The dominant countries which have dominated Kurdistan have tried to oppress Kurds, their land, and even their thoughts, signs, or their symbols historically. However, all these countries have not faced the Kurds in the same way. Some of them oppressed Kurds in subtler ways while others did this in the most brutal way possible. In some cases, they did not just kill the Kurds directly but they also denied the Kurds’ existence and their historical identity completely. One of these brutal systems is modern Turkey which was pioneered by “Mustafa Kamal Ataturk”. Ataturk’s government was the result of all the changes that had happened in the area after World War II. Based on the documents on this, the intellectuals of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in the Islamic countries concluded that in order to move past the old, corrupted system of proceeding governments, they needed to build secular governments. So they would get rid of big terms like Islamic “Ummat” (nation). This word implies a kind of unifying, and assimilation. All the national, language, culture, and customs of a wide geographical area were covered under the name of Ummat and the differences in language or culture would not be considered. Even the languages were about to die gradually due to Arabic language hegemony. The intellectuals of the Islamic geography understood the negative effects of such a situation thus they decided to help build a new kind of society and governmental form in which every culture could appear in their own place.

In Europe, such circumstances had been tried before and they had gained a part of their political and social goals by establishing nationalism and building distinct “State Nations”. In the Middle East and West of Asia apart from the freemasons’ institutional activities, independent intellectuals also were playing their role. These attempts resulted in pioneering many national governments including “Aman Allah Khan” in “Afghanistan”, “Reza Khan Pahlavi” in “Iran” and “Ataturk” in “Turkey”. Although each of these State Nations had its own differences, in the end, two of them influenced Kurds’ lives and death directly. Both Reza Khan Pahlavi’s government in Iran who wanted to achieve the ancient Persian nationality tried its best to remove the Kurds completely and also the national government of Ataturk took a step further and tried to genocide Kurds and he planned to erase the Kurds’ nation completely. He began to carry out this plan immediately.

At first the “Kamalists” established their ideology under the name of Kamalism or Ataturklouk. Based on this ideology, Turkey was supposed to be re-established on what was left of the “Ottoman Empire”. What Kamal Ataturk did here include some projects that were supposed to be improvements in different parts. What Ataturk did as developmental acts were also carried out in Iran by Reza Khan which will be discussed separately. Political, cultural, religious, and linguistic improvements had to be carried out.

Ataturk wished to erase the Ottoman traces on modern Turkey. His developmental plans in economy and policy were somehow inspired by the Western countries in order to modernize the new Turkey. While the “Ottoman Empire” was known as “Europe’s old man”, Ataturk wanted to make a young Turkey by the Turkish youth. In order to do so he had to remove religious heritage in Turkey. Before Ataturk, the Ottomans had Istanbul as the center of the Islamic world Calafat. What Ataturk wished was to establish a secular government in which religion is not a part of the governmental system. He wanted to gain the Western world’s attention by carrying out such plans. On the other hand, he encouraged nationalism to create a nationalistic notion among the Turks. He also applied election principles to develop a kind of democratic election system which was not popular before. However, nationalism in Turkey had a different meaning rather than the true meaning of this political term. In Turkey nationalism meant “Turkism” and removing all the other languages and cultures, from removing Armenians to the biggest problem of Turkey’s government; the Kurds. 

Ataturk ordered to forbid using any language except for Turkish. This subject became the basic subject in Turkey and all the parties except for the left parties supported this claim that Turkey is in fact the land of one language and one nation that is the Turks and Turkish language and if anyone speaks or writes in a different language will be punished. For instance, although the Armenians were not totally denied, they were not allowed to speak in their own language. The situation for Kurds was much more severe than this. Not only Kurdish people were not allowed to talk in their own language but also their language, their nationality, and a land called Kurdistan were basically denied. Kurdistan became the east part of Anadolu and nobody could ever mention the word Kurdistan and their nationality was denied. They were called mountainous Turks who had forgotten Turkish and according to the resources Ataturk himself organized linguistic institutions and organizations in Turkey to rebuild the language. First of all, these institutions began to change the Turkish alphabet from the Aramaic alphabet which was considered to be Arabic heritage to Latin so that they could follow the modernization process much better. They also hired hundreds of racist teachers to work in the east of Anadolu (Kurdistan) to supervise the process of education and develop the Turkish language at schools. They also were allowed to observe the mountainous regions and prevent the Kurdish language to be used and ridicule this nation who had always been living in this vast land.

If the Turks had begun the ethnic genocide of the Armenians and wanted to wipe them out completely on Turkish land by mass killing them, the problem for the Kurds, who numbered tens of millions, was different. They knew that the Kurdish nation, which had previously had several revolutionary leaders such as Sheikh Obaidullah Nahri, Sayd Reza Dersim, Sheikh Saeid Piran, etc., had many high-ranking officials in the institutions of the Ottoman state, and their experience of empire and rule dates back to ancient times, they could not carry out their ethnic genocide, so they resorted to a more dangerous way: cultural and linguistic genocide. In this way, over the past hundred years, although they have not been able to eradicate the Kurdish language completely, they have reduced the number of Kurdish speakers and dealt a severe blow to Kurdish culture and language in North Kurdistan. They have followed the same policy towards the Kurds at the international level, which we will discuss in detail in the next part by giving an interesting example, we will show how the racist Turks have denied the existence of the Kurds internationally and how their trick was exposed by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.