Publisher’s Note
Since the beginning of the Foreign Languages Press, it has always been on our minds to reprint The National Question by Ibrahim Kaypakkaya. Written in 1972, this document continues to carry critical importance in current times to help understand and analyze national liberation movements.
But this task was easier said than done. There have been some translations of Kaypakkaya’s works, done in the 80s and 90s in Greek, German and even English in booklet form, but the first translations released by a publishing house were done in German only in 2011 (under the title In stürmischen Jahren, published by Zambon). This translation, however, contained only a handful of (mostly short) documents and did not include The National Question. In May 2013, this lack was corrected when comrades from the German organization Trotz Alledem released Unser Zorn wächst wie das unendliche Meer. Programmatische Schriften, a compilation of: Critique of the TIIKP’s program, On Kemalism, and The National Question in Turkey. We also know of at least one attempt, started in 2015, to make a compilation that would have also included the General Criticism of the Safak-Revisionism, which was advertised on the website kaypakkaya.de
As for English, as far as we know, there has been only one translation published in July 2014 by Nisan Publishing. It was a happy surprise to see that this translation included both the shorter documents published by Zambon, as well as the longer ones published by Trotz Alledem. We know that some comrades, at least in France and India, have used this book as a basis to translate some Kaypakkaya works into their own languages.
We have used the Nisan Publishing translation of this document as the basis in publishing this edition of The National Question. In doing so, we realized that the first English translation contained some mistakes. The version of the text in this book is a corrected one. Below, we describe the issues we addressed.
Literal Translation
The Italians says “Traduttore, traditore,” meaning that a translator always betrays the original meaning of a text a little. We noticed that the Nisan Publishing translation was very literal in many places, probably to try to remain as true to the original text as possible and prevent unfortunate cases of wrong translations of expressions or terms.
In our opinion, a translation should try to reflect what the author wanted the reader to understand rather than the exact words or expression s/he used in his/her own language. This is why we rewrote some sentences to try to convey the meaning of the original Turkish word or phrase in a more natural sounding way in order to make it more understandable for comrades studying this book.
Milliet and Ulus
Kaypakkaya uses two different terms in this book, both of which are translated into English by the word “nation.” However, they actually have different histories and meanings.
The word “milliet” is a Quranic word that was broadly used during the Ottoman Empire period. It referred to an ethnic group with a common religion. For example, the “rum milliet” were people from the Balkans who were orthodox, and the “ermeni milliet” were Armenians who were oriental orthodox. Each of the milliet had different rights based on their religion, and a different hierarchy, etc., which led—with the introduction of capitalism in Turkey—to simply understand them as different nations.
The word “ulus” originally had more of a geographical or tribal meaning, which became—with the establishment of the Republic in Turkey—the preferred word to express the concept of “nation.” The spread of the use of this word is mostly due to the politics of secularization of Mustafa Kemal as a “less-religious” replacement for “milliet.”
In Kaypakkaya’s time, these two terms were used interchangeably. However, Kaypakkaya played with their historical differences. For example, in Chapter 7, Kaypakkaya wrote: “Turkey is today one of the multinational states. In Turkey, only the Kurds constitute a nation.” While this translation is completely accurate in its translation, it appears contradictory. In Turkish, however, Kaypakkaya uses “milliet” in the first case and “ulus” in the second, meaning that Turkey is a country with multiple milliet, or different religious ethnic groups, but that only the Kurds constitute an ulus, or “nation” as defined by Stalin.
In this edition we have attempted to translate this idiomatic nuance more clearly.
Missing Quotes and Paragraphs
The first English edition was missing several quotes and full paragraphs. For example, in Chapter 2, in lieu of the quote of Stalin was written “Check the quote from Stalin (it’s easy to do!),” which was actually a note from the translator. More glaring, eight paragraphs of the last chapter were missing in what was probably just a layout issue.
To correct these errors, we returned to the original text (using the Selected Works published by Umut Yayimcilik in 2004) to include those missing quotes and paragraphs.
Footnotes
On the different Turkish editions of this text, there has only been one footnote in Chapter 2 as well as one endnote regarding the text correction. We decided to include more of them to give more information and context regarding particular events or people to whom Kaypakkaya quotes or refers, in order to facilitate a better understanding for those who are not familiar with that time in Turkish history.
Finally, we would like to thank the translators of Nisan Publishing for their hard work. The German translation of Trotz Alledem has also been of tremendous help, especially for their footnotes. As the founder of one of the most important Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties, Kaypakkaya’s works are important for study both in Turkey/North Kurdistan as well as in imperialist countries and in the world. We hope to see more of his work published in English in the future.
A Short History of Ibrahim Kaypakkaya
Ibrahim Kaypakkaya was born in 1949 in a small village close to the city of Çorum. A student of physics, he was attracted to left politics during his university years and became a member of the clandestine TIIKP (Revolutionary Workers’ and Peasants’ Party of Turkey) led by Doğu Perinçek. This Party was a direct split from the main leftist party at that time called the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TIP), which had fallen into electoral politics and reformism, while TIIKP supported a democratic national revolution line and was pro-Chinese (this party was also the first Turkish party to be officially recognized by China).
Kaypakkaya realized that the TIIKP was more revolutionary in form than TIP, publishing for example translations of the works of Mao. It also had a journal using the revolutionary slogans from the Chinese Cultural Revolution. However, it was in essence a rightist reformist Party, that maintained a chauvinist line on the Kurdish question because of the influence of Kemalism.
During several months, an intense line struggle raged in TIIKP. Finally, Doğu Perinçek’s solution to resolve the line struggle was send a comrade to assassinate Kaypakkaya. The attempt did not work, as the attempted assassin was actually a supporter of Kaypakkaya. But shortly after this incident, Ibo decided to split from TIIKP and found a party in April 1972 based on Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, called the Communist Party of Turkey Marxist-Leninist (TKP-ML). It immediately founded a people’s army called the Liberation Army of the Workers and Peasants of Turkey (TIKKO) and began a people’s war in Dersim, the region that Kaypakkaya saw as having the best conditions to start a revolutionary movement.