Essay/Term paper: History of turkish occupation of northern kurdistan

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Law

Eric jensen
Poli. Sci. (Third World Politics)
11/27/96
History of Turkish Occupation of Northern Kurdistan.
Since 1984, and especially the last few months, the domestic problems of a
major N.A.T.O, Middle Eastern, and American ally state have come to the
forefront of the international news scene. That state is the Republic of Turkey
and it's primary troubles stem from the past seven decades of acrimonious
policies directed at the indigenous ethnic Kurds. The main problem, now, is the
Kurdish popular insurgency on it's hands, in Turkish occupied Northern
Kurdistan. The Kurdish question has long been covered up and denied by the
state of Turkey, but recent events has forced Turkey to concede that it has a
serious Kurdish insurgency on its hands. Turkey's inability to deal with this
situation is the result of the past seventy years of cultural, political, and
human rights abuses directed against the Kurdish population. In fact, this
"separatism" is so out of hand that the Turkish government has incessantly
appealed to it's allies and advisories alike to help counter the escalating
Kurdish asperation to succeed from the Turkish republic. Turkey's sputtering
and deteriorating economy is directly related to the long Kurdish struggle for
independence. Turkey has spent over eight billion dollars or twenty percent of
her GDP to combat the ever deteriorating predicament in northern Kurdistan, and
should spend more in the future(Laber). Because of the violence, the once
prosperous tourist business of Turkey, has now lost about $1.5 billion dollars
annually since 1990. Many people now talk openly of another possible military
coup, there were three major military coups during the last thirty years
(Alister) These circumstances in the state of Turkey have also hurt her
chances of ever joining the ever wealthy European Union and battering its
ailing economic situation. The depth of Turkey's domestic and ethnic dilemma is
one of the many that have arisen after the end of the cold war, yet the cold
war is a simple answer to a much more complex one. The factors that have arisen
to contribute to this civil war were created far before Capitalism versus
Communism, East versus West, or U.S versus the Soviet Union. In order to really
comprehend the holistic situation in Turkey one must first be familiar with
the complete history of the Turks and Kurds.
The Kurds of Turkey constitutes, by far, the largest ethnic minority group in
Turkey. The estimate of their population, however, are very dubious because of
the past Turkish policy to deny the very existence of any minorities within the
borders of her state. In fact, past Turkish rhetoric has been that there is no
official Kurdish problem in Turkey, because officially no Kurds exist. We can
ascertain that the kurds make up between twenty-five and thirty-three percent
of the Turkey's population. This would put the Kurdish population about twelve
to twenty million (Morris). Because of past and present forced Turkish
assimilation practices, the Kurds live in all parts of the country, but most of
the Kurdish population is concentrated in the southeastern part of Turkey.
They represent a high percentage of the population in fifteen provinces and
take up a total of thirty percent of all of Turkey (Kendal). Economically, the
Kurds are the poorest inhabitants of the country. The per capita of a Kurd is
one-tenth of a Turk living in Istanbul; well below the poverty line (McDowell).
While the rest of Turkey has modernized and adopted some capitalistic
practices, the Kurdish areas, by contrast, are underdeveloped and exploited by
feudal landlords. The wealth of the area is "drained and channeled to the
Turkish metropolis (Kendal)." Much of the region is relatively unchanged since
the last seventy years of Turkish rule or has suffered even worse economically.
The thirty million Kurds of the Middle East have lived in Kurdistan before
record of modern history was kept. The very first mention of the Kurds in
history was about 3,000 BC, under the name Gutium., as they fought the
Summerians(Spieser). Later around 800 BC, the Indo-European Median tribes
settled in the Zagros mountain region and coalesced with the Gutiums, and thus
the modern Kurds speak from as Aryan language (Morris). The Kurds are mentioned
by Xenaphon, a Greek mercenary, as he retreated from Persia with ten thousand
men in 401 BC, he says of the Kurds, "These people, lived in the mountains and
were very war-like and not subject to the Persian king. Indeed once a royal
army of 120,000 thousand had once invaded their country, and not a man of them
came back..(Morris)." When the Arabs spread Islam to the Middle East in the
seventh century, most of the Kurds gradually adopted the religion but fiercely
resisted Arab rule, much like today in modern day Iraq and Syria. This is
evident in a legend about the prophet Mohammed; when the prophet called all
the princes of the world to embrace the new religion, they all hurried to
submit to the prophet of the new religion. When the Prophet saw the Kurdish
representative, named Zemin, with his giant size and piercing eyes, the prophet
prayed to God that such a terrifying people never unite as a single nation
(Morris). Around the tenth century the Kurds became a military force to be
reckoned with in the Middle East and defended Islam against the invading
Christian crusaders and defeated the Mongolian armies at both Cerq De Chavalier
and the fortress of Irbile. Saladine, and the majority of his troops were
Kurdish (Safrastian). The Kurds established independent principalities, that
never united, but often fought each other for the benefit of foreign powers.
During the harsh reign of Shah Ismail in Persia, most of the Kurds who were
Sunni Muslims, allied themselves with the Ottoman Sultan Selim "the Cruel" and
played the pivotal part in defeating the Persian armies at Chaldiran in 1514,
and thus most of the Kurds in Iran are still Sunni Muslims among a
predominately Shiite majority. The Kurdish principalities, at this time were
free from the central government and struck their own coinage and had Friday
prayers in the name of the local prince (Morris). At that point of Kurdish
history Kurdish culture and literature flourished. This lasted until the
nineteenth century when the Ottoman empire tried to expand its rule into the
Kurdish territories. Using the tool of divide and conquer, the Ottamans use
Kurdish tribes to fight fellow Kurds. Though, the Ottoman government gained
nominal control of the Kurdish areas, they were never able to establish direct
rule(McDowell). During World War One, many Kurds actually remained loyal to the
Empire. They fought bravely in many battles. The Kurds inflicted such heavy
damages against the Tsarist government that they almost conceded to evacuating
the entire Caucus region. Some historians also suggest, they were eighty
percent of the Ottoman casualties at the infamous battle of Galilopi (Gunter).
During the war the Young Turk government, in pursuit of a purely Turkic empire,
massacred more then one million Armenians and seven hundred thousand Kurds.
After the Ottoman loss, the Empire collapsed and was on the verge of
fragmentation when a young army officer by the name of Mustafa Kemal emerged on
the scene.
Following the fatal defeat of the Ottoman empire after World War one, the
remnants of the former empire were divided up among the victorious allied
powers, even the Turkish speaking region were to come under the mandate of
foreign administration. In fact, much of Anatolia was already occupied by Greek
or Armenian forces. On August 10, 1920, Turkey and the allied powers signed the
treaty of Sevres. This treaty allowed for the creation of an independent
Kurdish and Armenian state on the remittance of the former Ottoman empire. This
treaty was to become null and void. Around the same time the Serves treaty was
being discussed, Mustafa Kemal gained power of what remained of the military
and political infrastructure in Anatolia. Kemal, starting in the Kurdish
region and proclaiming the unity of Turks and Kurds, organized resistance to
the Armenian and Georgian forces in eastern Anatolia. These forces were
defeated by almost entirely Kurdish armies, who thought they were fighting for
a state where, "Turks and Kurds would live as brothers and as equals (Kendal)"
as stated by Mustafa Kemal. However, after the defeat of the Greek armies in
western Turkey, Kemal declared to an assembly that "The state the we have just
created is a Turkish state (Kendal)" Immediately after, a strengthened Turkey
renegotiated the Treaty of Lausanne with the allies. With much more favorable
terms for the Turks, but no mention of the Kurds in the treaty. Thus the Kurds
went from equal partners to non-existent citizens in the new Turkish state.
After the treaty of Lousanne, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk proceeded to integrate the
country and start a process of Westernize the once orthodox Islamic empire.
Kemal abolished the Caliphate Arabic alphabet, and adopted the western Latin
alphabet, thus implementing some capitalistic measures in the name of a newly
established secular government. Mustafa Kemal enacted harsh laws on Islam in
general. Kemal made the Islamic call for prayer illegal and went as far as
banning Islamists. The most important of these decisions against Islam, was
the outlawing all Islamic holy houses of teaching. This was to have profound
impacts on the spreading of Islamic fundementalists within Turkey. This
backfired against Mustafa, by forcing Islam to go underground, the form of
fundamentalism that manifested in Turkey was much harsher then the ones that
existed before being banned by Kemal. Kemal trying to create a nation state ,
came upon a problem. The new state of Turkey was a heterogeneous one, composed
of multi-ethnical groups, not a homogenous one of just pure ethnic Turks, as
Mustafa Kemal proclaimed. The capitalization on a new found Turkish nationalist
movement yielded a well tuned systematic campaign of obliterating the essence
of the Kurdish within the boundaries of newly formed Turkey. Kemal abolished
all of the, " Kurdish schools, associations, publications, religious
fraternities, and medressehs (McDowell)." The Kurdish nation represented such a
threat to the territorial integrity of Turkey that all people and names of
places were forcibly Turkicized by the government. This was to became referred
to as ethnic cleansing or genocide. Old archeological monuments and structure
that proved the ancient history of Kurdish people in Anatolia were
systematically destroyed. The words 'Kurds' and 'Kurdistan' were eradicated
from all books and publications. Anything that would lead to a separate
identity of the Kurdish people were eliminated in order yield the assimilation
of the ethnically different Kurdish nation. Even the Kurdish language was
banned, a fact unparalleled in history! No one in the state of Turkey was
allowed to speak Kurdish, even though it was the language of thirty percent of
the people. All Kurdish students were feed Turkish propaganda on the ethnic
ancestry of the Kurdish people, they were taught that Kurds, were a pure
'Turkic race,' whereas in actuality the Kurds are ethnically Indo-Aryan, and
the Turks are a mixture of Hun-Mongolian people. The Turkish education minister
proclaimed that, the Kurds had forgotten their "Turkic" language in the
fastness of the mountains of southeast Anatolia, thus referring to them as,
"Mountain Turks.(Gunter)." The racist spoon feed propaganda of the Turkish
educational institutions has reached to such a degree of reducibility, that it
is often taught in the schools of Turkey, all the great Babylonian, Summerian,
Egyptian, and Hittite civilizations had been created by the Turks(Kendal). In
order to hide the fact that the Kurds had lived in Anatolia four thousand
years before one Turk stepped in. The Turkish intelligentsia determined the
Kurds came from Central Asia five thousands years ago. The situation
deteriorated to the point where to state " I am a Kurd " was a crime so serious
as to warrant the death penalty under Turkey's anti-terrorist laws(Kendal).
All past measures were not enough in the eyes of the Kemalist government to
destroy the remnants of five thousand years of Kurdish presence in Anatolia.
After these and more repressive measures were taken out, the substantial
Kurdish population began to revolt from the pressures unfairly exerted on them
by the oppressive and violence prone state of Turkey. The early revolts were
unorganized, lacked money, and poorly supplied. They lasted, on and off, a
little over thirteen years. The retribution of the Turkish army was so extreme,
they almost destroyed, looted, and burned the entire eastern portion of the
country. Whole villages were either deported to Western Turkey to be
assimilated or, if the government knew that the particular tribe or village
were not going to be assimilated that easily, they just simply massacred them.
much like the Nazi massacre of Jewish civilians(Morris). Throughout these
uncivilized methods of cruelty instituted by the Turkish governmental
establishment, the savage Turkish government managed to massacre or deport one
million, five hundred thousand Kurdish civilians (Kendal). The repression was
so haneous that the entire Eastern section of the state of Turkey was
prohibited to all foreigners and under martial law for almost thirty years, so
as not to disciple to the west. In contrast to Western Turkey, the whole of
Eastern Turkey was made into a military camp, and it has remained that way
until today. The Turkish minister of justice made the relationship of Turks and
Kurds clear:

I believe that the Turk must be the only lord, the only master of this country.
Those who are not of pure Turkish stock (Kurds and Armenians) can have only one
right in this country, the right to be servants and slaves (McDowell).

After Kemal's death, more successive and liberal minded regimes came to power.
The 1960 coup by the army attempted to Turkicize the whole of the Kurdish
region. Every single street, river, mountain, village, or city was given
Turkish name to the very last detail. What little hope the Kurdish population
had in the hope more or less disappears as the coup never really brought out
fundamental change for the Kurdish people. The rights of the Kurds were still
non-existent, the Kurdish language denied to them, and their culture still
prohibited. The successive coups of 1971 and 1980 always tended to bring
Kurdish freedom and self-expression to a halt. To justify a coup, the army
would state that there was a planned Kurdish uprising. Nevertheless, throughout
the 1960s and 1970s, Kurdish nationalism did emanate in the form of small
underground publications and newspapers, but they were always instantaneously
banned and the editors immediately apprehended and given lengthy jail terms.
Throughout all the repression, the Kurds were able to participate in political
life, although under forced Turkish identities(Gunter). Today the foreign
minister of Turkey, Ardal Inunu, is a Kurd; as well as his father the late
president Ismat Inunu, former presidents Fahrey Koruturk, and Cevdet Sunany,
even the late president Turgut Ozal claimed Kurdish heritage(Gunter). The
mother of all ironies, is that two people who made the bases of Turkish
nationalism were Kurds, Ziya Gokalp and Ismet Inunu, who were born in the
Kurdish cities of Diarbekr(Kendal). The amount of Kurdish people successfully
assimilated into main stream Turkish society is so infinitesimal that over
ninety-one percent of the Kurdish population doesn't even speak one word of
Turkish(Kendal). Reporter, who have only recently been allowed to enter Eastern
Turkey, are amazed at how, in this integral portion of Turkey no one speaks a
word of Turkish.
During the uneasy times of the 1970s many left-wing pro-Kurdish groups
manifested sporadically throughout the Turkish state. The 1980 coup put an end
to many of these organizations and political parties. After the brutal policies
of the military junta that took control of Turkey, may Kurds were put in prison
and executed for "separatism" which would mean anything from guerrilla warfare
to simply speaking Kurdish in public. During those times of extremism, even by
Turkish standards, a group of socialist-Kurdish youth began to organize and
formed a political party. Their simple selfless goal was to obtain the God
given right of self-determination for the worthy Kurdish nation, which included
out-right independence from the Turkish mainstream government. The main leader
for this independence movement was a young political science student from the
Kurdish city of Urfa, named Abdullah Ocalan or Apo (Kurdish for Uncle). This
group of organizers were Marxist-Lenninst in ideology and adamantly stated that
the Kurds and Turks were separate people and hence forth, the Turkish military
force present in Kurdistan was a belligerent action of occupation of Kurdistan.
The P.K.K (Party Kereykarey Kurdistan or Kurdistan Workers Party) also called
for the abolishment of tribalism, feudalism, and the "slave-like dependence of
women." A great amount of the P.K.K military force were female. The P.K.K also
believed the only way to attain freedom and independence were through violence,
much like the American and French revolution of mid 1700s.
To conceive the P.K.K as completely leftist is untrue, they have adapted the
Communist theme of ideology to counter-weight the Turkish entity as a NATO
state, so it is safe to assume that the P.K.K has chosen the Marxist path by
default. Similar to the American fore-fathers choosing a republic form of
government to resist the British form of government, and France choosing a
parliamentary form of government to overshadow the history of monarchical reign
of France. This might seem to be absurd, but not when you see a "democratic"
Turkey that espouses a contradictory nationalism and places signs everywhere in
Kurdistan that says, " Proud is He who calls oneself a TURK" or " A TURK is
worth the whole universe(Kendal)." So accordingly, underneath all the ideology
and propaganda of the Cold War, what you essentially have is two combating
nationalisms.
The 1980 coup mentioned earlier pretty much halted all of P.K.K's political
activities and other similar left-wing organizations. But the P.K.K's political
politburo immediately regrouped in Syria and Lebanon. With help from some
neighboring countries, the P.K.K was able to launch small raids into Turkey in
1984. After the attacks grew in strength and number, the Turkish government
became seriously alarmed. The P.K.K was as violent as it advertised, many times
killing Kurds collaborating with the Turkish government. This didn't raise
their popularity with the local populous. But, one thing they did accomplish
was that no other party or group in Turkey ever did, was the recognition of a
Kurdish problem in Turkey and a recognition of a Kurdish people in Turkey
(Gunter). Thus, the Kurdish situation was brought out to the international
arena for the whole world to witness the ever dynamic predicament in Northern
Kurdistan. The Kurds went from "Mountain Turks" to a "Kurdish reality in
Turkey." The Turkish army then extended martial law to thirteen provinces in
Eastern Turkey. The Turkish army chief of staff admitted that "condition of
war...exists in southeast Turkey(Smyth)."
The P.K.K then began to adopt a less hostile attitude towards the civilian
population, realizing they can not operate without the help of the people.
While the P.K.K ceased to attack civilians, the Turkish army's attitude towards
Kurdish civilians took an even harsher tone. What happened in the days of
Attaturk, were being implemented once again. It was like the situation was
dorment for forty-five years, and once again it came back to live. Amnesty
intentional reported the wholesale arrest and torture of Kurds in all parts of
Turkey. The entire village of Sirnak, population 25,000, was demolished and
it's inhabitants forced to flee(Pilger). In all the Turkish army has destroyed
an estimated 1,700 Kurdish villages and towns(Montalbano). The P.K.K has
successfully begun to infiltrate larger cities and organizing merchant strikes
and mass protest against the Turkish government. The Turkish army and secret
police reacted by covert assassinations and "death squads" that killed anyone
that was even remotely linked to the P.K.K. These death squads have even killed
journalists who have reported the Turkish atrocities in Northern Kurdistan.
Turkey has the highest death rate for journalists in the world, even exceeding
Bosnia and Tadjikistan. Many pro-Kurdish politicians and human rights activists
have been killed, causing mass protest from the Kurdish population, even the
protest control police open fire on unarmed civilian protesters, killing
hundreds of men, women, seniors, and children indiscrimenantly(Kendal). The
state sanctioned DEP (People's Democratic Party), a legal political entity was
forcibly closed down after their top political representatives were
mysteriously assassinated, their newspaper affiliates (Ozgur Daily) bombed, and
it's parliamentarians arrested. All of these went against the established
Turkish constitutional laws. The lifting of Parliamentary immunity is a direct
violation, but when it comes to using illegal laws against Kurdish civilians
there are no limits.
Needless to say, the brutal and genocidal acts of the Turkish government have
only fanned the flare of the Kurdish drive for independence. In some parts of
Turkey, over ninety percent of the people support the P.K.K(Marks). When the
people see the government burning their houses, farms, and family members how
can one really support the establishment? How can the people believe the
government when they have publicly broken parliamentary laws by arresting
Kurdish parliamentary members for speaking Kurdish? The people has two choices,
the foreign occupiers or their sons, brothers, daughters, sisters, or fathers.
In response to the "ethnic cleansing" and martial law, the Turkish government
has also stationed over 450,000 troops in the area, backed by US made modern
tanks, Apache helicopters, Super Cobra helicopters, F-16 fighter jets, and
50,000 elite contra-rebels in the Kurdish region. Many generals in the armed
forces have openly talked about using chemical weapons on the Kurds (Turkey
used chemical weapons on the Kurds in the 1930s, British used it in the 1920s,
and Saddam Hussien used it in 1988)(Kendal).
Turkey has went as far as raiding Iraqi Kurdistan with the air planes
given to them by the US. As recently as March 20, 1995, Turkey invaded Iraqi
Kurdistan. They said the invation was to search for and destroy the P.K.K, but
in actuality the army couldn't fight the P.K.K. The 35,000 invading force did
little more then destroying civilian villages, killing civilian Kurds, and
ruining farm crops. UNHCR (United Nations Higher Commission for Refugees)
reported that 10,000 Turkish Kurds, who escaped Turkey's systematic burning and
destroying Kurdish villages were forcibly detained and forced to return to
Turkey. The whereabouts of the refugees are unknown; knowning the Turkish track
record, their hopes are dismal.
Abdullah Ocalan
It now appears that the P.K.K has ascertained itself as the voice of the
Kurdish people, after seventy years of unrelenting oppression. The P.K.K's
unequivical insistence of independence is rebuffed by Ankara, who state that
everyone in Turkey is equal and there are no room for minorities in Turkey. The
army, an organization who operates independently from the political wing of
Turkey, will not even placate a hint of even a form of diminutive local
autonomy for the Kurdish people. The P.K.K is exhibiting, and for their part
proving to the Kurdish masses that their violent way is the only avenue for any
form of Kurdish independence. Since the creation of the irredentent Turkish
state the Kurds have not received anything more then a tombstone with a forced
Turkish surname. The P.K.K has given 15,000 martyrs in the span of eleven
years (Marcus), the army has massacred more then 1,500,000 in the span of sixty
years , more the 1,500 villages destroyed, every form of Kurdish identity
denied, and their politicians and journalists killed by secret police. After
all it is the US constitution that has written:

" When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to
dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to
assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which
the laws of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of
mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the
separation.....whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these
ends, it is the right of the people to alter it, or to abolish it, and to
institute a new government.."

It is the very example the United States has set, that the Kurdish people
wants to declare their independence. For, the only thing different between the
Kurdish revolution and the U.S one, is only two hundred and nine years. All
oppressions are bad, all occupations are wrong, every nation has the right to
decide their own fate.