Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey: Environmental, Urban and Secular Politics 9781784536107, 9781350985841, 9781786732286

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Introduction. Contested Spaces in Neo-liberal Turkey
Part I: History
1. Manufacturing Collective Identities: Turkey, Syria and France Contesting Sovereignty over Antioch
2. Ankara’s Forgotten Mental Maps, Changing Demography and Missing Minorities
3. Negotiating History and Diversity in a Border Province: The Non-Muslim Urban Past in Today’s Edirne
Part II: State
4. Mobilizing the State, Monitoring the Countryside: Mobile Village Courses in Turkey
5. İstanbul Confidential: Heroin, Espionage and Politics in Cold War Turkey, 1945 – 60
6. Mosques, Media and Meaning in the Federal Republic of Germany from the 1970s to the Early 1990s
7. The State, Law and Feminist Struggles in the Neo-liberalizing City: The İstanbul Courthouse as a Contested Space
8. The Political Economy of a Conservation Plan: The Case of Uluabat Lake
9. From Shining Icons of Progress to Contested Infrastructures: “Damming” the Munzur Valley in Eastern Turkey
Part III: Market
10. Irregular Migration and Negotiated Urban Space in Kumkapi, İstanbul
11. Turkey’s Urban Neo-liberalism: The Normalization of Informality During JDP Rule
12. Refusing to Become Pious Soldiers: Islamist Conscientious Objection in Turkey
13. “Wake Up!” and “Nomad”: Competing Visions of Turkish and Kurdish Environmentalism in the Music of Tarkan and Aynur
Index

Citation preview

¨ ge Go ¨ c
ek is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies Fatma Mu at the University of Michigan. Her research analyzes the impact of processes such as development, nationalism, religious movements and collective violence on minorities. Her recently published books include Social Constructions of Nationalism in the Middle East (2002), The Transformation of Turkey: Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era (2011) and Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and the Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789 – 2009 (2015). She has also co-edited A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (2011) and has contributed to a variety of books and journals.

“This is an inspiring collection examining the logic and the consequences of neo-liberal authoritarianism and its historical roots.”

¨ ktem, Professor for Southeast European Studies – Kerem O and Modern Turkey, University of Graz

“Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey brings together diverse perspectives offering significant insights into fast-moving but historically based changes in cities and rural areas across the country.” – Susan Pattie, Honorary Senior Research Associate, University College London

CONTESTED SPACES IN CONTEMPORARY TURKEY Environmental, Urban and Secular Politics

Edited by FATMA MU¨GE GO¨C
EK

Dedicated to all those fighting for freedom and democracy in Turkey today

I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition published 2019 Copyright Editorial Selection and Introduction © Fatma Müge Göçek, 2018 Copyright Individual Chapters © Fikret Adaman, Bengi Akbulut, Ozan Aksoy, Kristen Biehl, Laurent Dissard, Tuğçe Ellialtı-Köse, Ryan Gingeras, Zeynep Kaşlı, Pınar Kemerli, Zeynep Kezer, Burak Köse, Sarah Shields, Ceren Soylu, Sarah Thomsen Vierra, Metin Yüksel, 2018 Fatma Müge Göçek has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7845-3610-7 PB: 978-1-8386-0016-7 ePDF: 978-1-7867-3228-6 eBook: 978-1-7867-2228-7 Series: Library of Modern Turkey 28 Typeset by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents

List of Illustrations List of Contributors Introduction Contested Spaces in Neo-liberal Turkey Fatma Mu¨ge Go¨c¸ek

vii x 1

PART I HISTORY 1. Manufacturing Collective Identities: Turkey, Syria and France Contesting Sovereignty over Antioch

41

Sarah Shields 2. Ankara’s Forgotten Mental Maps, Changing Demography and Missing Minorities Zeynep Kezer

60

3. Negotiating History and Diversity in a Border Province: The Non-Muslim Urban Past in Today’s Edirne Zeynep Kas¸lı

92

PART II STATE 4. Mobilizing the State, Monitoring the Countryside: Mobile Village Courses in Turkey Metin Yu¨ksel 5. I˙stanbul Confidential: Heroin, Espionage and Politics in Cold War Turkey, 1945 – 60 Ryan Gingeras

133

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vi

6. Mosques, Media and Meaning in the Federal Republic of Germany from the 1970s to the Early 1990s Sarah Thomsen Vierra 7. The State, Law and Feminist Struggles in the Neo-liberalizing City: The I˙stanbul Courthouse as a Contested Space Tug˘c
e Ellialtı-Ko¨se

204

231

8. The Political Economy of a Conservation Plan: The Case of Uluabat Lake Ceren Soylu, Bengi Akbulut and Fikret Adaman

257

9. From Shining Icons of Progress to Contested Infrastructures: “Damming” the Munzur Valley in Eastern Turkey Laurent Dissard

281

PART III MARKET 10. Irregular Migration and Negotiated Urban Space in Kumkapı, I˙stanbul Kristen Biehl

319

11. Turkey’s Urban Neo-liberalism: The Normalization of Informality During JDP Rule Burak Ko¨se

341

12. Refusing to Become Pious Soldiers: Islamist Conscientious Objection in Turkey Pınar Kemerli

367

13. “Wake Up!” and “Nomad”: Competing Visions of Turkish and Kurdish Environmentalism in the Music of Tarkan and Aynur

394

Ozan Aksoy Index

417

List of Illustrations

MAPS Map 8.1 The Uluabat Lake Basin (The dotted line denotes the boundaries of the protected area).

266

Map 10.1 Map of I˙stanbul’s historical peninsula and district areas.

321

FIGURES ¨ s¸ku ¨ shortly after the construction Figure 2.1 C ¸ ankaya Ko of the new larger residence and office building by Austrian architect Clemens Holzmeister (c. 1930).

63

Figure 2.2 Ankara in 1924, at the outset of the Republic. Buildings with relatively larger footprints and in darker shade indicate the incipient growth towards the train station inaugurated in 1893.

68

¨ nu ¨ neighborhood Figure 2.3 Townhouses in Ankara’s Hisaro in the first decade of the twentieth century.

69

Figure 2.4 The Tevonian family sitting by the poolside in front of their estate (c. 1910).

70

¨ nu ¨ district in the early 1920s, Figure 2.5 The burned Hisaro with some new construction after Ankara became the capital.

73

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Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey

Figure 2.6 Looking north from Ankara’s southern foothills (c. 1935), the gradual transformation of the fabric of the estates is evident.

75

Figure 2.7 Aerial view of Ankara’s developing administrative quarter, with the C ¸ ankaya and Dikmen hills in the background. The artery on the left eventually became the ¨ rk Boulevard. new capital’s dominant axis, Atatu

77

Figure 2.8a Ankara’s transformation under the Republic: republican urban development overtook the agricultural belt surrounding the city’s historic core.

78

Figure 2.8b Driver’s guide to Ankara, 1942. The map comprises the linear axis of development between Ulus and C ¸ ankaya.

79

Figure 7.1 The newly built I˙stanbul Adliye Binasi (I˙stanbul Building of Justice).

234

Figure 7.2 Women protesting the injustice in front of the building; the banner in front reads “We do not consent to male justice; we rise against it and expose it; we demand severe punishment of rapists.”

251

Figure 9.1 Munzur River from Halbori Cliffs, “lieux de me´moire” of 1938 massacres.

296

Figure 9.2 Anti-dam protest march from center of Tunceli to the shores of the Munzur River.

302

Figure 11.1 Zincirlikuyu, Bes¸iktas¸, I˙stanbul.

350

Figure 11.2 Third Bosphorus Bridge, I˙stanbul.

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˘lu, I˙stanbul. Figure 11.3 Tarlabas¸ı, Beyog

358

Figure 13.1 Aynur. Rewend. Arista Music. 2010.

400

˘a Derneg ˘i. 2008. Figure 13.2 Tarkan. Uyan. Dog

401

Figure 13.3 Location of Hasankeyf.

403

List of Illustrations Figure 13.4a and b Ruins of Hasankeyf, sealed off from the public, May 2014.

ix

404

TABLES Table 4.1 Mobile Village Courses for men.

142

Table 4.2 Mobile Village Courses for women.

143

Table 13.1 Comparison of audiovisual features of “Uyan” and “Rewend”.

411

List of Contributors

˘azic
i Fikret Adaman is currently Professor of Economics at Bog University, Istanbul, Turkey. He holds a BA and MA in Economics at ˘azic
i University and a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Bog Manchester. His research interests include alternative economies, ecological economics, history of economy thought, and political economy. His publications have appeared in Antipode, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Conservation Letters, Development and Change, Ecological Economics, Energy Policy, Environmental Politics, New Left Review, and Voluntas. His co-edited book Neoliberal Turkey and its Discontents: Economic Policy and the Environment Under Erdogan has recently been published (I.B.Tauris, 2017). Bengi Akbulut is currently a professor in the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University, Quebec. She holds ˘azic
i University, a Ph.D. in Economics from a BA in Economics from Bog the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and was a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester. Her work is situated within the fields of political economy, ecological economics, development studies and feminist economics. Her work has appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Development and Change, and the Journal of Peasant Studies among others. Most recently she has co-edited a volume on the political ecology of neo-liberal Turkey, Neoliberal Turkey and its Discontents: Economic Policy and the Environment Under Erdogan (I.B.Tauris, 2017).

List of Contributors

xi

Ozan Aksoy is an ethnomusicologist with research interests in music, politics, environmental activism, and diaspora, particularly as they pertain to Kurdish communities originally from Turkey. His publications have appeared in Music and Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, Perspectives on Europe, Made in Turkey: Studies in Popular Music, and several edited volumes. He holds a Ph.D. in Music from CUNY Graduate Center and has taught at Columbia, New York University, and Hunter College, City University of New York. He is an avid multi-instrumentalist who has founded and led several Middle Eastern ensembles. Kristen Biehl is an anthropologist. For the past ten years she has been involved in intensive research within the migration and asylum field in Turkey, working with different migrant and refugee communities, as well as NGOs and public institutions. Her research interests range from exploring the everyday lived experiences of asylum policies in Turkey to understanding how urban society and space are transformed through migration and diversification processes. She has published widely in academic journals like Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Analysis, and Journal of Immigrant Minority Health. Biehl holds a BA in Social Anthropology and Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, an MA in Sociology ˘azic
i University, and is currently completing her Ph.D. from Bog jointly carried out at the University of Oxford’s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society. She has also held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and Mercator-Istanbul Policy Center. Laurent Dissard is a junior research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies of University College London. He received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania. His research examines both the politics of the past in the Middle East and Turkey’s history of infrastructural modernization. He is currently working on two manuscripts: Submerged Stories examines how the past in Eastern Turkey has become "worth" rescuing

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over the last 40 years. A Nation under Construction uses a recently available World Bank archive to trace the Cold War history and politics of Turkey’s first mega-infrastructure, the Keban Dam on the Euphrates River. ˘ c
e Ellialtı-Ko ¨ se is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University Tug of Pennsylvania and is affiliated with the Alice Paul and the Evelyn Jacobs Ortner research centers at the same university. She holds a BA ˘azic
i University and an MA in Cultural Studies in Sociology from Bog from Sabancı University. She also holds a Graduate Certificate in the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program from the University of Pennsylvania. Her academic interests are in gender and sexuality studies, socio-legal studies, feminist theory and sociology, ethnographies of the state, cultural studies, women’s movements and qualitative methods. Her previous publications include an article on the disciplinary discourses of sexual morality on women’s pre-marital sexual activity in Turkey; several op-eds on sexual violence, honor crimes, and women’s movements; three encyclopedia entries on child abuse, family violence, and virginity; and a review of the book entitled ‘Honour’: Crimes, Paradigms and Violence against Women (edited by Lynn Welchman and Sara Hossain). She is also a member of Gu¨ldu¨nya Yayınları, a feminist publishing collective based in I˙stanbul, where she made editorial contributions to the Turkish translations of two books, including Angela Davis’s recent book Freedom is a Constant Struggle. Ryan Gingeras is an associate professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and is an expert on Turkish, Balkan and Middle East history. He is the author of four books, including most recently Fall of the Sultanate: The Great War and the End of the Ottoman Empire 1908 – 1922. His first book, Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire, received short-list distinctions for the Rothschild Book Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies and the British – Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize. He has published on a wide variety of topics related to history and politics in such journals as Foreign Affairs, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Middle East Journal, Iranian

List of Contributors

xiii

Studies, Diplomatic History, Past & Present, and Journal of Contemporary European History. He received his doctorate in history from the University of Toronto in 2006. Zeynep Kas¸lı recently earned a Ph.D. in the Interdisciplinary Near and Middle Eastern Studies Program from the University of Washington, Seattle with a dissertation entitled “(Re)Bordering Territory and Citizenship on the Greek-Turkish Borderland.” She ˘azic
i University, an MA in holds a BA in Political Science from Bog Social and Public Policy from University of Leeds, an MA in Political Science from Sabanci University and a Graduate Certificate in Law and Society Studies from the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research topics include citizenship, minority and migrants’ rights, multi-level governance of mobility, diversity, and borders. Her articles have appeared in Alternatives: Global, Local, Political; Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies; and Journal of Refugee Studies as well as several scholarly periodicals and volumes. She is currently an affiliated researcher at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society in Leiden University and guest professor at the Vienna University, Political Science Department. Pınar Kemerli is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Government and International Affairs at the University of South Florida. She completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Government at ˘azic
i University in Cornell University in 2015, and holds a BA from Bog Turkey, and MA degrees from Goldsmiths College of the University of London and Cornell University. At USF, she is completing her book project, entitled Radical Muslims, on Muslim anti-war activists in Turkey, who bring together Islamic teachings on political responsibility together with global traditions of civil disobedience. Zeynep Kezer is an architectural and urban historian with interdisciplinary interests in politics, cultural geography, and material culture. She was trained as an architect at Middle East Technical University (Ankara) and holds an MArch and Ph.D. from University of California Berkeley. Kezer is interested in examining how modern state-formation processes and nationalist ideologies

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play out in the built environment, informing everyday practices and identity formation. She has published in various academic and professional journals and is the author of The Making of Modern Turkey: State, Space and Ideology in the Early Republic (2015). Her latest research focuses on the violent transformation of Eastern Anatolia’s cultural landscapes during Turkey’s transition from empire to republic, especially as they affected the region’s Armenian and Kurdish populations. ¨ se is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Program in Burak Ko Sociology at York University, Toronto, and a student member of the City Institute at the same university. He holds an MA in Social and Political Thought from the University of Sussex, Brighton, and a BA from the double major program in Political Science and International ˘azic
i University. His academic Relations and Sociology from Bog interests are in development studies, urban studies, political ecology, social movements, contemporary social theories and qualitative research methods. His research deals with the changing state-naturesociety relations in the neo-liberal era through a focus on infrastructure projects in Turkey. His previous publications include a co-authored book chapter on peri-urban governance in India’s major cities, a book review of Worlding Cities (edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong) and an op-ed on the Gezi uprising in Turkey entitled “Culmination of Resistance Against Urban Neoliberalism.” Sarah Shields is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina. Her 2011 book, Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of World War II, is a social and diplomatic history of the contest between France and Turkey over the Sanjak of Alexandretta. Her previous book, Mosul before Iraq: Like Bees Making Five-Sided Cells (2000), analyzes the economy and society of nineteenth-century Mosul and the region surrounding it. She is currently researching the long-term impact of the League of Nations on the Middle East. Ceren Soylu is currently Professor of Economics at the University of ˘azic
i Massachusetts Amherst. She holds a BA in Economics from Bog

List of Contributors

xv

University, and a Ph.D. in Economics at University of Siena. Her past and ongoing research is inspired by questions of inequality, power, and collective action problems. In her work, she applies quantitative and qualitative methods to address these questions in various fields: (i) the political economy of power; (ii) the political economy of the environment; (iii) social networks and collective action; and, (iv) distributional issues in health economics. Her publications have appeared in Cambridge Journal of Economics, Journal of Development Studies, Ecologia Politica, and Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review. Sarah Thomsen Vierra is an assistant professor of History at New England College of Henniker, New Hampshire. She received her doctorate in European History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Vierra’s dissertation, “At Home in Almanya: TurkishGerman Spaces of Belonging in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1961 – 1990”, was granted the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize by the German Historical Institute in 2012, and serves as the foundation of her forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press. In addition, she has contributed chapters on West Berlin’s Turkish community and migration in modern German history more broadly to forthcoming edited volumes. Her research interests include migration, local and national identities, and community formation. ¨ ksel is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Metin Yu Science and Public Administration at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in 2011. Recently, he has been focusing on the twentieth-century social and cultural history of Iran and modern Kurdish literature. His articles and book reviews have appeared in International Journal of Turkish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, The Muslim World, Iranian Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, and Patterns of Prejudice.

INTRODUCTION

Contested Spaces in Neo-liberal Turkey Fatma Mu¨ge Go¨cek

The diffusion of neo-liberalism in Turkey and my life trajectory have intersected in an interesting way. I have not lived in Turkey since the early 1980s, when I moved to the United States, initially to receive my doctorate and then to stay because of the teaching position I then got. I did, however, keep visiting Turkey every year since then, especially during the summers. In my mind’s eye, I remember noting at every visit all that was visibly new in my native city of I˙stanbul. The 1980s were marked by the building of a plethora of shopping malls, upscale restaurants and cafes. I remember the 1990s through the continuation of the building of private housing complexes, highrises and some roads. It was perhaps the 2000s when, with the coming to power of the Justice and Development Party (hereafter JDP) that the pace of building I witnessed reached an all-time high, expanding not only to neighboring towns and cities, but all over the rest of the country as well. This was also accompanied by infrastructural investments in subways and high-speed trains that eased transportation. I also started then to travel to east and southeast Turkey, populated predominantly by Kurds. It was shocking for me to sense the invisible line on our way that separated Harput from Dersim (Tunceli): as the population composition shifted from majority-Turkish to majorityKurdish, economic investment dwindled while military presence and

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securitization escalated. Here was the dark side of neo-liberalism, namely the violent exclusion of all those that did not fit its model of the ideal politically obedient, all-consuming citizen. I then witnessed such uneven neo-liberal development diffuse with increasing pace into the 2010s. It was also then when the first collective resistance to Turkish neo-liberalism occurred in 2013 at Gezi Park in Taksim, I˙stanbul. The urban populace valiantly resisted the transformation of this park into yet another building/mall complex, but was violently suppressed by the JDP government. The political suppression has continued unabated since then, as Turkey swiftly slides into the ˘an. single-leader authoritarian rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdog The JDP ruler and his cronies tout the visible transformation of social space by neo-liberalism as their greatest achievement to legitimate their autocratic rule. Yet the reality on the ground is, of course, much more complex. This edited volume specifically focuses on the contested spaces of neo-liberal Turkey, with the aim to convey its complexity by demonstrating how it does not impact all aspects of life similarly, always producing celebratory results. Instead, its impact is highly selective, uneven, violent and destructive at times. In terms of the particular shape neo-liberalism takes in Turkey, this volume demonstrates that not only the market and the state, but history also, structures current neo-liberal practices in Turkey. And most importantly, such current neo-liberal practices on the spaces of the market, state and history also generate new sites of resistance. In this Introduction, I commence by discussing the concepts of neoliberalism and contested spaces, briefly review the existing literature of these concepts in the context of Turkey, and then introduce the contributions to the volume. EMERGENCE AND CONTEMPORARY DIFFUSION OF NEO-LIBERALISM According to David Harvey,1 neo-liberalism is “in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human wellbeing can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized

Introduction

3

by strong property rights, free market and free trade.” What gives neo-liberalism its hegemonic power is the combination of various factors. First, economic practices combine with and supported by political practices that are advocated and monitored by the state; such combination privileges the market (read economic interests) at the expense of the nation (read political interests). Second, the unit of analysis is the individual, who is evaluated solely in terms of his (not her) ability to practice his freedoms and skills in the marketplace. Not only do economic rights trump all other rights, including universal human rights, but other social units such as communities and associations that hold society together are relegated to the margins. Third, the institutional framework also selects the economic ideas and practices over all else, prioritizing property rights that enable class privileges to reproduce across generations; free market that destroys all other concerns including the environment, historical preservation or cultural conservation; and free trade that eliminates all protection of those unable to fully participate in this economically driven system. In addition, the judiciary and the military and police forces are drawn in to sustain and securitize this new formation. Given these drawbacks, how and why has neo-liberalism become so hegemonic? Centeno and Cohen2 ably answer this query, stating that neo-liberalism is Janus-faced, including “structural economic development (re)distribution of political power, ideational and discursive shifts that frame how these changing conditions are perceived and acted upon, and the balance between coercion, exchange and conversion.” Indeed, neo-liberalism is extremely capable in releasing all the resources of a society, getting the state’s aid in putting them into circulation, and thereby creating the illusion of abundant development and progress. The unevenness of the development and the escalating inequities are carefully masked by the illusion of opportunities that only exist in consumption and actually for the economic and political elites alone. Still, everyone is portrayed as equal, and they indeed are in their chance to consume. Neo-liberal economists and politicians persistently argue that eventually not only the elites, but everyone, will acquire their fair market share. This illusion, promising a dream of economic equality amidst rising inequities and idealizing the manner in which the

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market can be a guide to all human action, explains the persistence of neo-liberalism to this day. The origins of the term neo-liberalism can be traced to the years preceding the Great Depression, to the 1920s and 1930s, specifically to a meeting of liberal theorists in Europe. What made these liberal theorists neo-liberal was the role they attributed to the state in relation to the economy: while classical liberalism called for the cessation of all state control over the market, thereby assuming that economic forces would then naturally produce conditions that best suited the civilized humanity of the West, these neo-liberal theorists instead advocated the state to actually intervene and guide individuals toward such behavior.3 The combination of economic power with political authority thus expanded the hegemonic control of neo-liberalism over states and societies. Yet such thoughts were not initially favored at the time when the existing economic and political conditions escalated into the global destruction known as World Wars I and II. Neo-liberal thought and advocacy expanded during and after World War II, but did not have any traction until the 1970s when it rose to prominence at the University of Chicago with economist Milton Friedman. Until then, David Harvey notes4 the economic political organization was one of “embedded liberalism [where] market processes and entrepreneurial and corporate activities were surrounded by a web of social and political constraints and a regulatory environment that sometimes restrained but in other instances led the way in economic and industrial strategy.” This was the period of the welfare state where healthcare, education and other services were publicly provided by the state. As this system started to stall due to a serious crisis in capital accumulation in the 1970s, the world was hit by unemployment and inflation. The employment of neo-liberalism by Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK to get out of these economic quandaries put the system into practice in the West for the first time.5 It was in this context that, in the aftermath of the Cold War in the 1990s, the “Washington Consensus” that advocated free market orthodoxy, specifically “fiscal austerity, market determined interest and exchange rates, free trade, inward investment deregulation, privatization, market deregulation, and a commitment to protecting private property”, moved to the

Introduction

5

forefront.6 This neo-liberal consensus was then spread to the rest of the world, primarily aided by financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the InterAmerican Development Bank. Nation states became hierarchically organized, with those countries in the North housing multi-national corporations dominating the rest in the South, especially through the aid of global civil society structures such as non-governmental organizations. NEO-LIBERALISM, SPACE AND SOCIOLOGICAL CONTRIBUTIONS Among the many social science fields, geography has played a leading role in the analysis of neo-liberalism by focusing on natural and human-built spaces. According to Kean Birch (2015: 579), geographers have provided the most insight into neo-liberalism for three reasons. First, geographers approach neo-liberalism as a process, articulating the restructuring due to privatization, marketization and commodification. Second, they study the changes neoliberalism undergoes over time, differentiating, for instance, the initial rollback stage of privatization and deregulation from the subsequent rollout stage of state-building and marketization of public services. Third, they meticulously stress the very varied, disparate outcomes and effects of neo-liberalism within and across countries throughout the world. Indeed, most recent research7 carefully articulates the neo-liberal variations across disparate contexts. In order of citation, they note, for instance, the contextual embeddedness of neo-liberal projects within transnational, national, regional, and local contexts; path-dependent interaction between neo-liberal projects and existing institutional and spatial landscapes; trace variations in industrially dependent regions across Western and Eastern Europe; economic and political interactions in setting state policies in Hungary at the regional and county levels; and the mild impact of the 2007 – 09 world financial crisis on neo-liberalism. All these studies unite, however, in articulating two significant findings in relation to neo-liberalism. First, neo-liberal projects are complex, path-dependent processes that assume a multiplicity of forms in accordance with the existing conditions; and second, neo-liberal

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projects ultimately decimate and (so far) irreversibly transform relations on the ground by polarizing existing inequities. In geographers’ conception of space, the physical space constantly interacts horizontally with “non-physical” political and economic institutions and organizations such as the state, market, judiciary and the like, and the physical and non-physical spaces interact vertically at various spatial scales such as the transnational, national, regional and local.8 As a consequence of these intersecting tensions, the physical space ends up dominating over the non-physical on the one side and macro scale analysis dictates micro scale insights. I hope the way this volume is set up will demonstrate the contributions sociology can make to the spatial analysis of neo-liberalism. Social reality in the field is analyzed in sociology through the intersection of space, time and meaning, where the last is produced through the interaction of existing structure and social action. As such, sociology would approach spatial analysis through a different vantage point. Rather than focusing on the content of the space, taking it as a given, sociology would analyze all the elements relationally through networks, taking note of which relationships dominate at the expense of others. Such a critical approach overcomes the problem of certain aspects of the content dominating others. Again, rather than concentrating on each and every factor comprising the context within which the neo-liberal project takes shape where the macro factors often overpower the micro processes, sociology would focus on, first, what form the boundaries of the space under analysis, and second, how the past and present factors interact to generate the process of meaning and knowledge production. As such, the focus of sociology intersects with that of anthropology, another field that has also made significant contributions to the analysis of neo-liberalism and space. A seminal article in this context by Ana Maria Alonso9 articulates the politics of space, time and substance in the context of state formation, nationalism and ethnicity. As space gets increasingly fragmented and controlled by the state, Alonso asks, how do people and place reaffirm their identities? Taking human experience in everyday life and concomitant meaning production in disparate contexts as the starting point, Alonso critically analyzes not only the

Introduction

7

ensuing conceptions of ethnic, gender, kin, sexual and national identities, but also highlights the manner in which the state intervention in these places leads to pockets of resistance to the state. Interestingly enough, the sociological analysis of space commences with a rough start as the two sociological reviews of the literature on space that are supposed to be seminal fall short.10 Gieryn oddly overlooks the entire burgeoning post-structural literature on the analysis of space to instead project all onto the material form and meaning and value of place. He treats space as a vacuum, claiming that it only acquires meaning when humans transform it into a place through their experience. More than a decade later, Logan corrects this oversight by focusing on the analysis of space in and of itself, but does so by once again taking space literally, analyzing space through mapping, distance, networks and clustering. What is missing in both is a discussion of how factors like history, state and market intersect to generate meaning, a shortcoming that has been overcome by other sociologists working on symbolic boundaries and meaning production. Seminal is the article by Michele Lamont and Virag Molnar11 on boundaries, where they discuss in detail both symbolic and social boundaries. Whereas symbolic boundaries are “conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, peoples, practices, and even time and space,” social boundaries are “objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to and unequal distribution of resources (material and nonmaterial) and social opportunities.12 Hence, while symbolic boundaries help people define and categorize the space around them, social boundaries determine what they do or do not have access to within that space. It is the intersection of these boundaries that determines the meaning of space. Such focus on boundaries highlights the dynamics of meaning construction because boundaries are liminal, that is, they highlight how the factors shaping meaning construction actually work. Sociological analyses of neo-liberalism gain speed the same year as Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas and Sarah Babb13 compare the paths to neo-liberalism of Britain, France, Mexico and Chile. The paths are, as expected, complex, but there is a pattern to the complexity: while the developing countries of Mexico and Chile are more dependent on

8

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey

direct external pressures like the IMF than the developed nations, the negotiations of neo-liberalism by the four differ in yet another way. It is the institutionalized patterns of state-society relations, namely the culturally determined patterns of public interaction, irrespective of the level of economic development, that separate Chile and Britain from France and Mexico. The neo-liberal impact was much weaker in France and Mexico as neo-liberalism was interpreted practically as “a necessary step to adapt the country to the international economy” rather than as an ideology to execute a monetarist revolution.14 The differentiation of this ideological versus pragmatic route to neo-liberalism introduces the significance of interpretation of meaning and knowledge by states and societies, the parameters of which are embedded in historical and cultural practices and traditions. Monica Prasad15 analyzes the difference in the reaction of France to neo-liberalism even further, arguing that France has not been as impacted by neo-liberalism as the United States and Britain have been because of the pragmatic stand it adopted in the postwar period. This stand privileged the aim of turning an agricultural country into an industrial one over furthering the goals of social justice for all citizens. In addition, the existing political structure in France impeded the development of the political innovations necessary to fully enact neo-liberal reforms. Hence, Prasad points out that it is not only cultural practices, but also historical and political processes, that determine the particular shape that the neo-liberal project actually assumes in a particular state. Most recent sociological work on neo-liberalism delves into analyzing not the physically transformed space, but instead the social and cultural implications on humans of living in that space. It is in this context that sociology is able to articulate the manner in which the polarizing inequalities of neo-liberalism work out. Daina Eglitis16 focuses on post-communist Latvia to articulate the manner in which class stratification has emerged in a totally novel, cultural manner: it is made apparent through means of consumption. Hence the concepts of distinction, style and lifestyle, given new cultural meaning through the advent of neo-liberalism, produce a new way to stratify society. Neo-liberalism culturally empowers consumption. The cultural impact of neo-liberalism transcends the market to

Introduction

9

move into not only class relations, but also politics. Michele Lamont and Nicolas Duvoux17 point out that neo-liberalism has manifested itself through “a deep transformation of shared definitions of worth (in favor of economic performance) and a narrowing of symbolic communities and solidarities at the cultural level.” Indeed, in contemporary France, the working class draws strong moral boundaries not only toward the resented elite, but also to the poor for being undeserving and not self-reliant on the one side and the youth by sacrificing them as collateral costs of economic transition. Such patterns of exclusion seem to extend today to Europe at large as countries most affected by neo-liberalism seem the least welcoming toward refugees.18 SIGNIFICANCE OF CONTESTED SPACES Given the manner in which neo-liberalism is unraveling relations, connections and ties, other than those formed in the context of the market and sanctioned by the state, how could humans sustain their sense of community, common welfare and sense of social justice? It is in this context that sites of resistance to neo-liberalism become significant in that they provide the factors that may eventually undermine its hegemony. Sociology helps analyze the emergence and sustenance of social resilience in the face of adversity that has recently assumed the shape of neo-liberalism. As such, social resilience is defined as “the capacity of groups of people bound together in organizations, classes, racial groups, communities or nations to sustain and advance their well-being in the face of challenges”.19 In order to articulate such resilience, one needs to specifically focus on sites at which neo-liberalism is resisted.20 It is in this context that the idea of conflict and contestation moves to the forefront: in order to capture the elements that potentially resist neoliberal penetration, it is necessary to focus on sites of contestation where different social groups try to promote disparate agendas in general, and where groups coalesce to contest the application of neoliberal agendas in particular. For instance, social movements such as the Tahrir Square and Gezi Park movements in Egypt and Turkey as well as the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States are

10

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey

instances of such contestation. It is in this context that the volume focuses on contested spaces: such spaces articulate the elements of both the perpetrating neo-liberal forces and the contesting anti-neoliberal ones. The above-mentioned example of the anti-neo-liberal movements in Egypt, Turkey and New York brings forth another point of discussion: as neo-liberalism is the social product of Western industrialized countries, not only its origins but also its impact may need to be analyzed separately in the West that created neo-liberalism as opposed to the non-West upon which neo-liberalism was imposed. Such differentiation is significant on two grounds: the impact of neoliberalism has been more devastating in the non-West, and the power inequalities neo-liberalism creates across the West–non-West divide need to be taken into account since the solutions offered vary significantly. Raewyn Connell and Nour Dados provide insight regarding how to approach neo-liberalism from the vantage point of the non-West, where they pitch the divide in terms of a North– South one. After arguing that all approaches to neo-liberalism privilege the North, they propose an alternative that prioritizes the experience of the Global South, specifically emphasizing three significant issues: “the formative role of the state, including the military; the expansion of the world commodity trade, including minerals; agriculture, informality and the transformation of rural society.” These are indeed also very significant in the context of Turkey, where the state and military play a very significant role in charting the particular path of Turkish neo-liberalism.21 Aihwa Ong’s work, however, demonstrates the complexity of the North– South interaction in that, in Asia, both the market and the state actively employ neo-liberalism to construct exceptions in citizenship and sovereignty; more specifically, “citizenship elements such as entitlements and benefits are increasingly associated with neo-liberal criteria, so that mobile individuals who possess human capital or expertise are highly valued and can exercise citizenship-like claims in diverse locations. Meanwhile, citizens who are judged not to have such tradable competence or potential become devalued and thus vulnerable to exclusionary practices.”22 Such escalating social divides within a society based on market forces alone leads to

Introduction

11

othering social groups that do not wield as much power in society on grounds of, for instance, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion. Particular in this context is the current role of Islam and its frequent association in the West (or North) with violence. Christina Scharff23 studies the impact of neo-liberalism on young women’s engagements with feminism in Britain and Germany; two processes that distinguish these young women are individualization on the one hand and the othering of Muslim women on the other. It is the othering of Muslim women that is significant here, as Islam as a religion has indeed recently emerged as a negative cultural marker in the West. Yet in Egypt, the same factor of religion is once again subversively employed in a totally different manner in relation to neoliberalism.24 Faith-based development organizations employ Islamic piety to legitimate neo-liberal development projects, thereby formulating an Islamic solution to social problems. Alongside religiosity, financial investment, entrepreneurship and business skills are underlined as just as significant factors indicating what it means to be a practicing Muslim. Hence Atia25 defines the ensuing pious neo-liberalism as “the discursive combination of religion and economic rationale in a manner that encourages individuals to be proactive and entrepreneurial in the interest of furthering their relationship with God.” Volunteerism plays a significant role in this project as these organizations systematically undermine the efficacy of the secular state institutions and their organizations. This too is significant in that neo-liberal Turkey has witnessed a similar development along religious lines. It is now time to turn to analyze neo-liberalism in Turkey. FORMATION OF NEO-LIBERAL TURKEY The emergence of neo-liberalism in Turkey is coeval with the United States and Britain in that systematic privatization, commodification and marketization of state-owned industries, organizations and lands commenced in the aftermath of the 12 September 1980 military coup.26 Until then, the economy of Turkey was based on the economic model of industrialization through import substitution.

12

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey

The attempts to transform to neo-liberalism where the economic model is predicated on the global flows of goods and capital became especially pronounced after the switch to civilian rule under the ¨ zal, who served as the Prime Minister from leadership of Turgut O 1983 to 1989 and then as the President from 1989 to 1993. It was during this period that the I˙stanbul stock exchange, mutual funds and investment banks were established, thereby creating the financial market that Turkey lacked until then. Also significant was the 1984 introduction of the two-tiered metropolitan municipality model whereby municipalities could now create and also implement their own plans, effectively transforming them into urban entrepreneurs, relatively freed from centralized state control.27 In considering the social impact of these reforms, the privatization of education and the media, especially the establishment of private universities and television stations, were significant in opening up new spaces of discourse in civil society. These developments generated an arena for the critical discussion on state and societal practices, and led to the generation of meaning and knowledge in civil society that escaped state control. In the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, with the collapse of the Soviet Union (1989 – 91), the redefinition of the world economic and political order around the leadership of the United States diffused neo-liberalism further throughout the globe, including Turkey. The 1990s were economically and politically difficult for Turkey, however.28 The liberalization of the market initially generated an open and democratic order that especially enabled the emergence of religiously conservative Islamic capital that had been marginalized by the secular Turkish state, military and urban elite to the provinces outside the three major cities of I˙stanbul, Ankara and I˙zmir. The decade was socially and politically marked by a tense coexistence: the secular state and urban elite under the guidance of the forcefully secular military tried to keep power and sovereignty away from the growing strength of the provincial, religiously conservative economic elite on the one side and liberal urban intellectuals on the other. Even ¨ zal’s more-than-a-decade-long stay in political power though O ensured that the instigated reforms were also carried out, the financial instability persisted alongside high inflation, reaching 80–90 percent

Introduction

13

on the one side and interest rates rising beyond 100 percent on the other. This financial instability was a consequence of the war against the Kurds that very much escalated military expenditure. In addition, the newly established financial sector was fragile and the banking system rather weak. The intense neo-liberal restructuring commenced in 1998 as the Turkish state accepted its first comprehensive disinflation program managed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1998 that was quickly followed by other similar programs put into effect in 1999, 2000 and 2001 where Turkey received substantive loans to completely restructure its economy along the neo-liberal model. The IMF forced the reduction of public spending that the Turkish state traditionally carried out on education, health care and social security. The enacted tax reforms gradually dispossessed the citizens and enriched domestic and foreign capital. This tense coexistence ended in 2002 when JDP, still in power in Turkey today, was established as a political party in 2001 and initially came to power the following year. In a way, JDP had the opportunity to reap the initial benefits of the neo-liberal structural transformation that had been set in place through the IMF reforms in the 1990s. Still, the rapid economic growth Turkey experienced in the 2000s was not predicated principally on economic production, but rather the freeing of resources and ensuing construction due to increased privatization. In addition, short-term capital flows into Turkey due to the restructured financial conditions on the one side and relative political stability on the other escalated investment and consumption based on credit, that is, borrowing against future income. Politically, however, Turkey sought eventual membership in the European Union, undertaking a series of liberalizing and democratizing reforms in that direction. It also pursued a “zeroconflict” foreign policy with all its neighbors, thereby elevating its international political standing as well. Most significant, however, was the peace process the state and the JDP government initiated with the Kurds of Turkey, with whom the Turkish state had been fighting a low-level civil war since 1984 after the formation of the PKK (Partiya Karkereˆn Kurdistaneˆ) Kurdish militia. Many of the military rules and regulations constraining the Kurds on their own ancestral lands of Kurdistan, subjecting them to systemic violence,

14

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey

were removed as JDP slowly started to gain control over the traditionally powerful Turkish military as well. In the 2010s, JDP consolidated the neo-liberal hegemony in Turkey, not only by advocating neo-liberalism in its political rhetoric and campaigns, but also by merging its principles with its inherently Islamic stand on issues. It was also then that rent-seeking JDP entrepreneurs expanded their reach beyond construction projects to money laundering, especially aided by the financial operations of the oil-rich states of Saudi, Arabia, Qatar and Oman. All took a turn for the worse during and after 2013 when capital started to outflow from Turkey due to increased political instability in the region on the one side and increased economic stability in the West and especially the United States on the other. It was also at this juncture that political resistance to neo-liberalism in Turkey exploded in the form of the Gezi Park social movement against the private enclosure of public spaces in general and the main public park of I˙stanbul in particular. The extreme police brutality unleashed on the demonstrators marked the initial appearance of the dark side of neo-liberalism, namely increased securitization and violence to protect the primacy of market forces and private property, and the lives of only those citizens who voted for JDP. From that time on up until the present when I penned this piece, all those individuals, social groups, organizations, newspapers and journals that have criticized President ˘an – a president who had sworn an oath in assuming office to Erdog be the apolitical president of all the citizens of Turkey but insisted unconstitutionally to use his power only to respect and protect those citizens who voted for JDP – have been systematically eliminated. Especially grave is the still ongoing systematic massacre of Kurds in southeast Turkey by the Turkish military and its secret militia. Hence, the auspicious intersection of JDP’s Islamist ideology with neoliberalism has created in Turkey its most undemocratic, authoritarian political rule. In summary, then, the temporal context of the emergence and spread of neo-liberalism in Turkey is similar to many other countries I discussed in the previous section, such as the United States, Britain, France, Mexico and Chile. Yet, also similar to these other countries is the fact that the actual form, that is, the content of neo-liberalism in

Introduction

15

Turkey varies significantly. I would argue that Turkey is more similar to France and Mexico than Chile and Britain in that neo-liberalism in Turkey is also portrayed practically as an economic development strategy necessary to keep up with the world economic order rather than as a transformative ideology.29 In considering the extra-economic dimensions and social and cultural impact of neo-liberalism, however, the case of Turkey is similar to Egypt, for instance, in terms of the use of religious ideology to mutually utilize, spread and legitimate Islam and neo-liberalism.30 Turkey is different, however, in that the intersection of the ideology of Islam and neo-liberalism has not stayed in the realm of civil society and volunteerism alone, but has instead spread into the realm of politics and the state.31 NEO-LIBERAL TURKEY IN ACTION: INTERSECTION OF ISLAMISM AND NEO-LIBERALISM The mutual constitution of Islamism and neo-liberalism has led many scholars to analyze this intersection in depth. These scholars have not only been able to bring the significance of extra-economic elements in the formation and reproduction of neo-liberalism in Turkey, but many have also emphasized the contemporaneous polarization of space in neo-liberal Turkey, especially between the economically more-developed and ethnically Turkish Western Turkey and the intentionally ignored and ethnically Kurdish nonWestern Turkey or, put another way, Kurdistan that has been under Turkish rule since the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923. I will therefore narrate neo-liberal Turkey today within the context of this spatial polarization of Western and non-Western Turkey.

Neo-liberal Western Turkey Works on the impact of neo-liberalism in Turkey commence in the early 2000s, as Nes¸ecan Balkan and Sungur Savran32 initially to assess how the structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF impacted the Turkish economy. Their two interconnected edited volumes capture the devastation neo-liberalism wreaks as the Turkish state transforms its interaction with society from a welfare-providing role into a neo-liberal one. Among many adverse measures, it no

16

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey

longer sustains the social security system, privatizes education and removes union protection over workers, and allows public education to deteriorate. Hence, neo-liberalism “ravages” society as state protection over the well-being of its citizens in the form of public ¨ltekin-Karakas¸33 goods are systematically taken away. Derya Gu articulates in her book how the most significant ingredient of neoliberalism, namely the Turkish financial market, was developed by the state through banking reform. It is no accident that the two most recent edited works on the impact of neo-liberalism in Turkey34 both cover in depth the conjuncture of the rise of Islamist capital and JDP as a political party with neo-liberalism. While one carefully analyzes the contours of state and society to determine the manner in which neo-liberalism fully penetrated into Turkey, the other contends that JDP has finally concluded the neo-liberal structural transformation initially imposed by the IMF by imposing neo-liberal hegemony on Turkey. JDP managed to do so by uniting the dominant and dominated classes through the ideology of Islam and employing neoliberalism to legitimate its undemocratic, authoritarian framework. Politically, as neo-liberalism strips away public goods distributed by the state to instead empower market forces, the now-neo-liberal state is forced to mobilize other ideologies to sustain and legitimate its rule over society. Cory Blad and Banu Kocer35 follow this line of reasoning to explain the strength of the recent grip of Islamist ideology over Turkey as the “cultural legitimation strategy” of the Turkish state. The consolidation process of the connection between political Islam and neo-liberalism in Turkey is carefully and thoroughly discussed by a number of scholars.36 While Yavuz describes the contemporary emergence of Islamic political identity, ¨ r traces the ensuing mobilization of political Islam. The Eligu remaining two books are based on ethnographies that carefully analyze the manner in which residents of I˙stanbul make sense of the all-encompassing transformation they witness around them. While ˘ al focuses on how Islam is negotiated and subsequently Tug incorporated into neo-liberal practices, Rutz and Barkan carefully determine the characteristics of the first neo-liberal transnational middle class of Turkey. It is not surprising that quality education, property and lifestyle concerns and comfort emerge as the priorities

Introduction

17

of this middle class. Such political apathy should also be taken as the point of departure to bring in the experiences of all social groups that politically oppose Turkey’s neo-liberal order: increasing populism and violence of JDP makes sense in this context. Zeynep Gambetti37 provides the most cogent discussions of escalating state and government violence as the rule of the market and sheer might forcefully replaces the rule of law. Umut Bozkurt38 delves into JDP’s neo-liberal populism, carefully discusses its publicly marketed social assistance programs on the one side and its prioritization of “common sense” rule based on experience at the expense of rationally acquired and expertly processed knowledge on the other. This combination also explains why democratic rule has disappeared in contemporary Turkey. Culturally, the enactment of neo-liberalism in contemporary Turkey under JDP governance has become visible in two sites: malls and mosques. According to the figures of the Religious Directorate (Diyanet), approximately 7,000 mosques were built in the last decade, bringing the total number of mosques in the country up to 82,963. And interestingly, most were there in form rather than content; one scholar39 argues that many were minarets without mosques, thereby disclosing JDP’s political attempt to wrap accelerated urbanization and the ensuing destruction of low-income settlements in commercially valuable areas within the fold of religious principles. And a few mosques in I˙stanbul and Ankara were built in significant areas with the intent to challenge the former republican symbolic dominance at those sites. And JDP could only undertake such a symbolic challenge to the hegemony of the republican past by extra-legally appropriating protected areas located in environmentally or historically protected areas. Cases in point are the new mosques built in I˙stanbul and Ankara, such as the C ¸ amlıca Camii and the Ahmet Hamdi Akseki Camii. At the moment, there are more mosques in Turkey than schools and hospitals combined. Even though the number of shopping malls built under JDP rule in the last decade is less in number than mosques, their rate of acceleration in the last decade is still significant. According to my count, there are at present 126 shopping malls throughout the country outside of I˙stanbul; in I˙stanbul, there are currently 89 malls,

18

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey

with another 39 projected to be built within the next two years, and most have been built during the last decade. In two years, the total number of malls in I˙stanbul alone will exceed the total number of malls in the rest of the country. This neo-liberal pattern is predicated on JDP’s target of development and justice, with shopping malls satisfying the first and mosques fulfilling the second ideal. And both mosques and malls are unique in that they are sanitized spaces of sameness; they are safe sites that do not politically challenge JDP rule – one is protected by the sanctity of religion and the other by the inviolability of commerce.40 So JDP inherently privileges the needs of believers and consumers within the population of Turkey over all others. And this privileging is evident ˘an’s frequent public speeches: whenever any public in President Erdog space becomes contested in contemporary Turkey, he especially monitors and reports on the damages wrought upon national commerce on the one side and mosques on the other. Hence the security of believers and consumers trumps the protection of the rest of Turkey’s citizens. It is no accident that these shopping malls are also heavily securitized; all have checkpoints at their entrances to both physically scan the shoppers on the one side and their belongings on the other. As a consequence, malls emerge as secure spaces unhindered by the frequent protests. I personally experienced this during the Taksim Gezi Park events of May 2013. There was a lot of strife in Taksim that ended up in the shutting down of a few subway stations there. When I eventually managed to take the subway to the Istinye Park Mall located some miles away, I was very surprised to observe the absolute tranquility I experienced there. It was as if I had literally traveled to another different country. Unlike old Taksim, replete with history, at the newly built Istinye Park, there were no cultural markers, no historical memories and spaces challenged by neo-liberalism. Instead, here Turkey’s neo-liberalism had built its own ideal oasis of wealth and splendor, combining prestigious Turkish brands with even more impressive Western ones. And the consumers shopped there in perfect peace, silencing their differences in religion, ethnicity and political orientation, united in their commonly shared act of consumption, and of course

Introduction

19

protected by the extensive security system monitoring those entering and leaving the mall. Cultural analyses of neo-liberal spaces have been extremely analytically rigorous during the last decade because they capture the complexity of neo-liberalism well. This is also true in the context of Turkey. The Gezi Park movement as well as other spaces of resistance ¨ lent to neo-liberalism in Turkey have been successfully analyzed by Bu 41 Batuman to demonstrate how humanly built space transforms under neo-liberalism to marginalize and exclude certain social groups, and how the marginalized then come back to reclaim the spaces, as the Tekel public workers and their unions did in Ankara before the Gezi movement in I˙stanbul. The survey of neo-liberal Turkey so far focuses exclusively on the western cities and towns of Turkey in general and literally on two cities in particular: I˙stanbul, the former imperial and recent commercial and financial capital, and Ankara, the current administrative and political capital. This is not accidental: neoliberalism’s publicly visible successes work best where economic and political power and capital intersect, as they do in these two cities. The satisfactory end-result of neo-liberalism, namely a comfortable lifestyle based on conspicuous consumption, can also be most successfully displayed in large cities that generate and control cultural capital. As one moves away from these neo-liberalized cities of the west to the rest of the country, especially to those mostly inhabited by social groups and communities like the Kurds, the darker side of neoliberalism moves to the forefront.

Neo-liberal Non-Western Turkey/Kurdistan Geographically, spaces in southeast Turkey comprise the ancestral lands of the Kurds. Since the Turkish Republic is unitary and ethnocratic in privileging the Turks in all matters related to state and society, however, the ethnically different Kurds are treated like secondary citizens, even on their own lands. As this tense political location intersects with neo-liberalism, the study of the Kurds in the non-Western parts of Turkey specifically highlights the process through which the Turkish state “rescales” its impact regionally and locally as well as how this impact is negotiated by local actors.42 In non-Western Turkey, then, the neo-liberal issues of political

20

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey

instability, endemic violence and state securitization take precedence over the neo-liberal concerns of urban construction, consumption and lifestyle that are dominant in Western Turkey. In this context, the most recent and comprehensive study is the edited volume of Zeynep Gambetti and Joost Jorgenden.43 Based on the articles of a special issue of the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies that the two scholars initially edited, the book, expanded with new contributions, provides a very thorough analysis not only of the Kurdish issue in Turkey, but also demonstrates how rigorous the analysis becomes through the application of the vantage point of space. In articulating the Kurdish issue, the authors state that “[f]rom the historical exile punishments, through the economic migrations in the 1950s, to the military village evacuations in the 1990s, the Kurds have moved and been forcibly thrust to the west of the Euphrates, carrying along with them the politics of poverty and the memories, wounds and political will of a century-long struggle with hegemonic Turkish institutions.44 The valuable contributions of this book further develop this narrative by tracing the process of meaning production by Kurds, from the manner in which the southeast is made and remade through history into the present, to how the Kurds forcibly exiled from the southeast to the west struggle in urban spaces, finally to why Kurds who work as seasonal migrants struggle even more across the country. The neo-liberal forces of the commodification of land in the countryside on the one side and the state rollback of public-sector employment on the other ensure that the Kurds bear the brunt of uneven development and ensuing increased inequality. Another ˘lu45 ¨ nes¸ and Welat Zeydanlıog excellent edited volume by Cengiz Gu also approaches the Kurdish issue from an interdisciplinary perspective, carefully spelling out its complex legal, political, cultural and symbolic elements. Finally, it is necessary to mention an earlier collection that highlighted the process of forced migration in Turkey, especially as it impacted the Kurds, edited by Dilek Kurban and her colleagues.46 I think the number of these recent collections on the various aspects of the experience of the Kurds in Turkey demonstrates an escalation of interest in them, both within Turkey and abroad. There are also quite a number of scholarly manuscripts47

Introduction

21

supplementing these recent articles. The most pertinent one among them to the topic under discussion here is the book by Cenk ˘lu48 that ethnographically analyzes how the Kurds, forced to Saracog move to the city of I˙zmir in the 1980s during the start of the neoliberal reforms, are excluded by the urban inhabitants through what he terms “exclusive recognition,” referring to the day to day interaction by which the inhabitants stereotype and stigmatize the Kurds. Turning onto the agency of the Kurds who remain on their ˘’s articles49 ancestral lands against all costs, Mustafa Kemal Bayırbag on neo-liberalism in Turkey demonstrate how the local urban bourgeoisie in Turkey’s provincial cities – especially those in the southeast like Gaziantep – politically mobilize to enhance capital accumulation not only at the local scale, but at the regional, national and global scales as well. Given that such predominantly Kurdish cities are not only frequently political unstable, but also that the ˘ argues that the presence of the state in them is rather weak, Bayırbag efficacy of neo-liberalism in such contexts depends on “the degree of political autonomy of the local bourgeoisie from the national political actors (i.e., their distance to party politics) . . . the composition of its constituency/supporters (or the class coalition behind it); [and] . . . the degree of their dependency on public resources.”50 Especially significant regarding the intersection of spatial analysis with the agency of the Kurds are the articles of Zeynep Gambetti, one on the spatial dynamics of the Kurdish movement in comparison with the Mexican Zapatista movement,51 and the other on how social actors struggle to appropriate urban space in what is considered the symbolic Kurdish capital, namely Diyarbakır.52 In the former, Gambetti first ingeniously defines the use of space by social movements as a political opportunity structure, then assesses how the Kurdish PKK jumps scales from the local to the global, extends networks and makes innovations in movement repertoires.53 Even more fascinating is Gambetti’s analysis of Diyarbakır through the same spatial perspective. Articulating as her starting point the first 1999 takeover of the municipality from Turkish official control by an explicitly Kurdish political party, Gambetti analyzes how the municipality then renegotiated urban space by employing

22

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey

“its institutional power to reverse Turkification.”54 What is most important in the essay for the purposes of this volume is the emphasis Gambetti places on the significance of the past and history in terms of defining the neo-liberalizing process of the present, arguing that “the renegotiation of Diyarbakır’s culture and history constructs a foothold or ground within Turkish territory for a Kurdish identity that has largely been constituted through a violent struggle with the Turkish state.”55 The practice of neo-liberalism on the ground in non-Western Turkey thus has an additional layer of tension between the neoliberal Turkish and Kurdish practices. In Kurdish cities, there are quite a number of similarities in the way neo-liberal practices become visible on the ground. For instance, one can witness the same flight of the middle classes away from the city centers to the suburbs, the same building projects generating residential neighborhoods by TOKI on hillsides, the construction of a massive transport infrastructure especially through roads and the same commodification of heritage. Yet, at the same time, there is also a significant difference embedded in the fact that these Kurdish cities have been formed through a very different historical trajectory, bearing the brunt of republican state violence on the one side and trying to hold onto a distinct language and identity on the other. Taking this claim further, I would argue that, in the analysis of neo-liberalism in general and neo-liberal Turkey in particular, history plays a very significant role in understanding local particularities, ones that still have not been studied in depth. History, I would argue, is also important in digging out possible sites of resistance to the hegemonic neo-liberal present, simply by the virtue of bringing alive past values, norms and practices not coopted by the present. SIGNIFICANCE OF HISTORY IN THE ANALYSIS OF NEO-LIBERALISM How and why does history wield power over neo-liberalism? The most significant element of resistance that history articulates are silenced spaces in the neo-liberal present, spaces that could effectively destroy the glittering glaze neo-liberal paints over all commodified objects. As neo-liberalism commodifies all, including

Introduction

23

meaning and knowledge production of the past, with the intent to fit the needs of omnipotent market forces, the complexity of past events is reduced, caricaturized and subverted. As such, the legitimacy of these events are coopted by dominant social groups to further their own interests. In the case of neo-liberal Turkey, the most significant element of the past that is systematically silenced is past violence committed by the dominant ethnic Sunni Turks against all others. Since neo-liberalism constructs its legitimacy on these silences in history, the critical analysis of silenced spaces also contain the potential to subvert neo-liberal hegemony. The most visionary scholar identifying and articulating the intersection of history with spatial analysis within the context of Turkey, thereby setting an example for all others to follow, is Kerem ¨ ktem.56 Initially setting out “to understand how nationalism works O through the interrelated spaces of the locality, the nation state and ¨ ktem focuses on the predominantly the international state system”, O Kurdish southeastern city of Urfa to figure out how the hegemonic Turkish national narrative is imposed on the ethnically, religiously and culturally cosmopolitan heritage of this particular city.57 He develops a table charting the ethno-nationalist strategies of incorporating space, specifically geography at the scales of the nation, locality and province/municipality on the one side, and those of incorporating time, specifically history and temporality on the ¨ ktem carefully discusses how the Turkish state systemother.58 O atically develops an official discourse, historically wiping off all others with the exception of the Turks. This nationalist spatial vision is then imposed onto Urfa, as the state physically destroys nonMuslims and Kurds, symbolically erases any material objects and buildings marking their existence or, worse still, subverts the initial use of the buildings, named streets, churches by turning them into ¨ ktem argues, Sunni Turkish spaces. Such violent imposition, O literally generates an aggressive Kurdish minority nationalism in response. Thus he provides insight into the origins and sustenance of violence in the region through the analysis of the past. ¨ ktem then employs his insights to study another predominantly O Kurdish city in the southeast, Mardin. Tackling the issue of political ¨ ktem argues that “the multi-ethnic and multipower more directly, O

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religious city, both as site of contestation over control and ownership and as a site of multi-layered heritage, emerge as the central stage on which the demise or re-articulation of ethnocratic domination will be decided.”59 He critically analyzes the dominant state narrative interpreting Urfa as a “mythical city” from “time immemorial”, thereby delegitimating the Kurdish claims to it as part of their ancestral lands. Yet this official narrative slowly unravels through popular culture with new TV series discussing Kurdish identity on the one side, and non-governmental organizations depicting the state violence against the Kurds on the other. Finally, in his most ¨ ktem60 expands the boundaries of how the Turkish recent essay, O state employed violence against all others, non-Turks and nonMuslims alike, in constructing its monolithic nation. In terms of history, between 1915 and 1990, the Turkish state employed physical violence, namely deportation, ethnic cleansing and population exchange on the one side, and symbolic violence of renaming places to silence “the pre-national, heterogeneous ¨ ktem does not discuss the toponymical order.” Even though O recent neo-liberal practices that often align with nationalist practices, he nevertheless provides significant insight into the Turkish state’s employment of space. Joost Jorgenden and Jordi Tejel Gorgas61 further articulate such violent spatial Turkish state practices especially in the case of the Kurdistan region of Turkey. Gorgas delves into the historical irony of the Turkish state literally creating the specifically territorial and cultural entity of the resistant “East” through its extremely violent policies targeting the Kurdish inhabitants living there. Such irony would, hopefully, generate the seeds of its own destruction as Kurds develop into a nationally conscious community. Jorgenden discusses the state’s physical destruction, the burning down of Kurdish rural settlements and its discursive destruction through changing the names of places to Turkish ones, but he also points out how such forced alterations are locally resisted by the Kurds. Hence, studying the Kurds of Turkey living in Kurdistan on their ancestral lands especially through their history would provide elements of resistance not only to national Turkish state and societal domination, but also to concomitant neoliberal domination.62

Introduction

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I would argue the Turkish state also employs such systematic erasure of the past in the rest of the country, including the west. And in such cases, nationalist state measures interact with state neo-liberal practices, once again to silence its multivalent past acknowledging the existence of social groups other than the dominant Turks. In this context, Ankara and I˙stanbul in particular, have emerged as the leading urban sites where neo-liberal projects have been systematically executed at all costs.63 During this process, neo-liberal Islamists have reinterpreted Turkey’s heritage by commodifying the past; they have restored old houses to serve almost exclusively as boutique hotels, cafes and restaurants, thus silencing the multireligious and multi-ethnic past of these major cities. Even though many such restored and commercialized spaces used to initially belong to rich non-Muslim citizens, for instance, all traces of these particular pasts have been subjected to willful amnesia. The neoliberal bent of such spatial cooptation is evident in the recent gradual elimination of I˙stanbul’s periodic bazaars.64 While more than 70 percent of Istanbulites still shop at such bazaars that offer cheaper and fresher products, such traditional grocers and vendors that were occupying commercially valuable urban space were forcefully removed to the outskirts of the city, only to be replaced by chains of supermarkets that offer less fresh, more standardized and more expensive products. Rather than reforming these bazaars, JDP justified its neo-liberal measures on the grounds of threats to hygiene, noise, congestion and security that such bazaars presumably posed. In underlining the significance of history in relation to neoliberalism, it is imperative to move from critical analyses of the pre2002 secular Turkish nationalist narrative of the state, to that of the post-2002 Islamist Turkish nationalist narrative of the JDP in general ˘an in particular. It is after all the and President Tayyip Erdog conjoining of Islamism and neo-liberalism within a nationalist framework that provides power and legitimacy to the JDP. The connections and conversations of the JDP policy with the Turkish and Ottoman past have yet to begin in earnest.65 Yet there are some clues regarding the impact of the past on the JDP’s neo-liberal policies at present. Public commemorations is one venue to follow.

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The once-frequent republican displays of strength and legitimacy through military marches and commemorations and reenactments of the victories of the Independence Struggle performed in secularly sanitized spaces are now replaced by JDP’s government-sponsored public tents erected at urban centers on religious holidays to feed the poor. Likewise, official receptions once attended by fashionably attired republican elite dancing to Western tunes are gradually replaced by popular mass gatherings starring Turkish singers. A very recent case in point is the very ostentatious celebration of the 1453 Ottoman conquest of Constantinople from the Byzantine Empire ˘an and financed on 29 May 2016 in I˙stanbul. Instigated by Erdog by the I˙stanbul municipality, the day started with banners on the Byzantine city walls, repaired without any regard of accepted renovation techniques, claiming “Reviving Anew, Raising Anew,” thus promoting JDP’s vision for a new future for Turkey based not on the secular Turkish past of Central Asia, but rather the religious past of the Ottoman Empire. Thousands of soldiers, clothed as Ottoman Janissaries in exactly the same red outfits, meshed with thousands of Istanbulites, each wielding a Turkish flag. This sea of red did not mention any of the Ottoman imperial subjects other than the ethnic Turks that constituted more than half of the total population, any of the Byzantine soldiers or imperial rulers and subjects that existed, or any of the violence committed during and after the conquest in 1453. Conjoining such a sanitized version of the past with the neoliberal financing of the present to produce a sea of Turks dressed in red, the JDP is trying hard to legitimate its rule on grounds other than the ones the Turkish Republic was once built on. I would argue that a critical study of the Turkish past is necessary to destabilize this JDP neo-liberal hegemony. In summary then, the most analytically rigorous approach to understanding the social issues of Turkey has to bring together not only the elements of neo-liberalism most evident in the study of the market forces, but also the roles history and the state play in the process. These three dimensions of history, state and the market that constitute the three parts of this edited volume are indeed what separates and defines this study from others preceding it. With this general discussion in mind, it is time to turn to the original

Introduction

27

contributions of this volume to articulate how they converse with and complement the existing literature on Turkish history, state and the market. CONTENTS OF THE VOLUME Given the extensive discussion above of not only the emergence and global diffusion of neo-liberalism, but also of the major contours of neo-liberal Turkey, what are the specific contributions of this volume to the literature at large? First, all the contributions prioritize the extra-economic, social impact of neo-liberalism in Turkey. Hence, the manner in which Turkish state and society have been socially, politically and culturally transformed is privileged in the analyses over the economic processes of change through privatization, marketization and commodification. Second, the contributions introduce an innovative approach to neo-liberalism by undergirding the significance of the past, namely the history of the Turkish Republic in impacting the particular contours of Turkish neoliberalism. Contemporary neo-liberal meaning and knowledge production is constantly in conversation with the past, to either exaggerate, subvert or silence the past. Third, the significance of history in relation to neo-liberalism is also expanded to the neoliberal practices of the state and the market. Contributions highlight the manner in which past state practices privileging control through economic “development” deftly mutates into state practices of control through education, religion, illegal practices, the environment and the like. In doing so, however, not only does the Turkish state expand its control, but opens itself to new spaces of contention against its rule. Such areas of contention also emerge in the context of neo-liberal market practices. Corruption, faulty legal practices, global migrants, religion and music all emerge not only as new sites of neoliberal practices, but, as the same time, as possible sites of resistance. In all, then, this volume captures the complexity of neo-liberal Turkey, putting the social, political and cultural factors of neo-liberal state and market practices in conversation with Turkey’s history. It argues that the intersection of these factors determine the particular form of neo-liberal Turkey.

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More specifically, the volume is organized in three parts, each part emphasizing history, state and the market. Part One, on history, specifically highlights the significance of history in shaping not only the physical boundaries of Turkey, but its national, symbolic contours as well. Sarah Shields analyzes the manner in which the Turkish contestation of sovereignty over Antioch impacted the manner in which the Turkish Republic defines the social boundaries of its nation: the necessity to get the consent of the governed in establishing political rule there leads the Turkish state to try to mould the ethnically and religiously diverse Antioch after its monolithic secular Sunni Turkish image of citizenry. As such, Shields highlights the historic roots of contemporary neo-liberal practices of national identity. Zeynep Kezer and Zeynep Kas¸lı in turn study the actions of the Turkish state in the past and present in Ankara and Edirne. From its inception, the republican capital Ankara had a very significant Armenian population that was systematically destroyed during the late Ottoman and early republican periods through forced deportations and massacres, with a large fire then destroying and thereby erasing the plunder of most of the Armenian properties left behind. Kezer carefully traces the setting in of collective amnesia practiced by Turkish state and society that systematically silences all traces of the Armenian past of Ankara today. Kas¸lı studies focuses instead on the manner in which the neo-liberal Turkish state attempts today to acknowledge the ethnically diverse past of the city of Edirne with the intent to profit from heritage tourism. The renovation of the abandoned Jewish synagogue is explicitly undertaken by the state to generate revenues, with no intent to address the forced deportation of Jews from the region in the not-sodistant republican past. Hence the conversations of the three essays with the past illuminate the manner in which current neo-liberal practices of national and urban identity are rooted in the past. Part Two moves specifically onto state practices from the past to ¨ ksel delves into how the Turkish the neo-liberal present. Metin Yu state employed education in general and Mobile Village Courses throughout the history of the Turkish Republic to colonize and control public spaces beyond its reach, in this case the spaces populated by peasants, Kurds and women. Moving from early

Introduction

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republican history to the Cold War era, Ryan Gingeras instead turns onto the tense relationship of the Turkish state with the United States in relation to one practice that trespassed state control, namely drug trafficking. Still, the official public stand of the Turkish state alleging no control over drug trafficking was contradicted by what was practiced on the ground: there was a close relationship between the drug lords and Turkish state officials and officers of various ranks, with Kurdish militants also joining the fray later on. Such past Turkish state practice illuminates the origins of the frustratingly ambiguous contemporary state practices regarding the war with ISIS over concerns of neo-liberal securitization, for instance. Sarah Thomsen Vierra’s analysis of Turkish mosques in Germany during the 1970s to the 1990s highlights the significance of state practices not only in relation to secularism and religion, but to the large Turkish diaspora in Germany as well. It becomes evident that while the German media spatially connects all Turks in Germany to mosques, the Turkish media reflecting the stand of the Turkish state instead highlights their belonging to both the German and Turkish states. The three remaining essays all focus on contemporary state ˘ce Ellialtı-Ko ¨ se delves into the formal legal practices in Turkey. Tug space in I˙stanbul, established by the state allegedly with the duty to deliver justice independent of state control. Yet the newly built “mega” I˙stanbul courthouse is first and foremost intent on disciplining all who enter it with strict rules and regulations. By then focusing on ¨ se instead ends up the practices within this legal space, Ellialtı-Ko documenting injustice: in its rulings, the courthouse privileges JDP members while aggressing against women’s rights. Such injustice also extends to those intentionally marginalized and aggressed upon by the Turkish state. Laurent Dissard’s analysis of the Munzur Valley dams first reviews how the Turkish state undertook many such dam projects in the past publicly in the name of economic progress, with the concealed intent to increase state penetration and control, since such projects not only uprooted the local inhabitants, who somehow always happened to be not ethnically Turkish, but also destroyed the local flora and fauna. Even though many experts therefore take a strong stand against building such dams, arguing their efficacy disappears very quickly, the neo-liberal Turkish state moves on with its dam

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projects in southeast Turkey, predominantly populated by ethnic Kurds. Dissard cogently argues that the intent of the Turkish state in building the Munzur dam is not development, as the publicity claims, but rather the control and discipline of the local Kurdish population through such dams. Ceren Soylu, Bengi Akbulut and Fikret Adaman, by focusing on the ongoing environmental degradation of the Uluabat Lake of Bursa despite its protection status, argue that the struggles and conflicts surfaced around the site’s so-called “participatory management plan” demonstrate a broader – and more structural – tension between the Turkish state’s growth-oriented modernist vision on the one side and its motivation to implement environmental protection on the other. By analyzing the differential positions of local stakeholders regarding the management of the site, they reveal the uneven ways different local groups in the area have been affected by their relationship with the state. As such, they articulate how the local manifestations of the state-society-environment relationship in Uluabat illustrates the tensions and contradictions inherent in the state-making process in Turkey. In all, these six chapters capture not only the significance of the past in shaping contemporary neo-liberal state practices, but also the complexity of the repertoire of such practices in general. Part Three focuses on neo-liberal market practices constantly intersect with transnational issues such as global migration patterns on the one side and domestic negotiations with informality, religion and music on the other. Kristen Biehl focuses on an increasingly growing population in the urban space of I˙stanbul, namely irregular immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan, who live in squalor without any state protection. Her interviews with such migrants reveal how the unacknowledged violence experienced by these migrants is never acknowledged by the JDP government and its news media outlets, thereby revealing, this time around, how physical human destruction can occur through the neo-liberal neglect of the Turkish government. Such neglect quickly disappears, however, when there are profits to be made through the ¨ se analyzes exploitation of all in service of market forces. Burak Ko the manner in which the current JDP government employs informality to illegally intervene in the practice of the rule of law.

Introduction

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JDP was not only able to have the corruption scandal involving its prominent members, including four ministers, dismissed by illegal means, but also used the same methods to open all legally protected urban spaces to the construction of malls and elite residences. Yet one can argue that the increasingly religious stand of the JDP in legitimating its neo-liberal practices also carries within them the possible seed of their own destruction. Indeed, Pınar Kemerli studies how mandatory military service in Turkey is closely connected with the construction of citizenship and religiosity. The contemporary modern human rights practice of conscientious objection that destabilizes this association could be rhetorically dismissed by the neo-liberal JDP government by alleging such a practice to be a Western ploy to undermine Turkey. Yet the space becomes quickly polarized and problematic when the conscientious objection that Kemerli analyzes is filed by a pious Muslim man. Finally, Ozan Aksoy’s essay concludes the part and the volume by studying the interpretation of contemporary environmental issues in the context of popular culture in general, and through the works of two popular singers, one Turkish and the other Kurdish in particular. The music of Kurdish singer Aynur reveals how Kurds of Turkey have a much more global grasp over the environmental destruction created by the neo-liberal Turkish state and its development projects. They are also increasingly voicing their criticism through public culture. Hopefully such popular resistance to Turkish neo-liberalism by younger generations will eventually lead Turkish state and society not only to conserve nature, but also reinterpret the past and present in a way that eliminates violent practices. In summary then, all the contributions in Parts One, Two and Three highlight the complexity of social, political and cultural practices in contemporary neo-liberal Turkey, stressing specifically the roles history, state and the market play in generating such complexity. NOTES 1. See Harvey 2007, 2. 2. See Centeno and Cohen 2012, 318. 3. See Gilbert 2013, 7 and 9; Davies 2014, 311.

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4. See Harvey 2007, 11. 5. The first application of neo-liberal policies occurred in Chile under Pinochet; the lessons learned were carried over to the ensuing Western practice. 6. See Davies 2014, 309 and Centeno and Cohen 2012, 319. 7. See Brenner and Theodore 2002; Peck, Theodore and Brenner 2009; Birch and Mykhnenko 2009; Varro 2010; Peck, Theodore and Brenner 2013. 8. See Brenner 2000; Mitchell 2007; MacKinnon 2010. 9. See Alonso 1994. 10. See Gieryn 2000; Logan 2012. 11. See Lamont and Molnar 2002. 12. Ibid. 2002, 168. 13. See Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb 2002. 14. Ibid. 2002, 533. 15. See Prasad 2005. 16. See Eglitis 2010. 17. See Lamont and Duvoux 2014, 58 and 65. 18. For further information, see Mijs, Bakhtiari and Lamont 2016, and Bail 2008. 19. See Hall and Lamont 2013a. 20. For such works, see Bourdieu 1998; Schmidt and Thatcher 2013; Hall and Lamont 2013b. 21. Connell and Dados 2014, 117. They even discuss the particular Turkish case in their work; see Ibid. 2014, 133. 22. Ong 2006, 6–7. 23. See Scharff 2011. 24. See Atia 2012. 25. Ibid. 2012, 809. 26. For a more detailed analysis of the 1980s, see Yalman 2009. ˘ 2010. 27. See Bayırbag ˘lu and Yeldan 28. For a more detailed analysis of the 1990s, see Cizre-Sakallıog 2000. 29. See Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb 2002; Prasad 2005. 30. See Atia 2012. ˘al 2009. 31. See Tug 32. See Balkan and Savran 2002a, 2002b. ¨ ltekin-Karakas¸ 2008. 33. See Gu ¨ zden 2013; Balkan, Balkan, O ¨ ncu ¨ 2015. 34. See Akca, Bekmen, O 35. See Blad and Kocer 2012 ˘al 2009; Rutz and Balkan 2009; Eligu ¨ r 2010. 36. See Yavuz 2003; Tug 37. See Gambetti 2007 and 2009c. 38. See Bozkurt 2013. 39. See Batuman 2013a. 40. It is therefore no accident that no social group, including the youth, face any harassment in these malls. See Mugan and Erkip 2009.

Introduction 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

33

See Batuman 2003, 2009, and 2013b. See Brenner 2004. See Gambetti and Jorgenden 2015. Ibid. 2015, 1. ˘lu 2013. ¨ nes¸ and Zeydanlıog See Gu See Kurban 2007. The notable exceptions are the prescient books on the Kurds written by Yalcın-Heckmann 1991, Bruinessen 1992, Kiris¸ci and Winrow 1997, ¨ zcan 2005, Barkey and Fuller 1998, Tas¸pınar 2004, Yıldız 2005, O ¨ ztu ˘lu 2010, O ¨ rk Jongerden 2007, Marcus 2009, Watts 2010, Saracog ¨ nes¸ 2012. 2011, Gu ˘lu 2010. See Saracog ˘ 2010, 2011 and 2013. See Bayırbag Ibid. 2011, 1. See Gambetti 2009b. Ibid. 2009a. Ibid. 2009b, 44– 5. Ibid. 2009a, 99. Ibid. 2009a, 100. ¨ ktem 2004, 2005, and 2008. See O See Ibid. 2004, 560. For a more extensive analysis of the impact of the Turkish nationalist past ¨ zkırımlı and Spyros 2008. on the present, see O See Ibid. 2005, 242; emphasis mine. See Ibid. 2008, 1. See Jorgenden 2009 and Gorgas 2009. For other recent studies on the past and present history of the Kurds, see ¨ zog ˘lu 2004, Houston 2008, Klein 2011, Jongerden and also Levene 1998, O ¨ nmez 2012. For the violence of Turkish state and Verheij 2012, and So society against another minority, the Armenians where I define minority as any social group that does not receive an equal share of the resources of ¨ cek 2015. a society, refer to Go ˘lu-Cook 2006; and Go ¨ r 2002; Batuman 2005; Potuog ¨ ktu ¨ rk, Soysal See Gu ¨ reli 2010. and Tu ¨ z and Eder 2012. See O For one exception, see Demir, Acar and Toprak 2004.

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Marcus, Aliza 2009 Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence. Albany: New York University Press. Mijs, Jonathan, E. Bakhtiari and M. Lamont 2016 “Neoliberalism and Symbolic Boundaries in Europe: Global Diffusion, Local Context, Regional Variation.” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 2: 1–8. ¨ ktem, Kerem 2004 “Incorporating the time and space of the ethnic ‘other’: O nationalism and space in Southeast Turkey in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” Nations and Nationalism 10/4: 559–78. ——— 2005 “Faces of the city: Poetic, mediagenic and traumatic images of a multi-cultural city in Southeast Turkey.” Cities 22/3: 241–53. ——— 2008 “The Nation’s Imprint: Demographic Engineering and the Change of Toponymes in Republican Turkey.” European Journal of Turkish Studies 7: 1–28. ¨ z, O ¨ zlem and M. Eder 2012 “Rendering Istanbul’s Periodic Bazaars Invisible: O Reflections on Urban Transformation and Contested Space.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36/2: 297–314. ¨ zkırımlı, Umut and S. Spyros 2008 Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece O and Turkey. London: C. Hurst. ¨ zog ˘lu, Hakan 2004 Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State: Evolving Identities, O Competing Loyalties, and Shifting Boundaries. Albany: SUNY Press. ¨ ztu ¨ rk, Murat 2011 Agriculture, Peasantry and Poverty in Turkey in the Neoliberal O Age. Wageningen: Wageningen Publishers. Peck, Jamie, N. Theodore and N. Brenner 2009 “Neoliberal Urbanism: Models, Moments, Mutations.” SAIS Review 29/1: 49–66. ——— 2013 “Neoliberal Urbanism Redux?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37/3: 1091–9. ¨ yku ˘lu-Cook, O ¨ 2006 “Beyond the Glitter: Belly Dance and Neoliberal Potuog Gentrification in Istanbul.” Cultural Anthropology 21/4: 633–60. Prasad, Monica 2005 “Why Is France So French? Culture, Institutions, and Neoliberalism.” American Journal of Sociology 111/2: 357– 407. Rutz, Henry and E. Balkan 2009 Reproducing Class: Education, Neoliberalism and the Rise of the New Middle Class in I˙stanbul. New York: Berghahn. Saatci, M. 2002 “Nation states and ethnic boundaries: modern Turkish identity and Turkish-Kurdish conflict.” Nations and Nationalism 8/4: 549–64. ˘lu, Cenk 2010 Kurds of Modern Turkey: Migration, Neoliberalism and Saracog Exclusion in Turkish Society. London: I.B.Tauris. Scharff, Christina 2011 “Disarticulating feminism: Individualization, neoliberalism and the othering of ‘Muslim women.’” European Journal of Women’s Studies 18/2: 119–34. Schmidt, Vivien A. and M. Thatcher, eds 2013 Resilient Liberalism in Europe’s Political Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ¨ nmez, Ebru 2012 I˙dris-i Bidlisi: Ottoman Kurdistan and Islamic Legitimacy. So I˙stanbul: Libra Books. ¨ mer 2004 Kurdish Nationalism and Political Islam in Turkey: Kemalist Tas¸pınar, O Identity in Transition. London: Routledge.

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˘al, Cihan 2009 Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Tug Capitalism. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Varro, Krisztina 2010 “Re-Politicizing the Analysis of ‘New State Spaces’ in Hungary and Beyond: Towards an Effective Engagement with ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism.’” Antipode 42/5: 1253–78. Watts, Nicole F. 2010 Activists in Office: Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey. Seattle: University of Washington Press. White, Paul J. 1998 “Economic Marginalization of Turkey’s Kurds: Failed Promise of Modernization and Reform.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 18/1: 139– 58. Yalcın-Heckmann, Lale 1991 Tribe and Kinship among the Kurds. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Yalman, Galip 2009 Transition to Neoliberalism: The Case of Turkey in the 1980s. I˙stanbul: Bilgi University Press. Yavuz, Hakan 2003 Islamic Political Identity in Turkey. New York: Oxford University Press. ˘en, Mesut 1999 “The Kurdish Question in Turkish State Discourse.” Journal Yeg of Contemporary History 34/4: 555–68. Yıldız, Kerim 2005 The Kurds in Turkey: EU Accession and Human Rights. London: Pluto Press. ¨ ksel, Ays¸e Seda 2011 “Rescaled localities and redefined class locations: neoYu liberal experience in Southeast Turkey.” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 13/4: 433– 55.

PART I

History

CHAPTER 1

Manufacturing Collective Identities: Turkey, Syria and France Contesting Sovereignty over Antioch Sarah Shields

“The great question of the day, which at the present moment constantly preoccupies the Turkish people, is the fate of the region of Antioch and Alexandretta which in reality belongs to the purest ¨ rk insisted, addressing the Turkish element,” Mustafa Kemal Atatu Grand National Assembly in Ankara on 1 November 1936.77 The president’s speech was received with wild acclaim by the delegates, for whom the region’s Turkishness was unquestioned. The territory ¨ rk was claiming had long been attached to Syria: it included Atatu Aleppo’s port city of Alexandretta (Iskenderun), a historic religious center (Antioch/Antakya), a beautiful coastline, prosperous farmland and a remarkably diverse population. This region, however, had been part of the far-flung multi-lingual and multi-religious Ottoman Empire since the early sixteenth century. Historically, then, the ¨ rk demanded had been part of the Ottoman Empire and region Atatu attached to provinces which had become part of a separate country, Syria, as a result of the Ottoman defeat during World War I. Despite the Turkish President’s claim that the Sanjak district belonged to its Turks, it had been administered by the French since 1920. Strategically, culturally and economically central for the Syrian

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mandate to which it was attached, the Sanjak of Alexandretta was put in play when Paris agreed to begin talks with Syrian nationalist ¨ rk emphatically rejected leaders toward Syrian independence. Atatu the notion that the Sanjak would become part of an overwhelmingly Arabic-speaking Syria, insisting to the Grand National Assembly that it belonged to Turks, that it should not be part of Syria because of the population’s collective, Turkish identity. The notion that Turks and Arabs could not coexist in a common state, that each state must have an exclusive collective linguistic essence, though far from the experience of the defeated Ottoman Empire, was one of the legacies of the age of nationalisms that had led to World War I. Turkey’s nationalist leader insisted: the people of the Sanjak were Turks, and thus must not be placed under the control of non-Turks. France not only rejected Turkey’s claim that the area was Turkish, but also insisted that the League of Nations had included the Sanjak as part of the French mandate for Syria. The government in Paris claimed it was prohibited from unilaterally revising the terms of the mandate. While Ankara and Paris disputed the terms of the mandate, the League of Nations discussed the Sanjak. With war drums pounding in Europe, and France fearful of alienating Turkey, the two countries agreed in Geneva to detach the Sanjak from Syria and create a separate government for it.1 A League of Nations Committee of Experts decided that the Sanjak’s new Assembly would be chosen based on identity categories. Each voter would register as a member of a community (Turk, Arab, Alawite, Kurd, Greek Orthodox, Armenian or other), and seats would be allocated in proportion to the number of registered voters in each group. Thus, the largest group would get to determine the nature of the new Assembly of the justcreated state of Hatay.2 The stage had been set for a new kind of contest: territorial conquest by communal affiliation. SHIFTING BASES OF SOVEREIGNTY: FROM CONQUEST TO IDENTITY For the League of Nations Committee of Experts, the collective identities of the population should determine the government of the territory. As the conflagration that was World War I subsided,

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Europeans and others agreed that self-government would be the way forward toward a peaceful world unmolested by the imperial agendas and nationalist demands that had threatened to destroy civilization. “Consent of the Governed” would create true legitimacy for postwar governments. At the same time, the League policy makers brought with them a set of assumptions about “the governed” that stood the process of “consent” on its head. Instead of asking people simply to choose their preferred government, the League assumed that the population’s political preferences were a necessary outgrowth of their essential identity, and that, as a result, they viewed this identity as therefore singular and fixed. The process chose one arbitrary element of local social categories and reified this privileged category as the essence of each man’s political being. In the Ottoman Empire, the transition away from dynastic legitimacy to nation state “consent” had begun over the half-century leading to the war. With the loss of territory and the growing influence of external political forces, the empire’s traditional rulers and new elites had sought ways to (re)assert their control over their diverse population. The empire had come apart in a spectacular way, with the devastation of minority communities, large-scale forced migrations and the imposition of new ideologies. By the end of the war, nationalist ideology had become well established in major cities of the empire, crowding out the cosmopolitanism so common at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The rise of nationalist elites in Ottoman successor states after World War I allowed the new ruling groups to embrace the League of Nations project and to make their own demands based on the identities of the “governed.” At the end of World War I, the League of Nations was committed to an emerging set of beliefs about states, territories and identities. Nations were the foundation of the system, the notion that the people, configured as a group with a common collective identity, constituted a nation with the right to determine its own future had as its corollary the need to identify the nation – which led inexorably to the necessity to define the people. There is some irony in the fact that the League had its headquarters in Geneva, located in a state with four recognized official languages.3 The Sanjak, like various areas in Europe, had a multilingual population for whom this new legitimacy reflected alien assumptions.

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Indeed, this insistence on respect for a self-governing group of people, a “nation,” and its right to “self-determination” was not yet the norm by World War I. Through the end of the nineteenth century, the international norm had generally given states the right to retain the territories conquered in war without regard for the language or affiliations of the inhabitants. Despite the apparent contradiction with the much-vaunted Westphalian principles that were supposed to have promoted peace and protected territorial integrity, expansion and consolidation were common practices.4 US President Franklin Pierce made clear not only the acceptability but also the desirability of the conquest of territory by force during his inaugural address in 1850. The policy of my administration will not be controlled by any timid forebodings of evil from expansion. Indeed, it is not to be disguised that our attitude as a nation and our position on the globe render the acquisition of certain possessions not within our jurisdiction eminently important for our protection, if not in the future essential for the preservation of the rights of commerce and the peace of the world. Should they be obtained, it will be through no grasping spirit, but with a view to obvious national interest and security, and in a manner entirely consistent with the strictest observance of national faith.5

By World War I, the principle that territorial acquisitions should not come from war was still relatively new. According to Quincy Wright, the principle of “no title by conquest” had been accepted by the Pan American Conference of 1890, though it had never been ratified.6 The Balkan Wars of 1911–12 redistributed significant territory, giving formerly Ottoman lands to Bulgaria, Albania, Greece and Serbia, even though Western Powers had promised before the advent of the war that the territorial status quo would be kept at all costs, based on the fear that the Balkan states would lose dramatically.7 Indeed, legal scholar Lassa Oppenheim wrote only nine years before the start of the war, in 1905, “As long as a Law of Nations has been in existence, the states as well as the vast majority of writers have recognized subjugation as a mode of acquiring territory.”8 By the end of World War I, however, it seemed a new ideology of legitimacy would compromise the territorial expansion the victorious Allies had anticipated. In his famous Fourteen Points speech to

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Congress on 8 January 1919, Woodrow Wilson insisted that “The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by . . . .”9 Refusal to allow the acquisition of territory by force was implicit in the 1920 League of Nations Covenant, with a “guarantee of the territorial integrity of all Members,” and included in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928.10 Still, it was not until the Stimson Doctrine of 1931 that the “legitimacy of territorial changes obtained by force” was legally denied.11 Nonetheless, during the war and consistent with the expectations of prewar statecraft, the Great Powers had promised themselves and each other some of the new territories that would fall to them if they won the war. In 1915, Great Britain and Russia promised each other zones in Persia and around Constantinople, while a 1916 agreement (Sykes– Picot) divided the Middle East into French, Russian and British zones, later adding Italy to collect her own spoils.12 When the Russian government was overthrown and its Bolshevik successors published the secret wartime agreements, London and Paris were compelled to offer reassurance about their future: “The goal envisaged by France and Great Britain in prosecuting in the East the War let loose by German ambition is the complete and final liberation of the peoples who have for so long been oppressed by the Turks, and the setting up of national governments and administrations deriving their authority from the free exercise of the initiative and choice of the indigenous populations.”13 SIGNIFICANCE OF WILSONIAN PROMISES AND IDENTITY-BASED CLAIMS The Wilsonian ideology had run squarely up against secret wartime promises allocating former Ottoman territory to the victors.14 At the Paris Peace Conference, the Allied negotiators found themselves sorting through the various promises they had made before their traditional assumptions had been suddenly derailed by a new insistence on “consent of the governed.” Diplomatic minutes and memoirs suggest that resolving the two sets of commitments was quite complicated by the dissonance. Allied leaders managed to produce a semblance of compromise through the novel institution of the mandate. Among the first projects of the League of Nations would

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be to legitimize the territorial settlements that resulted from the defeat of the German, Ottoman and Hapsburg empires, and to agree on a means for dealing with their colonies. Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant read: To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this Covenant.

Explaining that local populations were hardly civilized enough to be qualified to determine their own futures, the League of Nations assigned a European power to each of the new post-Ottoman states, and to all of Germany’s former African and Asian colonial possessions. The League of Nations accepted the allocation of the territories of defeated powers as mandates, insisting that the mandatory power assist the native people in attaining the level of discernment and administration required to become independent. The territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire were categorized as “Class A” mandates, considered more prepared for autonomy than Germany’s African colonies. Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.

The new system of mandates was to be administered through the League of Nations Mandates Commission, which exercised extremely limited oversight.15 It was “consent of the governed” under imperial control. The old system got a further boost with the American president’s illness, which was welcomed by British diplomat Harold Nicolson, among others. “The collapse of Wilsonism, tragic though it seemed at the moment, did in fact offer an occasion to revise Coalition policy upon a basis of

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greater realism.”16 With Wilson’s illness taking him out of the picture, and without the need to worry about the United States’ interest in taking charge of some of the mandates, the Great Power negotiators in Paris were able to sweep away the new considerations, at least for as long as it took to draw the new borders in the Middle East. While on one hand that “greater realism” would facilitate the handing out of mandates to the Allied victors, the new ideology of self-determination of peoples had introduced a new and compelling consideration. Sovereignty, if located in the people, must reflect their will. Although the new mandate system created by the League of Nations could hardly be accused of adhering closely to the demands of defeated Ottomans and Africans, the ideology that led to it insisted upon recognition of the collective identities of the population. By the end of World War I, this identity-based territorial and political claim was the only one that could be seriously entertained. The free trade, anti-Great Power colonialism dictated by the newly powerful US president at the end of the war had made it increasingly difficult for the victorious Europeans to make territorial claims based on their own naked aspirations. They had, indeed, conquered Ottoman, Hapsburg and German colonies, but new ideological trends precluded their simply keeping the territories they might have simply annexed or colonized outright in earlier eras. Indeed, even before the Paris Peace Conference began meeting in 1919, well before anyone in the Middle East had been canvassed about their desired future, President Wilson had already promised to divide groups in a novel way. Although they had been living together for centuries, now people who spoke Arabic were no longer to be “subjected to” a government who spoke Turkish. President Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech included this prescription: “The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development. . . .”17 Arabicspeaking people seeking political rights must therefore be given the opportunity to create their own governments. The assumption was that they would seek independence as Arabs, a linguistic category which, in the context of a nationalist era, seemed to Europeans and

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Americans to be the most salient of the varied and alternative identities one could possibly have. Within the Ottoman context, however, where Muslims speaking all languages prayed in Arabic and much of the population spoke more than one language, this European distinction was embraced only by a small nationalist elite. AMBIGUOUS COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES: LANGUAGE, RELIGION, ETHNICITY AND/OR HISTORY On what basis, if not conquest, then, could one country claim territory that had not been allocated to them by previously acceptable conquest? The new Turkish Republic claimed rights to the Sanjak based on the Turkish identity of the population. If the people of the Sanjak were to determine their own future, according to the new ideologies, they would do so as members of exclusionary identity groups – the consent of the governed required a “governed” that could be identified as a collective according to European nationalist norms, that is, a linguistic, ethnic, national collective. So the contested territory would be allocated – the territory would be assigned and the borders drawn – based on the League’s assessment of the collective identity of the population. President Wilson had insisted that colonial control had become unacceptable: “No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle . . . that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.”18 The government in Ankara was insisting that the population was Turkish, and therefore would not want to be tied to the destiny of Arabic-speaking Syria. The National Front government in Damascus claimed that the Sanjak was an integral part of Syria and the population was mixed. It would be essential, then, to find out what the people of the Sanjak wanted. SOCIAL MAKEUP OF THE SANJAK: FLUID IDENTITIES, VARIABLE POLITICAL PREFERENCES Like many Ottoman provinces, especially those along the coasts and important trading routes, the Sanjak had enjoyed a multi-cultural,

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poly-lingual and religiously diverse population. In addition to Muslims who spoke Turkish, Kurdish and Arabic, then, one could encounter Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant and Armenian Christians who spoke Arabic, French and Armenian. Jews spoke Arabic, Kurdish and Judeo-Arabic. While Turkish and Arab nationalist leaders viewed this diverse population as either Turkish or Arab, the population claimed multiple and overlapping identities. Greek Orthodox Christians spoke Arabic, rubbed shoulders in the markets with others who bought and sold similar goods and lived in mixed neighborhoods, for example. As Keith Wautenpaugh pointed out for neighboring Aleppo, the people of this nearby city thought of their great diversity as a positive sign, reflecting their role as a center of commerce: its human diversity reflected the city’s importance. But in any case, linguistic diversity was common. “Knowledge of languages played a prosaic and functional role in the lives of the people of Aleppo,” writes Watenpaugh, explaining that, far from determining one’s national identity, language was an instrument for commerce, prayer and government–and often a different language would be used for each.19 With Europeans at the League of Nations insisting that the Sanjak’s fate should be decided by the identity of its population, and leaders in Ankara and Damascus struggling to acquire or retain the territory for their “own” people, the struggle over the territory played out on a popular stage as the adversarial elites engaged the local population as characters in their identity pageant. If consent of the governed was the only legitimate way to allocate territory, and if that consent must be defined based on the essentialist identity of the population, then the competing forces must mobilize the “governed” to demonstrate their affiliations. Indeed, the deadly performances in the Sanjak enlisted costume (hats) as an important element and brought casts of thousands of “extras” to play the roles of nationalists. FROM AMBIGUITY TO VIOLENCE: FLAGS, REGISTRATION AND HATS The “extras” made their debut in the film smuggled out of the Sanjak’s main city of Antioch (Antakya). On 13 November 1936,

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people in I˙stanbul watched on the silver screen as a parade of Sanjaks “Turks” threw their fezzes into the Orontes (Asi) River. The audience cheered wildly at the spectacle, depicted in a motion picture smuggled out of the Sanjak by Yunus Nadi, editor of the nationalist daily Cumhuriyet. Fezzes had become the symbol of the old, defeated, decrepit Ottoman Empire and, just two years after the official founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, a new hat law required men to replace their former headgear with Western-style hats. The new fashion came to signify the modern secular nation state that the ¨ rk regime would work to create in the new Republic.20 Throwing Atatu their fezzes in the river, then, was street theater, the enactment of a new kind of identity intended to demonstrate political intent, collective affiliation and the nature of the population of the Sanjak. Hat demonstrations continued throughout the struggle over the territory. Thousands of hats were smuggled into the area by people affiliated with the Turkish Halkevleri (People’s Houses) to be distributed, beginning around the time that the League of Nations observer mission traveled in the area.21 Hats on the streets portrayed Turkishness, and Turkishness was most important with a League of Nations for whom identity would determine territorial destiny. The League’s observers arrived in the Sanjak in January 1937 to collect information about the nature of the area and the desires of the people. Before they were able to report on their observations, however, France and Turkey had already met in Geneva and arrived at an agreement to make the Sanjak independent. While Syrian nationalists, British diplomats and some of the local residents were furious at what they perceived as a betrayal, Turkish nationalists were ecstatic. Celebrations that began the night before the Sanjak’s official independence provided the stage as selfidentified Turks claimed the streets of Antioch. From 5:00 pm on 28 November 1937, they processed through the streets admiring the shops festooned in lights and decorations, stopping to watch the fireworks display. By the next morning, Turkish nationalist leaders had arranged trucks to bring villagers to the city for a parade and a day-long program. They watched young girls parade in special costumes, singing Turkey’s national anthem. Villagers danced in front of the Turkish consulate, enjoyed the free meal and listened to

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long speeches by Turkish nationalists emphasizing that their region’s new independence would allow all the people of the Sanjak to live happily on “the land to which they belonged.” At the Consulate, the day was celebrated with the hoisting of a Turkish flag, to the consternation of the local non-Turks. The evening kicked off with the Turkish Sports Circle processing with their torches, their group flag and their music in the lead, clapping and crying “Vive ¨ rk, Vive Hatay.” As the crowds gradually dispersed, intermittent Atatu celebratory gunshots were heard in the Turkish quarters until one o’clock in the morning.22 Flags – markers of collective identity – were the symbols that day of the contest over the streets of the city. La Re´publique´ published a photograph of six women (all dressed in contemporary European women’s fashion) sewing the new Sanjak flag in preparation for the celebrations: a Turkish flag with the addition of one five-pointed star in white outline.23 Antioch’s Arabic-speaking residents, unwilling to see their region severed from Syria, refused to mark the day they had been battling for six months. A crowd of nearly 1,000 people resisted police efforts to remove the Syrian flags unfurled in contravention of the mandatory regime’s injunctions against flying any flags except the French. Troops called in to assist the police managed to remove non-French flags without major problems. Arabs were pleased to see the government also remove Turkish red-and-white banners from the celebratory arches.24 Flags against flags reflected the city divided as the Sanjak of Alexandretta descended into chaos and violence. The population of this contested district became immersed in the politics of identity that would determine the future of their territory, according to the inverted logic of the League’s “consent of the governed.” Nationalist leaders a few hundred miles away were able to mobilize a diverse population into competing identity groups to make exclusionary claims for territory. As the League of Nations Committee of Experts had specified, the government of the newly independent Sanjak would be elected by community, so each voter was required to register to vote by claiming his collective identity. Only seven options were available, so each adult male would decide whether he was a Turk, Arab, Alawite, Kurd,

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Armenian, Greek-Orthodox or other. This was not as simple as the electoral regulations’ drafters in Geneva had imagined. After all, most Greek-Orthodox Christians and Alawites spoke Arabic, and many children had parents who spoke more than one language. Nonetheless, the number of seats in the new Sanjak Assembly would be allocated based on the percentage of each group registered to vote.25 From the start, then, the process of voter registration would dictate the electoral outcome. If more than half of the voters came from any one of the groups, that group would control the future of the contested territory. Registration became the central battle, and it was played out on the streets of the Sanjak over the next months. The future of the territory was now out of the hands of the international policy makers. They had turned it over to the local population, whose collective linguistic identities would decide how it was to be allocated. The group that claimed the most adherents would win the territory. Nationalists began working to organize their adherents. Turcophiles were funded and instructed from Ankara. They set up Halkevleri, People’s Houses that taught Turkishness, organized sports clubs, staged plays and concerts and organized propaganda.26 Arabophiles got marching orders from Damascus, but they were at an organizing disadvantage. Syria’s National Bloc government had just come to power with a promise to work with Paris in order to show that Syria was worthy of independence. When French officials insisted that they refrain from political activism in the Sanjak, they complied, hoping it would show their readiness for independence. It was local Arabic-speakers, organized by the League of National Action, who filled the gap, protesting despite the wishes of the Damascus government-under-mandate and the French mandatory authorities.27 Flags were important; hats were crucial. When the new President of Turkey insisted that the Republic become modern, he advocated the wearing of hats: Western-style brimmed hats. The Halkevleri imported caseloads of hats to distribute to people in the cities and throughout the countryside, demanding that they wear their affiliations on their heads. The fez quickly became a symbol of non-

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Turkishness, as people throughout the contested territory were forced to take sides in what had become a contest between “Arabs” and “Turks” for control over territory.28 The scare-quotes, however, reflect the ambiguity of identity even in a contest that pitted one collective against another for a hugely important prize. Activists from Damascus and Alexandretta pressured Arabic-speakers to register “as Arabs,” whether they had another affiliation (Alawite, Greek-Orthodox, Jewish – other) or not. Turcophiles carried out extensive campaigns to convince Alawites that they were actually Arabic-speaking Turks; to lobby Kurds that they were part of the Turkish family; and to pressure Armenians that they were a valued part of the larger community of Turkey. Turkish activists demanded that these groups register “as Turks.”29 Thus, although the registration process had been designed to ascertain the relative population of each group, it ended instead in a contest over the organizing ability of two of the seven collectives. As Arab and Turkish activists tried to convince the residents of the Sanjak that they had to choose between two mutually exclusive linguistic identities, however, some of the people resisted. On 9 May 1938, a number of people asked to be registered in the “other” category, claiming they were “Sunni Muslims.” Turkish representatives were furious, and some even walked out when the electoral bureaus run by the League of Nations representatives inscribed them as “other.” Turkey’s Consul in the Sanjak protested to the League and to the French administration, insisting that the electoral law had defined recognized minority communities as “other,” and only those belonging to these groups should allowed to be registered in it. Someone belonging to one of the listed communities must be forced to choose from among those. Sunni Muslim had not been included in the “other” category, he insisted, because they held a large majority that had no “statutory existence.” Indeed, he argued, the electoral law rested on the division among Sunni Muslims.30 The League of Nations accepted the protest and the local electoral boards refused to allow “Sunni Muslims” to enroll in the “other” category. Despite its lack of success, this grass-roots project suggests the unwillingness of some local residents to adhere to the new exclusionary identities on which the contest over the Sanjak was based.

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As registration continued, discussion gave way to intimidation, and intimidation to arson, expulsion, even murder. What had begun as an effort to allocate territory had been transformed by the League of Nations into a competition based on collective identity, where the streets became a stage for the daily demonstration of mutually exclusive linguistic affiliations. CONCLUSION: ON THE DESTRUCTIVENESS OF SELF-DETERMINATION AND CONSENT No longer a valid principle for territorial aggrandizement, the acquisition of real estate by conquest had to give way to a new kind of legitimacy. At the end of World War I, the only legitimacy that could be publicly acknowledged rested on “consent of the governed.” When territory was contested, that “consent” rapidly outran its container, becoming not only a recipe for regime legitimacy, but also for territorial aggrandizement, with horrific consequences visible not only in the Middle East, but especially in Europe. Indeed, efforts to revise Europe’s boundaries based on the collective (especially linguistic) identities of the population were among the sparks igniting the next World War. Unlike previous ideologies on which Ottoman, French, German and British expansion had been based, self-determination and consent required a newer, narrower and exclusionary definition of “the people.” Thus, national identity was an essential pre-condition for the ways in which the League of Nations configured contested territories in the Sanjak – and Czechoslovakia and Poland. Territories were contested in a new way, and those who were not included in the new “we the people” became outliers, minorities, exiles from their “own” state. New legitimacy was predicated on nationalism – and its less savory and more dangerous corollary, irredentism.31 The people of the Sanjak had to fight on these identity grounds because there were no others that were acceptable in the contemporary international context. So the sides formed for the contest based on essentialist characteristics which were newly defined, assumed to be mutually exclusive and dangerous for the future. At the same time, the new criteria provided legitimacy for a

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new anti-colonial elite, empowering them to educate their population in a new collective – national – identity, while simultaneously requiring these new states to redraw the criteria for membership. Indeed, the conflict over the Sanjak became an important corollary and counterweight to the conflict in Dersim, which took place at nearly the same time. After long-term efforts to integrate reticent residents – largely Kurdish-speaking Alevis – into the new community, the Ankara government seized on an incident in the spring of 1937 to carry out a massive military campaign to eliminate resistance. The results were the brutal extermination of much of Dersim’s population, including women, children and noncombatants, followed by the forced resettlement of survivors.32 The efforts to stage Turkishness on the streets of Antioch and Alexandretta were, at least in part, a response to Ankara’s lack of success in implementing Turkishness during the conflicts further north. The Sanjak was a much-needed demonstration of collective identity at a time when the new republican identity seemed to be under siege.33 Although “consent of the governed” resonated with the progressive politics of Europe after World War I, its enforcement in peripheral areas resulted in new kinds of identity politics and division. Edward Keene, in proposing a new way of understanding the way European interstate relations compensated to include areas outside Europe, argues that “we need to appreciate civilization not merely as a standard for regulating the entry of new states in international society, but also for validating an entirely different set of legal rules and political institutions in its own right.”34 The victors of World War I imposed their new “civilized” political ideology in ways that reinforced their own hegemony, not only for the former Ottoman Empire outside Europe, but also for southwest Europe itself, former Hapsburg lands. In moving from their own older versions of legitimacy, they imposed new kinds of exclusionary identities on their global subjects. Ironically, the new “consent of the governed” legitimation, while appearing to cohere with progressive new ideas, served largely to divide the Middle East even further, leading to the institutionalization of sectarianism and, through it, to the rapidly expanding ability of outside powers to intervene in the politics of the region.

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NOTES 1. League of Nations, Official Journal 1937, 24–9, 31– 4. Gilbert Telegram, 15 December 1936, 84/350/69/21/5, Foreign Service Post Files, Record Group 84, US National Archives and Records Administration, College Park (Hereafter NACP). Anker to Haller, 3 February 1937, SDN S 1646 No. 2. 2. Sarah D. Shields, Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of World War II (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 3. Already in the late nineteenth century, an emerging belief in selfdetermination had led to the holding of plebiscites for contested territories in Europe. Paul De Auer, “Plebiscites and the League of Nations Covenant,” Transactions of the Grotius Society 6 (1 January 1920): 45 –58, doi:10.2307/742784; “Plebiscites Past and Future: Official Statement, Issued by the League of Nations, Covering All Popular Votes under the Versailles and St. Germain Treaties, and under the League,” Current History 13 (1921): 394. 4. Mark W. Zacher, “The Territorial Integrity Norm: International Boundaries and the Use of Force,” International Organization 55, no. 2 (2001): 215–50, doi: 10.1162/00208180151140568; Andreas Osiander, “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth,” International Organization 55, no. 2 (1 April 2001): 251–87, doi: 10.2307/3078632. Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 97, http://ebooks.cambridge.org.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/ebook.jsf?bid¼ CBO9 780511491474. 5. United States Congress et al., The Congressional Globe (Blair & Rives, 1853), 244. 6. Quincy Wright, “Territorial Propinquity,” The American Journal of International Law 12, no. 3 (1 July 1918): 556, doi: 10.2307/2188238. 7. When the Ottoman Empire lost instead, however, this promise was not ¨ ge Go ¨ cek. kept. Private correspondence with Fatma Mu 8. Zacher, “The Territorial Integrity Norm,” 217. 9. “Avalon Project – President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points,” accessed 6 February 2014, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp. 10. Quincy Wright, “The Middle East Problem,” The American Journal of International Law 64 (1970), 270–1. 11. Zacher, “The Territorial Integrity Norm,” 270. Emphasis mine. 12. Harold Nicolson, Curzon: The Last Phase, 1919–1925, a Study in Post-War Diplomacy (Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin company, 1934), 83– 8. M Dockrill and J. Douglas Goold, Peace without Promise: Britain and the Peace Conferences, 1919–1923 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1981). David Fromkin, A Peace To End All Peace (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989).

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13. “Anglo French Declaration j The Balfour Project,” accessed 10 February 2014, http://www.balfourproject.org/anglo-french-declaration/. Emphasis mine. 14. See for a general overview of the issues Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford;New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 15. Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). http://avalon.law.yale. edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp, accessed 22 April 2011. 16. Nicolson, Curzon, 111. 17. “Avalon Project – President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points.” 18. Ibid. 19. Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 32, 143–4. Robert B. Satloff, “Prelude to Conflict: Communal Interdependence in the Sanjak of Alexandretta 1920–1936,” Middle Eastern Studies 22 (1986), 147–80. 20. Camilla T. Nereid, “Kemalism on the Catwalk: The Turkish Hat Law of 1925,” Journal of Social History 44, no. 3 (2011): 707–28, doi: 10.1353/ jsh.2011.0003. 21. For more on organizations like the Halkevleri, devoted to educate Turks to their proper identity, see Yuksel’s chapter in this volume. 22. Description of the events from Nantes: Ministe`re des affaires e´trange`res, Syrie-Liban Cabinet Politique (Hereafter CP) Summary, 20 November 1937, 511 and Zannardi to Director of General Security Beirut, 2 December 1937, 511. 23. 28 November 1937, Ministe`re des affaires e´trange`res, Nantes. 24. Description of the events from Nantes: Ministe`re des affaires e´trange`res, Syrie-Liban Cabinet Politique (Hereafter CP) Summary, 30 November 1937, 511 and Zannardi to Director of General Security Beirut, 2 December 1937, 511. 25. Marriner to Secretary of State, 9 June 1937, 751.67/178, Record Group 59, NACP. 26. Kemal H. Karpat, “The People’s Houses in Turkey: Establishment and ˘lu, Growth,” Middle East Journal 17 (1963), 55–67. M. Asim Karaomerliog “The People’s Houses and the Cult of the Peasant in Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 34 (1998). Sefa S¸ims¸ek, “‘People’s Houses’ as a Nationwide Project for Ideological Mobilization in Early Republican Turkey,” Turkish Studies 6 ˘lu described the project, “the People’s (2005), 71–91. As Karaomerliog Houses were supposed to create a mass society which in turn would serve to create the true nation.” 27. President of the Council of Ministers of the Syrian Republic to the Deputy of the High Commissioner, Damascus, 7 June 1937, CP 511. Farrell, 15 June 1937, RG 59, 751.67/17, NACP. Telegram, Durieux to Martel, 2 July 1937, CP 523.

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28. Shields, Fezzes in the River. 29. Poucel to Durieux, 14 October 1936, CP 523. Mehmet Ali and Kojo to Martel and Secretary-General of the League of Nations, 20 January 1937, CP 513. Soner Cagaptay, “Race, Assimilation and Kemalism: Turkish Nationalism and the Minorities in the 1930s,” Middle Eastern Studies 40 (2004), 86– 101, quoting Galip, 88 –9. MacMurray to Secretary of State, 1 December 1936, RG 59, 751.67/106, NACP. 30. Alexandretta Information, 15 May 1938, CP 514. “Summaries of the Reports,” attached to “Report to President of the Commission of the League of Nations for the First Elections in the Sanjak of Alexandretta on my activity at Rihanie and at Miskhane,” SDN C 1077. Karasapan to Garreau, 17 May 1938, and enclosures, CP 513. Garreau to Martel, 18 May 1938, CP 513. Karasapan claimed the French hand was behind these registration, but there is no evidence in the French archives to substantiate the accusation. Indeed, the French seem bemused by the challenge to the identity-voting regime. 31. See the introduction to this volume, page 18. 32. For pleas to League of Nations intervention and a description of the situation, see petition by Dersim’s tribal leaders to the Secretary General, 20 November 1937, League of Nations Archives (Geneva) R 3640. M. M. van Bruinessen, “The Suppression of the Dersim Rebellion in Turkey (1937–38),” Preprint (20 March 2007). Nicole Watts, “Relocating Dersim: Turkish State Building and Kurdish Resistance, 1931 – 1938.” New Perspectives on Turkey 23 (2000), 5–30. 33. Shields, Fezzes in the River, 241. 34. Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society, 117.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources League of Nations Archives (Geneva). Ministe`re des affaires e´trange`res, Syrie-Liban Cabinet Politique (CP). US National Archives and Records Administration, College Park (NACP).

Secondary Sources “Anglo French Declaration j The Balfour Project,” accessed 10 February 2014. “Avalon Project – President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points,” accessed 6 February 2014. van Bruinessen, Martin, “The Suppression of the Dersim Rebellion in Turkey (1937–38),” Preprint, 2007. ˘ aptay, Soner, “Race, Assimilation and Kemalism: Turkish C ¸ ag Nationalism and the Minorities in the 1930s,” Middle Eastern Studies 40 (2004): 86–101.

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De Auer, Paul, “Plebiscites and the League of Nations Covenant,” Transactions of the Grotius Society 6 (January 1920): 45–58. ——— “Plebiscites Past and Future: Official Statement, Issued by the League of Nations, Covering All Popular Votes under the Versailles and St. Germain Treaties, and under the League,” Current History 13 (1921): 394. Dockrill, M. and J. Douglas Goold, Peace without Promise: Britain and the Peace Conferences, 1919–1923 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1981). Fromkin, David, A Peace To End All Peace (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989). ˘lu, M. Asım, “The People’s Houses and the Cult of the Peasant in ¨ merliog Karao Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 34 (1998). Karpat, Kemal H., “The People’s Houses in Turkey: Establishment and Growth,” Middle East Journal 17 (1963): 55 –67. League of Nations, Official Journal, 1937. Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Nereid, Camilla T., “Kemalism on the Catwalk: The Turkish Hat Law of 1925,” Journal of Social History 44 (2011), no. 3: 707–28. Nicolson, Harold. Curzon: The Last Phase, 1919– 1925, a Study in Post-War Diplomacy (Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1934). Osiander, Andreas, “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth,” International Organization 55, no. 2 (April): 251–87. Satloff, Robert B., “Prelude to Conflict: Communal Interdependence in the Sanjak of Alexandretta 1920 – 1936,” Middle Eastern Studies 22 (1986): 147 – 80. Shields, Sarah D., Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). S¸ims¸ek, Sefa, “‘People’s Houses’ as a Nationwide Project for Ideological Mobilization in Early Republican Turkey,” Turkish Studies 6 (2005): 71 –91. United States Congress, The Congressional Globe (New York: Blair & Rives, 1853). Watenpaugh, Keith David, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Watts, Nicole, “Relocating Dersim: Turkish State Bbuilding and Kurdish Resistance, 1931 –1938.” New Perspectives on Turkey 23 (2000): 5–30. Wright, Quincy, “Territorial Propinquity,” The American Journal of International Law 12, no. 3 (July 1918). ——— “The Middle East Problem,” The American Journal of International Law 64 (1970). Zacher, Mark W., “The Territorial Integrity Norm: International Boundaries and the Use of Force,” International Organization 55, no. 2: 215–50.

CHAPTER 2

Ankara’s Forgotten Mental Maps, Changing Demography and Missing Minorities Zeynep Kezer

The production of cognitive maps and the attribution of meanings to urban spaces are inextricably intertwined with the patterns of everyday practices. The cycles of routines – whether mundane activities or timehonored rituals – weave various sites into webs of interconnected nodes, triggering mental processes for ordering space and creating hierarchies within it, highlighting some paths while downplaying others, identifying reference points, registering landmarks and detecting edges.1 Our mental maps are composite representations of individual and collective knowledges: The ones we generate through our own navigations are constantly interplayed with those of others, as well as with graphic and digital representations that are available to us. We take similar – if unsynchronized – itineraries with other fellow residents of the city, producing individual cartographic variations of the same terrains as we go about our daily lives. Collective activities – rituals, protests or celebrations – moving down certain streets or gathering by certain landmarks inscribe those spaces with meaning as sites of shared memory. Finally, even when we do not partake in them, awareness of the ebbs and flows of the activities of other groups – celebrations, parades, religious processions – further expand our cartographic repertoire of the cities we live in. It is through these

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intimate explorations, public exchanges, interactions with the built environment and constantly evolving mapping processes that we derive and develop identities and a sense of belonging to particular places. Ottoman cities, with their multi-ethnic, multi-religious makeup, had historically engendered a tapestry of rich and layered mapping processes, but these were ripped apart during the empire’s lengthy and violent demise. Large-scale population purges, which produced increasingly more homogeneous regions that would eventually break into different nation states, had already started in the midnineteenth century. As secessionist nationalisms gained momentum and became entangled with the geopolitical designs of the Great Powers, the purges accelerated and became more violent, culminating in the mass atrocities of World War I and the eventual unraveling of the Ottoman Empire. For the region that comprises modern-day Turkey, this was tantamount to a near total loss of non-Muslim populations, whose share in the population fell from 20 percent to 2.5 percent between the eve of World War I and the first census under the Republic in 1927.2 Death and departure were almost always accompanied by physical destruction: decades of pogroms, mass deportations, massacres and population exchanges had changed the spatial character of cities as well. Even when individual buildings or neighborhoods remained intact, they were severed from the patterns of everyday life that once animated them, endowing them with meaning. Bereft of their original uses and users, these sites could readily be appropriated, repurposed and woven into new spatial narratives, as illustrated in this and Zeynep Kas¸lı’s essay. Ankara provides a richly revealing site for exploring the erasure and re-inscriptions mental maps undergo as part of radical changes in demographic makeup, urban form and functions. A minor Central Anatolian provincial seat of merely about 20,000 inhabitants, Ankara, like most Anatolian towns, lost much of its demographic diversity during the traumatic events of World War I and its aftermath.3 The Armenians, who by far had been the largest non-Muslim group, were brutally eliminated with the deportation orders that started in 1915, followed later by the Greeks who were forced out during and after the War of Independence (1919 – 22),

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leaving a small number of Christians and Jews, whose communities gradually atrophied under the Republic. Moreover, although it was nowhere near a battlefield, a massive fire in 1916 also destroyed a substantial portion of Ankara’s core, specifically its predominantly non-Muslim neighborhoods. But Ankara’s rise to prominence as the capital of the newly minted Turkish Republic in 1923 would bring about a building boom and population influx, reconfiguring the entire landscape in and around the city, establishing new frames of reference and generating new mental maps at the expense of what had been there before. Turkey’s founding fathers’ idealization of the new capital as the model site where the sociospatial practices that epitomized a modern unitary political order could materialize added to the zeal with which they implemented change and superimposed mythical foundation narratives upon an existing landscape. In this essay, through the case of Ankara, I trace what happens when the physical referents of collectively constructed mental maps, large and small, disappear, together with the communities which, through their various activities, contribute to producing them. I examine the complex dynamics of the transition against the background of a violent tear in the social fabric. I suggest that the ascendance of a new political order and its attendant privileges, the urgency of providing the much-needed institutional, commercial and residential buildings for a modern government seat and the arrival of an overwhelming number of newcomers with no previous ties to the city, all converging in rapid order, facilitated the dissolution of a long-standing urban morphology to be superseded by another, leaving few legible traces of its existence. SPECTRUM OF SITES: THE PRESIDENTIAL PALACE OF C ¸ ANKAYA ¨ ¨ KOS¸KU The tensions between the successive layers of Ankara’s urban ¨ s¸ku ¨ , the palimpsest become most jarringly evident at C ¸ ankaya Ko Presidential Residence.4 Located in a vineyard estate on the city’s ¨ s¸ku ¨ was the setting for crucial strategy southern foothills, C ¸ ankaya Ko sessions during the War of Liberation and, subsequently, for planning

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the reforms that changed Turkey’s face, including the proclamation of the Republic and the relocation of the capital from I˙stanbul. In the early years of the Republic, the estate’s inclusion in the path of official celebrations and its extensive coverage, ranging from textbooks to commemorative stamps, reinforced its mythical place in the public mind, positioning it indisputably at the center of the foundational narratives of the modern Turkish nation state. But, completed in 1873, the estate also had a previous life as the summer residence of a well-to-do Armenian family, the Kasabians. This fact has long been known to historians, but its relatively recent public disclosure has been an unsettling surprise for the broader national audience. Although the family’s name remains chiseled in Armenian letters in the publicly accessible museum section of the presidential complex, official tours and literature omit this portion of the estate’s history as if it were an open – if unquestioned – secret. Juxtaposing these ¨ s¸ku ¨ notably incongruous narratives associated with C ¸ ankaya Ko reveals the process by which such conspicuous vestiges of another existence – and the mental maps that pertained to it – became illegible to those who remained behind. In late December 1919, Turkey’s national hero and eventual first ¨ rk) arrived in Ankara, accompanied president Mustafa Kemal (Atatu

¨ s¸ku ¨ shortly after the construction of the FIGURE 2.1 C ¸ ankaya Ko new larger residence and office building by Austrian architect Clemens Holzmeister (c. 1930). (Source: La Turquie Kamaliste, June 1935, courtesy of the Turkish Historical Society.)

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by a large military-bureaucratic cadre of nationalists, to lay the groundwork for a resistance movement to liberate the country from extensive post World War I occupation by the Allies.5 Mustafa Kemal and his close entourage initially stayed at the premises of the Ottoman School of Agriculture, later moving to the manager’s apartment at the city’s train station. Both of these were makeshift arrangements that became more stressful the longer they stayed in Ankara. Soon after securing the eastern borders and winning their first battles against Allied-backed Greek armies on the Western Front, ¨ naydın) in March 1921, Mustafa Kemal’s close friend Rus¸en Es¸ref (U convinced him to scout for more permanent accommodation from among the many available vacant vineyards on the hills just outside the city. In the following weeks, during an afternoon outing on horseback, Mustafa Kemal spotted a prominently appointed twostorey vineyard house atop C ¸ ankaya Hill, with commanding views of the town and the Anatolian plains. The estate belonged to Bulgurzade Tevfik Efendi, patriarch of one of Ankara’s most prominent families. With the support of other local notables, the city of Ankara purchased the house for 4,500 liras and presented it to Mustafa Kemal, who took it on the condition that the house would be deemed Army property and that he would move in only as a tenant. Different variations of this account, which displays some of official history’s central tropes, have long been in circulation. In the first place, the story clearly underlines the close alliance between the nationalists and Ankara’s notables. In the annals of official history, ¨ s¸ku ¨ and other, similarly stories about the gift of C ¸ ankaya Ko generous contributions, constitute points of local pride.6 They show Ankara’s local notables in a favorable light for their support, during uncertain times, of the fledgling nationalist movement and their defiance of the I˙stanbul government, which had embarked on this disastrous war campaign in the first place, dreadfully mismanaged it and surrendered in disgrace, delivering the most complete defeat in the empire’s history. Such narratives of grassroots support were also instrumental in justifying the choice of Ankara, first, as the staging point for the War of Independence and, later, as the nation’s capital. No less important are the lessons of honesty and humility that inhere in this story, which portrays the sale as a transparent

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transaction and reinforces the image of Mustafa Kemal as a modest leader, who did not assume ownership of the property, but rather chose to play himself down as a temporary occupant, a mere tenant in an estate that belonged to the Turkish nation. Notably, however, this otherwise mythical story lacks stability on the critical question of ownership and property transfer. Some versions indicate that the original owner was a British merchant, while others that it had always been in the possession of the Bulgurzade family.7 Most recently, in an article penned for the daily Hu¨rriyet, Soner Yalcın has stated that Ohannes Kasabian, a wealthy local businessman, had sold the estate with all of its interior furnishings to Bulgurzade Tevfik when he was leaving town during World War I.8 The article published in 2007 caused a significant public controversy with its title “C ¸ ankaya Ko¨s¸ku¨’nu¨n I˙lk ¨ s¸ ku ¨ was Sahibi Ermeni’ydi” (The First Owner of C ¸ ankaya Ko Armenian). But Yalcın’s article provided no further explanation as to why Kasabian really left Ankara or how. His column seemed to suggest that Kasabian’s departure was an escape to safety during the war, but did not question why his Turkish neighbor Bulgurzade Tevfik Efendi would not only feel safe enough to stay behind but also buy more property. Yalcın did not mention that Ankara was a safe place, far from the battlefront. We may infer then that the Armenian Kasabian and his family faced very different odds than the Muslim Bulgurzade Tevfik during World War I. The divergences between the fortunes of these two families are inextricably linked to broader socio-economic and political transformations that characterized the last century of the Ottoman Empire. Although the Ottomans had long been fighting to stave off separatist nationalisms and European expansionism, a devastating defeat in the Balkan War (1912 – 13) marked a watershed moment because it signaled, in no uncertain terms, that the disintegration of the empire’s core lands was imminent. In response, Ottoman politicians and intellectuals began to seek explanations – and scapegoats – for the empire’s misfortunes. At this critically tense juncture a faction within the Congress of Union and Progress (CUP),9 which espoused a particularly zealous brand of nationalism, staged a coup in 1913 and took the Empire’s reigns. Lead by

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the triumvirate of Enver, Cemal and Talat Pas¸as, this faction considered non-Muslims as a threat to Ottoman interests, and were especially suspicious of Armenians, whom they regarded as traitors. Hence, in 1915, using the war and the activities of Armenian nationalists as a pretext, they ordered the mass deportation of all Armenians with the exception of those residing in I˙stanbul. In this catastrophic journey toward the deserts of Syria and northwestern Iraq, untold thousands died at the hands of CUP officials and marauding bandits as well as from exposure, disease and starvation, decimating Anatolia’s Armenian population.10 In Ankara, Ohannes Kasabian and his family felt secure, for CUP’s deportation orders initially did not apply to Catholic Armenians. But in October 1915, the orders were expanded to include them as well. Luckier than most, the Kasabians managed to avoid deportation thanks to Ohannes’ connections in the German-run Rail Company, and obtained a passage to I˙stanbul, where they eventually settled. But, like most of Ankara’s wealthy Armenian families, the Kasabians lost their home: In a rebuttal to Yalcın’s article, published in I˙stanbul’s Armenian-language newspaper, Agos, Kasabian’s grandson wrote that, contrary to Yalcın’s claims, Ohannes Kasabian never sold the estate in C ¸ ankaya, but that it was confiscated from him together with the family’s other assets for which they never received any compensation.11 Kasabian’s grandson’s story echoes similar accounts of lost wealth. The CUP government had long been keeping detailed tabs on the assets of the Empire’s non-Muslim subjects.12 In preparation for the mass deportation, the government established special commissions, comprised of local notables and government officials, to keep an inventory of “abandoned goods” and oversee their administration.13 Prior to their departure, the Armenians were required to register their assets at these commissions, which were to sell them and transfer the money to the deportees at their final destination. In many cases the men were detained earlier, leaving it to the women and elderly to deal with the assets as best as they could.14 Needless to say, this convoluted arrangement was unlikely to work under the best of circumstances, given the obvious difficulty of coordinating such transactions with a proto-modern

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bureaucracy and an underdeveloped infrastructure. Correspondence between the central government and local commissions reveals that corruption was rampant: the government continually admonished the commissions against unlawful takeovers, sales and despoiling of property – but the sheer repetition of these warnings indicates that abuses were unstoppable. In any case, as entire families were wiped out during this death march, few were left behind to claim compensation. When lone survivors, mostly children, took refuge in (and eventually became citizens of) other countries they were not allowed back into Turkey even as tourists until the 1950s. When this ban was formally lifted, for several years they were required to sign a waiver relinquishing their claims on any family property.15 But even those, who, like the Kasabians, survived and stayed in Turkey, did not receive anything in exchange for the plundering of property and belongings by Turkish local notables, officials or officers. POLITICS OF SPACE AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE DISTRICT OF ¨ NU ¨ HISARO In the decades prior to this disastrous turn of events, Ankara had experienced a revitalization of its economy after more than a century of serious setbacks. Throughout the 1800s, Ankara’s once worldrenowned mohair industry had nearly collapsed as mass-produced cheap European fabrics flooded the Ottoman market and British entrepreneurs succeeded in breeding the rare angora goat in South Africa. By the end of the century, however, Ankara’s prospects had improved somewhat when it became a provincial capital as part of Ottoman bureaucratic reforms. Ankara acquired a regional advantage with the ensuing construction of government offices, opening of modern institutions including new schools, and improvement of intercity transportation and communications. Most importantly, the arrival of rail service in 1893 converted Ankara into an important break-of-bulk point for Central Anatolia. These developments spurred the growth of a new commercial-administrative district to the west of the citadel, toward the station, breaking open Ankara’s self-contained and rather insular form.

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FIGURE 2.2 Ankara in 1924, at the outset of the Republic. Buildings with relatively larger footprints and in darker shade indicate the incipient growth towards the train station inaugurated in 1893. (Map courtesy of Vehbi Koc Ankara Aras¸tırmaları Merkezi.) While artisanal trades, purveyors of agricultural goods and traditional consumer items (foodstuffs, fabrics and household goods) remained in the old commercial center on the southern foothills of the citadel, more modern business engaged in importexport brokerage. Warehousing and sales of foreign goods began to define the new center to the west. The nearby placement of new Ottoman institutions further cemented this trend along with parallel developments in the city’s residential fabric. Elegant townhouses were built along the citadel’s western foothills, in the district known ¨ nu ¨ , which, in turn, stimulated the growth of a shopping as Hisaro district with Ankara’s smartest stores specializing in imported luxury consumer goods. As with the new types of commercial enterprise, the ¨ nu ¨ (and the customers of the smart shops) owners of homes in Hisaro consisted almost exclusively of Greeks and Armenians, who had long been the preferred partners of European merchants conducting

¨ nu ¨ neighborhood in the FIGURE 2.3 Townhouses in Ankara’s Hisaro first decade of the twentieth century. (Source: Anonymous postcard ˘rafları Ars¸ivi Katalog ˘u.) from Ankara Posta Kartları ve Belge Fotog

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FIGURE 2.4 The Tevonian family sitting by the poolside in front of their estate (c. 1910). (Photograph Courtesy of Project SAVE.) business in the Empire. And yet, despite the incipient push for expansion, Ankara in the early 1900s remained very much a walking city. Its urban fabric was dense, with the bulk of its building stock huddled around the citadel, its streets were narrow and the outdoor spaces of most of its homes – including the posh ones – were quite cramped.16 While even the wealthiest townhouses near the city center were relatively cramped, vineyard estates in the surrounding hills were spacious. Most middle and upper-class families in Ankara, like the Kasabians, owned an estate or could visit one in the summers to escape Ankara’s dry summer heat and congestion.17 The farthest of these could usually be reached by horse carriage within an hour. While the relatively wealthy Armenians preferred the ¨ ren-Etlik C ¸ ankaya-Kavaklıdere district in the southeast and the Kecio district in the north, the Greeks concentrated in the south, mainly around the Dikmen hills. Vineyard houses were typically two-storey stone or brick masonry buildings with modest comforts.

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For instance, although the Kasabians had a sizeable estate, none of the three residential buildings in it had indoor plumbing.18 Many homes had their own artesian wells and, by the early 1900s, it had become quite fashionable to build a marble pool and a formal garden for outdoor living. Nevertheless, the vineyard estates were not so much relaxing vacation homes as sites of production. In addition to growing the more than 20 varietals of grapes for which Ankara’s vineyards were renowned, a typical property comprised vegetable gardens and a variety of fruit and nut trees. Larger estates also grew mulberries and some also kept silkworms and apiaries. People enjoyed their produce at the height of its season, but most importantly they prepared their pantry for Ankara’s bitter winters. The vineyard season started when the schools were let out in early summer and entire families moved out to their estates with their relatives and an entourage of servants. The Kasabian estate accommodated 14 members of the extended family and their servants.19 Family patriarchs commuted more regularly to the city for business, while the rest of the family – grandparents, wives and children – stayed at the estate until the end of September, returning after the first fall harvest. The passage of time in the summer was marked as much by the ripening of fruits as by annual festivities, among them the Blessing of the Grapes in mid-August for which Armenians would bring baskets of grapes to the Garmir Vank Monastery and camp for three days in the fields by the C ¸ ubuk River. These festivities, which, notably, were shared by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, appear to have predated the arrival Christianity in Anatolia. According to popular belief, the monastery itself stood on the grounds of an earlier temple dedicated to an ancient Anatolian fertility goddess – most likely Cybele.20 In short, especially for Ankara’s wealthier households, the cycles of ritual and harvest and the imperatives of economy bound together this belt of summer estates surrounding the city, integrating them into the geography of Ankara as a whole. ¨ NU ¨ FIRE 1915 DEPORTATIONS AND THE HISARO The deportation orders of 1915 violently disrupted these cycles. The exact chronology of events varies but, prior to their departure, the

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contents of homes, businesses and religious buildings that belonged to Ankara’s Armenian community were moved to the warehouses by the train station under the supervision of specially designated officials and gendarmes, in a process that lasted months.21 Decrying the lawlessness of the looting that ensued, Alice Odian Kasparian recalled, “Many officers expropriated anything they wanted.” In addition to the goods stored in shops owned by the deportees, she lamented the confiscation of common household goods, family heirlooms and jewelry – in short, she wrote, “everything that was removable was removed from the city as well as the summer homes”.22 In the course of these removals, a mysterious fire erupted in ¨ nu ¨ and environs.23 All-consuming fires in Ottoman cities Hisaro happened fairly frequently since most residential buildings were made of wood; but this one spread with ferocity, simultaneously and in multiple directions, devouring Ankara’s wealthiest households within a few hours.24 Refik Halid (Karay), a young Ottoman bureaucrat who witnessed the conflagration, wrote that words failed to describe the magnitude and severity this disaster, with mothers crying over lost children, distressed pregnant women going into early labor, young girls running and screaming with their hair ablaze and unattended casualties stranded in stretchers in narrow streets. What is striking about Karay’s account is not only the human cost of the tragedy, but also the degree of detail he offers about the material wealth and the widely Westernized tastes of the city’s non-Muslim merchant class: Shifting from one dangerous spot to another watching the calamity unfold, I arrived at a square where a temporary shrine to the wealth of Ankara’s Armenians had been erected. The choicest and most expensive carpets strewn over maybe a hundred salvaged pianos all lined up . . . In just the quarter of an hour, these luxuriously lacquered tinder boxes went up in flames as if they had been doused with gas. How eerie their moans, as if they were human beings, with thousands of melodies sounding off their glowing chords, and their white teeth popping with the heat. Homes in this neighborhood were free for all, the doors wide open and the contents intact; anybody could walk in and take anything they wanted.25

The Ankara fire went on two nights and two days, in Karay’s words, finally dying out when there was nothing left to burn. He recalled

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¨ nu ¨ district in the early 1920s, with FIGURE 2.5 The burned Hisaro some new construction after Ankara became the capital. (Source: ˘rafları Anonymous postcard from Ankara Posta Kartları ve Belge Fotog ˘u.) Ars¸ivi Katalog that “Ankara’s most elegant neighborhood, its largest shopping district, its wealth and prosperity had all been reduced to ashes”.26 The fire and deportations were twin disasters that ruptured Ankara’s social, economic and physical fabric. They uncoupled the previously interdependent urban and agricultural landscapes of the townhouses and vineyard estates, opening them up to fragmentation and re-appropriation, both physically and symbolically. This decoupling would also shape the trajectory of Ankara’s subsequent growth under the Republic and the discourses that surrounded it. THE 1919 ARRIVAL OF THE TURKISH NATIONALISTS AND “ABANDONED” VINEYARDS When the nationalists started arriving in Ankara in 1919, as they made their way into town from the train station, they were shocked ¨ nu ¨ district. by the charred remains of the once-prominent Hisaro As Vala Nureddin, a young journalist-author recalled, he felt that walking through Ankara’s labyrinthine streets was akin to “roaming

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through the ashes in a giant fireplace.”27 The fire had also reduced the town’s limited housing stock, making it difficult for them to find adequate shelter. Consequently, the newcomers had to convert a few school buildings into dormitories, rent rooms in the homes of local families or double up just to have a roof over their heads. Meanwhile, for those who could afford it, the now vacant vineyard estates proved an attractive alternative. Following the conclusion of the war, when Ankara became the capital of the newly formed Turkish Republic, the newcomers quickly rose to positions of power and their actions not only determined the directions of physical growth, but also began to inscribe new spatial hierarchies and patterns of movement onto the landscape. Many of them settled in “abandoned” vineyards they acquired from the National Real Estate Office on very agreeable terms.28 Mustafa Kemal’s estate in C ¸ ankaya became an especially powerful new magnet for future development. The district’s prestige and rent increased in proportion to his political success. When the modest spaces of the former Kasabian residence fell short of meeting the growing range of administrative, political and entertainment functions of a presidential compound, a modern villa was commissioned from Austrian architect Clemens Holzmeister (see Figure 2.1), who would later go onto work on several new institutional buildings of the capital. Prominent members of Mustafa Kemal’s entourage moved to neighboring estates, since they expected to benefit from their proximity to the sole source of authority. Despite their initial unwillingness to leave the comforts and amenities of I˙stanbul for Ankara’s distinctly harsher living standards, embassies also followed suit. They accepted the Turkish government’s free land offer and, like the ruling elite, settled in nearby “abandoned” vineyards, further reinforcing C ¸ ankaya-Kavaklıdere as Ankara’s prime neighborhood. These developments intensified urban development and traffic along a new North-South corridor connecting C ¸ ankaya to the city’s late nineteenth-century core, which was now home to various offices of the republican government. The new patterns of settlement in C ¸ ankaya were fundamentally different from that of the vineyards they replaced. Firstly, these were suburban residences, which, despite accessibility difficulties in the winter, were intended for year-round inhabitation. Built in the latest

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FIGURE 2.6 Looking north from Ankara’s southern foothills (c. 1935), the gradual transformation of the fabric of the estates is evident. (Source: LOC.) fashionable styles, these homes also had the symbolic function of showcasing by example the modern way of life the republican leadership wanted to cultivate in Turkish society. Secondly, unlike the exiled owners of the former vineyards, none of the new residents engaged in agricultural production in any way. This enabled very profitable subdivisions of large estates for residential development and the gradual transformation of the size and pattern of property plots in the area. Consequently, a new kind of Turkish republican elite, whose power stemmed from political connections and whose wealth derived from profitable land deals, came into existence. C ¸ ankaya residents’ ability to expedite the provision of public utilities – such as water, electricity, telephone and even public transportation – cemented the district’s ascendancy over the oncecomparable vineyard districts elsewhere in Ankara. The formation of a dominant axis between the old administrative center to the north in Ulus, passing through the new government quarter (which remained under construction well into the 1960s),

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and terminating at the presidential compound in C ¸ ankaya, decisively transformed Ankara’s macroform. Members of the republican elite, who had settled in once similarly popular vineyard districts of ¨ ren and Etlik before the outcome of the war was known and Kecio Mustafa Kemal established himself as the sole leader, found themselves gradually outnumbered and marginalized.29 The situ¨ nu ¨ , which ation was far worse in the burned-out district of Hisaro remained in a state of disrepair for several years. Although some new institutional and commercial structures including the City Hall and the Courthouse were built in this area, attention and investment had already shifted away from the citadel and its immediate vicinity. Over the next few decades, these once-elegant townhouses deteriorated and, as with most of the city’s older neighborhoods, became shoddily subdivided slums, housing Ankara’s seemingly endless influx of unskilled migrant workers and their families from all over Turkey. ESTABLISHING THE MYTH OF THE “BLANK CANVAS” The above-outlined changes in Ankara’s residential fabric occurred against a background of larger political and demographic transformations due to the city’s new role as Turkey’s capital. The relocation of the administrative apparatus of an expanding state necessitated the construction of ministries, government offices, courthouses and a wide range of ancillary official structures, which introduced land uses that were unprecedented in Ankara. They also generated new landmarks and, concomitantly, new toponyms that overrode older ones. The national assembly, the government quarter, the university – to name a few – came to represent physically Turkey’s new social and political order and, importantly, its express aspirations to join the ranks of modern Western nation states. The new institutional and governmental structures also served as references for spatial orientation and the clusterings of new urban functions in designated zones (education, administration, residential etc.) altered the relationships among the constituent parts of the city, ultimately reconfiguring how Ankara was experienced, visualized and mapped as a whole. Already by the 1930s, visual and verbal depictions of the city had shifted from describing it as a

FIGURE 2.7 Aerial view of Ankara’s developing administrative quarter, with the C ¸ ankaya and Dikmen hills in the background. The artery on the left eventually became the new capital’s dominant axis, ¨ rk Boulevard. (Source: Belediyeler Dergisi.) Atatu

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FIGURE 2.8A Ankara’s transformation under the Republic: republican urban development overtook the agricultural belt surrounding the city’s historic core. (Map reworked by the author, based on a 1953 Turkish State Highways Map.) concentric entity with a dense core surrounded by a belt of agricultural estates to a linear development with an increasingly prominent North– South axis. This pattern was reified not only in tourist guides and street maps, but also in infrastructure and transportation maps. Conse¨ ren, Etlik and even Dikmen, which was not that far from quently, Kecio C ¸ ankaya, were omitted from Ankara’s most commonly used maps.

FIGURE 2.8B Driver’s guide to Ankara, 1942. The map comprises the linear axis of development between Ulus and C ¸ ankaya. (Source: Author’s collection.)

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The departure of the vast majority of Ankara’s original nonMuslims coupled with the influx of new migrant populations who had no memory of the city prior to these changes facilitated the superimposition of new cognitive maps and narratives over the existing landscape predicated on collective amnesia. Ankara’s population increased from approximately 20,000 in 1920 to 74,000 in 1927 and 120,000 in 1935.30 The incoming population included a mix of bureaucrats from I˙stanbul relocating to Ankara to work for the new government, mostly unskilled labor from nearby provinces working in the construction sector or in menial jobs that facilitated the new capital’s growth and operations and students who came from across the country to study in the newly founded institutions of higher education. Turkish republican leaders used this opportunity to project their ideological agenda onto the city as if it were a blank canvas. Official depictions of Ankara as the national capital built from scratch by a progressive new government enjoyed wide circulation in the early years of the Republic. This myth that all but denied Ankara’s pre-republican past could gain traction because the fire district was in a wretched condition well into the 1940s and because the fabric of the vineyards surrounding the city was rapidly changing beyond recognition. That Ankara had no distinctive Ottoman urban landmark that could stand out from the new republican building stock similarly helped perpetuate this view. Establishing the blank canvas myth – albeit through sheer repetition – in the popular imagination was essential to maintaining the fiction of ethnic purity in Ankara and Anatolia, because forging a shared sense of demographic homogeneity was crucial to political stability for the neophyte nation state’s leaders. In reality, however, neither Ankara nor, for that matter, any other part of the country, had ever been homogeneous. Although the majority was Muslim, the Ottoman population was historically a mix of various ethnic and religious groups with multilingual communities of Christians, Muslims and Jews living everywhere throughout Anatolia and the Balkans. Non-Muslims had a significant presence in cities, as they often plied urban trades; but there were also many who lived in the countryside and worked the land. Ottoman towns, in particular, were sites of vigorous cultural crosspollination resulting from centuries of

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coexistence – as exemplified by Ankara’s Armenians, who spoke Turkish among themselves, but wrote it in Armenian characters.31 This is not to romanticize Ottoman communal living nor downplay the rising tensions among the empire’s constituent communities, which escalated tremendously with separatist nationalist conflicts and resulting in massive displacement of people in the region especially toward the end of the nineteenth century.32 Moreover, in Ankara, as in other towns, the mounting fortunes of non-Muslims who partnered with European merchants and the conspicuousness of the emerging wealth gap, as embodied in distinctive patterns of settlement and consumption, elicited widespread resentment among Muslims.33 Not all non-Muslims were rich – but the most conspicuously wealthy and well-connected were non-Muslim. They were publicly very visible because they predominantly lived in urban centers and exhibited Westernized patterns of consumption that that distinguished them from the rest. The stereotypical perception that nonMuslims had an unfair advantage in the nineteenth century’s changing economic order gained credibility based on their rising fortunes and privileges and it contributed to the post-rationalization of the disasters that ensued. ERASURE THROUGH TOPONYMY Republican efforts to consolidate an image of Ankara as a quintessentially national capital uncontaminated by ethno-religious diversity included toponym changes as well. Turkey’s leaders clearly understood the significance of place names as compact vessels of collective memory with a remarkable capacity to conjure up, in a word or two, an entire milieu and the histories embedded in. Hence, after naming Ankara’s new streets and neighborhoods after their ideological principles and the key battles and prominent heroes of the War of Independence, they turned to existing places that did not sound Turkish enough. Thus, for instance, in an effort to “Turkicize” the city, Ankara’s Jewish Quarter (Yahudi Mahallesi) was renamed Istiklal Mahallesi (Independence Quarter). The neighborhoods claimed by the great fire were treated as if they had never previously been developed. The western slope between the

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two walls of the citadel, which had been the site of much of Ankara’s most handsome townhouses, was turned into a park and named after ¨ nu ¨ . The new commercial Mustafa Kemal’s closest collaborator, I˙no ¨ nu ¨ district was named street cutting through the heart of the Hisaro after the Anafartalar Battle in which Mustafa Kemal had miraculously escaped certain death. Ankara’s reconfigured and renamed sites, including the Kasabian-estate-cum-presidential-compound, were then incorporated into the paths of commemorative parades and highly publicized sports events, inscribing them as new reference points on an existing topography, and thereby weaving them into new webs of meaning that were closely identified with the foundational myths of Turkey’s new political order. In the end, the rhetorical constructions that conflated the project of modernization with the project of homogenization produced a landscape so thoroughly severed from its original referents that, today, the obvious meaning of surviving place names in Ankara such as Papazın Bag˘ı (the priest’s vineyard) and the adjacent C ¸ ankaya (bell hill, as in, church bell hill), which should invoke the existence of a culturally diverse landscape and heritage, no longer could. The republican desire for purity and homogeneity, which found expression in policy and discourse alike, had undeniable parallels with the CUP’s vision. Despite personal rifts with the CUP leadership and significant disagreements over strategy – including over the disastrous deportation of Armenians – republican cadres included many who came from the CUP rank and file membership and whose ethnocentric views found new resonance, especially in the 1930s with the rise of similar ideologies elsewhere in Europe. Although not all members of the leading cadre espoused the same zeal, there were enough of them in influential positions to have a profound effect in shaping policy and perceptions.34 Transformations in the physical environment that were directly or indirectly linked to their policies were instrumental in establishing, in the popular imagination, a conception of Turkey as a uniform terrain with a homogeneous population and a shared unified heritage. In Ankara, the demise of non-Muslims, emerging residential trends, ideological convictions, political ambitions and personal designs dovetailed quite conveniently with an official meta-narrative,

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which continually pitted the legacy of the empire against the promise of the Republic, always positing the moral superiority of the latter over the former. These processes involved multiple actors simultaneously transforming the city’s landscape and blurring the legibility of parts of its pre-republican past that contravened official narratives whether they explicitly sought to erase them or not. It is, I argue, this eclectic, partially overlapping and always selective amalgam of gradual erasures that has lead to a generalized amnesia without specific culprits, which ultimately is tantamount to a more effective historical exclusion. ACROSS TURKEY, A DIFFUSE KIND OF AMNESIA Although Ankara experienced the fastest developments due to the radical change in its role, many Turkish cities under the Republic experienced similar erasures and re-inscriptions that masked the physical existence of a pluralistic society under Ottoman rule. The process was relevant for the republican urban development as much in cities that became battlegrounds like I˙zmir or Gaziantep as those, ˘ or Tirebolu, sustained relatively little or which, like Diyarbakır, Elazıg no damage to their fabric during the war. In I˙zmir, days after its liberation from post World War I occupation, a catastrophic fire destroyed the city’s residential and business district used primarily by non-Muslims, turning it into a no-go zone for as, thereafter, the remaining Smyrniots came to regard it with suspicion as the site of shady transactions. A decade later, a large urban park completely covered the ruins of what had once been a very dense and lively urban fabric, decisively eliminating the rich cartographies associated with it. In Gaziantep, where almost all the buildings were damaged during the 1921 siege, the many churches, historically the city’s reference points, were repurposed as warehouses and Surp Asdvadzadzin Cathedral, showcasing the civic pride of its Armenians, before its more recent conversion into the Kurtulus¸ (Liberation) Mosque, was, for long years, used as a prison. Elsewhere, the process of erasure was dispersed and happened more gradually but was potent just the same. Wartime deportations and later population exchanges translated into thousands of

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abandoned neighborhoods and businesses, as well as churches, synagogues and schools that could no longer be maintained by their respective communities, which had atrophied. In most cases, from Gaziantep to C ¸ anakkale and beyond, homes and businesses were appropriated by local notables aspiring to become Turkey’s new bourgeoise. Meanwhile, severed from the routines that kept them alive, religious and social institutions deteriorated from lack of use (as in the case of Diyarbakır’s Surp Giragos Church and Tirebolu’s many Greek churches), were converted to mosques (a common practice in towns where Muslim Balkan immigrants replaced departing non-Muslims) or assigned to mundane uses such as warehousing (as in the use of Saint Bedros in Gaziantep to store silk yarn or the use of Sivas’ Tuzhisar Church as a barn, and the Surp Garabed Monastery as a military arsenal). Countless others provided raw material for new construction, where only the most trained eyes could detect their traces. Lastly, as with Ankara, successive campaigns to representationally re-map the whole country through “toponymical engineering” further erased remaining traces of plurality.35 CONCLUSION Insofar as they undercut long-standing notions of land tenure and ownership, reconfigured cognitive maps and disrupted established cycles of life, changes in the physical world and the remappings they required had lasting consequences. They shook the lives of those who, as targets of such discriminatory policies, lost their homes, livelihoods and their communal institutions, while propelling the fortunes of those who, with the implicit approval of the powers that be, stood to gain from that loss. But more broadly, even for those who had little to lose or gain materially, these changes redrew the maps of their neighborhoods and towns and generated new economic and social hierarchies. Importantly, such changes operated in less discernible, more diffuse ways, making their impact harder to grasp because, for the most part, the physical environment continued to project an appearance of permanence, masking the disruptions in practice, transfers of ownership and concomitant shifts in meaning.

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The confiscation of individual and communal properties unmoored them from the webs of use and ownership that embedded them in their settings and the cognitive maps locals carried in their minds. It rendered them prone to a kind of repurposing that expediently edited out inconvenient facts about their provenance, allowing them, as if they were ideological commodities, to be woven into new narratives that suited the ascendant interests of the day. In the early years of the Republic this meant omitting the long-standing demographic diversity of Ankara – and, more broadly, of Turkey – as a whole. More recently, as demonstrated by other essays in this book, under the aegis of neo-liberalism, the preference has been to publicize and market that heritage, while carefully leaving out the history of violence that eradicated it. If we confront the latent tensions arising from the juxtaposition of these ideologically charged narratives, we may also begin to recognize the magnitude of the incongruities they embody.

NOTES 1. For foundational sources on the navigating and mapping the urban space see, for example, Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (MIT Press, 1960); Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 2nd edition (University of California Press, 2002); Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). For a multiplicity of mapping processes depicting the urban environment see also Dell Upton, “Another City: The Urban Cultural Landscape in the Early Republic”, in Everyday Life in the Early Republic, ed. Catherine E. Hutchins, Winterthur, D. E. (Henry Francis du Pont Museum, 1995). ˘lar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development 2. C ¸ ag (London: Verso, 1987, 67); Kemal Kiris¸ci, “Migration and Turkey: The Dynamics of State, Society and Politics”, in The Cambridge History of Turkey, ed. Resat Kasaba, 1st edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 175–7; Res¸at Kasaba, ed., The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 4, Turkey in the Modern World, 1st edition (Cambridge University Press, 2008). These numbers would continue to fall in later years as official policies and popular attitudes created a hostile environment for Turkey’s non-Muslim citizens. 3. There is a growing literature on the rupture of the demographic and physical fabric of Anatolian towns during this period: see, among them, ¨ ktem, “Incorporating the Time and Space of the Ethnic ‘Other’: Kerem O

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey Nationalism and Space in Southeast Turkey in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”, in Nations and Nationalism 10, no. 4 (2004): 559– ˘lu Kırlı, “The 78, doi:10.1111/j.1354-5078.2004.00182.x; Biray Kolluog Play of Memory, Counter Memory: Building Izmir on Smyrna’s Ashes”, ¨. U ¨ ngo ˘ur U ¨ r, New Perspectives on Turkey 26, no. I (Spring 2002): 1– 28; Ug “Geographies of Nationalism and Violence: Towards a New Understanding of Young Turk Social Engineering”, European Journal of Turkish Studies, Thematic Issue N8 7 Demographic Engineering-Part I (10 March 2008), http://www.ejts.org/document2583.html; Resat Kasaba, “Izmir 1922: A Port City Unravels”, in Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, ed. Leila Fawaz, C. A. Bayly and Robert Ilbert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 204–30). ¨ s¸ku ¨ has been Since the inception of this book project, C ¸ ankaya Ko abandoned as the presidential seat of power, in favor of a massive new palace administrative complex on the former site of Mustafa Kemal ¨ rk’s Model Farm further to the west of the train station. The Atatu profound political and symbolic significance of this move and the concomitant demolition of Ankara’s building stock that is closely identified with the republican reforms under Turkey’s JDP government constitutes another similarly interesting exercise in the erasure and reconstruction of mental maps. The last names in parentheses were acquired after the passage of the 1934 Surnames Act. At the time of the events, the individuals in question did not have last names. To avoid confusion, in this chapter, I will refer to the founder of modern Turkey as Mustafa Kemal, his name at the outset of my ¨ rk as his surname with the passage of narrative and prior to acquiring Atatu the 1934 Surnames Act, requiring all Turkish citizens to obtain one. ¨ nya Yayınları, Falih Rıfkı Atay, C ¸ ankaya: Atatu¨rk Devri Hatıraları (Ankara: Du 1958); Bilal S¸ims¸ir, Ankara . . . Ankara: Bir Bas¸kentin Dog˘us¸u (Ankara: Bilgi ¨ lu¨mu¨ne Kadar Atatu¨rkle ¨ fit Kansu, Erzurum’dan O Yayinevi, 1988); Mazhar Mu ¨ rk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1968); Beraber, XVI. Seri -Sa. 6a (Ankara: Tu ˘ lu, Kurtulus¸ Savas¸ında Ankara (Ankara: Ankara ¨ derrisog Alptekin Mu ¨ yu ¨ ks¸ehir Belediyesi Yayınları, 1993). Bu There are several varying accounts of this transfer, E. B. S¸apolyo, Kemal Atatu¨rk ve Milli Mu¨cadele Tarihi (Ankara: Ankara, Berkalp Kitabevi, 1944, ˘ lu, Kurtulus¸ Savas¸ında Ankara (Ankara: Ankara ¨ derrisog 390); A Mu ¨ lu¨mu¨ne Kadar ¨ yu ¨ ks¸ehir Belediyesi, 1993); M. M. Kansu, Erzurum’dan O Bu ¨ rk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1966). Notably in Atatu¨rkle Beraber (Ankara: Tu official publications describing the building, sometimes there is no ¨ rk moving into the building and turning account of the transfer, just Atatu it into the seat of power. For example, N. Evliyagil, C ¸ ankaya (Ankara: ¨ rk Matbaacılık, 1986); Atatu¨rk’u¨n Evleri (Ankara: Basın Yayın Ajans-Tu ˘u ¨ du ¨ rlu ¨g ¨ , 1977). Genel Mu ¨ s¸ku ¨ ’nu ¨ n I˙lk Sahibi Ermeni’ydi”, Hu¨rriyet, 25 Soner Yalcın, “C ¸ ankaya Ko March 2007.

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9. For detailed scholarly soures on the membership, activities, and legacy of the Congress of Union and Progress, see Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics 1908– 14 (C. Hurst & ˘lu, “The Second Constitutional ¨ kru ¨ Haniog Co Publishers Ltd, 2009); S¸u Period (1908– 18)”, in The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 4, Turkey in the Modern World, ed. Res¸at Kasaba, 1st edition (Cambridge University ˘lu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire ¨ kru ¨ Haniog Press, 2008); M. S¸u (Princeton University Press, 2008); Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 ¨ rcher, The Young (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Erik J. Zu Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatu¨rk’s Turkey (I.B.Tauris, 2010). 10. For recent scholarship on the events of 1915, see Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (2013); Taner Akcam, Ermeni Meselesi Hallolmus¸tur: Osmanlı Belgelerine Go¨re Savas¸ Yıllarında Ermenilere Yo¨nelik Politikalar (Istanbul: I˙letis¸im Yayınları, 2008); Ayhan Aktar, Varlık Vergisi ve ¨ mit ˘ur U ‘Tu¨rkles¸tirme’ Politikaları (Istanbul: I˙letis¸im Yayınları, 2000); Ug ¨ ngo ¨ r, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, U 1913–1950 (Oxford University Press, 2012). ¨ rriyet refused 11. Notably, despite the controversy Yalcın’s article generated, Hu to publish C ¸ uhacı’s response. The letter was eventually published by the Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos (Edwad J C ¸ uhacı, “Bir Varmıs¸ Bir Yokmus¸ . . .”, 20 April 2007) and the story was picked up by other ¨ r in Taraf and Ku ¨ rs¸at Bumin, in columnists as well, including Ays¸e Hu newspapers representing different ends of the political spectrum in Turkey ¨ rs¸at Bumin, “Bir Varmıs¸ Bir Yokmus¸ . . .”, Yeni S¸afak, 20 May 2007; Ays¸e (Ku ¨ r, “Ermeni Mallarını Kimler Aldı?”, Taraf, 2 March 2008). Heated Hu conversations about the ownership of the estate have continued to reverberate on the web, with sporadic references to it cropping up in ¨ ze Ko ¨ s¸k’u ¨n Tarihiyle Yu ¨ zles¸mek – various blogs and newspapers (“Mu Milliyet.com.tr”, accessed 21 February 2014, http://www.milliyet.com.tr/m uze-kosk-un-tarihiyle-yuzlesmek/ombudsman/haberdetay/26.11.2012/ ¨ s¸ku ¨ ’nu ¨n Gercek Sahibi Kasapyan 1632896/default.htm; “‘C ¸ ankaya Ko Ailesidir’» AGOS”, accessed 21 February 2014, http://www.agos.com.tr/ haber.php?seo¼ cankaya-koskunun-gercek-sahibi-kasapyan-ailesidir& haberid ¼ 3515). 12. For a detailed study of Ottoman record keeping on the assets of nonMuslim subjects, see Akcam, Ermeni Meselesi Hallolmus¸tur: Osmanlı Belgelerine Go¨re Savas¸ Yıllarında Ermenilere Yo¨nelik Politikalar. 13. A list of officials involved and measures required for sales of property and moveables, as well as indications about the problems encountered, can be found in Akcam’s Ermeni Meselesi Hallolmus¸tur (Ibid.). 14. In his recollections about his brief stay in Ankara as a communications officer, Karay speaks of renting a room in the home of an Armenian

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey woman and her daughter, noting that like other Armenian men, her husband too had been detained. Refik Halit Karay, Deli (Istanbul: Semih ¨ tfi Kitabevi, 1939). Lu In the early years of the Republic, there is abundant correspondence between the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the British Foreign Office, which often served as an intermediary on behalf of displaced Armenians and other non-Muslim communities about property and the right to return, which the Turkish government steadfastly refused. I was unable to find official documentation about when exactly this ban was lifted. It appears that things began to change in the early 1950s. Shortly after Turkey became a US ally and joined NATO, Armenian-Americans serving in the US Military began to visit their homelands as military officers with a special permit and recorded their experiences about finding long-lost family members, abandoned homes and other property. They also report that duration of their stay and their itinerary were under strict checks in these early years. Hampartzoum Vasilian, “Two Months in the Interior of Turkey”, The Armenian Review V, no. 1 (1952): 113–19; B. Kushikian, “One Month in Turkey”, The Armenian Review VI, no. 2 (1953): 115–25. Karay, Deli, 42 –4. Vehbi Koc, Hayat Hikayem (Istanbul: Apa Ofset Basımevi, 1973, 14–15). Private interview with Kasabian’s grandson, 7 February 2008. Private interview with Kasabian’s grandson, 7 February 2008. Alice Odian Kasparian, The History of the Armenians of Angora and Stanos (From Prechristian and Galatian Periods up to 1918) (Beirut: Doniguian Press, 1968, 24). Karay, Deli, 55. Kasparian, The History of the Armenians of Angora and Stanos (From Prechristian and Galatian Periods up to 1918), 36. For a detailed account of the fire please refer to Taylan Esin and Zeliha ¨ z’s recent book for which they meticulously combed through the Elo ¨ z, Ankara Yangını: scarce archival materials (Taylan Esin and Zeliha Elo Felaketin Mantıg˘ı, Istanbul, I˙letis¸im Yayınları (2015)). Karay, Deli, 48. Refik Halit Karay, n.d., 50–1. Karay, Deli, 51. ¨ nder S¸enyapılı, “Ankara ’70,” Mimarlık no. Vala Nureddin quoted in O March (1970): 29. Information about these transactions is relatively fragmentary. There are, however, witness accounts (again names cannot be disclosed here) detailing suspiciously quick transactions. A particularly interesting development are the various newspaper classifieds announcing the title registration of plots “without prior owners” or “full documentation” to higher-level republican functionaries. ¨ yku¨su¨, 2. basım ˘it, Atatu¨rk’le 30 Yıl: I˙brahim Su¨reyya Yig˘it’in O Nuyan Yig (Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 2004, 228–30).

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¨ niversitesi 30. Rus¸en Keles¸, Eski Ankara’da Bir Sehir Tipolojisi (Ankara: Ankara U ¨ ltesi Yayınları, 1971, 5). Siyasal Bilgiler Faku 31. Private interview with Kasabian’s grandson, 7 February 2008. 32. Carter Vaughn Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 1789–2007 (Yale University Press, 2010, 203–05). 33. For a concise overview of the history of the structural underpinnings of the inter-millet cleavages that got exacerbated toward the end of the ¨ ge Go ¨ cek, “Ethnic Segmentation, nineteenth century, see Fatma Mu Western Education, and Political Outcomes: Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Society”, Poetics Today 14, no. 3 (1993): 507– 38. 34. Ayhan Aktar, Tu¨rk Milliyetciliǧi, Gayrimu¨slimler ve Ekonomik Do¨nu¨s¸u¨m (I˙stanbul: Iletis¸im Yayınları, 2006, 105). ¨ ktem, “The Nation’s Imprint: Demographic Engineering and the 35. Kerem O Change of Toponyms in Republican Turkey”, European Journal of Turkish Studies, no. 7 (Demographic Engineering, part I) (23 February 2009), http://www.ejts.org/document2243.html.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Newspaper Articles ¨ rs¸at, “Bir Varmıs¸ Bir Yokmus¸ . . .”, Yeni S¸afak, 20 May 2007. Bumin, Ku ¨ s¸ku ¨ ’nu ¨ n Gercek Sahibi Kasapyan Ailesidir”, Agos, accessed 21 “C ¸ ankaya Ko February 2014. C ¸ uhacı, Edward J., “Bir Varmıs¸ Bir Yokmus¸ . . .”, Agos, 20 April 2007. ¨ r, Ays¸e, “Ermeni Mallarını Kimler Aldı?”, Taraf, 2 March 2008. Hu ¨ ze Ko ¨ s¸k’u ¨ n Tarihiyle Yu ¨ zles¸mek”, Milliyet, accessed 21 February 2014. “Mu ¨ s¸ku ¨ ’nu ¨n I˙lk Sahibi Ermeni’ydi”, Hu ¨ rriyet, 25 March Yalcın, Soner, “C ¸ ankaya Ko 2007.

Secondary Sources Ahmad, Feroz, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics, 1908–14 (New York: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, 2009). Akçam, Taner, Ermeni Meselesi Hallolmus¸tur: Osmanlı Belgelerine Go¨re Savas¸ Yıllarında Ermenilere Yo¨nelik Politikalar (Istanbul: I˙letis¸im Yayınları, 2008). ——— The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). Aktar, Ayhan, Varlık Vergisi ve ‘Tu¨rkles¸tirme’ Politikaları (Istanbul: I˙letis¸im Yayınları, 2000). ——— Tu¨rk Milliyetciliǧi, Gayrimu¨slimler ve Ekonomik Do¨nu¨s¸u¨m (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im Yayınları, 2006). ˘u ¨ du ¨ rlu ¨g ¨ , 1977). Atatu¨rk’u¨n Evleri (Ankara: Basın Yayın Genel Mu ¨ nya Yayınları, Atay, Falih Rıfkı, C ¸ ankaya: Atatu¨rk Devri Hatıraları (Ankara: Du 1958).

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De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, 2nd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). ¨ z, 1916 Ankara Yangını: Felaketin Mantıg˘ı (Istanbul: Esin, Taylan and Zeliha Elo I˙letis¸im Yayınları, 2015). ¨ rk Matbaacılık, 1986). Evliyagil, Nuri, C ¸ ankaya (Ankara: Ajans-Tu Findley, Carter Vaughn, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 1789–2007 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). ¨ cek, Fatma Mu ¨ ge, “Ethnic Segmentation, Western Education, and Go Political Outcomes: Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Society”, Poetics Today 14, no. 3: 507– 38. ˘ lu, S¸u ¨ kru ¨ , “The Second Constitutional Period (1908 – 18)”, in Haniog The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 4, Turkey in the Modern World, ed. Res¸at Kasaba, 1st edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008a). ——— A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008b). ¨ lu¨mu¨ne Kadar Atatu¨rkle Beraber; ¨ fit 1966 Erzurum’dan O Kansu, Mazhar Mu ¨ rk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi. (Ankara: Tu ¨ lu¨mu¨ne Kadar Atatu¨rkle Beraber (Ankara: Tu ¨ rk Tarih ——— Erzurum’dan O Kurumu Yayınları, 1968). Kasaba, Res¸at, “Izmir 1922: A Port City Unravels”, in Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, ed. Leila Fawaz, C. A. Bayly, and Robert Ilbert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Kasparian, Alice Odian, The History of the Armenians of Angora and Stanos (From Prechristian and Galatian Periods up to 1918) (Beirut: Doniguian Press, 1968). Kayalı, Hasan, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908 –1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). ¨ niversitesi Keles¸, Rus¸en, Eski Ankara’da Bir Sehir Tipolojisi (Ankara: Ankara U ¨ ltesi Yayınları, 1971). Siyasal Bilgiler Faku ˘lar, State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development Keyder, C ¸ ag (London: Verso, 1987). ˘lu, “The Play of Memory, Counter Memory: Building Izmir Kırlı, Biray Kolluog on Smyrna’s Ashes”, New Perspectives on Turkey 26 (Spring): 1–28. Kiris¸ci, Kemal, “Migration and Turkey: The Dynamics of State, Society and Politics”, in The Cambridge History of Turkey, ed. Res¸at Kasaba (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Koc, Vehbi, Hayat Hikayem (Istanbul: Apa Ofset Basımevi, 1973). Kushikian, B., “One Month in Turkey”, The Armenian Review VI, no. 2: 115–25. Lefebvre, Henri, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960). ˘lu, Alptekin, Kurtulus¸ Savas¸ında Ankara (Ankara: Ankara Bu ¨ derrisog ¨ yu ¨ ks¸ehir Mu Belediyesi Yayınları, 1993).

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¨ ktem, Kerem, “The Nation’s Imprint: Demographic Engineering and O the Change of Toponyms in Republican Turkey”, European Journal of Turkish Studies 7. ¨ nder, “Ankara ’70,” Mimarlık, 29. S¸enyapılı, O ¨ ngo ¨ mit, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern ˘ur U ¨ r, Ug U Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Vasilian, Hampartzoum, “Two Months in the Interior of Turkey”, The Armenian Review V, no. 1: 113–19. ¨ yku¨su¨, 2. basım ˘it, Nuyan, Atatu¨rk’le 30 Yıl: I˙brahim Su¨reyya Yig˘it’in O Yig (Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 2004). ¨ rcher, Erik J., The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Zu Empire to Atatu¨rk’s Turkey (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010).

CHAPTER 3

Negotiating History and Diversity in a Border Province: The Non-Muslim Urban Past in Today’s Edirne Zeynep Kas¸lı1

The Great Synagogue of Edirne, one of the largest in Europe, is located in the old district Kaleici, but has been, since the 1980s, derelict due to the absence of a local Jewish community. In the 1980s, the Jewish community declared their willingness twice to donate the building for public use, provided that they were allowed to use the small building in the yard for religious services. Yet, political authorities at both the local and the national levels disregarded their suggestions.2 The tide recently changed in 2010 when the Regional Directorate General of Foundations approved the restoration project with a budget of more than 3.5 million TL. In the summer of 2013, almost three decades later than the original request of the Jewish community, Hasan Duruer, the then governor of Edirne, declared that: The Jewish community [in I˙stanbul] has come to me to share their desire to both pray and hold weddings in the synagogue once renovations are complete. I told them that it will be a culture center because you do not have a community here anymore. Yet this is your place and you are welcome whenever you want to use it as long as you come to visit to Edirne. I think this will also contribute to the development of Edirne and tourism.3

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Nevertheless, immediately after the infamous clashes in Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque compound in early November 2014,4 the successor governor Dursun Ali S¸ahin declared that the synagogue building was going to be used as a museum whereas the Regional Directorate General of Foundations stated that there is no official change of function as such.5 Finally the renovated synagogue opened on 26 March 2015 with the participation of 800 Sephardic Jews from various countries, Turkish statesmen, representatives of leaders of other non-Muslim communities in Turkey, national and international media. That day, extensive security measures were taken by the Turkish Intelligence and special police forces in Edirne, while even the inhabitants of Kaleici were not allowed to walk in the streets without identity checks.6 During the opening ceremony, the then ¨ lent Arınc stated that “Edirne Great Synagogue vice Prime Minister Bu was constructed with the order of Sultan Abulhamid II in the Ottoman lands and is one of the concrete examples of freedom of religion and cohabitation tradition. For that reason, it was our duty to bring back to life this monument which remained from our ancestry [ecdad ].”7 Since this opening ceremony, the synagogue serves primarily as a religious site where Jewish visitors can pray and make ceremonies without prior permission from the local authorities, whereas at other times the synagogue stands as a monumental building open to all visitors of Edirne.8 The dramatic change in state and government policy has also been enthusiastically supported by the local populace in the last years.9 Shopkeepers, cafe and restaurant owners in the city center have shown their enthusiasm for the renovation which, they expect, will attract a lot of Jewish tourists to Edirne from all over the world. One cafe owner said “With Selimiye Mosque [a sixteenthcentury masterpiece by the chief Ottoman architect Sinan] being inscribed on the UNESCO list of World Heritage, the Bulgarian churches, and now the synagogue, many people will be eager to come and visit Edirne. They say the revenues from tourism are shared across 32 different sectors, so definitely a lot of people in Edirne will benefit in the long run. Consider one person buying just a bottle of water. If one million Jews visit Edirne per year, it makes 1 million TL.”

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Similar calculations about the future of Edirne’s economy were repeated by some local small business owners and entrepreneurs who participated the welcoming meeting organized by the Edirne Chamber of Commerce (ETSO) on 1 June 2014, during I˙stanbul Jews’ excursion to Edirne. It was an emotionally loaded meeting as current local notables and their many Jewish friends, who were originally from Edirne, had the chance to reunite once again. More importantly, Edirne’s mayor welcomed the visitors to their “home” and apologized for not taking good care of the Jewish sites until very recently. He also stressed that he hopes, from now on, that the Jewish community keeps its connections with Edirne strong: “This city belongs to you too. It also belongs to the Greeks on the other side of the water [Evros River] and maybe even to Bulgarians . . . Human mind erases the bad memories fast and remembers the good parts. We always remember you well . . . I welcome you to do business with Edirne and especially to buy a house in Edirne. [sounds of content in audience]. We are preparing a Master Plan with ETSO and our city’s local notables. We know Jews as good traders . . . I mean this is a very good time to invest in Edirne.”10 Given that the Great Synagogue and other remaining non-Muslim heritage sites in Edirne had been neglected for more than half a century, how and why are local and state actors so eager to revitalize it today? And given that “acts of remembering are always already acts of forgetting,”11 what is forgotten in this act of remembering the non-Muslim heritage of Edirne? More specifically, how does the experience of restoring old non-Muslim properties in Edirne shape contemporary urban memory? In this chapter, I analyze how current non-Muslim heritage renovations reframe the urban memory and ¨ cek draws attention cultural imagery of the border city of Edirne. Go to the silencing of the past violence committed by the dominant ethnic Sunni Turks against all others and how this neo-liberal hegemony today constructs its legitimacy on such silencing acts. ¨ cek also underlines that the critical analysis of silenced spaces Go contains the potential to subvert neo-liberal hegemony.12 The current situation in Edirne is certainly a reflection of this neo-liberalizing governance of urban space in Turkey under JDP rule, which has embraced faith and heritage tourism for it brings believers as

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consumers. Additionally I argue that, in the particular positioning of Edirne as a border town, two elements, namely changing national minority policies and the transforming border regime of the Turkish state during the EU accession process, have ultimately shaped the current manifestations of urban memory and cultural imagery. NEGOTIATING THE NON-MUSLIM URBAN PAST IN EDIRNE’S PRESENT Critical urban scholars have pointed out that recent urban transformations and restorations in Turkey reinforce the spatial segregation of poverty and wealth.13 In some cases, they lead to property transfer and displacement of existing inhabitants14 and at others they incorporate residents into renewal projects, either through employing the mortgage structure15 or through the state functionaries’ tactical use of informal processes in negotiating with the existing residents, that is, clientelistic relations or ambiguous laws and regulations.16 The current projects of property-led regenerations and culture-led restorations in Kaleici have been similar in form and content to the recent wave of neo-liberal urban transformations that has gripped large cities, yet smaller in scale. The main institutional actor negotiating spatial change has been the Turkish Prime Ministry’s Mass Housing Administration (Bas¸bakanlık Toplu Konut ˘ı, hereafter TOKI);17 it intervenes directly through I˙daresi Bas¸kanlıg undertaking new housing projects, and also indirectly through providing subsidies for renovations of historic houses and buildings in the town center. In this chapter, I touch upon the roles of different state and nonstate actors insofar as they impact cultural heritage sites in Edirne, but I do not focus on the dire consequences there and elsewhere in terms of experiences of dispossession and subsequent contestations. Instead, I concentrate on the intersection of minorities, markets and urban space with the intent to highlight the politicization of historical heritage, akin to Berna Turam’s18 work on the political facets of urban space as religion and gender intersect. More specifically, I analyze the local manifestations of changing national borders and minority politics, focusing specifically on how urban memory and cultural

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imagery of the border city of Edirne get reframed through current nonMuslim heritage renovations. I argue that the emerging urban imagery during the last decade was nurtured by a multicultural nostalgia, one that came to being as cross-border relations with neighboring countries intersected with developments in national minority policies, all occurring during the absence of long-established minority communities in the everyday life of Edirne. Ironically then, a multicultural facade emerges after all local non-Muslim cultures have been eliminated. LOCATING THE HERITAGE PROJECTS IN EDIRNE The renovation of non-Muslim heritage sites in Edirne comprises one of many similar projects supported by the Prime Ministry’s Directorate General of Foundations in cities like Diyarbakır, Antep, Hatay in the southeast and Ayvalık and C ¸ anakkale in the west of Turkey.19 Such projects have emerged as part of tourism-based investments undertaken throughout the world, especially after the end of the Cold War and the concomitant advent of spatial globalization with neo-liberal capitalist ¨ r 2002). Yet the case of Edirne further highlights the role expansion (Gu that two additional elements, namely minorities and borders, play in shaping contemporary global heritage projects, especially as they are interpreted by the Turkish state. Ever since the emergence of the possibility of Turkey’s accession to the European Union (hereafter EU) in the 2000s, the formal official meaning of the borders of the state and the boundaries of the nation’s body politic started to transform from a primarily nationalist and exclusive to a more liberal and seemingly inclusive one. This historically situated analysis reveals how the contestation of the non-Muslim heritage is locally manifested through two interrelated social practices: implicit and explicit exercises of inclusion and exclusion on the one side, and acts of remembering and forgetting on the other. In addition to the scholarly emphasis on the impact of neo-liberal restructuring of the market economy on the growing trend of “selling places” (Kearns and Philo 1993) or “urban imagineering” (Yeoh 2005), other scholars (Young et al. 2006: 1691) point out that such entrepreneurial city strategies have been “efforts to reimage cities,

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particularly to counter negative stereotypes and make them more appealing to investors, business, tourists, consumers and residents.” As a result of the rise of inter-urban competition within globalization and increasing capital mobility, the same scholars then continue to observe, in the specific case of Manchester, that the marketing of the city as “cosmopolitan” also defines what would be the “acceptable” and “unacceptable” forms of difference within the “cosmopolitan” city. In the case of Edirne, however, the border city’s current image as “the city of culture, history and tourism,” which underlines its multiethnic and multi-religious Ottoman past, is reshaped on rather different grounds, mainly in relation to the recent transformation in the political meaning of the territorial border, which was precipitated by the pressing needs of capital for flexible border regimes. Similar to Sezneva’s depiction of the “architecture of descent” in Kaliningrad, in Edirne too the urban architecture emerges as a space for “politics of past”, which are used to revisit the “acceptable” form of difference to be incorporated into the “architecture of descent.” For Sezneva, the urban transformation in Kaliningrad shows that the politics of past have brought “massive disturbances in the cultural and cognitive order of things”, first through de-Germanization in the post-World War II period and then through reinvention of the pre-Russian “European” character of the city after the collapse of the Soviet Union.20 In Edirne, the urban memory and cultural imagery have been shaped as a politics of past, its pre-republican past being revisited in conjunction with first the process of nationalization and then the EU-ization of the border and minority policies. Here the spatial location of Edirne within the larger neo-liberal restructuring of the world in general and the EU in particular impacts the current heritage projects in a manner that needs to be studied in more depth. The territorial border between Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria was sealed less than a century ago, in 1923, in the process turning Edirne from a centrally located town in Thrace on the road to the Balkans into an isolated Turkish border town with an increasingly homogenous population. I will later demonstrate this transformation through examining local newspaper articles over the many decades. Since the late 1990s onwards, however, there seemed to be a shift in the representation of this border from a “barrier” to a “bridge,” one

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that triggered the transformation of the imagery of an Ottoman “frontier city” (serhat s¸ehir) transcending the borders of the nation state, reaching out and connecting with people across and beyond the national borders. This time, however, the vanguards are not raiding Ottomans or Turkish republican soldiers, but instead officials and businesspeople. This change of perception was also accompanied by the strategic adoption of an imagined nostalgia toward Edirne’s past diversity; indeed, such nostalgia emerged as the only “acceptable” form of difference that was to be presented to future guests, visitors and tourists. As such, these new social actors locate nostalgia for past imagined diversity in physical structures like mansions, churches and the synagogue; this social practice reflects what previous scholars of nostalgia term a “novel adaptation” into the present contexts.21 This “presentist” strategy also has the tendency to produce an image of Edirne that renders the more recent form of urban diversity, namely the effect of rural-to-urban migration from the peripheries of Edirne and from other cities since 1970s, as an “unacceptable” form of difference. The present population structure in the city became religiously almost uniform due to the complete outmigration of Jews of Edirne. However, ethnically and culturally speaking, the fact that newcomers were mostly the Kurds who settled in the last two decades due to the Turkish state’s policy of forced displacement, and Roma people from outside the urban center of Edirne, imply that there was and is still diversity that cross-cuts the religious uniformity.22 Today the negative remarks about the “unacceptable” difference associated with the newcomers – or the “outsiders”, as most people in Edirne call them – come right after the utterances of nostalgia for the past ethnoreligious diversity and the neighborhood of Kaleici as its epitome in the urban space. Ironically, however, such need and want of diversity came to being only after the Jewish community had first completely disappeared from the public space and then recently been recalled as visitors. In that sense, while complex interplay of diversities pertaining to religion, ethnicity and class, as in Vertovec’s23 notion of super-diversity, can be observed at the societal level, the “acceptable” difference discourse in Edirne brings in Jews only as temporary visitors and leaves certain groups of current

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residents out of what Taylor24 called the “social imaginary.” In other words, the “acceptable” difference that the multicultural nostalgia appropriates does not seem to pave the way in present-day Edirne for the acceptance of more substantive “facets” of diversity a` la Vertovec, which would aim at a more inclusive social imaginary. Along the same line as Sezneva’s depiction of the “politics of past” as recurrently played out in the urban space, David Harvey reminds us that the “present tendency for nostalgia and finding solace in heritage is just the latest phase of a much longer trajectory” of heritageization,25 the roots of which are embedded in the distant past. Following that emphasis on the longue dure´e, I trace how the agencies of local actors intersect with the structure of political and economic processes to lead to the selective remembrances and representation of the waning “multicultural” heritage of Edirne. I first provide a chronological overview of what happened to the Jewish community of Edirne, the main non-Muslim community that lived until very recently in the city, specifically as they experienced implicit and explicit exclusions. I then contrast what happened with what is remembered, as I present the personal narratives of elderly Muslim Turkish Edirneans on the old multicultural life of Kaleici and Edirne.26 This contrast is accompanied by the local narrative on the two waves of urban transformation, namely the in-migration from the 1970s onwards and the recent attempts to recover and revive the forgotten non-Muslim heritage through urban renewal projects. As stated earlier, these changes in urban space and selective remembrance of the past, related to the larger global trend of heritage tourism, are nevertheless shaped in Edirne by recent changes in the meaning of national borders on the one side and of state-minority relations on the other. Ultimately, Edirne’s bygone multi-religious and multi-ethnic past is re-appropriated through the physical renovation of a few non-Muslim monumental buildings insofar as it helps revive the local economy through tourism and cross-border interactions. As such, the past is selectively remembered with the intent to economically profit from the renovations. Such remembrance for material gains persistently avoids the dark side of local history, the forced removal of non-Muslims through the last half-century and fails to morally acknowledge and account for past violence.

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PAST EXCLUSION OF NON-MUSLIMS IN EDIRNE AS SOCIAL PRACTICE A chronological approach to the city of Edirne can best commence through an analysis of its various names in history. Known initially as Adrianople during the rule of the Byzantine Empire, the city then fell under Ottoman rule in the fourteenth century and served as the Ottoman frontier capital for almost a century, until the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.27 Then, until the early twentieth century, what became administratively defined as the Province of Edirne (Vilayet-i Edirne) remained a prosperous city, well connected to northern trade routes leading from the Aegean towards the Black Sea, and to western trade routes linking the Ottoman imperial capital Constantinople, later referred to as I˙stanbul, with the Balkans.28 Today, Edirne is still referred to as “the Frontier City” (Serhat S¸ehir) in the local media, especially in newspapers, billboards and touristic materials, hearkening back to its Ottoman legacy. The city’s population under Byzantine rule was initially almost entirely nonMuslim. After its conquest by the Ottomans, successive sultans systematically settled Turcoman nomads coming into Asia Minor in this region with the intent to colonize the Balkans.29 As the city’s Muslim population increased through the centuries, the old principle of diversity upon which the empires were predicated also allowed for the continued presence of many non-Turkish and non-Muslim social groups. In the aftermath of the political and economic revolutions in Western Europe, Edirne’s significance as the Ottoman Empire’s gateway to Europe led to an increase in its non-Muslim population on the one side and in its economic activities on the other.30 Unfortunately, the city became a war zone in the shifting power relations between the Ottoman Empire and the expanding Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires that also aided Balkan states to revolt against Ottoman rule. Especially after the 1908 Constitutional Revolution and the coming to power of the Young Turks – many of whom, like Talat Pasha, were originally from Edirne – the city became the first casualty of the emerging war zone when the Balkan states declared war on the empire in 1912. The 1912 – 13 Balkan wars ended with the restoration of Edirne to Ottoman rule, only to be

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partially lost as the Ottoman Empire was defeated during World War I. It continued to be a war zone during the succeeding Turkish independence war that ended in 1922.31 During this fractious decade from 1912 to 1922, the ethnic and religious composition constantly changed, first due to the Ottoman defeat by the Balkan states in 1912 that led to the influx of Muslim Turkish refugees until the 1920s and then to the forced deportation of Armenians during World War I in general and 1915 in particular.32 According to the records of the Ottoman Refugee Commission (Muhacirin Komisyonu), during that decade, after Aydın, Edirne became the second most important refugee settlement in the empire, with a total population of 132,500.33 As the Greco-Turkish war of 1919 – 22 had exacerbated ethno-religious tensions on both sides of the border, the newly formed Turkish Republic deemed an official population exchange necessary. At the time, the international political climate advocated population homogeneity for sustained peace and therefore encouraged population exchanges. The 1923 Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations was accordingly signed in Lausanne between the Turkish and Greek states.34 It was also at Lausanne that the Republic of Turkey was finally recognized by Western powers as a sovereign geo-political entity. The city of Edirne was to play a significant role in determining the western borders of the new Republic. In Thrace, the Evros River became Turkey’s natural border with Greece; beyond the river, ˘ac was the only Turkish territory that was handed over in lieu Karaag of the 1919 – 22 war reparations. As the Turkish and Greek nation states continued to be increasingly nationalist and exclusionary in their political practices, cross-border activities ceased and the new republican boundaries gradually transformed Edirne into an isolated border town with an increasingly homogenous population.35 The last Greek residents left town on 18 October 1922, nine days after the last service of the local archbishop.36 The only remaining minorities comprised a very small community of Armenians and Bulgarians, and a significantly larger one of Jews. The origins of the local Jewish community dated back to the Roman and Byzantine Empires, thereby predating the arrival of the Turks. Yet this significant community

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gradually has declined ever since, mainly due to political and economic pressures brought upon by the Turkish state and its forceful agents on the one side and the declining fortunes of the city due to the establishment of the border on the other.37 It should be noted that such adverse developments especially caused a downturn in the predominant local economic activities in Edirne, namely the production of brooms.38 The interwar years of the Turkish Republic were marked by increased state aggression against the non-Turkish and non-Muslim citizens, an era which scholars identify as one when the discourse of national development coincided with the Turkification of the population and the economy.39 This unfortunate intersection adversely affected the local Jewish citizens, who were the main remaining non-Muslim community as well as the economically most active social group of the frontier city. The state’s exclusionary practices first came into force through the 1934 Settlement Law as various deputies started to raise concerns over “the presence across the country of large pockets of people who do not use the Turkish language;” they were indirectly and insidiously referring not only to Kurdish-populated regions, but also to places inhabited by non-Turkish-speaking non-Muslim communities and non-Turkishspeaking refugees from the North Caucasus, Crimea and the Balkans (I˙cduygu et al. 2008; Kirisci 2000). The formation of General Inspectorates, directly under the command of President Mustafa Kemal, was the major step undertaken to achieve this goal of creating a “Turkish” nation out of an empire. After the first General Inspectorate was established in the southeast, with the intent to contain and transform the Kurds, it was significant that the second Inspectorate was formed in the west, in the Turkish part of Thrace, ˘ and C including the cities of Edirne, Kırklareli, Tekirdag ¸ anakkale. At that time, the local paper Edirne Postası (Edirne Post) introduced to its readers the new Inspector-General of Thrace, I˙brahim Tali, with utmost respect and reverie. It informed the public about his efforts regarding the resettlement of Balkan refugees in Thracian towns with the intent to further develop the region. Around this time, large sections of the paper were also devoted to another social engineering project, highlighting the importance of using the Turkish language,

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with captions like “Turks, speak Turkish!,”40 reminding the populace of the earlier “Citizen, speak Turkish!” campaign of 1928.41 At the same time, Inspector-General Tali’s 90-page report of his tour in Thrace was presented to Ankara, with detailed accounts of “the Jewish problem” in the region. The origins of such tension could be traced back to the inherent Ottoman imperial tension between the economic power of non-Muslim commercial bourgeoisie and the political power of Muslim bureaucratic bourgeoisie, one that had eventually led to the demise of the non-Muslims and, with them, the empire.42 It is significant to note that such tension continued over the proportionally very few non-Muslim citizens of the Turkish Republic as well. Indeed, operating within an exclusionary nationalist framework, the report pointed to the local Jewish communities’ control over the economy of the province, and to the “corrupt officers” who cooperated with them at the expense of local Muslim landowners.43 Soon after this report was penned and sent to Ankara, the new republican capital, local aggression against the Jews of Thrace erupted, turning into a violent episode known as the 1934 Thrace pogroms. The first incidents of rioting and looting began in C ¸ anakkale on 24 June to then spread to other parts of Thrace on 30 June; the violence peaked in Kırklareli and Edirne on 3– 4 July 1934. This pogrom against the Jews was only referenced in the local newspaper with a small caption, ironically stating in the headline that “[t]here is no Jewish Problem in our country.”44 While it is said that some Jewish families returned to Edirne shortly thereafter, after they were assured by the local state and government authorities that everything was now “under control,” the exact number of local Jewish citizens who left for good, returned or stayed are still not known to this day. Such lack of knowledge is also an indication of the degree of official silencing of past violence. According to academic research and also local Edirneans’ accounts of the recent past, the most visible outmigration of Jews is estimated to have occurred after the 1948 foundation of the state of Israel. While this may certainly be a pull factor, it is already proven that the Jewish population of Edirne had dropped by 50 percent during the decade from 1935 to 1945, before the 1948 foundation of the state of Israel.45

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During my interviews with Edirneans, when I mentioned this now-forgotten piece of urban memory, namely the 1934 pogroms against the Jews, the narrative that emerged was almost uniform, with only slight variations. Two local notables, who are actually also the founding members of the now decade-old Local History Group of Edirne, compiling and publishing the relevant local material, acknowledged and condemned the 1934 events.46 Other informants also overtly acknowledged it, with some throwing in comments such as “it must have been hard to feel unwanted.” A retired school teacher complemented her recollection of her school days in the 1960s and 70s with the remark: “no wonder these [Jewish] pupils were always sticking with each other during the breaks, they were actually scared.”47 Few others acknowledged the existence of “exceptional events,” but intentionally refused to overemphasize them. Turhan Bey, an elderly notable from Kaleici, defined his reality by stating that “they [the Jews] still lived here in peace afterward [the 1934 pogroms] and left Edirne [either] for Israel or for I˙stanbul, thinking, just like many other Edirneans did, that I˙stanbul offered better opportunities for them than a small city like Edirne.” In this predominant narrative, Turhan Bey attempted to control the inherent past by expressing his unease about the “biased accounts of the 1934 Events;” he then tried to cover his exclusionary stand on the one side and assuming responsibility for the past violence on the other by declaring that the Jews left out of their own volition and that he himself still kept up with his many Jewish friends who migrated either to Israel or I˙stanbul. He finally minimized the degree of their suffering and loss by claiming that “[their] hearts are still full of love for Edirne.” However, when I insisted on finding out whether he did not even have a single negative memory he could recall, he shared the following personal experience: It was 1970 or 1971. I received a letter from the Association for Fighting against Zionism (Siyonizmle Mu¨cadele Derneg˘i). The envelope was addressed to a local Jewish friend of mine, but the note inside directly threatened me, stating: “You are friends with Zionist Jews. If you do not end that friendship, we will burn down your house.” To me! These lousy men could say such things to me whose grave in the Muslim cemetery is already prepared,

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¨ rk in his heart! Just me who carries the love of the Turkish flag and Atatu because I had Jewish friends! I found out the names of a few of these people involved in this organization, grabbed one of them on the street one day and took him to the court house, [to appear] right in front of the public prosecutor [to whom I registered my complaint]. Since I am known by everyone here [in Edirne], he could not say anything when I did that. But then, three months later, the prosecutor closed the case due to “lack of sufficient evidence”. . . They did such things to Jews at that time, like provoking kids to break their windows. There is even a local saying, “Instead of killing a Jew, just scare him.” . . . Well, this was a small group of people, but we also have a saying, you know, that “the mosquito is small, but it turns one’s stomach.”48

Turhan Bey’s personal memory exemplifies the nature of repeated social practices of exclusion against the Jews over the years. Even though Turhan Bey has silenced the inherent violence in his general “peaceful” account of the past, selectively remembering and representing the past diversity of present-day Edirne, recalling specific instances short-circuits that cleansed reconstructions. Indeed, such practices of overt exclusions continued well into the 1980s, and turned into public displays of destruction in 1988. As Turhan Bey also remembered, when scenes of Israeli soldiers breaking the arm of a Palestinian boy were shown on the official state television, a group of Muslim men from one of the nearby mosques gathered together after morning prayers and broke into the Great Synagogue in Kaleici, plundering its hand-woven carpets, brass candleholders, and silver objects (Bali 1998; Gabay 2012). They meted out what they considered popular justice with impunity. This unfortunate event could not be prevented by the local security forces, as Turhan Bey said, “despite the close distance between the synagogue and the police station”. The attackers were labeled by many, including Turhan Bey, as “a group of religious fanatics (yobazlar)” who, in the words of an elderly resident of Kaleici, “were not locals of Edirne, but those new migrants with a different profile, illiterate, that did not know the culture of Edirne.” Once again, the blame was diverted away from the established residents to the newcomers of Kaleic i and responsibility avoided. Needless to say, none were ever caught and punished for their crime.

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Just as significant as the dismissal of perpetrators of the violence is the manner in which my informants continually framed such exclusionary practices against the Jews through the many decades, from the 1930s to the 1980s merely as “exceptions” to the otherwise “harmonious life the neighborhood has with Muslim and nonMuslims families living together peacefully.” This emphasis on imagined harmony was immediately followed in many accounts with an intense longing for the old “civilized Edirne.” The manner in which the local residents silenced, suppressed and refused to perceive the persistent pattern of violence against the Jews demonstrates the power of selective forgetting, and the manner in which they only recalled the peaceful instances of coexistence reveals the power of selective remembering. In the next section, I specifically focus on the transformation in Kaleici neighborhood, on how this selective remembrance of the past was practiced on the ground. The earlier wave of transformation in the 1970s, which coincided with the outmigration of Jewish residents and the arrival of new urban populations, paved the way, I argue, for forgetting the non-Muslim past. Yet the recent wave of renewals of non-Muslim heritage, I contend, leads in turn to the selective recollection of the forgotten past. Indeed, social practices of exclusion and selective memory reveal how Kaleici serves as a contested space of urban memory; it has been maintained, plundered, forgotten, then remembered and re-appropriated as part of the urban heritage at different times and by different actors. SOCIAL PRACTICE OF REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN NEIGHBORHOOD Kaleici, literally meaning ‘’inside the citadel”, is the oldest neighborhood in Edirne and has been in existence since Byzantine times. During the Ottoman and later republican eras, it had been mostly populated by non-Muslims such as Jews, Greeks and Armenians as well. In terms of its local history, not only is the history of Edirne rife with stories about frequent fires devastating everything, but one in particular, the great fire of 1905, is specifically the most famous for destroying a large part of Kaleici.49 The impact of

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this fire on collective memory is similar to, yet different from, other ¨ nu ¨ comparable fires throughout the empire. The effects of the Hisaro fire on the physical referents of collectively constructed mental maps of Ankara that Kezer meticulously describes in this volume resembles ˘lu-Kırlı’s words, “caused a the Smyrna fire of 1922 that, in Kolluog temporal and spatial break . . . in the collective memory and inscribed the nationalist blueprint on Ottoman I˙zmir.”50 Yet unlike those examples, the 1905 fire in Kaleici did not seem to cause such an immediate break in the collective memory of Edirne. This may be due to the fact that, temporally, the departures of non-Muslim communities from Kaleici were not as abrupt as they had been in I˙zmir, but rather gradual instead. Spatially, too, Kaleici continued to be the most prominent non-Muslim neighborhood of the city, as manifested in the construction of the Great Synagogue in 1907. This new synagogue, with a capacity of 1,200 worshippers, not only united and replaced the 13 smaller synagogues destroyed by the 1905 fire, but also remained active until the 1980s. At present, however, the only lasting examples of past non-Muslim presence in Kaleici are several old mansions, the rundown and rebuilt Great Synagogue and the restorated Italian Church, located inside a primary school complex, one the public cannot access without the school principal’s permission.51 Hence, albeit not being completely illegible to those who remained behind or abruptly erased from the mental maps of the residents of Edirne, what physically remains of the non-Muslim heritage is almost close to nothing, including the total erasure of Catholic and Jewish cemeteries of Edirne from the public space. The elderly of Kaleici often remember the city with a nostalgia that is similar to what Leyla Neyzi discusses in relation to I˙zmir. Upon interviewing an elderly Smyrniote/Izmirian woman born in 1915, Neyzi found out that for her subject, compared to the old Greek Smyrna, present-day I˙zmir was as good as “dead” in that it was “no longer the same I˙zmir.” And what caused this adverse transformation was the arrival of Muslim immigrants from rural parts of the Balkans, the Aegean islands and Anatolia, peasants who were regarded as “primitive . . . did not fit in, not for years.”52 Likewise, the narratives of elderly Kaleici residents indicate that their old Edirne, despite having been plagued by many wars, had been a “civilized city.” The

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civilized state of affairs emerged mostly due to the presence and lifestyle of non-Muslims and their extensive connections with the outside world. Furthermore, people often expressed a literal nostalgia for non-Muslims’ well-kept wooden houses, adorned with fragrant blossoms and surrounded by clean streets. In addition, especially the Jewish community served as the harbingers of modernity, enabling Edirneans to watch the best and most recent films and follow the Parisian fashion “even before the newest styles reached I˙stanbul and I˙zmir.” All of my informants, with no exception, employed the word “emulate” (imrenmek) at least once in describing their memories of the Jewish way of life. What stood out was not only different but something they all emulated; they especially referred to publicly egalitarian gender relations in Jewish familes that they contrasted with their Muslim families, the strength of social ties among the Jewish community, and especially the “high culture” (ku¨ltu¨r du¨zeyi) they brought to the neighborhood and the city. What comprised such high culture was composed of men and women jointly meeting and chatting in public spaces like parks and cafes and going together to dance parties, when these were “foreign to the values and morals of many Muslim families like ours.”53 One retired banker, who lived in I˙zmir as well as in Edirne, articulated this point by stating that “thanks to non-Muslims, like I˙zmir, Edirne too was always one step ahead of the rest of the country, culturally speaking.”54 Yet, according to these established residents of Kaleici, the neighborhood and the city culture began to change drastically for the worse in the 1970s. This was the period when the Jewish community shrank to almost nonexistence and the city “got mixed” with Muslim newcomers from the peripheries of Edirne and other Anatolian cities, who initially arrived for work or study, eventually settling in Edirne during this first wave of homogenizing urbanization. Especially from the 1990s onwards, the Kurdish population has also continuously increased, like all other cities in Turkey, due to their forceful displacement during 30 years of war between the PKK and the Turkish Armed Forces.55 This first homogenizing wave is covered in contemporaneous newspaper reports. In 1974, for instance, the local paper Hudut

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(Frontier) noted that “[I]n our fast growing city, it becomes harder to find a house for rent. Due to many outsiders coming to Edirne, with the impact of industrialization or for other reasons, the population is rapidly increasing.”56 To meet this pressing need for housing in the city, over the years, the abandoned Kaleici houses once belonging to non-Muslims were given away either by their owners or, if abandoned then by the state authorities, to contractors known as “yıkıcılar” (literally meaning “demolitioners”) who built new apartment blocks instead.57 The only remaining Jewish resident of the city commented on this destruction by stating that, in those years, this was a “realistic thing to do” since “nobody, not even the Jewish families, were able to afford the high restoration costs, except for minor renewals”.58 As Keyder59 has already discussed in detail, to describe the urbanization wave of 1970s throughout the country, housing was the primary need for Muslim newcomers and was the mechanism through which rural migrants were incorporated into the urban fabric. As such, the new Muslim working and lower classes of Edirne all settled into the newly built three- to five-storey apartments in Kaleici. Hence, as Kezer’s study on the transformation of Ankara from an imperial provincial town to capital city shows, and as with everywhere else in Turkey where non-Muslim communities once existed but then were forced to leave, mostly Muslim working-class migrants have replaced the mostly professionally skilled non-Muslim residences and urban spaces and become the new residents of the changing urban landscape. This is probably why the elderly residents noted the “lack of civilization” in that the bourgeois and working-class lifestyles were obviously very different from each other. Yet, Kaleici and the city center at large experienced another, second wave of urban renewal during the last decade from 2000s to 2010s. Many people I interviewed, ranging from state officials, stakeholders and shop-keepers to residents, all mentioned the rule of former ¨ cel (2000–04) as pivotal in this wave. They all regarded Governor Yu him as the pioneer of positive urban transformation in Edirne. While the previous governor had initiated some renovations in and around ¨ cel’s rule that most of the the historic Alipas¸a Bazaar, it was during Yu projects targeted Kaleici and Edirne as a whole.60 People collectively

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remembered him as a very special person with a keen interest in history, an interest that also manifested itself in his active support for the establishment of the Local History Group. The official from the Regional Committee for the Protection of Cultural Heritage explained ¨ cel’s ultimate goal in all these restorations was to procure these that Yu ˘a Mansion was places for public use; for instance, the renovated Hafızag initially used as a city museum. Yet such state-driven renovations for the primary public use of all citizens could not last long due to unexpected death of the ¨ cel at a very young age. The renewals have since Governor Yu changed shape once again, marking the third neo-liberal wave of urban renewal in Edirne. Today, the ongoing renewals in Kaleici are mostly private property-led regenerations with the ultimate aim to use or sell the renovated buildings as commercially viable enterprises such as boutique hotels, bars and restaurants. Like contemporaneous urban renewal projects in other parts of Turkey, the organization of TOKI emerges again as one of the primary social actors; TOKI provides credit for undertaking individual projects, while the Ministry of Culture and Tourism offers funding for the restoration of cultural heritage sites in Edirne as in elsewhere.61 With such institutional support from the central government in mind, the current governor of Edirne today does not take leadership in renovating these places on behalf of the state, but rather calls enterprising Edirneans to “financially invest in history and the future by buying and renovating one of these old houses before the prices increase.”62 Interestingly, Edirneans are at the moment as appreciative of such entrepreneurial subsidies provided by the state for renewal projects as they had been regarding the restorations ¨ cel’s term. For them, who undertakes the undertaken during Yu renovations, namely the state or the private entrepreneur, does not really matter; all they care about is the fact that either way, the neighborhood looks better as the houses are restored before they all vanish from neglect. Nevertheless, there are significant differences that do emerge due to the particular nature of social actors undertaking these renovations. Unlike the early state-sponsored projects of the 2000s, the main audience of the privately sponsored renewals is no longer Edirneans,

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but rather “special guests” originating from outside the city. Those targeted are thus not the republican public, but instead a global audience. Take for example the Mihran Hanım Mansion, initially built by an Armenian family in the early twentieth century to be renovated. Following the death of its last non-Muslim inheritress, the mansion reverted back to the state treasury, as all non-Muslim property with no legal inheritors does. Then a businessman from C ¸ orlu, the neighboring industrial city, bought the mansion from the treasury, thereby transferring ownership away from non-Muslims to Muslims, as the republican state intended.63 After six years of construction work, the Mihran Hanım Mansion has recently been opened as a boutique hotel “welcom[ing] its special guests who desire to live in the Edirne of 100 years ago, to see the multicultural mansion style of Ottoman architecture.”64 This narrative dismisses the historical origins of the mansion, instead associating its multiculturalism only with a century-old “architectural style.” Who built the mansion and why does not matter; the mansion is now marketed as a cultural product for consumption by a global audience. This neo-liberal narrative amply underscores the manner in which this act of remembering conceals an act of forgetting. Additionally, the history sections of the boutique hotel’s brochure and its website actively silence the nonMuslim origins of the initial owner. The mansion is presented as one “otherwise known as the doctor’s house;” the names of the original owners of the mansion, Dr Vasil Mayısyan and his inheritress Mihran, are given without making any reference to their Armenian origin. This silencing occurs even though many elderly Edirneans can actively recall the religion of the owners. Similarly, another silencing occurs when the public information merely notes that “the mansion was transferred to the treasury;” it does not indicate that the mansion was confiscated, just the way other non-Muslim properties were expropriated by the state after non-Muslims minorities were forced to leave at different times.65 As Kezer rightfully argues, this generalized amnesia without specific culprits to name works as an effective historical exclusion. In this specific case, the neo-liberal narrative produces a century-long chronology to underline the mansion’s historical value while

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silencing certain parts of its history. Ironically, this act of turning the mansion into a space for nostalgia through selective remembering is precisely what undermines its claims of multiculturalism. The involved actors actively employ a “presentist” strategy as they embrace and inscribe multiculturalism onto the public space, but in the process they also have to indirectly acknowledge the absence of multicultural elements in today’s Edirne, without discussing the reasons behind the absence. Finally, the current production of nostalgia through such renovation projects not only shapes the present, but also the future of Kaleici, especially by imagining it as a space of heritage tourism. In summer 2013, Hollywood actor Russell Crowe stayed at the Mihran Mansion for a film project. For many Edirneans, the visit of such a celebrity as well as the sporadic visits of Jewish families trying to find their old family houses and the graves of their deceased relatives already provided ample evidence regarding the future commercial viability of such renovated spaces. Unlike the earlier overt and covert exclusions that the then “local” Jews of Edirne once experienced, this recent interest in heritage tourism demonstrates that they are welcomed by the current Muslim urban dwellers. Yet today the Jews are welcomed only temporarily and only as “visitors”, “special guests” and maybe “investors.” The old mansions and the neighborhood becomes a part of the city’s heritage as local Muslim residents selectively appropriate, subvert and silence the inherent non-Muslim essence of this heritage. Here previously “unacceptable” (ethno-religious) differences only become publicly “acceptable” in the absence of living non-Muslim communities that would constantly represent those differences in the everyday life of Edirne. As such, reviving Edirne’s Ottoman multi¨ cek calls a “sanitized version of cultural heritage exemplifies what Go the past with the neo-liberal financing of the present” that reached its peak during the JDP rule in the 2000s. Given that Edirne is spatially located at Turkey’s western border, I would argue that at this moment, contemporary border and minority politics of Turkey also emerge as two significant determinants in the current politics of space. The next section situates the local acts of selective remembering into changes in the larger political field.

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USE OF HISTORY, FAITH AND CULTURE FOR TOURISM: REVISITING BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES As already mentioned, during the imperial period Edirne served as the gateway to Europe, sustaining its significance as a local and transimperial trade center. Yet the establishment of nation states in general, and the Turkish Republic in particular, transformed Edirne into a border town with decreased significance. During the early decades of the Republic, for instance, according to the local newspaper Hudut, the border with Greece and Bulgaria did not appear as a crossing point for the local people either. The only ¨ rekko ¨ y Bazaar, established in the early exception was the weekly C ¸o 1930s and serving as a meeting point, especially for family members separated by the border.66 Yet this bazaar, a contact zone in the borderlands, did not last until World War II, when border controls started to become increasingly strict.67 News on border traffic has filled more newspaper space especially since the 1970s, mostly in the form of entries and exits of people. Until the early 1990s, the main actors of border crossings were either members of the Turkish minority communities, who at different times had fled from Greece, Bulgaria and the Former Yugoslavia to their “homeland”, and/or Turkish guest workers returning from Western European countries during their annual vacations.68 Yet Edirne’s representation as the “frontier city” has evolved into a discursive claim for being the economic and cultural center of the Balkans toward the end of 1990s. For instance in October 1999, the association of shopkeepers of the historical Alipas¸a Bazaar decided to rent a bus, bringing residents from the neighboring Greek town of Orestiada for a day trip to Edirne.69 In doing so, the head of this association stressed the positive significance of such crossborder interactions. He publicly declared their support for the renovation of the Bulgarian Church of Sweti George, should such a plan emerge. Perhaps the most significant underlying point was the impact of such visits on the economy, in terms of which he further stated: Our goal is to revive faith tourism and to improve Edirne’s economy. If there is no tourism, we are dead. I kindly ask the people of Edirne to

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be helpful and treat our guests well. We should not forget this: people would [only] want to revisit a place if they feel content.70

As foreshadowed by the shopkeepers in 1999, the two churches were indeed renovated and eventually reopened in 2004 and 2008,71 leading to a significant increase in the number of tourists coming from Bulgaria and Greece. And these new tourists did not come only or mainly to visit the churches, but also to shop at the old bazaars, weekly markets and especially at the new mall opened in 2011 to be proudly marketed “as the largest mall of Thrace”; Turkish, Greek and Bulgarian Thrace combined. For the same reason, small shopkeepers and elderly residents were also pleased with the renovation of the Great Synagogue, due to the fact that such renovation would attract many tourists of Jewish origin as well as other visitors from the region, adding only nominally, rather than substantively, to the imagery of Edirne as the “capital of history, culture and tourism” of the Balkans.72 While the 1999 initiative by local shopkeepers did demonstrate there was local demand to make Edirne into a regional center instead of an isolated border town without any interaction with the people beyond its borders, such civil initiatives could only emerge if and when the state and government would approach such a political turn. The emergence of the possibility of Turkey’s possible EU candidacy the very same year has paved the way for a change in Turkey’s foreign policy with its neighbors. After all, the Turkish state’s need to harmonize its social structure with EU rules and regulations across different fields precipitated active cooperation between Greece and Bulgaria as EU countries and Turkey as an EU candidate country. Both the 1999 Greek-Turkish Rapprochement73 and the increasing Bulgarian-Turkish cooperation by the mid-1990s74 started to be positively shaped with the EU-ization of Turkey’s border regime and its neighborhood policies.75 The reconsideration of the notion of national security has certainly led to an easing of border control. For instance, in this process, the status of Enez, the southernmost town of Edirne, which used to be a military zone since 1923, has recently changed and finally the town was open to foreign tourists’ visits in 2000s. The foreign tourists visiting Enez today are mainly the descendants of its previous Greek inhabitants, who left Enez at the

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time of the official population exchange, and they could finally come to Enez to visit their old villages and to pray in the ruins of the historic Hagia Sophia inside Enez Castle, dating back to the twelfth century.76 Similarly, the EU-ization of Turkey’s minority policies manifested itself in enabling the execution of local renovation projects targeting non-Muslim spaces such as churches and the Great Synagogue of Edirne. This was the case because, for the EU accession, Turkey is required to implement the Copenhagen criteria that include, inter alia, “the respect for and the protection of minorities.”77 During this process, the confiscated properties of minority foundations quickly produced intense political debate from the moment Turkey began the EU accession process in 2005. As a consequence, especially the amendments to the Law on Foundations became an important component of all the ensuing reform packages.78 The new law was put into effect in 2008, leading to the direct involvement of the Directorate General of Foundations in the restoration of several churches and synagogues throughout Turkey, including the Bulgarian churches and the Great Synagogue of Edirne. Additionally, such state involvement included, in the case of non-Muslim sites, the participation of representatives from the particular minority communities. The decision to change the function of the Great Synagogue from being a religious to a cultural site, for instance, was now made by the Regional Committee for the Protection of Cultural Heritage under the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Yet before reaching a final decision, the committee was obligated to get confirmation from the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This was the case because the latter had to consider Turkey’s foreign policy interests and, if necessary, negotiate with the representatives of the minority community – in this case the Jewish community of I˙stanbul – as well as their counterparts in the diaspora, in this case in Israel.79 Same procedure was followed for the restoration of the Bulgarian churches.80 As such, many international, national and local political actors influenced the development and execution of such renewal projects; and in doing so, they also all participated in shaping urban space and memory. Indeed, in the case of Edirne, it was in this context that the then governor Duruer met with the Jewish community of I˙stanbul,

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welcoming them to use the old synagogue/new culture center whenever they wanted.81 At that time this change in the function of the Great Synagogue appeared to have been negotiated and accepted by the Jewish community of I˙stanbul, both at the official and social levels. In the local Jewish newspaper published in Turkish entitled S¸alom, Moise Gabay introduced these changes to the local community in 2010 through penning a series titled “Our Lost History: Jews of Edirne.” After providing historical details about Edirne’s past and present and presenting stories about well-known figures of Edirne’s Jewish community, Gabay also mentioned the past violence leading to the community’s emigration in general and the destructive events of 1934 and 1988 in particular. He ended by inviting the Jewish community and Turkish state officials to revive the forgotten memory of Jews of Edirne.82 Two years later, Gabay took a day trip to Edirne to check the restoration work of the synagogue personally. Upon his return, he started his column by stating “imagine a one-day trip to Edirne,” and then mapped out his route from the Health Museum to the Selimiye Mosque, the Bedesten Bazaar and the churches of St Constantine and Helen. He recounted this “historical, faith and culture tour” as he continued into Kaleici where Jews once resided as follows: You are welcomed by coaches . . . you see a lady offering you lemonade, borekas, boyos from a restored wooden house of Jewish cultural heritage. The next is the “Edirne Great Synagogue Jewish Culture and Research Center” [where you] listen to a concert of hymns [sung by] the Maftirim Chorus. On the one hand, you study the handcrafts of Trakya University students and on the other you experience old marriage ceremonies through animations.83

Gabay ended by suggesting that Edirne’s tourism potential would be improved through annual visits to the city for religious festivals. With the help of the Turkish Ministry of Tourism and travel agencies, he pointed out, Edirne’s Jewish heritage could be added into travel guides. Yet Gabay also implicitly reminded the reader of past violent events, suggesting that “while state authorities and the Jewish community must take care of this monumental synagogue as part of Jewish heritage, the locals of Edirne must look after it as well so that any of the tragic events that have once happened will not be

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repeated.”84 It is significant to note that while Gabay does indeed share the commercial enthusiasm of local Edirneans regarding the tourism potential of non-Muslim sites, he cannot so easily and selectively forget the past violence as the local Muslim perpetrators are apt to do; instead, he gently cautions them not to repeat the past violence. This caution is probably predicated on how state authorities had twice refused communal requests to renovate the synagogue, pointing out to persistent exclusionary discourses and practices in the very recent past that may quickly be reactivated, as the next governor S¸ahin did. Nevertheless, what has led state authorities to take a completely different stance today can be explained not by the acknowledgement of past acts of violence but through the emergence of a new international political field, shaped by the EU-ization of state– minority relations and the border regime, as much as by the JDP’s neo-liberal hegemony over history. CONCLUSION Today synagogues and churches in Edirne and some other cities are renovated to be used as cultural sites in the absence of non-Muslim communities, whereas a reverse process can be observed with the Hagia Sophia museums in Iznik and Trabzon, which are turned back into mosques. A similar plan has recently been put forward for I˙stanbul’s Hagia Sophia Museum to be reinstated as a mosque.85 As ¨ r argues, when Hagia Sophia was turned from a mosque into a Gu museum in 1935, this was the result of a national discursive act by Mustafa Kemal, inspired by Western models of modernization, ¨r aiming to construct a national identity for the new Republic (Gu 2002: 248). The current proposal emerges as a new discursive act that aims to emphasize this site’s Islamic past above anything else. Measures like these point out that such historical urban sites are contested spaces and subject to constant redefinition by the ¨ r calls dominant discursive representations, or through what Gu “spatial-social materialization of power-knowledge.”86 For over a decade now, the dominant discursive acts in Turkey are shaped by the ¨ cek in the Introduction, has rule of JDP which, as underlined by Go relied on believers and consumers who do not politically challenge its

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rule. Within the framework of a more flexible border regime and legal reforms in minority policies, JDP’s urban policies encouraged faith tourism and promoted the consumption of nostalgia for Ottoman multiculturalism, which paved the way for restoration of the nonMuslim heritage in the neo-liberalizing “frontier city.” The functions of these spaces as religious sites, museums and culture centers are determined as a result of direct and indirect negotiations between the state officials and representatives of the non-Muslim minority communities. It is in this neo-liberal field of power that decisions are taken to allow for religious ceremonies of “visitors” in today’s culture centers as well as to convert former museums into mosques. ¨ cek states in her introduction, the significance of history in As Go relation to neo-liberalism has played out differently in the pre-2002 secular Turkish nationalist narrative of the state and that of the post2002 Islamist Turkish nationalist narrative of the JDP based not on the secular Turkish past of Central Asia but rather the religious past of the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, as I argue in this essay, by selectively remembering, imitating and presenting the past, as in the case of the renovated Mihran Hanım Mansion and the Great Synagogue in Kaleici, such renewed and sanitized areas also contribute to the construction of a particular urban history and memory. This memory cherishes the multi-ethnic and multi-religious Ottoman past by reappropriating the non-Muslim architecture in the absence of the non-Muslim subjects who once lived there. A historically situated analysis of the contemporary restorations in Edirne shows that what Harvey defines as “heritageisation” with its roots in the distant past is a manifestation of the process of selective remembering, and forgetting for that matter, of the past and the practices of implicit and explicit exclusions. The nostalgia which is utilized by various actors, that is, local state agents, local notables and entrepreneurs, and the reference point of which are the few remaining religious sites and old mansions of the non-Muslims of Edirne in the urban space, now invites the former non-Muslim residents of Edirne to “visit” or to “invest” in their old homes. Yet, as the former exclusions and non-representation of these exclusions in the public space imply, the “visitors” of today are welcomed exactly because they are not anymore the “locals” of

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Edirne the way their ancestors were. As such their presence becomes not only “acceptable” but also necessary for the faith and heritage ¨ cek, believers and tourism in the neo-liberal era that needs, for Go consumers. In that sense, the current claims about the multicultural Ottoman past emerge as examples of what Hall calls “commercial multiculturalism [which] exploits and consumes the difference in the spectacle of the exotic ‘other’”.87 Finally, the discourse of Ottoman multiculturalism seems to reinforce an imagery of “acceptable” difference which cannot be observed anymore in everyday social relations, due to the absence of non-Muslim communities, while it can be observed in the town’s architecture through ongoing urban transformation. Edirneans see this recent change as improvement, whereas they recall the earlier wave of urban transformation as decay. However, this recent architectural revival, which has begun to turn residential areas for the lower socio-economic classes into tourist complexes, I suspect, will trigger the exclusion of the existing local population from this social space. Further research will show the outcomes of the ongoing renewals on the lives of current residents and possible contestations that might emerge at the neighborhood level in the near future. NOTES 1. This essay is based on the data collected as part of my Ph.D. fieldwork. I would like to thank CES Columbia University (2013 Pre-dissertation Fellowship) and Oxford University Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies (2013–14 studentship) for their generous financial support during my field research. 2. The tension between the Jewish community of Edirne and the local and national authorities reveals itself when we trace the gradual downfall of the synagogue. In 1979, the Rabbi in Istanbul wrote a letter that he would be happy to leave the synagogue to the Prime Ministry’s Directorate General of Foundations. Yet the Rabbi stipulated that the 100 –50 remaining Jews in Edirne would be allowed to use the small building in the garden of the synagogue for religious ceremonies. During Prime ¨ zal’s visit to Edirne in 1984, Oral Onur, the local Muslim Minister Turgut O Turkish notable who was as close to the local Jewish community as to the ¨ zal to deliver the demand of the leaders of state authorities, approached O the shrinking Jewish community. See Bali (1998). While the experts came to check the buildings some months later, they did not accept the deal.

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4.

5.

6.

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Finally, the synagogue became “public property” in 1995 because of the Law of Foundations that automatically transfers ownership of minority properties that is left unused for ten years by its community to the Directorate General of Foundations. Over the years, the 1988 attack on the synagogue was followed by small burglaries of whatever was left after the last members of the community had left. Finally in 1997, the dome of the synagogue collapsed after a harsh winter. Since Trakya University, then given the rights over the use of the building, did not have the budget to repair it, its then president Osman I˙nci contacted the Rabbi in Istanbul. The Jewish community in Istanbul community organized a fundraising night for the synagogue which was planned to be used as a culture center, but the money raised was not enough to cover the expenses of a real renovation plan. Eventually, the university handed the building back to the Regional Directorate General of Foundations. The restoration process only began in 2008, and two years later, in 2010, the restoration project was approved with a budget of more than 3.5 million TL. This information was collected from an interview with Osman Inci, 5 November 2013 and with an official in Regional Directorate General of Foundations, 7 November 2013, in Edirne. Ibid. All translations are my own unless noted otherwise. Governor Duruer, previously the governor of Mardin in the southeast of Turkey, had also been well-respected by the people of Mardin for his active role in the protection and preservation of the historical heritage of the city there as well as for his contributions to the flourishing of tourism and cultural activities in the city. “Israeli police, settlers storm Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque compound,” Hu¨rriyet Daily News, uploaded 5 November 2014. Accessed 24 July 2015. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/israeli-police-settlers-storm-jerusalems -al-aqsa-mosque-compound - - -.aspx?pageID¼ 238&nID ¼ 73903&News CatID ¼ 352. Quite justified reactions came from diverse quarters to the words of Edirne governor Dursun Ali S¸ahin about Edirne’s historic Great Synagogue. Elsewhere, I noted that the governor’s public declaration was not an exceptional speech act but an example of the repeated practices of hate speech when it comes to non-Muslims in Turkey. “Once Upon a time there were Jews living here”, published on 25 November 2014. Available at: http://www.bianet.org/bianet/toplum/160201-bir-zamanlar-edirne-deyahudiler-yasarmis. The expected opening date has been postponed couple of times over the course of writing this chapter. It was first intended to open in autumn 2013, then postponed to first spring and to the fall of 2014. ¨ lent Arınc’ın Edirne Sinagog’unun acılıs¸ “Bas¸bakan Yardımcısı Bu konus¸ması,” YouTube, fully recorded and uploaded by Nesimkarliyol, 27 March 2015. Accessed 30 May 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch? ¨ yu ¨ k Edirne Sinagogu 46 yıl sonra yeniden ibadete v¼7D3Zftg8rfI; “Bu

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8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

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acıldı,” Milliyet, uploaded 26 March 2015. Accessed 30 May 2015. http:// www.milliyet.com.tr/buyuk-edirne-sinagogu-46-yil-sonra-yeniden-edi rne-yerelhaber-696148/. The participants from the Jewish community seem content with the positive messages they received in this opening ceremony from the officials as well as the experience of reuniting with the Great Synagogue which for them has had historical and symbolic value. “Edirne ¨ s,” Sinagogu’nu acmak icin yola cıkan 800 Sefarad ve 5 numaralı otobu Agos, Uploaded 28 March 2015. Accessed 29 March 2015: http://www. agos.com.tr/tr/yazi/11051/edirne-sinagogu-nu-acmak-icin-yola-cikan800-sefarad-ve-5-numarali-otobus. Informal talk with security personnel in the synagogue, 30 April 2015. It should still be noted that their exclusion from the opening ceremony first caused some discontent among local journalists and locals. During my follow up visit in April 2015, I found out that it was mentioned in local papers of the next day and during our chat with few shop owners, that the timing of the long delayed opening which coincided with the commemoration day for the Balkan martyrs was interpreted at best as “unfortunate” for the commemoration ceremony being left unattended by Arınc, and at worst as Jewish conspiracy, in the words of one shop owner: “They [JDP] is also Jewish in mind.” Retrieved from extensive notes I took during the meeting, 1 June 2014. ˘lu-Kırlı (2005), 28. See Kolluog See Introduction to this volume, page 14. ˘lu (2008). See Bartu-Candan and Kolluog ¨ nsal (2010). See Kuyucu and U See Karaman (2013). See Demirtas-Milz (2013). TOKI, founded in 1984, was radically restructured by the JDP government in the early 2000s. After that time, the new TOKI became the agency that still regulates to this day the zoning and sale of most state-owned land. ¨ nsal’s analysis demonstrates, TOKI also transformed into As Kuyucu and U a powerful real estate developer across Turkey after the neo-liberal model since it was authorized to construct for-profit housing on state land through public-private partnerships and through its own subsidiary firms. ¨ nsal (2010). See Kuyucu and U See Turam (2013). The full list of finished and ongoing restorations is available on the website of the Prime Ministry’s Directorate General of Foundations. “Cemaat Vakıfları Sorgulama,” accessed 19 January 2014, http://www. vgm.gov.tr/sayfa.aspx?Id¼38. See Sezneva (2013), 33. For a concise summary of the debates on previous scholarship on nostalgia, see Parla (2009).

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22. The Kurdish migration of the last few decades and the approximate percentage of the Roma population is mentioned in Field Report on Edirne by Turan et al. (2008). The increasing number of the Kurdish population in Edirne is a result of their forceful displacement during 30 years of war between the PKK and the Turkish Armed Forces. Among many studies analyzing the societal impacts of this process in other cities with a focus ˘lu on urban poverty and informality, see Erder 1996 and Is¸ık and Pınarcıog (2001). 23. See Vertovec (2007). 24. Cited in Vertovec (2012). 25. See Harvey (2001), 337. 26. For this research, I interviewed 13 residents of Kaleici. Most of my informants were older than 60, with two almost 90 years old. Yet, I also had informal unstructured conversations with around ten people in their 30s and two in their 50s, about the history of Edirne in general and the non-Muslim past in particular, including urban transformation specifically in relation to Kaleici. Five out of 13 informants are women, and most comprised local notables, small shopkeepers and retired and employed civil servants and workers. I employ pseudonyms for all the informants ¨ ngo ¨ r Mazlum, who have already published their except Oral Onur and Gu views on the 1934 Events. 27. Edirne is referred in many cultural materials, like postcards, as Adrianople until the early twentieth century; yet nineteenth-century Ottoman official records refer to the space as Vilayet-i Edirne. Information retrieved from the HathiTrust Digital Library, accessed 10 January 2014 at: http:// catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/003514333. ¨ rk (1998), 295. 28. See Koraltu 29. See Kasaba (2009). ¨ ksal (2008), 1507. 30. See Ko 31. Edirne was under constant attack by different political actors during half a century, commencing with the independence of Bulgaria in 1871, the autonomous rule of Eastern Rumelia in 1878, the Bulgarian occupation in 1885, the 1904 –08 Macedonia War, the 1912–13 Balkan Wars and finally World War I. See Balta (1998); McCarthy (1995). 32. See Akcam (2010). As Kasaba underlines, “territorial settlements reached at the end of the World War I fractured the space in which alternative histories had been taking shape and made nationalist ideologies gain strength.” See Kasaba (2009), 137. Before World War I, one out of every five persons living in present-day Turkey was a non-Muslim whereas, after the war, only one out of 40 persons was a non-Muslim. See Keyder quoted in Aktar (2003), 81. 33. See McCarthy (1995): 161. 34. The end of that decade witnessed the execution of the out-migration of about 1,000,000 Orthodox Greeks and the transfer of some 400,000 Muslims from Greece. See Kayali (2008), 143. Only the Greek-Orthodox

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35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

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population of Istanbul, Imbros and Tenedos, and the Muslim population of Western Thrace, were exempted from the exchange. See Hirschon (2003). According to the report presented at the 27 February 1919 Peace Conference, as of 1911, the total population of Edirne was 65,454, composed of 25,900 Greeks, 25,000 Muslims, 9,500 Jews, 3,500 Armenians, 1,504 Bulgarians and 50 Greek Catholics. See Balta (1998), 231. See Balta (1998), 239. The exact numbers are still controversial. According to a table on the numbers of the Jewish population in Edirne covering the period from 1519 to 1998, the population dropped successively from 28,000 (in 1911– 14), to 6,098 (in 1927), 1,158 (in 1945), 298 (in 1965) and finally to 3 (in 1998). See Bali (1998), 213. According to more recent studies, the numbers dropped from 13,899 in 1914 to 5,712 in 1927 and to 4,020 in 1935, and ˘aptay (2006) then 2,441 in 1945 to 321 in 1965. For more detail, see C ¸ ag and Bali (2008), 312. Since most of the broom grass fields suddenly became Greek territory, raw material had to be imported from Greece to continue local production ¨ rk (1998), 296. since Edirne was still the main center in 1928. See Koraltu ¨ rk also demonstrates that as of 1928, the Based on official records, Koraltu main economic activity of the Muslim population was agriculture while a minority was active in flour production, grain trade, construction and lumber business; as for non-Muslims, they comprised six out of the eight broom merchants and most of the small shops, silk-producing factories ¨ rk (1998), 302. and trades of dry goods and dairy products. See Koraltu ˘aptay (2006); Aktar (2003). See C ¸ ag See Edirne Postası, 18 June 1934. See Aslan (2007); Rodrigue (1990). On the same day, an anonymous commentary states that “[t]hose who want to live and be happy in these lands, will speak Turkish and will be one with the Turkish nation. This is a debt to be paid both to the fatherland and for being alive.” See Edirne Postası, 18 June 1934. ¨ cek (1996). See Go See Bayraktar (2006), 103. In line with rumors in Thrace hinting that Jews would be expelled from the region not officially, but rather unofficially through unconventional ways, Tali also stated that the Jewish community seemed prone to support communist propaganda as well as a possible Bulgarian invasion. Therefore, for Tali, Jews were “disloyal to Turkish state” and their presence in the region was a threat to national security along the border with Bulgaria and Greece. See Karabatak (1996), 71; Aktar (2003); Bayraktar (2006); Bali (2008). For the vulgar and negative descriptions of the Jewish community by Inspector Tali, see Bayraktar’s study (2006), 103, f. 48. See Edirne Postası, 7 July 1934. The small news piece also states that “upon the sudden departure of few Jewish families from Thracian towns to

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46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey Istanbul, inspector-general I˙brahim Tali took a tour of the region to make sure everything is under control.” ˘aptay and See endnote 12. A combination of numbers, provided by C ¸ ag Bali, reveal that the population dropped almost 50 percent within a decade. See Onur (2005); Mazlum (2013). Interview with Oral Onur, 16 September ¨ ngo ¨ r Mazlum, 4 November 2013. 2012, Istanbul. Interview with Gu Interview with Nurcan Hanım, 1 November 2013. Turhan Bey insisted that at that time most of them were already gone and after such incidents those who stayed also left eventually. But the real reason for their departure was economic, especially in the 1950s. He specifically noted that “most of those who left for Israel or Istanbul couldn’t find what they expected, and that is why when they come to visit here, many times they’ve said ‘we were living here like princes.’ But nobody tells this part of the story” he adds. Interview with Turhan Bey, Edirne, 31 October 2013. In a recent interview, Akcam underlines that while they were not mentioned in the “Black Relocation Book” of Talat Pas¸a, Armenians were sent to exile from 15 more settlements including Edirne. See Akcam, Today’s Zaman, 19 April 2013. In Kazancıgil’s chronology of Edirne, it is mentioned that the fire started in an Armenian house, though the exact reason for the fire remained unknown. See Kazancigil (1995). Yet after this fire, the neighborhood was reconstructed by the remaining Armenian, Greek and Jewish residents. Old residents of Kaleici remember that there was a small number of Armenians and Bulgarians who stayed and eventually died in Edirne. The Mihran Hanım Mansion belongs to one such family. Nevertheless, not much information is available on the Armenians of Edirne. Local archivist and historian Oral Onur published a collection of documents he found, but that does not provide any systematic and chronological reading of Armenians’ presence in Edirne. See Kezer (2005), 28. In the other parts of the city as well, only a small section of the big Jewish cemetery was recently saved before complete confiscation leading to total construction. While the two Bulgarian churches in other neighborhoods that are still properties of the Bulgarian foundations have recently been reopened, numerous cemeteries, schools and hospitals of minorities and foreigners did not last until today. See Balta (1998). See Neyzi (2008), 119. Interview with Turhan Bey, Edirne, 31 October 2013. Informal interview with Ekrem Bey, Edirne, 1 November 2013. See endnote 9. See Hudut, 19 August 1974. Yet, there were news in Edirne Postası about the contractors’ involvement in urban transformation as early as 1934, when one worker died during ˘ac. See Edirne Postası, the demolition of the French Girls School in Karaag

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58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

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18 June 1934. This example demonstrates that, similar to the case of Ankara’s urbanization in the early republican era, the targets for urban renewals were also spaces of non-Muslim heritage back then as well as in the 1970s. As this neighborhood with old wooden houses and mansions comprising spaces of architectural heritage is an officially protected area, any substantial renewal there has required authorization from the Regional Higher Board of Monuments in Edirne. See Edirne Urban Protected Area and the Architectural Plan and Procedures (Edirne Kentsel Sit Alanı ve Etkileme ¨ lcekli Koruma Amaclı Nazım I˙mar Planı ve 1/1000 ¨ lgesi 1/5000 O Gecis¸ Bo ¨ lcekli Koruma Amaclı Revizyon ve I˙lave Uygulama I˙mar Planı), accessed O 28 November 2013, http://edirne.mimarist.org/mddocs/plan_notlari.pdf. See Keyder (2005). This was mentioned also by an official from the Regional Committee for the Protection of Cultural Heritage. For more information about the initial restorations, see Hudut, 27 July 1999. See Sabah, 23 September 2013. See Vatandas¸, 15 November 2013. Currently there are many houses under renovation on the street of Kaleici. I found out while chatting with residents or Edirneans passing by that there are at least two ongoing projects, one intends to use the space as a boutique hotel and the other is a renovation undertaken by an Italian Jew who, according to rumors, intends to use the renovated mansion as a museum. The emphasis is mine. Accessed 10 November 2013, http://mihranhanim. com/konakhistory.html. Kurban and Hatemi (2009); Kezer in this volume. See Hudut, 8 December 1932. This bazaar was mentioned twice in Edirne Postası in the years 1933 and 1934, yet there was no news when it ended. According to the accounts of the elderly, the market stopped shortly before the outbreak of World War II. My survey of the paper from 1928 to 1935 reveals that there were many propaganda-like news items calling on people to “speak Turkish,” emphasizing “Thrace is the land of real Turks,” warning them to “only buy local products” and constantly repeating that “smuggling goods or failing to denounce smugglers is equal to selling your homeland to the enemy or shooting your nation.” See Edirne Postası, in order of quotations, 18 June 1934, 1 March 1934, 12 December 1931 and 23 January 1933. See Hudut, 28 August 1974; 19 June 1989. ˘ a engel deg ˘ il! Alipas¸a esnafının kiraladıg ˘ ı otobu ¨s “Sınırlar dostlug Yunanistan’dan ilk turist kafilesini getirdi”, Hudut, 26 October 1999. In the year 1999, after the many ups and downs experienced in formal Greek – Turkish relations, two earthquakes – in August in Turkey and in September in Greece – finally brought the people on both sides of the border together. The news about the other side became more frequent, accompanied by positive remarks about the visits of local state actors and

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72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83.

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey local political and economic elites from both the Greek and Turkish side of the border with the hope of strengthening cross-border ties. See Hudut, 26 October 1999. As encouraged by Edirne local notables, the renovation of the church of Sweti George was finally started in 2003 and the church reopened in May 2004. Then in 2008, the renovations of the other abandoned Church of Sts Constantine and Helen were undertaken with funding from the national and local Bulgarian government. In the local paper Hudut, the opening ceremony of Sweti George was represented as the “symbol of Turkish-Bulgarian friendship” and the participation of Turkey’s Minister of Finance and Bulgaria’s Prime Minister at the ceremony along with the publicly closed meeting of the committee of high-level bureaucrats and politicians at the border were interpreted as indications of the strengthening ties between the two countries. See Hudut, 10 May 2004. Their argument is supported by earlier examples of touristic visits of old Jewish residents of Edirne from Israel. Such news also appeared in local papers. For example in 1999, a group of Jews of Edirne from Israel visited the town with the guidance of Oral Onur. The visitors were saddened to see the fallen roof of the Great Synagogue and said they could have collected money to restore it only if they had known about the conditions prior to their visit. And they also added that many more old Jewish residents would be eager to come visit Edirne as tourists in the future. See Hudut, 12 May 1999. ˘du (2001); Rumelili ¨ ndog See Anastasakis et al. (2009); Aybet (2009); Gu (2005). ˘lu (2005); I˙cduygu (2007). See Apap et al. (2004); Dayıog See I˙cduygu and Sert (2010); Kas¸lı and Parla (2009); Kiris¸ci (2007). According to local accounts, this old church was used as a mosque until the 1960s, yet afterwards abandoned due to its deteriorating condition. There are plans for its restoration yet so far there seems to be no agreement on its function after renovation is completed. For an update on the situation, see “Historic Hagia Sophia in a Turkish province to be reopened as mosque,” Serdar Korucu, Hurriyet Daily News, 30 April 2015. ¨ zgu ¨ nes¸ (2010). See I˙cduygu et al. (2008); Grigoriadis (2008); Onar and O See Kurban and Hatemi (2009). I learned about the change of function process during my informal talks with officers in the Regional Committee for the Protection of Cultural Heritage that I conducted in Edirne in October 2013. One stated that they received the confirmation letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs along with the restoration project in 2008. Interview with the priest of the Bulgarian church in Edirne, 2 November 2013. See endnote 2. See S¸alom, 26 May – 23 June 2010. See Gabay in S¸alom, 19 September 2012.

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84. See S¸alom, 19 September 2012. 85. This draft bill is proposed by an MP from the radical right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and supported by an ongoing petition campaign as well as by the deputy prime minister. The Hagia Sophia Church was converted into a mosque after the 1453 conquest of Istanbul by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II and it was used as a mosque until 1935, when it became a museum. The MP from MHP claims that the decision to turn into a museum was against the constitution because it was never published in the official gazette. The MP’s statement, accessed 8 November 2013: http://www.agos.com.tr/haber.php?seo¼ mhplihalacoglundan-ayasofya-cami-olsun-teklifi&haberid ¼ 6076. For deputy Prime Minister Arınc’s declaration, accessed 15 November 2013, see http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/25125751.asp. And for the petition regarding the ongoing campaign, accessed 15 January 2013, see http:// www.ayasofyacamiiolsun.com/ ¨ r (2002): 248. 86. See Gu 87. See Hall, cited in Vertovec (2010), 85.

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Neyzi, Leyla, “Remembering Smyrna/Izmir: Shared History, Shared Traumas”, History and Memory 20/2 (2008): 106–27. ¨ zgu ¨ nes¸, “How Deep a Transformation? EuropeanizaOnar, Nora. F. and M. O tion of Greek and Turkish Minority Policies”, in International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, 17 (2010): 111–36. Onur, Oral, Edirne Yahudi Cemaati (Istanbul. Dinc Ofset, 2005). Rodrigue, Aron, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israe´lite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Indiana University Press, 1990). Rumelili, Bahar, “Civil Society and the Europeanization of Greek–Turkish Cooperation”, South European Society and Politics, 10/1 (2005): 45– 56. Sezneva, Olga, “Architecture of descent: historical reconstructions and the ¨ nigsberg”, Journal of politics of belonging in Kaliningrad, the former Ko Urban History 39/4 (2013): 767–87. Turam, Berna, “The Primacy of Space in Politics: Bargaining Rights, Freedom and Power in an I˙stanbul Neighborhood”, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37/2 (2013): 409–29. ¨ venc, “Alan Aras¸tırması Raporu: LMV Turan, C ¸ imen, Pekin, M. and S. Gu Sunumu”, Field Research Report: Presentation of Lozan Immigrans Foundation, in Meric’in I˙ki Yakası, NGO Grant Facility – Component B-3 ¨ badilleri Vakfı Yayınları, Culture in Action Programe (I˙stanbul: Lozan Mu 2008). Vertovec, Steven, “Super-diversity and its implications,” in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30/6 (2007): 1024–50. ——— “Towards post-multiculturalism? Changing communities, conditions and contexts of diversity”, in International Social Science Journal, 199 (2010): 83–95. ——— “Diversity’’ and the Social Imaginary”, in Archives of European Sociology, LIII/3 (2012): 287–312. Yeoh, Brenda S.A, “The Global Cultural City? Spatial Imagineering and Politics in the (Multi) cultural Marketplaces of South-east Asia”, in Urban Studies 42/5–6 (2005): 945–58. Young, Craig, Martina Diep and Stephanie Drabble, “Living with Difference? The ‘Cosmopolitan City’ and Urban Reimaging in Manchester, UK”, in Urban Studies 43/10 (2006): 1687–1714.

PART II

State

CHAPTER 4

Mobilizing the State, Monitoring the Countryside: Mobile Village Courses in Turkey 1 Metin Yu¨ksel

The introduction of Western-style education was a major instrument in the process of social and political modernization of the late Ottoman Empire, one that ultimately led young Ottoman officials, officers and intellectuals to increasingly challenge the Ottoman central imperial power through the demands of constitutionalism and representative institutions.2 Once in power, the Young Turks employed education with the intent to ensure that such future challenges were contained; they therefore utilized education to keep such social segments as women3 and tribes4 under constant central state surveillance. After the 1923 establishment of the Turkish Republic, this project of control continued as the republican state employed a rich range of educational projects for the building of a modern homogeneous Turkish nation along Kemalist ideological lines.5 Among such projects, one outstanding yet understudied nation-wide educational project was the Mobile Village Courses (Gezici Ko¨y Kursları, hereafter MVCs). In this essay, I analyze MVCs for men and women in Turkey from their start in around 1940 until about the mid-1970s. Based on a variety of primary and secondary sources, I locate these courses in their broader social, political and historical context revealing how the

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Turkish republican state actually attempted to create and control public spaces through education in non-urban locales where its reach and penetration was minimal, in towns and villages in general and ones in Kurdish regions in particular. In the existing literature, I was only able to locate two studies that specifically focus on these courses.6 As such, they did not analyze the phenomenon of the MVCs in their entirety. I argue here that even though these courses were essentially educational projects, they need to be critically examined in the interpretation and employment by the Turkish state of the MVCs to create and monopolize public spaces through education among peasants and Kurds, prioritizing in the process the education of women, not because of gender-conscious development, but instead because women were found by the state to be more “pliable” in actualizing this particular project. Hence four components were significant in the Turkish state’s creation of public spaces: control of knowledge production, peasants, ethnicity (read Kurds) and gender. The modern state logic operated in the following manner: with the use of mobile methods in reaching the masses in its countryside, the centralized modern state not only attempted to settle and homogenize its mobile and settled populations, but also become mobile itself in order to make its presence felt in the furthest points under its jurisdiction.7 EMERGENCE AND OPERATION OF MOBILE VILLAGE COURSES It should be noted that the mobilization of the modern state to reach its rural population in the countryside was also seen in different parts of the world. For instance, Muhammad Riza Pahlavi’s wife Farah Pahlavi notes that they used “mobile libraries” and “mobile theaters” to reach the furthest villages in rural regions in Iran.8 The Sovieteducated Kurdish historian Celıˆleˆ Celıˆl also points out that there were “mobile teachers” in the USSR in the 1930s in order to eradicate illiteracy.9 It seems that the MVCs provided central state control on four levels. Control of Knowledge Production. What initially makes MVCs for men and women noteworthy is that each word in its self-evident name reveals a different characteristic of the Turkish Republic. The

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central concept is “Courses,” that is, education. Modernization and/ or Westernization in Turkey has a long history that can be traced back to the eighteenth century. In this context, education that had been traditionally linked to and operated under the jurisdiction of the religious institution started to gradually separate into a civic, secular domain. After the 1923 establishment of the Republic, two reforms were especially significant in this respect: the abolition of the Caliphate has been interpreted as “the collapse of the contract between the center and periphery,”10 on the one side and the proclamation the very same year of the Law on the Unification of Education known as Tevhid-i Tedrisat that closed down all madrasas, that is, seminaries dedicated to the study of Islamic law, on the other.11 These two reforms brought a decisive end to the ongoing “duality and/or bifurcation”12 in the educational sphere since the late Ottoman Empire at the expense of the religious institution. Soon after the 1928 shift to the Latin alphabet, nation-wide literacy campaigns realized through Millet Mektepleri (People’s Schools) increased national literacy rates in the new letters dramatically in a short period of time.13 Put differently, both formal and informal (mass) education was consciously used by the new regime to build a culturally and linguistically homogeneous Turkish nation now equipped with knowledge over which the state had almost total public monopoly. Control of Peasants. The second concept in the name of these courses is Village, which points to the “peasantist”14 characteristic of the Turkish nation state. Soon after the abolition of the Caliphate, the Sheikh Said Revolt broke out in Kurdish regions in February 1925. In order to repress the rebellion, the Law on the Reestablishment of ˆ n Kanunu) was passed in the national assembly, Order (Takrir-i Su¨ku providing the government with extraordinary powers. Subsequently, from 1925 on, the political system in Turkey turned more authoritarian.15 In 1930, the attempt at multiparty politics with the foundation of the oppositional Free Republican Party (Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası) attracted a considerable amount of popular support. This opposition was quickly demobilized by banning the party, but the strong opposition led the Kemalist elites to develop a variety of popular educational projects to indoctrinate the peasantry

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with the political ideals of the new regime.16 As observed by another scholar, by means of education, “peasants were presented with the sole alternative of adopting the values and ideals of the new regime.”17 Furthermore, since the population in the country was mostly engaged in agriculture in the countryside, the state elites developed projects specifically oriented to villages and peasants, such as Village Institutes (Ko¨y Enstitu¨leri) and Village Rooms (Ko¨y Odaları).18 In this spectrum, MVCs were yet another project of popular education oriented to peasants. Nevertheless, village education differed from the education enacted in towns and cities.19 Control of Gender. The references to Men and Women in the name of MVCs reveal the gendered characteristic of the actions of the Turkish nation state in that the special design of these courses reproduced and reinforced “traditional” gender roles. While sewing courses were organized for women, men were trained in ironworking and carpentry. Moreover, while male students were taught by male teachers; female teachers trained the women. Although Kemalist ideological discourse claims its policies toward women as revolutionary in terms of gender inclusion, these courses demonstrate that such policies reproduced and reinforced existing “traditional” gender roles and divisions.20 Control of Kurdish Ethnicity. The institution of MVCs for Men and Women in Turkey also sheds light into another vital social and political subject, that is, the Kurdish issue in Turkey. Several academic studies, from the 1960s through the early 1980s, point to the uneven distribution of MVCs throughout the country, which is captured in ˘lu regional terms, that is, as “the east versus the west.” Ali C ¸ obanog states that: It is seen that there is an imbalance in the distribution of these courses throughout the country. It is understood from a village research conducted in 1966 that in the undeveloped and eastern provinces compared to the west few courses are offered. This imbalance of distribution has also been identified in the later studies. The picture is no different during the 1980 –1 academic year.21

This study suggests that the so-called “east-west gap” in Turkey that is formulated in terms of regional underdevelopment could be reinterpreted in terms of the predominantly linguistic Kurdishness of the “east.” Indeed, I demonstrate below the special location of the

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“east” in official reports. In this sense, although the “east” supposedly implies a geographical region in official representation, it is indeed the invisible name of the Kurdish “ethno-political” issue.22 STATE EMPLOYMENT OF MOBILE METHODS Alongside the above discussed contextualization of MVCs, another significant aspect comprises the mobility of these courses. Such mobility effectively and efficiently ensured the modern state’s reach into the otherwise inaccessible population in the countryside. And such state use of mobile methods was by no means limited to MVCs. It also extended to itinerant preachers (gezici vaizler)23 that functioned between 1948 and 1965,24 itinerant gendermarie (seyyar jandarma),25 and Mobile Courses for Tribes and the Organization of the Teachers of Mobile Tribes.26 Hence, mobile methods were employed by the state throughout to monitor the population in the countryside. As such, a settled, centralized and institutionalized apparatus, the Turkish nation state did not simply attempt to settle moving populations, but it also attempted to modify its activities in accordance with the mobile conditions in its countryside. James C. Scott, in his inspiring work titled Seeing like a State, demonstrates the various ways in which the modern state homogenizes both nature and society, thereby rendering them “legible.” Scott states that: Nomads and pastoralists (such as Berbers and Bedouins), huntergatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, run-away slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states. Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples (sedentarization) seemed to be a perennial state project – perennial, in part, because it so seldom succeeded.27

The theoretical implication of the existence and practice of MVCs is that the modern Turkish state did not solely keep settling mobile peoples. In addition, it also consistently mobilized itself to reach populations that remained beyond its control. By doing so, however, it ended up creating a new public space that was initially under its control, but one that became contested as state interests and priorities clashed with the expectations and needs of the local population.

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IMPLEMENTATION OF MOBILE VILLAGE COURSES IN TURKEY Statistical Sources. A very significant set of data regarding MVCs comprises the statistical figures provided by the Turkish Institute of Statistics. These figures provide information concerning the number of courses, students (their age groups and educational backgrounds), graduates and teachers. Until 1960, one can also find the information on the budget allocated for these courses. All this information is given on an annual and provincial basis. The Turkish Institute of Statistics does not have figures for the period between 1953 and 1960. Hence, I cannot include this period in this study. However, it seems possible to argue that the lack of data for this period does not affect the argument put forward in this study. The period covered here includes the start of these courses until 1974. There is not a specific reason to stop the analysis with the year of 1974. Suffice it to say that in his previously cited article, Mahmut Tezcan gives the figures for the years starting with 1974. An important point is that the stable versions of these courses were also initiated in 1960. However, I limit my focus solely with the mobile version of these courses that continued even after their stable versions were opened in 1960. Local Press and Memoirs. In addition, I draw upon the local press and memoirs of teachers who taught in the eastern provinces, these sources provide insight specifically into how teachers made meaning from the knowledge that was being disseminated, insight that is not reflected in the archival and statistical sources collected and stored by the state. For instance, one such memoir belongs to Faik Akcay, who is a retired primary school teacher who taught in a village in the eastern province of Bitlis from September 1967 to June 1969. While teaching there, Akcay’s writings concerning a diverse range of issues such as women’s and girls’ education and people’s education in general appeared in the local papers Bitlis Birlik and Kalkınan Tatvan.28 Curriculum. Before going into the statistical data about these courses, however, it is necessary to discuss their contents. What were the basic goals of these courses? The three booklets published by the Ministry of National Education comprise the main sources on the

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contents of these courses.29 These booklets demonstrate the dates of the start and end of the courses. They show the topics to be covered on a weekly and/or monthly basis. These booklets can also be supplemented by academic work published during the same period. For instance, Mahmut Tezcan describes women’s courses as follows: Mobile Courses for Village Women started in 1938. The purpose of the courses is to train young girls and village women about the necessary knowledge concerning house management and motherhood and to let them acquire the skills related to the arts at home. The girls who finished primary school and village women until the age of 45 can participate in these courses that are directed by the Ministry of National Education. A course stays in a village for eight months and then gets opened in another village.30

Upon their completion of MVCs, participants received a Course Completion Certificate (Kurs Bitirme Belgesi).31 Women’s courses included four categories of classes, namely cutting and sewing of men’s and women’s clothing for a total of 21 hours per week. Embroidery is three hours per week. House management and child care are three hours each in a two-week period.32 The regulation for the Women’s Courses, however, noted that Women’s Mobile Courses were obligated “to follow the special conditions of their students and villages.” Therefore, depending on the specific village’s social and economic conditions, some topics were not taught.33 The goal of Iron-Making and Carpentry courses for men, on the other hand, was as follows: To make sure that villagers can repair objects, carriages and agricultural tools made of iron or wood, which they use in their houses and different projects. [Also] to make sure that the producers of these tools come from within the people of the village and, along these lines, to make sure that a workshop capable of doing all these jobs can be constructed in every village.34

Divided into two sections called Village Iron-Making (Ko¨y Demircilig˘i) and Village Carpentry (Ko¨y Marangozlug˘u), these courses lasted 28 weeks each. The instruction started at the beginning of October and concluded at the end of April,35 carefully covering a period when there is minimal agricultural activity in the villages. Village

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Iron-Making courses were divided into two subsequent sessions, Hot Iron-Making (sıcak demircilik) and Cold Iron-Making (sog˘uk demircilik). Hot Iron-Making lasted six weeks, to be then followed by Metal-Working (el tesviyecilig˘i) for three weeks. Hot Iron-Making then had a maturation session (tekaˆmu¨l) which lasts five weeks, during which time the students probably worked on their own projects. After the completion of these 14 weeks of Hot Iron-Making, Cold Iron-Making commenced. It lasted six weeks, to be then followed by 1.5 weeks of Tinsmithery (tenekecilik), 1.5 weeks of Woodwork (dog˘ramacılık) and five weeks of maturation. Lasting 28 weeks, Village Carpentry was described in the booklets as covering the teaching of “carpentry, woodwork and works of carriages.”36 The name of the subject and its explanation were provided in the curriculum on a weekly basis.37 New regulations were developed for MVCs in 1958. The Ministry of National Education informed the governorates in Turkey about these new regulations that were “updated according to the requirements of the time and in parallel with the economic activities.”38 In addition to women’s courses and Iron-MakingCarpentry Courses, also included were Village Construction (Ko¨y Yapı Kursu) and Village Rug Business and Textile (Ko¨y Halıcılık ve Dokumacılık Kursu).39 The new regulations made the organizational flowchart clear as well, specifying that women’s courses were tied to ¨ ˘gretim the Directorates of Girls’ Technical Schools (Kız Teknik O Okulları Mu¨du¨rlu¨kleri) and men’s courses were under the authority ¨ ˘gretim Okulları Directorates of Boys’ Technical Schools (Erkek Teknik O Mu¨du¨rlu¨kleri).40 Hence, as the practice continued, it became increasingly organized and bureaucratized. In the process, the teachers were advised to follow the customs of villagers: “Without finding the geographical, economic and social features and customs of the village strange, the teacher is required to follow the village and villagers.”41 Moreover, the teacher is asked to participate in the spiritual atmosphere of the village by respecting the “feelings of conscience and beliefs of the villager” (vicdan duyguları ve itikatları).42 This is quite interesting because rather than “enlightening” the peasants along republican ideals, the teacher seems to be peasantified during this education.

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Statistical Data. According to the Turkish Institute of Statistics, MVCs for men and women started in 1939 and 1940, respectively.43 The statistical data about MVCs for men and women is provided in the two tables below.44 The most striking observation about MVCs is that while the number of women’s courses almost consistently increased throughout the period I examine, the number of men’s courses decreased. Thus the most interesting finding of this analysis is that the number of women’s courses was consistently far higher than men’s courses. This observation points to a significant gendered impact of state projects intent at penetrating the periphery. Perhaps due to the strength of patriarchy, not only in establishing such courses, but also attending them, male teachers and male students have a harder time negotiating the state penetration than women do. It could thus be the case that when afforded with the necessity to provide such courses, engaging women in both executing and receiving them may have appeared less risky and less important than involving men. REPORTING THE “EAST” THROUGH THE COURSES In addition to the official curricula and statistical data about these courses, one can also see a third set of sources about women’s mobile courses. In 1948, the Directorates of National Education in 13 eastern provinces submitted reports to the Ministry of National Education. ˘, Bitlis, Siirt, Ag ˘rı, ¨ l, Van, Elazıg These provinces are as follows: Bingo Erzurum, Mardin, Diyarbakır, Urfa, Kars, Hakkari and Tunceli.45 These reports provided information about the actual functioning of these courses. Before going into the details of these reports, however, I need to point out that these reports were written from the standpoint of “the east.” Why were these courses included in official decisions and reports regarding the “east” alone and not anywhere else?46 First and foremost, the start of these courses corresponds to the end of a period of social and political turmoil in the east, which is depicted by one scholar as a “civil war-like situation.”47 Second, the implicit and/or explicit goal of the republican investments realized in the “east” for its “development” has been the cultural assimilation

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142 TABLE 4.1

Mobile Village Courses for men

MOBILE IRON-WORKING-CARPENTRY COURSES Year 1939– 40 1940– 1 1941– 2 1942– 3 1943– 4 1944– 5 1945– 6 1946– 7 1947– 8 1948– 9 1949– 50 1950– 1 1951– 2 1952– 3 1960– 1 1961– 2 1962– 3 1963– 4 1964– 5 1965– 6 1966– 7 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973– 4 TOTAL

Courses

Students

Graduates

Teachers

Illiterate

6 14 13 12 22 20 39 49 56 61 85 81 86 113 187 185 182 167 204 200 177 166 173 144 125 109 60 2736

85 173 130 89 299 308 601 648 764 890 1069 1104 1134 1532 2685 2657 2779 2658 3975 3384 3311 2627 2436 2102 1854 1701 868 41863

85 132 88 84 274 281 586 619 749 853 1021 1051 1044 1409 2389 2486 2502 2500 3371 3202 2941 2494 2309 2025 1800 1328 781 38404

12 27 25 12 45 38 78 96 111 121 160 152 156 206 361 370 354 339 330 293 226 318 309 238 188 174 79 4818

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 127 95 59 93 143 130 30 73 53 41 23 4 871

of the population into the hegemonic realm of state-defined Turkishness. A shining substantiation of this argument is the following words of the 4th Inspector General based in the eastern ˘an, in the meeting of Inspectorate Generals regions, Abdullah Alpdog held on 7– 22 December 1936; he states that “. . . as to the taking root of the feeling of Turkishness, I find it very useful to build schools,

Mobilizing the State, Monitoring the Countryside TABLE 4.2

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Mobile Village Courses for women MOBILE COURSES FOR VILLAGE WOMEN

Year 1940– 1 1941– 2 1942– 3 1943– 4 1944– 5 1945– 6 1946– 7 1947– 8 1948– 9 1949– 50 1950– 1 1951– 2 1952– 3 1960– 1 1961– 2 1962– 3 1963– 4 1964– 5 1965– 6 1966– 7 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973– 4 TOTAL

Courses

Students

Graduates

Teachers

Illiterate

11 12 30 121 84 128 187 239 227 340 387 371 410 447 452 456 577 526 495 500 718 910 1205 1373 1527 1696 13429

320 284 947 3611 2278 3450 4263 5610 5631 8161 9703 9113 10117 10876 10988 10894 13833 14566 10704 11474 14914 19148 25939 30537 34563 32895 304819

286 241 759 2837 1887 2776 3570 5013 4776 6967 7121 6843 7125 8739 9251 8794 11958 12298 9658 9305 11135 15534 22921 20104 20239 27017 237154

11 12 30 122 84 128 187 239 229 339 391 381 414 443 452 456 580 526 498 504 730 907 1218 1419 1601 1833 13734

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1605 2038 2637 1736 1163 1134 2352 2590 2791 2785 2157 2037 25025

dispensaries, hospitals.”48 The “east” thus had a particular meaning in Turkish republican modernization. Viewing it in terms of religious reaction, tribalism and regional backwardness, Kemalist state elites did not recognize the “Kurdishness” of the Kurdish question;49 rather, they insisted on silencing the Kurdish part, approaching it instead as the “Eastern question” in terms of a “question of security.” This Orwellian approach of double-talk is

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further substantiated by the fact that Kurdish regions were almost continually under martial law and ruled by inspectorate generals throughout the early decades of the Republic and also from the 1980s through the early 2000s.50 The east became suspect in the eyes of the homogenizing republican center due to its linguistic specialty. Hamit Bozarslan’s following remarks demonstrate how language has been transformed in the Turkish Republic into a criterion of national loyalty: In a country henceforth almost homogenized religiously, where the Christians did not represent any numerically significant group, religion ceased to be the distinctive marker between “us” and “others”. Against those who saw Turkey’s legitimacy as founded in its identity as a Muslim country, the new regime opposed language as the distinctive boundary between the “nation” and the others. Non-Turkish speakers were thus conceived as potential enemies, capable, one day, of “serving” external enemies.51

Bozarslan’s observation is further substantiated by a Kemalist deputy in the 1930s. The deputy of Maras¸, Hasan Res¸it Tankut,52 traveled to the four eastern provinces of Van, Bitlis, Siirt and Mus¸ in 1940 with the intent to assess the loyalty of the population in the region during what could lead Turkey into a possible engagement in World War II. He specifically noted that: “. . . it is yet untimely to believe that the citizens who speak Kurdish would remain totally loyal [to the Turkish Republic].”53 It is interesting that in the project of the linguistic Turkification of Kurds in the country, Kurdish women attracted the attention of state elites more than men. The earliest documentation of this can be found in the Plan on the Reformation of the East (S¸ark Islahat Planı). Dated 24 September 1925, this report attached particular significance to the education of Kurdish girls and women and concomitant Turkish language instruction.54 The subsequent project oriented to Kurdish girls is the opening of a Girls’ Art Institute in Elaziz (Elaziz Kız Sanat Enstitu¨su¨) in 1937.55 The report prepared by the 4th Inspectorate General upon the occasion of the opening of this school strikingly reveals not only the approach of the Kemalist elites to the role of women in nationalist indoctrination but also, and even more importantly, the straightforward way

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in which they targeted Kurdish women for the assimilation of future generations of Kurds into Turkishness.56 Like the S¸ark Islahat Planı, this official report also attaches extreme importance to Turkish language instruction. One of the eight conditions listed in this report for the admission of girls into the Girls’ Art Institute in Elaziz, is as follows: In addition to having the above-mentioned qualities, preferably to have been speaking mountain Turkish in their homes and villages so far, and to be amongst village girls who have not been able to find the possibility to learn state Turkish (emphasis mine).57

These documents and projects lead to the following observation: the commonly repeated generalizations regarding “women’s emancipation” in modern Turkey are not valid from the point of view of Kurdish women’s experiences. Put bluntly, a more accurate historiography of women in republican Turkey needs to commence, I would contend, with the assimilation of Kurdish women as embodied in the 1925 Eastern Reformation Plan. This gendered approach needs to be more critically examined, analyzing how and why certain state projects intent on creating and controlling new public spaces target women more than men. So the “east” is employed by the Turkish republican state as the label by means of rendering invisible the Kurdishness of Kurdish regions. An interesting point in this regard is the fact that, unlike any other region in the entire country, the “eastern” regions have been continuously present as a topic in many reports written by ¨ nu ¨ and Celal Bayar’s reports from their Turkish state elite: I˙smet I˙no travels in these regions are cases in point.58 After focusing on how to read the “east” in the official discourse, I now turn to the reports from the “east” in the context of MVCs for Women. A collection of archival reports from 1948 on the functioning of MVCs for Women in eastern provinces provides another case of the reporting of the “east” to the center, this time in the context of women’s courses.59 Submitted by the Directors of National Education in eastern provinces in 1948, these reports include several categories of questions concerning the functioning of MVCs for Women in the East:

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a. Material Conditions (Maddi Durum) containing five questions that inquire about the building reserved for the course and the place where the teacher is accommodated. b. Condition of Hygiene (Temizlik) regarding how clean the place of instruction is kept. c. Condition of the Furniture and Its Care (Es¸ya Mobilyaları ve Bakımı) comprising five questions inquiring about the furniture and the equipment used for the course. ¨ ˘gretmenin Durumu) pertaining to how d. Condition of the Teacher (O and to what extent the teacher has been successful and knowledgeable in her job. ¨ ˘grencinin Durumu) investigating the e. Condition of Students (O number of students that attended the course and, if not, the reasons for their absence. ¨ ˘grenim Durumu) inquiring about the f. Condition of Learning (O extent to which the teacher has been attentive to the needs of the locals and/or her students. g. Observations of the Inspector (Denetleyicinin Mu¨talaası) regarding the suggestions of the person who supervised the course. Based on his/her observations, the investigator recommends whether the courses should continue to be opened in the same place. A case in point is the report of the Director of National Education in ¨ re, on the performance of an instructor by the name of Bitlis, Hamdi Tu ¨ re indicates that the teacher has been a gossip, Sabahat Arslan. Tu thereby not leaving a positive impression in the region. In the final part ¨ re notes that Arslan does not have the necessary of the report, Hamdi Tu skills to teach urban girls and women. In another case, in the evaluation of the reports from the province of Erzurum the Undersecretary of the Minister of National Education, R. Uzel warns ¨ rson, the instructor of the MVC numbered 107 in the Nevin Gu province of Erzurum. Uzel notes that, next year, if the teacher does not follow the rules of hygiene more carefully and mix with the villagers, becoming a role model for them, she will be dismissed from her job. The rest of the report generally includes positive observations about the performances of the teachers. Hence mixing with the eastern villagers emerges as a double-edged sword for woman teachers in that they

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cannot mix too much to gossip, but also not enough to provide a role model. It is noteworthy that even in articulating such impossible criteria for the women teachers to meet, the republican state gives agency to the Turkish female teachers alone, not at all taking into account the reaction and conditions of the “eastern” women other than the evaluation provided by their Turkish teachers. It should also be noted at this juncture that a large number of MVCs for women were opened in the center of the province or town rather than in villages. The names of the teachers alongside the provinces where they taught, as they appear in the reports, are as ¨ zyurt (Van/ ¨ l/Merkez), Nezahat O follows: Lebizer C ¸ etiner (Bingo Merkez), Sabahat Arslan (Bitlis/Merkez), Halide Zengil (Siirt/ ˘ rı/Merkez), Tu ¨ rkan Tanyeri (Mardin/ Merkez), Muazzez Sevimli (Ag Nusaybin), Maksude Malatacık (Diyarbakır/Bismil), Kadriye ˘ /Maden), Muazzez Hava Tug ˘ rul (Elazıg ˘ /Palu), 60 S¸ ensu (Elazıg ¨ zel (Urfa/Siverek), Naime Sungur (Tunceli/C ¸ emis¸kezek), Makbule O ¨ rson (Erzurum) and Mesrure Aydın (Hakkari/Merkez), Nevin Gu Neriman Erguvan (Erzurum/Hınıs-Merkez). Another future project for the historiography of women in Turkey comprises conducting oral interviews with these teachers and their families. The reports have only one incidence where a direct reference is made to the Kurdish language and the instruction of Turkish to the students. The report from the district of Hınıs in the province of Erzurum states that: “In this entirely Kurdish-speaking region, although it is difficult to teach students to express themselves, the teacher has been able to teach her students both to speak a clear Turkish and to give the pleasure of sewing and embroidery to the poor children of the homeland; who did not know how to thread a sewing thread into a needle.”61 So the way gender works in relation to instruction reveals two patterns: not only are Kurdish women targeted more frequently than Kurdish men, but Turkish women are also called to duty to educate their Kurdish counterparts more frequently than Turkish men. CONCLUSION This original study contributes to the present scholarship on the history of education in Turkey in the rural countryside on the one

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side, and to the study of the manner in which the republican state created and controlled new public spaces on the other. First and foremost, it unearths fresh statistical and archival findings concerning an outstanding and understudied topic such as MVCs for men and women in Turkey. Expanding on critical studies of the Kemalist modernization project it also highlights how the empirical study of MVCs provides insight into the mechanism through which the state created and controlled public spaces, spaces that became quickly contentious as they did not take into account the needs and priorities of the local populace. Second, rather than taking a descriptive and uncritical approach to these courses, I problematized these courses in the broader social, political and historical context of Turkey.62 In general, the empirical analysis reveals the manner in which the Turkish state attempted to create and control a public space through MVCs, one that attempted to reach the furthest villages in general and Kurdish ones in particular. The attempt was driven and became partially successful only in the case of those delivered and received by women. In especially “the east” (read Kurdish regions), the Turkish state silenced Kurdish ethnicity and language through a number of strategies, starting by marking the space merely as a geographical signifier. This attempt to create public spaces totally controlled by the state ultimately failed for two reasons. First, Turkish women teachers faced contradictory expectation that were impossible to accomplish in dealing with the Kurdish populace. And second, the courses did not at all take into account the priorities of the Kurdish populace. Still, the analysis reveals the manner in which the Turkish state attempted to control public spaces in the midst of the Kurdish regions and Turkish peasants. In doing so, the state and its officials and officers revealed in the process its inherent weakness to negotiate non-urban spaces in general and ethnic Kurdish spaces in particular. NOTES 1. An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the Hrant Dink Memorial Workshop organized by Sabancı University in I˙stanbul in 2009. For the proceedings, see Leyla Keough, ed., Hrant Dink Memorial Workshop 2009:

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2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

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Gender, Ethnicity and the Nation-state: Anatolia and its Neighboring Regions: Proceedings (I˙stanbul: Sabancı University, 2011). I am grateful to Professor ¨ ge Go ¨ cek for her contributions to this study. I would like to Fatma Mu ¨ ksel for their comments and suggestions thank Elif E. Aks¸it and Mezher Yu on an earlier version of this study as well as Faik Akcay for sharing his memories of living in the province of Bitlis as a teacher in 1967– 9 and providing a copy of his writings in the two local papers in Bitlis. This essay is partly based on research that was supported by a fellowship by the American Research Institute in Turkey. I would also like to thank for their ¨ tu ¨ phane, the Turkish Institute of Statistics, help the staff of Milli Ku ˘ı and Turkish Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Diyanet I˙s¸leri Bas¸kanlıg ˘itim Bakanlıg ˘ı Yayımlar Dairesi Bas¸kanlıg ˘ı Ars¸iv Ku ¨ tu ¨ phanesi, all Milli Eg in Ankara. ¨ cek, Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Fatma M. Go Westernization and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); S¸erif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: a Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). Elif E. Aks¸it, Kızların Sessizlig˘i (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2005). The following study examines the opening, development and curriculum of the School for Tribes and provides archival documents and photos of the students studying there: Alis¸an Akpınar, Osmanlı Devletinde As¸iret ¨ cebe, 1997). Also see Eugene L. Rogan, “As¸iret Mektebi (I˙stanbul: Go ¨ lhamid II’s School for Tribes (1892–1907),” in International Mektebi: Abdu Journal of Middle East Studies 28/1 (1996): 83 –107. Sevim Yes¸il, Unfolding Republican Patriarchy: the Case of Young Kurdish Women at the Girls’ Vocational Boarding School in Elazıg˘ (Ankara: Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Middle East Technical University, 2003). ˘lu, Halk Eg˘itimi Acısından Gezici Kadın Kursları (Ankara: Ali C ¸ obanog ¨y Unpublished MA Thesis, Ankara University, 1981); Mahmut Tezcan, “Ko ¨ zerine,” http://dergiler.ankara. Kadınları Gezici Kursları ve Erkek Kursları U edu.tr/dergiler/40/509/6218.pdf (accessed on 23 February 2011). See also ˘lu, “Modernization and Gender: a History of S¸ule Toktas¸ and Dilek Cindog Girls’ Technical Education in Turkey since 1927,” in Women’s History Review 15/5 (2006): 737–49. It should be pointed out that it was not only population that the state tried to take under its full control. As Laurent Dissard’s contribution in this volume demonstrates, the contestation about the construction of dams in Dersim is illustrative of the fact that reshaping nature is also another tool in the state’s control of its countryside. ¨ nya, 2004, 148). Farah Pehlevi, Anılar (I˙stanbul: Du ˆ rıˆvan: ¨ ksel, Kolana Wes¸engıˆra, Xaniyeˆ 3, Apartameˆnta Hijmara 6, E Metin Yu ˆ Malbata Celıˆlan: Hevpeyvıˆn bi Celıˆleˆ Celıˆl u ˆ Cemıˆla Celıˆl ra Kurdolojıˆ u (I˙stanbul: Avesta, 2014).

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10. Hamit Bozarslan, “Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey: from Tacit Contract to Rebellion (1919–1925),” in Essays on the Origins of Kurdish Nationalism, ed. Abbas Vali (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2003, 180–1). 11. Madrasas continued their underground existence in Kurdish regions until recently. For more on madrasas in Kurdish regions and the social, political and cultural roles played by Kurdish ulama, see the followings: I˙smail Bes¸ikci, Ku¨rtlerin Mecburi I˙skanı (Ankara: Yurt Kitap-Yayın, 1991, 69–70); Lale Yalcın-Heckmann, “Ethnic Islam and Nationalism among the Kurds in Turkey,” in Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics and Literature in a Secular State, ed. Richard Tapper (London: I.B.Tauris 1991); S¸erif Mardin, Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of Bediu¨zzaman Said Nursi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); Martin van Bruinessen and Joyce Blau, eds Islam des Kurdes (Paris: Equipe de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les societes mediterraneennes musulmanes, 1998); Martin van Bruinessen, ed. Mullas, Sufis and Heretics: The Role of Religion in Kurdish Society: Collected Articles (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2000); Serdar ¨ l, Bilgi, Toplum, I˙ktidar: Osmanlı ve Cumhuriyet Modernles¸mesi I˙le S¸engu Kars¸ılas¸ma Su¨recinde Dog˘u Medreseleri (Ankara: Unpublished Ph.D., Dissertation, Hacettepe University, 2008); Abdulhadi Timurtas¸, “Molla ˘i,” in S¸arkiyat I˙lmi Aras¸tırmalar Dergisi 1 Muhammed Zivingi ve I˙lmi Kis¸ilig (Nisan 2009), 104–20; M. Halil C ¸ icek, S¸ark Medreselerinin Serencaˆmı ˘layan, S¸ark Uleması (I˙stanbul: (I˙stanbul: Beyan, 2009); Mehmet C ¸ ag ¨ mmetcilik ˘layan Yayınları, 1996); M. Emin Bozarslan, Hilafet ve U C ¸ ag Sorunu (I˙stanbul: Ant, 1969, 361–2); Cegerxwıˆn, Hayat Hikaˆyem (I˙stanbul: ¨ ztoprak, S¸ark Medreselerinde Bir O ¨ mu¨r (I˙stanbul: Evrensel, 2003); Sadrettin O Beyan, 2003); Gıyasettin Emre, Medreseden Meclise, Meclisten Yassıada’ya (I˙stanbul: Kent Yayınları, 2006); Bediu¨zzaman Said Nursıˆ: Tarihce-i Hayat ¨ zler Yayınevi, 1976); Mu ¨ fid Yu ¨ ksel, Ku¨rdistan’da Deg˘is¸im Su¨reci (I˙stanbul: So (Ankara: Sor, 1993); S¸efik Korkusuz, Tezkire-i Mes¸ayih-i Amid I-II (I˙stanbul: ˆ bihar, “Ji ¨ z, 1990); Nu Kent, 2004); Turan Dursun, Kulleteyn (I˙stanbul: Akyu ˆ bihar 63–4 (June– July 1998); Destpeˆkeˆ Heta ˆIro Medreseˆn Kurdan,” in Nu M. Said Ramazan el-Buti, Babam Molla Ramazan el-Buti: Hayatı, Du¨s¸u¨nceleri, Mu¨cadelesi (I˙stanbul: Kent Yayınları, 2008); Abdulhadi Timurtas¸, Botan Medreselerinin Piri: Molla Muhammed Zivingıˆ (I˙stanbul: ˘lu, Bu¨tu¨n Yo¨nleriyle Arabkendıˆ (I˙stanbul: Kent, 2008); M. S¸erif Erog Kent, 2004). 12. Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (New York: Routledge, 1998); William L. Cleveland A History of the Modern Middle East (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000). 13. Literacy campaigns were not limited to Turkey. In the Soviet Union throughout the 1930s, all languages were considered equal and literacy in the mother tongue was provided in a great number of languages in the USSR. For more on this issue, see Bernard Comrie, The Languages of the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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˘lu, ‘Orada Bir Ko¨y Var Uzakta:’ Erken Cumhuriyet ¨ merliog 14. Asım Karao Do¨neminde Ko¨ycu¨ So¨ylem (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2006). ¨ rcher, Political Opposition in the Early Turkish Republic: the 15. Eric J. Zu Progressive Republican Party, 1924 –1925 (Leiden: Brill, 1991). Cemil Kocak’s recent work brings together archival documents revealing a wide range of oppositional voices – such as Islamic, Kurdish, communist, non-Muslim and so on – during the Single-Party Era and their suppression: Cemil Kocak, Tek Parti Do¨neminde Muhalif Sesler (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2011). ˘lu, ‘Orada Bir Ko¨y Var Uzakta:’ Erken Cumhuriyet ¨ merliog 16. Asım Karao Do¨neminde Ko¨ycu¨ So¨ylem (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2006). 17. Sefa S¸ims¸ek, Bir I˙deolojik Seferberlik Deneyimi: Halkevleri 1932 – 1951 ¨ niversitesi Yayınevi, 2002, 132). ˘azici U (I˙stanbul: Bog 18. Ibid. 132. 19. T. C. Maarif Vekaleti, Ko¨y Kursları Yo¨netmelig˘i (Ankara: Maarif Basımevi, 1958); Kenan Okan, Ko¨y Muallim Mektepleri Denemesi (Ankara, 1971). For ˘lu, the diploma of the graduates of village schools, see Necdet Sakaog ¨ niversitesi Osmanlı’dan Gu¨nu¨mu¨ze Eg˘itim Tarihi (I˙stanbul: I˙stanbul Bilgi U Yayınları, 2003, 218). 20. For two critical approaches to the Kemalist ideological stance concerning women’s social and political status, see the followings among others: ˘enog ˘lu, Colonial Fantasies: towards a Feminist Reading of Meyda Yeg Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 131–6); Ays¸e ¨ ylemi,” in Modern Tu¨rkiye’de Siyasi Saktanber, “Kemalist Kadın Hakları So Du¨s¸u¨nce: Kemalizm, ed. Ahmet I˙nsel (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2001, 323– 3). For a critical perspective arguing that there has been continuity from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic on the basis of patriarchy, see ¨ l Berktay, “Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Feminizm,” in Modern Fatmagu Tu¨rkiye’de Siyasi Du¨s¸u¨nce: Cumhuriyet’e Devreden Du¨s¸u¨nce Mirası, Tanzimat ¨ . Alkan (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2001, ve Mes¸rutiyet’in Birikimi, ed. Mehmet O 348–61). ˘lu, Halk Eg˘itimi Acısından Gezici Kadın Kursları (Ankara: 21. Ali C ¸ obanog Unpublished MA Thesis, Ankara University, 1981, 9). The Turkish original is as follows: ˘ılımında dengesizlik oldug ˘u go ¨ zeyindeki dag ¨ rKursların yurt du ¨ lmektedir. 1966 yılında yapılan bir ko ¨ y aras¸tırmasında, gelis¸meu ˘ u illerinde batıya oranla az sayıda kurs acıldıg ˘ı mis¸ ve dog ˘ılım dengesizlig ˘i daha anlas¸ılmaktadır. See Mutlu 1967, 88. Bu dag sonra yapılan aras¸tırmalarda da saptanmıs¸tır See Geray 1978, 365. ¨g ˘retim Yılında da durum pek farklı deg ˘ildir. 1980–1 O There are, in the text, the above references to Mutlu and Geray. See also Mahmut Tezcan, “Ko¨y Kadınları Gezici Kursları ve Erkek Kursları

152

22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey ¨ zerine,” http://dergiler.ankara.edu.tr/dergiler/40/509/6218.pdf (accessed U on 23 February 2011). ˘en, Devlet So¨yleminde Ku¨rt Sorunu (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2006); Mesut Yeg ˘en, “The Turkish State Discourse and the Exclusion of Kurdish Mesut Yeg Identity,” in Middle Eastern Studies 32/2 (1996), 216–29. ˘ı, Gezici Vaizlerin Vazife ve Salahiyetleri BCA [T. C. Diyanet I˙s¸leri Bas¸kanlıg Hakkında Talimatname] Fon Kodu: 51.0.0.0, Yer No: 4.37.5, 31.12.1950. ˘ı, ed., Kurulus¸undan Gu¨nu¨mu¨ze Diyanet I˙s¸leri Diyanet I˙s¸leri Bas¸kanlıg Bas¸kanlıg˘ı (Tarihce-Tes¸kilat-Hizmet ve Faaliyetler) (1924–1997) (Ankara: ˘ı, 1999, 478–80). Diyanet I˙s¸leri Bas¸kanlıg BCA Fon Kodu: 30. 18.1.2, Yer No: 4.36.6, 19/6/1929; BCA Fon Kodu: 030.18.1.2, Yer No: 78.71.11, 11/8/1937. The latter two projects seem to have remained only on paper as a proposal: BCA Fon Kodu: 030.18.01.02, Yer No: 40.75.16, 23/10/1933; BCA Fon Kodu: 030.18.1.2, Yer No: 36.38.14, 23/5/1933; BCA Fon Kodu: 030.10, Yer No: 143.24.10, 10/9/1933. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998, 1). ˘ların Doktoru,” Bitlis Among his contributions, see the followings: “C ¸ ag ¨ nemi,” Bitlis Birlik, 10 ˘itmenin O Birlik, 8 December 1967; “Halkı Eg ¨g ˘renirse,” Bitlis Birlik, 30 December ¨ rkce O October 1968; “Kadınlar Tu ¨ fusa Kayıt I˙s¸lemi,” Bitlis Birlik, 4 January 1969. Faik Akcay’s 1968; “Nu memoirs including the articles he published in the local press in Bitlis is forthcoming. It should be noted that Faik Akcay, the retired primary school teacher who worked in a village in Bitlis in 1967–9, pointed to the unreliable characteristic of official records on paper, which remained far from the lived realities (personal communication). ˘i, Ko¨y Kadınları Gezici Kursları These are as follows: T. C. Maarif Vekillig ˘itim Mu¨fredat Programı (Ankara: Maarif Matbaası, 1942); T. C. Milli Eg ˘ı, Gezici Ko¨y Demircilig˘i ve Marangozlug˘u Kursu Yo¨netmelig˘i (Ankara: Bakanlıg ˘itim Basımevi, 1949); and T. C. Maarif Vekaleti, Ko¨y Kursları Milli Eg Yo¨netmelig˘i (1958). In 1958, due to the fact that the goals of MVCs for both men and women overlapped, the regulations (yo¨netmelik) concerning these courses were turned into one single set of regulations. ¨ y Kadınları Gezici Kursları ve Erkek Kursları Mahmut Tezcan, “Ko ¨ zerine,” http://dergiler.ankara.edu.tr/dergiler/40/509/6218.pdf (accessed U on 23 February 2011), 131–2. T. C. Maarif Vekaleti, Ko¨y Kursları Yo¨netmelig˘i (Ankara: Maarif Basımevi, 1958, 17). ˘i, Ko¨y Kadınları Gezici Kursları Mu¨fredat Programı T. C. Maarif Vekillig (Ankara: Maarif Matbaası, 1942, 1). Ibid., 2.

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˘itim Bakanlıg ˘ı, Gezici Ko¨y Demircilig˘i ve Marangozlug˘u Kursu 34. T. C. Milli Eg ˘itim Basımevi, 1949, 3). The original is as Yo¨netmelig˘i (Ankara: Milli Eg follows: ˘ı demir veya ¨ ylu ¨ nu ¨ n evinde ve muhtelif is¸lerinde kullandıg Ko ˘actan yapılmıs¸ es¸yayı, araba, ziraat aletleri gibi vasıtaları tamir ve ag ¨ y halkı icinden icabında yeniden yapılabilecek sanatkaˆrları Ko ¨ yde bu is¸leri yapabilecek bir atelye yetis¸tirmek ve bu suretle her ko tesisini temin etmektir. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 11– 24. T. C. Maarif Vekaleti, Ko¨y Kursları Yo¨netmelig˘i (Ankara: Maarif Basımevi, 1958, 4). Ibid., 5. Ibid., 6. ¨g ˘retmen ko ˘rafi, iktisadi ve ¨ yu ¨ n cog Ibid., 10. The original is as follows: “O ¨ ye ve ko ¨ ylu ¨ ye uyar.” sosyal hususiyetleriyle aˆdetlerini yadırgamaksızın ko Ibid., 10. However, another book referring to the Archive of the General Directorate of Girls’ Technical Education notes that women’s courses began in 1938 with one teacher and 45 students. The same source also notes that in 1940 – 1, there were 12 courses with 12 teachers and 320 ˘itim Bakanlıg ˘ı, Cumhuriyetin 50. Yılında Rakam ve students: T. C. Milli Eg ˘itim Basımevi, 1973, 211). Grafiklerle Milli Eg˘itimimiz (I˙stanbul: Milli Eg Some other secondary sources on women’s courses note that they started ˘ lu, Osmanlı’dan Gu¨nu¨mu¨ze Eg˘itim Tarihi (I˙stanbul: in 1938: Necdet Sakaog ¨ niversitesi Yayınları, 2003), Mahmut Tezcan, “Ko ¨y I˙stanbul Bilgi U ¨ zerine,” http://dergiler. Kadınları Gezici Kursları ve Erkek Kursları U ankara.edu.tr/dergiler/40/509/6218.pdf [accessed on 23 February 2011]. In this table, the data for the period 1943–4 is taken from the following: ˘u ¨ du ¨ rlu ¨g ¨ , Millıˆ Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik ve Bas¸bakanlık I˙statistik Genel Mu ¨ ˘gretim I˙statistikleri 1943 –1944 (Pulhan Matbaası, 1946, xxxiii). Yu¨ksek O The rest of the table is derived from the following: Bas¸bakanlık I˙statistik ˘u ¨ du ¨ rlu ¨g ¨ , Milli Eg˘itim I˙statistikleri 1942–1943 (Ankara, 1945); Genel Mu ˘u ¨ du ¨ rlu ¨g ¨ , Milli Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik ve Bas¸bakanlık I˙statistik Genel Mu ¨ ˘gretim I˙statistikleri 1943–1944 (Pulhan Matbaası, 1946); Bas¸baYu¨ksek O ˘u ¨ du ¨ rlu ¨g ¨ , Milli Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek kanlık I˙statistik Genel Mu ¨ ˘gretim I˙statistikleri 1944–1945 (Pulhan Matbaası, 1947); Bas¸bakanlık O ¨ ˘gretim ˘u ¨ du ¨ rlu ¨g ¨ , Milli Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O I˙statistik Genel Mu I˙statistikleri 1945–1946 (Pulhan Matbaası, 1947); Bas¸bakanlık I˙statistik ¨ ˘gretim I˙statistikleri ˘u ¨ du ¨ rlu ¨g ¨ , Milli Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O Genel Mu 1946 – 1947 (Pulhan Matbaası, 1948); Bas¸bakanlık I˙statistik Genel ¨ ˘gretim I˙statistikleri ˘u ¨ du ¨ rlu ¨g ¨ , Milli Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O Mu ˘u ¨ du ¨ rlu ¨g ¨ , Milli 1947–1948 (I˙stanbul, 1949); Bas¸bakanlık I˙statistik Genel Mu

154

45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey ¨ ˘gretim I˙statistikleri 1948–1949 (Ankara, ¨ ksek O Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik ve Yu ˙ ˘u ¨ du ¨ rlu ¨g ¨ , Milli Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik 1950); Bas¸bakanlık Istatistik Genel Mu ¨ ˘gretim I˙statistikleri 1949–1950 (Ankara, 1952); T. C. Bas¸bakanlık ve Yu¨ksek O ¨su ¨ , Milli Eg˘itim I˙statistikleri Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek Devlet I˙statistik Enstitu ¨ ˘gretim 1960–1961 (Ankara, 1965); T. C. Bas¸bakanlık Devlet I˙statistik O ¨ ˘gretim 1961– ¨ su ¨ , Milli Eg˘itim I˙statistikleri Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O Enstitu ¨ su ¨ , Milli 1965 (Ankara, 1968); T. C. Bas¸bakanlık Devlet I˙statistik Enstitu Eg˘itim I˙statistikleri Yaygın Eg˘itim 1967–1974, T. C. Bas¸vekalet I˙statistik ¨ ˘gretim ˘u ¨ du ¨ rlu ¨g ¨ , Maarif I˙statistikleri Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O Umum Mu ˘u ¨ du ¨ rlu ¨g ¨, 1950–1951 (Ankara, 1957); T. C. Bas¸vekalet I˙statistik Umum Mu ¨ ˘gretim 1951–1952 (Ankara; Maarif I˙statistikleri Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O ˘u ¨ du ¨ rlu ¨g ¨ ), Maarif I˙statistikleri Meslek, T. C. Bas¸vekalet I˙statistik Umum Mu ¨ ˘gretim 1952–1953 (Ankara, 1956); T. C. Devlet I˙statistik Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O ¨ ˘gretim 1965– ¨ su ¨ , Milli Eg˘itim I˙statistikleri Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O Enstitu 1967. BCA Fon Kodu: 490.1.0.0, Yer No: 1060.1072.1, 23 September 1948. For a recent and important study on the state and the Kurds during the early republican period, see Senem Aslan, “Everyday Forms of State Power and the Kurds in the Early Turkish Republic,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies 43/1 (2011): 75 –93. Mete Tuncay, Tu¨rkiye Cumhuriyeti’nde Tek-Partili Yo¨netimin Kurulması (1923–1931) (Ankara: Yurt Yayıncılık, 1981, 127). Cemil Kocak, Umumi Mu¨fettis¸likler (1927–1952) (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2003, 255). ˘en, Devlet So¨yleminde Ku¨rt Sorunu (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2006); Mesut Yeg ˘en, “The Turkish State Discourse and the Exclusion of Kurdish Mesut Yeg Identity,” Middle Eastern Studies 32/2 (1996), 216–29. Ahmet Yıldız, “Ne Mutlu Tu¨rku¨m Diyebilene:” Tu¨rk Ulusal Kimlig˘inin EtnoSeku¨ler Sınırları (1919–1938) (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2001, 259). As Fatma ¨ ge Go ¨ cek’s extensive references to recent research on the topic show, Mu the conflict has been going on at the intersection of neo-liberalism and Islamism. Hamit Bozarslan, “Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey: from Tacit Contract to Rebellion (1919–1925),” in Essays on the Origins of Kurdish Nationalism, ed., Abbas Vali (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2003, 178). Tankut was the Inspector of Turkish Hearths in the Eastern Regions of the country. In Tankut’s words, the Turkish Hearths function to “indoctrinate the consciousness of Turkishness, and ensuring the adoption of the ¨ stel, I˙mparatorluktan Ulus¨ sun U Turkish language and culture.” Cited in Fu Devlete Tu¨rk Milliyetcilig˘i: Tu¨rk Ocakları (1912–1931) (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 1997, 333). BCA Fon Kodu: 490. 01 Yer No: 1015. 916. 4, 16 October 1940. The ¨ rtce konus¸an vatandas¸ların sonuna kadar original is as follows: “. . . Ku ˘unu arz etmeye ¨ z vakıtsız oldug sadık kalacaklarına inanmanın henu mecburum.”

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¨ stu¨ne: Gizli 54. Mehmet Bayrak, Ku¨rtler ve Ulusal-Demokratik Mu¨cadeleleri U ¨ Belgeler, Aras¸tırmalar, Notlar (Ankara: Ozge, 1993, 487); Mehmet Bayrak, ¨ zge, 2009). Ku¨rtlere Vurulan Kelepce: S¸ark Islahat Planı (Ankara: O 55. Sevim Yes¸il, Unfolding Republican Patriarchy: the Case of Young Kurdish Women at the Girls’ Vocational Boarding School in Elazıg˘ (Ankara: Unpublished Master’s Thesis at Middle East Technical University, 2003); ¨ rkyılmaz, “White Women’s Burden: Educating the ‘Mountain Zeynep Tu Flowers’ of Dersim”, paper presented at the Hrant Dink Memorial Workshop: Gender, Ethnicity and the Nation-State: Anatolia and Its Neighboring Regions, I˙stanbul, Turkey, 2009. For the very important ¨g ˘retmen memoirs of this school, see Sıdıka Avar, Dag˘ C ¸ iceklerim (Ankara: O Yayınları, 1986). For an interesting document by the Minister of Interior ¨ kru ¨ Kaya about the education of the boys and girls of Dersim, see Ays¸e S¸u ¨ r, “Avar, ne olur kızımı go ¨ tu ¨ rme!”, Taraf, 4 October 2009. Hu 56. BCA Fon Kodu: 030. 10, Yer No: 72. 470. 2, 1 September 1937. 57. In the Kemalist modernization project the issue of the instruction of the Turkish language to Kurdish women in schools plays a crucial role: Elif E. Aks¸it, Kızların Sessizlig˘i (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2005, 147). For an interesting talk that touches upon the issue of the mother tongue during the 4th National Education Council held in 1949, see T. C. Maarif Vekaleti 4. Milli Eg˘itim S¸urası (1949), 282–3. ¨ ztu ˘an, 2008); Celal ¨ rk, I˙smet Pas¸a’nın Ku¨rt Raporu (I˙stanbul: Dog 58. Saygı O Bayar, S¸ark Raporu (I˙stanbul: Kaynak, 2006). 59. BCA Fon Kodu: 490.1.0.0, Yer No: 1060.1072.1, 23 September 1948. There is another document about women’s courses in Eastern Anatolia. This documents talks about the allocation of resources for Mobile Village Courses in “Eastern Anatolia” and the province of Edirne. See BCA Fon Kodu: 30.18.1.2, Yer No: 120.64.1, 11 August 1949. ˘ and the one from Tunceli were 60. Both reports from the province of Elazıg ˘, submitted by Sıdıka Avar, the director of the Girls’ Institute in Elazıg whose memoirs were referred to above. 61. BCA Fon Kodu: 490.1.0.0, Yer No: 1060.1072.1, 27 September 1948. The original is as follows: ˘rencilere ifadeyi meram ¨ rtce konus¸an bu muhitte o ¨g “Tamamen ku ˘u halde o ˘retmen o ˘rencilerine hem ¨ c oldug ¨g ¨g edebilmek hayli gu ˘retebilmis¸ hemde ig ˘neye iplik ¨ rkce konus¸masını o ¨g temiz bir Tu takmasını bilmeyen zavallı memleket cocuklarına bicki-dikis¸ zevki verebilmis¸tir.” 62. A final remark should be made about two methodological issues in the conduct of this research on the history of education with a particular attention to MVCs in the East. Going beyond the exclusive use of officially kept records, one needs to do oral history interviews with both the participants and instructors of these courses in order to more fully understand the ways in which these courses operated. Last but not least,

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one should not approach a historical subject in isolation from the complex social and political conditions surrounding it. It is such a holistic perspective informed by the complexity and interconnectedness of social, political and historical matters that can provide a comprehensive and critical reinterpretation of such a seemingly educational project as MVCs for men and women in Turkey.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archives Turkish Republic Prime Ministry Republican Archives [Tu¨rkiye Cumhuriyeti Bas¸bakanlık Cumhuriyet Ars¸ivleri ], BCA.

Press ˘ların Doktoru”, Bitlis Birlik, 8 December 1967. Akcay, Faik, “C ¸ ag ¨ nemi”, Bitlis Birlik, 10 October 1968. ˘itmenin O ——— “Halkı Eg ¨g ˘renirse”, Bitlis Birlik, 30 December 1968. ¨ rkce O ——— “Kadınlar Tu ¨ fusa Kayıt I˙s¸lemi”, Bitlis Birlik, 4 January 1969. ——— “Nu ¨ r, Ays¸e, “Avar, ne olur kızımı go ¨ tu ¨ rme!”, Taraf, 4 October 2009. Hu

Online Sources

¨ zerine” ¨ y Kadınları Gezici Kursları ve Erkek Kursları U Tezcan, Mahmut, “Ko http://dergiler.ankara.edu.tr/dergiler/40/509/6218.pdf [accessed on 23 February 2011].

Published Sources

¨ cebe, 1997). Akpınar, Alis¸an, Osmanlı Devletinde As¸iret Mektebi (I˙stanbul: Go Aks¸it, Elif E., Kızların Sessizlig˘i (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2005). Aslan, Senem, “Everyday Forms of State Power and the Kurds in the Early Turkish Republic”, in International Journal of Middle East Studies 43/1 (2011): 75 –93. ¨g ˘retmen Yayınları, 1986). Avar, Sıdıka, Dag˘ C ¸ iceklerim (Ankara: O ˙ ˘u ¨ du ¨ rlu ¨g ¨ , Millıˆ Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek Bas¸bakanlık Istatistik Genel Mu ¨ ˘gretim I˙statistikleri 1943 –1944 (Pulhan Matbaası, 1946). O Ibid. Milli Eg˘itim I˙statistikleri 1942–1943 (Ankara, 1945). ¨ ˘gretim I˙statistikleri 1943–1944 Ibid. Milli Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O (Pulhan Matbaası, 1946). ¨ ˘gretim I˙statistikleri 1944–1945 Ibid. Milli Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O (Pulhan Matbaası, 1947a). ¨ ˘gretim I˙statistikleri 1945–1946 Ibid. Milli Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O (Pulhan Matbaası, 1947b). ¨ ˘gretim I˙statistikleri 1946–1947 Ibid. Milli Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O (Pulhan Matbaası,1948).

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¨ ˘gretim I˙statistikleri 1947–1948 Ibid. Milli Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O ˙ (Istanbul, 1949). ¨ ˘gretim I˙statistikleri 1948–1949 Ibid. Milli Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O (Ankara, 1950). ¨ ˘gretim I˙statistikleri 1949–1950 Ibid. Milli Eg˘itim Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O (Ankara, 1952). Bayar, Celal, S¸ark Raporu (I˙stanbul: Kaynak, 2006). ¨ stu¨ne: Gizli Belgeler, Aras¸tırmaIbid. Ku¨rtler ve Ulusal-Demokratik Mu¨cadeleleri U ¨ zge, 1993). lar, Notlar (Ankara: O ¨ zge, 2009). Ibid., Ku¨rtlere Vurulan Kelepce: S¸ark Islahat Planı (Ankara: O ¨ zzaman Said Nursıˆ, Tarihce-i Hayat (I˙stanbul: So ¨ zler Yayınevi, 1976). Bediu Berkes, Niyazi, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (New York: Routledge, 1998). ¨ l, “Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Feminizm”, in Modern Berktay, Fatmagu Tu¨rkiye’de Siyasi Du¨s¸u¨nce: Cumhuriyet’e Devreden Du¨s¸u¨nce Mirası, Tanzi¨ . Alkan, 348 – 61 mat ve Mes¸rutiyet’in Birikimi, edited by Mehmet. O ˙ ˙ (Istanbul: Iletis¸im, 2001). Bes¸ikci, I˙smail, Ku¨rtlerin Mecburi I˙skanı (Ankara: Yurt Kitap-Yayın, 1991). Bozarslan, Hamit, “Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey: from Tacit Contract to Rebellion (1919–1925)”, in Essays on the Origins of Kurdish Nationalism, edited by Abbas Vali (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2003). ¨ mmetcilik Sorunu (I˙stanbul: Ant, 1969). Bozarslan, Mehmet E., Hilafet ve U van Bruinessen, Martin and Joyce Blau, eds, Islam des Kurdes (Paris: Equipe de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les societes mediterraneennes musulmanes, 1998). van Bruinessen, M., ed., Mullas, Sufis and Heretics: The Role of Religion in Kurdish Society: Collected Articles (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2000). el-Buti, M. Said Ramazan, Babam Molla Ramazan el-Buti: Hayatı, Du¨s¸u¨nceleri, Mu¨cadelesi (I˙stanbul: Kent Yayınları, 2008). ˘layan, Mehmet, S¸ark Uleması (I˙stanbul: C ˘layan Yayınları, 1996). C ¸ ag ¸ ag Cegerxwıˆn, Hayat Hikaˆyem (I˙stanbul: Evrensel, 2003). C ¸ icek, M. Halil, S¸ark Medreselerinin Serencaˆmı (I˙stanbul: Beyan, 2009). Cleveland, William, L., A History of the Modern Middle East (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000). ˘ lu, Ali, Halk Eg˘itimi Acısından Gezici Kadın Kursları (Ankara: C ¸ obanog Unpublished MA Thesis at Ankara University, 1981). Comrie, Bernard, The Languages of the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). ˘ı. Kurulus¸undan Gu¨nu¨mu¨ze Diyanet I˙s¸leri Bas¸kanlıg˘ı Diyanet I˙s¸leri Bas¸kanlıg (Tarihce-Tes¸kilat-Hizmet ve Faaliyetler) (1924–1997) (Ankara: Diyanet I˙s¸leri ˘ı, 1999). Bas¸kanlıg ¨ z, 1990). Dursun, Turan, Kulleteyn (I˙stanbul: Akyu Emre, Gıyasettin, Medreseden Meclise, Meclisten Yassıada’ya (I˙stanbul: Kent Yayınları, 2006). ˘lu, M. S¸erif, Bu¨tu¨n Yo¨nleriyle Arabkendıˆ (I˙stanbul: Kent, 2004). Erog

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¨ cek, Fatma M., Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of the Empire: Ottoman Go Westernization and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). ˘lu, Asım, Orada Bir Ko¨y Var Uzakta: Erken Cumhuriyet Do¨neminde ¨ merliog Karao Ko¨ycu¨ So¨ylem (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2006). Keough, Leyla, ed., Hrant Dink Memorial Workshop 2009: Gender, Ethnicity and the Nation-state: Anatolia and its Neighboring Regions: Proceedings (I˙stanbul: Sabancı University, 2011). Kocak, Cemil, Umumi Mu¨fettis¸likler (1927–1952) (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2003). ——— Tek Parti Do¨neminde Muhalif Sesler (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2011). Korkusuz, S¸efik, Tezkire-i Mes¸ayih-i Amid I-II (I˙stanbul: Kent, 2004). Mardin, S¸erif, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: a Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). ——— Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of Bediu¨zzaman Said Nursi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). ˆ bihar, Ji Destpeˆkeˆ Heta ˆIro Medreseˆn Kurdan. Nu ˆ bihar, 1998, 63–4. Nu Okan, Kenan, Ko¨y Muallim Mektepleri Denemesi (Ankara, 1971). ¨ ztoprak, Sadrettin, S¸ark Medreselerinde Bir O ¨ mu¨r (I˙stanbul: Beyan, 2003). O ¨ ztu ˘an, 2008). ¨ rk, Saygı, I˙smet Pas¸a’nın Ku¨rt Raporu (I˙stanbul: Dog O ¨ nya, 2004). Pehlevi, Farah. Anılar (I˙stanbul: Du Robeson, Paul, Here I Stand (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988). ¨ lhamid II’s School for Tribes (1892– Rogan, Eugene L., “As¸iret Mektebi: Abdu 1907)”, in International Journal of Middle East Studies 28/1 (1996): 83 –107. ˘lu, Necdet, Osmanlı’dan Gu¨nu¨mu¨ze Eg˘itim Tarihi (I˙stanbul: I˙stanbul Bilgi Sakaog ¨ niversitesi Yayınları, 2003). U ¨ ylemi”, in Modern Tu¨rkiye’de Siyasi Saktanber, Ays¸e, “Kemalist Kadın Hakları So Du¨s¸u¨nce: Kemalizm, edited by Ahmet I˙nsel (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2001, 322–3). Scott, James C., Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). ¨ l, Serdar, Bilgi, Toplum, I˙ktidar: Osmanlı ve Cumhuriyet Modernles¸mesi I˙le S¸engu Kars¸ılas¸ma Su¨recinde Dog˘u Medreseleri (Hacettepe University: Unpublished Ph.D., Dissertation, 2008). S¸ims¸ek, Sefa, Bir I˙deolojik Seferberlik Deneyimi: Halkevleri 1932–1951 (I˙stanbul: ¨ niversitesi Yayınevi, 2002). ˘azici U Bog ¨ su ¨ , Milli Eg˘itim I˙statistikleri Meslek, T. C. Bas¸bakanlık Devlet I˙statistik Enstitu ¨ ˘gretim 1960– 1961 (Ankara, 1965). Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O ¨ ˘gretim 1961–1965 Ibid., Milli Eg˘itim I˙statistikleri Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O (Ankara, 1968). Ibid., Milli Eg˘itim I˙statistikleri Yaygın Eg˘itim 1967 –1974. ¨ ˘gretim 1950 –1951 (Ankara, Ibid., Maarif I˙statistikleri Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O 1957). ¨ ˘gretim 1951 –1952 (Ankara). Ibid., Maarif I˙statistikleri Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O ¨ ˘gretim 1952 –1953 (Ankara, ˙ Ibid., Maarif Istatistikleri Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek O 1956).

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¨ su ¨ , Milli Eg˘itim I˙statistikleri Meslek, Teknik ve Yu¨ksek T. C. Devlet I˙statistik Enstitu ¨ ˘ Ogretim 1965 –1967. T. C. Maarif Vekaleti, Ko¨y Kursları Yo¨netmelig˘i (Ankara: Maarif Basımevi, 1958). Ibid., 4. Milli Eg˘itim S¸urası (1949). ˘i, Ko¨y Kadınları Gezici Kursları Mu¨fredat Programı (Ankara: T. C. Maarif Vekillig Maarif Matbaası, 1942). ˘itim Bakanlıg ˘ı, Gezici Ko¨y Demircilig˘i ve Marangozlug˘u Kursu T. C. Milli Eg ˘itim Basımevi, 1949). Yo¨netmelig˘i (Ankara: Milli Eg Ibid., Cumhuriyetin 50. Yılında Rakam ve Grafiklerle Milli Eg˘itimimiz (I˙stanbul: ˘itim Basımevi, 1973). Milli Eg ¨ lhadi, Botan Medreselerinin Piri: Molla Muhammed Zivingıˆ Timurtas¸, Abdu (I˙stanbul: Kent, 2008). ˘i”, in S¸arkiyat I˙lmi Aras¸tırmalar ——— “Molla Muhammed Zivingi ve I˙lmi Kis¸ilig Dergisi 1 (2009): 104–20. ˘lu, “Modernization and Gender: a History of Toktas¸, S¸ule and Dilek Cindog Girls’ Technical Education in Turkey since 1927”, in Women’s History Review 15/5 (2006): 737–49. Tuncay, Mete, Tu¨rkiye Cumhuriyeti’nde Tek-Partili Yo¨netimin Kurulması (1923– 1931) (Ankara: Yurt Yayıncılık, 1981). ¨ rkyılmaz, Zeynep, White Women’s Burden: Educating the “Mountain Tu Flowers” of Dersim. A talk delivered at the Hrant Dink Memorial Workshop: Gender, Ethnicity and the Nation-State: Anatolia and Its Neighboring Regions (I˙stanbul: Sabancı University, 2009). ¨ stel, Fu ¨ sun. I˙mparatorluktan Ulus-Devlete Tu¨rk Milliyetcilig˘i: Tu¨rk Ocakları U (1912–1931) (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 1997). Yalcın-Heckmann, Lale, “Ethnic Islam and nationalism among the Kurds in Turkey”, in Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics and Literature in a Secular State, edited by R. Tapper (London: I.B.Tauris, 1991). ˘en, Mesut, “The Turkish State Discourse and the Exclusion of Kurdish Yeg Identity”, in Middle Eastern Studies 32/2 (1996): 216–29. ——— Devlet So¨yleminde Ku¨rt Sorunu (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2006). ˘enog ˘lu, Meyda, Colonial Fantasies: towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism Yeg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Yes¸il, Sevim, Unfolding Republican Patriarchy: the Case of Young Kurdish Women at the Girls’ Vocational Boarding School in Elazıg˘ (Ankara: Unpublished Master’s Thesis at Middle East Technical University, 2003). Yıldız, Ahmet, “Ne Mutlu Tu¨rku¨m Diyebilene:” Tu¨rk Ulusal Kimlig˘inin EtnoSeku¨ler Sınırları (1919–1938) (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2001). ˆ rıˆvan: ¨ ksel, Metin, Kolana Wes¸engıˆra, Xaniyeˆ 3, Apartameˆnta Hijmara 6, E Yu ˆ Cemıˆla Celıˆl ra Kurdolojıˆ uˆ Malbata Celıˆlan: Hevpeyvıˆn bi Celıˆleˆ Celıˆl u (I˙stanbul: Avesta, 2014). ¨ ksel, Mu ¨ fid, Ku¨rdistan’da Deg˘is¸im Su¨reci (Ankara: Sor, 1993). Yu ¨ rcher, Eric Jan, Political Opposition in the Early Turkish Republic: the Progressive Zu Republican Party, 1924– 1925 (Leiden: Brill, 1991).

CHAPTER 5

I˙stanbul Confidential: Heroin, Espionage and Politics in Cold War Turkey, 1945 – 60 1 Ryan Gingeras

A long-standing, but often troubled, partnership binds the United States and the Republic of Turkey. Shared national security interests, first brought on by the onset of the Cold War, lie at the heart of this relationship.2 As “the bulwark” of NATO’s Middle Eastern defense against the Soviet Union, Washington, under both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, came to invest vast amounts of money and attention into Turkey’s national security.3 American support for Turkey’s various military and domestic security services has historically possessed many dimensions. In addition to the building of permanent military bases and supplying armament and equipment, Washington has dispatched a great host of advisors and trainers to Turkey since the 1950s. Comparative cases suggest that the use of advisors as a means of imposing structural reform upon Turkey’s security apparatus has served two general strategic purposes. Providing American know-how in technical or organizational matters clearly has allowed for more direct American influence over elements of Turkey’s domestic and foreign security services. Moreover, the presence of American trainers serves as a means of inculcating local and national officials with American values and methods, thereby further sustaining American interests in the long term.4 As seen in

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other pieces in this volume, the building of the Turkish – American relationship is confluence with other aspects of Turkey’s general integration into the global marketplace and contemporary state norms. This essay provides an intimate survey of the construction and early evolution of one element of America’s security relationship with Turkey: the development of joint counter-narcotics operations in the city of I˙stanbul. In exploring how American officials came to influence the policing of narcotics trafficking in Turkey’s largest city between the years 1948 and 1960, this piece hopes to contribute to two specific historiographical issues. Firstly, the research presented here adds to the growing body of literature on the history of US antinarcotics policies on the world stage. Secondly, it attempts to shed new light on the relationship between Turkey’s narcotics economy and the evolution of the modern Turkish state. Since the 1960s, a number of historians have investigated the international nature of Washington’s anti-narcotics policies. William O. Walker III has convincingly demonstrated, in the case of American policies in Asia, that geostrategic and security interests have long influenced American approaches towards a global ban on narcotics trafficking.5 Early failures and difficulties have not dulled Washington’s pursuit of its anti-narcotics policies.6 Rather, by the beginning of the Cold War, the scope of Washington’s efforts to combat narcotics has grown with each passing decade. Accepting American standards and practices toward the drug trade has come to define Washington’s approach towards bilateral relations across the globe. Still, as such scholars as Paul Gootenberg, Luis Astorga and Eduardo Saenz Rovner have noted in different studies in Latin America, American efforts over the course of the twentieth century have repeatedly been met by mixed results.7 Studies of American antinarcotics activities in Asia further attest to the lack of tangible progress in halting the production or international trafficking of narcotics.8 In spite of the general failure of American attempts at halting the international drug trade, Washington’s enduring confrontation with narcotics has provided a vehicle with which other aspects of American national security policy have been addressed. Jonathan

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Marshal has shown that anti-narcotics operations have provided a means to equip and support counter-insurgency efforts in various corners of the world.9 Direct American involvement in policing narcotics trafficking abroad also successfully shrouded intelligence gathering and clandestine operations for the CIA. Finally, Washington’s enforcement of its anti-narcotics policies has resulted in an amplification of American influence worldwide as laws and policing institutions produced at home in the United States are replicated abroad.10 American advisors and officers, like the ones profiled in this essay, are critical to this mimetic process. The conduct, experiences and insights of American agents in I˙stanbul during the early stages of the Cold War provide a compelling case study of the multifaceted nature of US involvement in policing narcotics abroad. Turkey’s purported role as the primary source of heroin consumed by American addicts led to the placing of US officials in Turkey, marking a significant escalation in Washington’s commitment to combat narcotics at the source. The initiation of American counter-narcotics operations in I˙stanbul in the 1950s reflected the expanding postwar reach of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), the grandfather of the contemporary Drug Enforcement Administration. Geopolitical and national security concerns framed FBN activities in Turkey, seeing the country as a crucial front in fighting the drug trade (which could potentially weaken the United States and its Cold War allies) and the growing transnational threat of organized crime. This mindset, which entailed the propagation of American law enforcement methods and the promotion of clandestine intelligence operations, defined the movements and goals of FBN agents in Turkey between 1948 and 1960. There are painfully few studies of the history of the Turkish drug trade. Even though the production of opium has long been an important part of Turkey’s political economy, there are virtually no studies of how opium producers and traders have shaped the making of modern Turkey. Politicians in Turkey, according to F. Cengiz Erdinc, have historically paid very little attention to narcotics, in terms of its domestic use, transnational trade and its effect upon

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national security.11 Instead, Turkey’s national security interests remain almost exclusively framed in regional diplomatic and military terms or with respect to violent domestic movements.12 Similarly, little attention is paid to narcotics in the few histories of policing in the Republic of Turkey (as well as the Ottoman Empire).13 The general absence of research into the role of narcotics trafficking and antinarcotics efforts is striking considering the contemporary relevance of both of these issues. In addition to the threats posed by narcotics trafficking to national security (such as the role of drug profits in financing domestic Kurdish terrorism), it is now quite clear that the drug trade has contributed to the building of legitimate right-wing movements and the expansion of Turkey’s clandestine security apparatus.14 This essay is less a study of the success or failure of Turkish antinarcotics operations as it is about the politics of narcotics and mechanics of counter-narcotics efforts in Turkey. At the heart of this piece is the relationship formed between members of the FBN and Turkey’s Directorate of Public Security (Genel Emniyet Mu¨du¨rlu¨˘gu¨ or DPS). Interactions between these two agencies were contentious from virtually their first meeting. American reports filed between 1948 and 1960 tell of repeated acts of incompetence, duplicity and brutality on the part of Turkish officers. By their own admission, American agents were hopelessly dependent upon their Turkish counterparts for information or to make arrests. Both agencies, despite their mutual misgivings, used one another to conduct offthe-books intelligence operations. By the time the Turkish military seized power in Turkey in 1960, it is clear that the FBN tolerated, and DPS enabled, the I˙stanbul heroin trade as much the two bodies sought to hinder it. A close reading of how both Turkish and American officials approached narcotics trafficking at this stage in the Cold War affirms the degree to which law enforcement officials (particularly in counter-narcotics efforts) constrained their efforts for the sake of larger national security prerogatives. The case present here in this essay provides instructive examples of how the so-called “war on drugs,” even at this embryonic stage, ultimately served to promote American hegemony in Turkey and beyond.

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SETTING THE SCENE: POLITICS AND POLICING IN POSTWAR TURKEY The conclusion of World War II can rightly be called the beginning of a new era in the Republic of Turkey. Despite having avoided the conflict, Turkey continued to suffer from the political and ideological fallout that accompanied the state’s establishment in 1923. A rigid, autocratic one-party system of governance instituted by founding ¨ rk continued to reign at the war’s end. President Mustafa Kemal Atatu After holding power for over 20 years, the Republican Peoples’ Party had vigorously and often violently sought to transform Anatolian society through a series of nationalizing, modernizing and centralizing measures meant to undo or erase the land’s Ottoman imperial past.15 In addition to the oppression of Ankara’s reforms, two decades of continued economic underdevelopment soured popular perceptions of republican rule. By 1945, the country was ripe for a change in the political winds. Among those who helped to steer the emerging postwar order in ¨ n. His path Turkey was a career bureaucrat by the name of Kemal Aygu to power, as well as his precipitous fall from grace, is both illustrative of his times and critical to the specific history of Turkish – American anti-narcotics cooperation. Although little is known about his parents, it is evident that Kemal benefited greatly from the fame and exploits of his uncle, Refik Koraltan, a hero of the Turkish War of Independence (1919 – 22) and seminal member of the early repub¨ n also chose the budding lican government.16 Like his uncle, Aygu Turkish bureaucracy as his avenue into politics. After a brief stint ¨ n entered the Directorate of working as a district administrator, Aygu Public Safety. Before 1950, it is not clear what sort of duties fell under his purview.17 As a dependency of the Ministry of the Interior, the DPS managed a broad array of policing concerns exclusive of pedestrian crimes. A significant portion of directorate’s interests was of a political nature, including the monitoring of communists, revolutionaries, foreigners and minorities (including, but not exclusively, Kurds). The directorate’s jurisdiction supposedly did not extend to activities abroad, but one specific branch of the department did

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collect information from Turkish businessmen, merchants and tourists venturing out of the country.18 ¨ n’s years in the Directorate of Public Safety speak to Kemal Aygu the Turkish state’s historical obsession with political security. Rebellion, separatism and banditry were endemic to much of the Anatolian countryside at the outset of the Republic’s creation. Old Ottoman anxieties towards religious and ethnic minorities persisted into the 1950s.19 The onset of the Cold War and the emergence of a more assertive Soviet Union amplified Turkish paranoia. Turkish participation in the Korean War helped to heighten the potential threat of Soviet aggression.20 Despite their diminutive size as an official party, Turkish communists gleaned much attention in the Turkish press.21 With the arrival of tens of thousands of Turkish immigrants forced out Bulgaria between 1950 and 1953, it appears that local law enforcement officials in I˙stanbul, and elsewhere, seemingly gave greater credence to the native (and largely overblown) threat of a communist takeover.22 DPS anxiety towards Communist activity in I˙stanbul no doubt ¨ n’s mind than policing weighed more heavily on Kemal Aygu narcotics. Illegal drug use by Turkish citizens appears to have held even less significance. According to both American and Turkish officials, no “drug epidemic” confronted the Turkish state during the postwar period. Those few in I˙stanbul who were put in prison for smoking hashish or copping a hit of opium tended to come from the ˘lu, Galata or Tophane.23 Most of the seedier parts of town like Beyog resources the DPS devoted towards narcotics trafficking seem to have been levied at ports or on Turkey’s borders. Towns like Kilis on the Turkish/Syrian frontier thrived off of the illicit trade in opium (as well as the influx of goods forbidden under Turkey’s rigid statist economy). Locals in Kilis and elsewhere resisted the constraining trade conditions since borders, as well as the customs and controls that accompanied their imposition, had only recently been established with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.24 ¨ n’s big promotion occurred in June of 1950 when he was Aygu elevated to head the I˙stanbul branch of the Directorate of Public Safety.25 It is not a coincidence that such a rise in the ranks of the department occurred within a month of the critical election of

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1950. On 14 May, Turkish voters swept the Democratic Party into power in the first open election in the country’s history. The ¨ n’s uncle, Democratic victory concomitantly benefited Kemal Aygu Refik Koraltan, who helped to establish the Democratic Party in 1946 and, as a result, became president of Turkish Grand National Assembly for the next ten years. Within two years of assuming leadership over the I˙stanbul branch, ¨ n would again be promoted, this time to head the entire Kemal Aygu Directorate of Public Safety. His tenure within the DPS made him a fixture of I˙stanbul’s political landscape, a status that would result in his election as mayor of the city in 1958. Together with the Prime ¨ n helped to oversee one of Minister of Turkey, Adnan Menderes, Aygu the most dramatic “urban renewal” projects the city of I˙stanbul had ever experienced.26 The capriciousness with which I˙stanbul was “modernized” mirrored the Democratic Party’s grander ambition to solidify its power over the country. Despite coming to power after decades of autocratic rule under the Republican People’s Party, Menderes and the Democratic establishment resorted to many of the dictatorial practices favored by their predecessors (such as rigging elections and curtailing freedom of the press). Such designs earned the Menderes’ regime bitter enemies among the Turkish military and elements of the former republican regime.27 ¨ n’s ability to straddle politics and policing in both Kemal Aygu I˙stanbul and Turkey made him a pivotal figure in the progression of American and Turkish anti-narcotics operations during the 1950s. However, his actual contribution to these operations appears more ambivalent than his titles and authority would otherwise suggest. SPIES AND NARCS: TURKISH DOPE, CLANDESTINE SERVICE AND THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF NARCOTICS America’s crusade against narcotics predates the FBN’s arrival to Turkey by almost half a century. Despite the significant role played by American merchants and investors in the construction of the global opium trade during the nineteenth century, evangelical and progressive pressure from within the United States compelled Washington to be among the first signatory participants of

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International Opium Convention held in Shanghai in 1909.28 Although the passage of the anti-opiate Harrison Act preceded prohibition on alcohol by six years, Washington was slow to create a specific governmental arm to police the trafficking of opiates and other narcotics. When the Department of Treasury ultimately established such an agency in 1930, responsibility for managing the newly dubbed Federal Bureau of Narcotics fell to a one time railroad investigator and diplomat named Harry J. Anslinger.29 Washington’s specific interest in Turkish narcotics production and trafficking first began in the late 1920s. As one of the main centers of opium production for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey greeted Western calls for prohibition on opiates with hostility. Through the 1920s, Ankara resisted calls from the League of Nations to curtail or ban the production of opium, claiming that legal sales of morphine were a vital national resource.30 American involvement in Turkish opium issues intensified in the 1930s. Public lobbying efforts by such crusaders as Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia, who personally identified Turkish opium as a source of addiction in New York City, provided some impetus for this engagement.31 Police investigations and news coverage of high-profile traffickers, such as Elie Eliopoulos and August “Little Augie” Del Gracio, also attracted the attention of American officials tasked with policing the flow of narcotics into the United States.32 With the FBN’s Harry Anslinger in the lead, Washington ultimately forced Ankara to establish a national monopoly on opium production in 1931.33 However, as the 1930s progressed, the Turkish opium monopoly proved ineffective and corruptible. Anslinger’s weight as a crusader against narcotics and a Washington insider was further amplified after the outbreak of World War II. As the threat of the Axis powers eclipsed all other national priorities, Anslinger furnished the first international American intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (or OSS), with young agents to train in clandestine operations.34 Intelligence gathering and clandestine operations were not alien to Anslinger and his bureau before the OSS recruited several key FBN agents. Harry J. Anslinger himself possessed a background in

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espionage, which he acquired during the immediate aftermath of World War I.35 Even before the outbreak of war in 1941, the FBN worked closely with US Treasury and State Department officials stationed abroad to gather intelligence on drug shipments and other narcotics activities. Anslinger’s intelligence network in China assumed particular importance as the US military anticipated a coming conflict with the Japanese empire.36 With the conclusion of World War II, the FBN returned to the struggle against narcotics with greater clout and resources. Between 1951 and 1960, Anslinger would commission the opening of permanent FBN offices in Rome (1951), Beirut (1954) and Paris (1959). The establishment of these foreign bases of operation came in recognition of the emerging flow of heroin out of the eastern Mediterranean and of Turkey as the vital source of raw opium production. End of year FBN reports submitted to Congress after 1945 tell of an increase in Turkish opium seized at US ports (eclipsing opium derived from Iran, India and other sources).37 In April 1950, Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire declared that “a vast heroin and cocaine ring operating in the United States had its origins in I˙stanbul.” Although the claim was officially disputed as an exaggeration, the governor of I˙stanbul, as well as elements of the Turkish press, admitted that drug trafficking out of I˙stanbul was indeed a problem meriting greater Turkish study of “American legislation on narcotics offenses”.38 The fight against communism imbued the FBN’s approach towards narcotics. Anslinger personally equated the use of illicit drugs with personal susceptibility to communist propaganda.39 Some within the US Congress agreed with this appraisal.40 With respect to the greater Middle East, Anslinger and his subordinates proposed an aggressive transnational policy of containment and intervention in order to halt the trafficking of narcotics and secure support from opium-producing nations. If Washington succeeded specifically in compelling the Republic of Turkey to halt narcotics production and transshipment with its borders, the threat of mass addiction and, accordingly, communist infiltration would greatly diminish within the United States, Turkey and other regional allies (such as Iran).41

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Key in initiating FBN operations in southern Europe, Turkey and the Levant was one of the bureau’s most promising agents, George H. White. He was a prewar veteran of the FBN whose exploits were the subject of a major Hollywood picture entitled To the Ends of the Earth, starring Dick Powell.42 The attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 eventually compelled him, with Anslinger’s permission, to join the OSS. Although White spent much of his brief stint in the OSS working on secret “truth drug” experiments (which eventually led to the CIA’s notorious MK Ultra program), the FBN’s star agent also came into contact with OSS (later CIA) agents who operated in Turkey during the war.43 It is perhaps because of these OSS connections that Anslinger chose White for the FBN’s first in-country operations in Turkey. In June 1948, White arrived in I˙stanbul as a part of an informal operation to gather information on narcotics trafficking in the region. His presence in Turkey was leaked to the press after he took part in a local police sting on a downtown I˙stanbul bar.44 The arrests resulted in a minor publicity coup for Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics after it was claimed that over a million dollars in heroin was seized in the raid.45 White’s brief trip to I˙stanbul also entailed forging local contacts. One of the individuals he met was a journalist by the name of Rıza C ¸ andır, a former OSS informant with ties to the Turkish underworld.46 Although not mentioned in his personal report to Anslinger, it also appears that he met with Kemal ¨ n.47 Aygu ¨ n’s connection to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was Aygu reestablished a month after becoming head of the I˙stanbul branch. ¨ n met with Charles Siragusa, Towards the end of July of 1950, Aygu Henry Anslinger’s newest FBN emissary and agent-at-large assigned to Turkey. Charles Siragusa, like White, was also a self-fancied celebrity crime-fighter. As the founder of the FBN’s Rome office, he played a critical role in the FBN’s campaign to nab Charles “Lucky” Luciano, one of the most notorious Mafia figures in US history.48 Siragusa, like White, joined the OSS during the war. His service in the OSS, as well as his expertise in organized crime, later made him a valued CIA asset. ¨ n did not go well. Charles Siragusa’s first meeting with Kemal Aygu Although he found the I˙stanbul chief cordial, Siragusa’s hopes of

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quickly establishing a cooperative relationship regarding antinarcotics operations were dashed. Though hesitant to admit it, Siragusa went so far as to confess to Anslinger that his Turkish counterpart perhaps had set him up before he even arrived in the city. Reports of an impending secret American anti-narcotics mission to I˙stanbul were circulating in local papers on the very day Siragusa ¨ n, local police landed.49 Two days before his meeting with Aygu arrested one of the most notorious traffickers in the city, I˙hsan Sekban.50 However, when Siragusa broached Sekban’s apprehension ¨ n, he was flatly told that Sekban would probably never see with Aygu ˙ trial. Ihsan Sekban possessed the best lawyers in the city and had friends in high places. In other words, in Siragusa’s estimation, the I˙stanbul police not only betrayed his presence to the press but also placed the city’s most notorious trafficker under arrest as a way to save face.51 ¨ n’s assessment of I˙hsan Sekban’s influence in I˙stanbul was Aygu among Siragusa’s first lessons in the history and character of I˙stanbul’s drug trafficking networks. Siragusa knew next to nothing about organized crime in Turkey upon his arrival to the city. His first impressions of the major traffickers in I˙stanbul and the trade routes used to funnel opium, morphine and heroin out of the country came as a result of a local CIA briefing.52 Over the following weeks and months ahead, Siragusa and other FBN agents built upon the CIA’s initial intelligence reports through interviews with paid informants and policemen alike. Within two years of the FBN’s first arrival to Turkey, agents compiled a fairly detailed picture of I˙stanbul’s heroin underworld. It is now clear that Anslinger’s decision to send White and Siragusa occurred at a critical moment in the history of the FBN. As the threat of the Soviet Union and “the global Communist conspiracy” began to overshadow all other national security concerns during the early 1950s, Anslinger sought to maintain the relevance of his crusade against narcotics. Among his chief strategies was to raise both public and congressional awareness of the perils posed by the twin dangers of the drug trade and the growing influence of organized crime. He would argue that both threats, like Communism, were hazards of international proportions.53 Since Turkey had long been an epicenter

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of the global opium trade, Anslinger made it a priority to combat, as well as to understand, the I˙stanbul underworld. UNDERSTANDING THE I˙STANBUL MOB FBN reports from the 1950s paint the drug trafficking networks of the period as a small but growing sector of I˙stanbul’s underworld. While cocaine and hashish circulated in and outside of the city, the biggest source of revenue for I˙stanbul’s narcotics syndicates was heroin. Before World War II, the sale and transshipment of Turkish opiates was a trade few natives of I˙stanbul plied. Outside of a slew of international shippers and wholesalers (who included Europeans, Americans and Japanese), there were only a handful of local merchants and businessmen involved in drug trafficking.54 With the gradual departure of foreign traders and investors from Turkey (who were mostly forced out with the institution of the Turkish state monopoly on opium in 1931), the ranks of locals involved in the trade grew.55 According to the FBN, ethnic and regional ties typified the construction of the postwar trafficking milieu. Prominent hoods like ¨ seyin I˙hsan Sekban, as well as other major brokers such as Hu ˘lu and Nazım Kalkavan, tended to be individuals drawn from Eminog Turkey’s Laz minority, a Georgian ethnic group found along the country’s northeastern shores.56 These three individuals held particular sway over the outflow of refined and unrefined Turkish opiates to Western Europe and the United States. Some, like ˘lu, worked directly with Lebanese and French-Corsican Eminog traffickers in constructing the infamous “French Connection” heroin pipeline from the eastern Mediterranean to North America.57 Others involved in the trade operated as freewheeling wholesalers, selling raw and refined opium to seemingly random Western sailors, Syrian smugglers or Iranian importers. Success in the drug trade allowed several wealthy traffickers to diversify their economic interests. Informants claimed that I˙hsan Sekban dealt in real estate and guns.58 ˘lu also garnered a noted reputation in local real ¨ seyin Eminog Hu estate and as a smuggler of nylons, coffee, nuts and cigarettes.59 Perhaps most intriguingly, Nazim Kalkavan’s role in the heroin trade

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came as a result of his ownership of a major shipping line. Despite the company he may have kept as a result of his more nefarious interests, Kalkavan was a graduate of Oxford University and an acquaintance of Ian Fleming, famed writer of the James Bond series.60 ¨ seyin Compared to Nazim Kalkavan, I˙hsan Sekban and Hu ˘ lu possessed more subtle connections to power and Eminog ˘lu became a legitimacy. At some point before his passing, Eminog multi-million dollar investor in a state-run art academy in I˙stanbul. Although local authorities did manage to put him on trial a few times over the course of his career, a two-year prison sentence was perhaps ˘lu ultimately received.61 the worst of the punishments Eminog ˘lu’s partner, Ali Osman Tu ¨ seyin Eminog ¨ ter, received Meanwhile, Hu virtually no public attention. Although it is unclear what kind of effect it had on his status within the I˙stanbul underworld, FBN ¨ ter was a former officer in the agents conspicuously remarked that Tu Turkish military police.62 I˙hsan Sekban, it seems, perhaps exercised the greatest amount of influence among legitimate members of the Turkish political establishment. Although Sekban was convicted for heroin trafficking after his July 1950 arrest, he was later released on appeal.63 Several officers later confided to their FBN counterparts that Sekban’s influence also extended south to I˙zmir, one of his main bases of operation, where he held both the chief of police and the mayor in his pocket.64 The experiences Siragusa and other FBN agents accrued as investigators in the United States clearly conditioned the ways in which the narcotics underworld in I˙stanbul was perceived. FBN operations in Turkey occurred precisely at a time when the US government began to publicly assess the strength and nature of organized criminal activity at home. Before the 1950s, American scholars and officials used the term “organized crime” to describe a select number of criminal enterprises operated by networks of individuals (be it theft, prostitution or smuggling). “Organized crime” gradually took on a new meaning with the advent of the Cold War. In an era that featured rising waves of hysteria over the threat of communist infiltrators lurking within the folds of American politics and society, law enforcement officials increasingly adopted the concept of “organized crime” as a term describing discrete bands of

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individuals perpetrating national and international criminal conspiracies.65 In other words, as Michael Woodiwiss puts it, who was committing crimes took on greater significance than what crimes were being committed.66 Henry J. Anslinger, Charles Siragusa and other key figures within the Federal Bureau of Narcotics were among the leading American officials to promote this revised notion of organized crime. As witnesses before Senate investigations on organized crime and narcotics, FBN officials testified that the “American mafia” was a singular organization defined by ethnic (i.e., Italian) ties that controlled a plethora of illegal activities with an almost totalitarian grasp. As an “alien conspiracy” originating outside of the United States, American organized crime, FBN agents pointed out, worked hand-in-hand with analogous criminal syndicates abroad. Cumulatively, since the 1960s, the American definition of organized crime, which emphasizes the centrality of coherent, conspiratorial “ethnic” syndicates that dominate a coterie of illicit trades, has been adopted by foreign governments and international agencies as a model approach in investigating and describing “mafias” worldwide.67 In the case of Turkey, Charles Siragusa and other FBN agents came to I˙stanbul looking for gangs. This approach led American agents in the field to “rationalize” their understanding of the I˙stanbul underworld. Networks of traffickers, for example, were described as bounded and discrete syndicates with defined chieftains and members (as opposed to looser networks of traders and suppliers). Like “Cosa Nostra” back in the United States, the FBN emphasized the “ethnic minority” Laz character of Turkish narcotics traffickers. FBN intelligence reports at times contradict the perceived ethnic exclusivity of the gangs they pursued. Until the 1960s, it appears that several prominent heroin-dealing networks were composed of members drawn from a variety of native and foreign ethnic and religious groups.68 To this point, it appears that the FBN witnessed a dramatic transition in the character of the underworld during the 1950s. According to one agent in the field, local police officials were supporting the ascendency of Muslim traffickers in I˙stanbul as a way of doing away with the older Christian and Jewish networks.69 In

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hindsight, one could interpret this alleged favoritism shown towards Muslim traffickers as part of a general and long-standing governmental policy aimed at undermining the economic clout of non-Muslims in Turkish society.70 Yet from the perspective of those FBN agents then in the field, such machinations were evidence of a much more profound trend. Agents recognized that their insights into the gangs of I˙stanbul were tempered and guided by the information they received from both DPS officers and local informants. Moreover, Siragusa and others gradually came to understand that their interlocutors often contrived and created the realities presented to FBN agents. In short, as one combs through FBN intelligence files, it is clear that local police (as well as politicians) often worked in unison with the city’s local color. POLICE WORK: THE FBN AND THE DPS RELATIONSHIP, 1948 – 60 Relations between members of the FBN and the DPS evolved through the 1950s on an ad-hoc basis. None of the American officers stationed in Turkey had any fluency in Turkish. Although translators may have been present for some meetings, most conversations and briefings between the two sides seem to have been conducted in a variety of languages (often Italian or French, two languages some FBN agents ¨ n and spoke with various degrees of fluency). Occasionally, Aygu other DFS officers passed on original Turkish reports detailing the names, biographies, whereabouts and activities of major traffickers.71 In most cases, however, intelligence sharing, as well as coordination of operations, appeared to have been conducted by word of mouth or on the basis of personal relationships. ¨n While in the presence of his American counterparts, Aygu appeared thankful for the support he received from the FBN and repeatedly express interest in adopting more “Americanized” methods of policing. As head of the DPS, he attempted to centralize the directorate’s power and increase intelligence sharing among its various branches.72 He, along with other leading officials in Ankara, voiced support for reforming Turkey’s penal laws with respect to narcotics violations.73 In return, Charles Siragusa personally invited ¨ n’s men to be trained in American counter-narcotics several of Aygu

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methods at a FBN facility in Italy.74 Alongside specific changes to the narcotics bureau attached to the DPS, a more general wave of reforms swept over Turkey’s policing infrastructure. Under the direction of a American civilian advisor, the organization, labor codes and equipment of the DPS were upgraded and regularized.75 ¨ n’s pledges to reform policing and legal frameworks along Aygu American lines came at a time of dramatic US involvement in political, economic and military matters in Turkey. American pressure for more open and transparent elections in Turkey may have contributed to the victory of Adnan Menderes’ Democratic Party in 1950.76 Millions of dollars of direct military aid from Washington led to the construction of large military bases (such as I˙ncirlik in southern Turkey) and the modernization and provisioning of various elements of Turkey’s armed forces.77 In the hopes of boosting Turkey’s agricultural sector, Washington provided American-made capital goods, such as tractors, to Turkish farmers and financed the construction of dams and roads.78 Like the reformation of the DPS with respect to policing narcotics, security concerns generally buttressed American aid programs in Turkey. American planners reasoned Turkey, was safer from a Communist takeover with a more democratic political system, a more robust economy and a stronger military. In turn, the United States and its NATO allies were less vulnerable to Soviet aggression with a generally more secure Turkey as a stable partner. Yet, from virtually the beginning of the FBN’s efforts in Turkey, it was clear that the DFS approached drug trafficking in unsettling ways. George White’s escapade in I˙stanbul in 1948 was the first American experience with the underworld’s relationship with the police. The main target in the 1948 case, a pimp and heroin dealer named Vasil Arcan, was specifically suggested to White by the head of the I˙stanbul narcotics bureau. It was later discovered, after he was released from police custody, that Arcan was a regular police informant.79 Other concerns regarding the behavior and methods of the DPS troubled American agents in Turkey. Suspects were habitually beaten while in I˙stanbul police custody, a fact that often led sympathetic juries to acquit suspects caught red-handed.80 Informants working with the FBN agents also had to fear being arrested, harassed or

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shaken down for money by I˙stanbul policemen (including those DPS officers already handsomely paid by the US government for collaborating with American agents). American Consul General Fredrick Merrill specifically warned Siragusa and the FBN against ¨ n, claiming, “I am not sure I trust any dealing with the Kemal Aygu Turkish chief of police, particularly when salaries are so low!”81 No venture into the countryside could be undertaken without the ¨ n’s two most loyal officers in presence of at least one of Kemal Aygu the DPS, Ali Eren and Galip Labernas.82 The FBN’s reliance upon Labernas and Eren as case-making agents would also be tested (after it was discovered they too browbeat informants for money and information), yet ranking officers like Siragusa made it clear to his subordinates that the two Turks were to be trusted since they were ¨ n’s men.83 Aygu To counteract the double-dealing and incompetence perceived among the I˙stanbul police, Siragusa and other agents in the FBN relied upon their own initiative to make cases and gather information. In lieu of direct support from law enforcement, paid informants, often active drug traffickers, provided the only medium with which American agents could gain any independent insight into the I˙stanbul underworld. Charles Siragusa’s favorite informant, a ¨ snu ¨ Soysal, was perhaps the chief source of chemist by the name of Hu information for American agents in Turkey. Soysal was a member of a large extended family of heroin traffickers based in I˙stanbul. After Siragusa made his acquaintance in the summer of 1950, American ¨ snu ¨ from prosecution (despite DPS pressure and agents protected Hu harassment) and believed his claims that he had retired from the drug trade (despite an official DPS police report ranking him among the top traffickers in I˙stanbul).84 FBN frustration with the services and support offered by Kemal ¨ n and the I˙stanbul branch of the DPS steadily mounted between Aygu 1950 and 1955. Repeated pledges to provide more intelligence on drug trafficking to American agents arriving in I˙stanbul were rarely ¨ n to head the national fulfilled.85 In 1952, Ankara appointed Aygu ¨ n also was appointed governor for DPS office. Simultaneously, Aygu ¨ n’s time and the province of Ankara. For the next three years, Aygu commitment to American efforts in Turkey were naturally limited (to

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the great displeasure of the FBN agents in the field).86 Replacing ¨ n as chief of the I˙stanbul branch of the DPS was another Kemal Aygu veteran of the force, Alaattin Eris¸. It was later asserted that he, like ¨ n, received his promotion due to his association with a close Aygu compatriot in the capital (namely, Namık Gedik, the Minister of the Interior). Eris¸’s arrogance and bombast further soured already strained relations with American agents. After five years in country, no one from FBN had put together a case against a major I˙stanbul trafficker. News from the Turkish countryside was even worse; American agents touring the Anatolian hinterland reported that the government’s opium monopoly had little force of law among rural opium producers or sellers. Police in several rural towns, like Kilis, Iskanderun and Gaziantep, were either powerless to stop the trade or in the pocket of local traffickers.87 ¨ n’s career received an unexpected In September 1955, Kemal Aygu boost. Inaction by the police during a series of anti-Greek pogroms in I˙stanbul resulted in Eris¸’s dismissal as head of the I˙stanbul branch of ¨ n and Siragusa warmly greeted this change in the DPS.88 Both Aygu administration. Early that year, it had come to the attention of American officials that a former member of I˙stanbul’s city council, Naki Hıncal, had posed as a police officer and attempted to shake down an FBN informant for money. Officer Ali Eren, a DPS narcotics ¨ n loyalist, informed the FBN that Hıncal and agent and an Aygu Alaattin Eris¸ were close allies and that Naki Hıncal was personally ¨ n confirmed the story and invested in the drug trade.89 Kemal Aygu further implicated Eris¸ as a friend and confederate of I˙hsan Sekban.90 The American reaction to these revelations were fairly muted; one officer in the field had gathered that Eris¸ had consistently and deliberately hindered FBN investigations in I˙stanbul.91 Yet it was clear to Siragusa that such admissions of official corruption and complicity in narcotics trafficking were not pained confessions for ¨ n. Kemal Aygu ¨ n, Siragusa surmised, hated Eris¸ and wanted him Aygu removed. When an officer friendlier to US interests replaced Eris¸, ¨ n formally left his position as governor of Ankara to resume fullAygu time duties as head of the DPS.92 Once the dust from the September 1955 pogroms settled, Alaattin Eris¸ also landed a new position within the Ministry of the Interior as a provincial administrator. Before

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departing I˙stanbul altogether, Charles Siragusa suggested that Eris¸ could be hired as a paid informant due to his many contacts within the I˙stanbul underworld.93 In the run-up to Eris¸’s dismissal, agents based in the city gradually began to lay plans for a new approach towards combating Turkish heroin. Rather than target the main kingpins of the trade, greater investigative resources were devoted to apprehending traffickers transporting and selling raw opium in the countryside.94 Optically, this new tact produced the FBN’s first high-profile arrest in the country. In December of 1954, a joint operation comprising both ¨ zsayar and 26 Turkish and American officers apprehended Ahmet O other traffickers outside of Adana with over 400 kilos of raw opium, morphine and heroin.95 An “internal trends” report dealing with ¨ zsayar case in part Turkey explicitly states that the success of the O ¨ n and Eren were minimally hinged on the fact that both Aygu involved.96 By the end of 1955, the FBN invested virtually all of its resources in developing cases outside of the city. An ongoing lack of results spawned a detailed internal assessment of the FBN’s activities in Turkey in 1958. According to Paul Knight, a veteran of FBN investigations in both Lebanon and Turkey, several factors inhibited American agents from making cases in I˙stanbul. For one thing, the fact that most top traffickers in Turkey comprised an exclusively set of ethnic Laz migrants prevented outsiders, be they Americans or most Turks, from infiltrating major heroin operations. Problems also beset American attempts to make low-level arrests. Turkish officers in the DPS narcotics bureau made it clear to Knight that their paid informants only ratted out small time competitors while still maintaining a heavy hand in the drug trade. Even a long time informant like ¨ snu ¨ Soysal would never turn over evidence related to high-level Hu traffickers to the FBN since he too was still involved in moving product abroad. Despite the apparent impossibility of the tasks placed upon FBN agents in I˙stanbul, Knight insisted that a permanent American presence in Turkey was essential in maintaining information on the country’s trafficking networks. Turkish officers, it appeared to Knight, were too dilettante to take initiative in handling informants or cases on their own.97

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SPY VS. SPY: AMERICAN AND TURKISH CLANDESTINE OPERATIONS Until the establishment of a permanent FBN office in 1961, the myriad of American narcotics agents rotating in and out of I˙stanbul operated out of the US consulate. Among the officers to arrive in the late 1950s was a seasoned agent named Salvatore Vizzini. Over the course of his career, Vizzini’s fieldwork for the bureau would take him all over the world as an undercover operative.98 In addition to his work with the FBN, Vizzini’s activities also extended into the realm of clandestine operations. While based in Turkey, Salvatore Vizzini regularly collaborated with Harold Fiedler, a CIA operator attached to the Turkish security service who also possessed an office in the US consulate. In 1960, while touring the Turkish/Soviet border under Fiedler’s instructions, Vizzini shot and killed two men. Vizzini, in a later interview, stated the shootings were covered up by the FBN and were reported as a “junk deal gone bad.”99 Yet no report referencing the incident can be found with the FBN’s files. In fact the CIA is rarely mentioned within any of the reports submitted from Turkey. Sal Vizzini’s off-the-books collaboration with the CIA was not unique or isolated to Turkey. In his autobiography, Vizzini reveals instances during a tour of Lebanon where he personally undertook clandestine operations at the CIA’s behest.100 Interviews conducted by Douglas Valentine further affirm the often-blurred relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. In surveying the history of the FBN, it is generally clear that narcotic agents were useful in providing a veneer of legitimacy for gathering intelligence both abroad and, more controversially, at home. Furthermore, there is evidence that suggests the CIA coveted the gangsters and smugglers used by the FBN as informants in order to conduct more dubious operations. In 1960, William K. Harvey, a chief in the CIA’s intelligence branch, approached Charles Siragusa to help run the QJ/WIN program, an effort to form a unit of gangsters from around the world to be deployed for executive assassination missions. Although Siragusa later testified that he refused the assignment “on moral grounds”, Harvey’s role in contracting the

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services of prominent American gangsters in order to kill Fidel Castro suggests that such a plan was not a one-time affair.101 As the CIA and FBN grew (albeit unequally) in size and scope during the postwar years, the two continued to share tasks rooted in upholding American national security interests. Working within the confines of the FBN, as Sal Vizzini later explained, provided agents a “cover within a cover” that allowed them further immunity from local or foreign surveillance.102 The trade and production of narcotics, as it would turn out, was an element found in a variety of strategically important battlegrounds of the Cold War. As far back as the prewar period, the need to form alliances with pro-American forces abroad often trumped the FBN’s anti-narcotics operations. In China, Anslinger personally ignored reports detailing drug dealings among elements of Chang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist forces.103 With the outbreak of the Cold War, the FBN either ignored or provided political cover for CIA-backed allies in Southeast Asia and Latin America.104 Closer to home, both George White and Charles Siragusa provided critical support for the CIA’s “truth drug” experiments with marijuana and LSD in New York and San Francisco.105 Recently declassified documents suggest that the CIA’s collaboration with (and often appropriation of) narcotics operations continued well into the 1970s (a phenomenon that at times roiled drug enforcement officers).106 ¨n Over the course of the 1950s, the FBN realized that Kemal Aygu and elements of the DPS also operated under a dual pretense. In late ¨ n was “engaged in covert April 1955, FBN agents learned that Aygu and political intelligence” while he was simultaneously governor of Ankara and head of the DPS.107 Over time, it became clear that both ¨ n’s small network of spies.108 It Eren and Labernas were a part of Aygu was generally surmised that local communist activities in I˙stanbul were the primary focus of the three men. However, Charles Siragusa speculated that joint operations with the FBN may have provided ¨ n’s agents abroad. In 1956, the FBN invited Captain cover for Aygu Galip Labernas to train with the bureau in Italy. Charles Siragusa suspected that in addition to receiving this training, Labernas was ¨ n’s behalf. In also gathering “political intelligence” on Aygu conversing with Labernas, Siragusa emphasized that he would

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“strenuously object” to any Turkish intelligence operations while he was in Italy.109 Aside from Labernas’ stay in Italy, FBN files give very little indication of American policy towards Turkish clandestine operations in I˙stanbul ¨ n’s activities or elsewhere. It is even more difficult to contextualize Aygu 110 While some within the broader history of the Turkish secret service. ¨ n was aware of official domestic evidence suggests that Kemal Aygu clandestine operations conducted in I˙stanbul while he was mayor, nothing in the FBN files (or any other public source for that matter) suggests he was a regular agent of the National Security Service (the predecessor to Turkey’s contemporary clandestine service, the National Intelligence Organization).111 In the absence of any clues as to the nature or purpose of his activities, it is reasonable to also suggest that ¨ n’s circle of agents formed a personal contingent of spies. The Aygu existence and use of private or unofficial intelligence and paramilitary units is a historical phenomenon dating back to the late Ottoman era. Several studies have detailed the degree to which members of the last Ottoman government established networks of spies and assassins in order to promote both government and private interests.112 After the ¨ rk also personally maintained a set of empire fell, Mustafa Kemal Atatu retainers employed for “off the books” actions.113 The significance of this blending of tasks and interests on the part of American and Turkish narcotics officers and spies exceeds the operational value such alliances may offer. One could reasonably speculate that the utility of employing narcotics officers in an intelligence or clandestine capacity at the very least made up for the failures of anti-drug regimes. One could go still further, as other scholars and commentators have suggested, and contend that policing the drug trade is often nothing more than a facade that only partially shields more dubious operations conducted by elements of the state.114 A POINT OF RECKONING: THE 1960 COUP AND THE ¨N FALL OF KEMAL AYGU Turkey’s first decade of multiparty democracy took a violent turn on 1 May 1960. With tanks and soldiers in the streets of cities and towns

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throughout the country, a collective of military officers seized power that morning. The coup, its leaders declared, was not intended to put an end to democracy but to liberate it from the gross mismanagement and dictatorial tendencies of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes’ Democratic Party. It soon became clear to the citizens of Turkey that the regime’s leaders and many of its subordinates were to pay a penalty for their supposed crimes. Menderes was placed under arrest alongside the rest of the Democratic Party’s top men. The military’s retribution extended deep into Turkish society. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of bureaucrats and state officials were rounded up.115 For most of the Democratic Party’s erstwhile leaders, the small island of Yassıada, located just off the coast of the city of I˙stanbul, served as both their place of imprisonment and the setting for their future trials. Among the higher-profile prisoners taken to Yassıada was Kemal ¨ n. A month after the coup, the American consulate in I˙stanbul Aygu ¨ n from a trusted informant. A caught wind of a story regarding Aygu ¨ n found that the military physician sent to examine Kemal Aygu prisoner had “lost control” and was weeping incessantly. He ¨n confessed that he had committed many crimes. Once tried, Aygu was certain he would be rightfully put to death.116 ¨ n as a conspirator within The trials on Yassıada placed Kemal Aygu a series of crimes, including organizing a plot to kill former Prime ¨ nu ¨ , launching an attack on student protesters Minister I˙smet I˙no ˙ outside Istanbul University, falsely expropriating property in I˙stanbul and managing a Democratic slush fund.117 In some of these cases, ¨ nu ¨ , it appears that such as the so-called Topkapi plot against I˙smet I˙no ¨ n’s guilt was based upon association with other accused Aygu figures.118 Other trials, particularly several held outside of Yassıada, ¨ n as a more direct actor. One such case featured Kemal painted Aygu ¨ n as the main organizer of a bribery and extortion scandal Aygu involving brothels throughout the city of I˙stanbul. While mayor, he ¨ zen, were charged with along with then police chief Ferit Avni So extracting thousands of lire in payments from pimps and gamblers. ¨ zen was Vasil Ironically, among those asked to testify against So Arcan, the same narcotics trafficker and police informant nabbed by George White back in 1948.119

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By the time of his arrest, the FBN had little day-to-day contact with ¨ n. His prosecution, however, did lead to a shake-up Kemal Aygu within the ranks of I˙stanbul’s narcotics bureau. As early as June 1960, US Army intelligence reported a general purge of officers, particularly “hatchet men”, within the national police force.120 The coup ¨ n’s long-time government’s cleansing of the ranks included Aygu retainers in the DPS, Ali Erin and Galip Labernas, who were respectively forced into retirement and transferred out of the office.121 Their replacements within the I˙stanbul branch did make several interesting ¨ n’s tenure and legacy within the disclosures regarding Kemal Aygu ˙Istanbul section of Directorate of Public Safety. According to Hu ¨ seyin ˘lar, the post-coup head of the I˙stanbul branch’s criminal section, Cag ¨ n was completely corrupt. He, along with his “lackey”, Ali Kemal Aygu ¨ n’s Eren, had long protected the city’s top traffickers. Under Aygu direction, Eren had shielded the worst violators by focusing the bureau’s investigative powers on small-time traffickers.122 Revelations that the FBN’s principal partners in Turkey had long been participants in the Turkish underworld appeared to have had no official impact upon Washington’s approach towards the Turkish ¨ n was sentenced to life in prison in the fall of drug trade. When Aygu 1961, Siragusa posted only a brief report to his boss, Harry Anslinger. ¨ n, Siragusa declared, was not only “a sincere and effective Aygu collaborator,” but also “very pro-American and a great admirer of our Bureau.”123 As American operations in Turkey entered the 1960s, only a scant amount of debate took place when agents proposed creating a permanent FBN office in I˙stanbul. In response to that prospect, Harry Anslinger replied that such a plan would waste the time of personnel needed for undercover work elsewhere. Opening an office, Anslinger concluded, appeared to be “a little too much empire building” with “no cases in sight.”124 Yet an I˙stanbul office was eventually established in 1961, which was then followed by the opening of a second permanent base in Ankara exactly ten years later. By that point, a new American narcotics agency, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, had assumed the FBN’s place after it was disbanded in 1967. The passage of the 1960s saw little change to American drug enforcement methods in Turkey. FBN (and later BNDD) officers like

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Joe Arpaio continued to target producers and sellers of Anatolian opium while largely ignoring the major traders and transporters in I˙stanbul.125 When a news team from New York arrived to Turkey in 1971 to cover the source of America’s “heroin epidemic”, they were ˘lu and I˙hsan Sekban ¨ seyin Eminog informed that individuals like Hu were still in business. Their main informant on the status of I˙stanbul’s trafficking underworld was Galip Labernas, who had retired from the DPS.126 CONTINUITIES: POLITICS, POLICING AND HEROIN IN TURKEY, 1960 – 80 The story of the FBN’s first decade of investigations in I˙stanbul resonates beyond the borders of Turkey. While establishing operations in Turkey, Charles Siragusa discovered similar patterns of collaboration between politicians, policemen and drug traffickers in Marseilles and Beirut.127 In Iran, FBN advisors worked diligently to maintain a state ban on opium production despite reports that members of the Mohammed Reza Shah’s family were involved in the national and international opium trade.128 Despite earlier struggles, Washington continued to pressure Ankara to maintain ever-tighter controls on opium production and drug trafficking. Beginning with the Nixon administration declaration of a global “war on drugs” in 1969, American diplomats assumed a much more prominent role in coercing Turkish officials into abolishing the opium production in Anatolia altogether. Early Turkish resistance to such a demand eventually subsided. In addition to accepting substantial financial aid package of $35 million, Ankara’s decision to prohibit domestic opium production in 1971 was accompanied with private admissions that Turkish heroin posed a threat to “American youth and society in general.”129 Despite a rapid expansion of the ranks and a growing operational budget, recently released State Department documents seem to suggest that the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs played more of a supporting role in negotiating Turkey’s brief opium ban.130 Ankara’s decision to resume opium production in 1974 did not come as a complete surprise to policymakers and officials in

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Washington. From virtually the outset of the ban, nationalist activists and opium farmers opposed to the measure were in agreement that the new policy was the result of direct US pressure.131 British diplomats also surmised that organized crime also lobbied the Turkish government to rescind the ban.132 Forging closer ties between Turkish and American counternarcotics agencies remained an important goal for Washington into the 1970s as Turkish traffickers increasingly shifted their attention away from Anatolian opium and became more involved in wholesaling Afghani and Pakistani heroin more directly in Europe. However, obstacles witnessed by FBN agents in the 1950s continued to hamper cooperation between American and Turkish officials. Drug Enforcement Administration officers assigned to Turkey, for example, were largely prohibited from touring eastern Anatolia (where it was surmised that trafficking syndicates were establishing large laboratories for processing raw opium into heroin).133 According to classified BNDD documents leaked to the press in 1971, the head of the DPS, Abdullah Pektas¸, protected high-profile traffickers and took bribes.134 It was also apparent to American law enforcement officers that Turkish members of the DPS remained more concerned with domestic subversion and terrorism. In an era that featured intense fighting between leftist and rightist political groups around Turkey, the DEA privately advocated that it was essential for Ankara to “raise the overall narcotics effort to the level currently exercised for terrorist activity.”135 The intensification of America’s effort to combat drug trafficking in Turkey clearly did not dull the influence of Turkish smuggling syndicates upon local and national politics. Available evidence suggests instead that relations between various elements of the Turkish state and organized crime grew more intimate. American, French and Turkish investigations during the early 1970s exposed at least two members of the Turkish Grand National Assembly as active traffickers.136 More contemporary studies of the right-wing Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetci Hareket Partisi) have convincingly demonstrated the degree to which traffickers, military officers and student activists collaborated in perpetrating violent acts in the late 1970s.137 The onset of the 1970s, and the changing nature of the

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heroin trade in Turkey, also led to the formation of alliances between Kurdish narcotics traffickers and nationalist guerillas in eastern Anatolia.138 It was during this period of time that individuals such as ¨ rk, a notorious trafficker of the 1980s and 1990s and Behcet Cantu future financial backer of the Kurdish Workers’ Party, first entered into the weapons and heroin smuggling trade in the vicinity of Diyarbakir.139 A series of scandals since the 1970s has shed light on the overlying relationship between American and Turkish intelligence and clandestine operations and the drug trade in Turkey. Events such as the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II and the so-called “Susurluk Incident” in 1996 have affirmed the existence of a partnership between members of Turkey’s underworld and various intelligence services associated with NATO. Under the direction of this NATO consortium, dubbed “Operation Gladio,” notorious Turkish gangsters and traffickers such as Abdullah C ¸ atlı and Mehmet ˘ca were employed to suppress or eliminate “subversive” leftists Ali Ag ¸ atlı himself visited or dissidents living in Turkey and abroad.140 C Miami in 1982 in the company of a known Gladio agent (and Italian neo-Nazi) and was considered “under the protection” of the CIA.141 All in all, the continuity of events and the behavior of both Turkish and American officials after 1960 affirm several tendencies seen during the early stages of the FBN’s engagement with I˙stanbul’s drug trade during the 1950s. First and foremost, American national security prerogatives framed Washington’s approach towards narcotics trafficking and the building of its relationship with officers and officials in Turkey. The construction of American counter-narcotics efforts served at least four distinct purposes: one, it helped to assured American domestic security; two, it bound Turkey ever closer to the United States and its NATO allies; three, it helped to “reform” Turkey’s legal and policing system along American lines; and four, it provided added means through which clandestine operations could be undertaken. Despite clear evidence that such efforts did not result in an end to Turkey’s role in the drug trade (to the point that it was apparent Turkish officials abetted or profited from the activities of traffickers), the policy course was maintained for the sake of national security.

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Trends seen in the 1950s also point to the enduring influence of the drug trade and drug traffickers upon the making of modern Turkish politics and governance. Turkish collaboration with American counter-narcotics officials could not mask the corrupt and duplicitous relationships local and national officials forged with members of I˙stanbul’s underworld. In other words, drug kingpins like I˙hsan Sekban were active participants in the making of Turkish ¨ n superficially agreed that politics. While individuals like Kemal Aygu narcotics posed a threat to both Turkish and American security interests, it is clear that other domestic and international fears (such as Communism or the activities of certain minorities) were of greater concern. Moreover, like the United States, heightened attention towards narcotics trafficking offered new venue through which intelligence gathering and clandestine operations could be conducted. In Turkey’s case, however, policing the drug trade did not only provide cover for clandestine operations. Since the 1960s, it seems clear that Turkish national security interests have made allies out of elements of organized crime and the Turkish state. NOTES 1. Originally published as, “Istanbul Confidential: Heroin, Espionage and Politics in Cold War Turkey, 1945 –1960,” in Diplomatic History 37/4 (2013), 779–806. 2. For a more recent summation of this relationship, see George Sellers Harris, “Turkish-American Relations since the Truman Doctrine,” in ˘rı Erhan, eds, Turkish-American Relations: Past, Mustafa Aydın and C ¸ ag Present and Future (London: Routledge, 2004, 66 –106). 3. Memorandum of Conversation, by the Ambassador in Turkey (McGhee) 10 Februrary 1952, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954. Vol. VIII: Eastern Europe; Soviet Union; Eastern Mediterranean (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988, 877). 4. For examples in the case of the United States and the role of American civilian advisors in promoting American foreign policy objectives, see Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, “Decolonization, The Cold War, and the Foreign Policy of the Peace Corps,” in Peter Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss, eds, Empire and Revolution: the United States and the Third World Since 1945 (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2001, 123–53); Paul Sutter, “Tropical Conquest and the Rise of the Environmental Management State: The Case of U.S. Sanitary Efforts in Panama,” in Alfred McCoy and Francisco

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey Antonio Scarano, eds, Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009, 317–26). Walker’s exhaustive study of British and American policy towards opium in Asia demonstrates that national security concerns both drove and restrained the activities of anti-narcotics officers and crusaders. See William O. Walker III, Opium and Foreign Policy: The Anglo-American Search for Order in Asia, 1912–1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). For discussion of the debate and the challenges of criminalization during the immediate aftermath of the Harrison Act of 1914, see John C. McWilliams, “Through the Past Darkly: The Politics and Policies of America’s Drug War,” in William O. Walker III, ed., Drug Control Policy: Essays in Historical and Comparative Perspective (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, 10–13). On law enforcement cooperation with drug traffickers in Mexico, see Luis Astorga, Drogas Sin Fronteras (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2003, 283–94); on the FBN’s frustration with Peruvian officials and the impact of the Coca Cola company, see Paul Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008, 226 – 41); on drug corruption in Cuba under Batista, see Eduardo Saenz Rovner, The Cuban Connection: Drug Trafficking, Smuggling and Gambling in Cuba from the 1920s to the Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008, 113 – 22). Jonathan Marshall, “Opium, Tungsten, and the Search for National Security, 1940– 1952,” in William O. Walker III, ed., Drug Control Policy: Essays in Historical and Comparative Perspective (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, 89 –116); Brian Martin, “The Green Gang and the Guomindang State: Du Yuesheng and the Politics of Shanghai”, The Journal of Asian Studies 54.1 (February 1995, 64 –92); Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen, Web of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords, Spies and the History of the International Drug Trade (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1998, 235–66); Fredric Wakeman, “Licensing Leisure: The Chinese Nationalists’ Attempt to Regulate Shanghai, 1927– 1949”, in The Journal of Asian Studies 54.1 (February 1995, 19 –42). Jonathan Marshall, Drug Wars: Corruption, Counterinsurgency and Covert Operations in the Third World (Forestville, CA: Cohan & Cohen Press, 1991, 11 –28). See Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann, Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 105–64). F. Cengiz Erdinc, Overdose Tu¨rkiye: Tu¨rkiye’de Eroin Kacakcılıg˘ı, Bag˘ımlılg˘ı ve Politikalar (Istanbul: I˙letis¸im Yayınları, 2004, 14). See for example, Hamit Bozarslan, Violence in the Middle East: From Political Struggle to Self-Sacrifice (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2004); Bruce Kuniholm, “Thinking About the Future: Turkey, the US and

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˘rı Erhan, eds, Turkish-American the World,” in Mustafa Aydın and C ¸ ag Relations: Past, Present and Future (London: Routledge, 2004, 213–29); ¨ zcan, “The Military and the Making of Foreign Policy in Gencer O Turkey,” in Barry Rubin and Kemal Kiris¸ci, eds, Turkey in World Politics: An Emerging Multregional Power (Boulder: Lynn Rienner Publishers, 2001, 13 –30). ¨ neminde I˙c Gu ¨ venlik ve Tu ¨ rk Polis Ali Dikici, “Demokrat Parti Do Tes¸kilatı, Akademik Bakıs¸ 3.5 (Winter 2009, 61–94); Ferdan Ergut, “State and Social Control: The Police in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Republican Turkey, 1839–1939” (New School for Social Research Ph.D., ¨ zbek, “Policing the Countryside: Gendarmes of the Thesis, 1999); Nadir O Late Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire (1876–1908)”, in International Journal of Middle East Studies 40 (2008, 47– 67). Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London, 2005, 224 – 44); Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1986, 42 – 65); Mitchel P. Roth and Murat Sever, “The Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) as Criminal Syndicate: Funding Terrorism through Organized Crime, A Case Study”, in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 30.10 (2007, 901 – 20). On Turkish state-building see Michael Meeker, A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity (Berkeley: University of California ¨ mit U ¨ ngo ˘ur U ¨ r, The Making of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Press, 2002); Ug Oxford University Press, 2011). ¨ rk’s republican government in 1923, After the establishment of Atatu Koraltan went on to serve for 20 years in the assembly and at various levels of the provincial government. Most of Refik Koraltan’s memoirs, however, are devoted to his contributions to the independence struggle. See Refik Koraltan, Bir Politikacının Anıları (Ankara: Hacettepe-Tas¸ Yayınevi, 1999). Department of State Biographic Information Division, Aygun, Kemal; CIA-RDP86B00269R000400060004-7; CIA Records Search Tool (CREST); National Archives Building II, College Park, MD. “Survey of the General Directorate of Public Safety,” undated, Turkey, 1951– 2; Subject Files of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, 1916– 70; Records of the Drug Enforcement Administration; Record Group 170; National Archives Building II, College Park, MD. Ryan Gingeras, Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity and the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Hans-Lukas Kieser, Der Verpasste Friede: Mission, Ethnie und Staat in den Ostprovinzen ¨ rich: Chronos Verlag, 2000). der Tu¨rkei (Zu There is comparatively little on the social history of Turkey during the course of the Cold War. See John Vander Lippe, “Forgotten Brigade of the Forgotten War: Turkey’s Participation in the Korean War”, in Middle East Studies 36/1 (January 2000): 92– 102.

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21. Nazım Hikmet, a nationalist poet and long-time communist activist, received particular popular attention in 1950 after he undertook a ¨ ksu and hunger strike in protest at his false imprisonment. See Saime Go Edward Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazım Hikmet (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999, 212– 53). For the evolution of the Turkish Communist Party during the early stages of the Cold War, see Jacob Landau, Radial Politics in Turkey (Leiden: Brill, 1974, 101–5). 22. Huey Louis Kostanick, “Turkish Resettlement of Bulgarian Refugees, 1950– 1953,” Middle East Journal 9.1 (1955): 41–52; Geoffrey Lewis, “Political Change in Turkey Since 1960,” in William Hale, ed., Aspects of Modern Turkey (London: Bowker, 1976, 18); Martin Pera to Charles Siragusa, 9 March 1951, Turkey, 1951–2, FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 23. During the course of the FBN’s tenure in Turkey (1930–67), State Department officials drafted regular monthly reports on narcotics arrests in the city of Istanbul. The reports are seemingly drawn entirely from local newspapers. Details of the arrests are often minimal but they usually mention the violator’s name, the nature of the offense (usually possession or use of narcotics) and the location of the arrest. Most arrests, it appears, occur along the waterfront or in bars or cafes. See for example, Istanbul to Department of State, “Narcotics Offenses in the Municipal District of Istanbul”, 22 January 1951, Turkey, 1951–2; FBN Files, 1916– 70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 24. American Embassy Ankara to Department of State, “Smuggling at Kilis, Turkish-Syrian Border”, 23 July 1968, no file number, Subject Numeric Files, 1967–9; RG 59, NAB. The general predicament of enforcing antinarcotics efforts upon the newly created borderlands of the modern Middle East is most recently surveyed in Cyrus Schayegh, “The Many Worlds of ‘Abud Yasin; or, What Narcotics Trafficking in the Interwar Middle East Can Tell Us about Territorialization”, in American Historical Review 116/2 (April 2011): 273–306. ˘is¸iklikler”, in Milliyet, 26 June 1950. 25. “Yeni I˙dari Deg ¨ l, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul (London: I.B.Tauris 26. Murat Gu Publishers, 2009, 140–71). 27. For further background on the significance of the Democratic period and the origins and ramifications of the 1960 coup, see Kemal Karpat, “The Military and Politics in Turkey, 1960 –64: A Socio-Cultural Analysis of a Revolution”, in American Historical Review 75/6 (October 1970, 1654–83). 28. Douglas Clark Kinder, “Shutting Out the Evil: Nativism and Narcotics Control in the United States”, in William O. Walker III, ed., Drug Control Policy: Essays in Historical and Comparative Perspective (University Park: ¨ ner Turgay, “The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, 117–42); U Nineteenth Century Golden Triangle: Chinese Consumption, Ottoman Production, and the American Connection, II”, in International Journal of Turkish Studies, 3/1 (1984–5, 65–93).

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29. Harry J. Anslinger and Will Oursler, The Murderers: The Story of the Narcotics Gang (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961, 8–20). 30. Alan Block, “European Drug Traffic and Traffickers between the Wars: The Policy of Suppression and its Consequences”, Journal of Social History 23/2 (Winter 1989, 320–2). 31. See “Memorandum for Congressman LaGuardia”, 3 January 1933; Turkey, 1930 –4; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 32. Harry J. Anslinger to Stuart J. Fuller, 28 December 1932, N800.114N16ELIOPOULOS,ELIE/30, Central Decimal Files, 1930 – 9: NAB; Anslinger and Oursler, 56 –73. 33. Arnold H. Taylor, American Diplomacy and the Narcotics Traffic, 1900– 1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1969, 244). 34. See John C. McWilliams, “Covert Connections: The FBN, the OSS and the CIA”, in Historian 53/4 (Summer 1991): 660–72. 35. Douglas Clark Kinder and William O. Walker III, “Stable Force in a Storm: Harry J. Anslinger and United States Narcotic Foreign Policy, 1930– 1962”, in Journal of American History 72 (March 1986): 908–27. 36. Gootenberg, 218; Meyer and Parssinen, 245–6; Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy, 140–1. 37. Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs for the Year Ended December 31, 1947 (Washington, DC: US Treasury Department, Bureau of Narcotics, 1948, 14 –15). 38. American Consulate Istanbul to State Department, “Istanbul Press on Heroin Manufacture”, 13 June 1950, 882.53/6-1350, Central Decimal Files, 1950–4, RG 59; NAB. 39. In his memoirs, Anslinger posed that it was essential to be “on guard against the use of drugs as a political weapon by the communist forces in China and elsewhere in the Orient, Europe and Africa. There is every possibility that some of the Commies and fellow travelers may join hands in the world-wide syndicate . . .” See Anslinger and Ousler, 295. 40. In questioning Anslinger before the Senate, Senator Carl T. Curtis asserted that it was his understanding that “dope traffic” is believed to be part of “the communist conspiracy apparatus” in the case of Thailand. See US Senate, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Part 3 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1964, 687). 41. Garland Williams to Harry Anslinger, 10 April 1960, Iran File, 1958–60; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 42. For more on White, see Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf (London: Verso, 2004, 27 –8, 161). 43. For Commissioner of Narcotics Anslinger from White #10, 10 June 1948, George H. White Papers, Box 1, Folder 7, Special Collections Department, Stanford University; George White Diary, Entry, 1 June 1948, George H. White Papers, Box 7, Special Collections Department, Stanford University.

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44. “Heroin Kacakcıları”, Aks¸am, 5 June 1948. 45. In White’s own estimation, the haul was probably worth just $36,000. See For Commission of Narcotics Anslinger from White #9, 4 June 1948, George H. White Papers, Box 1, Folder 7, Special Collections Department, Stanford University. Also see “US Traps 4 in Istanbul”, New York Times, 4 June 1948. 46. For Commissioner of Narcotics from White #7, 28 May 1948, George H. White Papers, Box 1, Folder 7, Special Collections Department, Stanford University. 47. Frank Sojat to H. J. Anslinger, 5 January 1952; Turkey, 1951 –2; FBN Files, 1916– 70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 48. Meyer and Parssinen, 281–6. 49. “Beyaz Zehir Kacakcıları”, Aks¸am, 24 July 1950. 50. “Milyoner Eroinci Yakalandı”, Cumhuriyet, 25 July 1950. 51. Charles Siragusa to H. J. Anslinger, 24 July 1950, Turkey, 1950; FBN Files, 1916– 70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 52. Charles Siragusa to Mr H. J. Anslinger, 24 July 1950, Turkey, 1950; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 53. See Anslinger, The Murderers, 3. 54. Block, “European Drug Traffic and Traffickers”, 323–7; Erdinc 87–164. 55. In part the rise of local involvement in narcotics trafficking came as a result of urban migration trends during the postwar period. See for example American Consulate Istanbul to State Department, “The Floating Population of Istanbul”, 5 March 1957, 882.401/3-557, Central Decimal Files, 1955–9, RG 59; NAB. 56. See Ryan Gingeras, “Beyond Istanbul’s ‘Laz Underworld’: Ottoman Paramilitarism and the Rise of Turkish Organized Crime, 1908–1950”, in Journal of Contemporary European History 19/3 (2010): 215–30: Oktay ¨ zel, “Migration and Power Politics: The settlement of Georgian O Immigrants in Turkey (1878–1908)”, in Middle East Studies 46/4 (2010): 477–96. 57. Elmore Gross to Charles Siragusa, 17 March 1955; Turkey, 1955 –6; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 58. Frank Sojat to H. J. Anslinger, 5 February 1952; Turkey, 1951 –2; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 59. US Senate, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Part 4 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1964, 882). 60. Azai Yumak to Charles Siragusa, 12 November 1955; Turkey, 1955–6; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB; John Pearson, The Life of Ian Fleming (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966, 273–4; “Kalkavan Yalı 2.7 Trilyon Liraya Kalkavanlar’a Kaldı”, Hu¨rriyet, 29 May 1999. It should be noted that Ian Fleming, during the time he became acquainted with Kalkavan in Istanbul, was a member of MI6. 61. Newsday, The Heroin Trail (New York: New American Library, 1973, 32).

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62. Charles Siragusa to John Cusack, 9 July 1952; Turkey, 1951–2; FBN Files, 1916– 70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 63. Frank Sojat to Mr H. J. Anslinger, 1 October 1951; Turkey, 1951 –2; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 64. Frank Sojat to Mr H. J. Anslinger, 8 October 1952, Turkey, 1951 –2; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 65. See Lee Bernstein, Greatest Menace: Organized Crime in the Cold War (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). 66. Michael Woodiwiss, “Organized Crime-The Dumbing of Discourse”, The British Criminology Conference: Selected Proceedings. Volume 3. Papers from the British Society of Criminology Conference, Liverpool (July 1999): 1– 10. 67. Michael Woodiwiss, Organized Crime and American Power: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, 362–89). 68. FBN reporting on I˙hsan Sekban belies its own monolithic understanding of organized crime in Turkey. According to FBN informants, Sekban’s gang comprised both Greek Orthodox Christians and Albanians. It was also rumored that I˙hsan Sekban was actually of Armenian descent and had converted to Islam. See Frank Sojat to Mr H. J. Anslinger, 5 November 1951; Turkey, 1951–2; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB; Martin Pera to Charles Siragusa, 20 April 1951; Martin Pera’s File; FBN Files, 1916 –70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 69. Martin Pera to Charles Siragusa, 5 March 1951; Turkey, 1951– 2; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 70. See Ayhan Aktar, Varlık Vergisi ve ‘Tu¨rkles¸tirme’ Politikaları (Istanbul: I˙letis¸im Yayınları, 2001); Zafer Toprak, I˙ttihad-Terakki ve Cihan Harbi: Savas¸ Ekonomisi ve Tu¨rkiye’de Devletcilik (Istanbul: Homer Kitabevi, 2003); Zafer Toprak, Tu¨rkiye’de “Milli I˙ktisat” (1908 – 1918) (Ankara: Yurt Yayınları 1982). 71. See amendment to Frank Sojat to Mr H. J. Anslinger, 1 October 1951; Turkey, 1951 –2; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 72. Frank Sojat to H. J. Anslinger, 5 January 1952; Turkey, 1951 –2; FBN Files, 1916– 70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB; “Opium Production”, 16 March 1960; Turkey, 1960 –1; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 73. American Consulate General, Istanbul to Secretary State, “Narcotics Report – Turkey”, 17 September 1952, 882.53/9-1752, Central Decimal Files, 1950–4, RG 59, NAB. 74. Garland Williams to Harry Anslinger, 20 April 1958, Iran File, 1958–60; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 75. Dikici, 68 –70. 76. William Hale, Turkish Foreign Policy, 1774 –2000 (London: Frank Cass, 2002, 110–11). 77. Hale, 123; George S. Harris, “Turkey and United States,” in Kemal Karpat, ed., Turkey’s Foreign Policy in Transition, 1950 – 1974 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975, 56 – 7).

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¨ rcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B.Tauris, 1997, 78. Erik Jan Zu 234–6). 79. Charles Siragusa to H. J. Anslinger, 14 August 1950; Turkey, 1950; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 80. Elmore Gross to Charles Siragusa, 23 February 1955; Turkey, 1955–6; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 81. Fredrick Merrill to H. J. Anslinger, 23 October 1951; Turkey; 1951– 2, FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 82. Memorandum: District #17, 24 November 1955; Turkey, 1955–6; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. ¨ n is first referred to as Siragusa’s “personal friend” in Elmore Gross 83. Aygu to Charles Siragusa, 18 June 1955; Turkey, 1955 –6; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 84. Charles Siragusa to H. J. Anslinger, 10 August 1950; Turkey, 1950; FBN Files, 1916 –70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB; Charles Siragusa to H. J. Anslinger, 20 August 1950; Turkey, 1950; FBN Files, 1916– 70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB; Memorandum Report, 22 October 1958; Turkey, 1957– 9; FBN Files, 1916 –70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 85. Frank Sojat to H. J. Anslinger, 8 October 1952; Turkey, 1951–2; FBN Files, 1916– 70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 86. Frank Sojat to Frank Sojat to H. J. Anslinger, 13 May 1952; Turkey, 1951– 2; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 87. Charles Siragusa to H. J. Anslinger, 13 March 1951; Turkey, 1951 –2; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB; Memorandum Report, 13 December 1955; Turkey, 1955– 6; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 88. Memorandum Report, 15 September 1955; Turkey, 1955 –6; FBN Files, 1916– 70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 89. Elmore Gross to Charles Siragusa, 1 May 1955; Turkey, 1955–6; FBN Files, 1916– 70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. Hıncal in fact was thrown out of the party and his position for his involvement in drug trafficking. See “I˙ki Mebus D.P.’den I˙hrac Edildi”, Milliyet, 4 February 1953. 90. Memorandum Report, 24 June 1955; Turkey, 1955 –6; FBN Files, 1916– 70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB; Memorandum Report, 27 October 1955; Turkey, 1955 –6; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 91. Elmore Gross to Charles Siragusa, 1 April 1955; Turkey, 1955–6; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 92. Charles Siragusa to H. J. Anslinger, 27 June 1955; Turkey, 1955 –6; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 93. Memorandum, 27 October 1955; Turkey, 1955 –6; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 94. Charles Siragusa to H. J. Anslinger, 27 June 1955; Turkey, 1955 –6; FBN Files, 1916 –70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB; Charles Siragusa to H. J. Anslinger, 5 July 1955; Turkey, 1955 –6; FBN Files, 1916– 70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB.

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95. US Senate, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Part 4 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1964, 799); Charles Siragusa and Robert Wiedrich, Trail of the Poppy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Inc., 1966, 3 –32). 96. Memorandum: District #17, 24 November 1955, Turkey, 1955–6, FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 97. Memorandum Report, Bureau of Narcotics, District 17 (re: Turkey) 22 October 1958; Turkey, 1957–9; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 98. Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, xvi. 99. Ibid., 278. 100. See Sal Vizzini et al., Vizzini: The Secret Lives of America’s Most Successful Undercover Agent (New York: Arbor House, 1972, 175–93). 101. Alan Block, Perspectives on Organized Crime (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990, 214–16); Howard Jones, The Bay of Pigs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 91); Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, 227. 102. Vizzini, 175. For more thorough discussion of the CIA’s use of narcotics enforcement as cover for clandestine action, see Marshall, Drug Wars, 35 –62. 103. Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy, 69. 104. Vizzini, passim. 105. Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, 134–47. 106. See inserted documents in Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2009, 431–40). 107. Charles Siragusa to Kemal Aygun, 13 April 1955; Turkey, 1955–6; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB; Elmore Gross to Charles Siragusa, 18 June 1955; Turkey, 1955–6; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 108. Charles Siragusa to H. J. Anslinger, 5 December 1956; Turkey, 1955–6; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB; Memorandum, 10 March 1959; Turkey, 1957– 9; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 109. Martin Pera to Charles Siragusa, 5 March 1951; Turkey, 1951– 2; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 110. Most studies of Turkish clandestine operations are rather vague as to the organizational structure and personnel that comprised the three successive spying agencies that have existed in Turkey since 1923. Moreover, it is clear that the Turkish military has long maintained its own network of spies and special operatives since at least the beginning of the Cold War. See I˙lhan Bahar, Tes¸kilat-ı Mahsusa, MI˙T ve I˙stihbarat ¨ rgu¨tleri (Istanbul: Kum Saati Yayıncılık, 2009); Gu ¨ ltekin Ural, Tes¸kilat-ı O Mahsusa’dan MI˙T’e: Abdullah C ¸ atlı ve Susurluk Olayı (Istanbul: Kamer Yayınları, 1997). ˘an 111. Soner Yalcın, Efendi: Beyaz Tu¨rklerin Bu¨yu¨k Sırrı (Istanbul: Dog ¨ n was a Kitapcılık, 2004, 510). According to Yalcın’s interlocutors, Aygu

196

112.

113.

114.

115.

116. 117.

118.

119.

120. 121. 122.

123.

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey witness to the torturing of prisoners conducted by members of the Turkish National Security Service (Milli Emniyet Hizmeti). Taner Akcam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London: Zed Books, 2004, 143–4); Ryan Gingeras, “Last Rites for a ‘Pure Bandit’: Clandestine Service, Historiography and the Origins of the Turkish ‘Deep State’”, Past & Present 206 (February 2010): 121–44. For the case of Topal Osman, Mustafa Kemal’s private bodyguard, see Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to the Caucasus (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995, ¨ rcher, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of 369– 70); Erik Jan Zu Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement, 1905–1926 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1984, 88, 92). In surveying US clandestine support for narcotics-dealing allies in Burma and Thailand in the aftermath of World War II, William Walker poses that US policymakers “abetted corruption” and the drug trade in the hopes of maintaining anti-communist efforts in Asia. See Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy, 220; This thesis is perhaps most thoroughly developed in Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003). American Embassy, Ankara to Secretary of State, 7 June 1960; Box 2040, Central Dispatch Files, 1960–3; General Records of the Department of State; Record Group 59; National Archives Building II, College Park, MD. American Consulate General, Istanbul to Secretary State, 22 June 1960, 782.00/6-2260, Box 2040, Central Decimal Files, 1960 –3; RG 59; NAB. American Consulate General, Istanbul to Secretary State, 2 December 1960, 782.00/12-260, Box 2040, Central Decimal Files, 1960–3; RG 59; NAB. American Consulate General, Istanbul to Secretary State, 12 December 1960, 782.00/12-1260, Box 2040, CD Files, 1960–3; RG 59; NAB; American Consulate General, Istanbul to Secretary State, 20 March 1961, 782.00/ 3-2061, Box 2041, Central Decimal Files, 1960 –3; RG 59; NAB. ¨ s¸vet Davasında S¸ahitler Dinlendi”, Milliyet, 9 March 1961; “Rande“Ru vuculardan Harac Toplayan 2 Kis¸i Tevkif Edildi”, Milliyet, 5 October 1960. USARMA, Ankara to Secretary of State, 6 June 1960, 782.00/6-660, Box 2040, Central Decimal Files, 1960–3; RG 59; NAB. John Cusack to H. J. Anslinger, 23 June 1960; Turkey, 1960–1; FBN Files, 1916 –70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB; Vizzini, 198. John Cusack to H. J. Anslinger, 22 September 1960; Turkey, 1960–1; FBN Files, 1916 –70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. The phrase appears as commentary posed by Anslinger along the margins of the reports. Charles Siragusa to H. J. Anslinger, 16 September 1961; Turkey, 1960–1; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB.

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124. John Cusack to H. J. Anslinger, 30 June 1959; Turkey, 1957–9; FBN Files, 1916 –70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 125. Joe Arpaio and Len Sherman, Joe’s Law (New York: Amacon, 2008, 151– 69). 126. Newsday, 32. 127. Among the many files that detail governmental complicity in drug trafficking in Beirut during the early 1950s, see Charles Siragusa to H.J. Anslinger, 3 November 1953; Lebanon Files, 1945 –53; FBN Files, 1916– 70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. For police corruption and drug trafficking in France, see Charles Siragusa to Barrett McGurn, 3 March 1953; France Files, 1951–3; FBN Files, 1916–70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 128. Despite evidence pointing the involvement of a relative of the reigning queen (as well as Mohammed Reza Shah’s sister and lover) in the drug trade, FBN agent Joseph Salm posited that prosecuting such an individual “could jeopardize the position of the Shah of Iran and hence jeopardize the position of the United States in the area.” See Memorandum Report, 6 January 1957, Iran Miscellaneous File; FBN Files, 1916 – 70; DEA Records; RG 170; NAB. 129. “Memorandum for the President’s File”, 21 March 1972, Foreign Relations of the United States Vol. XXIX: Eastern Europe; Eastern Mediterranean, 1968– 1972 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2007, 1111). 130. Robert Davis to William J. Corcoran and Mark Kleiman, “DEA Draft on Middle East Heroin,” 21 January 1980, Subject Files of Attorney General Epstein, Southwest Asian Heroin, RG 60, NAB. ˘rı Erhan, Beyaz Savas¸: Tu¨rk-Amerikan I˙lis¸kilerinde Afyon Sorunu 131. C ¸ ag (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1996, 132–8). 132. From A. C. Goodson to R. A. Fyjia-Walker, PRO/FCO 9/2129, 16 July 1974. 133. “Turkey (DEA memo?),” 1980, Subject Files of Attorney General Epstein, Southwest Asian Heroin, RG 60, NAB. 134. Jack Anderson, “Turks War on Poppy-Growing Ban”, Washington Post, 8 January 1973. 135. “Turkey (DEA memo?)”, 1980, Subject Files of Attorney General Epstein, Southwest Asian Heroin, RG 60, NAB. For more discussion on party politics and violence in Turkey in the years preceeding the 1980 coup, see Bozarslan, Violence in the Middle East, 66 –77. 136. The most famous case of a Turkish MP involved in narcotics trafficking occurred with the arrest of Kudret Bayhan, who was apprehended in March 1972 in France with 146 kilos of morphine in his car. See “S¸ebekenin I˙stanbul Kolu Firar Etti”, Milliyet, 8 March 1972. Less well known is the case of Abdullah C ¸ illi, another member of parliament, who was identified by BNDD informants as a trader in illicit opium. See American Embassy Ankara to BNDD, “Narcotics Status Report”, 12 June 1972, Ankara 4189, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–3, NAB.

198

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˘an Yurdakul, Reis: Gladio’nun Tu¨rk Tetikcisi 137. Soner Yalcın and Dog ˘an Kitapcılık, 2007, 57 –69). Most noted is the case of (Istanbul: Dog Abdullah C ¸ atlı, one of principle members of the so-called “Susurluk gang” who served as a government-backed hit man during the 1980s ˘ca (would-be and 1990s. As a youth, he, along side Mehmet Ali Ag assassin of Pope John Paul II), were active members of the right wing ¨ rkes¸ (founder of the National Grey Wolves movement of Alparslan Tu Action Party). 138. According to DEA and CIA sources, it is clear that much of the trade in opiates had shifted towards the Kurdish borderlands between Turkey and Iran. There Kurds on both sides of the borders were suspecting of both processing, as well as transporting, morphine and heroin derived from Afghan, Iranian and Pakistani opium. See “Turkey (DEA memo?)”, 1980, Subject Files of Attorney General Epstein, Southwest Asian Heroin, RG 60, NAB; “The World Opium Situation”, October 1970, CIA-RDP 73B00296R000300060031-9. ˘an Kitap, 2007, 35–8). ¨ rk’u¨n Anıları (Istanbul: Dog 139. Soner Yalcın, Behcet Cantu ¨ ncel Yayıncılık, 140. Belma Akcura, Derin Devlet Oldu Devlet (Istanbul: Gu 2006, 34 –55); Yalcın and Yurdakul, 132–4. 141. Yalcın and Yurdakul, 152–6.

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——— Organized Crime and American Power: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). ˘an Kitapcılık, Yalcın, Soner, Efendi: Beyaz Tu¨rklerin Bu¨yu¨k Sırrı (Istanbul: Dog 2004). ˘an Kitap, 2007). ——— Behcet Cantu¨rk’u¨n Anıları (Istanbul: Dog ˘an Yurdakul, Reis: Gladio’nun Tu¨rk Tetikcisi (Istanbul: Dog ˘an ——— and Dog Kitapcılık, 2007). ¨ rcher, Erik Jan, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Zu Progress in the Turkish National Movement, 1905–1926 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1984). ——— Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B.Tauris, 1997).

CHAPTER 6

Mosques, Media and Meaning in the Federal Republic of Germany from the 1970s to the early 1990s Sarah Thomsen Vierra

Immigration to Western and Central European countries after World War II has resulted in the formation of established ethnic minority communities there that have recently challenged host societies to reconsider how individuals and groups fit into the larger whole of the nation. In the case of Germany, the challenges of integration have been particularly difficult for that country and immigrants from Turkey. Brought to the Federal Republic of Germany as part of a guest worker program in the 1960s and early 1970s, many of these “temporary” workers from Turkey transformed into permanent residents, brought their families to live with them and formed immigrant communities within West German cities. Initially, German politicians and media focused on perceived cultural differences between northern and southern Europeans, or ruralurban distinctions, as the greatest challenges to Turkish participation in German society. Over time, however, “Turk” became virtually synonymous with “Muslim,” and the assumed incompatibility of Islam and postwar European values was then singled out in regarding these immigrants from Muslim-majority countries as uninterested in or incapable of integration. Instead, as the narrative goes, Muslim immigrants operated in communities settled within but separated

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from larger society. For Turkish immigrants, their belonging in the Federal Republic became tied in the public discourse to sites of religious observance in general, and mosques in particular. While actors at all levels of society, from the transnational to the national to the local, used these contested spaces to define the relationship between Turkish immigrants and German society, the news media played a critical role in formulating and disseminating prominent versions of that connection. ¨ ge Go ¨ cek describes in her discussion of geographical As Fatma Mu and sociological approaches to space in the introduction, examining the boundaries – symbolic and social – of a contested space reveals as much about the factors that constructed it as it does about the space itself. In this essay, I examine this space-building process in two steps. I look at the ways both German and Europe-based Turkish media sought to define “the mosque” and, through it, the Muslim immigrant community. Then, I compare those representations to everyday practice, that is, to the experiences and narratives of Turkish immigrants and their children concerning their local mosques. This approach benefits from and brings together two areas of scholarship that investigate the connections between German society and Muslim immigrants. First, I draw on studies of news media representations in Germany of Islam and Muslims. While some scholars use a particular event as a point of reference1, others, such as Dirk Halm and Sabine Schiffer, chart German media representations of Islam over several years. In doing so, they concluded that those largely negative and over-simplified depictions fail to reflect both the experiences of Muslims living in Germany on the one side and the diversity of the global Muslim population on the other.2 German media, however, has not been alone in its efforts to shape public discourse. As Christoph Schumann demonstrates, the European edition of the Turkish newspaper Hu¨rriyet has deliberately undertaken to be a leading voice of Germany’s Turkish minority population, defining it as belonging simultaneously to both countries, hence highlighting the pertinence and significance of the Turkish diaspora to Turkish state and society.3 This issue of belonging is also taken up by another group of scholars primarily interested in investigating where ethnic and

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religious minorities belong in relation to German society through the framework of space. Some, like those mentioned above, are interested in the role of discourse and its effect on belonging. For ˘ lar, use of the “ghetto trope” to describe certain spaces in Ays¸e C ¸ ag the city has been used to remove Turkish immigrants from membership in the host society, thereby fixing them as incapable ˘ lar, geographer Patricia Ehrkamp explores ¸ ag of inclusion.4 Like C discourses in Germany, specifically those concerning assimilation, and examines how these discourses have been internalized by Turkish immigrants and transformed into a standard by which they measure their own and their community members’ identities.5 Part of Ehrkamp’s assimilationist discourse concerns religious identity, a facet of Turkish belonging Rauf Ceylan examined in his study of Turkish mosques and cafes in Duisburg. Ceylan found that mosques, contrary to German media representations, serve to root Turkish immigrants in their local environments, giving them an entry into community life, rather than simply separating them from it.6 Hence mosques comprise a contested space in that the German media represents it as separating and marginalizing, whereas the everyday practices of mosque-goers reveal it to be integrating them into the host society. Taken together, these studies make important contributions to our understanding of the roles of the news media in defining Germany’s Turkish minority through a religious framework on the one side, and the responses of Turkish Germans in countering such framing through their representations and everyday practices by arguing that it is specifically through such a framework that they have sought to make space for themselves in German society on the other. Yet, in focusing primarily to the time following German reunification, they miss how those representations and experiences developed as the Turkish Muslim community itself grew and became increasingly established. What events influenced German media interpretations and, thus, the German public’s understanding of Islam, as they became aware that their country’s own Muslim population was not the temporary one they had expected? How did Turkish-language media challenge and redefine that most contested space, “the mosque”, and what effect did their intervention have on the

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identity of the Turkish immigrant community? Finally, how did these competing constructions of the mosque match with the experiences of Turkish immigrants and their children on the local level? By investigating how Turkish mosques as a particular type of contested space in West Germany were discursively constructed, positioned and used, I begin to unravel the history of these institutions, real and imagined, and understand the role they played in the experiences of Turkish immigrants. First, I examine German media coverage of the topic of Islam and of mosques more specifically in the 1970s and 1980s to see what prompted its focus on Muslim immigrants, where the media placed “the mosque” and its members within broader German society, and how their coverage reflected how Turkish immigrants and their children were perceived by German society.7 Next, I turn my attention to how Turkish media in West Germany constructed its own image of “the mosque abroad.” My discussion of Turkish media focuses on the European ˘an Media Group’s Hu¨rriyet, one of the first and the edition of the Dog most widely circulated Turkish-language newspapers in West Germany at the time. Hu¨rriyet, a strongly secularist and nationalist paper, began publishing its European edition for Turkish migrants in the early 1970s and has remained one of the most broadly circulated Turkish-language newspapers in Germany.8 Lastly, I discuss the place and purposes of mosques in the narratives of Turkish immigrants and their children to compare how they understood, experienced and used local mosques in comparison to how media presented them. For this final section, I narrow the field and focus on the local level experiences of Turkish residents of a neighborhood in Berlin-Wedding, called Sprengelkiez. While these residents’ experiences cannot stand in for all members of the TurkishGerman community, they do suggest the ways that media coverage and lived experience collide, conflict and influence each other. GERMAN MEDIA COVERAGE OF MOSQUES AS AN INTERNAL THREAT Despite the influx of Muslim guest workers throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, West German media had little to say about Islam before

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1979. Newspaper and journal articles published in the 1970s generally concerned themselves with Islam in other places beyond West Germany’s borders and, therefore, outside of Germans’ immediate experience or interest. This changed drastically as the 1978 – 9 Iranian Revolution prompted the Federal Republic, along with the rest of Europe and the United States, to take a closer look at the religion of Islam and what they saw as its potential political consequences without taking into account either its Shiʿi character or its societal dynamics. At this point, Islam – and Muslims – were more than a news story; they became a threat to the stability of German society, and the German media turned its attention to the potential dangers of its country’s own growing Muslim population. In addition to defining the threat, the media constructed “the mosque” in spatial terms as the “other” space that reinforced Muslim immigrants’ separateness and inability to assimilate. This development coincided with one of the consequences of family reunification: the opening of Koranschule (Qur’an schools) to educate the children of Turkish immigrants. The appearance of Koranschule brought the issue from the private rooms off back courtyards, where informal prayer rooms and mosques were often located, increasingly to the center of public consciousness. German politicians and media began to zero in on the religious schools and, thus, the mosque as a present and growing danger. The specter of an international and violent Islamic political movement combined with the domestic experience of a growing Muslim population operating outside the oversight and understanding of German society, producing calls to be aware of and address the emerging threat. The spring of 1979 saw a burgeoning of media attention to the Koranschulen in West Germany, with articles focusing on how instructors in those schools were passing on more than religious instruction to their students. Initially, reporters emphasized the foreignness of the Koranschulen as a hidden and lurking menace with political extremist undertones. In an article for the conservative newspaper Welt am Sonntag [World on Sunday] entitled, “In the middle of Germany: Turks drill hate into children,” a reporter opens by describing the lessons young Turkish children would learn in their “particular type of Sunday school.” Such lessons included

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warnings that seemingly friendly German teachers were Christian missionaries or Jewish agents in disguise; prohibition of friendships with Germans, “as they are Christians and eat pork;” and the sanction of killing anyone who went against such lessons. The strangeness and threat of these “underground” and “illegal” Koranschulen are compounded by the reporter’s description of the class itself. “The lesson takes place in dank basements or dark courtyards,” the article states. “It lasts three to six hours. The teachers are dressed entirely in black” – calling to mind the radical mullahs of revolutionary Iran. The separation of boys and girls, along with the covering of girls’ hair, accentuate the foreignness of the situation, while the use of corporal punishment implies a propensity toward violence. The instructors, the reporter informs, belong to the extreme-right Turkish opposition party known as the Gray Wolves. Outlawed in Turkey, they use Koranschule in West Germany to indoctrinate the youth in Turkish nationalism and a hatred for their host society.9 The themes introduced in this essay – the foreignness of Koranschulen and their dangerous mixture of religion with radical politics – continued in West German media throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s. To some, the perceived increasing radicalism and fanaticism of mosques in West Germany could be tied directly to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s call for international Islamic revolution.10 A 1982 article from the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung communicated this fear of fanaticism succinctly through its title and the accompanying photograph. Above the heading “The Totalitarian Society of the Religious: How Islamists spread their dogma with violence” is a photograph completely filled with the prostrate forms of Muslim men in prayer.11 The absolute uniformity of the image, together with the lack of faces visible in the image, erases any sense of individuality among these men and instead reduces them to a collective identity that lacks humanity and, as the title states, threatens violence. Some officials from Islamic organizations in West Germany tried to counter this growing concern and suspicion when given the opportunity by German reporters, particularly in regard to religious ¨ lle from the Islamic Cultural Center in education. Necdet Demirgu Frankfurt explained to Die Welt, the weekly edition of Welt am

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Sonntag, that Koranschule were the only alternative for Turkish children to learn about Islam, which was not included in religious instruction in ¨ lle told the reporter, German schools. “In our Koranschulen,” Demirgu “children are advised [that] they must cooperate with the structure of this society and live peacefully with each other.”12 Mohammed ElSayed, secretary of the Islamic Community of southern Germany, told a reporter from the Mu¨nchener Merkur, a conservative daily out of Bavaria, that the children in his organization’s Koranschule learned “prayer, order, cleanliness – and how one behaves toward other people.”13 These public statements were geared toward presenting the Koranschule in a light that would make it seem not only nonthreatening, but also familiar. Many Germans, however, remained unconvinced by such assurances. Concerns persisted about the alien nature of mosques and Muslims as well as of their connections to political extremists and terrorism. Islamic organizations’ secrecy surrounding the sources of their finances – rumored to come from Libya – contributed to public fears about the potential for their local Koranschulen to become, in the words of one reporter, a site that acted as an agent “for ideas that could serve as the basis for political terror.”14 A 1984 article in Die Welt revealed the continuing connection between mosques and politically radical Islam, and marked a beginning of a transition. Entitled “Is the revolution of Islam coming to classrooms?” the article discusses the thorny issue of the place of religious education courses in Islam, highlighting the challenges of bringing such instruction into the German classroom versus the potential dangers of keeping them in unregulated mosques. The reporter suggests that the radical religious politics of mosques could invade the German school system, asking whether “the Islamic Revolution could be preached in German classrooms.”15 The photograph accompanying the article furthered its intent to set up the foreignness of the mosque and position its inhabitants as outside German society. In the foreground, a class of young girls wearing generous headscarves sits behind narrow tables, while the adults, including one man, stand in a line along the back wall. While the dress of the subjects in the picture stress their difference, the way they fill – even overflow – its borders suggests that the mosques and Koranschulen the reporter discusses are literally crammed with such people, leading

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the viewer to wonder what will happen when those subjects spill out of that space and into the German school system. What is to be done with these children, the article asks. This question – the place and control of religious instruction – would become a prevalent theme in West German media throughout the 1980s. While the perception of the mosque as a separate and threatening space persisted, as that last article suggests, the early 1980s saw a shift in focus from the menacing specter of politically extremist Islam to the impact on the Turkish children who attended Koranschule. Increasingly, the consequence to be averted was not simply hostility toward German society but the hindrance of successful integration of Turkish children into that society. And, while most of the media’s efforts to construct the mosque as a threatening space came from conservative-oriented newspapers and magazines, theirs were not the only voices. A Bundestag representative from the left-center Social ¨ er, articulated this growing conDemocratic Party, Thomas Schro sensus in a 1982 article in the party’s newspaper entitled, “How Integration is Hindered: Koranschulen are Breeding Grounds for ¨ er states his case bluntly, arguing “Koranschule Resentment.” Schro established in all Germany’s major cities hinder the opportunity to live together. They are breeding grounds for prejudices,” he continues, that teach not only the Qur’an and the Islamic moral code, but also spread anti-Semitism, advocate the oppression of women and practice corporal punishment – all in sympathy, if not ¨ er’s points about cooperation, with the fascist Gray Wolves.16 Schro the secrecy of the mosques, the lack of oversight and the opposition of such organizations to the secular Turkish state draw from the anxieties that arose in the 1970s. Yet, in his article, the German politician gave voice to a new and growing concern – that children who attend Koranschule would be “less able to integrate and less tolerant of other religious views and behaviors than other foreign ¨ er warns, children.”17 “Whoever sends his child to Koranschule,” Schro “harms him, because he forces the child to remain foreign.”18 ¨ er and many others like him saw it, was The solution, as Schro taking Islamic religious instruction from the dark and secretive corners of the back courtyards and placing it in the public schools, where it would receive necessary oversight. Muslims have a right to

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¨ er reasoned, have a religious freedom, and Turkish children, Schro right to religious education. “So, what is a matter of course for Protestant and Catholic children in our schools,” he argues “must apply to Turkish children of the Islamic faith as well.”19 Similar sentiments and criticisms echoed throughout the press in the early 1980s. While the secrecy surrounding the mosque prohibits one from ¨ ller knowing much about what happens within, reporter Liselotte Mu contends in a regional daily from northern Germany, it is clear “that it strengthens the youth’s defensive posture against the host society. In recent days, the intolerant direction of Islam has won the upper hand.” Bringing Muslim religious instruction into the public schools, ¨ ller argues, would “give space to an enlightened and tolerant form Mu of Islam.”20 However, the lack of a single organization with the authority to speak for all West Germany’s Muslims combined with the similar lack of a central governing body with the ability to enact country-wide educational reform made this an issue that was, and remains, a challenge.

TURKISH MEDIA COVERAGE OF MOSQUES AS AN OUTPOST OF TURKISHNESS Certainly, Turkish media also focused on the mosque as an educational space. In culturally Christian West Germany, many Turkish Muslim families faced the challenge of raising children who they wanted religiously and culturally rooted in Islam and the Turkish state. A January 1978 article in the European edition of the Turkish daily Hu¨rriyet articulated the role of the mosque in meeting this challenge. Next to a picture of the president of Bremen’s Turkish Islamic Cultural Association with a group of Koranschule students, the caption reads: “Through the major efforts of the Islamic Association in Vegesack, our children who are growing up under a German influence are also having the spirit of religion and loyalty to the homeland through the organized Qur’an courses.” Later, the writer reiterates the importance of this project, stating that the efforts of President Hasan Kızılkaya and his organization “have been unified” on the necessity “to educate the youth who have forgotten their Turkishness and their religion.”21

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As this last sentence mentions, mosques were not an exclusively religious space. Tightly intertwined with religious observance were the practice and preservation of Turkish identity, an effort in which the Turkish state took an active role. The Ministry of Religious ˘ ı) began sending imams to mosques Affairs (Diyanet I˙s¸leri Bas¸kanlıg in Europe in the late 1970s to provide religious leadership during Ramadan. The Ministry became even more involved in the religious lives of Turks abroad in the wake of the 1980s military coup in order to counteract the efforts of expatriate religious leaders who had fled the country. As part of a “counter offensive” to keep such leaders from gaining inroads among Turks abroad and turning them against the Turkish state, the Ministry took a more active role in cultivating relationships with European mosques and bringing them under its leadership.22 In 1984, the Turkish-Islamic Union for ¨ rkisch-Islamische Union der Anstalt fu ¨r Religious Affairs (Tu ˘ i, DITIB) was founded, ¨ rk-I˙slam Birlig Religion or Diyanet I˙s¸leri Tu an organization with direct connections to the Ministry of Religious Affairs and staffed with its imams. Much like the Mobile Village ¨ ksel examines in a previous chapter, mosques Courses Metin Yu became centers of learning and preserving “Turkishness,” in this case for first generation Turkish immigrants and their children. This aspect constituted a central focus of Turkish media, and especially Hu¨rriyet, in the 1970s and 1980s. For the second generation, spaces of cultural preservation focused on connecting children to their parents’ (and, ostensibly, their) Turkish roots. Nearly a decade later, Hu¨rriyet continued to highlight the importance of cultural as well as religious education in these spaces. In an article about the opening of a mosque in Berlin-Wedding, the writer quotes an announcement by the DITIB Attache´ in Berlin, Hayrettin S¸allı. In his statement, S¸allı describes the activities of the mosque, beginning with religious education: The biggest problem of our citizens living abroad is the future of their children who are growing up far away from the national and religious culture and the air of their homeland. As part of the services we provide for the Turks living around Berlin, a Qur’an Advancement Course has been going on for the past two years with the help of the TurkishIslamic Union for Religious Affairs [. . .] This course aims to teach our

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middle school-level children about their mother tongue Turkish and their religion Islam without getting in the way of their regular classes.23

In this section, S¸allı identifies the most significant challenge to the Turkish community in West Germany as imparting their national, cultural and religious values to their children. The first remedy for this problem, he argues, is a religious education intertwined with elements of Turkish culture and nationalism. Each class, for example, opened with singing Turkey’s national anthem.24 As this last element demonstrates, DITIB, along with other Islamic organizations, did not see religion-focused education as the single solution to preserving Turkish culture in second-generation youth. S¸allı also described additional language courses “that would familiarize students with Turkish culture and the Turkish homeland.” Such courses served to emphasize that the students were “living in a foreign country,” and encouraged them to maintain good relations with people in Germany.25 Thus, the leadership of Islamic organizations used mosques as centers of religious learning, but also places through which Turkish-German youth – living, in S¸allı’s words, in a “foreign country” – could be connected to the “Turkish homeland” and the cultural elements inherent in that connection. Their efforts contributed to the fusion of religious, cultural and national identity among the second generation, a fusion that is reflected in the testimony of one young Turkish-German woman we will meet later in the chapter who described Islam as the “Turkish religion.”26 Hu¨rriyet’s coverage of mosques also emphasized the importance of those spaces for the first generation as well. In addition to the spaces of religious observance, mosques served as a place to gather and celebrate Islamic holidays. These celebrations, such as for Ramadan and the Festival of Sacrifice (Kurban Bayramı), brought the first and second generations together to the mosque, infusing religious holidays with national traditions and culture. As these holidays constituted significant community events, Hu¨rriyet consistently reported on the activities surrounding Ramadan and Kurban Bayramı in West Germany throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. These articles focused on three main themes: the attendees, the manner in which the holiday was observed and the emotions connected to the celebration.

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The composition and number of attendees remained an important aspect of the news stories covering religious celebrations. In August of 1977, “just as it happens every year [Turkish] mosques around Europe filled up with the faithful.”27 Articles covering religious holidays repeated this theme as verbatim throughout the late 1970s and into the 80s.28 Another example is found in an article from June 1986, in which the reporter writes, “Despite it being a working day, the mosques filled up and overflowed to the gardens and streets with the faithful on the morning of bayram.”29 Unlike German media coverage that suggested an ominous nature to the numbers, for Hu¨rriyet the “overflowing” nature of participation confirmed both the universal and heartfelt religious observance of Muslims “abroad” and the critical importance of the mosque in providing the space for their Turkish identity. In addition to stressing the numbers filling the mosques and spilling out of them, the writers constantly connect these faithful back to their kinsmen in Turkey. Participants were referred to as “our compatriots,” “Muslim Turks in Berlin,” “Berlin’s Turks,” and “our citizens,” along with other similar identifiers. These labels linked the Turks living in West Germany to those in Turkey through their religious and national identities, and emphasized their place within a larger Muslim Turkish community. Articles also accomplished this through highlighting distinguished guests who joined in these religious celebrations.30 Local religious leaders, representatives from the national Islamic umbrella organizations, important businessmen, visiting officials from Turkey – these participants, singled out among the “droves” of the faithful – strengthened the connections of local worshipers to those across the country and back in Turkey. At the same time, they lent a degree of legitimacy and establishment to the proceedings. Such guests would not have been present at the early celebrations of Ramadan in the earliest religious spaces, such as back rooms of Kneipen [pubs] or rented halls of churches. Now, in these official mosques, they stood as the religious and cultural figureheads of an established Turkish Muslim community. Together with these visiting dignitaries, the men, women and children of West Germany’s Muslim community celebrated the

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holidays with a mixture of religious and cultural traditions. Prayer was featured as central to these events. Through the practice of ritual prayers and of giving thanks, individual participants became part of the larger body of believers. Newspaper articles stressed this fusion through repeated use of phrases like “unity,” “being together,” and “hearts became one.”31 In addition to ritual prayers, participants also appealed to Allah regarding developments in Turkey. In the late 1970s, during a period of escalating violence between left- and right-wing forces and political unrest that culminated in the 1980 military coup d’e´tat, Hu¨rriyet reported the prayers of the faithful in West Germany being “for our country’s and our people’s peace, for Turkey to come out of the straits it is currently in and for the terror in the country to be finished.”32 The prayers, together with the communal manner in which they were performed, connected participants to each other through their common faith and identity. Hu¨rriyet also focused on how participants reinforced their shared identities through a second major attribute of religious festivals: food. Particularly at the iftar dinners during Ramadan, food played a vital role in communal religious gatherings; the preparation and consumption of these celebratory meals gave the first generation an opportunity to enact their cultural traditions “even while abroad,” and pass them on to their children. A reporter covering an iftar dinner at a mosque near Frankfurt highlighted the role of food in an article entitled, “Not much missing from Ramadan abroad.” The article is surrounded on two sides by photographs: in one, a group of men sit at a long, rectangular table, their iftar meal in front of them; in the other, a smaller group of women and a boy enjoy their meal, sitting on the floor at a round table. One of the captions reads, “There was nothing missing on the iftar tables given at the Bonames Mosque.”33 The meal itself almost becomes a guest as the writer describes the scene: “Present at the table decorated with ¨ rek were many various Turkish foods ranging from baklava to bo [the visiting dignitaries.]”34 A year later, a writer goes into greater detail about the composition of the meal. Next to two pictures again displaying the men’s and women’s iftar tables is a list of the foods present at “spectacular” iftar: “5 sheep, 800 lahmacun, 100

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pide, 300 watermelons, and 50 kilos of yogurt.” This iftar, the readers are informed, “the guests said they would never forget for long years to come”.35 In the following years, articles focused less on the exact makeup of the meal than on the practice of consuming it communally. As fervent as the prayers and present as the tables of food were the emotions that the religious festivals brought out. Sorrow and happiness, joy and disappointment – Hu¨rriyet depicted participants experiencing and displaying a range of feelings, but found the causes of such emotions be more distinct. On one hand, it located a palpable undercurrent of sadness that permeated the events, a feeling a DITIB attache´ labeled in 1985 as “the pain of being abroad.”36 In its coverage of religious holidays and the festivities, Hu¨rriyet reminded Turkish Muslims that they were far from “home.” In celebrating together, participants “tried to dissipate the feelings of sadness coming from being far away from their relatives and families.”37 The constant reference to distance from loved ones and homeland, of being “abroad” in a “foreign world,” emphasizes the source of the sadness, but being together “alleviated the unhappy feeling” through its creation of a space of cultural preservation and performance. Iftar dinners were often highlighted in media coverage of the Turkish community in West Germany. Celebrated abroad, this ritual of breaking one’s Ramadan fast became a way of connecting to one’s memories and traditions of the homeland. A newspaper article from the late 1970s recounts how “the iftar dinner eaten in the men’s section passed with jokes and happiness,” while “the women had the opportunity to sweetly talk with each other.”38 Through communal celebration, participants created a space to experience and celebrate their Turkishness. As the title of a 1983 article states, “Berlin lived Turkey during bayram.” “Muslim Turks of Berlin,” the reporter writes, “lived the joy of being together on such a day despite being so far away from the homeland [. . .] Forgetting all resentments and hugging each other after the prayers, the believers who filled the mosque had the opportunity to live the bayram air of Turkey.”39 “Turkey”, then, could be recreated within the context of these spaces of religious and cultural preservation.

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TURKISH-GERMAN EVERYDAY PRACTICE OF MOSQUES AS PART OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD To this point, we have seen how West German media constructed the mosque as a reactionary space that threatened Turkish children’s successful integration and examined how Turkish media, the newspaper Hu¨rriyet specifically, advocated the mosque as a site of cultural and religious preservation and education. But how did Turkish immigrants and their children use and experience mosques at a local level? To address this question, I draw on oral history interviews of first- and second-generation Turkish immigrants from a particular neighborhood in Berlin-Wedding, called Sprengelkiez. The stories shared by these interviewees help us to think about the ways that media representation and personal experience collide and influence each other. Similar to the media discourse, the Koranschule was easily the most dominant topic in the first and second generations’ reflections on their participation in the life of local mosques. As discussed earlier, Korankurse (Qur’an instruction courses) became a standard part of religious life in West German mosques from the mid-1970s onward, and this was certainly also the case in two Berlin-Wedding mosques visited by residents of Sprengelkiez: the Beyazid mosque and the Yunus-Emre mosque. The Beyazid mosque began as a small prayer room on Sparrstrasse, and moved to its present location on Lindowerstrasse in 1976. Though the organization that operates the mosque has offered a variety of religious and social services since its founding, in those early years the mosque was open only for prayer times, Friday prayer, and Koranschule. At the time, Mehmet Asker, now an official of the mosque, was a student in the Qur’an courses. In my interview with him, Asker remembered that there were many more children in those early days. Classes used to be held during the weekdays after school. Now, Asker contended, parents are “more relaxed,” and the mosque offers Korankurse only on the weekends.40 The Yunus-Emre mosque, which started in a small apartment in 1976 before moving to its larger Reinickendorfer location, also offered Korankurse from the early days of its founding.41 These Koranschulen became a familiar space for numerous Turkish-German

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children in Sprengelkiez whose parents sent them there for religious instruction. The spaces that developed in response to the second generation consisted of religious education centered on the Qur’an itself, as well as exposure to religious rites and practices. While Korankurse differed among the two mosques, they were generally single-sex classes held by Turkish-speaking instructors. The children learned to read and recite the Suras in Arabic, though most of the students could not translate the text into a language they understood.42 Koranschule was meant to introduce and connect the second generation to the holy text and focal point of their community’s religious belief, and, at the same time, expose students to the forms of religious worship and obligation. The location of the classes, within the center of the Muslim community, familiarized the youth with Islamic religious life. A group of photographs of a mosque on Lindowerstrasse in BerlinWedding reflect the ways in which Turkish-German children in Sprengelkiez were exposed to and experienced religious instruction and practice. These pictures also offer a distinct contrast to the photographs included in those news media accounts concerning mosques discussed earlier. Taken by writer and photographer Kemal Kurt for a museum exhibit in 1993, they depict young students taking part in Koranschule and a prayer meeting. One image documents a Qur’an class of young girls and women. Approximately two dozen girls and young women kneel or sit crosslegged on the carpeted floor in small groups throughout a spacious room. In front of each student is a small wooden desk with either worksheets or a book lying open on top. Some are bent studiously over the work in front of them, while others look across the room or chat with the girl next to them. Each girl is dressed in long-sleeved shirts or sweaters with pants or long skirts in a manner suggesting both modesty and chilly weather. Similarly, everyone in the room wears a generous headscarf, though the ages of youngest girls suggest these were donned for the purposes of the class. Finally, an older woman – presumably the teacher – has stood up in front of her own desk and is talking with the students nearest her.43 While the subject is very similar to the photograph accompanying the 1984 article in Die Welt, by capturing the girls and women in the midst of their class

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work, Kurt familiarizes both the participants and their activities to the viewer. Rather than motionless rows of young girls backed by a line of serious-looking adults, the figures in Kurt’s photograph interact with each other and their lessons in mundane (and nonthreatening) ways. At the same time, by making a class of young girls the subject of his photograph, Kurt addresses a silence in Hu¨rriyet’s coverage of Turkish religious life in West Germany, which emphasized the religious participation of men and boys first and, occasionally, grown women. The photograph of the young boys’ Qur’an class shares several attributes with that of the girls’. Each student kneels in front of a small wooden desk, their respect for the religious nature of the space shown by their shoeless feet and the prayer caps that cover several of the boys’ heads. The makeup of the class is also single-sex, but this class is much smaller. Only 13 students kneel in front of the wooden desks, each with its own Qur’an open on top. They form a semi-circle with the teacher at the head. The teacher, perhaps in his thirties or forties, wears a white collared shirt with a dark tie and cardigan. His demeanor is serious as he leads the class.44 In both classes, the headcoverings, the kneeling desks and the single-sex environment set the Koranschule apart from the students’ other educational spaces, marking it as a unique and distinctly religious space. However, here, too, Kurt displays a subject less ominous than earlier German media portrayals. The relatively small size of the group and the lack of uniformity in regard to clothing run counter to both German and Turkish depictions of Muslim participation in religious life – a participation characterized as numerous and homogeneous. A third photograph continues to challenge the notion of rigid uniformity and shifts its focus in terms of subject from direct education to participation, depicting a group of men and boys in prayer. The photographer stands to the front and side of the participants, capturing them as they perform communal prayer. They face the same direction, going through the same physical motions of ritual prayer – standing, kneeling, bowing – though not in lockstep with each other. Also, the group is a diverse one: a man in work overalls stands near another in slacks and a sports coat, boys pray next to older men.45 Unlike the photograph accompanying the 1982

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Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article, showing their faces and the process of prayer humanizes the worshipers, revealing their nature as individuals first and common worshipers second. For the boys in the photograph, the space in which they are participating is one of religious education and preservation. Like apprentices, they learn their religious obligations through action, by praying alongside their fathers, brothers, and fellow Muslims. The participation of the second generation in the religious life of the mosque helped to ensure the continuation of that community. As both German and Turkish media emphasized, Koranschule and communal prayer were not only about teaching the second generation to be good Muslims, but also to identify with and take part in the broader (and local) ummah. Contrary to the binary nature of the consequences on youth in relation to the mosque put forth by German and Turkish newspapers then, the second generation responded to the efforts of their elders in a variety of ways. For some, their exposure to religious life as a young person led to increased participation as an adult. Mehmet Asker attended Koranschule at the Beyazid mosque as a young boy, and later came to serve the mosque in an official capacity.46 Similarly, Onur Korkmaz participated in Koranschule and religious celebrations at a mosque in Berlin-Wedding while growing up, and ultimately moved into a leadership position in the Yunus Emre mosque as an adult.47 Ceylan posits that the participation of the second generation, members of which have increasingly pushed for purpose-built mosques, reflects a broader desire to be a part of German society and to make a permanent space for the Muslim community within it.48 Korkmaz and Asker both expressed the desire to forge connections between their mosque and the neighborhood, though Korkmaz (a member of a DITIB mosque) seemed more enthusiastic about the prospect. In any case, it is clear that the mosque has become a central point of both the religious and working lives for at least some among the second generation, as the Hu¨rriyet reporters and their interviewees had hoped. For many others, Koranschule was an obligation or rite of passage that, at least initially, did not lead to greater participation in local religious life. A series of interviews conducted in the early 1990s of

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young Turkish-German girls in their early teens reveals an ambivalent attitude toward such religious spaces. Aylin recalled going to Koranschule during the summers whenever her family was not traveling. In discussing her relationship with Islam, Aylin contended that she found the religion very positive, but too complicated. Maybe she would be more devout, she thought, when she was older.49 Lale attended Koranschule early in the mornings and took her time there much less seriously than Aylin. “I messed around,” she confessed, not sounding particularly repentant. She and her friends often got into trouble, and once she was even made to leave class. Yet Lale contended that it was good for parents to send their children to the mosque to learn about the Qur’an. While she mused that she would likely do the same with her own children, what they (and she) would actually learn did not seem especially important to her. “They shouldn’t learn too much,” Lale explained, “but they should go. That’d be good for me, too.”50 For Aylin and Lale, then, participation in the educational spaces of the mosque was a valuable experience (albeit one whose value was perhaps clearer in retrospect), but not one that called them into deeper relationship or identification with the mosque community. These second-generation youth certainly considered their mosque a “Turkish” space. Yet, the boundary between the Qur’an courses and their everyday life seemed to be a porous one they crossed with relative ease, not the rigid boundary German and Turkish media built around their literary constructions of the mosque. Finally, some among the second generation found Koranschule neither personally compelling nor generically “good.” Rather, their reaction to participation in spaces of religious education took on a decidedly negative tone. While in some cases this was due to general disinterest on the part of the student, in others the conduct of the instructors made the space unwelcoming or even hostile. The ¨ zels are not a particularly religious family; though the father is a O devout Muslim, he “doesn’t force us, ‘you must do this,’” first¨ zel explained to me during my generation immigrant Sevim O ¨ zel interview with her. However, when the children came of age, O and her husband sent them to the local mosque for Koranschule. But ¨ zel recalled, were “a little strange. They hit hand [sic ] the teachers, O

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or did something like that. My husband heard, says, ‘No, you [kids] ¨ ler, added, “We were can’t go anymore.’” Her daughter, Filiz Gu there for maybe two, three weeks at most and that was it.”51 The negative experience of the Koranschule, coupled with their parents’ leniency in matters of religious observance, distanced the ¨ zel children from participation in institutional religious life, O ¨ zels’ a separation they maintained in adulthood. While the O experience may seem to reflect German media portrayals, it diverges in two ways: first, the parents, far from being intimidated by the mosque officials into submitting to their authority, removed their children from the class; and, second, the father continued to participate in communal religious life without forcing his family to ¨ zel children maintained a do the same. At the same time, that the O strong sense of their Turkish identity despite their lack of participation in activities at the local mosque challenges the central importance of that space in preserving and maintaining “Turkishness,” as depicted by Hu¨rriyet. CONCLUSION With each voice that sought to describe and define the place and purpose of Turkish mosques in West Germany, a different picture appears. For West German media, the focus shifted from a more diffuse danger of politically radical Islam to a threat to Turkish children’s integration, but coverage typically emphasized the foreignness of Islam, its adherents and its spaces. Along with those politicians and community figures they interviewed, West German print media constructed the mosque as a space apart from German society; secretive, uncontrolled and threatening. While initially the image of a breeding ground of political and religious extremism loomed largest, over time the mosque instead became articulated as a dangerous stumbling block to the success of Turkish children in German society. The solution, particularly in regard to the situation of Turkish children, then became breaking the border between the German state and the mosque, of controlling that space or, more accurately, of removing the children’s religious education to a more controlled space – the German school system.

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According to the coverage of the European edition of Hu¨rriyet, the mosque constituted a physical and symbolic center of both religious and national identity for the Turkish Muslim community in West Germany. While Koranschule brought the youth into the mosque and informed them of the tenets of the “Turkish religion”, prayer services and holiday celebrations taught them how to practice their religion as well as their parents’ cultural traditions and national identity. Likewise, observing religious holidays created space for the first generation to fulfill religious obligations and participate in Turkish cultural traditions as members of a larger community. While the meanings and implications of the mosque were different, both German and Turkish media agreed on one crucial point: they consistently and emphatically constructed mosques as spaces outside German society. Turkish mosques may have been embedded in local neighborhoods, but they served “foreigners” or “our citizens”, depending on the perspective, who even after 20 years, were still living in a “foreign country.” In this way, “the mosque” had, by the early 1980s, already been firmly located within the ghetto trope metaphor.52 For Turkish immigrants and their children in Sprengelkiez, local mosques were not the sinister places that inhabited German media, but nor were they always the source of comfort described in Turkish media. Turkish Muslims in that neighborhood certainly considered their mosques a Turkish space, and participating in them made most feel as if they were connecting to or at least acknowledging their Turkish roots. At the same time, mosques, and particularly Koranschule, were a normal part of their everyday landscape, and did not make them feel estranged either from their neighborhood or their neighbors. And while their descriptions are a far cry from the disturbing stories in German newspapers, at least in this neighborhood in the 1970s and 1980s, at this point there was not yet a sense of a mosque as a bridge to German society, as Ceylan found in his study of Duisburg mosques.53 Mosques embedded themselves in the local landscape and became a normal part of many Turkish immigrants’ lives, but they focused on preserving their participants’ Turkishness within German society

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and local Muslims (and non-Muslims) considered them to be a distinctly Turkish space. In this way, the particular experiences of Turkish Muslims in Germany connect more broadly to our understanding of contested spaces in regard to diaspora. Excluded from the established religious traditions and practices, immigrants created new spaces of religious observance. These spaces challenged the control of the state – the same body whose economic policies made their creation possible. The perceived “foreignness” of the religious and cultural characteristics attributed to these spaces by host society media marginalized both the spaces themselves and their inhabitants, a separation reinforced by the sending country’s press, though with a decidedly different tenor. In either case, the diasporic identity of the marginalized community was the central element of its media representations. This study suggests that the most fundamental disconnect in perceptions about Turkish mosques in West Germany is not found in rivaling media representations, but rather in the comparison between public discourse and daily life. While German and Turkish media sought to define mosques and, through those sites, the character of the Muslim community, Turkish immigrants and their children participated in local mosques on their own terms. The diversity of their experiences, even within the single neighborhood of Berlin’s Sprengelkiez, prompts one to question (in direct contestation of the media representations) the degree of influence local mosques had on Turkish and Turkish-German Muslims. Media constructions of difference, it would seem, placed more emphasis on separating Turkish Muslims from German society in the 1970s and 1980s than actual mosques had accomplished by the early 1990s. Even as most residents interviewed did consider local mosques distinctly “Turkish” spaces, at least in the case of Sprengelkiez, the evidence suggests the relationship between Turkish Muslims and their mosques was more akin to Germans and their churches: a place that hosts certain traditions and rites of passage, but one that has a defined (and relatively small) space in their everyday lives. Perhaps, in focusing on the foreignness of mosques in Germany, they and we have missed the familiar.

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NOTES 1. See Siegfried Ja¨ger, “Der Karikaturenstreit im ‘Rechts-Mitte-Links’Diskurs deutscher Print-Medien”, in Siegfried Ja¨ger and Dirk Halm, eds, ¨ nster: UNRAST Mediale Barrieren: Rassismus als Integrationshindernis (Mu ¨ del, “‘Umheimliche Ga¨ste. Die Verlag, 2007): 51 – 104; Carolin Ko Gegewelt der Muslime in Deutschland’: Anti-integrative Integrations¨ ber den Mord diskurse in der deutschen Presse am Beispiel der Debatte u an Theo van Gogh,” in Siegfried Ja¨ger and Dirk Halm, eds, Mediale ¨nster: UNRAST Verlag, Barrieren: Rassismus als Integrationshindernis (Mu 2007, 201 – 28). 2. Sabine Schiffer, “Der Islam in deutschen Medien”, in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 20 (17 May 2005): 23 –30; Dirk Halm, Marina Liakova and Zeliha Yetlik, “Pauschale Islamfeindlichkeit? Zur Wahrnehmung des Islams und zur sozio-kulturellen Teilhabe der Muslime in Deutschland,” in Siegfried Ja¨ger and Dirk Halm, eds, Mediale Barrieren: Rassismus als ¨ nster: UNRAST Verlag, 2007, 11 –50). Integrationshindernis (Mu 3. Christoph Schumann, “About ‘Turks’ and ‘Germans’: The Turkish Press in Germany and the Construction of Multiple Memberships”, in Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen, eds, Translocality: The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010, 369 – 400). ˘lar, “Constraining metaphors and the transnationalization of 4. Ays¸e S. C ¸ ag spaces in Berlin”, in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27, no. 4 (October 2001): 601– 13. 5. Patricia Ehrkamp, “‘We Turks are no Germans’: Assimilation discourses and the dialectical construction of identities in Germany”, in Environment and Planning A, 38(9) (2006): 1673–92. 6. Rauf Ceylan, Ethnische Kolonien: Entstehung, Funktion und Wandel am ¨r Beispiel tu¨rkischer Moscheen und Cafes (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag fu Sozialwissenschaften, 2006). 7. A quick note on my use of “mosque”: in the 1970s and even into the 1980s, German media only occasionally used the word “mosque” to describe the physical place Muslims met to pray and receive religious instruction. Instead, they spoke of “Islamic centers” and “Koranschule” [Qur’an schools]. However these Koranschule took place in the religious spaces that also served as a mosque, even though those spaces were not the purpose-built mosques that would become so controversial in the 1990s and 2000s. Here, the word “mosque” is used to describe these places in recognition of the roles they served in the religious life of the Muslim community. 8. Faruk S¸en and Andreas Goldberg, Tu¨rken in Deutschland: Leben zwischen zwei Kulturen (Munich: Beck, 1994). ¨ rken sa¨en Haß in Kinder,” Welt am Sonntag, 9. “Mitten in Deutschland: Tu 11 March 1979.

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10. Horst Zimmermann, “Wenn Suren-Pauken zum Pflichtfach wird: Gegen ¨ nger sind die Beho ¨ rden machtlos”, Saarbru¨cker Zeitung, Khomeinis Ju 26 April 1979. See also Frank La¨mmel, “Koranschulen in Deutschland: Feindbilder im Namen Allahs?” Mu¨nchener Merkur, 14/16 April 1979. ¨ nter Lerch, “Die totalita¨re Gesellschaft der Religio ¨ sen: Wie 11. Wolfgang Gu die Islamisten ihre Glaubenlehre mit Gewalt verbreiten”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 August 1982. 12. Martina Kempff, “Mohammeds Wort soll Einzug an den Schulen halten”, Die Welt, 17 April 1979. 13. Frank La¨mmel, “Koranschulen in Deutschland: Feindbilder im Namen Allahs?” Mu¨nchener Merkur, 14/16 April 1979. 14. Horst Zimmermann, “Wenn Suren-Pauken zum Pflichtfach wird: Gegen ¨ nger sind die Beho ¨ rden machtlos”, Saarbru¨cker Zeitung, 26 Khomeinis Ju April 1979. 15. Joachim Neander, “Kommt die Revolution des Islam ins Klassenzimmer?” Die Welt 137, 14 June 1984, 3. ¨ er, “Wie Integration verhindert wird: Koranschulen sind 16. Thomas Schro ¨ r Ressentiments”, Sozialdemokratischer Pressedienst, 1 March Brutsta¨tten fu 1982, 4. ¨ er, 4. 17. Schro 18. Ibid., 5. 19. Ibid., 5. ¨ ller, “Tu ¨ rken von Berlin wollen keine Deutschen werden: 20. Liselotte Mu ¨ rgerung/ ,Dritter Weg’ ist keine Dauerlo ¨ sung”, Senat dringt auf Einbu Hannoverische Allgemeine, 10 July 1982. 21. “Camide politikanın is¸i yoktur,” Hu¨rriyet, 1 January 1978, 6. 22. Thijl Sunier and Nico Landman, Transnational Turkish Islam: shifting geographies of religious activism and community building in Turkey and Europe (Boston: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 49– 53). 23. “Din Hizmetleri Atas¸esi bildiri yayınladı: ‘Islamiyet konusunda en iyi ¨ rkiye’de veriliyor’,” Hu¨rriyet, 20 November 1986, 18. bilgiler Tu 24. While the “national” and the “cultural” may be distinct in Turkey itself, in disapora these identifiers often become deeply enmeshed, as evidenced by the inclusion of the national anthem in religious instruction. 25. “Din Hizmetleri Atas¸esi bildiri yayınladı: ‘Islamiyet konusunda en iyi ¨ rkiye’de veriliyor’”, Hu¨rriyet, 20 November 1986, 18. bilgiler Tu ¨ per, 1993, audio cassette, “Die 26. Lale (pseudonym), interview by Ursula Tru Leute vom Sparrplatz”, Ausstellung (DLSA), Mitte Museum Archive (MMA), 14. 27. “Ramazan’ın ilk cuması gurbette muhtes¸emdi”, Hu¨rriyet, 21 August 1977, 1. 28. The following year the writer echoed the earlier story: “just as it happens every year, this year as well with the start of Ramadan our mosques abroad filled to the brim and spilled over.” “The tens of thousands” of “Berlin’s Turks passed through the streets of Berlin in droves, running to the

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29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey mosques from the early hours of the morning” in September 1983. This article continues to describe the scene: “With many of the believers being unable to fit into mosques and masjids in the city, they prayed in the courtyards and fulfilled their duties towards God.” See “Berlin, bayramda ¨ rkiye’yi yas¸adı”, Hu¨rriyet, 23 September 1983, 17. Tu “Bir bayram daha gecti”, Hu¨rriyet, 21 June 1986, 15. For examples, see “Ramazan’ın ilk cuması gurbette muhtes¸emdi”, Hu¨rriyet, 21 August 1977, 1; “Gurbette camiler doldu, tas¸tı. . .”, Hu¨rriyet, 7 August 1978, 1; “Ramazan’ın bereketi Berlin’de yas¸andı,” Hu¨rriyet, 29 August ¨ rkiye’yi yas¸adı”, Hu¨rriyet, 23 September 1978, 3; “Berlin, bayramda Tu 1983, 17; “Aks¸emsettin Camii ibadete acıldı”, Hu¨rriyet, 29 May 1986, 20; “Bir bayram daha gecti”, Hu¨rriyet, 21 June 1986, 15. ¨ rkiye’yi yas¸adı”, Hu¨rriyet, 23 September 1983, 17. “Berlin, bayramda Tu “Gurbette camiler doldu, tas¸tı. . .”, Hu¨rriyet, 7 August 1978, 1. “Gurbet’in Ramazan’ı memleketi aratmıyor”, Hu¨rriyet, 30 August 1977, 1. Ibid., 13. “Ramazan’ın bereketi Berlin’de yas¸andı”, Hu¨rriyet, 29 August 1978, 3. ¨ neticiler Bayramımızı kutladı”, Hu¨rriyet, 27 June 1985, 15. “Yo Gurbette camiler doldu, tas¸tı. . .”, Hu¨rriyet, 7 August 1978, 1. “Ramazan’ın bereketi Berlin’de yas¸andı”, Hu¨rriyet, 29 August 1978, 3. “The happiness brought by the holiday,” another writer contended in an article five years later, echoing a now-familiar refrain, “alleviated the unhappy feeling of being far away from our loved ones abroad.” ¨ rkiye’yi yas¸adı”, Hu¨rriyet, 23 September 1983, 17. “Berlin, bayramda Tu Mehmet Asker (pseudonym), interview by author, 8 June 2009, Berlin, Germany. Onur Korkmaz (pseudonym), interview by author, 6 June 2009, Berlin, Germany. Asker. Kemal Kurt, “Moschee Lindowerstr (1993), Neg. 26/32A”, DLSA, MMA. Ibid., Neg. 621/6A”, DLSA, MMA. Ibid., Neg. 619/25”, DLSA, MMA. Asker. Korkmaz. Ceylan, 175. ¨ per, 22 December 1992, DLSA, Aylin (pseudonym), interview by Ursula Tru MMA, 11 –12. Lale, 14– 15. ¨ zel (pseudonym), interview by author, 30 June 2009, transcripSevim O ¨ zel followed the story tion by Perrin Saylan, Berlin, Germany, 22–3. O about her children’s Koranschule experience with another about a local Hoca (teacher) who convinced a member of the mosque to entrust his savings to him, and then absconded with the funds – a story she seemed to find more amusing than upsetting.

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˘lar, “Constraining metaphors and the transnationalization of spaces 52. C ¸ ag in Berlin.” 53. Ceylan, Ethnische Kolonien.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources Interviews by author conducted in 2009 in Berlin, Germany Mitte Museum Archive (MMA)

Newspaper articles In Turkish “Aks¸emsettin Camii ibadete acıldı”, Hu¨rriyet, 29 May 1986, 20 ¨ rkiye’yi yas¸adı”, Hu¨rriyet, 23 September 1983, 17. “Berlin, bayramda Tu “Bir bayram daha gecti”, Hu¨rriyet, 21 June 1986, 15. “Camide politikanın is¸i yoktur”, Hu¨rriyet, 1 January 1978, 6. “Din Hizmetleri Atas¸esi bildiri yayınladı: ‘Islamiyet konusunda en iyi bilgiler ¨ rkiye’de veriliyor’”, Hu¨rriyet, 20 November 1986, 18. Tu “Gurbet’in Ramazan’ı memleketi aratmıyor”, Hu¨rriyet, 30 August 1977, 1. “Gurbette camiler doldu, tas¸tı. . .”, Hu¨rriyet, 7 August 1978, 1. “Ramazan’ın bereketi Berlin’de yas¸andı”, Hu¨rriyet, 29 August 1978, 3 “Ramazan’ın ilk cuması gurbette muhtes¸emdi”, Hu¨rriyet, 21 August 1977, 1. ¨ neticiler Bayramımızı kutladı”, Hu¨rriyet, 27 June 1985, 15. “Yo

In German Kempff, Martina, “Mohammeds Wort soll Einzug an den Schulen halten”, Die Welt, 17 April 1979. La¨mmel, Frank, “Koranschulen in Deutschland: Feindbilder im Namen Allahs?” Mu¨nchener Merkur, 14/16 April 1979. ¨ nter, “Die totalita¨re Gesellschaft der Religio ¨ sen: Wie die Lerch, Wolfgang Gu Islamisten ihre Glaubenlehre mit Gewalt verbreiten”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 August 1982. ¨ rken sa¨en Haß in Kinder”, Welt am Sonntag, “Mitten in Deutschland: Tu 11 March 1979. ¨ ller, Lisolette, “Tu ¨ rken von Berlin wollen keine Deutschen werden: Senat Mu ¨ rgerung/,Dritter Weg’ ist keine Dauerlo ¨ sung”, Hannoverdringt auf Einbu ische Allgemeine, 10 July 1982. Neander, Joachim, “Kommt die Revolution des Islam ins Klassenzimmer?” Die Welt 137, 14 June 1984, 3. ¨ er, Thomas, “Wie Integration verhindert wird: Koranschulen sind Brutsta¨tten Schro ¨ r Ressentiments”, Sozialdemokratischer Pressedienst, 1 March 1982, 4. fu Zimmermann, Horst, “Wenn Suren-Pauken zum Pflichtfach wird: Gegen ¨ nger sind die Beho ¨ rden machtlos”, Saarbru¨cker Zeitung, Khomeinis Ju 26 April 1979.

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Secondary Sources Ceylan, Rauf, Ethnische Kolonien: Entstehung, Funktion und Wandel am Beispiel ¨ r Sozialwissenschaf¨ rkischer Moscheen und Cafes (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag fu tu ten, 2006). ˘lar, Ays¸e S., “Constraining metaphors and the transnationalisation C ¸ ag of spaces in Berlin”, in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27, no. 4 (October 2001): 601–13. Ehrkamp, Patricia, “‘We Turks are no Germans’: Assimilation discourses and the dialectical construction of identities in Germany, Environment and Planning A”, 38(9) (2006): 1673–92. Halm, Dirk, Marina Liakova and Zeliha Yetlik, “Pauschale Islamfeindlichkeit? Zur Wahrnehmung des Islams und zur sozio-kulturellen Teilhabe der Muslime in Deutschland,” in Siegfried Ja¨ger and Dirk Halm, eds, Mediale ¨ nster: UNRAST Verlag, Barrieren: Rassismus als Integrationshindernis (Mu 2007). Ja¨ger, Siegfried, “Der Karikaturenstreit im ‘Rechts-Mitte-Links’-Diskurs deutscher Print-Medien”, in Siegfried Ja¨ger and Dirk Halm, eds, Mediale ¨ nster: UNRAST Verlag, Barrieren: Rassismus als Integrationshindernis (Mu 2007). ¨ del, Carolin, “’Umheimliche Ga¨ste. Die Gegewelt der Muslime in DeutschKo land”: Anti-integrative Integrationsdiskurse in der deutschen Presse am ¨ ber den Mord an Theo van Gogh”, in Siegfried Ja¨ger Beispiel der Debatte u and Dirk Halm, eds, Mediale Barrieren: Rassismus als Integrationshindernis ¨ nster: UNRAST Verlag, 2007). (Mu Schiffer, Sabine, “Der Islam in deutschen Medien”, in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 20 (May 2005): 23 –30. Schumann, Christoph, “About ‘Turks’ and ‘Germans’: The Turkish Press in Germany and the Construction of Multiple Memberships,” in Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen, eds, Translocality: The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010). S¸en, Faruk and Andreas Goldberg, Tu¨rken in Deutschland: Leben zwischen zwei Kulturen (Munich: Beck, 1994). Sunier, Thijl and Nico Landman, Transnational Turkish Islam: shifting geographies of religious activism and community building in Turkey and Europe (Boston: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

CHAPTER 7

The State, Law and Feminist Struggles in the Neo-liberalizing City: The I˙ stanbul Courthouse as a Contested Space Tug˘ce Ellialtı-Ko¨se

I˙stanbul’s urban face has dramatically changed since the mid-1980s due to a series of neo-liberal projects that have been implemented by the state by any legal and political means necessary. Especially starting from the early 2000s, the city emerged as the leading site of a major neo-liberal restructuring that rapidly altered its spatial structure and organization, the social relations within it and its global image.1 I˙stanbul’s urban facade today is dominated by highrise office spaces, luxury residence buildings and gated communities, shopping malls and packaged tourist sites, which used to be residential neighborhoods hosting hundreds of thousands of nowformer inhabitants before they were gentrified. Extensive neo-liberal policies ranging from the growing commercialization of urban space to the privatization of state-owned enterprises, many municipal services and spaces that were once considered as parts of the public domain such as squares, parks and historic kiosks and mansions have transformed the cityscape with the primary goal of turning it into a world-class global city attracting millions of tourists every year.2 Not surprisingly, all these transformations drastically deepened social exclusion in the city. A number of projects, be they called

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urban “renewal,” mega or large-scale urban development, were implemented at a great pace by the Justice and Development Party (JDP, hereafter) government that constantly promoted its neo-liberal politics in the name of urban growth and progress. The repercussions of these projects, namely increasing socio-spatial segregation and urban poverty, became more visible and more entrenched over time.3 It is against this background, which can be characterized as the formal withdrawal of the state from several areas of social provision and the urban space by leaving it to the rule of market and private real-estate investments, that this work aims to discuss courthouses. Courthouses are the major urban buildings funded by the government, which embarked on major building expansion and renovation programs for the judiciary in the last decade. More specifically, this chapter is an effort to examine how the I˙stanbul Courthouse, one of the landmark buildings constructed during the JDP government, constitutes a powerful icon of the state, state power and the image of an independent judiciary. Moreover – and maybe even more importantly – it is an effort to explore the ways in which the hegemonic meanings of this space are highly and constantly contested. Advertisements touting “the I˙stanbul Courthouse as the largest palace of justice in Europe” already started to appear on various sites long before its inauguration in July 2011. In the handing over ceremony of the place to the Ministry of Justice, then Prime Minister ˘an stated that, “Our government feels the rightful pride of Erdog earning I˙stanbul, the biggest city of Turkey and one of the largest cities in the world, a palace of justice that suits it best.” He also added that “his” government aimed to transform the judiciary from a malfunctioning, poorly working judiciary “torn between its wallet and its conscience” to an independent and well-functioning one.4 ˘an emphasized the rationale of constructing such a spectacular Erdog building by stating, “Late justice is no justice. We established these physical spaces to prevent any late justice from taking place.”5 Considering the unprecedented changes in the legal system since the early 2000s in Turkey, it is not completely stunning or accidental to ˘an whose political party has been the hear these words from Erdog governing party for more than a decade now, the long duration of

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which is very unusual for the late-republican Turkish political scene. Since it came to power, the JDP has always been invested in transforming the legal sphere more than anything else, including making comprehensive amendments to the constitution, changes in the civil and criminal codes, and personnel in the judiciary and public prosecutors. However, I suggest that we take a step back and focus on the centrality of law and the material space within which it is implemented, thereby enhancing the legitimacy and authority of the state. Courthouses can be easily said to constitute the major sites where the power of the national state is visible and state practices and their effects (i.e., the state’s power to punish its citizens in various forms, including taking someone’s freedom by putting him/her in prison) are more recognizable than in other spheres of government. Brenner et al. define state spaces as “the spatialities of the state itself, regarded as an ensemble of juridico-political institutions and regulatory capacities grounded in the territorialization of political power.”6 Following this definition, courthouses are also spaces where not only citizens encounter the state and feel the depth of state presence in their lives, but also groups of different social classes – that do not use the same public spaces due to increasing social exclusion or share frequent exchanges in their everyday lives7 – encounter one another. Much of the recent anthropological and geographical work has focused on the symbolic, procedural and performative aspects of the state in everyday life8 demonstrating how both the state and its subjects are constructed in relation to each other and through a variety of state discourses, institutions, techniques and practices in a multiplicity of sites. Following this scholarly tradition, I argue that the newly built, massive and spectacular I˙stanbul Courthouse is not only a stark reminder of the power and the magnitude of the state at the center of I˙stanbul physically, but it is also a central site for the symbolic production and reproduction of the state itself. As the most spectacular among the few state-funded buildings constructed at a time when the neo-liberal state removed itself from urban space, the I˙stanbul Courthouse constitutes an embodiment of state authority and a setting for public representations of state narratives of law, justice and equality. While the grandeur of the building implies a

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FIGURE 7.1 The newly built I˙stanbul Adliye Binasi (I˙stanbul Building of Justice) strong state, in control of the administration of justice, at the same time, it creates an effect of intimidation on the part of the citizen who feels subservient to the power of the state. Especially compared to smaller courthouses that were once actively in use in different parts of the city, the I˙stanbul Courthouse, now home to 11 former courthouses, is significantly grandiose and visually intimidating for those who are not familiar with the building, let alone with how things work inside it. In terms of physical properties, the courthouse, ˘layan, is sizeable: sprawling over 343,000 km2, it located in C ¸ ag consists of 18 blocks with 293 courtrooms and debt-collection offices, and 17 different entrances. The courthouse is the workplace for about 5,000 people and is visited by an average of 80,000 people every workday. STATE-SPACES, THE CITY AND THE I˙STANBUL COURTHOUSE

The State and Urban Spaces in Turkey Recent scholarly work on the state and urban spaces examined the ways in which the city and its spaces constitute the major sites for the material articulation of state and national images, identities and ¸ ınar and ideals, such as modernity, progress and development.9 C Bender10 convincingly claim that the city and urban space are closely

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related to nationalist projects that aim to consolidate national belonging and identifications and institute a particular sense of citizenship. From the settlement of urban areas and arrangement of urban spaces in general, to the building of capital cities and construction of public parks and squares in particular, urban spaces are used as the means to implement state consolidation and nationbuilding, centralization of power, national solidarity and development and integration and assimilation. With regard to the Turkish case, C ¸ ınar 200711 beautifully illustrates the spatial, architectural and geographical articulations of the modernization project in Turkey during the early years of the Republic, drawing on her analysis of the construction of Ankara. C ¸ ınar points out that the national ideology and its foundational principles of modernity and secular nationalism were inscribed in the city space in Ankara through the use and arrangement of public structures, erection of new monuments and statues, and renaming of streets, avenues and boulevards in the 1920s and the following decades.12 The meticulously planned construction of Ankara as the model city of the new nation demonstrates how the national ideology gets embedded in daily life through the state’s marking everyday city spaces with symbols of the nation and state power. In other words, the making of urban space in Ankara under the administration of the newly established Republic in the 1920s and 1930s was a conscious effort on the part of the state to act “as an agent of modernity vested with the power and authority to control space, dictate the meaning of urbanity, shape the evolution of the public sphere, and suppress contending ideologies.”13 While the instrumental use of urban space as a backdrop wherein state ideologies are given material form is especially extensive in nationbuilding processes, it is not exclusive to times of state formation.14 The public sphere, and more specifically the city, are continuously used by the state that needs to enhance its legitimacy and naturalize its authority through a set of discourses and practices15 as major sites for the consolidation of state power and the material manifestation of a particular social-political order. Today’s neo-liberal cities are visibly affected by economic policies prioritizing the effective rule of the market over anything else. In the

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midst of fully entrenched neo-liberal times, the state is increasingly curtailing its presence in urban space. Within this context, the investment of the JDP government that prides itself on building huge and technologically advanced courthouses, which will supposedly improve the legal system, is not incidental but a routine aspect of state functioning. The entity that we recognize and name as the state always needs “multiple sites in which state processes and practices are recognized through their effects”16 in order to be able to maintain an image of power, authority, accountability and superiority in the eyes of its subjects. Therefore, it is always a basic requirement for the state to create sites of everyday life where people encounter state bureaucracies, monuments and symbols, thus producing and reproducing itself both materially and ideologically. Weber17 reads the way cities are planned, built and managed by the state as a deliberate attempt to mark its material and symbolic presence on the public space, including urban squares, administrative buildings and the marketplace. The fundamental sites where the state affirms itself as an entity with strict control and surveillance over the lives of its subjects and aspects of its government are state institutions. Timothy Mitchell suggests that modern institutions create the appearance of a world divided into state and society through the particular ways in which they are spatially organized and monitored through “the coordination of [a variety of] functions into hierarchical arrangements, the organization of supervision, and the marking out of time into schedules and programs.”18 This alleged binary, in turn, does not only produce a sense of an elusively abstract, yet spatially encompassing and overarching, state but also, and more importantly, inscribes a commonsensical hierarchy into the state-society relationship. James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta describe the idea of the state being “somehow ‘above’ civil society, community, and family” as “state verticality”.19 And the very institution that gives the state its structural effect and its image of a “rationalized administrative form of political organization”20 is law. Law is generally understood as a sort of formal and objective framework, superior to other forms of knowing and a state tool for producing and securing order in society. Accordingly, the intrinsic association of law with the state creates the

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illusion of the state as neutral, stable and impersonal, which is actually the greatest ideological fantasy of modern times.21 Recent anthropological studies of the state have demonstrated that the state is not a unified, fixed, evenhanded or harmonious system or subject.22 Rather it is “a significantly unbounded terrain of powers and techniques, an ensemble of discourses, rules and practices cohabiting in limiting, tension ridden, often contradictory relation to each other.”23 Accordingly, while law as a central state institution is frequently approached with an expectation or desire on the part of citizens that justice might be attained through it, the mundane workings of the legal sphere that tend to be incoherent and ambiguous refute the very same myths of certainty and predictability. Common problems in legal practice and proceedings include, but are not limited to, the gaps between laws on paper promising equality in front of the law and the reality of police practices, the lack of access to the courts and unequal treatment in the court system that different groups of people experience based on their social class, gender, race/ ethnicity, level of education, sexual orientation, citizenship status and the like. These problems often disprove the myth of the dispassionate administration of integrity, evenhandedness and the rule of law by the state. This very last point brings us back to the earlier discussion of how state buildings are the essential means through which state understandings of modernity and nationhood find their material expression.

The Legal System and Spatial Contestation of Courthouses Lay people have different reasons and motives to visit a courthouse, which range from participating in a trial in any capacity, be it as a plaintiff, defendant or witness, to collecting state documents such as court papers, police clearance reports and/or death certificates. Regardless of the main reason for one’s presence in the courthouse, one encounters in it the distant yet overwhelming power of the legal institution and its penetration into his/her life. In this sense, the courthouse is a state space. Despite the constant attempt of the state to code this space as one of order, lawmaking and stability, however, its meanings are contested spatially. This spatial contestation in the specific example of the I˙stanbul Courthouse happens in two ways.

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First, the increasingly popular gatherings and protests that happen in front of the courthouse contest the hegemonic narrative of the place by challenging the taken-for-grantedness of the idea that justice is dispensed at, and sought for, purely and simply in the courtroom, which is a site for the compensation of violation of rights and social inequalities. What is most interesting here is that through such use of the courthouse, people take issue with, resist and negotiate the boundaries of what is inside or outside the purview of the judicial institution. Moreover, they often engage in tense interactions with the police, becoming once again subject to law. Second, the inside of the courthouse is home to a host of contestations through which meanings of the space and rules and regulations in this very space are re-defined and challenged by the public, respectively.

Illusion and Contestations of Modernity Courthouses, as mundane spaces of justice-seeking, conflict resolution and legal, moral and social regulation, more often than not fail to keep up with its promise of distributing justice and applying the rule of law without any exception. In most cases, the void between what the state claims to have provided its citizens (e.g., order, impartiality and equality) and its inability to fulfill this promise, serves to weaken its image as a supposedly impersonal and neutral entity, quite inevitably creating tensions that take place in different forms and magnitudes. The I˙stanbul Courthouse is an especially fitting space to explore these tensions. The official website of the courthouse provides detailed information about the physical properties of the place that is a product of “most recent technologies,” and the inside of the place can be objectively described as spacious with wide corridors, fairly clean, bright, fairly orderly and massive. Especially compared to old courthouses, the new I˙stanbul Courthouse is much more visitor-friendly; it provides information desk services, maps of the areas and building blocks at several spots. It also contains cafeterias, restaurants, bank offices, a post office, a health unit, a police station in addition to courtrooms, judge and prosecutor offices, offices for clerks and principals and meeting rooms for lawyers. Modernity in the place is thus represented through the use of technology, such as elevators and

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moving stairways, rooms with high-tech lighting and a central heating system. The spectacular architectural structure of the I˙stanbul Courthouse both in the outside and the inside inscribe a sense of modernity, order and stability to the space. However, the protests and demonstrations that take place nearly every day right in front of the courthouse and only a few feet away from the main entrance, challenge, if not negate, the sterility of the building, which is also heavily securitized. The immediate behind-the-walls of the courthouse often serves as a popular place for group protests and press statements that almost always focus on the state’s and law’s inability to bring justice. Among recent examples are the cases of Hrant Dink assassination trials, Pınar Selek’s trial, Gezi Park protest trials and many other trials of human rights violations. The popular use of the square in front and the stairs at the entrance for political action points quite explicitly to how the non-application of the rule of law often contradicts the hegemonic meanings attached to the space by the state. The posters, slogans and chants used during the demonstrations serve three functions. First, they unsettle the relatively quiet and neat order of the inside of the courthouse. Second, they re-negotiate the physical boundaries of legitimate spaces of truth- and justice-seeking. Last but not least, they bring to light what really happens that could have been easily rendered invisible due the modern appearance of the space, which yields a sense of having an innate, unquestioned ability to always dispense justice through open, swift and fair trials.

Disciplining the Space Within In addition to the strained relationship that seems to best describe the inside-outside interaction around the I˙stanbul Courthouse, the inside of the building gets to witness mostly invisible contestations of the place – one that is supposedly the site for settlement, reconciliation and harmony – and the regulations and segregations within. To begin with, the inside of the courthouse is regulated by a strict body of rules that seek to produce a safe and orderly space. As Haldar24 suggests, the architectural and visual dimensions of the courthouse are in fact far from being apolitical and incidental, but

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secure the effective capacity of an institutional order. The segregated architectural design and the ample use of security devices – physically scanning the visitors and all their belongings – in and around the courthouse aim to protect a particular public by rules that govern the ways in which one can enter (e.g., what one can bring inside) and utilize the place. Spatial regulations also include restricting the use of the space at certain times and/or to certain groups of people such as the laypeople, allowing only particular kinds of persons to use some areas in the building, prohibiting certain types of behavior to be performed within the courthouse such as smoking, selling things, yelling, running and the like. These regulations are an example of what Michel Foucault calls “disciplinary power,” which seeks to produce well-ordered and properly functioning institutions and organizations as well as disciplined people.25 Furthermore, such spatial forms of regulation serve to produce a particular kind of social order26 that is accompanied with its normative expectations of conduct. These rules and regulations, however, are not applied to everyone equally, thus producing layered segregations and inequalities within the courthouse, and they do not go uncontested. I return to this discussion in the following section.

Restricting Accessibility The spatial segregations grounded in material space through rules and regulations and their frequent contestations by the users of the space show that courthouses are in fact highly contested spaces. This particular contestation concerns how and why courthouses are physically organized and movement within them restricted. The most obvious example of this is the complete segregation of the courthouse in terms of accessibility. Modern courthouses seemingly designated as public are in fact divided into a series of exclusive spaces that are not accessible to all. Even the courtrooms that are – except a few situations – supposed to be open to the general public, are not always welcoming to the spectators. That is, someone who is not a party to a trial is almost always asked by the court bailiff why s/ he wants to attend the trial. During my fieldwork, I witnessed many cases when people’s requests to enter the courtroom were refused without even providing a reason for the refusal. When a reason was

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given, it was either the “limited seating” excuse or the “judges do not want to have outsiders in the hearing room” one. As for the courtrooms themselves, they are partitioned into zones that denote the physical manifestation of segregation and inequality within the space. For instance, each time a floor is elevated, this elevation unwittingly implies hierarchy. Similarly, when the state’s coat of arms is placed behind a judge’s chair, it suggests that the judge is the personal embodiment of state power with its full authority in that very room.

Demarcating Private Zones

Likewise, in the I˙stanbul Courthouse, there are private zones within the courthouse and each courtroom. Some entrances/exits and elevators are designed for use by prosecutors and judges only. One is almost invariably not permitted to use an entrance or an exit by the security officers even if one accidentally tries to enter or exit the building using that very specific door. Prosecutors and judges are also provided special shuttles at their service, which is an important privilege on its own. Similarly, most of the offices at “higher” levels are used primarily by prosecutors, which is another typical illustration of how power hierarchies are spatially marked and physically reified. While toilets are segregated between the general public and the courthouse personnel, daily visitors of the courthouse usually pay more for the same food served at the dining hall than others. These forms of spatial and other types of segregation through constant surveillance and inspection and the marking-out of courthouse spaces serve to help members of the judiciary maintain control over who has access to which resources and in what ways and capacities in the courthouse.

Routine Forms of Segregation Moreover, although aimed at achieving efficiency through a specialized management of courts, these spatial rules and regulations reproduce and sustain already existing power inequalities, especially with respect to state-society relations, by creating spaces of inaccessibilities and inequalities on the material space. In short, the geography of “everyday” courthouses and its effects undermine the

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vision of judicial space as equal, neutral and non-discriminate. The routine forms of segregation within the courthouse do not go uncontested, however. Rather, they are challenged in subtle and notso-subtle ways by different users of the space. One such example is the demonstration by lawyers who protested against being subject to security inspections at the entrance gate, unlike prosecutors or judges in the aftermath of the killing of prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz during the clash between two members of an outlawed farleft group and police forces in 2015. This single example illustrates how courthouse practices are challenged by lawyers who, due to professional affiliation and work duties, are frequent visitors to the space. Along with the protests happening in front of the courthouse, the opposition against non-egalitarian spatial practices together show that the I˙stanbul Courthouse is a highly contested space with complex power relations, multiple uses and meanings and conflicting expectations. THE I˙STANBUL COURTHOUSE AS A GOVERNMENT SPACE: JDP, LEGAL CHANGES AND ALLEGATIONS The emergence of the immense I˙stanbul Courthouse as a major ¨ cek’s discussion in the contested space – that is, following Go introduction to this book, a space where elements of both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces are concentrated – in the new urban order of the city is not incidental when Turkey’s recent political landscape is considered. Under the JDP rule Turkey has been undergoing a radical institutional transformation during which unprecedented change took place in the country’s legal system. Among the major changes, the new civil and penal codes that entered into force in 2002 and 2005, respectively, and fundamental amendments made in the constitution can be mentioned. While the recent wave of legal reforms of this magnitude is the first in the history of the Republic and has produced significant changes in the state-society relations in the country, it has been accompanied with intense debates about the administration of justice in Turkey. The legal scenery of millennial Turkey can be best identified by two virtually incompatible trends: the emergence of law as a major – and

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legitimate – site of struggle and countless controversies around the question of rule of law. On the one hand, several groups of people with different cultural, ethnic, religious, sexual and political affiliations pursue their agendas to seek equal treatment by the legal system and demand legal remedies for violation of their rights from the state. On the other hand, the popular belief in the rule of law and in the idea of an independent judiciary in Turkey is weak, to say the least, among marginalized populations and the general public. Daily news is increasingly full of stories of “legal scandals” that portray the state of the legal system, which is often identified as “rotten”, “dysfunctional” and “partial”. It is, in fact, in this judicial, social and political context that contemporary debates on judicial conduct and decisions, integrity and accountability have been taking place. One of the most recent, and already the most infamous, development that shook the ruling JDP government happened on 17 December 2013, when the sons of three ministers – the Minister of Economics, the Minister of Environment and Urbanism and the Minister of Internal Affairs – and several public officials, bureaucrats and businessmen known to be close to the JDP government, were taken into custody. While the allegations did not come as a shock to many in Turkey who had witnessed innumerable instances when laws were passed and abused, broken and/or temporarily suspended for political purposes. The recent aftermath witnessed developments that were at least equally “scandalous” as the actual allegations. The Ministry of Internal Affairs relocated and/or discharged from duty a total number of 166 judges and prosecutors as well as judicial police chiefs and officers who executed the arrest and search orders given by the involved prosecution offices and courts. This extreme yet unexceptional example shows clearly and conclusively the ways in which the judiciary is routinely, and quite aggressively, interrupted by the executive branch of the government in Turkey today. In other words, the government-led sanctions imposed upon legal personnel involved in the operations are noteworthy for illustrating the remarkably bold interventions made to the workings of the judiciary. As specific to this case, the relocations of a significant number of prosecutors and judges and their replacement by new

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judges in the I˙stanbul Courthouse expose the instability and vulnerability of the space in the event of political scandals and government crises. Furthermore, these relocations manifest the controversies that constantly shape the space and complicate its hegemonic meanings. Indeed, the I˙stanbul Courthouse, funded at the time by non-judicial branches of the JDP government, is probably the most-contested space of recent times in Turkey by not only unfulfilling its promise of justice and democracy, thus producing incompatibility between expectations and institutional realities, but by also being home to legally ambiguous and controversial practices itself. THE I˙STANBUL COURTHOUSE AS A GENDERED SPACE The final part of this work is devoted to the analysis of the I˙stanbul Courthouse as a gendered space. Based on my ethnographic observations in the course of carrying out 18 months of fieldwork in the I˙stanbul Courthouse and of observing trials for sexual offenses, I aim to discuss how this space is gendered, what this means for women who seek justice for several forms of gender-based violence and, finally, how feminists use, experience and contest this space. Considering the increasing use of law as a means to achieve equality and non-discrimination by feminists and women’s rights organizations in Turkey, the I˙stanbul Courthouse constitutes the major site to contest the principles and workings of the “masculine” law, “do” feminist politics and challenge the Turkish state’s unfulfilled promise of protecting its women citizens from violence and discrimination and bringing them justice. To begin with, the spatial underpinnings of gender and gendered nature of space(s) are well known. The role of gender as a category of explanation in geographical forms has been widely studied since the 1980s. Feminist geographers introduced questions about the ways in which spaces and places – from workplaces to domestic spaces, from urban parks to public toilets – are used differently by women and men.27 Gender, being of major significance to geographical construction of space and place, is also particularly central to the symbolic meanings of public and private spaces.

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While “home” is constructed as a woman’s place and associated with so-called feminine characteristics such as family, emotion and nurturance, “anywhere-but-home” is coded male with respective characteristics of work, reason and independence. These gendered messages iterate and shape the ways in which gender is constructed, understood and embodied. More significantly, they arrange work – both paid and unpaid – and urban processes in ways that limit women’s spatial and social mobility. As Doreen Massey suggests, “(t)he attempt to confine women to the domestic sphere [is] both a specifically spatial control and, through that, a social control on identity.”28 In brief, the gendered spatial division between public and private creates constraints that limit women’s mobility – due to difficulty in accessing financial resources and transportation – across urban space. When we consider, on the one side, the size of I˙stanbul and the physical and financial constraints on women’s mobilities29 and, on the other, the persistent problems and inequities in access to the law in Turkey30 alongside the intimidating face of the massive I˙stanbul Courthouse, it could be expected that women often have a hard time to physically get into the courthouse, let alone to initiate a legal procedure.

Gender Disproportion One of the major ways in which courthouses are gendered legal spaces in Turkey could be associated with the gender disproportion in the institutional and occupational organization of the legal field. Today in Turkey about three-quarters of all judges and public prosecutors in Turkey are male (10,117 out of 13,666). The exact proportion is 63.9 percent versus 36.1 percent for judges with 5,721 male and 3,239 female judges who are currently in active duty. The numbers get even more disproportionate for public prosecutors for whom the gender ratio is 93.4 percent versus 6.6 percent. In Turkey today 4,396 out of 4,706 public prosecutors are male. As for the Supreme Court, which is in charge of reviewing the decisions and judgments given by local courts of justice, the gender imbalance persists with the ratios of 84.4 percent versus 15.6 for members, 56.1 percent versus 43.9 percent for investigating judges, and 86.8 percent versus 13.2 percent for prosecutors.

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The I˙stanbul Courthouse not only reflects the gender disproportion in terms of judges and public prosecutors who work there, but also is home to a visibly gendered division of labor. From court bailiffs to cleaners, from court clerks to tea-makers, most jobs are disproportionately gendered in the courthouse. What is significant is that most of the jobs that require high levels of physical mobility and interpersonal contact are male-dominated. For instance, court bailiffs who are responsible for ensuring that trials run smoothly and for protecting the general order of the courtroom, and whose voices are often heard in the corridors, where other people are not supposed to speak loudly, scream and/or shout, are almost exclusively male. In addition, tea-makers, that is, people who serve tea and coffee at offices and public areas of the courthouse and thus are quite mobile and very visible within the courthouse, are mostly male. Likewise, most of the workers of Beltur, a metropolitan municipality company running the cafes inside the courthouse, are male. The only significant exception to this pattern is, not to our surprise, cleaners who are mobile and visible in both public and not very public parts of the courthouse and who tend to be females. Moreover, except for the female security officers who are employed mainly to conduct physical searches of women entering the building, most of the security officers are male as well as most of the police officers. The gendered organization of the courthouse in relation to who does what and who makes decisions about what kinds of things, is especially significant when the meaning of the space for women is considered. Both men and women use courthouses for many reasons ranging from trial for robbery or debt to divorce or inheritance issues that they face in diverse situations. Women, however, go to the court for reasons such as battery, rape, physical harassment, sexual abuse and murder much more than men, illustrating the crystallization of male violence against women. The courthouse, from a gender perspective, can be thought of as a crucial place for women in demanding justice and legal redress and protection. The existence of such a male presence in the courthouse, turning it into a masculine space, may intimidate women and make their entrance to and exit from as well as mobility inside the building harder, thus limiting their access to law.

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Failure to Deliver Justice to Women Despite its inherent promise to deliver justice to women who have been beaten, harassed and/or abused, the legal system often fails to fulfill this promise. Pointing to the significant disjuncture between the statistics on the frequency of violence against women and the infrequency of punishment, feminist legal and social scholars have documented the sexism of the judicial system, from its foundational legal principles such as the public-private distinction31 and the conceptions of rationality, to the attitudes of lawyers, and “the intricate and ostensibly ‘neutral’ rules of evidence and court procedures.”32 Many have demonstrated that women do not only face difficulties in seeking and getting legal recourse for sexual and bodily violations they suffered, but they also experience a “second assault” in the legal system.33 In fact, one of the major feminist critiques of the legal treatment of violence against women is that women who have been exposed to male violence are very likely to be re-victimized in the legal field.34 This and other critiques have not only pointed to women’s subordination through the law, but they have also turned the law, both its textual form and its application, into an important site of political struggle for feminist activism.

Feminists and the Drawing up of the New Criminal Code With respect to the Turkish context, the feminist movement’s engagement with the field of law can be traced back to as early as the 1980s35 and the 1990s. However, the extent and the degree of feminists’ engagement with the law as a political space has noticeably and considerably intensified in the 2000s. This can also be related to the general climate of Turkey in the 2000s when the legislation, the law, the constitution and the judiciary gained centrality as critical milieus for dealing with and reshaping social and political conflicts and contestations. Over the decade, the three consecutive JDP governments focused their efforts on legal and judicial reforms in their struggle against the Kemalist (read secular, modernist and nationalist) establishment. Furthermore, a variety of constituencies, including different ethnic and religious groups, feminists and LGBTQ activists and trade unions and leftist groups have begun to see the law

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as a domain where past and present injustices and inequalities might be redressed. Feminists put a great deal of pressure on the JDP government in the early 2000s to change the country’s civil and criminal codes. This coincided with the beginning of the talks and meetings between Turkey and the European Union (EU, hereafter), a crucial part of the EU accession process, when Turkey was supposed to harmonize its laws and regulations with the EU legislation. The harmonization process required the strengthening of human rights standards and civil and democratic rights. It also required significant changes in many laws and institutional regulations related to gender. In this climate, feminists and women’s rights activists have increasingly focused on the gender-discriminatory practices and effects of the legal system in Turkey. Probably, the most tangible transformation in the legal system for women came with the significant changes made in the civil and criminal codes remnant from the early republican era that were infamously gender-biased, family-oriented and antiwomen. The 2002 reform of the civil code could be said to have succeeded in bringing relative gender equality in the domestic sphere for women by abolishing the gendered distribution of rights and authorities in the family. On the other hand, the 1926 Turkish Criminal Code36, which was adopted from Mussolini’s Italy and which was particularly notorious for treating men and women unequally,37 being lenient on violence against women, and endorsing an understanding of women’s sexuality as “a potential threat to public order and morality, and thus . . . in need of legal regulation”38 was replaced by a new criminal code. The new criminal code in effect since then made landmark changes to how violence against women is handled in the legal system. The new code classifies sexual offenses as “crimes against the individual” instead of “crimes against public morality and family” under the section “crimes against society.” Accordingly, it defines sexual assault and rape “as any sexual act violating a person’s bodily inviolability,” and foresees the punishment of anyone who violates another’s “bodily inviolability by sexual conduct.” Moreover, sexual harassment and marital rape are now included in the criminal code; the male-oriented language of the code is abolished; and legal concepts and terms such as

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ırza tecavu¨z (Arabic derivations meaning sexual attack on personal chastity and honor) are replaced by “sexual attack on bodily integrity.” In addition, suspensions of or reductions in sentences given to rapists and abductors who married the victim are removed. Finally, legal provisions discriminating among women of different marital and/or virginity statuses are removed all together from the code. Despite these important legal transformations, however, results of many recent cases of sexual violence and the murder of women have been far from reflecting the expectations from the new legal regulations, creating wide-ranging public discontent and criticism. The discrepancies between the new laws and their application as well as the lack of a determined willingness by the state to protect women from male violence39 have compelled feminists in Turkey to focus their attention on the legal sphere.

Feminists and the Execution of the Criminal Code The feminist engagement with the field of law, however, has not been limited to lobbying activities during the process of making new laws. Especially in recent years, seeing the shortcomings of legal texts in affecting a genuine change in the workings of the law, feminists have organized particularly around court cases involving sexual harassment, rape and the murder of women. In addition to organizing campaigns and marches, preparing booklets and brochures and publishing articles and reports related to male violence against women, they began to follow an important number of court cases both inside and outside the courthouse. Indeed, the courthouse has long been an important space for the feminist contestations of the law and the state. However, in recent years, feminists began to pursue lawsuits, watch court hearings collectively, organize demonstrations, make press statements in front of courthouses, demand “intervener status” and make “sudden interventions” during the hearings. Indeed, feminists’ organization around such cases provided a greater visibility to male violence against women as well as its unsatisfactory treatment by the legal system. Moreover, highlighting the systematicity of male violence and the working of the law in a gender-discriminatory way, they challenged the treatment of such cases as singular incidents to be treated separately and politicized the issue of violence against women.

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Importantly, the physical presence of feminists in courtrooms reveals an important aspect of the law and the legal system. The modern system of law is often described as self-contained, objective and impartial, distributing justice through processing evidence in light of pre-given legal texts and reaching justifiable verdicts within neatly defined boundaries and procedures of the courtroom. However, the recent experience of feminist involvement with the legal system has shown that the law in reality does not operate in a vacuum and that outside interventions matter for the general course of the trials. For instance, when a feminist attorney interferes in the face of a discriminatory question directed to the female victim and demands the withdrawal of the question, or when she corrects a judge talking about a rape incident as a sexual relationship, or when she refers to an international agreement that Turkey is legally bound to meet its rules and regulations, not only the in-court discourses and practices are shattered, even though usually for that particular trial only, but also the whole course of the trial may change to the advantage of the female victim. This change, be it one in the court language or in the final verdict, refers to the fact that contrary to the general thinking that the law works as a closed system, the law is in fact a field open to effective interventions. The collective presence of feminists both inside and outside the courtrooms, be it through demonstrations and press statements or in the form of observers and participants, has recently turned the I˙stanbul Courthouse into a space of struggle for the feminist movement. Especially since the late 1980s, the feminist movement took to the streets in order both to bring “private” issues such as domestic violence to the political sphere and to reclaim public spaces ˘urtcu Parkı, I˙stiklal (Freedom) Street, from men. Places such as Yog and streets in general are significant for the memory of the feminist movement in Turkey. The I˙stanbul Courthouse as well as other courthouses in the city have increasingly become a part of this spatial repertoire. While they rarely live up to their promises of delivering justice to women, the struggle against violence against women and for freedom and equality continue inside and outside of this highly contested state-space.

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FIGURE 7.2 Women protesting the injustice in front of the building; the banner in front reads “We do not consent to male justice; we rise against it and expose it; we demand severe punishment of rapists.” (Photo by the author.) CONCLUSION Here, I have focused on the I˙stanbul Courthouse and discussed it as an increasingly important and contested state-space in the context of the ongoing neo-liberal transformations in the city. Amidst the legal transformations of the last decade, in the course of which the law and the juridical system have become crucial sites of political contestations and social struggles, the I˙stanbul Courthouse emerged as a critical statespace in the neo-liberalizing city, where the state is actively pursuing market-oriented policies and increasingly refraining from its socially redistributive functions. The seemingly contradictory rise of this colossal state building in the urban landscape stands as a material reminder of the state power built on the promise of maintaining order and delivering justice. However, as the results of male violence court cases that I have discussed here point out, justice is rarely achieved, despite the transformations in civil and criminal codes. In this context, the collective organizations of feminists and women’s rights activists turned the I˙stanbul Courthouse as well as other courthouses into new

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sites for feminists’ and women’s struggles. Similarly, as the processes of several recent court cases related to workplace murders, urban and ecological struggles, human rights violations and so on have recently shown, the courthouses, and particularly the I˙stanbul Courthouse, are increasingly central spaces – of struggle, resistance, and transformation – for groups and movements seeking social justice today. The utilization of courthouses as major sites to stage the protests and make press releases can be thought to be efficient from the perspective of protesters and activists who want their concerns voiced considering that courthouses, especially the ones that host high-profile trials, are often populated by journalists looking for headlines, stories and up-to-the-minute reporting. In the midst of times where trust in the legal system is frustrated and seems to be at an all-time low in Turkey, it is quite likely that courthouses will continue to be vehemently contested as spaces of conflict, struggle and politics at an increasing pace and more intensely than ever. NOTES ˘ lu-Cook (2006); Bartu-Candan & 1. See Keyder (1999, 2005); Potuog ˘ lu (2008). Kolluog 2. For a detailed discussion of the neo-liberal restructuring of the city see ¨ se, this volume. Ko ˘lu (2008). 3. See Keyder (2005); Bartu-Candan & Kolluog 4. See Zaman, 5 March 2011. 5. See Sabah, 2 March 2011. 6. See Brenner (2003, 7). ˘lu (2008). 7. See Keyder (2005); Bartu-Candan & Kolluog 8. See Mitchell (1991); Gupta (1995); Trouillot (2001); Aretxaga (2003); Navaro-Yashin (2002); Das & Poole (2004); Gupta & Sharma (2006). 9. See Keyder (1999); C ¸ ınar & Bender (2007). 10. See C ¸ ınar & Bender (2007). 11. See C ¸ ınar (2007). 12. Ibid. 13. C ¸ ınar (2007, 154). 14. Keyder (1999). 15. See Ferguson & Gupta (2002, 981). 16. See Trouillot (2001, 126). 17. See Weber (1904). 18. See Mitchell (1991, 94). 19. See Gupta (2002, 982).

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20. See Das and Poole (2004, 3). 21. See Abrams (1988, 68). 22. See Mitchell (1991); Trouillot (2001); Ferguson & Gupta (2002); NavaroYashin (2002); Aretxaga (2003). 23. See Brown (1995, 174). 24. Haldar (1994). 25. Foucault (1977). 26. Merry (2001, 17). 27. See Massey (1994); Nelson & Seager (2005). 28. See Massey (1994, 179). 29. See Alkan (2009). ˘acıog ˘lu (2005). 30. See Kog 31. Feminists widely demonstrated the negative effects of the public-private distinction in law for women, including the escape of intimate violence from criminal sanction. See Levit & Verchick (2006, 23). Brown, for instance, asserted that “historically ‘the private’ has functioned to depoliticize many of the constituent activities and injuries of women – reproduction, caring for children, domestic violence, incest, unremunerated household labor, emotional and sexual service to men.” See Brown (1997, 91). MacKinnon strongly maintained that the liberal ideal of the private wrongly “holds that, so long as the public does not interfere, autonomous individuals interact freely and equally.” See MacKinnon (1987, 99); emphasis added. She claimed that the state becomes complicit in the violation of women’s rights and in their injuries by choosing not to interfere in the private sphere, which is allegedly a sphere of “caring” intimacy. This approach resulted in the redefinition of intimate violence not as a personal or family issue, but as a symptom of a larger system in which men dominate women through power and violence. 32. See MacKinnon (1989); Smart (1995). 33. See Chamallas (2003); Henderson (1991); Kelly and Radford (1990); Levit and Verchick (2006); Scheppele (1987). 34. See Smart (1989); Goodmark (2004). 35. The first major feminist protest against domestic violence in I˙stanbul was triggered in 1987 by a court decision made public by a feminist activist who read the court ruling in a bar. The judge had refused to grant a divorce to a woman, mother of three children and pregnant with a fourth, who was regularly beaten by her husband; he explained his decision by saying that “one should not leave a woman’s back without a stick, her womb without a colt.” 36. The complete reform of the 1926 Penal Code was repeatedly on the Parliament’s agenda in the late 1990s, but was never pursued to the end. It was in 2002 that the 2000 Draft Law was included again in the government’s agenda, primarily in accordance with the EU accession process. When the Penal Code Draft Law Sub-Justice Commission of the Parliament started to review the draft law, a national Working Group on

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the Reform of the Penal Code from a Gender Perspective, composed of representatives of NGOs, bar associations, and academicians, was formed. The Working Group prepared its recommendations, including more than 30 amendments in a short time, and sent them to all MPs, NGOs and media representatives. Only a few months after that, an unexpected development occurred and the three-party coalition led by the Social Democrats resigned as the result of a political crisis in 2002. The early elections that happened on 3 November 2002 witnessed the victory of the religious right Justice and Development Party, which completely ignored the proposals of the Working Group. The draft law prepared by the new government foresaw almost all other articles of the Penal Code other than those pertaining to women. All but one of the articles concerning women were copied word-for-word from the old Penal Code. The only proposal for change concerning women was the extension of the legal abortion period from ten to 12 weeks (which was later canceled in the Justice Commission). The unwillingness of the government to consult, or cooperate with, any experts or NGOs in the process resulted in the launch of a massive public campaign that lasted until the acceptance of the new Penal Code in September 2004. 37. Articles 440 and 441 of the criminal code, which had double standards for men and women in cases of adultery, were in effect until the Constitutional Court annulled the articles in 1996. Before the annulment, a married woman was considered to have committed adultery if she had sexual intercourse with a man other than her husband, whereas a man could be charged with the same crime only if he could be shown to have had a continual relationship with another woman besides his wife. 38. See I˙lkkaracan (2004: 252). 39. In June 2009, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Turkey had failed to fulfill its obligation to protect Nahide Opuz, a survivor of domestic violence, and her mother, who was murdered by Opuz’s husband. The judgment is the first time the Court had spelled out a state’s obligation in regard to domestic violence, emphasizing that such violence is not a private matter but instead an issue that requires state intervention.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrams, Philip, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State”, in Journal of Historical Sociology 1(1) (1998): 58–89. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.1988. tb00004.x Alkan, Ayten, “Giris¸: Cinsiyet Dinamiklerinin Pes¸inden Mekanın I˙zini ¨ rmek” (“Introduction: Tracing the Space in Pursuit of Gender Su Dynamics”), in Cins Cins Mekan (Gendered Spaces), edited by Ayten Alkan (I˙stanbul: Varlık Yayınları, 2009, 7 –35).

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¨ s¸u ¨ rmesin” (“May God Not Let Anybody”), in Sabah, 2 March “Allah Kimseyi Du 2011. Available at: http://www.sabah.com.tr/Gundem/2011/03/02/ ˜ a, allah_kimseyi_dusurmesin. Accessed on 21 May 2014. Aretxaga, Begon “Maddening States”, in Annual Review of Anthropology 32 (2003): 393–410. doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093341 ˘lu, “Emerging Spaces of Neoliberalism: Bartu-Candan, Ayfer and Biray Kolluog A Gated Town and a Public Housing Project in I˙stanbul”, in New Perspectives on Turkey 39 (2008): 5 –46. “Bırakalım Yargı I˙s¸ini Yapsın” (“Let the Judiciary Do Its Job”), in Zaman, March 5, 2011. Available at: http://www.zaman.com.tr/politika_ birakalim-yargi-isini-yapsin_1102648.html. Accessed on 21 May 2014. Brenner, Neil, Bob Jessop, Martin Jones and Gordon MacLeod, “State Space in Question”, in State/Space: A Reader, edited by Neil Brenner, Bob Jessop, Martin Jones and Gordon MacLeod (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, 1 –26). Brown, Wendy, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Chamallas, Martha, Introduction to Feminist Legal Theory (New York: Aspen Publishers, 2003). C ¸ ınar, Alev, “The Imagined Community as Urban Reality: The Making of Ankara”, in Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City, edited by Alev C ¸ ınar and Thomas Bender (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, 151– 81). C ¸ ınar, Alev, and Thomas Bender, eds, Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Das, Veena, and Deborah Poole, “State and Its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies”, in Anthropology in the Margins of the State, edited by Veena Das and Deborah Poole (Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 2004). Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta, “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality”, in American Ethnologist 29(4) (2002): 981–1002. doi: 10.1525/ae.2002.29.4.981. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997). Goodmark, Leigh, “Law is the Answer? Do We Know That for Sure?: Questioning the Efficacy of Legal Interventions for Battered Women”, in Saint Louis University Public Law Review, 23 (1)(2004), 7–46. Gupta, Akhil, “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State”, in American Ethnologist 22(2) (1995): 375–402. doi: 10.1525/ae.1995.22.2.02a00090. Haldar, Piyel, “In and Out of Court: On Topographies of Law and the Architecture of Court Buildings”, in International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 7(2) (1994): 185–200. doi: 10.1007/BF01816606. Henderson, Lynne, “Law’s Patriarchy.” Law and Society Review 25(2) (1991): 411–44.

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I˙lkkaracan, Pınar. 2004. “How Adultery Almost Derailed Turkey’s Aspiration to Join the European Union”, in Sex Politics: Reports from the Front Lines, 2004, http://www.sxpolitics.org/frontlines/book/pdf/capitulo7_turkey.pdf. Kelly, Liz, and Jill Radford, “‘Nothing really happened’: the invalidation of women’s experiences of sexual violence”, in Critical Social Policy 10 (1990): 39–53. ˘lar, ed, I˙stanbul between the Local and the Global (Lanham: Rowman Keyder, C ¸ ag and Littlefield, 1999). ˘lar, “Globalization and Social Exclusion in I˙stanbul”, International Keyder, Cag Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(1) (2005): 124–34. doi: 10.1111/ j.1468-2427.2005.00574.x. ˘acıog ˘lu, Dicle, “Citizenship in context: Rethinking women’s relationships Kog to the law in Turkey”, in Citizenship and the Nation-State in Greece and Turkey, edited by Faruk Birtek and Thalia Dragonas (New York: Routledge, 2005, 144–60). Levit, Nancy, and Robert R. H. Verchick, Feminist Legal Theory: A Primer (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006). MacKinnon, Catharine, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Massey, Doreen, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 1994). Merry, Sally Engle, “Spatial Governmentality and the New Urban Social Order: Controlling Gender Violence through Law”, American Anthropologist 103(1) (2001): 16–29. doi: 10.1525/aa.2001.103.1.16. Mitchell, Timothy, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics”, The American Political Science Review 85(1) (1991): 77 –96. doi: 10.2307/1962879. Navaro-Yashin, Yael, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002). Nelson, Lise, and Joni Seager, A Companion to Feminist Geography (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005). ¨ yku ˘lu-Cook, O ¨ , “Beyond the Glitter: Belly Dance and Neoliberal Potuog Gentrification in I˙stanbul”, Cultural Anthropology 21(4) (2006): 633–60. doi: 10.1525/can.2006.21.4.633. Scheppele, Kim, “The Re-Vision of Rape Law”, The University of Chicago Law Review 54(3) (1987): 1095–116. Sharma, Aradhana, and Akhil Gupta, eds, The Anthropology of the State. A Reader (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). Smart, Carol, Feminism and the Power of Law (New York: Routledge, 1989). ——— Law, Crime and Sexuality (New York: Sage Publications, 1995). Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive”, Current Anthropology 42(1) (2001): 125–38. doi: 10.1086/318437. Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1904).

CHAPTER 8

The Political Economy of a Conservation Plan: The Case of Uluabat Lake Ceren Soylu, Bengi Akbulut and Fikret Adaman1

INTRODUCTION Every space is contested. As space is not only a mere physicality but rather a historical-geographical product of socio-ecological interactions, and as the social is ingrained and fragmented with relations of power and inequalities along multiple axes and scales, spaces host conflicting motivations, interests, demands and needs, and manifest uneven and power-laden relationships between different societal actors. Within this context, it would not be farfetched to claim that environmental conflicts correspond to one of the arenas where the contested nature of socio-space becomes most visible in the contemporary era. In line with this observation, this chapter aims at revealing the contested spatiality of a protected area in Turkey, Uluabat Lake, by illustrating the dynamics of the state-societyenvironment relationships it manifests. Uluabat Lake and its larger wetland, located in northwestern Anatolia within the province of Bursa (see Map 8.1), hold immense ecological value but are threatened by severe degradation, primarily due to pollution from surrounding industrial facilities, agricultural sites and urban centers as well as due to water withdrawal for irrigation purposes. Following the site’s designation as a Ramsar site –

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a wetland of international importance – in 1998, the Ministry of Environment in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) initiated a management plan in 2002 to halt the degradation problem and ensure wise use of resources in the Basin. The plan claimed to have been built on multi-stakeholder participation, involving national and local stakeholders. So far the plan has by and large failed on both grounds of addressing environmental degradation and sustaining the participation of local communities. This chapter looks at the political-economy of this failure. While there are many dimensions along which this locality can be conceptualized as a contested space, such as the struggles around what constitutes the “nature” (and hence how to protect it), or the contesting scales at which environmental politics are articulated, or the spatial practices and politics of groups with conflicting interests, we pick up two inter-related dimensions in particular: Firstly, Uluabat Lake stands as a microcosm of the ever-present tension between the Turkish state’s project of modernization qua economic growth and its efforts to implement environmental protection. Secondly, it epitomizes the fragmented sphere of the social, in particular vis-a`vis the conflicting uses, interests, needs and demands of different local groups regarding the environment, the uneven ways in which they are impacted by processes linking the state, society and the environment, and the differential mechanisms through which they are connected to the state. More specifically, we argue that the struggles and conflicts surfaced around the site’s so-called “participatory management plan” is a particular demonstration of the broader – and more structural – tension between the Turkish state’s growth-oriented modernist vision, on the one hand, and its motivation to implement environmental protection, on the other. By analyzing the differential positions of local stakeholders regarding the management of the site, we aim to reveal the uneven ways that different local groups in the area have been affected via their relationship with the state, and to tackle the ways in which the local manifestations of the state-societyenvironment relationships in Uluabat illustrate tensions and contradictions that are inherent components of the process of state-making in Turkey.

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Accordingly, we first present an overview of environmental politics in Turkey and locate it within the making of state hegemony, delineating especially the role of the historical and uneven configuration of state-society relationships. We then introduce the case of Uluabat, tracing the positionalities of different stakeholders within the web of relations of dependencies, both among the stakeholders as well as between the stakeholders and the Lake, and their differential links with the state and the constellation of statesociety relationships. The final section concludes by emphasizing the need for a radical re-configuration of state-society relationships for just and sustainable management of contested environmental spaces in Turkey.

ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS IN TURKEY Serving our industrialists means serving our economy; it means serving the Turkey of 2023 [the centenary of the foundation of the Republic of Turkey]. Together with [the] municipality [of Bursa] and our industrialists, we will succeed in creating the Grand Turkey. May this new road be fortunate and prosperous.2

These words belong to a member of the parliament elected from the provincial district where Uluabat is located in, uttered in 2013, in relation to the renovation of the highway connecting a local industrial zone to metropolitan centers, which would affect the ecology of the Basin. Such a pronounced desire for progress via economic growth, which, in turn, is envisioned to be possible only via industrialization, however, is hardly as recent. Achieving modernization and economic progress has been a long-standing objective of the policymakers in Turkey. Beginning especially with the decline of the Ottoman Empire and later instigated formally within the modern Republic, the idea of “catching up” (with the West) has been central to politics in Turkey. Although this notion of modernization implied a process of transformation beyond a merely economic one, a central role was (and still is) assigned to growth: rapid economic growth was (and still is) seen as primary providing support to the newly created political and social order, envisaged as the precondition and remedy for all the ills in the backward society.3

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Thus, growth policies have been given priority, based on the assumption that their achievement would automatically resolve social and political issues as well – albeit sometimes with a lag.4 Given the forceful appeal of economic growth, it should not come as a surprise that debates on how to best promote economic growth have always been important in politics.5 These debates, however, never shifted from politics of “development alternatives” to politics of “alternatives to development”. In fact, a wide range of ideologies within the country’s political landscape shares the common faith in growth as the essential societal goal. While the very foundations of the modern Republic – secularism and unitary nationalism – have been challenged by various political forces, ranging from revolutionary socialism to Islamic fundamentalism, the notion that development through rapid economic growth is a sine qua non for progress has remained largely uncontested. Even when challenges to the modernization project emerged especially after the 1980s, these critiques were not of modernization per se, but rather of its top-down implementation and, at times, its strict interpretation as a replica of the Western model.6 We argue that the roots of this undisputed appeal and dominance of growth-oriented modernization should be searched in the configuration of state-society relationships. In particular, the way the state presented itself and legitimized its claim to rule by drawing up a broad consensus for its existence has constituted its hegemony in Turkey.7 The state in Turkey has historically achieved its power and legitimacy, first and foremost, from the promise of fulfilling the ideal of modernization. The urgency to modernize and realize economic development has constituted a collective interest – an outlook for the whole nation that is envisaged as an organic unity without internal divisions, where even questioning its validity is considered unpatriotic. Following the Gramscian conceptualization of hegemony, we claim that this vision has enabled the Turkish state to represent itself as a “neutral institution” that embodies the collective will of the people, acquiring the consent of the society to its rule.8 That is to say, the idea of modernization (via economic prosperity) was (and still is) integral to the state’s ability to govern not by coercion, but by being backed with the consent of its constituency.

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Modernization via economic growth came to serve two further, related, purposes in (re)producing the Turkish state’s existence and hegemony. Firstly, the appeal of growth-oriented modernization as a goal has allowed the Turkish state to preempt opposition mobilized around the issues of social justice and (re)distribution. Class-based inequalities, for instance, have been brushed aside, since “classes” are invisible to begin with; there are no classes, but rather a division of labor among the Turkish citizenry, where each and every individual should work hard to elevate the country to the level of developed civilizations.9 Establishing modernization as a collective interest has therefore served to unify different groups around this “universal goal” and prevented the formulation of demands arising out of intrasociety divisions. Secondly, development via economic growth has become a requisite to enable the distribution of material concessions to subordinate classes for ensuring their consent. The Turkish state, to a large extent, has managed to maintain legitimacy by its generosity as long as the urban petty bourgeoisie and rural small producers are subsidized, and even the most impoverished groups in society are coopted by material improvements to their living standards.10 It should be emphasized that this feature of the state-society relationship in Turkey has remained historically persistent without much loss from its strength. Successive Justice and Development Party (JDP – its Turkish acronym) governments of the last decade, for instance, have retained the historically strong commitment to modernization/development, as attested by its most recent election slogan “Let Stability Last, Let Turkey Grow”,11 albeit within a distinct operationalization.12 Especially accelerated during this period is the capitalization of the natural environment, the privatization of realms previously under public ownership and the expropriation and redistribution of property through “legal” means such as urban transformation. In that sense, the JDP has successfully mobilized a spatial politics, for which the idea of modernization/development continues to form an indispensable basis: monumental constructions such as dams, highways, power plants, bridges (including a third bridge on the Bosphorous) and a canal project to connect Marmara to the Black Sea reproduce the commanding presence of the state in the most visible way, fabricating the image that it is indeed working hard

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for its people. On the other hand, this spatialized, construction-led modernization/development model reproduces the consent of large sections of the society, not only through the distribution of rents to large masses and the opening up of new areas of investment, but also by the effective persuasion of middle-lower classes through housing property and consumption opportunities.13 This project of modernization via growth has unsurprisingly taken its toll on the environment, for which a quick snapshot of the environmental problems in Turkey, ranging from pollution to overuse of natural resources to the extinction of species, is illustrative: pollution of seas and inland water bodies, excessive use of fertilizers, pesticides and insecticides in agriculture, threats to biodiversity, problems in the disposal of domestic and industrial waste, ecological destruction of mining activities, to name a few. To be more concrete: In 2016, Turkey ranked 99th (out of 180) in terms of its overall Environmental Performance Index, particularly 177th in biodiversity.14 The greenhouse gas emissions went up by 163 percent from 1990 to 2012, with the emissions increasing by 306 percent in industrial processes and 132 percent in the energy sector – one of the highest rates of growth in the world.15 The impact of the primacy of developmentalist goals over environmental issues have been manifested in the environmental pressure caused by many spheres of economic activity, from tourism to industry, from mining to agriculture. The state’s efforts to promote tourism as the new growth sector in the 1980s, for instance, went hand-in-hand with disruption and destruction of ecological balance, disappearance of flora and fauna, damaging of sensitive geological formations and intense pollution due to inadequate sewage treatment and disposal infrastructure.16 The case of industry, especially its informal component, is much more alarming: polluting activities of industrial firms, despite continuous lip service paid in official documents to abatement of air and water pollution, have been causing severe environmental degradation and posing serious threats to human health. The case of Dilovası, located 60 km east of I˙stanbul, is especially noteworthy: hosting six Organized Industrial Zones, the percentage of deaths related to various kinds of cancer is 33 percent, about triple the national average.17 On the other hand,

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these processes have brought, especially within the last 20 years, rising social opposition and resistance. Socio-environmental conflicts around energy investments, which have especially heightened with the liberalization of the energy sector and are highly visible around small-scale hydro-power plant constructions, point to the depth of environmental conflicts in general. This general picture, however, becomes puzzling when put alongside the fact that a well-defined and detailed environmental legislation was put in place, and done so relatively early on, by the Turkish state.18 Everyone’s right to live in a healthy and balanced environment was acknowledged and protected with the famous article 56 of the 1982 Constitution, and a comprehensive environmental law was passed in 1983. A ministry responsible for environmental protection was founded in 1991, followed by the preparation of related laws and regulations, the formation of extensive and elaborate institutional structures, and the establishment of organizational links. All in all, this legal-organizational structure stipulates the rights and responsibilities at the level of both local and central government bodies in a detailed manner and assigns well-defined roles to them. The country has also been signatory to numerous regional and global environmental agreements in addition to making consistent efforts to participate in international environmental conventions. It should be emphasized, on the other hand, that the country’s candidacy for EU membership has played an undeniable role in providing impetus to this process of formulating and implementing the legislative framework of environmental protection. Although reading the Turkish state’s efforts towards implementing environmental protection as a fac
ade, that is, lacking a genuine motivation, is certainly possible, we believe that such a reading would be too simplistic. We argue, on the contrary, that the Turkish state’s commitment to ensuring environmental quality should also be situated within its hegemonic practices of eliciting broad-based social consent via the construction of modernization as a collective interest. In other words, we hold that effectuating environmental protection is seen as a necessary precondition of becoming modern and civilized rather than being a mere showpiece. Since protecting

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the environment and improving environmental quality were seen as a criterion of being modern, environmental institutions were largely established as a part of the larger transformations that modernization implies. The fact that the formation of various laws and organizations related to environmental protection has often coincided with specific international conjunctures where the desire to be respected as a developed country can be most visibly detected, for example, within the context of environmental regulations made in line with the European Union accession process, is telling in this sense. Implementing environmental protection is indeed a part and parcel of the fulfillment of the modernization project through which the state seeks to elicit legitimacy and consent to its claim to rule. On the flip side, environmental protection measures such as the enclosure and designation of spaces as national parks, or the regulation of access and use of natural resources such as forests, pastures and marshes, serve as mechanisms by which the state manifests itself within the sphere of the social and governs the relationship within it. In this sense, the formation and operationalization of the institutional structure regarding environmental protection can indeed be seen as integral parts of how state-society relationships are constructed. It is therefore possible to read the constituting practices of hegemony from the process of environmental policy-making and implementation. To recap, we argue that both the strong commitment to growthoriented modernization and the efforts to implement environmental protection on the side of the state can be seen as components of its broader hegemonic project, that is, the practices through which it establishes itself, justifies its existence and its claim to rule, and seeks to elicit the active consent of the ruled. This perspective not only positions the state as a heterogeneous entity and a space of contestation and conflict, but also renders manifestations of conflicting practices of hegemony visible in different contexts and scales. The case of Uluabat Lake provides one such example, where both the state’s growth-oriented modernist vision and its environmentalism are spatialized, and the contestation of these radically opposed motivations are concretized.

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OVERVIEW OF THE ULUABAT LAKE We have been fishers for generations, and we used to be very well-off. The lake is so polluted now, we can no longer earn a living from fishing. We are unfortunately the last generation of fishers. As many others, my wife and my son are now working in one of the factories for a minimum wage. We know that industry pollutes the lake, but we are dependent on the wage income, so nobody here can afford to oppose them.19

The Uluabat (Apollania) Lake, one of the 14 Ramsar sites in Turkey (since 1998) and a part of the Living Lakes Network (since 2000), is located in Northwestern Anatolia and covers an area of varying between 135 and 160 km2, depending on the lake’s water level.20 The protected area with the Ramsar status covers the lake and the coastal band that includes two villages, totaling an area of 199 km2 (see Map 8.1). Today, the coastal and neighboring villages (a total of 12) are home to approximately 20,000 people. The main sources of livelihood include farming, fishing and employment in nearby industrial plants. The larger Basin surrounding the wetland hosts an impressive diversity of waterfowls and nesting birds, as well as aquatic plants.21 It has, however, been under environmental distress, intensified especially in the late 1990s, caused primarily by disposal of untreated industrial and communal wastewater into the lake – including sewage from the two larger town centers with a total population of around 60,000, runoff from use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers in agriculture, and disruption of the lake’s hydrology by reservoirs constructed to support the irrigation system. In 2002, the Ministry of Environment, in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), developed a management plan with the supposed participation of local and national stakeholders as stipulated by the Ramsar Convention.22 Participation of relevant ministries, governorships, local governance units, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academics and local residents was sought both at the initial stages of the design of the plan and throughout its implementation. Consequently, the main issues that the plan was to address were initially defined as mitigating pollution, maintaining sustainable use of natural resources in the Basin, creating alternative sources of income (such as tourism and animal husbandry) and, correspondingly,

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MAP 8.1 The Uluabat Lake Basin (The dotted line denotes the boundaries of the protected area) developing training programs for local residents to boost sustainable practices. The plan, however, failed in both ensuring effective participation of stakeholders and achieving sustainable development.23 We argue that within this failure (as an end result) lies the contested nature of

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Uluabat as a conservation site: a microcosm of the clashing motivations of economic development and environmental protection at the level of the state, on the one hand, and an arena of conflict and power relations among different local actors, whose positions, demands and interests have been shaped historically via their relationship with the state, on the other hand. Lake Uluabat, albeit being a protected area that holds immense importance in terms of biodiversity (including the globallythreatened Pelecanus crispus), is located in the immediate vicinity of industrial plants (in the sectors of food processing, mining, chemical and plastics) as well as the industrial zones of the neighboring town centers (Karacabey and Mustafakemalpas¸a) that host facilities in textile, food processing, chemical and automobile industries with almost 4,000 workers.24 The industry started to flourish in the region especially in the last 20 years, and continues to grow with both the recent and foreseen plans for industrial zones. The designation of industrial zones, in particular, has always been a conflicted process as most of the land earmarked as industrial zones in the proximity of the lake displays not only contested uses and interests at the local level (e.g., industrial development, agriculture, environmental protection) but also an existing tension between the developmentalist and conservationist motivations of the state. Although the proposed designations, approved by the Ministry of Industry (and at times also by the Ministry of Environment), have often been disputed in court and revoked, court decisions and regulations seem to have been bypassed in order to keep the primacy of industrial development intact.25 Most recently, a new industrial zone planned to be built on land previously designated as arable agricultural land within the Karacabey district, pushed by a local business association, has sparked bitter contestation between the conservationists and farmers, on the one hand, and the business community and the provincial government, on the other. The developmental twist in this case seems distinct than before, however, as the proposal is endorsed by the Public Housing Authority, which has the power to enclose land on grounds of eminent domain. The most immediate impact of industrial plants in the area is through the direct or indirect (via streams) disposal of untreated

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wastes into the lake.26 Despite being legally obligated to operate treatment facilities, most plants do not comply with the regulations, not least due to the lack of effective monitoring by the state. The seeming negligence in environmental regulation enforcement, however, insinuates lack of willingness as it signifies reluctance to hurt the industry’s capacity to generate income, employment and growth. This reluctance-cum-incompetence, coupled with the stateled processes of production of space around industrial zoning practices, have prioritized industrial development at the expense not only of environmental quality but also of other economic activities, most notably agriculture and fishing. Agriculture emerges as another growth locomotive in the broader Basin surrounding Uluabat in which the state’s developmental hand is highly visible. With the construction of river banks on the streams feeding the lake, 14,880 hectares of wetland were drained and eventually turned into arable land between 1937 and 1993.27 In line with the state’s larger agricultural development strategy, irrigated agriculture was encouraged with public investments in infrastructure and irrigation pricing policies, leading to a diversified crop pattern, which came with obvious environmental costs mainly in terms of increased use of water and the altered cultivation practices’ impacts on soil.28 At the same time, state-provided market and price subsidies have contributed to the gradual displacement of traditional crops, such as wheat and mulberries, and the expansion of market-oriented ones, such as olives and fruits.29 In addition, chemical use in agriculture took root and expanded, not least by explicit efforts of the state to increase agricultural productivity with subsidized supply of fertilizers and pesticides. On the other hand, the pronounced primacy of agricultural development in the area crowded out other livelihood activities that used to be important historically, including animal husbandry – as grazing land were turned into arable land – and sericulture.30 All in all, the agricultural policies pursued by the state, interacting with the dynamics of marketization and industrial development in the region, have radically transformed the use of space in the area, with substantial impacts on the lake and basin. As agricultural irrigation relies heavily on the streams feeding the lake, it has had

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critical negative impacts on the water budget of the basin. Arguably more importantly, farming practices in the area lead to contamination of both the streams and the underground water through the seeping of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, which causes overgrowth of weed in the lake and hurts the fish population by reducing the level of oxygen. The established practices of agricultural production, however, seem deeply rooted. The agricultural policies pursued in the region – for example, installation of the irrigation infrastructure, non-volumetric irrigation pricing, promotion of pesticides and fertilizers – have instigated a well-established incentive structure. Not only are farmers often unaware of the impacts of farming on the lake (or at best claim that they are minimal compared to those of the industry), but they also attach greater importance on short-term concerns – mainly on their income – than longer-term sustainability of farming, and thus of their livelihood.31 In the words of the head of the regions’ water user association, the local organization responsible for managing the irrigation structure: “Farmers are aware of the pollution created by excessive use of fertilizers, and negative impacts of wild irrigation, on the lake, but they are uneducated hence unaware that they are destroying their own future.” This apparent myopia, on the other hand, can also be read as an entrapment: even when farmers are aware of, and concerned about, the implications of their farming practices, stressing the need for installing efficient, such as drip, irrigation systems and for a general restructuring towards sustainable farming, they are unable to effectuate a substantial shift in their production patterns. Most of their efforts to this end suffer from financial constraints of high fixed costs associated with such a shift and insufficient support from the state. On the other hand, decreasing output prices enforce the need to intensify fertilizer use in order to increase production.32 The power asymmetry between the few food processing factories nearby – the main buyers of agricultural produce – and the largely unorganized farmers, lacking the capacity to collectively bargain, means that the former dictates low prices to the latter. Farmers seem hesitant to bargain with the industry collectively due to issues of trust and collective action, stating that “asking for higher prices would only

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result in loss of business, as there would always be some farmers who would not comply and sell their products at lower prices”. Obviously, this shaping of space in Uluabat, in particular the remaking of the Lake ecosystem, by the local manifestations of the state’s developmentalist vision interacting with existing socioeconomic structures, has had crucial implications not only in terms of the inequalities that are (re)produced, but also of the social and economic practices surrounding and producing the space. The fishers in the area, whose population decreased within the last two decades by more than half, are hurt worst by the degrading lake ecosystem. Both the number of fish species and the quantity of fish in the lake have rapidly been decreasing. While the fisheries were highly lucrative during the 1980s, with crayfish and carp being the most valuable species, the viability of fishing has been declining in the last decades. This has carried implications for both economic and social aspects of fishery: the existing organization of fishing practices and the traditional gender division of labor in fishing, most notably, has been changing. It was not socially acceptable for women to go fishing in the past (but they were expected to produce/repair the fishing tools), and a couple of men from different households used to go fishing together and share the total catch that would later be sold via an auction in the village. With the economic urgency created by decreasing fishing incomes in the last decades, this structure of village-level joint production has been replaced by that of familylevel one, in which women started to go fishing with their husbands so as not to have to share the catch, which is now worth much less, with other families. While this shift may empower women, it has arguably hampered the tradition of social cooperation in the fishing communities. Another consequence of the decline in incomes from fishing is a change in fishing behavior. The decrease in the number of financially valuable fish species led fishers to increase the volume of catch to sustain the level of previous earnings. Instead of having two or three nets as they did 20 years ago, for instance, now each fisher has around 50 nets. While the smaller fish caught alongside the adult ones used to be let back to the lake, nowadays almost all the fish caught are kept and sold. In addition, most fishers either deny that they have been

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fishing excessively or do not think they should reduce their fishing level. Stressing the difficulty of earning a subsistence-level of income from fishing, fishers no longer perceive the lake as a long-term source of livelihood that needs to be maintained and, therefore, do not take into account the future costs of excessive fishing.33 That is to say, the degradation of the lake caused a radical shift in perceptions, values and practices related to fishing and the lake. On the other hand, the younger generations in the fishing communities tend to seek employment in the industries located nearby despite perceiving them to be the main cause of pollution; those who remain as fishers describe themselves as “the last generation of fishers.”34 Moreover, not only those who have a direct relationship with the industry via employment but also their immediate families supported by the wage income are dependent on the industry for livelihood, even though fishing is still another source of livelihood. Being directly or indirectly dependent on the industry as such obviously changes how people relate to the lake. Seen in this light, maintaining fishers in this wage-employment relationship benefits the industry as it helps weaken the fishers’ potential to oppose its polluting activities. The in-depth interviews conducted in June 2014 confirmed this observation: the village that ¨ ”, Go ¨ lyazı, where fishing was once referred to as the “fishers’ villageo was the only source of income for 80 percent of households in the early 2000s,35 has now almost become a workers’ village frequented with regular daily shuttle services to nearby factories. When asked about the increased pollution problem in the lake, even those who are still fishers, mainly from the older generation, responded in a manner that is protective of the industry, stating the crucial role of the industry for the region as the wage income has become the most important source of income for many households – even for those where some members of the household are still engaged in fishing. This marks a shift in the position of the fishers in time, as the pronounced opinions of the fishers in 2009 stand in contrast: at the time, although the shift from fishing boats to “assembly lines” had already started, fishers and workers alike vocalized complaints about the industry’s fundamental role in the lake’s pollution and the state’s reluctance to monitor the industry’s polluting practices.36 In this

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sense, the positions and perceptions related to the industry display a different contestation for fishers, one between the urgency of subsistence (provider of employment) and the long-term viability of livelihoods (polluter of the lake). To recap, the local materialization of the Turkish state’s growthoriented modernization agenda took the form of state-supported development of agriculture and industry in Uluabat, with substantial impacts on both socio-economic dynamics and the physicalenvironmental processes that produce the space of Uluabat. On the other hand, the state’s conservationist hand made itself visible with attempts initiated with the management plan in 2002, only to fail to solve the degradation problem. Conceived to address the impacts of industrial pollution, contamination by agricultural chemicals and overfishing via an effective stakeholder participation, the management plan failed monumentally. Not only did the decision-making processes lack an encompassing participation and inclusion, but also the plan itself remained ineffective in tackling the prevailing patterns of agricultural and industrial production, and thus, the pollution issue.37 More specifically, the plan suffered at every step from the state’s reluctance to renounce its growth-oriented agenda by hurting the growth sectors of the region. The state’s unwillingness in this regard is further attested by the recent expansion of industrial zones mentioned earlier as well as a new highway construction at the immediate border of the protected area and the implicated vision to transform the larger region into a tourism center. The pronounced strength of the state’s developmentalist vision clashes with the vision of environmental protection encapsulated in the management plant, and often tilts this contestation towards growth orientation. The failure of the management plan has had further consequences beyond the degradation problem, materializing at multiple levels. Most local people, for example, have not been properly informed about the protection status of the wetland, yet they have been forced to deal with the concrete consequences of living in a protected area, with restrictions on their daily lives, for example, when they are not permitted to build a floating dock or a barn or an addendum.38 These constraints have been put in place due to the lake’s Ramsar site status, even though locals could not, in most cases, comprehend how and

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why these regulations were made, and how they were supposed to comply with them. A main complaint expressed during the interviews by fishers, farmers as well as state officials was that the management plan only listed the restrictions on the use of the lake and the basin, and failed to outline possible alternatives/solutions. As in the case of the restriction on building a floating dock mentioned above, the fishers interviewed were not complaining about not being allowed to build the dock in their preferred location, but they were rather frustrated by any alternative solutions not being suggested, let alone the fact that they did not fully grasp the reason behind the restrictions in the first place. Since the mission of the conservation plan – or any other information associated with it for that matter – was not clearly communicated to the local people, they developed an antagonistic position against conservation efforts, thinking that they would damage their livelihoods. Most locals have perceived the conservation plan as an attempt to “protect the lake for the sake of birds at the expense of people.”39 Perhaps more importantly, seeing that the industrial plants, together with the sewage of the nearby settlements, continue to pollute the lake, local people feel like they are forced to bear the whole burden of conservation while both industrial and urban pollution could be avoided by effective state regulation and enforcement. Such contested perceptions of what underlies the failure to solve the degradation problem aggravated the existing freerider problem that plagued the conservation efforts in the area: both fishers and farmers hold that any effort (in terms of altering practices) undertaken by them to remedy the lake’s degradation is pointless since the main issue lies in the industrial waste dumped on the lake, to which the state turns a blind eye. It seems that this conviction has to do with the perception of the states’ position vis-a`-vis the industry, which has been engraved with decades of growth-oriented policies and almost complete disregard for other dimensions of societal wellbeing.40 Consequently, a vicious cycle exists in which the problem of pollution leads to unwillingness to alter the perverse behavior of stakeholders, such as overfishing (by fishers) and excessive use of fertilizers and wild-irrigation practices (by farmers), which in turn perpetuate environmental degradation and make conservation

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increasingly costly and difficult. The historically instigated perception of the state’s growth-oriented position favoring the industry also explains, at least partly, why contestations that exist at multiple levels in Uluabat do not seem to translate into explicit action/ reaction – especially by fishers as the most affected by pollution – in the form of community-based action, protest or petitions.41 CONCLUSION This chapter has illustrated the spatialization of contesting motivations and practices associated with the Turkish state’s hegemonic project of modernization and the constitution of state-society relationships by deploying the Uluabat protected area as a case. Based on a conceptualization of space as a historical product of social, economic and political processes, on the one hand, and physical processes, on the other, it has narrated the contested dynamics of the production of space in the area. It has done so by demonstrating how the two conflicting motives associated with the construction of the state hegemony in Turkey – growth-orientation and environmental protection – has crystallized in the context of Uluabat. While the Turkish state has privileged the imperative of growth via a variety of policies and practices, including the enclosure and designation of space as industrial zones, lax monitoring of waste treatment facilities of industrial plants, ready provision of irrigation infrastructure and promotion of fertilizer and pesticide use, it has also committed to and implemented an agenda of environmental protection, most visibly seen in the area’s Ramsar site status and the associated regulations. The obvious contestation between these two motives can be detected not only in the spatial politics and conflicts around the designation of industrial zones, in the sociophysical transformations associated with the increased salience of irrigated agriculture by the drainage and irrigation canals or the visible degradation of the lake, but also in the loss of livelihood, shifting power and changing everyday practices, perceptions and values that shape the state-society-environment relationships. What we have not thus far touched upon is how opposition and insurgency are manifested in the contested topography of Uluabat. As

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hegemony is never absolute or completed, but always marked with cracks and needs to be continually produced and reproduced through the rhythms of state-society relationships, it is always marked with clashes and crises. The recent mobilization in I˙kizdere village of Uluabat against the turning of arable land into an industrial zone, especially within the contemporary context of environmental resistances in Turkey,42 is telling in this sense: rather than coining this opposition counterhegemonic in a straight-forward manner, we would like to emphasize its potential in challenging the force of the developmental imperative. While the discourses mobilized by I˙kizdere villagers animate concerns of losing their farming livelihoods, they also allude to a long-term well-being of the soil and the ecosystem. In this sense we see a potential counterhegemonic pathway in the contested space of Uluabat. NOTES 1. Ceren Soylu, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA; Bengi Akbulut, independent researcher; Fikret Adaman, ˘azic
i University. Department of Economics, Bog ¨ seyin S¸ahin, MP for Bursa of the ruling Justice 2. A speech delivered by Mr Hu and Development Party, on 26 November 2013. http://www.bursa.bel.tr/ hasanaga-yoluna-nester/haber/15213 (Bursa Metropolitan Municipality website, last accessed on 2 September 2016). 3. See Ahmad (1993) and Arsel (2005). ¨ c
ek provides an excellent account of the complex process of formation 4. Go and reproduction of neo-liberal practices in Turkey in the introduction to this volume. 5. That the discourses of the two main parties of parliamentary politics, Republican People’s Party – the traditional party of the militarybureaucratic elite – and the resurgent Democrat Party – the main oppositional party that came to power in the 1950s, – were dominated by developmentalism is illustrative in this respect. The clashes between the two parties were not centered on the validity of the developmentalist goals to achieve modernization, nor related to distribution and social justice, but on whether the growth strategy should be state-controlled or follow a liberal path. 6. See Keyder (1997). 7. See Akbulut (2011). 8. See Gramsci (1971). 9. See Lewis (2001).

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10. See Keyder (1989). ¨ rkiye Hazır Hedef 2023: I˙stikrar Su ¨ rsu ¨ n, Tu ¨ rkiye Bu ¨ yu ¨ su ¨ n”, http:// 11. “Tu www.haberx.com/istikrar_sursun_turkiye_buyusun(17,n,10674747,308). aspx (last accessed on 2 September 2016). 12. The specific operationalization of the modernization/developmentalist agenda under the JDP government, on the other hand, seems distinct from previous periods on more than one count. Many have recognized that it has mobilized a different business group, namely the small- and medium-size capitalists previously excluded from the dominant coalition, albeit ultimately around the familiar ideal of modernization. A notable ideological turn that accompanied this was a re-interpretation of the Islamic ethic in a vein similar to what Protestanism meant for Western capitalism. 13. See Akbulut and Adaman (2013); Adaman et al. (2014). 14. EPI is a composite index of biodiversity of various natural resources, level of pollution and negative impacts of environmental conditions on human health: http://epi.yale.edu/country/turkey (last accessed on 2 September 2016). 15. United Nations Climate Change Secreteriat (UNFCCC) Summary of GHG emissions for Turkey, http://unfccc.int/files/ghg_emissions_data/applicati on/pdf/tur_ghg_profile.pdf (last accessed on 2 September 2016; please note that the last inventory year for Turkey is 2012). 16. See Tosun and Fyall (2005). ˘lu et al., http://politikekoloji.org/tehlikeli-dayanikli-endustri 17. See Hamzaog yel-atiklar (2011) (last accessed on 2 September 2016). 18. See Adaman and Arsel (2005, 2010, 2012). 19. Expressed by a fisher in Uluabat during an interview conducted by the authors in 2014. 20. The Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, called the Ramsar Convention (1971), is an intergovernmental treaty, which provides the framework for national action and international cooperation for the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources. There are presently 169 contracting parties to the convention, with 2,241 wetland sites, totaling 215.2 million hectares, designated for inclusion in the Ramsar List of Wetlands of International Importance. The convention entered into force in Turkey on 13 November 1994. Turkey currently has 14 sites designated as Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar sites), with a surface area of 184,487 hectares. See http://www.ramsar.org/ wetland/turkey (last accessed on 28 August 2016). 21. Global Nature Fund, Living Lakes. See http://www.globalnature.org/ 35459/Living-Lakes/Asia/Uluabat-Lake/resindex.aspx (last accessed on 28 August 2016). 22. Being a contracting party to the Ramsar Convention, Turkey “shall formulate and implement their planning so as to promote the conservation of the wetlands included in the List [of Ramsar sites], and as far as possible the wise use of wetlands in their territory.”

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23. See Soylu (2010) and Akbulut and Soylu (2012). The arguments and data presented here are based on a field study conducted in the area from November 2008 to September 2009, comprising 20 in-depth interviews, three focus groups and a face-to-face survey with 607 randomly selected residents, and follow-up interviews conducted in 2012 and 2014. 24. Data gathered from the Governorship of Bursa: http://www.bursa.gov.tr (last accessed on 28 August 2016). ˘a Organized Industrial Zone at 25. One such example is the case of Hasanag the eastern corner of the lake, which was designated as an industrial zone in 1985 and an organized industrial zone in 2003. Although the status was later revoked by the court on the grounds that the proposed zone lies inside the protected area, the zone was ultimately registered in the same area (under a different name) in 2003, and remains active to this day with 95 plants. A similar conflict occurred in 2004, with a proposal for a separate industrial zone on the northeast corner of the lake pushed by a local business association, KOTIYAK. The zone was approved, ironically by the Ministry of Environment as well, despite the fact that it was located within the buffer area designated by Ramsar. It was, however, also revoked by a legal dispute. 26. This was pointed out by scientists, state officials and local people (including fishers, farmers and industrial workers) during our interviews. ¨ zesmi (2001). 27. See O 28. The head of the Uluabat Irrigation Association, which organizes the irrigation system for the farmers in 15 villages around the lake, acknowledged that wild irrigation is a major source of degradation. They, along with the farmers and the head of the Chamber of Agriculture, mentioned that moving to a drip-irrigation system would reduce the stress on the lake and is their preferred option. ¨ zesmi (2001). 29. See O 30. Ibid. 31. See Soylu (2010). 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. ¨ zesmi (2001). 35. O 36. See Soylu (2010). 37. Ibid., Akbulut and Soylu (2012). 38. Focus group meetings and in-depth interviews suggested that this was the case, and the survey data supported our observation: 446 of those surveyed (74 percent) had not heard of the management plan in 2009 – seven years after its implementation. Some actually mistook Ramsar to be the name of a person or an office, and believed that the problems related to conservation constraints on their daily practices would be solved if “Ramsar” were taken out of the picture. See Soylu (2010).

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39. The most visible conservation effort in accordance with the management plan is the International Eskikaraag˘ac
Stork Festival, which has been ˘ac
village, which is part of organized every year since 2005 at Eskikaraag the Euronatur European Stork Villages. The festival aims at increasing awareness about conservation and attracting local and international tourists, and it has been somewhat successful in providing income from tourism for the people from the village. However, the festival caused hostility among some local people towards storks, as a result of which they destroyed some of the storks’ nests, since conservation meant nothing more than a set of constraints for local people. 40. All groups of people interviewed – fishers, workers and farmers – think that the state weighs the interests of the industry more heavily than those of fishers and farmers. When asked “[t]o what extent does the state care about the interests of the following groups [industry, fishers, and farmers]? (0: not cares at all, ten: cares a lot)” around 80 percent of responses were between six and ten for the industry’s interests. Ninety-six percent of fishers and 92 percent of farmers responded between 0 and 5 for their own interests. Our interviews in 2014 showed that the perceptions were still in line with these results. 41. When asked whether they would take part in an action collectively organized by fishers to voice grievances about how they were affected by the degradation problem, 90 percent of the fishers participated in the survey responded positively. The lack of action can therefore be seen as a collective action problem, which is largely shaped by the expected negative response from the state against such an action. Another important factor affecting the prospects for collective action by fishers is the employment opportunities in the industry. As discussed above, most fishers, and their families, are now workers at the factories nearby. Therefore, even though they prefer to remain as fishers, provided the lake is cleaned up, they are currently dependent on the industry and are willing to bear the costs of pollution created by it. Failing to solve the pollution problem, hence, deepened power inequalities between locals and the industry by creating further relations of dependency with limited exit options. 42. See, for instance, C ¸ oban (2004), Avcı et al. (2010), Arsel et al. (2015), and Adaman et al. (2016).

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ˘ı Yeniden ¨ rkiye’de Kalkınmacılıg Adaman, F., B. Akbulut, and M. Arsel, “Tu ˘a I˙lis¸kileri (Re-reading ¨ nu ¨ s¸en Devlet-Toplum-Dog Okumak: HES’ler ve Do Developmentalism in Turkey: Small-Scale Hydropower Plants and the Transformation of State-Society-Environment Relationships)”, in Sudan Sebepler: Kalkınma ve C ¸ evrecilik Kıskacında Hidro-Enerji ve HES Kars¸ıtı Mu¨cadelenin Ekoloji Politig˘i (Hydro-Power Between Development and

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Environmentalism and the Political Ecology of the Struggle against Hydro-Power ¨ and C. Aksu. (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2016, Plants), edited by E. Evren, S. Erensu 291–312). ˘an’s Adaman, F., B. Akbulut, Y. Madra, and S¸. Pamuk, “Hitting the Wall: Erdog Construction-based Finance-led Growth Regime”, in The Middle East in London 10(3) (2014): 7 –8. Adaman, F., and M. Arsel, Environmentalism in Turkey: Between Democracy and Development?, Ashgate studies in environmental policy and practice (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2005). ——— “Globalization, Development, and Environmental Policies in Turkey”, in Understanding the Process of Institutional Change in Turkey: A Political Economy Approach, edited by T. C ¸ etin and F. Yılmaz (New York: Nova, 319–35) . ——— “Political Economy of the Environment in Turkey”, in Handbook of Modern Turkey, edited by M. Heper and S. Sayarı (London: Routledge, 317 – 27). Ahmad, F., The Making of Modern Turkey (New York: Routledge, 1993). Akbulut, B., “State Hegemony and Sustainable Development: A Political Economy Analysis of two Local Experiences In Turkey.” Ph.D., Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2011. Akbulut, B., and C. Soylu, “An inquiry into power and participatory natural resource management”, in Cambridge Journal of Economics 36(5) (2012):1143– 62. Akbulut, B., and F. Adaman, “The Unbearable Charm of Modernization: Growth Fetishism and the Making of State in Turkey”, in Perspectives: Political Analysis and Commentary from Turkey 5(13) (2013):14–17. Arsel, M., “Reflexive Developmentalism? Toward an Environmental Critique of Modernization”, in Environmentalism in Turkey: Between Democracy and Development?, edited by F. Adaman and M. Arsel (Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005, 15–34). Ibid., B. Akbulut and F. Adaman, “Environmentalism of the Malcontent: Anatomy of an anti-coal power plant struggle in Turkey”, in Journal of Peasant Studies 42(2) (2015): 1 –25. ¨ zkaynak, “Valuation Languages in Environmental Avcı, D., F. Adaman, and B. O Conflicts: How Stakeholders Oppose or Support Gold Mining at Mount Ida, Turkey”, in Ecological Economics 70(2) (2010): 228–38. C ¸ oban, A., “Community-based Ecological Resistance: The Bergama Movement in Turkey”, in Environmental Politics 13(2) (2004): 438–60. Gramsci, A., Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971) . ˘lu, O., N. Etiler, C. I. Yavuz, and C ˘layan, “The Causes of Deaths Hamzaog ¸. C ¸ ag in an Industry-dense Area: Example of Dilovasi (Kocaeli)”, Turkish Journal of Medical Sciences 41(3) (2011): 369–75. Keyder, C ¸ ., Tu¨rkiye’de Devlet ve Sınıflar (The State and Class in Turkey) (I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, 1989).

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——— “Whither the Project of Modernity?”, in Rethinking Modernity and ˘an and R. Kasaba National Identity in Turkey, edited by S. Bozdog (Washington, DC: University of Washington Press, 1997, 37 –51). Lewis, B., The Emergence of Modern Turkey. 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Republic of Turkey Ministry of Environment and World Wildlife Fund, Uluabat Lake Management Plan (2002). ¨ zesmi, U., “Uluabat Go ¨ lu ¨ ’nde Sulakalan-I˙nsan I˙lis¸kileri ve I˙lgi Sahibi O Analizi.” Unpublished mimeograph (2001). Soylu, C., “Contested Commons: Power Relations and Collective Action” Ph.D., Economics, University of Siena (2010). Tosun, C., and A. Fyall, “Making Tourism Sustainable: Prospects and Pitfalls”, in Environmentalism in Turkey: Between Democracy and Development?, edited by F. Adaman and M. Arsel (Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005, 249–62).

CHAPTER 9

From Shining Icons of Progress to Contested Infrastructures: “Damming” the Munzur Valley in Eastern Turkey Laurent Dissard

Once upon a time, dazzling marvels of infrastructural engineering were of course publicly celebrated. But in the eyes of literature and of literary criticism, the narrative of progress based on bridges, tunnels, sewers, railways, gas lines, electrification, and so on almost immediately came to seem naı¨ve and misguided.1

INTRODUCTION Dams were once symbols of modernity for “emerging” countries, the material manifestation of progress and the technological achievement that best expressed the power of the nation. In the opening quote, Bruce Robbins points to a shift occurring across the globe in the perception of such infrastructures. Once celebratory totems raised by engineers hired by the state to glorify the nation, the status of Turkish dams has moved from shining icons of progress to contested infrastructures wreaking havoc and destruction. These engineering projects no longer easily take part in the utopian fantasies of nation state building.2 Attempts are still made to celebrate them of course, and they are still inaugurated festively now and then, sometimes even placed on commemorative stamps. But the heart is no longer

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there. Once proud providers of water and electricity to all, dams today have become questioned, challenged and disputed across Turkey. Since its inception in 1923, the Turkish state has built more than 800 dams within its borders to regulate floods, provide water and produce electricity. Signs of their time, these “marvels of infrastructural engineering,” I argue, serve as remarkable chronological markers of Turkey’s recent political, economic and cultural history. The “turning point” from celebrated to contested is difficult to isolate precisely. And this is not this chapter’s aim. Rather, I simply narrate how Turkish dams, these immobile and silent infrastructures, have witnessed the demise of an empire, helped to build a nation, and fought in the Cold War.3 Here, I can only start to trace the change in Turkish public opinion of these technological masterpieces from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. What can be ascertained now is that, at the start of the twenty-first century, these same dams are being perceived very differently, and opposed vehemently across the nation. This is precisely the focus of this chapter’s second part: the section ‘Contested Infrastructures’ brings the reader to Eastern Turkey’s district of Tunceli, known as Dersim4 by Turkey’s Kurdish Alevi minority, and to a particularly disputed set of dams built (or planned) in the Munzur Vadisi Milli Parkı (Munzur Valley National Park). In essence, this other half of the chapter presents some of the results of my ethnographic fieldwork in the region.5 It describes the (failed) transformation of a social space through Turkish neo-liberal policies, recent state institutional involvement and military intervention, as well as massive infrastructural development. It also focuses on environmental protests against the intrusion of Hydro-Electric Power Plants (hereafter HEPP) financed by the state and built by private firms under neo-liberal arrangements. This anti-dam activism in Dersim, I then conclude, reveals more than a fight to protect nature however, going beyond the shift, in this particular contested landscape, from “Red” (leftist) to “Green” (environmentalist) political activism, and testifying instead to a larger discontent of citizens across Turkey against state-imposed and profit-driven engineering projects of a neo-liberal nature.

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SHINING ICONS OF PROGRESS

Dams as Signs of their Time in Turkey In Science and Technology Studies, infrastructures are noted for their lack of visibility, including small things like pipes and wires, larger engineering feats such as roads and bridges, as well as more abstract techniques like computer protocols. All these remain largely unnoticed in our everyday lives. Pipes in a city are laid underground out of people’s sight; wires of a computer are hidden behind its outer case; and rail tracks that enable trains to move are rarely the subject of travelers’ conversation. Unless it is broken, one also rarely thinks about the plumbing that brings water to homes. Hence, while infrastructures enable people, objects, resources and information to transit, they remain largely concealed, unnoticed and taken for granted. Small or large, abstract or concrete, oftentimes immobile and invisible, the pipes, wires, roads, bridges and protocols work so that other human activities can be performed. As a part of the urban background, infrastructures only become visible during moments of crisis.6 Unlike other types of infrastructures, dams are too large to be concealed. These towering walls of stone or concrete are difficult to ignore in the natural landscape. On maps the stretched-out arms of their water reservoirs resemble the younger siblings of seas and lakes. Dams are not buried underground like pipes nor are they as discreet as wires. But more visible than other infrastructures, dams are nevertheless removed. Most often, as a large part of the rural infrastructure that caters to the needs of cities, dams are away from the urban gaze. Dams provide water and produce electricity while simultaneously, silently perhaps but not innocuously, disturbing the countryside, nature and its wildlife, rural and nomadic lifestyles. Most of the time quiet and serene, dams and their associated reservoirs begin to make a loud growling public noise, in the process transforming themselves into contested infrastructures, when they spark social or political problems that humans have to deal with. A total of eight dams were built outside I˙stanbul between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to provide water for the city, including the Sultan Mahmut Dam in 1839, hidden today amongst

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the trees of the Belgrade Forest. Removed from the center and thus less visible, this dam nevertheless exhibits the style and design characteristic of the time. The shape of Sultan Mahmut Dam itself resembles other masonry gravity arched dams built contemporaneously in Western Europe. A room built like a shrine inside its walls around the water valve serves both a technical and aesthetic purpose. Roman columns, tulip-shaped gargoyles, and an oval shaped medallion with a radiating sun also adorn the dam’s exterior. The assorted mix of Baroque, Rococo, Neo-Classical and Empire style is typical of Ottoman architecture during this period of Westernization. Like many other monuments in the city built during the nineteenth century, European architectural forms and designs reveal the larger social and economic changes witnessed throughout the empire.7 The Sultan Mahmut Dam was constructed to reinforce the already existing Taksim water conveyance system serving the growing ˘ lu. Westernized, non-Muslim, upper-class population of Beyog As the rest of the city lagged behind in the nineteenth century, this neighborhood, where banks and foreign embassies bordered the mansions of wealthy families, had access to electricity, telephone ˘lu is also home to the world’s second lines and a tram system. Beyog ¨ nel), built in 1875. Scrutinizing infrastrucunderground subway (Tu tural development alerts us to the profound social inequalities embedded in the urban fabric. I am not ascertaining here a one-toone correlation between wealth or class and access to public amenities, but infrastructures do force us to ask, who benefits the most from them? Who is included and excluded from the water and electricity grids? How are cities and countries imagined and what social, historical, economic, as well as technological factors determine privileges?8 Again while one part of I˙stanbul profited from all sorts of public works to develop a modern lifestyle, other parts would have to wait their turn to benefit fully from modernity’s advantages. A more thorough historical study of infrastructures in I˙stanbul would indeed reveal that entrance into modernity does happen at disparate speed. Like archaeological artifacts, dams are signs of their time. Not only do they constitute interesting chronological markers, they are also indicative of larger processes like the structures built around Ottoman

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I˙stanbul that follow the empire’s social and economic transformation. Dams seen as materialized forms of ideology narrate the stories of empires and nations, which, over the centuries, have been built both ideologically, and just as significantly, materially. “Bridges, factories, radio networks, and railways”, Brian Larkin writing about Nigeria explains, “are as much objects of fantasy and imagination as are forms of fashion, literature, and film. [Their] building . . . is nothing if not an aesthetic form that tells us as much about the melodrama of Nigerian politics as it does about production and economics. All over the world, highway projects, corporate headquarters, and the laying of fiber optic cable networks occupy that messy conceptual boundary where the economic and rational meet the symbolic and fantastic.”9 Public works are entangled in a larger web composed of politics and technology, nature and science, institutions and people; a complex network of human and nonhuman actors which disentangled can tell us about the dreams and fears of states, the fulfilled and failed promises of governments, as well as the more personal hopes and fantasies of individuals. Indeed, the core of nation-building projects consists, more often than not, in the building of infrastructural projects. This has been the case for the Turkish Republic that emerged after the demise of the Ottoman Empire. The C ¸ ubuk-1 Dam, for instance, constructed just 12 kilometers north of Ankara between 1930 and 1936 under the supervision of Tahsin Ibrahim, a graduate of I˙stanbul’s School of Engineering, Walther Kunze and Heiden Berger ¨ syo ¨ Sapot” of France, expresses the of Germany, and a certain “Mo Turkish state’s new faith in engineering and progress.10 While the original plan called for a stone-fill construction, the more ¨ syo ¨ conventional method used in the old capital city I˙stanbul, “Mo Sapot” eventually convinced the other three men that concrete would avoid the high cost of transporting rocks from a quarry. At the time, it was also thought that this newer and supposedly more advanced technique would make for an overall better dam. Concrete was eventually chosen as the building material and imported by railway from Germany. Importing it from northern Europe, however, made the dam’s overall price much higher and, in the end, more expensive than using stones from a local quarry. Despite its high

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price, C ¸ ubuk-1 in Ankara became the first concrete dam in Turkey, a building material that, at least visually, was more progressive than the old stones of defunct Ottoman I˙stanbul. Built to control floods and provide drinking water to the city, C ¸ ubuk-1 and its concrete made a larger statement, a fashion statement one might say, that followed global trends. Concrete, when manufactured locally, is in fact a cheaper material than stone and had replaced it for the construction of dams across the world. In the 1930s, it also seemed a better match for Ankara’s new image. Infrastructures, Susan Leigh Star explains, are materialized forms of ideology inscribed within particular master narratives.11 Choosing concrete both followed a global technological trend and affirmed Ankara’s new status proving, no matter the cost, that the city was modern enough to be a capital on the one side, and that it could gradually destabilize the dominance in the national imaginary of old imperial I˙stanbul on the other. Thus, technologically at least, Ankara also rivaled other European cities. The dam and its reservoir came with newly created republican spaces of a shoreline, beaches and green picnic areas. As such, it helped the Turkish state bring a recreational space to the step(pe)s of the city. With its own “Bosphorus,” as some called it, Ankara could now compete with I˙stanbul in engineering achievements as well as natural attractions and leisure activities. Aslıhan Demirtas¸ describes how this double point of reference – (republican) Ankara surpassing (Ottoman) I˙stanbul while constantly making reference to it – characterizes Turkey’s newly found identity. Embarking upon the road to progress, the C ¸ ubuk-1 Dam was celebrated as a technological achievement opening wide open modernity’s gates and permitting new Ankara to outdo old I˙stanbul . . . without ever being able to completely free itself from it.12

Hydro-Power If C ¸ ubuk-1 in Ankara, and other concrete dams elsewhere in Turkey, began providing water for cities in western Anatolia during the first half of the twentieth century, large dams designed to meet the country’s rising energy needs would only be built after World War II. Hydroelectricity in Turkey was first produced at Tarsus as early as 1902 and other small Hydro-Electric Power Plants (HEPP) would later

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be tested in I˙stanbul and other large cities. At the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, however, electricity was only available in a very limited number of large cities and hydroelectricity only made up 0.3 percent of the 33 MW produced by the 38 electric power stations across the country. An important turning point in energy production can be traced specifically to the year 1956 and the construction of the Sarıyar and Seyhan Dams, the country’s earliest large HEPPs. Thanks to these and other large dams, the part of hydroelectricity would go from 6 percent (30 MW out of 500 MW) of the country’s total installed power in 1953 to 35 percent (478 MW out of 1381 MW) ten years later.13 Often promoted as guarantees of a better future, infrastructures such as dams are full of promises made by states to their citizens. In post-World War II Turkey, the Demokrat Parti (DP), newly founded in 1946 to challenge the rule of the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi or Republican People’s Party (CHP), made hydroelectricity part of its electoral promise. After its historic victory in 1950, which fully launched Turkey’s era of multi-party rule, the building of roads, factories, and dams gave it the image of a party in action working for the good of its people. Geared towards helping landowners, the policies implemented by its leaders Celal Bayar and Adnan Menderes gained wide support from the rural electorate. With the help of foreign credit, investing in public works made the DP popular during its first years of rule, and helped it again in 1954 to win the elections.14 The newly elected government upheld this appearance of a party that cared about its rural constituencies by building, for instance, the Seyhan Dam between 1953 and 1956 just north of Adana in southern Turkey. Designed to control floods and produce electricity, it also served as an electoral platform for the party. The Seyhan Dam is significant in recent Turkish history for another reason. Like the concrete of the earlier C ¸ ubuk-1, the steel for the dam was manufactured in Germany. This time, however, thanks to American subsidies from the Marshall Plan, the material produced from the German mills did prove to be the most affordable option. Furthermore, the dam was designed by an American engineering company based in Athens already involved in construction projects in Greece. One of Turkey’s first World Bank-financed projects, Seyhan

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thus marks the increasing importance of the United States into Turkish economy and society. In addition, and as a revealing side note, the dam was built 20 km from Adana’s Incirlik Base of the US Air Force, another symbol of American involvement in Turkey. Today the Menderes Island, in reality a small peninsula protruding into the reservoir of the Seyhan Dam, is still called “Amerikan Adası,” the island of the Americans, a souvenir of the time when GIs from the Incirlik Air Base would go for a swim during their days off.15 Besides serving as a chronological marker for the era of multi-party rule and the beginning of intense American imperial involvement in Turkey, the project holds another symbolic dimension as its head ¨ leyman engineer was none other than the “King of Dams” himself, Su Demirel, future Prime Minister and ninth President of Turkey. After studying Civil Engineering in I˙stanbul and the United States, Demirel was appointed in 1955, at the age of 31, Director General of the Devlet Su I˙s¸leri or State Hydraulic Works (hereafter DSI˙).16 Obsessed with building major public works, Demirel, during his rule as Prime Minister and President, was involved in the majority of Turkey’s postWorld War II dam constructions. His success in politics was based on ¨ yu ¨ k Tu ¨rkiye” (or Grand Turkey), which placed his vision of a “Bu development and the provision of services on the forefront of any political decisions. ¨ leyman Demirel had dreams of An engineer-turned-politician, Su large infrastructural projects for his “Grand Turkey.” He understood water as a resource to be tamed so that light could rescue Anatolia from obscurity. Infrastructures, as Larkin described above, are the objects of fantasy and imagination occupying the messy conceptual ground where science, economy and nature meet the dreams and hopes of individuals. Born a year after the foundation of the Turkish Republic in a rural and impoverished area of Southwestern Turkey, Demirel traces back to his childhood his dreams of progress and development and his goals to eliminate poverty and darkness. He states in an interview that “[i]n his village, he witnessed draught and villagers organizing communal prayers for rain; he recalled vividly how there was no ¨ y during his childhood and how the villagers electricity in Islamko would watch the lights of the city of Isparta, the provincial capital 20 kilometers away.”17 His vision of building large dams also went back to

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his time as a student in the United States, when sitting on the walls of the Boulder Dam in Nevada, he imagined the day his own country would own such a monumental structure.18 His dream would come true, first with Seyhan, a project for which he was head engineer and, later, during his first term as Prime Minister, with the even greater Keban Dam. The Seyhan Dam inaugurated more World Bank activities in Turkey. In 1967, for instance, the international institution provided Turkey with technical assistance for the reorganization of its electric power industry. Ankara also sought monetary loans from the World Bank, as well as from the United States and the European Economic Community (EEC), as early as 1961 for the construction of the Keban ˘ in Eastern Turkey.19 While the European Dam near the city of Elazıg Investment Bank (the EEC’s loaning institution) funded the building of the infrastructure, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank’s loaning institution) advanced Turkey $25 million for transmission lines sending electricity from Keban to Ankara and I˙stanbul.20 These loans played an important role in the West’s diplomatic strategy in the Middle East during the Cold War years. Through investments in Turkey, a NATO member since 1952, the United States was strengthening its ties with a country bordering the Soviet Union and reinforcing its position against the Communist Bloc. Beginning in the 1950s, large immobile infrastructures seemed to move like concrete pawns across the Cold War chessboard.21

Mega-Dams and the Emergence of Concern over their Impact Sarıyar, Seyhan and other dams built after World War II announced many of Turkey’s impending political, economic and social changes. The postwar enthusiasm for dams would reach its apex with Keban, the largest built in Turkey at the time. Constructed between 1966 and 1975, and thus overlapping with Demirel’s first term as prime minister, Keban not only continued a period of intense investment in dams, but also marked a shift in their scale. The earlier Sarıyar (160 MWh) and Seyhan (54 MWh) were no small matter of course. But the HEPP at Keban, less than 20 years later, with its yearly energy production as high as 1240 MWh, easily

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dwarfed both of them. The 207 m high Keban Dam carried Turkey from the era of high dams (over 15 m) into the era of mega-dams (over 100 m). In his book Silenced Rivers, Patrick McCully explains how the benefits of hydroelectricity have been largely exaggerated over the years while its negative effects on nature and society downplayed.22 A long-time director of the non-governmental organization International Rivers, he argues that no large dam can be built without their negative impact outweighing their positive ones. In Turkey, as the size of dams increased, it also became more and more difficult for people to ignore their unwanted consequences. With a ten-fold increase in physical size and energy production from Seyhan to Keban, it is at this time that dams also began to occupy more room in the country’s consciousness. The Keban Dam was celebrated as an engineering feat, a shining ¨ leyman Demirel, a dream come true. icon of progress and, for Su When news of the dam reached the public, however, a handful of people were more concerned about the region’s threatened cultural heritage. Kemal Kurdas¸, president of Ankara’s Middle East Technical University, and archaeologist Halet C ¸ ambel, met in 1966 to launch the “Committee for the Salvage of Cultural Property in the Keban Dam Area,” which organized a rescue project to study the ancient monuments and archaeological sites threatened by the dam’s rising waters.23 Still, construction continued unabated. After the first surveys in the region, the newspaper Milliyet launched a national fundraiser to collect money for further scientific work. Money donated villagers national of 1968.

by Turkish banks and foreign corporations, as well as and schoolchildren, helped to fully launch the interand multidisciplinary project at Keban during the summer Over a period of eight years, its participants managed to

record and protect some of the pre-history and history of an area now under water. This was the first time in Turkey when researchers came together as a community to respond to the threat of dam construction. If the project’s participants successfully fulfilled their scientific goals, needless to say, they were not what we could call today environmental activists. Behind the fundraiser and rescue project were archaeologists more concerned with ancient sites than with the

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preservation of nature. Their rescue efforts did not jeopardize, or even begin to put into question, the existence of dams itself. If the negative effects of dams do make a first public appearance on this occasion, anti-dam sentiments in Turkey would wait another 30 years to fully materialize.24 Hydroelectricity production remained the Turkish national priority as defined by the state and any negative attitude towards dams was not expressed as such at the time. If anything, this new public awareness represented only a small stain on their large, shiny concrete armors. The Keban Dam paved the way for more constructions on the ¨ rk Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the most renowned being the Atatu Dam built during the 1980s near Adıyaman.25 Infrastructures, and more particularly dams, are often seen as necessary for the economic development of “impoverished” countries. In Turkey, a strong link indeed exists between their construction and the prevailing development ideology. The series of dams built in Southeastern Turkey after Keban is presented as the backbone of a larger plan to “develop” the region and with the intent of the state to solve the country’s “Kurdish Question.” Initiated in 1984, relatively soon after the emergence in Turkey of neo-liberalism in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup,26 the Gu¨neydog˘u Anadolu Projesi or Southeastern Anatolian Project (hereafter GAP) has been contingent upon such infrastructural development in the TigrisEuphrates River basin. Its goals in the underprivileged, mostly Kurdish, provinces of Southeastern Turkey have quickly moved beyond the provision of water and electricity, however, to now include an ambitious remodeling in the region of life itself, be it economic, political, cultural or social. In her ethnographic work in Southeastern Turkey on the GAP, Leila Harris forces us to think beyond the positive or negative impact of dams and development, and consider instead the ways in which infrastructures participate in the different social reconfigurations of this predominantly Kurdish region. Just as importantly, her research also illustrates how not one aspect of this development project has remained unquestioned or unchallenged.27 While dams in Eastern Turkey have been interpreted by some as symbols of a republican attempt to modernize “backward” parts of the country, others have

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perceived them as unnecessary and unwanted interventions by the state into local affairs. This last sentence is precisely the theme of the article’s second part. Thus far, I have illustrated how dams, these shining icons of progress, could signal some of Turkey’s political and economic, as well as social and cultural, changes over the last two centuries. Over the last 20 years or so, however, dams and HEPPs, in and out of Turkey’s southeastern Kurdish provinces, have become questioned and disputed by a wide range of social actors. I now shift to a discussion of the politics of hydropower in one particularly disputed area of Eastern Turkey, known locally as Dersim. I first consider the significance of the Munzur Valley for Alevi Kurds in this region in order to then discuss the specific political effects of dams on this contested geography, and later examine in more details the “Campaign to Save Munzur” led by local activists against these state-imposed and profit-driven infrastructural constructions. CONTESTED INFRASTRUCTURES

The Munzur Valley and Alevi Kurds in Turkey The Munzur River finds its source near the town of Ovacık below the high peaks of the snowcapped Dersim Mountains in Eastern Turkey. ¨ lu ¨ mu ¨ r River near the city of Tunceli and It flows south to join the Pu later meets the Murat River, one of the main branches of the Euphrates River, before reaching the Keban Dam. Hidden among high mountains, the Munzur Valley is composed of deep ravines and narrow gorges. Known for its unique and diverse fauna and flora, it was declared a national park in 1971 and placed under the supervision of Tunceli’s Directorate of Environment and Forest. Over the past 40 years, the Munzur Valley National Park, to say the least, has not been well preserved. Some areas of the park have suffered from environmental degradation due to deliberate forest burning by the Turkish army, while in other parts of the district delineated as a natural reserve, villagers have been forced to resettle in order to rehabilitate this same forest.28 A perfect locale from an engineering perspective, the valley has not been left undamaged by the construction of dams. In 1983,

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almost a decade after the construction of the infrastructure at Keban and just before the start of the conflict between the Turkish army and the Partiya Karkereˆn Kurdistan (Kurdish Worker’s Party, hereafter PKK), Turkey’s DSI˙ included the construction of six dams and eight HEPPs in its master plan for the rivers of the Tunceli District; numbers that have since risen to ten and 16 respectively. Eight of these projects are located on the 85 km-long Munzur River and its tributaries; six of which are within the borders of the national park itself.29 With respect to these large infrastructures, the laws designed to protect the national park have been inefficient or simply ignored. Additionally, a recent 2004 amendment on the regulations for national parks now allows companies to lease for a period of 49 years parcels of such protected zones for their damming and mining projects. As is often the case, these latest legal developments occurred with almost no public debate; the people most concerned having very little say in the future use of their land.30 A large majority in the Munzur Valley is Alevi, a religious minority constituting more than 15 percent of Turkey’s population. These Alevis, on the one side, are related to their (Turkish-speaking) Alevi neighbors across the country through their very Anatolian form of Islam. In the Munzur Valley, a part of the Dersim, most Alevis speak different varieties of a northern Kurdish dialect called Zazaki, however. Alevi Kurds here are therefore, on the other side, related to their Kurdish-speaking neighbors living further south and east through their language. Tuncelililer, as Alevi Kurds from Tunceli are sometimes called, are related, on the first hand, to their Turkish Alevi neighbors through their religion and, on the second hand, to their Kurdish neighbors through their language. On the third hand, however, they are both and neither of these. And as numerous examples across the world have already informed us, three-handed creatures seldom fare well in the purgative projects of ethnic purity adopted by the nation states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By simultaneously belonging to both minorities, Alevi Kurds, in the end, constitute a minority within minorities. Doubly rejected, they occupy the ambiguous place of a very contested identity in modern-day Turkish society.31

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And for every contested identity, there exists a contested space. For the Alevi Kurds, the Munzur Valley occupies a large parcel of this disputed terrain. Difficult to access, it has sheltered over the years a population subsisting on animal herding and low-scale farming. Mostly rural, the largest city in the valley, Tunceli (formerly known as Dersim), has a population of only 32,000 today. Alevi Kurds consider much of the tangible and intangible natural and cultural heritage of the Munzur Valley sacred. In fact, nature and culture seem to intermingle to the point of being indiscernible as trees, caves, rivers, springs, forests and cliffs, dispersed throughout the valley, act like small natural sanctuaries. During the Ottoman period, tribes in the Dersim did not feel the need to pay taxes nor to provide soldiers to the army.32 Subsequently, at the birth of the Turkish Republic, the region remained more or less autonomous from the centralized government. In the 1930s, attempts by Ankara to reinforce its authority in the region brought some tribal leaders to resist and protest. These resistance movements were given a violent blow by the Turkish military in 1937 and 1938. Commonly referred to as the “Dersim Rebellion,” a phrase implying a pro-state historiographical bias, these events are commemorated locally as massacres, and interpreted by a few scholars as ethnic cleansing, mass extermination or attempted genocide.33 The city of Dersim, renamed at this point in time Tunceli, subsequently became a hotbed for anti-government sympathizers; its mountains and valleys serving as a refuge for contested social identities and political ideologies in Turkey. Over the last decades, many Tuncelililer have in fact comprised the core of the Turkish Left and, until very recently, the TKP-ML (Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Turkey) had more influence in the Dersim than any Kurdish nationalist movement or groups like the PKK. Scattered around the landscape are the traces of this continuous struggle between local politicized Alevi Kurds and the Turkish state. Unlike everywhere else in Anatolia, the flags, quotes, statues and other icons of Turkish nationalism act more like reminders of the failed attempts by the state to assimilate Dersim into the larger nation. Never entirely normalized in the minds of local people, the military presence in and near the city constitutes perhaps the most

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striking characteristic of this contested space. For instance, soldiers at checkpoints control every important crossroad in the district, including the entrance of the Munzur Valley itself. In the last couple of years, these military barriers have somewhat faded away if not entirely disappeared, making room for more disguised stations built atop the region’s high summits, and thus commanding highly strategic views of the surrounding valleys. With the assistance of helicopters roaming loudly above people’s heads, this allows the army to not only “mark its territory” but also “keep an eye” on the population. These attempts by the military to control the flow of people in and out of the region take part in the larger efforts by the state to mark its presence in a disputed zone that has witnessed since the mid-1980s the undeclared civil war between the Turkish army, on the one side, and the PKK and other armed leftist organizations on the other. Now spanning more than three decades, the conflict reached a peak of violence in the Tunceli district during the years 1993 and 1994. At that time, the army in its fight against “terror” systematically burned villages and deliberately displaced villagers suspected of collaborating with the “terrorists.” More than 15,000 villagers were displaced, causing a drastic decrease in the population, so much that today the number of people living in the district is half of what it was in the 1970s.34 This forced uprooting and resettling by the military has supplemented the successive waves of past emigration to the metropolitan centers of power in Turkey and Western Europe, creating an even larger urban diaspora of Alevi Kurds in and out of Turkey, and thus simultaneously reinforcing their politicization at the national and international level. The Munzur Valley comprises a small, but nonetheless symbolically significant, part of the larger terrain in this dispute as both sides attempt to infiltrate and establish their sovereignty over the same space. Traces of the resistance against this appropriation of space by republican Turkey and its army are omnipresent in the valley. The traumas associated with the military suppression of 1938, for instance, have materialized as “lieux de me´moire” scattered in the landscape. The caves, “castles,” and other hideouts used by the local resistance at the time are well known by locals today and

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FIGURE 9.1 Munzur River from Halbori Cliffs, “lieux de me´moire” of 1938 massacres. (Photograph taken by author in July 2014.) serve to commemorate the massacres perpetrated. The most famous example is the high cliffs of Halbori, located 20 km away from Tunceli’s center, where, according to witnesses, rebels were cornered by the army and forced to surrender or jump to their death into the Munzur River (see Figure 9.1). A more recent attempt to memorialize these painful events include the “Wall of Dersim 1938,” erected in 2013 by the Tunceli municipality along one of the main thoroughfares of the city, which displays black-and-white images of women and children refugees next to the photographs of the leaders killed during the rebellion. The village of Lirtik, the birthplace of Seyid Riza, executed in 1937, has also in recent years welcomed different ceremonies and tributes in memory of all those lost in the conflict against the army both then and now. ¨ mit U ¨ ngo ˘ur U ¨ r illustrates how In The Making of Modern Turkey, Ug different institutions throughout the twentieth century have helped the Turkish State inscribe its particular vision of modernity into the contested geographies of Eastern Anatolia. 35 Alongside these

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institutions, it is the infrastructures themselves that have been the means by which the state has reinforced its sovereignty in its Kurdish regions. Material constructions have actively participated in Turkey’s bid to connect Dersim to the rest of the country, and consequently to the rest of the “civilized” world. A contested space in contemporary Turkey, the Dersim in general, and the Munzur Valley in particular, have been appropriated and re-appropriated through the building of roads, bridges, dams and other contested infrastructures that reinscribe landscapes into politics. Built or planned, the dams in the Munzur Valley have also been incorporated within these particular discourses of assimilation and resistance. Perceived as more than merely symbols by local Tuncelililer, however, they have become instead the material manifestation of the state and the military in their attempts to appropriate the area, force people out of their homes into cities alongside the earlier village evacuations and submerge both their natural and cultural heritage.

“Damming” the Munzur Valley

Under the supervision of the DSI˙ and financed by various export credit agencies and national banks, private construction companies have been “damming” the rivers of the Dersim for more than 30 years now. But what exactly does it mean to “dam” a river? Rather than examining dams, these immobile engineering feats and taken-forgranted physical infrastructures as nouns, I want to open new avenues of inquiry in the second part of this essay by considering the act of “damming” itself. Instead of thinking about immobile walls of concrete blocking the flows of rivers, this methodological shift to the verb “damming” lets us ask, for instance, who dams? What gets dammed? Who benefits from damming? It introduces a relation between subjects and objects allowing us to scrutinize, beyond the thing itself, those who construct, those who use, and those who are most affected by damming.36 By considering the active process of damming, involving humans, nature and technology, we are brought closer to seeing the “hybrid subjectivities” of these seemingly immovable objects. In other words, infrastructures are transformed into “cyborgs” with a life of their own, and with more often than not unpredictable consequences that often escape human control.37

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The environmental impact of damming has been detailed elsewhere more eloquently.38 Suffice it to say here that “to dam” entails the fragmentation of a riverine ecosystem into two. Firstly, rivers are transformed upstream into lakes that inundate wildlife and forests. Locals in Tunceli have complained, for example, that the Uzuncayır Dam built in 2009 on the Munzur River has submerged a countless number of local plane and poplar trees, some of which were more than one hundred years old. Large water reservoirs also restrict the movement of animals, severely disturbing their migration patterns, and can also become important vectors for diseases. Secondly, dams decrease the quality of downstream river plains that are often home to very diverse ecosystems. Once built, natural flooding disappears as water is diverted from its users further along the river. Biodiversity is drastically reduced and fish habitats are significantly disturbed. The accumulation of silt behind a dam also alters a river’s ecology both up and downstream. In the end, damming deteriorates more than natural landscapes as it also disturbs the delicate balance between humans and animals. Damming not only splits rivers into two; it also divides human lives into a before and after the dam. This before and after, more often than not, materializes into a here and there for the people displaced. Dams across the globe have moved a considerable number of individuals living and working in river valleys while simultaneously disregarding their rights. Water stored behind their walls usually benefits large-scale irrigation farming in the plains and the electricity produced by their HEPPs is transferred to industries in the lowlands or cities located even further away. In Turkey and elsewhere across the world, the victims of dam construction are families usually living on subsistence agriculture and belonging to ethnic or religious minorities with very little political voice.39 In the end, the accounts of dislocation and relocation caused by dams from the shores of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and their tributaries in eastern Turkey to crowded cities in western Turkey and their suburbs augment the larger story of the country’s internally displaced population.40 In his urban ethnography of Johannesburg in South Africa, AbdouMaliq Simone characterizes cities by their “incessantly flexible, mobile, and provisional intersections of residents that operate

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without clearly delineated notions of how the city is to be inhabited and used.”41 Simone extends our understanding of infrastructures from physical objects directly to people’s activities. He adds how the constantly moving flow of human beings who are in relation with one another becomes “a coherent platform for social transaction and livelihood.”42 It is this living social fabric of a city that Simone calls people as infrastructure. Despite being a rural and sparsely populated area, the Munzur Valley nonetheless possesses a similar resilient network of people as infrastructure. Damming not only raises troubling issues for the valley’s ecology but also affects negatively these human intersections and social transactions. Building more dams in the valley would further isolate villages and villagers, disconnecting them from each other as well as from the center of Tunceli and, for instance, from emergency medical services. Activities that have sustained families for years such as animal herding or apiculture would also be rendered obsolete by more constructions. More damming, in the end, means more villagers leaving the valley, more communities broken apart and fewer chances for families displaced during village evictions by the military to return home. If these large infrastructures are so harmful, not just to the natural environment, but to the social fabric of the valley itself, rendering dysfunctional its people as infrastructure, why then are they built in the first place? Damming the valley does not benefit local farmers since agriculture in this mountainous region of Turkey is negligible on the national scale and merely satisfies local needs. When considered as a whole the estimated production of the Munzur dams and HEPPs only constitutes a negligible fraction of the total ¨ rk, or installed power capacity of, for instance, the Keban, the Atatu the yet-to-be-built Ilısu Dams. The sacrifice to nature seems too great for such a small amount of electricity that would only fulfill a minute percentage of the country’s needs. But if the benefits to the local population are inexistent and the energy production is insignificant, the estimated cost of the dams put together, up to two billion dollars, is not.43 Why then “dam” the Munzur Valley? The answer seems straightforward. “Damming,” above everything else, profits financially private construction companies, in this case a consortium of Turkish, American and Austrian firms.

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The failed attempts to build the Konaktepe Dam on the Munzur River will serve here to illustrate the broad network of engineering companies and construction firms that have been working on the rivers of Eastern Turkey with the blessing of various Turkish Ministries and Directorates.44 It demonstrates how Turkish dams and HEPPs privilege above everything else both economic and political interests. Valued at the relatively small sum of $10 million, the design and engineering phase, before the actual construction of the Konaktepe Dam, was undertaken by the project’s principal contractor, Stone & Webster, an American engineering firm owned by the Shaw Group in Massachusetts.45 Once this initial stage completed, Stone & Webster would have entered the project’s building phase estimated at the larger sum of $300 to $400 million. This work would have been shared with the Austrian companies Strabag AG and VA Tech Hydro GmbH (the former responsible for the tunnel and surge chamber and the latter for supplying the hydromechanical and electrical equipment).46 In addition, the Turkish companies Soyak Uluslararası I˙ns¸aat ve Yatırım A.S¸. and ATA I˙ns¸aat Sanayı ve Ticaret A.S¸. would have also participated in this second phase of construction.47 With the help of European and American export credit agencies, it is consortia of private firms like these, both Turkish and foreign, which are behind the damming of rivers all over Turkey. In order to reach agreements, obtain deals and acquire funds to dam the valleys, this network of engineering firms relies on a larger web of public and governmental institutions. Again, the construction of the Konaktepe Dam was included as one of the many projects in a 1998 agreement signed between the United States’ Department of Commerce and Turkey’s Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources. This bilateral pact helped American companies acquire contracts for the building of nine HEPPs in Turkey, while also securing the financing from the Ex-Im (Export-Import) Bank of the United States.48 These types of arrangements, oftentimes involving the ministries and directorates supposedly responsible for preserving the country’s environment, have led many to believe that successive governments in Turkey have simply acted as “clearing houses” for the private sector. Not seeing the benefits of “damming,” many local

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people feel that their rivers are being “sold” to the private sector purely for financial interests. Of course, dams and HEPPs are being built today on practically every river in Turkey unbiased to the fact that these might “belong” to Turks, Kurds, Sunnis, Alevis or others. Considering the particularly contested geography of the Dersim, however, the dams on the Munzur River, without knowing whom they are providing service or inflicting harm to, have become highly discriminatory. Far from benefitting local people, “damming” the Munzur River profits Ankara and a small number of private firms located outside the valley. Consequently, dams have been resisted by Tuncelililer, not only because of the degradation they cause to the environment, but because they embody the new neo-liberal avatars of Dersim’s traditional foes: centralized authority represented here by the DSI˙ and global capital incarnated by a network of foreign and Turkish construction companies. It is to the different acts of resistance undertaken at the local level against the construction of dams for the preservation of nature, as well as against the commodification of rivers undertaken through the government’s neo-liberal policies, that I now turn my attention to in the last part of this chapter.

Saving the Munzur Valley When its supposedly protected status as a national park was not able to “save” the Munzur Valley, local people felt it was their responsibility to do so. Today, none of the dams in the Tunceli District have remained unchallenged. To preserve the unique nature of the valley against the consortium of engineering firms, state institutions and loaning agencies, local Tuncelililer have joined forces with activists worldwide to lead the “Campaign to Save Munzur.” As an example, the point of confluence of the Munzur and ¨ lu ¨ mu ¨ r Rivers near the city of Tunceli, known locally as the Jara Pu Gola C ¸ etu and considered a sacred place by many Alevi Kurds, was first threatened by the Uzuncayır Dam in 2009.49 As water levels began to rise that year, more than 20,000 people gathered in the city center to march against its possible inundation. At the time, construction companies had promised local authorities that the

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FIGURE 9.2 Anti-dam protest march from center of Tunceli to the shores of the Munzur River (photograph taken by author in August 2014). reservoir would be kept low enough to keep the area unharmed. In 2011, however, the Tunceli Municipality and its Barıs¸ ve Demokrasi Partisi50 or Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) mayor were nonetheless sued by Turkey’s DSI˙ and fined 2.2 million liras for having transformed Jara Gola C ¸ etu into a park. Sparked by a recent court decision to demolish it, and the probable rise in water levels, the latest demonstrations organized at Jara Gola C ¸ etu by the “Campaign to Save Munzur” took place in June 2013, not incidentally just as protests in I˙stanbul’s Gezi Parkı began to erupt, both of which were geared against environmental destruction but expressed a deeper social anger and political will. Protests in Tunceli against dams often take the form of collective marches beginning in the city center and ending near the shores of the Munzur River itself, a few kilometers upstream (see Figure 9.2). ¨ z-gu¨r Large crowds gather and chant in unison slogans like Mun-zur O A-ka-cak! (Munzur will flow freely!), as onlookers applaud in approval

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and drivers (despite being jammed in their cars) honk in support. Anger that has accumulated over the years against state-sponsored infrastructural development is voiced here within the confines of the contested space, in a last cathartic attempt to save the valley from its fate. Again, the Jara Gola C ¸ etu, situated at the entrance of Tunceli, was the furthest point affected by the reservoir of the Uzuncayır Dam. Faced with its possible eradication, Tuncelililer also expressed their resentment for the many other plots of lands, roads and paths, trees and homes already inundated. In a way, the park served as a central nerve and as an ultimate advocate against the destruction of both local nature and culture. The Munzur Valley does not have a world famous archaeological site like Hasankeyf to serve as the “spokesperson” of the campaign.51 Instead, activists fighting for the preservation of the valley put forward its natural beauty, the spiritual significance of its rivers, trees, springs and cliffs, as well as the many places of pilgrimage for Alevis like the Jara Gola C ¸ etu. Animated by lawyers, teachers and journalists at the local level, this core receives additional support from environmentalists, academics and members of human-rights associations supporting ˘an similar causes globally, as well as famous musicians like Aynur Dog and Ferhat Tunc who have both sung for the valley.52 In addition, other anti-dam activists in Turkey occupied with their own contested infrastructures at Yusufeli, Hasankeyf and Allianoi have provided their support over the years to the struggle in the Dersim. If the “Campaign to Save Munzur” borrows the methods and discourses of environmentalists across the globe, thus participating in the larger international movement against dams, it is also unique, as Marie Le Ray argues, in the manner by which it calls upon a certain type of “distinct locality” to function.53 For instance, the Munzur Dog˘a ve Ku¨ltu¨r Festivali (Munzur Nature and Culture Festival), held every August since 1999, constitutes an opportunity for activists to assemble, discuss and organize protests against the construction of dams, HEPPs and mines in the Dersim. Besides the well-attended concerts held in Tunceli’s Atatu¨rk Stadyumu (renamed for the occasion the less republican-sounding S¸ehir Stadyumu or City Stadium in the festival program), festivities are also held during four days in the district’s largest towns. The festival

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constitutes the ideal occasion for the “Campaign to Save Munzur” to rally people to its cause through roundtables, explain its actions in panels, make its voice heard during marches, as well as share the information it does have about future infrastructural projects to all. Attracting up to 20,000 people each year, the event also coincides with the return home of many emigrants from Western Europe and allows the campaign to gain an international stature. Thanks to the festival and other happenings, the campaign has made an impact across borders, disseminating information about the region’s threatened ecology to the diaspora of Alevi Kurds that over the decades has woven strong political and economic ties across the world. Despite the distance separating them, members of this disjointed community have remained connected to their homeland – the springs, rivers, trees and cliffs of the Munzur Valley often providing the images bonding their different trajectories into one collective soul.54 Many anti-dam activists also manage websites and blogs, own Facebook and Twitter accounts, in order to reach out to this resilient network of residents outside the Munzur Valley, who nonetheless remain concerned about its fate. Closer to home, other actions are taken by the campaign throughout the Tunceli District, away from the city center and deeper in the valleys, sometimes next to the dams and HEPPs themselves, in order to inform local people about diverse environmental threats. These panels and workshops also allow activists to remain connected at the grassroots level. In this manner, the campaign can more easily track down future projects hitherto undisclosed and ensure that villagers in the valley do not accept deals with public or private representatives promising to deliver them cennet (paradise) if they sell their lands for the construction of these infrastructures. When marches, workshops, websites and other peaceful means to raise awareness and disseminate information remain unsuccessful, other strategies are adopted in an effort to stop the proliferation of unwanted dams in the region. One tactic has been to camp near the river as soon as construction work on a dam begins. Later, in an attempt to slow down the progress of workers, activists stand as a group in front of their drilling machines. As activists put their bodies on the line against dams, the state gendarmerie and private

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security companies try to stop these forms of civil disobedience; some confrontations leading to violent clashes where gunshots are exchanged and some occasionally wounded.55 Another tactic has been employed more recently against dams and HEPPs in the Dersim by members of the Tu¨rkiye I˙s¸ci Ko¨ylu¨ Kurtulus¸ Ordusu (the Liberation Army of Turkey’s Workers and Villagers), the guerilla arm of the TKP-ML better known as TIKKO. Over the past years, the partisans of this armed group have carried out “operations” at the Dinar HEPP in 2012 and Mercan Dam in 2014, placed bombs inside the control room of other HEPPs, and intimidated engineers and guards on-site, threatening to kill them if they continued working there. Using more or less peaceful means, located in or out of the Dersim, belonging to the “Campaign to Save Munzur” itself or to armed groups like TIKKO, all of these anti-dam activists remain vigilant and more than ever organized in their efforts to stop unwanted infrastructural projects too often started without the prior notice of the DSI˙, the Directorate of Forest and Environment, or the construction firms themselves. As a contested space in the political landscape of the Republic, the damming of the Munzur River has given the valley an additional dimension in the larger struggle of Alevi Kurds in contemporary Turkey. By actively resisting the construction of dams, members of the “Campaign to Save Munzur” are fighting against what they see as an encroachment of the state into their lands and into their lives. First instigated by citizens concerned about the valley’s ecology, the campaign has grown to express a broader discontent of citizens in the ineffective management of the country’s rivers by the state and the relentless march of destruction brought forth by top-down neo-liberal projects, infrastructural and other, imposed by its successive governments. What might seem at times like a desperate struggle against the inevitable, the campaign has nonetheless been successful in slowing down the tide of construction in the valley. After a lawsuit filed at Turkey’s Council of State by the lawyer Barıs¸ Yıldırım, the Konaktepe Dam, discussed earlier to illustrate the network of construction firms behind the “damming” of rivers in Eastern Turkey, was eventually canceled in October 2010.56 The latest judicial victory dates to

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November 2014 when the decision to effectively stop all ongoing constructions within the borders of the national park was taken. This is no small feat indeed and brings encouragement and hope to activists continuing the battle as new and supposedly more environmentally friendly dams are being prepared to replace the abandoned ones that lacked the appropriate Environmental Impact Statements. Finally, besides succeeding in halting the building of these particularly contested infrastructures, the recurring acts of resistance and ongoing legal battles against dams instigated by the “Campaign to Save Munzur” have raised awareness about their destructive effects across the country and encouraged a greater appreciation of natural and sacred places about to be submerged. CONCLUSION In his ethnographic work on India, Anand describes how “(f)ederal, state and municipal governments have identified infrastructure to be a critical area of state intervention, and have been busy unrolling ambitious plans to construct highways, piped water networks and electricity plants in an effort to make Indian cities (and the nation) ‘world class’”.57 As promises made to its people, governments understand the importance of building, and just as crucially maintaining, infrastructures. It is therefore no accident that election campaigns in Turkey are filled with promises of roads, bridges, metro lines and dams: each election cycle surpassing the previous one in terms of infrastructural promises. For instance, highways, airports and bridges are built in I˙stanbul to transform the city into a cosmopolitan metropolis that will attract more and more foreign investments. A priority for states and municipalities, public works are also at the core of Hedef 2023, ˘an’s vision for the Republic’s centennial anniversary, President Erdog which, according to the official website of his Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi or Justice and Development Party (JDP), aims to develop wind, geothermal and nuclear energy, build railways, highways and highspeed trains, design satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as possess one of the world’s largest seaports. Infrastructure, after all, is what makes a city, as well as a country, “world class.”

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Opposed to this never-ending gluttony for infrastructural “development” and an insatiable appetite for monumental construction projects in Turkey, campaigns like the one in Munzur illustrate how people across the country are expressing their dissatisfaction in what successive waves of governments have called “progress.” No longer part of the utopian dreams of nations, and associated instead with the broken hopes of displaced people and the destruction of ecological habitats, dams and other such mega-infrastructures are now being incessantly questioned, disputed and opposed. Alevi Kurds have adopted the avatar of environmentalism in their efforts to protect their nature and their culture in the Munzur Valley, shifting ever so slightly the traditional leftist discourses of the Dersim from a socialist struggle against capitalism, imperialism and the state, to an ecological battle, oftentimes against the same foes, for the preservation of nature: in other words, a move for many Tuncelililer from “Red” to “Green” political activism. The negative reaction to dams, however, underlines more than just a post-Cold War dissatisfaction in the building of contested infrastructures and destruction of natural habitats, highlighting in addition the manner in which citizens, with the escalation of identity politics in Turkey, have started to challenge top-down state projects by voicing their concerns and engaging in resistance in and out of the contested spaces themselves. Elsewhere in the country, other political actors like the anti-dam activists in Munzur have taken up different social causes under different names. What unites them, however, is surely to be found in the commonly shared discontent of neo-liberal practices and top-down decisions taken by the successive waves of governments in Ankara in the name of its people, which over the past decades have materialized as contested infrastructures inside Turkish cities as well as across the Anatolian landscape. NOTES 1. Bruce Robbins, “The Smell of Infrastructure: Notes toward an Archive”, in Boundary 2 34:1 (2007): 26. 2. Nina Laurie, “Dams”, in Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture, edited by Stephan Harrison, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2004, 157–9).

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3. This first part thus summarizes, in essence, a larger project examining the social history of dams in Turkey, which uses an understudied archive composed of files from Ankara’s Devlet Su I˙s¸leri or State Hydraulic Works (DSI˙), documents from the World Bank, Turkish and foreign newspaper articles, as well as oral histories of engineers, politicians and the local people most affected by their constructions. 4. Dersim corresponds to a zone a little bit larger than the modern district of Tunceli, comprising areas populated by Alevi Kurds within the districts of ˘. ¨ l, Erzincan and Elazıg Tunceli, Bingo 5. Information used to write the second part of this chapter was gathered very differently from the archival focus of part one. Leaving behind bureaucratic files and other greyish literature, I have over the last ten years visited Dersim repeatedly, following local lawyers, teachers and municipality representatives during the “Campaign to Save Munzur,” visiting the proposed sites of the future dams themselves and recording, up and down the region’s valleys and all around its reservoirs, countless stories about dams. 6. On infrastructures’ supposed invisibility, see Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”, in American Behavioral Scientist 43:3 (1999): 380; Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, “Steps toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces”, in Information Systems Research 7:1 (1996): 111–34; Geoffrey C. Bowker, Karen Baker, Florence Millerand and David Ribes, “Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment”, in International Handbook of Internet Research, eds Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup and Matthew Allen (Dordrecht, Germany: Springer, 2010), 97– 118; Robbins, “Smell of Infrastructure”, 33. For a differing point of view, see the excellent article by Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure”, Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–43. ¨ kru ¨ So ¨ nmezer, “Comments on the Influence of the Western 7. S¸ u Architectural Styles on the Ottoman Water Structures: Case Study Sultan Mahmud II Dam”, in Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Architecture and Urban Design, 19–21 April 2012 (Tirana, Albania: EPOKA University, Department of Architecture, 2012, 947–58). Also located in the Belgrade Forest, the Valide Sultan and Topuzlu Dams were built by Krikor Balyan, a member of the Armenian family of architects responsible for, among many other monuments, the Dolmabahce Palace and the spread of this particularly eclectic architectural style in Ottoman Istanbul. On Ottoman architecture in nineteenth-century Istanbul, see Zeynep C ¸ elik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century, Publications on the Near East, University of Washington Number 2 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986). On the particular influence of Armenian architects, see Hasan Kuruyazıcı, ed., Armenian Architects of Istanbul in the Era of Westernization (Istanbul: International Hrant Dink Foundation Publications, 2010).

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8. For a discussion of these questions, see for instance Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). 9. Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, 251). 10. Fatma Aslıhan Demirtas¸, “Artificial Nature: Water Infrastructure and its Experience as Natural Space” (MS thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000, 33 –42). 11. Star, “Ethnography of Infrastructure”, 385. 12. Demirtas¸, “Artificial Nature”, 38 –41. 13. Zehra Yumurtacı and Ercan Asmaz, “Electric Energy Demand of Turkey for the Year 2050”, in Energy Sources 26 (2004): 1157– 8, accessed 17 February 2014, doi: 10.1080/00908310490441520. 14. Feroz Ahmad, The Turkish Experiment in Democracy: 1950 –1975, The Royal Institute of International Affairs (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1977, 49); Feroz Ahmad, “Politics and Political Parties in Republican Turkey”, in The Cambridge History of Turkey Vol. 4: Turkey in the Modern World, ed. Res¸at Kasaba (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 236). 15. If the US no longer builds dams at home, it exports its expertise abroad, once with the help of the World Bank and now with other loaning institutions. Ties established during the Marshall Plan between Turkey and the American government, private companies, and banks, are still resilient as the dams later in this essay illustrate. For a discussion of the ¨ lme, Incirlik air base’s key role in Turkish-US relations, see Selin M. Bo “The Politics of Incirlik Air Base”, in Insight Turkey 9:3 (2007): 82 – 91. See also Gingeras in this volume for another US-Turkey relations story during the Cold War. 16. Created in 1953, the DSI˙, modeled on the United States Bureau of Reclamation, is the government agency responsible for the oversight and administration of Turkey’s water resources in relation to energy, agriculture, services and the environment. ¨ leyman Demirel: National Will and Beyond”, in Political 17. Yes¸im Arat, “Su Leaders and Democracy in Turkey, eds Metin Heper and Sabri Sayarı (London: I.B.Tauris, 2002, 88). ¨ leyman Demirel and Aslıhan Demirtas¸, “Su ¨ leyman Demirel ile 18. Su ¨ portaj, Interview with Su ¨ leyman Demirel”, Modern Essays 5 Graft Ro SALT Research, accessed on 17 February 2014, http://saltonline.org/ en/623/modern-essays-5/. 19. Finished in 1974, the rising waters of the Keban Dam reservoir materialized ¨ cek; it the “invisible line” mentioned in this volume’s introduction by Go ˘ to the south, separated Turkish, Sunni, “modern” and “developed” Elazıg and Kurdish, Alevi, “rebellious” and “backward” Dersim to the north. 20. Documents concerning the Keban Transmission Line Projects (Appraisal of the Keban Transmission Line Project Turkey and the Report and

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21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey Recommendation of the President to the Executive Directors on a Proposed Loan to the Republic of Turkey for the Keban Transmission Line Project both dated to October 1968) are available on the World Bank Group’s website, accessed on 17 February 2014, http://www.worldbank.org. For another similar Cold War story, namely the Aswan High Dam constructed on the Nile River in Egypt between 1960 and 1970, see Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams: Enlarged and Updated Edition (London: Zed Books, 2001, 238–9); Hussein M. Fahim, Dams, People, and Development: The Aswan High Dam Case (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981). For the earlier Aswan Low Dam built in 1902, see Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 34 –6). McCully, Silenced Rivers. Cevat Erder, “Lessons in Archaeological and Monument Salvage The Keban Experience”, Monumentum 17 (1978). See McCully, Silenced Rivers, 281–311 and Nina Laurie, “Dams”, 157–9 for the emergence of anti-dam activism across the world beginning in the 1980s. For a broader discussion of environmental activism in Turkey beginning in the 1990s, see Fikret Adaman and Murat Arsel, eds, Environmentalism in Turkey: Between Democracy and Development (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Construction after Keban continued first on the Euphrates River with, ¨ rk and Birecik dams, and later on the among others, the Karakaya, Atatu Tigris River with the very contested Ilisu Dam. John F. Kolars and William A. Mitchell, The Euphrates River and the Southeast Anatolia Development Project (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). ¨ cek in this volume’s introduction. See Go Leila Harris, “Modernizing the Nation: Postcolonialism, Postdevelopment, and Ambivalent Spaces of Difference in Southeastern Turkey”, in Geoforum 39 (2008): 1698–1708; “Irrigation, Gender, and Social Geographies of the Changing Waterscape in Southeastern Anatolia”, in Environment and Planning: Society and Space 24:2 (2006): 194. On the ambiguity of the term “Euphrates-Tigris Basin”, see Leila Harris and Samer Alatout, “Negotiating Scales, Forging States: Comparison of the Upper Tigris/Euphrates and Jordan River Basins”, in Political Geography 29 (2010): 151. For the connection between the Turkish state’s war with the PKK and the function of the GAP, see also Aksoy in this volume. Hugo de Vos, Joost Jongerden and Jacob van Etten, “Images of War: Using Satellite Images for Human Rights Monitoring in Turkish Kurdistan,” Disasters 32:3 (2008), 449266; Martin van Bruinessen, “Forced Evacua¨ l, tions and Destruction of Villages in Dersim (Tunceli), and Western Bingo Turkish Kurdistan September –November 1994”, in Report by Stichting Nederland-Koerdistan (1995): 15 –6. As of August 2015, out of the 26 projects in the Tunceli district, four dams and two HEPPs have already been built while the rest are either under construction or in the planning stage. On the Munzur River itself, three

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31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

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projects out of eight (the Uzuncayır Dam in 2009, the Mercan HEPP in 2003 and the Dinar HEPP in 2010) have already been put in operation. The other five have either been canceled (the Bozkaya Dam and Konaktepe Dam and HEPP as I explain later) or are about to be (the Akyayik and Kaletepe Dams) because of their location within the Munzur Valley National Park itself. The status of these dams, however, is constantly changing. As such, the Munzur Valley constitutes another case-study of the dynamic relationship between state, society, and the environment in Turkey, as illustrated elsewhere in this volume by Soylu, Akbulut and Adaman. On the contested identity of Alevi Kurds in contemporary Turkey, see Martin van Bruinessen, “‘Aslını inkar eden haramzadedir!’ The Debate on the Ethnic identity of the Kurdish Alevis”, in Working paper, Centre for the Study of Asia and the Middle East, Deakin University, Malvern, Victoria (Australia) (1997); “Kurds, Turks and the Alevi revival”, in Middle East Reports 200 (1996): 7–10; and Leyla Neyzi, “Embodied Elders: Space and Subjectivity in the Music of Metin-Kemal Kahraman”, in Middle Eastern Studies 38:1 (2002): 89 –109. van Bruinessen, “Forced Evacuations in Dersim”, 13. For more details on the “rebellion” in Dersim, see the pioneering work by Ismail Beşikci, Tunceli Kanunu (1935) ve Dersim Jenosidi (Istanbul: Belge Yayınları, 1990), which describes the suppression as an attempted genocide; and Martin van Bruinessen, “Genocide in Kurdistan? The Suppression of the Dersim Rebellion in Turkey (1937 – 38) and the Chemical War against the Iraqi Kurds (1988)”, in Conceptual and Historical Dimensions of Genocide, ed. George J. Andreopoulos (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1994). van Bruinessen, “Forced Evacuations in Dersim”, 15. ¨ mit U ¨ ngo ˘ur U ¨ r, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Ug Anatolia, 1913– 1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). See also ¨ ksel in this volume. Yu On infrastructures as a relation, see Star, “Ethnography of Infrastructure”, 380, and Star and Ruhleder, “Ecology of Infrastructure.” Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”, in Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65 –107; Constance Penley, Andrew Ross and Donna Haraway, “Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway”, in Social Text 25/26 (1990): 8 –23. McCully, Silenced Rivers, 29–64. Cheril Payer, The World Bank: A Critical Analysis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982, 250–1). van Bruinessen, “Forced Evacuations in Dersim”, 35; Bilgin Ayata and Deniz ¨ kseker, “A Belated Awakening: National and International Responses Yu to the Internal Displacement of Kurds in Turkey”, New Perspectives on Turkey 32 (2005): 5–42.

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41. AbdouMaliq Simone, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg”, Public Culture 16:3 (2004): 407. 42. Ibid., 410. See also AbdouMaliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 43. Marie Le Ray, “Associations de Pays et Production de Locality: La ‘Campagne Munzur’ contre les Barrages”, in European Journal of Turkish Studies, thematic issue n82, Hometown Organisations in Turkey (2005): 41, accessed on 15 January 2014, url: http://ejts.revues.org/370. 44. The entire Konaktepe facility would have included a 100 meter-high dam, a 15 kilometer long tunnel and a powerhouse with two Francis turbines generating a total of 180 MW of electricity. I explain later in the essay how, after multiple protests and a lawsuit, its construction was stopped. 45. According to their website, Stone & Webster was involved in instaling the first transmission line across the Bosphorus in 1965. Over the last 30 years, it has undertaken at least 30 projects in Turkey. According to the European Rivers Network (http://www.rivernet.org/ accessed on 15 January 2014), the company has also recently obtained the authorization to mine uranium in the region. ¨ rk, 46. VA Tech Hydro GmbH’s work in eastern Turkey also includes the Atatu Birecik and Ilisu Dams. 47. ATA Holdings has been blamed for taking shortcuts to save money in the ¨ rk Dam. Maggie Ronayne, The Cultural construction of the earlier Atatu and Environmental Impact of Large Dams in Southeast Turkey (London: KHRP and National University of Ireland, Galway, 2005, 48). 48. The Export-Import Bank of the United States is a government export credit agency that provides loans and insurances to US companies in order to help them export their goods and services abroad. According to its website, its stated goal is to create jobs at home by financing US companies working outside of the country. 49. Ferit Demir, “Alevilerin kutsal mekanı icin yıkım kararı,” Hu¨rriyet, 22 June 2013, accessed 15 January 2014, url: http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/ gundem/23558067.asp. 50. For a discussion of the successive Kurdish political parties in Turkey, including the BDP, see Nicole Watts, Activists in Office: Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010). 51. For a discussion of the politics of the historic site of Hasankeyf and its many medieval monuments threatened by the construction of the Ilisu Dam, see Aksoy in this volume, as well as Maggie Ronayne “Archaeology against Cultural Destruction: The Case of the Ilisu Dam in the Kurdish Region of Turkey”, in Public Archaeology 5 (2006): 223 – 36; Daniel Shoup “Can Archaeology Build a Dam? Sites and Politics in Turkey’s Southeast Anatolia Project”, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 19:2 (2006): 231 – 58. 52. See Aksoy in this volume for a longer discussion of Turkish and Kurdish musicians taking up the cause of environmentalism and Kurdish rights.

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53. Le Ray, “Associations de Pays,” 2 –4. 54. On the Alevi diaspora, see Elise Massicard, “Alevist Movements at Home and Abroad: Mobilization Spaces and Disjunction”, in New Perspectives on Turkey 28 –9 (2003): 163–87; Neyzi, “Embodied Elders.” See Jean-Francois Pe´rouse, “Phe´nome`ne Migratoire, Formation et Diffe´renciation des Associations de Hems¸ehri a` Istanbul: Chronologies et Ge´ographies Croise´es”, in European Journal of Turkish Studies, thematic issue n82, Hometown Organizations in Turkey 2 (2005) (English translation available on Jean-Francois Pe´rouse’s academia.edu website) for a discussion of hems¸ehri dernekleri or hometown associations in Istanbul, through which Alevi Kurds and others actively maintain social links after migrating. 55. This extreme form of police brutality constitutes another grim example of ¨ cek refers to in this volume’s introduction as the dark side of what Go Turkish neo-liberalism. 56. Designed soon after the DSI˙’s master plan in 1983, the project at the time did not require any environmental impact statement. The license later awarded to the engineering firms by the country’s Energy Market Regulatory Authority was withdrawn on the count that environmental degradation had not sufficiently been taken into account. 57. Nikhil Anand, Johnathan Bach, Julia Elyachar and Daniel Mains, “Infrastructure: Commentary from Nikhil Anand, Johnathan Bach, Julia Elyachar and Daniel Mains”, Curated Collections, Cultural Anthropology Online, 26 November 2012, accessed 15 January 2014, url: http://www. culanth.org/curated_collections/11-infrastructure/discussions/6-infras tructure-commentary-from-nikhil-anand-johnathan-bach-julia-elyacharand-daniel-mains.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Adaman, Fikret and Murat Arsel, eds, Environmentalism in Turkey: Between democracy and development (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Ahmad, Feroz. The Turkish Experiment in Democracy: 1950 – 1975, The Royal Institute of International Affairs (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1977). ——— “Politics and Political Parties in Republican Turkey”, in The Cambridge History of Turkey Vol. 4: Turkey in the Modern World, edited by Res¸at Kasaba (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 226–65). Anand, Nikhil, Johnathan Bach, Julia Elyachar and Daniel Mains, “Infrastructure: Commentary from Nikhil Anand, Johnathan Bach, Julia Elyachar, and Daniel Mains”, Curated Collections, Cultural Anthropology Online, 26 November 2012, accessed 15 January 2014, url: http://www.culanth. org/curated_collections/11-infrastructure/discussions/6-infrastructurecommentary-from-nikhil-anand-johnathan-bach-julia-elyachar-anddaniel-mains.

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¨ leyman Demirel: National Will and Beyond”, in Political Arat, Yes¸im, “Su Leaders and Democracy in Turkey, edited by Metin Heper and Sabri Sayarı (London: I.B.Tauris, 2002, 87– 105). ¨ kseker. “A Belated Awakening: National and Ayata, Bilgin and Deniz Yu International Responses to the Internal Displacement of Kurds in Turkey”, in New Perspectives on Turkey 32 (2005): 5–42. Beşikci, Ismail, Tunceli Kanunu (1935) ve Dersim Jenosidi (Istanbul: Belge Yayınları, 1990). ¨ lme, Selin M., “The Politics of Incirlik Air Base”, in Insight Turkey 9:3 (2007): Bo 82–91. Bowker, Geoffrey C., Karen Baker, Florence Millerand and David Ribes, “Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment”, in International Handbook of Internet Research, edited by Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup and Matthew Allen (Dordrecht, Germany: Springer, 2010, 97 –117). C ¸ elik, Zeynep, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century, Publications on the Near East, University of Washington Number 2 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986). Demir, Ferit, “Alevilerin kutsal mekanı icin yıkım kararı”, Hu¨rriyet, 22 June 2013. Accessed 15 January 2014, url: http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/ gundem/23558067.asp. ¨ leyman and Aslıhan Demirtas¸, “Su ¨ leyman Demirel ile Roportaj, Demirel, Su ¨ leyman Demirel”, in Modern Essays 5 Graft SALT Interview with Su Research. Accessed on 17 February 2014. http://saltonline.org/en/623/ modern-essays-5/. Demirtas¸, Fatma Aslıhan, “Artificial Nature: Water Infrastructure and its Experience as Natural Space”, MS thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000. De Vos, Hugo, Joost Jongerden and Jacob van Etten, “Images of War: Using Satellite Images for Human Rights Monitoring in Turkish Kurdistan”, in Disasters 32:3 (2008). Erder, Cevat, “Lessons in Archaeological and Monument Salvage The Keban Experience”, in Monumentum 17 (1978): 3– 24. Fahim, Hussein M., Dams, People, and Development: The Aswan High Dam Case (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981). Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Haraway, Donna, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”, Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65–107. ——— Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, “Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway”, Social Text 25/26 (1990): 8–23. Harris, Leila, “Irrigation, Gender, and Social Geographies of the Changing Waterscape in Southeastern Anatolia”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24:2 (2006): 187– 213.

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Harris, Leila, “Modernizing the Nation: Postcolonialism, Postdevelopment, and Ambivalent Spaces of Difference in Southeastern Turkey”, in Geoforum 39 (2008): 1698–1708. Harris, Leila, and Samer Alatout, “Negotiating Scales, Forging States: Comparison of the Upper Tigris/Euphrates and Jordan River Basins”, in Political Geography 29 (2010): 148–56. Kolars, John F., and William A. Mitchell, The Euphrates River and the Southeast Anatolia Development Project (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). Kuruyazıcı, Hasan, ed., Armenian Architects of Istanbul in the Era of Westernization (Istanbul: International Hrant Dink Foundation Publications, 2010). Larkin, Brian, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). ——— “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure”, in Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–43. Laurie, Nina. “Dams”, in Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture, edited by Stephan Harrison, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2004, 157–9). Le Ray, Marie, “Associations de Pays et Production de Locality: La ‘Campagne Munzur’ contre les Barrages”, in European Journal of Turkish Studies, thematic issue n82, Hometown Organizations in Turkey (2005). Accessed on 15 January 2014, url: http://ejts.revues.org/370. Massicard, Elise, “Alevist Movements at Home and Abroad: Mobilization Spaces and Disjunction”, in New Perspectives on Turkey 28–9 (2003): 163–87. McCully, Patrick, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams: Enlarged and Updated Edition (London: Zed Books, 2001). Mitchell, Timothy, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Neyzi, Leylal, “Embodied Elders: Space and Subjectivity in the Music of MetinKemal Kahraman”, in Middle Eastern Studies 38:1 (2002): 89–109. Payer, Cheril, The World Bank: A Critical Analysis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982). Pe´rouse, Jean-Francois, “Phe´nome`ne Migratoire, Formation et Diffe´renciation des Associations de Hems¸ehri a` Istanbul: Chronologies et Ge´ographies Croise´es”, in European Journal of Turkish Studies, thematic issue n82, Hometown Organisations in Turkey 2 (2005). Robbins, Bruce, “The Smell of Infrastructure: Notes toward an Archive”, in Boundary 2 34:1 (2007): 25– 33. Ronayne, Maggie, The Cultural and Environmental Impact of Large Dams in Southeast Turkey (London: KHRP and National University of Ireland, Galway, 2005). Ronayne, Maggie, “Archaeology against Cultural Destruction: The Case of the Ilisu Dam in the Kurdish Region of Turkey”, Public Archaeology 5 (2006): 223–36.

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Shoup, Daniel, “Can Archaeology Build a Dam? Sites and Politics in Turkey’s Southeast Anatolia Project”, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 19:2 (2006): 231–58. Simone, AbdouMaliq, For the City Yet to Come (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). Simone, AbdouMaliq, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg”, Public Culture 16:3 (2004): 407–29. ¨ nmezer, S¸u ¨ kru ¨ , “Comments on the Influence of the Western Architectural So Styles on the Ottoman Water Structures: Case Study Sultan Mahmud II Dam”, in Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Architecture and Urban Design, 19 – 21 April 2012, 947 – 58 (Tirana, Albania: EPOKA University, Department of Architecture, 2012). Star, Susan Leigh, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”, American Behavioral Scientist 43:3 (1999): 377–91. ——— and Karen Ruhleder, “Steps toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces”, in Information Systems Research 7:1 (1996): 111–34. ¨ ngo ¨ mit, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern ˘ur U ¨ r, Ug U Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). van Bruinessen, Martin, “Genocide in Kurdistan? The Suppression of the Dersim Rebellion in Turkey (1937–38) and the Chemical War against the Iraqi Kurds (1988)”, in Conceptual and Historical Dimensions of Genocide, edited by George J. Andreopoulos (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1994, 141–70). van Bruinessen, Martin, “Forced Evacuations and Destruction of Villages in ¨ l, Turkish Kurdistan September– Dersim (Tunceli), and Western Bingo November 1994”, in Report by Stichting Nederland – Koerdistan (1995): 1–61. van Bruinessen, Martin, “Kurds, Turks and the Alevi Revival”, Middle East Reports 200 (1996): 7 –10. van Bruinessen, Martin, “‘Aslını inkar eden haramzadedir!’ The Debate on the Ethnic identity of the Kurdish Alevis”, Working paper, Centre for the Study of Asia and the Middle East, Deakin University, Malvern, Victoria, Australia (1997). Watts, Nicole, Activists in Office: Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010). World Bank, Appraisal of the Keban Transmission Line Project Turkey, Website of the World Bank Group, accessed on 17 February 2014, http://www. worldbank.org. October 1968. World Bank, Report and Recommendation of the President to the Executive Directors on a Proposed Loan to the Republic of Turkey for the Keban Transmission Line Project. Website of the World Bank Group, accessed on 17 February 2014, http://www.worldbank.org. October 1968. Yumurtacı, Zehra, and Ercan Asmaz, “Electric Energy Demand of Turkey for the Year 2050”, Energy Sources 26 (2004): 1157–64. Accessed 17 February 2014. doi: 10.1080/00908310490441520.

PART III

Market

CHAPTER 10

Irregular Migration and Negotiated Urban Space in Kumkapı, I˙ stanbul Kristen Biehl

As it has been already for centuries, today too I˙stanbul’s historical peninsula remains at the heart of immense and highly diverse flows. Cruising along just a few of the tram stations cutting across the center of the peninsula provides a sufficient taster. Arriving at the BeyazıtGrand Bazaar tram station, you will have left behind most of the hundreds of thousands of tourists from all corners of the world ¨ nu ¨ flocking the wondrous palace, mosques and bazaars of the Emino and Sultanahmet districts. On a weekday and around rush hour, many of the men you see getting off here and turning rightwards onto the hills of Gedikpas¸a are likely to be working within the hundreds of small garment and apparel workshops hidden within the many buildings in the area, which become audible on the streets through the cacophony of sewing machines and hammers moulding ¨ niversite, Turkish and foreign shoes. Go one station further to Laleli-U students will cross to the right of the Ordu Avenue, rushing off to class at I˙stanbul’s oldest University, dating back to the fifteenth century, while eager traders from Euroasia, the Middle East and Africa will cross to the left, venturing into the wholesale retail district of Laleli where the breadth and colors of product displays and advertisements exhaust the eyes both horizontally and vertically.

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Go one station further to Aksaray laying at the juncture with the ¨ rk boulevard, many commuters and travelers densely trafficked Atatu will hop on or off the tram, as this is where two of the main transport arteries of this mega city of over 15 million lay: the Aksaray metro station and the recently opened Yenikapı Marmaray station, which is the first underground transport system to connect the European and Asian continents, contentiously built over the remains of the Byzantine Theodosius harbor. Here you might also notice many Arabic-speaking tourists walking in the direction of the Aksaray metro station, surrounded by more and more kebab restaurants, where nargile (water pipe) cafes and site-seeing agencies catering to their tastes and needs have been emerging. Nestled within this intense commotion and facing the Marmara Sea, where dozens of freighter ships wait docked for their turn to pass the narrow straights of the Bosphorus onwards to the Black Sea, lies the neighborhood of Kumkapı.1 When speaking of Kumkapı today, it is likely that most I˙stanbulites and tourists alike will think of the historic seafood restaurant area located down the hill of Gedikpas¸a and behind the Kumkapı train station, where dozens of restaurants, some as old as 80 years, line a small circular plaza with a fountain in its center and six radiating streets. Walk just a little further past the plaza with the sea to your back and you will see a large, elegant fourstorey white stone building to your left. When looking up at the building, you will notice that the delicately wrought black iron bars covering the windows are also fenced in the back. And you are likely to also see hanging laundry, or men clinging to the fences in an effort to catch some fresh air or a glimpse of street life. This is I˙stanbul’s detention and removal center for “illegal migrants”. It is at this juxtaposition of the tourist restaurants and the foreigner detention center where the residential part of Kumkapı begins, ending with the large void left by the two lane Gazi Mustafa Kemal Pas¸a Street. This area stands out today as one of the leading hubs for I˙stanbul’s growing “irregular migrant”2 population. Driven by both its successful economic growth and its position as a crossing point between Europe and Asia, in the last decade I˙stanbul has become a top regional hotspot for irregular migrant populations coming for the purpose of labor, protection and/or transit.3 Parallel to

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MAP 10.1 Map of I˙stanbul’s historical peninsula and district areas. Map data q Google. this, in recent years there has been growing research interest in qualitatively documenting the experiences of different irregular migrant populations in I˙stanbul.4 Most such studies though explore the matter from the perspective of different irregular migrant groups, while questions regarding the urban spatial dimension, such as how hubs of irregular migration emerge in the city and how their diverse residents experience them, remain unanswered.5 This essay aims to close this gap by presenting the issue of irregular migration in I˙stanbul through the lens of a neighborhood, Kumkapı, where such migrations are making a marked impact. In the first section I explore the recent history of the neighborhood from the 1950s onwards to understand the factors leading to this development. In the second section, I draw on interviews and ethnographic data to examine the different sentiments and experiences associated with living in Kumkapı, not only for irregular migrants themselves but also the “native” inhabitants, many of whom also have recent migrant origins.

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I conclude with some thoughts on how to understand contestation in spaces like Kumkapı that are deeply impacted by migration-linked processes of diversification and informality.6 THE EMERGENCE OF AN IRREGULAR MIGRANT HUB IN I˙STANBUL’S HISTORICAL PENINSULA For several centuries Kumkapı remained a residential, religious and educational center of the Greek and Armenian citizens of the Ottoman state, then the Turkish Republic. Following the 1950s, however, the demographic profile and spatial function of Kumkapı began changing quite substantially, as this was the period that marked the onset of two distinct migration movements from and to I˙stanbul. The first wave constituted the emigration of large segments of the Christian and Jewish minority populations of I˙stanbul in the face of persistently exclusionary republican state policies and nationalistic public hostility, such as the I˙stanbul pogrom of 6 – 7 September 1955. 7 The accompanying wave comprised rural immigration to I˙stanbul due to the decline in agriculture and rise of import-substituting industrialization. Hence as minority populations steadily emigrated, their neighborhoods throughout I˙stanbul began transforming into points of arrival and initial settlement for internal migrants.8 In Kumkapı more specifically, such movements at the time were also sparked by rapid commercialization of the surrounding area: following the mid-1960s Gedikpas¸a rapidly emerged as a central node of small-scale shoe manufacturers and traders,9 while automotive-related galleries, spare-part and repair shops opened up across Laleli.10 Hence for incoming internal migrants, who were initially mostly male and single, commercialization in the area was attractive, implying availability and proximity of jobs. While for the remaining settled residents, the area began suffering from declassement11 due to creeping commercialization and the growing prevalence of strangers within spaces once dominated by families. To this day, both housing availability and proximity of economic opportunities have remained important pull factors for the continuous flows of internal migrant arrivals in Kumkapı, which have though changed in terms regional origin, ethnic composition, migration

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motive and local reception, in parallel with changes in larger patterns of internal migrations to I˙stanbul.12 In recent decades, Kumkapı has also become a significant destination for international migrants. The radical transformation in neighboring Laleli from the late 1970s onwards in the face of successive new economic opportunities is very likely to have set the initial trigger for the arrival of foreigners, whether as tourists, traders, customers or migrants, in the surrounding area. The first opportunity was shaped around Arab tourists and traders coming to I˙stanbul from the newly oil-rich countries of the Middle East. Then following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Laleli became the leading market place for “suitcase trade.” This entailed the unregistered and unregulated cross-border trade carried out by small-scale traders from FSU, women primarily, who traveled regularly to Turkey to purchase moderate quantities of consumer goods, garments and leatherwear at lower prices.13 As an outcome, most buildings in Laleli became converted into malls, with lessaccessible top floors serving as either storage places, manufacturing workshops or residences mostly for the single men working in the district.14 Side businesses also continued to expand, such as hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, travel agencies and cargo shipping services for traders. In the meantime, the customer profile has greatly diversified from the previous predominance of Russians, to include many countries in the Caucuses and Central Asia, and, increasingly, Africa. Moreover, an ever escalating number of foreigners are integrated into the Laleli economy and its manufacturing counterparts in Gedikpas¸a and Beyazıt not just as traders, but in a plethora of informal job opportunities from being a menial worker to transnational broker. Hence it is no coincidence that the international migrant population residing in Kumkapı is highly similar to the customer and employee profile of these neighboring districts. Yet there are also many living in Kumkapı and working in places far and beyond, which points to a distinctive feature of this locality related to housing. Within the city master plans and the historical peninsula conservation plans, Kumkapı area has been planned both as a meskun alan (area of settlement) and sit alanı (protected area). As a consequence, unless one is able to utilize strong political ties or pay

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substantial bribes, it remains very difficult to obtain necessary building and business permits for medium-sized hotels or retail stores like entrepreneurs have done in Laleli, or boutique hotels in the Kadırga and Sultan Ahmet neighborhoods near by. But to state that Kumkapı remains merely a residential space would be a misconception. In the recent decade in particular, given the increasing arrival of foreign migrant populations in Kumkapı, housing has become highly commercialized and adapted to the conditions and needs of migrant populations. With increasing demand, an ever-growing number of both landlords and tenants have started the practice of letting and sub-letting rooms in their own households, and even sheds in basements or rooftops. Some are going as far as renovating entire buildings for these purposes into all-inclusive studio flats or dormitory-like structures with separate rooms and shared kitchen/ bathroom facilities. There are several aspects of the Kumkapı economy that serve as factors drawing irregular migrant populations to the area. Firstly, as mentioned the neighborhood is centrally located vis-a`-vis the vibrant employment hubs nearby. Secondly, Kumkapı itself offers unique businesses that are of interest to migrant populations, whether as recipient or supplier. Because of the density of the resident population and high turnover rate, the number of available super markets, real estate offices and second-hand furniture shops is much higher than what would be expected in an average residential neighborhood of this scale elsewhere in I˙stanbul. Many international migrants have started establishing their own businesses, including the dozens of country and region-specific cargo shipping companies established to serve suitcase traders whose transnational connections serve as a competitive advantage. There are also increasingly more ethnic restaurants and hairdressers, most of which have no signs, are known to and serve primarily members of the co-national/ethnic community. The streets and houses of Kumkapı have also emerged as centers of illegal trades such as human smuggling, drug trading and prostitution. A notable aspect is that most such businesses are characterized by informality, which has a historically rooted prevalence in the larger area. When the informal suitcase trade economy emerged in Laleli in

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the 1990s, Turkish authorities turned a blind eye to such trading as it supplied much-needed foreign currency to the national economy and formed a significant proportion of the country’s total trade exports throughout the 1990s.15 While in the last decade there have been some efforts to formalize the Laleli market, both in terms of registration and taxation, and employment of undocumented foreigners, most practices still remain located within the fuzzy terrain between formal and informal. Business practices in Kumkapı are also characterized by a high degree of informality in two senses: They often provide accessible and proximate informal employment opportunities for undocumented foreigners, and they can also provide informal services not easily/affordably available elsewhere – for example, as in money banking and remittance transfers. The growing housing sector catering to foreigners can also be described as one of informality. Rental contracts with foreign tenants are rarely signed, and even when signed – for instance by some intermediary real estate companies – the legal validity is suspect, and often mainly serves to protect the landlords. Moreover, most irregular migrants are also not interested in signing contracts, fearing there might be unknown consequences due to their legal status. SENSING AND EXPERIENCING KUMKAPI TODAY As an outcome of these decades-long overlapping processes of migration and urban change, today Kumkapı stands out as one of the most diverse residential neighborhoods of I˙stanbul in terms of both population composition and settlement patterns. Its “native” population – meaning those who are territorially rooted in and are citizens of the Turkish state, though not necessarily on equal grounds – include a small number of ethnic Greek, Armenian and Assyrian Christian minorities, most of whom have migrant origins coming in recent decades from the eastern provinces of Turkey, and ethnic Turks who originated from migration to the area between the 1960s and 1970s during the peak of rural-to-urban migrations from Black Sea and Central Anatolian provinces. What is notable is that though these older groups are increasingly less present in terms of actual residence, they still maintain a presence in the form of property and

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business ownership. As more recent arrivals during the 1990s, it is ethnic Kurds, and less so ethnic Arabs, originating from South Eastern provinces of Turkey that form the largest native population. The increasing numbers of international migrant groups arriving in Kumkapı, also since the 1990s, have greatly intensified this alreadyexisting local context of diversity, coming from a range of countries anywhere between Moldova to Uzbekistan in Eurasia, Somalia to Nigeria in Africa and Syria to Sri Lanka in the Middle East and Asia. Besides ethnic, national and religious background, both the native and foreigner population are also differentiated along lines such as migration time, motive and channel, gender, age and family composition, labor opportunities, legal entitlement, ties with place of origin, local reception and the like. Given this context of intense diversity, this section aims to chart some of the prevailing patterns in the sentiments, experiences and practices that inhabitants of Kumkapı associate with the place, mapping out variations in both negative and positive responses and their dependency on their context. Kumkapı is very often associated with a sense of familiarity, which entails both a social and spatial component. Firstly, it is a place where one is certain to encounter familiar people. This can be based on shared ethnicity. For example, given its centuries long historical role as a religious, educational and residential quarter for Armenians, Kumkapı has continued drawing all Armenian migrant arrivals to I˙stanbul, both from different parts of Turkey, and in recent decades from Armenia proper.16 It can also be based on regional affinities. Most of the ethnic-Armenian, ethnic-Kurdish or ethnic-Arab native residents of Kumkapı originate from the Batman, Mardin, Bitlis, Urfa and Diyarbakir provinces, and from particular districts as well, such as Sason in Batman and Mutki in Bitlis. The same applies for the international migrant population sharing nationalities, whether Sri Lankan, Uzbek, Georgian, Somali, Senegalese or the like. For almost every informant I met, regardless of the period they moved to Kumkapı and whether native or foreigner, their main reason for arrival was linked with the fact that they knew someone who was of shared ethnicity, nationality and/or region, and who was a relative, friend and/or acquaintance.

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Among the foreigner population, there are also some who do not have any such ties beforehand but learn that Kumkapı is the place to foster such ties. Ziya first came to I˙stanbul from Georgia some 15 years ago. Her arrival place in I˙stanbul was the office of a Georgian agency she had paid to find her domestic work, located uphill from Kumkapı in Beyazıt. In her first months she lived entirely in the homes of her employers, spending her one day off sitting at the agency, meeting and talking with fellow Georgians. It was through these visits that she learned about the possibilities of room sharing with fellow Georgians in Kumkapı even if for one night. Hasan came from Guinea to I˙stanbul in 2006 as a 17-year-old. His arrival place was the central Taksim district, where has was left by his smuggler and told to approach the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to file a refugee application. Due to his age, he was immediately placed in a staterun shelter for unaccompanied minor asylum seekers in I˙stanbul, located in the Kadikoy district on the Asian side of the city. When he was about to turn 18, however, the shelter staff told him that he would have to find his own housing and advised he visit Kumkapı, where he would find “people of his own kind”, meaning other African nationals. Such affinity can also be associated with channel and motive for migration regardless of ethnic/national background, as it is known as a place harboring particular kinds of foreigners, for example those who are irregular migrants. Altın and her husband moved from Turkmenistan to I˙stanbul six years ago. Initially, they stayed with relatives living in the Zeytinburnu district of I˙stanbul, but then chose to live in Kumkapı following some visits with other relatives living there when they noticed from walking on the streets that “everyone here is a foreigner, everyone here is kac
ak (illegal) so I don’t have to worry about sticking out.” The second dimension is related to a sense of familiarity through space. Many of the different resident populations of Kumkapı have created their own communal spaces. For example, most of the historic Armenian churches are still active, and some have been reappropriated by new residents for separate communal use: In one church the basement has been transformed into an informal school for children of migrants form Armenia, and in another church one

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of the chapels has been allocated for the use of migrants from Ethiopia on Sundays due to differences in preaching ceremonies. It is possible to find different migrant associations in Kumkapı. For internal migrants these are mostly based on shared hometown, and for international migrants on shared country. For the different international migrant populations, the businesses they operate, such as cargo companies, hairdressers and restaurants, also function as community spaces for socializing, and even holding periodic community meetings, also drawing co-nationals living elsewhere in I˙stanbul. Despite this familiarity, Kumkapı is also often associated with a deep sense of transience. For those few who have remained settled here for decades, this transience is about witnessing the constant and increasingly more rapid change of life in the area instigated by migrations. As mentioned in the first section, since the 1950s and 1960s, Kumkapı has been steadily transforming into an arrival neighborhood for migrant groups, therefore as migration patterns to the city have transformed, encompassing internal, and in recent decades international migrants with more varying backgrounds, motives and opportunities, so has the population in Kumkapı. Each epoch, though, has left its imprint, as some migrant arrivals have chosen to settle here rather than moving onwards, or have maintained property and businesses here. For such persons there is a strong sense that even though they remain fixed in Kumkapı, the place is forever in flux. Ali, an ethnic Turk, came to I˙stanbul from the province of Aksaray in during the late 1950s. He has been running the same tailor shop for some 20 years. “This is a place that continually fills and empties,” he explains. Arif, an ethnic Kurd, moved with his entire family from Mardin to Kumkapı in the late 1990s. He says: “Kumkapı is like a transit place. Those who improve their means move onwards.” This is precisely what he and most of his family did, buying homes in the neighboring Zeytinburnu district some years ago, while keeping their real estate business in Kumkapı. Ahmed from Tanzania has been living in Kumkapı for most of the past ten years and describes the place as: “Today you see Mustafa, tomorrow you see Omer. There is a move here everyday” then adding, “but Ahmed is here everyday.” Over the years he made

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several attempts to enter Greece undocumented. When he succeeded in 2010 he found that the situation there for migrants was much worse than Turkey, and returned to I˙stanbul. Soon after he was diagnosed with lung cancer and was able to access free treatment in I˙stanbul through the assistance of some NGOs. The hope of being fully cured is keeping him waiting in Kumkapı, though he is ready to return to his wife and children in Tanzania anytime. For those who have arrived more recently, a sense of transience is more to do with their own individual intentions to eventually move onwards. As mentioned in the previous section, Kumkapı offers several conveniences for migrants, including the presence of coethnic/regional/national networks, the proximity of a plethora of jobs and available housing. But few arrive here with the intent of settling permanently, seeing it rather as a transitional space where these conveniences can be utilized and harnessed as a stepping stone to elsewhere in the city, or abroad. As reflected in Arif’s comment, it is seen as a temporary space to gather the means for making a home, but not the place to make an actual home. Altın and her husband live in a small room, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with four other rooms inhabited by a minimum of two other migrants from different countries. Though they do not enjoy this intimate living arrangement with strangers, renting a single room instead of a flat permits them to save money, which is being invested in the house they are building in Turkmenistan and in the education of their one child who lives with his grandparents. Kumkapı is often also described as a place of opportunity, which is associated both with its thriving business potential and looseness of formal control structures. As mentioned in the first section, Kumkapı’s uniqueness in the area as a space characterized by an increasingly dense, diverse, dynamic and transient residential population has led to a proliferation of business opportunities, including the dozens of internet and international calling centers, real estate offices, laundry services, second-hand furniture shops, ethnic restaurants and hairdressers found on almost every street. Because of this opportunity context, previous residents of Kumkapı who have moved elsewhere often choose to keep their businesses there.

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For instance, both tailor Ali, who makes and sells sponge beds and bedding, and real estate agent Arif, who sublets rooms and flats in the area, recognize that the frequency of new arrivals is what keeps their businesses up and running. The same applies for foreigners. Leyla moved from Armenia to I˙stanbul more than 15 years ago. Like most of her fellow nationals, her arrival point was Kumkapı. In her initial years she tried many different kinds of work, including domestic work, street peddling, suitcase trading. She has long since moved away from Kumkapı, because “it is too crowded, mixed and filthy”, but still spends most her time there for business, as “there is potential here.” The growing residential population of migrants from former Soviet Union countries gave her the idea to run a grocery store selling smuggled food and medicine products from these countries, which is not noticeable from the street, being tucked behind the back of an apartment building. This store also operates as her office where she meets Armenian suitcase traders needing assistance with their shopping in Laleli. Many business owners in Kumkapı recognize that in order to succeed within such a context, one must remain flexible. This speaks particularly to a sense and skill in understanding and accommodating the different cultural repertoires and evolving demands of a rapidly changing and diversifying local population. For example, many local businesses, international calling shops in particular, use multi-lingual signs and hire foreigner migrants as staff. This flexibility also variously materializes in the emergence of “hybrid business practices” (Hall 2014). I have seen one mobile phone and international calling shop that included a retail stall in a corner of the shop for customers who might also be traders, another advertised services for getting residence permits, while another offered money banking and bill payment services for local migrants which the shop owner commented provides them “capital for free.” In visiting a real estate agent office I witnessed the agent assist a Moldovan woman waiting in the office for him to find her a domestic work job. Another Moldovan woman was also seated in the office, but she was waiting for a cargo company nearby to bring her a cheap flight ticket to Moldova. I was then informed how cargo companies working with countries of the former Soviet Union, especially those with which the

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Turkish government applies lax visa policies, offer cheap flights to individuals who need to temporarily return to their countries, for example, to re-issue visas. In return, they take shipments with them as luggage and sometimes bring back smuggled goods like those sold in Leyla’s store. Many cargo companies also offer remittance-sending services much cheaper than channels like Western Union. Indeed, none of these services are official and often become known either through word of mouth or a paper sign posted somewhere in the shop. Besides such street-level businesses, housing has also become a sector offering profitable opportunities. Strolling the streets of Kumkapı, one will encounter countless signposts advertising the availability of rental rooms posted on the windows and walls of all kinds of shops and buildings. This remains an entirely unregulated economy and is increasingly more targeted to Kumkapı’s yabancı (foreigner) population. The amount of rent paid for a single room, usually ranging between 200 – 300 dollars, is highly expensive considering size and conditions, and especially when compared to other localities nearby, or to what older residents pay for an entire flat. Moreover, given constant and growing demand, the average value of room rentals for foreigners continues to rise quite sharply, being also strongly impacted by currency devaluations. Besides property owners, the housing market also offers profits to non-owners through a brokerage system. As mentioned in the previous section, some of the older populations previously residing in Kumkapı (i.e., ethnic Armenians and ethnic Turks) still maintain properties in area. I have encountered several cases of such landlords using the help of local residents to take care of their rental business, on the grounds that the changed profile of tenants, for example, frequency of moving out, and cultural/social stereotypes, make it difficult to collect rent or evict when necessary. For example, the landlord of the building where tailor Ali rents his shop has entrusted him with gathering rent for all flats in the building, because “he did not want to deal with the Dog˘ulu, a Turkish term that literally translates as Easterner and is used in reference to Kurds. Ali adds a little commission for himself. When I commented that this seemed an easy way to make some extra cash, he replied “it is difficult to get money from bachelors”, telling about

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incidents when tenants, Kurdish and foreigner, suddenly disappeared without paying. For this reason, he has himself entrusted another local middleman, of Kurdish origin, to sort out the rental business. As the Kurdish population in Kumkapı is much greater in numbers and better networked, he sees this man as more capable handling such matters. This man also takes a commission for himself. Foreign migrants who have been resident in Kumkapı for some time and have trusting relations with landlords may similarly benefit from this system, as when they pay the rent for the flat and rent out rooms to other conationals, including traders staying only for a short period. In the first section of this chapter it was mentioned that many businesses in Kumkapı run informally. Illegal practices, prostitution of migrants in particular, are also highly visible on the streets. And it is common knowledge that most foreigners living in the area are irregular. Given this context, there is an overarching perception among all residents that Kumkapı is a space where formal mechanisms and even laws can be negotiated and/or fully avoided. Although there might be occasional controls, there is a sense that local authorities and security forces have little power or interest to change this. A teacher appointed to give courses at the municipal education center for children shared his first impression of Kumkapı as: “When I first came here I thought to myself for a few seconds, ‘am I in Africa?’ I knew about other nationalities being here but not the Africans. It’s like a ‘serbest bo¨lge ’ (free zone) here. I hear that the police don’t interfere that much.” This free zone expression succinctly summarizes the feeling felt by many Kumkapı dwellers that this is a place where anything goes and anything can happen, both positive and negative. Besides this legal dimension, flexibility is also associated with an exceptional stretching of societal and cultural norms. This aspect surfaces most poignantly in the sphere of housing, which is being made available for uses and people not as admissible elsewhere in I˙stanbul. As mentioned, Kumkapı has become popular among migrant populations for offering room rentals. The density of this housing type is very high, as several people often share single rooms. The turnover of people is also extremely rapid due to frequent moves of migrant populations both within and beyond Kumkapı.

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Also, different people might use rooms on different days of the week or even different times of the day. There are also significant variations in the way migrants use their housing spaces in terms of sharing practices (e.g., how many people share a single room and how often) and non-residential uses (e.g., rooms serving also as informal restaurants and/or hairdressers). These are aspects that migrants normally struggle to negotiate with landlords in other localities. The housing sector in Kumkapı is also more relaxed in permitting unwanted differences. For example, due to established cultural beliefs in Turkey around protecting family honor and popular cultural prejudices that have been developed one way or another against migrant others, if you are a single male, a foreigner, a female immigrant from a former Soviet Union country (who are often associated with sex work) and/or black, your chances of being offered housing in other districts of I˙stanbul are lower. In Kumkapı, however, such barriers are less and less significant, especially with the growing popularity of room rentals. The posted room advertisements will often specify this availability as “bekara oda” (room for bachelor), “bayana oda” (room for female) and “yabancıya oda” (room for foreigner). While houses are made accessible, surely in Kumkapı, too, these differences are not entirely overlooked. When responding to an add a female migrant may find out that this is an offer to enter into a romantic relation with a local man by sharing his house, while a black migrant might be turned down all together upon face-to-face encounter, or be shown an alternative of lesser quality. Arif describes how Kumkapı has become a place where married Turkish and Kurdish men rent rooms for their foreign mistresses in Kumkapı and adds: “There is flexibility here. This would not be permitted elsewhere.” Filth is a word one will often come across in descriptions of Kumkapı as a place. This can refer to actual physical conditions, such as littered streets and derelict housing, exacerbated by increasing crowdedness. Some will blame this fact to recent migrants who are seen to have a lack of care and investment in place due to their transience. Others, the Kurdish population in particular, will point to the purposeful negligence of the local municipality, which they see as

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a continuation of the state’s policy to exclude and punish them, as experienced in their hometowns in Eastern Turkey. Osman owns a tailor and dry cleaning shop and migrated from Batman to Kumkapı as a child in the late 1990s when the climate of political violence made business impossible for his father. He commented: “Their goal is to make life unlivable for us, and this way push us into migration each time.” These physical aspects of filth are also often intertwined with the social domain. This surfaces generally in comparisons made between descriptions of a past time when there were peaceful and respectful relations between neighbors regardless of religious/ethnic difference, and the present moment of social and moral decay. Mary, a 90-year-old ethnic Armenian who moved to Kumkapı from Gedikpas¸a after marrying a local and has lived on the same street for the past 60 years, commented: “there used to be only families here, there used to be neighborliness and respect, now nobody cares for one another, they use their homes like hotels. My neighbors change so often, I can’t keep track anymore.” As reflected in Mary’s words, the reason for such decay is partly blamed on the growing transience of migrant populations in Kumkapı. She also alludes to the past predominance of families as residents in the area, which contrasts with its current description as a place where mainly bekar (bachelor) people live. In Kumkapı though this term implies more than simply marital status, including all people who are actually married and have children, but remain alone in Kumkapı. It also refers to a certain mindset that this situation creates, as in the active pursuits of native men, regardless of whether their families reside in Kumkapı, to enter into romantic relations with the many bayan (single females) living in the area. Given this context, it is very common to hear comments about how Kumkapı is a place “not appropriate for family” and stories about how previous residents, like Arif and Osman, moved away after getting married. The blame for such changes is almost always placed on migrant “others” arriving in the recent decades. The most common local stereotypes one encounters in the locality are of “the Kurds” who are accused of filth in the form of overcrowded families, crime and tribal relations, the “Russians” with alcohol, promiscuity and prostitution,

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and the “blacks” because of mere color and dwelling practices. Besides putting the blame on such stereotyped cultural, gendered and racial attributes though, many inhabitants also recognize that Kumkapı increasingly draws people of a certain mentality regardless of background, which is attributed to creating an the environment of social filth. Today, Most migrants arrive in Kumkapı with the motive to make the best out of the opportunities and flexibility that the place has to offer. Thus there is a sense that people in Kumkapı are opportunistic. Irregular migrants bear the brunt of this the most, as the space is ripe with economic opportunities that exploit their lack of residence and employment rights, such as employers refusing to pay dues or landlords to return deposits. In such cases, irregular migrants know well that the authorities will not protect them and that they might even risk deportation. In fact the police are seen as being culprits themselves. Altın describes an incident when she and her husband were walking to the Aksaray tram station, got stopped by police and they got asked for residency documents. When they said they didn’t have any, the police put his hands in her husband’s pocket and took all the money he had and told them to walk away. Such acts have created a new opportunity for civilians as well, who pretend to be police to take such bribes.17 Foreigners, especially those who have spent longer time in I˙stanbul, also become integrated into these structures of profiteering and exploitation. Some are relatively more innocent, as in becoming a lead tenant of a large flat and sub-letting to co-nationals with a profit margin, while some are less so, as in roommates stealing and disappearing, or pushing you into the hands of drugs and prostitution rings. Given this context, trust is highly volatile. Altın’s comment summarizes this situation: “Everyone here is after opportunities. You can’t even trust your own kind.” CONCLUDING REMARKS I˙stanbul’s urban morphology and social fabric attest to the fact that migration, whether in terms of those it has taken or those it has brought, and whether forced or voluntary, is imprinted on every aspect of the material, social and cultural landscape of the city.

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While previous decades were characterized mainly by forced expulsions and internal migration to I˙stanbul, in recent decades the city is increasingly emerging as a point of destination and transit for irregular migrants. In the evolving field of international migration research in Turkey, I˙stanbul and its different localities continue to figure merely in the background as hubs for these irregular migrant populations living in or passing through the city. This essay has aimed to explore the urban spatial dimension of these irregular migrations to I˙stanbul, focusing on two questions: how do spaces of irregular migration emerge in the city and how do their diverse residents experience them? In the first section, I traced the geographic and historical context of Kumkapı’s social and spatial transformation to the present day. I showed that migrant settlement, diversity, informal/illegal practices in Kumkapı are not accidental, being variably and uniquely shaped by overlapping histories of migration, economic restructuring and rescaling processes, as well as emergent local practices. In the second section, I described the current diversity of Kumkapı’s population profile as an outcome of this history and reflected on the different sentiments, experiences and practices that Kumkapı dwellers associate with this place. I discussed familiarity, transience, opportunity, flexibility and filth as terms reflecting the different ways that Kumkapı as a place is spoken about today. When these five dimensions are examined together, it appears that migration-linked processes of diversification and informality in Kumkapı have led to the production of a conflicted sense of place. For many inhabitants, regardless of background, it is a place where you can find comfort, security and solidarity with familiar people and spaces even amidst the great diversity. Yet, it is also a place where this familiarity is under constant challenge, either because of the transient intentions of most newcomers, or the distrustful environment created by the fact that many are after improving opportunities. For irregular migrants in particular, it is a liberating space showing remarkable modes of accommodating differences otherwise marginalized, discriminated and controlled in the wider city, which has allowed different ethnic communities a sense of place in the city. The looseness of formal structures has also permitted this diversity to

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thrive economically, by offering Kumkapı inhabitants the freedom to rapidly and flexibly adjust to consumer demands and realize transnational business potentials. Yet it is this same flexibility that has seemingly, and opportunistically, put legal, social and moral norms on hold, permitting exclusion, exploitation and a deep sense of insecurity, even in the purview of the state. While most individuals in Kumkapı carry such internal conflicts about their feelings and attachments to this place for the stated reasons, contestation between residents is in fact often kept to a minimum. Given the extreme diversity of its populace, the multiplicity of ownership claims to place depending on “who came first” and the material and symbolic violence laden within everyday discourse and practice against the ethnicized, gendered and racialized “other”, I have often felt puzzled why active contestation did not surface as a more significant facet of everyday life in Kumkapı. Rather, many residents, native and foreign alike, have explained avoidance as a kind of survival strategy, pointing to a shared interest in maintaining the diversity and informality of this locality and refraining from inter-group conflict for multiple interlinked reasons: for example, Kumkapı offers pockets of familiarity and inclusiveness to all, it is only a temporary and functional space, inhabitants share the motive of wanting to improve livelihoods and need one another for that, some lack any alternatives to move elsewhere, some fear over life and so on. Such avoidance may seem irrelevant in the framework of a book dealing with contested spaces in Turkey. What is significant though is that in spaces like Kumkapı where migration-led processes of diversification and informality are taking rapid pace, it is in the conflicted sense of place that individuals internally harbor that we may also begin discerning the logic of globalization in its hegemonic neo-liberal form. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Cultural Diversity and the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies, who have provided me with valuable financial support to carry out this research.

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NOTES 1. Kumkapı, like its neighboring Laleli and Gedikpas¸a, is a historical district name that is known and used more commonly in place of the official neighborhood names. These districts roughly encompass the following administrative neighborhood units: Kumkapı (Katip Kasim, lower part of Nis¸anca and Muhsine Hatun), Gedikpas¸a (Mimar Hayrettin), Laleli (Mesih Pas¸a, Mimar Kemalettin, upper part of Nis¸anca and Sarac
I˙shak). 2. Fitting with popular and political discourse, Kumkapı residents describe this population by the expression “illegal migrant” (kac
ak go¨c
men in Turkish). In this essay however, I use the term “irregular migrant” for two reasons. The first is to avoid the criminalizing and stigmatizing tendencies associated with the former. Secondly, it speaks better to the reality, which is that most of these migrants are irregular with respect to the entry, residence and/or work regulations under Turkish laws. See Erder and Kas¸ka (2012). For example, many are legal until their visas expire. Some are able to succeed in obtaining residence permits when their visas expire, using different means like claiming Turkish origins, marriage to a Turkish citizen, applying for asylum, amnesties for irregular migrants, etc. But these permits are often only temporary, implying that they fall into the status of being illegal if and until when they are able to reissue their permits and almost none of them are able to obtain work permits, meaning that they must work as a kac
ak irrespective of residential status. 3. See Biehl (2013); I˙c
duygu and Aksel (2012); Pusch (2011). ˘lu (2011); 4. See Akalın (2007); Bloch (2011); Danıs¸ et al. (2009); Dedeog ¨ zdil (2009); Parla (2013); Perouse (2011); ¨ lcur and I˙lkkaracan (2002); O Gu ¨ nal (2011); Yu ˘du and Kas¸ka (2012); U ¨ z, Erdog ¨ kseker Sutter (2013); Tokso ¨ vell and Eerdewijk (2013). and Brewer (2011); Wissink, Du 5. See Biehl (2015). 6. This essay is a product of a larger doctoral research project for which I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Kumkapı over a period of 15 months (from August 2012 to October 2013). ¨ ven (2005). 7. See Gu 8. See Mills (2010); Soytemel (2013). ˘lu (2005). ¨ ftu ¨ og 9. See Mu 10. See Keyder (1999). 11. Ibid. (1999, 176). 12. See Keyder (2005). ¨ z (2010). ¨ kseker (2004); Eder and O 13. See Yu 14. See Keyder (1999, 178). ¨ kseker (2004). 15. See Yu 16. See Tas¸c
ı (2010). 17. The media has reported on many such incidents taking place in the area: ˘atay, “Sahte polisin oyunu uzun su ¨ rmedi”, Hu ¨ rriyet, 2 April 2013. Kenarlı, C ¸ ag

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˘atay, “Sahte polislik yaparken yakalandılar”, Hu ¨ rriyet, 26 July Kenarlı, C ¸ ag ¨ stu ¨ ”, Hu ¨ rriyet, 9 May 2011. 2013. Kıdık, Sefa, “Sahte polislere suc
u

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duygu and K. Kiris¸c
i (I˙stanbul: Bilgi University Publications, 2009). ˘lu, Saniye, “Survival of the Excluded: Azerbaijani Immigrant Women’s Dedeog Survival Strategies and Industrial Work in I˙stanbul”, Migration Letters, 8(1) (2010): 26–33. ¨ zlem O ¨ z, “From cross-border exchange to transnational Eder, Mine and O trading: the case of shuttle traders in Laleli, Istanbul”, in Transnational communities: shaping global economic governance. Edited by M. Djelic and S. Quack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Erder, Sema, and Selmin Kas¸ka, “Turkey in the New Migration Era: Migrants between Regularity and Irregularity”, in Turkey, migration and the EU: Potentials, challenges and opportunities, edited by S. P. Elitok and T. Straubhaar. Edition HWWI, No. 5(2012): 113–32. http://nbn-resolving.de/ urn:nbn:de:gbv:18-3-1187. ¨ lc
u ¨ r, Leyla, and Pınar I˙lkkaracan, “The ‘Natasha’ experience: Migrant sex Gu workers from the former Soviet Union in Turkey”, in Deconstructing Sexuality in the Middle East: Challenges and Discourses. Edited by P. I˙lkkaracan (London: Ashgate Publications, 2002). ¨ ven, Dilek, Cumhuriyet do¨nemi azınlık politikaları ve stratejileri bag˘lamında Gu 6–7 eylu¨l olayları (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 2005). I˙c
duygu, Ahmet, and Kristen Biehl, “The changing trajectory of migration to Turkey”, in Countries of Migrants, Cities of Migrants: Italy, Spain, Turkey, edited by M. Balbo, A. I˙c
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˘lar, “A tale of two neighborhoods”, in I˙stanbul: Between the global Keyder, C ¸ ag and the local. Edited by C ¸ . Keyder (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, 173–87). ——— “Globalization and social exclusion in I˙stanbul”, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(1) (2005): 124–34. Mills, Amy, Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance and National Identity in Istanbul (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010). ¨ retimi (I˙stanbul: ˘lu, Berna G., Fason Ekonomisi: Gedikpas¸a’da Ayakkabı U ¨ ftu ¨ og Mu ˘lam Yayıncılık, 2005). Bag ¨ zdil, Koray, “Creating New Spaces, Claiming Rights: West African O Immigrants in I˙stanbul”, in Public I˙stanbul: Spaces and Spheres of I˙stanbul, edited by Frank Eckardt and Kathrin Wildner (Verlag: Bielefeld, 2008). Parla, Ays¸e, “Undocumented Migrants and the Double Binds of Rights Claims”, in Differences: Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22(1) (2011): 64–89. Pusch, Barbara, “Bordering the EU: Istanbul as a Hotspot for Transnational Migration”, in Turkey, Migration and the EU: Potentials, Challenges and Opportunities, edited by Sec
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CHAPTER 11

Turkey’s Urban Neo-liberalism: The Normalization of Informality during JDP Rule 1 Burak Ko¨se

On 17 December 2013, Turkey woke up to another morning of dawn operations, comprising home and office raids, searches and custodies, that had become routine in the legal and political landscape of the country over the last ten years. What was anomalous this time, however, was that among the people who were the target of allegations and taken into custody were the sons of three ministers of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) government that has been in power since 2002, namely the minister of economy, the minister of environment and urbanism and the minister of internal affairs. The other targeted people included several bureaucrats in these ministries; a number of officials in the Mass Housing Administration (TOKI), a central state institution that is legally responsible for developing social housing projects and that has become the major actor in the land and property markets during JDP rule; the mayor of an JDP-run municipality in I˙stanbul infamous for its urban renewal projects that swept historical buildings and neighborhoods and displaced thousands of people; members of historical and environmental conservation boards in I˙stanbul; and a handful of businessmen, most of whom are owners of large construction companies and

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real estate developers that are known to be “close to the government” and have grown considerably in the last ten years. Shortly, a long list of corruption indictments, including allegations of violation of the zoning code, zoning of urban land under conservation for construction, unlawful provision of building permits, informal relations of interest between bureaucrats, officials and businessmen, and bribery circulated in the media. Other than the sheer amount of money found during the raids and the reach of the network connecting the people taken into custody, what was appalling for the public was that it was the first time that the JDP government was linked to a corruption allegation in such an ˘lu2 discusses at length, in explicit fashion. As Pınar Bedirhanog coming to power, JDP had embraced neo-liberal policies and the neoliberal discourse on corruption, which insisted on market expansion and deregulation as solution to the problem. This was the same discourse that the ex-president of the World Bank and the minister of economy Kemal Dervis¸ from the previous coalition government had drawn upon in introducing the second generation of neo-liberal policies in Turkey after the 2001 financial crisis. In embracing the same discourse, the JDP not only sought international support for its rule and ensured capital inflow,3 but also established a moral basis for itself, through which it could persuasively distinguish itself from the “corrupt” governments, politicians and bureaucrats of the past on the one side and harness domestic popular support for its rule on the other. Throughout its 12-year rule, the JDP, with the help of mainstream media outlets that are under direct government control or in close business connections with the government, had been successful in consolidating its image as an anti-corruption party composed of moral politicians. The corruption allegations, thus, came out in a context in which, despite previous accusations of corruption, the JDP had utilized an anti-corruption stand as an ideological instrument of legitimation.4 For urban specialists, journalists and activists that have been closely observing JDP’s urban policies, legal and planning regulations and development projects, however, the part of corruption allegations related to the construction sector came as no surprise: they had already been witnessing, documenting and publicizing the

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piling up of a great deal of unlawful regulations and practices concerning zoning plans, building codes, construction permits, public-private partnerships, public tenders and the sales of public urban lands in urban transformation or mega projects. In this chapter, based on such observations, I will argue that, rather than viewed as aberrations from the formal framework of urban policy and planning, the corruption allegations should be contextualized within urban neo-liberalism of the last decade in Turkey and the newly emerging forms of informality in this period.5 Hence the intensifying set of relations and practices that are subject to corruption allegations should be considered an essential part of the rule rather than an exception in the neo-liberal restructuring of the urban space in Turkey. CONTEXTUALIZING CORRUPTION At this moment, it is imperative to remember the well-known liberal treatment of corruption as an exceptional situation in a political or economic system that is otherwise supposed to work in a more or less proper, impartial and fair manner. Metaphorically speaking, corruption is viewed as rot in the apple, and it is commonly thought that, when it is removed, the remaining apple will be just as good to eat. Hence, corruption is considered to be an exception to the rule, an unwanted situation in the liberal economic or political system, which, in the absence of such situations, would be working to the benefit of society at large. Parallel to this logic, the neo-liberal discourse defines corruption as a problem that could be resolved through a neo-liberal receipt, that is, market-oriented institutional restructuring. Similar to the liberal logic, neo-liberal discourse views corruption as external to the capitalist system and impeding its regular working, but recognizes it, almost with an instrumental logic, as a problem to be dealt with through neo-liberal interventions. In contextualizing the corruption allegations within the emerging forms of informality in Turkey, I take my cue from Ananya Roy’s recent intervention into the debates on urban informality in the Global South.6 Roy invites us to shift our focus to the workings of state power in the distribution of legitimacy and value in urban space

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that operates through selective practices of deregulation and formalization on the basis of class and other dimensions of social differentiation. Drawing on a number of examples from planning processes, land privatizations, institutional arrangements and legal regulations regarding urban development and transformation, I demonstrate the entanglements of ongoing neo-liberal urban transformations and informality in Turkey. CHANGING BOUNDARIES OF THE FORMAL AND THE INFORMAL In so doing, following Roy, I problematize the well-established association of urban informality with the urban poor groups and settlements.7 There is a rich literature on the practices of the subaltern groups in cities of the Global South that, against all odds, make claims to land, housing and livelihoods in the city through informal practices, relations and networks.8 In that way, they challenge the formal structures of urban law, including, first and foremost, the law of private property, planning and politics. In spite of their laudable cause of asserting the subaltern agency into the accounts of urbanization in the South, following Roy, this scholarship has established a problematic association between informality and the urban poor, reading the former as an ontological or topological characteristic of the latter.9 This not only reproduces the clear-cut distinction made between however, but does so on the basis of informalities or informal practices of In countries like Turkey, informal

the formal and the informal, class, thereby obfuscating elite state officials. land and housing markets and

economic activities have constituted major factors shaping the urban space, social life and political relations, especially the relations between squatter settlements and politicians from all ranks. In such a context, neo-liberalism is often read as a process of formalization, of markets, labor relations, governance mechanisms and the like. ˘lu10 remark, under neo-liberalism, However, as Strutz and C ¸ avus¸og what we are witnessing is a redefinition of the meanings and boundaries of the formal and the informal, rather than a straightforward process of formalization. For example, while squatter settlements are problematized because of their informal status,

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flexible labor and precarious work are facilitated and supported by newly introduced laws and regulations. So, the categories of formal and informal – like lawful and unlawful, legal and illegal, uncorrupt and corrupt – are all culturally and politically constructed and contested, constantly defined and redefined through social and political struggles in specific socio-historical contexts. Moreover, it is in the purview of the state to determine what is lawful, legal and formal, predicated on socio-political conflicts and struggles as well as the dominant political rationality. The distinction between the formal and the informal thus transforms into both an instrument of power and a realm for political struggle. Understanding the relationship between informality and neo-liberalism, therefore, necessitates the analysis of the social, economic and political processes and configurations of this particular period. Rather than pointing to a process of formalization, evidence from several geographical contexts points to diversified, intensified and, at times, gentrified forms of informality, illegality or unlawfulness that supplement neo-liberalism.11 Be it through violation of zoning codes and building permissions by elites,12 formation of exclusively elite spaces of governance,13 or emergent relations between elites or mafia organizations and state actors,14 informality remains a key aspect of urban governance in the Global South. Instead of the much-vaunted withdrawal of the state, neo-liberalism often entails an active involvement of governments in the formation and operation of markets and class rule, generally resulting in even more intricate relationships between the state and capital to the detriment of lower classes. Since space, urban and rural, becomes the target of neo-liberal strategies of capital accumulation through state policies, governments often face the problem of overturning the protective legal, institutional and political configurations of the national developmentalist period, and they do so at an increasing pace required by neo-liberal capitalism in order to ensure capital accumulation. Neo-liberals usually introduce a series of market-oriented legal and institutional transformations unfolding at an unprecedented pace, many of them highly questionable even from a liberal legal perspective, in order to make capital accumulation and circulation smoother, less costly and, importantly, faster. This process is

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facilitated further through shady political and economic relations and transactions. INFORMALITY UNDER URBAN NEO-LIBERALISM IN TURKEY Notwithstanding these remarks, though, it would be misleading to establish a universal form of relationship between neo-liberalism and informality. Rather than a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between neo-liberalism and informality per se, I instead focus on the entanglements of neo-liberalism and informality in the context of the neo-liberal restructuring of urban space in Turkey. According to Roy, informality refers to a “state of deregulation, one where the ownership, use, and purpose of land cannot be fixed and mapped according to any prescribed set of regulations or the law. Indeed, here the law itself is rendered open-ended and subject to multiple interpretations and interests.”15 Following her, I conceptualize urban informality as a “state of deregulation” enacted in and through urban planning and development, institutional restructuring and legal regulations and applications particularly pertaining to the governance of urban land and housing. I argue that informal practices of state actors facilitated through institutional and legal transformations point to the emergence of new forms of informality in the context of urban neo-liberalism in Turkey. It is one where the state takes an active role in creating a deregulated, relaxed and flexible environment for neo-liberal strategies of capital accumulation.

THE CONSTRUCTION AND REAL ESTATE SECTORS As many scholars have noted, the construction and real estate sectors constitute the engine of the JDP’s growth-oriented economic policies.16 Since the early 2000s and especially after the 2008 global economic crisis, the JDP government supported the growth of the construction sector through a number of legal changes or new laws, institutional rearrangements and mega projects that have specifically, though not exclusively, centered on I˙stanbul. During this period, certain public institutions and ministries, such as the Mass Housing Administration (TOKI) and the recently established Ministry of

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Environment and Urbanism, were endowed with massive powers in determining the use, planning and governance of the urban space. At the same time, the existing legal and institutional limitations to and checks and balances on their actions were significantly chopped off, thereby reducing the accountability of their actions. Hence the JDP government has made a consistent effort to clear out all legal and institutional obstacles to urban neo-liberalism. As the construction and real estate sectors became more lucrative, a new faction of large developers emerged as important actors of urban change and development. In fact, the nurturance of this particular group of capitalists that support the JPD government is a crucial component of ITS political strategy to consolidate its hegemony in the country. In other words, the construction and real estate-based economic growth policy was adopted not only as an economic strategy to sustain capital flow in the face of global economic crisis, but also as a political strategy to support and control the growth of a powerful and loyal capitalist class. It is in this context of urban neo-liberalism that new practices and densities of informality have emerged in Turkey. In the remainder of the chapter, I discuss some significant contours of these new modes of informality under the headings of urban planning, institutional restructuring and urban transformation with respect to the legal, institutional and practical transformations shaping urban governance in Turkey. URBAN PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT A fundamental area of urban governance in which state actors’ informal and unlawful practices have by now routinely concentrated is urban planning, and especially drawing and redrawing of zoning ¨ kru ¨ Aslan plans concerning private or privatized urban lands. As S¸u remarks,17 underlying the ideal of modern urbanism is a legal and institutional framework that sets the rules for and regulates the relationships between different social groups and classes with respect to the use of urban space and resources. Consisting of predetermined principles, laws and regulations, this framework legitimates the model of modern urbanism, and forms the basis for urban policies

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that are supposed to serve the public good.18 In theory, the practice of planning both conforms to this regulatory framework and ensures its realization in practice. The concept of the urban “formal,” referring to all the confirming decisions, developments and practices, gains its meaning from this framework. Correspondingly, those that do not are regarded as “informal” and considered to be undesirable for breaking up the formal structure of the city. Accordingly, all decisions, developments and practices in the city that violate the principles and set of rules and regulations are defined as informal or unplanned. As occurrences or formations that violate the formal structure of the city, they are susceptible to problematizations and state interventions. Like many other countries in the Global South, Turkey’s history of urbanization is full of examples of violations of master or zoning plans by national or local authorities for political or economic ends. Indeed, throughout the history of the Turkish Republic many informal developments were selectively formalized as such, through legislation or planning measures. Master plans prepared during the first decades of the Turkish Republic to modernize the country’s major cities were not initially implemented mainly due to lack of resources. From the 1950s on, however, building amnesties and zoning changes formalized developments that violated existing plans. Between the 1950s and 1980s, the main mode of informal development in larger cities of Turkey was the emergence of squatter settlements in conjunction with industrialization on the one side and the lack of affordable housing for rural migrants on the other. However, even though these settlements were entangled with and spread under the gloom of formal structures of governance, they became, in Roy’s words, an “itinerary of recognition”19 for urban informality in Turkey. Until recently, the academic literature on the topic remained focused on the informality of squatter settlements rather than those of state actors or elites. In doing so, the scholarship too, albeit unwittingly, contributed to the reproduction of this itinerary, demonstrating that the definition of the informal is as much an issue of knowledge production as it is a technique of power. Yet, what the association of informality with squatter settlements

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conceals in the neo-liberal era is the proliferation and intensification of a particular practice of state informality, one that has become an important catalyst in the creation of urban rent; that is, the practice of the drawing and redrawing of zoning plans, especially in and through the process of privatization of state-owned lands, in order to provide “privileged rights of construction”20 to real estate developers and construction companies. The creation and the distribution of urban rent has become one of the major objectives and areas of operation for JDP governments and municipalities that have pursued a construction-based economic growth policy since the mid-2000s. During this period, the meaning of “public interest” and function of urban planning have radically changed along with the state’s political and economic choices. In addition to regulating urbanization processes in a rational and legitimate manner, urban planning is in theory a tool of political intervention to be employed in the name of public interest against the exigencies of capitalism.21 Yet, under JDP rule, urban planning has become a crucial instrument for creating and distributing urban rent. Similarly, the state-owned urban lands are supposed be employed in theory in the name of public interest either to control the urban land market against speculative movements or to allocate land for social housing or public facilities and services. The JDP instead privatized such state-owned lands in order to create a lucrative environment to increase construction and the real estate capital of its political allies. Such privatization of urban lands creates “absolute rent” on land; that is, privatization makes it possible for capitalists to earn individual rent from land that would otherwise be put into use for the public communal interest. In addition to absolute rent, as Tayfun Kahraman drawing on Marxist literature discusses at length,22 through changes in zoning plans and construction permits “differential rent” is created; that is, increases to coefficient values when the intensity of construction allowed on land escalate the accruing rent. These changes do indeed violate the principles of planning and rules and regulations set for rational urban development. However, through such changes, the state and government grant formal status to developments on privatized lands.

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FIGURE 11.1 Zincirlikuyu, Bes¸iktas¸, I˙stanbul. Source: I˙mre Azem ¨ ku ¨ s¸u ¨ CC 2015 Kibrit Film). (Lamekan: Metalas¸an Kentin C ¸o Hence, urban planning has deviated greatly from its initial aim to regulate and control market forces on behalf of society at large. Instead, it has been subverted into an instrument of neo-liberal urban policies, accompanied by informalities that are often allowed and legitimated by the state. Indeed, this is not a novel development because in Turkey’s urbanization in the past there are many examples of elite informalities having been formalized through state action. Yet while such instances were considered as exceptions in the past, now they have become routinized and normalized for state officials of all ranks, from municipal officers all the way up to ministers. Through changes in zoning plans and construction permits, areas once delineated for societal health, education, recreation and gathering in the aftermath of disasters are continuously opened up for the construction of shopping malls, office buildings, hotels, residences and high-income housing projects. In addition, historical or green areas under conservation are also opened up for such developments through the same practice. The infamous development projects on the privatized General Directorate of Highways (Karayolları Genel Mu¨du¨rlu¨˘gu¨) land in Bes¸iktas¸, about 50 storeys tall, and the residential development called 16/9 in Zeytinburnu are some of the well-known examples of changing zoning plans and construction permits. Both these developments were made possible through a redefinition of the functions of these areas as residential, commercial or touristic in zoning plans first and later increasing the coefficient values of

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allowed construction in these areas, resulting in highly increased rental returns. Legal cases through which civil society organizations, occupational chambers and local governments try to reject or resist the demands of the new “owners” often lose due to adverse decisions of the national government in general or the recently established Ministry of Environment and Urbanism in particular. In some cases, such protected areas are declared “special project area” or “urban design project area,” thereby providing the developers with “privileged construction rights.” The list of corruption indictments are full of examples of such informal or unlawful practices. Such indictments, however, are only the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of lawsuits pursued by the Chamber of Architects (Mimarlar Odası) and the Chamber of Urban Planners (S¸ehir Plancıları Odası) against such exceptionally common informal practices in larger cities like I˙stanbul and Ankara. Yet, in most cases, de facto developments emerge long before the resolution of lawsuits, rendering the formal legal processes obsolete, or the verdicts are circumvented through minor changes in zoning plans. In addition, on the northern shores of I˙stanbul, comprising forestry zones, wetlands and villages, a whole set of new urban development projects such as the Third Bosphorus Bridge,23 the third metropolitan airport, two new satellite townships and the prime minister’s “crazy project” of Canal I˙stanbul – building a second human-made canal parallel to the Bosphorus – that threaten the ecology of the entire region are planned. These projects are informal developments that violate the 2009 I˙stanbul master plan that not only did not support these developments, but stated that they would be detrimental to both the ecology of the region and the future development of the city. Still, the first two of these projects – the Third Bridge and third airport – are currently in the process of construction, and the manner in which they are carried out also indicate a whole new set of informalities. First off, the plans of these projects are constantly changed and remade without public scrutiny, pointing to a process of what Shubhra Gururani24 terms “flexible planning.” Secondly, the JDP government continuously tries to exempt them from environmental impact assessment by undertaking

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legislative maneuvers; it does so with the intent to preempt future lawsuits. Last but not least, these projects are carried out in spite of ongoing lawsuits, leading to, again, de facto developments, thereby making it harder to reverse the ongoing construction processes. A very recent example of such maneuvering was the acceptance of the zoning plan for the construction of the Third Bridge by I˙stanbul Metropolitan Municipality (I˙stanbul Bu¨yu¨ks¸ehir Belediyesi) after a court decision that cancelled the previous plan made by the Ministry of Urbanism and Environment. The decision came out on the grounds that the ministry did not have the authority to make such a plan that violated the 2009 Master Plan prepared by the municipality. In the meanwhile however, the construction of the bridge was still going on despite the court decision. INSTITUTIONAL RESTRUCTURING In order to further understand the entrenchment of the emerging forms of informality in Turkey, it is necessary to consider the institutional restructurings that have been in place in urban governance since the early 2000s. The JDP undertook a series of legal changes and promulgated new laws to grant extensive authority

FIGURE 11.2 Third Bosphorus Bridge, I˙stanbul. Source: Ali AKSOYER ˘an Haber Ajansı [DHA]). (Dog

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to the Mass Housing Administration (Toplu Konut I˙daresi, hereafter TOKI). TOKI was founded in 1984 as a central agency directly connected to the office of the prime minister to produce social housing nationwide, and with such exceptional power, it quickly turned into the most powerful actor in urban development.25 The early legal changes transferred the authority of the General Directorate of Land Office (Arsa Ofisi Genel Mu¨du¨rlu¨˘gu¨) to TOKI, bringing all state-owned lands under its control. TOKI could also establish companies and form partnerships with private companies and financial corporations and make plans and implement projects in a wide range of lands, from squatter settlements to lands assigned as mass housing areas by governorships. In addition, TOKI could expropriate private lands including all the buildings constructed on them in order to implement mass housing projects. A specific series of laws regarding squatter settlements made TOKI the only authorized agency in transforming these areas. TOKI was now authorized to use or sell all lands that belong to the treasury upon the approval of prime minister; it also controlled land sales by local governments, and approved or rejected zoning plans made or changed by local governments. These legal changes led to the centralization and concentration of authority over urban land in TOKI, created new financial resources for the agency and exempted it from public procurement law and, until very recently, scrutiny from the Court of Accounts (Sayıs¸tay). Through such legal maneuvers, the JDP government ably turned TOKI into an autonomous agency, equipped with extensive authorities and resources in urban development and exempted from formal norms and procedures of urban governance, shaping the restructuring of urban space in a deregulated, relaxed and flexible manner. It is important to note TOKI is no longer geared to develop and produce mass housing projects for the poor only. Instead, the majority of the housing projects TOKI produced targeted upper-middle and middle-class buyers. Civil society organizations and scholars have started to systematically study TOKI’s opaqueness in public tender and project implementation processes. Works by the initiative called Networks of Dispossession (Mu¨ lksu¨ zles¸ tirme Ag˘ları)26 and scholars 27 reveal the close

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relationships established between TOKI and some real estate and construction companies, most of which have grown considerably during JDP rule. A statutory decree enacted by the government in the summer of 2012 further accelerated this debilitating process: most of the authority of local governments and TOKI were now transferred to the newly established Ministry of Urbanism and Environment (C ¸ evre ve S¸ehircilik Bakanlıg˘ı). Among these were the preparation and approval of surveys, maps, plans and projects, expropriation of lands and buildings for such projects and the licensing of construction, building and occupancy permits. Hence the entire formal structure of local governance – and potential opposition – was suspended; instead a central institution was now authorized to act in all mechanisms and processes of urban development. The final blow to any remaining vestiges of accountability came with the disempowerment of autonomous occupational chambers such as the Architectures Chamber (Mimarlar Odası) and the Urban Planners Chamber (S¸ehir Plancıları Odası). This was accomplished through the establishment of the General Directorate of Occupational Services (Mesleki Hizmetler Genel Mu¨du¨rlu¨˘gu¨) within the ministry; this directorate literally took over the responsibilities and authority of the chambers. Most significant among these is the appointment of legal experts to court cases; now the ministry, not these chambers, has the authority to identify and choose legal experts in court cases. Needless to say, such a move further undermines presumed principles of objectivity and impartiality in the enactment of formal legal processes in cases related to urban governance, planning and development. On the whole, then, institutional restructuring during the last decade has defined and gradually collected all power and authority in urban governance in central state institutions; such centralization generated not only flexibility, but also arbitrariness in urban decision-making and practice. URBAN TRANSFORMATION AND LEGAL (RE)CODIFICATION Another increasingly critical area of urban policy in which the new practices and modes of informality are established is “urban

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transformation,” as it is known in the Turkish context. It refers to the urban regeneration or renewal policy of the neo-liberal period. As such it does not only entail the implementation process of urban transformation projects that are permeated with the informal practices of state actors. Rather, the new modes and practices of informality are instead inscribed into the set of laws enfolding the projects of urban transformation. Such urban transformation projects primarily target the inner-city slums in historical areas and squatter settlements in larger cities with I˙stanbul as the primary example. The codification of these often impoverished neighborhoods as informal settlements and especially their legally ambiguous situation have made these spaces vulnerable to state interventions. Implemented by municipalities or through collaborations between local governments and TOKI, the urban transformation projects in particular have mainly functioned as machinations of dispossession, displacement and further impoverishment for the poor that have found shelter and livelihood in these settlements.28 In brief, squatter settlements in Turkey have emerged as a response to a lack of affordable housing for rural migrants that have arrived as a consequence of labor-intensive industrial urbanization in larger cities. Instead of developing a social housing policy for this newly emerging urban working class, the Turkish state and its local governments merely overlooked the development of squatter settlements in stateowned or private urban lands, because these settlements provided a solution to the housing problem and by reducing labor costs, helped actualize industrialization and capital accumulation. As such, the proliferation of squatter settlements transformed into a major policy of urbanization during this period,29 and the state or the local governments, except for a few limited attempts, failed to develop a comprehensive social housing policy.30 Eventually, some of these settlements were formalized through new laws and specific procedures; local government elections provided the incentive for the delivery of infrastructure and urban services. The laws enacted and plans made in the course of the 1960s and 1970s recognized squatter settlements as entities in the city, thereby establishing a causal link between their spatial proliferation and the development of new industrial areas in the larger cities.31 Despite their codification as informal, unregistered and

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unplanned spaces, squatter settlements thus proliferated in this specific socio-historical context under the auspices of the formal; that is, through formal recognition by laws and plans as well as in practice. Together with the first wave of neo-liberal policies in Turkey in the 1980s, a squatter settlement amnesty law, carried out in the spirit of Hernando de Soto’s idea of land-titling in order to open the so-called informal areas to market economy, was enacted in 1984. Not all squatters benefited from the law, however, creating a legal difference between those with documents and those without, and those with titles and those with title assignment documents (tapu tahsis belgesi) that granted their holders not the title of, but the right to remain on the land that they were squatting. Moreover, the law and especially changes in the zoning law allowed construction companies, usually in cooperation with the more powerful local actors (such as earlier arriving migrants) in squatter settlements, to implement construction projects, thereby generating a new form of capital accumulation and a new middle class now benefiting from the newly created urban rent.32 Still, rural-to-urban migration continued in the 1980s and peaked with the forced migration of Kurds by the Turkish state in the 1990s, resulting in the further proliferation of squatter settlements, ones that naturally remained out of the reach of legal regulations of the mid-1980s. Beginning from the early 2000s, squatter settlements, especially the ones that shelter the most impoverished urban populations, have become the target of neo-liberal urban transformation policy and the Turkish state has assumed an active role in its application by undertaking legal changes and the rearrangements. During this process, squatter settlements started to be problematized and stigmatized as informal, unregistered or unplanned spaces, increasingly associated with criminality, illegal activity and even terrorism in official state discourses. What ensued were two legal changes and a new law that formed the legal basis of JDP’s urban transformation policy. First, the “Squatter Settlement Act” (Gecekondu Yasası) and “Municipality Act” (Belediye Yasası) were redrawn. Under the control of TOKI, the metropolitan and district municipalities were granted the responsibility/authority for four significant practices: one, to determine

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squatter areas for upgrading or clearance, two, to demolish houses and expropriate lands categorized as squatter areas that cannot be preserved and upgraded, three, to develop housing projects on such land or lease or sell them with the intent to fund housing projects and, four, to prepare maps and make plans for areas where new housing projects will be implemented. In addition, the newly legislated act for the renewal and upgrading of historical and dilapidated areas also authorized municipalities and TOKI to implement transformation projects in these areas as well. These new legal regulations not only introduced a series of ambiguous terms and definitions in determining what comprised a squatter settlement or a project area or who the partners ought to be in transforming them, but they also granted the municipalities and TOKI extensive powers in implementation, thus opening the gateway for arbitrary decision-making on the one side and selective and uneven application of legal provisions on the other. A legal set of rights and opportunities had been defined for the squatters, but the legal uncertainties and complexities in their tenure combined with legal redefinitions of their status either as “right holders,” referring to those with legally recognized title documents, or as “occupiers” those without documents or whose documents are not legally recognized, or as “tenants”, those residing in spaces owned by right holders or occupiers. Recent research by scholars on the implementation of urban transformation projects in such neighborhoods clearly document this process. The vagueness of terms and procedures combined with the open-endedness in defining who had authority over what. Further complicating matters was the ambiguity in the legal status of such lands. What ensued was a set of informal practices undertaken by state officials; they made ad hoc decisions without following procedures, and without taking into account the circumstances or legal rights of the squatters.33 Indeed, such informal practices enabled the smoother and faster implementation of the project in some cases,34 led to the mushrooming of neo-liberal property markets35 and adversely affected the living conditions of the least powerful inhabitants.36 In addition, since participation in decision-making processes was solely defined in terms of bargaining and agreement with project

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implementers, only the rights of the implementers were recognized at the expense of the inhabitants. This, in and of itself, established a legally recognized informal procedure into the implementation process.37 Lastly, the authority to immediately expropriate properties and the power to change or remake project plans enabled the implementers to take action and ably confront collective struggles undertaken against such projects. Hence legal struggles pursued by professional chambers and neighborhood associations against projects and court decisions cancelling the whole or parts of projects came to naught. Indeed, in the infamous case of the Sulukule neighborhood, Roma residents were quickly evicted from their homes to make way for the district municipality’s urban transformation project. All ensuing legal actions against the project became null and void as the project was completed before a legal verdict was reached. A recent decision by the Council of State (Danıs¸tay) also outlawed the project for countering principles of planning concerning such historical areas under conservation. Despite that, the luxury housing built in the neighborhood is still awaiting the necessary action to be taken by the municipality. The JDP-dominated national assembly legislated the “Disaster Act” (Afet Yasası) or the “Urban Transformation Act” (Kentsel Do¨nu¨s¸u¨m Yasası) in the spring of 2012. The intent of the act was to overturn all previous legal obstacles to the fast and seamless implementation of urban transformation projects. As such, the act opened up the way for

˘lu, I˙stanbul. Source: Hande Zerkin. FIGURE 11.3 Tarlabas¸ı, Beyog ¨ ku ¨ s¸u ¨ CC 2015 Kibrit Film). (Lamekan: Metalas¸an Kentin C ¸o

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various informal practices and potential arbitrariness under the disguise of legality. On the surface, the new law aimed to upgrade or renew urban areas under the risk of earthquake, thus potentially preventing these areas and their inhabitants from the disastrous effects of an eventual, long-awaited earthquake in the Marmara region. However, the legal definition of what comprised a “risk-prone area” was ambiguous, and it did not, for instance, clearly describe a scientific-technical method or institutional procedure to be followed to identify risk-prone areas. Instead, the law identified the Ministry of Environment and Urbanism as the authorized institution to determine such risk-prone areas. The law also expanded the boundaries of such risk-prone areas, once again authorizing the ministry to include neighboring areas that may not be risk-prone in order to maintain the integrity of project implementation. Recent applications of the law in several neighborhoods of I˙stanbul such as Derbent and Okmeydanı demonstrate that the legal provisions are exploited with the intent to implement urban transformation projects especially in neighborhoods with organized resistance to urban transformation projects. Hence similar to Asher Ghertner’s38 argument in the context of Delhi slums where legal procedures are suspended when it comes to the spaces of the urban poor, in I˙stanbul too, formal scientific-technical methods are suspended and legal ambiguity is exploited in the process of transforming squatter settlements. The new law also defined the bargaining process as one taking place between the right-holders and the implementers where the latter could comprise TOKI, a municipal company or a private construction or real estate company. Hence individuals are literally taken on by large state or private enterprises. It is not surprising that the more powerful actors (that is, municipal or bureaucratic officials, developers or contractors) end up defining the terms of the bargain. On top of it all, the new law also tied this process to a certain set of conditions and what may be called a reward-punishment system: the right-holders are supposed to reach an agreement with the project implementer in 30 days, and if they do not they might be subjected to “immediate expropriation;” their public services such as electricity, water and natural gas would also be terminated and they would be exempt from housing allocation or rent allowance. Needless to say,

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“occupiers” and tenants were totally excluded from such processes. Additionally, according to the new law, those who resist evictions and demolitions were now subject to legal action in accordance with the provisions of the Turkish Criminal Code (Tu¨rk Ceza Kanunu). The law also restricted legal channels through which such projects could be challenged: the lawsuits could only be filed within 30 days after the project decisions, and courts could not make the decision to suspend the execution. In other words, the law neatly suspended the basic human and constitutional rights of those opposing or resisting such projects, thus creating a permanent state of exception in the context of urban governance. The law also exempted such projects from the rules and restrictions of the Zoning Law, and all other laws containing provisions regarding zoning. As such, it created an entire exemption for urban transformation projects from the formal structures of urban governance. Instead, it authorized the Ministry of Environment and Urbanism to once again set the standards of the project regardless of existing plans, rules and regulatory principles. As such, project implementers were able to decide not only on the size of areas allocated for educational, health or recreational purposes in project areas without necessarily following existing planning principles, but all laws and regulations designed to protect the naturally and historically protected areas as well as agricultural lands, forestry zones, pastures, wetlands, seacoasts and the like could be and were suspended by project implementers. On the whole, then, the policy of urban transformation in Turkey perpetuated a constant “state of deregulation”,39 and it did so by drawing upon the force of law. These new practices and modes of informality inscribed into the law are likely to deepen class inequalities and socio-spatial segregation, cases of which were observed during the first wave of urban transformation. Recently, however, the Turkish Constitutional Court (Anayasa Mahkemesi) successfully canceled some provisions of the law, including the exemption of urban transformation plans, zoning regulations and urban transformation projects from the executive decisions of the courts and the expansion of risk-prone areas to include neighboring areas. In addition, there are now a few court decisions that canceled

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urban transformation decisions in the neighborhoods of I˙stanbul such as Derbent and Tozkoparan on the grounds that technical reports prepared by the ministry, the metropolitan municipality or the district municipalities were not scientific and that the metropolitan municipality rather than the ministry should have the authority to draw zoning plans. The courts also stated the planning process should abide by the principles of planning drawn by related rules and regulations such as the conservation of historical, green or coastal areas. In some cases, there is also a reference to the preservation of public good; however, it is yet to be seen if these decisions will become precedents for future lawsuits. In such court decisions, it is important to emphasize the importance of organized legal struggles of squatter neighborhoods and urban movements that, through a repertoire of strategies, challenge the daily operations of the law according to a market-oriented logic, turning the law itself into a site of contestation, as is the case with other legal struggles (see ¨ se, this volume). Still, there is much uncertainty as to Ellialtı-Ko whether such legal decisions will be carried out or circumvented by state officials relying on new laws. CONCLUSION I want to conclude by referring to the Taksim urban renewal project through which the JDP government sought to complete the touristification, privatization and gentrification of the historical city center, because this particular project epitomizes Turkey’s shady urban politics that I have discussed here. The project was aimed at building an “Ottoman-style” urban museum/shopping mall – decided by the ˘an himself, designed then prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdog undemocratically according to JDP’s neo-Ottomanist vision of the city, and marketed to Istanbulites through a publicity campaign – in Gezi Park, in place of which, in fact, there also had existed I˙stanbul Armenians’ Surp Agop cemetery during the Ottoman period, which was later seized from the Armenian community by the Turkish state in the late 1930s as part of the nation-building project. If it were not for the resistance started by a handful of protestors against the cutting down of a few trees in the park, the project would have been made

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into a fait accompli despite the objections of urban protestors and the ongoing lawsuits. Many foreign mainstream commentators were puzzled at first by how a renewal project in a local urban park could spark such a massive countrywide uprising and why completing the project seemed so important and central to the political agenda of the prime minister and his government. Yet, those aware of how JDP’s neo-liberal spatial politics had been holding the people and their living spaces in a tight grip for over a decade knew exactly what was happening and why. There have been many recent studies on the Gezi Park protests, and one analysis most studies share is that it was an act of resistance against the increasingly authoritarian neo-liberal politics of the JDP that had opened up the living spaces of urban and rural people, to capital accumulation at unprecedented scale and speed.40 The Gezi resistance was, in a sense, the culmination of many local resistance movements against such urban transformation and mega projects, against small and large hydroelectric, nuclear and thermal power plants, against mines, highways, bridges and “crazy projects” of different kinds. Such resistance movements united against the JDP’s neo-liberal spatial politics, and aimed to defend the remaining commons on the one side and to reclaim the dispossessed and commodified ones on the other. It was no coincidence that the Gezi resistance then transformed into neighborhood forums and solidarity groups throughout many cities where citizens longed to engage in a platform for democratic participation and decisionmaking, especially in the face of the JDP’s unruly authoritarianism. In this sense, the Gezi resistance and ongoing spatial struggles laid bare the contours of the JDP’s neo-liberal spatial politics. While not all the neighborhood forums and solidarity groups are as active today as they were in the immediate aftermath of the Gezi resistance, the reasons of which needs to be further examined, they have nevertheless provided resisting citizens with a repertoire of experiences, tools and networks of solidarity with which to mobilize. Here, I have discussed the entanglements between informality/ unlawfulness and neo-liberal urban transformations in Turkey, and argued that recent corruption allegations against JDP should be contextualized within these new forms of informality shaping not

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only the neo-liberal restructuring of urban space but also reconfiguring state-society relations. The state of deregulation created by the JDP through legal and institutional transformations and informal practices of state actors opened space up to the neoliberal strategies of capital accumulation, restricted legal and political channels for urban struggles, and perpetuated networks of political patronage and loyalty by allowing state actors to control the creation and distribution of urban rent. As such, it signifies a shift from an informal urban regime that supported industrial development between the 1950s and 1980s to one that has facilitated the opening up of urban space to neo-liberal strategies of capital accumulation. As Yas¸ar Adanalı succinctly put it in the case of corruption allegations “the issue is not the transfer of money from one pocket to another, it is rather the transformation of a city.”41 NOTES 1. An earlier and shorter version of this essay was published in ROAR Magazine’s Symposium entitled “Reflections on the Gezi Uprising” on 7 January 2014. ˘lu (2007: 1247). 2. See Bedirhanog 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. See also Aslan (2006); Demirtas-Milz (2013); Kuyucu & Unsal (2010); Kuyucu (2014). 6. See Roy (2009, 2011a). 7. See, for example, Bayat (1997, 2000). 8. See Bayat (1997, 2000); Chatterjee (2004); Benjamin (2008). 9. See Roy (2011a, 226–32). ˘lu (2011, 57). 10. See Strutz and C ¸ avus¸og ¨ se (2015). 11. See Al Sayyad and Roy (2004); Gururani and Ko 12. See Roy (2009). 13. See Ghertner (2011). 14. See Weinstein (2008). 15. See Roy (2009: 80). ¨ c
ek, this volume; also see the 270th issue of Birikim. 16. See Go 17. See Aslan (2006; 2010, 36 –40). 18. Ibid. 19. See Roy (2011b: 308). 20. See Kahraman (2010, 61). 21. See Ersoy (2012).

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22. See Kahraman (2010). 23. As this volume goes to press, the construction of the bridge is now complete and the government recently organized quite a spectacular opening ceremony amidst protests by the environmentalist group Northern Forests Defense. 24. See Gururani (2013). 25. See also Yılmaz (2013). 26. See Bianet, 23 December 2013. ¨ nmez (2011). 27. See, for example, So ¨ nsal (2010); ˘lu and Bartu-Candan (2008); Kuyucu and U 28. See Kolluog Kuyucu (2014); Demirtas¸-Milz (2013); “Turkun” (2014). 29. See Atayurt and C ¸ avdar (2010). 30. See Keyder (2000, 175). 31. See Atayurt and C ¸ avdar (2010). 32. Ibid. ¨ nsal (2010); Demirtas¸-Milz (2013); Kuyucu (2014). 33. See Kuyucu and U 34. See Demirtas¸-Milz (2013, 701). 35. See Kuyucu (2014, 609). ¨ nsal (2010). 36. See Kuyucu and U 37. See Demirtas¸-Milz (2013, 699). 38. See Ghertner (2008). 39. See Roy (2009, 80). ˘sız (2013); Kuymulu (2013); Tug ˘al ¨ c
ek, this volume; also see Ig 40. See Go (2013). 41. See Bianet, 23 December 2013.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ¨ kru ¨ , “Modern Kentte Formel Ve Enformelin Sınırı!”, in Yenimimar 36, Aslan, S¸u 2006. Retrieved from: http://www.yenimimar.com/index.php?action¼ displayArticle&ID¼952. ¨ ncesi Toplumsal Mu¨cadeleler ve Kent (I˙letis¸im ——— 1 Mayıs Mahallesi: 1980 O Yayınları: I˙stanbul, 2001). Atayurt, Ulus and Ays¸e C ¸ avdar, “AKP’nin gecekonduyla imtihanı”, Archþ 190, 2010. Retrieved from: http://www.archplus.net/home/news/7,1-3962,1,0. html?referer¼103. ˘lu, “Emerging spaces of neoliberalism: Bartu-Candan, Ayfer and Biray Kolluog A gated town and a public housing project in I˙stanbul”, in New Perspectives on Turkey 39 (2008): 5–46. Bayat, Asef, “Un-Civil Society: The Politics of the ’Informal People’”, in Third World Quarterly 18(1) (1997): 53 –72. doi: 0143-6597/97/010053-20. ——— “From “dangerous classes” to “quiet rebels”: Politics of the urban subaltern in the global south”, in International Sociology 15(3) (2000): 533– 57. doi: 10.1177/026858000015003005.

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˘lu, Pınar, “The neo-liberal discourse on corruption as a means of Bedirhanog consent building: reflections from post-crisis Turkey”, in Third World Quarterly 28(7) (2007): 1239– 54. doi: 10.1080/01436590701591770. Benjamin, Solomon, “Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy beyond Policy and Programs”, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(3) (2008): 719–29. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2427. 2008.00809.x. Birikim, I˙ns¸aat Ya Resulallah (I˙stanbul: Birikim Yayınları, 2011). Chatterjee, Partha, Politics of the governed: Reflections on popular politics in most of the world (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004). Demirtas¸-Milz, Neslihan, “The Regime of Informality in Neoliberal Times in Turkey: The Case of the Kadifekale Urban Transformation Project”, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37(2) (2013): 689–714. doi: 10.1111/1468-2427.12005. Ersoy, Melih, Kentsel Planlama Kuramları (I˙stanbul: I˙mge Kitabevi, 2012). Ghertner, Asher, “Gentrifying the state, gentrifying participation: Elite governance programs in Delhi”, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(3) (2011): 504–32. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01043.x. Gururani, Shubhra, “Flexible Planning: The Making of India’s ‘Millennium City,’ Gurgaon”, in Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability, edited by A. Rademacher & K. Sivaramakrishnan (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013). ¨ se, “Shifting Terrain: Questions of Governance in India’s ——— and Burak Ko Cities and their Peripheries”, in Suburban Governance: A Global View, edited by Pierre Hamel and Roger Keil (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). ˘sız, Aslı, “Brand Turkey and the Gezi Protests: Authoritarianism, Law, and Ig Neoliberalism”, in Jadaliyya, 12–13 July 2013. Retrieved from: http://www. jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12907/brand-turkey-and-the-gezi-protests_ authoritarianis. Kahraman, Tayfun, “I˙mar Uygulamalarında Gizli Yolsuzluk: Ayrıcalıklı ¨ zelles¸tirmeler ve Kentsel Rant”, in I˙s¸ Ahlakı Dergisi 3(6) (2010): 61–80. O ˘lar, “Enformel Konut Piyasasından Ku ¨ resel Konut Piyasasına”, in Keyder, C ¸ ag ˘lar Keyder (Istanbul: Metis I˙stanbul: Ku¨resel ile Yerel Arasında, edited by C ¸ ag Yayınları, 2000). Kuymulu, Mehmet B., “Reclaiming the right to the city: Reflections on the urban uprisings in Turkey”, in City 17(3) (2013): 274–8. doi: 10.1080/ 13604813.2013.815450. Kuyucu, Tuna, “Law, Property and Ambiguity: The Uses and Abuses of Legal Ambiguity in Remaking I˙stanbul’s Informal Settlements”, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(2) (2014): 609–27. doi: 10.1111/ 1468–2427.12026. ¨ zlem U ¨ nsal, “Urban Transformation’ as State-led Property ——— and O Transfer: An Analysis of Two Cases of Urban Renewal in I˙stanbul”, in Urban Studies 47(7) (2010): 1479–99. doi: 10.1177/0042098009353629.

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Roy, Ananya, “Why India cannot plan its cities: Informality, insurgence and the idiom of urbanization”, in Planning Theory 8 (2009): 76–87. doi: 10.1177/ 1473095208099299. ——— “Postcolonial Urbanism: Speed, Hysteria, Mass Dreams”, in Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, 307– 35). ——— “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism”, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(2) (2011): 223–8. doi: 10.1111/ j.1468–2427.2011.01051.x. ——— and Nazar Al-Sayyad, eds, Urban Informality, Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004). ¨ nmez, Mustafa, “TOKI˙’den Aslan Payı Kimlerin?”, 2011. Retrieved from: So http://mustafasonmez.net/?p¼684. ˘lu, “Enformellig ˘in Sınırları Deg ˘is¸irken Kent Strutz, Julia and Erbatur Cavus¸og Hakkı”, in Eg˘itim Bilim Toplum Dergisi 9(36) (2011): 56 –73. ˘al, Cihan, “Occupy Gezi: The Limits of Turkey’s Neoliberal Success”, Tug in Jadaliyya, 4 June 2013. Retrieved from: http://www.jadaliyya.com/ pages/index/12009/occupy-gezi_the-limits-of-turkey%E2%80%99sneoliberal-succ. ¨ rku ¨ n, Asuman, Mu¨lk, Mahal, I˙nsan: I˙stanbul’da Kentsel Do¨nu¨s¸u¨m (I˙stanbul: Tu ¨ niversitesi Yayınları, 2014). I˙stanbul Bilgi U ¨ nu ¨ s¸u ¨ mu ¨ , Sadece Cepten Cebe Konan Para Vardar, Nilay, “Mesele Bir Kentin Do ˘il”, in Bianet, 23 December 2013. Retrieved from: http://bianet.org/ Deg bianet/toplum/152197-mesele-bir-kentin-donusumu-sadece-cepten-cebekonan-para-degil. Weinstein, Lisa, “Mumbai’s Development Mafias: Globalization, Organized Crime and Land Development”, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(1) (2008): 22–39. doi: 10.1111/j.1468–2427.2008.00766.x. ¨ nu ¨ s¸u ¨ m politikaları ve TOKI˙’nin o ¨ nlenemez Yılmaz, Evrim, “Kentsel do ¨ kselis¸i”, in Perspectives 3(13) (2012): 40 –3. yu

CHAPTER 12

Refusing to Become Pious Soldiers: Islamist Conscientious Objection in Turkey Pınar Kemerli

While the United Nations and the European Convention on Human Rights recognize conscientious objection as a legitimate exercise of the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief, the exercise of this right is persistently violated in modern Turkey.1 Turkey, along with Azerbaijan, is the only member of the Council of Europe that refuses to recognize conscientious objection. In the absence of laws regulating their act, Conscientious Objectors (COs) are imprisoned in these countries for a series of crimes that do not correspond to their actions. These include “persistent disobedience,” “desertion” and “alienating the public from military service.”2 With military service codified as a citizenship duty for all male subjects, COs are condemned to a life of illegality even after release. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) defines their living conditions as “civil death” that results in “an inability to vote, marry, legally register a child, work, or get a passport.”3 To account for Turkey’s uncompromising attitude concerning CO rights and other forms of anti-militarist politics, scholars have pointed to several factors. Most prominent among these are the militarist imaginary of Turkish national identity,4 the codification of male conscription as a rite of passage to manhood and prestige over

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women5 and the atmosphere of insecurity provoked by the military struggle between the PKK guerilla (Partiya Karkereˆn Kurdistan/ Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and the Turkish army.6 In this chapter, I offer two additional factors facilitating the marginalization of antimilitarist values and practices in Turkey, namely the prominence of the citizen-soldier ideal in the republican configuration of citizenship and the Islamic valuation of military service. I argue that these factors work together in complicated ways to engender a militarized understanding of citizenship and piety, resulting in the projection of anti-militarism as unpatriotic and sacrilegious – a double pathology. After a brief outline of these two factors that help facilitate normative opposition to conscientious objection in Turkey, I turn to the examination of some prominent problems attending this opposition. In particular, I focus on a recent legal controversy concerning an Islamist conscientious objection, a new site of illegality emerging in the mid-2000s. After examining the confrontation between the Turkish state and this civil disobedience act that challenges normative citizenship and religiosity, I conclude by outlining its broader implications for secular governance and the rule of law in that country. TURKEY’S SPARTAN DREAM: MILITARISM OF REPUBLICAN CITIZENSHIP While its origins go back to Ancient Greece, civic republicanism emerged as a prominent political tradition in the early modern period in the West.7 Challenging the political imaginary of liberal individualism, civic republicanism presents a state-centered view of citizenship emphasizing the obligations and duties that accrue from membership in a given community. This tradition prioritizes not individual rights and freedoms, but instead public dispositions, participation in civil life and patriotism. The ideal of citizenship cultivated by the modern Turkish Republic in the aftermath of its emergence in 1923 draws predominantly upon this civic republican ¨ stel have shown, the content of ¨ sun U tradition. As scholars such as Fu the citizenship education institutionalized by the new state clearly demonstrates this point. Since 1924, citizenship education textbooks

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have also focused on the inculcation of public sensibilities and patriotic virtues.8 As part of this endeavor, students are regularly taught to envision themselves as the dependent parts of a larger political family (the nation) whose security and maintenance precedes their own.9 If need be, this official stand argues, individual lives must be forfeited for the survival and honor of the nation, and its protector, the state. It should be added that the attempt to regulate the private realm and individual subjectivities is an integral aspect of this pedagogical effort. Students are given instructions on even the minutest details concerning how to manage their selves and private lives, including personal hygiene, health, entertainment and recreational activities.10 The ultimate goal is to render individual subjectivities and worldviews compatible with the robust citizenship ideal endorsed by the regime, and ensure compliance with it. Importantly, a distinguishing feature of this civic-republican model is its militarism.11 Participation in the militia and martial valor are paradigmatic examples of public virtue and devotion to the state.12 Militarism is integrated into civic life not simply in the form of a citizen-army, but as everyday practices, school games, mating ceremonies and dietary concerns as well. These militarized public rituals constantly keep the “image of the fatherland” before the eyes of the citizens and produce “a burning love of country.”13 It is through these highly militarized forms of socialization that the private individual is disavowed and the patriotic citizen is generated.

Origins of Turkish State Militarism

¨ nder pointed out, perhaps the most important theoretical As Hasan U source of Turkey’s founding generation’s worldview was a book that embraced this vision and its emphasis on the citizen-soldier, namely Baron von der Goltz’s Das Volk in Vaffen (The Nation in Arms).14 Originally published in 1883, Goltz’s work theorizes an armed nation, always prepared for military mobilization and guided by army officers. Only a year after its publication, the book was translated into Ottoman as Millet-i Mu¨sellaha (the Nation in Arms or Armed Nation).15 As part of its effort to modernize the Ottoman military system, the Royal Military Academy used the book in the training of Ottoman soldiers from 1886 onwards. Goltz’s ideas thus came to

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shape the mindset of several generations of Ottoman soldiers educated in these academies, including not only the Young Turks, ¨ rk and most of the other founders of the Turkish but also Atatu Republic.16 Unsurprisingly, these ideas were integrated into the official discourses of Turkish nationalism after the declaration of the Republic.17 The theoretical impact of Goltz’s work on the republican view on citizenship in Turkey can be documented by a brief outline of a secondary education textbook entitled Askerlik Vazifesi (Military ¨ rk’s adopted daughter, Afet I˙nan, and Service). Penned by Atatu ¨ rk himself, the book was part of a larger heavily influenced by Atatu collection – entitled Vatandas¸ icin Medeni Bilgiler (Civilized Knowledge for the Citizen) – prepared in the 1930s.18 On the basis of frequent quotations from Millet-i Mu¨sellaha, the textbook presents military service as the most prominent obligation of citizenship.19 A distinctively pedagogical function is attributed to this institution. The army is said to be a school that is entrusted with modernizing the nation and officers are presented as the nation’s teachers.20 The content of the education the citizens receive while performing their military service should therefore include not simply teaching the arts of war, but also information about modern structures of power, social norms and technologies. But most importantly, the book stresses the connection between martial education and patriotism. Given this connection, military activities must be extended beyond the barracks. This is necessitated, in part, by the lack of female conscription in Turkey. Given that half of the nation’s citizens, women, are not conscripted, the vital training in patriotism must be delivered to them through other means. Moreover, the construction of the devout citizen is too important a task to be restricted to the limited period of military service (12 to 15 months): “Citizens must already learn and exercise certain things that will facilitate military service while they are still in school.”21 While the textbook Askerlik Vazifesi is designed to serve precisely this role, it also projects a broader worldview, just as Rousseau’s Spartan utopia, that intends to transform everyday life itself into an arena for the performance of martial valor and patriotism, thereby expanding the military from military institutions to civic education.

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Against this background, Turkey’s refusal to recognize CO rights does not seem surprising. The strong impact of the civic republican model and its attendant militarism on the theorization and practice of citizenship in that country has led to a widespread association of anti-militarism with disloyalty to the nation. It is true that through time this original model evolved to accommodate the changing socio-political dynamics in the country – including the emergent ¨ ge Go ¨ cek in neo-liberal ethos and practices summarized by Fatma Mu her introduction to this collection of essays – but its basic theoretical features and militarist tenets remained largely intact.22 To this day, martial valor is considered integral to citizenship, and there is widespread respect for universal conscription. As a result, antimilitarist political values and practices such as conscientious objection appear as unpatriotic transgressions of citizenship values, sustaining the broader normative orientations that ground the refusal to acknowledge CO rights. THE MILITARISM OF TURKISH ISLAM The other factor facilitating the marginalization of anti-militarist politics in Turkey is the Islamic valuation of martial obligations, endorsed and cultivated by the modern state. To be sure, the history of this valuation reaches back to the pre-republican period. In the multi-religious and multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, the bearing of arms was the prerogative of the Muslim millet – the largest and the most privileged confessional community in the empire – and the empire’s fighting ethos heavily drew upon Islamic martial traditions.23 The national resistance movement that emerged when the empire collapsed at the end of World War I tapped into this deeprooted tradition. As many have shown, the leaders of the resistance, including Mustafa Kemal, appealed to the religious sentiments of the Muslim population to convince them to take arms against the invading forces.24 Ironically then, the military effort that led to the establishment of the secular Turkish Republic was intensely religious, one that was not publicly acknowledged. This traditional association of martial duties with Islamic faith continues to influence popular attitudes towards conscription in

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contemporary Turkey. Military service is seen by the public at large not simply as a nationalist, but also a religious duty. The army is referred to as the Peygamber Ocag˘ı (the Heart of the Prophet), while the affectionate name used for conscripted soldiers is Mehmetcik (“little Muhammed”). The members of the Armed Forces who die while on active service are routinely referred to, and commemorated, as s¸ehit (religious martyrs).25 Indeed, martyr-funerals function as symbolic venues for the display and perpetuation of this religious valuation, and thus reveal the socially upheld sacred status of soldiering. While the popular association of Islam and military duties is widely acknowledged, the role of secular power itself in the perpetuation of this religious association is rarely noted. The principal reason for this neglect is the conventional conception of the republican regime, and most importantly, the Turkish armed forces as the staunch defenders of secularism. However, the modern Turkish Republic and its armed forces have never totally forfeited the traditional Islamic valuation of militarism. On the contrary, the republican regime has been actively involved in the perpetuation of a militarized understanding of national Islam, and worked to cultivate the forms of religious sensibilities that would sustain this militarized interpretation. ¨ ksel’s contribution to this book, which As noted also in Metin Yu focuses on the mobilization of Mobile Village Courses “to create and control public spaces through education in non-urban locales”26 in the early republican period, it is the pedagogical practices of the modern state that reveal this official strategy most transparently. Firstly, in addition to the above-described modernizing function military service is entrusted with, this institution was deployed as a vehicle to educate the conscripted civilians in the state’s favored version of Islam. Although highly neglected in relevant scholarship, Turkish military education includes a heavy deal of religious indoctrination, aimed at providing religious legitimacy for compulsory conscription and thereby disseminating a nationalist and docile version of Islam.27 As part of this effort, the state has produced a textbook entitled Askere Din Kitabı – The Book on Religion for the Soldier.28 In use almost since the beginning of the

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republican period, this textbook presents patriotism as central to Islamic faith. Islam is said to prescribe unconditional obedience to the state and its military institutions, suggesting that each “Muslim Turk” must faithfully perform his military service. Avoiding this duty is presented as a sin that would bring profound suffering in the afterlife. Even when military obligations endanger private lives or interests, obedience is essential. If one is martyred in this effort, this martyrdom must be considered as a tremendous blessing that will be richly awarded. In the course of making these arguments, the textbook relies heavily upon the Qur’an, hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) and early Islamic history, imbuing them with a nationalist and martial cast. The overarching aim is to inculcate in the conscripts the forms of religious dispositions that would strengthen their martial resolve and nationalist fervor. In this context, alternative interpretations of Islamic doctrine challenging this statecentered and martial interpretation of religion are systematically discredited. Military education’s emphasis on the martial tenets of Islam is paralleled in the national school curricula. This is not surprising given that women, who are not conscripted, must also be trained in the right form of religion. In fact, this is necessary to enable them perform supportive roles in the militarization of social life and sentiments. Moreover, as we have seen in the previous section, according to the Turkish state, the militarization of society is too important a task to be restricted to the short period and late age when men enter military service. Thus, in civilian life, it is first and foremost the national school curricula that aim to produce obedient and devout citizens who can be relied upon to perform the military obligation imposed on them. Especially since 1980, state schools have been actively engaged in the project of militarizing religion.29 That year saw the occurrence of the third coup d’e´tat in the history of the Turkish Republic. Interfering in the ideological struggles between the right-wing and left-wing student movements of the 1970s, the Turkish military took control of the government for roughly three years. An important act of the junta was to forge an alliance with the sponsors of an ideological movement known as the Turkish Islamic Synthesis.

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Developed by a group of conservative intellectuals, the National Hearts (Aydınlar Ocag˘ı), the movement advocated the integration of Sunni Islamic values into national culture.30 While it presented Islam as an integral part of Turkish cultural essence (o¨z) and national will, this movement did not support an Islamic state. Rather, it endorsed a paternalistic and pious model of democracy under the leadership of a benevolent army. Naturally, this vision was appealing to the junta. It also seemed to offer a potential solution to the encroaching Communism and other left-wing ideologies, blamed for the student radicalism of the former decade. Thus, in 1983, the Turkish-Islamic synthesis was officially adopted as the new cultural program in the National Culture Report of the State Planning Organization. Following this, a wholesale revision of the secular-track school curricula was inaugurated.31 Reflecting the influence of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, the post1980 school curriculum strongly emphasizes the links between Turkish people’s martial spirit and Islamic heritage: The Turks are from birth a nation of soldiers. Islam also commands one to fight for the fatherland all the time . . . Among the [pre-Islamic] settled Turks there were those adepts of the Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Manichean, Jewish, and Christian religions. Yet it is seen that these religions did not conform to the Turks’ spirit of warfare.32

In line with the political tendency to selectively tap into the past to ¨ cek drew attention to in her legitimize present policies, which Go introduction, the revised curriculum here claims that it is the militaristic features of Islam that makes it a perfect fit for Turkish national character on the basis of highly speculative and distorted interpretation of history.33 Born as soldiers, it is suggested, Turks then excel in martial valor thanks to their faith. Moreover, the curriculum attributes Islamic legitimacy to obeying the military demands of the nation state. For instance, third-graders read the story of “Hennaed Mehmet,” which is about a mother who smears henna on her son’s hands as he is about to depart for his military service. In Turkish culture, henna is applied to mark an important event such as a wedding or a religious sacrifice. When the commander of the son asks the mother why she is performing this ritual on this occasion, the mother assumes the role of the teacher,

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and educates both her son and the commander on the relationship between Islam, nationalism and sacrificial obligations of citizens as follows: We stain the sheep with henna so that they be a sacrifice to Allah. Also my son, we put henna on the young men who go to the army. We smear henna on them so that they may be a sacrifice to the fatherland. We sacrificed your grandfather in the Balkan Wars [in 1913] and your uncle at C ¸ anakkale. If it need be, my child, you will be a sacrifice for this fatherland.34

The boundaries between religious and nationalist sentiments and obligations effectively disappear in this narrative. The state and its army are sanctified as all-powerful institutions that can legitimately demand sacrifice. As Sam Kaplan notes, the message that the schoolchildren are intended to derive from this story is clear. It is their religious duty to obey the state and defend their nation – if need be with their lives. Inculcating a militarized understanding of religious duty in this way, the secular school system contributes to the project of engendering obedient and pious citizens who would faithfully respond to the military obligations imposed on them. In summary, then, along with its codification as an integral part of citizenship, militarism has been rendered essential to Islamic religiosity in Turkey and since 1980, a militarist interpretation of religion has been integrated within the republican configuration of citizenship. As a result of this merge, an even more hostile climate for the development and recognition of anti-militarist values and practices has emerged in contemporary Turkey. EMERGENCE OF ISLAMIST CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION AS A CONTESTED PUBLIC SPACE Set against this backdrop, it is against great odds that Turkey’s small conscientious objection movement emerged. Since the early 1990s, approximately 290 young men and women have declared conscientious objection in Turkey.35 The majority of these objections were based on anarchist, socialist or feminist political convictions. In this essay, however, I focus on Muslim COs because the existing government in Turkey for the last decade has been emphasizing

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Islamic values as a source of its legitimacy, thereby turning not secular conscientious objection, but instead the specifically Islamist one into a newly emerging contested public space. It was not before the mid-2000s that an Islamic group emerged within the broader anti-war movement, challenging the militarism of both normative citizenship and religiosity from a religious perspective. Currently, there are dozens of Muslim COs and many more Muslim activists involved in the Conscientious Objection Association (Vicdani Ret Derneg˘i), the umbrella organization heading the CO rights struggle. While there are a lot of overlaps between Muslim and other secular COs’ critique of conscription and militarism, there are some arguments raised specifically by Muslim objectors.36 Firstly, their protest against the Turkish state’s nationalist interpretation of Islamic values in its justification of conscription derives primarily from their Islamic beliefs. While they largely accept that some martial activities are obligatory for Muslims according to Islamic laws – so a pacifist refusal of violence is not acceptable for them – they nonetheless claim that this obligation holds only when performed in the name of the transnational community of faith, the umma. Moreover, Muslim COs claim that as a secular state, Turkey lacks the right to claim religious legitimacy for its army. In this context, they deny the martyr status of the fallen soldiers in the Turkish army. And, most importantly, they claim that by refusing conscientious objection, Turkey violates the Islamic principles of voluntarism. In their opinion, no Muslim could be forced, against her will, to perform military deeds that may involve taking lives. Muslim COs thereby claim that by disrespecting this tradition, the Turkish state transgresses a crucial Islamic norm. With its targeting of official citizenship and religion, the development of an Islamist objection to military service adds a compelling new dimension to anti-militarist activism in Turkey. But in addition to that, this development also raised a new challenge for the Turkish state. For the first time, some of the most prominent ideological resources that the state has historically relied upon – Islamic injunction to defend the country and the value of martyrdom – were rendered sites of public contestation by pious Muslims, ¨ cek’s comments on how religious ideals that the state confirming Go

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itself utilizes may themselves become potential sites of resistance against the state in the cotemporary dynamics of neo-liberal modernity.37 Indeed, the significance of this challenge, its broader implications, and the problems attending Turkey’s response to it became most transparent in a recent court case involving the conscientious objection of Muhammed Serdar Delice, one of the first COs who grounded his refusal to serve on his Islamic faith.

The Case of Muhammed Serdar Delice Delice declared his conscientious objection on 2 March 2010, after serving in the army for five months.38 Defining himself as a devout Muslim and a nationalist, he admitted that he enthusiastically joined the barracks when he was called to serve. But, this initial enthusiasm for soldiering began to fade as he encountered what he calls the “moral degeneration” in the army. The routine beating and humiliation of junior conscripts by their seniors and commanders – a well-reported but seemingly irresolvable problem – disagreed with his moral sensibilities.39 But, most importantly, Delice was distressed by the “disrespectful” attitude towards his religiosity in his unit. What humiliated him most and eventually led to his desertion was the desecration of his Qur’an by a senior officer who threw it out of the window. After this incident, Delice decided to discontinue his service, and declared his conscientious objection. The public declaration of his conscientious objection initiated the vicious legal circle awaiting all COs in Turkey. Arrested on 29 November 2011 for desertion, he was first sent to Kasimpasa Military Prison in I˙stanbul. During his time there, Delice was harassed by fellow prisoners and, in protest, he started a short-term hunger strike. ¨ lhane Military Medical Academy In February 2012, he was sent to Gu (GATA) for medical assessment. There, he was issued a report stating that there was no medical impediment to his recruitment. But, on account of his recent troubles, he was issued a 45-day temporary release. Within hours of release, Delice was taken back into custody, however. This time, he was sent to Mamak Military Prison in Ankara, where he spent some of these 45 days. In the meantime, Delice found out that a military court had sentenced him in his absence to ten months in prison for desertion. Insisting on his current CO status, he

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appealed this decision. His case was finally heard in Malatya Military Court of Appeals on 7 March 2012. While the routine procedure in conscientious objection cases is to disavow the domestic relevance of this internationally recognized right, in Delice’s case, the Malatya Military Court made a surprising exception. With a groundbreaking decision, it argued that the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights40 should be taken as the basis for evaluating domestic conscientious objection cases.41 This ruling came after an important development in ECtHR’s regulation of CO cases. Since the July 2011 Bayatyan v Armenia ruling (involving the conscientious objection of a Jehovah’s Witness), the ECtHR has begun to unequivocally categorize conscientious objection under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which concerns the freedom of thought, conscience and religion.42 After the Bayatyan decision, the European Convention’s pressure on Turkey to adapt its domestic law to international human rights standards had increased. In fact, shortly before Delice’s trial, Turkey was condemned by the ECtHR for violating Article 9 in its jurisdiction of two other CO cases involving Jehovah’s Witnesses: first, in Yunus Ercep v. Turkey (Application 43965/04) in November 2011, and shortly after, in the case of Feti Demirtas¸ (Application No. 5260/07) in January 2012.43 Thus, Turkey’s recognition of ECtHR regulations in Delice’s case seems to have been a partial response to this mounting pressure. However, despite this important acknowledgement, the Malatya court upheld a narrow interpretation of Article 9. It claimed that the provisions of Article 9 would apply only to the COs who are members of a religious faith that categorically rejects military service. In other words, what should be determinative for granting exemption from military service is not the beliefs and convictions of an individual, but the dominant theological stance of the broader religious group he is part of. As Mine Yıldırım reports, the court here referred to the example of Jehovah’s Witnesses, stating: “persons who are members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses reject military service, because they are part of this group or institution which fundamentally rejects military service.”44 However, in the case of Delice, who is a declared Muslim, this requirement was not fulfilled. The court claimed that

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conscientious objection was not compatible with the theological essentials of Islam. It stated that “as a belief system, Islam does not reject the use of weaponry, the wearing of uniform, and other provisions entailed in compulsory military service.”45 Given this theological position, Delice’s avowedly Islamic conscientious objection could not be considered as genuinely Islamic. Moreover, the court pointed out that Delice’s nationalist worldview does not support his conscientious objection either. The court’s opinion was that nationalist ideology is highly compatible with conscription. Consistent with the above outlined republican view of citizenship, the court interpreted military service as an essential requirement of citizenship, which should be performed enthusiastically by every nationalist. In addition, the court claimed that Delice’s initial agreement to serve and his decision to declare conscientious objection after only five months of active duty raised doubts about the sincerity of his objection. Because it had not been held as a consistent worldview, his current opposition to conscription was not convincing. Questioning “a key part of international law’s understanding of freedom of religion or belief, which is also found in the ECHR’s Article 9 – the right to change beliefs,” the court thus interpreted Delice’s initial compliance with conscription laws as a sign of insincerity concerning his following conscientious objection.46 On the basis of these objections that transparently reflect the mark of the militarist undergirding of normative citizenship and religiosity in Turkey, the court finally ruled that Delice’s conscientious objection was neither Islamic nor sincere. Opposing the court’s reasoning, Delice asked for the mufti of Malatya to be heard as an expert witness.47 Through this move, Delice aimed to counter the court’s interpretation of Islam as compatible with compulsory conscription. But this request was rejected on the grounds that courts could only rely upon scientific testimonies. Citing Law No. 5271 of the Turkish Constitution (on Criminal Procedure), the court pointed out that “Article 62 of this Law states that experts must take an oath saying that they will perform their tasks based on science.”48 The court held that the testimony of the mufti would not make reliable evidence because “the religious sphere is intrinsically related to beliefs and is dogmatic, [and] hence any

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view expressed from this field cannot be based on science and includes subjective elements.”49 The court’s decision was evidently paradoxical. On the one hand, it claimed that expert religious assessments should not be considered as relevant or determinative in legal proceedings as the religious sphere is characterized by subjectivity and dogma. But, on the other hand, the court grounded its legal judgment on Delice’s conscientious objection on its own theological assessments about the essentially militarist character of Islam. In other words – and despite affirming the theoretical inadmissibility of theology in the courtroom – the court asserted its own theological view as objective and authoritative while presenting Delice’s interpretation of Islam as inessential and faulty. What are the broader implications of this ambiguous legal response to Islamist conscientious objection? In the first instance, it is clear that the militarism attending the normative definitions of citizenship and religiosity in Turkey has had a major influence in the court’s evaluation of Delice’s objection. After all, the court disavowed the legitimacy of both Delice’s nationalism and the Islamic grounds of his conscientious objection precisely because they conflicted with the officially held militarist tenets of citizenship and religion. As a result of challenging the militarist values and practices affirmed by the state, neither his nationalism nor his religiosity were seen as authentic. On the contrary, it was precisely this opposition that rendered both illegitimate and illicit. By demonstrating how the militarist tenets of official citizenship and religion translate into legal language in the courtroom, Delice’s case thus brought attention both to the legal ambivalence concerning anti-militarist politic in Turkey and the multifaceted dilemmas facing COs. But perhaps more importantly, the court’s judgment on the authenticity of Delice’s Islamic conscientious objection raises doubts about the secular character of the law itself. By grounding a legal decision on its own theological assessments of the role of militarism in Islam, the Malatya court effectively violated an important doctrine of secularism, that is, the separation between the legal and religious spheres. Intervening in the religious realm, it pronounced individual beliefs and practices diverging from its own interpretation of Islam as

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illegitimate. On the surface, this performance may indeed appear as a glaring deviation from secularism. However, when revisited in the light of the above discussion, it becomes clear that, in fact, the flipside of Turley’s deployment of a militarist interpretation of Islam in civilian and military education is to produce a pious and patriotic citizenry. In both, Turkey certainly violates some secular norms, not least of all state neutrality towards religion and the right to religious freedoms. Importantly, however, these transgressions and exceptions are justified as sovereign measures, intended to protect state interests.50 Establishing what counts as religion and policing its scope, Turkey thus claims to remain within the limits of its sovereign rights each time it transgresses the norms of secularism. At the end, it is such constitutive entanglements of secularism with sovereignty that render religious freedoms such as conscientious objection necessarily precarious not only in Turkey, but in all secular nation states. CONCLUSION I have argued here that militarism is integral to the republican configuration of citizenship and religiosity in Turkey. Codified as unpatriotic and sacrilegious, anti-militarist values and practices such as conscientious objection have thus come to be seen as moral transgressions of the republican social contract, sealed by militarism. Especially after the 1980 coup, the militarist tenets of both configurations were strengthened, resulting in a highly unfavorable climate for anti-militarist politics.51 Importantly, this hostile atmosphere did not change under the governance of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (JDP), credited for diminishing the influence of the military in political life.52 While the Turkish army has indeed lost prestige and power in the last decade, the militarism of governing policies persists. For instance, JDP representatives, including ˘an himself, continue to oppose CO rights and President Erdog emphasize the sacredness of conscription.53 Likewise, recent polls demonstrate continuing opposition to conscientious objection.54 Against this background, I highlighted the tensions arising from the state’s confrontation with an emergent Islamist conscientious

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objection, an act of civil disobedience challenging the militarist tenets of official citizenship and religiosity. Several broader consequences emerge from this analysis. First, it seems that to succeed, anti-militarist politics in Turkey must include not simply a critique of the citizen-soldier tradition but also the prevalent interpretation of Islam. After all, official Islam is nourished by, and feeds into, militarism and its nationalist cast in Turkey. While the emergence of an Islamist grouping within the conscientious objection movement is promising, even amongst this group, there is not a clear consensus as to how the militarist tenets of official religion could be deconstructed. Moreover, Muslim COs are divided amongst themselves concerning their views on Islam’s relationship to power and militarism. While they all reject the secular state’s use of Islam to pursue nationalist interests, some affirm the potential relevance of Islamic values within the context of an Islamic state. This creates tension within the pacifist segments of the broader conscientious objection movement, interfering with the development of a consistent and unified stance. In addition to this tension, there are the risks involved in targeting popular views on religion and nationalism. Such critique may further antagonize a highly religious population already hostile to anti-militarist politics. However, and despite the risks, evading this confrontation does not seem to be an option in the Turkish context, where religion and militarism mutually reinforce each other. Thus, to demilitarize public sentiments and imaginaries, Turkey’s anti-militarists need to construct a viable and organized opposition to the militarist uses of religion. Second, the description of the long history of pedagogical strategies deployed to sustain a militarized understanding of citizenship and religiosity in Turkey invites a reevaluation of the controversial cultural policies of the JDP government. A series of legal provisions recently introduced by the Islam-sensitive government reflects the party’s increasing concern with Islamicizing society. These provisions include the promotion of religious education in schools and controversial alcohol restrictions.55 Coupled with the frequent remarks of the prime minister and other party officials concerning alleged plans to ban abortion, illegalize gender-mixed college dormitories, impose gender segregation in education and so

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forth, these developments cause increasing alarm amongst the secular segments of the population.56 While this alarm is understandable, it would be wrong to isolate JDP’s cultural policies as “backward” or “irrational” aberrations in Turkish state tradition. On the contrary, we have seen that the use of cultural policies to transform the nation in the favored image of the ruling party has been a consistent feature of political governance in Turkey. Set against this background and in line with this book’s invitation to integrate a rigorous analysis of history in our attempts to understand the socio-political spaces of contemporary Turkey, the JDP’s growing interest in cultural transformation does not seem to be an exception but the rule. Thus, rather than a deviant Islamic turn, JDP policies must be seen as part of a salient historical tradition of pedagogical governance that infantilizes the population and its democratic capacities on the one side, and systematically selects only those policies that legitimate its own interests on the other. Finally, the Turkish state’s persistent use of religion to produce an obedient and patriotic citizenry should lead to a reconsideration of secularism in that country. Contrary to its conventional portrayals, secularism in Turkey does not seem to follow an assertive but, more accurately, a pragmatic mode.57 While the state actively promotes the kinds of Islamic values that support nationalist goals and interest (as in citizenship education and military service), it selectively rejects others that oppose these interests (such as Islamist conscientious objection). As a result, it would be more appropriate to treat Turkish secularism as a sovereign modality of power, engaged with the persistent regulation of religion and religious subjectivities so that they become compatible solely with the interests of the secular nation state. While fractured with ambiguities and inconsistencies, it is this sovereign character of secular power that makes its regulatory capacities so pervasive and efficient. NOTES 1. The relevant clauses are Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ ccpr.aspx), and Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

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4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

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¨ zgu ¨r (http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/). For further details, see O Heval C ¸ ınar, “A View on International Implementation of the Right to Conscientious Objection, in Conscientious Objection: Resisting Militarized ¨ zgu ¨ sterci (New York: Zed Books, ¨ r Heval C Society, ed. O ¸ ınar and Cos¸kun U 2009, 183–98. ¨ cpınar, “The Criminality of Conscientious Objection in ¨ lya U Cf. Hu Turkey and its Consequences”, in Conscientious Objection, 242–56. Cf. “Turkey: Human Rights and the Armed Forces,” Report to the Human Rights Committee, 104th Session, December 2011, http://www.wri-irg. org/node/14403. ¨ l Altınay, The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Ays¸e Gu Education in Turkey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). As many have noted, men are expected to fulfill their military service before getting married, and in order to secure a long-term job. Altınay, The Myth (2004); Serdar S¸ en, Tu¨ rk Silahlı Kuvvetleri’nin Toplum Mu¨hendislig˘i (I˙stanbul: Su Yayinlari, 2011), Cynthia H. Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: ¨ lent University of California Press, 2000), Emma Sinclair-Webb, “‘Our Bu is now a Commando’: Military Service and Manhood in Turkey”, in Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East (London: Saqi, 2000), Pınar Selek, Su¨ru¨ne Su¨ru¨ne Erkek Olmak (I˙stanbul: Iletisim, 2011). ¨ mit Cizre Sakallıog ˘lu, ‘‘The Anatomy of the Turkish Military’s Political U Autonomy”, in Comparative Politics 29:2 (1997): 151–66, Gareth Jenkins, Context and Circumstance: The Turkish Military and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Pınar Bilgin, “Only Strong States Can Survive in Turkey’s Geography’: The Uses of ‘Geopolitical Truths’ in Turkey”, in Political Geography 26 (2007): 740–56. Comprehensive studies of this tradition include J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), Maurizio Viroli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Well-Ordered Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Phillip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), Iseult Honohan, Civic Republicanism (London: Routledge, 2002). ¨ stel, “Cumhuriyet’ten Bu Yana Yurttas¸ Profili”, in Yeni Yu ¨ sun U ¨ zyıl, Fu 24 April 1996; “Yurttas¸lık Bilgisi Kitapları ve Yurttas¸ Profili”, in Yeni Yu¨zyıl, 25 April 1996, “Makbul Vatandas¸”ın Pes¸inde (I˙stanbul, I˙letisim Yayinlari, 2004). See also Sam Kaplan’s comprehensive work, The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

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10. Noted also in Ays¸e Kadioglu’s “Citizenship and Individuation in Turkey: The triumph of Will over Reason”, in L’individu en Turquie et en Iran 26 (1998), http://cemoti.revues.org/34. 11. R. Claire Synder provides a detailed analysis of the citizen-soldier tradition. She notes that universal conscription has traditionally played “a key role in the constitution of republican citizenship, because it was military service that, despite its sometimes deadly purposes, instilled in individuals the virtues necessary for self-government aimed at the common good – selflessness, courage, camaraderie, patriotism, and civic virtue.” R. Claire Snyder, Citizen-Soldier and Manly Warriors: Military Service and Gender in the Civic Republican Tradition (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publisher, Inc, 1999, 8). According to this account, subjects (generally referring only to male individuals) become citizens not as a result of their shared bloodline or place of birth, but through engagement in civic and martial practices. In other words, the performance of martial acts and duties is not epiphenomenal to becoming a citizen, but a central condition of it. As we shall see, a similar pedagogical function is attributed to military practices in the Turkish context. 12. From Machiavelli to Rousseau, the prominent theorists of republicanism have signaled out the heroic soldier as the ideal model for the virtuous citizen. Consider Rousseau’s praise of Ancient Sparta, the beacon of virtuous citizenship. See in particular, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality”, in Basic Political Writings, trans. and ed. by Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company: 1987); and The Government of Poland, trans. and introduced by Willmoore Kendall (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985). For a very nice analysis of this aspect of Rousseau’s thought see, Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969, 1 –33). For Rousseau, Sparta represents a utopian society in which every aspect of life is modeled upon military principles of unity, discipline, dedication and sacrifice. In interpreting the Spartan image in this way, Rousseau was building upon a well-established tradition in Europe. As Elizabeth Rawson has shown, despite the cultural differences in the interpretation of this image, Sparta appeared as a model of a society where national defense was considered as the primary obligations of citizens and in which all aspects of life were organized according to soldierly necessities. Cf. Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 13. Rousseau, The Government of Poland, 7. ¨g ¨ nder, “Goltz, Milleti Mu ˘eler”, ¨ sellaha ve Kemalizmdeki Spartan O 14. Hasan U in Tarih ve Toplum 35 (2001): 45– 54. 15. Altınay, The Myth, 14. 16. Suavi Aydın notes that especially after the declaration of the Second Constitutional Monarchy in 1908, a German-admiring military

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17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey bureaucracy trained in the principles of Millet-i Musellaha took charge of the Ottoman Empire and set out to create a “military nation.” The military documents and journals published during the Balkan Wars (1912–13) as well as World War I reflect deep marks of this ideological orientation in the governing military cadres. Suavi Aydın, “The Militarization of Society: Conscription and National Armies in the Process ¨ kru ¨ of Citizen Creation”, in Conscientious Objection, 23 –5. See also, S¸u ˘ lu, Atatu¨rk: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton: Princeton Haniog University Press, 2011, 35). Altınay further demonstrates the continuation of Goltz’s ideas in the discourses of modern Turkish nationalism. The Myth, 14. Covering essential themes including the structures of government, nationalism, citizenship, militarily service and so forth, these textbooks provide valuable insights into the political imaginary of the ruling elite. ¨ rk’s adopted daughter, While the collection appeared as the work of Atatu Afet I˙nan, it was widely known that he co-authored these books. As Altınay shows, in the 1964 edition of the collection, Afet I˙nan admitted that the collection was co-authored by Mustafa Kemal: “I see it as my responsibility to set the historical record straight. Although these books ¨ rk’s ideas came under my name, they have been written based on Atatu and criticisms and the narrative style belongs solely to him.” Quoted in Altınay, The Myth, 14. Aydın, “The Militarization of Society,” 26. ¨ nder, “Goltz,” 51. For the modernizing function compulsory U conscription served, especially in the early years of the Republic, see Daniel Lerner and Richard D. Robinson, “Swords and Ploughshares: The Turkish Army as a Modernizing Force”, in World Politics 13:1 (1960): 19 – 44, and Serdar S¸en, Cumhuriyet Ku¨ltu¨ru¨nu¨n Olus¸um Su¨recinde Bir I˙deolojik Aygıt Olarak Silahlı Kuvvetler ve Modernizm (I˙stanbul, Turkey: Sarmal Yayınevi, 1996). Aydın, “The Militarization of Society,” 26. Altınay draws attention to the inclusion of racial and cultural dimensions to the state’s configuration of militarism after 1930, especially with the development of the Turkish history thesis. This revision seems to have resulted in the further popularization of militarism as an ethnic trait and cultural characteristic of the Turkish people. Altınay, The Myth, 26– 30. For the Ottoman army and martial spirit see Edward J. Erikson, Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (Connecticut, London: Greenwood Press, 2001); Mesut Uyar and Edward Erickson, A Military History of the Ottomans: From Osman to Atatu¨rk (Santa Barbara, Denver, Oxford: ABC CLIO, 2009). Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1961, 402). S¸erif Mardin notes, for example, especially against the Greek-led invasion on the Western Front, nationalists “capitalized on rural Muslims’ feelings of revulsion against the Greeks.”

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25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

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S¸erif Mardin, Religion, Society, and Modernity in Turkey (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 233. Jenkins, Context and Circumstance, 13. ¨ ksel, “Mobilizing the State, Monitoring the Countryside: Mobile Metin Yu Village Courses in Turkey,” 70. Notable exceptions include Serdar S¸en, Cumhuriyet, Sam Kaplan, “Din-u Devlet All Over Again: The Politics of Military Secularism and Religious Militarism in Turkey Following the 1980 Coup”, in International Journal of ¨ rbey, “Islam, NationMiddle East Studies 34 (2002): 113–27, Sinem Gu State, and the Military: A Discussion of Secularism in Turkey”, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29:3 (2009): 371–80. Ahmet Hamdi Akseki, Askere Din Kitabı, 3rd ed. (I˙stanbul, Turkey: Diyanet I˙s¸leri Yayınları, 1977). Kaplan, The Pedagogical State, 191. ¨ venc et al., Turk-Islam Sentezi (I˙stanbul: Sarmal Yayınevi, Cf. Bozkurt Gu 1991); Paul J. Magnarella, “State Politics: Desecularization, State Corporatism, and Elite Behavior in Turkey”, in Human Materialism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993, 87–114). Cf. Sam Kaplan, “Religious Nationalism: A Textbook Case Study from Turkey”, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25(3) (2005): 665–76. Kaplan, “Din-u Devlet,” 120. ¨ ge Go ¨ cek, “Introduction,” 14 –17. Fatma Mu Kaplan, “Din-u Devlet,” 121. For the records, see the website http://www.savaskarsitlari.org/arsiv.asp? ArsivTipID¼ 2. The following arguments are derived from the author’s interviews with Muslim COs between the winter of 2011 and summer of 2013. For a focus on the particular characteristics of Muslim COs’ resistance, see the author’s article, “Religious Militarism and Islamist Conscientious Objection in Turkey”, in International Journal of Middle East Studies. 47 (2015): 281– 301. ¨ ge Go ¨ cek, “Introduction,” 18. Fatma Mu The following depiction of Delice’s story, and the quotations from him, are based upon the author’s interview with Muhammed Serdar Delice on 2 July 2011. Cf. Mehmet Ali Birand, Shirts of Steel: An Anatomy of the Turkish Armed Forces (London, New York: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 1991). For regular updates concerning the mistreatment of conscripts and violation of rights in the barracks, see the website Soldiers’ Rights (Asker Hakları), http://www. askerhaklari.com/. ECtHR is an international court (based in Strasbourg, France), established in 1959 by the European Convention of Human Rights to hear cases involving alleged violations of human rights within the 47 member states

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41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey to the Convention. Reflecting the number of contracting parties, the Court has 47 judges. “Most applications before the Court are individual applications lodged by private persons, but a State may also lodge an application against another State Party to the Convention; this is called an inter-State application.” Cf. The European Court of Human Rights, “The ECHR in 50 Questions: Questions & Answers,” http://www.echr.coe. int/Documents/50Questions_ENG.pdf. “Turkey: Military courts recognize right to conscientious objection”, in War Resisters’ International, 1 May 2012, accessed 1 May 2012, http://www. wri-irg.org/node/15115. Rather than Article 3, referring to degrading and inhuman treatment, which had previously been the norm in CO cases. Cf. Mine Yıldırım, “Turkey: Selective progress on conscientious objection”, in Forum 18 News Service, 1 May 2012, accessed 1 May 2012, http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id¼1696. Yıldırım, “Selective progress.” Indeed, in accordance with this view, very shortly after this trial, a Turkish court passed a different verdict concerning a Jehovah’s Witness. After four years of imprisonment, a ¨ rmez, was granted the right to be Jehovah’s Witness CO, Barıs¸ Go exempt from compulsory military service on account of the pacifist character of his religion’s convictions. As opposed to Delice’s Islamic ¨ rmez’s objection to be truly objection, the secular state found Go religious. Ekin Karaca, “Mahkeme Delice’yi Degil Ama Vicdani Reddi Tanidi”, in Bianet, 9 March 2012, accessed 9 March 2012, http://www.bianet.org/ bianet/bianet/136810-mahkeme-delice-yi-degil-ama-vicdani-redditanidi. Yıldırım, “Selective progress.” In Islamic law, a mufti is a jurist expert on the Sharia. Yıldırım, “Selective progress.” Ibid. In making this argument, I am following the lead of scholars such as Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and Hussein Ali Agrama. Rather than approaching secularism as an institutional separation between religion and politics, these scholars promote conceptualizing it more broadly as a performance of sovereign power concerned with where to draw the line between religion and politics. This approach helps us see secularism’s ambiguities as part of the arbitrariness attending sovereignty in general. For a theoretically elaborate discussion of these issues see, Talal Asad, “Trying to Understand French Secularism”, in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), and Hussein A. Agrama, “Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State?” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (2010): 495–523.

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51. Importantly, this development coincided with the state’s need to generate consent for the increasingly more deadly and costly military operations pursued against the Kurdish guerillas in the southeast of Turkey. 52. Especially important in this transforming power dynamics between civilian and military power was the court case known as Ergenekon. ¨ rsoy, notes, it “has implicated hundreds of lower and higherAs Yaprak Gu ranking current and retired officers in attempts to stage coups against the ¨ rsoy, “Turkish ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP)”. Yaprak Gu Public Attitudes Toward the Military and Ergenekon: Consequences for the Consolidation of Democracy,” Working Paper No: 5 EU/5/2012, I˙stanbul Bilgi University, http://eu.bilgi.edu.tr/images/pictures/working_paper_5. pdf. For an analysis of the Ergenekon case and the controversies surrounding it, see Gareth H. Jenkins, “Between Fact and Fantasy: Turkey’s Ergenekon Investigation,” Silk Road Paper, August 2009, http://www.silkroadstudies. org/new/docs/silkroadpapers/0908Ergenekon.pdf. 53. To dispel rumors concerning the EU pressure on Turkey to legalize ˘an conscientious objection, in 2011 Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdog argued: “Conscientious objection has never been in our government’s agenda. The news items on this topic are simply speculations. Military service has been considered as a most sacred duty for this nation and land. There is a reason that we call our soldiers ‘Mehmetcik’, it means ‘little Muhammed’. We see military service as ‘the House of Muhammad’.”, ˘an, Hu¨rriyet, 22 November 2011, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdog accessed 22 November 2011, http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/ 19303120.asp. 54. In a recent poll conducted by Bilgi University and Konda Reseach Center in 27 different cities in Turkey, 81.8 percent of the participants opposed the right to conscientious objection. “Toplum bedelli askerlik ¨ s¸u ¨ nu ¨ yor?” Zaman, 25 November 2011, ve vicdani ret konusunda ne du accessed 25 November 2011, http://www.zaman.com.tr/gundem_toplumbedelli-askerlik-ve-vicdani-ret-konusunda-ne-dusunuyor_1206402.html. 55. “Turkey parliament passes anti-alcohol bill,” Al Jazeera, 24 May 2013, accessed 24 May 2013, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/ 2013/05/2013524101622966667.html.; “Turkey restricts alcohol sales despite criticism,” France 24, 9 September 2013, accessed 9 September 2013, http://www.france24.com/en/20130909-turkey-restricts-alcoholsales-shops/. 56. Constanze Letsche, “Turkish law will make legal abortion impossible, say campaigners,” Guardian, 1 February 2013, accessed 1 February 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/01/turkish-law-abortionimpossible; “Turkish government to act on accommodation housing ¨ rriyet Daily News, 5 November 2013, female and male students,” Hu accessed 5 November 2013, http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkish-

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government-to-act-on-student-homes-with-girls-boys.aspx?pageID¼ 238&nID ¼ 57392&NewsCatID ¼ 338 57. For a depiction of Turkish secularism as an assertive elimination of religion from the public sphere, see Ahmet T. Kuru, “Passive and Assertive Secularism: Historical Conditions, Ideological Struggles, and State Policies toward Religion”, in World Politics 59 (2007): 568–94.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Agrama, Hussein A., “Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State?” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (2010): 495 – 523. Akseki, Ahmet Hamdi, Askere Din Kitabı (I˙stanbul, Turkey: Diyanet Isleri Yayınları, 1977). Al Jazeera, “Turkey parliament passes anti-alcohol bill.” Accessed 24 May 2013. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2013/05/2013524101622966667. html. ¨ l, The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Altınay, Ays¸e Gu Education in Turkey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Asad, Talal, “Trying to Understand French Secularism”, in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006, 977–98). Aydın, Suavi, “The Militarization of Society: Conscription and National Armies in the Process of Citizen Creation”, in Conscientious Objection: ¨ zgu ¨ r Heval C Resisting Militarized Society, edited by O ¸ ınar and Cos¸kun ¨ sterci (New York: Zed Books, 2009, 23 –5). U Bilgin, Pınar, “Only Strong States Can Survive in Turkey’s Geography: The Uses of ‘Geopolitical Truths’ in Turkey”, in Political Geography 26 (2007): 740–56. Birand, Mehmet Ali, Shirts of Steel: An Anatomy of the Turkish Armed Forces (London, New York: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 1991). ¨ zgu ¨ r Heval, “A View on International Implementation of the Right to C ¸ ınar, O Conscientious Objection”, in Conscientious Objection: Resisting Militarized ¨ zgu ¨ sterci (New York: Zed ¨ r Heval C Society, edited by O ¸ ınar and Cos¸kun U Books, 2009, 183–98). Enloe, Cynthia H., Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). ˘an, Recep Tayyip, Hu¨rriyet, 22 November 2011. Accessed 22 November Erdog 2011. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/19303120.asp. Erikson, Edward J., Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (Connecticut, London: Greenwood Press, 2001). France 24, “Turkey restricts alcohol sales despite criticism.” Accessed 9 September 2013. http://www.france24.com/en/20130909-turkey-restrictsalcohol-sales-shops/.

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¨ rbey, Sinem, “Islam, Nation-State, and the Military: A Discussion of Gu Secularism in Turkey”, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29:3 (2009): 371–80. ¨ rsoy, Yaprak, “Turkish Public Attitudes Toward the Military and Ergenekon: Gu Consequences for the Consolidation of Democracy.” Working Paper No: 5 EU/5/201. I˙stanbul Bilgi University. http://eu.bilgi.edu.tr/images/pictures/ working_paper_5.pdf. ¨ venc, Bozkurt, et al., Turk-Islam Sentezi (I˙stanbul: Sarmal Yayınevi, 1991). Gu ˘lu, S¸u ¨ kru ¨ , Atatu¨rk: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton: Princeton Haniog University Press, 2011). Honohan, Iseult, Civic Republicanism (London: Routledge, 2002). Jenkins, Gareth H., Context and Circumstance: The Turkish Military and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). ——— “Between Fact and Fantasy: Turkey’s Ergenekon Investigation”, in Silk Road Paper, August 2009. http://www.silkroadstudies.org/new/docs/ silkroadpapers/0908Ergenekon.pdf. ˘lu, Ays¸e, “Citizenship and Individuation in Turkey: The triumph of Will Kadıog over Reason”, in L’individu en Turquie et en Iran 26 (1998). http://cemoti. revues.org/34. Kaplan, Sam, “Din-u Devlet All Over Again: The Politics of Military Secularism and Religious Militarism in Turkey Following the 1980 Coup”, in International Journal of Middle East Studies 34 (2002): 113–27. ——— “Religious Nationalism: A Textbook Case Study from Turkey”, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25(3) (2005): 665–76. ——— The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post1980 Turkey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). Karaca, Ekin, “Mahkeme Delice’yi Degil Ama Vicdani Reddi Tanidi”, in Bianet, 9 March 2012. Accessed 9 March 2012. http://www.bianet.org/bianet/ bianet/136810-mahkeme-delice-yi-degil-ama-vicdani-reddi-tanidi. Kuru, Ahmet T., “Passive and Assertive Secularism: Historical Conditions, Ideological Struggles, and State Policies toward Religion”, in World Politics 59 (2007): 568–94. Lerner, Daniel and Richard D. Robinson, “Swords and Ploughshares: The Turkish Army as a Modernizing Force”, in World Politics 13(1) (1960): 19–44. Letsche, Constanze, “Turkish law will make legal abortion impossible, say campaigners”, Guardian, 1 February 2013. Accessed 1 February 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/01/turkish-law-abortionimpossible. Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London, GBR, New York: Oxford University Press, 1961). Magnarella, Paul J., “State Politics: Desecularization, State Corporatism, and Elite Behavior in Turkey”, in Human Materialism, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993: 87 –114.

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Mardin, S¸erif, Religion, Society, and Modernity in Turkey (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006). Pettit, Phillip, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Pocock, J.G.A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Rahe, Paul A., Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). Rawson, Elizabeth, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Government of Poland (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985). ——— “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality”, in Basic Political Writings, trans. and ed. by Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987, 60–81). ¨ mit Cizre, “The Anatomy of the Turkish Military’s Political ˘lu, U Sakallıog Autonomy”, in Comparative Politics 29(2) (1997): 151–66. Selek, Pınar, Su¨ru¨ne Su¨ru¨ne Erkek Olmak (I˙stanbul: Iletisim, 2011). S¸en, Serdar, Cumhuriyet Ku¨ltu¨ru¨nu¨n Olus¸um Su¨recinde Bir I˙deolojik Aygıt Olarak Silahlı Kuvvetler ve Modernizm (I˙stanbul, Turkey: Sarmal Yayinevi, 1996). ——— Tu¨rk Silahlı Kuvvetleri’nin Toplum Mu¨hendislig˘i (I˙stanbul: Su Yayinlari, 2011). Shklar, Judith N., Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969). ¨ lent is now a Commando’: Military Service and Sinclair-Webb, Emma, “‘Our Bu Manhood in Turkey”, in Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East, edited by Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb (London: Saqi, 2000, 65– 92). Snyder, Claire R., Citizen-Soldier and Manly Warriors: Military Service and Gender in the Civic Republican Tradition (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publisher, Inc, 1999). ¨ cpınar, Hu ¨ lya “The Criminality of Conscientious Objection in Turkey and its U Consequences”, in Conscientious Objection: Resisting Militarized Society, ¨ zgu ¨ sterci (New York: Zed Books, ¨ r Heval C edited by O ¸ ınar and Cos¸kun U 2009, 242–56). ¨ stel, Fu ¨ sun “Cumhuriyet’ten Bu Yana Yurttas¸ Profili”, in Yeni Yu¨zyıl, 24 April U 1996. ——— “Yurttas¸lık Bilgisi Kitapları ve Yurttas¸ Profili”, in Yeni Yu¨zyıl, 25 April 1996. ——— Makbul Vatandas¸”ın Pes¸inde (I˙stanbul, Iletisim Yayinlari, 2004). ¨ nder, Hasan, “Goltz, Milleti Mu ¨ sellaha ve Kemalizmdeki Spartan Ogeler”, in U Tarih ve Toplum 35 (2001): 45–54. Uyar, Mesut and Edward Erickson, A Military History of the Ottomans: From Osman to Atatu¨rk (Santa Barbara, Denver, Oxford: ABC CLIO, 2009).

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Viroli, Maurizio, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Well-Ordered Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). War Resisters’ International, “Turkey: Military courts recognize right to conscientious objection.” Accessed 1 May 2012. http://www.wri-irg.org/ node/15115. Yıldırım, Mine, “Turkey: Selective progress on conscientious objection/”, Forum 18 News Service, 1 May 2012. Accessed 1 May 2012. http://www.forum 18.org/archive.php?article_id¼1696. ¨ s¸u ¨ nu ¨ yor?” Zaman, “Toplum bedelli askerlik ve vicdani ret konusunda ne du Accessed 25 November 2011. http://www.zaman.com.tr/gundem_toplumbedelli-askerlik-ve-vicdani-ret-konusunda-ne-dusunuyor_1206402.html.

CHAPTER 13

“Wake Up!” and “Nomad”: Competing Visions of Turkish and Kurdish Environmentalism in the Music of Tarkan and Aynur Ozan Aksoy

“My soul has become a nomad, neither a place can hide nor time efface my desolate side. For that which is distant, and my curiosity which flourishes near, my worries, yearnings, happiness and my burden, for all the places I have shouldered over time.” Aynur, from the liner notes of her 2010 album Rewend.

This chapter features two significant figures of Turkish and Kurdish popular music who are involved in environmental and political activism within the borders of Turkey, which has the largest, yet officially unrecognized, Kurdish population in the world. It is a comparative textual and contextual analysis of two songs and accompanying music videos, one written and performed by Tarkan, the most famous Turkish vocalist and pop music singer; and the other one by Aynur, one of the most popular Kurdish vocalists of the twenty-first century. The two singers generate alternate meanings within the cultural space their music creates as well as diverging interpretations while negotiating the new contested environmental spaces in Turkey. While one singer is willing to engage the existing inequities under Turkish rule that Kurds have to face on their ancestral lands in terms of environmental degradation, the other

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takes the neo-liberal shortcut, whitewashing and silencing such inherent sources of conflict and inequity. I specifically argue that Tarkan, in his Turkish song called “Uyan” (“Wake Up”) seeks to reach a local Turkish liberal audience with his musical localization, not at all foregrounding in his song the current Turkish – Kurdish conflict in Turkey. However Aynur, in her Kurdish song “Rewend” (“Nomad” in Kurmancıˆ-Kurdish) attempts to reach a larger, global audience with a subtler message of urgency she covertly delivers in her audiovisual representation. LARGER POLITICAL AESTHETIC CONTEXT AND ITS TRANSFORMATION In the last three decades, the people of Turkey have witnessed a gradual process of positive change in both the visibility and appreciation of cultural diversity. Musical expressions of multiple ethnic groups that form the fabric of society in Turkey, including Kurdish culture and music, have been widely circulated. Specifically, music has the capacity to create space for dialogue and understanding of the most crowded other in Turkish society, namely the Kurdish minority and its plight. The attitude of the Turkish state toward the demands of the Kurds has gradually shifted in the late 2000s, from the early period of Turkey’s state-sponsored violence and denial against the Kurds, who were defined as a “problem,”1 toward the recognition of Kurdish identity. In this chapter, I analyze one such new venue that extends beyond the themes of violence and denial: I study the politics of the environmental activism of a Kurdish musician and a liberal Turkish pop star. The Kurdish “Question.” To that end, it is relevant to further discuss the so-called “Kurdish Question” in order to provide the larger political and geographical context in general and the officially silenced violence in particular. The conflict and political violence in Turkey’s southeastern Kurdish regions, where the majority of the country’s approximately 15 million Kurds live, has been continuing for the last three decades. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK in Kurdish acronym) initiated an insurgency in 1984 with the conflict intensifying during the 1990s; it continues to haunt Turkey to this

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day. The Kurdish regions in Turkey were under emergency rule until the early 2000s and they are once again under emergency rule now. According to the Turkish authorities, the conflict has cost the lives of more than 40,000 people, including soldiers, PKK guerrillas and civilians. International human rights organizations estimate that around 3 million people have been internally displaced as part of Turkish state’s counter-offensive operations against the PKK. Those measures included the forced evacuation of nearly 4,000 rural ˘lu 2007). Pinar Kemerli’s chapter on this settlements (Zeydanlıog volume sheds light on the military response of the Turkish Republic to the Kurdish movement (see Chapter 12). The Turkish state has labeled the “Kurdish Question” as the central political space of republican unrest, one that is constantly contested by all parties, mainstream, marginal or in opposition. The formulation of the problem in such polarized terms created an urgency on the part of artists and musicians who aspired to be active in furthering reconciliation between Kurds and Turks. It is significant in this context that the singer Aynur publicly embraced her Kurdish identity. She did so by movig beyond the narrative of conflict and violence, participating instead as a cultural entrepreneur in the new transnational field of identity production and reproduction.2 Music and Attempts to Dissolve the Kurdish Question. Fatma ¨ ge Go ¨ c
ek and Burak Ko ¨ se, along with other contributors to this Mu volume, criticize the neo-liberal economic policies of the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (JDP, Justice and Development Party), which has been ruling Turkey since 2002 (see Introduction and Chapter 11 of this volume). In terms of their public relations campaigns, the JDP organizers have been extremely active and to a certain degree successful in conveying the message that JDP was in favor of ending the Turkish – Kurdish conflict. Indeed, in 2009, the JDP started the ‘democratic opening’ project to begin a dialogue around Turkey’s internal problems, starting with a conversation on Kurdish identity and civil and cultural rights. In 2010, the then prime minister of ˘an, met with some 60 musicians and Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdog composers to discuss the country’s democratic initiative. Here, ˘an gathered Turkey’s top performers and celebrities to talk Erdog

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about the government’s plans to end the civil war between Turks and Kurds by extending more cultural rights to Kurds. Turkey’s most famous singers, such as Sezen Aksu, Ajda Pekkan, ¨ l, I˙brahim Tatlıses, Emel Sayın, Ferhat Go¨c
er, and Mahsun Kırmızıgu were among the participants of this meeting. This relatively small development encouraged some peace-seekers to take action. The accelerated peace process (barıs¸ su¨reci) initiated a cease-fire between the PKK guerillas and the Turkish army in early 2013. In order to increase the public profile of the peace process, some political parties and religious organizations, including the ruling JDP in Turkey, started invoking the common religious bond between Kurds and Turks, most of whom are Sunni Muslim. What is significant in our context is the manner in which peace and reconciliation process also contained a cultural dimension engaging music. The recent endeavor of the exiled Kurdish musician S¸ivan Perwer engaging in a duet with the popular Kurdish singer ˘ an government’s Ibrahim Tatlıses marks the transition of Erdog policy of raising political support by utilizing culture; it drew on the popularity of those two famous singers, both of whom have extensive resumes full of accomplishments to further legitimate the peace process. This political and economic turn impacted not only the physical production of music, but also the distribution of both Kurdish and Turkish music. The cultural diversification lessened the previously hegemonic actors like PKK or the Turkish state over meaning production, allowing the ermergence of new actors. Different political parties or individuals with particular political agendas started to support various musicians and groups to further their causes as well. Hence, multiple voices with different musical, artistic, linguistic, and political features were accessible to audiences in Turkey for the first time. Compared to bipolar cultural milieu of 1990s between the PKK and the Turkish state, there are in 2010 more actors influencing the connection between the cultural and the political spheres. Along with such decentralization, there is an increased diversification of the locales of music produced and distributed thanks to Satellite TV, radios, and the Internet via the social media outlets. Music produced in Germany, Iran, or Iraq has

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now more ways to enter into the aesthetic world of Kurds and Turks, as well as into the soundscape of the cities. The contestation between the pro-Turkish government and proKurdish political alliances has been most evident in the state-run Kurdish TV channel of TRT-6, or TRT-S¸es¸ in Kurdish, that broadcasts the pro-government stand in Kurdish. The singers and players who appear on TRT-6 entrtainment programs have been paid well. Yet, since the channel had pro-government or anti-Kurdish nationalist ownership and management, many Kurdish musicians including some famous ones have also boycotted it. I visited the channel in 2012 to ¨ fer Akbal, the host of one of meet some of the musicians as well as Nilu their prime-time music shows. Ms Akbal complained about the state of Kurdish music and the absence of Kurdish musicians on the TRT-6. Some Kurdish musicians I interviewed interpret TRT-6 as part of a ploy to trick Kurds to embrace the Turkish government’s political views on the one side while lowering the legitimacy of PKK and other political parties as well as their cultural, intellectual, ideological, and political influence over Kurds on the other. Emergence of a New Transnational Field. Alongside the polarizing stands of the Turkish state and the PKK, the 1990s and 2000s were also marked by the formation of a new aesthetic in the transnational space and the new homelands among Kurds. Almost all the Kurdish musicians I interviewed for this essay have taken part in the new and constantly evolving aesthetic in Turkey as cultural entrepreneurs. Although some Kurdish musicians have occasionally resorted to militant and politically salient music, most attributed to themselves the political role of arbitrators or mediators between Kurds and Turks, for which they wrote many songs about peace and reconciliation. AYNUR AND TARKAN AS KURDISH AND TURKISH CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURS In the culturally strategic move beyond the theme of war and conflict between the Kurds and the Turks, it is necessary to explore new openings around new themes. Concerns about the environment provide such a new theme in that not only is this a global issue

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and concern, it also has significant reverberations expanding beyond the Kurdish – Turkish binary divide. I approach two music stars, one Kurdish and one Turkish, who focus on this theme of environmentalism as cultural entrepreneurs that have the potential to constructing the post-conflict joint space for Kurds and Turks in Turkey. I empirically focus on two songs where each comments on the site of Hasankeyf, a very ancient archaeological site with priceless artifacts that is under threat of being flooded to build a dam for the region. ˘an is the most popular Kurdish vocalist among her Aynur Dog peers. A worldwide-renowned singer and songwriter, she has emerged as one of the key figures in the Kurdish popular music scene in the early 2000s. Aynur’s 2010 album, Rewend (Nomad, in KumancıˆKurdish), has an overarching theme of preservation of tradition and historical monuments with the tone of an environmental activist. I provide a comparative textual and contextual analysis of Aynur’s Rewend album going beyond the lyrical explanations of songs dedicated to the preservation of historical sites. Although she has enjoyed popularity both among Kurds and Turkish progressives, on 16 July 2012, a large crowd of concertgoers booed and jeered her at the I˙stanbul Jazz Festival when she performed Kurdish songs. This cultural harassment was a stark reminder for all Kurdish musicians in Turkey to be cautious about Turkey’s political climate with respect to the so-called “Kurdish Question.” To that end, I place Aynur’s music within the context of understanding Kurdish popular musicians’ attempts in their albums and performances to represent and relate to cultural memory, space, history, environment, peace, and reconciliation over the past two decades. Tarkan, the Turkish megastar as they call him in Turkey, has embraced a leading role in environmental activism in Turkey since mid-2000s. He is among liberal environmental activists trying to stop the construction of the Ilısu Dam that will destroy the historic site of Hasankeyf. He accepted to become the public representative of one of the oldest environmental organizations in Turkey, called Dog˘a Derneg˘i (Society for Nature). He visited Hasankeyf and witnessed the devastating impact the Ilısu Dam would have on the natural and historical beauty of the site.

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FIGURE 13.1

Aynur. Rewend. Arista Music. 2010.

During the release of his single “Uyan” on Hasankeyf, Tarkan told reporters that “Our history in Turkey is disappearing. Unlike European countries, we do not keep our history alive. I am calling the politicians, the enlightened, and artists to listen to the voice of the nature.” He said he believed that anyone who loves this country should work tirelessly to protect the sites like Hasankeyf. Given the environmental focus of these two Kurdish and Turkish music stars on Hasankeyf, it is important at this juncture to study how the site became contested because the analysis of the contestation reveals how the forces of neo-liberalism privileging market forces, virulent nationalism favoring security concerns intersect with the political tension between the Kurds and Turks in Turkey.

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FIGURE 13.2

401

˘a Derneg ˘i. 2008. Tarkan. Uyan. Dog

HASANKEYF AS THE CONTESTED ENVIRONMENTAL SPACE Contemporary interpretations of changes in the ecosystem generate insights into the neo-liberal transformation of spaces and their ¨ r 2002, Turam 2013). discursive representations in I˙stanbul (Gu Studies that focus on sacred spaces under the threat of environmental destruction provide additional insights into how historical narratives around ruins connect to the concerns of local communities (Shinde 2011). The specific connection between environmental degredation and political conflict has been best explored in the context of Turkey by Leila M. Harris in her analysis of the water and conflict geographies of the GAP (Southeast Anatolia [Dam]) Project (Harris 2001). Another significant study (Ahdieh 2007) focuses on the Turkish– Kurdish water wars, providing the historical background of the disputes on the one side and the hydro-politics in Turkey and the

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Middle East on the other. The major issue generating such environmental contestation centers on development versus preservation. While the Turkish state claims that building dams would help the region prosper, the Kurdish community argues that the intent is to further deplete the natural and historic resources of ancestral Kurdistan on the one side, and to increase Turkish control and surveillance in the region on the other. It is significant in this context that the Turkish state has been intentionally constructing hydroelectric dams over lands where the PKK guerillas used to launch their attacks against the Turkish army. Ilısu Dam is one such project that, when carried out fully, will flood the town called Hasankeyf,3 a small town with 3,000 inhabitants located near the city of Batman in Turkish Kurdistan. Hasankeyf has become one of the prime foci of political mobilization by the environmentally conscious Kurds protecting their ancestral lands. The Turkish central government has proclaimed that the primary function of the dam system is to bolster the country’s counterinsurgency strategy against the PKK, which mobilizes from the border between Iraq and Turkey (Archeology News Network 2012). Similar to Laurent Dissard’s chapter in this volume on damming the Munzur Valley, I too want to highlight the connection between the Turkish state’s war with the PKK and the function of the GAP as a political development project (see Chapter 9). Strategically placed dams created by GAP will build a massive wall of water close to Turkey’s border with Iraq, and the terrain will become impassable by foot (Archeology News Network 2012). According to a recent Hu¨rriyet daily news reports, the planned dams were going to serve as buffers to prevent PKK guerillas from infiltrating Turkey’s borders with Iraq and Iran (www.hurriyet.com.tr). Once the construction of Ilısu Dam and all accompanying water allocation processes are completed, the whole city and the surrounding region will go under water, effectively washing away millennia of history. The most significant location, at least for the Kurds of the region as well as for Turkish environmental activists, has been the ruins of Hasankeyf, housing 8500-year-old archeological records of civilizations that once ruled there. Hasankeyf has been under such a threat for nearly two decades (Ronayne 2006).

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FIGURE 13.3

403

Location of Hasankeyf (Source: Financial Times).

In addition, the dam will also damage the ecology of the Tigris River valley that is the cultural, political and economic center of Kurdistan (BBC). There have been demonstrations in recent years by activists in Turkey and Europe to stop the construction of the dam. It is in this context that we need to evaluate the two 2010 music videos of Tarkan and Aynur, which were promoted in the publications ˘a Derneg ˘i, one the oldest preservationist organizations in of Dog ˘a Turkey (http://www.dogadernegi.net). In terms of Hasankeyf, Dog ˘i highlighted the twin dangers of the loss of the historical site Derneg and the destruction of the ecosystem. Activists who protested the construction of the dam believe that, ultimately, the Turkish state will prevail; the state employs water as a political tool to exert its power in this water-scarce section of the Middle East over the countries of Iraq and Syria as well as its own Kurdish citizens. One of the last efforts the activits have undertaken in the case of Hasankeyf was to apply for World Heritage status. Hasankeyf meets all the ten criteria UNESCO requires, including the possession of outstanding universal value with cultural or natural importance to be named a World Heritage site. Unfortunately, one of these criteria is the application of the local authorities in Hasankeyf, which the local government has refused to do (IPS News).

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FIGURE 13.4A and B Ruins of Hasankeyf, sealed off from the public, May 2014.4 (Photos by the author.) The most significant impact of building a dam on Hasankeyf would be the destruction of Kurdish culture. Indeed, in addition to resolving the issue connected with PKK guerillas in the short term, the Turkish state also stands to gain in the long term by wiping out one of the most valuable spaces of Kurdish history. As such the Turkish state would effectively erase and destroy what would be a “national treasure” of a future autonomous or semiautonomous Kurdish state. Some Hasankeyf residents I interviewed in May 2014 reflected these concerns; they states that the destruction of Hasankeyf would have thrre fundamental impacts: it would be an environmental disaster; it would erase an ancient site inhabited in the past and present mainly by Kurds; and it would increase the regional economic and political power of the central Turkish government. AN ETHNOMUSICOLOGICAL READING OF TARKAN’S “UYAN” AND AYNUR’S “REWEND” It is in this context that Aynur and Tarkan’s songs potentially serve as sites of resistance to the official discourse that the Turkish state is attempting to establish over Hasankeyf in particular and environmental concerns in general. In approaching these songs, like many other studies in ethnomusicology such as Martin Stokes’ works on Turkish music, I methodologically analyze the representations of iconic songs and their music videos as texts (Stokes 2010). I acknowledge that the process of “reading” a defined text-object

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engages the imagination and that the music videos that form distinct musical “objects” mediate their message thorough sonic, social, discursive, and visual modes. Music does not have to communicate something readily understood at all times, but in most instances it does. Musical practices and discourses thus express specific stances, ideas, messages, and emotions that can at the same time replicate and challenge the status quo in societies (Aksoy 2014). In order to highlight the strong bond between music and socio-cultural identity formation, I specifically rely here on feminist scholar Susan Friedman’s assertions in Mappings, which describes the process through which identities become narratives of formation as they travel through space and time (Friedman 1998). I thus approach the musical expressions and performances of Tarkan and Ayhur as cultural texts that represent the memories and narratives of people in Turkey and Kurdistan. As an ethnomusicologist, I choose to “read” these two albums and their music videos to reveal the inherent messages. In the particular case of global environmentalism, music has proven to serve as a significant space for ideological, political, and historical signifiers (Bastos 2012: 76). Here, I focus on two competing visions of Turkish and Kurdish environmentalism in contemporary Turkey in the context of the Kurdish uprising as expressed by two popular singers. Tarkan’s “Uyan” and Aynur’s “Rewend” are dedicated respectively to the environmental pollution and the preservation of the ancient town of Hasankeyf. Tarkan and “Uyan”. Tarkan’s “Uyan” music video5 depicts damages that environmental pollution has caused in Turkey and around the world. He calls for all to become conscious about the environmental pollution with the “Wake up, wake up, put your hand on ˘ a Journal’s special late.” On the Dog noted that “the people listening to this

refrain of his tune called your heart before it is too issue, Tarkan specifically song will hurt inside a bit.

‘Uyan’ aims to make people aware of the troubles nature faces and decide upon living consciously thereafter. This song is very special ˘ a 2008, 77). Here are to me because I composed it for nature” (Dog the lyrics:

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Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey

“Uyan” (Wake Up!) Verse I: Her eyes are like two fountains Calling out to us “Find a cure to this pain; Come and save me.” Like a broken-winged bird The poor thing cries blood It says “Ask your conscience before you throw me into the fire.” Refrain: Wake up wake up wake up wake up Put your hand on your heart Before it’s too late Don’t think the road is steep We can climb over mountains if we believe Final Section: Our place, country, soil Disappear forever Our house, home, only hearth Trickle away from our hands

Tarkan’s use of vocal features exhibits the characteristics of a Turkish male pop star. For this project, however, his composition and the lyrics exhibit folk music characteristics, almost like a Turkish folk tune, also called tu¨rku¨. He is a mainstream Turkish musician, and he seems to overlook the Turkish–Kurdish conflict in order to reach a wider swath of the population to mobilize a more easily accessible discourse for the liberal audience in Turkey. Among the first musical qualities this analysis highlights is that the rhythmic mode (usu¨l in Turkish) of the song is 5/8, which is also known as tu¨rk aksag˘ı, a common rhythmic mode associated with Turkish folk tunes. Tarkan starts the song with the sound of the bag˘lama (long-necked lute, the main folk music instrument), cura (lute), ney (end-blown flute), and then folk music drums. In that sense, it sounds like a folk song arranged in the 2000s with some additions, but sticking to the folk music sound. He explicitly emphasizes the land, the earth, Mother Nature, and all folk and rural elements in his sonic and visual expressions. Tarkan has incorporated folk music into his repertoire earlier in his career. He sang “Uzun Ince Bir Yoldayim” (“On the Long and Thin Path”), with the most

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˘ on his 2003 Dudu album. This prominent Alevi bag˘lama player Arif Sag As¸ık Veysel song has been one of the most popular Turkish folk music tunes of all times. I argue that his “Uyan” attempt is a continuation of his efforts in engaging with the public for an environmentalist agenda as part of his outreach to a larger audience. ˘ an’s Aynur and “Rewend.” The second music video is Aynur Dog “Rewend” (Nomad in Kurmancıˆ-Kurdish).6 Aynur is one of the most popular vocalists among her peers. She has emerged as one of the key figures in the Kurdish music scene in the late 2000s. Her 2010 album, also called Rewend, has the overarching theme of being constantly on the move without leaving a trace; it also contains a covert call for the preservation of Kurdish history and tradition through environmental activism. Although the song does not specifically address environmental pollution or the possible damages to Hasankeyf, Aynur does nevertheless establish an indirect connection to Hasankeyf in her music video accompanying the song produced by Fatih Akın, the famous Germany-based Turkish filmmaker. In the song, Aynur embraces the vocal style of traditional lamentation by Kurdish women with particular experimental vocal arrangements such as parallel vocals over drone singing. This song is placed first on her 2010 album with the same title on the cover; Aynure also wears the same costume on the record cover as well as in the accompanying music video that Akın directed. The arrangement of this Kurdish song is an excellent example of the new age or what is also known as world music sound, blended with some local musical ideas and practices. The music video is also a visual display of folk music instruments in use in Turkey and Kurdistan for centuries, with Aynur herself playing the bag˘lama for a couple of seconds. Here are the lyrics: “Rewend” (Nomad) The night is dark, pitch black. I have lost my senses; the darkness has made me insane. Like a parched thistle swept up by the wind, I am without place and time. Like cranes and a pair of wild ducks, I flew and alighted near the village.

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They say kisses of young girls are entrusted to their family’s homes. Like the prey of a merciless eagle, I was swept high and mercilessly plunged deep.

Aynur’s crane metaphor is striking in that she wants to engage with the most important station where cranes alight on their seasonal migration south: Hasankeyf in Turkish Kurdistan. Hence Aynur highlights the environmental significance of Hasankeyf to the seasonal migration of cranes on the one side and the sacred and historic symbolism of cranes to Kurdish history and culture on the other. Unlike Tarkan, Aynur also specifically underscores the violence directed against the Kurds by the Turkish state by turning them into “nomads” on their own ancestral lands. The cranes who have been inhabitants of these lands for millennia are likened to the Kurds, losing their ability to retain their natural habitat. Along with the difference in the tone of the environmental messages delivered by Tarkan and Aynur’s songs, there is also variation in the foregrounded sonic elements. FOREGROUNDED SONIC ELEMENTS IN THE TWO SONGS The two songs share thematic interruptions that take the form of a lament in Aynur’s and a free rhythmic bag˘lama solo in Tarkan’s song. While Aynur uses the Kurdish lament that she sings herself, Tarkan employs the rhythmic solo to bring in Orhan Gencebay, the current Turkish folk music idol, to initially sing along and then take over. In spite of these differences, however, both singers produce their songs in the cultural environment of I˙stanbul removed from the harsh realities of south-east Anatolia populated by Kurds. As such, what they represent through their songs could be imagined at best. Here are the sonic elements of both songs: Tarkan’s “Uyan” – Bag˘lama or Saz (long-necked lute) – Cura – Ney (flute) – 5/8 Rythym (Turkish Aksak) – Free-rhythmic bag˘lama solo Aynur’s “Rewend”

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– Piano – Bag˘lama and Mey – Upright Bass – Effective Use of Percussions – Parallel Vocals and Lamentation

In Aynur’s song, we hear piano and other Western instruments that create a world music sound along local musical instruments. Aynur’s vocal accompaniment is unique and powerful as she resorts to using the long and powerful folk tradition of Kurdish women’s lamentation. The symbolic allusions she makes in her lyrics to the environmental destruction of Kurds’ ancestral lands become clear in the music video, which is replete with visual queues and images of Kurdish historic sites in general and Hasankeyf in particular. Aynur reminds her audience about the danger of disappearance, like nomads leaving no trace behind, if inaction prevails. It is not accidental that Aynur wears the same costume on the album cover and the video, and that at the end of the video, she disappears near the graveyard and ruins of the hills of Hasankeyf. Her partnership on this music video with the German-born Turkish filmmaker and director Fatih Akın also demonstrates how it is possible to move beyond the Turkish – Kurdish divide the state fosters to join forces around issues that are important to both sides. Aynur and Akın had previously collaborated on Akın’s documentary/movie titled Crossing the Bridge. ¨ zcan of Radikal newspaper In an interview conducted with Nazan O on her album, Aynur stated that “One does not have to be from the region [with the implication that one does not have to be a Kurd] to appreciate seven millennia of civilization. The love, pain and all other human experiences of the countless communities who lived there are visible when you go there. You can feel it when you walk around the ruins.” She then continued to note: “I do not understand how people allow seven millennia of history to be destroyed for a dam project ¨ zcan 2010).” It also [the efficacy of which] will last only forty years (O becomes clear in her public statements that she and Fatih Akın share the same environmental sensibilities and values. Unlike Aynur’s song that contains a thematic interruption in the traditional form of a Kurdish lament, Tarkan instead engages in a

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free-rhythmic bag˘lama solo. These interruptions are placed to emphasize emotional contrast, achieving in both songs a particular level of textual meaning formation and sadness. I read this usage as yet another sign for the common sonic aesthetic heritage that both musicians have embraced. It is significant, however, that Tarkan’s free-rhythmic bag˘lama solo is performed by Orhan Gencebay, the idol of Turkish folk music. Gencebay represents Anatolian elements, all that is protected and revered by Turks. In the music video, Orhan Gencebay sits cross-legged on a deserted area and starts singing the refrain along with Tarkan. He then plays the freerhythmic bag˘lama solo. Tarkan is not only raising the awareness among Gencebay’s massive group of fans, but he is also getting the stamp of approval of one of the most respected folk musicians in Turkish music history. Comparatively, the musical meaning formation approaches of both Aynur and Tarkan as well as their arrangers and producers who shaped them come from the same cultural milieux in I˙stanbul, the center of cultural production in Turkey. Both artistic interventions can thus be considered to be a part of the “folk aesthetic” in that they both gaze into their environment from that particular standpoint. As such, I would argue that both Aynur and Tarkan converse with and reflect upon on an Anatolia through a musical mapping that is imagined. Yet, they convey two different imaginaries regarding the protection of environmental space. In the Kurdish imaginary, the issue of environmental protection expands beyond Hasankeyf to all the Kurdish ancestral lands currently colonized by the Turks. Turkish environmental protectionists view Hasankeyf as one site beyond multiple others belonging to their nation, without taking into consideration its local political, social, and historical implications for the people living there. I attempted to confirm my interpretation by interviewing Tarkan and Aynur in person, but failed to reach them. Hence what I present here is my cultural reading of signifiers and signified meaning-worlds embodied in particular spaces, in this case the visual and sonic association of the singers with the environment. I would argue that Aynur, in “Rewend,” projects a more global sound than Tarkan in “Uyan” because her vocals and embellishments reflect the world beat influence that is not overtly present in Tarkan’s

“Wake Up!” and “Nomad” TABLE 13.1

411

Comparison of audiovisual features of “Uyan” and

“Rewend” Criteria

Tarkan’s “Uyan”

Aynur’s “Rewend”

Musical Arrangement Sonic References

Turkish pop and folk ˘lama) (bag Turkish folk music elements 5/8 (Turkish aksak) Popular and Turkish folk

World beat (piano, bass, and Kurdish–Turkish folk) Lamentation and experimental vocals with urgency 4/4 Traditional Kurdish women þ experimental Kurmancıˆ-Kurdish Implications with respect to movement and nomads Covert

Rhythm/Meter Vocal Style Language Lyrical Context

Turkish Direct call for environmental action Overt

Delivery of Political Message Environmentalist Wake Up! Message Visual References Pollution, famine, drought and the Earth

Disappearance River, Hasankeyf, graveyard and darkness

song. Aynur sounds like she wants to reach the entire world through her voice while Tarkan merely aims to relate to the people in Turkey. In addition, while Aynur’s lyrics carry a subtle message, Tarkan’s call is overt for people of Turkey to “Wake up.” Aynur’s Rewend album was recorded in various studios in Germany and I˙stanbul with multiple arrangers and musicians. Tarkan’s Uyan CD single was recorded in I˙stanbul and arrangements made by a single ˘lu. Tarkan’s Uyan CD cover and liner arranger, namely Ozan C ¸ olakog notes do not have any English translations of words or phrases, which is another sign that his target audience is the Turkish people. Aynur’s album, on the other hand, has Turkish, Kurmancıˆ Kurdish, and English translations of lyrics and all other liner notes, indicating her aspiration to reach Kurdish, Turkish, and English-speaking audiences. ˘a All proceeds from Tarkan’s album went to the environmentalist Dog ˘i, and the single was released as an accompaniment for the first Derneg issue of Magazine Dog˘a. Like many other environmentalist activist musicians relying on folk music because of the inherent tradition embedded within of political protest, Tarkan too tapped into its populist spirit (Kahn 2013).

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It is also significant to discuss at this juncture that the most significant silence regarding Hasankeyf is the Turkish state’s official reason for building the Ilısu Dam, namely to contain the Kurdish PKK guerillas. The PKK has been so outlawed, marginalized, and stigmatized in Turkey today that no one can even mention its name for fear of being immediately branded a terrorist. It is therefore not surprising that neither Aynur nor Tarkan comment on the PKK connection that only the Turkish state feels powerful, privileged, and legally entitled enough to mention. Even though Aynur is in a much more precarious position as a Kurdish musician, she nevertheless publicly criticized the Turkish state for not protecting the environment and the historic sites in Hasankeyf. Tarkan avoided such criticism altogether by focusing not at the cause, but solely the consequence of the possible dam construction: he called every citizen into action to protect Hasankeyf without identifying the culprits. Ultimately, Tarkan’s lyrics are largely inclusive, but also anonymous whereas Aynur’s lyrics are symbol-laden and global in reach, addressing all those in the world who are suffering from oppression. It is difficult to gauge the impact of their songs, but Tarkan’s “Uyan” and Aynur’s “Rewend” music videos were viewed by 2.4 million and 1.6 million people respectively, based on the total of the ten accessible links for each music video as of 1 September 2014. CONCLUSION I sought to understand here Turkish and Kurdish musicians’ engagement with the themes of cultural memory, space, history, and environmental conservation in their albums and performances. I approached their musical expressions and performances as cultural texts that represent the memories and narratives of people in Turkey and Kurdistan. I specifically analyzed the two competing visions of Turkish and Kurdish environmentalism in contemporary Turkey through the songs of Tarkan’s “Uyan” and Aynur’s “Rewend.” Their stands became evident through their interpretation of Hasankeyf, an ancient historical site now inhabited by Kurds that is under the threat of being flooded by the Ilısu Dam the Turkish state has decided to build there.

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I read Aynur’s musical imagination as more global while I interpreted Tarkan’s as purposefully and overtly local, merely to reach out to the Turkish people as part of his liberal political activist stand. In addition, I argued that Aynur’s lyrics contained the subtle political message of Kurds’ being forced into “Nomad”ic status on their own ancestral lands while Tarkan simply issued a clear and direct call for everyone in Turkey to “Wake up,” without identifying the Turkish state as the culprit. There is no doubt that Tarkan’s Turkish, liberal, and populist stance and Aynur’s Kurdish background and experience in Turkey as a musician have informed the way each constructed the boundaries of their environmental activism. While Aynur’s approach foregrounded nature as the graveyard of humans, presumably comprising of mainly Kurds, Tarkan simply communicated a generic and vague idea, namely that the environment that should be protected. With his choices, Tarkan musically localized the sonic codes, articulating the dangers of environmental pollution for his Turkish audience. While Aynur took an overt political stance through her choice of Kurdish imagery in her music video, Tarkan avoided such a nuanced stand, overlooking the Turkish–Kurdish conflict that is so closely connected to environmental issues in general and in Hasankeyf in particular. He did so, I argued, in order to reach a much wider liberal audience through a more readily accessible discourse. In a didactic manner, Tarkan urged his Turkish audience to preserve the environment in general, notwithstanding the political dispute between Kurds and Turks which actually constituted the primary reason for the construction of the Ilısu Dam over Hasankey in the first place. In summary then, cultural production and reproduction through music comprises a significant site of meaning in contemporary Turkey. This site is also riddled with the tension between neoliberalism privileging market forces and security concerns on the one side and identity politics prioritizing human rights issues on the other. The stands that two very popular singers, one Kurdish and the other Turkish, take in relation to the possible environmental destruction due to the construction of the Ilısu Dam over Hasankeyf captured this tension empirically. In negotiating Hasankeyf, while one addressed the Turkish audience alone, silencing the inherent

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ethnic conflict, the other took a more nuanced and critical stand, highlighting the inherent connection between political and cultural space construction in contemporary Turkey. NOTES 1. It is significant to note in other historical writings on minorities that the oppressor has often termed the formation of a situation a “question,” with a pejorative connotation. Kurds, as this section shows, have a distinct identity and culture that is not at all in “question.” Nonetheless, the term seems to be embraced by everyone involved with the conflict. 2. This process is manifested in the songs that they wrote, performed, and disseminated from late 1990s through today. During the past 30 years, the Kurdish conflict became a national issue in Turkey, which created major difficulties for the articulation of Kurdish identity demands. Whenever Kurds have been mentioned in the public sphere by the Turkish media, the government officials, and many others, it has been in the context of the conflict. In the discursive connection has intimately attached Kurds of Turkey and elsewhere to political violence, separatism, or terrorism. 3. For a visual account, see the movie entitled “This was Hasankeyf” by the Italian director Tomasso Vitali. 4. In May 2014, I attended the meeting initiated by the call of a local organizing committee to all visual and audio artists to partake in the audiovisual documentation of the remnants of Hasankeyf. The project was successful in raising awareness among a larger international audience about the urgent action needed to document at least what is going to be lost. Photojournalists and other artists were among those gathered to help the local board to build an archive comprising paintings, films photographs, and oral history recordings with people who will soon have to leave their homes (www.hasankeyfmatters.com). I took the pictures in Figure 4a and 4b during that time. The pictures demonstrate how the Turkish ministry of culture, which has jurisdiction over Hasankeyf, sealed acces to the ruins citing security concerns. The locals told me that they thought this was undertaken to stop people form experiencing and remembering the natural and historical beauty of the site. 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼WNNYhEKG4AE. 6. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcydys_aynur-rewend-gocebe_music.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahdieh, Navid. 2007. “Turkey, Dams, Kurds, and Conflict Within and Between Countries.” ICE Case Studies, 200. http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/ kurd-water.htm.

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Aksoy, Ozan E. 2014. “The Music and Multiple Identities of Kurdish Alevis from Turkey in Germany.” Ph.D., dissertation, City University of New York. The Archaeology News Network: Dam threatens Turkey’s past. http:// archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2012/06/dam-threatens-turkeyspast-and-future.html (accessed 5 May 2014). Bastos, Rafael Jose´ de Menezes. 2012. “Musicality and Environmentalism in the Rediscovery of Eldorado: An Anthropology of the Raoni-Sting Encounter.” In Music and Globalization Critical Encounters, ed. White, Bob W. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. http://site.ebrary.com/id/ 10519687. Bes¸ikc
i, I˙smail. 1997. Tu¨rk Tarih Tezi, Gu¨nes¸ Dil Teorisi ve Ku¨rt Sorunu. Ankara: Yurt Yayınları. ˘a Yayınları: Ankara. http://www.dogadernegi.org/ Dog˘a Dergisi. 2008. Dog doga-dergisi-yayin-hayatina-basladi.aspx. Friedman, Susan. 1998. Mappings. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ¨ nes¸, Cengiz. 2012. The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey: from Protest to Gu Resistance. New York: Routledge. ¨ r, Berin. 2002. “Spatialisation of Power/Knowledge Discourse: TransformGu ation of Urban Space through Discursive Representations in Sultanahmet, Istanbul.” Space and Culture 5/3: 237–52. Hebdige, Dick. 2002. Subculture the Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Kahn, Richard. 2013. “Environmental Activism in Music.” In Music in American Life An Encyclopedia of the Songs, Styles, Stars, and Stories That Shaped Our Culture, ed. Edmondson, Jacqueline. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. http:// msvu.eblib.com/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p¼1524089. Kaya, Mehmed. 2011. The Zaza Kurds of Turkey: A Middle Eastern Minority in a Globalised Society. London: I.B.Tauris. ¨ zcan, Nazan. 2010. “Hasankefin Go ¨ c
ebesi” Radikal, 24 April 2010. http:// O www.radikal.com.tr/radikal2/hasankeyfin_gocebesi-993334. Ronayne, Maggie. 2006. “Archaeology against cultural destruction: the case of the Ilisu dam in the Kurdish region of Turkey”. Public Archaeology. 5 (4): 223–6. Solomon, Thomas. 2006. “Whose Hybridity? Whose Diaspora? Agency and Identity in Transnational Musics.” Paper presented at ICTM Colloquium at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, May 2006. ——— 2011. “Hardcore Muslims: Islamic Themes in Turkish Rap between Diaspora and Homeland.” In Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater: Artistic Developments in the Muslim World, ed. Karin van Nieuwkerk, 27 –54. Austin: University of Texas Press. Shinde, Kiran A. 2011. “‘This is religious environment:’ Sacred Space, Environmental Discourses and Environmental Behavior at a Hindu Pilgrimage Site in India.” Space and Culture 14/4: 448–63. Stokes, Martin.1992. The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Turam, Berna. 2013. “The Primacy of Space in Politics: Bargaining Rights, Freedom and Power in an I˙stanbul Neighborhood.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37/2: 409–29. van Bruinessen, Martin. 2000. Kurdish Ethno-Nationalism versus Nation-Building States: Collected Articles. Istanbul: Isis Press. ˘ lu, Welat. 2007. “Kemalism’s Others: The Reproduction of Zeydanlıog Orientalism in Turkey.” Ph.D., Dissertation, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.

DISCOGRAPHY Aynur. Hevra. Sony Music. 2014: Turkey. Aynur. Rewend. Arista Music. 2010: Turkey. ¨ zik. 2008: Turkey. Tarkan. Uyan. Hitt Mu ¨ zik. 2003: Turkey. Tarkan. Dudu. Hitt Mu

Index

Adana, 178, 287, 288 Adanalı, Yas¸ar, 363 Adıyaman, 291 Adrianople, 100, 122n27

Aksu, Sezen, 379 al-Aqsa Mosque, 93 Albania, 44 Alevi Kurds, 292–5, 301, 304–5,

Afghanistan, 30 Africa: and colonialism, 46, 47; and migration, 30, 319, 323, 326 ˘ca, Mehmet Ali, 186, 198n137 Ag

307, 313n54 Alexandretta, 41 – 2, 51, 53, 55 Allianoi, 303 Alonso, Ana Maria, 6 ˘an, Abdulla, 142 Alpdog

agriculture, 10; and the economy, 123n38, 136, 268, 272, 298, 322; and the environment,

¨ kru ¨ , 347 Alsan, S¸u Anafartalar Battle, 82 Anand, Nikhil, 306

262, 265, 268, 299; and irrigation, 268, 274, 277n28; and land use, 267 Ahmet Hamdi Akseki Camii, 17 ¨ fer, 398 Akbal, Nilu

Anslinger, Harry J., 167– 71, 173, 180, 183 anti-militarism, 367, 368, 371, 375– 6, 380, 381– 2

Akc
ay, Faik, 138 Akın, Fatih, 407, 409 AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi). See JDP (Justice and

Antioch, 28, 41, 49 – 51, 55 Arcan, Vasil, 175, 182 ¨ lent, 93, 121n9, Arınc
, Bu 127n85 Arpaio, Joe, 184

Development Party) aksak, 408, 411 Aksaray, 320, 328, 335

Arslan, Sabahat, 146 Astorga, Luis, 161 ¨ rk Dam, 299 Atatu

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey

418

¨ rk, Mustafa Kemal: and the Atatu foundation of the Turkish Republic, 62 – 3, 164, 181, 370; and the Sanjak, 42; and secularism, 50; speeches of, 41; symbolic importance of, 105 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 100 ¨ n, Kemal, 164, 169, 177, Aygu

Batman, 326, 334, 402 ¨lent, 19 Batuman, Bu Bayar, Celal, 145, 287 ˘, Mustafa Kemal, 21 Bayırbag bazaars, 25, 114, 319; Alipas¸a Bazaar, 109, 113; Bedesten ¨ rekko ¨y Bazaar, 116; C ¸o Bazaar, 113, 125n67

181 –3 ˘an), 31, 303, 394, Aynur (Dog 399, 407; and environmental

BDP. See Peace and Democracy Party ˘lu, Pınar, 342 Bedirhanog Beirut, 168, 184

activism, 399, 404; and historic preservation, 399, 404, 405; intended audience, 395, 396, 399,

Bender, Thomas, 234 Berger, Heiden, 285 Berlin-Wedding (district), 207, 213, 218, 219, 221

409, 411, 412; musical expressions, 407, 408 – 9, 410 – 11; music video, 403, 407, 409; politicization,

Bes¸iktas¸, 350 Beyazid mosque, 218, 221 Beyazıt, 323, 327 ˘lu, 165, 284 Beyog

408, 412 – 13. See also Rewend (album); Rewend (music video); “Rewend” (song) Ayvalık, 96

Bey, Turhan, 104– 5, 124n48 biodiversity, 262, 267, 276n14, 298 Birch, Kean, 5 Bitlis, 138, 141, 144, 146, 326,

Azerbaijan, 367 Babb, Sarah, 7 bag˘lama, 406, 407, 408, 409, 410

152n28 Bitlis Birlik, 138 Black Sea, 100, 261, 320, 325 Blad, Cory, 16

Balkan, Erol, 16 Balkan, Nes¸ecan, 15 Balkans, 80, 97, 100, 102, 107, 113, 114

BNDD. See Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, US Boulder Dam, 289 Bozarslan, Hamit, 144

Balkan Wars, 44, 65, 100, 122n31, 375, 387n16 Bas¸bakanlık Toplu Konut I˙daresi ˘ı. See TOKI Bas¸kanlıg

Bozkurt, Umut, 17 Britain. See Great Britain Bulgaria, 44, 97, 113– 14, 123n43, 165

Index

419

Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, US (BNDD), 183, 184, 185

CIA (US Central Intelligence Agency), 162, 169– 70, 179– 80, 186

Bursa, 30, 257, 259

C ¸ ınar, Alev, 234, 235 citizen-soldier, 368, 369, 382, 385n11 civic republicanism, 368, 371 ˘lu, Ali, 136 C ¸ obanog ˘lu, Ozan, 411 C ¸ olakog

˘lar, Ays¸e, 206 C ¸ ag ˘lar, Hu ¨ seyin, 183 C ¸ ag Caliphate, 135 C ¸ ambel, Halet, 290 C ¸ amlıca Camii, 17 Campaign to Save Munzur, 292, 301 – 6

collective identity, 43, 48, 51, 54– 5, 209 communism, 168, 170, 187, 374

C ¸ anakkale, 84, 96, 102, 103, 375 C ¸ andır, Riza, 169 C ¸ ankaya Kavakllıdere (district),

Communist Party of Turkey, Marxist-Leninist (TKP-ML), 294, 305 communists, 164 –5

70, 74 – 5 ¨ s¸ku ¨ : closure of, C ¸ ankaya Ko 76; location, 62, 82; pre-republican history, 63,

concrete, 285– 6, 287 Congress of Union and Progress (CUP), 65, 66, 82 Connell, Raewyn, 10

64; republican uses, 63, 74. See also C ¸ ankaya Kavakllıdere (district) ¨ rk, Behc
et, 186 Cantu Castro, Fidel, 180

Conscientious Objection Association, 376 Constantinople, 26, 45, 100 corruption: and the drug trade, 177; and informality, 343,

C ¸ atlı, Abdullah, 186, 198n137 ˘lu, Erbatur, 344 C ¸ avus¸og Celıˆl, Celıˆleˆ, 134 Ceylan, Rauf, 206, 221, 224

351; and the JDP, 31, 342, 363; and liberalism, 343; and neo-liberalism, 27, 342, 343; under the Republic, 67;

Chile, 7, 8, 15, 32n5 China, 168, 180, 119n39 Christianity, 71; Armenian, 49, 325; in Germany, 209,

and urban planning, 342, 363 coup (1913), 65 coup (1960), 181– 3, 190n27 coup (1980), 11, 213, 216, 291,

212; Greek, 49, 52, 193n68, 325; under the Republic, 62, 144, 173, 322; and the Sanjak, 49

373, 381 courthouses, 76, 232, 233, 234, 238, 252; and feminist legislation, 249; and gender,

420

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey 245, 246; as a state space, 237; and technology, 236. See also I˙stanbul Courthouse

267; and the state, 268, 270, 272, 276n12 Dikmen (district), 70, 78

Crimea, 102 Crossing the Bridge, 409 Crowe, Russell, 112 C ¸ ubuk-1 Dam, 285, 286, 287 C ¸ ubuk River, 71. See also

Dilovası, 262 Dink, Hrant, 239 Directorate General of Foundations, 92 – 3, 96, 115, 119n2

C ¸ ubuk-1 Dam cultural entrepreneurs, 398 – 9 cultural production, 410, 413 CUP. See Congress of Union and

Directorate of Public Security (DPS), 163, 164, 165, 166, 183, 185 Diyarbakır, 21 –2, 83 – 4, 96, 141,

Progress cura, 406, 408 Czechoslovakia, 54

186, 326 ˘a Derneg ˘i (Society of Dog Nature), 399, 403, 411 Drug Enforcement Agency, US

Dados, Nour, 10 Damascus, 48, 49, 52 – 53 Damming, 297 – 9, 300– 1, 305, 402

(DEA), 162, 185 DSI˙, Devlet Su I˙s¸leri (State Hydraulic Works), 288, 293, 297, 301 – 2, 305,

Delice, Muhammed Serdar, 377 –80 ¨ leyman, 288, 289, 290 Demirel, Su ¨ lle, Necdet, 209 – 10 Demirgu Demirtas¸, Aslıhan, 286

309n16 Dudu, 407 Duisburg, 296, 224 Duruer, Hasan, 92, 115, 120n3 Duvoux, Nicolas, 9

Democratic Party (DP), 166, 175, 182, 287 Demokrat Parti. See Democratic Party

ecology, 259, 298– 9, 304, 305, 351, 403 ECtHR. See European Court of

Derbent, 359, 361 Dersim. See Tunceli Dersim Mountains, 292 Dersim Rebellion, 55, 294,

Human Rights Edirne Chamber of Commerce (ETSO), 94 EEC. See European Economic

296, 311n33 Dervis¸, Kemal, 342 developmentalism, 275, 275n5; and environmentalism, 262,

Community Efendi, Bulgurzade Tevfik, 64, 65. See also Kasabian, Ohannes

Index Eglitis, Daina, 8 Egypt, 9– 11, 15 Ehrkamp, Patricia, 206 ˘, 83, 141, 289, 308n4, Elazıg 309n19 Elaziz, 144– 5 ¨ r, Banu, 16 Eligu El-Sayed, Mohammed, 210 ˘lu, Hu ¨ seyin, 171– 2, 184 Eminog ¨ nu ¨ (district), 319 Emino Enez, 114– 15 environmentalism, 307, 399, 405, 412 environmental protection, 258, 263 –4, 267, 272, 274, 410 Erdinc
, Cengiz, 162 ˘an, Recep Tayyip, 306, Erdog 361, 381, 397; and authoritarianism, 2, 14; and nationalism, 25, 26; and

421

European Economic Community (EEC), 289 European Union (EU) accession process, 13; and border policies, 95, 96, 114, 117; and environmental policies, 263, 264; and minority policies, 248, 253n36; and women’s rights, 263, 264 Evros River, 94, 101 familiarity, 326, 327, 328, 336 Federal Bureau of Narcotics, US (FBN), 162, 166, 167, 169, 173, 179 feminism, 11, 244, 247, 375, 405; and activism, 244, 247, 249, 253n35; and the judicial system, 247 – 8,

public appearances, 18, 232, 396 Eren, Ali, 176, 177, 178, 180, 183 Eris¸, Alaattin, 177 – 8

249– 52 Ferguson, James, 236 fezzes. See hats Fiedler, Harold, 179 filth, 330, 333, 334, 335, 336

Erzurum, 141, 146, 147 ¨ naydın), 64 Es¸ref, Rus¸en (U Ethiopia, 328 ethnomusicology, 404 – 5

fishing, 265, 268, 270 – 2, 273 flexibility, 330, 332, 333, 335, 336, 337 formalization, 344, 345

Etlik (district), 70, 76, 78 Euphrates River, 20, 291, 292, 298, 310n25 European Convention on

Foucault, Michel, 240 Fourcade-Gourinchas, Marion, 7 France, 7– 9, 14 –15, 42, 45,

Human Rights (ECHR), 367, 379 European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), 367, 378

50, 285 Free Republican Party (Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası), 135 Friedman, Milton, 4

422

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey

Friedman, Susan, 405 frontier city, 98, 100, 102, 113, 118

Gramsci, Antonio, 260 Grand National Assembly, 41, 42, 166, 185

Gabay, Mois, 116 – 17 Galata, 165 Gambetti, Zeynep, 17, 20 –2 GAP (Gu¨neydog˘u Anadolu Projesi,

Grand Turkey, 259, 288 Grey Wolves, 198n137, 209, 211 Great Britain, 7– 8, 11, 14 – 15, 45 Great Powers, 45, 47, 61 Greece, 44, 97, 101, 113– 14,

Southeastern Anatolian Project), 291, 401, 402 Garmir Vank Monastery, 71 Gaziantep, 21, 83 – 4, 177 Gedikpas¸a, 319, 320, 322, 323, 334 Gencebay, Orhan, 408, 410 General Directorate of Land

287, 329 Guinea, 327 Gupta, Akhil, 236 Gururani, Shubhra, 351 ¨ lhane Military Medical Gu Academy (GATA), 377 ¨ ltekin-Karakas¸, Derya, 16 Gu ¨ nes¸, Cengiz, 20 Gu ¨ r, Berin, 117 Gu

Office, 353 Geneva, 42, 43, 50, 52 Georgia, 327 Germany, 29, 46, 204, 285,

˘a Mansion, 110 Hafızag Hagia Sophia, 115, 117, 127n85

397, 407 Gezi Park, 2, 14, 19, 239, 302, 361 –2 Ghertner, Asher, 359 Gieryn, Thomas, 7

Halbori, 296 Haldar, Piyel, 239 Halid, Refik (Karay), 72 Halkevleri (People’s Houses), 50, 52

Girls’ Art Institute in Elaziz (Elaziz Kız Sanat Enstitu¨su¨), 144 –5 Global South, 10, 343, 344,

Halm, Dirk, 205 Hapsburg Empire, 46 – 7, 55 Harris, Leila, 291, 401 Harrison Act, 167

345, 348 ¨ c
ek, Fatma Mu ¨ ge, 94, 112, Go 117 –18, 119, 205, 242 ¨ c
er, Ferhat, 397 Go

Harvey, David, 2, 4, 99 Harvey, William K., 179 Hasankeyf, 303, 399– 401, 401– 4, 407 – 9, 410,

Goltz, Baron von der, 369, 370 ¨ lyazı, 271 Go Gootenberg, Paul, 161 Gorgas, Jordi Tejel, 24

411– 12, 413 Hatay, 42, 51, 96 hats, 49 – 50, 52 Hennaed Mehmet, 374

Index

423

HEPP. See Hydro-Electric Power Plants highways, 261, 306, 350, 362

Iran, 134, 168, 171, 184, 198n38, 208, 209, 397 Iranian Revolution, 208 – 9

Hıncal, Naki, 177, 194n89 ¨ nu ¨ , 68, 72, 73, 76, 82, 107 Hisaro Holzmeister, Clements, 74 Hu¨rriyet, 205, 207, 213– 17, 218, 220, 221, 223

Iraq, 66, 397, 402, 403 irrigation, 257, 265, 268 – 9, 273– 4, 277n28, 298 Iskenderun. See Alexandretta Islamic law, 135, 376, 388n47 ¨ y, 288 Islamko

hydroelectricity, 286, 287, 290, 291 Hydro-Electric Power Plants (HEPP), 282, 292; early usage of, 286 –7; environmental impact of, 298; and the Keban dam, 289; political implications of, 292, 300, 301; and protest, 303 – 5; in the Tunceli District, 293, 299 Ibrahim, Tahsin, 285 identity politics, 55, 307, 413 iftar dinners, 216– 17 Ilısu Dam, 299, 399, 402, 411, 412, 413

Isparta, 288 Israel, 103 – 5, 115, 124n48 Istinye Park, 18 Italy, 45, 175, 180– 1, 248 I˙nan, Afet, 370, 386n18 I˙ncirlik (air base), 175, 288 ¨ nu ¨ , I˙smet, 82, 145, 182 I˙no ˙Istanbul Courthouse, 29, 232, 233, 252; description of, 234, 238, 239, 240; and feminist activism, 25 – 51; as a gendered space, 244– 7; as a government space, 242– 4; internal spaces of, 239– 40; and modernity, 238– 9; restricted spaces of,

imams, 213 IMF. See International Monetary Fund Independence (Turkish). See War

240– 2. See also courthouses I˙stanbul Jazz Festival, 399 I˙zmir, 12, 21, 83, 107– 8, 172

of Independence India, 168, 306 industrial zones, 259, 267, 272, 274, 275, 277n25

Jara Gola C ¸ etu, 301 – 3 JDP (Justice and Development Party): and conscientious objection, 381, 382, 383;

Inter-American Development Bank, 5 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 5, 8, 13, 15, 16

and corruption, 30 – 1, 341, 342; and the environment, 351; establishment of, 13; and Islam, 14, 16, 18, 31,

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey

424

117; Kurdish relations, 13 – 14; and the legal system, 29, 233, 236, 242– 4, 247 –8, 356– 8, 363; and modernization, 1, 17; and neo-liberalism, 13 – 14, 16 – 18, 25, 96, 117, 346 – 7; and the Ottoman legacy, 26,

Kilis, 165, 177 Kiraz, Mehmet Selim, 242 Kırklareli, 102, 103 ¨ l, Mahsun, 397 Kırmızıgu Knight, Paul, 178 Koc
er, Banu, 16 Konaktepe Dam, 300, 305, 311n29, 312n44

112, 118, 361; and urban policies, 118, 232, 342, 346, 356, 362; and violence, 17 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 378,

Koraltan, Refik, 164, 166, 189n16 Korankurse (Qur’an instruction courses), 218 – 19

388n44 Johannesburg, 298 Jorgenden, Joost, 20, 24 Justice and Development Party.

Koranschule (Qur’an schools), 208; and cultural events, 212, 221, 224; and extremism, 211; and generational

See JDP Kadırga (neighborhood), 324 Kahraman, Tayfun, 349

experiences, 218, 219, 221– 3; negative media representations of, 208 – 10, 220; positive media

Kaliningrad, 97 Kalkavan, Nazım, 171– 2 Kalkınan Tatvan, 138 Kaplan, Sam, 375 ˘ac
, 101, 124n57 Karaag

representations of, 210 Korean War, 165 Kunze, Walther, 285 Kurban, Dilek, 20 Kurdas¸, Kemal, 290

Karacabey, 267 Kasabian estate, 66, 71, 74, 82, ¨ s¸ku ¨ 63. See also C ¸ ankaya Ko Kasabian family, 63, 65 – 7, 70

Kurdish Workers’ Party. See PKK Kurdistan, 13, 15 Kurmancıˆ Kurdish, 395, 407, 411 Kurt, Kemal, 219– 20

Kasabian, Ohannes, 65, 66 Kasımpas¸a Military Prison, 377 Kas¸lı, Zeynep, 61 Kasparian, Alice Odian, 72

Kurtulus¸ (Liberation) Mosque, 83

Keban Dam, 289 – 91, 292, 293, 299, 309n19 ¨ ren (district), 70 Kec
io Kellogg-Briand Pact, 45

LaGuardia, Fiorello, 167 Laleli, 319, 322, 323, 324, 325, 330 Lamont, Michele, 7, 9

Labernas, Galip, 176, 180, 181, 183, 184

Index

425

Larkin, Brian, 285, 288 Latin America, 161, 180 Latvia, 8

Marmara Sea, 261, 320 Marseilles, 184 Marshall, Jonathan, 161 – 2

law, Islamic. See Islamic law Law on Foundations, 115 Law of Nations, 45 Law on the Reestablishment of Order, 135

Marshall Plan, 287, 309n15 Massey, Doreen, 245 McCully, Patrick, 290 memory: collective, 81, 107; cultural, 399, 412; selective,

Law on the Unification of Education, 135 Laz (ethnicity), 171, 173, 178 League of Nations, 44, 167; and

104, 105, 106; and space, 60, 115; urban, 94, 95, 97, 104, 106, 118 Menderes, Adnan, 166, 175,

nationalism, 42, 43, 48; and the Sanjak, 42, 49, 50 – 2, 53 – 4; and territorial settlements, 45 – 6, 47;

182, 287 Menderes Island, 288 Mercan dam, 305 Merrill, Fredrick, 176

and Wilsonianism, 45 Lebanon, 171, 178, 179 Le Ray, Marie, 303 Liberation Army of Turkey’s

Mexico, 7, 8, 15, 188n7 Mihran Hanım Mansion, 111– 12, 118, 124n49 mines, 303, 362

Workers and Villagers (Tu¨rkiye I˙s¸c
i Ko¨ylu¨ Kurtulus¸ Ordusu, TIKKO), 305 Libya, 210 Lirtik, 296

Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 110, 115 Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, 300 Ministry of Environment, 258,

Logan, John, 7

265, 267 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 88n15, 115, 126n79 Ministry of Industry, 267

madrasas, 135, 150n11 Malatya Military Court of Appeals, 378, 379, 380 Mamak Military Prison, 377 mansions, 98, 107, 112, 118, 125n58, 231, 284. See also ˘a Mansion; Mihran Hafızag Hanım Mansion Mardin, 23, 141, 326, 328 Marmara (region), 359

Ministry of the Interior, 164, 177 Ministry of National Education, 138, 139, 141 Ministry of Religious Affairs, 213 Mitchell, Timothy, 236 Mobile Village Courses (MVC), 133, 134; curriculum, 138–40; and gender, 136,

426

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey 141, 145–7; and knowledge production, 134–5; and Kurdish ethnicity, 136; and

mobility, 138; and peasants 135–6 modernization, 261, 272; 18th-century, 135; and the environment, 258, 261 – 4; and homogenization, 82; and the Republic, 144, 148, 235, 259; Western, 117, 133, 135, 260 – 1

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 160, 175, 186, 289 Networks of Dispossession, 353 New York, 10, 167, 180, 184 ney, 406, 408 Neyzi, Leyla, 107 Nicolson, Harold, 46 Nigeria, 285, 326 North Atlantic Treaty Organization. See NATO

Moldova, 326, 330, Molnar, Virag, 7 mufti, 379, 388n47 ¨ ller, Liselotte, 212 Mu

North Caucasus, 102 Nureddin, Vala, 73

Munzur Nature and Culture Festival (Munzur Dog˘a ve Ku¨ltu¨r Festivali), 303 – 4 Munzur River, 292– 3, 296, 298,

Office of Strategic Services, US (OSS), 167, 169 Okmeydanı, 359 ¨ ktem, Kerem, 23 – 4 O

301 –2, 305, 310n29 Munzur Valley, 292 – 5, 297, 299, 301 –4, 307, 311n30 Munzur Valley National Park, 282, 292 – 3, 301, 206

Oman, 14 Ong, Aihwa, 10 Oppenheim, Lassa, 44 Ottoman Empire, 55, 133, 167, 371; disintegration of,

Murat River, 292 Mustafakemalpas¸a, 267 MVC. See Mobile Village Courses

42, 46, 61, 101, 165, 259, 285; governing practices of, 43, 100; legacy of, 50; policing in, 163; religiosity

Nadi, Yunus, 50 National Hearts, 374 nationalism: Kurdish, 23; postwar; 42, 54; and religion, 375, 380, 382; secular, 235, 260; separatist, 61, 65; and space, 6, 23; Turkish, 209, 214, 294, 370, 400

Occupy Wall Street, 9

of, 26, 188; territories of, 41, 46 Orantes (Asi) River, 50 Orestiada, 113 Ovacık, 292 ¨ zal, Turgut, 12, 119n2 O ¨ zcan, Nazan, 409 O ¨ zsayar, Ahmet, 178 O

Index

427

Pahlavi, Farah, 134 Pahlavi, Muhammad Riza, 134 Pakistan, 30, 185, 198n38

privatization, 13, 27, 349, 361; of education, 12, 16; of the environment, 261; as

Paris Peace Conference, 45, 47. See also League of Nations Partiya Kerkeren Kurdistan. See PKK Pasha, Talat, 100

neo-liberal restructuring, 4, 5, 11, 231; of urban lands, 344, 347, 349, 350 protest, 60, 274, 411; in Dersim, 294; at the I˙stanbul

Peace and Democracy Party (Barıs¸ ve Demokrasi Partisi, BDP), 302 Pekkan, Ajda, 379

Courthouse, 238, 239, 242, 252; environmentalist, 282, 302, 303, 312n44, 364n23, 403; at Gezi Park, 302,

Pektas¸, Abdullah, 185 People’s Houses. See Halkevleri Persia, 45 Perwer, S¸ivan, 397

361– 2; by lawyers, 242; against neo-liberalism, 18; by students, 182; by women, 253n35 ¨ lu ¨ mu ¨ r River, 292, 301 Pu

Pierce, Franklin, 44 PKK (Partiya Kerkeren Kurdistan), 294, 397, 398, 404, 411 –12; conflict with Turkish Armed Forces, 108, 122n22, 293, 295, 368, 395 –7, 402; formation of, 13; and the Ilısu Dam, 402, 404, 412; and transnationalism, 21 pogroms, 61, 103, 104, 177, 322 Poland, 54 pollution, 273, 274; agricultural, 262, 274; environmental, 405, 407, 413; impacts of, 262, 272, 276n14; industrial, 257, 271, 272, 273; and modernization, 262; and policy, 262, 265, 271, 272; and Uluabat Lake Basin, 257, 278n41; of water, 262, 271 Prasad, Monica, 8

Qatar, 14 Ramadan, 213, 214, 215, 216– 17 Ramsar Convention, 265, 276n20, 276n22 Ramsar designation, 257, 265, 272, 274 Reagan, Ronald, 4 Regional Committee for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, 110, 115 Regional Directorate General of Foundations, 92, 93, 119n2 Republican People’s Party, 164, 166, 275n5, 287 Rewend (album), 394, 399, 407, 411 Rewend (music video), 407, 412

428

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey

“Rewend” (song), 395, 405, 407, 408 –9, 411, 412 Riza, Seyid, 296

serhat s¸ehir. See frontier city Settlement Law (1934), 102 Seyhan Dam, 287 – 8, 289, 290

Robbins, Bruce, 281 Roma (people), 98, 122n22, 358 Rovner, Eduardo Saenz, 161 Royal Military Academy, 369 Roy, Ananya, 343, 344,

Sezneva, Olga, 97, 99 Sheikh Said Revolt, 135 Simone, AbdouMaliq, 298– 9 Siragusa, Charles: career, 169, 170, 180, 184; and Galip

346, 348 Rutz, Henry, 16 ˘, Arif, 407 Sag

Labernas, 180 – 1; and informants, 176, 178; and ¨ n, 169 –70, 174, Kemal Aygu 176, 177, 183; and organized

S¸ahin, Dursun Ali, 93, 117, 120n5 Saint Bedros, 84 S¸allı, Hayrettin, 213– 14

crime, 172 –3, 179 Somalia, 326 South Africa, 67, 298 Southeastern Anatolian Project.

Sanjak (district), 41 – 3, 48 –55 ¨ syo ¨ , 285 Sapot, Mo ˘ Sarac
oglu, Cenk, 21 Sarıyar Dam, 287, 289

See GAP Soviet Union, 150n13, 160, 165, 170, 289 ¨ snu ¨ , 176, 178 Soysal, Hu ¨ zen, Ferit Avni, 182 So

S¸ark Islahat Planı (1925 Eastern Reformation Plan), 144– 5 Saudi Arabia, 14 Savran, Sungur, 15 Sayın, Emel, 397 saz, 408 Scharff, Christina, 11 Schiffer, Sabine, 205 ¨ er, Thomas, 211– 12 Schro

Sprengelkiez (neighborhood), 207, 218, 219, 224, 225 squatter settlements, 355, 359; and industrialization, 348; and informality, 344, 348, 356; and legislation, 353, 355, 356 –7, 361; and state relations, 344, 355, 356; and

Schumann, Cristoph, 205 securitization, 2, 3, 14, 18, 20, 29, 239 Sekban, I˙hsan, 170– 2, 177, 184,

TOKI, 353, 357 Sri Lanka, 326 Star, Susan Leigh, 286 State Hydraulic Works. See DSI˙

187, 193n68 Selek, Pınar, 239 Selimiye Mosque, 93, 116 Serbia, 44

Stimson Doctrine, 45 Stokes, Martin, 404 Stone & Webster, 300, 312n45 Strutz, Julia, 344

Index

429

suitcase trade, 323, 324, 330 Sultanahmet (district), 319, 324 Sultan Mahmut Dam, 283 – 4

Third (Bosphorus) Bridge, 351, 352 Thrace, 97, 101– 3, 114, 122n34,

Sulukule (neighborhood), 358 Surp Agop, 361 Surp Asdvadzadzin Cathedral, 83 Surp Garabed Monastery, 84 Surp Giragos Church, 84

123n43, 125n67 Tigris River, 291, 298, 310n25, 403 TIKKO. See Liberation Army of Turkey’s Workers and

Sweti George, 113, 126n71 Syria, 66, 326, 403; border with Turkey, 165; independence, 42, 52; territorial disputes,

Villagers Tirebolu, 83, 84 TKP-ML. See Communist Party of Turkey, Marxist-Leninist

41, 42, 48 – 51 Tahrir Square, 9 Taksim, 2, 18, 284, 327, 361 Tali, I˙brahim, 102– 3, 123n43,

Tobey, Charles, 168 TOKI (Turkish Prime Ministry’s Mass Housing Administration), 22; administration

123n44 Tankut, Hasan Res¸it, 144 Tanzania, 328, 329

of state land, 121n17, 353; foundation of, 353; and housing projects, 95, 341, 353; under JDP, 121n17,

Tarkan (popular singer), 394, 410, 412, 413; environmental activism, 399, 405, 408, 411, 412, 413; historic preservation, 400; intended audi-

353, 354; public/private partnerships, 121n17, 353, 354, 356 –7, 359; and subsidies, 95, 110; and urban planning, 346–7, 355

ence; 395, 411, 412, 413; musical expressions, 406, 08, 409–10, 411, 413; music video, 403, 405. See also Uyan

Tophane, 165 Tozkoparan, 361 transience, 328, 329, 333, 334, 336

(CD single); Uyan (music video); “Uyan” (song) Tarsus, 286 Tatlıses, I˙brahim, 379

TRT-6, 398 ˘al, Cihan, 16 Tug Tunceli (Dersim), 1, 141, 147, 155n60, 282, 292 – 9, 301 – 4,

Taylor, Arnold, 99 ˘, 102 Tekirdag Tezcan, Mahmut, 138, 139 Thatcher, Margaret, 4

308n4, 310n29 Tuncelililer, 293, 294, 297, 301, 303, 307 Tunceli (municipality), 296, 302

430

Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey

Tunc
, Ferhat, 303 Turam, Berna, 95 ¨ re, Hamdi, 146 Tu tu¨rk aksag˘ı, 406 Turkish Armed Forces, 108, 122n22 Turkish Institute of Statistics, 138, 141 Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, 373, 374 Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), 213,

neo-liberalism, 12, 14; relations with Turkey, 288, 289, 300 urban planning, 346, 347, 349, 350 urban rent, 349, 363 urban transformation, 354 – 5, 361; in Edirne, 109, 119, 124n57; exemptions from, 360; under JDP, 343, 347, 356, 358 –9; in Kaleic
i, 95, 99, 122n26; in Kaliningrad, 97; resistance against, 362

214, 217, 221 Turkish Prime Ministry’s Mass Housing Administration. See TOKI

Urfa, 23 – 4, 141, 326 ¨ stel, Fu ¨sun, 368 U Uyan (CD single), 411 Uyan (music video), 405, 412

Turkmenistan, 327, 329 tu¨rku¨, 406 ¨ ter, Ali Osman, 172 Tu Tuzhisar Church (Sivas), 84

“Uyan” (song), 395, 400, 405, 406, 407, 412; musicality of, 408, 411 Uzbekistan, 326

Uluabat (Apollania) Lake, 257, 259, 265 – 8 Ulus, 75, 79 ¨ nder, Hasan, 369 U ¨ ngo ¨ mit, 296 ˘ur U ¨ r, Ug U United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),

Uzunc
ayır Dam, 298, 301, 303, 311n29 Valentina, Douglas, 179 Vertovec, Steven, 98, 99 Veysel, As¸ık, 407 Village Institutes (Ko¨y Enstitu¨leri), 136 Village Rooms (Ko¨y Odaları), 136

93, 403 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 327

Vizzini, Salvatore, 179– 80 volunteerism, 11, 15

United States: and the Cold War, 162, 175, 186; and the drug trade, 166–7, 168, 171, 187; and Islam, 208; and

188n5, 196n114 War of Independence (1919 – 22), 26, 61, 64, 81, 101, 164

Walker, William O. III, 161,

Index

431

Washington Consensus, 4 Watenpaugh, Keith, 49 Weber, Max, 236

Wright, Quincy, 44 Yalc
ın, Soner, 65, 66 Yassıada, 182

White, George H., 169 –70, 175, 180, 182, 192n45 Wilson, Woodrow: biography, 47; Fourteen Points speech, 44 – 5, 47; ideology, 45 – 6,

Yavuz, Hakan, 16 Yıldırım, Barıs¸, 305 Yıldırım, Mine, 378 Young Turks, 100, 133, 370 Yunus-Emre mosque, 218, 221

47, 48; and the Paris Peace Conference, 47 Woodiwiss, Michael, 173 World Bank: neo-liberal ideals,

Yusufeli, 303

5, 342; Turkish projects, 287, 289, 309n15 World Heritage sites. See United Nations Educational,

Zeytinburnu, 327, 328, 350 zoning, 268; laws, 360; plans, 343, 348, 349, 361; and TOKI, 121n17, 353; and

Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 258, 265

Zazaki, 293 ˘u, Welat, 20 Zeydanlıog

urban planning, 347, 350, 356; violations, 342, 345