The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
Ankara protests massacre holding white balloons in remembrance of their friends, October 13. Demotix/ Recep Yilmaz. All rights reserved.
On October 10, one of
the deadliest bomb incidents in the history of the Turkish Republic shook both
domestic and international public opinion. Photos and videos of people covered
in blood, then smothered by tear gas shot by the police at an Ankara peace
rally were indeed appalling and terrifying. And yet, the sheer spectacle of the
horrendous carnage can only hint at the complexity of the wound inflicted on
Turkish society by the attack.
Younger generations have
said that they were initiated into political awareness and mobilization by
the Occupy Gezi events in the summer of 2013. That year was the year of great
hopes, not only because of the revival of grassroots politics, but also because
a new political party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) led mainly by Turkey’s
Kurds, came into existence to serve as an umbrella organization uniting several
marginalized groups. Two years later, despite a brief euphoric interlude after
the 7 June general elections, moods are gravitating towards hopelessness. The
main reason is that the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) deploys
illegitimate tactics to confiscate or subjugate alternative modes of political
engagement. As far as dissident movements and parliamentary opposition are
concerned, most efforts to devise ways of voicing demands or addressing wrongs
are barred by cunning maneuvers ranging from taking advantage of legal
loopholes to outright oppression.
The marginalization of dissent
The most insidious
tactic involves the constant use of the term ‘terrorism’. The most insidious tactic involves the constant use of the
term ‘terrorism’. The armed Kurdish guerilla organization (PKK) and
ultra-leftist fractions were already labeled “terrorist” by Turkey and its western
allies, but the AKP government uses this designation to outlaw and stigmatize
the Gülen movement (its former Islamist ally), Occupy Gezi, the HDP (a party
that is now in parliament) and countless journalists and public personalities
who dare express discontent. Officials have even spread doubt about the
perpetrator of the Ankara bombing, insinuating that the Kurds might have blown
themselves up on purpose to gain a few more votes. Once it became public
knowledge that the perpetrator was affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq
and Syria (ISIS), the claim that the PKK might be collaborating with the ISIS was
voiced to keep the waters murky. Five days after the incident, the government
imposed a media ban on the Ankara
attack, prohibiting “all kinds of news, interviews, criticism and similar
publications in print, visual, social media and all kinds of media on the
Internet.”
The government’s
method in responding to the Ankara attack that cost more than a hundred lives
harks back the memory of the 1990s, the darkest period in the “low intensity
war” with the Kurds in Turkey. Instead of breaking (as it often likes to claim)
with a long tradition of authoritarian state power, the AKP is undeniably
perpetrating it. Any struggle or initiative that could potentially decentralize
the state apparatus so as to allow a space to breathe for languages,
ethnicities, religious or ideological affiliations not sanctioned by official
representations of ‘Turkishness’ have been severely crushed throughout the
history of the Republic. The 1990s was when the country was literally split
into two: on the one hand, Kurds in the southeastern provinces lived under a
State of Emergency that gave extraordinary powers to governors and the Turkish
armed forces to carry out homicide, imprisonment, censorship and village
evacuations. On the other hand, the Turkish public in the rest of the country
was brought to believe that the Kurdish question was the outcome of the
treachery of a band of terrorists whose eradication was the only means of
dealing with the problem.
The term ‘terrorism’
and the complicity of mainstream media outlets effectively hid the complexity
of the situation from the wider public for more than 20 years. The following
avowal by the prominent Turkish journalist Hasan Cemal is revelatory in
this regard:
“In Turkey, neither
journalists nor the press fulfilled their duties with respect to the Kurdish or
the Southeastern problem. The number of those who did remained low. I admit it:
as a graduate of political science, I did not know what the Kurdish problem
was. It was only when the PKK entered the political scene that I started to learn
I did not know what the Kurdish problem was. It was
only when the PKK entered the political scene that I started to learn …
If, at that time, we could have exposed the Diyarbakır Military Prison as the
horrible space in which crimes against humanity were being perpetrated… maybe
certain things could have been different in Turkey.”
A short history of ‘terrorism’
Terrorism is a real synch
word, but not in the sense we have come to think of it. It dates back to the
French Revolution when it referred to state-induced terror, that of Robespierre
out on a witch hunt among his very comrades. Opponents of Tsarist Russia then ‘democratized’
the term, bringing it within the reach of the populace whose only means of
resistance against an absolutist regime was to disturb the ordinariness of
everyday submission by disseminating fear and terror.
The French resistance
was ‘terrorist’ in the eyes of the Nazis and their collaborators. The bombing
of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 by an underground Zionist group was
one instance of the deployment of terrorist tactics to overthrow colonizers and
imperialist powers. In time, all of the previous connotations of the term were
relegated to oblivion. Terrorism became a term that designates a threat to the
state’s monopoly over the means of violence and summons the executive
prerogative, i.e., the right of a state to short-circuit democratic processes
of deliberation so as to decide on an effective course of action in eliminating
that threat.
The US ‘war on
terror’ is one such instance in recent history, and the Turkish state’s present
crackdown on Kurds and opponents is another. What the two cases have in common
is the pretext that the term ‘terrorism’ provides for disregarding basic rights
and liberties. It’s not that the latter are enough to protect lives in the face
of governmental prerogatives, but they can serve as discursive weapons to be
used and cited by social groups and movements in their struggle to resist
overarching forms of power. What the quasi-sacred term ‘terrorism’ does today is
to curb the will and the ability to resist arbitrary rule. What the quasi-sacred term ‘terrorism’ does today is to curb
the will and the ability to resist arbitrary rule.
Turkey’s Security Bill
In Turkey, the serial production of dead
bodies has reached a critical mass between June and mid-October: 694 people died, more
than 200 of whom were not members of the state’s security forces or of the Kurdish
guerillas. Bombs shattered lives and limbs in three peaceful rallies in
Diyarbakır, Suruç and Ankara. The methods and technology used in all three
attacks were the same. These can indeed be classified as instances of ‘terrorism’,
but there is more. The equation “PKK=terrorist=HDP” has been persistently
repeated and drummed into the general public’s mind since March, when President
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan began to publicly criticize the road map to peace
negotiated between the government and the HDP.
In striking contrast,
the PKK’s imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan’s letter was read later to a large
crowd of Kurds gathered on March 21 for the annual Newroz (Kurdish New Year) celebrations. Taking the peace process
seriously, Öcalan called on the guerillas to hold a conference to discuss the
prospect of laying down their arms. Taking the peace
process seriously, Öcalan called on the guerillas to …discuss the prospect of
laying down their arms. Disregarding the will of his own party’s
government, President Erdoğan also opposed the establishment of a monitoring
committee to oversee the peace negotiations and denied that there is such a
thing as the “Kurdish problem” in Turkey. Erdoğan was in turn criticized by the deputy prime
minister for meddling in affairs that lie under the jurisdiction of the cabinet.
But the government
soon succumbed to the voice of its master. The AKP ‘accidentally’ omitted the
peace process from its electoral manifesto. In April, AKP’s
parliamentary majority voted in a draconian security bill that allowed for
strip searches and 48-hour detention periods. It gave license to the police to
use firearms and to ‘remove’ protestors during demonstrations to unspecified
locations (not necessarily to the police station). The bill virtually turned every
public protest into an ‘act of
terrorism’. Furthermore, Prime Minister Davutoğlu called the HDP “a
gang of violence, a gang of terror” and Erdoğan said it was “propped up by
terrorists.” The accusations came at a time when the HDP was preparing to compete
in general elections as a political party that promised peace, participatory
democracy, gender equality, freedom of expression, conscience and sexual
orientation. In May, 56 attacks on HDP offices were reported throughout Turkey,
some of which were encouraged by local governors appointed by the AKP.
A selective ‘war on terror’
Thus, well ahead of
the June 7 elections in which the
HDP obtained 13.2% of the national vote and got 80 deputies into parliament, the AKP was already
preparing for a “fight against terrorism.” Conspicuously enough, a similar
preemptive logic was not applied to ISIS. Earlier on in the year the AKP
rejected a parliamentary motion to launch an
investigation into the activities carried out by ISIS in Turkey. Since we now
know with a fair amount of certainty that the bomb attacks in Diyarbakır, Suruç
and Ankara were the work of ISIS, this omission seems even more dubious. The
duplicity of the government – paying lip service to peace with the Kurds
domestically while assuming an extremely hostile stance since 2014 towards
Syrian Kurds fighting ISIS – hints at how the AKP was caught between two or more fires. The pro-PKK
Democratic Union Party (PYD) was instrumental in ousting ISIS from parts of
northern Syria and establishing the autonomous Kurdish enclave of Kobane. The government
was being cornered by both the geopolitical game and the electoral game.
The
government was being cornered by both the geopolitical game and the electoral
game.
Turkish and foreign
analysts have mainly focused on how the
peace process broke down when the PKK declared it would be resuming its armed
activities in the aftermath of the Suruç massacre.The PKK might indeed have
overestimated its chances of riding the revolutionary wind blowing from
Kobane in order to declare autonomy in the Kurdish-populated provinces of
Turkey. US support of the PYD also played a role in this miscalculation. In any
case, it chose to instigate an armed uprising in such a way as to cast a shadow
on HDP’s electoral victory.
But what often goes
unnoticed is the government’s unwillingness in allowing the new parliament to
function. Having passed the 10% electoral threshold, one of the most
undemocratic provisions in the 1982 Constitution drafted under the aegis of
putschist generals, the HDP was ready to revive the peace talks and propose to
establish truth commissions on the massacres,
executions and forced disappearances of recent history. Through legal but
largely illegitimate moves the AKP, which is still the largest party in
parliament, stalled negotiations with a view to forming a coalition and then
called for snap elections on November 1.
Ever since, there is
a fierce upsurge in state violence against both Kurds
and Turkish dissidents. The so-called ‘war on terror’ has literally turned into
a war against whole cities or districts in southeastern Turkey. The town of Cizre was not the first,
neither the last to undergo military siege and curfew, but in Cizre this lasted
for 8 days. Civilians, among them several children, were shot by snipers or
killed by mortar fire. The inhabitants of the town under siege suffered water and
food shortages; electricity, telecommunication, medicine and health care was
unavailable for days on end. Massive arrests, dozens of raids into homes and
newspaper offices, and numerous lawsuits against suspected “terrorists”
followed suite. Meanwhile, 128 HDP offices were attacked in a single night on September 8 by
what appeared to be ultra-nationalist mobs, although there are indications that youth groups
affiliated with the AKP were also involved.
Turkey polarized
Erdogan and top officials In Ankara to mourn soldiers killed by the PKK, September 2015. Demotix/Recep Yilmaz. All rights reserved.This spiral of
violence and finger pointing has resulted in dividing Turkish society, perhaps
not as severely as in the 1990s, but severely enough. The technological
difference between then and now is that social media enables the circulation of
news and opinion that conventional mainstream media censors. The photographs of
wounded or dead Kurdish civilians and guerilla, reports filed by human rights
groups, and opinion expressed by the opposition can now be circulated – which
is why the AKP government frequently imposes social media blackouts. Whether the social
media help alleviate the polarization is another question. Ethnic hatred (Kurds
depicted as “dogs”, “bastards” and even “Armenians”), disinformation and mud
slinging are as widespread on Internet as they are on print or on the screen. they were thinking about “Peace=terrorism” in a manner
reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984.
This is one of the
reasons why the October 10 Ankara rally was organized by several labor unions
and political parties: it was an attempt to allow the expression of demands for
peace viva voce. The rally was to
provide an occasion for the supporters of peace to make a bodily appearance,
thus exhibiting their solidarity with the Kurds and hoping to put pressure on
the government to stop cracking down on the opposition. In an evil twist of
fate, hundreds of bodies were destroyed that day – and so too the sanity of
those who believed they could still sway the hardened nationalist sentiments of
Turkish citizens.
The wound inflicted
on society by the Ankara bombing is most strikingly revealed at the Turkey-Iceland
soccer match two days after the massacre. When an announcement was made before
the match to observe a minute of silence for the victims of the attack, some
fans whistled in protest and chanted “Martyrs
are immortal; our land is indivisible.” They were alluding to the most popular
slogan in Turkey’s ‘fight against terrorism’, namely, that soldiers who die
while combatting the PKK are ‘martyrs’ and that the Kurds will not be permitted
to divide the country. As Tim Arango of the New York Times writes: “Nothing seems to be enough to bring Turks together these
days, even for a shared moment of grief or triumph.”
Obviously, the fans
were reiterating the official equation “PKK=terrorism=HDP”, but this time the
equation had been expanded in order to include peace demonstrators and
activists. It was as if they were thinking about “Peace=terrorism” in a manner
reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984.
Even worse, it was as
if those who perished in Ankara were responsible for their own death. This is
indeed the sign of deep social trauma. But is it
surprising that such confusion may arise in the hearts and minds of citizens when
a state besieges its own towns and perpetrates terror among its own population?
The outlook is grim indeed.
How to cite:
Gambetti Z. (2015) «Ankara’s war on peace», Open Democracy / ISA RC-47: Open Movements, 17 October. https://opendemocracy.net/zeynep-gambetti/ankara's-war-on-peace