The same Turk

International Journal of Kurdish Studies, Jan, 2004 by Herbert Adams Gibbons

One of the most common mistakes of those who have championed more warmly than wisely the successive nationalist regimes in Turkey is their assumption that Armenians and Greeks, by failing to cooperate with the new spirit of Young Turk liberalism, were responsible for their own misfortunes and for the disruption of the Ottoman Empire. Emphasis has been placed upon the disloyalty of Christian subject races, who are said to have entered into intrigues with outside Christian Powers to destroy Moslem Turkey. Because of this disloyalty they had to be suppressed. Prince Sureya Bedr Khan's splendid expose of the wrongs and sufferings inflicted upon the Kurds, whose official representative he is, demonstrates that the Turks have been equally implacable in their attitude towards a subject race of coreligionists.

The Kurds are Orthodox Sunnite Moslems, who worked loyally with the Turkish Government, both before and after the Revolution of 1908 and all during the World War. Their reward, as these poignant pages reveal, has been the same as that meted out to the Christian Armenians and Greeks. The motives of Turkish inhumanity to the Kurds have been the same; the methods of persecution, massacre, deportation, have been the same; the result bids fair to be the same--unless the cry of distress of the Kurds is heard by those Powers that guaranteed under the treaties of the Paris Settlement the rights of racial minorities to former enemy countries.

A study of the course of events in Turkey from the Revolution of 1908 to the outbreak of the World War leads to the conclusion that the Young Turks never had any other thought than to keep under the domination of the Turkish element all the other elements of the population of the Ottoman Empire. Their hostility was not directed against Armenians and Greeks alone: discrimination was not exercised against Christians alone. In fact, the first opposition to the "Turkifying" process inaugurated after the downfall of Abd-ul-Hamid came from Moslem Arabs and Albanians. The Arab revolt in the Hauran and the two Albanian revolts in the mountain regions of what was still at that time Turkey-in-Europe exhausted the Turkish Army and contributed greatly to the startling weakness of the Turks in the disastrous First Balkan War of 1912-1913. These revolts were more serious than the war with Turkey. They were provoked by the determination of the Young Turks to impose their will upon non-Turkish elements. Although numerically less than half the population of the Empire, the Young Turks had decided that three out of four in the Constantinople Parliament must be of their own race. That was their idea of a constitutional regime!

Prince Sureya's story of what has been happening in Kurdistan since 1925 proves that the Turk does not change his political conceptions--and his methods of realizing them. The Kurds were given liberal promises, then tricked into doing work for the Turks that paved the way for their own martyrdom and enslavement. When they woke up to this, they found that the Angora Government knew only the one traditional Turkish method of dealing with them. They were to be assimilated, and, if they refused assimilation, exterminated by massacre and deportation. To prevent undergoing the fate of the Armenians, they sprang to arms. The revolution started sooner than was intended, and the Kurds were at a disadvantage. But they managed to hold their own, in a good part of their territory, defeating successive Turkish armies sent against them, as the Albanians and Arabs had done. History has been repeating itself. More than half the Kurdish nation has been killed or exiled, but the war goes on into its fourth winter.

The outside world knows little, or nothing, of this last tragedy in the bloody history of Turkey--a tragedy that is still being enacted. Kurdistan is far away, and it is an interior country, out of touch with the rest of the world. Rarely does news from Kurdistan get into the papers. Angora calls this national movement "an abortive rebellion." Mustafa Kemal, after using the Kurds, now vilifies them when he finds that they will not surrender the traditions of a proud race running back for a thousand years before the Turks came to Asia Minor. Emir Sureya has succeeded in getting to the United States, and now he tells us in measured language, and with the competence of a scholar, things we ought to know about the past history of Kurdistan, about the character of his people, and their present sufferings.

Prince Sureya Bedr Khan is the grandson of Prince Bedr Khan of El Djezireh, the last semi-independent Kurdish ruler. He comes to us with a mandate from the Hoyboon, the Kurdish National Council, to state the case of Kurdistan to the American people and Government. How well he is able to do this, the reader of the following pages will judge.

It is good for us to know about the Kurds and their heroic struggle to save their heritage of centuries. They say they will fight on; and I am sure that they will. Their history is a pretty good guarantee of that. It is good for us to know that the Angora Government acts towards faithful coreligionists in the same way that it has acted towards Armenians and Greeks. This statement of the case of Kurdistan against the Turks gives us a little different light upon the Armenian persecutions and the ruthless suppression of Hellenism.