Operations of Law and Sovereignty from Below: Youth, Violence and Disorder in Urban Turkey
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OPERATIONS OF LAW AND SOVEREIGNTY FROM BELOW: YOUTH, VIOLENCE AND DISORDER IN URBAN TURKEY A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Deniz Yonucu May 2014 © 2014 Deniz Yonucu OPERATIONS OF LAW AND SOVEREIGNTY FROM BELOW: YOUTH, VIOLENCE AND DISORDER IN URBAN TURKEY Deniz Yonucu, Ph.D. Cornell University, 2014 Drawing on a fieldwork conducted in Narova, a working class Alevi neighborhood in Istanbul, Turkey and in Specially Authorized Assize Courts, specialized in “crimes against the state,” this dissertation analyzes a complex relationship among law, violence and sovereignty. Like other Alevi populations in Turkey in general, the residents of Narova are known for their active participation in socialist movements. In addition to discussing current militarized spatial control and its effects in Narova, this dissertation also illustrates social and historical processes and relations that contributed to the Alevi community’s affiliation and identification with leftist politics in Turkey, and sheds light onto the tradition of rule and violence in Turkey. Approaching the state as an impossible promise of monopoly over violence and law and as a fantasy product (re)productive of relations of production, I focus on Narova residents encounters with those who gained the authority to act on behalf of the state. I discuss the ways in which manifestations of sovereignty in Narova’s streets and in the courtrooms produce a relationship of mimetic rivalry between the police forces and Narova youth and illustrate the ways in which this relationship contributes to the assimilation of the police as the external object within the revolutionary self. I also demonstrate that the revelation of the “men” in the state through repressive practices lead to the state’s simultaneous demystification and mystification. I argue that the effect of mystification inherent to the fantasy of the state can thus be traced back not only to aspects of the representative system, such as the formal equality of citizens or welfare, but to its violent side as well. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Deniz Yonucu was born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1979. She graduated from Istanbul Bilgi University with a degree in Sociology in 2002. She holds two MA degrees in Sociology from Bogazici University and in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. Upon receiving her MA degree at the University of Chicago, she moved to Ithaca to join Cornell University’s Department of Anthropology. After Cornell, she will reside in Istanbul on a Research Grant from SALT, a Turkey based art and culture institution and will work on her book project based on her dissertation. iii For Mumtaz iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Steven Sangren for his guidance, encouragement and constructive criticism during the course of my graduate education. I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. Shelley Feldman, Dr. Magnus Fiskesjo and Dr. Vilma Santiago-Irizarry for their advice, assistance and suggestions during the development of this research. I am grateful to the residents of Narova who shared their stories, ideas and feelings with me. I am most particularly indebted to Engin, who offered the most generous help during the course of my fieldwork and made it possible for me to conduct very difficult research. Over the years a large number of friends and colleagues have made my work possible both in the USA and in Turkey. I would like to thank Alev Kuruoglu, Ayfer Bartu Candan, Basri Caglayan, Bernardo Brown, Berk Esen, Biray Kolluoglu, Brandy Doyle, Elif Taskin, Enis Kostepen, Eylem Akcay, Feyza Akinerdem, Gokhan Irfanoglu, Hilal Alkan, Nidhi Mahajan, Nil Doner, Nilufer Taskin, Meltem Ahiska, Monica Fagioli, Murat Keyder, Yasemin Ozcan, Yasemin Taskin, Zafer Yenal and Zeynep Ekmekci. Their support helped me to survive the research and writing process. I am grateful to the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Middle East Research Competition, Turkiye Ozgur Egitim Kultur ve Sanat Vakfi and Santral Egitim Kultur Vakfı for their generous support during the research and writing processes of this dissertation. I appreciate the assistance provided by ISAM library. Last but not least, my deepest thanks to Yigit Ekmekci and Gokcen Yildiz, without their support it would have been very difficult to complete this dissertation. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv PREFACE viii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I: Research Methods 34 CHAPTER II: Alevis: A community at the margins of central authorities 49 CHAPTER III: The History of Modern Turkey as the History of Emergency Rules 77 CHAPTER IV: Narova, the Gaza of Istanbul: The Creation of “State of Emergency” Zones in Istanbul 99 CHAPTER V: The police, gangs and revolutionary organizations: A furious competition over law and territorial control 133 CHAPTER VI: Before The Anti-Terror Law, In the Justice Palace 164 CONCLUSION 193 viii PREFACE As a child born and raised in Zeytinburnu, a working class neighborhood of Istanbul, I grew up listening to stories about the revolutionary struggle that took place in Turkey during the 1960s and 1970s. When I was a child in the mid-1980s, my grandmother would tell me stories about Deniz Gezmis, a revolutionary student leader who was executed by hanging in 1972 at the age of twenty-five. She would also talk about the clashes between the revolutionary youth and the nationalist youth that took place in Zeytinburnu streets, mass strikes, marches organized by Zeytinburnu workers and torture in prisons. I would play with the handmade wooden toys made by my revolutionary uncles in prison while listening to my grandmother’s stories. I do not remember her exact words. But I remember the tone she used when talking about the past, which sounded like a very distant past to me back then. She was sad, angry and fearful at the same time. She was feeling sad for my uncles and for all those who filled the prisons or had to leave the country after the coup of 1980. She was angry. For her, all the generous and nice people were put behind bars and tortured. She was fearful. She was afraid that when I grew up, I might have to face similar violence. After all, I was named after Deniz Gezmis. She was continuously telling me that I should never speak about the state in critical terms and that if did I would end up in prison and be tortured there. I suppose that was her way of protecting me; by telling me how brutal the soldiers and the police could be. Zeytinburnu was among the most organized working class neighborhoods of Istanbul before the coup of 1980. However, in the 1990s, the socialist movement lived largely in the memories of Zeytinburnu residents. It was as if all the strikes, factory viii occupations and clashes between the revolutionary youth and the nationalist youth were in the distant past. It was as if Zeytinburnu was inhabited by different people back then and that those people had left. When I entered high school in another neighborhood in 1994, I realized that there were still people in Turkey who believed that the revolutionary struggle was continuing and who considered themselves as part of the struggle. These people were my Alevi schoolmates from Alevi working class neighborhoods. That was the time I first learned that there were Alevis in Turkey. I remember listening to their stories about what had been taking place in their neighborhoods. They were talking about the barricades set up in their streets, marches organized to protest against the government and clashes between the police forces and their revolutionary sisters and brothers. They were also talking about kidnappings, tanks driving in the streets, house raids, torture and deaths in custody. While listening to their stories, I realized that there were Alevi-populated neighborhoods in Istanbul and that urban life in these neighborhoods was radically different from what I had witnessed in my own neighborhood, while being at the same time very similar to what my grandmother had told about the 1970s. I wanted to learn more about these neighborhoods. An Alevi friend took me to her neighborhood, Yenibosna, in 1994. It was very similar to and yet very different from my own neighborhood. Like Zeytinburnu, in Yenibosna the streets were muddy and most of the houses were makeshift shanty houses or incomplete apartment buildings. However, there was one big difference. There was not a single wall in the neighborhood without spray-painted leftist slogans, such as: “Long live our revolutionary struggle,” “The murderous state will pay the price,” “The people’s justice will call for an account,” etc. My friend took me to a café. While drinking tea in the café that day I watched high school kids discussing the possible paths to revolution. In my following visits to my friend’s neighborhood, I often found myself listening to intense conversations about the difference ix between democratic revolution and socialist revolution, the legitimacy of revolutionary violence, the disagreements between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, and so on. After my visits to Yenibosna, I thought that revolution might not be as far away as it seemed from my neighborhood. The ghost of revolution was still haunting the minds and souls of Alevi youth. Although those young people at the café were optimistic about the future, the 1990s were, indeed, dark times in Turkey. Some of the young people I met at that café were imprisoned, others had to leave the country and many of them were confronted with the most brutal forms of police violence. In 2012, when I was examining the human rights abuse application documents of the Turkish Human Rights Foundation (THIV), I understood that the police were especially violent towards high school kids in those years.