Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  Atatürk was also determined to reform the language to make it a tongue of pure Turkish, by purging it of its (many) foreign words. Turkish had previously been considered the rough street vernacular of the peasant, inferior to the poetic and often incomprehensible High Ottoman spoken by the elite. But Atatürk was dogged in his drive to ‘bring out the genuine beauty of the Turkish language and to elevate it to the high rank it deserves among the world languages’. First, in 1928, he switched the alphabet from Arabic to Latin. Then he held drinking-table meetings to come up with new words to fill the numerous gaps in the now-stripped-back Turkish language, reportedly keeping a blackboard in his dining room so he could scribble down any ‘Eureka’ moments his guests might have over the entrées. Finally, in 1932, he launched the Turkish Language Society, tasked with sieving away the impurities and moulding what was left into the ideal language.

  In a series of biannual summits attended by the world’s most eminent linguists, the society hammered out a theory of Turkish language based on an obscure academic paper by Dr Hermann Kvergic, which Atatürk had stumbled across and then seized on. The Austrian Kvergic held that the origin of all languages was the primitive noises made by prehistoric man in response to patterns of nature, such as the sunrise. The bit that gripped Atatürk was Kvergic’s note that these sounds formed the bedrock of the Turkish language – therefore handing it, in Atatürk’s mind at least, grounds to claim itself as the wellspring. He melded this idea with the notions outlined in the Outline to claim that the Turks were a people who had travelled west, following the sun to their final home in Anatolia; this was named the ‘Sun Language Theory’. And in conveniently circular fashion, the central claim that Turkish had evolved from the original language of prehistoric man meant that architects of the new Turkish could suck in foreign words when needed, since all foreign languages were ultimately descendants of the Sun Language anyway.

  Archaeology followed history and linguistics. The Ottomans had opened their first archaeological collection in 1846 during an era of Western-inspired reforms, focusing heavily on the Hellenistic era of the ancient Greeks as proof of the empire’s European links. The first projects of the republican era, though, looked for Turkey’s deep past, something that could root the Turks firmly on the land inside their new borders. Focus shifted from the Hellenes to the Hittites, the Bronze Age people who populated much of what is now modern-day Turkey, Syria and Iraq around 1600 BC. That was well before the Seljuk Turks arrived in Anatolia from the east in the eleventh century; nevertheless, researchers were quick to spot evidence of Turkish influence. The Hittite language, which was slowly being decrypted, was claimed to be a precursor of modern Turkish. Scores of sun-shaped trinkets were found at one burial site, adding credence to the idea that the Hittites were the sun-worshipping forefathers of the Turks. Other renderings revealed swastika shapes woven into the designs – more apparent evidence of the Hittites’ Turkish roots, since the emblem had also been found on mosaics in central Asia. There were scores of digs on Hittite settlements around Ankara and through central Anatolia in the 1930s, and many of the Western archaeologists working on these sites were also keen to establish links between their finds and present-day Turkish culture. Eminent American archaeologist Erich Frederich Schmidt, of the Oriental Studies department of the University of Chicago, wrote in 1931:

  The fundamental features of Anatolian houses have not changed very much since these early, long-forgotten people built their houses at the Alishar site [in central Anatolia]. The present Anatolian houses, with their brick walls on stone foundations and their flat-topped roofs composed of beams, layers of branches and mud, may still illustrate the buildings of their predecessors some five thousand years ago.

  Such was the pull of the legend that the Hittite sun was used as the emblem of Ankara from 1974 until 1995, when it was redesigned as a silhouette of a mosque with its lower parts fashioned into a star and crescent. Today, you can find it on the seal of the Turkish parliament and presidency.

  Atatürk’s obsession with finding a link between Turkish blood and Anatolian soil did not grow in a vacuum. The inter-war period was the age when empires were crumbling and nations encouraged to shape their own destinies. In his fourteen-point manifesto for world peace, drawn up in 1918 during the throes of the Great War’s great hangover, US President Woodrow Wilson stated that nations should have the right to determine their own path. But the populations of the nations he explicitly named in his plan were all indigenous to the land they lived on. The Turks, on the other hand, had been scattered across a huge sweep of the world until the implosion of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the war drew them back to Anatolia. At the same time, millions of non-Turks who had lived in Anatolia for centuries had been slaughtered and expelled. No wonder Atatürk felt he had something to prove.

  European Christendom, relieved that the Ottoman Empire was finished, had a vested interest in encouraging the success of Atatürk’s Türkishness project. Sir Denison Ross, a distinguished linguist from London’s School of Oriental Studies (later SOAS), talked with Atatürk about his theory for two hours at a 1936 linguistics conference, and came away saying that the Turkish president had held his own against all his academic attempts to tear holes in his ideas.

  Behind the scenes, though, the thinkers were quickly losing faith in the Sun Language Theory – as, according to some versions of the history, was Atatürk himself. The introduction of the theory at the 1936 conference had been met with incredulity from many of the attending academics, despite Ross’s generous recounting. Kvergic himself was surprised, when he visited Ankara, to learn of the ways his theory had been interpreted. By the time Atatürk died in 1938 the Sun Language Theory was almost completely discredited, and quietly died with him. But its legacy remains.

  ‘What is remarkable is that a large proportion of these new words [created by Atatürk and his linguistics cadre], instead of being regarded as an abstract academic exercise, have been absorbed into the language,’ recorded The Times’s correspondent in Ankara in 1961, twenty-three years after Atatürk’s death. ‘To such an extent has the language been changed that the speeches of Atatürk himself made in the 1920s are today almost incomprehensible to the modern generation.’

  Today the science of genetics can offer fascinating insights into who the Turks actually are – and they are not the people depicted in the Outline. A 2011 study by two American geneticists found that the closest cousins of contemporary Turks are the Jordanians, and that they share more DNA with Britons than they do with central Asians. Another study by a Turkish researcher in 2006 found that central Asian genes make up only 22 per cent of twenty-first-century Turkish DNA.

  Yet the idea of a Turkish bloodline, carried into the modern-day country from central Asia, has not died out: the most dogmatic of today’s Turkish nationalists still believe they are part of a pure race that originated in the steppes of the east. I once sat with two Turks from the Black Sea town of Trabzon, a well-known nationalist hotbed. One was tall, blond and blue-eyed, and had TÜRK in the runic letters of the early Turkic languages tattooed across the back of his neck. The other had just come back from Syria, where he had lost the ends of all the fingers on his left hand in a mortar blast. Such was his belief in the integrity and superiority of the Turkish bloodline that he had volunteered to fight alongside a Syrian rebel militia made up of ethnic Turkmen, a minority who often speak Turkish as their first language. He was short and swarthy, and showed me reams of photos of himself in the war zone, channelling Rambo. In one, he was wearing camouflage, shades and a bandana, flashing the wolf hand-sign adopted by Turkish nationalists with one hand and brandishing a huge knife in the other. I caught glimpses of other photos of him petting kittens as he scrolled through his macho collection.

  Over two hours and many strong teas in a smoky café next to the Bosphorus, the two told me their theories about the common genetics of all Turkic people stretching from western China to Aleppo, and how all should be united in a single s
tate. I wondered whether they had ever stood together in front of a mirror …

  Neither cared much about the broader Syrian conflict; both were horrified, in the classic way of the bigoted nationalist, at the number of refugees who had fled the war into Turkey, some three million by that time.

  ‘Why are they all here and not fighting?’ said the tall one.

  ‘Fighting for whom?’ I asked.

  He didn’t have an answer.

  The war that the shorter man had gone to fight was one of Turkish honour, not Syrian revolution – although the Syrian Turkmen didn’t see it the same way. He had returned from Syria not only minus his fingertips but also with his faith severely dented. The Turkmen were too religious, he said, and not quite Turkish enough for his taste. They had a bad habit of scooping up food from communal dishes using flatbread in the Syrian fashion, and of lapsing into Arabic when they were talking between themselves. Still, he attributed that to their personal failure to stay faithful to their true Turkish roots rather than to the natural mixing and assimilation that the Turkmen had done over their ten centuries among Arabs.

  But though the invaders from central Asia left little of their DNA in Anatolia, their impact on the culture – and language in particular – was colossal. Modern Turks share genetics with their neighbours to the west, but language with their neighbours to the east – an unusual phenomenon, since sets of genes and languages tend to stick together. Various forms of Turkic languages are found in Siberia, western China, the central Asian Stans and the Caucasus, while Azerbaijani is comprehensible (albeit comical) to Turks. Why the Turkic tongue caught on to such an extent in Anatolia even though the people who brought it did not spread their genetics is still not fully known. Maybe it is this lingering insecurity that has made language one of the most violent battlefields in modern Turkey.

  The forbidden language

  Murat Akıncılar slaps a pile of books down on the table. They don’t look much like revolutionary literature. Their covers are a blaze of primary colours: depictions of donkeys, lions and bears. The text inside is big and bold and, although I can’t read Kurdish, it is clear that much of it is written in verse.

  ‘We have collected all the children’s stories, riddles, poems, songs and puzzles,’ says Akıncılar, a linguistic researcher in the Turkish Kurds’ de facto capital of Diyarbakır, as we flick through the glossy pages. ‘Some are in Kurmanji [another of the Kurdish dialects spoken in eastern Turkey], some are in Zaza. We have spoken to eight hundred and fifty-four grandparents in fourteen provinces, thirty-two districts, two towns and seventy-six villages.’

  It is the first collection of folklore in a language that has often had to battle for its survival. Kurdish in its many forms is spoken across a stretch of the Middle East that spans Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, as well as parts of Armenia and Azerbaijan. It shares its roots with Persian, and has picked up influences from all the other languages it lives alongside. In Turkey, it is the mother tongue of between fifteen and twenty million people.

  Yet for many years Kurds were discouraged or outright banned from speaking their language. The first constitution of the independent and internationally recognised Turkey, signed off in 1925, enshrined that all Turks are equal before the law. It guaranteed freedom for any religion, sect, ritual or philosophic conviction – but it also gave strong statements about who a Turk should be. ‘The religion of the Turkish State is Islam; the official language is Turkish,’ it reads. Soon after, we discover that while all citizens over the age of thirty can stand for election to parliament, those who cannot read or write Turkish are ineligible. The oath the president takes has him swearing ‘to contend with all my strength against every danger which may menace the Turkish nation, to cherish and defend the glory and honour of Turkey’.

  The sky-high illiteracy rates at the birth of the republic – estimated by UNESCO to be almost 90 per cent in 1927 – offered an opportunity for the nation builders. Over the coming decades, the Turkish state set up various compulsory literacy classes that taught the republic’s citizens not only how to read and write, but also how to be good Turks. There were also campaigns run by university students against non-Turkish speakers (primarily non-Muslim minorities), and exhortations from Atatürk himself.

  ‘A person who says that he belongs to the Turkish nation, should, primarily and absolutely, speak Turkish,’ he said in one speech. ‘If a man who does not speak Turkish claims his loyalty to the Turkish culture and community, it will not be correct to believe him.’

  The Kurds, as the new republic’s largest linguistic minority, found themselves on the front line. That they were largely Sunni Muslims also meant they couldn’t swerve the Turkification project in the way that non-Muslim minorities could. Meanwhile, the Sun Language Theory proffered its own explanation for Kurdish, claiming that the Kurds were a Turkish tribe who had forgotten their native language because of their geographical isolation in the mountains and close proximity to Persian lands. When the Sun Language Theory was abandoned, its Kurdish aspects were replaced with even more preposterous ideas. In 1948, teacher Mehmet şerif Fırat published The Eastern Provinces and the History of Varto, a cod history that repeated the claims that the Kurds were of Turkish origin. Thirteen years later, it received the seal of approval from the Ministry of Education, who republished it with a ‘fake news’ foreword stating that it was ‘backed up with scientific evidence that cannot be refuted’.

  Also in the 1940s, Fahrettin Kirzioğlu published The Historical Turkish-ness of Kurds, which claimed that the tribes of the east were simply ‘mountain Turks’. It was a thesis that wafted in the winds of ultra-nationalism until 1980, when the army launched the third coup of the modern republic. In 1982, on the orders of the generals, it was adopted as state policy with a law that banned any language apart from Turkish. For the next nine years, Kurds could be arrested for even speaking their mother tongue or giving their child a name that included the letters X, W or Q (which exist in the Kurdish alphabet, but not in Turkish).

  Over decades the Kurdish language went into retreat, particularly in the cities and among more educated circles. Part of this was down to the natural way that minority languages slip into the background as they become less useful for trade and as populations migrate and mingle. But as time went on, the crackdown also became more concerted. Little attention had been paid to clamping down on Kurdish in the first years of the republic. But by the post-coup 1980s, nationalist politicians and journalists worked up such a fury about Kurdish being included as a ‘mother tongue’ on the Turkish census that it was removed altogether.

  It was in this atmosphere that Abdullah Öcalan, a leftist firebrand with only a perfunctory grasp of Kurdish himself, gathered a group of his comrades in a village hall close to the south-eastern town of Lice. It was 1978, Öcalan was twenty-nine years old, and his life had already taken some radical twists. Born on the very edge of Turkey’s Kurdish lands, he had initially planned to become a professional soldier. When his application to staff college was rejected, he instead became a minor bureaucrat and from there applied to university. He was offered a place at Ankara to study political science – but had already begun to delve into the world of militant leftist politics. In Istanbul, where he had worked as a clerk, he joined the Revolutionary Eastern Cultural Hearths, a Kurdish-slanted offshoot of a larger Marxist organisation. In 1972 he was jailed for seven months for handing out fliers for banned groups, and on his release became even more deeply entwined with his extra-curricular activities. His spell behind bars added an outlaw mystique to his natural charisma, and he began to build a personal following. After holding several small meetings in Ankara, he and his band of disciples decided to take their revolution to the south-east.

  Öcalan soon proved to be a ruthless leader, as happy to slaughter his comrades as he was his rivals. Of the twenty-two people invited to the PKK’s inaugural Lice meeting, seven were later killed on Öcalan’s orders; a further five fled from the group after being accused
of treachery, including Öcalan’s own wife. The group made such swift work of launching their campaign of extortion and murder across the south-east that within a year Öcalan was being discussed in the parliament back in Ankara. In 1979 he fled into the open arms of Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, a ruler who depended on the patronage of Soviet Russia and was quick to spot an opportunity to rile NATO member Turkey. From his comfortable new base in the Syrian capital Damascus, Öcalan exhorted tens of thousands of young Kurds back in Turkey to take up arms and die for his cause.

  Over the next three decades an estimated forty thousand people, both Kurds and Turks, perished in the war between PKK and the state. The south-east, always the poorest part of Turkey, remained trapped in poverty, and tens of thousands of Kurds migrated to the cities of the west, where many became estranged from their culture – ironic, since Öcalan’s professed aim was to revive and champion Kurdish traditions. Scores of villages were destroyed in army operations, and the rural population poured into the cities. As hard as the PKK pushed, the Turkish state pushed back harder. It seemed as though south-eastern Turkey had sunk into a cycle of endless violence.

  Erdoğan’s new era

  I took my first trip to south-eastern Turkey in 2013. It was on a whim: I needed a break from Syria and was curious to see Turkey’s Kurdish region. But as I was making my travel plans I realised that Newroz, the spring equinox celebrated by Kurds with huge pyres in the spirit of Bonfire Night (but with fewer safety precautions), was falling on the weekend I would be in Diyarbakır. Even better, the revelries would be the backdrop to the announcement of a new PKK ceasefire – the fruit of Erdoğan’s years of hard bargaining with the group.