{"id":14565,"date":"2026-06-08T09:50:42","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T07:50:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/?p=14565"},"modified":"2026-06-08T09:53:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T07:53:00","slug":"society-and-politics-the-kurdistan-famine-of-1918","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/society-and-politics-the-kurdistan-famine-of-1918\/","title":{"rendered":"Society and Politics: The Kurdistan Famine of 1918"},"content":{"rendered":"

A previous article published by the Kurdish Center for Studies, entitled <\/span>“Kurdistan: Society, and Politics (1914<\/span><\/u>\u2013<\/u>1920)”<\/u><\/a> concluded that political programs, especially in environments of open genocide, are measured not only by their justice or legitimacy, but more significantly by society’s capacity to bear their consequences. It noted how ignoring this social factor in reading the era of the First World War and its aftermath later led to a Kurdish nationalist narrative that lacks an analysis of the most crucial obstacles<\/span>\u2014<\/span>namely, the extent to which these programs corresponded with the daily reality of the population and how this dilemma could have been overcome. One of the primary duties of political movements is to study the past experiences of the nation and to present visions that avoid linking the future and destiny of the national project to the harsh daily life of the individuals of this nation. This raises the question once again today: Can the Kurdish political movement conduct its struggle without relying on the most vulnerable segments of society? <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A hundred years ago, the Kurdish nationalist movement did not succeed in advancing its national project without society, and society was unable to bear the cost. The result was what the Kurds are living through today. A hundred years ago, the situation of the Arabs and the Turks was no better, but their societies were displaced from politics through direct European patronage aimed at manufacturing new “nation-states”<\/span>\u2014<\/span>a patronage that was not available to a number of peoples and their political movements, including the Kurds, the Armenians, and the Syriacs. Perhaps the meeting between a Kurdish delegation led by Sheikh Said al-Kurdi (later al-Nursi) and the American Embassy in 1919 is the best example of the Kurdish protest against their exclusion from international patronage to establish a Kurdish state, similar to what was being prepared in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey itself. During the meeting, Bedi<\/span>\u00fczzaman Said al-Kurdi challenged the American side, saying: “If Kurdistan had a sea coast, you would destroy it with your naval power, but you will not be able to execute such a decision in the mountains of Kurdistan.”<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The Orphans of Kurdistan<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

What Mamdouh Salim Bek and Kamal Fawzi wrote through a series of articles in J<\/span>\u00een magazine in the years 1918<\/span>\u20131919 was an attempt to draw attention to the fact that the people called upon to bear a political project had not yet survived the war. In their texts, the Kurds appear as people seeking to survive war, genocide, and hunger, a large portion of whom lived in tents on the outskirts of cities, unable to secure bread and eating the corpses of their dead, while contemporary national debates review the history of the Kurds as if this reality were a marginal detail.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

From here, this episode attempts to move deeper into some of the texts of that stage, which were written by both Mamdouh Salim Bek and Kamal Fawzi.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Mamdouh was a Kurdish intellectual and journalist whose name emerged in the aftermath of the First World War, and he was one of the few voices preoccupied with the social dimension that the war left on Kurdish society. He wrote a number of articles in J<\/span>\u00een magazine concurrently with the founding of the “Kurdistan Advancement Association.” His articles, particularly the piece “Hawar <\/span>\u2013 The Cry,” formed a rare document on the daily life of the Kurds after the war. He became known later through the novelist Mehmed Uzun, who transformed some stations of his life into literary material in the novel The Shadow of Love. He participated in the Ararat rebellion alongside General Ihsan Nuri Pasha in 1930, and deliberately, the two comrades passed away in the same year (1976)<\/span>\u2014<\/span>Mamdouh in Damascus, and Ihsan in Tehran.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Mamdouh Salim wrote about the pains of the First World War inflicted on the Kurds due to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the occupation of Istanbul. Ironically, the Empire was defeated at the end of 1918, and the Kurds formed the majority of the population in the unoccupied part of the Ottoman state. Between 1918 and 1920, the Ottoman Empire had practically lost Istanbul and the entire western and southern coast, with an occupational depth by the Europeans that reached the borders of Anatolia. Thus, practically, Kurdistan and the Kurds were the largest part of what remained of the Ottoman Empire. This fact was quickly captured by Mustafa Kemal as soon as he commenced the process of organizing the resistance against the European occupation, forming defense associations that relied fundamentally on the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Eastern Provinces (also known by its unrecorded name, the Association for the Defense of Kurdistan).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Before the launch of the major battles of the “War of Independence,” Kurdish society had shattered due to the war, Russian incursions, and famine, and the urban belts in Anatolia were teeming with displaced Kurds who were double victims<\/span>\u2014<\/span>of the war, and of the plans of Talaat Pasha, the Minister of Interior and Grand Vizier during the war, who was in a hurry to launch the process of dismantling Kurdish society even during the war, a plan that Enver Pasha apparently did not agree with (the extent of agreement or difference between Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha regarding these policies still requires an independent study).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In this atmosphere, Mamdouh Salim Bek narrated what he saw with his own eyes:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In Ankara, in Konya, in Adana, in Erzurum, staggered Kurdish groups walk like an orphan without food, without shelter, without life. And from Van, and from Bitlis… listen to the heartbeat of the swarms of migrants, and look at their faces, if only for a moment, before you turn your eyes away from them. What a painful agony for these afflicted people, to be promised a meager daily wage not exceeding three or five piasters, or even a hundred piasters if they wish, and then nothing is given to them, and they are expelled from places of asylum, losing their homes, families, and loved ones on the roads, and losing their animals where death is more merciful than life, and their few piasters are plundered by opportunistic merchants and butchers!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

What a bitter irony that those who were accustomed to generosity in their own country, viewing it as a matter of pride and duty, have today become the ones in need of charity!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Regardless of the number of doors we knocked on, the number of those we pleaded with, and whichever paths we took, the state of our tattered clothes, our empty stomachs that found nothing to eat, and the expressions of misery drawn on our faces did not evoke from those we met anything but a cold astonishment, a condescending disgust, or a passing curiosity devoid of mercy or humanity. What is this unbearable cruelty?!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Endless states of deprivation have left, and continue to leave, unhealed wounds in the fabric of our society! And I draw your attention to this. There may be those who take pleasure in these wounds, or who see them as deserved by us, or even those who exploit them to achieve their base interests. But you, the notables who claim to be “the protectors of the Kurds and those who sacrifice for them,” will you accept this as well? Do you not see that the catastrophic scene experienced by this land today calls at least for an expression of grief and despair, even if in a desperate manner.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

If this is the case, then believe me, the storms that have made this nation so wretched will not delay in sweeping us all toward the brink of destruction, crushing us without mercy. The coming eras, with the weight and accumulation they carry, will not grant us an opportunity for salvation, nor will they allow us to pull ourselves up or save our lives.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Did the Kurdish man in Ankara know what alcohol or intoxicants were? Merely asking this question is a slap to the faces of those who, despite possessing the ability to break the chains of tragedies haunting an entire generation, remain sunk in indifference. I do not understand how those who content themselves with the position of a spectator, while this people is driven without guilt to the depths of degradation, can demand one day their right to self-determination!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Not a day passes without letters reaching us from Ankara and Adana, from our region and its surroundings, from Bitlis, from Van, from Erzurum… letters signed with the names of migrants, carrying between their lines stories of misery, pain, and wounds, and crying out for help. How do these words not cling to our hearts like the wounds of hell?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Today, the displaced Kurds scream: “I am hungry, I am naked, I am homeless, I am sick.” Yes, this is the reality. The holiest duty falling upon the benevolent among us is to move without losing a single minute to find a cure for these tragedies. The Kurdish migrants must return to their homes.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

When they return, they will find pure waters, extended plains, and towering mountains. Wonderful! But will they find there a hut to protect them from the cold? Will the returning Kurd find a sack of black barley to stave off his hunger and save him from ruin?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I have seen it with my own eyes; those wretched individuals who rushed with longing and enthusiasm toward the lands named “the liberated places” found nothing there but hunger and a harsh homelessness that received them without mercy. These people, half of whom perished while fleeing toward unknown horizons and dark dreams, none survived among them except those who became fuel for that land, which gave them nothing but demolished walls, and in which they found nothing but grass for food, while it was supposed to grow bounties for their children and suffice for their coming generations.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The displaced Kurds must return to their old homelands; this is what they want, and this is what we must achieve. But is it enough that they return? The returning Kurd must find a house that protects him from the severity of winter, and food that suffices him in summer and winter. If these two conditions are not met, the return will be nothing but a new journey toward death, and another torment.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

But you, O youth, O Kurdish saviors, know well how rare moral, health, and social diseases were among the Kurds. Do you realize the baseness of this war and migration, and how it has made us weaker from a social and health standpoint? Intoxicants were almost non-existent among the Kurds, and God forbid that prostitution should be widespread among them. We did not even know the names of diseases like syphilis.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Today, after four years of these disasters, our Kurdish people return to their country carrying with them one of these afflictions, and sometimes more than one. The generation of tomorrow, the Kurdistan of tomorrow, is in danger!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Think well! Your hearts are strong, and your morals are sublime. And since I know that you are realistic, far from illusions, not fearing to face facts, I will say it clearly, even if it sounds wounding: these are the gifts that this bloody war has granted us! But we must think of the solution! The “mother” that will give birth to the remedies for these tragedies is none other than “organization”… the organization that is built by determination, work, and resistance. It is “social organization,” that foundation upon which every civilized nation stands. A “social organization” led by people of intellect and courage, those who will penetrate into every hidden corner of Kurdistan, in war as in peace, to be guides and saviors, to light the torch of life in the darkness of poverty and misery.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Missing Corpses<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In issue <\/span><\/span>24, dated September 3, 1919, the Kurdish intellectual Kamal Fawzi published an article in J<\/span>\u00een magazine, which he wrote in the month of July, as appears in the text of the article. Kamal Fawzi wrote:<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Allow me to open the wounds of migration and its bitterness! And no one hears the groans of my lonely land that weeps for the grief of the Kurds in an atmosphere of mourning! These final days of this hot month of July remind me of my fellow citizens in Urfa, Mosul, Mardin, Diyarbakir, Adana, and Konya who surrendered to pure eternal tranquility. And I am certain that those living dead who passed away far from these helpless hands a year ago have today become curtains of shame in a humiliated grave. I want to weep a little more in these pages of migration, with my broken pen, whose voice cannot be heard by deaf and numbed ears.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

It was these harsh months that covered the misery of winter. A massive mass of migration and wretchedness, consisting of children, women, men, youth, and the elderly, was gathering in front of the Urfa station. Gendarmes surrounded them with bayonets and police guards. Who were these people?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Once upon a time, these, or a large part of them, were from the nobility of the Kurds, whose herds grazed in their rich and green villages, while they rode their purebred white horses.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

These were brides without brothers, without fathers, without husbands, lonely women who sent their heroic husbands to the path of martyrdom and then were forced to the lust of some of their brothers in absolute religion who are stripped of humanity, models of shame and enemies of the nation, merely for a loaf of bread!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

They were naked and lonely children who left their fathers and brothers to the enemies on the borders and their mothers to the black earth on roads covered with snow!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The police were constantly whipping the crowd to disperse it, and the gendarmes threatened them with bayonets. How is it possible! That mass which dispersed and scattered for a moment was accumulating anew, gathering, rushing, trying, clinging. With great difficulty, the saviors would slip from amid this crowd, each carrying a clay pot in his hand, and the lucky ones would try to escape.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And they fought to buy the hot blood of the slaughtered sheep that leaked from under the knife. Woe to those who returned empty-handed! It was one of the hot days in Riha (Urfa). There were poor people, widows, and orphans dying of hunger, dying in remote, isolated areas of the city, under the dry shadows of bare, dry trees. In these places that no foreign traveler had ever visited before, in these abandoned places that no one wished to see or visit, humanity was groaning.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In the morning, municipal employees who set out to search for human corpses and rushed to bury the dead without shrouds would see groups of the dead hiding under those bare shadows and return back. They would come the next day to bury what they had seen the previous day. Alas! Frequently it would not be possible to find a corpse. Yet, they would see that the people gathered there, struggling wretchedly between stones and dirt, were decreasing in number every day. This situation aroused suspicions.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The employees who came empty-handed every day, these visitors of death and misery, began to search things and examine them repeatedly.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Civil service officials performed their duty of investigation. Some voices were heard from a dark and winding pit. I believe the officers felt something there. They saw a group of people sitting around a fire. They were a caravan of hungry migrants, eating meat torn from the corpse of one of their comrades.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The next day, the poor were placed under a tight cordon. In less than two days, the unfortunate poor, who were waiting for the death of one another, driven by the hope to live a little longer, all died together. It was one of these hot days in Urfa in 1917, and there were a few rotten coffins, hidden and concealed from view. A car veered off the road and overturned on its way to the cemetery. I asked who these were. They said: “It is them again.” Yes, it is them! As you know, are they not the ones who left Bitlis, Mush, Van, and Erzurum, and migrated and crawled from one place to another? Here they are! The children of the wretched who were left homeless, and then died of hunger! They are the ones for whose tragedy we bear responsibility, which is our tragedy itself.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Society and Politics<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

What Mamdouh Salim Bek and Kamal Fawzi wrote adds new details to the history of the First World War in Kurdistan, and opens a window into an aspect that has long been overlooked in the Kurdish political and national narrative. For when we read their texts, in the context of the circumstances of that stage and its difficulties, we find a society preoccupied with surviving death, collapse, and disintegration. Therefore, despite the great security vacuum resulting from the collapse of the Ottoman Sultanate, the European occupation of the western and southern part of Anatolia including Istanbul, and the defeat of the Armenians in the East as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917<\/span>\u2014<\/span>despite all these events, the Kurds did not declare themselves through an independentist political project. The reason is due not to the absence of a program, will, or desire for independence, as much as it is related significantly to the inability of society to execute a political project of this magnitude as long as there was no state patronage. Neighboring societies were no less devastated, but the difference was that they enjoyed European patronage, in one way or another, and nation-states were manufactured for those chosen societies, in the manner that occurred with the establishment of Iraq when Emir Faisal was summoned and installed via the British political team according to the vision of Miss Gertrude Bell, the political officer in the British mission in Iraq. The Kurds did not receive this patronage. There was a modest attempt led by a non-high-ranking British officer, Major Noel in 1919, and his endeavors to establish a Kurdish state were quickly thwarted via counter-British projects from India, Baghdad, and Cairo.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The texts do not describe a famine in the literal sense<\/span>\u2014<\/span>meaning a shortage of food only. They describe a collapse that afflicted the social structure itself. Mamdouh Salim speaks about the disintegration of the standards that Kurdish society knew before the war, about the spread of phenomena he views as foreign to his environment, and about the transition of thousands of families from a life of stability to a life of begging and displacement. As for Kamal Fawzi, he goes further when he draws scenes of people waiting for the death of one another in order to stay alive.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And perhaps here lies the importance of re-reading this stage. For before searching for the reasons behind the success of this political project or the failure of that one, and before judging the leaders, elites, and decisions taken a century ago, it may be necessary to return to the fundamental question: What were the conditions of the society that these elites were attempting to lead? What was the amount of ruin that had afflicted it? And was it possible to succeed in wresting an independent political entity for the Kurdish nation by relying on intrinsic forces alone in a region that had become crowded with maps drawn by Europeans and their treatment of Kurdistan as a “land without politics”?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A previous article published by the Kurdish Center for Studies, entitled “Kurdistan: Society, and Politics (1914\u20131920)” concluded that political programs, especially in environments of open genocide, are measured not only by their justice or legitimacy, but more significantly by society’s capacity to bear their consequences. It noted how ignoring this social factor in reading the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":14566,"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":[1312,41],"ppma_author":[151],"class_list":["post-14565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","category-slider","tag-famine","tag-kurds"],"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\/14565","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=14565"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14569,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14565\/revisions\/14569"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14565"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=14565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}