LITMIR.BIZ

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1946. . . . Carr thus approached history from the angle of someone who had spent his life working for the Foreign Office and for a national newspaper. These influences and experiences strongly colored his views about history and how it should be studied.³

      As an amateurish historian who does not hold a PhD, like my source of admiration and inspiration E. H. Carr, and a journalist who practiced the job for a period three times longer than his, writing the story of Turkey’s war and peace with the Kurds was a challenge I thought I could undertake.

      The experience of my decades-old involvement with the issue, my direct relationship with the main protagonists—a cast ranging from former President of Turkey Turgut Özal, to the current one, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his predecessor Abdullah Gül, the late president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, the first president of Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Masoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey and the source of inspiration for Kurdish self-rule in Syria, Abdullah Öcalan, and the legendary guerilla leader of the Kurds, Murat Karayılan—provided invaluable insights in shaping my views on the road to peace and keeping an account on the war.

      Providing exclusive information of historical value that I have been privy to throughout my experience, which has never been published or spoken anywhere publicly will, I hope, make the book unique. The content supported by anecdotes in my records and memory, again, are of historical value and importance as they are about my intimate encounters with the historical figures in defining the future of Turkey and the Kurds. As such, the book has the ambition of contributing to the historical record.

      III

      In 2010, I was entrusted to write a report on how to proceed to resolve Turkey’s perennial Kurdish question, entitled “‘Leaving the Mountain’: How May the PKK Lay Down Arms” and subtitled “Freeing the Kurdish Question from Violence.” The 114-page report was recognized at the time as the most comprehensive report to date, and it remains so. It was written at a period when hopes for a peaceful resolution of Turkey’s Kurdish question were high. The Arab Spring, disseminating optimism for a promising future for the troubled region of the Middle East, had just blossomed, including in Syria where turmoil had just begun, raising expectations for benign change for all the deprived segments of its population, and above all the Kurds.

      The task was to provide a workable blueprint to the decision-makers for the resolution of Turkey’s decades-old Kurdish question by disavowing military means that had proved ineffective, thereby offering a way out of a seemingly intractable conflict without using means that further exacerbated it. The knowledge and awareness of peace talks between the belligerents, the Turkish state, and the insurgent organization the PKK waging an armed struggle against the former had inspired and guided this effort.

      In the report’s foreword dated June 2011, I wrote:

      There is nothing that has not been said or written to date on the Kurdish Question and the ways to solve it. During the various readings I undertook for the preparation of this report and during the one-on-one interviews I conducted with tens of people extending from the Presidential Palace to the Qandil Mountain, I arrived at the same conclusion. As a person who has been living with the Kurdish Question for the last forty years, it was a reinforced confirmation of a conclusion I had drawn so many times before. Therefore, this report does not reinvent the wheel when it comes to the resolution of the Kurdish Question. . . . The historical period ahead of us gives ample opportunities for removing violence from the Kurdish Question.⁴

      If the report were to be reprinted, I would refrain from keeping the preface of 2011 as it was written. The report deserves a whole new introduction. The wheel, it seems, needs to be reinvented for the resolution of the Kurdish question. The historical period in which we found ourselves in the second half of the 2010s greeted us with more ambiguities than opportunities to end the violence related to the Kurdish question. The experience taught me to be more prudent in reaching hasty conclusions and making generalizations in writing history.

      IV

      It was early October in 2012, in İstanbul. When we met after not having seen each other for more than two years, Barham Salih, an old friend with whom I had labored to promote good and close relations between Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds, opened his arms wide and approached to hug me, shouting jovially in English, “Cengiz, the Kurdish moment has arrived!” Barham, who would become the president of Iraq six years later, with a beaming face spoke as the harbinger of a long-awaited outcome. From the Gulf War in 1991 on, thanks mainly to the developments in Iraq, Kurds had managed to establish self-rule in the northern part of the country, and in the wake of the controversial War on Iraq waged by a US-led international coalition and the eventual removal of the Arab nationalist totalitarian regime of Saddam Hussein, they had established a quasi-independent state. Their influence had extended to the center of power, to Baghdad, where the portfolio of presidency of post-Saddam Iraq was reserved for them. The epic Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani filled the post for the first time from 2006 to 2014, to be taken over by one of his aides, Fouad Masum, and later his disciple Barham Salih in October 2018.

      I generally shared the optimism manifested by Barham in the fall of 2012. In numerous conferences, symposiums, and panels in which I took part in Turkey, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, my recurrent theme was: “Unlike the aftermath of the World War I, when the map of the Middle East was drawn following the demise of the Ottoman Empire that had ruled the region for 400 years, the Kurds have stepped into history. They are on the stage of history now and it is impossible to roll it back.”

      It was not only the developments in Iraq where Kurds gained a high profile and acquired almost independent state status that inspired such an argument. In Turkey, where half of the entire Kurdish national community reside, with a decades-old insurgency and violent manifestation of the issue, hopes for a peaceful resolution had emerged thanks to peace initiatives that had been launched. Although intermittent, those processes unleashed new dynamics that broke many taboos in the cultural and societal realm that were believed to be untouchable and eternal. In Syria, a proxy war of global and regional powers and an ugly civil war that devastated and fragmented the country nevertheless brought to the fore the country’s Kurds, who until 2014 were the most forgotten and ostensibly the most insignificant segment of the entire Kurdish people. Syrian Kurds were able to establish control of more than a third of Syria, encompassing all the oil-producing regions. More importantly, they proved to be the most reliable and efficient partners of American-led international coalition on the battlefield in the fight against the Islamic State (Daesh), to the dismay of Turkey. There were adequate reasons and indicators to rewrite the history of the post-Cold War period, with Kurds occupying a central place and promising fortunes on the stage of the Middle East.

      However, in 2015 and especially after 2016 and 2017, more prudence and sobriety were required in analyzing and forecasting the prospects for the Kurds. The slippery ground on which the history of the Middle East operates has countless times illustrated that tables can rapidly be turned against the Kurds. The end in July 2015 of Turkey’s peace process, which had generated earnest hopes for a political settlement, postponed the chances for resolution of the Kurdish conflict indefinitely, and perhaps forever. The aspirations for a political settlement were replaced by a zero-sum game that became the modus operandi of the Turkish regime, which drifted from an imperfect democracy into a full-fledged autocracy under the most powerful leader Turkey has had in almost a century. Turkey moved into the Syrian quagmire in 2016, not in cooperation with its NATO ally the United States, but as a partner of Russia, a rival of the US, and in conjunction with a trilateral partnership that included Iran, to confront the Kurds of Syria, at the cost of reversing the gains the Kurds had made since 2012. In 2017, the independence bid of the president of the KRG, Masoud Barzani, drew the ire of Turkey with which it had developed an extremely cordial relationship since 2009, and also of Iran. The latter coordinated with and supported the Shiite-dominated Baghdad government to overrun Kirkuk, the disputed city in Iraq over which the Kurds claim ownership and which they need to form the basis of their ultimate independent state to cede from Iraq. Not only Kirkuk but all the territorial gains of the KRG on the “Disputed Territories” were lost overnight. The divisions among the Iraqi Kurds helped the armies and paramilitary forces of Baghdad, supported by Iran, who easily defeated the Kurdish peshmerga. Turkey established a military presence inside the Iraqi Kurdistan

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