Mehmet Şükrü Sekban

Mehmet Şükrü Sekban sometimes also Şükrü Mehmet Sekban (* 1881 in Ergani ; † 1960 in Istanbul ) was a Kurdish doctor, scholar and politician from Turkey. Sekban was a protagonist of the Kurdish national movement and later became an advocate of the assimilation of the Kurds. Sekban was a member and founder of several Kurdish organizations and parties.

Life

Sekban (in the middle of the front row) with the Society of Dermatologists in Istanbul in 1919 (Osm: Emraz-ı Cildiye ve Efrenciye Cemiyeti)

Sekban was born to the officer Mehmet Agha. He attended elementary school in Ergani and Hozat . He attended middle school in Diyarbakır and high school in Istanbul. He studied medicine at the Medical Academy of the Gülhane Military Hospital (GATA) in Istanbul and graduated in 1903 as a dermatologist with the rank of captain. Between 1905 and 1907 he worked at the Edirne Military Hospital . In 1908 he returned to Istanbul. On October 2, 1908, he became a member of the Kürt Teavün ve Terakki Cemiyeti association , whose aim was to promote Kurdish culture within the Ottoman Empire. In 1909 the Kürt Teavün ve Terakki Cemiyeti was banned. Sekban also supported the work of the Kurdish student association Hêvi (English: hope ), which was founded in 1912. So he paid the rent for the Hêvi clubhouse in Istanbul. After the First World War , in which the Ottomans were among the losers, new Kurdish organizations were formed. These were more radical than the previous ones. Some called for a Kurdish state of their own. In 1918 Sekban was a member of the Kürdistan Teali Cemiyeti . When the Kürdistan Teali Cemiyeti later split up, Sekban was one of the founders of the splinter party Kürt Teşkilat-i İçtimaîye (German: Kurdish social organization ). This group was nationalistic, secular and opposed the caliphate .

After the First World War, Sekban resigned as a doctor in Istanbul in 1919 and left Istanbul for Baghdad in the new British mandate of Mesopotamia . After his short-term return to Turkey, he left the country again when the Treaty of Lausanne was signed in 1923 . Since he had participated in separatist activities, he had to flee like other Kurdish politicians. In September 1923 he gave an open letter in book form in Beirut with the title What do the Kurds want from the Turks? out. He published several letters that he had written to the Kurdish minister and his former acquaintance Fevzi Bey. Fevzi Bey should campaign for the Kurds as a member of the government. All letters went unanswered. In this book, Sekban described several ways in which the new Turkish government in Ankara could treat the Kurds. These four possibilities are assimilation, neglect, extermination and recognition of the Kurds. According to Sekban, the Turkish government must accept the Kurds as an independent people. Contrary to what was previously called for, the Kurds should not split off from Turkey. According to the right of self-determination that the American President Woodrow Wilson had formulated, the Kurds were supposed to administer themselves and Kurdish should be recognized as the language of administration and schools.

In 1927, Sekban and others founded the Xoybûn organization in Lebanon . Xoybûn wanted to found a Kurdish state and organized the Ararat uprising in 1930. In the late 1920s, Sekban was working as health minister in Iraq, which was then still a British mandate. After Iraq's independence in 1932 and anti-Kurdish government policies, Sekban left Iraq for Europe. He fell ill with tuberculosis and cured himself in Germany. He lived in Paris until his final return to Turkey . In 1938 he returned to Turkey and worked as a doctor. In Turkey he co-founded the Türkiye İşçi ve Çiftçi Partisi (German: Workers-Peasants Party of Turkey ) in 1946 . Sekban was married to a Circassian from Istanbul. Sekban died in Istanbul in 1960.

La question Kurd

During his tuberculosis cure in Germany, he began to write a new book. The book with the title La question Kurde (Eng .: "The Kurdish Question") was published in Paris in 1933. In this book he took the view that the Kurds were not related to the Medes . Both Kurds and Turks are a Turkic people from Central Asia . The Kurds should therefore not strive for independence, but rather allow themselves to be assimilated by the Turks. Sekban saw no potential for a state of their own in the Kurds and their language, which he regarded as insufficiently developed. The Kurds should therefore rather participate in society and life in Turkey, which, in his opinion, had made great strides.

This turnaround from Kurdish nationalists to supporters of assimilation earned him ridicule and hostility from other Kurdish nationalists. They assumed that he had written this book for selfish and opportunistic reasons in order to be allowed to return to Turkey. He himself later assured Musa Anter that he had only written the book to protect the Kurds from oppression and to prevent the government from destroying the Kurds.

His book was not used by Turkish nationalists and propaganda until later decades to portray the Kurds as a Turkish people. It was convenient for the government that a Kurdish nationalist put forward the thesis that the Kurds were related to the Turks. The Turkish author Bilal N. Şimşir writes that after long research, Sekban realized that the Kurds are a Turkic people and that he had regretted his previous work . He is said to have written the book “La question Kurde” in tears .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bilal N. Şimşir: Kürtçülük 1924-1999 , Verlag Bilgi Yayınevi, Ankara January 2009, p. 143.

swell

• Martin Strohmeier in articles by the Center for Asian and African Studies (ZAAS) Volume 8, 2004, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. Edited by Stephan Conermann, Geoffrey Haig
• Martin Strohmeier: Crucial Images in the Presentation of a Kurdish National Identity: Heroes and Patriots, Traitors and Foes , Leiden-Boston: Brill 2003 (Social, Economic and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia, 86).
• Kurdistan Time: Doctor Şükrü Sekban Doğdu (Turkish)