Photo: Hundreds of Kurdish politicians including mayors of major cities and towns who were elected by majority vote were arrested and handcuffed by the Turkish police in December 2009.

Paper Presented in the American Anthropological Association’s Annual Meeting in December 2009, Philadelphia

During the civil war in Turkey’s eastern and southeastern provinces between the Turkish army and the Kurdish guerilla, the PKK, state’s sovereignty operated in the zone of indistinction between the citizen and the terrorist, between the loyal ones and the betrayers, between the human and non-human. What is distinctive of Turkish state’s approach is its insistence on the inclusion of the Kurdish people into the rule of law as Turkish citizens who are considered belonging to the sphere of protection by the state, and state’s simultaneous persistence on the exclusion of the Kurds as active or potential terrorists that should be eliminated for the sake of the survival of the state. Even when the civil war is at its peak in 90s and when hundreds of people died from each side every month; and the majority of the Kurdish population in the region turned their back on the state, the Turkish state never gave up on its instance on including the population of the eastern and southeastern provinces into its rule of law. Thus, continue to exercise its sovereign power through the management of the ambiguous separation between the citizens of Turkey in the region and some ‘monstrous terrorist who are inveigled by foreign forces that dedicated themselves to divide Turkey’. Even though a certain part of the PKK guerilla who fight on the mountains at night are the tradesmen in the streets during the day; and although the guerilla are sons, daughters, fathers or mothers of the ‘Kurdish civilians in the streets’, the formation of the so-called ‘civillian’-‘terrorist’ distinction within Kurds allowed the Turkish state to continue its military interventions ‘on account of the security of the population in this region’. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan often repeated this so-called distinction between civilians and terrorists, by arguing that “the Turkish state is the protector of the civilians in the region against the PKK” .
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