The Kurds and Settlement Policies from the Late Ottoman Empire to Early Republican Turkey: Continuities and Discontinuities (1916–34)

Abstract

This article highlights the continuities and discontinuities between the settlement policies of the late Ottoman state and early Republican Turkey. It argues that although there was a certain degree of evolution in the language employed by the state between the late Ottoman and Republican periods, there is a significant amount of overlap between the policies pursued by the Committee of Union and Progress which seized power in 1913 and the Kemalist regime established in the early 1920s towards the Kurds. In short, the emergence of settlement policies aimed at assimilating the Kurds into the Turkish nation are not an innovation of the Kemalists; it is possible to trace them to the late Ottoman period. This is substantiated through a comparison of two laws relating to settlement; the 1916 “Ordinance Outlining the Transfer and Settlement as well as the Sustenance and Maintenance for Refugees arriving from Conflict Zones” prepared by the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior's General Directorate for Tribes and Refugees and the Settlement Law of 1934, which was implemented in Republican Turkey and which remained on the statute books until 2006.

Notes

¹Hans-Lukas Hieser, Iskalanmış Barış: Doğu Vilayetleri'nde Misyonerlik, Etnik Kimlik ve Devlet 1839–1938, trans. Atilla Derim (Istanbul, 2005), 391.

²Şerif Mardin, “XIX. Yüzyılda Düşünce Akımları ve Osmanlı Devleti”, in Türk Modernleşmesi: Makaleler 4 (Istanbul, 1991), 100–101.

³Reşat Kasaba, “Göç ve Devlet: Bir İmparatorluk-Cumhuriyet Karşılaştırması,” in Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyete Sempozyum: Problemler, Araştırmalar, Tartışmalar (I. Uluslararası Tarih kongresi 24–26 Mayıs 1993–Ankara) (Istanbul, 1998), 337.

⁴Ömer Lütfi Barkan, “Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Bir İskân ve Kolonizasyon Metodu Olarak Sürgünler,” İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 11, no. 1–4 (Ekim 1949–Temmuz 1950): 524–69; Kasaba, “Göç ve Devlet: Bir İmparatorluk-Cumhuriyet Karşılaştırması,” 336–43.

⁵Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Aşiretleri İskân Teşebbüsü (1691–1696) (Istanbul, 1963), 5.

⁶Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Derbend Teşkilatı, Genişletilmiş ikinci baskı (İstanbul, 1990 [1967]), 101–9.

⁷Of course, in a way, this situtation was realized in Abdulhamid II's period (r. 1878–1909) and continued after 1938. In 1893 he stated the following in regard to the issue of the necessity of creating a homogenous society. “The era in which we stabbed the members of alien religions into our flesh like a splinter is behind us. We should accept, within the borders of our state, only those who belong to our nation and share common religious beliefs. We should bring over the excess Muslim population in Bosnia-Hersegovina and Bulgaria and resettle them here on a regular basis. The resettlement not only increases our nation's might but also the economic power of our empire. It is necessary to consolidate Turkish elements in Rumelia and above all in Anatolia. And before everything it necessary to mold the Kurds among us and turn them into an intrinsic part of us. The major mistake of my predessesors, who ascended to the Ottoman throne, was their inability to Ottomanize the Slavic element.” Sultan Abdülhamit, Siyasî Hatıratım (Istanbul, 1999 [1974]), 49. As it can be seen, Abdulhamid II also pursued the “consolidation of the Turkish element” and “the molding of the Kurds” with the objective of turning them into an intrinsic part of the Turks. Moulding Kurds meant nothing more than assimilating them.

⁸Nedim İpek, İmparatorluktan Ulus Devlete Göçler (Trabzon. 2006), 131–2.

⁹See “İskân Kanunu,” Resmi Gazete, no. 2733, June 21, 1934.

¹⁰ T. B. M. M. Zabıt Ceridesi, Devre: IV, İçtima Senesi: III, Vol. 24, 140.

¹¹Şükrü Aslan, “Millet ve İskân: Çokluktan Tekliğe ve Hariciden Dahiliye Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemi Deneyimleri,” in Tarih, Sınıflar ve Kent, ed. Besime Şen and Ali Ekber Doğan (Ankara, 2010), 393.

¹²Apart from the zones outlined in the ordinance, it is also known that Kurdish refugees were sent to Menteşe (Muğla) for settlement. Fuat Dündar, İttihat ve Terakki'nin Müslümanları İskân Politikası (1913–1918) (Istanbul, 2007 [2001]), 152.

¹³BOA. DH. ŞFR. (Prime Ministerial Ottoman Archive, Ministry of Interior, Cipher Office) 63/188.

¹⁴Fuat Dündar, Modern Türkiye'nin Şifresi: İttihat ve Terakki'nin Etnisite Mühendisliği (1913–1918) (Istanbul, 2008), 500.

¹⁵Dündar, İttihat ve Terakki'nin Müslümanları İskân Politikası (1913–1918), 140.

¹⁶The fact that zones were not explicitly made known in the Settlement Law is meaningful. Turkish officials were extremely wary of making public distinctions amongst the Turkish population. However, the report was prepared for use of state officials and not a public document. This illustrates the difference between the language used by officials directed at the public and that used for internal affairs.

¹⁷This region was defined as “140,000 km² wide land which is encircled in the west from the point of confluence of the Çaltı River [between Divriği ve Kemaliye, southeast of Sivas] up to the Syrian border, from the Euphrates and in the north Çaltı confluences up to Mt. Ararat by high and broad mountain chains [Mercan, Cemal, Karasu, Aras mountain chains] and in the east the Iranian border and in the south the Iraqi and Syrian borders.” Dâhiliye Vekilliği, Nüfus Umum Müdürlüğü: Geçen Dört Yılda Yapılan ve Gelecek Dört Yıl İçinde Yapılacak İşlerin Hülâsası (Ankara, 1935), 32.

¹⁸On 14 August 1913 a letter from Malatya was published in the journal Hetawî Kurd (Kurdish Sun) it was emphasized that in the sub-province of Malatya 85 percent of the population spoke Kurdish while 15 percent spoke Turkish. It was also stressed that Turkish was only used in relation to the state. Even though it is not possible to know how far this reflected reality, the fact that Malatya was excluded from the regions set aside for Kurdish settlement and included in regions set aside for the settlement of Turkish refugees, we can conclude that in this period the Turkish culture in this region was weak. Comparing this to the present-day situation in Malatya we can more easily understand the results of cultural destruction. It is also possible to observe this tendency in other settlement zones. “Kürdistan Mektûbları: Malatya”, Hetawî Kurd, 1 (11 Teşrin-i Evvel 1329/ 24 Ekim 1913), 14.

¹⁹Dahiliye Vekilliği, Nüfus Umum Müdürlüğü, 19.

²⁰Ibid.

²¹In an article published in the fifth issue of the newspaper Kürdistan in May 1919, it was emphasized that deportation was not only specific to the Armenians, and that the Ordinance had been specially prepared for the Kurdish refugees. The points in these two articles were given under the twelfth article. It was also emphasized that while the deportation of the Armenians had occurred once, the Kurds had been exiled many times. The forced migration of the Kurds was amongst the issues in which Kurdish intellectuals of the period took special interest. See İsmail Göldaş, Kürdistan Teâli Cemiyeti (Istanbul, 1991), 2: 122; Namık Kemal Dinç, “20. Yüzyıl Kürt Göç Hareketlerinde Birinci Dalga: Kürtlerin Yeniden İskânı ve Kürt Mültecileri Meselesi,” Toplum ve Kuram, no. 1 (May 2009): 211–38.

²²An example of these articles being reflected in the encrypted telegraphs: “In order that the Kurdish refugees will not be able to continue their tribal life and defend their nationality in the places to which they are sent, tribal chiefs must be separated, come what may, from the tribesmen, and amongst them [the tribesmen] whatever influential individuals and leaders there are, they would be sent separately from the tribesmen one by one to the Provinces of Konya and Kastamonu and the the sub-provinces of Niğde and Kayseri.” BOA. DH. ŞFR. 63/172 See Dündar, İttihat ve Terakki'nin Müslümanları İskân Politikası (1913–1918), 271–3.

²³Of course, we do not want to emphasize here that the tribal system is “good,” and is an obstruction to the state gaining control over society. It is a fact that the state also uses conflict amongst tribes as a mechanism of control. The point that we are trying to emphasize is that behind the state's assault on the tribal system is the fact that it is, up to a certain point, an obstacle to assimilation. Some authors have evaluated the objectives of this law as being to promote land reform and end tribalism. For an assessment of this tendency see İsmail Beşikçi, Bilim Yöntemi Türkiye'deki Uygulama: 1, Kürtlerin ‘Mecburi İskânı’ (Istanbul, 1977).

²⁴BOA. DH. ŞFR. 63–187. For this document see: Dündar, Modern Türkiye'nin Şifresi, 502–3. This document reflects the basic logic of a number of encyrpted telegraphs sent to various places in this period. See “Kürtler ile İlgili Belgeler” [Documents concerning the Kurds], in Dündar, Modern Türkiye'nin Şifresi, 494–511.

²⁵BOA. DH. ŞFR. 63/188.

²⁶The continuation of this article is as follows: “It is under the authority of the Minister of Internal Affairs to drive those whose espionage is intuited off the border areas, and to deport the gypsy travellers of foreign nationalities and nomads who are not attached to Turkish culture from the national borders.”

²⁷This article is as follows: “Article: 6—After registering each settled family or individual to file specific to the relevant family history with information about their birth date, port of arrival, date of migration, region, address of residence, age, craft, and members of family, household heads shall be given each a certificate that is in the following form: As a member of the community from the neighborhood of … in the district of … in the county of … in the province of … , the individual named … with his family consisting of … members is temporarily settled in the neighborhood of … in the district of … in the county of … province of.”

²⁸Dündar, İttihat ve Terakki'nin Müslümanları İskân Politikası (1913–1918), 148.

²⁹BOA. DH. ŞFR. 63/187. See Dündar, Modern Türkiye'nin Şifresi, 502–3.

³⁰BCA (Prime Ministry Republican Archives), the document numbered 272.0.0.12/19.93 taken from Dinç, “20. Yüzyıl Kürt Göç Hareketlerinde Birinci Dalga: Kürtlerin Yeniden İskânı ve Kürt Mültecileri Meselesi,” 234.

³¹“Individuals who have been transferred from Zones No. 1 and No. 3 to Zone No. 2, and who have been in Zone No. 2 but transferred elsewhere in accordance with the articles 9, 10 and 11, cannot reside anywhere but the regions where they settled in, even though the requirement for the minimum duration as ten years is fulfilled.”