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by Mark Campbell
Since the establishment of the modern state of Turkey in 1923 out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, the newly formed Turkish state abandoned any idea of granting the sizeable population of Kurdish people, mostly living within the south east borders of the state, autonomy or any rights of self-determination as had been stipulated and provided for in the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres, signed just 3 years before in 1920.
Then, following on from the genocidal campaigns against the Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other Christian minorities living in Turkey, and after the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 establishing the present-day borders of Turkey, Kurds were denied not just their rights of self-determination but the newly formed ‘Kemalist’ government now announced that any non-Turkish citizen of Turkey will be forcibly ‘Turkified’.
Ismet Inönü, one of the founders of the Turkish state, speaking to the Turkish Congress of the Turk Ocakları in 1925 said: “We are frankly nationalist and nationalism is our only factor of cohesion. Before the Turkish majority other elements have no kind of influence. At any price, we must ‘turkify’ the inhabitants of our land, and we will annihilate those who oppose Turks or ‘le turquisme’.”
With this chilling statement of intent, the Turkish state now began a forced assimilation policy against the Kurdish people, who it is estimated make up anywhere between a quarter to a third of the population of Turkey. What followed were massacres on genocidal scales as the Turkish state labelled any Kurd who refused to abide by this new ‘policy’ and forcibly assimilate to be ‘a Turk’, giving up their ancient language, culture and history, as ‘terrorists’ and Kurdish leaders were hung and exiled while thousands of Kurdish villages were burnt and millions of Kurds forced into exile.
This has essentially been the Turkish state’s policy ever since and today Turkey is still destroying towns, bombing villages, criminalising and jailing elected Kurdish politicians and mayors, while still attempting to ‘forcibly assimilate’ the Kurds against their will to ‘be Turks’, and continuing to label any Kurds who do not submit to their will as ‘terrorists’.
These genocidal campaigns were of course also perpetrated against Christian communities who had lived in Turkey and the Pontic Greeks who lived along the coast of the Black Sea for thousands of years. The Greek Pontic community were subjected to genocidal treatment by the emerging Young Turks in the dissolving Ottoman Empire. A total of more than 3.5 million Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians were killed from roughly 1914 to 1923. Of this, as many as 1.5 million Greeks may have died due to massacre or from exposure to the elements. About one million had also migrated, mostly under coercion.
I’m therefore very pleased and honoured to be joined today by Dr Nikos Michailidis, who is an expert and specialist in the region.
Dr Michailidis, originally from Thessaloniki, Greece, has studied Political Science and International Relations at both Panteion University, Greece (B.A) and Boğaziçi University, Turkey (M.A), alongside studying Anthropology at York University, Canada (M.A). He received his PhD in anthropology from Princeton University and did fieldwork research in Trabzon, Istanbul and Ankara.
Dr Michailidis is a sociocultural anthropologist.
His research interests include political anthropology, Hellenic cultural heritage in the eastern Mediterranean, arts and politics, social transformation, collective memory, material culture and exchange, and humans and technology in Greece, USA, and Turkey. He is currently working on his first book which analyses the remaking and revival of listening to Pontian-Greek lyra (Liera) music in contemporary Turkey and its socio-political repercussions.
In our first question, Dr Michailidis looked at Turkey’s expansionist actions and answered the question whether they were simply an election ploy of a dictatorial president losing support ahead of next year’s elections and trying to garner Turkish nationalist votes, or whether these expansionist strategies being followed by Turkey are long-term planned policies and strategies of the actual Turkish ‘deep’ state themselves.
In the second question, Dr Michailidis explored the similarities between the genocidal campaigns against the Pontic Greeks of the Black Sea region and the Kurds in Rojava, looking at the stated plans for demographic population changes as detailed by the Turkish Social Services Minister recently in Adana and also the experience of the people of Afrin and ongoing attacks against the people of North and East Syria.
Finally, the Greek sociocultural anthropologist and expert in the eastern Mediterranean answered the following question: If Turkey have not succeeded in trying to solve the Kurdish question by military means and suppression in one hundred years of the Turkish Republic (in fact the Kurds are arguably stronger now, politically and in terms of awareness of their identity than in any point in history), do you think that Turkey really believe that they can solve the Kurdish question by military means alone or will there have to be a point of realisation that a political solution is needed and how might that come about in your opinion?
Please listen to the whole podcast for Dr Nikos Michailidis’s interesting and insightful replies.
