Kurdish Aspect, CO
June 3 2006
Return of the Turkish `State of Exception’
Kerem Öktem
MIDDLE EAST REPORT ONLINE
June 3, 2006
(Kerem Öktem is a research associate at St Antony’s College,
University of Oxford.)
Diyarbakýr, the political and cultural center of Turkey’s
predominantly Kurdish southeastern provinces, displays its beauty in
springtime. The surrounding plains and mountains, dusty and barren
during the summer months, shine in shades of green and the rainbow
colors of alpine flowers and herbs. Around the walls of the old city,
parks bustle with schoolchildren, unemployed young men and refugees
who were uprooted from their villages during the Kurdish insurgency
in the 1990s. The walls, neglected for decades, have been renovated
by Diyarbakýr’s mayor, Osman Baydemir of the Democratic Society
Party, successor to a series of parties representing Kurdish
interests.
Although Baydemir has restored that major symbol of local pride and
Kurdish identity, the state has not yet addressed the underlying
problems of the city, whose population is believed to have topped one
million, and its environs. Unemployment in Diyarbakýr is estimated at
around 40 percent. The infrastructure is poor. A brief rainstorm can
inundate even the relatively upscale shopping district of Ofis in the
twinkling of an eye, transforming its streets into unpassable moats
of muddy water. Refugees, squatting in buildings clinging to the
hills or residing in the informal high-rise suburb of Baðlar, cram
the busy streets and squares. Children of all ages and both sexes
escape the constraints of their makeshift homes to hawk facial
tissues, pens and erasers, or offer their services as shoeshine boys
and porters. Even more youngsters, many in shabby school uniforms,
others excluded from education for one reason or another, simply hang
out, wary of the ubiquitous police with their machine guns.
`KURDISH PROBLEM’
Such Kurdish youth have become the Turkish mainstream media’s new
face for the `Kurdish problem,’ especially after Prime Minister Recep
Tayyýp Erdoðan declared that the `security forces will intervene
against the pawns of terrorism, even if they are children or women.
Everyone should realize that.’ Erdoðan’s comments came in the wake of
a week of rioting in Diyarbakýr and other southeastern towns in late
March and early April 2006, in protest of the killing of 14
combatants of the `People’s Defense Forces,’ a group linked to the
rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK/Kongra-Gel), whose latest
ceasefire with the government broke down in the fall of 2005. The
April unrest left dead at least 14 other people in the southeastern
provinces of Diyarbakýr, Batman and Mardin. In Diyarbakýr, 12
protesters, most of them young men, were shot dead by security
forces, though three children, aged three to seven, and a man of 78
were also killed. Conservative estimates mention 400 wounded in
Diyarbakýr alone, with more than 500 detained for interrogation. The
violence spread to Istanbul, where three women passing by a
demonstration in a mostly Kurdish-populated suburb were killed by
petrol bombs cast by rioters.
Human rights organizations in Diyarbakýr speak of at least 200
children taken into police custody and severely beaten after the
riots. The Diyarbakýr Bar Association says that 80 children between
12 and 18 years of age remain behind bars, accused of `aiding and
abetting’ the PKK, a charge carrying a maximum jail sentence of 24
years.
Whether the protests were spontaneous or planned by the high command
of the PKK/Kongra-Gel, as the Turkish government claims, is hard to
establish. The fact that Internet and media outlets close to the
PKK/Kongra-Gel immediately circulated the dead militants’ portraits
and personal details, together with the highly inflammatory
allegation that Turkish security forces had used chemical weapons,
suggests some degree of planning. In any event, the ensuing riots in
late March and early April reminded Diyarbakýr residents and the
country’s Kurdish population of the darkest days of the undeclared
war in the southeast in the 1990s.
Following the riots, the government hardened its rhetoric toward the
Democratic Society Party mayors of Kurdish-populated cities, and
dozens of local party chairmen and members in the southeast were
taken into custody and charged with `aiding and abetting terrorists.’
A draconian draft Law for the Fight Against Terrorism is now being
discussed in the relevant committee of Parliament. Once again, it
appears, Turkey’s Kurdish question is framed as a national security
issue, seemingly interrupting the government’s cautious attempts,
under pressure to meet conditions for eventual membership in the
European Union, to resolve Kurds’ political grievances. How have
matters deteriorated so rapidly, less than two years after lawmakers,
promising a `Kurdish spring,’ paved the way for Kurdish-language TV
and radio programs, even if limited and controlled? Is Turkey no
longer a prime example of the moderating effects of the EU’s soft
power?
LETHAL COCKTAIL
Turkey’s mainstream media, along with many independent analysts,
hailed the EU’s October 3, 2005 decision to start membership talks
with Turkey as a historic turning point. The window of opportunity
was opened by the commitment of the governing Justice and Development
Party (in Turkish, Adalet ve Kalkýnma Partisi, or the AKP) to legal
reform and political liberalization in order to strengthen the
democratic system and protections for human rights. Backing for the
European project ran at a high 70 percent in Turkey. The emotive
drive for a `clean’ Turkey was powerfully unifying, allowing the
`moderate Islamists’ of the AKP, secularists, Kurdish nationalists
and, haltingly, the military establishment to join in the chorus of
support for the prospect of EU membership. Even if this convergence
was a single-issue alliance rather than an ideological realignment,
the gradual withdrawal of the military from the sphere of politics
and a more inclusive state policy towards ethnic and religious
minorities seemed to be at hand.
Within less than a year, however, this coincidence of positions
regarding the country’s EU orientation has eroded. This erosion is
due to a lethal cocktail of mutually reinforcing trends, each of
which the AKP government has failed to contain. An aggressive
nationalist discourse, steeped in anti-imperialist and anti-European
sentiment, as well as barely veiled xenophobia, has reemerged. The
set of actors and practices popularly known as the `deep state’
(derin devlet) has reared its head. Finally, turmoil in Turkey’s
Middle Eastern backyard has added yet more tension to the precarious
domestic situation.
RETRO-NATIONALISM
In the last few years, taboos about national history have been lifted
in Turkey. Topics that once could not be openly discussed, such as
the destruction of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian communities in 1915,
the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey, and the waves of
discriminatory state policies toward non-Muslim minorities, are now
in the public eye. There are myriads of new publications on the
Armenian genocide, the persecution of Kurds and other minority
groups, and a number of conferences and public discussions have been
convened, leading portions of the public to rethink Turkish identity
and the history of the Republic.
Almost simultaneously, a reactionary brand of Turkish nationalism,
infused with Islamist, secularist and/or socialist themes, reinvaded
the public sphere. Such a position had been propagated by the
maverick ex-Communist leader Doðu Perinçek and his Workers’ Party for
several years. More recently, however, this brand of nationalism has
become acceptable in the mainstream media and in the public debate.
Like most extreme nationalist discourses, it is based on the dual
pathology of excessive regard for the `self’ and hatred of the
resulting multiple `others.’ If, in this reading, the EU is reduced
to a `club of Christian nations’ trying to dismember the territorial
unity of Turkey, Kurds appear as the most significant internal
`other,’ overshadowed only by what is usually referred to as the
`Armenian diaspora.’ In the new nationalist identity politics, denial
of the destruction of Ottoman Armenians, in addition to the suspicion
of Kurdish `separatists,’ has become one of the central
crystallization points of a reaction to the European project and the
source of conspiratorial scenarios pertaining to the `dismemberment
of the unitary republic.’ An April survey conducted by Umut Özkirimli
of Istanbul’s Bilgi University, and published in the Tempo weekly,
shows that a majority of the public now shares the view that the EU
process constitutes a threat to the country’s territorial integrity.
Paradoxically, a majority — about 63 percent — also remains
supportive of the distant goal of EU membership.
The nationalist-conspiratorial mindset is reproduced in a growing
body of semi-factual bestsellers and films that celebrate the history
of the Turkish people as a fight for survival against malignant
European powers and the neo-colonial United States. Sales of such
books easily reach 100,000 copies or more, with Turgut Özakman’s
These Mad Turks, depicting the 1919-1923 Turkish war of independence
as a heroic, almost supernatural struggle of good against evil,
selling more than 700,000 official, and probably as many pirated,
copies. If this retrospective response to current developments
attempts to repair a `humiliated national pride’ with reference to
the `golden age’ of the War of Independence, the box office hit
Valley of the Wolves in Iraq deals with a much more immediate theme.
The film, loosely based on a real story, follows a Turkish avenger on
his mission to restore national pride after the humiliation of
Turkish soldiers by US occupying forces. The protagonist operates
outside the law, backed not by state agencies, but by patronage
extending from mafia-like organizations, extreme nationalists and
`patriotic’ individuals within the state apparatus. The stress on
`madness’ in many of these publications is disconcerting, if not
surprising — as is their celebration of violence and illegality as
long as it defends the honor of `Turkishness.’
These pop culture manifestations of national pride and suspicion of
the outside world might be read as indicators of a public disoriented
by the `free market of ideas,’ and frustrated by rejectionist and
essentialist discourses on Turkey in Europe. The remedy proposed by
these books, TV series and movies is the safe haven of familiar
nationalist narratives of a past splendor waiting to be restored. As
such, their extreme success might be explained, to some extent, by
the workings of market forces.
Some commentators, however, argue that there is a concerted effort of
`psychological warfare’ behind this `retro-nationalist’ cultural
production. There once was a National Security Council organ actually
named the Center for Psychological Warfare, responsible for spreading
information and disinformation during the Kurdish insurgency. The
center was officially disbanded, yet its structure and political
objectives have been taken over by at least one office within the
Interior Ministry, the Department for Public Relations. An
undisclosed number of agencies within the military and security
establishment, along with ultra-nationalist networks, are believed
still to be operating in this field. According to an April 4 report
in the Islamist newspaper Zaman, the Interior Ministry is concerned
to instill in Kurdish schoolchildren a sense of ethnic and religious
unity with the Turkish nation through the celebration of `collective
victories’ in World War I and the war of independence, hence
discouraging identification with a `Kurdish cause.’
Many members of the AKP government might be sympathetic to some of
this chauvinist rhetoric, especially after their hopes of lifting the
headscarf ban in Turkish universities were crushed by the European
Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Yet the party’s current
inability to set the tone of the debate, and its complete passivity
regarding the outbreak of violence in the Kurdish provinces, evokes a
more serious transformation: a reshuffling of the actors in the
political sphere and their capabilities. There appears to be a
creeping transfer of power from the democratically elected government
back to the military and security establishments and their formal,
semi-formal and extralegal extremities — in short, the `deep state.’
RETURN OF THE DEEP STATE?
Signs of renewed PKK operations and clandestine counter-terrorist
activities in the southeast have multiplied since November 2005, when
a bomb exploded in a bookstore in Þemdinli, a town in the province of
Hakkari, close to the Iraqi border. Locals witnessing the attack
identified the culprits as three plainclothes gendarmerie
intelligence officers. The incident evoked the series of
counter-insurgency plots from the 1990s, when the state sought to
contain PKK terror with extrajudicial killings carried out by
semi-legal anti-terrorism units, the Kurdish Hizballah and
paramilitary `village guards’ on the state payroll. Although the AKP
government promised a transparent investigation of the Þemdinli
bombing, regional discontent soon descended into violence, most
probably steered by the PKK/Kongra-Gel command. The riots resulted in
several protesters being shot dead by security forces.
In a bold move, the chief prosecutor of the province of Van, Ferhat
Sarýkaya, drafted an indictment that alluded to relations between the
General Command of the Armed Forces and PKK informants, and to the
involvement of gendarmerie officers in the Þemdinli incident. The
indictment reached the press before court proceedings started,
suggesting a political motive of exposing the army’s dealings. In
spite of the seriousness of the allegations, the prosecutor was
neutralized after the chief of the general staff, Gen. Hilmi Özkök,
reportedly contacted Prime Minister Erdoðan and asked for `necessary
steps to be taken,’ as members of the military were accused. In due
course, the Higher Council for Judges and Prosecutors dismissed
Sarýkaya from his post and barred him from the legal profession, on
the grounds that the indictment might lead to accusations against the
army and other state offices. This move was met with widespread
dismay from the country’s bar associations and even some senior
judges, who declared it a disproportionate intervention at best, and
a most serious breach of the judiciary’s independence at worst. Among
many Kurds, Sarýkaya’s dismissal was understood as a lack of
commitment to accountability for those in the state apparatus who act
in a clearly provocative fashion to fuel tensions between Kurds and
the state.
Tensions in southeastern towns and migrant quarters of western cities
were left to simmer, even if Erdoðan attempted to diffuse anger by
acknowledging the `Kurdish problem’ and insisting on a
`constitutional citizenship’ uniting all inhabitants of the country,
regardless of ethnic and religious background. With the rising
numbers of PKK fighters and soldiers being killed in combat, however,
a renewed eruption in the southeast seemed unavoidable, and in April,
it occurred.
As a number of commentators put it, this descent into violence
resembles comparable instances of social unrest in the late 1970s
before the coup of September 12, 1980, and the decade of the Kurdish
insurgency that reached its peak in the 1990s and triggered passage
of the infamous Anti-Terrorism Law of 1991. The immediate response of
the government to the April riots, in the form of the draft Law for
the Fight Against Terrorism, evokes the limitations on human rights
and personal freedoms facilitated by the 1991 law and administered
brutally during the state of emergency in the southeast.
In its current version, the new draft law threatens to make obsolete
most liberalizing reforms of the penal code undertaken in the last
few years. The draft outlaws not only the `propagation of terrorist
groups,’ but also the `propagation of the goals of terrorist groups,’
an ambiguous formulation that could be applied to penalize legitimate
requests such as education in Kurdish, on the grounds that these
demands are also advocated by the PKK. The new draft brings back
prison sentences of one to three years for the publication of views
that are deemed supportive of terrorist groups. In addition, the
chief prosecutor of any province would be able to suspend
publications, an action hitherto only possible with a court order.
Many critics of this draft point to the extensive scope of the
definition of terror, which could be used to charge independent
journalists and Kurds engaging in legal politics. Furthermore,
membership in organizations that advocate changing the constitutional
order would be punished with heavy jail sentences, even if violence
or incitement to violence is not on the group’s agenda.
THE MIDDLE EASTERN FRONT
Developments on Turkey’s Middle Eastern front are further stirring
the pot of recrudescent nationalism and assertiveness by the `deep
state.’ Northern Iraq, or Iraqi Kurdistan, closer than ever to formal
independence, is a base for PKK units that continue to infiltrate
Turkey across uncontrollable mountainous borders. Some analysts argue
that most of the recent incidents would not have been possible
without the logistical infrastructure supplied by the leaders of the
Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq. The unwillingness of US
occupying forces to contain the movements of PKK units into Turkish
territory is easy to comprehend, as the Kurdish entity in northern
Iraq and its leaders remain Washington’s only reliable allies in
Iraq. Turkish decision makers, however, are increasingly upset.
Along with PKK infiltration from Iraq, mounting tensions over Iran’s
nuclear program and rumors of airstrikes have induced the Turkish
military to deploy large army contingents to the Iraqi and Iranian
borders and to the urban centers of the southeast. While army sources
consistently deny allegations that the deployment is linked to
imminent extra-territorial movements of army units, recent incursions
into northern Iraq with the aim of targeting PKK positions suggest
otherwise. (Websites close to the PKK/Kongra-Gel have documented a
few of these raids.) Nevertheless, the relocation of army units to
the Kurdish provinces almost certainly has the additional corollary
of reestablishing a semi-state of emergency in those provinces, which
had just begun to be demilitarized a few years ago.
THE AKP’S LOW PROFILE
In State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben refers to President George W.
Bush after September 11, 2001 as attempting to produce a `situation
in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction
between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes
impossible.’ Reviewing the brief history of Turkish democracy since
the 1950s, one could safely argue that the notion of `emergency as a
rule’ has been a structural determinant of Turkish politics, and even
more so, the governance of the mostly Kurdish southeast. The hope
that the AKP government would use the EU-induced reform process to
extirpate the extralegal networks tying the security establishment to
the international mafia and extreme nationalists appears to have been
unfounded. Recent developments suggest that these networks have
remained in place, and can now benefit from the interplay of rising
Turkish nationalism, mounting inter-ethnic violence and a comeback of
the armed forces to the sphere of politics. All of these phenomena
reignite the Sèvres syndrome, the sense of a beleaguered Turkish
nation on the verge of extinction, which in turn justifies the
politics of exception, namely the suspension of human rights and
individual liberties in the fight against `Kurdish terrorism.’
Under these conditions, the EU’s soft power will encounter further
roadblocks in Turkey. Should Turkish units make regular sorties into
Iraq, and persist in enforcing heavy-handed security measures to
quell Kurdish protest in the southeast, Turkish-EU relations are
likely to sour. With no PKK ceasefire on the horizon and the ongoing
ostracism of elected Kurdish leaders on the one side, and growing
inter-ethnic alienation and the threat of a new Kurdish insurgency on
the other, the prospects for continuation of the government’s reform
course seem bleak. This predicament of the AKP is aggravated by the
fact that almost all opposition parties, including the centrist
Republican People’s Party of Deniz Baykal, have chosen to attack the
government from the right, reverting to the emotive language of an
even more hawkish nationalist position. Baykal caused an uproar in
Parliament when he alleged that the government intends to pardon the
jailed leader of the PKK/Kongra-Gel, Abdullah Öcalan.
Trapped in the power play of multi-party politics, the AKP appears to
have chosen to keep a low profile until the presidential elections
and possible early elections for Parliament in 2007. Party
strategists may believe that mounting tensions over the erosion of
the principle of secularism will ultimately strengthen the party’s
appeal to its pious core constituents, and help its reelection.
Yet that strategy entails obvious risks, as seen in the aftermath of
the May 18 shooting of a senior judge by an Islamist youth angered by
the court’s ruling banning the headscarf for public-sector employees
and university students. Demonstrators blamed the AKP (which bitterly
criticized the court’s ruling) for the shooting, some going so far as
to call Erdoðan `a murderer.’ If the AKP merely leaves the field to
their political opponents, such tensions could intensify, and there
could also be a vacuum in policy toward northern Iraq and probably
Cyprus, as well as in the southeastern provinces. The security
establishment would soon fill such a vacuum, prone as it is to
extralegal action in domestic matters and brusqueness in
international politics. Should this occur, EU accession talks would
be in jeopardy, as would social and economic stability.
An alternative scenario would be possible if the governing AKP
regained the political initiative by reestablishing an EU-oriented
reformist consensus. Regaining the initiative would mean addressing
Kurdish grievances, softening the requirement that parties win 10
percent of the national vote to be seated in Parliament, a rule that
effectively excludes Kurdish parties, engaging the Cyprus question in
good faith, and resuscitating the process of legal reform. Another
important step would be to withdraw or substantially revise the
anti-terrorism bill, which in its current iteration is likely to be
overruled by the Constitutional Court. This scenario would, however,
also require the EU to reach out to Turkey on issues such as Cyprus,
which currently appears rather farfetched.
GRIM PROGNOSTICATIONS
Angry young men and children in the streets of Diyarbakýr say they do
not desire to return to the undeclared war of the 1990s, which left
more than 35,000 dead, thousands of villages burned and destroyed,
and more than a million people displaced from their villages into the
packed cities of the southeast as well as metropolises in the west.
They also affirm, however, that if `nothing changes,’ a `civil war
will break out’ for which they believe themselves to be
`well-prepared.’ In the absence of job opportunities, decent living
conditions, parliamentary representation for parties sensitive to
Kurdish concerns and government recognition of Kurdish grievances,
these grim prognostications deserve to be taken seriously.
What can be said with some degree of certainty is that the great
expectations vested in the AKP government and in the dream of a
shortcut to EU membership were illusory indeed. The government would
take a considerable political risk if it committed itself sincerely
to clearing the swamp of extralegal ultra-nationalist and mafia
organizations, nurtured during the decade of violent conflict in the
1990s, and their mentors in the state apparatus. Without such
resolve, a further escalation of violence in the southeast and an
increase in hostility between Turkish and Kurdish communities is
inescapable. What may happen even in the worst-case scenario is a
more realistic evaluation of Turkey’s capacity for and interest in
joining the EU. In the words of Philip Robins, Turkey is a
`double-gravity state,’ condemned by geography and history to exist
between and within the state systems of the Middle East and Europe.
In any case, before spring turns into summer in Diyarbakýr and the
rest of Turkey, there will be many cold days.
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