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The Cases of Torture and Enforced Disappearances in Post-1980 Turkey

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The Cases of Torture and Enforced Disappearances in Post-1980 Turkey University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2014 State-Making, Evidence-Making, and Claim-Making: The Cases of Torture and Enforced Disappearances in Post-1980 Turkey Basak Can University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Can, Basak, "State-Making, Evidence-Making, and Claim-Making: The Cases of Torture and Enforced Disappearances in Post-1980 Turkey" (2014). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1224. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1224 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1224 For more information, please contact [email protected]. State-Making, Evidence-Making, and Claim-Making: The Cases of Torture and Enforced Disappearances in Post-1980 Turkey Abstract This thesis concerns the struggles over the production of the truth of state violence in Turkey in the three decades following the infamous 1980 military coup. Specifically, it focuses on cases of torture and enforced disappearance, two forms of violence which the state not only used extensively but also around which it built a specific egimer of denial in collaboration and complicity with the official forensic institution. The latter is the ultimate authority that produces medical documents and reports that can be used in making legal claims. Based on two years of fieldwork in human rights NGOs, forensic medicine institutions and hospitals, and interviews with human rights activists, forensic physicians, victims and the relatives of victims of violence, this thesis aims at a genealogy of the terms by which evidence making, claim making, and state making occurred in Turkey in the last three decades (1980-2013). These terms are crafted in the encounters between state officials, victims, and physicians, each of who hold different relationalities, epistemologies, and desires, and who find themselves to be in constant negotiation and struggle. The thesis shows that while human rights activist physicians' challenge to the state has been crucial in documenting and restricting violence, its partial success also shaped the political sphere, transforming political crises into medical problems that can be solved by ordering, regulation, standardization and normalization. While oppositional public discourse relied extensively on the concepts of scars, illness, DNA and bones, its demands hinged on procedural and legal transformations rather than on a shift in power. Although forensic evidence has become increasingly more valuable, I refrain from adhering to a linear narrative that would shift from personal and subjective to objective and forensic modes of witnessing. Instead, I recount how testimony and medical knowledge enforce one another or, enter into contestation at the site of medical institutions, graves, at home, on the street and in courts and produce not only a unique forensic history in Turkey but also a unique regime of bearing witness to violence alongside the one of denial. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Anthropology First Advisor Philippe Bourgois Second Advisor Petryna Adriana Keywords Body, Disappearances, Evidence, Law, Torture, Violence Subject Categories Social and Cultural Anthropology This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1224 STATE-MAKING, EVIDENCE-MAKING, AND CLAIM-MAKING: THE CASES OF TORTURE AND ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES IN POST-1980 TURKEY Başak Can A DISSERTATION in Anthropology Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2014 Supervisor of Dissertation __________________ Philippe Bourgois, Professor of Anthropology Graduate Group Chairperson _________________ Clark L. Erickson, Professor of Anthropology Dissertation Committee Adriana Petryna Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in Anthropology Deborah A. Thomas Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies State-Making, Evidence-Making, and Claims-Making: The Cases of Torture and Enforced Disappearances in Post-1980 Turkey COPYRIGHT 2014 Başak Can To Nejat (Paramaz Kızılbaş), iii ACKNOWLEDGMENT The research for this dissertation took place in multiple institutions and at different sites with the help and support of numerous people. The main data came from the Saturday Mothers, human rights activists, and forensic medicine experts. I could not have completed this research without their generosity and willingness to share their experiences with me. The Saturday Mothers lie at the heart of this research. I became aware of them 15 years ago when I first moved to İstanbul. Their unremitting resistance has become a source of inspiration for my ensuing interest in questions of state violence as well as political mobilization against violence. This work is dedicated to all the Saturday Mothers who are still searching for their disappeared loved ones and seeking justice every Saturday in Istanbul, Batman, Diyarbakır, Cizre... I am especially grateful to Besna, Maside, Adnan and Halime, not only for sharing their stories with me, but also for giving me the opportunity to befriend them. I am immensely grateful to the human rights activists at the Human Rights Association whose dedication to the cause of human rights while being fully aware of its limitations taught me how to delicately handle the tension between theory and practice, ideological commitment and reality. I am especially grateful to Sebla, Leman, Ümit, Hulisi, Gönül and İhsan. Thanks to them I always felt welcome at the Association. I am also grateful to the forensic medicine experts who work at the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, the Forensic Medicine Institution, and the Forensic Medicine Departments of the Universities, all of who shared with me their experiences and iv observations about the medico-legal documentation of political violence in Turkey. I am especially grateful to Hürriyet, Ümit, Gülrihan, Şebnem, Şükran and Ayşe for always making me feel comfortable at the Foundation and for answering my questions with patience. I also want to thank the forensic medicine experts Ümit, Neval, and Oğuzhan for not only providing me with invaluable knowledge regarding their practice, but also for helping me to shape my research questions. There are many people without whom I could not have completed this research. Nazan Üstündağ has been a great mentor and a friend since I met her in 2006 during my masters at Boğaziçi University. Her never-ending enthusiasm for reading everyday life, politics, and friendship against the grain has always been a source of inspiration and joy for me. I cannot thank her enough. Pınar Yanardağ and Pınar Şenoğuz are the two women whose existence in my life made the suffocating moments of everyday life in Turkey bearable. They never let me down and made me feel empowered every time I needed it most. I am grateful to K. Pınar for her always-positive attitude and for all of the delicious food she made for me, and to B. Pınar for her calm and calming mind. I cannot thank them enough. Erdem turned the most heavy and difficult moments of life into moments of joy with his stress-relieving attitude and mind. I could not have dealt with my moments of indecisiveness without his guidance. I met Ceyda in the first year of the PhD program and since then she has been a source of inspiration with her smart and spirited mind. There are people whose existence in my life make me feel strong although I have not shared everyday life with them in recent years. I am grateful to Ilgın, Çağrı, Dilan, Haydar, Mert, Onur, Evren, and Mavcı for what they mean to me. Since I returned to Turkey in 2011 I have met wonderful people. I want to thank them, especially Harun, v Ayhan, Şerif, Cansu, Sevda, Yusuf, İnanç, Murat and Mine for having me as their friend. My advisor, Professor Philippe Bourgois, became a role model for me during my graduate studies with his enthusiasm for new intellectual perspectives and always-critical questions. His support of my work always gave me confidence as I was trying to endure a series of academic and personal insecurities as an international graduate student in the United States and as I was doing my research and writing my dissertation. I also want to thank my professors Adriana Petryna and Deborah Thomas. The classes I took with them not only introduced me to new fields of interests but also taught me critical ways of bringing together analytical, empirical, and theoretical approaches in anthropological thinking and writing. Finally, this research could not have taken place without the generous support of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Anthropology. A grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation made the last year of my dissertation research and writing possible. Last but not least, I want to thank my family. My mother, my father, and my brother Önder always made me feel that I am the luckiest person in the world for not caring for anything but my health and peace. I am grateful to them. vi ABSTRACT State-Making, Evidence-Making, and Claim-Making: The Cases of Torture and Enforced Disappearances in Post-1980 Turkey Başak Can Philippe Bourgois This thesis concerns the struggles over the production of the truth of state violence in Turkey in the three decades following the infamous 1980 military coup. Specifically, it focuses on cases
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