Voices from the front : Turkish soldiers on the war with the Kurdish guerrillas
[...] Everyone in Turkey has experienced similar instances, some more some less, with or without being aware of it. Albeit no reliable figures exist, since 1984— when the PKK declared guerrilla war against Turkey—an estimated 2.5 million young men have been sent to the Emergency Rule Zone for military service. Along with their families, the situation has already affected at least 15 million; when their close relatives and friends are added, nearly half of Turkey’s total 62 million population has been affected. Indeed, not even resorting to figures, just by simply looking around us, we can already sense or witness that the hearts of our relatives, neighbors, or friends beat for their sons, brothers, or loved ones who might at that moment be fighting somewhere in the Southeast.
We further know that for the last 15 years, whether we call it “war,” “low intensity conflict,” “combating terrorism,” or anything else, many people involved, including politicians, the military, human rights organizations, the United States of America and EU officials, journalists, writers, and experts, have been talking. Yet those who have been sent to the Southeast war zones of Uırnak, Diyarbakır, Hakkari, Siirt, Mardin, and so on, for military service are only allowed to speak while they are in the military, restrained by “the chain of order and command.”
A young soldier appears on TV: “We have come here to finish the goddamn terror. I would advise others to volunteer to come here. It is a very nice feeling to climb up on the mountains and fight the terrorists. We are a nation of martyrs, and many martyrs will come from among us during the summer operations.” A youth from the Eruh Commando Brigade addresses his girlfriend Şölen: “Wait for me, and don’t you forget.” The young privates from the Çanakkale 116th Gendarmerie Basic Training Regiment send messages to their families: “I have missed my family a lot,” “I expect my fiancée Derya to wait for me and I will wait for her,” “my mom and dad are waiting for me,” “my parents, my beloved ones: I am OK, don’t worry for me.” The anchor person from the national channel TGRT is excited: “Serving in such a place is an award!”
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Contents
Foreword ix Acknowledgments xiii Preface 1 1. I Came Back Without Having Seen the Enemy / 11 2. A Twenty-Year-Old Youngster is Going... / 15 3. I Became a Soldier with a Beard / 19 4. If Soldiers Had the Opportunity, They Would Run Away / 25 5. To Escape Military Service, You Need to Stay Away From Bread / 29 6. The Donkey Was Looking at Me . . . Should I Shoot Him Right Here? I Asked Myself... / 33 7. It Is Up to the Poor to Protect the Homeland; the Rich know How to Go About It... / 41 8. My Mother Asks, “Where Is Mus?” / 49 9. I Slapped him Twice; He could not Understand Why He was Being Beaten... / 61 10. “I Have to Control My Nerves” / 67 11. Time Doesn’t Pass There; It Is as if Time Has Frozen... / 77 12. The Greatest Advantage of the State Is to Send the Twenty-Year-Old Youth to the Region / 83 13. Another Reward for Being a Veteran Is that Nobody Lets You Marry Their Daughter / 91 14. At Least I Sort of Saved Myself / 97 15. On the One Hand, There Is Great Respect and Love, but on the Other, There Is Brutality / 105 16. 1313: The Number Inscribed on My Arm / 109 17. I Love All Human Beings; Even the Terrorists We Captured / 117 18. We Took Out the Powder from Our Bullets and Inscribed Our Remaining Days / 123 19. I, Too, Lived that Festive Day / 133 20. You Can’t Finish Your Military Service by Running Away from It; You Have to Go Through It / 139 21. Turkey’s Balances Are Disturbed / 145 22. If I Knew an Alternative for Evading Military Service, I Would Advise the Youth to Take It / 151 23. I Definitely Wouldn’t Send My Child into Military Service / 157 24. I Ordered the Soldier to Kill the Dog; There Was No Other Way / 165 25. What Would a Woman’s Voice Do There? You Hear It because You Are Lonely... / 173 26. I Became a Terrorist, Like They Said, a Real Terrorist... / 183 27. Our Nickname among the Terrorists Was “Battalion of Bastards” / 189 28. I Didn’t Live up to the Uniform I Wore / 199 29. They Call It the “Invisible Enemy”: My Only Fear Was the Landmine and I Stepped on One... / 205 30. I Was Frightened. Instantly, I Thought of Death, of Dying. / 213 31. We Kept Asking, “Why Us?” But then We Realized that There Was No Way Out... / 219 32. Real Military Service Starts Here / 229 33. We Should Be the Ones Who Sanctify Life, not Death! / 237 34. Soldiers are the Ones Experiencing This Pain, I Mean the Conscripted Privates... / 245 35. Mother, I Survived Another Day / 253 36. These Were Moments When We Missed Death / 261 37. Am I an Idiot? Are the People Who Go There Idiots? / 269 38. While Everybody Is Sunbathing and Enjoying Themselves, We Go into an Operation! / 275 39. They Called Me “The Old Soldier” / 281 40. No Blood-for-Blood / 287 41. I Don’t Even Own a Piece of Land as Big as This Ashtray; Which Land Am I Going to Defend? / 291 42. In Place of the Ones Who Cannot Talk / 301 43. Numbers... / 309
Index / 317
Foreword
It was October, 2003. This was my first visit to Istanbul. The U.S. government by this time was deeply engaged in its military invasion of Iraq. Nine months earlier, the Turkish parliament, however, had surprised the Bush administration by voting to refuse to allow the U.S. military to use Turkey, where there had been American bases for decades, as a launch pad for its northern incursion into neighboring Iraq. Those parliamentarians voting to deny the Americans this access were persuaded in no small measure by an effective lobbying campaign mounted by the Turkish peace movement, in which Turkish feminists played a significant role.
Ayşe Gül Altinay was my host in Istanbul. A feminist anthropologist at Istanbul’s independent Sabanci University (where all first-year students are given laptop computers) and a sophisticated analyst of the daily workings of Turkish militarism, Ayşe Gül was making sure that I would learn a lot in a short time. We were meeting and having intense conversations over tea, coffee, meals, and wine with publishers, peace activists, conscientious objectors, university students and feminists. My mind was working overtime to absorb it all. Despite its importance to the making of “The West” and to current European Union and NATO politics, despite its century-long women’s movement (the archives of which are all available in Istanbul’s Women’s Library), despite its global significance in the complicated evolution of thinking about empire, nationalism, militarism, and the secular state, Turkey was a country about which there had been dismayingly little discussion in political science, international relations, and women’s studies. I knew embarrassingly little. I had a lot to learn.
On this October morning we were climbing up the stairs of a small building in the bustling Istanbul neighborhood of Tunel to meet Nadire Mater, codirector of BIANET, a self-consciously independent Internet news service. My first impression was of what I had always imagined a real newspaper office should be—no frills, no walls, lots of energy, windows looking out over the city; oh yes, and cigarette smoke. Nadire Mater greeted us warmly. She exuded the sense of a real newspaper woman: direct, informal, savvy. In Turkey today, to be an independent journalist means also having to stay alert, determined, and brave. In a country where the military plays a central role in political life, where a fierce ethnicized civil war has been going on in the Kurdish southeast for a generation, where, as in the United States, religion and politics are in an explosively fluid relationship, “national security” has been wielded by those in authority to dampen independent journalism.
I was beginning to see why Ayue Gül thought that I, who was trying to track the blatant and subterranean workings of gendered militarization in the United States and other countries, would find time spent in Turkey so valuable. Nadire Mater is the author of this terrific, eye-opening book you are about to read. Ayue Gül Altinay is its skilled translator.
The Turkish state still acquires its rank-and-file soldiers through all-male conscription. The voices we hear here are those of young men who have been conscripted. While there now exists a vibrant Turkish conscientious objector movement, most young men and their parents do not see themselves as having much choice but to submit to conscription.
Many conventional historians of the nation-state—a particular sort of state, one whose officials and defenders claim that it acquires its legitimacy from having roots in a horizontally bonded community of citizens, that is, in a nation—have asserted that the creation and perpetuation of a conscript army of male citizens are crucial for any state wanting to stay rooted in the nation. Feminist theorists of the state and of the nation have put neon-lit asterisks around the awkward fact that military conscription almost always applies only to male citizens, thus making living in both the nation and the state quite a different experience for women than for men. A system of male military conscription does not bind women to the nation-state.
Since the 1970s, more and more states have given up male military conscription, legislators seeing it as a symbol not of national legitimation of the state, but, instead, of state coercion. This has left these governments relying instead on “all-volunteer” forces. Britain, Japan, Australia, Canada, and the United States, followed more recently by South Africa, the Netherlands, and Belgium and several of the postwar Eastern Europe states, have given up conscription as the means for mobilizing soldiers. On the other hand, in France—the prototype of the male citizen nation-sate military—as well as in Germany, Russia, South Korea, Switzerland, Israel, and Italy, there are presently public debates over whether something essential in the nation-state will be lost if the state’s military no longer directly touches the lives of all its young male citizens—and their parents. Turkey’s state elites, like those of France and Russia and South Korea, are loathe to surrender their grip on masculinized nationalist legitimacy.
Those states that have turned to all-volunteer forces have faced the challenge of attracting sufficient numbers of young people into their uniformed ranks. When the local civilian economy is booming, or when the government is deploying its soldiers to wage a less than popular war, recruiters’ jobs become especially hard. Today in the United States, military recruiters are under such stress to meet their monthly recruiting quotas that many are reporting mental health problems. Most governments that have given up male conscription have found that to fill the ranks, especially to fill them with young people with secondary and even university educations (increasingly necessary as soldiering has called for more and more advanced skills), recruiters have needed to enlist more young women. The elimination of male conscription and the subsequent rise of women as a percentage of the state’s soldiers are not unconnected.
The Turkish military remains today dependent on young male conscripts. Since the early 1990s, women have been permitted to enlist voluntarily as officers (Italy, not Turkey was the last NATO military to permit women to voluntarily enlist), but they remain a very small percentage of all the Turkish government’s troops. At a deeper level, compulsory male military service remains widely seen in Turkish official circles and among Turkish nationalists to be the essential experience of national belonging. While this may seem to make Turkish political culture dramatically different from American political culture in the early twenty-first century, the proliferation in the United States of yellow ribbons with their “Support our troops” logo, together with the omnipresence of uniformed military personnel at school and professional sporting events and town holiday parades might suggest that the 1973 ending of conscription (“the draft”) in the United States did not actually sever the ideological links that many Americans forge for themselves between military service and national belonging.
Nadire Mater is a skilled and careful interviewer. The voices of the young men one hears here on these pages are relatively unfiltered, unchoreographed. The young men we meet here are reflective, unsure, candid. Precisely because state legitimacy, nationalist ideology, and masculinized military service have been so tightly woven together in Turkish political culture, making public these highly personal mullings by ordinary soldiers about their worries and anxieties can amount to political dynamite. Who is the “enemy?” What does it mean to become a “man?” How can one hold onto one’s basic humanity? To appreciate the political saliency of soldiers’ narratives, one needs only to think of how sensitive have been the publications of soldiers’ thoughtful narratives in Israel, in South Korea, in the United States and in Russia.
On one evening of my intense Istanbul visit, I was invited to join a party in the modern apartment home of a family long engaged in Turkey’s vibrant urban intellectual life. The conversations were lively, moving between Turkish and English. The buffet was enticing, the wine plentiful. Stories were shared, political meanings were dissected, laughter abounded. As the party wound down, a dozen of us were putting on our coats and saying extended goodbyes and thank yous in the front hallway. A friend of the hosts asked about their university graduate son’s imminent conscription into the military. There was no question that it would happen, only how he might be deployed. In a spirit of friendship, one of a party raised a glass and made a toast: “May your son be assigned to the Navy’s volleyball team!” We all joined in.
Several months later, now back in Boston, I heard the outcome of our collective wishing: the young man was assigned to the army and sent to the Southeast to join the government’s fight against Kurdish insurgents. I wonder now what he will think of these testimonies given to Nadire Mater. Which will most closely match his own? What, I wonder, will his father think? And his mother? And his sister? And his girlfriend? Maybe, though, he will feel it is best to keep his confused reflections to himself. Silence is comforting to many militarized nation-states. This book is not comforting.
Cynthia Enloe
VOICES FROM THE FRONT TURKISH SOLDIERS ON THE WAR WITH THE KURDISH GUERILLAS
Nadire Mater
Translated by Ayşe Gül Altınay
With a Foreword by Cynthia Enloe
Original Turkish Title Mehmedin Kitabı: Güneydogu’da Savaşmış Askerler Anlatıyor
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ISBN 1–4039–6120–4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mater, Nadire. [Mehmedin kitabi. English] Voices from the front : Turkish soldiers on the war with the Kurdish guerrillas / Nadire Mater ; with a foreword by Cynthia Enloe. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6120–4 1. Kurds—Turkey, Eastern. 2. Turkey, Eastern—Ethnic relations. 3. Turkey, Eastern—Politics and government. I. Title. DR435.K87M3813 2005 956.6'0'039—dc22 2005048702
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
