Kurds of Modern Turkey
Cenk Saraçoğlu
It was not until the convoy of the Democratic Society Party, the major Kurdish nationalist party in Turkey, was stoned in İzmir in November 2009 that the increasing anti-Kurdish sentiments in Turkey were openly discussed in Turkish media and academia. This incident happened when the ruling AKP party (Justice and Development Party) was in the process of initiating a reform package that intended to expand the political and cultural rights of Kurds. This intention of the government, also known as the ‘Kurdish initiative’, sparked deep political controversies in Turkey, as both the opposition parties and large sections of Turkish society took a dim view of it. In this context, the incident in İzmir was typically interpreted as proof of the fact that the AKP government’s reform package was leading to the development and popularisation of hitherto absent (or marginal) anti-Kurdish sentiments...
CONTENTS
List of Abbreviations / vii
List of Figures and Tables / ix
Acknowledgements / xi
Foreword / xiii
1 Introduction / 1
2 Clarifying the Object of Analysis: Exclusive Recognition / 9
3 Researching Middle Class, Migration and Kurds in İzmir / 27
4 The Historical Specificity of ‘Exclusive Recognition’ / 35
5 Urban Social Life: The Locus of Exclusive Recognition / 63
6 Neoliberalism, Migration and Urban Social Life / 79
7 The Recognition of Migrants as ‘Kurds’ / 105
8 Excluding the Recognised / 131
9 The Reinforcement of Exclusive Recognition / 163
10 Exclusive Recognition: An Ideology / 171
11 Conclusion: Exclusive Recognition as a Form of Racism / 179
Endnotes / 187
Bibliography / 205
Index / 225
LIST OF ABBREVATIONS
AKP Justice and Development Party
ANAP Motherland Party
CKMP Republican Peasants People Party
CUP Committee of Union and Progress
DSP Democratic Left Party
DTP Democratic Society Party
GAP South East Anatolia Development Project
HEP People’s Labour Party
HÜNEE Institute of Population Studies at Hacettepe University
IMF International Monetary Fund
KDP Kurdistan Democratic Party
MHP Nationalist Action Party
PKK Kurdistan Workers Party
PUK Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
SHP Social Democratic People’s Party
TÜİK Turkish Statistical Institute
INTRODUCTION
When Turkey is discussed in the international media and academia it is generally portrayed as a cluster of contradictions: ‘a secular state versus a religious society’; ‘a conservative government versus the secularist military- bureaucratic elite’; ‘a democratic political system versus an authoritarian state tradition’; ‘EU candidate versus inadequate democracy’. These statements are generally used to qualify Turkey as a distinct and unique country. They are so deeply entrenched in the public mind that any significant political development in Turkey is commonly situated within the context of one of these putative contradictions. For example, the intention of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) to lift the restrictions on the wearing of the headscarf in universities has by and large been understood in relation to the conflict between the ‘conservative government’ and ‘secularist military elite’. Likewise, the ceaseless tensions between the military and the AKP government have also been seen as the symptoms of the contradiction between the ‘democratic political system and the authoritarian state tradition’. These presumed dualities may be useful in coming to terms with the fundamentals of some social issues and political developments in Turkey. Nevertheless, they give rise to an oversimplified understanding of social phenomena that demand a more complex analysis. An approach that relies solely on these dualities without a historical and sociological analysis cannot go beyond partial and superficial explanations. This tendency to present Turkish society in simple and a-historical terms is also epitomised by discussions of the ‘Kurdish question’ in Turkey.
‘The Kurdish question’, here, refers to the controversies concerning the status of the Kurds1 in the social and political life of Turkey. The Kurds in Turkey form a large community which comprises between 12 per cent and 17 per cent (9 to 13 million) of Turkey’s total population.2 In international academic, political and media circles, the situation of the Kurds in Turkey has typically been discussed in the context of two of the above-mentioned contradictions: the contradiction between ‘the democratic political system and authoritarian state tradition’ and the contradiction between ‘Turkey’s candidateship to European Union (EU) and the problems in its democracy’. In the former framework, the Kurdish question is seen as one of the longstanding non-democratic elements in the Turkish political system, based on the fact that the state long denied the presence of the Kurds in Turkey as a distinct ethnic group and limited their ethnicity-based political and cultural rights. Accordingly, the resolution of ‘the Kurdish question’ has been thought to depend on the full democratisation of the Turkish political and legal system. In the latter framework, which complements the former, the Kurdish question is seen as one of the most important obstacles to Turkey’s integration in the EU. From this perspective, Turkey can gain entrance to the EU only if the Turkish state changes its non-democratic treatment of the Kurds. A quick glance at the academic and press literature on the Kurdish question reveals numerous works with this theme. By ‘narrowing the perspectives to the political dimension of the Kurdish “ethnic” problem’, these academic studies and political commentaries have generally limited their focus to the possible political and legal reforms that would regulate the rights and freedoms of the Kurds (İçduygu et al., 1999: 992). In this light, the Kurdish question is reduced to a problematic political relationship between the rights of the Kurds and the Turkish state. This tendency reached its peak in late 2009 when the AKP government launched an initiative (known as the ‘Kurdish initiative’) to propose a comprehensive plan for resolving the Kurdish question by enlarging the cultural and political rights of the Kurds in Turkey. The fact that the phrases ‘Kurdish initiative’ and ‘democratic initiative’ are used interchangeably in Turkish public life to refer to this project indicates that the problem of ‘democratisation’ and the Kurdish question in Turkey are considered to be the two sides of the same coin. Needless to say, the status of the Kurds vis-à-vis the Turkish state is an integral component of the Kurdish question in Turkey, and therefore the academic and political discussions concerning the political and legal rights of the Kurds are very important. However, the problem with these discussions is that they have failed to comprehend some important new dimensions of the Kurdish question in recent decades. Certain recent tendencies in Turkish society, such as sporadic and short-lived lynching attempts against Kurdish seasonal workers in some Turkish towns (Gambetti, 2007), and evident manifestations of an anti-Kurdish discourse in some marginal media and the internet, indicate that the Kurdish question is more than simply a problem between the state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The anti-Kurdish discourses on the internet and in other media portray the Kurds as culturally inferior, intrinsically incapable of adapting to ‘modern city life’, naturally criminal, violent and separatist people (Bora, 2006). It is quite ironic but meaningful to observe that at a time when the Turkish state is taking some ‘historical’ steps towards recognising certain political and cultural rights of the Kurds, we witness indications of a rising antagonist discourse towards the Kurds in Turkish society. The prevalent approaches that focus merely on the relationship between the state and the cultural rights of the Kurds lack the necessary analytical tools for examining such novel social-relational dimension of the Kurdish question.
I am not the first person to point to the increasing anti-Kurdish sentiments in Turkish society. Several recent articles have dealt with manifestations of this attitude on the internet and in marginal nationalist printed media. While these analyses drew attention to an emerging (or rising) anti-Kurdish sentiment, almost all of them reveal the limitations and problems of focusing solely on the anti-Kurdish narratives revealed on the internet and in marginal media (see Aktan, 2007; Esen, 2007; Saç, 2007). In these media sources, the social positions of the subjects who utter these anti-Kurdish discourses, the context in which the discourses emerged and the justifications behind the prejudices towards Kurds are generally obscure. Therefore, it is difficult to develop a complex examination of the historical and social sources of these sentiments based only on the analysis of media content. Another problem with these studies is that they typically exaggerate the importance and social influence of marginal websites and racist political magazines that in reality are hardly known to the majority of people. In fact, it was necessary to investigate the perceptions of the ‘common people’ in order to come to grips with the social sources of this novel dimension of the Kurdish question. Bearing these limitations and problems in mind, I conducted an extensive one-year field study with the main objective of producing a preliminary framework for the analysis of the social sources of recent anti-Kurdish sentiments in Turkish society. This field study, conducted in İzmir between June 2006 and June 2007, involved close observations of the urban social life and in-depth interviews with 90 middle-class people who openly expressed anti-Kurdish sentiments. Neither the city of fieldwork nor the people who were interviewed were chosen arbitrarily. İzmir is a city that has received Kurdish migrants at an unprecedented rate since the late 1980s, and most of the Kurdish migrants that came to this city have constituted segregated communities in slums areas or shanty towns. Poverty, unemployment or unstable and insecure informal jobs3 are endemic among these migrants. In other words, they constitute one of the poorest segments of İzmir’s population. As for the individuals interviewed, they were chosen from middle-class people who live in apartments and houses relatively close to the neighbourhoods where Kurdish migrants are concentrated. The primary reason for choosing middle-class research participants for the interviews was that, in the initial stages of the fieldwork, I observed recurrent and illuminating patterns and commonalities in the perceptions of the Kurds among this group. My objective was to draw a typology of a specific form of anti- Kurdish sentiments among these middle-class people through these commonalities, treat this specific typology as a coherent social fact and trace the social and historical processes through which this specific form of anti-Kurdish perspective has been formed. Besides enabling me to draw this typology, choosing middle-class people was also critical in order to challenge the socially established notion that racist and xenophobic sentiments in society are a marginal and hence negligible phenomenon because they are seen only in the ‘lumpen’, ‘rabble’ and ‘uneducated’ segments of the youth population in Turkey.
The in-depth interviews that I conducted in İzmir have yielded some significant results that helped me to propose arguments about the social and historical sources of the anti-Kurdish perspectives of middle-class people in İzmir. These interviews enabled me to draw a typology of these anti-Kurdish sentiments among middle-class people in İzmir and identify this typology with the concept of ‘exclusive recognition’. I have constructed the concept of ‘exclusive recognition’ based on four common features of the anti-Kurdish discourses revealed in the in-depth interviews: firstly, in contrast to the conventional assimilationist discourse of the Turkish state, the recent anti-Kurdish discourse recognises the ‘Kurds’ as a distinct group of people. Secondly, these middle-class residents of İzmir recognise the Kurdishness of these Kurdish migrants when they see them in their urban encounters and observations. Thirdly, this recognition necessarily involves discursive exclusion of these Kurdish migrants through certain stereotypes and labels. In other words, the recognition or identification of the ‘Kurd’ in everyday life is expressed in the middle-class discourse by means of certain stereotypes. Fourthly, these people use such negative stereotypes exclusively against Kurdish migrants, and not towards other ‘ethnically’ non-Turkish Muslim communities living in Turkish cities such as Bosnians, Lazs, Georgians and Circassians.
Throughout this study, I use ‘exclusive recognition’4 as an operational concept that can help me to examine the social sources of the anti- Kurdish sentiments in the western Turkish cities that have been influenced by Kurdish migration since the late 1980s. This concept is functional in three respects: Firstly, as shown above, it conveys the most common and important characteristics of the anti-Kurdish discourses of the middle-class people living in İzmir, and helps me to draw the typology of their anti-Kurdish sentiments. Secondly, exclusive recognition is qualitatively different from the positions of the state or the existing nationalist parties, which are based on ‘non-recognition’ and ‘assimilation’. In this sense, this concept denotes the historical specificity of recent anti-Kurdish expressions in Turkish cities. Thirdly, by emphasising the historical specificity of anti-Kurdish sentiments seen among middle- class segments of society, this concept helps me organise and expose my thoughts concerning the complex maze of social relations and dynamics that have led to the emergence of these anti-Kurdish sentiments. Besides helping me to develop the concept of exclusive recognition, the in-depth interviews are also important in shedding some light on the social context in which they emerge. One of the most important findings of this fieldwork is that the perspective of research participants cannot be seen as an extension or manifestation of the traditional mainstream nationalist ideologies in Turkey. The way these middle-class people construct and perceive Kurdish migrants in the city is fundamentally different from the way the Turkish state and some other ultra-nationalist parties construct the ‘Kurds’. This indicates that the sources of the stereotypes and labels used by interviewees to construct their perspective of ‘Kurdish’ cannot be sought primarily in the traditional nationalist discourses of the state or in any other discourse produced by a nationalist political actor in Turkey. In other words, what I call exclusive recognition cannot be seen as the ideological manipulation or inculcation of an organised political institution.
This leads me to turn my attention to some other areas of social life in order to trace the origins of these sentiments. A close analysis of the narratives of the interviewees indicate that middle-class İzmirlis (people from İzmir) develop and reinforce their perception of ‘Kurdishness’ through their interactions with and observations of Kurdish migrants in the urban social life of İzmir. The locus and source of these sentiments is not the state or any nationalist political organisation but the social life of the city and urban everyday life erlations between Kurdish migrants and middle-class people in İzmir. However, this is not to imply that these urban everyday life encounters lead inevitably to such sentiments. These encounters take place in a specific social setting and, in order to capture the fundamental social sources of these sentiments, it is necessary to unravel the social processes through which this social setting is formed. This encourages me to examine the ways in which a) the neoliberalisation of the Turkish economy; b) the armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state; and c) the consequent exodus from Eastern Anatolia contributed to the formation of the social context in which these sentiments were shaped. These dynamics have profoundly altered the social life of Turkish cities. Therefore, an adequate examination of the construction of Kurdish migrants as negatively viewed ‘ethnic others’ should be coupled with an analysis of the resonances of these three national-level dynamics within the urban life of İzmir. Hence, when analysing the research findings of my fieldwork I endeavour to ensure a constant dialogue between macro- and micro-level processes. It is this constant dialogue that enables me to use these sentiments as a vantage point for shedding some light on the socio-economic structure of Turkey. More importantly, it is through such an analysis of anti-Kurdish sentiments that I could invite researchers to rethink the Kurdish question in light of its novel dimensions and to develop some new perspectives that would transcend the dominant academic tendency to see the issue merely as a problem of the democratisation of the political and legal systems. In this sense, this book endeavours to go beyond a microlevel examination of the case of İzmir.
The book is organised in such a way as to reflect this interaction between macro- and micro-level processes.
Chapter 2 clarifies the research object and scope of this study, and presents the basic theoretical premises that guide my research and analysis. In this chapter, I introduce the concept of ‘exclusive recognition’ that I use to identify the anti-migrant sentiments of the middle-class people living in İzmir.
Chapter 3 includes some background information about the fieldwork that I undertook in İzmir in general and the in-depth interviews I conducted with middle-class research participants in particular.
Chapter 4 aims to show the historical specificity of exclusive recognition by juxtaposing it with the state’s conventional nationalist and assimilationist policy towards the Kurds. Following a detailed historical examination of official and mainstream nationalism in Turkey, this chapter points out that exclusive recognition is a novel and historically specific sentiment, and that its origins should be sought outside the traditional discourses of the state.
The fifth chapter points to the necessity of tracing the origins of exclusive recognition in the urban social life of İzmir. It also presents a succinct conceptualisation of ‘urban everyday life’ and situates it within the general analytical framework of the entire study. This chapter also includes brief background information on the historical transformation of social life in İzmir.
The sixth chapter brings into focus the neoliberal transformation of the Turkish economy, the armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state, and Kurdish immigration into the western cities of Turkey. These are three national-level dynamics that have shaped urban everyday social in İzmir. Therefore, an analysis of their structural effects on Turkish cities is critical for grasping the social processes through which exclusive recognition is formed in the urban space. The seventh chapter deals extensively with the social processes through which Kurdish migrants have been recognised as a distinctive and homogeneous ethnic group in İzmir. It analyses the ways in which the three national dynamics mentioned above have facilitated the socioeconomic and spatial segregation of Kurdish migrants, thereby preparing a convenient urban milieu for the recognition of these migrants as ethnic others.
Building on the analysis presented in the seventh chapter, the eighth chapter examines the processes whereby Kurdish migrants have been discursively excluded through certain stereotypes and labels that are attached to ‘Kurdishness’. By scrutinising the ways in which middle-class people justify and rationalise these stereotypes and labels, this chapter unravels the ‘logic’ behind exclusive recognition.
In the ninth chapter I look at the processes through which exclusive recognition has been reinforced and reproduced by some factors that are outside the urban life of İzmir. Accordingly I explicate how recent political developments in the Middle East have played important roles in the reinforcement and perpetuation of exclusive recognition. In the tenth chapter I engage in a theoretical discussion of exclusive recognition around the concept of ideology, and, by doing so, I try to summarise and also deepen the fundamental arguments of the whole book. Also, in this chapter, I show the ideological character of exclusive recognition and specifically identify it as a form of cultural racist ideology.
In the eleventh, concluding, chapter I point to the importance of developing theoretically rich and empirically grounded perspectives on the Kurdish question in order to examine its new dimensions in the urban space.
Kurds of Modern Turkey
Cenk Saraçoğlu
Migration, Neoliberalism and Exclusion in
Turkish Society
TAURIS ACADEMIC STUDIES
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Copyright © 2011 Cenk Saraçoğlu
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Library of Modern Middle East Studies 95
ISBN 978 1 84885 468 0
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