Denial of Kurds by Turkey
The Kurds, who are a people that speak various dialects of Northwestern Iranic languages, have historically constituted the demographic majority in southeastern Turkey (or "Turkish Kurdistan") and their independent national aspirations have stood at the forefront of the long-running Kurdish–Turkish conflict.
[10][11] Around sixty years later, Vasily Nikitin, who was the Russian consul in Urmia between 1915 and 1918, joined the nascent academic discipline of Kurdology.
Mark Sykes, Ely B. Soane, Edward Noel, and Cecil J. Edmonds were especially active in highlighting the political and societal differences separating Iraqi Kurds from the Turkish nation.
For his part, Rışvanoğlu never denied his Kurdish ethnicity and identity, but that every Kurd was Turkic instead of Iranic, as is commonly understood in mainstream academia.
[21] Mehmed Şükrü Sekban, a Kurdish medical doctor from Ergani who worked in Sulaymaniyah in modern-day Iran, was likely the first person to publish an entire book that asserts that all Kurds are originally Turkic.
The book was titled "The Kurdish Question: On the Problems of Minorities" and written in French in 1933 before being translated to Ottoman Turkish two years later.
In his works, he targeted Western and Russian Kurdologists, especially Minorsky, Nikitine and Vil’chevsky, and dedicated a large part of his career to debunking their claims that Kurds were not a Turkic people.
He claimed that foreign Kurdologists were extremely biased and falsified history and studies in order to distance Kurds and Turks from each other.
[31] Historians reported that Sharafkhan Bidlisi mentioned that every Kurd descends from one Oghuz tribe, eventually splitting off into many smaller subtribes.
They also reported how Sharafkhan Bidlisi mentioned the Kurds as a part of the Turkic people since the times of Oghuz Khagan, in the Sharafnama which he presented to Sultan Mehmet III in 1597.
In these theories it also mentions how the colors red-yellow-green were used by from the Göktürks to the Ottomans, and are important to all other Turkic peoples, of which many wore green-yellow-red silk clothing.
[34] Tevfik Rüştü Aras, the Turkish foreign minister between 1925 and 1938, defended the idea that the Kurds should disappear like the Indians in the United States.
[37] Subsequently, the simple mention of the words "Kurds" and "Kurdistan" was prohibited, and replaced with terms like "Mountain Turks" and "The East", respectively.
[38] It was denied that a Kurdish nation had ever existed; according to the Turkish History Thesis, the Kurds migrated from Turanic Central Asia in the past.
The Turkish president Cemal Gürsel denied the existence of Kurds in Turkey in a press conference in London and during a speech he held in Diyarbakir.
[44] Cemal Gürsel was also closely linked to the then newly established Turkish Cultural Research Institute (TKAE)[45] which published several books on the topic.
[46] During the trials against the Revolutionary Cultural Eastern Hearths (DDKO) following the coup d'état in 1971,[47] the prosecution argued that Kurds do not actually exist, and their language was in reality a dialect of Turkish.
[51] In March 2021, the Turkish Ministry of National Education released a schoolbook on the Kurdish-majority Diyarbakir Province that makes no mention of Kurds or the Kurdish language at all.
It occurs most often as part of a laundry list of ethnicities—Laz, Çerkes, Georgian, Arab, Bosnian, Albanian—all specificity swamped by false diversity.
