The Turkification Of The Kurds: Genocide As A Tool For Nation Building

By Aare Kurunmi Kakanfo

After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Ataturk, a charismatic Turkish nationalist, wanted to create a Eurocentric, modern, homogeneous, secular Turkish nation. To achieve this, he had some problems with the status of Kurds, Greeks, and Armenians living in strategic regions and border areas in what he and his fellow Turkish nationalists considered the borders of modern Turkey.

What did Ataturk do? He simply went to war and used ruthless war tactics to erase millions of Armenians, Greeks and Kurds in order to create modern Turkey.

I will be focusing on the annexation and Ethnic cleansing of the Kurds in modern Turkey. 20% of the population of current Turkey are ethnic Kurds and it used to be more than that. One of the ideologies of Ataturk which is Kemalism is that any ethnicity apart from Turks found within the borders of modern Turkey must be Turkified.
To achieve this, apart from the use of violence, Turkey did the following to erase the 30 percent Kurds within its post-1918 borders:

1. They banned the speaking of Kurdish language in Turkey.
2. Any ethnic Kurd caught speaking Kurdish language was sentenced sometimes to life imprisonment.
   3.They banned Kurds from giving their children Kurdish names.
3. They started rewriting Kurdish history.
4. Kurdish identity was expunged from the constitution and they were given a new identity which they call “Mountain Turks”.
5. All local radio stations that broadcasted in Kurdish language were banned.
6. Kurdish nationalists who promoted Kurdish music, language, and history were hunted down both at home and abroad.
7. Intraethnic marriage between Ethnic Kurds was frustrated en masse. Ethnic Turks were economically empowered to marry young Kurdish women in order to destroy any form of Kurdish identity.
8. South East and Eastern Turkey where Ethnic Kurds were in the majority were economically sabotaged so that ethnic Turks would be forced to mass migrate into other areas dominated by ethnic Turks.
9. It became a crime for ethnic Turks to give their children Kurdish names.

This was what Turkey’s government did to its 20-30 percent minority population. While Turkey was erasing and wiping out its Kurdish population, it was sending its military into Greek Cyprus to protect the minority Turkish population of Cyprus. The Turkish military fought against the Cypriot government and balkanized Cyprus into two. The reason Turkey gave for invading was that Cyprus wanted to exterminate its Turkish minority but Turkey was wiping out its Kurdish and Armenian minorities. This is a good example of hypocrisy in Geopolitics.

Ethnic Kurds and Ethnic Turks are both Sunni Muslims yet Turkey was genociding them because of ethnic differences. This is a classic example of why Islamic brotherhood superceding ethnic solidarity is a lie from the pit of hell.
This persecution of ethnic Turks was why Kurds created the PKK which was a militant organization meant to protect the Kurdish people from extermination in Turkey.

I hope my fellow Yorubas can learn one or two things from this history as regards how the erasure of culture and use of violence is used to build modern nation-states.