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ABSTRACT
This article examines the incomplete transformation of the Kurdish Hizbullah from an illegal underground organization to a social and political movement influent in the Kurdish Turkey. The article contextualizes Hizbullah’s transformation within the broader social and political developments after the 2000s. After a critical evaluation of the reconfiguration of the Kurdish political sphere in Turkey, the article critically addresses the Hizbullah’s conversion to civil society. It analyses the Hizbullah’s strategies of reorganization and mobilization through associations, political activism and public celebrations under the AKP rule. While acknowledging the political and social impact of this reconfiguration, this article also underlines the limits of this process, with a special focus on the Kurdish question and the ambivalent approach to Kurdish identity and martyrdom promoted by the political leaders and supporters of the movement. Relying on boundary making theory, the article argues that the Hizbullah’s attempt to rearticulate religion and ethnicity to broaden its political and social base remains circumscribed by the hegemonic aspirations of the Turkish state on the one hand, and the ongoing antagonism with the Kurdish national movement on the other.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Newroz is not particular to the Kurds and is widely celebrated by other Middle Eastern and Central Asian nations. However, Turkey’s violent repression of the Kurdish dissidents during the celebrations of Newroz in the 1990s has transformed it into a political platform where the Kurds are mobilized around and counter the state hegemony through this symbolic and mythical event. For more information: D. Aydin, ‘Mobilizing the Kurds in Turkey: Newroz as a Myth’, in C. Gunes and W. Zeydanlioglu (eds), The Kurdish Question in Turkey: New Perspectives on Violence, Representation and Reconciliation, Routledge, London, 2014, pp. 68–88.
2. Yasin Börü was killed by the Kurdish demonstrators during what is known as Kobane protests in 6–8 October 2014. During the protests, more than 40 demonstrators were killed by the police, but the murder of Yasin Börü and three of his friends, Riyat Güneş, Ahmet Dadak, Hasan Gökgüz, marked a new era in the PKK-Hizbullah conflict. Yasin Börü case was also heavily utilized by the government representatives and pro-government media organizations against the HDP. Many songs and religious anthems were composed and public events dedicated to Yasin Börü and Aytaç Baran.
3. Aytaç Baran was killed two days after the 7 June 2015 elections, where the HDP gained 13 per cent of votes and received 80 MPs in the parliament. Baran’s murder case has not been resolved yet. Within hours, the pro-Hizbullah city militia, Sheikh Said Brigades, killed three HDP activists in their houses and fired guns in the streets of Diyarbakır.
4. Kalima Tawhid or Kalima Tayyibah (lā ilāha illāllāh, muḥammadur rasūlullāh, لَا إِلٰهَ إِلَّا الله مُحَمَّدٌ رَسُولُ الله) is one of the six kalimas/pillars of Islam. It is used to convert to Islam and declare one’s faith to Allah and his Messenger. It means ‘There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah’.
5. I prefer to use the term Kurdish Hizbullah to describe the legal and illegal networks of Hizbullah movement in Turkey and to distinguish them from the Shi’i Lebanese Hizbullah. Hizbullah in Turkey is a Sunni Shafii group and the majority of the group is consisted of Kurdish citizens. The legalization of Hizbullah activities led to a reconfiguration of Hizbullah’s political views, which increasingly welcomes a religious form of Kurdish nationalism in the making. In this article, I will, however, use the term Hizbullah alone to refer to the group as there is no possible ambiguity.
6. S. Zabaida, ‘Islam, the state and democracy: contrasting conceptions of society in Egypt’, Middle East Report, 179, 1992, p. 9.
7. O. Taspinar, Kurdish Nationalism and Political Islam in Turkey: Kemalist Identity in Transition, Routledge, New York, 2005, pp. 116–208.
8. C. Houston (2001), Islam, Kurds and the Turkish Nation State, Berg, New York, pp. 147–191.
9. G. Türkmen-Dervişoğlu, ‘Negotiating symbolic boundaries in conflict resolution: religion and ethnicity in Turkey’s Kurdish conflict’, Qualitative Sociology, 41(4), 2018, pp. 569–591.
10. C. Çiçek, ‘Kurdish identity and political Islam under AKP rule’, Research and Policy on Turkey, 1(2), 2016, p. 147.
11. The reason why Gürbüz included the Gulenists as a rival Kurdish movement is not clear. Gulenists were an important actor in the Kurdish region during the AKP period until the early 2010s, but the political clash between the two groups brought an end to the domination of the Gulenists.
12. M. Gürbüz, Rival Kurdish Movements in Turkey: Transforming Ethnic Conflict, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2016, pp. 24–28.
13. H. Lutz, ‘Intersectionality as method’, Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, 2(1–2), 2015, pp. 39–44; K. Davis, ‘Intersectionality as a buzzword: a sociology of science perspective on what makes a feminist theory successful’, Feminist Theory, 9(1), 2008, pp. 67–85.
14. In a previous article, I have discussed the role of the state in this intersectional dynamic and argued that the internal colonization theory is not only useful to analyse state domination in the Kurdish case but also provides a relevant theoretical framework to understand the reconfiguration and multiple layers of agency and dissidence among the Kurdish society. See M. Kurt, ‘My Muslim Kurdish brother’: colonial rule and Islamist governmentality in the Kurdish region of Turkey’, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 21(2), 2019.
15. Z. Sarıgil, Ethnic Boundaries in Turkish Politics: the Secular Kurdish Movement and Islam, NYU Press, New York, 2018.
16. A. Wimmer, ‘The Making and unmaking of ethnic boundaries: a multilevel process theory’, American Journal of Sociology, 113(4), 2008, pp. 970–1022.
17. E. Axiarlis, Political Islam and the Secular State in Turkey, I.B.Tauris, London, 2014, pp. 10–115; C. Grissi, The Kurdish Question in Turkey in the Third Millennium, VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, Riga, 2010.
18. C. Gunes, ‘Kurdish politics in Turkey: ideology, identity and transformations’, Ethnopolitics, 8(2), 2009, pp. 255–262; R. Burç, ‘One state, one nation, one flag—one gender? HDP as a Challenger of the Turkish Nation State and its gendered perspectives’, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 21(2), 2019.
19. All names and identifying information are changed for the safety and anonymity of the interviewees.
20. As I will explain further in the following pages, Hizbullah’s anti-state discourse was limited to the critique of the secularist and modernizing republican project. However, the movement had no issue with collaborating with the state and security forces during the violent years of the 1990s.
21. Some accounts highlight that the actual number is much bigger and many of the unsolved killings during the 1990s committed by the Hizbullah members. See M. Kurt, Kurdish Hizbullah in Turkey: Islamism, Violence and the State, Pluto Press, London, 2017, p. 31.
22. The amount of the documents confiscated by the police is told to be around a million pages and contains notes from Hizbullah members, CVs, investigation documents, intelligence-like reports and much more. The archive was never made public, but it served as the main evidence for Hizbullah-related court cases. My interviewee Azad told me that he had to hide for a year during this time and that many others hid for two-three years. Personal interview with Azad, 28.10.2013.
23. Personal conversation with Suleyman, 24.01.2016.
24. For more details and discussion, see M. Kurt, op. cit., pp. 93–111.
25. The conversations took place in the spring of 2016 at the height of security operations in the region.
26. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy>, (accessed 12.12.2018).
27. For a list of the Blessed Birth events taking place across Europe in 2017, <https://hurseda.net/Kultur/181768-2017-Avrupa-Kutlu-Dogum-etkinlik-takvimi.html>, (accessed 28.11.2018).
28. Personal conversation with Mucahid (11.05.2016), Abdulaziz (01.10.2015), Gurbet (27.06.2016) and Şeyma (14.05.2016).
29. Several managers of association were convicted due to their affiliation to Hizbullah in previous years. This was taken as an evidence of the links between Hizbullah and Mustazaflar Association.
30. Personal Interview with Gurbet (27.06.2016) in Bingöl and Şeyma in Diyarbakır (14.05.2016).
31. The Democracy Meetings took place after the failed military coup in 2016 and lasted 27 days. People went on the streets across Turkey, whereas the great majority of the participants in the Kurdish region were pro-Hizbullah citizens.
32. <http://hudapar.org/web/394/genel-baskanimiz-yapicioglu-cumhurbaskani-erdoganla-gorustu.jsp>, (accessed 10.12.2018).
33. <http://www.hudapar.org/webtv/164/genel-baskanimiz-sayin-zekeriya-yapicioglu-taksim-meydaninda-konustu.jsp>, (accessed 10.12.2018).
34. [M. Kurt, ‘The “success” of political Islam in the Kurdish context’, Open Democracy], <https://www.opendemocracy.net/mehmet-kurt/success-of-political-islam-in-kurdish-context>, (accessed 04.12.2018).
35. Mehmet Göktaş’s public talk during the Blesssed Birth event on 17 April 2016, Diyarbakır.
36. Mele Beşir Şimşek, Public talk during the Blessed Birth event on 17 April 2016. The proposed remedy to the Kurdish question by Molla Beşir, and others during the event, reminded me of Christopher Houston’s observation that ‘medical metaphors are often employed by Islamists in their attempts to grasp the parameters of the Kurdish problem. So writers frequently opine that unless a proper diagnosis of the condition is carried out, the correct remedy will not be prescribed. Nationalism is asserted as festering in Western imperialism’s drive to expose and thus subjugate the Muslim ümmet […] If the Turkish Republic itself is sometimes classified as the West’s greatest tactical triumph, Kurdish nationalism too is treated as Western-inspired, sometimes through the claim of the West’s direct injection of funds, but more often as symptomatic of an ideological infection. Thus the body politic (the Islamic ümmet) is labelled as sick, being under attack from foreign-bodies that contaminate its holistic entity. The cure then is to purge it, by ridding the body politic of that which penetrates it, and restore it to health and strength’. See C. Houston, op. cit., p. 161.
37. <http://www.haksozhaber.net/diyarbakirda-kurt-meselesi-ve-cozum-sureci-toplantisi-56109h.htm>, (accessed 26.11.2018).
38. The number of organizations is surprisingly high in both cases. This is a result of the rise of Islamist civil society. 600 delegates can represent 3500 organizations only if one person is involved in the membership or administration of several organizations. It indeed became a common practice among many Islamist groups to receive funding for several projects, as a strategy to avoid monitoring and suspicion, and to sign political statements and declarations with as many organizations as possible.
39. <http://www.haksozhaber.net/kurt-meselesine-islami-cozum-calistayi-sonuc-bildirgesi-58162h.htm>, (accessed 26.11.2018).
40. N. Chomsky & E. S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Vintage, London, 1994.
41. My interviewee Abdulaziz refused the term of the Kurdish question and told me that the question is the lack of Islam (sorun İslamsızlıktır), (01.10.2015).
42. The AKP used Sheikh Said during the campaign for the 2016 constitutional change referendum. Banners were hanged across Diyarbakır before the visit of Erdogan and the prime minister Binali Yıldırım, to try to mobilize the Kurdish population after the violent destructions in 2015–2016. Targeting the pro-Hizbullah neighbourhoods in Diyarbakır, banners read: ‘Every single “yes” vote [to the constitutional change] is a prayer to the soul of Sheikh Said’. Hizbullah did support the constitutional change in the referendum.
43. Mehmet Kurt, op. cit., pp. 45–48.
44. Several interviewees highlighted that the moral values of Kurdish society were in decay due to the Kurdish movement’s secular policies. They were especially infuriated by the changing relations between men and women in public. Interestingly, women members of Hizbullah were even more virulent this regard. Personal Interview with Mucahid (11.05.2016), and Gurbet (27.06.2016).
45. H. Ozsoy, ‘The missing Grave of Sheikh Said: Kurdish formations of memory, place,and sovereignty in Turkey’, In K. Visweswaran (ed), Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East, University of Pennsylvania Press, Pennsylvania, 2013, p. 212.
46. Huseyin Yilmaz, the vice president of Huda-Par, <http://hudapar.org/web/772/seyh-said-efendinin-kiyaminin-rengi-islamdi.jsp>, (accessed 29.08.2018).
47. M. Cormack, (ed), Sacrificing the Self: Perspectives on Martyrdom and Religion, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002.
48. The discourse of martyrdom is constructed upon rivalry with the PKK both in the official narrative of Hizbullah and in the semi-fictional novels and stories written by Hizbullah members. For a detailed analyses and themes, see M. Kurt, op. cit., pp. 125–127.
49. Caravan of Martyrs (Şehitler Kervanı) was an album series produced during the conflict between the PKK and Hizbullah in the 1990s, with eulogy and anthems for the Hizbullah martyrs.
50. Sheikh Said Brigades (Şeyh Said Seriyyeleri) and the Bodyguards of Huseyn (Huseynin Fedaileri) are two Hizbullah underground units operating respectively in Diyarbakır and Batman. They have so far appeared in public once after the killing of Aytaç Baran in June 2015, but several youtube videos include images and songs made for the units. They also have a twitter account (@Saidseriyyeleri and @H_Fedaileri) with more than ten thousand followers. See for instance <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h1skMbuRkw>, (accessed 28.11.2018); for an only media analysis on the group: <http://www.radikal.com.tr/yazarlar/umit-kivanc/seyh-said-seriyyeleri-1381090/>,(accessed 28.11.2018).
51. The concept of the indirect rule is developed by Mahmood Mamdani to explain the post-colonial policies of conservatizing the society and provoking domestic conflict in favour of the ruler. See M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1996, pp. 3–35 and 62–108.