Inclusive Citizenship and Societal Reconciliation within Turkey’s Kurdish Issue

ABSTRACT

Using Turkey’s Kurdish issue as an example, this article discusses how conflicts produce problems at multiple levels of relations in multi-ethnic societies and considers how debates about different models of democracy and reconciliation can contribute to addressing these problems. Turkey’s Kurdish issue presents an interesting case to discuss how state-group, state-individual and intergroup relations require different mechanisms when talking about interlinkages between debates on inclusive citizenship and reconciliation, by bringing to the fore the necessity and difficulties of societal reconciliation for a multi-layered peace process. Specific attention will be paid to societal reconciliation and inclusive citizenship mechanisms through different intervention methods and how the lack of these, along with other reasons, facilitated the failure of the peace process in Turkey.

KEYWORDS:

• Kurdish issue
• Turkey
• reconciliation
• inclusive citizenship
• peace process
• ethnic conflict
• multi-layered peace process

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Reconciliation is a broad term indicating a process of healing relations between different groups as well as changing institutions and cultures of violence, encompassing many social, political, economic and legal processes. While scholars also use other concepts, such as transitional justice, confronting the past, post-conflict reconstruction, etc., this article adopts ‘reconciliation’ as an overarching process making use of multiple sources.

2. Until 2004, when the Turkish state launched a Kurdish TV channel, Kurdish language was largely absent in public. Although Kurds are still deprived of their linguistic rights in the form of education in their mother tongue, during the emergency rule in the southeast even owning a Kurdish music cassette could constitute a reason for imprisonment.

3. Dialogue, as opposed to negotiating, is a conscious choice in this context since the latter requires some form of give-and-take while talks determine whether the parties will engage in this process, and thus can be considered as part of the pre-negotiation stage.

4. Before the leak, Prime Minister Erdoğan called the talks with the PKK ‘inglorious’ and after they were released, he argued that ‘the government did not talk to the PKK, but rather the state’ (Mynet 2011).

5. The HDP is the 9^th political party to be founded by Kurds since the first Kurdish party, the HEP (Halkın Emek Partisi, Peoples’ Labour Party), was established in 1993. All of the HEP’s successors have been shut down by the Constitutional Court (Celep 2018). The HDP was formed in 2012 when its members realized that the BDP would also be closed down.

6. To surpass the 10% national election quota in Turkey, Kurds in the 2011 elections ran as independent candidates and later formed their groups as a political party in the national parliament.

7. Village guards are locally recruited civilians armed and paid by the state to fight against the PKK. There were around 20,000 voluntary and 52,000 provisional village guards at the end of 2018 (TRTHaber 2018).

8. According to the Copenhagen School, desecuritization refers to a process of reversing securitization (extreme politicization enabling the use of extraordinary means in the name of security) and moving issues out of the threat–defence sequence and into the ordinary public sphere where they can be dealt with in accordance with the rules of the (democratic) political system (Weaver 1998).

9. This is a term mostly cited by Kurds since many believe that Kurds have been cheated by various empires and governments and that most of Turkey’s EU reforms were decided on paper under the pressure of EU candidacy, but not fully implemented.

10. See the Faili Belli website for detailed information on these cases (https://www.failibelli.org/).

11. Ibid

12. In very few cases, there was tension between Arabs and Kurds or Roma and Kurds in western cities, but social polarization usually takes place between Turks and Kurds.

13. Law No. 655, Law on Ending Terror and Strengthening Social Re-integration, passed on 16 July 2014.

14. There are significant differences in the beliefs and worship practiced by Sunnis and Alevis – the two Islamic sects in Turkey – which have created long-lasting animosity between the two. It is estimated that around 70% of the Kurds in Turkey are Sunni, and the remaining 30% consist of Alevis and Yezidis (Andrews 1992). Historically, there have been many injustices done to Alevis that require confrontation and apology, but the current government is also accused of supporting strong policies favouring Sunnis. Along with linguistic and other ethnic rights, the reports of the WPCs which worked in the pre-dominantly Kurdish provinces show that Kurds also want religious freedom. Assyrians and Yezidis are the two non-Muslim communities, residing predominantly in southeastern Turkey.

15. Anayasa Platformu Website. http://www.anayasaplatformu.net/.

16. Yeni Anayasa Platformu. https://www.facebook.com/Yeni-anayasa-platformu-177677635607086/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ayşe Betül Çelik

Ayşe Betül Çelik received her Ph.D. in political science from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 2002. She is a full Professor at the Political Science and International Relations Program at Sabanci University in Istanbul. Her work focuses on ethnicity, peace processes, forced migration, reconciliation, civil society and gender in peacebuilding. Some of her works appeared in journals like Human Rights Quarterly, Journal of Refugee Studies, New Perspectives on Turkey, South European Society and Politics, Patterns of Prejudice, and International Journal of Intercultural Relations.