1) Introduction
This paper aims to critically analyze the ways in which liberal and humanitarian civil society and NGO’s in Turkey perceive, approach, and develop policy proposals about the problem concerning the internally displaced Kurdish populations. By focusing on the liberal policy proposals concerning the problems of internally displaced people, I want to analyze the ways in which Kurds are imagined and produced as subjects of liberal and multicultural rights. Here, I will show both the limits of the liberal multicultural imagination and the sites where liberal multicultural projects and proposals conceal other projects and imaginations concerning justice.
Throughout the paper I will compare the statements of the Turkish state elites and army officers towards the Kurdish uprising in the eastern and southeastern Turkey since 1984 on the one hand, and the reconsideration and reproduction of the Kurdish ‘problem’ within the context of cultural recognition especially after 2000s by the Turkish liberal and humanist intelligentsia, composed of liberal academicians, journalists, writers, human rights activists and organizations, think-tank institutions, and various NGOs, on the other.
I argue that although definition and recognition of the Kurds as an ethnic-minority by some of these liberal and humanitarian NGO’s that work on the problems of the internally displaced Kurdish people is presented as a challenge against the official discourse of the Turkish state that continually denies the political presence of the Kurds, the liberal project fails in identifying and problematizing the structural political and social reasons behind the Kurdish problem such as the ongoing armed conflict in the southeast provinces of Turkey, the current ban on the Kurdish language, and the continuing criminalization of being and claiming a Kurd. Moreover, the liberal and humanitarian proposals also fail in specifying different effects of internal displacement over particular groups such as women, children, old and young Kurdish people. Unlike the Kurdish men, who have to learn Turkish during their obligatory military service, Kurdish women, who never engaged with the Turkish language in their lives before they arrive in the big western cities of Turkey, appear today as the most silenced, suppressed and discriminated population group of the new urban terrain that is shaped by the forced migration of the Kurds. A discussion of the structural questions of the internally displaced Kurdish women whose particular problems cannot be understood and solved within the discourse of rights will compose a significant part of this paper.
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“Analar milyonlarca Mehmetçik doğurabilir ama bir Skorsky helikopter doğuramaz…”
“Turkish mothers can give birth to millions of Mehmetciks (Turkish soldiers), yet they cannot give birth to a Skorsky helicopter…”
(A Turkish military commander’s response to his injured soldiers, who asked for a Skorsky helicopter to carry them immediately to the hospital)

Introduction:
In this paper I aim to analyze the ways in which the sovereign-image of the Turkish state is formed. My basic question is: Why in Turkey the survival of the state (‘devletin bekaasi’) is always considered as more important than the survival of the citizens when there is a conflict between their interests? Furthermore, what are the conditions of possibility that allow Turkish state officials to express this fact publicly as the words of the Turkish general quoted above bear witness?
To be sure, one can rightly argue that in many other countries, too, the survival of the state cannot be risked because of individual citizens’ interests that conflict with the interests of the state. Yet, it is unusual to hear this statement explicitly from the officials of governments and armies where the public image of the government appears as the protector of its own population. Thus, in such countries it is expected that the government should be even prepared to sacrifice itself for the sake of the well being, security and survival of the population. For instance, in France, in July 2008, when it was realized that during a military exercise 17 civilians were injured by mistake because of the use of real bullets instead of fake ones, the chief of the general staff of France, General Bruno Cuche declared his resignation, and the resignation was confirmed immediately by the President of France, Nicholas Sarkozy . As a more recent example, on December 6, 2008, when a 16 year old anarchist was shot to dead by the Greek police, the Greek government declared a public apology, the Ministry of Interior decided to resign though his resignation was not approved by the Prime Minister. The two police officers who were claimed to be responsible for the death of the young anarchist were dismissed from the police department and started to be tried. When demonstrations against the government began the Greek Prime Minister stated: “Democracies aim to protect their people, and not to kill them. What the police did is an individual but a shameful act. Therefore, I understand the protests of the people.”
To be sure, both the resignation of the French chief of the general staff and the statement of the Greek Prime Minister reflects an understanding of a liberal democratic government, whose target is the survival, security, and well-being of both each member and all the population of the nation. Such kind of a power regime that takes care of the health, security, welfare and efficiency of the population is defined by Michel Foucault as bio-power or governmentality. For him, what is distinctive of bio-power/governmentality is its aim to secure the whole population. Foucault traces the roots of such kind of power regime in the western tradition of pastorship and in the image of the shepherd-king, who sacrifices himself for the sake of the survival and well-being of his flock. Similar to the image of the shepherd-king of ancient times, for Foucault, modern liberal western state appears as a mechanism of governmental management that aims to maximize the common benefits and improve the conditions of life and the possibility of the survival of the general population. According to this formulation population is the primary target of bio-politics; and government is just the institutionalized form/effect of the management of this population. Foucault claims that bio-power designates the dominant mode of power in contemporary West, and nowadays we are witnessing the progressive ‘governmentalization’ of the power relations.
However, the situation in Turkey is different.
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This article investigates the demography politics in Turkey, beginning with the partition of the Ottoman Empire after WWI and spanning a period until the 1960s. The reorganization of the world into mutually exclusive states entailed new formations of populations as well as territories; it signified the making of the national spatialities. Drawing both social and physical boundaries in Asia Minor were mainly justified as an endeavour of separating different populations. With the establishment of the new Turkish Republic, demographic knowledge has continued to be a pivotal political venture. The boundaries between the homogeneously imagined geo-body of the nation and the “excessive populations” have become a repressive political domain. In other words, demographic knowledge, as a technique of nation formation, has been constituted by and through divisive practices. The last section of this essay points out how these divisions resulted in differential state policies in Turkey with respect to recognised minorities (e.g. Greeks) as well as unrecognised ones (Kurds).
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The Memorandum

On February 28, 1997 General Staff ordered a notice to the government on the rising reactionary and separatist activities in the monthly meeting of the National Security Council. After the notice, the coalition government led by Islamists was dissolved and a new coalition government was formed by secularist parties (the post-modern coup d’état). Then, state held activities against Kurdist and especially Islamist groups started to take place. In 2000, a deputy from the Islamist party (Virtue Party) made public the existence of a memorandum that suggests a set of activities against certain newspapers, journalists, and political parties. General Staff accepted the existence of the memorandum. On March 9, 2007, the weekly magazine Nokta brought out another memorandum which was produced within the General Staff again. The title of the document is as follows: The Reevaluation of Accredited Press Organs. Memorandum evaluates certain press organs and journalists in terms of their credibility and it classifies them as anti-TAF (Turkish Armed Forces) or pro-TAF.
According to the memorandum, journalists who do not have credibility must not be invited to any TAF press activities because of the fact that they can make disinformation campaigns, they can collect secret information on TAF and convey it to separatist groups, and finally they can attack military staff or facilities. In other words, “some” journalists can be a spy of the terrorists or even a suicide bomber. It would seem that the main criterion of the credibility is just making criticism of TAF. Because journalists criticized TAF for adopting a soft stance and journalists criticized TAF for not fully supporting Turkey’s EU membership and democratization reforms, are both labeled as anti-TAF journalists.
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Turkish Commander Requested Turkish Cypriot Prime Minister to prove his Turkishness

The leading government party in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), the Republican Turkish Party (RTP) held its party conference on March 18, 2007. The commander of the Cyprus Turkish Peace Forces Lieutenant General Hayri Kivrikoglu protested the Prime Minister and head of RTP Ferdi Sabit Soyer and refused to shake his hand in a meeting held that evening. Kivrioglu asked him why they held a party conference on the memorial day of martyrs, why they did not play the Independence Anthem (the Turkish National Anthem), or did not hang th poster of Ataturk and Turkish flags in the party conference. Finally, Kivrikoglu requested Soyer, the Prime Minister to prove his Turkishness.
The Prime Minister was shocked to hear a commander from Turkey question his Turkishness in his country. He replied that there were posters of Ataturk and Turkish flags in the conference and he underlined the fact that playing the Independence Anthem in party conferences is not compulsory. Soyer protested Kivrikoglu and stated that nobody could question their Turkishness, they do not need authorization from any circles because they are the representatives of the people of TRNC. According to TRNC Constitution, the state is to follow Ataturk’s principles and all deputies have to swear that they will follow Ataturk’s principles as well.
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The Kemalist and nationalist circles are complaining about the fact that a headscarfed First Lady will lead to a regime crisis in the country

The Present Ahmet Necdet Sezer’s term of office will end in May and the presidential election process will start in April. Who will be the ruling party, AK Party (Justice and Development Party)’s candidate and who will be the new president is one of the heatedly discussed topics in Turkey nowadays.
Today’s state structure was mainly invented by the military rule that came after the coup d’état of 1980. The current distribution of powers on the one hand gives important powers to the President like vetoing the laws, vetoing the appointments of high bureaucrats and diplomats, assigning the Chief of General Staff. On the other hand, s/he is totally irresponsible and unaccountable. As a responsible and accountable person, the Prime Minister has to share the executive powers with the President.

The Regime Crisis
AK Party is coming from the political Islamist tradition yet they identify themselves as “Conservative (not Muslim or Christian) Democrat” and the party itself resembles a wider coalition that includes politicians from right to central left. They are in favor of economic and political liberalization which boils down to Turkey’s European Union membership in practice.
However, the party is being heavily criticized by Kemalists and nationalist circles for encouraging reactionary attitudes and not preserving national interests. The secularist President Ahmet Necdet Sezer vetoed some reform laws of AK Party like laws on reforming the education system. Kemalist and nationalist circles are concerned about the possibility of the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan becoming the new President. The disaster scenario for them is the following: If Erdogan or one of his men becomes the President and AK Party will be the only ruling party after the parliamentary elections in November, there will be a serious regime crisis. Also the idea of having a headscarfed first lady is a symbolic part of the disaster. In the previous Parliament, the presence of a headscarfed deputy led to huge protests from Kemalist and nationalist politicians.
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Introduction
What is the actual relation between Orientalism and the people who live in the lands which are designated as the ‘Orient’? How do people who are the targets of Orientalism perceive, negotiate, manage and respond to the Orientalist discourse? How is the West imagined by these people? In what ways does this imagination of the West affect the formation of their subjectivities? In other words, what are the ways in which the distinction or the border between the images of the West and the East are produced and managed as power-knowledge, which subjects the subjectivities? These are the questions that this paper tries to investigate.
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” (Said 2003: 5). On the contrary, Orientalism creates the European identity as against all ‘those’ non-Europeans, by drawing a strict boundary between East and West. In response to this Orientalism, at the end of his book Said advocates putting aside the Orientalist creation of the East-West distinction in order to put an end to the essentialist antagonism between East and the West. However, despite his crucial contribution to the elaboration of the problem, Gil Eyal argues, Said doesn’t consider any hybrid entity between the East and the West and thereby ignores the fact that Orientalism is also a project of producing and managing boundaries and hybrids, namely the people in-between (Eyal 2006: 6-7). In Eyal’s words, Said’s “approach ignores the reality of the boundary itself. It basically requires us to think the boundary as a nonentity, a ‘fine line’ without any width to it…” (Eyal 2006: 7). In this sense, one has to reconsider the crucial role of the production and management of the hybrids and boundaries in the production of identities.
Maybe Said’s neglect of a discussion concerning the Ottoman Empire and contemporary Turkey–the country which is often defined as ‘a bridge’ between the East and the West, considered as neither developed nor underdeveloped, and regarded neither a ‘true’ colonizer nor a ‘true’ colony–depends also on the fact that he ignores the reality of boundaries and hybrids.
Regarding this gap in post-colonial theory, it would be complementary to trace the roots of the Occidentalist discourse in the Turkish context, which implies knowledge about the image or the fantasy of the West as both an idealized and a frustrated figure. The contemporary Turkish identity appears as the ‘effect’ of the Occidentalist discourse. In this sense, Occidentalism is the constant creation and management of the border between the East and the West and the mechanism of the reproduction and purification of the hybrid entities which emerge as the effects of this border regime. Whereas one can not separate knowledge and power, Occidentalist discourse, which produces a regime of truth regarding the images of the West, also marks a regime of power. The Occidentalist discourse began to be institutionalized as the motive of modernization since the Tanzimat reforms in Ottoman Empire in late 19th century and became the dominant discourse in the formation of the Turkish Republic and the new Turkish national identity. In this historical framework the hegemonic interventions of the Turkish state, bureaucrats, intellectuals, academicians, journalists and various groups of experts, through the boundary management of dividing spheres, regions, and people along the axis of East and West, becomes possible and justifiable with a constant reference to an imagined West as an ideal model. Therefore, throughout this paper I will to try to investigate the ways in which Occidentalism is exercised, institutionalized and diffused as one of the dominant discourses of the Turkish modernization.
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In this paper, I will focus on a particular debate, which was a hot topic in Turkish media in the summer of 2005. The debate was about the leisure time activities of lower class inhabitants of Istanbul, who were blamed to spoil the Istanbul panorama. Their leisure time habits, like swimming with underwear, were identified as a problem of “incivility” in accordance with the interchangeable use of “civilized” with “modern”, “Westernized” and/or “contemporary” in Turkey. Once cited as a problem to tackle, a variety of positions, propositions, classifications, and also solutions were put forward in media, through which I will interpret certain claims on the Turkish Nation, culture, poverty, and modernity. These claims, I will argue, are bound with disciplining of certain populations in line with the middle class aspirations. Throughout, certain practices, objects and bodies are considered to be a “problem”. They are put on view as to be corrected and fit the dominant representations of “proper citizen”. Hence, I will discuss that the problem about “non-modern” is a problem of governance. So, this paper is an attempt to bring objects and practices marked as “backward” and “non-civilized” back “‘into touch’ with the larger, less tangible and less coherent network of relationships” (Hebdidge, 1988).
My short discussion will not cover all the claims, and for that matter, all the parties involved. I have to exert from the beginning that the maneuvers, complicities, appropriations or rejections that lower class inhabitants of the city take on, are beyond the scope of this paper. My analysis is not about how power is assumed or subverted by lower classes; rather, I will focus on the desires and aspirations of middle classes in respect to their taste for leisure time. That is to say that although the subject matter of this paper seems as the practices of lower class people, it is actually about the normative framework of middle classes.
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