Is Hassan Khari Resurrected?

Omar Sindi | Exclusive to iKurd.net

The Lausanne Peace Conference started on November 20, 1922, with Lord Curzon representing Britain, and Ismat Pasha Inunn representing the newly recognized Turkish state. With help from a Kurdish deputy, Hassan Khari, who was duped by Mustafa Kemal to wear Kurdish clothes in the Turkish Parliament, the message was sent to the Conference that there were no differences between Kurds and Turks.

Inunn was able to convince the Conference that the Kurds did not want to separate from Turkey, and the name of a Kurdish state or autonomy was eliminated from the Conference agendas. However, afterward, Khari was accused of treason by Kemal and executed. Prior to his execution, he asked, “What do you have to advise?” He said, “Put my cemetery near the route, so when Kurds pass by, they can spit on my grave for my treachery…”

“History is not there for you to like or dislike. It is there for you to learn from it. And if it offends you, even better. Because then you are less likely to repeat it. It’s not yours to erase. It belongs to all of us.” – Unknown

Since Donald J. Trump became the President of the United States, international institutions have been at crucial points, perhaps even at breaking point, and they remain incomplete and ineffective when it comes to compromising on subjects that fall under the heading of “internal affairs”—such as the rights of minority peoples and groups around the globe.

“It is spontaneous to entertain the misleading impression of the reality of utopian hope. For people, it’s appropriate to close their eyes against a painful reality, an act of listening to the siren’s poem until they turn into beasts.” People are engaged in a great and difficult struggle for liberty and freedom, the Kurdish people in the Middle East in general, particularly Kurds in Turkey.

From Imrali prison in the Sea of Marmara island, Abdullah Ocalan, the de facto head of the Kurdistan Worker Party (PKK), has called on the PKK to disarm and disband its armed struggle against the Turkish state. Afterwards, the PKK commanders declared a unilateral ceasefire.

However, what is the Turkish state’s counteroffer to respond to the PKK ceasefire, to uplift the over 30 million Kurds in Turkey? President Erdogan’s nationalist ally, Devlet Bahceli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), said, “The Kurdish militant PKK’s jailed leader could be allowed to speak in Turkey’s parliament, if he announces an end to the group’s insurgency, in exchange for the possibility of being released.” – Reuters News.

It appears that Mr. Bahceli’s view, linking the whole Kurdish issue in Turkey to Ocalan’s release from jail, shows that the offer is of empty content and nothing less than the PKK’s surrender without any preconditions.

For example: In Iraq, in the 1960s, there was an armed struggle for Kurdish rights under the leadership of General Mustafa Barzani between the Kurdish peshmerga and various Iraqi regimes in Baghdad. The regime in Baghdad would announce ceasefires with the Kurdish leadership based on recognition points for Kurdish rights, debates, settlements, discussions, and timeframes for agreements.

But the dialogue between the Turkish state and the PKK is nothing less than surrounding and disbanding the party, and you are not welcome in Turkey either. The Turkish state’s policy of labeling terrorism is a lip service excuse; the Turkish state is vehemently against Kurdish liberation movements. In many Kurdish towns and cities in Turkey, elected mayors have been removed and replaced with government appointees.

But there is one thing to bear in mind, by which people’s senses are guided: the weight of experience. There is no way of knowing the future, but the past. And knowing the past, there is a wish to justify what has been in the conduct of occupying forces’ policies by Turkey, the Iranian regime, and the Arab regimes in Iraq and Syria, in Kurdistan, for the last 100 years or more, to justify those hopes with which the Kurds have consoled themselves.

It is a deceptive hope, with which the Kurdish nation’s demand has been received. These occupying forces—Turks, Persians, or Arabs in Iraq and Syria—are not sincere about the status of Kurdish rights, issues, and concerns. Their major armed forces are garrisoned in Kurdish areas.

These forces are not there for entertainment or reconciliation; they have spent an incalculable amount of money to keep these hostile occupations ongoing in Kurdistan for generations. Had these funds been spent on economic progress agendas for their respective citizens’ well-being, it would have had a much more positive impact on economic progress in their respective countries. The attention of these regimes’ policies is to annihilate the Kurds as a nation to exist.

The Kurdish nation has faced genocidal operations, chemical bombardments, ethnographic changes, and demographic shifts. The list of mistreatment toward the Kurds is abhorrent and endless. Kurdish kolbars (porters/laborers) in Iran, due to the country’s poor economy and lack of job prospects, are forced to carry loads of material goods across the Iran-Iraq border in order to make ends meet.

The Iranian regime’s forces have been shooting and killing, injuring, and jailing these unarmed kolbars for years, which is against international law to target unarmed civilians. In Iraq, the Kurdish city of Kirkuk recently witnessed an Iraqi soldier roping a tractor driver’s neck and dragging a Kurdish man out of his seat while he was en route to plough or cultivate his land. In October 2017, when the Iraqi army, with Iranian assistance, took control of Kirkuk by force, an Arab man told a Kurdish man, “Don’t speak Kurdish, speak Arabic.”

The Syrian regime is a history denier, where former Minister Muhammad Talab Hilal, in the 1960s, wrote a baseless thesis claiming that the Kurds in Syria are not from Al-Jazira and denied the very existence of a Kurdish language and ethnicity.

But the Danish writer Carsten Niebuhr, who traveled to Jazira in 1764, recorded five Kurdish tribes (Dakuries, Kkie, Schechanied, Mallie, and Aschetie) and one Arab tribe. At that time, the Syrian regime was not in its inception. The abhorrent thing is that no Arab academic or writer dared to reject Talab’s false writing on the Kurdish issue in Jazira.

Pro-Turkey fighters are looting in the Kurdish of Afrin in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava) — Pro-Turkey Syrian Islamist mercenary militants fighters are looting in the Kurdish of Afrin in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), March 18, 2018. Photo: AFP

In the Afrin area, Arabs have been settled on Kurdish land, and Kurdish olive trees have been uprooted from farms and sold. For Ahmad al-Sharaa and President Erdogan of Turkey, sending jihadists from Chechnya and Azerbaijan, among other places, to fight for them in Syria, Libya, and Somalia is acceptable. But for Rojava Kurds, it is taboo if their brethren from other parts of Kurdistan come to assist them in fending off or repelling foreign invaders who attack them on a daily basis. However, despots will use racism or chauvinism to justify any perceived injustice!

Numerous times, academics, historians, writers, and political pundits have hinted that the hindrance of Kurdish liberation movements is the inherent divisiveness of the Kurds, along with their alliances with outsiders who pit them against each other. In the seventeenth-century Kurdish epic poem Mem and Zin by Ahmade Khani, he laments the curse of disunity:

“These Kurds who have gained glory by their swords,
How is it that they are denied the empire of the world and are subject to others?
The Turks and the Persians are surrounded by Kurdish walls; each time the Arabs and the Turks act, it is the Kurds who bathe in blood.
Ever disunited, ever discordant, they refuse to obey each other…”

In the 1920s, during the Turkish War of Independence, Mustafa Kemal, the Turk, convinced Vladimir Lenin that it was indispensable for the Soviet Union to assist him militarily and economically in his war against British, French, and American imperialism. Even though the Soviets provided substantial economic and military assistance, Kemal duped Lenin and refused to join their camp.

2018: President Erdogan deceived Vladimir Putin into allowing Turkish forces to invade Afrin City in Syria against the Kurdish forces because, at that time, Russia controlled the airspace over the Afrin area…

2019: President Erdogan was able to trick U.S. President Trump into allowing an invasion of another section of Rojava Kurdistan against the Kurdish forces in Syria.

In 2025, President Erdogan of Turkey and his ally, Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the MHP, appear to want to resurrect the Hassan Khari project in an effort to deceive Ocalan and the PKK on the Kurdish issue in Turkey. While it’s too early to predict, only time will tell.

Omar Sindi, a senior writer, analyst and columnist for iKurd.net, Washington, United States.

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.