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.
(more…)

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” .
(more…)

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.
(more…)

“Analar milyonlarca Mehmetçik doğurabilir ama bir Skorsky helikopter doğuramaz…”
“Turkish mothers can give birth to millions of Mehmetciks (Turkish soldiers), yet they cannot give birth to a Skorsky helicopter…”
(A Turkish military commander’s response to his injured soldiers, who asked for a Skorsky helicopter to carry them immediately to the hospital)

Introduction:
In this paper I aim to analyze the ways in which the sovereign-image of the Turkish state is formed. My basic question is: Why in Turkey the survival of the state (‘devletin bekaasi’) is always considered as more important than the survival of the citizens when there is a conflict between their interests? Furthermore, what are the conditions of possibility that allow Turkish state officials to express this fact publicly as the words of the Turkish general quoted above bear witness?
To be sure, one can rightly argue that in many other countries, too, the survival of the state cannot be risked because of individual citizens’ interests that conflict with the interests of the state. Yet, it is unusual to hear this statement explicitly from the officials of governments and armies where the public image of the government appears as the protector of its own population. Thus, in such countries it is expected that the government should be even prepared to sacrifice itself for the sake of the well being, security and survival of the population. For instance, in France, in July 2008, when it was realized that during a military exercise 17 civilians were injured by mistake because of the use of real bullets instead of fake ones, the chief of the general staff of France, General Bruno Cuche declared his resignation, and the resignation was confirmed immediately by the President of France, Nicholas Sarkozy . As a more recent example, on December 6, 2008, when a 16 year old anarchist was shot to dead by the Greek police, the Greek government declared a public apology, the Ministry of Interior decided to resign though his resignation was not approved by the Prime Minister. The two police officers who were claimed to be responsible for the death of the young anarchist were dismissed from the police department and started to be tried. When demonstrations against the government began the Greek Prime Minister stated: “Democracies aim to protect their people, and not to kill them. What the police did is an individual but a shameful act. Therefore, I understand the protests of the people.”
To be sure, both the resignation of the French chief of the general staff and the statement of the Greek Prime Minister reflects an understanding of a liberal democratic government, whose target is the survival, security, and well-being of both each member and all the population of the nation. Such kind of a power regime that takes care of the health, security, welfare and efficiency of the population is defined by Michel Foucault as bio-power or governmentality. For him, what is distinctive of bio-power/governmentality is its aim to secure the whole population. Foucault traces the roots of such kind of power regime in the western tradition of pastorship and in the image of the shepherd-king, who sacrifices himself for the sake of the survival and well-being of his flock. Similar to the image of the shepherd-king of ancient times, for Foucault, modern liberal western state appears as a mechanism of governmental management that aims to maximize the common benefits and improve the conditions of life and the possibility of the survival of the general population. According to this formulation population is the primary target of bio-politics; and government is just the institutionalized form/effect of the management of this population. Foucault claims that bio-power designates the dominant mode of power in contemporary West, and nowadays we are witnessing the progressive ‘governmentalization’ of the power relations.
However, the situation in Turkey is different.
(more…)

The Paper Presented in the American Anthropological Association’s Annual Meeting in 2008 in San Francisco.

1 - The Power of Death over Life
1.1 - The Life of Ikbal Yasar’s Dead Body
On 22nd of March, 2008, Ikbal Yasar, a 20 year old Kurdish man was killed by the Turkish police in Yuksekova , a Kurdish populated town in the southeast corner of Turkey on the border of Iran and Iraq. 22nd of March was the day when most of the Kurds in Turkey were celebrating Newroz that is the Kurdish New Year. Yet, since celebrating Newroz in many eastern and southeastern Kurdish populated provinces of Turkey was banned by the Turkish state, Newroz celebrations usually transformed into Kurdish people’s protest of and resistance to the Turkish state. Ikbal Yasar was shot to dead by the police during such a demonstration. A day after, at the midnight of 23rd of March at 2am, the body of Ikbal Yasar was buried hurriedly in a cemetery close to the government offices in the town. The immediate burial of Yasar was ordered by the governor of the town and the chief officer of the police. There was no funeral prayer. The burial of someone at midnight indeed violates the customary code of funeral in Islam. Nevertheless, Ikbal Yasar, whose official ID given by the Turkish State showed that he was a male human being, a believer of Islam and a citizen of Turkey when he was alive, was buried as if he was nothing but a residue of some flesh.
This treatment of Ikbal Yasar’s dead body is just an example within lots of stories about the humiliation and distortion of dead bodies of Kurdish demonstrators or guerillas during the civil war in Turkey’s eastern and southeastern provinces which started in 1984 and still continues today.
(more…)

in the middle of the street, dusty girls played a game. Mumtaz listened to their folk song:
“Open the gate, toll keeper, toll keeper
How much will you cough up to pass on through?”
The girls were hale and hearty, but their clothes were in tatters. In a neighborhood where Hekimoglu Ali Pasha’s manor stood at one time, these homes, which were the remnants of life, these poor clothes, and this song, brought strange thoughts to mind. It is certain that Nuran had played the same game in her childhood. Before that, her mother and before that the mother of her mother sang the same ballad and played the same game. This ballad is what has to continue… Everything can change; even we can change everything by our own will. Yet, what will not change and what gives a shape to life is that on which our own mark appears.
(Huzur, 20-21)

To love Debussy, to love Wagner, and to live the song in Mahur : This is our fate.
(Huzur, 140)

1) Introduction-Intentions:
What is the role of narratives of continuity as well of disjuncture in the formation of modern subjectivities? How is the loss of the past as well as anxiety towards the future perceived, understood and narrativized by modern subjects? Why does our lost and forgotten past appear as an object of desire as well as a source of frustration? Are the ghosts of the past still haunting us?
Throughout this essay I will try to answer these questions while critically analyzing one of the prominent concerns of the modern Turkish literature, namely the attempt to distinguish the ‘original’ Turkish work of art through the search for the ‘true essence’ of the modern Turkish subject. While pursuing this question I will especially focus on Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s novel Huzur (Peace of Mind), which was written and published in 1949. According to many literary critics the novel Huzur is dedicated to explore the origins and the essence of Turkish subjects and the uniqueness of the Turkish novel as well as the source of the internal order and the permanent state of peace of mind. However, the narrative of the novel is significant not because of what it seeks to find out but what it fails to find out. The long story of Huzur is briefly about the loss of ‘peace of mind’ while compulsively pursuing peace of mind and a balance in life.
Tanpinar, in his essay ‘Bizde Roman’ (‘Our Novel’), asks the question “Why don’t we have a novel that is specifically ours?” His answer to this question reflects evidently his main concerns as a man of literature of that period: “In order to create a literature organically ours, we have to go back to us ourselves, go back to our own past, and go back to our own cultural wealth” (Tanpinar, 1936: 90). Tanpinar’s aspiration is the return to the ‘realities proper to the Turkish’, which for him were ignored and erased by the westernizing elites of the newly formed Turkish Republic. Thus, he argues, we can find out the continuity in the history of Turkey. The search for the authentic Turkish self, or as some others call the search for ‘the original Turkish spirit’, is the main point of departure in Tanpinar’s novels.
(more…)

Two days ago, the same day we discussed violence, the ineffable Condoleezza Rice, a US official, declared that what was happening in Gaza was the Palestinians’ fault, due to their violent nature.

The underground rivers that crisscross the world can change their geography, but they sing the same song.

And the one we hear now is one of war and pain.

Not far from here, in a place called Gaza, in Palestine, in the Middle East, right here next to us, the Israeli government’s heavily trained and armed military continues its march of death and destruction.

The steps it has taken are those of a classic military war of conquest: first an intense mass bombing in order to destroy “strategic” military points (that’s how the military manuals put it) and to “soften” the resistance’s reinforcements; next a fierce control over information: everything that is heard and seen “in the outside world,” that is, outside the theater of operations, must be selected with military criteria; now intense artillery fire against the enemy infantry to protect the advance of troop to new positions; then there will be a siege to weaken the enemy garrison; then the assault that conquers the position and annihilates the enemy, then the “cleaning out” of the probable “nests of resistance.”

The military manual of modern war, with a few variations and additions, is being followed step-by-step by the invading military forces.

We don’t know a lot about this, and there are surely specialists in the so-called “conflict in the Middle East,” but from this corner we have something to say: According to the news photos, the “strategic” points destroyed by the Israeli government’s air force are houses, shacks, civilian buildings. We haven’t seen a single bunker, nor a barracks, nor a military airport, nor cannons, amongst the rubble. So–and please excuse our ignorance–we think that either the planes’ guns have bad aim, or in Gaza such “strategic” military points don’t exist.
(more…)

by Saul Newman

Max Stirner’s impact on contemporary political theory is often neglected. However in Stirner’s political thinking there can be found a surprising convergence with poststructuralist theory, particularly with regard to the function of power. Andrew Koch, for instance, sees Stirner as a thinker who transcends the Hegelian tradition he is usually placed in, arguing that his work is a precursor poststructuralist ideas about the foundations of knowledge and truth (Koch 1997). Koch argues that Stirner’s individualistic challenge to the philosophical bases of the State goes beyond the limits of traditional Western philosophy, presenting a challenge to its transcendentalist epistemology. In light of this connection established by Koch between Stirner and poststructuralist epistemology, I shall look at Stirner’s convergence with a certain poststructuralist thinker, Gilles Deleuze, on the question of the State and political power. There are many important parallels between these two thinkers, and they may be viewed, in different ways, as anti-State, anti-authoritarian philosophers. I want to show the way in which Stirner’s critique of the State anticipates Deleuze’s poststructuralist rejection of State thought, and more importantly, the ways in which their anti-essentialist, post-humanist anarchism transcends and, thus, reflects upon, the limits of classical anarchism. The paper looks at the links between human essence, desire and power that form the bases of State authority. So while Koch focuses on Stirner’s rejection of the epistemological foundations of the State, the emphasis of this paper is on Stirner’s radical ontology – his unmasking of the subtle connections between humanism, desire and power. I will also argue that this critique of humanist power that both Stirner and Deleuze are engaged in can provide us with contemporary strategies of resistance to State domination.
It must be understood, however, that while there are important similarities between Stirner and Deleuze, there are also many differences, and, in many ways, it may seem an unusual approach to bring these two thinkers together. For instance, Stirner was, along with Marx, one of the Young Hegelians, whose work emerged as a supremely individualistic critique of German Idealism, particularly of the Feuerbachian and Hegelian kind. Deleuze, on the other hand, was a twentieth century philosopher who, along with Foucault and Derrida, is regarded as one of the chief ‘poststructuralist’ thinkers. While Deleuze’s work can also be seen as an attack on Hegelianism, it follows different and more diverse paths, from politics and psychoanalysis, to literature and film theory. Stirner is not generally regarded as a ‘poststructuralist’, and, apart from Koch’s groundbreaking article (Koch 1997) and Derrida’s work on Marx (Derrida 1994), he has received virtually no attention in the light of contemporary theory. However, and this is perhaps the problem with labels like ‘poststructuralism’, there are several crucial planes of convergence between these two thinkers – particularly in their critique of political domination and authority - that one can tease out, and which would be denied if one stuck to such labels. It is precisely in this rejection of the tyranny of ‘labels’, essential identities, abstractions and ‘fixed ideas’ - this attack on authoritarian concepts which limit thought - that Stirner and Deleuze achieve some sort of common ground. This is not to ignore the differences between them, but on the contrary, to show how these differences to resonate together in unpredictable and contingent ways to form, in Deleuze’s words, ‘planes of consistency’ from which new political concepts can be formed.
(more…)

The last article of Hrant Dink, Turkish-Armenian writer, that appeared on his newspaper Agos the day he was assassinated.
by Hrant Dink
Source: Agos Newspaper
January 19, 2007

In the beginning I was not concerned about the investigation initiated by Şişli Public Prosecutor under the pretext “insulting Turkish identity”.
This was not for the first time. I was familiar with a similar case from Urfa. I was being prosecuted since three years because of my statement at a conference in Urfa in 2002 where I said that “I was not Turk but an Armenian and a citizen of Turkey” and there was again the accusation of “insulting Turkish identity”. I was completely unaware of the trials, I was not interested at all. Some of my lawyer friends from Urfa were dealing with the case in my absence.
I was completely indifferent too when I gave my interrogation to Public Prosecutor in Şişli. In the end I was trusting to my article and my good will. If Public Prosecutor evaluated the whole of the series of my articles and not this single sentence which alone did not make any sense at all, then he would easily understand that I had not an intention of “insulting Turkish identity” and this comedy would end, I thought.
I was completely sure that after the interrogation I would be not be sued at all.
I was sure of myself
But to my surprise, the case came up in court.
Still I didn’t lose my optimism. So I even told to lawyer Kerinçsiz who accused me during a live Tv program that “he should not be so eager that I would not be punished due to this case and that in case of punishment I would leave the country.” I was sure of myself, I really did not have the will or intention to “insult the Turkish identity”. Everyone reading the whole of the series of my articles would understand this.
(more…)

Simon Tormey
April 2006

“To sleep perchance to dream, ay there’s the rub” (Hamlet)

I close my eyes and I dream of ‘revolution’. What do I see? The world turns black and white, though perhaps tinged with sepia. I see a white male, balding with a goatee beard haranguing an audience infused with enthusiasm for his message of class struggle, heroic deeds, new and optimistic visions of machines and men working in perfect harmony – a pain-free, alienation-free future. This world is an absolute or complete break from the present. It is a world where the pain and fear of our world, the hunger, the agony has disappeared. Those listening to the bald man try to imagine a world that is so radically different from the one they are in that when they think of how they are going to get there they describe this process as a ‘revolution’. Revolution is not reform – how could it be when what they want is so radically different to the world that exists? NO, it must be a revolution – a fast-spinning vortex of energy, desire, solidarity. They see some pain, but not as much as staying where they are. Some shots are fired, screams, guns, bombs, firing squads. The dream turns black.

I wake up. Did I dream all of this? Yes, I must have done. It must be a dream because it is no longer ‘real’ in some meaningful respect –or it must not be real in the part of the world I inhabit. In this world, my world, those things that we thought of as components of the revolutionary dream seem to have shrivelled to the point of irrelevance. Modernist dreams of impressive new world orders have died in my world, withered on the vine of disappointments, despondency, dictatorships. As Lyotard puts it, we are no longer ‘believers’ in revolution. We have become Pagans – we live for today, for the corporeal, the immediate, the sensual, the personal.

And yet (contra Lyotard) we are angry, and getting angrier – at war, at imperialism, at poverty, at environmental degradation, at waste, at oppression, at the abuse of our fellow men and women. History has not come to an end. We still care; but we do not care for ‘revolution’. ‘We scream’, as John Holloway aptly puts it, but where do the resources to turn the scream into the kind of action that will relieve our agony come from? How do we turn the scream into something that overturns that which makes us scream? This is the question of ‘revolution’ today.
(more…)