Civic Nationalism and Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
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HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
Civic Nationalism and
Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
Thomas W. Smith*
ABSTRACT
Are civic states culturally neutral? The Turkish model of civic nationalism is
often praised as a success, albeit an authoritarian one, in creating a unitary
national culture. In fact, Turkey’s national identity has come at a steep
cultural cost. Civic institutions have homogenized and folklorized minority
cultures. Ethnoreligious conceptions of Turkish identity have underpinned
immigration and naturalization, internal movement and resettlement,
education, language, and cultural policies. Turkish nationalism has weighed
heaviest on Kurds, Islamists, religious minorities, and the left. A state-run
“Turkish Reformation” of Islam failed in the 1930s; more recent attempts to
nationalize Islam have turned the state into a mouthpiece for mainstream
Sunni doctrine. The Turkish case suggests that in states with deep societal
divisions, the dream of civic nationalism may be a coerced one.
I.
INTRODUCTION
Bowing to demands from the European Union (EU), Turkey has launched a
series of human rights reforms intended to expand basic freedoms and
uphold a platform of individual and group rights in the country. With EU
entry talks slated to begin in October 2005, Turkey’s future in Europe hinges
on the outcome. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoƒan, a reformed Islamist who
was jailed for four months in 1999 for “inciting religious hatred,” now
* Thomas W. Smith is an Assistant Professor of Government and International Affairs at the
University of South Florida St. Petersburg. He is the author of History and International
Relations (1999) as well as journal articles in the fields of international law and human rights.
From 1997–2000 he taught at Koç University in Istanbul. He can be reached by e-mail at
twsmith@stpt.usf.edu.
Human Rights Quarterly 27 (2005) 436–470 © 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
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governs under the eagle eye of the country’s military.1 For Erdoƒan, human
rights represent “the common voice of human conscience.”2 He argues that
countries that fail to embrace “the universality of human rights, democracy,
and the rule of law will be driven into lonliness.”3
Turkey’s reformers inevitably will confront the Kemalist model of civic
nationalism, the hard-communitarian and laic ideology of the country’s
founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. By virtually every measure, that vision of a
unitary state bonded by civic loyalty has been a remarkable success. A
modern bureaucracy, a Western legal system, progressive national education, and all the trappings of a modern state are the progeny of a revolution
that arguably redrew the boundary between Europe and the Middle East.
Kemalism has been especially emancipating for women, who have enjoyed
full civil rights since 1934.
Like that of all modern states hewn from traditional societies, Turkey’s
civic success has come at steep cultural cost. From its inception, the
machinery of the state has been dedicated to homogenizing a diverse
populace. Civil association has been stunted. Religion has been nationalized. All but the most folkloric of minority cultural expressions have been
discouraged. In times of crisis, civic nationalism has masked ethnic
chauvinism. The only explicit minority rights that exist in Turkey have their
origins outside the Kemalist social contract; these are the protections
accorded non-Muslims—traditionally Greeks, Armenians, and Jews—in the
1923 Lausanne Treaty, which codified the status of modern Turkey in
international law.4 Large Muslim communities of Kurds, Arabs, and Alevis, a
collection of liberal Shiite sects, as well as smaller non-Muslim groups such
as Syrian Orthodox and Chaldean Catholics, enjoy few rights to shield them
from the majority.
However, liberalization is afoot. The opening of the economy in the
1980s spurred political liberalization in the 1990s. The sixteen year
insurgency by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partia Karkaren Kürdistan, or
PKK) ended in 2000,5 and civil rights laws are being removed from a war
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
U.S. BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR, TURKEY: INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
REPORT (2002), available at www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2002/13986.htm.
Recep Tayyip Erdoƒan, Address at the New Tactics in Human Rights Symposium
Ankara, Turkey (29 Sep.–4 Oct. 2004), available at www.newtactics.org/file.php?ID=484.
Recep Tayyip Erdoƒan, Address at the Symposium on Conservative Democracy,
Istanbul (10 Jan. 2004). The address is available in Turkish, under the title, 10.01.2004
Muhafazakarlik ve Democrasi Sempozyumu, in the electronic archive of the Justice and
Development Party (AK Parti), available at www.akparti.org.tr/.
Treaty of Peace Between the Allied Powers and Turkey, July 24, 1923, 28 L.N.T.S. 11,
18 Am. J. Int’l L. 1 (Supp. 1924) (hereinafter Treaty of Lausanne).
For overviews of the Kurdish question and the war, see OMER TASP∫ INAR, KURDISH NATIONALISM
AND POLITICAL ISLAM IN TURKEY: KEMALIST IDENTITY IN TRANSITION (2005); Doy;u Ergil, The Kurdish
Question in Turkey, 11 J. DEM. 122 (2000); HENRI J. BARKEY ET AL., TURKEY’S KURDISH QUESTION
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footing. The number of civil society organizations has exploded over the
past fifteen years. New media, a new Islamic political economy, and lively
popular culture have outstripped the official ideology. Erdoƒan’s “Islamic”
liberalism is also generally well regarded.6 The Copenhagen Criteria and the
Turkish National Program for accession to the EU have detailed explicit
guidelines for reform.7
The prospect of membership has also encouraged a looser conception
of citizenship. Turks are reaching a détente with their own government over
what it means to be Turkish, as the divided loyalties of EU membership
replace the absolutes of the modern state. In the process, the unitary state
and an invented national culture are giving way to greater cultural freedom.
It is no coincidence that minorities who have been shoehorned into this
national Turkish identity—Kurds, Alevis, Syriacs, and others—are among the
strongest supporters of EU membership. Most Islamists in Turkey support
membership as well, as a way of lifting Kemalist repression of observant
muslims.
II. DOES CIVIC NATIONALISM ACCOMMODATE
MINORITY CULTURE?
Political theorists have long distinguished between inclusive civic nationalism and exclusive ethnic, religious, or cultural nationalism.8 In this age of
(1998); KEMAL KIRISC∫ I & GARETH M. WINROW, THE KURDISH QUESTION AND TURKEY: AN EXAMPLE OF
TRANS-STATE ETHNIC CONFLICT (1997); MICHAEL M. GUNTER, THE KURDS AND THE FUTURE OF TURKEY
(1997).
See Hugh Pope, Turkish Politician’s Change of Heart: AKP Leader Turns Away from
Islam and Finds his Party May Win Power, WALL ST. J., 1 Aug. 2002, at vol. 240:23, A9.
See Copenhagen European Council, Conclusions of the Presidency, E.U. Bull., no. 6,
§ 7(A)(iii) (1993) (establishing what are known as the “Copenhagen Guidelines” or
Copenhagen Criteria”). The Copenhagen Guidelines require a country seeking accession to the EU to achieve the following goals:
A
6.
7.
[S]tability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and
protection of minorities, the existence of a functioning market economy as well as the capacity to
cope with competitive pressure and market forces within the Union. Membership presupposes the
candidate’s ability to take on the obligations of membership including adherence to the aims of
political, economic and monetary union.
8.
Id. See also Thomas W. Smith, The Politics of Conditionality: The European Union and
Human Rights Reform in Turkey, in THE EUROPEAN UNION AND DEMOCRATIZATION 111 (Paul J.
Kubicek ed., 2003).
See HANS KOHN, THE IDEA OF NATIONALISM: A STUDY IN ITS ORIGINS AND BACKGROUND 16 (1940),
which distinguished between “liberal, civic Western” and “illiberal, ethnic Eastern”
nationalism; LIAH GREENFELD, NATIONALISM: FIVE ROADS TO MODERNITY 11 (1992); YAEL TAMIR,
LIBERAL NATIONALISM (1993); David Brown, Are There Good and Bad Nationalisms?, 5
NATIONS & NATIONALISM 281, 281–82 (1999); CITIZENSHIP IN DIVERSE SOCIETIES 366–67 (Will
Kymlicka & Wayne Norman eds., 2001); MARGARET MOORE, THE ETHICS OF NATIONALISM 15
(2001); SEYLA BENHABIB, THE CLAIMS OF CULTURE: EQUALITY AND DIVERSITY IN THE GLOBAL ERA 152
(2002).
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Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
439
ethnic strife and the Balkanization of states, the logic of civic nationalism
seems unimpeachable. As Michael Ignatieff noted in Blood and Belonging,
a civic nation is “a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in
patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values.”9
Political theorists have nonetheless started to scrutinize how civic states
accommodate diversity.10 Is civic nationalism neutral with regard to religion,
race, and ethnicity? Does it guarantee basic rights? Is it compatible with
minority rights? Does it homogenize and deracinate? Are the alternatives
worse?
For multiculturalists (and some cultural conservatives), civic nationalism presents one of the great conceits of modernity. Will Kymlicka argues
that the defects of civic nationalism have been “obscured by the myth of the
ethnocultural neutrality of the state.”11 Kymlicka claims that “virtually all
liberal democracies have, at one point or another, attempted to diffuse a
single societal culture throughout all of its territory.”12 Anthony Smith
contends that civic nationalism goes to the heart of the “modernist fallacy,”
that nationalisms of all stripes have deep primordial roots.13 David Brown
notes that, often, “ethnic domination is disguised as national integration.”14
James Tully adds that civic-liberal constitutions are “imperialistic”: liberalism not only fails to recognize diversity, but speeds assimilation to the
dominant culture through civic institutions and a common language.15
Minority cultures exist precariously in most modern states. Formal
citizenship rights often neglect the idea of cultural belonging, whether
defined in primordial (natural, organic) or instrumental (constructed, modern) terms. Civic institutions may be necessary for democracy and markets
to function smoothly. But the costs of assimilation are clear. National
identity, shared values, and other symbols of solidarity typically are cast in
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF, BLOOD AND BELONGING: JOURNEYS INTO THE NEW NATIONALISM 6 (1994).
Surveys include Bernard Yack, Reconciling Liberalism and Nationalism, 23 POL. THEORY
166 (1995); Michael Freeman, Liberal Democracy and Minority Rights, in HUMAN RIGHTS:
NEW PERSPECTIVES, NEW REALITIES 31 (Adamantia Pollis & Peter Schwab eds., 2000); DAVID
BROWN, CONTEMPORARY NATIONALISM: CIVIC, ETHNOCULTURAL AND MULTICULTURAL POLITICS (2000);
Gerard Delanty, Two Conceptions of Cultural Citizenship: A Review of Recent
Literature on Culture and Citizenship, 3 GLOBAL REV. ETHNOPOLITICS 60 (2002), available at
www.ethnopolitics.org/archive/volume_I/issue_3/delanty.pdf.
WILL KYMLICKA, POLITICS IN THE VERNACULAR: NATIONALISM, MULTICULTURALISM AND CITIZENSHIP 4
(2001).
Id. at 26.
ANTHONY D. SMITH, NATIONS AND NATIONALISM IN A GLOBAL ERA ch. 5 (1995).
BROWN, CONTEMPORARY NATIONALISM, supra note 10, at 10–11.
JAMES TULLY, STRANGE MULTIPLICITY: CONSTITUTIONALISM IN AN AGE OF DIVERSITY ch. 3 (1995).
Charles Taylor adds, “If a modern society has an ‘official’ language . . . that is, a statesponsored, -inculcated, and -defined language and culture, in which both economy and
state function, that it is obviously an immense advantage to people if this language and
culture are theirs.” KYMLICKA, supra note 11, at 27.
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HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
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the image of the majority. Cultural patrimony is usually controlled by the
state, which may folklorize minorities in the name of diversity or inclusion.
Majority politics often are in league with mass media, popular culture, and
economies “that benefit majorities in thousands of subtle ways.”16 So
efficient are “civic state-builders,”17 to use Kymlicka’s phrase, that minorities
may be hard pressed to find refuge.
III. CIVIC NATIONALISM AND THE EMERGENCE
OF MODERN TURKEY
In Turkey, perhaps more than in any case since the French Revolution,
enlightenment liberalism has underpinned civic identity. The literature of
1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man18 were de rigueur at the
military academies whose cadets went on to lead the nationalist movement.
Atatürk’s leading biographer claims that the French Revolution was “the
supreme point of reference” for the Turkish leader throughout his life.19
Though built atop nearly 100 years of Europeanizing reforms (Tanzimat ),
the civic model departed from late Ottoman practice, as the flexible
accommodation of the millet system of autonomous nations, in the
nonterritorial sense of the word, gave way to the fixed identity and space of
the modern state.
The Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, or CHP),
which was established by Atatürk in 1924 and ruled Turkey as a one-party
state until 1946, proclaimed that the Turkish nation was a “social and
political whole formed by citizens that are united by a common language,
culture and objective.”20 The fez, the symbol of the Orient, was banned. The
Latin alphabet and Gregorian calendar were adopted. Vernacular Turkish
replaced the more courtly Ottoman language. The civil code was borrowed
from Switzerland, the penal code from Mussolini’s Italy. “Enlightened”
(aydy;n) judges, teachers, and other civil servants fanned out across
Anatolia, intending to reshape traditional society. In hundreds of provincial
towns “People’s Houses” (Halk Evleri ) were established to spread the
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
See Joel E. Oestreich, Liberal Theory and Minority Group Rights, 21 HUM. RTS. Q. 108,
118 (1999); see also Michael Freeman, Are There Collective Human Rights?, 43 POL.
STUD. 25 (1995); William F. Felice, The Case for Collective Human Rights: The Reality
of Group Suffering, 10 ETHICS & INT’L. AFF. 47 (1996).
KYMLICKA, supra note 11, at 230–32.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (Fr. 1789), reprinted in THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION AND HUMAN RIGHTS: A BRIEF DOCUMENTARY HISTORY 77–79 (Lynn Hunt ed., 1996).
ANDREW MANGO, ATATÜRK: THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE FOUNDER OF MODERN TURKEY 49 (1999).
Turkish Daily News (11 Mar. 1995), quoted in KEMAL KIRISC∫ I & GARETH M. WINROW, THE
KURDISH QUESTION AND TURKEY: AN EXAMPLE OF A TRANS-STATE ETHNIC CONFLICT 97 (1997).
2005
Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
441
Kemalist message. This cultural revolution left its mark, though in the most
rural social terrain it could produce “more control than transformation.”21
Thanks to the glasnost in Turkish historical research over the past
decade, researchers have begun to excavate some of the mythology
surrounding Turkish Republicanism.22 The rhetoric of civic impartiality
notwithstanding, there is ample evidence that ethnicity and religion determined policies and practice regarding immigration and naturalization,
internal movement and resettlement, economics, education, religion, language and culture. The country’s cultural core was revealed in times of
crisis. In the early years of the Republic some critics of the civic model of
citizenship were branded as racists and prosecuted. Ankara also reined in
right wing ülkücülar —literally, “idealists”—who espoused a noxious ethnic
Turkish nationalism. Still, enforcement of civic nationalism has weighed
heaviest on Kurds, Islamists, religious minorities, and the left.
The genius of Turkish nationalism (Türkçülük ) was its ability to conflate
the organic/ethnic and the civic/territorial. An organic Turkish identity was
constructed in the 1920s and 1930s, rich in ancestral myths, national
memories, and ethnic symbolism. To be a Turk denoted a civic identity, but
was also a carefully fashioned ethnie, traced literally in children’s textbooks
to the Altaic-Ural peoples of Central Asia. Afet Y:nan, one of the architects of
the new history, wrote that “Turkish children will learn that they are part of
an Aryan, civilised and creative people descended from a high race who
have existed for tens of thousands of years.”23
The prehistory of Central Asia was rewritten to show that distinct
Muslim minorities had descended from the same ancient Turkish tribes—
hence the designation of Kurds as “Mountain Turks.”24 The founding myths
often mimicked social science. “Turkism” was propelled by the ideologue
21.
22.
23.
24.
Y:lkay Sunar, State, Society, and Democracy in Turkey, in TURKEY BETWEEN EAST AND WEST:
NEW CHALLENGES FOR A RISING REGIONAL POWER 143 (Vojtech Mastny & R. Craig Nation eds.,
1996).
See, e.g., Kemal Kirisci, Disaggregating Turkish Citizenship and Immigration Practices,
36 MIDDLE E. STUD. 1 (July 2000); Berna Yazici, Discovering Our Past: Are “We” Breaking
Taboos? Reconstructing Atatürkism and the Past in Contemporary Turkey, 25 NEW PERSP.
TURK. 1 (2001); Kerem Öktem, Creating the Turk’s Homeland: Modernization, Nationalism and Geography in Southeast Turkey in the late 19th and 20th Centuries (2003)
(paper for the Socrates Kokkalis Graduate Workshop, Kennedy School of Government,
Harvard University), available at www.ksg.harvard.edu/kokkalis/GSW5/oktem.pdf; Soner
Çaƒaptay, Citizenship Policies in Interwar Turkey, 9 NATIONS & NATIONALISM 601 (2003);
AYHAN AKTAR, VARLYK; VERGESI VE “TÜRKLEST∫ IRME” POLITIKALARY; [THE CAPITAL TAX AND “TURKIFICATION”
POLICIES] (2003); Soner Çaƒaptay, Race, Assimilation and Kemalism: Turkish Nationalism
and the Minorities in the 1930s, 40 MIDDLE E. STUD. 86 (2004).
HUGH POULTON, TOP HAT, GREY WOLF AND CRESCENT: TURKISH NATIONALISM AND THE TURKISH
REPUBLIC 108 (1997).
CHRISTOPHER HOUSTON, ISLAM, KURDS AND THE TURKISH NATION STATE 99–101 (2001).
442
HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
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Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924), whose ideas were derived from the racial
theories of the nineteenth century European Orientalists.25 Faux-academic
journals publicized the fantastical Sun Language Theory (Güne π-Dil Teorisi)
that Central Asian Turkish was the root of all the world’s languages, and the
Turkish History Thesis (Türk Tarih Tezleri ) that Turks were the fount of all
civilizations.26
The upshot was that, from Eastern Thrace to Kurdistan, “Turks were a
people like the peoples of Europe . . . [and] had more historic right to Turkey
than did anyone else.”27 Turkey would be a modern nation state. People
who spoke Turkic languages—Azeris, Kazahks, Kirgiz, Turkmen, Uzbeks
and many others—inhabited vast reaches of Central Asia, to the Uighur
region of China, sometimes known as “East Turkistan.” But Pan-Turkists, or
“Turanists,”28 who clamored for the union of all Turkic speakers, were
blocked by Atatürk’s pragmatism. Turkey’s “natural” frontiers would be
those laid down in the struggle for national liberation and codified at
Lausanne.29
Within those boundaries, civic identity was carefully tended. The term
“Turk,” a pejorative under the Ottomans, was rehabilitated. Turkish facets of
Ottoman history were highlighted, and Greek, Armenian, and Syriac
contributions obscured. State-run archaeological excavations were conducted to show that the early civilizations of Anatolia were Turkish. At
Atatürk’s behest the Turkish Language Association (Türk Dil Kurumu),
founded in 1932, set out to retrieve an authentic Turkish cleansed of Arabic
and Persian words.30 The Turkish Historical Society (Türk Tarih Kurumu),
originally an arm of the ethnic-nationalist Turkish “hearth” (ocak) movement, became the quasi-official voice of Turkish history. The Historical
Society is still active, along with state archivists and republican leaning
historians, in promoting nationalist historiography.31
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
See ZIYA GÖKALP, TURKISH NATIONALISM AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION: SELECTED ESSAYS OF ZIYA GÖKALP
(1959); See especially The Programme of Turkism, in id. at 284–313. See also DAVID
KUSHNER, THE RISE OF TURKISH NATIONALISM, 1876–1908, at 8–10 (1977).
Çaƒaptay, Citizenship Policies in Interwar Turkey, supra note 22, at 601–02.
JUSTIN MCCARTHY, THE OTTOMAN PEOPLES AND THE END OF EMPIRE 213 (2001).
The name “Turanists” refers to the mythical land of Turan where Turks were said to have
originated.
Treaty of Lausanne, supra note 4. See also JACOB M. LANDAU, PANTURKISM: FROM IRREDENTISM
TO COOPERATION 74–75 (1995).
See KUSHNER, supra note 25, at 101–02 (1977). The Turkish Language Association is still
operating under auspices of the Turkish government. Its website is available at
www.tdk.gov.tr/.
See ERIK J. ZURCHER, TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY 199 (1997); POULTON, supra note 23, at 101–
09. For an overview of recent Turkish nationalist—and antinationalist—historiography,
see Howard Eissenstat, History and Historiography: Politics and Memory in the Turkish
Republic, 12 CONTEMP. EUR. HIST. 94 (2003). The English-language website of the Turkish
Historical Society is available at www.ttk.gov.tr/ingilizce/index.html.
2005
Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
443
There has also been a concerted effort to diminish the Armenian
genocide. The State Archive still publishes compilations of purportedly
exculpatory documents along with interpretations attributing the violence in
Eastern Anatolia during World War I to Armenians in league with the
imperial powers keen to resolve “the Eastern question” regarding the future
of the Levant.32 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs also wields its diplomatic
influence on the issue. For example, it successfully pressed the Clinton
administration in 2000 to have a resolution memorializing the tragedy
withdrawn from consideration by the US Congress.33 In 1999, a Genocide
Monument and Museum were established in the Eastern province of Iƒdir to
memorialize the 80,000 Turks officials said were massacred by Armenians
in the region between 1915 and 1920.34
The fact remains, however, that incipient Turkish nationalism under the
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), also known as the Young Turks,
and the national liberation movement itself, led to the ethnic cleansing of
Eastern Anatolia.35 The scheme, devised by the CUP leadership, was
referred to as a relocation (tehcir ). Between 1915 and 1917 hundreds of
thousands of Armenians, some of whom collaborated with Russia and even
took up arms in hopes of establishing an Armenian state in Eastern Anatolia,
as well as tens of thousands of Syrian Orthodox Christians, were massacred
or marched to their deaths.36 In many cases, the physical space they had
occupied was “Turkified,” as state agencies redistributed vacated properties
to Muslim refugees from the Balkans. Some evacuated villages were given
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
See OSMANLY; BELGELERINDE ERMENILER, 1915–1920 [OTTOMAN DOCUMENTS RELATING TO THE
ARMENIANS] (1994); ERMENI OLAYLARY; TARIHI [ARMENIAN HISTORICAL INCIDENTS] (1998); ERMENI
MESELESININ SIYASI TARIHÇESI, 1877–1914 [POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION] (2001).
All are published in Ankara by the State Archives.
See Eric Schmitt, House Backs Off on Condemning Turks’ Killing of Armenians, N.Y.
TIMES, 20 Oct. 2000, at A11. For a view from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, see TÜRKKAYA
ATAÖV, THE “ARMENIAN QUESTION”: CONFLICT, TRAUMA AND OBJECTIVITY (1997). In April 2003, the
Turkish Ministry of Education issued a circular urging schools to have fifth- and seventhgrade students write essays arguing that allegations of the Armenian genocide were
unfounded. The Ministry also encouraged schools to stage conferences on the topic.
Police arrested seven teachers for comments made at one of these conferences. See also
U.S. BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR, TURKEY: COUNTRY REPORTS ON HUMAN
RIGHTS PRACTICES, 2003, at 23–24 (2004), available at www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2003/
27869.htm.
See Directorate General of Press and Information, Office of the Prime Minister,
Genocide Statue and Museum Opens in Igdir, TURK. PRESS REV., 6 Oct. 1999, available at
www.byegm.gov.tr/YAYINLARIMIZ/CHR/ING99/10/99X10X06.HTM.
See DONALD QUATAERT, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, 1700–1922, at 184–86 (2000); TANER AKÇAM,
FROM EMPIRE TO REPUBLIC: TURKISH NATIONALISM AND THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE (2004); Richard G.
Hovannisian, Introduction, in REMEMBRANCE AND DENIAL: THE CASE OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
13 (Richard G. Hovannisian ed., 1998).
See BENJAMIN A. VALENTINO, FINAL SOLUTIONS: MASS KILLING AND GENOCIDE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
157–66 (2004).
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HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
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new Turkish names, and churches transformed into mosques.37 During the
War of Independence in 1922 and in population exchanges in 1923 some
1.2 million Greeks were also ousted from Asia Minor.38 Greece in turn
expelled 800,000 Turks.39
A recent history of ethnic strife in the twentieth century adopts the
standard interpretation: “A new Turkified Ottoman state that sought ties with
Turkish and Islamic states to the east had no room for a large, alien,
potentially traitorous Christian population, whether Armenian or Greek.”40
Although the national movement at times invoked jihadist language to rally
popular support, ethnic cleansing was probably driven less by religious
differences than by an overwrought dream of a homogeneous nation state.
As one commentator noted of the massacres, “that was not Islam; that was
secularism”—i.e, a kind of völkisch nationalism imported from Europe.41
Nergis Canefe has argued that this “demographic purfication” flowed from
the “political obsession” of Turkish nationalists “to fit into the definition of a
Völk and to prove the presence of an ethnoreligiously distinct Turkish nation
in order to claim legitimate political existence.”42 More than any economic
or security rationale, this explains “the nationalist resort to a final solution at
the very inception of the Turkish nation-state.”43
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
Öktem, supra note 22, at 8.
ERIC D. WEITZ, A CENTURY OF GENOCIDE: UTOPIAS OF RACE AND NATION 51 (2003); Hovannisian,
supra note 35, at 14.
WEITZ, supra note 38.
NORMAN M. NAIMARK, FIRES OF HATRED: ETHNIC CLEANSING IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY EUROPE 43 (2001).
Quoted in John Kelsay, Bosnia and the Muslim Critique of Modernity, in RELIGION AND
JUSTICE IN THE WAR OVER BOSNIA 139 (G. Scott David ed., 1996).
Nergis Canefe, Turkish Nationalism and Ethno-Symbolic Analysis: The Rules of
Exception, 8 NATIONS & NATIONALISM 133, 149–50 (2002).
Id. at 149. A kind of glasnost is underway here, too. Since 2000, several workshops have
brought together historians and other scholars—Turks, Armenians, and others—to
discuss the fate of the Armenians. Though far from conclusive, the meetings have been
fruitful. Some of the Turkish participants, including the Ottoman historian Halil Berktay,
have been denounced by nationalist Turks for their research. Officials at Sabancy;
University, where Berktay teaches, were pressed to fire the historian; they did not. See
Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, The Burden of History: TurkishArmenian Dialogue, TESEV ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER (Apr. 2001), available at www.tesev.org.tr/
nisan/apr3.html; Ron Suny & Fatma Müge Göçek, Discussing Genocide: Contextualizing
the Armenian Experience in the Ottoman Empire, 9 J. INT’L INSTITUTE (2002), available at
www.umich.edu/~iinet/journal/vol9no3/suny.htm; Belinda Cooper, Turks Breach Wall
of Silence, N.Y. TIMES, 6 Mar. 2004, at B9. Turkey’s best known contemporary novelist
Orhan Pamuk has been pilloried in much of the Turkish press after mentioning in an
interview in February 2005 that a million Armenians had been killed in Turkey. See
Nouritza Matossiann, They Say Incident. To me, It’s Genocide, THE GUARDIAN, 27 Feb.
2005, available at observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1426319,00.html.
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Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
445
IV. MUSLIM AND NON-MUSLIM MINORITIES
As noted, minority rights in Turkey are rooted outside the Kemalist social
contract. Religious, educational, cultural, linguistic, and emigration rights
were incorporated at European insistence in the Lausanne Treaty.44 Although
these rights were codified in modern treaty law, precisely who constituted a
minority drew on Ottoman dhimmi law governing non-Muslim communities, as well as a series of treaties concluded in the nineteenth century in
which the Sublime Porte recognized the rights of Christians living under
Ottoman rule.45 Some civic purists objected to the Lausanne provisions on
grounds that the state should be blind to ethnic and religious differences.
Tekin Alp, a former publicist for the Young Turks, wrote in 1937 that
Kemalism “has ended the Muslim/non-Muslim divide by laicism . . . The
fundamental Law has recognized as Turks all the citizens of the country
without distinction of race or religion, and has prepared the way for a
complete integration of minority elements into Turkism.”46
In practice, the Lausanne rights extend only to Turkey’s communities of
Armenian Orthodox (60,000–70,000 strong today), Jews (25,000), Greek
Orthodox (3,000), and, on extremely rare occasions, Syrian Orthodox
(10,000).47 The state does not recognize the Lausanne rights of other nonMuslim minorities: Armenian Catholics, Chaldeans, Nestorians, Bulgarians,
Georgians, and Turkey’s estimated 10,000 Baha’is.48 Jews have always been
viewed as the most “Kemalist” of non-Muslim groups. In 1925, the Rabbi of
Istanbul waived the safeguards set out at Lausanne, demonstrating the
Jewish community’s confidence in the civic state.49
That confidence has largely been vindicated. Aside from a few right
wing Islamist screeds, antisemitism is virtually unheard of. The recent
rapprochement between Israel and Turkey in the security sphere is widely
accepted.50 The two synagogue bombings in Istanbul in November 2003
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
Treaty of Lausanne, supra note 4, arts. 37–45.
Most important was the Treaty of Berlin (1878). During the nineteenth century, Christian
minorities used the diplomatic intervention of their Great Power patrons to help them
secure certain privileges under Ottoman rule—exemption from military service, for
example. See DONALD QUATAERT, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, 1700–1922, at 66 (2000).
POULTON, supra note 23, at 123–24.
Figures adapted from Nigar Karimova & Edward Deverell, Swedish Institute of
International Affairs, Minorities in Turkey, Occasional Papers no. 19, at 14 (2001),
available at www.ui.se/texter/op19.pdf.
U.S. BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR, TURKEY: INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
REPORT (2004), available at www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2004/35489.htm.
See STANFORD J. SHAW, THE JEWS OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE TURKISH REPUBLIC 244 (1991).
Turkey and Israel signed a bilateral defense alliance in 1996, prompted by shared
adversaries in the Arab world, common concerns about terrorism, and fears of growing
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HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
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were universally condemned.51 However, Dönmes, descendants of Jews
who converted to Islam in the seventeenth century, are fully tolerated by
neither Jews nor Muslims. The word dönme means “turned,” but connotes
“turncoat,” and many converts hide their lineage.
All Muslims are considered members of the majority, the “Turkish
Nation”; there are no officially recognized Muslim minorities.52 According
to a Turkish saying, “There are seventy-two and a half peoples in Turkey”
(the half refers to the Roma).53 In fact, demographers estimate that there are
perhaps fifty different ethnic groups in the country.54 To the extent that these
represent competing political identities, Kemalists have seen this as a
challenge to overcome. Atatürk warned that some citizens “have been
subjected to propaganda about Kurdish, Caucasian and even Laz and
Bosnian nations. But they are misnomers . . . because the individuals of this
nation, as members of the integrated unified Turkish Community, have a
common past, history, morality and law.”55
Most Turks are Sunnis of the Hanefi rite. The following minorities also
exist: large Muslim minorities of 10–15 million Alevis, a blanket term for the
easy-going sects that account for 70 percent of Turkey’s Shiites; 12–14
million Kurds, including Shaffii-rite Sunnis, Zaza-speaking Alevis (who
increasingly identify themselves as Zazas, not Kurds, and refer to their
historical lands as “Zazastan”), and perhaps tens of thousands of cryptoYezidi, followers of a syncretic faith that combines elements of Manicheism,
Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Gnosticism, and who historically have
been persecuted at the hand of Sunnis as well as Shiites; and some 300,000
Arabs, among them Alevi Nusayris who are concentrated in Hatay province
and Shajii-rite Sunnis centered in Urfa, Mardin, and Siirt.56 Turkey is also a
nation of immigrants. There are sizeable numbers of assimilated Muslim
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
Islamic militancy. The United States, with which both countries have close ties, played
matchmaker. Turkish and Israeli forces have engaged in joint naval exercises, and the
Israeli Air Force has trained over Turkish soil. The crackdown on Palestinians by the
Ariel Sharon government has, however, tested Turkey’s tolerance. See, e.g., Suha
Bolukbasy;, Behind the Turkish-Israeli Alliance: A Turkish View, 29 J. PALESTINE STUD. 21
(1999); Dov Waxman, Turkey and Israel: A New Balance of Power in the Middle East,
22 WASH. Q. 25 (1999). A bibliography on recent Turkish-Israeli relations is available at
tsi.idc.ac.il/Bibliography.html.
See BBC News, Turkish Press Aghast at Bombings (16 Nov. 2003), available at
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3275387.stm.
POULTON, supra note 23, at 95.
Quoted in Servet Mutlu, Ethnic Kurds in Turkey: A Demographic Study, 28 INT’L J. MIDDLE
E. STUD. 517, 517 (1996). Thanks to Doƒan Gürpinar of Sabancy; University for clarifying
this point.
Id.
POULTON, supra note 23, at 95.
See FUAT DÜNDAR, AZYN; LYK; LAR: TÜRKIYE NÜFUS SAYYM
; LARYN
; DA [MINORITIES: THE TURKISH POPULATION
CENSUS] (1999); Karimova & Deverell, supra note 47, at 14.
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Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
447
Circassians, Albanians, Pomaks, Laz, Slavs, Georgians, Azeris, Tatars,
Ossetians, and others from the Balkans, the Crimea, and the North
Caucuses, most of whose forebears sought refuge in Anatolia as the empire
receded in the nineteenth century. Most of the country’s 50,000 nominally
Muslim Roma live on the margins of society.57
Even for protected minorities the reality of civic nationalism has lagged
the law, particularly in moments of national crisis. During the 1930s and
1940s, laws governing asylum, assimilation, deportation, internal movement and resettlement, education, and culture favored Hanefi Turks. The
Law on Settlement,58 adopted in 1934, marked “a massive social engineering project aiming to sustain the construction of a Turkish national
identity.”59 Race (irk ) and culture (hars ) were critical; only those of “Turkish
descent and culture” could gain refugee status.60 Also in 1934, 8,000–
10,000 Jews were uprooted from the strategic zones of Edirne and the
Dardanelles and relocated to Istanbul.61 New Sunni immigrants were
resettled in their place in the belief that they would be firmer stalwarts
against foreign incursions. A series of laws enacted in the 1930s denaturalized expanding numbers of non-ethnic Turks.62 Minorities have always been
encouraged to speak Turkish—with Jacobin fervor during the “Vatandas,*
Türkçe Konus!* ”/“Citizen, Speak Turkish!” campaigns starting in the late
1930s.63
Since the time of the Young Turks, economic nationalism had been
stirring as well. Christians and Jews had historically dominated Turkish
commerce, banking, and trades. Hoping to create a “national bourgeoisie,”
the CUP organized boycotts of Greek and Armenian firms while fostering
Turkish/Muslim entrepreneurs, thus raising national consciousness at the
expense of minorities. In the early Republican period, companies were
required to employ high percentages of Turkish capital and personnel.
Tariffs, subsidies and other state preferences were also designed to favor
Muslim-owned firms. The Press Law of 1931 barred minorities from owning
magazines and journals. Some professions, including medicine and law,
were closed to non-Turks.64
More than most countries, and with only one major exception—the
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
Karimova & Deverell, supra note 47, at 14. See also the country entries for Turkey in the
European Roma Rights Centre archives, available at www.errc.org/Archivum_index.php.
Law on Settlement, No. 2510 (1934).
Kirisci, supra note 22, at 5–6.
Id. at 18.
POULTON, supra note 23, at 116.
Çaƒaptay, Citizenship Policies in Interwar Turkey, supra note 22, at 605–13.
POULTON, supra note 23, at 122.
Ayhan Aktar, Economic Nationalism in Turkey: The Formative Years, 1912–1925, 10
BOÎAZIÇI J.: REV. SOC. ECON. & ADMIN. SCI. 263 (1996).
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tragic Struma affair65—Turkey opened its borders to Jews fleeing Hitler,
much as the Ottomans had welcomed Jews evicted from Spain during the
Inquisition. Beginning in the 1930s, the government welcomed close to
45,000 Jewish refugees, including German academics who were given
prominent posts at state universities, boosting Atatürk’s Westernizing education reforms. Istanbul became a nexus in the Zionist underground railroad to
Palestine. By 1945 as many as 100,000 Jews had passed through Turkey on
the way to the promised land.66
At the same time, discrimination against minorities, including Jews,
spiked. The capital tax (varly;k vergesi ) was imposed in 1942–1944; nonMuslims were charged as much as ten times the Muslim rate. Armenians
were saddled with the harshest levies, though hundreds of Greek, Jewish,
Georgian, Dönme, and other firms were bankrupted. Business owners who
could not pay were packed off to a labor camp in As*kale, near Erzurum.
Often justified as fiscally necessary in order to raise war funds or tame
inflation, the scheme is now thought to have been mounted specifically to
carve up minority businesses and further Turkify the economy.67
The degree of homogenization during the first generation of the
Republic was striking. According to the Ottoman census of 1906, nearly a
fifth of the subjects living within the boundaries of present day Turkey were
minorities: 10 percent Greek, 7 percent Armenian, and 1 percent Jewish.
Between 1914 and 1924 this demography changed radically. When Turkey
conducted its first census in 1927, non-Muslims comprised only 3 percent
of the population.68 Minority communities continued to erode through the
postwar years. After 1948, some 30,000 Turkish Jews emigrated to the new
state of Israel.69 In 1950 there were still 100,000 ethnic Greeks in Turkey.
However, the anti-Greek riot in Istanbul in September 1955, the expulsion
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
In December 1941, the Struma left Constanta carrying 800 Romanian and Russian Jews
hoping to make their way to Palestine. The ship’s engines failed while passing through
the Bosphorous, and the vessel sat in the port of Istanbul for ten weeks, refugees aboard,
while Turkish, British, and local Jewish officials wrangled over their fate. Under British
and German pressure, Ankara denied the refugees visas. Turkish police towed the ship
several miles out into the Black Sea, where the next morning it was scuttled by a
torpedo launched from a Soviet submarine. There was one survivor. See DOUGLAS FRANTZ
& CATHERINE COLLINS, DEATH ON THE BLACK SEA: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE “STRUMA” AND WAR II’S
HOLOCAUST AT SEA xiv–xv (2003).
See STANFORD SHAW, TURKEY AND THE HOLOCAUST: TURKEY’S ROLE IN RESCUING TURKISH AND EUROPEAN
JEWRY FROM NAZI PERSECUTION, 1933–1945, at 266 (1993).
See Turkish Society Begins to Learn the Realities of the Country’s Past . . . And Its
Present, TURKISH PROBE, 12 Dec. 1999.
ÇAÎLAR KEYDER, STATE AND CLASS IN TURKEY: A STUDY IN CLASS AND DEVELOPMENT 79 (1987).
U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, COUNTRY STUDY: TURKEY, available at countrystudies.us/turkey/
34.htm.
2005
Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
449
of dual citizens in 1964, and tensions over Cyprus in the 1970s, reduced the
Greek community to 3,000 people.70 Also during the 1970s, antagonism
toward Armenians rose in response to terror attacks by the Armenian Secret
Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) against Turkish diplomats and
other targets abroad.
Today non-Muslims account for less than one-quarter of 1 percent of
Turks.71 While overt discrimination is rare, the state encroaches on minority
institutions and culture in myriad ways. As of 1965, minorities were not
allowed to open new schools or to expand existing ones. The Greek
Orthodox Holy Theological School on Heybeli Island in the Sea of Marmara
was shuttered in 1971 when all institutions of higher learning were
nationalized. A breach of Article 40 of the Lausanne Treaty, this was a blow
to the Greek Church because Ankara decrees that only Turkish citizens may
become Greek Orthodox Bishops or Patriarchs in Turkey.72 Treasury officials
have seized minority schools and churches as constituents have dwindled.
Dilapidated and “improperly registered” properties have also been confiscated. It remains difficult for minority vakifs, or pious foundations, to
acquire property, although reforms adopted in August 2002 should help.73
The ethnocultural demise of the Syrian Orthodox (Suryoye) community
in the Mardin/Midyat region of Southeastern Turkey is at hand. The ancient
Christian sect was recognized as a millet by the Ottomans, placing the
community on legal par with Greeks and Armenians. The massacres of
Syriacs alongside Armenians in 1915 are largely forgotten, though in 2001
a Syriac priest was acquitted of “provoking religious enmity” for publicizing
the killings.74 The community is thought to have numbered a quarter million
in 1923, but was targeted for “Turkification” for much of the Republican
period. Caught in the cross fire between the PKK and the Turkish Army, the
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
U.S. BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR, TURKEY: INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
REPORT (2004), supra note 48. See also HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, THE GREEKS OF TURKEY (1992);
Panayote Elias Dimitras, “Dwindling, Elderly and Frightened?” The Greek Minority in
Turkey Revisited, AIM (31 Jan. 2000), available at www.aimpress.ch/dyn/trae/archive/
data/200002/00201–001–trae-ath.htm.
Based on author’s estimation.
U.S. BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR, TURKEY: INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
REPORT (2004), supra note 48.
NURCAN KAYA & CLIVE BALDWIN, MINORITIES IN TURKEY: SUBMISSION TO THE EUROPEAN UNION AND THE
TURKISH GOVERNMENT 28–32 (2004), available at www.minorityrights.org/admin/download/
pdf/MRG-TurkeySub.pdf. The issue was forced by a case lodged with the ECHR dealing
with the expropriation of a Christian place of veneration. See Institute of French Priests
and Others v. Turkey, Application no. 00026308/95, Decision as to Admissibility (14
Dec. 2000).
See U.S. BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR, TURKEY: INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS
FREEDOM REPORT (2001), available at www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2001/5694.htm.
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community has withered from an estimated 60,000 in 1985 to a few
thousand today, with heavy emigration abroad.75
The Syrian Orthodox have almost never been able to exercise their
rights under the Lausanne Treaty. Church officials can identify only one
court ruling that granted them protections under the Treaty.76 In 1997
Ankara authorized the Church to conduct classes in Aramaic, but at the
same time blocked plans to open a Syriac seminary and to bring in clergy
from abroad.77 Suryoye have been barred from publishing and importing
religious literature written in Aramaic. Church officials struggle to hang on
to ecclestical properties. War and republicanism have also decimated the
several thousand Chaldean Catholics of Hakkâri Province.78
V. KEMALISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS TODAY
Although prompted by the country’s bid for EU membership, many of
Turkey’s recent reforms had been brewing for years. Kemalism could hardly
contain the financial boom brought about by the opening of the economy in
the 1980s, and political change could not be far behind. The EU has given
precise direction to Turkey’s new freedoms. Since February 2002, the
Turkish Parliament has adopted seven reform packages aimed at fulfilling
the Copenhagen Criteria for EU membership, which include minority rights
and the rule of law, and satisfying specific judgments from the European
Court of Human Rights (ECHR).79 In March 2004, the Council of Europe
determined that Turkey had liberalized more in the past two years than in
the previous ten. At the same time, the COE Committee that had been
formally monitoring Turkey’s human rights practices since 1996 announced
that Ankara had honored its obligations and commitments as a member of
the COE and that Turkey would no longer face special scrutiny.80
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
U.S. BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR, TURKEY: INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
REPORT (2004), supra note 48. See also Jan Pacal, What Happened to the Turkish
Assyrians?, TURKISH DAILY NEWS, 29 Aug. 1996.
Letter of the Archbishops of Tur’Abdin and Istanbul to the President of the Republic of
Turkey about the Status of the Aramean Minority in Turkey (27 Mar. 1995) (on file with
author).
See Niyazi Oktem, Religion in Turkey, 2002 B.Y.U. L. Rev. 371, at 377.
See OTMAR OEHRING, HUMAN RIGHTS IN TURKEY: SECULARISM = RELIGIOUS FREEDOM? 36–37 (2002),
available at www.missio-aachen.de/Images/MR%20T%C3%BCrkei%20englisch_tcm1411238.pdf.
See Thomas W. Smith, Leveraging Norms: The ECHR and Human Rights Reform in
Turkey, in HUMAN RIGHTS POLICIES AND PROSPECTS IN TURKEY (Zehra Arat ed., forthcoming).
See COUNCIL OF EUR. PARL. ASS., Honoring of Obligations and Commitments by Turkey,
COE Doc. 10111, art. 3 (17 Mar. 2004).
2005
Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
451
Even as Turkey edges closer to Europe, many in the Kemalist establishment—the military, the courts, the bureaucracy—seem intent on liberalizing
within the confines of the official ideology. As The Economist noted, “the
legacy of Atatürk, the great modernizer, has itself become a brake on
continuing modernization.”81 Republicanism is jealously guarded by the
“pashas,” as Turkey’s military chiefs are known, but is also embedded in
institutions and ingrained in public life. It is second nature to deny divisions
in society and to repress grassroots politics. Turks are well versed in civic
nationalism. Many see multiculturalism as tantamount to dismantling the
state and believe that inserting religion into the public sphere would result
in a backslide from modernity.
It should also be noted that far from receding into history, Kemalism has
been bolstered over the past generation, first by the “neo-republican” laws
and institutions erected following the 1980 coup, and then by the draconian
Anti-Terror Law,82 enacted in 1991 in response to the insurgency by the PKK.
According to Freedom House, Turkey slipped from being “free” for most of
the 1970s to being only “partly free” ever since, although the 2003 and
2004 ratings did applaud improvements in political rights and civil
liberties.83
The 1982 constitution, which is still in force, sharply curbed individual
rights while expanding the power of the National Security Council, which
puts its stamp on virtually every facet of public policy. The State Security
Courts (Devlet Güvenlik Mahkemeleri ), which combined military and
civilian judges, have tried thousands of defendants, most of them Kurds. The
Courts had come to symbolize Turkey’s lack of judicial independence and,
also under EU pressure, were formally dismantled in June 2004.84
Although steadily eroding, Kemalist discourse continues to shape
official conceptions of human rights. Ankara refers conspicuously to human
rights violations carried out by Kurds, Islamists, and the radical left, but
often downplays state abuses and only recently has started to accept the
idea of cultural and minority rights. Ethnic and religious strife have fostered
a climate of societal violence. At the same time, civic nationalism has also
encouraged state violence, as Jacobin authorities punish errant citizens.
Although allegations of torture have declined markedly over the past few
years, abuses are still common, especially in political cases. The US State
81.
82.
83.
84.
Turkey: A Revolution of Sorts, ECONOMIST, 2 Aug. 2003, at 46.
Law to Fight Terrorism, No. 3713 (1991).
Freedom House Data, available at www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2003/
countryratings/turkey.htm.
See Commission of the European Communities, 2004 Regular Report on Turkey’s
Progress Towards Accession, COM(2004)656 final, at 23 (hereinafter EU Progress
Report 2004).
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HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
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Department Country Report for 2003 claims that there are still hundreds of
instances of torture each year, with radical leftists and Kurdish activists the
main targets. Village guards in the Kurdish Southeast, the Jandarma, and
police special teams are considered the worst violators.85 Detainees’ charges
of abuse are rarely taken seriously and impunity is common. The pace of
prosecutions has picked up and there are growing numbers of convictions,
though often for mistreatment rather than the graver crime of torture.
Legal reforms continue to chip away at scores of laws covering political
parties, assembly and association, media, broadcasting, religion, education,
language instruction, artistic expression, and “crimes against Atatürk.”86
Turkey’s new Penal Code, adopted in September 2004 and due to take effect
in April 2005, defines torture and ill-treatment in line with international
conventions.87 Doctors may now be prosecuted for falsifying medical
reports used to cover up torture. Reforms in police and prosecutorial
conduct have been ordered. Judges have been barred from suspending
prison sentences in torture convictions.88 As the war in the Southeast has
waned, Ankara has taken broad strides to dismantle the most repressive
statutes. Suspects detained for “collective” or “political” crimes that formerly fell under the jurisdiction of the now defunct State Security Courts
may still be held incommunicado for forty-eight hours. Though still tailored
to extract confessions, this is an improvement over the two-week detentions
previously allowed under emergency rule. Although the state of emergency
was lifted in November 2002, the Southeast remains the site of illegal
detentions, torture, and disappearances. Turkey has also agreed to retry
cases remanded to it by the ECHR.89
Legal and administrative changes have filtered slowly through the
machinery of state. Rules on political assembly have been relaxed, but
demonstrators are still routinely detained. The Political Parties Act was
liberalized.90 Undeterred, the Constitutional Court banned the Kurdishbased People’s Democracy Party (Halk Demokrasi Partisi, or HADEP) in
March 2003.91 Chief prosecutor Sabih Kanadoƒlu has filed a petition to
close HADEP’s successor, the Democratic People’s Party (Demokratik Halk
Partisi, or DEHAP), and the dissolution of the Rights and Freedoms Party
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
See U.S. BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR, TURKEY: COUNTRY REPORTS ON HUMAN
RIGHTS PRACTICES, 2003, supra note 33, at 5.
See EU Progress Report 2004, supra note 82.
Id. at 54.
See U.S. BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR, TURKEY: COUNTRY REPORTS ON HUMAN
RIGHTS PRACTICES, 2003, supra note 33.
Id.
Political Parties Act, No. 2820 (1983), amended by Act No. 4748 (2002).
Frank Bruni, Threats and Responses: Istanbul; Turkey Bans One Kurdish Party and
Moves on Second, N.Y. TIMES, 14 Mar. 2003, at A13.
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Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
453
(Hak ve Özgürlükler Partisi, or HAK-PAR) as well as the Turkish Communist
Party (Türkiye Komünist Partisi, or TKP), are also pending.92 The proliferation of civil society organizations in recent years has been staggering,
though the fate of civic groups still rests partly with the state, which
approves or rejects NGO charters. The National Security Council has been
revamped to dilute the power of the generals, though the military’s political
influence is still pronounced.
New Article 302 of the Penal Code regarding criticism of the state or
state institutions is now limited to speech intended to “insult” or “deride”
those institutions.93 New Article 216 replaces Article 312 of the Turkish
Penal Code, which criminalized “inciting people to enmity and hatred by
pointing to class, racial, religious, confessional, or regional differences.”94
The new Article is amended to read “in a way that may be dangerous for
public order.”95 The “Law Concerning Crimes Committed Against Atatürk”
remains in force.96
A 150-article Press Law continues to hamstring the media, though
prosecutions under speech laws are increasingly rare.97 In a bell-weather
decision in 2001, Nadire Mater was acquitted of charges that she had
insulted the military by writing Mehmet’s Book, an unflattering oral history
of the war in the Southeast based on interviews with Turkish soldiers.98 A
cascade of acquittals in other free speech and free press cases has followed.
Still, several journalists remain in prison for speech violations, and local
officials often censor divisive expression on their own initiative. Turkish
courts ordered the closure of two internet based newspapers in 2003—the
left wing Ekmek ve Adalet (“Bread and Justice”) and the pro-Kurdish Özgür
Politika (“Freedom Politics”)—though both websites continue to operate.99
Human rights groups remain skeptical of Ankara’s half-measures. In a
rejoinder to the EU’s sanguine 2001 progress report, Human Rights Watch
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
See Commission of the European Communities, supra note 84, at 42.
Draft Turkish Penal Code, art. 302 (2004).
Turkish Penal Code, art. 312 (1926), amended 1981.
Draft Turkish Penal Code, art. 216 (2004).
The Law Concerning Crimes Committed Against Atatürk, No. 5816 (1951).
For details of the 2004 Press Law, see INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHER’S ASSOCIATION, NEW TURKISH
PENAL CODE: A LONG WAY TO FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION (2004), available at www.ipa-uie.org/
PressRelease/171204/COMMENTS.htm; Sarah Repucci, Countries at the Crossroads
2005: Turkey 4–5 (2005), available at www.freedomhouse.org/research/crossroads/
2005/turkey2005.pdf.
NADIRE MATER, MEHMEDIN KITABY; GÜNEYDOGU’DA SAVASMIS ASKERLER ANLATIYOR [MEHMET’S BOOK:
SOLDIERS WHO FOUGHT IN THE SOUTHEAST SPEAK OUT] (1998). For an account of the trial, see
Douglas Frantz, Turkish Journalist Cleared of Insulting Army, N.Y. TIMES, 30 Sept. 2000,
at A7.
See Reporters Without Borders, Internet Under Surveillance 2004: Turkey, available at
www.rsf.fr/article.php3?id_article=10683.
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contended that Turkey had done little more than “tinsel and varnish” its
human rights record on the eve of EU summits, arguing that a bevy of review
boards instituted by the government amounted to a Potemkin human rights
regime.100 A March 2004 update focuses on the “grudging and uneven
implementation” of reforms.101 The government recently permitted Amnesty
International (AI) to reopen its office in Istanbul that had been closed by the
military in 1980. AI has praised the pre-accession reforms adopted by
Erdoƒan’s government, but holds that torture remains widespread and
systematic.102
Turkish human rights NGOs are among the government’s sharpest
critics. The Human Rights Association (Y:nsan Haklary; Derne ƒi ), which
focuses on Kurdish rights, faces a labyrinth of intimidation, detentions, and
prosecutions by the state. Scores of court cases are pending against the
group.103 The Turkish Human Rights Foundation (Türkiye Y:nsan Haklary;
Vakfy; ) operates rehabilitation centers for victims of torture. The Foundation
also prepares detailed, monthly reports on abuses, and drafts a variety of
policy papers.104 Several Turkish NGOs recently joined Physicians for
Human Rights to write the “Istanbul Protocol,” a medical handbook to help
doctors document cases of torture.105 The Istanbul Bar Association has gone
so far as to draft a new, liberal constitution. The Organization of Human
Rights and Solidarity for Oppressed People, known as Mazlumder (“the
oppressed”), a Turkish Islamist human rights NGO focusing on religious
freedom with offices in twenty cities, has also faced harassment and
prosecutions.106
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.
105.
106.
See Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Watch Analysis of the 2001 Regular Report on
Turkey (Dec. 2001), available at hrw.org/backgrounder/eca/turkey-analysis.htm.
See id.; Human Rights Watch, Turkey: Rights Progress Marred in Key Year for EU Bid
(3 Mar. 2004), available at hrw.org/english/docs/2004/03/03/turkey7784_txt.htm.
See Amnesty International, Turkey: Systematic Torture Continues in Early 2002, AI
Index Eur 44/040/2002, available at web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGEUR440402002.
According to the European Commission, between October 2003 and August 2004,
ninety-eight different investigations and court cases were launched against the IHD/
HRA. See Commission of the European Communities, supra note 84. The website of the
Human Rights Association is available at www.ihd.org.tr/eindex.html.
See the website of the Turkish Human Rights Foundation, available at www.tihv.org.tr/
eindex.html.
U.N. HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, ISTANBUL PROTOCOL: MANUAL ON THE EFFECTIVE
INVESTIGATION AND DOCUMENTATION OF TORTURE AND OTHER CRUEL, INHUMAN OR DEGRADING
TREATMENT OR PUNISHMENT, U.N. Doc. HR/P/PT/8/Rev.1, U.N. Sales No. E.04.XIV.3 (2004).
See the Mazlumder website, available at www.mazlumder.org/english/mainpage.htm.
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Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
455
VI. NATIONALIZING ISLAM
For devout Muslims, Kemalism ushered in a cultural revolution. Modernization was waged in the language of contemporary (çaƒdaπ) society, as
opposed to the obscurantism of Islam. In the 1920s, the state dismantled the
institutions of high Islam. In the 1930s and 1940s, it targeted the vernacular
faith—the veneration of saints, festivals, pilgrimages, religious dress and
amulets, soothsaying, and local sheiks. Many religionists were driven
underground. Prohibitions were relaxed beginning in the 1950s, although
sharp curbs on “political Islam,” defined with an overabundance of
prudence, remain in place.107 Needless to say, many observant Turks loathe
the Kemalist leviathan. The religious orders have always led the opposition
and remain the best organized sector of civil society. Historically, the
religious periphery was pitted against the secular center as well, though
thanks to mass urbanization the politically savvy core of Turkey’s Islamists
now live in Western cities.
Extensive secularization had occurred during the Ottoman Tanzimat
and under the Young Turks. For Atatürk, secularism meant modernization as
well as control. In the seat of power, state secularism crippled the religious
institutions and learned community (ulema) that had mediated Ottoman
rule. In the countryside, it “smash[ed] localised folk cultures and replaced
them by a unified national culture.”108 The Caliphate, the nexus of global
Islam, was abolished in 1924.109 Islamic schools (medreses) were padlocked
and pious foundations nationalized. The Sufi orders (tarikats) were banned,
and dervish lodges (tekkes) and sacred tombs (türbes) closed in 1925. The
shari’a was repealed and family law secularized in 1926. Some religious
reactionaries were executed by the Independence Tribunals (Istiklal
Mahkemeleri ). In 1930, Hagia Sophia, the great Byzantine church-turnedmosque, was converted into a museum. In 1933, Ankara decreed that
muezzins would recite the call to prayer (ezan) in Turkish rather than
Arabic, replacing the word “Allah” with the pagan Turkish term “Tanry;.”110
What is followed in Turkey is not Jefferson’s model of the separation of
church and state, but rather Rousseau’s—or Hobbes’—model of laicism, or
state control over religion.111 Established in 1924, the Presidency of
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.
ERIK J. ZÜRCHER, TURKEY: A MODERN HISTORY 192 (1998).
POULTON, supra note 23, at 99.
Law Concerning the Abolishment of the Caliphate and the Expulsion of the Ottoman
Dynasty from Lands Under the Jurisdiction of the Republic of Turkey, No. 432 (1924).
The best discussion of this top-down secularization and Turkification of Islam is Binnaz
Toprak, Civil Society in Turkey, in CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE MIDDLE EAST 107 (Augustus Richard
Norton ed., 1996).
In The Social Contract, Rousseau advocates a “purely civil profession of faith of which
the Sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social
sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject.” The
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Religious Affairs (Diyanet Isl* eri Bakanly;ƒy;) literally administers Islam in
Turkey. The Diyanet owns Turkey’s nearly 80,000 mosques. The agency’s
90,000 employees run the mosques, craft religious doctrine, organize the
annual pilgrimage to Mecca, oversee religious and moral education in
schools, keep track of the country’s holy relics, publish journals and
convene scholarly symposia, and represent the faithful in the Islamic
Conference. Officially, every imam in Turkey is a civil servant, appointed
and paid by the Diyanet and supplied by the agency with civic-minded
sermons.112 The Treaty of Lausanne notwithstanding, the General Directorate of Foundations (Vakiflar Genel Müdürlüƒü) similarly oversees minority
religious institutions, churches, monasteries, and schools.
The early Republic was keen to sever religion from civil society and
nationalize it. It was suggested that Kemalism, sanctified through an
elaborate “cult of Atatürk,” might eclipse Islam as “Turkey’s religion.”113
What emerged instead was a kind of religious corporatism that both
antagonizes and accommodates Islamists. Church and state have conspired
on many levels. The secularizing Young Turks were praised across the
Islamic world for their anti-imperialism. The national liberation movement
was sometimes cast in terms of cihat, or religious struggle, to rid Anatolia of
nonbelievers; the pro-nationalist Mufti of Ankara issued revolutionary
fetvas, or Islamic legal edicts.114 Koranic terms such as se* hit (religious
martyr) or gazi (holy warrior) were appropriated by the Republic.115
In recent years the military has branded the PKK and leftist opponents of
the regime as unbelievers. Even hardened secularists agree that Turkey’s
political culture and ethos of communal life owe much to Islamic traditions.
To a great degree, Turkish identity is tied to Sunni identity. This was as true
in the early Republic, which retained Islam as the state religion until 1928,
as it is today for traditional Turks worried about the excesses of neoliberalism
and the possible homogenizing effects of joining the EU.
dogmas of civil religion, he added, “ought to be few, simple, and exactly worded.” JEANJACQUES ROUSSEAU, THE SOCIAL CONTRACT AND DISCOURSES 276 (1973). No political theorist
posits a more rigorous conception of secular sovereignty than Hobbes. In Leviathan,
Hobbes theorizes a secular absolutism that trumps especially divine law:
Some men have pretended for their disobedience to their Sovereign, a new Covenant, made, not
with men, but with God . . . . But this pretence of Covenant with God is so evident a lie, even in
the pretenders own consciences, that it is not only an act of an unjust, but also of a vile, and
unmanly disposition.
112.
113.
114.
115.
THOMAS HOBBES, LEVIATHAN 230 (1983).
Y:lter Turan, Religion and Political Culture in Turkey, in ISLAM IN MODERN TURKEY: RELIGION,
POLITICS AND LITERATURE IN A SECULAR STATE 42 (Richard Tapper ed., 1991).
On the “cult of Atatürk” see YAEL NAVARO-YASHIN, FACES OF THE STATE: SECULARISM AND PUBLIC LIFE
IN TURKEY 188 (2002).
See M. S*ÜKRÜ HANIOÎLU, PREPARATION FOR A REVOLUTION: THE YOUNG TURKS, 1902–1908, at 318
(2001); FEROZ AHMAD, THE TURKISH EXPERIMENT IN DEMOCRACY, 1950–1975, at 363 (1977).
See Turan, supra note 112, at 42.
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Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
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Religion also colored the peopling of the Republic. Kemal Kirisci argues
that even at the height of state secularism, Turkish immigration officials
exhibited a striking preference for admitting Hanefi-rite Sunnis. The Ottoman Empire had provided haven for Muslims from the Crimea, the VolgaUrals, the Caucasus, Central Asian “Turkistan” and the Balkans. This
practice was formalized in the Republican period. The gateway to citizenship was marked by “Turkish descent and culture” as viewed through the
lens of religion.116 Gagauz Turks from Romania—Christians who spoke
Turkish—were barred entry, while Bosnian Turks—Sunnis who did not
speak Turkish—were welcomed. Alevis and Azeri Turks, who are Ithnaashriarite Shiites, faced similar obstacles. In general, writes Kirisci, “Turkey has
followed a much more restrictive policy compared to the Ottoman Empire.”117 “A determining factor” in immigration and refugee policies was
“who the state felt most at ease with, or . . . who the state has felt constitutes
the very core of the Turkish national identity on which it can unyieldingly
rely,” namely Hanefi Sunnis, especially those who spoke Turkish.118
In Turkey, democratization has always fueled greater Islamization. In
some ways this should come as no surprise. As Hakan Yavuz has argued,
Islam comprises “the grammar according to which a large segment of
Turkish society communicates.”119 Since the 1950s, clandestine Sufi networks have surfaced and cultural conservatives have gained a voice.120
Conscious (su* urlu) Muslims now lead consciously Islamic lifestyles, boosting new markets in religious popular and commercial culture, from high
fashion veiling to Muslim beach resorts.
One also finds syncretisms of Islam/science, Islam/modernity, and
Islam/capitalism. Ideologically, Turkey’s Islamists range from the violent
fringe of Hizbullah and the Raiders of the Islamic Great East (Islamî Büyük
Doƒu Akincilari ), which apparently in league with al-Queda bombed the
synagogues and the British Consulate in Istanbul in November 2003,121 to
secularized, near-Marxist Alevis.
116.
117.
118.
119.
120.
121.
Kirisci, supra note 22, at 18.
Id. at 3.
Id. at 18.
See M. Hakan Yavuz, The Assassination of Collective Memory: The Case of Turkey, 89
MUSLIM WORLD 193, 193 (1999).
See Ays*e Ayata, The Emergence of Identity Politics in Turkey, 17 NEW PERSP. TURKEY 6769 (1997); Ziya Önis*, The Political Economy of Islamic Resurgence in Turkey: The Rise
of the Welfare Party in Perspective, 18 THIRD WORLD Q. 743 (1997); Hakan Yavuz,
Political Islam and the Welfare (Refah) Party in Turkey, 30 COMP. POL. 63 (1997); Ahmet
Yy;ldy;z, Politico-Religious Discourse of Political Islam in Turkey: The Parties of National
Outlook, 93 MUSLIM WORLD 187 (2003).
See BBC News, Istanbul Rocked by Double Bombing (20 Nov. 2003), available at
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3222608.stm.
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A handful of neo-Ottomanists hope to see the House of Osman revived
and the Caliphate reconstituted.122 Technically illegal but nonetheless
enormously influential, the Naksi* bendi brotherhoods extend from the
conservative Süleymancy;s, Khalidis, and Kadiris, to Fetullah Gülen’s flourishing Nurcu (“seekers of the light”) movement, a New Age mix of Islam and
science. Rooted in the Sufi tradition, the orders stress the esoteric and the
mystical, and claim to embody a more authentic faith than either the
legalistic Ottoman ulema or the paper pushers of the Diyanet.
The travails of Turkey’s Islamists are well known. Since the late 1960s,
a succession of political parties rooted in the Naksi* bendi movement have
been shuttered by the Constitutional Court on grounds that they were
hotbeds of confessional politics.123 In July 1996, Necmettin Erbakan of the
Refah (Welfare) Party became the first Islamist Prime Minister in Turkish
history, only to be squeezed out of office a year later under pressure from
the military. The Constitutional Court closed Refah soon thereafter and
convicted Erbakan of inciting religious hatred.124 The successor Fazilet
(Virtue) Party was also shut down in 2001.125 The Council of State has
strengthened the fifty year prohibition against wearing headscarves at
universities and in public offices.126 The National Security Council has
called for stricter enforcement of the ban on the tarikatlar. Turkish military
122.
123.
124.
125.
126.
See HOUSTON, supra note 24, at 12–14, 183; JENNY B. WHITE, ISLAMIST MOBILIZATION IN TURKEY:
A STUDY IN VERNACULAR POLITICS 23 (2000); Alev Çinar, Refah Party and the City
Administration of Istanbul: Liberal Islam, Localism and Hybridity, 16 NEW PERSP. TURKEY
23 (1997).
See Yusuf Sevki Hakyemez & Birol Akgün, Limitation on the Freedom of Political Parties
in Turkey and the Jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, 7 MEDITERRANEAN
POL. 54, 65–66 (2002).
The closure of Refah was upheld by the ECHR. A divided Court ruled that Refah did
indeed envision an “Islamic theocratic regime,” and that banning the party thus met a
“pressing social need” that was within the margin of appreciation accorded states under
the Convention and that “was not disproportionate to the legitimate aims pursued.” See
Refah Partisi (Prosperity Party) v. Turkey, Applications 41340/98, 41342/98, 41343/98,
41344/98, Judgment §§ 76, 82 (31 Jul. 2001). The ECHR has also upheld the dismissal
of members of the military for participating in fundamentalist activities (Kalaç v. Turkey,
Application 20704/92, Judgment (1 Jul. 1997)); and has ruled inadmissible at least
twenty applications involving military life and religious observance and dress.
U.S. BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR, TURKEY: INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
REPORT (2001), supra note 74.
In June 2004, the ECHR ruled against a woman who was barred from attending medical
school at Istanbul University because she wore an Islamic headscarf. The Court held
that Article 9 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and
Fundamental Freedoms, opened for signature 4 Nov. 1950, 213 U.N.T.S. 221, Europ.
T.S. No. 5 (entered into force 3 Sept. 1953), which deals with religious freedom, “does
not protect every act motivated or inspired by a religion or belief,” and found that the
university ban on headscarves “pursued the legitimate aims of protecting the rights and
freedoms of others and of protecting public order.” Sahin v. Turkey, Application 44774/
98, Judgment §§ 66, 84 (29 June 2004).
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Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
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officials continue to purge alleged Islamists from the ranks.127 Although
militant Islamists represent a sliver of the country’s Muslims, they loom large
in the minds of the military and intelligence services, who have pursued
what Hakan Yavuz terms “the securitization of Islam,” the view that Islam in
general threatens the Kemalist lifestyle.128
But Turkey is not simply hostile to Islam. Rather, laicism has both
coerced and accommodated the faith. Ankara has encouraged a uniquely
Turkish Islam. In the 1930s the government promoted a “Turkish Reformation” to modernize and nationalize Islam. A state panel recommended the
Turkification of texts and services, that prayer times be adjusted to fit the
modern work day, that church style pews be introduced in mosques, and
that hymns replace Koranic recitation.129
Although resisted by traditional Muslims, some reforms remained in
place until overturned in the 1950s by the Islam-friendly Demokrat
Partisi.130 A similar “national and progressive image” of Islam was promoted
by the National Unity Committee, which governed for eighteen months
following the 1960 coup. “Backward” elements of Islam, such as women
wearing the çarsa* f, or veil, were said to have been imported from foreign
lands.131 In the late 1960s, the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (Türk-Islam Sentezi ),
the brainchild of the Hearth of the Enlightened (Aydy;n Ocaƒy;), was
advanced as the antidote to political and social radicalization. Yet, as
Étienne Copeaux writes, at the same time as the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis
“was reinforcing the Cult of Kemalism, it was making official the place of
religion in society, making religious education a requirement at all levels
and allowing complete freedom to the development of [religious high
schools].”132 This cultural engineering was reinforced by a post-1950s
generation of respected Muslim intellectuals who affirmed Islam as the
cultural core of Türkçülük.133
127.
128.
129.
130.
131.
132.
133.
For background, see Eric Rouleau, Turkey’s Modern Pashas: Military with Political
Power, LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE, Sept. 2000. See also Soner Çag¨atay, European Union
Reforms Diminish the Role of the Turkish Military: Ankara Knocking on Brussels’ Door,
WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR NEAR EAST POLICY: POLICYWATCH NO. 781 (2003), available at
www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=1659.
See Ebru Dogan, BBC News, Turkey’s Militant Minority (21 Nov. 2003), available at
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3227320.stm.; M. HAKAN YAVUZ, ISLAMIC POLITICAL IDENTITY IN
TURKEY 244–45 (2003).
YAVUZ, ISLAMIC POLITICAL IDENTITY IN TURKEY, supra note 128, at 50; ZÜRCHER, supra note 107,
at 201.
AHMAD, supra note 114, at 378–81.
Id. at 374–75.
ÉTIENNE COPEAUX, ESPACE ET TEMPS DE LA NATION TURQUE: ANALYSE D’UNE HISTORIOGRAPHIE
NATIONALISTE, 1934–1993 (1997), quoted in Eissenstat, supra note 31, at 104.
See Binnaz Toprak, Religion as State Ideology in a Secular Setting: The Turkish-Islamic
Synthesis, in ASPECTS OF RELIGION IN SECULAR TURKEY 10 (Malcolm Wagstaff ed., 1990);
Michael E. Meeker, The New Muslim Intellectuals in the Republic of Turkey, in ISLAM IN
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These ideas began to bear fruit in the 1970s under the National Front
coalition governments composed of Turkish nationalists and Sunni Islamists.
After the 1980 coup, the Turkish-Islamic synthesis became the centerpiece
of the military’s “retraditionalization” policies to promote a Turkish national
culture. Better to be a Muslim than a Marxist (or a Kurd for that matter; in
1981 a special Diyanet branch was established to propagate Islam as an
alternative to Kurdish nationalism), especially if the state could influence
what kind of Islam people practiced.134 General Kenan Evren, who led the
coup, set out to revive Turkish Islam as “a rational and logical religion,”
noted for its “high regard for knowledge and science.”135 In the end, Evren’s
Islam largely mirrored majority Hanefi Sunnism.
The Diyanet was accorded new powers to cultivate orthodoxy. It
rapidly expanded the construction of mosques and began issuing its own
fetvas against the temptations of the left. The 1982 Constitution decreed that
“religious and moral education and instruction” for primary and middle
school students “will be conducted under the supervision and control of the
state.”136 The Ministry of Education stepped up funding for the public
religious secondary schools, the Iman-Hatip lycées, which ostensibly
trained religious leaders, but became feeders for the national Sunni
movement. At their height, in 1996–1997, the Iman-Hatip schools enrolled
more than 500,000 middle and high school students.137
In 2003, the state added night and summer Koran courses to counteract
the mushrooming number of private religious dershanes, or educational
institutes. Education Minister Hüseyin Çelik explained that “religion education should be carried out with the State’s resources and under State
supervision, in a healthy manner, instead of being pushed underground as a
nefarious activity.”138
State and society have largely converged on the same centrist Sunnism.
“Turkey has succeeded in incorporating Islamists into the political system,”
concludes Hakan Yavuz, “and this in turn has softened and restructured
Islamic demands and voices.”139 This domestication of Islam might seem to
vindicate years of repressive secularism, as Islamists internalize republican
norms.
However, as noted, the state itself is deeply implicated in religious life.
134.
135.
136.
137.
138.
139.
MODERN TURKEY: RELIGION, POLITICS AND LITERATURE IN A SECULAR STATE 189 (Richard Tapper ed.,
1991).
Toprak, Civil Society in Turkey, supra note 110, at 107–08.
YAVUZ, ISLAMIC POLITICAL IDENTITY IN TURKEY, supra note 128, at 70–71.
TURK. CONST. art. 24 (1982).
Yavuz, ISLAMIC POLITICAL IDENTITY IN TURKEY, supra note 128, at 124, Table 5.1.
Uƒur Akinci, State and Religion Education in Turkey: A Dilemma (4 Jan. 2004),
available at www.turkishpress.com.
YAVUZ, ISLAMIC POLITICAL IDENTITY IN TURKEY, supra note 128, at 237.
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Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
461
As it polices religious expression and association it inevitably favors one
version of Islam over others. The Diyanet is dominated by Hanefi Sunnism,
which the agency seems to view as synonymous with “Turkish” Islam, and
which receives the lion’s share of state support.
This confluence of faith and power prompted a UN special rapporteur
for religious freedom who visited Turkey in 1999 to warn against even “a
quasi-official status for the Hanefi conception of Islam.”140 Such ties make it
seem natural or inevitable that Turkish identity should be defined by
majority Sunnis, who indeed have monopolized public resources and
largely molded the country’s “civic” culture.141
Islamic nationalists have profited most from this arrangement.142 The
Justice and Development Party (AKP), known as a “reformed” Islamist
faction, swept to victory in the November 2002 national elections, forming
Turkey’s first majority government in twenty years. Party leader Tayyip
Erdoƒan, who engineered the AKP’s divorce from the more strident wing of
the Naksi* bendis, calls himself a “conservative democrat” and compares the
party to the center-right Christian Democrats in Western Europe.143 The
party’s logo, an illuminated light bulb, often set against a portrait of Atatürk,
signals its commitment to the secular Enlightenment rather than the
“heavenly light” (nur) of Islam.144
Some of Turkey’s Islamists see the sprint for EU membership as an
affront to Muslim values, though most view it as a path toward “deKemalization” and hence greater religious freedom.145 The AKP favors
membership, but envisions Turkey adding to the “mosaic” of European
cultures, not simply assuming European identity. Erdoƒan frequently employs Islamic language and devices, and from political economy to foreign
policy he exhibits an Islamic sensibility. But this is balanced by almost daily
140.
141.
142.
143.
144.
145.
Interim Report of the Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights and the
Elimination of all Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or
Belief, Addendum 1: Situation in Turkey, U.N. GAOR, 55th Sess., at 5–6, U.N. Doc. A/
55/280/Add.1 (2000).
Hans-Lukas Kieser, The Alevis’ Ambivalent Encounter with Modernity: Islam, Reform
and Ethnopolitics in Turkey (19th–20th cc.) 1 (2002) (unpublished manuscript prepared
for the Conference, Anthropology, Archaeology and Heritage in the Balkans and
Anatolia or The Life and Times of F.W. Hasluck (1878–1920), University of Wales,
Gregynog, (3–6 Nov. 2001)), available at www.hist.net/kieser/pu/Wales.pdf.
See Metin Heper & S*ule Toktas*, Islam, Modernity, and Democracy in Contemporary
Turkey: The Case of Recep Tayyip Erdoƒan, 93 MUSLIM WORLD 157 (2003); Thomas W.
Smith, Between Allah and Atatürk: The Turkish Model from Laicism to Liberal Islam, 9
INT’L J. HUM. RTS. (forthcoming 2005).
The Enigmatic Mr. Erdogan, ECONOMIST, 18 Dec. 2004, at 74.
See the AKP website, available at www.akparti.org.tr/.
Bertil Dunér & Edward Deverell, Country Cousin: Turkey, the European Union and
Human Rights, 2 TURKISH STUD. 6, 7 (2001).
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repudiations of political Islam, even the idea of an Islamic political
community. As Erdogan puts it, “Islam is a religion, democracy is a way of
ruling, You can’t compare the two, We just want to increase the happiness
of the people.”146
Nationalizing Islam has weighed heaviest on Turkey’s millions of Alevis,
arguably the country’s largest minority. Nominally Muslim, the heterodox
Shiites have their own religious ceremonies (cem) and hereditary priest class
(dede). They profess to follow the inner (batin) meaning of the faith rather
than its external (zahir ) rules. Accordingly, most do not pray, fast, tithe or
make the Hajj. Nor do they accept the Sunni shari’a.147 Their nonsegregated
services, which are held in cem-houses, not mosques, are infused with
music, poetry, and dancing.
Politically, Alevis range from Marxists to mystics, though most are leftleaning: Turkish Alevism has been compared to Catholic liberation theology. Having been ostracized by the Sunni Ottomans, Alevis cheered
Atatürk’s secular reforms, and continue to press for the separation of church
and state in order to insulate them from the Sunni majority. Although many
Alevis are not religious, the public face of Alevism alarms conservatives.
Twin portraits of Atatürk and the Imam Ali, who is venerated by Shiites as
the Prophet Mohammed’s rightful heir, are often mounted behind the dais at
Alevi conferences and cultural events. For Turks accustomed to the
monotheism of Kemalism, and for Sunnis, who do not idolize saints, the
scene elicits a kind of cognitive dissonance.148
Beginning in the 1970s an Alevi cultural revival clashed with the
growing Sunnization of state and society. Right wing Sunni nationalists,
including the fascist “Gray Wolves,” led pogroms against rural Alevis as
well as the “urban diaspora” in Western Turkey.149 Hundreds were killed. In
the 1990s, Alevis were still stigmatized as disloyal and heretical ky;zy;lbasl* ar,
literally, “redheads,” a folkloric reference to Alevi tribal headgear.150 In July
1993, thirty-seven people were killed when a Sunni mob firebombed an
Alevi cultural congress in the city of Sivas. The attackers were incensed by
the presence at the conference of Aziz Nesin, a secularist who had
translated portions of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses into Turkish.151 The
violence was legitimized by a toxic Sunni-nationalist discourse, some of it,
146.
147.
148.
149.
150.
151.
Quoted in Pope, supra note 6.
See Martin van Bruinessen, Kurds, Turks and the Alevi Revival in Turkey, 200 MIDDLE E.
REP. 7 (Jul.–Sept. 1996).
See Tahire Erman & Emrah Göker, Alevi Politics in Contemporary Turkey, 36 MIDDLE E.
STUD. 99, 105 (Oct. 2000).
POULTON, supra note 23, at 162–63, 262.
DAVID SHANKLAND, THE ALEVIS IN TURKEY: THE EMERGENCE OF A SECULAR ISLAMIC TRADITION 26 (2003).
van Bruinessen, supra note 147, at 9.
2005
Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
463
notably the lumping of Alevi activism and Kurdish separatism, advanced by
the state.152
Alevis were also shaken by the rapid ascent during the 1990s of the
right wing Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (MHP), or National Action Party.
Despite a sordid history of religion baiting Alevis and race baiting Kurds, the
MHP became the lynchpin partner in the coalition government from 1999
to 2002.153
In February 2002, a state court closed the Alevi Democratic Peace
Movement as well as the main Alevi cultural association. With Alevis
threatening to take the case to the ECHR, an appeals court overturned the
ruling.154 Prime Minister Erdoƒan has embraced non-Muslims, offering
cabinet positions to religious minorities, and running ethnic Armenians on
the AKP ticket in local elections. Erdoƒan has made overtures toward Alevis
as well and has distanced himself from the anti-Alevi fanatics of the MHP,
but he has also reportedly said that “Alevism is not a religion” and that Alevi
cem-houses are “culture houses” rather than “temples.”155
The Diyanet seems to view Alevis as errant Muslims, and budgets
almost nothing for their activities. Recently the agency attempted, corporatist
style, to co-opt Alevi youth with a cultural association invented in Ankara.
Alevis have thus far failed in their efforts to have their children exempted
from the religion courses taught in schools, which they say parrot the Hanefi
mainstream. Most Alevis would probably prefer to see the Diyanet dismantled altogether—a remote possibility given that the state continues to
rely on the agency to set the tone for moderate Sunnis, and remains deadset against ceding control of mosques to the religious orders.
VII. THE KURDISH REALITY
The impact of the ethnicization of citizenship on Turkey’s Kurds has been
well documented. Atatürk offered Kurdish tribal leaders future autonomy in
exchange for their help during the independence movement, but that
commitment faded as liberation gave way to nation building, and rebellion
in the Kurdish region—roughly the Eastern quarter of the country—was used
152.
153.
154.
155.
Kieser, supra note 141, at 17.
See Alev Çinar & Burak Arikan, The Nationalist Action Party: Representing the State, the
Nation or the Nationalists, 3 TURKISH STUD. 25 (2002); M. Hakan Yavuz, The Politics of
Fear: The Rise of the Nationalist Action Party (MHP) in Turkey 56 MIDDLE E. J. 200
(2002).
U.S. BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR, TURKEY: INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
REPORT (2003), available at www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2003/24438.htm.
U.S. BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR, TURKEY: INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
REPORT (2004), supra note 48.
464
HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
Vol. 27
to justify repression nationwide.156 By the late 1920s, state historians and
social scientists toured the Southeast describing how Kurds had descended
from Turkmen tribes and thus really were Turks, albeit “Mountain Turks.”157
Ethnic chauvinism festered beneath this civic veneer. In 1927, Foreign
Minister Tevfik Rus*di predicted that the Kurds, “inevitably doomed,” would
suffer the fate of the “Red Hindus [Indians].”158 For the first seventy years of
the Republic, Kurdish identity was officially denied. In 1991, then prime
minister Süleyman Demirel broke the silence when he lifted the ban on the
Kurdish language (though only for “non-political” communications) and
acknowledged, as he put it, “the Kurdish reality.”159
For some, the rise of Kurdish nationalism was sparked by the “structural
violence” caused by systematic deprivation and injustice by the state. For
others, it was a reaction to “internal colonialism”: the case fits Michael
Hechter’s theory that unequal economic relations between core and
periphery within a country incite peripheral nationalism.160 To the extent
that Ankara has recognized a problem at all, it has favored economic rather
than ethnic explanations. However, for most observers, Kurdish nationalism
is the result of modern identity politics. Many Turks view Kurdishness as a
latter-day political construct rather than an authentic ethnie. During the war,
the notion of a separate Kurdish identity was widely dismissed as “absurd,
unnecessary, and subversive,” and activists for Kurdish rights were cast as
“terrorists and enemies of the nation.”161
The identity of Turkey’s Kurds is not fixed. Nonetheless, the main
markers by which ethnicity is gauged—the emic (the view of the group from
within) as well as the etic (the view from without)—both point to the
“undeniable existence” of a distinct Kurdish ethnicity and culture.162 Many
Kurds see no contradiction in being a Turk of Kurdish extraction. Intermarriage is common. Prominent businessmen, entertainers, and politicians—a quarter of Parliament by some estimates—are of Kurdish descent.
Others lapse between Kurdish and Turkish realities in what is supposed to
be an essentialist state. Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of the PKK,
speaks only broken Kurdish. Tribal lineage (Dersim, Kuchgiri, Barzani, and
156.
157.
158.
159.
160.
161.
162.
DAVID MCDOWALL, A MODERN HISTORY OF THE KURDS 186–89 (1997).
HOUSTON, supra note 24, at 99–101.
Quoted in PHILIP MANSEL, CONSTANTINOPLE: CITY OF THE WORLD’S DESIRE, 1453–1924, at 421
(1996).
Quoted in Ergil, supra note 5, at 130.
See MICHAEL HECHTER, INTERNAL COLONIALISM: THE CELTIC FRINGE IN BRITISH NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT,
1536–1966, at 7–9 (1975). Incomes in the Kurdish Southeast are roughly one-tenth of
those in the industrial swathe of Western Turkey.
HENRI J. BARKEY & GRAHAM E. FULLER, TURKEY’S KURDISH QUESTION 117–18 (1998).
HEINZ KRAMER, A CHANGING TURKEY: CHALLENGES TO EUROPE AND THE U.S. 39 (2000). On Kurdish
emic and etic markers see Mutlu, supra note 53, at 518–19.
2005
Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
465
many others), religious sect and rite (Shafii Sunni, Alevi Shiite, Yezidi), and
language (Kurmanji, Surani, Zaza, Gurani) further delimit identity. Depending on circumstance these identities may overshadow Kurdish ethnic
identity.163
Strife between Kurds and the state is a recurrent feature of the Republic.
Early insurrections in the Southeast were equally caused by forces of
Kurdish nationalism and Islamic rejectionism of the secular state. Journalists
at the time (and many Turkish historians since) described the rebels as
“religious fanatics,” “reactionaries” or “irredentists,” but almost never as
nationalists.164 By the mid-1920s, Kurdish activists, including the Azadi
(Freedom) movement, were openly espousing separatism.
The state always met resistance with violence. In 1925 the Sheikh Said
Rebellion was crushed, and the Independence Tribunals brought back to
prosecute its leaders. Other revolts broke out near Aƒri Daƒy; (Mount Ararat)
from 1926–1930 and in Dersim (now Tunceli) in 1937. One source says
there have been as many as thirty-eight armed mutinies in the Kurdish
region since the early 1920s.165 Between 1925 and 1938, tens of thousands
of Kurds and Alevis were deported to Western Turkey.166 Parts of the area
were under continuous martial law from 1925 until 1946. Quiescent in the
1950s and 1960s, the Southeast grew increasingly restless in the 1970s.
From 1984 until 2000 the region was the site of a brutal secessionist war in
which more than 30,000 people died.167 There are still occasional flare-ups
of violence between Kurdish fighters and Turkish security forces. The PKK
has reconstituted itself as the Kurdistan People’s Congress, or Kongra-Gel,
and is thought to have some 5,000 fighters harboring in Northern Iraq.168
Turning Kurds into Turks was always a civilizing mission to eradicate
tribalism and feudalism. Ankara repeatedly sought to overturn land tenure,
banishing the aƒas, the great Kurdish landlords. The campaign targeted
“ethnic” or “folk” Islam as well. Atatürk wrote that no “civilized nation
[could] tolerate a mass of people who let themselves be led by the nose by
a herd of shaykhs, dedes, sayyids, chelebis, babas and amirs,” in other
163.
164.
165.
166.
167.
168.
See KIRISCI & WINROW, supra note 20, at 23–25.
See Lâle Yalçy;n-Heckmann, Ethnic Islam and Nationalism among the Kurds in Turkey,
in ISLAM IN MODERN TURKEY: POLITICS AND LITERATURE IN A SECULAR STATE 103–06 (Richard Tapper
ed., 1991).
See HOUSTON, supra note 24, at 125.
MCDOWALL, supra note 156, at 199–200.
See Stephen Kinzer, Turks and Kurds: A Corner of the World that Peace Forgot, N.Y.
TIMES, 4 July 1999.
See INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP, IRAQ: ALLAYING TURKEY’S FEARS OVER KURDISH AMBITIONS 14, 18
(2005), available at www.icg.org/home/index.cfm?l=1&id=3241. See also Yigal Schleifer,
How Will Turkey Respond to Growing Rebel Violence?, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, 22
Sept. 2004.
466
HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
Vol. 27
words, backward clerics and holy rollers.169 Southeastern Turkey is legendary for its dissenting, and sometimes clandestine, religious brotherhoods
and lodges. Religious heterodoxy has compounded the separate identity of
Kurds while foiling attempts to “Diyanetize” Islam in the Southeast. The
reputation of some Naks*ibendi sheikhs was such that they managed to
transcend sectarian and tribal rivalries and exploit regional solidarity born
of resentment toward Ankara.170 Kurdish cohesiveness grew in response to
the increasing Turkification of the state. As the influence of the tarikats
waned, this solidarity was parlayed into a secular ethnic nationalism.
Former President Turgut Özal—a Kurd himself—predicted that mass
immigration to the industrial centers of Western Turkey would complete the
assimilation of Kurds.171 Surveys and voting patterns do show that Kurdish
identity is strongest among those who remain on the land. Displaced by
poverty and war, roughly half of Turkey’s Kurds now live in the Western part
of the country. Villagers who migrate to the cities, typically through “chain”
migration, maintain close ties to their regional compatriots in the city. These
social networks (hemse* hri ) reproduce rural culture but less so ethnic or
political identity.172
In the 1995 and 1999 elections, the main legal Kurdish-oriented party,
HADEP, polled well in the Southeast, but received scant support among
Kurdish migrants in Western Turkey.173 Still, the party’s strength in the
provinces was remarkable given the slim chance of reaching the 10 percent
threshold needed to gain seats in the parliament, and given the high
likelihood the party would be closed by the Constitutional Court, which, in
fact, happened in 2003.174 This trend continued in the 2002 elections.
DEHAP won 60 percent of the vote in the Southeast, though country-wide,
three-quarters of Kurds voted for non-Kurdish parties.175
169.
170.
171.
172.
173.
174.
175.
MCDOWALL, supra note 156, at 196.
See Yalçy;n-Heckmann, supra note 164, at 104; MCDOWALL, supra note 156, at 196–98,
210–11.
BARKEY & FULLER, supra note 161, at xii. This echoes Ernest Gellner’s observation that the
rise of nationalism often attends the transformation from agrarian—or in the Kurdish
case, grazier—society to industrial society. See generally ERNEST GELLNER, NATIONS AND
NATIONALISM (1993). See also Murat Somer, Ethnic Kurds, Endogenous Identities, and
Turkey’s Democratization and Integration with Europe, 1 GLOBAL REV. ETHNOPOLITICS 74,
87–88 (June 2002), available at www.ethnopolitics.org/archive/volume_I/issue_4/
somer.pdf.
See Tahire Erman, Becoming “Urban” or Remaining “Rural”: The Views of Turkish
Rural-to-Urban Migrants on the “Integration Question,” 30 INT’L J. MIDDLE E. STUD. 541
(1998).
Ays∫e Günes∫-Ayata & Sencer Ayata, Ethnic and Religious Bases of Voting, in POLITICS,
PARTIES & ELECTIONS IN TURKEY 137, 139 (Sabri Sayary; & Yy;lmaz Esmer eds., 2003).
See Bruni, supra note 91.
Ali Çarkog¨lu, Turkey’s November 2002 Elections: A New Beginning?, 6 MIDDLE EAST REV.
INT’L AFF. 30, 33–34 (2002), available at meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2002/issue4/carkoglu.pdf.
2005
Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
467
It is hard to overstate the leviathan pressures Kurds have faced.
Turkification of the Southeast was begun in earnest in the 1950s. The
Kurdish language was banned. Registrars refused to record Kurdish names
on birth certificates (in July 2003, Parliament removed language from the
Census Law that had prohibited the use of names contrary to the “national
culture”).176 Established in 1956, the “Special Commission for Name
Change” re-christened thousands of Kurdish villages with new Turkish
names.177 State mapmakers were not far behind. The process was accelerated after the return to civilian rule in 1983. With the outbreak of the war,
Kurdish rights entered a deep freeze. Kurdish cultural and historical
representations were banned. Kurdish-leaning newspapers, publishing houses,
charitable organizations and NGOs were shuttered. Books about Kurds,
Kurdistan and Kurdish nationalism, including distant historical accounts,
were seized. Turkey’s great novelist, Yas*ar Kemal, was prosecuted in 1995
for arguing that the Kurdish language would fade without literary freedom.178
Kurdish civilians bore the brunt of the war. According to the Human
Rights Foundation of Turkey, thousands of Kurdish villages were evacuated,
and hundreds burned or razed.179 The army instituted Vietnam style
“hamletting” as the war progressed. More than a million Kurds were
displaced. Most of the PKK’s victims were also Kurds (schoolteachers and
postal workers, considered agents of Ankara, were favorite targets), and
many Kurds supported the movement only under duress. In a well-regarded
1995 survey, only 11 percent of Kurdish respondents favored secession,
though two-thirds of those polled said they wanted greater respect for
Kurdish identity and culture, and some measure of self-administration.180 It
was clear, however, that civic allegiance had shallow roots in the Southeast.
The government ruled by military might teamed with the arming of the
“village guards”—in reality, a massive bribery scheme to purchase the
loyalty of tribal leaders to carry out indirect rule.
Aside from an occasional skirmish the war is now over, and bitterness
between Turks and Kurds is receding. Having invested so much blood and
treasure (as much as $100 billion) in the war, many Turks are reluctant to
176.
177.
178.
179.
180.
U.S. BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR, TURKEY: COUNTRY REPORTS ON HUMAN
RIGHTS PRACTICES, 2003, supra note 33.
Öktem, supra note 22, at 9.
See Yas∫ar Kemal, The Dark Cloud over Turkey, 24 INDEX ON CENSORSHIP 141 (1995);
Stephen Kinzer, Intellectuals Urge Turkey to End the War Against Its Kurds, N.Y. TIMES,
22 Oct. 1999, at A12.
See Press Release, Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (31 May 2001), available at
www.tihv.org.tr/eindex.html.
The survey was conducted by Doƒu Ergil of Ankara University. Ergil’s findings are
summarized in MCDOWALL, supra note 156, at 446.
468
HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
Vol. 27
make concessions to Kurdish culture. Since 1999, the Village Return and
Rehabilitation Project has overseen the return of about 10 percent of the
displaced, Kurds as well as some Syriacs. Refugees must receive official
permission to return. There have been some 300,000 applications, half of
which have been denied, ostensibly for security reasons.181 Some Kurds
report being allowed to return only after signing an affidavit stating that they
had fled because of the PKK’s actions, not the government’s, a tactic
possibly aimed at bolstering the government’s defense in future cases
brought at the ECHR.182 Some of the displaced have been resettled in new
“consolidated villages” instead of original sites, often distant from the
villagers’ agricultural lands. Resettlement has not been helped by the fact
that 60,000 village guards remain on the public payroll. Indeed, some
villagers have had to flee a second time.183 The entire process has reinforced
suspicions that the displacements were designed to be permanent.
The Kurdish issue has always been an international one as well.184 The
generals have warned that regime change in Iraq may spin off an
independent Kurdish state there, and have vowed to block it from happening; an estimated 1,500–3,000 Turkish special forces soldiers are active in
Northern Iraq, trying to undermine Kurdish efforts.185 Ankara is particularly
worried that Iraqi Kurds might try to seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which
also happens to have a significant Turkmen, or Turkoman, minority that
Turkey fears may be persecuted under Kurdish rule.186 Today much hope is
invested in the Eastern Anatolian Project (GAP), a massive regional
irrigation and rural development plan, although critics say that the project,
181.
182.
183.
184.
185.
186.
Joost Jongerden, Resettlement and Reconstruction of Identity: The Case of the Kurds in
Turkey, 1 GLOBAL REV. ETHNOPOLITICS 80 (2001), available at www.ethnopolitics.org/
archive/volume_I/issue_1/jongerden.pdf.
See HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, DISPLACED AND DISREGARDED: TURKEY’S FAILING VILLAGE RETURN PROGRAM
4 (Oct. 2002), available at www.hrw.org/reports/2002/turkey/. The largest share of
applications to the ECHR from Turkey have been lodged by Kurds seeking damages
under Protocol I, Article 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights for properties
allegedly wrecked by Turkish security forces. Since 2000, there has been a sharp up-tick
in the number of “friendly settlements,” in which Turkey pays monetary damages to the
applicant, but also satisfies the Court that legal and administrative reforms have been
enacted to prevent future abuses. Thomas W. Smith, Leveraging Norms: The ECHR and
Human Rights Reform in Turkey, supra note 79.
See HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, DISPLACED AND DISREGARDED, supra note 182.
See generally KIRISCI & WINROW, supra note 20, ch. 6; MICHAEL M. GUNTER, THE KURDS AND THE
FUTURE OF TURKEY ch. 4 (1997); DIETRICH JUNG & WOLFANGO PICCOLI, TURKEY AT THE CROSSROADS:
OTTOMAN LEGACIES AND A GREATER MIDDLE EAST ch. 7 (2001).
See INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP, IRAQ: ALLAYING TURKEY’S FEARS OVER KURDISH AMBITIONS, supra
note 168, at 11–12.
See id. at 6–8; Scott Peterson, Kurdish Groups Unite as Turkey Watches, Warily,
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, 4 Oct. 2002; Sandra Mackey, The Coming Clash Over Kirkuk,
N.Y. TIMES, 9 Feb. 2005, at A23.
2005
Civic Nationalism & Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey
469
which has already inundated a number of villages and historical sites, is
emblematic of the state’s top-down engineering of life in the Southeast.187
Elsewhere in the country, the taboo surrounding all things Kurdish has
lifted. There is lively debate about Kurdish cultural and linguistic rights,
although outspoken advocates of Kurdish freedoms still risk public censure
and state prosecution. In August 2002, Parliament ended the ban on
Kurdish-language broadcasting (officials suggested that state-run television
broadcasts might prove useful in order to counter satellite TV propaganda),
and legalized private Kurdish language lessons.188 In June 2004, the staterun TRT television and radio began broadcasts in Kurmanci, the most
widespread Kurdish dialect in Turkey. While Turkification had the full
backing of the state, Kurdish cultural entrepreneurs are largely on their own.
Language dershanes face frequent bureaucratic obstacles, notably shutdowns for fire code violations.189
Reforms or not, many police-state absurdities linger: discerning subversive lyrics, censors still seize Kurdish pop music; officials recently detained
rock star Haluk Levent after he performed at a Kurdish cultural festival in
Germany; in the past, the government had in essence criminalized the
letters “x,” “w” and “q,” which are common in Kurdish but do not exist in
the Turkish version of the Latin alphabet, and a number of prosecutions
were mounted over spelling;190 in the “poster crisis” of 2003 a lower court
ruled that a campaign of posters reading “Peace will prevail” in Turkish and
Kurdish threatened national unity, and police nationwide were ordered to
hunt down and remove the subversive placards.191
VIII. LEAVENING CITIZENSHIP? TURKEY IN EUROPE
Turkey presents a vigorous case of civic nationalism harnessed to ethnicity
and culture. However, the coercive style of citizenship and the processes of
homogenization described here no doubt happen more subtly in other
187.
188.
189.
190.
191.
See, e.g., THE KURDISH HUMAN RIGHTS PROJECT, THE ILISU DAM: A HUMAN RIGHTS DISASTER IN THE
MAKING (1999); Stephen Kinzer, Dam in Turkey May Soon Flood—A ‘2nd Pompeii,’ N.Y.
TIMES, 7 May 2000, at 1.
U.S. BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR, TURKEY: COUNTRY REPORTS ON HUMAN
RIGHTS PRACTICES, 2003, supra note 33.
A good overview of difficulties Kurds still face is Canadian Immigration and Refugee
Board, Country of Origin Research: Turkey, TUR42658.E (2004), available at www.irbcisr.gc.ca/en/research/ndp/ref/?action=view&doc=tur42658e. See also At Last, Turkish
Kurds Are Able to Voice Their Hope of Freedom, TELEGRAPH, 11 June 2003.
See Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, supra note 189.
Ebru Dog¨an, BBC NEWS, Kurds Wait for Turkish Sea Change (19 Dec. 2003), available at
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3328875.stm.
470
HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
Vol. 27
settings. Constructing a civic state and a national culture almost inevitably
entails the leveling of diversity and the folklorizing of minorities. In the garb
of civic inclusion the institutions of state become vehicles for the majority.
In politics as well as economics the path to success may be open only to the
assimilated. In the Turkish case, ethnoreligious state policies were at the
heart of national identity, state building, and the division of public
resources, although the day to day tasks of state also served to diminish
diversity. The dream of a modern civic state turned coercive.
How will Turkey accommodate its own diversity? Islam is sometimes
held out as the cement that will hold the country together. A more likely
scenario is that Turkish accession to the EU will help to crack this dilemma.
Already, the prospect of membership has been a boon to reform. There are
signs that joining the EU may actually heighten cultural conservatism out of
fears of homogenization within Europe. Ironically, Turks might become
more Turkish in Europe; this accounts in part for the popularity of Erdogan’s
efforts to balance Euro-friendly policies and religious traditionalism. But a
federalist Europe also offers a more supple civic model, in which the unitary
state and Turkish “national culture” exist alongside other nationalisms and
identities, including transnational movements, for example, those already
linking Kurds in Germany or Syriacs in Sweden to their brethren in Turkey.
In Turkey and elsewhere, the divided loyalties of the EU are replacing the
absolutism of the modern state.
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