The Formation of Kurdishness in Turkey

Political Violence, Fear and Pain

Ramazan Aras

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134648788
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The Formation of Kurdishness in Turkey examines political violence, the politics of fear and the Kurdish experience of pain through an analysis of life stories, personal narratives and testimonies of Kurdish subjects in contemporary Turkey. It traces the physical and psychological impacts of the war between the state security forces and the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) guerrillas in the last three decades, in Kurdish populated areas in the south-eastern part of Turkey.

Focusing on the instrumentalization of violence, the ensuing and manufactured culture of fear, gendered experiences of state violence, pain, incarceration, and corporeal punishment, Ramazan Aras argues that these phenomena have shaped contemporary Kurdish history and memory. Analysing occurrences of various forms of protracted state violence and fear not only as personal and differential markers experienced by individuals, but also as communally-felt phenomena which have engendered collective suffering, this book asserts that these traumatic experiences have marked the social body and produced a prevailing narrative of Kurdishness.

Providing an anthropological study of political violence, fear, and pain amongst the Kurdish community in Turkey, this book will be welcomed by students and scholars of Kurdish Studies, Middle East Studies and Anthropology.

1	The modern nation-state and political violence

“Violence” is an enormously broad and multifaceted term, meaning “the use of physical force” by a standard definition. Yet violence has other forms, such as psychological, symbolic, structural, epistemic, aesthetic, visible or invisible, physical or emotional. The present study investigates the political form of violence as an omnipresent phenomenon that grounds destructive, catastrophic contemporary socio-political events. The violence of modern states and the counter-violence of oppositional groups and movements has surpassed arguments of legitimacy and consent and made the subject controversial among thinkers and social scientists. In recent decades, state-sponsored violence, terror, counter-violence, diverse ethnic and religious conflicts in different parts of the world have shattered communities, occasioning prevalent social suffering. These upheavals, along with the insidious practices of modern nation-states, have demonstrated how they can cause such catastrophic consequences at both subjective and collective levels. Modern societies have been deeply touched by diverse forms of state violence and terror, which have resulted in the loss of millions of lives.

The experiences of political violence as social and political phenomena have led to some fundamental questions in theoretical and ethnographic works by many thinkers and researchers. One of the crucial questions is, “How do we define and understand both state violence and the opposing counter-violence? And some researchers have asked further questions: Are people inherently violent? Are they more violent now than in earlier periods? What are the fundamental roots of political violence? Who are the main actors? Is it individuals, groups, social structures, a blind fate, or all of these? Is it possible to comprehend cycles of history without engaging the construction and perpetuation of violence (Lawrence and Karim 2007: 9–10)? Questions resembling these are still lingering within academia, waiting to be answered. To begin with, the question of political violence in today’s world requires us to rethink Hannah Arendt’s warnings years ago. In her analysis in the 1960s, Arendt talks about how violence has been a marginal topic among thinkers (Arendt 1970 [1969]: 8) and has not received enough attention. She calls for urgently needed studies in the wake of the nuclear arms race and at the time of intensified Cold War strategies, the violence of decolonization and leftist student movements of the 1960s. In her exploration, Arendt raises questions about the definition of violence, and argues that the only consensus is that violence is the most overt manifestation of power. Yet the disagreement on definitions of the concepts and acts of “political violence,” “genocide” and “terrorism” among researchers indicates the lack of a consensus on what exactly constitutes violence today. In her analyses, Arendt separates the concept of “violence” from that of “power” and describes them in a “non-dialectical and asymmetrical relationship and thus adopts the (Aristotelian/Kantian) means-ends model to define violence as instrumental” (Hanssen 2000: 25).

While Arendt attempts to define the roots of the phenomenon of violence and discussions around it, Eric Wolf emphasizes connections between ideas and power, which are essential for the understanding of wars, political disorders and conflicts:

These upheavals have entailed massive plays and displays of power, but ideas have had a central role in all of them. Ideas have been used to glorify or criticize social arrangements within states, and they have helped warriors and diplomats to justify conflicts or accommodations between states. Ideas have furnished explanations and warrants for imperialist domination and resistance to it.

(Wolf 1999: 1)

In his analysis, Wolf addresses the crucial role of ideas in manufacturing consent for and legitimizing violence. Nevertheless, differing approaches and the multifaceted character of the issue create many controversial issues around it.

One of these ambiguous issues is the concept of legitimacy, because there is no consensus on what should be defined as terror and illegitimate in these discussions. The debates on the definition of political violence result from the ideological, intellectual and political positions of researchers, but there is also the hegemony of statist discourses in these domains. Perceptions and analyses are fashioned by such positions, depending on whether they support, or are involved in, conflicts and acts of violence. The legitimacy and the definitions of violence and terror are produced and derived from those standpoints. Though such acts of violence and terror are evaluated as inhuman, illegitimate and immoral behaviors by some, they can be seen by others as revolutionary, humane or legitimate acts through legitimizing discourses of security or selfdefense. The security, sovereignty and survival of the state and nation are fundamental to the reasoning occurring in the context of state violence and terror. The politicization of the definition of acts of violence and terror contextualizes the perpetrators in two opposing sets of meaning. On the one hand, the perpetrators of violence are described as inhuman, brutal and uncivilized killers and terrorists who should be eliminated and destroyed. On the other, the same actors of violence are viewed and supported by others as patriots, freedom fighters, fallen heroes and martyrs who should always be remembered with honor and dignity. In the context of state violence and terror, legitimacy becomes a fundamental concern in the sense that “violence is only violence by definition if the perpetrators fail to form the legitimacy necessary to perform their cruel acts against claims of others that these acts are illegitimate” (Riches 1986: 1–27; see also Nagengast 1994: 115).

Taking aim at the increasing capability of modern states to destroy and disrupt life, Talal Asad explains how today’s liberals, who justify state violence and terror, consider themselves morally advanced and believe in attacking “evil” as a moral obligation, either to redeem themselves or those others who cannot do so for themselves:

Liberal thought begins from the notion that everyone has the absolute right to defend himself, in the full knowledge that the idea of defense is subject to considerable interpretation, so that (for example) liberation from the oppressor in Iraq becomes a partial defense for both the American occupier and the insurgency.

(Asad 2007: 4)

Thus, in this diversity of approaches toward the act of state-sponsored violence, understanding and describing the act of counter-violence become further controversial issues. Actually, discussions of the acts of state violence, particularly as extended to counter-violence and their emerging transnational character go back to the 1960s. How do the explanatory instruments of the actors of counter-violence compare with the justificatory moral codes of diverse forms of state-sponsored violence?

One of the most thought-provoking discussions concerning the legitimacy of counter-violence was voiced by post-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon in his well-known work The Wretched of the Earth (1967). In the preface of the book, Jean-Paul Sartre, who considered revolutionary counter-violence an emancipatory instrument for the colonized, generally approved of Fanon’s philosophical views on the issues of decolonization, resistance, violence and liberation. For Sartre, the ultimate duty of the colonized is to “thrust out colonialism by every means in their power” and the native can achieve that by “thrusting out the settler through force of arms”:

The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time; there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot …

(Sartre, in Fanon 1967: 19, 25)

For both Fanon and Sartre, the counter-violence of the colonized is a response to the violence of the colonizer. In Fanon’s words, “the violence of the colonial regime and the counter-violence of the native balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity” (Fanon 1967: 69).

Three decades later, Edward Said, in response to these discussions, stated that there is only one way to change in Fanon’s world, and that is for the colonized to decide to end the colonization or to lead to an epistemological revolution. Fanon is quoted generally with approval by Said in his understanding of resistance and popular revolt, where the colonizer cannot give the colonized their freedom “but must be forced to yield it as the result of a protracted political, cultural and sometimes military struggle that becomes more, not less adversarial as time goes on” (Said 1994: 249). According to Said, Fanon’s violence is “the synthesis that overcomes the reification of white man as subject, Black man as object” (ibid.: 326). In other words, Fanon advocates counter-violence as a cleansing force that “frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect” (Fanon 1967: 74). What Fanon and his followers conceived has been a guiding principle for many political movements, particularly in the last three decades, including the Kurdish leftist/nationalist movement (the PKK).

The question of why authorities choose to rule by violence, terror and fear (Walter 1969) requires an examination of both the construction and transformation of the state into an oppressive apparatus. In the following section, I will elaborate on this issue, but now it is important to look at two assumptions on the roots of political violence. The first of these is that the struggles of various groups/parties for power ultimately result in the use of violence as instruments to deter each other, which sometimes take the extreme forms of genocide or massacre. Sociologist Hamit Bozarslan states in his work on political violence in the Middle East (2004) that unequal power relations manifested in material and symbolic domination create an environment conducive to conflict and violence. Bozarslan argues that in this milieu, the dignity and identity of social, political, ethnic and religious groups are not recognized and further, they are identified as “the other” and commonly described as atavistic, backward or subhuman (H. Bozarslan 2004: 9). Sometimes, ethnic or socio-political groups that have suffered the abuse of their rights and have no access to a legal framework with which to legally act in their defense and practice their culture, faith and ideologies apply violence as an instrument against these authorities. That is why, contrary to assumptions that the dynamics of certain cultures produce violence in some necessary relation to religion, race or geography, it is rather socio-political and economic factors, along with ethnicity, religion, race, gender and class, that operate in the process of the eruption of violence. The use of violence against the oppressive regime in this context becomes widely considered to be an effective way for a oppressed people to regain their rights, to improve their conditions and to achieve their goals. Whereas Sartre and Fanon advocate violent anti-colonial struggle as the only form of resistance, Arendt seeks a model of instrumental violence. She criticizes the insurrectionary counterviolence of the 1960s, but sanctions the use of violence in self-defense as a justifiable act.

The second of these two assumptions I would like to examine about the roots of violence is an oversimplified, ethnocentric point of view, which asserts that some people or cultures are inherently prone to violence. As some anthropologists and researchers working on political violence have also claimed, studies on violence and conflicts around the world “are set within the fundamental assumption that violence is not a natural or genetic characteristic in human populations, and then go on to ask what social and cultural dynamics foment, perpetuate, and resolve conflict” (Nordstrom and Martin 1992: 9). By contrast, I follow anthropologist Valentine Daniel who eloquently explains in his work on Sri Lankan civil war that “violence is not peculiar to a given people or culture; violence is far more ubiquitous and universally human” (Daniel 1996: 9). Yet it is consistent to further acknowledge that violence is “a human condition … present (as a capability) in each of us, as is its opposite – the rejection of violence” (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004: 2).

The issue, then, is how perpetrators on both sides legitimize violence by fabricating certain self-defense discourses and strategies, thereby making violence a justifiable act. However, the line between self-defense and violation is made largely ambiguous through these discourses. Consequently, the concepts of violence, terrorism, genocide, etc., become ambiguous, because they are differently channeled, renegotiated and redefined in various political settings by both state and non-state actors. In general, the concept of terrorism does more than simply designate the killing of people or civilians; the concept itself is employed to generate and spread fear, insecurity and distrust and to violate the privacy of a community. Nevertheless, as Talal Asad has argued, the analysis of terrorism as an illegal and immoral form of violence is incomplete. Asad criticizes “thinking of terrorism simply as an illegal and immoral form of violence” and advocates an investigation of “what the discourse of terror – and perpetration of terror – does in the world of power” (Asad 2007: 26). He argues, “the discourse of terror enables a redefinition of the space of violence in which bold intervention and rearrangement of everyday relations can take place and be governed in relation to terror” (ibid.: 28). In two analyses of the “war on terror” in the aftermath of 9/11, both Sara Ahmed (2003) and Begoñia Aretxaga consider another use of the discourse of terror by the state in the making of world(s). Aretxaga suggests that:

The war on terrorism might indeed create the very enemy it is seeking to eradicate; it might create terrorism in a new way, setting the stage of war not as a state of exception, but rather as a permanent state of affairs in which the state of exception has become the juridical norm and the legitimating right of police and military intervention. This permanent state of exception does not eliminate practices of terror; rather it instrumentalizes terrorism for new kinds of social, political and economic production.

(Aretxaga 2001: 147)

In contemporary world, while state-sponsored violence has been made an ordinary operating procedure, through certain legitimizing discourses and by manufacturing consent, the issue has not received the attention it deserves within academia. So, as anthropologist Linda Green has also pointed out “despite an alarming rise in the most blatant forms of transgression, repression and state terrorism, the topic has not captured the anthropological imagination” (Green 1995: 107). Yet the writing and production of anthropological knowledge on state-sponsored violence and terror might become an intricate one, due to the challenge of “writing ethnography of violence without its becoming pornography of violence” (Daniel 1996: 4). Despite all the challenges of studying state violence, in recent decades a number of anthropologists have made significant contributions to developing a literature on diverse forms of state violence. Some of these researchers, and in this I do agree with them (Taussig 1984; Scheper-Hughes 1995; Green 1995: 109, Sluka 2000; Nordstrom and Martin 1992), have identified the construction of ethnographies on political violence and state terror as “sites of resistance,” “acts of solidarity” and as a way to “write against terror” and thus to overcome anthropologists’ unsuccessful ways of imagining the subject.

In this chapter, I begin by examining the transformation of the modern state where its foundational principles and dynamics produce political violence and terror. Then, I analyze the use and instrumentalization of violence and terror where I ask how the state legitimizes such inhuman acts and produces consent. To fathom the subject, it is crucial to look at the changing character of the state and the concept of terrorism. For Talal Asad, terrorism is “an integral part of liberal subjectivities although terror itself is dismissed as being essentially part of a nonmodern, nonliberal culture” (Asad 2007: 2). Following Asad’s argument, and Agamben’s concepts of the “state of exception” and “sovereignty,” I examine contemporary transformations of the state apparatus toward a legitimized idea of violence (fighting evil), in the course of which modern states have reached an enormous capability to destroy life and terrorize people. In the second part, I look at the ways the state dehumanizes oppositional groups through (re)definition of the other and how the state constantly creates and redefines “new enemies” as threats to its sovereignty. I argue that the extreme use of violence, the creation of terror and the perpetration of atrocities have become embedded aspects of a modern nation-state’s militant actions. In the last part, I scrutinize the politics of the Turkish nation-state experience in relation to the unresolved Kurdish question. In short, this chapter aims to provide a generally new way of seeing state violence and Turkish nation-state practices in the context of the Kurdish question, rather than offering any solutions.

The nation-state, violence and the question of sovereignty

The violence of the state, which has become a pervasive and infinitely diverse human experience, necessitates a reflection on the formation of the state with its multidimensional structure. The state as a hegemonic apparatus operates through formations of different institutions in different periods in order to govern its citizens and to control subordinated oppositional ethnic, religious and ideological groups. In this section, I am going to focus on some interconnected issues through the use of some general theoretical points of view developed by some thinkers and anthropologists. In the first place, I will define the many dimensions of the formation of the nation-state project and demonstrate how the emergence of conflicts between the state and counter-entities (political, ethnic, religious, etc.) has led recently to a crisis of the modern state. I then discuss how and when the state authorities attempt to use of violence against oppositional bodies (groups, movements, communities, etc.). Lastly, I discuss the topic of sovereignty, where I will delve into the issue of how authorities attempt to fabricate consent for the use of violence and develop strategies for the protection of the sovereignty of the state.

Beforehand, it is important to point out how the complexities of modern nation-state formation and its institutions have turned the subject into a difficult one to study. Phillip Abrams talks about these complexities and claims that

[t]he state is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask, which prevents our seeing political practice as it is. There is a state-system: a palpable nexus of practice and institutional structure centered in government and more or less extensive, unified, and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Map
• Introduction
• 1 The modern nation-state and political violence
• 2 A genealogical exploration of Kurdish suffering in Turkey
• 3 The state and the politics of fear
• 4 A nation in pain Gendered Suffering and Loss
• 5 The embodiment of state violence Memories of Incarceration and Corporeal Punishment
• 6 The making of the Kurdish world(s)
• Reference
• Index