Kurdish Question

Turkish nationalism was a latecomer to the Ottoman lands. Defensive in nature, it aimed to deter the disintegration of the Empire at the hands of the Great Powers and the minority groups which had already endorsed nationalist ideals. When this target proved unrealistic, it aimed at the formation of a strong Turkish nation-state. Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, it proved successful in that aim. The abolition of the Caliphate and the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 launched a rigorous nation-building campaign. The need for national unity and cohesion required an intensive programme of national homogenization. As the large Ottoman non-Muslim populations of Anatolia had been reduced to a numerically insignificant minority by 1923, nation-building efforts could only focus on the Muslim majority of the population. Every Muslim citizen of the Republic, regardless of his ethnic origins, was invited – and obliged – to adopt the republican Turkish national identity. There was no room for separate ethnic or religious groups. Kurdish, Alevi or any other group identities were persistently denied by the state. These efforts were intensified in the aftermath of the 1925 Kurdish insurrection led by Sheikh Said in south-eastern Turkey. The most famous of the measures was a campaign named ‘“Vatandaş, Türkçe konuş!”–“Citizen, speak Turkish!”’. This was launched in 1928 aiming to impose the universal use of Turkish by all minorities, while a series of additional measures aimed to further advance national homogenization. Preventing the formation of villages by non-Turkish-speaking refugees, resettling small groups of non-Turkish-speaking populations in Turkish-speaking villages, emphasizing the honour and benefits of being a Turk and speaking Turkish were all tools in a state effort to bring about the Turkification of Anatolian Kurds, Arabs, Circassians, Laz, Albanians, Roma and other Muslim ethnic groups. Non-Muslims were accepted as separate ethnic groups, but for that very reason, their citizenship rights were often questioned. The denial of the existence of any minorities other than the Istanbul Armenians, Greeks and Jews, which in turn faced persistent discrimination, became one of the cornerstones of Turkish minority policy.3 This nation-building programme met with considerable success until the rise of the Kurdish question in the late 1970s questioned its fundamental premises. Severe repressive measures throughout the 1980s and 1990s did not seem to offer a long-lasting solution; on the contrary, they further alienated Turkey's Kurdish population from the Turkish state. It also reinforced the appeal of the Kurdish Workers' Party (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan – PKK), a Kurdish secessionist group that had launched guerrilla warfare and terrorist attacks in south-eastern Turkey since the late 1970s.
This study will first focus on the recent reform of minority rights legislation, which was influenced by Turkey's efforts to meet the Copenhagen Criteria4 and start accession negotiations with the European Union. It will then explore a report of a state-affiliated committee, which was prepared in the context of this reform process and sparked a heated and interesting discussion on the reconsideration of Turkish national identity. It will be argued in this study that the suggestion to introduce a new civic Turkish national identity based on citizenship of the Republic of Turkey (Türkiyeli) – instead of the current ethnic one (Türk) – bears strong similarities with the civic identity sponsored by Ottomanism in the late Ottoman era. While Ottomanism attempted to co-opt Ottoman non-Muslim minorities, it is now Turkey's Kurds whose concerns the report is mainly trying to address. Nonetheless, the historic failure of Ottomanism cannot be considered as a clear sign that this new attempt to develop a novel civic national identity in Turkey would fail. The prospect of Turkey's EU membership and the anchor role of the European Union in Turkey's political reform programme create conditions that may assist in the future redefinition of Turkish identity on more liberal and inclusive lines.

This paper focuses on the political participation of Turkey’s two largest minorities, the Kurds and the Alevis. It argues that the political participation of Kurds and Alevis is disproportionately weak compared with their population size both for historical reasons and due to state practices. Creating an environment conducive to strong political participation of Turkey’s Kurds and Alevis will comprise a decisive step in the course of Turkey’s transformation from a procedural to a substantive democracy. Political integration of Kurds and Alevis would also mean the removal of a potential source of domestic conflict and enhance the long‐term stability of the Turkish political system.

The Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi [HDP]) was one of the leading actors in Turkey's double parliamentary elections in 2015. Under the leadership of Selahattin Demirtaş, it has enjoyed great success, crossing the ten percent threshold and entering parliament in the June 7, 2015 elections. Yet the hype was mitigated by the party's poorer results in the November 1, 2015 elections. This electoral performance manifested the strengths as well as the limits of the HDP's ability to maintain its support in a polarized political environment. Yet the HDP remains an indispensable actor for the peaceful resolution of the Kurdish issue.

The Kurdish movement in Turkey has three stated objectives: to achieve a resolution of the Kurdish issue, to democratize Turkey and to establish a decentralized political system formulated as Democratic Confederalism by Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).[1] Although the PKK is at the heart of the Kurdish movement—a term that refers to all the armed and unarmed, legal and illegal groups that are organized around the ideology put forward by Öcalan—the links between the various organizations within it are not rigid.

Ev berhem di eslê xwe de têza doktora ye, bi zimanê Rûsî ji layê Enwer Qadir Mihemed ve li zanîngeha Rojhelatnasî ya Lenîngrad hatiye amadekirin. Şêwirmendiya vê berhemê zana û rojhelatnasa berniyas a Sovyetê, Nikolayevna Verejekina kiriye. Wek têz ev xebat di salên heştê da hatiye gengeşekirin û pişt ra weke pirtuk bi Kurdiya Soranî di sala 1990an li Swêd û di sala 2007an de li Silêmaniyê hatiye çapkirin.

Összefoglaló: Tanulmányomban az első világháború után brit fennhatóság alatt létrejött iraki mandátum, azon belül is az új állam számára sok fejtörést okozó Moszul tartomány helyzetét vizsgálom meg. Ennek során arra a kérdésre keresem a választ, hogy milyen bel-és külpolitikai problémákat okozott Iraknak az, hogy Nagy-Britannia mindenáron az ország területéhez kívánta csatolni a moszuli térséget. Az elemzés során elsősorban az 1920-1932 közötti időszakra, a mandátum fennállásának idejére fókuszálok, azt követően ugyanis a térség által okozott külpolitikai probléma megszűnt. Ugyanakkor a belpolitikai kihívás, a "kurdkérdés" a mai napig fennáll, amelyről egy kitekintésben számolok be. Kutatásomhoz elsősorban a mandátum időszakából származó diplomáciai jelentéseket, memorandumokat használtam fel, amelyeket a szakirodalom segítségével elemeztem és értelmeztem, olyan perspektívákat is megvilágítva, amelyek kevéssé ismertek a magyar olvasók előtt.

Le 24 février 1983, le « Roi laid », de son vrai nom Yılmaz Pütün et de son nom de scène Yılmaz Güney, cofonde l’Institut kurde de Paris et en fait l’un de ses légataires. Depuis son décès, le 9 septembre 1984, plusieurs copies de ses films, des effets personnels et professionnels y sont conservés. Cette communication a été l’occasion de mettre en pratique des démarches de recherche sur les films kurdes et de discuter d'une partie des hypothèses à propos de la fabrication d'un patrimoine cinématographique à l'Institut kurde de Paris.

The  article  develops  the  stadial  formation  thesis  of  the  proto-statehood  among  the  Iraqi  Kurds. The concept of national identity of the Iraqi Kurds remains the subject of a complex and long-lasting discussion. The main obstacle for the emergence of the Kurdish integral nationalism is still the fact  that  the  Kurds  speak  different  dialects  of  Kurdish  language,  and  still  maintain  political  and  inter-clan  conflicts  over  the  distribution  of  power  (not  to  mention  the  futility  of  any  attempts  to  define  political  boundaries  of  Iraqi  Kurdistan).  Ironically,  Great  Britain  faced  practically  the  same  contradictions  during  its  occupation  of  Mesopotamia  at  the  end  of  the  WWI  (following  the  Mudros  armistice  in  October  1918),  when  British  attempts  to  create  an  independent  Kurdish  state  failed  for  a  number of reasons, which are discussed in the article. In our opinion, this period was responsible for the  formation  of  proto-statehood  in  Kurdish  area  (Kingdom  of  Kurdistan,  for  example,  obtained  classic  characteristics  of  a  chiefdom,  but  at  the  same  time  had  a  vivid  anti-colonial,  anti-imperialist  orientation). The phenomenology of the British government’s political relations with such ‘quasi-states’ presents the subject for this article’s analysis.

The social codes which has been in the Eastern Anatolia and Southeastern Anatolia regions are produced over these factual and conceptual practices, such as Motherhood. Because motherhood is a concept that is tradition-bound, has strong roots and can be restructured with all of its habitus instead of a contemporary concept that is updated with fashion. Motherhood can be transferred, it is prolific and the only existential practice against death. In this study, the concept of motherhood will be discussed over Diyarbakır mothers who try to make themselves heard in front of the HDP (Peoples' Democracy Party) building in Diyarbakır by considering the factual process mentioned above. The population of the study consists of Diyarbakır mothers and the sample consists of fifteen mothers and five fathers who were on ‘Child Watch’ and chosen with purposeful, random, and snowball sampling method. In this context, the obtained results will be analyzed sociologically with the interviews conducted on various subjects such as what did the mothers, who try to be heard from the first day that their children were gone lost, to find their children, how much time they have spent in the ‘Child Watch’, what do they think and want both for their children and all the youth as a mother, whether or not their spouses, families, or acquaintances support them, and how can motherhood provide a solution against the Kurdish question.

La invasión turca en el norte de Siria, con la aquiescencia del presidente Trump, ilustra la inclinación populista autoritaria del presidente turco Erdogan de tratar la política exterior como una extensión de la gestión de la crisis interna. Pero esto solo agravará aún más los problemas económicos y políticos interconectados que enfrenta al gobierno liderado por el Partido de la Justicia y el Desarrollo (AKP, por sus siglas en turco), independiente, de si Erdogan gana su guerra contra los kurdos de Rojava.  La invasión turca en el noreste de Siria en octubre de 2019 junto con sus aliados locales, denominada “Operación Manantial de Paz”, ha sido retratada por el presidente Recep Tayyip Erdogan como una campaña defensiva y humanitaria.

Bu meseleyi bütün boyutları ile bilmek için; dünyanın siyasi ve ekonomik yapısını 1700’lerden ele alıp dersler çıkarmak ve meselenin sosyolojik arka planını görmek gerekir. Çünkü bu soruna günlük siyasî sorun olarak bakarsanız ne sorunun sebepleri anlaşılır ne de gerçek bir çare bulunur. İşte ilk önce etnik milliyetçilik, ulusal milliyetçilik ile dinî ve ekonomik bloklar milliyetçiliğini kelime bazında bir miktar açalım, sonra bunların dünyadaki gelişimini ve Osmanlı dünyasındaki geçmişlerini görelim.