Why Does a Kurd Who Demands Rights Get Branded a "Primitive Nationalist"?

Rastinews — One of the most common labels to surface during Turkey's ongoing process has been "Kurdish nationalists." Kurds themselves have used it far more than anyone else. So who applies this label, against whom, and who exactly are these Kurdish nationalists?

Anyone who says the process is being run against Kurdish interests, who argues that Öcalan is acting against or harming Kurdish rights and demands, or who insists Kurds must have formal status — independence, federation, autonomy — gets branded a "Kurdish nationalist."

Looking at who gets labeled makes it easy to identify who is doing the labeling. Those bound to Öcalan by unshakable loyalty under any circumstance, who treat his views as absolute truth and his political line as an order, apply this label to politically active Kurds outside their own ranks.

They are not alone. Various factions of Turkey's left, secular nationalists, and many journalists apply the same label to Kurds outside Öcalan and the PKK who argue that Kurds must have status. Turkish nationalists, for their part, see nothing wrong with calling any Kurd who says "I am a Kurd" a nationalist. It should also be stressed that most of those we call Turkish nationalists are, in reality, racists.

Setting aside whether some or all of those labeled "Kurdish nationalists" are actually nationalists, the real problem lies in the tone of the label, the way it is delivered, and the words attached before or after it. The problem is that the label is usually delivered as an insult. We see people going beyond "Kurdish nationalist" to phrases like "primitive Kurdish nationalists."

Nationalism, in brief, can be defined as an individual's solidarity with the nation they belong to, making rights claims through collective identity, protecting that nation's interests, and defending its sovereignty or independence. The ideology traces its roots to the French Revolution, spread rapidly across the world in the 19th century, and, with the rise of nation-states, shaped the world's political geography and the drawing of borders. But power, organization, and the degree of nation-building determined how those borders were drawn, and not every nation won its independence.

Nations left under the sovereignty of another nation-state have also fought for their rights; some succeeded, while others are still fighting. Many struggles between a minority nation and the state that rules it have turned into armed conflict or civil war. (These cases, and the current state of affairs, will be the subject of another piece.)

Because nationalist ideology includes the desire of people from the same nation to build and remain a shared, independent state, its highest demand is the right to self-determination. Self-determination is often traced to the principles US President Wilson announced at the end of World War I in 1918, yet the word does not actually appear among his Fourteen Points. On the contrary, in a way that legitimized empire, Wilson proposed weighing colonized peoples' sovereignty claims equally against the ruling power's "just claims," and laid out what needed to be done for the peace settlement to follow.

Marx was the first to address the relationship between oppressor and oppressed nations. In his view, the oppressor nation cannot free itself until the oppressed nation is liberated. Building on Marx's writing on the Irish question, Vladimir Lenin, leader of the October 17 Revolution, expanded, detailed, and framed every nation's right to self-determination in a book titled "The Right of Nations to Self-Determination."

This principle is one of the founding tenets of socialist ideology, and defending a nation's right to self-determination is not the exclusive property of that nation's own members — it is an ideological duty for anyone who embraces socialism.

By that logic, defending the Kurds' right to status is not a Kurdish monopoly. Every socialist defends this right, and doing so makes no one a Kurdish nationalist.

The objection labeled "Kurdish nationalism" amounts to opposition to a chauvinist nation-building discourse. Opposing an aggressive, intolerant chauvinism that is built on assimilating non-Turks to impose a dominant identity and that denies rights and freedoms is not nationalism — and even if it were, it would be progressive and revolutionary, because it would be the nationalism of an oppressed nation.

The nationalism of an oppressed nation is a revolt against injustice and inequality. The nationalism of an oppressor nation, by contrast, rests on domination, humiliation, prohibition, and repression, so the two cannot be weighed on the same scale.

The nationalism of the oppressor nation is reactionary and imperialist; it serves the interests of the bourgeoisie and undermines class struggle. In socialist thought, the nationalism of an oppressed nation is certainly not an end in itself — it is a transition toward moving past the bourgeoisie and into class struggle, because nationalism itself is a bourgeois ideology.

Seen through this lens, it becomes easy to identify which kind of nationalism should be rejected.

So what is the disposition of those who use the phrase "Kurdish nationalists" as an insult?

Every organized Kurd who says this describes themselves as a socialist. They claim to be opening a new chapter in socialism, one that will dismantle every form of oppression and exploitation by hegemonic states through communes built in municipalities and neighborhoods. Yet until only recently, these same people were declaring "democratic autonomy" or "self-rule" with weapons in hand, even in places where they could not win 50 percent of the vote.

Everyone from Turkey's left and Turkey's press who uses this label in the same demeaning tone is thoroughly versed in leftist literature — they know these principles far better than we do. That means their use of the insult is conscious and deliberate, carried out with the sensitivity of protecting a different hegemony.

In truth, what deserves criticism is that Kurds are not nationalist enough. For a people who have suffered this much persecution and denial, being nationalist is close to a necessity — it is unavoidable, and even the only remedy against chauvinism.

In a multilingual, multicultural, multi-faith geography where imposing a single, uniform identity was never possible, who gets to set the standard for what counts as a reasonable, acceptable limit on rights claims raised against the chauvinist nation-building that so-called brotherly peoples' nation-states have forced through with sheer obstinacy, at any cost?

If Kurds had already achieved equality, had already secured all their natural rights at the constitutional level, and still insisted on nationalism, then perhaps the criticism would be fair.

For the record, I am not a Kurdish nationalist, and I don't regard that as an accomplishment or a mark of superiority. If anything, it could be seen as a flaw. Because when everything a people values is under attack, when that people is denied — in Frantz Fanon's words — the way to preserve one's own dignity and self-respect is to lay claim to it.

The reason those insulted as Kurdish nationalists voice maximalist demands rests on this: denial is claimed to be over, yet rights are still withheld. There used to be no such thing as a Kurd; now there is, but with no rights. I ask you: which is worse?

Look, being able to ask this question at all shows that acknowledgment without rights can rival denial itself. Isn't that just as humiliating? Isn't that chauvinism too?

(Let me repeat, since it fits here, a point I have made in nearly everything I've written lately: whoever is foul-mouthed, spreads hatred, singles people out as targets, or violates personal rights — whichever side they come from — we must reject that language and that style.)

To my mind, the criterion here is not letting nationalism slide into racism. And indeed, the dominant nation's nationalism is, to a large extent, just racism dressed up and presentable.

Let's not forget that many nations practice nationalism even while holding all their rights. The core motivation behind that nationalism is keeping another nation under the yoke, establishing hegemony, denying and refusing to recognize it — in other words, chauvinism.

French nationalism, for instance, is fierce toward Algeria. Italian nationalism draws its inspiration from Mussolini. Russian nationalists hunger to invade Ukraine and keep the Turkic republics tethered to Moscow. Turkish nationalism, for its part, has sworn to turn the Kurd into a Turk.

Racism largely needs the machinery of the state; it draws support from it. Impunity is the rule, and racist crimes are rewarded. Kurds, for that reason, never had a chance to practice racism in the first place.

What gets labeled "maximalist demands" of Kurdish nationalism stems from despair — despair born of not even being handed a crumb, of arriving at the point of "brotherhood with these people is impossible."

At bottom, it is being forced to give up.

The people sneered at and belittled as "Kurdish nationalists" are the unorganized masses, those speaking from the gut, those grumbling in the unease the process has stirred up, those who have paid a heavy price and been burned by it. Yet they are the ones who still place value on the struggle being waged.

They have been deceived, massacred, imprisoned and exiled more times than can be counted; their very existence has been treated as a burden, and they have simply had enough.

If someone has been branded a separatist and a traitor and subjected to every form of discrimination simply for demanding a right as legitimate as their mother's milk, you cannot then tell them, "be the most level-headed, the most measured, the most careful one here."

Their trust has run out; now it is your turn to earn theirs. If you harbor fears, you created them yourselves, and you cannot expect them to be the one who understands your fear.

So go ahead, extend trust to the Kurd who voices separatist rhetoric, and let's see whether, despite all their pain and wounds, they take the sincere hand held out to them or not.

If you extend a hand while saying, "take it, or we will dig your grave," you are imposing indignity, nothing more.

If one of the process's spokespeople steps forward and ignorantly declares that "Kurds have no tradition or experience of statehood," using it to justify abandoning their theses and demands, they need to be reminded of the following:

The nation-state you're talking about is, after all, a story barely 200 years old.

Throughout that span, Kurds fought. Late nation-building, driven by geographic and sociological circumstance, cannot be a crime deserving punishment.

Local uprisings alone could not forge nationhood; but with a life lost from nearly every household, and at a heavy price, nationhood has, however belatedly, now been achieved.

And you cannot trample over that. You cannot run social experiments on it. You cannot force-feed it fantastical, imaginary political transformations.

You cannot impose ideas that have taken hold nowhere else in the world, as though the Kurd could somehow afford such a luxury.

Once we are equal, I reject every form of nationalism; indeed, as a socialist, I would take an internationalist stance and fight against it myself.

That is why, even though I don't consider it right and would not be one myself, I cannot accuse anyone of practicing Kurdish nationalism, nor can I accept them being condemned in demeaning language.

On the contrary, I grant them their due and respect them; I demand that conditions be created so that they no longer need to do this, and I fight for exactly that.

Because, to my mind, the path to resolving the Kurdish question within Turkey lies in tackling it together with, and intertwined with, the country's broader democracy problems, and in setting demands within a realistic framework.

I believe that once this approach gains traction, the grounds and conditions for nationalism among Kurds will disappear.

But in the process currently being run under an authoritarian regime, it is equally impossible to accept the negative labeling of "primitive Kurdish nationalists" being used as a cover for abandoning demands and theses.