The Political Representation of Kurds in Turkey

New Actors and Modes of Participation in a Changing Society

Cengiz Gunes

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780755641178
• eBook ISBN: 9780755606337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Social Sciences

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Turkey relentlessly persecuted any form of Kurdish dissent. This led to the radicalisation of an increasing number of Kurds, the rise of the Kurdish national movement and the PKK's insurgency against Turkey. Political activism by the Kurds or around Kurdish-related political demands continues to be viewed with deep suspicions by Turkey's political establishment and severely restricted. Despite this, the pro-Kurdish democratic movement has emerged, providing Kurds with a channel to represent themselves and articulate their demands. This book is timely contribution to the debate on the Kurds' political representation in Turkey, tracing the different forms it has taken since 1950. The book highlights how the transformations in Kurdish society have affected the types of actors involved in politics and the avenues, organisations and networks Kurds use to challenge the state. Based on survey data obtained from over 350 individuals, this is the first book to provide an in-depth analysis of Kurdish attitudes from across different segments of Kurdish society, including the elite, the business and professional classes, women and youth activists. It is an intimate portrait of how Kurds today are dealing with the challenges and difficulties of political representation.

1

Kurdish political parties in Turkey

This chapter provides an account of the emergence and development of the main political movements and parties that represent the Kurds in Turkey and highlights their ideological inclinations and approach to the accommodation of Kurdish rights. It also assesses how these parties relate to each other and the institutions of the state. It uses a wide range of primary sources and secondary literature to chart the development of political parties that have a Kurdish constituency or advocate Kurdish rights. It also provides brief profiles of the leading figures in these political parties and the extent to which different sections of the Kurdish community are represented within them.

The study of political parties has been a key topic for political scientists since the beginning of the twentieth century and, consequently, the academic literature on the subject is vast and ever-growing. The interest in political parties is unsurprising due to the fact that they fulfil an essential function in a representative democracy. Political parties play a key role in the public deliberation of political issues and policies and the representation and aggregation of citizens’ interests and political demands.¹ Consequently, political parties are generally seen as the most significant political actors in representative democracy and as ‘vehicles of representation’ they are essential for the functioning of democracy and formation of governments.²

Turkey held its first multi-party parliamentary election in July 1946, but the subsequent election held on 14 May 1950 is generally considered to be the country’s first free and fair election. This liberalization of the political system was initiated and orchestrated by the political elite and mainly as a response to the changing domestic and global developments. The existing literature on Turkey’s transition to multi-party democracy highlights the importance of intra-elite competition and the growing influence of the US in Europe and its promotion of democracy as the key factors.³ However, despite nearly seventy years of holding elections, Turkey is yet to consolidate its democracy and become a fully functional democratic state. The military’s dominance in politics throughout the twentieth century has historically prevented the development of a democratic system. The AKP government’s growing authoritarianism since 2015 has reversed much of the progress Turkey made in instituting a more open and liberal political system during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The limits and shortcomings of Turkish democracy become more visible when we look at the experiences of political parties that tried to represent the demands and interests of the Kurds in Turkey. As discussed in the introductory section, Turkey’s dominant political norms and restrictive legal order created a situation where political parties representing the interests of Kurds were repressed, with some facing closure in the past three decades on grounds that they threatened the country’s national unity and territorial integrity.

While Turkey’s political system remained firmly against the collective representation of Kurdish political demands, as Chapters 3 and 4 discuss in more detail, from 1950 onwards, many Kurdish individuals have been elected to the positions of political office mainly via the centre-right political parties. The same period also witnessed the emergence of a new generation of political activists who began to challenge, through their writings and dissent-orientated political practices, the repression the Kurds faced in Turkey. During the 1960s, Kurds also increased their involvement in Turkish left-wing organizations and in the 1965 parliamentary elections: a Kurd from Diyarbakır – Tarık Ziya Ekinci – was elected as an MP for the Workers Party of Turkey (Türkiye İşçi Partisi, TİP).⁴ The demands for political and economic equality the nascent Kurdish movement voiced resonated with the Kurdish masses, especially during the ‘Meetings of the East’ held in Kurdish majority regions in 1967.⁵ This led to the emergence in 1969 of a Kurdish left-wing political group, the Revolutionary Cultural Centres of the East (Devrimci Doğu Kültür Ocakları, DDKO) in Ankara and Istanbul, but they were closed down and their leaders and activists prosecuted during the military rule between 1971 and 1973.

The repression Kurdish political activists experienced during the military regime pushed many of them to take part in dissent and resistance-orientated political activities, particularly from the mid-1970s onwards.⁶ Their efforts resulted in the establishment of new political groups or parties and during the late 1970s; the following Kurdish groups or parties were active: the Socialist Party of Turkish Kurdistan (Türkiye Kürdistanı Sosyalist Partisi, TKSP) in 1974; Rizgarî (Liberation, 1976); the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK, 1978); the Kurdistan National Liberationists (KUK, 1978); Kawa (1978); Ala Rizgarî (the Flag of Liberation, 1979); and Tekoşin (Struggle, 1979). Due to the violent political environment of the 1970s and the repression unleashed by the military coup of 12 September 1980, few of them managed to survive.⁷ Since the early 1980s, the PKK managed to establish itself as the dominant Kurdish political force in Turkey. The PKK members, including its leader Abdullah Öcalan, moved to Syria in 1979 and subsequently established a military base in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, where preparations for its guerrilla campaign against Turkey were made, which it embarked upon on 15 August 1984. During the 2000s and 2010s, the PKK ceased its military activities for long periods of time to facilitate the development of a political solution of the conflict but has not totally ended its armed campaign.

Since 1990, numerous pro-Kurdish political parties have also been active in Turkey raising Kurdish demands, challenging the established order in Turkey to recognize Kurdish identity and cultural rights, and putting forward proposals to end the conflict peacefully. In addition, during the past decade, Islamist political actors have increased their visibility in Kurdish politics in Turkey and have organized themselves within the Free Cause Party (Hür Dava Partisi).

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)

The PKK was formally established on 27 November 1978 in the Lice district of Diyarbakır province as a clandestine political party advocating the unification of Kurdistan under a united socialist republic. Its emergence as a political/ideological group dates back to 1973 and to the political activism of the left-wing university circles.⁸ By the end of 1975, the group moved most of its cadres to the Kurdish regions in the south-east of Turkey and expanded its efforts to build its support base there. This was initiated during a series of meetings held secretly in Kars, Bingöl, Diyarbakır, Elazığ and Gaziantep during April and May 1977, when the group’s ideas and political programme were shared with a larger group of sympathizers by its leading figure in the movement, Abdullah Öcalan. The PKK interpreted the Kurdish-state relations as a form of colonialism and proposed that Kurdistan’s colonial exploitation and national oppression could only be achieved through armed resistance and by a revolutionary movement.⁹ The PKK’s rhetoric also targeted the Kurdish feudal elite who were described as partly responsible for Kurdistan’s national fragmentation because of their cooperation with the state.

A significant number of the PKK members, prior to the military coup in 1979 and 1980, relocated to Syria and Lebanon, and during the early 1980s, the PKK formed close links with the Palestinian organizations there and established its guerrilla training camps, where it provided ideological and military training to its cadres.¹⁰ Also, starting in the early 1980s, the PKK began to build a strong presence in Europe, mainly in Germany, through a network of community organizations. The PKK’s activities in Europe, Lebanon and Syria provided it with the necessary organizational and financial resources to begin its guerrilla campaign against Turkey in August 1984.¹¹ As the scope and depth of its guerrilla war increased significantly, the PKK managed to mobilize many Kurds in Turkey during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In this period, the PKK guerrillas were able to connect with local populations and establish a local network of supporters who provided important logistic support.¹² Also, the mountainous terrain alongside the Turkey–Iraq border provided a highly suitable environment to conduct a guerrilla campaign.

In March 1985, the National Liberation Front of Kurdistan (Eniya Rizgariya Netewa Kurdistan, ERNK) was established to carry out the political development and mobilization of the masses.¹³ Within the ERNK organization in Europe, there were numerous sub-organizations established during the late 1980s and early 1990s to represent different segments of the Kurdish society, such as women, youth and different religious groups.¹⁴ In 1993, more organizations representative of the religious groups were established, including the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (Herekata Îslamiya Kurdistanê), the Union of Alevis of Kurdistan (Kürdistan Aleviler Birliği) and the Union of Yezidis of Kurdistan (Yekîtiya Êzîdiyan Kurdistan) to mobilize the Muslim, Alevi and Yezidi religious communities.

As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 6, from the late 1980s onwards, with the gradual increase in the activities of the Kurdish national movement, more and more Kurdish women started to engage in politics. In particular, women participated in large numbers in the numerous serhildan (popular uprisings) and one of the most significant developments that the PKK initiated, especially in the early 1990s, was the mobilization of women, which had a significant impact on the PKK’s overall mobilization. Not only did the mobilization of women significantly increase the PKK’s overall support base and fighting force, the presence of a significant number of female guerrillas within the ARGK ranks lessened the appeal and force of traditional values. As a result, the increasing levels of participation in the past thirty years has meant Kurdish women have become a significant political actor in Turkey.

From 1990 onwards, the popular expression of Kurdish identity demands and open support for the PKK became much more commonplace in Turkey as Kurdish political activism evolved into a vocal social movement. This was demonstrated in several instances of serhildan between 1990 and 1993, to which large numbers of ordinary Kurds across Kurdish towns participated and who often fought with the police and the gendarmeries. Furthermore, numerous mass rallies and other forms of protest such as shop closures and school boycotts were organized in Diyarbakır, Batman, Şırnak and Siirt. Additionally, many people attended the funerals of the PKK guerrillas, which became a political act in itself and a sign of support for the PKK’s struggle. In the early 1990s, Kurds in Turkey became much more visible and actively voiced their demands for the recognition of their identity. The PKK-led Kurdish rebellion has been the most radical and has lasted the longest in the history of the Kurds in Turkey. The conflict cost the lives of more than 45,000 people (mainly soldiers, guerrillas, village guards and Kurdish civilians), and resulted in the forced evacuation of 3,500 villages and hamlets.¹⁵

As I have argued in greater detail in my previous work, in order to represent its struggle as the ‘embodiment of Kurdish national struggle’ to its target groups, the PKK re-activated the myth of Newroz and the Legend of Kawa in its discourse.¹⁶ This enabled the PKK to construct a contemporary myth of resistance in its discourse that it used to narrate this struggle. It adopted a sensitive approach to religion and sought to connect with religious Kurds. Consequently, the PKK was able to articulate the demands of the various sections of Kurdish society and address the problems that they faced within its national liberation discourse. It established various cultural and political organizations in Europe and through these was able to reach out to a large section of Kurdish diaspora and mobilize them in support of its struggle.¹⁷ The Kurdish diaspora was an important source of human and financial resources for the PKK.

However, due to the stalemate that the PKK experienced in its guerrilla war, from the early 1990s onwards, it started to concede that the revolutionary overthrow of the Turkish rule through a popular uprising and the construction of a ‘united’, ‘socialist’ and ‘independent’ Kurdistan were no longer achievable and realistic. In subsequent years throughout the 1990s, as part of its attempts to formulate a political solution to the conflict, the PKK began appropriating the democratic discourse. After the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Öcalan, was captured by the state of Turkey in February 1999, it began to change its political objectives and construct a more coherent and condensed democratic discourse. The discursive transformation and ideological repositioning were guided by the ideas that Abdullah Öcalan put forward in his trial in 1999.¹⁸

During his trial, Öcalan called for a new relationship between the Kurds as a political community and the state in Turkey based on the principles of equality and freedom and he rejected the separatist approach his movement had previously taken.¹⁹ He called for measures to address the Kurdish demands within a democratic Turkey and expanded on his democratic solution proposals through the defences he submitted to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in 2001 that considered his appeal. His defence was published as a two-volume book at the end of 2001, where he proposed a ‘nation of Turkey’ as an inclusive identity for all citizens and argued that such a framework would be a major step in the direction of the democratic solution: ‘All that is necessary is loyalty to the democratic system, to renounce the chauvinist fascist claims and for each group [in Turkey] to experience its cultural identity and education without denying the formal system.’²⁰ In 2004, Öcalan submitted another defence text to the ECHR that expanded on his democratic solution and was published as a book in the same year titled Bir Halkı Savunmak (Defending a Nation).²¹ In this new text, the issue of the formal legal status of the Kurds and Kurdistan within the existing states gained more emphasis. Here, Öcalan proposed a framework whereby the ‘people’s own democratic administration in Kurdistan’ will co-exist with the ‘state as the general public authority’.²²

Öcalan’s new theorization has been used by the PKK to re-orient its political objectives and demands for the Kurds and has generated a lively debate on the resolution of the Kurdish question and the possible steps that can be taken to accommodate Kurdish demands within the borders of the existing states in the Middle East.²³ Parallel to its discursive transformation, the PKK also established new representative organizations during the early 2000s. The first one of these was the Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy Congress (Kongreya Azadî û Demokrasiya Kurdistanê, KADEK) in 2002. In 2003, KADEK was abolished and a new organization People’s Congress of Kurdistan (Kongra Gelê Kurdistan, Kongra-Gel) was established. However, this has not resulted in any change in the proposed solution to the Kurdish question in Turkey.²⁴

In the new party programme the PKK accepted in 2005, its proposal for the solution of the Kurdish question was described as the ‘democratic solution’; the central tenet of which was described as the ‘democratic transformation’ of the current state system in the Middle East into federal and confederal entities. It put forward the proposals to reconstitute the Kurds as a nation without constructing a Kurdish nation-state, and the confederal Kurdish entity it proposed would neither challenge the established and internationally recognized boundaries nor resort to nationalism or establishing a nation-state.²⁵ While the construction of a Kurdish nation-state is seen as unnecessary, the central focus would be on developing an administrative framework for Kurdish self-government.

The mid-2000s noticed the establishment of a new entity, the Union of Kurdistan Communities (Koma Civakan Kurdistan, KCK), which was established with the specific objective of putting into practice the ‘democratic confederalism’ proposals. The KCK is described as ‘the people’s non-state based democratic system’ and has, as its basic principle, ‘the democratic solution of the Kurdish question, the recognition of Kurdish identity on all levels and the development of Kurdish language and culture’.²⁶ It is the umbrella organization bringing together the decentralized autonomous Kurdish administrations and is designed as an alternative ‘hybrid’ institutional framework to provide political representation to the Kurds and allow them to organize themselves as a nation within the existing state boundaries in the Middle East. It is a bottom-up organization where Kurds are organized at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Political representation of Kurds in Turkey
• 1 Kurdish political parties in Turkey
• 2 Electoral politics and the Kurds in Turkey
• 3 Tribes and political representation
• 4 Religious groups and political representation
• 5 The modern classes and political representation
• 6 Women and youth and political representation
• 7 Representative democracy and the democratic confederal project: Reflections on the transformation of the Kurdish movement in Turkey
• Conclusions: Re-thinking Kurdish political representation in Turkey
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint