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ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the housing experiences of Kurdish migrants/working classes in a Turkish-dominated working-class district of Zeytinburnu in Istanbul since the 1990s. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article argues that Kurds experienced housing discrimination predominantly in the forms of refusal of tenancy and the threat of removal from their homes by their Turkish neighbours and landlords. To struggle against this form of racism, they developed homeownership as a form of everyday anti-racist practice. For them, owned home rather than rented home emerged as a space of resistance where they can restore their dignity and integrity in a place polluted by racialized power relations with a long colonial history. The article also argues that the reproduction of the space in the form of apartmentalization since the 1980s and the crisis of the housing industry in the 2000s played important roles in Kurds’ development of homeownership as an anti-racist practice.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my friend Ayşe Serdar and the anonymous reviewers of Ethnic and Racial Studies for their comments on drafts of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Since 2011 as in many working-class districts in Istanbul, Zeytinburnu has also received hundreds of migrants from Syria. These migrants have experienced different forms of racism from Turks and Kurds carrying Turkish citizenship. Nevertheless, this article will not attempt to examine their experiences.
2 This paper assumes that the category of “northern Kurdistan” does not negate the category of “Western Armenia”. The use of the concept of “northern Kurdistan” should not be understood such that this paper ignores or denies the history of Armenians, Assyrians and other non-Muslim communities in these regions and the racist crimes of Kurds and Turks against them.
3 While a small number of Christians, including Greeks and Armenians, also lived in the district, according to my respondents, many of them left Zeytinburnu after the 1955 pogroms committed against them by Muslim groups.
4 Between 1990 and 2000, around 81,000 people most of whom were peasants migrated to Zeytinburnu and its population reached 287,897 in 2016 (TÜİK Citation2017). Data from the TÜİK (Turkish Statistical Institute) survey reveal that forging around 32.2 per cent of the district’s population, almost 92,891 people come from northern Kurdistan. However, not everyone born in northern Kurdistan is ethnically Kurdish and there are many Kurds living in Anatolian cities, such as Konya and Ankara, as well.
5 According to KONDA’s research in Turkey and northern Kurdistan in 2010, 18.5 per cent of Kurds live in more than nine-member families. Yet, this rate is only 2.3 per cent among Turks. The rate of Kurds living in six to eight-members of families is 35.8 per cent and this rate is 15.4 per cent for Turks. Kurds living in three to four members of families is 41.3 per cent and this rate is 66.3 per cent for Turks (KONDA Citation2011, 94).
6 There are no data on the rate of Kurds who own home.
7 Although many of their activities involve in anti-racism and they use anti-racist discourses without identifying them anti-racist, neither the PKK nor the legal pro-Kurdish parties have been identified as “anti-racist movements”. They have generally been called Kurdish movements. However, two well-known Istanbul-based activist groups have identified themselves as anti-racists. These are the Committee against Racism and Discrimination working under the Human Rights Association and founded in 1994, and the Platform of Say Stop to Racism and Nationalism which was founded in 2007. Rather than in these small-scale movements identifying themselves as “anti-racists”, Kurds in Zeytinburnu have mobilized and organized in the pro-Kurdish political parties which mobilize thousands of Kurds. Besides, the concept of “anti-racism” is not used by large circles in Turkey and academic debates on this subject are absent. While there are numerous publications on nationalism, there are very few publications on racism in Turkey. The inadequacy of intellectual debates on anti-racism also affects both Turks’ and Kurds’ understandings of racism and anti-racism. For instance, none of my Kurdish respondents identified their struggle against housing exclusion as anti-racism.
8 The racialization of Kurdish men has had a deep impact on the Turkish language and Turkish culture, such that many racist insults used against Kurds have become ordinary Turkish daily swear and humiliation words used not only against Kurds but also against Turks by Turks themselves. Today, “kıro” which is formed from the Kurdish word “kuro” which means “son” in Kurdish and which is used like the word “mate” in British English or “bro” in American English while speaking Kurdish has become a very prevalent Turkish insult word to indicate someone who does not know how to behave properly or someone who is rude, mannerless and uncivilized. Moreover, the Kurdish word “keko”, which is used as brother in Kurdish, has begun to be used by Turks to insult some men especially Kurdish men.
9 In 1915, during the First World War, by using telegraph lines, the Ottoman state officials secretly ordered the state forces that the massacre and deportation of all Armenians from the Ottoman-ruled territories. After these secret orders, more than one million Armenians faced genocide in their ancient lands. They were massacred, raped, tortured and their individual and collective properties were seized by the Turkish state. Numerous Kurds also participated in the genocide and committed these crimes (Kevorkian Citation2006).
10 Kirve: A man who acts as a sort of godfather to a boy during his circumcision.