The Republic of Turkey had an official policy in place that denies the existence of the Kurds as a distinct ethnicity. The Kurds, who are a people that speak various dialects of Northwestern Iranic languages, have historically constituted the demographic majority in southeastern Turkey (or "Turkish Kurdistan") and their independent national aspirations have stood at the forefront of the long-running Kurdish–Turkish conflict. Insisting that the Kurds, like the Turks, are a Turkic people, Turkish state institutions do not recognize the Kurdish language as a language and also omit the Kurdish ethnonym and the term "Kurdistan" in their discourse. In the 20th century, as the words "Kurd" and "Kurdish" were prohibited by Turkish law, all Kurds were referred to as Mountain Turks () in a wider attempt to portray them as a people who lost their Turkic identity over time by intermingling with Arabs, Armenians, and Persians, among others. More recently, Turkey's opposition to Kurdish independence has defined how it has conducted itself throughout the Middle East, particularly with regard to the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
Background
Kurds are Turkey's largest ethnic minority, accounting for 18% of the country's population per Harvard University. Throughout the 20th century, Turkish Kurds faced widespread persecution, with the Dersim rebellion alone having led to the deaths of approximately 13,160 civilians at the hands of the Turkish military in the 1930s. While denying their Kurdish identity, the Turkish government has also sought to Turkify the Kurds with the pretext that they are actually assimilated Turks.
Turkification of Kurds
İbrahim Kafesoğlu claimed that Kurds were not a nation, but a tribe of Turkic, Turanid origin.Türkiye'nin Batılılaşması ve Millı̂ Meseleler, Ercüment Kuran, Mümtaz'er Türköne, 1994, pp. 271Millet ve Millî Birlik Bilinci, Şükrü Kaya Seferoğlu, Hayri Başbuğ, 1985, pp. 37 In 1975, Mahmut Rışvanoğlu, himself an ethnic Kurd from the Reşwan tribe, released a book titled "The Tribes of the East and Imperialism" in which he insisted that all Kurds are Turkic people originating from Central Asia. He alleged that towards the end of the Ottoman Empire, imperialists from both the East and West began "brainwashing" today's Kurds into denying their Turkic heritage; the so-called imperialists declared that Kurds were a completely separate people and part of the “Aryan race” before spreading Kurdish nationalism.Mahmut Rışvanoğlu, Doğu Aşiretleri ve Emperyalizm, vol. 2, İstanbul: Türk Kültür Yayını, 1975
Mehmet Eröz, Doğu Anadolu'nun Türklüğü, Istanbul: Türk Kültür Yayını, 1975 The Outlook, based in New York, in 1925, described Kurds as "Turanian both by race and language".Outlook and Independent - Volume 139 - Page 598 Alexandre Jaba, a consul from the Russian Empire who was posted to Erzurum in the 1850s, met with the Kurdish elder Mela Mehmûdê Bayezîdî and requested him to write summaries on the Kurdish literature, folklore, and society, and to translate the Persian-language Sharafnama into Kurdish. Jaba later compiled the first Kurdish dictionary, and the German linguist Ferdinand Justi wrote the first Kurdish grammar. Around sixty years later, Vasily Nikitin, who was the Russian consul in Urmia between 1915 and 1918, joined the nascent academic discipline of Kurdology.Soane, E. B.; Vladimir, Minorsky (1923). "The Tale of Suto and Tato: Kurdish Text with Translation and Notes". Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies. Cambridge University Press. 3: 69–106. doi: 10.1017/S0041977X00000069, S2CID 162669858
B.P. Nikitine, ‘Les Kurdes racontés par eux-mêmes’, L'Asie française no. 231 (Mai 1925), 148–157
B.P. Nikitine, ‘Kurdish stories from my collection’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 4 (1926), 121–138
Les Kurdes, étude sociologique et historique, Paris: Klincksieck, 1956 Vladimir Minorsky, who began his career as a Russian diplomat, began writing articles in the Encyclopaedia of Islam about the Kurdish people and Kurdistan.V. Minorsky, ‘Kurdistan’ and ‘Kurds’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, Rışvanoğlu is noted for having expressed a dislike for Minorsky and often referred to encyclopedias as "imperialist tools" in an obvious reference to Minorsky's studies. He often accused Minorsky and other Orientalists of being “Turkophobes” by researching the independent Kurdish identity. In the British Empire, on the other hand, there were also diplomats and academics who wrote about the Kurds and established a presence in Kurdistan. Mark Sykes, Ely B. Soane, Edward Noel, and Cecil J. Edmonds were especially active in highlighting the political and societal differences separating Iraqi Kurds from the Turkish nation.E.B. Soane, To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise, C.J. Edmonds, Kurds, Turks and Arabs. London, Oxford University Press, First Edition, 1957 Noel personally travelled across Kurdistan in 1919 to see how committed to nationalism the Kurdish tribes were. For his part, Rışvanoğlu never denied his Kurdish ethnicity and identity, but that every Kurd was Turkic instead of Iranic, as is commonly understood in mainstream academia.Rışvanoğlu, Doğu ve Emperyalizm, pp 69–70, 186–8.
The Turkish nationalist Mehmet Eröz claimed that the Kurds, like the Azeris and the Turks, originated from the Oghuz Turks and therefore could not qualify as a completely distinct ethnicity. Eröz claimed that the word "Kurd" (Turkish: Kürt) was found on the Turkic Elegest inscription and that it specifically referred to Kurds and also stated that "Kurdish Turks" would be the proper terminology to describe Kurds in Turkey.Eröz, Doğu Anadolu’nun Türklüğü, p. 13
Both Eröz and Rışvanoğlu compiled words from Old Turkic that they found in modern Kurdish dialects, and in which they developed a theory that claimed that despite the Kurdish language being influenced by the Iranic languages over time, many elements that were unique to the so-called "Kurdish Oghuz language" have survived in their modern language.
A Turkish prosecutor at a court in 1971, speaking about the issue of Kurdish separatism in Turkey during a trial against members of the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party/Front, went on to make statements about the various Kurdish languages and dialects and stated that "there is no doubt that Kurdish is a Turkic language, just like Yakut or Chuvash. It is not immediately recognizable as such because our racial brothers have, for centuries, had contact with Arabs, Armenians and Persians, which has destroyed the purity of their language."“İddianame” (Indictment), in Devrimci Doğu Kültür Ocakları Dava Dosyası, Kalite Matbaası, 1975, pp. 15–25 This claim is similar in nature to the one that alleges that the Persian-speaking Hazaras, who inhabit modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, are a Turkic people who had their language heavily Iranicized while retaining some Turkic elements.Martínez-Cruz, Begoña; Vitalis, Renaud; Ségurel, Laure; Austerlitz, Frédéric; Georges, Myriam; Théry, Sylvain; Quintana-Murci, Lluis; Hegay, Tatyana; Aldashev, Almaz; Nasyrova, Firuza; Heyer, Evelyne (2011). "In the heartland of Eurasia: the multilocus genetic landscape of Central Asian populations". European Journal of Human Genetics. 19 (2): 216–223. . . PMC 3025785. PMID 20823912. Our study confirms the results of Li et al's study that cluster the Hazara population with Central Asian populations, rather than Mongolian populations, which is consistent with ethnological studies. Our results further extend these findings, as we show that the Hazaras are closer to Turkic-speaking populations from Central Asia than to East-Asian or Indo-Iranian populations.
Whereas Ziya Gökalp an ethnic Turk, he did not contribute nor place importance on the theory of Kurds being a Turkic people, and believed that Turkishness is a matter of choice and dedication, not descent or background.Rohat Alakom, Ziya Gökalp'in Büyük Çilesi Kürtler, pp. 74–75, Avesta Yayinlari (January 1, 2018),
Mehmed Şükrü Sekban, a Kurdish medical doctor from Ergani who worked in Sulaymaniyah in modern-day Iran, was likely the first person to publish an entire book that asserts that all Kurds are originally Turkic. The book was titled "The Kurdish Question: On the Problems of Minorities" and written in French in 1933 before being translated to Ottoman Turkish two years later.Dr. Chukru Mehmed Sekban, La question Kurde: des problèmes des minorités. Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1933 Sekban was originally a Kurdish nationalist who later renounced Kurdish nationalism and began research in which he proclaimed that Kurds were ethnically related to Turks, and suggested that it would be best for both of them to form a singular political community. He claimed that the Kurds had migrated to the West Asia much earlier than other Turkic people did and significantly intermixed with the local Iranic-speaking peoples, and had their Oghuz Turkic language heavily changed after being dominated by the Medes. Sekban further stated that Kurds were not direct descendants of the Medes, nor were the Medes Kurdish, and that these were all empty claims made by Kurdish nationalists.Şükrü Mehmed, "Kürdler Türklerden Ne İstiyorlar?", pp. 26–39, Ahmet Arvasi, in support of Sekban's claims, asserted that the Kurds indeed constituted part of the Turkic nation and that any claims of distinctness were based on false claims by foreign imperialists in order to divide the Turks. He also claimed that before the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Kurds referred to themselves as Kurds while knowing they were part of the Turkic people.Doğu Anadolu Gerçeği, Türk Kültürünü Araştırma Enstitüsü y., 1986, pp. 52.
Arvasi also claimed that Kurds are not descendants of the Medes, Gutians, Corduene, or Merwanids, and that "Kurd" as an ethnonym was never mentioned in the languages of these nations. Arvasi claimed that the etymology of the ethnonym "Kurd" comes from words in various Turkic languages which refer to snow, such as "Kürt" in Kazakh and Chuvash, "Kört" in Kazan Tatar, "Körtük" in Uyghur and Kyrgyz, all meaning "heavy snow drift", as well as "Kürt" in the Taranchi language meaning "freshly fallen snow". Arvasi also claimed that the term "Kurdistan", created by Ahmad Sanjar of the Seljuks, meant "mountainous land which heavy snow fell on". He also stated that before the imperialists began coming to the Ottoman Empire, there was never a distinction between Kurds and other Turkic people, and that the term Kurdistan was used by everyone to refer to lands where Kurds lived, without separatist or negative intentions. He accuses imperialists of having designed a Kurdish nationalism in which was specifically designed to convince Kurds that they aren't Turkic, as well as falsifying Kurdish history and origins.
Şerif Fırat's "History of Varto and the Provinces of the East", became a very popular book. Fırat was a Zaza Alevi tribal chief of a branch of the Hormek tribe. In 1925, his branch of the tribe had helped crush the Sheikh Said revolt. Fırat's book mentioned stories that were passed down from generation to generation, found among other Alevi tribes as well, which mentioned that all Alevis originate from Khorasan. Fırat writes that his ancestors had lost their Turkic language after living with the Iranic Zazas, who are also Turkic but had migrated from Khorasan to Anatolia much earlier. Fırat also claimed that every Kurdish tribe is genuinely Turkic, whether in Turkey, Iran, Iraq or Syria, or anywhere.M. Şerif Fırat, Doğu İlleri ve Varto Tarihi, Kardeş Matbaası, 1970