The Kurdish History
The origins of the Kurds is a matter of scholarly dispute. In les Kurds Basile
Nikitine reviewed for the layman the various opinions of linguists, and other
scholars who have studied the Kurds, on the earliest inhabitants of what has
come to be Kurdistan. In short theses are presented to us on the problem of the
origins of the Kurds. One insists on their Iranian (Indo-European) origin and
their removal in seventh century B.C. from from the region of Lake Urmyia to
Bohtan. The other thesis asserts the autochthonous character of the Kurds,
related to such other Asian people as the Khaldes, Georgians and Armenians, and
of the language they spoke which was later replaced by an Iranian one. Withe so
much yet to be learned about the early history of this part of West Asia the
safest thing for the laymen to say is that from the beginning of history the
mountains above Mesopotamia were inhabited by people who fough and sometimes
defeated the empires of the plains, the Babylonians and the Assyrians. In any
event, either by assimilating or displacing the previous inhabitants the heart
of Kurdistan was settled, probably by the seventh century B.C., by Iranicised
tribes. These tribes are the cultural progenitors of the modern Kurds.
About the time of the arab conquests in the seventh century the term Kurd was
beginning to be applied as an ethnic description of the Iranicised tribes with
their asian, Semitic and Armenian blendings. The Kurds was first applied by the
Seljuk Sultan Sandjar in the twelfth century when created a large province of
the name. In the fifteenth century, however, this province shrank, and in both
the ottoman and Turkish empires the area called Kurdistan was only a part of the
actual area in which the kurds predominated. From the fall of Nineveh in 612
B.C., when the Medes vanquished the Assyrian empire, to the battle of Chaldiran
in 1514 which roughly established the patition of Kurdistan between the Turkish
and Persian empires, the Kurdish tribes came under the dominion of the
successive conquerors of West Asia. They knew as invaders the Selucid, Parthian,
Sassanian, armenian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Seljuk, Mongol and finally Ottoman
peoples. From the worship of the sun the Kurds passed under the influence of the
religions of Zoroaster, Christ, Mithras and Islam. During these millenia many
Kurds rose from mere tribal leadership to establish a dynastic state which might
last a century before succumbing to the attacks of an imperial power, rival
Kurds or the two in alliance. Among these dynasties the best knewn is the Ayyubi,
which produced the greates Kurd, Salah ud Din al Ayyubi, Saladin
1139 - 1193.
Throughout kurdish history a pattern was repeated. Countless deeds of
magnificent courage and determination were done. Leaders again and again fought
valiantly against imperial powers to preserve the rule of Kurds over their own
people. When the foreign government was weak the Kurdish princes and chieftains
rejoiced in independent action. When the empire was strong those Kurds who
enjoyed its favour gladly fought those Kurds who did not. It was easier for a
Kurdish prince to be vassal to a foreign overlord than give up his struggle with
a rival Kurd. When the Kurds did think in terms of a political horizon beyond
the tribe it was of the supranational body of Islam. In the early years of the
sixteenth centurey Turkey and Persia were the major powers of the West Asia. The
two empires were at war for half the time between 1514 and 1639, and had the
Kurds been united they could at least have held the balance of power between the
two empires. But rivalries among themselves kept the Kurds disunited. Hakim
Idreis, who was Prince of Bitlis, set up for the Sultan a cordon
sanitaire of autonomous Kurdish states which eventually protected the
Otteman frontier all the way from Georgia to the south Zagros. The greater
Kurdish princes struck money and had public prayers read in their name, a prime
mark of sovereignty in Islam. The chieftains were left to rule their tribes
according to their ways. The system flourished for a century and half.
Conditions were about the same in Persia. During the dynastic upheavals of the
eighteenth century the Kurds showed no sense of unity even when one of their own,
Kerim Khan Zand, became shah. When he died and another Kurds, Luft Ali
Khan, attempted to reign, he was defeated by a northen alliance which
included the Kurdish prince of Ardelan. In 1826 Sultan Mahmud II began to extend
Ottoman civil administration in Kurdistan as part of his reform of a decaying
empire. The Kurdish princes resisted and it was a quarter century before they
were finally deprived of their principalities. The feudal lords had already been
weakenedby their own excessive demands on their followers. Nevertheless, they
were able to lead their followers into rebllion many time throughout the first
half of the nineteeth century. In 1843 Emir Badr khan of Jazirat-ibn-Omar
on the Bohtan began an attempt to gain freedom from Ottoman control. It was the
first uprising which might be called nationalist in a modern sense, as Badr
Khan planned to establish a Kurdish Government extending over the
considerable confederation he headed. Badr fought the Ottoman army for
four years. His government wa reported by American missionaries to have imposed
a just rule of law and prosecuted favouritism and graft. With his allies, who
included the Persian Kurds of Ardelan, he presented the Sublime Porte with a
grave military problem shadowed by the larger political implication of Badr
Khan's hoped-for Persian support.
Badr Khan surrendered to Osman Pash in 1847 and was sent into exile. By
1849 the Sultan had destroyed the Kurdish Government pf Bitlis founded by Hakim
Idris, that of the Baban dynasty in Sulaimani and all the others dating from
the Ottoman rise to empire. When the Ottoman Government was distracted by the
Grimean war the Kurds rose again, once more in Hakari and this time with the
Nestorians as allies. The revolt spread from Van to Baghdad. the leader, Yezdan
Sher, was taken in 1855 and removed to Constandinople. The last major
uprising of the nineteenth century was from 1878 to 1881 and was led by Shaikh
Ubaidalla Nehri who attacked Persia with some success. Under British and
Russian pressure Turkey co-operated with Persia and the Shaikh's attempt to
establish a Kurdish state came to an end. Ubaidalla was exiled to Mecca
where he died. In 1892 the Ottoman government opened 'tribal school'in
Constandinople and Baghdad. These schools were intended to inculcate loyalty to
empire in arabs abd Kurds while training them in the discipline of a modern army.
The experiment did not last long. In 1878 Shaikh Ubaidalla wrote to a British
vice-consul:
The Kurdish nation ia a people apart. Their religion is different and their
laws and customs are distinct…. The chiefs and rulers of Kurdistan, whether
Turkish or Persian subjects, and the inhabitants of Kurdistan one and all are
united and agreed that matters cannot be carried on in this way with the two
governments…
The European idea of political nationalism, that is, a people organised in an
independent state, had reached West Asia, Shaikh Ubaidalla was a feudal
lord, spiritual and temporal, and the political nationalism he talked of ran
against the great political and religious traditions of Islam and the
institution of the Sultan-Caliph. While respecting the rights pf peoples to be
governed by their own relgious laws, Islam had from its inception thought of the
State as co-extensive with the community of Islam. The institution of the
Sultan-Caliph expressed this concept and Kurdish rulers were happy with it as
long as they retained their princely autonomy. When the otteman government
introduced Government by Turkish officials, the violating the considerable
freedom of action they had long enjoyed, the more far-sighted kurdish leaders
embraced political nationalism. Following the Young Turk revolution in 1908,
Kurdish political clubs were established in Constantinople, Mosul, Diyarbakir
and Bagdhad, all imperial centers with a leavening of intelligentsia educated in
Western thought. The Kurds got such education in Constantinople, the centre of
ferment in declining empire or, in the case of the young princes of the Badr
Khan and Babah families, in exile in France and Switzerland. This
intelligentsia, however, counted for little in the countryside, where the feudal
and tribal leaders generally regarded them with hostility and suspicion as
carriers of ungodly and revolutionary ideas.
The new parliament in Costantinople meant little fotr the politics of
Ottoman-Kurdish relation. These continued to be conducted through diplomatic
manoeuvre frequently lapsing into military action. In these circumstances the
Kurdish intelligentsia could do little. What little they did in the way of
political clubs and schools teaching Kurdish was carefully watched by the
Government and in 1909 these were closed down. In 1910 a new society of students
lawyers was formed. But even in these sophisticated circles rivlries between
feudal families undermined the nationalist enterprise. The followers of Badr
Khans and Abd al Qadir spied on each other and then informed the
Turkish authorities. Such was the miserable infancy of Kurdish political
nationalism on the eve of the war which was to wipe away the Ottoman empire. The
Turkish Government presented the first World War to its empire as a holy war, a jihad.
The majority of simple Kurds responded happily to the chance to make war for
their Sultan-Caliph. Some Kurdish religious scholars however refused to support
what they considered an improper call for a jihad. Among the
intelligentsia the war was viewed as an opportunity for the nationalist cause.
At the end there was indeed a great opportunity but it was to be lost.
Kurdistan lay immediately below the Ottoman empire's historical enemy to north,
Roussia. Althought the Russians had at times dabbled in feeding Kurdish hopes
their policy developend into backing for the Armenians at the expense of the
Kurds. But they never turend their face wholly against the Kurds and from time
whispered encouragements to them. As armenian nationalism had become
increasingly threatening to the Sublime Porte the sultans encouraged the Kurds
as the mortal expense of thousanda of armenians. When the war came, the Kurds
fighting for Sultan once again found the Armenians a proper enemy. But by the
end of the war the situation was profoundly changed and the Kurds and the
Armenians were reconciled. Kurds sheltered Armenians from Turkish massacre in
1916. In the same year a Kurdish envoy in Tiflis unsuccessfully sought Russian
aid from Grand Duke Nicholas, the Commander-in-Chief of the Turkish front. When
the war began Russian forces swept into Kurdistan from Persia where they had
been stationed since 1909. Massacre by Russians, Armenians, Assyrians,
pestilence, famine, the slaughter of flocks and the killing hardships of
migration in servere winter were the price paid by the Kurdish tribesmen for the
glory of fighting the jihad for their sultan.
In 1915, the Tyoung Turks, still believing their country to be on the winning
side in the war, confirmed their policy towards the subject peoples of the
Ottoman empire. The Kurdish Emir Bedir-Khan tells of how, hearing of the
plan to transport the Kurds to Western Anatolia and 'Turkify' them, he was
instantly converted from support for the Pan-Islamic movement to Kurdish
nationalism. In March 1018 the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended the Ottomans war
with Russia. By that time the Russian army was a spent force and its conquests
uin Armenia and Kurdistan had been lost to the determined efforts of Mustafa
Kemal combined with the collapse of Russia into revolution. The Turkish empire
came to its end militarily on 31 October1918 when an armistice was sigend with
the British on board H.M.S. Agamemnon in the Aegean. Mustafa Kemal's Turkish
Nationalist party was in power within a year, determined to resist Allied
demands. The National Pact adopted by them as policy declared those territories
not occupied by the Allies on 30 October 1918 to form a whole which did not
permit of division for any reason. British forces, though already occupying most
of what is now Iraqi Kurdistan, took over Mosul town only on 3 November. The
protesting Turks insisted, probably with some truth, that the Kurds there wished
to remain in the Ottoman state.
The Kurds were still loyal to the religious authority of the caliphate and at
this time the secularised étatisme of Kemal lay in the unforeseen future.the
Turks made a great effort to win the confidence of the Kurds during this period.
The National Pact however prefifured the later Government policy denying the
very existence of the Kurdish nationality: the pact declared the areas
unoccupiedon 30 October 1918 to be inhabited by an Ottoman-Muslim majority
united by religionand race. Outside Turkey, Kurdish nationalists had begun, as
soon as the war ended, soliciting for Kurdish statehood, sinking their
differences with Armenians in order to pursue mutual interests. They based their
appeal on President Wilson's Fourteen Points of January 1918, which provided for
an unmolested opportunity for autonomous development for minorities within the
Ottoman empire, and on two similar Anglo-French declarations later the same year.
When British forces were replaced in 1919 by French in Syria and Cilicia, Mosul
remained in the British sphere of influence; but frontier between french Syria
an British Iraq was defined in 1922 and arbitrarily divided Kurdish-populated
Jazirah.
The peace treaty signed at Sévers by the Sultan's government (still recognised
by the Allisies despite the Nationalist majority in parliament) provided for an
Allied commission to draft a scheme of local autonomy for the predominantly
Kurdish area east of the Euphrates, south of Armenia and north of Syria and
Mesopotamia. The Constantinople Government promised to execute the Commission's
decisions and to allow self-government to the Kurds if within a year the
majority of them wanted it and the League of Nations considered them fit for it.
However, there other provisions in the treaty which would have reduced Turkey to
colonies of the major European powers. Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemel the
Turkish Nationalists rejected the treaty signed by the puppet Government, and
the Turkish war independence began. The Turks won and forced the Allies to draw
up the new peace treaty , the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which made no mention of
the Kurds. Mustafa Kemel at that time might easily have thought Turkification
would proceed satisfactorily. A more pressing aspect of the Kurdish problem was
the Mosul question. The Treaty of Lausanne left to be settled later the Turkish
frontier with Iraq which meant, in effect, how much of Kurdistan was to come
under Turkish control. Eventually the league of Nations awarded the Mosul vilayet
to Iraq, but as Turkey did not recognise the League's jurisdiction the matter
was only finally settled by Turkey, Britain and Iraq on 5 June 1926.
The Turks were reluctant to lose the vilayet for several reasons. Among
them were the oil fields of Mosul and the possible threat of nationalist
incitement spreading from the Iraqi Kurds to their fellows in Turkey. The
British had attempted to establish a reliable Kurdish Government in the vilayet
but failed in the attempt. The Iraqi Kurds did not pose a threat to the Ankara
Government; the threat came from the Kurds within the Turkish state.
Write by Derk Kinnane
in 1964