A street in Diyarbakır. Author's photo collection.
The situation of the Kurds in a drastically changing
Middle East has received little attention in academia and less in the
media despite their growing impact on regional and international politics. The
biggest stateless people living in the Middle East are on the verge of a new
status, not only in Iraqi Kurdistan, where a referendum for independence takes
place on September 25, 2017, but also in Syria and Turkey. In Syria, Kurds have
fought an organised and effective struggle against the IS. In Turkey, they have
suffered a massive destruction of Kurdish cities, displacement of half a
million Kurds and eradication of all forms of legal entity by the Turkish
state. Then there is Iran. This
week’s short series looks at current political struggles of the Kurds in four
neighbouring countries. Mehmet Kurt, series editor.
“The colonial world is divided into compartments […] the colonial
world is a world cut in two (Fanon, 2001).”
In the recent period starting in July 2015, with the sudden end in peace
negotiations between the Turkish state and the Kurdish mainstream movement, we
have witnessed an intensification of violence in Turkey Kurdistan. Kurdistan
unlike the Occupied Palestinian territories does not exist on world maps.
However, it does exist in the minds and hearts of its people. In this paper, I
examine the new modalities of power emerging in neocolonial geographies more
precisely, the spatial configurations of colonialism in Diyarbakır – de facto capital of Turkey
Kurdistan. In doing so, I raise
the question of whether this is an internal war getting worse day by day? If
not, is it a colonial occupation, in the sense that the war is not in this
country (in Turkey) but somewhere else (in its colony). Can we approach the
Turkish state`s current policies by deploying a neo-colonial narrative?
A portrait of Diyarbakir
The geographical layout of Diyarbakır very much reveals the range of forces that
have shaped it. It is a city cut in two in a colonial manner, compartmentalized
both in terms of space and its inhabitants. Almost half of the city is
allocated to military quarters, compressing it from north and south. As a
result, the new city expands in a horizontal direction from east to west.
Researchers like myself, human right activists and journalists happen to
pass by Diyarbakır
from time to time. Other than these groups of people, Kurds living in other
cities and people who have an economic interest in the city, mostly hired by
the government, I haven't encountered anyone else who has mentioned living in, or
visiting the city.
People who are not local inhabitants of the city are either scared or do
not find the need to breathe the same air with locals. They go out from their
spatial accommodation and communities as little as possible. They simply do not
interact. Instead, they keep a distance which, I would argue, is in itself
singularly colonial.
Fanon calls them “the governing race”, those settlers who are
always foreigners who come from elsewhere. In the case of Diyarbakir, settlers
do not come from overseas but from the western part of Turkey. They remain foreign.
Bureaucrats, teachers, entrepreneurs, religious officials are likely to have an
economic interest in being there. They are strangers in the city in the sense
that first, they don’t interact with the local community, and have no interest
in participating in its social life, but mostly wait it out until their
compulsory service period is over.
Secondly, they are considered as strangers/representatives of the
Turkish state by the locals, and therefore get easily identified and marked in
public space. And not so surprisingly, they claim a right on the land and
administration as a part of the homeland. They represent the state – people
of Diyarbakır always add
Turkish when they use the word state – whose rule is imposed and can only be
maintained by means of force; guns and war machines. In Cizre, a district of
Sirnak almost completely destroyed during the curfews, 1300 teachers who are
originally from the west were texted and called back by the Ministry of
National Education, just before the armed conflict started.
Graffiti from those who imagine Kurdistan will end up in a graveyard.Indeed, the graffiti above, also from Cizre, gives an insight into the
anxiety gathered around the fact that people living in the Kurdish regions are
like natives of some place that is not Turkey.
Other than public officials, the direct representatives of the state
appear to be the police and army. Police barricades and stations on every
corner, the armoured vehicles passing every five minutes, checkpoints always
present in the street of Diyarbakır – these constitute the dominant symbols of social order.
An informant suggested
that, “if you move the flags and the army out of Diyarbakır, there is no State here”. All the police cars
and tanks carry Turkish flags and, at least once a day play a very
nationalistic song “Ölürüm Türkiyem” (I Would Die for My Turkey).
Death zone
As a snapshot of the year of 2016, the armed conflict between the
Turkish state and PKK moved into the city centres and, self-governance was
declared in several districts. By that time the governmental strategy of
declaring on and off curfews enabled the Turkish state to cut off all outside
connections and access to basic needs such as food, electricity, water etc. from
these districts. People who lived there were forced to leave: the ones who couldn`t
leave or refused to do so were criminalized as terrorists and killed.[2]
Within this period, I argue that the city divided into two – a military zone and a death zone[1]. The former includes the barracks, boardings for the families of soldiers,
teachers and bureaucrats, the office of the governor, which are usually built
next to or close by each other, very well-protected with high technology. All
the public housing allocated for government officials are surrounded by walls
and signboards stating that the area belongs to the military and that entrance
is not allowed.
The immediate presence of the police and military proves that no one
needs to hide their oppression. On the contrary, the ordinary language of life
is pure violence, the violence of the settler. Many checkpoints and portable
police stations have been built there, as the figure shows, which can either target
or be the target itself. The death zone
– contrary to the military zone as a territory of prosperity, wealth and
security – is defined and marked by the power to kill and of death as a result.
It can be a bomb attack; you can get hit by an armoured vehicle or just by a bouncing
bullet.
Portable police stations everywhere in the city.After all, state violence has always been present in the streets of Diyarbakır and in the lives of its inhabitants. In the recent
period starting with summer 2015, however, we witness an intensification of
violence in a “war without an end” form. We have faced the
re-territorialization of physical space through turning many districts
into death zones; and the re-occupation of lives by constant police
harassment, fear of death and humiliation. Meanwhile, the Sur district of Diyarbakır has become a
fabric producing and circulating this toxic knowledge of death.
Re-occupation of Diyarbakır
In the Sur district, the most historic part of the city, known as the
heart of the city, armed conflict raged for almost four months. During that
period, the police and soldiers stayed in the local houses and hotels and left
their marks in the streets. When the curfew was partially lifted, the racist
and hateful language of the state once again became visible. Previously, mentioning
the mundane symbols of social order in Diyarbakır, I argued that they reflected the neocolonial legacy of
the Turkish state seeking ways to make its sovereignty visible and tangible. This
exhibitionist attitude operates not only at the symbolic level of social life
but also involves the struggle over the organization of the space.
With the sudden end in the peace negotiations the war moved to a new
phase. The notion of hendek, ditches was introduced into the political
discourse and became a symbol of resistance on the Kurdish side. Ditches,
beyond the holes in the land, represented the collective will of insurgency. At
this point, the graffitis carved on the walls give us important clues to the state`s
response; how space is imagined and twisted in Kurdistan. “If you are
Turk be proud, if not obey” or, as the figure says “JOH (special police soldier
forces) came to Sur to educate. The subject is obedience”.
Police soldiers left their mark in Sur.These writings can be seen as outpourings of the colonial heritage of
the Turkish state. In the self-governing neighbourhoods, the state met the
autonomy of the ditches with destruction and humiliation.
Meanwhile, in the western part of Turkey, many attacks and lynchings
targeting Kurds took place. Those who live or work mostly as seasonal
plantation or construction workers were targeted. For example, in the city of
Kütahya the barracks that Kurdish building workers stayed in were set on fire.[3]
Both the players and executives of the football team of Diyarbakir, Amedspor,
were met with racist attacks and were beaten up during the Turkey cup match. I
took the figure 8 from a newspaper in which the opponent team unfurls a banner
at the start of the game saying “those of us
who die are martyrs and who live are soldiers, but those of you who die are
carrion and who live are traitors.”
Outpouring of racism in the Turkish Cup.War, after all, implies a struggle between a minimum of two parties. Yet,
the term itself does not tell us much about the reasons/nature of the
“conflict”. Therefore, I purposefully name it occupation, not to treat war
through the lenses of security and counterinsurgency but as a matter of the
takeover of land and resources and assimilation.
Racism, “essential to the social construction of an otherwise
illegitimate and privileged access to property and power” as Stoler said, has
long been the founding relation uniting the colonizer and colonized. In this
context, I treat racism as a central organizing principle of Turkishness, of
differentiating between ruler and the ruled as was the case in so many other
colonial contexts.
The ongoing war in Turkey Kurdistan can also be referred as “İsraellilesme”
(becoming Israeli likewise), embracing the Turkish state`s politics of collective
punishment of Kurds. At this point, I
would turn to the term ‘re-occupation’ to understand the new phase of
the war in Turkey Kurdistan. Violence has always been present and foundational
in colonial geographies so – why now?
The Arabic word fetih means to conquer a city or a country by
war. Especially in the Ottoman political imaginary, it was often used to refer
to the politics of conquest. In the current discourse of AKP, it is possible to
find references to the same vocabulary, trying to recall the soul of fetih. “The
fetih of Istanbul”, for instance, is celebrated every year with million-dollar-budgeted
organizations. In 2016, the whole city was covered with pankarts of “joy of
fetih” synchronically matched to the ongoing war in the Kurdish regions, which escalated to the point of destroying entire towns
within a matter of days. The figure shows the level of destruction and “the
soul of fetih”, soldiers hanging flags everywhere and playing Mehter Marşi which
is originally the Ottoman military marching song.
Nusaybin June, 2016.The discourse of fetih
as a site of production makes reference to a particular time in history,
the Ottoman Empire. The justification for the bloody war taking place in the
Kurdish regions in the eyes of Turks is produced by recapturing the nostalgia
of the good, old, powerful days of the Turkish nation. No need to mention that
it accumulates other familiar, therefore, dangerous discourses of nationhood
and Islamhood, and by doing so, gets stronger. At the end of the day, to be a
Turk requires that one celebrate the soul of fetih for the sake of the nation, so much so that different
occupational groups sent Turkish flags and a Koran to the military forces “fighting
against terror” in the district of Sur.[4]
In this paper, I have aimed to reflect on the geographical layout of Diyarbakır which I believe very much reveals a city cut in two
in a colonial manner, compartmentalized both in terms of its space and its
inhabitants. The press release given in Artvin by a parliamentarian from the CHP – the
main opposition party who are regarded as social democrats – succinctly sums up the neocolonial outpourings of the Turkish state:
This is neither Cizre nor Sirnak (referring to the districts in the Kurdish
regions under curfew by this time). This is the Republican city of Artvin. I
hope that not even a single person's nose would bleed in Artvin. If the people
of Artvin get hurt, I am telling you, they cannot pay the price for it. They
are just mixing Artvin with other cities.
He gave this
speech at a protest in Artvin, trying to prevent police intervention against
the protestors. Claiming Artvin in this republican manner, as an indicator of
the city`s distinctiveness from the Kurdish regions, indeed reveals the founding
principle of the Turkish state. It is a very symbolic declaration of the simple
fact that the colony is distinct from the metropole, whereby the latter is seen
as a collateral of the state of emergency and the state of siege.
REFERENCES
79 günlük sokağa çıkma yasağı Cizre gözlem raporu
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Arslan, S., & Sandal, H. (2015, November 21).
Farqin`de devletin 'duvar yazisi' halleri [Web log
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CHP milletvekili Uğur Bayraktutan: "Burası ne
Cizre, ne de Şırnak, burası bir cumhuriyet kenti
Artvin" (2016, February 16). Turnusol.biz.
Cörüt, İ. (2015, December 16). Türk Devleti’nin
kolektif cezalandırma siyaseti ve hendekler. Bianet.
Ekin Van olayına dair inceleme raporu (Rep.).
(2015, September 4).
Fanon, F. (2001). The wretched of the earth.
London: Penguin.
Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public
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Memmi, A. (1965). The colonizer and the
colonized. New York: Orion Press.
Stoler, A. L. (1989). Rethinking Colonial
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Terörle mücadele eden polislere kur'an-ı kerim ve
türk bayrağı. (2016, January 30).
[1] I use the term death
zone to refer to a
territory where no one has security of life protected by law/citizenship- in order to underly
this peculiar terror
formation that keeps ramifying in the neocolonial geographies. Death zone
refers to geography of lawlessness where the tortured bodies can be tied to the
back of a police car and displayed in public.
[2] According to the report of Human Rights
Foundation of Turkey, between the dates August
16, 2015 and April 20, 2016 there had been 65 officially confirmed, open-ended
and round-the-clock [all day long] curfews in at least 22 districts of 7 cities in
Southeastern Turkey. At least 1 million 642 thousand residents affected by
these curfews and according to the statement of Ministry of Health on February
27, 2016, at least 355 thousand residents were forced to leave the cities and
districts they lived in and at least 338 people lost their lives.
[3] See the news here.
[4] See the news here.