One newly designated country rejected this international settlement, went to war to overturn it, emerged with roughly twice the territory envisioned for its new state, carried out a documented genocide against one indigenous people, expelled and displaced others, and ended up controlling most of the historic homeland of a people that had been promised a state. Another people promised self-determination never received a state at all. To this day, they remain the world’s largest stateless nation, and in have long faced restrictions on the expression of their national identity and barriers to political representation.
Who is this state?
The answer is Turkey.
Changing the name to Türkiye does not change this history.
The post-Ottoman settlement initially envisioned a much smaller Turkish state under the proposed Treaty of Sèvres. It also envisioned independent Armenian and Kurdish states, alongside Arab self-determination and Jewish self determination in the already recognized Jewish ancestral homeland.
The Turkish national movement violently rejected that settlement and through the Armenian Genocide, the destruction and expulsion of Armenian communities from much of their historic homeland, and the disappearance of the promised Kurdish state, was able to lay claim to a much enlarged Turkish state.
Armenia exists today, but largely as a post Soviet-era republic established east of the historic Armenian heartland, while much of historic Armenia remains within Turkey. The Kurds, meanwhile, remain divided among several states and without a sovereign homeland of their own.
So let’s hear it for Turkey, a country actually born of genocide, ethnic cleansing, land grab and ongoing political suppression of minorities.
P.S. The Arabs attempted something similar against Jewish self determination, but unlike the Armenians and the Kurds, the Jews ultimately succeeded in preserving and defending their national self-determination in part of their ancestral homeland (and had Jews received their fair territorial share of the Ottoman Empire lands based on their population, Israel would be much larger).
Mick Hartley 
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