There are moments in the history of a people when the scattered becomes organised, when grievance becomes programme and when exile becomes the unlikely birthplace of national consciousness. For the Kurds, one such moment came on 5 October 1927 in the Lebanese mountain town of Bhamdoun.
Xoybûn, meaning “to be oneself” in Kurdish, was an organisation founded by exiled Kurdish intellectuals and tribal leaders. Its leader was Celadet Ali Bedirxan, a member of one of Kurdistan’s most distinguished intellectual families, a man who understood that the Kurdish cause required not only arms but ideas, not only rebellion but organisation.
The new Turkish Republic, founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923, pursued a policy of centralisation and Turkish nationalism that left no room for Kurdish identity or autonomy, suppressing the Kurdish language, names and institutions. It was in response to this systematic erasure that Kurds, many of them exiles and former officers, came together to build something more durable than a tribal uprising. Xoybûn was the result.
Its founding drew together former members of earlier Kurdish nationalist organisations alongside Kurdish intellectuals who had taken refuge in Iraq, Iran and Syria. The first central committee included figures such as Mehmet Şükrü Sekban, Celadet Ali Bedirxan, Memduh Selim, Haco Agha and Bozan Bey Shahin. What made Xoybûn different from what came before was its reach and its ambition. This was not a local or tribal network. It was a pan-Kurdish political organisation with a diplomatic strategy and the willingness to pursue armed resistance when necessary.
Xoybûn marked a pivotal advancement in Kurdish nationalism by establishing a structured political organisation that transcended tribal affiliations, uniting intellectuals, elites and activists from diverse regions under a unified agenda for independence. That fragile unitywas itself a political achievement in a landscape where Kurdish politics had long been fractured by family loyalty and competing interests.
The driving force behind the Ararat rebellion was Xoybûn. The Republic of Ararat was declared around 1927 in the Mount Ararat region of eastern Turkey, with its military leadership entrusted to Ihsan Nuri Pasha, a Kurdish former Ottoman officer, while political direction came from the Xoybûn league including members of the Bedirxans. For a brief moment, a Kurdish state existed on the slopes of the mountain that has long served as the symbolic heart of Kurdish identity. Turkish forces crushed it in 1930.
But the significance of Xoybûn was never reducible to the Ararat rebellion alone. Celadet Ali Bedirxan’s 1930 treatise La Question Kurde, ses origines et ses causes, issued under Xoybûn auspices, articulated the historical and political grievances of Kurds to a French-speaking audience, contributing to broader awareness amid interwar geopolitical shifts. Xoybûn understood something that many nationalist movements of the era did not, that the battle for Kurdistan was a battle for international opinion and that the Kurds needed advocates in European capitals as much as fighters on the mountain.
As Xoybûn spread, Kurds in Syria began to consider it an essential centre of knowledge and learning. Kurdish writers and philosophers participated in Xoybûn sponsored activities and the organisation offered a space where Kurdish intellectuals could gain experience speaking about nationalism and self-determination thus providing a foundation for the emergence of the Kurdish political movement.
Xoybûn was dissolved in 1946, its formal existence ended but its influence far from over. Despite its suppression, Xoybûn’s legacy endured as a symbol of resilient nationalist aspiration, informing later Kurdish movements and sustaining Kurdish nationalist discourse through diaspora networks in Europe and the Middle East.
The story of Xoybûn is the story of a people who refused to accept that defeat was permanent. Driven from their lands, scattered across four countries and denied recognition by every power that carved up the post-Ottoman world, Kurdish nationalists built institutions in exile, wrote manifestos in foreign cities and declared a republic on a mountain. They lost. But the idea survived.
