Kurds in Dark Times

Often touted as a bridge between East and West, Turkey is of considerable interest to scholars, geopolitical analysts, and the wider public. Turkey’s tribulations through a century as a Western-looking republic on the periphery of the Islamic world have been well-documented. In the early 2000s, after the Justice and Development Party (AKP) assumed government and implemented a raft of political and economic reforms, hopes were high that democracy might be consolidated and a free and prosperous future assured. As Ayça Alemdaroǧlu and Fatma Müge Göçek, the editors of this new volume, argue, such optimism was misplaced. In recent years, Turkey, under the rule of the AKP and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan, still in power after two decades, has experienced a period of creeping authoritarianism, marked by human rights violations; repression of journalists, academics and dissenting voices; and increasing political violence and societal polarization. These, and other developments, have amounted to democratic backsliding.1The sociopolitical circumstances of Turkey’s Kurdish population, by some estimates up to one-fifth of the total,2 provide a useful gauge on the workings of the Turkish political system. In the early years of the Turkish republic, an era of top-down nation-building, military operations and assimilationist measures against Kurds took place within a severely curtailed political arena. The emergence after the mid-1970s of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), deemed a terrorist organization by the Turkish state, gave rise to a low-intensity civil war in Turkey’s southeast that exacerbated and, in turn, was fed by democratic shortcomings. The early years of AKP rule, now widely regarded as a period of unprecedented political freedoms, saw considerable progress on cultural and political rights for Kurds. However, the success of the pro–Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in the general election of June 2015 saw the AKP lose its parliamentary majority, after which the AKP and Erdoǧan adopted new postures that resulted in much of the democratic backsliding mentioned earlier.Alemdaroǧlu and Göçek characterize this recent turn as a “dark time,” hence the volume’s title. Here they draw a parallel with Hannah Arendt’s examination of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes,3 wherein human rights violations were not only perpetrated but rationalized and trivialized, such that everyday citizens overlooked them and lent their support to the regimes carrying them out. Underlining how freedom of expression and academic freedoms are curtailed in similar circumstances in contemporary Turkey, one contributor to this volume, Barış Ünlü, was accused of “terror propaganda” for setting an exam question for his Turkish students about PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and was later dismissed from his university position, while another, Güllistan Yarkın, was accused of violating Turkey’s Antiterror Law, resulting in the rejection of her application to have her PhD from State University in New York conferred in Turkey.This volume, which grew out of a conference at Northwestern University, in 2016, sets out to examine the ways in which Kurds in Turkey have been shaped by and, in turn, responded to such “dark times.” As recently as the 1990s, there was only a handful of scholarly analyses of Kurdish issues, however, as the editors note, the field of Kurdish studies has since grown significantly. This collection brings together a group of established and emerging scholars and aims to open a “significant window into Kurds’ lives in Turkey” in that it shifts the focus from top-down analyses of Kurdish political organizations to examine the “amorphous nonpolitical and informal experience[s]” of Kurdish laypersons (18). While some scholars have already brought an analytical lens to the workaday experiences of Kurds, thus providing a perspective of Kurdish issues from the ground up,4 this volume, through its incorporation of sociological, anthropological, and political science methodologies, in combination with sharp observations of race, intersectional, spatial, and temporal dimensions of inequality, representation, recognition, violence, displacement, and nonviolent resistance, is a weighty addition, making an extremely valuable contribution to the field of Kurdish studies.In chapter 1, Metin Atmaca, drawing on medieval Arabic, Ottoman, and European sources, provides a wider spatial dimension to the Kurdish issue that frames the discussion to come. Atmaca examines shifting perceptions of Kurdistan, the land in which Kurds have long resided. The very concept of an entity known as Kurdistan is contested in modern Turkey. It is a favorite ploy of Turkish nationalists to challenge Kurds to find such a place in an atlas, however, as Atmaca demonstrates, the concept of Kurdistan had been politically and geographically constituted before the ascendance of the Ottoman Empire, from which the modern Turkish state eventually emerged.The two following chapters focus on the political and social upheavals of the later Ottoman period to investigate issues that continue to define Turkey’s political trajectory and the Kurds place within it. Janet Klein’s chapter analyzes the advent of the idea of minorities in the Ottoman lexicon and questions arising about whether such distinct “nations” could fit within a larger polity. In the Ottoman case, the loyalty of the Armenians, a “minority extraordinaire,” whose Otherness represented a threat to Turkish hegemony, was called into question, ultimately resulting in the horrific events of 1915. Parallels may be drawn with the Kurds, who were similarly “minoritized” during the Ottoman period and today constitute a majority in the border region of south-eastern Anatolia. Happening concurrently was the construction of “Turkishness,” the forging of a shared identity among disparate language and ethnic groups previously only bonded by common designation as Muslims. In his chapter, Ünlü posits the idea of the “Turkishness contract,” through which these previously diverse groups identified as Turkish, adopting specific “ways of talking, thinking, seeing, knowing and feeling” (102) in return for a place within an institutional structure that privileged them as Turks. His theoretically rich and carefully constructed analysis of “Turkishness” and its implications within Turkish society and politics may seem counterintuitive in a volume about Kurdish issues, but Ünlü argues that being party to the contract also requires not seeing or feeling anything for those not contained within it, which in this case primarily means Kurds. In so doing, an “interaction order” (113) is created, which goes some way to explain the long-term marginalization of Kurds.Displacement from their ancestral homes is an experience shared by many Kurds in Turkey and three chapters deal with this phenomenon. Michael Ferguson examines Turkey’s Aegean port of Izmir as a city that has absorbed successive waves of displaced peoples since the 1850s. Focusing on the hilltop Kadifekale neighborhood, Ferguson investigates the circumstances of Kurds who were displaced during the 1980s because their security and livelihoods were threatened by ongoing violence in the southeast. These Kurds set up social welfare organizations in the neighborhood, while enduring considerable anti-Kurdish sentiment and, recently, facing further displacement as urban renewal proceeds. Güllistan Yarkın’s chapter focuses on Istanbul’s working-class Zeytinburnu district, which like Kadifekale has absorbed multiple waves of rural-to-urban migration, often of distinct ethnic communities into makeshift gecekondu (night-built) accommodation. Yarkın finds that, despite official attempts to galvanize a shared Turkishness, ethnic categories remained relevant in the district, however, she records a shift in attitudes toward “old Kurds,” who were deemed “loyal” and “obedient,” and Kurds who arrived since the 1980s, who are viewed as “suspect” and supporters of the “terrorist PKK” (151). In the most in-depth ethnographic immersion in this volume, Deniz Duruiz works among Kurdish migrant farmworkers near Bursa. Duruiz’s presence intrigues resident (Turkish) agricultural engineers, while sunburned Kurdish workers grapple with racial stereotypes applied to them, even as they make judgments about Gypsies and newly arrived Syrian refugees, thus underlining the complex social dynamics that prevail within Turkey. These three chapters all provide potent insights into the racialization that displaced Kurds’ experience and the power relations they must navigate in everyday life.While Kurds have been displaced over decades, inter-communal violence is something that has escalated in recent years. In her chapter, Şefika Kumral documents the fourfold increase in mob violence against Kurds since 2004, noting that, while earlier instances of such violence elicited shocked reactions from the Turkish populace, recent episodes are largely accepted without reproach. Significantly, this has occurred despite the intensity of the state’s conflict with the PKK diminishing. Kumral posits that such violence does not erupt due to economic competition between Turks and Kurds, or as a side effect of military clashes between the state apparatus and the PKK, but is largely a result of the increasing visibility and political mobilization of Kurds, which has created an environment of contested democratization, a potent characteristic of today’s “dark times.”Interpretations of violent events are also the subject of Ali Eşref Keleş’s critical examination of media representations of the Roboski massacre, when thirty-four Kurdish “smugglers” were killed by the Turkish military in 2011. Complex, sometimes conflicting, narratives of these events arose. Erdoǧan effectively denied any wrongdoing, retorting that the state does not bomb its citizens, and, bizarrely, one minister claimed that it was the government that had suffered most from the incident because the actions of the military had been called into question. Keleş’s analysis highlights general indifference to the plight of Kurds and the casual racism directed toward them in the Turkish media. Delal Aydin details other experiences of such casual racism, recounting her education at the Ziya Gökalp High School in Diyarbakır. Here, at a school intended to foster Turkishness in a heavily Kurdish-populated region, divides between Turks and Kurds remained so stark that it became a site of Kurdish youth mobilization, giving rise to the Kurdish yurtsever movement in the 1990s. Questionable logic is also applied to forms of Kurdish nonviolent resistance in Turkey, as underlined in Amy Bartholemew and Ruşen Firat Güllüoǧlu’s discussion of political prisoners’ hunger strikes. Hunger strikers interviewed by the authors stressed their acts of resistance were expressly intended to be nonviolent and to highlight the Kurdish “right to coexistence” rather than to make separatist demands, yet Erdoǧan condemned their activities as “blackmail,” and the European Parliament’s rapporteur on Turkey deemed them “unacceptable in a democracy.” The chapter argues that much of the Kurdish political movement remains committed to negotiation and engagement with the state, yet it documents how political avenues are increasingly restricted as authoritarianism becomes increasingly entrenched.Other forms of Kurdish nonviolent resistance include the activities of the Saturday Mothers and Peace Mothers, groups that emerged during the mid-1990s to demand answers when Kurdish civil rights actors and others began disappearing, apparently at the hands of the state. The Saturday Mothers have since become the longest-standing civil disobedience movement in Turkey, their longevity highlighting the troubled trajectory of human rights in Turkey. Emine Rezzan Karaman, in her chapter, introduces lengthy and moving accounts from several mothers whose family members have been disappeared, providing a “counterhistory” to official accounts of events in southeastern Anatolia. Tellingly, these women have widened their purview beyond seeking answers only about their own disappeared family members to now also advocate for other—non-Kurdish—marginalized groups. In becoming suddenly visible and politically outspoken these women have also played a role in recasting gender roles in Kurdish society.The participation of women is a defining feature of the modern Kurdish political movement and the final two chapters examine women’s engagement in a range of capacities. Hazal Atay observes that despite measures dating back to the 1930s to encourage women in the political sphere, “moustachioed politics” (336) persists in Turkey. In such a milieu it has mostly been pro-Kurdish parties, since the 1990s, that have made strides in fostering women’s mobilization and representation. In light of current aspirations among Kurdish political organizations to achieve gender parity, Atay highlights the way that the politicization of Kurdish women has led to the feminization of Kurdish politics. This process has also occurred among exiled Kurdish communities in Europe. Freed from constraints imposed in Turkey, Kurds based in Europe have found new opportunity spaces and devised new mechanisms for continuing their political struggle. Nisa Göksel documents a process of “gender transformation” in “Euro-Kurdistan” similar to that recorded by Atay in Turkey. Göksel concludes that Kurdish women in Europe have played vital roles establishing advocacy networks and building international support for the Kurdish cause, despite being physically separated from the broader Kurdish movement, at the same time, negotiating new spaces within their own political and familial spheres.An afterword from Hamit Bozarslan rounds out the volume. He provides more detail on the “dark times” that Turkey and its citizens, regardless of ethnicity or political affiliation, are enduring, and challenges Turkey’s—and others’—classifications of Kurdish political activity as “terrorist.” Bozarslan recalls fabled historian Ibn Khaldun’s assertion that dominated peoples cannot lay claim to a history of their own because their history is subsumed by that of their masters; however, he posits this book, amid the burgeoning field of Kurdish studies, as a corrective, of a vital Kurdish enterprise that endeavors to provide deeper context and new perspectives that counter long-standing narratives that have denied, stereotyped, or criminalized Kurds and their political activities and aspirations.Apparent in many of the contributions is a note of skepticism toward Turkey’s institutions and political actors and their respective mechanisms and motivations. For example, it is asserted that the AKP sought a peaceful solution to the Kurdish issue only in order to win EU membership (3) and that many among the succession of crises that have rocked Turkey in recent years have been “artificial or deliberately unleashed” (389) by the government itself, yet such perspectives no doubt arise from direct experiences of the sociopolitical architecture of modern Turkey, the “dark times” of the title. Overall, this collection provides new and telling insights into the Kurdish experience in Turkey at a time when dissenting voices are increasingly marginalized. Put together, these chapters provide an empirically and methodologically rich and varied portrait of the struggles of the Kurds to assert their collective identity and achieve equality in a constantly shifting political landscape that is almost always slanted against them. It should be an immediate acquisition for academic libraries and scholars of Kurdish studies, modern Turkey, contentious politics, and those examining issues of race, ethnicity and authoritarianism, while also setting out case studies that will be valuable for sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists

Biology · Geography · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Turkey's Politics and Society · Ecology

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  Open Access•P C Lewis•Journal of Linguistic Anthropology•2025

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