THE KURDS IN ERDOGAN'S 'NEW' TURKEY - DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL IMPLICATIONS Edited by - Taylor and Francis
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Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics
THE KURDS IN ERDOGAN’S
‘NEW’ TURKEY
DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL IMPLICATIONS
Edited by
Nikos ChristofsThe Kurds in Erdogan’s ‘New’ Turkey This book focuses on the AKP government since 2002 during which time the state’s approach to the Kurdish question has undergone several changes. Examining what preceded and followed the failed putsch of 2016, it explains and critiques that which situates the Kurdish question in its broader context. It stands out with the main objective to avoid any ‘policy-oriented bias’ through an interdisciplinary and multi-thematic approach. The volume discusses the state and policies in the Kurdish region of Turkey, as well as counter-hegemonic discourses that seek to reform existing institutions. Some chapters focus on the domestic aspects and gender perspectives of the Kurdish question in Turkey, the focus of which has been taken over by recent developments in Syria and the Middle East in general. Other chapters include a range of new aspects of Turkish society and politics, and the international aspects of Ankara’s policies and their implications not only inside Turkey but also internationally. Taking both domestic and foreign policy aspects into account, the book offers a set of innovative explanations for the state of crisis in Turkey and a solid basis for thinking about the likely path forward. Scholars, researchers, and postgraduates interested in political theory and Kurdish and Middle East politics will find this book invaluable. Nikos Christofis is an associate professor in the Center for Turkish Studies and the School of History and Civilization at Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China. His work focuses on comparative historical analysis of Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus. He has published extensively in Greek, English, Turkish, Chinese, and Spanish.
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The Kurds in Erdogan’s ‘New’ Turkey Domestic and International Implications Edited by Nikos Christofis
First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Nikos Christofis; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Nikos Christofis to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-69930-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-69931-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-14389-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003143895 Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
For Liana... Always!
Contents
List of illustrations ix
Notes on contributors x
Acknowledgments xiii
List of abbreviations xiv
Introduction: The Kurds in Erdoğan’s ‘new’ Turkey: domestic and
international implications 1
NIKOS CHRISTOFIS
PART I
Accelerating Turkey’s transition 23
1 Conquering the state, subordinating society: A Kurdish perspective
on the development of AKP authoritarianism in Turkey 25
JOOST JONGERDEN
2 The Kurdish struggle in Turkey: The risks of peace and surrender 41
SEEVAN SAEED
3 Neither peace nor resolution: Friends and foes during Oslo and
İmralı talks 2005–2015 54
KUMRU F. TOKTAMIŞ
PART II
Kurdish gender perspectives 71
4 Clashes, collaborations, and convergences: Evolving relations of
Turkish and Kurdish women’s rights activists 73
NADJE AL-ALI AND LATIF TASviii Contents
5 One state, one nation, one flag—one gender?: HDP as a challenger
of the Turkish nation state and its gendered perspectives 90
ROSA BURÇ
PART III
State discourse and counter-hegemonic politics 109
6 Left-wing populism in Turkey: The case of HDP 111
ÖMER TEKDEMIR
7 ‘My Muslim Kurdish brother’: Colonial rule and Islamist
governmentality in the Kurdish region of Turkey 128
MEHMET KURT
8 Neo-colonial geographies of occupation: A portrait of Diyarbakır 145
HAZAL DÖLEK
9 Dersim 1937–1938: Shifts and continuities in the state discourse
and reasoning under Kemalism and Erdoğanism 159
PINAR DINÇ
PART IV
International implications 181
10 The geopolitics of Turkey’s Kurdish question 183
CAN CEMGIL
11 Turkey in Syria: A neo-Ottomanist or a nationalist moment for
Erdoğan? 199
CENGIZ ÇANDAR
12 Autonomous administration in the shadow of Turkish aggression:
De facto (Kurdish) autonomy in Northern Syria and the Turkish
invasions of Efrîn and northeastern Syria in 2018–2019 218
THOMAS SCHMIDINGER
Afterword 237
MICHAEL M. GUNTER
Index 244Illustrations
Figures
8.1 Nusaybin June, 2016. (source: Takvim, 6 June 2016) 153
9.1 A copy of state archives from 1932, describing that the
disciplinary operation deemed necessary in the Dersim terrain
was postponed due to insufficient state budget (source: BCA,
Republic of Turkey State Archives, Catalogue number: 030 10/
110-741-2, 15 April 1932) 162
Maps
1.1 Cities and towns in Upper Kurdistan 4
1.2 Cities and towns in Lower Kurdistan 6
1.3 Demographic distribution of the Kurds in the Middle East 10Contributors Nadje Al-Ali is Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology of Middle East Studies at Brown University, where she is Director of the Center for Middle East Studies (CMES). Her main research interests revolve around feminist activism and gendered mobilization, mainly concerning Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and the Kurdish political movement. Her publications include What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (2009, co-authored with Nicola Pratt) among others. She is on the advi- sory board of Kohl: A Journal of Body and Gender Research and has been involved in several feminist organizations and campaigns transnationally. Rosa Burç is a PhD researcher at the Center on Social Movement Studies as part of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy. She specializes in the political sociology of statelessness, with a focus on the Kurdish Middle East. She has worked as a teaching associate at Bonn University, after graduating from SOAS, University of London. Her work has been published in journals, edited volumes, and international media. Can Cemgil is an assistant professor at Istanbul Bilgi University, Department of International Relations, and teaches international relations and international political economy. He received his PhD from the University of Sussex in 2015. His research interests include international historical sociology, inter- national theory, Middle Eastern geopolitics, and Turkish foreign policy. He has published articles in journals such as Globalizations, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, IDS Bulletin, Geopolitics, and Philosophy and Social Criticism. Nikos Christofis is an associate professor in the Center for Turkish Studies and the School of History and Civilization, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China, adjunct lecturer at the Hellenic Open University in Greece, and affiliate researcher at the Netherlands Institute at Athens (NIA) His work focuses on comparative historical analysis of Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus. He has pub- lished extensively in Greek, English, Turkish, Chinese, and Spanish. Among his latest publications are From Kemalism to Radicalism: The Turkish Student Movement, 1923–1980 (2021; in Greek); “Between ‘nation’ and ‘Class’: The
Contributors xi Left and Cyprus (2021; in Greek); and Erdoğan’s ‘New’ Turkey Attempted Coup d’état and the Acceleration of Political Crisis (2020). He is the series editor of ‘Mediterranean Politics’ for Transnational Press and of the ‘New Directions in Turkish Studies’ for Berghahn. Cengiz Çandar is Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Stockholm University Institute of Turkish Studies and a senior associate fellow at UI (The Swedish Institute for International Affairs). He won the Abdi Ipekçi Peace Prize in 1987 for contributing to Greek–Turkish relations. He is a Turkish public intel- lectual and expert on the Middle East and was Special Adviser to President Turgut Özal. He is the author of Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds with a foreword by Eugene Rogan (2020). Pinar Dinç was a postdoctoral researcher at Lund University as a Swedish Institute Fellow between 2017 and 2018 and a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Fellow between 2018 and 2020. Her research interests lie in the areas of nationalism, ethnicity, social movements, memory, diaspora, and the conflict and environ- ment nexus in the Middle East and beyond. Since 2020, Pinar is leading the ‘Turkey beyond Borders: Critical Voices, New Perspectives’ project at Lund University. From 2021 onwards, she will be working as a researcher at the Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science at Lund University. Hazal Dölek is a political geographer with a background in anthropology, inves- tigating the intersections of space-making, intimacy, and neo-colonialism. Her projects explore gendered and anticolonial places that endure in the occupied geographies. Her main research interests are ethnography of place; intimacy, feminist, and de-colonial critical theory; affective mappings, MENA; and Kurdistan and Palestine. Michael M. Gunter is a professor of political science at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, Tennessee. He also is the Secretary-General of the EU Turkey Civic Commission (EUTCC), headquartered in Brussels. He is the author of critically praised scholarly books on the Kurdish question. He has also published numerous articles on the Kurds and many other issues in lead- ing scholarly journals. Among his latest publications are The Kurds: A Divided Nation in Search of a State, 3rd ed., (2019); Routledge Handbook on the Kurds (Routledge 2019); Historical Dictionary of the Kurds, 3rd ed., (2018); and Kurdish Issues: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Olson (2016). Joost Jongerden is an associate professor in rural sociology at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and project professor at the Asian Platform for Global Sustainability & Transcultural Studies at Kyoto University, Japan. He is also one of the founding members and editors of Kurdish Studies. A com- mon denominator of his research has been the question of how people cre- ate and maintain a livable life under conditions of precarity. This interest has expressed itself in the ways in which people develop alternatives to market- and state-induced insecurities. He refers to this as ‘Do-It-Yourself Development’.
xii Contributors Mehmet Kurt is a Marie Curie Global Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a lecturer at Yale University. His research lies at the intersection of political sociology, anthropology of religion, and social movement theory with a specific focus on the Kurdish question, politi- cal Islam, and civil society in Turkey and among Muslim diasporic communi- ties in Europe and the United States. He is the author of Kurdish Hizbullah in Turkey (2017). Seevan Saeed is an associate professor in Middle East politics at Shaanxi Normal University in Xi’an, China. He received his BA and MA degree in sociology at the University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom, and his PhD in Middle East Politics from the University of Exeter. He has delivered lectures at domes- tic and international universities. He has published books and articles in peer- reviewed international journals in six languages. Thomas Schmidinger is a political scientist and social anthropologist teach- ing at the University of Vienna and the University for Applied Sciences Oberösterreich (Austria). He is co-editor of the Vienna Yearbook for Kurdish Studies and has published several books on the Kurds in Syria and Iraq as well as books and studies about Jihadism and political Islam. Latif Tas is the author of Legal Pluralism: Dispute Resolution and the Kurdish Peace Committee (Routledge 2014) and Authoritarianism and Alternative Politics: Governmentality, Justice and Gender Politics among Kurds (2021). He was awarded a Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellowship hosted by SOAS (UK), Syracuse University (US), and MPI for Social Anthropology (Halle, Germany). He specializes in comparative politics, socio-legal anthropology, social and political movements, and transnationalism, and he has researched the question of how and why people create and maintain an alternative legal and economic life under authoritarian or monopolistic state structures. Ömer Tekdemir is a lecturer at Coventry University London. He is a co-editor of the open-access journal New Middle Eastern Studies and the co-convener of the International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East and Asia working group of the British International Studies Association (BISA). He is the author of Constituting the Political Economy of the Kurds: Social Embeddedness, Hegemony and Identity (Routledge 2021). Kumru F. Toktamış is an associate professor of political sociology at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, where she is the coordinator of the Cultural Studies Minor. Her work focuses on the historical-comparative studies of col- lective action, state-formation, (de)democratization, and ethnic clashes with a focus on Kurdish politics in the Middle East.
Acknowledgments The present volume grows out of a special issue I edited for the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies (2019, 21:3). The articles in the issue have been revised and updated, while additional original chapters have been prepared in order to meet the scope of the book. I would like to express my gratitude to the founding editor and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, Vassilis K. Fouskas, who welcomed the initial idea, for all his help through the production process of the special issue. Furthermore, I cannot thank Bahar Baser enough for her invalu- able advice and assistance in preparing the issue, as well as the three anonymous reviewers. In addition, I would like to thank once more Joe Whiting for accept- ing the book and including it in the series Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics, and the four anonymous reviewers who provided constructive comments. Special thanks go to Michael M. Gunter for preparing the afterword in the book; for providing the maps in the book the credit goes to Professor Mehrdad Izady, who gave permission to use them. Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues Bingzhong Li and Seevan Saeed for providing a constructive exchange of ideas and the Centre for Turkish Studies at Shaanxi Normal University in Xi’an, China, for providing an excellent working environment. As always, this book is dedicated to the strongest person I have ever met, my partner in life and best friend, Liana, for her continuous support and patience throughout the writing and editing process of this volume. The usual disclaimer applies.
Abbreviations
AKP Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, Justice and Development Party
BDP Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi, Peace and Democracy Party
CHP Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, Republican People’s Party
DBP Demokratik Bölgeler Partisi, Democratic Regions Party
DDKO Devrimci Doğu Kültür Ocakları, Revolutionary Eastern Cultural
Hearths
DTK Demokratik Toplum Kongresi, Democratic Society Congress
DÖKH Demokratik Özgür Kadin Hareketi, Democratic Free Women’s
Movement
ENKS Encûmena Niştimanî ya Kurdî li Sûriyê, Kurdish National
Council
ESP Ezilenlerin Sosyalist Partisi, Socialist Party of the Oppressed
FETÖ Fethullahçı Terör Örgütü, Fethullah Gülen Terror Organization
HAK-PAR Hak ve Özgürlükler Partisi, Rights and Freedom Party
HDK Halkların Demokratik Kongresi, People’s Democratic Congress
HDP Halkların Demokratik Partisi, People’s Democratic Party
HEP Halkın Emek Partisi, People’s Labour Party
Hüda-Par Hür Dava Partisi, Free Cause Party
IS Islamic State
KADEP Katılımcı Demokrasi Partisi, Participatory Democracy Party
KCK Koma Civaken Kurdistan, Kurdish Communities Union
KİP Kurdistan İşçi Partisi, Kurdistan Workers’ Party
KUK Kürdistan Ulusal Kurtuluşcuları, National Liberationists of
Kurdistan
MHP Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, Nationalist Movement Party
MİT Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı, National Intelligence Organization
NES Rêveberiya Xweser a Bakur û Rojhilatê Sûriyeyê, Autonomous
Administration of North and East Syria
ÖSP Özgürlük ve Sosyalizm Partisi, Freedom and Socialism Party
PAK Parti Azadi Kurdistan, Kurdistan Freedom Party
PDY Paralel Devlet Yapılanması, Parallel state structure
PKK Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, Kurdistan Workers’ Party
PUK Yekîtiya Nîştimanî ya Kurdistanê, Patriotic Union of KurdistanAbbreviations xv
PYD Partiya Yekitîya Demokrat, Democratic Union Party
PYNK Party Yeketiya Nistimaniya Kurdi, Parties of Kurdish Patriotic
Unions
SDF Hêzên Sûriya Demokratîk, Syrian Democratic Forces
TAK Teyrêbazên Azadiya Kurdistan, Kurdistan Freedom Hawks
TEV-DEM Tevgera Civaka Demokratîk, Kurdish Democratic Movement
TİKKO Türkiye İşçi ve Köylü Kurtuluş Ordusu, Liberation Army of the
Workers and Peasants of Turkey
TKDP Türkiye Kürdistan Demokrat Partisi, Kurdistan Democratic Party
of Turkey
YDG-H Yurtsever Devrimci Gençlik Hareket, Patriotic Revolutionary
Youth Movement
YPG Yenikneyen Parastina Gel, People’s Protection Units
YPJ Yekîneyên Parastina Jin, Women’s Protection Units
YPS Yekîneyên Parastina Sivîl, Civil Protection UnitsIntroduction
The Kurds in Erdoğan’s ‘new’ Turkey: domestic
and international implications
Nikos Christofis
The Kurdish question—the concept itself elicits no small amount of controversy—
has remained an enduring challenge for the modern Turkish state. The positions
of the major actors are by now so entrenched that a proper debate seems all but
impossible. The authoritarian and illiberal shift over the past decade of the ruling
Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) and its party
leader and Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has brought the circum-
stances of the Kurds—and the Kurdish question more generally—to the center
of the political agenda once again. The Kurds’ rise as new regional actors in the
Middle East in the past few years and the impact this is having on the regional
order has created a more complex reality. Kurdish political activism has reached
a new height at the beginning of the twenty-first century with Kurdish movements
in Iraq, Turkey, and Syria establishing themselves as a significant force in the
domestic politics of these states. The consolidation of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq
and the establishment of a Kurdish de facto autonomous region within Syria is
adding to the Kurds’ growing influence in the region and enabling Kurds to forge
stronger relations with regional and international forces (Gunes 2019).
Taking the above into consideration, the present collection of articles, origi-
nally published as a special issue for the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern
Studies,1 has been revised and expanded in scope. The volume now incorporates
analysis of some of the more recent issues that have arisen both domestically in
Turkey but also internationally. It aspires to analyze these recent developments in
the Middle East region to understand the inter-connections and inter-dependen-
cies that involve the Kurds.
The Kurdish question in the Turkish Republic
The Kurdish question is an ethnic conflict that predates the modern Turkish
Republic. Its genesis lay in the late nineteenth-century challenge to the Ottoman
state by Kurdish separatists in the Empire’s periphery. Following the break-up
of the Ottoman Empire, the European powers—in their project of shaping a
new Middle East—agreed at the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 to establish an inde-
pendent Kurdistan.2 Yet the prospect fell victim to realpolitik and the failure of
the Europeans to enforce the terms of Sèvres, with the victory of the Turkish
DOI: 10.4324/9781003143895-12 Nikos Christofis
nationalists in 1922. With the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923,
however, Sèvres and the trauma of national retrenchment shaped the perceptions
of the new elite regarding the largest non-Turkic ethnic population in its territory.
The Kurdish question thus emerged as the central outcome of the homogenizing
Kemalist nation-building process, the principal aim of which was to ‘Turkify’
the disparate identities within the newly created state. The trauma of Sèvres ulti-
mately drove Turkey’s hypersensitivity to any politics—including efforts to build
local solidarities around enduring kinship or ethnic identities—seen as undermin-
ing Turkish national identity. The new Turkish state thus brought—often coer-
cively—all groups under ‘one flag’ (Çalıslar 2013, 29–33), a dictum that has
returned with full force recently under AKP rule. Along with denial of Kurdish
identity, the republic attempted to erase their language and their culture by coerc-
ing and forcing the Kurdish population to comply with a narrow, exclusive, and
discriminatory vision of the Turkish nation (Yeğen 2017). Indeed, as Yeğen com-
ments, Turkish state discourse sought to either ‘disappear’ (or cast as reactionary)
Kurdish identity right up until the 1980s:
This standard conviction draws its strength from the striking silence of the
Turkish state as to the ‘Kurdishness’ of the Kurdish question. Whenever the
Kurdish question was mentioned in Turkish state discourse, it was in terms
of reactionary politics, tribal resistance or regional backwardness, but never
as an ethno-political question.
(1996, 216)
‘Turkification’ policies prompted a series of repressive episodes, the first coming
at the dawn of the republic in response to the Sheik Said rebellion of 1925. Here,
the new state was able to kill two ‘reactionary birds’—the emerging Kurdish
nationalism and the religious opposition to Kemalist secular reforms (Bozarslan
1996, 141)—with one stone. Later repression—including the Dersim massacres
of Kurds in 1937—continued until the 1960s, tempered only (and then only some-
what) by the election of the Democrat Party (DP) in 1950. During its decade
in power, the DP co-opted parts of the Kurdish leadership and sought to blunt
the sharper edges of state assimilationist practices (van Bruinessen 2000, 227).
This move, in effect, delayed the onset of a more robust collective movement by
Kurdish groups: ‘The Turkish political system managed this de facto compro-
mise so well that it never came to the formulation of explicit, collective demands’
(Bozarslan 2004, 84).
The radicalization of the Kurdish question
This all started to change in the 1960s, a period of great significance not just for
the Kurdish question but for Turkey in general. The 1961 constitution heralded
a relatively relaxed political environment which allowed socialists, students, and
trade unions to organize and operate openly. Within this environment, the first siz-
able, left-wing political party, the Worker’s Party of Turkey (Türkiye İşçi Partisi,Introduction 3
TİP), was established, recruiting several Kurdish intellectuals.3 The weekly peri-
odical Yön (Direction) opened a space for the Turkish left to raise and discuss the
heretofore subaltern Kurdish question and hosted critical essays concerning the
issue (Alış 2016).
The socialist/communist flowering in Turkey in the 1960s thus embraced the
Kurdish cause associating it with the National Question. Before that, the Turkish
Communist Party (Türkiye Komünist Partisi, TKP), especially during the 1920s
and 1930s, had also cast Kurdish mobilization and resistance as reactionary—mir-
roring the Kemalist line—a stance that was also endorsed by the Comintern. In
other words, the ‘Kurdish unrest was nothing more than backlash by “the past”,
characterized by tribalism, banditry and political reaction against “the present”,
in the form of the modern, secular, national Turkish republic’ (Yeğen 2016,
160–162).
Several Kurdish university students participated in the Federation of Ideas
Clubs (Fikir Kulüpleri Federasyonu, FKF) and the Revolutionary Youth (Devrimci
Gençlik, Dev-Genç), two organizations that helped radicalize the student move-
ment in Turkey in this period of tumult (Christofis 2021). Most Kurdish university
students, however, organized through a series of ‘Eastern Rallies’ in the south-
east region of Turkey, under the auspices of the Revolutionary Eastern Cultural
Hearths (Devrimci Doğu Kültür Ocakları, DDKO), a network of revolutionary
cultural centers (Çalıslar 2013, 34). The cultural centers soon expanded, creating
a network across many Kurdish towns and urban centers of Turkey (Bozarslan
1992, 99–101). The birth of a robust student movement within Turkey itself, along
with the revolt of Mustafa Barzani in Iraqi Kurdistan (1961–1975), pushed the
Kurdish nationalists to try to acquire greater visibility (Bozarslan 2015, 449–450).
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK)—a ‘mili-
tant guerrilla political organization’—was born amidst this firmament, recruiting
its leadership and membership from among the disenfranchised. It was formally
established in November 1978.4 As Bozarslan notes: ‘The violence [that the PKK
perpetrated] was rational/instrumental, in the sense that it sought to change the
political and juridical status of the Kurdish minority by winning either inde-
pendence or some degree of political autonomy’ (Bozarslan 2004, 23), the argu-
ment being that state repression meant no alternative avenue of genuine political
expression was available (Jongerden and Akkaya 2011, 124). Following a period
of political incubation during the 1970s and after ample preparation, the PKK
prevailed, also violently, against the other Kurdish organizations.
The ‘12 September’ regime, which emerged after the September 1980 coup,
returned to the pre-1960 approach of the state towards the Kurdish ‘disease’,
launching an offensive campaign against the PKK in 1984 that would continue
into the late 1990s. The Kurdish regions in Turkey were under emergency rule
throughout this period; the conflict cost the lives of more than 45,000 people,
including soldiers, guerrillas, and civilians (Zürcher 2017, 306–307; also HRW
1994 and 1997). According to Turkish and international human rights organi-
zations, an estimated three to four million civilians were displaced as a result
of the scorched-earth counter-offensive operations undertaken by the Turkish4
Nikos Christofis
Map 1.1 Cities and towns in Upper KurdistanIntroduction 5
military, including the forced evacuation of nearly 4,000 Kurdish rural settle-
ments (Gunes and Zeydanlıoğlu 2014, 1; Jongerden 2001, 80–86). By 1990 the
influence of the PKK expanded as it morphed into a popular national-liberation
movement (Jongerden and Akkaya 2011, 125),5 attracting the support of mil-
lions of supporters and sympathizers from all parts of Kurdistan and Western
Europe.
The Kurds and the Justice and Development Party
The ruling AKP, a liberal-turned-illiberal Islamist and conservative party, has
dominated Turkish politics since 2002. The party’s rise to power was greeted
initially with great promise both at home and abroad (Tuğal 2016, 4), as it pro-
moted democracy and EU accession. Born of the Milli Görüş (National Outlook)
Islamist tradition in Turkey, the AKP nevertheless broke away, charting a new
course that contributed to the party’s mass acceptance. Nevertheless, the party
remained true to the position of the Milli Görüş (and Turkish Islamic discourse
in general) in emphasizing a presumed ‘natural’ synthesis between Turkish Islam
and Turkish national identity (Çosar 2011, 184). In hindsight, the party’s commit-
ment to a popular—even populist—Turkish nationalist-Islamic fusion contained
the seeds of its embrace of anti-Kurdish discourse and action after 2010.
The context was shifting even before the AKP came to power. Abdullah
Öcalan’s arrest in February 1999 at the Greek embassy in Kenya opened up a new
phase in the history of the party and of the Kurds in Turkey. In 1999, the PKK
declared a unilateral ceasefire, reducing the violence significantly. Until the end
of the 1990s, over one-third of the annual central government budget was spent
on combating the PKK (Waldman and Çalışkan 2016, 168), something that along
with the heavy human losses from both sides, forced the newly-elected AKP
government to acknowledge that the Kurdish question would never be solved
by military means alone. The policy posture moved, therefore, towards dialogue.
Nevertheless, violence continued intermittingly. The global ‘War on Terror’ and
the Iraq War in 2003, which saw the US split the world into ‘the war zone’ and
‘the peace zone’ (Aras and Toktaş 2007), also affected Turkey, as the PKK has
remained on global watchlists as a ‘terrorist’ organization.
A resumption of activities in 2004 answered the Turkish government’s slow
pace and inertia regarding the promotion of reforms and peace by the PKK. The
following years counted many more victims on both sides. Discussions in 2009
about granting Kurds greater rights as part of the Kürt Açılım (Kurdish Opening)
did not prevent violence between the two sides. Indeed, the legal reforms that
granted limited cultural and linguistic rights to the Kurds have not yielded signifi-
cant results in solving the conflict. As Zeydanlıoğlu notes, while the AKP govern-
ment has been much more open-minded than any previous government in Turkish
history regarding the Kurds, these gestures have been systematically presented as
‘charity’, or ‘gifts’, of the state’s paternalist policy, rather than genuine recogni-
tion of the Kurdish people and their distinctive identity.66 Nikos Christofis Map 1.2 Cities and towns in Lower Kurdistan
Introduction 7
In other words, the extent of liberalization for the Kurds should not be exag-
gerated as the dominant Turkish perception remains: the Kurds should not be
ungrateful by formulating any demands linking the linguistic issue to broader
political, regional, or administrative demands, such as the right to public educa-
tion in their mother tongue (Gunes 2017, 17). The AKP’s ‘open-mindedness’ did
not last for long, despite the Kürt Açılım and the proposal by Öcalan to estab-
lish a ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’. Although this democratic opening
towards the Kurds was welcomed initially, it was soon replaced by mistrust. The
government’s poor handling of the issue, the closure of the Democratic Society
Party, which succeeded the Democratic People’s Party in 2005, and the arrest of
over 1,000 of its members the following months were formative factors. The talks
revived once more in Oslo in 2009, but clashes between Turkish soldiers and the
PKK in the summer of 2011 put a halt again to the peace talks for another two
years (Merdjanova 2018; Kadıoğlu 2019). These entered a new phase in March
2013, after Öcalan again called for a ceasefire and the PKK’s disarmament and
withdrawal from Turkey, in what is known as the Solution Process.7
The Solution Process took place amidst a highly polarized climate. Fear and
suspicion have intensified after Erdoğan declared the birth of a Yeni Türkiye (New
Turkey) (Christofis 2018). Erdoğan’s Yeni Türkiye vision, which emerged first
in 2010 (Bora 2018, 11), aims to see ‘Erdoğan [become] the party, and the party
Erdoğan’ (İnsel 2015). Indeed, since 2010, the party has undergone a ‘neoliberal
authoritarian’ (Christofis 2020) shift on all fronts, while the AKP’s illiberal politi-
cal developments are characterized now by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s
power grab, loss of judicial independence, and electoral manipulations (Yeşilada
2016, 23). The Kurds have been confronted by this turn, as have other minority
groups in Turkey, with the AKP seeking to define ‘the People’ in increasingly nar-
row (if ostensibly ‘national’) terms. The Kurds fall outside the AKP’s definition
of ‘the People’ as it is being defined in Erdoğan’s Yeni Türkiye.
The AKP’s third electoral landslide in 2011 accelerated the process of hegem-
onic political centralization. Along with its silent partner, Fethullah Gülen and
his religious movement, the government moved to ‘cleanse’ the state apparatus
by its Kemalist rivals launching mass purges, mainly, in the army. The illiberal,
authoritarian shift in Erdoğan’s Turkey created a ‘polemical’ political and social
climate leading to the Gezi Park protests in May/June 2013, a diffuse, nationwide
popular reaction against the AKP’s neoliberal, authoritarian, and conservative
populism (Akça 2013). The polarized climate gave many Turks new sympathy
for the Kurds, which Erdoğan was already beginning to recast in classic terms
(i.e., as an ‘internal’ threat to the country’s sovereignty). Indeed, one of the main
attributes of the New Turkey is conspiracy theories that foreground ‘internal’ and
‘external’ threats to the country, essentially reviving—if it was ever dormant—the
dominant official discourse and repertoires on the Kurds and the Kurdish question
in general. In other words—along with the protesters of Gezi (and, since 2014,
the Gülen movement)—the Kurds are presented in state discourse through state-
owned media once again as terrorists. For example, addressing a parliamentary
meeting of his party on 9 October 2012, Erdoğan ruled out public education in8 Nikos Christofis
Kurdish, since the mother tongue of the country is Turkish and ‘the separatist ter-
rorist organization PKK’, was exploiting this issue (Zeydanlıoğlu 2014, 163); a
policy that continued the following years.
The launch of the Halkların Demokratik Kongresi (People’s Democratic
Congress, HDK) at the end of 2011 to broaden the base of opposing and dissident
voices to AKP policies led to the founding, the following year, of the Halkların
Demokratik Partisi (People’s Democratic Party, HDP), the political wing of the
HDK. The new party espouses an anti-capitalist agenda and issued a political pro-
gram that openly supports the rights of women, the disabled, the LGBT commu-
nity, and the youth in the public domain. It also supports differences in languages,
cultures, and faiths, representing the ‘historically marginalized sectors’ that have
been ignored for decades in Turkey (Gunes 2017, 19). The new party tested its
strength for the first time in the presidential elections of 2014 with Selahattin
Demirtaş, the co-chair of the party since 2014,8 receiving just under the 10 percent
of the votes—the threshold needed to enter parliament. The national elections of
the following year saw the HDP cross the threshold when it achieved an unprece-
dented 13 percent of the national vote, drawing support not only from the Kurdish
regions, where AKP has often polled very well but also from a large number of
Turks (Gunes 2017, 24–25).
The HDP’s electoral triumph in June 2015 posed a direct challenge to Erdoğan’s
hegemony. Already in April 2015, Erdoğan had repealed the results of the
Dolmabahçe Agreement. The Agreement was made between the Turkish govern-
ment and pro-Kurdish lawmakers at the Prime Minister’s office in Istanbul on 28
February 2013 and outlined the steps for the resolution of the Kurdish issue, granting
further rights to the Kurds. Özpek argues, although the peace process was presented
as a pre-condition of democratization by the negotiating parties, peace-building
was seen as an instrument to keep criticism away from the AKP government, and
the PKK and democratization trend sharply declined after the peace process started.
Nevertheless, this is unconvincing, especially considering the long time-spam
of the process, from the Oslo talks in 2009 until 2013. Indeed, the democratization
trend sharply declined after the peace process started. The increasing authori-
tarianism of the AKP, combined with the militant nature of the PKK leadership,
seem to have made the peace process futile leaving no room for non-state actors
to interact and work towards a stable peace (Christofis 2020, 19). In that respect,
Turan (2019, 208) provides two more dynamics, which complicated the power
balance and even created a deadlock:
First, in the context of the Syrian crisis, Rojava became a zone where both
sides claimed as their own sphere of influence. Ankara government chose to
avoid antagonistic relations with the ISIS for a long time, while the PYD was
defending Rojava against the ISIS. Second, […], during the election process
in June 2015, ‘both sides put each other on target board’. What this means
is that the HDP’s declaration of non-support for the constitutional reform for
the presidential system disappointed the AKP officials who wanted to see the
Kurds content for a subjugated and an unequal position.Introduction 9
Following the 7 June elections, interests of the AKP and the PKK elite diverged,
and the violent clashes recommenced. Erdoğan sought to leverage the Kurdish
issue to squeeze the HDP out of its ascendant position by confecting a period of
political chaos in the lead up to fresh elections on 1 November 2015. This period
was marked by plain terror, such as the Ankara bombings two weeks before the
run-up elections of November, where more than a hundred Kurds lost their lives,
an action that was also attributed to the Turkish state. The confrontation with the
PKK resulted in several hundred deaths, with the military launching operations in
several Kurdish cities, such as Diyarbakir and Cizre, where more than 75 percent
of the population had voted for the HDP. These attacks against the Kurds did
not stop in 2016 or 2017. The attempted coup on 15 July 2016—which Erdoğan
described as a ‘godsend’—saw the declaration of a state of emergency (subse-
quently renewed several times), which has given him and his parties a free hand to
consolidate the AKP’s hegemony. The constitutional referendum to extend presi-
dential power passed in this environment. The result? A regression in Turkey to
the classic posture of the Kemalist ancien régime, better expressed in the motto
‘Tek Millet, Tek Parti, Tek Şef’ (‘One Nation, One Party, One Leader’), leaves
the Kurds in Turkey, as ever, in a very ambivalent and precarious state.
At the same time, international developments, and in particular, in Syria, have
complicated the issue of the Kurds even more. Τhe Arab uprisings provided an
opportunity for Ankara to actively get involved in the regional politics of MENA
and promote itself as a ‘model’ for the region. Indeed, the Arab uprisings have
loomed large on the Turkish foreign policy agenda as they have shifted the bal-
ance of power in the broader Middle East region as well as impacting on the
region’s relations with international actors. Soon after the protests began, many
countries’ regimes drastically changed. The Ben Ali regime in Tunisia and the
Mubarak regime in Egypt were toppled within a few weeks, while Libya’s de
facto ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, was killed and a civil war followed. Within this
context, the so-called ‘Turkish model’ of the AKP was highlighted by many as the
‘best example’ for the economic development and democratization of the Middle
East region (Christofis 2019, 7).
Against this background, Syria, where the street protests that started in March
2011 have turned into a civil war and the possibility of a solution to the con-
flict until now remains bleak, presents perhaps the most important spillover case
of Ankara’s policies. Turkish-Syrian relations moved, after a long stalemate in
the Cold War years, having experienced a series of changes that culminated in
the ‘Levant Quartet’, an agreement for closer economic and cultural integration
between Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. By 2012, however, the relations
between the two countries deteriorated, leading the Turkish President Erdoğan
to criticize the Assad regime’s policy towards the rebels and called for sanc-
tions against it, while President Gül warned Syria not to provide any assis-
tance to the PKK, bringing to an end the warm relations that were nursed
since 2003.
(Derisiotis 2013, 656)10
Nikos Christofis
Map 1.3 Demographic distribution of the Kurds in the Middle EastIntroduction 11
As the opposition to the regime grew in numbers throughout 2011, it was believed
at the time that al-Assad’s days in power were numbered. After the opposition
proved ineffective in toppling the regime and a long and bloody civil war ensued
across Syria, Western powers have, however, gradually reduced their commit-
ments, and Turkey decided to join the Saudis and the Qataris to bring a regime
change—with very little success (Turan 2015, 142; Christofis 2019, 7).
Yet in its encouragement of opposition to Damascus, as Park (2019, 283)
rightly points out, Ankara failed, at least initially, to anticipate the seriousness of
the Kurdish dimension of the Syrian crisis because it downplayed the emergence
of the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekitîya Demokrat, PYD) and its armed
wing, the People’s Protection Units (Yenikneyen Parastina Gel, YPG)—both
affiliated to the Kurdish Communities Union (Koma Civaken Kurdistan, KCK),
an umbrella organization pledging allegiance to Abdullah Öcalan—as the lead
element in the Kurdish response to the Syrian crisis (Saeed 2017).9 As Gunter
(2021a) rightly observes,
the resulting Syrian Kurdish autonomy caused great apprehension in Turkey
because suddenly PKK flags were flying just across its southern border with
Syria. What had been a common border with the much more pliable Iraqi
Kurds largely led by Massoud Barzani had abruptly metastasized into one
with the Syrian Kurds largely led by the PKK‐affiliated PYD and its military
arm the YPG.
As the civil war was unfolding, the Syrian government responded in mid-2012 by
withdrawing its military from three mainly Kurdish areas leading to the establish-
ment of Rojava by the PYD in early 2013. Schmidinger points out that compared
to Syria’s other theaters of war, the areas under Kurdish control did not change
much after the summer of 2012; what did change, however, were the neighbors
of the three enclaves that bordered territory under its control in northern Syria.
Moreover, while they bordered areas that were, for the most part, either held by
the regime or by units of the Free Syrian Army, in 2013, this situation changed:
The military gains of jihadist parties in the civil war, particularly of the Jabhat
al-Nusra and the so-called ‘Islamic State’ (IS), which had referred to itself as
‘Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria’ until the conquest of Mosul and the
declaration of a Caliphate on 29 June 2014, led to a situation where, in the
course 2013, the two eastern regions of Cizîrê and Kobanê were increasingly
encircled by jihadists and, within Syria, were completely locked in by IS.
(Schmidinger 2018, 101)
Allsopp and van Wilgenburg (2019, 18) note that ‘as the PYD system of govern-
ance continued to alter and evolve in response to the changing configurations
of territorial control in Syria, this brought with it the need to form tactical alli-
ances with other non-Kurdish groups’. The YPG repelled repeated attacks by
ISIS until mid-2014, but an IS advance in northern Iraq in June 2014 drew that12 Nikos Christofis country’s Kurds into the conflict. As a result, the government of Iraq’s autono- mous Kurdistan Region sent its Peshmerga forces,10 the military forces of the autonomous region of Kurdistan Region of Iraq, to areas abandoned by the Iraqi army. In return, in August 2014, the jihadists launched a surprise offensive, and the Peshmerga withdrew from several areas. A turning point for the PYD-led administration was the ‘siege of Kobanê’ when, between 13 September 2014 and 15 March 2015, the so-called Islamic State laid siege to the Kurdish majority town of Kobanê, which was almost lost to its army. A number of towns inhabited by religious minorities fell, notably Sinjar, where ISIS militants killed or captured thousands of Yazidis (Park 2019, 286–287; Schmidinger 2018, 104; Derisiotis 2019). The proximity of the town to the Turkish border, on the other hand, allowed the media to follow the impend- ing tragedy closely and garner Western support for embattled Kurdish fighters. Military intervention by the US-led anti-ISIS coalition and support from the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga helped tip the scales against ISIS and further legitimized the image of the Kurds as reliable Western allies (Allsopp and van Wilgenburg 2019, 18). In January 2015, after a battle that left at least 1,600 people dead, Kurdish forces regained control of Kobanê. The Kurds—fighting alongside several local Arab militias under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance, and helped by US-led coalition airstrikes, weapons, and advisers—then steadily drove IS out of tens of thousands of square kilometers of territory in northeastern Syria and established control over a large stretch of the border with Turkey. By October 2017, SDF fighters captured the de facto ISIS capital of Raqqa and then advanced south-eastwards into the neighboring province of Deir al-Zour—the jihadists’ last significant foothold in Syria (BBC 2019). While Ankara saw the PYD/YPG as an extension to the PKK—and, therefore, as a threat—the PYD’s position was that its struggle focused primarily on Kurdish self-determination and Abdullah Öcalan’s concept of ‘democratic autonomy’, rather than on the overthrow of the government in Damascus as such. Regardless, the war in Syria provided Turkey with a pretext to get actively involved in Syria. With the emergence of the PYD/YPG in Rojava in northern Syria, Ankara now worked towards both the overthrow of Assad and the obstruction of Kurdish autonomy in the region by supporting and harboring jihadists as mercenary fight- ers. Despite any claims by Ankara or from anywhere else, there is little doubt that democratic confederalism in Rojava is a more developed form of democ- racy than systems of representative governance that are mistakenly referred to as democracy. ‘However strange this inclusive system of council-based, bottom-up governing practices might appear’, Schmidinger (2019, xi) notes, ‘there is little doubt that direct democratic forms and cooperative techniques developed in the stateless democracy in Syrian Rojava are a politically and sociologically remark- able example of egalitarian politics’. In August 2016, Ankara sent troops and tanks over the border to support a Syrian rebel offensive against IS. It has maintained a military presence in north- ern Syria ever since. Those forces captured the key border town of Jarablus,
Introduction 13
preventing the YPG-led SDF from seizing the territory itself and linking up with
the Kurdish enclave of Afrin to the west.11 In 2018, Turkish troops and allied
Syrian rebels launched an operation to expel YPG fighters from Afrin. Dozens
of civilians were killed and tens of thousands displaced. Turkey’s government
says the YPG and the PYD are extensions of the PKK, share its goal of secession
through armed struggle, and are terrorist organizations that must be eliminated
(BBC 2019). This intervention has resulted in the departure of more than half
of Afrin’s inhabitants, changing the city’s demographics as documented by the
Independent International Commission of Inquiry’s (IICI) mid-September 2020
report (Soz 2021). The report also revealed gross violations perpetrated against
Kurdish inhabitants, especially in Syrian regions under the control of the Turkish
army and armed opposition fighters. Afrin is among these areas, in addition to the
cities Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ayn in northeastern Syria, that have been controlled
by Ankara and the armed opposition since late October 2019, after most of their
Kurdish inhabitants had fled (Soz 2021).
The war Turkey waged against Afrin beginning in January 2018 did not just
destroy Kurdish autonomy; it threatens to undermine Kurdish existence at the
‘Mountain of the Kurds’ as a whole (Schmidinger 2019, 77). Analysts rightly
argue that, although Erdoğan himself, and Ankara, has stated that his country does
not intend to occupy Syria but only aims to protect its borders and improve the
local humanitarian situation, this Turkish military presence followed by political,
economic, and cultural engagement in northern Syria would suggest a different
story (Talbot 2019, 85). Indeed, the Turkish invasion of northern Syria, the third
in a row during the almost decade of the Syrian war, is a prime example of illegal
warfare, as it produces no legitimate basis for Turkey or the security concerns of
Ankara to intervene in a foreign country. On the contrary, taking into considera-
tion domestic politics in Turkey it seems that a military intervention was orches-
trated in order to counter the increasing dissidence and the failures of Erdoğan and
Turkey’s government in the interior of the country. In fact, present conditions and
policies towards the Kurds, both inside and outside Turkey, enhances, and in fact
discloses, the interrelation between domestic and foreign policymaking and the
militarization of the two and through coercion, to ideologically transform Turkey
into a ‘New Turkey’.
In the meantime, in June 2018 the United States and Turkey reached an under-
standing for the SDF/YPG forces to begin pulling out of Manbij and be replaced
by separate, coordinated US and Turkish patrols in the western side of the area,
suggesting that the United States would again be in charge to decide whether to
support its de facto Syrian Kurdish ally or de jure Turkish NATO ally. As the sug-
gested settlement declared by Turkey that the Manbij model eventually would also
be applied to Syria’s Raqqa, Kobanê, and other important areas controlled by the
Syrian Kurdish PYD/YPG, and with a proposed roadmap certain to be opposed
and rejected by the Syrian Kurds, the long‐term possibility of a US‐Turkish mili-
tary clash remained (Gunter 2021a). Trump’s sudden decision to withdraw from
Syria in December 2018 put an end to the potentiality of a clash with Turkey,
but at the same time, apparently left the door open for Turkey, Syria, Russia, and14 Nikos Christofis
Iran to move in to the detriment of the Syrian Kurds. US involvement rekindled
the following summer, continuing to bargain with Turkey over Syria’s future,
as well as creating a safe zone in northeastern Syria that would allow Turkey to
protect its borders from the perceived threat of Syrian Kurdish SDF/YPG forces.
The second US withdrawal from Syria in October 2019 quickly led to a major
change in the situation by allowing Turkey finally to establish a small safety zone
stretching approximately 75 miles along the Syrian‐Turkish border between the
cities of Tel Abyad and Ras al‐Ayn and maybe 20 miles deep (Talbot 2019, 91;
Knights and van Wilgenburg 2021, 188–189). This resulted in Moscow, Ankara,
and the Assad regime apparently achieving strategic gains while the Syrian Kurds
experienced significant losses.
Thus, on 9 October 2019, Turkey finally drove into a small section of north-
eastern Syria, in an attempt to establish a ‘safe zone’ to end what it claimed to be
an existential PKK threat to its territorial integrity, a move that succeeded, how-
ever, only with Russia’s permission. As far as Turkey’s government is concerned,
this, at least in the short run, increased its popularity, especially after the poor
performance in the municipal elections in March and June elections. However,
it seems unlikely that Russia will permit Turkey to extend its safety zone much
further against the wishes of its Syrian ally who, of course, wants to regain all its
lost territory (Gunter 2021b).
Despite the proof of gross violations and displacement of large numbers of
Kurds, Turkish state media still deny these events, using the presence of mil-
lions of Kurds in Turkey and Ankara’s relationship with the Kurdistan Regional
Government in Iraq to deny any ethnocentrism in Turkish-Syrian engagement
(Soz 2021). The state of the Kurds in Turkey, however, tells a different story.
Ankara’s hand extends not only inside Turkey, where Turkish authorities have
removed Kurdish words that were written on signs in municipalities where a
pro-Kurdish party won, and the murder a young Kurdish who was just listen-
ing to Kurdish music, but also abroad, as for example, when Ankara called for
a Norwegian city to remove a painting depicting Kurdish female fighters from
Syria. All these incidents underscore the societal hatred against Kurds in Turkey,
a hatred that is fueled by state media, especially those supported and funded by the
far-right National Movement Party (MHP), which strives to wipe out the Kurds
but demonstrates also Ankara’s perception of the Kurds as a real electoral threat.
It has become abundantly evident that Turkey’s adoption during the past dec-
ade of a new foreign policy orientation and official foreign policy discourse has
been about building a new nationalist hegemonic project and reconstructing ‘the
conception of nation in Turkey and [redefining] the notions of national history,
national homeland, and national interest’, in which nationalism and foreign policy
decision-making go hand in hand. Here, nationalism is understood as an ideologi-
cal instrument of political hegemony, through which attempts to win the consent
of large sections of society, to ‘interpellate’, and, when necessary, mobilize the
same for a particular political project (Saraçoğlu and Demirkol 2015).
Given that foreign policymaking legitimizes the domestic-level hegemonic
project, the AKP’s nationalist discourse and its foreign policy discourse are soYou can also read
