Managing oil theft: socio-material relations, debt, and disruption in Southeastern Turkey

ABSTRACT

In the Kurdish-populated Southeastern Turkey, oil theft carried out by Kurdish villagers who live near the oilfields in Diyarbakir are sometimes criminalized. But often, the matter is resolved by the state-owned oil company’s engineers and technicians. This paper argues that rather than an exterior problem, oil theft and its management are central to the governance of the colonial and militarized petro-geographies of Turkey’s Northern Kurdistan. The governance of kaçak oil, I argue is a technology of rule that is predicated in a moral economy of debt, reciprocity, negotiation, and collaboration that reproduces state territoriality and sovereignty. Yet the relations around oil and oil infrastructures, not only operate as technologies of governance, but also become the means through which Kurdish villagers reappropriate such infrastructures through acts of misuse and sabotage, which in turn, expose the fragility of state power. In arguing so, this paper situates kaçak oil as a distinctively political commodity whose management both reinstates the contours of the sovereign state and proper citizenship as well as a site where Kurdish actors redefine the limits of colonial state power by refusing the relations of indebtedness imposed by a violently benevolent state.

KEYWORDS:

• Oil
• moral economy
• debt
• colonialism
• Turkey

Introduction: the uses and abuses of petroleum

Oil theft is widespread in Turkey’s Kurdish-populated Southeastern region. Instances of theft are also widely publicized – they routinely appear on Turkish national television where they are portrayed not merely as mundane acts of sabotage, but as direct attacks on the state. Sinister perpetrators are featured tapping into the pipelines or wells of the state-owned Turkish Petroleum and pipeline corporation BOTAŞ, siphoning off crude oil or refined fuel for eventual sale on the black market. If resources belong to the nation-state, the coverage underscores, then stealing constitutes an assault on both the nation and the state itself: In the southeast, unlike other areas of the country, oil theft is not only portrayed as a crime against the state but frequently, as an act of terrorism. The ‘thief,’ who is often Kurdish, is thus cast as a figure that is both criminal and morally corrupt. The national media often claims that these ‘crude petroleum thieves’ or ‘fuel oil thieves’ are supplying oil to the armed guerilla organization Partîya Karkerên Kurdistanê (Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK) or funding the organization with contraband oil revenues. With highly propagandist tones, media outlets like Sabah or Hürriyet highlight the ‘breathtaking’ aspects of the operations carried out against the thieves by the Anti-smuggling and Organized Crime Department, often with the suggestion that the PKK has been dealt a massive blow.

The official narrative of the Turkish state and the media criminalizes oil theft in a military colonial context characterized by decades of insurgency and counterinsurgency, but in everyday life, the dynamics of oil theft are much blurrier than this: During my ethnographic research in the oil production facilities in Southeastern Turkey (Northern Kurdistan from now on) between 2016 and 2017, I often observed that when an oil theft takes place and the ‘thieves’ are caught, the matter is often resolved by the engineers and technicians employed at the state-owned oil exploration and extraction company Turkish Petroleum (TPAO), as opposed to courtrooms or police stations. Most of time, no legal action is taken against the thieves at all. The theft becomes an act of improper use that creates relations of debt and obligations upon the ‘thief’, their family, and their village. These new forms of indebtedness, in return, are already predicated upon an existing material and moral economy that is marked by the ongoing histories of military colonial occupation and warfare in the region. In other words, while at first glance, oil theft is a criminal act that Turkish authorities wish to clamp down on, upon closer consideration, it constitutes as an essential instrument in the governance of peoples and territory in Northern Kurdistan.

In this paper, I unpack the above argument by focusing on an instance of oil theft in the Kurdish province of Diyarbakır’s Sarıcak village and its management afterward. This ethnographic account provides a lens to explore the operations of state power and the relations between petroleum engineers who are mostly Turkish, Turkish and Kurdish workers and technicians, and Kurdish villagers in an economy of debt, gift, negotiation, and collaboration that revolves around the use, reuse, and misuse of petroleum and petro-infrastructures. Tracing theft, vandalism, sabotage, and other manifestations of the socio-material and moral economies that oil is embedded in the petro-geographies of Northern Kurdistan, I also aim to explore the role that geological matter and artifacts play in the operations of everyday state power and citizenship. The sacred status of oil in the national imaginary and the governance of the distinction between the proper use and improper use of oil and oil infrastructures sit at the center of how relations between the Turkish state and Kurdish people are managed, and how state sovereignty, territorial power, and regimes of proper and improper citizenship are reproduced in this colonial and capitalist-extractivist geography.

Situating the everyday management of oil theft in Diyarbakır’s oilfields in the socio-material economies in Northern Kurdistan, I argue that rather than an exterior problem, oil theft and its management are central to the governance of Turkey’s Kurdish regions, while both state power and its defiance operates and materializes through the everyday relations between petroleum engineers and Kurdish villagers. While seemingly coded as illegal by the state and its agents, on the backdrop of the violent operations of coloniality and exclusive regimes of citizenship, oil theft and other acts improper use operate as technologies of rule in an economy of indebtedness. Yet as I further demonstrate, in addition to their utilization as central instruments in the governance of peoples and territory, acts of improper use also work in unexpected forms: Kurdish villagers and farmers disrupt these forms of symbolic and material power through various acts of misuse, sabotage, and vandalism, targeting oil pipelines, stockpiles, and wells. Relations around oil and oil infrastructures, do not just operate as technologies of governance that sustain state sovereignty, territorial power, and regimes of citizenship. They also become grounds upon which Kurdish villagers attempt to reappropriate such materials and infrastructures, troubling the relationship between means and ends. Often, these practices unsettle the sacredness of oil and the intended use of commodities. I read these acts through Sara Ahmed’s notion of ‘queer use,’ where things can be used in ways ‘other than for which they were intended or by those other than for whom they were intended’ (2019, 199). Refusing to be involved in certain relations of indebtedness, queer use is a fugitive act that exposes the fragility of state sovereignty. In making these arguments, I also situate kaçak oil as a distinctively political commodity whose management both reinstates the contours of the sovereign state and proper citizenship as well as a site where Kurdish actors unsettle the limits of colonial-extractivist state power. Before moving on to discussing how oil theft is a central feature of the sustenance of colonial relations of indebtedness in the petro-geographies of Turkey’s Kurdish towns and provinces, the following section offers a brief background of the conflict and state violence in Northern Kurdistan as well as oil production in Turkey.

Oilfields and battlefields: ongoing histories of war and violence

With the Ottoman Empire’s integration into the capitalist world economy and the growing influence of European nation-states, the Ottoman Empire’s ‘a-national and de-central structure’ (Yeğen 1996, 218) became more centralized. Kurdish polities, which were incorporated and preserved to a certain degree by the Ottoman state were abolished as a result of the centralization reforms of Sultan Mahmut II and continued by subsequent Ottoman reformers: the reformers of the Tanzimat Era (1839–1876), Sultan Abdülhamid II (1842–1918), and the Young Turks (Yadırgı 2017, 93). Mustafa Kemal and the founders of the New Republic resumed and even accelerated these policies. Centralization reforms in the Ottoman Empire marked the end of a period of de facto consensus between the Kurdish tribes and the Ottoman palace, during which the tribes enjoyed relative autonomy. The Kurdish tribes’ political power decreased dramatically, however, after a series of administrative reforms in the first half of the nineteenth century aimed at destroying the autonomy of peripheries and centralizing the economy, politics, and administration.

With the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 and the violent suppression of multiple Kurdish rebellions, and the territorial order that characterized the new nation-state, Kurdish tribal formations lost the little autonomy they enjoyed, and faced further assimilation and repression policies. The new republic officially denied the existence of Kurdish identity despite acts of recognition of the demands of the Kurds during World War I and the National War of Independence, during which Kurdish leaders supported the resistance movement led by Mustafa Kemal. As the rulers of the new Turkish Republic or the CHP (Republican Peoples’ Party) perceived Kurdish autonomy or language as a threat to the territorial unity of Turkey, they violently suppressed the Kurdish rebellions that followed. Yadırgı (2017) writes that CHP followed three policies in the following years: (1) forced deportation of Kurds from their lands, (2) assimilation of Kurds into Turkish identity, and (3) the intentional underdevelopment of Kurdistan (Yadırgı 2017, 168).

The PKK emerged as a Marxist-Leninist organization aiming to establish a socialist Kurdish state in the late 1970s. Advocating that an independent state was the only way to end the repression and denial of Kurdish identity in the Turkish Republic, the PKK adopted armed struggle as a revolutionary strategy. The Turkish state retaliated by declaring a state of emergency in 11 provinces in 1987, recruiting and arming Kurdish peasants to serve as ‘village guards’ in a paramilitary force and conducting massive military operations in mountain hideouts, villages, and cities. As young Kurdish men and women began taking up arms against escalating state violence, the ranks of PKK dramatically expanded. From 1980 to 2002, Turkey’s Kurdistan remained under martial law and state-of-emergency rule. The war that broke out between the Turkish state and the PKK in 1984 resulted in 45,000 deaths, while 1.2 million people were subjected to forced migration. About a quarter of all rural settlements in the region of Turkey were ultimately emptied. Human rights organizations estimate that up to 4 million were displaced as a result of the conflict (Göç-Der 2011, Jongerden 2007).

It is in this background of state violence, warfare, and dispossession that the story of oil theft I narrate during a week in March 2017 in this article took place. The events and conversations I discuss in this article are based on 14 months of fieldwork I conducted in Turkey’s Kurdish provinces in 2016 and 2017 as a part of my research on the territorial and temporal politics of oil in Turkey. Turkey is an oil-poor state; despite being located near rich oilfields in Syria and Iraq, Turkey remains an oil-poor state, with only 6% of its domestic oil production supplying its annual consumption. But more than 85% of these humble domestic oil reserves are found in Turkey’s Kurdistan, a region of colonial military occupation since the late nineteenth century and warfare since the 1980s. What I call the ‘absent presence’ of oil in Turkey, has been central to political imaginaries and politics in Turkey (Oguz 2020). From a myriad of speculations about oil’s hidden abundance as well as the temporal and territorial projects they legitimize, to the centrality of petroleum geologies and infrastructures to the sustenance of and resistance to the ongoing colonial occupation of Turkish Kurdistan, oil has been at the center of political imaginaries and projects in Turkey.

Oil production began in Turkey with the discovery of first oil in Raman (currently located in the Batman province) in 1946. International oil companies like Shell and Mobil have also explored oil and operated oilfields throughout the 1970s and 1980s. With the intensification of the armed conflict between Turkey and the PKK in the mid-1990s, however, these companies sold many of their oil production and exploration licenses to Turkish Petroleum. Since then, TPAO has been operating these oilfields once managed by foreign companies, and as the national companies’ engineers have repeatedly told me, their strategy is very different from Shell and Mobil. While foreign companies’ objective is to drill the maximum amount of oil in the shortest time, TPAO aims to extend the life of a well as much as possible. ‘As a national company,’ as one engineer told me, ‘We play the long game. We want the Turkish people to benefit from the oilfields for a long time, rather than collecting our revenues and taking off.’ Playing this ‘long game,’ TPAO’s engineers cast themselves as patriotic agents of the state and inevitably build long-term relationships with the Kurdish villagers that live around the oilfields and oil production facilities. In these relationships, they regard themselves as benevolent actors who strive to maintain ‘good relationships’ with the local population. The story of oil theft I narrate below takes place in such a facility that was previously owned by another company, PERENCO, but has been under the management of TPAO since 2008 along with the seventy oil wells in its vicinity.

Managing oil theft

On an afternoon in March 2017, I was in the administrative offices of a petroleum production station, owned and operated by TPAO near the Sarıcak village in the province of Diyarbakır. The phone was ringing. Nizam, who went by ‘Nizam Usta’ (Master Nizam), a Kurdish man in his mid-forties, was the chief technician of Sarıcak. He was joined by the chief production engineer, Tarik Bey, a Turkish man of around the same age. Tarik Bey was going through well log data and staff inspection schedules while Nizam Usta was reading the numerous letters of complaint they had received from the neighboring villages over the past month. The familiar smell of smell of rotten eggs lingered in the room.¹ I learned that the call was coming from the gendarmerie station command, a reinforced concrete building enclosed with barriers and a Turkish flag, located right outside the main entrance of the Sarıcak production camp (Figure 1). The commander had called to inform Tarik Bey about having caught an oil thief. Apparently, a Kurdish villager had been accused by the gendarmerie of stealing oil for his trucks. Tarik Bey explained to me the situation after he hung up.

The night before, this one guy Hasan installed a tap on one of the pipes that pass through the village. He started siphoning crude oil into the barrels in the back of his truck. He was going to sell the oil in the black market for illegal refining.

I asked him how he was caught. ‘Oh yeah, we noticed the damaged pipe this morning and informed the gendarmerie, and they found him in less than a day. What a big fool!’ I asked what was going to happen to him. ‘Oh, him and the muhtar² are on their way here,’ he replied. I’ve just confirmed with the commander, we’ll manage the situation.

Figure 1. Saricak Camp (Author’s photo).

A few minutes later, Nizam Usta received a second call on the telephone. The muhtar (village chief) of the nearby Özekli village was calling. He had brought a young man named Hasan with him. Waiting for Hasan and the village chief to arrive, Tarik Bey cackled and said:

But you know what pains me when things like that happen? The guy that steals the fuel to sell it, I don’t feel bad about that. But the oil that keeps leaking through the pipe that was tapped into after he’s done loading up his barrels? What a waste! I feel bad about that. This wealth belongs to all of us; it shouldn’t go to waste like that. By the way, the barrels are probably ours, too.

In Tarik Bey’s speech, the symbolic power that oil held in the Turkish national imaginary operated to flatten uneven relations of racialized citizenship. Hasan’s act (stealing oil, even more so, allowing oil to leak through the pipes all night), however, was selfish, completely impervious to the sanctity of oil, and thus detrimental to the entire nation. But in practice, Hasan’s act was useful for them. I learned from Nizam Usta that the gendarmerie had questioned Hasan, who had confessed to damaging the pipes and stealing propane. The gendarmerie then released Hasan under the village chief’s care. In return, the village chief called Nizam Usta and begged for their mercy and asked them to not press any charges against ‘the poor, reckless boy.’ Now Hasan, his family, and the village chief were on their way to the camp.

Ten minutes later, three men were sitting across Nizam Usta’s desk upon which a large box of village eggs had recently been placed. A shy, tall man in his mid-twenties, Hasan was sitting in between his father and the village chief, his head bent over, and his eyes fixated somewhere on the floor. As Hasan remained silent, the village chief explained how inexperienced, shortsighted, and stupid the young man was – that he had no ill intentions and that he had thought he could score some easy money. The young man’s father spoke in Kurmanji for a few minutes, expressing how grateful he and his family would be if his son could be forgiven for his crime, that he would never do such a thing again, and that he did not wish his son’s future to be ruined. Nizam Usta said he understood what was at stake, but that they should also understand that the young man’s behavior had caused a lot of damage to them. Tarik Bey interrupted, reminding them that the theft had caused harm to them as a (national) oil company and, thus, to the nation. What had been stolen belonged to ‘the homeland.’ Nizam Usta glanced at me, his eyes filled with a spark of cynicism and even, ridicule.

The long and repetitive ritual of bureaucratic dialogues and processes had a ritualistic quality. When thieves like Hasan were apprehended, a series of steps were initiated: The gendarmerie had to detain him, the village chief had to intervene, Tarik Bey and Nizam Usta had to be called and begged for forgiveness and the two men had to reluctantly admit that they could rectify the matter, the young man, his dad, and the village chief had to visit the camp, as Nizam Usta and Tarik Bey played hard to get, the young man had to express remorse, and other intermediary steps, until the matter was settled amicably and hands were shaken once again.

These exchanges that took place over servings of tea every fifteen minutes (and the sounds of teaspoons being stirred) were embedded in a constellation of uneven and distributed relationships constituted by everyday negotiations, complaints, debts, and favors. After the second cup of tea, for example, the muhtar reminded Tarik Bey and Nizam Usta that they had always been good neighbors to TPAO’s Sarıcak camp and their employees. They had never spared them hospitality and had always been generous in sharing their food. They had always been loyal watchmen. Whenever they spotted a fire, they had immediately informed the authorities. This wasn’t the case with other villages, as they surely knew, the muhtar added. ‘Thank you, muhtar, thank you. We know, and we appreciate it a lot. But we have also been good neighbors to you.’ Nizam Usta said. ‘Of course, of course!’ the village chief replied at once. ‘But you know, this is petroleum you are dealing with, and it’s very messy, very damaging for our soil, crops, animals. Some villages would rather have the fire keep going.’

Nizam Usta maintained his apathetic and paternalistic attitude. He said he would do his best to help them out, since they were neighbors and neighbors always need each other, through thick and thin. But, he added, he could not promise anything, since the young man had broken the law, and the law of the state was the law of the state, in the end. He was going to do his best, though, and try to pull all the strings he had. As they were leaving, the village chief thanked Nizam Usta and Tarik Bey twice, the father thanked them both three times, and the boy, lifting his head, perhaps for the third time, thanked them each once.

In encounters like this, Turkish Petroleum’s engineers usually avoid taking matters to the police or the gendarmerie. Conversely, the gendarmerie refrains from pressing charges, leaving matters to the petroleum engineers. In this way, they would have the upper hand, as sporadic acts of oil theft would prove to be useful bargaining leverage, and the muhtar of the village, for example, would be indebted to the company. The relations between the engineers & mechanics at the Sarıcak oilfield and Kurdish villagers in neighboring villages are characterized by a temporally distributed economy of everyday acts of negotiation, indebtedness, favor making, and gift-giving. Rather than being crimes that disrupt everyday social order, acts like pipeline sabotage and crude oil/fuel theft sustain this socio-material economy of people, pipelines, oil, and bureaucratic artifacts in the oilfields of Turkey’s Kurdistan.

Whether instances of theft are criminalized or not, is determined by engineers’ and military officers’ perceptions of loyalty. If a villager (or their village) has been regarded to be ‘loyal to the state,’ acts of theft or sabotage are handled informally. ‘Loyalty to the state’ here might refer to whether villagers have voted for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) or the pro-Kurdish political party Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), for example. It might also refer to the village’s history of gratitude or willingness to collaborate with engineers in mundane matters, such as informing the petroleum camps about leaks, fires, or break ins. If a village is considered to be loyal, then, an instance such as oil theft is not criminalized. It is handled informally: the crime of the villager is ‘forgiven’ by the engineers and the gendarmerie who represent themselves as the personification of a benevolent state (See Yörük and Özsoy 2016). The forgiven culprit’s family, in return, are now placed in relations of indebtedness. As I will explore in detail the following sections, the set of obligations that the debtor owes are economic, moral, and political: villagers are expected to continue being cognizant of possible pipeline leaks, snitch on their fellow villagers’ who transgress any legal boundaries, and even police each other against any political inclination that might be considered as ‘disloyal’ by the engineers and gendarmerie.

Once Hasan and the others left, I asked Nizam Usta about the fires the village chief had mentioned. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In some areas, there is no TPAO personnel. No one would notice the fire until the morning. But often a villager spots the fire and lets others know. If we have good relations with them, they call the gendarmerie or the fire service. This is one of the reasons we try to keep up the good relationships with these villages – for surveillance and security assistance.’ Tarik Bey then picked up his desk phone and dialed the gendarmerie station and asked to talk to the commander. They spoke for a few minutes and the matter had been resolved. The commander was going to drop the charges, which were probably not yet official anyway. The commander had also reminded Tarik Bey to deliver the cables he asked for the electrical rewiring of the outpost building. ‘This place is always like this, busy with people asking for things, complaining about things,’ Tarik Bey said to me, after speaking with the commander. ‘We’ve been gifted fresh eggs today, at least; we’ll have delicious omelets tomorrow morning,’ Nizam Usta commented.

Letters of request and complaint

Another ten minutes and another glass of tea later, I was in the adjacent office, looking at a series of folders lined up on a desk. These letters were stored in a closet in a room, in bulky folders (Figure 2). These were letters of complaint and request, written by the residents of neighboring villages. The letters sent to the Sarıcak camp had first been faxed to the TPAO District Management Director and then stored in this office. Some of them were complaints mentioning soil damaged by pipeline leaks or bursts. Some of the letters were supported by sketches of the lands and properties that had supposedly been damaged. Many letters asked for monetary compensation in return for the soil damage and livestock loss that TPAO had caused due to leaking pipelines and unfenced wells. They mentioned that their cows, calves, or goats, had drunk contaminated water or from oil wells. Some of the letters had reports from a veterinary doctor attached, confirming that the animal had really died of the cause that was stated in the letter. Other letters contained requests for artifacts, infrastructures, and technical assistance. In Nizam Usta’s words, ‘What else could you want from engineers and handy people like us, after all?’ These letters requested extra or unused pipes, waste, industrial oil and gasoline, barrels, wire, barbed wire, cables, and iron tubing. Others asked for technicians to help build things for their village – a new mosque, a new funeral house, or asphalt for the village roads.

Figure 2. Folders of letters of request for artifacts, assistance, and compensation. (Author’s photo).

These letters point to the socio-material economy through which complex relationships of everyday collaboration, negotiation, and dependence were constituted between TPAO’s engineers, chiefs, mechanics, pipes, electric wires, and villagers. Examining the ‘active role of documents in the flow of bureaucratic processes,’ (Hull 2013, 32) Matthew Hull describes paper as ‘graphic artifacts’ (1) that shape governance in Islamabad. For Hull, forms of sociality gather around these artifacts (21), but the materiality of artifacts also shapes these forms of sociality, governance, and the discourses the mediate: graphic artifacts help constitute the scales at which they operate, including the boundaries between the state, society, and the individual (22–23). Paper artifacts – letters of complaint and request – not only shaped the social relations they were mediating, but also linked the materiality of oil and infrastructures to modes of territorialization.

In Sarıcak, paper artifacts – letters of complaint and request – not only shaped the social relations they were mediating, but also linked the materiality of oil and infrastructures to the spatially differentiated character of the governance of Kurdistan and the Kurdish people. Nizam Usta told me that they usually accommodate most of the requests from loyal villages, unless they are too extravagant. ‘We have to keep them happy,’ he explained. But only most of them, not all of them. In fact, all complaints were not compensated, and all requests were not honored. While all letters were faxed to the offices of the TPAO District Management in Batman, they were handled unevenly, as some TPAO engineers differentiated between the villages of Diyarbakır and Batman. They favored the villagers of Batman, whom they considered to be ‘loyal’ (to the Turkish state) to the ones in Diyarbakır, whom they regarded to be often dissident. Within Diyarbakir, some villagers were relatively more loyal, while some villagers were marked to be disloyal, and even ‘traitors’ due to a variety of potential reasons I will address in this article. The socio-material economy of negotiation, complaint, and favors, thus, mediated not only the uneven relations between oilfields and villages, but also the uneven scales of differentiation within Kurdish villages and exclusionary regimes of citizenship, which cast some Kurdish villages as ‘good' versus ‘bad' Kurds in Turkey (cf. Mamdani 2002). These relations index the ongoing effects of state violence and dispossession in the region, which have historically cast Kurds as undeserving or ‘pseudo citizens’ (Yegen 2009). Such labels of loyalty and disloyalty, also directly affect whether acts of oil theft, sabotage, or breaking in are criminalized or not.

Loyal and traitor: relations of debt

Later in April 2017, I was in a car with Bekir Bey, the chief engineer at the Garzan production field in Batman, and Şeyhmuz Usta, the chief worker of the Garzan field. We were on our way to check on a workover rig, which usually traveled between well to well to perform maintenance or treatments on oil wells in the Garzan field. Bekir Bey was driving the pickup and telling me about the pipeline system. Pipes crisscrossed everywhere over the landscape, cutting through fields, villages, and roads (Figure 3). ‘Bekir Bey, this is the pipeline that burst yesterday,’ Şeyhmuz Usta spoke from the backseat. He was pointing to a pumpjack near a green field; oil had leaked all around it. Oil pipelines are made of carbon steel, and eventually, bacteria breed on the bottom of the pipe, producing sulfur and accelerating the corrosion process. ‘Ah, yes. They burst over time because petroleum is a liquid with many chemicals in it. They corrode the pipes over time.’ Sometimes the coating of the pipe was damaged and sometimes microbial corrosion on the exterior of the pipe resulted in ruptures, spilling oil along and other toxic substances like sulfur into the soil.

Figure 3. Exposed pipeline, a drilling rig, and fields. (Author’s photo).

Huseyin Usta, the chief of Yeşiloba village near Diyarbakir, would say similar things to me about the alterlives (Murphy 2017) of oil a month later – about how when a pipe ruptured, TPAO would pay for two years of damage, but the effects of the toxic spill in soil would last much longer than two years, unmeasurable by law and the compensation required. Springwater sources were also polluted by the oil pipe explosion, never to be fixed again. The camp in Garzan had connected its water sources to their villages. Now, the only water source the village got was the ‘grid water’ from Garzan, which delivered two tons of water per day, not nearly enough for cultivating the land and raising animals. Not only was a third of the village occupied by TPAO now, but because of the afterlives of toxicity, the village population was down to 15 houses. ‘We should have been 200 otherwise,’ Huseyin Usta, ended his story.

I asked Bekir Bey if that field belonged to one of the villagers. ‘Yes, he is the one who called us yesterday. We always compensate; we always pay for the damage we cause,’ he replied, looking around the road. Then he suddenly slowed down, looking at something on my side of the road. There was a tractor in an empty field. In the back, two wellheads were visible. ‘What the hell? Who is doing this?’ asked Bekir Bey. ‘I think it’s Sait Ağa’s tractor,’ said Şeyhmuz Usta. ‘I can’t believe this. Two months ago, this guy asked for three or four pipes. New pipes. We wrote to head office and got permission. Then the guy comes and asks for 30 pipes! I said, ‘No offense but we cannot give you 30 pipes.’ And now he’s plowing the field!’ ‘What’s the crop?’ I asked. It was pistachios. For Bekir Bey, PERENCO,³ which operated oilfields here before TPAO, was a wealthy company and had ‘given everything that was asked’ to the villagers and spoiled them:

We are the state; we have to do everything by the book. There should be paperwork, and things take time with us. With PERENCO, they got used to things getting done instantly. They need a pipe; they’re given a pipe the same day. Their soil is damaged; an engineer pays them the same day. With us, they have to file a complaint letter; we have to fax it to Batman. It takes days. The villagers do not understand the difference. They want things to be the same way they were with Shell or PERENCO.

Bekir Bey thought that the people of Diyarbakır ‘made a fuss about everything;’ that they constantly complained and asked for compensation. ‘The villager in Batman isn’t like that.’ There were other categories that Bekir Bey operated with and classified the villagers. ‘There are traitor villagers and pro-state villagers,’ he said to me one day, as we were driving back to Batman in his car. ‘The traitor villagers are PKK supporters, HDP supporters, BDP supporters.’ He identified himself a ‘nationalist’ suggesting he was associated with the far-right MHP (Nationalist Movement Party). Bekir Bey’s desk in his office reflected his political views, with a Turkish flag, the coat of arms of the Ottoman Empire, and a portrait of Mustafa Kemal (Figure 4). ‘Who are the pro-state villages?’ I asked. ‘They are the ones that became village guards.’ ‘Cakilli, for instance,’ he said, pointing to a barren hill ahead with small brick houses, is a pro-state village. When villagers want something, they fill out a request form or write a petition. I must fax those papers to Batman, but I always add my notes on them. If the request is written by someone from a pro-state village, I add a note, ‘the camp chief has approved this request.’ If the request comes from a traitor village, there is no note. Then it becomes clear to the directorate, and their requests are usually not fulfilled.

Figure 4. Bekir Bey’s Office: a Turkish flag, the coat of arms of the Ottoman Empire, and a portrait of Mustafa Kemal. (Author’s photo).

‘How about this village?’ I asked, pointing to Beşiri village. ‘They’re pro-HDP, their village chief has been removed, and a kayyum [trustee] has been appointed. The same thing happened to İkiköprü village.’ Ten minutes later, at the workover well, we were invited into a barracks, which turned out to have an elaborate dining room. Shepherd’s salad, bulgur rice, meatballs, and lentil soup were immediately served by a young engineer entered the ‘room’ and welcomed Bekir Bey with great respect. He was in his late 20s and had been there for only a year. He had graduated from the prestigious Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara. He told me that he had ‘not worked at a field where they had had good relations with the villagers.’ Bekir Bey laughed. ‘Give them an inch, and they’ll take a mile,’ he added. He told us that a villager had asked for a piece of protective coating pipeline for the minaret of the village mosque. The young engineer spoke:

We said, ‘Sure,’ and gave it to him. The next week, he asked for cement. A month later, he said he was entitled to the shares of the oilfields on his land. Then, he told us that we cannot operate our tankers there. Can you believe the guy?

Bekir Bey jumped in, ‘This is a state company; this is the state. How can he threaten the state?’ he said, rhetorically. ‘How did he manage to prevent the tankers from operating?’ I asked. Hamit Usta: ‘He blocked the road. He parked his tractor in the middle of the road. And the gendarmerie doesn’t intervene. I don’t understand. The state is being passive.’ ‘When was this?’ asked Bekir Bey. ‘A year ago, or longer, maybe.’ ‘It’s the solution process.⁴ Let’s see him try something like that today. Our state will intervene.’ Hamit Usta nodded, with a smile that intentionally revealed the lack of sincerity in his approval. Şeyhmuz Usta replied, ‘Well, they’re right to be resentful. The company can at least fix the roads they damage. Or build a park, a school. Something.’ The young engineer had another story to tell: ‘Two months ago, someone stole the rotary table from the drilling rig a few months ago, right, Bekir Abi?’

Haha, true. Well, we called the village chief and told him that maybe when the kids were playing, they accidentally ‘took’ a piece. The chief acted like he had no idea what was going on. Then I told him that if they needed iron, they didn’t need to worry about that, and we’d be happy to give them five pipes. The next day he called me, telling me he has found the rotary table. We sent the pipes, and the table came back. This is how things work here. It’s not about loving your nation, your company, your soil – it’s all a transaction.

‘Well, but we do damage their village roads, their soil,’ Şeyhmuz Usta murmured.

Yes, but we do the same things in the gas fields in Thrace. Does anything like this happen? Are our wells protected there? I leave my engine unattended for an hour, I come back, and it’s gone – it’s gone! Who does that to the petroleum company of its own country? I understand if we were Shell or Mobil. This is TPAO. This is Turkey, the Turkish state, the nation.

Şeyhmuz Usta, again: ‘But they feel like they are not included in this nation.’ Just when things started to heat up, Bekir Bey spoke, surprising me:

That’s actually right. Our trucks drive through their roads four times a day, destroying them. They have their elderly, their sick; they need to go to the hospital, to the city. I call the general directory, or Batman, they tell me, ‘Not our problem; that’s not our road.’ Come on! Of course, the guy thinks that he is not a first-class citizen, his village is not important, and we don’t care about messing up his road. A month later, he blocks it. And he resents us.

In the oil fields of Kurdistan, relations built around oil and infrastructures ineluctably raise questions about the state. The everyday negotiations I documented show how the state not only decides what is legal and illegal, but also determines what constitutes sabotage and misuse. In this schema, Kurdish villagers’ citizenship is always on the brink of exclusion, their morality is always under suspicion, and the threat of violence is omnipresent. Conversely, state sovereignty is seemingly always under threat. In the stories told to me by Kurdish villagers living near Sarıcak, these processes of violence are further inseparable from the acts of environmental violence that are enacted by the colonial-militarized state. Villagers recounted to me how children or animals playing near the oilfields accidentally ate the jelly-like liquid that turned out to be a toxic substance used in production. In others, tobacco fields turned to mush; pistachio fields turned black. In yet other stories, I learned how dogs, sheep, and goats were poisoned, or how they would fall into oil wells, breaking their legs or falling to their death. In others, spills ruin lentil fields, wheat fields, and cotton fields for years to come.

Indebtedness

Maurizio Lazzarato (2012, 2015) argues that debt is not just an economic relation, but a political one that establishes modes of subjection, exploitation, and bondage. In Northern Kurdistan, relations of debt, gift, and obligation have a distinctively political character, which cannot be understood by taking into consideration the racializing logics of capitalism and colonialism in the region. It is the positioning of Kurds as improper subjects, as pseudo-citizens, and potential terrorists, that renders the debt unpayable (cf. Chakravartty and Da Silva 2012). For Lazzarato, debt turns life itself into a form of debt that cannot be settled but continuously reproduced. Following Lazzarato, the only way to break this oppressive and dispossessive relationship, is to refuse being cast as infinitely indebted.

Examining the Turkish state’s seemingly free social welfare programs, Yoltar argues that what seems to be a free provision by the Turkish state often operates as a mechanism of debt production in practice, which Yoltar argues is a form of political and economic dispossession for the Kurds in Turkey. The proper, or ‘deserving’ subject of these programs rest on notions of a paternalistic state and conditional citizenship embedded in debt relations that require loyalty and obedience to the state (Yoltar 2020). Focusing on lawsuits known as ‘compensation recovery cases,’ Biner argues that the Turkish state uses the ‘legal devices to transform reparative justice mechanisms into debt-producing mechanisms that create new compulsory bonds between the state and Kurdish citizens’ (2016, 1) This makes the compensation recovery cases, Biner argues, a practice ‘designed to entangle its historically dissident and disloyal citizens in an interminable cycle of moral and economic indebtedness’ (Biner 2016, 168). For Biner, debt refers to the material and intangible relationship that the Turkish state has established with Kurdish citizens through which militaristic state violence transforms itself into forms of dispossession.⁵

Relations of indebtedness are a central feature of the military colonial regime in Northern Kurdistan. These mechanisms contribute to the ongoing dispossession of Kurdish citizens that are perceived to be undeserving or disobedient. In the petro-geographies of this region, debt producing mechanisms operate through instances of oil thefts that are ‘forgiven’ by the national oil company’s engineers. In this way, while engineers are cast as morally superior arbiters of the state, Kurdish villagers and farmers who are implicated in these thefts find themselves in relationships of indebtedness and negotiation in a moral economy that nevertheless secures itself through the threat of criminalization, exclusion, and violence.

Unsettling use

The moral and socio-material economies of negotiation and collaboration, are entangled with not only uneven relations between and within oilfields and villages, or engineers and villagers, but also economies and processes of slow violence (Nixon 2011) and alterlife (Murphy 2017). In this relational economy, however, oil infrastructures also become tools of ‘ontological experiments’ or ‘emergent systems that produce novel configurations of the world’ (Jensen and Morita 2017, 618): Practices of theft and sabotage of oil and oil infrastructures in Northern Kurdistan may also disrupt the relations of indebtedness that they are embedded in and expose the incomplete and fragile nature of the sovereignty of the Turkish state in the region. Kurdish villagers regularly practice acts of deterritorialization or counter-territorialization through various instances of sabotage, vandalism, misuse, and the rearrangement of infrastructures, all of which, following (Ahmed 2019) and Harney and Moten, can be regarded to be fugitive (Harney and Moten 2013) acts of queer use (Ahmed 2019). In addition to frequent instances of theft and pipeline sabotage, the protection barriers built around oil wells, for example, are broken into or cut, to be used for another construction project by the villagers, or for leisure. And sometimes, they are reappropriated as shooting targets. Almost all of the dark green painted metal cages placed around the wells in Diyarbakır are riddled with hundreds of bullet holes (Figure 5). When I asked Nizam Usta about what the countless bullet holes on the caged oil wells meant, he said, ‘It’s just target practice. It’s also a way of saying ‘I was able to shoot a thousand bullets in this space, and not any one of you were able to stop me.’ You know what I’m saying?’ He seemed pleased about something.

Figure 5. Oil well cages as shooting targets. (Author’s photo).

I have mentioned earlier that within relations of indebtedness, petroleum engineers expect Kurdish villagers to inform them about possible pipeline leaks and fires, other theft and breaking in attempts, and even bourgeoning political beliefs that are considered to be disloyalties against the state. Most of the Kurdish villagers found themselves having to operate within these obligations, but this does not mean they fulfilled every one of them. One of the villagers – I’ll call him Ali – who lived close to the caged oil wells, for example, told me a story after he vehemently denied his sons’ involvement in the hundreds of bullet holes that marked the cages. A couple of years ago, he recounted, twenty of empty oil barrels were stolen from a nearby petroleum storage facility. The barrels were going to be discarded by the camp’s workers, as they had corroded and couldn’t be used for petroleum storage anymore. The engineers couldn’t make sense of the disappearance of the barrels (what would be the use of damaged barrels?) and the gendarmerie had no leads. Two weeks later, the barrels appeared again; this time in the middle of the ruins of a deserted village. The barrels were covered with bullet holes, but upon close inspection, the gendarmerie realized that the holes were left on the barrels in a particular way that represented letters; and when ordered in a certain way, clearly read ‘Azadî.’⁶ Ali was clearly amused in remembering this incident. When I asked him why, he responded victoriously, ‘you know, there’s nothing illegal about carving ‘freedom’ on a bunch of discarded barrels. It seems insignificant. But you know, it is significant.’

In a way, the barrels were emancipated from their previous use and removed from the ‘logic of utility and the tyranny of ends’ (Marmont 2022, 192). At the same time, they were also profaned, disrupting the sacredness of oil in the national imaginary. In What’s the Use?, Ahmed explores how use becomes a ‘conversation about the value of things’ (14), with use and value being distributed unevenly between bodies, things, and ways of being and doing. With its anti-utilitarian imperative, queer use or queer vandalism interrupts the logic of capitalist and colonial regimes which depend on extracting value from and using racialized bodies and peoples; it disrupts the binary of useful versus useless. If queer use is ‘not getting used to it’ (Ahmed 2019, 228), in Northern Kurdistan, it might mean not getting used to being indebted forever.

The fugitive and queer use of petro-infrastructures (and their non-human animal companions) interrupt the colonial relations that are sustained through an economy of negotiation and debt. Putting petro-infrastructures into misuse places them in relations of unproductive expenditure that has the potential to unsettle the instrumental logic of the Turkish state.⁶ As Ahmed (2019) puts it, ‘if not being willing to receive the will of the colonizer is to queer use or even to become queer through misuse (perversion as self-revelation), to queer use is to live in proximity to violence’ (207). In this ongoing colonial context where political and ecological violence is an ongoing reality and threat, theft means debt; but it also comes with the refusal to pay it, and perhaps, even with the refusal of the very political-moral-economy that produces uneven relations of indebtedness.

Conclusion: situating kaçak

Scholarship on urban practices in the Global South conceptualizes informality and formality as forms of practice (McFarlane 2012), suggesting that the management of the distinctions between informality/formality and legality/illegality are the very tools through which modes of governance and citizenship operate and materialize. In Turkey, and especially in the rural, colonial, and militarized context I focused on, the governance of the distinction between the formal and the informal, the legal and the illegal serves as a medium for managing the relations between the Turkish state and Kurdish people. It becomes a technology of governing the colonial geographies of Kurdistan and reproducing territoriality and state sovereignty. Oil theft, at first seemingly coded illegal and undesired by the state and its agents, is in fact utilized as an essential instrument in the governance of Kurdish people, bodies, and territories. However, Kurdish villagers also disrupt these forms of symbolic and material power through various acts of reappropriation, misuse, and sabotage. Thus, relations around oil and oil infrastructures, do not just operate as technologies of governance that sustain state sovereignty and territorial power. They also become the means through which Kurdish villagers attempt to reappropriate such materials and infrastructures, which in turn expose the fragility of state sovereignty.

As Emrah Yildiz explains in this special issue’s introduction, kaçak | qaçax | قا†چ†اق† can be understood in three overlapping, yet analytically distinct registers: as a contraband commodity to understand the complexity of economies beyond dichotomies of formality and informality; as a modality of communing for those harmed by infrastructural violence, commoditization, and extraction; and as a fugitive public enemy that unsettles economic, political and/or legal normative orders of the nation-state and its regimes of citizenship. In the petro-geographies of Northern Kurdistan, kaçak encapsulates all these multiple meanings and modes of existence: illegal/contraband, and leaking, and insurgent: it registers something paradoxical in the workings of state power. While performatively maintaining the seeming distinction between legal vs. illegal and formal vs. informal as the grounds of its own legitimacy, the state desperately depends on the cultivation and sustenance of illegal and informal economies. Yet in places like Northern Kurdistan, the life worlds of kaçak opened up by these blurred relationships may also work to shake the very grounds of legitimacy that the state is founded upon. In Northern Kurdistan, kaçak oil emerges as a distinctively political commodity whose management both reinstates the contours of the sovereign state and proper citizenship as well as a site where Kurdish actors redefine the contours of the political and the limits – and leakages – of colonial-extractivist state power and sovereignty through queer use and vandalism. Complicating notions of domination versus resistance, kaçak can also be thought as a form of ‘destituent power’ (Agamben 2014, 2015; Braun and Wakefield 2018) that profanes the existing order. As Marmont (2022) notes, ‘unlike constituent power, which is the sovereign destruction and overthrowing of a present order so as to replace it with a newly composed one, the logic of Agamben’s destituent power is one of flight’ (196). Here, kaçak is a site of colonial management; yet it is also an anti-utilitarian, insurgent practice of refusing the relations of indebtedness imposed by a violently benevolent state.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Wenner-Gren Foundation: [Grant Number 9265] and National Science Foundation: [Grant Number 1624210].

Notes on contributors

Zeynep Oguz

Zeynep Oguz is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the Laboratory of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Lausanne.

Notes

1 Hydrogen sulfide – a lethal gas that is released during oil production – smells like rotten eggs.

2 Village chief in Turkish.

3 PERENCO, the mid-sized Anglo-French oil and gas company that is the largest foreign oil producer in the Turkey today. Before 1993, many of the fields in Diyarbakır belonged to Shell, who discovered the oilfields in the late 1970s. After Shell left, the fields were transferred to PERENCO. However, according to the petroleum law, the license of a firm expired after 40 years, and TPAO would take over the fields with expired licenses. TPAO also took over the relationships that Shell and PERENCO had developed over 40 years.

4 ‘The solution process’ refers to the failed peace negotiations going on between the Turkish state and the PKK. The peace process started in 2012 and collapsed in 2015, after which full-scale warfare in Northern Kurdistan resumed.

5 Also see Açıksöz (2020) for an ethnography of sacrifice and debt among disabled Turkish veterans in contemporary Turkey, and Babül (2015) for a discussion of how governmental reform programs centered around women's and children's rights reinforce a moral economy that requires the grateful obedience of the protected. Neyzi and Darıcı (2015) examine the experience of indebtedness in Kurdish youth in the framework of kinship relations and the Kurdish Issue in contemporary Turkey.

6 ‘Freedom’ in Kurmanji Kurdish.

7 See (Gandolfo 2013) on a Bataillean examination on informality in Lima.