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ABSTRACT
The history of Turkey, as experienced by its minority populations, is characterized by instances of demographic and topographic engineering, war, dispossession, and political violence. Rather than being single historical events, these are longue durée systematic processes of Turkification that have continuity with contemporary political arrangements and privileges, despite the fact that the notion of Turkishness has been continuously changing. This article reflects on ethnographic research and interviews with liberal Turkish university students in Istanbul about the Turkish–Kurdish conflict, conducted during a time of relative peace and political optimism. It discusses Turkish liberals’ silencing of state violence and denial of privilege constituted through violence. This ‘forgetting’ is conceptualized as a continuous investment in Turkishness, which involves complicity. Such analysis of belonging might help to explain today’s lack of political mobilization and solidarity between the Kurdish movement and opposition groups in the present time of growing political oppression.
Acknowledgements
I am most grateful to Banu Karaca who inspired me to think about Turkishness in terms of investments and gave me feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript during her course at Sabancı University in 2015.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Beja Protner is a sociocultural anthropologist and an MA graduate of Cultural Studies from Sabancı University. For the past six years, she has studied the Kurdish Issue in Turkey through the lens of Anthropology of Violence, Memory Studies, Anthropology of Affect and Emotions, and Gender Studies. Her latest publication (2018) is an article in Kurdish Studies, entitled ‘Reading and Feeling Gender in Perpetrator Graffiti and Photography in Turkey.’
Notes
1. Başaran, “Secular Citizens of Turkey.”
2. Pandey, Routine Violence.
3. Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment.
4. Ünlü, “The Kurdish Struggle.”
5. Üngör, “Seeing like a Nation-State;” and Öktem, “Incorporating the Time.”
6. Özyürek, Nostalgia for the Modern.
7. See David and Toktamış, eds., Everywhere Taksim.
8. In their critical discussion of the limits of inclusiveness of the Gezi uprising, Parla and Özgül noted the hostility in intellectual and activist circles towards critical accounts of the uprising and warned that this way ‘the memory of and nostalgia for the Gezi protests risks becoming immune from critique for many oppositional groups in Turkey.’ They proposed that ‘engaging in / … / antisacralization work is precisely necessary to confront the historical as well as the ongoing state violence that Gezi and other protest movements around it have undertaken to denounce.’ Parla and Özgül, “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship,” 624.
9. David and Toktamış, “Introduction,” 20.
10. See Walton, “Everyday I’m Çapulling.”
11. Human Rights Watch, “Turkey.”
12. Ünlü, “The Kurdish Struggle,” and Parla and Özgül, “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship.”
13. See Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment, and Karaca, “The Art of Forgetting.”
14. One might like to put them into the popular category of ‘White Turks,’ which has been used for the secular urban Republican elite, tracing its origins back to the foundation of the Republic and is associated with economic and political privilege, as well as the so-called modern (i.e. ‘Westernized’) lifestyle, and a binary opposition to working-class Muslims and Islamists. However, the black and white picture is hardly sufficient to account for the complexities and nuances of today’s Turkey’s society.
15. Although my fieldwork included mostly secular urban youth, similar and more intolerant attitudes towards Kurds and the Kurdish issue may be observed among others who belong to the category of ‘Turkishness’ and participate in the Turkishness Contract, such as (ultra) nationalists, Muslim conservatives, and Islamists who are currently rising as the ‘majority’ (in terms of power and the numbers). As Murat Somer (“Media Values and Democratization”) showed, conservatives and secularists in Turkey have a shared perspective on the Kurdish issue. Turkish Islamists are also affected by the Kemalist institutions and values, as Mehmet Gurses (“Islamists, Democracy and Turkey,” 650–1) argued, and turn to the nationalist frames in their perspective on Kurdish demands for cultural and political rights. As regards to denial of past atrocities and the consequent present privilege, Parla and Özgül (“Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship,” 623) wrote: ‘Even those who occupy very different points along the political spectrum in Turkey exhibit a similar blindness when it comes to the question of foundational violence, dispossession, and their own privilege as the majority within this national body.’
16. Cf. Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists.
17. Rothberg, “Trauma Theory, Implicated Subjects,” original emphasis.
18. Ünlü, “The Kurdish Struggle.”
19. This study does not include the revolutionary Left in Turkey, which is often on the side of minoritized populations and is treated with similar violence and oppression. There were times when part of the left-wing movements and part of Kurdish movements collaborated in a highly polarized and fragmented political arena of inter-fractional violence. After all, the PKK arose out of trans-ethnic revolutionary movements in the 1960s–1970s. The analysis of complex dynamics of clashes, cleavages, and strategic collaborations throughout history exceeds the scope of this article, which only focuses on the situation since the Gezi movement and seeks to identify historically rooted ontological limitations of such alliances in the present. However, it is worth mentioning the argument of Joost Jongerden and Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya (‘The Kurdistan Workers Party’), who recognized the inability of the Turkish ‘left’ to move beyond nationalist (Kemalist) frames as the reason for the impossibility of a joint revolutionary left already in the 1970s when the ‘left’ was at its peak. On the other hand, trans-ethnic revolutionary movements such as the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TIP) in the 1970s were brutally crushed by the state. This may be, I speculate, as in the current case of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) which made similar unifying efforts, precisely because of their potential to form a strong opposition that bridges the ethnopolitical divide on which the oppressive regimes constitute their power.
20. Behar, Vulnerable Observer.
21. Jessee, “The Limits of Oral.”
22. I have discussed the ethical and methodological issues of this research in depth in a conference paper titled ‘Doing and Experiencing Ethnographic Fieldwork in/on the Environment of Political Conflict: Conflicting Narratives, Ethical Issues, and Positionality’ at the 13th International ‘Border Crossings’ Students’ Conference ‘Balkan Worlds, Balkan Lives: Experiencing, Sensing and Imagining the “Realities”’ at University of Sarajevo (April 23–27, 2015).
23. Pandey, Routine Violence.
24. Skurski and Coronil, “Introduction.”
25. Ibid., and Parla and Özgül, “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship.”
26. See Üngör and Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction, and Der Matossian, “The Taboo.”
27. Parla and Özgül, “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship.”
28. Ibid., Üngör, “Seeing like a Nation-State;” and Üngör and Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction.
29. Ünlü, “The Kurdish Struggle,” 399.
30. See Oran, “The Minority Concept,” and Çağaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism.
31. Aktar, “Turkification Policies.”
32. Parla and Özgül, “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship”; Üngör and Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction; Der Matossian, “The Taboo”; Karaca, “The Art of Forgetting,” 27–8; Toprak, “National Economy;” and Aktar, “Turkification Policies.”
33. Öktem, “Incorporating the Time;” Jongerden, “Crafting Space, Making People”; and Güvenç, “Constructing Narratives.” As Jongerden and Güvenç, respectively showed, in the last decade there has been a struggle over space in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia with the attempts of the Kurdish movement to re-appropriate the space through name changing and Kurdish nationalist urban symbolism. However, the situation has been reversed again during the latest escalation of war in 2015 and its aftermath.
34. Oran, “The Minority Concept.”
35. Ünlü, “The Kurdish Struggle,” 399.
36. Çağaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism.
37. Yeğen, “Prospective-Turks,” Üngor, “Seeing like a Nation-State;” and Zeydanlıoğlu, “Turkey’s Kurdish Language Policy.”
38. See Turkyilmaz, “Maternal Colonialism.”
39. See Göral et al., The Unspoken Truth, and Özar et al., From Past to Present.
40. Ünlü, “The Kurdish Struggle.”
41. Butler, Frames of War.
42. See Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists; Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment; and Ünlü, “The Kurdish Struggle.”
43. See Üngör and Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction.
44. See Bayraktar, “The Anti-Jewish Pogrom.”
45. See Kuyucu, “Ethno-religious ‘Unmixing’.”
46. See Çaylı, “Architectural Memorialization.”
47. See Özar et al., From Past to Present, and Deringil, “From Ottoman to Turk.”
48. Lipsitz, The Posessive Investment, viii.
49. Ünlü, “The Kurdish Struggle;” Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists; and Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment.
50. Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists.
51. Karaca, “The Art of Forgetting,” 29–30; Üngör and Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction; Parla and Özgül, “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship;” and Aktar, “Turkification Policies.”
52. See Lipsitz, The Posessive Investment.
53. Karaca, “The Art of Forgetting,” 29–31.
54. Ibid., and Parla and Özgül, “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship.”
55. I use “The Promise of Turkishness” as an analogy to Sara Ahmed’s title of her book The Promise of Happiness where she discusses the violence of (hetero)normative conceptualization and imagination of happiness, and calls for its conscious rejection and transgression.
56. See Lipsitz, The Posessive Investment, for the elaboration on these benefits the case of the United States.
57. See Keyman and Kancı, “A Tale of Ambiguity,” and Öktem, “Incorporating the Time.”
58. See Hale, “Human Rights.”
59. Ünlü, “The Kurdish Struggle,” 400.
60. Karaca, “The Art of Forgetting,” 29–30, and Parla and Özgül, “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship.”
61. Parla and Özgül, “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship,” 398, original emphasis.
62. Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists, and Ünlü, “The Kurdish Struggle.” For the subheading of this section, I took and slightly reshaped the thoughtful phrase from the title of Skurski and Coronil’s introductory piece to their edited book; Skurski and Coronil, “Introduction.”
63. Protner, “Detomorilci in druge pošasti.”
64. Özyürek, “Introduction;” Neyzi, “Remembering to Forget;” Zeydanlıoğlu, “The White Turkish;” and Yeğen, “Prospective-Turks.”
65. I use “Turkish” for those who identified themselves as such.
66. The interviews were conducted in English. Interviewing in a foreign language (for both, interviewer and interviewees) is always a limitation. However, the language barrier was not very strong, as the English skills of my interlocutors were strong. In addition, the informal way of conduct enabled the participants to take time and make sure they expressed themselves as they wanted. I retained the flow of narratives in the transcripts, but corrected some major grammar mistakes. All the names used are pseudonyms.
67. Skurski and Coronil, “Introduction,” 10.
68. Altınay, The Myth; Kaplan, The Pedagogical State, 173–216; and Keyman and Kancı, “A Tale of Ambiguity.”
69. Pandey, Routine Violence.
70. Trouillot, Silencing the Past.
71. See Zeydanlıoğlu, “The White Turkish,” and Turkyilmaz, “Maternal Colonialism.” As Zeydanlıoğlu showed, Turkish political elites used the colonial-like orientalist discourse against the Kurds. Moreover, the combination of excessive physical violence during the insurgencies and assimilation efforts through boarding schools is a typical example of colonialism, as Turkyilmaz showed. In addition, one may see also the continuous combination of heavy military presence and economic exploitation through top-down projects that disregard local population as a sign of colonial rule.
72. Saraçoğlu, Kurds of Modern Turkey, 140.
73. See Ahıska, “Occidentalism.”
74. See Zeydanlıoğlu, “The White Turkish.”
75. Cf. Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists, where he discusses blindness of white Americans to the structural inequality and segregation of black Americans. They naturalize it, ascribe it to individual choices, or blame in on the black people themselves.
76. Protner, “Detomorilci in druge pošasti.”
77. Arcan, “Ethnic Conflicts.”
78. Protner, “Detomorilci in druge pošasti.”
79. Pandey, Routine Violence, 3.
80. Kolluoğlu Kırlı, “Forgetting the Smyrna Fire,” and Scagliola, “The Silences and Myths.”
81. See Balta, “Causes and Consequences” for the discussion of the war between the PKK and the Turkish state as a civil war. Calling it a ‘civil war’ is controversial, because the existence of a civil war in Turkey has been largely denied and veiled by the terrorism discourse. However, as Balta argued, the conflict satisfies the scholarly definitions of civil war. By marking it as a ‘civil war’ (rather than conventionally used ‘low-intensity conflict’), I aim to draw attention to the complexities and ambiguities of local people’s intense experience of the conflict, typical for civil war situations.
82. See Scagliola, “The Silences and Myths” where he establishes this argument with the example of the Dutch-Indonesian decolonization war.
83. Çırakman, “Flags and Traitors.”
84. The unreliability of sources was especially emphasized by some of my interlocutors in the context of ‘awakening’ and reflection after the experience of media silence and false representations of the Gezi uprising.
85. Ünlü, “The Kurdish Struggle.”
86. Cf. Skurski and Coronil, “Introduction,” 1–2.
87. Ibid.
88. Taussig, Defacement, 5.
89. Ibid., 2.
90. See Biner, “Acts of Defacement.”
91. Taussig, Defacement, 3–4.
92. Biner, “Acts of Defacement.”
93. Ünlü, “The Kurdish Struggle.”
94. See Butler, Frames of War.
95. Kolluoğlu Kırlı, “Forgetting the Smyrna Fire,” 41.
96. Göral et al., The Unspoken Truth.
97. Protner, “Perpetrator Graffiti.”
98. See Trouillot, Silencing the Past.
99. Ünlü, “The Kurdish Struggle.”
100. Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia.”
101. See Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists.
102. Rothberg, “Trauma Theory, Implicated Subjects.”
103. Başaran, “Secular Citizens of Turkey.”
104. Karaca, “The Art of Forgetting,” 29.