Kurdistan at the dawn of the century - I Rafiq Hilmi New Hope
About the Author: Rafiq Hilmi was born in 1898 in Kurdistan, and passed away, after a stroke, in 1960, at the age of 62. During his lifetime he led a busy and active life, always searching for ways of serving his beloved country-Kurdistan and his people. Educated in Turkey and influenced by the Turkish way of life, he soon became disillusioned with them and, on his return to his country, he immediately started to work for Kurdish independence. Despite his young age he assumed very serious responsibilities, and, having worked with Sheikh Mahmud during the latter’s short rule, he became a trusted aid and confidant of the Sheikh who later sent him back to Turkey to seek agreement with the rebel Turks despite Hilmi’s advice to the'Sheikh to forge an agreement with the British, instead. Later, Hilmi tried, several times, to rally the Kurds around to seek and fight for their legitimate right’ to self-determination but the Kurds were, as ever, disunited and unable to agree on a common cause. In the late thirties to middle forties, he established and became the leader of the first and most powerful Kurdish intellectual, national force - a political party which became the guiding inspiration for dozens of other national organisations, and the school, from which, the majority of Kurdish politicians graduated. That party - “Hiwa or Hope, was behind the Kurdish movement in Southern Kurdistan and was the only truly patriotic organ ever.
Contents
Dedication / I Foreword to the Memoirs of Rafiq Hilmi, by the renowned friend of the Kurds and Kurdistan, the Noble Lord Eric Avebury / II Foreword by Professor Pakiza Rafiq Hilmi / V
Preface / VII Author’s Dedication / XXIV Introduction / XXV
The War Is Over / 1 Surrender / 2 The Ottoman Empire After the Treaty / 2 Mustafa Kemal in Anatolia / 6 The Cabinet of Ferid Pasha and Mustafa Kemal / 10 The Empire Signs At Sevre / 13 (Article 62) / 14 (Article 63) / 15 (Article 64) / 15 The Treaty of Sevre / 17 Kemal Turns Against the Kurds / 18 The Sixteenth Century Treaty of Union / 20 between the Kurdish Emirates and the Ottoman Sultan Salim the First / 20 Result of the Union / 20 Centuries of Oppression / 23 In the Aftermath / 24 Southern Kurdistan during the last days of the First World War / 24 Sheikh Mahmud’s Life Style / 28 The Mosul Scandal / 34 and the Murder of Sheikh Sa’id and his son Sheikh Ahmed / 34 The Return of Sheikh Mahmud to Slemani / 39 After Sheikh Mahmud’s Return to Slemani / 42 The First World War and Sheikh Mahmud / 43 Return of the British to Kirkuk / 46 The Arrival of Captain Noel in Slemani / 51 The Ruler of Kurdistan / 53 Sheikh Mahmud and the Peace Conference / 57 The Situation in Slemani / 58 during the First Period of Sheikh Mahmud’s Rule / 58 Major Noel’s Journey in Turkey / 62 Accompanied by Faiq i Tapo / 62 Slemani After Noel’s Departure / 66 Slemani During Soane’s Rule / 67 What were Sheikh Mahmud and his “Government” Doing? / 73 My Journey to Koysinjaq with Captain Beale / 76 Beale was the unparalleled “Wrath” of the Almighty / 80 The Decline of Sheikh Mahmud’s Influence Among the Tribes / 81 Sheikh Amin of Sindolan / 82 Part Two / 87 Introduction / 87 Another Example of British Intrigue / 89 Aimed at Reducing Sheikh Mahmud’s Influence / 89 Ahmed Nuri7 The Post and Telegraph Inspector / 89 The Appearance of the Start of Sheikh Mahmud’s Revolt / 92 My Trip To Rawandiz with Beale / 95 Sheikh Mahmud’s First Revolt and its Outcome / 97 The Situation in Rawandiz During the Darband Battle / 108 Sheikh Mahmud’s Error in this Rebellion / 114 Rawandiz & I, after Beale’s Departure to Hawler / 115 My Arrest in Rawandiz and Dispatch to Koya Prison / 117 My Life in Prison / 120 The “Friendly Indian” / 123 Abdulla Agha i Haji TayerAgha i Hawezi / 130 My Release from Prison / 133 The Trial of Sheikh Mahmud / 134 in Baghdad and his Exile to Andaman Islands / 134 The Greek Army Invasion of Turkish Soil / 142 The Fall ofVenizelos’s Government / 145 The Outcome of Bakir Sami’s Efforts and his Agreements with France and Italy / 151 News of The Kurdish Question in Istanbul / 154 Mustafa Kemal and the Kurds / 159 Specific Factors in Mustafa Kemal's Success / 165 Some Special Reasons / 165
DEDICATION
To my father who never exchanged his dedication to Kurdistan for worldly advantage and my mother who was every bit his equal. To my sister, Professor Pakiza who has been engaged, for more than half a century, in serving Kurdish literature and history, and to the rest of my family who have never deviated from the path which my father drew for himself. Finally, to Majors Noel and Soane who loved - / Kurdistan but left it to its fate
Feridun Rafiq Hilmi, London, April, 1998
I
Foreword to the Memoirs of Rafiq Hilmi, by the renowned friend of the Kurds and Kurdistan, the Noble Lord Eric Avebury
House of fords
Rafiq Hilmi, bom at the turn of the century, was an active participant in the momentous changes which occurred after the end of the 1914-18 war in Kurdistan. After the Sublime Porte - the ruling body of the Ottoman Empire - capitulated to the allied powers on October 30, 1918, the British forces in Mesopotamia continued to push north, occupying Kirkuk and Arbil so that they would he able to detach the Vilayet of Mosul, including the oil-producing areas, from the rump of Turkey. Sheikh Mahmud, the great- grandson of the famous Kak Ahmed i Sheikh was appointed governor of ‘Kurdistan’ in Mosul by Edward Noel, the British intelligence agent who advocated an autonomous Kurdish state. Rafiq Hilmi was there when the local Kurdish leaders pledged their support to Sheikh Mahmud the same day, November 1. His connection with the family went back even earlier when, as a boy of 10, he had recited a poem of lament on the occasion of the murder of Sheikh Mahmud’s father and brother in 1908.
Rafiq Hilmi narrates the unfortunate events which followed the elevation of Sheikh Mahmud to the title of Ruler of Kurdistan by Colonel Arnold Wilson, the British civil commissioner for the Persian Gulf, who was also a friend of the Kurdish autonomy. Mahmud surrounded himself with the illiterate and the greedy; the only good thing he did for Kurdistan, Hilmi tells us, was to organise a petition appointing Sherif Pasha as the Kurdish representative at the peace conference. The author wrote the petition, and the letter to Sherif Pasha, which however was never delivered to him by one of those many mischances which recur throughout Kurdish history.
To most people in Kurdistan, it must have seemed that the end of the Ottoman Empire presented a real chance to regain their freedom. President Wilson had promised ‘an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development' to the nationalities under Turkish rule in his address to Congress of January 8, 1918, while the British and French, in their declaration of November 7, 1918, had said they would achieve ‘the complete and definite emancipation of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks and the establishment of national administrations deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous populations Yet, on the ground, it did not take long for the British, most of whom displayed arrogant colonial attitudes, to fall out with their new allies. Sheikh Mahmud, after a brief rebellion, was tried and sentenced to death in Baghdad, though ostensibly he was the Ruler, not the British (He was reprieved, and lived until 1956) Rafiq Hilmi was imprisoned himself during the rebellion, but treats the experience in a matter of fact way, showing no bitterness.
If the Americans, British and French had kept their promises; if the Kurds had not relied on Ataturk’s smooth talk about the brotherhood and equality of Turks and Kurds; if Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, had not been persuaded against Kurdish autonomy by Sir Percy Cox, or if someone other than Sir Percy had been High Commissioner for Mesopotamia at this critical period, perhaps things would have turned out differently. Yet as Hilmi shows, the main obstacle to the Kurdish freedom was the tendency for the Kurds to fight among themselves, shifting loyalties for some perceived short term advantage, at the expense of the goal of national unity. That was the bane of Sheikh Mahmud, as it has been of all the attempts to establish a Kurdish entity before and since. Even now, in south Kurdistan, the personal rivalry between Mas’oud Barzani and Jalal Talabani weakens the Kurds, and makes them vulnerable to the imperialist designs of neighbouring powers. We should learn from history, and Rafiq Hilmi’s memoirs contain many valuable lessons.
Eric Avebury June 9, 1996
Foreword by Professor Pakiza Rafiq Hilmi
Yaddasht is the memoirs of some fifty years of the painful and difficult life of Rafiq Hilmi, the teacher of Kurdayeti and Kurdish patriotism, which also happens to be a true and unadultrated representation of the life of the Kurds, spanning the period from before the first world war, right upto the last days of the life of the teacher himself which ended in I960.
The urge to document the history of the struggle of the Kurdish nation in the mind of the suffering and patriotic son of the Kurds, Rafiq Hilmi, was unmatched. It was making him restless and he was pursuing it night and day. Through continuous research and reading, by analysis and discussion and by turning the ideas and facts over and over in his mind.
He himself says in his introduction to the Yaddasht: ‘It has been sometime when I started thinking about publishing such a trust-worthy and scientific history that would not be suspect or half-hearted. That is why he started developing his program for his writing project since 1932. At that time when he was a member of a scientific society with that day s inteligensia in Mosul, such as Dr. Majeed Kheddury, Dr. Mahmud Al-Chalabi and Derwish Al-Muqdadi, he fulfilled the first stage of his wish by publishing ‘The Kurds’ which describes in Arabic the ancient history of the Kurds in order to help familiarise the Arabs with Kurdish history. That book is the first twentieth century publication of its kind.
The cultural matter of Yaddasht can, therefore, be found in that book. After ‘The Kurds’, he published a booklet by the title of ‘’Pages from The Kurdish Question’, in Turkish, in Basra, which was later translated to Arabic. This book was a …
Rafiq Hilmi
Kurdistan at the dawn of the century Volume I
New Hope
New Hope Publication Kurdistan at the dawn of the century Volume I Rafiq Hilmi
