Turkish Social Darwinism
In his revolutionary historiography, Swiss historian of late Ottoman history and the history of Turkey, Hans-Lukas Kieser, depicted Talaat Pasha, strongman of the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) of the Ottoman Empire during the World War I years, as the “Father of Modern Turkey” along with his infamous reputation as the architect of the Armenian genocide. Kieser underlined that Social Darwinism had been applied, albeit differently, to the Kurds, as well as the Ottoman Christians:
Talaat and his close political friends had inscribed mass crime into their project of an imperially connotated new Turkish nation building, the result of which were very distant, viable futures for Asia Minor. Talaat’s comprehensive effort at new nation building was, first, demolition and spoliation. This included not only mass removal, demographic engineering, and comprehensive looting but also starvation and systematic mass killing. . . . With the purpose of achieving an exclusive Turkish-Muslim unity in Asia Minor, Talaat’s policy ‘replaced’ the removed Christian population with Muslim migrants. Moreover, Talaat sought to ‘dilute’ non-Turkish identities of Muslim groups and considered these groups fit for assimilation into the new nation of a “New Turkey,” in contrast to Ottoman Christians.
Talaat’s demolitionist domestic policy had started as a consequence of the Balkan Wars, and from spring 1914 the Rûm1 presence on the Aegean coast was erased. His policy reached an unprecedented extent with the Armenians in April 1915 by embracing its most ambitious and comprehensive scheme of erasure and demographic change. Talaat also engaged in the large-scale removal of Kurds from parts of the eastern provinces in 1916, because to him many Kurds appeared as unreliable elements. It was a prime moment for him to exploit the fact that thousands of Kurds had fled before the advancing Russian army. . . . Talaat defined his policy.
He forbade sending Kurdish refugees from the war zones to southern regions “because they would either Arabize or preserve their nationality there and remain a useless and harmful element.” To be useful and acceptable elements of the new nation, Kurds, therefore, had to first lose their nationality (milliyet) and then be prevented from adopting others, like Arab or Armenian identities. . . . Jacob Künzler, a Swiss medical missionary in Urfa and a rare foreign observer and reporter of the Kurdish removal, organized help for tens of thousands of Kurds who starved near Urfa in 1916. . . . “The intention of the Young Turks was to keep these Kurdish elements from returning to their ancestral homeland. They should slowly become assimilated into Turkdom in Inner Anatolia,” Künzler wrote. “In spite of a good harvest that year, almost all of the deported Kurds were victims of the famine.”
Kurdish mass deaths of 1916–17 were to put mildly, the result of irresponsibility and negligence, but never of massacre. This distinguished them from the Armenians.2
Turkishness: The Driving Force for Nation-Building
Kurds were exempted from the genocidal policies directed at Christian Armenians. They, although Muslims, were considered as unreliable elements, and were targeted for assimilation into Turkdom or Turkishness; this ultimately led to the denial of their distinct identity and language. The social and demographic engineering involved preceded the foundation of the Turkish nation-state in the early 1920s. The groundwork for this denial started during the rule of the CUP in the last years of the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 1910s, while World War I was ongoing.
The Turkish sociologist Barış Ünlü proposed two concepts, “the Muslim Contract” and “the Turkishness Contract,” as tools for the analysis of the history of Turkey of the past hundred years. The Muslim Contract, which he used to describe the social engineering performed by the powerholders of the Ottoman state in the wake of the Balkan Wars (1911–1912) and by the founders of the Turkish nation-state in 1923 following the national struggle, was a gateway to the subsequent Turkishness Contract that suppressed and effectively denied the Kurdish identity. He argued that his concept of the Turkishness Contract has “three fundamental articles.” The first of these is that to live privileged and secure in Turkey, to have upward mobility or at least the potential for it, being Muslim and Turk are primary requirements. The second article is the absolute ban on showing solidarity with or engaging in political activity favoring the Ottoman and Turkey’s non-Muslims, and on speaking the truth about what has been done to them (deportation, massacre, genocide, confiscation, racism, discrimination, etc.) The third article concerns the Muslim groups, and especially the Kurds who have resisted Turkification decisively and firmly. To speak the truth on what has been done to them, to be involved in pro-Kurdish political action, and to show empathy and to establish emotional solidarity with them are strictly forbidden.3
Being Muslim was the first gate that opened to the Turkishness Contract; if the person was a Muslim, she/he could pass to Turkishness. This distinguishes the situation of non-Turkish Muslims more than those citizens of Turkey who are not Muslims. Because Turkishness is equipped with material and moral rewards and not being so is identified with material and moral punishments, millions of Muslims who are originally non-Turkish passed into Muslim Turkishness and espoused the assimilationist policy of the state; they were assimilated. In other words, millions of Muslims abandoned being Kurdish, Arab, Circassian, Pomak, Georgian, Laz, Albanian, Bosnian. In retrospect, that abandoning may not be understood well, because generations have passed since the first generation [that abandoned its original identity to be Turkish]. The identity abandoned has been left behind, no longer exists, and indeed has been obliged to be forgotten. There is no memory to remember or to know what has been left behind. Looked back, the transition may be seen as if it has always been there, a natural and a normal phenomenon. But, for the first generation that made the transition it was probably an arduous process that required an intense and conscious endeavor. The dual nature of the process was an element that made it even more difficult: To abandon what you are and to be able to learn who you will be.4
“Turkishness” as the driving force in the nation-building and state-crafting following the national struggle (1919–1922) under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) followed an evolutionary course. This was already embedded in the Unionist weltanschauung during the years of World War I, in the wake of the Balkan Wars where the Ottoman Empire had lost its geopolitical heartland. Its evolution signified the transition from the Society of Union and Progress, the ruling party of the late Ottoman period, to the People’s Party (later the Republican People’s Party) of Mustafa Kemal, which largely carried the legacy of the former. It also manifested the continuity between the two organisms and the two sequential historical periods.
Erik J. Zürcher, the Dutch scholar who is the most authoritative and indisputable expert on the Young Turks, the last period of the Ottoman Empire under the rule of the Union and Progress (İttihad ve Terakki), and the formative years of the new Turkish republic, has explicated the evolution of the inferred “Turkishness”:
On the issue of national identity, a radical choice was also made. Ottomanism obviously no longer was an option. But the Muslim nationalism which had been championed from 1912–1922 was now also abandoned the new republic was made, based on the idea of a “Turkish” nation . . . a romantic idealization of the Turkish national character, with racist elements. . . . Turkish nationalism led to the forced assimilation of the 30 per cent or so of the population which did not have Turkish as its mother tongue.5
As early as 1923 laws, government proclamations, and the programs of the People’s Party (the founding political vehicle of modern Turkey, led by Mustafa Kemal) ceased to speak of “Muslims” or “Kurds” and “Turks.” The third article of its 1923 statute states: “Every Turk or every outsider who accepts Turkish nationality and culture can join the People’s Party.”6 Two years later, on December 8, 1925, the Ministry of Education announced in a proclamation on “currents trying to undermine Turkish unity” that use of the terms “Kürt,” “Çerkez,” and “Kürdistan” (Kurd, Circassian, Kurdistan), as well as “Laz” and “Lazistan,” would be banned.7 In 1931, “Turk” was defined: “Any individual within the Republic of Turkey, whatever his faith, who speaks Turkish, grows up with Turkish culture and adopts the Turkish ideal, is a Turk.”8
The renowned historian Erik J. Zürcher, using those