Are Kurds a pariah minority?

The Turkish Republic was born of force. At the conclusion of World War I, France, England, Italy, Russia, Greece, and the Armenian people each tried to seize territory in the Anatolian peninsula, designating for the Turks a rump-state less than one-quarter the size of Turkey today. In October 1920, as the Turks fought for their survival against simultaneous invasions of Greeks in the west and Armenians in the east, a Kurdish chief named Alishan Beg hijacked a shipment of arms and rose in rebellion. Turkish nationalist forces subdued the rebels, but the willingness of the Kurds to be a fifth column permanently sparked distrust in Turkish officialdom.

It would be a mistake to retroactively attribute nationalistic motives to the Kuchgiri rebellion, or succeeding uprisings. Arbitrary tax levies and livestock seizures by Turkish soldiers deployed to the east to fight Armenian militias did antagonize local Kurds. The primary cause of the early rebellions, however, was more religious than nationalist (Lewis, 1961: 403-404; Cornell, 2001). Many conservative elements in Kurdish society distrusted the Turkish leadership's opposition to the caliphate, the traditional seat of Islamic rather than nationalist rule (McDowall, 2000: 188). With the Greeks repelled, Ataturk turned his attention to building the new Turkish nation-state. Wary of perceived Kurdish disloyalty at a time of crisis, and fearful of the potential secessionist threat arising out of the Mosul vilayat dispute, Ataturk offered the Kurds little flexibility in the design of the new state. Turkish became the sole language of both state and education (McDowall, 2000: 191).

It was the final abolition of the caliphate in combination with Bolshevik support that spurred a new Kurdish rebellion in 1925 (McDowall, 2000: 192-196). Turkish forces decisively put down the rebellion, but the damage was done when it came to the issue of trust between the government in Ankara and the Kurdish tribes in the east (Lewis, 1961: 260-261). The rebellion convinced Ataturk that a loyal opposition was not possible. He used the emergency Law for the Maintenance of Order, enacted in the wake of the uprising, to promote his agenda in areas far beyond the localized Kurdish problem (Ataturk also based his decree abolishing the fez on the Law for the Maintenance of Order) (Lewis, 1961: 265).

Historians and scholars have often criticized the draconian nature of Turkey's Kurdish policies. David McDowall, for example, has argued that, in the wake of the 1925 revolt, that "the army ... now found control of Kurdistan to be its prime function and raison d'etre" (2000: 198). Human rights groups such as Amnesty International often criticize the Turkish military's press and civil restrictions. But these criticisms fail to consider that from Ankara's perspective, the early Kurdish challenge threatened the very existence of a state that neighboring powers had already proved all too willing to try to extinguish. Perhaps the Kurds are labeled a pariah minority as a result of the restrictions, but Turks feel that their survival is at stake; they have no desire to become a pariah minority themselves. That Kurdish groups received support from the Soviet Union, and more recently from Syria and Greece, has only reinforced this belief (Kitfield, 2002; Barkey, 1996: 77).