'Kurdistan and the Kurds' [‎39r] (77/122)

CHAPTER III.
THE KURDISH MOVEMENT.
§ 1 .—History of the Movement.
A movement in favour of the independence of Kurdistan seems to
have been inaugurated as early as 1908 by Sureya Bey, a member of the
family of Bedr Khan. This family had been banished from its home and
sent to Syria for heading a rebellion against the Turkish Government.
After the Revolution in 1908 in Constantinople, he went to reside in the
capital and seized the opportunity offered by the new regime to found a
paper called “ The Kurdistan,” in which he advocated the independence of
the Kurds. Later, being forced to leave Turkey as a result of differences
of opinion with the Committee of Union and Progress, he moved to Egypt,
where his paper is still issued fortnightly in Cairo. The idea, however,
seems to have found at the time little or no response in Kurdistan, but to
have been rather an exotic growth, fostered by a disappointed exile.
During the war the movement naturally sank into obscurity; the
Kurds worked under the orders of the Turkish Government, which found
them useful accomplices in the deportation and massacre of the Armenians.
In Kurdistan and Armenia both races live side by side in apparent peace,
but under the surface there smoulders unceasingly the fire of racial and
religious hatred, ready to burst into flame at a moment’s notice. There
is abundant evidence of the complicity of Kurds in these outrages ; to
mention only the vildyah of Kharput, Hajji Kaza, a Kurd of the Isoli
tribe and a member of the Administrative Council, and Khalil Bey, who is
also a Kurd, earned an unenviable reputation in this connection. And it
has happened on almost every occasion that Kurds have been the willing
instruments of Turkish tyranny ; a notable exception is the chief of the
Baziki Kurds. For the most part, however, the Kurds seem to have been
opposed to the Turks in the course of the last five years, i
Previous to the signing of the armistice in November, 1918, three
things in Southern Kurdistan had prepared the way for a movement in
favour of independence." The first was the treatment of the Kurdish
population by the Turkish Government, the second was the conduct of
the Russian troops in Kurdistan, and the third was the method adopted
by the British authorities in dealing with the Arab Government and our
evident intention of supporting some form of Arab independence. \ The
* That the idea was not unknown even earlier is proved by the fact that in July,
1918, certain Kurdish chiefs in Persian Kurdistan met to discuss the question of an
independent Kurdistan under British auspices ; the Mukri, also, an important tribe in
the Sauj Bulak district, suggested this to the British Consul when on a tour near
Sakiz, and pointed out that, with Kurdistan in the hands of the Kurds and freed from
the weak and partial government of the Persians in Azerbaijan, the difficult Armenian
question could be settled amicably with the good offices of the British Government.