Kurdish nationalism
Kurdish nationalism is a nationalist political movement which asserts that Kurds are a nation and espouses the creation of an independent Kurdistan from Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
Early Kurdish nationalism had its roots in the Ottoman Empire, within which Kurds were a significant ethnic group. With the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, its Kurdish-majority territories were divided between the newly formed states of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, making Kurds a significant ethnic minority in each state. Kurdish nationalist movements have long been suppressed by Turkey and in the states of Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
Since the 1970s, Iraqi Kurds have pursued the goal of greater autonomy and even outright independence against the Iraqi nationalist Ba'ath Party regimes, which responded with brutal repression, including the massacre of 50,000-100,000 Kurds in the Anfal campaign. The Kurdish–Turkish conflict, where Kurdish armed groups have fought against the state, has been ongoing since 1984. After the 1991 uprisings in Iraq, the United Nations enforced the Iraqi no-fly zones under Security Council Resolution 688, which included much of Iraqi Kurdistan, facilitating autonomy and self-government outside the control of the Iraqi government. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq that ousted Saddam Hussein, the Kurdistan Regional Government was established, enjoying a great measure of self-governance but stopping short of full independence.
History
Devastation from the war, as well as "looting and destruction of crops by Russian, Ottoman, and British ... caused severe famine in the area".In such dire conditions, it was the central focus of all tribal leaders to rebuild their village/tribal infrastructure in order to provide for their own people. Major nationalist or political movements were not foremost in their minds; survival was the necessity.The only chance that a Kurdish state would be formed was the revolt against the newly emerged Turkish Republic was Sheikh Ubeydullah but this was short lived, because the revolt was never strategic nor unified in a Kurdistan sense.
The Kurdish nationalist struggle first emerged in the late 19th century when a unified movement demanded the establishment of a Kurdish state. Revolts occurred sporadically, but only decades after the Ottoman centralist policies of the 19th century began did the first modern Kurdish nationalist movement emerge with an uprising led by a Kurdish landowner and head of the powerful Shemdinan family, Sheikh Ubeydullah. " In 1880 Ubeydullah demanded political autonomy or outright independence for Kurds and the recognition of a Kurdistan state without interference from Turkish or Persian authorities." The uprising against Qajar Persia and the Ottoman Empire was ultimately suppressed by the Ottomans, and Ubeydullah, along with other notables, was exiled to Istanbul. The Kurdish nationalist movement that emerged following World War I and the 1922 end of the Ottoman Empire largely reacted to the changes taking place in mainstream Turkey, primarily the radical secularization, centralization of authority, and rampant Turk ethnonationalism in the new Turkish Republic. Western powers fighting the Turks promised the Kurds that they would act as guarantors for Kurdish freedom, a promise they subsequently broke. One particular organization, the Society for the Elevation of Kurdistan was central to the forging of a distinct Kurdish identity. It took advantage of period of political liberalization in during the Second Constitutional Era of Turkey to transform a renewed interest in Kurdish culture and language into a political nationalist movement based on ethnicity. Around the start of the 20th century Russian anthropologists encouraged this emphasis on Kurds as a distinct ethnicity, suggesting that the Kurds were a European race based on physical characteristics and on the Kurdish language. While these researchers had ulterior political motives their findings were embraced and still accepted today by many.
Ottoman Empire
Under the millet system, Kurds' primary form of identification was religious with Sunni Islam being the top in the hierarchy. While the Ottoman Empire embarked on a modernization and centralization campaign known as the Tanzimat, Kurdish regions retained much of their autonomy and tribal chiefs their power. The Sublime Porte made little attempt to alter the traditional power structure of "segmented, agrarian Kurdish societies" – agha, beg, sheikh, and tribal chief. Because of the Kurds' geographical position at the southern and eastern fringe of the empire and the mountainous topography of their territory, in addition to the limited transportation and communication system, agents of the state had little access to Kurdish provinces and were forced to make informal agreements with tribal chiefs. This bolstered the Kurds' authority and autonomy; for instance, the Ottoman qadi and mufti as a result did not have jurisdiction over religious law in most Kurd regions. In 1908, the Young Turks come to power asserting a radical form of Turkish ethnic identity and closed Ottoman associations and non-Turkish schools. They launched a campaign of political oppression and resettlement against ethnic minorities – Kurds, Laz people, and Armenians, but in the wartime context they could not afford to antagonize ethnic minorities too much. At the end of World War I, Kurds still had the legal right to conduct their affairs in Kurdish, celebrate unique traditions, and identify themselves as a distinct ethnic group. The Treaty of Sèvres signed in 1920 "suggested" an independent Kurdish and Armenian state but after the establishment of the Turkish Republic by a Turk ethnonationalist government which balked at the treaty, the 1923 Lausanne Treaty was signed which made no mention of the Kurds. The once politically unified Ottoman Kurdistan was then divided into the different administrative and political systems in Iraq, Turkey and Syria.The Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Sèvres
The first Kurdish political party originated in the Kurdish diaspora rather than from within Kurdistan. The organization known as Khoybun or in Kurdish Xoybûn, or "Independence," was founded by a group of Kurdish intellectuals in Paris in 1918. These intellectuals saw the period following World War I as ripe for organizing a movement aimed at securing a Kurdish nation-state out of the ruins of the recently defeated Ottoman Empire.After the cataclysm of World War I, the Paris Peace Conference offered the opportunity for a new world. The optimism and idealism promoted by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson aimed for a lasting peace reinforced by an international framework and fraternity of states. The principle of self- determination from Point Twelve of Wilson's Fourteen Points instilled false confidence in minority populations of the Ottoman Empire that they would soon be able to choose their own paths as independent nation-states.
The British found the Ottoman theater of the war much more difficult than they had imagined. At war's end, the British had a hard time maintaining troop concentrations in the Ottoman Empire. The cost of the war was enormous, and the politicians and population back in Britain sought to hasten troops' return home. The Allies' plans to carve up the Ottoman Empire were equally challenging to execute because the different peoples of the empire were seeking their own futures, rather than leaving outsiders or their old overlords to decide for them.
During the war, more attention was paid to the Armenians than to the Kurds. This was likely because the Armenians were primarily Christian, and thereby more prone to identify with the West and vice versa. The Kurds were considered complicit in the atrocities committed against the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire during the early stages of the war. Little attention was given to Kurdistan until after the war when the prevailing thought was a realignment of the Ottoman territories along the European model of nation-states in which Ottoman minorities each would govern their own people in their own territories. British Foreign Office documents of the time indicate a certainty of a future Armenian state, but leave out other parties such as the Kurds and the Assyrians. A sketch of the Draft Treaty of Peace between Turkey and the Allied Governments by Middle-Eastern Political Section of British Delegation and a map of the "Proposed Settlement of Turkey in Asia" depict various boundaries for Armenia, but make no mention of Kurdistan.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson went so far as to order a draft of boundaries for an Armenian state. This was the atmosphere going into the end of the war and into the peace conference. The horrors of the war pushed idealism to its extreme in the minds of some negotiators and some heads of states, while the reality on the ground was starkly different from their grand visions of a new world. Other statesmen, particularly Lloyd-George and Clemenceau, had imperial interests in mind rather than the international peace and reconciliation that Wilson professed.
After the surrender of the Ottoman Empire and the close of World War I, plans for the lands, resources, and people under former Ottoman jurisdiction were negotiated. While the U.K. and France were drawing their lines on the map of the Middle East, the Americans, whom they invited to take up mandates in Armenia and Kurdistan, refused to become involved on the ground. U.S. foreign policy appeared hesitant because policymakers feared the U.S become entangled in a colonial-style scheme that ran counter to U.S. ideals and taxpayer wishes. According to Tejirian, "the internationalism of the 1910s, which followed the first acquisitions of the 'American empire' after the Spanish-American War and led to U.S. entry into World War I, was followed by the isolationism of the 1920s, emphasized most dramatically by U.S. refusal to join the League of Nations." Lack of international sponsorship was a problem that would plague the Kurds.
The Foreign Office's Political Intelligence Department presented British negotiators with a thorough study of the Ottoman Empire's lands and peoples before they attended negotiations in Paris. This document placed heavy emphasis on Armenia and commitments to the French and Arabs. The situation of Kurdistan was addressed with the statement, "We are thus committed to the partition of Kurdistan into three sections, in the two largest of which certain rights are secured to ourselves, the French, and the Arabs, but none to the Kurds." The study noted the strategic value of Kurdistan thus:
The Power paramount in this country will command the strategic approaches to Mesopotamia and control the water supply of the eastern affluents of the Tigris, on which the irrigation of Mesopotamia largely depends. It is therefore essential that the paramount Power in Kurdistan and Mesopotamia should be the same; in other words, that Great Britain should have an exclusive position in Kurdistan as opposed to any other outside power. At the same time, the arguments against annexation apply even more strongly to Kurdistan than to Mesopotamia. It is desirable that the county should form an independent confederation of tribes and towns, and that His Majesty's Government should assume functions intermediate between the administrative assistance, amounting to direct responsibility for the conduct of government, which they intend to undertake in Mesopotamia, and the mere control of external relations, to which they propose to limit themselves in the case of the independent rulers of the Arabian Peninsula. In the hills British control should be exerted with the least direct intervention possible. In the lowlands bordering on Mesopotamia, where there are important oil-fields and other natural resources, it may have to approximate to the Mesopotamian pattern.The Kurdish representative at the Paris Peace Conference was General Muhammad Sharif Pasha. After the Young Turk Revolution deposed Sultan Abdulhamid II and sentenced Sharif Pasha to death, he fled the Ottoman Empire. Sharif Pasha had offered his services to the British at the beginning of the war, but his offer had been refused because the British did not anticipate their being engaged with operations in Kurdistan. He spent the war years in Monte Carlo waiting for another opportunity. Despite his disappointment with the British, Sharif Pasha reestablished his contact with the British near the end of the war. In 1918, he began communicating with Sir Percy Cox, the head of British forces in Mesopotamia, to discuss establishing British protection over an autonomous Kurdistan. He argued for similar arrangements in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, describing something akin to the mandate system. He also argued for a British sponsored committee aimed at reconciling relations between the Kurds and the Armenians. Kurdish nationalist organizations nominated Sharif Pasha as their representative at the Paris Peace Conference because of his strategic views and high level contacts within the British government.
At Paris, Sharif Pasha carefully laid out Kurdish claims to territory and constructed an argument for Kurdish independence. His claims were based on areas where Kurds constituted the dominant population. He included the Persian Empire's Kurdish territories in addition to Ottoman lands. His inclusion of the Persian Kurdish lands was merely to make a point that the Kurds were a large nation spanning a large area, thereby worthy of a homeland free from the outside interference that had often plagued Kurdistan.
Delegates representing the Kurds, the Armenians, and the Assyrians presented claims to territory and independence. Bughos Nubar, the chief Armenian delegate, had confided to Sir Louis Mallet of the British Delegation fears that the Allies were "abandoning Armenia to her fate." He worried about French ambition in Armenia, and sought British and US recognition for Armenian independence.
Sharif Pasha and Bughos Nubar agreed to support each other's bid for independence even if there were disagreements as to the particulars of territory. The two presented overlapping claims and criticized each other's demands, but the scheme worked. The negotiators were convinced that both the Kurds and the Armenians deserved homelands in the new Middle East, and granted provisions for statehood and self-determination in the resulting Treaty of Sèvres.
Sharif Pasha grew frustrated with the Allies over his sidelining in negotiations and with the Kurdish League over his agreement with the Armenians, and eventually resigned his post. Following his marginalization, Sharif produced a pamphlet outlining the justification for Kurdistan's territories. He began with historical claims to the lands, noting many academic works on the geography of Kurdistan and taking care to distinguish between Kurdish and Armenian lands. His argument against the Armenian claims in Kurdistan is that greater Armenia is not "the ethnical cradle of their race." In an unusual turn in his case, Sharif asserts that the Armenians in Kurdistan came as émigrés, abandoning agriculture in Armenia for urban life in Kurdistan. Sharif further accuses the European powers and Turkey of conspiracy against the Kurds by inventing Armenian history in Kurdish lands. He likely made this last statement out of anger from being sidelined at the conference. Nevertheless, Sharif Pasha made a difference in that his case for a Kurdish homeland was written into the peace treaty. The "Kurdistan" specified in the treaty did not include all of the Kurdish territories, but it contained a large portion of Ottoman Kurdistan.
Some groups formerly under Ottoman dominion desired reclamation of lands they perceived as their own. Greek irredentism gained the support of the British, thus enabling them to land Greek forces at Izmir. However, the Greeks became too covetous toward the Turks, and found themselves on the retreat before Turkish retaliation near the plateau of Ankara. The Turks had found a new nationalist leader. The fall of the Ottoman Empire and its Sultanate was certain.