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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The university libraries that have our book includes Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, University of Chicago, Utah University and the University of Arizona.

Moreover, in Turkey our book can be found in the Library of the Turkish Parliament as well as in the Libraries of Bogazici University, Sabanci University, Koc University, Middle East Technical University, Harran University and Suleyman Demirel University.

Table of Contents:
- “Preface” / by K. Murat Guney
- “Power and Reality in Turkey” / by Meltem Ahiska
- “The Fear of Archive and the Black Notebook of Nizami Bey: History, Memory and Power in Turkey” / by Meltem Ahiska
- “The Gender of Europe: The Docile Virgin, The Absorbing Female, and The Conquering Son” / by Nurdan Gurbilek
- “Patterns of Behavior, Forms of Interpretation, and Inequality in a Istanbul Courthouse” / by Dicle Kogacioglu
- “The Youth, Population and Power in Turkey” / by Ferhunde Ozbay
- “Non-Governmental Organizations in Turkey: ‘Voluntarism’ in the Age of Modernity, Nationalism and Neo-Liberalism” / by Yasemin Ipek Can
- “Different Faces of Power and the Transformation of Alevi Identity” / by Ozlem Goner
- “Managing’ the Kurdish Question” / by Firat Bozcali
- “A New Hegemonic Battlefield: The Formation of the Official Kurdish TV, TRT6″ / by T. Balca Arda
- “Being Mothers of the Army: Mothers of Martyrs in Turkey” / by Esra Gedik
- “AKP (Justice and Development Party) and the ‘new’ Power in Turkey” / by K. Murat Guney

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.

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:

a) Sources in English

- A. Tamer Aker, Ayse Betul Celik, Dilek Kurban, Turgay Unalan, Deniz Yukseker, June 2006, Coming to Terms with Forced Migration: Post-Displacement Restitution of Citizenship Rights in Turkey, TESEV, Istanbul, www.tesev.org/eng

- A. Tamer Aker, Ayse Betul Celik, Dilek Kurban, Turgay Unalan, Deniz Yukseker, Confronting Forced Migration: The Construction of Citizenship in the Aftermath of Internal Displacement in Turkey, TESEV, Istanbul,

-Ayata, Bilgin, Yükseker Deniz, Spring 2005, A Belated Awekening: National and International Responses to the Internal Displacement of Kurds in Turkey, New Perspectives on Turkey, No:32, P:5-43

-Brown, Wendy, “Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights” in Left Legalism, Left Critique. edited by Wendy Brown and Janet Halley, 2002

-Brown, Wendy, “The Most We Can Hope For? Human Rights and The Politics of Fatalism”, in The South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3, Spring/Summer 2004

-Foucault, Michel, 1994, The Subject and Power, in Power, ed. by James Faubion and Paul Rabinow, The New Press

-Gambetti, Zeynep, Spring 2005, The Conflictual (Trans)formation of the Public Sphere in Urban Space: The Case of Turkey, New Perspectives on Turkey, No: 32

-Hartman, Saidiya, 1997, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Oxford University Press

-HUNEE (the Hacettepe University Population Research Institute), December 2006, Migration and Internally Displaced Population Survey in Turkey, http://www.hips.hacettepe.edu.tr/tgyona/tgyona_eng.htm

-Merry, Sally Engle, 2006, Human Rights and Gender Violence, University of Chicago Press

-Povinelli, Elizabeth A., 1998 The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship, in Critical Inquary 24 (Winter 1998)

-Povinelli, Elizabeth A., 2002, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism, University of Chicago Press.

-Povinelli, Elizabeth, June 2005, Without Shame: Australia, the United States and the “New” Cultural Unilateralism, The Australian Feminist Law Journal

-Scalbert, Clémence –Le Ray, Yücel and Marie, 2006 Knowledge, ideology and power. Deconstructing Kurdish Studies, European Journal of Turkish Studies, Thematic Issue No: 5

-United Nations Guiding Principles on Internally Displaced Persons, www.un.org & http://ochaonline.un.org/webpage.asp?Page=660&Lang=en

-Üstündag, Nazan, 2004 The Construction of Witnessing Voices and the Representation of Violence and Loss, Paper presented at the Symposium ‘The Stakes at Issue with Turkey`s Application for Membership of the European Union’ organised by the Kurdish Institute in Paris, Paris, October 2004

b) Sources in Turkish:

-Aker, A. Tamer; Celik, Ayse Betul; Kurban, Dilek; Unalan, Turgay; Yükseker, Deniz, June 2006, TESEV Report: “Zorunlu Göç ile Yüzlesmek: Türkiye’de Yerinden Edilme Sonrasi Vatandasligin İflasi”, http://tesev.org.tr

-Barut, Mehmet, 2001, Goc-Der Raporu, (Report of Migrant’s Association), Istanbul

-Cemal, Hasan, 2003, Kurtler (The Kurds), Dogan Kitap, İstanbul,

-Kurban, Dilek, and Aktan, Hamza, July 15, 2006, Interview with Dilek Kurban: Iki Ayri Dil Konusuluyor (Two Different Languages are Spoken), Birgun Newspaper

-Kurban, Dilek, January 7, 2007, Bir Vatandaslik Hakki Talebi (A Demand for Citizenship Right) Radikal 2 Newspaper

-Mutluer, Nil, 2008, Cinsiyet Halleri: Turkiye’de Toplumsal Cinsiyetin Kesisim Sinirlari (States of Gender: The Limits of Intersections of Gender in Turkey), Varlik Publishing House, Istanbul

- Turkiye Baris Meclisi –The Peace Parliament of Turkey-, July 2007, Turkiye Barisini Ariyor: Ya Gercek Demokrasi Ya Hic! (Turkey Is Searching For Its Peace: Either Real Democracy Or Nothing), Aram Publishing House, Istanbul

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.

When the French military commander signed his resignation and when all the riots against the government took place in Turkey’s neighbor country Greece, the public opinion in Turkey was watching the incidents with both a surprise and a fascination. In Turkey, a country that officially presents itself as a democracy just like France and Greece, it is unimaginable to hear an apology of a Turkish minister because of a mistake of the state or because of using extreme state violence. It is also unimaginable that a state official in Turkey says that people’s protest against the state is understandable. on December 10, 2008, just four days later after a young anarchist in Athens was killed by police and people of Greece started to organize massive demonstrations against the Greek state, in Istanbul, Turkey, a small group of young anarchists carrying the banner, “we are 16 year old, too” protested the violence of the Turkish police. The protestors expressed that just in the year of 2008, 9 people were shot to dead and 12 were injured by the Turkish police ‘by mistake’, 8 people died when they were under police custody, and 36 people died in the prisons, yet no public official declared an apology for these killings. Moreover, none of the police officers who were accused of killing civilians ‘by mistake’ were dismissed; they still continue their jobs as police officers.

A) Formation of the Sovereign-Image of the State in Turkey
To be sure, the government’s denial of being mistaken is not specific to 2008’s Turkey. On the contrary, this denial is just an effect of the formation of the sovereign-image of the Turkish State. I argue that, the sovereign-image of the Turkish State is based on the denial of any weakness (zaafiyet gostermeme), since the state assumes that any apparent weakness can put the survival of the state (devletin bekaasi) in danger. Thus, the Turkish state never apologizes and can never be mistaken, since this would mean a deficiency and a weakness in the sovereign-image of the state.

Here, by the sovereign-image of the state I mean the discursive and institutional formations that make the state be seen/perceived as sovereign, strong and independent enough in the eyes of both its own citizens and other countries especially the ones that are historically constructed as enemies or potential colonizers. To be sure, the perception of the state by its own citizens and by other states is directly related to how the state perceives, and thus, constitutes an image of the citizens and other states. Now, before discussing the Turkish state’s imagining of its own citizens, I firstly want to examine the ways in which the Turkish state constitute its sovereign-image in response to another image, namely the image of the West as both an idealized and a frustrated figure. To be sure, Turkish state’s imagining of its own citizen as a burden and obstacle in the race of modernization or as a potential enemy in the struggle for the defense of independence is strictly related to the state’s imagining of the West both as the ideal model of modernization that should be caught up and imitated through a fast and intensive development and as a threat of absorption/colonization that should be prevented through strengthening sovereignty and independence of the state. That is to say, a sort of Occidentalism, which designates a discursive formation developed in response to a constructed image of the West, plays a crucial role in the formation of Turkish identity and in determining relations between the state and its citizens as well as the state and the nation.

A.1.) Occidentalism in Turkey
It is Edward Said, who argues in his groundbreaking work Orientalism that “the Orient is neither an inert fact of nature nor essentially an idea”. On the contrary, Orientalism creates the European identity as against all ‘those’ non-Europeans, by drawing a strict boundary between East and West. However, despite his crucial contribution to the elaboration of the problem, Said does not consider the agency of non-Europeans in reproducing or resisting this Orientalist discourse. Moreover, Said, does not examine the role played by the image or fantasy concerning the West in the formation and maintenance of power relations in non-European contexts.

Now, regarding this gap in post-colonial theory, in order to understand the ways in which the sovereign-image of the Turkish state as well as Turkish state’s particular approach to its own citizens are formed, one should trace the roots of the Occidentalist discourse in the Turkish context.

The Occidentalist discourse began to be institutionalized as the motive of modernization since the Tanzimat reforms in Ottoman Empire in late 19th century and also became one of the dominant discourses in the formation of the Turkish Republic and in the invention of a Turkish nation. In this historical framework the hegemonic interventions of the Turkish state, bureaucrats, and military through the management of dividing spheres, regions, and people along the axis of East and West, tradition and modernity, backward and forward becomes possible and justifiable with a constant reference to an imagined West as an ideal model.
It is Meltem Ahiska, who first underlined the relation between Occidentalism and the formation of state power and national characteristics. She describes Occidentalism as a power regime according to which the sovereign power of the state as well the image of the new Turkish citizen are reproduced on the border between the desire and frustration, celebration and avoidance, convergence and divergence toward the image of the West. Ahiska defines Occidentalism as: “the conceptualization of the ways in which the West figures in the temporal/spatial imagining of modern Turkish national identity” . Thus, unlike the Orientalist discourse that aims to provide a coherent picture of the Orient as backward and inferior, the Occidentalist discourse is based on a contested image of the West that is both idealized and frustrated. According to Ahiska, “Occidentalism can be best understood as describing the set of practices and arrangements justified in and against the imagined idea of ‘the West’” (Ahiska 2003: 16) In this sense, sovereignty and independence of the Turkish state appears as a performance for the imagined Western gaze.

A.2.) A Paranoid State
Thus, in order not to be ‘seen’ as dependent to and open for any intervention of the ‘modern civilized world’, the Turkish state feels the need for denying any claim concerning its deficiency or impotency. To be sure, one can read these denials as an affirmation of the actual deficiency and impotence of the Turkish state against the West. However, indeed, the state’s rhetoric concerning the denial of any weakness aims not to persuade the West but to rule Turkish citizens. Thus, while producing the image of the West as a superior power that threatens sovereignty and independence of Turkey, the state also reproduces its sovereign-image as the only protector of its citizens against a potential absorption and colonization by the West.

In accordance with this rhetoric, the Turkish state believes in that any concession, even a very small and unimportant one such as a public apology for state’s failure, will be seen as a weakness, and thus, will cause a chain reaction that will result in the total destruction of the Turkish state. In addition to the anxiety concerning absorption by Western states, the frustration about being divided by internal and external powers, supports the insistence on a permanent denial of any weakness and mistake in order to survive. The historical roots of these frustrations can be traced back in the last decades of the 19th century, when the Ottoman Empire, identified as ‘the sick man of Europe’, was struggling with both the separatist uprisings in the Balkans that resulted in major territorial losses of the Empire and economic capitulations and privileges that were previously given to the West European powers and soon converted the Empire into a semi-colony. Now, today, according to the official narrative, Turkish independence is constantly threatened by a possible Western absorption just like the Ottoman period when the Ottoman State was captured economically by capitulations, and moreover, Turkish state permanently struggles with the threat of separation by the powers that intended to reanimate the treaty of Sevr, which was the treaty enforced by the Western allies to the Ottoman Empire after the First World War and stipulated formations of independent Armenian, Kurdish, and Greek states in Anatolia, yet was undermined thanks to the war of independence, and invalidated by the subsequent Turkish Republic. These narratives concerning extreme frustrations do not merely designate a rhetorical strategy of the state but also constitute the very pillar of the hegemony of the state that constantly shapes the national project and controls the body of the individual citizen.
One of the recent and extreme description of this official narrative concerning eternal threats was expressed by the former chief of general staff Yasar Buyukanit, who said that “Turkey, now (in 2007) is experiencing even worse conditions than the years of the war of independence (1919-1922) when the country is directly occupied by allied forces. Today we are surrounded by both external and internal enemies. Greece and Bulgaria on the West, Russia and Armenia on the North, Iran on the East, Iraq, especially the Formation in the North (he means Iraqi Kurdistan), Syria, and Cyprus on the south are potential external threats against the sovereignty of Turkey. On the other hand, the PKK, the communists, some betrayers within us who go and blame Turkey to the European Courts are internal threats against the integrity of our country. To be sure, the Turkish army will fight to death against those who devoted themselves to divide Turkey”. To be sure, the content of his speech reflects the very idea of a popular nationalist saying that was invented after the Turkish war for independence: “there is no friend of the Turks but the Turks!”

While reproducing these statements concerning permanent threats, successive Turkish governments constantly denied any claim about the historicality of Armenian genocide. Kurdish presence as a political and cultural identity group was permanently denied at the cost of an ongoing civil war in the eastern and southeastern provinces of Turkey that started in 1984 and by now resulted in the death of 40.000 people from each side and internal displacement of 2 million Kurds by force. Turkish governments also denied any demands of the communist participants of the longest hunger strike of the world history that took place between 2000 and 2007, aimed to protest and prevent to be transferred to F-type prisons, resulted in 122 deaths and more than 500 permanently injured prisoners, yet did not be able to change any single condition in Turkish prisons. Moreover, Turkish successive governments constantly denied any negotiation concerning the sovereignty claim of the Turkish northern side of Cyprus with the southern Greek government of Cyprus at the cost of undermining Turkey’s candidacy for the membership to the European Union. Thus, today Cyprus is a member of European Union, and represented just by the Greek government.

As a result of these official denials, a very ironic and crippled picture of Turkey and its neighbors comes on the scene. According to the official discourse, which was reproduced constantly by the mainstream media everyday, some of Turkey’s neighbor countries are “the so-called Kurdish Formation in Iraq”, “the Greek Administration of Southern Cyprus” and “the Armenian State that is based on the ideology about the so-called Armenian Genocide”. As one can expect, all these three states are still not officially recognized by the Turkish state. Moreover, in Turkish newspapers one can often come across a sentence such as “the Turkish state is fighting against the so-called separatist organization (they mean the PKK)” or “Turkish lobbying organizations in the US are fighting in order to disprove the so-called claims of Armenians” (they mean claims concerning Armenian Genocide that took place in 1915 in Anatolia.)

To be sure, by now, I mentioned only political entities and discourses that are denied because they are explicitly defined as dangerous formations for the survival of the state. That is to say, these formations are already considered as enemies of the state that should be eliminated for the defense of the sovereignty, integrity and independence of the state.

A.3.) The Tension Between the State and the Nation
Yet, what is distinctive in the Turkish case is Turkish state’s possible approach to its own citizens as potential threats, even though citizens are in fact identified as objects of the protection of the state. Members of the nation, namely individual citizens can be considered as a threat or danger against the survival of the state, if they do not or cannot identify themselves fully with the state’s projects of development to catch up with the West or with state’s concern of security in order to prevent a possible absorption by the West or a potential separation by the enemies. According to the state rhetoric, for the sake of the survival of the state, the nation should follow the state, and sacrifice itself if it is necessary. Here, I argue that the sovereign-image of the Turkish state is also based on a tension between the nation and the state. The patronizing state is formed on the basis of the idea concerning the primacy of the survival of the state even at the expense of the sacrifice of the nation/people. That is to say, the nation can be sacrificed for the survival of the state, but there is no chance for the survival of the nation if the state fails. Thus, the Turkish state appears as the prior, superior and separate power that both cultivates and protects the nation. This discursive separation between the state and the nation that subordinates the nation to the state produces the nation as an always already backward, deficient and weak entity that should be disciplined by the state. As a result, the nation appears as a burden or an obstacle in the eyes of the state in its race with the West/civilized world both in terms of development (catching up with the West) and security (preventing itself from being colonized/absorbed).

To be sure, the official Occidentalist discourse helps to reproduce a certain image concerning the lack of the nation/people in following state’s projects and projections that aim to catch up with the West/Modern World. It is thought that the nation/people constantly fall behind the expectations of the modernizing state elite. As a result, Turkish nation is always already sentenced to fail against the model of the West. A permanent failure, and a constant belatedness, which are the effects of this Occidentalist discourse, threaten the pride of the nation, and cause a feeling of inferiority before the superiority of the West. This is the injury attached to the Turkish national subjectivity by the official Occidentalist discourse. This discourse about ‘the failure’, which produces the impure and injured subjects as an effect, opens the space for state elites to intervene into, manage and exercise power over the nation and over individual bodies in the name of the filling the gap with the West, so that the injury can be rehabilitated. However, simultaneously it is the same power which reproduces this gap and this injury. As Ahiska reminds us, “the state elites constituted their power through a projection of the West in affirming their construction of a modern society.”

B) Turkish State’s Approach to Its Own Soldiers
As a result, in Turkey, where the nation is subordinated to the order of the state, the survival of the state is always taken more important than the survival of the people. I think, one of the best example of this attitude can be observed in the military, where the body of the Turkish soldier is considered as nothing more than a resource for the fight of the state. That is to say, the calculations of the military are primarily based on the aim to reproduce the sovereign-image of the state that never loses, is never mistaken and never compromises. Thus, the concern for the survival of every single soldier and the protection of soldier’s body comes always secondary, if the survival of the state is at stake. Unlike other strong military powers such as the US or Israeli armies that publicly declare that the protection of every single soldier is their primary concern, the Turkish army officers do not hesitate to publicly declare that a Skorsky helicopter can be more valuable than the soldiers, if the survival of the state depends on this calculation. As it is known, Israel declared war on Hezbollah in 2006, when two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped by Hezbollah guerilla. To be sure, there were many other and more historical and structural reasons of this war. Yet, the public discourse created by Israel in order to legitimize this war was based on Israeli state’s concern about the survival and well-being of its two soldiers. A similar incident took place in the southeast Turkey, in October 2007. After an attack of the PKK-guerilla forces to a Turkish military station in Daglica in Hakkari region, 8 Turkish soldiers were taken as prisoners of war by the PKK. A day after the attack, the Turkish army officially declared that “8 of its soldiers are missing”. To be sure, according to the official discourse there is no PKK but the ‘so-called separatist organization’, and what is going on in the southeast of Turkey is not a war but “an act of cleansing the mountains from the beats.” Since beasts are not human beings, they also cannot commit the act of kidnapping the Turkish soldiers. A week later, the PKK put the videos of the 8 Turkish soldiers on the popular video-sharing website YouTube, to prove that Turkish soldiers were with them, and their health conditions were well. In response to that, the Turkish state banned YouTube immediately. (Today in Turkey, one still cannot access to YouTube, since the official ban of it continues). The PKK assumed that the Turkish state would care about the lives of its own soldiers. Yet, this was never the case in Turkey. In the period when the Turkish soldiers were held by the PKK, an officer of the Turkish army publicly declared that “we now count these 8 soldiers as death.” About two weeks later, on November 4, 2007, the PKK released all of these 8 soldiers. When these soldiers arrived to Turkey, the Minister of Justice Mehmet Ali Sahin said in his speech in the Turkish parliament: “Members of the Turkish Armed Forces should not fall in such a situation. Therefore, I did not feel happy about their return.” That is to say, the Turkish state prefers that these 8 soldiers rather died (maybe they should commit suicide) instead of being kidnapped by the PKK, because being kidnapped by the PKK marks a weakness on the side of the state and undermines the sovereign-image of the state. Just after their arrival, these 8 soldiers were sent to the military court, since they were accused of being traitors of the country. ‘Crossing the border without the permission of their commanders’, ‘insistence on violating military order’, ‘violating duties of being a state official’ were accusations among many others that were directed to the 8 soldiers. The state also banned the access of the media to the court, since possible news about the case can violate the security of the state, that is to say, these news can make the state appear as weak, deficient, and impotent.
As it is obvious now, in Turkey, soldiers who are not strong enough, or who did not willfully sacrifice their very being for the survival of the state can appear as obstacles for the security of the state. In that sense, the Turkish military commander’s justification of the rejection of his injured soldiers demand for a helicopter that would carry them to the hospital through a statement that “this will cost much for the state” should not be thought as a single decision of a person, but as a reflection of the foundational logic of the Turkish Republic. A very popular saying within the Turkish military officers repeats: “To pity on the soldier means to betray the country!”

B.1.) Similarities Between Turkish State’s Approach to the So-Called Terrorists and to its Own Soldiers
In another paper, I showed that 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 one and the betrayer, between the human and non-human. The exercise of the state’s sovereignty is multiple: The state exercises its constituted power through the inclusion of the guerilla activity into the domain of the rule of law as the object of criminal investigation. Thus, the so-called terrorists who were captured dead or alive by the Turkish state were subjected to official identification and legal criminal investigation since they were citizens of Turkey. Yet, at the same time, the state exercises its sovereign and constituting power through creating states of exceptions and transforming the criminal-citizens into terrorist-subjects. In these moments killing or torturing of the bodies of the so-called terrorists can take place without any threat of legal sanction.
Testimonies of two Turkish soldiers about different treatments of guerillas’ dead bodies provide a remarkable example for the indistinctness in the exercise of sovereignty .

“Once I saw a dead PKK member, some were kicking it. I couldn’t stand it and I cried. My friends asked, “Why are you crying?” I said, “How can you treat a dead person that way and kick it?” He was left naked; a friend took his sport shoes from his feet. Under such situations the dead body is usually taken to the nearest station. The highest-ranking officer orders the soldiers to come and see him. When they come, he kicks the dead body and says, “I leave him to you.” Some tear off his clothes, some take his shoes…” (–Testimony of an anti-aircraft commando who served for the military in Van region between 1995-1996, Mehmedin Kitabi P. 179, Voices From the Front, P.217)

“The corpses that are captured in the operations are placed on the ground in the helicopter landing area. They are identified by the public prosecutor and than it was recorded how the battle took place.” (–Testimony of a medical sergeant who served for the military in Bingol, in 1996, Mehmedin Kitabi P.192, same quote in Voices From the Front, P.232)

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 militia who fight on the mountains at night are the tradesmen in the streets during the day; and although the militia 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’. For instance, 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” .

After I examined Turkish state’s treatment of the so-called terrorists during the years of civil war, I realized that state’s approach to its own regular citizens as well as to its own soldiers is also somewhat similar to its approach to the state of war in the southeast. Since the Turkish state constantly reproduces the discourse about living under the permanent threat of being divided and absorbed, the everyday treatment of regular citizens by the Turkish state reminds treatment of people under conditions of war. In the eye of the Turkish state, its own regular citizens as well as its own soldiers are considered not only objects of state’s protection but also as potential dangers for and possible enemies of the state. Thus, the state exercises its sovereign power through the management of the distinction between the loyal-citizen and traitor-criminal. That is to say, in the eye of the state every loyal-citizen has the potentiality to transform into a traitor, either in the form of a burden, an obstacle or in the form of an enemy. For instance, soldiers can be a burden or an obstacle for the state since they are assumed as ignorant, weak and able to be inveigled easily. Moreover, their education, protection, health and even their death cost for the state.

According to the testimony of a gendarmerie private, who served for the military between 1996 and 1998 in Tunceli, during the most violent years of the war in the southeast all military personal received an official communication by the army that more or less says: “Don’t become wounded and don’t die because martyrs and veterans cost much to the military. Do not put this burden on the state budget!”

Moreover, just like the case of 8 soldiers who were kidnapped by the PKK, ordinary soldiers can appear easily as sings of the weakness of the state. As a result, they are considered as enemies of the state.
Nevertheless, the state aims to include all Turkish men into the sphere of the military. In Turkey, military service is obligatory for every Turkish male citizen, and rejecting to go to the military service is considered as a big crime and counted as betraying to the country. The state insists on including every citizen into the domain of the rule of law. Yet, it is also expected from you to sacrifice yourself if the survival of the state is at stake. Otherwise, you will be considered as a potential danger for the survival of the state. In the military you are living under the auspices of the state but not only as an object of protection of the state, but also as an integral part of the state instrument as a material resource that carries always the risk of causing a weakness or deficiency that will undermine the sovereign-image of the state.

As a sniper corporal, who served for the military in 2006, in the border station in Dogubeyazit, Agri, expressed in his testimony:

“In the military, they see you just as a resource. For instance, there is a list of things about what a watchman should not do during his guard duty. The rules are written on a paper that you see during all this long guard duties. You know, you have not many things to do there. So, you read and read the rules again. The tenth rule says: ‘It is forbidden to commit suicide during the guard duty. Soldiers, who commit suicide, will be punished’. Can you believe in this? They write it on the paper and put it on the wall. So, if you commit suicide you should be sure that you will definitely die. Otherwise, they will punish you.”

As all these testimonies of soldiers indicate, in the eyes of the military commanders there is no difference between the value of soldiers and military equipments. The question for them is how to use soldiers and equipments in such a way to secure the survival and sovereign-image of the state.

There are several examples of such a calculation of the military which primarily aim to conceal any visible weaknesses of the state at any cost. A recent tragic example disclosed again the logic of the military. At the midnight of October 3rd, 2008, the Kurdish guerilla - PKK, raided the Turkish military station in Aktutun in Hakkari region, killed 17 Turkish soldiers according to official records, injured more than 30 soldiers and completely destroyed the station. This last one was the fourth destruction of the same military station by the PKK since the beginning of the civil in Turkey in 1984. After all of the former three attacks military commanders insisted on rebuilding the station in the same place, near the Aktutun village that was located in the bottom of a valley surrounded by steep mountains. So, each time, in order to attack to the military station the PKK guerilla crossed the border of Iraq that is just four kilometers away from the Aktutun station, easily took up position on the mountains, surrounded the station on the day and started to attack after the sunset while soldiers in the station got panicked and even could not respond. The military commanders insisted on rebuilding the station in the same place, because they thought that to change the location of the station could be considered as a weakness of the state and a victory for the PKK. Thus, they rebuilt the station in the same location for four times and each time they sent there about 50 soldiers whose lives are already prepared to sacrifice.

One day later, a small group of liberal writers and intellectuals in Turkey turned their anger not only to the PKK but this time also to the military commanders. They asked, “how can life be so cheap in the military?”, “are not these soldiers sons of this nation?” At that moment, the liberal critics of the army remembered again the statement of the military commander who said years ago: “Turkish mothers can give birth to millions of Turkish soldiers, yet they cannot give birth to a Skorsky helicopter.” To be sure, what happened in Aktutun reflects the same logic that is intrinsic in this former statement. Shortly after, some reports about military stations that were raided by the PKK more than one time appeared in the liberal media. The results were extremely surprising: According to the official record, the military station in Uzundere (in Hakkari) was raided by the PKK for 127 times. The military station of Uzumlu was raided 38 times, the station of Alan was raided 30 times, and the station of Samanli was raided 20 times. All of these stations were located in geographically improper places that make guerilla attacks very easy and secure for the PKK. In fact, most of these military stations were constructed long before the presence of the guerilla. They were regular military stations that aim to prevent border smuggling. Yet, after the civil war started in the southeast, the military persistently rejected to change the location of any station since they thought that this would mean that the state was not strong enough in controlling every single part of the country. As a result, hundreds of soldiers died with eyes open because of the repeated raids of the guerilla.
To be sure, these were all known facts. Yet, the location of stations and the value of life of the Turkish soldier were not problematized until Aktutun station was raid for the fourth time. Still the critics who question the logic of the army compose a very small minority. Nevertheless, the question concerning which historical and political conditions did allow the introduction of the value of life of the Turkish soldier as a problem deserves another detailed research.

Conclusion:
In this short paper, I just tried to introduce the problem concerning the subordination of the lives of people to the idea about the primacy of the survival of the state as an effect of the formation of the sovereign-image of the Turkish state. In Turkey sovereignty of the state is based on the idea of the supremacy of the survival of neither the nation nor the people but the state. This idea marks one of the foundational discourses of the Turkish state that was formed in 1923 over a very small territory left from the ruined, separated, razed and collapsed 600 years old Ottoman Empire. And maybe therefore, this time, the Turkish state is so afraid of being separated and lost again. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic, who is the embodiment of the sovereign-image in Turkey, once said that “To be sure, one day my worthless body will be part of the soil, yet the Republic of Turkey will survive eternally” Here, he underlines the importance of neither the survival of the nation nor the survival of the people but the survival of a sovereign state, a sovereign regime, a republic. Even though about 85 years were passed after the foundation of the Turkish Republic and the expression of this statement of Mustafa Kemal, his words and his cult still rule Turkey. Unlike all other examples of self-criticism and questioning of the past that took place in post-Franco Spain, post-Mussolini Italy, post-Hitler Germany, post-Soviet Russia, post-Mao China or post-Pinochet Chile, in Turkey, the sovereign-image of the state and its embodiment in the figure of Mustafa Kemal have never been problematized radically.

Today, Mustafa Kemal, the first president of Turkey, the military commander of the war of independence, and the hero of the war of Dardanelle, who in this war said to his soldiers, “I order you not to fight but to die!” still lives as the sovereign-image of the state. He is everywhere, on the banknotes, on the walls, on every corner, as a picture, as a label of a street or neighborhood, as a mask, as a statue, stares in our eyes and orders us to die again and again for the sake of the survival of the state.

Maybe it is the time to begin not to obey but to reverse this order: “Do not die for but fight against the sovereign-image of the Turkish state.” Perhaps, introducing the problem concerning sovereignty in Turkey and questioning the sovereign-image of the Turkish state are good starting points for such a fight.

Bibliography

a) Sources in English

-Ahiska, Meltem, 2003 Occidentalism: The Historical Fantasy of the Modern, in The South Atlantic Quarterly 102:3/3, Spring/Summer 2003, Duke University Press.

-Foucault, Michel, 2007, Security, Territory, Population Lectures at College de France 1977-1978, Picador Pres

-Foucault, Michel, 2000, ‘Omnes et Singulattim’ Toward a Critique of Political Reason, in Power, ed. By Paul Rabinow

-Guney, K. Murat, “The Body and Politics, the Power of Death over Life”, unpublished MA thesis, May 2008, Columbia University

-Said, Edward W., 2003 [1978] Orientalism, Vintage, New York

-Mater, Nadire, 2005, Voices From the Front: Turkish Soldiers On The War With The Kurdish Guerrillas, translated by Ayse Gul Altinay from the Turkish Original of: “Mehmedin Kitabi: Guneydogu’da Savasmis Askerler Anlatiyor”, Palgrave Macmillan Press

b) Sources in Turkish

-Ahiska, Meltem, 2005 Radyonun Sehirli Kapisi: Garbiyatcilik ve Politik Oznellik (The Magical Gate of the Radio: Occidentalism and Political Subjectivity), Metis Yayinlari, Istanbul

-Bila, Fikret, 2007, Komutanlar Cephesi (The Front of the Commanders), Detay Yayincilik, Istanbul

-Istanbul.indymedia.org, December 10, 2008

-Mater, Nadire, 1998, Mehmedin Kitabi: Guneydogu’da Savasmis Askerler Anlatiyor (The Book of Mehmeds: Soldiers Who Fought in the Southeast Are Talking), Metis Yayinlari, Istanbul

-Milliyet Newspaper, issues of February 16, 2007 / October 22, 2007 / November 5, 2007 / February 2, 2008 / July 2, 2008 / October 4, 2008

-Ntvmsnbc.com –news website- http://www.ntvmsnbc.com, December 6, 2008 & December 10, 2008

-Ozgur Gundem Newspaper, issue of June 23, 2005

-Taraf Newspaper, issues of October 4 and 5, 2008

-Taraf Newspaper, October 8, 2008, “Aktutun’un Kara Talihi” (The Tragic Destiny of Aktutun)

Table of Contents:
-”Preface” / by K. Murat Guney
-”Power and Reality in Turkey” / by Meltem Ahiska
-”The Fear of Archive and the Black Notebook of Nizami Bey: History, Memory and Power in Turkey” / by Meltem Ahiska
-”The Gender of Europe: The Docile Virgin, The Absorbing Female, and The Conquering Son” / by Nurdan Gurbilek
-”Patterns of Behavior, Forms of Interpretation, and Inequality in a Istanbul Courthouse” / by Dicle Kogacioglu
-”The Youth, Population and Power in Turkey” / by Ferhunde Ozbay
-”Non-Governmental Organizations in Turkey: ‘Voluntarism’ in the Age of Modernity, Nationalism and Neo-Liberalism” / by Yasemin Ipek Can
-”Different Faces of Power and the Transformation of Alevi Identity” / by Ozlem Goner
-”‘Managing’ the Kurdish Question” / by Firat Bozcali
-”A New Hegemonic Battlefield: The Formation of the Official Kurdish TV, TRT6″ / by T. Balca Arda
-”Being Mothers of the Army: Mothers of Martyrs in Turkey” / by Esra Gedik
-”AKP (Justice and Development Party) and the ‘new’ Power in Turkey” / by K. Murat Guney

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.

The armed resistance of the Kurdish people under the banner of the socialist and ethnic organization Kurdistan Workers Party –the PKK- started under conditions of the violent suppression of the left and Kurds by the military junta of 1980 and by the subsequent Turkish governments. The PKK demanded the recognition of Kurdish presence in the region and declared its political goal as the democratization of Turkey in such a way that social, cultural and linguistic rights and autonomy of Kurds are officially recognized. On the other hand, the PKK was defined by the Turkish state as a terrorist organization, thus in the name of the ‘war on terror’ almost 40,000 people died, who were mostly Kurdish rebels and civilians; thousands of villages and hamlets were burned and razed by the military under the pretext of the perceived threat by the villagers who supported and harbored the PKK militias, thus, millions of the villagers were forced to leave their homelands. However, still today in Turkey the presence of Kurds and Kurdish language are not recognized officially. This official denial of the presence of Kurds in Turkey makes the distinction between the citizen and the terrorist in the Turkish Kurdistan very unclear. The Turkish state can easily define anybody who claims rights of Kurds as terrorists, as someone who is not considered even as a human being, and therefore his life can be taken without any legal sanction and his dead body can be tortured without violating moral and religious norms.

Hence, the usual treatment of the dead bodies of Kurdish guerillas and their supporters that are captured by the Turkish army and police is pitiless. The officers of the army and governors of the state occasionally call the guerillas and their supporters ‘beasts’ and their dead bodies ‘carcasses’.

Just like various other examples, the ‘dehumanization’ of Ikbal Yasar and his burial as a residue of some flesh depends on the exercise of sovereignty of the Turkish state that operates, as I said before, through the separation between docile and loyal citizens on the one hand, and the dangerous ones and terrorists on the other. The separation between the citizen and the terrorist brings the ancient division between the zoe (that is the bare life) and bios (that is the political and qualified life) into mind, which Giorgio Agamben analyzes in his essays and books such as Homo Sacer. Bare life indicated “the life which can be taken but not sacrificed” . For Agamben since the biological/bare life becomes the main target of contemporary politics, the ancient distinction between bare life (zoe) and political life (bios) disappears, and all lives become bare lives.

Yet, can there be an absolute bare life? That is to say, can there be a body whose killing and destruction eliminates it absolutely without converting it into a ‘sacred’ being or without articulating it to a system of value? I claim here that there is no material and concrete bare life as such that can be eliminated absolutely. As opposed to Agamben I argue that there is no bare life that can be taken without being sacrificed. On the contrary the power and sacrificial value attached to the dead body continue to operate since the controversial position and subjectivity of the dead body in the very zone of indistinction between the citizen and the terrorist, between the loyal one and the betrayer, between the human and non-human is still the target of the politics. In fact, sovereignty operates in this zone of indistinction between citizen and terrorist.

The so-called terrorists who were captured dead or alive by the Turkish state were subjected to official identification and legal criminal investigation since they were citizens of Turkey. Yet, at the same time, the state exercises its sovereign and constituting power through states of exception. In these moments killing or torturing of the bodies of the so-called terrorists can take place without any legal sanction. To be sure, the killing and immediate burial of Ikbal Yasar by the state authorities marks one of these moments when the state aimed to display its sovereignty through reclaiming the possession of the body of its betrayer-citizen. The exposure of the distortion of the proper humanly and religious behavior towards the dead body (in Ikbal Yasar’s case the immediate burial of the dead body without considering that he has a family, religious affiliation and legal rights), is loaded with a message of the state to the members and supporters of the PKK who continue to fight against the state: “If you are serving the terrorist organization, then we will ‘dehumanize’ your body.” Thus, Ikbal Yasar, whose dead body appears as a site of the exercise of the sovereignty, was sacrificed to sublime and deify the power of the state over the bodies of its subjects.
Yet, because of the very fact that the material human flesh (alive or dead) is always already inseparable from the discursive space concerning the definitions and norms of being ‘human’, the outcome of this sacrifice can be converted into its direct opposite through reclaiming the ‘humanization’ of the dead body. Nowadays it seems that the ongoing conflict in the southeast regions of Turkey is extended towards a war for sovereignty over the dead.

Thus, the story continues: At daybreak, it would be claimed that the residue of Yasar’s body was far more than some mere flesh. In the morning of the previous night the family of Ikbal Yasar together with the mayor of Yuksekova, Salih Yildiz (a member of the pro-Kurdish Democracy and Society Party -DTP), applied to the public prosecutor and claimed the body of Yasar. Thus, the family took the body from where it was buried the night before. And from that time on, Ikbal Yasar’s body became more than a dead body of an ordinary citizen. The past woundings of the entirety of the Kurdish people were attached to the dead body of Ikbal Yasar, and on the streets of Yuksekova he was henceforth welcomed as “a sacred martyr of the Kurdish resistance” .

In the morning of March 24, all stores remained closed in the neighboring city of Hakkari and in the towns of Semdinli and Yuksekova. Hundreds of thousands people, including two members of the parliament and several mayors from the pro-Kurdish party DTP, were waiting for the second funeral of Ikbal Yasar. His body was carried by a three miles long cortege. In the mosque a customary funeral prayer according to the Islamic norms took place. After the funeral, Hamit Geylani, a member of the DTP and MP of Hakkari region declared that “the body of Ikbal Yasar was stolen by the state, yet was reclaimed thanks to the resistance of the tens of thousands.” While he was continuing his speech, the demonstrators were shouting that “Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who claims that he is a faithful Muslim, is indeed the main violator of Islam and is a murderer himself!” When demonstrators began to call loudly for the resignation of the governor of Hakkari and then shout the slogan “God Damn the Turkish State!”, the police and gendarmerie opened fire on demonstrators, attacked violently the people on the streets, and even raided apartments without having any legal permission to enter. In the afternoon of March 24, after the police was withdrawn from the main streets of Yuksekova, demonstrators calmed down and returned to their homes.

It is obvious that Ikbal Yasar was killed by the state forces, but could not be eliminated at all. This means, the sovereignty of the state which is a power over life and death, “a power which takes life or lets live” , “a power which is exercised through the inclusion of the exception” , a power over all other powers and therefore has no outside, has yet its limits. Killing somebody does not mean eliminating him, since there are various contradictory claims over the proper shape, legal rights, religious needs and possession of the dead body. There is a life of the dead after his killing since the dead body remains as a residue of the power of sovereignty.

Thus, the life story of Ikbal Yasar did not end, although he was dead since the 24th of March. A month after, on April 23, 2008 when the western side of Turkey was celebrating the 88th anniversary of the foundation of the Turkish Parliament as the most important national holiday of the country, in Yuksekova, once again all stores and workplaces remained closed. Nobody left his home. The silent disobedience of the residents of Yuksekova was only violated by some children playing on the streets and by some soldiers patrolling in the town. At that moment, Ikbal Yasar’s death marked an evident separation of a population in the southeast region of Turkey from the rest of the country.

1.2 - The Brief History of the Treatment of Dead Rebels by the Turkish State
As I said before, Ikbal Yasar’s story does not designate a single or unique event; on the contrary it is just the last ring of a chain of similar incidents, ongoing conflicts and continous struggles concerning the claims over dead bodies.

To be sure, claiming dead bodies and participating in public funerals as in the case of Ikbal Yasar is a very new possibility of political struggle in the history of the war in Turkish Kurdistan. From 1984 until the end of 90s, there were rare and single attempts of claiming bodies of dead guerillas, militias or demonstrators. Yet, usually people were hesitant to ask state authorities for the bodies, fearing that admitting to having a relative in the PKK would put them at risk of state retaliation. The testimony of a Turkish gendarmerie commando who served in the military between 1992 and 1994 in the Ovacik district of Tunceli describes the hesitation of the families of dead guerillas in that period as the following:

“It was after the clash in Yesilyazi town (in Tunceli). We brought the bodies of the terrorists to the unit with us. We laid down the bodies in the football field. The people revolted against our leaving the bodies in the field, in a way they protested us. Most of them recognized their dead but did not claim their bodies, they lamented. If they are 300 people, at least 200 of them were crying. They called us all sorts of names. We stayed in the Yesilyazi station for two days with no sleep at nights. We were exhausted. The lack of sleep was driving us crazy. The first lieutenant spent quite some time to calm down the local people. They started roaming around in Ovacik, shouting and screaming. They went home when warned. None of them claimed the corpses.” (Mehmedin Kitabi, P.74-75; same quote in Voices From the Front, P. 85)

Thus, although at that time period the local people of the Turkish Kurdistan could not claim the bodies of their relatives, they usually knew or were informed by the state officially or unofficially about what would happen to the dead bodies of Kurdish guerillas and rebels. For instance, it is made well-known that members of the counter-terrorist state organization, namely the Special Operation Forces collect ears of the PKK-members they killed in the battles in order to produce necklaces or key rings from these ears as a symbol of their courage and heroic attitude. Besides, burning of rebels’ dead bodies and throwing them in the squares of their villages of birth were common rituals conducted by the army. Moreover, there were cases when the bodies of rebels were left on the battleground where they were killed. Usually the villagers were not allowed by the army to bury the corpses. According to the report prepared by the Dicle Haber Ajansi (Dicle News Agency) and Insan Haklari Dernegi (Human Rights Association) about the mass graves of PKK guerillas, since 1989 more than 20 mass graves of PKK rebels were discovered in the region; some of them were open graves where the dead bodies were left on the battleground. As indicated in this report, in October 1996, four PKK guerillas were killed in the Kozluk district of Batman, their bodies were burned and left on the ground. After a while the villagers found and buried the bodies, yet a year later in 1997, soldiers came and took out the bodies from where they were buried and right now these dead bodies are still left on the ground. In another case mentioned in the same report, in May 12, 1997, 28 PKK guerillas were killed near the city of Bitlis by the Turkish army. After the battle, the dead bodies of guerillas were carried by a bulldozer first in the city center and then left in the dumping-ground near Bitlis so that people in the city could see the distorted bodies of their relatives and friends. According to the report, today in the region there are still five to ten open mass graves of Kurdish rebels where the dead bodies still lie in the open air. Through the exposure of dead bodies on the streets or village centers or through the distribution of photos , videos, stories about the tortures and bad treatments of the dead bodies the state tried to discourage local people from joining the PKK.

2- The Turning Point > ‘Serhildan’ (People’s Uprising) Continues
However, the year 1999 designates a turning point in the Kurdish issue. In 1999, the leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan was captured in Kenya by the Turkish intelligence service. Following Ocalan’s capture, the PKK 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, Siirt and Bingol. Thus, after 2000s, when Kurdish groups started to organize under the banner of human rights and peace organizations, and thus attain official access to European courts and international humanitarian organizations the exposure of the bad treatment of dead bodies by the state started to produce a reverse effect. Since the beginning of 2000s this time the Kurdish political and human rights organizations started to distribute widely photos, videos and other evidences that prove the brutal and inhuman attitude of Turkish state against the dead bodies of its own citizens.

From that time on Kurdish politicians adopted the claiming of dead bodies of rebels and guerillas as a prominent strategy of their political struggle. After 2000s the PKK as well started to provide clear information about the identity of its members that are killed by the Turkish army. This information, that was not available before includes the photo, exact name, birth place and birth year of the dead guerilla, so that the family of the guerilla can easily recognize and claim the dead body. Today, in the transformed political space of Turkish Kurdistan, where democracy and human rights are at stake, claiming dead bodies became a strategy that is strictly tied to the Kurdish demands for human rights, cultural recognition and democracy. Moreover, gatherings for the funerals of the dead guerillas are usually transformed into mass demonstrations and uprisings of the people, what is called in Kurdish, ‘Serhildan’.

Although the Turkish state still tries to dehumanize the dead body of Kurdish guerillas and although the Presidency of Religious Affair which is an official state institution did not hesistate to publish a declaration about the impropriety of having funeral prayers of the dead guerillas in Islam, the times when the unnamed guerillas was thrown into the mass graves were already over. Just like the Turkish state whose politics over dead bodies is strictly related to the exercise of the law and its exceptions, today the Kurds are struggling not only outside the rule of law, as armed guerillas or rebels, but also within the rule of law as advocates of human rights and filed many legal actions against the Turkish state.

Yet, many attempts of Kurdish lawyers and human rights advocates are considered by the state as ‘political or ideological’ rather than ‘legal’; that is to say usually Kurdish lawyer’s attempts are not considered within the rule of law but outside the law. This means that, whereas the Turkish state operates in the zone of indistinction between the law and its exceptions, Kurdish lawyers and activists are also prepared to struggle in this very zone of indistinction between the inside and outside of the rule of law.

I think, in Turkish Kurdistan the articulation of the discourse of human rights by the Kurdish lawyers and the struggle of Kurdish politicians and activist for the extension of politics towards the question concerning the treatment of dead bodies transform the political sphere dramatically such that the definition and meaning of ‘the political’ as well as the scope of sovereignty and power are changed. Nowadays, it seems that the new threshold of the political struggles in Turkish Kurdistan is being determined by the power of death over life.

Bibliography

a) Sources in English

-Agamben, Giorgio, 1998, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press

-Agamben, Giorgio, 2005, State of Exception, The Chicago University Press

-Ayata, Bilgin, Yükseker Deniz, Spring 2005, A Belated Awekening: National and International Responses to the Internal Displacement of Kurds in Turkey, New Perspectives on Turkey, No:32, P:5-43

-Butler, Judith, 2004, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Verso

-Foucault, Michel, 1978, History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Vintage Books

-Foucault, Michel, 1997, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at College de France 1975-1976, Picador Press

-Foucault, Michel, 2007, Security, Territory, Population Lectures at College de France1977-1978, Picador Press

-Gambetti, Zeynep, Spring 2005, The Conflictual (Trans)formation of the Public Sphere in Urban Space: The Case of Turkey, New Perspectives on Turkey, No: 32, P.43-73

-Mater, Nadire, 2005, Voices From the Front: Turkish Soldiers On The War With The Kurdish Guerrillas, translated by Ayse Gul Altinay from the Turkish Original of: “Mehmedin Kitabi: Guneydogu’da Savasmis Askerler Anlatiyor”, Palgrave Macmillan Press

-Marcus, Alize, 2007, Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence, New York University Press

-Mbembe, Achille, 2003, Necropolitics, in Public Culture, 15(1): 11-40, Duke University Press

b) Sources in Turkish

-Aker, A. Tamer; Celik, Ayse Betul; Kurban, Dilek; Unalan, Turgay; Yükseker, Deniz; June 2006, TESEV Report: “Zorunlu Göç ile Yüzleşmek: Türkiye’de Yerinden Edilme Sonrası Vatandaşlığın İflas” (Confronting Forced Migration: The Construction of Citizenship in the Aftermath of Internal Displacement in Turkey), (also available at http://tesev.org.tr)

-Bila, Fikret, 2007, Komutanlar Cephesi (The Front of the Commanders), Detay Yayincilik, Istanbul

-Cemal, Hasan, 2003, Kurtler (The Kurds), Dogan Kitap, Istanbul

-KONGRA-GEL (PKK), 19 November 2003, Declaration of Foundation Conference of the People’s Congress of Kurdistan

-Mater, Nadire, 1998, Mehmedin Kitabi: Guneydogu’da Savasmis Askerler Anlatiyor (The Book of Mehmeds: Soldiers Who Fought in the Southeast Are Talking), Metis Yayinlari, Istanbul

-Milliyet Newspaper, issues of April 1, 2006 & April 23, 2008

-Oz, Kazim (director), the movie “Fotograf” (Photograph), 2001 –The movie is about the photos of dead guerillas taken by the Turkish soldiers

-Ozgur Gundem Newspaper, issues of November 22, 2004; December 22, 2007; February 2, 2008; February 18, 2008; March 24, 2008; March 27, 2008

-Radikal Newspaper, August 10, 2005, Aydinlar Ne İstiyor? (What do the Intelectuals want?),

-Rojaciwan News Center, December 2007, www.rojaciwan.com

-Sengun, Kilic, February 1992, Biz ve Onlar: Turkiye’de Etnik Ayrimcilik (Us and Them: Ethnic Discrimination in Turkey), Metis Yayinlari, Istanbul,

-Yegen, Mesut, 1999, Devlet Soyleminde Kurt Sorunu (Kurdish Problem According the the Discourse of the Turkish State), Iletisim Yayinlari, Istanbul

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.

In the service of this aim, Huzur appears as a novel which seeks to draw the border between the inside and the outside, and thus, tries to reveal what belongs to Turkish culture/essence/homeland and what should be left outside of this body. The East vs. the West dichotomy constitutes the surface of the novel, whereas Tanpinar tries to extract Turkey’s unique position in the history. However, after the first half of the book, which is a nostalgic celebration of Turkish-Ottoman glorious past and ‘authentic’ customs, music, fashion and architecture against that of the new and the modern, in its second half the novel is transformed slightly into a narrative of being stuck in the ‘thick’ border between the inside and the outside, us and them, the East and the West. Thus, the narrative concerning the search for our own essence, of things which are familiar to us converts slowly into an uncanny story of discomfort. Similar to Freud’s conception of the uncanny, which refers most broadly “to that class of objects or experiences –initially very familiar- that return out of time and place to trouble the stable boundaries between subject and objects, interior and exterior” (Ivy, 1996: 308 & Freud, 1919: 217-256), throughout the story of Huzur which attempts to draw the strict boundary between us and them, the East and the West, the familiar and the unfamiliar one witnesses how heimlich (familiar) is transformed into unheimlich (uncanny) while the lost objects of the past begin to reappear as ghostly reincarnations. Thus, Huzur appears as a narrative of a permanent uneasiness and of a constant lack of an essence, origins and peace of mind. Nevertheless, Huzur is a novel which discloses the state of mind on which the actual Turkish subjectivity is based. As Jacques Lacan states, “to constitute oneself as a subject (who can distinguish itself from an object) requires an initial lack, the very possibility of recognizing myself in a mirror, for example, implies that I have already lost some essential, unmediated self-being.” (Ivy, 1996: 308 & Dolar, 1991: 10-13). In this sense, Huzur, which allows Turkish subjects to look at themselves in the mirror, succeeds in being “a novel which is ours”, however which is not specific or unique to us. Rather, it is a narrative of modernity in general. Hence, Tanpinar’s Huzur is still considered as one of the seminal novels of modern Turkish literature.

Now, after this brief introduction, first I want to introduce Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar and the period in which he lives so that we can trace the roots of the arguments of Tanpinar’s critiques. Then, I will focus on his novel Huzur. Lastly I will try to discuss the contemporary rediscovery and revaluation of Tanpinar as a man of literature as well as his novel Huzur as a prominent work of Turkish literature, especially after the introduction of the neo-liberal and Islamic neo-conservative policies in the Turkey of 1980s. It is very interesting in that, this time Huzur itself returns as a ghostly object of the lost and forgotten past literature. Whereas Huzur had only two publications between 1949 and 1980 and was usually overlooked by the critics of that period, since the 1980s it has been republished more than fourteen times. Academic interest in and papers about Huzur and Tanpinar increased dramatically after the 1990s. It is not a coincidence that it is also in this period that the academic departments of comparative and Turkish literature are institutionalized and popularized widely throughout the country. Recently, Huzur is recognized as the center piece of the canon of Turkish literature. Thus, through repetition the text emerges as originary. Today, Huzur is not only a narrative of our past losses. Just like the Tales of Tono, which is marked as the origin of the Japanese folklore studies (Ivy, 1996: 315), Huzur itself is now “a memorial marker, a monument to an absence, to a loss that must be perpetually recovered through a discipline that ensures the disappearance of its origins as it produces them” (Ivy, 1996: 315). It was also announced that the first translation of Huzur in English under the title of ‘The Mind at Peace’ will appear in January, 2008.

1) Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar and His Predecessors
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1901-1962), a novelist and a professor of Turkish literature, is an influential intellectual figure of the early Republican period in Turkey. He is deeply influenced by western writers such as Valery, Bergson, Baudelaire, Proust as well as by his teacher and the last famous Turkish poet, Yahya Kemal, who pens nostalgic epics using the Persian ‘aruz’ rhythm instead of the newly invented Turkish rhythm. Tanpinar composed a cultural universe in his work, bringing together a ‘modern’ Western literary voice with the ‘traditions’ of the Ottoman culture. He left five novels, a rich collection of essays, poems, scripts and lecture notes behind, which are still waiting for the attention of contemporary literary critics and scholars. He was not only a man of literature but also worked as a state official, as a supervisor for the Ministry of Education. For a short period, he was even elected as a member of the parliament. Indeed, in that period, it was very common for public intellectuals to work as civil servants. However, it is hard to say that Tanpinar’s opinions and stance abide totally by the official ideology of the Turkish state.

Unlike the very first generation of Kemalist writers and intellectuals, some of whom also worked as state bureaucrats and were known as the founders of the official ideology of the Turkish Republic, Tanpinar disagrees with the necessity for an absolute disjuncture from the past in order to be modernized. For him, since such a disjuncture requires the absolute surrender of Turkey to the Western world, and thus necessarily leads to the loss of our own essence as well as to the disturbance of our inner order. “The fear of losing one’s self in the other/in the West” (Gurbilek, 2003: 615): This is one of the main concerns of Tanpinar. Therefore, he approaches the modernizing project of the Kemalist state critically, and tries to develop an understanding which advocates progress without losing ties to the past. Although he supports the development of Turkey and never opposes Kemalist ideology explicitly, in his writings and speeches he compulsively reclaims the denied past of the Ottoman period. Indeed, he both reclaims the past/forgotten/origin and seeks to catch up with the ‘modern’ Western world. In this sense, he desires to develop a synthesis of the Eastern and Western way of thinking in order to be able to claim that the modern Turkish subject is unique, original and different from the others as well as progressive, commensurable and equal with others. Nevertheless, what makes Tanpinar a unique thinker and writer is his awareness of and emphasis on the paradox of such a kind of desire. The desire for being particular is in conflict with the desire for winning the admiration of the exemplary model. In Tanpinar’s words: “It is impossible for Europeans to admire us because of things that we have borrowed from them. The most they will say is a short ‘Well done!’ It is only when we introduce to them things that are specifically ours that they will like us, treating us as their equals in the path of beauty and self-realization…” (Tanpinar, 1992: 91). Thus, the desire for being a specific subject necessitates the recognition of the subject by the others and therefore the simultaneous disappearance of the specificity of the subject. You should lack specificity/origins in order to be recognized as a distinct/unique subject. Thus, the formation of the subject is based on a certain lack, a lack of origins. And, the very subjectivity of modern individual is formed between the constant desire for and lack of origins. Therefore, it is not a coincidence that Tanpinar himself chooses the form of the novel, which is evidently a Western form of expression, in order to uncover the particularity of Turkish literature as well as to be able to be recognized and admired by the West.

To be sure, here what we mean by ‘the West’ is indeed a ‘fantasy’ of the Turkish writer about the West. It is our fantasy about the way in which others think and conceive of us. Thus, the Turkish particularity is based on a phantasmatic relationship to the fantasy concerning the Western gaze. As Turkish sociologist Meltem Ahiska states, this relation designates a certain understanding of Occidentalism. She says “Occidentalism can be best understood as describing the set of practices and arrangements justified in and against the imagined idea of ‘the West’” (Ahiska, 2003: 16) In this sense, Turkish identity appears as a performance for the imagined Western gaze. In other words, this identity is strictly bound by the image of the West. This means that what the Turkish writer calls inside consist of an outside. Thus, one can say that our inner world is also made up of imitated sentiments and ways of expressions.

Thus, where the desire for origins/particularity and the desire for recognition as equals in the eyes of the other intertwines, the border between the interior and exterior of the national subjectivity falls apart, so that the characters of Tanpinar’s narratives appear as uncanny figures. This paradox is evident in Huzur as well. Beginning with the first pages of the novel, it is a narrative of the impossibility of both the recovery of the past loses and the ability of catching up with the West.

Now, in order to be able to elaborate Tanpinar’s critiques and to focus on his novel Huzur, we should understand against what he directs his response. Let’s return to the 1920s and look at what happened in Turkey in that period. Like the Meiji period in Japan or Russia under the rule of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, Turkey experienced radical transformations after the collapse of the old imperial order, namely after the surrender of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. Shortly after the foundation of the new Turkish Republic in 1923 by the Kemalist elite, a bunch of reforms and new laws were promulgated with an immense effort to cut social ties with the Ottoman imperial past, Islamic forms of association and collective identity. The new republic was to be a ‘tabula rasa’ that would start afresh in its efforts to catch up with the West. In order to achieve both of these aims at once, it tried to change not only the forms of administration or political association, but also the very pillars of daily life. In 1928 a law made compulsory the use of the new Turkish script (a modified form of Latin alphabet instead of the Arabic one) in all public communications. The alleged reason for this immense change was facilitating communication with the so-called civilized world. This reform surely achieved to create generations of Turkish citizens who cannot relate to their past through written documents and who are effectively disconnected from it. The outlawing of fez, -a form of headwear-, the replacement of Muslim calendar, Arabic numerals and measures by the European clock, calendar, numerals and by continental European weight and measures were among the changes that were increasingly setting Turkey on a path discontinuous with its past, and turning its face towards the model of the modern West. Moreover, the newly founded Turkish History Association introduced a new history of Turkish communities, according to which Turks were defined as a former ‘shamanist’ tribe that first appeared in the Central Asia between 6th and 7th centuries B.C. and spread around the world from there, converted into Islam only after 7th and 8th centuries A.D., fought against and governed over the Arab communities until the First World War. All of these meant that Turks were no more a part of the Islamic civilization; from that time on in the eyes of the founding elite of the Republic, Turks were no more a religious but an ethnic community. Finally caliphate was abolished, symbols of the empire were banned, and the Ottoman Empire was even not included by the new Turkish History Association in the list of the so-called 15 Turkish States founded throughout the history.

Most of these reforms, the new understanding of the Turkish history and the attempts towards an unconditional westernization gained popular support with the first generation of the Republican intelligentsia including prominent writers and poets of that period such as Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu, Halide Edip Adivar, Behcet Kemal Caglar. Hence, a strong contempt towards the tradition, rural life and Ottoman past is evident in their writings. For them, not only the technology and institutions of the West but also the culture, life styles and literary forms of the ‘contemporary civilization’ should be imported. Therefore, one must give up with the tradition and anything which belongs to the past. Thus, the first generation of the Republican intellectuals developed an ideology which aims to repress the past/the history/the tradition.

However, by supporting this ideology, probably they themselves invented a narrative about the past, the history and the tradition of Turkey. As Michel de Certeau shows “the disappearance of the object –whether newly imagined as the folk, the community, authentic voice, or tradition itself- is necessary for its ghostly reappearance in an authoritatively rendered text.” (Ivy, 1996: 297) This means that the denial of the past and the disappearance of the tradition simultaneously invoke the reappearance of the past and of the tradition as objects of fantasy. Since the concealment of the past was perceived as a loss, as a death and as an erasure, the gap between the present and the past shows up as a structure of desire for the return/recovery of the death/lost past. Thus, the ghostly appearances of the past unfold as unapproachable objects of national fantasy. As Susan Stewart states, this is “the structure of nostalgia, that is, the desire for desire in which objects are the means of generation and not the ends.” (Ivy, 1996: 297)

To be sure, this phenomenon of nostalgia is a byproduct of modernity. The modern desire for uncovering the covered, revealing the concealed, demystifying the mysterious produces at the same time the covered and concealed mystery, as such. The logic of nostalgia and the desire for the origins/essence is evident in almost all modern thinkers from Marx to Freud, who seeks to show us the disguised truths concerning political, social and psychological relations behind the commonsensical forms of appearances. Thus, the assumption concerning the presence of hidden truths or lost and forgotten origins both produces the past/the origins as such and invokes a desire for returning to these origins. In this sense, I claim that the modern attempt at ‘the disenchantment of the world’ and the nostalgic celebration of the enchanted past are two sides of the same coin.

In this sense, Tanpinar’s response to the official ideology of the Turkish Republic is an effect/a byproduct of the conception of the new Turkish Republic as a ‘tabula rasa’ by the Kemalist elite. Thus, far from being traditional or conservative, Tanpinar’s critique is a reflection of modernity.

At this point, Huzur appears as a seminal work in which the two sides of modernity, namely the disjuncture from and desire for origins intertwines in a controversial way.

2) Huzur (Peace of Mind)
Istanbul, August 1939
Mumtaz hadn’t wandered through city streets since his cousin Ihsan,
an older brother to him, had taken ill.
(Huzur, the very first sentence)

As I mentioned before, Huzur is a narrative of the search for an internal order, a balance in life and absolute peace of mind. However, the narrative is simultaneously about the inevitable failure of this search. Thus, the very subjectivity of the modern Turk appears in the split caused by this failure.
In accordance with this search for the particular Turkish subjectivity, Tanpinar begins his novel Huzur by introducing the character Mumtaz (means ‘happy’ in Arabic & Ottoman languages), who is the protagonist of the novel, a young writer living in Istanbul in the 1930s and is in love with a western educated intellectual woman Nuran, who grew up in Istanbul, as well. Though in the first instance the novel appears as a love story between Mumtaz and Nuran, after a short while one realizes that this love story represents the relation between the modern subject to its lost past. Here, Nuran, symbolizes old Istanbul, the glorious past, the uncorrupted essence, all of which are objects feared to be lost.

Soon, this coming together of love and fear, hope and frustration becomes the common pattern of Huzur’s narrative. Mumtaz is living with his cousin Ihsan, an older brother to him. Ihsan is both a father and a mentor for Mumtaz. It is Ihsan who introduces Mumtaz to the works of Ottoman poets such as Bâkî, Nef’î, Nâilî, Nedim, and Galib, along with composers such as Dede and Itrî. Ihsan looked after Mumtaz, when Mumtaz lost his father and mother. However, now Ihsan is ill and therefore needs care. And as I cited above, the book opens up with this serious frustration, which is also an indicator and maybe a summary of the story to be unfolded.

Furthermore, the social conditions which form the background of the narrative, is shaky, as well. It is late 1930s and the world is coming slightly close to a disastrous war. Yet, nobody wants to speak about a possible war. On the other hand, Mumtaz cannot finish his book about the Ottoman poet Sheikh Galib, who lived in the 18th century and wrote the legendary love story Husn-u Ask (The Beauty of Love).

There is hope and desire for love, health, peace and happiness in the opening pages of the book. Yet Tanpinar also points to the misery and fear hidden in this hope and desire from the very beginning. This fear will perpetually haunt Mumtaz during the story and consequently threaten his ‘happy’ state of mind.
Since the very beginning of the story Mumtaz is passionately tied to the beauty of Istanbul, Turkish classical music, antiques and old furniture from Ottoman period and old poems, especially the ones written in the form of Persian rhythm ‘aruz’. Thus, Mumtaz compulsively seeks to record all of these lost objects of the past, as a collector of old furniture or as an author who writes about the past Turkish literature.

Here one should note that, all of these ‘fetish’ objects of Mumtaz are not chosen coincidentally. Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire was absolutely abandoned by the Republican elite. Whereas the capital of Turkey was founded in Ankara, Istanbul was converted into a symbol of hatred towards the Ottoman past. There were no state investments in the city until the 1950s. Thus, Istanbul of the time appeared as a ruined ghost town. Even the population decreased radically until the mid 20th century. On the other hand, Turkish literature experienced radical shifts. The Persian rhythm ‘aruz’ was replaced by the newly invented Turkish rhythm so that after the 1930s no poets would write and or would even understand poems written in the ‘aruz’ rhythm. Moreover, the new Turkish folk music was supported by the modernizing elites against the classical Ottoman music.

Now, all of these objects reappear in the novel Huzur within “the logic of fetish, indicating the denial of a feared absence that is then replaced with a substitute presence.” (Ivy, 1998: 97 & Freud, 1927) Mumtaz, constantly fearing losing his own essence and origin, compulsively collects antiques, old poems and music. Thus, Tanpinar through the lenses of Mumtaz compulsively describes old music, old poems and old Istanbul as sublime objects of the past. However, at same time Tanpinar underlines the impossibility of returning to the past, recovering the losses and remembering the forgotten. Since we lost our origins, it is impossible to differentiate between the old and the new, the inside and outside. While describing the old bazaars of Istanbul he writes:

….Mumtaz would always find something astounding at the Flea Market or in the Bedesten. Here, two opposing and difficult-to-imitate extremes of life, which didn’t approach without latching onto one’s skin or settling within, actually merged. Genuine poverty and grandeur, or rather, their remnants…. At each step, morsels of out-of-fashion entertainments and the bygones of old and grand traditions, the origin and means of which had been forgotten, could be found heaped together. In one of these narrow, interlinked shops, old Istanbul, veiled Anatolia, and even, the last scraps of the Ottoman Empire’s heritage would glimmer abruptly in the most unexpected way. Vintage outfits that varied from town to town, tribe to tribe, and period to period; old carpets and kilims whose place of weaving he’d be sure to forget even if reminded, yet whose motifs and colors he’d recollect for days; a store of artwork from Byzantine icons to old Ottoman calligraphy panels; embroidery, decorations, in short, caches of objet d’art; jewelry that had adorned the neck and arms of some forgotten beauty from a bygone generation or two; all of it, in this humid and crepuscular world, could keep him in its thrall for hours with the allure of a long-gone age and the draw of mystery added in. This was neither the traditional, nor the modern East. Maybe it was timeless life that had changed its clime. (Huzur, 42)

For Tanpinar, since we lost our origins and essence, we should create a new essence of Turkishness on the basis of a synthesis between the East and the West. It is crucial to note that here Tanpinar neither gives up with his desire for the lost past/tradition nor renounces the coming westernized/modernized future. On the contrary, he tries to constitute continuity in the Turkish history instead of the Kemalist attempt to break off from the past:

“As Mumtaz looked at this shop, involuntarily, he recalled Mallarme’s line: “It’s ended up here through some nameless catastrophe.” Here, in this dusty shop, in this place on whose walls handmade tricot stockings hung…. In neighboring shops with wooden shutters, simple benches, and old prayer rugs rested the same luxurious and, when seen from afar, occult insights of tradition, in an order eternally alien to the various accepted ideas of classification, on shelves, over bookrests or chairs, and on the floor, piled one atop another as if preparing to be interred, or rather, as if being observed from where they lay buried. The East, however, couldn’t be authentic anywhere, even in its grave. Next to these books, in laid-out hawker cases, were lapfuls of testimonials to our inner transformation, our desire to adapt, and our search for ourselves in a new context and climate: pulp novels with illustrated covers, school textbooks, French yearbooks with faded green bindings, and pharmaceutical formulas. As if all the detritus of the mind of mankind had to be hastily exposed in this market, books mixed and mingled together, books on reading fortunes in coffee grounds and Momsen’s vision of Rome, the remnants of Payot editions and Karakin Efendi’s treatise on angling, as well as subjects like veterinary medicine, modern chemistry, and the techniques of geomancy.” (Huzur, 47)

As Tanpinar argues, “the East could not be authentic anywhere, even in its grave.” Thus, since we lost the possibility of being purely authentic, Tanpinar’s desire for the origins transforms now into a call for the ghostly reappearance of the death past. Here, not only Istanbul, but also poems, music and antiques show up as ghostly. Yet, for Mumtaz, Nuran’s love also appears as an unapproachable but simultaneously inevitable ghostly object of desire. For him, Nuran is the hope for being whole again; she is the possibility to return to the past, to the origins, (and perhaps to ‘the Real’ in Lacanian terms). Thus, Nuran appears in various forms to complete Mumtaz’s lack in different aspects:

….his beloved Nuran, a living being who’d put up with so much suffering for him, who’d shared all his hopes, who’d lived temporarily apart from everything, only with him and only for him. But that wasn’t all. There were also an array of Nurans who’d wallowed in trivial episodes, most of which assumed their actual contexts and colors from the inadequacies in Mumtaz’s soul, and had all but branded them into his flesh; Nurans who sought an opportunity to escape from the watery depths where they had been confined, surfacing to control Mumtaz’s life. Each of them individually, like the characters in a Wagner opera, emerged with its own special mood and manner of coming to life within her… (Huzur, 60)

However, the impossibility of being together with Nuran and being whole again is already evident since the beginning of the story. The desire of having absolute peace of mind and being complete by returning to the origins come together with the threat of losing one’s peace of mind and one’s origins. Thus, Mumtaz’s search for peace of mind transforms soon into a desperate story of fear of losing one’s very subjectivity. Here, Nuran appears as another substitute for the missing origin. Whereas she is an object of desire, she also reminds Mumtaz of his lack of being whole again. Thus, the love of Mumtaz for Nuran, Istanbul and origins appears as a threat for his peace of mind as well as his very being:

…All of these Nurans subdued him, agitating his person and his nerves to different degrees. Some of them left him in the same distressed psychological state for days, dragging him back and forth between anger and vengeance or the blackest death, then with the slightest cue or under the simplest pretext, she’d relinquish her place to another representation; and then Mumtaz’s face, terse with jealousy, and his pulse, racing with fury, would suddenly transform, and an irresistible compassion would tear him apart, his shoulders would droop under the weight of the sins he’d thought he’d committed against her, he’d believe he was cruel, insensitive and selfish, and grow ashamed of himself and his life. (Huzur, 60)

Hence, at one point of the narrative the character Suat appears as the embodiment of Mumtaz’s inner feelings of threat and fear. Suat, who is a relative of Mumtaz and was a classmate of Nuran in the university, is in love with Nuran, as well. However, he was seriously ill and is being treated in a distant city and therefore at the beginning he does not represent a threat for the love between Mumtaz and Nuran. Yet, the story evidently transforms into a desperate one, when Suat’s letter of love, indicating that he is cured and is now returning to Istanbul is received by Nuran and Mumtaz.
The character of Suat is depicted as an entire opposite to the character of Ihsan, who is the good brother and the protector of Mumtaz as well as the symbol of the peace of mind, the balance in life and the true origins. On the other hand, Suat, a Nietzschean character, shows up as the symbol of modernity, who questions any established moral statement, asks for a total disjuncture from the past, seeks to destroy any assumptions concerning origins and authenticity. Thus, Suat, the pure reflection of modern desire for rootlessness, appears as the monstrous character of the novel. Just like the story of Frankenstein, Suat cannot find anyone to communicate, at the symbolic level. However, as an uncanny figure he threatens dramatically the peace of mind of Mumtaz and Nuran. In the sense that he appears as an excessive product of modernity so that he represents the fear of being completely modern, one can argue that Suat is actually the ‘double’ of Mumtaz. As Lacan argues, “it is not the anxiety of losing on the contrary it is the anxiety of gaining something too much, of a too close presence of the object. What one loses with anxiety is precisely the loss” (Dolar, 1991: 13) Thus, Suat appears as Mumtaz’s image in the mirror including ‘the object petit a’. Hence, Suat perpetually reminds Mumtaz, his lack/inability of being whole, loving Nuran and returning to his own origins.

One day Suat commits suicide. He hangs himself while listening to Beethoven. To be sure, this is an exaggerated expression of being modern. Thus, Suat shows that he even can control his own death. At that point, the presence of a character such as Suat in Tanpinar’s narrative was radically criticized by certain Turkish literary critics. One of them, Nurdan Gurbilek, argues that “Tanpınar the critic says that there is ‘a lack of something substantial of our own’ in Turkish novels of the late Ottoman period and years later Tanpınar the novelist is faced with a similar lack: Suat, the evil-minded character of Tanpınar’s novel Huzur is unconvincing, rather superficial, because he is a ‘translation’ of Dostoyevsky’s abject heroes, especially Stavrogin of The Possessed.” (Gurbilek, 2003: 3). Gurbilek continues; “Suat, the evil-minded dandy, commits suicide as a challenge to the intellectuals of mediocre ideas and moderate sensibilities, but his suicide (accompanied by a Beethoven concerto) is nothing but an imitation, a literary cliché borrowed from a Dostoyevsky book.” (Gurbilek, 2003: 622)

However, I claim just the opposite. Here, Tanpinar, far from being a simple imitator, is introducing the present Turkish subjectivity which is always already formed as an exceeding mimic of the object of imitation. In colonial or semi-colonial contexts according to Homi Bhaba’s formulation “there is always an excess, a slippage that reveals mimicry as something more or less than the object of mimesis” (Ivy, 1998: 96). This excess of mimicry is a result of efforts to sustain difference between the so-called Western ‘original’ and its non-western ‘copy’. Therefore, it is not a coincidence that in Turkish literature as well as in Turkish daily life we usually encounter with uncanny figures such as extremely traditionalist bigots or extremely westernized dandies, thus they appear as if they are artificially formed. However, I claim that the very present subjectivities in a belatedly modernizing country such as Turkey correspond with this ostensible artificiality. Therefore, despite the arguments of some prominent literary critics, I claim that Tanpinar is very successful in facing and disclosing the inevitable lack of originality in Turkish novel as well in Turkish daily life. Thus, Suat, who perhaps can be considered as the pure materialization of the Kemalist ideal of modernization as well the symbol of absolute disjuncture from the origins, appear in the novel Huzur as the Frankenstein-like figure of the Turkish modernity

In the novel, before long, Suat begins to appear as a ghost and to haunt the relation between Nuran and Mumtaz, so that this relation becomes impossible forever. At this point, Suat’s ghost also reminds them of the lack/inability of constituting a balanced, peaceful mind and identity, the impossibility of recovering the past losses and of converging past, present and future within one single continuous history.
Suat’s ghost never stops following Mumtaz. “Anxiety is the lack of the support of the lack”, says Lacan; the lack lacks, and this brings about the uncanny (Dolar, 1991: 13) Thus, in the controversial final of the book the readers witness how his uncanny encounter with the lack of lack converts Mumtaz, who is pursuing ‘peace of mind’ throughout the story, into a madman at the end of the book. At this point some literary critics explain Mumtaz’s loss of sanity through his loss of hopes for love and peace of mind. However, on the contrary, he gets crazy because he cannot give up with desiring for being whole again, loving Nuran and returning to the past and origins. This is maybe what Freud calls as ‘Melancholia’, which indicates the state of being in which one cannot cope with the loss, and cannot return to the symbolic world.
At the end of the novel not only Mumtaz but also the world around him turns upside down. It is September 1st, 1939 and the book closes with the declaration of the Second World War. At that moment, Nuran is far away. Ihsan is dying. And the book of Mumtaz about Sheikh Galib remains unfinished just like his search for peace of mind…

3) The Reappearance of Huzur
To be sure, in Huzur there are plenty of discussions concerning love, aesthetics, politics, civilization, life and death, on which I could not touch. Throughout this short examination I just tried to discuss the narrative concerning the formation of the new modern Turkish subject through reading Tanpinar’s novel Huzur. I claim that the attempt to form the subjectivity of the modern Turk is based on a repeated failure and a constant lack. Thus, this attempt resulted in the production of lacking subjects which are neither westernized nor traditionally authentic/unique. The Turk appears always already in between, between the East and the West, between the glorious but recently lost past and the idealized but unattainable future, between the downfall and the belatedness, between tradition and modernity. In this in-between space, both ghosts of the absent past and unattainable future as well as the ghosts of the glorious Ottoman Empire and of the idealized Western world haunt permanently the Turkish subject.

To be sure, this ambiguity creates different political, social, as well as literary reflections in different periods of the Republic. However, the following questions always remain to be answered: “Who are we? Who is the Turk? Where do we belong to? Where did we come from? Where are we going?”

Tanpinar’s answers to these questions by implying what make us ‘us’ are our failed attempts to be particular. Hence, this answer indicates not a particular but a general paradox of modernity.

In this respect, I argue that, the way of problematization of these questions, that is to say the formation of the contemporary Turkish subject, is based on the lack of ties to its origins/past and also on the constant inability of catching up with the idealized model of the West. However, this does not mean that the desire for being ‘whole’ again, the desire to return to ‘the Real’ in Lacanian sense, the desire for returning to the lost glorious past as well as the desire for reaching the West in the future is exhausted. On the contrary, these lacks invoke the desire for being completed, which seems as the main motive behind the reproduction of the Turkish subjectivity.

Of course, the reappearance of the novel Huzur as a social phenomenon is not a coincidence and is related to this above-mentioned desire. As I said, Huzur was published only two times (the one in 1949 and the other in 1970) before 1980, and was read only by a marginal minority and deprived of any academic and intellectual interest. However, things began to change when the military junta of 1980s introduced ‘the Turkish-Islamic syntheses’ as the new official ideology to suppress the leftist movement. Courses on religion were introduced as requirements to finish high schools, a certain interest towards the Ottoman past and its so-called multicultural structure was promoted, all of the history books were revised and finally Ottoman Empire was included in the glorious past of the Turkish history as well as in the list of the so-called Turkish States founded all along the history.

Since then the Islamic movements in Turkey became very popular and the headscarf became widespread as a symbol of traditionalism in post 1980s. As I cited from De Certeau, “the disappearance of the object is necessary for its ghostly reappearance in an authoritatively rendered text”. So, it is not a coincidence that the period in which the lost and forgotten Islamic and Ottoman traditions began to reappear as ghostly objects overlaps with the time in which Tanpinar’s books are republished excessively. Just like the rediscovery of Islam and of the Ottoman past, Tanpinar’s books appeared as the lost and forgotten objects of the Turkish literature. From that time on, Huzur itself, the narrative of the inevitable loss as well as of the desire for the recovery of the past losses, converted into an object of loss and desire. Thus, for the most part the newly emerged Islamic intelligentsia celebrated Tanpinar as the writer and Huzur as the narrative of ‘the true and original Turkish-Islamic literature’. On the other hand, the new cosmopolitan secular academics considered Huzur as the seminal work and the center piece of the Turkish literature canon. Interestingly the attempt to find continuity in the history, which is internal to the narrative of Huzur now appears as an external approach according to which Huzur itself is considered as the missing object to bridge the gap between the past and the present.

Thus, nowadays, Tanpinar and Huzur are reclaimed as the objects of the fetish, just like the compulsive advocacy of the headscarf or the fetishistic investments in the so-called traditional ceremonies, Ramadan festivals, model-architectural parks composed of miniatures of both enduring and lost Ottoman buildings, Ottoman restaurants, ‘traditional music’ concerts etc.

Yet, not only the Islamists but also the Kemalists are haunted by the ghostly return of the lost past. Last year before the general elections in Turkey, while massive demonstrations were organized by the Kemalist groups against the so-called threat of the Islamic reactionism, a certain group of Kemalist women advocated their rights to make-up and attended demonstrations with mini skirts and with excessive make-up to protest the spread of the headscarf.

After considering all of these, I think that, the contemporary clash in Turkey, which is presented as a conflict between the Islamists and the Kemalists, between tradition and progress, between the East and the West is just two sides of the same coin. Both of these are ghostly products of modernity which are still haunting us.

Thus, Tanpinar is right by introducing Ihsan and Suat as true characters. Indeed, we have real fathers like Ihsan who are fascinated with our glorious past and also real brothers like Suat who are compulsively challenging any idea of the origin, we have also mothers who present their denial of the loss of tradition by wearing headscarf and sisters who present their denial of the failure of the Kemalist ideals by advocating their right to excessive make-up.

In the space in-between, since the late Ottoman period until today the Turkish subjects are destined to be Mumtaz, to be torn between a funny and wretched localness and a crippled and incomplete foreign model, hopefully not to get mad but to lose their happiness in the search for peace of mind. However, I think, now, the deconstruction of the binary oppositions between us and them, tradition and modernity, the East and the West, Islamism and Kemalism opens up different possibilities to think the ways in which modern subjectivities are formed and reminds us that we are not stuck between these opposite alternatives. Rather than insisting on achieving a balance in life, synthesis between tradition and modernity and absolute peace of mind, now perhaps it is time to rethink and redefine what peace of mind means in a world in which uniqueness, originality and essence are no more a matter of question.

Bibliography

-Ahiska, Meltem, 2003 “Occidentalism: The Historical Fantasy of the Modern”, in The South Atlantic Quarterly 102:3/3, Spring/Summer 2003, Duke University Press.

-Dolar, Mladen, 1991, “’I Shall Be With You on Your Wedding Night’: Lacan and the Uncanny,”

-Freud, 1927, “The Uncanny”

-Freud, 1963, “Fetishism,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, Collier Boks

-Freud, 1963, “On Repression”, “Mourning and Melancholia”, “Fetishism” in Freud, General Psychological Theory, Collier Books

-Gurbilek, Nurdan., 2003, “Dandies and Originals, Authenticity, Belatedness, and the Turkish Novel” in The South Atlantic Quarterly 102:3/3, Spring/Summer 2003, Duke University Press.

-Ivy, Marilyn, 1996, “Ghostlier Demarcations: Textual Phantasm and the Origins of Japanese Nativist Ethnology,” in Culture and Contexture: Readings in Anthropology and Literary Study, ed. by E. Valentine Daniel and Jeffrey M. Peck, The University of California Pres

-Ivy, Marilyn, 1998 “Mourning the Japanese Thing,” in In Near Ruins: Culture Theory in Question, ed. by Nicholas Dirks, University of Minnesota Press

-Tanpinar, Ahmet Hamdi., 2000 [1949] Huzur (The Peace of Mind), Dergah Yayinlari, Istanbul

-Tanpinar, Ahmet Hamdi., 1992 Edebiyat Ustune Makaleler (Articles about Literature), Dergah Yayinlari, Istanbul

-Tanpinar, Ahmet Hamdi, 1936, Bizde Roman (Our Novel), Dergah Yayinlari, Istanbul

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.

We have never had the honor of visiting Palestine, but we suppose that people, men, women, children, and the elderly–not soldiers–lived in those houses, shacks, and buildings.

We also haven’t seen the resistance’s reinforcements, just rubble.

We have seen, however, the futile efforts of the information siege, and the world governments trying to decide between ignoring or applauding the invasion, and the UN, which has been useless for quite some time, sending out tepid press releases.

But wait. It just occurred to us that perhaps to the Israeli government those men, women, children, and elderly people are enemy soldiers, and as such, the shacks, houses, and buildings that they inhabited are barracks that need to be destroyed.

So surely the hail of bullets that fell on Gaza this morning were in order to protect the Israeli infantry’s advance from those men, women, children, and elderly people.

And the enemy garrison that they want to weaken with the siege that is spread out all over Gaza is the Palestinian population that lives there. And the assault will seek to annihilate that population. And whichever man, woman, child, or elderly person that manages to escape or hide from the predictably bloody assault will later be “hunted” so that the cleansing is complete and the commanders in charge of the operation can report to their superiors: “We’ve completed the mission.”

Again, pardon our ignorance, maybe what we’re saying is beside the point. And instead of condemning the ongoing crime, being the indigenous and warriors that we are, we should be discussing and taking a position in the discussion about if it’s “zionism” or “antisemitism,” or if Hamas’ bombs started it.

Maybe our thinking is very simple, and we’re lacking the nuances and annotations that are always so necessary in analyses, but to the Zapatistas it looks like there’s a professional army murdering a defenseless population.

Who from below and to the left can remain silent?

Is it useful to say something? Do our cries stop even one bomb? Does our word save the life of even one Palestinian?

We think that yes, it is useful. Maybe we don’t stop a bomb and our word won’t turn into an armored shield so that that 5.56 mm or 9 mm caliber bullet with the letters “IMI” or “Israeli Military Industry” etched into the base of the cartridge won’t hit the chest of a girl or boy, but perhaps our word can manage to join forces with others in Mexico and the world and perhaps first it’s heard as a murmur, then out loud, and then a scream that they hear in Gaza.

We don’t know about you, but we Zapatistas from the EZLN, we know how important it is, in the middle of destruction and death, to hear some words of encouragement.

I don’t know how to explain it, but it turns out that yes, words from afar might not stop a bomb, but it’s as if a crack were opened in the black room of death and a tiny ray of light slips in.

As for everything else, what will happen will happen. The Israeli government will declare that it dealt a severe blow to terrorism, it will hide the magnitude of the massacre from its people, the large weapons manufacturers will have obtained economic support to face the crisis, and “the global public opinion,” that malleable entity that is always in fashion, will turn away.

But that’s not all. The Palestinian people will also resist and survive and continue struggling and will continue to have sympathy from below for their cause.

And perhaps a boy or girl from Gaza will survive, too. Perhaps they’ll grow, and with them, their nerve, indignation, and rage. Perhaps they’ll become soldiers or militiamen for one of the groups that struggle in Palestine. Perhaps they’ll find themselves in combat with Israel. Perhaps they’ll do it firing a gun. Perhaps sacrificing themselves with a belt of dynamite around their waists.

And then, from up there above, they will write about the Palestinians’ violent nature and they’ll make declarations condemning that violence and they’ll get back to discussing if it’s zionism or anti-semitism.

And no one will ask who planted that which is being harvested.

For the men, women, children, and elderly of the Zapatista National Liberation Army,
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
Mexico, January 4, 2009

Scholars and activists welcome the new Kurdish channel in state television and ask for improved rights to private channels amid reactions from main opposition party and some circles of the Kurdish movement.

Republican People’s Party (CHP) president Deniz Baykal criticized the incentive, saying, “the state shall remain blind to ethnic identities of citizens” and spending public money to that end.

“Public broadcasting should benefit all citizens. Politicians must review their approach to notions like state of law and rights of citizens, plurality and equality,” professors Özden Cankaya of Galatasaray University, told bianet. “This channel could provide an opportunity to bring education services to Kurdish speaking population in Turkey, who are deprived of such for a long time. I would also contribute to efforts of peace.”

Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) begin broadcasting in Kurdish on January 1st, through the newly established TRT 6. Consisting of programs aimed at children and women as well as cultural and news bulletins, the new channel is on air 12 hours a day. Renowned Kurdish artists such as musician Rojin take part in the broadcast.

While the government promotes TRT 6 as a part of its plans to recognize cultural plurality in the country, some criticize the move as insincere and as a political trick to win Kurdish votes before the upcoming local elections in March.

Lack of a sound lawful base for the broadcast provides grounds for this argument. A procedure for TV and radio broadcasts in “languages other than Turkish that are traditionally used by Turkish citizens were established in 2006.

On the other hand, the foreseen broadcasts were limited to 45 minutes a day, subtitles in Turkish were mandatory and programs aimed at children were banned. Local TV stations like Gün TV faced pressures and prosecutions upon claims of violating this code. “Without a new law, introduction of TRT 6 won’t benefit us” said Ahmet Birsen of Gün TV. “Our channel was closed for a year for airing Şivan Perwer’s song Xalo. Now, it was on TRT 6 on its opening day. Implementation of the law remains arbitrary.”

Reiterating the argument, pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) MP Gültan Kışanak insisted that without recognizing the same rights for private channels, TRT 6 would remain a hoax to undermine their struggle for cultural rights.

On the other hand, president of the Women’s Center (KA-MER) in Diyarbakır, Nebahat Akkoç, welcomed the incentive as an important step. “We’ll intervene to influence the content of the broadcast. Women in could benefit from TRT 6 if they could learn their rights in their own language.”(EÜ)