His aim was to create an indestructible nation-state with a monolithic Turkish identity, one that could never again be almost torn asunder by foreigners. To do so, he needed to deny the existence of the country’s largest minority, making up one-fifth of its population; the only minorities recognized by the new republic were its small non-Muslim ones. On March 3, 1924, all Kurdish schools, associations, publications, and religious organizations were banned, the use of the Kurdish language was forbidden in the courts and government offices, and the word Kurdistan was excised from official documents. Kurdish dress, music, and names became outlawed, and, most incredibly of all, Kurds were declared to be “mountain Turks who have forgotten their language.” Kurds who did not call themselves Kurds could still rise high in Turkish government and society, but any Kurd who dared utter his or her true identity risked arrest, torture, and imprisonment. As late as 1979, when a former minister of Public Works declared, “In Turkey there are Kurds. I too am a Kurd,” he was sentenced to two years and four months imprisonment with hard labor.
March 3, 1924, also saw the abolition of the Islamic Caliphate, turning Turkey into a fully secular state and severing the religious link between Kurds and Turks that had united them for centuries. Many Kurdish Muslims, as well as Turkish Muslims, were deeply offended; they had not waged war to live in a secular state.
The events of 1924 led to Turkey’s first modern Kurdish revolt, under the leadership of Shaikh Said of Piran. The shaikh and his forces succeeded in capturing over one-third of the Southeast before Turkish troops rushed in to suppress the uprising. Shaikh Said and dozens of others were hanged, thousands of civilians killed, thousands more deported, and hundreds of villages burned, establishing a precedence of cruelty in Turkish-Kurdish relations.
Two more major Kurdish uprisings followed in 1930 and 1937 to 1938, one in the foothills of Mount Ararat, and another in Dersim, now known by the Turkish name of Tunceli—many Kurdish place names have been replaced with Turkish ones over the decades. Again, thousands of civilians were killed—perhaps forty thousand in Dersim alone—and large regions evacuated. As many as 1 million Kurds were displaced between 1925 and 1938. Southeast Turkey was placed under military rule, and the revolts ended as the Turks forced the Kurds into an uneasy submission for the next thirty years.
A Turkish newspaper correspondent who visited Dersim a decade after the uprising wrote: “The place was desolate. . . . There are no more artisans, no more culture, no more trade. . . . If you speak to [the people] of government, they translate it immediately as tax collectors and policemen. We give the people of Dersim nothing; we only take.”
Atatürk marginalized the Kurds yet further by “proving” a mythical Turkish history that declared that all the world’s civilizations had been founded by the Turks, and that all languages derived from the “Sun Language,” whose closest modern descendant was, of course, Turkish. Kurdish was said to contain only eight hundred words, and so was not a real language, while the word Kurd was said to have come from the sound of crunching snow—kart, kurt, kart, kurt—that the early Turks made while walking over snow in the Southeast’s mountains. Many Turks, still reeling from the humiliations of the early twentieth century, eagerly embraced such absurd nationalist theories, which were taught in the schools and continued to be propagated long after Atatürk’s death. Chauvinist sayings such as “A Turk is worth the whole world” became woven into the very definition of what it meant to be a loyal citizen of Turkey.
Life in Kurdistan improved somewhat in the 1950s, following Turkey’s first free general election. Exiled aghas and shaikhs were allowed back into the region and began to accrue their old power, with some entering politics, while also becoming estranged from their constituents as they took up residence in the cities. A limited amount of cultural expression was also allowed. Nonetheless, Kurdish political parties continued to be outlawed, and the Southeast remained mired in poverty; the government did little to develop the area, although a good system of roads was built—the better to police the Kurds.
In 1960, a military coup overthrew an authoritarian civilian government and, surprisingly, instituted a new liberal constitution that gave the Turks much more democracy than before. However, the new constitution also established the powerful National Security Council, composed of an equal number of military and civilian members, but usually headed by a four-star general, designed to oversee the civilian government. In 1971 and 1980, the Turkish military staged two more coups.
The 1960s was a turbulent decade in Turkey, as left-wing students and other radicals organized large, antigovernment demonstrations, leading to mass arrests. However, it was the 1980 coup that brought about the harshest modern clampdown on human rights. Staged to end the violence between left- and right-wing radicals that had begun two years earlier, resulting in over five thousand deaths, the coup led to the adoption of another new constitution. This one institutionalized the power of the military, sharply curtailed civil liberties, and outlawed all political parties. The military junta also cruelly enforced and augmented the ban on the Kurdish language, while sending troops into the Southeast to arrest and interrogate tens of thousands of “political suspects.”
Unbeknownst to the Turkish authorities at that time, however, Kurdish history was about to enter a whole new phase. Abdullah Öcalan and his followers had formed the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). A tragic civil war was in the offing.
M Y TOUR OF Turkey’s Kurdistan did not begin in the Southeast, the Kurds’ traditional homeland, but in romantic, sophisticated Istanbul to the northwest—seemingly as far away from Kurdistan as it is possible to get and still be in Turkey. But Istanbul is also the world’s largest Kurdish city, as it is home to about 2 million Kurds, out of a city population of 12 million. The Kurds started migrating to Istanbul and other western Turkish cities when the evacuations of their villages began in the 1920s. What started as a trickle grew to a stream in the 1960s and 1970s—due mostly to economics—and to a flood in the 1980s and 1990s—due to the civil war. At least a third of Turkey’s estimated 14 million Kurds, out of a total country population of 70 million, now live in its western cities, including Ankara, Adana, Mersin, and Izmir, as well as Istanbul.
Most of Istanbul’s more recent Kurdish migrants are uneducated, unable to speak Turkish, and desperately poor. To Turkey’s credit, however, many of the migrants who arrived in the 1960s and 1970s have become solidly middle class, their educated children working professional jobs. Well assimilated into mainstream Turkey, these Kurds live lives much like urban dwellers in any other modern capital, with all the accoutrements that go with it—computers, cell phones, nightlife, music, casual sex, Western fashion.
While in Istanbul, I stayed with one such middle-class Kurdish family, who lived in a pleasant neighborhood on the city’s outskirts. The parents, Elif and Yakup Sevinc, were originally from a village in the Bingöl region— a northern, hardscrabble Kurdish province. They had moved to the capital over thirty years before. Elif was unable to speak anything but Kurdish when she arrived, while Yakup knew only the basic Turkish he’d learned while in the army. Yet they’d done remarkably well, not only living in a comfortable, modern apartment, but also becoming the proud parents of three well-educated sons. Ali, an economist, lived nearby with a family of his own; Atilla, now also known as Alan, had emigrated to New Jersey, and Aydin was a university student.
Ali and his English-speaking cousin Sheri, an architect, picked me up soon after my arrival to whisk me to my temporary home, where Elif was waiting. Round and motherly, with a lovely face always wreathed in smiles, and always ready with a hug, she took attentive care not only of me during my visit, but, it seemed, of the whole world all the time, as she cooked up enormous traditional Kurdish/Turkish meals for everyone every evening. All followed, of course, with fragrant tea served in tulip-shaped glasses. Elif had been to New Jersey to visit her son Atilla the year before and had just started taking literary classes, painstakingly writing out her homework
at the kitchen table in the late afternoons. Whenever I thought of all the twists and turns her life had taken, I felt in awe.
In yet more of the generous Kurdish hospitality that I encountered everywhere, the rest of the family was also waiting for me. Ali would serve as my occasional chauffeur and informal historian, Yakup would introduce me to various friends, and Sheri and her English-speaking friend Sedef—an Azeri Turk whose family was originally from Iran—would serve as my interpreters. Most of all, Aydin, the youngest son, a tall and lanky man with an irrepressible smile, essentially took more than a week out of his life to help me navigate Istanbul and its difficult transportation system. Aydin’s bedroom was a testament to his many passions, filled with books by Mehmed Uzun, a foremost Kurdish writer from Turkey; various Kurdish folk instruments; recordings of both Kurdish music and American rock and roll; posters of Che Guevara and the NBA, and the anarchists’ flag. “I am a Communist and an anarchist,” he proudly told me.
But for all these trappings of success and well-being, the more time I spent with my adopted family and their friends, the more I learned that, as usual, more than one reality was operating here. Yes, the family and their friends had done well, and, yes, they did not have to worry about chemical attacks, harsh Islamic laws, or Turkish gendarmes burning their villages, as did their fellow Kurds in Iraq, Iran, or Turkey’s Southeast. However, what they had achieved had come at a steep price. The usual one: hard work. And an unusual one: a decades-long denial of who they were.
Although my new friends were, in fact, closer to their heritage than many middle-class Kurds in western Turkey, none of the younger generation spoke Kurdish. It was outlawed while they were growing up, as was Kurdish music and all other forms of Kurdish cultural and political expression. Like most urban Kurds now in their twenties, thirties, and forties, they had gone through school pretending they were Turk. And although that pressure originally came from outside, it was also internalized. To be Kurdish back then was humiliating and worse, as everyone “knew” that the Kurds were stupid and dirty, they were ugly and dark, they were aggressive and primitive—animals, really.
“I hated being Kurdish growing up,” one thirty-something said to me. “I tried not to think about it, and I never said I was Kurd—I didn’t even want my mother to come to my school conferences, because she spoke only Kurdish and then my friends would know.”
“There was a boy I liked very much, and finally one day I told him I was Kurd,” said another. “But he didn’t believe me. He said, ‘Don’t talk about yourself this way! It’s like swearing! Kurds are ugly and stupid. You’re too beautiful and smart to be Kurd.’ ”
“In high school, the teachers said many bad things about Kurds,” said one young filmmaker. “You could protest, but if you did, you would get hurt. Or you could say nothing, but then you ended up with psychological problems—I know many who were affected in this way. So I tried to find a third way. I didn’t volunteer I was Kurdish, but if someone asked, I admitted it.”
A similar scenario played out in the business world, with men and women denying their origins in order to both survive and get ahead. “We never told anyone we were Kurdish,” said an owner of a large factory. “We were ashamed, and we wouldn’t have had any business partners or customers if we had.”
Arriving in the cities in desperate economic straits, most of the earlier generation of Kurdish migrants gave little thought to asserting or savoring their ethnicity. They just wanted to get ahead and see their children do well. And if that meant that their children had to speak Turkish, and pass for Turk, so be it. Teaching their children the Kurdish ways and language made little sense, especially since it could get them all in trouble, and they themselves didn’t know how to read or write Kurdish anyway. So the parents continued speaking together in Kurdish while their children spoke together in Turkish, each having only an imperfect knowledge of the other’s language and world.
I couldn’t even begin to imagine the effects of all this. I thought about the brutal mistreatment of African Americans and other minorities in the United States and its numerous, deep-rooted repercussions: psychological, sociological, economic. But here was a people not only subjected to a harsh prejudice and repression at every turn, but also forbidden to even admit who they were, indeed forced to pretend to be the “enemy”—though many Kurds have close Turkish friends, adding another complicating layer to the mix. Whole generations had been “passing” for what they were not, with all the psychological baggage that that entails.
Generations had also been irreparably distanced from one another, sometimes in more ways than one. With Europe then in dire need of manual labor, and travel between Turkey and Europe relatively easy, more than 1 million Kurds migrated to the continent between 1950 and 1980, some three hundred thousand heading to West Germany alone.
Among them had been the father of Sheri, the architect; he was also my hostess Elif’s brother-in-law. He, his wife, and three oldest children had arrived in Istanbul in the late 1950s, to live in a three-room apartment with three other families. For nine years, he earned a meager wage serving tea in a bank; then he heard that the Ford Motor Company was hiring workers in Germany. He applied, was hired, and departed for the European country, where he’d bunked in dormitories together with masses of other Kurdish men for fifteen years, returning home to visit his family just one month a year.
As with Elif and Yakup, the strategy had worked, and worked well, though the emotional toll must have been tremendous. Now retired, Sheri’s father had managed to provide his family with a comfortable house and educate all six of his children. In addition to Sheri, two of his daughters were teachers, another was studying to be a journalist, and one of his sons was a mechanical engineer. His second son’s career was harder to categorize, as he’d just been released from jail after serving five years due to his involvement with an illegal socialist political party. Not that his case had gone to trial: in Turkey, political suspects are incarcerated before trial and, because the legal system is so slow, are often in jail for years before their cases are finally heard.
Sheri’s journalist sister had also run into problems with the Turkish state. She worked for Freedom Radio, which had been shut down eight months earlier for broadcasting Kurdish songs that promoted separatism, or so the authorities said.
“Our parents ask us, Why are you doing this? Why don’t you just get good jobs, keep quiet, and make money?” Sheri said. “But we cannot.”
Like many Kurds in Turkey under forty, and many over forty as well, she and her siblings were through pretending to be something they were not. The civil war had changed all that.
FOR MANY NONPOLITICIZED Kurds living in western Turkey, the shift largely began in 1991, when President Turgut Özal convinced the parliament finally to lift the ban on the Kurdish language and folkloric music recordings. Almost alone among Turkish politicians, Özal recognized that unless the government softened some of its harsh Kurdish policies, the civil war then escalating in the Southeast—to reach its peak in 1992 to 1995— could literally tear Turkey apart. The language ban reversal caused an uproar among the parliamentarians—who passed it nonetheless—yet in reality it was a limited measure, as it permitted only private speech, already taking place in the street. The ban on Kurdish broadcasts, education, and modern song lyrics continued. But by repealing the ban, Turkey was at last admitting that it had a Kurdish population. This alone was cause for widespread celebration among Kurds.
However, at the same time, the parliament also instituted a harsh new antiterror law. The ruling allowed the authorities to imprison anyone suspected of “disseminating separatist propaganda” or otherwise threatening national security. It was used to sentence hundreds of writers, publishers, musicians, and other nonviolent “offenders” to long prison terms simply for disagreeing with the government’s Kurdish policies. One of the most outrageous cases involved Ismail Beşikçi, a sociologist of Turkish ethnicity who had already spent years in prison prior to 1991 for
merely defining the Kurds as a separate ethnic group. He was sentenced to one hundred-plus years under the new law for continuing to write about Kurds. Even Turkey’s best-known novelist, Yaşar Kemal, who is part Kurdish, was prosecuted under the law and handed a twenty-month suspended sentence in 1996 for publishing a pro-Kurdish essay in a German magazine.
Nonetheless, as the 1990s progressed, other small positive changes in everyday Kurdish life in western Turkey occurred. The word Kurd started appearing in the newspapers—“I couldn’t believe my eyes, I never thought I would see it,” one young Istanbul Kurd said to me—and Kurdish music and other forms of cultural expression became more prevalent. Most of all, ordinary Kurds increasingly flaunted rather than hid their heritage—as indeed, more politicized Kurds had been doing since the 1980s, if not before; many Kurds had been working for more rights by peaceful political means long before the rise of the PKK.
By the time of my visit to Turkey in the fall of 2002, the political situation for the Kurds was continuing to ease. Turkey was working to improve its civil rights record, in the hopes of being admitted to the European Union. The previous August, the parliament had approved a reform package allowing the Kurds limited broadcast and education rights, while also outlawing the death penalty. The antiterror law was still in effect, but the accused were usually fined rather than imprisoned. However, the Turkish government still did not officially recognize the Kurds as a minority and continued to deny them many basic civil, cultural, and political rights. Brutal police tactics, inhumane prison conditions, heavy censorship, and the constant threat of arrest and torture continued.
THE MESOPOTAMIA CULTURAL CENTER, devoted to Kurdish culture, was housed in a humble building on the Istiklal, one of Istanbul’s most famous streets. From early morning until well past midnight, the thoroughfare teemed with enthusiastic tourists, beefy businessmen, and boisterous young Turks.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 38