The creation of Iraq and early Kurdish revolts

Following the Treaty of Lausanne, Britain and the League of Nations in 1925 attached the Mosul Vilayet and the rest of today's Iraqi Kurdistan to the British-occupied Mesopotamian vilayets of Basra and Baghdad. Out of these holdings Iraq was created. The British installed Hashemite Emir Faysal, a prince from the Arabian peninsula, as King of the new Iraq, and Britain's mandate over Iraq was supposed to last twenty-five years. Some Kurdish leaders who had been friendly towards Britain, in the hope that they would be helped to establish a Kurdish state in the area, were gravely disappointed. The opportunity structure of foreign support for their Kurdish nationalist aims was not as favorable as they had imagined. The British had decided that creating and controlling a single Iraq, including the Kurdish areas in question, would be the best way to exploit the oil fields around Kirkuk and Mosul, as well as to protect their colonial holdings elsewhere.

Sporadic Kurdish unrest and agitation against being included within the new Iraq had begun even before the Treaty of Sèvres. Lacking sufficient troops to quell the unrest, as early as 1919 the British deployed the RAF to aerially bombard Kurdish rebels and civilian areas in rebellion, setting an enduring precedent for both the region and the world.

At first glance, ethnic nationalist movements may seem amongst the least likely of social movement phenomena amenable to a rational choice (RC) analysis. We have a tendency to view ethnic nationalism as an expression of identity and the strong emotional values attached to identity. This chapter does not attempt to dispute the idea that powerful non-material values underpin ethnic identity and that these may act as strong behavioral motivators. If, however, we accept that identity is a dynamic phenomenon and that ethnic nationalist movements often play a major role in fostering ethnic identification in the first place, then resource mobilization (RM) and rational choice analysis can provide some very useful insights. If a given population lacks a strong sense of ethnic identity, or possesses a non-politicized ethnic identity, then an ethnic nationalist movement may not be able to attract their support with ideological appeals centered around the ethnicity and non-material values of the ethnic group. Instead, the initial attempts to garner large-scale support may have to appeal to the material self-interest of the target population. Additionally, rational, material interest-based appeals, as well as strategic use of recruitment networks and other mobilizational vehicles, may serve as the crucial extra inducement to action for a population receptive to the politicized ethnic ideology of a movement but needing additional motivation.

As discussed earlier, RC theory derives from economics, and its basic premise is that rational actors will choose options that maximize their gain and minimize their risk, based on the information available to them.

Many of the sources on the Kurds consulted by this author made implicit use of a synthesis of the three theoretical approaches to understanding social movements examined in this study. What concerns us here is whether or not an explicit synthesis of these theories contributes significantly to our understanding of the subject matter and the field of social science in general.

Consider this excellent example of a theoretical synthesis by Martin van Bruinessen. He argues, in essence:

Introduction

Throughout today's world, ethnic minorities are mobilizing along ethnic nationalist lines, demanding power and recognition as a group from the states in which they live. In some cases, they are demanding a state of their own, based on their group's status as a nation of its own. These challengers to the states in which they live are often brutally suppressed, yet mobilization often continues in the face of this repression. Why, despite the high risks involved and the often remote chances of success, have such movements continued to emerge?

Contextually specific accounts of ethnic nationalist resurgence typically lack much of a theoretical component. The historical details of specific cases are thought to present an “obvious” explanation for the conflict – “group ‘X’ was oppressed, dissatisfied, or simply in a position to wrench more power from the state, which it then tried to go about doing in the following way …” forms a common approach to the subject. The fact that we can probably find a vast array of injustices, grievances, and relative deprivation affecting ethnic minorities in every society on the planet, yet few ethnic minority groups mobilize for change, is left unexplained. Approaches that are more theoretical often focus so much on one element of the phenomenon (such as socio-political structures in society, movement strategies, or identity struggles) that the resulting account leaves out more than it explains.

As was stated in the introduction to this study, the synthesis of opportunity structures, resource mobilization, and identity-framing is not intended to serve as a falsifiable paradigm or theory (if such a thing even exists in the social sciences). Rather, its intent is to focus analysis of social movements on the most important factors, serving as a theoretical framework of explanation. The Kurdish case has been examined here as a sort of heuristic application of these theories and their synthesis. In this sense, readers must judge for themselves the utility of the approach. Hopefully this study provides a sufficiently interesting employment of social movement theories to aid in such judgment.

The application of individual theoretical approaches to understanding social movements in Chapters 2-4 relied on the case of Kurdish ethnic nationalist movements in Turkey. Chapter 2 found that political opportunity structures (a version of structural approaches in general) were particularly useful for explaining the form that emergent challenger movements take. To a lesser extent, a greater understanding of the likely timing of movement emergence was also arrived at. In the case of resource mobilization and rational choice approaches, Chapter 3 arrived at a better understanding of how a movement that has emerged may build itself up. For movements such as the PKK that start with few or no resources, the RM-RC approach was particularly useful for illuminating the mobilization process.

This chapter focuses on the usefulness of a structural analysis in explaining Kurdish ethnic-nationalist opposition to the state in Turkey. In particular, I probe the explanatory power of the following five variables:

1. the relative openness or closure of the institutionalized political system;

2. the stability of that broad set of elite alignments that typically undergird a polity;

3. the presence of elite allies;

4. the state's capacity and propensity for repression; and

5. international and foreign influences supportive of the state or its opponents.

The first four of these variables are those that constitute McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald's notion of opportunity structures. The final variable (the international dimension) I judged simply too important to be left out. Understandably, there is a common tendency to include a long list of factors that constrain or encourage state opposition movements, but to make sense of such a complex phenomenon we must focus on a short list of variables and divide the subject into cognitively manageable chunks. The analysis presented here examines opportunity structures in different phases of Turkey's modern history, ending with the present.

Although there have been many outbreaks of subversive violence as well as specifically Kurdish rebellions in modern Turkey, there have been no cases of successful revolution or Kurdish revolts there. Hence it is not possible to even approach “proving” or “disproving” the importance of different approaches to the subject; rather, we can only hope to roughly evaluate the extent to which the opportunity structures concept contributes to a compelling explanation for the outbreak of ethnic nationalist rebellion in Turkey.

The early Iranian state and the Simko revolt

The events surrounding World War One did not witness a disintegration of lands held by the Iranian monarchy in the way they did for the Ottoman empire. Nonetheless, the Iranian state at the time did not effectively control much of the countryside. Parts of Iranian Kurdistan which had been tenuously ruled by Iran since 1639 (when an Ottoman–Safavid treaty ceded some of the Kurdish regions to the Ottomans), rose up in rebellion. Around the same time as the Kuchgiri, Sheikh Said, and Barzinji revolts in Turkey and Iraq, Ismail Agha Simko led the most major Kurdish revolt in Iran at the time. A feudal tribal agha with a villainous reputation for being more of a warlord than a genuine nationalist, Simko first subdued and plundered the Kurdish, Azeri, and Assyrian groups in his region around Lake Uromiyah. These groups and their leaders might otherwise have emerged as competitors to Simko. In an attempt to take advantage of what he saw as Iranian state weakness (lack of coercive capacity and divisions amongst the capital's elites), Simko then declared an independent Kurdish state in the area under his control, proclaiming his actions to be a prelude to independence for all of Kurdistan. Simko held the area against the Iranian army for four years, and even met in 1923 with fellow Kurdish sheikh Mahmoud Barzinji (described in Chapter 6 on Iraqi Kurdistan, Barzinji and Simko had some similarities in style and followings) to coordinate strategies.

Having examined Kurdish nationalist challenges to the Turkish state from an “opportunity structures” as well as a “resource mobilization” perspective, we now consider the same issue from the perspective of social psychology and culture. As was the case in the previous two chapters, an attempt will be made to limit the bulk of our explanatory focus to this last theoretical perspective. Such a perspective should prove most useful for understanding “why” Kurdish ethnic nationalist dissent arose in Turkey, as well as the values, aims, and objectives of Kurds in the country. At the same time, important revelations concerning how Kurdish nationalist resurgence occurred and the prospects of this phenomenon should be made.

Many variants of cultural and social-psychological approaches could be applied to the Turkish-Kurdish case, and the intangible, amorphous nature of identity and culture makes the task doubly difficult. For the purpose of delimiting our task as well as furthering current research trends on social movements, the approach taken here applies the perspective adopted in McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald's Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements. “Framing” is defined along the same lines originally espoused by David Snow, as “conscious strategic efforts by groups of people to fashion shared understandings of the world and of themselves that legitimate and motivate collective action.” The analysis of cultural framing is therefore broken down into the following components:

1. the cultural tool kits available to would-be insurgents;

2. the strategic framing efforts of movement groups;

3. the frame contests between the movement and other collective actors – principally the state, and countermovement groups;

4. […]