Activists in Office: Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix I n September of 2006 I stood with a dozen visitors in front of a sand-colored 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 manifestation 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 scholars 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 conflicts 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 conventional 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 terrorism . Displaying one in a government building—as did Kurdish compatriots 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 information on...