European Journal of Turkish Studies Social Sciences on Contemporary

10 | 2009 State-Society Relations in the Southeast

Nicole F. Watts (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejts/4006 DOI: 10.4000/ejts.4006 ISSN: 1773-0546

Publisher EJTS

Electronic reference Nicole F. Watts (dir.), European Journal of Turkish Studies, 10 | 2009, « State-Society Relations in the Southeast » [Online], Online since 29 December 2009, connection on 10 May 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/ejts/4006 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejts.4006

This text was automatically generated on 10 May 2020.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Re-Considering State-Society Dynamics in Turkey’s Kurdish Southeast Nicole F. Watts

Kurdish Nationalism and Identity in Turkey: A Conceptual Reinterpretation Güneş Murat Tezcür

The Shared Political Production of ‘the East’ as a ‘Resistant’ Territory and Cultural Sphere in the Kemalist Era, 1923-1938 Jordi Tejel Gorgas

Crafting Space, Making People: The Spatial Design of Nation in Modern Turkey Joost Jongerden

Incoherent State: The Controversy over Kurdish Naming in Turkey Senem Aslan

The Invention of a Tradition: Diyarbakır’s Dengbêj Project Clémence Scalbert-Yücel

States at the Limit: Tracing Contemporary State-Society Relations in the Borderlands of Southeastern Turkey Leila M. Harris

Contesting the ‘Truth’ of Turkey’s Human Rights Situation: State-Association Interactions in and outside the Southeast Marlies Casier

Experiencing Justice and Imagining State: Engaging the Law to Challenge the Rule of Exception in Marie Le Ray

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Re-Considering State-Society Dynamics in Turkey’s Kurdish Southeast

Nicole F. Watts

1 State-society relations in Turkey’s Kurdish southeast have long been characterized as pitting a powerful and determined state against a reluctant, resistant, but largely overwhelmed population. Such an image of a binary, state versus society relationship is readily substantiated by a myriad historical and contemporary examples: multiple Kurdish against the central state, cultural and political dissent articulated from poetry to political parties, emergency rule law in Kurdish-majority provinces, extrajudicial killings condoned and organized by state security forces, a series of constitutional court decisions to close parties supported by at least a third of the region’s electorate, street clashes between protestors and police in Diyarbakır – the list is long. It was in recognition of this (continuing) history and less-than-ideal relationship between the state and in the southeast that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan argued in mid-2009 that it was time to bring ‘freedom and security, in their fullest sense, to our Eastern and Southeastern regions’ and to work towards creating a new kind of Turkey in which no one felt ‘crushed, excluded, or oppressed’ and ‘no one, absolutely no one, feels like a second-class citizen when dealing with the state and its institutions’ (Erdoğan 2009). And it was with these points in mind that a 2008 Turkish think tank report on the southeast enjoined: ‘The State should remember that, at the very least, it owes an apology to society in general, and to Kurdish people in particular’ (TESEV 2008: 36).

2 This special issue offers a kind of ‘Yes, but...’ response to these characterizations. It is not our intent to minimize them or belie their authenticity but to take them as a contextual framework that, while pointing to persistent structures and dynamics that have indeed set the fundamental rules of the game, nonetheless only tell parts of the story, and do not capture all possible moves and countermoves taken by the many different players involved. Yes, state policies in the southeast and towards the country’s ethnic Kurds have been -- and still are -- driven in large part by a security

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imperative that has legitimated the security establishment’s control over policy making and rationalized a wide array of coercive mechanisms. Top-down models of social engineering and the provider-logic of father state have and do still dominate conceptualizations of appropriate interventions in the southeast. Nonetheless, rather than take these experiences and narratives as the end point of analysis we here use them as our point of departure.

3 In this vein, this issue seeks to re-assess state-society relations in the southeast in two main ways. First, we reconsider standard conceptual assumptions, emphasizing in particular the need for nuanced approaches that do not take either the Turkish state or Kurdish society as unitary and treat the relationships between them as variable rather than stable. The ‘southeast’ has indeed been constructed through war, discourse, and imagination as a kind of zone of exceptionality, resistance, and contestation, but it is not immune to the same gritty dynamics of real-life state-society relations that exist almost everywhere: an incoherent and often-divided state that usually lacks the resources to execute policies effectively; social groups that co-opt local officials and penetrate state institutions in various ways; blurred boundaries between public and private that complicate the idea of a state space distinct from a social one; all sorts of non-hostile and in fact mutually beneficial relations that form on all sides; resistances that not only undermine state authority on many different levels but sometimes reproduce its power. Moreover, state-society relations in the southeast, just like in other places, are dynamic and changeable.

4 Second, then, more specifically, we reconsider state-society relations in the region since 1999 in the context of the significant political changes that have occurred in the last ten years. Rather than assuming a permanent ‘state of exception’ (Agamben 2005; also see Öktem 2006) or a static, binary relationship with fixed players, then, this issue emphasizes historical specificity and calls for an open recognition of the variability of authority, accommodation, and protest through time and across space, as well as a willingness to explore and interrogate a state-society boundary that has been simultaneously effective and over-stated.

5 In keeping with these themes, this essay is divided into four main parts. Part I examines some of the ways state and society in the southeast have typically been depicted in both popular and academic scholarship. Building on eclectic body of state-society relations scholarship, Part II offers some alternative fundamentals for a more nuanced way of studying state-society relations in the southeast. Part III offers some thoughts on why and how state-society relations in the southeast became ‘exceptional’ in the 1980s and 1990s, in the sense that they differed fundamentally from other parts of Turkey, and Part IV examines the degree to which we can evaluate the post-1999 period as constituting a new phase of state-society relations in the region.

I. Traditional depictions of state-society relations in the southeast

6 Both popular and scholarly narratives of state-society relations in the southeast have tended to depict the state as a well-coordinated entity that, beginning with the establishment of the republic in 1923, imposed itself with varying degrees of success on the Kurdish population of the southeast, applying force to suits its aims but ignoring the well-being of ordinary people. A classic rendition of this perspective can be found

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in the following passage from Kurdish activist and author Musa Anter’s famous memoir, Hatıralarım. Anter writes: The villagers used to take wood to to sell. They transported it by donkey. They would sell the firewood for about 50-60 kuruş. If the donkey and the saddle were in good condition, they could sell it for 5-6 lira. To make the donkey go while riding it, Kurds say 'ço'. Poor Kurds who didn’t know Turkish and who didn’t know anything about this would say 'ço,' and the gendarmes would stop them and beat them up for speaking Kurdish. When the Kurd – speaking Kurdish -- tried to defend himself against this, they would prosecute him and charge him with a crime. Something like this happened to one of my mother’s relatives. His donkey and firewood were confiscated and sold (to pay the fine). He received 5 for them, but his fine was 12 lira. So he was jailed for two days and beaten up. Three and a half months later when the tax collectors came to our village, they wanted him to pay the remaining seven lira outstanding on the fine and said that if he didn’t pay, they would seize his house and belongings. Of course the gendarmes came along with the tax collectors. My uncle was able to pay the fine by selling a few of his sheep. This incident didn’t just happen to my uncle, it was commonplace. If there was a documentary archive of crimes in Mardin you would find a great many of this sort of disgraceful document (Anter 1991: 29).

7 In Anter’s narrative, relations between state and Kurdish society are emphatically negative and oppositional; binary (interactions occur directly between state authorities and Kurdish villagers, who each play clearly delineated roles); and hierarchical (authorities punish villagers, who seem almost helpless here to stop them). The state is depicted as almost omniscient; restrictions on the use of Kurdish are not just issued from a central office in but are applied at the local level by multiple sets of state representatives who, somewhat remarkably, possess sufficient capacity to track his uncle’s failure to pay the full fine from one set of institutional representatives (gendarmes) to another (tax collectors).

8 Anter’s portrayal – given dark substance by the author’s murder at the hands of state- sponsored death squads at a Diyarbakır fair in 1992 -- has long been reiterated by activists, academics, journalists, and other commentators, as Güneş Murat Tezcur discusses extensively in his contribution to this issue. Relying, as he argues, on dichotomies between ethnic and civic nationalism and/or between state and society, many analysts and observers have reinforced the idea of the state as a unitary ‘overlord’ state (Robins 1993) with essentially unchanging (i.e. adversarial) policies towards Kurds, especially in the southeast. Kurds themselves tend to be portrayed as falling into two main groups: ordinary people, who are variously ignored and repressed, and ‘traditional’ Kurdish landed and tribal elites, who are portrayed as co- opted and, sometimes, thus less than fully Kurdish (McDowall 1997: 400). The ‘natural’ Kurdish response to Turkish rule is assumed to be resistance and protest, something seen as prevented only through heavy levels of state pressure -- thus we read repeatedly of ‘Kurdish re-awakenings’ and ‘rebirth’ at times of increased mobilization (see e.g. White 2000: 13-131).

9 Some points are worth noting here. First, it is important to emphasize that there has been a great deal of sensitive scholarship on Kurdish politics in Turkey that complicates the binary, state-versus-society model, even if indirectly (see e.g. work by Belge; Bozarslan; Somer; Yeğen, Kirişci and Winrow, Dorronsoro), indeed sometimes by the same scholars otherwise faulted for perpetuating a binary model (e.g. McDowall 1997, whose masterwork certainly teases out many of the ambiguities of state and

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society that might fall by the way in some of his generalizations). So the dominance of the state-versus-society paradigm is not because we entirely lack alternative information or because we don’t know better. I elsewhere elaborate (Watts forthcoming-a) on the various empirical, theoretical, and methodological reasons for the durability of this paradigm, but it is worth briefly stating that probably the most important reason the model continues is because there is so much empirical evidence to support and perpetuate it. The military’s identification of Kurdish ‘separatism’ -- very broadly defined -- as one of the most serious threats to the security of the state helped justify two military interventions (1971 and 1980) in civilian politics, excluded civilian officials from having any serious input into policymaking on the Kurdish issue, and contributed to the construction and perpetuation of a repressive juridical and security regime that criminalized many types of contention and identified particular ‘identities of resistance’ as internal enemies, thus stripping challengers of their rights as citizens and implicitly (if not explicitly) justifying their persecution (see e.g. 2003, 2008). Although there have been divergences, confrontations, and deviations, the security imperative and the security apparatus has been allowed to dominate policymaking. The closure of the pro-Kurdish (DTP) in December 2009, the detention of many pro-Kurdish mayors and activists, and ensuing clashes between protestors and police in cities such as Diyarbakır certainly conveys the impression of an exhaustive and repetitive cycle of conflict, of a relationship of near- permanent opposition.

10 Nonetheless, it is clear that the state-versus-society paradigm formulates a narrow reading of Kurdish-state relations in the southeast and disregards or sidesteps many other important questions and developments. Working with a binary model, for instance, it is hard to understand why so many have not rebelled, how and why the nature of Turkish governance in the southeast has changed over time (for example, it differed substantially before the 1980 military coup and after), why and how Kurdish cultures and dissent survived and changed; and why so many Kurds vote for mainstream Turkish or Islamic parties. This last point and many others are developed by Tezcür in his contribution here.

11 Moreover, ironically, while the binary state-versus-society/oppressor-and-victim model has dominated our thinking, there is also an implicit and (less commonly) explicit appreciation for the fact that in some ways Turkish authorities clearly failed to achieve their goals. Without minimizing the enormous impact of the centralized Turkish state on culture and politics in the southeast, it is clear that, if as Joost Jongerden writes in this issue, state authorities aimed at a ‘homogenous and ubiquitous representation throughout the territory as everywhere the same, from west to east and north to south,’ then something went very wrong.

II. Reconceptualizing state-society relations in the southeast

12 Our re-assessment of state-society relations in the southeast, then, constitutes an effort to open doors onto some of these complicated and fascinating dynamics. For the contributors to this issue, it involves four inter-related tasks. First, building on a diverse body of work on state-society relations (e.g. Migdal 1988, 2001; Mitchell 1991; Migdal et al 1994; Gupta 1995; Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Das and

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Poole 2004) we seek to disaggregate the state rather than assuming it to be a unitary actor. This can be done by studying officials at different levels of governance – Migdal divides them, for instance (2001: 117-122), into those ‘in the trenches,’ the ‘dispersed field offices,’ ‘agency’s central offices,’ and ‘commanding heights’ -- and by looking at different institutions and institutional responses to particular policies or events, for example, between the judiciary (or parts of it) and the parliament. The value of such an approach is illustrated in this issue by Senem Aslan’s investigation of the judiciary’s varied responses to court cases concerning Kurdish names. Without an appreciation for the fact that, as she documents, the upper courts tended to support the right to give Kurdish names -- in contrast to lower courts that tended to reject them -- we cannot really explain how so many people in Turkey come to have (legal) Kurdish names or why naming has become such a contentious issue. Similarly, Marie Le Ray notes in her study of legal activism in Tunceli/Dersim how different representatives of the judiciary have given different decisions regarding, for instance, the right to hang Newroz posters. The explanatory power of the ‘disaggregated state’ is further illustrated in this issue in Jongerden’s contribution, in which he argues that the failure of the proposed Village Return and Rehabilitation Development Plan—intended to create new settlements to house villagers forced to leave their homes in the fighting of the 1980s and 1990s—can be attributed in good part to divergent institutional responses between the plan’s home institution, the Regional Development Administration of the Southeast Project, and governors and military officials, who preferred to have villagers living in urban areas where they would be easier to supervise. Resistance by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) to the plan sounded its death knell; as Jongerden writes, the project ‘hit the rocks’ even before the pilot plan was implemented.

13 By applying an anthropology (Migdal 1988, 2001; Das and Poole 2004) or ethnography (Hansen and Stepputat 2001) of the state that situates state actors within specific social and political contexts, we gain insight into the kinds of pressures officials face in their daily negotiations and interactions with different actors. This not only sheds light on policy implementation or lack thereof but pushes us to explore the potential for different types of relations between state and social actors, rather than assuming that a dominant national narrative is necessarily relevant. Officials trying to implement policy in villages in the southeast, for instance, face very different constraints and opportunities than those sitting in Ankara. They may be quite capable, as Gupta writes of a case in India (2001: 65-96), of carrying out one or more functions of stateness – for instance, inspection and surveillance -- but not implementing others, for instance, exacting discipline. Assuming states to be ‘messy until proven otherwise’ also encourages us to problematize coordinated and unitary action. Furthermore breaking the state down into constituent parts helps focus more precisely on studying the concrete ways in which the state makes itself appears in ‘everyday and localized forms,’ as Hansen and Stepputat put it (2001: 5), and how the state tries to make itself tangible.

14 Second, the articles in this issue seek to ‘unpack’ the notion of society by examining different social responses to governance and statecraft in the southeast. What is very clear from the collection of essays here is the diversity of responses from local inhabitants and the need for micro-level studies of their interactions with the state. The value of such an approach is illustrated in particular by Leila M. Harris’ study of villagers in Harran. The fact that many villagers welcomed the GAP project, she argues, speaks to the ways that substantial state investment can encourage at least some local

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communities to recast themselves as ‘subjects of nationalist, statist, and modernization efforts’ rather than as rebels or victims of the system.

15 While many of Harris’ interviewees were ethnic Arab, it is clear both from her work and from many of the other studies here that common ethnicity does not necessarily equate with political preferences or hold equal ‘value’ at all times and for all people. Such a perspective means challenging Turkish and Kurdish nationalist narratives that portray Kurds uniformly as a ‘security threat’ or, conversely, as a subjugated and oppressed population with a natural and universally held desire for independence. Developing a more nuanced view of social responses and differing interpretations of what Brubaker (2005) calls ‘groupness’ also involves setting aside the binary categories of oppressor/ victim promoted by human rights activists and other movement organizations. In fact, as many of the articles in this issue illustrate, Kurdish responses to state policies have varied dramatically depending on the person, place, and time. Farmers Mufa and Amit both live in Kurdish villages in province’s Harran plain, but one views the state’s GAP project as beneficial, whereas the other sees it as something akin to ‘suicide,’ as Harris reports. Variations in Kurdish responses to the Turkish national project – and the socio-political implications of such variations -- are discussed extensively by Tezcür in his contribution here. As he writes, because of the fact that Kurdish identity is ‘formed, articulated, and lived in many different ways,’ this poses challenges for Kurdish nationalists trying to mobilize large sectors of the population. Problematizing the relationship between ethnicity and action also suggests a methodological shift, Tezcür argues, calling for an ‘ethnic-boundary making approach’ to studying state- Kurdish relations that draws attention to the strategies and processes that groups use to try and construct groups by defining boundaries between themselves and others.

16 Third, building on literature in state-society relations as well as in ethnic conflict and social movement theory, we seek to foreground the state-society dynamic. This involves several enterprises. One is to locate the state as an actor competing with other groups for the right to make rules and norms. The ‘mélange model,’ as Migdal once termed it (1988), establishes relatively clear identifications of state and societal players, then examines how and why they work in cooperation and conflict. When do state actors gain more influence than social authorities? How and why does this change? What sorts of accommodations do they reach with each other, and how does this happen? In particular, we are interested in how state-society relations in the southeast have changed since 1999, a period marked by a significant reduction in the PKK’s military strength on the ground in the Kurdish regions of the country; by new international developments (Turkey’s accession to the EU, and the U.S. and British invasion of ); and the civilianization of governance in the southeast. Do we see shifts in power relations, expansions or restrictions of the political field, and new capacities on the part of state and society to maintain or challenge authority? If so, to what can we attribute this?

17 Another important aspect of the state-society dynamic is the recognition of the mutually transformative process between state and society. Put simply, social groups and state actors influence, shape, and constrain each other; the impact is not just top (state) down. This point is emphasized in a number of the articles in this issue. In his contribution, Jordi Tejel Gorgas argues that opposition between Turkish and in the 1920s and 1930s compelled both Turkish and Kurdish elites to continually adapt their discourse in contrast to their perceived enemy: as he writes, ‘a

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kind of mimicry, in a double sense, was established between the ‘dominant’ (the Turkish state) and the ‘oppressed’ (the Kurdish dissent movement).’ Moving to more recent decades, Senem Aslan’s study of Kurdish naming cases shows how activists’ efforts to push the envelope of Turkish legal reforms elicited particular sorts of responses on the part of local officials and judges, in turn shaping the judiciary’s application of recent legal reforms concerning Kurdish names. Marie Le Ray’s study of law activism in Tunceli/Dersim shows how activist-lawyers’ strategies and efforts to engage one authority against another sometimes resulted in verdicts favorable to their clients. Marlies Casier’s study highlights the pressure Turkish human rights organizations have put on Turkish authorities both nationally and in terms of their policies in the southeast, and the way authorities have tried to counter this through the appropriation of human rights discourse. Clémence Scalbert Yücel illustrates how notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’ were transformed through interactions between local officials and Kurdish performers of dengbêjî (a style of Kurdish singing), with the process of institutionalization changing dengbêj song practices. And Joost Jongerden demonstrates how displaced villagers in the southeast returned to their original homes despite planning officials’ designs to the contrary, contributing to the failure of the resettlement project. These cases all underscore James Scott’s attention (1988) to the way that both ordinary people can empower or undermine state policies and practices, even in contexts in which the state appears to wield vastly more resources than challengers and citizens.

18 An additional facet of our examination of the state-society dynamic involves interrogating the distinctions we typically make between who and what constitutes state and society. As Mitchell wrote almost 20 years ago (1991), an alternative approach to the state has to begin with the uncertain boundary between state and society. For us this involves both questioning our standard classifications of who constitutes official, challenger, and ordinary citizen, as well as spaces and institutions themselves. At what point can state institutions be treated as sites of social challenge? When do private spaces such as the home become a public office? How do the conversations about such people and places change over time, imbuing them with different meanings? As a number of the articles in this issue note, such blurriness is particularly evident in the case of the Kurdish-party-controlled municipalities. It is also a factor complicating perceptions of the new human rights bodies established in the last five years by the AKP administration, as Marlies Casier documents in her article here. What becomes evident in these studies is the fact that such pro-Kurdish and human rights ‘officials’ sometimes defy categorization, alternately and/or simultaneously serving as both movement entrepreneurs and civil bureaucrats, and sometimes of more than one ‘state-like’ apparatus (i.e both as Turkish state officials and as officials of a kind of quasi-).

III. The southeast as a space of exception

19 The southeast discussed in this issue is not a fixed territory with clearly demarcated borders but a cultural and political construction. Socially produced spaces are the products of practices constituted through interactions and multiple narratives (see Harris, Jongerden and Tejel Gorgas in this issue). As Tejel Gorgas details, the construction of the east and, later, southeast as a space of exception dates to the early

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years of the republic, and while understandings of what is meant by this have changed over time (see e.g. Yeğen 2004), the ‘east’ or eastern Anatolia has long been understood as something beyond geography, as, in Tejel Gorgas’ words, ‘the location of actual armed resistance and the representation of a region intrinsically conservative and counter-revolutionary.’

20 As used here, then, the southeast is distinct from the official Turkish administrative region of the same name, neglecting some provinces officially classified as southeast (Kilis, , Adıyaman) and including others technically part of Turkey’s administrative Eastern region. We conceptualize them here as part of metaphorical Kurdish southeast even if geographically they lie northeast or west (in the case of Tunceli/Dersim) because these provinces have Kurdish populations that were directly affected by the war and emergency law rule. Geographic designations are, then, ambiguous and inconsistent, very much an artifice given concrete meaning through, among other things, governmentality and conceptions of population. However, our discussion of the southeast writ large should not obscure the fact that those ‘within’ the region tend to act in locally distinctive ways across space and time, and there is no necessary or usual coordination in action or rhetoric between cities or provinces within the southeast. Electoral variations between and within provinces and cities are one of the most obvious indications of this (see e.g. Dorronsoro and Watts 2009; Kirişci 2007).

Creating exceptionality: processes of differentiation in the southeast

21 Use of the term southeast is thus not meant here simply as a synonym or stand-in for ‘Kurdish issue,’ which can be roughly defined as the question of how the Turkish political establishment resolves the tension between its unitary, Turkish-nationalist based political framework, on the one hand, and collective Kurdish mobilization demanding cultural and political rights including some form of self-determination, on the other. The Kurdish issue is thus a national question involving the status of Kurdish- state relations throughout the country, and while it incorporates questions of governance in the southeast, it extends beyond this.

22 Conversely, a discussion of state-society relations in the Kurdish southeast constitutes an assertion that there is something different or exceptional about state-society relations in this region, as distinct from Kurdish-state relations in other parts of the country. This difference is not sociologically innate or fixed; neither ethnicity nor social structure (i.e. tribalism) defines the southeast as a distinct sub-space. Rather, a number of factors and actors have constructed it as such. Key aspects of this differentiation process include the security regime in operation here almost continuously since 1979-1980 and the application of different sets of laws under martial and then extraordinary rule law (Olağanüstü Hal, or OHAL) that was in effect in most of the region until the late 1990s and in four provinces until 2002; the activities of the PKK and its efforts to monopolize the means of coercion and symbolic capital, creating dual and dueling authorities in parts of the southeast; the different level and nature of party activities in the Kurdish-majority provinces from the late 1970s onward; differing regional configurations (with ) and international linkages (i.e. to the Kurdish diaspora in Europe) than in other parts of Turkey; and much more restrictive

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control over information as compared to other parts of the country due to both the PKK and the state.

Characteristics of exceptionality

23 Cumulatively, these distinctions helped produce a particular kind of state-society relationship in the southeast. First, security institutions dominated the state apparatus at the expense of the conventional court system and electoral institutions. Extraordinary law institutionalized a state-versus-society relationship, and the state to a large degree lost symbolic authority and the ability to legitimate its rule through non- physical means. The state’s relationship with ‘society’ in the southeast was, then, exceptionally coercive. Although the parliament and other branches of the Turkish state exerted some limited checks on military power in other parts of Turkey, in the executive, regular parliamentary renewals of OHAL aligned security, executive and legislative branches of the state, with the clear preponderance of the first. This legal ‘state of exceptionality’ (Agamben 2005; also Das and Poole 2004) was something recognized by the European Court of Human Rights, for instance, when it stopped requiring domestic remedy for court cases originating with plaintiffs in the southeast and instead allowed them to directly petition the court.

24 Such dominance of the security state did not necessarily mean a uniform application of policies, as several articles in this issue make clear. For instance, Senem Aslan’s article shows how even in the 1980s and 1990s, officials applied decisions regarding Kurdish name cases inconsistently, even after the Ministry of the Interior sent out national circulars stating that officials in registration offices should register names of parents’ choice. Nevertheless, as she writes, state registrars continued to refuse to register Kurdish names, the gendarmerie searched for Kurdish names to inform legal authorities, and local public prosecutors occasionally filed suits against parents who gave their children Kurdish names.

25 Second, both because of the dominance of the security regime, and because the PKK sought to sever typical mediation channels between government and people (for instance, tribes) and monopolize others (pro-Kurdish political parties), the context of the 1980s and 1990s created an image of a dense state-society barrier and a high level of polarization between authorities and local people. Many Kurds in the southeast came to see the state as highly unrepresentative, impenetrable, and fundamentally different than themselves. This can be thought of as a ‘de-naturalization’ of the state (see e.g. Hansen and Stepputat 2001) as it took on the image and practice of above and beyond the reach of ordinary people, of being disassociated from society, and of being an imposed rather than ‘natural’ feature of daily life. If, as Hansen and Stepputat argue, one main way the state governs is by acquiring ‘discursive presence and authority to authorize,’ then the state in the southeast in this time largely lost this authority. And, indeed, the PKK’s effort not to mediate between citizen and state but replace that state authority entirely contributed to a kind of blockage in representation and the formulation of social demands and interests within formal political institutions. It is in this highly polarized context, for instance, that the Turkish Human Rights Association was formed, as Casier writes in her contribution to this issue, noting that especially in the southeast, the emerging human rights organizations ‘came to occupy an anti-

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authoritarian space offering one of the few vehicles through which people could engage in criticism of the official state ideology and policies.’

26 Somewhat paradoxically, however, in practice boundaries between state and society were blurred through the security regime and militarization of society because state policies were not only implemented by officials in uniforms and judicial robes but by village guards, militias, and extrajudicial forces (Balta Paker 2009; also Dorronsoro 2006). This era saw, in other words, state penetration of society in new ways. In particular, the existence of state-sponsored village guards composed of local Kurdish tribes and clans, or portions of them, meant that Kurdish ‘society’ was regimenting and patrolling ‘itself.’ This perpetuated the sense that villages and towns had been incorporated into a kind of detention camp in which, as Agamben writes (2005:39), people ‘moved about in a zone of indistinction between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit and the illicit’ and ‘every juridical protection disappeared.’ The security forces’ penetration of private and social spaces -- the home, the office, the cultural fair, for instance -- extended threat, coercion, and punishment into ordinary and private places. The case of Vedat Aydın, a founder of the Diyarbakır branch of the Human Rights Association and the pro-Kurdish HEP party’s regional branch chairman in Diyarbakır, is perhaps one of the earliest and best known such examples. Aydın was taken from his family and his home late at night by policemen (or men dressed as police) and found shot dead a few days later on a highway outside Diyarbakir. No perpetrators were ever identified or prosecuted (Watts forthcoming-b). This transformation of the borders of the state through the mechanism of the privatization of enforcement is explored extensively by Marie Le Ray in her discussion of the law in Tunceli. As she writes, the village guards contributed to making the state ‘less legible’ because they moved across the ‘ divide between legal and extralegal forms of enforcement’ and also used this ‘acquired right to violence to settle local and community conflicts’.

27 A third characteristic of this period was a new societal dualism in which Kurdish society was simultaneously reproduced as more unified and homogenous (i.e. as people who are victimized, repressed, and distrusted), and, at the same time, reconfigured with new fault lines and split into new sorts of factions and groupings (i.e. village guards, PKK supporters, new urban migrants). The war, OHAL, and forced migration blurred some of the differences and distinctions that had permeated Kurdish society in the southeast in earlier decades, producing a more unitary and more broadly nationalized populace in the sense of the construction of a national subject. This was demonstrated, for instance, through electoral results that showed increasingly consistent support for pro-Kurdish and Islamic parties rather than secular Turkish parties. On the other hand, the 1980s and 1990s also created new social distinctions and differences, or more accurately, reconfigured old divisions and competitions along new lines, and with new types of resources (see especially Balta Paker 2009). The 1980s and 1990s also saw the development of new hierarchies of authority, as PKK-supported and aligned actors and those who benefited economically from the war and the drug trade moved into positions to challenge so-called traditional elites and those who had dominated the political scene prior to the 1980 coup.

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IV. Post-exceptionality? State-society relations in the southeast after 1999

28 Nonetheless, the fact that the southeast has been a kind of space of exception does not mean this is a permanent status or that the state-society relationship is not under negotiation. Collectively, the articles in this issue suggest at least the possibility of ‘post-exceptionality’ in state-society relations in the southeast. Such post- exceptionality does not signal ‘democratization,’ stability, or a shift to something imagined as ‘normalcy’ (i.e. an alignment with relations in other parts of Turkey) but indicates an environment in which substantial reconfigurations in the nature of authority are taking place, creating a chaotic and tense environment. As Le Ray writes of Tunceli in her contribution to this issue, ‘The unilateral cease-fire of the PKK in 1999 and the official lifting of the emergency rule in July 2002 did not suddenly turn war into peace and a state of emergency rule into a binding rule of law on the whole national territory.’ Rather, post-exceptionality involves a de-stabilization of the Turkish nation- state project, struggles to create new spaces and alternatives to dominant discourse, and new efforts at the production and control of knowledge. It is thus a highly contested process involving many levels of challenge, accommodation, and counter- moves. Moreover, the imprint and influence of both the security state and the PKK are still very much present, with neither exercising hegemonic authority but both nonetheless shaping and circumscribing actors on the ground.

29 Collectively, the essays in this issue point to several main dynamics of the post-1999 period that suggest a new, ‘post-exceptional’ phase of state-society relations. First, political authority is redistributed among a wide number of state and non-state actors, with pro-Kurdish municipalities playing a particularly important role in blurring the boundary between state and society. Second, ‘social’ resistance to state policies has become increasingly institutionalized, largely taking place within the formal political arena and legal channels. Third, as in earlier eras, the state-society relationship is again mediated through third-party players, although such players have been reconfigured and reconstituted due to the PKK-state war. I briefly discuss each of these dynamics here in turn.

Hedging hegemony: the crowded field of political authority in the southeast

30 In the 1980s and 1990s the struggle for physical, juridical, and symbolic control over land and people in the southeast was roughly bi-polar, between central state institutions and the PKK. In contrast, in the post-1999 period, central state officials share authority and governance with multiple sets of actors. State-society relations are multi-faceted, negotiated on many levels, and involving many different players. These include parties, municipalities -- in the southeast almost exclusively controlled either by the Kurdish nationalist parties or the AKP -- non-governmental or civic committees and associations (some but not all affiliated with the PKK), and European and EU institutions and actors, all of whom may be involved in various ways in a range of governance projects ranging from local renovation projects and infrastructural improvements to population surveys, health reforms, cultural festivals, literacy programs, sociological research on local folkloric traditions, the production of films,

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books, and audio recordings, and more. Put another way, although state authorities regained physical control over territory in the second half of the 1990s, they began to cede or lose control over symbolic, informational, and economic capital.

31 In this issue, articles by Scalbert Yücel, Tezcür, and Jongerden in particular highlight the important role played by pro-Kurdish dominated municipalities in encroaching on central government authority and offering new formulations of state-society relationships. Pro-Kurdish parties first won local offices in the southeast in 1999 (and again in 2004 and 2009), and their control over municipalities has blurred the boundary between state and movement, official and activist, and state and society. As Scalbert Yücel puts it, pro-Kurdish municipalities are ‘situated in an inbetween space,’ on the one hand seen as governmental offices staffed by state actors, and, on the other, as part of the broader Kurdish national movement. Zeynep Gambetti also eloquently discusses this bifurcation of authority in her work (Gambetti 2008), noting that in Diyarbakir, people have two oppositional sets of planners and agencies to resist or to enforce their demands.

32 Such inbetween-ness is evident in many of the activities carried out by pro-Kurdish mayors and municipalities. On the one hand, many of their endeavors look like routine languages of governance (Hansen and Stepputat 2001): the gathering and control of knowledge of the population, and the generation of resources ensuring the reproduction and well being of the population. At the same time, these seemingly mundane governance functions have been carried out through the prism of the Kurdish national movement; thus, for instance, municipal health booklets have been published in Kurdish under the rationale of better access to the population, and such activities as the naming of parks and streets take on very high symbolic value (Jongerden in this issue; also Watts 2006 and forthcoming-b).

The Institutionalization of resistance

33 Another dynamic evident in the post-1999 period is an increasing tendency towards the institutionalization of resistance in which challengers use formal institutions of state to challenge Turkish authorities. This is a reflection both of pro-Kurdish party control over municipalities, which gave activists new access to material and symbolic resources, and to changing perceptions of state institutions -- especially the legal system -- as being accessible in new ways and a potential instrument for promoting particular interests.

34 Access to the tools and resources of governmentality and government practices has facilitated a number of activities that bring contentious social practices and norms into formal realms of representative government, bridging the state-society relationship in new ways. As Scalbert Yücel discusses, for instance, dengbêjî -- long discouraged and then outright prohibited by Turkish officials -- is now an activity licensed by municipal officials in Diyarbakır. A ‘deviant’ social practice thus has become officialized. Similarly, local practices of using Kurdish place names even after Turkish authorities changed and Turkified them (see e.g. Öktem 2008) have been incorporated into a now- standard repertoire of institutionalized contentious action, as pro-Kurdish municipalities seek to reconstruct and Kurdify public space through the naming and renaming of parks and streets (Jongerden in this issue; Gambetti 2008, Watts 2006). As Jongerden writes in this issue, ‘the (re)naming strategy of DTP mayors not only directly

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counteracts past efforts to efface Kurdishness from rural and urban political geography, but also tries to reintroduce a Kurdish politico-cultural sensitivity into the public setting of everyday life.’

35 Particularly striking are new civilian efforts to use the court system, a topic examined by both Le Ray and Aslan in this issue. As Le Ray writes, inhabitants of Tunceli/Dersim may on one level consider the court system an instrument of repression and domination but nonetheless recognize that on a practical level it works in an incoherent way that can, ultimately, be exploited to their benefit. She notes that because people and organizations in Tunceli know the system is inconsistent, ‘they often refuse to give up when a court dismisses a case or when a verdict goes against them.’ People also apply to the courts not only to try and redress grievances but as a site of active mobilization. As Aslan argues in her contribution here, the post-2000 period saw Kurdish activists increasingly using Kurdish names and naming cases as a ‘tool for the symbolic creation of Kurdish nationhood,’ applying for approval for many names that had nationalist connotations and included many letters of the Kurdish Latin alphabet.

36 The institutionalization of resistance offers new sorts of resources for challenging central Turkish authorities, but it can also be seen as reinforcing the authority of the state and legitimating top-down policymaking and governance. While the Kurdish national movement aims to challenge Turkish governmentality and, more generally, the Turkish national basis of the Turkish state, it does not challenge the idea of authority as properly located within traditional state institutions. The DTP’s emphasis on good governance, for instance, reflects modernist top-down efforts to transform Kurdish society both along the lines of the civilizing mission and into a new sort of Kurdish subject. The logic of opposition in the Kurdish southeast is thus, as in many other places, that of would-be statebuilders, something that affirms and reproduces the ‘state spectacle’ (Hansen and Stepputat 2001: 37). Such reliance on the categories and master frames provided by the state is hardly new, as Tejel Gorgas’ contribution to the issue reminds us: even in the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, Kurdish elites created categories that mirrored those of the state (also see Bozarslan 2003).

37 Similarly, the EU-espoused ethos of multi-culturalism, human rights, and democratization offers both incentives and master frames and, at the same time, imposed or self-imposed limits on challengers’ demands. For instance, despite the landmark symbolic value of a Turkish-state- approved dengbêj project, Scalbert Yücel argues that the involvement of the state in the project through the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism has not substantially modified negotiations between the actors involved. As she writes, ‘even though there is no longer a ban, auto-censorship is still in force and the dengbêjs are represented as “innocent relics” who portray the Kurdish part of the “Anatolian mosaic” promoted by many government officials in the 2000s.’

Restoration (and reinvention) of intermediaries

38 Third, the articles in this issue highlight the ways that the state-society relationship is again facilitated through intermediaries, in particular, political parties (DTP and AKP) and, to a lesser degree, non-governmental organizations, civic groups, new and traditional media, and the and associated actors. Instead of a two-way relationship between state and social actors, then, state-society relations can be

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thought of as a triadic exchange between state actors, Kurdish ‘society,’ and intermediary political institutions that serve both to integrate Kurds into the polity and as sites for resistance and dissent (for more on this see Watts forthcoming-a).

39 State-society relations in the southeast have typically involved ‘third party’ actors who transform the state-society dynamic from a two-way relationship to a more complicated triadic exchange of cooperation, cooptation, bargaining, and challenge (see e.g. Bozarslan 1996; Tejel Gorgas in this issue; also, especially, Belge 2008). However, many such intermediaries, particularly tribes, lost some or all of their influence during the fighting in the 1980s and 1990s, or saw this influence re- formulated in the context of the PKK-state war. In the post-1999 period, pro-Kurdish political parties, the AKP, and a network of Kurdist associations and non-government organizations serve in most parts of the southeast as liaisons between state institutions and ordinary people. While only some of these actors are aligned with the PKK, all are forced to position themselves vis-à-vis the PKK and the state, and their work is conducted through the prism of the region’s experiences of war. The complexities of such positioning are particularly striking in the case of human rights organizations, as Casier’s article here makes clear, as well as parties, as Tezcür discusses. For instance, he argues, the PKK’s decision to return to arms in 2004 becomes understandable only when one analyzes how the PKK’s control over its Kurdish constituency was threatened by the rising appeal of the AKP in the wake of the EU-induced reform process. ‘It was not a coincidence,’ he writes, ‘that the PKK remobilized its armed forces few months after the March 2004 local elections when the AKP won in many Kurdish provinces.’

Conclusion

40 Collectively, the articles in this issue draw attention to a number of important points that complicate typical conceptions of state-society relations in the southeast, and, more generally, contested borderlands and spaces of exception. First, we find that in some ways state-society relations in the southeast are and have been like such relations elsewhere; they are not so exceptional as to be beyond the scope of analysis. In the Kurdish southeast, like elsewhere, the state has often operated in an incoherent and inconsistent fashion; social reactions have been mixed; and both elites and ordinary people have influenced officials, policies, and practices in important ways. This was true even in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the late 1980s and 1990s under emergency law rule.

41 Second, at the same time, state-society relations in the southeast have indeed been strikingly different in particular ways, not because of anything innate to the region but because both authorities and challengers have made them such. Especially since 1980 state-society relations in the southeast were ‘exceptional’ in the sense that they were structured by different rules and practices than those in other parts of Turkey and were marked by the predominance of coercive methods of rule, lack of representation and accountability, and the security establishment’s penetration of Kurdish society.

42 Third, we find that in the post-1999 period important changes in the nature of governance and authority can be seen in many parts of the southeast. Many different players now compete for and wield symbolic, informational, and material resources. Pro-Kurdish municipalities have played an especially important role here in offering new conceptualizations of representation and blurring the boundary between state and

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society as well as official and challenger. Many of the articles here also point to an institutionalization of resistance that has accompanied legal reforms and changing perceptions of authority. This moment can be characterized as a phase of post- exceptionality in which public institutions and public space have become sites for the reinterpretation of the citizen-state relationship in the southeast. However, the nature of this reinterpretation means that the distinctiveness of the southeast in terms of its particularity is not necessarily being eroded but may even be being institutionalized.

43 It is in this context of contested post-exceptionality that the December 2009 closure of the pro-Kurdish DTP, detention of dozens of pro-Kurdish mayors and activists, and waves of street protest can be interpreted. For some activists and disheartened observers, these events -- made all the more striking given that they came after almost half a year of AKP-led discussion of a Kurdish reform package and ‘democratic opening -- seemed to indicate a return to the state of exception and a renewal of an unadulterated state-versus-society relationship between citizen and authorities in the southeast. They certainly reinforced the idea that whatever various politicians might say or even do, Turkish policies in the southeast would continue to be driven by traditional security imperatives enforced through mechanisms of physical and juridical coercion.

44 At the same time, the closure of yet another pro-Kurdish party and the subsequent detentions and protests cannot erase the very substantial transformations in the nature of authority and representation that have taken place on the ground in the southeast in first decade of the 21st century. What the events do highlight, however, is the uncertain and tension-fraught experience of ‘re-naturalizing’ the state. It is possible to see the post-1999 phase of post-exceptionality as the start of a process in which state authority – now shared, if uncomfortably, by central Turkish and local Kurdist actors -- began to seem again a ‘natural’ feature of people’s mental and physical landscape. If so, the December 2009 clashes between activists and Turkish authorities highlight the challenges of this process, as well as the tenuousness of the public self- performance of the ‘state in transformation’ perpetuated by both the AKP officialdom and pro-Kurdish party leaders.

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AUTHOR

NICOLE F. WATTS Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California [email protected]

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Kurdish Nationalism and Identity in Turkey: A Conceptual Reinterpretation

Güneş Murat Tezcür

Introduction

1 Writing in 1977, George Harris observed that ‘serious Kurdish conflict, therefore, now appears to be a thing of the past’ (Harris 1977: 124). Yet Kurdish nationalism has proved to be a resilient and resourceful force. Paralleling the rise of militant Kurdish mobilization in Turkey and the formation of an embryonic Kurdish state in North Iraq has been the proliferation of scholarly interest in Kurdish identity. In this article, I take a critical look at several assumptions underlying the current scholarship on Kurdish nationalism. Primarily, I question those analysts who rely on two principal dichotomies: the dichotomy of ethnic nationalism versus civic nationalism and the dichotomy of state versus society. Neither of these two approaches adequately captures the richness and ambiguity of Kurdish political identity in Turkey. Also, I suggest organizations rather than ethnic groups should be the focus of scholarly analysis. Finally, I argue that those studies which operate within the confines of these two dichotomies and conceptualize ethnic groups as unitary actors with well-defined demands and goals do not engage the most interesting questions. To demonstrate that this is so, I offer a number of examples of how the politics of Turkish and Kurdish nationalism interact and affect the construction of ethnic identity at a popular level. How does respond to Kurdish nationalism’s challenges to its legitimacy? Why are electoral results in Kurdish-populated areas of Turkey not more closely correlated with the ethnic identity of voters? In other words, what factors explain ethnic defection, that is, voters’ support for parties that explicitly oppose ‘the national aspirations of the ethnic group with which they identify’? (Kalyvas 2008: 1048). What factors explain the seemingly perplexing choices of the Kurdish nationalist movement? I would like to offer tentative answers to these questions. The conceptual

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approach put forward in this article may contribute to a more refined understanding of the trajectory of Kurdish nationalism in Turkey.

I. The Turkish State and Kurdish Nationalism

2 Many studies of Kurdish nationalism in Turkey are based on two dichotomies. First, these studies generally share the assumption that civic nationalism is ‘more virtuous and liberal’ than ethnic nationalism’, which is ‘generally seen as dangerous and exclusive’ (Wolff 2006: 52). Many scholars argue that Turkish nationalism, which is perceived to promote Turkic ethnicity at the expense of other ethnic groups, fostered and radicalized ethnic Kurdish nationalism. Next, scholars tend to analyze the interaction between the Turkish state and Kurdish-speaking citizens of Turkey through the lens of a binary state-society distinction. Several examples suffice to show how these two dichotomies underline assertions regarding the evolution of Kurdish nationalism. David McDowall suggests that any modern history of the Kurds must focus on ‘the struggle between the Kurdish people and the governments to which they are subject’ (McDowall 2000: 1). Michael Gunter claims, ‘Kurdish nationalism largely developed in the 20th century as a stateless ethnic reaction against the repressive “official state nationalisms” of Turkey, Iraq, , and ’ (2007: 15). The Turkish state’s discriminatory, violent, and exclusive policies have had a decisive influence in shaping contemporary Kurdish nationalism (e.g., Yavuz 2001: 1; Smith 2005). In a similar vein, Martin Bruinessen argues that state repression in Turkey actually contributed to ‘the strength of what it tried to destroy, Kurdish culture’ (Van Bruinessen 2003: 57). Hamit Bozarslan also conceptualizes the relationship between the Turkish state and Kurdish-speaking groups as being antagonistic and conflict-ridden. ‘[T]he relations of domination between the state and the Kurds would involve systematic persecution, marginalization and humiliation of Kurdishness’ since 1925’ (Bozarslan 2003: 187). The Turkish state’s coercive and assimilationist practices such as compulsory Turkish-language education and military service together with experiences of discrimination as workers in Turkish cities have contributed to the formation of a radicalized Kurdish nationalist identity (Saatci 2002). Likewise, state policies that ignore the Kurds in official historiography and impose the symbols of Turkish nationalism over Kurdish landscape have stimulated a chauvinistic Kurdish nationalism (Canefe 2002; Öktem 2004). Analyzing the rise of the PKK in the 1980s, Kurdish intellectual Altan Tan claims that the brutal 1980 coup was the primary factor explaining popular support for the PKK (Tan 2009: 399).

3 Such arguments, which reduce the evolution of Kurdish nationalism to a reaction to ethnic Turkish nationalism and violent and discriminatory state policies, have not gone unchallenged. The ethnicisation of bureaucracy that has caused ethnic conflict in many newly independent countries has not been pervasive in Turkey (Wimmer 1997). Many ethnic Kurds have achieved positions of influence and power within the bureaucracy and are integrated into Turkish society (Cornell 2001). Furthermore, it has not been empirically demonstrated that ‘the ethnic definition of Turkish nationalism preceded, and was causally linked to, the development of Kurdish “counternationalism”’ (Somer 2004: 241). Martin Van Bruinessen also notes that the role of violence in the Kurdish question is overstated and observes that many Kurdish elites have been willing to be co-opted into the political system and to downplay their Kurdish identity (Van

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Bruinessen 1999b). The most spirited challenge comes from Metin Heper, who argues that the Turkish state’s policies towards its Kurdish citizens cannot be characterized as being assimilationist and repressive (Heper 2007: 6). He argues that existing studies of Kurdish nationalism cannot explain ‘the periods of relative peace and quiet in the state-Kurd relationship’ (p. 181). According to Heper, Turkish nationalism is primarily of a civic nature, ‘those who professed loyalty to the state were considered a Turk, irrespective of culture, religion, and language,’ and ‘supplemented by cultural nationalism’, which entails that citizens who ‘internalized the constellation of ideals, values and attitudes that give rise to a ‘we’ feeling have been considered real Turks’ (p. 184). Hence, ‘Turkey has constitutionally adopted civic nationalism...one could become a real Turk to the extent to which one adopted the ideals, values, and attitudes of the ethnic Turks’ (p. 179).

4 Ironically, Heper’s empirical discussion contradicts his central claim that the Turkish state has not practiced policies of assimilation toward the Kurds. For instance, he states, ‘unless a person declared his/her being a Kurd publicly and demanded political rights for the Kurds, the state has not made an issue of Kurdishness’ (p. 118). He continues, ‘names of villages with Kurdish names were given Turkish names and parents were forbidden to give Kurdish names to their children’ (p. 163). Similarly, he observes, ‘[a] person could go on speaking his/her mother tongue; however, if that person also spoke Turkish and gave his/her children Turkish names and adopted the mores of ethnic Turks, s/he, too, would have met the nationality condition’ (p. 92). All these practices that are documented by Heper are examples of forceful assimilation, which entails that an ethnic group’s language and culture are institutionally marginalized in favor of another ethnic group that is larger in numbers and controls the state. To adopt the terminology of Mann, the Turkish state policies towards the Kurdish-speaking people involved institutional coercion, policed repression, violent repression, and unpremeditated mass killings (Mann 2005: 12). The latter strategy was applied to suppress the Dersim in the late 1930s (Olson 2000; Bulut 2005) and conquer Dersim, an ‘internal frontier’ where indigenous groups in a peripheral region resisted centralization and homogenization (Yiftachel 1996).

5 Plenty of primary sources amply document how the coercive state policies have left lasting legacies of discrimination and alienation among considerable segments of the Kurdish people (e.g., Anter 1999: 31-34, 361; Cemal 2003: 15-34, 373-379; Ekinci 2004: 94-97; Kaya 2003: 24-39, 143-150). This legacy still persists. In the words of an old man from Batman whose son joined the PKK, ‘I am paying my taxes, fulfilling my military service, yet I don’t have the same rights. I cannot express my identity freely.’1 Furthermore, Heper sterilizes the impact of state policies on the Kurds by ignoring how Kurds are perceived and treated differently from ethnic Turks (e.g., Yeğen 1999; Jongerden 2004/2005; Ülker 2007).2 He is silent about the indiscriminate violence that targeted the Kurds in the early years of the Republic and again during the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., Alınak 1996: 74-93). Indiscriminate state violence has been the primary reason for why ordinary people join insurgent organizations in many political conflicts (Ganguly 1996; Goodwin 2001: 235). Inevitably, he fails to understand how state policies have fostered a deep sense of injustice and grievance among many Kurdish-speaking citizens.

6 Curiously enough, Heper still operates within the frameworks of the dichotomy of ethnic nationalism versus civic nationalism and the dichotomy of state versus society,

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and focuses on ethnic groups rather than organizations in spite of his criticism of the previous literature on Kurdish nationalism in Turkey. First, Heper uses ethnic labels in an uncritical and ahistorical fashion. For instance, he writes, ‘the Turks came to the conclusion that the Kurds had tended to stray away from the ideals, values, and attitudes ‘they had come to share with the Turks’, and in the process, their secondary identity could replace ‘their generic primary identity of being a Turk’ (p. 10). Heper writes as if ethnic groups are unitary actors pursuing clearly defined goals. In fact, the complicated relationship between ethnic groups, which are not monolithic and homogenous actors, and organizations that claim to represent ethnic interests should be critically analyzed to make sense of the dynamics of ethnic relations (Brubaker 2002). The interests of the ethnic constituency are not always compatible with the interests of the ethnic organization. Second, the Turkish state has not been a monolithic actor and its policies have been fundamentally affected by its interaction with autonomous social actors, especially after the transition to multiparty rule in 1950. While Heper actually recognizes that the civil and military approaches to the Kurdish question differ substantially (p. 179), he does not systematically analyze the causes and implications of these differences. Third, the discussion of whether Turkish nationalism is ethnic or civic is not very productive. The ethnic vs. civic nationalism dichotomy has very limited analytical value in understanding the patterns of ethnic conflict in Turkey. Civic nationalism ‘is not necessarily a better or a worse kind of nationalism’, it ‘advantages majority cultures’, and ‘has some very strong assimilationist and possible exclusivist tendencies’ (Wolff 2006: 52-53). Hence, on the one hand, the authors who emphasize the ethnic elements of Turkey cannot really explain how millions of Kurdish-speaking citizens voluntarily adopt Turkish identity and avoid any identification with Kurdish nationalism. On the other hand, scholars who insist on civic or at least non-ethnic aspects of Turkish nationalism overlook the fact that millions of Kurdish-speaking citizens have strong grievances against how the state and media treat them. Turkish nationalism has been too ambivalent and characterized by conflicting tendencies to be categorized either as ethnic or civic.

An Ethnic Boundary-Making Approach and Kurdish Nationalism

7 A more promising approach to the study of nationalisms is suggested by Fredrik Barth, who argues, ‘the critical focus of investigation…becomes the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses’ (Barth 1969: 15). According to Andreas Wimmer, ‘ethnicity is not primarily conceived as a matter of relations between pre-defined, fixed groups...but rather as a process of constituting and re-constituting groups by defining the boundaries between them’ (2008: 1027). The process of ethnic boundary-making involves many different strategies. In the case of nation building, state elites either ‘redefine an existing ethnic group as the nation into which everybody should fuse’ or ‘create a new national category through the amalgamation of a variety of ethnic groups’ (p. 1032). While the first strategy is called ‘incorporation’, which captures the fundamental aspects of nation-building in Turkey, the second is known as ‘amalgamation’. The creation of a national identity on the basis of a majority ethnicity inevitably involves the creation of minorities who are ‘perceive[d] as too alien or politically unreliable for incorporation or amalgamation’ (1034). From this perspective, the formation of a unified Kurdish category that transcends linguistic, tribal, and regional differences has partially been a product of the Turkish Republic.

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8 The predominant mode of Turkish nationalism entails the ‘incorporation’ strategy of ethnic boundary making that marginalizes all ethnic identities other than Turkish. Public recognition and political representation of other ethnic identities is prohibited because this is perceived to undermine national unity and foment polarization. At the same time, this strategy has aimed to enlarge the boundaries and transform the content of Turkishness. Several examples will be informative. İlker Başbuğ, Chief of the General Staff of the (TSK) argues, ‘[t]he constitutional recognition of ethnic identities aims to undermine the nation-state. Nobody should expect Turkey to administer policies that target a certain ethnic group in political arena. This may bring the country to polarization and decomposition’.3 In a speech delivered to the Turkish Staff Officers' School on April 14, 2009, he argues against that the idea that political violence in Turkey can be described as ethnic conflict.4 According to him, the PKK unsuccessfully attempts to generate ethnic tensions and violence. Many citizens with Kurdish and Zaza origins are members of the TSK and were martyred in the fight against the PKK.5 All citizens, regardless of their ethnic identity, are equal according to law. Başbuğ approvingly cites Heper and notes that there was no ethnicity-related violence from 1938 to 1984. He even refers to findings from a public opinion poll indicating that an overwhelming majority of Kurds and Zaza express their emotional attachment to Turkey. He concedes that ethnic identities can be freely expressed at the individual level but should not have any place in politics. Başbuğ argues that ‘politicization of ethnicity’ generates instability and violence in , Iraq, and the Balkans.6 Deniz Baykal, the leader of the CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi), similarly pursues the ‘incorporation’ strategy. He argues that Turkishness should be perceived as the national identity of Turkey, and that it does not prevent Turkish citizens holding other ethnic identities. At the same time, he opposes constitutional recognition of ethnic identities.7

9 Prime Minister and leader of the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s construction of Turkish nationalism is both similar to and different from the views of Başbuğ and Baykal. On the one hand, he also perceives Turkishness as a broad category that encompasses multiple ethnic identities. ‘Turks, Lazs, Kurds, Circassians, Georgians share the citizenship of Turkish Republic and are all our brothers.’8 On the other hand, he is more willing to publicly acknowledge the historical distinctiveness of the Kurdish identity. He argues that this distinctiveness does not necessarily undermine the unity between the Turks and Kurds since they have a long history of cooperation and share similar cultural values, which tend to be based on their common belief in Islam. In this sense, the Turks and the Kurds do not just happen to live in the same territory, but have established close bonds through their interactions, struggle against common enemies, and being members of the common Islamic culture. Hence, Erdoğan adopts a position that is characterized by both ‘incorporation’ and ‘amalgamation’ strategies, and aims to undercut the appeal of Kurdish ethnic nationalism. Since the Turkish state should not be seen as a monolithic and static entity, these competing interpretations of Turkish nationalism have evolved and became more articulate over time with the state’s attempts to counter the challenge of Kurdish nationalism.

10 The Kurdish nationalists pursue several strategies of ethnic boundary making in response to these constructions of Turkish nationalism. They argue that the characterization of Turkish nationalism as civic is no more than a facade to perpetuate the domination of the Turkish ethnicity. Primarily, they draw narrower boundaries of

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ethnic identity in an effort to identify the Kurds as a separate nation from the Turks. Wimmer labels this type of ethnic boundary-making as ‘contraction’ (p. 1036). , co-chairperson of the DTP (Demokratik Toplum Partisi), offers primary examples of an ethnic entrepreneur employing such a strategy in her speeches. She reduces Kurdishness into a certain type of political identity. In a speech delivered in on December 2, 2008, she argued, No one who becomes a candidate of the AKP can say, ‘I am a Kurd’. This is not acceptable because the AKP’s policies deny the Kurds. Whoever becomes an AKP candidate is not a Kurd even if she says ‘I am a Kurd’. This does not mean that we are practicing ethnic politics. The AKP and the ones who claim that there is a single nation [Turkish nation] in this country practice ethnic politics.

11 She further argued in an electoral rally in March 2009 that the true measure of Kurdishness is support for the DTP.9 Hence, an individual would not count as an authentic Kurd if she votes for parties other than the DTP. Ayna’s strategy may be self- defeating and has the unwanted consequence of contracting the appeal of Kurdish nationalism because it does not only draw a sharp boundary between the Kurds and other ethnic groups in Turkey, but also qualifies the meaning of Kurdishness by restrictive political criteria.10 Ayna’s definition of Kurdish ethnicity stands in sharp contrast to the multidimensional and ambivalent ways in which Kurdish-speaking citizens of Turkey articulate and experience their identities. The fluid nature of Kurdish identity in contemporary Turkey is well documented (e.g., Van Bruinessen 1999a: 23-360). Even during the heydays of the conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK, ethnic identity did not necessarily determine political allegiance (cf. Kalyvas and Kocher 2007).

12 Other Kurdish nationalists pursue an ethnic boundary-making strategy that is called ‘transvaluation’ (Wimmer 2008: 1037). They explicitly challenge the normative hierarchy established by Turkish nationalism and argue that Kurds should have equal symbolic status and political power. An earlier example is found in the work of the Cemilpaşazade brothers, who argue that the Turks were uncivilized people who invaded a Kurdish civilization (Malmisanij 2004). The argument that the Kurds were cheated after the Independence War has a long history among Kurdish nationalists.11 Ahmet Türk, the co-chairperson of the DTP, frequently mentions in his speeches how the 1924 Constitution established an autocratic political system and denied Kurdish identity despite the fact that the Kurds were crucial for the success of the Independence War led by Atatürk.12 He now demands that this injustice should be redressed by the enactment of a new constitution that offers recognition to the Kurdish identity. He delivered segments of his February 24, 2009, address to the DTP parliamentary group in Kurdish in order to criticize the prohibition of other languages than Turkish in official spaces. This provides a striking example of how the Kurdish nationalists respond to the state elites’ claim that Kurdish identity is not suppressed in Turkey.

13 The strategy of ‘transvaluation’ also entails contesting the hegemonic historiography. Kurdish nationalists reinterpret key historical events of the early Republican years. They have glorified the Sheik Said Rebellion of 1925 and the Dersim Revolt of 1937 in an attempt to establish continuity in the Kurdish resistance to repressive and domineering state authority. Besides, the Kurdish nationalist movement has a tendency to interpret all conflicts in which Kurdish-speaking people are involved as hate attacks that target the Kurds specifically because of their ethnic identity. For instance, a group attacked

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Kurdish houses in rural Kyrgyzstan in late April 2009 after allegations that a Kurd raped a four-year old girl. According to Kurdish news agency ANF, the attacks were ethnically motivated and aimed to expel Kurds from the village and seize their properties.13 This tendency to ethnicize conflict is consistent with the observation that ‘[t]he ethnic nature of the conflict is always contested and not intrinsic to the act itself; it emerges through after-the-fact interpretative claims’ (Brubaker and Laitin 1998: 444).

14 In parallel to the strategy of ‘transvaluation’, Kurdish nationalists also legitimize political violence by arguing that restrictions on Kurdish identity would not have been lifted if not for the PKK’s armed struggle. They insist that the PKK has restored dignity to Kurdish identity and prevented its further humiliation.14 In a speech delivered in Lice on August 13, 2008, Necdet Atalay, now mayor of Batman, declared: We were ashamed of our Kurdishness 30 years ago. How happy for these people [PKK militants], they have taught us how to live with pride. Now, no Kurd is ashamed of her Kurdishness. To the contrary, every Kurd is proud of her identity. This struggle entailed tremendous sacrifices. I hail these honorable individuals in your presence.

15 The Kurdish nationalists do not only contest Turkish nationalism, but also try to articulate a crystallized and homogenous notion of Kurdish identity. Yet, Kurdish identity is formed, articulated, and lived in many different ways that make it very difficult for Kurdish nationalists to mobilize all ethnic Kurds under their banner. Particularly interesting is how some people speaking the Zaza dialect of Kurdish object to be classified as Kurds and pursue their own version of the ‘contraction' strategy. The city of Elazığ, which has a large Zaza population, organized a very well-attended protest against ‘PKK ’ on October 24, 2007. The participants, many of who are Zaza Kurds, shouted, ‘We are all Turks, we are all Mehmets [a generic name given to soldiers of the Turkish army]’. A middle-aged person, employed in a state institution in Bingöl, remarks, ‘The PKK aims to manipulate . They argue that Zazas are Kurds. We are different. Why don’t Zaza establish Zazaistan then? Kurds should help us then.’15 Other Kurds resist the Kurdish nationalist narrative of ethnic identity for more mundane reasons. In the words of a high-ranking representative of the DTP in Istanbul, ‘Many [Kurdish] parents do not want their children to be politicized and join our party. They prefer them to have good education, secure decent jobs and stay away from trouble. For this reason, we are unable to fully mobilize our potential’.16

16 For many ethnic Kurds, there is no rigid boundary between Kurdish and Turkish identity, which remain compatible with each other. The fusion of identities cannot be solely explained by forced and involuntary assimilation. Several examples can be illuminating. A Kurdish businessman who frequently commutes between Diyarbakır and Iraqi Kurdistan, who was detained for sympathizing with the PKK when he was a student at University in Diyarbakir in the 1980s, makes the following comment: We speak Turkish to each other even if there is nobody among us whose mother language is not Kurdish. This is not because we have to, but because we like to. I also speak Turkish with my children. They need to have a good command of the language if they would like to be successful in life. Their future is in Turkey, not here [Iraqi Kurdistan].17

17 Another Kurdish tradesman from Diyarbakır, who was imprisoned in the infamous Diyarbakır military prison for his sympathy to Ala Rizgari, a Kurdish organization, in the early 1980s, wants his five children to be fluent in Turkish. In fact, his youngest child, a 9-years old girl, does not speak Kurdish at all. While he becomes emotional

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when he sees the Kurdish flag and soldiers in Iraqi Kurdistan and deeply admires the Barzani family, he strongly believes that his children’s future lies in Turkey.

18 Social stigma attached to the Kurdish language and identity also leads many Kurdish- speaking individuals to hide their ethnic origins and adopt new public postures. A social-democrat engineer in the western town of İzmir observes, ‘We have a brilliant engineer in our office. I know he is a Kurd but he walks to the balcony whenever he speaks to his parents in Kurdish. He does not want us to hear him speaking Kurdish’.18 A person who is an amateur film director and owns a video shop in Muş explains to a visitor that Kurdish albums and films have fewer sales than Turkish ones. Yet, almost all of his customers seem to be interested in the Kurdish products.19 A Zaza Kurd who was born in a village near Palu, a district of Elazığ, now lives in İzmir after retiring as a bank manager. His two daughters have no knowledge of his mother tongue, which he refuses to speak. He deeply admires the achievements of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. These are examples of a ‘positional move’ that involves an individual changing his or her identity in order to escape negative connotations associated with the original ethnic group. Such ‘long-term ethnic switching’ entails strategically motivated changes in language, custom, manner, and dress (Nagel and Olzak 1982: 129), and does not challenge the sociopolitical hierarchy between ethnicities (Wimmer 2008: 1039). People who voluntarily eschew or downplay their Kurdish identity have many motivations, especially since negative stereotypes of Kurds are pervasive.

19 At the same time, many Kurdish-speaking citizens also emphasize that they are treated as second-class citizens and deprived of their rights. A barber who also works a security guard in Dicle University in Diyarbakır relates that his great-grandfather participated in the Congress in 1919 as a representative of Van. He complains: My great-grandfather used to address Atatürk as Field Marshal. Now look at our situation. They treat people who recently emigrated from Bulgaria better than us. They even treat Afghan refugees who were given housing in Diyarbakır better than us. Yet we will fight for this state if a war erupts, not the Afghans. We do not discriminate against anybody. We do not want to be discriminated against. We are the owners of this country.20

20 These specific examples suggest that ethnic boundary making is a more promising approach to the Kurdish question than the dichotomy of ethnic vs. civic nationalism. Two reasons for this conclusion can be cited. First, the relationship between Turkish and Kurdish nationalisms cannot be adequately captured as the resistance of the latter to the domineering attempts of the former. This relationship is interactive and dynamic, and both nationalisms continuously mold each other. For instance, the ‘transvaluation’ strategy pursued by the Kurdish nationalists has made the Turkish nationalists explicitly accept Kurdishness as a respected ethnic identity. The state elites are now at pains to emphasize that nobody is discriminated against because of ethnic identity and that all ethnic identities deserve equal treatment. 21 State TV now broadcasts in Kurdish, and universities will soon have Kurdish language and culture departments. This explicit recognition of Kurdishness as a legitimate source of public identity represents a sharp break from previous discourses that denied its existence. In particular, Prime Minister Erdoğan articulates a discourse that has some elements of the strategy of ‘amalgamation’ and focuses on common values shared by ethnic Turks and Kurds. At the same time, the Turkish nationalists do not recognize the Kurds as a nation with the collective right of self-determination, and accuse the Kurdish nationalists for being divisive. In response, the Kurdish nationalists repeatedly reject

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this accusation and try to emphasize their commitment to Turkish-Kurdish unity. Second, Kurdish nationalism, as well as Turkish nationalism, is not monolithic and includes several competing strategies. Nationalists on both sides strive to draw rigid boundaries while ethnic identities tend to be fluid and permeable at popular level. They try to impose sanctions over behavior that is deemed to be inappropriate from a nationalistic view. Consequently, ethnic categories do not automatically involve certain types of political orientation and behavior. The relationship between ethnic identity and ethnicity-oriented political action needs to be explained, rather than to be assumed.

II. Electoral Competition and Kurdish Nationalism

21 Perspectives that conceptualize the relationship between state and society primarily in antagonistic terms ignore the role of electoral dynamics and cross-ethnic interactions in the evolution of Kurdish nationalism in Turkey. Elections often blur the distinction among state and non-state actors and fundamentally shape the nature of their interaction (Migdal 2001). Social actors affiliated with political parties participate in the elections and vie with each other for control over the ethnic constituency. Even highly autonomous state actors, such as the TSK and the judiciary, may become responsive to popular demands for greater respect for human rights. The judiciary, more specifically lower courts, is more inclined to punish security forces who commit human rights violations on occasions when civil society activists mobilize the legal system, public opinion, and international linkages (Tezcür 2009).

22 The results of Turkish elections have not been closely correlated with the ethnicity of voters, and political parties have engaged in appealing to the ethnic identity of voters only to a limited extent (Horowitz 2000: 318-332). In fact, ethnic identity does not automatically determine voting in Turkey. As the performance of the AKP in the 2007 elections demonstrate, centrist and multiethnic political parties espousing moderate platforms can be very successful (cf. Reilly 2002: 167). The parties that claim to represent national interests of the Kurds have never received more than 7 percent of the vote, even if Kurdish-speaking citizens are estimated to make up 14 percent of the population (Koc et al. 2008).

23 In Turkey, elections have helped to co-opt local Kurdish elites, to expand legal space for contentious Kurdish activism, and to shape the nature of competition among Kurdish political actors. First, electoral competition since 1946 has contributed to strategic alliances between Turkish political parties and Kurdish religious, tribal, landed, and capitalist elites. The latter have consolidated their authority and commanded vast patronage resources in exchange for delivering votes to the former. This mutually dependent relationship between the state and local elites has been an important factor in preventing elections from becoming agents of socioeconomic change for many years (Beşikçi 1992: 53-56). At the same time, electoral processes have been an important force that offers ethnic Kurds avenues of political representation and power within the system.22 A prominent example would be the long albeit intermittent parliamentary career of Abdülmelik Fırat, the grandson of Sheik Said who led the most important Kurdish rebellion in the early years of the Republic (Kaya 2003). Other important examples include Yusuf Azizoğlu who served as Health Minister in the early 1960s, and Şerafettin Elçi, who was a minister in 1979.23 These Kurdish politicians were not

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immune from slanders demonizing their Kurdish ethnicity. For example, Kamuran İnan, who challenged Süleyman Demirel for the leadership of the Adalet Partisi in the 1970s, complains that his ambition was thwarted as his opponents highlighted the fact that he is from the ‘East’.24

24 Second, elections have also contributed to the expansion and resiliency of the Kurdish contentious political action. In 1967 the public rallies sponsored by the TİP (Türkiye İşçi Partisi), which gained parliamentary representation in the 1965 elections, provided the first instance of Kurdish identity being openly politically articulated since the repression of the rebellions in the late 1930s (Gündoğan 2005).25 Since the early 1990s, Kurdish nationalists have made use of the electoral opportunities to make symbolic and policy demands from the political system, reach domestic and international audiences, gain protection from state repression, and command material resources (Watts 2006). Electoral participation also helped Kurdish nationalists form inter-ethnic alliances with varying degrees of success, most notably in the 1991 elections. Not surprisingly, military interventions that suspended elections and destroyed legal avenues for Kurdish demands generated spirals of radicalization. The 1971 coup led to the proliferation of clandestine and conspiracy-oriented organizations.26 Similarly, the 1980 coup significantly contributed to the appeal of the PKK’s militancy (Romano 2006). 27

25 Finally, electoral participation has not only generated opportunities for the Kurdish nationalists but also exposed them to fierce competition. In fact, the behavior of the Kurdish nationalist movement at critical junctures would be puzzling unless one takes the effects of electoral competition on the movement into consideration. After being sentenced to the death penalty in June 1999, Abdullah Öcalan announced that the armed struggle had fulfilled its historical mission and asked the PKK militants to withdraw from Turkey. Meanwhile, the EU-induced reform process brought one of the most ambitious democratization periods in modern Turkish history. While authoritarian practices persisted, legal and political opportunities for non-violent Kurdish mobilization were unprecedented. Yet, Öcalan and the PKK decided to renew armed struggled on June 1, 2004. The reescalation of violence inevitably derailed the reform process and contributed to a deterioration of the human rights situation. In this context, the PKK’s decision to return to arms becomes understandable only when one analyzes how the PKK’s control over its Kurdish constituency was threatened by the rising appeal of the AKP. It was not a coincidence that the PKK remobilized its armed forces few months after the March 2004 local elections when the AKP won in many Kurdish provinces. The PKK intensified its attacks after the July 2007 parliamentary elections when the AKP increased its share of the Kurdish vote at the expense of the DTP. 28 The PKK tactically moderated its behavior and announced ceasefires only after the 2009 local elections when the DTP made significant gains. Hence, partial democratization had the unintended consequence of radicalizing the Kurdish nationalist movement when it threatened the movement’s control over its constituency (Tezcür 2011). Ironically, the reformist AKP has become a greater concern to the Kurdish nationalists than the TSK. Hence, the primary goal of the PKK violence was to perpetuate control over the constituency (cf. Bozarslan 2000).

26 Competition among Kurdish nationalists is as important as competition between the Kurdish nationalists and multiethnic parties. Kurdish nationalism in Turkey is not synonymous with the PKK and its ancillary legal organizations.29 In fact, Kurdish

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nationalism has been represented by at least two competing tendencies since the early 1960s, when expanding political liberties enabled public expressions of Kurdish identity and culture. The fifty Kurds that were imprisoned by Adnan Menderes’s government in 1959 included many figures that later became influential political leaders.30 They were not a unified group, but were divided along religious and political lines (e.g., Anter 1999: 164-169; Miroğlu 2005: 173-177; Çamlıbel 2007: 145-164). The first Kurdish nationalist organization to be set up after the suppression of the Kurdish revolts in the early Republican Years was the TKDP [Türkiye Kürdistan Demokrat Partisi]. The TKDP, established in 1965 and inspired by the Barzani movement, competed against left- oriented Kurdish activists. 31

27 Since the 1990s, Islam has increasingly provided a medium through which many Kurdish nationalists express their grievances and aspirations.32 The Kurdish Islamists are represented in a diverse set of organizations ranging from the AKP to civil society associations such as the Med-Zehra group (Atacan 2001), Mazlum-Der [İnsan Hakları ve Mazlumlar İçin Dayanışma Derneği], established in 1991, and Mustazaf-Der [Mustazaflar İle Dayanışma Derneği], established in 2004, and to militant organizations such as Hizbullah, which fought a bloody war against the PKK throughout the 1990s (Faraç 2001). Ex- Mazlum-Der members and current AKP parliamentarians İhsan Arslan and Abdurrahman Kurt, both of whom represent the province of Diyarbakır, have been influential in the making of the AKP’s Kurdish policy. According to Kurt, Erdoğan refers to Islamic bonds between the Turks and the Kurds when he says ‘there is a single nation in Turkey’.33 Obviously, his configuration of Kurdish identity is very different from the DTP’s and has strong Islamic connotations. The Kurdish Islamists have taken advantage of the opportunities presented by the AKP government, which saw the former as an effective antidote against the secular Kurdish nationalist movement. The Kurdish Islamists hoped that the AKP would reduce the TSK’s political autonomy and expand the scope of public expressions of religious rituals, symbols, and discourse. They were instrumental in mobilizing grassroots support to the AKP in the 2007 parliamentary elections, and are the only group that has matched the mass-mobilization capacity of the secular Kurdish nationalists. For instance, the Kurdish Islamists organized a huge rally in Diyarbakır to protest Israel’s attack against the Gaza Strip on January 4, 2009.

28 The competition between the Kurdish Islamists and the secular Kurdish nationalist movement has occasionally turned violent. For the latter, the rise of the AKP and the Kurdish Islamists posed an existential threat to its claims of being the authoritative representative of Kurds in Turkey. In Yüksekova, a town where the secular Kurdish nationalist movement is the dominant actor, the AKP and Kurdish-Islamist associations were subject to repeated attacks.34 The local branch of Mustazaf-Der was ransacked on March 24, 2008, and the AKP office was bombed on August 14, 2008. Political tensions continued to increase before the critical March 2009 local elections. In a separate incident, hundreds of PKK sympathizers attacked a local Islamist association in on February 1, 2009.

29 The Kurdish-Islamists can be as radical as the secular nationalists in their political views and demands. An important publication that disseminates Kurdish-Islamist ideas is the monthly magazine Mizgȋn, which has been published in both Turkish and Kurdish since August 2004.35 While the journal, based in Diyarbakır, is highly critical of the Turkish state’s policies toward the Kurds, it also keeps a distance from the Kurdish nationalist movement. Furthermore, the journal criticizes the Islamic movements for

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being insensitive to Kurdish suffering while condemning violence in Palestine and Afghanistan. It is affiliated with Toplum-Der (Toplumsal Hakları ve Değerleri Koruma, Eğitim, Yardımlaşma ve Dayanışma Derneği, established in 2004). The political proposals and analyses of the magazine are ambitious and assertive. The journal argues that federalism is the best solution to the Kurdish question, and that confederalism and independence should be also considered as viable options (Hocaoğlu 2009: 8).36 The March 2009 issue has a ‘Great Kurdistan’ map that includes territory from six countries (Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Azerbaijan, and Armenia). Kurdistan is labeled as ‘a country looted on all sides,’ ‘a country everywhere under occupation,’ ‘a country whose land is covered in blood and tears,’ and ‘a country that abounds in illegal murders.’ Not surprisingly, a judge ordered the confiscation of the issue. The April 2009 issue of the journal has a cover that shows a combined map of ‘Great Kurdistan’ and remaining regions of Turkey, which are separated by a white border, under the title of Federation. 37 The leading article in that issue argues that the most sensible solution to the Kurdish question is the formation of a grand federation that includes Turkey and all areas in the region with a Kurdish majority.

III. Inter-Ethnic Influences and Kurdish Nationalism

30 As a final point, perspectives that exclusively conceptualize the relationship between the Turkish state and Kurdish community as an unbroken lineage of hostilities miss the interactions that have been crucial to the formation of Kurdish nationalist identity and movements in Turkey. The PKK pursues a complex and ambivalent stance when it identifies its historical precedents and allies. The PKK neither condemns all Turkish political activism as being hostile to the Kurds nor glorifies all past Kurdish political activism. Its historiography tends to dismiss the DDKO (Devrimci Doğu Kültür Ocakları), the organizational source that was central to the flourishing Kurdish political activism in the 1970s, as being irrelevant and insignificant. Instead, the PKK traces its lineage back to the Turkish rural guerrilla groups that mushroomed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The PKK’s embrace of the iconic figures of Turkish left and discourse of inter- ethnic cooperation in pursuit of common goals has its origins in the 1960s, when a new Kurdish intelligentsia participated in leftist political activism. ‘During this decade a Kurdish national movement was reconstructed through the inter-ethnic, institutionalized, and legal framework of the radical left’, and has left a lasting impact on the ideological premises of Kurdish nationalism (Watts 2007: 76).

31 According to Cemil Bayık, a senior PKK figure, the PKK has restored dignity to socialism.38 The PKK declared May as the ‘month of martyrs’ and May 18 as the ‘day of martyrs’ in its 1st Conference in 1981. May 18 is the day when Haki Karer, an ethnic Turk and a close companion of Abdullah Öcalan, was murdered by a rival Kurdish organization in Antep in 1977. Along with Kemal Pir, another ethnic Turk and PKK leader who died in hunger strike in September 1982, Karer represents the unity between the Turkish and Kurdish peoples in their common struggle.39 Their participation in the PKK is a testimony to the insurgent organization’s commitment to peace between Turks and Kurds and Turkey’s unity.40 The ‘martyrs’ who are embraced by the PKK also include Deniz Gezmiş, Hüseyin İnan, and Yusuf Arslan, the leaders of the THKO (Türkiye Halk Kurtuluş Ordusu), who were executed on May 6, 1972, and İbrahim Kaypakkaya, the leader of TİKKO (Türkiye İşçi Köylü Kurtuluş Ordusu), who was

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murdered on May 18, 1973.41 Mahir Çayan, the leader of THKP-C (Türkiye Halk Kurtuluş Partisi-Cephesi), who was killed with nine of his companions in a firefight with the security forces on March 30, 1972, is also considered a hero in the PKK discourse. The deaths of these iconic figures of the Turkish left are periodically commemorated by the PKK and its ancillary organizations. The PKK’s speeches and discourse are full of references to their ideals and struggles. According to , a senior member of the PKK leadership, Öcalan has burdened the legacy of Turkish leftist militant groups that were crushed by the March 12, 1971 coup. Kalkan criticizes the Turkish left for failing to cooperate with the PKK in its resistance to the September 12, 1980 coup.42 For Ali Haydar Kaytan, another senior PKK member, the tragic fate of Gezmiş and Çayan has deeply influenced Öcalan’s decision to engage in politics.43

Conclusion

32 The argument that Kurdish nationalism has been ethnicized and radicalized in reaction to the repressive and assimilationist policies of the Turkish state contains much truth. Nonetheless it falls short of shedding light on the ambivalences and pluralism inherent in Kurdish political identity in Turkey. It leads to a biased understanding in the sense that certain expressions of Kurdish identity are prioritized and others ignored. I suggest that the deconstruction of this argument opens up an avenue for understanding how Kurdish nationalism has evolved in Turkey. First, the ethnic vs. civic nationalism dichotomy does not capture the complexity and dynamic nature of how Turkish and Kurdish identities are constructed and interact with each other. A boundary-making approach to ethnic identity presents a richer conceptual framework to make sense of how Kurdish nationalism challenges Turkish nationalism and aims to impose uniformity over the experience of Kurdishness. The question of how various boundary-making strategies generate and redefine new identities, shape nationalist discourses, and change state policies demands further research. Second, a rigidly conceived state vs. society dichotomy underestimates how varying interactions of state and society have been central to the formation of Kurdish political identity in Turkey. In particular, a rigid state-society dichotomy overlooks the importance of electoral competition in shaping the strategies of Kurdish nationalists who have been deeply concerned with threats to their political hegemony from other Kurdish actors. Finally, studies that prioritize ethnic groups as the primary actors in the political process fail to examine the dynamic relationship of ethnic organization and their ethnic constituencies. Hence, it is important to recognize ethnic organizations qua organizations primarily concerned with their own survival. They may sometimes sacrifice the interests of the very ethnic constituencies they claim to represent when the requirements of political survival contradict their declared political function.

33 These three conceptual suggestions may help develop answers to important questions regarding Kurdish political identity in Turkey. In this article, I make some preliminary attempts to engage with such questions. First, why is it that so many Kurdish-speaking citizens of Turkey do not articulate their identity in the ‘ethnic’ sense that is demanded by the Kurdish nationalist movement? For sure, the coercive and assimilative practices of the state provide a partial answer to this question. At the same time, hegemonic Turkish nationalism has been ambivalent and porous enough to allow many Kurds to pursue ethnic boundary-making strategies such as ‘positioning’ and ‘transvaluation’.

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These strategies do not often correspond to strategies employed by the Kurdish nationalist movement. Pluralism and fluidity has been central to identity construction and boundary-making despite the armed conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK. The recognition of this plurality also provides some valuable insights into the question of why electoral results are not perfectly correlated with voters’ ethnic identity in Turkey. The Kurdish Islamists, who have considerable grassroots support, do not necessarily share the priorities of the secular Kurdish nationalist movement. While they often engage in alliances with multiethnic political parties such as the AKP, they are not just pawns of the Turkish state and the AKP. They pursue their own autonomous interests. Finally, why does the PKK often act in ways that are inconsistent with its declared goals of expanding the rights of the Kurds, as exemplified in the PKK’s radicalization at a time of increasing democratization in Turkey? One needs to focus on how electoral competition jeopardizes the Kurdish nationalist movement’s control over its constituency and the logic of organizational survival to come up with a satisfactory answer to this question. Hence, one needs to overcome the state vs. society dichotomy to systematically analyze competition between the Kurdish nationalists and the AKP over the Kurds.

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NOTES

1. Personal communication, Batman, June 2007. 2. Reports prepared by the leading politicians of the early Republican era clearly shows how the state perceived the Kurdish citizens as potentially destabilizing elements and developed policies to diminish their ‘Kurdishness’ (Karabekir 1995; Öztürk 2007; Uluğ 2007; Akçura 2008). 3. He was then Commander of the Land Forces. Reported by , September 28, 2006. 4. The violence in Turkey since 1984 can be described as ‘ethnic conflict’ not because the Turks and the Kurds fight against each other, but because violence is perpetrated ‘across ethnic lines, in which at least one party is not a state (or a representative of a state), and in which the putative ethnic difference is coded […] as having been integral rather than incidental to the violence’ (Brubaker & Laitin 1998: 428). 5. For state policies that distinguish between Kurds and Zaza in an effort to limit the appeal of Kurdish nationalism, see Van Wilgenburg (2009). 6. The full text of the speech is available at http://www.tsk.tr/10_ARSIV/ 10_1_Basin_Yayin_Faaliyetleri/10_1_7_Konusmalar/2009/ org_ilkerbasbug_harpak_konusma_14042009.html

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7. Speech delivered by Baykal in his address to the CHP’s parliamentary group on August 11, 2009. 8. Speech delivered by Erdoğan in his address to the AKP’s parliamentary group on August 11, 2009. This speech was crucial in setting the tone of Prime Minister’s ‘Kurdish initiative’ in the summer of 2009. 9. In a speech delivered at a DTP electoral rally in İdil, a district of Şırnak. Reported by Radikal, March 14, 2009. 10. Curiously enough, Ayna is not fluent in Kurdish and cannot deliver her public speeches in that language. 11. For example, see Epözdemir (2005). 12. This argument is also central to Türk’s defense in front of the Constitutional Court on September 16, 2009. At the time of writing, the Court was still considering if the DTP shall be banned. 13. Reported by Fırat News Agency (ANF), April 27,2009. Available at http://www.gundem- online.com/haber.asp?haberid=71471. 14. A communiqué published on November 27, 2008, the 30th anniversary of the PKK’s establishment, claims that the PKK has created a new type of person who is full of hope, free, and proud of her identity out of a nation that was forgotten and had lost its will. 15. Personal communication in Bingöl, August 2, 2008. 16. Personal communication in İstanbul, June 18, 2007. 17. Personal communication in , Iraqi Kurdistan, November 19, 2007. 18. Personal communication in İzmir, July 17, 2007. 19. Personal communication in Muş, August 3, 2008. 20. Personal communication, Diyarbakır, October 19, 2007. 21. For example, the CHP leader Deniz Baykal repeatedly emphasizes that ‘ethnic identity is a source of pride’. Reported by Sabah, June 5, 2008. 22. The fact that Iraq lacked an effective parliament and strong mass parties for most of its history was one of the important factors that left the Barzanis without any options other than armed struggle. For a self-narrative of the Barzanis’ struggle, see Barzani (2005). 23. In 1961, the Interior Minister attacked Yusuf Azizoğlu for pursuing policies favoring the Kurds (Kürtçülük). Azizoğlu denied the charge, and, in a parliamentary speech, declared that he was an authentic Turk. In 1979, Şerafettin Elçi declared that ‘I am Kurd and there are Kurds in eastern Turkey’. After the 1980 military intervention, he spent 30 months in prison. 24. İnan (2007). Ironically, Kurdish nationalists accuse him for denying his ethnic identity. 25. These rallies definitely had an ethnic dimension. Ethnic Arabs and Azeri Turks did not support the rallies. Interview with Ümit Fırat, August 4, 2007. Available at http://www.bianet.org 26. These organizations were highly critical of electoralism. For example, see ‘Kürt Halkının Anti- Sömürgeci Ulusal Demokratik Mücadelesinin Seçim Siyaseti’, Rizgari 3, May 1977, pp. 107-127. Available at http://www.lekolin.org 27. At the same time, one should not underestimate the pervasiveness of ethnic grievances before the coup. For instance, see Howe (1980). 28. Many Kurdish public figures who are not affiliated with the AKP concede that the party has been more accommodative of Kurdish identity than other Turkish political actors. Personal communication with Esat Canan, Ankara, October 11, 2007. 29. It should be added that the PKK has not been a monolithic organization, but has fiercely suppressed all dissent by violence (Marcus 2007). 30. Their imprisonment and trial is known as ‘49’lar’ (‘the 49ers’) because one of the detainees died before the trial. They were arbitrarily imprisoned to repress embyronic Kurdish cultural activism. After the military coup of May 27, 1960, these Kurds were left of out the general amnesty. Their trial dragged on for years before all were acquitted.

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31. The first leader of the TKDP was Faik Bucak, who was murdered in 1966. His son Sertaç Bucak was the chairman of the Kurdish nationalist Hak ve Özgürlükler Partisi (HAK-PAR) from 2006 to 2008. 32. Hence, Islam no longer only plays a binding role for the Turks and the Kurds, as Cizre Sakallıoğlu (1998) claims. 33. Personal communication with Abdurrahman Kurt, Ankara, December 13, 2007. 34. Similar attacks also occurred in the city of Hakkari, the capital of the same province. For instance, the AKP office in the city was bombed on November 1, 2008, a day before the visit of Prime Minister Erdoğan, and a truck that belonged to a student dormitory operated by an Islamic community was set on fire on the night of January 4, 2009. 35. The website of the magazine is http://www.mizgin.net 36. For instance, see May 2009 issue of Mizgȋn. 37. While the April 2009 issue of the journal was also confiscated, I was able to purchase a copy in Yüksekova in early June 2009. 38. Reported by ANF (Fırat News Agency), December 1, 2008. 39. See the interview with Ali Haydar Kaytan by Rojhat Laser, ANF, May 17, 2009. Available at http://www.gundem-online.com/haber.asp?haberid=72306. 40. See the interview with Cemil Bayık, ANF, May 20, 2006. Available at http://www.gundem- online.com/haber.asp?haberid=12764. 41. One can also add Sinan Cemgil, another THKO founder, who was killed in a firefight with security forces alongside his two friends on May 31, 1971. 42. See the interview with Duran Kalkan, a PKK leader, ANF, May 15, 2009. Available at http:// www.gundem-online.com/haber.asp?haberid=69527. 43. See the narrative of Ali Haydar Kaytan. Reported by Hasan Güneş, ANF, November 25, 2008.

ABSTRACTS

This article argues that the evolution of Kurdish nationalism in Turkey is more ambivalent and nuanced than is usually acknowledged. This claim is based on three interpretive approaches: 1) the primary actors in national politics are conceptualized as organizations, rather than as ethnic groups; 2) a boundary-making approach to ethnic identities is more promising than an insistence on an ethnic versus civic nationalism dichotomy; and 3) state-society relations are better understood in terms of a series of interactions among state actors and social actors than in terms of a global dichotomy of state and society. These three approaches may help develop answers to important questions regarding political identity in Turkey. First, why do so many Kurdish- speaking citizens fail to articulate their identity in the terms demanded by the Kurdish nationalist movement? Second, why are the electoral returns in those areas of Turkey with large numbers of Kurdish speakers not more closely correlated with the ethnic distribution of the population? Finally, why does the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) often act in ways that are inconsistent with its declared goals of defending and expanding the political and civil rights of the Kurds?

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INDEX

Mots-clés: élections, Islam, nationalisme kurde, PKK Keywords: elections, ethnic boundary making, Islam, kurdish nationalism, PKK

AUTHOR

GÜNEŞ MURAT TEZCÜR

Güneş Murat Tezcür is an assistant professor of political science at Loyola University of Chicago [email protected]

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The Shared Political Production of ‘the East’ as a ‘Resistant’ Territory and Cultural Sphere in the Kemalist Era, 1923-1938

Jordi Tejel Gorgas

1 Scholars have traditionally underlined the power of symbolic imposition by states on their citizens and dissident groups. Analyzing ‘the Vendée’1 (1793) as a symbol of the counter-revolution in , Charles Suaud, for instance, argues that popular cultures, even the most ‘rebellious,’ possess a low degree of autonomy relative to the work of symbolic imposition by the state (Suaud 1997: 3-23). Though Suaud admits a degree of interaction between the symbolic production of the dissident groups and that of the state, he gives primacy to the latter. For this author, along the same line of thought as Pierre Bourdieu (1993: 571-625), the state uses various means to organize visions of society and forms of conduct that ‘individuals internalize imperceptibly as a political “ unthought” (impensée) which applies to everyone, even those who had thought they could escape it’ (Suaud 1997: 4).

2 Without neglecting the state’s symbolic strength, this paper suggests that in particular historical circumstances, the interaction between the state and anti-establishment actors in the symbolic field can be much more balanced than typically represented. I suggest that, following Bernard Lahire’s invitation, we must historicize the validity of sociological concepts and not ‘generalize the theoretical approaches interpreted in a relatively restricted context’ (Lahire 1998: 249). In this sense, the Kemalist period (1923-1938), which was marked by high levels of international pressure (peace negotiations) and several internal rebellions (Kurdish revolts, the Menemen incident), is a useful case study due to the great fluidity of parallel ideological productions and the mutual interaction between the Turkish state and Kurdish nationalists in the creation of collective social representations.

3 Contrary to many classic works (Davison 1981; Lewis 1968) that analyze the Kemalist period in light of the state reforms that aimed to create ‘new citizens’ (İrem 2002), this

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article claims both that the Turkish elites interacted with society –including dissident groups– and thus were not members of an ‘autonomous’ entity (i.e., the state), and that Turkish society was capable of articulating dissent challenging the hegemonic designs of the state. In particular, some Kurdish segments within and outside Turkey were able to challenge Turkish state authority in the international arena.

4 Concretely, the article first deals with the dynamics that limited the autonomy of the Turkish state, in particular in the 1920s. It then suggests that the Turkish regime’s response to these constraints was to put in place extremely violent policies concerning the inhabitants of the Eastern provinces. In so doing, it contributed in a paradoxical and progressive manner to the creation of a specific ‘territorial’ and ‘cultural’ entity: ‘the East’ or ‘Eastern Anatolia,’ understood, beyond the geographic reality, at once as the location of actual armed resistance and the representation of a region intrinsically conservative and counter-revolutionary. Indeed, while the Kemalist regime was affirming the ethnic homogeneity of Turkey and the equal treatment of its ‘Turkish citizens,’ it was contributing, with these very practices, to the creation of non-physical ‘borders’ separating the West and the East of the country.

5 I show that at the same time, in spite of the strong ideological commitment of the Kemalist elites, Turkish authorities were obliged to take into consideration the dissenting discourses elaborated by Kurdish intellectuals who were in exile in Syria and Lebanon after the establishment of the Turkish republic. Using archival material, newspapers, pamphlets and other materials published during the 1920s and 1930s, it is possible to see that the Kurdish intellectuals who organized around the Khoybun committee (1927-1943) became “legitimate” representatives of the Kurdish opposition to the Kemalists, in part due to the relative freedom of action in the Levant under French mandate.

6 The paper thus demonstrates that dissident actors challenge the so-called ‘autonomous status’ of states in the international arena. Contemporary history tell us that different dissident movements have succeeded both in challenging the legitimacy of the states or regimes concerned by way of the increased diasporization of their groups, and in gaining legitimacy, both in their respective countries and internationally. The Kurdish experience in Syria and Lebanon is in that sense one of the first instances of diasporization in the twentieth century.2

7 Through the analysis of Kurdish pamphlets and journals I note, however, that the opposite is also true. Kurdish intellectuals lacking ideological tools such as schools or a ‘national’ army were often constrained in their response to Turkish state propaganda. In other words, though carrying a message concerning an ‘us’ –the ‘Kurdish national community’– Kurdish intellectuals were not independent of state categories: the research of an ancient and golden age, the ‘purity’ of language, the ‘homogeneity’ of society, the ‘civilized’ we-group as opposed to the ‘Barbarian’ other, among others. In so doing, both groups of actors contributed, albeit with different goals, to a ‘shared’ political production of ‘the East’ as a sphere of ‘resistant’ culture.

8 More generally, studying the Kemalist period through the lens of the interaction between the Turkish state and the Kurdish movement provides a means to extend the ‘state-in-society’ framework developed by Joel S. Migdal (2001) in order to answer the question of how cultural, political, and religious spaces are constructed, reshaped, and eventually politicized as an outcome of the struggle between the state and some segments of a given society for symbolic imposition. Indeed, the politicization3 of the

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‘East,’ which resulted from the activities and intellectual endeavors of both the Turkish state and the Kurdish elites, has had a long-term impact. As the contemporary history of Turkey has shown, the construction of the ‘East’ as a politicized space has persisted remarkably well both in state discourse and within Kurdish activist circles.

9 True, the Kurdish dissident movement failed to achieve Kurdish independence or political autonomy in Turkey. However, the Turkish state did not obtain a complete victory over the movement. After the Second World War, former Kurdish activists wrote memoirs, and thus projected ‘a point of reference in a long “national” temporality and transmitted the “flame” to future generations’ (Bozarslan 2007: 431). It is was the end of the 1960s that the works of these ‘elders’ allowed a new generation lacking points of reference to find a historic lineage (Bozarslan 2007: 431; Gündoğan 2005: 37-74; Watts 2007: 52-77). The young militants plunged into this ‘revolutionary library’ to find answers to their new questions: the myths of a rich past (Medes, Saladin), a history marked by resistance to power –be it Ottoman or Turkish– and a ‘homogenous’ cultural identity (Strohmeier 2003: 199-203).

10 Some elements of the ‘doctrine’ produced by the ‘elders’ were then re-used to legitimize a ‘national’ struggle with a strong Marxist accent. Whereas the Westernized intellectuals organized around the Khoybun committee in the 1920s and 1930s asserted that Kurds were ‘civilized’ and more ‘modern’ than Turks, the new generation claimed the contrary: Kurds lived in a ‘backward’ region, the ‘East,’ and were victims of ‘traditional exploitation’ (e.g. landowners and religious chiefs) and, particularly, of state policies. Interestingly, state discourse did not change, for Turkish officials continued to perceive the Kurdish question as a matter of regional backwardness. As they had in the 1920s and 1930s, state elites and Kurdish activists in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to a shared production of the ‘East’ as a particular political entity. The present article sheds light on this entity by looking at both the historical context and the dynamics that led to the politicization of the ‘East’ during the Kemalist era.

I. The Relative Autonomy of the Kemalist State

11 The creation of the modern Turkish state in the 1920s has often been described as a ‘race to reform’ (Dumont 1997: 155), with the abolition of the caliphate, banning of the fez, emancipation of women and the adoption of the Latin alphabet, all of which aimed to bury the Ottoman past and bring about a new Turkey. In the end –so the narrative goes– Turkey emerged victorious on the international level after having managed to replace the treaty of Sèvres (1920),4 which was heavily constraining for Turkey, with the treaty of Lausanne (1923). In doing this, the Turkish leaders became their own masters, and masters of their national unity. Guided by an iron fist and legitimized internationally, Kemalist Turkey could, as of then, follow its unstoppable march towards ‘modernity.’ The true picture is somewhat more blurred.

12 First, the Sèvres treaty, and in particular the clauses relating to the creation of Armenian and Kurdish states in the oriental provinces of Anatolia, imposed political and psychological ‘boundaries’ to which the Kemalist leaders had to adapt. Hence, the series of treaties and international accords signed by Turkey after 1919 had important repercussions for the definition of Turkish national identity (İçduygu & Kaygusuz 2004: 26-50). Indeed, the foreign affairs of a state do not only decide the conventions and accords that delineate the ‘community inside’ as opposed to ‘foreigners,’ they also

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secure the boundaries of a particular national identity ‘through a specific concept of “national” security which domesticates a particular identity to be secured’ (İçduygu & Kaygusuz 2004: 29). The Sèvres Treaty was in this sense a decisive turning point; it buried both the Ottomanist and Pan-Turanian projects and limited the new Turkey to a territory where the Turkish and Muslim elements would dominate.

13 Nevertheless, the ‘East’ became the ‘fortress’ of the new Turkish state. As a borderline, the Eastern provinces had to be fully integrated into the state framework in order to face external threats, namely the establishment of an ‘enemy’ Armenian state as well as a Kurdish state ‘at the orders’ of foreign powers (i.e., Great Britain, due to its presence in Iraq as a Mandatory power). These concerns led the Kemalists to try to ‘win’ the Eastern provinces of Anatolia, and at the same time it led to the emergence of a security-based vision of the ‘Eastern’ provinces (Yerasimos 1991: 31).

14 In this sense, the acquisition of the vilayet of Mosul –where Kurds formed the main ‘minority’ group– was essential. If Turkey succeeded in controlling former Ottoman territories where significant Kurdish populations lived, the threat of a Kurdish state would disappear. In the tense context of the Turko-British negotiations over the status of the vilayet of Mosul, the Turkish National Assembly tried to win the hearts of the Kurdish populations by issuing a decree providing for the creation of a local Kurdish Assembly on 7 July 1923. This Turkish initiative also sought to convince the League of Nations of the ‘traditional’ good relations between Turks and Kurds. Although the autonomy suggested for the provinces with Kurdish majorities was limited, the decree nevertheless called for the use of the Kurdish language (Ali 2001-2002: 37). However, once the treaty of Lausanne was signed on 24 July 1923, with sovereignty over the Eastern provinces of Anatolia thus assured, Kemalist leaders set aside all projects for Kurdish autonomy. During the diplomatic negotiations on the future of the vilayet of Mosul, the Turkish representatives emphasized the idea of ‘sameness,’ the ‘shared origin’ of Turks and Kurds, as a pretext to secure Turkish control over this area.

15 In spite of the weakness of the Kurdish nationalist movement in the early 1920s, the threat of Kurdish separatism began to impose itself on the minds of Turkish leaders. The revolt of Sheikh Said of Piran in 1925 (Olson 1989) further fed these fears and nurtured the view of the East as ‘other,’ as simultaneously ‘door’ and ‘fortress’ of the Turkish ‘nation.’5 If the Lausanne Treaty brought a certain stability to Turkey’s borders, the ‘Eastern’ question, seen in a security perspective, was present in Turkish foreign policy throughout the 1920s and 1930s, sometimes creating diplomatic tensions with neighboring states: from Iraq under British Mandate between 1922-1925 (Edmonds 1957: 386-435) to Syria under French mandate between 1920-33 (Mizrahi 2003: 115-149; Tatchjian 2004: 307-347), including Iran during the Kurdish revolt of Ağrı-Dağ between 1927-31 (Olson 1998: 93-95; Tejel Gorgas 2007: 244-261).

16 In addition, the Kemalist regime of the 1920s and 1930s was far from capable of monopolizing the symbolic capital of legitimacy or recognition (Bourdieu 1991: 230). The national culture (Bourdieu 1994: 115), created by legal and linguistic norms and promoted by the new elites, was not shared by all citizens. If Mustafa Kemal did regulate formal political participation effectively, he was less successful in putting an end to alternative bonds (local, ethnic and religious) that engendered competitive channels of collective action, and therefore identity, which partly escaped state control (Brockett 1998: 47).

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17 Indeed, Mustafa Kemal’s Turkey had to face non-violent resistance from its own ‘citizens’ in Kayseri, Erzurum, Maraş (1925) and Bursa (1933), and violent dissent in Rize, Elazığ-Diyarbakır (1925), Ağrı-Dağ (1927-1931), Menemen (1930), and in the region of Dersim (1936-1938).6 In the Eastern provinces the Turkish military was forced to intervene in order to put down no less than 16 uprisings between 1923 and 1938. However, only three revolts (Sheikh Said, Ağrı-Dağ and Dersim) had explicitly Kurdish nationalist claims and were organized by Kurdist committees or individuals. More significantly, the latter three revolts obliged the Turkish state to mobilize thousands of soldiers as well as to spend a significant part of the national budget in order to stamp out the dissent emanating from the Eastern provinces of the country. Still, even these “nationalist” uprisings were interlinked with other motivations, in particular religious and tribal (Bozarslan 1988: 121-136; Bozarslan 1991: 61-80; Bruinessen 1992: 278-305; Kieser 1998: 279-316; Olson 1989; Watts 2000: 5-30).

II. Making the ‘East’

18 Indeed, the Kemalist regime officially labeled these revolts ‘reactionary,’ ‘obscurantist’ and ‘feudal’7 (Bruinessen 1992: 298-299; Bruinessen 1994: 141-170; Jwaideh 2006: 203-211; Olson 1989: 124) Watts 2000: 5-30) resulting from the actions of a few tribal chiefs who were motivated by irrational forces. Turkish elites considered the opposition movements originating from the Eastern provinces illegitimate, as they were seen as representing obstacles to ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’ and thus were open to severe punishment: ‘dissent was to leave; to leave was to betray’ (Salamé 1994: 23).

19 The Turkish regime’s reaction to the rebellion was brutal. The destruction of hundreds of villages8 and the deportation of hundreds of Kurdish nobility towards the Western was legitimized by the press loyal to the regime, which presented Sheikh Said as a ‘bandit’ and his followers as ‘dogs,’ ‘jackals’ or even ‘convinced valets of [British] imperialism’ (Erdoğan 2001-2002: 49-56).9 Furthermore, a campaign of ‘Turkifying’ the Kurdish regions was organized (Aslan 2007: 245-272). The Kurdish language was targeted from 1924 onward with a ban on Kurdish schools, associations and publications (Seal 1995: 238), and use of the terms ‘Kurd’ and ‘Kurdistan’ in scientific discourse was prohibited the same year (Akin 1998-2000: 52). In the linguistic arena, the Kurdish names of villages, mountains and towns were also ‘Turkified’ (Öktem 2004: 7-21; 2009). The suppression of the Kurdish language and culture became, in fact, one of the integral components of the strategy for constructing a Turkish national identity based on uniformity and indivisibility (Beşikçi 1990: 132; Vali 1998: 84; İçduygu, Yılmaz & Soyarık 1999: 194-195).

20 In 1928, the Kemalist regime established the position of General Inspectorate under the leadership of İbrahim Tali, and gave this vali exceptional administrative, political and military power in the Eastern provinces. In the same vein, following the Ağrı-Dağ or Ararat revolt, the regime in Ankara created two new general inspectorates as well as pro-governmental militias, and promulgated a new law (No. 2237, 5 May 1932) which provided for the deportation of parts of the Kurdish population of the Eastern vilayets to the western vilayets (Azizan 1934).

21 The virulence of Kemalist policies in the Eastern provinces contrasts, however, with the relatively moderate positions held by the ‘dissidents’ at the time. For example, after the uprising of 1925, Ankara sent a delegate to the rebel chiefs to discuss their demands.

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Despite state propaganda about the ‘obscurantist’ character of the insurgents, the demands put forth did not present any serious danger to the foundations of the young republic: general amnesty for the prisoners engaged in the uprising of 1925, the right of return to their homes, exemption from taxes of the agricultural populations, and the cancellation of the decree imposing disarmament on the Kurds who, in the case of war, would be forced to provide voluntary corps not exceeding 40 percent of the population. 10 It is worth mentioning that the nationalist committee Azadî, which was responsible for the organization of the Kurdish uprising, had presented moderate grievances to the Kemalist authorities before the revolt erupted, such as minority rights that already applied to Christians and the nomination of government officials of Kurdish origin in the Eastern provinces (Olson 1989: 43-45).

22 It should also be noted at the same time that within the Turkish administration, the Kemalist cadres did not all believe in the same approach for resolving the question of the ‘Eastern vilayets.’ Indeed, after having tried to ‘pacify’ Eastern Turkey through coercion, the Inspector General İbrahim Tali came to the conclusion, in accord with certain Kurdish deputies, that a change of attitude was needed to obtain the definite appeasement of these regions. At the end of October 1928, Tali traveled to Ankara to explain his program. He advocated putting in place a system of administrative autonomy and decentralization that was to rely on the collaboration of the Kurdish leadership. Thus, the Inspector General considered it possible to promote a purely regional military recruitment and to give the majority of public service jobs to inhabitants of the regions concerned. Finally, Tali argued for ‘sensitivity’ in assimilating the Kurds, levying taxes on them, and applying ‘republican’ laws.11

23 In order to justify this reversal in Ankara’s policies towards the Eastern provinces, İ brahim Tali pointed out that, either way, taxes were being collected ‘only with great difficulty from the centers and the countryside refused to pay them.’ Moreover, conscription only fed the ranks of deserters who, incidentally, went to join the rebels in the mountains, thus increasing their technical expertise. Finally, far from growing closer to the government of Ankara, it was to neighboring countries (Iraq, Iran and Syria) that ‘the Kurds of Turkey were turning and it is abroad that they asked for help.’ 12 İbrahim Tali’s appeals were not listened to. What is more, a robust program of ‘’ was adopted and, ‘to help and maybe oversee the Inspector General, whose liberalism seemed excessive, General Ali Fuat Paşa, who had the full trust of Gazi and the General Staff, was named at the head of the Army Corps of Diyarbakır.’13

24 The collection of exceptional measures implemented against thousands of Kurds, whether or not they were directly implicated in the armed movements,14 contributed to the delimitation of a non-physical ‘border’ separating the West from the East, which from then on was seen from both sides of the ‘border’ as a specific region portrayed as possessing a homogeneity that did not really exist. The ‘East’ became a territory of refuge for an intrinsically counter-revolutionary popular culture. In this respect, Kurdish identity (language, social structures, attachment to religious brotherhoods) was held forth as a symbol of otherness and politicized by the state itself.15 In other words, following Suaud’s analysis of the Vendée, the ‘East’ and ‘its”’ overlapping ‘Kurdishness’ began to symbolize what the Turkish elites deemed ‘illegitimate on the political, economic, social and cultural levels’ (Suaud 1997: 8).

25 The inhabitants of the ‘East’ were henceforth perceived by the Kemalist cadres and the officials on the ground through a double prism: on the one hand, Kurds were

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stigmatized as ‘backward,’ having remained on the sidelines of civilization; on the other hand, they were also seen as ‘Turkish’ citizens who, with a bit of help, could rejoin the path of progress (Yeğen 1996: 216-229). Thus, the Turkish Hearths16 [Türk Ocakları] were given the mission, after the Sheikh Said revolt, to ‘make Turkish’17 the inhabitants of the Eastern provinces (Aslan 2008).

26 To do this, the cadres of the Hearths thought that one first had to ‘know’ the population; they took an interest in the Kurdish question and had works concerning the Kurds translated. Some ‘researchers’ went further, and wrote reports on the Kurds without digging deeper to get to know the Eastern populations. However, the Turkish officials posted to the Eastern provinces organized what Suaud, writing on the expertise of French officials sent to Vendée, calls a ‘unified, stigmatized and naturalized image’ (Suaud 1997: 9) of ‘the Kurd.’ In so doing, state elites contributed to the construction of a collective social representation of the Kurdish identity. For example, in a declaration to the newspaper Cumhuriyet in 1930, Othman Mazhar (Kansu) emphasized the impossibility of the government’s civilizing task in the ‘East’ as he was convinced that it was impossible ‘to destroy the black soul, that crass sensibility, that blood-thirsty instinct, among the Kurdish masses.’18

III. Contradictions within the State

27 Othman Mazhar’s declarations suggest that despite the regime’s official attachment to ‘revolutionism’ –in other words, the desire to pursue reforms regardless of the costs– a portion of the Turkish officials considered, at least unconsciously, the ‘East’ and its inhabitants as intrinsically refractory and difficult to drive towards ‘civilization.’ Faced with these ‘insurmountable’ obstacles, certain segments of the Turkish state distanced themselves from the Kemalist regime’s ‘modernization’ program for the Eastern provinces, this ‘other’ territory. Put in other words, in some cases state employees and representatives in Eastern provinces ‘betrayed’ the ideological commitment and sought an accommodation to the prevailing [backward] social ‘reality.’ The Kemalist state was thus, as are most states, a site of contradiction between the two elements that shaped its image (of a dominant and autonomous entity) and practices (or the routine performance of state actors and agencies) (Migdal 2001: 16-23).

28 In this respect, the official report signed by Abeddin Özmen, the Interior Ministry’s inspector posted to the Eastern provinces during the Dersim revolt (1936-1938), sheds some light on the contradictions in the state’s administration between the openly expressed objectives and the means it gave itself to achieve them. Abeddin Özmen suggested that the Kurd, ‘whatever the reason may be, is not used to regular government, neither the reality nor the concept.’ For a Kurd, he argued, ‘the most powerful person is the chief of the tribe, the village chief, the man who owns the fields in which he works and the cattle which he rears.’19 In this brief ‘ethnographic’ description, we again find the elements mentioned above: the backward Kurd associated with the rural world, and the ‘mountain Turk,’ a neologism invented to designate the Kurds in the 1930s and linked ‘naturally’ to reactionary [irtica] chiefs (Akin 1998/2000: 51-60; Nezan 1978: 104-105; Olson 1989: 123-125). In this way, the inspector affirms that the region he administers ‘has no resemblance to other parts of the country’ and that the regime should therefore energetically apply itself to finding a ‘solution to the problem of assimilation.’

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29 However, Abbedin Özmen ‘painfully’ regrets Ankara’s policy towards the officials sent to the ‘East.’ Firstly, officials in the Western vilayets, ‘whose removal would be necessary [due to their poor engagement and even some irregular activities], are sent to the Eastern vilayets.’20 The result of this lack of rigor on behalf of the government was that the Eastern citizens did not trust the state. Secondly, for Özmen, the state was not really interested in the mission on which the agents of the state work. State officials were obliged to work in very difficult conditions in the Eastern provinces: lack of offices or official buildings; lack of housing and schools for the children of officials.21 In the face of this ‘hard situation,’ some state employees showed little enthusiasm in their job. In summary, the consequence of this negligence on the part of the government in Ankara was that the ‘civilizational’ mission of the Kemalist project in the Eastern provinces could not be fully accomplished.

30 The concerns of this zealous Turkish official are confirmed by other data. Indeed, the geographical spread of the Millet Mektepleri [Schools of the Nation], which were designed to diffuse the new Latin alphabet to the Turkish population, illustrates the disinvestment of the state in the Eastern provinces with effects –such as the failure of the cultural assimilation policy in the years 1920-1930– that contradict the official Turkish government propaganda. Between 1928 and 1935, the best equipped administrative region was Marmara, which was home to 31.1 percent of the schools between 1928 and 1935 (a third of which were in the vilayet of Istanbul), whilst southeast Anatolia comes in last with 2.8 percent. As Birol Çaymaz and Emmanuel Szurek deduce, this imbalance draws ‘the political territory of access to knowledge –a territory which marginalizes Eastern Anatolia and the Southeast, the location of the Kurdish revolts in the 1920s and the areas most reluctant to accept the imposition of the republican order’ (Çaymaz and Szurek 2007: § 71).

31 This state of affairs confirms Reşat Kasaba’s accounts of the single-party period. According to Kasaba, in the 1920-1930s, the Turkish state was still in the making, and although it tried to deal with all social and political challenges that emerged, its policies were not always ‘coherent or consistent’ (Kasaba 2000: 4). To make things more complicated, some of these challenges did not arise in Turkey itself but abroad. During the 1920s-1940s, Kurdish rights were pursued not only in Turkey but also in consulates and offices in Germany, France, Great Britain, Iran, Italy, Switzerland, the United States of America, and especially in Syria and Lebanon (Rondot 1946; 1949; Tejel Gorgas: 148-166). In spite of the limited results of this activity, the Turkish state was obliged to react to those challenges and take into consideration an alternative discourse on the ‘Eastern question.’

IV. Voices of Dissent

32 Social scientists have underlined that the state is not only embodied in the ‘objective’ form of structures but also in the ‘subjective’ form of mental structures, ‘schemes of perception and thought’ (Bourdieu 1994: 107). As portrayed in a wide range of analyses, the state –often depicted as one monolithic entity– creates mental structures and imposes fundamental visions, contributing to the construction of what is designated as ‘national identity’ through institutions such as school and the army. The state is also seen as powerful enough to construct identities in order to attain certain objectives: return national identity to the forefront, reconfigure national identity, nationalize

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national identity, and assimilate ‘minorities’ (Norman 2004: 133-135). In the end, in these analyses, we again find the idea that the state is autonomous from society and is situated in the ‘center’ of the system, whereas society, a passive receptor, is situated on its ‘periphery’ (Shils 1975).

33 In contrast to this vision, I suggest that if the state can count on a whole range of institutional tools to achieve the ‘nationalization of citizens,’ dissenting groups can also work to create an antagonistic social representation (Moscovici 1996), and thus begin to compete on the symbolic level as well. The fight for hegemony between the state and dissident movements (ethnic, feminist, ecologist, etc.) can be more or less equal, despite an inequity in the distribution of resources clearly favoring the former (Aslan 2008; Belge 2008; Watts 2004: 121-147). The present case demonstrates that some movements can participate in shaping a political space in spite of their relative ‘weakness’ in a particular moment.

34 After the Sheikh Said insurrection was crushed in 1925, members of Kurdish clubs based in Istanbul were forced into exile, fleeing repression by the new Turkish regime. While some of them found refuge in Iraq, others looked for the protection of France in the Levant. Some exiled Kurdish intellectuals worked to reorganize the Kurdish associations in the Lebanese town Bihamdun in 1927.22 The result of these efforts, the Khoybun League, represented the realization of the ‘unnatural marriage’ between, on the one hand, a westernized intelligentsia, and on the other hand, the representatives of the Kurdish nobility: aghas, sheikhs and tribal chiefs.23

35 The Khoybun League especially invested in political propaganda24 and political contacts, for the most part unofficial, both with state actors (Iran, France, Great Britain, Italy, USSR), and non-state actors (the Armenian movements, and Turkish opposition members25). In doing so, the Khoybun managed to insert itself, with the help of France, into the system of politico-military alliances, and thanks to this became an important regional actor during, for example, the revolt of Ararat.

36 At the same time, as Hamit Bozarslan emphasizes, due to the limitation of their forces, the Kurdish elites in exile were forced to be ‘at the same time the political and the military leadership of the nationalist revolts and the producer of their political and ideological discourse’ (Bozarslan 2001: 58). The Khoybun’s propaganda was principally aimed at in Syria to dissuade them from listening to the Turkish promises of amnesty; it varied, however, as the themes put forth and the language used changed depending on the audience.

37 The early Kurdish nationalists’ background was not very different from the Turkish one. Like their Turkish counterparts, the leaders of the Khoybun had been educated in modern Ottoman schools and associations in Istanbul, where they expressed their wish to lead the Kurds toward western civilization and declared the necessity of modernizing Kurdish society ‘from the top-down.’ However, once the Kurds failed to obtain their independence in the aftermath of the First World War, Kurdish activists were forced to adapt their political and ideological discourse to different targets.

38 This is well illustrated by a letter by Sureya Bedir Khan to Kamuran Bedir Khan and intercepted by the General Security as Sureya Bedir Khan was preparing the publication of a brochure entitled ‘The Kurdish question, its origins and its causes.’ He explains to his brother that ‘the brochure in the will deal with the weakening of the Aryan race […].’ In order to counter this danger, there should be an

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‘Aryan Confederation’ uniting the Kurds, Armenians and Persians, presided by Iran. However, the Arab brochure was to deal with ‘our numerous services rendered to the Islamic and Arab causes.’ Finally, the French brochure would deal with ‘the history of our revolutions and insurrections […] foreigners’ opinions of us and the duties incumbent on civilized Europe.’26

39 Likewise, and despite the intellectual baggage heavily saturated with the ideals of modernization and secularization, the Khoybun didn’t hesitate to use religious terminology to mobilize tribes and brotherhoods from the Eastern provinces in their call for revolution against the Turkish regime, which they depicted as endangering ‘our religion and the honor of the Kurdish nation.’ Thus, the Khoybun looked to the Qur’an to justify the revolution: ‘God, source of glory, did he not say to us in the Qur’an: Walk for Justice, you will find me with you? Let us not fear the spilling of our blood for the religion, the nation and the safeguard of our honor, with the firm conviction that God is on our side.’27 Clearly, the Kurdish nationalist movement was not operating in a vacuum. As the Azadî committee did during the Sheikh Said revolt, Khoybun leaders attempted to mobilize followers and exercise power in arenas in which other social forces (sheikhs, aghas and tribal chiefs) were doing the same.

V. The Interactive Shaping of Social Representations

40 The Khoybun League’s discourse did not build itself autonomously. It also thought of itself as an opposition to the exterior enemies and became part of a mirror effect, in a dynamic relationship with the other, the Turk.

41 If at the beginning of the Turkish Republic Kemalist policies regarding the Kurdish populations caused little reaction on the part of the Kurdish elites,28 the physical and symbolic violence29 that followed the Sheikh Said revolt in 1925 changed things. In a complex interaction with the physical and symbolic violence of the Turkish state, Kurdish nationalists started to elaborate an equally virulent discourse: ‘We repeat, the struggle will be hard, bloody; but IT WILL END ONLY WITH THE LAST BULLET AND THE LAST KURD’ (Hoyboun 1928: 41).

42 While qualified Kurdism as ‘feudal’ and ‘reactionary,’ Kurdish intellectuals affirmed that the Kurdish nation was civilized, and that it was the Turks, ‘Mongols,’ who belonged to the ‘barbaric’ nations (Bozarslan 2001: 60). In the same way, while the Kurdish periodicals of the lamented the backwardness of the Kurds, deploring in particular the plight of (Klein 2001: 25-51), Khoybun activists claimed that Kurdish women had more freedom than their female counterparts in the Middle East.

43 Khoybun members worked hard to paint the Turks as ‘barbarians’ and ‘assassins of Christians,’ and also to demonstrate that the Kurds under Turkish rule found themselves in the role of victim, becoming a ‘martyr nation,’ with statistics to prove it (Hoyboun 1928: 62-68; Chirguh 1930: 49-52). In the face of Turkish policy, the Khoybun’s discourse clearly aimed to create boundaries between ‘us’ (the Kurds) and ‘them’ (the Turks); a necessary step in any conflict before being able to construct a ‘political entity.’ The elaboration of boundaries between two groups is a complex process, but once they exist, they become part of the usual arsenal for political actors. While the

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boundary is ‘activated,’ it constitutes, ‘coupled with the relations that are attached to it, a social identity’ (Tilly & Tarrow 2008: 138).

44 Nevertheless, if these Kurdish intellectuals were responding to a certain extent to the civilizational syntax elaborated by the Turkish elite in the 1930s, ‘Turkishness’ was also constructed in relation to the ‘others’ by state elites. In other words, the image of the ‘backward’ Kurd helped to construct Turkish identity as the ‘new Turk,’ civilized and modern. The opposition between Turkish and Kurdish nationalism compelled both elites to continually adapt their discourse in contrast to their ‘enemy.’ Hence, a kind of mimicry, in a double sense, was established between the ‘dominant’ (the Turkish state) and the ‘oppressed’ (the Kurdish dissent movement).

VI. The Struggle for Discursive Legitimacy

45 Anatolian people’s resistance to state policies, along with the cultural diversity of Turkey and the dissenting voices of the Kurdish nationalists, drove Turkish elites to look for a ‘scientific’ legitimacy for their project of homogenizing and civilizing the nation. Like their European and Eastern counterparts, Turkish ideologues turned in particular to the past to nourish the new state discourse. The ‘reform’ of history in Turkey began in 1930 with the publication of The General Themes of Turkish History, a work that looks in particular at prehistory and ancient history, and was aimed at school children. In 1931, the History Commission was replaced by the Committee for the Study on Turkish History, controlled by Mustafa Kemal’s followers, who organized the first Congress on Turkish History in Ankara in July 1932. The aim of the congress was indeed to legitimize the new thesis on the ‘Turkish’ origin of all civilizations, and therefore, all languages and peoples, including the Kurds. In order to support the Kemalist ideologues’ claims with ‘scientific proof,’ the historical theses were accompanied by linguistic arguments between 1932-35. These arguments later became part of the ‘Sun- Language Theory’ (1936) which reaffirmed the claims of the new Turkish history: the Turkish origin of all languages and all civilizations in the world (Aytürk 2004: 1-25). The ‘Sun-Language Theory’ did not gain the sympathy of all Turkish scholars. However, the real criticism arose not in Turkey, but in Syria, where the Khoybun’s members pursued their ‘international advocacy.’

46 While part of the nationalist propaganda of the Khoybun League addressed the Kurds in Syria and Turkey, the larger effort was directed towards the superrecipient (Copeaux 1997: 34): the potential political and military allies –Great Britain, France, Iran and to a lesser extent the Arabs– and the political enemy par excellence, Kemalist Turkey. The intellectual work of Khoybun, however, changed from the early 1930s onward for two reasons. First, the failure of the Ağrı-Dağ revolt (1927-1931) demonstrated the uselessness of sporadic revolts against Turkey without the support of either Great Britain or France. Second, the Kemalist projects for the reform of Turkish history and language posed new challenges for Kurdish identity, whose very existence in Turkey was denied.

47 These two factors drove the Bedir Khan brothers to change their strategy, abandoning the ‘sword’ for the ‘pen.’ The leaders of the Khoybun, in particular the two Bedir Khan brothers Celadet and Kamuran, argued that there was an urgent need to consolidate the feeling of belongingness in the Kurdish community, by restoring the Kurdish language, developing teaching in Kurdish, and ensuring the rebirth of popular

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literature. Supported by French officers, the Bedir Khan brothers invested in the publication of cultural journals30 in order to create ‘real Kurds’ who knew their language and past (Tejel Gorgas 2007: 267-307). This strategic reversal of the Kurdish ideologues also brought about a change in the tone and objectives of the brochures elaborated after the defeat of the Ağrı-Dağ revolt. The warrior discourse developed between 1928 and 1931 by the Khoybun was replaced by ‘scientific’ arguments looking to refute the ‘scientific’ theses produced by the government in Ankara and the projects of cultural assimilation regarding the Kurds. Hence, the Kurdish intellectuals worked to ‘prove’ the existence of Kurds as a specific ethno-linguistic group, and to present the Kurdish inhabitants of the ‘East’ as a culturally homogenous region.

48 The best example of a response to Kemalist arguments on Turkish history and language is a 1933 document of some fifty pages by Celadet Bedir Khan entitled ‘Open letter to Mustafa Kemal, President of the Republic of Turkey.’ The document is presented as a warning to Kurds who accept the offer of amnesty by the Turkish government in 1932, but in fact the largest part of the text is dedicated to refuting the Kemalist theses on the Kurdish language. Celadet Bedir Khan states that the Kurdish language is not a dialect of Turkish, and compares grammars in order to demonstrate that Kurdish is indeed an Indo-European language. Bedir Khan even goes so far as to try to demonstrate the proximity between German and Kurdish to affirm the ‘superiority’ of the latter in comparison with Turkish (Bedir Khan 1973: 32-41).

49 But Kurdish intellectuals did not just invest in the linguistic debate with the purpose of claiming Kurdish uniqueness; they also became ‘explorers of the imaginary’ in order to provide to the Kurdish ‘nation’ myths and symbols that would allow it, on the one hand, to resemble other nations in the world, and on the other hand, to create internal cohesion. Among the founding myths, we can highlight those of Newroz (Kurdish new year, which corresponds to the beginning of Spring, 21 March),31 the ‘national’ character of the story Mem û Zîn written by Ahmedê Khanî in the 17 th Century (Bruinessen 2003: 40-57), and the drawing of historical lines between the Kurds and their ‘ancestors’ the Medes, founders of an empire in the West of present-day Iran.

VII. Dealing with Dissenting Voices

50 The amnesty offered by the Turkish government to the Kurdish dissidents in 1932 came as surprise. Hamit Bozarslan (2006: 123) highlights the apparent paradox that the openings came at a time when the Kemalist regime seemed to be consolidating its position following the long period of turbulence that began with the effects of the world economic crisis in 1929 and the demonstrations in favor of the outlawed Liberal Party, continuing with the ‘incident’ of Menemen in 1930 and the final phase of the Kurdish revolt around Ağrı-Dağ between 1930-31 (Nouri Pacha 1986).

51 But can we consider the amnesty of 1932 a real opening towards the Kurdish nationalist movement? The violent repression of the last holdouts of the Kurdish rebels around the region of Ağrı-Dağ in 1932, the deportation law of May 1932 which particularly affected the population of Eastern Turkey, and the nationalist theses defended during the first history congress that same year do not make it seem like the Kemalist regime was seriously interested in changing its policy towards the ‘East.’ Rather, the Turkish representatives’ overtures towards Kurdish elites between 1932 and 1935 can be understood as Ankara’s desire to quiet or co-opt dissenting voices that had made

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themselves heard abroad, preventing the consolidation of the Turkish nationalist claims as a hegemonic ideology as much with the recipients as with superrecipients: embassies, consulates, and Orientalist libraries.32 In this sense, Ankara’s new policy was quite successful.

52 Born in Maden, Şükrü Mehmed Sekban (1881-1960) taught medicine in Istanbul and joined the association Kürdistan Teali Cemiyeti. In the Ottoman capital, Sekban became a brilliant orator and was appreciated by the young Kurdish students there ( 1991: 34). With the arrival of the Turkish Republic, he took refuge in Iraq and became the representative of the Khoybun in Baghdad. In a radical reversal, Sekban later left Iraq and published a piece in which he criticized his former companions and attacked the basis of the Kurdish nationalist doctrine. In it, Sekban disputes the Aryan origins of the Kurds, stating that Turks and Kurds are of the ‘same race,’ the ‘Turanian’ family (Sekban 1933: 27, 36), and invites the Kurds to follow the path Mustafa Kemal traced for them in order to find ‘peace of mind and material prosperity’ (Sekban 1933: 38). Shortly after the publication of his work ‘The Kurdish Question’ (1933), Ankara gave him an amnesty.

53 Another case of the Kemalist regime co-opting members of the Kurdish opposition was that of Massoud Fany. Originally from Sulaymaniya, Massoud Fany was an Ottoman official in the province of Adana. Anti-Kemalist until the end of the 1920s, he found protection in Syria, where he applied for a government grant to study in France. In spite of his links with the Kurdish movement in Syria,33 he wrote a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne in 1933 where he used arguments similar to those put forward by Mehmed Sekban the same year. Whilst reaffirming several times that the origins of the Kurds were not clear, Fany came to the conclusion that the Kurds were Turanian like the Turks (Fany 1933: 91). The author also showed himself to be heavily critical of the Kurdish movement, who were, according to Fany, controlled by the British, and dedicated the last chapter of his thesis to openly attacking the Khoybun League. Like Sekban, Massoud Fany received an amnesty and returned to Turkey.

54 The two motors of the Kurdish nationalist movement in the Levant, Celadet and Kamuran Bedir Khan, were also contacted by Turkish representatives. In 1932, the Turkish Consul in Beirut met Kamuran Bedir Khan in private in a ‘friend’s house,’ after six ‘urgent invitations.’34 Despite the failed first attempt, Turkish officials remained particularly interested in the intellectual work of the Bedir Khan brothers and tried to contact them again several times in order to neutralize their symbolic dissent.35

55 Thus, through the intermediary of the Turkish consul in Beirut, Şükri Bey –head of General Security in Ankara and president of the Turkish delegation on the Permanent mission of borders based in Damascus– met Celadet Bedir Khan in 1935. Significantly, during their confidential meeting at the General Consulate of Turkey, Şükrü Mehmed Sekban’s and Massoud Fany’s theses were among the central themes of the discussion. After Şükri Bey lauded the works of Şükrü Mehmed Sekban, Celadet curtly responded: ‘If you are counting on these people you are going down the wrong road; furthermore, if you really thought they were useful and disinterested, you would be speaking to them and not to me.’36 Despite the various impasses in a rather tense discussion, numerous propositions for a return to Turkey were apparently made to Celadet Bedir Khan.

56 After this meeting, amnesty offers by the Turkish representatives to the Bedir Khan brothers stopped, probably for two reasons. First, thanks to the violent suppression of

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the Dersim revolt (1936-1938), Turkey was not confronted with an organized movement of dissent in the Eastern vilayets until the 1960s and 1970s (Gündoğan 2005; Watts 2007: 52-77). Secondly, the journal Hawar ceased publication between 1935 and 1941 due to financial reasons. Kurdish intellectuals’ polemical interpretations (Licata, Klein & Van der Linden 2006: 56-57) of the language and history of the Eastern vilayets thus ceased to impair the hegemonic paradigm of the Kemalist elites.

Conclusions

57 While traditional accounts on Atatürk’s Turkey approach the state as a powerful and centralized apparatus, this article suggests, on the contrary, that Turkey was still a state in the making and lacked a consistent policy in the face of the multiple social and political challenges that emerged in the 1920 and 1930s. While the Kemalist regime presented itself as highly ideological and committed to ‘revolutionism,’ the reality was more complex.

58 First, the international conjuncture of the interwar years led Turkish authorities to seek accommodation between their principles and the diplomatic necessity of accepting the ‘loss’ of the Turanian territories. Second, if the state elites aspired to cultural hegemony through nationalizing the bodies and perceptions of the ‘Turkish’ populations, this goal was jeopardized both by the everyday practices of the state apparatus and by the construction, albeit unconscious, of ‘areas of dissidence,’ namely the ‘East,’ by the regime itself. In other words, whilst Kemalist ideologists considered the Kurds as ethnic Turks and the East as a part of the motherland, they also viewed the Eastern populations as anomalous and naturally resistant to modernity and civilization. In so doing, they played a decisive role in the formation of a distinct cultural sphere that overlapped imperfectly with a geographical space.

59 Thirdly, not only did the Turkish state have to face different styles of everyday resistance (survival of religious brotherhoods and tribal bonds, armed revolts, and use of Kurdish language) within its borders; it also had to face challenges from places such as Syria and Lebanon, where some Kurdish intellectuals had found protection. Thus, the advantages of the contemporary transnational activism that offers ethnic groups and diasporas important opportunities to become actors in the international arena are not a completely new phenomenon. The French Mandate in the Levant allowed Kurdish activists to maintain relations with their ‘home’: Kemalist authorities and Kurdish communities in Turkey. The Kurdish movement in Syria succeeded in creating a transnational web of relations with different actors, including foreign governments, opposition groups, missionaries, journalists and Western scholars. In so doing, Kurdish activists in Syria challenged not only Turkish state authority but also its legitimacy.

60 Kurdish discourse was, nonetheless, not built autonomously. It developed in opposition to the other, the Turk, and became part of a mirror effect, in a dynamic relationship where both sides contributed, albeit with different goals, to a shared political production of ‘the East’ as a unique social and cultural sphere. All in all, the study of the Kemalist period through the lens of the ‘state-society’ approach advanced by scholars like Joel Migdal (2001), Timothy Mitchell (1991: 77-96) or Tamir Moustafa (2000: 3-22) proves to be extremely useful in accounting for the dynamic shaping and inter-shaping of different social and political actors on the one hand, and the question of how spaces become politicized as the result of the struggle of those actors, on the other.

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NOTES

1. Between 1793-1796, the region of Vendée in Western France saw the emergence of several counter-revolutionary movements in which ‘conservative’ elements (catholic church representatives and local nobility) played an important part. The cause was the decision of the Convention of 23 February 1793 to conscript 300,000 men. 2. For a similar argument, but applied to Kurdish activism in Western countries since the 1980s, see Watts 2004: 121-147. 3. Politicization is understood here as the social production of politics, of its stakes, rules, and representations (Lagroye 2003). 4. The Treaty of Sèvres provided for, inter alia, the creation of an Armenian State in what is now north-east Turkey, as well as the establishment of a Kurdish state in the south-east of Turkey, which could later join the former vilayet [province] of Mosul in northern Iraq. The treaty also imposed the loss of Ottoman sovereignty over the Straits. 5. Preface by the President of the Turkish Republic, Cemal Gürsel, to the work of M. Şerif Firat, Doğu Illeri ve Varto Tarihi (1961). Quoted by Bozarslan 1988: 124. 6. For an analysis of collective public protests during the Kemalist period, in particular those with religious characteristics, see Brockett 1998: 44-65. 7. Terms used by in his political memoires, Siyasi Hatıralar (1952). Quoted by Bozarslan 1988: 124. 8. The very official Turkish newspaper, Milliyet, in 1930 reported that ‘200 villages around Ercish have been destroyed. Particularly in Pantos, no village remains.’ Milliyet, 16 July 1930. 9. For an analysis of the process of ‘animalization’ of certain groups or individuals in order to legitimize physical violence, see Burgat 1999: 49-62. 10. CADN, Fonds Ankara, n° 92. Consulate of France (Tauris) to Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Paris). Tauris, 28 May 1926. 11. CADN, Fonds Beyrouth, n° 1055. Consulate of France (Adana) to Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Paris). Adana, 30 June 1930. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. An ‘unhappy Kurdish chief’ apparently told the French authorities: ‘If the government had only punished those guilty after the Sheikh Said affair, the Kurds would have submitted, but the men in Ankara massacred innocent people; it’s now a fight to the death between them and us.’ CADN, Fonds Beyrouth, Cabinet Politique, n° 1054. Information n° 881/51. Beirut, 6 October 1927. 15. For a similar argument, see the study of the Palestinian case in Israel (Kemp 2004: 73-98). 16. Students from the Military Medical School and Civil Service School, as well as some intellectuals, established the first Turkish Hearths in 1912. Their aim was to advance the cultural, educational and economical level of Turks and to strengthen their Turkish ‘common identity’. During the Kemalist period, a great number of branches were opened in Turkey and abroad where lectures and courses about Turkish nationalism were organized (Üstel 1997). 17. PRO, FO 371/14579/E2678/44. Travel notes taken by W.S. Edmonds to A. Henderson, Istanbul, 21 May 1930. 18. Cited by Bozarslan 2006:125. 19. PRO, FO 371/34977/E3090/65. Report annexed to the call of the National Khoybun League to his Excellence Churchill, President of the Council of Ministers of his British Majesty. Damascus, 12 March 1943. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid.

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22. Among the participants to this congress were: Celadet Bedir Khan, Kamuran Bedir Khan, Memduh Selim, Mustafa Şahin of Barazi, Fehmi Licî, Sheikh Mehdi (the brother of Sheikh Said), Karim Suleymani, Emin Agha of Raman, Haco Agha of Heverkan and Khurşid bey (Soran 1992: 18). 23. For analyses of Kurdish nationalism in the late Ottoman era, see Janet Klein (2002) and Hakan Özoğlu (2004). 24. In addition to written propaganda (pamphlets, posters, etc.) in several languages, the members of the Khoybun used techniques such as short propaganda films and records with songs calling for anti-Kemalist revolution. CADN, Fonds Beyrouth, Cabinet Politique, n° 1055. General Security. Beirut, 12 April 1930; CADN, Fonds Beyrouth, Cabinet Politique, n° 571. General Security. Beirut, 25 November 1936; respectively. 25. The Committee of the Holy Revolution, which aimed to restore the caliphate in Turkey, and the Armenian party Tashnak, created links to the Khoybun committee between 1927-1928. The former minister of the interior Muhammad Ali Bey declared himself in favor of giving autonomy to the Kurds and the Armenians in the framework of a confederation reuniting the three people. However, the alliance between the three groups failed. CADN, Fonds Beyrouth, Cabinet Politique, n° 1055. Letter by Muhammad Ali Bey to Radi Azmi Bey. Paris, 11 February 1928. 26. CADN, Fonds Beyrouth, Cabinet Politique, n° 1055. General Security. Information n° 1985. Beirut, 22 August 1930. 27. CADN, Fonds Beyrouth, Cabinet Politique, n° 1055. Pamphlet from the Khoybun committee (16 June 1932). Civil service. Aleppo, 23 May 1933. 28. An exception is Şükrü Mehmed Sekban, a member of the Kurdish Committee of Istanbul, exiled in Iraq until the end of the 1920s, as evidenced by a letter titled ‘What do the Kurds want from the Turks?’ (Kürdler Türkler’den ne istiyorlar), which sent to the (ethnic Kurdish) minister Fevzi Pirinççizade of Diyarbakır in 1923. See the letter edited by Bayrak 1994: 26-39. 29. , Justice Minister in 1930, asserted that ‘Turks are the only masters and owners of this country. Those who are not of pure Turkish stock have only one right in this country, the right to be servants and slaves.’ Milliyet, 19 September 1930. 30. Between 1932 and 1946, Celadet and Kamuran Bedir Khan edited two bilingual French- Kurdish revues (Hawar, 1932-1943, and Roja Nû, 1943-1946) each with a supplement in Kurdish (Ronahî, 1942-1945, and Stêr, 1944-1945, respectively). The two brothers also wrote 17 workbooks on topics such as the Kurdish alphabet and religious lessons in Kurdish. 31. Created by the Kürdistan Teali Cemiyeti at the end of the 1910s, the Khoybun renewed this myth of Persian origin, especially during the 1930s. 32. See the members’ list of Hawar in 1933 in CADN, Fonds Beyrouth, Cabinet Politique, 1055. Note on Hawar. Damascus, 4 April 1933. 33. It’s worth noting that even during his scholarship in France, he continued to receive the Kurdish journal Hawar, edited by Celadet Bedir Khan. Ibid. 34. IKP, FONDS RONDOT, Meeting between the Turkish Consul and Kamuran Bedir Khan. Beirut, 8 December 1932. 35. Giving in a second time to the requests by the Consul of Turkey, Kamuran Bedir Khan accepted to meet this official again on 5 January 1933. After this meeting, the ‘Turks spread the news in the eastern provinces that’ the Bedir Khan Brothers had rallied to Turkey and would be returning to the country. CADN, Fonds Beyrouth, Cabinet Politique. General Security. Beirut, 18 January 1933. 36. IKP, FONDS RONDOT, Conversation between Celadet Bedir Khan and the Turks. Damascus, 3 July 1935.

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ABSTRACTS

While traditional accounts of Atatürk’s Turkey approach the state as a powerful and centralized apparatus, this article suggests, on the contrary, that Turkey was still a state in the making and lacked a consistent policy in the face of the multiple social and political challenges that emerged in the 1920 and 1930s. Concretely, the article suggests that the Turkish regime’s response to contestation was to put in place extremely violent policies concerning the inhabitants of the Eastern provinces, in particular. In so doing, it paradoxically contributed to the creation of a specific ‘territorial’ and ‘cultural’ entity: ‘the East.’ It also argues that despite Kemalist elites’ strong ideological commitment, Turkish authorities were obliged to take into consideration the dissenting discourses elaborated by Kurdish intellectuals who claimed the existence of a Kurdish region in Eastern Anatolia. In that respect, and based on a historical approach, the article analyzes the Kemalist period through the lens of the interaction between the Turkish state and the Kurdish movement in order show how cultural, political, and religious spaces are constructed, reshaped, and eventually politicized as an outcome of the struggle between the state and some segments of a given society.

INDEX

Keywords: contest, cultural sphere, Eastern Turkey, Kurds, politicization, space, state Mots-clés: espace, Etat, Kurdes, politisation, sphère culturelle, Turquie de l’Est

AUTHOR

JORDI TEJEL GORGAS Jordi Tejel Gorgas is a historian and lecturer in the Department of Contemporary History, Fribourg University, Switzerland. [email protected]

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Crafting Space, Making People: The Spatial Design of Nation in Modern Turkey

Joost Jongerden

Introduction

This article is concerned with the contemporary expression of a particular form of nation-building and identity politics, namely the molding of state-society relations and Turkishness through spatial means. Two cases will be discussed, the first focusing on plans for the reconstruction of physical space, in particular the design of villages and rural settlement patterns, the second on the attachment of values and meaning given to space by means of naming practices, in particular the naming and renaming of settlements and public spaces in urban environments. While the first case has an emphasis on the construction of physical space, the second focuses mainly on discursive space. The ultimate aim of these spatial practices, it will be argued, is the construction of a material and discursive environment contributing to the engineering of lived experience, expressed in the 1930s by the architect Abdullah Ziya in terms of the nationalist need to construct villages in such a way that their inhabitants ‘talk, dress and live like Turks’ (Ziya 1933).1 Spatial politics have received considerable attention in Turkish and Kurdish studies, though mainly in the form of a treatment of resettlement politics (which includes population exchanges). Karpat and Ari have argued that resettlement gave Anatolia its Turkish imprint (Karpat 1985; Ari 1995), while Keyder advanced the argument that resettlement contributed to a ‘nationalization’ or ‘turkification’ of the petty bourgeoisie (Keyder 1979-1980). Beşikçi focused on the flip side to this, regarding the employment of spatial politics in Turkey not so much as a means of nation building but of nation destroying; in this case, the Kurdish nation (Beşikçi 1991a; 1991b). In all these studies, however, space was only a ‘nominal participant’, their primary focus being on nationhood and its construction/destruction.

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This study engages with the debate on the engineering of a Turkish nation-state, but from a specifically spatial perspective. It does not question how Turkish nationalists and state institutions have attempted to engineer administration and design culture through the development of new spaces, so much as inquire into the kinds of space they have desired. This approach therefore refers to the work of Kerem Öktem, who, also focusing on the Turkish context, has directed attention to what he names the ‘material and discursive appropriation of space’ – defined as the annihilation of ‘the Other’ from spatial representation by means of a geographical reproduction, primarily through the tactic of renaming and reconstruction, especially of urban space (Öktem 2005, 2009). Houston (2004), too, engages with this theme, calling it the ‘animation’ of cities in Turkey as Kemalist, and referring also to Kurdish strategies to counteract their erasure from public space. Also focusing on the urban environment, Bozdoğan (2001) and Nalbentoğlu (1997) have looked at spatial construction from the perspective of ‘architectural culture’. Bozdoğan shows how architecture became an expression of power for the new regime during the establishment of the republic. Although mainly concerned with the types of buildings constructed in cities during this period, Bozdoğan also discusses village architecture as a spatial component of Kemalist ideology, with the design of new villages as intended to contribute to a revolution in lifestyle, e.g. the turning of peasants into Turks (Bozdögan 2001: 97-105), a theme with which I also have engaged (Jongerden 2007). Developing the literature on the material and discursive production of rural and urban space in Turkey, this article investigates the two cases mentioned specifically in order to consider the spatiality of the Turkish state’s Kurdish policies. It will examine both state attempts to construct environments thought to be conducive to Turkification and also counterstrategies of Kurdish actors, particularly villagers and local municipalities.

I. Centrality of Space

Social space is a complex category. It may be understood as either literal or metaphorical. First, there is the literal dimension of space, that which is materially constituted. A paradigmatic example of social space in the physical dimension would be the design of settlements and settlement structures, i.e. the construction and arrangement of the built environment. Second, there is the metaphorical dimension of space, that which is constituted by the discursive. A paradigmatic example of social space in the abstract dimension is the attachment of values to space through naming strategies, i.e. the enculturalization of the world we live in. Nowadays, the concept of socially produced or constructed space appears in publications with little apparent need for justification or explanation (Unwin 2000: 12). It was not so long ago that the word ‘space’ had a geometrical meaning (Lefebvre 1991: 1) or was conceptualized as a residual of time (Massey 2005: 18) – but strong arguments were made for a mode of thinking that brought spatiality, and the production of space, to the center of social theory (Soja 1989) and social scientists rapidly adopted the idea of space as socially produced (Unwin 2000: 12). This idea of a socially produced space may be summarized in three propositions (Massey 2005: 9-12). First, space is the product of social practices, constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimate tininess of the local. Second, space is the sphere of the possibility of multiple trajectories: the story of the world cannot be told merely as the story of

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those in power. Third, space is always under construction (and therefore there is no ‘end of space’): when new (social and political) relations are established and new ‘connections’ made, space itself is transformed. In this contribution, the analysis of space as embedded in social practices (proposition 1) and being continuously under construction (proposition 3) are discussed in two different cases related to Kurdish policies in Turkey. The first case involves regional development plans and practices aimed at a transformation of the countryside into an instance of the nation, a homogenous and ubiquitous representation throughout the territory as everywhere the same, from west to east and north to south. The second case discusses plans and practices for naming and renaming, from the regional to the village and street levels, as a method of attaching national values to public space. Thus, while discussing the production of space at different levels of scale, the first case will take the physical production of space as a point of entry and the second case will focus on the discursive production of space. Moreover, employing the idea of ‘multiple trajectories’ (proposition 2) will draw attention to the conflicting spatial trajectories of Turkish state institutions –with each other, with Kurdish villagers and municipalities, and with the national-state program(s).

II. The Social Production of ‘Physical’ Turkish Space and Counterstrategies

The settlement issue in Turkey has been perceived by Turkish nationalists primarily as a problem with the existing rural settlement structure, a structure regarded as a barrier against modernization and Turkification (the two were intimately intertwined). Two aspects of this rural settlement structure were considered to be problematic. First, there was the high number of rural settlements. Statistics vary, due to counting problems and varying counting models, but the number of villages was generally calculated at around 35,000 and the number of hamlets at 30,000 to 50,000.2 The second problem was inaccessibility: the state could not easily reach a large number of the rural settlements, recorded statistically as a high level of dispersion. This ranged – with the caveat on counting – from one settlement per nine square kilometers in the Marmara region near Istanbul to one per 77 square kilometers in Hakkari in the Kurdish southeast (Tütengil 1975). A redesign of the countryside was regarded as of crucial importance for the engineering of a Turkish culture and consolidation of the nation-state (Bozdoğan 2001; Jongerden 2007). In the early decades of the republic this redesign of the countryside had been referred to as ‘internal colonization’. Architects developing new model villages were seen as ‘cultural missionaries’, ‘civilizing’ and ‘converting’ the population into Turks. These ambitions and attempts, this civilizing mission with its connotation of Turkification, were later afforded the more neutral term of ‘modernization’ (Ziya 1933; Köymen 1939a; Barkan 1948; Bozdoğan 2001). The following section will briefly review this history, roughly covering the period 1930-2000.

Modernization, Turkification and the redesign of rural space

The principle dynamic of the republic was modernization and Turkification. It was in this context that Prime Minister Şükrü Kaya concluded in 1937 that ‘the principal

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shortcoming of our villages is that they are dispersed and small. It is evident that civilization (. . .) does not go to these small places’ (Özefe 2001a: 24). A quarter of a century later, Mustafa Ok, then member of parliament for the Republican People’s Party, the CHP, published an essay on the idea of concentrating the rural population into large settlements in which he proposed to abolish all hamlets and reduce the number of villages from 40,000 traditional villages scattered around the countryside to some 6,000-10,000 modern villages, established along main roads (Ok 1962). And again, almost 40 years after that, social scientist and CHP vice-president Oğuz Oyan laid the foundation for a master-plan for the Kurdish southeast, in which he wrote: ‘Apart from the social and economic problems, the fact of evacuated villages in East and Southeast Anatolia has created new opportunities and dynamics for the formation of new standards that can accomplish a new rural settlement pattern; for the transition from dispersed and unsuitable settlement units towards settlements units of sustainable size and potentials’ (Oyan 2001: 7). Three commentaries are highlighted here in which the redesign of (parts of) the countryside was propelled to a high position on the political agenda. Şükrü Kaya made his statement in the midst of a lively discussion within the peasantist current3 of the Kemalist movement (Karaömerlioğlu 2006) about the design of new villages that would guide and direct their inhabitants to a ‘Turkish’ lifestyle (Ziya 1933). Mustafa Ok’s polemic on the abolition and reduction of rural communities set the agenda for rural resettlement as a political program and eventuated in various plans to cluster villages. Oğuz Oyan conception of a master plan for the southeast of Turkey involved the reconstruction of a region which had been subject to village evacuation and widespread destruction by the military in the course of the war between the state and insurgents of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Taken together, these three commentaries mark a seventy-odd year period in which a redesign of the countryside was politically valued as a national priority, with the ultimate aim being to bring the rural population within the realm of a centralized administration and its cultural mission of modernization, culturally equated with Turkification, or, becoming Turkish. In Turkey during the 1930s, at the time when PM Şükrü Kaya made his statement, there was considerable debate on the development of a new type of village. Prominent names in this debate were Turkish nationalists and self-appointed architects like Abdullah Ziya, Kazım Dirik4, Burhan Arif and Şükrü Çankaya. For them, the term ‘nation- building’ was more than a figure of speech: they truly believed that the new environments they constructed really could turn villagers into Turks (Bozdoğan 2001). These were to be disciplinary environments (Nalbantoğlu 1997), infusing peasants with a nationalist consciousness (Bozdoğan 2001: 105). The various village plans that emerged from this ‘design for nation’ had in common the application of geometry. Their spaces were isotropic, corresponding perfectly to the ideal of the nation, which conceptualizes its ‘members’ as essentially the same. The uniform application of particular elements in the design of new villages becoming prevalent at that time had to make these settlements into instances of the nation-state, each village a microcosm of the national cosmos. A main street would run to Republican Square with a statue of Atatürk in the middle emphasizing his centrality in the new social order,5 while at the head of the square there would be a People’s House [Halk Evi], the (CHP) party building6 designed to serve both as a school for the dissemination of the ideals of the Kemalist revolution and as the location for the local

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administrative headquarters. The centrality and integration of these cultural and political institutions of the state –and the manifest absence of a mosque– reveals clearly the conception of social relations that the radical secular Kemalist elite of the 1930s aimed to realize in the public domain. With space represented as isotropic and materially associated with homologies and seriality, e.g. reproducible products (Poovey 1995: 29), the most important product became the Turkish man (and woman). Although the village issue received considerable attention in the mid-1930s, the tide was turning towards the end of the decade. The writer Yakup Kadri complained about the faltering of the Kemalist political project, arguing that fashion exhibitions interested the ruling elite more than the crucial problems of the country (Karaömerlioglu 1998). Others, such as Nusret Kemal Köymen, a sociologist at the vanguard of the peasantist movement in Turkey, worried about opinions circulating within the Kemalist elite that it was better not to bother about the fate of the rural population, as that might raise expectations which could not be fulfilled and consequently create hostility against the government (Köymen 1939b). Indeed, the departure of Köymen for the United States in order to continue his studies in rural sociology, when his life’s work had been devoted to the development of a new rural space for Turkey, was symptomatic of the loss of forward momentum for the movement aiming at a redesigning the countryside (Jongerden 2007: 196). The issue of rural redesign was left, but not abandoned. Mustafa Ok’s proposal for the abolition of hamlets and small villages and the resettlement of their inhabitants in larger settlements was taken seriously. Already in 1963, just a year after Ok’s sweeping statement, the costs had been calculated for the resettlement of the inhabitants of all villages and hamlets into 10,000 settlement units of 10,000 houses each. This turned out to be equivalent to 120 billion US dollars (Geray 1999), an incredible amount far exceeding the financial capabilities of the state.7 The concern in Ankara with the state of the countryside at this time was, however, recognized with the establishment of a Ministry of Village Affairs, in 1964. A decade and a half later, three years after the military coup of 1980 –but still under the prime ministership of retired admiral Bülent Ulusu, who had been appointed by junta- leader – the now Ministry of Village Affairs and Cooperatives drafted a Model Village Project [Örnek Köy Projesi] in which the costs were calculated for the abolition of hamlets only and the establishment of their populations in villages. These costs were estimated at 15.6 billion USD (Korkut 1987: 2-3).8 Another calculation was made in 1987, according to which the abolition of 52,000 hamlets and the concentration of their inhabitants into 10,400 villages would require about 20 billion USD, not including the resources needed to create a new framework of economic activities for the resettled population (Korkut 1987: 3). Somewhat similarly, in 1993 it was claimed that the concentration of the population – into small cities of up to 100,000 people and medium sized cities of between 100,000 and 1,000,000 people– was vital in order to fight the PKK’s ‘social fire of anarchy and disorder’ that weakened the ‘power and authority of the state in the Southeast’ (Akın 1993: 39). Using a medical metaphor, it was argued that the problem in the region should not be regarded as a cancer to be cut away, but instead as a sick organ to be nursed back to health for the benefit of the ‘national functional structure’. The small rural settlements were the cancer cells spread throughout the national body, and the

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remedy proposed the development of small and medium sized cities, to be called ‘attraction centers’ [cazibe merkezleri] (Akın 1993: 39-49). Though calculations were made for the abolishment and resettlement of the rural population, and returned to the political agenda occasionally, the main approach to the redesign of the countryside in the period 1970-2000 became administrative clustering. Basically, the idea behind the establishment of such clusters was to identify rural settlements that could be equipped with the necessary means to perform central functions for rural settlements in the immediate vicinity. These clusters would be given formal administrative status, responsibilities and competences and have authority over the rural settlements within their borders. Clustering did not entail a concentration of the population, but a concentration of services (Doganay 1993). Such a concentration of services would relieve the state of the burden of having to establish services in every single settlement, as described by Mustafa Ok, and avoided the need for an expensive and complicated resettlement operation (Günaydin 2001; Güven 1974; Güven 1977; Tütengil 1975). The most important services envisaged were cultural (education) and administrative (local administration and cadastre). It was assumed that, over time, these clusters would attract migration and develop into towns and that, as a consequence, the ability of the authorities to supervise and control the countryside would improve. It was thought also that the integration of rural settlements into the national grid would produce a shared socio-cultural framework (including a common language and cultural values), and would be accompanied by the assimilation of ‘subcultures’ into the ‘national culture’ (Korkut 1987; Tütengil 1975; Doganay 1993) – this being primarily a euphemism for turning Kurds into Turks. Divided along party political lines of division, three approaches to clustering emerged during the 1960s and 1970s: the center-village [merkez-köy] approach, a form of clustering described above, and the village-town [köy-kent] and agricultural-town [tarım-kent] approaches, which aimed also at the development of rural-industries within these clusters. Advocates of the center-village approach were to be found in the conservative [Adalet Partisi], while proponents of the village-town and agricultural-town approaches were to be found in the CHP and the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Action Party (MHP). Attempts to implement center-village and village-town approaches were made at the times when their advocates came to power in the 1970s, but abandoned again in the carousel of government change during this period. The most serious attempt to redesign the countryside on the basis of a clustering system was made with the employment of the center-village model for the reconstruction of the Kurdish southeast at the beginning of the new millennium, during the period of government of Bülent Ecevit’s Democratic Socialist Party (DSP). In 2001, a so-called master plan for return was announced, the East and Southeast Anatolia Return to Village and Rehabilitation Project Sub-Regional Development Plan [Doğu ve Güneydoğu Anadolu Bölgesi Köye Dönü ve Rehabilitasyon Projesi Alt Bölge Gelişme Planı] –henceforth the Village Return and Rehabilitation Development Plan. In the plan it was acknowledged that the evacuation of villages and the displacement of people in the (south)east – approximately 3,000 rural settlements had been evacuated and destroyed, and an estimated 1-3 million people displaced –had inflicted much suffering, but that it ought also to be considered an opportunity for the creation of something new. Therefore, a plan for reconstructing the region should be concerned not merely with ‘return’ (of villagers to their homelands), but also with the creation of the

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conditions in which the ‘forced migrants’ could become more productive, both for themselves and for ‘their country’. Employing the traditional analysis of the countryside settlement issue (too many small, thinly dispersed settlements), the evacuation was regarded as an opportunity for the development of a new structure that was more ‘rational’ and ‘vital’: ‘Apart from the social and economic problems, the event of evacuated villages in East and Southeast Anatolia has created new opportunities and dynamics for the formation of new standards that can accomplish a new rural settlement pattern; for the transition from dispersed and unsuitable settlement units towards settlements units of sustainable size and potentials’ (Oyan et al. 2001a: 1).9 The plan introduced two working-concepts: the sub-region [alt-bölge] and center-village [merkez-köy]. The concept of a sub-region was defined as a cluster of settlements distinguished from other settlements by economic, cultural, administrative and/or social characteristics. Supposed affinity and coherence between peoples and villages were used as characteristics to ‘border’ sub-regions. The center-village was defined as the settlement within a sub-region, which, by virtue of its characteristics of size, location, and infrastructure, could be turned into a junction or hub for the other settlements, and administratively developed into an intermediate entity between the district town and the small villages and hamlets. At the same time as improving efficiency, it was thought that such a development would bring modernity (Turkishness) to the countryside. The Village Return and Rehabilitation Development Plan proposed a pilot scheme consisting of 12 projects, one per province, each project being a sub-region and consisting of a center-village with its dependent villages and hamlets, varying in number between 6 and 42. In addition to the 12 center-villages, 77 villages and 105 hamlets were planned, 194 settlements in total. Implementation of the pilots failed, however, for two reasons. First, the plan, to be executed by the Regional Development Administration of the Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP-BKI), met serious opposition from other state institutions in the region, who preferred a spatial trajectory of urbanization. Secondly, it was not warmly welcomed by the displaced villagers, who wanted above all else just to go back home to their own villages. Regarding state institutional opposition, the (Ankara appointed) state governors in the region had made it clear that they approached the issue of a redesign of the region from a security rather than a reconstruction perspective, even as the master-plan was being drafted. These governors had suggested the destroyed and evacuated rural settlements be classified into two types: those settlements which, mainly for reasons of security, were not deemed appropriate for reconstruction, i.e. those which had been emptied in the effort to win the war against the PKK and in order not to lose gains made needed to stay that way; and there were those settlements that were deemed appropriate for reconstruction because of the feasibility of turning them into centers for the spatial concentration of populations, appropriate for supervision and control. The military, for their part, did not favor the principle of either village return or creation, being of the opinion that settlement in urban centers would create better opportunities for supervision. One former commander, for example, of the Artillery Battalion of the 61st Internal Security Brigade, based in Van, was plainly negative about a cluster-pilot in Özalp-Dorutay, concluding that these kinds of development projects were expensive but ineffective, since they did not initiate social-cultural change in the area and had not brought the population closer to the state –indeed, he added, the

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people there were ‘adverse’ [tepkisel] to the state, as evidenced by their majority vote in the 2002 elections for DEHAP, the main Kurdish party at the time (Arisoy 2002: 97–9). Regarding the people themselves, the villagers who had been forced to leave their homes and (often) seen them destroyed were no more receptive to the approach developed in the master plan. Though clustering was the key-concept, it was clear from the proposed pilots that abolishment of settlements and relocation was expected to take place, and they rejected this. In the context of research underlying the master- plan, a survey of 1,097 evacuated people from 297 selected villages was undertaken in which revealed around 90 percent of respondents indicated a desire to return home, to the settlements from which they had been evacuated,10 with even more, 98 percent, rejecting the proposal that they be resettled in a settlement other than their own (Oyan et al. 2001a: xx). As was acknowledged by those who drafted the plan, settlements are not places for a random housing of individuals and family units, but the spatial expressions of kinship. For its inhabitants, place is not an arbitrary location in an abstract grid, which can be changed at will: through generations, people come to feel attached to a particular environment, which becomes part of family, community or tribal history. Also, concentration of the population could run up against economic difficulties. The economy in the southeast is agriculture-based and peasants are inclined to establish their houses on or near their land. A concentration of the population implies the separation of farmers from their land, with negative affects for their livelihoods. In the end, the design of rural space in accordance to the master plan did not take place. When the AKP came to power with the 2002 elections, it withdrew support for the Village Return and Rehabilitation Development Plan and announced its intention to come up with a new approach, which never materialized. The clustering approach and its modernizing mission thus hit the rocks even before implementation of the pilot scheme, and with no alternative at hand. As a result, the present situation basically involves the concurrent operation of two diametrically opposed spatial strategies. One is that of the governors and the military, who prefer to have the population in urban centers or larger rural settlements which are easy to control. Put bluntly, rather than cede rural territory, the prevailing preference has been to empty it. The other is that of the displaced villagers who return by their own means to the villages from which they were evicted. The counter-strategy of returnees is just to go back, meeting and trying to deal with official opposition, lack of support, and other obstacles as they present themselves.11

III. The Social Production of a ‘Discursive’ Turkish Space, and Counterstrategies

The ambition of the various – sometimes contradictory, often contentious – ideas and approaches of state-institutions and Turkish nationalists for the design of physical space was to plan environments that could ‘civilize’ or ‘modernize’ the countryside and develop its citizenship, understood as converting its inhabitants into Turks. Another attempted conversion process – increasingly challenged in the southeast – has been the naming and renaming of physical space. Naming and renaming is never ‘innocent’: attaching names to places weaves values and meaning into the ‘geographic fabric of everyday life’ (Alderman 2002). Name variants

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such as Yerushalayim [Hebrew] / al-Quds [Arab] and St. Petersburg (monarchist) / Leningrad (Marxist) are associated with different repositories of values, and are not simply interchangeable. Names are not fixed entities, of course: as symbols, fluid (or at least viscous) carriers of meaning, they also are subject to historical processes and undergo changes of reference and the shifting dynamics of politicized interpretation. The renaming of Leningrad into St. Petersburg rehabilitates a tsarist name, and is meant to express both the failure and annihilation of Soviet communism, while ‘ Yerushalayim’ references the Israeli claim to the city and ‘al-Quds’ the Palestinian. When names are associated with practices of erasure and identity politics, name change may provoke powerful emotions and reactions (Rose-Redwood 2008: 433). And the dynamic rejection, replacement and introduction of names do not just represent change, they effect it –or, in line with the rather ritualistic aspect of this, by the deed is change performed. The process of (re)naming, that is, in itself enacts the transformation which it symbolizes. Taking a spatial perspective (going from large scale to small), this activity started in Turkey with the initial assumption of the ethnically-based, European name for the new nation. Next, the county was asocially dehistoricized by its division into seven regions by the 1st Geographical Congress according to natural features (in 1941), with old names from the Ottoman provincial [eyalet/vilayet] system like ‘Eastern Rumelia’, ‘Pontus’ and ‘Kurdistan’ discarded for the ‘Marmara Region’, the ‘Black Sea Region’ and the ‘Southeast Region’ (Erinç & Tunçdilek 1952). Then, centralized administration of the 63 new provinces [il] was established (in 1926) through the naming of the provinces according to their central cities [merkez], with all the uniformity of a nationalist blank canvass (the city of Van became the provincial capital of Van, for Erzerum it was Erzerum, etc). Finally, the names of settlements were changed. Some were minor adjustments made to conform with Turkish rules of vocalization –‘Erzerum’ to ‘Erzurum’, for example, ‘Konieh’ to ‘Konya’ (Law 1999)– while others involved linguistic purification as an aspect of ethnic cleansing or cultural domination, like the replacement of the Greek ‘Smyrna’ for the Turkish ‘Izmir’ in 1922 and the Kurdish ‘Dersim’ for the Turkish ‘Tunceli’ in 1936.12 This republican renaming of settlements can be understood as a discursive erasure of the ‘Other’; spatially, it is the incorporation of places associated with ‘the Other’ into Turkish space, or, the conversion of space from one form to another. The spatial forms being converted by name changes may operate across several, interconnecting discourses, a single instance enacting moves like traditional-to-modern, local-to- national, Christian-to-Muslim, etc. From the Kemalist perspective, however, all these moves can be regarded as going in the direction of Turkishness. This political act of giving names –particularly names that are commemorative of Turkish nationalism, nationalists and the republican struggle– is thus the infusion of an idea of Turkishness into public space (the country, its settlements, etc). The following section discusses this production of a discursive Turkish space, through naming, defined as assigning a new name, renaming, defined as assigning a new name and discarding the old (replacing one name with another), and back-naming, defined as a particular form of renaming involving the assignment or rehabilitation of a previous name (as in the case of St. Petersburg). It also pays considerable attention to the ‘return of the Other’, i.e. the attempts of municipalities under the control of a pro-Kurdish party to discursively re- establish Kurdishness in this public sphere.

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Renaming and back-naming settlements

On the 20th of April, 2008, Hasip Kaplan, Şırnak13 MP for the pro-Kurdish DTP, proposed an amendment to Law 5442. Law 5442 stipulates that ‘Village names that are not Turkish and give rise to confusion are to be changed in the shortest possible time by the Interior Ministry after receiving the opinion of the Provincial Permanent Committee’.14 In Kaplan’s amendment it is suggested that name change adopt the objective of respecting ‘the rich history originating in the foundation of the Republic, protecting cultural plurality, and maintaining diversity’.15 Law 5442 had originally been used to legitimate the change of names of thousands of settlements with non-Turkish (Kurdish, Armenian, Greek, etc.) names to Turkish. To date, Kaplan’s amendment continues to be under consideration, but if it is accepted the old names of these rural settlements could be rehabilitated. Back-naming alone would not result from Kaplan’s amendment since it proposes a strategy of double naming, with the ejected names of ‘villages, districts, provinces and geographical locations, along with [other] settlement areas’ to be employed alongside the ‘new names’ rather than replace them. In practice this is already the case. Although the ‘old’ names have long been expunged from standard maps and only the ‘new’ names given in official publications (the state’s representation of space), in daily life (the public’s mental mapping, or folk representation of space) a large proportion of the name changes did not have very much impact. Locals in the (south)east region especially have continued to call their own and surrounding villages by the old names. Indeed, government institutions with local functions to execute, such as the office of the Kaymakam [district administrator], use village/hamlet information files which already include both the new and the old names. Kaplan’s proposal openly challenged the ‘one state, one nation, one language’ canon of Kemalism, and represented an overt attempt by the DTP parliamentary fraction to change an official policy based on the annihilation of ‘the Other’ from public space. The importance of Kaplan’s amendment needs to be seen against the background of systematic efforts by state institutions to remove Kurdish, Armenian, Greek and other non-Turkish village names and replace them with Turkish ones. Efforts by state institutions to efface ‘the Other’ from the public sphere by means of renaming strategies have a history which goes back to the nationalist government of the (Young Turk) Committee of Union and Progress at the end of empire and the first years of the republican regime. Waves of place name changing also occurred –and were initiated– under so-called liberal governments, notably the period of the Democrat Party of Menderes in the 1950s and the Motherland Party of Özal in the 1980s (each voted into power following a period of culturally repressive politics, the former after the one- party era, the latter after a spell of military dictatorship). Indeed, it was in 1957, during the fourth of Menderes’ five terms of office spanning the decade of the 1950s, that the ‘Special Commission for the Change of Names’ [Ad Değiştirme Ihtisas Komisyonu] was established, under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior. The Commission brought together representatives of the General Command of the Armed Forces, the Defense Ministry, the Education Ministry, the Faculty of Letters, History and Geography of the University of Ankara and the Foundation, and embarked on the task of the Turkification of place names. By 1968, approximately 30 percent of the names of the 45,000 villages that had been counted in

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Turkey were changed. In 1973, the Commission commenced work on larger scale maps, changing the names listed in the topographical records of another 2,000-odd villages and nearly 13,000 of the almost 40,000 hamlets (again, around 30% of the total). Most of the name changes occurred in the eastern third of the country, the traditional homeland for most of Turkey’s non-Turkish (Kurdish, Armenian, Laz, etc.) populations. This is shown visually by the density of black spots in Figure 1. In the province of Mardin, for example, 91 percent of the place names were changed, while 72 percent were changed in Trabzon (Öktem 2005: 185-221).

Figure 1 : Distribution of villages of which the name has been changed: one point is equal to five villages

(source: Tunçel 2000: 30)

In total, the names of some 85,000 rural settlements (45,000 villages + 40,000 hamlets) were reviewed during the period 1957-78, and a final count of just over 25,000 (12,884 hamlets + 12,211 villages) changed (Tunçel 2000: 28). The numbers for changed village names (i.e. excluding hamlets) per province are given in Figure 2. Listed in ascending order, it immediately strikes the eye that most of the name changes occurred in the provinces of the Kurdish Southeastern region, followed by the Eastern and eastern Black Sea regions. The process of village renaming was put on the agenda again by the military junta after the 1980 coup, and yet more changes enacted by the reconvened Commission in 1984 following the election victory of Özal’s Motherland Party, even though up to 90 percent of place names in some of the southeastern provinces had already been changed by that time (for an extensive discussion, see Öktem 2005: 185-221). This latest review resulted in the change of an additional 280 place names (Tunçel 2000).

Figure 2. Number of villages of which the name was changed per province, in ascending order

Province No. of villages Province No. of villages Province No. of villages

Tekirdağ 19 Yozgat 90 Bitlis 236

Edirne 20 Kütahya 93 Konya 236

Istanbul 21 Amasya 99 Tokat 245

Nevşehir 24 Artvin 101 Bingöl 247

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Kocaeli 26 Çorum 103 Tunceli 273

Bilecik 32 Maraş 105 Gaziantep 279

Kırklareli 35 Rize 105 Kastamonu 295

Kirşehir 39 Balıkesir 110 Muş 297

Isparta 46 Içel 112 Gümüşhane 343

Uşak 47 Hatay 117 Erzincan 366

Niğde 48 Sakarya 117 Ağrı 374

Burdur 49 Hakkâri 128 Elazığ 383

Çanakkale 53 Ordu 134 Urfa 389

Denizli 53 Bursa 136 Trabzon 390

Sinop 59 Zonguldak 156 392

Izmir 68 Giresun 167 398

Aydın 69 Antalya 168 Sivas 406

Eskişehir 70 Adana 169 Van 415

Muğla 70 Bolu 182 Diyarbakır 555

Çankiri 76 Samsun 185 Mardin 647

Manisa 83 Ankara 193 Erzurum 653

Kayseri 86 Malatya 217

Afyon 88 Adiyaman 224 Total 12,211

(source: Tunçel 2000: 28)

Some of the new names that were introduced as replacements expressed a sense of religious, political or ethnic identity reflecting the nature of the political regime. In Diyarbakır for example, the name ‘İslamköy’, which obviously evokes a religious identity, had in fact been attached to a settlement in an area formerly inhabited by Christians (Armenians); the name of the model village ‘Cumhuriyet’ (administratively dependent on the province’s central district) expresses republicanism; and ‘Türkmen’ (in the district of Çüngüs) arouses the idea of an ethnic identity in a region mainly inhabited by Kurds. However, such place names expressing the nature of the regime or the alleged identity of its people seem to have been exceptions. In most of the cases, the new names did not have any pronounced religious, political, or ethnic significance, and nor were they translations from the original, but appear instead to have been often

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arbitrary, effectively de-historicized references to a general category from nature, evoking, if anything, an unspecified sense of timelessness.16

Return of the Other: (re)naming in the urban environment

In recent years the naming issue has arisen again at the level of street and park names. The protagonists of this are the DTP-run municipalities. These local offices are advocating Kurdish-oriented name changes, in ideological opposition to the central authority of state and thus resulting in a clash within the state, between its institutions, with municipalities set against governors.17 In January 2001, the High Court in Ankara [Danıştay] decided upon a case brought by Ali Parlak, governor of the southeastern province of Batman (see figure 3). A few months previously, in June 2000, the mayor of Batman, Abdullah Akın, elected on behalf of the pro-Kurdish party HADEP (predecessor to the DTP), had changed a reported 200 street names in the city.18 One of the names that was removed by Akın was ‘Aydın Arslan’, former ‘super-governor’ of the state of emergency region and in this position responsible for the reign of repression related to the ‘state of exception’ in the region.19 Another street name changed was ‘Mehmet Akif Ersoy’, the poet (1873-1936) who wrote the words of the Turkish national anthem. The names proposed to take the place of these important figures in the political and ideological canon of the central state were ‘Botan’ and ‘Garzan’, the Kurdish names of now primarily Kurdish provincial or regional demarcations, and which compete with Turkish provincial demarcations. As well as this type of transferred back-naming (reviving names from the past but attaching them to different entities), the Batman municipality introduced names associated with anti-colonialism. Kurdish political parties in Turkey, including, but not only the PKK, have defined their endeavor as an anti-colonial struggle, so attaching the names of leaders of anti-colonial movements across the world to items in the public arena is intended to symbolize their alignment with this history and thereby evoke the legitimacy of their struggle. The employment of the name ‘Zilan’ falls into this category, notwithstanding its ambivalence in meaning (Zilan is the name of both a celebrated PKK militant and a tribe based north-northeast of Batman). Clearly, the (re)naming strategy of DTP mayors not only directly counteracts past efforts to efface Kurdishness from rural and urban political geography, but also tries to reintroduce a Kurdish politico-cultural sensitivity into the public setting of everyday life. Similarly, reference to multiculturalism, another approach to name selection in this Kurdish (re)naming project, operates as an expression of the pluralism the Kurdish politicians say they adhere to. Exemplifying this, the name ‘Laleş’ is associated with the Yezidi, a non-Muslim Kurdish group, a substantial number of which used to live in the Beşiri region, east of Batman, before many migrated out of the region in the 1980s.

Figure 3: Street names proposed by the municipality of Batman

Proposed Reference Name

Mahatma Anti-colonial and non-violent activist, resisting British dominance over India Gandhi

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Ömer Leader of the anti-colonial movement in Libya, resisting Italian dominance Muhtar

A Kurdish town in northern Iraq, subject in 1988 to a poison gas attack by state Halabja forces under Saddam Hussein

Yılmaz Kurdish socialist and director of the film Yol [The Way], Cannes prize-winner but Güney banned by the state for its depiction of ‘Kurdistan’ and the Turkish presence there

Mehmet Kurdish member of parliament, killed by unknown assailants in Batman in 1993 Sincar

Ahmed Arif Kurd and poet, writer of the poem 33 Bullets (see below)

The name of a tribe in the area, but also the code name of a PKK militant who Zilan engaged in a suicidal action killing several members of the Turkish armed forces in Tunceli/Dersim on June 30th, 1996

Elmedina The Kurdish name of a village flooded in 1927

Laleş A village in Northern Iraq, home to the holiest site in the Yezidi religion

The Kurdish name of a region covering parts of provinces of Şırnak, Hakkari, Van, Botan Siirt, Eruh and into Northern Iraq

Garzan Kurdish name of a region covering parts of Batman, Siirt, Van, Hizan and Gevaş

İnsan Turkish for ‘human rights’ Hakları

Özgürlük Turkish for ‘freedom’

Taken as a whole, at an aggregated level, the names selected by the Batman municipality give expression to resistance to repression, anti-colonial struggle, Kurdishness, and (cultural) diversity. The Batman case was, in fact, part of a concerted effort on the part of the DTP to employ its control over the local state-apparatus in a large part of the southeast in order to change the ‘city text’, to reclaim urban space in the region from decades of Kemalism. In other words, the DTP naming strategy is at heart a political struggle over the meaning attached to public space. In the end, the political sensitivity of these names in the Turkish context was made manifest by the High Court ruling from Ankara, which demanded the cancellation of the names listed above on the grounds that they encouraged rebellion against the state (e.g. ‘Ömer Muhtar’, ‘Mahatma Gandhi’, ‘Halabja’, ‘Botan’ and ‘Garzan’), separatism (e.g. ‘Yılmaz Güney’), or belong to a ‘foreign’ language and would open the doors to cultural erosion (e.g. ‘Laleş’) (Zaman, 6 October 2000; Ozgur Politika, 23 January 2001; Watts 2006).20 Another example of name-controversies comes from Diyarbakır, the main city in the Kurdish southeast. After his election in 2004, the HADEP mayor of Diyarbakır, , removed a statue Atatürk from one of the city’s main squares along with one of the signs to the city proclaiming ‘Ne Mutlu Türküm Diyene’ (Watts 2006). The phrase translates as “How Happy is He Who Can Say He is a Turk,” and is one of the most

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widely used and well-known aphorisms quoted from Mustafa Kemal, and an emblematic slogan of republican mythology.21 Then, in late 2005, a statue was erected in Diyarbakır commemorating Musa Anter, one of the country’s most prominent Kurdish authors and activists, killed as part of a wave of ‘unknown assailant murders’ when visiting the city in 1992. The removal of a statue of the republic’s founding father along with the slogan and the later erection of a statue of the slain Kurdish intellectual clearly evidences efforts to create a new ‘geography of memory’ (Alderman 1996, 2002). In fact, it is rather puzzling that this silent rebellion did not evoke any reaction from the side of the authorities. The DTP in Diyarbakır city also proposed new street and park names, a list which repays a closer look, because, as in Batman, the naming reveals the values and ideas the DTP desires to inscribe in the public sphere. In several neighborhoods, the party proposed the renaming of street names, but original names also were proposed for new streets and parks in the rapidly expanding city.22 Several controversial names were included in the proposal, which I have identified from a list of proposed names (undated, but most likely from 2007) and cross-checked with people working at the municipality (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Street names proposed by the municipality of Diyarbakir

Proposed Reference Name

1 Gulan Kurdish for the ‘First of May’, International Workers Day

8 Mart Women’s day

Barış Turkish for ‘peace’

Aşiti Kurdish for ‘peace’

Ekim Turkish for ‘October’

Turkish for ‘33 Bullets Park’, commemorating the extrajudicial killing of Kurdish 33 Kurşun villagers in 1943 on the order of a Turkish general and hero of the war of Parkı independence

Named after Chahar-cheragh Square in the city of Mahabad (in today’s Iran) where Çarçıra Qazi Muhammed announced the (Russian-backed) independent state of the republic Parkı of Kurdistan, (and where he and several of his comrades were executed a year later, when Iranian authority was restored)

Azad Kurdish for ‘freedom’

Özgür Turkish for ‘free’

Jiyanan Kurdish for ‘free life’ Azad

Kardeşlık Turkish for ’brotherhood’

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Ciwan Kurdish for ‘youth’

Amid Old Kurdish name for Diyarbakır

A long poem written in 1706/7 by Ahmet Hani in which he called forcefully for Mem û Zîn Kurdish self-rule and which was adopted by later generations as a national epic

Zembilfroş Kurdish epic poem

Ahmed Xani Kurdish poet (Hane)

Ahmed Arif Kurdish poet

Musa Anter Kurdish writer and activist

Ayşe Nur Turkish writer and activist Zarakoğlu

A young Kurdish woman who was going to participate in the celebrations for World Zeynel Peace Day 2001, but died after falling from the sixth floor of a building while being Durmuş chased by police

The name of a Kurdish woman who became victim of a honor-killing, stoned to death Şemse Allak by her family for having an extramarital relationship

In response to references to Turkish nationalism and nationalists in the naming of items in urban spaces, the Diyarbakır municipality sought to commemorate events and individuals related to the Kurdish struggle against an oppressive Turkish state. Through commemorative naming a past is brought into the present and versions of history into a setting of everyday life (Azaryahu 1996; Alderman 2002; Rose-Redwoord 2008). ‘33 Kurşun Parkı’ [33 Bullets Park] is an example of this, commemorating the extrajudicial killing of Kurdish villagers in 1943 on the order of a Turkish general and hero of the war of independence – and as such, symbolizing the ruthless treatment of Kurds and incorporating the repression inflicted in the social space of everyday life.23 Another instance of commemorative symbolism, ‘Çarçıra Parkı’ was named after a square in the city of Mahabad (in today’s Iran) where Qazi Muhammed announced the independent state of the republic of Kurdistan, known as the Republic of Mahabad, on January 22, 1946, and where he and several of his comrades were executed a year later, when Iranian authority was restored. The name ‘Çarçıra Parkı’ thus commemorates the struggle for an independent state, not only as a dream or an ideal, but as a near reality and the product of struggle. The references to the Kurdish epic Zembilfroş and most certainly the Kurdish love story Mem û Zîn should be interpreted as adding cultural depth, commemorating the history and thus affirming the existence of a Kurdish nation. Ahmed Xani (or Hane) adapted the popular romance Mem û Zîn into a long poem of the same name written in 1706/7, in which he called forcefully for Kurdish self-rule, and which was adopted by later generations as a national epic (Bruinessen 1999; Hassanpour 2008).

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The municipality also weaves into the city geography a leftist or emancipatory discourse. References are made to the struggle of workers (‘1st of May’) and women (‘8th of March’), both of these days being established by the Paris-based, socialist Second International. The name ‘October’ should be understood as a reference to the Russian October Revolution of 1917. References are also made to freedom, brotherhood, and peace. In addition to International Women’s Day, the gender issue is referred to by ‘Şemse Allak’, the name of a Kurdish woman who became victim of a honor-killing, stoned to death by her family for having an extramarital relationship. By giving her name to a park, the DTP municipality emphasizes again its stance against honor- killings. Not all the proposed names have been accepted by the governorship (see Figure 5). In a dossier sent to the Administrative Court [İdare Mahkemesi], the vice-governor of Diyarbakır stated that the name ‘33 Bullets’ makes the state an object of accusation. The governorship wanted the banning of the names ‘Zembilfroş’, ‘Jiyana Azad’, ‘Aşiti’, ‘Ciwan’, ‘Yek Gulan’ and ‘Zeynel Durmuş’ as symbols of a forbidden terrorist organization (i.e. the PKK). In relation to the requested ban on the name ‘Ciwan’, the governorship added to its declaration that Article 222 in the Turkish Penal Code mentioned a prison sentence of 2-6 months for acts contrary to rules regarding the Turkish alphabet.24

Figure 5: Accepted, rejected and revised street and park names proposed by the DTP municipality25

Accepted names Rejected names Revised names

Jiyanan Azad Park

Amidiye Street Zembilfroş Park Barış Park Aşiti Park Mem u Zin Park 33 Kurşun Park 8 Mart Kadın Park Çarçıra Park Ahmed Arif Park Yek Gulan Özgür Park Zeynel Durmuş Ciwan Park (accepted as Civan Park) Ahmede Hane Street 1 Gulan Park Seyrangeh Park (accepted as Seyrangah Park) Ahmet Arif Street Şilan Ayşe Nur Zarakolu Street Roşna Musa Anter Park Rojda Şemse Allak Park Nefel Ekim Park Daraşin Gülistan Beybun Berfin

Article 222 integrates (penalties for) the original 1928 Turkish Letters Law and 1925 Hat Law, which had been aimed at the incumbent theocratic establishment, the clerics [ulema], banning the -based script of Ottoman and the turban/fez as part of the revolutionary founding process of the secular republic. The 1928 Law (No.1353, Türk Harflerinin Kabul ve Tatbiki Hakkında Kanun) detailed a Turkish alphabet consisting of 29

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Latinate letters and specifically stipulated ‘old Arabic letters’ as no longer acceptable.26 In practice, this law also discriminated against Kurdish, which employs the non- Turkish (unlisted) letters ‘q’, ‘x’ and ‘w’ –although, as Euro MP and co-chairman of the Turkey-EU Joint Parliamentary Commission Joost Langendijk notes, ‘However legally surprising it may be to see this article used against communication in Kurdish, the practice fits with the article’s history and purpose.’27 Indeed, the article was invoked in other cases during the same period (2007), against a union leader in Kilis, for example, for using the (non-Turkish) letter ‘w’ in newspaper articles;28 and against Abdullah Demirtaş, DTP mayor of Sur (a district in Diyarbakır province), for giving multilingual information on local service provision, for which he was forced out of office (at the time of writing, Demirtaş was still facing charges under Article 222).29 Many of the names proposed for Diyarbakır by its municipality were rejected by the governor and the Higher Court, and an appeal against this decision by the municipality was pending at the time of writing, to be handled by the State Council [Danistay], in Ankara. Two names, in fact, have been accepted after revision, as shown (Figure 5): ‘Seyrangeh’ has been turkified into ‘Seyrangah’, and the ‘w’ in ‘Ciwan’ has been changed to a ‘v’. Other names have been accepted, such as that of Musa Anter, the Kurdish writer and intellectual killed on September 20, 1992 by a Turkish death squad. Thus in spite of opposition from state authorities, small steps are being taken to include ‘another’ city text. Turkish nationalist arrangements are challenged and new a discursive social space developed, which is not simply parochial Kurdish nationalist, but articulated to a universal discourse of rights and emancipation.

Conclusions

This article has discussed the state’s concern with space, both physical and discursive, to redesign and rename space in order to mold social space (or rather, the state’s concern to mold social space at the material level, both physically and discursively). The primary dynamic of this concern has been nation building, the perceived need to turn the inhabitants of the territory into Turks and convert the sovereign space into an expression of Turkishness. Emphasis has been placed on the lesser known attempts to redesign rural space, and the recent Kurdish response to counter the hegemonic domination of urban space, again through the machinery of state, but at a more local level. Following Massey (2005), space is specified as the product of social practices, constituted through interactions, and also as subject to continual revision, always under construction. This article has paid considerable attention to the constructivist argument, discussing efforts to re-design and re-name. The existing rural settlement structure was regarded by Turkish nationalists as a barrier to the civilizing project of the republic, so spaces had to be crafted that would facilitate the production of a Turkish population, environments which would in of themselves develop citizenship. These spaces were attributed the agency to convert their inhabitants into Turks. Only the state could achieve this, through centralized design and planning – or at least, no other initiating organization was imagined. The nationalist ideology of state reflexively saw itself as the natural and inevitable mediator for development of the nation. The spaces envisioned, rural settlements and rural settlement patterns (networks), were not only attributed an assimilating agency, they also had to actually

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express Turkishness. And so the work of renaming those rural settlement considered to have non-Turkish names was done, and redone again and again, with a thorough precision. Nevertheless, in spite of all this industry, the results achieved were less than desired. An important conclusion we may draw, therefore, is that an engineering of space –at least, a top-down, centralized engineering of rural space– is easier said than done. Attempts to craft such assimilating spaces physically through model village/rural development schemes were prone to institutional conflicts, both diachronic and synchronic. Different approaches replaced one another at the design planning and pilot project stages, with progress hampered by changes in government and the conflicting agendas of different state institutions backing alternative and competing ideas, especially in respect of managing the rural environment in the evacuated parts in the southeast. Furthermore, the spatial practices of everyday life happened to conflict with the plans designed by state institutions (as people have returned to their villages in the southeast, irrespective of official obstruction). Although the spatial design project for the countryside was a national concern, in its modernizing, developmental aspect, it was also, in its ethno-nationalist aspect, particularly focused on the eastern part of the country, and especially the Kurdish southeast. The (re)classification of Kurds as ‘mountain Turks’ was one strategy employed in this endeavor; another was the renaming of villages and hamlets. Again, however, we are led to conclude that the extent to which this was –and has been– effective in everyday life in the Kurdish region is extremely questionable. People in the region continued to refer to their neighboring settlements by their old –often Kurdish, Armenian or Assyrian– names, because these names were part of their mental universe. In southeast Turkey today, we are witnessing an overt struggle over space, or, to put it differently, a political struggle in the form of spatial strategies. The battle for spatial sovereignty of the physical space in southeast Turkey may be less bloody these days than in the recent past, but it is no less vital to the major actors, the state and the people. The nationalist spatial strategy has become contested, countryside and cities in the southeast the social battlegrounds for control of the discursive dimension of physical space. The attachment to streets and parks of names referring to or commemorative of Kurdish regions, events and people in the Kurdish pantheon of contemporary culture and cultural history, political struggle and universal ideals, as well as the proposed back-naming to old Kurdish (and Armenian and Assyrian) names, along with the actions of people returning to their evacuated settlements, combine to constitute both a political statement and spatial exposure.

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NOTES

1. All translations from Turkish by the author. 2. A village was defined by the Village Act of 1924 as a settlement with its ‘people living compactly or dispersed, who jointly own a mosque, a school, a pasture, a summer pasture and part of a forest reserved for fire-wood form a village, together with their vineyards, gardens, and fields’ and having a population of between 150 and 2,000 inhabitants. The Village Act defined hamlets purely in terms of size, as settlements with a population of less than 150. The State Institute of Statistics, however, has used an upper limit of 250 inhabitants for a village, and the Minister of Internal affairs determined the minimum population of a village at 500 people (Jongerden 2007: 1267). 3. A key element in the ideology of peasantism was the idea that rural life and the peasantry constituted the stronghold of national values and traditions. The most ardent supporters of the peasantist movement even thought that the nation was the peasantry and made rural society the sole focus of their interest (Jongerden 2007: 208). 4. Kazım Dirik, a former member of the Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress and general in the war of liberation, is said to have developed some 200 model villages in the period he was inspector-general in Thrace (1935-1941). He was the creator of the ‘ideal republican village’, a model rural community through which inhabitants could be integrated into the ongoing revolution (Dirik 2008: 291). 5. Underlining the continuing centrality of Atatürk: photographs, drawings and paintings of the flag and of Ataturk are to be found adorning every school textbook, in every place of work, at the entrance of all official buildings from the local tax office to the police headquarters; there are even shrines, an Atatürk corner [Atatürk köşesi] composed of the flag, a picture of the man, a copy of his words and those of the national anthem required by law in every place of education. Supplementing this, at the discursive level, use of the name ‘Ataturk’ is again ubiquitous, used like a beacon of excellence for the majority of main streets, major sports stadia, top schools, state cultural centers (museums, concert halls), etc throughout the land. 6. It was not until after World War II that a multi-party system really developed in Turkey, prior to which it was, with two brief exceptions, a single-party state, led by Ataturk’s People’s Party, the CHP.

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7. Meanwhile, in 1963, a five-year plan was introduced by the newly established State Planning Organization (DTP) which included an unimplemented program and thus ultimately unsuccessful attempt at rural community development, despite some good results at the pilot project stage – one of the obstacles being that of the financing of schemes nationwide (Elbruz 1974: 144-154). 8. To lower the costs for the state, it was proposed that the inhabitants of the hamlets contribute 2 million TL (7,000 USD) per household toward their compulsory relocation into a modern settlement, even though it was acknowledged that low-income villagers could not be expected to find such a large sum of money. 9. All translations from Turkish by the author. 10. This is not indicate that over 90 percent of the displaced population actually would return– obviously, expressing a desire and really doing it are not the same thing. 11. These include the refusal to permit return, favored treatment to village guards, intimidation by security forces and village guards, non-provision of amenities, failed infrastructure and wasted lands. 12. The 1936 change of name of the Kurdish city Dersim [Silver Gate] to the Turkish Tunçeli [Bronze Fist] immediately following a bloody uprising there and ‘genocidal’ response (Bruinessen 2000) seems to have been very clearly intended to send a message asserting the authority of the state over its territory. 13. One of the provinces in the southeast. 14. Provincial Administration Law No. 5442, adopted on June 10, 1949, Article 2D (Amended in 1959 by Law 7267). 15. http://www2.tbmm.gov.tr/d23/2/2-0233.pdf 16. For example, in the Çınar district in Diyarbakır the villages were given new names such as ‘Gümüştaş’ [Silver Stone], ‘Ağaçsever’ [Tree Lover], ‘Akçomak’ [White Cudgel] and ‘Ovabağ’ [Plains Orchard] the Kurdish village Kuştiyan [Killed People] was renamed ‘Soğansuyu’ [Onion Water]; Kanipanık [Flat Spring] was renamed ‘Yarımkaş’ [Half Eyebrow]; and Bımbareki [Holy] was renamed ‘Halkapinar’ [Circular Spring]. 17. Each province has a governor, appointed from Ankara (by the Council of Ministers [the Cabinet], on approval from the president). 18. Interestingly, where once the Kurds had organized their fight for rights mainly from an illegal position, today they have entered representative bodies and do their fighting against the hegemonic nationalism from within the existing political system (even though they remain balanced on the fringes of the state). 19. The state of emergency region (OHAL) was created in 1983 and ended in 2002. Generally covering the southeastern region, its composition changed over time (see Jongerden 2007: 85). 20. Regarding the foreign language, it might be noted that the use of English language names also can sometimes be perceived as a cultural threat in Turkey, as elsewhere. In education, for example, there is a ministry [Milli Eğittim Bakanlığı] ruling to the effect that the officially registered company names of private educational establishments must be Turkish, even though many schools and universities operate under English language names. What is accepted in the public domain is still not sanctioned officially, the space taken not ceded. 21. Although it is standard to take Ataturk’s words to refer to one who can say he is ‘a Turk’, an alternative translation would be to refer to one who can say he is ‘Turkish’, as the Turkish language does not distinguish between ethnicity and nationality in this case (both are expressed by the word ‘Türk’ –thus the recent, controversial suggestion to introduce a Turkish word for nationality, ‘Türkiyeli’). 22. Most of the new names did not raise controversy, because they only concerned a renumbering. To give an example, in the Huzurevleri quarter of the Kayapinar district, a rapidly expanding neighborhood in the south of the city, 12th Street was renamed ‘1st Street’, and 1st

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Street ‘2nd Street’. There are numerous, hundreds actually, of examples of such a re-numbering of street names. 23. General Mustafa Muğlalı ordered the execution of 33 villagers. Known as a hard-liner, war hero Muğlalı had previously been chairman of a special court, ordering death sentences for 36 people following anti-government riots in Izmir in 1930. The 33 villagers condemned in 1943 and shot at a remote spot near the border with Iran were members of the Milan tribe and family members of the suspects of a sheep theft, allegedly killed because of conflicts between the Kurdish tribe members and the Turkish military. On February 28, 2004 the Chiefs of Staff of the Turkish Armed Forces announced the renaming of a military base in Van-Ozalp, on the border with Iran, to the ‘General Mustafa Muğlali Army Base’ [Orgeneral Mustafa Muğlalı Kışlası] This led to furious reaction from human rights activists and Kurds, and the proposal for a ‘33 Bullets Park’ is to be considered a counter-move to this. 24. Reported at http://www.ntvmsnbc.com/news/376773.asp. 25. ‘Street’ and ‘Park’ are translations of the Turkish (suffixed) words that the municipality proposed (‘Caddesi’ and ‘Parkı’): i.e. although Kurdish words may have been suggested in (the content of) the new names, the linguistic rules applied to (structural forms of) the names were those of Turkish. 26. At http://www.idealhukuk.com 27. Reported at http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=115171 28. This notwithstanding the fact that the letter ‘w’ is used in Turkey, widely (e.g. ‘showroom’), usually (‘WC’), famously (‘Show TV’) and even officially (‘www. […] .gov.com.tr’). 29. Reported at http://bianet.org/english/minorities/103328-newroz-and-kawa-reason-for- imprisonment; http://bianet.org/english/minorities/114726-state-wants-kurdish-speaking- employees-but-tries-kurdish-mayor. The Demirbaş’ case was later taken up as one of the main rallying points of DTP diplomacy in the European institutions in 2006-7 (see Casier, forthcoming 2010). Permitting he three banned letters has recently been cited as an issue discussed between the government and military as part of the AKP’s developing Kurdish/ [açalım] (reported by Radikal newspaper, 16.09.09).

ABSTRACTS

Much has been written about identity politics in Turkey, mainly focusing on citizenship issues and analyses of state discourses. This article is concerned with a different dimension of identity- politics: the molding of society and identity through the construction of space. Based on a discussion of two cases, this contribution analyzes state attempts to craft ‘assimilating spaces.’ The first case discusses plans and activities to redesign the countryside in the 20th century. State institutions thought the principal shortcoming of rural Anatolia was the dispersed settlement structure and small size of the myriad rural settlements. In order to be able to establish the authority of the state in the countryside and develop a national body of people it was thought that a new rural settlement structure had to be developed, either by abolishing or clustering small rural settlements. The latest and most serious attempt to redesign the countryside was made in the war-affected Kurdish southeast at the beginning of the new millennium. However, this program encountered problems as a result of institutional disagreement and opposition from returnees. The second case discusses the issue of village- and street names and how through

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naming strategies a discursive national space was designed. Drawing on recent examples from the Kurdistan region in Turkey, this article show politics of assimilation were embedded in the state's discursive spatial practices, but also how these were resisted at the local level. Turkish nationalist discursive arrangements are challenged and a new discursive social space developed. Data for this article was obtained mainly through archival research, in particular the study of documents of state institutions, and field research.

INDEX

Keywords: Abolition of Villages, Assimilation, Center-Village, Clustering, Kurds, Nation-Building, Renaming, Resistance, Spatial Practices, Turkey

AUTHOR

JOOST JONGERDEN Professor, Wageningen University, [email protected]

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Incoherent State: The Controversy over Kurdish Naming in Turkey

Senem Aslan

1 In 2002, seven parents were taken to the criminal court in Dicle, a town in the province of Diyarbakır, for giving Kurdish names to their children1. According to the prosecutor’s claim, these names were the code names used by militants of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), and, therefore, were against the Civil Registration Law, which stipulated that names which do not conform to national culture, moral norms, customs and traditions and which offend the public could not be given to children. The case was brought to the attorney’s attention by the Diyarbakır gendarmerie, which investigated the records at the Registration Office and came up with a list of Kurdish names after the Ministry of the Interior sent a secret circular, warning local administrators about an increase in Kurdish naming.2 Ironically, the court was presided over by a female judge with a Kurdish name, Şirvan. During the hearings, the prosecutor drew attention to a report sent from the Turkish Language Society, stating that the names ‘did not conform to Turkish naming habits.’ In fact, some of the names in the list, such as Serhat and Baran were commonly used in Turkey. The families’ attorney underlined that the prosecutor did not have the right to bring name annulment cases to court. In the end, the judge recognized the attorney’s claim and dismissed the case due to procedural reasons.3

2 In Turkey, Kurdish names constitute one of the main issues of cultural contestation between state authorities and the Kurds. A Kurdish name ban is widely cited by many scholars as an example of the Turkish state’s repressive policies of assimilation and is condemned by human rights activists. This article explains why, despite expanding legal spaces for expressions of Kurdish identity, the issue of Kurdish naming has become more contentious since the late 1980s. Beginning with the 1990s, the Turkish government gave signs of relaxing limitations on the expressions of Kurdish culture. The Kurdish language ban was lifted in 1991 and many Turkish politicians and members of the government increasingly acknowledged the need to recognize Kurdish cultural rights. Mainstream newspapers, which had largely avoided writing about the Kurds in previous periods, started to refer to the Kurdish issue more frequently.

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Political opening continued in the 2000s. In the post-2000 period, as part of an effort to meet European Union (EU) membership criteria, the parliament passed laws that eased restrictions on the use of the Kurdish language in the media and educational domains. Consequently, broadcasting in Kurdish in public and private radio and TV stations and teaching Kurdish in private institutions became legal.

3 It was, however, in these two decades that state authorities and parents trying to give their children Kurdish names began challenging each other more heatedly. Parents encountered problems in their attempts to register Kurdish names at the registration offices and were sometimes harassed by authorities. Some Kurds refused to register their children unless they were allowed to give Kurdish names and faced administrative problems in the following years. Consequently, Kurdish naming has become subject to numerous police investigations and court cases. Why do we see an increased contention over naming between Kurdish activists and Turkish state authorities at times when the space for expression of minority identities was expanded? My answer to this question is twofold, calling attention to the mutually transformative relationship between state behavior and activist strategies.

4 Part of the answer to this question, I argue, relates to incoherent state responses to the issue of Kurdish naming. A detailed analysis of the naming controversy in Turkey suggests that the ban on Kurdish names was not an absolute and permanent rule that remained valid at all times across similar cases. Instead, different parts of the Turkish state formulated and implemented different and contradictory responses in dealing with the issue of naming. Particularly, I call attention to the role of local state officials, such as registrars, public prosecutors, judges, police, and gendarmerie, in the escalation of naming controversy. The local bureaucracy’s insistence on the Kurdish name ban, despite the consistent rulings of the Court of Cassation [Yargıtay] against this practice, denoted a subtle contestation among state actors over how to solve the Kurdish problem.

5 Second, increased contention over naming was a consequence of changing strategies of Kurdish activism. The naming controversy suggests that earlier policies of Turkification have created their counterparts within Kurdish activism, which in turn has made negotiation and compromise more difficult for both sides. Kurdification of names increasingly became a tool for the creation of Kurdish nationhood and a symbol for protest against the Turkish state. Especially in the post-2000 period, Kurdish activists sought to construct unique Kurdish names through the creation or revival of names of Kurdish linguistic origin and to mobilize Kurds at large to adopt these names to distinguish themselves from the general Turkish public. The recent insistence of activists to register Kurdish names with letters that do not exist in the official alphabet and the support of the PKK in such efforts strengthened official perceptions that Kurdish naming practices were more a tactic of constructing an exclusivist understanding of Kurdishness than an effort at cultural preservation and thus met with official resistance. In this article, I call attention to the mutually transformative relationship between states and minority strategies. The Kurdish movement did not remain static in the face of the Turkish state’s policies. It evolved and responded in ways that altered the dynamics of cultural and legal conflict.

6 This case study on the naming controversy suggests a need for a more contextual, dynamic, and relational understanding of state behavior. Most analyses of state- Kurdish relations depict the Turkish state as a unified and coherent actor that imposes

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a set of rigid and uncompromising nation-building policies to transform the citizens into one, specific understanding of Turkishness.4 Such assumption reifies the state as an integrated unit and ignores the dissonance and confrontations that take place between different state institutions and actors. This article draws on the ‘state in society’ approach (Migdal et. al. 1994, 2001) and calls attention to the non-monolithic nature of the Turkish state. As Hansen and Stepputat (2002: 16) suggest, ‘As modern forms of governmentality penetrate and shape human life in unprecedented ways, the practices and sites of governance have also become ever more dispersed, diversified, and fraught with internal inconsistencies and contradictions.’ Such heterogeneity of state responses has a lot to do with the different contexts in which state institutions operate. Understanding how states respond to an issue requires going beyond a procedural understanding of policy making to an analysis of how state institutions and actors interpret and recreate policies at different levels.

7 In the first section, I provide a brief discussion of why states interfere in naming practices along with a short history of the Turkish state’s policy of naming. In the second section, I briefly discuss the legal restrictions on Kurdish cultural expressions after the start of the armed conflict in the 1980s and 1990s. In the third section, I examine how the naming issue became more contentious at the end of the 1980s with the escalation of the armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish military. I show how state agents, particularly local officials such as registrars, public prosecutors, judges, police, and gendarmerie who worked in the conflict-ridden Kurdish areas came to perceive any expression of Kurdishness as a political symbol in support of the PKK. I also examine the decisions of the Turkish Court of Cassation, which is the appeals court of last resort, with regards to personal naming practices and discuss how the local state institutions frequently ignored its consistent rulings against the ban on Kurdish names. I argue that the local bureaucracy’s insistence on the ban, despite the rulings of the Court of Cassation, played a crucial role in instigating the naming conflict and facilitating the growing politicization of personal naming practices among the Kurds. In the final, fourth section, I discuss this cultural contention within the context of the EU reforms and the increasing Kurdification campaign of the Kurdish movement.

I. The Politics of Naming for State and Nation-Building

8 States’ interference in personal naming practices is inextricably linked to modern state formation and establishment of direct rule. Collection of taxes, imposition of conscription, institutionalizing a standard legal system and property regime, and establishing a system of universal citizenship entail expansion of state control over daily lives of its citizens. As Scott et al. (2002) emphasize states’ efforts to impose direct rule over their populations necessitates increased social legibility: ‘The modern state- by which we mean a state whose ideology encompasses large-scale plans for the improvement of the population’s welfare- requires at least two forms of legibility to be able to achieve its mission. First, it requires the capacity to locate citizens uniquely and unambiguously. Second, it needs standardized information that will allow it to create aggregate statistics about property, income, health, demography, productivity, etc.’ (Scott et. al. 2002: 10). One of the ways states increase the legibility of their populations is through assigning each individual a fixed and hereditary surname.

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9 The that was passed in 1934 in Turkey indicates such state efforts to identify each individual as a legal person. This law required each citizen to adopt a family name. It also brought certain restrictions on the types of surnames that can be adopted. These restrictions suggested that the state’s aim to impose a surname law went beyond a purely administrative motive. The Turkish state also considered the law as an agent of social makeover to mold citizens into a homogeneous, national unit. First, the law was used as a tool for detribalization. The Republican regime considered tribes as signs of backwardness and tribal leaders as centers of power that could challenge the expansion of state authority in the countryside. Tribes were seen as communities that stood in the way between states and citizens; they were obstacles to establishing direct state rule.5 The Surname Law forbade surnames that were related to tribes. Hüseyin Koca (1998: 132) writes that sons of some tribal leaders were given different last names than their fathers’ and that each son received a separate last name to break up the tribal structure, which was quite strong especially in the Kurdish and Arabic-speaking areas of Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia.6 Nevertheless, no systematic data is available on how extensive this practice was. At best, the practice had been uneven and incomplete. Sometimes large landowning families and tribes could keep their established names, by which they were known if they were powerful enough to influence the local officials.7

10 Second, the Surname Law was meant to foster a sense of Turkishness within society and prohibited surnames that were related to foreign ethnicities and nations. Policy of naming has been a conventional tool for states to construct a new national tradition and identity. It can be a mechanism for ethnic segregation or assimilation (Scassa 1996: 174-175). Domestically, Turkish policy aimed at the latter. The Surname Law was a tool for the creation of Turkish national identity and an ethnically indistinguishable citizenry. Nevertheless, at a global scale, it also intended to draw clear-cut boundaries of Turkishness, separating Turkey from the other Muslim nations. The new language policy of the early Turkish Republic promoted the development of purified Turkish to establish a radical break with the Ottoman past and to construct a secular national identity.8 A regulatory statue on surnames that was prepared by the Council of Ministers after the law required surnames to be taken from words of Turkish origin.

11 Although there was no legal requirement for the Turkification of first names, personal naming practices were also influenced by the new language policy. There was already a media campaign before the Surname Law that promoted the replacement of personal and geographical names of Arabic and Persian origin with pure Turkish names (Sadoğlu 2003: 257). Unlike non-Muslims, who conventionally used different names than the Muslims at the time, there was no distinct separation between Kurdish and Turkish names. Both ethnic communities used to give traditional Muslim names, which were predominantly Arabic and Persian, to their children. With the new Turkification trend, both Turks and Kurds increasingly began to give pure Turkish names to their children. Naci Kutlay (1997: 311-312), a prominent Kurdish intellectual and activist, notes that during the first few decades of the Republic, many Kurds, especially those who lived in urban areas, gave their children pure Turkish names and names that were reminiscent of Central Asia or Turkish history. Bulliet (1978: 494) writes that the use of Turkish names slowly but steadily increased among the population at large since the establishment of the Republic. Especially non-Muslim minorities felt more pressure to Turkify their names in order not to encounter any discrimination. Türköz (2007) writes

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that as recognized minorities, the Jewish, Armenian, and Greek communities were not legally required to change their names, but this was not made explicit in the law. Many non-Muslim citizens ‘chose to divest their names of explicit markers of their ethnic affiliation. Changes in minority names were made in several ways: by cutting off an ending that marked the name as ethnic, by maintaining one syllable of the old name and adapting the name to Turkish, by adopting a fairly innocuous name such as Çiçek, or, in one case, a complete translation of a name’ (Türköz 2007: 901).

12 The Turkification trend also paved the way for a large-scale toponymical engineering.9 Not only non-Turkish geographical names that suggested the existence of different ethnic communities within Turkey’s boundaries but also those that contained some reference to particular religious or traditional structures and to the old regime began to be changed in the early Turkish Republic. To cite an example, a village named Kürtşeyh [Kurdish Sheikh] was divested of its ethnic connotation and took a neutral name of Çiçektepe [Flowerhill]. Over the years until 1980, the names of 67 percent of subdistricts and 63 percent of villages were changed in Southeastern and Eastern Turkey10. This was followed by another wave of renaming during the military rule after the 1980 coup. Renaming of places emphasized Turkish claims of ownership to these geographic areas and sought to recreate their inhabitants’ sense of space in accordance with the official nationalist ideology. Most importantly, through acts of renaming the Turkish state underlined the extent of its power over its citizens.

13 As Scassa (1996: 172) discusses, states regulate the use of surnames more closely than personal names because fixation of surnames is crucial for modern state building as it helps institutionalize a standard legal system and property regime. Thus, individuals cannot change their surnames as easily as they can change their first names. States’ interest in the regulation of personal names, nevertheless, has been more sporadic and contextual. In Turkey, too, the state’s intervention in the parents’ choice of names for their children has been uneven and directly correlated with efforts to invigorate a common national identity. Official restrictions in personal naming practices emerged at times when perceptions of threat against national unity increased within the state circles. It was after the 1980s, with the escalation of the armed conflict between the Kurdish insurgency and the Turkish army, that state officials came to be more selective with regard to personal naming practices.

14 The first attempt to regulate the choice of first names came with the 1972 Registration Law. Article 16/4 of the law stipulated that names which do not conform to national culture, moral norms, customs and traditions and which offend the public could not be given to children. It was left to the discretion of officials working at the registration offices to decide whether a name ran counter to the ‘national culture’ or not. Sezgin Tanrıkulu, a prominent human rights attorney based in Diyarbakır,11 argued that before the military coup in 1980, Kurds could have given Kurdish names to their children. He called attention to the prevalence of many Kurdish names such as Berfin, Helin, Hazal, Baran, and Kendal, which could have been officially registered. 12 Some of the Kurdish activists whom I interviewed confirmed this and pointed out that negotiating with state officials working in the registration offices over a Kurdish name could be possible before the 1980s. A disagreement over a name was usually resolved during such negotiation, without having to go to a judicial process.13

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II. 1980s and 1990s: Official Restrictions on Kurdish Cultural Expressions

15 The 1980 military coup has become a turning point in state-Kurdish relations in Turkey, and it was after this date that the issue of naming became increasingly politicized. The emergence of Kurdish groups that advocated self-determination and the formation of the PKK at the end of the 1970s convinced the military that separatism was an imminent and a serious threat that should be stopped, at any cost. The military rule that lasted from 1980 to 1983 interpreted any manifestation of Kurdishness, from speaking the Kurdish language to listening to Kurdish music, as a challenge against national integrity and did not tolerate it. The repressive measures that the military rule undertook during this period played a significant role in the radicalization of the Kurdish masses (Bozarslan 2001: 46-47). The state policies of this period were also crucial in politicizing the use of the Kurdish language and bringing the language issue to the core of cultural contestation that would last for the years to come. For instance, the infamous Law 2932, which came into effect towards the end of the military rule in 1983, banned the use of the Kurdish language in public and private.14 The second article of the law stated, ‘No language can be used for the explication, dissemination, and publication of ideas other than the first official language of countries, recognized by the Turkish state.’ The law was carefully formulated to make Kurdish its sole target but never mentioned the word ‘Kurdish,’ as it would mean the official acknowledgement of the existence of the Kurdish language. The law also prohibited the spread of any language, other than Turkish, as the mother tongue. Until its repeal in 1991, the law was used to justify probations, interrogations, and litigations against those who spoke, sang, or published in Kurdish.15

16 It was in the contentious environment of the 1980s that Kurdish names have been increasingly seen as subversive of national culture and banned at the local registration offices. According to Sezgin Tanrıkulu, the military regime, which was in power between 1980 and 1983, sent a list of Kurdish names to the registration offices and banned these names.16 Transition to multi-party politics in 1983 did not lead to a relaxation of the policies restricting Kurdish cultural practices. The emergence of the PKK and the start of the Kurdish armed resistance increased the state’s intolerance towards expressions of Kurdishness. The armed conflict also led to a gradual politicization of Kurdish cultural elements, such as music, dress, language, and celebrations, which curtailed the state’s willingness to relax cultural measures. For instance, a genre of Kurdish music developed that glorified and propagated armed struggle and self-determination. Newroz, known as the New Year that marks the first day of spring around March 21, became a more public and political event that symbolized Kurdish resistance against state repression. The PKK also used Newroz as a means to propagate and conduct violence. Its celebrations led to violent conflicts between state security forces and Kurdish activists from time to time (Yanık 2006: 287). Such politicization strengthened the hardliners’ position within the state, particularly the military’s. The hardliners tended to see the Kurdish cultural demands as a subtle prelude to autonomy and eventually territorial secession. Although the end of the 1980s brought a debate among politicians, members of civil society organizations, and intellectuals about how to solve the Kurdish problem through non-military means,

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relaxation of legal restrictions on Kurdish cultural expressions proved to be a difficult matter.17

17 By the beginning of the 1990s, the government began to relax some of the major restrictions on expressions of Kurdish culture. The infamous Law 2932, which banned the Kurdish language in public and private, was lifted in April 1991.18 The following December, Deputy Prime Minister Erdal İnönü argued that Kurdish citizens should enjoy their cultural identity in full. On March 1991, the Minister of Culture issued a directive allowing for the celebration of Newroz, the Kurdish New Year, all over the country. The following year the Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel announced that he recognized the Kurdish ethnic presence. President , in particular, took important steps in an attempt to solve the problem through non-military means. In January 1990, he approved the compulsory jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, which since then has become a crucial appeal mechanism for Kurdish activists. He also announced that he was partly Kurdish, argued for Kurdish broadcasting on state television, tried to form informal contacts with the Kurdish leaders, stated that a federal system could solve the Kurdish problem, and advocated the preparation of an amnesty law for the PKK fighters (Ataman 2002).

18 Such liberalization also had an effect on bringing the Kurdish issue into the public debate. As Somer (2004: 246) states, ‘Beginning in 1991, not only did the number of articles escalate drastically, but also a large percentage of the articles began to use ‘Kurd,’ indicating that the discursive categories that the journalists were using in describing similar events were in transition.’ In a country in which officials almost never used the word ‘Kurd’ and identified the Kurdish issue as a problem of regional backwardness or terrorism, these were drastic changes. As Yeğen (2007: 137) notes, Kurdish resistance pushed Turkish nationalists to publicly recognize the existence of a separate Kurdish identity, which they had denied for decades. This recognition, nevertheless, was uneven at different levels of the state. In other words, there was no integrated state response towards such liberalization. Attempts to reduce tensions by easing the restrictions on Kurdish linguistic and cultural practices failed to produce the desired impact on the ground. Resistance to cultural policy change by state officials working at the local levels has played a considerable role in instigating further cultural and symbolic conflict. For instance, even after Law 2932 was lifted in 1991, most of the restrictions on the use of the Kurdish language remained de facto in force, largely because the abolition of the law did not influence the behavior of the local state cadres. 19

III. Mixed State Responses to Kurdish Naming

19 An analysis of the Kurdish naming controversy since the 1980s demonstrates the incoherent nature of state policies in Turkey. The naming controversy underlines how parts of the state –the military, bureaucracy, political parties, government, and judiciary along with their representatives at the lower levels of the state in local areas– formulated and implemented different and sometimes conflicting responses in their attempts to deal with the Kurdish problem. The continuing controversy over Kurdish naming seems in part to be due to local officials’ reluctance to recognize Kurdish names, and, more generally, their reluctance to make concessions to the idea of ‘Kurdish rights.’ Specifically, it was the local registrars, public prosecutors, judges,

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police, and gendarmerie who played significant roles in escalating the naming controversy.

20 In some cases, Kurdish names came to be targets of the local police and prosecutor. In February 1987, for instance, the weekly news magazine Nokta reported that the Office of the Public Prosecutor in Bitlis brought twelve people to court, charging them with giving Kurdish names to their children. The judicial process started after the Bitlis chief of police conducted a survey of the names registered in the public registration office and wrote a report about local naming practices to the office of the public prosecutor. In this report the police chief wrote that the majority of the population living in Bitlis conserved their local characteristics, that they continued to speak their local language, and that they gave their children Kurdish names. Before the public prosecutor in Bitlis charged the parents, he asked for an opinion from the Ministry of the Interior. As a result, the Ministry prepared a committee of experts composed of two administrators from the General Directorate of Population and Citizenship Affairs. The report written by the committee underlined that the names were not Turkish and added, ‘Over the long term, the names given to children are very important for our national unity and social structure. Therefore, names given to children should have a character that unites society.’ The report also drew attention to the Article 16/4 of the Registration Law, which stipulated that names which do not conform to the national culture, moral norms, customs, and traditions and which offend the public cannot be given to children. As a result of this report from the Ministry of the Interior, the public prosecutor applied to the court to annul the Kurdish names. After 10 months of the first hearing in court, the judges decided to drop the case for procedural reasons, claiming that public prosecutors could not open court cases to annul registered names. This ruling was in conformity with a previous decision of the Court of Cassation, which stipulated that a name’s non-Turkish origin could not be a justification for its annulment. 20 Neither the decision of the court in Bitlis nor the earlier decision of the Court of Cassation, however, could serve as precedents and prevent name annulment cases from being opened in the Kurdish regions in the following years.

21 Often it was the officials in public registration offices in Kurdish cities who played a critical role in instigating the contestations over naming. In 1988, the registration office in issued a criminal complaint about a parent who gave his children Kurdish names, Valat and Baver. According to the registrars, these names were not in conformity with the national culture, customs, and traditions and, therefore, should be erased from the registration records. The civil court of Midyat asked an opinion from the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate of Population and Citizenship Affairs. This time the General Directorate’s interpretation conflicted with its report in the previous year. While it underlined that the names were not of Turkish origin, it called attention to the Lausanne Treaty and stated that people who belonged to minority groups in Turkey had the right to give foreign names to their children. Accordingly, the family in question could be considered as belonging to a minority and that the children’s names were common among people who constituted a minority community in Eastern Turkey. This was one of the very rare instances that an official institution recognized the Kurdish population as a minority in Turkey. In fact, the opinion was based on an incorrect interpretation of the Lausanne Treaty, which recognized only the non-Muslim Turkish citizens as minority groups. In accordance with the answer sent from the Ministry of the Interior, the local civil court of Midyat ruled that the Kurdish

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names of the children could not be changed.21 While the decision of the Midyat court paralleled the decision of the court in Bitlis a year ago, its legal justification was different.

22 A survey of the Court of Cassation [Yargıtay] decisions concerning naming clearly shows the dissonance between state institutions at different levels and how the issue became more controversial in the Kurdish localities in the 1990s. In Turkey, the Court of Cassation is the court of appeals of last resort and reviews the decisions of the lower courts to ensure standardization in the legal practice. If the Court of Cassation does not agree with a decision, it annuls the decision of the lower court and remands the case to the lower court. If the lower court insists on its previous decision, the General Assembly of the Court of Cassation concludes appellate review on the lower court’s judgment and makes the final decision on the case.22 Since the 1980s, the Court of Cassation’s decisions with regards to taking non-Turkish names have been consistently liberal. In all the cases about naming, Kurdish or other foreign names,23 the court ruled that individuals were free to take any name, unless the meaning of the name was insulting, humiliating, or profane. Such rulings, however, were hardly taken into consideration by the local bureaucratic circles in the conflict-ridden Kurdish areas. For state agents who served in the local areas of the conflict, banning Kurdish names became a way to assert state authority over the very private details of Kurds’ lives, at times when many such officials felt their authority was being threatened.

23 In 1990, for instance, the Court of Cassation overruled a decision of a lower civil court, which ruled that the parents involved should annul the Kurdish name, ‘Berivan,’ that they had given their child and registered officially. The Court of Cassation rejected the ruling based on several reasons. It ruled that, procedurally, name annulment cases could not be opened in courts either by public prosecutors or by registration offices but that only individuals could apply to courts in order to change their names. The court also stated that, since naming their children is a right of parents, no individual could be stripped of a name by a court decision according to the main principles of human rights. In addition, it found the lower court’s explanation inadequate as to why the name, ‘Berivan,’ did not conform to the national culture, customs, and traditions.24

24 During the 1990s, the Court of Cassation also issued rulings on a number of cases that involved individuals who wanted to change their Turkish names to Kurdish. In the 1990s, with the intensification of the armed conflict and the popular spread of Kurdish nationalism, more Kurds wanted to take distinctive Kurdish names and used the Turkish court system to seek their rights. The lower courts in general were not empathetic to such demands and rejected the plaintiffs’ demands on the grounds that the names were not Turkish. A fewer number of these plaintiffs could appeal their cases to the Court of Cassation. In all these cases, the court of last resort consistently ruled that personal names do not have to be of Turkish origin. For instance, in 1993, the Court of Cassation cancelled a lower court’s decision that refused a parent’s demand to change his daughter’s name from ‘Berrin’ into a Kurdish name, ‘Berfin.’ While the lower court refused this demand on the grounds that the name was not Turkish, the Court of Cassation issued the following ruling:

25 According to the stated clause of the law, names which do not conform to national culture, moral norms, customs and traditions and which offend the public cannot be given. Although the court rejected the case based on this clause, the justification was based on a photocopy of a text that was written by the chairman of the editorial board

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of the Turkish Language Society [Türk Dil Kurumu] to the Ministry of the Interior. The aforementioned chairman’s opinion that giving the name ‘Berfin’ to Turkish children would be contrary to the national culture, moral norms, customs and traditions because of its foreign origins cannot be a justification for a court decision. Why the word ‘Berfin’ does not conform to our traditions and cannot be given as a name to Turkish children unlike names that are commonly used in our society such as Pervin, Nermin, Şermin, Berin, and the like should be explained thoroughly in a way that would leave no doubts. 25

26 As a result, the Court of Cassation annulled the decision of the lower court. A year later, in a very similar case, the Court of Cassation overruled another lower court’s decision that did not allow a woman to change her name from Songül to Rojda. In this case too, the lower court based its decision on an opinion that came from the Turkish Language Society. The Court of Cassation, nevertheless, did not find such opinion adequate and made a decision based on the meaning of the name and whether or not the individual was known within the society by the name he/she wanted to take. Unless the meaning of the name was insulting, defamatory or profane, the Court of Cassation ruled that the lower courts did not have the right to deny that name to the individual, even though the name was not Turkish.26

27 One important controversial case was seen in 1999. A father, whose daughter’s name was ‘Hatice,’ applied to the Court of Cassation to challenge the lower court’s refusal to change her name into Kurdish, ‘Mizgin.’ The lower court denied the name change to Mizgin on the grounds that it did not exist in the Turkish language and stated that it had Persian (Kurdish) 27 origin. The court referred to the opinion of a Turkish language and literature professor, who stated that the name had different and contradictory meanings, one of which could be considered insulting. According to the expert’s opinion, the name could mean ‘guest, dining table, hospitable, clean, and urine,’ depending on the way it was spelled in Persian. One of the reasons why the lower civil court found the name objectionable was because of its meaning of ‘urine.’ The plaintiff, however, stated that it meant ‘good news’ in his regional language. The Court of Cassation found the lower court’s decision appropriate and approved it. Nevertheless, the decision did not come as a result of a consensus. In his dissenting opinion, one judge stated that it would not be right to ban the name Mizgin because it was used commonly in the plaintiff’s region, that people’s lifestyles in this region could not be considered as distinct from the Turkish culture, and that the plaintiff had the right to choose a lifestyle from the milieu that he lived in. He also called attention to the commonness of non-Turkish names within Turkish society and expressed his skepticism about the objectivity of the expert’s opinion on the name’s meaning.28

28 In 2000, the plaintiff applied to the Court of Cassation for a reexamination of the case. This time the General Assembly of the Court of Cassation found the expert’s opinion inadequate and subjective. It issued a ruling in favor of the father and stated:

29 ‘First we should note that the fourth clause of the Article 16 of the Registration Law was not written to purify Turkish from words of foreign origin but to avert people from giving names that do not conform to the national culture, moral norms, customs and traditions. Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia is a part of the motherland, where, not only a

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particular ethnic group, but people with different ethnic origins live as part of our country’s reality.’

30 The court acknowledged that many of the names used in Turkey are of Arabic and Persian origin and are ingrained in Turkish culture and traditions. It was convinced by the father’s claim that the child is commonly called as ‘Mizgin’ by her family and friends and that the name is commonly used in the region where the family resided. As its final decision the court ruled that the father had legitimate reasons to change his daughter’s name.29

31 As the different court cases indicate, the attitude of different state institutions towards Kurdish naming was neither monolithic nor consistent. To ensure nationwide unity in implementation, the Ministry of the Interior sent separate circulars in 1986, 1990, and 1992 stating that officials in registration offices should register names of parents’ choice. The circulars also specified that if a name was considered objectionable, registrars should first consult the Ministry before informing the public prosecutor.30 Nevertheless, state registrars continued to refuse to register Kurdish names, the gendarmerie searched for Kurdish names to inform legal authorities, and local public prosecutors occasionally filed suits against parents who gave Kurdish names to their children. In addition, disregarding the highest court’s previous decisions on the issue, many local courts continued to interpret the Article 16/4 of the Registration Law as a ban against Kurdish names. For example, in 1998, the Elazığ registration office refused a father’s demand to register his child’s name as ‘Laşer Rodi.’ The administrative court of Malatya approved the registration office’s claim two years later. In an interview, the father stated that although his grandmothers’ Kurdish names were officially registered, he was not able to register his child’s name for the five years since his birth.31

32 This study did not try to methodically study the motives for local officials’ relatively conservative reactions to national-level legal reforms loosening restrictions on Kurdish cultural expression. However, it is plausible that they resisted national policymakers’ reform efforts for several reasons. First, it is likely that some officials toughened their behavior because of the harsh circumstances of the war, which made them less tolerant of cultural practices and symbols of Kurdishness. Some blamed local people for their distress related to the everyday risks of war, came to associate almost every element of Kurdish culture with separatism, and thus were little inclined to accommodate Kurdish cultural expressions or to distinguish between non-politicized and politicized forms of such expressions. Second, the authority of the military-bureaucratic apparatus on the ground was strengthened by several governmental decrees during the fight against the PKK, which increased extralegal and arbitrary practices of local state officials in the region. Finally, unlike the parliamentarians and the members of the government, these local officials were largely insulated from international pressures for the improvement of human rights.

33 As the naming controversy suggests, the Turkish state has not been a coherent and unitary actor in dealing with the Kurdish issue. Instead, ideological or normative disagreements as well as different contexts in which state actors operated mattered in the different interpretation and implementation of laws and policies. As Joel Migdal (2001: 116-117) points out, the state may not generate a single response to an issue or problem: ‘Rather, its outcomes –the formulation and implementation of its policies– are a series of different actions based on the particular calculus of pressures that each engaged component of the state faces in its particular environment of action ….The

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outcome can just as likely be a sum of ill-fitting responses that stem from the different components of the state as they respond to their various arenas of domination and opposition.’ These contradictory responses that state institutions and actors had given to similar situations, nevertheless, reduced the credibility of the future policy changes in the eyes of the Kurds and further contributed to the politicization of the naming issue. In the post-2000 period, Kurdish naming became a tool for activists to express their protest against reforms which they perceived to be merely cosmetic.

IV. Post-2000: Further Politicization of Kurdish Naming

34 At the time of the most substantial language policy change in Turkish Republican history, the Kurdish naming controversy escalated once more in the 2000s. A substantial transformation in state policy came after the capture of Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK, in Kenya in February 1999. After his capture, the PKK, which renamed itself first as KADEK (the Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy Congress) and later as Kongra-Gel (People’s Congress), declared a five-year unilateral ceasefire that led to a dramatic reduction of armed clashes in the years to come. At the end of 1999, another significant development took place. The Helsinki meeting of the European Council, held on December 1999, took key decisions on the enlargement of the European Union and declared Turkey a candidate. The prospect of becoming a full member of the EU and the decline in PKK’s armed operations created a suitable conjuncture that put pressure on the government to address the issue of human rights and to undertake reforms that would have important consequences for the Kurdish demands. Between 2001 and 2003, the Turkish Parliament passed seven sets of reform packages that encompassed constitutional and legal amendments to meet the EU membership criteria.32 These amendments also addressed some of the long-awaited Kurdish demands for cultural rights. In August 2002, a change in the Law on the Teaching of Foreign Languages abolished the ban on teaching Kurdish in private classes. Another important improvement with regards to Kurdish cultural rights came with the amendment to the broadcasting law, which allowed for ‘broadcasting in different languages and dialects Turkish citizens traditionally use in their daily lives.’33 This amendment opened the way for broadcasting in Kurdish in public and private radio and TV stations. Despite many implementation problems on the ground, the legal changes removed many restrictions on the use of the Kurdish language.

35 The expansions of Kurdish linguistic rights coincided with changing Kurdish strategies. In 2002, the PKK declared that it promoted political uprising as a solution to the Kurdish problem. As Romano (2006: 144) points out, the discourse of the Kurdish insurgency shifted to the language of human rights, democracy, and multiculturalism as its military strength weakened and as it needed to attract greater European and international support. In its 8th congress, the PKK announced KADEK as its only legitimate representative and declared its decision to undertake political actions of .34 Only a few months before this announcement, one of the major newspapers in Turkey, Hürriyet, reported that the Turkish intelligence agencies warned the government about the PKK’s decision to begin a Kurdish naming campaign as part of its new civil disobedience strategy. Accordingly, the PKK would mobilize people to apply to courts to replace their Turkish names with Kurdish names as a way

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to create the Kurdish nation.35 In May 2002, the Ministry of the Interior sent a secret circular warning to local administrators about a possible increase in Kurdish naming and asked them to ensure that parents name their children in accordance with the registration law. The circular granted governors wide discretion over decisions about Kurdish naming without specifying how this authority should be used.36 This process started another wave of contention between state officials and the Kurds. Any demand for a Kurdish name was interpreted by state officials to be in line with the demands of the PKK and could be perceived as a crime. The Registration Office in took a family to court for giving the name Rojhat to their child.37 A lawyer who wanted to give the name Robin to his newborn son could not register it in Diyarbakır.38 In Ardahan, two fathers who wanted to give Kurdish names to their sons were sent to the State Security Court on the charges of separatism and supporting a terrorist organization through propaganda. The case was dismissed when the fathers’ relationship with the PKK could not be established.39 In Diyarbakır, after surveying the civil registry records, the gendarmerie prepared a list of 600 Kurdish names and sent it to the office of the public prosecutor, which immediately started investigations. In the gendarmerie’s document it was written that the campaign for Kurdish naming was part of the PKK’s attempts of political struggle and that those who insisted on giving Kurdish names to their children acted in accordance with the PKK’s directives. Similarly, in Izmir nine people who gave Kurdish names to their children were taken to court for supporting the PKK. According to the Turkish Human Rights Foundation, a total of 76 name annulment cases were brought to the courts in the year 2002. 40

36 The mobilization of both state officials and the Kurds with regards to naming in the post-2000 period underlines the difficulty of reconciliation, even at the cultural and symbolic level, after periods of armed conflict. Ross (2007) emphasizes the importance of ‘psychocultural interpretations’ in playing a causal role in ethnic conflicts. As Ross argues, parties to the conflict do not act in a vacuum. Their interpretations of new phases in a conflict are conditioned by their preexisting beliefs, experiences, and narratives: ‘The ambiguity of most events means they can be interpreted in different ways, and to deal with this ambiguity groups turn to readily available interpretations and narratives that then shape subsequent behavior. This, of course, is what makes ethnic conflict so difficult to contain and manage and why ambiguous events are selectively interpreted as confirming evidence for preexisting beliefs. Furthermore, since many disputes involve parties with a long history of conflict, older grievances are easily appended to newer ones as political conditions warrant.’ (Ross 2007: 25). In Turkey, the history of armed conflict prevented most state actors from seeing Kurdish rights as a neutral category of minority rights, even after the decline in armed clashes. Rather, the Kurdish demands for recognition of difference have been predominantly perceived as demands for national self-determination. Especially for the local bureaucracy and the military that had firsthand experience of the war, the pro-EU reforms that began to lift restrictions on the use of Kurdish meant conceding to the demands of the Kurdish insurgency through outside pressure. For instance, the resistance of the military and the bureaucracy to the expansion of the cultural and linguistic space for expressions of Kurdishness was quite apparent in the cases of Kurdish broadcasting and private Kurdish teaching. Many human rights activists have emphasized the bureaucratic complications that undercut the implementation of many of the reforms and the gap between legislation and actual practice.41

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37 Another process that underlined the difficulty of cultural reconciliation involved the changing strategies of Kurdish activism. The pro-Kurdish activists’ efforts to mobilize the Kurdish masses around naming were a consequence of the new cultural-linguistic turn in the movement’s strategies. With the expansion of the legal-cultural space, the post-2000 period has seen renewed efforts to develop the Kurdish language and literature, to increase the volume of Kurdish publications, and to do research on Kurdish history and culture. In this process, Kurdish activism also expanded its focus to cultural and symbolic contestation, which aimed at defining Kurdishness by differentiating itself from Turkishness. For the Kurdish activists, names increasingly became a tool for the symbolic creation of Kurdish nationhood. Prominent Kurdish activist Naci Kutlay (1997: 327-328) states, ‘The identity search and struggle in recent years showed itself, primarily and in its simplest form, in the use of Kurdish names. Everybody looks for a Kurdish name for his/her children, more distinctly in the cities with high Kurdish population density and less so in villages, and they take care that these names be meaningful and pure Kurdish. Names chosen from Kurdish history and geography began to be used, replacing the old traditional names. At the same time these names indicate the families’ patriotic character, advocating Kurdish identity.’ As stated earlier, many Kurds and Turks used to share similar Muslim names in the past. Kurdish activists’ naming campaign in the post-2000 era, nevertheless, increasingly took a nationalist, exclusivist character, aiming to construct a clear-cut boundary between Turkishness and Kurdishness, and thus played a role in complicating the reconciliation process.

38 In June 2003, the Turkish Parliament changed Article 16 of the Registration Law to minimize contradictory interpretations of the article and to put an end to the naming controversy. The article, which stipulated that children could not be given names that contradict with the ‘national culture’ and ‘Turkish customs and traditions,’ was changed. The amendment dropped the terms ‘national culture’ and ‘Turkish customs and traditions,’ and stated that only names that disregard moral norms or offend the public could not be given as first names. The following September, the government sent a circular to the governors explaining the amendment and asking them to ensure that any name could be registered in their province as long as it does not violate moral norms and offend the public and is spelled in accordance with the official Turkish alphabet. Soon after the amendment was passed, the pro-Kurdish Democratic People’s Party (DEHAP) and the Free Society Party (ÖTP) organized a campaign for the registration of Kurdish names that include letters q, x, and w, which do not exist in the official alphabet. Administrators of these parties collectively applied to courts to replace their names with explicit Kurdish names such as Xemgin, Berxwedan, Warjin, Qalferat, and Hêzîl Avaşîn. The applications reached hundreds. While the activists declared that they wanted to show the limits of the cultural openings and the EU reforms, they also introduced a set of Kurdish names, which were largely unknown to the public before. Some of these names also had explicit nationalist connotations such as Şérwav [warrior], Serxwebun [independence], Welat [motherland], and [uprising].42 Neither the local courts nor the Court of Cassation allowed the registration of Kurdish names with the letters that did not exist in the alphabet. In the rulings, the courts stipulated that spelling of the names should conform to the rules of the Turkish alphabet and that nonconformity could create administrative problems and confusion. 43 The registration of Kurdish names that are spelled with the letters in the official alphabet, nevertheless, has created fewer problems since the amendment of the related

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article in the Registration Law and signified some change in Turkish state policies.44 In 2008, a father could register his newborn daugher’s name as Helin Kurdistan, which meant ‘nest of Kurdistan,’ without much difficulty in Şanlıurfa.45

39 The insistence on the part of the Kurdish activists to use names that are distinctively Kurdish and spelled with letters that do not exist in the official alphabet signified to the public the Kurdish activism’s dissatisfaction with the new openings and its unwillingness to accept an easy conciliation. The recent naming controversy also underlined a Kurdification process that paralleled the earlier Turkification practices, which aimed at purification of the language and the construction of an exclusive ethnic identity. As such, it indicates a mutually transformative interaction between state policies and minority activism. The naming controversy of the post-2000 period underlines the potential of Kurdish nationalism to act like a mirror image of Turkish nationalism, which in turn makes reconciliation over minority rights more difficult to achieve. Practices of Kurdification reinforce a sense of ambivalence among state actors vis-à-vis minority rights, lead them see such initiatives as steps for separatism rather than acts for ethno-cultural preservation, and consolidate their resistance to policy reforms. Many municipalities in the Southeast run by the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) began to push harder for Kurdification, which resulted in official resistance at different levels of state institutions. In 2007, the Diyarbakır Municipality published a 105-page reference book that listed Kurdish names. In Urfa, in the district of Suruç, the municipality’s efforts to Kurdify street names failed as a result of litigation.46 In Diyarbakır, giving Kurdish names to parks was not allowed by the district administration based on the grounds that the constitution stipulates Turkish as the official language.47 Such a broad interpretation of the related article in the constitution once more underlined the local administrative suspicions of the Kurdish cultural demands and the non-linear character of state-minority relations.

Conclusion

40 The Kurdish naming contention in Turkey suggests that the conventional approaches to state-Kurdish relations remain inadequate in understanding state behavior. As the Turkish state’s responses to Kurdish naming indicate, nation-building should not be conceptualized as a linear and unchanging process. This process was in fact marked by many instabilities and contradictions in state discourse and practice. Nevertheless, the scholarship on state-minority relations remained largely unconcerned with how different state institutions in Turkey could tackle the same issue in different ways. In this study, I argue that different contexts in which state actors operated mattered in formulation and implementation of policies. Depictions of the Turkish state as a coherent and unitary actor may overlook some of the major factors that instigate the Kurdish conflict. What we need is more ethnographic analyses of the Turkish state that problematize its contradictory practices and attend to the practices of state institutions at the local levels. This study is only a step towards this in its attention to the fragmentations and divergent practices of different state actors. More nuanced and in- depth studies of state institutions could give a clearer picture of struggles that take place at the state level, explain why state actors behave the way they do, and clarify how a state’s inconsistencies affect its relations with the society.

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41 One question that this study raises relates to the decisions of the Court of Cassation vis- à-vis Kurdish naming. The Court’s tolerance for Kurdish names is particularly interesting because the Court has a reputation for endorsing a guardianship role to protect Kemalist ideals and prioritizing state interests over individual rights and freedoms.48 Therefore, the Court has not been consistently liberal on matters of human rights, let alone Kurdish political and cultural rights. Under what circumstances and in which issue areas the Court observes human rights norms and acts as an agent of liberalization are important questions that go beyond the objectives and scope of this study. These questions still await an answer and require further study on the decisions of the Court of Cassation.

42 The naming controversy also underlines how state policies and minority activism mutually condition one another. The Turkish state’s interventions over the years to regulate and control the private lives of the Kurds, such as what names to give to children, gave new meaning and politicized many of the cultural expressions, as in the case of Kurdish naming. The general official discourse on Turkishness and the Turkification policies influenced the manner Kurdish activists imagined Kurdish identity and pushed them to define it in more exclusivist terms with clear-cut boundaries. The increasing use of names by Kurdish activists as markers of divisive identity coupled with the history of armed conflict, in turn, contributed to the official resistance against Kurdish naming, especially at local bureaucratic levels. One implication of this study is that nation-building should be seen as a dynamic and interactive process, rather than a unidirectional one. Neither state actors nor minority activists act in a vacuum. In other words, both state policies and minority strategies are a result of an interaction, in which earlier acts and discourses matter for the formulation of current practices of both sides. A clean causal relationship between state policies and minority mobilizations may not be easily established with an approach that takes into consideration such mutual transformations. Nevertheless, an interactive and contextual understanding of state-minority relations could better illuminate the possibilities for reconciliation after long periods of conflict.

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NOTES

1. I thank Jason Scheideman, Nicole Watts, the members of the EJTS editorial board, and the two anonymous readers for their helpful comments and criticisms on previous drafts of this article. 2. Radikal, ‘Baran, Serhat Yasaklı,’ 4 March 2002. 3. Radikal, ‘Berivan’ın Yargıcı Şirvan,’ 19 April 2002 and Cumhuriyet, ‘Şirvan’dan Baran’a Onay,’ 22 May 2002. 4. For some examples of such approach see Natali (2005), McDowall (1996), and Hassanpour (1992). 5. I discussed state’s efforts to detribalize the Kurdish regions and to makeover the Kurdish society at length in my dissertation. For more see Aslan (2008). 6. This practice was also confirmed by some of my interviewees in Southeastern Anatolia. 7. For more on the Surname Law and the negotiations between citizens and state officials during the surname adoption process, see Türköz (2004) and (2007). 8. For more on the language policies of the early Turkish Republic, see Çolak (2004) and Sadoğlu (2003). 9. For a detailed analysis of changes in place names during the Republican period, see Öktem (2008). 10. Türkiye Mülki İdare Bölümleri, 1 Kasım 1980 durumu, İçişleri Bakanlığı, Genel Yayın No: 408, Seri III, Sayı 4. The practice continued after 1980 as well. 11. Tanrıkulu was the president of the Bar Association in Diyarbakır and is the regional representative of Turkish Human Rights Foundation. He was one of the first attorneys who submitted Kurdish complaints to the European Court of Human Rights. 12. Interview with Sezgin Tanrıkulu, Radikal, 25 August 2003. 13. My impression is that demand for distinctively Kurdish names was also lower in the pre-1980 period, before the expansion of Kurdish nationalism to the masses. Nevertheless, to my knowledge, there has been no study to verify a change in Kurdish naming preferences over time. 14. For the full text of the law, see ‘Türkçeden Baska Dillerde Yapılacak Yayınlar Hakkında Kanun,’ Resmi Gazete, No: 18199, 22 October 1983, pp. 27-28. 15. According to the official statistics, between 1986 and 1991, 115 court cases were opened and 189 people were tried for the violation of Law 2932. This data is compiled from the website of the General Directorate of Criminal Registration and Statistics of the Ministry of Justice: http:// www.adli-sicil.gov.tr/istatist.htm. However, many more people were detained and interrogated but not charged for violating Law 2932. There is no statistical data about their numbers. In addition, in many cases the authorities considered speaking in Kurdish as a violation of the Turkish Penal Code’s Article 142, which banned advocating separatism and propagating ideas that weaken national sentiments. 16. Interview with Sezgin Tanrıkulu, Radikal, 25 August 2003. 17. See Cemal (2003) for detailed accounts of positions by different state actors on the Kurdish issue.

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18. For more on the debates see ‘Kürtçeye Özgürlük,’ Nokta, 3 June 1990. 19. I discuss how local state officials recreated many of the linguistic restrictions even after the abolition of Law 2932 at length in my dissertation. For more see Chapter III in Aslan (2008). 20. See the articles ‘Zozan oldu Suzan,’ Nokta, 15 February 1987, pp. 16-18 and ‘Zozanların yasağı da kalktı,’ Nokta, 14 February 1988, p. 38. 21. See ‘Resmi bir itiraf: Kürtler azınlıktır,’ Nokta, 19 June 1988, pp. 22-23. 22. More information about the Turkish Court of Cassation can be found at www.yargıtay.gov.tr. The court decisions in this article are compiled from the Kazancı case law database. For more information on the database, see www.kazanci.com.tr. 23. The following are a few case examples that involved non-Kurdish names. It was the 18th Civil Chamber (18. Hukuk Dairesi) of the Court of Cassation that heard all these cases. For instance, a dual citizen of Germany and Turkey applied to the Court of Cassation to annul a lower court’s decision that did not allow him to replace his Turkish name with his German name, Dennis. The Court of Cassation annulled the lower court’s decision and issued a ruling that there was no law or regulation that required a name to be Turkish and that everyone had the right to officially carry a name by which he was known in society. For more see Esas no: 2002/4750, Karar no: 2002/7382, 1 July 2002. About a man who wanted to take his original German name after he became Turkish citizen, see Esas no: 1996/2181, Karar no: 1996/2777, 19 March 1996; about the name ‘Jutta,’ see Esas no: 1997/3451, Karar no: 1997/4459, 6 May 1997; about the name ‘Jülyet,’ see Esas no: 2002/10421, Karar no: 2002/12155, 16 December 2002. 24. Yargıtay İlamı, T.C. Yargıtay 3. Hukuk Dairesi, Esas no: 8859, Karar no: 516. 25. Yargıtay İlamı, T.C. Yargıtay 18. Hukuk Dairesi, Esas no: 9708, Karar no: 0832, 13 October 1993. 26. Yargıtay İlamı, T.C. Yargıtay 18. Hukuk Dairesi, Esas no: 1994/7386, Karar no: 1994/8560, 21 June 1994. 27. Only once in the court’s decision the name’s Kurdish origin is acknowledged. In the rest of the text, the name is referred to as Persian. 28. T.C. Yargıtay Hukuk Genel Kurulu, Esas no: 1999/18-966, Karar no: 1999/1010, 1 December 1999. The decision can be found at Yargıtay İçtihatları, no. 52, April 2000. 29. T.C. Yargıtay Hukuk Genel Kurulu, Esas no: 2000/18-127, Karar no: 2000/154, 1 March 2000. 30. Interview with a Kurdish activist. Also see Türkiye İnsan Hakları Vakfı (1993): Örneklerle Türkiye İnsan Hakları Raporu 1992, Ankara: Türkiye İnsan Hakları Vakfı Yayınları, p. 171. 31. T.C. Malatya İdare Mahkemesi, Esas no: 1999/1204, Karar no: 2000/335, 11 April 2000. For the interview see ‘Rodi’nin adı yok,’ Milliyet, 13 February 2003. 32. For more on the reform packages see Oran (2004). 33. For detailed information on the recent reforms that related to state-minority relations in general, see Oran (2004), Yıldız (2005), and Kurban (2003). 34. For this resolution see http://www.kurdistan.org/Current-Updates/kadek.html 35. ‘40 Yıllık Kani Oldu Kürt İsmi,’ Hürriyet, 29 January 2002. 36. Kurban (2003: 196); ‘Kanun Değisti, Kafa Değişmedi,’ Radikal, 1 September 2003; and see the interview with Sezgin Tanrıkulu, Radikal, 25 August 2003. 37. ‘Rojhat’a dava açıldı,’ Özgür Politika, 11 October 2002. See http://www.savaskarsitlari.org/ arsiv.asp?ArsivTipID=5&ArsivAnaID=10059#ilgili to access the full article. 38. ‘Oğluna Robin Adını Koyamadı,’ Cumhuriyet, 16 October 2002. 39. ‘Yine Kürtçe Yine Yasak,’ Radikal, 30 May 2002. 40. For more information on the official circular about naming and the several cases in this period, see Türkiye İnsan Hakları Vakfı (2003): Örneklerle Türkiye İnsan Hakları Raporu 2002, Ankara: Türkiye İnsan Hakları Vakfı Yayınları, pp. 22-26. The report can be reached at www.tihv.org.tr. 41. For more on the EU reforms and practice see Kurban (2003) and Aslan (2008).

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42. For more see the 2002, 2003, and 2004 annual reports of the Turkish Human Rights Foundation at www.tihv.org.tr. Also see Radikal, 16 December 2003 and 28 October 2003. 43. Yargıtay Ilami, T.C. Yargıtay 18. Hukuk Dairesi, Esas no:2004/3398, Karar no:2004/4808, 25 February 2004. 44. See the annual reports of the Turkish Human Rights Foundation after 2003 at www.tihv.org.tr. 45. ‘İşte Küçük Kürdistan,’ Radikal, 28 October 2009. 46. ‘Şanlıurfa’da Kürtçe Sokak İsmi Polemiği Bitmiyor,’ Hürriyet, 26 December 2008. 47. ‘Kürtçe İsimler Reddedilince Park İsimsiz Kaldı,’ Hürriyet, 13 May 2009. 48. See the short discussion on Turkish higher courts’ conservatism in JURISTRAS report, ‘Supranational Rights Litigation, Implementation, and the Domestic Impact of Strasbourg Court Jurisprudence: A Case Study of Turkey,’ in http://www.juristras.eliamep.gr/?p=156

RÉSUMÉS

This article analyzes contention over Kurdish naming in Turkey. It explores why there has been increased contention over naming between Kurdish activists and Turkish state authorities since the 1980s. First, it underlines the incoherent state responses to the issue of Kurdish naming and calls attention to the role of the local state officials in the escalation of naming controversy. In particular, the paper analyzes the dissonance between the rulings of the Court of Cassation [Yargıtay] and the local state actors’ decisions and behavior. Second, it discusses the increasing Kurdification campaign of Kurdish activism and its role in exacerbating contention over naming.

INDEX

Mots-clés : Cour de cassation, kurdification, noms kurdes, politique linguistique, relations Etat- société, turquification Keywords : Court of Cassation, judicial politics, Kurdification, Kurdish names, language policy, name ban, state-society relations, Turkification

AUTEUR

SENEM ASLAN Senem Aslan is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Near Eastern Studies in Princeton University. She will be an assistant professor at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine starting in the fall of 2010.

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The Invention of a Tradition: Diyarbakır’s Dengbêj Project

Clémence Scalbert-Yücel

1 This paper analyses the formation of a ‘Kurdish tradition’ at the cross-roads of various initiatives by Kurdish national(ist) and government actors, focusing mainly on the contemporary dengbêj [Kurdish singer] project, which was carried out within the auspices of the Diyarbakır municipality, one of the biggest cities in southeast Turkey.1 This project involved a number of different state offices and openly pro-Kurdish non- state actors, working –at least on paper–in cooperation with each other.

2 Led by the pro-Kurdish Diyarbakır Municipality and the Diyarbakır-based cultural centre Dicle-Fırat Kültür Merkezi, the Dengbêj ve Dengbêjlik Geleneği [Dengbêj and Dengbêjî Tradition] project was funded by the European Union’s Grant scheme for the promotion of cultural rights in Turkey. The scheme aimed to ‘support and enrich the daily usage of languages and dialects other than Turkish.’ It helped develop various projects around Turkey that dealt with cultures associated with ‘non-Turkish languages.’2 The scheme’s institutional framework involved the Office of the Prime Minister Directorate General of Press and Information, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the Central Finance and Contracts Unit of the Republic of Turkey. Financed by this scheme, the Dengbêj ve Dengbêjlik Geleneği project aimed to create an anthology (a book and a CD), and to hold two concerts, which ultimately took place in September 2007 in Diyarbakır and Istanbul.

3 The project was noteworthy for several reasons. First, it was the first time a Turkish ministry had been involved in a project that openly aimed at supporting Kurdish culture and Kurdish language, which have long been highly circumscribed.

4 Second, the project stands out as an important step in a process initiated decades ago by the Kurdish national movement, namely, the recognition and construction of a specifically Kurdish ‘tradition.’ It marks the passage from a loose, unofficial and contentious effort to the institutionalisation of a Kurdish heritage in Turkey. This specific project must be considered as part of a much wider interest in the dengbêj on the part of both the municipality and the Kurdish movement, an interest that

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culminated with the opening of the Mala dengbêjan [House of Dengbêj] in the heart of Diyarbakır’s old city in May 2007. Institutionalisation on such a scale would probably not have been possible without the involvement of the EU, the ministry and the municipality.

5 Third, the project highlights the complex position of a nominally ‘state’ office such as the Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality when such an office is governed by pro- Kurdish challengers. On the one hand, the municipality can be seen as a ‘Turkish’ governmental office staffed by ‘state’ actors. On the other hand, because the municipality is controlled by the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP, Demokratik Toplum Partisi), it is inscribed within a nebula of actors belonging to the trend of the Kurdish movement more or less loosely organised around the DTP - PKK (TV channels, cultural centres, journals, political parties) that functions as a network and shapes ideologies and actions (the actors in this Kurdish network, also, however, act sometimes in contradictory ways)3. It is thus possible to speak of ‘activists in office’ (Watts 2006) who sometimes have rather tense relationships with other local and sometimes national state representatives. This fact necessitates, as recommended by Nicole Watts (forthcoming), that we look at the role of the political party (among others) as a third dimension of the state-society relationship: through the party, the Kurdish contention enters the state’s offices. The municipality is thus situated in an in- between space.

6 Looking at these aspects in relation to one another, I pose the following questions: How have the dengbêjs (themselves, their practices and their songs) been constructed as a Kurdish ‘tradition’ and heritage? What have been the effects of both the state’s policies (from those of the repressive institutions on the ground to those of the contentious municipality) and of the Kurdish movement (including the municipality) on the process and outcome of building such a ‘tradition’? The ‘invention of tradition’ refers not merely to an invention, but also to a revitalization and adaptation of old practices left in abeyance (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983). In this case it results not from strong interventionism, but rather from a smoother and loose process involving the selection of ‘a tradition,’ the attribution of symbolic meaning, and the definition of the forms of this so-called tradition. Because a specific ‘object’ is distinguished, constructed as protected, and transmitted as one of the main carriers of the Kurdish culture, we can also characterise this ‘invention of a tradition’ as a patrimonialisation process.

7 The paper argues, most generally, that the dengbêj ‘tradition’ as it exists today is the result of a several-decades-long process of negotiation between individual and collective actors within Kurdish society as well as between these Kurdish actors and representatives of the state. In fact, both the state and the Kurdish national movement have demonstrated contradictory attitudes toward Kurdish folklore and the dengbêj, ranging from protection to disinterest and repression. The dengbêj themselves have similarly produced contradictory narratives about who they are and what they do, or what they should be and should do. In addition, I suggest that the contemporary involvement of the state in the Dengbêj project through the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism has not substantially modified negotiations between the actors, although it does mark an important symbolic change in state policy. Even though there is no longer a ban, auto-censorship is still in force and the dengbêjs are represented as ‘innocent relics’ who portray the Kurdish part of the ‘Anatolian mosaic’ promoted by official narratives in the 2000s.

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8 Scholars in many disciplines have produced a number of works on the building of Kurdish national identity and the different ‘symbolic and tangible elements’ (Thiesse 1999: 14) that shape it, including history (Bozarslan 2003; Hirshler 2001), geography and landscape (O’ Shea 2004), and language (Scalbert-Yücel 2005; Tejel 2007), to mention only a few. In the vein of these works, the building of a Kurdish ‘tradition’ can be studied as part of the process of building a distinct national culture.

9 Building the dengbêj ‘tradition’ is today part of this process, but it must also be considered in a wider context. Interest in memory is rapidly spreading in contemporary Turkey and is helping people explore personal and collective histories. These memories are also –within certain limits– fostered by official narratives that ‘rediscover,’ for instance, an Ottoman and multicultural past. With the opening of the ‘Pandora’s Box of history’ since the 1990s, ‘a nostalgia industry has emerged, ostensibly offering up titbits from a ‘lost’ past’ (Neyzi 2002: 142). The interest of the state as well as associative or private sectors in such memorial narratives, policies and products, is observable today in Turkey as in many other parts of the world. EU-funded projects that openly aim at developing a ‘cultural dialogue’ promote an image of Turkey as a peaceful ‘cultural mosaic.’ But these cultures and this diversity, in the way they are exhibited and displayed, may also be frozen and innocent representations of a lost but also imagined past (De Certeau 1993). The way memories are remembered, traditions reinvented (as in the dengbêj’s case) often confirms this.

10 Research for this study involved interviews with municipality employees, folklorists, music professionals of the private sector (tape sellers and producers, TV employees, singers), and 12 dengbêjs from the House of Dengbêj in Diyarbakır. Interviews with the dengbêjs were conducted within the House over two weeks. The dengbêjs interviewed were all male, mainly residing in Diyarbakır, and from the villages of the province. They were between 50 and 75 years old. Some work outside the house, some own land, and some are retired. Some claim to have nothing. A short interview was also conducted with Mehmûd Kizil, who was not a member of the House but visited it when I was there.

11 The paper follows a time frame that is roughly divided, maybe a bit artificially, into a period of contention and ban (from the 1960s –the earliest time the dengbêjs I met mentioned when speaking about contention– to the early 1990s), followed by a period of ‘opening’ (starting progressively in the late 1990s). The first part of the paper examines the survival of a certain way of dengbêjîin spite of repression by state institutions, wider social changes, and a rather disinterested Kurdish movement. The second section looks at the revival of the dengbêj practice and at a renewed interest among some Kurdish activists, looking specifically at the municipality-led project.

I. Defining the dengbêj and dengbêjî

12 It is necessary to start with a definition of the term dengbêj. This is a working definition only, since the invention of a dengbêj tradition necessarily examines the making of the dengbêj’s contemporary definitions. The term dengbêj is a Kurdish term composed of the words deng [voice] and bêj (present tense of gotin, to tell). According to Yaşar Kemal, the dengbêj is a man who recites epics in a professional way4. The terms bard or troubadour are sometimes used alluding to the long epic songs that dengbêjs recite, generally without musical accompaniment. Christine Allison also distinguishes

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between the stranbêj and the dengbêj, the latter singing without musical accompaniment (2001: 68). Besides the geographically or historically limited terms ‘bard’ or ‘minstrel,’ Michael Chyet (2003) gives a clear and straightforward definition: ‘reciter of romances and epics.’ The dengbêj must also be defined by his social position: he used to work for and praise a master who took care of him in exchange.5 Roger Lescot, one of the first authors who worked on Kurdish oral literature, thus gives the following definition of the dengbêjs: These professional poets, who over the course of years furnished their memories as apprentices of certain old masters, assumed the task of conserving the traditions of the past and, if some new event were to occur, the celebration of the heroic deeds of the present. … They sometimes faced each other in competitions which were held regularly until quite recently. Every emir or chief of an important tribe maintained one or more of these bards, whose songs, because of the contemporary allusions they might contain, sometimes also had political connotations. Thanks to their unlimited repertoire and matchless gift of improvisation, these men transmitted, from the remotest centuries until today, poems with thousands of verses (Lescot 1977: 798).

13 Even though this definition is quite romantic, it contains the main elements of the dengbêj and its practices. This definition must be kept in mind, but does not reflect the reality of those who today define themselves and are defined as dengbêj, or indeed the reality of the previous generation from whom they learned. The evolution of the practice will be examined in the last part of the article.

14 Dengbêjî is defined by Chyet (2003) as ‘minstrelsy,’ ‘singing,’ or ‘the art of being a dengbêj.’ I shall refer to the last one in this text. The term dengbêjî(and dengbêjlik in its Turkish version), even though it sounds a bit artificial, is also used by the leaders of the Dengbêj Project and by the dengbêjs. However, even the dengbêj themselves have contradictory ideas of what it means to be a dengbêj, as I explore further within the paper.

II. The survival of the dengbêj practice

The hidden dengbêjs: repression and stigmatization of a ‘Kurdish’ and ‘feudal’ practice

15 Because it is obviously linked to the use of the Kurdish language, the practice of dengbêjî has been obstructed by the state. Since the 1960s (the earliest dates mentioned by the dengbêjs interviewed in Diyarbakır), there have often been tensions between dengbêjs and the authorities. However, according to the interviewees, such tensions did not result in imprisonment or torture until the 1980s.6 One interviewee spoke about fines given for each Kurdish word pronounced. These fines, which date back to the 1930s, were set at a local level by municipality workers or Turkish Hearth members of different southeastern localities in the 1930s (see for instance Aydın et al. 2001: 378). Repression, however, varied depending on where one was located. Outside towns, for instance, authorities showed more tolerance for the use of the Kurdish language. One of the most senior dengbêj described a warning he received from the authorities in the 1960s, when he had been brought to the governor’s office and warned by the governor himself. He reported the governor saying as follows: ‘In the internal part, within the walls, it is forbidden. Outside the wall it is free. In the gardens it is free; in the

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countryside it is free. In town, it is forbidden.’7 As pressure was always greater in town, the village played an essential part in preserving the şevbihêrk [evening gatherings] where dengbêjs used to sing, and the apprenticing of the kilam [song] (see note 54 for an extensive definition). Later, villages were the best places in which to collect the kilam. Even though speaking Kurdish had been strongly discouraged at the local level since the 1920s, it was not officially forbidden at the national level until the 1980s (see e.g. Scalbert Yücel 2005: 56-82). The official ban on language occurred with the 1982 Constitution and Law 2932 of 1983 after the military coup of September 12, 1980 led by Kenan Evren. The first softening of the legislation occurred in 1991 under Turgut Özal when Law 2932 was amended, enabling the use of Kurdish language in recording and publishing. As suggested by the governor’s attitude (or, more accurately, the way this attitude was remembered and told) in the event related above, but also in the very way the use of spoken Kurdish was circumscribed during these years, there was no single official attitude toward Kurdish language use: speaking Kurdish could be banned and fined, but could also be tolerated depending on the place one was in and according to whom one was facing; some state employees were, simply put, more tolerant than others. The situation has become tougher in the 1980s.

16 Most of the dengbêjs who lived in town when the coup occurred ceased to sing afterwards. For instance, B. was assumed to be dead by the people who collected oral literature and who tried to gather some dengbêjs around newly established cultural centres in the early 2000s. Like many of interviewees, however, this dengbêj had simply stopped singing after 1980. Collecting and recording were also much more difficult after 1980: as the researcher Hilmî Akyol notes, people were frightened and refused to sing. Those who later settled in town also stopped singing when they abandoned the rural settlement for the urban one. This is how one interviewee who left his village 15 years ago put it: ‘In Diyarbakır, no. Songs were over, they disappeared. Turko [colloquial Kurdish term for ‘the Turk’] didn’t allow it. They tore up our tapes. They didn’t allow.’ Other interviewees recounted similar experiences. Even within the four walls of the house, people were discouraged from singing by their own family. People either stopped singing or sang in secret; the state’s repression was internalised. Some interviewees stressed the fact that songs fell into oblivion because the dengbêj practice stopped for several decades. One mentioned that his repertoire was reduced to a third. Visiting the House today enables them to remember and renew their repertoire.

17 Because of this repression, dengbêjî has tended to be represented as something ‘hidden’ [tiştekî veşartî], or as a ‘buried treasure,’ as one of the dengbêj said: ‘The dengbêj, it is a treasure buried in the ground. The dengbêj is like gold.’8 As such dengbêjî needs to be discovered, cherished and protected.

18 But dengbêjî was not only repressed by the state. It was also impeded by a Kurdish population that was both worried about persecution and had to some degree lost interest due to wider social changes (i.e.,urbanisation, the arrival of television, and the development of new, ‘modern,’ musical forms), and because of the attitudes of some within the Kurdish movement. Even though dengbêjî is today considered a highly important Kurdish tradition that needs to be preserved, and although the songs and the şevbihêrk used to be widely and highly appreciated, dengbêjs were also associated with poverty and dependency. The dengbêj often learned to sing while herding sheep; and being a shepherd –though perceived as quite romantic today– ranks low in the social scale. The dengbêj worked for a beğ or an ağa, who looked after him and whom he

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praised in exchange. People could be forced into dengbêjî by poverty and received protection, food and shelter in exchange (what some of the interviewees called karşılık). Schematically sketched, they were beggars [parsek], a slave in the house [xulam] and miserable [perîşan].9 People could be pushed into dengbêjî by need [îhtiyaç]. Thus one of the dengbêj mentioned having been discouraged by his father from singing because of this negative image.

19 The poverty of the dengbêj seems to be still very much relevant today, but it is also cultivated as an image that can be used for specific aims i.e., when the dengbêjthemselves are asking for an exchange of goods or services. A few dengbêjs I met presented themselves in this vein. One for instance, presented himself like this: ‘I started singing when I was seven, and I still sing. I was an orphan; I grew up with my uncles. My parents were dead. I was naked, poor, and not respected.’10 He followed with a long presentation of his hard childhood and his later work as a shoe-shiner. Another presented himself as follows: ‘I was thrown in the street. Home went, house went, properties went. I am now in the street. I have no home. […] What kept Kurds on their feet, until today, that’s the dengbêjs. These dengbêjs, they need people to take care of them, to take care of them. Each dengbêj, he goes barefoot, naked, he has no house. The economy is at zero. Ah! Thank God! The municipality took care of us, it opened this place.’11 Some of the House’s dengbêjs ownbusinesses and are relatively wealthy; some are retired and earn a small wage. But most of them clearly have few resources. However, not all of them spoke about their economic situation. It seems that those who did are the most involved in trying to use their impoverished status to obtain a karşılık from their dengbêjî. The stigma can be inverted and used in order to secure resources – not only economic resources but also symbolic ones, because poverty also secures the ‘traditional’ image of the dengbêj. The stigma is thus inverted by the process of institutionalization of the ‘tradition,’ and poverty becomes part of the definition of the dengbêj and constructs his social reality too.

20 The Kurdish movement, which had an ambiguous attitude toward folklore, also had a share in marginalizing dengbêjî. This ambiguity has been perceptible since the early 1990s, when the movement developed cultural policies and activities, in particular around the Centre for the Culture of Mesopotamia, Navenda Çanda Mezopotamya (NÇM). The NÇM opened in 1991 in Istanbul (branches were later opened in other towns). According to its website, Dicle-Fırat Kültür Merkezi, which opened in 2003, can be considered a new branch of the NÇM in Diyarbakır. Since 1991 the NÇM has been a leading organization in promoting the cultural aspects of the Kurdish movement. Its first aim was to ‘protect the culture, art, history and language of the colonised peoples of Mesopotamia,’ meaning, the Kurdish people. It also aims at ‘recreating the national culture’ which, it asserted, had been ‘destroyed’ and ‘assimilated.’12 But what culture? The journal Rewşen [Enlightened] published by the Centre between 1992 and 1996 paid attention to folklore, popular culture and popular literature [çirokên gelerî, edebiyata gel]. In the first issue, an article entitled ‘Folklor’ underlined the importance of folklore in building a national identity and called for the rediscovery of Kurdish folklore which, the article argued, had been made meaningless by the occupier.13 Subsequent issues did not ignore oral literature, proverbs or songs, but they were not the journal’s main focus. In January 1993, the NÇM opened a branch in Diyarbakır (it was shortly after shut down). Its manager, Îbrahîm Xort, declared: ‘The NÇM branch in Diyarbakır will mainly focus on research, collection of oral literature, music, traditional dances and

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theatre lessons […] NÇM calls on all the Kurds, saying: collect proverbs, stories, jokes, songs, poems, books, etc.; collect everything that is in your hands or in your region and send it to us in order for us to be able to gather together our culture.’14

21 The interest in folklore and its collection has been evident since the beginning of NÇM. However, the NÇM’s activity branches are divided into music, theatre, folkloric dance, art and language; no specific section is devoted to oral literature. While oral literature was one of the areas of activity of the Kurdish Institute in Istanbul, funded in 1992 as a research institute in order to complement the NÇM, the Institute did not publish any books related to it before 1998. In Rewşen no specific mention is made of the dengbêj – the term is present in some of the articles but no specific attention is given until the publication of the journal Jiyana Rewşen [The Enlightened Life], which replaced Rewşen in 1996. Jiyana Rewşen advertised the monthly activities of the NÇM’s Istanbul and Izmir branches; since 1997, concerts given by dengbêjs have been occasionally (although rarely compared to the numerous other concerts) advertised.15 The Diwana Dengbêj (literarily ‘court of dengbêj,’ an expression which refers to the public gathering of dengbêj on a stage or on TV) slowly developed in the second half of the 1990s, and is today a traditional part of all gatherings and festivals. Despite organising these gatherings, however, it seems that, in practice, the Kurdish movement organisations showed very little interest in the collection, recording, and transcription work conducted by a few individuals in the Kurdistan region. One sees a divergence of views within the movement itself on the role to be attributed to oral literature and folklore, as well as different opportunities between people residing in Istanbul and those residing in the southeast, where collection mostly took place. With fewer resources and opportunities (due in particular to the state of exception in place until the early 2000s), the southeast has been a place for less visible and less prestigious activities such as folkloric collection; Istanbul or Izmir have been places for creative work like theatre or cinema, works that give room for another conception of the ‘Kurdish culture.’ The fact that the collection of folklore also took place in prison nurtures the hypothesis that this type of work was done by those in the movement with few resources.

22 Within the Kurdish movement, and certainly within the NÇM itself, Kurdish activists cultivated a somewhat different definition of culture, grounded not in folklore and ‘ancient tradition’ but in the party and the guerrilla struggle.16 The NÇM held a 5-days Kurdish conference on culture [Konferansa Çandê ya Kurdî], for instance, in November 1992. The report published in Rewşen17 after the meeting seems to include two competing views on culture. On the one hand, Abdurrahman Durre and Feqi Hüseyin Sağnıç (two of the oldest representatives of the movement, who came from the medrese and pre-PKK political trends) stressed the importance of language and oral literature (Rewşen 8, 1992: 23-24). On the other hand, even though amateur folklorists participated in the conference, the main abstracts discussed a new culture to be built on the ground of the guerrilla struggle. Ibrahîm Gürbüz, director of the NÇM, stated: Our art, our culture and our literature must rise from this revolution. Our music, literature, painting must talk about this revolution. Today in our country each act of resistance is a heroic example. This heroism must be written down. In order to break the influence of the colonialist and occupier, culture and art, alternative art and culture must be created. In order to do this a body politic must be discovered. The characteristics and particularities of this polity are the following:national, democratic, scientific, universal, egalitarian, social. That is to say that the form and the shell of our culture and art must be national, and its content must be democratic and socialist.18

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23 The few people I met who had started to collect and record oral literature said that they were discouraged by the political milieu which, during the 1990s, gave priority to contemporary music, theatre and folkloric dances. In the 1990s, people interested in folkloric and oral literature were considered ‘reactionary’ [gerici]. At that time, the dengbêjs did not appear at all a priority for the PKK, which was a socialist party that fought against feudalism, of which dengbêj were considered to be fully part. Thus, dengbêjs fell into oblivion for a while.19

The role of key people and places in the survival of dengbêjs

24 For these reasons,20 the dengbêj never had high visibility among the cultural activities of the Kurdish movement until recently. However, certain individuals and places played an important role in keeping them active and practising.

25 Discussions with some of Diyarbakır’s kasetçi [tape maker and seller] clearly show that the dengbêj always maintained an audience, despite their low visibility. While political artists like Koma Berxwedan, Aram, Şivan Perwer and Xelîl Xemgîn –political bands and singers with musical accompaniment– were illicitly but widely circulated in the 1980s (sometimes in more than 100,000 copies), the more austere dengbêj recordings were circulating illicitly as well, although in a smaller circle of amateurs. The amateurs were mainly old men who had enjoyed the actual şevbiherk and fully appreciated the subtleties of the Kurdish language at a time when, especially in towns, Turkish was quickly superseding Kurdish. The recordings circulating at the time were mostly from well-known dengbêjs like Şakiro, Hûseynê Farê, Ayşe Şan, Meryem Xan and Îsa Perwarî. However, more local dengbêjs were also recorded, appreciated, and listened to. These recordings were made illegally on simple tape-recorders: people would place tape- recorders in front of the dengbêj during the şevbihêrk, and record for one or two hours. Then they would go see a kasetçi, who was able to issue tapes that accessed the illegal market. The kasetçi could also make a copy for himself and keep it as a precious archive21. Among the amateurs were wealthy people who gathered the dengbêj (either local or visiting) at their place and could ask his guests to fill tapes for them.

26 In Diyarbakır, dengbêj also used to gather in cafés until 1980. A café frequently mentioned was the Café of Mehemedê Hezroyê, or the Café of Dengbêj, which already existed in the 1960s. It was situated within the city walls of the old town of Diyarbakır, in the market Çarçiya Şewitî, far from the main streets. It was a small two-storey café. The ground floor was for ordinary customers, but dengbêj gathered on the first floor where they could sing. Both local and visiting dengbêjs used to gather there. The gendarmerie and police had a relatively tolerant attitude toward the place until 1980: The police or military didn’t come to the café. There was no problem. Trustworthy people used to go. Those who were curious about Kurdish, they came. No one came from outside. Nobody came to this café. […] Here [in the House of Dengbêj] everybody comes; there nobody came. The café was in the middle of the market, it was small, on the first floor, a hundred meters from the main road. I mean, nobody came! And if people came, when police or military came, they didn’t sing, they stopped. They said the Turks have come, zaptiye have come. We didn’t sing. In the village as well, when zaptiye came, we didn’t sing. Zaptiye or military. This is their name in kurmanci. For them we say zaptiye […] when they came we didn’t sing; we didn’t dare. Zaptiye used to beat people.22

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27 Although everybody knew about the place, it was not shut down until the 1980 coup. Until then, dengbêjîwas kept alive by this milieu of men, particularly elderly men. They also composed an important part of the audience of Radio Erivan, which broadcasted in Kurdish from the 1950s; the dengbêjs the radio broadcast contributed to keeping alive a strong interest in these singers and their songs within the Turkish territory.23

28 A more detached and organised interest arose from people one could define as amateur folklorists, who took up the mission of collecting oral literature. Hilmî Akyol is important in this domain, though he is far from the only one. Born in Hazro (a district of Diyarbakır province), Akyol grew up in Diyarbakır and started collecting popular songs and stories when he finished high school in 1979. He first collected songs and stories from two persons in Diyarbakır, then in Hazro’s villages, and then in other districts of Diyarbakır. In the early 1990s, villagers fled the destroyed villages and settled in Diyarbakır; he therefore started his collection again within the city. He loved the tales he listened to every evening in his childhood, and was afraid that the elderly people would die. Thus, he started building a personal archive, without ever realizing that it would one day be transcribed and published. He said he had gathered around 700 tapes, some of which he recorded, others bought. In 2005 he sent more than 500 of them to Suleymaniye (Northern Iraq) where the Kelepor Institute established the Hilmî Akyol Archives in his name. His first book was published in 2000 by the Kurdish Institute in Istanbul, and by 2009 he had published more than 10 books of collected folklore. Akyol used to work as truck-driver, carrying oil from Iraq to Turkey, and at the same time collected stories, songs and proverbs. He collected this material alone from 1979 until 2000, when he started working within the ‘collection and research’ branch of the Kurdish Institute in Istanbul with a number of other people. When the Institute opened a branch in Diyarbakır in 2004 he worked there for two years. In 2006 he joined the municipality of Diyarbakır (the Araştırma İnceleme branch24) and now works as one of the administrators of the House of Dengbêj. Before this he played an important role in gathering the dengbêj around the Dicle-Fırat Cultural Centre.25 He is a key personality of the Municipality Dengbêj project. His trajectory from solitary to associative work illustrates the slow rise of the interest for folklore by Kurdish organizations.

III. Rediscovery and institutionalization of a ‘tradition’

29 Folklore and oral literature have been focal points of Kurdish organizational attention since the emergence of the first Kurdish associations in the late Ottoman Empire. Oral literature acquired a core position in the construction of Kurdish national identity in the 1930s and 1940s thanks in large part to the efforts of the Bedirxan family, which became the focal point of the Kurdish national movement in exile in Syria, and which published the journal Hawar (1932-1935; 1941-1943). The French Orientalists were also central in the discovery of the rich Kurdish oral literature and in its use as a resource to build a national self, through what Jordi Tejel describes as the ‘Kurdish-French connection’ (Tejel 2006, 2007). Since then, many individuals have worked to collect and preserve Kurdish oral literature. Of particular note are Mehmed Emin Bozarslan and Zeynelabiddin Zinar. Both live in Sweden and have published collections through their publishing houses, respectively Deng and Pencînar. In Turkey, Ahmet Aras has also

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been important in this regard, publishing three Kurdish epics in 1993 and 1996. Later, many other writers have published collections of oral literature and epics.

30 However, while there has long been interest in Kurdish oral literature, dengbêjs do not seem to have garnered much attention. Although Hawar occasionally mentioned the dengbêjs, and while published epics were collected from dengbêjs themselves (in particular from Ehmedê Fermanê Kiki26), no article underlined the specific role dengbêjs played in Kurdish national identity or Kurdish society. Interest mainly grew in the 1990s.

The pioneering role of various Kurdish writers

31 In understanding the renewed attention given to the dengbêj, Mehmed Uzun (1953-2007), one of the most prominent Kurdish writers from Turkey, played a central role in building the current image and position of the dengbêjs. Mehmed Uzun’s work is inscribed within several legacies: Kurdish notable history, the written production of the medrese, and oral literature. His work gives an important place to the dengbêjs. One of his first novels, Rojek ji Rojên Evdalê Zeynikê [One day in the life of Evdalê Zeynikê, 1991], tells the story of one famous dengbêj, Evdalê Zeynikê, who even became a mythological figure and subject of other dengbêjs’ songs. Uzun’s last novel, Hawara Dîcleyê [The Cry of the Tigris, 2001-2003] is built on an oral narrative: the first volume is composed of four şevbihêrk, and the narrator, Biro, is a dengbêj. He presents himself as the voice of the peoples without voices, of the peoples without history, of the ‘forgotten.’ Uzun clearly underlines the role the dengbêj played in the transmission of history, and the memory of this people without a state. Uzun’s essay Dengbêjlerim [My dengbêjs], published in Turkish in 1998, is directed to a large audience. It aims to introduce the dengbêjs to a Kurdish and Turkish audience; indeed, the work opens with the words ‘I will tell you about my dengbêjs.’ Mehmed Uzun compares them to Homer, pays tribute to them, and describes them as one of the main sources for his oeuvre. They were, he wrote, his masters [usta] and teachers [öğretmen] (Uzun 1998: 75). At the same time Uzun’s work, and in particular Dengbêjlerim,participated in the re- construction and re-invention of the dengbêj in general, and of some particular dengbêjs as national figures. He pays tribute to some of the dengbêjs he knew personally, but also to the most acknowledged dengbêjs like Evdalê Zeynikê. Uzun not only presents his own dengbêjs, but also the people’s dengbêjs. Later, underlining the role Mehmed Uzun played in the rediscovery and re-invention of the dengbêjs, Diyarbakır’s dengbêjs paid him tribute: when he was sick in the city hospital, they sang for him in a concert organised by the municipality.27

32 Following Mehmed Uzun, other writers have written books about the dengbêjs, among them Uzun’s translator, Muhsin Kızılkaya (2001). Salihê Kevirbirî (2002 and 2003) also contributed to a better knowledge of the dengbêjs of Turkey and Armenia.

33 This rediscovery and reinvention of the dengbêjs lies behind contemporary Kurdish literature, and in particular behind Uzun’s literary work and fame in contemporary Turkey. However, I would also like to stress the role the writer Yaşar Kemal seems to have played in the rediscovery of Kurdish oral literature and its uses in literary creation. Indeed, Yaşar Kemal’s work is clearly fuelled by a deep knowledge of Turkey’s oral traditions (Erhat 1978; Yücel 2008). He was one of the first writers in Turkey to discuss and to define the dengbêjs (see, for instance, Erhat 1978: 260-264). He was the

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first to mention Evdalê Zeynikê, who had been a guest in Kemal’s family house in Van, and who became one of the characters of Yer Demir Gök Bakir published in 1963. The dengbêjs are found throughout Kemal’s work, as shown in the importance of their characters in the second volume of An Island Story (2002). For Yaşar Kemal, the Russian novel, based on oral literary tradition, was a model that the Turkish novel could build from. Kemal spoke about these traditions to Kurdish writers, and in particular to Mehmed Uzun, whom he had met in Sweden in the early 1980s. In the foreword Kemal wrote for the Turkish translation of Uzun’s Siya Evînê, he stressed that the language of Russian writers like Pushkin or Gogol and the Turkish author Nazim Hikmet had been fed by the rich oral literature of their countries, just as Kurdish literature might build from its own oral tradition (Uzun 1995: 8). The rediscovery of this oral literature and dengbêjs among Kurdish writers may be located behind Kemal’s advices.

The role of a loose political and cultural network

34 Even though the rediscovery of the dengbêj as a ‘Kurdish tradition’ came partly from activists and writers with no affiliation with the movement around the DTP and PKK, a constellation of political actors associated to varying degrees to this network have re- appropriated the dengbêj today.

35 The municipality is one central point in this constellation. The pro-Kurdish party HADEP (replaced by the DEHAP and later DTP) was first elected to head the municipality in 1999, and is still in office. As Zeynep Gambetti writes (2009: 98). ‘This was the first time that a political party representing the Kurdish resistance movement took hold of a state institution wielding local power.’ The election of this party brought ‘activists into office’ and brought the municipality into a space in between ‘the state’ and the ‘Kurdish national(ist) movement.’ I follow Gambetti when she writes that ‘the sheer weight of the municipality as a state institution that forcefully opens up a space for Kurdish culture and identity largely surpasses the narrow limits of everyday subversion because it furnishes subversion with agency, vision and coordination’ (Gambetti 2009: 100). Part of this coordinated subversion within the state came from the municipality’s ‘symbolic politics,’defined by Nicole Watts as‘the use of representation –narratives, symbols, and spectacle– to maintain or transform a power relationship’ (Watts 2006: 136). The cultural policy of the municipality can be defined – at least partly– as symbolic politics in that it mobilizes Kurdish culture and language. To understand the ‘rediscovery’ of the dengbêj, the element of the municipality’s cultural policy that interests me here is the artistic and cultural festivals that have been organised in southeastern pro-Kurdish municipalities since the early 2000s, when the Extraordinary Rule that had been in effect in the southeast since the 1980s ended.The first suchfestival was Diyarbakır’s Kültür ve Sanat Festivalı [Culture and Arts Festival]in 2001. Today most of the pro-Kurdish municipalities organize festivals on Diyarbakır’s model. The declared aim of these festivals is to promote democracy and fraternity between people; art and culture are described as the main tools to develop mutual acquaintance and democratization.28These festivals appeared as a place of promotion of multiculturalism and of rediscovery of the ancestral multiculturalism of the region.29 This rhetoric of multiculturalism, today legitimized by the EU and UNESCO, gives high visibility to local cultures, and mainly Kurdish culture. Today, there is no festival without the dengbêjs and the Diwana dengbêjan.

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36 The municipality, however, is well embedded in the political network and does not work on its own. The dengbêj were also promoted by cultural centres, in Diyarbakır particularly by the Dicle-Fırat Kültür Merkezi, which opened in 2003. The cultural centre opened in April 2003 with a concert given by local dengbêjs. The dengbêj participating in the festival were those who performed in Dicle-Fırat. Television has also been central in promoting and publicising the dengbêj, who were first broadcast by Med TV from Europe. Local dengbêj have also been participating for five years in the program Müzik Diyari [The country of music] broadcasted by the local channel Gün TV. A few weeks before my visit to Diyarbakır, a new program had been created: Nalina dengbêjan [The lament of the dengbêj] replacing Müzik Diyari every fortnight when the dengbêjs would appear. It is possible to argue that by 2009 these three components – municipality, TV channel and cultural centre– worked as a network with the same dengbêjs, promoting the same narratives.

37 Within this sphere, the dengbêjs are now depicted as important –if not the most important– representatives of oral literature and of Kurdish culture.30 Cevahir Sadak Düzgün, in charge of culture at the Diyarbakır municipality, stated: ‘When you say Kurdish culture, you first think about dengbêj.’31Dengbêj are considered carriers [taşımak ] of Kurdish culture,32 like the mothers [dayik] and the medrese.33 Osman Baydemir, mayor of Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality said in April 2008: ‘The dengbêjs, linking the past to the present of the Kurds, are the most important carriers of this rich cultural accumulation,’ and on the same occasion the parliamentary deputy Selahattin Demirtaş declared that the existence of the dengbêj had protected the Kurdish culture and language from being wiped out.34 They are the memory of a Kurdish people deprived of written memory, of written history and of archives.35 This narrative is very close to Uzun’s, according to whom the dengbêj Biro of Hawara Dîcleyê is the voice of the forgotten.

38 These narratives, developed by the municipalities and by the Kurdish cultural and political activists, are also found among some of the dengbêjs themselves, who are clearly appropriating the ‘dominant’ rhetoric: dengbêjî is portrayed as coming from ancient times, from ancestors. Dengbêj are also portrayed as a treasure [xezîne] or as something very profound [kur] and respectable [bi rûmet]36. One even spoke about a kind of archive [arşîv]: Until today there was no Kurdish archive even though Kurds are numerous in the world. The Kurdish culture, through its own language, from tongue to tongue, from person to person… what kept the Kurdish culture on its feet, it was the dengbêjs, until now. If there was no dengbêj, who would have said what? We don’t know what happened. Because we have no archive.37

39 We can refer to this rhetoric as dominant because it seems to be produced by the ‘knowledgeables’: the municipality, the folklorists, and the writers who are in daily contact with the House’s dengbêjs. This narrative seems to pass from them to the dengbêjs, since the same terms and the same ideas are sometimes found in the narratives of both. It can also sound like slogans, short phrases easily memorised: ‘Since Kurds first existed, there have been dengbêjs’; ‘Among the people dengbêj always existed,’ and so on.

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The Dengbêj Project: the central state’s disinterest?

40 As the main carriers of Kurdish culture, dengbêj need ‘protection’ [xwedî kirin]. This term is recurrent among Kurdish cultural and political activists and associations, and some of the dengbêjs themselves. Kurdish culture faced assimilation policies and was on the verge of ‘disappearance’, therefore it needs ‘protection’ and sometimes ‘recording.’ The Dengbêj Project is directly aimed at preventing the disappearance of what is defined as a ‘tradition.’ The actors seem not to distinguish clearly between tradition and heritage. This is reinforced by the use of three languages (Kurdish, Turkish and French) and translation in the CD and the anthology produced within the frame of the project. The terms çand [culture] or kevneşopî [tradition] are found in Kurdish; with their equivalent of kültür [culture] or gelenek [tradition] in Turkish; in English the term tradition is only found in the title of the project and the term of patrimony is used everywhere else for the Kurdish or Turkish ‘tradition’ (and in a lesser extent ‘culture’). It seems that these different terms are interchangeable for the actors.38 What is clear from the texts in both the CD and anthology is that dengbêjî (either defined as a tradition or patrimony) is considered as a part of the Kurdish culture, as an element having been transmitted from the old ages (‘before the written word’) to today, as an element to be conserved and recorded.39

41 In order to prevent the disappearance of this ‘tradition,’ the passage toward a written object is deemed essential. As the objective of the project was to make something ‘immortal’ [nemir], ‘some document, like a book’ [belge, weke pirtûk]40 was needed. Some dengbêjs expressed the same idea toward the recordings: ‘The anthology, it is very good! The culture does not disappear. A book, it is not something small. It is something difficult to do. The names of the dengbêj that have been recorded do not disappear.’41 Others expressed: ‘Something written or recorded, it stays,’ or ‘Everything dies but not the written word.’42 These phrases are quite similar to the words of Osman Baydemir introducing the anthology: ‘We know, in the beginning was the word; but word passes, writing remains’ (in Düzgün; Akyol; Gazi; Avci & Günal 2007: 8). This need to produce books and writing is recurrent among the Kurdish movement and can be linked to what I would define as a ‘complex of orality,’ developed when few written documents are available to use as a ground for a ‘high national culture.’ This ‘complex’ and the need to refer to a written culture is clearly visible in the narratives and projects of the municipality. The first words Cevahir Sadak Düzgün, in charge of culture at Diyarbakır Municipality, said to me in our interview when I asked her about the project’s idea were: ‘In reality the foundation of Kurdish oral culture is the dengbêjî. For the written culture, it is the medrese of Kurds.’43 The municipality of Diyarbakır (but also the wider Kurdish movement) seems to be trying to resolve this imbalance between a huge oral tradition and a few written documents by developing two parallel projects, one dealing with written culture, symbolised by the medrese, and another dealing with oral culture, symbolised by the dengbêjs. The first is, however, rather limited and paradoxical (a single CD, but no book, was produced). The dengbêj project, in comparison, grew progressively bigger.

42 According to Düzgün, even before the European fund was advertised and became available, the municipality had already expressed its desire to develop a project on the dengbêj, and its research branch had already started collection work. The Dengbêj project indeed was divided in two parts. A part funded by the European Union was

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dedicated to developing a written dengbêj anthology and CD together with the organization of two concerts in Istanbul and Diyarbakır. Another part, funded only by the municipality, was dedicated to the opening of a House of Dengbêj. The two parts of the project were done concurrently. The House of Dengbêj was opened on the 30th May 2007 (the first day of the 7th Diyarbakır Kültür Sanat Festival); the anthology and CD were ready for the organization of the concerts in September 2007.

43 The Dengbêj Project was among the 10 projects selected within the frame of the European Union Promotion of Cultural Rights in Turkey Programme (PCRT),44 the aim of which was to: … contribute to the implementation of the legislative changes related to cultural rights. The project will contribute to increasing mutual understanding, knowledge and wider appreciation of the cultural variety of Turkey. It will also promote economic development by means of support to local and regional initiatives and entities, and will provide valuable experience for local and national public institutions, directly involved in promoting cultural rights implementation.

44 The rhetoric of cultural diversity and inter-cultural dialogue is dominant: ‘The specific objective of the Cultural Initiatives Support Grant Scheme (CISGS) is to support fostering mutual understanding, knowledge and wider appreciation of the various cultures in Turkey.’45 The Dengbêj project was conducted along with other projects, dealing with Romani, Circassian, Bosnian, or Georgian culture and language, within the same framework. Some projects did not focus on a particular culture or language, but on the idea of the ‘cultural mosaic’ itself, by investigating local ethnic diversity and cultural exchange in cities such as Istanbul or Kahramanmaraş. This focus on cultural diversity and dialogue explains the fact that the first idea of the Diyarbakır project was to join the dengbêjs to the Laz singers from the Black Sea. However, this dimension of the project, which would have been a continuation of a first encounter between the dengbêj and their Laz counterparts during the 2006 Kültür Sanat Festival, was eventually dropped; the final project focused on the dengbêj only.

45 The Dengbêj Project that received funding was designed by the municipality together with the Dicle-Fırat Cultural Centre. The implementation of the Scheme necessitated the collaboration of the Office of Prime Minister Directorate General of Press and Information, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the Central Finance and Contracts Unit of the Republic of Turkey, all based in Ankara. As the beneficiary of the Programme the Ministry of Culture and Tourism was responsible for its technical implementation. Because of the involvement of the Turkish state in the project, it acquired a high symbolic value. Indeed one of the results of the project was the first- ever publication of a book in Kurdish with state participation. Düzgün noted that although financially it was a very small project compared to other EU-funded projects of the municipality, it was a big project in terms of its ideas. It is symbolically important for the municipality: When elected officials use the Kurdish language they have typically been put on trial, which also underscores the inconsistency of the state and its different institutions concerning its language policies.46 For Hilmî Akyol, the fact that the book was published by the Ministry of Tourism and Culture symbolized state recognition of the Kurdish language. For the dengbêjs, the involvement of the state signifies that singing is now free again.

46 How exactly was the state involved?47 According to the interviews I conducted, the Dengbêj Project was designed and written by the municipality (its branch of research and projects), in collaboration with people from Dicle-Fırat Cultural Centre. It was

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selected by European representatives. I understood that the state involvement in the project was quite minimal. Meetings between representatives of the Turkish Ministry of Tourism and Culture and of the municipality were organized twice. The first time the project’s members travelled from Diyarbakır to Ankara was for training regarding the Fund. Another time, representatives from the Ministry in Ankara came to inspect that the money had been spent properly. At the beginning, municipal employees sent copies of all written materials to the Ministry of Tourism and Culture, which eventually informed them that this was not necessary. From the perspective of those involved with the project in Diyarbakır, the Ministry seemed to withdraw from the content of the project. As Düzgün pointed out, this is also stressed on the cover of the anthology: ‘The whole responsibility of this publication belongs to Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality.’ However, according to Düzgün, the Ministry asked that the Kurdish texts be published together with a Turkish translation. This constituted the only Ministry interference on the content: the biographies of the dengbêjs were translated; the Turkish toponyms were used together with the Kurdish ones, and short Turkish summaries of the songs were inserted.

47 Is this apparent minimal involvement really that minimal? I would suggest that this project (like the other projects selected within the grant framework) is located within a larger process of institutionalizing an innocent and static multiculturalism in Turkey. As we will see below, the way the ‘tradition’ is practised and passed down today seems to confirm this idea. In addition, an important ‘auto-censorship’ enables the ‘tradition’ to develop only within limits given by the rhetoric of cultural diversity and dialogue.

‘The tradition is not what is used to be’

48 The Dicle-Fırat Cultural Centre and its extension, the Dengbêj House, are perceived as being places where dengbêjî has come to life again. Since 2003, they gave visibility to the dengbêj, but also institutionalised them and their songs. As one dengbêj said: In Diyarbakır, no. Songs were over, they disappeared. Turko didn’t allow it. They tore up our tapes. They didn’t allow … When we came, Dicle Fırat opened. Diyarbakır’s dengbêjî started too. [Again?] Yes again. In Dicle Fırat we became dengbêj. Now... When I was 10 years old I started singing. Now I am 60. I had not sung for 20 years. For 20 years it was forbidden. When Dicle Fırat opened, when I came, at the beginning, I was scared. Now it is free.48

49 The House of Dengbêj was opened as a dedicated place for the dengbêjs who, since 2003, would gather in a room in Dicle-Fırat Cultural Centre, a few meters from where the House of Dengbêj is located today. Because Dicle-Fırat is a place for teaching (music, theatre), the dengbêjs and classes disturbed one another. To prevent this, the house of dengbêjs was opened by the municipality in one of Diyarbakır’s traditional old black stone houses in the old town, which was refurbished by the Chamber of Architects. Organized around a courtyard, several rooms downstairs are dedicated to the dengbêjs, who sit, chat, drink tea and sing. Upstairs are the offices. One is the office of the research branch of the municipality, the other is the tourism office. This is no coincidence: the Dengbêj House is now included in the municipality’s touristic circuit of the town, the dengbêj are shown to the tourists and the dengbêj anthology is available and distributed in the main tourism office in Dağ Kapı49.

50 The dengbêjs who frequent the House mostly live in Diyarbakır, and are kayıtlı, which in this case means both ‘registered’ and ‘recorded.’ The system of registration started

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with Dicle-Fırat. Twenty-four dengbêjs are currently on file: their names and contact details are registered, and their voices are recorded and stored ‘in the computer.’ The registration does not oblige them to come everyday, but ensures the place will never be empty, for when a visitor comes, dengbêjs should be present and available to perform. Thus registered, the dengbêjs are also tied [bağlı] to the House: ‘We are tied to this place. When dengbêj are needed, they call us.’50 What are dengbêjs needed for? ‘For the festivals. When a festival or a meeting is organized, they send us.’ Dengbêjfrom Dicle Fırat and Mala Dengbêjan are also sent to the local TV station, Gün TV, where they receive a little money in exchange of their performance. Being registered also means they cannot record or participate in any public activities without the authorization of the House. Hence the main symbolic role given to the dengbêj by this complex is ‘to protect the Kurdish culture’; their main practical role is to animate the house and to participate in festivals and TV programs (see a performance of some dengbêjs of Diyarbakır’s dengbêj house at: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=j6pYhN2WKuo&feature=related).

51 As many of the dengbêj emphasised, being registered is a form of recognition in a time when people do not give value [değer, qîmet] to or show sufficient interest in them. The institution, and being a member of it, is perceived as something that can enable the dengbêj to be known and appreciated like they were before. No. There was nothing. Now we exist here. Whether or not we were practising dengbêjî, we started with Dicle Fırat. We entered the market with Dicle Fırat. Arif! How many tapes has he sold?! He used to stay behind his herd. Before Dicle Fırat, nobody knew him. With Dicle Fırat we became dengbêj. We became known and people became aware of us and we became aware of the people.51

52 Poor, registered, and tied to the municipality, dengbêj can ask for compensation [karşılık]; they thus organised a strike in 2008 to secure a salary. ‘Dengbêjî, it is not something little; dengbêjî, it is the Kurdish culture. I mean it is the foundation of the Kurds. If there is no foundation, on what do you build? No! I mean it is necessary that people take care of it, of this culture.’52 Indeed, such arguments can lead to the claim that the dengbêjs, as the foundation of the Kurdish culture, must be supported and even paid. The idea of organising a strike emerged from some of the dengbêjs. Even though some dengbêjs seemed to have disagreed with the idea or even with the dengbêj leader of the strike, no open conflict was mentioned. The strike consisted mainly in not coming to the House for nearly two months; the once regular Diwan that used to take place in the house had to be organized with non-registered dengbêjs. The registered dengbêj then met with Cevahir Sadak Düzgün and mayor Osman Baydemir, asking the municipality for a salary. The mayor promised to do what he could. Today they do not have a salary, but free lunch is provided every day, as well as a bus pass to travel in the city. One of the dengbêj also mentioned an ‘eidî (understood to be a kind of pocket money given for the religious feasts).

53 The strike highlights the institutionalization and professionalisation of the dengbêjs, who feel themselves to be a kind of municipal workers, keeping alive and displaying the Kurdish culture to visitors, and holding rights as such. For some, however, the simple opening of the House is already a mark of kindness [qencî]. From the encounters I had with various dengbêjs of the House, it is possible to affirm that their conceptions of their own practices and images are two-fold: Some of them seem to simply be doing what they like to do, and have clear ideas of what their art is or should be; others seem to have well understood the narrative of the Kurdish movement –i.e., the loose political

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and cultural network described above– which enables them to be more instrumentalist, as demonstrated in the organisation of the strike, an imported form of protest that the movement is familiar with.

54 Nowadays, the dengbêjs rarely sing in private houses, in the village guesthouses [köy odaları], or during weddings. The dengbêjs sing in the House, during festivals, and on TV; three places and times which are characterized by staging and constitute a deviation from common previous practices.53 The same images and symbolism are used in staging in these three different places and times. The House is an old building with rooms filled with wooden sofas, cushions and carpets. Small coffee tables and old copper trays are covered with old copper or tin objects like coffee pots and samovars. On the walls are pictures of past dengbêjs which remind both the visitors and the dengbêjs themselves that dengbêjî is an ancient practice. Gün TV programs staging the dengbêj are also shot in what is called the şark köşesi (literally ‘oriental corner’): little couches covered with carpets, and pictures of dengbêjs who have passed away. During the festivals, the stage is also generally organized as a small şark köşesi and the dengbêj sometimes wear the şal û şapik (traditional Kurdish trousers and jacket) as well as the keffiyeh. The şark köşesi and the collective ‘mnesic objects’ (Fliche 2007: 196-200) that compose it inscribe the dengbêjs in the past and reinforce the process of patrimonialisation granting them a heritage status.

55 In such contexts, all songs [kilam]54 cannot be sung, and the old songs are not performed in the old way.First, the songs performed today are shorter. This is due to two reasons. Firstly, lack of practice, sometimes for a couple of decades, led to a loss of memory and shortening of the songs. The second reason is directly linked to the issue of the performance and the audience. The contemporary audience does not necessarily appreciate long epic stories, nor do they always understand them. This is reflected in the way in which people visit the House: they come for a little while, sit in the room with the dengbêj, and listen for them for a few minutes. They also often record the songs with their mobile phones, like they would shoot a photo souvenir. For the festivals and the television, the long epic songs are also largely shortened and cut.

56 Cutting the song –or creating short songs– is, however, not only a recent development, but is also tied to constraints on recording and radio broadcasting that developed in the 1950s. This point is emphasized by Mehmûd Kizil, who learned dengbêjî alongside his father. He first shortened the long songs for the purpose of recording (his first record came out in 1965 in Istanbul): songs couldn’t fit on an LP record, and a record’s audience is different of a şevbihêrk’s one. Mehmûd Kizilalso said that he did not go much to the café of Mehemedê Hêzro, where the dengbêj used to sing long songs. Because he recorded, and because people liked short songs and became bored by long songs, he became used to sing shorter songs55. Recording also brought musical accompaniment more in sync with young people’s tastes; dengbêj often compared themselves in the interviews to the sazî. This is a recent neologism that derives from the musical instrument saz. I understood that it was used in order to qualify the ‘modern’ singers who used musical instruments. Most of the dengbêjs stressed the fact that they are not given enough value and interest compared to the sazî, whose popularity has increased through radio and TV broadcasting, particularly among youth. Economic and symbolic stakes also pushed people toward the use of instrumentation: adding instruments makes the dengbêj easier to listen to, more attractive, and potentially more famous. This changed the form of the music.

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57 For an unfamiliar and novice audience, the dengbêjs of the House choose their own songs, but on TV or during a stage performance, they sometimes sing what they are requested to sing. Political and guerrilla songs are also censored by the associations or TV channels. This means that an important part of the repertoire remains ‘in the chest’ of the dengbêj and may eventually be forgotten. This can also halt the creative process and lead to a fixation of the dengbêj in the past, or give new directions to the creative process. Also, ‘old’ songs seem to be given more value than the new ones as representing the ‘tradition,’ the real ‘culture.’ They are often referred to as the ‘classic songs.’ Here we see at work the selection by the actors of what they want to (and/or can) accept as a legacy in the contemporary context. As Lenclud(1987: § 31) argues, the tradition ‘is not a product of the past, a work from another age that contemporaries would passively receive […] but an interpretation of the past carried out according to rigorously contemporary criteria.’

58 Some of the dengbêjs insisted that the transmission process that was a central element of the dengbêj has changed or disappeared. They say that in their time, there was an ‘education’ and that they learned as pupils [şagirt] or servants [berdest] beside a master [usta], who might sometimes be someone from the family. They would sit in the main room while the master and the old people [mezin] sang; they would then practice on their own, and return to the master for corrections. The master would critique passages where omissions or errors were made and ask the pupil to correct the song. The pupil would not start singing in front of an audience until the master gave him permission. Thus, a chain of transmission was built. This chain of transmission is already broken, since some of the dengbêj of the House have learned from tapes. Some even advise the young to learn, at least partially, from tapes. Some of the dengbêjs who learned beside a master are well aware of the fact that this method of learning has stopped and say that they will not be replaced. Their own children, and youth in general, they said, have no wish to learn; they do not take pleasure in listening to the songs of the dengbêjs, and prefer the sazî. The issue of repertoire and transmission thus underlines the fact that dengbêjs carry different ideas of what dengbêjî is. It also stresses the actual reformulation of dengbêjî, like every ‘tradition.’

59 Some dengbêjs are happy with the more commercial turn that dengbêjî has taken, oriented toward recording and festivals that might eventually give them recognition and a small economic profit. However, because of this, some people argue that dengbêji is not what is used to be. Dengbêjs really feel that dengbêjî will fade after they are gone. The collectors, folklorists and other people interested in the dengbêjs are not completely credulous either; according to them, ‘real dengbêjî’ is already gone. The conditions that defined the dengbêjs’ practices and art, such as the context of the enunciation and the transmission from a master, have disappeared. Dengbêjs have become symbolic; they have become a heritage [mîras], as said one of the music professionals interviewed, who compared them to swords in a museum: before they were used daily by everyone; now they stand on a shelf.

Conclusion

60 The ‘dengbêj tradition’ as it stands today has been built progressively over several decades through the input, interaction and negotiation between a large number of actors. These actors cannot be classified clearly into two categories of ‘state’ or

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‘society,’ because they often overlap. On the one hand, the Kurdish national movement enters ‘the state’ via the municipal office. On the other hand, the state enters society when, for instance, individuals or associations censor themselves. Furthermore, ‘state’ and ‘society’ are themselves very much plural, divided and contradictory. This is seen in the state’s ban on the Kurdish language, for instance, which is carried out in flexible and sometimes arbitrary ways. It is also evident in the Kurdish movement, whose different groupings have had different attitudes to the dengbêj, as well as in the permeability and interaction of the different social actors, far beyond the PKK-driven Kurdish movement, in the re-discovery of the dengbêj. Today, the dengbêj have become the symbol of Kurdish culture and are mobilized as such not only by the Kurdish movement described here but by a much wider sphere. The AKP, for instance, has also organised dengbêj concerts in Diyarbakır,56 and different cultural organisations have built their own dengbêjprojects with various foreign funds.57

61 The overlap is not only noticeable in term of actors, but also in terms of politics. Dengbêj practice has not simply been circumscribed by a repressive state; rather, the Kurdish national movement, together with broader social changes, has fuelled the ‘disappearance’ of the dengbêj. Moreover, the renewal in interest in dengbêj and the dengbêj practice can be attributed to a set of actors who, while typically thought of as in competition with each other, in this case displayed the common objective of publicizing and protecting dengbêjî. It might be hazarded, however, that their aims were different: for some, the aim was to create and rescue a ‘Kurdish culture’ or ‘Kurdish heritage’; for others, it was to show a liberal attitude, and build a ‘diverse’ or ‘multicultural’ Turkey. Whatever the motivations of the actors involved in the project may be, it seems that the policies implemented led to a similar result: a deep transformation of the practice, making the dengbêj a more ‘frozen’ than ‘living’ heritage.

62 One should therefore consider bringing into the analysis a third and ostensibly ‘external’ actor, namely, the European Union, and examine more deeply its role in the possible homogenization of the policies of both the state’s and society’s actors toward a Kurdish culture that is defined sometimes as a ‘national culture,’ sometimes as a ‘local culture,’ and sometimes as a ‘minority culture,’ but that is today part of the so-called ‘cultural mosaic’ of Turkey.

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NOTES

1. I am very grateful to Muriel Girard and Ioannis Kanakis for their insightful comments, and to the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) which sponsored this work as part of the program ‘From Cultural Friction to Armed Conflict: A Comparison of Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan.’ I also wish to thank special issue editor Nicole Watts and the two anonymous referees for their very stimulating comments. 2. www.cultural-rights.org/default.aspx, consulted on 4 February 2008.The phrase ‘languages and dialects other than Turkish’ is the actual formulation of the different legal documents. The main documents concerning the language uses are the Regulation on the teaching of different languages and dialects used traditionally by Turkish citizens in their daily life (Resmi Gazete, 20 September 2002) and the Regulation regarding the languages of TV and radio broadcasting (Resmi Gazete, 18 December 2002). 3. This paper particularly focuses on the role of this political trend, because of the inscription of the Dengbêj Project in a DTP led municipality. In this paper, when I speak of the Kurdish

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movement I will refer to this particular trend. However, in general, the Kurdish movement(s) can not be limited to this trend and is composed of many different political trends and views. 4. ‘Kürtçe ‘dengbêj’ sözcüğü de öyle genel anlamda: deng: ses demek, bej ise söyleyen, dengbej tipik olarak profesyonel destan söyleyen adam demek.’ Interview with Yaşar Kemal by Azra Erhat (Erhat 1978: 264). 5. Djeladet Ali Bedirxan mentioned that mir, ağa or beg always had a little suite of dengbêjs who had privileges: they were given houses and the masters took care of their living. See Hawar 4, 1932: 88 (republished by Nûdem, Stockholm, 1998, vol. 1). 6. The fact that dengbêj had been arrested or jailed because of their dengbêjî activity is however documented for the early decades of the Republic: for instance, according to Bedirxan dengbêjs were arrested for relating Sheikh Said’s revolt (1997: 37). 7. ‘Îç kismî, nava bedenê yasaq e. Derva bedenê, serbest e. Nava baxçê serbest e, nava çolê serbest e. Hundirê bajêr yasaq e.’ Interview with B., 23 November 2008, Diyarbakır. 8. ‘Dengbêj, xezînê di bin erdê ye. Zêr çawa ye, dengbêj ew e’. Interviews, Diyarbakır, November 2008. 9. Interview with H. Akyol, 22 November 2008, Diyarbakır. 10. ‘Di heft saliyên xwe da, min dest pê kir û heta niha ez dibêjim. Ez sêwî bûm, dest apê-amo da mezin bûm. Dê û bavê min mirîbûn, ez tazî bûm, faqîr, bê kes, bê hurmet.’ Interview with B., 23 November 2008, Diyarbakır. 11. ‘Ez ketim kuçê. Mal nema, xanî nema, avahî nema. Ez niha li kuçê me. Mal tune. […] Ê ku Kurd li ser linga girtiye, heta niha, dengbêj e. Ji wan dengbêjan re, lazim e ku gel xwedî dere, xwedî dere. Her dengbejêkî di ling wî da sol tune, cil lê tune, xanî tuneye. Aborî, ekonomî, sifirê da ye. Ax! Welleh! Şaredariya mezin li me xwedî derket, li wira vekiriye.’ Interview with D., 26 November 2008, Diyarbakır. 12. NÇM Tanıtım Broşürü, Istanbul : NÇM, n. d.: 58. 13. Rewşen 1, February 1992: 46. 14. Îbrahîm Xort, ‘MKM (Navenda Çanda Mezopotamya) li Amedê’‚ Rewşen 9, February 1993: 16. 15. Jiyana Rewşen advertised the following ‘concerts’: Dengbêj Seyda (04.01.1997 and 08.02.1997, Istanbul), Dengbêj Salihê Qubînê (concert in Istanbul on the 11.05 1997 and 10.08.1997), Dengbêj Mehmûd Kizil (Istanbul, 2.11.1997), Concert by Diwana dengbêjan (09.11.1997, Istanbul; 10. 05.1998), Dengbêj Zahro (16.02. 1998, Izmir). Dengbêj Reşît (13.01.1998, Istanbul), Dengbêj Salihê Şirnexî (08.08.1998). It also advertised different talks given by Ahmed Aras about Evdalê Zeynikê and about Kurdish folklore in 1997. 16. See Scalbert Yücel 2005: 331-333. 17. ‘Konferansa Çanda ya Kurdî,’ Rewşen 8, 1992: 21-24. 18. ‘Konferansa Çanda ya Kurdî,’ Rewşen 8, 1992: 22. 19. Discussions with music professionals, November and December 2008, Diyarbakır. Interview with a folklorist, February 2004, Istanbul. In this way, the case of the dengbêj seems quite similar to the Corsican traditional songs. Rejected by urban Corsicans in the 1940s, they were reclaimed decades later as main element of Corsican identity (Pizzorni-Itié 2004, 1997). 20. The wider social change in Turkey is also invoked to explain the disappearance of dengbêjî. This social change includes the modernisation of the countryside (the arrival of electricity, radio and television) as well as education and changes in norms and values, urbanisation, and the end of feudalism. These are certainly elements that should be integrated into the discussion, but they go beyond the scope of this article. 21. Discussion with a group of kasetçi,2 December 2008, Diyarbakır. 22. ‘Polis, asker, nedihatin qahwê. Problem tunebû. Însanên merd diçûn. Ê ku meraqliyê kurdî bûn, wana diçûn. Ewe dervê nedihatin. Kes nedihatin wê qahwê. […] Li vir her kes tê. Li wir her kes nedihat. Qahwê li orta çarşî bû, piçûk bû, kata jor bû, ji cadê 100 metre bû. Yanî kes nedihatin. Ku bihata, gava ku asker û polîs bihata, nedigot, disekiniya. Digot Turka hatin, zaptiya hatin. Me nedigot. Li gund jî, dema ku zaptî

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dihat me nedigot. Zaptî, asker yanî. Navê wan bi kirmancî. Em ji wan ra dibêjin zaptî. Gava ku bihata me nedigot … gava dihatin em disekiniyan, newerîbûn. Zaptiya mirov dixistin’ Interview with N., 25 November 2008, Diyarbakır. Zaptiye is the Ottoman word for police. It is not usednowadays except in some villages to refer to gendarmes. Here the interviewee refers most probably to the gendarmes, present in the villages. Thanks to Noémi Lévy for this information. 23. Radio Erivan was the radio the most listened by the Alikan tribe İsmail Beşikçi studied in the 1960s (Beşikçi 1969: 203). On Radio Erivan see also Kevirbirî 2002. 24. The objective of the branch is to shed some light on the local cultures, to record and develop them, as well as to study them. The Dengbêj project is one of the main projects of the branch. 25. Interviews with Hilmî Akyol, 22 November and 2 December 2008, Diyarbakır. 26. According to Mehmed Uzun, Ehmedê Fermanê Kiki had successively been the dengbêj of Reşid Bey from the Kikan tribe, of İbrahim Paşa from the Milan tribe and of the Cemilpaşazade in Diyarbakır. He left the city in 1925 after Sheikh Said’s revolt and settled in a small village next to the Syrian border. At that time Celadet Bedirxan was collecting epics and tales from dengbêjs, and heard about Ehmedê Fermanê Kiki from the Cemilpaşazade. He convinced Kiki to come to Syria where he stayed until his death in 1951 (Uzun 1998: 108-133). 27. ‘Dengbêjler Uzun için soyledi,’ Evrensel, 26September 2006. 28. Interview with the Director of culture of Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality, Şerif Baltaş, Tîroj 2, May-June 2003: 55. 29. ‘Îcar dora Mîhrîcana Sertê ye,’ Azadiya Welat, 13-19 September 2003; ‘Neden ve Nasıl bir festival,’ Batman Sesi 8, August-September 2004: 3. 30. ‘ Sözlü edebiyatın güçlü temsilcisi olan dengbejlik geleneğinin’ (on http://www.diyarbakir- bld.gov.tr/NewsDetails.aspx?ID=1132, consulted on 01 February 2008. 31. Interview, 24 November 2008, Diyarbakır. 32. The vocabulary used in the following news articles is related to the transmission of an oral culture, without written tradition. ‘İki belediyeden dengbej divanı,’ www.heryerdenhaber.com/ V1/...//Iki-belediyeden-dengbej-divani, consulted in 2008; ‘Dengbejler söylemeye devam edecek,’ 31 mayis 2007, http://diyarbakir-bld.gov.tr/newsDetail.aspx?id=999, consulted on 27 August 2008; also available at or http://www.rojaciwan.com/haber-25123.html, consulted on 22 June 2009. 33. It is as such that the dengbêj were presented during the concert they gave on the 8 November 2003 for the Literature Days organized in Diyarbakır. 34. ‘Dengbêj Evi’nde klam sesleri,’ 12 April 2008. http://www.diyarbakir-bld.gov.tr/ newsDetails.aspx?id=1432, consulted on 27 August 2008. 35. ‘Kürtlerin hafızası Dengbejler divan kurdu,’ http://turkish.rizgari.com/modules.php? name=News&file=print&sid=9859, consulted on 22 June 2009. 36. Interviews with dengbêjs, Diyarbakır, November and December 2008. 37. ‘Ku çiqas Kurda li dunya heye, heta niha arşîva kurda tunebû, kultura kurda, bi zimanê xwe, dilden dile, yani şexsa ji şexsê, li ser linga girtiye, heya niha dengbêj bûye. Çünkü dengbêj tuneba, kê çê bigota? Merîv nizane çi bûye. Çünkü arşîva me tuneye.’ Interview with D., 26 November 2008, Diyarbakır. 38. The term of heritage [miras] is barely used in the context of the Dengbêj Project except in a few documents as if the term gelenek, tradition, was more meaningful. According to Muriel Girard, in the documents regarding maintenance of heritage, the term of miras is not exclusive, but is used alongside the terms değer [value], varlık [wealth], or eser [work] and tarihi çevre [historical environment] for material heritage. 39. See Düzgün, Akyol; Gazi; Avci, Günal(2007: 8-11) and the CD ‘Dengbêjên Diyarbakirê,’ Kom Müzik, 2007. 40. Interview with Cevahir Sadak Düzgün, 24 November 2008, Diyarbakır. 41. ‘Antolojî pir baş e! Kültür winda nabe. Pirtûk tiştekî hindik nîne. Tiştekî zor e. Navê dengbêjan ku qeyîtlî bûn winda nabin.’ Interview with S., 25 November 2008, Diyarbakır.

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42. Interviews with dengbêjs, November 2008, Diyarbakır. 43. ‘Bi rastî bingeha çanda kurdî ya devkî, dengbêjî; bi nivisî jî, medresê kurdan e.’ (interview with Cehavir Sadak Düzgün, 24 November 2008, Diyarbakır). 44. The Promotion of Cultural Rights in Turkey Programme (PCRT) is divided in two schemes: ‘Broadcasting Support Grant Scheme’ (BSGS) (15 projects elected) and ‘Cultural Initiatives Support Grant Scheme’ (CISGS). 45. http://www.cultural-rights.org/program1.aspx?pgid=31, consulted on 22 June 2008. 46. Trials for using Kurdish in official documents by DTP MPs or mayors are numerous. One can mention the trial of Osman Baydemir and of Yurdusev Özsökmenler, mayor of Bağlar, for printing a brochure in Turkish, Kurdish and Zaza about the cleaning campaigns of the municipality in June 2007. Another example is the Council of State’s dismissal of the mayor and the 17 city council members of the Sur city council of Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality after it had decided in October 2006 to enforce multilingualism and had passed a resolution on ‘Multilingual Municipality Service.’ 47. I did not conduct any interviews with T. C. Ministry of Tourism and Culture personnel, although I had planned to do so before going to Diyarbakır. However, my previous fieldwork experiences focussing on the Kurdish movement, the reluctance the researchers can express to face and meet state officials in order to discuss quite contentious issues (Watts, forthcoming), together with the narratives that the interviewees produced of a monolithic and absent state, unfortunately led me to change my plans. Thus the (dis-)involvement of the central state I describe here is mainly drawn from indirect sources. 48. ‘ Li Diyarbakır, na. Kilam qediya. Kilam hatin helandin. Tirko nedihişt. Bandê me dişêkinand. Nedihiştin. Wexta ku em hatin, Dicle Fırat vebû, dengbejiya Diyarbakir jî baslamîş kir. Dîsa? E, dîsa. Dicle Fırat te, em bûne dengbêj. A niha, emrê min 10 sal bû min kilam gotiye, niha jî emrê min 60 salî ye. 20 sal min kilam negot. 20 sal, yasak bû. Wexta Dicle Fırat vebû, ewil ez hatim, ez dîsa ditirsiyam. A niha serbest bûye.’ Interview with P., 25 November 2008, Diyarbakır. 49. See also ‘Return to Diyarbakır’, Zaman, 6 December 2009. The Dengbêj House is inscribed among the touristic highlights of the town. 50. ‘Em bağlî vê derê ne. Dema ku dengbêj lazim in, bangê me dikin.’ Interview with B., 23 November 2008, Diyarbakır. 51. ‘Na! Tîştek tunebû! Em a niha dengbejê mevcud li vê derê, ku dengbejiya me hebe tunebe, ji Dicle Firat’ê da me dest pe kiriye. Em bi Dicle Firat ketin piyasa. Arif çiqas bandê wî hatin firotin, ji xwe ber diwara digot, heta Dicle Firat, kesi nas nekir. Bi Dicle Firatê, em bûn dengbêj, em hatin nas kirin, û xelkê me nas kir, me xelk nas kir.’ Interview with D., 26 November 2008, Diyarbakır. Arif is a dengbêj whose recording was advertised in all music shops during my stay in Diyarbakır. 52. ‘U yanlız, dengbêjî ne tişkî hindik e, dengbêjî kultura kurda ye. Yani temela kurda, temel, Temel tunebe, avahî li ser çi çêdibe? Na! Yani ji vî kulturê re, lazim e ku însan xwedî dere.’ Interview with D., 26 November 2008, Diyarbakır. 53. Of course one must keep in mind, as underlined by Lenclud (1987 §16) that the tradition, in the sense of ‘customs,’ is capable of variation and that ‘changing traditions’ must be considered (Finnegan 1991: 112). 54. Christine Allison, after fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan, distinguishes the stran from the beyt or destan. Stran is the generic term for ‘song’ with musical accompaniment. She also mentions that there is a wide range of stran: historical, love, dances, etc, songs. Beyt or destan ‘are heroic and long narrative songs, often with some prose sections, performed without musical accompaniment’ (2001: 64-66). In my fieldwork in Diyarbakır, the term kilam was used to refer to the generic ‘song’ more than the term stran. Some of the dengbêj then distinguished between three types of kilam: The song for dancing [kilamê govendê]; the song of gathering, about the wars, the combats and the tribes [kilamê cemaatan, a ser şeran, ser aşîret]; and the love song [kilamê li ser

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dila]. The songs of the dengbêjs were the kilamê cemaatan. For the dengbêjs I met, however, the term kilam mainly referred to the dengbêj songs, whereas the term stran mainly referred to other songs (for weddings, for instance, and with musical accompaniment). However, it is impossible to generalize because the term stran is also used by some of them. The terms destan or beyt are not used to refer to the dengbej’s songs. Beyt, however, is used in order to refer to a coherent part in an epic. The expression ‘strana dengbêj’ has become widespread. Celadet Ali Bedirxan does not distinguish the stranbêj from the dengbêj, who according to him both tell tales and epics. Stran is according to him an exclusively musical; epics and tales being both sung and narrated (alternating verses and rhythm prose). Hawar 3, June 1932: 72 (reedited by Nûdem, Stockholm, 1998, vol. 1). But the situation today is different from the 1930s, music creation having evolved at lot and the ‘invention of the tradition’ brings a redefinition of all these genres. 55. Interview, 26 November 2008, Diyarbakır. 56. http://www.akparti.org.tr/gnsayfa/haber.asp?haber_id=19003&kategori=8, consulted on 10 September 2009. 57. See, for instance, the Project of the Bingöl Social, Cultural and Economic Development Association. http://www.bingolonline.com/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=8109, consulted on 10 November 2009.

RÉSUMÉS

Turkish authorities have obstructed the expression of Kurdish culture and forms of Kurdish cultural expression for nearly a century. Beginning in the late 1990s, however, non-Turkish forms of cultural expressions gained visibility in the Turkish public sphere. This paper examines one aspect of this new Kurdish cultural production through an analysis of reconstruction of the tradition of the dengbêj (Kurdish singer) in the city of Diyarbakir. This process has developed through the participation and initiative of various Kurdish national(ist)s and the state actors. In contrast to typical depictions of opposition between an oppressive Turkish state and an oppressed Kurdish people, the paper argues that the dengbêj 'tradition' as it exists today is the result of a several-decades-long process of negotiation between different Kurdish individual and collective actors, between different part of the Kurdish society, and between these Kurdish actors and representatives of the state. It shows that both the state and the Kurdist movement(s) have demonstrated contradictory attitudes toward dengbêj, ranging from protection to disinterest and repression, and that the practice of the dengbêj as well as the definition of the ‘tradition’ have been profoundly shaped by this process.

INDEX

Mots-clés : dengbêj, Diyarbakır, Kurde, municipalité, patrimoine, politique culturelle Keywords : cultural policies, dengbêj, Diyarbakır, heritage, Kurds, municipality motsclestr belediye, dengbêj, Diyarbakır, gelenek, kültür politikaları, Kürt

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States at the Limit: Tracing Contemporary State-Society Relations in the Borderlands of Southeastern Turkey

Leila M. Harris

1 Ali lives in an Arabic speaking village of the Harran plain1 and owns a small plot of land with his brother (17 decares).2 The brothers recount that they have had difficulty with weeds this year. Ali suggests that this is due to the fact that they haven’t rotated their crops. His brother disagrees, and says it is because the state subsidy for pesticides associated with cotton is insufficient, so they only had enough money to apply pesticides once. Despite these problems, they consider themselves to have benefited tremendously from irrigation. ‘With one year’s harvest, I now earn enough to buy a tractor,’ Ali says, explaining that ‘culture’ and ‘development’ have also come to rural areas with state irrigation provision.

2 Amit lives in a Kurdish-speaking village a few miles to the west of Ali. As someone who does not own land and who had previously been engaged in herding sheep and goats on the plain, he and his family have very different experiences of irrigation. He explains, ‘It was said that GAP3 is happiness, GAP is survival, but it has been a suicide pill for those of us engaged in animal husbandry. It prepared our end. Right now, (speaking about) GAP gives me discomfort.’ Others who had also relied on animal husbandry – selling yoghurt, cheese, and animals for income, and using wool, meat, and dairy products for family needs– tell of increasing difficulties in terms of being able to make ends meet since the coming of widespread canalet irrigation. With fields now dedicated to irrigated cotton production, there is no longer space available to graze animals.

3 In another nearby Kurdish speaking village, Mufa takes great pride in showing me the documentation of the state subsidy he will receive for last year’s cotton crop. Although he only owns 25 decares of his own land, he is entitled to 630 USD of cotton subsidy (based on 9 cents per kilo of cotton, the subsidy in 2001). This is significant money in a plain where average household incomes are estimated as less than $5,000 a year.4 Mufa

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believes that without the subsidy farmers would not be able to afford pesticides, irrigation water, or other expenses associated with cotton, and would likely revert to growing wheat or other dryland crops. He believes the state must benefit from cotton production; otherwise they would not pay him to grow it.

I. Towards an Ethnographic Approach to States At their limits

‘A state exists chiefly in the hearts and minds of its people; if they do not believe it is there, no logical exercise will bring it to life’ (Joseph Strayer, 1970: 5)

4 As suggested by the brief vignettes above, state delivery of irrigation to the Harran plain in southeastern Turkey over the past decade as part of the large-scale GAP project has had dramatic and varied implications for village life, crop selection and rural economies. My purpose here is to read the Turkish state and trace shifting state-society relations through villager narratives in the Harran plain of the Southeastern Anatolia region–a border region that has been historically and geographically marginalized since the initial establishment of the Turkish Republic (see Map 1, below). The time period under examination is also significant as the region is undergoing rapid and extensive change as part of the large-scale GAP project. Tracing variable responses and interpretations of the ‘state’ in a region experiencing important state-led developmental changes reveals the changing horizontal reach of the state (extending into regions and spaces where the state previously had little presence) and also shifting verticality of the state (providing a sense of the shifting intensities of state-society interactions in the village spaces of this border area). The evidence offered is also suggestive of changing state-society relations in ways that are potentially important for issues of the legitimacy of the Turkish state, and also shifting possibilities related to the Kurdish question –an especially critical issue given the history and geography of this region, and lingering conflicts related to separatist movements and the Turkish state response.

MAP 1: Southeastern Anatolia

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5 While I invoke ‘the Turkish state’, reading the state in relation to rural residents’ narrations is necessarily to also recognize ‘the state’ as a non-distinct, indeterminate contested sphere. Indeed, insights to be gained from this analysis are due precisely to the fact that I investigate and situate the state in relation to its most unlikely and contested ‘sites’ and articulations –through that of the small, rural, marginalized, ethnically diverse villages of Turkey’s southeast. The extent to which the state ‘appears’ in this region, and is narrated by villagers living in this region, reveals something about the degree of success, vertically and horizontally, of state and nation- building projects in the contemporary moment.

6 My approach to questions of state consolidation, nation-building, and citizenship draws heavily from a growing body of work on ‘ethnographies of the state’ (e.g. Gupta 1995; Moore 1993; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Secor 2007). In brief, ethnographic approaches to states detail the everyday practices, encounters, and lived effects of the state. As Navaro-Yashin notes, an ethnographic approach to states allows an analysis of ‘people and the state, not as an opposition, but as the same domain (2)’ (see also Migdal 2001, 2004 for overview of state-society approaches). My study builds on these works in reading how the state is lived and articulated in everyday life. However, I also extend these works by picking up on Gupta’s (1995) interest in understanding the ways that the state is experienced and lived in rural spaces. Pushing this a bit further, I provide an analysis of evolving state-society relations in spaces that are not only marginal in terms of their rurality,5 but more centrally, with respect to state and nation-building projects over time. In the Turkish example, the contemporary southeast is emblematic in this regard –as a culturally, politically, and economically contested region that has increasingly frustrated Turkish state and nation-building since the establishment of the Republic in 1923 (Kirişçi & Winrow 1997; Dahlman 2002; Harris 2002, 2008a). As such, rural spaces of the southeast can be understood not only as marginal to Turkish state and nation-building, but also as sites of open contestation. I argue that it is only by reading the ‘state at its limits’ in those border spaces where Turkish state and nation- building have often been contested, frustrated, and even overtly challenged (ibid) that we can begin to trace and understand both illustrative and exceptional dimensions of state-society relations and understandings.

7 The analysis provided focuses on the case of irrigation delivery as among the recent changes that have fundamentally altered everyday village life in the southeast, and, with it, the ever-dynamic character of state-society encounters. The reach of the state is analyzed horizontally, in terms of infiltrating new spaces and life practices, and also vertically, in terms of intensified interaction, for instance associated with increased incorporation of rural residents into the Turkish economy or increased dependence of villagers on state services. Narratives analyzed include both ways that villagers invoke the state in relation to questions about irrigation and GAP-related changes, as well as following questions that directly dealt with the state and villagers’ experiences of state programs and services.6 Taken together, my aim is to analyze how the state is lived, in very real terms, in the fabric of everyday village life in the southeast, focusing on the period since the advent of GAP large-scale damming and water diversions, and highlighting the experience of the Harran plain in particular. As I discuss in the later sections, ways that villagers narrate these changes sheds light on how the Turkish state is experienced, and lived, but also necessarily exposes ways that rural residents situate themselves as part of, or in opposition to, larger economies and communities

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atregional or global scales (cf. Appadurai 1996), including in relation to the Turkish state and nation.

8 With respect to broader concerns related to the state, nation-building, the Kurdish question, or contemporary change in Turkey, specific contributions of this analysis include 1) theoretical contributions in terms of specifying the value of reading state- society relations ethnographically, and in particular, through a reading that seeks to understand state-society encounters at the margins –in those liminal spaces where state practices are less apparent, or may be actively contested. This contribution enriches approaches to the contemporary state, and responds to calls for qualitative analyses of nation-building (Berger 2006) and for treatments of state practices and national identity that take seriously negotiations of socio-spatial difference (cf. Radcliffe & Westwood 1996; Craske 2005). 2) Empirical contributions in terms of providing analysis of ways that residents of southeastern Turkey narrate and respond to Turkish state practices. While there is a rich literature on the Kurdish question generally, or with respect to GAP related development, there is very little that provides analysis of state-society encounters with attention to narratives and responses of residents living and working the region. As such, by elaborating the ways that the state is experienced, lived, and narrated in the southeast, this analysis adds significantly to literatures on Turkish state and nation-building (e.g. Secor 2007; Kaplan 2006), on Kurdish identity and historiography (e.g. Hirschler 2001; Yeğen 1996; Sömer 2004), to socio-political considerations related to the Southeastern Anatolia project (e.g. Harris 2002; Çarkoğlu & Eder 1998; Öktem 2005; Erhan 1997) or geopolitical considerations related to the Kurds or the southeast (e.g. Harris 2008a; Gunter 2004; Ergil 2000; Erhan 1997). Furthermore, 3) the paper is not only of significance spatially (in the rural, ethnically diverse spaces of Turkey’s southeast), but also temporally –through focus on changes underway as part of widespread irrigation delivery and other state-fostered changes associated with the GAP project. Finally, 4) as I elaborate in the concluding section, the analysis is suggestive not only of the changing horizontal and vertical reach of the state, but also of shifts in the ways that residents in the region understand themselves in relation to broader notions of community. Along these lines, it is suggested that contemporary state-led change in the southeast is likely to hold symbolic importance precisely given the history of conflictual relations, and specific discourse related to exclusion of the region invoked in Kurdish separatist discourse. As such, the analysis holds promise with respect to broader questions of citizenship, democratization, and changing citizen subjectivities.

9 With respect to method, the examination here draws from field-work conducted in the Harran plain, the first area to receive irrigation water through GAP. The plain is located directly north of the border with Syria (see Map 2) and is home to Arabic and Kurdish speaking minority populations,7 making it both a literal and figurative border of the reach and extent of Turkish language, ethnicity, and state influence. Narratives are drawn from interviews with state agents associated with the GAP program, both in Ankara and Şanlıurfa, as well as over sixty open-ended interviews conducted in the newly irrigated Harran plain and elsewhere in Southeastern Anatolia in 2001, 2004, 2005, and 2007. A survey of 124 rural households in eleven different villages of the plain was also carried out cooperatively with a sociologist from Harran University in 2001.8 Admittedly, results from the Harran plain must not be understood as representative for the entire southeast region, as experiences here necessarily differ from those of other populations and spaces of the region (particularly given that the plain is dominated by

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Arabic speakers, and populations here face issues very different from those of the Kurdish-dominated spaces to the north and east, particularly sites such as Diyarbakir, or small mountain villages that have been the primary sites of conflict over the past several decades). In particular, it must be born in mind that the Harran plain stands out politically from the rest of the southeast region, as an Arabic speaking pocket with distinctive regional political trends (i.e. that shuns pro-Kurdish politics that might be popular elsewhere in the region and with tendencies to favor Islamic and even Turkish nationalist political parties). Nonetheless, I ask: While the Turkish state has been analyzed ethnographically in the centers of Ankara or Istanbul (see Navaro-Yashin 2002; Secor 2007), or within specificstateinstitutions,9 what is the reach, extent, and constitution of the ‘state’ at its margins –in the impoverished, Arabic and Kurdish speaking, rural southeast? Furthermore, how are state-society relations evolving in the contemporary moment, particularly with regard to irrigation and other recent GAP- related efforts?

MAP 2: Recent Irrigation Projects in Southeastern Turkey: Harran Plain

II. Situating state-society relations in a Border Region

10 With even a cursory understanding of Turkish history and politics, the salience of the southeast, and specifically the rural southeast, as an ‘extreme’ site to investigate the Turkish state should be clear. In brief, it can be argued that Turkish modernist aspirations, concerns over territorial integrity, and efforts to gain access to the European Union highlight the southeast region as a central space that is the locus of these interrelated issues (Harris 2008a). Perhaps with the exception of border disputes with neighboring Greece over Cyprus and the Aegean sea, the southeastern border with neighboring Syria and Iraq is a primary cause of disquiet for those concerned with

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solidifying and maintaining the borders and integrity of the ‘Turkish state.’ As the only majority Kurdish administrative region in contemporary Turkey, southeastern Anatolia has been the primary site of the decades-long conflict related to Kurdish separatism – one of the most direct oppositions to Turkish state legitimacy and territory in the history of the Republic (see Kirşçi & Winrow 1997; Watts 2007; Harris 2002; Dahlman 2002). More recently, the southeast has also been a focal point for rising Islamisms, a contentious staging ground for US-led attacks against neighboring Iraq, the site of continuing skirmishes between Turkish military and separatist forces, and a region that experiences frequent charges of state corruption and human rights abuses. All of these issues make the southeast of particular importance for Turkish state and nation- building, also serving as a locus of concerns frequently highlighted with respect to European concerns about possibilities for Turkish accession to the EU (see also Gunter 2004; Ergil 2000).

11 I highlight the importance of the southeast together with other scholars who argue that there is theoretical significance to studying states and nations at their metaphorical and literal ‘borders’ (see Jones 2009; Paasi 2005 and other authors for recent examples of the growing interest in border studies). As Kaplan et al. assert with respect to nationalism (1999), there is a lot to be learned by considering borders, those sites which are simultaneously both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the nation, revealing precisely how it is that nation-building processes come undone (or, are also maintained and consolidated).10 Referring to ‘border’ sites as transgressions that disrupt the very idea of the nation-state, these authors write, ‘in attempting to consolidate its nationalist power for the well-being of the people, thenation-state often overlooks the effects its decisions and consequent events may have on diverse populations whose difference, often marked through concepts such as sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and class, may situate them adversely to a center’ (Kaplan et al. 1999: 5). Focusing on the ‘border’ of the GAP region similarly highlights the betweenness, indeterminacy, and double-movements of the Turkish nation and state, simultaneously writing these peoples and spaces as outside of Turkey, and attempting to incorporate them more fully into Turkish economies, politics, and identities (see also Radcliffe & Westwood 1996; Craske 2005; Zurcher 2005 for analyses of nationalism attentive to socio-spatial difference).

12 Consideration of contemporary state interactions and bordering processes in the southeast necessarily requires some attention to the history of these issues. While the map of contemporary Turkey was officially drawn in 1923,11 it wasn’t until the 1940s and 1950s that the southeastern borders between Turkey and its neighbors were solidified with the arrival of state agents to police the territorial limit of the Republic. Prior to that time, residents of the region would pass across the plains into present-day Syria without concern for official passports, state agents, or internationally recognized maps of what constituted ‘Turkey’. As Yeğen (1996) has described, the solidification of the border in southeastern Turkey served to cut off traditional trading routes including those that had long been established between Kurdish areas in Turkey and those farther to the south and east.12 In this sense, efforts to create a ‘Turkish economic space’ proceeded by marginalizing traditional economic relations and possibilities. In a similar fashion, the solidification of the official borders between the states cut off transhumance routes of nomadic pastoralists who had traditionally summered in the high mountains of eastern Turkey and wintered in the plains of Syria. Indeed, many

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villages of Turkey’s Harran plain were only established after the formal creation of the border between Turkey and Syria. With the formal establishment of the border, nomadic populations were systematically settled and animal husbandry livelihoods gave way to settled agriculture.13

13 The relatively recent solidification of the international border is an important issue to highlight, both to emphasize state attempts to consolidate the mapped territory of Turkey as distinct from that of its neighbors and to indicate the consequences the extension of the Turkish state apparatus throughout the border areas has had for residents of the southeast.

14 Throughout Turkish historiography, there has been a great deal of emphasis placed on demarcating Turkey from its ‘Arab’ neighbors, specifically following the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire. As described by Navaro-Yashin (2002: 49) ‘no affinity between Turkish and Arab cultures of the Middle East was allowed in official accounts of geography and history,’ instead a cultural border between Turkey and the Arab world was constructed and policed. For instance, schoolbooks were very careful to separate ‘Turks’ from ‘Arabs.’ As she explains, much of this insistence resulted from portrayals of Arabs as having threatened the integrity of Ottoman rule. Rising Arab nationalisms explicitly challenged the Islamic Caliphate under the sultan, resulting in portrayals of Arabs as those who betrayed their Ottoman brothers. Such discourses continue to this day, deliberately writing the Arab world as outside of and even oppositional to Turkey or Turkishness, with implications for Turkey’s contemporary regional geopolitical affiliations (witness current efforts to gain entry to the European Union or hostilities between Turkey and Iraq or Syria of the past several decades).

15 Consideration of these nationalist discourses is important to situate the ways that contemporary residents in my study area may understand themselves in relation to the state. As an isolated ‘Arab’ pocket within Turkish territory the Harran plain is a critical, and problematic, target of contemporary state interest and intervention with irrigation delivery and the GAP project. With 80-90 percent of the Harran plain as Arabic speaking, the plain extends the Arab populations from Syria into Turkish territory, creating an ethnically and linguistically minority Arab population.The plain is thus both the literal border area between Turkey and its Arab neighbors to the south, and also a site that disrupts those very distinctions, instead demarcating the existence of ‘Turkish Arabs’ within Turkish territory. Thus, the insistence that Turks are distinct from Arabs that has been so foundational to Turkish nationalist discourses exposes attempts to fix the territorial mapping of Turkey to fundamental challenge, as these populations are claimed simultaneously as both within and without ‘Turkey’ (cf. Kaplan et al. 1999). Thus, within the broader context and importance of the southeast as a Kurdish site, the peculiar geography of the Harran plain is also important to expose the limits and tensions inherent to Turkish state and nation-building projects. Attempts to solidify and fix the border, and to extend the reach of the Turkish state throughout the southeast, necessarily exposes tensions, fissures, and ambivalences inherent in such a project (Harris 2008a).14

16 Before turning to contemporary illustrations of changing state-society relations in this region, it is also necessary to briefly mention other aspects of state-society interactions in the rural spaces of the southeast, as well as to provide some general context on socio-economic considerations in the region and for the Harran plain.15 In the early days of the Republic, the Turkish state first demonstrated interest in Anatolian village

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life by sending agents to villages in order to discover ‘authentic’ Turkish language and culture. Over the past several decades, many would characterize the predominant focus of state-society interactions as militaristic, dominated by the Kurdish conflict, the state’s burning and evacuation of villages, limits on assembly and cultural-linguistic expression, and state-imposed curfew (see Yavuz 2001; White 2001; Mutlu 2001; Kirşçi & Winrow 1997 for more detail on the Kurdish issue and for understanding of ways in which this has been a predominant feature of all state-society questions for the region, and even for Turkey on the whole). In terms of state-led developmentalism, recent state interest in the area has included electricity delivery, drinking water provision, and more recent interventions related to irrigation, health, and agriculture associated with the large-scale Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) (see Ünver 1997a, 1997b; Carkoğlu & Eder 1998; Erhan 1997; Harris 2002; Akşit 1996, for overviews of the GAP region, the GAP project, and related socio-cultural considerations). While the bulk of the research discussed in this article focuses on irrigation and other GAP-related interventions, many villagers in the Harran plain invoke the coming of electricity as an initial state intervention of great import. They attest that it has only been since the recent delivery of electricity that the state has extended its reach and concern to include their villages. As such, narratives related to electricity suggest that this made villagers feel as though they were not entirely forgotten by the state, implicitly suggesting as well that prior to the 1970s and 1980s, these villagers felt themselves to be ‘outside’ of state interest and concern. Stronger connections to the Turkish state in these village spaces were further solidified with the ensuing arrival of television and telephones throughout the region. Whether watching news of the Turkish parliament, learning the Turkish language through TV, encountering state agricultural extension agents on GAP TV,16 or maintaining telephone contact with sons in the military, the contact zones between the state and rural residents have clearly been extended and intensified over the past several decades. The empirical material presented below must necessarily be understood in relation to these long-standing state interventions in these rural areas,17 as well as in relation to the ongoing discourses of exclusion and difference that mark the region as Arab, Kurdish, underdeveloped, or a modern (again, see Harris 2008a).

17 Part of my argument is that the recent establishment of canalet irrigation up to the border, but not beyond, is an important recent intervention that marks the boundary of what lies ‘within’ and ‘without’ modern Turkey, and serves as a recent chapter in the complex and evolving history of state-society relations in this contested region. Turkish state agents are again traveling to small Anatolian villages, this time not to rediscover an authentic Turkish past, but to forge a modern Turkish future. The coming of irrigation to the Harran plain required a flurry of activity to prepare the fields and villagers for what was to come; state agents from DSİ (State Hydraulic Works) built the canalets, Village Services and other agencies built roads and began ongoing processes of land leveling and drainage works, scientists and engineers took measurements and conducted research, drinking wells were established, and preliminary steps were made to create new management mechanisms in the form of Water User Groups to maintain the irrigation infrastructure. To prepare for water delivery in the plain, state agents redistributed agricultural plots as part of a land consolidation program to make the size and shape of the plots more suitable for irrigation. As with the introductory vignettes, I now turn to ways that villagers in the region narrate irrigation and other recent changes, and what this suggests in terms of

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intensified state presence in the daily lives and practices of villagers in the Harran plain, and in turn, what this might suggest in terms of tracing ever-shifting state- society relations in these marginal and contested rural spaces.

III. Recent Engagements: Shifting State-Society relations with Irrigation Delivery to the Harran Plain

18 Narratives offered by villagers in the Harran plain invoke the ‘state’ in relation to everything from crop selection (for instance due to cotton subsidies) to increased marginalization of those engaged in animal husbandry (a process that began long ago with Ottoman and Turkish state sedentarization of nomadic pastoralists). These recent state irrigation-related interventions in village life –to measure salinity levels, monitor water usage, test soil quality, or to teach appropriate irrigation techniques– augment and intensify long-standing state presence in these rural spaces. With these changes, it is important to consider how villagers narrate the ‘state’ in relation to these changes, including their sense of themselves in relation to state agents, interests, and practices.

19 While interviewing rural residents about irrigation-related changes, villagers often stressed that state interest in the region has changed. For instance, respondents remarked ‘at least the state turned its face towards us’, or ‘the state thinks about us now’. Another said, ‘We did not see any accomplishments of governments in the past, we are a little bit happy to see some now’. In relaying such sentiments, several credited recent state attention to the southeast directly to the late leader Turgut Özal.18 One such response was provided by Sübyan, a man who now works as an irrigation technician and who lives in an Arabic speaking village in the central part of the plain. ‘ Sulama [irrigation] has been good. Water brought life here. Özal knows the people of this region and knew that 90 percent of the 1 million people living here used to go work as seasonal workers, he initiated the project andTansu Çiller brought the water. Nobody leaves here as seasonal workers now, people in fact come here to work’.

20 By linking state leaders Özal and Çiller to irrigation and related changes in his village, Sübyan answers a question related to irrigation with a commentary on the ‘state’, discursively connecting the irrigated landscape and economy to state actors and interests. In some senses this is intuitive, as the state is the instigator of irrigation and advertises all that it is doing for villagers through GAP TV and other means. In another sense, this connection is striking. Sübyan is providing a reading of the state, and also state legitimacy, in relation to the changing agro-economy of his village. In so doing, he allies himself with a larger group of residents who appear to welcome increased attention and intervention of the ‘state’ in village life. Characterizing himself and his village as ‘beneficiaries’ of Özal’s vision and Çiller’s implementation, such statements pose fundamental challenges to simplistic accounts that portray rural residents of the southeast, or ethnic minorities in particular, as oppositional to encroachments of the state or modernization efforts –an issue I revisit in the conclusion.19

21 The most common response of villagers of the Harran plain to the question of ‘why did the state bring irrigation to your village?’ in our 2001 survey was ‘to benefit the farmers’, ‘to benefit the village’, ‘to benefit us’, or some variation. Of 125 respondents, approximately 76 (60%) noted in their answer that it was in part to benefit the people or villages of the plain. A proportion of respondents (approximately 30 of 125, or 24%), noted that the state intends to benefit rural residents, but also ‘itself.’20 As explained by

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one villager, the state brought irrigation to the village ‘to have the land worked on, to benefit the state and the people in the region’. Another young woman noted, ‘First, the villagers here will gain and then the government will gain. The government is charging for the water and also getting taxes’. Particular reasons that villagers noted to describe how the state is likely to also benefit from irrigation include: to develop the region economically, to generate taxes from increased income, increased productivity (as the state is the major purchaser of cotton), and from the collection of irrigation fees (which is arguable as irrigation water remains heavily subsidized, in 2001 priced at approximately $4 per decare of cotton for an entire season of unlimited water). Others note additional reasons for delivering irrigation: to reduce unemployment, to induce farmers to grow cotton, to benefit the landowners, to develop the region and stop migration to urban areas, this is a reason also cited in GAP planning documents), and one even noted that state delivery of irrigation is ‘for God’.

22 While the majority of interviewees perceived state delivery of irrigation as generally beneficial, at times noting ‘benefits’ also for the state, a smaller subset (approximately 10% of respondents) conveyed negative or skeptical understandings of state irrigation delivery. Negative responses were more likely among those who had been animal herders prior to canalet irrigation delivery, among the landless, and among women (Harris 2008b),21 indicating that there are some important differences related to experiences of these changes among residents of the plain, and among those living in the southeast region more generally (see also Harris 2006 for discussion of socio-spatial difference related to GAP changes). Among more negative respondents, one villager repeated back the question to introduce his skeptical response ‘why did the state bring you water?… The state brought irrigation to its own lands, the state didn’t bring water to us. We are hand laborers for the state, did they bring it for us? [bize mi getirdi?]’. Another complained, ‘the country is rich, but the people are poor because the state keeps eating all the money’, referring to corruption and inequality, and echoing concerns of other villagers who noted that state agents involved in GAP took bribes for certain jobs or for land distribution. Paralleling dissatisfaction with state practices among some villagers, several GAP-affiliated employees also complained about the ‘state’ as overly bureaucratic to the extent that investors pull out of the region, or as failing to give needed levels of support for engineers and other agents to do their job.

23 Following the question of ‘why did the state bring irrigation to your village?’ we asked directly whether or not the delivery of irrigation has changed respondents’ attitudes towards the state.22 Again, responses varied, but generally villagers conveyed increasingly positive associations with the state. ‘We now have a more positive attitude towards the state because we used to go to places like Adana, but now we are working on our fields directly in front of our houses’.23 Another noted, our view of the state ‘changed positively’: ‘We had hatred before but now they started investing in the southeast. The state started to think of us’. Similarly, ‘My positive feelings increased because we now have electricity, water and are more comfortable’; ‘We did not trust the state before. But it brought electricity, water, phone etc. to us and now we trust the state a lot’; or even more forcefully: ‘since the state cares for us, we have become more devoted to the state’. Another said it this way: ‘the head of the household is more appreciated if he takes care of his family, we have come to appreciate the state more’.

24 For these residents, receiving renewed state attention and services has resulted in an intensified sense of belonging and loyalty as citizen subjects. The characterization of

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the state as family by referring to the ‘head of household’ is especially notable, drawing directly on a notion of the state as a patriarchal unit (as with the term devlet baba [father state]) obligated to care for those under his charge and directly linking state irrigation delivery to nation-building. Such associations have obvious implications for questions of state legitimacy, related questions of support for Kurdish separatism in the region, as well as Benedict Anderson’s (1983) question of how people forcefully identify with a ‘nation’ to the extent that they are willing to offer their lives in its defense. To varying degrees, all of these positive responses convey citizens’ intensified relationships with the state, either perceiving themselves increasingly as under the charge of the state, situating themselves as increasingly ‘devoted’ to the state, or as beneficiaries of state services. For some of these villagers, irrigation delivery is clearly creating a field for intensified nationalist association and state consolidation, enabling consideration of how it is that states are established and maintained overtime through specific practices.

25 While such positive characterizations of the state following irrigation delivery were common, a smaller proportion of respondents noted increasingly or persistently negative perceptions of the state. Among the more skeptical responses, one noted: ‘My ideas about the state changed, but not in a positive way –I wish land reform was carried out’. Another said, ‘Nothing changed for me but those who are rich became richer’. Echoing these concerns, another said: ‘It changed negatively, because only the landowners benefited from irrigation. The rich are richer, the poor became poorer’. Similarly highlighting inequalities as a lens through which to understand the state, yet another said: ‘It brought an increase in welfare of the people. But it did not benefit everyone because those who did not have land were kept down as workers’. For these villagers, the differential benefits of irrigation have highlighted and even exacerbated inequalities in the region, intensifying concern with respect to landholding differentials and heightening dissatisfaction with the state. Other responses similarly noted the uneven benefits associated with irrigation, ‘the state didn’t benefit me by bringing water, only the landlord’. A 29 year-old Kurdish man said it this way: ‘Supposedly, the state brought water for improvement of people –to create better economic conditions– but it divided people (into classes). I developed negative feelings about the state. It has double standards’. As these portrayals suggest, perceptions of irrigation-related changes vary importantly with respect to landholdings, livelihoods, and other factors.24 The variability of experiences of irrigation conveyed by this diversity of portrayals reflects the ‘situated knowledges’ of residents (Haraway 1991), demonstrating how landholding or livelihood situations inflect varied perceptions and understandings of the state.

26 Interestingly, common to all the portrayals, whether positive or negatively inclined, is the recognition of the state itself as the purveyor of these changes, and by extension, the state itself as an object of interest and concern (cf. Mitchell 1991, as detailed more fully in Harris, in process). It is also of interest to note that many of the negative portrayals do not cast irrigation itself negatively, but instead perceive state failures with respect to ensuring that the benefits of irrigation are shared equitably or to ensure that the benefits will last well into the future (see Harris 2009). For these farmers, they may not be opposed to irrigated agriculture, but would only prefer that more attention be paid to make sure that they too enjoy the benefits associated with these changes. Among the more negative portrayals that cast irrigation as altogether detrimental, Amit’s quote prefacing this article names GAP as a ‘suicide pill’ for animal

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herders. Others invoked the term ‘slavery’ to express their situation as sharecroppers falling increasingly in debt. For others, new visible markers of wealth among the landed, with increasing numbers of cell phones and cars, have made them feel relatively worse off, heightening a sense of division between the rich and poor, as one woman said, ‘we have been left more backward’. These views were a minority in terms of frequency of responses, but nonetheless portrayed profound senses of exclusion from irrigation economies and, by extension, the Turkish nation and state (again, see analysis in Harris 2009 and 2008b for discussion of overall positive associations with irrigated agriculture, as well as differentiated experiences of these changes among different populations of the region).

27 Some respondents also took the opportunity to call the state to task for perceived failures in meeting obligations to rural residents in other senses. Referring to the fact that after irrigation delivery they were expelled from land they rented for twenty-five years, one rural resident said, ‘we call the state to do its job…we want the state to work for citizens’. Another woman noted, ‘We want the state to be more interested in the region, we feel sadness for being forgotten’. By intervening in village lives and economies, the transition to irrigation has thus also exposed the state to new types of critique. Most often, the failure of the state to enable the full realization of irrigation’s potential is noted, ‘because the state couldn’t organize the irrigation fairly therefore my feelings/thoughts remained the same’. Others echoed the sentiment with respect to the need for land reform, ‘now we want real land reform’.25 One 25 year old Arabic speaking woman said it this way: ‘We are unhappy with the system, the government, their coming and going. We want peace, equality, and most importantly, for the work done by poor people to be valued’. For her, state irrigation delivery is insignificant as long as there are other more substantive problems, making recent efforts appear feeble in the absence of more widespread reform. For these residents and others as noted, state irrigation delivery highlights other aspects of services that have not yet been dealt with, opening the state up to critique as residents sense that they can legitimately raise further, or more long-standing, demands. Even as such statements suggest that the state has not yet performed its duties adequately, these narratives are nonetheless suggestive of a sense of citizenship among these residents. They are, in part, expressing that they view themselves as citizen-subjects –able to call on the state to meet its obligations to them.

Conclusions: Reconsidering State-Society relations in a Contested Border Region

28 Given the histories of state repression and conflict in the southeast, it is fair to say that I was expecting much more negativity and distrust towards the ‘state’ than I found. Even with some overtly negative and critical responses, the general impression I was left with after more than 60 open-ended interviews and 124 survey responses is that many consider that while they had not been well-served by the state previously, they are receptive to recent development efforts in many senses and consider these interventions to be long overdue. Despite several possible issues that might have resulted in some respondents painting a more favorable impression of the state than they otherwise might,26 the overall positive association with irrigation and state intervention in this contested border region nonetheless presents a puzzle, particularly

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as other commentators have argued GAP related changes have aggravated volatility in the region (e.g. Öktem 2005). This issue of receptivity towards the state is also borne out by earlier research, for instance the survey conducted by Akşit and Akçay in soon to be irrigated areas (conducted in 1993, published in 1997). While there are remarkable differences between the 1993 results and our own from 2001, both demonstrate a strong receptivity on the part of rural residents to enhanced state involvement with respect to water management.Consider for instance, results from the 1993 survey related to the question ‘Who should own the water?’ To this question, 66% of respondents said ‘God’, 27.5% said ‘the state’, 3.8% said ‘the user’, and 2.5% said ‘society’. When asked ‘who should control the water?’ 80% said ‘the state’, and the other 20% felt management should be left to the farmers themselves. We repeated these two questions in our 2001 survey of recently irrigated areas of the Harran plain. We asked, ‘According to you, who should own the water?’. The responses received were 59% of respondents said ‘the state’, 15% said ‘the farmers’ and 14% said ‘water user groups’. Not a single respondent said ‘God’ in our survey, while this was the majority response in the Akşit and Akçay survey, 66% (during open ended interviews, however, ‘God’ was mentioned on several occasions in response to similar questions).27 To the question of ‘who should manage the water?’ the majority of respondents in the 2001 survey said ‘the state’ (48%), while a lesser number said ‘Water User group’ (36%), and only 5 respondents said ‘farmers’ (6%). Regardless of difficulties in comparing the results of these surveys, it is interesting that for both there are the relatively few respondents who note that water ownership and management should be in the hands of the farmers themselves; instead, the ‘state’ is perceived as most legitimate in terms of water ownership and control.

29 I consider such favorable responses to be significant, especially given the contentious nature of contemporary debates related to Islamism/secularism, Kurdish cultural rights, or tensions related to exclusions of ‘Arabs’ within Turkey, all of which are particularly salient throughout the southeast.28 Indeed, it is possible that residents of the region are receptive to the Turkish state’s attention to the region precisely because the lack of state investment historically has been a primary discourse that the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has invoked to garner support for the separatist movement (see Mutlu 2001). Given this, the discourse regarding the southeast as having been left out of state interest and attention is a familiar one, and undoubtedly frames the ways that villagers narrate state intervention in their villages as present. This might provide a partial answer for why state intervention may be viewed as welcome in this ‘forgotten’ region (Harris 2008a, 2008b). This possibility points to the potential that GAP-related changes hold a great deal of symbolic importance, also with considerable possibilities for recasting state-society relations in this contested border region.

30 While I have argued that the state is productively analyzed through narrations of villagers living in the marginal spaces of the rural southeast, it is also worthwhile to reemphasize that, at once, with such invocations of the ‘state’, villagers are also recasting and articulating themselves as subjects of nationalist, statist, and modernization efforts. Indeed, as Sömer (2004) has also argued it is important to consider ways that identities and notions of Kurdishness and Turkishness are cast as compatible, and may shift over time, in relation to state discourse and policy, rather than viewing such identities as static. Similarly, he also calls for more work that considers the Kurdish question not in relation to cultural rights, or security threat, but

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through focus on self conception and political beliefs of Kurds themselves, including how these are being continually reshaped through development processes in particular. In case study work described here, there is considerable evidence through which to consider how elements of statist and nationalist projects take hold among rural residents, and similarly, how notions of Turkishness, Arabness, or Kurdishness may be reimagined and recast in relation to ongoing state-society shifts. As such, we can begin to consider how Kurds, Arabs, and others that have been historically marginal to Turkish state and nation-building are reimagining themselves, and their relationship to the state, in the contemporary moment: ‘We are Turkish citizens but the state exploits us’, or ‘the state thinks about the villager’ or ‘I don’t think the state profits from sulama[irrigation]. The state did land leveling for us. The state thinks about its citizens’. All such statements simultaneously assess the ‘state’, and also position rural residents as ‘citizens’, or even as beneficiaries in relation to such endeavors. In such examples, even when the ‘state’ is characterized in a negative sense, for instance, as exploitative, the respondent nevertheless views himself as ‘a citizen of the ‘Turkish’ state’. Again, such associations are significant, especially when we consider the histories of difference that have persistently marked the region economically, culturally, and linguistically. These results can also be read as significant given broader globalization-related processes underway, as the possibility of intensified associations with national or state scales necessarily proceed in tension with increasing focus on supranational, global, or even local scales that are gaining force in the institutional and governance realms (cf. Appadurai 1996; Agrawal 2005). Along these lines, these results are also interesting in light of claims made that people’s associations with the nation or state within which they reside has become increasingly tenuous in a globalized era as citizens are increasingly connected to other peoples and places beyond the state’s borders, making the ideal of state borders that match up with social boundaries as increasingly elusive (Migdal 2004).

31 For rural residents to recognize themselves as Turkish, as recipients of state services, or, in the case of the one quotation above, as part of a family being cared for by the state provides testimony to the success (even if limited) of Turkish state and nation- building efforts. Within the terms of a Turkish state-building project not yet a century old, irrigation is the latest iteration of practices that further extend the Turkish state and nation into border regions that have long been contested, and have consistently foiled attempts to simplistically mark the territory and populations as singularly ‘Turkish.’ All of this suggests the need to move beyond simplistic associations of the southeast as ‘Kurdish’ or necessarily oppositional to the Turkish state. Instead, we need to consider the co-constitution of Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab citizen subjects, and indeed, the ways that the Turkish ‘state’ and ‘nation’ themselves are iteratively produced, and refashioned in relation to ongoing changes and negotiations.

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Moore, Donald (1993) ‘Contesting Terrain in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands: Political Ecology, Ethnography, and Peasant Resource Struggles’, Economic Geography, October 69(4), pp. 380-401.

Mutlu, Server (2001) ‘Economic Bases of Ethnic Separatism in Turkey: An Evaluation of Claims and Counterclaims’, Middle Eastern Studies 37(4), pp. 101-135.

Navaro-Yashin, Yael (2002) Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey, Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Öktem, Kerem (2005) Reconstructing Geographies of Nationalism: Nation, Space, and Discourse in Twentieth Century Turkey, unpublished PhD Thesis, School of Geography and Environment, Oxford, UK, University of Oxford.

Paasi, Anssi (2005) ‘The Changing Discourses on Political Boundaries: Mapping the Backgrounds, Contexts, and Contents’ in Van Houtum, Henk; et. al. (eds) B/ordering Space, Aldershot, Ashgate.

Radcliffe, Sarah; Westwood, Sallie (1996) Remaking the Nation: Place, identity and politics in Latin America, London, Routledge.

Secor, Anna (2007) ‘Between Longing and Despair: State, Space, and Subjectivity in Turkey’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, pp. 33-52.

Shankland, David (1999) ‘Integrating the Rural: Gellner and the Study of Anatolia’, Middle Eastern Studies 35(2), pp. 132-149.

Sömer, Murat (2004) ‘Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict: Changing Context, and Domestic and Regional Implications’, Middle East Journal 58(2), pp. 235-253.

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Strayer, Joseph (1970) On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Ünver, Olcay (1997a) ‘Southeastern Anatolia Integrated Development Project (GAP), Turkey: An Overview of Issues of Sustainability’, Water Resources Development 13(2), pp. 187-207.

Ünver, Olcay (1997b) ‘Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP)’, Water Resources Development 13(4), pp. 453-483.

Watts, Nicole (2007) ‘Silence and Voice: Turkish Politics and Kurdish Resistance in the Mid 20th Century’, Ahmed, M.; Gunter, M. (eds) The Evolution of Kurdish Nationalism, Costa Mesa, CA, Mazda Press.

White, Paul J. (2001) Primitive Rebels or Revolutionary Modernizers? The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey, New York, Zed Books.

Yavuz, Hakan M. (2001) ‘Five Stages of the Construction of Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 7(3), pp. 1-24.

Yeğen, Mesut (1996) ‘The Turkish State Discourse and Exclusion of Kurdish Identity in Turkey’, in Kedourie, S. (ed) Identity, Democracy, Politics, London, Frank Cass, pp. 216-229.

Zurcher, Erik-Jan (2005) ‘How Europeans adopted Anatolia and created Turkey’, European Review 13(3), pp. 379-394.

NOTES

1. The author wishes to acknowledge tremendous research support from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Minnesota, and the American Research Institute in Turkey. Nurcan Atalan-Helicke also offered research support for the work presented here. Special thanks also to Nicole Watts, members of the EJTS editorial board, and several anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. 2. One decare is equivalent of one-tenth of a hectare, or 0.2471 acres. 3. GAP is the Turkish acronym for the large-scale state development project Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi or Southeastern Anatolia Project. The project is extensive, revolving around damming and diversion of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to pursue ‘integrated regional development’ of Turkey’s most impoverished region (see Ünver 1997a, 1997b for overview; Harris 2002 ; Öktem 2005 for critical analysis). 4. According to Ünver (1997a: 466), prior to irrigation, average family income in the plain was approximately $1,034 in 1994, and after irrigation delivery in 1995, it rose to closer to $4000. More recent estimates that take into accounts the effects of the 2001 financial crisis in Turkey are not available. See Harris (2008b) for discussion of other changes that accompanied this increase in average household income (including increasing expenses, increasing debt, and other related changes). 5. As Shankland (1999) argues, it is essential to attend to rural processes to appropriately understand questions of modernization and other socio-cultural dynamics of importance in contemporary Turkey. The analysis here contributes centrally to such a project. 6. As such, questions were asked directly about the ‘state’ (see footnote 15), but analysis also includes the ways that villagers invoked the state in relation to irrigation and GAP-related changes generally. 7. Estimates are that approximately 80% of residents in the plain are Arabic speaking and 20% Kurdish speaking. This refers to primary or familial language spoken, as residents generally also speak Turkish. It is problematic in some sense to use native language as a proxy for an

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understanding of ‘ethnicity’ (Akşit, 1996), and it is politically contestable to refer to individuals as either ‘Arab’ or ‘Kurdish’. At times, I reproduce those designations in my analysis, however, due to the fact that villagers often describe themselves or others as such Arap or Kürt. Some villagers may, while identifying their family with either of these designations, also forcefully associate themselves as Türk. Thus, these categories should not be understood as singular or finite. 8. The survey was carried out in 11 different villages of the plain, representing approximately 10% of Harran plain villages, and selected according to location in the plain (with villages selected to provide geographic coverage of all regions of the plain), as well as also representing different irrigation union districts. Particular villages were selected based on size, from 300 to 800 residents (making these ‘middle’ sized villages), and primary language spoken (nine predominantly Arabic-speaking villages and two predominantly Kurdish speaking villages were chosen to maintain the 80% Arabic speaking ratio of the plain). Among survey respondents, 91 were men and 33 were women. For in-depth interviews with villagers, there were approximately 30 male respondents and 30 female respondents. See Harris (2008b) for more in-depth analysis of survey results, particularly for discussion of differentiated experiences of irrigation among residents in the plain relative to gender, ethnicity and landholdings. 9. Much recent work on the micro-physics of state power and distributed effects of state practices following Foucault has tended to focus on institutions such as prisons or schools (see Kaplan 2006 for a study of state and nation with respect to the education system in Turkey). As Navaro-Yashin argues, in addition to studying such institutions, there is a need to also understand the ways that the state is invoked and maintained in relation to quotidian practices, whereby people enact, or critique the state in everyday senses. 10. In another paper, Harris 2008a, I argue that the southeast is also significant for understanding Turkish modernization efforts –as both a site of intense interest in overcoming underdevelopment and also as a site where certain key elements undermine modernization attempts. 11. With the exception of the , annexed from Syria in 1938. 12. As described in detail by Yeğen (1996), the solidification of the border areas had important implications for economies and social interactions throughout the Kurdish areas in Turkey and surrounding countries. Specifically, as each new state attempted to attain integrated ‘national economies’ within its own national borders, traditional Kurdish traditional trading routes and spheres of interaction were fragmented. Economic circulation between Damascus, Baghdad, Aleppo and elsewhere were cut off to the extent that continued trade across trans-state Kurdish areas was even criminalized, branded as ‘smuggling’. These processes were among many that led to economic disarticulation in the southeastern Anatolia region. More recent geopolitical tensions, including US-led wars in Iraq, have continued such processes, with many years of sanctions that again criminalized trade along routes that had been historically significant for Kurdish populations, including between Turkey’s southeast and neighboring Iraq, with considerable economic consequences for Turkey’s southeast region. 13. The irony of the state arriving one day to establish the border of ‘Turkey’ was the subject of a film, Propaganda (Çetin & Çetin 1999). In it, villagers who have never had a state ID, let alone a passport, are forced to adapt to the arrival of border guards in the middle of their town, separating friends and families. The mythic town of the film straddling the newly established border is not unlike the situation that faced villages straddling the border between Turkey and Syria, with residents of the Harran plan similarly disconnected from families on the other side of the border in Syria. As several farmers explained, for certain bayram [religious holidays] the government eases passport requirements so that they can travel freely to visit friends and family.

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14. To reiterate, I emphasize the southeast as an important border region, and the Harran plain as a border area within this border region both as significant, but results from Harran cannot be thought of as representative of the entire southeast region, given political, ethnic, linguistic, and other differences. 15. With respect to other notable characteristics of the Harran plain, it is also noteworthy that there are high degrees of landlessness in the plain, commonly estimated at approximately 25% (Ünver 1997a). This percentage was comparable to the overall proportion of survey respondents who reported that they owned no land. The other general citations provided on the southeast also provide information on other notable socio-cultural features of the region, including gender concerns, the aşiret structure, and economic considerations as a region that remains predominantly agricultural and is the site of relatively little economic investment. 16. The GAP channel is a public relations facet of the GAP project, designed to advertise and promote GAP development efforts –from agricultural extension to family planning. Based on my interviews and survey, it is also one of the primary ways that residents are familiar with GAP and recognize this as a state program. In the survey, 83 respondents (69%) said they had heard of GAP, compared to 38 (31%) who said they did not. In a follow up question, we asked what they think GAP does. Of responses given, thirty identified irrigation and dam building, and a considerable number of others identified the television station. Relatively few also associated GAP with social programs. 17. Encounters with the state in these villages also necessarily include schoolhouses (the first place that students may be required to speak Turkish, and also villages spaces symbolically marked by the Turkish flag as a visible marker of state and nation) (see Kaplan 2006). Interactions with imams also represent less obvious ‘contact zones’ between villagers and the state, as all imams are state employees and may often represent issues as directed by the Directorate for Religious Affairs. Of course, in other parts of the southeast, especially in mountainous areas, the ‘village guard’ system represents a very different sort of state presence. 18. Some argue that Özal’s concern for and interest in the southeast largely stems from his own Kurdish heritage. Ataman (2002) provides a discussion of the restructuring of Turkish policy vis- à-vis ethnic minorities under Özal’s leadership. 19. I do not want to overstate this case, however, given that the Harran plain is both an Arabic speaking region of the southeast (and thus not necessarily as oppositional as the Kurdish and mountainous spaces of the region). Additionally, as the pilot area for irrigation delivery, the Harran plain is somewhat exceptional as a space that is most likely to have received benefits from the project (relative to those sites that were inundated to make way for the infrastructure works, for instance). 20. This was asked as an unprompted open-ended question, and the response was noted. The researcher classified the responses based on whether their answers indicated some benefit to villages or the southeast region, and whether benefits to the state were mentioned in their responses. 21. For instance, only one-third of self-identified ‘poor’ women considered irrigation to be beneficial, in contrast with approximately ¾ of the entire survey population who noted irrigation as either being ‘very beneficial’, or ‘beneficial.’ Even as the survey cannot be read as statistically significant, nonetheless, these sorts of discrepancies pose interesting questions for consideration in terms of differentiated reception of irrigated-related changes. 22. The first question asked was ‘Why do you think the state brought irrigation to your village’ (question 30: ‘Size göre, devlet köyünüze sulamayı neden getirdi?’). The follow up question was, ‘Since irrigation, have your ideas about the state changed? If so, why?’ (question 31: ‘Sulama geldikten sonra devlet hakkındaki düşünceleriniz değişti mi? Evetse, nasıl?’)

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23. This is an often-celebrated benefit of irrigation delivery, as many villagers used to travel to Adana for seasonal work as irrigators or cotton pickers. Some villagers still do travel to Adana, noting better pay, but many stay in Harran due to the proximity. 24. See Harris (2006) for discussion of how differentials with respect to livelihoods and landholdings have been retrenched through transition to irrigated economies, and Harris (2008b) for more general discussion on differentiated effects of, and responses to, GAP-related changes among women, the landless, Kurds/ Arabs, and others living and working in the region. 25. In the survey, 72.5% of respondents answered ‘yes’ to the question “in your village, is there a problem of unequal land ownership?’ Of survey respondents, only 43% said that they owned their own land. 26. I conducted most interviews with the help of Turkish assistants. Students from a local university also helped administer the survey (however, several among these students also spoke Kurdish and/or Arabic). Throughout the fieldwork, I encountered both very open critique of the state (perhaps enabled by my position as an independent American researcher, viewed as an outsider and as potentially sympathetic to such critique, especially related to the Kurdish issue) and also obvious caution and skepticism as to the purpose and goals of the research (for instance, with questions as to whether I was being sent there by the state, and so forth, although such skepticism and distrust was relatively rare). 27. One should not read too much into this comparison, as we do not have adequate details about the sample of the earlier surveys or the way that the earlier survey was implemented (although the earlier survey was also among villages of the Harran plain, and several of our villages overlapped). In terms of this particular discrepancy in responses, a possible explanation is that the earlier surveyors likely provided choices to respondents (upon hearing ‘God’, it would be less likely for respondents to provide some other answer), while our survey was asked in a way that left all responses open-ended (responses were only later grouped and categorized). 28. Villages of the region are generally portrayed as highly Islamic, and the region generally often supports Islamist or Kurdish political parties.

RÉSUMÉS

There is theoretical significance to studying states and nations at their metaphorical and literal ‘borders’. Focusing on the contested border region of southeastern Anatolia, this chapter highlights the tensions, contradictions, and recent shifts in state-society relations in the rural spaces of the southeast. As I detail, state delivery of irrigated agriculture represents a recent and significant chapter in the evolving state-society relations in this contested border area. With contemporary changes associated with the large-scale Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), state influence in rural areas and encounters with the state by rural populations are intensified. This occurs both horizontally, in terms of infiltrating new spaces and life practices, and also vertically, in terms of intensified interaction, such as that associated with the increased incorporation of rural residents into the Turkish economy or the increased dependence of villagers on state services. Reading the state ethnographically through the differentiated responses of villagers to recent irrigation-related changes, my aim is to analyze how the state is lived, in very real terms, in the fabric of everyday life, and to consider what this suggests for understanding state-society relations and the changing citizen subjectivities in the liminal spaces of Turkey’s southeast.

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INDEX

Keywords : borders, Harran, Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), state-society relations Mots-clés : frontières, Harran, relations Etat-société, Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP)

AUTEUR

LEILA M. HARRIS Leila M. Harris is a political, social, and cultural geographer who focuses on developmental and environmental change, water politics, and gender and social difference, particularly in Turkey and the Middle East. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, and Gender and Women's Studies, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. [email protected]

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Contesting the ‘Truth’ of Turkey’s Human Rights Situation: State- Association Interactions in and outside the Southeast

Marlies Casier

Without public pressure it is impossible to achieve change. The state is aware of this and thus marginalizes human rights organizations. It turns them into targets. If a soldier dies, the high ranked military officers say ‘Where are the human rights defenders now?’ They try to tell the public that the human rights associations are merely interested in the lives of the ‘terrorists’ and not in the lives of their children (Ayhan Bilgen, former president of Mazlum-Der, personal interview, 14 January 2009, Ankara).

1 Among the changes that took place in Turkey in the first decade of the 21st century was the way some branches of the state engaged the question of human rights.1 In good part due to pressure from the European Union – specifically, in order to gain formal acceptance of Turkey’s candidacy and move towards meeting the political conditions of the Copenhagen criteria for accession – governments in Ankara enacted a series of legal reforms aimed at providing ‘stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities.’2

2 Long critical of Turkey’s human rights record, particularly in the southeastern part of the country, European institutions have actively supported the Turkish government in its reform drive, stressing the need to develop working relations with civil society. And indeed, the government did consult with human rights associations during the legislative process in the first half of the decade. These included international associations such as Human Rights Watch and national ones such as the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey [Türkiye İnsan Hakları Vakfı, or TİHV], and the Human Rights Association [İnsan Hakları Derneği, or İHD].3 There thus appeared to be a window of opportunity for cooperation between at least some branches of the state and the country’s human rights associations, and a chance for the deepening and enhancement of the role of civil society in national affairs. Ideally, this would both assist the

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development and protection of basic liberties, including those newly won, and enable violations to be addressed, in particular those related to Turkey’s Kurdish question, and the armed conflict that resulted from it.4

3 However, this process has not resulted in a more cooperative relationship between the country’s human rights associations and relevant state institutions. On the contrary, the process seems to be producing a dual system comprised of mutually antagonistic actors: the new state-centric institutional bodies, on the one hand, and the established domestic human rights associations, on the other. Instead of working in cooperation with established human rights associations, the newly developing state institutional structures appear to be challenging them for authority over the ‘truth’ concerning , especially regarding the Kurdish question. The majority of severe human rights violations inside Turkey have been and are still related to the unresolved Kurdish issue and the ongoing armed conflict with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).5 However, the new state-centric institutional bodies that are being created are thus far unwillingto seriously address these violations, instead prioritizing the presentation of a positive image of Turkey’s human rights reforms. These government institutions are thus developing parallel to and in competition with existing human rights associations.

4 This paper examines these dynamics. First, I examine the roots of the current human rights-institutionalization process. I link this process primarily to pressure from the European Union: when EU policies created new political capital for human rights, the Turkish government and state officials began to tackle the question of human rights violations more vigorously and, from 2001 on, enact serious legal reforms (Eralp 2006; Arat 2007). The Turkish state consequently had to start to engage civil society actors in the development of its new public policy. In the area of human rights, this meant that state institutions now had to work closely with exactly those associations that constituted some of their fiercest critics, some of which had been considered as actually undermining the state’s policies, if not thought of as straight-forwardly advocating separatism.

5 Second, I examine the nature and workings of a new government human rights body: the Human Rights Council of Turkey, which operates mainly as a co-operative arrangement between state officials (the Human Rights President at the national level, and the provincial governorships in the provincial and sub-provincial boards) and state-friendly NGOs. An examination of this council and the way it works suggests that the government attempted to extricate itself from the predicament of having to work with civil society actors it viewed as a threat by incorporating only those actors that did not challenge the state’s reproduction of itself or the meaning people are expected attach to it (Migdal 2001: 150). In particular, those NGOs perceived as contributing to the Kurdish nationalist movement and considered part of the DTP-led (and PKK inspired) alternative state-building project in the southeastern municipalities are largely excluded from the state-centric institutionalization process.

6 Third, I look at the balance of power between the government-sponsored human rights institutions and what we may think of as ‘traditional’ human rights associations. On the one hand, the former authority of the established human rights associations is to some degree eroding due to shifts in patterns of relations between these associations and EU institutions, which now rely less on traditional human rights associations due to the increasing capacity of the European institutions inside Turkey. In addition, the

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politicization6 of the established human rights associations has become a matter of concern for the European Commission.

7 On the other hand, a significant part of the social-political space created over the years by domestic human rights associations remains intact, and the government’s efforts at a human rights ‘take-over’ is actively contested. And, in fact, the established human rights associations still possess a number of advantages over the new state institutions in their ability to set the human rights agenda and determine the discourse for civil liberties and justice in the southeast.

8 Although this particular paper looks at national-level political dynamics, it offers a useful window onto studying some of the ways state-society relations in the southeast have shaped political dynamics throughout the country. EU pressure to have Turkey conform to European human rights standards was instigated in good part by the pre-1999 realities of the southeast, where the state’s counter-guerilla warfare had been accompanied by many human rights violations. This EU attention – and the government’s efforts to ‘officialize’ human rights processes in Turkey – was one response to the activities and pressure of domestic and international human rights organizations and Kurdish diaspora activists who had largely focused on these violations that were taking place in Kurdish-majority provinces of the southeast. All these actors sought to link the Kurdish issue and human rights frames, and to achieve international political and judicial recognition for their grievances and claims. This same linkage, however, came with great complications for the broader human rights reforms and institutionalization process.

I. The roots of the current institutionalization process

9 Understanding the current institutional challenge and its effects on human rights associations in Turkey requires a brief summary of Turkey’s human rights position and policy. Historically, Turkey was among the 48 countries that voted for and signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris, 1948; it is recognized as among the 12 founder-members of the in 1949, and thus one of the 14 signatory countries to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in 1950, which it ratified four years later. However, ‘human rights’ as such did not enter the country’s political agenda before the 1980s, when systemic repression and human rights violations including torture and extrajudicial killings began to attract domestic and international attention.

10 The Turkish state’s problem with human rights during the post-1980 period has to be understood specifically in the context of the violent conflict with the PKK in the southeast,7 but also, and more generally, in light of the existence of a ‘security regime’ based upon intimate relations between the political institutions and the institutions responsible for security related issues, and the meta-ideology they share. In this ideology national security is the central concept that justifies interventions in all possible domains of social activities (Dorronsoro 2005: 22-23; Sakallioğlu-Cizre 2003; Cizre 2008). The state-centric conceptualization of domestic sovereignty in Turkey is constructed around a hegemonic nationalist mythology of existential threat, one perceived as ever present since the war of independence, coming both from without and within, and actually based on a still insecure sense of identity (Kentel

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forthcoming). Tellingly, it presumes the citizens’ first duty as to safeguard the integrity of the republic, which is at odds with the more inclusive and pluralistic culture of democratic tolerance promoted by the European Union through the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights.8 The emphasis in the EU approach lies on the responsibility of the state to protect the rights of its individual citizens, instead of vice versa, as is the case with the cultural ideology of Kemalist Turkey (Eralp 2006). As explained in the analysis of the making of Turkish ‘state-centric modernity’ (Keyman & İçduygu 2005: 5): … while giving the masses political rights, [the Kemalist elite] demanded at the same time that they accord normative primacy to the national interest over individual freedoms, to duties over rights, and to state sovereignty over individual autonomy. Thus, the making of the modern Turkey involved the transformation of masses into citizens, but prevented the language of rights from entering into the process of the construction of secular national identity (Keyman & Içduygu 2005: 6).

11 Nevertheless, Turkey’s disturbing human rights record came increasingly under the scrutiny of international human rights associations following the 1980 coup, (e.g. Cizre 2001) and from 1986 onward this was reinforced by the first homegrown Human Rights Organization, the İnsan Hakklari Derneği (İHD), parent organization to TİHV. Established in Ankara, İHD originated from the engagement of leftist professionals and intellectuals and the relatives of the political activists imprisoned during and following the 1980-1983 military rule (Çalı 2007; Türkmen 2003). İHD publicized the plight and conditions of the still thousands of political prisoners to the outside world and was in contact with Amnesty International, which was monitoring the conditions of the detention of the political prisoners and publicly advocating their cause.

12 During the mid- and late-1980s the effects of military rule were still very much in evidence – there were no trade unions or leftist political parties left at the time of İHD’s founding, for example – and the emerging human rights associations thus came to occupy an anti-authoritarian space offering one of the few vehicles through which people could engage in criticism of the official state ideology and policies (Çalı 2007; Türkmen 2003). Human rights defenders in Turkey therefore easily came to be seen as leftist-communists and therefore a threat to the state, especially in an environment in which the Turkish military was promoting the Turkish-Islamic synthesis as a buffer to socialist movements and ideas.

13 From the beginning of the 1990s onwards the Kurdish question came to dominate the agenda of the human rights associations (Emir Ali Türkmen, personal interview, 17 January 2009),9 with the PKK replacing the left as the greatest perceived threat to the integrity and unity of the Turkish state.10 New national human rights associations were set up such as TİHV, a foundation that specialized in the rehabilitation of victims of torture, and the Organisation of Human Rights and Solidarity for Oppressed People İnsan Hakları ve Mazlumlar İçin Dayanışma Derneği (Mazlum-Der), known to have a more Islamic-inspired approach. The new associations obviously focused on abuses in the southeast, an emphasis that continues to this day.11 Together with international human rights associations, including those related to the Kurdish diaspora in Europe (e.g. the London-based Kurdish Human Rights Project, KHRP, founded in 1992),12 groups like İHD and TİHV have played an important role in the recording and publication of human rights violations in the country (see e.g. Watts 2004; Adamson 2001).13

14 The voices of these associations came to be heard by civil society associations and politicians in Europe, especially during the 1990s when the number of serious human

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rights violations in the Kurdish southeastern provinces of Turkey sky-rocketed. Consequently human rights turned into a matter of concern with regard to Turkey’s applications for membership to the European Union. In 1989 Turkey’s failure to respect the human rights of its citizens was amongst the reasons cited for the rejection of its application (Doc. SEC (89) 2290); in 1996 Turkey’s human rights record was a reason given for the European Parliament’s objection to Turkey’s entry into the EU Customs Union, and similarly, at the Luxemburg Summit of 1997, the poor human rights situation played a significant role in Turkey’s rejection as a candidate. Since the green light for its candidacy was given in 1999, and for the negotiations in 2005, respect for human rights has been addressed continuously in the relations between Turkey and the European Union (Doc. 2008/157/EC).14

15 Until the end of the 1990s the nationally based human rights associations, in particular İHD and TİHV, held a kind of exclusivity over the registration, publication and prosecution of human rights violations in Turkey. These particularly concerned violations suffered by Kurdish political activists and their families during the violent phases of the armed conflict at the end of the 1980s through the mid-1990s. İHD quickly became the address for international human rights associations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for information on developments in the Kurdish inhabited provinces under the State of Emergency Law, Olağanüstü Hal (OHAL). The İHD branch at Diyarbakır operated as the central branch for the southeastern predominantly Kurdish provinces, with human rights violations in the region being reported there and then passed on to Ankara or (directly) to international associations (Nazmi Gür, former president of İHD Van Branch and former member of İHD Diyarbakir, personal interview, 15 January 2009, Ankara). From 1992 the branch of Diyarbakir started to cooperate extensively with KHRP to bring cases before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg.

16 Human rights activism employed through the ECHR played an important role in the recent legal development of fundamental freedoms. Turkey finally recognized the right of individual petition to the ECHR in 1987, the year that saw – in addition to Turkey’s formal application to the EU – the instatement of OHAL, which ‘initiated a period of grave human rights violations committed by security forces against Kurdish civilians, leading to a rapid increase in the number of petitions filed with the ECHR’ and as a result of which ‘it was initially for Kurds that the European human rights law offered an alternative arena for rights-based litigation’ (Kurban et al. 2008: 3).15

17 In total, Turkey was found to have violated human rights in almost 1,700 cases brought before the European Court of Human Rights during the decade 1999-2008 (with a further 200 settled out of court, combining to account for all but 16 of the judgments made) (ECHR 2009a: 139).16 The judgments found against Turkey directly affected the laws and practices inside the country as the jurisprudence of the ECHR had to be incorporated into the national laws in order to prevent similar violations in the future (Smith 2008). The ECHR therefore was instrumental in the reform of Turkish legal system, leading to reforms in pre-trial detention, trial procedures, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly and association (see also Adamson 2001; Watts 2004).

18 Turkish state authorities for the most part denied accusations of human rights abuses until the middle of the 1990s. Typically, the government would accuse its foreign critics of illegitimate involvement in internal affairs and support of separatism (see e.g. Çalı

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2007: 222). Human rights defenders in the country faced prosecution, imprisonment, torture, and death.17

19 From the EU Customs Union Protocol in 1995-1996 onwards, however, the state engaged in ‘tactical concessions’ (Cizre 2001), entering into a dialogue with internal and international critics about various accusations. These concessions were instrumental and strategic, in order to gain military and economic support. Thus, while certain abuses were recognized, they were presented as the aberrant behavior of particular individuals rather than part of a systematic policy (Cizre 2001: 68). In 1997, under Refah deputy Haşim Haşimi, the parliamentary Human Rights Commission wrote the first report that openly criticized the consequences of the counter-insurgency measures in the Kurdish provinces, bringing many human rights violations to light. As Haşimi stated while reading the minutes of his speech in the Turkish General Assembly of 2nd of June 1998: There are natural catastrophes that you, as a state, cannot do anything about, but there are human catastrophes that you as a state can do something about… Whose power has evacuated the people? Thousands of people fled to the outskirts of the city and the gecekondus [shantytowns]. Who has forced them to live this life? Who has brought them to [own nothing but] a piece of bread? (Haşim Haşimi, personal interview, 20 September 2007, Diyarbakır).

20 It was when the politics of denial ended after the 1990s and important legal reforms undertaken that the government decided to establish an institutional human rights body in order to integrate the protection of human rights into the state administration. By 2004, provincial and sub-provincial human rights boards had been established under what came to be called the Human Rights Presidency of Turkey.

II. The particularities of the new institutional body

There is one positive effect of the [new] institutions: the government is using the word human rights all the time and the symbols of human rights are all over the walls of their buildings. (Hüsnü Öndül, personal interview, January 2009, Ankara).

21 Following its victory in the November 2002 election, the AK Party (AKP) government not only accelerated the pace of democratization but also initiated a process aimed at institutionalizing the protection of human rights in the state administration. Concretely, the government organized an organizational and legislative establishment consisting of a national structure for dealing with violations. This was made up of local and provincial boards [kurular] headed by the provincial governors and coordinated by a central government department; the Human Rights Presidency of Turkey, answerable to the prime ministry [Başbakanlık İnsan Hakları Başkanlığı], under which subsumed various other bodies, such as a think tank known as the human rights advisory board; and the ‘Human Rights Council of Turkey’ [Türkiye İnsan Hakları Kurumu].18

22 At first glance there were reasons for optimism about the new human rights institutional structure. Made up of local elected representatives, academics, lawyers, politicians, professional bodies, journalists, NGOs, and trade unions, the boards were tasked with monitoring human rights-related legislative reforms and their implementation in the country, and instructed to investigate complaints about human rights abuses filed by citizens and forward their findings to the prosecutor. A Human Rights Advisory Board was established to provide a platform for consultation and information exchange between academics, NGOs and other civil society actors dealing

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with human rights.19 Thus, an integration of (local) civil society actors and formalized recognition of civilian democratic oversight seemed central in the new human rights policy in Turkey.

23 However, those NGOs that have openly criticized state practices and its ideological underpinnings have been excluded from – and excluded themselves from – the institutionalization process. To give but one example of the skepticism that abounds amongst Turkey’s human rights defenders, the TİHV-General Secretary testified: There is no political will to enhance the cooperation between the civil society and the state authorities. What they do is no more than window-dressing. For example, we get lots of invitations for meetings. Lately, after a meeting of Babacan [Turkey’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and chief EU-negotiator for Turkey until January 2009] with many NGOs, the NGOs had to leave the premises when Babacan gave his briefing to the press (Metin Bakalcı, personal interview, 22 January 2009, Ankara).

24 The human rights boards from the start suffered a legitimacy problem in the eyes of national and international human rights associations. First of all, the boards were organized under the prime minister and run by the provincial governors. This was not in line with the Paris Principles which sets out the need for national human rights institutions to be independent.20 Now the same provincial governors representing the state and in charge of the police were charged with investigating violations of human rights perpetrated by the state and its security forces. Furthermore, in the whole process of institutionalization and protection of human rights and the drafting of the laws that were needed for its regulation, the traditional human rights associations were not consulted, and have complained that they are excluded from the negotiations.

25 At the same time, however, the established human rights associations have always taken an anti-establishment position and have been hesitant to cooperate with local officials, even when considering them necessary for the fulfillment of their aims (Tocci & Kaliber Luiss 2008). Consequently, these associations have also refused to take part in the boards. They have criticized the ways in which the government tried to introduce the new human rights bodies, and in May 2009 TİHV and the four associations affiliated with the Human Rights Joint Platform, or İnsan Hakları Ortak Platformu, known as İHOP, signed a strongly worded rejection of the latest draft law on a reformed Human Rights Council. In addition to stating their opposition to being included in a process of ‘anti- democratic implementation, which can be considered also as a human rights violation’, they also criticized the composition of the boards as failing to meet the terms set by the ministry and as being, ultimately, ‘problematic and functionless.’21

26 Initially, some of the established human rights associations such as TİHV did take part in the Human Rights Advisory Board that was established, but that involvement ended following its first report (since which the Advisory Board has not been operative). Tellingly, that first report dealt indirectly with the Kurdish problem, in that it attempted to tackle a practical political problem concerning the vocabulary of identity. The Turkish word Türk has a double meaning, referring both to ethnicity and nationality, which is obviously problematic for politically sensitized Kurds in particular, who, given their raised nationalist consciousness, may identify themselves as Turkish by citizenship but not by ethnicity. In order to distinguish the two, and move away from prejudicial language, the report prepared by professors Ibrahim Kaboğlu and Baskın Oran used the concept of ‘Türkiyelilik’, which means ‘being from Turkey.’ However, the academics were charged with ‘denigrating Turkishness’ and inciting people to enmity and hatred under Articles 301 and 216 of the Turkish Penal

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Code. This was followed by the dismissal of fourteen members of the board, after which the chairman and many other intellectuals resigned.22

27 A closer look at the NGOs participating in the human rights boards reveals the nature of the new institutional structure. Membership of NGOs on the boards is upon the invitation of the provincial governors, who, as representatives of the state, could be expected to be loyal to the official ideology. And indeed, the NGO representation found on the Human Rights boards does consist primarily of members of NGOs working within the confines of the state’s ideology, including some that are actively engaged in its promotion such asthe Atatürk Düşünce Derneği [ADD, Atatürk Thought Association], Türk Dünyası Insan Hakları Derneği [Turkic World Human Rights Foundation], Türk Ocakları Derneği [Turkish Hearths Foundation], Şehit Aileleri Derneği [Association for the Families of Martyred Soldiers] and Türk Anneleri Derneği [Association of Turkish Mothers].23 They also tend to be less than focused on human rights, which makes them questionable choices for the Human Rights boards. Indeed, a UN Special Representative in 2004 judged the selection of NGOs for participation in the Human Rights boards to be based on ‘political affiliation’ and ‘other extraneous considerations’ (Jilani 2005).

28 The characteristics of the NGOs that are members of the Human Rights boards have particular implications for the protection and promotion of human rights as related to the Kurdish question. The institutional bias of some of these organizations in respect to this issue and the stance they could be expected to take on the boards is quite apparent. In the case of the more overtly nationalist organizations – like Atatürk Düşünce Derneği, Türk Dünyası Insan Hakları Derneği, and Türk Ocakları – and in the case of Şehit Aileleri Derneği, the list of soldiers lost (‘martyrs’) and their date and place of death, i.e. overwhelmingly in the southeast during the 1990s figures on their websites.24

29 These associations portray a suspicious, hostile and sometimes demonized image of Kurdish and human rights associations. They tend to be suspicious of the motives and aims of human rights groups that address the Kurdish question (and, by extension, Kurdish associations in general), considering them to be appropriating the language of rights in the pursuit of a hidden agenda that could endanger the national unity and security, and even as operating merely as legal representatives of the PKK (Tocci & Kaliber 2008: 13). The idea that İHD is biased and defends the rights and freedoms of Kurds, including terrorists, but not the primary right to life of murdered Turkish soldiers and their families is also widespread. Historically and ideologically, these organizations have upheld a civic or assimilationist approach to the Kurdish question, prioritizing individual rights and denying the existence of a Kurdish collectivity legitimately demanding collective rights (ibid.: 24).

30 Predictably perhaps, the attitude of distrust found among the member NGOs of the human rights boards is shared by the president of the human rights presidency coordinating the human rights boards, Professor Hasan Fendoğlu, who expresses the view that the human rights associations failed to join the boards because of their ‘unwillingness’, as they would think of the boards as ‘competition’, and suggests that they are not really representative of the nation as a whole but, on the contrary, part of Kurdish nationalist politics: Human rights organizations here are different than in Europe because in Europe NGOs support the state. In Turkey, however, certain NGOs want to separate from the state. The DTP took 5 percent of the votes of the . They are small but their voice is strong, [while] the majority is big but has not got a [national] human rights organization. Concerning human rights, it is said that they are

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communist and Turkish people have not established a human rights organization. In the future we might have new NGOs. (Hasan Fendoğlu, personal interview, 22 January 2009, Ankara).25

31 The absence of the established domestic human rights associations in the new institutions weakens Turkey’s human rights institutionalization process. These associations have developed expertise in the documentation and publication of human rights violations and the assistance of victims over the years. İHD and Mazlum-Der have their own networks of lawyers with whom they work. Since the beginning of the 1990s these associations have also supported victims by taking their cases to Strasbourg, supported by KHRP, which has provided legal training to the human rights defenders and lawyers working for the associations (Kerim Yıldız, personal interview, January 2008, London). The human rights boards, on the other hand, suffer from a lack of expertise (as acknowledged in their own 2007 report and in many of the interviews of the author). While the expertise build up by the domestic organizations remains under- utilized, the boards have tried to develop their own capacity building with financial support from the European Union and some of its member states.

32 The boards’ data collection and public reporting seems to be a relative strength of the Human Rights Presidency, which has published fairly full sets of figures.26 According to the report, the statistics should demonstrate the implementation of reform, showing progress or failure concerning human rights. However, the report offers a clearly biased logic in the relative accounting for desirable and undesirable trends. For example, the report argues that an increase in the reported number of formal complaints related to ill treatment while in custody can be accounted for as indicating a rise in public awareness of the boards, rather than an actual increase in the number of people suffering ill treatment at the hands of security forces. However, other data showing a decrease in complaints (e.g. related to torture and freedom of expression), is taken as evidence that the problems in these areas have decreased and the measures taken (to prevent torture) are proving successful (HR 2007: 20, 23).

33 More generally, the number of citizen complaints – less than 5,000 formal complaints for the whole four-year period – appears rather low. For instance, it is less than half the number of cases filed against Turkey pending at the ECHR (see note 17). The greatest numbers of the formal complaints concern alleged violations regarding the right to health and property (totaling almost 20 percent of the complaints). The violations for which Turkey received the most international and domestic attention are related to rights concerning freedom of thought and expression, freedom of association, and freedom of assembly and demonstration, and these all ranked in the bottom third of the thirty rights categories listed by the Presidency data presentation. The words of the Human Rights President himself also reflect the need to appease the criticisms of the outsiders, while at the same time they reflect the ongoing ‘security regime’, as he tried to reassure the author: In Turkey, there is freedom of expression. You can criticize the army, the president, the government and the parliament, but what you cannot do is insult them… In the last six months our Minister of Justice gave permission to prosecute in 70 cases related with article 301 and he was right to do so. I know that, because I’ve monitored these cases and they were rightfully prosecuted. Today freedom of expression has improved. There is only some homework left to be done (Hasan Fendoğlu, personal interview, 22 January 2009, Ankara).

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34 Clearly, the new institutional bodies and the traditional human rights associations have contesting claims as to the ‘truth’ of the nature and the number of human rights violations in today’s Turkey. Whereas the Human Rights President and the Boards appear to downplay violations of the freedom of expression and the existence of torture, the traditional human rights associations such as İHD present strikingly different priorities and figures. Regarding torture, for example, the report of the Human Rights Presidency indicates for the year 2007 a total number of 29 cases of torture and 133 cases of ill treatment, totaling 162 (HR Report 2007: 16-17). İHD, on the other hand, reports 678 cases of torture and ill treatment for the year 2007 (İHD 2008), in one year outnumbering the 461 cases the human rights presidency attests for the whole period 2004-7. Similarly, with regards to freedom of expression the human rights presidency’s report indicates a total of 5 cases for 2007 in which freedom of expression was violated (HR Report 2007: 16). İHD’s report, on the other hand, states that in 2007, 190 court cases had been filed involving 1232 persons. The İHD report further finds that about 369 people were convicted in 2007 and given prison sentences and penal fines in cases deemed to be in violation of the freedom of expression (İHD 2008).27

35 Finally, there is a lack of engagement among the Presidency and its boards with the Kurdish question. There are no geographical tables to show where applications were made (although there are figures showing the institutions held responsible for human rights violations).28 Nor is there any discussion about the rights of ethnic and linguistic minorities, or about questions such as the need for dialogue and reconciliation in the light of the armed conflict. This is in stark contrast to the demands and proposals of the established human rights associations and think tanks. Given the current political climate and recent history, these omissions cannot be seen as inconsequential or accidental, but suggest an effort to redefine human rights in Turkey in a new and ‘de- Kurdified’ way.

36 An assessment of the resources of the traditional human rights associations on the one hand, and the Human Rights Presidency and its boards, on the other hand, also highlights the fact that the traditional associations and newly established boards, and, in particular, its member NGOs, constitute competing clusters of organizations. The human rights associations have expertise and a history of intensive cooperation with one another, and they are also embedded into transnational advocacy networks with international human rights associations. Additionally, the human rights associations have found a welcoming work environment at the local level, in particular in those municipalities in the southeast run by the DTP (see Watts, 2006; Gökalp 2007). At the national level, however, the domestic human rights associations have had problems accessing the mainstream media and establishing broader public support (beyond the support they enjoy in the Kurdish-majority southeast and among a small audience, generally the liberal intelligentsia, in the western part of the country). The human rights associations have also experienced difficulties accessing most of Turkey’s parliamentary deputies and have been unable to directly affect governmental policies, despite (or because of) their indirect success, for example through the cases brought against Turkey in the ECHR.

37 Therefore, while the established human rights associations continue to function as advocates for the southeast and (other) minority interests outside the mainstream, nationalist discourse (i.e. Armenian, Christian, Romany, LGBT, etc.) at the national level, the Human Rights Presidency and its boards, as organs of the state, may be better

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positioned. In other words, a dual system with a dichotomous human rights discourse is developing. This affects relations with the European institutions and all of these entities’ claims to speak with authority about the human rights situation inside the country, as illustrated in the following anecdote recalled by human rights lawyer and activist Hakan Ataman: There is no positive dialogue. There is a dialogue [with the institutions] about things that do not pose a threat to the state, such as the rights of children and women. However, at the same time, an issue such as rape under custody is something that cannot be addressed… I attended a EU seminar on human rights and torture. During the workshop an enormous dispute burst out between state officials and human rights defenders. No solution was found and there was a total lack of dialogue (Hakan Ataman, Secretary General of the Human Rights Agenda Association, personal interview, 16 January 2009, Ankara).

III. Shifting patterns of relations between the EU and human rights associations

38 Established human rights associations’ ability to control discourse and ‘assert the truth’ about the human rights situation in Turkey is being challenged not only due to internal developments but also due to changes in the patterns of relations between these associations and EU institutions. These changes also in turn affect internal developments, extending their impact and further squeezing the socio-political space the human rights associations have to work in. Two main changes can be noted, one related to the capacities and relative needs of the EU, and the other to EU perceptions of the human rights associations themselves.

39 First, EU institutions are now more capable of gathering information themselves within Turkey because of their increased capacity. Therefore they rely less on the information provided by Turkey’s established human rights associations. This increased information-gathering capacity was enhanced by the European Commission’s establishment of its permanent delegation to Ankara, and through financial and organizational support provided to pro-democracy think-tanks and other institutions. These now provide information and services to the international agencies. Not only the traditional human rights associations but also international ones such as Amnesty International attest that while the information requested from them peaked in 2004-2006, the demand has now decreased. They attribute this to the extended expertise within the European Commission itself (Personal interview of the author with Jenny Vanderlinden, Turkey Coordinator for Amnesty International , February 2009).

40 Turkey’s human rights’ institutionalization process has also enjoyed extensive financial support from the EU. The development of the human rights presidency and its boards came with considerable financial and organizational support from the Council of Europe and other foreign donors, such as the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which invested in their own capacities in Turkey as a prospective member. Members of the boards received training; an international symposium was organized and a handbook developed for the board members. Additionally, some projects enjoyed assistance from the United Nations Development Program, UNDP. Linked to this, surely, traditional human rights associations have, by contrast, complained about the waning interest and financial support from European institutions for their activities. As

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an İHD member argued, ‘Since 2000 the EU has been mostly depending on the official reports of the government’ (Necat Taştan, personal interview, 17 January 2009).

41 Waning interest and support from Europe for the established human rights associations is not linked solely to the increasing number of alternative organizations and institutions with a presumed expertise on human rights affairs. Some EU representatives now seem to view human rights associations in Turkey more critically, faulting them for perceived structural problems and politicization. As the deputy head of the cabinet of the European Commission’s Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn testified: We cannot be sure about whether or not organizations are related to the PKK since we cannot check for each organization how they are being financed, therefore we base ourselves mostly upon the big international NGOs and their reports [in order to evaluate the reforms related to human rights in Turkey]. (Myriam Verger, deputy head of the cabinet of European Commission’s Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn, personal interview, 2 July 2007, European Commission, Brussels).

42 The politicization of these associations has actually been a fact from the very beginning (Çalı 2007, interviews by the author) but only lately does this seem to have become a matter of concern for the members of the European Commission, rendering them skeptical of the data these associations provide and thus decreasing the legitimacy the associations had previously enjoyed. The diminished support for some of the human rights associations can be read from the financial support for human rights projects. Whereas İHD, for example, enjoyed considerable funding in the past, through the grants of the EC’s European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR), today neither the national headquarters nor the regional branches are receiving any funding.29 Similarly the Association for Assistance and Solidarity with Migrants, Göç Edenler Yardımlaşma ve Dayanışma Derneği (GÖÇ-DER) and Mazlum-Der – which all received project funding from the EIDHR in 2005 – are no longer supported.30

43 A number of factors may have contributed to this, not least the changing post 9/11 climate which saw the PKK entering US and European lists of terrorist groups and the raising of European consciousness regarding Turkish complaints about the freedoms allowed to Kurdish diaspora activism on the continent (e.g. the arrests of PKK cadres in France, Germany and (most recently, in March 2009) Spain; and the many house searches of Kurdish activists in the ). Another detrimental influence on the human rights cause seems to have been a perception of AKP legitimacy, noted as being the first majority government for a decade and democratic counterweight to the military and deep state. In addition, a more critical stance towards human rights associations is linked to the reduction in hostilities in the southeast (and its accompanying reduction in human rights violations) and the developing EU-Turkish relationship. Certainly, human rights defenders complain that they have been told by members of EU-delegations that ‘while you want Turkey to become a member of the EU, at the same time you are amongst those who work against the accession of Turkey to the European Union’ (TİHV Diyarbakir Branch member, personal interview, 29 September 2007). And: When we narrated the contents of the reports by İHD to members of the European commission we constantly got the same reply: ‘We can’t believe it. Are you telling us there are two Turkey’s?’… Actually the message was: ‘Don’t do anything that might put the AKP government into a negative light’ (Necat Taştan, personal interview, 17 January 2009).

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During the meetings with EU-delegations I have noticed myself how uncomfortable they felt when we talked about the problems. I was told that I was too pessimistic, that I should not just focus on the negative things, that this would be in favor of the ones that are opposing Turkey’s accession to the European Union, in Europe as well as in Turkey. But that is a wrong attitude. It shows that Turkey is in a comfortable position in the negotiations, as it is able to stay in control (Ayhan Bilgen, former President of Mazlum-Der, personal interview, 14 January 2009).

44 Until the commencement of the accession negotiations, though, associations such as İHD were able to affect European policy makers. İHD and Mazlum-Der would actively send representatives of their associations to participate in meetings and conferences within member states of the European Union, as well as in the European Parliament. Sometimes these visits were and are supported financially and organizationally by Kurdish diaspora organizations, who serve as brokers to establish and maintain contacts (Casier 2010). The European Commission and Parliament also sent several delegations to Turkey, and in particular, to the southeastern provinces, to assess the human rights situation, where they made many visits to the local branches of İHD, TİHV and Mazlum-Der. Through these contacts these associations were able to engage in public criticism of the Turkish state and the Turkish government and call for the need to democratize the country.

45 Today the traditional human rights associations can still count on a moderate level of support from the European Commission, for example through the financial support provided to the Human Rights Platform, İHOP. The İHOP organizations share the idea that the Turkish state and its political system need to democratize in order to be able to guarantee respect for human rights, and are thus politically engaged insofar as they address the root causes of violations, and not just its symptoms. Although traditional human rights associations are still exchanging information with the European Commission’s delegation to Ankara, it does seem that the importance given to the information that is being provided is decreasing.31 Finally, recent efforts by state prosecutors to purge civil society organizations and the DTP of suspected PKK activists has also affected associations such as İHD.

Conclusion: Ongoing contestation over the ability to speak the ‘truth’ over Turkey’s respect for human rights

46 This paper has looked at how the current institutionalization of human rights protection in Turkey’s state administration challenges the established human rights associations’ authority over ‘the truth’ concerning the human rights situation in the country. Given the accession negotiations, the Turkish government is highly motivated to uphold a positive image of its reforms and has, moreover, been pressured to engage more substantially with its civil society actors. However, the institutionalization of human rights has been achieved in such a way as to lend the state institutions the image of thorough cooperation with a wide range of civil society actors, while in reality excluding actors that threaten the state’s reproduction of itself. The lower levels of the new institutional structure, the local and provincial boards, have been shown to consist primarily of organizations and associations that work for and within the confines of the Turkish state ideology and its practices that have been repudiated by the established

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human rights associations. Furthermore, not only have these associations been excluded from the institutionalization process but they are suffering a decreasing credibility in the eyes of EU officials, who have come to rely increasingly on alternative resources and, moreover, who criticized human rights defenders for being engaged in politics and obstructing Turkey’s membership.

47 The institutionalization of human rights protection appears to be repackaging human rights within the ideological framework of the Turkish Republic, with the development of a state-friendly human rights sector operating in the context of ongoing EU accession negotiations. Thus, in spite of negotiations and the consequent capacity- building in Turkey for the protection of human rights, the last decade has seen the coming into existence of alternative institutions that threaten the existing ones and have partially silenced their voices.

48 Notwithstanding this critique, however, there is also an ongoing negotiation at play between the established human rights associations and the governmental bodies as the human rights associations have, over the years, created a space for themselves in the socio-political landscape, in particular at the local (municipal) and the international scale, which they have to a certain extent been able to maintain. Compared with the newly established human rights institutions, the traditional associations still possess expertise, inclusion in transnational advocacy networks, and are – though under pressure – consulted and to some extent supported by the same EU institutions that support official human rights institutionalization efforts. Part of the space the established human rights associations have created since the 1980s remains intact, albeit somewhat marginalized.

49 Both sides in this emerging dualistic system can be regarded as having gained from the EU – and not just its financial support. Signaling the importance of a broad cooperation with civil society and pressing both the government and the civil society organizations to enter into dialogue, the European Commission, has – ironically perhaps – effectively created a structural opportunity for the human rights associations to criticize the government. Insofar as they have refused to take part in the provincial and local boards and have been left off the Human Rights Advisory Board the associations have taken a position from which they attempt to affect the institutionalization process. Their refusal to be involved in the particular way the institutionalization is developing constitutes a strategy for denying the new institutions the legitimacy that they would gain by incorporating the established human rights associations. This explains why the national offices of the main human rights groups determined not to enter into cooperative relationships with the new governmental bodies even though locally, in the boards, some associations have left it up to the choice of their local branches whether or not to cooperate (Ayse Bilgen, Mazlum-Der vice-president, personal interview, 19 January 2009 and Hüsnü Öndul, İHD representative for İHOP, 20 January 2009, Ankara).

50 This strategy appears fruitful. Since the start of the institutionalization process the composition of the boards has been changed – specifically, the heads of the police and the secret services have been excluded from the boards after criticisms from the human rights associations and the INGOs, and the government has not (yet) managed to establish the new Human Rights Council as it is against the will of the established human rights associations. However, these gains have also been small and not sufficient

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to meet the demands of independence that the traditional human rights associations, backed by the INGOs and the Council of Europe’s directives, have been demanding.

51 The ways in which the institutionalization process is currently developing – that is, in exclusion of the traditional human rights associations and thus developing towards a separate, state-centric human rights body – risks reinforcing the divide in state-society relations in the area of human rights. The state-led human rights institutionalization, which the EU institutions reckoned would reinforce cooperation between state and societal organizations, might thus, on the contrary, turn out to contribute to their ongoing differences. This is the case even though the process might, at the same time, increase the level of integration of different actors into a separate competing cluster of organizations. With regards to the southeastern branches of an organization such as İHD, non-engagement – which has shown itself still a form of engagement – reconfirms the alignment of the association’s relations with the local DTP authorities, engaged in an alternative project of state-building (see Watts, this issue) that is very much based upon an anti-statist discourse. What should be clear, though, is that the current human rights institutionalization process has mutually transformative effects on both state and society. It affects the already existing political dividing lines within Turkey’s civil society and between state and society actors, and by doing so complicates the ways in which the discourse on human rights is being appropriated in the contest over speaking the ‘truth’ over the (dis)respect for human rights in Turkey.

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Keyman, Fuat; Içduygu, Ahmet (2005) ‘Introduction. Citizenship, identity, and the question of democracy in Turkey’, in Keyman, Fuat; Içduygu, Ahmet (eds.) (2005) Citizenship in a Global World. European questions and Turkish experiences, Oxon/New York, Routledge, pp. 1-27.

Kurban, Dilek; Erözden, Ozan; Gülalp, Haldun (2008), ‘Supranational rights litigation, implementation and the domestic impact of Strasbourg Court jurisprudence: A case study of Turkey’, JURISTRAS, Athens: Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP), URL: http://www.juristras.eliamep.gr/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/ casestudyreportturkeyfinal.pdf

Migdal, Joel S. (2001) State in Society. Studying how States and Societies transform and constitute one another, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Önderoğlu, Erol, (2008a) ‘Four Year Old Injustice Ends: The Minority Report Is Not Guilty’, BIA News Service, Ankara, 7 May 2008, URL: http://bianet.org/english/english/106792-four-year-old- injustice-ends-the-minority-report-is-not-guilty

Önderoğlu, Erol, (2008b) ‘Minority Report Case Goes To Justice Ministry To Obtain Permission For Trial Under Article 301’, BIA News Service, Ankara, 17 December 2008, URL: http://bianet.org/ english/minorities/111420-minority-report-case-goes-to-justice-ministry-to-obtain-permission- for-trial-under-article-301

PMHRP (2008) ‘Prime Ministry Human Rights Presidency 2007’, HRR Human Rights Report of Turkey, Ankara, Basbakanlık İnsan Hakları Baskanlığı.

Rumford, Chris (2001) ‘Human Rights and Democratization in Turkey in the Context of EU Candidature’, Journal of European Area Studies, 9(1), pp. 93-105.

Sakallioğlu, Ümit Cizre (2003) ‘Demythologizing the national security concept: The case of Turkey’, Middle East Journal 57, No. 2.

Scalbert-Yücel, Clémence; Le Ray, Marie (2007) ‘Knowledge, ideology and power. Deconstructing Kurdish Studies’, European Journal of Turkish Studies, No. 5, URL: http://www.ejts.org/document777.html

Smith, Thomas W. (2007) ‘Leveraging Norms: The ECHR and Turkey’s Human Rights Reforms’, in Arat, Zehra F. Kabasakal (ed.) Human Rights in Turkey, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 262-274.

Tocci, Nathalie; Kaliber Alper; PRIO (2008) ‘Conflict Society and the Transformation of Turkey’s Kurdish Question’, Case Study Report, Working Paper 4, SHUR Working Paper Series, URL: http:// www.luiss.it/shur/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/shurwp01-08.pdf

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Türkmen, Emir Ali (2003) ‘”Bizim sol’ ve İnsan Hakları”’, Birikim, 165, pp. 6-10. URL: http:// www.birikimdergisi.com/birikim/dergiyazi.aspx?did=1&dsid=150&dyid=457&dergiyazi=‘Bizim sol’ ve İnsan Hakları

Türkmen, Fusun (2007) ‘Turkey’s Participation in Global and Regional Human Rights Regimes’, in Arat, Zehra F. Kabasakal (ed.) Human Rights in Turkey, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 249-261.

United Nations, (1948) ‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, Paris, URL: http:// www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

Watts, Nicole F. (2004) ‘Institutionalizing Virtual Kurdistan West: Transnational Networks and Ethnic Contention in International Affairs’, in Migdal, Joel (ed.) Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 121-150.

Watts, Nicole F. (2006) ‘Pro-Kurdish Mayors in As-If Democracy: Symbolic Politics in Diyarbakir’, Conference paper presented at the World Congress of Kurdish Studies, Irbil, 6-9 September 2006. URL: http://www.institutkurde.org/en/conferences/kurdish_studies_irbil_2006/ Nicole+F+WATTS.html

Watts, Nicole F. (2006) ‘Activists in Office: Pro-Kurdish Contentious Politics in Turkey’, Ethnopolitics, 5(2), pp. 125-144.

Watts, Nicole F. (2009) ‘Re-considering State-Society Dynamics in Turkey’s Kurdish Southeast,’ in European Journal of Turkish Studies, No.10. URL: http://ejts.revues.org/index 4196.html

Yildiz, Kerim & Brigham, Claire (2006) Human Rights Defenders in Turkey. Kurdish Human Rights Project, London.

Interviews conducted by the author:

Abdurrahman Kurt, AKP-MP for Diyarbakır and spokesperson for the Parliamentary Human Rights Commission, 20 January 2009.

Ayhan Bilgen, former President of Mazlum-Der and representative of Mazlum-Der in İHOP, 14 January 2009, Ankara.

Ayse Bilgen, Mazlum-Der vice-president, 19 January 2009, Ankara.

Emir Ali Türkmen, former Secretary-General of İHD, 17 January 2009, Ankara.

Hakan Ataman, Secretary General of the Human Rights Agenda Association, 16 January 2009, Ankara.

Hasan Fendoğlu, President of the Human Rights Presidency, 22 January 2009, Ankara.

Haşim Haşimi, former Refah-MP, former mayor of Cizre and former member of the Parliamentary Commission on Human Rights, 20 September 2007.

Hüsnü Öndül, former President of İHD and İHD-representative in İHOP, January 2009, Ankara.

Jenny Vanderlinden, Turkey Coordinator for Amnesty International Belgium, February 2009, Brussels.

Kerim Yıldız, Executive Director of the Kurdish Human Rights Project, January 2008, London.

Myriam Verger, Deputy Head of the European Commission’s Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn, 7 July 2007, Brussels.

Metin Bakalcı, Secretary-General of TİHV, 22 January 2009, Ankara.

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Nazmi Gür, former President of İHD-Van Branch and former member of İHD-Diyarbakır Branch, 15 January 2009, Ankara.

Necat Taştan, Board member of İHD, 17 January 2009, Ankara.

Anonymous, TİHV Diyarbakır Branch member, 29 September 2007, Diyarbakır.

Yılmaz Ensaroğlu, former president of Mazlum-Der and representative of Mazlum-Der in İHOP, 15 January 2009.

NOTES

1. The author would like to acknowledge her gratitude for the insightful comments of Nicole Watts, Andy Hilton and Joost Jongerden, as well as the critiques from the referees. 2. http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/enlargement_process/accession_process/criteria/ index_en.htm 3. E.g. http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2004/06/14/turkey-eu-bid-hinges-further-rights-reforms 4. Actually, the ‘Kurdish question’ was first named as such as early as 1930 – for a brief review of the history of the concept of the ‘Kurdish question’ and its internationalization (sic), see Scalbert-Yücel and Le Ray 2007, paras.12ff. The Kurdish question is also referred to in this paper in terms of the ‘southeast’, i.e. conflating geopolitical and ethnic specifications, and obviously assuming a Turkish national perspective based on a status quo (i.e. not a pan-Kurdish, or Kurdish separatist). 5. E.g. assessments of newspapers that are being closed down and journalists and intellectuals that are being prosecuted (to be found on http://bianet.org/english/freedom-of-expression/ 117182-bias-second-quarterly-media-report) reveal that half of the papers and journalists that are targeted are the ones who have been publicizing extensively on the Kurdish issue. In particular those people who have made explicit references to the speeches of leading figures within the PKK have been subject to investigation and/or prosecution. Amnesty International has been criticizing Turkey of an ‘entrenched culture of impunity’ (http://www.amnestyusa.org/ document.php?id=ENGEUR440082007&lang=e), which dates back to the 1980s coup and the consequent war during the 1990s. 6. Politicization refers here to the difficulties of maintaining one’s neutrality towards the warring parties when confronted with the domestic context of an ongoing armed conflict. Within several domestic human rights organizations there have been and still are divisions over the question of how to address human rights violations in relation to the conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK. These discussions are all the more difficult as within the boards of a number of organizations there is a continuous pressure to incorporate representatives of a number of political parties (Emir Ali Türkmen, personal interview, 17 January 2009, Ankara) that leads to a politicized discourse of some of the human rights defenders that reflects itself in their reports and media interventions (personal observations). However, civil society organizations in Turkey suffer more generally from being politicized, as many endorse a specific ideological outlook and often do not tolerate the right to existence of alternative ideological perspectives (Ç aylak 2008). 7. The (recent) ‘war on terrorism’ reminds us how easily liberties are rolled back ‘in the national interest’ during times of conflict, even in the (relatively) liberal West. 8. This largely follows the UN Declaration (in Section I, Articles 2-12), with additions for internal EU procedures (Sections II-V), and (five) subsequent Protocols (1963-66) elaborating on these. (http://www.hri.org/docs/ECHR50.html). 9. Türkmen is former İHD secretary-general.

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10. It has to be noted that for some organizations, such as Mazlum-Der, as much attention was devoted to the headscarf issue as to the Kurdish issue. In its defense of its position on the headscarf Mazlum-Der received support from İHD (Çaylak 2008). 11. For instance, Mazlum-Der lists three problem areas: religious freedoms, migration and the Kurdish issue (http://www.Mazlum-Der.org). TİHV has three branches in Ankara, Istanbul, and Diyarbakır, while almost half of İHD’s branches (13 of 29) are in the East and Southeast Region, and only 5 of its 17 Special Reports dating back to 2001 cover events and issues outside of that area (and one of those five investigating the confinement conditions on İmralı Prison of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan). 12. http://www.khrp.org/ 13. This is not to decry the role of other NGOs oriented to specific types or aspects of human rights but involved in civil life generally, notably the labor unions and professional associations. Unions recently they have been involved in the government’s attempt to tackle the Kurdish question, as has the Union (Federation) of Turkish Bar Associations, Türkiye Barolar Birliği (TBB), established in 1938 (http://www.gazeteport.com.tr/SIYASET/NEWS/GP_520421). 14. The first, and indeed only substantive point made in the formal decision to open accession negotiotiations at the December 2004 summit (conveyed in the Presidency Conclusions of the Brussels European Council) retrospectively ‘welcomed the decisive progress made by Turkey in its far-reaching reform process’ and stated its expectation that Turkey ensure the irreversibility of the political reform process and its full, effective and comprehensive implementation, notably with regard to fundamental freedoms and to full respect of human rights...’ (Doc. 16238/1/04 REV 1: para.18). 15. Dilek Kurban is an officer with the democratization program at the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation [Türkiye Ekonomik ve Sosyal Etüdler Vakfı, TESEV] and co-author of the organization’s recent Roadmap publication, which makes wide-ranging proposals for solving the Kurdish question (Ensaroğlu & Kurban 2008). The TESEV Roadmap’s other co-author, Yılmaz Ensaroğlu, Mazlum-Der co-representative on the steering committee of the Human Rights Joint Platform [İnsan Hakları Ortak Platformu, İHOP], a human rights umbrella group formed in the mid-90s and also representing/comprising İHD and the local (Turkish) branches of two international organizations, Amnesty International,Uluslararası Af Örgütü - Türkiye (UAÖ) and the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, Helsinki Yurttaşlar Derneği (YYD) – http://www.ihop.org.tr; http:// www.amnesty.org.tr; http://www.hyd.org.tr. 16. These figures represent about 20% of all the violations determined by the Court during this period (and, indeed, during its 50 year history), the most of any of the 47 countries that have signed up to the European Convention and thus fall under the Court’s jurisdiction. Some 10,000 applications remain currently pending (ECHR 2009b: 78). (http://www.tesev.org.tr) 17. The İHD website currently lists 23 ‘murdered executives and members,’ ten of the twelve victims with details listed having been members of branches in the southeast. Members of other NGOs, such as the president of the Diyarbakır-based human rights group Society for the Assistance and Support of Families of the Disappeared [with Lost Loved Ones], Yakınlarını Kaybeden Ailelerle Yardımlaşma ve Dayanışma Derneği(YAKAYDER) have also faced prosecution. 18. The Human Rights Presidency (department) was established in 2001, and can perhaps best be described as a work in progress. For organizational schema, see http://www.ihb.gov.tr/teskilat/ ihb-organizasyon-semasi.pdf and http://www.ihb.gov.tr/ENGLISH/organization_table_hrp.xls. 19. For a more extensive overview of the changing conditions of these developments see Çalı, B. (2007). 20. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/parisprinciples.htm

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21. The statement refers to the 2007 report that the stipulation of a minimum 3 human rights associations and maximum 2 state personnel members are included on each board is not met in some provinces. At: http://www.ihop.org.tr/english/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=101:the- draft-law-on-establishment-of-human-rights-council-of-turkey-must-be-withdrawn- immediately-&catid=1 (English); and http://www.hyd.org.tr/?pid=728 (Turkish). 22. The still incomplete legal process here testifies to the complexity of intra-state relations (i.e. within the judicial system) in the case of indictments under contested legislation, as well as the problem in this context of timely resolution. Initially the charges against Kaboğlu and Oran under 301 were dropped on the determination of the Justice Minister, and the defendants were to be acquitted from the 216 charge. Then the Supreme Court of Appeals 8th Penal Circuit overturned the acquittal decision regarding 216. However, the Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals intervened and the case went to the Court of Appeal’s Plenary Penal Committee, which confirmed the original acquittal decision (in April 2008, four years after the report was made public). However, later that year the 28th Criminal Court of First Instance sent the file to the Justice Ministry for permission to try it under Article 301 following a failed attempt by the accused to have it sent to the Constitutional Court (Önderoğlu 2008a; 2008b). 23. Along with representatives from other groups, like Türk Kadınlar Birliği [Turkish Women’s Union], Umut Çocukları Derneği [Children of Hope], Diyabetle Yaşam Derneği [Living with Diabetes] and Çagdas Yasama Destekleme Derneği [Foundation for the Advancement of Contemporary Life]. 24. www.add.org.tr; http://turkdunyasihd.org; www.sehitaileleri.org.tr 25. Originating from the southeastern province of Elazığ, Fendoğlu was previously project director for the state Human Rights in Turkey Reform Implementation Support Project, and has authored various relevant publications such as the recent European Commission sponsored overview, ‘Turkey in the [New] Milleniıum, Human Rights and the EU’, with a foreword by PM Erdoğan (Fendoğlu 2007). 26. See a full report, in English (PMHRP 2008)); a short (6-page) untitled statistical listing, in English (Altıntaş 2009: 6); and a fuller (17-page) statistical bulletin, in Turkish (BİHB 2008: 8). 27. The evaluation of these governmental and non-governmental reports’ numbers is somewhat complicated by the fact that neither side’s reports clearly define ‘torture’, ‘ill treatment’ or ‘freedom of expression.’ 28. A table topped by the police and followed by the courts and government ministeries (BİHB 2008: 10). 29. The EIDHR is an instrument of the European delegation to Turkey of the European Commission, also known as the Ankara delegation to the EC. For details about the projects currently receiving funding: http://www.avrupa.info.tr/Files/eidhr/2008_projects _in_Turkey_en.pdf 30. İHD received project funding from EIDHR until 2007 for different projects (on the prevention of torture, the rights of minorities and ethnic groups, anti-mining and the rights of disabled). The total budget of the funded projects amounted to about 300,000 euros, making up for over 80% of the total budgets that were foreseen for these projects. GÖÇ-DER and Mazlum-Der received funding until 2005. For projects on (respectively) human rights education, training and awareness raising and for the support of IDPs see: http://www.avrupa.info.tr/files/ EIDHR_Projects_English(1).pdf 31. This was emphasized in several interviews by the author with long time human rights defenders, January 2009 in Ankara and in Diyarbakir, in September 2007 and March 2008.

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RÉSUMÉS

The first decade of the 21st century saw Turkish state actors – under pressure from the European Union – initiate a kind of institutionalization of human rights. Initially, a window of opportunity for cooperation seemed to emerge between these actors and the country’s human rights associations, which state officials had for many years viewed as a threat and undermining state policies. This paper examines the institutionalization process and relations between human rights associations and Turkish officials. It shows that despite early indications of a more cooperative relationship, the process has produced a dual system comprised of mutually antagonistic actors: new state-centric institutional bodies on the one hand, and the established human rights associations on the other. Instead of cooperation, the newly developing structures appear to be challenging the authority of Turkey’s human rights associations over the ‘truth’ concerning respect for human rights in Turkey, especially regarding the Kurdish question. The institutionalization of human rights has been achieved in such a way as to lend state institutions the image of cooperation with a wide range of civil society actors, while in reality it is exclusive of those associations deemed a threat to the state’s reproduction of itself and the self-image it wants to portray. The paper demonstrates this by examining: (1) the ways in which the institutionalization process has developed; (2) the nature and workings of the new government- led human rights body; and (3) how this relates to shifts in patterns of relations between the human rights associations and EU institutions.

INDEX

Keywords : Turkey, Kurdish question, human rights, state-society relations, institutionalization, Turkey’s EU accession motsclestr Türkiye, Kürt sorunu, insan hakları, devlet-toplum ilişkisi, kurumsallaşma, Avrupa Birliği'ne Katılım Mots-clés : Turquie, question kurde, droits de l’Homme, relations Etat-société, institutionnalisation, adhésion de la Turquie à l’EU

AUTEUR

MARLIES CASIER Marlies Casier, Doctoral Candidate in Political Sciences and researcher for the Middle East and North Africa Research Group at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Department of Third World Studies, Ghent University (Belgium)[email protected]

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Experiencing Justice and Imagining State: Engaging the Law to Challenge the Rule of Exception in Tunceli1

Marie Le Ray

1 During the 15-year war between the Turkish Army and the Kurdistan Workers Party, Turkish military and civilian officials relied heavily on judicial institutions and the law to control and sanction people living under emergency rule law in many parts of the southeast. Although the lifting of emergency rule law in Tunceli and Hakkari in 2002 can be seen as marking an official end to the conflict, the inauguration of this ‘post- emergency era’ did not signal a clear break with previous practices and power relations on the ground. In Tunceli/Dersim2, substantial legal restrictions on political activity and expression continued, as did extra-judicial killings and state-sponsored rights abuses, although on a much more occasional basis. Courts, moreover, appeared unwilling to sanction them, at least until the late 2000s. Nonetheless, inhabitants of Tunceli have resorted to law to seek justice and redress, inviting the courts to make a judgment on diverse issues.3

2 The fact that residents of Tunceli find law to be a useful if imperfect tool to combat official abuses suggests that state-society relations can, as O’Brien and Li write (2005: 77), be fruitfully explored by examining the dynamics of legal struggle. It surely calls for a more complicated picture of the state and its justice than a ‘them against us’ framing would provide. How do individuals or collective actors engage law in an environment in which possibilities of justice seem restricted? What resources do they have, and what tactics do they develop to face obstacles and restrictions? What does this tell us about state-society relations in this period of transition?

3 In an effort to explore these questions, this paper examines the ways people seeking redress actually experience and ‘learn’ justice. While paying further attention to the conditions under which lawyers succeed (or not) in publicizing a case and in using cases for political causes, it also examines the role played by these ‘cause lawyers’4 –

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those who put political commitment into the center of their professional lives – in the redefinition of the state-society relations.

4 I demonstrate that even while such lawyers and their clients tend to imagine the state as a coherent, all-encompassing and often hostile entity, they also develop a complicated knowledge of the inner working of the state that is sufficient to appeal to diverse authorities and, in some cases, to play off one part of the state against another. More, I argue that the diverse resources Tunceli lawyers draw from their multiple engagements – i.e. social and political networks and legal skills – enabled them to consolidate an alternative language of justice and set of judicial practices. This meant that even in a restrictive environment such as Tunceli, lawyers were able to create new possibilities for justice and to offer challenging definitions of the borders between legal/illegal, legitimate/illegitimate and law/exception. Although favorable decisions from domestic courts were unusual, at least through the late 2000s, what has happened out of the court – in particular, the strategic interactions between judicial and non- judicial actors – has been as important, if not more, than what happens in the court itself.

5 Beyond Tunceli, this case highlights the way transitions to new security and political orders can indeed take very diverse forms, in contrast to the homogenous image of ‘political transition’ often promoted by international institutions. In fact, only rarely do such transitions occur as steady evolutions towards peace and normalization. Rather, they occur in a much more complicated and partial way characteristic of a ‘not war not peace’ situation.5 I here consider transition as an intense period of struggle over the socio-political and ideological terms of the national project. This process of renegotiation of the state’s borders and of the ‘social contract’ can be seen more precisely through the prism of law and uses of law. Indeed, as Rachel Sieder argues in her study of postwar Guatemala, ‘one of the primary sites of engagement where such different imaginaries and political projects are contested from the top-down and the bottom-up is the law. This is because the law is central to claiming rights and enforcing obligations’. In effect, she argues, the legal system is ‘converted into a contested site of meaning’ over state accountability and citizens’ rights (Sieder 2001: 204). Law is, however, not considered here only as a discursive and technical resource in an abstract debate over legitimate values. Law is also embodied and experienced according to one’s actual position within a specific social and political configuration. Unpacking law thus means unpacking political power.

6 This study also contributes to recent literature on judicial struggles in authoritarian or hybrid regimes. These studies generally concentrate on the ‘realist-strategic’ reasons that bring authoritarian leaders to empower courts as well as the strategies judges develop to increase their autonomy and become (or not) agents of democratization (Moustafa 2003; Pereira 2005; Hilbink 2007). Tamir Moustafa, notably, demonstrates that courts in such regimes serve as ‘dual-use’ institutions: they consolidate the functions of the authoritarian states but also open new avenues for activists to challenge regime policy (Moustafa 2003). Concerning the Turkish case, scholars have similarly tended to analyze judicial empowerment in the light of ‘realist-strategic theories’, either to highlight the selective nature of court activism (Belge 2006), its role in the definition of the legitimate political domain (Koğacıoğlu 2004) or in the enforcement of the state ‘civilizing mission’ (Shambayati & Kirdiş 2009).

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7 These studies all contribute in important ways to unveiling the way structures of power are secured through alliances between the judiciary and the military. However, most of them focus on higher courts. This paper, in contrast, draws our attention to the ‘other end’ of the equation: to the politics of the judiciary as viewed through the activities of lawyers, their clients, and lower courts, and, moreover, in one specific site. My work builds, then, on recent analyses such as that by Güneş Murat Tezcür, whose study on the critical Şemdinli case, dealing with a state’s counterinsurgency operation in a remote southeastern town, offers a kind of critical breakthrough by conceptualizing courts as interactive institutions seeking other political actors’ support and by focusing on lower courts to question the conditions under which these courts can challenge political hegemony (Tezcür 2009; see also Aslan in this issue). Following Tezcür, I acknowledge the idea that ‘lower courts play a crucial role in shaping citizens’ access to substantive justice and perceptions of how the legal system functions’ (Tezcür 2009: 329) and I ‘localize’ my observation of the working of justice by concentrating on the province of Tunceli. Special attention is given as well to the alliances and support networks people are able to develop within this local configuration.

8 This article relies on the press coverage of different trials from 2003 to 2009 in which inhabitants of Tunceli sued the state or faced state accusations.6 Along with providing some details of the legal proceedings involved, such coverage also demonstrates the way lawyers ‘export’ their cases out of the court and the types of discourse they mobilize. Secrecy and publicity are indeed at the core of the legal dynamics I will explore7. My interest here lies in using the law as a prism to highlight the transformation of state-society relations. The cases presented here are consequently not meant to be representative but illustrative of some of the dynamics of this transformation.

9 The paper is organized as follows. In the first section, I discuss some of the ways the state comes to be imagined locally by observing the working of justice and, more specifically, the tactics developed to circumvent obstacles in this environment in which national security is still given precedence over legal rationality. In the second section, I turn to examining legal mobilization as a means of uncovering alternative norms that challenge the conceptual borders of the state.

I. Imagining and experiencing the state through its justice

Law and politics in Turkey: defining the legitimate political perimeter

10 Judges and prosecutors in Turkey claim authority over an important and growing number of social and political issues and are also actively involved in politics. Beginning with the establishment of the Republic, the judiciary has contributed in important ways to the consolidation of the Kemalist system and to securing its legitimacy. In their contribution to the national project of ‘modernization’ and ‘westernization’, judges, prosecutors and bar associations have adopted a rather conservative interpretation of Kemalism, and their decisions tend to support state positions as defined under the influence of the National Security Council.8 At the core of these positions and principles is the exclusion of contentious political projects based on ethnic or religious identity. Elaborating on different courts’ decisions concerning

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the headscarf issue or political and human rights, Arslan concludes (2007: 223) that the judiciary is in fact one of the most conservative institutions in the country.

11 The Constitutional Court has played a particularly important role in politics. Following the 1980 coup and the 1982 Constitution, the court came to constitute, in the words of Shambayati and Kirdiş (2009: 3), ‘an administrative agent assisting the military in simultaneously regulating the political society and transforming the nation’. The primary purpose of the courts is to enhance the powers of the state rather than to protect citizens’ rights (Shambayati & Kirdiş 2009: 3). However, this conservative stand should not be seen as the simple result of pressures exerted on the judiciary by the military or other Kemalist forces, and, indeed, Dicle Koğacıoğlu and Ceren Belge offer us a more complicated picture of this juridico-political sphere. Both focusing on the case of the Constitutional Court, they observe that, while powerful and independent enough to frequently rule against the government, the Court has been aligning on entrenched statist nationalism and secularism in its decisions. Koğacıoğlu explains it as a ‘shared discursive framework of secular statist nationalism with the National Security Council’ but immediately warns against over-simplification: ‘There is a significant range of variation in terms of the ways in which individual members articulate elements of this framework with notions of democracy, international treaties, minority rights, and so on. Thus, instead of seeing these cases as already-made decisions under the whispers of generals, I see the Court engaging with a medley of themes and tendencies that it tries to resolve case by case’ (Koğacıoğlu 2004: 441-442). Here is thus an invitation to disaggregate this encompassing statist framework to analyze how it is concretely activated within a legal system conceived as plural and influenced by diverse principles. As for Belge, she further explains this alignment on Kemalist secularism and nationalism by analyzing what she calls ‘the Republican alliance’, an alliance empowered in 1960-1961 that included the military and civilian bureaucracy, the Republican People’s Party, the intelligentsia (university and press) and university students (Belge 2006). The Constitutional Court of Turkey was then one of several non- majoritarian institutions established by Republican groups concerned with preserving their political power, whenever necessary, against popular majorities. According to Belge, the continued allegiance of the Court to these republican values in the last four decades can be explained, at least until recently, by weak links with the international human rights community and the lack of direct access to the Court for the nongovernmental organizations. Law schools largely remained institutions of Kemalist socialization as well (Belge 2006: 658). Analyzing the rulings of the Court from 1962 to 1999, she demonstrates that the Court’s activism has not been inexistent but selective. It has been highly active in defending the autonomy of the Republican alliance (judges, prosecutors, university professors, civil servants) from governments and even from citizens, but it took a conservative stance on civil rights and liberties when mobilized by individuals or groups challenging the hegemonic status of Kemalism (socialists, communists and right-wing Democrat Party members in the 1960s and 1970s; Islamist and Kurdish activists in the 1980s and 1990s). As she writes (2004: 671): ‘The concept of the rule of law (…) was colored by a peculiarly Republican understanding of what was arbitrary and what was lawful’. However, the author goes further by showing that this Republican alliance, like the definition of Kemalism as an ideology, was not static through the decades. When groups disagreed within the alliance, in fact when the Republican’s People Party turned against the military during the 1970s (with a shift to the left of the party) and in the early 1990s (with a brief alliance with Kurdish activist

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groups), important gains for civil rights were won through the Constitutional Court (Belge 2004: 676).

12 The war between the Army and the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan, or PKK)9 and the consequent establishment of a long-lasting emergency rule conferred a new dimension to this alliance between the judiciary and the military and the underlying power configurations that underlay such relationships.10 During the conflict, the Turkish political establishment relied heavily on law to control and sanction people challenging their political project. Officials considered any public expression of Kurdish cultural or political identity a sign of support for the PKK. Moreover, the 1990s also saw a dramatic expansion in state-sponsored extra-judicial killings and of forced evictions (Bruinessen 1996; Bozarslan 2001; Etten et al. 2008). The state-supported units involved appeared to be acting with impunity, and law was not a reliable resource for people seeking justice and redress for abuses committed by security forces. In many ordinary people’s political imaginary, the state thus became associated with the ‘deep state’, a network of agents operating illegally in the name of national interest and under the protection of the consolidated alliance between the Army, the National Security Council and the Constitutional Court, locally translated into collusion between the diverse security forces and the courts.

13 The judiciary in Turkey is thus at the core of an intricate and dynamic political machinery. The ‘Republican alliance’, by its very composition, blurs the border between what would be ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ elements. But it also appears to be very effective in producing and preserving a hegemonic representation of what the state’s sphere of action and the ‘legitimate’ political domain should be. If one has to be careful, as underlined, not to reify this alliance and disregard internal dynamics, the combination of interests proved to be quite consistent in time. In fact, Republicans rarely broke their ground with the military and, more specifically, from the 1990s onwards, the judiciary played its part in making national security and unity paramount by outlawing the Kurdish and Islamist ‘enemies’. The Constitutional Court actively contributed to defining the boundaries of the political domain through, notably, its power to dissolve political parties on constitutional grounds (Koğacıoğlu 2004). Most of these decisions concerned Kurdish or religiously oriented parties.

14 But how does the legal system operate at the local level? To what extent and around which sets of practices do local prosecutors and lower courts define the boundaries of the legitimate political scene as well as the borders of ‘the state’ and its legitimate action? Looking at the case of Tunceli, the legal system appears very much involved in regulating the local political scene and maintaining the boundary between friends and enemies. Throughout the 1990s, public prosecutors in Tunceli brought multiple cases against Kurdish activists or communist sympathizers. The lifting of emergency rule and the replacement of the State Security Courts11 did not put an end to this form of judicial activism. On the contrary, with the coming to power of a Kurdish DTP mayor in March 2004, public prosecutors appear even more prone to draw and monitor the demarcation between legitimate and illegitimate political statements and behavior. In the first two years of her tenure, Tunceli mayor Songül Erol Abdil, for instance, faced eight different investigations. She ended her time in office in March 2009 with seven trials underway against her. The basis of these diverse legal proceedings included a group-authored letter with other DTP mayors to the Danish prime minister that urged him not to close the -based Kurdish station Roj TV (2005), Abdil’s mention of PKK guerrilla

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women on the occasion of the national day against violence on women (2007), and the publication of a municipal catalogue entitled ‘Dersim municipality’ (referring to the Kurdish name of the province) and the public use of the expression ‘geography of Kurdistan’. Her case is far from unusual. Just to name another example, Abdullah Demirbaş, the former DTP mayor of the Sur district in Diyarbakir, faced no fewer than 23 different legal actions between 2004 and 2009. The number of these proceedings reveals a judiciary actively working for the preservation of a very strict public grammar by quite systematically controlling public rituals and statements that prosecutors and judges identify as challenging statist ideology. Judges and public prosecutors thus remain central figures in the ongoing conflict between ‘the state’ and these political challengers, thus restricting challengers’ opportunities to redefine the rules of the political game.

15 As Nicole Watts has demonstrated, inclusion in formal politics ‘can become an important ‘middle-ground’ activism for political and/or ethnic activists who straddle the lines between formal/informal and legal/illegal resistance’ (Watts 2006: 126-127). It indeed provides them with ‘an institutional basis for public collective gathering (…), some legal protection from prosecution, new access to domestic and international audiences, and new symbolic resources’ (Watts 2006: 126). But the legal harassment of officeholders can also be relatively effective in regulating the public sphere by marking a sharper line between legitimate and illegitimate – legal and illegal – statements and behaviors. In fact, the Tunceli mayor seemed quite affected by this harassment and under pressure to censor herself: ‘This means we should not even talk. The moment we open our mouth, they launch investigations and trials against us!’ (Evrensel, 22/03/2009). She came to watch herself in everyday conversations or while talking on the phone, concerned that any statement, even casual, would be used against her.12

16 Kurdish office-holders, members of far-leftist parties and associations, and ordinary citizens of Tunceli have experienced this political use of the law. Some of them came to consider it useless, if not dangerous, to seek justice and redress in court, and consider justice clearly one sided. In fact, the judicial system in Turkey is widely perceived as deeply politicized. A recent study conducted by the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, for instance, shows that the judiciary is largely conceived as identical with the state. Interviewees do not believe in the independence and impartiality of the judicial system (Sancar & Aydın 2009).13 They see it as dominated by an ‘etatist worldview’ and by favoritism and power relations.

Experienced justice, imagined state in Tunceli

17 In Tunceli, this distrust is fed by different practices of a judicial system prone to harassing identified political ‘enemies’ and to offering protection for soldiers and other state agents. In this section of the paper I discuss the way practical encounters with local officials – and the stories heard about a relative or a neighbor’s experience with these officials – shape local perceptions. The cases I develop here are not meant to be representative but rather illustrative of the obstacles that plaintiffs or the prosecuted encounter in Tunceli. They shed light on the ways ‘justice’ and ‘the state’ come to exist in these margins.

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Obstacles to legal action: the prevalence of Turkish national interests

18 Lawyers and plaintiffs in Tunceli complain about a number of tactics and devices that restrict and complicate the possibility of building a case and holding of a fair trial. Getting a case accepted when the target is the local state is difficult. First, the local governor has to give prior permission to open any investigation against representatives of the state and may, quite arbitrarily, choose not to give this permission. For example, when village heads of Hozat (a district of ) came to complain about the military’s burning of their forests in 2004, the local governor decided that there were no grounds to open an investigation. As for public prosecutors, when they do not decide not to investigate for ‘security reasons,’ they can preempt or derail accusations against state’s (security) agents in various ways. In September 1994, seven villagers of Mirik disappeared in the middle of a military operation against the PKK. The village was burnt afterwards. The case was then brought to the Tunceli Civil Court of First Instance. Its final judgment was that ‘the concerned people have suddenly disappeared in an area where physical security was not guaranteed owing to intense terror events and the consequent military operations’ (Radikal, 12/05/2003). Nine years later, the relatives decided to sue again, accusing the military of being directly responsible for the disappearances during this time. However, instead of investigating the case against the military, the Tunceli chief prosecutor sent the file to the State Security Court of Malatya. The justification given was that the bullets found on the crime scene came from a Kalashnikov and not from G3 weapons, which, according to the prosecutor, directly pointed to the PKK and exonerated the army. This highly questionable practice not only prolongs the procedure – with cases possibly getting buried in transfers between courts declaring themselves with no jurisdiction – it also transforms an alleged crime committed by the Turkish army into a (PKK) crime against the Turkish state. In a similar case concerning the disappearance of a 61-year-old villager who had been detained by the military, the public prosecutor of Hozat declared the case beyond his jurisdiction and transferred it to a military court (Radikal, 12/05/2003). The lawyer in charge of the case was quite doubtful that the investigation and the suit would be taken seriously in these conditions.

19 Other mechanisms constitute serious obstacles to attempts to sue state agents. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that plaintiffs can face judicial retaliation and be turned from plaintiff into defendant. In Tunceli, the military is responsible for burning extensive acreage of forests in its war against the PKK (Etten et al. 2008). When the Bar Association in Tunceli applied to the court to request an investigation into the matter, the public prosecutor decided to bring a case against the applicants on the ground that such an allegation was an insult to the Turkish Army.14 Even when a prosecutor accepts a case against state agents, it can decide to keep the results of this investigation secret [gizlilik kararı], thus preventing the lawyers and plaintiffs from having access to documents and collected evidence. The conditions under which evidence is collected may also be questionable. For instance, in November 2007 in the district of Ovacık, members of the gendarmerie allegedly fired at some villagers. They claimed that it had happened in the middle of a skirmish, while villagers maintained that the gendarmerie had fired several hours for no apparent reason. As an investigation was authorized, ‘the public prosecutor chose to have the gendarme of the village in question carry out the investigation, which involved gathering statements from the villagers at whom they

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had allegedly shot. Not surprisingly, the gendarmes did not find any evidence against themselves.’15

20 On the other hand, when political challengers are sued, prosecutions on the basis of illegally obtained or fabricated evidence seem to remain common practice.16 Prosecutors and courts may also choose to ignore possibly exonerating evidence. In 2005, the public prosecutor of Tunceli launched an investigation against Mayor Songül Erol Abdil for allegedly celebrating the birthday of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan in the local DTP office. The investigation was based on a news report found on the Internet. Although the mayor demonstrated that she spent the entire day in a municipal council meeting and the investigation concluded that there was no ground for prosecution, the prosecutor nonetheless opened a trial against her.Abdil later declared: ‘I have always cooperated with investigations in a timely manner as a part of the ordinary competences of the justice. But this investigation and the trial indictment have an extra-ordinary feature’. She considered addressing the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors on that matter (Sabah, 27/04/2006). In another case, a local journalist, working for the Kurdish agency DIHA, was accused of having provided aid and assistance to members of an illegal organization on the basis of the confessions of a PKK member. The Heavy Penal Court of Malatya sentenced the defendant to 6 years of prison, disregarding not only the fact that confession is not legally admissible evidence in court but that an investigation had shown the defendant in another city on the date he was alleged to have committed the crime (Evrensel, 03/07/2008).

21 In these different cases, plaintiffs have experienced a justice that clearly sides with the military and offers them impunity. Regardless of whether judges and prosecutors are afraid to challenge the security regime or simply adhere to it, their behavior suggests the judicial system is a well-oiled wheel of a mechanism with a single chain of command. One of the Tunceli lawyers put it this way: ‘In Turkey, the influence of specific institutions [the military command and governors] is very important. Judges and prosecutors come to make decisions in accordance with what [these institutions] say; their public statements (concerning a case) thus constitute a form of pressure on judicial personnel’ (Evrensel, 08/05/2008). In the above-mentioned case, experiences of justice thus feed a quite homogeneous picture of the state in which its different parts apparently act in a concerted way (whether voluntarily or due to pressure) to implement a hegemonic doctrine and draw a clear-cut line between friends and enemies. This machinery appears sufficiently coordinated to make the line between victim and perpetrator, and judicial and extra-judicial practices, less legible. However, as the next section of the paper discusses, experiences of justice can also feed a more complex, multi-layered, and fragmented picture of the state.

Circumventing obstacles: practical learning of a multi-layered state

22 People gain a good sense of the fragmentation of the state when experiencing a justice that works differently from one area to another. For example, in 1997, several soldiers suffered minor injuries in a traffic accident between a civilian minibus and a vehicle of the gendarmerie. The public prosecutor decided to open a lawsuit against the civilian driver. The Tunceli Civil Court of First Instance found him not guilty, in accordance with the police investigation report, and exonerated him from responsibility in the accident. The defendant was thus quite surprised to learn that he was found responsible and sentenced to pay reparations for the same accident by the İskenderun

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Civil Court of First Instance in a suit opened on the behalf of the public treasury. The judgment was upheld by the Court of Cassation and the case was finally brought to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). In this case, two equivalent courts issued different judgments while reviewing the same evidence. This discrepancy in judicial decision-making casts serious doubt on the idea of a comprehensive justice system detached from political influence, maneuvers and local configurations. As the defendant’s lawyer put it: ‘the Court gave a decision in violation of basic rights and justice; this decision strongly damages both the idea of justice and faith in it’ (Evrensel, 30/01/2007).

23 However, inhabitants of Tunceli do not just passively observe this incoherence. Their practical learning of the inner working of the state and its justice also appears in the tactics they develop to circumvent obstacles. As many inhabitants and collective actors in Tunceli understand how the legal system works, they often refuse to give up when a court dismisses a case or when a verdict goes against them. They generally exhaust as many legal remedies as possible, sometimes not so much because they believe in higher courts to provide redress for grievances as to gain access to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The ECHR has indeed often constituted the sole judicial institution people trust to prosecute acts by state officials and administrations. However, exhausting domestic remedies (as required by the ECHR) also increases the plaintiff’s chances of finding a judge less anchored in the logics of the local political game, less susceptible to certain kinds of political pressure, and more sensitive to other arguments and considerations. In their campaign to prevent the building of eight different dams within the Munzur Valley, a national park since 1971, campaigners from Tunceli have, for instance, played the game of administrative and legal litigation to its fullest. They first supported the General Directorate of National Parks and Wildlife when it denied the General Directorate of State Water Works the authorization to drill and conduct surveys within the valley. Since this did not work, they also called on the Prime Ministry to cancel the Council of Ministers’ decision to award the construction contract to an international consortium. This did not work either. However, in July 2005, the 10th Chamber of the Council of State, the highest administrative court in Turkey, accepted the plaintiffs’ claim and ordered the cancellation of the project. The Council ruled that the project, falling inside the boundaries of a national park, lacked legality since the General Directorate of State Water Works had not produced an environmental impact report.17 But the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Murat Cano, also suggested that the Council of State had validated the juridical links he had made between water, climate, forms of life and (right to) life. And indeed, the Council of State had earlier proven highly sensitive to environmental rights and the primacy of human life and nature over economic gain (Arsel 2005: 269-70) and security considerations.18 However, upon appeal of the government, the General Assembly of Administrative Chambers of the Council of State reversed this ruling in May 2006.

24 In seeking justice and redress, inhabitants of Tunceli may also look for backers among authorities outside the judiciary. During the conflict, they often learned the hard way that seeking a helping hand from higher authorities did not help them or could do more harm than good.19 Nonetheless, especially in the post-1999 period, with the transformation of the emergency rule following the arrest of the leader of the PKK in 1999, and its official lifting in 2002, they have continued to try and address as many centers of power as possible when faced with a judicial dead end. In 2008, for instance,

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87-year-old Yusuf Kaplan was arrested for allegedly providing food to the PKK. He was jailed in Elazığ, a neighboring province. He was sentenced to three years and nine months of jail in December 2005, and the Court of Cassation upheld the decision. After three months in jail, his daughter, seriously worried about his health, asked for a reconsideration of his case based on health considerations. She applied to the Turkish Presidency for amnesty, to the Ministry of Justice, and the General Directorate of Prisons, asking that her father be transferred to prison in Tunceli. In addition, she planned to have local deputies bring the issue to the Parliament’s attention (Aktüel Bakış, 26/04/2008).

25 The parliamentary deputy is a key figure. At the height of the conflict, and however limited the latitude of maneuver at the time, the deputy – often called upon through personal connections – could be the one to intervene (informally) to end a period of detention or try and spare one’s son or daughter from torture. But the deputy is also a key figure in helping a local trial become a nationally debated case by discussing it in Parliament and, possibly, asking for parliament to send a delegation to investigate. In September 2007, soldiers operating in the district of Hozat shot two villagers collecting wood in the forest. One of them, Bülent Karataş, was killed. The other, Rıza Çiçek, was heavily wounded. The local governor and the General Staff declared that ‘two terrorists’ had been ‘neutralized after having ignored soldiers’ warnings’. Hospitalized in Elazığ, Rıza Çiçek was directly transferred to prison on the request of the Elazığ public prosecutor, to be later charged with belonging to and aiding an illegal organization. Meanwhile, however, many residents and political figures in Tunceli mobilized to support the villagers. A delegation of deputies from the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) also chose to investigate. They notified the national media, conveyed the results of their investigation to the CHP, and wrote a report for the Parliament that directly challenged the military and local governor’s version of events. Their findings included, among other discrepancies, the fact that the two villagers were unarmed and that Bülent Karataş had been shot on the front of his body and not in the back, as a narrative of non-compliance to the order to halt would suggest. Their report concludes in favor of Rıza Çiçek, identified not as a terrorist but as an ordinary villager, thus incriminating the soldiers.

26 The fact that inhabitants of Tunceli could mobilize this kind of political support is crucial in any attempt to circumvent obstacles (such as secrecy deemed necessary for security reasons) and challenge the state’s version of events. In this case, it offered an alternative version of events audible at the national level, shaking the mantle of security that affects the attribution of ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ in Tunceli. This being said, the power of even high-level officials should not be overestimated; in this case, the intervention of the deputies did not prevent the Peace Court of Hozat from pressing charges and keeping Rıza Çiçek in jail for eight months awaiting trial. In the end, however, the Heavy Penal Court of Malatya released the defendant for lack of evidence (Birgün, 22/04/2008).

27 Finally, inhabitants of Tunceli proved to be relatively effective in drawing attention to their problems with the justice system through the media and collective action, in order to gain a national audience. Dense transnational networks of migrants are also a key resource in reaching an international public and gaining support from organizations such as Amnesty International and from the European Union, for example. In the case of the campaign against the dams, collective action preceded and

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followed every step of the judicial struggle. Campaigners expanded their network, their visibility, and their expertise by linking with other collective environmental actions at the national and, to some extent, the international level. In this way, the Munzur campaigners participated in March of 2009 in a ‘Water Court’ held during the Alternative Water Forum of Istanbul. The court was an initiative conceived as a response to the 5th World Water Forum that aimed to rethink the management of world water resources. The trial reenacted ‘what should have been,’ according to the organizers, a court decision that takes into consideration the different national and international agreements Turkey is signatory to.20 It is difficult to evaluate to what degree such actions affect the judicial struggle, but, at least in the case of the Munzur dams, they provided resources campaigners could use to re-frame their struggle. The past legal experiences of the peasants of Bergama for example, who fought the use of cyanide in the extraction of gold in a newly opened mine, brought together these activists and certainly shaped activists’ legal approach and framing in the Munzur campaign (Le Ray 2005).

28 The different cases and tactics presented here provide interesting insights into the ways people experience the judiciary and in turn, develop their own sets of practices on the margins. On the one hand, many people came to consider the judicial system as an instrument of domination and regulation controlled by the military and other dominant political forces. It is then part of a view of the state-society relationship seen as a ‘them versus us’ relationship. The tendency to seek justice through the courts and through other institutions or forms of organization (international organizations, higher authorities, collective action) can be understood as a sign of distrust of the judicial system.

29 On the other hand, the way people are using the courts and mobilizing around them also demonstrates that they have developed a fairly complex picture of the legal system and, beyond that, of the state. I would argue that the tendency to address multiple levels of authority within and outside the judicial system reveals an understanding of the judiciary as anchored in both a local and a broad political context and as a many- layered institution with diverse, possibly conflicting agendas. In this understanding, the political resources that people are able to mobilize by using the fragmentation of the state is as important as the content of the legal procedures. The fact that people of Tunceli sometimes succeed in finding support among authorities (e.g. deputies and political parties) and in having, at a given moment, some parts of the state (in the cases discussed above, the Malatya Heavy Penal Court, the Directorate of National Parks and the Council of State) challenge others, definitely blurs the boundaries between state and society and calls for a less dichotomous perspective.

30 Citizens’ ability to mobilize support, to use the fragmentation and incoherence of the state against itself, creates opportunities for justice by providing specific political resources and multiplying the arenas in which contentious issues are debated. Nonetheless, the existence of such opportunities by no means guarantees success for plaintiffs. The steps that inhabitants of Tunceli took to sue the state or to defend themselves against state charges often proved unsuccessful. Moreover, these legal procedures could last for months, cost a considerable amount, sometimes require the plaintiffs or defendants and their lawyers to drive hundreds of kilometers to testify, and might entail threats and coercion. Even after the official lifting of emergency rule,

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law thus remained an unreliable resource for people willing to challenge a state they viewed as unjust.

31 Nonetheless, Tunceli has become the site of active legal mobilization. Politically disadvantaged people resort to legal measures to promote a wide range of rights and interests: not only to seek redress for offenses perpetrated by state security forces but also concerning the right to return to villages, the security management of the region, the building of dams within the Munzur Valley, and the preservation of Tunceli cultural patrimony as defined by local collective actors. This growing legal mobilization does not owe so much to the new opportunities of a ‘post-conflict’ legal system as to the background characteristics and networks of the legal entrepreneurs involved and the status of local power relationships. Legal mobilization in Tunceli thus does not result from a ‘normalization’ of the legal and political system; it constitutes a form of political participation through which the very border between normality and exception and the boundaries of the legitimate political domain are actively renegotiated. As we shall see, inhabitants and collective actors of Tunceli resort to legal mobilization to challenge the conceptual boundaries of the state.

II. Engaging the law

Justice as a site of contention? Marking the borders of exception through legal struggle

32 Following the lifting of the state of emergency in 2002, the government passed a series of reforms that offered more protection for individual rights and, at least in theory, made it easier for ordinary people to use the legal system to seek justice. Provisions restricting pre-trial detention rights were amended. In May 2004, the State Security Courts were abolished. A ‘Law on the compensation of damages that occurred due to terror and the fight against terrorism’ was also approved. In June 2005, a new penal code entered into force, including provisions concerning torture and ill-treatment. The Turkish criminal code and the criminal procedure code were amended in December 2006. In Tunceli itself, jurisdictional assistance became available to people with low financial resources from December 2002 on, with first applicants in 2004. A human rights board and a mailbox for anonymous complaints for abuses were installed within the governorship. Local authorities also entered in (a limited) dialogue on the question of internally displaced people with one of the non-governmental organizations operating in Tunceli. According to the governor, about 500 houses were rebuilt in villages between 2000 and 2008, and nearly 4,000 people received financial compensation in the same period(Yeni Şafak, 14/11/2008).

33 All these devices were meant to represent guarantees offered by a state in transition. However, the transition to a ‘postwar state’ did not correspond to a clear-cut rupture or constitute a continuous and irreversible process. In Turkey, the unilateral cease-fire of the PKK in 1999 and the official lifting of the emergency rule in July 2002 did not suddenly turn war into peace and a state of emergency rule into a binding rule of law on the whole national territory. Inhabitants of Tunceli certainly saw improvements in their political and everyday lives as soon as 1999. But these improvements and the practical implementation of legal reforms have been very dependent on the subsequent national and local security agenda. The PKK’s end to its unilateral cease-fire in June

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2004, in particular, ended a relatively violence-free period, and after this time the legal and security situation in Tunceli deteriorated. The AKP, first inclined to establish an EU-oriented reformist dynamic, chose to keep a low profile when faced with ‘the interplay of rising Turkish nationalism, mounting inter-ethnic violence and a comeback of the armed forces to the sphere of politics’ (Öktem 2006). In this context, the implementation of the different reforms was mitigated. Some of the amendments seemed quite cosmetic, and some new legislation even reintroduced former restrictions. Setbacks were particularly obvious regarding the criminal courts, police laws and anti-terror laws. Anti-terror legislation was amended in June 2006 in response to ‘an escalation of terrorism.’ In June 2007, three Kurdish provinces on the Iraqi border were declared ‘high security zones,’ which led to the implementation of extraordinary security measures, fueling worries about a practical return to the state of emergency. Transition thus constitutes a highly dynamic and contested political process. Indeed, post-conflict transition can be seen as a period during which a range of political actors compete to impose their definition of state and citizenship.

34 In Tunceli, legal mobilization did offer some tools and spaces to renegotiate the conceptual borders of the state. First, it enabled individuals and collective actors to ask for the redefinition of the state and its justice through the renegotiation of the separation between rule of law and rule of exception. Exception, again, cannot be considered a form of governance that simply appears when the emergency rule ends. The approach Veena Das and Deborah Poole develop in their study of the margins of the state (Das & Poole 2004) is useful here in helping us further explore the relationship between law, margins and exception. When the authors elaborate on the characteristics of the margins, they indeed resort to the idea of ‘exception’ but rule out its conception as ‘an event that can be confined to particular kinds of spaces or periods in time, or a condition that stands opposed, somehow, to ‘normal’ forms of state power’ (Das & Poole 2004: 11). Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, they rely on the latter’s notion of ‘bare life’, a life that can be taken without the mediation of law and without incurring the guilt of homicide, and the form of sovereignty it reveals, to look for its embodiments in the everyday life. As Das and Poole write (2004: 13-14), the focus is consequently on: Those practices that seem to be about the continual refounding of law through forms of violence and authority that can be construed as both extrajudicial and outside, or prior to, the state. This refounding happens both through the production of killable bodies, as posited by Agamben, and through the sorts of power embodied by figures such as the policeman or local ‘boss’ (…) It is precisely because they also act as representatives of the state that (these figures) are able to move across – and thus muddy – the seemingly clear divide separating legal and extralegal forms of punishment and enforcement’.

35 Such figures in Turkey would include policemen, members of the Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counterterrorism Center [Jandarma İstihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele, or JİTEM], and village guards (villagers armed by the Turkish authorities in their fight against the PKK). The was put into place in 1985 by law. Such militias were under the control of the Interior Ministry but, locally, came under the direct authority of the gendarmerie for situations concerning security and information. They actually work in close collaboration with special forces like JİTEM and can be linked to diverse banditry activities and the criminal economy (Balta 2004; Dorronsoro 2006). The inclusion of these village guards as official operatives in the enforcement of national security interests did redefine the borders of ‘the state’ by transforming the

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way it was embodied and practically experienced at the local level. It in fact contributed to rendering the state less legible because these village guards have crossed the divide between legal and extralegal forms of enforcement and have used their acquired right to violence to settle local and community conflicts. As for JİTEM, it continued to operate illegally even after the lifting of the emergency rule, although commanders of gendarmerie and some officials have denied its existence. Believed to be involved in numbers of crimes including kidnapping, torture, extrajudicial killing, and bombing, its members have remained largely unaccountable (Ağaşe 2006). In Tunceli itself, these hybrid figures may be involved in the disappearance and murder of the seven Mirik villagers in 1994, as well as in the assassination of Imam Boztaş in March 2004 and Hasan Şahin in August 2005.21Again, the impunity the JİTEM members enjoyed let them appear an embodiment of the state’s justice and violence and made clear that ‘the frontier between the legal and extralegal runs right within the offices and institutions that embody the state’ (Das & Poole 2004: 14).

36 In this conception, it is hard to find a clear division between forms of violence that are in and out of law as this frontier evolves in parallel with the constant re-founding of the state. Exception itself and ‘killable bodies’ can be produced through a complex legal process or thanks to the quiet acquiescence of the judiciary. But, at the same time, when parts of the state are willing to change the way the state and justice are imagined, law can become a discursive resource, a ‘language of justice’ in the hands of activists opposed to embodied practices of law. In Tunceli, applicants this way both demanded state accountability and tried to outlaw forms of governance by exception. They tried, in short, to push back the boundaries of exception.

Looking for accountability

37 Beginning in 2008, at the national level, the case led to the investigation of an alleged clandestine neo-nationalist network involving military and police officers, politicians, prominent media members and businessmen. They were accused of trying to topple the elected government through a military coup. Many observers saw this case as indicating a possible end of impunity for the agents embodying the state of exception.22 In Tunceli, the Ergenekon case created hopes, or at least opportunities, to ask for investigations concerning unsolved political murders in the province (Bianet, 13/01/2009) and the Kurdish region more generally. However, even before Ergenekon, in the mid-1990s, inhabitants and lawyers in Tunceli began applying to the judiciary to investigate the disappearance or death of their relatives. In October 1994 for example, Kasım Aydın, an inhabitant of Hozat, asked the public prosecutor to investigate his father’s disappearance and the destruction of his house. Sixteen people either disappeared or were found dead in the area at that time. In 1998, the prosecutor of the Malatya State Security Court opened an investigation after the Hozat prosecutor, the District administrative council and the prosecutor of the Gendarmerie General Command had successively declared that they had no jurisdiction. This investigation continued for years, with the plaintiffs eventually applying to the ECHR. In April 2001, the Turkish government finally offered compensation to the applicants for a friendly settlement.23 Many other victims, though, found themselves trapped in judicial dead ends or did not dare file a lawsuit. This was the situation, for instance, in the case of Nazım Gülmez, a 61-year-old villager seized by a commando team in 1994 and never returned. When his relatives visited lawyer Hüseyin Aygün to talk to him about

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opening a case nine years later, after the events, they explained that they had been too afraid of possible retaliation to do so before (Radikal, 12/05/2003). Only following the official lifting of the emergency rule and the experience of several years of relative calm did such people begin to look for their missing relatives and ask for accountability.

38 Until the late 2000s, these trials did not prove very effective in pushing justice to seriously investigate disappearances and killings, and even less in sanctioning the perpetrators of these crimes.24 In the case of the disappeared villagers of Mirik, years of procedure and introduction of new evidence resulted only in the payment of a ‘symbolic compensation’ to the family for what was still characterized, 15 years after, as an ‘attack by unknown assailants’ (Bianet, 13/01/2009). But the strength of these trials may be elsewhere, more specifically, outside the court, as the lawyers’ public declarations and their media coverage25 force the sensitive issue of state accountability to the agenda and contribute to activating a public debate on the redefinition of the state’s borders.

39 In their public statements concerning these trials, lawyers skillfully combine elements of law and more general political rhetoric. Their language of justice often refers to fundamental rights and higher law including the Turkish Constitution and different international conventions Turkey is signatory to, such as the European Convention on Human Rights or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The right to life is, quite logically, at the core of this struggle against practices and ‘figures of exception,’ against the production of ‘bare life’. In August 2008, in the case involving villagers Bülent Karataş and Rıza Çiçek, lawyer Hüseyin Aygün invoked the Turkish Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights concerning the right to life and the abolition of death penalty. He declared: ‘It is not enough that governments suspended the death penalty. If members of the police and gendarmerie deliberately kill people, if they make a practice of killing people, if these murders remain unpunished by decision of courts and judges and, finally, if the perpetrators of these crimes can benefit from legal devices such as prescription, then the abolition of death penalty in this country is pointless’ (Ajansdoğu, 25/08/2008). In a somewhat different vein, when, in May 2009, lawyer Barış Yıldırım tried to challenge the creation of temporary security areas in Tunceli, he referred again, following a technical legal argument, to fundamental rights and liberties. In a statement made in cooperation with different political parties and labor unions, he indeed questioned the legality of such security zones, arguing that their creation would require the Parliament’s intervention. He further asserted that the creation of these temporary zones of security would prevent access to villages and pastures, in contradiction to the fundamental principles of liberty of circulation and property rights. He then addressed the government and military general staff in these terms: ‘In this province in which you never invested, that never received its share of the budget, do you think about how thousands of animal keepers and villagers will find enough to eat and drink?’ (Cihan, 16/05/2009). In these public declarations, lawyers attempt to confront the state and justice with discrepancies between written law and practice. Their technical knowledge of both national and international legal texts enable them to try and ‘make the system live up to what it’s supposed to be’ (Diamant 2005: 11). The ‘majestic’ vision of law they promote then supports calls for a single legal order applicable throughout the country. But these lawyers also work at exacerbating inhabitants’ sense of injustice while pointing at and building connections with larger

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social or political grievances or unveiling the functioning of a double-standard of justice. Today, this language of justice, articulated around fundamental human rights against the prevalence of the language of security, significantly shapes the local public sphere. It offers a challenging version of where the division between legal and extralegal practices should stand, and of what the borders of legitimate state action should be.

40 How did this language become audible and to what extent does it resonate within the judiciary itself? If so, what does it tell us about the state-society relations and its possible transformation? The next section of my paper discusses these questions.

An emerging normative community? Cause lawyers and the discourse of human rights

41 Lawyers in Tunceli have played a central role in the emergence of an alternative language of justice, notably based on an innovative legal argumentation and able to challenge parts of the statist ideology. They are the main figures through which the norms of justice were brought out of the courtroom and into public debate. Some of these lawyers indeed expanded public interpellations as well as interviews and articles within diverse media to inform the public, to question existing norms and practices of justice, and to propose alternative uses of law. They framed their declarations so as to turn ‘private’ legal disputes into calls for political change. They did so using diverse sensitive issues that had to be negotiated in this period of transition: forced disappearances and extra-legal killings, return to villages, state compensation, and conditions for public gathering and public speech. They also took part in and offered legal support for pre-existing or emerging local causes, such as the Munzur campaign against the dams, and diverse national causes such as a symbolic hunger strike organized in November 2006 to denounce conditions in Turkish prisons. A call to ‘speak the language of peace and not the language of violence’ was issued in a common statement with other bar associations in December 2006. And in February 2008, the Tunceli Bar Association, with other bar associations of the southeast, organized a press conference to question and condemn Turkish military operations in North Iraq.26

42 Moreover, these lawyers felt entitled to educate people about their rights and to warn them about possible abuses. After the official lifting of emergency rule, they organized seminars and distributed leaflets to inform people about the new legal provisions concerning security devices and practices, such as identity controls, custody, and, more recently, uses of surveillance cameras (Evrensel, 25/12/2007). Independent of the cases they could advocate, these lawyers thus continuously struggled to expand the domain of rights against exception and reframe – through the diffusion of legal knowledge and frequent public statements – inhabitants’ sense of justice.

43 Lawyers in Tunceli became extensively involved in the local public sphere from the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century. They grew increasingly organized through the creation of the Tunceli Bar in 2001 (by 2010 involving 30 lawyers) and the subsequent establishment of specific commissions (on women and children, the environment, and human rights) in late 2004. This public engagement owes much to these lawyers’ biographical trajectories and to the networks they were able to build.

44 Hüseyin Aygün and Özgür Ulaş Kaplan are two of these publicly engaged lawyers. Born in the early 1970s, they both studied in Tunceli before entering, respectively, Ankara

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and Istanbul law schools. They were both politically active students. For political reasons, Aygün had to interrupt his activities and finally graduated in 1995. He chose not to pursue an academic career – his initial desire – believing he would be discriminated against because of being a Tunceli-born, leftist Alevi Kurd (Radikal, 21/02/2005). In 1998, Aygün and Kaplan both returned to Tunceli as lawyers and opened an office together. At their instigation, the Tunceli Bar Association was created in February 2001, and Aygün became its first president. In the same period, Kaplan took leadership of the newly created Association for the Protection of Wildlife in the Munzur Valley, an environmentalist association mainly devoted to preventing the building of the dams within the valley. In 2006, he became president of the bar association. Aygün, meanwhile, became involved in the production of a local newspaper that focused on the revival of the . In May 2009, he published a book on the forced exile of Tunceli inhabitants following the large military operations and massacres in the region in 1937-1938. In the municipal elections of March 2009, he also actively supported an independent, far left candidate.

45 These lawyers appear to be multi-positioned in-between the judicial, the political, and the activist spheres.27 Their ability to enter public space is to be understood in the learning experiences and the successful mobilization and combination of resources coming from both their professional and activist spheres.28 Arguably, again, the lifting of emergency rule offered a somewhat more conducive legal and political environment for these cause lawyers. But, while learning about this changing environment by trial and error, the lawyers contributed to the expansion of what constituted ‘legitimate’ boundaries on discourse and practice. These lawyers’ public engagement, well beyond the borders of the courts, is indeed quite risky. When asked about the difficulties he encountered opening an office in a zone of (post)conflict, Özgür Ulaş Kaplan stated that he ‘only’ had to suffer slight intimidation that was ‘nothing comparable’ to what Ali Demir, the only lawyer in Tunceli prior to 1998, had experienced. Demir had been taken into custody and heavily beaten.29 But these politically-motivated lawyers also had to face practices of exception. On February 13, 2005, Aygün organized a press conference to announce that gendarmerie regiment commander had threatened his life. According to Aygün’s report, the commander told his relatives that Aygün was a ‘traitor to the nation’, an ‘enemy of the state’, and that he was tired of ‘finding him under every stone’. He told Aygün personally that he was not well thought of by the gendarmerie and suggested he stop his activities (Bianet, 15/02/2005). Following the press conference, Aygün was put on trial for slandering the gendarmerie commander.30 In April 2005, the Tunceli public prosecutor asked for an investigation into Aygün and Kaplan: their names, this time, had allegedly been found in a notebook belonging to an armed militant killed in a military operation. They were therefore suspected of belonging to this Turkish leftist armed movement (Bianet, 12/12/2005). Forensic analyses later revealed that their names had been added to the document after it was originally drafted (KHRP 2008: 41). In 2006, the commander of the gendarmerie again asked the prosecutor to launch legal proceedings against the bar association on the ground that it ‘coerces individuals into making applications to the ECHR’ (KHRP 2008: 41).

46 In such an environment, in which security forces tend to conceive lawyers as a threat to the integrity of the state, local and international networks of support have played a critical role in protecting them. When he was threatened by the commander of the gendarmerie, Aygün decided to go public. Being a local public figure embedded in

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important social and political networks, he could count on the support of elected local representatives and deputies, of local political parties and trade unions, and of diverse associations such as the Human Rights Association (İHD). A campaign to support a man recognized as a human rights lawyer who had brought hundreds of cases to the ECHR was also organized abroad by organizations such as Amnesty International, at the instigation of the Tunceli migrant networks. The globalized discourse of human rights thus not only structures a challenging language of justice to oppose the hegemony of security forces, it also provides Tunceli lawyers with possibility that their activities and words will resonate and be recognized in multiple spaces. This ability to appeal to an international community highlights the strength the Tunceli lawyers can wield. As Lisa Hajjar reminds us, the human rights business requires cultural capital (Hajjar 1997: 497). Cause lawyers, indeed, need to activate specific political and intellectual resources to connect with media and other human rights organizations at the local level but also, possibly, at the international level. It then enables these lawyers to project counter- hegemonic views by relying on the ‘inherent contradiction between supranational human rights ideals and the local politics of hegemony’ (Hajjar 1997: 497).

Human rights and rule of law in the state’s self-performance

47 In this period of transition, the Tunceli lawyers have not been the only ones mobilizing the discourse of human rights and rule of law in an effort to (re)define the state’s boundaries. State officials have also used human rights frames.31 For instance, Tunceli Chief of Police Osman Öztürk, who served from September 2004 and August 2008, declared he wanted to transform the image of the police and its relations with the population of Tunceli, and initiated a program called ‘To lend a friendly hand.’ In this program, the police are not only responsible for security but also actively involved in securing the social welfare of inhabitants.32 In this way, policemen and women in Tunceli sponsored orphan children, distributed clothes during cold winters, proposed basic health care for the poor and regularly volunteered in schools to build closer relations with children, in a project entitled ‘Uncle police, Aunt police’ (Bizim Anadolu, 15/07/2005). Further indicating his desire to ‘bring the population together’ and gain its trust, Öztürk said: Tunceli is a province that experienced severe terrorism, a place in which inhabitants have sometimes suffered from terrorists’ psychological pressure. It is a province that has experienced many terrible events. It is like this if we look at the historical past as well... So, through our achievements, we have demonstrated to our citizens that we do not consider them inherently guilty or potentially culpable. But although our inhabitants here are people worthy of this country's greatest respect, there are also those among them who commit crimes. These people will be brought to justice, in accordance with the law and with consideration for what happened during these terrible years. In so doing, we will respect and comply with human rights, fundamental rights and liberties as defined in the Constitution and laws, proving that we are doing our job well aware that our country is a state of law (Bizim Anadolu, 15/07/2005).

48 This chief of police had undoubtedly mastered the language of human rights and rule of law. He seemed to perfectly incarnate this ‘new bureaucratic generation’ called on to develop ‘an intrinsic respect for human rights’ (KHRP 2008: 58). A highly experienced officer, he has a training that includes participation in diverse professional seminars in the United States as well as in Europe. If Öztürk speaks the language of law and human rights, it is thus to redefine the role of the police within these ‘globalized’ norms, in an

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effort to promote a renewed image of the police, far from the practices of exception that used to blur, in an encompassing perception of the Tunceli inhabitants as ‘presumed guilty’, the distinction between ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’.

49 The opening ceremony of the judicial year in September 2008 also constituted an interesting moment of this public self-performance of a transforming state. Present at the ceremony were the governor of Tunceli, the vice-mayor of the city, heads of the gendarmerie and the chief of police. The public prosecutor elaborated then on a quite majestic conception of justice – as ‘a sacred value that does not tolerate the slightest stain’ – to remind listeners of the need for an independent and impartial justice, this time for the sake of the state: In societies where peace and tranquility have collapsed, in countries where trust in the power of Justice is not acquired, it is very difficult to secure the continuity of the state (…) Members of the judiciary must operate without taking a stand, they should make their decision without regard for someone’s position within the society, his or her financial situation, skin color, philosophical beliefs, political conviction, religion or nationality, but, rather, in accordance with what law and conscience dictate (Cihan, 08/09/2008).

50 Does this indicate that a common language of law and justice has been emerging in Tunceli, a language that cause-lawyers, public prosecutors and police officers are coming to share? Patricia Woods, looking at the case of Israel, argues that cause lawyers there played an important role in redefining the content and norms of the ‘judicial community,’ bringing about meaningful political change. She sheds light on the ‘diffuse, informal and formal legal interaction, debate and conflict’ that animate the judiciary socio-professional community and argues that these interactions contributed to the development of new legal norms, thus enabling the Israel High Court of Justice to challenge the autonomy of religious institutions in the late 1980s (Woods 2003).

51 In the case of Tunceli, interactions seem to remain still limited and purely formal. When the bar association approached the newly appointed chief of police to propose a series of joint seminars on human rights issues for example, the police apparently chose not to participate (KHRP 2005: 55). In October 2007, on the other hand, the chief of police did visit lawyer Barış Yıldırım, the local representative of the Human Rights Association (İHD), to reassert ‘the deep commitment of the police organization to human rights and freedoms within the democratic, laic and social state that Turkey is’ (Zaman, 28/10/2007). This public discourse of a shared commitment to human rights does not seem, however, to be translated into a shared way of making use of the law and embodying it. Less than one month before the chief of police visited Yıldırım, for instance, the police headquarters filed a complaint against him for a public statement he made condemning what he referred to as the military forces’ repeated violations of rights and abuses against civilians. Even if all parties are familiar with the conceptual framework of human rights, then, it can be used to serve different political projects. Nonetheless, some recent court decisions may indicate some changes in these same alliances and invite us to pay more attention, beyond the given signal of conflict, to the transformations affecting political configurations.

Legal breakthrough: changing alliances?

52 The following cases illustrate several issues in which local courts in Tunceli produced decisions that challenged the political status quo. These adjudications not only

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challenged the definition of the political and public domains promoted by the security forces, they also undermined the terms of the dominant ideology, opening new avenues for the redefinition of the ‘social contract’.

53 On 12 February 2008, the Tunceli Civil Court of First Instance dismissed a case opened against two members of a Turkish leftist party for having distributed leaflets in 2007 inviting people to the Kurdish spring celebration of ‘Newroz’ (the Turkish authorities have reactivated this celebration as well, but under the name ‘Nevruz’, banning and harshly repressing for long the ‘Newroz’ celebration)33. Their lawyer, Barış Yıldırım, successfully argued that ‘Newroz’ was a proper name, and therefore did not violate the law on political parties’ stating that no other language than Turkish should be used during party events and for their placards. According to Yıldırım, this decision constituted a landmark decision (Zaman, 19/05/2008).

54 On 14 February 2008, the Tunceli Chief Public Prosecutor decided to drop proceedings against Yıldırım for his September 2007 statement criticizing the military. He based his decision on paragraph four of Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which states that criticism made to express one’s opinion cannot constitute a crime. This constituted a groundbreaking decision. As one Bianet headline claimed: ‘If only everybody was interpreting 301 like the Tunceli prosecutor!’ (Bianet, 14/02/2008). Five days later, the Tunceli Peace Court dismissed a case against Hanefi Bekmezci, a trade-union member also sued under Article 301 for a public statement made in September of 2005. The court first sentenced him to five months in prison, later converted to a fine. But Yıldırım, serving as his laywer, appealed to the Supreme Court of Appeals, citing decisions by the ECHR. On November 2007, this court overruled the sentence, ‘arguing that the statement he had read was ‘intended as heavy criticism’ and did not represent a crime’ (Bia news center, 20/02/2008). The Tunceli Peace Court submitted to this decision and acquitted Bekmezci. Bianet interpreted this as an important precedent for cases prosecuted under Article 301 (see e.g.Bianet, 19/02/2008).34

55 In March 2008, the Tunceli peace court acquitted three young members of a leftist political party, sued on the basis of the Article 215 of the Turkish Penal Code (concerning the ‘praise of a crime or a criminal’) for having commemorated Deniz Gezmiş, Yusuf Aslan and Hüseyin İnan, leading figures of the Turkish revolutionary movement of the late 1960s, sentenced to death and executed in 1972. While many trials had been opened on the basis of this article before, it was the first time such a case had been dismissed, and not for lack of evidence but on the legal argument that dead people cannot be considered criminals (Birgün, 15/03/2008).

56 Also in 2008 the 3rd Heavy Penal Court of Malatya acquitted Rıza Çiçek, wounded by the Turkish military and accused of ‘belonging to an illegal organization’ (see above), for lack of evidence. The defendant’s lawyer, Hüseyin Aygün, declared: ‘We believe this is a very important breakthrough. We congratulate the judge. The fact that he made his decision without paying much attention to the General Staff’s declaration is promising’. Aygün added that he would bring the case to the ECHR, as no trial had yet been opened against the military, and that he would open a case as well against the Ministry of Interior, to ask for reparations for the eight months Çiçek spent in prison awaiting his trial (Evrensel, 08/05/2008).

57 Different conclusions may be drawn from these ‘judicial events’. Regarding the first three listed cases, the courts’ decisions are important in terms of guarantees for freedom of expression and offering activists and public actors more (potential)

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protection for operating within a still-restrictive public sphere. Beyond that, two of these decisions more precisely confer a legal public existence to contentious figures and symbols (Deniz Gezmiş, Newroz). Of course, Newroz and Deniz Gezmiş have been celebrated for many years in Tunceli, despite quite systematic legal harassment. Activists have thus forced them into the public sphere, although at some risk. Of course, these judiciary decisions do not confer legitimacy on the figures and symbols themselves, or say much directly to the potential for celebrating or commemorating them, because the court decisions regarding them were made based on precise technical legal points. But they nonetheless produced tools for re-conceiving and transforming the borders of the public sphere. The fact itself that judges accepted lawyer’s technical and innovative legal argumentation (or produced this innovative argumentation themselves) invites us to further examine the possibility of underlying transformations of the public sphere.

58 Again, looking at these few cases, my point is not about demonstrating a steady process of ‘democratization’ and ‘normalization’ in the last couple of years. In fact, none of these decisions turned into a consolidated ‘permissive’ judicial practice. To take just one example, one year after the ‘Newroz decision’, the public prosecutor intervened to forbid the Tunceli munipality from using the word Dersim rather than Tunceli on some posters. The court stated that there was no such thing as the ‘Dersim municipality’ within Turkish borders and stated that the ‘Dersim’ appellation was ‘serving the propaganda of the (PKK) terrorist organization’. The posters were consequently removed (Gündem, 10/02/2009). In reaction, a pro-Kurdish Tunceli member of parliament said he would submit legislation to the Parliament to change ‘Tunceli’ into ‘Dersim’. The Justice Minister in turn called this ‘a move driven by a separatist mindset’ (Nethaber, 12/02/2009). In an account of this affair in the Günlük Gazetesi, the reported noted that the case was surprising given that in December of 2000, the Malatya Heavy Penal Court had dismissed a similar case. A Turkish leftist party member was then sued for having used the name ‘Dersim’ during his party convention and charged with ‘making propaganda for an illegal organization’. The decision of the Court acknowledged the idea that the term ‘Dersim’ was used in diverse historical and scientific texts, as well as newspapers and magazines, and not exclusively by the PKK. It was further stated that the term ‘Dersim’ has even been found in documents of the military command (Genelkurmay Baskanlığı) dating from 1929 and used by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and İsmet Inönü themselves (Günlük Gazetesi, 14/02/2009).

59 This article highlights the fact that there has not been any systematic consolidation of new judicial practices. Dicle Koğacıoğlu may have already provided some tools to explain these apparent setbacks or inconsistencies in courts’ decisions when she showed, looking at the Constitutional Court, that judges feel entitled to differentiate between the political and the cultural domains, so that practices considered ‘harmless when they are conceptually located as “cultural” and/or “traditional” are considered a threat when they are “unduly politicized”’ (Koğacıoğlu 2004: 435). In Tunceli, naming Dersim as threatening and harmless may be as well linked to the personality of the judge and the way (s)he specifically articulates, in his/her arbitration, elements of the nationalist and statist framework with other principles (Koğacıoğlu 2004: 442). The state of the balance of power between local and national politics may also be taken into account.

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60 On the other hand, some of these new legal practices look more durable. The case concerning Deniz Gezmiş may have contributed to changing possibilities concerning how even contentious public figures are remembered and commemorated. In the summer of 2008, two leaders of migrants associations were charged with ‘praising a crime or a criminal’ for having hung a poster of Seyid Riza, the leader of the resistance opposed to the Turkish troops in 1936 and 1937. Seyid Riza was arrested and hung in November 1937. In his argumentation, the lawyer Barış Yıldırım used the same technical argument, referring notably to the civil code, to claim that people could not be legally considered criminals after their death. In May 2009, the peace court dismissed the case.

61 Violaine Roussel examines this sort of undetermined dimension of the judicial process, looking at the ‘micro-disruption’ of the game that innovative judicial argumentations and decisions express. For Roussel, every failure or success, every procedural coup, as well as every stand taken by non-judicial actors, is a signal about what might now become possible to strive for. They thus constitute a frame of possibilities that were inconceivable within the judicial game until that time (Roussel 2002). In this way, the decision concerning Rıza Çiçek can be seen as an indication that the judiciary was no longer prepared to systematically align with categories of ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ used by the security forces and the local governor. In the same way, the Tunceli pro-Kurdish deputy and the Justice Ministry’s interventions in the Dersim case, and the CHP delegation’s involvement in the Rıza Çiçek case, as well as the Ergenekon trial, are many signals that lawyers, prosecutors, and judges use to consider their moves at the local level. For the lawyers, every successful use of an innovative argument comes to enlarge the frame of possibilities, encouraging them to push even further, by trial and error, the borders of the conceivable.

Conclusion

62 Studying judicial activism in Tunceli after 1999 demonstrates that even within a restrictive environment, possibilities for legal challenges may be more open than generally believed. Lawyers and their clients indeed proved capable of exploiting the state’s inability to act and speak in a single voice and of engaging it at multiple levels. Moreover, by bringing cases out of the courts and into more general public debate, lawyers accessed new resources and support networks in their struggle to promote alternative languages of justice and sets of practices. On this basis, they could engage law in order to challenge the dominant discourse on security and to force the redefinition of the state’s legitimate conceptual borders.

63 Rather than speculating on a growing receptivity of the prosecutors and judges to the language of justice and the innovative judicial practices promoted by lawyers, I here insist, in a processual approach, on the tactical ability of these lawyers to actively push for the consolidation of these practices. More directly questioning the redefinition of power alliances through the emergence of a ‘normative community’ would, however, require more study of the personal, political and professional experiences of judicial actors and an ethnography of the local legal system to learn about common spaces of debate or socialization. Finally, and in accordance again with Tezcür’s conclusions (2009), further attention should be given to the reorganization of local political configuration around multiple, possibly competing, centers of power. In Tunceli, the

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alliance between the military and the judiciary appears this way to be redefined in reaction to the emergence of political Islam on the local scene. Recent corruption affairs involving the AKP in 2009 elections but also award of contracts referred to the court could provide us with new readings of the transformation in relations between state and society.

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Yanık, Lerna K. (2006) ‘ “Nevruz” or “Newroz”? Deconstructing the “Invention” of a Contested Tradition in Contemporary Turkey’, Middle Eastern Studies, 42/2, pp. 285-302.

NOTES

1. The research for this paper benefited from the financial support of the French National Research Agency (ANR) Thematic Program ‘Conflicts, War(s), Violence’, ‘Conflits-TIP’ Project. I also want to thank Elizabeth Picard, Olivier Grojean, Amonah Achi, Nicole Watts and the two anonymous readers for their stimulating comments and criticisms on previous drafts of this article. 2. Between 1936 and 1938, the Turkish government carried out extensive military operations to secure control of the region of Dersim, renamed Tunceli by a 1936 law. Dersim has for long been conceived as an unruly territory, in fact the last to resist the centralization process of the Turkish state. The ‘civilization process’ of Dersim was extremely violent and cost the lives of tens of thousands of its inhabitants. Survivors were sent afterwards to internal exile, in Turkish-Sunni dominated areas. Many did not return until the mid-1940s (See Bruinessen 1994; Watts 2000). From the 1970s on, the name ‘Dersim’ progressively became a symbol of political opposition while ‘Tunceli’ became closely associated with this violent moment of ‘colonization’. My choice of the word Tunceli here is notably to underline how the name Dersim is at the core of the process of renegotiation of state-society relations. 3. I here focus on grievances related to abuses committed by the security forces or restrictions on freedom of speech and political activity. However, inhabitants of Tunceli also resort to courts to settle more ‘ordinary’ issues – but no less likely to be formulated in political terms – such as a woman’s right to divorce or disputes over land, thus inviting the judiciary to regulate everyday life as well. 4. On ‘cause lawyering’ see, among many others, Sarat & Scheingold (2005). 5. For an international relations approach, see, for example, the CERI project ‘Emerging from violence’, http://www.ceri-sciencespo.com/themes/projets/documents/02/sortir_violence.pdf. 6. Although most of the cases examined here took place in the 2000s, some of them were continuations of proceedings launched in the 1990s. Interpretation of the cases and further insights are based on several years of fieldwork in Turkey and, more specifically, on nine months spent in the province of Tunceli between 2003 and 2008. 7. My focus is consequently less on what happens within the court than on what is said and done about the case out of the court. This study would thus be complemented by ethnography of the courts and trials themselves and would benefit from a closer analysis of the actual trial records. 8. Founded in 1962, the National Security Council was composed of civilians (the President, the Ministers of Defense, Interior and Foreign Affairs, and following the constitutional amendment of October 2001, the Minister of Justice and Deputy Prime Minister) and members of the armed forces. It rapidly expanded its power to oversee the actions of the government and parliament. The 7th reform package passed in July 2003 aimed at limiting the role of the military in the NSC. However, despite institutional changes, the National Security Council remains highly influential, if only through more informal channels. 9. Founded in 1978 by Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK aimed to integrate Marxist-Leninism with Kurdish national aspirations. It has led a guerrilla war against the Turkish state since 1984, in which 44,000 people died, according to recent declarations of the Chief of Staff of the Turkish Army (Hürriyet, 16/09/2008). Abdullah Öcalan was arrested in 1999 but keeps ‘advising’ the PKK from prison. 10. On the complicated but possibly mutually empowering relation between law, violence and exception, see notably the March 2007 issue of the Law & Society review (vol. 34, n° 1, 2007).

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11. Put into place in 1984 in eight provinces (Adana, Ankara, Diyarbakır, Erzurum, İstanbul, İzmir, Malatya, Van), these courts were abolished by the Turkish Parliament in May 2004 to be replaced later by ‘Heavy Penal Courts’. Until 1999, these State Security Courts included military judges and prosecutors. They adjudicated in every matter identified as threats against state security. They have notably condemned many intellectuals and politicians for ‘inciting people to hatred’ on the basis of either race or religion. Interestingly enough, almost all of these judgments have been upheld by the Court of Cassation (Arslan 2007: 236). 12. Interview with Songül Erol Abdil, conducted with Nicole Watts, August 2008. 13. See, in Turkish, Sancar & Aydın (2009). 59 in-depth interviews were conducted. 14. Kurdish Human Rights Project’s Fact-finding mission report, Return to a state of emergency? Protecting Human Rights in South-East Turkey, June 2008, p. 40. The report specifies that the military court found no evidence against them and acquitted them. 15. Ibid. p. 46. 16. Idem. 17. For an expanded account of this judicial procedure, see the online Istanbul Water Tribunal report (http://www.boell.de/downloads/ecology/2munzur_en.pdf) 18. One of the local arguments in favor of the dams was indeed that they would inhibit the circulation of the guerrillas in the mountains of Tunceli. 19. To give one example, when in 1994, at the height of the conflict, the military was burning villages and forests in the region, several villages’ headmen tried to draw the attention of national leaders. Some of them travelled to Ankara to meet the president of the Federation of Human Rights Association and their deputies. They were detained upon their return. Others visited Prime Minister Tansu Çiller, who assured them that the military could not be involved and that it consequently had to be the PKK. The Minister of the Interior even suggested that villagers did this to themselves in order to get compensation. Among these headmen who dared to protest, several were arrested and detained, threatened and some of them even disappeared, to be later found dead (Stichting Nederland–Koerdistan 1995: 24-25). 20. For a report about the content of the indictment and about the adjudication of the Munzur case, see, in English: http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:u4Ub0jrZqicJ:tragua.com/archivos- tla/audiencia-2009-turquia/case-munzur-en.pdf 21. See the statement of the Tunceli lawyer Hüseyin Aygün on that matter (Cihan, 27/02/2009), http://www.haberler.com/hukukcu-huseyin-aygun-ergenekon-sorusturmasi-haberi/. 22. For one account among others, see in Today’s Zaman the article interestingly titled: ‘Ergenekon case opportunity to prove rule of law in Turkey’, 04/10/2009, http:// www.todayszaman.com/tzweb/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=172293. 23. Kurdish Human Rights Project’s News archives, available on http://www.khrp.org/content/ view/198/2/. 24. The Turkish penal code still does not recognize ‘forced disappearance’ as a crime. 25. Most of the newspapers cited here are known to be left-wing. Some of them (Bianet, Evrensel) are platforms actively producing and relaying information that is not generally found elsewhere, especially in mainstream media. 26. See the Tunceli Bar’s web site at http://www.tuncelibarosu.org.tr/?act=2&p=1 27. Lawyers in Turkey have always been well represented within the political elite. According to a 1973 article by Frank Tachau and Mary-Jo D. Good, lawyers represented 10 to 15 percent of the members of Parliament prior to 1950, to become the largest single grouping (27-32 percent) after 1950 (Tachau & Good 1973: 5). I do not have more recent national data but, from the late 1960s and 1970s onward, lawyers were not to be found only in the mainstream political parties but, increasingly, in the ranks of the opposition parties and radical leftist groups as well. The investment of young leftist activist lawyers in the Bar of Istanbul in the 1970s opened the way to the politicization of this bar association for example. The profession is thus in no way to be

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considered as politically homogeneous; bridges between the political, activist and legal professional spheres are multiple and diverse. 28. Attempts to explain cause lawyers’ activism always run the risk to be tautological. For stimulating reflections on cause lawyering, see, among others, the thematic issue of Politix directed by Brigitte Gaïti and Liora Israël (2003). 29. Personal interview with Özgür Ulaş Kaplan in his office, Tunceli, 05/05/2004. 30. For an English account of this affair, see the Amnesty International public document on http://www-secure.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR44/006/2005/fr/fb3e012f-d51f-11dd-8a23- d58a49c0d652/eur440062005en.html. 31. The use of the discourse of human rights by local state officials is not new. Even at the height of the conflict, officials tried to present themselves as the legitimate defenders of human rights. In December 1996 for example, a statue celebrating human rights was inaugurated in the Tunceli main square, in the presence of the city mayor, the chief of police and the governor of the province. However, with the transformation of the security order following 1999 and the efforts to reconstruct the state as a guarantor of democratic rights and obligations, this discourse of human rights has taken on a whole new dimension. 32. Reassigned to Kırşehir in 2008, Öztürk put into place the same program in this province in the centre of Turkey, 140 kilometers from Ankara. 33. On this point, see Yanık, Lerna K. (2006). 34. The AKP-led administration had prepared a bill proposing changes to the controversial article at the beginning of January 2008, which sparked off a months-long public debate. It was finally not before April 2008 that the Turkish Parliament started debates on the amendment to finally approve it.

RÉSUMÉS

This article explores the uses of law in a restrictive and changing political environment. It focuses on the specific case of Dersim/Tunceli – a theatre of the PKK/Turkish army warfare in the 1990s – following the arrest of the PKK leader in 1999 and the lifting of emergency rule in July 2002. The paper analyzes how cause-lawyers resort to law in a period in which the state’s local ruling and control devices are transforming and in which the ‘rule of law’ has to be reinstated. While acknowledging the crucial role of the courts in shaping people’s perception of ‘the state’ as all-encompassing, the article underlines how people also come to learn ‘the state’ as multi- layered and incoherent by facing obstacles to legal action and circumventing them in this changing and uncertain period. It then discusses justice as a site of contention and argues that increasing levels of legal activism is directly contributing to the redefinition of the rule of law and, beyond that, of the conceptual borders of ‘the state’ itself.

INDEX motsclestr olağanüstü hal, hukuki mücadele, ‘cause-lawyering’, devlet-toplum ilişkileri Keywords : rule of exception, legal mobilization, cause-lawyering, state-society relations Mots-clés : état d’exception, mobilisations du droit, ‘cause-lawyering’, relations Etat-Société

European Journal of Turkish Studies, 10 | 2009