Armenian, Syriac and Kurdish questions should be taken as a whole

22 May 2011, Sunday / E. BARIÅ? ALTINTAÅ?, Ä°STANBUL

Ä°smail BeÅ?ikçi believes Turkey’s economic history should be researched
by scholars willing to investigate the fate of assets left behind by
deported Armenians.

The Kurdish question is inextricably linked to problems faced by
Turkey’s Armenian and Syriac communities in the Southeast in the past,
sociologist Ä°smail BeÅ?ikçi, an expert on the history of the Kurdish
question, has said.

BeÅ?ikçi has been researching the Kurdish question for years and,
although he is Turkish, has spent 17 years in prison after being
convicted for his writings on the subject. Speaking at a panel
discussion on the Kurdish question, where he was the guest speaker, at
an event organized by the Journalists and Writers’ Foundation on
Tuesday, BeÅ?ikçi said the Kurdish question cannot be viewed separately
from the question of Turkey’s Armenian and Syriac communities, who
were driven out of the country, leaving behind their businesses,
banks, agricultural fields and even factories. He said the transfer of
property from these communities, particularly from the Armenians, who
were victims of a forced deportation campaign when the Unionists were
in power at the end of the Ottoman era in 1915, to Kurds in the region
and the aftermath of the mass deportation had unified into a single
problem.

BeÅ?ikçi said the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), who were in
power during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, had extensive plans
to reorganize the empire so as to `Turkify’ it. This also called for
the nationalization of the Ottoman economy, which brought the problem
of what to do with Turkey’s then-sizable communities of Armenians,
Greeks and Alevis. Most of the events that took place at the turn of
the past century, such as a population exchange between Greece and
Turkey, and the deportation and killings of Armenians, which they say
amounted to genocide, took place as part of the CUP and the early
Republic of Turkey governments’ plans to nationalize the economy.
BeÅ?ikçi stressed that the international community had also been
immensely helpful in this plan, which he says still comprises the core
of the state’s official ideology.

Once the new regime did away with its Greeks and Armenians,
transferring their assets to Turkish (Sunni) Muslim and Kurdish
(Sunni) Muslim communities, they had to face the problem of the Alevi
community, which they decided could easily be converted to Sunni
Islam, BeÅ?ikçi said. A similar strategy of assimilation was assumed
for the Kurds, who were allowed to keep the capital, buildings,
livestock, fields and other assets left from the exiled, as long as
they denied their Kurdish identity.

BeÅ?ikçi said Turkey’s Kurdish policy was based on denying the Kurdish
identity and on its destruction whenever possible. The state also
exerted tremendous efforts to make sure that academia and the
political parties of Turkey steered clear of the Kurdish question. The
Turkey Workers’ Party (TÄ°P) became the first party to be shut down
because of the Kurdish problem, when it included that the Kurds should
be given their democratic rights in its party manifesto. BeÅ?ikçi said
the most important challenge for the state was to make sure that a
local Kurdish bourgeoisie could not emerge in the region. `So you can
invest in the south or the west as a Kurdish businessman, and they
will give you all the loans in the world to do that, but you will not
be allowed to open a factory in, say, Diyarbakır or Van,’ BeÅ?ikçi
explained. He said Kurdish people who owned capital were persistently
directed toward the Western provinces. This was to enable further
assimilation. `A local bourgeoisie and Kurdish investments in the
region would keep the Kurds in Kurdistan, which is in violation of the
policy of assimilation,’ he said.

`There are immovable assets left over from the Armenian and Syriac
communities that are under the control of the Kurds. When the
Armenians were forced out and weren’t allowed to return, the state
allowed Kurds to keep their assets. After 1915, Kurds started
migrating from rural areas toward the cities where the Armenians
lived. In fact, today, the source of the Turkish bourgeoisie’s wealth
is Armenian and Greek property, although books on Turkish economic
history never mention this,’ he said.

BeÅ?ikçi said he hoped Kurdish researchers and future generations will
rewrite Turkey’s economic history and investigate the real source of
the wealth in the country, asserting his belief that this would also
help Turkey solve its age-old problems, including the Kurdish and
Armenian questions.