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” .

Thus, in Turkish Kurdistan sovereign power is exercised in the zone of indistinction between the rule of law and the state of exception, while deciding who is the the loyal Kurdish citizens of Turkey and who is the terrorists who betray the Turkish state. Agamben states that the potentiality of ‘the state of exeception’ is always already intrinsinc in the logic, exercise and actuality of ‘the rule of law’. In Turkey, too, sovereignty operates in this indistinct zone between the pro-PKK and pro-state people, villages and towns. And it is this very separation and simultaneous integration of the categories of the terrorist and the citizen, which allow the state to exercise its power over death.

At that point one needs to ask what are the ways in which this separation between human and non-human is produced? Although Agamben is right by saying that all lives are now bare lives since the regulation, management and control of the bodies and lives became the very target of politics, as Judith Butler criticizes him in her article “Indefinite Detention” Agamben overlooks the actual fact that the lives which counted as bare lives are not usually docile and ‘normalized’ populations but ‘specifically’ poor populations, homosexuals, women, blacks, Arabs, Afghans etc., who are considered as the deviations, the inferior, abnormal and pathological parts of the society. This means that the exercise of sovereignty is not completely arbitrary or indistinct; on the contrary, it is overdetermined by the exercise of certain norms as well as by regulations according to certain calculations regarding ‘the normal’.
While neglecting a historically specific analysis concerning the formation of the racialized, economized, sexualized and genderized discourse of the exception, Agamben does not focus in detail on the specific differences as well as interactions between the mechanisms of the modern disciplinary power and sovereignty.

In his lectures collected under the title “Society Must Be Defended”, Michel Foucault introduces ‘State racism’ as a significant mechanism of the exercise of such modern regimes of power. Here, Foucault describes the racist discourse -and especially the State racism- as the modern mechanism of exclusion which is exercised through the collaboration of both the bio-power over life that aims to protect health, well being and survival of the society/population and sovereign power over death that seeks to eliminate the deviants and abnormals that threaten health, well-being and survival of the society/population.

In Foucault’s words, what gives the modern power its specificity is “a racism bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use the elimination of races and the purification of the race to exercise its sovereign power” Thus, Foucault elaborates the specific ways in which the decision regarding the state of exception, namely who will be converted into a killable body, is taken. In this sense, State racism seeks to reproduce and maintain the normalized populations and obedient subjects through simultaneous reproduction and exclusion of the definite others, namely the deviant, pathologic, inferior and ‘dangerous’ individuals. Racism is the mechanism which controls what must live and what must die. Racist discourse categorizes populations in a hierarchical order which discriminates between the healthy/docile and the unhealthy/dangerous.

At this point, I argue that the Kurds in Turkey are produced as an anomaly and thus exluded by the racism of the Turkish state. Here, it is also crucial to indicate that the modern racism that Foucault talks about here is not marked by racial antagonisms; it is not a struggle between two races anymore. Rather, modern racism seeks to eleminate the degenerations (deformations, mutations etc.) within the same race. Thus, modern racism appears as a biological relationship within the race according to which “the more inferior races die out and the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole”

Nowadays, in Turkey through referring to the understanding of racism as a struggle between two races it is usually argued that the Turkish–Kurdish clash has begun in 1923 and persisted since the very foundation of the Turkish Republic that never recognized Kurds officially as an ethnic minority. Liberal scholars such as Baskin Oran, Caglar Keyder and Resat Kasaba criticize the Kemalist and secularist doctrine of the Turkish state as “a patriarchal and antidemocratic imposition from above that has negated the historical and cultural experience of the people in Turkey”. However, such studies neglect not only the agency and resistance of the oppressed populations against the Kemalist regime but also the historical formation and subsequently changing connotations of the ‘cultural experience’, ethnic and religious identities of the people in Turkey in accordance with the transformations in the historical and political context. Thus, these liberal approaches produce the assumption that the Kurdish or the Turkish identity implies an essential, coherent, single cultural group. This statement that is based on the claim that there is an essential ethnic or racial category of the Kurds (and the Turks) as such, assumes a continous struggle between these two races over the same geography. However, in fact, until 1980s the definition of Kurdishness as a category of racial and political identity remained ambiguous. To be sure, there was a certain historical trajectory of the struggles for the recognition of the rights, languages and cultures of the Kurds, but the division between the Turks and the Kurds were usually not considered in terms of a conflict between two races or a degeneration of the dominant race by the inferiors. Moreover, as the sociologist Mesut Yegen argues, until 1980s the social and political problems attributed to the eastern and southeastern Turkey was usually considered by the Turkish state as problems derived from ‘economic underdevelopment’, ‘religious fundamentalism’, ‘manipulation of foreign states’, ‘banditry’ or ‘traditional order of tribalism.’

However, right after the military coup in 1980 one witnessed the intensification and diffusion of the racist discourse throughout the country. The military coup harshly suppressed the Turkish left and introduced the conservative Turkish-Islamic synthesis as the new norm of the Turkish identity. As a response to the intense state violence and oppression in the early 80s the armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state has begun. From that time on Kurds were produced by the normalizing discourse of the state continuously as the deviants and pathological parts of the society, namely as the terrorists. Thus, the fight of the Turkish army against the PKK was introduced officially as a fight for “cleaning the mountains from the beasts.” According to the rhetoric of the Turkish military commanders of 1990s, there was no PKK but ‘the separatist organization’, no guerillas but the ‘terrorists’, no dead bodies of rebels but ‘carcarsses’, and no war but a ‘low-intensified conflict’. This means that for the Turkish commanders what is going on is not a war at all, and therefore there is no possibility for peace as well, since the ultimate aim of the fight is the elemination of all terrorists/deviants. All of these statements indicate that this conflict is considered by the Turkish state as a fight within the same race that aims the elimination of the deviants for the sake of the defense and purification of the society. Thus, with the beginning of the armed clash in 1984, Kurdishness and terrorism were produced together as associated categories of deviance. And the elimination of this deviance has become the main justification of the State racism and the state violence in Turkey after 1984.

At the same time, namely beginning from the 1980s the Kurdish movement that is composed of the PKK, the pro-Kurdish political party and the pro-Kurdish civil and human rights associations has produced a new past and subsequently a new future imagination for the Kurdish ethnic and political identity. Here I want to emphasize that there is a particular history of the formation, reformation and transformation of the Kurdish political identity as a response to a history of the changing definitions concerning “the norms, security priorities as well as enemies of the state.” With the rise of the Kurdish movement various past uprisings against the Turkish state including the well-known Sheikh Said uprising in late 1920s was appropriated as ‘Kurdish uprisings’, and the PKK declared that its resistance is the 29th uprising of the Kurds against the Turkish Republic during its history. Thus, the formation, popularization and consolidation of the PKK after its first guerilla attacks and massive demonstrations in major southeastern towns and cities of Turkey after 1980s designate a significant moment, when the new political and ethnic identity of the modern Kurd came up as the most dangeorus enemy (or as the “so-called citizens”) of the Turkish state. Whereas the PKK at a certain extent formed and created the particular secular, leftist and progressive Kurdish political identity, it made also visible the modern mechanisms of racism and exclusions in Turkey. These exclusions are not based only on ethnicity but also class. And in that sense, the PKK is not only the movement of the Kurds but also the poor Kurds. That is to say, first there is not one single but multiple identity formations that are attached to Kurdishness, and second one cannot ignore the social and economical base of the ‘new’ Kurdish movement. However, many historical and anthropological studies about the Kurdish issue today either lacks an analysis of the historical formation of the Kurdish identity, and therefore, reproduce the assumption that the Kurds are an essential, single and eternal cultural group or ignore the significance of class and poverty and intend to explain the situation just through the concept of ethnicity. At this point, I claim that the formation of a politically informed and active Kurdish identity as the major enemy of the Turkish state is a relatively new phenomena that coincides with the leadership (‘agency’ and ‘interpellation’) and popularization of the political organization, namely the PKK, in the region. One should also note that the popularization of the Kurdish movement did not only create a new politically active Kurdish identity, but it also shaped the definition and the norm of Turkishness as well as the understanding of the security of the Turkish state. The redefinition of the Turkish identity and nation gave rise to the popularization of the ultra-nationalist ideologies. As a result, the ultra-nationalist National Movement Party (MHP) that got at most 5% of the votes in the former elections since 1970s, got for the first time 18% of the votes in the general elections in 1999 and became part of the coalition government.

It is also significant to emphasize the fact that the armed conflict has produced a division between the ‘old Kurds’ and the ‘new Kurds’ in the discourse of the Turkish populations in the West who witnessed a mass migration of the Kurds to their cities in late 80s and early 90s. To be sure, there were Kurdish populations in the Western metropolitan cities of Turkey who came there long before 1980s. Althouth linguistic differences between Kurdish and Turkish populations occasionally marked a separation between these populations, most of the ‘old Kurds’ spoke Turkish in the public and thus usually these ‘old Kurdish’ populations were considered integral parts of the cities. Yet, especially after 1990s, when massive migrations of the Kurds from the east to the west of the country took place because of the forced migration of the Kurds by the Turkish army, things began to change. The local populations in the Western cities of Turkey, who read and watched the conflicts in the eastern and southestern provinces through the lenses of the pro-state Turkish media, began to associate the new-comers of the Kurds with terrorism. Thus, even some of the ‘old Kurds’ who were settled in the western cities felt the need to separate themselves from the ‘new Kurds’, since the ‘new Kurds’ were identified as ‘potential terrorists’ and thus proclaimed by the local Turkish populations as ‘persona non grata’ (unwelcome people).

Especially after 1991 and 1992, when the armed conflict and therefore the losses of the people from both sides were at its peak and also when the ‘new Kurds’ in the western Turkey began to attend demonstrations to protest the violence of the Turkish state in the east, indicidents such as attempts of lynching demonstrators (in Konya), burning of Kurdish houses (in Adana), forcing the Kurds to leave the city (in Bayramic/Canakkale) took place. From that time on such kind of incidents were spread all around the country. Yet, in each event, local Turkish populations argue that “they have no problems with the Kurds, but they are definitely against terrorism.”

The novel production of the division between the old and the new Kurd shows that the formation of Kurdishness as an ethnic and political identity coincided with the beginning of the armed conflict in the region. And this Kurdishness was produced as an identity category that was always associated with terrorism and violence.

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 who identified themselves as Kurds were the deviants with false-consciousness. Maybe they were inveigled by some foreign forces, they nevertheless appeared as pathologies in the societal body, namely as terrorists. They were deemed as security threats for the future survival of the society and therefore, they should be eliminated by force. Through such discourses, laws and techniques, Kurds are constantly reproduced as killable bodies for the sake of the well-being, health and integrity of the Turkish society in general.

The Transformation of the Political Sphere in the Turkish Kurdistan And The Treshold in the Kurdish ‘Problem’
To be sure, since the late 1990s Turkey has experienced major political transformations. On the one hand, the PKK has changed its political objective. It no more aims to establish or destroy state power but to achieve the democratization of state and society by resolving national, social and gender contradiction. On the other hand, the liberal Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) government recently introduced proposals for a democratic opening in Turkey that seek to solve the Kurdish question and the Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan used statements such as the ‘Kurdish originated citizens of Turkey’ or ‘Kurdishness as a sub-identity’ in order to indicate the Kurdish citizens of Turkey. These conditions allowed the multiplication of the demands of Kurdish people as well as the multiplication of the considerations of the problem by the Turkish public opinion.

However, the struggle to produce and to eleminate the distinction between the “Kurdish-speaking citizens on the streets” and the “Kurdish terrorists on the mountains” has persisted. While the Kurdish movement attempts to form the Kurdish political identity through the collapse of this distinction, the Turkish state persistently operates in the zone of indistinction between the citizen and the terrorist in that it exercises its sovereignty “on account of the security of the population in the region”. Today, members of the liberal AKP government continue to reproduce a rhetorical separation between the ‘civilian southeastern citizens in the streets’ and ‘the terrorists on the mountains’. Some section of the Turkish liberal civil society also took over this separation . As I said before, 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 the region. Morever, this distinction also opened a new space for governmental interventions under the title of “amnesty for and reinstatement of the terrorists into the society who did not commit a crime against the state” as well as psychological and social rehabilitation of the internally displaced Kurds and the reintegration of them as the members of national community. Thus, the distinction between ‘the civilian Kurd’ and ‘the terrorist Kurd’ still continue to produce the Kurds as the source of the problem that has to be rehabilitated. Such distinction serves only to subject the Kurds in Turkey to the normalizing discourse of the Turkish state. It seems that, unless this threshold in the Kurdish question concerning the civilian – terrorist distinction is overcome, any proposal for a democratic opening and reconciliation in Turkey will remain useless.