BECOMING ROMA: GYPSY IDENTITY, CIVIC ENGAGEMENT, and URBAN RENEWAL in TURKEY by Danielle V. Schoon

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Becoming Roma: Gypsy Identity, Civic Engagement, and Urban Renewal in Turkey

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Authors Schoon, Danielle van Dobben

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BECOMING ROMA: GYPSY IDENTITY, CIVIC ENGAGEMENT, AND URBAN RENEWAL IN TURKEY

Danielle V. Schoon

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

SCHOOL OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND SCHOOL OF MIDDLE EASTERN AND NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2015

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE

As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Danielle V. Schoon, titled Becoming Roma: Gypsy Identity, Civic Engagement, and Urban Renewal in Turkey, and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

______Date: 04/30/2015 Brian Silverstein

______Date: 04/30/2015 Salih Can Açıksöz

______Date: 04/30/2015 Anne Betteridge

______Date: 04/30/2015 Zehra Aslı Iğsız

______Date: 04/30/2015 Carol Silverman

Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College.

I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.

______Date: 04/30/2015 Dissertation Director: Brian Silverstein

______Date: 04/30/2015 Dissertation Director: Salih Can Açıksöz

STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder.

SIGNED: Danielle V. Schoon

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I could not have completed this dissertation without the support and guidance of my mentors, colleagues, family, and friends. I would like to express my very great appreciation, first and foremost, to my dissertation advisor and academic mentor, Dr. Brian Silverstein, for his expert advice and encouragement, and for reading and rereading many drafts of my work. I would also like to offer special thanks to my dissertation committee, Dr. Salih Can Açıksöz, Dr.

Anne Betteridge, Dr. Zehra Aslı Iğsız, and Dr. Carol Silverman, for agreeing to serve on my committee and for supporting my project. I wish to acknowledge several other professors at the

University of Arizona who did not serve on my final dissertation committee, but who contributed to this work along the way: Dr. Ana Maria Alonso, Dr. Aomar Boum, Dr. Michael E. Bonine,

Dr. Linda Darling, Dr. Yaseen Noorani, and Dr. Leila Hudson.

This research was made possible by the generous financial support of the Fulbright-Hays

Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship (funded by The Mellon Foundation that year), the Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS) Summer Research Grant and Dissertation Writing

Grant, several Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships, and many intramural grants from the University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS),

Graduate and Professional Student Council (GPSC), Associated Students of the University of

Arizona (ASUA), School of Anthropology (SOA), School of Middle Eastern and North African

Studies (MENAS), and Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES). I am grateful to the staff at the Fulbright IIE office in Turkey, who managed the distribution of funds and my orientation, as well as Dr. Sinan Ciddi of ITS, Dr. Scott Lucas of MENAS, Dr. Diane E. Austin of SOA, and

Dr. Anne Betteridge of CMES for their support, and to the staff of these offices who made these grants possible. I am particularly thankful for the assistance of Georgia Ehlers and Shelley 5

Hawthorne Smith in the UA Graduate College Office of Fellowships and Community

Engagement for their assistance with my Fulbright application. Thanks to Vladimir Spencer for the opportunity to participate in the U.S. Department of State and World Learning Foreign Policy

Dialogue Among Emerging Leaders in Turkey and the U.S. in 2008. I am grateful to the

American Anthropological Association, Association of American Geographers, Middle East

Studies Association, and Gypsy Lore Society for opportunities to present my work at their annual meetings.

Of course, this research would not have been possible without the generous contributions and willingness to participate of countless people and organizations in the field. Many of them go unnamed here for reasons of anonymity, but they have my deepest appreciation and gratitude.

My special thanks are extended to Funda Oral for collaborating on this research project with me and for dedicating time, thoughtfulness, and creativity to pursuing answers to some of our most pressing questions. I would also like to thank the members of the Sulukule Platform and those people volunteering their time and resources to improving the situation of Turkey’s Roma, particularly Cihan Baysal, Viki Ciprut, Hacer Foggo, Figen Kelemer, Ana Oprisan, Nejla

Osseiran, Derya Nuket Ozer, Emre Sahin, Çiğdem Şahin, and Özlem Soysal. For their scholarly contributions, I would like to thank Dr. Asu Aksoy, Dr. Jaynie Aydin, Dr. Ayfer Bartu Candan,

Dr. Elsie Ivancich Dunin, Dr. Victor A. Friedman, Dr. Zeynep Gürsel, Dr. Tolga İslam, Dr.

Hikmet Kocamaner, Dr. Biray Kolluoğlu, Dr. Zeynep Korkman, Dr. Tuna Kuyucu, Dr. Jennifer

Mack, Dr. Adrian Marsh, Dr. Amy Mills, Dr. Judith Okely, Dr. Öykü Potuoğlu-Cook, Dr. Sonia

Seeman, Dr. Zeynep Gonca Girgin Tohumcu, Dr. Özlem Ünsal, and Dr. Jeremy Walton. I especially appreciate Dr. Arzu Öztürkmen and Dr. Robert Reigle for helping me to establish professional affiliations at Boğaziçi University and the Turkish Music Conservatory School 6

(MIAM) at Istanbul Technical University (İTÜ), respectively. Nafiz Akşehirlioğlu, Elmas Arus,

Cenk Aydin, Sevi Bayraktar, Moira Bernardoni, Ashwin Bijanki, Abdullah Cıstır, Megan Clark,

Jonzi D, Hannah Draper, Caroline Finkel, Bajram Haliti and the World Romani Congress, Engin

Işık, Constanze Letsch, Devi Mays, Kobra Murat, Abbas Nokhasteh, Simone Pekelsma, Şükrü

Pündük and members of the Sulukule Romani Culture Development and Solidarity Association and the Sulukule Romani Orchestra, Logan Sparks, Mija Sanders, Ashley Stinnett, Maisa Taha,

Delpha Thomas, Ahmed Tohumcu, Pelin Tünaydın, Reyhan Tuzsuz, Kevin Yıldırım, Sema

Yıldız, Jessaiah Zure, Members of EdRom, the members of Tahribad-ı İsyan and the children of the Sulukule Atelier, the Adnan Menderes University Roma Studies Center, the Istanbul Studies

Center at Kadir Has University, the Orient-Institut Istanbul, the Tarlabaşı Toplum Merkezi, and the directors of several Romani associations in Izmir, Edirne, and Istanbul, also made significant contributions to my studies and fieldwork, for which I am very grateful.

I wish to acknowledge the support of my dear friends, teachers, and colleagues throughout my graduate work at the University of Arizona and in the field, especially Danielle

Adams, Nadezhda Alexandrova, Paul Amiel, Elizabeth Angell, Julie Armin, Mete Bağcı, Eric

Beisterfeld, Berker Berki, Burcu Borhan, Abigail Bowman, Diana Budur, Tamara and Tylor

Brand, Jacob Campbell, Josh Carney, Amy Clark, Jessie Clark, Nick Danforth, Reed Duecy-

Gibbs, Courtney Dorroll, Gail Godbey, Mary Goethals, Gökçe Günel, Murat Güney, Timur

Hammond, Didem Havlioğlu, Nejlah Hummer, Damla Işık, Vedica Kant, Sarah El-Kazaz,

Gregory Key, Hikmet Kocamaner, Nicholas Kontovas, Jim Kuras, Mehraneh Mirzazad Kuras,

Avital Livny, Susan MacDougall, Priscilla Magrath, Lynn Maners, Alexander Markovic,

Melanie Medeiros, Keri Miller, Elizabeth ‘Artemis’ Mourat, Britta Ohm, Ahmet Okal, Judith

Okely, Dana Osborne, Özlem, Ebru and Cenk Özgür, Corky Poster, Lucero Radonic, Sarah 7

Raskin, Robin Reineke, Rodrigo Renteria, Carolina Safar, Öznur Sahin, Megan Sheehan, Gila

Silverman, Loanne Snavely, Evren Sönmez, Jenn Squire, Robin Steiner, Angela Storey, Pete

Taber, Natalia Martinez Tagüeña, Teoman Tureli, Seçil Uluışık, Sue and Jerry Whittaker,

Urszula Wozniak, Joanna Wulfsberg, Mark Wyers, Murat Yıldız, Aslı Zengin, and many others.

Last but certainly not least, I am deeply grateful for the love and support of my family, especially my parents and parents-in-law. Two dissertators and a new baby would not have made it to the finish line without all of you! For the dishes, meals, childcare, and words of encouragement, I am endlessly grateful. I am so lucky to find balance in my life with sweet, little

M, who endured her parents’ dissertating with patience and a good sense of humor. And finally, to my dear and loving husband, Eric Schoon, for his good company and constant encouragement, plus many hours of discussing, reading, contributing to, and editing my work. Eric, I’m so grateful to be sharing this journey with you.

Any remaining errors are my own. If I have failed to acknowledge anyone in particular, I beg his/her pardon.

DEDICATION

For Myriam;

and, in Memory of

Hugo Henri van Dobben

and

Michael E. Bonine

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT...... 10

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION...... 11 1.1 Dissertation Format...... 22 1.2 Contribution to Scholarship...... 23 1.2.1 Culture and Power...... 23 1.2.1.1 Romani Identity and Belonging...... 36 1.2.1.2 Neoliberal Forms of Governance in Turkey...... 43 1.2.1.3 Globalization and Urban Development...... 47

CHAPTER 2: PRESENT STUDY...... 52 2.1 Research Scope, Settings, and Methods...... 52 2.1.1 Sulukule and the Sulukule Platform...... 58 2.1.2 The Sulukule Children’s Atelier and Tahribad-ı İsyan...... 65 2.1.3 Romani Associations (dernek) in Istanbul, Izmir, and Edirne...... 69 2.1.4 Conferences, Lectures, Workshops, and Meetings...... 72 2.1.5 Public Events: International Romani Day, Hıdrellez, and Kırkpınar...... 73 2.2 Main Arguments of Each Article...... 77 2.2.1 Article 1...... 77 2.2.2 Article 2...... 80 2.2.3 Article 3...... 84 2.3 General Conclusions...... 85

REFERENCES...... 89

APPENDIX A: ARTICLE ONE ‘Sulukule is the Gun and We are its Bullets’: Urban Renewal and Romani Identity in Istanbul...... 100

APPENDIX B: ARTICLE TWO Romani Rights in the European Periphery: The Politics of Minority Recognition and Ethnic Identity in Turkey...... 122

APPENDIX C: ARTICLE THREE Closing Doors, Opening Windows: Dislocated Roma and the Politics of Openness in Istanbul, Turkey...... 175

ABSTRACT

This dissertation is a study of economic, political, and social reforms in contemporary Turkey and how they are experienced by the country’s Romani (“Gypsy”) population. By focusing on urban renewal projects, the pluralization of cultural identities, and the proliferation of civil society organizations, this dissertation analyzes these changes in urban Romani communities, examining how state and civil society initiatives impact identity and civic engagement. This research contributes broadly to work in anthropology studying the relationship between culture and power, specifically investigating how local cultural identities and practices intersect and interact with transnational political-economic processes. While the meaning and application of the concept of ‘culture’ has been much debated in the social sciences, this analysis is situated within studies that consider culture a site of governance. Many modern forms of governance work less through force than by subjecting culture to the political logic of empowerment and improvement. This study interrogates this process via ethnographic research with dislocated Roma and Romani rights civic actors in three Turkish cities, focusing in particular on one dislocated Romani community from a neighborhood in Istanbul known as Sulukule. The project is unique in that it addresses Romani identity, culture, and citizenship where they intersect with current politics around urban development in Turkey. While ‘urban renewal’ projects are incorporating the land of the urban poor into new plans for Istanbul as a global city, Romani residents find themselves increasingly dispossessed. More than interventions that aim to improve the conditions of Turkey’s Roma, urban development has renewed the politicization of urban Romani communities, particularly the youth, who have begun participating in social movements and Romani rights activism. The study finds that, while the changes resulting from liberalization and democratization in Turkey are typically posed by scholars, politicians, and civil society actors as either positive or negative, the advantages and disadvantages for marginalized populations like the Roma are actually simultaneously produced and mutually constituted. While Turkey’s Roma are being integrated into discourses, practices, and institutions of Turkish national belonging and transnational Romani rights solidarity, they are also facing the dissolution of their local communities, traditional occupations, and cultural life. This dissertation suggests broader repercussions for anthropological understandings of the impact of free-market liberalization and democratization in so-called ‘developing countries,’ and particularly interrogates the politics of ‘openness’, the relationship between civil society and ‘political society’, and the role of transnational networks in urban politics.

CHAPTER 1:

INTRODUCTION

This dissertation is a study of economic, political, and social reforms in contemporary

Turkey and how they are experienced by the country’s Romani (“Gypsy”)1 population. By focusing on urban renewal projects, the pluralization of cultural identities, and the proliferation of civil society organizations, this dissertation analyzes these changes in urban Romani communities, examining how state and civil society initiatives impact identity and civic engagement.

This research is part of a broader effort in anthropology to study the relationship between culture and power. Brian Silverstein encourages anthropologists to acknowledge but look beyond the functions of liberalization as a process of incorporating places like Turkey into global capitalism, and attend to the particular cultural configurations that involve people’s worldviews and lifestyles. He writes, “Culture is now, in liberalizing locales such as Turkey, a major site of administration, governance and management, and as such invites us to rethink our approaches to culture in its relation to power” (2010a: 23).2 While the meaning and application of the concept of ‘culture’ has been much debated in the social sciences, my own analysis is influenced by

1 There are various approaches to usage in Romani Studies. Following the scholar, Ian Hancock, I generally use Roma or the adjective Romani (i.e ‘the Romani people’), although the Turkish, Roman (sing.) and Romanlar (pl.) are sometimes also used. 2 The analysis by Rose and Miller of American work reform in the early part of the 20th century is a case in point. They demonstrate that scientific management is a type of cultural economy, and examine the ways that terms such as ’productivity’, ‘quality’, or ‘excellence’ gained traction, not just in corporate boardrooms but also in state agencies, schools and charities. The “enterprising subject” was articulated as the active citizen of democracy at work, an ethic of personal identity. Ironically, the ways in which we discipline ourselves are precisely how we make ourselves ‘free’, ‘efficient’ and ‘empowered’ (2008: 193-8). 12 recent scholarship on Turkey that looks at local assemblages of culture and the political.3 As noted by scholars of governmentality, many modern forms of governance work less through force than by subjecting culture to the political logic of empowerment (see Cruikshank 1999).

Similarly, programs that set out to improve the condition of a particular population also shape livelihoods and identities (see Murray Li 2007). This study investigates how local cultural identities and practices intersect and interact with transnational political-economic processes.

Through fieldwork with Romani rights associations, activists, and dislocated Roma in Istanbul,

Izmir, and Edirne, I engage with internal debates over the direction of Romani identity and citizenship in Turkey today in order to analyze their broader repercussions for anthropological understandings of the impacts of liberalization and democratization in so-called ‘developing countries’.

More specifically, this dissertation focuses on Romani identity, culture, and citizenship where they intersect with current politics around urban development in Turkish cities. As urban renewal projects are incorporating the land of the urban poor into new plans for Istanbul as a

‘global city,’ low-income Romani residents find themselves increasingly dispossessed. More than any interventions that aim at improving the conditions of Turkey’s Roma, urban development has inadvertently triggered the politicization of urban Romani communities (see

Seeman in Jurková and Bidgood 2009), particularly the youth, who have begun participating in a

‘right to the city’ social movement in Istanbul and taking up activist discourses that posit urban identity as an alternative to both Turkish national belonging and transnational Romani rights

3 For instance, Silverstein (2010b) traces the Islamic reasons for the secularization of religious disciplinary practice in Turkey; Martin Stokes (2010) looks at the transformation of Turkish public life via an analysis of popular music; Yıldız Atasoy (2009) analyzes the political resignification of moral values and ethical standards by Islamic groups in the development of an ethos of Muslim engagement with the market economy; Hakan Yavuz (2006) explores how and why the AK Party has adopted a liberal line; and Potuoğlu-Cook (2006) connects Turkey’s neoliberal projects to nostalgia for an imagined Ottoman past, heritage tourism, and urban gentrification, and suggests that contemporary Turkish belly dance is a site at which secular, middle-class subject positions in a market-driven economy can be explored and better understood. 13 solidarity. This dissertation interrogates these issues via an ethnographic study of a Romani community that was dislocated from an Istanbul neighborhood known as Sulukule.

While the changes resulting from liberalization in Turkey are typically posed by scholars, politicians, and civil society actors as either positive or negative, I found that the advantages and disadvantages for marginalized populations like the Roma are actually simultaneously produced and mutually constituted. For example, while Turkey’s Roma are being integrated into the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, they are also facing the dissolution of their communities, traditional occupations, and cultural life. Similarly, the profusion of international human rights organizations in Turkey today supports counter-hegemonic narratives and identity politics, and in doing so highlights social divisions that were not necessarily explicit before (such as Turk vs.

Roma). This dissertation investigates the ways that CSOs and human rights discourses both enable and limit the boundaries of Romani identity (Timmer 2010), human rights concepts and institutions are mobilized in political struggles (Rajagopal 2003), and particular concepts of culture are deployed in the production of human rights (see Asad 2000; Cowan, Dembour, and

Wilson 2001).

All of these changes are analyzed in this dissertation under the rubric of reform. Reform has been on the agenda in Turkey since the nation was founded in 1923 (Silverstein 2010a: 22).

Out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey was established on the

French Revolutionary model, adopting the principles of Presidential power and laicite (laiklik in

Turkish). Polarization due to multiple conflicts over territory had led to segmented social groups and the evacuation, expulsion, or massacre of the non-Muslim population in Anatolia. At the same time, Muslim populations from the Balkans and Caucasus had flooded into the region. The

Turkish Republic, although secular, was defined by its new demographic of Turkish-Muslims, 14 subsuming all heterodox Muslims (like Alevis) and non-Turkish Muslims (like Kurds) under one national identity that was, under the republican ethos, supposed to represent everyone equally

(see Keyder 2005). The founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, preached six basic principles (“six arrows”): Republicanism, Populism, Secularism, Reformism, Nationalism, and Statism. Populism urged social and political changes in the name of “the people,” while reformism tempered the idea of revolution by promoting gradual but nonetheless profound reforms. Statism was the defining feature of the new Republic, which emphasized the role of the state in achieving its democratic goals by enacting policies on society and by directing the economy. The nation was the sole source of official identity, and rival ethnic, religious, or social associations were shut down and the media strictly censored (Keyder 1987: 107).4

Statism, as an identification of party and state, began to break down at the beginning of

WWII, and the government established a multi-party system in 1946. The elections of 1950 resulted in a peaceful transfer of power to a new party, a functioning parliament, and more democratic political activity. The Democrat Party upheld the market and local traditions over

Statism and thereby gained the support of the masses. The new dominant role of the U.S. in the world economy and American funds to support economic liberalization, bourgeois criticism of the bureaucracy, and the aspirations of petty producers coincided to initiate a transition to capitalism based on market mechanisms (Keyder 1987: 202). The struggle between individuals seeking economic freedom and state interventions into the public sphere was a theme in Turkish

4 Scholars of Turkish history and society have demonstrated how statism is manifested in public institutions. For example, Sam Kaplan analyzes Turkey’s educational system, and argues that schools are more than bureaucratic institutions -- they are state projects that simultaneously totalize and individualize its subjects. The Turkish state has been characterized by a commitment to produce citizens out of school children, as the national community is embodied metonymically in the classroom. All members of the state are characterized as fraternal citizens bound with the same language, culture, and ideals (Kaplan 2006). Similarly, Sibel Bozdoğan analyzes early Republican architecture, which literally embodies Kemalist “nation building” via the modern principles of rationalism and functionalism (in Bozdoğan and Kasaba 1997: 133-156), and Arzu Öztürkmen traces the origins of Turkish folk dance as a national genre that represents a combination of populist romanticism of the ‘folk’ and statist inventions of tradition (in Kandiyoti and Saktanber 2002: 128-146). 15 politics from 1950-1980, resulting in several military coups and a fluctuating economy. When economic growth slowed in the 1970s and the gap between populist rhetoric and government practice became more pronounced, the religious right claimed to offer a more viable alternative to the failed promises of secularist nationalism. Tensions culminated in the 1980 coup, when the military took power and re-established an authoritarian regime, effectively eliminating the Left

(Keyder 2004: 66)5.

As Silverstein points out, the pace of reform has accelerated in contemporary Turkey and, moreover, the effects of current reforms are now increasingly being reflexively measured and studied (2010a: 22). The technologies of reform are rooted in major changes that occurred in the early 1980s. Öniş and Şenses refer to the period from 1983 to today as the ‘neoliberal era,’ in which the Turkish economy opened up to the global market (2009: 1). The first phase of this transformation was the “deregulation phase,” in which the key actors were the IMF and World

Bank; the second phase began in 1989, with the decision to open up the capital account completely, and was characterized by weak coalition governments and corruption. By the end of the 1990s, chronic fiscal deficits and high rates of inflation resulted in the “twin crises” of

November 2000 and February 2001, which changed the balance of power radically in favor of a coalition of transnational and domestic actors favoring further liberalization combined with regulatory reforms (Öniş and Şenses 2009: 1-4; Keyder 2004: 67). The economic reforms of the

IMF and World Bank and the political reforms of the European Union (EU) increased when

Turkey was granted candidate country status in 1999. The success of the conservative religious

Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002 also increased the pace of liberalization, as they made a formal commitment to economic reforms and EU membership during their early years of government. Their election and subsequent reforms have spurred debates over the role of the

5 For background on the coup, see Öktem 2011: 52-60; Zürcher 2004: 292-296. 16 state and the emergence of so-called ‘neoliberal’ forms of governance, such as civil society organizations (CSOs) and grassroots organizations, as an alternative to the welfare state. This period has also seen the shaping of new class formations, subjectivities, and sensibilities, private initiatives and private property, and a restructuring of the relation between state and citizen (see

Atasoy 2009; Tok 2010; Rutz and Balkan 2010). At the same time, the globalization of Turkish media has created new spaces for minority identities to be articulated, particularly for Kurds (see

Saraçoğlu 2010). As Salih Can Açıksöz has written, the political culture of Turkey in the 2000s has been shaped by tensions between Turkey’s EU membership process, which facilitates the restructuring of nationalism via neoliberal and multicultural democratic reforms, and the generations-long armed conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Worker’s Party

(PKK), which has intensified Turkish nationalism (2014: 247).

The “golden age” of the Turkish economy reached its peak in 2006, but by 2007-8 doubts were raised as to the sustainability of the country’s economic growth. Today, Turkey is experiencing political instability, ideological polarization, and setbacks in the EU membership process. The emphasis in public debates has shifted to a more explicit concern with issues relating to poverty and social justice. Saad-Filho and Yalman point to neoliberal reforms under the governing AK Party that led to regressive distributive shifts and higher unemployment and job insecurity. They suggest that a study of neoliberalism focus on everyday practices of dispossession and exploitation (2009: 1-2). Sadık Ünay agrees that scholars must direct attention to the multifaceted impact of neoliberal globalization, but sees potential for a ‘strategic-effective state,’ which could pursue both increased national competitiveness and social-distributive justice as long as there is an appreciation for fundamental democratic values and civil liberties (Ünay

2006: xv). Yet, how to define the source of these civil liberties is a cause for debate, as liberalism 17 and republicanism compete in the public arena. The religious right and Kurdish parties promote liberalization and EU accession, while the Republican parties continue to promote gradual reforms and a strong, interventionist state.6 The AK Party has promoted EU reforms in the areas of minority and human rights, while the Kemalists have positioned themselves within the French model of laicite to promote the republican model of equality against the acceptance of a separate

Kurdish identity (Atasoy 2009: 3). The rise of the AK party as the leaders of reform is a source of frustration for the Kemalists, who have long considered themselves the vanguard of modernization (Silverstein 2010: 22). Yet, the nature of these reforms, and indeed the way

‘modernization’ works to justify repressive state policies, is a question of interest to scholars and activists alike. Particularly in the area of urban development, the AK Party has proven to be willing to resort to oppressive and even violent measures to pursue their reforms.

Urban development in Istanbul, in particular, has received substantial attention from scholars (Öncü 1988; Keyder and Öncü 1994; Keyder 2005, 2008; Bartu-Candan and Kolluoğlu

2008; Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010; Göktürk, Soysal, and Türeli 2010; Aksoy 2012). The major political, economic, and cultural changes ushered in by the 1980 military coup included economic liberalization, which removed barriers to foreign economic investment and privatization (Keyder 1999), and a new system of urban governance in which the municipality system was reorganized into a two-tiered system of metropolitan (büyük belediye) and district

(ilçe belediyesi) municipalities (Angell, Hammond, and van Dobben Schoon 2014: 649).

Bedrettin Dalan, Istanbul’s first mayor after the coup, headed the project of turning Istanbul into a ‘global’ city from 1984 to 1989 via a series of demolition and redevelopment projects, with the support of the military and then Prime Minister, Turgut Özal. It was also during this period that

6 Nonetheless, Esra Özyürek demonstrates that neoliberal symbolism of privatization and market choice were integrated with the statist, nationalist ideology of Kemalism in the 1990s in order to defend the republican position in opposition to political Islam (2006). 18 the settlement and further development of gecekondu (informally built, or ‘built over night’) neighborhoods were legalized (Dicle 1983; Saraçgil 1997; Duyar-Kienast 2005), which had been built by rural migrants to the cities since the 1950s. After the coup, rural-to-urban migration continued, but for different reasons: clashes between the Turkish Army and the PKK (Kurdish

Worker’s Party) in southeastern Turkey sparked a massive migration of Kurds fleeing to

Istanbul. While previous migrants had benefitted from the informal housing market, these

Kurdish migrants confronted one that was increasingly formal and regulated (Öktem 2011: 92).

Furthermore, the politics of Kurdish identity took on spatial dimensions in the city, where

Kurdish migrants and Istanbulites lived in separate neighborhoods but regularly encountered each other and contested conceptions of the ‘citizen’ and the ‘stranger’ in “the everyday-life spaces of the city” (Secor 2004: 353).

The mayoral victory of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Refah (Welfare) Party in 1994 initiated new debates about public space, religion, and cultural politics. Although the Welfare

Party was officially banned in 1997, that political movement maintained both its popular support and political infrastructure (White 2002; Öktem 2011). Indeed, much of the AK Party’s current success builds upon the transformations ushered in by the Welfare Party in the 1990s (Angell,

Hammond, and van Dobben Schoon 2014: 650). Their rise to power after winning the 2002 national election led to a number of far-reaching political and economic transformations. The terms of Turkey’s IMF bailout required the continuing transfer of state assets into private hands, and the AK Party undertook a number of reforms over the following years that extended the

IMF’s recommendations. “Privatization, real estate, and urban transformation played a central role in this—financing local politics and helping to drive Turkey’s economic growth over the course of the decade” (Angell, Hammond and van Dobben Schoon 2014: 650). Economic 19 liberalization, globalization, and growth under the AK Party have spurred the commercialization of Istanbul, evident in the building of mega shopping centers, the growth of gated housing communities (see Bartu-Candan and Kolluoğlu 2008), and the AK Party’s urban transformation projects.

Activists and scholars alike have labeled the AK Party a ‘neoliberal’ regime.

Neoliberalism is a fitting term for referencing IMF-inspired structural adjustments and the ways that Turkey is increasingly being incorporated into global capitalism. However, while Turkey’s increased privatization and focus on entrepreneurship are consistent with the neoliberal model, the Turkish state is directly involved in developing urban infrastructures and Prime Minister

(now President) Erdoğan himself advocates for specific urban development projects. Therefore,

“rather than a withdrawal of the state, changes of the past decade are better understood as part of a shift in the mode and medium of state intervention” (Angell, Hammond, and van Dobben

Schoon 2014: 650-651). Widespread disapproval of such interventions culminated in the Gezi

Park protests of summer 2013, when a relatively small protest movement to protect a public park in Istanbul escalated into a massive national movement against the oppressive tactics of the government to limit free speech and the right to assemble.7

The Gezi Park protests drew worldwide attention to the tensions that exist in Turkey today over the ongoing processes of free-market liberalization and democratization. These processes are occurring in tandem – efforts to address minority and human rights and question the role of the state are happening in the context of socio-economic and political reforms.

Ironically, while development projects dislocate thousands of urban minorities to the outskirts of

7 Initially a series of peaceful demonstrations and sit-ins to contest an urban development plan for Taksim’s Gezi Park in central Istanbul, the Gezi Park protests escalated into a full blown social movement, known as Occupy Gezi, in cities across Turkey after police violently evicted protestors from the park with tear gas and an excessive use of force. 20 the city, the expansion of civil society in recent years has created a space for various human and minority rights issues to be addressed. The most salient example of these two processes interacting in both complementary and contradictory ways took place in Sulukule, a Romani neighborhood whose demolition under one of the AK Party’s first large-scale urban renewal projects inspired a significant protest movement. Right to the city and Romani rights activists found a common agenda in Sulukule, and issues raised in Sulukule about the dislocation of marginalized populations continue to inform debates over urban development in Istanbul.

Beyond Istanbul, references to the events in Sulukule are central to Romani rights efforts in

Turkey. However, Turkey’s Roma do not, in general, participate in so-called ‘resistance’ against the state, and Romani rights representatives per se were not present at the Gezi Park protests. In

Article 2 (Appendix B) of this dissertation, I explain the reasons behind this, which have much to do with how the Roma are situated in Turkish society and history.

The Roma of Turkey, or Romanlar, go by many names8 depending on their location and occupation, and are only just beginning to identify with a global, ethnic ‘Romani’ identity due to the influence of international CSOs and other non-state actors (Strand in Marsh and Strand 2006:

98). They are identified by non-Roma via references to dark skin color and, more substantially, via class differentiation, as the Roma are some of Turkey’s poorest citizens and tend to live and work informally (see Uzpeder et al 2008; Akkan, Deniz, and Ertan 2011). Discrimination against the Roma is rampant in Turkish society, discernible in negative stereotypical representations in literature, television, and film, as well as in exclusionary tactics in education, housing, and employment (ibid.). Despite this, unlike the Armenian, Greek, Jewish, Kurdish, and Alevi minorities of Turkey, the Romanlar tend to identify first and foremost as Sunni Muslim Turks, and the Roma designation is secondary (ibid.: 100). Many of the social divisions they experience

8 Çingene, Kıpti, Poşa, Mıtrıp, Karaçi, etc. (Oprişan in Marsh and Strand 2006: 163). 21 are among themselves. For example, the urban Roma of Istanbul tend to distinguish themselves against rural migrants, particularly Kurds, and against nomadic groups that the Roma themselves refer to by the derogatory term çingene (Kolukırık in Marsh and Strand 2006: 136).9 Many of the settled Roma in Istanbul and Izmir identify themselves by their neighborhood, or mahalle

(Mischek in Marsh and Strand 2006: 157-162). The Roma of Sulukule, for example, claim to have been living in their neighborhood at least since the conquest of Istanbul in 1453, and were known as Sulukule Romanlar. Despised by other Roma living in Istanbul for their association with the entertainment sector, their sense of identity only recently expanded to incorporate

European notions of Romani ethnicity when the municipality demolished their neighborhood.

Rather than a dispute over the right to recognition as an ethnic minority, however, the conflict between the Sulukule Romanlar and the municipality was wrapped up in ongoing contestations over the gentrification of low-income neighborhoods in Istanbul.

It is the encounter between minority rights politics, Turkey’s urban Romani communities, and state-led urban renewal projects that I find to be particularly significant for understanding how Romani identity is being shaped in Turkey today. Social and spatial exclusion have worked hand in hand to marginalize Turkey’s urban Romani communities; the incorporation of their neighborhoods into the city via urban renewal projects is touted by the government, and received by some, as a positive step toward Romani inclusion. Yet, demolitions like the one in Sulukule actually increase the social and spatial exclusion of Romani city dwellers, and the residents of neighborhoods like Sulukule experience such development projects as violent and oppressive.

The bad press that the demolition of Sulukule generated around the world, alongside other news stories about ongoing minority rights issues for the Roma of Turkey, eventually motivated the government to respond. In 2010, the AK Party declared a Romani Initiative

9 Amy Mills argues that the rural–urban distinction is at the root of social difference in Istanbul (2008: 393). 22

(Roman Açılımı), which promised legal and social reforms aimed at Romani integration in

Turkey. Prime Minister (now President) Erdoğan addressed a large crowd of thousands of Roma at a public event at Istanbul’s Abdi İpekçi Sports Hall, saying, “As the state, we have shouldered the responsibility on this issue. From now on, your problems are my problems.”10 He continued, referencing a well-known proverb, “Türkiye’de altmışaltı buçuk millet var” (there are sixty-six and a half nations in Turkey, the ‘half’ referring to the Roma): “Nobody in this country can be treated as ‘half’ a person,” he said.11 He went on to discuss plans to construct state housing for

Roma across Turkey: “I don’t want to see my Roma brothers in tents any more. I want them to enjoy a decent standard of living.” As critics have pointed out, such a statement further stigmatizes the Roma as nomadic and backward and, more importantly, in need of government assistance (Gençoğlu-Onbaşi 2012; also see Timmer 2010). Furthermore, the past five years have seen little progress in legal and social reforms for Romani integration other than the construction of these promised housing developments, which suggests that the Romani Initiative may be little more than a justification for urban renewal projects like the one in Sulukule.

This dissertation takes up questions of Romani identity and civic engagement in light of urban development and current approaches to minority issues in Turkey in order to clarify the nature of liberalizing reforms and their effects for marginalized urban citizens.

1.1 Dissertation Format

This dissertation is comprised of two chapters and three appended articles. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the relevant literature and this dissertation’s contribution to

10 Quotes from this speech in English are taken from a news story that was printed at the time in Today’s Zaman, “National Prime Minister Tells Roma ‘Your Sufferings Are Mine’” [http://www.todayszaman.com/national_prime- minister-tells-roma-your-sufferings-are-mine_204361.html accessed May 2015]. 11 Erdoğan repeated a similar phrase in several following public speeches: “Artık hiç kimse Romanları 'buçuk millet' olarak tarif edemez.” 23 anthropological, Turkish studies, and Romani studies scholarship. Chapter 2 describes the scope, settings, and methods of my research, the main arguments of each article, the general conclusions I draw in these articles and their implications for future research. The three appended articles provide in-depth analyses of key issues drawn from my fieldwork. The first article, “‘Sulukule is the gun and we are its Bullets’: Urban renewal and Romani identity in

Istanbul,” has been published in CITY: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action,

Vol. 18, No. 6: pp. 720-731.

1.2 Contribution to Scholarship

This dissertation builds on and contributes to anthropological scholarship on culture and power, with specific interventions into discussions of Romani identity and belonging, neoliberal forms of governance in Turkey, and globalization and urban development. This section gives an overview of these literatures and the contribution of my dissertation. Along with its academic contributions, my research aims to shed light on pressing questions of how to incorporate minorities into urban design and policymaking. Furthermore, as the Roma are increasingly experiencing dislocation throughout Europe (notably in Italy and France recently), the implications of this research extend beyond Turkey, offering valuable insights for scholars and policy makers contending with issues of urban development, economic liberalization, and the role of minorities in democratizing countries.

1.2.1 Culture and Power

This dissertation aims to address Silverstein’s entreaty “that anthropologists include consideration of the experiences of places like Turkey – not a post-colony, and not post-socialist, 24 with a history of strong nationalism – in their assessments of the substance of liberalizing reform” (2010: 22). Alongside other scholars who are increasingly addressing the effects of liberalization on the nature of government and its objects (see Murray Li 2007), Silverstein urges us to consider our approaches to culture in its relation to power (ibid.). In Turkey, reforms are oriented toward accession to the European Union12 and geared toward shaping the country and its governance in particular ways. This process, Silverstein argues, is increasingly reflexive and results in the application of new technologies to the economy, politics, and society (ibid.). For example, Turkey, in order to attract tourists and foreign investment, is being developed as a brand (see Iğsız 2014). ‘Brand Turkey’ is marketed and protected as a product on the global market, and the AK Party has taken an active interest in training politicians and citizens in how to do this (Iğsız 2013). Individual Turkish cities must compete for attention and resources in this arena, selling their local culture as a way to develop ‘value’ (Silverstein 2010: 23). However, particular aspects of the city’s cultural heritage and diversity are highlighted while others are ignored or erased. Similarly, when Istanbul was selected as a ‘European Capital of Culture’13 in

2010, resources were directed towards culture-led development rather than structural economic changes (Göktürk, Soysal and Türeli 2010: 14). In other words, ‘culture’ was celebrated while poverty and marginalization remained unexamined and unaddressed.

In this context, Turkey’s Roma are also rendered visible or invisible in new ways. On the one hand, they are being counted and their social and cultural values and practices studied and better ‘known.’ Their exclusion from state institutions has been identified as an official

12 Silverstein points out that Turkey is not merely undertaking reforms for the sole purpose of joining the EU; rather, membership in the EU in seen as part of a process of reform toward what is increasingly understood in Turkey as ‘good governance’ (2010: 23). 13 Beginning in 1985, every year several European cities are chosen to represent the cultural heritage and diversity of Europe. The cities are encouraged to raise funds and initiate projects that make it a better place to live and more attractive to tourists. 25

‘problem’ and targeted for reform by the state. Within the rubric of human rights, Turkey’s

Roma are being redefined as full citizens and invited to participate in so-called ‘civil society’ and democratic politics. This is read as a sign of Turkey’s progress toward democratization and full membership in the EU. However, how to define the status of the Roma and their citizenship is a matter of debate (which I explain further in Appendix B of this dissertation). At the same time, diverse interpretations and expressions of Romani identity, culture, and civic engagement are rendered invisible, as one formulation of ‘Roma-ness’ is celebrated and encouraged and others are ignored or erased. For example, the music and dance heritage of Istanbul’s Roma is publicly celebrated by governmental and non-governmental agencies, but other occupations such as bear training or fortune telling are considered backwards and immoral (Tünaydın 2013: 53-54).

Similarly, the Roma are romanticized as nomadic and living ‘day-to-day,’ while settled Romani communities are being uprooted due to urban renewal projects in the cities and secure, long-term employment opportunities are generally not available to the Roma.

This situation for the Roma is not new, as they have experienced marginalization throughout their history in Turkey, and indeed all over the world. However, the emphasis on a single Romani identity that is rooted in ethnic difference is new to Turkey. The Romani rights movement in Europe began in the early 1990s when, after the collapse of communism and during processes of state building in Central and Eastern Europe, increasing attention was given to minority rights issues. Since then, Romani rights activists and organizations have been on the rise (Vermeersch 2006: 2). But, while Turkey was certainly impacted by the politics of capitalism and globalization in this region (see Appendix C of this dissertation), the trajectory of minority rights in Turkey is distinct. Minorities in Turkey are defined by the state according to

26 the Treaty of Lausanne,14 which recognizes non-Muslim religious minorities (e.g. Jews and

Greek Orthodox Christians), but not (Muslim) ethnic minorities (e.g. Kurds and Roma); nor does it recognize Alevis as minorities. However, with EU-inspired reforms since the 1980s,

Turkishness has increasingly been subjected to scrutiny and Kurdish and other ethnic identities are discussed and debated in the public sphere. Romani rights have been perhaps the least contentious of these debates, as Turkey’s Roma do not have a history of conflict with the state.

With growing attention, organization, and resources, a significant movement for Romani integration into politics and state institutions has unfolded.15

Nurdan Gürbilek refers to a “new cultural climate in Turkey” that first emerged in the early 1980s. She notes that it is characterized by contradictions: the world’s biggest shopping malls in cities ringed by shantytowns; “land of international biennials, international festivals, international exhibitions, but home to people sunk furiously in nationality… land of people who cry they are victims of the West while victimizing their own ‘minorities’” (2011: 2). Repression, she suggests, is a state strategy wielded alongside the promise of freedom in the cultural sphere.

Opposition to the post-coup state in the 1980s was suppressed via state violence and thousands were imprisoned, while at the same time an era of cultural pluralism was eventually ushered in via pop music, television, and an explosion of personal expressions of individualism that had heretofore been silenced. This second strategy of power, as Gürbilek refers to it, was liberal and

14 A peace treaty signed in Lausanne, Switzerland, on July 24, 1923, that officially settled the conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies at the end of World War I. The treaty defined and recognized the borders and sovereignty of the modern Turkish Republic. It also provided for the protection of the Greek Orthodox Christian minority in Turkey and the Muslim minority in Greece. The Treaty of Lausanne remains the basic legal reference point for the definition of minorities in Turkey today, and is interpreted so that only non-Muslim religious groups are officially recognized, while Muslim minorities (e.g. the Alevi) and ethnic minorities are not granted special rights. 15 At the time of filing this dissertation, Turkey held general elections (June 7, 2015) and the country’s main political parties all fielded Romani candidates for Parliament, which is unprecedented in Turkish history. The CHP fielded Ozcan Purcu in the western province of Izmir, the AKP fielded Cemal Bekle, and the HDP fielded Sedat Zimba in the northwestern province of Edirne. Ozcan Purcu was elected the first self-identified Romani Parliamentarian in Turkish history. 27 inclusive, “aiming to encircle speech rather than silence, to transform rather than prohibit, internalize rather than destroy, tame rather than suppress... a liberal politics promising freedom of speech settled snugly into prohibitive policies of state” (6-8). Scholars of Turkey refer to this kind of politics as ‘neoliberal’ (Balkan and Savran 2002; Can 2006; Potuoğlu-Cook 2006; Ünay

2007; Öniş and Şenses 2009; Atasoy 2009; Rutz and Erol 2010; Saraçoğlu 2010; Tok 2010;

Silverstein 2010). Theoretically, neoliberalism refers to political economic practices that advocate individual entrepreneurial freedoms, strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade, while positing a minimal role for the state to merely create and preserve conditions in which these practices can flourish (Harvey 2005: 2). In practice, neoliberal globalization is identified with infusing the ideas of capitalism into state institutions and transforming social life in light of mathematical calculations that value production, competition, and profit above all else

(Bourdieu 1999; Harvey 2005). The ideal of ‘the self-regulating market’ as the driving force behind the individual pursuit of wealth depends on particular conceptions of the role of the state and the rational citizen-subject. However, neoliberalism is manifested in various ways depending on local contexts and political objectives.

Michel Foucault traces the shift to liberalism in 18th-century Europe, from free exchange to competition in the principle of the market; from the necessity of laissez-faire to competition as a principle of formalization, with its own structure and internal logic; and from the relationship between the economy and the state as one of a reciprocal delimitation of different domains to an active governmentality that governs for, not because of, the market (Foucault 2008: 116-17). It is within this conception of the market that the liberal definition of ‘freedom’ came to be considered the necessary condition for mutual and collective enhancement. The function of the state, then, is to guarantee economic freedom, and its sovereignty is legitimized in that function 28 alone (2008: 83). However, there is a problematic relationship between the ongoing production of freedom and excessive governance, which always risks limiting and destroying freedom. This becomes the obsession of the liberal art of government: to govern properly, and not too much.

Foucault suggests that there has been a gradual but continuous takeover by the state of a number of practices – a “perpetual statification” (2008: 77). Liberalism does not entail an absence of power – rather, it works in and through the condition of individuals being actively ‘free’

(Burchell in Barry et al 1996: 29-30). Nikolas Rose proposes that the ‘government of freedom’ today relies on the production of multiple technologies and practices, from ‘technologies of spaces and gazes,’ which are obsessed with the management of crowds and city planning, to the notion and statistical calculation of norms, technologies of consumption that determine the relationship between people and products, presuppositions of self-hood and the increasing role of expert knowledge, and the government of autonomous individuals via the dissemination of procedures for self-realization (1999: 69-91).

Beck, Giddens and Lash propose that the notion of ‘risk’ is central to modern government, identifying the relationship of society to the threats and problems produced by it as one of the areas of systematic transformation in liberal forms of governance today (1994: 7).

Mitchell Dean takes up this idea to analyze the “governmentalization of government,” which moves away from risk’s association with danger towards a more calculable kind of risk as a form of rationality. ‘Risk rationality’ is linked to particular forms of identity and expertise, through which risk becomes a characteristic of the population as a whole and individuals are distinguished by their share of the probability of risk (Dean 2010: 205-214). The state is not responsible for ‘society,’ per se, but only for managing the population as a whole, by constantly 29 calculating the minimum intervention necessary, predicting risks, and monitoring the mechanisms through which all of these calculations and predictions are made.

Rose and Miller insist that the central neoliberal motif of freedom should not be dismissed as ideology, but rather recognized in the routines of all kinds of administrative practices, like statistics (2008: 18; also see Silverstein 2010). Timothy Mitchell explains that calculability depends on a notion of the economy as a “self-contained, internally dynamic, and statistically measurable sphere of social action, scientific analysis, and political regulation”

(Mitchell 2002: 4, 8-9). This “politics of calculation” empowers certain kinds of knowledge generated by experts who become the spokespeople for the progress of modernity and the rationality of capitalism (ibid.: 15). The government must arm itself with a precise knowledge of society and the economy so that the constraint of its power is determined on a purely economic basis (Foucault 2008: 62). The methods developed by experts to govern aspects of human life such as marriage or work remind us of the fundamental role that knowledge plays in rendering aspects of existence thinkable and amenable to intervention (Rose and Miller 2008: 28-37).16

The ‘population’ is produced via the liberal art of government, which is the basis for

Foucault’s concept of ‘bio-politics’ (Foucault 2008). Bio-politics allows for the emergence of all kinds of expert knowledge, insomuch as the state must ‘know’ the population in order to govern properly. Liberal mechanisms of power, then, are willing to govern indirectly, via regimes of law and rights, but also via public health, family life, standards of living, and working conditions

(Dean 2010: 119). In other words, bio-politics allows for the indirect governance of citizens’ bodies – the liberal state acts upon our dispositions, feelings, and likelihoods towards certain actions. However, in order to function indirectly, citizens must learn to govern themselves.

16 Barbara Cruikshank demonstrates how the “welfare queen” of the 1970s and 80s in the U.S. was constituted as a quantifiable and calculable citizen-subject, which was the condition for her appearance as a scapegoat in attacks against the welfare system (1999: 104-121). 30

Therefore, a particular kind of subject emerges in the liberal state: the free, autonomous individual who makes decisions according to particular norms and regimes of truth and knowledge. Liberal discourses and practices of freedom appear to presuppose the autonomous subject, but in actuality create new political subjects who are increasingly expected to be the subjects of their own lives. This new political subject is the citizen, who is imbued with both personal and social responsibility and at the same time has inherent rights (Rose in Barry et al

1996: 37). The neoliberal subject is characterized by the relation between expertise and politics, the privatization of public services (or a “de-governmentalization of the State”), and “active individuals seeking to enterprise themselves, to maximize their quality of life through acts of choice, according their life a meaning and value to the extent that it can be rationalized as the outcome of choices made or choices to be made” (ibid.: 57). In other words, the neoliberal state works through autonomous agents by distancing formal political institutions from other social actors (54).

The neoliberal conception of the state as an enterprise that plans, budgets, and calculates risk, is meant to serve as a model for human behavior, as well. The neoliberal subject is “homo economicus,” the man of enterprise and production (Foucault 2008: 146-7). Neoliberalism entails an ethos of personal responsibility because society should not carry the burden of individual risks. Any kind of failure, then, is simply the result of bad decisions. ‘Homo economicus’ exercises his freedom appropriately by disciplining himself, maximizing his capabilities, and weighing his benefits against potential risks. However, Barbara Cruikshank suggests, this self-policing, or self-improvement, is increasingly being enforced at the micro- level through civil society organizations and these small intrusions of power and authority in our lives have become so normalized that we would have a difficult time tracing them to their 31 source. This does not mean that the daily business of individuals falls somehow ‘outside’ of politics – democracy is saturated with power relations obscured by the ‘will to empower’

(Cruikshank 1999: 1-3). Freedom and power are not opposed to one another, then. Neoliberal governance works through things like civic activism, subjecting emotions and subjectivities to a particular mode of power: the political logic of empowerment (ibid.: 67-72).

Tania Murray Li extends the logic of empowerment to the logic of improvement via governmental and civil society programs that set out to improve the condition of the population in a deliberate manner by shaping landscapes, livelihoods, and identities. Murray Li argues that these programs also set the conditions for particular problems, like the dislocation of populations. To understand the rationale of improvement schemes, we must ask what they seek to change and analyze the calculations they apply. However, she argues, it is equally important to pay attention to the gaps between what is attempted and what is accomplished, as subjects are produced as much by the failures, exclusions, or misrecognitions of the improvement programs as by their successes (for example, via social movements or collective mobilization)17 (2007: 10-

12). Murray Li engages the question of expertise posed by Mitchell, Ferguson, Rose and others, but is also interested in “the conditions under which expert discourse is punctured by a challenge it cannot contain” (11). She refers to Foucault’s concept of “permanent provocation” as the interface between the will to govern and strategies of struggle, suggesting that politics is a relation of power and a practice of contestation. “Political economy and contestation thus stand alongside the will to improve” (2).18 The neoliberal subject emerges not via force or the

17 Murray Li and Cruikshank’s arguments both draw from Partha Chatterjee’s The Politics of the Governed (2004), in which he argues that the growth of democracy in the Third World does not depend on the strengthening of "civil society," but on the increasing entry of marginal populations into "political society," in which they are able to compel the state (often in illegal ways) to negotiate what they are entitled to as citizens. 18 James Ferguson demonstrates how neo-liberal governmentality renders things technical and problematizes things so as to evacuate the political (“anti-politics”) and justify development and the intervention of experts (1994). 32 hegemony of the state, but by “learning to practice politics” and the specific, embodied practices upon which neoliberalism depends (23).

The Roma have been directly impacted by the rise of neoliberal forms of governance in

Europe. Privatization and the dismantling of the welfare state in governments across Europe, but particularly in former socialist countries, have resulted in the further social and economic marginalization and exclusion of the Roma.19 At the same time, they are at the center of conflicts over increasing rates of immigration to the western countries of the EU from the east. Extreme right political groups are not only anti-immigrant, but also explicitly and even violently anti-

Roma. Sigona and Trehan note that the loss of communism as the nemesis of the West alongside new nationalist movements created the need for a new ‘enemy,’ as national identity is defined in relation to the other (2009: 4-5). As the Roma have never been fully integrated into the body politic, they are easy scapegoats in the current climate of economic recession. Romani rights discourses have emerged in direct response to this situation (Guy 2001; Vermeersch 2006), but these discourses often emphasize civil and political rights while failing to address social and economic segregation (Sigona and Trehan 2009: 7-8). Sigona and Trehan argue:

The neoliberal gaze on Roma privileges spaces and forms of political mobilization which are ultimately ‘safe’ because they do not pose a threat to the assumptions on which the neoliberal order rests, and hence do not confront nor address the structural causes of the socio-economic marginality that affects the vase majority of Romani communities. Mainstream human and minority rights discourses operate within the neoliberal order providing an ‘acceptable’ although inadequate… framework for understanding and addressing Romani marginalization and anti-Gypsyism (8).

Turkey’s Roma are only recently being incorporated into such minority rights discourses. Like the rest of Europe, Romani rights in Turkey is focused on their integration into politics but fails

19 Other scholars have discussed the adverse effects of democratic transition for Roma in the former socialist states of Eastern Europe (see Barany 2002; Guy 2001; Pogány 2004; Klimova-Alexcander 2005; Bancroft 2005). The edited volume by Sigona and Trehan (2009) deals with the impacts of neoliberal ideologies and failed policy interventions in post-socialist Europe. 33 to address the underlying structural inequalities that continue to prevent their equal access to employment and social services or their full acceptance in mainstream society (Pogány 2006: 1;

Ghai 2000: 5).

Debates in the social sciences over the term ‘neoliberalism’ question whether it has come to stand in for too much, making it useless as a descriptive concept. However, as James Ferguson points out, neoliberal mechanisms of government are in fact multivalent (2009). He suggests that, instead of discarding the term neoliberalism, we think through the ways in which we conceptualize the links between the demands of marginalized people and practices of government. If we can be specific in our uses of the term ‘neoliberalism’ and avoid simply equating it with a nefarious “external causal force that is decimating local livelihoods,” then we can use it to reflect on how its various referents are in fact related. Ferguson further proposes that our empirical research may actually lead us to discover a surprising affinity between neoliberalism and progressive politics, and this is precisely what I found in my own research.

The Turkish Roma are being interpellated20 into a new kind of political subjectivity due to European Union integration policies, urban renewal projects in Istanbul and other cities around Turkey that are spurring activist movements over the ‘right to the city’, and a proliferation of CSOs that have turned their attention to Romani rights in Turkey. Rather than suppose that ‘Roma-ness’ is an essential identity of which Turkey’s Roma must become conscious, I analyze the political, economic, and social processes currently going on in Turkey that make Romani identity potent, visible, and attractive. The title of this dissertation, ‘Becoming

Roma,’ points to identity as always in process, contingent, indeterminate, and relational. Yet, this does not mean that the process of ‘becoming Roma’ in Turkey is haphazard or unintentional;

20 I refer to interpellation in the sense of being hailed or called, as defined by Althusser (1970), particularly for its emphasis on the subject as an effect of social relations. 34 rather, the Romani population of Turkey, as the ‘safe minority’ (in supposed contrast to the

Kurds, in particular)21, is currently the target of numerous state and non-state interventions that bring them into a particular relationship with the state and civil society. My research frames the making of the Roma as an ethnic minority in Turkey as a pragmatic project that “depoliticizes difference by co-opting diversity into the realm of the acceptable and non-threatening” (Fleras

2009: 8). In Appendix B of this dissertation, I argue that the state’s recently declared Romani

Initiative deploys ‘Roma-ness’ as a convenient descriptive category for classifying the Roma of

Turkey into a suitable target population for administrative, legal, economic, and electoral policy, or what Partha Chatterjee terms ‘political society’ (2004: 37). However, becoming Roma is also a process of “becoming political,” or laying claim to political subjectivity by articulating their rights as citizens in the idioms available to them (Secor 2004: 352). Şükrü Pündük, the director of the Sulukule Development of Roma Culture and Solidarity Association, exemplifies this new kind of political subjectivity. His family had lived in Sulukule for several generations. When his neighborhood was declared a renovation site, he founded the association. By the time I interviewed him, the battle for Sulukule had already been lost, but Şükrü remains a representative for the dislocated community at cultural events and music concerts in Istanbul. He is also regularly invited to meetings of the World Romani Congress and other international organizations, in Turkey and cities around Europe. His assessment of Turkey’s urban renewal policies struck me as particularly sophisticated, so I include it here in its entirety:

This decision that our government has made, to replace local culture with state culture, is not only happening here. It is happening all over the world. You know, because the neoliberals want to create one type of human being. They think everybody should be the same. They think it is enough to exhibit culture in a museum: shaman culture in one

21 Potuoğlu-Cook has argued, “Against the unresolved Kurdish and Armenian issues, the Turkish Roma represent the pleasant, ‘safe face’ of cultural/political pluralism” in Turkey (2010: 101). The Kurds of Turkey are often portrayed as aggressive, violent, and dangerous to the unity of the Turkish nation; my Romani informants actively disassociated themselves from ‘the Kurdish kind’ of ethnic minority in Turkey. 35

museum, black culture in another museum, Indians in another museum. This is the world policy today. They imagine that people should be robots, and go to work every day from 9 to 5. But this is not life. Life is something other than working every day. In places like Taşoluk, the streets are dead. Early in the morning there is movement in the streets, everybody leaving for work. Then again in the afternoon, when people take a lunch break. And then again in the evening there is movement as people come home from work. Other than that, there is no sound in the streets. Only police and ambulance sirens going by. When I think of America, I think of it like that. Endless tall buildings, and nothing else. I’m sure there is plenty of diversity there, but I can’t see it. Like here, our culture is supposed to be the Bosphorus Bridge and the Aya Sofya. Tourists are not supposed to see us. If we were robots, that might work. But we’re not. So they can’t replace our culture, even if they want to. They cannot take our culture and put it in Tasoluk. Everything is beautiful right where it is. So, as they discover that it is not possible to create that one type of human being in all the world, to replace every culture, what they do instead is to simply destroy culture (interview, June 2010. Translation from Turkish by Funda Oral).

Although not all the Roma I spoke to in Sulukule articulated their experience this way, their dislocation formed the backdrop for their present experiences of the Turkish state, the spaces of the city they occupied and moved in, their relationships with neighbors and activists, and their ongoing negotiations with Turkish citizenship and Romani identity.

While liberal reforms in Turkey have not necessarily benefitted marginalized citizens like the Roma or yet produced comprehensive means for integrating the Roma into Turkish society, neither can it be suggested that the increased enrollment of Romani children in public schools, the inclusion of Romani voices in the public sphere, or the attention of the Turkish state to

Romani rights issues is not benefitting the Roma in multiple, although complex, ways.

Therefore, this dissertation attempts to complicate our picture of Turkey’s liberalization process with a focus on internal debates about Romani identity, ‘the right to the city,’ and minority citizenship. I show that minority rights are enabled by and stand in an uneasy tension with political and economic liberalization in Turkey today.

My interventions into debates in Turkish studies, Romani studies, and urban anthropology are informed by the theoretical underpinnings I have outlined here. The title of this 36 dissertation, ‘Becoming Roma,’ refers to a particular configuration of social, economic, and political factors in Turkey that I attempt to disentangle in the following sections, namely: identity, civic engagement, and urban renewal.

1.2.1.1 Romani Identity and Belonging

Recent research has traced changes in perceptions of identity amongst the Turkish Roma over the past decade (Marsh and Strand 2006).22 This is because, despite recent liberal transformations of the Turkish public sphere, the republican approach to difference23 still holds a lot of power in Turkey, which perceives difference as divisive and threatening to the unity of the nation. ‘Roma-ness’ as an essential identity is becoming a powerful idea among Romani and non-Romani activists in Turkey today, and it contends with the national and religious designations that are ideally available to all citizens of the Republic of Turkey. There is a tension among Romani rights activists over these ascriptions: many of my informants claimed to be

Turkish Muslims first and only accepted ‘Roma-ness’ as a sub-identity (what President Erdoğan has referred to as alt kimlik), which designates cultural differences but still locates them firmly within a discourse of Turkish identity (the supra-identity, or üst kimlik). Activists in and from

Sulukule have challenged this particular formulation and encouraged Romani youth to embrace a more contentious and civically active political subjectivity. As I discuss in Appendix A of this dissertation, Romani youth are incorporated into discourses of resistance via the ‘right to the city’ social movement against state-led urban renewal projects in Istanbul. In hip hop music videos with lyrics and bodily movements that portray Romani youth as masculine and

22 Other research interrogates the category of Roma as a race or nation as it accommodates enhanced concern with human rights issues, such as poverty and discrimination, in Europe (see Barany 2002; Pogány 2004). 23 Technically, under the republican ethos, Turkish citizenship is supposed to represent everyone equally regardless of racial, ethnic, or gender differences. In practice, this has had the effect of actually ignoring or erasing existing differences. I explore the implications of this for Turkey’s Roma in Appendix B of this dissertation. 37 aggressive, these representations directly contest the more traditional representations of passive, entertaining Gypsies that are common in Turkish films and television.24

A movement toward solidarity among Romani communities across Turkey is growing in direct connection to the Romani rights movement in Europe. The emergence of an ethnic

Romani identity in Turkey is facilitated by European Romani rights organizations that highlight the history of discrimination and marginalization that the Roma continue to experience around the world. The demolition of Sulukule is often cited by these organizations as an example of human rights abuses toward the Roma in Turkey, and this narrative of shared identity via the experience of discrimination was essential to the protest movement against the neighborhood’s demolition. However, internal conflicts and contradictions made it difficult to direct everyone in

Sulukule toward a common goal. Coercion and lack of transparency by developers and state agencies, as well as land expropriation, caused tensions between residents who sold their houses and those who took part in resistance.25 I found that different perspectives on the neighborhood’s history, its demolition, and what the community wants for its future highlight the ways in which culture, place, and politics all factored into staking claims to Romani identity.

Taking cues from this ethnographic data, I employ ‘identity’ as a category of practice rather than analysis, as it is informed and constantly reshaped by specific, local configurations of politics, economics, and social life (Camaroff and Camaroff 2009; Croucher 2003; Kandiyoti and

Saktanber 2002; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Following Stuart Hall, I recognize that identities are never unified or singular; rather, identities are fragmented, irreducible, and constituted across intersecting discourses and practices (2000: 17-18). Furthermore, I deploy Joan Scott’s approach to identity as contingent and related to power. Scott suggests that the concept of identity, when

24 The most commonly known and recognized Romani musician in Turkey who performs this stereotype on public stages is a darbuka player named Balık Ayhan. 25 Such conflicts are detailed in Appendix A of this dissertation. 38 taken as a sociological category of shared traits and experiences, can easily lend itself to overly simplistic understandings of ‘diversity’ as nothing more than a plurality of identities and a condition of human existence, “rather than as the effect of an enunciation of difference that constitutes hierarchies and asymmetries of power” (1995: 14). The result is that group identities become totalized, reiterating their minority status in relation to whatever is taken to be the majority. The dynamic characteristics and margins of Romani identity in Turkey are clarified via this approach, contributing to a better understanding of the new cultural categories that are being constructed in the context of liberalization. In Appendix A, I consider Romani identity in relation to the neighborhood of Sulukule and its demolition. I propose that urban Romani identity is informed by the dynamics of various Sulukule assemblages that include interactions between various actors and networks with competing interests in the neighborhood. In Appendix B, I explain how Romani rights in Turkey has become a new target of civic and state intervention and

Romani citizenship is being reshaped by a politics of pluralism (Tambar 2014).

Scholars of Romani studies actively debate the usefulness of representing the Roma as an autonomous, distinct group with internal coherence. As Michael Stewart has pointed out, “the enormous diversity of Romany social forms, as well as Roma evasion of the trap of nation- state/ethnic figurations, continues to provide a potent source for anthropological reflection and theorization” (2013: 415). The question is whether or not there exists a set of shared experiences among the diverse groups of people around the world known as “Gypsies” and, if there does, what constitutes this shared experience? Historians and linguists have definitively proved a common origin in India, and this is the basis for designating the Roma as an ethnic group (see 39

Fraser 1995; Hancock 2002; Matras 2004). The International Romani Union (IRU)26 also used this as a basis for designating a Romani “nation without a territory.” However, this approach has been countered by social scientists who insist on the importance of local origins and ties over obsessive concerns with exotic origins (see Acton 1974; Okely 1983), and who turn attention, instead, to contemporary issues and ethnic mobilization in the struggle for recognition (Stewart

2013: 419). Thomas Acton points out the limits of the discourse of the nation-state by suggesting that the Romani movement is transnational and non-territorial, “a product and beneficiary of globalisation” that challenges the European ideology as a whole and should result in a reassessment of ‘European identity’ (in Marsh and Strand 2006: 27). Michael Stewart and others have further emphasized the development of Romani distinction in direct relationship with non-

Romani society (see Stewart 1997). Romani and non-Romani communities generally share the same social spaces and, in fact, depend on each other economically, but they also tend to rely on stereotypes of the ‘Other’ against which the ‘Self’ can be defined. The most commonly accepted mode of defining Romani identity among activists and non-governmental organizations is to emphasize the shared experience of discrimination and marginalization by Roma all over the world and throughout history. In Europe, especially, the groups known as Roma, Sinti,

Travellers, and Gypsies have experienced state and social persecution for centuries (see Fraser

1995).

26 The IRU is a global Romani rights organization seated in Prague. It was officially established at the second World Romani Congress in 1978. The World Romani Congress is a series of forums for discussion of issues relating to Roma around the world. There have been eight World Romani Congresses to date. Along with improvements in civil rights, the aims of the congresses are to standardize the Romani language, preserve Romani culture, and gain international recognition of the Roma as a national minority of Indian origin. The Romani flag and national anthem were established at the First World Romani Congress in 1971, and it was determined that the word ‘Roma’ would represent them (rather than “Gypsy” or its variants); International Romani Day was declared at the Fourth World Romani Congress in 1990; an official Romani non-territorial nation was declared at the Fifth World Romani Congress in 2000.

This has certainly been true in Turkey, where the Roma fill occupational niches as tinkers, recyclers, and entertainers (see Eren 2008) and contribute significantly to the economic and social fabric of city life, but are relegated to the status of second-class citizens.27 Although academic studies of the Roma in contemporary Turkey are on the rise, there continues to be a dearth of resources on the topic.28 The edited volume by Adrian Marsh and Elin Strand, Gypsies and the Problem of Identities: Contextual, Constructed and Contested (2006), contains some of the few published works on contemporary Turkish Roma, and follows Fredrik Barth’s approach to the study of ethnicity by focusing on how the Roma negotiate boundaries (see Barth 1969).

Elin Strand’s chapter describes what she found in her fieldwork in Istanbul: that Turkish

Muslim Roma are indifferent to the aims of the IRU and their declaration of a Romani “nation without a territory,” nor do they self-ascribe as an ethnic minority. Strand found that their primary identification is Turkish, while the Romani aspect of identity is located in associations with their local communities or neighborhoods (mahalle) and family origins. Furthermore, in several of her interviews, Strand heard Turkish Muslim Roma identify themselves in contra- distinction to the Kurds, whom they described as violent separatists (in Marsh and Strand 2006:

99-100; also see Eren 2008: 140). Several Roma told Strand about their experiences with non-

Turkish Roma attempting to recruit them to Romani activism. They not only turned the activists away, claiming that they already have a nation, but they also referred to the non-Turkish Roma as yabancı, which literally means ‘foreign’ but also implies that they were non-Muslims. “I believe that here lies the crucial difference between the Romanlar of Turkey and the Roma in

Europe. A Muslim Roman identifies himself/herself more with a Turkish Muslim, albeit he/she is gadjo [non-Roma], and less with a foreign (Christian) yabancı Rom” (in Marsh and Strand 2006:

27 They have also been the targets of violence (see Özateşler 2014). 28 There is a lack of scholarly resources on the Turkish Roma in the Ottoman Empire, as well, with the major exception being Marushiakova and Popov 2005. 41

101). The Islamic concept of umma (a supra-national community of Muslims) ideally encompasses all Muslims despite ethnic or national identities.

My fieldwork with Turkish Muslim Roma in Istanbul in 2011-2012 confirms Strand’s findings and her assertion that the emphasis on ethnic boundary-markers that is so prominent in studies of the Roma in Europe is not useful for fully understanding identity politics in Turkey.

Strand also makes an important point that Romani activists in Europe misinterpret the absence of

Romani ethno-nationalism in Turkey as false consciousness. This leads her to rightly question whether the Romani rights movement in Europe is truly transnational and can accommodate

Turkish Muslim Romani identity (ibid.: 101-102). I would add to Strand’s suggestion that

Turkey’s Roma “have the option of activating multiple identities, operational under differing conditions” (ibid.: 102) that this option has limits. I argue in Appendix B of this dissertation that an important aspect of the marginalization that the Roma experience in Turkey is due to class distinctions. Although the Roma’s self-designation as Muslim and Turkish affords them symbolic inclusion in the Islamic community and Turkish nation, respectively, their low status vis-à-vis the larger society makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the Roma to achieve equal citizenship in practice.

My analysis of the social position of the Roma in Turkey is informed by Partha

Chatterjee’s concept of ‘political society’ (2004). As Chatterjee suggests, democracy in much of the world today does not work through the strengthening of ‘civil society,’ but rather through the increasing entry of marginal populations into ‘political society,’ by which they are able to negotiate with the state for what they are ideally entitled to as citizens (ibid.: 66-67). Rather than asking whether the Roma are being adequately integrated into civil society (and, subsequently, resistant to hegemonic state discourses), examining how and why the Roma in Turkey do not 42 meet such expectations offers insights into the nature of political transformations occurring in

Turkey (and elsewhere) today.

Alongside concerns with Romani identity, this dissertation takes up a discussion of

Romani belonging in the city. Some ethnographic studies of other Romani communities have characterized the Roma as closed: Sutherland called them “the hidden Americans” (1975), Sway called them “familiar strangers” (1988), and Gmelch referred to the Roma as one of the “groups that don’t want in,” along with other sedentary “artisan, trader, and entertainer minorities”

(1986). Although these studies were conducted among particular Romani communities and were not necessarily meant to characterize all Roma, they are foundational texts in the field of Romani studies and reflect a larger trend, even in popular perceptions, to view the Roma as outsiders.

However, if we assume that the Roma simply do not “want in,” then do we justify their exclusion? And, when minority rights activists work toward the integration of Roma into social, economic, and political institutions, do they also inadvertently tie them to exclusionary or limiting discourses of identity? On the other hand, what of urban development projects that force so-called ‘closed neighborhoods,’ like Sulukule, to integrate? These are salient and pressing questions today, as we consider increasing state violence and exclusionary policies toward the

Roma in several key European Union member states in recent years (see Bancroft 2005; Orta

2010).

Assumptions about the Roma as a bounded social group resisting establishment hegemony from without are put into question by the Roma I spoke to in Istanbul, Izmir, and

Edirne who do, indeed, “want in.” My conversations with Romani rights activists in Turkey also put into question the “us/them” paradigm in light of the fact that international CSOs seem to be taking over Roma-led organizations (Sigona and Trehan 2009) and activism in Turkey and other 43 parts of Europe. Important work in this area focuses attention on the impact of neoliberal restructuring on Europe’s Romani populations (Sigona and Trehan 2009; Van Baar 2011).

Following such work, this dissertation focuses on the emergence of Romani identity in Turkey via the relationships that get established between civil society activists and urban Romani communities that are being dislocated due to state-led urban renewal. In Appendix C, I describe how urban rights activists in Sulukule attempted to incorporate the neighborhood into ‘the commons’ (the resources of the city that are ideally available to all of its residents), but came up against competing assumptions about Romani belonging. Culture played a central role in this – appropriating and refashioning the stereotype that all Gypsies are musicians and dancers, locals and civil society actors employed music and dance performance as a form of moblization against forced evictions (Potuoğlu-Cook 2011). There is no doubt that music and dance have been central to cultural events and livelihoods in Sulukule for generations; however, the idea that these particular dance and music practices should be valued and preserved is a newly emerging idea among the Istanbul public (see Seeman 2009).

1.2.1.2 Neoliberal Forms of Governance in Turkey

As discussed above, scholars of contemporary Turkey characterize the political-economic transformations that the country has undergone since the 1980s as ‘neoliberal.’ Indeed, since the

AK Party came to power in Turkey in 2002, neoliberal economic policies have been implemented more rigorously, such as the privatization of state entities and the state’s withdrawal from the provision of some social services (Coşar and Yücesan-Özdemir 2012).

However, while some scholars have argued that neoliberalism signals the demise of the authoritarian state (Atasoy 2009; Yavuz 2003), the Turkish state has simultaneously resorted to 44 breaches of privacy, mass arrests, and infringements on freedom of speech. Furthermore, social security spending and welfare interventions coexist with neoliberal economic reforms in Turkey

(see Eder 2010; Buğra and Keyder 2006). At the same time, while the pluralization of cultural identities and opening up of the public sphere are described as signs of Turkey’s transition to a more democratic society (see Keyder 1999; Keyman 2008), scholars like Kabir Tambar (2014) have pointed out the tensions that exist in the politics of pluralism in Turkey today. In truth, the country has witnessed the expansion of civil society alongside oppressive policies against ethnic minorities and heavy-handed, even violent, measures against anyone who challenges the state’s authority. This dissertation moves from the premise that neoliberalism does not necessarily result in the withdrawal of the state and that it can even augment state interventions (Dean 2002;

Brown 2005).

My ethnographic research suggests new ways of understanding the convergence of neoliberal forms of governance with existing configurations of state discourses and practices in

Turkey by drawing attention to openness. Openness is ubiquitous in discourses surrounding liberal democratization and is used as the measure for its success, informing global economic and political standards for so-called developing countries, or “emerging economies,” like

Turkey. The concept also drives policy-making in democratic and democratizing countries and informs IMF and World Bank strategies for development. It bolsters efforts on the part of the

Open Society Foundation and other such entities to advance human rights and democracy around the world. Openness travels across multiple domains, not only to characterize an open economy or an open society, but also a liberal disposition, as open-minded. I propose that attention to openness is particularly important for understanding the social and political milieu in Turkey today, where discourses and practices of openness have, by and large, been shadowed by 45 instances of government scandal and corruption, restrictions on freedom of speech and access to information, and displays of intolerance. After the Arab Spring, the “Turkish model” of a moderate Muslim state that accommodates secularism and democracy was lauded by the United

States government as an example for countries in the Middle East to follow. Yet, the AK Party has also come under scrutiny for its undemocratic way of addressing dissenting voices. Turkey is a particularly dynamic place to study the contradictory outcomes of neoliberalism on the ground.

Among the most common ways scholars have analyzed the relationship between the state and society in Turkey are through attention to secularism, nationalism, and/or modernity (see

Bozdoğan and Kasaba 1997; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Çınar 2005; Kaplan 2006; Özyürek 2006;

Silverstein 2010b; White 2002). Scholarly works that consider the dynamics of globalization and democratization in Turkey are also prevalent (see Heper 1997; Kedourie 1998; Kandiyoti and

Saktanber 2002; Aydın 2005; Yavuz 2006, 2009; Keyman 2007; Kuzmanovic 2012; Aknur

2012; İnce 2012; Tambar 2014), particularly studies of urban development in Istanbul (see

Keyder 1999; Mills 2010; Göktürk, Soysal and Türeli 2010; Turam 2015). Many of the narratives of Turkey’s political, economic, and social transformation since the 1980s emphasize the country’s ‘opening up’ to the outside world and many of the country’s hitherto opaque and

‘closed’ entities and institutions ‘opening’ up through a process of democratization. However, the usefulness of studying contemporary Turkey through this ‘openness,’ and the lived meanings of the term, have not yet been explored. The Gezi Park protests of summer 2013 brought the issue of openness into sharp focus, as Turkish citizens faced various closures (of access to online social networks like Twitter, of the right to assemble, of Taksim Square, of streets, and ultimately, of one of Istanbul’s few remaining public spaces, Gezi Park) and debated how open

(democratic, liberal, tolerant) the current government is or is not in practice. Openness, it turns 46 out, is central to debates around Turkey’s EU accession and the nature of the current governing party, and fundamental to competing visions of Istanbul’s future as a global city.

I interrogate openness as a form of logic29 that underlies liberal technologies of government in Turkey, and I understand liberal government as Foucault defined it, as the

‘conduct of conduct,’ or techniques and practices that seek to govern the self and others indirectly (1982: 789-794). As discussed above, scholars of governmentality have posed important questions about liberal techniques of government via concepts such as ‘freedom’

(Rose 1999) and ‘tolerance’ (Brown 2006). Following this kind of scholarship, I analyze openness as a new distribution and articulation of power in Turkey. I propose that openness defines the ground of liberal democratic ethics in Turkey today and is a key resource for the

Turkish government.

While there are competing claims to openness, the concept itself is not actively debated.

Unlike neoliberalism (which is used among leftist activists and scholars in/of Turkey to point to

Western imperialism, the evils of capitalism, and the complicity of the AK Party in global regimes of power and oppression), openness is generally accepted as being a positive trait for a state, an organization, or an individual. I do not claim the opposite (that openness is not a positive thing); rather, I interrogate how openness operates in practice and achieves results that are often contradictory or ambiguous. I am interested in how openness works in ways that may be unexpected – what are the unintended (or intended but counterintuitive) consequences of openness? I refer to ‘the politics of openness’ to suggest that it can have mixed effects; my ethnographic data illustrates how political and social initiatives that aim to increase openness in

29 As in a set of principles or a system by which reasoning is conducted and assessed as valid. Logic also justifies a course of action or how particular elements are arranged to perform a specific task. 47

Turkey are experienced by urban Roma as both beneficial and detrimental. I propose that such an analysis contributes to a better understanding of the limits of liberal governance in general.

1.2.1.3 Globalization and Urban Development

What is referred to as the “era of globalization” is usually defined by post-national identities and alliances, prolific international social and economic contact and exchange, and new challenges to states that are increasingly governing immigrant and refugee populations. One of the main concerns raised by this situation is centered on identity politics: how to integrate difference and how to balance an ethics of the particular with the universal, the local with the global. At the level of policy, charged debates have revolved around cultural relativism, human rights, racism, minority accommodation, citizenship, and belonging. A number of issues arise with regard to a series of ‘isms’: nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, globalism and, increasingly, cosmopolitanism. This dissertation puts these theoretical concerns into dialogue with the dynamics of pluralism in the context of Turkey, asking what kinds of theoretical implications local Turkish dynamics have. I locate the situation of a particularly marginalized group in Turkey, the Roma, in these debates and address the shortcomings of current theoretical and conceptual paradigms in engaging their needs and concerns, particularly ‘minority rights.’

As mentioned, Istanbul has been the target of an ongoing state project since the 1980s to turn it into a ‘global city.’ Istanbul is one of the largest cities in Europe, with over 15 million residents. Due to intense internal migration over the last seven decades, and despite plans to control development, Istanbul’s growth has been mostly informal. Kurdish and other internal migrants, as well as poor or marginalized residents such as the Roma, often live in illegal housing, whether in shantytowns of their own making (gecekondu) or by squatting in abandoned 48 buildings. Urban transformation projects that are intended to regulate and formalize Istanbul’s housing market are disproportionately impacting marginalized Istanbul residents, particularly

Kurds and Roma.

Tahire Erman investigates various representations of gecekondu dwellers by scholars over time, from the ‘rural Other,’ to the ‘disadvantaged Other,’ to the ‘threatening Other.’ Erman suggests, “While the approach to the gecekondu people varies from an elitist one, to one which is sympathetic to the gecekondu people, this group, nevertheless, has been consistently the ‘inferior

Other’ for Turkish gecekondu researchers” (2001: 991). Popular perceptions in Turkey have followed a similar trajectory. Suzan Ilcan explains that the concept of the ‘stranger’ is part of the way that urbanites forge social spaces via difference (1999: 244). Metin Heper blames the housing situation on Turkey’s notorious bureaucracy and the fact that legislation on housing is dispersed in so many different and contradictory laws and regulations, but he also points to the ambivalence of public officials toward gecekondu dwellers and suggests that this is due to ethnic and class discrimination (1978: 40). Government efforts to integrate gecekondu inhabitants have had mixed results. Erman asks the important question: “Integration to what?” (1998: 541). In the

1950s, when mass migration to cities started, the bureaucratic elites regarded the city as an effective means for the acculturation of its inhabitants to modern values. Rural migrants were expected to assimilate into urban society by discarding their rural values and adopting the lifestyles of the modernizing urban elites. This expectation was met with disappointment, however, and the failure of rural migrants to become urbanite has been defined and experienced as social marginality.

Many of the city’s current Romani residents came to Istanbul from the Balkans in the

1950s and lived alongside rural Anatolian migrants in gecekondu neighborhoods. The conception 49 of migration as a social problem emerged in this period alongside the creation of the rural migrant as a social type. İpek Türeli writes, “This new contradictory character of the city— that is, the increasing display of poverty versus new displays of wealth, or cattle versus new

American cars on the boulevards—resulted in a complex set of anxieties amongst the more established urban middle classes. These anxieties had to do with bourgeois fears of invasion, contamination, and criminality, as well as with the uncertainty of class—that is, not being able to tell an authentic Istanbulite apart from the others” (Türeli 2008: 15). Erman wants to free the definition of an urbanite from the monopoly of elites by recognizing that the migrant population is hardly marginal – it has stamped its presence onto the city in physical and social terms, and the migrants have become major actors in local politics and the urban economy30 (Erman 1998:

542).

Urban belonging and the ‘right to the city’ are currently contentious issues in Turkey’s cities, particularly Istanbul. Who has access to public spaces and to the Istanbullu identity is a matter of public debate. As nostalgia for the Republican modernist vision (see Özyürek 2006) exists alongside critiques of the nationalist narrative and appropriations of neo-Ottoman cosmopolitanism, “culturally appropriating Istanbul is overtly political and involves re-writing the city” (Türeli 2008: xii). Central urban neighborhoods have begun to newly attract middle and upper class city dwellers with narratives of cosmopolitan history and openness while simultaneously displacing undesirable manifestations of difference among the urban poor who have lived there until recently (see Mills 2010). As Türeli writes, “Earlier anxieties regarding rural migrants have strangely morphed in recent times and combined with other anxieties

30 In the 1970s, the remittances of migrant workers meant that gecekondu areas became significant markets for televisions, radios, washing machines, refrigerators, and other commodities. As these workers often owned land in the villages and maintained their connections with family and businesses back home, sending money and supplies back and forth, “the migrant became part of the consumer market the moment he set foot in the city” (Keyder 1987: 159). 50 concerning the loss of local character. Thus, the process of migration is now blamed for obliterating the city's former cosmopolitan character” (Türeli 2008: xi). The demolition of

Sulukule brought Romani rights discourses into this debate, as many of the neighborhoods that are undergoing urban renewal in Istanbul are made up of marginalized inhabitants such as Roma,

Kurdish migrants, transsexuals, and sex workers. Other urban residents engage in narratives of nostalgia for a cosmopolitan past, but fail to commit to a multicultural society in the present

(ibid.: 5). Engaging with work in Romani studies that challenges the long-held supposition that

Roma do not shape their identity around place (Theodosiou 2003, 2010, 2011), this dissertation demonstrates that the Roma of Sulukule indeed identified with their neighborhood, neighbors, and the particular spaces of their homes and streets. With the demolition, however, displaced

Romani residents were propelled into new encounters and experiences with the city (and the city now encounters and experiences the Roma in new ways, as well). I argue in Appendix A of this dissertation that urban renewal increasingly forms the context in which Turkey’s Roma are articulating Romani identity according to their relationship with the city and urban rights activist networks.

Interestingly, while non-Romani urban residents tend to correlate the city’s Roma with other rural migrants, Istanbul’s Roma locate themselves in narratives of local identity by contrasting themselves with the more recent Kurdish migrants. They refer to the Kurds as a

“closed group” (Strand in Marsh and Strand 2006: 100), thereby associating themselves with the cosmopolitan character of the city. The Sulukule Roma, in particular, trace their history back to the conquest of the city in 1453, linking themselves to narratives of Ottoman pluralism and establishing a strong sense of Istanbulite identity and belonging. While the AK Party pursues their agenda of turning Istanbul into a ‘global city,’ urban activists demand open spaces, open 51 access, and the right to participate in the making of the city. In Appendix C, I explore how

Istanbul’s Roma are brought into these competing claims via debates over urban renewal – are they the symbolic urban residents of a multicultural city, or do they represent the rural, informal aspects of a city that must be modernized, ‘opened up’, and regulated?

CHAPTER 2:

PRESENT STUDY

The present study comprises three articles, each of which focuses on liberalizing reforms in Turkey and their impacts on the Roma in Turkey. In this chapter, I describe the scope, settings, and methods of my research, summarize the main arguments of each article, and offer some general conclusions.

2.1 Research Scope, Settings, and Methods

I spent several summers in 2006, 2009, and 2010 doing preliminary dissertation research and Turkish language training in Istanbul and Ayvalık, Turkey. In November 2008, I participated in the Department of State and World Learning “Foreign Policy Dialogue Among Emerging

Leaders in Turkey and the U.S.”, a three-week program that took place in Istanbul, Ankara, and

Diyarbakır. I later conducted long-term fieldwork in Turkey for fourteen months, from August

2011 to November 2012, funded by Fulbright-Hays, the Institute of Turkish Studies, and small intramural grants. During that time, I conducted the bulk of my ethnographic research with urban rights activists in Istanbul and the dislocated Sulukule Romani community in the neighborhood of Karagümrük.31 I supplemented this research with a study of the activities of civil society organizations (CSOs) and Romani associations (dernek) across several Romani communities in

31 Karagümrük lies not far inside the ancient city walls. It was an important center for religious orders in the Ottoman period. The district was also home to the Customs Office, by which it takes its name, that controlled entry into the city through Edirnekapı. During the economic decline of Istanbul in the 1970s, Karagümrük became notorious for its black market and mafia bosses. Until the 1990s it was also near the city’s main long distance bus terminal, with some spillover low-cost accommodation, restaurants and entertainment. It is now considered a violent inner city area; the demolition of Sulukule is part of an ongoing effort by the Fatih muncipality to ‘clean up’ the district.

Istanbul, Izmir, and Edirne, and broader state processes in the areas of minority rights and

Romani citizenship.

Before moving into the details of data collection and analysis, I would like to briefly describe the path that led me to my dissertation research. While it may not seem of central importance at first, this narrative reveals the role of serendipity in qualitative research (Fine and

Deegan 1996) and the importance of dance to my perspective on Romani identity and belonging in Turkey. I have been a dancer all of my life, and many of my academic experiences have been shaped by the connections made with various dance communities. I first discovered the academic study of dance at Cross-Cultural Dance Resources, Inc. (CCDR), and went on to pursue various explorations of the role of dance in reflecting and shaping social dynamics. As a graduate student at UCLA in the World Arts and Cultures program in 2000-2002, my study of Middle Eastern dance (“belly dance”) led me to an interest in the Roma. My thesis, “Embodying the Exotic: The

‘Gypsy’ in American Female Oriental Dance,” explored stereotypical representations of the

Roma over time and how they are embodied and performed by American belly dancers. At the

University of Arizona, I directed my studies toward the Roma in the Ottoman Empire and present-day Turkey, an area that has only recently gained the attention of Romani studies scholars.

My first trip to Turkey was for language study at Boğaziçi University in the summer of

2006. On one of many walks along İstiklal Caddesi (a famous avenue located in the historic

Beyoğlu district and connecting at one end to Taksim Square), I happened to bump into an old dance acquaintance. She invited me to a musical concert that evening by Selim Sesler – I immediately recognized that name from a dissertation written on Romani music and identity in 54

Turkey by Sonia Tamar Seeman.32 At the concert, I was introduced to another expat from the

U.S. who was taking dance lessons with a Romani woman in Sarıgöl, a Romani neighborhood in the Gaziosmanpaşa municipality of Istanbul33 – she offered to let me accompany her to one of the lessons the next day. The Romani dance instructor turned out to be Reyhan Tuzsuz, someone

I had already heard of through my belly dance networks in the U.S. I continued to take dance lessons with Reyhan for the remainder of that summer; however, in 2009, when I returned to

Istanbul and contacted Reyhan to resume lessons, I found that her home and adjacent dance studio had been demolished in one of the city’s infamous urban renewal projects. This initiated my inquiry into other such projects, particularly the demolition of Sulukule, which was prominent in Turkish and international news stories at the time. I had already heard of Sulukule’s reputation as a Romani neighborhood that produced some of the best Turkish musicians and dancers.

As I was studying Ottoman Turkish at the Harvard-Koç program in Cunda, Ayvalık, that summer, I requested from my instructor that he look out for any mention of Sulukule in Ottoman historical documents. One day, during a morning class, there was a knock at the door of school.

My instructor opened it to find Cihan Baysal, a prominent figure in the ‘right to the city’ activist movement in Istanbul and a member of the Sulukule Platform. She was simply looking for a place in which to hold an upcoming meeting of the Sulukule Platform, but upon hearing the name ‘Sulukule,’ my instructor immediately brought me out to speak with Ms. Baysal. That chance encounter initiated several connections that became essential to my dissertation fieldwork

32 See Seeman 2002. 33 Gaziosmanpaşa became a municipality in 1983, but originated as a state-sponsored resettlement community that grew into a gecekondu known as Taşlıtarla. The resettled community was a group of Roma who had been evicted from their homes in Sulukule by the government in the 1950s (Türeli 2008: 41-42). 55 in Sulukule, particularly with Funda Oral,34 another prominent activist in the Sulukule Platform and a respected figure in the Sulukule community who was later to become my key informant and collaborator in the field.

My research proposal originally stated that I would investigate the socio-cultural implications of recent involvement by the Turkish state and international CSOs in the Sulukule

Romani community. Furthermore, I intended to focus on dance as an important expression of cultural heritage and solidarity for the Sulukule Roma. During my fieldwork in Istanbul, I expanded my field site beyond Sulukule to ask questions about state and CSO involvement in other Romani neighborhoods in Istanbul, Izmir and Edirne, and to explore the rapid growth of local Romani rights associations around Turkey. In the Sulukule Romani community, my interest in dance propelled me toward a local, privately-funded atelier for dislocated children run by

Funda Oral, where I was able to work with Romani youth and direct my attention to issues around arts education and civic engagement. This expansion of my original proposal enhanced my research project in terms of depth, timeliness, and relevance.

My main purpose, however, shifted to investigate the impact of urban renewal projects on

Romani neighborhoods with a focus on the former residents of Sulukule. I started by contacting members of the Sulukule Platform, a coalition of CSOs that organized a massive protest against the demolition of Sulukule and is now working to bring government services to the displaced community. I circulated a questionnaire among them in order to establish demographic data and I interviewed several of the members that are still active in the Sulukule community and other displaced communities in Istanbul. Funda Oral became a central figure in my research, as she helped me make contacts, establish connections, conduct interviews, and participate in local events. She is also a source of information regarding the demolition of Sulukule, as she was

34 I have permission to use her real name. 56 directly involved with the residents during that period and has first-hand memories of it. A respected figure in the dislocated community for her voluntary efforts to revitalize the music and dance culture of the Sulukule Roma in Karagümrük, Ms. Oral’s support of my research project gave it credibility among locals. Together, we conducted a series of interviews with key actors in the Sulukule community, particularly the director of the Sulukule Roman Kültürünü Geliştirme ve Dayanışma Derneği (Sulukule Romani Culture Development and Solidarity Association) and

35 member of the Sulukule Romani Orchestra, Şükrü Pündük. We also interviewed the mukhtar

(elected head of the neighborhood) about integrating the Sulukule Roma in Karagümrük. We conducted interviews with five dislocated women from Sulukule in their homes and maintained ongoing interviews with one particular woman, whom I refer to as ‘Derya Hanım,’ for one month. I also observed or participated in weekly music and dance lessons at the art atelier and, by teaching weekly English language lessons, I got to know three young men who had formed a

Hip Hop group called Tahribad-ı İsyan (Revolt’s Destruction)36 – they became central to my research and appear in Article 1 in Appendix A of this dissertation.

Through snowball sampling, I was able to conduct and audio-record a total of 48 semi- structured interviews with activists and civil society actors, members of the dislocated Sulukule

Romani community in Karagümrük, and directors of Romani rights associations (dernek) in

Istanbul, Izmir, and Edirne. I also had multiple informal conversations and attended important meetings of activists and Romani rights associations in these cities. In Istanbul and Izmir, I visited several neighborhoods that were currently undergoing demolition, including Tarlabaşı, where another contentious urban renewal project is taking place. I established professional relationships with scholars and attended several lectures, art and architecture exhibits, film

35 I have permission to use his real name. 36 I refer to the members of this group using their stage names, as they are public figures. 57 showings, and workshops on topics related to urbanization in Istanbul. I had professional affiliations with Boğaziçi University and the Center for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM) at

Istanbul Technical University and made use of their libraries and other resources. I attended a meeting of the ICTM Study Group in Music and Dance of Southeastern Europe in Macedonia in the spring of 2012 and presented a co-authored paper about Sulukule along with Funda Oral and

Dr. Zeynep Gonca Girgin Tohumcu at a meeting of the Gypsy Lore Society in Istanbul in

September 2012. I attended the 2012 public events celebrating International Romani Day (Dünya

Romanlar Günü) on April 8th in Istanbul and Hıdrellez on May 5th and 6th in Edirne, and also attended the Kırkpınar oil wrestling events in Edirne in the summer of 2012. I traveled to

Budapest, Belgrade, Sofia, and Skopje to attend conferences and interview leaders of European

Romani rights organizations regarding their initiatives in Turkey, and interviewed the Secretary

General of the World Roma Organization (Rromanipen) in Belgrade. I collected information from local news and CSO educational pamphlets and publications. Since returning from the field, I continue to follow Turkish news about the Roma and urban rights activism, and I remain in contact with some of my informants via electronic correspondence.

I organized my data into three collections: 1) an in-depth, 14-month case study of the dislocated Sulukule Roma that focuses on narratives collected among urban rights activists,

Romani women from Sulukule living in Karagümrük, and the members of the Sulukule Romani

Culture Development and Solidarity Association, as well as activities geared toward integration and cultural preservation at the Sulukule Children’s Art Atelier (Sulukule Çocuk Sanat Atölyesi);

2) a review of the activities of CSOs and associations (dernek) across several Romani communities in Istanbul, Izmir, and Edirne, and their links with Romani rights organizations in

Europe; and 3) interviews with policy makers and community leaders regarding broader state 58 processes in the area of Romani rights and the Roman Açılımı (Romani Initiative, or Opening). In the next section, I will describe the key sites at which I conducted my research.

2.1.1 Sulukule and the Sulukule Platform

Sulukule was located in the Fatih municipality of Istanbul on what is known as the

Historic Peninsula.37 Sulukule was located just inside the Theodosian Walls, south of the

Karagümrük neighborhood and near Edirnekapı (Gate of Edirne, where Mehmed the

Conqueror made his triumphal entry into Constantinople in 1453AD). It was also near where the

Lycus River once ran, but which is now the path of the Adnan Menderes highway. This would have been the periphery of the walled city, but as Istanbul grew far beyond the walls in the late twentieth century, Sulukule found itself at the center of a massive metropolis (Somersan and

Kırca-Schroeder 2007: 722). Sulukule was a local name for the area because of the presence of a historic water tower; it was comprised of the Neslişah and Hatice Sultan neighborhoods.

Sulukule was the oldest continuously settled Romani neighborhood in Europe (Somersan and

Kırca-Schroeder 2007: 721; İngin n.d.).38 From at least the 1950s until they were shut down by the municipality in the early 1990s, entertainment houses (eğlence everli) run by Romani families in Sulukule provided nightlife entertainment to locals and tourists and sustained the

37 The Historic Peninsula is the heart of the old city, where the remains of ancient empires lay just beneath the surface and historic sites like the Hagia Sofia and Blue Mosque attract the interest of tourists. This area is enclosed by the double Theodosian Walls, erected during the reign of Emperor Theodosius II in the 5th century to replace the old Constantinian Wall. 38 It was also an extension of the former Romani Lonca neighborhoods of Istanbul, dating to the 11th century (Oral and Tohumcu 2011: 10-11). 59 local economy.39 Some of Istanbul’s most famous Romani musicians and dancers come from

Sulukule (or, if they don’t they say they do, since being Roman and being from Sulukule signals a long lineage of professional musicianship). The houses certainly provided music and dance entertainment; I also heard rumors that drugs and prostitutes were available in some of the houses or surrounding streets.

Somersan and Kırca-Schroeder note that the Roma in Sulukule lived a peripheral and precarious existence over the centuries (2007: 725). Sulukule was subjected to multiple redevelopment projects in the twentieth century, beginning with redevelopment projects under the government of Adnan Menderes from 1956-1960 and extending into the urban restructuring of the 1980s and Bedrettin Dalan’s vision of Istanbul as a ‘global city’, explained in chapter one of this dissertation. In 1958, Sulukule was located closer to Topkapı, but residents were moved up toward Edirnekapı to make way for Millet and Vatan Avenues (now Turgut Özal Caddesi and

Adnan Menderes Bulvar); two other small-scale demolitions occurred in 1966 and 1982 (ibid.:

726). As the dislocated residents often say, they kept getting moved up (“yukarı tarafa taşındık”). The entertainment houses that were the engine of the local economy were shut down by the municipality in the early 1990s (around the time the bus terminal was relocated further away from the city center) and the neighborhood experienced a swift decline.

Although Sulukule was located within a zone of the Historic Peninsula that was on

UNESCO’s World Heritage List since 1985, the area was not officially designated a

Conservation Area until 2003. Despite this, in October 2006, Sulukule was declared an urban

39 Martin Stokes, in his 1989 article “Music, Fate and State,” describes the area this way: “Istanbul's central dolmuş station, Topkapı garage, is at a point midway between the gecekondu and the old city. Close to the famous brothels of Sulukule and surrounded by graveyards conspicuous with their tall cypress trees, this area occupies a prominent place in the urban Turkish imagination. It is a twilight zone spatially, socially and morally. Within the walls lie monuments to Ottoman Turkish civilization; without lies the ephemeral junk of modern Turkey's trash culture. Within, the palaces and mosques; without, the beer houses and brothels. Within, order and the living; without, chaos and the dead” (28). 60 renewal area and the Sulukule Renewal Project was approved in 2007 by the Istanbul Renewal

Areas Board of Protection and the Greater Istanbul Municipality (Gunay n.d.: 6; İslam n.d.: 1).

Activists refer to this kind of project as “planned gentrification” or “government-led gentrification”; the area has both touristic and commercial value because of its location. The plan encompassed a total of 645 dwellings and 45 shops.40 The Fatih Municipality claimed that the project would renew the area in harmony with the architectural heritage of the Historic Peninsula

(Gunay n.d.: 7) and involve the residents in planning the new housing development. They justified the demolition to the public with reference to Sulukule’s association with criminal activities (İslam n.d.: 1). TOKİ (Turkey’s Mass Housing Administration) and a private Turkish architectural firm, Aarti Planlama, were responsible for implementing the new housing project.

Ironically, this occurred in the middle of controversies over the implementation of legally binding “Conservation Oriented Development Plans” in the Historic Peninsula.41 Before the

1980s, conservation projects in the Historic Peninsula focused on physical structures, and mostly those that were important to the tourist industry. In the last thirty years, however, there has been increased attention to the social dimension of conservation (see Kocabaş 2006). In some historic

Greek and Armenian neighborhoods, the original residents had been intimidated into leaving or left after the decline of the area (see Mills 2010; Türeli 2008), and the houses had been subdivided into low-income apartments. Now, gentrification of these areas displaces poor tenants when higher income groups move in, often supported by discourses of conservation as the new tenants have the resources to restore or preserve the historic houses in what are becoming

40 “Yenileme Projesinin Mimarları Anlatiyor,” Mimarizm, accessed June 2015. http://www.mimarizm.com/kentintozu/Makale.aspx?id=341&sid=328. 41 Turkey signed the Convention on the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage and embodied its provisions in the 1983 Conservation Act, legislation that made metropolitan municipalities responsible for producing legally binding “Conservation Oriented Development Plans” (Kocabaş n.d.: 2). 61 fashionable neighborhoods.42 A UNESCO funded study in 2004, the Istanbul Historic Peninsula

Conservation Study, offered advisory Conservation Area Plans for key areas of the Historic

Peninsula that prioritized the protection of the historic environment and emphasized rehabilitation (Kocabaş n.d.: 2). However, the Mayor of Fatih declared several of these “Renewal

Areas” using a new law, the Law on the Protection and the Revitalization of Deteriorated

Historical and Cultural Immovable Assets through Renovation and Regeneration43 (Law no.

5366, popularly known as the “Urban Transformation Law”) enacted in 2005, which gives expropriation powers to municipality mayors and allows them to implement renewal projects without permission from local residents or property owners (İslam n.d.: 1). UNESCO responded by threatening to place the Historical Peninsula on their World Cultural Heritage in Danger list.

In 2008, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee referred to the Sulukule Renewal Project as a gentrification project and declared, “a balance must be found between conservation, social needs and identity of the community” (UNESCO 2009: 45).

Debates between those who favor development and those who favor conservation continue. The CODP was annulled in 2009, so that “there is no legally binding framework for urban conservation planning in the Historic Peninsula” (Kocabaş n.d.: 2). This issue gained an even higher profile in 2010 when Istanbul was the European Capital of Culture and monies were used to transform inner-city neighborhoods into commercial, touristic, and leisure hubs (Gunay n.d.: 3). A number of studies refer to the 2000s as a period of “neoliberal urbanism,” characterized by public-private partnerships and urban renewal projects that result in social exclusion (see Bartu-Candan and Kolluoğlu 2008; Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010; Keyder 2005;

42 Also see Angell 2014 on discourses of earthquake risk. 43 Yıpranan Tarihi ve Kültürel Taşınmaz Varlıkların Yenilenerek Korunması ve Yaşatılarak Kullanılması Hakkında Kanun

Pınarcıoğlu and Işık 2001), as I discussed in chapter one of this dissertation.

To illustrate the social exclusion of the Roma of Sulukule in that particular urban renewal project, existing property owners in the neighborhood were told that they could buy into the new apartment units if they could afford to pay the difference between the new apartment and the value of their property; however, the value of their property was calculated by the Fatih

Municipality (İslam n.d.: 1). The other option was to accept a unit in the TOKİ social housing complex in Taşoluk, 40km outside of the city center, where they would have to pay monthly installments of 500 Turkish Lira for fifteen years (ibid.: 1; also see Gündoğdu and Gough 2009:

21-22). Renters and squatters were not incorporated into these deals and were simply forced out of the neighborhood (İslam n.d.: 3). As Tolga İslam points out, renters would have to pay up to ten times as much as they paid to live in Sulukule if they wanted to remain living in a centrally- located neighborhood (ibid.: 4). If the owners of historic buildings in the neighborhood could provide a deed (tapu), they could remain in their houses, but with the obligation to carry out a conservation project with the assistance of the Control Bureau for the Conservation of Cultural

Assets (KUDEB). Most of the dislocated Sulukule residents originally chose to go to Taşoluk; however, many of them could not keep up with the payments and it was difficult to find employment in such a remote area of the city (Tok and Oğuz 2013: 60). When I left Istanbul in

2012, I was told that six families still lived in Taşoluk, while the rest of them had dispersed to other parts of Istanbul, particularly Karagümrük, or other cities.

A coalition of civil society organizations, academics, and activists known as the Sulukule

Platform was formed in 2005 in order to combat the demolition of the neighborhood (see Uysal

2012). They organized benefit concerts and street rallies, circulated petitions against the demolition, and gave hundreds of press conferences in Turkey and abroad. Their stated aim was 63 to convince the city to rehabilitate the neighborhood rather than to demolish it, emphasizing the historical importance of the area and the cultural heritage of the Roma. They proposed that the area’s conservation should be a participatory process, appealing to UNESCO’s concept of

“intangible heritage.” However, the municipality did not find economically viable uses for the houses, and so went forward with plans to demolish the historic houses and replace them with neo-Ottoman condominiums built by TOKİ. The Sulukule Platform successfully stalled the demolition process several times, with activist events such as “40 Days 40 Nights” (40 Gün 40

Gece) and by filing several lawsuits. STOP (Sınır Tanimayan Otonom Plancilar, or Autonomous

Planners with No Frontiers) drafted an alternative plan for Sulukule that would provide a higher quality living environment and employment opportunities for the current Romani residents.

However, after the general elections in 2007, the demolitions started again, before the plan could be approved by the Board of Protection. Despite efforts to prevent the urban renewal project, the last remaining house within the urban renewal zone was demolished on November 12, 2009.44

Interests in economic development and tourism combined with gentrification in Sulukule to justify the demolition of the neighborhood and the construction of a new housing complex.

Scholars and activists point out that the new development completely ignored the existing urban pattern (İnceoğlu and Yürekli 2011: 7-8) and failed to address the social issues of the neighborhood, which were instead used as justifications for demolition. Some suggest that the urban transformation project in Sulukule was one of “urban cleansing based on ethnicity and social-economic status, since the inhabitants of the area were exclusively of Romani

44 This house was owned by Gülsüm Bitirmiş; she became an important local figure in the struggle against demolition, as she had lived in Sulukule for over fifty years and, with the help of Sulukule Platform activists and the media, attempted to resist the demolition of her home. The demolition of this last house in Sulukule was a symbolic blow to all that the activists had been working for. A few streets that had been part of the Sulukule neighborhood but were not included in the urban renewal zone still remain.

64 backgrounds” (Çetin n.d.: 8). Others claim that Law no. 5366 “has turned into a social exclusion instrument in the hands of ambitious central and local governments in the need for re-creating

‘global’ and ‘competitive’ cities,” exemplified by the demolition of Sulukule (Gunay n.d.: 1). As

I discuss further in Article 1 (Appendix A), the fate of Sulukule is a focal point for protests against other urban renewal projects in Istanbul, and the networks formed in the protests against

Sulukule’s demolition were galvanized in the Gezi Park protests of summer 2013.

When I arrived to do fieldwork in September 2011, most of Sulukule had already been demolished with the exception of a few houses and the building of the new condominiums was underway. The narrow streets of Karagümrük were often jammed by trucks and the new development project was fenced off and protected by guards. Several members of the Sulukule

Platform had formed CSOs in the dislocated community – one focuses on providing afterschool assistance to children, another on providing money-earning opportunities for women like screen pressing textiles. The Sulukule Children’s Art Atelier (Sulukule Çocuk Sanat Atölyesi), run by

Funda Oral, is dedicated to preserving the musical heritage of Sulukule by providing music and dance lessons to the dislocated children45. Ms. Oral helped to initiate my contacts in the neighborhood and among the Sulukule Platform members and arranged for my official affiliation with the Sulukule Roman Kültürünü Geliştirme ve Dayanışma Derneği (Sulukule Romani

Culture Development and Solidarity Association). The association’s director, Şükrü Pündük, is from a family who lived in Sulukule for generations and owned entertainment houses. He is a musician himself and now directs the Sulukule Romani Orchestra, which performs regularly in venues around Istanbul.

I met with Mr. Pündük (“Şükrü Bey”) often at the office of the association in

45 Nejla Osseiran’s short documentary film about the atelier is available online: https://vimeo.com/59108733 [accessed May 2015]. 65

Karagümrük to discuss the demolition of the neighborhood and the future of the dislocated community. Mr. Pündük was the public face of the protest against the demolition, participating in press conferences and traveling abroad for meetings of various Romani rights organizations.

For its part in the founding of the atelier, the association won the first European Commission award for Roma integration, given to civil society organizations in the Western Balkans and

Turkey. The association was also one of the clients in a case against the Fatih municipality initiated by the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC)46; in 2012, an Istanbul court determined that the urban renewal project in Sulukule was “not in the public interest” and ruled in favor of its cancellation. However, construction continued and the municipality’s appeal process is ongoing; compensation claims are pending.

2.1.2 The Sulukule Children’s Atelier and Tahribad-ı İsyan

Funda Oral (or, as the children refer to her, “Funda Abla”) and some other activists from the Sulukule Platform intervened on behalf of the children of the neighborhood from the beginning of the urban renewal project to ensure they enrolled or remained in school despite their dislocation. They realized quickly that the children were very interested in playing music, both the music of their parents as well as Hip Hop, and that music could be used as a tool for education and solidarity. By giving the children a place to practice music, the activists also hoped to perpetuate the cultural heritage of the Sulukule Roma and help the children heal from the trauma of dislocation. For several years, they met for classes in local coffee shops or wherever they could find space. With funding from the Istanbul European Capital of Culture

Agency to rent a small house next to the demolition site, the Sulukule Children’s Art Atelier was officially opened in 2010 in collaboration with the Sulukule Romani Culture Development and

46 Two other cases were litigated by the Istanbul Chamber of Architects and the Istanbul Chamber of City Planners. 66

Solidarity Association, the Sulukule Platform, and the Istanbul Technical University music conservatory. Local musicians and conservatory teachers set up a program of musical training for children between 7 and 18 years old, and 200 children applied to the program. Most of them were Roma from Sulukule, some were the children of Romani families who lived nearby, and some were non-Romani children from other neighborhoods in the area.

The atelier’s aim is “to increase the self-confidence of the community to express their culture, demand their civil rights, and communicate openly with non-Romani society”

(interview, July 2012). When I left Turkey in October 2012, there were 80 children attending the atelier, participating in lessons and workshops each week that educate children in classical,

Turkish, and Romani music. As Ms. Oral told me, “After the neighborhood was demolished and the community was dislocated, it was important to keep the Romani youth together in an environment where they can be creative and learn how to collaborate” (interview, July 2012).

Over time, the atelier also became a kind of community center where older children run Hip Hop workshops, lessons are given to support the public school program, and young people receive assistance in completing their education from a distance. “In just 2 years it has become a place owned, in a sense, by the children,” Ms. Oral explains. “Some of them have keys to the building so they can make use of the space to practice music, dance, and meet with their friends.” The atelier also created a performance group of twenty children, including musicians and dancers, that is often invited to play at public festivals and concerts. The media has recently shown more interest in the atelier: it has appeared in magazines, newspapers, television and radio programs.

Ms. Oral explains, “So, the atelier has also become a center for Romani children to communicate with outside institutions and social groups” (interview, July 2012). 67

A Hip Hop group, Tahribad-ı İsyan (Revolt’s Destruction), also found support and flourished at the atelier. The advocacy and promotion of the group by Ms. Oral has garnered the attention of many Turkish and international journalists, artists, academics, and activists and resulted in various projects, including music videos, local concerts, art installations, and a song on Amnesty International’s ‘Listen to Roma Rights’ CD. The rap group is made up of three young men who go by the stage names Slang, Vz, and Zen G. Slang is Laz-Roman from

Sulukule, with parents from Trabzon and Edirne; Zen G is from the Istanbul mahalle

(neighborhood) of Zeytinburnu, with parents from Trakya and Van; and Vz is Kurdish from

Adana. They all grew up with music and dance particular to their regional backgrounds and mahalles, at weddings and other community events. The boys met in school and through networks of mutual friends they started rapping together. Their group found support at the atelier, where they use the space for practice and where they give Hip Hop lessons to the younger kids once a week.

Turkish Hip Hop started in the Turkish migrant communities of Germany as a way to express frustration with low-paying jobs and racism. It rose to prominence in the 1990s with the groups Cartel and Islamic Force and started a new genre referred to as Oriental Hip Hop. Interest in Hip Hop music increased in Turkey since the rapper known as Ceza became popular in 2001.

Although Turkish Hip Hop was originally influenced by African American music, it has come into its own in the last decade and now finds inspiration in Turkish melodies and rhythms, even sampling arabesk and other Turkish folk music. In general, Hip Hop is considered a global genre that can more easily take on local themes than other musical genres, and it has become popular all over the world, from the Philippines to Palestine. As Slang told me, “Hip Hop is universal”

(interview, April 2012). While some of the songs of Tahribad-ı İsyan address what they perceive 68 to be universal social issues, like discrimination and prejudice, they also rap about issues specific to Turkey, to Istanbul, and to the Sulukule community. For example, ZenG wrote a song that critiques the public education system in Turkey, and the group performs another song about the problems of drug addiction in their neighborhood. The rappers also criticize the demolition of

Sulukule; but, they told me that some good things have come from it, like the founding of the

Atelier and its support of their group. As Vz raps in one of their songs, “Sulukule is the gun, and we are its bullets.” The members of Tahribad-ı İsyan told me they want to offer a good example to the other kids. “If we are famous one day,” Slang said, “this is will our contribution”

(interview, April 2012).

While Romani music in Turkey has particular connotations that most non-Romani Turks would immediately hear in dokuz sekiz (9/8), Hip Hop connotes participation in a global youth protest movement against discrimination and oppression. It has a broader base of listeners and, although Hip Hop is dance music, the emphasis is on the lyrics. It provides Tahribad-ı İsyan an opportunity to address social and political issues related to urbanization and Romani identity. So, while the older generation that participated in the protests against demolitions in Sulukule is now experiencing job loss in the rapidly diminishing live entertainment sector, the rap group, on the other hand, has drawn a lot of media attention. The rappers have met and worked with Sultan

Tunç, a Turkish rapper who lives in Germany, and Jonzi D, a rapper from London. So, while I describe in Article 1 (Appendix A) how Tahribad-ı İsyan’s music has become the soundtrack of protest against urban renewal in Istanbul, it is also a way for the members of the rap group to reach beyond Sulukule, beyond Turkey, and beyond Romani identity – a way to, literally, get out. 69

I visited the atelier several times a week during my fieldwork. It was a meeting place for not only the students, but also their parents and other community members that often came to

Ms. Oral with requests for personal, economic, or legal advice and support. Local and international scholars, journalists, artists, and activists also came to the atelier, asking questions about the demolition or proposing a project. Many young volunteers like myself came and went.

Ms. Oral’s reputation as a respected member of the community was established via her work at the atelier, and her generous welcome to people like me enabled multiple collaborations between the young Roma and visiting artists and activists. Ms. Oral arranged for me to give weekly

English lessons to the members of Tahribad-ı İsyan at the atelier, and in that way I was able to establish a working relationship with them and gain the trust of people in the community. With time, I began to observe Tahribad-ı İsyan’s classes at the atelier, attend their public performances, and interview them individually and as a group. I came to care deeply about them and their future, and we remain in touch via electronic correspondence and letters. As I explain in Article 1 (Appendix A of this dissertation), the group has seen a lot of success since the Gezi

Park protests, when their music became the soundtrack of the ‘right to the city’ movement. Their staring role in the film, Wonderland, propelled them into the limelight when it was shown at the

2013 Istanbul Biennial; the film has since been shown in venues around the world, including the

Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City.

2.1.3 Romani Associations (dernek) in Istanbul, Izmir, and Edirne

The mobilization of Romani rights groups and the organization of Romani associations

(dernek) increased in the last decade, since Turkey’s Associations Law (Dernekler Kanunu, No.

5253) was significantly revised in 2004 to comply with the Copenhagen Criteria. The revisions enabled their cooperation with international organizations and introduced opportunities for funds 70 from the European Union. But, while the law clearly outlines the right of Turkish citizens to found associations and makes it more difficult for the state to monitor their activities, it explicitly prohibits engagement in “political” activities and associations must notify the government if they are to receive or use foreign funds. Furthermore, it prevents associations from being established solely on the basis of religious, ethnic, or racial affiliations, although in practice many civil society organizations do manage to serve particular religious or ethnic communities

(Kuzmanovic 2012: 9-11). Nonetheless, the revisions to the Associations Law corresponded with the movement against Sulukule’s demolition, and together these had the effect of mobilizing

Romani associations in cities all over Turkey, from Diyarbakır to Istanbul. Their cooperation with international Romani organizations is increasing a sense of solidarity between the Roma of

Turkey and those of the Balkans, in particular (Marsh and Strand 2005: 8).

The Edirne Roman Derneği (Edirne Roma Association, or EdRom) has been the most prominent Romani association in Turkey due to its involvement in projects supported by the

European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) and other international Romani rights organization. For example, along with the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly (hCa) and funded by the European

Commission, the Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation–Turkey, and the Swedish

International Development Cooperation Agency (ERRC’s core donor), EdRom developed and implemented a “Promoting Roma Rights in Turkey” project between 2005-2008, “with the aim of contributing to the advancement of the Roma rights movement in Turkey” (Marsh in Uzpeder et al 2008: 1). EdRom is also the key member of the Türkiye Romanlar Konfederasyonu

(Confederation of Turkish Roma), and both organizations share the same director, Erdinç Çekiç.

Most of my fieldwork was conducted with the Sulukule Roman Kültürünü Geliştirme ve

Dayanışma Derneği (Sulukule Romani Culture Development and Solidarity Association), which 71 rivaled EdRom for prominence in the years of Sulukule’s demolition scandal. The association’s director, Şükrü Pündük, often found himself representing Turkey’s Roma in the international media. In the last several years, however, Mr. Pündük has turned his attention to starting his own small business and, while he remains active in the Sulukule Romani Orchestra, his role in the

Romani rights movement has diminished.

The many Romani dernek that have been established around Turkey in the last decade47 have formed and dissolved several alliances like the Confederation, and are often involved in conflicts over resources and agendas. EdRom has been by far the most successful at acquiring funding from and establishing collaborations with international Romani rights organizations and is therefore often the target of envy or scorn by other dernek leaders and even accused of hogging resources to the detriment of other associations. Another cause of tension among the

Romani associations is party affiliation, despite being officially ‘non-governmental.’ I found that the associations represented larger political dynamics; for example, many of the Romani dernek in Istanbul were AK Party supporters, while the Izmir dernek were largely for CHP. While most of the dernek leaders I met were working hard to represent the interests of their Romani neighborhoods in Istanbul, Izmir, and other cities around Turkey, several of them had also run for local office or Parliament positions. I regularly heard accusations, from one association of another, that the dernek leaders were simply using Romani rights as a platform for their own political aspirations.

Other than the Sulukule association, I also spent time with the director of the Kuştepe

Çiçekçileri Koruma ve Kalkındırma Derneği (Kuştepe Flower Sellers Preservation and

Improvement Association), in the Kuştepe neighborhood of Istanbul, and the director of the

İzmir Romanlar Derneği (Izmir Roma Association), who also finances and organizes the

47 To my knowledge, there are close to 250 Romani associations in Turkey today. 72 publication of a Romani rights periodical called RomCa: Kültürel ve Sosyal Politika Dergisi. The first issue was published in 2012, during my fieldwork, and included articles on constitutional reforms and how revisions to certain articles pertaining to the Roma might impact them.

2.1.4 Conferences, Lectures, Workshops, and Meetings

During my fieldwork, I regularly attended lectures, art and architecture exhibits, film showings, and workshops on topics related to urbanization and/or Romani rights in Istanbul, at the Orient-Institut Istanbul, the Istanbul Studies Center at Kadir Has University, the American

Research University in Turkey (ARIT), the Depo, the Netherlands Institute in Turkey, Istanbul

Bilgi University, and SALT. I also attended several meetings of the Romani associations, which proved to be central to my research.

In May 2012, I attended a meeting of the World Roma Organization (Rromanipen) in

Istanbul. In attendance were several prominent Romani dernek leaders and activists like Funda

Oral, as well as a representative from the Turkish Ministry of European Affairs. The major topics addressed were how Rromanipen could serve as a model for solidarity and cooperation between the Turkish Romani associations, how to move forward under the AK Party’s Romani Initiative and ongoing urban renewal projects, and how to be effective in influencing the direction of legislation and policy regarding Turkey’s Romani citizens, particularly in light of Turkey’s constitutional reforms. One issue that came up over and over at the meeting was how to represent themselves to the greater public. When one attendee suggested that, instead of dividing an already disadvantaged group into the categories of Rom, Dom, and Lom,48 they should reclaim

48 The words Rom, Dom and Lom describe various Gypsy tribes; those who went into Western Europe are generally called Rom (Roma), while the ones who remained in the Middle East and eastern Turkey call themselves Dom or Lom.

73 the term çingene, a representative from the Hatay association exclaimed, “Çingene değilim! Ne mutlu Türküm diyene!” (I am not a Gypsy! How happy is the one who says I am a Turk!”, the motto of the Turkish Republic). This points to the central topic of Article 2 (Appendix B) in this dissertation, which discusses competing representations and discourses of Romani identity in

Turkey. As I explain further in the article, the solution most often posed is that of cultural representation. In this instance, attendees of the meeting suggested that the various associations should represent the Roma to the greater public by performing folk dance and music.

In general, attendees at the Rromanipen meeting agreed that the associations needed to be responsible for gathering general information on Turkey’s Romani population. A month later, I attended another meeting in Aydın at the Adnan Menderes Üniversitesi Romanlar Uygulama va

Araştırma Merkezi, a Romani research center that had just been established with the purpose of gathering data about Turkey’s Roma and their social problems. This particular meeting was referred to as a Danışma Kurulu ve Çalışma Grupları Toplantası (consultative committee and working group meeting), and many familiar dernek representatives and activists were invited to attend. The director of the center led the meeting by asking attendees to identify the main problems facing Turkey’s Roma. Like the Rromanipen meeting, the answers emphasized

‘knowing themselves’ via the collection of data about how many Roma live in Turkey, where they live, and under what conditions. This process of developing self-knowledge in the service of public representation and access to social services is explored further in Appendix B of this dissertation.

2.1.5 Public Events: International Romani Day, Hıdrellez, and Kırkpınar

Along with more attention to Romani rights in Turkey, some annual Romani holidays and 74 events have begun to attract participation and official recognition over the past several years.

Kırkpınar is the annual oil wrestling (yağlı güreş) festival that takes place in Edirne every June, and has since the 14th century. Although Kırkpınar is not an exclusively Romani event, it is of great importance to the Roma of Edirne, who (according to my guide that summer) can earn enough money during one month of festivities to support them and their families for the rest of the year. I also noticed that most of the Kırkpınar musicians were Romani, and the music (davul and zurna) was central to the event. In the evenings, after the wrestling matches were over for the day, local Roma gathered outside the arena at Sarayiçi to eat, play music, and dance together.

Although my research project does not focus on this event in particular, my time in Edirne for

Kırkpınar made me realize that a study of Roma in Edirne would look quite different from the one I was conducting in Istanbul.49 Located close to the Greek and Bulgarian borders, the Edirne

Romani community is more directly connected to Balkan politics and many of the Roma in

Edirne came to Turkey during the Balkan Wars.

Of more direct relevance to this dissertation were the celebrations of Dünya Romanlar

Günü (International Romani Day) and Hıdrellez (or Kakava), both of which I attended in the spring of 2012. International Romani Day was designated by the International Romani Union50 as April 8th to celebrate Romani culture and raise awareness of Romani issues around the world, but has only been celebrated in Turkey for a few years. One of its aims is to educate the Roma and wider public about the Porajmos, the Romani genocide by the Nazis in World War II. I attended two competing celebrations of International Romani Day in 2012 in Istanbul that demonstrate, first of all, ambivalence among Turkey’s Roma regarding transnational affiliations

49 See Seeman 2002. 50 The day was officially declared in 1990 at the fourth World Romani Congress (a series of forums for discussing Romani issues) in honor of the first major international meeting of Romani representatives on April 8th in 1971 in England. The International Romani Union (IRU) is a global Romani rights organization, officially established at the second World Romani Congress in 1978. 75 with other Roma elsewhere and their designation as an ethnic minority by civil society actors.

Second, these events revealed the internal debates that Turkey’s Roma are engaged in over the terms of their integration, and the conflicting agendas of state and civil society actors for Romani rights in Turkey.

Hıdrellez (or Hıdırellez, Ederlezi, Kakava) is a spring festival (bayram) celebrated on

May 5-6 throughout the Turkic world and former Ottoman territories in the Balkans and Middle

East. It is a celebration of the meeting of the prophets Hızır (Al-Khidr) and Ilyas (Elijah) on earth, and is associated with water and fertility. It is a day for spring cleaning, making wishes, and finding a suitable match for marriage. The day is recognized by Muslim Roma and Alevi as the beginning of spring51 and has recently become popular among the general public in Turkey.

The Armada Hotel in Istanbul organized an annual, free Hıdrellez festival in the Romani neighborhood of Ahırkapı beginning in 1997, which later turned into a collective civil community activity. It was recognized by the Istanbul European Capital of Culture agency in

2010; when the municipality attempted to charge an entrance fee the following year, people boycotted the event and it was cancelled. In 2012, a commercialized Hıdrellez celebration drew

Istanbulites to Parkorman (a large city park); those who could afford to pay 30TL to Biletix

(Turkey’s version of Ticketmaster) could enjoy concerts, rides, food trucks, and even stand-in photo boards where people could pose as Roma.

I attended the 2012 Hıdrellez event in Edirne, which drew hundreds of Roma and non-

Roma (including Edirne’s mayor) to the Tunca River at Sarayiçi where people ritually bathed and threw pieces of paper on which they had written their wishes or prayers. Women collected green branches and shaped leaves and flowers into crowns to wear for good health and fortune.

51 In some Balkan countries, particularly Bulgaria and Macedonia, the day is attributed to Saint George and celebrated by Catholics and Orthodox Christians (see Dunin 1998). 76

Young, unmarried girls wore wedding dresses and I was told that this was “to wish for a husband.” Small fires were built and people jumped over them three times, uttering prayers or wishes to Hızır. Music and dancing lasted all night, until dawn the next day, and at some point pilaf (a rice dish) was offered on behalf of the mayor to everyone in attendance. The event was greeted with major fanfare by the media, the local government, and local Romani dernek.

I was invited to the Hıdrellez event in Edirne by a young Romani woman, Ayla,52 who is active in EdRom. She and some other local Romani youth had created t-shirts on which they had written, “Stop child marriage!” and “Stop discrimination!” Some of them carried hand drums called darbuka, and they had written a song that they sang loudly in the crowd, to a 9/8 rhythm:

Çocuk yaşta gelin olmaz – Children cannot be brides Gelinlik bedende durmaz – The bridal gown won’t fit them (i.e. it would be too big and fall off)

Sahip çık...okuluna! – Stake a claim to… your school! Sahip çık... kitabına! – Stake a claim to… your book! Sahip çık... romanlara! – Stake a claim to… the Roma!

Baba, beni okula yolla – Daddy, register me in school Baba, bana koca bulma, çeyiz alma – Daddy, don’t find a husband for me, don’t buy me a trousseau

Hundreds of people were gathered on the bridge over the Tunca River to watch the young girls

(who looked to be between the ages of 12-16) dressed in their bridal gowns wash their faces in the river water. Some of the girls stopped and listened to the song intently, and I saw both curiosity and confusion on their faces. Some of the older women scoffed and inserted their own lyrics – when the song asked where the girls should stake a claim, instead of answering school or books, they inserted “kocasına!” (their husbands). Ayla was upset and told me, shaking her head,

“We can never change this community.” Eventually, amidst accusations from the crowd that they were being provocateurs, the activists put up their drums.

52 A pseudonym. 77

At this event, local Roma perform pride in local tradition and representations of Romani culture, and this is sanctioned by local government. However, for Ayla and the other activists, child marriage is not an aspect of culture, but a social problem. In fact, child marriage among the

Roma is an area identified by both the state and civil society organizations as a target for intervention and improvement, begging the question: what elements of Romani culture and identity are to be celebrated and what are to be discarded in the project of integration? This gave me insight into the competing narratives of Romani identity in Turkey today and the tension between acceptable cultural practices and those that are considered outdated or even embarrassing by young Romani activists.

2.2. Main Arguments of Each Article

This section gives an overview of the main arguments of each of the appended articles.

2.2.1 Article 1: “’Sulukule is the Gun and We are its Bullets’: Urban Renewal and Romani Identity in Istanbul”

Schoon, Danielle van Dobben. 2014. “’Sulukule is the gun and we are its Bullets’: Urban renewal and Romani identity in Istanbul.” CITY: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, Vol. 18, No. 6: 720-731. DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2014.962885

This article came out of collaboration in the field with Timur Hammond and Elizabeth

Angell53 that resulted in a special feature in the journal City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. Our co-authored introduction, “Assembling Istanbul: Buildings and

Bodies in a World City,” proposes that Istanbul offers a fertile site for exploring the promises and pitfalls of assemblage theory as a way of conceptualizing the city. As discussed above, deeply contested processes of urban transformation are rapidly altering the city’s built

53 Sarah El-Kazaz was also part of the original project. 78 environment and social terrain. Much of the scholarship in this area has been framed through the dichotomy of the local and the global and rarely problematizes what counts as the “global,” eliding the diverse temporalities of globalization and the multi-directionality of power and agency in the formation of a “neoliberal” Istanbul. Rather than simply treating Istanbul as a case study of global processes at work, we ask how these universalizing formations – of the global, the neoliberal, and the urban – are themselves constituted out of particular local assemblages, and how ethnographic engagement with this lived specificity can speak back to and generate new theoretical perspectives on the city. We explore the production of urban politics and experience in contemporary Istanbul in light of the growing body of work on the city as an urban assemblage (Farías and Bender 2010; Farías 2011; McFarlane 2011a, 2011b, 2011c; Brenner,

Madden, and Wachsmuth 2011; Wachsmuth, Madden, and Brenner 2011; Swanton 2011;

Anderson et al 2012). The contributions to the special feature, based on ethnographic research in

Istanbul in the years immediately preceding the Gezi Park protests, explore the assembling of the city at different sites and around different kinds of urban experience – religious practice, ethnic identity, and disaster risk.

My article examines how the controversial demolition of Sulukule instigated connections between transnational Romani rights and ‘right to the city’ networks, creating new possibilities for the explicit participation of the neighborhood’s dislocated residents in urban politics. These connections inextricably linked the neighborhood to the politics of Romani identity and urban renewal in Istanbul. I argue that Sulukule is not only ‘made’ in its place; the meaning of the neighborhood and its demolition expands and changes as it travels and encounters various (often competing) agendas. Analyzing the conflict that arose over a Hip Hop film that takes place in

Sulukule, I show how a particular formation of Romani identity emerges from the dynamics of 79 various actors in the neighborhood. This identity – as urban, politically engaged, and a source of resistance against oppressive global forces – travels along urban rights and Romani rights activist networks and gains far-reaching salience and durability. Highlighting the global connections that are made and broken around a demolished neighborhood in Istanbul demonstrates the potential impacts of a seemingly singular event on urban politics.

My use of the term ‘assemblage’ in this article is informed by work in critical urbanism that proposes a study of the city through engagement with assemblage theory. This kind of work follows the Deleuzian approach that identifies social formations as assemblages of complex and layered configurations, alongside Latour’s emphasis on local interactions and incommensurable entities (2005: 243), but also moves beyond these. McFarlane has referred to this approach as

“assemblage thinking” – a way of studying the city that is inherently political and oriented toward a more socially just urbanism (2011: 205). Assemblage connotes indeterminacy and becoming – Robbins and Marks have suggested that sensitivity in analysis to assemblages proceed from the proposition that the world is relational, and trace “the way particular configurations actually make involved actors the way they are, producing the contingent character of the objects and agents involved” (2009: 182). I propose that such an approach is useful for considering the contingent and relational nature of urban identity, its multiple possibilities, and how it is impacted by space and place. As we write in the Introduction to the special feature in City, “In pushing us to think in terms other than inside/outside and beyond clearly bounded entities, assemblage helps us to analyze in more detail the networks of people and things whose differential intensities help to constitute multiple Istanbuls and to explore… the various kinds of urban identities that are assembled through particular neighborhoods” (Angell,

Hammond, and van Dobben Schoon 2014: 648). Assemblage thinking invites us to question how 80

Romani identity is assembled in concrete, local places and in articulation with transnational networks. Implicit in that question are contestations over for and by whom and under what terms that identity is made visible. As this article demonstrates, it was through interactions between

Sulukule Roma and civil society activist networks that a particular formation of Romani identity came to find durability and salience within the contemporary urban landscape of Istanbul.

2.2.2 Article 2: “Romani Rights in the European Periphery: The Politics of Minority Recognition and Ethnic Identity in Turkey”

Article 2, “Romani Rights in the European Periphery: The Politics of Minority

Recognition and Ethnic Identity in Turkey,” turns attention to debates over the direction of

Romani identity and citizenship in Turkey today and the ambiguous experiences of Turkey’s

Roma as the targets of recent state and civil society interventions. Since negotiations for

Turkey’s full membership in the European Union (EU) began in 2005, governmental and civil society initiatives that explicitly target the country’s Romani population for social and economic integration have accelerated significantly. Some Romani communities are benefitting from these initiatives, for example through increased access to education and state identity cards.

Furthermore, attention to Romani rights in Turkey is creating new contexts for the Roma to participate in politics and public debates about citizenship. However, based on fieldwork I conducted with Romani rights associations and activists in Istanbul, Izmir, and Edirne in 2010 and 2011-2012, I can confirm what other scholars of Romani culture and society in Turkey have claimed: that Turkey’s Roma do not associate themselves with other marginalized groups, nor do they define themselves according to European conceptions of ethnic difference (Strand in Marsh and Strand 2006: 99-100). Furthermore, my fieldwork revealed a general sense of disappointment and frustration among civil society actors that Turkey’s Romani community 81 leaders tend to profess loyalty to the nation and its discourses of national belonging over solidarity with the global Romani rights movement. Conceptions of Romani identity as rooted in ethnic or racial distinction that have been established and propagated by the Romani rights movement in Europe are at odds with conceptions of national belonging and equal citizenship in

Turkey, and this is the source of misunderstandings and frustration between pan-European and

Turkish Romani rights activists. Moreover, there are disagreements among Romani community leaders as to the agenda for advancing Romani rights in Turkey, and attempts at long-lasting alliances between communities have generally failed.

In my fieldwork, I found that many Roma in Turkey are disillusioned with recent so- called reforms in the area of Romani rights, as they offer more than they seem to deliver.

However, albeit with a few significant exceptions, most of Turkey’s Roma are not turning to international Romani rights organizations for the solution; rather, they appeal to their own government and political system to affect small changes incrementally. They do this within local narratives of Turkish history, citizenship, and belonging, rather than international Romani rights conceptions of ethnic identity and minority rights. Indeed, I found that Romani rights in Turkey is being shaped in the context of the country’s EU and global economic integration and subsequent discourses and practices of civic activism. Romani identity in Turkey is being shaped by multiple actors and processes, not the least of which is the politics of urban renewal and the dislocation of urban Romani neighborhoods due to gentrification and privatization in Istanbul.

Recent reforms in Turkey (often referred to as part of an ongoing process of liberalization and democratization) have resulted in the expansion of civil society. This is evident in increasing debates over identity and human rights in the public sphere and the profusion of civil society organizations. International human and minority rights organizations often support counter- 82 hegemonic narratives and identity politics, while pointing to social divisions that were not necessarily explicit before – for example, the European model of rights defines the Roma as an ethnic minority. Turkey’s current government, the AKP (Justice and Development Party), responding to pressure from the EU to improve minority rights standards, declared a Romani

Initiative (Roman Açılımı) in 2010 that is broadly meant to integrate the country’s Roma into state services and institutions and the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The language of the initiative avoids reference to the Roma as a ‘minority’ group; instead, Erdoğan frames their difference as “alt kimlik”, or sub-identity, which allows for cultural differences but still locates them under the umbrella of Turkish national identity.

Turkey’s Roma are grappling with integrating a European conception of ethnic Romani identity and solidarity into the context of Turkish citizenship, itself undergoing changes due to

Turkey’s European Union integration aspirations and the increasing attention of international

CSOs to minority rights in Turkey. I argue that the Turkish Roma are caught in a double bind within a politics of inclusion that, in order to work, must highlight their difference; in Turkey, to be different is to be excluded from the national narratives of belonging. As the “’safe face’ of cultural/political pluralism” (Potuoğlu-Cook 2010: 101), the Roma in Turkey are often contrasted by the government with Armenian and Kurdish minority rights movements, which are associated with separatism. As a result, Romani culture, particularly in the form of music and dance, is publicly celebrated, yet social issues related to their education, housing, and employment are considered the responsibility of civil society. This neoliberal perspective of social responsibility has enabled the proliferation of civil society organizations in Turkey, including Romani rights associations that receive funding and training from European organizations such as the Open Society Foundation. Transnational Romani rights networks offer 83 the Turkish Roma opportunities, but also impose limitations. A European conception of the

Roma as an ethnic minority is inherent in their mission statements; however, the Roma of Turkey do not fully integrate this conception into their own discourses and agendas. Internal debates about the future direction of Romani identity in Turkey highlight Turkey’s position in European

Union accession negotiations, the politics of human and minority rights interventions, and the uneasy engagement of local dynamics with transnational solidarity networks. The multiple ways in which Turkey’s Roma are defined and targeted by the state and civil society actors increasingly form the grounds from which they elaborate Romani identity: not in terms of ethnic difference or minority rights, but in terms of culture.

This article explores the politics of Romani rights in Turkey at the nexus of the Turkish state, local and international civil society actors for Romani rights, and the leaders of Romani associations (dernek) in Turkey. I show that treating the Roma as a minority group, or not, places them in a particular relationship vis-à-vis the state and society. Furthermore, I highlight how the concept of ‘minority rights’ assumes a particular vision of liberal, democratic politics. I demonstrate that Turkey’s Roma do not fit neatly into models of democratization in which underrepresented groups are expected to find their voices and demand the rights of citizenship and individual freedom, thereby challenging authoritarian state regimes and contributing to the success of a country’s transition to more liberal and democratic governance. Rather, Turkey’s

Roma tend to make temporary, strategic alliances, and do not necessarily have lasting affinities with international rights movements. I argue that, via state and civil society interventions,

Turkey’s Roma are brought not so much into the domain of civil society, but into the domain of a kind of politics that Chatterjee refers to as ‘political society’ (2004), wherein their political, social, and economic lives are regulated by new legal policies and governmental institutions. As 84

Chatterjee suggests, democracy does not depend on the strengthening of ‘civil society,’ but on the increasing entry of marginal populations into ‘political society,’ in which they are able to compel the to negotiate what they are entitled to as citizens (41). Rather than asking whether the

Roma are being adequately integrated into civil society (and, subsequently, resistant to hegemonic state discourses), examining how and why the Roma in Turkey do not meet such expectations offers insights into the nature of political transformations occurring in Turkey today.

2.2.3 Article 3: “Closing Doors, Opening Windows: Dislocated Roma and the Politics of Openness in Istanbul, Turkey”

Article 3, “Closing Doors, Opening Windows: Dislocated Roma and the Politics of

Openness in Istanbul, Turkey,” interrogates the concept of ‘openness’ that I encountered in multiple arenas during my fieldwork, from the government’s ongoing initiative to integrate the country’s Roma into mainstream society, referred to as the Romani Opening (Roman Açılımı), to human rights discourses of tolerance and pluralism that guide and inform state and civil society interventions into Turkey’s Romani communities with the purpose of establishing a more open and democratic Turkish society. I am critical of openness in the sense that I want to understand the conditions that make it ubiquitous, polyvalent, and normative. The article explores, first, how the political and moral discourse of openness travels across multiple domains – how it circulates and is evoked in different contexts to mean various things – and how its polyvalence allows both politicians and civil rights activists with very different agendas to evoke openness. Second, I move beyond a theoretical discussion of openness to an understanding of how the concept works in practice. I ground my analysis in an ethnographic account of dislocation in Sulukule that 85 describes how the targets of governmental and civil society interventions perceive, experience, and talk about openness.

I situate my research at the intersection of anthropological scholarship on urban development and globalization, studies of Romani belonging, and studies of neoliberal forms of governance in Turkey. I suggest that, while ‘openness’ is ubiquitous in global discourses about the liberalization of economies and democratization of societies, it remains under-theorized in social science research, resulting in a lack of clarity about and attention to some counter-intuitive features of liberalization. A closer examination of such discourses frames my interrogation of dominant political and cultural categories and aims to initiate broader inquiries into the politics of development.

2.3 General Conclusions

By way of making several general conclusions, let me return to the title of this dissertation. As I have explained, ‘Becoming Roma’ points to an ongoing process rather than a state of being. In other words, ‘Roma-ness’ is not an essential identity with a common origin; rather, it has a history that is still in the making today. ‘Roma-ness’ in Turkey reflects a particular configuration, or assemblage, of social, economic, and political factors. I highlight the factors that I take into account in this study in the dissertation’s subtitle: identity politics, civic engagement, and urban renewal.

Urban renewal forms the context in which urban Roma articulate their identity according to their relationship with the city, their neighborhood, and place/space. The narratives I collected among the dislocated Sulukule Roma demonstrate that a process of Romani cultural differentiation is informed by the demolition of Sulukule. As I conducted interviews after the 86 demolitions were over, I found it interesting how powerful was this place that no longer existed, not only in political efforts but also in personal expressions of belonging, inclusion and exclusion, and identity. For example, Sulukule, which by the time final demolitions were implemented had a reputation for drugs and prostitution, actually gained a more positive status in these memory narratives. Interviewees reminisced about the good old days, describing neighborly behavior like the sharing of food and resources. Furthermore, the demolition of

Sulukule contributed to the politicization of Romani identity in Turkey. One might refer to this as the ‘Sulukule effect,’ whereby the demolition of the neighborhood and the transnational networks of civil society actors expanded to impact other neighborhoods and discources about other demolitions.

The ‘Sulukule effect’ reached beyond the neighborhood, the city, and even Turkey. At the same time, global rights discourses effect what it means to be ‘appropriately Roma’ in

Turkey, shaping the limits of Romani collective identity and acceptable and effective ways to engage in politics. The Turkish government's efforts to mitigate the social and symbolic boundaries between Romani Turks and non-Romani Turks via the Romani Initiative, coupled with activist and CSO interventions into Romani communities, treat the Roma as a unified population and contribute to the codification of Romani identity in Turkey. Romani associations strategically make similar moves towards solidarity, but continuously come up against internal conflicts and debates over how to represent themselves to the public and whether or not the state should treat them as an ethnic group, a minority group, or equal citizens of the Turkish Republic.

Culture becomes central to these debates, and is often posited as the solution. Yet, as this dissertation demonstrates, culture is not apolitical; rather, it is a site of governance, administration, and contestation. 87

The larger context for these issues is the ongoing reforms under the AK Party in the past decade that are resulting in the pluralization of cultural identity, gentrification and urban development in Istanbul and other Turkish cities, and the expansion of civil society and increasing civil society initiatives. These processes intersect and are magnified in Turkey’s

Romani neighborhoods, where urban renewal projects are dislocating Romani communities and

CSO involvement is increasing. This dissertation interposes the Turkish Romani experience between debates over whether the liberal model of democracy is inherently beneficial or whether it only produces new forms of control. I found that the advantages and disadvantages of liberalization for marginalized populations like the Roma are simultaneously produced and mutually constituted. Internal debates around Romani identity, ‘the right to the city,’ and minority citizenship are both enabled by and stand in an uneasy tension with political and economic liberalization in Turkey. The dynamic characteristics and margins of Romani identity in Turkey are thereby highlighted here.

Romani identity is formed in encounter: with the city, urban activism, and European discourses and practices of minority and rights. In all three articles of this dissertation, I emphasize Romani identity as an assemblage of these factors. Attempts by the state and civil society to address Turkey’s Romani community are in turn playing a role in producing the community they attempt to address. As activists attempt to incorporate the Roma into narratives of urban belonging in Istanbul, they find that their own cosmopolitanism and the discourses of

Romani nationalism are at odds. Alongside this is the contradiction of aversion and admiration for the Roma and the poor that results in ambiguous emotions. In Turkey, Romani and non-

Romani citizens are engaged in new encounters and are getting to know each other in very new ways. Non-Romani Turks are only just being exposed to the idea that the Roma are more than 88 musicians and dancers, or that they are part of the national community and contribute to its resources. As it turns out, the Roma of Turkey, generally thought to occupy the periphery of the country’s social life, are actually central to the political-economic processes of liberalization underway in Turkey today.

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100

APPENDIX A: ARTICLE ONE

‘Sulukule is the Gun and We are its Bullets’:

Urban Renewal and Romani Identity in Istanbul

A young man in a hoodie is running from the zabıta (municipal police). The police car chases him through an Istanbul ghetto with streets lined in trash. The crumbling buildings show few signs of their former residents–no doors or windows, just gaping holes, and graffiti on the walls. The boy turns a corner where a spray-painted sign on a metal fence ironically admonishes people: ‘Buraya çöp atmayınız’ (‘Don’t throw trash here’). He ducks through a gutted building, jumping over concrete rubble and piles of things left behind. He has lost the police for now, but he continues to run. The camera pulls back, offering viewers the larger picture: we are in

Sulukule, or at least what is left of the neighborhood after its infamous demolition. From the trash and the empty homes and the graffiti, the camera zooms out and away, moving over the new housing development that replaced the old homes of Sulukule. Where eclectic and colorfully painted two-story buildings used to crowd up against each other and press close to the

Theodosian Wall, now there are gated condominiums: clean, new, and identical. They rise out of the center of the neighborhood and seem to threaten the remaining homes with prospects of future demolitions, future ‘improvement.’

The camera then dives back into the neighborhood and takes us into a home where rapper, Fuat Ergin, sits on a plush red seat, wearing an army jacket and a mock crown. He is the stereotypical yet contemporary version of the “Gypsy King,” flanked by two men in suits, the cut and fabric of which signal associations with the mafia. The young man who escaped the police stands with two other young men, presenting themselves before the king, who instructs them: 101

“They’re at the gates to knock down our neighborhood Today it’s Sulukule, tomorrow Balat, Okmeydanı, Tarlabaşı, Gezi Parkı Time’s running out They’re taking from the poor and giving to the rich Knocked down the shanties to build expensive apartments Let art and music be your armaments Tahribad-ı İsyan54 Stop the demolitions!”

Located in central Istanbul, Sulukule was a largely Romani (Gypsy)55 neighborhood famous for its professional musicians and dancers. It had also gained a reputation as a seedy and dangerous ghetto associated with prostitution and drugs. Today, Sulukule is notorious for the

‘urban renewal’ project that eventually resulted in its demolition, a project that attracted global attention to the systematic dislocation of Istanbul’s marginalized residents from inner-city neighborhoods for land redevelopment. This scene from the film Wonderland56 takes place in and around the demolition site and directs attention to three interrelated themes addressed in this paper.

The first theme is the role of dislocated Romani youth from Sulukule in Istanbul’s urban politics. In the scene described above, three young rappers are charged with protecting the city; they are sent out by the “Gypsy King,” armed with art and music, to stop the demolitions that are razing historic and low-income neighborhoods and transferring them to the middle and upper classes of Turkish society (the line, “Today it’s Sulukule, tomorrow Balat, Okmeydanı,

Tarlabaşı, Gezi Parkı,” refers to other areas in Istanbul undergoing urban renewal.) The suggestion that marginalized Romani residents of Istanbul might have the power to stop these

54 Tahribad-ı İsyan is a rap group made up of three young men who go by the stage names Slang, Vz, and Zen G. 55 There are various approaches to usage in Romani Studies. Following the scholar, Ian Hancock, I generally use Roma or the adjective Romani (i.e ‘the Romani people’), although the Turkish, Roman (sing.) and Romanlar (pl.) are sometimes also used. 56 Wonderland (Harikalar Diyarı) is short art film by Halil Altındere in the style of a music video. http://vimeo.com/78545350. 102 redevelopment projects may seem exaggerated. Yet, the film dramatizes a reality in Istanbul today: the controversial demolition of Sulukule has instigated “global connections” (Tsing 2005:

3) between Romani rights and ‘right to the city’57 activist networks, creating new possibilities for the explicit participation of the neighborhood’s dislocated Romani residents in urban politics.

This article explores the “productive friction” and “contingent collaborations” (Tsing 2005: 3) that afford the dislocated residents of Sulukule limited agency in the politics of urban redevelopment.

Second, the images in this first scene of Wonderland prompt questions about the relationship between Sulukule’s dislocated residents and their built environment. There is a clear distinction in the film between the partially demolished homes of the old neighborhood and the new housing development; the young man belongs to the former space and does not have access to the latter. The film brings us into Sulukule as it exists today: no longer a neighborhood in real space and time or a name on a map, nonetheless it is a place that continues to echo beyond its demolition. Later in the film, Vz raps, “I’m not settled in Sulukule but I live there” (Sulukule'de oturmuyorum ama yaşıyorum), which expresses a common sentiment among dislocated residents that Sulukule is still their home. The new housing development, on the other hand, stands as a symbol (onerous for some) of Istanbul’s future as a ‘global city.’ The experiences and interactions Romani youth have with the demolition and construction sites in Sulukule directly inform their understanding of and involvement in Istanbul’s urban politics.

Third, the relationship of the local to the global, or inside to outside, is a central theme in

Wonderland. Beginning in the narrow streets of Sulukule, the camera zooms out to establish the larger context of land redevelopment and the dispossession of marginalized urban citizens, issues

57 The ‘right to the city’ was first proposed by Henri Lefebvre and further elaborated by David Harvey. Urban activists in Istanbul have adopted the idea and slogan. 103 of major concern in Istanbul today. This article executes a similar maneuver: an investigation into the dynamics of a particular neighborhood that explores its global connections. Yet, rather than proposing that global forces are simply acting upon local objects, I examine “through which vehicles, which traces, which trails, which types of information, the world is being brought inside [a place] and then, after having been transformed there… pumped back out of its narrow walls” (Latour 2005:179-80). In other words, I am interested in how the abstract concept of the

‘global’ gets actualized in concrete, local places (Farías 2010:15). However, Sulukule is not only

‘made’ in its place; the meaning of the neighborhood and its demolition expands and changes as it travels (by vehicles such as Wonderland) and encounters various (often competing) agendas.

These three interrelated issues inform the central concern of this paper, which is the assemblage of Sulukule Romani identity and the politics of urban renewal in Istanbul. Drawing from some of the principles of actor-network theory (ANT)58 and oriented by “assemblage thinking” (McFarlane 2011a), I analyze Sulukule as both an effect of associations between multiple actor-networks and as the site where Romani identity is mobilized (as in, made capable of movement). I demonstrate how one particular formation of Romani identity (urban, politically engaged, and a source of resistance against oppressive global forces) travels via urban rights and

Romani rights activist networks and thus gains far-reaching salience and durability.

First, I offer a brief history of Sulukule assemblages, drawing attention to space/place as an effect of associations. Sulukule is enacted and assembled at multiple sites that are connected by various actor-networks. ‘Sulukule assemblages’ (plural) refers to these multiple enactments. I then detail a contentious encounter between activists, artists, and Sulukule youth that occurred due to the violence portrayed in Wonderland by the Hip Hop group, Tahribad-ı İsyan (Revolt’s

58 Actor–network theory is an approach to social theory and research that treats objects as part of social networks and maps relations that are both material and semiotic, avoiding essentialist explanations. 104

Destruction). This demonstrates the multiple competing agendas surrounding Sulukule and points to how global connections instigated by Sulukule’s demolition continue to create new paths for engagement with urban renewal and Romani identity in Turkey. I argue that Romani identity does not emerge as either a reflection of or a resistance to larger social forces; rather, it is performed and contested within contingent socio-material associations between various actors and networks.

Situating Sulukule

An extensive body of academic literature has been produced about Sulukule that frames the importance of the neighborhood within larger issues, such as heritage preservation (Aksoy and Robins 2011; Gürsoy 2009), urban development and gentrification (Karaman and İslam

2012; Dinçer 2011; Ingin and İslam 2011; Potuoğlu-Cook 2010 and 2011; İslam 2010; Tok and

Oğuz 2013), and social movements (Uysal 2012; Gökçen 2009; Somersan and Kırca-Schroeder

2007; Foggo 2007). These works carefully explore the macro-economic and political processes that create the conditions for urban renewal and the displacement of marginalized citizens in

Istanbul. Taken together, they draw a grim picture of a neoliberal regime acting upon the spaces of the city. Although a political economic analysis rightly positions urban renewal within shifting regimes of property, governance, and capital in contemporary Istanbul, such an analysis marginalizes the agency of individuals actively engaged in reshaping themselves and their city.

The dominant way of understanding Sulukule—as one example of the dispossession and displacement of the urban poor under a neoliberal regime—is incomplete in that it fails to pay attention to the work of assembling. How does the conjunction of actors, ideas, and projects in 105

Sulukule shape the multiple trajectories of the neighborhood? And, further, how does Romani identity get linked to this neighborhood?

Understanding Sulukule as generated by actor-networks in multiple sites does not preclude recognition of the structural effects of capitalism; however, it does avoid positing neoliberalism as a machine or master narrative. Ozan Karaman (2012) suggests an interface between political economic and assemblage approaches to the city; his “immanentist approach” proposes that the interactions between governmental institutions, urban social movements, city dwellers, and other urban social formations “exceed the event of the encounter, in the sense that they are not simple interactions between parts of a single determinate totality; rather, the interactions between the parts are contingent and generative of new connections between them”

(2012: 1292-93). While none of these interactions can be traced back to a totalizing essence, like neoliberalism, a structure of domination exists; yet “the structure is a cause immanent in its effects” (2012: 1297). To interrogate Sulukule in terms of its assemblages is not, therefore, a denial of the structural inequalities that allow for the displacement of the urban poor, but rather an exploration of how such inequalities emerge from the relationships between actor-networks in particular places. Furthermore, such an approach can better account for the agency of individuals in these places. While attempts have been made to reveal “what Sulukule is, or was, or still even could be, actually about” (Robins 2011:37), extant scholarship has overlooked what new connections emerge from the interactions of various actors and networks in Sulukule (DeLanda

2006:4-5), and what these global connections generate.

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Sulukule Assemblages

Although the neighborhood was demolished, Sulukule remains a powerful touchstone that contributes to various narratives of the ills of neoliberalism and the persecution of the

Romani people. I briefly trace various Sulukule assemblages to demonstrate the effort that has gone into defining (and redefining) the physical and symbolic boundaries (Latour 2005: 28-29) of the neighborhood and its dislocated residents. Sulukule is relentlessly being assembled at various sites of practice; these assemblages constitute multiple Sulukules that are mobilized according to the agendas of different groups.

Sulukule was located in the Neslişah and Hatice Sultan quarters of the Fatih municipality and attracted both locals and foreigners to its eğlence evleri (entertainment houses) until they were shut down by the municipality in the late 1990s. In 2006, the municipality received authorization from the Turkish Cabinet to expropriate the entire neighborhood for renewal and development. Despite efforts by activists to prevent the project, most of the remaining houses in

Sulukule were demolished in November 2009, replaced by so-called “neo-Ottoman” condominiums. The residents who could present legal documentation of home ownership were offered units in TOKİ-built apartment blocks59 in Taşoluk, 40 km northwest of the city center.

However, Taşoluk offered few employment opportunities and only four families are known to have remained there, while another 850 families dispersed. About 40% of the Sulukule population now lives in the neighborhood up the hill from their previous homes, in an area called

Karagümrük, where some activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) remain active with the dislocated community.

The juxtaposition of the demolished homes and neo-Ottoman condominiums in

Wonderland parallels the lived experiences of Sulukule’s Romani people in Karagümrük. The

59 TOKİ (Toplu Konut İdaresi Başkanlığı) is Turkey’s Housing Development Administration. 107 interactions of the dislocated residents with their new built environment, as well as their memories of the old neighborhood, shape how they perceive the city and their place in it. The neo-Ottoman condominiums that replaced their old homes are interpreted by the dislocated residents and activists alike as an ironic displacement of people with a real claim to Ottoman heritage for a fabricated version of Ottoman architecture that appeals to middle and upper class desires.60 Perhaps more impactful than the symbolic meaning of the new development is the physical boundary between Karagümrük and the housing development. The metal fences invite all kinds of interventions from the Romani youth, especially graffiti art, forms of vandalism, and attempts to gain entrance. Zabıta patrol the boundary between the neighborhoods, creating an atmosphere of surveillance, but this only mobilizes Romani youth to find ever more creative ways of rebelling against the policing of a space over which they still feel a strong sense of ownership.

Alongside the destructive actions of the bulldozers that left a razed neighborhood and a dislocated community, much was also produced in and through Sulukule. In particular, new connections were forged between Turkish and international rights organizations that resulted in new regimes of knowledge, interventions by NGOs and activists, and flows of material resources. The neighborhood’s demolition drew attention from European Romani rights activists and NGOs to the situation of the Romani people in Turkey.61 As a persistent minority, the Roma are socially marginalized, particularly in the areas of education, employment, health, and housing. Social discrimination is a shared experience among the Romani people of Turkey, yet only recently has a sense of solidarity emerged. This shift is largely due to the mobilization of

60 Personal communication (interviews, 2011). 61 Estimates of the current population of Romani people in Turkey are unreliable as official census figures do not include the ethnic composition of the population (Uzpeder et al 2008) and Turkey’s Romani people rarely possess identity cards. Nevertheless, estimates range from 300,000 (Petrova 2004: 10) to two million (European Commission Turkey Progress Report 2006). 108

Romani rights groups and the organization of Romani associations (dernek) in the last decade.

Turkey’s 2004 Law on Associations (Dernekler Kanunu) enabled these associations and facilitated their cooperation with international organizations, introducing opportunities for funds from the European Union. Since 2004, Romani associations have been founded in cities all over

Turkey.

The mobilization of Romani rights in Turkey increased significantly with the threat of demolition in Sulukule (Arkılıc 2008:29). The most prominent coalition of Romani rights and

‘right to the city’ activists was formed between the Sulukule Romani Culture Development and

Solidarity Association (Sulukule Roman Kültürünü Geliştirme ve Dayanısma Derneği) and the

Human Settlements Association. This coalition, known as the Sulukule Platform, initiated a movement called “We Must Save Sulukule,” organizing benefit concerts and street rallies, circulating petitions against the demolition, and giving hundreds of press conferences in Turkey and abroad. The stated aim of the Sulukule Platform was to convince the city to rehabilitate the neighborhood rather than to demolish it, emphasizing the historical importance of the area and the tangible and intangible heritage of its residents.62 Local and international journalists and artists got involved, initiating a proliferation of public discussions about Sulukule’s Romani culture and its potential loss. International organizations also got involved, including the

European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), the U.S. Helsinki Commission, and the Open Society

Foundations.

The public importance and social impact of the neighborhood, its community, and its demolition grew as activists, artists, academics, politicians, and the media added to the narrative.

This has resulted in a kind of common ‘knowing’ that has evolved around Sulukule, so that when

62 Sulukule was one of the largest Romani settlements in the world and it is a commonly held belief that the neighborhood was also the oldest Romani neighborhood in Turkey. 109 the neighborhood is mentioned (whether in print or in conversation), there is an unspoken consensus about what is being discussed: the dispossession and displacement of the poor in historic city centers in favor of state-led gentrification. This urban knowledge circulates so that the symbolic weight of Sulukule continues to reverberate along multiple networks, not only tying various collectivities in Istanbul together, but also extending beyond Turkey to transnational discourses and rights movements. These relationships exist within a constantly emerging set of tensions between various claims to what Sulukule represents. Alongside new alliances produced around Sulukule, there have also emerged clashing agendas, failed attempts at lasting solidarity, and conflicts over resources.

It is precisely because Sulukule no longer exists as a place on the map that its meaning is contentious; its absence allows for contests over the ability to define its symbolic meaning. In my interviews with activists, they often attempted to explain why the demolition occurred despite such an active and far-reaching movement against it. All of the activists agreed that Sulukule stands as an example of what will happen to Istanbul if they fail to resist the neoliberal state’s urban renewal agenda. However, some told me that it had been a mistake of the Sulukule

Platform to frame the issue as one of Romani rights, because less of the general Turkish population related to that cause than they do to gentrification and urban renewal per se. Other activists told me it was a straightforward matter of social injustice, framed either as a matter of neoliberal state oppression or as part of the history of persecution of Romani people. Finally, a third explanation was that the Romani residents of Sulukule did not become actively engaged in their own cause. Although there were residents who resisted the demolitions by chaining 110 themselves to bulldozers or refusing to leave their homes, others did not participate in the resistance and sold their homes willingly.63

These conflicting representations point to a disjuncture rarely addressed in either the media or the academic literature about Sulukule. One exception is the research by Serkan

Yolacan (2008), that points out that the international media portrayed Sulukule as primarily a flashpoint of contestations over urban renewal in Turkey, so that only one aspect of the neighborhood came to represent the whole: an “authentic Gypsy/Roma settlement popular for its tradition of dance and music endangered by urban renewal” (ibid.: 4-5). This framing, he claims, did not represent the views of all of Sulukule’s residents, who were not musicians and were not opposed to the urban renewal project (ibid.: 27-28). This rare portrayal of Sulukule as a

“conflict-ridden neighborhood” (ibid.: 4) reflects contradictions made evident in my own fieldwork. The dislocated residents of Sulukule have experienced major hardships; yet, the interventions of the Sulukule Platform resulted in many of them obtaining state identity cards and health insurance for the first time in their lives. Similarly, many of the Sulukule children now living in Karagümrük are enrolled in school and getting educational support from NGOs.

Some of the dislocated residents expressed to me that, although the urban renewal project in their neighborhood should have allowed them to stay in Sulukule but receive adequate social services, the demolition ended up affording them many opportunities.64 The Sulukule Platform did not, in this sense, fail to ‘save Sulukule.’ In terms of public awareness of Romani rights issues in

Turkey, as well as international awareness of Turkish Romani politics, the movement was successful.

63 This is a complicated issue involving property owners versus renters, coercion and lack of transparency by developers and state agencies, and the passing of housing laws that enable land appropriation (see Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010). 64 Personal communication (interview, 2011). 111

The Sulukule Children’s Art Atelier (Sulukule Çocuk Sanat Atölyesi) in Karagümrük is the manifestation of this success. The atelier was officially opened in 2010 and the Hip Hop group, Tahribad-ı İsyan, found support and flourished there. The advocacy and promotion of the group by the atelier’s director, Funda Oral, has garnered the attention of many Turkish and international journalists, artists, academics, and activists and resulted in various projects, including music videos, local concerts, art installations, and a song on Amnesty International’s

‘Listen to Roma Rights’ CD. One particular non-profit arts and cultural organization based in

London, OpenVizor, initiated a large project with the group called Sulukule Hip Hop Tiyatrosu

(Sulukule Hip Hop Theatre). The director, Abbas Nokhasteh, brought London-based Hip Hop artist, Jonzi D, to the atelier to work with the group and took Slang, Zen G, and Vz to London to participate in a Hip Hop festival. He also brought Tahribad-ı İsyan and various Turkish artists together to create a play called Sahnede İsyan (Revolt on Stage).

Sulukule is indeed salvaged again and again by the discourses and practices put into motion by the Sulukule Platform and repeated in ongoing movements against urban renewal in

Istanbul today. In fact, the movement against Sulukule’s demolition contributed in large part to the forming of networks that are still active in the ‘right to the city’ movement in Istanbul and that initiated the Gezi Park protests of 2013 that spread throughout Turkey and garnered significant international attention.65 Despite multiple appropriations of Sulukule for various causes, the narrative of Romani dispossession and resistance gained prominence through the work of the Sulukule Platform, ultimately creating the conditions for the reception and success of

Tahribad-ı İsyan and Wonderland.

65 The Gezi Park protests were initially organized by Taksim Dayanışması (Solidarity), an umbrella group of Turkish NGOs and activists, many of which were also active in the Sulukule Platform. 112

Romani Identity in an Istanbul Ghetto

The connections between Romani rights and ‘right to the city’ networks enabled collaborations like the one between Tahribad-ı İsyan and OpenVizor, as they enabled the film

Wonderland. However, these associations are made up of “uncertain, fragile ties”; the work that goes into maintaining them is traceable via instances of conflict and controversy (Latour 2005:

28-29). Drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork in Karagümrük,66 I examine a contentious encounter between the Sulukule Platform, Tahribad-ı İsyan, and OpenVizor, drawing attention to

“the many contradictory ways in which social aggregates are constantly evoked, erased, distributed, and reallocated” (Latour 2005: 41). Following Anna Tsing’s notion of “the productive friction of global encounters” (2005: 3), I focus on what is generated in articulation with the competing agendas of transnational activist networks in Sulukule: a particular formation of urban Romani identity that posits the Roma as politically active participants in resistance to a neoliberal bulldozing machine. As Vz raps in Tahribad-ı İsyan’s song Ghetto Machines,

“Sulukule is the gun and we are its bullets,” indicating the politicization of the group and suggesting that the demolition has made them into a force that is going out into the world.

Although it emerges from Sulukule assemblages, this Romani identity also ‘plugs in’ to other assemblages (DeLanda 2006:208), particularly the Gezi Park protest movement, where it takes on new meaning.

‘Productive Friction’ and ‘Contingent Collaborations’

Wonderland was shown to thousands of visitors at the Istanbul 2013 Biennial shortly after the Gezi Park protests. Although it had been filmed before the protests, Wonderland was

66 I conducted fieldwork in Turkey from 2011-2012 and continue my research via electronic correspondence with informants. As part of my fieldwork, I was an English language instructor for Tahribad-ı İsyan at the Sulukule Children’s Atelier. 113 chosen to be included in the Biennial because it spoke to the concerns of gentrification and the displacement of the urban poor. “We pissed on the foundations of the newly built blocks, cuz I was pissed at TOKİ,” Vz raps in the film. “My town will be torn down too. Sulukule now belongs to the bourgeoisie.” Sulukule was once again appropriated as a rallying cry by ‘right to the city’ activists and the music of Tahribad-ı İsyan became the soundtrack for an urban resistance movement. As reported by Jenna Krajeski for Bülent Journal of Contemporary

Turkey, “Activists took notice of Sulukule, and the neighbourhood became iconic for those opposed to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his plans for the urban transformation of

Istanbul. During the Gezi park protests, mere mention of the neighbourhood implied a political declaration, and when the 2013 Istanbul Biennial became reframed to comment on urban development, Sulukule… was translated into works of art, like Wonderland.”67 Similarly, the director of the film, Halil Altındere, suggested that the rappers of Tahribad-ı İsyan are representative of current urban politics in Istanbul and the way that Turkey’s youth are being galvanized.

The film acquired another level of meaning in the context of Gezi, particularly due to its depiction of violence against the police. At the end of the film, the members of Tahribad-ı İsyan are shown beating up and setting fire to a zabıta officer who is guarding the new housing development in Sulukule. This garnered mixed reactions. For urban activists, the film was received as part of ongoing efforts to point out the injustices of urban renewal in Istanbul. For others, however, the violence portrayed in the film went too far. Some activists expressed concern that the violence depicted in the film might undermine the cause by reinforcing stereotypes about the Romani people as aggressive and violent, further justifying demolitions

67 “Ghetto Machines: Tahribad-i İsyan’s Rap Rebellion”, Bülent: Journal of Contemporary Turkey, accessed May 2015, http://bulentjournal.com/ghetto-machines/. 114 like the one in Sulukule.68 In particular, the film provoked a strong reaction from

Abbas Nokhasteh, who released a “Statement about Sulukule Arts and Civil Society” on behalf of OpenVizor:

The demolition in 2009 of Sulukule… can be defined as an act of violence by state and commercial authorities. However, the people of Sulukule did not react with violence towards these symbols of authority. This is a paradox, a disarming defiance by a community refusing to be victims of circumstance… This positive defiance is expressed by supporting each other and the work of local associations, for the future of young people… We do not believe in violence towards others as a force for transformation and change. We do not believe that the images of a police officer being beaten and burned by youngsters are constructive, challenging or relevant… Together through our voices and partnerships, we [support] the message of love, community and togetherness, the forces that brought us to and sustain us in Sulukule… We invite you to join us in engaging, celebrating and supporting this ancient and culturally vital community.69

Mr. Nokhasteh asked Funda Oral and other members of the Sulukule Platform to support and distribute his organization’s statement against the violence in Wonderland. They responded with a refusal based on the following points: first, they did not believe that such a declaration would change the situation for the children of Sulukule; second, they did not believe that the goals of the Sulukule Platform would be negatively affected by the film; third, Tahribad-ı İsyan approved of and willingly participated in the film, so the activists wanted to stand by them; and fourth, by the time the statement had been released, the Biennial was over and it did not seem appropriate to condemn the film after it had garnered so much local support and attention. Nor did the activists want to negatively impact their relationship with the Biennial installation organizers and the director and producers of Wonderland, who had been supportive not only of

68 Personal communication (electronic correspondence, 2014). 69 “Statement about Sulukule arts and civil society,” OpenVizor, accessed May 2014, http://www.openvizor.com/Content/Index/625. 115

Tahribad-ı İsyan, but also of the mission of the atelier.70 After receiving this refusal, Mr.

Nokhasteh ended OpenVizor’s relationship with the atelier and withdrew financial support.

OpenVizor’s statement against Wonderland exemplifies the tensions that exist in competing attempts to represent Sulukule according to a particular cause. The statement claims that the film prompted “overwhelming concern by young people and parents in Sulukule,” which suggests that not all of the dislocated Sulukule residents felt that the film represented them. It also emphasizes that, even though the demolition was an act of violence on the part of the municipality, the people of Sulukule did not respond with violence themselves. Mr. Nokhasteh calls this a “beautiful and inspirational paradox” and an example of “positive defiance” on the part of a people “with a strong resilience.” He goes on to paint a picture of Sulukule as sustained by the forces of “love, community and togetherness,” quite different from the picture of resistance offered by Wonderland. Any tensions or conflicts between various representations of the neighborhood are overlooked in OpenVizor’s statement. The dislocated Romani people are encouraged to defy the “state and commercial authorities,” but in non-violent ways best exemplified in their support of NGOs in their community. At the end of the statement “we” are all invited to engage in and support Sulukule, but the power dynamics that make that possible are not addressed. Mr. Nokhasteh overlooks the agency of the members of Tahribad-ı İsyan by assuming that their involvement in Wonderland merely reflects their exploitation within the music industry and the ambitions of the artists who created and distributed the film.71 Yet, the position of OpenVizor to speak on behalf of the Sulukule Romani community is not questioned.

OpenVizor’s Hip Hop theatre project, “Revolt on Stage,” was never performed live, but the play and behind-the-scenes shots of its planning and practice stages were compiled and

70 Personal communication (electronic correspondence, 2014). 71 Personal communication (electronic correspondence, 2014). 116 released on video in May 2013, shortly before the Gezi Park protests erupted. The video did not garner the kind of attention that Wonderland did, but it portrays the efforts of OpenVizor to create a community project that would positively impact the young people who attend the atelier.

The youth of the neighborhood are presented together on stage as a group unified by Hip Hop music and dance, and the themes of the play deal with local issues the youth can relate to, such as unemployment, the expectations of their parents, and their aspirations to make better lives for themselves outside of the neighborhood. In one scene, as ZenG spray paints “Açın halinden

TOKİ anlamaz!” (TOKİ doesn’t understand the hungry) on a metal fence, Slang raps about his plans to leave the ghetto and buy his mother a house. The politics of urban renewal form the backdrop of the play, but are not explicitly addressed. The young people are engaged in “positive defiance” via the performance of Hip Hop, within the parameters of a particular version of the genre that celebrates the expression of local culture and rejects violent engagements with the authorities. OpenVizor represents the conditions of the ghetto as an obstacle to overcome and suggests that music and dance can empower young people to improve their own circumstances.

Wonderland’s portrayal, on the other hand, suggests that Sulukule’s Romani residents are active urban citizens and participants in the making of the city, even if that involves violent resistance against a state that is making recourse to authoritarian tactics. The ghetto is not portrayed as a site of hope for the future of its youth; their “Wonderland” is the utopian vision of

Istanbul as a ‘global city’ gone terribly wrong. The film speaks to Tahribad-ı İsyan’s inheritance as displaced youth on the margins of Istanbul society, living in a highly policed neighborhood with soaring unemployment and crime rates. But the rappers seem to embrace the ghetto as a source of ‘street cred’; the film justifies their use of violence by situating it within their experiences of marginalization and dislocation. This portrayal of Sulukule took on increasing 117 resonance in the aftermath of the Gezi Park protests, as the members of Tahribad-ı İsyan are shown wearing bandanas over their faces, raising fists, battling bulldozers, and throwing

Molotov cocktails, images that were frequently evoked in media coverage of the protests.

The Gezi Park protests were initially intended to contest the urban development project for a central public gathering space, Taksim’s Gezi Park, but snowballed into a broader movement when protesters were violently evicted from a sit-in by police. Participants grew to include environmentalists, anarchists, socialists, communists, feminists, labor unions, Kurds,

LGBT groups, and more. Many of the Sulukule Platform members were directly involved in the protests, but conspicuously absent were representatives of the Romani associations. As one

Romani activist from Edirne told me, “Other Romanlar are not here and they are against us.”72

The major exception was Tahribad-ı İsyan; the members of the Hip Hop group attended the protests as participants, and were also invited to perform at a protest concert, “Stand Up” (Ayağa

Kalk), organized by Taksim Solidarity.73

Tahribad-ı İsyan’s participation in both the OpenVizor and Wonderland projects exemplifies the flexibility and contingency of group identity. Yet, their involvement in the Gezi

Park protests points to the strengthening of ties between Sulukule and non-Romani urban rights activists. Urban Romani identity as portrayed in Wonderland finds durability and salience among

Istanbul’s ‘right to the city’ actor-networks as it links up with the interests of the Gezi Park protests.

72 Personal communication (electronic correspondence, 2013). 73 One of the rap group’s recent songs is called “Gezizekalı,” which literally means “Gezi-minded” but is a play on the word gerizekalı (‘slow-minded’ or ‘idiot’), a term that has been used by both the Gezi Park protestors and those who oppose them. (Thanks to Kevin Yıldırım for directing my attention to this.)

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Conclusion

While it is tempting to interpret Wonderland as merely another instance of resistance against a neoliberal regime, assemblage thinking invites us to question how Romani identity is assembled in concrete, local places and in articulation with transnational actor-networks. Implicit in that question are contestations over for and by whom, and under what terms, that identity is made visible. The disagreement between OpenVizor and the Sulukule Platform over Wonderland helps us think more carefully about what is generated by urban assemblages.

Urban Romani identity is informed by the dynamics of various Sulukule assemblages that include interactions between actor-networks with competing interests in the neighborhood.

Tahribad-ı İsyan is shaped within these dynamics: neo-Ottoman condominiums surrounded by metal fences and guarded by municipal police; limited employment opportunities outside of the possibility of success as Hip Hop artists; and the networks of urban activists and artists linking

Sulukule to agendas that originate outside of the neighborhood. Tahribad-ı İsyan’s success with

Wonderland affected the mobilization of a particular conception of Sulukule: the demolition of the neighborhood as emblematic of urban transformation projects that are reshaping the landscape of Istanbul in favor of commercial interests. In the context of the Gezi Park protests, this political identity of the Sulukule Roma rose to prominence.

The urban Romani identity that has emerged out of Sulukule is not only informed by the context in which it was shaped; it also works to inform the direction of urban politics in Istanbul in “mutually constituted symbiosis” (McFarlane 2011: 208). Just as Wonderland brought

Tahribad-ı İsyan into the politics of the Gezi Park protests, offering new capacities and potential to urban Romani identity, these politics inform the direction of Sulukule assemblages, dismantling some networks while forming new ones. The concerns of urban transformation, 119 neoliberalism, gentrification, and the marginalization of minorities like the Roma are assembled in places like Sulukule; their effects travel along the networks that connect a neighborhood in

Istanbul to a non-profit organization in London. Similarly, we see that the local is generated via

“many other places, many distant materials, and many faraway actors” (Latour 2005:200). It is through these interactions that a particular formation of Romani identity has come to find durability and salience within the contemporary urban landscape of Istanbul. Furthermore, these global connections, via the use of mobile mediums like Hip Hop and film, afford both activists and the dislocated residents of Sulukule limited agency to participate in the making of their city.

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APPENDIX B: ARTICLE TWO

Romani Rights in the European Periphery:

The Politics of Minority Recognition and Ethnic Identity in Turkey

In late May 2013, hundreds of demonstrators gathered in Istanbul’s Gezi Park to resist its demolition by one of the government’s infamous redevelopment projects. After a sit-in of several days and the growth of the demonstration to include thousands of people, the police raided the park and dispersed demonstrators with tear gas, inadvertently encouraging widespread attention to the cause instead of diverting it. In the early days of June, tens of thousands of protestors gathered in Gezi Park and adjacent Taksim Square and experienced violent clashes with police that left several dead and hundreds wounded. This aggressive display of state power set off a countrywide urban protest movement against President (then Prime Minister) Erdoğan and the

AKP (Justice and Development Party) that lasted for several months and continues to reverberate today. When urban citizens who were barricaded from Gezi Park and Taksim Square gathered instead in small neighborhood forums, the international public media and scholars were quick to note both the democratic tone and format of these forums and the diversity of ideologies and identities represented in the Occupy Gezi movement—Kurds, LGBTQ people, nationalists, anarchists, environmentalists, Islamists, and others were united by their desire to save one of the few remaining public spaces in Istanbul and their frustration with the heavy-handed response of

123 the government.74

It was this sense of solidarity among usually divided and disparate groups that captured international interest. As Zeynep Tufekci wrote at the time:

In Gezi, one thing that struck me and that I’ve been tweeting about, and that came up in many of the 100+ interviews I conducted with the participants was the spirit of tolerance and diversity. Gezi protests participation included people ranging from nationalist/ traditional Kemalists to Kurdish political parties, from the “internet generation” youth (as they are referred to here) to feminists, from “revolutionary muslims” to many ordinary citizens who do not fit into any of these categories.75

There were various interpretations of the meaning of such solidarity, but most agreed that the reasons were complex (see David and Toktamış 2015). One article noted, “The majority of those taking part are middle-class and secular, but the participation of working-class people, practicing

Muslims, and ethnic and religious minorities belies any simplistic attempt to characterize this movement as a simple reiteration of existing divisions between secular and religious, urban and rural, Turkish and non-Turkish, and so forth” (Hammond and Angell 2013).76 Britta Ohm described the dynamic interactions of the protestors thusly:

Inadvertently, the protestors showed the limits of media and representation in contrast to the active, physical togetherness of hitherto deeply divided groups of people in the real public space, the direct getting-to-know each other, seeing each other, speaking with each other, learning about and from each other, organising things together, and, increasingly,

74 See “The Visual Emergence of the Occupy Gezi Movement, Part Three: Democracy’s Workshop,” http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12749/the-visual-emergence-of-the-occupy-gezi-movement-p, accessed August 2015; “Can the “Spirit of Gezi” Transform Progressive Politics in Turkey?”, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12616/can-the-spirit-of-gezi-transform-progressive-polit, accessed August 2015; “Resisting Tear Gas Together,” http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12294/resisting-tear-gas-together, accessed August 2015; “Alignments of Dissent and Politics of Naming: Assembling Resistance in Turkey,” http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12001/alignments-of-dissent-and-politics-of-naming_assem, accessed August 2015; “Everywhere is Taksim, Resistance Everywhere,” http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/11980/everywhere-is-taksim-resistance-everywhere, accessed August 2015. 75 “’Come, Come, Whoever You Are.’ As a Pluralist Movement Emerges from Gezi Park in Turkey,” Zeynep Tufekci, accessed July 2015, http://technosociology.org/?p=1421. 76 “Is Everywhere Taksim?: Public Space and Possible Publics,” Jadaliyya, accessed July 2015, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12143/is-everywhere-taksim_public-space-and-possible-pub. 124

suffering together, helping each other during relentless attacks of teargas and water cannon and, also, joining in burying and commemorating the dead.77

Ohm goes on to describe Turkish society in the process of discovering itself as a society that is open to all, in direct protest against social exclusion, the privatization of public space, and the

‘neoliberal’ takeover of the city—what Zeynep Tufekci has referred to as “anti-postmodern pluralism.”78 Rather than describe the movement in terms of solidarity, Ohm proposes that it was about discovering a tentative “common-ness through the very defense of the commons.”79 El-

Kazaz proposes a similar interpretation80 – she points out that other controversial issues in

Turkey, such as the repression of the Kurdish minority or the government’s arrests of journalists, did not evoke a protest movement akin to the right to the city movement that the Gezi Park demonstrators inspired. She traces the right to the city cause back to the passing of a law, the

“Renewal and Preservation Law” no. 5366, by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in 2005, that allows municipalities to designate urban renewal areas for demolition or transformation. The first such project was implemented in a Romani (“Gypsy”)81 neighborhood of central Istanbul known as Sulukule, which prompted a coalition of civil society organizations known as the

Sulukule Platform to organize a protest against the demolition (although ultimately it was unsuccessful). The networks that were formed in the Sulukule Platform were later galvanized in the Gezi Park protests, and Sulukule remains a touchstone example of the ills of neoliberal urban

77 “A public for democracy: overcoming mediated segregation in Turkey,” Open Democracy, accessed July 2015, https://www.opendemocracy.net/britta-ohm/public-for-democracy-overcoming-mediated-segregation-in- turkey#.Ue440fjnUIM.facebook. 78 ibid. 79 The concept of ‘the commons’ has origins in the legal term, ‘common land,’ but has since been expanded to include the shared cultural resources of a city. It was elaborated by David Harvey as part of his discussion on the ‘right to the city’ (first posed by Henri Lefebvre in Le Droit à la Ville in 1968), which rests on the ideas of accessibility, interaction, and public participation in the use and production of urban space. It has been a central concept in the right to the city movement in Istanbul, as I discuss in Article 3 (Appendix C) of this dissertation. 80 “It Is About the Park: A Struggle for Turkey’s Cities,” Jadaliyya, accessed July 2015, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12259/it-is-about-the-park_a-struggle-for-turkey%E2%80%99s-citie. 81 There are various approaches to usage in Romani Studies. Following the scholar Ian Hancock, I generally use ‘Roma’ or the adjective ‘Romani’ (i.e ‘the Romani people’), although the Turkish, Roman (sing.) and Romanlar (pl.) are sometimes also used. 125 governance for right to the city activists in Istanbul (see Schoon 2014). It is not surprising, then, that scholars like Britta Ohm included the Roma when listing the diverse groups thought to be represented in the Occupy Gezi movement. However, with the exception of a few individuals acting on their own behalf, the Roma, as a group per se, did not participate. In fact, not only were the representatives of Romani associations (dernek) not in attendance at any of the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul or elsewhere, several such leaders publicly participated in Erdoğan’s “respect for the national will” counter-rallies for AKP supporters.82

This article addresses the challenges posed to scholars and activists in understanding the status of Romani rights in Turkey today, exemplified first of all by the absence of Romani rights representatives from the Occupy Gezi movement and second by their presumed presence. If the movement was indeed made up of diverse groups that found common ground in their rejection of the AKP and its strategies of urban governance, then the absence of Romani rights representatives tells us something about how they define their cause and its place in the current political climate. Just as important, if outside observers interpreted the Occupy Gezi movement as a manifestation of civil society resistance against state power and an example of democracy at work, the presumed presence of the Roma alongside other underrepresented or marginalized citizens in Turkey hints at expectations that Romani rights would be central to such a movement.

This expectation is grounded in assumptions about the role of civil society in a democracy and the relationship between civil society and the state. It is also informed by the Romani rights movement in Europe, which measures the treatment and status of the Roma as a ‘litmus test’ for

82 “Başbakan Recep Tayyip Erdoğan'a destek verdiklerini belirten Roman Kültürünü Yaşatma Derneği Başkanı Efkan Özçimen, ‘Avrupa'ya, Türkiye'yi bölmek ve Gezi Parkı'nı bahane edip huzurumuzu bozmak isteyenlere inat Romanlar göbek atacak’ dedi” (http://www.turkiyegazetesi.com.tr/gundem/46775.aspx, accessed July 2015).

126 the growth of a vibrant civil society and, hence, the progress of democratic development

(O’Nions 2007: 1).

A movement toward solidarity among Romani communities across Turkey is indeed growing in direct connection to the Romani rights movement in Europe. Since negotiations for

Strand in Marsh and Strand 2006: 99-100). My fieldwork revealed a general sense of disappointment and frustration among civil society actors that Turkey’s Romani association leaders tend to profess loyalty to the nation and its discourses of national belonging over solidarity with the global Romani rights movement. Moreover, there are disagreements among

Romani association directors as to the agenda for advancing Romani rights in Turkey, and attempts at long-lasting alliances (such as confederations) have consistently failed.

I suggest that Romani rights in Turkey functions in the domain of popular politics, a kind of politics that Partha Chatterjee has called the ‘politics of the governed’ (2004), wherein the political, social, and economic lives of the Roma are being intervened upon by new policies and 127 institutions. This approach sheds light on the contradictions in government and civil society projects that seek to integrate Romani populations while targeting them as different or separate from the ‘majority.’ It also accounts for the role of the Roma in this process, rather than perceiving them as passive subjects of power. Whatever agency they do have is limited, but

Turkey’s Roma selectively and strategically mobilize human and minority rights concepts and institutions in their particular political struggles (see Rajagopal 2003). As ‘subalterns’83 who have generally been excluded from the established structures for political representation of both the state and civil society, the Roma make temporary, calculated alliances and do not necessarily have lasting affinities with international rights movements. Furthermore, they engage in local conflicts over resources and position and display disjointed or contradictory loyalties. These forms of ‘doing politics’ do not always seem ‘civil’ to civic actors. However, as Chatterjee suggests, democracy in most of the world does not consist of the strengthening of civil society, but of the increasing entry of marginal populations into political society, in which they are able to negotiate with the state for what they are entitled to as citizens (41).

Against the notion of civil society “as a ‘hold-all’ concept that has been both an explanatory category as to how some societies are managing their democratic processes as well as a normative category that sets goals in terms of what societies should aspire to be in future in order to claim to be potentially or essentially democratic” (Gudavarthy 2012: 1), this article acknowledges that the category of civil society fails to adequately explain real political processes in practice or the specificities of particular societies. Rather than asking whether the Roma are being effectively integrated into Turkish civil society (and, subsequently, resistant to hegemonic

83 In postcolonial theory, ‘subaltern’ refers to populations that are socially, politically, and geographically outside of the hegemonic power structure. The term is derived from Antonio Gramsci’s work and entered postcolonial studies through the Subaltern Studies Group. A foundational text of postcolonialism is the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Spivak. 128 state discourses or representative of Turkey’s successful democratic transition), examining how and why the Roma in Turkey do not meet such expectations invites us to interrogate assumptions inherent to the Romani rights movement regarding citizenship and rights, civil society and the state, and universal affiliations and particular identities (Chatterjee 2004: 3-4), as well as their usefulness for explaining how popular politics actually works in much of the world today.

Romani Rights in the European Periphery

Europe’s Roma are today considered the largest ethnic minority in Europe. The Council of Europe estimates the current population of Roma in its member countries (Europe and much of Asia Minor, including Turkey) at ten to twelve million.84 However, this number is somewhat unreliable, as Roma do not always register their ethnic identity for fear of discrimination, while others may have Romani origins but do not identify as Roma. In Turkey, estimates are even less reliable as official census figures do not include the ethnic composition of the population.

Furthermore, Turkey’s Roma rarely possessed identity cards until recent years and they are not designated an official minority by the state. Estimates range from 300,000 (Petrova 2004: 10) to two million.85

In general, ‘Roma’ is an ethnic and linguistic designation, but it is also often used to distinguish territorial, occupational, and cultural differences (Oprişan in Marsh and Strand 2006:

84 See http://www.coe.int/t/dg3/romatravellers/default_en.asp [accessed April 2015]. 85 “Turkey 2006 Progress Report”, Commission of the European Communities, accessed August 2015, http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/pdf/key_documents/2006/nov/tr_sec_1390_en.pdf. 129

165-166).86 Although some groups go by other names, use of the word ‘Roma’ to designate them as a separate ethnic group, with ‘Romani’ as their official language, was established at the first

World Romani Congress in London in 1971 (along with a flag and anthem), and use of the word

‘Gypsy’ and its variants was denounced. At the third World Romani Congress ten years later, attendees called for the Roma to be recognized as a national minority of Indian origin; at the fourth meeting in 1990, the annual celebration of International Romani Day was designation as

April 8th. In 2000, the Congress produced the “Declaration of the Romani non-territorial nation.”

Use of the term ‘Roma’ in Turkey and elsewhere should be understood as part of this process of

Romani political mobilization (Vermeersch 2006: 13).

Although scholars do not agree on whether there is one characteristic that unites all the

Roma in the world (discussed further below), one thing that they have in common is that the

Roma have been subjected to discrimination, racism, violence, and assimilation throughout history (Klimova-Alexander 2005: 14). This has certainly been true in Turkey, where the Roma fill occupational niches and contribute significantly to the economic and social fabric of city life, but are relegated to the status of second-class citizens.87 They are often marginalized in education, employment, healthcare, and housing, exemplified by the proverb “Türkiye’de altmışaltı büçük millet var” (there are sixty-six and a half nationalities in Turkey, the ‘half’ being the Roma), which refers to the common perception that the Roma are not full members of

86 In Turkey, local names are often used to designate the Roma, such as abdal, posa, kıpti, mutrib, and others (Oprişan in Marsh and Strand 2006). Non-Romani Turks use the derogatory word çingene to refer to the Roma, although use of this term is diminishing as Turks are becoming more aware of the Roma and their social marginalization via NGO activism and education. The majority of Turkey’s Roma are Sunni Muslims (Kolukirik and Toktaş 2007: 763-4). The older generations often speak Romani, although dialects can be mixed with Turkish, Kurdish, Greek or Persian (Oprişan in Marsh and Strand 2006). Younger generations may know a few words in Romani but mostly speak Turkish (Kolukirik and Toktaş 2007: 763-4). The Roma live mostly in the Western regions of Turkey. A high number of Roma immigrated to Turkey after the 1923 population exchange between Turkey and Greece (Arkılıc 2008: 18) and more Roma from Europe immigrated to Turkey to escape fascism and Nazi persecution in the 1930s. 87 They have also been the targets of collective violence (see Özateşler 2014). 130 society. The most common Romani occupations in Turkish cities are in semi-formal economies, particularly entertainment (music and dance) and flower selling. They are also involved in informal occupations as scrap-iron recyclers (hurdacı), garbage collectors, shoe shiners, vendors, buskers, and beggars, making them highly visible in the streets but socially and economically marginal. Like in many parts of Europe, the Roma in Turkey are associated with music and dance—although this is generally a positive association, it also leads to exotic stereotypes and contributes to a process of distancing them from ‘normal’ society (see Silverman 2012).

Although social and economic marginalization is a shared experience for the Roma of

Turkey, there has generally been a lack of solidarity among various Romani communities until recently (see Arkilic 2008). The shifting sense of shared identity and solidarity in the last decade is due to several factors: the mobilization of Romani rights activism, particularly due to contentious urban renewal projects in Istanbul and other cities88; the proliferation of Romani associations (dernek) after their legalization in 2004;89 and increasing attention from both the

Turkish state and international rights organizations, largely due to Turkey’s concessions to EU requirements (Seeman in Jurková and Bidgood 2009: 207).90 The AK Party’s Democratic

Opening Process (Demokratik Açılım Süreci) includes an Armenian Opening, Alevi Opening, and Kurdish Opening. The Roma emerged as a “disadvantaged group” in public discourse for the first time in Turkey when the AK Party declared a Romani Opening (Roman Açılımı) in 2010 that promised legal and social reforms aimed at Romani integration.

88 I have elsewhere discussed the emergence of a political identity among urban Romani youth in Istanbul due to the politics of urban renewal and right to the city activism (Schoon 2014). 89 According to Sonia Seeman, the first Romani folklore ensemble was established in Edirne in 1999 with government funding, which marked a shift in the government’s approach to its Romani citizens and paved the way for the establishment of civic society organizations five years later (Seeman in Jurkova and Bidgood 2009: 206). Since 2004, Romani associations (dernek) have been founded in cities all over Turkey, from Diyarbakır to Istanbul. 90 Elif Babül has demonstrated how transnational standards of governance have impacted Turkish governmental practices. She suggests, “Regardless of its final outcome, the bid for EU accession continues to influence the funding structures, work habits, and encounters taking place at government offices in Turkey” (2015: 118). 131

However, Turkish Muslim Roma are generally indifferent or opposed to the aims of international Romani rights organizations and do not self-ascribe as an ethnic minority. As a young Romani man in Bergama told me:

There was no need for a Romani Opening. The Kurdish Opening makes sense as Kurdish people have problems. I say that we are Turkish. Our grandfathers were Ottoman. We don’t want differentiation among Çerkez [Circassian], Roma… Turkey is a nice mosaic, all together. Atatürk said, ‘Peace at Home, Peace in the World.’ There is a political aim behind discussions about ethnicity. There are some people who run the world. They want to create divisions and take over control. They are the ones who are racist. When you look up çingene [Gypsy] in the dictionnary, it means: ‘brings bad luck; thief; nomadic.’ But according to Islam, the rule is that everybody is equal, no matter where they are from or who they are. Everbody has to respect Allah. That’s the final word (interview, August 2012; translation from Turkish by Funda Oral).

Other scholars of Romani rights in Turkey have recorded similar attitudes and offered various explanations. Elin Strand, in her fieldwork with Roma in Istanbul, found that their primary identification is Turkish, while the Romani aspect of identity is located in associations with their local communities or neighborhoods (mahalle) and family origins. Furthermore, in several of her interviews, Strand heard Turkish Muslim Roma identify themselves in contra-distinction to the

Kurds, whom they described as violent separatists (in Marsh and Strand 2006: 99-100). Several

Roma also told Strand about their experiences with non-Turkish Roma attempting to recruit them to Romani activism. They not only turned the activists away, claiming that they already have a nation, but they referred to the non-Turkish Roma as yabancı, which literally means ‘foreign’ but also implies that they were non-Muslims. Strand writes, “I believe that here lies the crucial difference between the Romanlar of Turkey and the Roma in Europe. A Muslim Roman identifies himself/herself more with a Turkish Muslim, albeit he/she is gadjo [non-Roma], and less with a foreign (Christian) yabancı Rom” (in Marsh and Strand 2006: 101).

Similarly, Semra Somersan found that the Roma of Sulukule, despite the influence of right to the city activists, consistently emphasize their religious identity over their Romani 132 identity. She attributes this to the structural violence that the Roma have experienced in Turkey over the centuries—social and economic exclusion, forced evictions, poverty, and stigmatization have produced both shame and fear regarding Romani identity. Furthermore, advertising one’s

Romani origins in Turkey, as elsewhere, has typically resulted in discrimination in the workforce, education, housing, and healthcare (N.d.: 725-726). Being Muslim, on the other hand, provides status and respect in Turkey (731). Furthermore, the Islamic concept of umma (a supra- national community of Muslims) ideally encompasses all Muslims despite ethnic or national identities.

My fieldwork confirms Strand’s assertion that the emphasis on ethnic boundary-markers that is so prominent in studies of the Roma in Europe is not useful for fully understanding identity politics in Turkey. Strand also makes an important point that Romani activists in Europe misinterpret the absence of Romani ethno-nationalism in Turkey as false consciousness. This leads her to rightly question whether the Romani rights movement in Europe is truly transnational and can accommodate Turkish Muslim Romani identity (ibid.: 101-102). Similarly,

I agree with Somersan’s point that structural violence is an incentive for Turkish Roma to emphasize other aspects of their identity. However, although the Roma’s self-designation as

Muslim and Turkish affords them symbolic inclusion in the Islamic community and Turkish nation, respectively, their class position vis-à-vis the larger society makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the Roma to achieve equal citizenship in practice (see Ceyhan 2003). Even when

133 they do manage to operate successfully in political society,91 their sucessess are temporary

(Chatterjee 2004: 60-61).

I approach the question of Turkish Romani identity from a different angle. I propose that, as the Roma are being re-positioned within a new citizenship regime in Turkey, they are laying claim to political subjectivity by articulating their rights as citizens in the idioms available to them (Secor 2004: 352). In the following pages, I analyze the shaping of Romani rights activism in Turkey at the nexus of state and civil society improvement projects in order to interrogate assumptions about citizenship and rights, civil society and the state, and universal affiliations and particular identities. I then demonstrate how Romani rights in Turkey plays out in the domain of popular politics via cultural performance.

Citizenship and Rights

“Roma have been peaceful people throughout history, never starting wars, etcetera. They have positive cultural traits, like independence, nomadism, etcetera. They should use these traits to gain rights, instead of getting into the politics of land, flag, power, nation. Nationalism is outdated. We live in a global world, in a democracy. This is a chance to be connected and to create a community of people based on equal rights. There can be multiple identities inside of that, which is the EU ideal. The potential for this is with the youth, not the dernek directors” (interview with a Turkish Romani Rights Activist and Journalist, November 2011).

The Romani rights movement in Europe began in the early 1990s when, after the collapse of communism and during processes of state building in Central and Eastern Europe, increasing attention was given to minority rights issues. Since then, Romani rights activists and organizations have been on the rise (Vermeersch 2006: 2). In the past decade, the European

91 At the time of filing this dissertation, Turkey held general elections (June 7, 2015) and the country’s main political parties all fielded Romani candidates for Parliament, which is unprecedented in Turkish history. The CHP fielded Ozcan Purcu in the western province of Izmir, the AKP fielded Cemal Bekle, and the HDP fielded Sedat Zimba in the northwestern province of Edirne. Ozcan Purcu was elected the first self-identified Romani Parliamentarian in Turkish history.

134

Commission has directed new resources toward raising awareness about the discrimination and marginalization of the Roma in EU member countries. As a candidate to the EU since 1999,

Turkey has increasingly given attention to its poor human rights record, particularly in the area of minority rights. Turkey’s relationship with its minorities is rooted in particular historical circumstances. The independence of the Turkish Republic in the early 20th century was the result of international treaties that carved off pieces of the defunct Ottoman Empire and constructed the borders of the new nation. Polarization at the end of the Ottoman Empire due to multiple conflicts over territory had led to segmented social groups and Greek, Armenian, and Turkish nationalisms (Göçek 2002: 20-21). Greeks and Armenians were considered internal enemies who had collaborated with the imperial forces and wanted to partition the state, and so were not incorporated into the imaginary of the Turkish Republic (Akçam 2004: ix-x and 1). The Turkish

Republic, although secular, was defined by its new demographic of Turkish-Muslims92 (see

Adak and Altınay 2010), subsuming all heterodox Muslims (like the Alevis) and non-Turkish

Muslims (like the Kurds) under one national identity that was to be defined via language, race, and religion. Under the republican ethos, Turkish citizenship was supposed to represent everyone equally. The Lausanne Treaty of 1923,93 the basic legal reference point for the definition of minorities in Turkey, was interpreted so that only non-Muslim religious groups were recognized as minorities, while a category for Muslim ethnic minorities was not recognized as legitimate

(Göner 2010: 112; Kieser 2006: 180). A common history was constructed as part of the national narrative so that other nations emerged as alien and the shared past of the Greeks, Armenians,

92 The diversity of the empire was no longer part of the new nation’s reality: with rising nationalism in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and then with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after WWII, Turkish-Muslim immigrants had flooded into Anatolia; most of the Christian population had been exchanged (as with the Greek- Turkish population exchange) or killed (as with the Armenian massacres); and most of the Jews had left. 93 A peace treaty signed in Lausanne, Switzerland, on July 24, 1923, that officially settled the conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies at the end of World War I. The treaty defined and recognized the borders and sovereignty of the modern Turkish Republic. It also provided for the protection of the Greek Orthodox Christian minority in Turkey and the Muslim minority in Greece. 135 and Turks were detached from one another (Akçam 2004: xi). This was the context into which many Muslim Roma from the Balkans (known as “Turkish Gypsies”)94 migrated to the western provinces of Turkey.

Rural-to-urban migration since the 1950s put diverse groups into more frequent contact and introduced urban notions of communal identity to Kurdish, Alevi, and other migrants (Göner

2010: 120; Mills 2008: 393). Later, the globalization of Turkey’s society and political economy in the 1980s opened the way for critiques of the national narrative and new examinations of the past. During the 1990s, in particular, against the backdrop of violent conflicts between the state and the PKK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party) and inquiries into the cultural history of the Rum

(Turkey’s Greek Orthodox Christians), Turkey’s policies of homogenization were increasingly questioned. Yet, in 1994, President Demirel stated that the constitution of the Turkish Republic did not specify origin, belief, or language as the basis for citizenship or ‘national belonging.’

Membership of the Turkish nation merely entailed that one must be a Turkish citizen; therefore, a Turk was anyone who was a citizen of Turkey and there would be no need for the recognition of a Kurdish minority and the granting of minority rights since full rights had already been bestowed upon them as citizens of Turkey (Kirişçi and Winrow 1997: 2).

Since the election to power of the AK Party in 2002, reforms aimed at liberalization and democratization have accelerated. Social movements have emerged that redefine the terms and limits of collective identity and bring debates about the politics of identity into the public sphere.

Struggles for public recognition are aided by new communication networks, which have become a means for contesting and accommodating different conceptions of identity, and “globalizing” local identities (Yavuz 1999: 180; Tambar 2014: 83). Yet, despite transformations in the public sphere, the republican approach to difference still holds a lot of power in Turkey, which

94 See Silverman 2012: 44. 136 perceives difference as divisive and threatening to the unity of the nation.95 When, in 2004, the

Prime Ministry’s Human Rights Advisory Board adopted the report of its Working Group on

Minority and Cultural Rights as part of Turkey’s endeavor to abide by the human rights provisions of the Copenhagen political criteria required for Turkish accession to the European

Union,96 the author of the report and the president of the board were prosecuted for “insulting state institutions” and “inciting people to hatred and enmity” (Oran 2007: 2). Although the defendants were eventually acquitted, the trial brought to light the tensions that continue to exist in Turkey today between republican conceptions of civil rights and conceptions of minority rights and ethnic identity accepted and implemented by EU legislation and programs.

In 2005, Erdoğan responded to accusations that the government was not doing enough to recognize its minorities by offering a new conception of identity in Turkey. He distinguished between what he termed üst kimlik (supra-identity), which is citizenship in the Turkish Republic, and alt kimlik, which refers to sub-identities such as Kurdish, Alevi, or Roma. Many public intellectuals in Turkey criticized this distinction, noting that by proposing the Kurdish ‘sub- identity’ is merely a cultural difference that is ultimately subsumed within the unity of the nation,

Erdoğan elides the suppression of Kurdish language and culture and the state’s history of violent oppression of Kurds and other minorities (see İnce 2012; Yavuz 2009). Nonetheless, this approach appeared again in 2009, when the AKP declared that the “Democratic Opening” would improve standards of democracy, freedom, and respect for human rights in Turkey, was declared by the AKP in 2009. The project includes a Romani Initiative (Roman Açılımı) alongside

95 Note that this kind of argument against policies of multiculturalism is not unique to Turkey, as we have witnessed David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, suggest that England needs a stronger national identity to prevent Islamic extremism. 96 “EU Turkey Progress Report 2007,” accessed June 2015, ec.europa.eu/enlargement/pdf/key_documents/2007/nov/turkey_progress_reports_en.pdf. 137 initiatives for Kurds, Alevi, Armenians, and other so-called ‘disadvantaged groups’ in Turkey, but avoids the term ‘minority.’97

When the Romani Initiative was announced at a public event at Istanbul’s Abdi İpekçi

Sports Hall, Erdoğan addressed a large crowd of thousands of Roma, saying, “Nobody in this country can be treated as ‘half’ a person.”98 He went on to say:

Today we are heading towards the destination. We call this road the ‘national unity and brotherhood project.’ We are taking up the issues one by one – the Kurds, the Laz, the Roma, the Circassians – all Turkish citizens are our brothers. Their problems are our problems. We have taken the first steps. But we expect support from you as well. I hope this process will successfully continue and in time we will put an end to poverty and lack of education. We have strongly opposed the primitive mentality that there is no place for the Roma at state institutions, and we will continue to do so. We will construct the future with you.99

He suggested that that Roma had been treated as equal citizens during the Ottoman Empire: “My brothers, I want to underline this point. Our civilization is nurtured by tolerance. The only thing not tolerated in these lands is intolerance. People from different backgrounds lived in these lands for centuries. Our lands have never witnessed racism in history.” Erdoğan’s language in this speech was chosen carefully—he refers to the Kurds and the Roma at Turkish citizens and brothers, and charges them with the responsibility of supporting the intiative.

As part of the Romani Initiative, a workshop was held with Romani dernek leaders from

Istanbul, Edirne, and other major cities. Following the workshop, a report was drafted that listed the most significant problems experienced by the Roma. Discrimination in language, with

97 The Romani Initiative has been the least contentious of these, as Turkey’s Roma do not have a history of conflict with the state. The Roma in Turkey are the ‘safe minority,’ in supposed contrast to the Kurds, in particular, who are portrayed as aggressive, violent, and dangerous to the unity of the Turkish nation. My Romani informants often actively disassociated themselves from ‘the Kurdish kind’ of ethnic minority in Turkey. Potuoğlu-Cook has argued, “Against the unresolved Kurdish and Armenian issues, the Turkish Roma represent the pleasant, ‘safe face’ of cultural/political pluralism” in Turkey (2010: 101). 98 Erdoğan repeated a similar phrase in several following public speeches: “Artık hiç kimse Romanları 'buçuk millet' olarak tarif edemez.” 99 Quotes from this speech in English are taken from a news story that was printed at the time in Today’s Zaman, “National Prime Minister Tells Roma ‘Your Sufferings Are Mine,’” accessed May 2015, http://www.todayszaman.com/national_prime-minister-tells-roma-your-sufferings-are-mine_204361.html. 138 reference to the term “çingene,” was highlighted along with exclusion from education, employment, healthcare, and housing. Specifically addressing housing rights for the Roma

(which was receiving a lot of media attention in Turkey and abroad at the time), Erdoğan addressed these issues in his speech: “No matter what people say, you are our friends. You are human. You are my Roma brothers… I don’t want to see my Roma brothers in tents any more. I want them to enjoy a decent standard of living.” He went on to promise, “There will be no Roma living in shanty houses anymore” (ibid..). As critics have pointed out, such a statement further stigmatizes the Roma as nomadic and backward and, more importantly, in need of government assistance (see Gençoğlu-Onbaşı 2012100; Timmer 2010). Others proposed that the Romani

Initiative may be little more than a justification for urban renewal projects like the one in

Sulukule. A few months after the event, Turkey’s Housing Administration (TOKİ) announced it was launching projects for over two thousand residential units for Roma in eleven cities around

Turkey. The initiative has also included a school initiative to add information about the Roma to textbooks and eliminate insulting expressions, the provision of state identity cards, and social programs aimed at combating drug abuse and the prevention of early marriage (see Gençoğlu-

Onbaşı 2012).

The Turkish government has several times made public statements claiming that they are doing a better job of addressing Romani rights than the rest of Europe.101 However, in my interviews with Roma in Istanbul, Edirne, and Izmir, many complained that the initiative has not actually resulted in any concrete social or political changes, and that it seems to be merely a justification for moving urban Romani communities out of centrally located neighborhoods and into state housing. The real changes, they told me, will happen when the Roma take

100 Also appears in Özerdem and Özerdem 2013. 101 See http://www.dailysabah.com/politics/2015/04/19/turkish-govt-continues-reforms-for-roma-as-eu-struggles-to- find-solution [accessed June 2015]. 139 responsibility for their own problems. This is echoed in the language of international Romani rights initiatives. Zeljko Jovanovic, the Director of the Roma Initiatives Office, recently stated,

“Roma communities will become less dependent on external supporters only when organizations led by Roma become strong enough to make the case on their own behalf, to have their own voice heard and their own power felt by governments, the EU, and others.”102

The mobilization of Romani rights groups and the organization of dernek led by Roma increased since Turkey’s Associations Law (Dernekler Kanunu, No. 5253) was significantly revised in 2004 to comply with the Copenhagen Criteria. The revisions enabled their cooperation with international organizations and introduced opportunities for funds from the European

Union. But, while the law clearly outlines the right of Turkish citizens to found associations and makes it more difficult for the state to monitor their activities, it explicitly prohibits engagement in “political” activities and associations must notify the government if they are to receive or use foreign funds. Furthermore, it prevents associations from being established solely on the basis of religious, ethnic, or racial affiliations, although in practice many civil society organizations

(CSOs) do manage to serve particular religious or ethnic communities (Kuzmanovic 2012: 9-11).

Romani dernek must walk a fine line between these stipulations and “doing the rights thing”

(Osanloo 2004; also see Asad 2000) in order to secure funding from EU agencies. Therefore, the multiple ways in which Turkey’s Roma are defined and targeted by the state and civil society actors increasingly form the grounds from which they elaborate Romani rights (also see Timmer

2010). Romani rights, then, emerges not via the hegemonic state, but by “learning to practice politics” (Murray Li 2007: 23), or what Anna Secor has referred to as “becoming political”

(Secor 2004: 352).

102 See http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/investing-roma-led-change [accessed May 2015]. 140

A large source of funding for Romani rights directed initiatives in Turkey is European non-governmental human and minority rights organizations. The Open Society Foundations have had an office in Turkey since 2001 and aim “to create a more open society marked by increasing democratization and responsiveness to human rights.”103 They offer grants to projects aimed at

EU membership, political reform, disadvantaged groups, and civil society. In general, the Open

Society Foundations have been instrumental in the Romani rights movement in Europe. Through the Roma Initiatives Office, they aim to combat discrimination as well as facilitate collaboration across the foundations to “increase knowledge and enhance the impact of Roma-related grant- making and advocacy.”104 The European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), a public interest law organization “working to combat anti-Romani racism and human rights abuse of Roma through strategic litigation, research and policy development, advocacy and human rights education,”105 has also been active in Turkey – it filed and won a number of court cases against the municipality that demolished the historic Romani neighborhood of Sulukule in Istanbul.106

EdRom (the Edirne Romani Association) has emerged as the most prominent Romani dernek in Turkey due to its involvement in projects supported by the ERRC. For example, along with the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly and funded by the European Commission, The Open

Society Institute Assistance Foundation–Turkey, and the Swedish International Development

Cooperation Agency (ERRC’s core donor), they developed and implemented a “Promoting

Roma Rights in Turkey” project between 2005-2008, “to build capacity of Roma and other civil society actors to engage in effective advocacy for the rights of Roma and to raise awareness in

103 See http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/about/offices-foundations/open-society-foundation-turkey [accessed June 2015]. 104 See http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/about/programs/roma-initiatives-office [accessed June 2015]. 105 See http://www.errc.org/about-us-overview [accessed June 2015]. 106 Also see http://www.errc.org/article/roma-rights-2013-national-roma-integration-strategies-what-next/4238/10 [accessed June 2015]. 141

Turkish society about the human rights problems facing the Romani population.”107 The objectives of the project included the collection of data regarding “the social, linguistic, historical and geographical profile of Romani communities in Turkey,” as well as the empowerment of Turkey’s Roma “to seek justice for human rights violations and build the capacity of Romani civil actors to mobilize for effective advocacy” (2). The project also aimed to advocate for the protection of Romani rights by the state, via “adequate legislative, institutional and policy frameworks,” to “ensure access to fundamental social and economic rights without discrimination” (2).

One result of the project was the publication of a book titled We Are Here (Uzpeder et al

2008). The introduction to the book promotes “values of democracy, social justice and peace, and the grassroots mobilization of Romani communities” (2). At the same time, and “above all,” the book “seeks to portray the Roma of Turkey as citizens of the Republic, with their own history, social positions and relations, and their specific problems” (2). The language of this project exemplifies the discourse of CSOs that intervene in Turkey’s Romani communities, combining the twin objectives of promoting democracy (which involves the mobilization of the

Roma themselves as well as efforts to persuade the government to reform state institutions toward the inclusion and protection of ethnic minorities) and identifying the Roma as citizens of the nation (who must be counted and studied) with specific problems (which must be identified, documented, and targeted for intervention). In this way, the Roma of Turkey are constructed as a unified population and a target of administration and reform. As the target of numerous interventions, ‘Roma-ness’ is a convenient descriptive category for classifying the Roma of

Turkey as a population for administrative, legal, economic, and electoral purposes (see

107 “Roma Rights in Turkey,” ERRC, accessed June 2015, http://www.errc.org/about-us-projects/roma-rights-in- turkey/2512. 142

Chatterjee 2004: 37). However, much of this is self-imposed; Romani associations in Turkey are doing the work of gathering information about themselves, with a focus on their own problems and needs.

In May 2012, I attended a meeting of the World Roma Organization (Rromanipen) in

Istanbul. In attendance were several prominent Romani dernek leaders and activists, as well as a representative from the Turkish Ministry of European Affairs.108 The major topics addressed were how Rromanipen could serve as a model for solidarity and cooperation between the Turkish

Romani associations, how to move forward under the AK Party’s Romani Initiative and ongoing urban renewal projects, and how to be effective in influencing the direction of legislation and policy regarding Turkey’s Romani citizens, particularly in light of ongoing debates about constitutional reforms. Some argued that what is needed is to become partners with the state

(ortaklaşmak); others suggested that representatives of the associations should travel to other

European countries, like Spain, to see how the Roma live there. All agreed that the Romani associations needed to be more systematic, active, and organized in their efforts. A non-Romani activist insisted that it was time for the Roma to take over responsibility for their own rights and social problems. In general, attendees at the Rromanipen meeting agreed that the associations must be responsible for gathering general information on Turkey’s Romani population. It was suggested that each dernek should have a veri dosyası (dossier of data) available, and the association representatives agreed to come to the next meeting with statistics about their respective communities. A month later, I attended another meeting in Aydın at the Adnan

Menderes Üniversitesi Romanlar Uygulama va Araştırma Merkezi, a Romani research center that had just been established with the purpose of gathering data about Turkey’s Roma and their

108 The AK Party representative said he would communicate the issues addressed in the meeting directly to the Prime Minister and emphasized that their goal was “the highest standards of democracy.” However, he made it clear that the ministry could only offer support, and not funding. 143 social problems. This particular meeting was referred to as a Danışma Kurulu ve Çalışma

Grupları Toplantası (consultative committee and working group meeting), and many familiar dernek representatives and activists were invited to attend. The director of the center led the meeting by asking attendees to identify the main problems facing Turkey’s Roma. Like the

Rromanipen meeting, the answers emphasized ‘knowing themselves’ via the collection of data about how many Roma live in Turkey, where they live, and under what conditions.

Of interest here is how the promotion of Romani rights becomes embedded in larger discourses of rights and citizenship and how minority rights discourses both enable and limit the boundaries of Romani rights in Turkey (Timmer 2010). Minority Rights Group International tracks the progress of Romani rights in Turkey, issuing reports on the Roma as one of the groups in Turkey they label ‘minorities,’ alongside Alevis, Armenians, Jews, Kurds, Laz, and others.109

According to them, Turkey fails to meet international standards for human rights by not recognizing certain ethnic groups as minorities, including the Roma.110 However, while minority status would direct new resources and attention to Turkey’s Roma, at the same time it would target the Roma for new forms of regulation and governance.

Kabir Tambar’s work (2014) describes a situation in Turkey that is parallel to the one I have described, in which the category of minority applied to Turkey’s Alevis111 spurs internal debates and disagreements. Like the Roma, Alevi spokespersons position themselves within the official state narrative rather than emphasizing minority status (3). Tambar explains this as a

“reckoning of pluralism”—caught in between state-building projects and liberal claims to difference, “democratic politics in the modern state contends with the legacies of a historical

109 See http://www.minorityrights.org/4400/turkey/roma.html [accessed June 2015]. 110 “Turkey Overview: Minorities,” Minority Rights Group International, accessed August 2015, http://www.minorityrights.org/4400/turkey/roma.html. 111 The Alevi practice a Sufi-Shia form of Islam, while the majority of Turks identify as Sunni Muslims. 144 contradiction” (7). In Turkey – where the state has sought to cultivate a conception of politics that transcends differences of class, ethnicity, gender, religion, and culture – various social actors are prompting questions about the legitimacy of this state project and demanding a “historical reckoning with the dominant imagining of Turkey’s political modernity” (2014: 2-3). In the name of minority rights and democracy, these actors accuse the state of misrecognizing its minorities. However, Tambar found that the Alevis are puzzled by this political challenge to state authority, and many of them reject the category of minority (3). He demonstrates that, as the AK

Party has embraced state-led pluralism as a governing ideal and the other major parties (the CHP and the MHP) have followed suit, minorities remain dependent upon the state’s authority to define the conditions of political articulation (4-5). In fact, pluralism is employed by both those who wield state power and those who are critical of the state. “This variegated field suggests that the discourses of pluralism and liberalization are not simply about augmenting minority freedoms; rather, the political liberties they support are elements of a new mode of regulating social difference” (ibid.: 8). In other words, the tensions between nationalism and the politics of difference have not been resolved, only reconfigured. Tambar writes:

The growing inclusion of heterogeneous populations in public deliberation is neither simply an index of expanded political opportunity for disadvantaged groups nor a widening of the space of politics whereby power can be contested. It is the ground and target of governmental logic that often perpetuates the political vulnerability of such groups. Increasingly and in many locales, the discourse of inclusion represents a modality of governance that disciplines the boundaries within which social difference in permitted to authenticate itself… It represents an element in the regulation of social, religious, and ethnic differences (12).

He concludes that the “tactics of inclusion” used by Turkey’s political parties only serve to extend “the state’s authority to define the proper limits of social difference” (13).

Tambar alerts us to shifting configurations of power in Turkey and the inherent contradictions in the state’s politics of pluralism. Critics of Turkey’s brand of multiculturalism 145 express frustration with the demeaning nature of liberal sympathies for minorities112 and doubt over whether the AK Party’s policies truly come from a newfound respect for difference or just the need to make concessions to the EU (Kieser 2006: 135). Other scholarship on the pluralization of cultural identities in Turkey today directs attention away from the state to the emergence of so-called ‘neoliberal’ forms of governance, such as civil society and grassroots organizations. Although it may appear that civil society is working to resist the hegemony of the state, in fact the state and society are not at odds in the project of identifying and ‘knowing’ the

Roma. Civil society initiatives do not inherently free minorities from state power; rather, liberal forms of governance reconfigure the power relations that govern marginalized populations like the Roma.

The co-opting of civil society as a technique of neoliberal governance has been well documented (see Cruikshank 1999; Murray Li 2007), and the Roma have been directly impacted by the rise of neoliberal forms of governance in Europe. Privatization and the dismantling of the welfare state in governments across Europe, but particularly in former socialist countries, have resulted in the further social and economic marginalization and exclusion of the Roma.113 At the same time, they are at the center of conflicts over increasing rates of immigration to the western countries of the EU from the east. Extreme right political groups are not only anti-immigrant, but also explicitly and even violently anti-Roma. Sigona and Trehan argue that the loss of communism as the nemesis of the West alongside new nationalist movements created the need for a new ‘enemy,’ as national identity is defined in relation to the other (2009: 4-5). As the

112 Such as Burcu Gürsel’s response to a public interview with Temelkuran in which Armenians are infantilized (see http://www.armenianweekly.com/2010/12/11/queens-of-hearts/, accessed August 2015). 113 Other scholars have discussed the adverse effects of democratic transition for Roma in the former socialist states of Eastern Europe (see Barany 2002; Guy 2001; Pogány 2004; Klimova-Alexander 2005; Bancroft 2005). The edited volume by Sigona and Trehan (2009) deals with the impacts of neoliberal ideologies and failed policy interventions in post-socialist Europe. Also see van Baar 2011. 146

Roma have never been fully integrated into the body politic, they are easy scapegoats in the current climate of economic recession. Romani rights discourses have emerged in direct response to this situation (Guy 2001; Vermeersch 2006), but these discourses often emphasize civil and political rights while failing to address social and economic segregation (Sigona and Trehan

2009: 7-8). Sigona and Trehan argue:

Like the rest of Europe, Romani rights in Turkey is focused on their integration into politics but fails to address the underlying structural inequalities that continue to prevent their equal access to employment and social services or their full acceptance in mainstream society (see Pogány 2006:

1; Ghai 2000: 5).

Here I seek to complicate the picture of state domination versus civil resistance by directing attention to that ways that many of the Romani dernek leaders and the communities they represent, despite their participation in EU-funded projects, continue to reject their designation as an ethnic minority and associations with the international Romani rights movement. The following description demonstrates how discourses of universal Romani rights are disrupted by narratives of national belonging.

International Romani Day, Take 1

It was April 8th, International Romani Day (Uluslararası or Dünya Romanlar Günü), a day designated by the International Romani Union to celebrate Romani culture and raise 147 awareness of Romani issues around the world. I had been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in several Romani neighborhoods in Istanbul, Turkey, for almost eight months, and, although the non-Romani activists I spoke to were very concerned with what they saw as the emergence of a new social consciousness about the Romani members of Turkish society, I consistently came up against difficulties discussing Romani identity with my Romani informants. Like other scholars asking similar questions, I often received the response: “Yes, we are Roma, but we are Turkish

Muslims first” or, even, “No, we are not Roma, we are all Muslims.” Yet, while it seemed that perhaps the Roma were not particularly interested in cultivating a political identity based on ethnic difference, Romani communities were progressively becoming more politicized, Romani dernek were being established in every city across Turkey, and Turkey’s Roma were increasingly organizing or participating in public events that celebrated Romani culture.

It was with this puzzle in mind that I attended an International Romani Day event at the

Fırat Kültür Merkezi, a shopping center in Istanbul, Turkey, with my activist friend and key informant in the field, Funda Oral. Ms. Oral is a non-Romani Turk who became involved in

Romani rights activism in 2002 with the Sulukule Platform, a coalition of civil society organizations that tried to prevent the demolition of a Romani neighborhood in Istanbul known as Sulukule. She has since established an art atelier for the dislocated children of Sulukule that facilitates classes in music and dance. Her broader interest in Romani rights activism stems from her experience with the dislocated Sulukule community, as she has witnessed firsthand their spatial and social marginalization and the structural inequality that prevents the Roma from receiving the benefits of social services such as education and adequate healthcare. While she

(along with other activists) has dedicated emotional and material resources to this cause for many years, Ms. Oral is aware of the power dynamics that allow her to play the role of mediator 148 between the Roma and government officials, and does not want to sustain that role forever. She told me many times that her ultimate goal is for the Roma to become conscious of their own rights and learn to represent themselves.

Ms. Oral and I discussed this as we arrived at the Fırat Kültür Merkezi in the Fatih municipality, which is both the religious and tourist center of the city. It was also the location of the battle between ‘right to the city’ activists and municipal officials over the demolition of

Sulukule. The mayor of Fatih, Mustafa Demir, is infamous among activists for his support of the destructive urban renewal project. Yet, as we entered the auditorium, we saw that his name was prominently displayed in several places, including a sign that stated “Mustafa Demir welcomes the Roma.” At the time, I supposed that Demir’s support of the International Romani Day event could be read as either an attempt at reconciliation or a publicity stunt; Ms. Oral interpreted it as the latter. Either way, it seemed immediately obvious that this event was intended to be a public display of the municipality’s support of Romani rights in Turkey.

The auditorium was not packed; about 300 people (both Romani and non-Romani Turks, as well as some foreigners) were coming and going from the room. The majority of attendees were middle-aged men dressed in suits, however some younger men and families milled around the rear of the auditorium. Journalists stood with their video and still cameras around the periphery. The first few rows of seats were occupied by AK Party parliamentarians and the leaders of Turkish Romani associations.

I did not recognize most of the Roma in attendance – they were not families or dernek leaders from Sulukule, Tarlabaşı, or other Romani neighborhoods in Istanbul where I had been doing fieldwork. Rumors were circulating that people friendly to the party had been bussed in, an accusation regularly lobbed at AK Party politicians when they hold public events. Someone 149 signaled the beginning of the event and audience members were encouraged to sit down. A large screen had been set up on the stage, onto which was projected the words 8 Nisan Dünya

Romanlar Günü and a collage of black and white photographs from the Porajmos (the Romani word for the Holocaust): Nazis pointing guns, piles of bodies, emaciated children. The images from the Porajmos were flanked on the screen by the logos of the event’s sponsors, the

Kültürlerarası Diyalog Platformu (Intercultural Dialogue Platform), the Edirne Roman Derneği

(Edirne Roma Association, or EdRom), and the Fatih municipality. The doors were closed, the lights dimmed, and the audience quieted. A short film played: more photographs, this time set to the Yugoslav Romani song, “Erdelezi.”114 First was a series of images of Roma from various places and times, many posed in front of tents and caravans, followed by a slew of more graphic images from the Porajmos. I noticed that some audience members, especially the families sitting towards the back of the auditorium, seemed restless during the film, gesturing and whispering to each other, and some left. After the film was over, a prayer was said and then we were asked to stand for a moment of silence in honor of all of the Roma lost in the Porajmos.

The formality of the event attested to its public nature: the presence of politicians and journalists, the formal attire of the men in suits, and the scheduled events, including speeches and prayers. That a large part of the event focused on the Porajmos was also telling. Educating Roma around the world about this history is a priority for European Romani rights organizations and one of the stated purposes of International Romani Day. It is also a central concern of the Decade of Roma Inclusion initiative, which emphasizes inter-communal solidarity with the world’s Jews in order to fight discrimination in general. Although the AK Party chose not to participate in the

Decade of Roma Inclusion initiative, its efforts have been taken up by international organizations

114 This song was popularized in the film “The Time of the Gypsies” and signals transnational ties to European Romani rights groups (Seeman in Jurkova and Bidgood 2009: 213). 150 in Turkey, including the Council of Europe (CoE), Open Society Foundations, (OSF), the

European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), and the World Bank. However, International Romani

Day has only been celebrated in Turkey for several years; furthermore, Holocaust history is not part of the Turkish public school curriculum, and the fact that tens of thousands of Roma were murdered by the Nazis is not well known in much of the world. The graphic photographs being projected onto the screen must have been disconcerting, and possibly even confusing, to Turkish

Romani audience members who were likely seeing such images for the first time. Furthermore, solidarity with the world’s Jewish community is not a popular sentiment in Turkey today, where relations with Israel have been tense. The images of Roma posed in front of tents would also not resonate among the urban Roma in attendance, or even inspire feelings of solidarity, as there is as much prejudice against the nomadic Turkish Roma among them as there is among non-

Romani urbanites, and the settled Roma make a concerted effort to disassociate themselves from the people they refer to as “çingene.”

The logos of organizations that were projected onto the screen conveyed messages almost as potent as the photographs from the Porajmos. The Intercultural Dialogue Platform, for example, is connected to the Gazeteciler ve Yazarlar Vakif (Journalists and Writers Foundation), a non-profit organization established by the Gülen movement with the mission “to organize events promoting love, tolerance and dialogue.” Also, EdRom is a member of the Türkiye

Romanlar Konfederasyonu (Confederation of Turkish Roma), but their logo appeared separately and was prominently displayed at the top center of the screen, likely because both organizations share the same director, Erdinç Çekiç, and EdRom’s associate director was responsible for creating the photograph collage and the video that followed. The many Romani dernek that have been established around Turkey in the last decade have formed and dissolved several alliances 151 like the Confederation, and are often involved in conflicts over resources and agendas. EdRom has been by far the most successful at acquiring funding from and establishing collaborations with international Romani rights organizations, particularly the ERRC, and is therefore often the target of envy or scorn by other dernek leaders and even accused of hogging resources to the detriment of other associations. Their sponsorship of the 2012 Dünya Romanlar Günü signaled their social capital; it also pointed to tensions over how to publicly represent Romani identity and who should manage those representations.

The rest of the evening was made up of invited speeches by AK Party parliamentarians and Romani dernek leaders. The Turkish Romani dernek representatives consistently iterated how proud they were to be Turkish citizens (“Ne mutlu Türküm diyene”)115 and praised the AK

Party for their recently declared Roman Açılımı (Romani Initiative). At the end of the event, I caught up with a visiting representative of the ERRC in the lobby. Visibly frustrated, he angrily complained that nationalism is the main obstacle to Romani rights initiatives in Turkey. He told me, “This is why the Roma in Turkey can’t improve their situation. They can’t stop saying ‘Ne mutlu Türküm diyene’!”

When I later followed up with Ms. Oral about the International Romani Day event and asked her about this display of exasperation, she told me, “Expressing identity is something new in Turkey. Five years ago it was so rare to hear people say ‘I’m Kurdish,’ or ‘I’m Roma,’ etcetera. So I don’t expect Romani Day to be owned by Roma people in Turkey yet, as they say they’re Turkish. Secondly, we didn’t know that Roma were killed in the Holocaust. Roma here, they say they are Turkish and Muslim. They don’t know about their history, and they are not much interested in their history, either. But in 5 years, there will be well-educated Roma youth

115 “How happy is the one who says I am a Turk” was a phrase first spoken by the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and is often repeated today by Turkish nationalists.

152 who will own their identity and be curious about the history. I think only then Romani Day will be more meaningful” (electronic correspondence, October 2014).

Civil Society and the State

That the Roma are expected to have an affinity with other Roma (from some other time or place) and other marginalized groups; that, as they are incorporated into civil society, the

Roma will manifest a united will resistant to the hegemonic discourses of the state; and that the

Roma must take responsibility for their own integration—these expectations reveal underlying assumptions about the relationship between civil society and the state. Romani rights initiatives in Turkey rely on the assumption that ‘civil society’ exists as a domain that is accessible to the

Roma, or that can be made accessible, and that in order to demonstrate that Turkey is a true democracy the Roma must be brought into this domain. However, from the perspective of activists and CSOs, the Roma do not ‘do politics’ in a modern way. That is, despite access to new resources and education in the discourse of minority rights, they do not become ‘enlightened citizens.’ Explanations offered most often by activists and scholars for the failure of the Roma to participate in their own integration are that the Roma are acting out of fear of state violence and repression or that they are suffering from state misrecognition or even their own ‘false consciousness,’ which prevents them from being fully integrated into civil society. This was a general trend in my fieldwork: Romani rights activists often expressed hope that the Roma will become conscious of their oppression by the state and develop into activists on their own behalf

(“own their identity”), but Romani dernek leaders instead espouse pride in the Turkish national heritage and make concerted efforts to emphasize the basis of their equal citizenship in the nation as Turkish Muslims. 153

Minority rights discourses situate the Roma within a particular conception of the relationship between the state and society. In this classical conception, civil society is a domain

(the “third sector”) that is distinct from government and business. It manifests the interests and will of the citizens, rather than the state. It has come to loosely refer to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), but also individuals in a society. It is also understood as the ultimate manifestation of the founding principles of a democratic society, particularly freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. A vibrant civil society is considered vital to a functioning democracy; linked by common interests, civic values, and collective activity, the role of civil society is to keep the powers of the state in check and to hold government accountable (see Almond and

Verba 1989; Putnam et al 1994). A vibrant civil society is said to signal a legitimate democracy in so-called ‘developing nations’ like Turkey.116 Some activists refer to civil society as a domain that must be protected against the forces of the state and the market (Ehrenberg 1999: 30).

Volunteering and activism are characteristic roles for civil society actors (see Cruikshank 1999)

– in this conception, civil society emerges when people demand social services from the state

(Schwedler 1995). The ‘awakening’ of civil society in ‘non-Western countries’ in the twentieth century has been attributed to economic globalization in the wake of the fall of communism in

Eastern Europe in the late 1980s (Powell 2007) and the subsequent rise of neoliberal forms of governance.117

Social scientists have recently questioned the usefulness of the concept of civil society for studying and understanding the way democratic politics work in practice in much of the world today (see Mercer 2002; Dalton 2014). Some have pointed out that the state and civil society are not in fact separate domains – civil society actors are not necessarily “non-

116 Turkey is on the World Bank list of developing nations. 117 Conditions imposed by the World Bank and IMF in the 1990s pressured developing states to shrink. 154 governmental,” nor do they function outside of hierarchies of power (Adak and Altınay 2010: 7;

Agnew 2002; also see work on aid organizations, such as Tvedt 1998). Scholars in post-colonial studies have turned attention to civil society as a domain of the bourgeoisie (Chatterjee 2004, drawing on Marx), a neo-colonial project, or a neoliberal technique of governance that transfers responsibility onto the third sector as a substitute for the welfare state. Scholars of the state and civil society in Turkey have also demonstrated that the state and civil society are not, in practice, separate domains. Navaro-Yashin argues that public life is a site for the generation of the political and that there is, in reality, no distinction between domains of “power” and “resistance”

(2002). Similarly, Kuzmanovic found that, despite the political discourse of the EU and the

World Bank, there is no easily discernible bounded sphere of civil society in Turkey that is distinct from the market and government (2012: 2). Despite this, the category of civil society

(sivil toplum) is evoked, mobilized, and contested by civic activists to assert their practice as authentic and genuine (2-3).

Regardless of such critiques, international policy actors and donors who draw on dominant ideas of civil society impact the “makings of civil society” in Turkey (Kuzmanovic

2012: 4), where the emergence of civil society is generally attributed to the opening of the economy and public sphere in the 1980s. Reforms under the AK have directed substantial local and foreign investment to “democracy enhancing strategies.” The Delegation of the European

Union to Turkey supports the development of civil society in Turkey to “contribute to a more open, participatory and more dynamic democratic society, enriching the political agenda and the public debate.”118 The amendment to Turkey’s Law of Associations in 2004 was enacted alongside a decision by the EU that allowed Turkish CSOs to access EU money under the

118 “Civil Society Development,” Delegation of the European Union to Turkey, accessed August 2015, http://avrupa.info.tr/eu-and-civil-society/civil-society-development.html. 155

“Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance” (IPA). That same year, the Civil Society

Development Center in Turkey was founded to help CSOs with capacity development and grant writing, which led to the professionalization of many of the larger organizations.119 As the availability of local funding is very limited and competitive, CSOs working in the area of human and minority rights generally look to foreign funds for support.

Chatterjee points out that national liberation movements have been bolstered by ideas of republican citizenship, but these have been overtaken by the developmental state, “which promised to end poverty and backwardness by adopting appropriate policies of economic growth and social reform” (2004: 37), prompted and aided by the World Bank, IMF, and European human rights organizations. “In adopting these technical strategies of modernization and development, ethnographic concepts offer convenient descriptive categories for classifying groups of people into suitable targets for administrative, legal, economic, or electoral policy”

(Chatterjee 2004: 37). The AK Party’s democratic initiative process targets various groups as populations – that is, as laborers, objects of welfare, and potential voters, or “multiple targets with multiple characteristics, requiring multiple techniques of administration” (2004: 35-36).

While citizens inhabit the domain of theory, populations inhabit the domain of policy; while citizenship carries the ethical connotation of participation, the population makes available to government a set of rationally manipulable instruments for reaching large sections of the nation’s inhabitants as targets of economic, administrative, and political policies. The government secures legitimacy not by the participation of citizens but by claiming to provide for the well being of the population. “Its mode of reasoning is not deliberative openness but rather an instrumental notion of costs and benefits. Its apparatus is not the republican assembly but an elaborate network of

119 Applications for grant money generally need to be in English, and CSOs must demonstrate the ability to manage large sums of money and match new funds. See https://www.opendemocracy.net/openglobalrights/h-selen- ak%C3%A7al%C4%B1-uzunhasan/turkey-eu-and-civil-society-incomplete-revolution [accessed June 2015]. 156 surveillance through which information is collected on every aspect of the life of the population that is to be looked after” (34). State and civil society interventions focus on official recognition of the Roma’s “social problems,” which singles them out as a separate population in need of reform.

Murray Li interrogates the ‘logic of improvement,’ or programs that set out to improve the condition of the population in a deliberate manner by shaping “landscapes, livelihoods, and identities” (2007: 1.). She argues that these programs also set the conditions for particular ‘social problems.’ To understand the rationale of improvement schemes, we must ask what they seek to change and analyze the calculations they apply; however, we must also pay attention to the gaps between what is attempted and what is accomplished, as “subjects are produced as much by the failures, exclusions, or misrecognitions of the improvement programs as by their successes” (12).

We have seen that the Roma in Turkey are targeted by the state as a population and by international rights organizations and activists as a minority group, and that in both cases the

Roma are treated as a homogenous group with specific social and economic problems. Ironically, while European Romani rights activists work against critiques of their own essentializing discourses, they often discredit nationalist narratives of belonging within the same lines of critique.

The opposition between the universal ideals of national or global belonging and the particular demands of cultural identity is at the heart of identity politics in Turkey and the politics of recognition in many locales. Furthermore, instances of ambivalence over narratives of belonging are products of this context (Chatterjee 2004: 7). As Chatterjee points out, the tension between discourses of citizenship and those that identify and classify populations is

“symptomatic of the transition that occurred in modern politics in the course of the twentieth 157 century from a conception of democratic politics grounded in the idea of popular sovereignty to one in which democratic politics is shaped by governmentality” (ibid.: 4). An ordering of power relations is based precisely on the distinctions between the universal concept of ‘the people’ as bearers of rights versus the particular rights of citizens that must be protected by the nation (29).

Universal Affiliations and Particular Identities

“Identity can be a trap for people. It is only useful if it provides opportunities, rather than limitations. Equality is an awareness of what we all have to offer to society. While a collective identity isn’t possible, they must own their own social problems. There are only brief instances of solidarity and unity, because needs shift and change. Society in general should be a place where everybody’s needs are met” (interview with a Turkish Romani Rights Activist, October 2011).

Chatterjee has noted “the contradictions posed for a modern politics by the rival demands of universal citizenship on the one hand and the protection of particularist rights on the other”

(8). Charles Taylor’s famous essay, “The Politics of Recognition” (1994), deals with just such contradictions. In the liberal conception of citizenship, he notes, all citizens are to be respected for their human potential and dignity; all contributions to society are culturally specific, and so cannot be judged by any dominant criteria. Therefore, what every person makes of his/her human potential must be considered equally valuable. At the same time, however, we are encouraged to recognize and acknowledge specificity and difference. The problem that state institutions often encounter in attempting to extend equal status to minorities is how to acknowledge the rights of minorities without promoting specific ethnic, religious, or other identities. Nationalism, on the other hand, has always hinged on the politics of recognition, while it has been historically unsuccessful at the politics of equal dignity. Taylor’s solution is a “politics of difference,” which would guarantee fundamental rights equally to all citizens but, in those areas deemed less 158 fundamental, would be willing “to weigh the importance of certain forms of uniform treatment against the importance of cultural survival” (61).

Nancy Fraser argues that the politics of recognition does not do enough, unless it is integrated with a politics of redistribution. She proposes, instead, the “status model,” in which overcoming subordination would be the priority and would be implemented through the workings of institutions (2000: 115). Such a model would allow for an affirmative and official recognition of difference. Joan Scott’s critique approaches recognition from another direction, by deconstructing the very notion of a unified concept of identity. Scott suggests that identity, when taken as a sociological category of shared traits and experiences, easily lends itself to overly simplistic understandings of “diversity” as nothing more than a plurality of identities and a condition of human existence, “rather than as the effect of an enunciation of difference that constitutes hierarchies and asymmetries of power” (1995: 14). Understood this way, the debate centers on the issue of recognition, but people’s stakes in those debates are obscured, “as are the history and politics of difference and identity itself” (14). Identity then becomes understood and treated as a natural, inherent, inescapable trait and discrimination is thought to occur when those traits are not officially recognized or respected. However, Scott points out, difference is actually produced by discrimination, “a process that establishes the superiority or the typicality or the universality of some in terms of the inferiority or atypicality or particularity of others” (15). Scott wants to historicize the question of identity and its production inside of conflicts over power, and to call into question the stability of identity as something that defines our human existence. She locates the problem in a liberal approach to tolerance, which frames collective identity via individual experience. Group membership is judged by how well members embody the 159 prescribed signs of belonging. The result is that group identities become totalized, reiterating their minority status in relation to whatever is taken to be the majority. Instead, Scott suggests:

Identities are historically conferred, that this conferral is ambiguous (though it works precisely and necessarily by imposing a false clarity), that subjects are produced through multiple identifications, some of which become politically salient for a time in certain contexts, and that the project of history is not to reify identity but to understand its production as an ongoing process of differentiation, relentless in its repetition, but also – and this seems to me the important political point – subject to redefinition, resistance, and change (19).

Similarly, scholars of Romani studies actively debate the usefulness of representing the

Roma as an autonomous, distinct group with internal coherence. As Michael Stewart has pointed out, “the enormous diversity of Romany social forms, as well as Roma evasion of the trap of nation-state/ethnic figurations, continues to provide a potent source for anthropological reflection and theorization” (2013: 415). The question is whether or not there exists a set of shared experiences among the diverse groups of people around the world known as “Gypsies” and, if there does, what constitutes this shared experience. Historians and linguists have definitively proved a common origin in India and this is the basis for designating the Roma as an ethnic group (see Fraser 1995; Hancock 2002; Matras 2004). The International Romani Union (IRU)120 also used this as a basis for designating a Romani “nation without a territory.” However, this approach has been countered by social scientists who insist on the importance of local origins and ties over obsessive concerns with exotic origins (see Acton 1974; Okely 1983), and who turn attention, instead, to contemporary issues and ethnic mobilization in the struggle for recognition

(Stewart 2013: 419). Thomas Acton points out the limits of the discourse of the nation-state by

120 The IRU is a global Romani rights organization seated in Prague. It was officially established at the second World Romani Congress in 1978. The World Romani Congress is a series of forums for discussion of issues relating to Roma around the world. There have been eight World Romani Congresses to date. Along with improvements in civil rights, the aims of the forums are to standardize the Romani language, preserve Romani culture, and gain international recognition of the Roma as a national minority of Indian origin.

160 suggesting that the Romani movement is transnational and non-territorial, “a product and beneficiary of globalisation” that challenges the European ideology as a whole and should result in a reassessment of ‘European identity’ (in Marsh and Strand 2006: 27). Michael Stewart and others have further emphasized the development of Romani distinction in direct relationship with non-Romani society (see Stewart 1997). Romani and non-Romani communities generally share the same social spaces and, in fact, depend on each other economically, but they also tend to rely on stereotypes of the ‘Other’ against which the ‘Self’ can be defined. The most commonly accepted mode of defining Romani identity among activists and non-governmental organizations is to emphasize the shared experience of discrimination and marginalization by Roma all over the world and throughout history.

As Carol Silverman points out, recognizing that Romani identity is not essential or universal does not discredit its importance for particular communities or for the sake of political mobilization (2012). Drawing from Gayatri Spivak’s term “strategic essentialism” (1988), she reminds scholars that we have the luxury to critique essentialized identities while those who utilize them are considered misguided (53). She writes, “For Roma, identity has always been construed in relation to hegemonic powers such as patrons of the arts, socialist ideologues,

European Union officials, and NGO funders” (55). Similarly, O’Nions proposes that identity politics distracts from structural inequalities and the realities of discrimination and marginalization for the Roma on the ground (2007: 222-224). As a young Turkish Romani man from Istanbul told me, “Poverty and identity are not parallel problems – if we aren’t poor, is identity still an issue? In Turkey, this is more about class discrimination than ethnic difference”

(interview, February 2012). Rather than debates about identity, per se, my Romani informants were more concerned with institutional reform and the way they are perceived by the general 161

Turkish public. These two concerns are related, in that negative perceptions of the Roma were often cited as the main cause of their discrimination. Educating the public, then, is considered the solution, and this is increasingly done via cultural performance (see Seeman in Jurková and

Bidgood 2009).

Popular Politics in Turkey: “A Roma Initiative in 9/8”

In Turkey as in much of the world, the Roma are associated with music and dance. This is, to a certain extent, a positive association for non-Roma who believe that the very best musicians are Roma. Romani musicians are often hired to play music and dance at celebrations, like weddings. This creates a temporary economic tie between Roma and non-Roma, but not a social one, because on the other side of this association lies a rejection of the Roma as people

(Silverman 2012: 3-4). Romani dernek leaders, recognizing the positive associations that non-

Roma have with their music and dance, take up cultural performance as a tool for educating the public about the fact that the Roma do, indeed, contribute in positive ways to Turkish society

(Seeman in Jurková and Bidgood 2009: 209). Music and dance are used to represent Romani culture time and again at public events in Turkey, those that are state-sponsored as well as those that are organized by Romani dernek or local communities. One dernek leader from Izmir told me that he could not hold a public event without including music and dance to attract attendance.

In fact, cultural difference is the most acceptable form of difference in Turkey and is even celebrated, as it is not seen as incompatible with the discourses of national or global belonging; furthermore, cultural difference is rendered innocuous by concepts such as alt kimlik. 162

Although Romani musicians perform all types of classical and folk Turkish music, they are credited with what is referred to in Turkey as “dokuz sekiz”, or nine eight (9/8).121 Non-

Romani Turks, when they hear dokuz sekiz music at a meyhane (a restaurant that serves alcohol), will often stand up and imitate the Romani dance, which people sometimes mistake as belly dance122 but which has its roots in çöçek (a Balkan music and dance genre). 9/8 music, dance, and alcohol consumption are interrelated in Istanbul’s nightlife scene. For the Roma, however, dokuz sekiz music contributes in large part to a sense of identity in Turkey based on a common cultural heritage (see Seeman 2002).

9/8 music and dance are also typically present at public events, even those that are considered political—they were central components of the Romani Initiative event in 2010.

Kibariye, a famous Romani singer, performed a concert and publicly showed support for the initiative and Erdoğan.123 News report headlines referred to the event as joyful, celebratory, and full of music and dancing. One particular headline celebrated the event as “A Romani Initiative in 9/8.”124 Some activists expressed frustration that the supposed intention of the event, which was to initiate major social and economic reforms geared towards Romani rights, was overshadowed by an emphasis on music and dancing. Gençoğlu-Onbaşi suggests, “This caricatured image [of the Roma singing and dancing] causes major problems, rendering the elimination of discrimination an even more distant possibility” (in Alpaslan and Özerdem 2013:

63). However, famous Romani musicians typically play the role of cultural liaison between

121 9/8 is a compound time signature that is common in Balkan music. In Turkey, it is known as a “limping” (aksak) meter, because it is irregular. 122 This is likely because many of Turkey’s professional belly dancers are Romani women (see Potuoglu-Cook 2010). 123 Kibariye also recently met with current Prime Minister Davutoğlu (see http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkeys-roma-singer-praises-itsy-bitsy-chirpy-pm-for-reform- promises.aspx?pageID=238&nID=81334&NewsCatID=338, accessed August 2015). 124 “Dokuz Sekizlik Roman Açılımı!” Radikal, accessed August 2015, http://www.radikal.com.tr/politika/dokuz_sekizlik_roman_acilimi-985693. 163

Romani communities and the general public or the state in Turkey because they are the most well known (or only known) Roma in Turkey. The power and potential of cultural performance as a political and educational tool should not be dismissed (Potuoğlu-Cook 2010: 102).

International Romani Day, Take 2

In Istanbul, a Romani persona known as “Kobra” often MCs public events that celebrate

Romani culture. Kobra Murat is a Romani singer and he also designs gaudy fashions for Romani weddings and sünnet (circumcision) celebrations. More than a month after the celebration of

International Romani Day at the Fırat Kültür Merkezi, I was invited to attend a Roman Şenliği

(Romani Festival) on May 13th. I was told that it would be an alternative International Romani

Day celebration organized by local Istanbullu Romanlar and that this event would be “cultural rather than political.” While the festival would also be sponsored by Mustafa Demir and the

Fatih Municipality, this time the program would involve no films or speeches; rather, the lineup included a fashion show of designs by Kobra Murat and music by the Sulukule Gençlik

Orkestrası (Sulukule Youth Orchestra) and the Sulukule Roman Orkestrası.

I arrived to the shore of the Haliç (Golden Horn) to find a crowd of thousands, mostly local Roma, in everyday clothing – I did not see dernek leaders in conspicuous attendance. A large elevated stage had been set up on the Balat Sahili (shore of Balat) and enormous speakers assured attendees that the music would be blaring. Vendors sold cotton candy and simit (Turkish pretzels). Kobra, who regularly MCs for music performances with the Sulukule Roman

Orkestrası, started the show with several familiar songs. On stage left, a boy sat on an elaborate throne dressed in one of Kobra’s sünnet costume designs; on stage right, a young couple sat together as though at their wedding. Several young women modeled some of Kobra’s bright, 164 gaudy dresses. Ummiye, the hostess of the television show, Roman Show, made a guest appearance, and representatives from the blog spot ‘Çingeneyiz’ (We are Gypsies)125 spoke to the crowd about pride in Romani identity and cultural heritage.

Directly in front of the stage was an area for standing and dancing; families had claimed patches of grass further back and were sitting around their portable mangal (grills), grilling meat, peppers, and pide. My friends and I were invited by one family from Tarlabaşı to join them126; they shared their food and rakı with us and showed us how to dance. Kobra was on the microphone calling out phrases of praise to encourage and celebrate Romani identity and, to the shock of the activists in attendance, he invited the Fatih mayor, Mustafa Demir, up on stage and lavished him with praise for supporting the event. I received a text message from one of the activists: “Isn’t it disgusting? They are dancing with him! After he destroyed their neighborhood!”

This alternative International Romani Day contrasts with the first event in some important ways. While the first was held indoors in a shopping mall and was attended by public officials, the second was held outdoors and emphasized the performance of Romani culture, particularly music and dance. The festival, furthermore, involved the consumption of alcohol in a public space, an issue of recent contention since AK Party officials have begun to regulate and limit alcohol consumption. Mangal use has also come under regulation by the government; rural migrants to the city live in areas that lack green spaces for use on holidays and occasions for families to gather outdoors, so they often use any patch of grass available, alongside highways or

125 http://cingeneyiz.blogspot.com/ [accessed August 2015]. 126 And we recognized them from the recent documentary about urbanization in Istanbul, Ecumenopolis. 165 the green spaces along the Haliç or the Bosphorus. Mangal, alcohol, music, and dance all signal

Roma-ness in the Turkish imagination.127

These factors played into the role of the second International Romani Day event as an

“alternative” to the first, as it was directed toward a local audience and conceptions of identity rooted in culture as opposed to ‘politics.’ However, both events were publicly announced and held in public spaces where outsiders, like me, could participate, and both events were sanctioned and even sponsored by the municipality. In both cases, the non-Romani activists who attended were disappointed by the way the Roma expressed their relationship to state power. At this second International Romani Day event, civic actors were disillusioned and frustrated by the

Roma dancing with a political figure that represented their bad treatment via urban renewal.

In fact, the performance of culture at this second event was not apolitical – it was deployed in a particular way.128 Kobra invited Mayor Demir on stage to dance because cultural performance is precisely the tool by which they are able to participate in popular politics.

Chatterjee explains that the arena of political society is characterized by practices that appear

‘uncivil’ from the perspective of civil society, but are essentially political. Since legal and constitutional changes do “not immediately imply the real incorporation of all relations of domination within the political processes instituted by that state” (1984: xxxviii), political society is formed via negotiations with the state and civil society in order to benefit populations that are left out of projects of development, or else remain mere targets of the developmental techniques of the state (Gudavarthy 2012: 2). Much like the untouchables in India, who supported national independence even though they knew it would lead to their dominance by the

127 They are also markers of rural-ness (i.e. halk versus vatandaş), or rural migrants who don’t know how to ‘behave’ in the city (see Türeli 2008: 15-28). 128 Potuoğlu-Cook’s work demonstrates “the inextricable connection between aesthetic and political categories” (2010: 102). 166 upper castes (Chatterjee 2004: 14), the Roma in Turkey are working to create the conditions by which they might participate in the political-legal apparatus. As Elizabeth A. Povinelli has aptly noted, the targets of multiculturalism must identify with their cultural traditions in order to gain access to public sympathy and state resources (2002 :38). Cultural performance serves to moblize the population (albeit temporarily) and to display unity and solidarity to the public.

Furthermore, it makes subtle claims on the government by appealing to their promises of pluralism and at the same time affirms “the duties of good citizenship” (ibid.: 60).

Conclusion

On one hand, Turkey’s Roma publicly iterate their Turkishness over their Roma-ness.

Many of the civil society actors I encountered during my fieldwork explained this as ‘false consciousness’ or a lack of education, and proposed that once Turkey’s Roma become conscious of their oppression by a neoliberal, authoritarian state, they will join in the resistance against hegemony and become full members of civil society, with both its rights and responsibilities.

However, the leaders of Turkey’s Romani dernek are not oblivious to their social and economic marginalization, nor do they fail to consider ways in which to improve their situation. But they do this within a strategic politics that appeals directly to the state narrative of national belonging.

On the other hand, the context of Turkey’s negotiations with the European Union has connected local issues to global ones. Minority rights discourses both enable and limit the boundaries of Romani identity and situate the Roma in Turkey in a particular relationship vis-à- vis the state and society. Turkey’s Roma are not passive subjects of these new configurations; they are engaged in politics in new ways, as their relationship to Turkey’s legal system is changing and they are recognized by the state apparatus in ways that are not only punitive. 167

How do we study unthinkable or marginal identities? Subaltern Studies suggests that the very categories and institutions that enact violence against the population are also the ones that promise justice and freedom (Gudavarthy 2012: 3). Politics, then, consists of the legal-political principles of the state, and those who lie outside of it (i.e. the subalterns). However, as Shahid

Amin has pointed out, these domains seek to enter, break down, transform, and incorporate each other. In other words, they are not self-contained domains (2002: 13-15). Therefore, the point is not to construct a new dichotomy (i.e. civil society versus political society), but rather a resignification of so-called ‘universals’ for the specificities of democracy and democratization in particular locations.

A common critique of Chatterjee’s concept of political society is that it renders civil society invalid or relegates already marginalized communities to the margins of politics forever.

However, I find that the concept invites us to question Enlightenment categories and how they might be “renewed from and by the margins” (Chakrabarty 2000: 16). Furthermore, we can question our original assumptions about civil society: namely, that there is a domain of civil society ‘out there’ that marginalized communities can aspire to enter. The concept of political society recognizes that the privileged position civil society is meant to occupy (freedom of association, individual rights and responsibilities) is not available to the Roma; they make their claims on government through direct political negotiations because they are not protected by such legal-political principles. Their actions may appear ‘uncivil’ from the perspective of civil society; yet, where does the ideal civil society exist? The Roma do not, in fact, fare better in western European countries, like France.

This article has demonstrated that Turkey’s Roma do not fit neatly into models of democratization in which underrepresented groups are expected to find their voices and demand 168 the rights of citizenship and individual freedom, thereby challenging authoritarian state regimes and contributing to the success of a country’s transition to more liberal and democratic governance. It is proposed by conservative politicians in Europe that the Roma are not suited to modern forms of governance. Similar accusations have been lobbed at Turkey, claiming that liberal democracy is not compatible with either nationalism or Islamism, in order to reject

Turkey’s accession to the EU. However, the domain of popular politics is not an intermediary stage through which the Roma will pass on their way to full and equal citizenship; nor is

Turkey’s process of democratization incomplete. Rather, this is what democracy looks like, not only in postcolonial states and so-called ‘developing nations’ or the ‘third world’, but also in the very places where democracy is modeled on European notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

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APPENDIX C: ARTICLE THREE

Closing Doors, Opening Windows:

Dislocated Roma and the Politics of Openness in Istanbul, Turkey

We sat on the floor in Derya Hanım’s129 bedroom, the only room in her father’s house where she felt comfortable hosting guests. The single bed she shared with her two children took up half the room. An old television set with a fuzzy picture sat atop a chest of drawers and seemed to be on at all times, the volume set to low. Derya Hanım laid out a cloth on the ground and served us strong tea and some cookies. Her 6-year-old son was at school and her 3-year-old daughter was sitting next to me, showing me her coloring book. Funda Oral, a Turkish urban rights activist and prominent figure in the dislocated Romani (“Gypsy”)130 community, sat on my other side. We were discussing Sulukule, a Romani neighborhood that was demolished in 2008-

2009 in a highly contested urban renewal project. Derya Hanım was one of hundreds of Roma that had been dislocated by the project and now she was living with her father in a small apartment in Karagümrük. The old neighborhood was just a few blocks away, but the newly built condominiums that had replaced the houses in Sulukule were now home to middle and upper class Istanbul dwellers (and Syrian refugees have recently been housed there).

I asked Derya Hanım about life outside of Sulukule, expecting an answer that reflected the anger and frustration of the community at being forcibly removed from their neighborhood.

News about Sulukule’s demolition and the plight of its Romani residents had been circulating in

Turkish and international media for several years. So far, my interviews with urban rights

129 In Turkish, Hanım is a title meaning Mrs. or Miss and a term of respect. 130 There are various approaches to usage in Romani Studies. Following the scholar Ian Hancock, I generally use ‘Roma’ or the adjective ‘Romani’ (i.e ‘the Romani people’), although the Turkish, Roman (sing.) and Romanlar (pl.) are sometimes also used. 176 activists about the demolition had revealed underhanded deals between politicians and private companies, residents being badgered and compelled to sell their homes, and widespread disappointment that the municipality had followed through with the project despite a concerted effort by civil society actors to prevent it. The dislocated Sulukule residents had been offered state housing in apartment blocks built by TOKİ (Toplu Konut İdaresi, the Social Housing

Administration) 35 kilometers away (about two hours away via public transportation), but of the families that opted to go there very few stayed for long.131 I was told that many of them were now bouncing from place to place around Karagümrük, unable to keep up with rent payments and bills, and that some were unhappy with apartment living compared to the communal lifestyle they had enjoyed in Sulukule (see İslam n.d.).

Derya Hanım wanted to talk about something else; she wanted to tell me about the opportunities for her children that became available with the demolition of Sulukule. Comparing herself to her new neighbors in Karagümrük, who were largely non-Romani Turks and Kurds,

Derya Hanım told me, “Look, these people have a particular job, okay? People have set up an organized life, they have become open to the outside (dışarı açılmışlar)… Now our people, what do they do? They live day-to-day. For example, I have 5 lira, okay? It’s nothing. I say: I’ll buy 2 loaves of bread for 1 lira. I say I’ll buy… you know, I’ll buy dough, I’ll toast it. Am I able to explain? Because while living in [Sulukule], what was work life? Some people were tostçu

[sellers of toasted sandwiches], some women made muhallebi [milk pudding]. So, job opportunities weren’t available.” Turning to Ms. Oral, she said, “Now why am I pleading to you, why am I explaining my predicament? I am unable to obtain a work possibility. My parents did not open my eyes. I say let my children not be like that. When they grow up, may they be like you. May they be more important people. Let them stand on their own two feet. Because what?

131 See also: Karaman and İslam 2012; İngin and İslam 2011; Somersan and Kırca-Schroeder 2007. 177

You’ve got your career, your professional circle behind you. You are able to stand on your own two feet. Can I stand on mine?” Ms. Oral answered, “You can. You will. Slowly slowly, you will.” But Derya Hanım insisted, “May my children start getting ready now.” Derya Hanım’s comparison made Ms. Oral uncomfortable. “It’s not exactly like that,” she said, “But yes, you are very right about something you said. The children need to open up. Because the neighborhood is demolished, that closed life… that period ended.” Derya Hanım agreed, “Yes, that’s what I’m saying, Funda. What was so great about the concept of mahalle [neighborhood]? You know, we have this concept of abla/abi [older sister or brother]; we say ‘you’re my sister, you’re my brother,’ we act familiar. May my son and daughter not do that. We are opening up now!

Because strangers, if you say ‘brother,’ they don’t perceive it the same way. In the Romani millet

[group of people, or community] there is ‘sister’, ‘brother.’ You consider them one of your own.

But strangers don’t consider us one of them.”

By way of explaining that she does not know the city beyond her neighborhood, Derya

Hanım said, “If you tell me that there is a computer [for me] in Kadıköy [a neighborhood on the

Asian side of Istanbul], I would tell you that I’ll come and get it. I don’t even think: Is it far? Is it nearby?” Derya Hanım went on to explain that she does not understand distances in the city. She also said that she does not understand how to use computers or cell phones, but that it is important her children understand these things in order to get ahead in life. While she describes her own world as closed, she feels that the demolition of Sulukule opened up new possibilities for her children. “If I had studied or if I was in a different environment, maybe I would not have married someone from the neighborhood. I could have married someone else… If Sulukule wasn’t demolished now… Look, I’m sad that they demolished it! It was where I was born and grew up. But, I don’t know. If the neighborhood had not been demolished and [my children] had 178 grown up like me, their children would have suffered.” To explain, Derya Hanım recalled the horse drawn carts of her childhood on holidays. Now her children go to the amusement park, instead. Upon hearing this, Ms. Oral insisted that there was nothing wrong with the old traditions. Derya Hanım agreed, but suggested that the old life is no longer viable: “If they had opened us up to the outside, but if our traditions and customs had gone with us… We have turned into fish out of water. If only our neighborhood remained, but we have been given an opportunity.”132

I was surprised by Derya Hanım’s comments, but Ms. Oral was not. As we left the apartment, Ms. Oral told me that she had heard other Roma from Sulukule talk about their new lives this way, especially the young people. “So there is this question, this idea of opening up to the rest of the society,” she told me. “With the demolition, maybe they realized how closed they were in the community.”133

“People have become open to the outside”

This article elaborates on the idea of “opening up” that is expressed by Derya Hanım and

Funda Oral in the previous interaction. In this and other conversations, Derya Hanım articulates frustration with the demolition of her neighborhood, but emphasizes the opportunities that her forced relocation might afford her children. She imagines a future for her children that is different from her own, contrasting the old neighborhood and its traditions with a city in which her children might move beyond the borders of her own experiences to other parts of the city and, via computers and cell phones, to other parts of the world. Derya Hanım also contrasts what she sees as the Romani lifestyle and that of her new neighbors. While she describes the latter as

132 Thanks to Greg Key for his assistance with the translation of this interview. 133 I conducted this interview during my dissertation fieldwork in 2012. 179 organized and disciplined with money, she describes the Roma as living “day-to-day.” She expresses nostalgia for the familiarity of her neighbors in Sulukule, but insists that this is no longer possible and encourages her children to avoid such familiarity with strangers in the city.

Reflecting upon my conversations with Derya Hanım, I am struck by the way she refers to her new lifestyle as more open than her previous lifestyle in Sulukule. While opportunities for her children to attend school and travel beyond the confines of the neighborhood seem to illustrate becoming “open to the outside”, Derya Hanım’s instructions to her children to avoid familiarity with strangers prompted me to consider what unexpected consequences might result from openness. Furthermore, how did Derya Hanım come to value openness rather than the closed, protected borders of her neighborhood? Both Derya Hanım and Ms. Oral articulate openness as the characteristic condition of the world today, a condition that cannot be reversed – once something is open, it cannot be closed. Furthermore, they discuss openness as inevitable; whether good or bad, they suggest that it is no longer possible to live in a neighborhood that is isolated from the rest of the city and its politics. Yet Derya Hanım and Ms. Oral hold very different subject positions. Derya Hanım is formerly uneducated and unemployed, caring for two children on her own and living in one room of her father’s apartment. She has always experienced social and spatial marginalization based on the fact that she is a Roma from

Sulukule, and a woman. How open is the city and its opportunities to Derya Hanım and her children? Ms. Oral, on the other hand, is a non-Romani middle-class, educated woman who speaks several languages. Her involvement in the Sulukule community is based on her voluntary commitment to social justice and the right to the city. The encounter between Derya Hanım and

Ms. Oral was enabled by the demolition of Sulukule and subsequent civil society interventions into the dislocated community; their understanding and articulation of urban renewal and 180

Romani belonging, identity, and culture have been formed in conversation with each other.

Derya Hanım’s vision of the future is explicitly shaped by the presence of Ms. Oral in her life – she wants her children to be more like Ms. Oral, as in self-reliant and able to “stand on their own two feet.” Ms. Oral wants that, too, but also values traditional aspects of neighborhood life that are being threatened by urban renewal, such as horse-drawn carriages.

As I continued my fieldwork among the Sulukule Roma, other Turkish Romani communities, and urban rights activists in Turkey in 2011-2012, I encountered the term

‘openness’ in multiple arenas, from the Turkish government’s ongoing initiative to integrate the country’s Roma into mainstream society, referred to as the Romani Opening (Roman Açılımı), to discourses of minority rights and pluralism that guide and inform state and civil society interventions into Turkey’s Romani communities with the purpose of establishing a more open and democratic society. This led me to begin a broader investigation of openness, its meaning and its use in the Turkish context. How are state and civil society initiatives, under the rubrics of democratization and liberalization, experienced and understood by a dislocated Romani woman and an urban rights activist, two Istanbul residents who experience the city in very different ways but nonetheless find common ground in their hopes for a ‘more open’ future? Moreover, who actually benefits from openness and what forms of closure are implicated in projects that purport to increase openness?

What is Openness?

Openness literally refers to something without restricted participation or access. 181

Something that is open is porous, vacant, available, exposed, or candid.134 An open market is an unrestricted market; an open society is characterized by freedom and transparency; an open mind is able to consider something without prejudice. Openness is ubiquitous in discourses and practices of liberal democratization and is the measure for success in countries transitioning to democracy and a market economy.135 Openness informs global economic and political standards for so-called developing countries, or “emerging economies,” like Turkey. Openness also drives policy-making in democratic and democratizing countries and informs IMF and World Bank strategies for development. It bolsters efforts on the part of the Open Society Foundation and other such entities to advance human rights and democracy around the world. Discourses and practices of openness travel across multiple domains, to not only characterize open economies and open societies, but also open borders, open governance, and open minds (also see Dikötter

2008). It is generally accepted as being a positive trait for a state, an organization, or an individual, and it holds a seductive logic to liberal sensibilities. Open-mindedness is the ideal trait of the cosmopolitan or global citizen (see Appiah 2007). Similarly, openness is the condition for civil society to flourish and, ideally, should result in freedom and justice. It is an atmosphere in which people have a ‘right to know.’ For example, in government and business administration, openness is an imperative for transparency (versus secrecy and corruption) and a willingness to be subjected to scrutiny and critique. Openness is said to inspire confidence and result in the participation of employees or of citizens, and participation is considered a necessary feature of

134 In Turkish, openness is açıklık, and can refer to the state of being open, free, exposed, empty, clear, distinct, promising, unprotected (as in, an unprotected city), not enclosed, frank, not secret, and light (as in, a light shade of color). Açıklık can also refer to a gap, open or blank space, or aperture. To open is açmak and an opening is açılım (this can also mean ‘initiative’). Açığa çıkmak means to become known or to come out; açık fikirli refers to being enlightened, open-minded, or liberal-minded; açık şehir is an open city; açığa vurmek is to bring something into the open. A woman who is not covered (i.e. does not wear a headscarf) is açık, and so is something indecent, revealing, obscene, bawdy, immodest, or suggestive. 135 I appropriate the term ‘transition’ from political science that refers to a process of change from one political system to another, usually a democratic one. Democratization is often paired with the liberalization of the economy, or deregulation, in so-called ‘developing countries’. 182 democratic governance and juridical institutions. Yet, openness seems often enough to be accompanied by forms of political closure (see Keenan 2003). Furthermore, increased access to information means that we are now privy to seemingly endless instances of political scandal and corruption around the world (see Darch and Underwood 2010). A close analysis of openness begs the question: open to what? Who determines what flows in or out, and who benefits from that flow?

I propose that attention to openness is particularly important for understanding the social and political milieu in Turkey today, where discourses and practices of openness are central to liberalizing reforms but have, by and large, been accompanied by instances of government scandal and corruption, restrictions on freedom of speech and access to information, and displays of intolerance. Although reform has been on the agenda in Turkey since the nation was founded in 1923, the pace of reform has accelerated in contemporary Turkey and, moreover, the effects of current reforms are now increasingly being reflexively measured and studied (Silverstein 2010a:

22). The technologies of reform in Turkey are rooted in major changes that occurred in the early

1980s, when Turkey committed to economic liberalization and integration with the global economy. The country’s course to democratization has a longer history, beginning with the first multi-party election in the mid-1940s, but has experienced fits and starts involving intermittent military coups and periods of political instability. Turkey has been on a path toward European

Union (EU) accession for five decades, yet full membership continues to elude them. After the

Arab Spring, the “Turkish model” of a government of moderate Muslims that accommodates secularism and democracy was lauded by the United States government as an example for countries in the Middle East to follow. Yet, the governing AK Party has also come under scrutiny for its undemocratic way of addressing dissenting voices. Turkey is a particularly 183 dynamic place to study the contradictory outcomes of globalization and democratization on the ground.

Social scientific approaches to the current political situation in Turkey are largely framed in terms of religion, secularism, nationalism, and modernity (see Bozdoğan and Kasaba 1997;

Navaro-Yashin 2002; Çınar 2005; Kaplan 2006; Özyürek 2006, 2007; Silverstein 2010b; White

2002, 2012). Scholarly works that consider the dynamics of globalization and democratization in

Turkey are also prevalent (see Heper 1997; Kedourie 1998; Kandiyoti and Saktanber 2002;

Aydın 2005; Yavuz 2006, 2009; Keyman 2007; Kuzmanovic 2012; Aknur 2012; İnce 2012;

Tambar 2014), particularly studies of urban development in Istanbul (see Keyder 1999; Mills

2010; Göktürk, Soysal and Türeli 2010; Turam 2015). Many scholars of Turkey describe the current government as ‘neoliberal’ (see Potuoğlu-Cook 2006; Ünay 2006; Rutz and Balkan 2009;

Atasoy 2009; Öniş and Şenses 2009; Saraçoğlu 2011; Akça, Bekmen, and Özden 2013; Balkan,

Balkan and Öncü 2015), although the usefulness of neoliberalism as a descriptive term is a matter of debate. The value of studying contemporary Turkey in terms of ‘openness,’ however, has not yet been explored. The Gezi Park protests of summer 2013136 brought the issue of openness into sharp focus, as Turkish citizens faced various closures (of access to online social networks like Twitter, of the right to assemble, of Taksim Square, and ultimately, of one of

Istanbul’s few remaining public spaces, Gezi Park) and debated how open (democratic, liberal, tolerant) the current government is or is not in practice. Openness, it turns out, is central to debates around Turkey’s EU accession and the nature of the current governing party, and fundamental to competing visions of Istanbul’s future as a global city.

136 Initially a series of peaceful demonstrations and sit-ins to contest an urban development plan for Taksim’s Gezi Park in central Istanbul, the Gezi Park protests escalated into a full blown social movement, known as Occupy Gezi, in cities across Turkey after police violently evicted protestors from the park with tear gas and an excessive use of force. 184

While the pluralization of cultural identities and opening up of the public sphere are read as signs of Turkey’s successful transition to a liberal democracy, the country has seen simultaneous openings and closings since the Turkish state began to earnestly pursue liberalization in 1983 (see Gürbilek 2011). The globalization of Turkey’s economy and the expansion of civil society have occurred alongside oppressive policies against ethnic minorities and heavy-handed, even violent, measures against anyone who challenges the state’s authority, often in the name of security. Attention to openness in contemporary Turkey affords the opportunity to home in on the ways that the concept functions in a specific context, even as it is influenced by global processes. I propose that openness be explored as a ‘keyword’ of Turkish society, indicative of a certain form of thought and practice, and that it be analyzed, as Raymond

Williams suggests, in terms of the problems of its meanings as well as the problems it is used to discuss (1983: 15). More than its meanings, however, I am interested in how openness is applied.

Therefore, rather than analyzing openness as an ideology, I look for openness in the routines of administrative practices (see Rose and Miller 2008). Alongside other scholars who are increasingly addressing the effects of liberalization on the nature of government and its objects

(see Murray Li 2007), Silverstein encourages anthropologists to look beyond the functions of liberalization as a force incorporating places like Turkey into global capitalism, to the particular cultural configurations at the level of people’s worldviews and lifestyles. In Turkey, reforms are oriented toward accession to the European Union137 and geared toward shaping the country and its governance in particular ways. This process, Silverstein argues, is increasingly reflexive and results in the application of new technologies to the economy, politics, and society (2010a: 23).

137 Silverstein points out that Turkey is not merely undertaking reforms for the sole purpose of joining the EU; rather, membership in the EU in seen as part of a process of reform toward what is increasingly understood in Turkey as ‘good governance’ (2010: 23). 185

Although openness, per se, has gone largely un-theorized in the field of anthropology, it is an explicit object of study in other social sciences. Economists are interested in whether financial openness has a positive effect on economic growth in developing countries, and political scientists debate the role of openness in achieving more democratic conditions or a better democracy. In the field of psychology, “openness to experience” and “openness to change” describe personality traits; the presence or absence of openness is correlated to liberal or conservative minds that are either prone to prejudice or tolerant of new ideas and change. I propose that anthropology can, by placing human subjects at the center of analysis, occupy a unique position in this discussion, addressing openness at the intersection of culture and power

(Silverstein 2010a: 23). Therefore, I interrogate openness as a form of logic138 that underlies liberal technologies of government in Turkey, and I understand liberal government as Michel

Foucault defined it, as the ‘conduct of conduct,’ or techniques and practices that seek to govern the self and others (Foucault 1982: 789-794). Scholars of governmentality have posed important questions about liberal techniques of government via concepts such as ‘freedom’ (Rose 1999) and ‘tolerance’ (Brown 2006). Nikolas Rose offers a genealogy of ‘freedom’ in the English- speaking world that traces the origins of the concept and how it has been made real. He asks what the concept of freedom does to justify particular practices and he analyzes the costs and benefits of such practices (1999: 9-11). Similarly, Wendy Brown traces the social and political work that the discourse of ‘tolerance’ does in constructing and positioning liberal and non-liberal subjects in Western democracies (2006: 3-4). Following this kind of scholarship, I analyze openness as a new distribution and articulation of power in Turkey. I propose that openness defines the ground of liberal democratic ethics in Turkey today.

138 As in a set of principles or a system by which reasoning is conducted and assessed as valid. Logic also justifies a course of action or how particular elements are arranged to perform a specific task. 186

Attention to openness is important because the concept is normative and ubiquitous in liberal discourses, and foundational and taken-for-granted concepts are key to understanding our present condition. Brown suggests, “the semiotically polyvalent, politically promiscuous, and sometimes incoherent use of tolerance… can be made to reveal important features of our political time and condition” (4). An interrogation of openness can do similar work toward understanding the social and political present. First, I consider the trajectory of openness from the election of Turgut Özal and his Motherland Party in 1983 to today. I highlight the role of the

EU in Turkey’s economic and political reforms, the increased pace of liberalization under the

AK Party since the early 2000s, and the recent explosion of civil society organizations working towards a more open society in Turkey. I discuss the AK Party’s Democratic Initiative Process

(Demokratik Açılım Süreci) with a particular focus on the Romani Opening (Roman Açılımı) that was declared in 2010. Second, I return to Sulukule to interrogate the consequences of discourses and practices of openness, literally, on the ground. The onus is on individuals like Derya Hanım to ‘open up’; yet, as we see in urbanization projects like the one in Sulukule that forcibly open up

Romani neighborhoods with bulldozers in the name of ‘renewal’ only to then often surround them with security walls, the state continues to have a stake in who opens up and how. Interior

Minister Beşir Atalay has stated that the primary goals of the Democratic Initiative Process are to improve the country’s democratic standards, particularly in the area of human rights, and to end terrorism in Turkey.139 Although security and openness may seem like conflicting commitments, in fact they often go hand in hand. The paradoxical situation of inextricably linking openness and security frames my discussion of how state-led Romani integration gets articulated to housing policies and urban rights activism in Turkey today. How is security framed as the condition for

139 See http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/default.aspx?pageid=438&n=interior-minister-atalay-outlines- democratic-initiative-2009-11-13 [accessed April 2015]. 187 openness in discourses around urban renewal? And how do justifications for opening up a closed neighborhood hinge on particular conceptions of urban subjects as open or closed?

I refer to ‘the politics of openness’ to suggest that it can have mixed effects; my ethnographic data illustrates how political and social initiatives that aim to increase openness in

Turkey are experienced by urban citizens as both beneficial and detrimental. As I will describe further in this article, discourses and practices of openness operated to justify the demolition of

Sulukule, on the one hand, and the intervention of activists to prevent the demolition, on the other hand. Furthermore, openness is linked to visibility and vulnerability. For example, CSOs in

Sulukule helped the Romani residents obtain identification cards for the first time in their lives; official recognition by the state means that the Roma have access to social services, but it also means that they are now imbricated in official institutions and surveillance. I am interested in how openness works in ways that may be unexpected – what are the unintended (or intended but counterintuitive) consequences of openness? What doors are closed and windows opened? And how might opening windows render things visible or accessible in new ways (Gürbilek 2011:

69)?

I. Openness in Turkey

There is a fuzzy line between openness as a concept and openness as a practice (as in, when it is used to carry out a particular function, like increasing trade and capital mobility). The concept is prevalent as an object of analysis particularly in economics, political science, and psychology. In all of these fields of study, there is thought to be an empirical relationship between openness and growth. For example, most economists argue for a bi-directional causality between economic growth and trade openness in developing countries (see Edwards 1993; Zeren 188 and Ari 2013), and this is accepted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World

Bank.140 While some suggest that this positive correlation is not inevitable and that the relationship between financial openness and economic growth must be studied on a case-to-case basis, the long-term positive effects of an open economy are not questioned; rather, the emphasis is on the impact of local variables for a successful transition, such as quality of education, level of government corruption, presence of inflation or public debt, and the like (see Yanikkaya 2003;

Andersen and Babula 2008). In principle, an open market is a free market in which all economic actors can trade without any external constraints. In practice, opening developing countries to the global market has meant allowing for the flow of global capital and (as critics of neoliberal governance point out) the penetration of the IMF and the World Bank into the local economy

(see Scott 1998).

In political science, democracy is defined via openness, which refers to transparency and accountability in government and the full participation of citizens. An open market is identified by political scientists as the necessary condition for democracy to flourish. According to the classical conception by Karl Popper, democratizing societies would evolve from being organic, traditional, and closed to being open, transparent, and tolerant. Furthermore, collective thinking would be replaced by individuality and personal responsibility. He imagined that once people became conscious of their own oppression, they would never desire to return to a closed society.

Democracy is supposed to provide the conditions for this; political freedoms and human rights are the foundation of the open society (Popper 1995). Liberalization and democratization, then,

140 See the IMF Working Paper, “Trade Openness and Growth: Pursuing Empirical Glasnost” (2007) and the World Bank article, “Emerging Turkey: Lessons from an Economy in Transition” (2014). Only a few rare studies of Turkey by economists suggest the possible detrimental effects of economic openness, for example on carbon emissions,140 child labor,140 and female-headed households140. 189 are thought to be twin processes of development141, as economic reforms are expected to lead to political reforms and, eventually, democracy. However, we see that in places like China and

Russia, economic development does not necessarily lead to a liberal democracy.

In Turkey, while the country’s commitment to economic liberalization is unquestionable, the extent to which their practices can be deemed democratic has been a source of recent debate.

For example, unrestricted Internet access is thought to be a marker of a free and democratic society142 – an open Internet is claimed by some as a human right, and others suggest the importance of Internet openness for economic growth.143 On the other hand, authoritarian or undemocratic governments are thought to be unwilling to accept the idea of freedom of information or open access to state records.144 Internet access has become of recent concern in

Turkey, where the AK Party has several times blocked the use of Twitter due to leaks of alleged wiretaps implicating then Prime Minister (now President) Erdoğan in a corruption scandal, and

Erdoğan himself threatened to ban the use of Facebook and YouTube in Turkey. In February of

2014, the Turkish Parliament passed a bill that allows the government to block any website deemed to contain “insulting content,” without court authorization; it also requires service providers to make the browsing histories of users available to the government for up to two years.145

141 In the ideal model, economic growth will produce an educated and entrepreneurial middle class that will begin to demand control and eventually force repressive governments out of office. 142 Concern about mass surveillance, control of the Internet by corporate or political interests, and the borders between privacy and freedom of expression are of recent debate in the U.S., as well, especially in the wake of WikiLeaks (a website launched in 2006 that publishes classified media and information, with the slogan “We open governments”) and the Edward Snowden affair. 143 See the Dalberg report, “Open for Business? The Economic Impact of Internet Openness” (2014): http://www.dalberg.com/documents/Open_for_Business_Dalberg.pdf 144 Darch and Underwood note, “freedom of information is an ideological-determined political instrument that can be deployed to achieve a range of different agendas. In one example, it is seen as a mechanism for access to market information, a neo-liberal device in the service of the project of global expansion of the capitalist market. In another, it is located in a rights-based discourse and serves as an instrument for the assertion of the individual rights of poor and oppressed people” (2010: 4). 145 See http://www.icnl.org/research/monitor/turkey.html [accessed April 2015]. 190

At a conference about online freedom held at Bilgi University in Istanbul later that same year, Neelie Kroes, the European Union commissioner for the digital agenda, criticized Turkey’s blocking of Twitter as incompatible with human rights and said, “It is the Internet’s open, frontier-less nature that explains its success and the entire edifice is affected if you meddle with this openness.”146 In truth, the AK Party’s ban on social media was largely ineffective, and has turned into a joke among the general public.147 Zeynep Tufekci is a professor of Information and

Library Science who explores the interactions between technology and society. She has a popular blog on the topic and has written extensively about Turkey’s Twitter ban. She argues that the government is aware that such a ban will be largely unsuccessful in practice, but that Erdoğan’s real goal is to demonize social media as a threat to Turkish family values.148 Erdoğan justifies the ban on social media in terms of protecting Turkey from foreign infiltration.149

In this section, I unpack Turkey’s seemingly contradictory commitments to economic liberalization, EU accession negotiations, and so-called neoliberal forms of governance, on the one hand, and to public displays of nationalism and suspicion of foreign interventions, destructive urban renewal projects and undemocratic policies of urban governance, and the censorship of dissenting voices in journalism and the social media, on the other hand. I begin my evaluation in the early 1980s in order to trace continuities between then and today because, as

Kerem Öktem writes, “Most of the major domestic and international issues which determined

Turkey’s politics in the last three decades can be traced back to [this period], and most of the achievements and failures of the country’s political and economic trajectory can be measured against the backdrop of this period” (2011: 3). This historical perspective demonstrates that

146 See http://blogs.rsf.org/en/2014/09/03/no-internet-without-openness-says-neelie-kroes/ [accessed April 2015]. 147 See “Twitter’in Açılması” (Twitter’s Opening): https://twitter.com/35tenkalk34de/status/585147435678314496 [accessed April 2015]. 148 See http://technosociology.org/?p=1608 [accessed June 2015]. 149 See http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/21/turkey-blocks-twitter-prime-minister [accessed June 2015]. 191 policies and discourses of openness have been linked to forms of political closure (see Keenan

2003) since the beginning of economic liberalization in Turkey. In particular, openness is often accompanied by fear of what is being made visible or accessible and what might flow in. For that reason, discourses and practices of openness and security exist in tandem.

Turkey in the Age of Glasnost

The Turkish economy began to successfully open up to the global market in the late

1970s150 under the True Path Party (or DYP, which succeeded the conservative Democratic Party and Justice Party) and Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel. Prime Minister Undersecretary, Turgut

Özal, played a major role in the ‘24 Ocak Kararları’ (January 24 decisions), a program announced Jan. 24, 1980, that included a devaluation of the Turkish Lira, shrinking the state’s role in the economy, lifting or reducing support of the agricultural sector, promoting foreign investment, and providing importers major tax releases.151 The decisions marked Turkey’s shift from mixed capitalism to a free market economy, but were difficult to implement because of the strength of Turkey’s labor unions. With the 1980 coup (when the Turkish army took control of the government), the labor unions lost their power and the program was implemented. Turgut

Özal was subsequently appointed Deputy Prime Minister responsible for economic affairs between the coup and the 1983 elections. He then formed the Motherland Party (ANAP) and was elected Prime Minister, and continued to pursue major economic reforms until he was elected

President in 1989. The first phase of his reforms involved deregulation, in which the key actors

150 Economic liberalization actually began in Turkey in the 1950s, when American funds contributed to Turkey’s transition to capitalism. However, this process was often interrupted over the following thirty years, as state interventions into the public sphere was a theme in Turkish politics from 1950-1980, resulting in several military coups and a fluctuating economy. 151 See http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/default.aspx?pageid=438&n=economist-discuss-mile-stone-of-turkeys- market-economy-2011-01-25 [accessed June 2015]. 192 were the IMF and World Bank (see Öniş and Şenses 2009). The capital account was opened completely in 1989, which paved the way for the privatization of state enterprises. Süleyman

Demirel also continued to play an important role in Turkey’s economic liberalization, as he served as Prime Minister and President of Turkey several times, leading various conservative coalition parties, until the year 2000. The conservative AK Party (elected in 2002, 2007, and

2011) inherited this legacy and continues to pursue a liberal market economy, close relations with the United States, membership in the European Union, and a “pro-Western”, pro-business agenda under Prime Minister Davutoğlu and President Erdoğan today.

The success of the conservative political parties in Turkey over the past three decades is, at least in part, because the 1980 coup effectively eliminated any opposition from the Left.

Turgut Özal’s Motherland Party ruled Turkey during the time of glasnost (literally meaning

‘openness’), a policy under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that, paired with economic and political restructuring (perestroika), consisted of state reforms within the Communist Party aimed at more consultative government and transparency. Glasnost reflected a broader trend of increased global trade among multinational corporations and a desire to decrease the barriers that inhibit trade. Communism was, at the time, considered the last remaining obstacle to the global flow of capital and the victory of democracy. It is believed that glasnost worked too well in loosening state censorship and allowing for freedom of information and expression, thereby precipitating the end of communism in the Eastern Bloc.152 Openness thus characterized the

152 Turkey’s strategic position for the U.S. came into question with the changed international climate after the end of the Cold War. However, their geographic location as a Muslim ally in the Middle East has more recently bolstered US-Turkey relations again. For example, Turkey participated in the anti-IS coalition by curbing access to Syria and cooperating with logistical efforts on their border. A news report reads, “Turkey's openness to expanding its role possibly stems at least in part from calculations about what its coalition partners may demand in order to actively include Turkey in shaping developments in an area it views as crucially important. International concerns surrounding the fate of the IS-besieged, Kurdish-populated town of Kobane, Syria (also known as Ayn al Arab), are highlighting broader questions about whether, how, and under what conditions Turkey might become more involved” (http://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/IN10164.pdf, accessed April 2015). 193 transition to capitalism in the post-Soviet states. The ‘reawakening of civil society’ is attributed to public debates about state-civil society relations during the era of glasnost – all kinds of freedoms that had been suppressed by the state would be revived. This was also the context in which the Open Society Foundations were founded in 1993 by Chairman George Soros, a prominent advocate of democracy around the world.153 Yet, this ‘reawakening of civil society’ by western countries was more about maintaining political stability in the region in order to advance capitalist interests.

Turkey held a strategic position in the Cold War years. A special issue of the Middle East

Report, titled “Turkey in the Age of Glasnost,” was published in Sep. - Oct. 1989 that describes

Turkey’s role in US-Soviet relations in the years leading up to the opening of the Berlin Wall.

Omer Karasapan’s article in the issue points out that Turkey’s openness towards the U.S. meant, very specifically, their willingness to allow American military facilities and weapons on Turkish soil in order to combat the expansion of the Soviet Union. In the 1980s, as part of the U.S. Cold

War strategy, “Incirlik airbase, in southern Turkey, the most important US military facility between Italy and South Korea, resumed operations as a NATO alert base” (4).154 Along with military and economic support, the American agenda for supporting Turkey’s 1980 coup as well as the country’s accession to the European Union was also based on security.155 As Karasapan wrote at the time, “What Turkey brings to joint arms ventures with Europeans – cheap manpower

153 Soros has since played a leading role in the Romani rights movement, funding projects all over Europe through the Roma Initiatives Office. The Open Society Foundation in Turkey has been instrumental to some of the initiatives for Roma there, along with other discriminated groups, and they actively support Turkey’s EU membership and the expansion of civil society. 154 This base continued to play an important, and contentious, role in the Gulf and Iraq wars. In order to prevent the government from allowing the U.S. to launch an offensive in Iraq from Turkey in 2003, over a hundred AK Party parliamentarians joined those of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) in parliament. 155 This strategic relationship goes back to the Truman Doctrine of 1947, which enunciated American intentions to guarantee the security of Turkey and resulted in large scale U.S. military and economic support. Turkey joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1952. This relationship is considered the basis for Turkey’s move from a single-party government towards democracy. 194 and a large untapped market – is precisely what Ankara hopes will eventually sway the EEC156 into accepting it as a full member” (9). Whereas relations with Europe had soured after the 1980 coup and the repressive policies that followed, the expectations of the U.S. “never featured human rights” (“From the Editors”: 2).

Other articles in the special feature juxtaposed reports of prison conditions and torture with cultural evaluations of cinema and music, which, the editors suggested, “reflect the impressive recuperative powers of this society” (2). This seemingly contradictory picture characterized Turkey in the 1980s, as repressive and unfit for the EEC due to the government’s poor human rights record, but at the same time experiencing an explosion of cultural and commercial life in the public sphere. External investment in the country was strategic in terms of security, but also, as Karasapan mentions, in terms of an untapped market. Nurdan Gürbilek describes the “new cultural climate in Turkey” that emerged in this period as characterized by such contradictions: the world’s biggest shopping malls in cities ringed by shantytowns; “land of international biennials, international festivals, international exhibitions, but home to people sunk furiously in nationality… land of people who cry they are victims of the West while victimizing their own ‘minorities’” (2011: 2). She explains how these contradictions came about in Turkey’s post-coup atmosphere. Repression, she suggests, was a state strategy wielded alongside the promise of freedom in the cultural sphere. The media and advertising industry gained tremendous power, and “the market became the constitutive basis of culture” (5). Opposition was suppressed via state violence and thousands were imprisoned, while at the same time an era of cultural pluralism was ushered in via pop music, television, and an explosion of personal expressions of individualism that had heretofore been silenced. This second strategy of power, as

Gürbilek refers to it, was liberal and inclusive, “aiming to encircle speech rather than silence, to

156 European Economic Community, the predecessor to the European Union. 195 transform rather than prohibit, internalize rather than destroy, tame rather than suppress... a liberal politics promising freedom of speech settled snugly into prohibitive policies of state” (6-

8).

Kerem Öktem describes similar contradictions. He begins his history of contemporary

Turkey in 1989, as a key moment for global and domestic events that led to processes of exclusion and what he refers to as the violent politics of today (2011: 4-5). He points out that

Turgut Özal was elected president on the day the Berlin Wall fell. Özal was a technocrat who had worked for the World Bank in the U.S., and he was the first civilian to ever hold the office of

President since the founding of the Turkish Republic. For Turks, his election marked the end of a decade of military oppression (Öktem 2011: 2, 56). At the same time, the end of communism opened roads to the Balkans and the formation of Turkic republics in Central Asia. Yet, openness in this era did not, Öktem points out, extend to communists and socialists in Turkey, who were exiled, imprisoned, or executed. Nor was the new Turkey willing, despite the expansion of its civil society and visibility of identity politics in the public sphere, to account for its “dark moments in the emergence of the republic” (7), such as the population exchange with Greece, the

Armenian genocide, and policies of assimilation towards Alevis and Kurds. Most importantly, the mass arrests and torture of Kurdish nationalists in Diyarbakır Prison and other prisons in the

Kurdish provinces in the 1980s and 90s “laid the groundwork for the radicalization of the

Kurdish nationalist movement and created an ever-growing pool of activists, who would see no other choice than to join the armed struggle against the Turkish state” (65). And so emerged an

“Angry Nation,”157 where violence continues to interrupt Turkey’s supposed march towards progress, and state interventions are justified to the public via discourses of national security.

157 The title of Öktem’s 2011 book. 196

Öktem attributes the conflict between these political trends to the deep state (derin devlet), or “state within a state,” that is supposedly made up of foreign and domestic intelligence agents and the Turkish military, security, judiciary, and mafia, who are willing to employ covert and anti-democratic tactics of violence to ensure state interests. While I do not contest the presence of the deep state in Turkey, I propose that the contradictions between openness and security are not unique to Turkey. Rather, in line with Gürbilek’s argument that the contradictions of the 1980s were actually constituted by liberalism and capitalism (2011: 3), I agree that the power dynamics that have shaped Turkish politics have also shaped the rest of the world, and the contradictions that characterize Turkey are the result of ongoing relationships with others, particularly Europe and the United States. Furthermore, Gürbilek suggests that understanding the roots of current conflicts in Turkey in the 1980s helps us to recognize the limitations of the liberal strategy overall (11). After all, the victory of liberal democracy and the end of socialism ascribed to the 1989 revolutions in eastern Europe gave way in the 1990s to sectarian violence in the Balkans, increased violence between the Turkish military and the PKK

(Kurdistan Worker’s Party), and George Bush’s ‘global war on terror.’

Despite failed promises, openness maintains a particular allure, renewed by popular sentiments about the globalization of culture and technology, such as the ‘global village.’ Indeed, openness is imagined in Turkey even when it is not experienced; both Gürbilek and Öktem attribute this to the “new market-oriented spirit” (Öktem 2) that was born in the 1980s, and the commodification of everyday life. This spirit was embodied in a series of popular commercials that aired in Turkey in the 1980s and 90s, in which a famous Turkish actor, Şener Şen, demonstrated the sturdiness of a particular brand of faucets (Artema) that could be opened and closed over and over again. In one commercial, Şen appears in his robe standing at his Artema 197 shower faucet and says, “Just imagine: in so many buildings, so many people, who knows how many times we open, we close, we open, we close. We are doing it all the time.”158 This line subtly refers to urban development in Turkey’s major cities in the 1980s and 90s by which

Istanbul, in particular, was to become a ‘global city.’ At the same time, clashes between the

Turkish Army and the PKK (Kurdish Worker’s Party) in southeastern Turkey sparked massive migrations to Istanbul, increasing pressure on the city’s inadequate infrastructure. The final phrase in the commercial that Turks still jokingly repeat, “aç kapa, aç kapa” (open close, open close) was ironic because, in those days, simply opening the faucet did not guarantee that water would actually flow out.159 But the commercials capitalized on a vision of the future city, whose infrastructure would reach every home, even in shantytowns like Sulukule, via running water.

Such a vision bolstered urban redevelopment plans in Istanbul and other cities in the decades that followed.

By the end of the 1990s, chronic fiscal deficits and high rates of inflation resulted in

Turkey’s “twin crises” of Nov. 2000 and Feb. 2001, which changed the balance of power radically in favor of transnational and domestic actors favoring further liberalization (Öniş and

Şenses 2009: 1-4; Keyder 2004: 67). Urban redevelopment continued under Recep Tayyip

Erdoğan, as the mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. Erdoğan founded the AK Party and won a sweeping victory in 2002 on a platform of structural reforms and economic growth. He succeeded in the following years in decreasing inflation and reforming Turkey’s Constitution.

But, in the wake of 9/11, strategies of openness continued to coexist with violent state measures, now justified via discourses of combating terrorism.

158 “Bir düşünsenize: bu kadar çok bina, bu kadar çok insan, kim bilir kaç defa açıyoruz kapıyoruz, açıyoruz kapıyoruz. Biz bunu hep yapıyoruz.” See https://youtu.be/UFSMHsyozF8 [accessed April 2015]. 159 Thanks to Zeynep Gürsel for this reference. 198

“Democratic Openings” under the AK Party

The pace of liberalization increased under the AK Party, as they made a formal commitment to economic reforms and EU membership during their early years of government.

Their electoral victory in 2002 was on a platform of fighting corruption – the acronym AK Party plays on the Turkish word ak, which means white or clean. They passed anti-corruption legislation as part of their push for European Union membership early on; however, much of this legislation has since been amended or nullified. Nothing illustrates the various openings and closings that Turkey has experienced over the past three decades as well as Turkey’s relationship with the EU, which has been by far the most influential force driving liberalization and democratization since Turkey’s application for formal membership in 1987. In 2002, the

European Council promised to open accession negotiations with Turkey if it fulfilled the

Copenhagen criteria (which include a functioning market economy and a dedication to democratic governance and human rights). However, since negotiations began in 2005, the status of various chapters remaining indefinitely open or blocked from being opened (by Cyprus and

France) has led to frustration and cynicism among the general public in Turkey.160 Only one chapter has been closed (the Chapter on Science and Research, in 2006), and no new chapters were opened between 2010-2012. Working Groups were established in 2012 to provide benchmark dates for closing several chapters that have remained open for years, but in light of the violent state measures used against Gezi Park protesters in summer 2013, Germany blocked the start of new accession talks with Turkey.

Zeynep Gürsel’s documentary film, “Coffee Futures” (2009), tells the story of Turkey’s journey toward EU membership through the everyday practice of coffee fortune-telling,

160 According to a survey conducted by Transatlantic Trends, Country Profiles: Turkey 2014 (see http://trends.gmfus.org/transatlantic-trends/country-profiles-2014/country-profiles-turkey-2014/, accessed April 2015). 199 juxtaposing the prognostications of politicians and those of fortune-tellers about the future of

Turkey. In the film, narratives of coffee futures paint a picture of the EU looming large and unreachable behind a closed gate – Turkey knocks and knocks but cannot go in. Turkey’s efforts are never quite enough, as they are held to an unreachable standard (see Ahıska 2003). In

Gürsel’s follow-up article, “Following Coffee Futures,” she confirms the centrality of Turkey’s

EU negotiations in the country’s internal politics, whereby EU membership frames AK Party reforms as contributing to modernization, the lifting of various obstacles, and the production of higher standards for human rights and the environment (2012: 375). Furthermore, improving external perceptions of Turkey seems to be of central importance to the current government and the public, “as always-deferred, never-quite-realized citizens of the European Union” (376). As one coffee fortune-teller says in the film, “The EU? Good question. We need another cup for the

EU, that’s how it goes: forever opening and closing.” Despite setbacks in Turkey’s negotiations to join the European Union, economic and political reforms that have been initiated via the process of accession will continue to direct the country’s trajectory, whether the negotiations turn out to be successful in the long run or not. Furthermore, studies show that merely being a candidate to the EU raises a nation’s trade openness.161 However, there is concern over which direction Turkey’s economy is open to: trade with Europe and America is interpreted by the

European Union as a sign of progress, whereas trade with the Middle East is read as a sign of their “slide to the East” (Tocci 2011: 154).

The biggest impact of EU reforms in Turkey have been on the expansion of civil society organizations, particularly since a new Associations Law was enacted in 2004 and a Foundations

Law in 2008. In 2010, an “Openness, Transparency and Civic Participation Project” was

161 See http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/607/2/trading-for-membership-effects-of-eu-candidacy-on-trade- openness-and-gdp-per-capita-in-countries-seeking-membership [accessed April 2015]. 200 implemented in several Eastern European and Balkan countries, including Turkey, coordinated by CLS-Sofia and financed by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation Bulgaria Office. Two Turkish civil society organizations, TUSEV (the Third Sector Foundation of Turkey) and TÜMİKOM (the

Turkey Parliamentary Monitoring Committee) were partners on the project. They released a report entitled “Turkey: Openness and Transparency in Turkish Parliament and Civic

Participation in Legislative Process”, which focused on the legal and institutional framework for an open parliamentary system, current practices and transparency in the parliament, and participation in legislative processes. The report reads:

In order to talk about a healthy democratic system, the parliament should be open, transparent and accountable and citizens shall participate in the decision-making processes. For the development of the country's democratic system, both the government holding the executive power and MPs holding the legislative power shall be under the control of democratic mechanisms. If the citizens do not feel responsible to hold their representatives accountable, likewise, non-democratic inclinations and abuses would be likely to occur. By making the political, administrative and parliamentary system transparent and accountable, the belief in the power of people, e.g. democracy, will develop (Durna, date unknown).

Similarly, the National Democratic Institute is a non-profit organization that promotes

“openness, accountability and citizen participation in the political process along with the development of a strong, dynamic civil society.” NDI’s mission in Turkey is to increase the government’s responsiveness to the public by encouraging greater transparency and fostering citizen consultation.

Democratic practices in government, such as transparency, accountability, and the full participation of citizens, is also being encouraged as a business model in Turkey. A study released in 2008 by the International Journal of Manpower encourages “a trust-based approach to promote employees’ openness to organizational change in Turkey” (Ertürk 2008). On a visit to 201

Turkey in 2011, U.S. Vice-President Biden called for increased openness in order to support a business climate. The “entrepreneurial spirit”, he claimed, is about open societies and open economies. This includes the freedom of expression and access to the Internet. Openness “is the conduit to young and brilliant minds,” Biden proclaimed, and went on to suggest that the next

Steve Jobs could be a Turk.162 Biden’s speech exemplifies the classic mode of neoliberal governance identified by Foucault, by which techniques of government extend to individuals and self-governance (see Foucault 2008). Openness in Biden’s speech is conceived as fundamental, not only to society but also to the “entrepreneurial spirit” of individuals.

Donald MacKenzie’s work demonstrates how economic theories make real the objects they purport to describe. He looks to Austin’s notion of ‘performativity’ to examine how particular technologies or discourses come to produce some material version of what began as an abstract formula or a disparate set of practices (MacKenzie et al 2007: 56). The analysis by Rose and Miller of American work reform in the early part of the 20th century is a case in point (2008).

They demonstrate that scientific management is a type of cultural economy and examine the ways that terms such as ’productivity’, ‘quality’, or ‘excellence’ gained traction, not just in corporate boardrooms but also in state agencies, schools, and charities. The “enterprising subject” was articulated as the active citizen of democracy at work (2008: 193-8). In this way, liberal mechanisms of power govern indirectly, not only via regimes of law and rights but also via dispositions, and feelings. Citizens must learn to govern themselves, which Rose refers to as

“responsibilization” (Rose 2006: 4). For Rose, the technologies of liberal government produce modern subjects who are “made free” via educational practices that inculcate certain dispositions and reshape the way people conduct themselves in spaces regulated by freedom (Rose 1999: 22,

65).

162 See http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/03/world/meast/turkey-biden/ [accessed April 2015]. 202

In Turkey, subjects are to be governed by the freedom that openness creates. The AK

Party’s Democratic Opening Process (Demokratik Açılım Süreci) includes an Armenian

Opening, Alevi Opening, and Kurdish Opening. The Roma emerged as a “disadvantaged group” in public discourse for the first time in Turkey when the AK Party declared a Romani Opening

(Roman Açılımı) in 2010 that promised legal and social reforms aimed at Romani integration.

Prime Minister (now President) Erdoğan addressed a large crowd of thousands of Roma at a public event at Istanbul’s Abdi İpekçi Sports Hall, saying, “As the state, we have shouldered the responsibility on this issue. From now on, your problems are my problems.”163 He continued, referencing a well-known proverb, “Türkiye’de altmışaltı buçuk millet var” (there are sixty-six and a half nations in Turkey, the ‘half’ referring to the Roma): “Nobody in this country can be treated as ‘half’ a person.” He went on to discuss plans to construct state housing for Roma across Turkey, saying “I don’t want to see my Roma brothers in tents any more. I want them to enjoy a decent standard of living.”

Numerous news stories about the Romani Opening event claimed that Erdoğan’s speech was met with joyful music and dancing by the thousands of Roma in attendance. Kibariye, a popular Romani singer and TV show host, gave a concert at the event and apparently could not stop singing the praises of Erdoğan (“öve öve bitiremedi”). Yet, there was dissonance between what appeared to be massive appreciation for the AK Party by Istanbul’s Roma and the themes that had dominated media coverage of Romani issues in Turkey in preceeding years, particularly the infamous urban renewal project in Sulukule that dislocated hundreds of Romani residents.

Activists who had been involved in protesting the demolition of Sulukule told me that Erdoğan’s promise to provide new houses for his “Roma brothers in tents” was just another way for the AK

163 Quotes from this speech are taken from a news story in Today’s Zaman: http://www.todayszaman.com/national_prime-minister-tells-roma-your-sufferings-are-mine_204361.html [accessed April 2015]. 203

Party to justify the relocation of urban Roma to state housing by perpetuating the belief that the

Roma are transitory, and by focusing attention on one aspect of their social problems while ignoring their marginalization in education and employment.164 Furthermore, they suggested that the Romani Opening was just smoke and mirrors, a way to distract from the bad press around

Sulukule, that would not amount to real improvements for the Roma. One Romani dernek leader from Izmir told me, “They said the Romani Opening would open the society up to us, but it turns out they want us to open up to society” (interview, July 2012).

The Romani Opening event bears an uncanny resemblace to Turgut Özal’s public appearances with arabesk stars in the late 1980s. Martin Stokes describes how arabesk music emerged from the culture of the gecekondu (squatter or shanty, literally “built over night”) neighborhoods that were built by rural migrants around Turkey’s large industrial cities beginning in the 1950s (1989: 27). Particularly in the environment of political and economic disorder of the late 1970s, arabesk expressed the underside of urban development and so-called

‘modernization.’ Arabesk singers were Kurds, Roma, and transsexuals, and the style was influenced by Egyptian film music; it was associated with brothels and nightclubs, and its lyrics expressed a culture of kadercilik, or fatalism (ibid.: 28-29). While TRT (the Turkish Radio and

Television Corporation) banned the broadcast of arabesk music and films, in 1988 Prime

Minister Özal made several public appearances with arabesk stars and attended concerts; the news at the time reported “Prime Ministerial Support for Arabesk” (ibid.: 29). The Motherland

Party even adopted a popular arabesk song as its slogan for the 1988 election campaign. In 1989,

Özal’s wife invited Bülent Ersoy (a transsexual arabesk singer who had been banned from performing during military rule from 1980-1983) to perform at a televised official party (ibid.:

29-30).

164 Also see Gençoğlu-Onbaşı 2013. 204

Özal’s public embrace of the urban lower classes via arabesk was criticized at the time as merely a tactic for courting votes, and Stokes himself interprets it as an example of the exploitation of the lower classes by a wealthy minority (ibid.: 30). Just as the 1980s was characterized by the contradictions of closed doors and open windows, I suggest that the AK

Party’s Democratic Opening Process is a spectacle of pluralism that makes minority rights a public issue while justifying state interventions into ‘problem’ populations.165 Yet, there is a major difference between the politics of openness in the 1980s and 90s and that of today; namely, the implementation of projects of openness exceeds the power of the state. Although

Erdoğan claimed to “shoulder the responsibility on this issue,” the Romani Opening has resulted in few state-implemented improvements for Turkey’s Roma. Instead, international and Turkish civil society organizations are increasingly intervening in Romani communities to improve their access to education and other social services. The co-opting of civil society as a technique of neoliberal governance has been well documented (see Cruikshank 1999; Murray Li 2007). Here I seek to complicate the picture of state domination versus civil resistance by directing attention to the ways that the politics of openness in Turkey operates in several directions, to rationalize state-led urban renewal and to motivate civil society interventions into urban Romani communities that are under threat of demolition. Furthermore, both kinds of interventions are compelled by competing visions of Istanbul’s future as a ‘global city.’ Of greater significance, however, is how openness comes to be embodied by individuals subject to state-led dislocation, like Derya Hanım. In the following section, I detail how openness operated to reshape an

Istanbul neighborhood and the lifestyles of its Romani residents.

165 Also see Potuoğlu-Cook 2010. 205

II. Opening Up Sulukule

The open market and open society are intimately connected to conceptions of open space.

As Jai Sen notes, “open space has seemed to be part of a new culture of doing things that is emerging in our times” (2010: 995). Competing claims to openness in Turkey are manifested in the urban landscape of Istanbul. The city witnessed both rapid modernization and an influx of rural migrants in the 1950s, as the center of political power shifted from Ankara back to Istanbul.

İpek Türeli explains that the opening up of the city during this period, via newly constructed boulevards that blasted through historic neighborhoods, was interpreted at the time as an expose of the city’s underlying Ottoman-Turkish character and simultaneously made for a more automobile-friendly environment (2008: xvii). Funded by U.S. grants, these urbanization projects were meant to showcase the efforts of the Democrat Party under Prime Minister Adnan

Menderes to transform Istanbul into a representation of post-war modernity. Türeli links the creation of an open environment to economic and social openness in this period, “through the use of boulevards and infrastructure that support the movement of people and goods and that showcase an enlarging consumer economy as well as class encounters in public spaces and thereby advance democratization” (viii). However, the opening of the boulevards also made migrants and poverty more visible and created public anxieties about urban change. “The image of migrants, when set against the new architecture, roads, and cars of the city, created a stark visual contrast” (Türeli 2008: xxv). Furthermore, the population of the city increased by fifty percent in just a decade, shocking the more established Istanbul residents.

Many of the city’s current Romani residents came to Istanbul from the Balkans in the

1950s and lived alongside rural Anatolian migrants in the gecekondu neighborhoods. The conception of migration as a social problem emerged in this period alongside the creation of the 206 rural migrant as a social type (Türeli 2008: 11). Türeli writes, “This new contradictory character of the city— that is, the increasing display of poverty versus new displays of wealth, or cattle versus new American cars on the boulevards—resulted in a complex set of anxieties amongst the more established urban middle classes. These anxieties had to do with bourgeois fears of invasion, contamination, and criminality, as well as with the uncertainty of class—that is, not being able to tell an authentic Istanbulite apart from the others” (15). The trope of invasion in public discourse and the media in the 1950s prompts Türeli to refer to Istanbul as an ‘open city,’ a term which refers to a lack of urban growth controls in urban planning, but is also used in

European War conventions – in the event of the imminent capture of a city, it may be declared an open city to signal that all defensive efforts have been abandoned. The opposing army is then expected not to attack the city, but to simply march in, thereby protecting the city's historic landmarks and residents. Türeli explains, “Employing the term open city, I can capture not only the ‘government’ of state politics, but also the consent that appeased public reactions within market mechanisms. The opening up of the city in the post-war period gave way to a deliberate obsession with the city in the realm of culture, which in turn had material effects on city form”

(xxv). More established urban residents engaged in narratives of nostalgia for a cosmopolitan past, but failed to commit to a multicultural society in the present (5).

The obsession with urban culture and Istanbulite identity alongside anxieties about migrants and their impact on the city continued to show their effects through the 1980s and 90s.

Bedrettin Dalan, Istanbul’s first mayor after the 1980 coup, headed the project of turning Istanbul into a ‘global’ city from 1984 to 1989 via a series of demolition and redevelopment projects, with the support of the military and Prime Minister Turgut Özal. Rural-to-urban migration continued, but for different reasons: clashes between the Turkish Army and the PKK (Kurdish 207

Worker’s Party) in southeastern Turkey sparked a massive migration of Kurds fleeing to

Istanbul. While previous migrants had benefitted from the informal housing market, these

Kurdish migrants confronted one that was increasingly formal and regulated (Öktem 2011: 92).

Furthermore, the politics of Kurdish identity took on spatial dimensions in the city, where

The mayoral victory of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Istanbul in 1994 initiated new debates about public space and cultural politics, as Erdoğan declared he would restore Istanbul’s rightful position as a global city. The rise to power of the AK Party after winning the 2002 national election led to a number of far-reaching political and economic transformations. The terms of

Turkey’s IMF bailout required the continuing transfer of state assets into private hands, and the

AK Party undertook a number of reforms over the following years that extended the IMF’s recommendations. “Privatization, real estate, and urban transformation played a central role in this—financing local politics and helping to drive Turkey’s economic growth over the course of the decade” (Angell, Hammond and van Dobben Schoon 2014: 650). TOKİ (Turkey’s Mass

Housing Administration) was placed under Prime Minister Erdoğan’s personal control and granted powers to acquire and rezone public and private land. Although it is officially a non- profit entity, today it controls a real estate portfolio worth over $7 billion.

As nostalgia for the Republican modernist vision (see Özyürek 2006) exists alongside critiques of the nationalist narrative and appropriations of neo-Ottoman cosmopolitanism,

“culturally appropriating Istanbul is overtly political and involves re-writing the city” (xii). This re-writing Istanbul as a ‘global city’ continues to guide the direction of urban redevelopment 208

(Angell, Hammond and Schoon 2014: 649-650). Economic liberalization, globalization, and growth under the AK Party have only increased the pace of projects that seek to fulfill this vision. Mega shopping centers and gated housing communities (see Bartu-Candan and Kolluoğlu

2008) accommodate a growing middle class that desires the benefits of the urban environment without compromising privacy or security. Central urban neighborhoods attract middle and upper class city dwellers with narratives of cosmopolitanism and openness while simultaneously displacing undesirable manifestations of difference among the urban poor (see Mills 2010). As

Türeli writes, “Earlier anxieties regarding rural migrants have strangely morphed in recent times and combined with other anxieties concerning the loss of local character. Thus, the process of migration is now blamed for obliterating the city's former cosmopolitan character” (xi).

(Strand in Marsh and Strand 2006: 100), thereby associating themselves with the open character of the city. The Sulukule Roma, in particular, trace their history back to the conquest of the city in 1453, linking themselves to narratives of Ottoman cosmopolitanism and establishing a strong sense of Istanbulite identity and belonging. Ms. Oral told me, “the Roma who lived in Sulukule had been living there for at least three generations, so if someone is to be considered ‘Istanbullu,’ it is them.” While the AK Party pursues their agenda of turning Istanbul into a ‘global city’ that is open to the flow of global capital and commercialized cultural difference (see Potuoğlu-Cook

2006), urban activists demand open spaces, open access, and the right to participate in the making of the city. Istanbul’s Roma are brought into these competing claims via debates over urban renewal – are they the symbolic urban residents of an open, multicultural city, or do they 209 represent the rural, informal aspects of a city that must be modernized, ‘opened up’, and regulated?

Sulukule: Open or Closed?

In 2010 (the same year that the Romani Opening was declared), Istanbul was named the

European Capital of Culture. Istanbul was chosen as part of the EU’s mission to “engender unity in diversity in all corners of the Union” (Göktürk, Soysal and Türeli 2010: 6).166 However, the ways that the city used the money and the choices that were made to display certain aspects of the city’s heritage over others were cause for contentious public debates. Ironically, low-income and marginalized Istanbul residents were further displaced by projects that were meant to contribute to the country’s ongoing democratization. As scholars of Turkey noted, public displays and performances of cosmopolitanism, pluralism, and multiculturalism masked the fact that the major beneficiaries of the events and funds directed to Turkey by the EU were not, in fact, the city’s minorities (ibid.: 14). Nostalgia for Istanbul’s cosmopolitan Ottoman past167 was celebrated while the city’s poor (transsexuals, Roma, Kurds) were rendered invisible or forcibly removed.

Just three years later, Istanbul again drew the attention of the world, this time due to a massive protest movement against the urban development plan for Taksim’s Gezi Park. On June

4, 2013, a solidarity group associated with the Occupy Gezi movement, Taksim

166 Also see the EU Reports for Cultural Capital: http://ec.europa.eu/culture/our-programmes-and-actions/doc413_en.htm. 167 A neo-Ottoman nostalgia for Istanbul as a cosmopolitan city has gained momentum in Turkey since the 1980s. Amy Mills demonstrates that the movement to “recover” ethnic minorities in history is most visible in Istanbul, where it works together with gentrification to produce a cosmopolitan, multicultural notion of Turkey as modern and European. She argues that, as the European Union is pressuring Turkey to reform laws concerning the rights and status of its minority citizens, Istanbul is a “boundary space” where “contours and margins are continually retraced through negotiation with the paradox – of being distinctively Turkish and yet of Europe, of being secular and modern and yet denying those who are not Muslim and Turkish full inclusion – that lies at the core of Turkish nationalism” (2005: 442). 210

Dayanışması (“Taksim Solidarity”), issued several demands to the state, including an end to police violence against the protestors and the end of the sale of public spaces to private companies and investors. Speaking to the media from Morocco that same day, Erdoğan called the protestors ‘looters’ (çapulcu) and terrorists. These two public statements delivered on the same day exemplify competing claims to openness in the city. Erdoğan was able to label urban protestors as criminals and terrorists by tapping into the sense of fear and vulnerability that

Istanbul residents experience as the city undergoes rapid social and physical changes. Speaking as a protector of the city, he directed that fear to so-called dangerous internal and external forces that seek to destroy the unity of the nation168. The activists, on the other hand, made demands of the state based on the ‘right to the city,’ a conception of urban space as shared, public, and open.

Such competing claims were central to the conflict over Sulukule, whose demolition in

2009 under one of the AK Party’s first large-scale urban renewal (kentsel yenileme) projects inspired a coalition of ‘right to the city’ activists called the Sulukule Platform. Sulukule was known in Istanbul as a Romani neighborhood. In 2008, members of the Sulukule Platform submitted a report on Sulukule to UNESCO that repeatedly refers to Sulukule as one of the oldest Romani settlements in Europe (İngin 2008). The neighborhood was subjected to multiple redevelopment projects in the twentieth century. In 1958, Sulukule was located closer to

Topkapı, but residents were moved up toward Edirnekapı to make way for Millet and Vatan

Avenues (now Turgut Özal Caddesi and Adnan Menderes Bulvar); two other small-scale demolitions occurred in 1966 and 1982 (Somersan and Kırca-Schroeder 2007: 726). Some of

Turkey’s most successful Romani musicians came from Sulukule, and even those who were not from Sulukule claimed to be because it gave them clout in the music industry. From the 1950s to

168 See http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/turkey-prime-minister-gezi-park-erdogan and http://www.al- monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/06/erdogan-gezi-conspiracy-taksim-governance-authoritarian-akp.html [accessed April 2015]. 211 the early 1990s, the engine of the neighborhood’s economy was driven by entertainment houses

(eğlence evleri), where visitors enjoyed entertainment by Romani musicians and dancers. After the municipality shut the houses down in 1992, the neighborhood fell into hard times and some of the residents who had depended on the regular income from the entertainment houses turned to prostitution and selling drugs. Sulukule acquired a reputation for being seamy and dangerous, and people’s homes fell into disrepair.

The municipality, in partnership with private industry, justified Sulukule’s demolition by portraying the existing conditions of the neighborhood as “primitive,” “shabby,” “run-down,” and “like a city in the Middle Ages” (İslam n.d.: 2). The new development, it was promised, would be a place where different social groups could live side by side. Furthermore, the old

Sulukule was described as a segregated neighborhood and a dangerous zone where other

Istanbulites did not feel welcome; the new development, on the other hand, would integrate the area into the fabric of the city (ibid.: 5).169 Ironically, during my fieldwork I found that the new development, as it was being constructed, was actually surrounded by corrugated metal fences and protected by security guards, so that even the previous residents of the neighborhood were prevented from entering. As Tolga İslam has pointed out, discourses of integration, which appeared democratic and humanitarian, resulted in “disintegration” in practice (ibid.: 5). The so- called ‘closed’ Romani neighborhood was replaced by an enclosed housing development for the middle and upper classes.

Yet, the old neighborhood had only been ‘closed’ insofar as the police had difficultly entering it because residents took care of each other and gangs of men prevented access by non- welcome visitors.170 During the era of the entertainment houses, however, “tourists arrived to

169 İnceoğlu and Yürekli confirm that politicians justified the demolition according to “social problems” (2011: 9). 170 Also see Karaman and İslam 2012: 241. 212

Sulukule by the bus load” (personal communication). Such a neighborhood, that relies on an internal system for its economic viability and acquires what it needs through internal networks rather than state services, was represented by the municipality as a relic of “the Middle Ages.”

The houses in Sulukule were Ottoman style courtyard houses (avlulu evler), composed of one or two rooms located around a small, shared courtyard. According to Karaman and İslam, “The unique living spaces reflected the communal lifestyle of the residents. The buildings were seldom accessible directly from the street. Individual houses opened to communal courtyards and courtyards opened to streets through very narrow passageways” (2012: 237). Reminiscing about the old neighborhood, previous residents recounted communal care of the neighborhood’s children, communication between neighbors that occurred at open windows and doors, and neighborhood activities like weddings and sünnet (circumcision celebrations) that took place in the streets. The dislocated residents of Sulukule remember their neighborhood as a place where neighborly values and communal living still held sway: a kind of village in the middle of the city. One woman told me: “If I needed an apple, my neighbor gave me an apple” (personal communication). I also heard Sulukule described as a place where the Roma were protected from the outside world. For example, Şükrü Pündük, the director of the Sulukule Romani Solidarity and Culture Association, told me that the residents of Sulukule had been safe behind the

Theodosian wall. Now, he said, they are scattered around the city and many of the social and economic networks that tied them together have been broken (personal communication). Now many of the dislocated Sulukule Roma live in apartment units in Karagümrük and do not know their neighbors. More than one Romani woman described this situation to me as “living in a jail.”

Whereas the municipality painted a picture of diverse groups of people living side by side in a 213 kind of multicultural utopia, the “integration” of the neighborhood merely made it accessible to private interests and the flow of capital.171

Karaman and İslam ask the question: “To what extent are intra-urban borders acceptable at a time of proliferating discourses about a borderless world, and open cities?” (2012: 234).

They argue that intra-urban borders have a dual nature: while they may exclude outsiders, they are functional in defining a communal territory and enable communities to survive; at the same time, however, such borders can isolate communities and further encourage their marginalization

(241). The borders around Sulukule were both internally and externally constructed, as part of the ongoing marginalization of Istanbul’s Romani residents (238-9). While the closed neighborhood provided a sense of safety for the residents, it was also largely neglected by the municipality. Residents told Karaman and İslam that there were no public parks in Sulukule and that the street cleaners often did not go there (241). “In concurrence with the Turkish state’s decades old policy of forcing Romanis and minorities in general to choose between second class citizenship and assimilation, the Fatih Municipality’s renewal scheme aims at incorporating the

‘dark citizens’ into the society, tearing down the visible and invisible borders that separate the community from the rest” (241). While the authors are critical of the municipality’s

“humanitarian pretext” for the urban renewal project in Sulukule and its narrative of

“incorporation” to justify the demolition (234), they also point out that activist discourses of the

‘right to the city’ and the group right to difference are based on conflicting premises. The ‘right to the city’ ethos presupposes individuals as “anonymous and autonomous authors of the city”

(241). Indeed, Sulukule Platform activists relied upon a narrative of shared urban heritage, or

‘the commons,’ in their fight to save Sulukule.

171 Tahire Erman, in response to government efforts to integrate gecekondu inhabitants, has asked the important question: “Integration to what?” (1998: 541). 214

Sulukule as ‘the Commons’

The concept of ‘the commons’ has origins in the legal term, ‘common land,’ but has since been expanded to include the shared cultural resources of a city. It was elaborated by David

Harvey as part of his discussion on the ‘right to the city’ (first posed by Henri Lefebvre in Le

Droit à la Ville in 1968), which rests on the ideas of accessibility, interaction, and public participation in the use and production of urban space. As Harvey writes:

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights (2008: 1).

‘The commons’ is thus posed in opposition to the liberal emphasis on the individual, but it is framed within a discourse of human rights. The vision of Istanbul’s future embodied in the concept of ‘the commons’ is one of collective stewardship, against the value of private property.

When Erdoğan speaks of external forces that threaten the unity of the nation, ‘right to the city’ activists respond with a call to stop selling the collective resources of the city to outside interests.172

For urban rights activists, Sulukule has come to represent a kind of urban lifestyle that is being threatened by a ‘neoliberal’ regime. They argued against its privatization by claiming a collective right to the cultural resources of Istanbul’s neighborhoods. Sulukule was located within a zone of Istanbul’s Historic Peninsula that was on UNESCO’s World Heritage List since

1985, and the area was officially designated a Conservation Area in 2003. Activists emphasized this in their efforts to save the neighborhood, incorporating the Roma into a narrative of the collective identity of the city and suggesting that its demolition would be a collective loss. The

172 Since the Gezi Park protests, a broader public movement has been organized against inequality via this concept of the commons, or müştereklerimiz (see http://mustereklerimiz.org/). 215 barrier they encountered was that Turkey’s Roma are not generally considered central to Istanbul identity; in fact, the public at large perceives them as outsiders, despite their centuries-long presence, and as rural nomads, although some Romani communities settled in Istanbul centuries ago. The demolition of Sulukule was relatively easy for the municipality to justify to the public because the neighborhood was perceived as dangerous and inaccessible. I was often told by non-

Romani Turks that the urban renewal project in Sulukule was a good thing for the city because it needed “cleaning up.”

Activists attempted to combat these perceptions of the Roma by highlighting their contribution to the music and dance culture of the city. They organized one particular large-scale event that invited Istanbul residents to enter Sulukule and see for themselves that it was not dangerous.173 As Ms. Oral remembers, “In 2007, as we only had 40 days before demolitions, we organized a ‘40 days and 40 nights’ event in Sulukule with presentations, panel discussions, concerts, and press conferences to increase awareness about the culture and history of the neighborhood. We had meetings about the rights of inhabitants and exhibitions and workshops for local people to inform them about their rights and possible results of the demolitions, and to mobilize the society about urban renewal plans” (personal communication). In fact, this was referred to as a “visibility project,” and many international figures got involved. The lead singer of Manu Chao expressed solidarity with the Sulukule Roma, and Gogol Bordello even showed up to play a concert. “As a result,” Ms. Oral goes on, “Sulukule was proved to be part of ‘the commons’ and the demolitions were postponed for few years, although in the end we couldn’t prevent it.” In part, this was because the municipality presented their own narrative of heritage conservation in Sulukule, proposing that they would increase a sense of belonging for Istanbul residents by integrating the area, and at the same time prevent the decay of historical areas by

173 See Aslı Kıyak Ingın’s blog at http://40gun40gece-sulukule.blogspot.com/ [accessed June 2015]. 216 evicting residents who are unable to invest in their maintenance (Gunay unpublished: 7).

Furthermore, they suggested that the new development would create an area attractive to tourists.

Harvey admits, “questions of the commons are contradictory and therefore always contested” (2011: 103). By way of example, he asks a rhetorical question: Is the biodiversity of the Amazon forest a global ‘commons’? If so, is the expulsion of its indigenous populations justified in order to preserve biodiversity? “Behind these contestations lie conflicting social interests. At the end of it all, the analyst is often left with a simple decision: whose side are you on, and which and whose interests do you seek to protect?” (ibid.). Regarding the right to the city, we might ask whether individual freedoms can be upheld alongside collective human rights.

Does transparency in urban administration and democratic decision-making necessarily lead to social inclusion and the reduction of poverty, inequality, and violence? I pose this as a rhetorical question in order to demonstrate that interventions that aim to increase urban openness do not inevitably result in a single outcome. The vision of solidarity and urban community in ‘the commons’ is attractive to urban rights activists, but does not always resonate with poor, marginalized residents who make temporary, strategic alliances but do not necessarily have affinities with urban rights movements. As one activist explained, “I have to tell you that the

Sulukule Platform was criticized for not representing the demands of the local community. We have always been discussing how much the campaigns represented the wishes of local people as they were easily induced to sell their rights to the municipality or to 3rd parties. I guess who should own the city, the history, and the culture is an ongoing discussion that we are talking about as ‘the commons’ now” (electronic correspondence, May 2014).

The competing claims to urban openness between the Fatih municipality and the Sulukule

Platform activists underscore competing visions of the future of Istanbul as a ‘global city.’ What 217

I want to emphasize here is that both the municipality and the Sulukule Platform activists were operating within their respective definitions of openness. Asu Aksoy, a professor at Istanbul

Bilgi University and an urban rights activist, penned an article in 2009 titled, “Istanbul’s Choice:

Openness,” in which she proposed that if Istanbul can hold on to its “‘worldliness’ – a combination of openness, liberalism, pragmatism, democratic culture, and global embeddedness

– then this momentum would help Turkey become more centrally and deeply engaged with, and implicated in, world affairs…” Furthermore, “Istanbul’s insistence on the virtues of openness, over and against regressive and nationalistic calls for defensive closure, will make all the difference” (1). Yet, the idea that Sulukule might remain a ‘closed’ neighborhood, where residents would maintain a self-sustaining local economy and control their own streets, seems entirely untenable in such an urban environment.

While state-led interventions into Romani communities consist mainly of development projects that appropriate poor urban neighborhoods in prime real estate areas and relocate

Romani residents to state housing, they have also successfully drawn public attention to the social problems that Turkey’s Roma face in the areas of education and employment and attracted civil society organizations from Turkey and abroad to implement projects of improvement in

Romani communities. Civil society interventions are improving children’s enrollment in school, helping Roma to acquire state identification cards and social services, and providing afterschool programs for children and employment opportunities for women. As Derya Hanım’s narrative at the beginning of this article reveals, integration into the city results in both new opportunities and the loss of previous ways of life.

218

Conclusion

I have proposed that the politics of openness has characterized Turkey’s economic, socio- political, and urban landscape from at least the early 1980s to today. However, working against possible interpretations of openness as a universal or coherent project, I suggest that the politics of openness is diffuse and can cut several ways, so that outcomes can be positive or negative but, more importantly, they can be unanticipated, unintended, and experienced in multiple ways.

Furthermore, there are simultaneous advantages and disadvantages for marginalized populations like the Roma. For example, while they are being integrated into society and citizenship,

Istanbul’s Roma are at the same time facing the dissolution of their communities, traditional occupations, and cultural life. The politics of openness bolstered the justifications of the Fatih municipality for tearing down or “integrating” the closed neighborhood of Sulukule while also directing the mission of the activists to save the neighborhood from demolition via a narrative of public accessibility. Furthermore, justifications for the urban renewal project in Sulukule hinged on particular conceptions of the Roma as closed and promised to open up the neighborhood, yet the demolition effected new ways of living in the city that are experienced as both restrictive and freeing. Civil society interventions today help the Roma to gain access to social services and also work to combat discrimination by increasing the visibility of the Roma in the public sphere. But the consequences of increased visibility include state surveillance and vulnerability to further marginalization.174 In the context of efforts to make Istanbul a ‘global city,’ the city’s Roma are made visible as either a ‘social problem’ or as an important part of Istanbul’s ‘commons’ that should be protected and preserved. In many of the narratives I collected among the dislocated

Sulukule Roma, there are references to a major shift in their experiences of space as they were

174 See El-Kazaz 2014.

219 moved from small houses that shared communal courtyards to apartment units that only accommodate nuclear families and limit the use of the streets for communal events. Ironically, while the municipality framed the urban renewal project in Sulukule as one of integration, the

Sulukule Roma now living in apartments in Karagümrük feel less connected to their neighbors.

On the other hand, some, like Derya Hanım, see new potential for the whole city to be opened up to them and their children.

Gürbilek asks, “Will we be able to find a guarantor of freedom in the politics of openness today?” (21). I suspect not. In fact, as we have seen, openness and closure are two sides of the same coin (see Keenan 2003). I noted in the introduction to this article that the AK Party’s

Democratic Opening Process aims to improve Turkey’s democratic standards and simultaneously combat terrorism. A focus on urban renewal in Istanbul serves to explicate how these seemingly contradictory processes actually link up. In the politics of openness in Turkey today, discourses and practices of security and openness are mutually constituted and function in tandem. Indeed, the marriage of openness and security is a current trend in much of the world. The ideology of democracy rests on openness and the EU was formed according to this ideology – borders would be opened and goods and ideas would flow freely. Yet the borders between nations have actually constricted; security has increased; those who are allowed in and out is more tightly regulated than ever before; government surveillance is justified by politicians using fear tactics and contribute to feelings of vulnerability and insecurity among citizens of the ‘free world.’ The contradictions of the open society and the open market are simultaneously produced and mutually constituted. Further inquiries into the politics of openness may end up revealing the limits of liberalization and democratization in practice.

220

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