Of milestones and millstones

International Journal of Kurdish Studies, Jan, 2004

Today is the 11th of June in the year 2004. Only yesterday, in Turkey four Kurdish parliamentarians were released from prison pending retrial, having served ten of fifteen-year sentences for promoting "separatism." Hours earlier, for the first time since the founding of the Turkish republic, state radio carried the first of a weekly thirty-minute broadcast in the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish. Additionally, thirty minutes were allotted for a program in the dialect of Zaza Kurds. In essence thirty minutes weekly are to represent the culture of some fifteen million Kurds in Turkey.

Associated Press characterized the release of the Kurdish parliamentarians and the radio programs as "no small steps for Turkey," insomuch as Ankara's armies have been fighting Kurdish "separatists," notably the PKK, since 1984--"a war that killed 37,000 people, most of them Kurds."

Greeted by hundreds of cheering Kurds as she emerged from Uluncanlar prison, Leyla Zana told reporters, "A new era is beginning in this country, a new page is being turned." In the eyes of Kurds in Turkey, these are milestones. And no wonder, given 20th century Kurdish history. For not until 1991 were Kurds legally permitted to speak their language in public forums. Yet even then, the language ban was lifted only for "non-political" discourse. Leyla Zana breached that ban in that year when she took her oath of office in Kurdish. Further insulting Ankara's injury, she wore a hair band of yellow, green and red--the colors of the flag of Kurdistan. Still the partial lifting of the language ban was well met among Kurdish optimists. Again no surprise, given that in 1981, former cabinet minister Seraffetin Elci was imprisoned for 2 years and 3 months at hard labor for having said in public, "I am a Kurd. There are Kurds in Turkey."

Kurdish life was not ever thus. In the mid 11th century when the Byzantine empire was troubled, the Kurdish Shaddadid and Marwanid emirates played significant and respected roles as intermediaries. Little more than a century later Kurds ruled an empire founded by the illustrious Saladin. And yet, some seven centuries later their status in the region had so diminished that British Consul J. C. Taylor would inform the Earl of Clarendon in a March 19th, 1869 report "on the social and political condition of the consulate for Koordistan: "Malazgerd, Iklat, and Boulanik are rich undulating plains, but of comparable little value now, as they are infested with the common curse of the country, the Koords. These vagabonds prey upon the unfortunate agricultural sedentary classes to an extent that forces emigration to foreign countries of flight to adjacent districts. There is not one of their numerous Chiefs who has not been several times in prison for well-authenticated atrocities, yet still each time they have been in the most unaccountable manner released, to resume the same practices that first occasioned their imprisonment ... The Reshkotan and Bekran Koords--intolerable thieves--roam with their flocks over the mountain pastures to south; Jibranlee and Modikan Koords inhabit the high hills to the north-west and south-east; the Hassananlee and Millanlee, the northern portions about Boolanik and Malazgerd. The Kochers and Koords are under very imperfect subjection, and it is only by satisfying all demands however outrageous, that the Christian agriculturist can maintain their position." And twenty years later, in 1889, British Consul Chermside would both acknowledge the Kurdish past and deplore the Kurdish present, in writing: "They are a strong, warlike, hardy race, and, in the time of their Begs, mosques, medressehs, schools, bridges, & .c., existed in many districts where such evidences of civilization now only remain as ruins. The descendants of the Begs are, as a rule, illiterate, and lead idle, purposeless lives, occupied in their tribal and family quarrels, and exacting all they can from their own clansmen and the Christian Rayahs ..." And ten years later, in 1896, Edwin Bliss would draw this unpalatable comparison: "The Armenians are a thrifty, industrious, moral, and brave people, with a marked race tenacity, which has kept them a unit wherever they have gone.... Naturally agriculturists, and thus lovers of peace, they gathered principally in the plains and valleys, leaving the more inaccessible portions of the mountains to the Kurds, who preferred the wilder life of herdsmen and brigands."

Irony of ironies, during the reign of the Ottomans, Kurdish culture was not suppressed. It took Kemal Ataturk and the Young Turks in the 20th century to change all that, with more than a little help a Kurd. It was Zia Gokalp who provided the ideological rationale for what became known as Kemalism. As Harvard University historian Richard Robinson explainrf in his 1963 work, The First Turkish Republic: "The liberal Ottoman nationalist concept espoused literally by Namik Kemal and the Turkism of Ziya Gokalp's young days ultimately blended to give form to modern Turkish political nationalism ... a form to which Ziya Gokalp finally gave substance at the close of World War I when the fallacy of Ottomanism and the unreality of political Pan-Turkism became painfully apparent. In 1923, he wrote: 'Nation is not a racial, ethnic, geographical, political or voluntary group or association. Nation is a group composed of men and women who have gone through the same education, who have received the same acquisitions in language, religion, morality and aesthetics.' Note his inclusion of religion. Initially, Gokalp placed no politically feasible geographical limit on what he conceived to be the Turkish nation. He merely declared, 'It is necessary to consider everyone a Turk.' It was Kemal who modified Gokalp's definition of Turkish nationalism by secularizing government and limiting Turkey's territorial claims."