Activists in Office: Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey

6. Creating a New Kurdish Subject

142 I n April 1999 pro-Kurdish party candidates swept into local offices in towns and cities across the southeast. For the first time in Turkey’s history , a Kurdish political party expressly committed to furthering collective Kurdish rights had gained control of dozens of municipalities in the Kurdish-majority southeastern provinces. In local elections in 2004 and 2009, pro-Kurdish candidates repeated this election feat and won even more seats in local government. This chapter argues that pro-Kurdish parties and officials used the resources of local office to try to establish an alternative Kurdish governmental presence and to construct a new Kurdish subject or collective community. Who were the subjects who lived in Diyarbakır’s Sur, Bağlar, and Yenişehir neighborhoods? What did this citizenry look like, how did 6 Creating a New Kurdish Subject The everyday world in which the members of any community move, their taken-for-granted field of social action, is populated not by anybodies, faceless men without qualities, but by somebodies, concrete classes of determinate persons positively characterized and appropriately labeled. And the symbol systems which define these classes are not given in the nature of things—they are historically constructed, socially maintained, and individually applied. —Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 363–64 creating a new kurdish subject 143 people sound and behave, what did they need, and what did they want? Pro-Kurdish elected officials provided alternative, “Kurdified” kinds of answers to these questions through two main mechanisms. First, they engaged in bureaucratic activities and modernization projects that could serve to build a competing vision of state-society relations as well as legitimize Kurdish activists’ demands for more local or regional autonomy. These projects can be understood as a pro-Kurdish effort to develop, in Michel Foucault’s classic formulation, a new governmentality, a style of governance in which the welfare and aspirations of a population become both object and subject of rule (Foucault 1991, 87–105). Second, pro-Kurdish mayors made extensive use of symbolic politics that helped routinize explicitly Kurdish norms and practices, re-marked the cultural and physical landscape as Kurdish, and perpetuated pro-Kurdish mayors’ images as anti-systemic challengers. Pro-Kurdish mayoral activities between 1999 and 2008 can also be seen as a form of “as-if politics”: politics that, although understood by all involved to be somehow less than they seem, nonetheless produce guidelines for speech and behavior, define national membership, and create complicity by involving large numbers of people in their performance (Wedeen 1999, 6, 83–84).1 Pro-Kurdish mayors continued to operate within a highly constrained political context, in which provincial governors, prosecutors, security forces, and other central authorities retained considerable capacity to circumscribe their activities through bureaucratic and legal procedures. The mayors’ construction of a Kurdish national space from the inside out was thus a tenuous and piecemeal project that was highly vulnerable to external dynamics (especially actions of the state and of the PKK). Nonetheless, access to the many different types of resources of local office allowed pro-Kurdish mayors to try to build a kind of “as-if Kurdistan” that served to convey an impression of authority and to construct a new sociopolitical community. These activities directly challenged Turkish official narratives that rejected collective Kurdish identities while reinforcing the notion of a cultural space (Kurdistan) distinct from the rest of Turkey. Cumulatively, control over municipalities was an important mechanism by which mayors and party representatives extended their authority and influence among local Kurdish populations and advertised the cultural basis for a political desegregation from Ankara. Municipalities—especially Diyarbakır—also came to 144 creating a new kurdish subject serve as lead organizations in the coordination of various pro-Kurdish political and social organizations. As Zeynep Gambetti writes (2005, 53), “The existence of a DEHAP municipality [in Diyarbakır] spatially united—while at the same time ideologically distinguishing—the various social and civic actors already involved in opening up niches for themselves in the polarized public space.” This chapter first discusses pro-Kurdish mayors’ efforts to build a kind of competing governmentality and then examines pro-Kurdish symbolic politics. Although I incorporate material from a number of different cities and towns, the bulk of the discussion centers on the city of Diyarbakır, which constituted the largest and most important site of pro-Kurdish electoral activism from 1999 to 2008. Self-rule: Modernization and Competing Governmentality...