy ultra-nationalist organisation, the Turkish Revenge Brigades.

KURDS,

TURKS

AND

THE

ALEVI

REVIVAL

41

tortured to death. Throughout the neighbourhood police and demonstrators clashed; in the general rioting that ensued a number of shops and workshops owned by alleged 'fascists' were raided and destroyed. That night the police shot one demonstrator. The rioting continued the following days and spread to yet another neighbourhood. Young radicals attempted to seize control of the situation, throwing stones to the police and raising barricades, while moderate Alevi community leaders made great efforts to calm the masses. It was the police, however, who went completely out of control and who instead of using conventional methods of crowd control repeatedly shot into the crowds, killing another 15 persons. Even after the Istanbul police chief, in a meeting with Alevi leaders, had by radio given his men orders not to use firearms any more, several more demonstrators were deliberately shot dead. The insulting language and threats shouted by the police to community leaders w h o attempted to negotiate with them showed that many of the police acted out of aggressive hatred towards the Alevis. There were, it is true, policemen who attempted to hold their colleagues back, but they were not successful. 1 The arson in Sivas had shown up that part of the state apparatus — the local police and local government in Sivas — did not stand above communal divisions but sided with the aggressors. Central g o v e r n m e n t authorities apparently did not have control over part of the police force, which through selective recruitment in the 1980s consisted mostly of extremely right-wing Sunni Muslims. T h e reactions to the events showed that society was deeply divided; the division ran right through the government, whose conservative m e m b e r s without blinking declared Aziz Nesin responsible for the events. 2 The rift between the government and the Alevi communities was opened wide and deep again. T h e social democrat members of the government failed to restore confidence in the government, because they were completely ineffective. Their criticism of the police, in connection with the Sivas events and on several later occasions, was only answered with scorn and oblique threats. When the Istanbul police chief — a man who had become notorious for the extra-judicial executions of left radicals carried out by his force, and whose men it were who killed 16 demonstrators in the Gazi riots — publicly insulted the (social d e m o c r a t ) m i n i s t e r of human rights and blamed him f o r the death of a policeman, they in vain demanded his resignation. Supported by f i l l e r , the

See the interview with prominent Alevi spokesperson Liitfti Kaleli in the weekly edition cf Cumhuriyet, March 24-30, 1995. A description and analysis of the events from the view of young Alevi radicals is given in Zeynep Çabuk, Gazi direniçi: taç, yiirek, barikat... ('The uprising in Gazi: stones, courage, barricades', Istanbul: Oz, 1995). 2

The public prosecutor of the Ankara State Security Court, Nusret Demiral, even announced hi s intention to start proceedings against Nesin and request the death penalty.

KURDISH

42

KTH N O

N A TION A LIS M

police chief did not even have to apologise. Nor was he ever held accountable for the shooting in Gazi. 1 T h e events in Sivas and Gazi reinforced and radicalised the Alevi revival. C o m m u n i t y leaders w h o go on closely c o - o p e r a t i n g with the authorities in the hope of recognition as a distinct religious community or in pursuit of personal gains appear to be losing support from below, while left radicalism

a p p e a r s to be gaining

influence among

the y o u n g .

The

government's efforts to use Alevi awareness as an alternative to Kurdish nationalism have largely failed. Alienation from the state inevitably brought many Alevis closer to the PKK (which within a few weeks took revenge for the arson in Sivas by killing a group of men in a staunchly Sunni village north-east of Sivas). Whereas until the early 1990s most Kurdish Alevis had little sympathy for the PKK, among other things because of its flirt with Sunni Islam, by 1994 it appeared to have gained considerable support among them. Many if not most of the Kurdish Alevis define themselves as Alevis first and only in the second place, or not at all, as Kurds. State-sponsored publications have hammered on the old theme that Alevism is a specifically Turkish form of Islam and that the Alevis, even those w h o speak Kurdish or Zaza, descend from Turcoman tribesmen and therefore are essentially Turkish. The P K K and other Kurdish nationalists, on the other hand, have made efforts to persuade them that in the present confrontation their most relevant identity is that of Kurds, and that moreover the Alevi religion has Iranian (Zoroastrian) rather than Turkish origins (so that by implication even the Turkish Alevis are related to the Kurds). 2 It is hard to determine how much effect both propaganda offensives have had, but it appears that among the radical left Turkish Alevis there is now a tendency to view the P K K as their natural ally because they are up against much the same coalition of extreme right-wing political forces, which have gradually come to control important parts of the state apparatus. This conservative religious and ultra-nationalist block is not interested in cultural and religious pluralism and rejects compromises with Kurds and Alevis alike. In its efforts to create a monolithic state and society, this block constitutes the most divisive force in Turkey today.

' O n l y in the late s u m m e r of 1995, when the S H P had merged with the C H P and the enlarged party renegotiated the conditions for its participation in the government, could it force the police c h i e f s resignation. ^ O n these ideological debates, see M. van Bruinessen, "Aslini inkar eden haramzadedir! T h e debate on the ethnic identity of the Kurdish Alevis", in: Krisztina Kehl-Bodrogi, Barbara Kellner-Heinkele and A n k e Otter-Beaujean (eds), Syncrelistic religious communities in the Near East (Leiden: Brill, 1997). pp. 1-23.

KURDISH SOCIETY AND THE MODERN STATE: ETHNIC NATIONALISM VERSUS NATION-BUILDING 1

T w o major national problems dominate the political scene of the contemporary' Middle East. The first and most conspicuous is the Palestinian problem, the second the Kurdish question. The Palestinian problem has, during the past fifteen years, received much attention because it appeals to strong sentiments and has a strong symbolic value. It appears to exemplify the conflict between Islam and the West, between Arabs and Jews, between the Third World and American Imperialism, between the poor and the usurpers who drive them off their land. The Kurdish question is not so easy to define and understand. The Kurds, even more clearly than the Palestinians, are a distinct people, differing in language and culture from all their neighbours, but there has never been a Kurdish state, although for over a century Kurdish nationalists have attempted to create one. 2 Kurdistan, the traditional habitat of the Kurds, is now divided over four states: Turkey (where an estimated 7 to 12 million Kurds live), Iran (4 to 5 million), Iraq (3 to 4 million) and Syria (0.5 to 1 million). 3 Altogether, the Kurds thus number between 15 and 22 millions, i.e., more than the entire population of Iraq, and almost twice that of Syria. All four countries have their Kurdish problem; and the Kurds in all four countries feel that they have a problem with the state. But opinions differ widely as to what the real nature of the problem is, let alone how it should be solved.

Competing nationalisms appealing to the Kurds The Kurds are often called a nation without a state; they are perhaps the largest people that has struggled in vain for statehood. To some observers, as well as to many Kurds, this is the essence of the Kurdish problem. Such a view appears to overlook the fact that for many centuries the Kurds have quite

' A n earlier version of this paper appeared in Indonesian in the journal of the Indonesian Association of Political Scientists, Jurnal llmu Politik No. 7, 1990. The first part of the paper was also presented, in a slightly different form, at the international conference "The Kurds: Human Rights and Cultural Identity", organised by the Kurdish Institute of Paris with the Fondation France-Liberte's Danielle Mitterand, in Paris, October 14-15. 1989. The first movement whose leader appeared to have explicit ideas on a separate Kurdish state: took place in 1880. For the early history of Kurdish nationalism see Jwaideh 1960; Olson 1989. T h e official censuses of these countries do not mention the Kurds separately, and population estimates vary widely. For an account of the estimates given here, see van Bruinessen 1978, 20 22. 3

44

KURDISH

ETHNO -NATIONALI SM

happily done without a state of their own. However, something important changed in the early twentieth century, as a result of the impact of the European nationalisms. National aspirations became more widespread among the Kurds as well as among the other ethnic groups of the Middle East. More importantly, since the end of the First World War the political elites of those countries among which Kurdistan was divided have made concerted efforts to turn their countries into nation states. In each, there is one dominant ethnic group o Turks, Arabs or Persians o and the governments have carried out various policies aiming at the assimilation of the other ethnic groups to the d o m i n a n t one, in order to f o r g e "national unity". This has meant the suppression of other cultures and traditional ways of life, and their gradual replacement by a new "national" culture. The Kurds, being the largest or (in Iran) second largest of these other ethnic groups, have borne the brunt of these policies. The existence of a separate Kurdish identity, let alone a Kurdish national movement, is in all these states considered as a major threat o not just a security threat, but a threat to the state's self-defined identity. A m o n g these states, Turkey has always been the most radical in its attempts at "nation-building", and has most actively (and violently) attempted to destroy Kurdish national identity. The very name "Kurd" became, and long remained, taboo. Speaking of the Kurds as a nation is, to this day, considered as an act of subversion; and even among Turkey's intellectual elite it used to provoke highly emotional reactions. In Iran and Iraq, there was at least some tolerance of Kurdish culture, though there too assimilation was aimed at. In the Shah's Iran, Persian was the only language allowed in schools, in the law courts and in other official use. Publications in Kurdish were not allowed, and all Kurdish organizations and associations were banned. Iraq is the only country which allows the Kurds a certain cultural and even political autonomy. But at the same time, it considers itself as an integral pan of the wider Arab nation. Economically vital parts of Iraqi Kurdistan have been "Arabized" by deporting Kurds and replacing them with Arabs from southern Iraq. T h e intermarriage of Arab men with Kurdish women is highly encouraged (with monetary incentives) as another means of Arabization of the country. And in the past years, a very radical transformation of the Kurdish countryside has been started, apparently aiming at the complete elimination of the traditional Kurdish village, one of the mainstays of Kurdish culture. Kurdish nationalism has developed to a large extent in reaction to political and cultural domination by Turks, Persians and Arabs and to these attempts at assimilation. Before the twentieth century, only a minor part of the tribal and intellectual elite among the Kurds thought (and wrote) at times about the Kurds as if they were a distinct group with common interests. For the most part, however, the Kurds as a people were not a focus of solidarity feelings; people felt loyally only to their families and to their tribes or

KURDISH

SOCIETY

AND THE MODERN

STATE

45

villages, to Islam or m o r e c o m m o n l y to a particular religious leader. A l t h o u g h all were a w a r e of being different in many respects f r o m their n e i g h b o u r s , the K u r d s w e r e (and are) certainly not a culturally h o m o g e n e o u s group. T h e y s p e a k dialects that are not a l w a y s m u t u a l l y u n d e r s t a n d a b l e , and i m p o r t a n t groups even speak languages d i f f e r e n t f r o m Kurdish proper. N o r d o they all a d h e r e to the s a m e religion: m o s t are Sunni M u s l i m s but s o m e are a l s o followers of other religions and sects. J u d g i n g by objective criteria, one would be inclined c o n s i d e r the K u r d s as a c o n g l o m e r a t e of d i f f e r e n t ethnic g r o u p s rather than as a single o n e . 1 W h a t unites t h e m is not a n y set of o b j e c t i v e , e c o n o m i c , political or cultural characteristics, but only the a w a r e n e s s a m o n g m a n y of t h e m that they constitute one people. T h i s a w a r e n e s s is a result of a series of historical developments, the most important of which was the rise of K u r d i s h n a t i o n a l i s m . T o t h e extent that the K u r d s feel one and h a v e an a w a r e n e s s of a c o m m o n destiny, they are a nation. But f o r e a c h individual K u r d , the Kurdish nation is not the only entity with which (s)he f e e l s (s)he shares a c o m m o n destiny. B e s i d e s those w h o h a v e been a s s i m i l a t e d to a d o m i n a n t nation by f o r c e , there are also K u r d s w h o h a v e q u i t e willingly c h o s e n to i d e n t i f y t h e m s e l v e s p r i m a r i l y as c i t i z e n s of their state or as f o l l o w e r s of a particular religion or sect.

Relations between the Kurds and the state before the modern age F r o m the sixteenth until t h e early twentieth c e n t u r y , Kurdistan w a s divided a m o n g the t w o great M i d d l e Eastern states, t h e O t t o m a n and the Persian E m p i r e s . Both were multi-ethnic states, in which there was no clearly d o m i n a n t ethnic group. T h e r e was certainly discrimination a m o n g d i f f e r e n t c a t e g o r i e s of c i t i z e n s , but it was based o n religion a n d e d u c a t i o n , not on ethnicity as such. Kurds could and did pursue political careers without shedding their Kurdish identity. T h i s w a s especially so in the Sunni O t t o m a n E m p i r e , since most of the K u r d s were also Sunnis, but in Shii Iran, too, there w e r e K u r d s w h o rose to high positions. Kurdistan itself w a s also a multi-ethnic m o s a i c , p e o p l e d by K u r d i s h pastoral n o m a d i c tribes as well as K u r d i s h speaking peasants; by Jewish and Christian c o m m u n i t i e s of m a n y tongues and d e n o m i n a t i o n s , w h o were peasants, c r a f t s m e n or m e r c h a n t s ; by A r a b i c and: T u r k i s h s p e a k i n g m i n o r i t i e s of various origins; by n o m a d i c and sedentary gypsies, and by various other small M u s l i m minorities. K u r d i s t a n is an area of high and vast m o u n t a i n c h a i n s , d i f f i c u l t to penetrate. Geographical conditions have m a d e it into a buffer zone between the t w o empires. T o both it w a s a peripheral area, over which they had no great

' T h e cultural variety among the Kurds is discussed in s o m e detail elsewhere: van Bruinesseri 1978 (Ch 1) and 1992; for linguistic variety see Kreyenbroek 1991.

KURDISH

46

ETHNO-NATIONALISM

desire to exert direct control. Instead, they left local Kurdish rulers in control of large areas, in exchange for token obedience, very modest taxes, and military loyalty in case of war. Only a few districts of key e c o n o m i c or strategic importance were placed under centrally appointed

governors

commanding regular arm\ troops. In the rest of Kurdistan, a small number of Kurdish aristocratic f a m i l i e s held sway, as the rulers of

autonomous

principalities. The courts of some of these principalities mirrored, though on a more modest scale, the splendour of the Ottoman and Persian courts, and were centres where the arts and sciences flourished. The Kurdish literary tradition was first fostered at these courts in the late 16th and 17th centuries. Each principality consisted of a number of large tribes or tribal confederacies, which formed the backbone of its military might. In order to maintain his position the ruler had to balance these tribes against each other while all the same time keeping tribal feuds in check. This tribal military elite was superimposed upon a settled society of farmers, dependent peasants, serfs and various classes of townsmen. The recognition of a Kurdish ruler by the central state gave him essential support against potential rivals. It therefore often happened that rivals or disaffected family members allied themselves with the neighbouring empire. Inter-Kurdish rivalries thus often became interlocked with conflicts between the two empires. In many battles between the Ottomans and Persians, there were Kurds taking part on both sides, at times even sections of the same tribe. They were fighting out their own conflicts, which happened to coincide with the larger one, or, having fled to the neighbouring empire, they had no choice but to fight on its behalf or be expelled. This is a pattern that has recurred in Kurdish history up until the present day. M o v e m e n t s of administrative reform in the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 1 led to the gradual reduction of the Kurdish principalities and the concomitant expansion of a centralized bureaucracy into the Kurdish districts. By the mid-nineteenth century, the last principalities had been abolished by military force. Kurdish society thus c a m e in more direct contact with the state o and not only with the Ottoman and Persian states. T w o other empires, the Russian and the British, began to make their presence f e l t in K u r d i s t a n , by m e a n s of c o n s u l s , m e r c h a n t s ,

explorers,

and

missionaries. Russian armies in fact occupied parts of Kurdistan during the Russo-Turkish wars of 1828 9 and 1877-78. There had been French and Italian Catholic missionaries working among the Christian minorities of Kurdistan as early as the mid-seventeenth century, but in the course of the nineteenth

' G e n e r a l studies on reform in the Ottoman Empire: Davison 1963, Lewis 1961, Shaw & Shaw 1977. For the part that later became Iraq, see Longrigg 1925, esp. 298-321. On the effects of the reforms on Kurdish society, see van Bruinessen 1978: 220-233.

KURDISH

SOCIETY

AND THE MODERN

STATE

47

century the n u m b e r s of missions o British, A m e r i c a n , G e r m a n and S w e d i s h o rapidly increased. T h e i r p r e s e n c e c h a n g e d t h e b a l a n c e of p o w e r b e t w e e n M u s l i m s and C h r i s t i a n s in the r e g i o n , f o r the m i s s i o n a r i e s , t h r o u g h their e m b a s s i e s in Istanbul, could and did put pressure on the central g o v e r n m e n t on behalf of the local Christians. T h e r e was m u c h resentment a m o n g the Kurdish elite (the princely f a m i l i e s and the c h i e f t a i n s of large t r i b e s ) b e c a u s e of increasing interference with their traditional perks. It w a s widely believed, and correctly so, that the administrative r e f o r m s restricting the a u t o n o m y of the K u r d i s h r e g i o n s w e r e inspired or e v e n i m p o s e d u p o n t h e E m p i r e by the Western powers.

Relapse towards indirect rule: Kurdish irregular police forces T h e i m m e d i a t e result of the abolition of the K u r d i s h principalities w a s anarchy and chaos. Unlike the Kurdish rulers before them, the

new

administrators could not hold the tribes in c h e c k . N u m e r o u s f e u d s e r u p t e d , tribesmen raided settled villages, theft and robbery increased. In order to be able to p o l i c e t h e r e g i o n , s o m e of t h e a d m i n i s t r a t o r s c o n c l u d e d a l l i a n c e s of c o n v e n i e n c e with at least s o m e of the tribal chieftains, thereby f o r c i n g these chieftains' rivals into the role of rebels and bandits and c o n d o n i n g their allies' oppression of the settled population. Under the reactionary Sultan A b d u l h a m i d II, w h o ruled during the last quarter of the 19th century and strongly resisted E u r o p e a n pressures f o r r e f o r m , this w a s m a d e into an official policy. Rather than strengthening his r e f o r m - m i n d e d bureaucracy and a r m y , he had Kurdish tribes armed and m a d e into militia f o r c e s , the so-called H a m i d i y e (after the sultan's name), to police the eastern provinces. T h e Hamidiye

h a v e earned a

bad r e p u t a t i o n b e c a u s e of their a p p a r e n t i n v o l v e m e n t in m a s s a c r e s of A r m e n i a n villagers in 1895. H o w e v e r , their t r e a t m e n t of f e l l o w K u r d s w a s o f t e n j u s t as harsh and cruel. B y endorsing selected chieftains, the sultan gave them a licence to e x p a n d their p o w e r s at the e x p e n s e of their less f a v o u r e d rivals, and to squeeze whatever they could out of the population. 1 T h i s too is a r e c u r r e n t pattern in the history of K u r d i s t a n (and of similar peripheral areas elsewhere). Even w h e n the state could not exert direct i n f l u e n c e over K u r d i s t a n , its choice to back u p certain c h i e f t a i n s rather than others greatly affected the local balance of power, and in m a n y cases resulted In severe oppression of the local population at the hands of the selected chieftains and their thugs. T h e f o r m a t i o n of the H a m i d i y e has, consciously or not, been imitated by later g o v e r n m e n t s . T h e British, d u r i n g their o c c u p a t i o n of and mandate over Iraq, gave certain chieftains administrative powers and made their

' O n the Hamidiye and other policies of Sultan Abdulhamid II: Duguid 1973; van Bruinessen 1978: 233-9. Detailed accounts of these and later Armenian massacres in Walker 1980.

48

KURDISH

E T H N O - N ATI ON AL1 S M

armed retinues into a sort of local police. The result was that on more than one occasion important sections of the population suffered physical oppression and extortion against which there was no appeal. It also forced other traditional leaders, who happened to be in conflict with the favoured chieftains, into the role of rebels against the state. 1 Most recently, Turkey has founded and armed a similar type of Kurdish militia, the "village guards" (Koy koruculari),

to

c o m b a t the guerrilla fighters of the radical separatist Workers' Party of Kurdistan. Again, there arc many reports of these "village guards" being used as local strongmen's thugs, coercing the villagers into obedience or terrorizing rivals and their dependants. 2

Tribalism and the modern state T h e violence surfacing in these cases is in a way an aspect of traditional society, c l o s e h related to its tribal character but it is exacerbated precisely by the state's intervention. Rather than detribalizing and modernizing Kurdish society, which have been the government's stated aims for most of the twentieth century, the state has, in at least some cases, only strengthened the worst aspects of tribal society. There is little reason to see here evil intent on the part of the states concerned; in Iraq the Kurdish movement itself has not been much more successful in diminishing tribalism itself during the last thirty years. It has often provoked similar undesired consequences by enlisting tribal support. Conflicts and feuds are endemic in tribal society every tribal chieftain has his rivals and enemies. Once a particular chieftain had joined the Kurdish movement, it was almost inconceivable for his important rivals to do so too. They had the choice of remaining neutral or opposing the movement. Often the government did not even leave them that choice. Similarly, for each tribe co-operating with the central government, there were rivals w h o allied themselves with the Kurdish movement o not out of political conviction but because of tribal conflicts. Many of the urbanized Kurdish politicians and intellectuals abhor tribalism and tribal politics, but the Kurdish movement has so far not been able to do without the tribes. The really tribal Kurds may be a minority now, but in the pasl at times when guerrilla warfare was being waged the hardy tribesmen, who knew the mountains best, always played a crucial role, and they have left an indelible mark on the movement.

' T h e British Political Officer, ('. J. Edmonds, w h o spent many years working in Kurdistan, mentions several striking example in his memoirs (1957). O n the Workers' Party of Kurdistan and its war with the village guards, see van Bruinessen 1988.

2

KURDISH SOCIETY AND THE MODERN STATE

49

Speaking of "tribes" and "tribalism", as I do here, might easily give a wrong impression of Kurdish society. Romantic images of the Kurds as nomadic shepherds are largely mistaken. Although in the past there were many more full nomads than now, they probably never made up even as much as half of Kurdish society. Many of the large nomadic tribes have been forced to settle since the 1920's because the new borders between T u r k e y and its southern neighbours cut through their traditional migration routes. T h e y gradually settled near either the warm winter pastures in the Mesopotamian plain or the lush mountain pastures of Turkish Kurdistan. After the rebellions of the 1920's and 1930's in Turkish Kurdistan, many tribesmen were deported to western Turkey. In Iran, Reza Shah carried out a policy of forced settlement of nomadic tribes, and sent many chieftains into distant exile. There are still a f e w fully nomadic tribes, but these represent only a small proportion of the total Kurdish population. It is more common now for the tribes to combine shepherding with some farming, and to live in a village, although in summer many follow their flocks to the mountain pastures, where they still live in tents. And there are also tribes that hardly practice any shepherding at all but have become full-time farmers, or even townspeople. This does not mean that all Kurds belong to some tribe or other; there have always been many who do not. The largest group of those non-tribal K u r d s were peasants, o f t e n subordinated to a tribe or a rich land-owning family. Many of the Kurdish families, that have for generations lived in towns or cities, have also gradually lost their tribal ties. It is not nomadism or shepherding that distinguishes the tribes f r o m the non-tribal Kurds, but rather the strong group loyalties between the members of a tribe. A tribe is like a very large family (some tribes comprise thousands of households), demanding from its members the same loyalties and offering them the same type of protection and security. Most tribes claim to be descended from a common ancestor, which though it may not be literally true certainty strengthens the members' sense of solidarity. Each tribe is also associated with a specific territory, where in theory only members of the tribe and their dependants are allowed to own land. Tribal solidarity is expressed in strict obedience to the tribal chieftain. The almost unquestioning loyalty of tribesmen to the chieftain is perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of tribalism, at once its strength and its weakness. In most situations, tribesmen will listen to their chieftain first, and follow him in any decision. Whether they do the bidding of the government or take part in a rising against it, depends almost entirely on the chieftain. Even members of the tribe who have left their tribal area and moved to a town, remain tied by the obligation of loyalty and obedience to their chieftain.

50

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Central governmenl officials in Kurdish districts have therefore often found themselves obliged to appease the chieftains if they wished to get anything done at all. Thereby they have strengthened the powers of these chieftains over the rest of the population, and contributed to the social and economic polarization of Kurdish society. Many chieftains for instance have succeeded in registering as their own private property land that was previously held in common by the tribe. Or they have simply taken land and other property away f r o m those who were less well-connected, and had themselves recognized as the legitimate owners. Certain chiefly families succeeded in extending their authority over much larger populations than their own tribe, due not only to the force of their own armed men but also to their clever cooperation with government officials. In several parts of Kurdistan, the interests of the military and the civilian bureaucracy have become so interwoven with those of the chieftains, that the bureaucracy almost seems to have become part of the tribal organization. Of the countries wilh a significant Kurdish population, Turkey is the only one that has a proper parliamentary system with general elections; each province elects a certain number of representatives. In the Kurdish provinces, the contending parties simply have to put forward candidates with strong tribal backing, if they wish to stand any chance of winning. Chieftains thus have become affiliated with political parties, although hardly affected by their ideologies. Where there have been two rival chieftains, one would join the right-wing, the other the left-wing party; in a subsequent election year, the affiliations might well be reversed. The election campaigns have reflected local tribal rivalries rather than national-level issues. Tribal c o n f l i c t s a l w a y s increase towards election time, for the stakes are generally quite high. Taking part in state-level politics gives a chieftain the opportunity to do much for his followers', he can have influence on the distribution of government spending in the region, and o f f e r various other f o r m s of patronage: contracts, licences, education, jobs. 1 Consequently, contact with modern political institutions such as the state bureaucracy and political parties has not abolished tribal structure but rather has modified and perhaps even strengthened it. We may even say that to some extent, the bureaucracy and the parties have become tribalized in their way of operating in Kurdistan. This is regrettable not only to the central government's proponents of "modernization" and integration, but to most educated Kurds as well. The most radical Kurdish nationalists see this as a typical

"colonial" p h e n o m e n o n , and a c c u s e the tribal elite of

being

collaborators enabling the cantinued "colonial exploitation" of Kurdistan by

' o n political patronage in Turke> in general, see S a y a n 1977; on the situation especially in its Kurdish provinces: Kudat 1975.

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51

the T u r k i s h , A r a b and Persian bourgeoisies. A l t h o u g h this is an e x t r e m e l y s i m p l i s t i c v i e w , it c a n n o t be d e n i e d that there a r e s i m i l a r i t i e s with the situation that existed in Europe's Asian and A f r i c a n colonies.

Population movement and its impact on ethnic awareness A m o n g the most drastic social c h a n g e s brought about by the e c o n o m i c and political d e v e l o p m e n t s of this century is the large-scale migration of Kurds a w a y f r o m Kurdistan. T h e first to leave were either the very poor or m e m b e r s of the elite, the f o r m e r seeking e m p l o y m e n t , the latter In search of education or political careers. By the turn of the century, most of the porters in Istanbul w e r e K u r d s , and there were m a n y m o r e K u r d s w o r k i n g in o t h e r l o w e r - c l a s s j o b s . T h e s a m e w a s probably true of T e h r a n and B a g h d a d . M o r e o v e r , in these cities there w e r e m e m b e r s of the traditional Kurdish elite w h o had acquired positions in the military or civilian b u r e a u c r a c y , and y o u n g e r m e m b e r s of aristocratic families studying at the first colleges. In the 1920's and 1930's, n u m e r o u s K u r d s were d e p o r t e d to western T u r k e y or central and eastern Iran, by the modernizing regimes of these states'. In Iraq, large-scale deportations started in the 1960's and h a v e continued until n o w . H o w e v e r , t h e largest v o l u m e of p o p u l a t i o n m o v e m e n t is p r o b a b l y labour migration. T h e mechanization of agriculture, although c o m i n g late to K u r d i s t a n , c a u s e d m u c h o p e n and h i d d e n u n e m p l o y m e n t in the v i l l a g e s . P e o p l e started m o v i n g e l s e w h e r e in search of e m p l o y m e n t . In T u r k e y they migrated to the cotton plantations of the Mediterranean and A e g e a n coasts, to the large cities of the west, and soon also a b r o a d , to western E u r o p e or Libya; in Iran to T e h r a n , of course, which in the 1970's had a b o o m i n g construction sector, or to the oil fields in the south or in n e i g h b o u r i n g K u w a i t ; in Iraq to B a g h d a d and other cities, w h e r e the oil b o o m created m u c h e m p l o y m e n t . T h e n u m b e r s of these "economic migrants" were reinforced by tens of thousands of students seeking education at the universities in the m a j o r cities, and later by m a n y internal refugees. T h e K u r d i s h war in Iraq ( 1 9 6 1 - 7 0 , 1 9 7 4 - 5 , and again since 1976), the Gulf W a r , violent political c o n f l i c t s in T u r k e y during the 1970's, heavy military repression and a l o w - s c a l e guerrilla w a r since 1984, h a v e f o r c e d m a n y K u r d s to leave their villages f o r r e a s o n s of s a f e t y and security. M o s t of t h e m also went t o t h e large cities. A s a result of all these p o p u l a t i o n m o v e m e n t s , a very large n u m b e r of K u r d s n o w live o u t s i d e K u r d i s t a n , although most still h a v e relatives there and, if possible, regularly go back. T h e r e are n o reliable statistics, but b y a rough e s t i m a t e at least a quarter f a third of all K u r d s n o w live outside Kurdistan proper. Vast districts

' O n the deportations in Turkey: Be^ik^i 1972, Vanly 1971, R a m b o u t 1947; on those in Iran: Salzman 1971.

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of Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir. Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran are now virtually Kurdish. This obviously has important consequences for the political relations in these countries as well as for the nature of the Kurdish movement. During the past half century, the Kurds of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria — and not only those who migrated to the cities — have very clearly become more integrated into the economic, political, social and cultural life of these countries, although not always on equal terms with the dominant ethnic groups. Compulsory education, military service, and the mass media, to a large extent state-controlled, have exposed them to the same influences as the other citizens of these states. The available infrastructure gives the Kurds of Turkey, for instance, much better links with western Turkey than with the Kurds in neighbouring countries. Due to the very different political, economic and cultural climates in the countries, the Kurds there developed different tastes and attitudes. Iraqi Kurds art; Iraqi as much as they are Kurds, and they differ in various rcspects (and are aware of differing) from the Kurds of Turkey or Iran. T o this we may add the effects of forced assimilation, which in Turkey until the 1 %0's seemed rather successful. One might even wonder whether the Kurds are now one nation or rather three — also given the fact that the political history of the Kurds of Turkey, Iran and Iraq until recently showed little mutual interdependence. The dominant school of thought of the 1950s and 1960s believed that increased communications, e c o n o m i c integration and especially the mass migration from the countryside to the big cities would make the populations of Third World states more homogeneous and turn them into new nations 1 . According to that line of thought, it was expected that the Kurds would gradually lose their distinctive Kurdishness. N o w this is precisely what did not happen, neither to the Kurds nor to many other non-dominant ethnic groups. Although the Kurds continued to be further integrated into the economies of the countries where they lived, the increased contacts with other ethnic groups made them more aware of their own separate ethnic identity. As a reaction against the discrimination that many suffered at school or in finding j o b s (Kurds used to be considered as backward, stupid, and uncultured, while in Turkey there was also much discrimination for political reasons), many began to search for things in Kurdish history and culture that they could take pride, In Kurdish cultural associations were founded precisely in the big cities, and cultural journals were published there rather than in Kurdistan itself. Even children of parents who had been successfully assimilated, rediscovered their Kurdish roots and started learning Kurdish again. It is largely due to the migration to big cities outside Kurdistan, that Kurdish national awareness and pride in Kurdish culture have become mass phenomena.

' O n e of the earliest scholars to criticise this theoretical paradigm of "nation-building" was Walker Connor. His 1972 article gives a useful summary, and a passionate criticism, of the views of the "modernisation" school on the withering away of sub-state ethnicity.

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Early K u r d i s h rebellions Until the 1960's, the K u r d i s h national m o v e m e n t had r e m a i n e d quite limited in scope. A t times w h e n the central g o v e r n m e n t s s e e m e d w e a k , or d u r i n g general political crises, there had been Kurdish rebellions, but t h e s e were usually short-lived. T h e first large Kurdish national rebellion took place in the border region of the O t t o m a n and Persian Empires in 1880, a f t e r t h e defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the war with Russia. It was led by a religious leader, Sheikh Ubaidullah, aided by tribal chieftains. T h e c o m m o n Kurds took part not out of nationalist feeling but out of loyalty and o b e d i e n c e to t h e sheikh and their tribal chieftains. M o r e or less similar rebellions took place in the f o l l o w i n g d e c a d e s . In Iraq, Sheikh M a h m u d Barzinji p r o c l a i m e d himself " K i n g of K u r d i s t a n " in 1922, and r e b e l l e d a g a i n s t the B r i t i s h w h o then occupied the country. In Iran, around 1920 the tribal chieftain S i m k o b r o u g h t a large area under his control and remained a political threat to the central g o v e r n m e n t until he was assassinated in 1929. In T u r k e y , Sheikh Sa'id led a l a r g e r e b e l l i o n in 1925 a g a i n s t Atatiirk's p o l i c i e s of s e c u l a r i z a t i o n

and

discrimination against the Kurds. A f t e r this rebellion was put d o w n with m u c h b l o o d s h e d , t w o large rebellions in other parts of Kurdistan f o l l o w e d : in 19293 0 a r o u n d M o u n t A r a r a t , and in 1937 in D e r s i m 1 . T h e r e w e r e n u m e r o u s smaller rebellions, of purely local dimensions. In all cases, except perhaps that of the Ararat rebellion, the leadership belonged to the traditional Kurdish elite, and participation f o l l o w e d the traditional pattern of all tribal rebellions. O n l y in the Sheikh Sa'id and Ararat revolts had political parties played a minor role in preparations f o r the rebellion. T h e Kurdish political parties or o r g a n i z a t i o n s of that period only had a f e w urban intellectuals and military m e n as m e m b e r s , and still tacked a mass f o l l o w i n g . Lack of organization w a s one important reason w h y the revolts could be suppressed with relative ease. A s o m e w h a t d i f f e r e n t rebellion took place in Iran immediately after the S e c o n d World W a r . D u r i n g the war, the Soviet Union and G r e a t Britain had o c c u p i e d large parts of Iran (in the north and south, r e s p e c t i v e l y ) ; m o s t of Kurdistan fell within the neutral zone in between. T h e central g o v e r n m e n t w a s m u c h w e a k e n e d , and could not exert e f f e c t i v e control there. A f t e r the war, the Soviet armies withdrew across the border, but they left an independent republic of A z e r b a i j a n with a strongly p r o - c o m m u n i s t g o v e r n m e n t behind in northwestern Iran. T h e Kurds of the area around M a h a b a d f o l l o w e d the e x a m p l e of A z e r b a i j a n , and also e s t a b l i s h e d an i n d e p e n d e n t R e p u b l i c , w h i c h existed f o r almost a full year, in 1946. T h e president of this Kurdish republic w a s a O n Sheikh Mahmud's rebellion: Edmonds 1957 (passim), Rambout 1947 (Chapter 111), Jwaideh 1960 (Chapters X, XI); on Simko: van Bruinessen 1983; on Sheikh Sa'id: van Bruinessen 1978 (Chapter V); Olson 1989. All these and many other Kurdish rebellions are also discussed in: Jwaideh 1960; Arfa 1966, and Kutschera 1979.

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respected Muslim divine, Qazi Muhammad; the chief of its army a Kurd from Iraq who later became the most famous Kurdish national leader, Mulla Mustafa Barzani. A political party with members among the urban intellectuals, merchants and ulama, as well as among the tribal elite, the Democratic Party of Kurdistan (KDP), formed the backbone of the state. By the end of 1946, the central government of Iran had regained sufficient military strength to suppress this separatist Kurdish movement 1 . The government carried out severe reprisals, and for the next three decades Kurdish national aspirations remained more effectively suppressed than in the neighbouring countries. Both the KDP and Barzani, however, were destined to play important roles in the years to come, at first In Iraq, and then later in Iran as well.

The Iraqi Kurdish movement, 1958-1980 It was in Iraq that Kurdish nationalism first became a mass movement. The Kurds in fact enjoyed more rights here than in the neighbouring countries, and the level of education arid economic welfare was on the average higher. A populist-leftist military coup d'état in 1958 toppled the royal government that the British had installed. The new leader, colonel Abdul Karim Qassem, promised real democracy, substantial land reform measures, and national rights for the Kurds. He invited Barzani (who had lived in exile in the Soviet Union since the fall of the Mahabad Republic) back to Iraq, and legalized the Democratic Party of Kurdistan, which had until then been a small underground organisation. The KDP had been founded by urban intellectuals as the, successor to the parts of the same name in Mahabad, Iran. Qassem's promises caused great expectations among the Kurds, and contributed to a rising Kurdish nationalism. When the expectations were frustrated, Barzani took to the mountains with his men and began a guerrilla war (1961). The war lasted, with interruptions, until 1970, and the Kurds became ever stronger. Several governments in Baghdad fell, at least in part because of the Kurdish war, until in 1968 Hasan al-Bakr and his relative Saddam Hussein came to power. This government made serious concessions to the Kurds, and in 1970 concluded an agreement promising them substantial autonomy. During a decade of fighting, Barzani had much strengthened the Kurdish movement, and reconsolidated his control over it. During the first years, there was a clear rivalry between himself as the representative of the tribes, and the politicians of the K D P who represented the urban Kurds. Barzani proved himself the cleverer politician, expelled his most serious rivals from the party, and appointed a board that was loyal to him. His major rivals, Ibrahim Ahmad and Jalal Talabani, though claiming to be the real KDP, were effectively isolated, and ended up in a precarious position between the government and Barzani. When they actively

' O n the Mahabad Republic, see hagleton 1963.

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f o u g h t against Barzani (in 1966), they were considered by m a n y K u r d s to be traitors. A f t e r the 1970 a g r e e m e n t , they had no c h o i c e but t o r e c o n c i l e t h e m s e l v e s with Barzani and a c c e p t his leadership. In later y e a r s , h o w e v e r , Jalal T a l a b a n i w o u l d r e - e m e r g e on t h e political s c e n e as an i n d e p e n d e n t K u r d i s h leader. Until t o d a y , there is a B a r z a n i and a Talabani w i n g of the K u r d i s h m o v e m e n t in Iraq, which still r e p r e s e n t s the t w o d i f f e r e n t social bases: the traditional and tribal versus the m o d e r n u r b a n ' . In the course of the I960's, Barzani had established relations with the Shah of Iran, and received gradually i n c r e a s i n g a m o u n t s of e c o n o m i c and military support. T h e Shah had an interest in w e a k e n i n g the Iraqi g o v e r n m e n t , and he f o u n d the K u r d s a useful tool f o r putting pressure on it. T h e events of the f o l l o w i n g years strengthened the mutual d e p e n d e n c e of the S h a h and the Iraqi Kurds. In 1971, the British withdrew their last troops f r o m the Gulf area, and the Shah tried to fill up the power v a c u u m , o c c u p y i n g a f e w islands in the Strait of H o r m u z . In t h e s a m e year, Iraq nationalized the Iraqi P e t r o l e u m C o m p a n y ( w h i c h w a s then still o w n e d by B r i t i s h , D u t c h , F r e n c h

and

A m e r i c a n capital). Western countries a n s w e r e d with an e c o n o m i c boycott of Iraq, w h i c h then sought closer e c o n o m i c and political ties with the S o v i e t Union. In 1972, Iraq and the Soviet Union signed a Treaty of Friendship. It is no accident that in that s a m e year Barzani w a s invited to Tehran and there met the A m e r i c a n S e c r e t a r y of State, H e n r y K i s s i n g e r , w h o p r o m i s e d

him

substantial military a i d 2 .

T h e 1970 agreement promised a u t o n o m y f o r the entire region where the m a j o r i t y of the population w a s Kurdish, to go into e f f e c t within f o u r y e a r s T h i s region w o u l d t h e r e f o r e include the important oil p r o d u c i n g districts of K e r k u k and K h a n i q i n , together representing a b o u t half of Iraq's k n o w n oil reserves. T h e g o v e r n m e n t did not wish to leave t h e m under K u r d i s h control, and t h e r e f o r e a t t e m p t s w e r e m a d e t o " A r a b i z e " t h e s e districts b e f o r e the a u t o n o m y would be implemented in 1974. K u r d s w e r e deported f r o m Kerkuk and A r a b s f r o m e l s e w h e r e w e r e settled in their place. In various other ways, too, it b e c a m e clear that the g o v e r n m e n t w a s unwilling to give the K u r d s what it had promised In 1970. In 1974, the g o v e r n m e n t finally d e c l a r e d a u t o n o m y f o r an area m u c h s m a l l e r than w h a t the K u r d s c l a i m e d to be a d m i n i s t e r e d b y a K u r d i s h administration

that

had been hand-picked by Baghdad. Barzani, after the

On this first Kurdish war (1961-70) and the internal conflicts, see Vanly 1970, Kutschera 1979, Pelletiere 1984 (all sympathetic to the Kurds), Jawad 1981, and Ghareeb 1981 (closer to the government point of view). ^This meeting and the following clandestine CIA aid to the Kurds remained a well-kept secret until a congressional committee investigated clandestine CIA operations and its report was leaked to the press. See Pike Commission 1977.

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American promise of aid, felt he did not have to settle for a compromise and rejected the government given autonomous ; institutions. He already controlled large parts of northern Iraq and set up his own government there, entirely independent of Baghdad (but depending on Tehran). Tens of thousands of Kurds left the big cities and joined Barzani in the north. The Kurdish guerrilla army, strengthened with CIA-supplied arms, and later aided by Iranian artillery, Israeli military instructors, and British ballistics experts, kept the Iraqi army at bay and protected a large "liberated area" in the mountains. For a year, Barzani ruled over his mountain "kingdom" as a vassal state of Iran. It was the closest the Kurds had ever been to having a state of their own. The war caused much destruction. At least fifty thousand villagers had to leave their villages because of the fighting and took refuge at first in the mountains and then later in refugee camps inside Iran. In March 1975, at the OPEC conference in Algiers, the Shah concluded an agreement with the Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. Iraq made important concessions to Iran with regard to an old border dispute, and in exchange the Shah stopped giving support to the Kurds. Barzani's movement had become so dependent on Iran that it collapsed within days. Another fifty, perhaps a hundred thousand Iraqi Kurds fled to Iran; the remainder surrendered to the Iraqi government. In order to prevent new guerrilla activity from across the border, the Iraqi government created an empty zone 10 to 15 kilometres wide all along the border. All villages within this zone were destroyed, and their inhabitants placed in camps or in new strategic villages that were easily controlled by the military. Some villagers resisted and were aided by students; they took to the mountains again and started small-scale guerrilla activities again (1976). Meanwhile, Kurdish political leaders abroad established new organizations to. replace Barzani's KDP and provide leadership for the new struggle. In Iran, Barzani's sons and some former allies formed a "Provisional Command" for a new KDP, in Syria Jalai Talabani set up his Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). By the end of 1977, both had a few bases in the border zones. Until the revolution in Iran, however, their guerrilla activities remained on a very low level, and they enjoyed rather limited popular support. The population was tired of war, afraid of the Iraqi government's brutal reprisals, but also in part co-opted by the real economic improvements the government brought about. Due to the oil booin, the government disposed of unprecedented amounts of money, and it embarked upon ambitious development projects in Kurdistan and caused a rapid rise in the average family's income 1 .

' F o r a glimpse of the radical transformation of Iraqi Kurdistan in those years (including the deportations) see Dziegel 1981. The author is a Polish anthropologist, w h o worked in one of the agricultural development projects in Kurdistan.

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The Iranian revolution and the Kurds With the advent of the Iranian revolution, Iran once again became a major factor in Iraqi Kurdish politics. Since the Mahabad Republic (1946), there had been little open Kurdish political activity in Iran. The Democratic Party of Kurdistan (now called KDP-Iran, to distinguish it from the Iraqi Kurdish party) had been forced to lead an underground existence; its leaders were in jail or lived abroad in exile. In the year of the revolution, political prisoners were freed, others 5 returned from foreign exile. In February 1979, the Iranian Imperial Army finally deserted the Shah; the police and gendarmerie left their posts, and commanders of army bases in Kurdistan surrendered control to the local people - in many cases to representatives of the KDP-Iran. For a half year, there was no central government authority in Kurdistan, and various Kurdish organizations competed for control of the situation. All of them demanded some form of autonomy for Kurdistan, a demand which appeared to have strong popular support. In Tehran, on the other hand, none of the factions competing for power was willing to give in to the Kurdish demands. There were several rounds of negotiation but these bore no results, because both in Tehran and among the Kurds there were too many competing power centres. If one group made a concession, it was likely to be labelled a traitor by the others. A collision seemed inevitable. It came in August 1979, when Khomeini himself sent the army in to Kurdistan to subdue the Kurds by force. This was the beginning of a long guerrilla war. In the course of the fighting, two Kurdish organisations consolidated themselves, while the others withered away. The largest and most successful was the social-democratic KDP-Iran, which found its strongest support in the Mahabad region; the other was the Marxist Komala, based in and around Sanandaj. The Army and Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) were initially not very successful in fighting a guerrilla war against the Kurds. The government then invoked the support of the Iraqi Kurds (Barzani's sons and their "Provisional Command"). There were still thousands of experienced guerrilla fighters and tens of thousands of other Iraqi Kurds living as refugees in Iran There had already been several clashes between the Barzani faction and young sympathisers of both the Komala and the KDP-Iran. The younger Iranian Kurds especially resented the Barzanis' earlier co-operation with the Shah, and: they accused them of having killed Iranian Kurdish revolutionaries in the late 1960's. The Barzanis needed Iranian support, and believed moreover that the KDP-Iran and the Komala were collaborating with Iraq, so they joined forces with the Army and Pasdaran against the Iranian Kurds. Iraq, which felt threatened by the Iranian revolution, attempted to influence the situation among the Iranian Kurds. It gave financial support and arms to various organisations active in Kurdistan, but found only a few small

58

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groups willing to obey its orders. T h e KDP-Iran and Komala were more careful than the Iraqi KDP; they gratefully accepted the military and logistic support given by Baghdad but preserved their independence. When the Iraqi army invaded Iran in September 1980, these organisations refused to coordinate their actions with it The KDP-Iran even offered Tehran a truce so that the army could concentrate its actions on the Iraqi front. The truce was not accepted, and the Iranian Army and Pasdaran, at times aided by the Barzanis, continued their actions against the Kurds during the war. In 1983, the KDPIran was expelled from its last remaining strongholds inside Iran; since then, its guerrilla fighters have been operating from base camps inside Iraq, in the empty zone along the border.

The Kurds and the Gulf War In Iraqi Kurdistan, guerrilla activities against the central government gained a new impetus after the beginning of the Gulf War. With the Iraqi Army occupied at the front, the PUK and the "Provisional C o m m a n d " (later renamed K D P again) succeeded in bringing large parts of mountainous northern Iraq under their control again. Until 1986, there were many armed clashes between these two organisations (and a few smaller parties). The K D P was firmly allied with Iran, and the PUK therefore established closer relations with the K D P - I r a n . T h r o u g h the last n a m e d party, the P U K o p e n e d negotiations with Baghdad, but at the same time also with Tehran — a delicate balancing act. In 1983 and 1984, Iran opened two new fronts against Iraq, both in Kurdistan. The K D P took active part in the operations of the Iranian Army. Finally in 1986 Tehran also arranged peace between the K D F and PUK, who f r o m then on co-ordinated their military operations against the Iraqi A r m y . This obviously weakened the position of the KDP-Iran, which desperately needed its bases in Iraqi Kurdistan. But the P U K maintained its friendly attitude, giving the Iranian Kurds various forms of help, while the Barzanis' K D P also stopped hostilities towards the KDP-Iran. 1 For a while it looked as if Iran, with strong Kurdish support, might win the war, and the state of Iraq fall apart, with perhaps a semi-independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq as a result. Turkey seemed poised to intervene and prevent any such occurrence. In the spring of 1988 the tide turned and Iraq regained the initiative. In March, Kurdish peshmergas helped the Iranian army advance into Iraq and capture, among other territories, the strategic Kurdish town of Halabja. That town .vas then bombarded with poison gas, resulting in

' F o r a more detailed treatment of the complicated situation in Kurdistan during the Gulf War, see Entessar 1984, van Bruinessen 1986 and 1988(b).

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the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians. 1 Iraq followed this up with a series of attacks on Iranian positions and not only halted the Iranian offensive but forced its enemy to accept a cease-fire and enter into peace negotiations. The Kurds were left alone again. The Iraqi army immediately launched an offensive against the remaining Kurdish guerrillas. Hundreds of villages were destroyed and their population resettled in other parts of the country. In August, valleys held by the K D P were b o m b e d with chemical weapons. Unknown numbers died, around seventy thousand people fled in panic across the Turkish border. Areas under the control of the PUK were apparently also bombed with poison gas, but these are too far from the Turkish border. Little is known as vet of the people who fled into Iran. These attacks thoroughly demoralised the Iraqi Kurds; it appears that very few guerrilla fighters still remain in the mountains. A f t e r the cease fire between Iran and Iraq, the Iranian Kurds also set their hopes on negotiations with the central government. With Rafsanjani firmly in control, it seemed that a settlement was possible. In July 1989, the secretary-general of the KDP-Iran, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, was invited to negotiations with the Iranians in Vienna. A s he was sitting at the negotiating table, he and the other two Kurdish envoys were assassinated. 2 This murder left the KDP-Iran in disarray, for Ghassemlou was an irreplaceable leader. Earlier that year, a top leader of the Komala was also assassinated, in Cyprus, apparently by an Iranian hit man.

Turkey and its Kurds In Turkey, the situation of the Kurds is quite different from that in Iraq and Iran, and the Kurdish movement there has developed along quite different lines. After the great Kurdish rebellions of the 1920's and 1930's, which were brutally repressed, numerous Kurds were deported from the Kurdish provinces to other parts of Turkey, and. the government did all it could to make them assimilate into the Turkish majority. It was decreed that the Kurds were Turks and they were forced to give up their traditional culture. Their language was

T h e Halabja massacre b e c a m e a symbol for the horrors of the Gulf War. It was generally accepted that it was Iraq (which had after all, just lost Halabja) that carried out the poison gas attacks, but two years later the Pentagon completed a study that concluded that both sides had used chemical weapons in the battle, and that m a n y of the Kurdish victims died because of Iranian not Iraqi poison gas ( Washington Post, 3 May 1990; International Herald Tribune, 4 May 1990). T h e central argument of this report seems to be that cyanide, of which many victims allegedly died, was not used by Iraq in this war but only by Iran. ^ T h e precise circumstances of the murder remain unclear, because the Iranian negotiators left the c o u n t r y w i t h o u t being property i n t e r r o g a t e d by the police. A c a r e f u l j o u r n a l i s t i c reconstruction, by Marc Kravetz, was published in the Paris newspaper Liberation, August 7, 1989.

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forbidden, Kurdish folklore was banned, Kurdish villages were given Turkish names, people with distinctly Kurdish names had to change them and assume Turkish family names. Calling oneself a Kurd was considered an act of subversion. The Kurdish provinces were the most backward of the country, and until recently there was little effort to develop them, so that the Kurds felt that their region was deliberately kept underdeveloped. 1 Because of this underdevelopment, large numbers migrated from Kurdistan to western Turkey in search of work and education, and this paradoxically contributed to the resurgence of a Kurdish movement in the 1960's and 1970's. The new Kurdish movement, in which educated Kurds in the big cities played a major role, put forward very modest demands: economic development for Eastern Turkey (the name Kurdistan was not used, because that would be too subversive) and recognition of the existence of the Kurdish people. No one spoke about autonomy yet, as did the Kurds in the neighbouring countries. This urban Kurdish movement was closely allied to the Turkish left, and many of its activists were members of the Workers' Party of Turkey (TIP). In Turkey's Kurdish provinces the movement did not yet have much influence; in those provinces, it was the example of Barzani's movement in Iraq that had a greater impact and strengthened an awareness of Kurdish identity. Repression by the government divided the movement and led to its gradual radicalisation. By the late 1970's, there were a large number of Kurdish parties and organisations, all of them illegal, which were very active both in the cities and in the Kurdish provinces. Nationalism became very widespread; and the demands voiced became more radical; some organisations began talking about an independent Kurdistan. 2 The growth of this Kurdish movement was one of the reasons which led to a military coup d'(tat in 1980, and large-scale military operations in Kurdistan. Many Kurdish activists were killed, many others fled abroad, tens of thousands were arrested. The army began a campaign to stamp out Kurdish nationalism and to destroy the Kurdish identity. 3

The rise of the Workers' Party of Kurdistan (PKK) in Turkey Virtually all Kurdish organisations were destroyed; only the most radical and undemocratic survived. The Workers' Party of Kurdistan (PKK) had emerged in the late 1970's as a very secretive and authoritarian party with a radical ideology and violent policies. It considers Kurdistan as a colony of the Turkish bourgeoisie and declared a war of liberation. While in most other ' A c c o r d i n g to almost all indicators of economic development, the Kurdish provinces lagged far behind the other parts of the country. See Jafar 1976. ^ O n the history of the Kurdish mavement in the 1960's and 1970's, a survey of the parties and their activities, see: Kendal in Chaliand 1980, van Bruinessen 1984, and Heinrich 1989. 3 O n the military's policies towards the Kurds since 1980, see Laber & Whitman 1988.

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organisations the traditional Kurdish elite played leading parts, most of the PKK's activists are from the lowest strata of society. Much of their violence has been directed against Kurdish landlords and tribal chieftains, w h o m they consider to be collaborators with the "colonial" power. A f t e r the military coup, the P K K reorganised itself abroad (in Lebanon and Syria, apparently), and in 1984 it initiated a guerrilla struggle inside Turkey. From base camps in northern Iraq, western Iran and perhaps Syria, PKK guerrillas attacked military targets and "collaborators". They were spectacularly successful; a force of four hundred guerrillas (later increasing to several thousands) kept tens of thousands of soldiers and "village guards" occupied. The government tried to put pressure on Syria (which supports the PKK for its own reasons). 1 the Army even invaded Iraq in 1983 and later carried out several bombing raids over Iraq and Iran in order to destroy the PKK's base camps, but all in vain. Each time the Army claimed it had wiped out the PKK, it was soon surprised by a new raid. 2 The Turkish press reported extensively on the PKK's violent activities, especially after a number of attacks in which it killed women and children. Such incidents long prevented the P K K f r o m gaining m u c h s y m p a t h y . Gradually, however, disapproval gave way to a grudging admiration. By the end of the 1980s, the P K K enjoyed widespread popularity, as ever more people had become convinced that only the PKK could stand up to the Turkish arm)'. There is little doubt that it has been the P K K that has forced the Turkish public and the Turkish authorities to admit that Turkey has a "Kurdish problem". They have been forced to admit that there are Kurds in Turkey, and that a way has to be found to redress the wrongs done to them. It is probably only a matter of time before the Turkish government will grant certain basic rights to the Kurds. Turkey's wish to join the European c o m m o n market is another factor that will force it to review its Kurdish policies: Turkey can only become a m e m b e r if it grants its citizens more democratic freedoms. The government has already done much to improve the economic conditions of the Kurdish provinces. Sooner or later, it will also recognise the Kurds as a separate ethnic group and grant them certain cultural rights. It remains to be seen, however, whether such recognition when it does come, will not come too late and will be enough to satisfy the Kurds.

' S y r i a has several long-standing conflicts with Turkey. It claims the Turkish province of Hatay (the f o r m e r sanjaq of Alexandrette, partly inhabited by Arabs), which in fact belonged to Syria until 1938 and was ceded to Turkey by the French. More important is the conflict over the water of the Euphrates, on which most of Syria's agriculture depends. Turkey is going to divert much water from this river for an ambitious large irrigation project, which Syria feels is a vital threat to its own agriculture. 2

O n the PKK, its ideology and activities, see van Bruinessen 1988(a) and Heinrich 1988.

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Prospects The political d e v e l o p m e n t s of the past decade have strengthened contacts between the Kurds of Turkey, Iran and Iraq; there is now a stronger awareness of belonging together than there was in the past. The wish for a separate state, uniting the various parts of Kurdistan, has also become stronger again. But most Kurdish politicians are quite aware that without strong foreign support such an independent state is impossible. And they know that neither the USA nor the USSR have an interest in such a redrawing of the map of the Middle East. In the past both superpowers have played the Kurdish card as a means of weakening unfriendly regimes (the US supported Barzani in Iraq, the Soviet Union gave some half-hearted support to the Mahabad republic, and later, indirectly, to Kurdish organisations in Turkey), but they will probably not allow complete separation. There is only one foreign power that has an interest in the establishment of an independent Kurdistan. That is Israel, which perceives Iraq as its most dangerous e n e m y in the long run, and will do anything to weaken it. Barzani in the past accepted Israeli aid, but the present Kurdish leaders seem unwilling to ally themselves with Israel, because popular sentiment among the Kurds, as among Muslims elsewhere, is strongly antiIsrael. Even more limited forms of independence, such as a small Kurdish state carved out of Iraq atone, will be difficult to achieve because too many powers all opposed to it. During the mid 1980's it seemed, for a while, that the Gulf War might result iri the separation of Iraqi Kurdistan from the rest of the country. Turkey, which still has an old claim to this northern part of Iraq, with its rich oil sources and its partly Turkish population, 1 then gave clear signals that it would not tolerate such a eventuality. In 1983, the Turkish army for the first time invaded northern Iraq; in 1986 there was a public debate in Turkey about military plans for the occupation of the region in the case of a breakdown of the Iraqi front. Because of the great strategic importance of Turkey for the US, it was expected that in such an event the Americans would feel obliged to become involved too. Consequently,

apart

from

the

PKK,

all

important

Kurdish

organisations aim at cultural rights and political autonomy within the borders of the existing states. Militarily, they are in a much weaker position than at the height of the Gulf War. On the other hand, the central governments need peace and will have to reach some understanding with their Kurdish

Most of the population of northern Iraq (the former Ottoman province of Mosul) are Kurds, but there is a large Turkish (Turkoman) minority. T h e status of this region (whether it was to be part of Turkey, part of Iraq, or independent) remained undecided until 1926, when the region was definitively joined to Iraq. Turkish nationalist circles have not yet resigned themselves to the loss of this region.

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population. But it will take a tong time before relations of mutual trust are restored, after the use of chemical weapons by Iraq and the murder of Kurdish negotiators by Iran. It may well be that Turkey, which has never officially recognised the existence of the Kurds, will be the first to reach an acceptable solution of its Kurdish problem.

References: Anderson, B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Editions, 1983. Arfa, Hassan, The Kurds: An Historical and Political Study. London: Oxford University Press, 1966. Be§ikçi, ismail, KiÀrtlerin 'Mecburi iskani. Ankara: Komal, 1977. Bruinessen, M. M. van, Agha, Sheikh and State: On the Social and Political Organisation of Kurdistan. Ph.D. thesis, Utrecht, 1978 |revised version published as: Agha, Sheikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan. London: Zed Books, 1992]. — "Kurdish Tribes and the State of Iran: The Case of Simko's Revolt", in: Richard Tapper (ed), The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan. London: Croom Helm, 1983. [reprinted in this volume] — "The Kurds in Turkey", MERIP Report (Washington) no. 121 . February 1984, 6-12. ¡reprinted in this volume| — '"The Kurds between Iran and Iraq", MERIP Middle East Report no. 141, July-August 1986, 14-27. (reprinted in this volume] — "Between guerrilla war and political murder: The Workers' party of Kurdistan", MERIP Middle East Report no. 153, July-August 1988(a), 40-46. [reprinted in this volume] — "De Situatie van de Koerden sinds de Golfoorlog", Internationale Spectator {The Hague) 42, 1988(b), 174-184. — "Kurdish society, ethnicity, nationalism and refugee problems", in: Philip Kreyenbroek & Stephan Sperl (eds), The Kurds: a Contemporary Overview. London: Routiedge, 1992. Chaliand, Gérard (ed), People without a Country. London: Zed Books, 1980. Connor, Walker, "Nation-building or nation-destroying?", World Politics 24 no 3, 1972, 319-355. Davison, Roderic, Reform in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton University Press, 1963. Duguid, S., "The Politics of Unity: Hamidian Policy in Eastern Anatolia", Middle Eastern Studies 9, 1973, 139-156. Dziegel, Leszek, Rural Community of Contemporary Iraqi Kurdistan Facing Modernisation. Krakow: Agricultural Academy, 1981: Eagleton, William, The Kurdish Republic of 1946. London: Oxford Ifniversity Press, 1963.

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Edmonds, Cecil J.,

HTHNO-N ATION ALI S M

Kurds,

Turks and Arabs.

London: Oxford University

Press. Entessar, Nader, "The Kurds in post-revolutionary Iran and Iraq", Third Quarterly

World

6, 1984, 911-933.

Ghareeb, Edmund, The Kurdish

Question

in Iraq. Syracuse University Press,

1981. Ghassemlou,

Abdul

Rahman,

The

Kurds

and

Kurdistan.

Prague:

Czechoslowak Academy of Sciences / London: Collet's, 1965. Heinrich, Lothar A, "Die Arbeiterpartei Kurdistans (PKK): Kult des Opfers und Kult der Tat als Programm", Orient (Hamburg) 29, 1988, 423-439. — Die kurdische

Nationalbewegung

in der Türkei.

H a m b u r g : Deutsches

Orient-Institut, 1989. J a f a r , M a j e e d , Under-underdevelopment: Kurdish

Area in Turkey.

A Regional

Case Study

of the

Ph.D. thesis, Helsinki, 1976.

Jawad, Sa'ad, Iraq and the Kurdish Question,

1958-70. London: Ithaca Press,

1981. J w a i d e h , W a d i e , The

Kurdish

Nationalist

Movement:

Its Origins

and

development. Ph.D. thesis, Syracuse University, 1960. Kreyenbroek, Philip G., "Kurdish identity and the language question" in: Turaj Atabaki & Margreet Dorleijn (eds), Kurdistan in search of ethnic identity. Papers presented to the First Conference on Ethnicity and Ethnic Identity in the Middle East and Central Asia. Utrecht: Department of Oriental Studies, 1991. Kudat, Ay§e, "Patron-Client Relations: The State of the Art and Research in Eastern Turkey", in: Engin D. Akarli & Gabriel B e n - D o r (eds), Political Participation in Turkey. Istanbul: Bogazi^i University, 1975. Kutschera, Chris, Le Mouvcment National Kurde. Paris: Flammarion, 1979. Laber, Jeri & Lois Whitman, Destroying Ethnic Identity: The Kurds of Turkey. New York/Washington: Helsinki Watch, 1988. L e w i s , B e r n a r d , The

Emergence

University Press,Centuries 1961. Longrigg, S. H., Four

of Modern

Turkey.

London:

Oxford

of Modern Iraq. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1925. MacDowall, David, The Kurds. London: The Minority Rights Group, 1985. Olson, Robert, The Emergence Rebellion,

1880-1925.

of Kurdish

Nationalism

and the Sheikh

Said

Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989.

Pelletiere, Stephen C., The

Kurds:

An

Unstable

Element

in the

Gulf.

Boulder/London: Westview Press, 1984. [Pike Commission,] The Pike Report on the CIA. London: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1977. Rambout, L u d e n , Les Kurdes et le droit. Paris: Le Cerf, 1947. Salzman, Philip C., "National Integration of the Tribes in Modern Iran", The Middle East Journal

25, 1971, 325-336.

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AND THE M O D E R N

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65

Sayari, Sabri, "Political Patronage in Turkey", in: Ernest Gellner & J. Waterbury (ed), Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies. London: Duckworth, 1977. Shaw, Stanford J. and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol 11: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808-1975. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Vanly, Ismet Cherif, Le Kurdistan lrakien: Entité Nationale. Etude de la Revolution de 1961. Neuchätel: La Baconnière, 1970. — Survey of the National Question of Turkish Kurdistan, with Historical Background. Zurich: Hevra, 1971. Walker, Christopher, Armenia, the Survival of a Nation. London: Croom Helm, 1980.

GENOCIDE IN KURDISTAN? THE SUPPRESSION OF THE DERSIM REBELLION IN TURKEY (1937-38) AND THE CHEMICAL WAR AGAINST THE IRAQI KURDS (1988) 1

— For Ismail Beçikçi

Even as these lines are being written, Kurdish leaders in Iraq are appealing to the United Nations to prevent the genocide of their people at the hands of Saddam Hussein's army. In the aftermath of the Iraqi defeat in the Gulf War ("Operation Desert Storm"), the Kurdish population of northern Iraq had risen in rebellion against Saddam Hussein's government, as had the Arab Shiite population of the south. The rebellion appears to have been a largely spontaneous reaction to the rout of the army and to George Bush's call upon the people of Iraq to overthrow their dictator. It even surprised the Kurdish political organizations, which were relatively late in attempting to provide leadership f o r the rebellion. The scope of the rising was unprecedented; the K u r d s took control of all towns and cities in the north, and the central government infrastructure collapsed. The successes of the Kurds, and their hopes of helping establish another regime in Iraq, lasted only a few weeks. Although the army had been severely beaten in the battle for Kuwait, enough destructive power remained to suppress all internal unrest. After putting down rebellions in the south, troops and helicopter gunships moved in on Kurdistan. The lightly armed and ill-organized Kurds were no match for the well-equipped elite troops, w h o proceeded with the utmost brutality. T h e cities were reoccupied at the cost of enormous destruction and untold numbers of civilian casualties. M o s t of the population fled into the mountains further north and east, where there is no infrastructure to support them. They are being mercilessly pursued by the army and p o u n d e d by helicopter gunships. Hundreds of thousands are massed along the borders of Turkey and Iran, hoping to be let in, as yet in vain. If aid is not f o r t h c o m i n g immediately, large numbers of Kurds will die of exposure and hunger, if they are not killed by Saddam's troops.

(An early version of this article was presented at the conference "Genocide: the Theory — the Reality", held o n 16 February 1991 at Yale Law School. It was rewritten for publication in M a r c h - A p r i l 1991; the Postscript was added in early 1993. I wish to think G e o r g e J. Andreopoulos and especially Diane F. Orentlicher for their comments on the first version. |

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The question whether the present atrocities against the Iraqi Shiites and the Kurds warrant the term "genocide" is painfully irrelevant to them; what difference does it make whether they are massacred "as such" or simply massacred? 1 Genocide or not, the international community has shown itself unwilling to actively intervene and stop the killing; the best that may be hoped for is an international relief effort on behalf of the survivors. We cannot evade the embarrassing question whether these massacres could have been prevented or stopped before they assumed these massive dimensions. The perpetrators, obviously, are Saddam Hussein and his regime, but responsibility lies also with the anti-Saddam alliance, which called for rebellion and then looked on passively while Saddam took his revenge. But even in the absence of direct involvement, does not the international community have a moral responsibility to prevent such wholesale slaughter? Can this responsibility possibly hinge on the legal nuance of a definition of genocide? As long as non-intervention in any country's "internal affairs" remains a sacrosanct principle without further qualification, attempts to revise the definition of the term genocide are, 1 am afraid, bound to remain a futile intellectual exercise. It is too early now to give a balanced account of the catastrophe brought upon the Kurdish people in these recent days, the worst in its sorrowful history. In this chapter I shall discuss two earlier massacres in Kurdistan that have by some been called genocide. Both took place in the course of the suppression of Kurdish rebellions, the first in Turkey, more than half a century ago, the other more recently in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein bombed his disobedient Kurdish subjects with chemical warheads. Both massacres are borderline cases. While there are those who argue that they constitute genocide by the terms of the 1948 Convention, others (including, hesitantly, myself) are reluctant to use that term. It will be hard, on the one hand, to prove that in these two cases the state intended "to destroy, in whole or in part, |the Kurds] as such." On the other hand, these were not simply punitive actions carried out against armed insurgents. In fact, these massacres were only the tip of the iceberg and have to be understood within the context of the two regimes' overall policies toward the Kurds. These policies amount to variant forms of ethnocide — in the case of Turkey, deliberate destruction of Kurdish ethnic identity by forced assimilation, and in Iraq destruction of Kurdish social structure and its socio-economic base. Both regimes presented these policies as fundamentally benevolent forms of engineered modernization, in the Turkish case even as a civilizing mission. ^The words "as such" refer to the definition of genocide according to the 1948 Convention: "... genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) I m p o s i n g m e a s u r e s intended to prevent births within the g r o u p ; (e) F o r c i b l y transferring children of the group to another group."

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The Kurds: Geographical and Political Situation A f t e r the Arabs, Turks, and Persians, the Kurds are the fourth most numerous people of the Middle East, numbering at present around twenty million. When after the First World War the map of the Middle East was redrawn, the Kurds ended up divided over four or five countries. About half of them now live in Turkey, some four million in Iraq, five million in Iran, and almost a million in Syria, while there are smaller Kurdish enclaves in the Soviet Union. Kurdistan, "the land of the Kurds," is not the name of a state but of the mountainous region where the Kurds have for centuries lived. It had long been a natural buffer zone between the two great Middle Eastern empires, the Persian and the Ottoman; after the collapse of the latter it was divided up among the successor states. Nationalism developed relatively late among the Kurds, which is one reason why they failed to establish a state of their own. 1 Islamic sentiment prevailed in and after the Great War, leading many of the Kurds to ally themselves with the Turks against the Christian powers, and resulting in the incorporation of a large part of Kurdistan into the new Turkey. Southern Kurdistan, occupied by the British, was added by them to newly created Iraq while Iran consolidated its control of the eastern part. In each of these states, the Kurds were soon in conflict with the central governments. From the 1920s on, there were numerous Kurdish rebellions in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, all of limited geographical scope. In many cases these were primarily reactions to the imposition of central government control or to concrete government policies, but the rebellions had clear Kurdish nationalist overtones. The governments, in turn, had recourse to increasingly repressive policies vis-à-vis the Kurds, aimed at destroying their potential for separatism. The conflicts were most serious in Turkey and in Republican Iraq, which were based on Turkish and Arab nationalism, respectively. A general survey of the Kurdish movement and of the treatment of the Kurds by the governments of these countries is beyond the scope of this c h a p t e r . 2 I shall restrict myself below to a discussion of only two cases of severe repression possibly constituting genocide. In both cases I shall begin with a description of the physical violence first, and then analyze the context

' W i t h the exception of the short-iived Republic of Mahabad, which existed for less than a year in a part of Iranian Kurdistan in 1946. 2

T h e best general historical surveys of the Kurdish national movement are: Wadie Jwaideh, The Kurdish Nationalist Movement: Its Origins and Development (Ph.D. thesis, Syracuse University, 1960), Chris Kutschera, Le mouvement national kurde (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), and David MacDowall, A modern history of the Kurds (London: I. B. Tauris 1996). Lucien Rambout, Les Kurdes et te droit: Des textes, des faits (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1947), though dated, is still useful on the 1920s and 1930s, as is Hassan Arfa, The Kurds: An Historical and Political Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1966). T h e author of the last-named work, a retired Iranian general, took himself part in a punitive campaign against Kurds.

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of government policy and Kurdish activities in which it took place. This will, I hope, allow me to throw light on the complex nexus of motivation and intent to destroy.

An Almost Forgotten Massacre: Dersim, 1937-38 In 1990 a book was published in Turkey that by its very title accused Turkey's one-party regime of the 1930s of having committed genocide in the Kurdish district of Dersim. 1 The book was immediately banned and did not generate the debate its author, the sociologist ismail Begikfi, had hoped for. Begik^i was the first, and for a long time the only, Turkish intellectual to publicly criticize Turkey's official ideology and policies regarding the Kurds, beginning with his 1969 study of the socio-economic conditions of eastern Turkey through a whole scries of increasingly polemical works. He paid a heavy price for his moral and intellectual courage; all his books were banned, and he spent more than ten years in prison for writing them. Although my conclusions may be slightly different f r o m his, I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to his committed scholarship, and dedicate this chapter to him. The massacres with which Begikgi's book deals occurred in the course of Turkey's pacification of ihe rebellious Kurdish district of Dersim (presently called Tunceli) in 1937 and 1938. The events represent one of the blackest pages in the history of Republican Turkey, gracefully passed over in silence or deliberately misrepresented by most historians, foreign as well as Turkish. 2 A s the campaign against Dersim went on, the authorities made sure that little information about it r e a d i e d the outside world. Diplomatic observers in Ankara were aware that large military operations were taking place, but had little idea of what was actually going on. A f t e r the events, however, the British consul at Trebizond, the diplomatic post closest to Dersim, spoke of brutal and indiscriminate \ lolence and made an explicit comparison with the Armenian massacres of 1915. "Thousands of Kurds," he wrote, "including women and children, were slain; others, mostly children, were thrown into the Euphrates; while thousands of others in less hostile areas, who had first been

' i s m a i l Be§ikji, Tunceli Kanunu '1935) ve Dersim Jenosidi [The 1935 law concerning Tunceli and the genocide of Dersim] (Istanbul: Beige yayinlari, 1990). 2 T h e r e is not a single word aboat the events in the two standard texts, Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: O x f o r d University Press, 1968), and Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and of Modern Turkey, vol. 2, The Rise of Modern Turkey 1808-1975 (Cambridge: C a m b r i d g e University Press, 1977). Turkish authors referring to the Dersim campaign prefer to gloss over the massacres. Thus, the retired general Muhsin Batur mentions in his memoirs that he took part, as a young lieutenant, in the 1938 Dersim campaign but refuses to speak out: "I beg my readers to be excused, I shall not write this page of my life" (Muhsin Batur. Anilar ve goru^ler: U( donemin perde arkasi IMemoirs and views: behind the scene in three p e r i o d s | (Istanbul: Milliyet, 1985), quoted in M u s a Anter, Amlarim [My memoirs] (Istanbul: Doz., 1990), 44.

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deprived of their cattle and other belongings, were deported to vilayets (provinces) in Central Anatolia. It is now stated that the Kurdish question no longer exists in Turkey." 1 I shall first, using the f e w available sources, attempt to give an impression of the situation in Dersim prior to the pacification campaign and sketch the events of 1937 and 1938. Then I shall attempt to show that what we are dealing with w a s not merely the brutal suppression of an internal rebellion but part of a wider policy directed against the Kurds as such. Dersim is an inaccessible district of high, snow-capped mountains, narrow valleys, and deep ravines in central Eastern Turkey. It was inhabited by a large number of small tribes, eking out a marginal existence by animal husbandry, horticulture, and gathering forest products. Their total numbers were, by the mid-1930s, estimated at 6 5 , 0 0 0 to 7 0 , 0 0 0 . 2 Dersim was a culturally distinct part of Kurdistan, partly due to ecological-geographical factors, partly to a combination of linguistic and religious peculiarities. Some of the tribes spoke Kurdish proper, but most spoke another, related language known as Zaza. All adhered to the heterodox Alevi sect, which separated them socially f r o m the Sunni Kurds living to the east and south ( a m o n g whom there were both Zaza and Kurdish speakers). Although there are Alevis in many other parts of Turkey, those of Dersim constitute a distinct group, with different beliefs and practices. 3 Dersim was, by the mid-1930s, the last part of Turkey that had not been effectively brought under central government control. T h e tribes of Dersim had never been subdued by any previous government; the only law they recognized was traditional tribal law. Tribal chieftains and religious leaders wielded great authority over the c o m m o n e r s , w h o m they often exploited economically. They were not opposed to government as such, as long as it did not interfere too much in their affairs. Many chieftains, in fact, strengthened their position by establishing close relations with the military

1 Report f r o m the Consul in Trabzon, 27 September 1938 (Public Record Office, London, FO 371 files, document E5961/69/44). ^This figure was given in December 1935 by then minister of the interior §ukrii Kaya (quoted in Be§ik?i, Tunceli kanunu (1935), 10). It referred to the province of Tunceli. T h e historical district of Dersim was in fact larger than Tunceli, and included parts of neighbouring Sivas, Erzincan, and Elazig provinces. This may explain why another contemporary author gives the much higher population figure of 150,000, apparently referring to larger Dersim (Na§it Ulug, Tunceli medeniyete a(iliyor [Tunceli is opened up for civilization] (Istanbul: C u m h u r i y e t Matbaasi, 1939, 144). T h e military campaigns were mainly restricted to the province of Tunceli, and therefore I prefer the f o r m e r figures. ^Interestingly (and perhaps of some political significance), many of the Dersim Kurds are partly of Armenian descent — Dersim used to have a large Armenian population. Even well before the Armenian massacres, many local Armenians voluntarily assimilated, becoming Alevi Kurds (L. Molyneux-Seel, "A Journey in Dersim," The Geographical Journal 44, no. 1 [1914]: 49-68). This has left traces both in the local Zaza dialects and in popular belief.

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and police officers appointed to the region. There was a tradition of refusing to pay taxes — but then there was little that could be taxed, as the district was desperately poor. Young men evaded military service when they could, but by 1935 a considerable proportion of them did in fact serve in the Turkish army. There were perpetual conflicts between the tribes, often taking the form of protracted feuds. Many of the tribesmen carried arms, and raids against neighbouring tribes were not uncommon. The local military officials were often drawn into the tribal conflicts too, as some chieftains accused their enemies of conspiring against the state. At the same time there was Kurdish nationalist agitation among the tribes, carried out by the educated sons of leading families. 1 In 1936 Dersim was placed under military government, with the express aim of pacifying and "civilizing" it. The tribes' response to the modernization brought by the state, consisting of roads, bridges, and police posts, was ambiguous. Some chieftains sought accommodation with the military authorities, others resented this interference in their f o r m e r independence. By early 1937, the authorities believed, or had been led to believe, that a major rebellion was at hand, a show of resistance against the pacification program, instigated by nationalists. The person said to be the chief conspirator was a religious leader, Seyyit Riza. Five tribes (out of around one hundred) were said to be involved in the conspiracy. The military campaign against Dersim was mounted in response to a relatively minor incident, and it would seem that the army had been waiting for a direct reason to punish the tribes. One day in March 1937, a strategic wooden bridge was burned down and telephone lines cut. Seyyit Riza and the tribes associated with him were suspected. The army may have believed this to be the beginning of the expected rebellion. One Turkish source mentions that there was around the same time another minor incident elsewhere in Kurdistan and suggests co-ordination by Kurdish nationalists. 2 The official history of the military campaign, however, considers the incident as of a local nature only. 3 It is hard, in retrospect, to separate intertribal violence f r o m deliberate rebellion against the state. One pro-Turkish source in fact suggests that the suspicions against Seyyit Riza were based on denunciations by his local enemies. 4 In any case, the army had its warrant for intervention. The first

' A c c o r d i n g to a detailed military study of the events, Dersim-born A r m e n i a n s , w h o had survived the Armenian massacres and lived in Syria, returned to the area together with Kurdish nationalists and successfully incited the tribes to rebellion. Re§at Halli, Turkiye Cumhuriyetinde avaklanmalar (1924-1938) [Rebellions in the Republic of Turkey, 1924-1938] (Ankara: T. C. Genelkurmay Ba§kanligi H a r p T a r i h i Dairesi, 1972), 377. 2

M a h m u t Gologlu, Tek-partili (Ankara, 1974), 243. Halli, Turkiye Cumhuriyetinde 4

Cumhuriyet, axaklanmalar,

1931-1938 |The one-party republic, 1931-1938] 379.

H i d i r Oztiirk, Tarihimizde Tunceli ve Ermeni mezalimi [The place of Tunceli in our history and the atrocities by the Armeniansl (Ankara: Turk Kultiirunu Ara§tirma Enstitiisii, 1984), 31-36.

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troops, sent in to arrest the suspects, were stopped by armed tribesmen. The confrontations soon escalated. When the tribes kept refusing to surrender their leaders, a large campaign was mounted. Military operations to subdue the region lasted throughout the summer of 1937. In September, Seyyit Riza and his closest associates surrendered, but the next spring the operations were resumed with even greater force. They must have been of unprecedented violence and brutality. The few existing accounts of the events are necessarily partisan. One important book was written by a local man, the veterinarian and nationalist activist Nuri Dersimi, w h o was involved in the early stages of the rebellion, and w h o lost many relatives in the military reprisals. The book he published fourteen years later in Syrian exile is obviously coloured by his nationalist views and may contain certain cosmetic corrections, but seems on the whole reliable. 1 The best I can do is to quote verbatim some passages. When the Turkish troops began hunting down the rebellious tribes, the men gave battle, while the women and children hid in deep caves. "Thousands of these women and children perished," Dersimi writes, "because the army bricked up the entrances of the caves. These caves are marked with numbers on the military maps of the area. At the entrances of other caves, the military lit fires to cause those inside to suffocate. Those who tried to escape from the caves were finished off with bayonets. A large proportion of the women and girls of the Kureyshan and Bakhtiyar [two rebel tribes) threw themselves from high cliffs into the Munzur and Parchik ravines, in order not to fall into the Turks' hands." 2 The Kirgan, a tribe that had opted for submission to the Turkish army and broken with the rebels, was not treated with greater clemency: "Because the Kirgan trusted the Turks they remained in their villages, while the rebel Bakhtiyar withdrew. As a result, they were destroyed. Their chieftains were tortured and then shot dead. All who tried to escape or sought refuge with the army were rounded up. The men were shot on the spot, the women and children were locked into haysheds, that were set fire to." 3

M. Nuri Dersimi, Kurdistan tarihinde Dersim [Dersim in the history of Kurdistan] (Aleppo, 1952). Dersimi left the area when it had become clear that the new military governor of Dersim considered him to be the m a j o r instigator of the rebellion. This w a s before the military operations proper had begun. Dersimi was therefore not an eyewitness of the massacres; on the whole his account seems factually correct, although his figures may be somewhat exaggerated. Possible distortions in the book concern Dersimi's own role, and his desire to depict the Dersim population as more nationalist than it actually was. The Dersim rebellion shows more the signs of traditional tribal resistance to government interference than anything so modern as the wish for a separate state. ^Translated f r o m Dersimi, Kurdistan tarihinde Dersim, 285-86. A m o n g the girls w h o thus committed suicide was the author's daughter Fato (ibid., 319). ^Dersimi, Kurdistan tarihinde Dersim, 286-87.

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When winter approached and the army could not continue its operations, it offered a cease-fire and a peaceful settlement with the rebels, while promising to leave the other tribes in peace and to give compensation for the damage done. 1 These promises served to lure the chief rebel leader, Seyyit Riza, into the town of Erzincan (whose governor he knew and trusted). He was arrested, together with his retinue of some fifty men. They were summarily tried and eleven of them, including Seyyit Riza, were immediately executed. 2 In the spring of 1938 military operations resumed on an even larger scale. The Karabal, Ferhad and Pilvank tribes, which surrendered, were annihilated. Women and children of these tribes were locked into haysheds and burnt alive. Men and women of the Pilvank and A§agt Abbas tribes, that had always remained loyal to the government, were lined up in the in and Inciga valleys and shot. The women and girls in Irgan village were rounded up, sprinkled with kerosene and set alight. Khech, the chief village of the Sheykh Mehmedan tribe, which had already surrendered, was attacked at night and all inhabitants were killed by machine gun and artillery fire. The inhabitants of Hozat town and the Karaca tribe, men, women and children, were brought near the military camp outside Hozat and killed by machine gun. (...) Thousands of women and girls threw themselves into the Munzur river. (...) The entire area was covered by a thick mist caused by the artillery fire and air bombardments with poisonous gas. (...) Even young men from Dersim who were doing their military service in the Turkish army were taken from their regiments and shot. 3 A n o t h e r Dersim-born Kurdish nationalist, Sait K i r m i z i t o p r a k , published in 1970 under the pseudonym of Dr. §ivan a history of the Kurdish movement, in which he devotes a few pages to the Dersim massacres. 4 Though clearly indebted to Dersimi's book, he adds some information from oral sources. On the 1938 campaign he writes (in free translation):

' A c c o r d i n g to Dersimi, Kurdistan tarihinde Dersim, 288, the army also pretended to acquiesce in the rebels' demands, but he docs not explain what these demands were. 2

T h e trial and executions were carried out with great haste because all had to be settled before President Atatiirk, w h o was already on his way, visited the region. T h e officials in charge did not wish to embarrass the president by having the local people petition him for mercy. T h e events are narrated, with apparent feelings of shame, by the man w h o was ordered to organize the summary trial and executions, the later foreign minister Ihsan Sabri f a g l a y a n g i l , in his memoirs, Amlanm (Istanbul: Yilmaz, 1990), 45-55. ^Dersimi, Kurdistan tarihinde Dersim. 318-20. Dersimi mentions especially his own brother, w h o then had a clerical j o b at Diyarbakir air base, and w h o was taken away to be shot, together with two friends. 4

D r . §ivan, Kurt millet hareketleri ve Irak'ta Kurdistan ihtilali [Kurdish national movements and the revolution of Kurdistan in Iraqi (Stockholm, 1975; previously published clandestinely in Turkey in 1970).

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In the spring of 1938, the government offered amnesty to all who would surrender their arms. The Karabal, Ferhad, Pilvank, Sheykh Mehmedan and Karaca tribes, who responded to this call, were entirely annihilated. In a later stage, they also killed most of the Kureyshan tribe of Mazgirt district, the Y u s u f a n and the Bakhtiyar tribes, not sparing women, old men and children. They were killed en masse, in many cases by the bayonet. T o w a r d s the end of s u m m e r , the Hormekan, Kureyshan and .Alan of Nazimiye district, and part of the Bamasuran of Mazgirt were also annihilated, by poison gas bombs as well as by bayonets. Their corpses were doused with kerosene and set alight. 1 Improbable though it may seem, these accounts are to a large extent confirmed by the documents published in the official military history of the c a m p a i g n . 2 Only the claim that the army used poison gas in the 1938 offensive, made by both Dersimi and §ivan, cannot be substantiated. At several instances the reports mention the arrest of women and children, but elsewhere we read of indiscriminate killing of humans and animals. With professional pride, reports list how m a n y "bandits" and dependants were "annihilated," and how many villages and fields were burned. Groups who were hiding in caves were entirely wiped out. The body count in these reports (in some engagements a seemingly exact number like 76, in others "the entire band of Haydaran tribesmen and part of the Demenan") adds up to something between three and seven thousand, while tens of villages are reported destroyed. In seventeen days of the 1938 offensive alone, 7,954 persons were reported killed or caught alive; 3 the latter were definitely a minority. According to these official reports, then, almost 10 percent of the entire population of Tunceli was killed. The Kurds claim that their losses were even higher.

Genocide or Ethnocide? The killing in Dersim was undoubtedly massive, indiscriminate, and excessively brutal, but was it genocide? W a s the killing done "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part" the Kurds (or only the people of Dersim) "as such"? Or was it only the suppression of an armed rebellion, with considerable overkill? I shall try to show that it was neither. There was never a policy

' Si van, Kurt millet hareketleri,

of

98.

Hall], Turkiye Cumhuriyetinde ayaklanmalar, 365-480. This important source gives a detailed day-by-day account of the military operations, prepared by the W a r History Departmenl attached to the Turkish General Staff. The book is not publicly available; it was printed in a very limited edition, and most of these f e w copies were moreover requested back and destroyed within a short time after publication. Friends who prefer to remain anonymous provided m e wilt, photocopies of the section on Dersim. Some of the key passages are also quoted verbatim iri Be^ikji, Tunceli kanunu. ^Halli, Turkiye Cumhuriyetinde

ayaklanmalar,

478.

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physically destroying the Kurds or part of them as such. There was, however, in the Dersim campaign, a deliberate intent to destroy rebels and potential rebels, and this was part of a general policy directed toward the Kurds as such. But this policy is more appropriately termed ethnocide, the destruction of Kurdish ethnic identity. Intent to destroy may be inferred from the wording of the Secret Decision of the Council of Ministers on the Punitive Expedition to Dersim of 4 May 1937. 1 T h e decision envisages a final solution to the perpetual rebellions in Dersim. "Thi> time," it reads, "the people in the rebellious districts will be rounded up and deported." But then it orders the army to "render those who have used arms or are still using them once and for all harmless on the spot, to completely, destroy their villages and to remove their families." Given the fact thai almost every man in Dersim was known to carry arms, this reads like a brief to kill all men in the area. It is not immediately obvious from official sources that the Dersim campaign was directed against the Kurds as such. T h e r e are no explicit references to Kurds, becausc the Kurds by that time had already been defined out of existence. T h e military reports call all p e o p l e of D e r s i m indiscriminately "bandits" (haydut). Interior Minister §ukru Kaya, however, had found it necessary to inform the National Assembly that the people of D e r s i m were "authentic Turks," thereby implicitly m e n t i o n i n g the unmentionable ethnic dimension of the Dersim question. 2 The problem was, of course, that most people in Dersim were not yet aware of their Turkishness. Many did not know any Turkish at all, and the authorities had to communicate with them through interpreters; 3 airplanes dropped leaflets "in the local language." 4 Dersimi and §ivan. both local men, are at pains to show that the Dersim rebellion was in fact a Kurdish nationalist rebellion, and that this was the reason for the brutality af the campaign. But they appear to project too much of their own sentiments on the rebels, who acted out of narrower interests and loyalties than lofty national ideals. The rebellion seems to have been primarily a response to government interference in the tribes' affairs, resistance to what the government saw as its "civilizing mission."

'Published in Befikgi, Tunceli kaminu, 67. 2

W h e n presenting a special law for Dersim in 1935, two years before the campaigns, the minister (quoted in Be§ik9i, Tunceli kanunu, 10) declared that the people there were "a group originally belonging to the Turkish race" (aslen Turk unsuruna mensup bir kitledir). Destruction of Kurdish ethnic identity w a s paradoxically legitimated by the denial of its existence (see below). ^ a g l a y a n g i l , Amlarim, 47. 4

Halli, Turkiye Cumhuriyetinde

axaklunrnalar,

390.

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The regime presented this mission — begun well before the rebellion — as a determined struggle against backwardness and the oppression of the people by feudal lords, tribal chieftains, and reactionary religious leaders. One observer close to g o v e r n m e n t circles e n t h u s e d , soon a f t e r the Dersim campaign, on its civilizing effects: the tribal c h i e f t a i n s , the m i s c h i e v o u s religious leaders and their accomplices have been caught and deported to the west. The successful military operations have once and for all uprooted any possibility for a future bandit movement in Tunceli. Dersim is f r o m now on liberated and saved. There remains no place in Dersim now where the army has not set foot, where the officers and commanders have not applied their intelligence and energies. Once again the army has, in performing this great task, earned the eternal gratitude of the Turkish nation.' In practice, however, the thrust of the government effort, including the operations in Dersim, was not so much directed against "feudalism" and backwardness as against Kurdish ethnic identity. The brutal Dersim campaign was but the culmination of a series of measures taken in order to forcibly assimilate the Kurds, as I shall presently show.

The Kurdish Policies of Republican Turkey The Republic of Turkey, proclaimed in 1923, owes its existence to the War of Independence fought by Mustafa Kemal and his associates against the various other nations claiming parts of the former Ottoman territories in the wake of the First World War-notably Greeks, Armenians, French, and Italians. A "National Pact" defined the extent of territory for which the independence m o v e m e n t f o u g h t as the f o r m e r Ottoman lands inhabited by n o n - A r a b Muslims — in other words, by Turks and Kurds, for these were the major non-Arab Muslim groups in the Empire. Kurds took part in this struggle along with the Turks, and the movement's leaders in fact often spoke of a Turkish-Kurdish brotherhood, and of the new state as being made up of Turks and Kurds. In January 1923, Mustafa Kemal still suggested there might be local a u t o n o m y f o r K u r d i s h - i n h a b i t e d a r e a s , 2 but his policies soon changed drastically. The very fact that the new republic was called "Turkey"

Ulug, Tunceli, 159 (slightly abbreviated). Na§it Hakki Ulug was a deputy for the province of Kutahya in the Grand National Assembly and had earlier written a journalistic account ori "feudal" relations in Dersim and the need for their abolishment. He shows no interest in the human cost of the "civilizing" process, and mentions not a single killing. 2 When the Istanbul weekly ikibin'e Dogru ("Towards 2000") published in its 6 November 1988 issue the minutes of a press meeting where Mustafa Kemal had spoken of autonomy, it created a sensation in Turkey. The magazine was immediately banned for "separatist propaganda." but a court decision later lifted the ban.

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(a borrowing from European languages) already indicated that some citizens were going to be more equal than others. 1 The new republican elite, careful to preserve their hard-won victory, were obsessed with threats .o territorial integrity and with imperialist ploys to sow division. In this regard, the Kurds were perceived to be a serious risk. There was a Kurdish independence movement, albeit a weak one, which had initially received some encouragement from the British. The call for Muslim unity, sounded during the War of Independence, had been more effective among the Kurds than Kurdish nationalist agitation, but when Turkey set on a course of secularization the very basis of this unity disappeared. The Kemalists attempted to replace Islam as the u n i f y i n g f a c t o r by a T u r k e y - b a s e d nationalism. In so doing, they provoked the Kurdish nationalist response that they feared. Some policies caused grievances among much wider circles than those of committed Kurdish nationalists alone. In the World War, numerous Kurds had fled to the west when Russian armies occupied eastern Anatolia. A s early as 1919, the government decided to disperse them over the western provinces, in groups not larger than three hundred each, so that they would not constitute more than 5 percent of the population in any one locality. Some Kurds who wished to return to Kurdistan were prevented f r o m doing so. 2 In the new Turkey, all modern education was henceforth to be in Turkish; moreover, traditional Islamic schools (medrese) were closed down in 1924. These two radical changes effectively denied i.he Kurds access to education. Other secularizing measures (abolition of the caliphate, the office of sheikh al-islam, and the religious courts; all in 1924) caused much resentment in traditional Muslim circles. Kurdish nationalist intellectuals and army officers then joined forces with disaffected religious leaders, resulting in the first great Kurdish rebellion, led by Sheikh Said in 192.v