Denial of Kurds by Turkey

The denial of Kurds was for, several decades, the official state policy of Turkey. The term "Mountain Turks" was invented by General Abdullah Alpdoğan and initially used to describe a people living in the mountains who did not speak their own language but a Turkish dialect.[1] 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.[2] Kâzim Karabekir, a former commander of the Turkish Army during the War of Independence, said the Kurds in Dersim were in fact assimilated Turks and they should be reminded of their Turkishness.[3] The Turkish Minister of Justice Mahmut Esat Bozkurt, stated that there is no other nation which could claim rights in Turkey than the Turkish race, and that all non-Turks would only have the right to be a servant or slave.[1] Subsequently, the simple mention of the words Kurds and Kurdistan was prohibited, and replaced with terms like Mountain Turks and East.[4] The prohibition also included text in foreign languages[5] That there has ever existed a Kurdish nation was denied, and through the Sun Language Theory it was claimed that Kurds were of Turkic central asian origin, who had forgotten their ancestral language due to the fact that they were living isolated in the mountains under Persian rule.[4] During the 1920's and 1930s, merchants were fined for every word of Kurdish they used separately.[4] In school, students were punished if they were caught speaking Kurdish and during the 1960s Turkish language boarding schools were established in order to separate the students from their Kurdish relatives[6] and Turkefy the Kurdish population.[7]

The term "Mountain Turk" became more commonly used in 1961 when Turkish President Cemal Gürsel supported studies to prove the Turkishness of the Kurds. In a book by Mehmet Şerif Fırat to which Gürsel wrote a foreword, he demanded studies which provided a proof of a fact which confirmed that Kurds were in reality Mountain Turks. Gürsel was also the head of the newly established Turkish Cultural Research Institute (TKAE) which published several books on the topic.[1] During the trials against the Revolutionary Cultural Eastern Hearths (DDKO) following the coup d'état in 1971,[8] the prosecution argued that Kurds do not actually exist, and their language was in reality a dialect of Turkish.[9] Also Kenan Evren, the chief of the military junta following the coup d'état in 1980, denied the existence of a Kurdish ethnicity and claimed the word Kurd arose from the sound the snow made if one walked in it and restricted the use of the Kurdish language.[10]