A Hundred Years Later: The Kurds and the Republic of Turkey

In the aftermath of the WWI, a significant proportion of Kurdish elites preferred the establishment of a joint Turkish-Kurdish state over participation in the nascent Kurdish independence movement. This position can largely be explained by the circumstances and prevailing attitudes of the late Ottoman period. Kurds, particularly the Sunni majority in Turkey, as the situation was different for Alevi and Yezidi communities, identified themselves as part of the Muslim majority, which had been dominant and privileged within the Empire to the detriment of non-Muslims.

Kemalist propaganda was thus able to mobilize Kurdish notables (shaykhs, tribal chiefs, aghas, beys, and others) with relative ease. Their motivations were twofold: to defend the Caliphate against Christian occupying forces and to prevent Kurdistan from being transformed into an Armenia. Fear of Christian domination backed by Western powers, the possibility of reprisals for their implication in the massacres of 1915, and the obligation to return Armenian lands and property that had been seized all contributed to pushing much of the Kurds—who had been directly implicated in the genocide—into alignment with the Kemalist movement.

However, the discourse on Turkish-Kurdish “Muslim brotherhood” did not survive the abolition of the Islamic Caliphate by Mustafa Kemal in 1924.

The young Kemalist regime turned rapidly toward an assertive Turkish nationalism beginning in the summer of 1923. Kurds were excluded from meaningful political representation: in the second Grand National Assembly, only 1 Kurdish deputy remained out of 337 members, compared with 72 in April 1920. The decisive rupture, however, came with the abolition of the Caliphate, the symbolic embodiment of the unity of the Ummah. This act ended the fiction of a Kurdish-Turkish partnership and any notion of equality between the so-called “founding brothers” of the Republic.

A significant portion of the Kurdish elite subsequently chose to rebel against the state. During the so-called Shaykh Said revolt of 1925, religious leaders assumed a central role, framing their uprising as a reaction to the abolition of the Caliphate. Kurdish nationalists—organized since 1920 around the Azadî society, which advocated an independent Kurdistan and in fact played a decisive role in encouraging Shaykh Said to revolt—interpreted the events instead as a response to the denial of Kurdish identity. Yet beneath both religious and nationalist rhetoric, many shaykhs and notables were above all motivated by the need to safeguard their traditional power and social prestige, which were directly threatened by the new regime’s project of a centralized, modern nation-state.

In any case, the pro-Kemalist and anti-Christian unanimity of previous years was shattered, ushering in one of the deepest and most enduring divisions within the Kurdish community: for or against the Republic. This fundamental division became increasingly apparent over the course of the century: “For or against the Turkish state.”

The Shaykh Said revolt of 1925 marked also the beginning of a period of intense state repression and widespread violence in Kurdistan (of Turkey). Colonial rules, conceptualized as early as 1925 in the “Eastern Reform Plan” (Şark Islahat Planı), were implemented through disarmament campaigns, military operations, demographic engineering, and the imposition of various forms of “emergency rule.” These measures granted civil authorities and the military legal authority to carry out brutal forced assimilation policies and violent reprisals.

The most emblematic cases are the genocidal violence sequences in Zîlan in 1930 and Dersim between 1936 and 1938. The abduction and placement of children who survived the massacres into Turkish military households or boarding schools as part of efforts to “Turkify” them represents, regrettably, only a small fraction of the historical realities that continue to shape Kurdish collective memory.

Thus, in the aftermath of the “joint victory” in the War of Independence, the first quarter-century of the Republic—from 1925 to the 1950s—can be characterized as a prolonged “hangover” for the Kurds. Despite their differences in the realm of “turco-turque” politics, the three military coups of the subsequent two decades (1960, 1971, and 1980) also shared a common feature: the progressive criminalization of the Kurds, their language, and their demands for civil rights—well before the later resurgence of Kurdish aspirations and the emergence of organized, and eventually armed, political movements.

All rhetoric and discourse surrounding the “Kurdish question” served to legitimize “special policies” through disparaging language both domestically and internationally, with lexical and ideological emphases shifting according to the prevailing international context. Consequently, the Kurds (later referred to more euphemistically as the “inhabitants of the East,” when it became politically unacceptable to name them) were characterized as guilty of “reactionism” in the 1920s, “banditry” in the 1930s, “backwardness” in the 1940s, “communism” in the 1950s, and “social and economic underdevelopment” in the 1960s and 1970s, before the discourse of “terrorism” became dominant in the 1990s.

In any case, four recurring structural elements characterize Republican policy toward entities not covered by the “Turkishness contract.” These are deliberate ethnic violence (ranging from massacres to scorched earth policies, pogroms, and genocide), racism (which is structural despite its variations, sometimes stemming from a more ethnicist conception of national identity, sometimes from a more religious one), legalized impunity that protects individuals and organizations guilty of crimes and violence committed in the name of the nation, and finally a fierce denial of this violence.

Yet this century-long trajectory of war and destruction appears to have produced the opposite of its intended effect: a significant proportion of Kurds today possess a stronger sense of Kurdish identity than their ancestors did a century ago. Moreover, their direct experience of “minority status” has prompted them to forge alliances with other groups marginalized and stigmatized by the Republican regime, to the extent that, since the early 20th century, they have emerged as advocates for multiculturalism, feminism, and, among the most progressive, the rights of LGBTIA+ communities. Indeed, despite the enormous human cost of these struggles, the pro-Kurdish movement’s capacity for mobilization—both civil and military—is far more developed today than it was a century ago.

Despite these observations, we may conclude by posing a fundamental and challenging question: in the context of Turkey’s centenary, to what extent does the “Kurdish issue” remain an issue of “independence”?

The aspiration for an independent and free Kurdistan continues to occupy the imaginations of many members of this stateless people. Yet, the contemporary geopolitical landscape—hardly more favorable to the Kurds in 2023 than it was in 1923, despite undeniable progress in international awareness of their struggles—combined with the political lessons drawn from a century of experience with, and critique of, the nation-state model, casts this aspiration as largely utopian or a distant pipe dream.

Thus, the Kurdish pursuit of emancipation and equality in Turkey generally takes the form of demands that can, at least theoretically, be realized within existing state borders. In other words, Kurds seek a status that affirms their existence as a people, both politically and legally. Many would be satisfied with effective constitutional recognition, guarantees of equal rights under the framework of republican citizenship, partial autonomy, and the ability to exercise self-determination and local self-government—if only through respect for election outcomes. For them, securing such status is fundamentally a matter of survival.

In Turkey, the assimilation and integration of Kurds has been both more extensive and more profound than in neighboring countries. In contrast, spatial and cultural segregation between Kurds and Arabs in Iraq, or between Kurds and Persians in Iran, has reinforced Kurdish aspirations for independence in those contexts. While concrete data are limited, the results of the Iraqi Kurdistan independence referendum—approved by 93% of voters—offer an indicative measure of this trend. It is uncertain whether a comparable referendum would even achieve a majority in Turkey, highlighting one of the reasons why the future of the Republic remains closely intertwined with the fate of the Kurdish population.

The Kurds’ everyday resistance takes countless forms in this country, in a wide variety of areas, and is embodied, among other things, in the Kurdish movement’s struggle for genuine (some would add “radical”) democratization of the Republic. Whether motivated by Realpolitik or the result of new values developed after a century of struggle, this democratization of the regime unfortunately sometimes seems even more illusory than the possibility of an independent Kurdistan.

Thus, those who have not aligned themselves with either the “plague” or the “cholera” represented by the iron fist of the authoritarian Turkish republican statefind themselves oscillating between these competing forces and confronting a profound dilemma. Their orientation shifts not only with the changing balance of power but also in response to their objective or subjective position within the material and moral economy of Kurdish society—a society shaped by multiple divisions of ethnicity, religion, class, geography, generation, and gender. In this context, each Kurd experiences, at the level of intimate consciousness, the significance of these questions.