The Treaty of Sèvres and the Kurds

On 10 August 1920, less than two years after the end of the First World War, the Treaty of Sèvres was signed between the Ottoman Empire and the Allied Powers. It holds an exceptional place in Kurdish political history: for the first time, a major international treaty contained a distinct section titled “Kurdistan”. Yet the treaty did not found a Kurdish state, nor did it define a ready-made independent Kurdistan with final borders, as is sometimes claimed. Understanding what happened means returning to the original text — above all Articles 62, 63 and 64. What was the Treaty of Sèvres? Sèvres belonged to the post-war settlements that followed the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and its allies. Representatives of the Ottoman government signed it at Sèvres, near Paris, on 10 August 1920. It was a comprehensive treaty, redrawing large parts of the Ottoman political and territorial order — Armenia, Kurdistan, the Arab provinces and the Straits among them. But the Turkish national movement led by Mustafa Kemal rejected it, and its Kurdistan provisions never became lasting political reality. Signed: 10 August 1920 — Place: Sèvres, near Paris — Kurdistan section: Part III, Section III — Articles 62, 63, 64 — Outcome: Never implemented; replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne, 1923 Article 62: a scheme of local autonomy Article 62 provided for a commission sitting at Constantinople, composed of representatives appointed by the British, French and Italian governments. Within six months of the treaty coming into force, it was to draft a scheme of local autonomy for the predominantly Kurdish areas within the geographical scope the article defined. The text also required safeguards for the Assyro-Chaldeans and other ethnic and religious minorities in those areas. The first stage, then, was not the proclamation of an independent state but the creation of an autonomous administration. Article 63: what Turkey had to accept Article 63 is short but decisive: the Turkish government agreed to accept and execute the decisions of the commissions referred to in Article 62 within three months of their communication. The autonomy scheme was therefore not a non-binding suggestion but a treaty obligation. Article 64: a conditional road to independence This is the article that matters most in Kurdish political memory. Article 64 did not declare independence on the day of signature; it set out a conditional path. If, within one year of the treaty entering into force, the Kurdish peoples of the defined areas addressed the Council of the League of Nations and showed that a majority of the population desired independence from Turkey, the Council would consider the request. If the Council judged those peoples capable of independence and recommended that it be granted, Turkey undertook to renounce all rights and title over those areas. Sèvres never said “a Kurdish state is hereby founded”. It set out a chain of legal and political steps that could — had the treaty been implemented — have ended in an independent Kurdish state. And the Kurds of the Mosul Vilayet? The end of Article 64 carried a crucial point: if independence were achieved through that mechanism, the Principal Allied Powers would raise no objection to the voluntary adhesion, to the new Kurdish state, of the Kurds living in the Kurdish part of the Mosul Vilayet. This did not make the whole Mosul Vilayet automatically part of a Kurdish state: it depended first on that state coming into being under Article 64, and then on a voluntary adhesion. Did Sèvres draw Kurdistan's borders? Not in the way many circulating maps suggest. Article 62 described a geographical scope for the autonomy scheme; it did not draw the final borders of a Kurdish state covering every Kurdish-inhabited region of the Middle East. Modern maps captioned “Kurdistan according to the Treaty of Sèvres” are later reconstructions or interpretations, not an official map annexed to Articles 62–64 that can be treated as settled state borders. Iran, moreover, was not part of the Ottoman state whose territory the treaty was reorganising. Sèvres therefore never proposed a state automatically uniting all Kurdish regions of present-day Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. Why it failed — and Lausanne, 1923 Between the signature of Sèvres in 1920 and the final settlement of 1923 the balance of power shifted completely. The Turkish national movement under Mustafa Kemal rejected the treaty's terms and fought the War of Independence; with its victories, the settlement imposed at Sèvres became unenforceable. On 24 July 1923 the Treaty of Lausanne was signed. It became the basis of the new international settlement with Turkey and contained nothing of the mechanism of Articles 62–64. The Kurdistan project vanished from the settlement. The Mosul question continued after Lausanne, and most of the vilayet ended up within the Iraqi state, then under British mandate. In sum Sèvres offered a conditional international legal possibility of a Kurdish state. Describing it as “the Kurdish state that was created and then cancelled” is inaccurate. A scheme of autonomy for predominantly Kurdish areas. — The option of requesting independence within one year. — Proof that a majority of the population desired it. — A League of Nations assessment of capacity, then its recommendation. — Turkey's renunciation of its rights if the conditions were met. — A possible voluntary adhesion by the Kurds of the Kurdish part of the Mosul Vilayet. The sharper historical question is not “where did the Kurdish state created by Sèvres go?” but “why did the legal opening Sèvres created never become a state?”