Village Guard System
Șemsa Özar,
Nesrin Uçarlar,
Osman Aytar
DİSA
The report you are holding contains an analysis, in a historical and social context, of the village guard system, which is one of the tools of the state in Turkey for polarizing the society as "pro-statist" and "enemy of the state" as a result of arming civilian citizens. This research sheds light on the background of the continuity between the Hamidiye Cavalry Regiments, the Late Ottoman paramilitary organization, and the "modern" village guard system that has been in practice since 1985.
For approximately 30 years, the common denominator of various political powers was to consider the village guard system as an infection that needs to be eradicated, and also viewed it as an armed force that should persist after these political groups came to power. We follow the traces of the motive behind this dual attitude in the part of our research where meeting minutes of the Assembly and the news of the press organs were examined.
In this research you will see that the village guard system is not only a tool of power, an instrument to polarize the Kurdish society or a world of armed crime, but also a social problem and an experience of human devastation. This field research was conducted on such a large scale for the first time and was based on the interviews done with the village guards, their spouses and children in their own villages. The research demonstrates the vast existence of different point of views regarding the village guard system, the state, PKK, Kurdish identity and their roles in this system among villagers who became the village guards willingly, by force or due to reasons beyond their control.
The research does not consider the village guard system as an institution that can be reformed or dissolved, but rather as an instrument that needs to be finalized by the mechanisms of seeking justice and social security while passing through a process without weapons and clashes. For this reason, a chapter regarding by which legal, political and social precautions the paramilitary organizations in other countries were abolished was also included in the report.
Osman Aytar defended his doctoral thesis on organizing diversity at the Department of Sociology at Stockholm University in Sweden in 2007. Now he is an associate professor in social work at Malardalen University in Sweden. In addition to his published books and articles in Kurdish and Turkish, migration, ethnicity, integration, diversity, diaspora, stateless nations and groups, globalism, organization and leadership are his main research interests.
Șemsa Özar graduated from Wirtshaftsuniversitaet, Vienna with a PhD in 1990. Since 1990 she teaches at Boğaziçi University primarily economic development and gender courses. Her research and writing concentrates on gender aspects of labour, social policy, forced migration, informal labour and micro and small enterprises. Her recent publication, Ne Değiști? Kürt Kadınların Zorunlu Göç Deneyimi (What Has Changed? Kurdish Women's Experiences of Forced Migration) coauthored by Handan Çağlayan and Ayșe Tepe Dogan offers a gendered perspective on the immigration of Kurds in Turkey.
Nesrin Uçarlar received her PhD from the Department of Political Science, Lund University in 2009. She works as lecturer at Department of International Relations, Istanbul Bilgi University. She currently conducts a research project on the community-based restorative justice in Turkey at Diyarbakir Social and Political Research Institute. Her recent studies focus on the elaboration of the Kurdish issue from the viewpoint of contemporary political philosophy in the framework of the concepts such as power, resistance, justice and the political. Besides her individual and joint publications, she recently contributed as co-editor - with Büșra Ersanli and Günay Göksu Özdoğan - of ''Türkiye Siyasetinde Kürtler - Direniș, Hak Arayıșı, Katılım" ["Kurds in Turkey’s Politics - Resistance, Claiming Rights and Participation”].
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