Gypsy Stigma and Exclusion in Turkey, 1970

The Social Dynamics of Exclusionary Violence

G. Ozatesler, Kenneth A. Loparo, Gül Özate?ler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137386618
• eBook ISBN: 9781137386625
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Using an oral history approach, this book draws on Gypsy and non-Gypsy narratives to tell the story of Gypsy forced dislocation from Bayramic, a northwestern town of Turkey, in 1970. Gül Özatesler examines memory construction, the categories of Gypsyness and Turkishness, and the different perspectives and positions that emerged, considering all in relation to underlying socioeconomic structure. The book reveals how ethnic and other identities can be deployed to conceal socioeconomic and political inequalities.

1

Introduction

On January 5, 2010, a group of people attacked Gypsies in the Turkish town of Selendi in Manisa province.¹ They stoned their houses, damaged their vehicles, and injured three of them. The reason behind the attack, apart from momentous outburst, was obscure to the wider world at the time. The attack had started from minor individual conflicts, but how and why the local townspeople organized themselves to attack against the Gypsies was unclear. How do individual fights escalate into group conflicts and lead to pogrom-like situations? What motivated the townspeople to attack the Gypsies? How do our ways of socialization enable such expressions of violence? To answer these questions, we have to examine how and why the attacks mobilized discontent through ethnic categories. To explain such attacks, we must grasp not only the socioeconomic context of the moment but also the way the category of Gypsyness has been constructed over time.

This incident happened when I was already working on my research on the forced dislocation of the Gypsy people from Bayramiç, Çanakkale, in 1970. The momentous effect, the specific dynamics, and the local contexts of the two cases were very different. However, the social construction of Gypsyness and the socioeconomic situation of these two towns reveal interesting similarities. The attack in Manisa reflected the ongoing strength of this construction, notwithstanding local specificities. The reoccurrence of a similarly articulated attack points at the persistence of the stigmatization of Gypsyness. This similarity at a deeper structural level shows the value of my case study, which questions the role of similar categories in society and their mobilization during violent attacks. To study and understand such events, it is necessary to combine theoretical perspectives on exclusionary violence and the social construction of categories with a concrete analysis of local configurations. The term “exclusionary violence” is taken from Werner Bergmann to refer to the multidimensionality of the attacks.² I believe the term is much more satisfactory than the ethnic violence approach that does not problematize ethnicity as such and fails to take other dynamics into account. A similar successful approach is that of Jan Gross, who analyzed pogrom-like violence against Jews by their neighbors in Jedwabne, a town in Poland.³ In his work, Gross meticulously analyzes the dynamics that are at work and thus contributes enormously to our insight on the way pogroms start and evolve. He, however, does not explicitly theorize beyond his case study. This book, which owes a great deal to the work of Gross, aims to frame the case study more in an explanatory theoretical framework.

The case that is central to my study concerns the forced dislocation of Gypsy people from the town of Bayramiç and enables us to apply theoretical tools to a concrete case study. Bayramiç is my mother’s hometown, and my close relatives were settled there until 2001, when my grandmother passed away. In analyzing this case, the local dynamics, discourses, and constructions required study. This particular world, however, took its shape in relation to more general categories and hierarchies. The cognitive world of the townspeople was deeply influenced by categories of Gypsyness and Turkishness around the forced dislocation. Therefore, the study analyzes how such categories were applied in the local context.

In Bayramiç there were different subcategories of Gypsies. At the time, the main ones⁴ were local Gypsies and muhacirs⁵ (immigrants). Muhacirs were those who moved into the town in the 1920s as a result of the population exchange with Greece. The local ones were those who had already been in the town when the muhacirs came. They were mainly musicians and blacksmiths, professions that were considered traditionally Gypsy. Muhacirs, on the other hand, started working as porters, drivers, and petty workers.

In 1970 some groups of people were mobilized to attack the Gypsies: stoning their houses, beating some of them, and eventually forcing them to leave the town. Powerful figures among lorry drivers took the lead, including some low- and middle-class townspeople and villagers. It was the time when urbanization was intensifying in the town and the migration from the countryside to the city was on the rise. The changes also had their impacts on the development of highway transportation, which was pivotal for conducting business with the urban centers. The transportation business was especially essential for the trade of the wood from the forests into the town, where no other industry was available.

In the beginning, the driving business was not very popular among non-Gypsies, since the mountain roads were very dangerous. Therefore, some muhacirs stepped into this business and built a reputation as outstanding drivers. By the 1960s, the highway transportation and forestry businesses had developed and the number of drivers and lorries in the town had increased. The conflict in 1970 started with the break-up of a lorry partnership between a Turkish bully and his former best friend, a muhacir Gypsy. It immediately triggered rumors of immoral acts by the latter’s brothers, who were accused of making passes at Turkish girls. It did not take a lot to create a Gypsy threat in the town, ranging from stories about their violent attitudes and immoral behavior to unfair competition in the markets. The first attack targeted the muhacir families, but the second one after a few weeks extended to local Gypsies. While the discontent had started as a “lorry-drivers” feud, it soon turned into a full-scale Gypsy hunt. According to the town attorney (who is the chief officer of a Turkish town), at the time, some 3,000 people from the town and the surrounding villages stoned the Gypsy houses and forced them to leave the town. In the second attack, the town attorney, who tried to stop the crowd, was also beaten up. Most of the Gypsies left the town within several months, and some never returned. They struggled to survive in other towns and cities, while some villagers and townspeople took over their professions. Many local Gypsies came back, while most muhacirs tried to find their livings outside of the town.

This is not just a dramatic and moving story of the personal trauma and passion of individuals caught up in community violence. This book provides a deep context as to why and how these violent attacks could happen, what dynamics constituted the relationship between the people in the town in relation to the categories of Turkishness and Gypsyness, how these surprisingly flexible categories were employed in their relationships in different contexts, and how people remember and represent their relationships and experiences. This has a relevance that goes far beyond one small town’s moral panic. It reveals how ethnic and other identities represented in cultural spheres can be employed to conceal socioeconomic and political inequalities. Such categorization of people in our social worlds should not be taken as a given, but should be analyzed as flexible social constructions that could be radically altered as relationships and social contexts change through time. The phenomenon of violence that seems at first a terrible interruption of social order will be revealed as a rule-making or rule-changing tool that factions can use to regulate power relations and social boundaries.⁶

In the case under discussion, violence changed not only the relationship between the Gypsies and non-Gypsies but also the relations within these communities. During my fieldwork, many townspeople were still scared of talking negatively about the perpetrators and almost all used confusing and contradicting narratives ranging from their personal experiences to dominant discourses. The violence that was experienced in the town threatened not only the existence of the Gypsies but also other people’s relations with the Gypsies. It had severe repercussions for the way townspeople thought about Gypsies, but also for the room to interact with them beyond Gypsyness. At the time of the attacks, many people felt desperate and impotent. The narratives of the protectors, the ongoing silence of the townspeople, the hesitations in narratives, the narratives of witnesses, and the existence of secrets also reveal the effects of the attacks on not only the position of Gypsies in the town but also that of the non-Gypsies. This leads on to a discussion of the role of the state and state officials as well as state discourse to understand the use of violence by the townspeople.

The forced dislocation and exclusionary violence can be analyzed in three main dimensions: (1) the socioeconomic context, (2) the historical and social construction of relevant categories, and (3) the position of the relevant actors using theories developed by Bergmann and Van Arkel about anti-Semitic violence. Bergmann’s approach, with its focus on power mechanisms and social control in such violent cases, basically draws upon the use of violence especially when the perpetrators perceive a negative change in power relations. In such cases, violence is generated in order to control the levers of power in society. Constructing a threat in such an environment intensifies the exclusion and motivates the perpetrators. Additionally, Van Arkel stresses the functionality of stigma and the importance of a social distance between the majority and the minority. His study of European anti-Semitism shows how a historical stigma can become functional in interplay with the current power relations and how the terrorization mechanism (which forces people to at least passively support discrimination and outright violence) leads to the redefinition of group boundaries. All three conditions together (functional stigma, social distance, and terrorization) create the conditions for collective violence. Thus, in order to understand the Gypsy hunt in 1970, we need to study both the specific context of the attacks, including the roles of particular actors, and the historical construction of the Gypsy category.

First, the local context of the violent attacks is important. We need to know more about the socioeconomic situation in which the people were mobilized against the Gypsies at that particular moment. Why it happened at that particular moment will be one of our questions. The specific historical context of the town in relation to the wider context of the country will help us comprehend the reasons for the collective violence and how categories became functional. The socioeconomic transformation that the country went through and how it influenced the town, especially due to rapid urbanization, will prove to be important. In that period, the town experienced a boom in the transportation sector, which together with a transformation of the social relations in the town is crucial to understand what was going on in our case study. It was a time during which power relations were changing and new opportunities were rising, due to which some people were gaining and others were losing their previous status and power. Why did muhacir Gypsies attract particular attention? This question leads to our second dimension in the analysis.

While the first dimension looks at the effects of socioeconomic transformation on the social relations and categories, the second focuses on the historical background of these relations and categories in the local context.⁷ In this light, people who were called Gypsies were not random targets of the violence. There had been a disagreement over a lorry at a time when the driving business and transportation had become profitable and prestigious. In addition to this, it was also a time when more villagers were searching for jobs in the town. These newcomers mostly lacked the capital to start their own businesses⁸ and were dependent on low or unskilled labor. An easy way to enter the urban labor market was through the service sector, in which most muhacir Gypsies were active. Even relatively lowearning jobs, such as shoe polishing, would be a good start for someone who wanted to start a new life in the town. Thus, the muhacir Gypsies were holding powerful positions. This is essential to understand social relations in the first dimension. However, this in itself still does not explain why the Gypsies were targeted. That is why we have to look at the social construction of Gypsyness as a category and the historical stigma attached, which takes us to the second dimension.

The construction of Gypsyness in the local context had its own particularities, but it also interplayed with the perceptions, stereotypes, stigmas, and discrimination of Gypsyness at the national level. The construction of the Gypsy threat did not occur out of the blue, but was deeply rooted in the historical experience that goes back to Ottoman times. Although the townspeople had other ways of relating to one another beyond these categories, when a certain type of competition or conflict arose, the Gypsy stigma was easily activated. The “master status”⁹ that Gypsyness had acquired was fueled and maintained by the social distance between Gypsies and non-Gypsies. This can be characterized as “labeled interaction,”¹⁰ which was based on the existing hierarchized and limited relations between Gypsies and the rest of the local society. The Gypsy category had been used historically to maintain this status quo. At the same time, however, as a reference point, it could fade in day-to-day contacts. Thus, the effect of the category depended on the context. Some people regarded the process as dangerous, because the group boundaries were blurring. Alba and Nee studied the process of assimilation in the United States and show how boundaries between ethnic groups can change over time. They differentiate between boundary crossing, boundary blurring, and boundary shifting. Crossing happens at the individual level, whereas blurring refers to the situation in which ethnic differences between groups become less clear and reflect the ambiguous state of group boundaries. Boundary shifting, finally, creates a new situation in which a former group becomes included in a new encompassing category, for example, Asian Americans, who increasingly become viewed as “whites.” I find their approach very useful, as they emphasize categories instead of groups, which is crucial to understand what was going on in the case that is analyzed in this book.¹¹ Moreover, different people could react differently. In the town, there were protectors along with perpetrators. Then, although the people had been exposed to the same historical discourse on Gypsyness and socioeconomic context of the time as well as terrorization of the perpetrators, there was still space for agency that led to different perspectives and roles during the attacks.

Dwelling on agency as our third dimension will allow us to understand different and to some extent conflicting positions. These positions were of course related to people’s socioeconomic positions and to the extent of terrorization by the perpetrators. Mainly the families of wealthy land holders, state officials, and some merchants were against the attacks. There were plenty of people who employed the muhacir Gypsies and defended them. Among them, there were some who stood up against the crowd with a rifle in their hands. Among the state officials, the attorney was the most noticeable, as he was almost beaten to death for trying to stop the crowd with his gun. The previous experiences of the townspeople also help us understand their attitude toward Gypsies. Some of the Turkish townspeople who were close neighbors of the Gypsies and thus shared good relationship with them were also among those who protected the Gypsies by providing them shelters in their houses and in more indirect ways by informing them of the dangerous situation. However, there were also former friends who became leading figures in the attacks. Obviously, the different positions that people took during the attacks depended on their previous experiences with one another, and were not just automatic reactions that can be reduced to their position in the local socioeconomic structure. Although the latter influences how one experiences other ethnic and social groups, the personal stories reveal how different people may relate within structural dynamics. Especially in the narratives on the attacks, these experiences make us understand why people remembered the conflict in different ways ranging from the “Gypsy incidents” to the “drivers’ feud.”

Indeed there were “inherited discourses” against Gypsies, as Nirenberg terms them, but they had not been mobilized actively in any violent act extensively before. Moreover, many people experienced one another beyond those discourses because of a relatively less social distance. At some point, however, anti-Gypsy discourses were employed widely. We cannot ignore the existence of the inherited discourses, but what is significant here is the combination of three dimensions that reveal which actors employed the anti-Gypsy discourse and mobilized these according to their own socioeconomic interests. On the other hand, there were also other actors who resisted those discourses and stood up for their Gypsy friends, neighbors, and townspeople, to the point that they engaged in real fights against the attackers.

As Nirenberg argues, structuralists do not deal much with historical change but emphasize the collective systems such as fixed discourses in relation to stereotypes and beliefs that precede violent acts against minorities. One of Nirenberg’s problems with the structuralists’ analysis is to posit “everyman” as passive and uncritical receptor of inherited ideologies in medieval studies. He makes a crucial comment:

I am not arguing that negative discourses about Jews, Muslims, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgment
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Gypsies under Surveillance
• 3. Historical Context: The Timing of the Attacks
• 4. Gypsyness in the Town
• 5. Narrating the Attacks
• 6. The Forced Dislocation: From Drivers’ Feud to Gypsy Hunt
• 7. Conclusion
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index