The Historical Background of Kurdish National Movement
The Historical Background of Kurdish National Movement
According to a wide-spread perception in Europe and the Western hemispere, the only democratic society in the Middle East is that of the Kurds, who were never allowed to create their own state and their state bulding process was blocked their neighbours. This view is often expressed in European and Western discourse on the region, regardless of political ideology. The statelessness of the Kurds, their difference from the majority societies and the fact that we cannot speak of a Kurdish state today because of the borders drawn by the Europeans, all play a role in winning Western sympathy.
However we have strict limits in this paper, it is worth pointing out that the Kurdish national movement was also late to emerge compared to other states in the region. In the Ottoman Empire, in parallel with the emergence of the Unity and Progress Committee (1889, İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti), the Young Turks (1908) or the Pan-Turkic ideology (1903, Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset), political nationalism permeated a significant part of the intelligentsia. The Balkan nationalists, as well as the Greeks and Armenians living in the empire, were not lagging behind the Turks in this respect. But even by comparison, the idea of Kurdish national awakening began to emerge later and was in many ways influenced by the examples of Ottomans.
The idea of an effective extension of central power had already begun in the reign of Mahmut II (1806-1843). As a result, armed uprisings broke out in the predominantly Kurdish areas within the Ottoman Empire in 1842 and again in 1880, first in Cizre (Türkiye) and later in Mosul (modern Iraq). Among other things, to counter the discontent and later Armenian and Russian pressure, Sultan Abdülhamit II created the so-called Hamidiye regiments in 1891, which were then given regular income to both secure the country's borders and to curb the excessive strengthening of various Kurdish interests.
The first Kurdish organisations were established in the Ottoman Empire in 1908 in Diyarbakır under the name of Osmanlı Kürt İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti and at the same time in Istanbul under the name of Kürt Teavün ve Terakki Cemiyeti. During the First World War, the voices calling for Kurdish autonomy and statehood were partly supported by the Russians and partly by the British. In this sense, the proclamation of the the Fourteen Points by Woodrow Wilson further reinforced the perception that the Kurdish-inhabited areas could claim some form of autonomy. Since the peace of the Sèvres had also touched on the matter, it became more up to date. The Koçgiri uprising broke out in vain against the fledgling Anatolian independence movement, but Kemal Pasha and Nuri Pasha suppressed the rebellion by the summer of 1921 (Sezen Kılıç, Avusturya Arşiv Belgelerinde Şeyh Sait İsyanı (1925), XIX Türk Tarih Kongresi. Ankara: 3-7 Ekim, 2022 Kongreye Sunulan Bildiriler, VII Cilt. Türk Tarih Kurumu, Ankara, 2024, 897-899.) Also can not be considered as a coincidence that Kemal and the War of Independece (1919-1923) underlined the unity of Muslims withing the country, that refered to Kurds and Turks (and others) at the same time and tried not to divide the society.
In the pages of El Müfid, a publication published in Damascus in March 1919, an article on the need for an independent Kurdish state was published for the first time (Fehmi Taştekin, Rojava Kürtlerin Zamanı. İletişim, 2016, 26). The self-organization of the Kurds in present-day Syria and south-eastern Turkey, who lived in a state until the Ottoman collapse, was more advanced than in other Kurdish-inhabited areas. This initiative was primarily aimed at reaching out to Sunni-religious communities associated with the Kurmandji language border, so not the entire ethnic Kurdish population.
The 1925 riots in the area of Şeyh Said and the 1927 riots in the Ararat Mountains illustrated the fragility of the Kurdish-inhabited areas. It is true that some explanations describe these conflicts not exclusively as ethnic unrest, but at least as much as a social tension, namely a local response to the extension of the state's powers. In other words, the history of the Kurdish unrest in Turkey between the two world wars can be interpreted as the emergence of the nascent modern Turkish state in areas where tax collection, military and social welfare had hitherto been in the hands of local (Kurdish) elites rather than the state.
Later on, the 1925 uprising was crushed by the Turkey, but many of the Kurdish leaders fled to Syria. The Kurdish national movement, which is later based in Syria, sent support from Syria to the Turkish-Iranian border region during the armed clashes two years later. Indeed, one of the major intellectual and political groups that defined itself in opposition to the Kemalist Turkish leadership was also established in Lebanon, which was then officially independent of Syria but had a thousand links with Damascus (and Paris), under the name of Xoybun (Taştekin, 26).
These examples show that Kurdish intellectuals and armed groups, which tried to implement the European understanding of nationalism were fragmented and faced many challenges. Also worth to mention, that from the very beginning of the nationalist movement, the Kurdish autonomy was heavily linked with other, foreign powers and therefore the process was (and still is) opposed heavily by the local powers in many ways.
Author: Péter Kövecsi-Oláh, advisor - LCTS, LUPS
Image source: saradistribution.com