QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – The Treaty of Lausanne enacted the separation of the Kurdish people between four states – Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria – whose democratic record over the past century is largely negative, Hayrettin Oztekin of the Kurdistan Cultural Centre in Lausanne (CCKL) told Switzerland’s ATS news agency on Saturday during a protest by thousands of Kurds who rallied to mark the 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne which defined the borders of modern Turkey but shattered aspirations for a Kurdish state.
“We want to take advantage of this centenary to show the whole world that the Kurdish question remains unsolved, and that the consequences of the Treaty of Lausanne are still tragically felt,” Oztekin said.
With the end of the World War I, it was necessary to rearrange the system in Europe and the Middle East – the two most prominent arenas for the World War I. The victorious states opted to hold conferences, the most important of which was the Treaty of Lausanne which led to the emergency of the new Turkey at the expense of the Kurds and the peoples of the region. The treaty was signed on July 24, 1923 by Turkey, Britain, France, Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Japan.
On the one hand, the treaty recognized Turkish sovereignty over Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, and established the new modern borders. On the other, it abandoned the other peoples, mainly the Kurds, who were living on their own homeland. Thus, Lausanne was a new era of conflicts linked with the Kurdish cultural and national rights for a century.
Berivan Firat, a spokeswoman for the Kurdish Democratic Council of France, told AFP on Saturday: “The Kurdish people, like all the peoples of the world, claim a right to be able to live with their identity on their own lands,” adding, “This treaty opened the door to all sorts of bullying, all sorts of massacres towards the Kurdish people.”
Before Lausanne, the Allies signed the Treaty of Sèvres with Turkey in August 1920 which allowed the withdrawal of Turkish forces from Kurdish areas to allow the formation of an autonomous Kurdish state. This was explicitly mentioned in the Articles 62, 63, 64 of the treaty. However, the Turks, led by Mustafa Kemal, refused to recognize it although the Kurds and Armenians repeated appeals to British officials to uphold Sèvres’ provisions for autonomy or independent states. However, the British government no longer saw an advantage to its prior commitments.
As a result, the Allies of the World War I failed to fulfill the promises they made at Sèvres to Greeks, Armenians, and Kurds and left the latter without a homeland. The promises were founding an autonomy for the Kurdish areas in the East of the Euphrates, south of Armenia, and north of the Syrian-Turkish border.
“The Allies – Britain and France – were quick to agree upon a settlement along imperialistic lines whenever a territory provided economic opportunities or strategic necessities and always found the men and materiel to control such areas. However, when treaty terms served no national, commercial or imperial interest, even the most solemn promises suddenly became worthless. The abandonment of the Armenians, and to a lesser extent, the Kurds, is the classic example of this; the two groups did not even merit specific mention in the Treaty of Lausanne,” said Robert Bruton in his “Why the Great War Allies Failed to Enforce the Treaty of Sèvres.”
The Treaty of Lausanne came to abolish that of Sèvres and denied the articles, especially those related to the Kurds and other communities. It was tantamount to giving legitimacy to the Turkish state with its current borders to be founded on the bodies and skulls of the Armenians, Syriacs and the Kurds who have been struggling for their cultural rights since then.
For the Armenians, Kurds, Arabs and other communities who had invested so much in Wilsonian rhetoric of “self-determination” it was something very different, Ara Toranian has said of the treaty that it was “the crime of the century that came after the crime of the century, only excepting the Shoah.”
Not only the UK and France, the US also had an important role in entrenching the legacies of Lausanne. It first emerged as an observer, however, it moved to play a direct role in the guise of peace-keeper. “Essentially, the US abandonment of support for Kurdish autonomy in the 1920’s has continued to reproduce the same abandonment policy towards the Kurds. The US abandonment of the Kurds in Basur of Kurdistan (Northern Iraq) in the 1991 to the abandonment of the Kurds of Rojava to Turkish invasions and ‘security concerns’, resulted in a number of incursions by Turkey into Rojava since 2016,” said Dr. Hawzhin Azeez, co-director of The Kurdish Center for Sturdies. She added, “Their [the US] acquiesce to Turkey’s annexation of Afrin in 2018 and then later again in 2019 of a large swath of land on the border between the two countries has empowered Turkey to hope for an ongoing and permanent occupation of these territories.”
The Treaty of Lausanne and before it, the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916, paved the way for the emergence of unified nation-states that adopted violent and oppressive policies against minorities such as the Kurds. They took repressive measures that curbed Kurdish identity, culture, and linguistic rights. “One of the most unjust impact of the Lausanne Treaty was the revoking of hundreds of thousands of citizenship and national identity of Kurds in Syria, resulting in a state of inhumane existence devoid of basic rights such as access to education, healthcare, employment, marriage, property and more,” Azeez added.
Unfortunately, that human rights, freedoms, democracies, or other similar bright and shiny slogans have not been the first and most important priorities for the World War I victors. Their concern is on the economic side, how to collect their expenses, recover their material losses, and avoid economic crises resulting from the aftermath of the war. Therefore, the loss of the Kurdish nation and its distribution among other nationalities and geographies will not be a major or great problem for them.
The regimes (Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria), that the Kurds are living within, have ill-treated them over decades amid global silence that empowered those regimes more and more. Now, thanks to Lausanne and other previous treaties, the Kurds are now the largest nation in the world without a state.
“The UK and France divided the Middle East following the World War I. The Treaty of Lausanne created the current Turkey and closed the door against the idea of any independent state for the Kurds,” said Simon Dubbins, Director of International and Research of the UK’s Unite the Union during a speech in the forum about Lausanne in the city of Hasakah, northeast Syria. “The Kurds were left stateless on their own homeland. The Turkish state denied the existence of the Kurds.”