When we think about Turkey, what usually comes to mind is either Ataturk’s Modern Turkey or Erdogan’s Islamist Turkey. The former is associated with positive connotations, while the latter is seen negatively. It is not difficult to discern that Erdogan is criticized primarily for being an Islamist.
Turkey has been seen as the land of Turks: modern Turks, secular Turks – Ataturk’s Turks, who are now, in a way, held hostage by the Islamist dictator Erdogan. Word association is immediate: if Erdogan is an Islamist dictator, and if pre-Erdogan Turkey was modern and secular, then the problem lies with Erdogan. This association is so ingrained that it becomes difficult to make the case for the Kurds.
There are roughly 20 million Kurds in Turkey, with zero recognition that they even exist. Zero. And this has nothing to do with Erdogan but everything to do with the Republic’s founding ideology.
It began in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, with an organization you have probably never heard of: İttihat Terakki Cemiyeti, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the Young Turks. While you may not be familiar with the Committee itself, you have likely heard of one of its crimes: the Armenian Genocide.
This genocide, as the governor of Erzurum Vilayet reported to the Harbord Commission in 1919, “started in 1896 with orders always coming from Constantinople.” The Ottoman Empire began the campaign, but it was the Committee that finished the task. The Committee also orchestrated ethnic cleansing and genocidal campaigns against the Greeks and several genocidal campaigns and massacres against the Kurds.
Ottoman ideals
What was that ideology, and why did it lead to massacres and genocides? To understand this, we need to go back to the founding principles of the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Empire was ruled by Islamic Sharia. Under Sharia, Muslims were considered superior to non-Muslims (Dhimmi). A Muslim would not pay certain taxes, while a non-Muslim could not ride a horse or wield a sword. These and other privileges were reserved for Muslims.
Over time, many Dhimmi accepted Islam in order to join the superior echelon of society. Ottoman Muslims included Greeks, Armenians, Serbo-Croatians, Bulgarians, and others. Descendants of Turkic tribes were only a tiny portion of the population.
Things changed following the French Revolution. Starting with the Greek Orthodox Christians, the peoples in the western parts of the Empire began to see themselves as distinct nations. These were Serbs, Bulgarians, and others in the West, but also Armenians in the East – all non-Muslims.
Observing the Empire’s irrevocable losses in the Balkans, some young officers in the military and bureaucracy, later known as the Young Turks, doubted the Empire could prevent a total collapse. They eyed Anatolia and Kurdistan as the “homeland” of Ottoman Muslims. The problem was that significant Greek and Armenian populations lived there.
These Greeks and Armenians were important members of the Empire’s social fabric and formed the newly developing capitalist class. They were well-educated, often abroad in Europe, fluent in multiple languages, and had commercial and political connections with the West.
They demanded equal rights with Muslims, including political offices. The Young Turks, being members of the superior class, who were educated in Western Europe – mostly in France and later in Germany – never truly embraced the idea of equality with the Dhimmi, the Christians, and the Jews.IN FRANCE, they learned about the idea of being a nation, and in Germany, the idea that part of your society could be “a pest.” This toxic mix became the ideology of the Committee, causing the Armenian and Greek genocides. As a committee member, it was also the ideology of Ataturk, and ultimately of the so-called “Modern Turkish Republic.”
In the Ottoman era, “Turk” essentially meant “Muslim.” A Catholic Albanian, a Greek Orthodox, or a Jew who converted to Islam would become a Turk, which meant accepting Islam. At the time, the word did not have any ethnic connotation. This was not true in the Near East, in Kurdistan, but this did not bother the Young Turks.
They thought the Kurds would also be happy to become Turks.
Upon forming the Turkish Republic and following the path laid in front of him by the Committee, Ataturk declared that every citizen of his Republic was a Turk, famously saying, “How happy is the one who says, ‘I am a Turk.’”
The Kurds did not agree. They never accepted being non-Kurds, and the Turks have never understood why. As Emin Sirin, a former MP from Erdogan’s AK Party, once asked, “How could the Kurds not accept being Turkish when I, as a Circassian, did?” This single example explains the problem the Kurds have had with the Turks since 1924.
Continuing the job started by the committee, the Turkish Republic has actively worked on erasing any trace of non-Turkishness from the land and the minds of the people. With fear and terror, millions were forced to abandon their heritage and adopt Turkish/Muslim last names (“soyisim”).
All toponymy – cities, towns, villages, rivers, streams, mountains, and hills – were replaced with invented Turkish ones. Kurds have suffered most under this racism because only Kurds had the mass to resist. To this day, the Kurdish language is effectively banned; the use of Kurdish letters (x, w, and q) is prohibited, and there is not even one school that educates in Kurdish – not one. This constitutes extreme racism by any standard definition.
In his Federalist No. 10, James Madison warned that “In a democracy, majority factions gain power, and that leads to tyranny.” Turkey, in its current form, is a tyrannical state ruled by an ‘invented’ ethnic majority.
Turkey was founded as a republic for Turks, with a racist constitution that granted the land only to Turks. The ideology that the Republic is founded on, “Turk Yurdu” (Turkish Homeland), appears to have been co-developed with the Nazis’ “Lebensraum.” While the Nazis were defeated, Ataturk’s Republic – from the Committee of Union and Progress to Erdogan’s regime – remains largely intact, now with Erdogan’s irredentist ambitions added to the mix.
Turkey’s irredentist policies, from its actions in Cyprus to its growing involvement in Syria, highlight a policy of territorial expansion and ethnic dominance. This hostility extends not only toward the Kurdish people within its borders but also to Kurds living beyond them. Facing the threat Turkey presents cannot be left to the Kurds alone.
As Turkey forms a new axis of evil together with the Islamic Brotherhood network in the region, it is the moral and strategic duty of the international community to unite in opposing Turkish irredentism and supporting the Kurdish struggle for independence. Only by standing together can we ensure a future where justice, freedom, and equality prevail over oppression and expansionism.
The author, born in Iskenderun and based in Vancouver, is a writer on international politics, the Middle East, and Kurdistan since 2005. He is vice president of the Canadian Kurdistani Confederation and hosts the podcasts Rojeva Kurdistan and Nation on the Rise. @mhusedin