https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/opinion/erdogan-kurds-syria.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=curThe Long Kurdish Struggle
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s war is an ethnonationalist attack on Kurds and their aspirations.
By Rosa Burc
Ms. Burc is a researcher working on the Kurdish movement in the Middle East.
Oct. 22, 2019
On Oct. 12, Hevrin Khalaf, a 35-year-old Kurdish politician, was stopped at a checkpoint outside the town of Tel Abyad in northeastern Syria by Turkey-backed Syrian Arab militias.
Four days earlier, Turkey and its proxies had invaded northern Syria and destabilized the relatively peaceful region, displaced more than 100,000 people, unleashed racist propaganda against the Kurds and moved to destroy Rojava, the Kurdish experiment in democratic self-governance.
Ms. Khalaf, who was the secretary general of the Future Syria Party, played a vital role in fostering Kurdish-Arab friendship and worked for a joint future in a postwar Syria. Turkish-backed militiamen pulled Ms. Khalaf out of her car and struck her head and legs with metal objects. They grabbed her by her hair and dragged her until skin was peeled off her scalp. And then they shot her in the head, according to her autopsy report. The killers were filmed shouting insults while firing.
Ms. Khalaf embodied the kind of society the people in Rojava, the autonomous enclave in northern Syria imagined and fought for since 2012. With all its imperfections, the Kurdish experiment sought to create a society built on gender equality, bottom-up organization, participatory deliberation, ecological principles and peoples’ reconciliation. It is an attempt at self-determination. The Kurds in northern Syria did not seek the establishment of an ethnic nation-state.
The next morning, Yeni Safak, a newspaper close to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, celebrated Ms. Khalaf’s murder as a “successful operation of neutralizing” a political leader affiliated with the “terrorist” People’s Democratic Union, or P.Y.D.
The brazen gloating over a war crime — the unarmed Ms. Khalaf’s execution — by one of the largest-selling daily newspapers in Turkey, rips the facade off Ankara’s claims of its “Operation Peace Spring” being motivated by altruistic concerns of “resettling Syrian refugees” and facing an existential national security threat from Rojava, which the Turkish government has been describing as a “terrorist corridor.”
There have been no confirmed reports of an actual attack or military provocation coming from the Kurdish self-administered region in northern Syria against Turkey. Why then did its bare existence pose a threat to the national and territorial integrity of Turkey?
Mr. Erdogan’s war seemed more of an attempt to consolidate his power by creating and exploiting a nationalist surge in Turkey. And by justifying his invasion of northern Syria by speaking of “resettling” Syrian refugees there, he was also responding to the growing anti-refugee sentiment in Turkey, which contributed to his losing the Istanbul and Ankara elections in March.
Mr. Erdogan’s war is an ethnonationalist attack on Kurdish people and their aspirations, and an attempt at using Turkish military might to engineer demographic changes on land that belongs to more than one nation.
The history of anti-Kurdish militant nationalism in Turkey is much older than Mr. Erdogan, and his party and goes back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. While Kurdish autonomy was suggested in the first post-war treaty, those terms were renegotiated after the Turkish war of independence and set the borders of modern Turkey and left the Kurds without a self-ruled region. Colonial mapmaking divided the Kurdish regions between the Turkish-, British- and French-mandated states of Iraq, Syria and Iran. The Kurds ended up being persecuted minorities in each of these countries.
In the eyes of the Turkish state, the Kurds didn’t exist. Our names were replaced with Turkish names, our language banned, our music criminalized and our existence denied. Kurds were forcefully assimilated into being Turkish. Large Kurdish populations in Turkey fled to neighboring Syria during violent Turkification campaigns in the first half of the 20th century.
In Syria, Kurds were forced into a precarious existence. Ideologically driven by pan-Arabism, policies in post-independence Syria denied citizenship to Kurds in the northeast, rendering the entire community stateless. Stamped out between Turkification and Arabization, statelessness for the Kurds means much more than the simple lack of a Kurdish nation-state. It means the lack of basic protection from any of the states they naturally inhabit.
When my father was born, his mother tongue was a crime. Until 1991 the Kurdish language was officially forbidden in Turkey, which made speaking, writing or listening to Kurdish illegal. In my father’s Yazidi-Kurdish village in Turkey, every day students at his school would have to read an oath that ended with the line, “My existence shall be dedicated to the Turkish existence.” The oath was recited in schools until 2013.
My parents were university students in Ankara, when in another part of Kurdish geography another state attacked the Kurdish right to exist. Saddam Hussein launched a genocidal campaign against Kurds in northern Iraq in 1988. Tens of thousands ran to the Turkish border to escape annihilation.
My parents traveled to Diyarbakir in Turkey’s southeast and helped build shelters for those seeking refuge after the chemical attack in Halabja, which killed 5,000 civilians instantly. My mother would tell me that her friends in college were arrested for reading a statement condemning massacres committed by the Iraqi dictator. Those who publicly expressed solidarity with Mr. Hussein’s victims were persecuted in Turkey for promoting Kurdish separatism.
A couple of years later, during the Turkish-Kurdish conflict of the 1990s, thousands of Kurds in Turkey became refugees. More than 40,000 died in the conflict between Kurdish insurgent groups and the Turkish state. Executions of civilians, forced displacements, destroyed villages, arbitrary arrests and disappearances of Kurdish journalists, activists and politicians filled that dark decade of the 1990s.
The Kurds in Turkey had a relatively peaceful decade of reprieve between 2005 and 2015 when the Justice and Development Party government partly lifted restrictions on Kurdish language, allowed Kurdish media and started a peace process. In June 2015 general election, the Peoples’ Democratic Party, or the H.D.P., the pro-Kurdish party, crossed a 10 percent threshold required to enter Parliament and won 80 seats.
Sadly, the shaky yet promising peace process fell apart, the conflict between the Turkish forces and the Kurdish insurgents restarted in 2015, and Mr. Erdogan targeted the H.D.P., removing the impunity of its members of parliament, and arrested its co-leaders, Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag.
Mr. Erdogan’s political opponents such as the secularist Republican People’s party, or the C.H.P., supported his persecution of the pro-Kurdish party and its leaders. The Turkish president found complete support again when he invaded the Afrin region of Syria in 2018 and northern Syria recently.
Political and ideological differences among Turkish political parties disappear when anti-Kurdish nationalism is at play. The capitulation of the Turkish press and the opposition parties on the Kurdish question is beginning to have serious, dark effects on the lives of about 20 million Kurds who live in Turkey.
The precariousness of Kurdish lives in Turkey in times of nationalist hysteria is strikingly illustrated by the murder of Siren Tosun, a 19-year-old laborer from Diyarbakir, who was attacked and shot in the head for speaking Kurdish in late August. On Sept. 29, Turkish police raided a concert of the nationwide talent show winner, Dodan Ozer, for singing a Kurdish song, snatching the microphone from him while he was onstage.
A couple of days into the recent Turkish assault in northern Syria, 78 people were investigated for social media posts criticizing the military operation, and nine members of the H.D.P. were arrested for using the slogan “No to War, Peace Now” during a political meeting. A Turkish court ruled that this slogan constitutes “propaganda for a terrorist organization.”
Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria is an attempt to bolster the suppressive ethnic foundations on which both countries, Turkey and Syria, were established. Mr. Erdogan’s plans of demographic engineering are a continuation of the former Syrian president Hafez al-Assad’s original “Arab Belt” project, which emptied Kurdish villages and replaced them with Arabs.
The growing evidence of war crimes, indiscriminate airstrikes in disregard of civilian life by Turkish military forces and their allied mercenaries, and Mr. Erdogan’s rhetoric of “cleansing” only foreshadows the extent of the humanitarian crisis that awaits the peoples of northern Syria.
A no-fly zone, an arms embargo and a political solution to the Kurdish question are essential to protect the Kurds from ethnic cleansing. These efforts are necessary to prevent the further deepening of authoritarianism in Turkey and to work toward a common democratic future.
Rosa Burc, a doctoral researcher at the Center on Social Movement Studies at Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, is working on the Kurdish movement in the Middle East.
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