1) Introduction
This paper aims to critically analyze the ways in which liberal and humanitarian civil society and NGO’s in Turkey perceive, approach, and develop policy proposals about the problem concerning the internally displaced Kurdish populations. By focusing on the liberal policy proposals concerning the problems of internally displaced people, I want to analyze the ways in which Kurds are imagined and produced as subjects of liberal and multicultural rights. Here, I will show both the limits of the liberal multicultural imagination and the sites where liberal multicultural projects and proposals conceal other projects and imaginations concerning justice.
Throughout the paper I will compare the statements of the Turkish state elites and army officers towards the Kurdish uprising in the eastern and southeastern Turkey since 1984 on the one hand, and the reconsideration and reproduction of the Kurdish ‘problem’ within the context of cultural recognition especially after 2000s by the Turkish liberal and humanist intelligentsia, composed of liberal academicians, journalists, writers, human rights activists and organizations, think-tank institutions, and various NGOs, on the other.
I argue that although definition and recognition of the Kurds as an ethnic-minority by some of these liberal and humanitarian NGO’s that work on the problems of the internally displaced Kurdish people is presented as a challenge against the official discourse of the Turkish state that continually denies the political presence of the Kurds, the liberal project fails in identifying and problematizing the structural political and social reasons behind the Kurdish problem such as the ongoing armed conflict in the southeast provinces of Turkey, the current ban on the Kurdish language, and the continuing criminalization of being and claiming a Kurd. Moreover, the liberal and humanitarian proposals also fail in specifying different effects of internal displacement over particular groups such as women, children, old and young Kurdish people. Unlike the Kurdish men, who have to learn Turkish during their obligatory military service, Kurdish women, who never engaged with the Turkish language in their lives before they arrive in the big western cities of Turkey, appear today as the most silenced, suppressed and discriminated population group of the new urban terrain that is shaped by the forced migration of the Kurds. A discussion of the structural questions of the internally displaced Kurdish women whose particular problems cannot be understood and solved within the discourse of rights will compose a significant part of this paper.

Throughout the paper, I will particularly focus on TESEV’s (Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation) study and its subsequent book about the forced migration of over one million Kurds within the country and will critically analyze novelties and failures of TESEV’s liberal and humanitarian proposals for the reconciliation between the Turkish state and internally displaced Kurdish population. While I claim that the basic assumptions of the liberal and humanitarian project reproduce Turkish state’s discriminatory rhetoric and Kurdish subordination, I will ask: How can we rethink and analyze social, economical and historical inequalities beyond the rights discourse? What could be other projects of justice? What are the other possible ways of overcoming structural inequalities between Turkish and Kurdish populations of Turkey?

Before continuing with the introduction and detailed analysis of TESEV’s study and book, one should note here that TESEV’s policy proposals concerning how to overcome the damages of internal displacement and how to form policies for the reconciliation between the Turkish state and internally displaced Kurdish people are still debated and contested projects. That is to say, these liberal projects still remain mostly on paper and are not fully applied. For instance, TESEV’s proposal for the application of a compensation law that aims to recover internally displaced people’s material loss financially is accepted, legalized, and today this law (Law no. 5233 titled “Law on Compensation for Losses Arising from Terrorism and the Fight against Terrorism”) is in effect. Yet, the Turkish state still does neither recognize Kurdishness as a political and ethnic identity nor consider the problem of internal displacement as part of the Kurdish political question. Nevertheless, the Turkish state officially took TESEV’s proposals seriously and distributed TESEV’s book concerning internal displacement to all governors and public officials in the eastern and southeastern provinces as a means to rethink the problem. Hence, in this paper, I critically analyze this liberal and humanitarian proposal not only as a partially applied governmental project, but also as a liberal ideal at its best.

2) Constructing the Problem of Internally Displaced People
The social, political, economical and cultural problems of Turkey’s hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Kurdish people, whose villages were evacuated, burned and destroyed by the army because of the Turkish state’s alleged security concerns during the ongoing civil war in the eastern and southeastern provinces of the country were long ignored by the subsequent Turkish governments. Today, because of the mass migrations from the east and southeast regions of the country there are about more than one to two million Kurdish people who are living in metropolitan western cities of Turkey such as Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Bursa and Antalya under the pressure of vital problems such as poverty, unemployment, inability to adapt to metropolitan life, political and social difficulties in expressing themselves in their native language Kurdish, non-recognition of their cultural and political rights and ongoing police investigation and violence because of their alleged relation with the Kurdish guerilla in the past. To be sure, this forced, fast and traumatic migration of Kurdish villagers from their birth place to metropolitan Turkish cities that are unknown for these people has different effects on different social groups such as women, children, old and young Kurdish people. A lot of reports and studies that introduce these problems and propose policies for reparation and reconciliation were prepared by various political actors such as pro-Kurdish Goc-Der (Migrants’ Association), pro-Kurdish IHD (Human Rights Association), and pro-Kurdish political party DTP (Democracy and Society Party). According to these studies the question of internally displaced Kurdish populations is considered first and foremost as a political problem that derives from Turkish state’s ongoing denial of Kurdish presence and ethnic-identity and from the official ban of Kurdish language. Thus, for Goc-Der, IHD and DTP, the Kurdish question is neither a security problem as the Turkish state claims nor merely a problem of the recognition of cultural rights as some liberal intellectuals argue, but a structural and political one. Kurds demand the recognition of Kurdish language as the second official language of Turkey, recognition of Kurds as the mutual founders of the Turkish Republic with the Turks, and some autonomy in governing the municipalities in the Kurdish populated eastern and southeastern provinces. Thus, Kurdish demands are mostly demands of power-sharing and self-government rather than a mere subjection to the basic citizenship rights, even if these rights are extended in a multicultural manner.

However, pro-Kurdish NGO’s and party were neither effective on the Turkish state and civil society nor influential on the international public opinion. The reasons for their failure vary. One of them is Turkish state’s presentation of the pro-Kurdish legal NGO’s and political party as collaborators and supporters of the illegal Kurdish guerilla, the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), which is recognized as a terrorist organization in the national and international arena. Here, one should also note that the members and supporters of Goc-Der (Migrant’s Association) are often subjected to police investigation. For instance, there are more than 20 ongoing cases in Turkish criminal courts where the director of Goc-Der, Sefika Gurbuz is tried because of the Turkish state’s claim concerning her support of the PKK.

The second reason can be Kurdish NGOs’ and political party’s lack of sufficient knowledge in accessing to the international humanitarian lobbying and funding institutions, their inability to use English properly and to have enough representatives who can translate and express Kurdish organizations’ claims in English before the international public opinion. It is Sally Merry, who underlines the fact that the vast inequality in resources and wealth is always a subtle factor behind the ways in which the international consensus about norms of democracy and human rights is built. Thus, the wealthier and larger organizations that possess the money and know-how to access international civil society are more powerful and influential participants in transnational decision-making process. That is to say, a lack in terms of financial recourses as well as know-how can result in a failure in the equal representation in the international civil society.

That was the case in Turkey as well. Pro-Kurdish NGOs’ and party’s attempts remained politically inefficient and unsuccessful in terms of influencing, persuading and mobilizing national and international governmental and non-governmental organizations to develop policy proposals according to the problem-space defined by Kurdish organizations. Yet, on June 2006, when TESEV, a semi-academic liberal and humanitarian think-tank organization sponsored by George Soros’ ‘Open Society’, published its book, Coming to Terms with Forced Migration: Post-Displacement Restitution of Citizenship Rights in Turkey (written by Aker, Celik, Kurban, Unalan, Yukseker in 2005 and 2006), the problem of the internally displaced Kurdish populations started to be debated widely as one of the prominent questions of Turkey’s contemporary politics.
TESEV, founded in 1994, was created in order to promote applied policy related research and ‘forms a bridge between academic research and the policy making process.’ This above-mentioned book was part of TESEV’s works on minority rights, multiculturalism and displaced persons undertaken within TESEV’s democratization program – “which is clearly linked to the process of European Integration of Turkey. The objectives of the program are to undertake research on the obstacles to a democratic society and state and to formulate policy proposals.”

Thus, the success of TESEV’s study and book in terms of being widely distributed and accepted, derives from not only TESEV’s ostensible neutral position in the conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdish guerilla, the PKK, but also TESEV’s established connections with European Union and its ability to access international funding and lobbying organizations through the help of the Open Society. Moreover, TESEV’s know-how and capacity in producing, publishing, broadcasting, distributing the knowledge that they produced plays an important role in the successful promotion of TESEV’s work.

TESEV’s book is based on a qualitative field research on the forced migration of thousands of Kurdish people from their villages between the years 1984 and 2005. The report claims that this displacement was the result of the pressure of the Turkish armed forces on account of the security problems and the ‘war on terror’. Consequently the report aims to develop and propose new governmental policies such as rehabilitation, psychological assistance, providing employment and, economic restructuring through new economic and cultural investments to deal with the consequences of this social problem. The main intention of the report is the creation of a new social basis for the reconciliation between the state and the displaced in order to make possible the re-integration of the excluded populations into the social and economic life.

3) TESEV’s Challenge Against the Turkish State’s Official Narrative
In this sense, the report has proposed a new description of the internal displacement of the Kurdish populations which seems in opposition to the state’s narrative. According to the Turkish state’s official discourse, the villagers left their villages by their own choice considering the ongoing insecure conditions or economic difficulties and sometimes by the pressure of the so-called ‘terrorists’, namely by the PKK, which continued its armed struggle against the Turkish armed forces since 1984. Thus, the Turkish state has never accepted its responsibility for the presence of internally displaced people. As Bilgin Ayata and Deniz Yükseker (writers and contributors of the TESEV report) argue, even though “Turkish authorities agreed to tackle the problem of the internally displaced people under the international pressure within the context of Turkey’s bid to European Union, Turkish successive governments never explicitly conceded that the villages were evacuated by the security forces.” Turkish authorities also strictly avoid using the ethno-cultural category ‘the Kurd’, while designating internally displaced people. Instead, state officials usually prefer to use the economic-category ‘the poor’ to mention this internally displaced population.
Therefore, the report of TESEV appears as a challenge against the state’s discourse at two points:

a) Introducing ‘Forced Migration’
First, TESEV put the term ‘forced migration’ into the agenda as the new description of internal displacement while blaming the state for being the agent and perpetrator of this oppressive force. To prove this statement, TESEV refers to the accounts given by internally displaced people, who mentioned “ultimatums by gendarme to leave their villages within a short period of time (a few hours to several days). The reason of the ultimatums was either the villagers’ refusal to become village guards (armed and aided by the state to fight against the PKK) or the accusation that they aided and abetted PKK militants”. Moreover, TESEV’s report and related articles also refer to the testimonies of military commanders of the period between 1992 and 1994, who mentioned cutting off the supply routes of the PKK as an integral part of the new and intensive strategy ‘to destroy PKK’. Thus, the liberal researchers considered these testimonies as the evidence of the rationale behind the evacuations of the villages. These statements look like a radical challenge against the governors, officers and other bureaucrats of the Turkish state in the eastern and southeastern regions who usually preferred to describe the incidents without mentioning any agent except the PKK. For the state officials in the region, there are ‘empty villages’ (bosalmis köyler) and ‘internally displaced persons’ (yerinden olmus kisiler) and not ‘evacuated villages’ (bosaltilmis köyler) or ‘the people who were displaced by force’ (yerinden edilmis kisiler).

United Nations coined the term, ‘internal displacement’ to designate “persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border.” However, as expected, according to the Turkish state’s particular interpretation of ‘internal displacement’, the emphasis on ‘force’ is missing. Therefore, the usage of the statement ‘forced migration’ interchangeable with the statement ‘internal displacement’ in the TESEV report makes the results of the research unacceptable, invalid and ‘false’ for the state. While members of the TESEV were blamed as ‘liars’ and ‘betrayers’ by the chief of the general staff of the Turkish Armed Forces Yasar Buyukanit , TESEV declared publicly that the militaristic approaches intending to solve the problem in the southeast totally misrepresent the actual case and reproduced the problem in a more severe manner.

b) Introducing Kurds as the ‘Ethno-Cultural Population’
The second challenge of the researchers of TESEV against the state’s narrative was their usage in their reports of the ethno-cultural category ‘Kurds’ as the signifier of the target of the forced migration while underlining clearly the fact that the great majority of the population which was displaced were Kurds. In this sense, TESEV produced Kurds as a population, as a group of people who should be the legitimate target of governmental policies.

However, according to the rhetoric of the state bureaucrats and the army officers, since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 there are no Kurds as such. The only subjects within the borders of Turkey are Turks. People who claim that they are Kurds and insist on being recognized as a different socio-cultural group are deviations from pure Turkishness. In this sense, Kurds were produced as the by products of the normalizing discourse of the state, which tend to produce and purify Turkishness. Thus, Kurds appear as a permanent security threat fro the perspective of the state.

According to the Lausanne Treaty (1924), which designates the recognition of the new Turkish Republic by the winners of the First World War, only non-Muslim groups such as the Armenians, Greeks and Jews received the minority status, while Kurds counted as the integral part of the Muslim majority population. Although the secular Turkish state officially recognizes the ethno-cultural identity ‘the Turk’ and not the religious identity ‘the Muslim’ as the basis of citizenship, the article in Lausanne Treaty which included Kurds into the Muslim community were usually used by the state elites in order to claim that Kurds are Turks. In this sense, about 30 Kurdish uprisings in the late 20s and early 30s against the new Republican administration such as the well-known Sheikh Said uprising, which lasted more than 2 months and hardly suppressed by the state forces, were considered not as ethnic conflicts but signs of religious fundamentalism. In fact, the characteristics of the rebels were also ambiguous, because they identified themselves sometimes as Kurds and in some other periods as Muslims. After the last strong revolt of 30s in Dersim in 1936, when the city was bombed by the newly formed Turkish air forces, was totally evacuated (90.000 people) and was renamed as Tunceli, the uprisings were interrupted. A member of the Turkish parliament of that period argued that “these people were bombed in order to remind them that they are Turks”. This statement concerning Kurds continued to be the main motive of the state’s policies towards Kurdish populations until the 1980s.

In 1984, the strongest Kurdish armed uprising in the eastern and southeastern Anatolia began which was led by the armed separatist Kurdish militia ‘Kurdistan Worker Party’ (PKK). In fact, the formation of the Kurdish identity, the appropriation of the past uprisings as ‘Kurdish uprisings’, and the production of the Turk/Kurd clash as a categorical formation intensified especially after this period. At the same time the attempts for the purification of Turkishness were also on the rise. During the armed conflict between the PKK and Turkish armed forces, the state constantly produced statements that people identified themselves as Kurds are the deviants who developed some kind of false-consciousness, maybe they were inveigled by some foreign forces, nevertheless, they appeared as pathologies in the societal body, namely as terrorists, they are security threats for the future survival of the society and therefore they should be eliminated by force.
As the material result of these statements in 1987, the state declared 13 southeastern provinces of Turkey to be in a ‘state of emergency’. In this respect, the Turkish state decided on the suspension of the political and social rights of the region’s people for the sake of the governmental and militarily interventions. Under the state of emergency, the state racism of the Turkish state embedded in its exercise of bio-power appeared as the main motive of the murders and plunders in the region. This approach towards the purification of Turkishness through the elimination of the deviance/pathology in the society caused almost 40,000 deaths who were mostly Kurdish civilians.

During this period, thousands of villages and hamlets were evacuated and burned by the military and its allied ‘village guards’. The report of TESEV concerned the internally displaced people, who were displaced after the evacuation of these villages between 1984 and 2005. At this point, by saying that these internally displaced people are ethnically Kurds, TESEV does not only criticize the state officials for ignoring the ‘Kurdish reality’ and for manipulating people through a ‘false’ description of the internal displacement, but TESEV’s particular counter-explanation concerning the forced migration of the Kurds also necessitates a total reconsideration of the history of Kurds in Turkey in general whose presence was neglected since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. Thus, TESEV’s proposal appears as an effort of producing a counter-history of the Kurds in Turkey. Thus, the introduction of Kurdishness into the public discursive space presupposes a new understanding of Turkishness as well. As an effect, TESEV advocated a new multicultural content for Turkishness, namely ‘Turkiyelilik’ (means ‘from Turkey’) which will include Kurds, Alevis, Zazas and other groups through the means of cultural recognition.

Consequently, TESEV’s study extended the discursive space concerning the Kurdish issue and disclosed a new possibility for politics for both the Kurdish movement and the Turkish state by introducing statements concerning ‘forced migration’ and ‘Kurdish presence in Turkey as an ethnic and cultural minority”. Moreover, TESEV’s report triggered again the debate about the expansion of the understanding and scope of the Turkish citizenship. Yet, at that point TESEV’s proposal for the subjection of the Kurds to a new and multicultural understanding of Turkish citizenship reproduced the unitary nation-state as the only model of the normalizing force.

4) The Sites Where the Liberal Multicultural Rights Discourse Conceals Other Projects of Justice, Fails to Identify Problems and Reproduces the State’s Rhetoric
After introducing the challenge of TESEV’s study against the official narrative of the Turkish state about the Kurdish question, now at this point, I want to mention the sites where the state’s and liberals’ approaches converge and reproduce the same discriminatory mechanisms. I argue that, despite all of the above-mentioned challenges of TESEV’s study, the liberal approach to the Kurdish problem reproduces the Turkish state as the ultimate authority that set the norm of being damaged, being a victim, and being a Kurd. By doing that, liberal proposals conceal other alternatives for justice such as power-sharing or self-government of Kurds in the locales where they inhabit. For example, although the recognition of Kurdish cultural rights by the Turkish state is mentioned as one of the most important steps to achieve a reconciliation between the internally displaced Kurdish people and the Turkish state, neither the official recognition of Kurdish language nor a formation of an autonomous territory for the Kurds were expressed as policy proposals by the researchers of TESEV. In a personal interview with Dilek Kurban, who is a lawyer, a member of TESEV and a co-writer of TESEV’s book on forced migration of Kurdish people, she said me:

“You know, I myself am a Kurd from Dersim, and I agree with all of these critiques about the insufficiency of our study. Yet, we cannot mention demands such as the official recognition of Kurdish language or autonomy for the Kurds, since these demands directly oppose to the Turkish state’s sovereignty. If we did this, they (the Turkish government) would not take us seriously. Moreover, they would treat us as they treat Goc-Der (Migrant’s Association), and you know Goc-Der is considered by the Turkish state as one of the legal faces of the illegal PKK. We did the best that we could. And we aimed to be taken seriously by the government. Now, I think we opened a new discursive space to discuss the Kurdish question, even though this new discursive space is still insufficient.”

Yet, not everyone agrees with Dilek Kurban. A Turkish sociologist from Bogazici University, Nazan Ustundag expresses her doubts about the sincerity of Dilek Kurban’s and other TESEV researchers’ comments. Rather than considering TESEV’s study as the best they can do, Ustundag thinks that this study, similar to Turkish state’s expectations, serves to criminalize Kurdish movement. In a personal interview she argues:

“TESEV intended to undermine all efforts of the Kurdish movement and Goc-Der that seek to be recognized as legitimate representatives of internally displaced Kurdish people. Through marginalizing Goc-Der’s former studies and proposals concerning Kurdish problem and problems of internally displaced people, TESEV just reproduced Turkish state’s discourse and its identification of Kurdish organizations as criminal and terrorist groups. Thus, TESEV confirmed Turkish state’s definition of the criminal and did not even mention that most of the internally displaced Kurdish people who are living now in western cities of Turkey are still considered by the Turkish state as potential criminals and terrorists because of their alleged relation with the PKK in the past.”

In addition to these critiques, one can also argue that TESEV’s study also lacks the specific problems of Kurdish women who are now living in the big cities of Turkey’s west, yet cannot speak Turkish, because they never needed to learn Turkish before they came to the west. Moreover, TESEV’s proposals concerning providing compensations for the damages of internally displaced people do not cover the damages of Kurds that derive from their necessity to sell their labors, that is to say their involuntary servitude in order to survive in the metropolitan cities. Kurds, who came after the forced migration are already deprived, must usually work in informal sectors, and neither the financial nor the psychological compensation of their past losses can change their low-class position as involuntary servants so must continue to sell their labor in order to survive.

While analyzing the sites where the state’s and liberals’ approaches converge and where liberal projects fail to identify the specific problems, I will also introduce three stories of three Kurdish women, Sabiha, Asiye and Ayten respectively, who came to Istanbul after the forced migration, and encountered there with structural problems because of their ethnic identity, gender and class position. Sabiha is not allowed to tell her traumatic experiences about the forced migration because she is afraid of being identified as a terrorist or criminal just because of her ethnic-identity. Asiye cannot speak Turkish as many other Kurdish women, and therefore discriminated not only because of her ethic-identity, but also because of her gender position. Ayten must sell her labor in informal sectors to feed her family members who lost everything they had when their village was burned by the military. Ayten was not only subjected to capitalist exploitation because of her low class-position, but as a woman she was also a victim of sexual harassment in the work place, and should struggle with this problem, too, in order to survive in the newly emigrated city.

Now, before discussing these three stories in detail, I want to first analyze how TESEV’s liberal proposals reproduce the Turkish state as the ultimate authority that set the norm of being damaged, being a victim, and being a Kurd.

a) Concealment of Other Projects of Justice
In order to understand how TESEV’s approach converges with the official discourse in reproducing the Turkish state as the final authority and Turkishness as the ultimate identity, and thus, conceals other possible imaginaries for justice, one maybe should first look at how the problem of internal displacement is defined by TESEV:

“The dominant perception of internal displacement in Turkey has been one interpreted through official state ideology -which has recently acknowledged the phenomenon but refused to accept its responsibility. This ‘acknowledgement without acceptance’ portrays internal displacement as the inevitable outcome of the security forces’ legitimate defense against terrorism. The fact is that one million people lost their property, abandoned their cultural roots, and were forced to migrate to western provinces because their way of life was not embraced by the official, narrow definition of citizenship.”

Thus, TESEV describe the question of internal displacement within the problem-space of rights and definition of citizenship. While producing the problem as a lack of Turkish state’s legal protection of Kurdish cultural rights, TESEV’s proposal for a solution will be an introduction of an extended definition of ‘Turkish citizenship’ that includes Kurds as an officially recognized minority group. Thus, the possible way of achieving reconciliation is described by TESEV as stated below:

“TESEV Working Group believes that Turkey needs to develop serious socio-economic projects, compensate financial as well as non-pecuniary damages, take steps to improve public and mental healthcare, and adopt policies to truly bring an end to the time of clashes and to achieve reconciliation.”

However, since TESEV’s proposal considers the problem within the framework of liberal rights discourse, (in this case, Kurds’ problem is thought as a lack of a right to have compensation) it subjects Kurdish people again to the norms and regulations of the Turkish state. According to TESEV’s proposal, Kurds first of all should prove that they were damaged because of the internal displacement. Here, of course the criteria of being damaged are defined by the state authority, and only after the internally displaced people are able to introduce themselves as injured/harmed/damaged persons than they can have the right to demand compensations from the state.

It is Wendy Brown, who clearly makes visible the ways in which these regulatory powers of identity are exercised through the rights based on identity. Thus, she shows that rights, far from making the rights’ seeking member of the identity categories (e.g. women or in this case Kurds) free, reproduce them as injured/harmed/damaged victims, and thus, subordinate them to the normative order of the protection by the state.

At that point, Brown introduces the question concerning the paradox of rights: “How can rights be procured that free particular subjects of the harms that porn, hate speech, and a history of discrimination are said to produce without reifying the identities that these harms themselves produce?”
Here, one can be skeptical about whether the question should be ‘how to solve this paradox’ or is this paradox itself a trap of liberal rights discourse that does not allow us to think other ways for eliminating structural, racial, gender and economic inequalities within a society?

In another text, Wendy Brown underlines that “….rights activism is a moral-political project and if it displaces, competes with, refuses, or rejects other political projects, including those also aimed at producing justice, then it is not merely a tactic but a particular form of political power carrying a particular image of justice.” This means that while the political power of the liberal, multicultural and human rights project subjugates, suppresses or conceals other projects and understandings of justice, it produces a certain kind of subject as an effect of that power. Thus, “the rights discourse offers a form of protection for individuals that may trade one form of subjection for another”

b) Question Concerning `Turkishness`
In order to achieve reconciliation, that is to say to achieve justice; TESEV suggests the introduction of an extended identity of Turkishness that includes Kurds as an officially recognized minority group. Thus, according to this proposal Kurds can only be recognized officially if they accept to be subjected to this extended citizenship status of Turkishness. To be sure, this sort of subjection to Turkishness conceals other possibilities about justice such as sharing sovereign power of the Turks with the Kurds or self-governance of Kurds in their autonomous zones.

Here, rather than reconsidering Kurds as the sharer of sovereign power of the state, the liberal proposal aims to exculpate Turkish state and Turkish identity and integrate Kurds into this newly constructed domain of multicultural Turkishness.

To be sure, the approach towards the broad and multicultural understanding of the Turkishness is related to the liberal approach towards history. While accusing the Turkish Republic of ignoring and repressing multicultural diversity during its history, liberals simultaneously produce an imagination of a clean and new beginning for a future society. Thus, in order to be freed from the ‘burden’ of the past, and to exculpate the nation, they demand the apology of the current state because of its past guilt. To be sure, this statement is based on an ideological understanding of the time, in which past, present and future produced as if they are separate entities, and as if the perpetual effect of the past over the present and over the future can be neglected. Only after the apology of the state, liberal multicultural understanding of Turkishness can become possible, this will cover all the differences in Turkey, through cultural recognition. As Dilek Kurban declared, “the state should face with the past and accept its responsibility and its guilt. Only after that, the reconciliation between the suppressed people and the state can be possible”

Thus, the writers of the report appeared as the first liberal Turkish intellectual group, who mentioned the ‘shame’ of the Turkish State, and demanded the apology of the state publicly. For them the state was responsible for the forced migration of millions of people and burning of thousands of villages. As I cited before, in the foreword of the report, Etyen Mahcupyan, the director of the democratization program of TESEV, claimed that the State of the Turkish Republic’s policies against the Kurdish populations since 1984, when the armed conflict between the Kurdish militia PKK and Turkish armed forces began, are based on “an ideologically nationalist and narrow understanding of Turkishness”, therefore, these policies were not able to solve the Kurdish Problem until today. As he argues, it is the Turkish state, which is responsible for the present consequences of the ‘forced migration’. For Mahcupyan, “forced migration is not a natural disaster; on the contrary it was a social failure and a derogatory act, for which all of the civil society, including them are responsible.” In this sense for Mahcupyan, TESEV’s research presupposes a new understanding of Turkishness based on the rejection of the former racial definition of the Turk as an ethnic category. In this respect, the new imagination of the Turkish identity, ‘Turkiyelilik’ (means from Turkey) should be based on the common interests of all culturally different people within the same territory, namely within Turkey. In fact, the debate concerning ‘Turkiyelilik’ was older than the TESEV report. Since the early 2000, a few liberal writers and academicians mentioned this term. However, TESEV’s report and complementary researches and projects about the re-integration, rehabilitation and employment of internally displaced people opens a space for institutionalizing this new understanding, at least locally, within the framework of the local NGO’s and Kurdish municipalities in the region.

However, for TESEV, the recognition of Kurds as a ‘different’ and legitimate cultural group is acceptable, to be sure, under the auspices of the Turkish state. In this sense, TESEV’s suggestion of a change in the understanding of Turkish citizenship presupposes a new content for the citizenship, whereas this presupposition reproduces the unitary nation-state as the only model and as the normalizing force again. In this respect, both the state and the liberal multiculturalists conserve a monolithic understanding concerning the nation-state, the national identity and the necessity of sharing the same national interests and imaginations within the borders of the same state. As it was clearly mentioned by the writers of the report, “the solution of the Kurdish problem requires both the acceptance of its past crimes by the state and the unconditional capitulation of the PKK militia. The re-integration of the militia into the society, who did not commit crime, is also necessary” . Thus, according to this liberal approach, the democratic recognition of the Kurds as a minority can be possible only after Kurds recognize the Turkish armed forces, which burnt their villages and killed or injured their relatives, as the legitimate monopoly of coercion in Turkey and get together with Turks under the label of ‘Turkiyelilik’. As Povinelli points out, liberals construct the ‘difference’ of the minority as the legitimate part of the state’s multiculturalism only to plough it into the ground of a new, transcendental, monocultural nation… Therefore, one must not overlook the fact that the multicultural discourse and fantasy plan in cohering national identities. Moreover, such policies serve to mask the former and the ongoing struggles of Kurds against the domination of the state, make their injuries invisible and force them to give up all their gains concerning autonomy. The call of the liberal intellectuals for the reconciliation between the Turkish state and the Kurdish people is a call for a total forgetting/erasure/denial of the past violence.

c) Women’s Stories
As I said before, Kurdish women, who never engaged with the Turkish language in their lives before they arrive in the big western cities of Turkey, appear today as the most silenced, suppressed and discriminated population group of the new urban terrain that is shaped by the forced migration of the Kurds. And, these problems of Kurdish women cannot be identified by the liberal rights approach, since liberal rights discourse aim to create a homogenized and standardized understanding of citizens and imagine a monocultural nation and national identity while erasing particularities and differences within the population.

To be sure, the main purpose of the liberal rights approach including TESEV’s proposals concerning reconciliation between the Turkish state and internally displaced Kurdish people, is to develop policies in order to integrate Kurdish populations into the economy as labor force and also as consumers, who were excluded from the economic relations since the late 80s, because they were considered not citizens but security threats. Thus, liberals assume the internally displaced Kurds as a monolithic entity whose survival in the metropolitan city should be secured and whose integration into the economy should be managed. Yet, this approach ignores the present/ongoing effect of internally displaced people’s past damages and injuries on their recent struggle for the survival in the city.

As the Turkish sociologist Nazan Ustundag states: “Kurdish displaced peoples are considered by authorities, NGO’s and academicians alike as composing the third wave of migration in Turkey, and are distinguished from former migrants only in terms of their higher levels of poverty and ‘ignorance’ of urban ways . Once they enter the urban realm, they become part of a larger narrative of development and world capitalism where the specific violations they endured and the main problems that caused their ‘migration’ become hidden and go unregistered. When displaced populations are studied, it is usually their conditions, problems and the ways in which their immediate survival is secured what gains most attention.”

What are the consequences of the concealment of the specific violations that internally displaced people endured and the main problems that caused their migration? To be sure, this concealment of the main problems that caused forced migration serves nothing else than the persistence of the problems. First of all one should indicate that these people were forced to migrate because of their alleged cooperation with the PKK-guerilla, thus their villages were evacuated and burned because of their alleged criminal status. Now, if one looks at TESEV’s book on the forced migration, one encounters with the following statement: “The solution of the Kurdish problem requires the unconditional capitulation of the PKK militia and the re-integration of the militia into the society, who did not commit crime.” (-emphasis added by me) Through introducing this statement TESEV reproduce Turkish state’s definition concerning the crime and the criminal. Thus, for TESEV, too, the PKK is a terrorist organization and people who collaborate with the PKK are supporters of terrorists and criminals. Yet, is not Turkish state’s reason for forced migration this alleged criminalization of the Kurdish villagers?

Today, internally displaced Kurdish people are still targets of criminal investigation. Yet, the liberal proposals do not identify this as a problem. Moreover, the silencing of Kurdish language, as an ongoing violence against Kurds who are living in western Turkish cities was not stated as problem by the liberal rights activists. To be sure, the question concerning internally displaced people’s current deprived situation that was caused by the dispossession of them during the forced migration and resulted in the necessity of selling their own labor involuntarily in order to survive in the big cities is not mentioned by these liberal proposals.
Now, I want to focus on these problems more in detail by introducing the stories of three Kurdish internally displaced women.

c.1) Sabiha’s Story
Sabiha is a 34 year old woman and mother of four children. She grew up in Van province that is a mostly Kurdish populated city on the border of Iran. Her village was evacuated and burned by the Turkish army in 1995, and thus, she migrated to Istanbul. She learned to speak Turkish in Istanbul. When she is asked to talk about her memories of evacuation of her village, her migration to Istanbul and her hardships that she encountered with while trying to adapt to life in Istanbul, she says that she only tells these stories to people that she knows well and trusts. She says:

“Sometimes I stand outside. A funeral of a Turkish martyr takes place. My neighbors loudly say nearby me: ‘God damn all the Kurds, we wish they all die!’ I say: ‘Hey neighbor, why do you say this? I feel sad, too, yet we all are humans’. I think my neighbors talk like this just to test me. They are curious how I will answer to them. You know, when we come here our files followed us, as well. Therefore, we usually do not say many people why we come here. I usually say that we came to Istanbul, because my husband found a job here. If I even say the truth, I am sure that they will not believe in me. You know the state both harassed and incriminate us.”

The narrative of Sabiha is a salient example of the anxiety of expressing one’s victimhood before the public because of the fear of being criminalized. Thus, Sabiha tells that although she has a good dialogue and a certain relation of solidarity with her neighbors in terms of taking care of each others’ children or collaboration in some housework, she still thinks that she should keep her experience about the forced migration secret and not talk much about it to other people. To be sure, this case indicates how the Kurdish women in Istanbul are silenced because of a lack of trust in both neighbors and the Turkish state. Thus, the regime of fear constructs and maintains a border between the formerly settled and the new-comer migrant so that any sincere communication becomes impossible. Kurdish people who are living in metropolitan western cities of Turkey still cannot express their own problems in the public sphere since they are afraid of being considered as potential terrorists and criminals.

c.2) Asiye’s Story.
Another significant issue that one should consider while dealing with the problem of forced migration is the radical difference between the experiences of Kurdish men and women. In contrast with the Kurdish men, who necessarily learn Turkish during the obligatory military service in the army, Kurdish women, who usually do not have any access to state institutions in the village, and therefore do not need to learn Turkish until they come to Turkish metropolitan cities have much more difficulties than Kurdish men in adapting to the city life. Kurdish women have more difficulties than the Kurdish men in terms of accessing public services such as education, justice, social security, health care and employment since Kurdish women cannot speak Turkish. This problem becomes much more visible especially in those cases when Kurdish women cannot (or do not want) have an accompanying Turkish speaker with them. According to a report prepared by Goc-Der (Migrant’ Association), the number of Kurdish migrant women who went to a doctor because of gynecological problems is extremely low. Furthermore, one should not forget that most of the Kurdish women’s first engagement with the Turkish state took place during the evacuation and burning of their villages. This traumatic experience makes Kurdish women to feel more uneasy in any encounter with the state while accessing public service.

Asiye’s story is a dramatic example of this experience of the loss of the possibility to express oneself in her native language in the public sphere. Asiye is a 55 year old Kurdish woman, who did not know to speak Turkish when her village was evacuated and burned by the Turkish army. Now, even after living so long in Istanbul, she is still resisting to learn and speak Turkish, since she identifies Turkish as the language of the oppressors who exiled them. To be sure, Asiye experienced many difficulties because she does not speak Turkish. In an interview conducted with her 17 year old daughter Meryem, Meryem tells a story about the difficulties they experienced in their first year in Istanbul, when they did not know some other Kurdish neighbor who could help them.

“Once I had something to do. I left it at home. I returned home in the evening. My mother was crying. She got mad. She said, ‘your voice was not here, nobody’s voice was here, I was so afraid.’ My mother continued: ‘I run to our Kurdish neighbor from Van. I told him my problem, but I was so frightened that my entire body was shaking.”

c. 3) Ayten’s Story
To be sure, one of the most vital problems that internally displaced Kurdish people experience in the cities is poverty. When they arrive in the western cities they are almost totally dispossessed and need to accept any job opportunity in order to survive. According to the research of Hacettepe University Population Studies Institute, 70% of the Kurdish internally displaced women work in informal sectors in the western Turkish cities.

Ayten is one of them. She is 19 year old. When their village was burned she was 6. After temporary stays in various towns and villages, when they came to Istanbul, she was 9. Since the first month of their stay in Istanbul, Ayten has been working in textile factories. She never had social security insurance, and just like her many other friends she was fired several times from the factories without getting her payments. She also says that several times she had to leave the job because of the ‘bad’ treatment of employers. Her statements clarify what she means by ‘bad’ treatment:

“We should work for 14 hours in 6 days of a week. If you do a little mistake of sewing you cannot get the money for that piece. Moreover, the cost of that piece is cut from your salary. Usually ventilation of the work place is very poor and heating does not work properly, too. Listening to Kurdish music is absolutely forbidden in the factory. Yet, the most disgusting thing is employer’s corrupt behaviors towards women employees.”

By ‘corrupt behavior’ of employers Ayten means sexual harassment, and she left the job several times for this reason. Yet, despite all of these negative conditions, Ayten continues to work, because she has no other option. This is exactly what Saidiya Hartman defines as ‘involuntary servitude’. In her book Scenes of Subjection Hartman elaborately analyses the negative effects of the liberal production of the historically discriminated black and woman populations as free and equal subjects of the liberal order, and she argues that slavery continues even after the American civil war and abolition of slavery, through a tacit state racism and through capitalist exploitation. What is remarkable in Hartman’s analysis is her disclosure of the fact that the sudden, overnight formation of blacks as equal citizens with whites in terms of bearing rights yet also having duties and responsibilities, serves nothing but to neglect/erase/forget the past injuries of black populations and their consequent economic poverty that was caused by the exploitation of the black bodies during centuries long period of slavery.

Just like the blacks of the US, Kurds of the Turkey experienced Turkish state’s double standards towards them even after their forced migration and integration in the western Turkish cities. In the west parts of the country, Kurds were produced as responsible citizens of Turkey who had few rights yet heavy economic responsibilities and public duties. Kurds are considered as free and willful agents in selling their so-called free labor, namely in their submission to the capitalist relations of exploitation, yet at the same time they are considered criminals, inferiors or the weakest ring of the chain when they violate or cannot fulfill legal duties. Thus, “the equality of rights veils the relations of domination and exploitation”

To be sure, the internally displaced Kurds started the life in the metropolitan city as already poor and deprived people; therefore they have no other way than selling their labors. In fact, this necessity of selling one’s labor does not fill but widen the gap between the Turkish bourgeoisie and Kurdish poor classes. To be sure, this is quite the opposite of freedom that is defined as the object of liberal multicultural projects, because the dependency of Kurdish population on capitalist owners designates an involuntary servitude.
In this case, Ayten is thought as a responsible citizen who should overcome the deprived situation of her family as if she is responsible for this deprivation and not the Turkish state that evacuated, razed and burned all her family’s possessions in their village.

5) Conclusion
Throughout this paper I tried to show the limits of multicultural liberal projects and imaginations. Maybe more importantly I tried to make visible how the liberal multicultural projects and proposals can work to conceal other projects and imaginations concerning justice. As one can clearly see now, the projects of liberal rights and multicultural recognition fail to identify the specific violations internally displaced people endured and the main problems that caused their migration. On the other hand, Kurds in Istanbul still cannot talk about their past injuries and sorrows, are prevented to express themselves in Kurdish in the public, have to work under bad conditions in order to survive, and are still targets of criminal investigation.
However, the universalistic discourse of rights, even if it is extended to the social and economical spheres continue to mask Kurds’ and women’s past injuries and former discriminations that are in fact the real causes of the contemporary poverty and misery of internally displaced deprived populations. The liberal and multicultural rights project, even in its best and ideal form will reproduce the exploited classes as already deprived and therefore permanently dependent on the capitalist exploitation and/or state’s aid. Moreover, liberal multicultural projects conceal other options of justice and reconciliation such as self-governance or power sharing of the deprived Kurdish people. As a consequence, interventions in the name of liberal, multicultural rights, even in its most extended form, will reproduce the identity categories of the Kurd, woman or poor as permanently inferior, deprived and dependent while masking the long history of discriminations and exploitations of these populations.

Perhaps, from now on, rather than continuing to speak in the name of them, one should start to let internally displaced people speak, let them speak in their own native language about their own injuries, let them identify their own problems, let them define what is bad and what is good for them, and let them share the power, govern themselves and exercise their own proposals. By now, silencing of the people just served to the continuation of the unfortunate war in Turkey’s southeast, and resulted in the death of thousands. Death can never be compensated, not even by the best multicultural formula for reconciliation. Yet, death can be prevented, at least can be postponed for a long period, if people are given the chance to speak and to listen to each other. By speaking I do not merely mean expressing one’s own thoughts, but also changing the power structures, so that other possibilities for justice become visible. To be sure, the disclosure of other possible worlds is a good start to undermine hardened relations of domination and injustice.

Bibliography:

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