Armenian News-NEWS.am presents the article “Armenian, Syrian and Kurdish questions should be taken as a whole” by Baris Eltinas, published in Today’s Zaman newspaper.

“The Kurdish question is inextricably linked to problems faced by Turkey’s Armenian and Syriac communities in the Southeast in the past,” said sociologist İsmail Besikci, an expert on the history of the Kurdish question.

“Besikci has been researching the Kurdish question for years and, although he is Turkish, has spent 17 years in prison after being convicted for his writings on the subject. Speaking at a panel discussion on the Kurdish question, where he was the guest speaker, at an event organized by the Journalists and Writers’ Foundation on Tuesday, Besikci said the Kurdish question cannot be viewed separately from the question of Turkey’s Armenian and Syriac communities, who were driven out of the country, leaving behind their businesses, banks, agricultural fields and even factories. He said the transfer of property from these communities, particularly from the Armenians, who were victims of a forced deportation campaign when the Unionists were in power at the end of the Ottoman era in 1915, to Kurds in the region and the aftermath of the mass deportation had unified into a single problem,” the newspaper reads.

“Besikci said the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), who were in power during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, had extensive plans to reorganize the empire so as to “Turkify” it. This also called for the nationalization of the Ottoman economy, which brought the problem of what to do with Turkey’s then-sizable communities of Armenians, Greeks and Alevis. Most of the events that took place at the turn of the past century, such as a population exchange between Greece and Turkey, and the deportation and killings of Armenians, which they say amounted to genocide, took place as part of the CUP and the early Republic of Turkey governments’ plans to nationalize the economy. Besikci stressed that the international community had also been immensely helpful in this plan, which he says still comprises the core of the state’s official ideology,” the source reads.

“There are immovable assets left over from the Armenian and Syriac communities that are under the control of the Kurds. When the Armenians were forced out and weren’t allowed to return, the state allowed Kurds to keep their assets. After 1915, Kurds started migrating from rural areas toward the cities where the Armenians lived. In fact, today, the source of the Turkish bourgeoisie’s wealth is Armenian and Greek property, although books on Turkish economic history never mention this,” he said.

“Besikci said he hoped Kurdish researchers and future generations will rewrite Turkey’s economic history and investigate the real source of the wealth in the country, asserting his belief that this would also help Turkey solve its age-old problems, including the Kurdish and Armenian question,” the newspaper reports.