The Extended Version of the Paper Presented in the American Anthropological Association’s Annual Meeting in November 2010, New Orleans

After 25 years long armed conflict between the Kurdish guerilla, the PKK and the Turkish army in the southeastern provinces of Turkey, in 2008 the liberal Islamic Justice and Development Party (the AKP) government introduced the first concrete governmental proposal in Turkey to solve the Kurdish question. The liberal proposals for the solution of the Kurdish question were named by the AKP government as the “democratic opening process”. The “democratic opening process” intends to solve the Kurdish question through the means of the cultural recognition and economic development. On January 1st 2009 as the first step of the “democratic opening process” the first official Kurdish TV channel in Turkey namely the “the TRT Ses (The Turkish Radio and Television Six”) started to broadcast. After the years long bloody conflict that left behind 40.000 deaths and about 3 million internally displaced people, and after the years long official denial of the Kurdish presence in Turkey, the recognition of the Kurdish culture through the introduction of an official TV channel that broadcasts in Kurdish appeared at the first glance as a revolutionary step in the Turkish political history.

However, just like any other liberal democratic “opening” for the cultural recognition and inclusion, the democratic opening process of the AKP government, too, had its limits: About one month after the first official Kurdish TV started to broadcast, the leader of the pro-Kurdish party at that time, Ahmet Turk, disclosed the limits of the “democratic opening” through his speech on the international mother language day, February 21st, 2009. When Ahmet Turk started to speak in the parliament in his mother language, namely in Kurdish, the live broadcast of the official television of the parliament was immediately cut, and an official warning was read: “The constitution and the law on political parties prohibit the usage of any language other than Turkish in the parliament. Therefore we had to cut the live broadcast and we apologize for this!” Following this incident the parliament speaker of that time and a former member of the AKP, Koksal Toptan released a statement declaring that “in the parliament the use of any language except Turkish means an open violation of the constitution.”

Here, the hypocrisy of the AKP government is based on a clear separation between the cultural and the political dimensions of the Kurdish problem. According to the new liberal democratic opening policy of the AKP, one can legally sing in Kurdish or talk about “cultural” issues in Kurdish only in the official Kurdish TV channel, but it is illegal to speak in Kurdish to express “political” demands in the parliament.

Now, in the rest of this paper I primarily want to focus on the cultivation of the intellectual background that allowed the AKP government to easily adopt this liberal solution for the Kurdish question that is based on the separation of the cultural demands of the Kurds from the political ones. To do that, I will analyze the rise of political liberalism in the intellectual and academic circles of Turkey. Here, I will particularly concentrate on the development of the liberal studies on the question of minorities, and try to disclose how the liberal scholar’s identification of the Kurds as a “cultural minority” created an ideological separation between “the cultural” and “the political” which hinders to understand the structural political and economic causes that reproduce the Kurdish question.

Recently there is a proliferation of the studies on the question concerning minorities in Turkey and of the researches that particularly focus on the Kurdish question. To be sure, the first and foremost reason of the current rise in the scholarly interest is the ongoing Kurdish political struggle that in the last 25 years clearly introduced the Kurdish question as an ethic problem.

However, during the years of the 1980s and 1990s, when the armed clash between the Turkish army and the Kurdish guerilla the PKK was at its peak, the scholarly interest in the Kurdish question was very rare due to the nationalist prejudices or due to the probable fear of the Turkish social scientists. In that period, the problem was usually defined through the language of warfare. Thus, there was little space for political negotiation. And even in this little space any attempt for political negotiation was undermined by the actors from both Turkish and Kurdish sites. Therefore, during the 1990s the Kurdish question was a taboo among the Turkish scholars.

By 1990s there were only some scholarly works on the Kurdish issue written by non-Turkish authors like those of David McDowall and Martin van Bruinessen which provided important historical insight concerning the development of the Kurdish problem. The only exceptional figure in the Turkish social sciences who dedicated all his life to the scholarly studies on the Kurdish question was Ismail Besikci. Beginning from the 1960s, when there was even no one single scholarly study on the question, he as a Turkish Marxist scholar developed academic interest in the Kurdish issue. Yet, after publishing his first book he was detained and put on trial for communist and anti-national propaganda where he was sentenced to 13 years imprisonment for violating the indivisibility of the Turkish nation. In prison Besikci continued to write. As a result he spent 17 years of his life in the Turkish prisons whereas 32 of 36 books of him were banned by the Turkish state. As the tragic example of Ismail Besikci clearly showed, by the year 1999, a scholarly interest in the Kurdish question from within Turkey necessitated a total sacrifice of one’s life.

However, things started to change beginning from 1999 when the leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan was captured in Kenya by the Turkish intelligence service. Following Ocalan’s capture, the PKK forces withdrew to Northern Iraq and declared a unilateral ceasefire which lasted until 2004. In the same year of Ocalan’s capture, namely in 1999, HADEP, the political party of the Kurdish movement of that period, won for the first time control of the 37 municipalities in southeastern and eastern Turkey, including major cities such as Diyarbakir, Batman and Siirt. Moreover, the election of the liberal Islamic AKP in 2002 and the consequent flourishing of the liberal, Islamic and pro-Kurdish NGOs in Turkey have changed radically the political approach towards the Kurdish question. These conditions allowed the multiplication of the demands of Kurdish people as well as considerations of the problem by the Turkish intellectuals and NGOs.

In this period several researches were conducted on the Kurdish question, including studies on the transformation of the state discourse on the Kurdish question (Yegen 1999, 2006), on the forced migration of the Kurds (Ayata and Yukseker 2005, Goc-Der 2001; TESEV 2006, 2008), on the sufferings of the displaced Kurdish women (Ustundag 2004, 2005), and on the Kurdish nationalism (van Bruinessen 2000, Jwadieh 2006).

These were also the years when the term “minorities” was introduced by the liberal scholars as a political problem. In 2004 a liberal political scientist, Baskin Oran published the first comprehensive book on the question of minorities in Turkey, where he discussed the issue on the basis of international law (Oran Türkiye’de Azınlıklar: Kavramlar, Teori, Lozan, Iç Mevzuat, Içtihat, Uygulama [Minorities in Turkey: Concepts, Theory, Lausanne Treaty, Domestic Legislation, Case Law, Application] 2004). According to the Lausanne Treaty signed in 1924 that internationally recognized the foundation of the Turkish Republic, only the remaining Armenians, Greeks and Jews, namely the non-Muslims, were officially recognized as ‘the minorities’, whereas the Muslim groups such as the Kurds, Circassians, Bosnians and Albanians were considered as the organic parts of the nation. In his study Baskin Oran criticized Turkish state’s official understanding about the ‘minorities’ that was limited to the non-Muslim groups and thus, Oran stated that ethnically and religiously diverse groups such as the Kurds and the Alevis, too, should be recognized as ‘minorities’ in Turkey. Supported with examples from international law and liberal principles Oran’s argument was introduced as a challenge against the official discourse of the Turkish state that historically denied the presence of diverse ethnic or religious identities.

Oran’s approach to the minorities coincides with the rise of the emerging Turkish liberal intelligentsia of the time who popularly declared the “the failure of the Turkish state’s Kemalist modernization project in including religious and ethnic diversities and in recognizing historical and cultural experiences and the realities of people living in Turkey.” By posting notions of lost authentic ‘indigeneity’ the Turkish liberal scholars of late 90s and early 2000s started to reclaim the rights of the religious and ethnic “minorities” whose presence were long denied by the Turkish state.

However, in reality the cultural and historical experience of people living in Turkey is much more complex than the liberal stories about the so-called lost authentic indegeneity of the minorities. At this point it is crucial to note that, the Kurdish political movement, which is composed of the PKK, the pro-Kurdish political party, and the pro-Kurdish NGOs, has never ever identified the Kurds as a “minority” or a “sub-identity” in the liberal sense of the word. Moreover, in his several speeches the former leader of the Kurdish political party Ahmet Turk clearly declared that the Kurds in Turkey are not minorities and the Kurdish political movement does not struggle for having minority rights. Rather, the Kurdish political movement claims that the Kurds should be considered constitutionally as the “co-founders” of the Turkish Republic together with the Turks. Moreover, the Kurdish political movement defines its political objective as the recognition of the Kurdish language as the second official language of education and struggle for the political autonomy and self-governance in the regions where the Kurds are the majority (Turkiye Baris Meclisi -The Peace Parliament of Turkey- 2007). Thus, from the very beginning on the Kurdish political movement have risen demands concerning political sovereignty and power sharing that were not limited to the liberal demands concerning the recognition of the cultural and legal rights of the Kurds.

In this sense, if there is a rising popularity of the question concerning the cultural rights of the minorities in Turkey, one has to note that this rising interest is particularly an obsession of the liberal scholars, who insist on defining the Kurds as “a minority” despite the objection of the Kurds themselves.

One of the leading figures of the liberal academicians, Caglar Keyder, describes the liberal ideal as “a new order that should be based on civic, nonethnic, and nonpopulist citizenship, in which the state will recognize basic civil rights of individuals and in which political liberalism will be accepted and internalized by the masses as the guiding principle” (Keyder 1997: 46-47). Thus, according to Keyder the Islamic movement has to be transformed into a genuinely Islamic-democratic political party and ethnic separatism should be converted into a democratic struggle for the recognition of the ethnic rights under the umbrella of the liberal, pluralist, democratic state.

That is to say, according to the liberal utopia, any different ethnic, religious and ideological groups such as the Kurds, the Alevis, the Islamists or the Kemalist can be considered as a minority as long as they “internalize” the principles of liberal democracy and express their difference through the language of the “rights” (and not through the language of political sovereignty).

It is clear that, at this point, Keyder introduces a purely liberal imagination of modernization and, very ironically he -without hesitation- claims to represent the best political option for the common good of the people, just like a Kemalist state-elite would do. To be sure, Keyder’s statements are a salient example of “intellectual authoritarianism”. Such intellectual authoritarianism and an elitist attitude are very common among both the Kemalist and anti-Kemalist liberal social scientists in Turkey who repeatedly proposed to “change people’s mentalities” to make them internalize modern principles of proper citizenship. The problematic of representing people’s needs and desires by the intellectual is never widely questioned in the Turkish context. Instead, in Turkey, the intellectual, either liberal or Kemalist is usually considered as the one who introduces the modern political model for the masses and as a vanguard who leads the people in the process of modernization.

At this point, sociologist Meltem Ahiska carefully discloses the parallels between the modernization conception of the Kemalist-elites and the anti-Kemalist liberals who are “the mirror image of each other”. In the political imagination of the Kemalist ideology that dominated Turkish official political discourse and institutions until recently Turkish Republic’s founder Mustafa Kemal’s ideas and principles concerning the Turkish nationalism are considered as a transcendental discourse outside and above the political sphere of competing ideologies. Today, in a similar vein, in the political imagination of contemporary Turkish liberals, the principles of the liberal rights and multiculturalism are considered as a transcendental discourse outside and above the political sphere of competing ideologies, ethnicities and religiosities.

Yet, in its application the liberal ideology presupposes not a transcendental but a very particular political model: For the liberal scholars any ethnically, religiously or ideologically diverse group can be considered as a “minority” only under the auspices of the liberal multicultural state. As Elizabeth 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” (Povinelli 1998).

Thus, the attempt to ‘minoritize’ the Kurds is an ideological imposition of the liberals from-above who reduce the Kurdish political struggle for sovereignty and self-government to a rights-based politics of cultural recognition.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, liberal scholar’s attempt to subordinate the Kurds as a cultural minority to a liberalized version of the Turkish national identity is highly compatible with the recent policies of the AKP government that intends to separate Kurdish political demands from the Kurdish cultural identity and thus, seek to solve the Kurdish question through compensating the sufferings and losses of the Kurds with the recognition of the cultural minority rights.

Thus, unlike the former uncompromising approach of the Turkish state to the Kurdish question that was based on the absolute denial of the Kurdish presence and political demands, the policy of the AKP government together with a liberal intelligentsia aim to divide the Kurdish movement from inside by recognizing the presence of the Kurdish culture but not the Kurdish political demands.

As a result, the distinction between the “Kurdish-speaking citizens on the streets” and the “Kurdish terrorists on the mountains” has persisted, even though in reality 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”. While the Kurdish political movement attempts to form the Kurdish political identity through the collapse of this distinction, the liberal AKP government 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” and continues its military interventions in the Kurdish region. Moreover, this distinction also opened a new space for interventions by the government and by the liberal NGOs entitled “the reinstatement of the terrorists into the society”. Such NGOs also propose programs for the psychological and social “rehabilitation” of the internally displaced Kurds and the “reintegration” of them as the members of national community.

At this point I want to take your attention to the selective use of the words by the liberal scholars to identify and cure the problem: For the Turkish liberals as well as for the AKP government the Kurds in opposition should be “reinstated, rehabilitated and reintegrated” to the society. Yet, who said that the Kurds were disintegrated from the society? In Turkey the supporters of the Kurdish political movement are never ever disintegrated from the political sphere in Turkey, and the Kurdish uprising including the armed struggle of the Kurdish militia is part of the realities of Turkey for the last 30 years. The Kurds are always already integral parts of the society and politics of Turkey. Here, what bother the liberal scholars and the AKP government is however the fact that the oppositional Kurds are not “integrated” to their particular “imagined” liberal society that is based on the principle of cultural recognition of the Kurds without letting them share power in the government. So, here the liberal intellectual and governmental attempt for the reintegration and rehabilitation of the supporters of the Kurdish political movement is indeed an attempt for the normalization of the Kurdish question through the minoritization of the Kurds and the subordination of the Kurdish opposition to the order of the monocultural nation-state.

On the other hand, the attempt for the minoritization of the Kurds by the proposals of the liberals and by the current policies of the AKP government also reproduce the marginalization and criminalization of the ongoing political struggles of the Kurds for self-government and power sharing and make the Kurds’ past injuries invisible. For instance in one of the most comprehensive studies on the Kurdish question and on the problems of the 3 million internally displacement Kurds in Turkey the scholars who prepared a report for the liberal think tank Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation TESEV, explicitly mentioned that “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.” As it is clearly seen here through introducing such statements the liberal writers who claim to be oppositional and anti-government just reproduce Turkish state’s definition concerning the crime and the criminal by confirming the state’s identification of various Kurdish organizations as illegal terrorist groups. First and foremost one should indicate that during the armed clash between the Kurdish guerilla and the Turkish army in the southeast of Turkey, millions of the Kurds were forced by the Turkish military to leave their villages because of their alleged cooperation with the PKK-guerilla. Thus, about 2.000 villages were evacuated and burned because of the villager’s alleged criminal status. It is very ironic that in a study that claims to defend the legal and cultural rights of the internally displaced Kurds, the liberal scholars describe the PKK as a criminal organization which subsequently makes the people, who collaborated with the PKK, appear as criminals, too. This was exactly the same claim that the Turkish state used to justify the forced migration.

So, it is clear that, just like the liberal understanding of cultural rights, the liberal approach to the legality and legal rights, too, is limited to the official unitary understanding and constitution of the nation-state. As a result, while confirming Turkish state’s definitions concerning legality and illegality, the liberals cannot propose a solution for the ongoing criminalization experienced by most of the internally displaced Kurdish people who are living today in the poor neighborhoods of the Western cities of Turkey and are still considered by the Turkish state as potential criminals and terrorists because of their alleged relation with the PKK in the past. Instead, just like the current government, the liberal scholars mobilize the distinction between the loyal/civilian Kurds and the criminal/terrorist Kurds to introduce the Kurdish people as the source of the problem and thus as the targets of the rehabilitation programs.

From 1980s on, the Kurds in Turkey were considered not citizens but security threats. To be sure, the main purpose of the liberal rights and cultural recognition approach concerning a solution for the Kurdish question is to develop policies in order to integrate the Kurdish population into the economy who were excluded from the economic relations since the start of the armed conflict. Thus, the AKP government and many liberals today just concentrate on the results of the Kurdish problem and intend only to secure the survival of the displaced Kurds in the metropolitan western cities as a cheap labor force, as potential consumers and as integral parts of the developing economy of Turkey. However, neither the government nor the liberal intelligentsia in Turkey focus on and intend to overcome the structural causes of the Kurdish question, they ignore the present and ongoing effects of the internally displaced people’s past damages, dispossessions and deprivations on the recent struggle of the Kurds for the survival in the city.

Nevertheless, the liberal approach of the intellectuals and the AKP government could not be successful so far in persuading all the Kurds to give up political demands for the sake of cultural recognition. The Kurdish political movement today seems even more careful in identifying the hypocrisy of the liberals and the AKP government as we saw in the case of the pro-Kurdish party leader’s intended Kurdish speech in the national parliament to disclose the limits of the AKP’s ‘democratic opening’ policies.

It seems that, unless the threshold in the Kurdish question concerning the distinction between “the cultural” and “the political” is overcome, any proposal for a democratic opening and reconciliation in Turkey will remain useless.

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