1925: Sheikh Said Piran, Kurdish rebel

Early this morning this date in 1925, just hours after his condemnation for an eponymous rebellion against the newborn Turkish Republic, Sheikh Said Piran was publicly hanged.

This founding member of the Kurdish anti-Ankara martyrology had sparked a momentarily-successful rising against Turkey, fired by grievances that have not ceased to resonate since.

The secular nationalist Kemal Ataturk‘s intent to “Turkify” its peoples. The Kurdish populace’s frustrated national ambitions, indifferently bartered away by distant great powers dismembering the Ottoman Empire.* Ataturk’s abolition of the Caliphate.

“Oppressive and vile towards the Kurds,” Sheikh Said declared. (pdf)

For several years we have been able to read in the newspapers and official documents about the oppression, insults, hatred, and enmity that the Turk Republic [sic] accords to the Kurdish notables and dynasties. There is a lot of evidence available from authentic sources that they want to subject the Kurdish elite to the same treatment to which they subjected the Armenians

The February revolt quickly made him master of the majority-Kurdish eastern province of Diyarbakir, but a massive Turkish counterattack drove him east, encircled him, and had the Sheikh in irons by mid-April.

The government arrogated martial law powers to itself and appointed Orwellian courts called Independence Tribunals to prosecute Kurdish elites, rebels or no. (Some Kurdish intelligentsia were hailed to Diyarbakir from Istanbul.) Hundreds hanged, without even counting wholesale extrajudicial retribution against Kurdish civilians.

the repression of the 1925 rising was accomplished with a brutality which was not exceeded in any Armenian massacres. Whole villages were burnt or razed to the ground, and men, women and children killed.


Mass hanging of Kurds at Diyarbakir, May or June 1925 (Source)

Despite prosecutors’ avowed intention to extirpate the separatist sentiment “root and branch,” it hasn’t exactly put the whole Kurdish issue to bed.

Just ask Kurdish guerrilla Abdullah Ocalan, who received on this very same date 74 years later his own Turkish death sentence (since commuted).

* A past-is-prologue artifact from the time: the “Issue of Mosul“, a prickly international relations dispute over control of the historic city, accurately suspected to be sitting on a lot of oil.

Turkey claimed it as part of its historic heartland, but Great Britain had seized it just before World War I ended and wound up hanging onto it for the embryonic Iraqi state. Kurds who also considered it part of their homeland got short shrift altogether. It’s still disputed today among Iraqis, situated as it is just on the edge of Kurdish Iraq.

On this day..

838: Babak Khorramdin

On this date in 838, Babak Khorramdin was chopped to pieces for his 20-year rebellion against the Abbasid Caliphate.

A Zoroastrian son of northwest Iran’s Azerbaijan region, Babak rose to head a movement at once political and religious rooted in cultural preservation against the Arab-dominated caliphate.

Captured at last — he had spurned a guarantee of safety with that timeless insurrectionary sentiment, “Better to live for just a single day as a ruler than to live for forty years as an abject slave” — he had his hands and legs struck off in the presence of the caliph. It is said that Babak washed his face in the blood of these wounds to deprive his royal observer the pleasure of seeing his face fall pallid.

Babak remains an iconic figure in his homeland for his resistance to Arab domination, as evidenced by this Farsi-language vignette …

… and this performance of the Persian Ballet.

But he is not an unproblematic character for contemporary Iran, and not so much because of the anti-Islamic character of his revolt. Babak, whose personal ethnic composition seems to be a bone of historical contention, is also hailed an Azeri nationalist hero vis-a-vis Iran. His fortress is mountainous northern Iran still stands … and has latterly become a meeting-ground for advocates of “greater Azerbaijan” on the occasion of Babak’s birthday in July, much to the displeasure of Iranian authorities.

On this day..