Welcome to Kurdistan (not north Iraq)

Perhaps I should first note what the Abant Platform is. It is a discussion forum launched in 1998 in order to "allow Turkish intellectuals from all walks of life to come together and talk freely." The idea and the organization belong to none other than the strongest religious community in Turkey: The Fethullah Gülen movement. In a step that some considered a public relations campaign, and others have suspected as an effort to "buy in" the intellectuals, the Gülen movement promised to create a sustainable ground for "dialogue" in a country dominated by hostile monologues. And, like it or not, they have been successful in establishing in the national scale something similar to the Bilderberg Meetings in the global scale. (But unlike Bilderberg, Abant is open to the public.)

The country that isn’t there

Last week’s Abant meeting was probably the most ambitious one, for it took place at a capital which is despised by most nationalist circles in Turkey. For the latter, the mere existence of a Kurdish political entity in Iraq is the beginning of the much-feared end: The establishment of an Independent Unified Kurdistan, which will include southeastern Turkey.

The fear is not totally groundless. World War I, which shaped the map of the current Middle East, left the Kurds as a people without a country. They were divided into four states, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. At first they were not terribly upset by this setting, because the tides of modern nationalism, which hit other peoples of the region, had not reached them yet. Yet as time went by, national consciousness arose among the Kurds, too, which led them to launch a series of uprisings and guerilla wars against their host states.

In return, these host states decided to crush Kurdish nationalism by force, and often ended up in inflaming it. That was the case especially in Turkey. From the 1920s on, Ankara decided to deny the very existence of Kurds, and imposed on them a strict policy of assimilation. The response of the Kurds was to launch more than 20 revolts, the last one being an almost civil war carried out by the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

After seven decades of forced assimilation, Turkey realized its mistake. Thus, since the 1990s on, the ban on Kurdish language and culture was gradually lifted. Today, besides marginal Turkish nationalists, most people in Turkey do not fear the word "Kurd," as they used to do it in the past. But another term is still anathema and almost un-utterable: Kurdistan, i.e., the land of the Kurds.

In the Abant Platform, this term has apparently created a controversy. Most visitors from Turkey preferred to call the country that they had stepped in as "Northern Iraq," whereas the hosts insisted that its name was "Kurdistan."

The gap of terminology might have been bridged there Ğ most of the Abant participants are Turkish liberals, after all, not nationalists Ğ but this incident shows how big the gap is between the minds of the two countries, and how hard is it to stand in the middle. No wonder Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the Nationalist Action Party, or MHP, lambasted Abant organizers as those "who lost their identities."

In order to build reconciliation, both sides would need to take steps. Iraqi Kurds need to convince Turkey that their homegrown "Kurdistan" is not a step for the greater goal of building the Independent Unified Kurdistan. The political fate of Iraqi Kurds (whether it be based an autonomy or independence) cannot be mimicked in Turkey, whose biggest Kurdish city is not Diyarbakır or Batman, but Istanbul. For Turkey’s Kurds, the solution is the affirmation of full civil liberties in the current borders, not the creation of new borders.

Remember the Ottomans

The steps Turkey needs to take are, first, to realize that Iraqi Kurdistan is a reality that cannot be denied. Disallowing its name and official status doesn’t help us Turks in any way. We have spent seven decades asserting, "Kurds don’t exist." Now we should not lose more time by asserting, "Kurdistan doesn’t exist."

The second step to take is simply to remember our Ottoman past. In the Ottoman Empire, the region was commonly called "Kurdistan," and nobody had a problem with that. In fact, the empire established an official province of Kurdistan between the years 1847 and 1864, whose capital was transferred several times, first from Ahlat to Van, then to Muş and finally to Diyarbekir. (The name of the latter city was changed into "Diyarbakır" during the republican times.) The term "Kurdistan" continued to be used freely by the Ottomans, who were, unlike their modern Turkish successors, not fearful about the ethnic and religious diversity of their country.

In fact this whole Kurdish question hints to us Turks that the ultra-nationalist (and ultra-secularist, for that matter) excesses of our much-praised Republican Revolution needs to be left aside. Whether we will be able to face that is the national million-dollar question.