Kurdish Life in Contemporary Turkey

Migration, Gender and Ethnic Identity

Anna Grabolle Celiker

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781784532154
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857739414
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

The question of Kurdish identity and belonging is counted among the most controversial and challenging issues in modern Turkey. Kurdish Life in Contemporary Turkey cuts to the heart of this debate in an exploration of shifting ethnic identities brought on by the processes of extensive rural-urban labour migration. As well as analysing the effects of migration on social networks and local political landscapes, this volume examines how Kurdish gender roles have changed. The everyday experiences of rural-urban migrants from Van province, on the south-eastern borders of the country, are central to this book, but they are inextricably linked to conflicting discourses on Kurdishness and the place of this minority in Turkey.

1

INTRODUCTION

This book portrays the lives of Kurds originally from the eastern province of Van in Turkey, many of whom have migrated, either from villages to the province capital or from the province to larger cities further west. They have moved from all-Kurdish villages to the more ethnically mixed Van city or to areas in Turkey that are predominantly Turkish. Since in Turkey it is common to identify oneself according to province of origin and my Kurdish interlocutors often refer to themselves, in Turkish, as ‘Vanlı’, people from Van, I follow this usage throughout the book.

In a regional context, this work on Vanlı migration represents a much-needed addition to the ethnographic body of knowledge on Kurds, specifically those living in Turkey. Furthermore, it offers a case study of relatively recent internal migration within Turkey, discussing push and pull factors. Finally, borrowing concepts from the study of transnational migration, this book considers both migrants and those who have remained in the villages as part of one social field with ‘interdependencies’ (Cohen 2001: 955).

One contribution of the transnational perspective has been a move away from a unidirectional model of rural-urban migration to a consideration of migrants and non-migrants as positioned in the same social spaces. In addition, this approach makes allowances for fluidity and ambiguity within these social spaces. While certain macro-processes affect migrant and non-migrant lives alike, there is nevertheless variation in migration outcomes. Social scientist Smith captures this ambiguity in his foreword to a book on transnational migration; he warns of ‘overly celebratory narratives of transnational cultural hybridity’, while also pointing out that migrant communities are not homogeneous (2002: xii–xiii).

The aim of this book is to show changes that migration has brought to the lives of Vanlı villagers over the last three decades. My long-term involvement with migrant and non-migrant Kurdish Vanlı for more than 12 years has led me to realise that there are certain structural constraints that have affected their lives. As villagers they have had limited access to health care and education. As Kurds they have faced discrimination by the state and by Turkish society. As women and men they have been constrained by a dominant Kurdish age-gender hierarchy. As migrants to cities they have often been limited in their choice of residential area or jobs. Whether they have migrated or remained in the province, these Kurdish Vanlı form a social field where networks are formed, discourses are perpetuated, and religious and social practices are performed. This creates a certain commonality of experiences.

At the same time, however, there is great variety in how these experiences have translated into outcomes, largely due to the ever-accelerating rural-urban migration in the province, which has been a major cause of change in the lives of Kurdish Vanlı; it has led to socio-economic differentiation among them, as well as coexisting yet contradictory discourses on village life, Kurdishness, gender relations, and religion. This means that Kurdish Vanlı may now live quite different lives, hold different ideas, and take part in different practices. In comparing and contrasting constraining structures and variety of experiences, a spectrum of migratory lives has been presented in this book.

Kurds in Turkey

There are both Turks and Kurds living in Van, but my research is mostly based on the experiences and narratives of Kurdish Vanlı. Although I do not focus exclusively on the issue of Kurdish ethnic identity, it is an integral aspect of the everyday lives of Vanlı and thus deserves some preliminary discussion. A debate on and the silencing of Kurdishness have played an important role in Turkey’s public discourses and impinge on the way in which Kurdishness has been experienced by my interlocutors.

Through my frequent visits to the eastern province of Van from 1997 onwards, I became increasingly aware of parallel universes existing in Turkey. I was living and socialising with Kurds in Istanbul, in the west of the country. Both there and in Van, I was listening to people singing, swearing, joking, and chatting in Turkish and Kurdish and expressing political opinions in private that could not be voiced in public. On the other hand, I was teaching young, mostly Turkish, students at universities in Istanbul as a language instructor. When at work, so went the unspoken caution, the words ‘Kurdish’ (Kürt) or ‘Kurdish language’ (Kürtçe) were unmentionable. Discussions of current affairs in lessons meticulously bypassed any mention of the war raging in the east of the country between the Turkish army and the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Kurdish: Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) since the 1980s—but it became very real for some, such as my student whose brother was killed in action during his military service.

Everyone was aware of these issues and just as aware of the fact that they were not to be talked about. We foreign teachers were warned not to provoke reactions by questioning the official line that tarred even Kurds lobbying for political and linguistic rights non-violently as ‘terrorists’ (terörist) or ‘separatists’ (bölücü). Mostly these things were not even discussed with Turkish colleagues. The word ‘Kürt’ was hardly ever used, but there were veiled references to ‘the culture of the East’ (Doğu’nun kültürü); this ‘culture’ was portrayed as one of violence, ignorance, and political extremism. I met young men who were scared of doing their military service in case they were sent to fight in the east of Turkey, and I heard and read about soldiers who came back broken souls after the traumas of war. Incidentally, a book interviewing soldiers who had done their military service in the East, describing their fears and experiences, was banned by the government.¹

The first time I visited the East, I went by intercity bus with my future husband. I felt the fear of the young soldier who entered the bus at a checkpoint in Elazığ, eastwards of which the provinces then still under emergency law began. I also felt the fear of the villagers on the bus who studiously looked at the seat ahead of them while the collected ID cards were being sifted through, felt the seething anger when an old man was taken off the bus and not let on again, and felt the frustration when these controls were repeated at numerous checkpoints the closer we got to Van. On this first visit I met my future mother-in-law and many other middle-aged villager women who could speak no Turkish, but were expressive, funny, scathing, and poetic in Kurdish.

In Beyoğlu, a quarter in Istanbul, I saw the ‘Saturday mothers’,² many of them Kurdish, holding up pictures of relatives who had disappeared after being detained by police or gendarmerie. Sometimes, busloads of police in riot gear stood at the ready on their regular protest spot to discourage even the beginnings of such peaceful demonstrations. The protesters’ struggle to find out the fate of the many ‘disappeared’ relatives from the 1990s was not covered by the mainstream media, and they seemed to be viewed with suspicion rather than compassion or solidarity by passers-by.

I attended a wedding in Istanbul at which we were told to switch off the Kurdish folk song people were dancing to or leave the rented hall. Many Kurds told me about how they used to listen to Kurdish music secretly, hiding cassettes if there were army searches in their village homes or switching off the tape in the car before approaching one of the many army road blocks in the East. People in Istanbul I had just met would feel free to tell me not to learn Turkish from my ‘eastern’ husband since his accent was ‘broken’ (bozuk) or to ask me whether he beat me.

This is not to suggest that there was constant hostility between Turks and Kurds. Indeed, I often heard western Turks say, ‘Turk or Kurd, it did not use to matter. We all used to live together peacefully’ (implied: before the armed conflict between the army and the PKK began). Indeed, there have been countless interethnic friendships, marriages, and business partnerships. There have also been successful Kurdish businesspeople, actors, singers, and parliamentarians. However, a basic condition for their success seemed to be not mentioning ‘the K word’. In 1979, cabinet minister Şerafettin Elçi had claimed in public, ‘There are Kurds in Turkey. I too am a Kurd.’ He was later sentenced to two years and four months of hard labour (McDowall 1997: 413). Kurdish singer-songwriters sang in Turkish, Kurdish writers wrote in Turkish, and Kurdish parliamentarians joined mainstream parties and also government cabinets.³ Haig describes this as the ‘invisibilisation’ of Kurdish ethnicity: ‘[Turkish state policy] has been characterised precisely by a lack of overt policy formulation, by indirect or masked reference, or systematic lack of reference to Kurdish, rather than officially formulated agendas, or public debate’ (2004: 122). Yeğen also writes about the ‘masked references’ the Turkish state has used:

Whenever the Kurdish question was mentioned in Turkish state discourse, it was in terms of reactionary politics, tribal resistance or regional backwardness, but never as an ethno-political question. In Turkish state discourse, the Kurdish resisters were not Kurds with an ethno-political cause, but simply Kurdish tribes, Kurdish bandits, Kurdish sheikhs—all the evils of Turkey’s pre-modern past.

(1999: 555)

This invisibilisation and masking of anything pertaining to Kurds was present in both private and public discourses; people in the west of Turkey made sure of friendships before ‘outing’ themselves as Kurds or proffering criticism of the lack of cultural rights for Kurds, let alone any more radical opinions. Anthropologist Neyzi notes that individuals from different linguistic, religious, or ethnic backgrounds in Turkey experience a conflict between the official national identity or historiography and that of their own family. This leads to a silencing in public, which sometimes also extends to the private realm (2004: 9). A manifestation of such parallel worlds is the common Kurdish childhood memory of living in a virtually monolingual Kurdish village, growing up speaking Kurdish, and then being beaten by the lone Turkish teacher if one is unable to speak Turkish. Neyzi rightly points to the penetration of such public denigration into the private realm; anecdotal evidence from my interlocutors showed that Kurdish children often became embarrassed by their families’ linguistic background and perceived ignorance.

In this context it does not come as a surprise that much of the literature on Kurds has been produced outside of the country. Centres of Kurdology are found in Europe and the USA rather than in Turkey. According to a recent review of Kurdology, there have been different ‘generations’ of academics in Kurdology,⁴ and each generation has had a different focus. The first generation, exemplified by Russian scholars such as Nikitine and Minorsky, as well as some Kurds in exile themselves, offer a somewhat essentialised portrait of ‘the Kurd’ and ‘his character’. The second generation, from the 1960s onwards, has framed the study of Kurds in terms of a ‘national struggle’ or ‘minority rights’. This perspective has been shaped by political events in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, the four countries with large Kurdish populations, as well as by a growing diaspora of Kurds in Europe; many of the contributors to the literature were either Kurdish themselves or sympathetic to their struggle. The authors of the review argue that the aim of such studies was ‘not to understand the Kurds themselves but rather to understand the relationships between the Kurds (either considered as minorities or as national movements) and the states’ (Scalbert-Yücel and Le Ray 2006: §8–17). Thus, internationally,⁵ Kurds have often been constructed as an oppressed people without a nation.⁶ There have been attempts at formulating solutions⁷ to the so-called ‘Kurdish Question’, sometimes with reference to ethnic conflicts in other countries, such as the Basques in Spain, the Northern Irish,⁸ or the Chechens.⁹ Research on Kurds has thus often focused on social and political macro-analyses. Reasons for this may be that the oppression of Kurds in Turkey and its neighbouring countries took precedence over small-scale studies and, indeed, that it was difficult to gain access to communities and individuals in the east of Turkey for research.

It is important to note here that not only the Turkish state made it difficult to study Kurds, but that ‘Kurdish nationalist movements themselves impose an ideological mortgage on the Kurdish studies,’ frowning upon the discussion of religious, linguistic, and other diversity (Bozarslan n.d.). Such diversity was thought to damage the cause of ethnic identity politics.

According to Houston, ‘many of the more recent books on the Kurdish question are uninterested in ethnographic research and are obsessed with questions of geo-politics and international relations’ (2001b: 1). MacDonald, however, claims that there has been ‘a transition in Kurdish studies from primarily historical and political presentations to a modern focus on the “construction” of the Kurdish identity and an attempt to scientifically examine Kurds in their broadest social context’ (1998). In other words, Kurds are beginning to be seen not only as acted upon, but also as actors, and they do not act as a homogenous group, but display diversity.

Early anthropological works on the Kurds by Leach (1940) and Barth (1953) were not followed by other works from the same authors; there was a general decline in interest in the Kurds until the 1960s and 1970s, argued by Bozarslan to be due to the ‘pacification’ of the Kurdish populations by the Turkish, Iranian, and Iraqi states at the time (Bozarslan n.d.).

Finally, a third generation of Kurdologists has offered work that considers ‘nations’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘identity’ as constructions. This perspective has allowed for historically contextualised and more differentiated pictures of ‘Kurdishness’ to emerge. Since the late 1970s, Dutch academic Bruinessen is perhaps the best-known Kurdologist internationally; he has published extensively on Kurdish social organisation and identity based on fieldwork in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria; he is a first point of reference for scholars in the field. His work has also been helpful because he points to the fragmentation of the Kurdish ‘community’ in Turkey (e.g. 1997a). Today, scholars pursue a wide variety of research interests related to Kurds: the languages and oral and written literature (e.g. Allison 1996, Blau 1996, Chyet 2002, Kreyenbroek 1992), material culture (e.g. Aristova 2002, Kren 1996, O’Shea 1996), religions (Kreyenbroek 1996, Mir-Hosseini 1996), women and gender (e.g. Hajo et al. 2004, Mojab 2001, Savelsberg et al. 2000, Wedel 1997), social organisation (e.g. Bruinessen 1978, 1989a, Yalçın 1986), the use of Kurdish media (e.g. Hassanpour 1996, 1997), the history of Kurdish nationalism (Olson 1989, Strohmeier 2004), the linguistic policy of the Turkish state (Haig 2004, Skutnabb-Kangas and Bucak 1994), the Kurdish diaspora (Ammann 1997, 2000, 2004, Wahlbeck 1999), the pro-Kurdish political movement (e.g. Casier et al. 2011), and Kurds in urban centres (Houston 2001a, 2001b, Seufert 1997, Wedel 1997).

Today, most academics show no ambition to study Kurds in all four states (Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria) at once or to try to compare them all; rather, there is more focus on Kurds in each individual state. Arguably, this change in perspective reflects ideological changes. The attempt to write about Kurds in all four states together implies a sense of unity and common purpose, perhaps even national ambitions. Studying Kurds in a certain state, on the other hand, means that more attention is paid to interactions with other ethnic groups within the state. It offers the potential to de-reify the concept of ethnicity and analyse how Kurdishness is shaped through these interactions. In fact, the subjects of Kurdology, ‘Kurds’, have been deconstructed to a certain extent (Scalbert-Yücel and Le Ray 2006: §22–3).

In Turkey, academic research on Kurds has often been hampered by state control. The following examples show how much was at stake for researchers of Kurdish issues. A Turkish academic now inextricably associated with the study of Kurds, İsmail Beşikçi, lost his position at Erzurum University for writing about Kurds and was imprisoned after the military coup of 1971. He wrote a series of books criticising the dominant Kemalist discourse on Turkish history and tried to bring to attention issues relating to Kurds.¹⁰ However, his books were banned, and he faced trials for each one of them (Bruinessen 1997b: 18, cf. Scalbert-Yücel and Le Ray 2006: §52). According to Bruinessen, ‘Most Turkish academics discovered only after 1991, when ethnicity could be openly discussed, that it was a relevant factor after all’ (1997b: 24). Whether it could be openly discussed even then is debatable; one academic report deserves mention for causing uproar at its publication in 1995. The Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey (TOBB) had commissioned a study on Kurds in Turkey. The report, written by a research team under political scientist Doğu Ergil, was a surprisingly candid document, asking over 1,000 Kurds living in the east or the west of Turkey about their attitude towards government policies, language, and the PKK. It seems that some interviewees were too scared to answer certain questions.¹¹ The State Security Court reacted to the report by investigating whether a charge of separatist propaganda could be brought against the authors (İncesu and Meresh 1995, cf. Scalbert-Yücel and Le Ray 2006: §60). It is clear that in such a climate, academic research has been stifled, and only research matching the official discourse passed muster.¹² Houston says:

For intellectuals, especially those employed at the state universities, the Kurdish problem represents a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures, Tables, and Illustrations
• Notes on Names, Spellings, and Pronunciation
• Glossary of Turkish and Kurdish Terms
• Glossary of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Gundême: A Kurdish Village in Eastern Anatolia
• 3. Gundême as a Sending Community: Dispersal and Differentiation
• 4. Kurdishness after Migration
• 5. Socio-Political Changes and Networks
• 6. Tepelik: Vanlı in Istanbul
• 7. Transactions of a Special Kind: Marriages
• 8. Changing Gender Relations
• 9. Religion in the City
• 10. Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography