The State and Kurds in Turkey: The Question of Assimilation (review)

Metin Heper is professor of politics and dean of the Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He has been visiting professor at a number of important universities outside Turkey, including Harvard and Princeton. In this book he addresses one of the most important policy issues facing the state of Turkey. It is particularly timely because of the international interest in the Kurdish issue in several countries of the Middle East. Heper poses a new paradigm for an evaluation of the relationship between the state of Turkey and its Kurdish minority. His main point is that the current state and the Ottoman Empire before it have not used ethnicity as a basis for governance of the Kurdish minority but rather attempted as much as possible to assimilate the Kurds on the basis of a common religion and a shared interest in the Turkish nation.

One of the most telling parts of the book is the preface, in which Heper notes that he became aware of ethnicity only in secondary high school, when he found that one of his schoolmates was Jewish. He uses this and other anecdotes to illustrate his contention that ethnicity is not a major factor in Turkish thinking about other ethnic groups—and this concept plays a vital role in his explanation of relations between the Turkish majority and the Kurdish minority.

The book begins with an excellent description of the policies of the Ottomans toward the several non-Turkish minorities of the empire. Heper details the system of governance of the sultans, noting particularly that both Muslim and non-Muslim communities were allowed a significant degree of autonomy and also were permitted to follow their own cultural and tribal customs. Each of the communities was designated as a millet, or confessional community. This was an important concept and management tool for allowing a degree of autonomy while maintaining the integrity of the empire. Heper often notes that the government of the sultans was inward rather than outward looking. By this he means that attempts to assimilate other communities into the empire were carried out to strengthen the Ottoman nation rather than to try to impose its own culture on unwilling parts of the empire.

The early chapters describe in detail the organization of the caliphate. Among the more important points are (1) the fact that both non-Muslim and Muslim minorities were important members of the Ottoman civil and military services and (2) that the Kurdish tribal leaders were allowed even more autonomy than some of the other communities. Heper does condition his arguments on this point to the effect that some of the practices of the sultans were intrusive, most particularly the "recruitment" (actually abduction) of non-Turkish young boys to assume positions within the government by converting them to Islam and requiring them to learn Turkish.

The second major part of The State and Kurds in Turkey addresses the period of the Republic of Turkey, from 1923 to the present. Much had changed in the period since the sultanate; many of the non-Muslim parts of the empire had become independent. The far-flung entity had become geographically the Turkey of today. So the challenges of dealing with minorities had changed. Despite this, Heper maintains that starting with Ataturk, most political leaders have tried to follow a "civic nationalism" rather than an "ethnic nationalism," the principle that all citizens of Turkey are bound together by a shared culture, not race. Ataturk used the phrase Turkeye Millet (or the Turkish Nation—a concept formerly used to identify communities other than Turk) to emphasize that the nation is one community. Heper has carried out extensive research on the statements of presidents, prime ministers, and other leaders of the republic to make this point.

A second aspect of the policy of the republic was, again following the example of the sultanate, that a...