The Kurdish Issue in Turkey

Zeynep Gambetti, Joost Jongerden, Zeynep Gambetti, Joost Jongerden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317581505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume gives a thorough and comprehensive analysis of the Kurdish issue in Turkey from a spatial perspective that takes into account geographical variations in identity formation, exclusion and political mobilisation.

Although analysis of Turkey's Kurdish issue from a spatial perspective is not new, spatial analyses are still relatively scarce. More often than not, Kurdish studies consist of time-centred work. In this book, the attention is shifted from outcome-oriented analysis of transformation in time towards a spatial analysis. The authors in this book discuss the spatial production of home, identity, work, in short, of being in the world. The contributions are based on the tacit avowal that the Kurdish question, in addition to being a question of group rights, is also one of spatial relations. By asking a different set of questions, this book examines; which spatial strategies have been employed to deal with Kurds? Which spatial strategies are developed by Kurds to deal with state, and with the neo-liberal turn? How are these strategies absorbed and what counter-strategies are developed, both in cities populated by the Kurds in south-eastern Turkey and in other regions?

Emphasizing that identity or place, its particularity or uniqueness, arises from social practices and social relations, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers working in Kurdish and Turkish Studies, Urban and Rural Studies and Politics more broadly.

1 Introduction

The Kurdish issue in Turkey from a spatial perspective¹

Zeynep Gambetti and Joost Jongerden

Campaigning for the newly founded political party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), in the 2014–15 electoral marathon, Kurds in Turkey have taken a step towards bracketing ethnic and regional demands with a discourse that seeks to embrace other marginalized groups, such as Armenians, Syriacs, LGBTTs and the working class poor in the country’s west as well as its east. This step marks a spatial as well as temporal shift in institutionalized Kurdish politics. Instead of contenting themselves with electoral command of the southeastern provinces, leading Kurdish politicians have allied with smaller leftist and environmentalist parties to compete with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the latter’s main rival, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), as well as the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), in spatial settings beyond the strongholds of the Kurds. Although not new, the search for an alliance between the Kurds, minority groups and diverse, broadly leftist-oriented ideological tendencies is a spatial shift in Kurdish politics in that it reveals, and is also a consequence of, the growing number of Kurds living in provinces other than the Kurdish-populated southeast.²

Clearly, Turkey’s “Kurdish issue” is not solely and no longer one of identity and of the colonization of a particular region. From the historical exile punishments, through the economic migrations in the 1950s, to the military’s village evacuations in the 1990s, the Kurds have moved and been forcibly thrust west of the Euphrates, carrying along with them the politics of poverty and the memories, wounds and political will of a century-long struggle with hegemonic Turkish institutions. The unstable forces of deterritorialization and reterritorialization are constantly at play throughout Turkey, with Kurdish enclaves emerging in numerous urban zones, and the level of mixity increasing in countless others. Both the Kurdish political movement and the main markers of identity and belonging among Kurds are inevitably moulded by this shifting spatial landscape.

Although analysis of Turkey’s Kurdish issue from a spatial perspective is not new, however, spatial analyses are still relatively scarce. Kurdish studies tend much more to be oriented to time-centred work. These mostly represent the trajectory of Turkey’s Kurds either through modernist state discourses—in terms of a “backwardness” and “lack,” or other narratives presupposing particular outcomes—or else as a development of resistance, from its origins to the present. Such time-centred approaches aimed at particular outcomes leave little room for the telling of different stories and thus end up silencing subaltern voices.³

In this book, we would like to shift the attention from outcome-oriented analysis of transformation in time towards a spatial analysis. How this might inform research on the Kurdish question in Turkey and what may be gained from this perspective, however, do need to be explained.

The concept of socially produced/constructed space appears in publications today with little apparent need for justification or explanation.⁴ Yet it was not so long ago that “space” was ignored in social theory, when it was routinely assumed that sociology had a historical rationality. The “sociological imagination” of which C. Wright Mills spoke in the late 1950s,⁵ for example, was a time-centred imagination.⁶ Space, as Doreen Massey argued, had “been marshalled under the sign of time.”⁷ In a Cartesian logic of dualities, time was equated with becoming, space with being; time was equated with change, space with stasis; time was considered as active, space passive; time was equated with the subject, space with the object.⁸ Time was considered qualitatively and thought in terms of development, change, growth or whatever parameter was used; space was looked upon as quantitative and isotropic, the blank canvas on which development, change or growth would occur.

Through most of the twentieth century, sociology was concerned with explaining (and forecasting) the making of the world,⁹ applying an evolutionary (and imperialist) notion of what modernity was supposed to be. Conceptualizations such as “stages of development” and “backwardness” became expressions of the social as intervals on a time-scale. Difference was explained as stage- or phase difference, ergo time. This held true for various theories of a modernist kind, both liberal and Marxist, from the work of Rostow, Lewis, Parsons and Lerner on phases and stages of development, to historical materialism that “marginalised space, and privileged time and history.”¹⁰ Soja, referring approvingly to Foucault, states: “The nineteenth century obsession with time and history [ … ] continued to bracket modern critical thought,”¹¹ while according to Anderson, social sciences lost their “spatial consciousness.”¹² Ideas such as “inevitable social outcome” and “path of development” frequently surfaced. With respect to the Kurdish issue in Turkey too, modernization (development) was considered to be a process of inevitable and unilinear social transformations. The backward would become the modern, the tribal make way for the state, and the inevitable future would be realized according to the (assimilationist) formula Kurd + time = Turk. In this line of thinking, the possibility of difference is not an option.

It was against the backdrop of this time-centred social thought and its presupposed social outcomes that thinkers such as Lefebvre, Harvey, Soja, Massey and others reintroduced a spatial consciousness into social sciences, and with it, also, multiplicity. They brought the idea of a social production of space to the centre of social theory. This, to our view, is of much significance. Although historical analysis is indispensable in producing genealogies of social phenomena that would otherwise remain uncritically “naturalized,” transformations in spatial attributes cannot be ignored if one is to grasp how and why certain shifts occur and to explain difference. In other words, causalities constructed solely on successive moments in time fail to account for the power structures that embed social phenomena within sets of spatial relations of varying scales and dimensions.

This is illustrated in studies of the Kurdish issue insofar as considerations of the successive strategies used by the Turkish state vis-à-vis ethnic and cultural diversity from the founding years of the Republic to the present omit a whole array of spatial transformations that state policies have either aimed at producing or responded to. These include the forced migration, resettlement, concentration or dispersal of the Kurdish population in certain regions or urban zones alluded to, the spatially induced differences in assimilation or resistance, access to and/or lack of resources and so forth.

It must be underlined that our purpose is not to refuse all historiography. Indeed, critical temporal narratives of the Kurdish issue (closely related to the political constitution of the Republic) are crucial in clarifying competing discourses about decisive moments in its emergence and subsequent development. To wit, during the 1920s and 1930s, the newly established state of Turkey practiced a de facto politics of colonization vis-à-vis the territory that had become “the southeast” on its map, of what is also known as the northern part of the Kurdistan region.¹³ The Turkish state imposed its authority over the peoples living there (Kurds, Arabs, Armenians and Syriacs, along with Turks and others) and proceeded to keep the region under firm control thereafter. For most of the Republic’s history, the southeast has been ruled under martial law and emergency regulations. The primarily temporal analysis tends to bring to the foreground transformations and historical developments in relation to place and space as a given. What is ignored is the actual production of space, that is, an analysis of the relations and practices constituting particular productions of space and the performativity of spatial practices, or how people experience and shape the places they live in, and how social relations co-define and institutions occupy geographical location as territory.

The assimilation of ethnic and cultural difference into a ubiquitous Turkish identity was the main objective of the state, with oppression and reform as the two means of weakening social relations in Kurdish society and increasing its vulnerability to assimilation.¹⁴ Already in the 1920s and 1930s, the displacement and resettlement of Kurds constituted a part of this politics of assimilation, employed both as an instrument to punish rebellion and crush further discontent and resistance, and also as a way of weakening tribal structures, regarded by the state as the stronghold of Kurdish identity. At the same time, land reform was used as an instrument to target Kurdish landlords and co-opt peasants. Importantly, the Turkish state refused either to accommodate Kurdish aspirations or enter into political discussions on the matter. In the Republic, citizenship was considered to be equivalent to Turkishness, and in practice Kurds were required to qualify themselves thus, as cultural Turks.¹⁵

The state was able to extend its control over the region partially through local Kurdish (tribal) leaders, who generally supported the strong central leadership, but the Turkish nationalist politics also met with a series of resistance and rebellions (the largest being the Sheik Said rebellion in Diyarbakir in 1925, the Ağrı rebellion of 1927–30, and the Dersim uprising in 1937). In general, these were spatially confined and suppressed in a relatively short time. The resistance initiated by the PKK since 1984, however, has already acquired a history of more than three decades and spanned other state territories (Syria, Iraq and Iran) in Kurdistan as well as the southeastern portion of Turkey.¹⁶ In the 1990s, the PKK’s liberation struggle took the form of a full-fledged asymmetric war, with a heavy toll in human life (an estimated total of 40,000 deaths) and material damage (to the local region especially), including the massive evacuation of rural settlements, primarily by the Turkish Armed Forces and special units.

What is often referred to as the Kurdish movement in Turkey today is composed of a variety of actors, of whom the PKK is the best known. Their aim now is not so much secession as social and political recognition, a struggle for democratization. The means through which the struggle is organized are as various as the actors engaged in the movement: from armed combat to syndicalism, from political resistance to emboldened cultural self-assertion, from ethnic nationalism to democratic pluralism. In the southeastern provinces inhabited predominantly by Kurds, the movement has increasingly succeeded in attracting votes, converting these into political representation, and thence to the bottom-up construction of alternatives,¹⁷ while the 2011 general elections also brought success in large cities such as Istanbul and Mersin.

Also, however, place and the way it is organized in rural and urban settings has become an important focus of the struggles, as the medium through which the social is constituted as well as the very outcome of these struggles. This focus emerged with electoral victories by candidates of the movement at the municipal level. It developed with an attempt at a parallel organization of local politics through a participatory democracy aiming at a “democratic confederalism,” following the path set by PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. The state response was police and judiciary intervention through the arrest of scores of leading members of the Communities in Kurdistan (KCK, or Koma Civakên Kurdistan) on terrorism charges.¹⁸ Thwarted for the moment in this attempt, the Kurdish movement today has shifted its energies again to link with other marginalized groups in a bid to promote its ends in a different way by posing within the established framework as the democratic alternative to the principal political protagonists, the pro-Islamic AKP, the Kemalist CHP and the Turkish nationalist MHP.

Within the context of Kurds and the Kurdish question, the authors in this book discuss the spatial production of home, identity, work; in short, of being in the world. The contributions are based on the tacit avowal that the Kurdish question, in addition to being a question of group rights, is also one of spatial relations. In such an approach, relevant questions to be asked concern the ways in which the Kurdish issue is articulated in terms of a space-centered/spatial practices approach. In relation to that, we would like to emphasize that identity or place, its particularity or uniqueness, arises from social practices and social relations. And this introduces a different set of questions concerning issues of spatial strategy.

Which spatial strategies have been employed to deal with Kurds? Which spatial strategies are developed by Kurds to deal with the state and with its neoliberal turn? How are these strategies absorbed and which counter-strategies are being developed, both in cities populated by the Kurds in southeastern Turkey and in other regions? The spatial divides within cities, the question of transitional spaces like those of seasonal migration, and the shift in spaces of political activism, these all have an impact on both the broader “ethnic” question and on patterns of exclusion and belonging. Collective memories and experiences, cultural values and motivations, modes of being gendered and sexuated all undergo considerable variations.

But so do the strategies and tactics used by agents of the hegemonic re...