I had never heard about Hrant Dink until I saw Hürriyet that day.

It was as if I had been looking for something in this world, and I had finally found it one rainy afternoon on Hürriyet ‘s internet page. Was Sabiha Gökçen, Atatürk ‘s adopted daughter, the world‘s first combat war pilot, the only heroine of the Turkish Republic, an Armenian? Agos, Turkish-Armenian community‘s weekly newspaper, had reported so, according to Hürriyet. This dissertation began the day I saw the headline of the Turkish daily Hürriyet on its front page on 21 February 2004: ―SABIHA GÖKÇEN‘S 80-YEAR-OLD SECRET.‖ I was in the Giesel library of the UC San Diego casually surfing the Turkish news while trying to finish a seminar paper. It will be argued here that the failure of Kurdish nationalists in the immediate aftermath of the war can in large part be explained by developments that occurred over the four years of conflict. However, often overlooked in this story is the geopolitical legacy of the First World War. This reversal of fortunes is accounted for in a number of ways, divisions amongst the Kurdish nationalists, the military success of Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s ‘nationalist’ forces in the Greco-Turkish War (1920–1922), and the ‘betrayal’ of the Kurds by perfidious European powers. Yet, only a few years later, Sèvres was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), a treaty which made no provisions for Kurdish self-rule. These efforts culminated in the summer of 1920 with the inclusion of clauses within Treaty of Sèvres which provided Kurdish-inhabited regions of the dying Ottoman Empire with a pathway to independence.

ABSTRACT Historians who have examined the ‘failure’ of the Kurds to obtain statehood in the immediate aftermath of the First World War have, understandable, closely examined the lobbying efforts engaged in by the Kurdish elites in Istanbul, specifically those activists associated with the Society for the Betterment of Kurdistan (est.

Nutuk by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk