Turkish National Identity and Its Outsiders

Memories of State Violence in Dersim

Ozlem Goner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367192969
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315462950
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the ways in which states and nations are constructed and legitimated through defining and managing outsiders. Focusing on Turkey and the municipality of Dersim – a region that has historically combined different outsider identities, including Armenian, Kurdish, and Alevi identities – the author explores the remembering, transformation and mobilisation of everyday relations of power and the manner in which relationships with the state shape both outsider identities and the conception of the nation itself.

Together with a discussion of the recent decade in which the history, identity, and nature of Dersim have been central to various social and political organisations, the author concentrates on three defining periods of state-outsider relationships – the massacre and the following displacements in Dersim known as '1938'; the growth of capitalism in Turkey and the leftist movements in Dersim between World War II and the coup d'état of 1980; and the rise of the PKK and the 'state of exception' in Dersim in the 1990s – to show how outsiders came to be defined as 'exceptions to the law' and how they were managed in different periods.

Drawing on archival methods, field research, in-depth and multiple-session interviews and focus groups with three consecutive generations, this book offers a historical understanding of relationships of power and struggle as they are actualised and challenged at particular localities and shaped through the making of outsiderness. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of sociology, anthropology and political science, as well as historians.

1 Introduction

Outsiderness

Sitting on her sofa, her eyes on the television, Najni Bese, an elderly woman in Dersim, is saddened by the news about the destruction of Ezidi villages by ISIS, the death of refugees trying to escape the violence in Syria, and beatings of student protesters by the Turkish police. Murmuring “all that we saw,” Najni Bese clearly identifies with the victims in all of these stories. Whether young protesters, the people of Ezidi, or even a young black man shot by the police in the US, they are blurred together forever in the elderly woman’s all-too-ready identification with the victim. In the words of Dersim’s politically active youth, these populations are all “outsiders like us,” they “all suffer (state) violence.” This narrative of state violence connects the past and the present within an eternal historicity of suffering and reveals a lack of hope that contradicts the current vibrant political scene in Dersim.

This is a book about outsiderness. Exploring the relations of power and struggle between the Turkish state and outsiders since the early construction of the state until now, with a focus on narratives and everyday experiences of violence, it argues that while the foundations of the state and nation lay in defining and managing outsider places and populations, outsider subjects remember, transfer, mobilize, and transform outsiderness by constructing identities and movements. It focuses specifically on the historical productions, reproductions, and transformations of Dersim and its people as outsiders in eastern Turkey. The objective and subjective meanings of outsiderness in Dersim are revealed in their multiplicity, flexibility, and continuity. Its outsider identities, mainly Alevi, Kurdish, and Armenian, and its mountainous geography with scattered populations were equally problematized in state discourse, making Dersim the target of state violence throughout modern Turkish history.

In the 1930s, national leaders called Dersim “the biggest problem within national boundaries.” They “solved” this problem through extended massacres and displacement of its people, events referred to as “38” by my informants. In the 1980s, the military junta penalized Dersim for their involvement in Leftist movements by detaining, torturing, and even killing youth and banning the practices of Alevism and the use of Zazaki language. Once again, in the 1990s, Dersim suffered extreme state terror for supporting the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK). An examination of the continuities and transformations in the making of outsiderness reveals that national identity is based, in large part, on the effects of state violence against outsiders over time, and outsiders connect transferred and experienced episodes of violence to form antistate identities and movements.

This study develops outsiderness as a central conceptual and analytical tool, which is different from minority and other categories, including ethnicity, race, and religion. What does it mean to be an outsider? As opposed to the notion of minority, outsiderness is based on a relationship. Not all minorities are outsiders. If we think about the early constructions of a Turkish nation, for instance, most groups were minorities in one way or another. However, not all were defined as a problem, an “anomaly” in need of state intervention. Different identities were included in the nation based on the definition and management of the “anomaly,” the major one being Dersim in the 1930s.

Poststructuralist theories about subject and identification have influenced recent studies of gender, race, and ethnicity with their emphasis on flexible identities constructed in relation to others (Hall 1996; Laclau, Butler, and Zizek 2000; Derrida 1981; Laclau 1994; Butler 1990). Informed by these theories, this book specifies the historical relationships of power and struggle within which identities are produced. There is a dialectical relationship between the nation, state, and outsiders. As the nation and the state are produced in relation to their difference from outsiders, outsiders interpret and (re)define their identity as they struggle within and through different power relations.

Outsiderness reveals inclusion and exclusion of populations and places, as national and transnational actors, and the way groups struggle with these multifaceted and changing forms and mechanisms of power. More specifically, discourses about, and contestations over, different identities in Dersim show that the meanings and constituency of the nation, as well as those of outsiders, are multiple and flexible and are shaped by global, national, and local power struggles. Turkish national identity has been constructed through a differential management of outsiders, which included non-Muslims, Alevis, Kurds, Leftists, and Environmentalists depending on the global, national, and local intersections of power and struggle.¹

Interestingly, people in Dersim have identified with all of these identities and participated in, and become, pioneers of these movements. Najni Bese’s identification with “all those who suffer” reveals glimpses of why and how Dersim came to internalize and mobilize outsiderness. The Dersim people transformed outsiderness from a negative, repressive category to a positive form of identification and a productive means for struggle. As outsiders embrace outsider identity and mobilize it within and through different movements, the state is no longer an external form of power to resist against; it is, instead, internalized in outsider consciousness and provides a basis for struggle within and through different forms of power. This orientation on the construction of an outsider identity, which can no longer be explained by any of its components, such as race and ethnicity, separates this book from other studies focusing on the state constructions of the racialized others or the governing of the “margins” or “subjects,” both in the Turkish context and beyond (Yeğen 2007; Saatci 2002; Ergin 2014; Marx 1998; Mamdani 1996; Das and Poole 2004).

I explore the objective and subjective constructions of outsiderness by examining three episodes of state violence, specifically as told through the life narratives of three generations of Dersim people: witnesses whose narratives were shaped by 38; children, who grew up in the Leftist movements in the 1960s and 1970s; and grandchildren, who interpret this inherited historicity and their own identity based on state terror in the 1990s. These three periods are not always distinct or clear-cut. In the life narratives of consequent generations, transformations are especially blurry. People often discuss different events that took place at different times as the same state repression happening over and over again. Nevertheless, these life narratives and notions of political subjectivity reveal important processes and transformations, which I examine based on the notion of generations. Although there are differences among a single generation, the term and its methodological uses in this study reveal the transfer and transformations of power, struggle, identity, and subjectivity.

In his essay on the “Problem of Generations,” Mannheim defines generational location as “certain definite modes of behavior, feeling and thought” (Mannheim 1952, 291). Criticizing the positivist conception of time, which is based on quantitative measurement as “mechanistic,” Mannheim emphasizes subjectively experienced time (Mannheim 1952, 282). If time is subjectively constructed and experienced, then the contemporaneity of two agents can be defined as “a subjective condition of having experienced the same dominant influences” rather than “co-existence of persons between two sets of dates” (Pilcher 1994, 486).

Borrowing Mannheim’s notion of generations, I differentiate the witnesses of 1938, children, and grandchildren as different generations not because of their objective situation in a family lineage, or simply because they were born at different times, but because different historical processes, which they shared with their contemporaries, shape the “formative” years of their lives. Despite some fuzziness in the boundaries, witnesses, children, and grandchildren mostly coincide with three historical periods. If the lives of the witnesses are centered around 1938, children’s life narratives often begin with the late 1960s, when they started becoming involved in Leftist politics, and the grandchildren, born into a war between the Turkish state and the PKK, are formed as political subjects at the peak of this war in the 1990s. Looking at the life narratives of these generations, I argue that episodes of state violence are transferred to subsequent generations via different means of historicity, mainly a consciousness of history, which shape identity and movements even in the absence of a collective memory.

That makes this study different from studies of memory and trauma, which are centered around a past event and its present constructions or the transmission of trauma across generations (J. Olick 2007; Hirsch 2012). Since state violence has been continuous in Dersim, subjects construct a sense of history, explained in the following paragraphs as the consciousness of history, where an imagined and experienced past, as well as everyday experiences of violence, are connected and reinterpreted. This consciousness shapes subjects’ interpretation of political identity and is simultaneously transformed within movements. As such, (state) violence is not only repressive, and memories of violence are not only traumatic. By analyzing the productive role of a consciousness of history in identity and movements, this book deconstructs the binary between repressive and productive forms of power and acknowledges subjectivity based in suffering but beyond trauma. Focusing on the life narratives and everyday experiences of outsiders, this book is as much about the productive aspects of power as it is about repression, as much about struggle as it is about loss.

Despite transformations in state discourse and national identity, all three generations in Dersim perceive the state as the same unified repressive body and they have a good reason for doing so. If Dersim is defined as insurgent in the 1930s, communist in the 1970s, and terrorist in the 1990s, we need to explain the unity within and continuity of the state, as much as its multiplicity and transformation. This is not an abstract assumed unity, or a “myth” as Timothy Mitchell calls it, but rather a continuity that is based on the differential definition and management of outsider populations (Mitchell 1990). The continuity of the entity that can be called a state emerges from the dialectical relationship between the state and outsiders. On one hand, the state is continuous and consistent, through setting and managing the boundaries between the outsiders and the nation. On the other hand, the outsiders interpret the experienced, transferred, and imagined state violence to produce antistate identities and movements. As various movements in Dersim—mainly the Leftist, Kurdish, and Environmentalist—are interpreted and identified as antistate, the state becomes an internalized component of subjective identity, and hence equally continuous and unified despite the multiplicity of power relations and actors.

This work has three objectives. First, it analyzes the making and remaking of Dersim as an outsider population and place, connecting state, nation, and outsiders as they are created by global, regional, national, and local relations of power and struggle. Second, it illustrates that outsiderness is internalized in the form of identity and is carried through different forms of historicity, mainly process, memory, and a consciousness of history. Although the witness generation avoids sharing their memories of 38, their consciousness of history as suffering is transferred to subsequent generations who internalize outsiderness and interpret this consciousness within the Leftist and Kurdish movements. Finally, it develops an inherent theory of power and struggle that is built upon the construction of outsider subjectivity and movements in relationship to state power. Revealing a consciousness of history for three generations in Dersim, this book shows how the state becomes an inherent part of outsider identity when outsiderness is internalized in subjects’ consciousness. Before I provide more detail about these three points, it is important to understand why and how Dersim constitutes an illustrative case for outsiderness and how my particular relationship to Dersim allowed me to reveal different forms of historicity and the connections between state, identity, and movements.

1.1 Dersim and outsiderness

Why Dersim? Why is it problematized by the state and what does it tell us about outsiderness? Political intellectuals in Dersim explain state violence in terms of Dersim’s Alevi and Kurdish identities. However, the meanings and problematization of these identity groups change over time and cannot be accounted for simply by modern categories, such as race, ethnicity, and religion. National and ethnic identities, products of the nineteenth century, remain contested in Dersim to this day. The great majority of the witness generation in Dersim refer to themselves as Kırmanc in the local language, which, as I will explore in the Chapter 2, is a complex local identity defined based on religious, cultural/spiritual, ethnic, and lingual differences from other groups in the region. If it is to be defined within modern categories of differentiation, Kırmanc can be thought of as an ethno-religious category through which the earlier generations have differentiated themselves from three different groups: Sunni Turks, Sunni Kurds (the majority of the Kurds), and Turkish Alevis. Although Alevi identity is an important component of the Kırmanc identity, and some witnesses refer to themselves primarily as Alevi when they speak Turkish, there is some disassociation from the mainstream Alevis in Anatolia who refer to themselves as Turkish.

The translations of Kırmanc identity into modern-day categories have been a source of mobilization and controversy among different political groups. To start, despite the witness generations’ separation of Kırmanc and Kurdish identities, the word Kırmanc is mostly translated as Kurdish, especially by those who are involved in Kurdish politics. Those who are critical of Kurdish politics, on the other hand, either translate Kırmanc as Zaza, another ethnic identity in the region, or call themselves Dersimli (meaning “from Dersim”), believing Dersim constitutes a separate group of people in the region. Some believe that Kırmanc is the local term for Alevi, although this interpretation does not explain the self-differentiation from Turkish Alevis. These contestations over Dersim’s identity also shape categorizations of the dominant local language, named Kırmancki, Zazaki, or Dımılki. Those involved in Kurdish politics believe that the local language is a dialect of Kurdish, whereas others think it is a completely different language. For the majority of the Turkish population, Dersim and its language were considered to be Kurdish, since it is located in eastern Turkey (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Located in eastern Turkey, Dersim also constitutes the northwest border of the geographical area known as Kurdistan. Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dersim_region_in_the_mid_1930s_English.png).

Throughout this book, I will discuss how Dersim’s identity is debated both in state documents and at the level of self-identification by looking at the meanings of, and contestations over, identity in different periods. For now, as an entry point, whose complexities will be examined throughout this book, I will provide a brief discussion of Dersim’s main identities, as well as the notion of outsiderness central to this study. In the early twentieth century, when categories were based mostly on religion, the most important identities in the region were Alevi and Christian (Armenian). Ethnic categories—mainly, Kurdish, Zaza, and Armenian—also existed but they were generally subsumed under religious categories until the early twentieth century. I will contextualize Dersim’s problematic identity with respect to the construction and transformation of outsiders under the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish state.

Alevism can be defined as a religious/cultural identity composed of nonorthodox interpretations of Shiite Islam and elements from other belief systems such as Shamanism and Zoroastrianism.² The majority of Turkey’s population belongs to the Sunni sect of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: outsiderness
• 2 The production of Dersim as an outsider: Turkish nation and the state in the 1930s
• 3 Memory, consciousness of history, and identity of outsiderness: the witness generation
• 4 Capitalism, Leftist movements, and transformations of outsiderness: the children generation
• 5 The PKK, state of exception, and the paralysis of outsiderness: the grandchildren generation
• 6 Outsiderness: transformations, contestations, and potentials
• Index