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The Kurdish question is inextricably linked to problems faced by Turkey’s Armenian and Syriac communities in the Southeast in the past, sociologist İsmail Beşikçi, an expert on the history of the Kurdish question, has said, reports Today’s Zaman.
Beşikçi has been researching the Kurdish question for years and, although he is Turkish, has spent 17 years in prison after being convicted for his writings on the subject. Beşikçi said the transfer of property from these communities, particularly from the Armenians, who were victims of a forced deportation campaign when the Unionists were in power at the end of the Ottoman era in 1915, to Kurds in the region and the aftermath of the mass deportation had unified into a single problem.
Beşikçi said the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), who were in power during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, had extensive plans to reorganize the empire so as to “Turkify” it. This also called for the nationalization of the Ottoman economy, which brought the problem of what to do with Turkey’s then-sizable communities of Armenians, Greeks and Alevis. Most of the events that took place at the turn of the past century, such as a population exchange between Greece and Turkey, and the deportation and killings of Armenians, took place as part of the CUP and the early Republic of Turkey governments’ plans to nationalize the economy. Beşikçi stressed that the international community had also been immensely helpful in this plan, which he says still comprises the core of the state’s official ideology.
Once the new regime did away with its Greeks and Armenians, transferring their assets to Turkish (Sunni) Muslim and Kurdish (Sunni) Muslim communities, they had to face the problem of the Alevi community, which they decided could easily be converted to Sunni Islam, Beşikçi said. A similar strategy of assimilation was assumed for the Kurds, who were allowed to keep the capital, buildings, livestock, fields and other assets left from the exiled, as long as they denied their Kurdish identity.
Beşikçi said Turkey’s Kurdish policy was based on denying the Kurdish identity and on its destruction whenever possible. The state also exerted tremendous efforts to make sure that academia and the political parties of Turkey steered clear of the Kurdish question. The Turkey Workers’ Party (TİP) became the first party to be shut down because of the Kurdish problem, when it included that the Kurds should be given their democratic rights in its party manifesto. Beşikçi said the most important challenge for the state was to make sure that a local Kurdish bourgeoisie could not emerge in the region. “So you can invest in the south or the west as a Kurdish businessman, and they will give you all the loans in the world to do that, but you will not be allowed to open a factory in, say, Diyarbakır or Van,” Beşikçi explained. He said Kurdish people who owned capital were persistently directed toward the Western provinces. This was to enable further assimilation. “A local bourgeoisie and Kurdish investments in the region would keep the Kurds in Kurdistan, which is in violation of the policy of assimilation,” he said.
“There are immovable assets left over from the Armenian and Syriac communities that are under the control of the Kurds. When the Armenians were forced out and weren’t allowed to return, the state allowed Kurds to keep their assets. After 1915, Kurds started migrating from rural areas toward the cities where the Armenians lived. In fact, today, the source of the Turkish bourgeoisie’s wealth is Armenian and Greek property, although books on Turkish economic history never mention this,” he said.
Beşikçi said he hoped Kurdish researchers and future generations will rewrite Turkey’s economic history and investigate the real source of the wealth in the country, asserting his belief that this would also help Turkey solve its age-old problems, including the Kurdish and Armenian questions.