Dillon noted that Kurdish nationalism was \u201calive and active,\u201d but it did not translate electorally for a party with a Kurdish identity (which is natural given the absence of any party permitted to do so). Therefore, the Kurdish bloc became a balancing tool between the three Turkish parties: the Justice Party, the Republican People’s Party, and the New Turkey Party.<\/p>\n
In the October 10, 1965 elections, the Turkish electorate gave a wide majority to the Justice Party led by S\u00fcleyman Demirel, which garnered about 52.9% of the votes and 240 out of 450 seats, compared to 28.8% for the Republican People’s Party and 134 seats. The New Turkey Party obtained a modest percentage nationwide, but achieved a noticeable presence specifically in the Kurdish regions, where it found greater acceptance among local families compared to the central parties. Some Kurds tactically relied on this party, as was customary, due to the fundamental impossibility of voting for a Kurdish party. However, not all Kurds rallied behind it; the 1965 election votes were distributed almost equally among the parties in Northern Kurdistan.<\/p>\n
Although the Turkish Workers’ Party entered parliament for the first time with 14 seats, its Kurdish presence was very limited for two reasons: it built its rhetoric on the working class and failed to understand the complex and different relationship between the peasant and the landowner in Kurdistan.<\/p>\n
The voting map in the Kurdish provinces\u2014as Dillon himself hints\u2014reveals that the region interacted with the elections in a completely different way from the west of the country. The Kurdish bloc did not lean towards a specific ideology but moved according to social-tribal balances, the influence of the Aghas, the relations of religious orders, and the weak actual presence of the state in the countryside. From this perspective, the Justice Party benefited from its traditional alliances and an extended network of relationships in the countryside, while the New Turkey Party found its place due to its more pragmatic discourse. As for the Republican People’s Party, with its central Kemalist identity, it remained weak in most Kurdish provinces and relied more on the votes of Turkish officials working in the Kurdish area.<\/p>\n
Siirt emerges as a striking example in Dillon’s report; it is a city with a strong Arab presence, surrounded by a wholly Kurdish countryside. This diversity was reflected in the ballot boxes, which were distributed between tribal influence in favor of the Justice Party and local figures associated with the New Turkey Party, while the presence of the Republican People’s Party remained confined to administrative centers. One candidate presented himself as an Arab in Siirt and a Kurd in Ankara to try to win the votes of both Kurds and Arabs in the strong polling centers.<\/p>\n
Reading the 1965 election results through Dillon’s report and Van Hollen’s commentary on it offers an early and in-depth picture of the tensions and conflicts over identity, political representation, and the relationship between the state and society in Northern Kurdistan that Turkey would witness later, leading up to the current moment of the peace process between the Republic and the PKK.<\/p>\n
In addition to its historical value, the Dillon report remains one of the most important diplomatic documents that recorded early the fragility of the “Turkification” project in the southeast and the reality of a region that feels different, views the state with a kind of distance, and holds within it a latent capacity to reshape the political equations of Turkey as a whole.<\/p>\n
The following is the complete\u00a0 text of the report as it appeared in the US State Department archives and was published in the book: Turkey in the 1960\u2019s and 1970\u2019s: Through the Reports of American Diplomats edited by Rifat N. Bali<\/p>\n
Report by Robert S. Dillon, “Field Trip to Southeast Turkey,” Dated October 19, 1965<\/strong><\/p>\n CONFIDENTIAL<\/p>\n TO: Department of State INFO: Istanbul, Izmir, Adana, Tehran, Tabriz, Baghdad FROM: U.S. Embassy \u2013 AnkaraSUBJECT: Field Trip to Southeast Turkey DATE: October 19, 1965 REF: A-1016<\/p>\n Attachment is a report of a trip undertaken by Foreign Service Officer Robert S. Dillon to the Kurdish-majority areas of Southeast Turkey. The main objective of the trip was to observe political developments related to the campaign for the Turkish general elections held on October 10. The attachment includes observations not related to the elections.<\/p>\n The reporting officer was struck by the non-Turkish character of the area, its geographical ruggedness, the colonial nature of the Turkish administration, and the vitality of the Kurds. He concludes that Kurdish nationalism remains an important factor in the region and could pose a potential threat to the unity of Turkey.<\/p>\n Copy to the Ambassador.. Christopher Van Hollen Counselor of Embassy<\/strong><\/p>\n Report by Diplomat Robert S. Dillon: A Trip to Southeast Turkey (Kurdistan)<\/strong><\/p>\n During the period from September 27 to October 4, I traveled in the Kurdish-majority provinces of Southeast Turkey, accompanied by Vice Consul John Kelly and Abdullah Kasapci from our Consulate in Adana. The primary purpose of the trip was to observe political activity associated with the October 10 elections. Additionally, I had the opportunity to observe general conditions in the area and was particularly interested in its ethnic composition, as were many visitors before me.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Driving east from Adana through Gaziantep, a city with a distinctly Arab character, one is constantly reminded that he is not in inner Anatolia but on the northern edge of the Syrian plain. Moving eastward, the Euphrates River seems to serve as the dividing line for Kurdistan. Although Urfa is clearly mixed\u2014Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab\u2014a large part of the province is likely Kurdish. This pattern becomes clearer moving east; Diyarbak\u0131r, for example, is predominantly Kurdish, as is Elaz\u0131\u011f, while sparsely populated provinces like Mu\u015f, Bing\u00f6l, and Tunceli (which I did not visit) are reported to be entirely Kurdish.<\/p>\n Diyarbak\u0131r, a city of about 100,000 people, is the center of the Turkish Southeast, just as Erzurum is the center of the Northeast. In its new quarter, there is a large settlement of ethnic Turks, mostly government employees, army officers, and a few businessmen who have come from Western Turkey. The rest of the city is Kurdish.<\/p>\n Although Diyarbak\u0131r still bears many characteristics of a transit city, it is a bustling place. One of the most prominent reasons for this activity is the presence of oil installations and American military bases that have brought a wave of foreigners and Western Turks. The city also has two good hotels (more than typically seen in the rest of Southeast Turkey), in addition to a number of good restaurants.<\/p>\n From Diyarbak\u0131r, we headed to Elaz\u0131\u011f, the center of another Kurdish region, although the city itself appears to have a relatively high percentage of Turkish residents. This may be due to its proximity to Kharput (Harput), the older city that was an important Armenian center. Today, it is merely ruins, having been destroyed in 1916, very distant from the turn of the last century when it hosted an American Consulate and an American School. The wealthy families in Elaz\u0131\u011f today are descendants of Atat\u00fcrk’s collaborators, who were granted the lands of the deported Armenians as a reward for their services.<\/p>\n Elaz\u0131\u011f is located at the head of a fertile valley, part of which will soon be flooded by the waters of the Keban Dam. While many look forward to the expected economic gains, the more pessimistic\u2014and perhaps more insightful\u2014assert that the dam’s benefits will go to outsiders from Western Turkey, not to the local population, especially some Kurdish peasants who will lose their homes.<\/p>\n From Elaz\u0131\u011f, we returned to Diyarbak\u0131r and then continued the next day to Siirt, which can truly be described as being off the beaten track. The main road east heads towards Bitlis, Tatvan, and Van. To reach Siirt, one must turn off the main road and drive across fractured rocky terrain. This is the home of Ko\u00e7ero, the most famous figure in Turkish bandit stories, about whom the press wove dozens of tales, most of them romantically exaggerated. Ko\u00e7ero was, of course, a Kurd\u2014his name means “Eagle” in Kurdish\u2014though this fact was never mentioned in the newspapers. Despite his absence, his memory has not been erased, and the region still suffers from robbers and bandits. Siirt province is said to be the worst, but banditry is widespread in the provinces of Siirt, Diyarbak\u0131r, Mardin, Bitlis, Mu\u015f, and Tunceli (Dersim). Gendarmerie patrols run nightly on the main roads as a necessity for any car to pass, we were told.<\/p>\n A day or two before our arrival, an armed clash occurred between bandits and the gendarmerie or regular forces. This news was not in the press but was known to everyone, according to a Peace Corps volunteer in the city. A Turkish major was seriously wounded and evacuated by helicopter to Diyarbak\u0131r.<\/p>\n Aside from the presence of bandits, the most striking aspect of Siirt is that the city itself has an Arab majority, while its countryside is Kurdish. Arabic can be heard everywhere in the streets, although many Siirt residents can communicate in Turkish and Kurdish. The Peace Corps volunteer who teaches English in the high school pointed out that the language problem is significant because all the teachers are from Western Turkey, and many students have limited Turkish. The problem is greater in middle school, as those who continue to high school have usually mastered Turkish.<\/p>\n The Arabs in Siirt are almost all Sunni Muslims, unlike Mardin to the southwest where Christian Arab communities reside, or the Arab villages in Adana and the District of \u0130skenderun where the majority are Alevi. Unlike most western provinces, Siirt has only two Arab villages, according to one source, and stands almost alone as an Arab area.<\/p>\n One reason for my visit to Siirt was to see Adil Ya\u015fa, the Republican People’s Party deputy who was running for re-election. Ya\u015fa was in a village campaigning when we arrived and returned the next day. We did not wait for his arrival as we left in the morning for Bitlis, but we had the opportunity to speak to some of his colleagues. The most salient fact that emerged was that Adil Ya\u015fa, who is considered a Kurd in Ankara, and whose older brother, Professor Memduh Ya\u015fa, is considered a “prominent Kurdish intellectual” in Istanbul, is actually of Arab origin.<\/p>\n Memduh had hinted at this when I had lunch with him in Istanbul in August, telling me with a smile that I would find many people in Siirt who speak Arabic.<\/p>\n Another source from Siirt, also an Arab, told us the rumor that Adil Ya\u015fa paid 25,000 Turkish Liras to be at the top of the Republican People’s Party list in the province. This source mentioned several landowning Kurdish families as potential “Aghas,” but did not mention the Ya\u015fa family. It can be inferred that the Ya\u015fa family outside Siirt prefers to identify themselves as Kurds rather than Arabs.<\/p>\n From Siirt, we drove to William Saroyan’s birthplace, Bitlis, an old Turkish-Armenian city strategically positioned over a deep valley of the Tigris River, on the main road north from Diyarbak\u0131r and Syria to Lake Van. Bitlis is not a beautiful city, but it is very attractive because, unlike many old Armenian cities, its Armenian houses were not destroyed and are still inhabited. These houses are so solidly built that Bitlis, as a local official said, “looks like the most solidly built city in Turkey.”<\/p>\n We then visited the Governor of Bitlis, a young man who spoke English and had studied at the University of Kansas on an exchange program. After our visit, we drove to Tatvan, the ferry port on the eastern end of Lake Van. From there, we circled the southern shore of the lake, an area of rugged high mountains, and arrived at Van late in the afternoon.<\/p>\n Van is also an old Armenian city, but unlike Bitlis, almost all of its Armenian structures were destroyed. The new city is located about three kilometers from the site of the old city on the lake shore, and it is moving towards the hills. The “mountainousness” of the Kurds is more evident here. The lake is devoid of boats and rarely used, although the surrounding road is bustling with bus, truck, horse, donkey, and pedestrian traffic.<\/p>\n In Van, there are two new hotels attempting to attract tourists. However, the “Turistik” hotel’s interior does not live up to its exterior appearance. While generalizations should be cautious, Turks do not seem to be the world’s worst hotel owners, as some seasoned travelers say; that privilege seems to belong to the Kurds.<\/p>\n After spending Saturday night in Van, where we talked to some local politicians about the three-way competition between the Justice Party, the Republican People’s Party, and the New Turkey Party, we set off at dawn towards Hakk\u00e2ri. This part of the journey was one of the most exciting, as we saw many ancient ruins, mostly Armenian, and a large number of modern scenes, mostly Kurds riding horses, some carrying modern weapons. We saw a man near us carrying an “Enfield” rifle, an unusual sight compared to Western Turkey, where villagers only own old rifles.<\/p>\n The road to Hakk\u00e2ri passes through stunning scenery, including the valley of the Great Zab. The town itself is not a real city, but a government center in the heart of Kurdistan. It includes essential buildings: the Governor’s house, a large gendarmerie barracks, and a road construction station. There appears to be no presence of regular forces inside the town, as they were stationed\u2014we were told\u2014on the Iraqi border. We were also told that the town’s population increases in winter to about four thousand with the arrival of large numbers of nomads and semi-nomads. They had already started descending from the mountain pastures (Yaylas) where they spent the summer, and we saw many black and brown goat hair tents on the roads.<\/p>\n We returned to Van after hours spent fixing a car tire and visiting the Governor’s wife and the commander of the gendarmerie unit. The next day, I flew from Van to Ankara via Diyarbak\u0131r and Malatya. The sparsely populated rugged nature was perfectly clear from the air.<\/p>\n As on a similar trip to the provinces north of Lake Van, I was struck by the purely colonial nature of the Turkish administration. A small group of Western Turks in the large cities and towns govern a vast area inhabited by people who do not speak Turkish and do not feel Turkish. In Siirt, for example, a handful of Turks were absorbed into official positions, school teachers, and army officers. These people live together, eat in the Officers’ Club, and feel isolated among the local population. Most do not bring their families and live in the hope of returning to Western Turkey.<\/p>\n Despite the good intentions of many of them, most of these officials are not qualified to govern “Turkey’s foreign provinces.” They are trained to ignore\u2014even despise\u2014the ethnic differences that are key to understanding the economic, social, and political life of the region. In Diyarbak\u0131r, we saw the Kaymakam (District Governor) of Bismil, a completely Kurdish area, swaggering into our hotel with his pistol in his pocket, shouting orders at the Kurdish workers. We were told that this young man, who appeared to be about twenty-five and was likely a recent graduate of the Political Science Faculty in Ankara, was deeply unpopular in Bismil. Perhaps it was fortunate for its residents that he spent most of his time in the Demir Hotel in Diyarbak\u0131r.<\/p>\n My impressions of Kurdish nationalism are, of course, very superficial. Nevertheless, the blatantly Kurdish character of the region, the vitality of the Kurds, and the fact that\u2014although the use of the Turkish language in schools has had some effect\u2014the Turkish presence in the area is too weak to be an effective tool for the “Turkification” of the region are striking.<\/p>\n Furthermore, democratic processes work in two directions. The good representation of the Kurds at the national political level\u2014through their active leaders in the New Turkey, Republican People’s, and Justice parties\u2014is partially offset by the recourse of some politicians to campaigns based on addressing Kurds as Kurds. (In other places, the Embassy and the Consulate in Adana reported the arrest of election candidates on charges related to making appeals with Kurdish nationalist content).<\/p>\n Therefore, it does not seem illogical to say that Kurdish nationalism still poses a threat to the unity of Turkey in its current form, and that Barzani’s success in establishing an autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq could lead to a renewal of separatist pressures north of the border<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In October 1965, American diplomat Robert S. Dillon wrote a confidential report after a field trip he undertook to Northern Kurdistan during Turkey’s parliamentary election campaign. Although the official mission was to observe the atmosphere of the general elections on October 10th, the report quickly became a political-ethnographic reading of a region that was, at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":14198,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"jnews_post_split":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,61],"tags":[43,1243,1242,36,1062],"ppma_author":[151],"class_list":["post-14190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","category-slider","tag-kurdistan","tag-robert-s-dillon","tag-suleyman-demirel","tag-turkey","tag-u-s"],"authors":[{"term_id":151,"user_id":13,"is_guest":0,"slug":"hussain-jummo","display_name":"Hussain Jummo","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Jummo-3.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Jummo-3.jpg"},"0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14190"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14197,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14190\/revisions\/14197"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14190"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=14190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1-182x300.jpeg\")
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