The Kurdish Nation
RISING AND EVOLUTION OF KURDISH NATIONALISM
After the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the Kurds of Turkey, feeling themselves as Muslim Turk's brothers, stood by keep to the Umma. But the Dar-al-Islam did no more rule Anatolia. Atatürk found a laic republic, and at first it was a good thing for some religious minorities as the Yezidis and the Alevis, often maltreated by their Sunnit compatriots. As for the Kurds of Syria, Irak or Iran, nobody asked their wishes.
But the founders of the Turkish Republic aimed at a unitarist state and seeked a cement for this unity. If it was not religion that bind Anatolians, what could they imagine ? Tragically, stupidly, melting patriotism and an ethnical nationalism, they systematically persecuted anyone who did not call himself from the "Turkish race". The Kemalist were good praticians of the "Volk" theory and stressed the practice of non-Turkish languages : one people, one language, one nation, wasn't it the rule ? So Turkey presents the terrible case of a confusion with the both types of nation, with a state which was at first a political and ideological creation, but considering an ethnical origin as a political adhesion to the Republic : so borning out of the Turkish ethny became logically a high treason.
What was happened for the Kurds is common for persecuted people : revolts at first, roughly repressed ; shame after, because an ethnical particularism caused a social exclusion. For doing well in the new society, for going to school, it was necessary to know perfectly the dominant language and culture. Some Kurds forgot their identity, or hide it ; Kurdish became a rural idiom and its practice proved a quite rustic education. But of course, if a population does not completely disappear, come after a few generations a nationalist reaction, the pride in that was before a shame, the " rediscovery " of its origins. For some negated and humiliated nations, the more they had been deprived of their history and ignore their own past, the more they need to recreate one, often "millenial". The Kurds had undoubtedly ancient but problematic origins. But they called themselves Medes or Karduks. As the very ancient feast of Newrouz, the New Year of Iranian people, because it narrated with the mythic birth of the Kurds, the legend of Kawa the smith, and because this story reminds cruelly their present subjection, it expresses and symbolized all their revendications and their will to exist.
Nowadays, are the Kurds a shared nation or a minority divided by several states ? A minority is a group of persons differing from most of their compatriots by one or several characteristics, like religion, language, ethny, but without questionning their adhesion to the state where they live. Copts, a religious minority in a Muslim land, are however Egyptians. But the Kurds are bind neither by language, nor ethny with the Syrian, Iranian or Turkish states. In fact, these three lands are based on nationalist Panarabic and Pan-Turkish ideologies, that de facto exluded the Kurds. Iran, a federal state, could integrate more easily the Kurds, but the Iranian empire had structured its identity, since the XVIth century, with an allegiance to Shiism, opposing to the two great Sunnit empires, the Ottoman and the Mughal's, and today, this religious allegiance excludes the Kurds, who are 90 % sunnit. Moreover, wars and politics of discrimination adopted by governements during all the XXth century in the Kurdish countries had created economical and cultural disparities : Kurds of three states had a similar social level, lower than their occupants.If their Ottoman and Safavid pasts bound them with Arabians, Turks and Persians, the quite similar subjection they had endured for the destruction of their identity paradoxically strenghened it. We can talk about a Kurdish history, a Kurdish XXth century, that are not the same than their neibourghs.
But expelled from Kurdistan by the war or poverty, millions of Kurds live today in their occupant's towns or have emigrated anywhere in the world. And if in general the Kurdish regions had been more or less kept apart from the economical rise of the metropolis, the dominant societies inside the Kurds wished to take their place had however influenced them. Difference too between the Kurds who stayed in their motherland and the diaspora. If some Kurds choose their new citizenship and considered their identity just like an origin, some others call themselves essentially Kurds, without preventing many contradictions. As the problem of language, it is the more complexe and may be the more painful one. Since the beginning of our century, Kurdish scholars had given to their language an alphabet and a written literature. But a number of Kurds, especially from Turkey where repression was cruel, can not speak Kurdish. Then how do they feel their difference from their Turkish "compatriots" whose history and way of life bind with them ? And what sort of Kurd who feels Europe as his homeland ? It is easier for the Kurdish people as every people to know, to feel who they are not, than to determine who they are. The famous poem of Cigerxwin, " Kî ne ez ? ", " Who am I ? ", song by the so famous singer Sivan, is almost a password, so it expresses their difficulty to be and to think themselves. Then to be Kurd without speaking Kurdish or to be Kurd out of Kurdistan implies a choice between two attitudes : Rejecting one of the both cultures, or being be torned between them, with a guilt complex that man could palliate by a political action.
ABOUT THE VALUES OF NATIONAL CRITERIONS
However, we have just to examine the oldest states in the world for seeing how the belonging of their citizens to their own culture, the bind to their nation and the feel of their identity depend on a thousand of various conditions and situations, so complicated, so subtle than life itself. It is easy to constate that after all, the theory of volk was elaborated just for founding in a short time Nation-States for populations who lived before in Cities-States or occupied lands, and giving to them a land and frontiers, either inside a unitarist state (one nation one state), or to englobe them in large empires with a limited autonomy. It happened then in the Habsburgs' Austro-Hungarian empire and in the Soviet Union, especially under Staline, who interested very much the question of national entities. If this theory have been so used during our century it is perhaps because it allows to botch up quickly a national unity with easy-to-understand and measurable criterions.
But is it absolutely necessary to have its own borders for being a real nation ? The idea that a population can only be legitimated inside a frontier is problematic for diasporas. That we mean by Jews or Armenians could concern the citizens of Israël or Armenia, or someone who is faithful to his origins for religious or cultural feelings, but who considers himself as the citizen of an other State-Nation, or someone who belongs to two states, one where he lives, one where he borned, or an else land considered as a secured state against persecutions. The Roms present an extreme case : this people without territory or over-landed have a real community of origins, of language, a specific way of life, but are privated to political representation because without precise localisation. It is necessary to admit that there are nations who do not wish or who can not to constitute a state, but who have had their own destiny.
A common language is less important in despite of the excessive fondness that a lot of movements for " national liberation " had expressed. For a language is the more moving element, the more disposed to change, the less stable fact in the history of a population. If we watch the linguistic map of Europe, we can easily constate that the state frontiers are not the linguistic frontiers. Eire, independant after centuries of fight against the United Kingdom, is however for the most part an English-speaking country. German is speaking beyond the frontiers of Germany and even in so-called unified states, the strong vitality of regional languages, for example in Germany or Italy, or the practice of several language, as in Luxemburg, denies the idea that a state language is necessary for a political and cultural unity. In the same way, a renouncement of a language for an else does not destroy always a civilisation, even if a people adopt its occupant's language. Let take the example of Egypt, one of the oldest political foundations in the world. Successively occupied by all the great empires in the Classical Times, then by Arabians, it is less the adoption of the occupant's language by the Egyptians than their conversion to a new religion, Christianism then Islam, that changed their history, however without destroying their originality. For their identity is based on a geographical particularity that induced an original way of life and a special cosmogony. The Persian language had almost disappeared with the Sassanid empire as a writing language, but had finally surveyed with important Arabic influences, in its vocabulary as for its grammar and of course its alphabet. And two centuries after the Arabian conquest, Iran reborned as a main cultural center, and thousand years after the lost of its independance, as an empire.
People need common characteristics or believes for being a nation, but this bind between citizens can appear quite subjective and circumstancial. For someone, it could be indeed language or religion, especially if a belief is practiced too as a national particularism (Judaism, Armenian Church). All these characteristics have for function to isolate a group from Humanity. For the constitution of a nation is essentially an exclusion : To affirm ourselves is to refuse the others, to refuse what we are not, or what we do not want to be. As individuals, the identity of a population is so made with acceptations - "I am like this or like that" -, than negations - "I am not like this nor like that".
Finally, the less dangerous or less bloody way to affirm ourselves amongst Humanity is perhaps to choose the belief or the idea that engenders not a great passion in our time. During the Religious War in France, the moderate party opposed the national unity to the religious unity that was the source of serious conflicts. The religious group of Alevis in Turkey presents so a interesting case : They had sufferred by the Sunnit intolerance and agreed to the laicisation of the Ottoman society. It is perhaps because their community, including Kurds and Turks, has an inter-ethnical status, that they are today the more progressist, the more open-minded community and of course the more exposed to fanatism in Turkey.
CONCLUSION
Nationalism failed as a way for people's liberation. As a new religion, it encourages to hate or to distrust strangers as men had been encouraged before to hate heretics or infidels. After the Religious Wars - total wars where all a population was condemned and had to be massacred or converted - succeeded the clash of nations, not just clash with professionnal armies, but with all the both countries. Ancient Greeks in their free cities, or the Republican Romans already considered war as a self-sacrifice to their community. Or if this self-sacrifice did not happen, the sacrifice of the ennemy took the place of it. " What does the national passion ? the exaltation of the collective strongness can only end to this dilemna : either imperialism triumphes - it is the ambition to be equal to the world - or the neighbourgh opposes strongly it then it is the war. Therefore we can observe that a nation in its first rising of passion refuses rarely a war, even if it is hopeless. " (Denis de Rougemont, "L'amour et l'Occident").
Nobody knows what will be the political destiny of the Kurds, and if, sooner or later, the intransigence of the governements will not bind them to create an "ethnical" state. It would be not inevitably a check. But if the political conditions exist that could allow for the Kurds to live without complexe nor danger their identity, this identity will not be probably so problematic and the characteristics that bring them to the neighbouring populations will be more striking that their differences. For reaching the status of civilisation, we must pass beyond the one of nation. The Greek cities in the Vth and the IVth centuries were absolutely nationalist, chauvinist, and revanchist. But for the Greek koinè appeared and subdued the Levant and the Mediterranean, and hellenized even the Roman people, the dichotomy Greek/Barbarous had not be based on the ligneage (no more opposition Citizen/Metic, so) but on a political and cultural mind. " A Dyonisan of the Haurran or a Caesarian of Cappadoce was not less Greek and citizen (or Greek because citizen) than an Ephesian or an Athenian. They belonged to the same civilized world, the world of the City "(Maurice Sartre, "Le Haut-Empire romain"). A long common history, sometime prosperous, sometime bloody, could bind the populations of Anatolia and Mesopotamia, as today people in Europe feel bind each other. Those who speaks Kurdish, those who does not speak it, those who lives in Kurdistan, those who does not live in it, those who takes his identity as a political choice, those who takes it as a heritage, all one are right since, because with their own way, they enrich and extend the Kurd-i-stan, the Kurdish Land.
Sandrine Alexie - October 1998
