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Syndrome

      Those articles of the ill-fated Treaty of Sèvres left a profound imprint, really a scar, in the Turkish political culture for generations to come. Trepidation, mainly on the part of Turkish ruling elites, about a possible dismemberment and breaking up of Turkey, territorially and socially, has become a permanent nightmare and instilled the concept of Sèvres Syndrome in the Turkish political lexicon. The reactions of Turkish authorities, particularly during the 1990s, which witnessed the upsurge in the last Kurdish insurgency and violence coinciding with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the Cold War, revived the memories of Sèvres. It is widely interpreted that Sèvres Syndrome drove the resentment of the Turkish political class against Kurdish aspirations.

      The Trilogy of Evil: Sèvres, Kurds, West

      The permanent effect of the Treaty of Sèvres did not confine itself only to worries of Turkey’s dismemberment. Its wording and spirit turned the Western world into a suspicious entity in the eyes of Turkish authorities, in seeking the ultimate partitioning of Turkey by carving out an independent Kurdish state from its territory. Turkey’s ruling elites believed that the Kurds would never be able to achieve any of their aims without the abetting of the Western powers and their endorsement of Kurdish independence. Turkey’s anchoring in the Transatlantic Alliance, thus entering under the security umbrella of NATO in the early 1950s, may have alleviated its fears regarding its territorial integrity but its suspicions on the West’s intentions concerning the Kurds never entirely died out. On the contrary, they revived from time to time to the extent that they created serious cleavages with Turkey’s primary military and security partner, the United States, as witnessed in the Syrian debacle after the year 2014, having repercussions for the entirety of the international system and the collective security of the Western world.

      The Treaty of Sèvres, with its reference to Turkey’s renunciation of sovereign rights on the part of its territory where, if the Kurds enjoy local autonomy, they ultimately may desire independence and “voluntary adhesion to such an independent Kurdish State of the Kurds inhabiting that part of Kurdistan which had hitherto been included in the Mosul Vilayet,” also established an unmistakable association between the Kurdish citizens of Turkey and those of Iraq. Thus, the Turkish political class has always been inimical to any Kurdish national activity whether it is within the boundaries of Turkey or not. In this regard, Sèvres played a tremendously important role in pitting Turkey as an adversary to all Kurds, irrespective of where they live. Sèvres bears a great deal of responsibility for Turkey’s denial of the Kurdish identity within Turkey and its perception of the Kurds as a security problem outside its borders.

      The content and spirit of the Sèvres Treaty molded Turkish political culture in such a way that any Kurdish demand in reference to ethnic or national rights was interpreted as a machination of foreign (mainly Western) powers seeking to dismember Turkey whose national struggle, in other words the national liberation war, made its achievement impossible. The connection between foreign Western powers and the Kurdish element in the post-Ottoman Turkish entity born in Asia Minor is established as a matter of fact. The Kurds began to be seen as a potentially divisive element, one that is therefore ready to be manipulated by the foreign centers of power that brought the end of the preceding Ottoman state by carving up its territories. Any Kurdish activity with ethno-national underpinnings and administrative demands pertinent to self-rule is regarded as secessionism to be prevented, even in its embryonic stages.

      Turkification: Making Kurds “Mountain Turks”

      The acceptance of a distinct Kurdish identity, from the exclusivity of their language (Kurdish) to the geographic name of the land that they inhabit (Kurdistan), would be contrary to Turkish nation-building in Anatolia (or Asia Minor). The denial of the Kurdish identity with all its components and the efforts to transform these people into “mountain Turks” should be understood within this context.

      The leader of the military regime (1980–1983) and the president of Turkey (1983–1987), General Kenan Evren, in his speeches before the public frequently referred to the Kurds as “mountain Turks.” Naming of the Kurds as mountain Turks without a language, during the military regime which left a strong mark on the future decades of Turkey, not only became an ideological linchpin of the regime but also simultaneously constituted the gravest form of denial of Kurdish identity.

      Notwithstanding the episode of military junta rule of the early 1980s, depicting Kurds as “mountain Turks” and thereby denying their distinct ethno-national identity has been the practice of Turkish governments ever since the foundation of the republic. In his book A History of Turkey: From Empire to Republic published in 1956, Morgan Philips Price (1885–1973), a British historian and a member of the Parliament from the Labour Party, summarizes the opinion of the Turkish government about the Kurds in the aftermath of the Sheikh Said revolt, the first major Kurdish rebellion of the Republican Turkey, in the following lines:

      The revolt was suppressed. Several Kurdish aghas were hanged and whole tribes were deported to the interior of Anatolia, where they were surrounded by Turkish peasants, while the country they had left was recolonized by Turks. The nationalist Turks from this time on refused to recognize the Kurds as a separate people, in spite of the fact that everyone knows they have a language of their own. They are now called “mountain Turks,” and are given the same rights as any Turkish citizen but without any national privileges.¹³

      The preposterous denial of Kurdish identity in Turkey has a history as a continuous phenomenon for a very long period. In the wake of suppression of the Sheikh Said revolt, in 1925, then the Prime Minister İsmet İnönü was very explicit on this matter: “We must Turkify the inhabitants of our land at any price, and we will annihilate those who oppose the Turks or ‘le Turquisme.’”¹⁴

      Mahmut Esat Bozkurt, Minister of Justice of the Kemalist Turkey, reinforced this with his blunt statement recorded in 1930: “In the face of a Turkish majority other elements have no kind of influence. I believe that the Turk must be the only lord, the only master of this country. Those who are not of pure Turkish stock can have only one right in this country, the right to be servants and slaves.”¹⁵

      The 1930s was the period that the Turkification process had been initiated in full steam in all walks of life. The Turkish Linguistic Society (Türk Dil Kurumu, TDK) was introduced and entrusted with the purification of the Turkish language from Arabic and Persian influence. To achieve this end, a “Sun-Language Theory” with racist undertones was developed. Simultaneously the Turkish History Society (Türk Tarih Kurumu, TTK) was founded, which in its turn focused on discovering the traces of the Turkish nation in pre-Islamic times—in Antiquity. The Turkish History Society claimed that the Sumerians of Mesopotamia and the Hittites who established a civilization in Anatolia were ethnic Turks. The ferocity in the wording of the young Turkey’s justice minister should be understood within the context of the 1930s. The period coincides with the rise of nationalism all over Europe, particularly in Germany under Nazism and in Italy under Mussolini’s Fascism.

      The Turkification efforts of the 1930s produced dividends regarding the denial of distinct Kurdish culture and language, and fueling Turkish nationalism. In the 1960s, under a new set of prevailing circumstances, when the Kurds attempted to raise the “Eastern Question” without pronouncing the word “Kurdish,” the Turkish nationalist reaction was severe and menacing. Ötüken, the monthly mouthpiece of pan-Turanian ultra-nationalists, published articles by the influential poet and Turkish ultra-nationalist guru Nihal Atsız (1905–75) in its April and June 1967 issues. Atsız did not deny the Kurdish identity and the existence of the Kurds within Turkey. Unlike many Turkish nationalists who tended to deny a distinct identity for the Kurds and claimed they were originally ethnic Turks, Atsız declared that the Kurds, indubitably, were of Iranian origin, speaking a broken, primitive Farsi (Persian). Using venomous language he insulted the Kurds, and wrote that if they did not want to be assimilated in the Turkish nation, they could leave the country, with an implied threat of expulsion:

      Yes. . . . If they resist and remain as Kurds, if they insist on speaking and making publications in their primitive language with four, five thousand words and founding a state [of their own], they can leave. We took these lands shedding blood,

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