Activists in Office, Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey
Nicole F. Watts
University of Washington Press
Thousands of Kurdish politician-activists have been prosecuted and imprisoned, and hundreds have been murdered for espousing Kurdish political and cultural rights over the past twenty years. The risks are high, yet pro-Kurdish political parties have made significant gains as resources afforded by the political system have allowed them to challenge state rhetoric and policies and to exercise power at the municipal level, which has helped legitimize and advance the pro-Kurdish movement. Activists in Office examines how these parties, while sharing many of the goals expressed by armed Kurdish groups, are using the legal political system to promote their highly contentious Kurdish national agenda in the face of a repressive and sometimes violent state.
Nicole F. Watts asks illuminating questions about the motivations, rewards, and impacts of activists who remain engaged in legal politics despite state repression and other hardships. Her analysis sheds light not only on the particular situation of Kurds in Turkey, but also on the challenges, risks, and potential benefits for comparable movements operating in less than fully democratic contexts. The book is a result of more than ten years of research conducted in Turkey and in Europe, and it draws on a wide array of sources, including Turkish electoral data, memoirs, court records, and interviews.
Nicole F. Watts is associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments / ix Abbreviations / xxiii
Introduction: Other Routes of Resistance / 3
1 Early Routes: Conditions of Kurdish Electoral Mobilization / 26
2 New Collective Challengers: The Institutional Trajectory of Turkey’s First Pro-Kurdish Party / 51
3 Resources of the System / 75
4 Characteristics of Coercion: Obstructing Access to Resources / 94
5 Producing Competing Truths / 122
6 Creating a New Kurdish Subject / 142
Conclusions: Assessing a Challenger’s Impact / 161
Notes / 179
References / 185
Index / 201
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In September of 2006 I stood with a dozen visitors in front of a sand-colored building in the center of Erbil, a jumbled city of around a million people that had become the capital of the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. We took pictures, and some of the guests posed for the cameras. This was not a particularly attractive building, but adorning the front was a large sign written in Arabic, English, and Kurdish: “Kurdistan National Assembly - Iraq.” Kurdish flags were draped inside the building. They also fluttered from the top of the city’s distinctive citadel and brightened the walls of shops, museums, and homes. They had red, white, and green stripes, with a yellow sun in the middle. Kurdish was spoken throughout the city. Kurds staffed their own checkpoints to ensure security on the roads between cities, elected their own prime minister, and chose which contractors they wanted to build on their land. After nearly a century of conflict, Kurdish inhabitants of this region of northern Iraq had turned desperate desire into something that felt very much like a concrete manifestation of a dream they called Kurdistan.
The complications, fears, and hopes fueled by the partial realization of a Kurdish national project in the Middle East have ensured that scholars and others who write about Kurdish politics find it relatively easy to convince readers of the importance of their topic. It is common now to find audiences who will agree that, by most assessments, Kurdish conflicts in Iraq and Turkey are some of the longest-running conflicts in the Middle East, that they have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and that “the question of Kurdistan” is deeply destabilizing not only for Iraq but for Turkey, Iran, and the rest of the region. In January of 2007 the topic of “Kurdish History” even made the American television game show Jeopardy. Such an acknowledgment of the relevance of Kurdish affairs by this icon of American popular culture offers a vivid illustration of how dramatically the profile of Kurds has changed since the mid-twentieth century, when they were sometimes referred to as a “forgotten people” of the Middle East. Despite geographic, political, and social fragmentation, Kurdish national movements in Iraq, Turkey, and elsewhere have made their concerns matter for states vastly more powerful than themselves, and to people far from historic Kurdistan.
This book is about how Kurdish activists have made themselves matter and how they have impressed their ideas and agendas on reluctant and often repressive states. In Iraq, as well as in Turkey and Iran, they have done this in part by waging war. But some activists have also sought to use nonviolent means of protest and persuasion. My focus is on Kurdish activists in and from Turkey who have sought to use electoral politics and the institutions of the state to change the basic rules of the game (Migdal 2001, 63-64) in a rough political terrain where the formal rules of conventional political engagement are not always agreed upon and are, in fact, often broken. In the city of Diyarbakir, one of the largest cities in the mostly Kurdish southeastern region of Turkey, flying a Kurdish flag of any design and size is seen by authorities as a sign of separatist terrorism. Displaying one in a government building—as did Kurdish compatriots across the border in Erbil—would be to invite immediate and coercive repercussions. Nonetheless, as this book documents, such official proscriptions on Kurdish national expression have not prevented the most central and formal political spaces from becoming sites of Kurdish activism and open struggle. This study explores how and why this has occurred, as well as the opportunities and constraints of trying to use state-constructed and legitimated frameworks for what have constituted radical and even revolutionary demands.
Kurds, Kurdishness, and the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey
This book is not intended as a general text on the Kurds in Turkey, but a few introductory remarks may be useful. After ethnic Turks, Kurds are the largest ethnic group in Turkey, making up anywhere from 15 to 20 percent of the population, or around 11 to 14 million people out of a total population of 72 million (in 2008; see, e.g., Mutlu 1996; Barkey and Fuller 1998, 62; Bozarslan 2008). Turkish officials stopped publishing information on ethnicity and language after the 1965 census, so exact estimates of the total Kurdish population range considerably depending on methods of calculation and political persuasion. As of the late 1990s, about half of Turkey’s Kurdish population lived in the southeastern part of the country, an area that borders strategic frontiers with Iraq, Iran, and Syria and that contains valuable water resources. In thirteen southeastern provinces (Agri, Batman, Bingol, Bitlis, Diyarbakir, Hakkari, Igdir, Mardin, Muş, Șirnak, Siirt, Tunceli, and Van), Kurds constitute a majority of the population (55 to 90 percent). In another eight provinces or so they comprise a sizable minority (15 to 50 percent of the population) (Mutlu 1996, 526-27). Half of the Middle East’s Kurdish population lives in Turkey. There are about four to five million Kurds living in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq (also known as Iraqi Kurdistan); about eight million in Iran; about two million in Syria; and almost two million in Asia and Europe.
For many centuries the areas in which Kurds lived were referred to by outside officials, writers, and observers as part of a flexibly bordered geographic region known as Kurdistan. As used today, this includes current-day southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, western Iran, and the northernmost tip of Syria. However, this was not an area that had ever constituted an independent Kurdish state, and only in the last century did people from this …
Nicole F. Watts
Activists in Office, Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey
University of Washington
University of Washington Press Activists in Office Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey Nicole F. Watts
University of Washington Press Seattle and London
This Publication is Supported In Part by the Donald R. Ellegood International Publications Endowment and by the Institute Of Turkish Studies.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Watts, Nicole F. Activists in office: Kurdish politics and protest in Turkey / Nicole F. Watts, p. cm. (Studies in modernity and national identity) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-295-99049-1 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-295-99050-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Kurds—Turkey—Politics and government. 2. Turkey—Politics and government—1980- 1. Title. DR435.K87W38 2010 324.256T083—dc22 2010022921
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and recycled from at least 30 percent post-consumer waste. It meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi 239.48-1984.
