Long before Kurdistan had institutions, parties, or internationally recognised border to argue over, one man in Kirkuk understood that a nation without organisation is a nation without a future. Rafiq Hilmi was not a military commander or a tribal chief rather he was a historian, a poet, a linguist and above all a political pioneer where in the late 1930s at considerable personal risk, he built the first organised Kurdish political party from scratch.
Born in Kirkuk in 1898, the son of an Ottoman army officer, Hilmi received an education that took him from Slemani and Baghdad to the Military Academy and Technical School of Istanbul, where he mastered not only Kurdish but Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and French. He was a man of the world at a time when most Kurdish political life was defined by tribal loyalties and local grievances. That breadth of education and perspective shaped everything that followed.
At the request of Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji, the governor or Southern Kurdistan, Hilmi accompanied Major Edward Noel in his travels throughout Kurdistan between 1918 and 1922, teaching him Kurdish and Persian. Noel was no ordinary British officer. As Political Officer in Slemani, he was one of the few British officials who championed the Kurdish cause, favouring an independent state for the Kurds at a time when neighbouring states were deciding otherwise. That Hilmi worked closely alongside such a figure was no accident. It was a formative encounter with a Western official who took Kurdish aspirations seriously and it shaped Hilmi’s conviction that the Kurdish cause was best advanced through engagement with the West rather than in opposition to it.
That pro-British, pro-Western instinct was not opportunism, It was a considered strategic position at time when the alternatives such as pan-Arab nationalism, Soviet influence, and Ottoman nostalgia offered the Kurds nothing.
In 1938 Hilmi founded Hîwa, meaning Hope, the first organised Kurdish political party, established by a group of Kurdish intellectuals in Kirkuk. It expanded rapidly from Kirkuk across the provinces of Southern Kurdistan, bringing in Kurdish civil servants and academics under a coherent nationalist programme focused on securing autonomy of Kurdistan. For the first time Kurdish political life had a structure and leadership that operated on principle rather than tribe or family.
The Hiwa Party was the first Kurdish organisation to bring together members from all section of Kurdish society including businessmen, intellectuals, soldiers, tribal leaders, religious figures, and political elites under one roof. That coalition building was Hilmi’s greatest political achievement. Kurdish politics had always fractured along tribal and regional lines. Hilmi, however briefly, held it together.
Hilmi advocated for a pro-British line within the party at a time when that position was neither popular nor without risk. He understood something that many of his contemporaries did not. Small nations do not achieve self-determination through isolation. They achieve it through alliances, institutions and making themselves indispensable to the powers that shape the international order.
The party did not survive long. Hîwa dissolved in 1945, its moment passing as the political landscape shifted around it. But what it built did not dissolve with it. The organisational traditions, the political networks, and the nationalist framework that Hîwa established laid the groundwork for every Kurdish political movement that followed in later years.
Beyond politics, Hilmi wrote for two Kurdish newspapers, Rojî Kurdistan and Bangî Kurdistan, and later became recognised as a talented literary critic following the publication of the second volume of his Kurdish Poetry and Literature in which he studied Goran’s poetry and the modernist literary movement in depth. He understood that political independence and cultural identity are inseparable. A nation which cannot tell its own story in its own language has already lost something essential.
Hilmi died in 1960, having spent his life building something he would never fully see completed. Kurdish statehood remains unrealised. Kurdish political life remains fractured. But the idea that Kurds could organise and articulate a political programme rooted in principle rather than tribe, that idea did not die with him.
He built something in difficult circumstances with limited resources and no guarantee of success. He did it because he believed it was necessary. That is, in the end, the only reason to build anything.
