ABSTRACT
“Eternal Histories, Elusive Homelands” explores the intertwined historical pathways of the Armenian, Turkish and Kurdish national movements and highlights aspects of cooperation and conflict. It seeks to reconstruct the historical evolution of the three movements from the shared goal of imperial reform to the competing quest for a national homeland. The quest for “Western Armenia” takes the reader from early constitutional writings of Perso-Armenian merchants in distant India and loosely organized Armenian solidarity organizations to internationally operating revolutionary parties such as the Social Democrat Hnchakian party (1887) and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (1890). The quest for “Eastern Turkey” unfolds as a history from Ottoman reformism to pan-Turkist and, later, territorially confined nationalism – the latter reflected in the Union for the Defense of Law in Anatolia and Rumelia (1919). Finally, the quest for “Northern Kurdistan” is a story of early clergy-led uprisings against central authority and short-lived Kurdish independence under Xoybûn (1927–1930); secularization and politicization of the movement under the impact of affirmative policies for Kurdish culture in Soviet Armenia (Radio Yerevan, Rja Ţəzə) and fully-fledged guerilla warfare with the emergence of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK). Linking the three historical trajectories together, this chapter argues that the removal of Armenian populations during World War I created a highly ambivalent situation on the ground: while it brutally eradicated the demographic basis for an “Armenian homeland” in the Eastern Provinces, the unintended consequence was a concentration of the remaining Kurdish population and resulting demands for the liberation of the region now as a “Kurdish homeland”.
