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obstacles that exist. The Zaza language has just been a written language in
about fifteen years. Our language belongs to the Indo-European family. About
3-4 million people in foremost southeast Turkey speak the Zaza language.
The index contains all
issued edition of the magazine ZazaPress. The first number of the magazine came
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Zazaki: It´s position among
western-Iranian languages
By Paul Ludwig (html) and (pdf)
A Grammar of Dimili
By Terry Lynn Todd
The Identity of Hewrami Speakers
By Amir Hassanpour
The Debate on the Ethnic Identity of the Kurdish
Alevis
By Martin van
Bruinessen
Dynamics of the Kurdish &Kirmanc-Zaza Problems in
Anatolia
By Paul White
Book reviews: Grammatik der Zaza-Sprache
By Geoffrey Haig
Poems by Faruk Íremet
Poems by Susanne Ayata
The Zaza Flag
By Jaume Ollé
Notes on some religious customs and institutions
By G.S.Asatrian and
N.KH.Gevorgian
A Panorama of Indo-European Languages
By Albert Von le Coq
Gorani and Zaza
By W.B.Lockwood
A joint work by Oskar Mann and Karl Hadank
By Internationale
Presse-Korrespondenz
The difference between Zaza, Kurdish and Turkish
By
Faruk Íremet
ZAZAKI - ITS'
POSITION AMONG WESTERN-IRANIAN LANGUAGES
By:
Ludwig Paul
Zazaki is
a West Iranian language spoken in Southeast Anatolia, northwest to the Kordi
(Kurdish) speaking regions, by approx. 2 Mio. Since the beginning of the 20th
century Zazaki has been accepted as a language of its own among linguists[1],
and not any longer merely as a Kordi dialect. Nevertheless until recently the
Zaza people were generally held to be Kurds speaking a special dialect of
Kordi. Due to the oppressive minority and language policy of the Republic of
Turkey, until 15 years ago there existed practically no indigenous Zazaki
written literature, and so no means by which the Zaza people could find out
anything about their own language and cultural identity[2].
Only
after the military coup d‘ état of 1980 and the following emigration of Turkish
leftists, many of them Kurds, to countries of Western Europe the publication in
Zazaki started in the exile - then still under the label "Kordi
dialect". In 1984 AYRE („mill"), the first exclusive Zazaki journal,
was published by the pioneer of Zaza nationalism Ebubekir Pamukçu (d. 1993).
Considered an outsider among the Zaza, or even a „Turkish agent" trying to
split off the Zaza from their Kordi sister people, Pamukçu finally saw some
fruits of his labour when in the early 90ies a stronger awareness of an own
cultural identity started gaining a foothold among the speakers of Zazaki. At
present the further development of Zazaki language and culture is endangered by
the Turkish policy of „purifying" Eastern Anatolia of its indigenous Kordi
and Zaza population, as well as by the long-standing process of forced and
unforced assimilation (to Turkish and Kordi). As moreover there is even
religious and political discord among the Zaza, it is far from certain whether
the „making of the Zaza nation" will reach a successful conclusion.
Although
the history of Zazaki studies is already 140 years old, we still lack a
comprehensive grammar of even one of its dialects, and a reliable survey of its
dialectology[3]. During the last four years I have, preparing my PhD thesis,
which is intended to supply this want. In what follows, I will first give an
outline of the historical phonology of Zazaki, and then sketch a couple of its
morphological features –whith the aim, in both cases to determine more
precisely than has been done hitherto the position of Zazaki among West Iranian
languages and dialects. First attempts at achieving this aim have been made by
Vahman and Asatrian recently[4].
The West
Iranian languages and dialects are generally divided into a Southern and a
Northern group. Already in the Old Iranian period the sound system of Old
Persian (OP), the language of the Royal Achaemenian Court centered in Southern
Iran, showed specific historical changes opposing it to the more conservative
Avestan language (Av.) spoken at about the same time. In the Middle Iranian
period this division became more distinct as Middle Persian (MP), the successor
to Old Persian spoken in southern Iran, showed further sound changes not shared
by the still more conservative northern Parthian (Pth.). Most of the dialectal
distinctions attested in Old and Middle West Iranian, and some more in
addition, are found in modern West Iranian languages and dialects as well.
Although there are a couple of well-defined phonetic laws seperating the
southwest from the northwest, it must be said that there is, in all historical
stages, a varying amount of interdialectal borrowing whichs blurs the picture;
furthermore, due to migrations in all periods, the SW/NW-distinction does not
for all languages coincide with the geographical reality of today[5]. One major
aim of this paper is to show that the NW/SW-distinction is not a clear-cut, but
should rather be explained in terms of graduation, with each language
attributed its position on a scale ranging from the „most north-western"
to the „most southwestern". To facilitate comprehemsion of this study, a
simplified list of the most important West Iranian languages and dialect groups
is given below, together with the sketch of a map indicating their geographical
location (fig. 1)[6]:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] See O.
Mann, Mundarten der Zaza, hauptsächlich aus Siwerek und Kor (Kurdisch-Persische
Forschungen, Abt. III, Bd. IV), ed. K. Hadank, Berlin 1932, p. 18.
[2] „Zaza"
denotes the people, „Zazaki" their language. There are other names for
this language used by its speakers, e.g. „Dimlî" or „zonê mâ" (lit.
„our language"), but „Zazaki" seems to have gained widest acceptance
in scientific publications.
[3] The
nearest thing to a comprehensive grammar of a single Zazaki dialect published
so far is T. L. Todd‘s A Grammar of Dimilî (also known as Zaza), Ann Arbor
(UMI) 1985.
[4] F.
Vahman and G. S. Asatrian, Gleanings from Zâzâ vocabulary, Iranica Varia,
Papers in honour of Ehsan Yarshater (= Acta Iranica 30), ed. J.
Duchesne-Guillemin, Leiden 1990, pp. 267-275; and G. S. Asatrian, Ešçe raz o
meste Zaza v sisteme iranskyx jazykov, Patma-banasirakan handês 1990/4, Erevan,
pp. 154-163.
[5] E.g.
„northwestern" Balûòî is spoken in the SE, but „southwestern"
[N.]-Tâtî in the NW
[6] The
NW/SW-dichotomy is also a simplification (and will be questioned below). The
dialect grouping followed here corresponds in general to that proposed by P.
Lecoq in his articles dealing with NWIr. dialects in R. Schmitt (ed..) Compendium Linguarum
Iranicarum (Wiesbaden 1989) (=CLI). Some of the dialects groups are more or less
geographical and by no means uniform (esp. the CD), nevertheless this grouping
seems to be a justifiable compromise for the moment.
The
linguistic material concerning the modern dialects in this paper is mainly
(unless otherwise stated) taken from the following sources.
Caspian:
M. Pâyande-Langerûdî, Farhang-e Gîl va Daylam (Teheran 1987);
Semnânî:
A. Christensen, Contributions à la dialectologie iranienne II (Copenhagen
1935);
H
Homâdoxt, Gûyeš-e Aftarî (Teheran 1992); Central D.:
A.
Christensen, Contributions à la dialectologie iranienne [I] (Copenhagen 1930);
O. Mann, Die
Mundarten von Khunsâr, Mahallât, Natänz, Nâyin, Sämnân, Sîvänd und Sô-Kohrûd
(Kurdisch-Persische Forschungen, Abt. III, Bd. I, ed. K. Hadank Berlin 1926);
M. Moqaddam, Gûyešhâ-ye Vafs va âštiyân va
Tafreš (Teheran 1949); Tâlešî: B. V. Miller, Talyšskij jazyk (Moskau 1953);
L. A. Pirejko, Talyšsko-russkij slovar’
(Moskau 1976);
G. Lazard, Le dialecte Tâlešî de Mâsûle
(Gîlân)', Studia Iranica 7/2, 1978, pp. 251-268;
Âzarî: E.
Yarshater, A grammar of Southern Tati dialects (The Hague 1969);
Y. Zokâ, Gûyeš-e
Keringân (Teheran 1954), and Gûyeš-e Galîn-qaya („Harzandî") (Teheran
1957);
Zazaki:
from my forthcoming PhD thesis; Gôrânî: D. N. MacKenzie, The dialect of Awroman
(Kopenhagen 1966);
Kurdish:
D. N. MacKenzie, Kurdish dialect studies I (London 1961).
A Grammar of Dimili
Av. Terry
Lynn Todd
Dimili is an Iranian
language, part of the Indo-Iranian subgroup of Indo-European. It is spoken in
central eastern Turkey by perhaps as many as one million people. The Turks and Kirmanji
Kurdish speakers around them call the language Zaza which has pejorative
connotations (Mann-Hadank, 1932:1). The most important analysis of the language
is based of fieldwork done in the first few years of this century by Otto Mann
whose notes were edited and published posthumously by Karl Hadank (Mann-Hadank,
1932).
Prior to Hadank, Peter
Lerch (1857:49-87) had published some forty pages of Dimili texts along with
some Kirmanji texts but no grammar was attempted and his translations are not
believed to be accurate. A few years later Friedrich Müller attempted an
analysis of Dimili based on Lerch's texts but achieved little more than a
comparison of some Dimili words with cognates, mostly in New Persian. In 1862
W. Strecker and O. Blau published less than 100 words reportedly from the
vicinity of Quziljan in the mountainous Dersim area of central eastern Turkey.
Blau concluded that it was a dialect very similar to the one which Lerch had
recorded. Albert von Le Coq (1903) published two volumes of texts from the
"Cermuk/Kosa" area near Siverek, Turkey. Volumes which unfortunately
were not available for the present research. Again no grammatical sketch was
attempted.
Mann's fieldwork and
Hadank's careful analysis of Mann's notes have long been recognized as
extremely valuable andscholarly works. Of particular significanse are the
historical, cultural, and folkloristic contributions, the detailed comparisons
of vocabulary with other Iranian and non-Iranian languages and the treatment of
syntax which far surpassed that of most grammars of that era. Their work was
also ramarkable for the careful separation of various dialects of Dimili: the
greatest description was of the dialect spoken in Siverek accompanied by 35
pages of texts, individual sentences and their translations. But a contrastive
sketch of the dialect of Kor was included as well as 10 pages of vocabulary of
the Bijaq dialect, 25 pages of analysis and vocabulary of the Chabakhchur (Bingπl) dialect and 16 pages of analysis,
vocabulary and texts of the Kighi dialect.
To the credit of Mann and
Hadank, the present research confirms that their work is remarkably trustworthy
and insightful. Their research attests virtually all of the forms found in the
present corpus plus a few which do not occur in the present corpus. Their
interpretation of those forms is occasionally inadequate but that is primarily
due to the linguistic time period in which the description was done.
Their research was done
early in the development of modern linguistics and since that time linguistic
research in the Dimili speaking area has not been encouraged. Our experience
with grammars written in that era has made us cautious about taking them as
accurate and definitive. Wherever possible modern linguists have sought to do
new fieldwork to substantiate the older grammars, to extend our understandig of
the languages described and to describe them in terms that reflect more recent
insights into linguistics in general.
For Dimili that effort has
been hindered by the fact that their area has been under martial law almost
continuously since the 1920's and serious linguistic research has not been
permitted (MacKenzie, 1960:xvii). Windfuhr (1976) complited from Mann-Hadank
the more important details that can be drawn from that work and sketched a
"Mini-Grammar of Zaza" that consists of a brief historical survey of
the scholarship and a sixteen page structuralist abstract. The mini-grammar
unfortunately remains unpublished but it was graciously made available for this
research.
Mann concluded
(Mann-Hadank, 1932:19) that Dimili is not a Kurdish dialect and Hadank
concluded (1932:4) that the name Dimili is most likely a metathesis
"Daylemî", i.e. the language reflects that of the Daylamites who came
from an area called Daylam on the south coast of the Caspian and who were often
distinguished from the Kurds in medieval references. Dimili speakers today
consider themselves to be Kurds and resent scholarly conclusions which indicate
that their language is not Kurdish. Speakers of Dimili are Kurds psychologically,
socially, culturally, economically, and politically. It is quite possible,
especially since the term Kurd has always been ill-defined (MacKenzie,
1961b:69), that speakers of Dimili should be identified as Kurds today.
The language, however, is
distinct from Kurdish dialects. MacKenzie (1961b) attempted to define Kurdish
by citing elements that were common to all Kurdish dialects that distinguished
them from other Iranian dialects. Refering to the fact that historic /-sm/ and
/-xm/ have become /-v/ or /-w/ in Kurdish and the retention of /.-/ in the stem
of the verb 'go', he says, "In short, apart from this /.-/ and the
treatment of /-sm/ and /-xm/, I can find no feature which is both common to all
the dialects of Kurdish and unmatched outside them." (1961b:72) Those
features are not shared by Dimili. Tedesco (1921:199) based on Lerch's texts
classified Dimili as a central dialect. Kurdish he classified as north-western
(1921:198). See also Windfuhr's comments (Azami and Windfuhr, 1972:13) and distribution
maps (Azami and Windfuhr, 1972:198-990 regarding the development of /*fr-/ into
/hr-/ and the present indicative based on the old present participle in /-and/
which Dimili shares with other dialects.
(.....)
Amir
Hassanpour
Research Associate
Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
The Identity of Hewrami Speakers:
Reflections on the Theory and Ideology of Comparative Philology
Published in:Anthology of Gorani Kurdish Poetry
Compiled by A. M. Mardoukhi, Edited by Anwar Soltani
London, 1998, ISBN 0 9529050 00
The
European authorities generally maintain that Gorani [Hewrami] is not Kurdish
and that the people who speak it are not Kurds; but the people themselves feel
themselves as Kurds in every way (Edmonds 1957:10)
This observation by C.J.
Edmonds, a European who was quite familiar with the language, culture and
politics of the Kurds, has become a cliché of Kurdish studies. Until the 1960s,
however, few Kurds know about the European constructions of the genealogy of
Gorani or, as many Kurds call it, Hewrami. For one thing, the Western
literature on the Kurdish language was generally not available in Kurdistan.
Another limitation was the ban on debating Kurdish issues especially in Turkey,
Iran, and Syria. When Kurdish intellectuals gradually learned about the
identification of "Gorani" as a non-Kurdish speech, the response was,
generally, resentment and resistance. Such a spirit pervades the publication,
in this volume, of the manuscript of "Gorani" poems acquired by the
British Museum in the mid-nineteenth century. The editor of the book, Anwar
Soltani, unequivocally treats the Hewrami poems as genuine Kurdish literature.
Although European or
Western1 claims that Hewrami is not Kurdish are rooted
in "scholarly" or academic traditions of historical and comparative
philology, they cannot be, like all other knowledge forms, but social
constructions. Thus, far from being objective, they are influenced by the
political, ideological, epistemological, and cultural contexts in which
academic disciplines emerge and live. Moreover, under the political conditions
of Kurdistan, almost any claim, by Kurds and non-Kurds, on the status of the
language acquires a political dimension. This is in part because the Kurds
today are a stateless nation subjected to harsh measures of linguicide and
ethnocide (see, e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas and Bucak 1994). One justification for the
assimilation of the Kurds in Turkey, Iran and Syria has been the official
denial of a single Kurdish language. The ideologists of Middle Eastern
states reduce Kurdish to a conglomerate of unrelated dialects obscurely mixed
with Turkish, Persian or Arabic. Even when Kurdish is considered a "purer
form of Persian," it still remains a dialect of this language without any
right to official status as a medium of administration or education. To many
Kurdish nationalists, genealogies which assign Hewrami, Dimili (Zaza) or, for
that matter, Luri, a non-Kurdish identity serve the interests of the Middle
Eastern states.
Kurdish Constructions of
their Language Genealogy. The first history of Kurdistan, Sharaf-nameh, composed by a
Kurdish prince in 1597, identified the Gorans as one of the four constituting
elements of the Kurdish people, which are different in "language and
manners" (Chèref-ou'ddîne 1870:27). Three centuries later, Haji Qadiri
Koyi (1817?-1898), in one of his poems extolling the great literary figures of
Kurdistan, did not hesitate to include Hewrami poets among them (Koyi
1986:219-27). During the twentieth century, Hewrami poetry has been
indisputably presented as Kurdish literature in both the print and broadcast
media.
Written sources aside,
neither the speakers of Hawrami nor their neighbouring speakers of Central
(Sorani) and Southern Kurdish have ever doubted the Kurdish identity of the
people and their dialect and culture. Many Sorani speakers do, in fact, regard
Hewrami as a purer and older form of Kurdish. It is important to emphasize that
this indigenous construction of Kurdish language genealogy was not based on any
grammatical or structural analysis of the dialects concerned. It was, rather,
rooted in the lived experience of speech communities that have communicated
mostly through the oral, rather than written, medium.
Western Constructions of
Hewrami Genealogy.
The non-Kurdish identity of Hewrami was first problematized by European
philologists in the nineteenth century. An early major Western work on Hewrami
was apparently the short grammatical survey of the dialect written by Rieu in
his Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum (1881).
This pioneering work compared Hewrami (called the "Guran dialect" by
the author) with Persian and classed it, without hesitation, as a Persian
dialect. Interestingly, Rieu, "Keeper of the Oriental MSS." in the
British Museum, noted that C.J. Rich, the buyer of one of the Hewrami
manuscripts, had identified the work as Kurdish: "Two poems in the Guran
dialect of the Courdish Language; purchased at Sine, August 1820." Rieu
added, however, that "[A]lthough spoken in Kurdist~n, the dialect is
essentially Persian. In its vocabulary and grammatical structure it agrees in
the main with the language of Iran, from which it differs, however, by certain
phonetical changes, by its verbal inflexions, its prepositions, and some other
peculiar words" (Rieu 1881:728). Using Persian grammar as a touchstone,
Rieu recorded Hewrami phonetic and morphological features as variations or
transformations of their Persian counterparts. Almost all the brief grammatical
descriptions are stated in the following ideologically slanted rules, in which
Persian is the standard and Hewrami its dialectal deviation or derivation (Ibid.,
pp. 729, 730):
Persian /gh/ is often replaced
by /kh/, as in /dagh/ 'burn' (/dakh/)..
Most Persian words beginning with /khu/ have in Guran a /w/
alone...
The Guran word has still less declension than Persian...
The past adds, as in Persian, u or a to the root...
In a few words /l/ appears to have taken the place of Persian /r/
...
It is remarkable that, more
than a century later, the construction of Hewrami genealogy by Western
linguists was no more than a reiteration of Rieu, which MacKenzie (1965:255)
assessed as a "masterly grammatical sketch."2
Unlike Major E.B. Soane,
another contributor to Hewrami studies, Rieu had not experienced the linguistic
and cultural life of Hewrami and its neighbouring communities. Much like Rieu,
however, Soane declared categorically in 1921 that Hewrami was a non-Kurdish
language, a "Persian variant":
The
Gûrânî language itself has been termed a Kurdish dialect. It is, however, not
so at all. Kurmânjî has its characteristic grammatical forms, vocabulary, and
idiom which have nothing in common with Gûrânî. The latter, however, shows in
its grammatical forms that it is but a Persian variant, long separated from the
mother tongue, and having borrowed widely in more recent times both from
Kurmânjî and from Persian. It is the most northerly of the group of Persian
dialects represented by Luristân and comes very close to the Lur languages of
extreme northern Luristân. At the same time it is the least affected by later
Modern Persian, or else split earlier from the original mother tongue (Soane
1921:59).
Soane was writing these
words in Sulemani (Sulaymaniyah) while working on a photographic reproduction
of the British Museum manuscript of Hewrami poems published in this volume. At
the time, he was an official of the British Mandate over Iraq. Before his
assignment to Kurdistan during the last stages of the First World War, Soane
had lived in Kirmashan (Kirmanshah) where he learned Kurdish. In 1907, he
disguised himself as a Persian merchant and travelled to Halabja, a small town
close to the foothills of the Hewraman mountains. There, he became the scribe
of Adila Khan, whose court was a centre of Kurdish literature in both Hewrami
and Sorani Kurdish (see Edmonds 1957:139-182, on life in Halabja and Hewraman).
The story is narrated in his To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise
(Soane 1912; 1926). Having lived at Halabja for at least six months, he had not
depicted a Hewrami identity problem or an ethno-linguitic conflict in the mixed
Sorani-Hewrami environment. In fact, the two sons of Adila Khan, Tahir Beg and
Ahmed Mukhtar Beg, who were in close contact with Soane, composed poetry in
both Hewrami and Sorani (Tahir Beg 1966).
Next came Vladmir Minorsky,
a diplomat and a brilliant scholar who made significant contributions to the
study of Kurdish history. He, too, was quite certain, in his major work on
"The Guran," about the identity of Hewrami: "That Gûrânî is very
distinct from Kurdish there cannot be any doubt..." (1943:88-89). Like
other students of Kurdish society, he was familiar with the inseparability, in
the minds of the native speakers, of Hewrami and Kurdish. Still, he tried to
correct those who use the two names interchangeably. He wrote, for instance:
In
prose we know only the religious tracts of the Ahl-i Haqq. The copy of their
religious book Saranjâm, of which in 1911 I published a Russian
translation, is in Persian... Hâjjî Ni'mat-allâh, author of the Firqân
al-akhbâr, says that he wrote in "Kurdish" a Risâla-yi tahqîq,
and by "Kurdish" he most probably means Gûrânî, for elsewhere (p. 3)
he writes that "Kurdish" was the language (zabân-i zâhirî) of Sultan
Sohâk, whom we know to have spoken Gûrânî. The "Kurdish" quotations
in the Firqân prove also to be in Gûrânî (Ibid, p. 89).
Elsewhere, he notes that
"[T]he same MS. contains a "Kurdish" (i.e. Gûrânî) alphabet in
20 verses" (p. 92, note 4).
The most important
refinement of Rieu's discovery can be found in the work of D.N. MacKenzie who,
since the 1960s, has emphasized the non-Kurdish character of Hewrami. His Kurdish
Dialect Studies, a comparative and descriptive survey of the Northern
(Kurmanji) and Central (Sorani) dialects, is based on field work in Iraqi
Kurdistan. Although an excellent descriptive study, it has been criticized by
some descriptive linguists for its preoccupation with philological
considerations (Paper 1962; McCarus 1964). While other philologists generally
mention, at least in passing, the Hewrami speakers' self-identification as
Kurds, MacKenzie consistently rejects it as an error. For instance, in his very
brief note on the "Iranian dialects" spoken in Iraq, he wrote: "Two
other Iranian languages, often erroneously classed as Kurdish, are Gûrânî and
Lurî" (MacKenzie 1971:1261).
MacKenzie's major work on
the genealogy of Kurdish (1961a) is summarized in his article on Kurdish in
The Encyclopaedia of Islam, where he denies the existence of a single
Kurdish language:
The
many forms of speech known to outsiders as Kurdish do not constitute a single,
unified language. Instead it can be said that the various Kurdish dialects,
which are clearly interrelated and at the same time distinguishable from
neighbouring but more distantly Western Iranian languages, fall into three main
groups (MacKenzie 1986:479).3
Underlying this statement
we find a view of language as a (dialectally) unified speech, and a strong
comparativist bias (to qualify as a language, Kurdish must be clearly
distinguishable from other "Iranian languages"). After presenting a
geogrphical distribution of the northern, central and southern dialects, and
identifying Hewrami as a "non-Kurdish speech," MacKenzie presents the
dialects in historical-comparativist terms. A few examples will suffice.
Northern
Kurdish is more archaic than the other dialects in both its phonetic and
morphological structure, and it may be inferred that the greater development of
the Central and Southern dialects has been caused by their closer contact with
other (Iranian) languages... The common "Iranian" inventory of
Northern Kurdish is: a i u, â ‘ î ô û, ... In Central and
Southern Kurdish the distinction between v and w is lost, in
favour of w. A new distinction is made, however, between palatal l
and velarized l (Í) ... (Ibid.).
What makes a "form of
speech" Kurdish? According to MacKenzie, "historical sound change"
is the main distinguishing feature:
There
is no single early historical sound change which characterises Kurdish but a
combination of two later changes and one conservative feature serves to
identify a dialect as Kurdish, viz. (i) -m-, -$m-, -xm-
> -v- (-w-), e.g. nâv/w "name",
P[ersian] nâm; çâv/w "eye", P ça_m; tov/w
"seed", P tuxm; (ii) Iranian initial x- > k-,
e.g. kar "donkey", P xar; kânî "spring,
source", P xânî; ki^rî n "to buy", P xarîdan;
(iii) Ir çy- >ç (other West. Ir. > s-), e.g. çûn
"to go", P $udan (Ibid).4
Even if we
accept "historical sound changes" as relevant indicators of Kurdishness,
one may ask if these three features are adequate yardsticks. In his more
detailed study of the features, MacKenzie (1961a:72) writes:
In short, apart from this ç-, and the treatment of -$m
and -xm, I can find no feature which is both common to all the dialects
of Kurdish and unmatched outside them. To isolate Kurdish convincingly,
therefore, would seem to entail comparing it with at least each West Ir.
dialect, listing the common and divergent features. For practical purposes,
however, taking Kurdish as 'that which is generally recognized, by Iranists, as
Kurdish', it is necessary to consider for comparison only its immediate
neighbours, past and present.
When the comparison is done
(mostly for Central and Northern dialects), he finds out that Kurdish does not
lend itself to a neat genetic classification. MacKenzie admits that "every
feature of Kd. has its counterpart in at least one other Ir. dialect" (p.
70). It seems, therefore, that if Kurdish dialects do not fit the phonetic spaces
created by comparative reconstructionists, they cannot belong to the same
language. Not surprisingly, MacKenzie identifies Zaza and Hewrami as
non-Kurdish languages, and argues that the remaining dialects "do not
constitute a single, unified language" (1986:479). He has also looked at
the non-linguistic, i.e. historical and geographical, evidence, which to a
large extent corroborates his genealogy. This is Minorsky's hypothesis of a
Gorani and Zaza migration from the Caspian regions of Gilan to Kurdistan
(MacKenzie 1989; 1961a:86).
Resentment and
Resistance. The
most detailed linguistic counter argument was offered by Hewramani (1981), who
rejected the historical and linguistic accounts of Soane, Minorsky, MacKenzie
and others. By the mid-1990s, many researchers referred to the controversy and,
quite often, decisively rejected the philological account (see, e.g., the
Kurdish version of Muhemmed's 1990 doctoral dissertation). The Kurdish cultural
and literary journals also cover the debates on the status of Hewrami, Zaza and
Luri extensively. Part of this effort is the translation of some of the
academic research which treats Hewrami as Kurdish, e.g., Osip [Yusupova] (1990)
and Smîrnova and Eyûbî (1989). Another instance of resistance is the
publication, as genuine Kurdish literature, of this volume, which is based on
one of the manuscripts Rieu identified as the Gorani dialect of Persian.
The case of Dimili is more
complicated than Hewrami. The formation of identity (cultural, linguistic,
political, gender, etc.) is a complex and ever changing process of social and
historical development. For instance, under the conditions of political
conflict since the 1980s, some Dimili speaking intellectuals have formed a
non-Kurdish ethnic and linguistic awareness. This is best seen in the active
Dimili publishing and cultural effort, especially in Europe. Although the
number of activists is not significant, the development and the struggle is
important. To the disappointment of many Kurds, including Dimili intellectuals,
there is, thus, some resistance to the Kurdish nationalist construction of a
unified nation based on a single language.
One relevant question is
the political role of linguistics, which enjoys the credibility of the academy
and the authority of a science. The philologists' position on Hewrami was, for
example, consciously used by the Pahlavi regime in the 1960s and 1970s for the
denial of the language rights of the Kurds (Hassanpour 1992:287-88).
According to Todd
(1985:vi), "Dimili speakers today consider themselves to be Kurds and
resent scholarly conclusions which indicate that their language is not Kurdish.
Speakers of Dimili are Kurds psychologically, socially, culturally,
economically, and politically."5 Leezenberg (1993:13) notes that the
"growing acquaintance with the work of Western authors seems to
have been instrumental in the rise of a specifically Zaza nationalism among
educated expatriates in recent years." Obviously, no one can predict how a
ceratin body of knowledge will be used. However, it is not difficult to discern
from the Hewrami case that the kind of knowledge in which the expert does not
exercise a monopoly of power is more likely to meet the requirements of
democratic scholarship. A discipline of linguistics which treats the speakers'
knowledge as valid or relevant as the linguist's judgment would probably be
less likely to be used against the wishes of the speakers.6
In our times, the upsurge
of nationalism among the Kurds is an important factor behind rejections of the
philologists' genealogies. Nationalists in Kurdistan, as elsewhere in the
world, envision their people as a linguistically, culturally, ideologically and
politically united entity. This nationalism emphasizes language as a major
indicator of Kurdishness (a Kurd is one who speaks Kurdish, according to Haji
Qadiri Koyi). It is well known that the idea of "one nation, one
language" is an ideological, clearly nationalist, position.7 Equally ideological is the rejection of
Kurdish linguistic unity when the speakers of Kurmanji, Sorani, Southern,
Hewrami, and most of the Dimili identify themselves as Kurds. On the
non-academic front, a diverse group of journalists, army generals,
parliamentarians, judges, politicians and many others in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and
Syria have declared Kurdish a non-language.8
Issues in Theory,
Ideology and Epistemology. The philologists' claims about Hewrami invite criticism on different
levels. Theoretically, one may raise questions about the contribution of
genetic classification to our understanding of language in general and Kurdish
in particular. Why is the placement of a language on a family tree so central
in comparative philology?9 How can such placements, whether based on a
few phonetic isoglosses or even an extensive grammatical reconstruction, decide
the status of Hewrami either as a dialect of Kurdish or an independent
language? Admitting that knowledge about the world's language families is
useful, why is genetic classification used as the main or only explanatory
framework in presenting a living language like Kurdish (e.g., in MacKenzie 1986)?
Are official or state languages like Persian, Arabic, Danish or English treated
in a similar manner?
All knowledge forms
including "the exact sciences" are ideologically constructed and
utilized; in other words, it is not possible to create objective or neutral
knowledge. There is a growing literature on linguistics as an ideological and
mythical body of knowledge.10 Research has also been conducted on the mythical
and ideological roots of comparative philology (see, e.g., Crowley 1990;
Cunningham 1994).
Epistemologically, one may
look at the relationship between the philologist/linguist, the
"informant" or "native speaker," and the object of
research, i.e., the language itself. Who problematizes? Who conceptualizes? Who
decides the method of research? Whose knowledge counts? What is the
subjectivity of the linguist? Is the native speakers' construction of their own
genealogies considered to be as valid as the philologist's comparative
reconstruction?11 In this unequal distribution of
symbolic-political power, who exercises "authority?"
The conflict between the
linguist and the native speakers of Hewrami is by no means unique to the
Kurdish case.12 While Kurdish nationalists criticize the
philologist's claims from a primarily political perspective (its negative
implications for Kurdish nation-building), this paper is concerned with
theoretical and epistemological issues. From this perspective, the conflict is,
in part, related to the cleavage between expert and indigenous knowledge
systems, i.e. the distribution of power in the production of knowledge and its
democratization. The struggle for the democratization of knowledge, which
inspires this paper, has been going on in the West since the Renaissance,
taking numerous forms from the secularization of learning to today's efforts
aimed at the feminization of social theory and methodology.
Resolving the Conflict:
A few Probes. How
can the conflict over the genealogy of Hewrami be resolved? One alternative is
a statement of the theoretical-methodological limitations of the approach,
knowing that all disciplines have their own constraints. For instance, one may
state that the data generated by the theory and the method (i.e., the placement
of Hewrami or Dimili on a family tree) are not relevant bases for making claims
about the ethnic, cultural or national identity of the speakers of the two
speech forms. That such claims cannot be made is further corroborated by the
findings of other branches of linguistics. Neither structural criteria (Hudson
1980:30-37) nor mutual intelligibility (Simpson 1994) is an appropriate basis
for distinguishing between language and dialect. The speakers of Hewrami alone
are in a firm position to decide whether their speech is a dialect of Kurdish
or an independent language.13 Indeed, some students of the language (e.g.
Blau, Kreyenbroek, Leezenberg) distinguish, to varying degrees, between indigenous
and expert (philological) genealogies.14 Leezenberg (1993:7), for instance, has pointed
to the web of conflicting interpretations, and has given equal space (symbolic
rather than physical) to indigenous perceptions of their language:
The
nomenclature of this group (or these groups) of dialects is rather confusing,
as are the precise relations between the ethnic groups speaking them. Western
authors use 'Gorani' as a generic term for all of these dialects, but none of
my informants (save those familiar with European writings on the subject) ever
used it in that way; instead, the expression 'Hawrami' or 'Hewramani' is used
as a collective term by Iraqi Kurds (as well as by Hassanpour 1989:139-51), but
also more specifically, to indicate the dialects spoken near the border with
Iran... here, I will be conservative, and stick (albeit reluctantly) to
'Gorani' as a generic label, while keeping in mind that few locals use it in
that way, and that no conclusions as to the ethnic affiliation can be drawn
from it.15 At present, the Gorani speakers
think of themselves as Kurds, even though they are aware of speaking dialects
which are not mutually comprehensible with Kurmanci or Sorani...(emphasis
added).
The lines are carefully
drawn here; as a result, a much more complex picture of the situation is
provided by stating the limitations of the method, the genealogical claims of
native speakers, and at least one element in the subjectivity of the linguist
(reluctant preference for a potentially inappropriate label).16 Leezenberg's approach leaves little room for
the political use of his findings against the aspirations of the native
speakers.
Hewrami and Dimili provide
ideal contexts for a critical examination of the state of the politics of
linguistic theory in general and comparative philology in particular. I have
tried to highlight aspects of a conflict which is well known but not adequately
discussed. I suggest that the philologist's construction of Hewrami genealogies
is no less ideological than the native genealogy.17 Such a claim does not detract from the value
of comparative philology as a source of knowledge. Indeed, an appreciation of
the social construction of our disciplines will put us on a much firmer ground
in the challenging task of knowledge creation.18
Footnotes
1. By
"Western," I do not mean a geographic or racial division of
linguists. Iranian linguists ofa nationalist persuasion, for example, use and
create philological evidence, to deny the existence of a distinct Kurdish or
Baluchi language. "Western" implies, here, the theoretical and
methodological claims of "historical and comparative philology" and
its various forms and practices that originated in the West and has been
institutionalized in the academy throughout the world. My own critique of
Western constructions of Hewrami is rooted in the equally Western traditions of
critical social theory,ethnomethodology, qualitative methodology and research
ethics. (Return to main
text)
2. It is
beyond the scope of this paper to examine the work of all linguists who have
studied thedialect (e.g., O. Mann, A. Christensen, and K. Hadank). (Return to main
text)
3.
Compare, also, the following statement: "Kurdish has -- or, more
precisely, certain dialects ofKurdish have -- a literary tradition.
Nevertheless the language has achieved no unity and, since the literature has
been somewhat neglected, most work on Kurdish has been on a dialectal
basis..." (MacKenzie 1969:460-61). (Return to main
text)
4.Compare
this quotation with the examples from Rieu's grammatical study quoted on page
2,above. (Return to main
text)
5. Todd's
study was based on work with Dimili speakers living in Europe, mostly in
Germany. (Return to main
text)
6. The
question of power in the production, transmission and utilization of knowledge
has beenincreasingly examined since the 1960s. A body of research critically
examines the androcentric, ethnocentric and ideological nature of knowledge.
While these studies are mostly focused on Western societies, it is obvious that
all knowledge, Eastern, Western or Indigenous, is socially conditioned.
Research on the political and ideological components of linguistics has also
appeared in recent years (see, e.g., Newmeyer 1986; Joseph and Taylor 1990).
Taylor (1990), for instance, examines an episode in the history of the
"institutionalization of authority in the science of language." (Return to main
text)
7. In a
review of the literature on this issue, Woolard and Schieffelin (1994:60)
write: " It is atruism that the equation of language and nation is a
historical, ideological construct, conventionally dated to Herder and
eighteenth century German romanticism, although the famous characterization of
language as the genius of a people can be traced to the French Enlightenment
and specifically Condillac. Exported through colonialism to become a dominant
model around the world today, the nationalist ideology of language structures
state politics, challenges multilingual states, and underpins ethnic struggles
to such an extent that the absence of a distinct language can cast doubt on the
legitimacy of claims to nationhood." In the case of Kurdistan, the
perception of the unity of various dialects under the common name of Kurdish
was formed before the age of colonialism, when feudal disunity was rampant in
Kurdish society. (Return to main
text)
8. For a
survey of the "Turkish scientific and political discourse" on the
Kurdish language see Akin(1995). (Return to main
text)
9. See,
e.g., Bichakjian (1992) and Ruhlen (1994) and Cunningham (1994) for different
assessmentsof the assumptions and methodology of this area of language studies. (Return to main
text)
10.
Risking oversimplification, ideology refers, here, to beliefs, views, and
consciousness whichreflect the experience or interests of particular groups;
ideology legitimizes social power, often through intellectual practices
involving mystification or rationalization. For a recent review of the research
on ideological construction of linguistic knowledge, see Joseph and Taylor
(1990), Woolard (1992), Woolard and Schieffelin (1994). In recent years, there
is renewed debate on the "scientific" status of linguistics. See, for
example, the contributions under the rubrics of "on moving linguistics
into science" in Communications of the Workshop for Scientific Linguistics
(Chicago), 1992. See, e.g., Di Pietro (1990),Hagman (1992), Levin (1992), Read
(1992), Sullivan (1992), Yngve (1992a; 1992b). (Return to main
text)
11. In
recent years, linguistics has made some progress in democratising the
relationship bypromoting, conceptually at least, the status of the
"informant" to "native speaker" (Yngve 1981). At least one
linguist has suggested a "colleague" role for "informants, the
unsung heroes of so much linguistic research." But, even in this case,
informants can become colleagues only if they attain some expertise: the
informants, according to Nida (1981:169), can "make a much greater
contribution if only their latent capacities are adequately developed through
sufficient informal training by collaborating linguists." (Return to main
text)
12. Such
conflicts have come into the open especially in the theory and practice of
"economicdevelopment" in the developing world (see, among others, the
special issue of IDRC Reports on"Indigenous and Traditional
Knowledge," Vol. 21, No. 1, April 1993, published by International
Development Research Centre of Canada). In fact, a "participatory
research" methodology has been developed to deal with the researcher's
monopoly of power in the creation of knowledge (see, e.g., Hallet al 1982). In
the positivist, "scientific" tradition of knowledge production,
"ordinary people are rarelyconsidered knowledgeable, in the scientific
sense, or capable of knowing about their own reality... Experts' assessment of
common people's inability to 'know' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy"
(Maguire 1987:36). (Return to main
text)
13.
Hewrami and Zaza are not the only bones of contention in the world of
comparative philology. Brukman (1970:1165), in his review of the genealogy of
Koya (spoken in India), critiqued the classification of the dialect according
to linguistic criteria, and wrote: "[Native speakers'] judgements may be
purely political or cultural; but these are in fact the only relevant
judgements that can be made about the relation of Koya to either Gondi or
Telugu, since we have no clearly established linguistic criteria that serve to
differentiate languages from dialects. Such considerations may produce an
embarrassing proliferation of 'languages,' but they are the only basis for
realistic evaluation we have. Non-native-speaking linguists are in general much
more arbitrary about their decisions in this regard than native speakers."
(Return to main
text)
14. In the
latest major reference work on "Iranian languages," Compendium
Linguarum Iranicum(R diger Schmitt 1989), Kurdish and Gur nî/Z z appear under
two separate sections. According to Blau (1989:336), "in spite of the
linguistic proximity and the speakers' profound feeling of belonging to the
Kurdish national entity, these two languages cannot be linked to Kurdish because
they have not undergone the typical transformations of Kurdish." According
to Kreyenbroek (1992:70), "[B]oth Zaza and Guran are normally identified
as Kurds, and regard themselves as such. From a purely historical and
linguistic perspective, this is probably incorrect, but such considerations
seem insignificant in comparison with the feelings of the people
concerned." However, in dealing with Kurmanji and Sorani, he notes that it
"may be somewhat misleading to speak of 'the main dialects of Kurdish'.
Firstly, the only obvious reasons for describing Sorani and Kurmanji as
'dialects' of one language, are their common origin, and the fact that this
usage reflects the sense of ethnic identity and unity of the Kurds. From a
linguistic, or at least grammatical point of view, however, Sorani and Kurmanji
differ as much from each other as English and German, and it would seem more
appropriate to refer to them as 'languages'..." (p. 71). (Return to main
text)
15. This
is a refreshing statement about yet another conflict between native speakers
and thephilologists. Hewrami is the name used by most of the Sorani and Hewrami
speakers to refer to the speech and culture of Hewraman. Different ethnic and
religious names (Kakeyi, Bajalani, Shabak, etc) are used for small groups who
speak varieties of the dialect and are widely dispersed outside Hewraman (see
Leezenberg, n.d., on some of these groups and the shifting politics of their ethnic
affiliation). (Return to main
text)
16. By
contrast, the author of a relatively long encyclopedia article about Dimili
does not mention,even as myth or controversy, the native speakers'
identification of their speech as Kurdish (Asatrian 1995). (Return to main
text)
17. I have
provided further detail about the ideological constraints on philological
constructions ofHewrami genealogy in an unpublished paper (Hassanpour 1996). (Return to main
text)
18. The
ethical dimensions of research have received increasing attention in recent
years (see, e.g.,Kidder 1981). It would be useful to examine ethical issues in
philological approaches to Kurdish language in general and Hewrami and Dimili
in particular. (Return to main
text)
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"ASLINI ÍNKAR EDEN HARAMZADEDÍR!"
The Debate on the Ethnic Identity of the Kurdish Alevis
By Martin van Bruinessen
The
existence of Kurdish- and Zaza-speaking Alevi tribes, who almost exclusively
use Turkish as their ritual language, and many of which even have Turkish
tribal names,2 is a fact that has exercised the explanatory
imagination of many authors. Both Turkish and Kurdish nationalists have had
some difficulty in coming to terms with the ambiguous identity of these groups,
and have attempted to explain embarrassing details away. Naive attempts to
prove that Kurdish and Zaza are essentially Turkish languages have not been
given up, and have after 1980 even received a new impetus.3 Kurds, on the
other hand, have emphasized the Iranian element in the religion of the Alevis
and suggested that even the Turkish Alevis must originally have received their
religion from the Kurds.4 Several articulate members
of the tribes concerned, appealing to alleged old oral traditions in their
support, have added their own interpretations, often all too clearly inspired
by political expediency.5 The tribes have never had a
single, unambiguous position vis-i-vis the Kurdish nationalist movement and the
Turkish Republic. The conflicting appeals of these two national entities (and
of such lesser would-be nations as the Zaza or the Alevi nation) to the
loyalties of the Kurdish Alevis have torn these communities apart. The conflict
has thus far culminated in the Turkish military operations in Tunceli and
western Bingöl in the autumn of 1994, which were continued through 1995.
Who
are the Kurdish Alevis?
I shall use the term 'Kurdish Alevis' as a shorthand for all Kurmanci- and
Zaza-speaking Alevis, irrespective of whether they define themselves as Kurds
or not. My use of this term does not imply any claim that they are 'really' or
'essentially' Kurds or whatever. The heartland of the Kurdish Alevis consists
of Dersim (the province of Tunceli with the adjacent districts of Kemah and Tercan
in Erzincan and Kigi in Bingöl). The Dersimis themselves perceive a cultural
difference between the (Zaza-speaking) Seyhhasanan tribes of western Dersim
(Ovacik and Hozat with parts of Çemisgezek and Pertek) and the Dersimi tribes
proper of eastern Dersim (Pülümür, Nazimiye, Mazgirt), among whom there are
both Zaza and Kurmanci speakers.
From
Dersim, a series of Alevi enclaves stretches east, through Bingöl, northern
Mus, Varto all the way to Kars. The largest and best known of these tribes, the
Kurmanci-speaking Hormek (Xormek, Xiromek) and the Zaza-speaking Lolan (see
Firat 1970 and Kocadag 1987, respectively) claim Dersim origins, and there are
in fact sections of the same tribes still living in eastern Dersim (in Nazimiye
and Pülümür, respectively).6
Further
west, we find another important Kurdish Alevi population, the Koçgiri tribal
confederation, in and around the Zara district of Sivas. The Koçgiri claim a
relationship with the Seyhhasanan of western Dersim, although they presently
speak a Kurmanci rather than a Zaza dialect.7 There are several
other small Zaza- and Kurmanci-speaking enclaves in Sivas, that also claim
Dersimi origins. Another indication of their relationship with the Dersim
Alevis is the presence of seyyids of the same lineages (notably Kureysan)
living in their midst.8
Another
series of enclaves stretches south, through Malatya, Elbistan (in Maras) and
Antep to Syria and Adana. Little more is known of these tribes than the names
of the most important among them. According to Dersimi (1952: 59-60) these
tribes, all of which allegedly speak Kurmanci, also claim an old connection
with Dersim. We do not know to what extent their religion corresponds with that
of the Dersimis and how it relates to their Yezidi and Nusayri neighbours. At least
some of these communities were served by seyyids of lineages based in Dersim,
but there were also other ocak (seyyid lineages) among them.9 The American
missionary Trowbridge reports that the Alevis of Antep, whom he knew well, considered
the Ahl-i Haqq seyyids of Tutshami (near Kirind, west of Kermanshah) as their
highest religious authorities.10
It is
only about the religion of the Alevis of Dersim and the Koçgiri that we have
more than superficial information; we do not know to what extent these beliefs
and practices are shared by the other Kurdish Alevis.11 Most of our
information is from older travellers' and missionaries' reports or in the form
of memories of what people "used to believe" and "used to
do", for, as Bumke aptly remarks, the Dersimis seem to adhere to "a
religion that is not practised" (Bumke 1989: 515). This statement is
perhaps taking it a little too far, for certain practices like the pilgrimage
to mountain sanctuaries, small offerings at numinous spots to prevent bad luck,
and making vows at holy places, are still very much alive, although perhaps
only a small minority takes part in them.12 It is true,
however, that for most Dersimis the food taboos and the veneration due to sun,
moon and fire are items frequently mentioned but rarely respected in practice.13
The
beliefs and practices of the Alevis of Dersim, as they are known to us from
19th and early 20th-century sources, appear to be more heterodox and
'syncretist' than those of the Tahtaci and the central Anatolian Turkish Alevis
-although this may of course in part be due to the fact that the latter have
hidden their beliefs better or have gradually been further islamicized. The
belief in metempsychosis, for instance, was more pronounced among the Dersimis;
the Armenian author Andranig (1900) gives a fascinating account of the belief
that human souls are reborn in animals.14 The Dersimis
apparently recognized, like the Ahl-i Haqq, various degrees of divine
incarnation or theophany, from the full manifestation of God in Ali and
possibly in Haci Bektas, to a more modest but nonetheless significant divine
presence in the seyyids. Mark Sykes, usually a good observer, wrote of the
Dersim tribes that they were in name Shi'is but appeared to him to be
pantheists.15
Sun and
nature worship appear to have had at least as prominent a place in the life of
the Dersimis as the ayin-i cem and other common Alevi rituals.16 Andranig adds to
this the worship of the planets, of thunder and rain, fire, water, rock, trees,
etc. (1900: 169). Worship of the sun, however, was the most regular of these
rituals, taking place each morning at sunrise. The form of this worship varied
from place to place. Ali Kemali writes that the Dersimis worshipped the first
spot that was touched by the sun's rays (Kemali 1992[1932]: 152). Melville
Chater, who spent the night in a Kurdish Alevi village near Malatya in the
1920s, gives a slightly different description of this morning worship. The
villagers woke well before sunrise and went to work in their fields. "As
the sun rose, each man, woman and child turned eastward, bowing to it a polite
good-morning, then resumed to the day's routine" (Chater 1928: 498). More
reliably perhaps, a study of the traditional religion of Dersim by a person of
local origins has it that "when the sun comes up, people turn towards it
and utter prayers and invocations; or they prostrate themselves and kiss the
earth, or each brings his hand to his mouth and utters a supplication".17
Dersimis
explained their sun worship to Ali Kemali with a legend according to which Ali
after his death had risen to heaven and changed into the sun -an interesting
statement for those who wish to recognise remnants of the worship of (old
Turkish) Gök Tengri or (Iranian) Ahura Mazda in the Alevis' veneration for Ali.
Öztürk, however, reports that in Dersim the sun is associated with Muhammad and
the moon with Ali, which appears to defy such simple single-origin
explanations. The Kurdish Alevis' sun worship especially is strongly
reminiscent of identical practices among the Yezidis, about whom more will be
said below. It also brings to mind a now extinct sect called Semsi (i.e.,
sun-worshippers?), that is known to have existed in the districts of Mardin and
Diyarbekir at least into the 19th century.18
Moon
worship, though less frequently mentioned in the literature, is perhaps even
more typical of the Dersim Alevis. Our sources do not make clear whether this
also was a daily ritual or took place on certain nights only. Melville Chater
gives the only eyewitness account, from the same Malatya village. He noticed
the villagers climbing on their roofs in the evening, waiting for the moon to
appear. As soon as it became visible, "simultaneously the Kurds arose,
making low bows and salaaming profoundly to the risen planet; then they
descended their stone stairways and disappeared for the night" (Chater
1928: 497).
Yet
another minor but distinctive trait of religious practices in Dersim consists
of the remnants of what may be called a 'snake cult' (which also once existed
among the Armenians of this region). Several tribes have their own centres of
pilgrimage, where the image of a snake is an object of veneration. The best
known is that at the village of Kistim near Erzincan, where a wooden snake
known as the 'saint of Kistim' (Kistim evliyasi) appears to come alive
during pilgrimage rituals at the shrine. The Bektasi çelebi Cemalettin,
the nominal head of the rural Alevi communities, in the 1910s made a vain
attempt to have the centre at Kistim closed and the piece of wood destroyed.19
The more
specifically Alevi rituals, however, appear to connect the Dersimis with the
Turkish Alevis. Most of their gülbank (invocations) and nefes
(religious songs) are in Turkish, and they were so well before the first
efforts at assimilation under the Republic. According to Ali Kemali, who had
been vali of Erzincan and knew the region very well, there were no Kurdish gülbank
at all (Kemali 1992: 154-5); the same observation was made by Mehmet Zülfü
Yolga, who was born in Pertek and became kaimakam of Nazimiye (1994: 99). Nuri
Dersimi contradicts this and claims that the seyyids of the Kureysan and
Bamasor (Baba Mansur) lineages always recited gülbank in "an
archaic form of Zaza" (Dersimi 1952: 24). Hasan Resit Tankut, writing in
1949, claimed that the Dersimis had only recently, at the instigation of the
nationalists Alisêr and Seyyid Riza, begun to replace the Turkish nefes
with poems in their own language.20
Another
practice connecting the Alevis of Dersim with Turkish Alevis was the
relationship with the central tekke of Haci Bektas. This is mentioned by
Molyneux-Seel (1914: 66) as the chief place of pilgrimage outside Dersim.21 In theory, the
Dersimi seyyids, who acted as rehber and pir to the common
tribes, recognized the çelebi at Haci Bektas as their murid, but
in practice they all took seyyids of other lineages as their pir and murid
and had little to do with Haci Bektas. Three minor ocak of western
Dersim, however, the Aguçan, the Dervis Cemal and the Saru Saltik, claimed descent
from khalifa appointed by Haci Bektas (Dersimi 1952: 27-8; cf. Birdogan
1992: 152-7).
Turkish
or Kurdish origins?
The
Kurdish Alevis are commonly called Kizilbas by their neighbours. This is also the
term by which they occur in Cuinet's late 19th-century population statistics,
without further ethno-linguistic designation. This name of course associates
them with the Safavids, whose followers were mostly Turcomans. Sümer mentions
in his study of the Safavids' Kizilbas supporters (1976) only two Kurdish
tribal communities, and those were relatively insignificant: the +inislu and
the Çemisgezeklü. Many of the latter must have followed the shah into Iran, for
we find in the 16th century a large Çemisgezek confederation living south of
present Tehran, whence they were sent by Shah Abbas to Khorasan in order to
protect Iran's northeastern border against Uzbek incursions.
The
present Kurdish Alevis are too numerous to be the descendants of only the
remaining parts of those two tribes. This raises the question where the
Dersimis came from, and the answer suggested by most Turkish scholars, both of
the official history school and liberal ones, is that they are kurdicized (or
zazaicized) Turcoman Kizilbas tribes. This assumption appears so reasonable
that is has been unquestioningly accepted by some western scholars as well
(e.g. MSlikoff 1982a: 145). However, it is hard to imagine from whom these
tribes could have learnt Kurdish or Zaza, given the fact that social contacts
with Shafi'i Kurmanc and Zazas are almost nonexistent. In Sivas, on the other
hand, Kurdish (and Zaza) Alevis have long been in close contact with Turkish
Alevis, without the latter being assimilated. I propose the alternative
hypothesis that a considerable part of the ancestors of the present Alevi Kurds
neither were Turcomans nor belonged to the followers of Shah Isma'il, but
rather were Kurdish- and Zaza-speaking adherents of other syncretist, ghulat-influenced,
sects. I shall presently present some evidence to support this hypothesis.
It has
too often been taken for granted that the Kurdish tribes were, at least by the
time they were incorporated into the Ottoman Empire (roughly 1515), staunch
Sunnis, whereas the Turcoman tribes had an ineradicable tendency towards
heterodox ideas. The idea of the Kurds as strict Sunnis may have been put into
circulation by Idris Bitlisi, the diplomat who brokered the alliance of leading
Kurdish families with Sultan Selim and his successors. Idris, and in his tracks
other Ottoman historians like his son Ebü'l-Fazl, Sa'deddin, Hüseyin Bosnevi
and Müneccimbasi, as well as the historian of the Kurdish ruling families,
Sharaf Khan Bidlisi, attributed the Kurds' preference for the Ottomans as
against the Safavids to their religious convictions.22 A profession of
Sunni orthodoxy was a transparant promise of loyalty to the Sultan, and the
Kurdish historians' insistence on the Kurds' orthodoxy may reflect what they
wished the Sultan to believe rather than what they themselves knew to be the
case. Even Sharaf Khan, who himself had spent a considerable part of his life
in the service of the Safavids, emphasized that the Kurds' abhorred (Shi'i)
heterodoxy. On the other hand, he made no attempt to hide the prominence of Yezidism
among the Kurds, perhaps because this did not represent a political threat to
the Ottomans.
Heterodox
Kurds in pre- and early Ottoman history
There
are, in fact, indications that extremist Shi'i ideas were more widespread among
the Kurds than the said Kurdish authors were willing to concede. Bitlis, the
home town of both Idris and Sharaf Khan, has produced its share of unorthodox
thinkers. The Hurufi text Istiv¯an¯ame, written around 1450 by
Ghiyathuddin al-Astarabadi, speaks of a certain Darvish Haji 'Isa Bidlisi as
the originator of a deviant doctrine, which declared the shar'þ
obligations not binding to true believers because these already lived in
Paradise.23 This resembles what one may still hear
present-day Alevis in Dersim say: "heaven and hell are here."
Secondly, there are reasons to believe that the religious ideas of the
well-known 15th-century heterodox mystical teacher, Shaikh Bedreddin, reflected
views that were well-established in the same region: Bedreddin's chief mystic
teacher was Hüseyin Akhlati, a peripatetic scholar and mystic hailing from a
district near Bitlis.24
There are
yet other indications that Kurdish tribes have played a part in the propagation
of certain forms of Alevism (though not necessarily of the Safavid variety). As
Irène Beldiceanu-Steinherr gathered from her archival research, the major
Bektasi communities of the 15th and 16th centuries appear to have consisted of
nomadic tribes.25 Ottoman documents contain
numerous references to these tribal groups (named Bektas, Bektaslu or
Bektasogullari) and associate them with a wide range of localities, in an arc
from Sivas by Malatya, Mar'as and Antep to Aleppo and Adana and incidentally
even further west. Most surprising, perhaps, is the explicit reference to the
Kurdish element in these tribes. Cevdet Türkay classifies them as Konar-göçer
Türkmân Ekrâdi taifesinden, "nomadic Turcoman Kurds."26 This term, which
occurs often in his list of tribes, appears to refer to tribes of mixed
composition.
As Xavier
de Planhol was one of the first to observe, the arrival of large numbers of
Turcoman tribesmen in eastern Anatolia from the 11th century onward gave rise
to intensive cultural exchanges and the emergence of a new type of pastoral
nomadism (combining the vertical, short-distance transhumance of the Kurds and
the horizontal wanderings of the Turcoman) and of new tribal formations,
incorporating smaller groups of various origins. The Karakoyunlu and Akkoyunlu
must have incorporated Kurdish clans in their outwardly Turkish component
tribes, and in the Ottoman period the large tribal confederation Boz Ulus is
known to have had Kurdish as well as Turkish sections. Some tribes that can be
traced through the centuries changed their language, from Turkish to Kurdish or
the other way around; the composition of their members may also have shifted
over time.27
The said
tribal Bektasis were found in the same regions where we later encounter Kurdish
Alevis. But they must be only one of numerous Kurdish tribal elements that went
into the formation of the present Kurdish Alevis. Several major Dersimi tribes
are found by name in Ottoman sources. Türkay lists, for instance, numerous
occurrences of the Lolan, Dirsimli and Dujik/Dusik (a name that we find used in
the 19th century to refer to the tribes of Dersim collectively), and all of
them he classifies as Ekrâd taifesinden; only one major Dersim tribe,
the Balaban, are listed as Yörükan taifesinden.28
Alevis
and Yezidis
The fact
that some of the present Yezidi leaders represent their religion as extremist
anti-Alid sect (a member of the amir's family is even named Mu'aviye) should
not blind us to the close similarity in ideas and practice with those of the
Kurdish Alevis and the Ahl-i Haqq or Kaka'i of southern Kurdistan. The now
extinct Semsis were mentioned above as a fourth, perhaps similar religion.29 The relationship
between these religious groups may even be more intimate than has thus far been
assumed. The German anthropologist Felix von Luschan, who travelled through Anatolia
measuring skulls around the turn of the century, noticed that Yezidis and
Alevis were, at least by some of their neighbours, considered as one and the
same sect:
"In some places in
Western Kurdistan, people that are exactly like the Kyzylbash are called Yezidi,
and protest that they have nothing at all to do with the Kyzylbash; in other
places, so I was told one day at Kiakhta on the Böilam River and again near
Diarbekr, that Yezidi and Kyzylbash were two words for the same thing, the one
being Arabic, the other Turkish. I do not know if this is correct, but, as far
as I could ascertain, the creed and the social condition of both groups are
fairly identical." (von Luschan 1911: 231)
An aged
Zaza Alevi whom I interviewed in a village in Tercan (east of Erzincan) in
1977, though disclaiming any contact with Yezidis, appeared to know the name of
Melek Ta'us and some legends that struck me then as Yezidi-flavoured. Yolga,
writing in the 1940s, in fact claimed that there were some Yezidis among the
Dersim tribes (1994: 96).
Luschan's
observation that the Yezidis were "exactly like the Kyzylbash"
referred to their measured skulls. He found that the cranial indexes of all the
sectarian Shi'i groups of Anatolia - the Tahtaci and Bektas of Lycia, the
central Anatolian Kizilbas (and the Yezidis who so much resembled them), as
well as the 'Ansariye' (i.e. Nusayri) - were highly similar to each other, and
contrasted strongly with those of the neighbouring Arab and Kurdish groups. All
sectarians whom he had measured were brachycephalic, and their Sunni neighbours
dolichocephalic. Von Luschan concluded that the former represented "the
remains of an old homogeneous population, which have preserved their religion
and have therefore refrained from intermarriage with strangers and so preserved
their ancient characteristics" (ibid., p. 232). Later Turkish nationalist
authors were to see in the same skulls proof of the Turkishness of all these
groups - with the exception, perhaps, of the Yezidis and Nusayris.
Shifting
views of self
Some of
the local historians of the Kurdish Alevi tribes, notably Firat, Risvanoglu and
Kocadag, have forcefully emphasised the Turkish origins of their tribes,
claiming to base themselves at least in part on oral tradition. Their works
contain useful bits of information but have to be used with extreme caution
because of the politically motivated desire to 'prove' the Turkishness of these
tribes, in conformity with the official kemalist view of history. Other local
historians such as Dersimi, on the other hand, have emphasised their
Kurdishness, and more recently there is a school of thought among people of
Dersimi origins that stresses Zazaness as distinct from Kurdishness (Pamukçu,
Selcan, Dedekurban).
I have
found no references prior to the republican period that call these tribes
anything other than Kurds or Kizilbas.30 Writing in the
mid-19th century, Alexandre Jaba, the Russian consul at Erzurum, who had good
local informants, refers to them as 'the Dujik tribe' (thus named after Dujik
Baba, a mountain in central Dersim that by extension referred to the entire
mountain range of Dersim). Jaba comments that "the Turks call them Dujik
or simply Kurds (Ekr¯ad), whereas the proper Kurds give them the name of
Kizilbas."31 Taylor, the British consul
at Diyarbakir, who visited Dersim in 1866, speaks exclusively of Kizilbas (with
Seyhhasanli and Dersimli proper as subdivisions); the Austrian officer Butyka,
who travelled there in 1879, speaks of 'Dersim Kurds' and 'Seyyid Hasanli
Kizilbas Kurds'.
There
were oral traditions, however, which appeared to suggest that at least some of
the tribes had foreign origins. Taylor (1868: 318) already was told that the
Seyhhasanan were originally from Khorasan, and had come to Dersim more recently
from the Agcadag region near Malatya. (The Dersimi proper were, in his view,
descendants of an "original pagan Armenian stock".) The Kurdish
nationalist Nuri Dersimi also, without a trace of scepticism, mentions this
tradition. In his description the belief in Khorasani origins appears even more
widespread. Not only the Seyhhasanan but also several eastern Dersim tribes,
the Izoli, Hormek and Sadi, as well as the major seyyid lineages, Kureysan and
Bamasoran, claimed to have come from Khorasan many centuries ago (1952: 24-5).
Dersimi associates these Khorasani origins with the popular Alevi hero, Abu
Muslim of Khorasan, whom many Kurds believe to have been a Kurd, and
secondarily with Haci Bektas. This is no doubt one reason why the tradition was
popular and appears to have spread further from the seyyids to the tribes who
were their 'disciples': Khorasan was felt to be the original homeland of the
Alevis. Dersimi also emphasises that these tribes already spoke Zaza when they
arrived and that even in his day the said seyyids could not even speak Turkish.
This is a hardly veiled reaction to the official Turkish view that declared
these tribes to be Turkish and pointed to the Khorasan connection as a
corroboration. (It appears that before the republican period, people never equated
Khorasani with Turkish origins.)
In the
1930s, several authors mention tribes considering themselves the descendants of
troops of the Khwarizmshah Jalaluddin, a military adventurer who had moved to
eastern Anatolia before the Mongol invasion.32 A Turkish
intelligence report of the early 1930s has it that old men in the Pülümür
district still remembered legends about the Khwarizmshah Jalaluddin, and that
the mountain Dujik Baba was considered as his grave and therefore also known as
Sultan Baba.33 It is not clear to me
whether this really was a living tradition or one recently invented by amateur
historians embellishing the Khorasan theme with historically possible Turkic
ancestors.34
The First
World War and Turkey's War of Independence, in both of which a strong appeal
was made to Sunni Muslim solidarity, did not have a great impact on Dersim
society as a whole. The Young Turks, seeking to recruit Dersimi support for the
struggle against Russians and Armenians, and clearly believing the Dersim
Alevis to be something like village Bektasis, invoked the support of the
Bektasi çelebi Celaleddin Efendi to incite the Dersimis to war. According to
Nuri Dersimi, who accompanied the çelebi, these efforts remained almost
completely without success, showing that the Bektasi mother tekke had little
authority in Dersim (1952: 94-103). Firat (1970) claims that his own tribe, the
Hormek, did take active part, but the generally apologetic character of his
book warrants some scepticism.
If there
was any participation by the Dersim tribes in the War of Independence, it was
at best half-hearted. The assertion by Baki Öz that the Alevis of East Anatolia
at this early period considered Mustafa Kemal as a reincarnation (don
degistirmesi) of Ali and Haci Bektas (Öz 1990: 29) probably is an
anachronism and refers to a later period. Ali Kemali, who was one of the first
(republican) governors of the region and who wrote his book only a decade after
the war, is a more reliable source; he only mentions Kurdish separatist
rebellions against the Ankara government. It is true that Mustafa Kemal managed
to coopt several important Dersim chieftains and made them deputies in the
National Assembly.35 But as long as the kemalist
movement had the character of a movement of (Sunni) Muslims it did not generate
much enthusiasm in Dersim; its becoming a new government can only have made it
less attractive to the average Dersimi.
Kurdish
nationalism did find a certain following among the people of Dersim and Sivas
in this period. The first rebellion of an expressly Kurdish nationalist
character in the emerging new Turkey took place among the Koçgiri, with some
reverberations in Dersim.36 Nuri Dersimi, who was one of
the organisers of the Kürdistan Te'ali Cemiyeti, relates that in Sivas not only
Kurmanci and Zaza-speaking Alevis, but also Turkish Alevis joined this Kurdish
nationalist association and began calling themselves Kurds - apparently in
opposition to the new Ankara government that was seen as Turkish (Dersimi 1952:
64-5). That this was a Kurdish rebellion receives confirmation from Ali
Kemali (who, writing in 1932, was one of the last Turkish official authors to
call a Kurd a Kurd). But it was clearly as much an Alevi rebellion as a Kurdish
rebellion, judging from the alleged participation by Turkish Alevis, and the
absence of response among Sunni Kurds. The most charismatic leader, Alisêr, as
said before, began composing nefes in Kurmanci instead of Turkish, which
also indicates that his orientation was not a secular Kurdish nationalist one,
but at once Alevi and Kurdish.
The
Kurdish Alevis who lived further east (Bingöl, Mus, Varto), surrounded by Sunni
Zaza and Kurmanci-speakers with whom they had a long history of conflict, were
less inclined to see themselves as Kurds. When their traditional enemies took
part in Shaikh Sa'id's Kurdish nationalist-cum-Sunni rebellion, these tribes,
notably the Hormek and Lolan, opposed the Kurds and threw their lot in with the
kemalist government (Firat 1970[1945]). Both these Alevi tribes and Shaykh
Sa'id's supporters were, incidentally, Zaza speakers, but this clearly was not
sufficient reason for expressions of solidarity; there were persons who pleaded
for unity against the Turkish state, but they did this in the name of common
Kurdish, not Zaza identity. Sections of the leading elite of these tribes have
emphatically defined themselves as Turks at least since the 1930s; it cannot
yet be established whether this was only as a response to the emerging official
policy of defining the Kurds out of existence or had older roots.
Kemalist
officialdom defines the Alevi Kurds
The
Kemalist view of the Kurds has always been marred by internal contradictions.
On the one hand, the official view came to declare them Turks, on the other
hand they were always mistrusted because they were not, and deliberate attempts
were made to assimilate them and make them lose all non-Turkish traits. The
attitude towards the Alevi Kurds has been even more paradoxical and
inconsistent. On the one hand, being Alevis they have been hailed as adhering
to a really Turkish variety of Islam and as natural allies of the kemalists'
program of secularisation, on the other hand their Zazaness or Kurdishness made
them alien and unreliable. The fact that the language used in ritual by the
Kurdish Alevis was Turkish appeared to offer promising prospects for their easy
assimilation, but on the other hand their history of opposition to the state
made them highly suspect. Thus a study of Dersim prepared by the Gendarmerie in
the early 1930s made the following observations:
"[As for the Zazas,]
with them the language used for religious and customary purposes is Turkish.
Those taking part in the rituals are obliged to speak Turkish. It is due to
this obligation that the Alevi Zazas, in spite of centuries of neglect, have
not moved away too far from Turkdom. Among the Alevis of Dersim it is possible
to make oneself understood in Turkish, though one cannot expect an answer [in
the same language]. It is noteworthy and regrettable that, whereas one can
reach mutual understanding in the Turkish language with everyone over 20 or 30,
their Turkish is being completely Zazaicised, so that it is impossible to come
across the Turkish language in children below the age of 10. This proves that
the Alevi Turks of Dersim have started losing their language, and if [this
problem] remains neglected the day will come when no Turkish speakers will be
found here."37
Thus the
Zaza Alevis are represented as Turks by origin, who were gradually being
Zazaicised. The paragraph that immediately follows, however, asserts that it is
more than language that divides them from Turkdom:
"The worst aspect of
Alevism, and one that deserves analysis, is the deep abyss separating them from
Turkdom. This abyss is the Kizilbas religion. The Kizilbas do not like the
Sunni Muslims, they bear them a grudge, they are their archenemies. They call the
Sunnis 'Rumi'. The Kizilbas believe that divine power is embodied in [human]
carriers, and that their imams have been tortured to death at the hands of the
Sunnis. Therefore they bear the Sunnis enmity. This has gone so far that for
the Kizilbas, Turk and Sunni are the same, as are the names of Kurd and
Kizilbas."38
This last
observation is the reverse of what later written apologetic works like Firat's
assert: for the Dersimis, Kurd and Kizilbas are identical, and so are Turk and
Sunni.
The
report just quoted owes much to the work by one of the architects of official
history, Hasan Resit Tankut.39 From the late 1920s to the
1960s he wrote a series of research papers and policy counsels on
'ethnopolitics', i.e. on how to turkicise the other ethnic groups. A number of
his previously unpublished, mostly confidential papers have recently been
published by Mehmet Bayrak. The quotations above echo an anonymous report,
probably by Tankut, submitted to the Birinci Umumi Müfettis (the 'super
governor' of those days), Ibrahim Tali, in 1928 (Bayrak 1993: 510-23). Tankut,
who knew eastern Anatolia well, in his confidential reports never pretended
that the Kurds were Turks, but he wrote that the Alevis' use of Turkish in
their rituals should make the task of assimilation much easier than it would be
in the case of the Shafi'i Zazas (ibid.: 515).
In all
his writings Tankut made a point of distinguishing between Sunnis and Alevis,
Kurds and Zazas -although he often subsumed them all under the blanket term
Kurds. In a study of the Zazas, both Shafi'i and Alevi (1994a), he emphasised
the Iranian background of their religion (as exemplified by their use of the
term 'Homay' for God). In spite of his explicit recognition of Zoroastrian
influences in the religion of the Alevis, he thought that they were originally
Turkic and could (should) be made into Turks again. His advice was to keep
(Sunni) Zazas, Kurmanc and Dersim Alevis as far apart as possible in order to
turkify them more easily. In a policy paper written in the wake of the 1960
coup he proposed to literally drive a wedge between the Zazas and Kurmanc by
resettling Turks in a 50 kilometers wide corridor between these linguistic
groups' major settlement zones (1994c).
Execution
of this proposal appears never to have been considered seriously, but there
certainly have been less drastic state-sponsored efforts to dissociate the
Zazas from the Kurmanc and the Alevis from the Sunnis. The Alevi revival of the
late 1980s as well as the recent movement proclaiming the Zazas to be a
distinct people have had complex causes but both received encouragement from
circles within the state apparatus intent on reducing the danger of Kurdish
nationalism.
Zaza,
Alevi and Dersimi as
deliberately embraced ethnic identities
Until the 1930s, Dersim had never been completely brought under control by the
central government, and it was the major target of the kemalist government's
efforts to pacify the eastern provinces and assimilate the non-Turkish
population. The great Dersim rebellion of 1937-38 was in fact little more than
some low-intensity resistance to the pacification program but it was suppressed
with great excess of violence, resulting in the massacre of at least 10 per
cent of the population (van Bruinessen 1994a). Mass deportations -only a part
of the deportees returned to Dersim, now named Tunceli, after a decade
-contributed to the relatively successful assimilation of the Dersimis and
their integration into the public life of Turkey. As Alevis with a libertarian
streak of mind, many educated Dersimis no doubt felt closer to the secular
kemalist reformers-from-above than to the, in their eyes, bigoted Sunni Kurds -
in spite of the memory of 1937-38.
When the
political liberalisation of the 1950s and 1960s made a wider spectrum of
political organisations available, the Dersimis generally tended to end up on
the left or extreme left of that spectrum. In most of the left-wing movements
since 1960 the Dersimis have been represented, often in leading positions.
Dersimis were also actively involved in the rise of Kurdish nationalism as a
mass movement towards the end of the 1960s. Perhaps the most radical of Kurdish
political leaders of those days, known by the code name of Dr. Sivan (Sait
Kirmizitoprak) was a Dersimi.40 In fact he
belonged to Nazimiye branch of the Hormek, the same tribe as M.S. Firat, who a
generation earlier had insisted on their Turkishness! Several of the Kurdish
movements of the 1970s again had Dersimis in their leadership, from the
intellectual Özgürlük Yolu movement to the activist PKK.41
It is
true that more young Dersimis in the 1970s were active in 'Turkish' radical
left movements than in Kurdish nationalist ones, but this did not appear to
reflect disagreements about their ethnic identity. The leftists did not deny
being Kurds but they simply did not consider this identity as relevant for the
political struggle. They condemned Kurdish nationalism as a feudal and
petty-bourgeois movement - not because it was Kurdish but because it was
nationalist. Something similar was true of their Alevi identity: they were
proudly aware of the Alevis' history of rebellion against the state but
rejected Alevi belief and ritual as well as the traditional enmity towards
Sunnis. The movement that found the most widespread support in Dersim,
T¡KKO/TKP-ML, was a maoist movement believing in rural guerrilla, the following
of which initially cut across ethnic and religious boundaries.
In the
course of the 1980s this began to change, at least in part as a result of the
collapse of virtually the entire left movement in Turkey and the rise of the
PKK as the single most important opposition movement. Tunceli remained the last
stronghold of T¡KKO/TKP-ML, which elsewhere practically disappeared. The
organisation became so closely identified with Dersim that its character
changed: from part of the 'Turkish left' it became an organisation of secular,
radical Alevis. By the end of the decade some of its leaders were talking about
the Alevis as an ethnic group, on a par with (Sunni) Turks and Kurds, others
about the Dersimis as a distinct group.
Although
both left-wing and Kurdish nationalist parties and organisations retained a
measure of support among the young people in Dersim, many others turned their
backs on radical politics. The politicisation of the 1970s had only resulted in
more repression, for which the elder generation blamed the left youth
movements. Their reaction was a return to religion - an emphasis on the Alevi
identity as a religious, not necessarily ethnic, identity. This response was no
doubt influenced by the wider Alevi resurgence elsewhere in Turkey and among
migrants in Europe: the mushrooming of Alevi associations, a flood of
publications on Alevism and the public celebration of cems. The Alevi
resurgence was further reinforced when government authorities in the late 1980s
began openly endorsing it. This official support probably was not only meant to
counterbalance the growth of Sunni Islamism but also to stop Kurdish
nationalism making further inroads among the Kurdish Alevis. There was some
pressure to emphasise the Turkishness of Alevism.
Meanwhile
in Europe Zaza-speaking Kurds - some of them Sunnis, others Alevis -were
bringing about a minor revival of Zaza literature, in the margin of the
remarkable resurgence of Kurmanci literary activities. A minority among them
began perceiving the Zaza as a distinct ethnic group that had to liberate
itself from cultural domination by Kurds as well as the Turkish state. This
Zaza 'nationalism' still is largely a matter of exile politics, and it may
still appear as a marginal phenomenon, but gradually it is also influencing the
debate among Dersimis inside Turkey.
The
recently emerging Zaza and Alevi nationalisms in Turkey are best understood in
their dialectical relationship with the development of Kurdish nationalism. The
same process of urbanisation and migration that gave rise to a modern Kurdish
awareness in the large cities also brought Alevi villagers (Turkish as well as
Kurdish or Zaza speakers) to the Sunni towns of the region and into direct
competition for scarce resources with their new Sunni neighbours. The political
polarisation of the 1970s aggravated Sunni-Alevi antagonism as rightist and
leftist radicals chose these communities as their recruiting grounds and
contributed much to the mutual demonisation ("fascist" Sunnis versus
"communist" Alevis). A series of bloody Sunni-Alevi clashes, perhaps
better called anti-Alevi pogroms, did much to strengthen a common Alevi
awareness.42 In the region where these clashes took place,
it did not matter much whether one was a Kurd or a Turk, one's primary identity
was the religious one. There were Turks and Kurds on both sides of this divide
- which gave rise to such surprising phenomena as Sunni Kurds supporting the
pan-Turkist Nationalist Action Party and young Turkish-speaking Alevis
declaring themselves to be Kurds.
The 1980s
witnessed a veritable cultural and religious revival of Alevism, beginning
among the Turkish and Kurdish immigrant communities in western Europe.
Activists of various persuasions -leftist, Sunni Muslim, fascist, Kurdish
nationalist -had earlier made some attempts to organise these communities, but
the 1980 military coup in Turkey represents a real watershed. Unprecedented
numbers of experienced organisers came as refugees to western Europe. The most
successful among them were radical Sunni Muslim groups and Kurdish
nationalists, among whom the PKK gradually became dominant. The Turkish regime
meanwhile attempted to regain some control of the immigrant communities by
taking over the major mosque federations and sponsoring an ultra-conservative
and nationalist brand of Sunni Islam known as the "Turkish-Islamic
synthesis".43
It was
probably as a reaction to, and in part in imitation of, increased Sunni
religious activities in Germany that Alevis also began organising, after long
having kept a low profile or even hidden their religious affiliation. For the
first time, large Alevi religious ceremonies were held in public (in republican
Turkey these ceremonies were officially banned and could at best be held
semi-clandestinely). Alevi associations were established, and these attracted
many young Alevis who previously had been prominent in various leftist or
Kurdish organisations. A few of the smaller leftist organisations were entirely
Alevi in membership; these too now tended to emphasise their Alevi identity in
combination with their marxism-leninism, and to think of the Alevis as a sort
of nation, to the extent of speaking of Alevistan as their homeland.44 These activities
abroad stimulated an Alevi revival in Turkey too, where the gradual political
liberalisation made the establishment of religious and social Alevi
associations possible.
In the
late 1980s, the Turkish government began making conciliatory gestures towards
the Alevis, and granting Alevism a certain formal recognition, in a transparant
effort to neutralise the community's alienation from the state and to prevent
the radical Kurdish movement PKK from making further inroads among the Kurdish
(and Zaza) Alevis. In fact, the one region where the PKK has had great
difficulties in establishing itself, and where it always has had to compete
with other radical political movements, was Dersim (i.e., the present province
of Tunceli and neighbouring districts), which is largely Zaza-speaking and
Alevi. The people of Dersim had, at least since the 1960s, always been more
inclined towards left radicalism than Kurdish nationalism. The PKK, which
initially had been militantly antireligious, had in the late 1980s moreover
adopted a conciliatory attitude towards Sunni Islam, in a successful attempt to
gain more grassroots support in the Sunni region. This obviously did not
contribute to its popularity among the Alevis, and it may even have
strengthened Alevi particularism.
In the
perception of the PKK, the entire Alevi revival was directly engineered by the
state in order to sow division among the Kurds, and its protagonists were all
agents. This has also led to suspicions, and purges, of Alevis in the party's
own ranks, which in turn did little to warm the Alevis' hearts to the PKK. The
renewed emphasis on Alevism as one's primary identity, with an increasing
awareness of the religious dimension of that identity, is largely a reaction to
Sunni fundamentalism and inclusive Kurdish nationalism.
There has
always existed a distinct Alevi awareness, although sometimes submerged under
other ethnic loyalties. The present Zaza nationalism, however, is something
entirely new, and it is still forcefully opposed by numerous Zaza-speakers who
stick to their self-definition as Kurds. For the conditions of its emergence we
shall again have to look to the migrant communities in Western Europe rather
than to Turkey (unless one subscribes to the popular conspiracy theory that
blames it all on the Turkish intelligence services).
In
Turkey, where all local languages besides Turkish were banned, it did not
appear to matter much whether one originally was a Kurmanci or a Zaza-speaker.
In Europe however, one of the issues with which Kurdish activists attempted to
mobilise Kurdish migrant workers was the demand for mother tongue education,
i.e. for official recognition of the fact that Turkish is not the native
language of every immigrant from Turkey, and for the acceptance of Kurdish
among the immigrants' mother tongues taught in school. This placed the
Zaza-speakers in an awkward dilemma: should they also demand that their
children in German schools be taught Kurmanci instead of Turkish as their
'mother tongue'? Some in fact did, like generations before them had always
learned Kurmanci as the lingua franca in their region, but a certain uneasiness
remained. This was clearly an issue on which the interests of Zaza-speakers and
Kurmanci-speakers were not identical.
A related
issue that contained the seeds of conflict was the language to be used in
Kurdish journals published in Turkey and especially in European exile. Several
journals appeared during the 1960s and 1970s, and most of them were exclusively
in Turkish, with at the most an occasional poem in Kurdish.45 The first
periodical that completely avoided Turkish was the short-lived cultural
magazine Tirêj, published in Izmir. This was also the first significant
modern Kurdish journal to have a small section in Zaza.46 After the 1980
military coup, Kurdish publishing activities no longer were possible in Turkey,
but writers and journalist carried on in European exile, especially in Sweden.
A true revival of Kurmanci literature took place here. Children's books,
collections of folk tales, and the first novels were published, and a whole
range of journals appeared.
The
Iranian revolution and the Iraq-Iran war also brought large numbers of
intellectuals from the other parts of Kurdistan as refugees to Europe. For the
first time since the early twentieth century, there were common Kurdish
cultural activities on a significant scale. In Paris a Kurdish Institute was
established, the first significant all-Kurdish institution, with an important
library and various periodical publications. The old dream of a common standard
language resurfaced, but since neither Kurmanci nor Sorani-speakers were likely
to make concessions to the other, journals targeting readers from all parts of
Kurdistan had sections in both Kurmanci and Sorani. The literary magazine
published by the Kurdish Institute then decided to add a section in Zaza, as
the third relevant Kurdish language.47 This led to
strong negative reactions from certain nationalist intellectual circles, which
for political reasons fiercely opposed linguistic fragmentation. Some of them
strove for a synthetic unified Kurdish language, others believed they could put
up with two written Kurdish languages, but agreed that developing Zaza, which
previously hardly had any written tradition, as another written language
amounted to sowing division among the Kurdish nation.
The
debate on the development of, or ban on, written Zaza made a strong impact in
the small circle of Zaza intellectuals in exile, causing a parting of the minds
among them. In the late 1980s, the first Zaza journal was published, and it was
emphatically non-Kurdish. It carried articles in Zaza, Turkish and English but
not in Kurdish, it spoke of the Zazas as a separate people, whose identity had
too long been denied not only by the Turkish state but by the Kurds as well,
and it coined the new name of Zazaistan for the ancient homeland of these
Zazas, indicating its rejection of the term Kurdistan as a geographical name.48 The journal at
first had only a very small circle of readers, but the many angry Kurdish
reactions suggested that the journal did have a point after all, and gradually
growing numbers of Zazas were won over to its views. There appears not to be an
organised Zaza nationalist movement yet, but the publishing activities go on
increasing, with two new journals appearing in Europe and recently a series of
booklets in Turkey, all of them proclaiming the Zazas to be different from the
Kurds.49
Thus
there were, by the late 1980s, three competing national or ethnic movements
that appealed to the loyalties of the Alevi Kurds: Turkish, Kurdish and Zaza.
The Alevi identity represented a serious fourth option, with a potentially
stronger emotional appeal than the bonds of language alone. This situation gave
rise to an intensive debate among Dersimis (and Kurdish Alevis in general)
about their 'real' or 'original' identities and a quest for their roots. One
aspect of the quest was an analysis of the names by which, before the arrival
of Turkish and Kurdish nationalism, their grandparents referred to themselves
and their neighbours. Not surprisingly, the results were inconclusive; earlier
generations obviously did not think in contemporary ethnic terms. The names
used and their referents appear to vary from valley to valley, and moreover are
also different depending on the context and language of discourse.50
When speaking
Zaza, Dersimis often refer to themselves as Kirmanc and to their
language as Kirmancki, which are almost the same names as those by which
Kurdish speakers refer to themselves and their language (Kurmanc and Kurmanci),
but which obviously have different referents.51
When speaking Turkish or other foreign languages, both may in fact translate
these names as Kurd and Kurdish, which appears to support the Kurdish
nationalist viewpoint. However, the Dersimis (when speaking Zaza) call the
Kurmanci language Kirdasi, and they refer to the Sunni Kurdish tribes as
Kir or Kur. Their eastern Zaza-speaking
but Sunni neighbours, in the districts astride the Murad river, are called
neither Kur nor Kirmanc but Zaza and their language Zazaki,
although it is practically identical with the Kirmancki spoken
in Dersim. Another term used by some Zaza speakers (mostly in the Siverek
region, but apparently here and there in Dersim as well) is Dimili,
which as some orientalists (Hadank, Minorsky) have suggested could possibly
derive from Daylami and thus point to Daylam as the Zazas' region of
origin. 'Zazaists' have not failed to appeal to this name as proof of the
distinctness of the Zazas.52
The identity debate, especially among Dersimis living in European exile,
tended towards the ever more forceful assertion of the distinctness of Dersim
(and the Kurdish Alevis in general): Alevi, but unlike the Turkish Alevis, Zaza
or Kurdish, but unlike the Sunni Zazas or Kurds. Some of the protagonists in
the debates were quite aware of how their perceptions of their own ethnic
identity were shifting. A revealing illustration is given in a programmatic
statement by the editor of a new journal addressing specifically the Zaza
Alevis, Desmala Sure. Like many others of his generation, this man had
begun his political career in a Turkish left-wing organisation and later moved
to the Kurdish left. In the course of the 1980s he evolved to a Zazaist
standpoint, and more recently yet he developed the view that centuries of
Sunni-Alevi conflict had divided the Zaza 'nation' into two 'nations' of
different creeds. Reviewing his earlier analyses, the editor writes:
"There
was a time when I defended the view that the Dersim rebellions did not have a
'national' character [meaning here: 'Kurdish national'], but I have since quite
some time changed my mind. In one of my writings I characterised the Dersim
rebellions as 'Zaza movements'. I now feel obliged to correct myself on this
point: the Dersim rebellions were Kirmanc-Alevi rebellions. I include the
Koçgiri rebellion among the Dersim rebellions, for Koçgiri is [culturally] a
part of western Dersim. I now consider the Shaykh Sa'id rebellion as a national
rebellion [i.e., of the Sunni Zaza 'nation']. In 1987 I described the Shaykh
Sa'id rebellion as a Zaza rebellion; I still adhere to that view."53
At least some
former activists of T¡KKO/TKP-ML and other left organisations appear to be
receptive to such views.
Although the Zazaist
and 'Kirmanc-Alevi' movements still appear to be marginal in Dersim and
elsewhere in Turkey, Kurdish nationalists perceived them to be potentially
dangerous and suspected the Turkish secret police of being the true motor
behind this separatism in Kurdish ranks. For obvious reasons, they were equally
distrustful of the official sponsorship of the Turkey-wide Alevi resurgence,
which they considered as an ill-disguised attempt to drive a wedge between the
Kurdish Alevis and the other Kurds. The recent accommodation of the PKK, the
most important Kurdish nationalist movement, with Sunni Islam54 had stirred up
old Alevi fears, making a rejection of Kurdish nationalism more likely.
To counter
these dangers, the PKK launched an ideological counter-offensive with an
appropriately named journal Zülfikar, which specifically addressed the
Alevi Kurds.55 With the well-chosen slogan 'Aslini inkar eden haramzadedir!'
in its masthead, and in a language rich in Alevi symbolism, the journal warned
them not to forget that they were Kurds and to beware of state propaganda
associating Alevism with Turkdom as well as of bourgeois Alevi leaders
collaborating with the (Sunni and state) establishment.56 The journal
specifically attempts to disassociate the Kurdish Alevis from Bektasism, which
it represents as the state-dominated variety of Alevism.
The debate on
the ethnic identity of Dersim was not carried on with words alone. In 1994 the
PKK stepped up its guerrilla activities in the greater Dersim area, in what
probably was a deliberate effort to force the Dersimis to make a political
choice, for or against the Kurdish movement. It had since 1984 done this with
some success in the districts north of the Iraqi border, where it gained
popular support precisely because of the Turkish army's brutal reprisals
against the civilian population. The government responded by one of the most
massive military operations since the establishment of the Republic, forcibly
evacuating and partially or completely destroying around a third of Dersim's
villages.57
Conclusion
The debate on the identity of the Kurdish Alevis still is in a state of flux.
Among no other group in Turkey is there such an intensive and self-conscious
search for the most appropriate way to define oneself. The gradual evacuation
of Dersim -there are far more Dersimis elsewhere in Turkey and in Europe now
than in Dersim itself -probably means that much of the traditional culture and
religious practices of Dersim has gone, or will soon be, lost. Young Dersimi
intellectuals have, it is true, made efforts to record and preserve oral
tradition, but these very efforts show that much of the tradition is dead
already. Another aspect of this effort to preserve is the deliberate intention
to reinvent Dersim and its culture and to reaffirm its origins. Oral tradition
is directly relevant to the debate on the ethnic identity of the Kurdish
Alevis, and representatives of all rival views have had recourse to it,
systematising and interpreting it in the light of their own ideological positions.
Thereby they are contributing to a new living tradition, one that is written
and stripped of elements that are too strictly local. It is unlikely that the
question of the origins of the Kurdish Alevis will ever be unambiguously and
convincingly answered, however; the debate is likely to continue.
Notes
1. This is an extended version of a paper originally presented at the
conference on Bektashis and similar syncretistic groups in the Middle East,
held at the Free University in Berlin in April 1995. A shorter version of this
paper will appear in the proceedings of that conference.
2. Names like Koçusagi and Asagi Abbasusagi are common in Turkish-language
sources (see the tribal lists in Kemali 1992[1932]: 157-65, Yavuz 1968: 351-96
and Dersimi 1952: 46-69), and local people themselves refer to their tribes by
these Turkish names when speaking Turkish. When they speak Zaza, however, they
do not use these Turkish forms but say, e.g. Kozu instead of Koçusagi, Abasanê
Cêrî instead of Asagi Abbasusagi. It is not clear whether these are more
authentic forms or, to the contrary, bastardisations of the Turkish. Mustafa
Düzgün (1992) gives the local (Zaza or Kurmanci) equivalents to many of the
Turkish names occurring in Nuri Dersimi's well-known history of the region.
3. The semi-official Türk Kültürünü Arastirma Enstitüsü in Ankara has published
a long series of books on this and related themes.
4. See e.g. Cemsid Bender's books and articles, especially Bender 1992b.
5. E.g., Dersimi 1952; Firat 1970 [1946]; Kocadag 1987; Pamukçu 1992; Selcan
1994, all making contradictory claims concerning the 'original' ethnic identity
of Kurdish Alevis.
6. Dersimi (1952: 65) also notes Hormek at Refahiye, and there is another Lolan
enclave near Yozgat in Central Anatolia.
7. See Dersimi 1952: 61-2. Tankut, though usually well-informed, calls the
Koçgiri Zaza-speakers, perhaps because of this relationship with western Dersim
(1994a: 415). Sykes remarks that their language is "seemingly a dialect of
Kurdish, but hardly comprehensible to Zazas or Baba Kurds, or Diarbekir
Kermanjis" (1908: 479).
8. The Kureysan, perhaps the most important seyyid lineage of the Dersim
Alevis, have their largest concentration in Mazgirt and Nazimiye, but there are
also sections of them in Kigi, Hinis and Varto, Pülümür, and Sivas (Jandarma
Umum Kumandanligi, n.d.: 33).
9. The Baliyan tribe of southwestern Malatya considered Hüseyin Dogan Dede (d.
1983), a seyyid of the Aguçan lineage, as their mürsid-i kamil but
also had dedes of local lineages such as the Kalender (Sahhüseyinoglu
1991: 83-8). The Aguçan are one of the minor Dersim ocaks, identified
there as the descendants of an eponymous khalifa of Haci Bektas.
10. "The Geographical Centre of [the Alevi] religion is in the town of
Kirind, Kermanshah province, Persia. Four of Ali's male descendants now reside
in Kirind. They are by name, Seyyid Berake, Seyyid Rustem, Seyyid Essed Ullah,
Seyyid Farraj Ullah. (...) These men send representatives throughout Asia Minor
and northern Syria for preaching and for the moral training of their
followers" (Trowbridge 1909: 342-3). Sayyid Baraka (d.1863) and his
grandson and successor Sayyid Rustam (still alive in 1920) had established
themselves as the chief religious authorities of the Guran Ahl-i Haqq, and commanded
great respect among other Ahl-i Haqq communities in Iran (see my "Satan's
psalmists").
11 See however Trowbridge 1909 (on Antep), Chater 1928 (on a village between
Elazig and Malatya), and Sahhüseyinoglu 1991 (on a tribe living between Malatya
and Elbistan).
12 For a description of perhaps the major pilgrimage of Dersim, to the mountain
sanctuary of Düzgün Baba, see Ferber & Grässlin 1988: 145-156.
13. Recent publications referring to these taboos and forms of 'nature worship'
are Bumke 1979; Feber & Grässlin 1988: 138-41; Özkan 1992: 259-74; Düzgün
1988; Düzgün et al. 1992; Dedekurban 1994.
14. Andranig 1900: 167-70. I wish to thank Professor Jos Weitenberg of Leiden
University for translating these passages for me. One of Andranig's
interlocutors, a seyyid, told him that humans return after their deaths as
mammals, then as snakes, birds, insects, butterflies, mosquitoes and finally as
flies. Another claimed to still remember a previous existence as a donkey. He
had been reborn human again because a previous human existence had ended
unnaturally, in the war, and had therefore not been properly completed.
15. Sykes (1908: 479) wrote of the Kureysan, Balaban and Sadilli that they were
"Shias or Pantheists" and noted of the Koçgiri, "In religion I
take them to be advanced Pantheists, who recognize nature as a female principal
and God as male. This opinion I give with every reservation as the result of
interpreted conversations with well-to-do elders."
16. Riggs, one of the best informed missionary writers, emphasizes the worship
of sun and fire and only later mentions the ayin-i cem (1911).
17. "Sabahlari günes dogarken karsisina geçilip dua edilir ve salavat
getiril1?. Ya yerde secde edilerek yer öpülür veya her kes elini agzina
götürerek niyaz eder" S. Öztürk 1972: 100.
18. These Semsi are mentioned by the 17th-century Polish Armenian traveller,
Simeon (ed. Andreasyan 1964: 100), by Carsten Niebuhr, who also met them at
Mardin (1780: 376-8), and by the Italian missionary Campanile (1818: 194-200).
An old Semsi place of worship near the city of Diyarbakir was only recently
destroyed when the Mardin road was widened. Niebuhr remarked that many Semsi
converted to Jacobite Christianity; others may have merged with the Yezidi or
with the Alevi. A major tribe among the Yezidi of Armenia is presently named
Semsiki, but nothing is known of their relation to these earlier Semsi.
19. Dersimi 1952: 96-8. The cult of the 'saint of Kistim' is also decribed by
Asatrian & Gevorgian 1988: 588. Another 'snake' pilgrimage centre, Bone
Ocak in the district of Hozat, is briefly described in Kaya 1995: 97. On the
snake cult among the old Armenians, see Abeghian 1899: 74-6.
20. Tankut claimed they wrote in Zaza (1994b: 292). His editor, Mehmet Bayrak,
corrects him and states that Alisêr's poems were in Kurmanci; he also claimed
that Turkish had never been the only language used in ritual. Informants from
Dersim give contradictory accounts regarding the use of Zaza and/or Kurmanci in
the ritual of the cem. Very few prayers and nefes in these languages
have been published, however (Düzgün et al. 1992).
21. The list of other pilgrimages given by Molyneux-Seel -Hasan(?) at Sivas,
Ali at Kufa (sic!), Musa [Kazim] at Baghdad and Husayn and Abbas at Kerbela
-gives the impression of having been mentioned by the author's informants to
satisfy his curiosity only. The number of Dersimi actually visiting them must
be minimal (although a few Dersimi later did claim to have visited Kerbela and
to have been imparted important esoteric knowledge there). This makes one
wonder how popular the pilgrimage to Haci Bektas ever was.
22. Idris gave his account in a report to the sultan published by Sevgen (1968)
and in his Salmn¯®me; this account was incorporated by Ebü'l-Fazl in
his Zayl-i Hasht Bihisht (which probably was the source for von Hammer's
account in GOR II, 432-4), by Sa'deddin in his T®cü'l-tev®rþ and by
Hüseyin [Bosnevi] in Bed®yi'ü'l-vak®yi'.
23. "Seine Behauptung war, dass es im paradies kein
unterworfensein unter das gesetz (taklf) ge2?. Wir sagen aber, dass wir
im paradiese sind, und daher kann es für uns kein taklf geben. Diese fünf
gebete gehören zu unserm taklf (va n panç nam®z bar m® taklf ast),
sie brauchen also nicht verrichtet zu werden ..." (Ritter
1954: 42?.
24. Babinger 1921: 1032?. Akhlat was at most times in Bitlis' sphere of
influence. It was, of course, also an important Selçuk settlement, but Sharaf
Khan, who mentions Hüseyin of Akhlat with great respect ("the most
prominent among the 'ulama of his age in both the exoteric and the esoteric
sciences"), appears to imply that he was a fellow Kurd (Bidls 1860:
351). In the 16th century, the most conspicuously heterodox Kurdish tribe
mentioned in the Sharafn®me, the Pazuki, also were based around Akhlat.
25. Beldiceanu-Steinherr 192?. This finding is based on a painstaking combing
of the available tax registers and other documents for Amasya;
Beldiceanu-Steinherr's research did not cover the other provinces where
Bektaslu communities are mention2?.
26. Türkay 1979: 22?. Unfortunately Türkay gives no indication of the dates and
type of documents in which he found the references to these tribes. It is not
so surprising that there were Kurds among the early Bektasis, for the Vil®yetn®me
also relates that Haci Bektas first visited Kurdistan before moving further
west to central Anatol2?.
27. Examples are mentioned in van Bruinessen 1989.
28. Altan Gokalp has suggested that the terms Türkman and Yörük as used in
these documents were not ethnic-linguistic labels but referred to different
statuses for purposes of taxation; he believes that neither Yörük nor Türkman
were necessarily turcophone (personal communication; cf. Gokalp 1989: 530-2.
29. Among the scholars who have commented upon these similarities are Ivanow,
Mokri, and MSlikoff. Izady (1992) goes further and subsumes the three under the
name 'cult of angels', which in his view represents an old Kurdish religious
substra3?.
30. With the exception of the Balaban who, as said, are listed as Yörük in
Türkay's work, although other sources call them Kurds too.
31. Jaba
1860: 6n-7n. As important component tribes of the
Dujik Kurds, Jaba mentions the Balaban, Kureysan and Gülabi. See also the
observations in Blau 1862: 621-7, where the Dujik (or Du+ik) Kurds are
described as a subgroup of the Kurdish tribes.
32. Jalaluddin is a historical person, and his peregrinations in eastern
Anatolia are well-documented. After his death his troops, mostly Kipchak Turks,
entered the service of the Selçuk ruler Kay-Kubad, who gave them his eastern
marches, Erzincan, Amasya and Larande-Nigde as a fiefdom (iqt®') (Cahen
1968: 245-3?.
33. Jandarma
Umum Kumandanligi n.d.: 32, 38. The
association of the Dujik Baba with Jalaluddin Khwarizmshah is also noticed by
Tankut (1994a[1937]: 442-3), who appears to consider the Bahtiyar tribe as
descendants of Jalaluddin's companions. Yolga, a former kaimakam
(district governor) of Nazimiye, goes even further and makes most of the tribes
of eastern Dersim the descendants of Jalaluddin's armies (1994: 83-4).
34. Edip Yavuz, a former kaimakam of Pülümür and vali of Tunceli,
who attempts to prove the Turkishness of all Dersim tribes, also mentions the
belief that Jalaluddin Khwarizmshah is buried on the Dujik Baba (1968: 368),
but he does not relate this to any tribe's claims of descent -perhaps because
of his wish to prove the Dersimis to be Oghuz rather than Kipchak Turks, as
Jalaluddin's men were.
35. Dersim, with five deputies, probably was even overrepresented in the first
National Assembly. The names of these deputies, as well as those in the earlier
Ottoman parliament and in later republican assemblies, are given in Kalman
1995: 483-8.
36. See Kemali 1992[1932]: 125-43; Dersimi 1952: 120-68;
Komal 1975; Kieser 1993).
37. "[Zaza alevilere gelince:] Bunlarda mezhep ve âdet dili Türkçedir.
Ayinlerde istirak edenler Türkçe konusmak mecburiyetindedirler. Bu
mecburiyettirki alevi zazalik asirlardan beri ihmal edildigi halde türklükten
pekte uzaklasmamis. Dersim alevileri arasinda cevap istememek sartile Türkçe
meram anlatmak mümkündür. Sayani nazar ve esef olan nokta sudurki 20-30
yasindan yukari yasli her fertle Türk dili ile mütekabilen anlasmak ve
dertlesmek mümkün oldugu halde bunun [...(?)] türk dili tamamen Zazalasmakta ve
hale 10 yasinda küçük çocuklarda ise türk diline rastlamak imkâni
kalmamaktadir. Bu netice Dersim alevi türklerinin de benliklerini kaybetmege
basladiklarina ve ihmal edilirse günün birinde Türk dili ile konusana tesadüf
edilemeyecegine delildir." (Jandarma Umum Kumandanligi n.d.: 38-39).
38. "Aleviligin en kötü ve tefrika deger cebhesi Türklükle aralarinda
derin uçurumdur. Bu uçurum kizilbaslik itikatid[idir. Kizilbas, Sünni müslimini
sevmez, bir kin besler, onun ezelden düsmanidir. Sünnileri rumi diye anar.
Kizilbas ilahi kuvvetin hamili bulundugunu ve imamlarinin sünnilerin elinde
iskence ile öldügüne itikat ederler. Bunun için
sünnilere düsmandir. Bu okadar ileri gitmistirki kizilbas Türk ile sünni ve
Kürt ile kizilbas kelimesini ayni telâkki eder." (ibid.,
emphasis added).
39. Hasan Resit Tankut is best known as one of the fathers of the
pseudo-scientific Sun-Language Theory (which holds that all languages derive
from Turkish and all civilisations from the Turks). Brought up as a young
orphan in an Alevi Kurdish family in Elbistan, Maras, he later travelled
extensively in eastern Turkey. See the biographical notice in Bayrak 1994:
197-204.
40. Dr. Sivan led the left-wing branch of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of
Turkey and began preparing for a prolonged guerrilla struggle as early as 1969,
from a base in Iraqi Kurdistan. He was killed there in 193?. One of the major
movements of the 1970s, DDKD, acknowledged him as its ideological leader.
41. Özgürlük Yolu leader Kemal Burkay is a Dersimi, as are many of his
associates; among the founders of the PKK we find the Dersimis Mazlum Dogan and
M. Hayri Durmus, who both were killed in Diyarbakir prison in 1982.
42. On the clashes, see Laçiner 1978, 1989.
43. On this semi-official state ideology, see Ahmad 1988; Toprak 1990.
44. I first encountered the name of Alevistan in the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet
in 1976, in a report on subversive activities in Germany. Maoist enemies of the
state allegedly conspired to divide Turkey into Kurdistan in the east,
Alevistan in the centre, and a Sunni Turkish remnant in the west. In the 1980s
there was an ephemeral ultra-left organisation in Germany, Kizil Yol,
that similarly proclaimed its intention to liberate Alevistan. Many Kurdish
nationalists and leftists of other persuasions suspected that these were
machinations by the Turkish intelligence services, designed to provoke a Sunni
and Turkish nationalist reaction.
45. The most complete survey of periodicals published by and for Kurds in
Turkey is given by Malmîsanij & Lewendî, (1992). They list 65 periodicals
published between 1960 and 1980, many of them appearing semi- or illegally.
46. Only three issues of Tirêj could appear in Turkey in 1979 and 193?.
A fourth and final issue was published in Swed3?. There was in fact one earlier
journal that published a few brief pieces -a song text, a folktale and a
word-list -in Zaza. This was the short-lived Roja Newe, the first and
only issue of which appeared in Istanbul in 1963 (see Malmîsanij & Lewendî
1992: 159-61.)
47. This magazine, Hêvî/Hîwa, began publication in 1983. Its Zaza
section appeared under the responsibility of Malmîsanij, who had also written
the Zaza contributions in Tirêj, and was later also to contribute Zaza
material to various other journals. While continuing his efforts to preserve
Zaza oral tradition and to win more respect for Zaza culture, Malmîsanij was to
firmly oppose Zaza separatism when this emerged.
48. Ayre and its successor Piya were published monthly in Sweden from
1987 on. The editor, Ebübekir Pamukçu, was a Sunni Zaza speaker who had previously
been marginally involved in Kurdish cultural activities and had at a yet
earlier stage in his life been attracted to Turkis,. His most substantial
contribution to the journal, an analysis of the Dersim rebellion from a Zaza
nationalist point of view, later appeared as a book in Turkey: Dersim Zaza
ayaklanmasinin tarihsel kökenleri (Istanbul:
Yön, 1992).
49. The most substantial of these booklets is Selcan 1994. Presently the most
important Zaza journals are Desmala Sure and Ware (both published
in Germany).
50. See Malmîsanij 1992 and Selcan 1994 for two such analyses, reaching
opposite conclusions in support of the Kurdish resp. 'Zazaist' positions of
their authors (who both are Zaza speakers).
51. In Kurdish, the term 'Kurmanc' frequently refers to peasants as opposed to
nomads, who are then called 'Kurd'. This could also be the primary meaning of
Zaza 'Kirmanc'. However, as early as the 17th century the Kurdish poet Ahmed-i
Khani used the names 'Kurd' and 'Kurmanc' interchangeably to refer to the
collectivity of the Kurds.
52. A difficulty with this explanation is that most Zaza speakers do not even
know the name of Dimili Sevgen (1950) distinguishes three
"ASLINI ÍNKAR EDEN
HARAMZADEDÍR!" The Debate on the Ethnic Identity of the Kurdish Alevis,
was first published by the Kurdish Study Group in August 1996.
Dynamics of the Kurdish & Kirmanc-Zaza Problems in Anatolia
By Paul White
Dynamics of the Kurdish &
Kirmanc-Zaza Problems in Anatolia was first published as a booklet in English in
1996 by the Kurdish Study Group. Apart from the 'Introduction', only the
'Interview with Seyfi Cengiz' and the essay 'Workers Movements in Turkish
Kurdistan' are reproduced here from the KSG booklet. As explained further
below, this latter essay is itself a translated excerpt from a now out-of-print
book by Cengiz. Copies of the complete booklet, which includes pages of
tabulated strike statistics, can be obtained from the KSG.
Introduction
This booklet is a contribution to the difficult task of a fully nuanced
understanding the rich nature of Kurdish society and politics. Focussing on
Turkish Kurdistan (or 'Kirmanciye and North Kurdistan' as Seyfi Cengiz would
prefer), this publication appears at a fortuitous time; recent publications by
some leading Western Kurdologists indicate that scholars in this hemisphere are
finally beginning to move beyond the trite socio-political paradigm of Kurdish
nomadic society and peasant-based guerilla politics.
This publication's author,
Seyfi Cengiz, is well known in Kurdish circles for stressing the existence of a
Kurdish industrial proletariat. In the material translated and reproduced
herein, he demonstrates this by charting its actions between the key years of
1964-80, immediately prior to Turkey's last military coup d'Stat, which
temporarily stifled such activities.
Cengiz is also well known for
his insistence on the separate (non-Kurdish) identity of the Zaza and Kªrmanc
(pronounced Ker-manj) or Kizilbas (pronounced Keh-ziehl-baash) living in the
eastern part of Anatolia, in the Turkish state. The origins of these nations
are obscure, but both probably originated from a region south-west of the
Caspian Sea known as 'Daylam' in contemporary Iran, before emigrating westwards
into Anatolia.
The distinct identity of both
of the Zaza and Kizilbas was denied by Ottoman rulers and Kurdish aristocrats
and landlords in the past. In Cengiz's view, they face the same problems today
from extreme Turkish nationalists and their Kurdish analogue. Due in large part
to Seyfi Cengiz's pioneering work, the Kirmanc and Zaza questions have shaken
politics throughout Anatolia of the past few years.
***
It is hoped that the material
in the present booklet will give English-speaking readers valuable insights
into the politics and work of the KCM and the DCM. The lengthy interview by the
editor and the large segments of Cengiz's book Türkiye Kürdistani Isçi
Hareketleri [The Workers Movement in the Kurdistan Part of Turkey, Yeni Gün
Publications, n.d.] have never appeared in English before, nor has the
completely new, updated table "Table of Workers Actions: 1964-80".
Other material reproduced here has been published previously in the papers of
leftists. The present collection puts them together for the first time, so as
to facilitate a less fragmented picture. Readers interested in pursuing some of
the questions discussed here might also with to read the editor's article in
volume 2, number 2 of the Journal of Arabic, Islamic & Middle Eastern
Studies, entitled "Ethnic Differentiation among the Kurds: Kurmancî,
Kizilbas and Zaza", also published by the Centre for the Study of Asia and
the Middle East (CSAME) and to follow the debate which this article sparked in
the Kurdish Newsletter, produced by CSAME's Kurdish Study Group.1
Acknowledgment must be made
of the efforts by several people for their translations of original texts from
Turkish which make this publication possible. Senem Güneser translated the
large sections of Türkiye Kürdistani Isçi Hareketleri, while Endercan
Dal translated much of the remaining material, with Ali Saatçi, Cihangir Özlük
and Sehergül Çinar also rendering valuable assistance. Some minor translations
were also made by the editor.
This booklet grew out of the
editor's research for a doctoral dissertation on leadership in the Kurdish
national movement in Turkey. It is produced solely in the hope of promoting
understanding of the complex ethnic politics of Eastern Anatolia. Neither the
Centre for the Study of Asia and the Middle East nor the editor or any of the
translators in any way endorse the viewpoints or activities of any political
grouping or trade union cited herein.
Notes
1. This issue of JAIMES can be obtained by sending $15.00 to the KSG, made out
to JAIMES . Overseas readers should add a further $Aust.5.00. The Kurdish
Newsletter can be obtained free of charge from the KSG.
Paul J. White, Melbourne,
June 1996.
***
This is the
slightly edited text of an interview with Seyfi Cengiz by the editor, on 19 May
1992.
Interview with
Seyfi Cengiz
PW: What is the history of your organisation?
SC: First, I
myself was a member of the Kurtulus organisation. In 1978 the organisation
split. We left the organisation and founded another organisation, Têkosîn,
which means struggle, or, sometimes, armed struggle. Then, after 1983, we were
in exile, mainly in Europe, and we had discussions about our past views. We
came to an agreement on the Manifesto of the KCM, which we worked on for a long
time, through discussions. Then, in 1989 and 1990, we officially established
the KCM [Kurdistan Communist Movement - Kürdistan Komünist Hareketi]. Since
then we have a publication called Kurdistanli Marksist, and now another
publication, which is called Desmala Sure. Now the movement is being called, briefly
Communist Movement, without any country's name in front, We have two national
sections at the moment, one is the Kirmanc section, the other is the Kurdish
section. These are known as Kurdistan Communist Movement, the other is known as
the Kirmanciye Communist Movement (or Dersim Communist Movement).
PW: What can you
say about Kurtulus? What was its politics?
SC: Kurtulus was
the name of the journal. And the group itself became known by the same name.
Now they call themselves Türkiye ve Kuzey Kürdistan Kurtulus Örgütü [Turkey and
North Kurdistan Liberation Organisation], not only Kurtulus. This organisation
was established in 1975-76, and I was among the half a dozen people who founded
it.
But, two or three
years later I left Kurtulus, and together with some other comrades I founded Têkosîn.
Kurtulus is a Stalinist group. Now, of course, it doesn't openly defend
Stalinism, but in essence its policies on Russia and some other issues were
Stalinist views. They were pro-Soviet . At the moment, of course, things are
changed. They talked about a working class party in Turkey, first of all, when
the Türkiye Halk Kurtulus Parti-Cephesi [THKP-C] Turkish Peoples Liberation
Party-Front] was founded by Mahir Çayan. Kurtulus comes from that background.
The THKP-C split into three main groups. One was Dev Yol [Devrimci Yol -
Revolutionary Path], one was Kurtulus, the other one was known as Halkin Yolu
[People's Way].- and later that [latter] group was weaker, and dissolved
itself.
Kurtulus and Dev
Yol were the main ones, which emerged from the THKP-C, and Kurtulus criticised
some of the THKP-C's views. Dev Yol defended all of the views; that was the
difference at the time. When the group emerged in the Left, the differences
came out mainly on the Chinese question, or the Russian question. Some of the
Left was pro-Russia, and some was pro-China. At the time, Kurtulus didn't take
any stand on that division. We said 'we are neither pro-Chinese nor
pro-Russian; we don't take sides'. That was one of the main differences that
was distinctive about Kurtulus, but there were some other circles that had the
same stand, of course. [But], at the time, our criticism of the past, and
having a different stand on the Chinese-Russian conflict were enough difference
to have a different group.
PW: When you say
"criticism of the past", does this mean that Kurtulus was criticising
Mahir Çayan's guerilla strategy?
SC: They were
criticising guerilla strategy, and they were saying that we must work within
the working class and establish an industrial working class party. Without that
party, we can't give leadership to a people's movement, and so on. But, in
practice, actually they didn't encourage their members to work within the
working class movement. They simply tried to get stronger by working among
students, the teachers' union and other middle class people. It was a middle
class movement, actually - mainly a student and teachers' movement, and still
is, but much weaker then before, and getting more and more weaker.
PW: So, you and a
group of people left Kurtulus. Was it because of this question, or were there
other questions as well?
SC: The Kurdish
question was the main question which we split on. They were talking about
Kurdistan, they were saying that the Kurdish question was an important
question, but, actually, although there were many articles in the journal of
Kurtulus about the national question - and it was one of the first groups which
dealt with the Kurdish question. It wasn't members of Turkish background, but
it was myself and a few others, members from Kurdistan, who wrote about the
national question and who dealt with it, and who posed questions and tried to
get the others to understand that this question is an important question and
that the group must take a stand on it.
They accepted the
stand that we put forward, but in time - because they weren't honest on that
point - we had many problems with them. In practice we saw the signs of their
behaviour that they didn't accept the question as an important question. Then we
suggested some discussions - on paper, in the journal, in front of the members,
in front of the Left generally - but they didn't accept the discussions, and we
split.
It was mainly the
Kurdish question. But, generally, the strategy of Kurtulus Š there wasn't a
clear strategy, there wasn't a program; you can't discuss anything, actually.
There were many problems, many disagreements, but nowhere can you see a
program, a strategy. We were insisting that we must have a program and a clear
strategy, we must have an organisation, because at the time there wasn't even
an organisation. There was just some responsible individuals who led the
movement, and it was up to them to decide [everything]. Actually, that was the
most important question that we discussed and also the conflict between their
practice and the group's theoretical stand, the inconsistencies between theory
and practice. They were saying that we must work among workers, but the group
wasn't working among workers, it was working wholly among students and teachers
and became a teachers' organisation, a students' organisation. And on other
issues, it was always the same; they were saying one thing but in practice it
was always another.
PW: So Kurtulus
came out of the 1960s radical movement in Turkey, that started with
publications like Ant and Solu, then came Mahir Çayan, then came
Kurtulus and other organisations?
SC: Yes.
PW: Kurtulus came
out of this, so we can say in a sense that Tekosin came out of that same
process?
SC: Of course, in
that sense, of course.
PW: How was it
different? Was Tekosin very different from other organisations in the Turkish
state, in Anatolia?
SC: Well, the
difference Š you know, actually many other groups in Anatolia, like us, emerged
from different general tendencies in Anatolia, mainly Turkish tendencies -
different backgrounds, different traditions. For instance, there is an
organisation called Türkiye Kürdistan Sosyalist Partisi, TKSP. That group
emerged from a group called TÍP, the Turkish Workers Party. [Editor's note:
Previously known as the Partiya Sosyalista Kurdistan in Kurdish, the TKSP
changed its name to the Partiya Sosyalist a Kurdistan at its Third Congress, in
October 1992.]
Other groups
mainly emerged from Kurdish tendencies. There wasn't a Kurdish political party,
of course. In 1961 there was a party which was founded at the same time as TÍP
and Demirel's party called the Adalet [Justice] Party were established. That
party's name was the Yeni Türkiye Partisi, New Turkey Party, founded by Yusuf
Azizoglu, who was from Diyarbekir [Diyarbakir] and was a Kurd. The party
itself, its composition, was mainly from Kurdistan. That was the first Kurdish
party in Turkey. It was a party of the Kurdish nationalist bourgeoisie.
Later, another
Kurdish party was founded, named the Türkiye-Kürdistan Demokrat Partisi, T-KDP.
This KDP was [established] in connection with Barzani's party in Iraq [of the
same name]. It was founded by two individuals, Sait Elçi and Faik Buçak, in
1965. Later, it split, and two parties emerged, with the same name, from that
tendency. One of them was headed by Dr. Sait Kirmizitoprak, who was from Dersim
[now officially called Tunceli]. [Editor's note: Actually, there was a very
slight difference in the two parties' names. The one led by Sait Kirmizitoprak
was known as the Türkiye'de Kürdistan Demokrat Partisi (Kurdistan Democratic
Party in Turkey, while the other, led by Sait Elçi, which presented itself as
the legitimate Barzani-ite party, called itself the Kürdistan Demokrat
Partisi-Türkiye (Kurdistan Democratic Party - Turkey).]
Then during the
late Sixties, (in 1969-70), an association - mainly of Kurdish intellectuals
and Kurdish students - was founded. It was the Devrimci Dogu Kültür Ocaklan
(DDKO - the Revolutionary Cultural Centres of the East]. That association
became strong quickly . It was founded in Istanbul and in Ankara, centrally,
but then they had branches in many areas of Kurdistan. But when the 1971
military coup occurred, like many other left wing organisations and trade
unions, that Association as well was abolished.
In the Seventies,
when the rule by the military was over, and the period of civil rule began, we
had many groups again emerging from different tendencies, from different
traditions. Many Kurdish groups like Rizgarî [Liberation], Ala Rizgarî [Banner
of Liberation], and many other groups emerged from that association (DDKO).
They became political tendencies and became political circles, parties, and so
on. And from the original KDP, another group emerged called KUK [Kürdistan
Ulusal Kurtulusculari - Kurdistan National Liberators]. So, I mean to say that
the Kurdish groups mainly emerged from two different tendencies. One is from an
association established in the late Sixties; the other is from the Turkish Left
movement.
Tekosin's
background was different. Our tradition was different; we had a radical
background. Our stand on international questions was quite different. All the
Kurdish groups were pro-Soviet, for example. At least we weren't pro-Soviet.,
we were in the middle. A centrist position, actually; it wasn't a proper
position, but, that was a position, anyway, an important position, at the time.
Our views were different because we came from different traditions. Every
single group had something which it was still defending from its own
[ideological] background.
On other issues,
the Kurdish issue, we were defending that you must have a working class party
in Kurdistan itself, All of the groups claiming to be socialist were saying the
same thing. But, in practice, none of us, none of the groups, dealt with the
working class movement, worked within the working class and tried to have a
working class party.
The understanding
of a party, because of Stalinist understanding of socialism, was different as
well. Without working in the working class, you can have a working class party,
according to that understanding of socialism. Some groups were simply defending
a guerilla strategy, and because of that they were specially working among the
peasants in the countryside, but, when you asked them, they used to say they
were communists and they were trying to establish a working class party. And
many groups and circles were composed of intellectuals and students, but they
were calling themselves communist groups. And there are still such communist
groups there.
After the 1980
military coup, we began guerilla warfare for three years. We were alone, at the
time; other groups didn't resist against the military coup. They tried to, but
they couldn't.. After a short time, nearly all of them were eliminated by the
military junta.
We stood alone by
ourselves. Of course, we couldn't change the situation and we decided to
withdraw. Some cadres, including myself, went into exile, first in Syria, in Damascus,
Beirut, then in Sweden. Some are still in Sweden, some in Germany, in Holland,
and I am here [in Britain].
In exile we had
long discussions, a period of discussions. We exchanged views, we came
together, we discussed, in meetings and so on. We criticised our past, as I
told you before, we came to a conclusion of the Manifesto.
PW: During your
guerilla period, was your activity based in the city or the countryside - or
both?
SC: We were
defending a guerilla strategy which was almost the same as in Cuba, in China,
in Vietnam. We were saying that the countryside has the central importance for
guerilla strategy, because the countryside is the weakest point of the state.
We must have our base first in the countryside - surrounding the cities, in time
from the countryside, but step by step, not all at once, of course, by
establishing liberated areas, and in time surrounding the city and taking the
power.
Yes, although we
were emphasising that political work in the city, in the working class, is very
important, and saying this isn't going to be exactly like China - the
revolution in Kurdistan and Turkey is not going to be exactly like China, we
might have risings in the cities and in the countryside at the same time, and
both the city and the countryside have a role to play at the same time, and
only by that combination, can we have a revolution. We were saying this; it was
different, actually [from a classical Maoist or Guevarist strategy].But, in
practice, we were in the countryside, we were working among peasants; there was
no difference, at the time, at that stage.
PW: The first
Kurdish nationalist movements in the late nineteenth century were very
religious, very autocratic. How does that compare with today?
SC: Well, at the
moment, when you talk about the Kurdistan Communist Movement and the Dersim
Communist Movement, we don't yet have an organisational structure, actually. We
mainly call ourselves a movement of discussion and cadres. We need to organise
ourselves, in time. Of course, our organisational principles and our
understanding of the party is quite different from the others. All others are
organisations of the Kurdish nationalist bourgeoisie and, some of them,
organisations of the Kurdish petty bourgeoisie, Kurdish middle class. Their class
structure, their class base is quite different from ours, their class milieu is
quite different from us.
At the moment, we
say that the theoretical struggle, and winning cadres, are the main duties of
the socialist. And that's why, at the moment, we don't have a structure for our
organisation, [But] we have an understanding of [party] organisation which is
quite different from theirs and in time we are going to organise ourselves into
a party, of course. [At the moment] we mainly defend that opinion - that we
must work in the working class movement, among workers and try to organise the
advanced workers, the intellectual workers, into a party. We can only organise
ourselves, together with those advanced workers, into a party. This means we
need some time; it's a process, and we are still in the beginning, in the first
stage of the process.
PW: What is your
organisation's goal?
SC: We are
socialists, we are communists. Our goal is to establish a socialist society, to
fight for a socialist society, to fight for a classless society - I mean
communism. But we can't achieve our goal at this stage by simply ignoring the
immediate questions of society. There are national questions [relating to
Kurds, Kirmanc-Kizilbas and Zazas], there is a question of religious minorities,
and so on. These are important and immediate questions. We must deal with them
in a socialist way. That is why we must have some immediate demands, in order
to lead the democratic political movement. At the same time, by working in the
working class movement, and trying to bring together the advanced workers,
organising them into a party. This is not something against socialism; there is
nothing in it [against socialism].
PW: Is it
absolutely important to strive for either autonomy or independence now?
SC: We say this
is not the time to discuss autonomy, federation, or an independent state. We
must defend each nation's right to self-determination. It's their right to
self-determination, first of all. Without having their right to self-determination,
they can't decide whether, autonomy, federation, or an independent state, are
in their interests. Without having the right to chose, they can't chose
anything. First of all, they must have the right to chose, and only when the
conditions are right and they have that right, can they decide which one is
going to be right for them. They can only decide that at the time, after having
the right to self-determination, At present we demand national
self-determination, and it (autonomy, federation or independence) is not a
practical question at the moment.
But, generally,
as a principle, at the same time, by defending nations' right to
self-determination, at the same time, we always say we are for unity, for equal
and voluntary unity. As a principle, we defend this, because without defending
this, when the time comes, people will decide something else - a solution
that's not going to be in the interests of socialism. In order to have the
right decision, in the interests of the working class movement for socialism,
we must fight from now for voluntary unity, for equal unity between peoples,
between different nations. The right to self-determination, doesn't mean to
invite nations to separation. On the contrary it's a way to avoid that result.
PW: Under what
circumstances would your organisation support autonomy?
SC: First of all,
let me tell you this. Under these conditions, without having a revolution -
without having working class power - we never support autonomy. Without a
revolution, defending autonomy as a solution means defending a reformist
solution, not a revolutionary solution, because ultimately autonomy is
something which is within the framework of a capitalist state; it is not a
revolutionary solution, before a revolution. Federation is the same, and it
fits in with the interests of the bourgeois class, with the middle class [also]
sometimes, but not with working class interests, It's not in the interests of
revolution against the state. All of the groups that defend not national
self-determination, but autonomy, or which interpret national
self-determination in practice to mean autonomy, and federation - they are
reformist organisations. They don't have a revolutionary perspective; they
don't have a revolution in their perspective; they are not revolutionary. The
only revolutionary solution at the moment must be formulated as national
self-determination.
PW: Under what
circumstances would your organisation negotiate with the Turkish state?
SC: On this
question we must talk about the working class, not my organisation. In
principle, can a working class party negotiate with the state? I can't say that
there are no conditions where this could occur. It depends on conditions.
PW: Are there any
circumstances in which your organisation would support a struggle for an
independent Kurdish state?
SC: As Lenin
said, the Marxist program on the national question must not suggest
independence as a permanent demand, as a binding demand. The binding demand of
a Marxist program must be national self-determination. But there can be some
specific conditions, under which we can defend independence, separation. This
can only be defended under very specific conditions, and when it is in the
interests of the socialist movement. In principle, we can't defend independence
and, as you know, we don't put forward that slogan of an independent Kurdistan,
for example, and we don't defend it [at the present time]. We could only
support it under certain specific conditions, if these emerged, and if the
interests of the fight for socialism impose the necessity to defend
independence, then, at the time, we must defend independence.
PW: What sort of
conditions would they be?
SC: During the
Spanish Civil War, there was a time, for example, when fascism was in power,
but in the other non-Spanish countries [within the Spanish state], Catalonia,
the Basque country, there was a resistance against the fascism in power in
Spain. Just think, for example, of conditions like these in Anatolia: that
fascism is in power in Turkey; a racist party is in power, but in Kirmanciye
(Dersim), in Kurdistan and in the Zaza country, there is a significant
democratic resistance to fascism. And if this fight goes on, and if Turkish
people [i.e., the ethnically-Turkish citizens of the Turkish state] are behind the
fascist regime Š this is just speculation, but you asked me Šunder these
conditions, if there isn't a working class [i.e., socialist] alternative in
Turkey, and one does not appear to be close, then in those conditions, we can
defend independence.
PW: So, you're
stressing national self-determination above everything else, and class
struggle, and Marxist strategy, so it seems that you don't consider yourself a
nationalist?
SC: Of course
not!
PW: Why not?
SC: We are
socialists. You know, defending national self-determination doesn't make one a
nationalist. It means being against the foreign occupation, it means favouring
the people's own power, in their own country. This is defending democracy,
defending democratic principles; it has nothing to do with nationalism.
Nationalism is something that emerges in strategy, in solutions, in program.
Our program, as you know, is there, our strategy is there. If that is a
nationalist program, and nationalist strategy, then we are. I don't think it
is; the only socialist program and strategy in our conditions, can be that
strategy and that program. And we have a socialist goal, of course, so we try
to have a solution, have demands, that fit our socialist goal, the working
class struggle for socialism.
PW: What is your
attitude to the rebellion in nineteenth century and early twentieth century
Anatolia - and to their leaders, like Sheikh Said and Shaikh Ubeydullah,?
SC: Well, you
know, Ubeydullah, who was a sheikh, a Kurdish sheikh, and he was defending his
previous rights under the Ottomans - they were like princes, [these sheikhs];
they had small kingdoms within the Ottoman Empire. From the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the Turkish rulers tried to abolish the Kurdish
principalities, and all the Kurdish sheikhs and princes resisted that. I find
nothing in it to admire, for a socialist. It was a resistance for their own
class interests.
Sheikh Said, he
was right, defending some rights against Turkish rule, but I find nothing in Sheikh
Said's way of thinking, or way of acting to admire. But there was someone in
Kirmanciye called Seyit Riza. Although he seemed to be a religious man, he
wasn't a man like Sheikh Said, like Sheikh Ubaydallah. Between
"Sheikh" and "Seyit" there is a big difference. That man
(Seyit Riza) resisted against Turkish rule not once, but dozens of times, and
he was the leader of the resistance - the most popular leader of the
resistance. He died in a way you can admire. When he was executed in the city
of Harput, he was very brave. He put the noose on his neck, then he pushed the
executioner [out of the way], and then he himself kicked his chair away,
executing himself. The words that he said, before the execution, and at the
time of execution, were quite brave words. In that man - he was a nationalist,
I am not a nationalist, I have nothing to admire in nationalism, in that sense
- his courage, his determination, I find something to admire in it.
PW: What strategy
does your organisation have to achieve its goal? What is the role of armed
struggle? What is the role of workers' strikes?
SC: In our
strategy, we are planning to organise an uprising, led by the working class
movement, by a working class party and the working class itself. This uprising
must mainly be based on the cities, of course, and must have the support of the
countryside. We are trying to organise an uprising, led by the working class
movement and we accept armed struggle when conditions are right, when working
class interests impose it. Some populist people, think the only form of the
armed struggle people to be guerilla war, and this war must be centred in the
countryside. This is not true.
In Russia, for
example, in Moscow, in Petersburg, there were times when wars of barricades,
and in some ways guerilla wars, were fought by the working class, and by
communists. Eventually, I think there is only one way that people can liberate
themselves, the working class can liberate itself. It is by force and by arms.
This is why we accept using force. We are going to be forced to use force; this
doesn't depend on our wishes, but it is dictated by others.
PW: So, the armed
struggle is not the dominant aspect of your strategy, its subordinate to the
political considerations.
SC: Of course.
PW: Many tendencies
claiming to be Marxist believe that, since there is very little industry in
Turkish Kurdistan, and Kirmanciye, and consequently little resident working
class, there is little basis for class struggle politics at this point?
'Socialism' is therefore irrelevant. What do you say to this?
SC: This is
entirely wrong, to me. First, they don't know working class history in
Kurdistan, in Kirmanciye, they don't deal with the working class movement.
That's why, according to them, there isn't a working class movement, or it
isn't a force in the country itself. It's wrong; they don't know who are the
working class. I wrote a book [Türkiye Kürdistani Ísçi Hareketleri - a
condensed version of which appears as the last two sections of the present
work], about the working class movement in Kurdistan - including also the
Kirmanc and Zaza working class movements, It's a significant movement there,
and we have a significant working class. Besides, we have Kurdish, Kirmanc and
Zaza workers in Turkish cities, like Istanbul, Izmir, Mersin, Ankara. The
working class in Anatolia is not mainly made up of Turkish workers. It's made
up of non-Turkish nationals, mainly.
Those workers in
those Turkish cities - in Istanbul, Izmir, Ankara and so on - have relations
with the countryside, with Kirmanciye (Dersim), with Kurdistan. They still have
relations. There are millions of workers from Kirmanciye, from Kurdistan, from
the Zaza country in Europe, for example in Austria, especially in Germany, in
Holland, in this country. Those are Kirmanc, Zaza or Kurdish, but nearly all of
them are workers. They have relations with their own countries. They earn money
and they send it to Kirmanciye, to Kurdistan, for their relatives there. It's a
different culture, different society, and they find themselves responsible for
helping their relatives in the country. One of their feet is in the country;
the other foot is in Turkey and so on. They have something for the liberation
of Kirmanciye, of Kurdistan, of the Zaza country, and they have a role to play
in it.
PW: So, when you
talk about an uprising, led by the working class, this would mean throughout
the present Turkish state?
SC: We mean we
should organise an uprising in the whole of Anatolia. And we try to prepare a
working class leadership for that uprising. But we are, for example, some of
us, from Kirmanciye, we should mainly work in Kirmanciye. Some of us are
Kurdish from Kurdistan. They must work in Kurdistan itself. They must try to
organise a working class leadership in their own country. Internationalism must
be interpreted in that way. I mean, everyone, not all the time, but mainly,
should work in his or her own country and try to establish a working class
alternative in his or her own country. Beginning with that point, we can have
an international worldview. It's about strategy, it's about program. Marx was
an internationalist, but he was working with the German party, mainly. That
wasn't something wrong.
PW: Why are the
Kirmanc and Zaza questions now coming forward?
SC: Both of these
questions are national questions. One of them - the Kirmanc question - is also
an Alevi-Kizilbas question, as I told you before. Both of these questions were
raised by myself, as an individual. Why? Simply because I had to fight against
Kurdish nationalism, because I am from the east; I am not Turkish. It is a
Turkish socialist's duty to fight against Turkish nationalism. Of course, I
fought against Turkish chauvinism in the past, and I still fight against it
now, and I will [continue to do so]. But our main duty - Kurdish socialists,
Kirmanc socialists, Zaza socialists - is to fight against their own
nationalism, in order to get the leadership of the movement, in order to unite
workers from different nationalities.
We mainly fight
in our own countries to get leadership in the arena. [Since] Kurdish
nationalism was becoming more dominant, we had to fight against Kurdish
nationalism. I wrote some articles which talked about the Zaza question and the
Kirmanc question put forward [into public view] the Zaza question, the Kirmanc
question. These articles were polemics against Kurdish nationalism, because the
Kurdish nationalists denied the history of Kirmanc, the history of Zaza, and
tried to show them as [part of] Kurdish history.
For example, the
Dersim uprising. They say it's a Kurdish uprising. It's wrong history; you must
correct it. And they're making propaganda around it. They are saying the Sheikh
Said uprising is a Kurdish uprising, and they are making nationalist propaganda
around it - in exile, in the country itself. This is not right. The Dersim
uprisings - there were a series of them, from the 1820s to the 1930s which
never ceased, you see. These were Kirmanc uprisings, those were Alevi
uprisings.
There is one -
only one - Zaza uprising, the Sheikh Said uprising in 1925. In Turkish
Kurdistan, I can only remember the Agri uprising in 1926-1927, which was
Kurdish. There are some other minor Kurdish uprisings, very local uprisings.
Those are not big uprisings, history doesn't mention them too much. The only
uprisings which history mentions and which were quite important were the Dersim
uprisings, and there were dozens of them,. as I said, since the nineteenth
century they continued as an uninterrupted uprising process. Those are Kirmanc
uprisings, those are Alevi uprisings.
But Kurdish
nationalists claim that all those Kirmanc uprisings were Kurdish uprisings.
They have no uprisings of their own, actually. They didn't make any uprisings
against the Turkish state, against the Ottomans, because they were in power at
the time. The Kurdish aristocracy had a strategic alliance since the beginning
of the sixteenth century with the Ottoman rulers.
The Kurdish
aristocracy has been used against the Armenians - they've been used in Armenian
massacres, in Kirmanc massacres, in Alevi massacres, in Yezidi massacres, in
Assyrian massacres. The Kurdish aristocracy has the blood of these massacres on
its hands. We told Kurdish nationalists: "You must think on this. Your
aristocracy played a role in those massacres, to put down those uprisings, and
you are still trying to escape from this question. You are trying to share your
aristocracy's views."
Their
aristocracy, together with the Ottoman-Turkish aristocracy, suppressed those
uprisings. Now they say those were Kurdish uprisings. This is ridiculous! When
they try to revise history, we try to correct it. That was a duty, and it was a
fight against nationalism. They said Zazas are Kurds. We said: "the Zaza
language, according to many foreign linguists, is not a dialect of Kurdish, but
a different language.You are acting like Turks! Turks were saying that Kurdish
and other languages are different dialects of Turkish, and by this way they
were denying the very existence of the people who spoke those languages, and
their rights. Now, your way, denying other nations, other languages and their
equal rights, your way of doing that is to claim that those are not separate
nations, those are not separate languages, those are part of the Kurdish
language and Kurds."
Nationalism was very
strong at the time when those questions were put forward.
PW: When was
that? In the Eighties?
SC: Yes, it was
in the second half of the Eighties. For the first time, I wrote about the Zaza
question, in an article in 1987, called "Tarihte Kürt ve Zaza
Hareketleri" [The Kurdish and Zaza Movements in History] in the magazine
Sosyalist Ísçi, number 38, in 1987. The first article on the Kirmanc question
was written in the first issue of Desmala Sure, in December last year [1991],
called "Dersim Sorunu: Kirmanc-Alevi Ulusal Sorunu" [The Dersim
Question: the Kirmanc-Alevi National Question]. At the time of the first
article, about the Zaza question, there was the Iran-Iraq war. It was right
before the Halabja massacre, and Kurdish nationalism was quite strong and
everywhere Kurdish nationalists were saying that a [Kurdish] state is about to
arise, with Iranian support. They took the side of Iran against Iraq, as you
know, Talabani, Barzani, all the Kurdish groups, including the PKK [Partiya
Karkêren Kurdistan - Kurdistan Workers' Party, the largest Kurdish organisation
in Turkey] , TKSP and others. Nationalism was quite strong. They had an
illusionistic way of thinking. I wrote the article at that time.
PKK fanaticism
made me talk about the Kirmanc question, because they attacked Dersimlis
[people from Dersim - now known officially as Tunceli]. You should be aware
that Dersimlis describe themselves as Kirmanc, their language as Kirmanci or
Kirmancki (Dimli) and their country as Kirmanciye or Dersim. They do not define
themselves as Kurdish. On the contrary, they reject this identity. Dersmilis
call Kurds Qurr-Kurr, and the Kurds' language Kirdaski. This is discussed in my
article "Dersim Sorunu", in Desmala Sure number one.
But the PKK said
that Dersimlis are hain [traitors], Alevis are hain, are state agents. Ísmail
Besikçi attacked Dersimlis, he attacked Alevis, in a book, Tunceli Kanunu
(1935) ve Dersim Jenosidi [Tunceli Law (1935) and the Dersim Genocide]. He was
accusing all the Dersimli Marxists of being under the influence of Kemalism,
under the influence of Turkish nationalism. He was asking why the Dersimlis
don't support the PKK, because he became a PKK man. He was talking in a
ridiculous way, a quite nationalistic way. In Serxwebûn ['Independence' - a PKK
publication] and other journals, there were attacks against Kirmanc people and
against Alevis. There needed to be someone to come out and have the courage to
say something about these attacks. That happened to be me. I'm sorry, but I had
to accept the risk! And I brought out the Kirmanc question. Now they've got
trouble!
PW: What section
of Kurds are represented in your organisation: speakers of which dialect,
mostly? Kirmanci speakers mostly?
SC: Well our
movement is mainly made up of Kirmanciye revolutionaries, Kirmanci-speaking]
revolutionaries, Alevi revolutionaries. As I told you, in Anatolia as a whole,
in the Turkish Left, in the Kurdish movement, Alevis make up a large part of
its left movement. We have a few Kurdish comrades, only a few - several
comrades in the country itself, working for the Kurdistan Communist Movement
and some comrades in exile. Others are mainly Kirmanc.
But now Š our
potential Š . We were guerilla fighters during the Tekosin time, and there are
still hundreds of villagers, peasants and youth who are our supporters in the
country. They are still there, they are in contact with us. We have a
potential. We can measure hundreds of individuals, and outside, in exile, we
were tens of individuals, up to [the launching of Desmala Sure]. Since then, we
brought up the Kirmanc question, and we made it known for the first time. It
was already there, but no-one dealt with the question. Because we dealt with it
for the first time, now hundreds of people are supporting us, supporting Desmala
Sure.
Desmala Sure's
ideas are getting stronger, gaining support - in exile and the country itself.
Now we can measure it [i.e., the level of support] in hundreds of supporters, hundreds
of sympathisers. After every issue [of Desmala Sure], I go abroad and have
meetings with people in different cities, in different countries. I talk with
hundreds of people, and I know the situation quite well. I've just come back
from a trip. There are hundreds of people who sympathise with our views and who
distribute Desmala Sure. It's being discussed quite widely - beyond our
expectations. We could measure our potential in thousands; it's only the PKK's
threats and the general threat from Kurdish nationalism - especially the PKK's
threats -that makes people hesitate in taking a side, immediately.
PW: Some
organisations of Kurds which are nationalist encourage Kurds to discover what
asiret (tribe) they come from. Do you do this?
SC: We don't do such
a thing. The tribal spirit must be overcome; the nationalist spirit must be
overcome. But these are different questions. For instance, as a researcher, I
deal with the tribes. Š
It has been over
for some time, because now it's something, mainly, [that] belongs to the past.
For example, in Kirmanciye, a Kirmanc identity emerged, which is something that
overtook the tribal structure. Whatever tribe they belong to, they came to a
conclusion; they all agree that one identity defines them - Kirmanc identity.
Tribal structure is getting weaker and weaker, all the time. We always fought
against tribal splittism. In Kurdistan, it's the same. It must be overcome, of
course we fight against tribal spirit, and nationalism, as well.
But this doesn't
mean that we should deny the national identity of the others; we can't gain
anything! There is nothing that socialism gains from this. It is the state
which makes people forget, you see. Forbidden languages, forbidden cultures,
forbidden national identities, trying to Turkify them forcibly for centuries.
Fighting against chauvinism, fighting against racism, against Turkish
chauvinism, and Turkish colonialism, you must deal with those problems. You
must bring them out and talk about them. That this land is not only Turkish
land; there are other nations, other languages. You are suppressing them; you
suppressed them in history. You massacred them. There were not only Armenian
massacres; there were Kirmanc massacres. There are Alevis, there are Kurds.
It's not only Kurds, there are others.
To have
democracy, you must defend equal rights for all the nations. We can't just deny
their identity; it is already there. When you talk to them - especially people
belonging to the older generations - they say: "We are Kirmanc. You are
saying that we are Kurdish. We are not Kurdish." They always said this to
us. When you say "you are Turkish", they are against you, and they
say they are not Turkish, they are not Zaza, they are not Kurdish, they are
Kirmanc, some of them. If Zaza, they say "we are not Kurdish, we are Zaza.
This is in people's knowledge; in their oral, common knowledge. It isn't a
hundred people who are saying this, it's hundreds of thousands, it's millions
that agree on this identity. Kirmanc and Zaza peoples speak the same language,
which is called Dimli. The dialects are different, known as Kirmancki and
Zazaki. So, the Dimli-speaking people is divided into two main groups. This is
not the only difference between Kirmancs and Zazas. The two peoples also differ
religiously from one another. Kirmanc people as a whole belong to a faith
called the Kizilbas or Alevi religion, whereas the Zazas are Sunni Muslims,
adhering the Safii [Shafi'i] school of Islamic law.
Although the two
seem to be mainly of the same origin, they do not share a common history.
Ultimately, they do not identify themselves as one nation. I speak of them as
separate nations, because that is how theypresent themselves. It is their
self-identification. Yet, at the same time, in order to bring them closer to
each other and bend the stick towards voluntary unification, I spoke of them as
Dimli people (Kirmanc-Zaza people) in my writings. The term "Dimli"
as a common name defining the two people, is being used by their Kurdish
neighbours. In some places, some small sections of both Kirmanc and Zaza
peoples name themselves, especially their language, as Dimli as well.
PW: But why do
these identities suddenly, now, blossom? Surely it's not just because of your
articles? There must be some deep changes in material conditions?
SC: Of course, in
the world situation, you know. In the world generally, national movements have
been getting stronger for some time. It's been some time since those questions
have come up. But we thought that the national questions were solved, in Soviet
Russia, for example. Now what do we see? Nothing was solved. It was already
there. Now this is what I mean. In Anatolia, if you try to cover-up, if you try
to suppress those questions, you might have the illusion that you solved them,
but in the future, those questions come back again. That's why you must see
them, you must bring them forward, and you must deal with them.
PW: I know that
the Turkish part of Kurdistan is very under-developed. This is well known,
economically. But it is still not the same now economically as it was before WW
II, for instance. There has been some modernisation, although very, very small.
Do you think that this very limited modernisation that has occurred since 1945
has caused many changes in the consciousness of Kurdish people? Or has it been
insignificant?
SC: Of course,
the changes - especially since the 1950s, because the capitalist mode of
production started to get stronger in Kurdistan, in Kirmanciye, within Alevi
society, within Kirmanc and Kurdish society. Class divisions started to clear
up, since that time. And now in Kurdish society, within Kirmanc society in
general, there are clear class distinctions; we can easily distinguish the
three main classes from each other. There is a bourgeois class, there is a
working class, and there is a petty bourgeois or middle class.
In the political
arena, you can easily distinguish the political circles and movements by their
class background, by their class connections. Some of them defend petty
bourgeois interests. Some of them are bourgeois nationalists - they defend the
interests of their nationalist bourgeoisie. It's a section of their
bourgeoisie, because other sections of these bourgeoisies, in Kirmanciye, in
Kurdistan, always collaborate with the Turkish bourgeoisie, with the Turkish
state, as before. But a section broke from that bourgeoisie, because the
national movement is getting stronger, and the bourgeoisie divided, and one
section of it began to be nationalist, in order to lead the movement, to take
the leadership, and to maintain their traditional authority in society. There
are these main classes, and every group has connections with those classes.
PW: With one
class, or another?
SC: Yeah. For
example, the PKK defending an independent Kurdistan were originally, if you ask
me, a petty bourgeois movement, because it wasn't the demand of the Kurdish
nationalist bourgeoisie. They [the Kurdish nationalist bourgeoisie] are
demanding a sort of autonomy, a sort of federation, at the moment. They are
quite a reformist tendency. Their interests are represented by the TKSP, by
Tevger [pro-TKSP] groups, by HEP [People's Labour Party - a pro-PKK legal
party, which has since changed its name to Demokrasi Partisi (DP) for legal
reasons] and other groups. But they didn't look upon the PKK as an important
movement. But when the PKK got stronger than the others, so that now it's the
only group that represents Kurdish struggle in the eyes of the world and other
surrounding states, the nationalist bourgeoisie made connections with the PKK.
Now the PKK is
becoming a bourgeois nationalist party; they are ready to adopt a reformist
political line, if the Turkish bourgeoisie accepts that the PKK is the only
legitimate representative of the Kurdish people, and accepts to solve the
question, by talking to the PKK. For that reason, their leader, Abdullah Öcalan,
has said many times that his party is ready to give up the slogan of
independence and to become a legal party. He has said that Turkey and Kurdistan
might stay together for forty years, and so on. They are ready to change their
strategy, towards reformism, like others. They were against federalism, now
they are defending federalism. Their reformist tendency is becoming stronger.
They are becoming more representative of the nationalist bourgeoisie of Turkish
Kurdistan.
Of course, there
have been many changes: class structure is quite changed since the 1950s. A
working class emerged, and trade unions emerged, a working class movement came
about. Before the Fifties, there was a feudal class, a Kurdish aristocracy.
There were some individual bourgeois Kurds, but you couldn't talk about a
Kurdish bourgeoisie, as a class, at the time. But, since the Fifties, there is
a bourgeois class in Kurdistan. Class structure, politics, is quite changed,.
Tribal structure began to dissolve since then. and now it's quite weak,
compared with before the Fifties.
PW: What are the
problems of leading your organisation?
SC: I am quite
enthusiastic about revolution; I'm a revolutionary, first of all. I like the
struggle, the time of struggle, the struggle itself; it's my life. I'm happy
being a revolutionary. If I was born again, I would begin sooner to do the
same. It doesn't matter where I am; it depends on my comrades. I ask comrades:
"Comrades, please do my work; allow me to do other duties. Prepare
yourself for what I am doing now, collectively".
I encourage
comrades to write articles, to advances their qualities as soon as possible.
And, I tell you what, I don't think I am going to live for a long time, because
as a revolutionary, I am dealing with risky questions. I know the risk, and I
have enemies, too many enemies. I'm doing my revolutionary work, whatever risk
that work brings with it, I am ready to face that risk.
***
Workers Movements in Turkish Kurdistan
Seyfi Cengiz
The objective of
the following sections is to try to identify the specific weight of the working
class in the Kurdistan part of Turkey, its fighting power and the level of the
struggle reached. Without these, at this present time, where the working
movement is at the stage of a new ascent within Turkey and the Kurdistan part
of Turkey, we will not find correct answers to the problems we are faced with.
This study covers
Turkey's twenty administrative provinces. At this point, I must point out, in
order to avoid any misunderstandings, that I do not see twenty within the
Kurdistan part of Turkey. This would not have been right, either from an
historical or an ethnic point of view. The reason I have used the twenty
provinces as my basis was due to the difficulty I was faced with, in
distinguishing the workers' movement in this area.
Seyfi Cengiz
The first recorded workers' movements in Turkey began in 1872. Workers' actions
were seen very rarely from 1872 to 1908. In thirty-six years, only twenty-eight
strikes and one rally took place. The majority of these actions occurred in Ístanbul
and its surrounding area.
The first great
ascent of the workers' movement came in 1908. At least twenty-eight strikes occurred
in 1908 alone. This is equal to the number of strikes which occurred in the
thirty-six years between 1872 and 1908.
The 1908 strike
movement - which was similar to a general strike - overflowed from the main industrial
centres of the [Ottoman] Empire. Strikes were witnessed all over Ottoman Turkey
and in various Ottoman countries. Besides Selanik and Ístanbul, Varna, Ízmir,
Aydin, Zonguldak, Adana, Balya-Karaaydin and many other places experienced
workers' movements one after another. The first strikes in some working
industries were also seen in this period.
The 1908 strike
wave had its affect in Ottoman Kurdistan as well. The workers went on strike in
one of the oldest industries - the Ergani Copper Mine, at the end of September,
when strikes were very intense. The strike at Ergani seems to have been the the
first workers' movement in the Kurdistan part of Turkey.
After a long
time, the strike in Ergani was followed by the strikes listed below which broke
out under conditions of great oppression:
August 1924:
Ankara-Sivas railway construction workers' strike;
July 1925: Erzurum telegraph workers' strike;
August 1927: Adana-Nusaybin railway construction workers' strike.
Apart from these
three strikes, no other workers' movement emerged in the Kurdistan part of
Turkey until 1950. Those strikes that are mentioned faced the harsh attacks of
the Kemalist army, police and courts (Istiklâl or Supreme Courts).
Of these strikes,
the Adana-Nusaybin railway strike was put down bloodily by the army.
In Turkey,
approximately 10 years of the 23 years between 1925-48 passed under martial law
against the uprisings in the Kurdistan part of Turkey. [Two years, eight months
and twenty-eight days of this period is within 1925-27, and seven years, one
month and eleven days of it is within 1940-48.]
Waging a
colonialist war in Kurdistan, the Kemalist bourgeoisie did not let Turkey's
working class breathe either. The workers' movement, which appeared
occasionally up until 1938, was hardly encountered during the period 1938-48.
On 20 February
1947, an amendment was made to the Corporations Act, to permit the formation of
trade unions without the right to strike. Due to this change, workers' unions
generally started to be formed in Turkey. Workers' activity, which restarted in
1948 and continued until the 1950s, although scarce, was in addition to the
formation of unions.
This process,
which was experienced generally throughout Turkey, was shortly reflected in
Kurdistan as well. The Tobacco and Cigarette Industry Workers Union in Malatya,
and the State Railway Industry Workers Union in Sivas were established in 1949.
This was followed by the establishment of the Textile Industry Workers Union in
Gaziantep, in 1950. These unions were the first workers' unions established in
Kurdistan, which happened in parallel with developments occurring in Turkey.
Over the following years, the unionisation movement spread to other cities of
Kurdistan.
The first
workers' movements in Kurdistan after 1927 come onto the agenda in the 1950s,
with the effect of the process in Turkey. Three workers' actions occurred - two
in Antep (Gaziantep) and one in Sivas that were recorded in those years:
1950, the textile
workers' rally in Antep.
1952, the Bakery workers' resistance in Antep.
1959, Sivas railway workers' rally.
These are the
first workers' movements in the industries mentioned (textiles, food,
transport) in the Kurdistan part of Turkey. Workers' movements which were
encountered before only in the areas of mining and construction were now also
witnessed in the industrial sector in those years. These were the first
workers' actions in the form of resistance and the protest rally in the
Kurdistan part of Turkey.
The working class
of Turkey falls in a new and a forward stage of its history after 1960. After
1961 a new ascent starts in the workers' movements; until 1963 about 40 strikes
and demonstrations took place. The working class raised its demand to have the
right to strike and collective agreements as soon as possible. In 1963, Section
274 of the Trade Unions Act and Section 275 of the Strike and Collective
Agreement Act became effective. These victories were great contributions to
rousing the workers' movement. The working class movement won a new
acceleration.
Stopping after
1959 in Kurdistan of Turkey, workers' actions started again in 1964, following
the Strike and Collective Agreement Act becoming effective in Turkey, in 1963.
After this date, workers' movements in Kurdistan were not seen to be rare
events any longer. As an organic piece of the general movement of the working
class around Turkey, more than ever before under this general influence, the
workers' movement took on the quality of a continuous phenomenon in Kurdistan.
So much that, working class activity gained a power and intensity, especially
in Kurdistan in 1975-80, which could be noticed easily at all times.
Social Weight of
the Working Class in Kurdistan
Before going into the workers' movements of 1964-80 period, it might be useful
to give a rough idea about the working class's numerical power, level of
intensity and geographical distribution in Kurdistan with the datum available.
The table below
contains datum from the Employment Ministry for December 1951. The datum in the
tables covers workplaces that have at least 10 workers and the Work Act which
became effective in 1936 was applied. It is indicated that workers of
agriculture, transport, small businesses, those who work at small businesses
and people who work at home and the unemployed were not included in the table:
|
Regions
under the control of the Employment Administration |
Number
of Workers |
Ratio
to the Total Number of Workers in Turkey |
|
Diyarbakir |
20,186 |
|
|
Sivas |
17,241 |
|
|
Erzurum |
9,471
|
|
|
Gaziantep |
6,940 |
|
|
Total in Republic of Turkey |
36,597 (53, 838) |
8.6 (12.6) |
|
Total in Kurdistan of Turkey |
427,364 |
100.0 |
SOURCE:
Ístatististik Yillligi, C.20, 1952, DÍE as it is from Í¡[çi Sinifi Mücadeleleri
Tarihi, p. 83, TÍB [The Working Class of Turkey and its Struggles].
According to the
datum, something like 8.6% (except Sivas) of the total of 427,364 workers
(those who work in large enterprises) in Turkey in 1951 are in the mentioned
regions. When the fact that nearly half the total number of workers are
concentrated in Ístanbul, Ízmir and Zonguldak regions is taken into account,
the above datum is significant.
In 1951,
population in the regions of Diyarbakir and Sivas was especially observed to be
intensifying, which could be considered important.
Besides this
geographical density, the density of workers in the public workplaces also
attracted attention. Y. N. Rozaliev notes that there were 20 workers in the
Elazig Wine Factory, 140 in the Bitlis Tobacco Factory, 505 in Malatya Tobacco,
127 in the Diyarbakir Alcohol-Vodka Factory, 97 in the Gaziantep Alcohol-Vodka
Factory. At the time, one of the 10 largest textile factories which had 1,200
workers was the Malatya Cotton Textiles Factory.
Kurdistan's first
trade unions, (if the ones under union, association or similar names, as we saw
in the example of the Adana-Nusaybin railway line, were not taken into
account), established in Sivas, Malatya and Antep, where the intensification of
workers started in 1949. This process continued by gaining momentum in the
later years.
Kemal Sülker
gives information below about the dispersion of unions and numbers of workers
who were members of a union, in the provinces and regions in 1954.
Number of unions and workers belonging to a union in
1954 in the provinces.
|
Regions |
Provinces
connected to regions |
Number of
unions |
Number of union
branches |
Number of
workers that are members |
Total number of
workers |
|
Diyarbakir |
Diyarbakir, Mardin, Mus, Siirt,
Bitlis, Hakkari, Van |
10 |
- |
930 |
20,871 |
|
Elazig |
Elazig, Malatya, Tunceli,
Bingöl, Adiyman |
13 |
1 |
4,354 |
? |
|
Erzurum |
Erzurum, Agri, Erzincan, Kars |
3 |
2 |
289 |
16,263 |
|
Gaziantep |
Gaziantep, Maras, Urfa |
13 |
4 |
1,458 |
14,638 |
|
Sivas |
Sivas, Tokat |
6 |
2 |
2,099 |
17,862 |
|
Kurdistan total |
45 |
9 |
7,031 (9,130) |
51,772 (69,634*) |
|
|
Turkey total |
348 |
107 |
179,501 |
561,168 |
|
SOURCE: Kemal Sülker,
Türkiye'de Sendikacilik, pp. 109-10. (See also: TÍB, pp. 107-09.) *Sivas Region
is included in the figures in parentheses, and Sivas is excluded in the figures
without parentheses.
Number of paid workers in the Kurdistan part of
Turkey
|
|
Employment type |
Number of workplaces |
Average of paid workers |
|
Kurdistan |
State |
74 (20%) |
29,366 (69%) |
|
Private |
288 (80%) |
13,411 (31%) |
|
|
Total |
362 (100%) |
42,777 (100%) |
|
|
Turkey |
State |
439 (5%) |
277,641 (34%) |
|
Private |
9,047 (95%) |
539,990 (66%) |
|
|
Total |
9,486 (100%) |
817,631 (100%) |
SOURCE: 1981 Yillik Sanayi
Ístatistikleri Geçici Sonuçlar, DÍE, pp. 63-99. (1981 Annual Statistics of
Manufacturing Industry, Temporary Results)
The above datum only covers manufacturing industry
workplaces, (that is, large scale enterprises), which have ten or more workers.
According to this datum, a total of around
42,000 workers (if we assume all the paid people to be workers) work in large
manufacturing industry in Kurdistan. This is 5 per cent of the total in Turkey.
Sixty-nine per cent of industrial workers in
Kurdistan are congregated in public sector workplaces, which comprise only 20
per cent of the total number of workplaces. In private sector workplaces, which
are 80 per cent of the total workplaces, only as small a portion as 31 per cent
of industrial workers work.
If one looks at Turkey in general, it is seen
that 66 per cent of the workers in large manufacturing industry are congregated
in the workplaces that belong to the private sector. However, only 34 per cent
of industrial workers work in the public sector, which covers a very small part
(5 per cent) of the total number of workplaces. In a way, the situation in
Turkey in general is contrary to the situation in Kurdistan. (Before we
continue, let's note that this phenomenon shows that the biggest employer in
Kurdistan is the government itself, and that the proletariat of Kurdistan very
often faces the government as a capitalist also.
As a matter of fact, when the chronology of the
workers' movement is studied, you very often come across the example of a
direct lock-out by the government against the working class. This situation
seems meaningful, in order for the working class to understand very quickly the
personality of the government's bourgeois class nature.)
The number given above was indicated to show
the number of workers in the workplaces where only ten or more workers work. In
order to reach the total, there is a need to add the number of small
manufacturing industries which have between one to nine workers. Therefore, it
can be seen that industrial workers in Kurdistan numerically form a potential
that should not be despised.
The numbers of workers in large manufacturing
industries particularly built up in the centres listed below.
|
Provinces |
Number of workers |
Provinces |
Number of workers |
|
Antep |
9,202 |
Erzincan |
2,369 |
|
Malatya |
6,591 |
Erzurum |
2,288 |
|
Elazig |
4,863 |
Diyarbakir |
2,146 |
|
Sivas |
4,798 |
K. Maras |
1,970 |
|
Siirt |
3,651 |
Urfa |
921 |
There were no manufacturing workplaces with ten
or more workers in Bingöl in 1980. Consequently, the numbers that were given in
the previous table covered only 19 provinces.
While the number of large enterprises in the
manufacturing sector increased in the other cities in Kurdistan in the early
1980s, Bingöl had its first similar type of workplaces functioning. Taking
these developments which occurred after 1980 into account, it is possible to
assume that the number of workers in the big manufacturing industry in
Kurdistan, today, had reached at least fifty thousand.
It is clear that socialists' practical actions
should intensify firstly in the working class of the Kurdistan part of Turkey.
It should start, as I have mentioned earlier, in the big cities and the biggest
factories in these cities.
Number of Insured workers in 1970 and 1980
|
Year |
Permanent |
Temporary |
Total |
Public |
Private |
|
1970 |
85,313 |
36, 222 |
123, 430 |
75,788 |
45,837 |
|
1980 |
139,601 |
64, 107 |
207,037 |
119,277 |
84, 400 |
SOURCE:
The related volumes of the Yurt Ansiklopedisi (Yurt Encyclopedia), 1972-80.
According to this datum, there are 123,430 insured
workers in 1970 and 207,037 insured workers in 1980 in the Kurdistan part of
Turkey. It is obvious that the total number of workers is not constituted of
the above number in Kurdistan. It is known that to employ an uninsured worker
is a common practice throughout Turkey.
It has been indicated in the above source that
the proportion of workplaces that made reports was around 24 per cent in 1980
in Turkey. In 1982 only 32 per cent of the workplaces registered at the SSK
[Social Insurance Association] handed in reports. The proportion not submitting
reports is much higher in the building industry.
If the proportion not submitting reports is
assumed to be even higher in Kurdistan, then the number of workers in reality
is quite higher than the number of insured workers given number of insured
workers.
The number of insured workers increased to
210,625 in 1981. Of this number, 7,692 are women workers. In Kurdistan the
number of insured workers in 1981 is 9.45 per cent of the total number in
Turkey. While the proportion reached 10 per cent for male workers, this
proportion dropped to 3.86% for female workers.
In 1970 there were no insured women workers in
two of Turkey's provinces (Mus and Hakkari). However, in 1980 Hakkari was the
only province in Turkey which did not have any insured women workers.
The high number of uninsured workers also shows
that the proportion of workers who were not members of a union is also quite
high. These are the phenomena that undermine the working class's situation.
The provinces in which the number of insured
workers was highest in Kurdistan in 1980 were:
|
Provinces |
Number of insured workers |
Provinces |
Number of insured workers |
|
Gaziantep |
23,674 |
Diyarbakir |
18,897 |
|
Sivas |
22,991 |
Maras |
16,131 |
|
Malatya |
20, 966 |
Urfa |
10,334 |
|
Erzurum |
20,804 |
Siirt |
9,441 |
|
Elazig |
20,164 |
Van |
8,672 |
The increase in the number of workers attracts
one's attention mostly in Diyarbakir, Erzurum, Antep, Maras, Malatya and Urfa
in 1970-80.
The number of collective agreements in 1972-80
|
Total number of agreements |
1972 |
1973 |
1974 |
1975 |
1976 |
1977 |
1978 |
1979 |
1980 |
Total |
|
157 |
194 |
195 |
242 |
255 |
223 |
327 |
348 |
116 |
2,057 |
|
|
Public |
73 |
114 |
119 |
60 |
136 |
156 |
218 |
195 |
90 |
1,161 |
|
Private |
84 |
80 |
76 |
182 |
119 |
67 |
109 |
153 |
26 |
896 |
|
Total workers |
23,297 |
18,637 |
32,756 |
13,608 |
37,269 |
19,256 |
56,564 |
33,238 |
10,866 |
245,491 |
|
Public |
12,864 |
12,873 |
28,146 |
3,985 |
26,766 |
12,685 |
51,450 |
24,684 |
9,881 |
183,334 |
|
Private |
10,433 |
5,764 |
4,610 |
9,623 |
10,503 |
6,571 |
5,114 |
8,554 |
985 |
62,157 |
|
Total workplaces |
350 |
322 |
449 |
697 |
567 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
2,385 |
|
Public |
179 |
207 |
271 |
105 |
231 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
993 |
|
Private |
171 |
115 |
178 |
592 |
336 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
1,392 |
The table above gives the number of workplace
collective agreements signed in 1972-80 and the number of workers and
workplaces these agreements cover.
According to these datum, the number of workers
taking advantage of collective agreements does not show a regular development.
It follows a line which increases and decreases from year to year. the reason
for this is that datum is not included in the table for some of the provinces
after 1976. Apart from Diyarbakir, Elazig, Erzincan, Erzurum, Gaziantep, Siirt,
Sivas, Van, Kars and Malatya, only the datum for 10 provinces from 1972 to 1976
is included in the above table. However, from ten of the provinces mentioned,
the figures for Diyarbakir, Elazig, Erzincan, Erzurum and Antep from 1972-79
are included in the table. The figures that are included for the years 1972 to
1980 belong only to Siirt, Sivas, Van, Kars and Malatya.
However, progression by increasing and
decreasing from year to year also occurs for the figures up to 1976. One of the
reasons for this is that the agreements are usually made in a two year cycle.
From 1972 to 1980, 56% of the awards are signed in the public sector and the
rest are signed in the private sector. Approximately 75% of the workers took
advantage of those collective agreements signed in the public sector. This
shows that the number of workers per workplace in the public sector was much
higher.
1978 was the year that the number of workers
taking advantage of collective agreements was the highest. This situation had
occurred in the period of 1976-78.
A Brief View of the Workers Movement in the
Kurdistan Part of Turkey During the Period of 1964-80
During the period of 1964-80, a total of two
hundred and four [instances of] workers' [industrial] actions took place in the
Kurdistan part of Turkey. Out of these, one hundred and fourteen were strikes,
seventy-seven were boycotts or other forms of resistance, four were rallies,
three were meetings and the rest were different kinds of actions. (Two
telegrams were sent, [plus] one press release and two announcements were
issued.)
The distribution of these activities, according
to years, can be followed from the table below, where workers' [industrial]
activity from 1964-80 is given in three different periods.
Summary: Industrial Action 1964-80
|
Periods |
Number of strikes |
Number of boycotts |
Number of rallies |
Number of meetings |
Other actions |
Total actions |
|
1964-69 |
36 |
- |
1 |
1 |
38 |
|
|
1970-74 |
18 |
8 |
- |
- |
- |
26 |
|
1975-80 |
60 |
69 |
3 |
2 |
6 |
140 |
|
Total |
114 |
77 |
4 |
3 |
6 |
204 |
Approximately 18 per cent of the workers'
activity took place in the period of 1964-69, 13 per cent in 1970-74 and 69 per
cent in the period of 1975-80. The working class actions did not stop in the
period of 1970-74, which also covers 12 March, the period of the military
dictatorship. (1972 is excluded.). However, due to the characteristics of this
period, there had been reductions in the number of actions. It is quite clear
that this relative reduction had fallen to a parallel level around Turkey.
After 1974-75 a new ascent in the workers'
movement was experienced, in which the same parallellism also occurred. The
most intense workers' activity was staged precisely at this period in the
history of the Kurdistan part of Turkey. Approximately 52 per cent of the total
of one hundred and fourteen strikes and 90 per cent of the sixty-nine boycotts
which took place in the seventeen years between 1964-80 coincide with the
period of 1975-80. This period is significant from the point of view of
participation in strikes and boycotts, and due to other considerations.
Two key points of Turkey's workers' activity
can be identified between the years of 1960-80; specifically 1967-70 and
1976-78. These years were also the summit of the Kurdistan part of Turkey's workers'
activity. In order to be able to comprehend the situation in 1976, 1977 and
1978, one would need to take note of postponements of strikes and also the
number of strike decisions in the table section. [See the Table of Workers
Actions: 1964-80, in the following section.]
The 1976-78 period forms a special phase in the
history of Turkey's workers' movement. Each important workers' action in this
period of time in Turkey were accompanied by parallel actions in the Kurdistan
part of Turkey. This was the situation on May Day 1976, the DGM Boycott (16-21
September 1976) [a reference to the campaign to dismantle the military courts
left operating despite the formal return to civilian rule after the 1971
military coup], the Warning Action to Fascism (20 March 1978) and May Day
1978.1
While we look at the sectoral distribution of
the strikes (between 1964-80) in the Kurdistan part of Turkey, we see this: The
trade, transport and service sectors are leading with thirty strikes (26 per
cent), followed by the mining industry, with nineteen strikes (17 per cent),
the food industry with eighteen strikes (16 per cent), construction with ten
strikes (9 per cent) and textiles, with nine strikes (8 per cent). Then comes
the petrol, machine-metal-iron/steel, stone-soil and other industries.
However, with the sectoral dispersion of
resistance, the leading industries respectively are: construction (nineteen);
textiles (twelve); trade, transport and service (eleven); mining (seven);
machine-metal, goods/iron-steel (six); agriculture (five); food (five) and
other industries with a lesser number of struggles. From the point of view of
total industrial actions, the leading industries are, respectively: trade,
transport, services (forty-one); construction (twenty-nine); mining (twenty-six);
food (twenty-three); textiles (twenty-one).
The industrial distribution of workers'
activity gives us a concrete idea about the economic structure of the Kurdistan
part of Turkey. The same thing can be seen by looking at the general figures in
relation to numerical power, numbers and density of workers in different
industries.
It is also useful to look at the geographical
distribution of workers' [industrial] activity. These are the cities in which
activity intensified:
Geographical Distribution of
Workers' Industrial Activity
|
Provinces |
Number of strikes |
Number of boycotts |
Number of rallies |
Number of meetings |
Other actions |
Number of actions |
|
|
Diyarbakir |
22 |
13 |
2 |
1 |
- |
38 |
|
|
Antep |
14 |
16 |
- |
2 |
1 |
33 |
|
|
Malatya |
16 |
7 |
- |
- |
- |
23 |
|
|
Elazig |
11 |
4 |
- |
- |
2 |
17 |
|
|
Erzurum |
12 |
4 |
- |
- |
- |
16 |
|
|
Sivas |
8 |
6 |
- |
- |
- |
14 |
|
|
Maras |
5 |
3 |
- |
- |
- |
8 |
|
|
Siirt |
4 |
- |
- |
- |
4 |
|
|
|
Urfa |
2 |
6 |
- |
- |
1 |
9 |
|
While there were only 4 strikes and one meeting
in Diyarbakir between 1964-75, it was the leading city from 1975 to 1980 where
workers' [industrial] activity was intense. One the other side, there is a need
to indicate that common actions took place in many provinces at the same time.
Because of this, most of the common actions were recorded under Diyarbakir.
According to one source, a total of thirty-nine strikes took place in
Diyarbakir between 1976-80. Seventeen of these strikes were encountered in
1980. According to the same source, 5,357 workers participated in these
strikes. [See the Yurt Ansiklopedisi, Diyarbakir section.] This figure for the
number of strikes in Diyarbakir was well above the findings of this study for
the period of 1975-80. This shows that the results obtained from this study
were below the real figures.
From the point of view of the number of insured
workers, it is interesting to see Diyarbakir after Antep, Sivas, Malatya,
Erzurum and Elazig, when it [Diyarbakir] was the leading city in workers'
activity. One of the reasons for this could be that Diyarbakir is a city where
all the public institutions and regional trade unions are. Without any doubt,
the most important reason is that it [Diyarbakir] functions as a political
centre in the Kurdistan part of Turkey. It is important in a sense that it is
one of the political centres for the leftist movements. As one of the most
important political centres for the Kurdish movement, Diyarbakir has an
original place in Kurdistan's history. It is also very meaningful for
Diyarbakir to be one of the centres for workers' action after 1975. This shows
that class consciousness weighs heavier.
Following Diyarbakir, workers' activity
intensified mostly in Antep, Malatya, Elazig, Erzurum, Sivas, Urfa, Maras and
Siirt. The workers' movement is seen in only nine provinces in the Kurdistan
part of Turkey between 1964-69, until 1974 [when] it is seen in eleven
provinces. However, workers' [industrial] activity seems to be apparent in
almost all provinces and become more common until 1980.
From Kurdistanli Marksist
number 2-3, February 1990.
Notes
1. On 30 April 1976 workers of
the Hitit Ecza Deposu [Hittite Medicine Warehouse] in Diyarbakir who were on
strike, enlarged DÍSK's [Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions] emblem
and then hung it on the picket line. One of the [industrial] actions organised
by DÍSK all over Turkey, to protest the DGM's acts becoming effective, took
place in Antep between 16-21 September 1976. Fifteen thousand workers from
Kurdistan's various cities joined the Warning to Fascism action on 20 March. The
May Day of 1978 was celebrated by rallies, meetings, meetings in halls and
demonstrations in many parts of Kurdistan.
|
|
LINGUISTICS |
Book reviews
Zülfü Selcan: Grammatik der
Zaza-Sprache. Nord-Dialekt (Dersim-Dialekt). Berlin: Wissenschaft und
Technik Verlag, 1998. xiii + 730 pages. ISBN 3-928943-96-0.
Zazaki (also known as Dimili) is a northwest Iranian language spoken across a
large area of central Anatolia centered on the towns of Tunceli, Erzincan, and
Bingol. Estimates of the number of speakers range from one to four million,
making Zazaki the second largest minority language in Turkey. Despite
the size of the speech community, Zazaki has until very recently been
extremely poorly documented. The neglect of Zazaki is in part due to the
policies of the Turkish government, which has consistently obstructed research
on all its minority languages, but also to the misconception that Zazaki is a
"Kurdish dialect." The present book goes a long way to putting the record
straight on this and many other issues and is therefore of considerable import,
for general linguists, scholars of Iranian languages, and all those interested
in the minority languages of Turkey. The book under review can claim to be the
first comprehensive grammar of Zazaki, though it shares this honor with
another book, Paul (1998b). Fortunately Paul's book concentrates on the
southern dialects of Zazaki, while Selcan's book covers the northern
dialects, so the amount of overlap is limited. Furthermore, the two books
embody quite different approaches: Paul's book is a classical corpus- based
grammar while Selcan, a native speaker active as an author in Zazaki for
25 years, relies extensively on his own intuition. Selcan's book calls
itself a "grammar of the Zaza language," but it is in fact
much more than that: "compendium," or "handbook" would have
been equally fitting titles. The book begins with a 100-page critical review of
"all previous known research" (p. 7) on Zazaki. The reason for
an overview of this depth is not simply linguistic, but in large measure
political. As mentioned above, there is a widely held misconception that Zazaki
is a dialect of some other language, most particularly of Kurdish.
Linguistics 39-1 (2001), 181-197 0024-3949/01/0039-0181
© Walter de Gruyter
182 Book reviews
This view has been all-too-willingly accepted by Kurdish nationalists, who have
used it to justify extending their territorial claims to include the Zazaki
speech zone. Selcan vehemently rejects what he refers to as the
"Kurdocentric" viewpoint, and the entire 100-page section can be
considered a rebuttal of that standpoint, meticulously cataloguing over a
century of European (including Russian) research on the subject, before
deconstructing most of the politically tainted efforts of Kurdish and Turkish
writers (pp. 64-103). The sheer weight of evidence Selcan has amassed to prove
that Zazaki is a language in its own right is impressive (see Paul 1998a;
Gippert 2000 for further justification). But this section makes heavy reading,
at times repetitive and polemic. One wonders, for example, whether the patently
ridiculous attempts of one scholar to prove that Zazaki is a "Turkic
language" are really worth a nine-page criticism (pp. 95-103). Although
this section will leave little doubt in the reader's mind that Zazaki is not a
Kurdish dialect, it is far less clear what, if any, the political implications
of Zazaki's genetic affiliation should be. People's loyalties are not solely
determined by the linguistic affiliation of their mother tongue. Ethnic,
political, and religious factors also play a prominent role, as demonstrated by
examples such as Hindi and Urdu. In the case of Zazaki, it has been noted that
the religious split among the Zazas (Alevi Islam versus Sunnite Islam) is at
least as important as language in shaping the Zazas' self-identification (see
e.g. Firat 1997; Paul 1998b; xiii). Thus while on purely linguistic grounds
Selcan is right to emphasize the independence of Zazaki, the fact remains that
many Zazaki speakers do identify themselves as Kurds and have even been active
in Kurdish nationalism (Van Bruinessen 1997: 209). For example, the writer of
the most widely-used Zazaki dictionary (Malmisanij 1992) has no qualms about
referring to Zazaki in the foreword of his dictionary as a "dialect
spoken in Kurdistan." It is very significant that Selcan makes no
reference to this dictionary, or its author, anywhere in his book. The simple
fact is that, in spite of the linguistic evidence, some Zazas do consider them
selves Kurds, a fact that deserves more mention than it gets in Selcan's book
(just a footnote on page 36). These comments aside, Selcan has compiled the
most comprehensive survey of the literature on Zazaki available, which will
remain an invaluable source for future reference. The grammatical description
begins with a detailed description of sources (see below), and of autonyms used
by Zazaki speakers (a very complex issue), before moving on to a
dialectological survey of Zazaki (pp. 123-136). The detailed phonology
section (pp. 137-222) covers traditional segmental phonology and phonotactics,
details of allophonic variation and discussion of dialectal differences, and an
extensive section
Book reviews 183
on stress (pp. 192-203), as well as information on the relative frequency of
individual phonemes in texts. A quirky feature of this section is Selcan's
notion "minimal pair": he only accepts a contrast as phonemic if it
occurs in two words which are SYNTACTICALLY AND SEMANTICALLY cornmutable. He
would not, for example, consider a preposition and an imperative verb form as
candidates for a minimal pair. This is an original, and in many respects
perfectly logical, extension of the notion of functional phonemic contrast,
though I am unaware of any theory that applies it consistently. One of the
immediate results of this approach to Zazaki phonology is to reduce the
number of phonemes. For example, Selcan does not count the
aspirated/nonaspirated distinction in the voiceless stops as phonemic, although
they are considered so by Paul for the northern dialects (Paul 1998b: 183). The
bulk of the grammar is made up of the section on "Morphology and
syntax" (pp. 228-696), beginning with a discussion of the classification
of parts of speech based on traditional German grammar. There is no clear
section on word formation or derivation (except pp. 571-575 on derived
adjectives); "morphology" appears to be restricted to the expression
of inflectional categories. The Izafe construction (section 17.1.2), one of the
most fascinating aspects of Zazaki grammar, is for some reason treated
in chapter 17, "Definiteness." Izafe is the traditional term in
Iranian philology for the vocalic particle by which posthead nominal modifiers
arc linked to their head nouns. In Persian, the Izafe particle is invariant; in
Kurmanji Kurdish it inflects for gender and number of the head noun; but in Zazaki,
it inflects for
(i) gender and number of the head;
(ii) category of the modifier (adjective vs. noun);
(iii) syntactic function of the entire NP in the clause.
Chapter 18 deals with case, including a row of suffixes/clitics somewhat
confusingly called "postpositions" on page 273, but later
"secondary case" (p. 291). An interesting feature of Zazaki is
the importance of the feature [+animate] in the inflection of masculine nouns:
in direct object function, inanimate masculine nouns take no oblique suffix,
while animates do (p. 279):
(1) televe kitav ceno 'the pupil takes the book' (kitav-0, masc.)
(2) televe malim-i vineno 'the pupil sees the teacher' (malim-ob., masc.)
Intriguingly, the constraint on inflecting inanimate masculines is only
operative with direct objects of present tense verbs. Unfortunately Selcan
refers to this particular SYNTACTIC function as obliquus, that is, the
name of a particular morphological case. Later it transpires that masculine
Book reviews 184
inanimates CAN take the oblique case (e.g. as subject of ergative
constructions, or as genitive attributes, cf. p. 284). This chapter also includes
a more detailed discussion of ergativity in Zazaki, another typologically
interesting aspect of the language. The next major division is the discussion
of verbs and related topics (pp. 340-546). The Zazaki verb system is
morphologically considerably more complex than that of Persian, or of Kurdish.
Verbs in Zazaki have a morphological passive (restricted to transitive verbs)
and in some tenses also inflect for the gender of the morphological subject
(third person only). For example u manen-o 'he stays' versus a
manen-a 'she stays'. Using a list of 533 basic verbs, Selcan undertakes a
detailed classification of the verbs into eight conjugation classes and two
transitivity classes (pp. 364-374), noting correlations between the two.
Like other Iranian languages, Zazaki also makes extensive use of
so-called preverbs, particles of various provenance that modify the semantics
of the basic stem. Section 21 deals with preverbs in some detail, and Selcan
presents a highly original analysis whereby the preverbs are likened to vectors
in a grid of spatial orientation (p. 414), expressing horizontal, vertical, and
rising and falling motion. Also noteworthy is his explanation for the order of
preverb relative to verb stem (they occur both before and after the verb stem).
He links this to a more general principle of the Zazaki clause according to
which elements that express the end result of a state of affairs are
postpredicate, while those that contribute to a particular state occur before
the verb (p. 433). The description of tense follows traditional German grammar,
likewise the terminology. Notable is the lack of a formal category
"future." Interestingly, Selcan describes tense from the point of
view of entire clauses and explicitly includes temporal and modal adverbs as
part of the inventory of the tense system. At this point, however, a major
weakness of the book becomes apparent (see below): there are very few examples
that go beyond a single sentence. Rather, Selcan presents a series of examples
and then gives short rules for explaining the combinability of various tense
forms with various types of adverbs, summarizing the results in tables (e.g. p.
449). This seems to me to be taking the principle of "segmentation and
classification" to an extreme. A reader wishing for a clear statement
regarding, say, the difference between the use of the imperfect and the
preterit, perhaps illustrated with some longer text passages, will be
disappointed (see for example the description of the semantics of the
imperfect, pp. 458-460). Section 28 (p. 547) is headed "Adjectives."
It begins with an attempt to distinguish adjectives from adverbs, focusing
mainly on the lack of inflectional potential of adverbs, for example
comparative and case (p. 547). However, the argument is considerably weakened
when we learn
Book reviews 185
later (p. 564) that adjectives in the northern dialects do not have a special
comparative form. In fact, the comparative construction conforms to hat has
been suggested is an Anatolian areal type (see Haig forthcoming). It is
somewhat irritating to find in this section yet another treatment of the Izafe
construction under the heading "declination of the adjective" (pp.
549-552). The extensive tables here repeat information already given on pages
256-257 and 284. In fact the contents of the "Adjective" section are
altogether rather surprising, including for example the extensive section on
numerals and expressions for dates and times, pages 586-613. The remaining
sections are "Adverbs," "Adpositions," "Negative
expressions," "Terms of address," "Interjections," and
an extensive section on various types of ideophone. The section on adpositions
is the most disappointing part of the book. The definition of this word class
("words that express the relationship of one word to another")
obviously cannot be taken literally. Closer inspection reveals that Zazaki uses
a variety of structural means for expressing relationships covered in English
by prepositions, but Selcan is committed to a purely linear classification
based on a three-way distinction between preposition, postposition, and
circumposition. He fails to make the crucial distinction between genuine basic
prepositions and strongly grammaticalized Izafe constructions. Because in both
cases the first element occurs before the lexical head, both wind up as
"prepositions." Thus ve 'with, through, towards' is a simple
preposition (ve cti 'with the stick') and is simply preposed to its
noun, while seweta, glossed 'because of, is actually the first element
of an Izafe construction, as in sewet-a Sileman-i 'because of Sileman',
lit. 'the reason-of Sileman' (p. 649). This presentation obscures the
interesting fact that Zazaki has very few simple prepositions; it would appear
that at least the northern dialects are moving toward a postpositional type.
Another unfortunate feature is the use of the term "circumposition,"
a relic of Kurdish linguistics. What Selcan refers to as circumpositions could
in my opinion be better analyzed as NP/PP + the secondary case clitics -ra,
-ro, -de, etc. Consider for example (p. 653) bin-e dare-ra, 'from
under the tree'. Dare is 'tree' and bin is a noun meaning 'base'.
Selcan analyzes this construction as a circumposition around a noun, that is, bin-e
[dare] ra. But the more logical analysis is [bin-e darej-ra, that
is, an Izafe construction consisting of two nouns, meaning 'the base of the
tree', plus a secondary case clitic indicating 'source'. Despite the lack of
analytical finesse, this section is amply illustrated so that the reader is in
a position to draw her own conclusions. Much the same can be said of the
section on Konjunktionen (pp. 661-676), essentially an inventory of
conjunctions illustrated with extensive examples. Although the book gives an
extremely comprehensive account of Zazaki grammar, the material is not always
presented in reader-friendly
Book reviews186
fashion. I would estimate that 60-70% of the grammar consists of tables and
lists. Likewise, the terminology is distinctly idiosyncratic. The
"continuative" is hardly a "mood," and it actually looks
like a cleft construction (pp. 478-480, 530-531). What Selcan refers to as a
"relative pronoun" (p. 334) is in fact the pronominal head of a
relative construction, as in English the one who is coming. The
organization of the near 500-page section on "Morphology and syntax"
is likewise confusing: it appears to be based on word classes (noun, adjective,
verb, etc.), each of which gets a major chapter, but other same-level chapters
are distributed among them. The result is that morphological and syntactic
topics are mixed throughout the book. For example the Izafe construction is
tucked away in chapter 17, "Definiteness," the syntax of relative
clauses in chapter 33, "Conjunctions." In fact, the book simply lacks
a roper section on syntax dealing with complex clauses, deletion rules,
word-order variation, etc. Syntactic typologists will not find it easy to work
with this grammar, but admittedly, Selcan did not write the grammar primarily
for syntactic typologists. Finally, a critical word on the use of sources, and
the objectives of the grammar. Selcan claims to have 250 hours of recorded
material at his disposal (p. 118; the demographic details of the informants are
listed on pp. 704-705). Yet apart from in the dialectology and phonology
sections, virtually no reference is made to this corpus. Most example sentences
in the grammar are not sourced, so I assume they are constructed by the author
himself. Where examples are sourced, they are mostly from written sources,
often texts written by Selcan himself under the pseudonym Zilfi, a fact
that severely diminishes the book's value for historical and comparative
purposes. More worrying is the fact that not a single extended text sample of
authentic spoken Zazaki appears in the entire book. The whole grammar is based
on mostly short, and presumably constructed, sentences. Typical examples are
'The child gives the book to the teacher' (p. 323), or 'The wolf eats the
abandoned lamb' (p. 346). As has been pointed out many times (see e.g. Chafe
1994: 84), such sentences (e.g. with two or more definite full NPs) are
extremely rare in natural discourse. The importance of basing grammars on
authentic texts is being increasingly recognized, for both discourse and
functionally based grammatical theories, but also as an integral part of the
documentation of poorly documented languages such as Zazaki (see Himmelmann
1996 for explicit justification). Surely a book of this length could have
accommodated some representative samples of actual language usage (compare the
70 pages of texts in Paul's [1998b] Zazaki grammar). The above comments on
sources also raise the issue of the objectives of the grammar. For example,
Selcan describes in detail how mathematical equations such as
Book reviews 187
"the square root of 25 equals five" (p. 609), or the numeral
1,002,003,000 are expressed in Zazaki. Now Zazaki has never been a language of
education, so such expressions can hardly be considered part of established
usage. What the author appears to be doing here is not so much describing
actual usage but making recommendations of how a hypothetical
"standardized Zazaki" should be. In this connection we could also
note the complete absence of any reference to Turkish influence on Zazaki,
although this is undoubtedly a feature of the modern language. In other words,
the grammar is, at least in parts, prescriptive rather than descriptive.
Writing a prescriptive grammar is of course a perfectly legitimate exercise for
a native speaker, but the reader could expect a clearer statement on the aims
of the grammar, and a clearer distinction between descriptive and normative
sections. These critical comments are not intended to detract from my overall
positive assessment of the book. Grammatik der Zaza-Sprache is a truly monumental
achievement, which will undoubtedly prove an essential source for Zazaki for
many years to come. Selcan has done an excellent job of compiling, analyzing,
and presenting a vast amount of data, rounded off with maps and extensive
indices and bibliographies. The book is attractively and professionally
finished, with very few typos or other errors (and is, incidentally, very good
value for money). I sincerely hope that Selcan will complement this impressive
achievement with a collection of spoken Zazaki narratives in the near future.
in chapter 33, "Conjunctions." In fact, the book simply lacks a
proper section on syntax dealing with complex clauses, deletion rules,
word-order variation, etc. Syntactic typologists will not find it easy to work
with this grammar, but admittedly, Selcan did not write the grammar primarily
for syntactic typologists. Finally, a critical word on the use of sources, and
the objectives of the grammar. Selcan claims to have 250 hours of recorded
material at his disposal (p. 118; the demographic details of the informants are
listed on pp. 704-705). Yet apart from in the dialectology and phonology
sections, virtually no reference is made to this corpus. Most example sentences
in the grammar are not sourced, so I assume they are constructed by the author
himself. Where examples are sourced, they are mostly from written sources,
often texts written by Selcan himself under the pseudonym Zilfi, a fact
that severely diminishes the book's value for historical and comparative
purposes. More worrying is the fact that not a single extended text sample of
authentic spoken Zazaki appears in the entire book. The whole grammar is based
on mostly short, and presumably constructed, sentences. Typical examples are
'The child gives the book to the teacher' (p. 323), or 'The wolf eats the
abandoned lamb' (p. 346). As has been pointed out many times (see e.g. Chafe
1994: 84), such sentences (e.g. with two or more definite full NPs) are
extremely rare in natural discourse. The importance of basing grammars on
authentic texts is being increasingly recognized, for both discourse and
functionally based grammatical theories, but also as an integral part of the
documentation of poorly documented languages such as Zazaki (see Himmelmann
1996 for explicit justification). Surely a book of this length could have
accommodated some representative samples of actual language usage (compare the
70 pages of texts in Paul's [1998b] Zazaki grammar). The above comments on
sources also raise the issue of the objectives of the grammar. For example,
Selcan describes in detail how mathematical equations such as
"numeral
1,002,003,000 the square root of 25 equals five" (p. 609), or the are
expressed in Zazaki. Now Zazaki has never been a language of education, so such
expressions can hardly be considered part of established usage. What the author
appears to be doing here is not so much describing actual usage but making
recommendations of how a hypothetical "standardized Zazaki" should
be. In this connection we could also note the complete absence of any reference
to Turkish influence on Zazaki, although this is undoubtedly a feature of the
modern language. In other words, the grammar is, at least in parts,
prescriptive rather than descriptive. Writing a prescriptive grammar is of
course a perfectly legitimate exercise for a native speaker, but the reader
could expect a clearer statement on the aims of the grammar, and a clearer
distinction between descriptive and normative sections. These critical comments
are not intended to detract from my overall positive assessment of the book. Grammatik
der Zaza-Sprache is a truly monumental achievement, which will undoubtedly
prove an essential source for Zazaki for many years to come. Selcan has done an
excellent job of compiling, analyzing, and presenting a vast amount of data,
rounded off with maps and extensive indices and bibliographies. The book is
attractively and professionally finished, with very few typos or other errors
(and is, incidentally, very good value for money). I sincerely hope that Selcan
will complement this impressive achievement with a collection of spoken Zazaki
narratives in the near future.
Universitat Kiel
GEOFFREY HAIG
References
Chafe, Wallace (1994). Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Displacement
of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Firat, Gulsun (1997). Soziookonomischer Wandel und ethnische Identitat
in der kurdisch-alevitischen Region Dersim. Saarbrucken: Verlag fur
Entwicklungspolitik.
Gippert, Jost (2000). The historical position of Zazaki revisited. Paper
presented at the First International Workshop on Kurdish Linguistics, 12-14
May, Kiel.
Haig, Geoffrey (forthcoming). Linguistic diffusion in modern East Anatolia:
from top to bottom. In Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in
Comparative Linguistics,
Alexandra Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus (1996). Zum Aufbau von Sprachbeschreibungen. Linguistische
Berichte 164, 315-333.
Malmisanij (1992). Zazaca-Turkce sozluk/Ferhenge Dimilki-Tirki. Istanbul:
Deng.
(Orginally published 1987 in Uppsala.)
Paul, Ludwig (1998a). The position of Zazaki among West Iranian languages. In Proceedings
of the 3rd European Conference of Iranian Studies, 11-15.09.1995, Cambridge,
Nicholas Sims-Williams (ed.), 163-176. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
188 Book reviews
—(1998b). Zazaki, Grammatik und Versuch einer Dialektologie. Wiesbaden:
Reichert. Van Bruinessen, Martin (1997). Kurden zwischen ethnischer, religioser
und regionaler Identitat. In Ethnizilat, Nationalismus, Religion und Politik
in Kurdistan, Carsten Borck, Eva Savelsberg, and Siamend Hajo (eds.),
185-216. Munster: Lit.
By Faruk Iremet
From the book: and in the hunger of love,
Stockholm 1994
Translation: Fred Dufva
INHERITANCE
The day is here now
the searching is over
to the last point in my sheet
The Fairy-tales which I was listening to
in my cradle
I will give you
in inheritance
THE LOST TIME
You have the changing
like the spring weather
but the old time
has gone
our youth songs
that became snow
with the lost time
IN THE ENDLESS BLUE SKY
I am so full of joy today.
I do not know why
in my innermost inner
I will laugh
and be enthusiastic.
Earthdust to smoke,
stone to dust
I want to mix them all together
I do not know why
I am so full of joy today.
In my heart there is no hate
in my eyes there is no tears.
Of joy I will fly
into the Endless blue sky
With all my peaceful thoughts.
EXTINCT VOLCANO
The love for you gives me
the longing force
when Tigris pours from above
and draws the borders together
with Eufrat.
My love, do you remember?
We walked together
over the bridge of the ten eyes
and looked down
at the whirling water of Tigris
we wondered about our fate
We thought about children, a family
the fate whirled us to exile
we walk along the town wall
of Diyarbekir
A circle is closing
and here I can't see
an end or a beginning.
The love that we had in mind
is filled with shadows now
everything can changed
but not the love for Zazaistan.
Yet another day has passed
we have got a new page
to write upon
the day that has passed
brought grudge.
when that grudging turns against love
the thuja blooms on our mountain
that day the sun shines upon our country.
The love for you my love
the longing for freedom
without fear.
Karacadag's extinct volcano
now has it's eruption in me.
Don't forget me
I never forget
our mulberry tree's
have maybe withered
but the birds hasn't stopped
twittering on the bough.
DESERT RAIN
I have loved
as much as I could
from the spine of an hedgehog.
To the pain of a fight
from a mourning mother
to an orphan child.
So what is the crying
in the stinking smell of the world.
That human being that hasn't
run from that fear
that human I love.
Well, that's the way a courageous human is
hasn't felt fear
with her young hands
fresh is love like a
budding bough in the spring.
A long way to walk
blood has penetrated
tears has been demanded
I cant say that one don't
cry of longing.
But the meaning will then become a lie
my love becomes a lie
it will be a lie...lie
A budded bough in spring time.
I have loved
as much as I could
from our homes canary,
to a wild bear on the mountain,
from the bud's by the gravestone
to the moons light over the jail
what is there to love in that love
that they didn't fled from
I became enchanted.
For that is the way the rose is
full of vitality is the bud
dried out is the past
from the wind of the April storm
the remaining is desertrain.
MY COMPANION
You came with the winds
that blew in from the horizon
you were Demeter
laid untied or something...like that
how could the time get pregnant in my heart?
And how could I be guilty
to the stunging longing?
Now I must pray to Helios
no more twilight to love
the wind, storms,
want to live my caresses with
your scent.
Were picked off my bough,
I have severe pain since then
was that the pain of love?
But I will never love so
and never drink that way
of anyone's heart to forget
but still I have tears left to shed...
If I'll fall in love again.
Forgive me my love, early I learnt
to doubt about everything
the dreams of my life has been
desert and this has been my companion.
To dance with an open embrase
in the middle of the desert storm
and sing out your name by
the horizon write with tears in
the sand in the darkness of
the Milky Way's eternity.
May I say how it feels to be
to heavy for once own grapevine
Or to be a well of shiver drying out
to feel you so close to me is a
dream and so intimate
to my eternal solitude I initiated you.
HUG ME DEAREST
Hug me dearest
tighter
as much as you can
I want to feel
how much I am worth
in your warm embrace
Do not let me go
I do not wont to
fly away with the wind
hold me tight
in you embrace
on the Earth
among moistly rotes
I want to die like this
I want to own a grave like this
I want to rest in your heart like this.
Faruk Iremet
Susanne Ayata
You were a fine human
beeing
You emaneted calm and harmony
You had a wonderfull wife who
Gave birth to your four children
But now you are no longer
here
The cancer took your life
Maybe it was the longing for your land
You could never return back home
Home to Zazaistan
They put you in prison and
they tortured you
But you never gaved upp.
You moved to Sweden and continued your battle.
Here you could talk, here you could write.
Write and for ever write
Your own language Zazaki
You could never return
home, home to Zazaistan.
You could never see your beloved Zazaistan a last time
The cancer took your life, to fast you were too young.
(Piya, Amor 15-16 P.21, 1992)
The
Zaza flag
The Alevis or Zazas
are a minority (70.000) according to Le Monde) that live in the territories
that were the old turkoman emirate of Danishmend. Their name mean "Ali
partisan" and they emigrated from Babylon in VIIth century and were later
converted to shiism. The Zazas are divised on 28 tribes each one directed by an
important clan. Around 1917 the rebels used plain red flags and these flags
were roll up in their heads during the fight against Turks, who called the
Zazas the Kizilbach (Red Heads). In1921 Ismail Aga directed the revolt in the
region of Kochgiri, that was repressed in blood (20.000 deaths). During this
revolt was created the flag with Z that is in fact a traditional embroidery in
the zaza clothes. The flag was used during the followings revolts: 1934 Kocj
Asireti in Dersim; 1937-38 Seyit Riza also in Dersim; 1978 Haliloztoprak in
Marach; Sivas city in 1979; revolt of Tchorum in 1980. The Zaza flag is banned
in Turkey and is used mainly in the zaza emigration in Germany and other
countries. (from an article by Lucien Philippe).
Jaume Ollé, 10 October 1998
The situation of Zazas is
better explained in a paper by Martin van Bruinessen, from the Turkish and
Kurdish Studies Department, Utrecht University (The Netherlands):
"Meanwhile in Europe Zaza-speaking Kurds - some of them Sunnis, other
Alevis - were bringing about a minor revival of Zaza literature, in the margin
of the remarkable resurgence of Kurmanci literary activities. Aminority among
them began perceiving the Zaza as a distinct ethnic group that had to liberate
itself from cultural domination by Kurds as well as the Turkish state. This
Zaza 'nationalism' still is largely a matter ofexile politics, and it may still
appear as a marginal phenomenon, but gradually it is also influencing the debate
among Dersimis inside Turkey."
[...]
"This debate on the development of, or ban on, written Zaza made a strong
impact in the small circle of Zaza intellectuals in exile, causing a parting of
the minds among them. In the late 1980s, the first Zaza journal was published,
and it was emphatically non-Kurdish. It carried articles in Zaza, Turkish and
English but not in Kurdish, it spoke of the Zazas as a separate people, whose
identity had too long been denied not only by the Turkish state but by the Kurds
as well, and it coined the new name of Zazaistan for the ancient homeland of
these Zazas, indicating its rejection of the term Kurdistan as a geographical
name. The journal at first had only a very small circle of readers, but the
many angry Kurdish reactions suggested that the journal did have a point after
all, and gradually growing numbers of Zazas were won over to its views. There
appears not to be an organized Zaza nationalist movement yet, but the
publishing activities go on increasing, with two new journals appearing in
Europe and recently a series of booklets in Turkey, all of them proclaiming the
Zazas to be different from the Kurds."
Original footnotes: "Ayre and its successor Piya were published monthly in
Sweden from 1987 on. Presently the most important Zaza journals are Desmala
Sure and Ware (both published in Germany).
Therefore, it seems that
the caption Zazakistan (Alevistan) - Alevis or Zazas (Kizilbashes) of the flag
showed above in the Flags of Aspirant Peoples chart [asp] is simplistic if not completely erroneous.
Caker and Ivan Sache,
10 May 1999
Notes on some religious customs and institutions
G. S. ASATRIAN
and
N. KH. GEVORGIAN
0.1. The present article
is based mainly on the archives of Gevorg Halajyan -a former inhabitant
of Dersim- kept in the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Academy
of Sciences of the Armenian Soviet Republic. The archive includes materials on
the etnography, demography, topohraphy, religious beliefs and language of
Dersim and its Zaza and Armenian population. G. Halajyan was born in
1885 in Dersim and lived there almost until his thirtieth year - up to the
Armenian Genocide in Turkish Armenia in 1915. He died in 1966 in soviet
Armenia.
0.2. G. Halajyan's archives, which contain interesting, sometimes
entirely new data, are of particular importance because this Dersim region and
much of Eastern Turkey is not easily accessible to scholars. The data of this
archive can be verified in large part by other Armenian sources, the latter
also unknown to most specialists, but very important for the investigation of
both the Zaza and the Kurds.
It must be stressed that Halajyan's materials should be regarded as historical:
no doubt many of the rites, customs, etc. described have by now disapperared,
whilst others have changed their forms and functions in the eighty years and
more that have elapsed.
1.1. The Zaza, who call themselves dimli or dimla , inhabit mainly
Dersim (modern Tunceli), in the far west of Upper Armenia (Barjr Hayk); and in
the territory between the two branches of the Euphrates: between Erzincan -Arm.
Erznka- in the north, and the Murad su -Arm. Arcani- in the south. The Zaza
live also in Bingöl, Muþ, in the province of Bitlis, in the environ of
Diyarbakir, in Siverek, and in other parts of Eastern Anadolu5.
1.2. Zaza is possibly a pejorative nickname given them by their
neighbours. K.Hadank, with reference to Rich, a traveller of the beginning of
the XIXth century, notes that zaza means "stutterer"
("stotterer"). Although it is very likely that zaza is really a
nickname (Spitzname), it seems to have been inspired, as D.N.MacKenzie
suggests, by the sibilant character of their language. The Armenians call the
Zaza dýlmik (see below) or zaza-kürder. In the latter case, the second part of
the composite name, kürder (Kurds), denotes social status or mode of life
rather than nationality. Thus, the same Armenian authors who use the term
zaza-kürder in fact are distinguishing the Zaza from the original Kurds
The exact number of the Zaza at present time is not known, but can be estimated
to be around half a million.
1.3. The appearance of the Zaza in the territories they now inhabit
seems to be connected to waves of migration from the highland of Gilan-Daylam
of the Daylamite population in the Xth-XIIth centuries. This historical fact is
reflected also in their name for themselves, dimli, dimla < Daylam (F. C.
Andreas), more precisely, from the adjectival form delmik (from the
original form of the name of the province, Delam or Delim, attested also in the
Armenian tradition.
1.4. The Zaza language belongs to the north-western group of the Iranian
languages and is closely related to Talishi, Harzani, Gilaki, and Samnani. The
Zaza language cannot be regarded as a Kurdish dialect. The valid linguistic
evidence for the exclusion of Zaza, as well as of Gurani and Luri, from the
system of Kurdish dialects, was first presented by D. N. MacKenzie
1.4.1. The Zaza language, as we can judge from the scanty
materials available (texts, glossaries, etc.) contains, besides original
vocabulary (Wortschatz), and Turkish and Arabo-Persian borrowings, also a large
number of Armenian loan-words. The latter reflect the age-old Armeno-Zaza
relationship. Among the archive materials of G. Halajyan, there is a
succinct glossary of Armenian loanwords in Zaza, comprising 50 lexical items.
A very interesting facet of Armenian influence upon Zaza can be observed also
in the morphological system, i.e. in the formation of the partic. praes. form
the past stem with the suffix -(v)ox/v ( The suffix -ox in
Kurdish cannot be the fricative variant of the original -ok (<*-aka-), which
forms nomina agentis from the present stem of the verb, cf. garok "vagrant,
vagabond", gazok "one who bites" (<*gaz-aka ),
etc.
2.1. We possess rather scarce information about the religious beliefs
and customs of the Zaza. Only superficial remarks are to be found in works
dedicated to the Kurds and to the extreme Shi'a sects in Turkey and in Iran.
The archive of G.Halajyan, supported by data from the other Armenian
sources, remedies this deficieney considerably.
To begin with, some authors, e.g. V. A. Gordlevskij, call the Zaza
kizilbas, although this term is inappropriate to them. The term kizilbas
implies simultaneously extreme Shi'ite religion and Turkish etnicity. It is
preferable to regard the Zaza as an isolated ethnic group of Iranian origin,
who confess a certain form of extreme Shi'ism with a great admixture of indigenous,
primitive religious elements.
The religious ideas and beliefs of the Zaza are characterized by great variety,
as is true of most extreme Shi'a sects. All these sects doctrinally deify ‘Ali,
for instance, professing on the same level various substrative primitive and
Christian beliefs which are closely interlaced. At the same time, the cult
practise of the inhabitants of each individual region displays its own special
features, which bear witness to the lack of any unified institution to
standardize cult practice and dogma, in contrast to the institutions of
Christianity or Islam
Many Christian elements, mainly Armenian, are obvious in religious beliefs of
the Zaza. These elements either came to be amalgamated with the usual extreme
Shi'a ideas, or else were directly adopted from the Armenian population of
Dersim
Due to limitations of space we are unable to mention all the etnographic
materials on the Zaza, such as worship of trees, mountains, springs, snakes,
etc, assembled by G. Halajyan. For the same reason we shall avoid either
making extensive etnographical comparisons (parallels) or offering
comprehensive interpretations of the origin of certain customs or beliefs. As
to the Sufi (Folk Sufi) influence on Zaza religious beliefs, it is apparently
confined only to some elements not incorporated into any other system, and
seems to be too greatly blended with indigenous beliefs to allow confident
identification
2.2. The prerogatives of cult among the Zaza are traditionally assigned
to representatives of certain clans. The keepers of the Zaza religious doctrine
are four clans -Avajan, Bamasur (Bamasuran), Kures (Kuresan),
and Derves Jamalan. There are others clans too, namely Devres
Gulabian and Sare Saltik (Turk. Sari Saltuk), but they play but a
minor role in cultic affaires. Religious offices are hereditary. As to the
supreme order -Piri Piran (the Elder of Elders)- it may be both
hereditary and conferred by ordination. The hierarchy of priesthood is as
follows: Rahbar, Mursid, Dede, Seyid, pir,
and Piri Piran28. Terms such as mulla, Seyx, and Ulem, are never
used in Zaza cultic practice.
2.3. The order of Piri Piran is inherited by the heir apparent in the
elder male line of the Kuresan clan at maturity (i.c., not younger than 18),
provided the candidate is without corporal defects. Otherwise, another, younger
heir may be raised to the office. When there is no heir apparent, the order of
Piri piran is handed down to a near relative in the male line. The ceremony of
ordination takes place as follows: The Council of Elders (a mixed secular and
clerical body) summons the Supreme Council Jama'at, whose seven superior
clergymen consign the authoritiy of chief of the clan to the heir. Before the
ordination, the hair and beard to the candidate for Piri piran must be shaved,
except for his moustache -the sign of masculinity. Then, the afore-mentioned
clergymen with saz in hands to the left and right of the burning hearth and ask
the kneeling candidate to approach the hearth. At the same time, spiritual songs
which bring tears to the attendants eyes are being sung. Then, the eldest of
the order come, to the candidate and lays his right hand on his head. The other
six clergymen do the same. During this ceremony prayers in Zaza are offered.
The ceremony of ordination is concluded with the tying of a red, triangular
shawl sar -on the newly-ordinated Piri Piran's neck. Then the Piri Piran sits
to the right of the hearth on a rug-covered cushion and al the attending
clergymen kiss the new Lord's shoulder by way of congratulation. Shots are
fired outside to inform laymen of the election of a new Piri Piran. In honour
of this event a public feast with songs are dances is organized, the food
contributed by laymen according to their means. Everyone strives to offer as much
as he can for this sacred meal.
2.4. The Piri piran is the religious and secular head of the tribe
(Asirat). When he marries, his wife (ana) enjoys almost equal rights in the
family together with her husband. If the heir has not come of age when the Piri
piran dies, the Ana assumes those powers he had exercised in secular affairs,
but not others; she has no authority in the religious life of the asirat .
Nevertheless she always wins the respect of all tribesmen
2.5. According to G. Halajyan, rahbars -the representatives of
the lovest clergy- do not differ in social respect from the common mass of
laymen (talibs). They have a household, livestock, etc. Their duties are to
visit the congregation, to perform daily religious rites, and to admonish
laymen in the religious and ethical norms of the community. Usually, they are
not paid for these functions. It is noteworthy that rahbars have the right to
punish guilt, and are not allowed to show clemency. The prerogative to forgive
sins attaches only to the Piri Piran upon the application of the Jama'at.
The works of domestic economy of rahbars are performed by their family members
or by volunteers from the talibs. Once or twice in a year the
Zaza have to visit the chief of the clan and to present gifts to him according
to their prosperity. It may be a sheep or a goat , wool, a bit of linen, a
carpet, etc. These offerings are connected with the belief that they can
prevent calamity, ward off cattle-plague etc, and guarantee a rich harvest.
2.6. Some authers (G.Halajyan, V. Gordlevskij) mention the
existence of communion and baptism among the Zaza. That is only approximately
true, because even if there are some possible typological parallels or even
genetic relations to Christian cult practice, still these rights among the Zaza
have differet functional content. On communion among the Zaza we have only
descriptive evidence from G. Halajyan. He considered this communion rite a
means for purification from sins. It is possible that the rite goes to the
early Christian agape, or to the "Carmat's meals". It has the same
meaning as amongst all the other extreme Shi'a sects, e.g., the "love
mean" among the Karakoyunlu in the region of Maku. Besides, amongst the
Zaza of Dersim, communion was administered formally like that of the Christian
one. The Host,which is called by the Sufi term lovmeye haqi ("God's
Portion"), is made of fluor, clarified butter, without salt and
leaven, and is baked in the hearth of the Piri Piran' s house. The thickness of
the Host is about 5 cm. The Host is assigned first of all for the ceremony of
initiation of the musahib ("God-brotherhood") and for the
Eucharist of the dying. The Host used for the musahib-ceremony is named
gulbang, a term designating also "choral songs" amongst the dervishes
of Asia Minor. It is possible that among the Zaza the term gulbang corresponds
to Arm. Awetis (Gk), ef. NP. At this ceremony the musahibs ("God-brothers")
swear eternal fidelity to each other. Then a rahbar, sayid or pir crumbles and
dispenses the Host among the attending musahibs, who kiss the hem of the
cleric, and eat the Host while seated.
2.7. The rite of Baptism is not universal among the Zaza, but is
practiced mainly by those who seem to be of Armenian origin and to retain
rudiments of their ancestral Christian customs. As G. Halajyan states, the rite
of Baptism is practiced only by women, who secretly administer it to new-born
children of either sex from eight to forty days after birth, as follows: The
mother of the new-born child and the midwife collect seven sorts of field
flowers and take water from seven springs. This water they pour into a jar and
put in it the flowers and keep it in a private place. Then the oldest woman in
the family, with theassistance of her daughter-in-law and of the midwife, prepares
boiled water and adds seven drops from from the infusion of water kept standing
with flowers. Holding the child by his hands and feet they dip him thrice into
the water. Then with a feather they daub the sign of the Cross with the
flower-water on the forehead, feet, breast and lips of the child, and swaddle
and bathe him only after three days. The used water, as amongst the Armenians,
is poured over the extinguished ashes of the oven or into a pit where the foot
of man never steps. The tradition of Baptism is preserved by the feminine line,
and if the daughter from such a family marries a genuine Zaza, she carries on
the tradition in her husband's family, but secretly, with the help of women
from her own parent's house. If proselytes take a bride from an orthodox Zaza
family, her children also secretly undergo the Baptism by her mother-in-law or
by her husband's sisters. Although aware of their Armenian origin and sometimes
preserving former customs, proselyte Armenians still speak sometimes preserving
former customs, proselyte Armenians still speak only Zaza and perform all Zaza
religious rites.
2.8. One of the features which distinguish the Zaza from other extreme
Shi'a sects is the existence of the institution of musahib (perhaps
"God-brotherhood") among them. A similar instition called bire
axirate and xuska axirate ("Brotherhood and Sisterhood of the Next
World"), apparently connected with Sufism, exists also among the
Yazidis.
In contrast to the Yazidis, however, the institution of the musahib amongst the
Zaza exists only for the male sex. The musahib is chosen by a teenager without
his parents' interference. After the decision is made, the two teenagers
declare it to the family cleric -rahbar- who blesses the spiritual union. In
honour of this event a celebration is arranged. Henceforth the relations of the
two musahibs will be closer and more durable than blood-bonds. The musahib
ceremony must be performed before marriage.
The relationship musahib entails the following reciprocal obligations: 1)
to safeguard the safety and honour of the co-musahib' s family; 2) in
case of death, to look after the co-musahib' s wife and children like his own; 3)
and in an emergency the musahibs must spare no efforts, risking their very
lives, to rescue each other. Sexual and matrimonial intercourse with the dead
musahib' s wife is strictly forbidden, but levirate marriage is widespread
among the Zaza, as well as among the Kurds.
2.9. The institution of kirva ("godfather") plays a
very great role in the spiritual life of the Zaza. It is the formal conclusion
of a relationship between the Zaza and the Armenians, or between the Kurds and
the Armenians, and has been described in detail.
2.10. Because of limited space it is not possible to describe here in
detail the primitive beliefs and customs of the Zaza, which are abundantly
treated in the materials of G. Halajyan. Nevertheless, at the end of this
article, it is suitable to describe the cult of the snake in the sanctuary of
the village Kistim. Religious mysteries in this sanctuary are performed on the
Zaza feast of Xizirilyas , which coincides with the Armenian Feast of Surb
Sargis (St. Sergius) and is celebrated after a three-day fast. On this day many
Zaza pilgrims gather in the village to see the Holy Staff (Evliya Kistimi ,
"te Saint of Kistim" or Cuve haqi , "the Staff of
Truth", i.e., "God"). The sanctuary is a great stone
building in which the representatives of priesthood sit around the Holy Hearth
and begin the sima' (lit., "hearing") to the accompancment of
musical instruments. To the right of the hearth on the wood-pillar (erkvan )
hangs a green clothbag, in which is a staff. The top of this staff is carved in
the form of a snake's head; this is the Cuve haqi . N. Dersimi and G. Halajyan
report that because of the great number of people crowded here, the
heart-rending spiritual songs, and the mourning and lamentation, congregants
enter into trance and see the staff become a snake, leave the bag, and after
some miraculous acts, return into the bag and change back into the staff.
Halajyan further reports that the rite of the musahib is timed to coincide with
this celebration.
A separate work might be written on each problem here discussed, but it is
hoped that these brief notes might at least serve to encourage the further
investigation of this interesting and quaint people, the Zaza.
A Panorama of Indo-European Languages
Albert Von le
Coq
Albert Von le Coq was in
Zincirli in 1901 when the Committee of the Orient were excavating near
Maraş (the excavations of Karkamış). Le Coq took part willingly
in the excavations. In his lecture in the Oriental Languages that was delivered
in Arabic and Persian, as Le Coq could not speak neither Turkish nor Kurdish at
that time. However, within the period of four months in Zincirli, Le Coq could
learn Turkish and he collected some Kurdish texts. After four months he went to
Iskenderun, Beirut and Damascus accompanied by a Kurdish teacher named Yusuf
Efendi.
In Damascus, Le Coq was
acquainted with Omar ibn Ali who was called "Xalo", the Catholic
Priest of Beirut Johann Babtist Muradyan and the attache Selim R. Khair. In a
meeting with Omar ibn Ali, Le Coq could enrich his collection and information
about the Zaza. And with the assistance of the other persons who was bilingual,
speaking Turkish and another Europen language, Le Coq could translate the
writings he collected from Kurdish into German.
In our possession there are
two volumes entitled "Kurdisch Texte" that contain 19 Kurdish, 3
Zaza,that is 21 short stories and epics. The volumes contain even four jokes
that were translated from Turkish into Zaza by Omar ibn Ali. One of the Zaza
stories (Ibrahim Paşa) was related by Omar ibn Ali in Zaza languages. The
other stories (Dunya Guzeli, Yusub Eziz) were translated by the same person
from Kurdish into Zaza. Also, the volumes contain comparisions between Zaza,
Baba Kurdi and Lolo Kurdi, and a list for the spelling of numbers. Le Coq made
comparisions between German, Zaza, Baba Kurdi and Lolo Kurdi, something like a
mini dictionary. There is also a comparision between phrases in the four
languages.
The person who assisted Le
Coq in his work on Zaza, was Omar ibn Ali. Omar ibn Ali introduced himself in
Kurdish in the wolumes (p.63) that he originally came from the town of
Cermik. He went to Damascus to earn his living. He confessed that he was 78
years old when he helped with the volumes, and lived in Salihiye, a block in
Damascus.
From
"A Panorama of Indo-European Languages"
(W. B. Lockwood, A Panorama of Indo-European Languages,
London, Hutchinson University Library, 1972, s. 243-244)
W.B.Lockwood
The area
of the north-western dialects of Iranian was largely overrun by Turkish,
subsequently known as Azeri or Azerbaijani, introduced in the eleventh century.
By the sixteenth century, this language had ousted the indigenous Iranian
except from the peripheral area along the Caspian coast. Two of these
north-western dialects, however, survive outside the area; they are Gorani and
Zaza. The Gorans moved south, but their language, now much declined, survives
only in the neighbourhood of Kermanshah. As the language of an obscure sect,
Gorani became the vehicle of a considerable literature, but is no more than a
patois today. The Zaza people, living in some small communities among the Kurds
of Eastern Turkey, are descended from immigrants from Dailam on the southern
shore of the Caspian and have in part retained the language of their ancestors,
which they themselves call Dimli. It is an almost unwritten language.
Internationale
Presse-Korrespondenz
1925, no.31, p.458)
A joint work by Oskar Mann
and Karl Hadank has been published entitled "Mundarten der Zaza". The
following is its fourth part "Kurdisch-Persische Forschungen". In
this work Oskar Mann concentrates on the folklore in the villages of Siverek,
Bucak, Kor, Çapakçur and Kiµi. Based on this, Karl Hadank produces a kind of
lingustic appendage to the abovementioned book.
Oskar Mann opens his book
by throwing light on Zaza in July 1906. The manuscripts that he collected were
written originally in Zaza, to be translated latter into German by some persons
in the area who could Persian and Turkish. These writings drawed the attention
and the interest of Karl Hadank, and that is why he preserved them. Karl Hadank
left these writings aside for a while because the under taking seemed to him
difficult and demanding at the time. After many years, he took up the same
subject. In order to establish the grammar of the Zaza, he compares it with
Gurani, Gilaki, Mazenderani, Asterabadi, Semnani, Nayini, Kurdish, Ossetish,
Armenish, Turkish to discover the unique aspects of the Zaza. And this has been
the focus of his work. Eventually, he produces a long book entitled
"Mundarten der Zaza" with 398 pages.
The remarkable research of
Karl Hadank penetrates even in the Academic Seiences in Prusya in October 1931.
However, Karl Hadank elucitades in the intreduction of his book that to arrive
at a thorough understandins and appreciation of his book, the manuscripts of
the book ought to be taken into consideration.
By Faruk Iremet
Why this work? One might ask. It’s all because our
language Zaza is said to be a dialect.
Through my work I want to show the big difference between our language Zaza and
other languages.
The little dictionary after the article may be helpful for various authorities
and others, so that the Zaza language not will be mixed up with other
languages.
I hope my little work will be helpful, and it's my duty as a Zaza to make the
facts known.
The difference between
Zaza, Kurdish and Turkish
To find similarities
between two languages, you have to check which languages they come from and
developed from. You do that by studying old words and expressions. It's for
that reason linguistic researchers always investigate the original words, such
as the names of flowers, animals, natural phenomena and the grammar structure.
In that way the research-workers define and reinforce their theories about a
language's origin.
A language's development
starts with images. Mankind developed the written language through images. The
pictures became the foundation of the written language. At the same time
language has become the key for communication among people.
Mankind's social life
begins with the clan. People who landed up in remote regions, away from the
clan, took with them their language's character. Banishments, coercion
transfers, exile or pure love of adventure are some of the factors that have
made people meet other cultures. When mankind entered unknown provinces, it
also caused the spread of the language.
Thomas Young, linguistic researcher, submitted
in 1813 his theory in the following way: "Sanskrit, Greek, Latin,
Celtic, Germanic, and Persian (Iranian) are from the same group of
languages". He has given this group the name "The
Indo-European language". According to Young, those who speak
Indo-European languages are "Aryan"
Examples:
|
English |
Zaza |
Swedish |
Turkish |
The Zaza language has
borrowed words and has been affected by ethnic groups who have settled down
between the Euphrates and the Tigris (Mesopotamia) in front of and behind the
Zaza people. These following languages, for example, have had influence on the
Zaza: Persian, Armenian, Hurish, Hitish, Sumerian, Greek and Turkish. In
contemporary Zaza, borrowed words exist and are used. That doesn't mean that Zaza
is a dialect of these languages. The presence of borrowed words in a language
doesn't prove that it is a dialect. The land of the Zaza people has been at the
centre of wars and capitulations, the Silk Road and a place for rest for
nomadic people. This is the reason why the Zaza has been enriched with words
from other languages. Neither the Zaza people's cultural life nor their
language has been substantially affected, and the changes have not been lasting
ones.
In Europe some
"intellectual" Zaza people attempt to form theories about the Zaza
language. They want to see the Zaza as a dialect of some other languages. This
shows that they haven’t fully understood the Zaza language and the culture . If
they really want to see Zaza as a dialect, and if they do their research
properly, they cannot overlook the fact that Zaza is close to the Persian
language (because it belongs to the Indo-Iranian language-group). So, is it not
more logical to say that Zaza is a Persian dialect ? There remains just one
more thing; they would have to prove this with historical research. Researchers
in the Indo-European language have, with their work, presented and proved that
Zaza is one of the older languages spoken in the Middle East. If one reads the
works of Oscar Mann, Karl Hadank, CI.J.Rich, A.V.Le Coq and Peter Lerch about
languages, one can see that according to these linguistic researchers Zaza is a
separate language.
In page 4780 in the book
"Encyclopaedia of languages and linguistics" one finds the following "The
languages spoken in Turkey are Turkish, Kurdish (Kurmanchi), ZAZA, Cherkess,
Ayhbas, Laz, Georgian, Arabic, Armenian e.t.c". Further down on the
same page one can read "Turkish is spoken throughout the country.
Kurdish, with its dialects, and Zaza are spoken mainly in eastern and
south-eastern Anatolia". In the same book one can read this sentence: "the
illiterate speakers (principally women and children) of Kurdish, Zaza etc in
rural regions, are generally monolingual". In other words, they speak
Zaza or Kurdish and they don't understand each other. If one opens at
"Zaza" in this ten-volumed encyclopaedia, one sees Zaza in the list
of world languages , in other words, not among the dialects. Under
"Zaza" it says "see Dimli" and there it says briefly that
it is an Iranian, Indo-Arian or Indo-European language. Accordingly the Zaza is
not a Kurdish, Turkish, Assyrian, Armenian, Persian or Arabic dialect. When
they speak about Zaza they speak about a language, not a dialect.
One should not think that we
are just copying the ideas of European linguistic researchers and relying on
their works to convince the public that our language is not a dialect. On the
contrary we turn to our people. If we ask about our "dialect" Zaza
the answer will indeed be interesting. If we ask such a question to a Zaza (
who doesn’t speak either Turkish nor Kurdish):
-Tı bı kamcin lehçeya qısey
kenê/kena? (Which dialect do you speak?). The first reaction from the Zaza
will most likely be a smile, and he/she will ask this question back:
-Lehçe çıçi yo? (What’s a dialect?). But if we
change the question and put it this way:
-Tı bı kamcin
zıwana qısey kenê/kena? (Which language do you speak?). The answer will be:
-Ez bı zıwanê
Zazaki qısey kena. (I speak Zaza). This question I myself have asked and their laughter
over the word dialect I still can't forget. Can they who have Zaza as a mother
tongue without manipulation put such a question to their parents?
Now we shall see which
answer our "intellectual" university graduate will give.
Language: What the people think and feel can
bring a mutual communication key. If one uses the theory of Stalin one explains
language in this way: "Jointly language is the foundation of a
nation". In other words, a people who are a nation also have a joint
language.
Dialect: Language in local design. A dialect
is a part of a language and doesn’t differ so much from its mother tongue. What
differs is the pronunciation and some local expressions. (E.g. Sausage/Körv, Good/ Gött).
The Swedish and the
Norwegian languages are so close to each other that it would be better to say
they are one language with different dialects. But, when the Swedes talk about
the Norwegian language, they don’t say that Norwegian is a dialect of Swedish,
but a totally separate language.
Another example is the
Finnish language. Finns never say that Estonian, Lettish and Lithuanian are
dialects of Finnish. (These languages are very close to each other). This is
because these countries have their own states. If I should give a simple
explanation of how I perceive the modern definition of a language to be, I
would say as follows:
Language: The communication key between a
people who have a state, a flag and an army is called language.
Dialect: A people that don’t have a state,
a flag (maybe exists but is not accepted) or an army is called a dialect.
I can’t avoid joking here.
I know it is a very interesting explanation, but it seems to fit in to today’s
society.
In order to explain my
attitude I’m forced to go back in time. Maybe in such a way that you, at first,
might not understand what all this history has to do with this. I have to rely
on your patience, dear reader. The pieces of the puzzle will fall into place.
Before the renaissance in Europe, before the reforms in the 16th century, Copernicus
(1473-1543) wrote his theories about the solar system. When he wrote down his
theory and publicised it, he provoked the church and was sentenced to death.
Copernicus just said this: "The world doesn’t stand still on its
location, on the contrary it twists in its course and in the suns course. The
orbit around the sun takes a year." Copernicus, like Galileo, couldn't
rescue himself out of the clutches of the church, the priests and the
fundamentalists. After Copernicus, Galileo Galilee (1564-1642)
with his research, helped and given his time renewal?? (I don’t understand what
this sentence is supposed to mean). The standpoint of his research was "Dynamics".
In one way Copernicus and Galileo were able to rescue themselves from the
courts of inquisition. Their destiny was not that of Giordano Brunos. After
seven years in prison, G.B. was burned alive. Up until the year 1835 it was
forbidden to print or publish books that claimed that the earth turns around
the sun. Books that nonetheless succeeded to reach the readers were burned. For
200 years the church forbade such ideas.
"When mankind
thinks then it is free or can become free" says Albert Bayet. What a beautiful
explanation of the whole. When mankind can' t freely think and develop its
opinions, and when new theories cannot be developed from free thoughts, then
mankind is not free. Therefore free thoughts and theories must be expressed, be
brought up for discussion without obstacles. Then one can develop the thoughts
even more and maybe see what what is correct or wrong. The other important
question is whether opinions can be correct or wrong? No, correct or wrong do
not exist. Here I think as J.P. Satre and Shakespeare. "Correct
or wrong do not exist. What is wrong for me can be correct for somebody else
and what is correct for me can be wrong for somebody else." If we
accept this theory, we can understand each other and then we can sit down and
proceed with our discussion. When we speak badly of each other, calling each
other traitors, speak about each other without knowledge, we just show a
person’s empty innate quality. Reading books or getting an employment in
government service doesn’t mean that one is automatically an intellectual
person. In order to become a renewer and an intellectual one has to be able to
listen without prejudice and really want to try to understand other people’s
opinions. Only in being together and in a constant discussion with other people
can one’s thoughts be developed. Furthermore it demands a big portion of
courage. Courage to express one’s opinions and courage to take in others
opinions. It also demands courage to stand up for the opinions one really
believes in. Just saying ‘yes’ all the time doesn’t help anybody , because then
nothing can develop further. intellectualism indeed put its demands on the
intellectuals.
We just try to express
opinions that many not have dared to express for years, other than in close
friends company. From the night's treacherous dark deep, from the tyrants
blood-sucking claws, from the mist we will pull out our free thoughts and tell
where our roots come from. This can just be done with the courage to express
our opinions and the courage to listen.
During the 13th century Aristotle’s
ideas and thoughts were forbidden. Those who read the philosopher’s
publications got the death sentence like a gift. What happened during this long
period? What changes did we experience? Could the ideas of Aristotle, Galileo,
Copernicus, Copernic, Nicolas d'Autrecourt, Civan Aucassin, Michel Servet and
Giordano Brunos be destroyed? (Not forgetting the fact that the free thoughts
of Michel Servet and Giordano Brunos and their longing for free thoughts led to
their burning). No! Could oppression and torture change mankind's free
thoughts? Were not these philosophers called the children of Satan and morons?
Now it’s time to look at the following question a little closer. -Yes, what
happened during these years? Who judges history today? The young knight La
Barne was killed by order of the church. What had he done? His crime was that
he had read "The dictionary of philosophy", which the church had
banned. Do you know what happened to the young knight? First his tongue was cut
out and then his head was separated from his body. Thereafter his dead body was
tossed on the fire. The young man who was treated so cruelly, was guilty of
reading a banned book. We are not equally bestial today, or?
In this way some of the
European intellectuals express themselves over the reactionary opinions and
fanatic political ideas:
Montesquieu; "A reactionary opinion is
a backward opinion."
Voltaire; "Reactionary opinions have
coloured the world with blood."
Diderot; "A reactionary opinion is
a opinion that make me sick."
Helvetius; "A reactionary opinion
means, like a knife, worries for mankind."
I think that those who put
obstacles in the way of the development of the Zaza language and culture are
equally reactionary. I think that the statements of these European philosophers
are still true today.
Voltaire also says; "If
mankind not can say its opinions freely in a society, then the people can not
talk about freedom." Dear reader, now you maywonder; -Why do you write
about these things we already know about? If you are wondering just this, I
answer you; -That which was experienced in the 13th and the 19th century is
actually not just of historic interest. It still continues today in our
developed society. In todays society, it is however not only the spokesmen of
God who ban opinions, but above all the great god of the ageCapitalism. It is
said that we learn from history, but occasionally one wonders.
I will now try to
abbreviate my discussion. Despite "mud-throwing philosophy", new
modern torture methods and oppression methods during history, it has not been
possible to kill free thought. Our work for the language and culture of the
Zaza people has already caused disturbances in many reactionary and
nationalistic circles. Let me answer those who do not want to listen to what I
want to say. I want to say to those who, rather than objectively discuss, begin
a "pie-throwing contest"; we don’t want to throw back. We want to
cooperate and expose the whole truth. I also want to say these words to those
who want to blacken our name by saying that we are spies, that we receive
support from the Turkish security police (MIT) and that we work together with
them - it's not true. Instead of developing lies about people who work with the
Zaza-question, it’s better to go to mass media with the documents you have (such
a presentation of documents will give pleasure also to us Zazas). Once more I
want to put my question: - The people who come with their humiliating
spy-theories about us Zazas - How can they get such secret documents from MIT?
First they have to show how they have been able to find such documents about us
Zazas. Here I don’t want to discuss "who" can obtain such documents.
The matter must be left open how one can produce required information from the
security police, that’s up to the reader’s own fantasy.
Those who write and are
politically active have to be very careful with their statements. Otherwise
they will cause needless doubts. Through handing over false information the
confidence in that person will disappear. The most important thing is that they
not will think that the people are morons that not can think for themselves.
Our people haven’t forgotten these people’s hostile behaviour in old times.
We are not incapable of
developing new thoughts, politics and a new history for us. On the contrary, with
our work we elaborate a new methodology with a new systematic work. With this
work we will maintain our people’s identity. With our democratic perspective we
will be defenders to world fraternisation. We will not tire of defending and
calling out our brotherhood-slogan. We knew what awaited us when we came
through with our Zaza people’s identity-wish, and we knew well which obstacles
we would come up against regarding our language theory. We knew that what we
wrote and expressed would bother and disturb many nationalists (they who think
they are humanists and socialists). The national identity of minority people
and languages and dialect theories in the Middle East have a dirty state
tradition that only serves to exterminate minorities. The Turks, Iranians and
Arabs have, for centuries, been saying: -We are not different people. We are a
single people. We haven’t got different languages. Kurdish is our dialect.
(What irony of fate that the Kurds now say the same thing to the Zaza).
Thanks to our work for our
people and for our language we will not become a toy for the Middle East
states, nor play in their political games. The game is over. Thanks to us, a
new era will begin for the Zaza. That is how it is, my ladies and gentlemen, we
have also awoken to the dream of being a people. We have also ascertained that
those who write about the Zaza have learned the game from their colonialist
rulers, and they have had a good teacher. This they prove through writing and
disceiving the mass media with false theories and this they do with great
pride. BRAVO...
"The one who knows
why one lives, also knows how to live" says Nietzsche. Of todays 6000
different languages there are at most 600 that can be considered to have such
vitality that their futures are secured, predicts Michael Kraus,
linguist at the University in Fairbanks, Alaska. In the periodical New
Scientist (96.01.06) he put out his research about these 600 languages and
proves this scientifically. Of these languages, many are spoken by such a
limited group of people that they are under threat of extermination. The
world’s smallest language, Aoreish, is spoken in the Island State Vanuatu in
the Pacific Ocean.
Some languages disappear, but
many renew themselves. The renewal is influenced by the achievements in the
field of technology and science. The development of technology and science
doesn’t just change mankind’s everyday life. Simultaneously it affects and
changes mankind’s language; new terminology is created. The new terminology
usually becomes international. The European countries wanted for centuries to
create a common language. Thanks to the development of technology and science,
this ideology has almost succeeded. In todays research, scientists from several
countries cooperate and then it´s natural to find common terms. This I
personally think is a very wise concentration (but I don´t mean that a language
should not defend its origin). E.g. in Zaza we can say "bewnayox" for
TV, or "gosdayox" for radio, but these words are so artificial that
they will not live long in spoken and written language. Because they can be
difficult to pronounce and they can change the words meaning. This is not good
for a language. The door of the language has to be kept open for foreign words.
There are thousands of examples of foreign words that work in the language in
its original shape and only have to change to the language’s grammatical shape.
Some words can fit to another language without customs duty. This doesn´t mean
that the language is poor, on the contrary this language is rich. For example,
in the Swedish language Turkish words still are preserved in their original
form: kalabalik, kiosk and dolma. Todays English does not just have hundreds of
foreign words, it has thousands from different languages. These words come from
Latin, Greek, Gaelic, French, Spanish etc, and have been adopted by the English
language. It´s not only a linguistic alteration, but also a change that is
reflected in food customs and culture. Mankind is a animal of the flock, and in
a modern society communication has enabled us to associate more easily, and
then the different languages and cultures begin to influence eath other. Each
influence renews the culture and the language. The renewal of the language is
like a blood transfusion. This is like blood running through the language's
veins; the people are the veins and the language is the blood. The blood in the
veins and the language among the people receive vitality. Therefore each human
being has to think, write and speak in their own language. People who are
educated and conscious of their heritage and culture will never be ashamed of
their language.. Those who are ashamed of their language, transfer their shame
to their own children and the children grow up with their shame. Children who
grow up with this way of thinking in society, lose their roots from the past
and thereby a big part of their identity. Obviously this is not the children's
fault, the fault is the parents´. The families who have Zaza as a mother tongue
and teach their children another language preventtheir children from learning
to speak, write or read their mother tongue, and these children lose their
connection with their historical roots. In this way a language is erased. When
the parents don´t use the language, the children don´t want to use it either,
and nor can they learn it. For me that means denying ones roots and language.
In other words, it´s disrespectful.
In Europe all languages and
dialects (e.g. Sorani and Kurmanji in Sweden) have the right to be taught in
school. The families who want their children to learn their mother tongue,
receive immigrant language teaching. Even if one of the parents is from Europe,
the children have the right to immigrant language teaching, to keep both parts
of their identity alive. The parents however often choose the language that is
spoken in the country where they live. The reason for this is that there are no
Zaza teachers or education in the schools. Here I want to point out another
thing: some Zazas that I know who are married to people with other
nationalities and have another language as mother tongue, also have other
problems. For example one of the Zazas I know is married to a Turkish woman,
the second is married to a Zaza woman, and the third is married to a Kurdish
woman. In the family where the father is Zaza and the mother is Turkish, the
child speaks the respective language with the respective parent. With the Zaza
who is married to a Zaza woman, they speak just Zaza. For the Zaza who is
married to a Kurdish woman, the matter is a little different. There are
conflicts. In that family, only Kurdish is spoken, and the immigrant language
teaching is in Kurdish. I can give more examples of such conflicts. E.g. where both
parents speak Zaza, but for political reasons choose to send their children to
Turkish or Kurdish schools. Where this is the case, it means that one loses
contact with one´s mother tongue. The children learn one language entirely, or
mix it with all these languages. But what happens to these children? Which
identity do these children have? To which nationality do they belong? Obviously
it´s not the children who should be answering all these questions. But one
shall not forget that in the children it creates a psychological identity
crisis. When the children are among other nationalities, they feel themselves
that they don´t have a nationality. This is where their "-Who am
I?"conflict begins. This conflict makes the children aggressive, violent
and hard to get close to. The children, our flowers of the future, the hope of
the future and our future generation in this way become totally destroyed. At
the root of the children´s bad future is unfortunately ignorant parents.
When I began to write, I
took Nietzsche´s words: "The one who knows why one lives, also knows
how to live". Maybe you wonder why I wrote this. I wrote down these
words to point out an important thing. What will be left after us when we die
areour deeds. With deeds, I mean our children and our written documents in our
language. Therefore we always have to defend our language to the utmost, and in
this way prevent the Zaza language from dying. In our day-to-day speech we use
at most 300-500 words and I think that it will not be hard to teach our
children these everyday words. Give the children their Zaza roots. Give them
their national identity and pride. Ally yourselves with the Zaza language and
its dialects. Teach your children to play with Zaza children and create
contacts betweeen children. From to today this is the investment you shall make
for your children. It’s an investment for the future, and one of the wisest you
can make. The words I write can be understand as nationalistic. I don´t myself
see it as nationalistic to protect one´s language. Then the world´s countries'
language institutions would be nationalistic. Here I would like to quote the
philosopher and thinker Bertrand Russell. This quotation is Bertrand
Russell´s answer to Woodrow Wyatt´s question.
Wyatt - "Do you think that
nationalism is good or bad?"
Russell - "...You have to separate
the nationalism in cultural- and political in certain respects. In the cultural
way it´s insipidly that the world is so one-coloured...." and then he
continues; "- Within literature, art, languages and all culture you can
accept nationalism. But if you look on the thing from the political way
nationalism is obviously not good. You can´t show one sole thing that can prove
that nationalism is good".
One will not find
nationalism in our obvious nationalistic identity wishes and the right to use
our language. The nationalism can be found in the theories that want to
extinguish us, our language and our culture. To deny us Zaza our rights, that's
nationalism.
Now we will compare our "dialect" (so that
the person who calls our language a dialect can check properly) and other
"DIALECTS". We will now look together at the similarities and
dissimilarities.
|
|
English |
Zazaish |
Kurdish |
Turkish |
Family
|
1 |
father |
Pi |
Bav |
Baba |
Animal
|
1 |
rabbit,
hare |
Arwêş |
Keroşk |
Tavşan |
Seasons
|
1 |
autumn, fall |
Payız |
Payîz |
Sonbahar |
Body
|
1 |
sweat |
Arıq |
Xuydan |
Ter |
Time
|
1 |
dawn |
Sodır |
Berbang |
Şafak |
Weather
|
1 |
sun |
Tiji |
Ro, tav |
Güneş |
Nature
|
1 |
mountin |
Ko |
Çîya |
Dağ |
Grammatic difference between
zazaish, kurdish and turkish.
Sentence structure
|
English |
Zazaish |
|
Turkish |
Kurdish |
PS: If you want to be respected by other people and
get your national identity known among the world's countries, first of all you
have to maintain your national identity.