Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

Iraq came up. Saddam Hussein was possessed of megalomania, and the country that he ran, an artificial creation from the First World War, contained dissident elements, held together by oil money. He stood between Turkey and Iran, which, run by megalomaniacs, was Shia, from a branch of Islam so different as almost to constitute a different religion. The key factor was that, in northern Iraq, there were Kurds. That opened up, for Turkey, an enormous problem, the greatest that she had had to deal with. The Kurds are a people who never took off as a nation. There are perhaps 25 million of them, spread over Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, where they formed the bulk of the population of the south-east, bordering Iraq. Kurdish, like Iranian or Hindi, is an Indo-European language, and some of the words are recognizable to a western European (‘new’ is nu ; ‘me’ is min ; ‘two’ is du ; ‘four’ is char , cf. French quatre ; ‘valley’ is dal , cf. German Tal ; and the grammar is fairly familiar). In Xenophon’s Anabasis people called Curtaroi are mentioned. His 10,000 Greek mercenaries, unpaid, unwept and unsung, were finding their way back home from fifth-century BC Persia, came to a river in some mountains, and found Curtaroi offering attitude on the opposite bank. They wondered what to do, encamped. Next morning, they found the Curtaroi engaged in fisticuffs, and crept past towards the sea. Nearly two millennia later, at the time of the Crusades, the Arabic Ekrad (plural for ‘Kurd’) were well-documented as mountain warriors, of whom the great Saladin was one (‘Selahattin’ in Turkey is generally a Kurdish name). But they were split up over various states, and the language was never standardized. It has divided into several variants, and though a specialist can recognize what is being said, people on the ground have to communicate in Turkish or Arabic once they leave their home area. There were historical differences noticeable even in the sixteenth century, as Kurdish emirates fought; and there was even rivalry between the two chief Moslem brotherhoods of the area, the Kadiri and Nakshibendi. One of the chief Kurdish elements in Iraq, the Behdinandi, simply refused, under the British Mandate, to use the Sorani Kurdish that was expected, and preferred Arabic. The outstanding pioneers of these matters were Russian and British, in this case D. N. McKenzie. In Turkey the chief Kurdish language is called Kırmanç, but it is split into dialects (Dimili) and there is another version, possibly a different language altogether, called Zaza. There are theories to the effect that the Zaza-speaking Kurds are not even of Kurdish origin. Some may even have been Armenian, and when the Turkish army found PKK — Kurdistan Workers’ Party — corpses, these were sometimes not circumcised. At any rate, regardless of the linguistic divisions, many Kurdish parents did not want their children educated in anything other than Turkish, so that they would get on in life. In Van, in the 1960s, there was the moving sight of young men studying in the street lights, with a view to just getting on. Most did: there was intermarriage, and, whatever was said about the Kurdish question later on, most Kurds voted for ordinary Turkish parties and, if they went into politics, shot up that tree. Turkey was simply so far above Iraq or Iran in terms of interest and development that no Kurd in his senses would have wanted to live anywhere else. However, something went badly wrong. A terrorist movement, the PKK, developed, and made the running for the latter part of Özal’s reign.

The Turkish government and army were blamed for this, but it was simply not an easy question, and the Kurds themselves did not know what the answer was. In the end, this had to do with a more general failure, that of the Turkish Left. It had had its chance in the 1960s, and it was even not far from power in the 1970s, when Ecevit ran things. However, it did not know what to do with the Kurds, regarding them as a weird amalgam of Armenians and gypsies. It did not help that Kurdish society (many parts were much less than that whole) was significantly different, in that Şafi Islam reigned, harsher than the Turks’ Sunni version. Ordinary Kurds (there were many extraordinary Kurds) behaved differently towards women, especially, who did not rate very highly: polygamy went on, though given religious rather than legal sanction, and there was a great demographic problem. This imposed a terrible strain on every sort of infrastructure, and matters were again complicated because the south-east of Turkey worked by dry agriculture. The State had responded with a scheme for great dams to divert the water of the two biblical rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, towards irrigation and hydro-electricity, but this would take time, and in any case the profits went towards the tribal chiefs, the Agas , who mainly ran affairs in these parts, clan-fashion. The Turkish Left were no good at these matters, and bear some responsibility for the troubles that followed. Sprigs of Istanbul grandee families, Henri Barkey or Çağlar Keyder, thinking beardedly about their own local version of Eighteenth Brumaire and looking to jobs in America, could hardly be bothered, at the Ankara School of Political Science, with some hairy peasant from Siverek called Abdullah Öcalan.

Öcalan was a megalomaniac, given to comparing himself with Mao and Lenin. His family background was not entirely unlike Stalin’s, in that he had a weak, henpecked ( sılık ) father and a bossy (Turkish) mother. His first enthusiasms (like Stalin’s) were religious. His first intention was to work in the State, but as a student he encountered Kurdish nationalism. This had complicated origins. There had always been uprisings by Kurds against the State but they did not have a nationalist side until late in the day. There was no doubt a vague idea of Kurdishness, but the realities were religious and tribal. The Republic, declared in 1923, was secular, and the last Caliph was dismissed in 1924. In 1925, and again in the 1930s, there were Kurdish uprisings, the last one (in Dersim, from 1936 to 1938) put down with much harshness. On all occasions, the State used tribes against each other — they had fought all along, whether over access to water, or over some hereditary grievance such as sheep-stealing, and in any case some were strictly Moslem, adhering to the Şafi version of Islamic law, which required its adepts to perform ritual ablutions if they had been in the same room as a foreigner or a woman, while others were Alevi. By the later sixties, Kurdish banners figured in student demonstrations. In 1969 ‘eastern revolutionary cultural hearths’ were set up in Kurdish towns, but after the coup of 12 March 1971 the organizers fled to Europe.

Öcalan went on to a surveyors’ school and then the department of Political Science at Ankara University, which had been a training ground for the bureaucratic elite of republican Turkey (it was called Mülkiye, after an Ottoman equivalent, but the original inspiration had been the modernizing École des Sciences Politiques in Third Republican France, also a country that took a very robust view of peasant dialects). As the university civil war of that period got under way, he was associated with the Left (and spent seven months in prison after the coup of 1971) and took up with his Krupskaya, Kesire Yıldırım; but no-one remembered anything much about him. The university Left, usually products of the professional class and as likely as not to regard themselves as way above village Kurds with a background in surveying, probably played its part in driving him towards Kurdish nationalism. They seem to have regarded him as a possible police agent as he talked ‘in a very gauche [ toy ] way’ about a Kurdish state, and the Turkish Left hardly bothered to include Kurdish banderoles.