STUDIES IN MODERNITY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba, Series Editors

Studies in Modernity and National Identity examine the relationships among

modernity, the nation-state, and nationalism as these have evolved in the nine-

teenth and twentieth centuries. Titles in this interdisciplinary and transregional

series also illuminate how the nation-state is being undermined by the forces of

globalization, international migration, and electronic information flows, as well

as by resurgent ethnic and religious affiliations. These books highlight histori-

cal parallels and continuities while documenting the social, cultural, and spatial

expressions through which modern national identities have been constructed,

contested, and reinvented.

Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture

in the Early Republic by Sibel Bozdoğan

Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity

in Postcolonial India by Vikramaditya Prakash

Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics

by Jenny B. White

The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space,

edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman

Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya:

An Ambivalent Modernism

Everyday Modernity in China, edited by Madeleine Yue Dong

and Joshua L. Goldstein

Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870–1940

by Afshin Marashi

Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters (1830–1914)

by Zeynep Çelik

Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the

Twentieth Century, edited by Sandy Isenstadt and Kishwar Rizvi

A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees

by Reşat Kasaba

Activists in Office: Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey

by Nicole F. Watts

NICOLE F. WATTS

ACTIVISTS IN OFFICE

KURDISH POLITICS AND PROTEST IN TURKEY

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS • SEATTLE AND LONDON

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Watts, Nicole F.

Activists in office : Kurdish politics and protest in Turkey / Nicole F. Watts.

p. cm. (Studies in modernity and national identity)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-295-99049-1 (hardback : alk. paper)

isbn 978-0-295-99050-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

 1.  Kurds—Turkey—Politics and government.

2.  Turkey—Politics and government—1980-  I. Title.

dr435.k87w38 2010 324.2561’083—dc22 2010022921

The paper used in this publication is acid-free and recycled from at least 30 percent

post-consumer waste. It meets the minimum requirements of American National

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THIS PUBLICATION IS SUPPORTED IN PART BY THE DONALD R. ELLEGOOD

INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS ENDOWMENT AND BY THE INSTITUTE

OF TURKISH STUDIES.

FOR ALI

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

Abbreviations xxiii

Introduction: Other Routes of Resistance 3

1 Early Routes:

Conditions of Kurdish Electoral Mobilization 26

2 New Collective Challengers:

The Institutional Trajectory of Turkey’s First Pro-Kurdish Party 51

3 Resources of the System 75

CONTENTS

4 Characteristics of Coercion:

Obstructing Access to Resources 94

5 Producing Competing Truths 122

6 Creating a New Kurdish Subject 142

Conclusions: Assessing a Challenger’s Impact 161

Notes 179

References 185

Index 201

Just as we must abandon the image of the state as a free-standing

agent issuing orders, we need to question the traditional figure of

resistance as a subject who stands outside the state and refuses its

demands. Political subjects and their modes of resistance are

formed as much within the organizational terrain we call the state,

rather than in some wholly exterior social space.

—TIMOTHY MITCHELL, “The Limits of the State,” 1991

The notion that social movements are completely separate from

the state doesn’t really describe reality.

—DAVID S. MEYER, VALERIE JENNESS, and HELEN INGRAM,

Routing the Opposition, 2005

To ascertain or demonstrate the impact of a challenge, researchers

must ascertain what might have happened in its absence.

—EDWIN AMENTA and MICHAEL P. YOUNG,

“Making an Impact,” 1999

We should not ask “what is a nation” but rather: how is nationhood

as a political and cultural form institutionalized within and among

states? How does nation work as a practical category, as classifica-

tory scheme, as cognitive frame? What makes use of that category

by or against states more or less effective?

—ROGERS BRUBAKER, Nationalism Reframed, 1996

IX

In September of 2006 I stood with a dozen visitors in front of a sand-col-

ored building in the center of Erbil, a jumbled city of around a million

people that had become the capital of the Kurdistan region of northern

Iraq. We took pictures, and some of the guests posed for the cameras. This

was not a particularly attractive building, but adorning the front was a

large sign written in Arabic, English, and Kurdish: “Kurdistan National

Assembly—Iraq.” Kurdish flags were draped inside the building. They

also fluttered from the top of the city’s distinctive citadel and brightened

the walls of shops, museums, and homes. They had red, white, and green

stripes, with a yellow sun in the middle. Kurdish was spoken throughout

the city. Kurds staffed their own checkpoints to ensure security on the

roads between cities, elected their own prime minister, and chose which

PREFACE AND

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

X PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

contractors they wanted to build on their land. After nearly a century of

conflict, Kurdish inhabitants of this region of northern Iraq had turned

desperate desire into something that felt very much like a concrete mani-

festation of a dream they called Kurdistan.

The complications, fears, and hopes fueled by the partial realization

of a Kurdish national project in the Middle East have ensured that schol-

ars and others who write about Kurdish politics find it relatively easy to

convince readers of the importance of their topic. It is common now to

find audiences who will agree that, by most assessments, Kurdish con-

flicts in Iraq and Turkey are some of the longest-running conflicts in the

Middle East, that they have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and that

“the question of Kurdistan” is deeply destabilizing not only for Iraq but

for Turkey, Iran, and the rest of the region. In January of 2007 the topic

of “Kurdish History” even made the American television game show

Jeopardy. Such an acknowledgment of the relevance of Kurdish affairs by

this icon of American popular culture offers a vivid illustration of how

dramatically the profile of Kurds has changed since the mid-twentieth

century, when they were sometimes referred to as a “forgotten people” of

the Middle East. Despite geographic, political, and social fragmentation,

Kurdish national movements in Iraq, Turkey, and elsewhere have made

their concerns matter for states vastly more powerful than themselves,

and to people far from historic Kurdistan.

This book is about how Kurdish activists have made themselves matter

and how they have impressed their ideas and agendas on reluctant and

often repressive states. In Iraq, as well as in Turkey and Iran, they have

done this in part by waging war. But some activists have also sought to

use nonviolent means of protest and persuasion. My focus is on Kurdish

activists in and from Turkey who have sought to use electoral politics and

the institutions of the state to change the basic rules of the game (Migdal

2001, 63–64) in a rough political terrain where the formal rules of con-

ventional political engagement are not always agreed upon and are, in

fact, often broken. In the city of Diyarbakır, one of the largest cities in

the mostly Kurdish southeastern region of Turkey, flying a Kurdish flag

of any design and size is seen by authorities as a sign of separatist ter-

rorism. Displaying one in a government building—as did Kurdish com-

patriots across the border in Erbil—would be to invite immediate and

coercive repercussions. Nonetheless, as this book documents, such offi-

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XI

cial proscriptions on Kurdish national expression have not prevented the

most central and formal political spaces from becoming sites of Kurdish

activism and open struggle. This study explores how and why this has

occurred, as well as the opportunities and constraints of trying to use

state-constructed and legitimated frameworks for what have constituted

radical and even revolutionary demands.

KURDS, KURDISHNESS, AND THE KURDISH

CONFLICT IN TURKEY

This book is not intended as a general text on the Kurds in Turkey, but a

few introductory remarks may be useful. After ethnic Turks, Kurds are

the largest ethnic group in Turkey, making up anywhere from 15 to 20

percent of the population, or around 11 to 14 million people out of a total

population of 72 million (in 2008; see, e.g., Mutlu 1996; Barkey and Fuller

1998, 62; Bozarslan 2008). Turkish officials stopped publishing informa-

tion on ethnicity and language after the 1965 census, so exact estimates of

the total Kurdish population range considerably depending on methods

of calculation and political persuasion. As of the late 1990s, about half of

Turkey’s Kurdish population lived in the southeastern part of the country,

an area that borders strategic frontiers with Iraq, Iran, and Syria and that

contains valuable water resources. In thirteen southeastern provinces

(Ağrı, Batman, Bingöl, Bitlis, Diyarbakır, Hakkari, Iğdır, Mardin, Muş,

Şırnak, Siirt, Tunceli, and Van), Kurds constitute a majority of the popu-

lation (55 to 90 percent). In another eight provinces or so they comprise a

sizable minority (15 to 50 percent of the population) (Mutlu 1996, 526–27).

Half of the Middle East’s Kurdish population lives in Turkey. There are

about four to five million Kurds living in Kurdish-controlled northern

Iraq (also known as Iraqi Kurdistan); about eight million in Iran; about

two million in Syria; and almost two million in Asia and Europe.

For many centuries the areas in which Kurds lived were referred to by

outside officials, writers, and observers as part of a flexibly bordered geo-

graphic region known as Kurdistan. As used today, this includes current-day

southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, western Iran, and the northernmost

tip of Syria. However, this was not an area that had ever constituted an inde-

pendent Kurdish state, and only in the last century did people from this

XII PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

region regularly begin to use the term and to refer to themselves as Kurdish

(see, e.g., Özoğlu 2004). Even today it can mean different things to different

people. Most often, Kurds and non-Kurds alike use ascriptive character-

istics (characteristics that are largely beyond people’s ability to choose) to

define Kurdishness, especially mother-tongue language. One prominent

study on ethnicity in Turkey listed language, a difference in mezhep (Mus-

lim religious denomination; most Sunni Kurds follow the Shafi’i tradition,

whereas most Sunni Turks are Hanefi), and, to a lesser extent, marriage,

music, epic song, and dance as characteristics that Sunni Kurds use to dis-

tinguish themselves from Turks (Andrews 1989, 112–13).

Although such markers help describe how Kurds in Turkey have dif-

ferentiated themselves—and been differentiated—from Turks and other

groups, they do not shed much light on what Fredrick Barth (1969, 15)

calls the “cultural stuff” within, and they suggest a monolithic portrait of

Kurdishness that misses or sidesteps the complexities of Kurdish identity

as actually lived in Turkey today. Kurds in Turkey have never acted as a

unified group or a coherent political entity. Many people who identify

themselves as Kurdish do not speak Kurdish and live outside territorial

“Kurdistan,” however flexibly defined.

Kurds are also culturally diverse. Linguistically, there is no single

Kurdish language, but two main language groups (Kurmanji and Sorani)

and two other dialects (Zazaki and Gurani). Most Kurds in Turkey speak

Kurmanji, but a small and politically influential portion from the Dersim/

Tunceli region speak Zazaki, as do some from Bingöl and Elazığ. Speak-

ers of one Kurdish dialect do not easily understand other dialects. Many

Kurds are Sunni Muslim (as are most Turks), but possibly as many as 30

percent are members of the Alevi faith (Andrews 1989, 116), a heterodox

Muslim minority. In some places and moments, such religious distinc-

tions may take on more import than ethnic identity (see, e.g., Massicard

2005b). Religious identifications have been further diversified through

Kurdish participation in Sufi brotherhoods, or tarikat, which practice

various forms of Islamic mysticism. Finally, some Kurds’ affiliations with

different tribes and clans have given rise to different outlooks and percep-

tions of self-interest and collective interest.1 Such geographic, religious,

linguistic, tribal, and class differences have meant that it was impossi-

ble at any one moment to point to a “Kurdish” perspective or peculiarly

Kurdish type of politics.

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XIII

CONTEXT OF CHALLENGE

Like most “ethnic” conflicts, the struggle between Turkish authorities and

Kurdish challengers is not really about ethnicity. Turks and Kurds do not

have a history of animosity or communal conflict, and even at the height

of the war between the state and Kurdish rebels in the early 1990s, civil-

ian attacks between Turks and Kurds were relatively rare (although not

unheard of). Rather than being grounded in ethnic bias per se, Turkish

authorities’ efforts to suppress collective expressions of Kurdish identity

have largely stemmed from fears that concessions to Kurdish activism

could ultimately result in Kurdish regional autonomy, the loss of valuable

resources (especially water), and, eventually, territorial dismemberment.

Accompanying such pragmatic and strategic concerns have been a series

of Turkish nationalist frames that have treated Kurdish society, taken

collectively, as an obstruction to modernization, secularization, and the

consolidation of the centralized state. Kemalism, the set of reformist

principles and foundational myths of the Turkish Republic developed in

the 1920s and 1930s, had little or no tolerance for Kurdish cultural and

political expressions. Although many early perceptions of the nature of

the Kurdish challenge had faded by the 1950s and 1960s, authorities con-

tinued to view Kurds not as individuals but as a potential collective that

posed serious security risks and threatened the territorial integrity of the

country. This was because of both the predominance of security-oriented

policymaking within the state and the increasing influence of Kurdish

ethnopolitics outside the country and within. Popular and official fears

were further aggravated by growing Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq

after 1991, as well as by civil wars and political breakups in such countries

as the former Yugoslavia.

Turkish authorities used a variety of strategies to try to ensure that

Kurds did not mobilize collectively and would remain loyal to the state.

These strategies have varied depending on the period, but some rough

generalizations can be made. Strategies of “opportunity” sought to inte-

grate ethnic Kurds by providing them with equality of opportunity for

personal advancement. Turkish authorities have not legally discriminated

against Kurdish citizens of the country simply on the basis of being Kurd-

ish; like all Muslim citizens of the country, Kurds have equal rights to

vote, run for office, serve in high-ranking positions, and participate fully

XIV PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

in economic and social life. Such opportunities, regardless of ethnicity,

were an important precondition for pro-Kurdish political contention in

Turkey and were crucial for integrating many Kurds into the political sys-

tem and into many different political parties.

At the same time, authorities have applied strategies of “social recon-

struction” to downplay or eradicate a sense of distinct Kurdish identity.

Full Kurdish participation in Turkish political and intellectual life has

until very recently been contingent on the adoption of Turkish cultural

and political norms and the outward acceptance of an ethnified ver-

sion of Turkish nationalism (see, e.g., Yeğen 2004, 2007). Despite legal

reforms and a growing public discourse of ethnic diversity, as late as

2008 Kurdish-language instruction was still not permitted in universi-

ties or public schools. Only in early 2009 were a few select universities

told they could begin for the first time to teach Kurdish literature or his-

tory. Official and semi-official narratives of the identity of the country’s

inhabitants still emphasize the “Turkic” origins of the country’s popula-

tion and describe Turkey’s citizenry as uniformly Turkish. In addition,

there have over the years been many efforts to reconstruct physical space

and historical memory as purely Turkish, with little or no recognition

of ethnic and religious minorities such as Armenians, Greek Christians,

Alevi Muslims, and Kurds (see, e.g., Öktem 2004, 2008). After the 1960

military coup, for instance, thousands of Kurdish place names were

changed to Turkish ones, and a flood of research used pseudo-science

to attempt to “prove” that Kurds were really Turks and that Kurdish did

not exist as a distinct language. As late as 2005 the Turkish government

announced it would change the proper names of a number of animals

whose names referenced Kurds and Armenians.

Where these techniques failed, Turkish authorities used strategies of

coercion to suppress those who challenged these norms and tried to advo-

cate reforms or mobilize against the state. These coercive mechanisms

are discussed in more detail in many of the following pages. Suffice it

to say here that state policies became substantially more coercive with

the transformation of the regime after 1980, when much of the southeast,

and Kurdish communities there, came under an ongoing “state of excep-

tion” (Agamben 2000). State security courts, first used from 1973 to 1976

and then reinstated after 1982, tried and convicted Kurdish dissenters,

including many for crimes of speech, in conditions routinely understood