The Weight of the Past : Memory and Turkey’s 12 September Coup [1 ed.] 9781443879880, 9781443872058

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The Weight of the Past

The Weight of the Past Memory and Turkey’s 12 September Coup By

Göze Orhon

The Weight of the Past: Memory and Turkey’s 12 September Coup By Göze Orhon This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Göze Orhon All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7205-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7205-8

To my brother, my son, fourteen-year-old Berkin Elvan, who was struck on the head by a teargas canister during the Gezi Park protests and died after spending 269 days in a coma on 11 March 2014.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 At A Glance: Memory Studies in Turkey Content of the Book Chapter One ............................................................................................... 12 On the 12 September 1980 Coup in Turkey Before the Coup The Staging of the Coup After the Coup Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27 Defining Memory Defining the Guidelines Conceptual Discussions Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 50 Sources and the Methods of the Study Construction of the Sample Social Characteristic of the Sample The Phases of the Fieldwork A Self-reflective Account of Value-Free Research and Impartiality Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 59 The Mnemonic Legacy of the Coup 1980s and the Official Representation of the Coup “Opening the Curtain”: Journalistic Works towards the End of the Decade The Latecomers in the 1990s and the “Narrative Opening” in the 2000s Memory Politics: Self-Conscious Actors, Collective Action The Two Specific Issues: Absent Voices in the Coup Memory

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Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 80 Collective Remembering and Forgetting: The Destruction of Sites of Memory and Engagement with Different “Stories” of the Coup Destruction of Sites of Memory Defining the Boundaries of Collective Memories: Engagement with Different “Stories” of the Coup An Assessment on the Interaction between Collective Memories and the Current Status of Coup Memory Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 114 Perceiving the Past through the Present: On Generation Reviewing Generation Political Groups as Generation Units: Boundaries between Groups and Identity Construction Generation: Between Past and Present Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 140 Patterns of Retrospection Detachment Regret Victimhood Transformation Conclusion ............................................................................................... 157 Notes........................................................................................................ 164 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 187 Appendix A ............................................................................................. 205 Appendix B.............................................................................................. 209

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the Turkish Board of Higher Education for funding my PhD studies in the University of Essex, and to Asker Kartari for his invaluable assistance in helping me to obtain this scholarship. I would like to offer special thanks to my PhD viva examiners, Barbara Misztal and Mike Roper, for their critical and constructive questions and valuable suggestions. Their contributions allowed me to see my study in a new light. I would also like to thank Rob Stones, the chair of my board meetings, for his stimulating suggestions and constructive comments. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the participants of my study for their willingness to share their stories with me, and for driving my enthusiasm in this topic. Needless to say, without them, this study would not have been possible. My heartfelt thanks go to the many people who were kind enough to assist me in reaching out to the many participants of the research, and to those who provided me with emotional support and encouraged to undertake this research. They are too numerous to name here one-by-one, but I thank them all with great sincerity for their invaluable contributions to the study. I would like to offer particular thanks to Umit Cetin and Emel Uzun for their valuable friendship and for the timely support they offered when times were hardest. Umit’s hospitality always made London feel like home to me, especially when I needed it most; while Emel was always there whenever I needed a friendly shoulder to help me bear my burdens. Yalcin Armagan undoubtedly deserves special thanks, not only for his companionship for more than half of my life, but also for his devoted logistic contribution to my work. As an avid peruser of second-hand bookstores, without his help I would have been unable to source many of the books on 12 September that have long been out of print. I offer my sincere gratitude and deepest appreciation to my advisor Ewa Morawska for her continuous academic and moral support throughout my studies. Her guidance helped me in all phases of the research and writing of my PhD thesis at University of Essex. I have always felt her support and interest in my work, even when encouraging me to work independently. Just knowing her was as valuable to me as carrying out my scholarly pursuits under her supervision. I learnt a great deal from her, and I will for the rest of my life feel her guiding hand behind me. The term kalokagathia has always stirred my belief in the possibility of a better

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world, ever since I first heard it from her as a first year student in a PhD colloquium, and I will carry the feelings it evokes in me in my pocket forever. I wish to thank my family for their unwavering support; they never stopped believing in me, even when I lacked belief in my ability to complete this study. Special thanks go to my sister Ela Tunoglu, who gives me great strength and courage whenever I need it. The “gang” of the family, made up of my nieces Deniz and Yaprak and my nephew Efe, inspired me to reflect upon on the “weight of the past” that we will bequeath to them. Every day, they reinforce my belief in the possibility of a good future. I wish I had got to know Meral earlier in my life and could have had the benefit of her support during the last years I spent completing this study. She has been a gift to me with her compassion and support, making me feel more spirited and strong, and helping me to face up to anything life may throw at me. While we have only recently become acquainted, I feel lucky that she was with me when I was working hardest to compile this book. I cannot imagine the past few years without the presence of Berfin Emre, my friend, my sister and my companion. She has provided me with irreplaceable support in all my endeavours for as long as I have known her, including the completion of this book. She has of course been a great companion to me throughout my studies, and during my stay in the United Kingdom. Granting somebody the wish of having someone like her in one’s life would be a great gift I could give to anyone, and any expression acknowledging her value to me would be an understatement given the vastness of her support and companionship. I can only hope it is enough to say Thank You.

INTRODUCTION

It had been four years since the military coup that was staged. The populations of military prisons were dominated by thousands of left-wing detainees overshadowing those from the right-wing. A year previously the military had transferred power to a civilian government after an overwhelming majority of citizens had elected the army chief Kenan Evren to the presidency and the military had issued the 1982 Constitution. Joined by hundreds released from the infernal Diyarbakir Prison, the Kurdish national salvation organisation, PKK [Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan], carried out its first attack in August 1984. Two detainees in Diyarbakir Prison and four in Sagmalcilar died during hunger strikes in protest against the military violence in prisons. The nationwide martial law had been in effect for four years. It was around the fourth anniversary of the military coup and the year I first attended primary school. I vividly remember my class teacher—the wife of a military officer—frequently asking the class for their opinions and feelings towards our president, General Kenan Evren. Each line of questioning closed in her appraisal of the General, all the while impressing upon us that he looked so caring that he should be thought of by us all as a “grandfather”. I had to wait until my late teens to realise that the “caring” and “grandfather-like” man was actually responsible for the deaths of thousands in prisons and on the streets “in dubious conditions” or due to torture. He was also answerable for the exile of some thirty thousand people, the loss of loved ones, friends or family members. Yet, I learned more: the 12 September coup was a “milestone” the consequences of which have been shadowing the lives of peoples of Turkey for more than thirty years. The 12 September 1980 coup was instrumental in the profound economic, political and social transformation of Turkey. The statist and developmentalist economic policy of Turkey bolstered by a national salvation ideology was, in compliance with the worldwide trend in the 1980s, reorganised according to the requirements of the neo-liberalisation process. The political sphere was overwhelmed by the National Security Council which would remain as the unique body fulfilling executive, legislative and judicial functions for three years. Any public opposition deemed likely to jeopardise the implementation of novel policies was

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Introduction

destroyed. Society was reorganised so as to become an “open air prison”, while behind jail walls a brutal mechanism of discipline and punishment was in operation. Through the resulting oppression, society became segregated which sustained a belief in the division of those regarded as “guilty”—and therefore politically “inconvenient”—and the innocent. Consequently, while it was identified as an act of violence which marked a rupture in lives of “the inconvenient”, the coup was held to promise relief and security for others. The 12 September 1980 coup has been the subject of numerous studies amongst different academic disciplines. However, the remembrance of the period as laden with experiences of profound transformation alongside experiences of atrocity, violence, suffering and oppression has yet to be scholarly explored. This invites further inquiry particularly in relation to the very intense nature of the coup experience which often hinders or obstructs the understandings of authors/narrators and audiences alike. This intensity is confirmed by the delay in the circulation of coup stories and by the (traumatic) “implosion” that characterised early works on coup experience in the 1990s. This is also connected to the societal segregation generated by the coup which underpinned the differentiation of experiences for both individuals and oppressed political groups. There is a substantial gap between the experiences of those who regained a “sense of security” and those who, simply put, suffered under the coup’s oppression. Furthermore, a gap still remains between the experiences of those who commonly suffered, yet to different degrees due to their affiliation with opposing political “sides”. The differentiation among coup experiences has resulted in group introversions and the emergence of “monologic” stories “told by comrades for comrades”. Last but by no means least the official labour of obliteration that overwhelmed coup remembrance casts a shadow on possible investigations into coup memory. Until recent years the coup’s legacy was demarcated by the extent to which official representation has become influential in informing frames of the coup’s remembrance amongst the wider public. A core aim of this book is to fill in the gaps in these under-investigated areas. The differentiation among the coup experiences of groups due to diverse political positions in the past naturally generates different memories. However, memory “is not an easy terrain to navigate” (Radstone and Schwartz 2010, 5) and studying it, in a sense, is like completing “a multiple-sided jigsaw puzzle that links events, issues, or personalities differently for different groups” (Zelizer 1998, 3). On the one hand, as a recently maturing area—if not “newly establishing”—“memory studies is too broad a field to have overarching theories to unify”

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(Roediger and Wertsch 2008, 18); while, on the other, it is in “need to develop unique theoretical perspectives to bear on the critical issues of the field” (ibid). This study is naturally not immune to this relative exiguity of theoretical precision. This exiguity can be compensated for through a strict adherence to the main premise informing the study of memory which is—this is stating the obvious, though—that memory is not a given product but a complex construction which requires “an in-depth exploration of its internal dynamics” (Shahzad 2011, 380). These dynamics can be explored through paying particular attention to the set of concepts—identity, temporality, representation(s), power and politics that designate the possibilities of contestation among memories and so forth—introduced by and inherent in memory construction processes. This study adopts an “intersubjectivist approach [advocating] the study of social contexts and the investigation of the social formation of memory by exploring the conditions and factors that makes remembering in common possible” (Misztal 2003, 5-6). This is an exploratory study due to the limits posed by the little scholarly knowledge we have of coup remembrance; yet, on the other hand, I was encouraged by a priori knowledge concerning the intense nature of the coup experience that inspired the scientific pursuit of “elements worth discovering” (Stebbins 2001, 6). The shared political identities within right and left-wingers and the non-politically affiliated groups constituted the basis for a differentiation of coup experiences in the past. Identities naturally play a constitutive role in generating the collective frames that shape group’s remembrances in the present. Examining the interplay between these identities and currently employed social/collective frames is one concern of this study. The memories of the past and present-day social and political contexts and circumstances are strictly bounded and further invite questions of actual politics and current political power; the memories are capable of informing and reorganising politics (Passerini 2010, 460) in the present which, in turn, defines the possibilities of the construction and circulation of those memories. An investigation into the relation between the coup remembrance and present contexts is also central to the study. This study seeks to examine the relation between the existing representations of the coup—including its official representation—and the collective/social frames that inform both collective memories of groups and individual recollections.

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Introduction

At a Glance: Memory Studies in Turkey The Emergence of the Field The developing field of memory studies has gained broader appreciation in Turkey since the mid-1990s, and Neyzi (2010, 4-5) mentions some of the more critical works and events that marked this flourishing interest. The first significant development in the field, representing an institutional attempt to conduct and encourage historical research independent of the official Turkish historiography, was the establishment of the History Foundation [Tarih Vakfi] in 19911. The 1998 “Memories of the Republic” project initiated by the institution, which included a collection of oral testimonies from people of different generations on the 75th anniversary of the Republic, was in all probability the broadest, most collectively organised project related to the topic to date2. Another such institution, but one that grew out of a long-established tradition in the Turkish socialist movement, was the Turkey Social History Research Foundation [Turkiye Sosyal Tarih Arastirma Vakfi - TUSTAV], established in 1992. Besides the overarching oral and audio-visual archive established by the foundation, TUSTAV financed publication of memoirs, historical research, focused mainly on the Turkish left-wing movement, and related legal and political documentation. The establishment of the foundation can be attributed to the increasing interest among left-wing individuals in history, particularly after the devastating impact of the 12 September coup on the integral biographies of politically engaged individuals. As I shall discuss elsewhere in this book3, the 2000s marked a return/reconstruction of the past, both in official and academic/intellectual terms, the latter of which was probably encouraged by the former. In the Turkish context, this orientation was further reinforced by the apparent attempts of the Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi] government to condemn the Kemalist past, which spurred efforts to revise its most problematic parts. The first few years of the 2000s witnessed a rapid growth in popular interest in oral history and memory studies, marked by a series of consecutive studies from 2000 on4. One event of particular note had been the “Politics of Remembering” workshop, organised in Bogazici University in 20035. A 2006 issue of the journal New Perspectives on Turkey devoted to social memory was a clear indication of the concrete attention being oriented towards the topic and served as a showcase in which the work on memory could be seen. A conference on Oral History Studies in Turkey organised in the same year

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served to bring together scholars and oral historians to discuss the issue, promoting possibilities of academic/intellectual interaction, and the proceedings of the conference still constitute one of the most far-reaching and seminal studies in the field. Of all these significant and pioneering studies, the Turkish edition of Ozyurek’s (2001) edited volume merits particular attention, in its bringing together a wide range of scholars to speak about different and intriguing topics, all of which touched upon delicate issues in Turkey’s recent past, and converged with the Englishspeaking world through its publication in both English and Turkish6.

Main Themes in Memory Studies and Oral History The Republican past is bitterly overloaded with traumatic events, in particular, acts of oppression against ethnic and religious minorities. The physical and symbolic/cultural elimination of minorities were conceived to be an integral part of the nation-building process, a main component of which was the denial of the Ottoman past. The Armenian Genocide (1915), the law of capital levy (1942) and the Pogrom of 6-7 September 19557, all of which were aimed primarily at depriving non-Muslim citizens of their wealth and property and displacing them both progressively and forcibly as well as the massacre of Kurdish-Alevis in Dersim in 19388 constitute the most notorious acts of exclusion or oppression of the recent past. The works of Kolluoglu Kirli (2005) and Neyzi (2008) addressing the catastrophic Fire of Smyrna, which was started allegedly to displace the non-Muslim minority from the city of Izmir in 1922; Neyzi’s (2002) work on Sabbateanism, and the oral histories she compiled with a Christian Arab from the multicultural Antioch (2005) and with a Jewish witness to the Republic (2005); Ozturkmen’s (2006) ethnographic work on the formerly multi-ethnic and multi-religious Tripoli; and Gocek’s (2004, 2006, 2007, 2011: Gocek and Bloxham 2008) works on the Armenian Genocide stand as testament to the growing interest in these topics9. Another significant focus of memory studies in Turkey is related to the link between the urban, urbanisation and memory. Ahiska’s (2006) discussion about the politics of archives in Turkey draws parallels with the state of memory in relation to non-sustainable and destructive urbanisation policies, particularly in the Turkey’s larger and developing cities—with more intense concern directed towards the urban transformation projects in Istanbul. For the neo-conservative Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi], which can actually be construed as more neoliberalist in its leanings based on its truculent rentier approach, one of the most significant acts was to initiate huge urban transformation projects

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Introduction

that demanded the destruction of many urban areas of historical significance. Furthermore, in some instances, these projects brought about deliberate symbolic interventions into the (Kemalist) past10 and novel memory politics that were built on the obliteration of sites of national memory. Similar to the archiving practice in Turkey, the urban administration and the local politics of memory “[imply] a very particularistic relation to the past, in the sense that history starts anew with each new director” and this “can also be interpreted as a modern attitude that sets the past clearly apart from the present” (ibid: 18). These attempts by those in political power actually follow uninterrupted from the early Republican era, as the elimination of minorities brought about also an inevitable radical transformation of the urban landscape, as well as the urban fabric and imaginary. Amy Mills’ Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity11 (2010) and Neyzi’s (1999) Istanbul’da Hatirlamak ve Unutmak, Birey Bellek Aidiyet [Remembering and Forgetting in Istanbul, Individual Memory Belonging] constitute two prominent studies on physical and symbolic transformation of urban landscape and memory in relation to minorities. In the collection of works gathered together by Senol Cantek (2003; 2006; 2012; 2014) examining Ankara’s broad cultural contexts, she leans toward the unusual, and incorporates the city—formerly neglected, or at least overshadowed, by Istanbul’s multi-ethnic/religious past—into a research of the urban past in terms of its urban fabric. In doing so, she returns the past back into the hands of Ankara, disproving the allegations that it is the “pastless” and “invented” capital of the country. Neyzi adds Kurdish oral studies as an expanding point of focus to the studies of memory and oral history in Turkey. To her, “the lack of recognition of the Kurdish language by the Turkish state throughout the 20th century led to a heightened consciousness about language, oral tradition, music and performance” (Neyzi 2010, 3). Gocek (2008, 89), on the other hand, draws attention to the “Cyprus issue” as another controversial topic, and marks “the past massacres of Armenians, the treatment of Kurds at present, and the contested partition of the island of Cyprus” as the main problems in terms of the construction of the past “faced by the Turkish nation-state”. The Armenian Genocide in particular naturally constitutes “one of the most heated debates about archives in Turkey” (Ahiska 2006, 10). Currently, memory studies embrace a variety of topics, including “fiction, architecture, monuments, commemoration, museum and heritage studies” (Neyzi 2010, 4). Although works related to women’s memories of Turkey have not overlapped with the trajectories followed by Western feminism (Yelsali

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Parmaksiz 2011, 572), studies of gender and memory flourished relatively early in Turkey. Some research projects in particular paved the way for the development of gender and memory as special area of research. The establishment of the Women’s Library and Information Centre Foundation [Kadin Eserleri Kutuphanesi ve Bilgi Merkezi Vakfi] spurred interest in the subject and enabled the institutionalisation of women’s history (ibid, 576). After gaining official support, in mid-1990s the centre carried out a pilot oral history project, during which life history narratives were collected from elderly women (ibid); and the newly-established academic departments devoted to gender studies constituted platforms from which similar projects could be launched12. Works by Durakbasa (1996; 1997; 2008; 2011) and Ilyasoglu (1993; 1997; 1998; 2001) in particular contributed much to the establishment of gender and memory as a field of study.

Common Focus: Loss The two themes mentioned above serve to highlight the significance of “loss” as the main focus of memory studies in the Turkish context. If not too aggrandising of the sensibilities of Turkish practice, this coincides with a search for a “lost past”, which in turn lays a burden on studies of memory, making this pursuit an integral part of social action against oppressive regimes of remembering. This is perhaps why oral history, which in Turkish practice in particular is considered to be more convenient for establishing links between political action and scholarly work, is of more interest than memory studies in Turkey. The establishment of the Memory Centre [Hafiza Merkezi] in 2011 is a prime example of the collaboration between scholarly practice and human rights activism. The centre spends significant effort in documenting human rights violations, and one of the most successful works by the centre in this regard is the creation of a database of forced disappearances that saw overwhelming intensity in the Kurdish territories in the 1990s. With the collaboration of international actors, the centre runs a number of memorialisation projects on controversial events of the past, including Armenian and Kurdish issues, “unidentified” murders and religious conflicts. On the other side of the coin, however, lie the tendencies for nostalgia that are inherent both in popular and scholarly memory works. “A nostalgia industry has emerged”, writes Neyzi (2002, 142), that is oriented towards the cosmopolitan past, aiming to revalue it and searching symbolically for the “’lost’ minority populations” (ibid). As Mills (2010, 15) puts it, nostalgia is a means of “coping with the nation’s failure to live up to its implicit harmony and [ethnic and religious] inclusivity” or

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Introduction

compensation “for a contemporary malaise, a lack of community and identity that is the result of rapid, alienating change”. This goes back to the foundation of the Republic, the main premises of the official Turkish historiography and its deliberate exclusion of the country’s multiethnic/religious character, and in this regard, nostalgic tendencies can also be associated with a “return of the repressed” story. The establishment of a memory regime and the regulation of the past through selective exploitation are essential for and applicable to, more or less, most nation-building processes. In the Turkish case, a historical rupture was definitely desired, and the absolute negation of the Ottoman past was the base upon which the Republic was built. In compliance with Renan’s infamous dictum on the essentiality of forgetting for the building of a nation, what "marks the beginning of [the Turkish] national narrative" is amnesia (Kolluoglu Kirli 2006, 41). However, this sense of loss cannot be limited temporally to the early Republican era. Sirman (2006, 35) reminds that the "1990s included a number of different developments [that] all spelled a story of loss". The possibility of Turkey’s accession to the EU which was “perceived [as] threat to Turkey’s integrity” accompanied by the "corruption, ethnic and religious claims to identity, inflationary pressures, and the increase in poverty in metropolises […], have all been [influential] in creating sense of loss" (ibid, 36). This was also related to a more general, international academic trend in which popular interest in memory was encouraged by the so-called decline and the relative failure of modernity as a worldly project. In other words, the trajectories seen in Turkey mirrored those of its Western counterparts, and this sheds light on why the “citizens of Turkey […] have been sorting through the rich layers of their history, long covered by the river of a modernist, future oriented vision” over the last two decades (Ozyurek 2007, 2). This study is a product of some of the intellectual orientations explained above, and inherits the intertwined nature of political and scholarly practice in Turkey. The coup past is a political “beehive”, and any scholarly work means stirring it up. Regardless of its motivations and “sincerity”, this study, to some extent, utilises the beam width made possible by the recent attempts to look back at the uncanny parts of the history of the Republic, and is one of the many endeavours to seek a lost piece of the jigsaw-like past. The efforts of politically-engaged people to integrate the rupture that the 12 September coup introduced to their lives into their biographies and the depreciation of the political identities and political group affiliations could be underlying reasons behind the growing interest in (oral) histories from the 1990s onward. The perception that the

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relationship between the present and the future had been severed was accompanied by a quest into the past (what was wrong with it?) and a revaluation of political history (Ilyasoglu 2006, 17). This study, despite the fact that the author is too young to have experienced the coup, can be seen in a way as a vicarious quest to uncover the past.

Content of the Book Kerwin Lee Klein (2000, 128) mentions that “the declaration that history and memory are not really opposites has become [a] cliché”. At the risk of reinforcing the same cliché, I would refer to the collaborative, rather than competitive, operation of memory and history. The first chapter of the book is designated with such a premise in mind and it provides a historical basis for contextualising the coup memory. I present a brief outline of economic, political and social facade of Turkey in periods prior and subsequent to the coup. The last section focusing on coup’s social implications is of particular importance for the purposes of this book as it introduces different appearances of coup experience in relation to the coup’s efforts to reorganise Turkish society and to oppress large segments of it by means of discipline and punishment and enables establishing connections between memory and experience. The second chapter provides a conceptual discussion on memory. It opens with an account of Halbwachs’ legacy, yet follows by a critical assessment on his work. I subsequently focus on this as a frequently problematised and widely criticised concept of collective memory. I briefly revisit the course of the field’s development beginning from the kernels in Walter Benjamin’s work to contemporary studies motivated by profound shifts in the nature of the act of remembering. This chapter also includes conceptual discussions on relationalities between memory and forgetting, memory and contestation, and finally memory and identity which also constitute frameworks guiding the analyses. The third chapter focuses on the sources and methods of the study and opens with a description of the sample by unravelling the rationale behind its construction and distinct social characteristics. This section portrays issues of age and cohort, educational status of participants in relation to their class positions, and religious and ethnic identities. It also briefly illustrates the phases of the fieldwork. This chapter also includes a selfreflective account on claims of value-free research and impartiality. Studying memory requires the assumption that “[the] evidence of the past exists in every mode of public expression” (Zelizer 1995, 232) and this is the postulation that motivates the fourth chapter. As the coup

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Introduction

memory can by no means be conceived as detached from the existing representations of it, this chapter revolves around different forms, actors/authors and periods of the coup’s representation. Beginning with the official representation that coercively dominated the field of representations during the 1980s, I demonstrate the course of the emergence of “alternative”, and occasionally challenging, representations of the coup until recent times. The aim of the fifth chapter is twofold: firstly, it reveals a particular appearance of the coercive “rules of remembrance” (Zerubavel 1996, 286) established by the military power. The military’s attempts to “erase the memory of pre-1980s” are illustrated by an analysis of official efforts to destroy sites of memory—objects as bearers of memory in particular. I then focus on three different “versions” of the coup’s story informed by different collective frames. The influence of official attempts at oblivion is traced in the memories of non-politically affiliated participants who prove to be largely committed to the official representation of the coup. I move on to focus on collective memories of right and left-wing groups characterised by dissemblance due to the differentiations in past experiences and present identities. I argue that the right-wing collective memory is heavily tainted by a traumatic coup experience which eventually crystallised in the conspiratory understanding of the coup. The left-wing collective memory, on the other hand, represents an amalgamation of the coup experience and a larger context in which collective experience is located. This provides the basis for contextualising coup experience in which the self is identified as an active agent. The sixth chapter is to be thought of as the basis on which the analyses in fifth chapter are built. The common self-perception among participants as members of a generation is central in shaping shared frames. Here, the analysis on understanding of generation is instrumentalised in examining the understandings of temporality, in more accurate terms, the past and present relationship. The analyses are preceded by a framework composed of two crucial discussions related to the use of the concept of “generation” in the context of this study. As revealed in this chapter the study’s participants constitute a cohort. However, the relationship between the cohort and generation deserves a detailed discussion of the main similarities in the experiences of this cohort that enables us to assess them as members of the same generation. Here I utilise Mannheim’s theory and present a detailed discussion through employing its main premises in order to reveal common intellectual baggage and similarity in experience. However, a significant difference emerges between each group’s understandings of generation. This naturally invites reflections on the differentiation within

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the cohort which entails focusing on the interplay between memory and identity and, thus, elucidating memory’s function in identity construction processes and the groups’ activities in terms of drawing boundaries between themselves and others—which naturally touches upon the issue of differences within the cohort. Thus, I present a discussion that provides an understanding on the causes of the wide differentiation between groups’ perception of generation. The last chapter of the study facilitates attention to the interplay between memory, identity and present experience that, though at intervals, paves the way for deviations in individual recollections from social/collective frames. My aim in this chapter is twofold: on the one hand, I attempt to create some space for individual recollections in order to avoid the frequently observed over-emphasis on collective/social frames. On the other hand, this chapter is also to be read as an effort to portray the transformation of political identities through exploring the dynamics of coup memory which refers to the possibilities of access to emergent cultural repertoires, the encounters with different social frames informing memory and other subsequent experiences.

CHAPTER ONE ON THE 12 SEPTEMBER 1980 COUP IN TURKEY

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of different aspects of the 12 September coup. A brief account of the periods prior and subsequent to the coup will enable the reader to situate the mnemonic legacy and analyses of the personal/collective memories in wider context. The chapter is composed of two main sections that explore the crucial historical moments leading to and succeeding the coup respectively. In the first section I consider the official justifications of the coup as landmarks which, to some extent, represent the factual conditions in Turkey during this period. However, in doing so the actual motivations behind the coup that crystallised in the subsequent period are momentarily sidelined. I systematically [i] reveal the crisis in the parliament coupled with its inability to elect a president; [ii] the economic bottleneck; and [iii] the prevalence of acts of violence on the streets. The second section constitutes the actual context in which individual and collective memories can be located. In this section, as well as dealing with the political and economic outcomes of the coup, I discuss the social atmosphere generated by the coup in a more deliberate fashion. This social aspect is assessed as the repercussions of Turkey’s momentum towards a total reorganisation of society: such reorganisation was not only enabled through the military power’s interventions into any personal and social practice of daily life, but also by means of building a brutal mechanism of discipline and punishment in prisons. Thus, this section provides the facts and figures relating to the coup, attempts by the military to reorganise society in the form of an “open air prison”, and finally the brutality and atrocity that constituted the ordinary components of daily life in the prisons.

On the 12 September 1980 Coup in Turkey

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Before the Coup The Economic Bottleneck: From Crisis to Integration The economic transformation, its background and outcomes, was probably the most discussed and elaborated aspect of the 1980s due to the advanced heterodox economic literature in Turkey (Keyder 1990; Boratav 2008; Keyder 2008; Ozan 2012). The economic aspect of the coup also offers an insight into the question of why such transformation appeared in the form of a sudden rupture (through a military coup) in Turkey’s economic and political formation. During the 1970s, the economic crisis in Turkey, defined as a crisis of the import-substituting economic strategy, was a consequence of the worldwide crisis of capitalism (Ozan 2012, 48)13. The main indicator of the climax to the crisis in 1978 was Turkey’s inability to repay short-term foreign loans and the implementation of stabilisation policies offered by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (ibid, 52)14. Despite efforts to overcome the crisis through the prescriptions of the IMF, the Turkish economy required a more fundamental intervention: the stabilisation programme known as the “24th January Decisions”, appeared as the only possible solution for a total transformation of the import substituting industrialisation that had “reached its structural limits” (Eralp et al. 1993, 1)15. Besides many other changes, the 24th January Decisions also meant a significant decrease in the wages of the working classes, economic and legal advancement of the larger corporations to enable effective networks of exportation, the promotion of foreign/multinational corporations, and finally the abolishment of the small entrepreneur stratum. The 24th January Decisions aimed mainly at accelerating Turkey’s neoliberal transformation and inevitably had social and political consequences. The austerity policies envisaged in the decisions were first and foremost to have a detrimental effect on the working classes that enjoyed relatively high wages before the economic crisis16. The ongoing crisis in the 1970s had already resulted in social discontent particularly amongst the urban working classes suffering from a lack of commodities, queues and the black market (Ozan 2012, 56)17. Other complexities that hindered the implementation of the decisions were the then state of the rising labour movement, a high level of unionisation and urban working class social organisation. However, in the meantime parliamentarian politics proved to be incapable of implementing an economic policy that pre-required a determining and monolithic political power that would later solidify in the totalitarian military power between 1980 and 198318.

14

Chapter One

Setting the Political Scene: The Continuous Crisis in Parliament and the Military’s Constant Interference Gramsci (1976, 212) suggests that although armies are constitutionally barred from politics, the army’s duty is specifically to defend the “legal” form of the state and its institutions. Gramsci’s assertion provides the groundwork for ideas about the army’s position in Turkey: the Turkish army had constantly been a decisive component of politics both through repeated military coups (in 1960, 1971 and 1980) and more implicit interferences in the political field. The 1970s were characterised by the political legacy of the previous coup—known as the 1971 memorandum— that had several objectives: it aimed at re-enabling the public order believed to be jeopardised by the growing popularity of the left-wing both in and outside the parliament19. The memorandum’s economic aim was to enhance the position of capital owning higher classes against a strong labour movement through, for instance, banning industrial actions and restricting the rights to organisation (Keyder 1990, 68). Lastly, it “imposed” on the parliament the two initial duties of urgently overcoming the political conflict within the parliament and electing a new president, the tenure of whom would expire in 1973 (Hale 1994, 184). However, in view of the decade’s political and economic indications, the extent to which the 1971 memorandum attained its aim remains controversial. The first and foremost indicator of the ongoing political instability was the establishment of more than ten successive governments in parliament between 1973 and 1980. Notably, the conflict between the military cadres and the parliament over the election of the president continued throughout 1972 and 1973. The parliament only came to elect a president who was “convenient according to the customs of the military” on 6th May 1973 (Hale 1994, 204-208) 20. Particularly, by the second half of the decade the parliament had proved incapable of “dealing with” the activities of the left-wing and labour movements which enjoyed massive support, particularly after the 1974 amnesty (Belge 1990, 175)21. The results of the 1977 general elections once more underlined the permanency of the crisis. The leaders of the two opposing parties, which in together had attracted more than 78,28 percent of total votes, were not expected to agree on forming a coalition. The consecutive governments’ inability to enable the legislative function coupled with the ongoing polarisation within the parliament became the precursor to repeated crises regarding the election of new president in 197722 and the apparent rise in acts of violence proved to be the most visible aspect for the military of the inefficacy of the parliamentary regime.

On the 12 September 1980 Coup in Turkey

15

Politics, Violence and the Public Anxiety The Profile of the Sides in “Conflict” The continuous “conflict” between the left and right-wings was perhaps the primary topic of daily political conversations during the second half of the 1970s. Understanding the course the incidents took, and which is represented as the “conflict between the two (political) sides” requires a brief preliminary identification of the politically affiliated groups and their members. During the 1970s, the left-wing groups gathered under a series of legal and illegal organisations which represented different strategic and ideological tendencies. Among the independents, Maoists and followers of the guidelines of the Soviet Union, the former enjoyed massive support in so far that, for instance, its party magazine sold around forty thousand per week (Belge 1990, 159)—probably the highest sale rates for a left-wing publication ever achieved in Turkey. Although these organisations were mainly populated by higher-education students, they established organic relations with the working classes. Besides, the occupational associations and unions also appeared as the efficient means of left-wing/socialist politics. The right-wing, on the other hand, was organised under the youth branch of the Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi], the Idealist Hearths [Ulku Ocaklari], which was mainly characterised by tendencies towards militarism and anti-communism. Unlike the leftwing’s organisational diversity, the right-wing rather presented a monolithic and uniform character. Towards the end of the 1970s, membership of the nationalist/anti-communist youth organisation was estimated to be around 100,000 (Agaogullari 1990, 224). These members are known to have undergone ideological (militant anti-communism) and practical (weapons usage) training offered in commando camps. Trained as the to be members of paramilitary organisations, those who were later accused of committing acts of violence are known to have been trained in the camps. The fact that the cyclical nature of the rise in the rightwing/paramilitary activities is usually relational to the proliferation of leftwing/socialist movements implies that right-wing/paramilitary organisations are regularly employed as a means of countering the ideological and physical domination of the left-wing organisations23. The so-called conflict between the political sides should also be conceived in relation to

16

Chapter One

the foreign policy of the United States characterised by anti-communist and anti-soviet tendencies during the 1970s24. Main Trajectories of the Violence Politics: Armed Conflict or a Planned Attack? The martial law that was proclaimed in thirteen cities in 1978, with the justification of curbing the rise in acts of violence, proved non-functional as violence steadily increased through the years between 1977 and 1980 (Keles and Unsal 1982, 35). It is striking to note that while 319 people were killed in 1977, this figure rose to 2,457 between 1978 and 1979 (ibid). The figures, nevertheless, do not include the thousands of people injured in these incidents. Despite official denials in 1970s (Birand et al. 2006, 56), due to the disclosure of official documents, investigations by journalists, and subsequent inquiries, it was later revealed that members of the nationalist organisation were involved in the incidents, spontaneously taking part in paramilitary activity. May Day in 1977 (memorialised as the “Bloody May Day”) remained the initial departure point for a series of incidents which subsequently increased public anxiety. In the demonstration in which more than 200,000 people participated (Belge 1990, 159), thirty-four people died and hundreds were injured in the cross fire that spread from state buildings in Taksim Square. In March and October 1978, two similar incidents took place in Istanbul and Ankara respectively, in which fourteen left-wing students were killed and more were injured by the bombs thrown at them25. On six and seventh of April 1978, a series of mail bombs were sent to prominent public figures occupying official administrative positions. The political diversity amongst the targets of the bombs, the ethnic diversity of the cities the victims lived in, and the time-sequence of the bombs were mainly aimed at generating public confusion and controversy. The acts of violence changed in form and were oriented towards the masses in the following months of 1978. In three similar incidents— acknowledged by Sivas (1978), Kahramanmaras (1978) and Corum (1980) to be slaughters—approximately 150 people were killed and hundreds injured even though the nature of the incident in Kahramanmaras appeared to be catastrophic (Hurriyet 10 January, 2012). These three cities shared a few, though very significant, common features: they constituted the electoral districts in which the Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi] pulled more than the ten percent of the votes26 despite its nationwide vote proportion of 6,42 percent (Agaogullari 1990, 230). The cities also represented a distinct ethnic and religious character as they

On the 12 September 1980 Coup in Turkey

17

accommodated relatively larger populations of the Alevi27 minority (ibid). All of the incidents were provoked through agitations against communism and Alevi identity, and aimed at generating a public rising against leftwingers and minorities. Between 1978 and 1980, numerous assassinations of prominent actors belonging to the opposing political sides emerged as the latest form of violent practice. In what became a period of serial assassinations targeting academics, politicians, political activists, journalists, and high-ranking officials, thirteen people were killed, and two seriously injured (ibid, 233). The last stage of organised attack against the left-wing was an armed operation in Fatsa where the rise of the left-wing had culminated in the establishment of a local socialist government in 1979. In July 1980, the Turkish army organised an operation against Fatsa intended to annihilate the left-wing local administration and its popular support28. The army was supported by nationalist former inhabitants of the town (Birand et al. 2006, 120). Such fundamental steps against the ideological foundations of left-wing politics and the physical annihilation of its adherents were taken immediately following the carrying out of the coup.

The Staging of the Coup On 12th September 1980, at four in the morning, the military announced that it had seized power through the dissemination of NoticeNo: 1 which presented justifications for the coup as “enabling national unity and cooperation”, “avoiding a probable civil war and fraternal fight”, “reestablishing the authority of the state”, and “eliminating the motives that interfere with the functioning of the democratic system” (Resmi Gazete, September 12, 1980). The initial undertakings of the military were to declare a nationwide night curfew (it was strictly forbidden to go out between 00:00 am and 5:00 am), the abolishment of parliament, and proclaiming nationwide martial law. Although the military remained in power for three years (1980-1983), the ethos of the coup remained efficient until the end of the 1980s.

After the Coup The Economic and Political Outcomes of the Coup The legal basis of the 12 September coup was provided by the introduction of a temporary Constitution (Oran 2003, 21), and the 15th article of the 1982 Constitution which banned the assessment of the

18

Chapter One

“offences and penalties [of the members of the National Security Council] retrospectively”. Until amendments made in 2010, the unaccountability of members of the National Security Council fell under constitutional guarantee. The 24th January Decisions that remodelled the Turkish economy and societal structure lay at the heart of socioeconomic transformation between the years 1980 and 198329. The coup was perceived as a unique political strategy that would enable the implementation of the decisions. Content with the regulation of the labour market through military measures, suspension of union activities, and the prohibition of all industrial action and collective bargaining (Boratav 2008, 191), prominent capital-owners soon declared their support for the coup (Birand et al. 2006, 151; Ozan 2012, 20; Schick and Tonak 1990, 397). The most efficient and perennial political activity of the military coup that prevailed thirty years in the political life of the country was the introduction of the 1982 Constitution that was prepared by an assembly composed of National Security Council members and members assigned by it (Tanor 2008, 42). The 1982 Constitution secured a constricted political milieu that enabled the efficient implementation of the transformation and avoided any probable public opposition against it (Cosar 2002, 729). In 1982, the new constitution that was put to vote together with the presidency of Kenan Evren, the leader of the military coup, was voted in favour with a proportion of 91,4 percent (Turkish Statistical Institute date unspecified)30. In 1983, the military handed power to the Motherland Party [Anavatan Partisi] led by Turgut Ozal, the foundation of which and subsequent participation in the elections was approved in person by Kenan Evren (Eralp et al. 1993, 7)31. Thus, the core of the economic and political framework for the two periods (1980-1983 and 1983-the end of the decade) did not differ at all. As Ozkazanc (1997, 42) epitomises below, the essence of the decade following the military coup remained the massive depoliticisation and vigorous contestation for taking a share under conditions of unfair economic distribution: “[The 1980s] instructed the people of Turkey to act as “homo economicus”. The people who believed in “social salvation” since the establishment of the Republic until the 1980s, attempted to assimilate living in a country where everyone saved herself. After all, any effort [that was] put forth for a mass salvation failed.”

On the 12 September 1980 Coup in Turkey

19

The Social Implications of the Coup: Facts and Figures During the seven years when the nationwide martial law remained in effect, what characterised daily lives were social fear, anxiety, and suspicion against each other due to the mechanism of denouncement. The 12 September coup should be conceived as an oppressive and imperious attempt to replace any social and individual practice with novel military impositions, particularly with regards to politics, opinion, and memory. The practices of making politics, reflecting and remembering were harshly countered by the political oppression which appeared in the form of an over-inclusive description of crimes of thought, mnemonic destruction and obliteration. Shortly after the coup, thousands of people were either placed under surveillance or arrested; on 9th October 1980, just a month into the regime, two twenty-two year old militants—one from the left and the other from the right-wing—were executed; the aim of these initial executions was to demonstrate the military’s so-called equal distance from both political wings. Drawing on the criminal complaint filed by the Human Rights Association in 2010, up-to date figures of the penal and juridical statement of the coup between 1980 and 1983 are as such32: x 650,000 people were placed under surveillance and were tortured during their detention period extending over ninety days x 1,683,000 people were blacklisted as communist, Alevi, Kurdish, religious fanatic or follower of sharia x 230,000 people were tried in a total of 210,000 cases in martial law courts x 7,000 were tried for crimes that could potentially warrant the death penalty, and 517 of these were sentenced to death x The Military Supreme Court of Appeal approved the death penalty for 124 people x 49 people were executed (18 left-wing, 8 right-wing, and 23 ordinary prisoners) x 71,500 people were tried according to articles 141, 142, 163 of the Turkish Penal Code33 x 98,404 people were tried for “being a member of an organisation” x 388,000 were refused passports x 30,000 people were dismissed as they were found (politically) “inconvenient” x Investigations into 18,525 public officers were conducted x 14,000 people were denaturalised x 30,000 people were forced to become refugees x 366 people died in dubious circumstances

20

Chapter One x 299 people died in prisons x 171 people were documented to have lost their lives due to severe torture x 14 people died in hunger strikes staged to protest against torture and maltreatment in prisons34 x 16 people were claimed to have died whilst escaping from lawenforcement officers x 95 people were claimed to have died in armed conflicts x 43 people were claimed to have committed suicide35 x 937 films were banned due to being assessed as (politically) “inconvenient” x The activities of 23,677 associations were terminated x The political parties and unions were closed; many politicians were kept under surveillance without justification, and were later arrested x 3,854 teachers, 120 academic members and 47 judges were discharged x 400 journalists were tried for a total of 4,000 years of imprisonment x Journalists were sentenced to 3,315 days and six months imprisonment x 31 journalists were imprisoned x 300 journalists were attacked (by unidentified person or persons) x 3 journalists were shot to death x The newspapers were prevented from publishing for 300 days x 303 files were claimed for 13 national newspapers x 39 tons of newspapers and periodicals were destroyed x Hundreds of thousands of publications were confiscated and destroyed36. The owners of the publication houses were placed under surveillance, arrested, tortured and killed. x Torture became a prevalent practice in prisons and police stations; according to the narrations of the sufferers, the torture practices included sexual assault, rape, foot whipping, dog baiting against the naked detainee, chaining two prisoners to each other, hanging the prisoner by chain, raping with bludgeons, soaking in sewage, forcing to read books aloud or to sing hymns, forcing to eat faeces37, urinating on the prisoner, and many others38.

The figures imply the scope of the operation conducted against society with the justification of enabling “relief” and re-establishing “security”. While the 12 September coup fulfilled its promises of relief and security for some, for many others the coup was identified as a deliberate act of terrorism, violence, fear and which instilled a sense of insecurity. Besides segregating the society into political poles representing the “guilty”, the politically “inconvenient” and others, it also generated a physical separation between “inside” the prisons and the rest of the society “outside”. Daily life was itself transformed into a form of imprisonment due to the prevalence of bans, monitoring and control.

On the 12 September 1980 Coup in Turkey

21

Society as Prison The determination to re-organise society underpinning the 12 September coup became evident through its macro and micro interventions in daily life. Attempts were made to reshape particular quotidian components through its notices, which functioned as the very means of telling individuals how to live their daily lives. The social, political and religious diversity within society was replaced with a mass of uniform, impotent and passive citizens that resembled the military itself. The military latter intervened in each social practice to such an extent that it even introduced “the criteria to be complied with at weddings” according to which people should obtain permission in advance from the local commandership of martial law, and should avoid rampancy. However, as “rampancy” was never clearly defined, any “inconvenient” act could constitute a crime against the commandership (Birand et al. 2006, 161). Such ambiguities were well employed by the military power as a constant threat towards individuals and served as efficient means for spreading fear. The decisions which came into effect in different cities are illustrative of the intervention into the “social”: “All shopkeepers should place bins in front of their shops, and the bins should be painted black or blue. Cab drivers should shave each day. The simit [a traditional Anatolian snack] sellers should wear gloves while selling. All houses and apartments on the E5 highway should be painted white. Parents should not give names that are contradictory to national culture, manners and customs to their children (ibid, 161)”39.

The National Security Council also acted harshly against the freedom of travel, and played a decisive role in the mobilisation of populations. The local martial law commanderships possessed the authority to banish persons from the local territory on the basis of political “inconvenience”. Decisions relating to banishment were efficiently applied against the attorneys handling the cases of left-wing detainees. The justifications of forced mobilisation could vary: on 2nd March 1981, for instance, fifty-five unemployed inhabitants of Istanbul, seventeen of which were children, were banished from the city (Cemal 1986, 249). The coup aimed at minimising social contact and encouraging isolation and atomisation through individual or communal intervention. Therefore, the fact that “whenever two persons came together, the military officers suspected an organisation” was to become an idiom that aptly described

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Chapter One

the coup period whilst closing down associations and political parties, and the disintegration and imprisonment of members, constituted the communal aspect. The trials against members of left-wing organisations during the coup period, in particular, appeared as one of the most populous cases in Turkey’s legal history. During the local case of the Revolutionary Way [Devrimci Yol] in Fatsa, 2000 people were tried; in the national case of the Confederation of Revolutionary Unions of Labourers [Devrimci Isci Sendikalari Konfederasyonu], 1477 unionists were tried, seventy-eight of whom were judged for death penalty (Birand et al. 2006, 179). The most extensive trial against the right-wing was the file claimed against the Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi] and the idealist40 organisations in which 587 defendants were judged (ibid, 178). Another legal imposition that affected thousands of public officers was Martial Law Code No: 1402. Under this code, approximately 30,000 public officers were discharged and 7,233 were banished (ibid, 171)41. The foremost means of gathering evidence on the public officers to be charged was the denunciation mechanism: politically “convenient” public officers were encouraged to denounce their colleagues. Through these means, 20,921 denouncements were made and 18,525 officers were subsequently investigated (ibid). The denunciation mechanism also served the underpinning justification for widespread house searches. There is no accurate information on the actual number of private dwellings searched; but considering that the number of blacklisted people approximately constitutes four percent of the total population of the country in the 1980s, it can be inferred that thousands of houses were searched. House searches operated as a means for blacklisting people and destroying, or causing people to destroy published materials and personal belongings. The public broadcasting channel, Turkish Radio and Television Institution—it was the unique broadcasting institution of Turkey until 1989—was under the control of National Security Council. Thus, the range of content of the channel, including the music genres to be broadcasted, was decided by the military. Two days after the military coup, National Security Council issued a dictate to the Turkish Radio and Television Institution ordering that “news about anarchy, fire and traffic accidents and news against the National Security Council and the martial law should not be broadcasted”. The injunction included instructions prescribing that “the public would be interviewed and asked their opinions about the 12 September coup. Middle aged persons should be preferred as interviewees. Before being broadcasted, approval should be obtained [from the military administration]” (ibid, 165).

On the 12 September 1980 Coup in Turkey

23

The military also suppressed the press: the reporting of the news about dubious deaths in prisons, torture and suicides were banned42. Time magazine and the comic book, Tarzan, were included in the list of banned publications (ibid, 166). Despite efforts put forward by critical journalists, some major elements of the press presented a supportive attitude towards the coup and functioned as the main means of disseminating its official representation. The casual acts and decisions concerning daily life—varying from suggesting what time people should go out to sanctioning what could be done; from whom it was permissible to see, to what should be read—were decreed by the military institutions. However, prisons constituted those spaces in which the life, the body, and the minds fell most heavily under the sadistic control of the military. Life in the Prisons “Owing to the work of oblivion, the returning memory… causes us to breathe a new air, an air which is new precisely because we have breathed it in the past… since the true paradises are the paradises that we have lost” (Proust cited in Lowenthal 1985, 205).

The prisons appeared as the primary means for eliminating political opponents: however, what was referred to as “opponent politics” was mainly the left-wing/socialist political movements with its entire organisational structure43. The expression “We will create a generation that will not even know you” was derived from a testimony on the dialogue between a left-wing/socialist detainee and a military officer during an interrogation in February 1981 (cited in Mavioglu 2006a, 173). It epitomises the coup’s objective of punishing people, not only during the time they remained in prisons, but throughout the remainder of their lives. Yet more importantly, it clearly demonstrates the coup’s orientation towards the ideological and physical annihilation of the influence of leftwing politics—which was achieved through severing the link between two subsequent generations. Despite international pressure (Oberdiek 1991), the well-planned tactics of oppression and deterrence that were spontaneously employed as a means of gathering information, prevailed in all prisons without exception. The strategies of deterrence were: x The treating of detainees as private soldiers: the detainees were forced to wear military uniforms, comply with the military hierarchy (prisoners had to speak in the form of an oral report during their daily conversations

24

Chapter One with officers), and their hair was to be cropped short against their will (Mavioglu 2006a, 45). x The strict separation of detainees into categories: the separation was between left-wing detainees, right-wing detainees, and independents (ibid, 56). The wards of independents were populated by detainees who were overwhelmed by the maltreatment and torture, and who personally decided to follow military rules, and thus, were exempt from further physical and psychological violence44. x The “mix and pacify strategy”: detainees were confined on a one-toone basis with their political opponents for the purposes of psychological oppression. It was also a means of generating the public perception that the military coup prospered to “end the fraternal fight, and taught persons to live in harmony” (ibid, 110).

Besides these main strategies, physical violence prevailed throughout each moment of detainees’ daily lives: when arriving at the prison, whilst being transferred to the court house, when taking a bath, whilst in the prison yard or visiting the infirmary or during visits45. Some ex-detainees refer to the “scientifically designed” torture methods and recall that the military administrations, in collaboration with “scientists”, conducted surveys on the “profiles of terrorists”, and used prisoners as experimental objects against their will (Mavioglu 2006a, 60-61). The same testimonies imply that both “medical and sociological analyses of the ‘anarchic’ incidents before the 12 September coup were conducted on the prisoners” (ibid)46, and that certain medications were tested on prisoners in order to gain knowledge of side effects47. The ideological propagation of the military coup and Turkish nationalism were also designated as parts of psychological torture: detainees were forced to sing the national anthem on a regular basis, to memorise certain poems, and to read the canonical texts of Kemalist nationalism48. Detainees were also regularly exposed to the singing of national hymns and forced to listen to demeaning announcements from loudspeakers placed in the corridors. It was significant that the aim of using such instruments with regard to the left-wing detainees was ideological deterrence through exposing them to the bearers of a symbolic political ethos (nationalism) which they opposed and had even devoted their lives to struggling against. However, the impact on right-wing detainees was catastrophic as the political values and symbols they had adopted were turned against them as means of persecution49. The punishment inflicted on the politically “inconvenient” masses continued throughout the years following. Those people released from the prisons after several years experienced great difficulty in accommodating

On the 12 September 1980 Coup in Turkey

25

themselves to life outside due to the violence they had suffered and the dramatic transformation of political and social conditions in Turkey during the 1980s. The testimony of one left-winger who had been imprisoned for three years epitomises the difficulty of “getting used to living outside”: “[When I was released] I saw a silent Turkey outside. […] I couldn’t recognise the [value] of the money. There occurred such a huge transformation that I even didn’t know how much to pay for the bus or for the bread. [I recognised that] the prices dramatically increased. My children who were so little when I was imprisoned had grown up, and were so silent. The people for whom we stood against panzers in order to prevent their gecekondus50 to be demolished were changing their way when they saw us” (Genc 2006, 406).

Thousands of people who were released from the prisons after several years faced more or less similar predicaments in their subsequent lives: the “rupture in lives” caused by the coup refers to the interval in which these people who had led an infernal life for years then found themselves in a position were forced to repair their shattered lives. The experience of the coup, and the years spent in military prisons in particular, produced a generation that found itself in the middle of a struggle to establish a new life, and consequently on the threshold of living in a “new” country for the sake of which they once struggled at a risk to their lives. Thousands of people who witnessed the cruelty and brutality in prisons unfortunately represent an aspect—although a crucial one—of a “paralysed” society: in the light of Turkey’s transformation discussed above, the coup resulted in massive suffering. With regard to a sense of permanent damage wrought by the 12 September coup on the country, it is clear that the people of Turkey still experience the detrimental effects of the coup in their daily lives. The common experiences of the series of predicaments, including individual and familial suffering, prison lives, and the obstacles encountered in the effort to making a “new” life, particularly for those politically affiliated, constituted the very essence of the personal and collective memories of the coup. Individuals who were not directly subject to the oppression of the coup discovered these “stories of predicaments” only after such representations of the coup by politically affiliated groups came into circulation at the end the 1990s and throughout the following decade. However, the close ones of those who had suffered had already been informed of personal experiences after ex-detainees had rejoined their families, reached their friends and socialised while leading a “normal” life. The emotional and intimate sharing between people who

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Chapter One

had common experiences must have encouraged subsequent attempts to represent coup memories. Such representations, to large extent, played a crucial role in the consolidation of collective memories. The circulation of these representations also enabled the transformation of the coup memory as well as a challenge against the obliteration of the official representation that maintained its uniqueness until the end of the 1980s. The scope and the forms of this transformation constitute one of the aspects this study focuses upon.

CHAPTER TWO DEFINING MEMORY

“Just like God needs us, memory needs others” (Coser 1992, 34).

Memory is a concept that can mean different things in different times (Radstone 2000, 3). Given the shifting use of the term, it is inevitably a formidable task to attempt to fix the meaning of memory. What brings about this difficulty is twofold: on one hand is the scholarly aspect wherein memory is understood as “more practiced than theorised” (Confino 1997, 1386). Here the concept of memory is loaded with a practical burden carried across an ever-increasing number of studies from various disciplines varying from anthropology, psychology, historiography etc. The so-called “memory boom”—particularly post-1990s—has been intended as a substantial diversification in memory-centred works and has led to a dramatic increase in use. On the other hand, the popular use of the term “memory” further reinforces the potential blurring of the term’s meaning. Thus, an imbalance even emerges between the “rhetorical” power of memory and its precise meaning (Gillis 1994, 3) as any exploration that deals with the past experiences of a certain community is categorised as “memory”. However, the term’s common denominator which is most commonly drawn upon simply denotes “the ways in which people construct a sense of past” (Confino 1997, 1386). The history of memory is as old as the history of humankind itself; LeGoff (1992, 68) and Hutton (1993, 16) make explicit reference to the developments that constitute the shifts in history of memory. While LeGoff (1992, 68) adheres to historical periods originating in Western thought defining five distinct periods of “memory”51, Hutton (1993, 16), drawing upon Ong’s periodisation of the history of communication (2002), distinguishes four distinct periods in the concept’s history with the distinction mainly centring on societies’ shifting relation to memory within the progress from the orality to media literacy52. The practical developments above generated shifts in how, since prehistory, humans remember. However, it was not until the twentieth

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Chapter Two

century that memory was ascribed a social aspect and became the subject of social science research. The understanding of remembering separately from cognitive faculties did not emerge until memory was conceived of as a product of “social frames” (Halbwachs 1992 [1925], 43). Consequently, one main advance that profoundly transformed reflections on remembering was the seminal work of Maurice Halbwachs (1992 [1925]) that carried memory out of a cognitive understanding and which still constitutes a basis for the study of memory. However, both the increasing popularity of memory in social science research and the belatedness of the introduction of Halbwachs’ work in the English speaking world require reflection on the possible reasons for the increasing contemporary interest in memory. The question regarding the recent popularity of memory work which is considered to “[have] become a culture industry in its own right” (Connerton 2009, 1) deserves an answer when the views of scholars dealing with history and memory are considered. These views appear to oscillate between certain conclusions: while some complain of a so-called “surfeit of memory” (Maier 2011) or emphasise our current “obsession” with it (Huyssen 1995, 7), others declare that “[w]e speak so much of memory, because there is so little of it left” (Nora 2006, 17). However, I tend to regard memory studies as a newly established field that can be enhanced and sympathise with the more optimist view that memory research promises epistemological opportunities apropos the plural nature of reconstructions of the past, examining the relation between present social and political contexts and remembering, as well as investigating the connections between remembering and forgetting, the regimes of contestation among reconstructions, and identity.

Defining the Guidelines The Legacy of Maurice Halbwachs’ On Collective Memory Halbwachs presents a distinctive and foundational figure in memory studies on the basis of his ground-breaking theorisation of the essentially social nature of memory distinguishing it from its prevalent uses in philosophy, psychology, and historiography (Olick and Robbins 1998) and also the natural sciences. The challenge he introduced, particularly against the cognitive understanding of the term that had dominated the understanding of memory, is crystallised in his suggestion that “[t]here is no point in seeking where [memories] are preserved in my brain or in some nook of my mind to which I alone have access: for they are recalled

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to me externally, and the groups of which I am a part at any time give me the means to reconstruct them […]” (1992 [1925], 38). His objective of “socialising memory” challenged the idea that memories are simply the traces of individual pasts as well as “the illusion that memories are independent” (Misztal 2003, 53). The two main premises of Halbwachs’ conception of memory are the introduction of the social frames that are “used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections” (Halbwachs 1992 [1925], 43) and his emphasis on the socially constructed nature of memory according to the “present social milieu” (ibid, 49). His emphasis on the latter arises from his former postulation—understanding of memory as an essentially social construct. With regard to the latter, memory is neither the representation nor a mirroring of the past as it was. Memory is the social and selective construction/reconstruction of the past depending on the motives of the present. Although Halbwachs is remembered primarily as the first to coin the term “collective memory”53 and to effectively “socialise” memory, kernels of his thought may be found in a series of preceding works (Olick et al. 2011, 5). Many contributions to reflections on the notion of memory had been made before Halbwachs: Ernst Renan’s What is Nation? (1990 [1882]), Aby Warburg’s The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance54 (1999 [1932]), George Herbert Mead’s The Philosophy of the Present (2000 [1932])— which develops a concept of shared memory—and Mikhail Bakhtin’s “theory of genres” (1986) are all worthy of mention as forbearers of “social” memory (Olick et al. 2011, 21). Although the scholarly interaction between Halbwachs and Mead is known, it is not clear in Halbwachs’ work whether he acknowledged other contributors. It would not be plausible to attempt to abstract Halbwachs’ intellectual production from the social context he studied. Halbwachs’ intellectual legacy was a product of his own journey as an intellectual and he long oscillated between the influences of Emile Durkheim and the philosopher Henri Bergson, with both of whom he had studied. To Coser (1992, 5), thanks to the termination of “his love affair” with Bergson’s individualistic philosophical understanding of temporality, he devoted himself to a sociological understanding of memory. One can trace Durkheim’s influence through the connection between Halbwachs’ locating of collective memory within social groups and Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in Society (1984 [1893]) which demonstrates the concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity, as well as Halbwachs’ “emphasis on the collective nature of social consciousness

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[and his view that] a shared past is the essential element for the reconstruction of social solidarity” (Misztal 2003, 50). His postulation regarding the constant effort of a particular group to reconstruct the past (Halbwachs 1992 [1925], 182) enables an understanding of individual recollections in making a fundamental connection with the “thoughts of the corresponding groups” (ibid, 53). For Halbwachs, groups employ collective frameworks that refer to the instruments incorporated in the construction of collective memories; however, his account differs from the totalising aspect present in Durkheim’s view of society, and rather emphasises the plural nature of collective memories that enables social differentiation (Olick 1999, 334). Nevertheless, Halbwachs does not overlook the decisive role the “predominant thoughts of the society” play in collective memories of groups (1992 [1925], 40). Collective memory, to Halbwachs, is more than the sum of individual recollections (ibid, 39); although individual recollections shape the collective memory, the collective memory “evolves according to its own rules” (Misztal 2003, 53). His effort to concretise the differentiation of collective memory from individual recollections becomes manifest in his distinction between autobiographical and historical memories. Autobiographical memory, in his account indicating the individual memory of lived experience, is condemned to fade away unless it is recalled and shared during contacts with those others with whom we share a certain past. Historical memory, on the other hand, is where the person does not remember his/her experiences directly but they are recalled through social institutions (Coser 1992, 23-24). The heavy demarcation between autobiographical and historical memories invites overemphasis on the social/collective construction of memory and neglects the individual mind and, as an implication, individual memory. As can be inferred from this distinction, by no means can a pure individual memory exist. For Halbwachs, the only condition for the existence of pure individual memory is that of the dream. In other words, it is only in dreams that the mind is completely detached from the system of representations as the dreams’ images are “nothing more than raw materials” (Halbwachs 1992 [1925], 42)55.

Collective Memory Re-visited: Critiques on the Legacy of Halbwachs and Collective Memory Halbwachs’ work is frequently characterised by dualisms that pave the way for certain deficiencies inherent to his approach. In this section, I focus on four problematic dualities in Halbwachs’ legacy all of which

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have attracted substantial critiques. These are the dualities he builds between individual/collective, past/present, history/memory, and identity/memory. Halbwachs’ strong emphasis on the collective frameworks and determination of the individual mind paved the way for disregarding the mutual operation of the individual and the collective. The disconnection between the two is further reinforced by Halbwachs’ distinction between autobiographical and historical memories. This sharp distinction not only shadows the constant interaction between the two, but also results in regarding the “individual and collective levels as problems of different order” (Olick 1999, 336). Collective frameworks are informed by the recollections of individuals, if not their simple aggregate, with the collective memory rather constituting the site in which each member’s memory is articulated (Crane 1997, 1383). Thus, instead of locating the individual and the social in different realms, the distinction is to be replaced by an “intersubjectivist approach” to memory that advocates focusing on the interplay between the individual and social dimensions of reconstruction enabling the avoidance of “both social determinism” and “visions of an individualistic, atomised social order” (Misztal 2003, 10). Halbwachs, in order to highlight the role of the present in the construction of the memory of the past, overemphasises the present which becomes crystallised in his “presentist” approach. Halbwachs aimed mainly at showing “how the present situation affects the selective perception of past history” (Coser 1992, 33) and his emphasis on the role of the present constitutes an insightful contribution to the current understanding of memory. However, as Barry Schwartz argues, when Halbwachs’ presentist position is carried to its ultimate conclusion there would eventually appear to be no continuity between the past and the present (1982, 374)56. Schwartz displaces the literal construction of the past through asserting that “[the past] can only be selectively exploited” (ibid, 396). His supposition that “social beginnings can infuse the present and occupy space within it; but the amount of space they occupy varies from one historical period to the next” (ibid, 395) contextualises the present’s impact on the reconstruction of the past and overcomes the past/present tension in Halbwachs. However, despite critiques on this pastpresent relationship, Misztal argues that Halbwach’s approach cannot be condemned as narrow presentism as “his perspective does not exclude the possibility of collective memory having both cumulative and presentist aspects” (2003, 55). The past and present relationship in Halbwachs’ work—as with the distinction between autobiographical and historical memories—also finds

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repercussions in his views on memory and history. If, as Halbwachs suggests, memory is entirely shaped by the requirements of the present, and if memory is composed of continuously shifting reconstructions of the past depending on present contexts, then it has nothing to do with the precision which the historiographic approach is claimed to offer57. Such a view of memory can only be valid if memory work blindly ignores the social contexts within which memories are embedded. It is therefore inexpedient to build an exclusive relation between history and memory. While memory work does not necessarily exclude the “objective” sources that historiography offers, history may be conceived of as a practice rather than knowledge which welcomes “the active participation” of each member of collective memory (Crane 1997, 1385). Thus, history and memory work collaboratively rather than competitively. Another dualism within Halbwachs’ account appears in his view on the relation between identity and collective memory. To Megill (2011, 194195), “the Halbwachsian model holds that memory is determined by an identity (collective or individual) that is already well established”. That is to say, Halbwachs rather sees a unidirectional relation between memory and identity. Through such an assertion he actually neglects a perspective that envisages identity and memory in constant interplay and reciprocity throughout construction of both. Megill stresses that it is not the well established character of identity, but on the contrary, the very uncertainty—or “the lack of fixity”—of the identity that leads “to the project of constructing memory with a view to constructing identity itself” (ibid, 195). In the same vein, Zelizer (1995, 228) places the nature of the relation between identity and memory concretely through reversing the unidirectionality in Halbwachs’ schema and argues that commitment to “shared frames of reference” regarding the past enables one to embrace an identity which is both meaningful for the individual and the collective. Certain deficiencies in his account do not detract Halbwachs’ fundamental contributions to the study of memory; his introduction of “social frameworks” as the basis of memory, insight regarding the memory’s constructed feature depending on the needs of the present, the connection he makes between the social groups and collective memory as well as between the collective memory and group identity have been constitutive influences on contemporary memory studies.

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Collective Memory (or not?): Controversies and Contributions The concept of collective memory has acquired a dominating role since the 1980s (Olick et al. 2011, 5). On one hand, the widespread use of the concept facilitated further improvements in the study of memory, while on the other, led to a sense of confusion as to what the term actually refers to. The two processes developed hand in hand. Rather than denying the existence of those works that offered definitive improvements and revisions to the concept, Sutton argues that the confusion owed much to the “multiplicity of relevant and under-theorised phenomena” (2008, 28)58. The use of “collective memory” invited “further proliferation” in that there appears an overlap between the meaning of “collective memory” and other uses offered such as “cultural memory”, “social memory”, “public memory”, “political memory” and so forth (Olick and Robbins: 1998: 112; Zelizer, 1995:211)59. Critiques of Collective Memory In her Regarding the Pain of Others Sontag categorically rejects the term collective memory and asserts that “there is no such thing as collective memory” as she sees the term as a “part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt” (Sontag 2004, 76). To Sontag, collective memory imposes a hypothetical homogeneity and totality in attempts to understand the memory of groups, as memory is individual and each individual account is to be understood in its uniqueness (ibid). What informs collective memory is not the remembering but the stipulating process that imposes “that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds” (2004, 76)60. Thus, For Sontag, the term “collective memory” is synonymous with ideology61. Gedi and Elam (1996 cited in Olick 1999, 334), on the other hand, propose that collective memory alone offers a poor replacement for the older and more established terms like myth, commemoration and tradition. However, the term “myth”, for instance, even if we put aside its ancient uses and etymological roots, is known to be first used in the 1830’s to denote its current use (Merriam Webster Dictionary 2012). We are comparing “myth”, a well-established term, with a notion (collective memory) which was not substantially elaborated until Halbwachs (1992 [1925]) and did not come under closer inspection until the 1990s. Thus, it is controversial as to whether supposedly well-established concepts like

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myth or tradition were themselves adequate to begin with (Olick et al. 2011, 28). Kerwin Lee Klein’s critique, on the other hand, (2000, 128) is relatively concerned with the over-inflated meaning of memory. To him, the semantic realm of memory has been considerably broadened and has become a “metahistorical category that subsumes” other concrete notions such as oral history or folk history. Subsequently, the ambivalence and the vagueness of the term led its users to make “sweeping philosophical claims” about what memory actually is (ibid). More recent attempts to redefine the notion of collective memory which have aimed at specifying and clarifying its meaning may also be read as attempts to respond to Klein’s critique of the blurred meaning of the term. In an Effort to “Narrow the Focus”: Revisions and Specifications In her frequently cited work, Zelizer (1995, 235) asked why memory studies were still contented with stating that “it is not individualised” when defining collective memory62. The frequent emphasis made on the “nonindividual” feature of collective memory is actually a property inherited from Halbwachs’ legacy as, most probably, what Zelizer complains about arises from the pursuit of further reinforcement of the Halbwachsian dichotomy of individual vs. collective/social. However, Zelizer (ibid) also mentions that the blurring of the term’s meaning could be overcome by “slowing down” the pace of the acceleration of unfocused and unelaborated uses of the term, and by “tightening up” and “narrowing the focus”. Consequently, one needs to ask what else collective memory might be. In my terms, collective memory is the integration of shared and distributed memories in contestation with each other; it is shaped in relation to the course of the contestations, power relations and existing representations of the past all of which are in constant interaction with each other. The various definitions of the term mainly focus on the shared nature of collective memory. However, more comprehensive definitions reveal different aspects of collective memory such as its relation to identity building processes, and thus as implication, the past and present of group identities, as well as its connection to past experience. Lowenthal (1985, 196) indicated the timely transformation of individual remembrances through sharing and validating, both of which guarantee their recalling. To him, unshared individual recollections become less certain and “less easily evoked” in passing time (ibid). In the course of remembering and recalling people continuously revise their

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accounts in order to “fit the collectively remembered past” and abandon remembering the parts that do not fit. Wertsch (2002, 1) similarly points to the shared nature of collective memory through emphasising the role of the “active agents” in distributing it. Zerubavel (1996, 293-294), like Halbwachs, stresses that a collective memory is not a mere an aggregate of these personal recollections; however, the influence of each personal recollection is uneven, and thus, only the commonly shared plots maintain their existence while others erode in time. Zelizer (1995, 214) offers a more comprehensive definition of the term: for her, collective memory refers to recollections “by” and “for” the collective. Besides the shared feature of the collective memory, she points to the triple processes of discussion, negotiation and contestation (ibid) in constructing collective memory. For Misztal (2003, 15), on the other hand, collective memory is based on the “experience mediated by representations of the past”. Misztal also emphasises that it is collective memory that embodies the group’s identity (ibid). Wertsch’s account (2002, 44) is case-specific and mainly draws on his work on post-Soviet memory in Russia. However, his definition is far more exhaustive and multi-dimensional. For him, collective memory is, first and the foremost, subjective as it is “embodied by a single-committed perspective” and “reflects a particular group’s social framework”. Secondly, it is determined by a stable group essence. Collective memory builds arbitrary relations between the past and present, and for this reason, it is an ahistorical, anti-historical construction. Lastly, its reinforcement is enabled through a series of commemorative actions.

An Account of the Trajectories of Memory Studies Modernity, the Decline of Experience and Building Memory Historians of memory designate the significance of the First World War concerning the shifts within understandings of temporality and experience (Olick and Robbins 1998, 118). Early symptoms of this shift can be traced in Benjamin who, confirming this assumption, speaks about the decreasing significance of storytelling in relation to the decline of experience after the war: “[E]xperience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness. […] With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. […] For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience” (2003, 143-144).

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Benjamin was referring to the striking and sudden gap between the domestic world of close family ties, the uniformity of the steady life, and the massive power of modern techniques of destruction that were introduced by the sweeping force of modernity. This havoc, which humanity repeatedly encountered in the following decades of the century, was the initial traumatic moment that was counterbalanced by a great commemorative moment and that caused “the cult of memory [to] become a universal phenomenon” (Winter 2006, 26). During the twentieth century the nation-building process in the form of “inventing traditions” and “imagining communities” of a shared history (Anderson 1991) constituted the focus of building memory, more specifically national memory that appeared as the most crucial component of “nation-ness”. The declining experience since the beginning of the century was displaced by commemoration and “built memory”. Herein, at the risk of making an anachronic shift, I should refer to Pierre Nora’s Lieux de Mémoire, the main concern of which was the state of memory in contemporary society. Nora, like Benjamin, was concerned with the “loss of experience” but rather in relation to the disappearance of the milieu where the experience of memory used to exist (Weissberg 1999, 16-17). What marked the main argument of his frequently cited maxim, “[w]e speak so much of memory, because there is so little of it left” (Nora 2006, 17) and also his whole work was that modern society is no more living within memory. Twentieth century societies stand amid the rupture between “living memory” and “its odd residue” (Weissberg 1999, 17). We are now living with what we built as signs and sites of memory such as monuments, museums, memoirs, archives and history books—what Nora coins as the “realms of memory”, “the re-formation of things that no more exist” (Nora 2006, 19)63—whereas preceding societies used to live within the milieu of memory. According to Nora, the essential roots of the sense of continuity between past and present are intended to be (re)built through these realms. Thus, living memory (milieus of memory) is conquered and eradicated by history—realms of memory (Nora 1989, 8). To Carrier (2000, 39): “Central to his explanation is the idea of rupture, or historical discontinuity, as the cause of radical transformation in collective consciousness: from historical memory to patrimonial, cultural, social, historiographical or archival memory-concepts which require closer 64 examination” .

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In the middle of the century, the mourning for experience was firmly interrupted by the traumatic weight of the Second World War which is, together with the general trauma the century generated, frequently claimed as serving as one basis for the emergence of memory studies (Misztal 2003, 2; Assmann 2006, 211; Connerton 2009, 1). The Holocaust and the Untellable The Holocaust marked the greatest traumatic moment of the century. The pressure “freighted both with the irretrievable memories of the untold dead and unspeakable, traumatic memories” (Radstone 2000, 6)65 introduced the victim’s or the survivor’s demand for “public recognition of their experience and testimony” (Ashplant et al. 2000, 3). The delay in initially characterising the trauma and the suffering the Holocaust caused was due to the untellable nature of the event—reminding us in Adorno’s words that “misunderstanding is the medium in which the noncommunicable is communicated” (1983, 232). Yet, in the following decades, the Holocaust also brought about scholarly and artistic orientation towards the testimonies of witnesses in search of understanding the essence of the event. However, until the 1970s, the testimonies of witnesses were suppressed and superseded by the heroic stories of the war (Winter 2006, 27-28). The answer to “the question concerning [the Holocaust’s] precise historical meaning [that] has re-emerged with a new urgency” (Barash 1997, 707) in the following decades laid neither in the accounts of the perpetrators of the continental Jewish massacre, nor in the testimonies of “heroic” military officers. Beginning from the 1970s, it was no longer the stories of prominent figures such as generals, admirals or soldiers that embodied the content of memory work, but was increasingly concerned with stories of civilians (Winter 2006, 89). Thus, the Holocaust, in a sense, democratised memory studies by way of enlarging the scope of interlocutors of scholarly memory work. By the 1970s, the access to the accounts of the victims led to the emergence of new voices with new memories (ibid, 28). The repercussions of the significance of the event did not remain limited to the 1970s; in the post-1980s when a boom in engagement with memory work became evident, the disappearance of the Holocaust generation imposed urgency on memory studies to reconsider dealing with the testimonies of the remaining witnesses.

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Towards the End of the Century: The Urgency of Memory Despite the prevalent reference to Holocaust remembrance in the flourishing of memory studies it was only one, although significant, aspect of the ever-increasing interest in memory in 1980s and 1990s. Misztal (2003, 2) explains the so-called memory boom in the 1980s, that became fully developed in the 1990s through “[the introduction of an] impressive number of civic anniversaries […], the growing interest in ethnic groups’ memories, the revival of fierce debates over the Holocaust and the Vichy regime, and the end of the Cold War, which brought an explosion of previously suppressed memories”. Her explanation, to some extent, coincides with that of Assmann (2006, 210-211) who identifies five main motivations that generated the peak in memory work: i. The decline of “grand-narratives”. The revival in long-hidden memories through the access to the archives of post-communist countries which enabled “a new basis for history and memory” to emerge. ii. The postcolonial situation. Efforts to recover indigenous history through narratives and memories. iii. The post-traumatic condition following the Holocaust and the world wars. iv. The disappearance of the generation who individually experienced these traumatic events and mediation of their accounts. v. The possibilities of circulating and storing information offered by the new digital technologies.

All the above-mentioned motivations generated their own corollaries. However, the decline of “grand narratives” and the corollaries had a ground-breaking and multifaceted effect in several aspects: On the one hand, the practical failure of socialism discredited the capability of the “grand narrative” of Marxism in explaining the world and society. The imagination of a holistic working class as the transformative force of history was replaced with the emergence of fragmented identities. Accordingly, while identity proved to be an increasingly significant notion within scholarly work, on the practical level identity politics gained prominence in making politics and political action66. On the other hand, the decay of socialism can spontaneously be identified with the turn to collective pasts and emergent efforts to compile new narrative accounts (Confino 1997; Koshar 1998; Neal 1998; Schwartz 2003) as well as an unprecedented encounter of two distinct (communist and anti-communist) institutional historiographies. The post-communist narratives have constituted influential sources for the collective memories of people who

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experienced either the establishment of communism and/or its downfall (Schevchenko 2009; Oushakine 2009; Horolets 2010). Indigenous people and the population of post-colonised geographic domains for whom oral memory still constitutes native methods of narrating the past, also received their own share of scholarly interest (Stoller 1995; Hannoum 2001). With regard to the third, the post-traumatic condition following the Holocaust has been the focus of a series of studies and Holocaust memory has itself embodied a branch in memory works (Novick 2001; Lebow Kansteiner and Fogu 2006; Cohen-Pfister and Wienroeder-Skinner 2006). The disappearance of the generation that included the Holocaust survivors urged the collection of testimonies and their incorporation to scholarly memory work (Langer 1993; Browning 2003). New information technologies not only offered completely innovative ways of storing and preserving information, but also transformed human being’s cognitive capabilities of remembering67. Currently, remembering something no longer depends on retrieving something “on the tip of one’s tongue”, but rather in “Googling”. The multidimensional transformation of the social settings we inhabit are inevitably echoed in the scholarly world and constitute the subject of a series of studies (Turkle, 1995; van Dijck 2007; Mayer-Schonberger 2009). The historical developments that marked the motivations and the peak points in memory work did not remain limited to scholarly interest. The “memory boom” included the common activity of a series of actors varying from film producers to activists, museologists to other experts (Assmann 2008, 54).

Conceptual Discussions Remembering at Impasse: Memory and Forgetting The boundaries of both remembering and forgetting are designated in relation to each other. The interrelation lies in the reflexive nature of the relationship between the two: generating memory through a certain commemorative activity (such as erecting memorials, writing memoirs, forming archives) means drawing the boundaries of what is to be remembered and what is to be forgotten as “the threat of forgetting begets memorials and the construction of memorials begets forgetting” (Connerton 2009, 29). Thus, as long as one is not solely occupied with the cognitive causes of how forgetting occurs, the relation between memory and forgetting remains crucial to the investigation of both.

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Before focusing on mechanisms or types of forgetting, I should make a remark concerning the empirical difficulties in defining and investigating the act of forgetting. To assert that a certain part of the past is “forgotten” instinctively means that there is a proper content of remembering or a definable/measurable plot. Such assertion undermines the efforts to demonstrate the processes of inter-subjective social construction(s) of the past as well as the plural nature of social remembering. In the same vein, Herzog (2009, 115) argues that we, the sociologists, should avoid using “forgetting” as a term as “there is no act as forgetting”, but “only different mechanisms for constructing and reconstructing memory”. Consequently, to him, the opposite of remembering cannot be forgetting, but ignoring (ibid). Similarly, Misztal highlights that they (remembering and forgetting) are both “frames of meaning or ways in which we view the past” depending on the “the group’s common map of the world” (Misztal 2003, 82). Below I make basic distinctions between, what I call, reactive, ethical, desperate and coercive forgettings—synonymous with “ignoring” in types of forgettings I identify. I treat Huyssen (1995) and Connerton (2009) as the representatives of reactive forgetting who draw the boundaries of remembering and forgetting in relation to the defective features of external structures and build their discussions upon the context of modernity and late modernity. Ethical forgetting is rather related to forgiving, recovery and reconciliation. Avishai Margalit (2002), through reminding us that human beings are not cognitively capable of forgetting, views forgetting as a kind of ethical duty that we owe to ourselves. The third, desperate forgetting, is illustrated in Susan Sontag’s account (2004) in which she sees forgetting as a unique way of overcoming pain and suffering— although images of pain demand that we do the opposite. Coercive forgetting is related to power’s conscious efforts to shape or re-shape the past and generate forgetting through a variety of mechanisms, be it censorship, banning, destruction, obfuscation or data distortion etc68. I focus on each of the categories designated above respectively. Reactive Forgetting Connerton (2009), sees forgetting as an inherent feature of modernity and capitalism, and thus, concludes that we are living within a kind of cultural amnesia. To him, cultural amnesia is not accidental, but rather intrinsic to and necessary for the operation of the market. Forgetting is built into the capitalist process of production itself and incorporated in the bodily experience of its life-spaces (ibid, 125). In the current phase of

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modernity, varying from the architecture of modern cities, to the capitalist mode of production which destroys the labour process through turning it into the appearance of a commodity; from storage and preservation strategies of information technologies to the inevitable instabilities due to the inherent crises of capitalism which is epitomised, for instance, in the sudden unemployment of individuals69, all result in an invisible, yet immense forgetting in capitalist societies. Huyssen (1995), in the same vein, reflects on forgetting through considering the modern commitment to memory. To him, the rising interest in memory is a reflection of the fact that forgetting has already become an irreversible implication of the acceleration of daily life, particularly in the advanced modern era. On the other side, he emphasises the fragmented nature of time and the emergent discontinuity between the past, present and the future which represents the “reorganisation of the structure of temporality” (ibid, 8). One major implication of modernity was the strict commitment to the future and to progress in the sense that while the past is perceived as a negligible fragment of time, the present and the future became almost synonymous: however, through the crisis of the ideology of progress and modernisation, and the decline of teleological philosophies of history (ibid, 7), we are currently “obsessed with memory”70. The obsession fulfils a function of resistance against the “accelerating technical processes that are transforming our Lebenswelt (lifeworld) in quite distinct ways” (ibid). To add to the accounts of Connerton and Huyssen, forgetting is not only an inherent feature of modern societies, but also a daily practice imperative to one’s survival. The reactive character of forgetting in the contemporary epoch appears to be a means of overcoming the detrimental and even destructive nature of a social milieu that constantly requires change and different levels of readjustment. Ethical Forgetting Ethical forgetting refers to the conscious act by “one who was wronged” to change her mental state—“a change of heart”—(Margalit 2002, 203) in order to “cover up” the sin committed against her (ibid, 208). Margalit understands forgetting in the sense of overcoming resentment and vengefulness. Although he highlights the fact that forgetting is not voluntary (ibid, 201), he rather views it as an act of disregarding that could occur in time, and only as an implication of “the ideal of successful forgiveness [for] the wrong done to us” (ibid, 208). Thus, forgetting becomes synonymous with forgiving.

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His account on forgetting relies on the distinctions between pairs of thick/thin relations, and ethical/moral. In Margalit’s account, the distinction between ethics and morality “is in turn based on a distinction between two types of human relations: thick ones and thin ones” (ibid, 7). Ethics is rather concerned with the way we should regulate our thick relations and morality stands for the regulation of our thin relations (ibid). Forgetting/forgiving is an ethical duty we owe to our thick relations. One expects that “shared memory” constitutes an exception, as Margalit ascribes forgiving and forgetting to the “ethical” and thus, to our thick relations. However, in the course of his discussion he considers forgetting/forgiving in our thin relations as also an ethical act while concluding that, reflexively, forgiving is also an act that we (ethically) owe to ourselves if we are not to be full of self-hatred (ibid, 207). His conclusion implies that, forgiving—and as an implication, forgetting— becomes possible in “shared memory”. Accordingly, Margalit concludes that, albeit the responsibility of keeping a shared memory falls on everyone in a community of memory, no one can be singularly charged with remembering it (ibid, 58). I do not agree with Margalit with regard to his view that forgiving (and forgetting) is “ethical” in the sense that it is an act that one owes to herself. On the contrary, not forgetting but maintaining the memory or remembering are both ethical and moral acts in the case of shared or collective memory, particularly of an atrocity, an injustice or a cruelty done to a community. It is ethical; because it is essential for maintaining the integrity of one’s self-narrative. And, it is at the same time moral as one owes it to a “community of memory” in that remembrance of each member is essential for maintaining the very identity of that community71. Booth makes a similar point and underlines that “[neglecting] the memory of the community” or “[not bearing] witness to it would be to damage the group’s identity and violate a norm of reciprocity and co-responsibility” (2006, xii). Desperate Forgetting In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag places a similar emphasis on forgetting to Margalit’s account, but through a different motivation. While she regards the massive catastrophes as representing the “monstrous bout of evil” (2004, 103) in the contemporary era in which “heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together” (ibid), she asserts that “the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans” (ibid, 102). However, Sontag insists that there cannot be a collective character of

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remembering in so far as, she asserts, remembering is solely an individual act, and so is forgetting. Thus, the wish to “never forget” forwarded by communities of memory is an act that serves no purpose other than keeping the pain alive. Even though, despairingly to Sontag, “too much remembering [...] embitters” in a world ridden with excessive injustice (ibid, 103). She suggests forgetting and assuming memory is “faulty and limited” in order to make peace, to reconcile (ibid) and to survive peacefully. Regarding Sontag’s account in which she offers forgetting as a remedy for overcoming pain, it remains controversial whether ignoring the pain— as forgetting is simply impossible—results in ignoring the atrocity or assimilating even though we are not the ones who experienced it, as we, as humans, maintain our sensibilities as long as we remember. Remembering might also be essential for transforming the pain into a means of resistance through which suffering people empower themselves. Coercive Forgetting Up to this point, it should have become clear that remembering is not an individual act, but is always regulated by “social rules of remembrance” (Zerubavel 1996, 286) pre-defined and continuously redefined in order to tell us what to forget and what to remember. “Rules of remembrance”, be it in relation to religion or politics, employ effective means—such as, for instance, imposing canonical texts—that spontaneously generate certain remembrances and enhance forgetting through suppressing those which fall behind (Knapp 2009, 125). Subsequently, what I call coercive forgetting is related to “rules of remembrance” through which an oppressive memory regime is operated in order to generate forgetting or remembering a certain version of the (hi)story. Coercive forgetting occurs “when [power] apparatuses are used in a systematic way to deprive” people of their memory (Connerton 1989, 14). In the contexts of political power, Connerton sees oppressive memory regimes as intrinsic to totalitarianisms; totalitarian regimes employ various means in order to enable “the mental enslavement of the subjects” (ibid). Practices to enhance coercive forgetting may vary from censorship to “violent recasting or obliteration” (Popular Memory Group 1982, 209), from public burning of books (Bertman 2000, 60) to “demolishing statues, altering calendars, prohibiting certain kinds of bodily practices” (Herzog 2010, 120). In such cases, “struggles for remembering are synonymous with the struggles against state power” (ibid, 117). Collective efforts to (re)construct the past, forming communities of memory, dissemination of

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(counter) memories are essential for challenging the regimes of coercive forgetting. Although compensation of the individual and social losses is not possible, collective memory is capable of transforming “victims” to active subjects resisting subordination. Considered in connection with Margalit’s and Sontag’s understandings of forgetting, under such conditions one is neither expected to forget for ethical reasons nor to overcoming the pain as each member of a community of memory is needed for transformation from “victims” to active subjects. The following section focuses on the course of such resistance and transformation by reviewing the contestation of memories.

Memory and Contestation If memory is social, it would inevitably be the subject of struggles and contestations as conflict itself is inherent to any level of the social. As “the struggle for possession and interpretation of memory is rooted in the conflict and interplay among social, political, and cultural interests” (Thelen 1989 cited in Olick and Robins 2009, 127), collective memory should be understood as a notion that is used to capture the continuing struggles over images of the past. The contestation of memories to become central and prove that they offer the “correct way to interpret the past” arises from the inevitability of a lack of agreement upon how a certain part of the past is to be remembered (Zerubavel 1996, 295). In the course of contestation, various means are employed for imposing novel reconstructions, diffusing certain representations, challenging and negotiating existing accounts of the past. As a consequence, we need to reflect on “why [a certain] construction has more staying power than its rivals” (Zelizer 1995, 217), and why some constructions achieve centrality and prove to be more influential on recollections of individuals and groups while some others are significantly excluded, obstructed or refused during contestations. The centrality and the dominance of constructions are to do with their positions against power; thus, contestation among memories is best understood in terms of a hegemonic struggle on how to remember a past event or a figure. The above section on “Coercive Forgetting” demonstrated that the dominance over remembering is maintained through systematic interventions into the regimes of memory. At this point, the Popular Memory Group’s (1982) approach to memory and processes of memory construction enables us to understand the “ongoing processes of contestation and resistance, a relatively free space of reading a reaction in which official and unofficial, public and private, interpenetrate” (Olick and Robbins 1998, 126). The

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theoretical basis of the contestation draws on a Gramscian understanding of memory politics that constitutes the site for the penetration of “countermemories” which offer potentially oppositional and unofficial constructions of the past. The Group regards counter (alternative) memories as investments “in the constant struggle for hegemony” over the dominance of how to construct the image of a certain part of the past (Popular Memory Group, 1982, 213). Herein, the distinction between dominant and popular memories constitutes one of the main premises of the Group’s approach to contestation. Accordingly, dominance of memory indicates the “power and pervasiveness” of certain representations (ibid, 207)72. The dominant memory is produced in a relational context in which institutions work collaboratively or build alliances in the process of winning consent (ibid). However, the Group asserts that the dominant memory is usually instable in that it is neither “monolithically installed” nor “everywhere believed in” (ibid); but is rather “produced in the course of […] struggles and always open to contestation” (ibid). Similarly, the popular memory, or counter-memory, is subject to continuous reconstruction. Its evertransforming content depends on its position against power, the circumstances within formal politics, and the activities and means they employ in introducing “alternative” constructions. Thus, both dominant and popular memory is ever-flowing and the efficiency of both depends on the changing impact of the other. The contestation is also strictly connected with the past-present relation as the past is always “subsumed in the present” (ibid, 211). How the past is represented and what it is believed to be is the matter of present perceptions. The relation of the past and present within the contestation is “organic” and is never unidirectional. The former gives shape and content to the present social structures which are very much to do with “origins and particular [histographies]” (ibid, 212). The latter, on the other hand, plays a decisive role in deciding the possibilities of penetration of “alternative” memories in the realm of memory, their capability to permeate public perceptions of the past and the opportunities they achieve in transforming it.

Memory and Identity What Identity? Identity, more or less, shares the same fate with memory with regard to the semantic load it carries and the different meanings ascribed to the term, particularly after the second half of the century73. The substantial

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proliferation in the current uses of the term appears to be the main reason for the emphasis on sense of ambiguity surrounding its numerous different applications. Whilst the initial conceptions primarily sought to link the “individual personality” and “the ensemble of social and cultural features” of groups—regardless of how large they are (Gleason 1983, 926)—Bendle (2002, 5) identifies seven current different uses of the concept which barely correspond to each other74. Laclau (1992; 1994, 4) suggests the location of social identities is found in the context of “the relation between proliferation of particularisms and decline of universal values”. The dualism between the two indicates the tension between the decline of the “grand narratives” and their selfconscious subject with essential identities, and novel attempts to conceptualise identities in terms of pluralities which owes to the politicisation of different parts of the social life. Similarly, Taylor (2010, 3) underlines the transformation of the social and political world in the last three decades as undermining the “fixed concepts and categories of the modern era” including ideology and identity (in the essentialist sense) and the latter’s associations with “class” and “nation”. It was not until the “cultural turn”, the academic and political interest on “class and social and political structures” was overwhelmingly superseded by the “focus on identity and social action” (ibid, 4). Then, within a dominant tendency to conceptualise identity in terms of particularisms, how are we to define “old political identities” relying upon an essentialist basis of class and nation? To put it more clearly, how are we to understand the socio-political location of the “old identities” such as those of socialist individuals who are mobilised by the “grand narrative” and the teleological insights of Marxism and build their political projects as self-conscious subjects of (working) class? Equally, for instance, how are the classical nationalists devoted to maintaining the “goodness” and the perpetuity of the nation and who are motivated by the claims of superiority of a certain race to be understood? The conception of “political identity” forwarded by Laclau (1992; 1994; Laclau and Zac 1994) appears as a significant attempt to amalgamate the “new understandings” of identity with the “old identities”. Laclau displaces the dualism between particularism and universalism—the former ascribed to “new” identities and the latter to the “old”—through asserting that these two should not necessarily exclude each other, and that they are actually coexistent. To him, “universality is not commensurable with any particularity”, and thus, it cannot “exist apart from the particular”. The tension caused by the coexistence of universality and particularity that seems to constitute a paradox is actually the precondition

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of politics in the democratic sense (1992, 90). Such inference also implies that it is only under the conditions in which any particular is in constant competition with another to incorporate its aims to the universal representation that democracy is possible. Secondly, Laclau employs the term “identification” (instead of identity) as he conceives of the process of building identities as a matter of constructing, not of discovering or recognising—epitomised by the distinction between essentialism and antiessentialism (1994, 2). Hereby, “identification” is thought to be a more convenient tool than “identity” as it presupposes that “one needs to identify with something because there is an originary and insurmountable lack of any [essential] identity” (ibid, 3). Thirdly, Laclau and Zac (1994, 17-23) contextualise identities through introducing the question of legitimacy which, by implication, brings about the questions of power and hegemony. This contextualisation clarifies the interrelations between the identification processes and power through regarding the deliberative (in the sense of consent production) and coercive interventions of power. Lastly, Laclau and Zac (1994) conceive of power as being preconditioned with a lack of absoluteness (a certain power prerequires the existence of conflicting wills, one of which will eventually dominate); through such an understanding of power, it remains possible for unstable and constantly conflicting identities (or in their terms, identifications)—coined as the lack of “over-identification” or the failure to achieve “fully-fledged identities” —to become the very guarantee of politics (ibid, 37)75. The third and the fourth aspects of Laclau and Zac’s interpretation are of particular importance for the purposes of this study76. The Nature of a Relationship: The Dialectics of Memory and Identity The relation between memory and identity is best understood through regarding the dialectical relationship between the two: while personal/collective identity perpetually gives shape and content to the memory, how the past is remembered in turn embodies and solidifies the identity of an individual or a group. In other words, shared stories are enabled with the commonality of an identity, and only with shared stories about the past does personal and group identities become possible (Olick et al. 2011, 177). The interplay between the two operates through several aspects of memory construction. If there is no remembering divorced from social frames; subsequently, besides past experiences, memory is always embodied by one’s membership to certain communities of memory (Zerubavel 1996, 289) the basis of which is the shared identity. Such inference is applicable to any

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community varying from a nation to a political group. Group identities not only function in assembling narratives about the past, but also play a decisive role in what to remember and what to forget. On the personal level, while the individual seeks to “establish coherent connections among life events” (Gergen and Gergen 1997, 162), identity serves as the guide in identifying those past experiences to be included and excluded. When it comes to the interplay between memory and identity in terms of the past and present relationship, one can infer that “the reconstruction of the past always depends on present-day identities and contexts” (Misztal 2003, 13). The contextual shifts and emergent possibilities of transformation in identities in the present find repercussions in the substance of constructions of the past. A narrative shaped through a group identity and constructed through inclusion of certain elements can be, in a novel context, revised by way of adding new elements or removing its certain components. The construction of memory in relation to personal/group identities is not necessarily a self-conscious activity. Due to the “neutrality” ascribed to past experiences, persons frequently do not recognise how present necessities and changes make an impact on present recollections. However, commitment to political identities can make a change in terms of the selfconsciousness of subjects. In some cases, “the reinterpretation of the past [may become] a part of a deliberate, fully conscious and intellectually integrated activity” (Berger 2011, 218). Such reinterpretation and reconstruction is enabled when one conceives of her own biography as a part of a worldview, “a universal meaning system, within which one’s biography is [to be] located” (ibid). Hereby, biographies or collective memories about the past become subject matters of political prospects through which battles on the past are maintained. This is particularly applicable to memories concerning past sufferings, injustice and grievances caused by social/political wrongdoing. The memory of such a past functions as a guard in protecting the identity of a community (Booth 2006, xi). Identity, on the other hand, constitutes a platform on which a political struggle against the perpetrators of the wrongdoing is operated. Herein, the groups of particular identities turn to becoming “actors with histories and [political] projects” who “speak of past injustices inflicted by earlier generations of other groups” (ibid, 4); the contestation among the memories of the past coexists with the political struggle against the conflicting groups in the present. Thus, the continuous effort to reveal past injustices becomes the central component of a political project.

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Another aspect of the memory of a wrongdoing in the past is that preserving memory, under such circumstances, means to be “bearing witness [or] bearing memory to others [who suffered]” which is conceived as essential to doing justice (ibid, xiii). Thus, commemoration and preserving memory becomes an ethical duty owed to a community composed of the persons with a shared identity. Each witness not only confirms the past injustice against its inflictors and rivals through owning the shared past but also, by way of testimony, turns towards becoming a subject struggling for the present goodness and future compensation of peers who share the same identity. Within such schemata, the political identity of the witness “works in three tenses”: “[It attaches the witness to] the past for purposes of accountability, sheds light on who the [witnesses] are [in the present], and binds [them] as stewards over [their] future societies” (ibid, 15-16).

CHAPTER THREE SOURCES AND THE METHODS OF THE STUDY

Construction of the Sample The 12 September coup was a moment in which the political subjects endured different forms of oppression on the basis of their political identities. Accordingly, the relation between political identities and memory has performed a decisive role in identifying the participants. Yet, such selection in terms of constructing the sample still demands some clarification. As I mentioned in the previous chapters, the coup was the initial point of a huge social, political and economic transformation process that aimed at eliminating political movements that could potentially pose threats to the smooth implementation of this project. The ongoing conflict between the right and left-wing groups was factual even though to what extent these clashes were spontaneous remains controversial. The coup’s socalled balanced attitude towards sides, unexpectedly for some, engendered the inclusion of right-wing militants who believed that they struggled for the sake of the state. As the coup held different motivations whilst “punishing” political sides, the form and the type of the oppression the groups faced was naturally divergent and produced different responses. Thus, the first rationale was the acknowledgement of the differentiation of coup experiences and belonging to diverse political communities which would inevitably generate different collective frames. This also enabled a comparative perspective on the different frames designating coup memories. I had a broad idea of the experiences of the politically affiliated, the right and left-wings, and the representations they produced after the coup’s traces began to fade away towards the end of the decade. Even though unevenly, both political sides found opportunities to “tell” their story of the coup which were frequently characterised by experiences of arrest, imprisonment, discharge, or at best, fugitiveness. Herein, “solidity” and harshness of the experience encouraged those who suffered oppression and generated a wider representation of the forms of oppression. However, the

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coup’s segregation between those who are politically inconvenient and Kenan Evren’s “convenient citizens” who did not formerly engage in politics raised questions about how the coup is remembered by people who had no political affiliations and who witnessed the coup and its oppression as “simple citizens”. Thus, besides politically affiliated, it would be more tangible to include non-politically affiliated participants in this study. Today, the politically affiliated recruited under various organisations constitutes the sides of the struggle around the coup memory. These efforts, to some extent, corroded the unique position of the official representation, but it still holds some coherency and credibility; partly due to this, I assumed a priori that the less harshly the coup’s oppression was felt in lives, the more likely one becomes less immune to the official representation. This presumption once more urged me to expand the inclusion of the sample through interviewing non-politically affiliated persons. A further rationale behind the construction of the sample was related to the dynamics of coup memory: the fieldwork temporally coincided with a period in which the official efforts in terms of “coming to terms with the coup” mobilised the mnemonic struggle at the collective level and provided individuals with an opportunity to revise their recollections of past experiences. Following the course of the official attempts since this study was initiated in 2008, I was able to presume that the fieldwork phase would take place when the initial legal steps would be taken and the public debate on coup’s legacy would reach culmination. Once the plurality of the sample in terms of political identity was pursued, this temporal coincidence would provide opportunities to observe the modifications and transformations in different groups’ and individuals’ coup memories. Accordingly, I wanted to utilise this opportunity through opting for the plurality of the sample. The experiences of physical—and the simultaneously ideological— elimination of persons through circulating threats of arrest and imprisonment is of central importance in understanding coup memory. The rupture in lives, the traumatic nature of torture and experiences of imprisonment naturally have constituting effects on individual retrospections. On a collective level, these experiences constitute the “mortar” of the frames utilised by political groups. Contrary to what the coup aimed to achieve, these oppressive moments had a unifying effect on group members rather than a dispersing one. Such experiences also extended to the families and close ones of the detainees who were visitors behind prison doors, and who were themselves oppressed and punished because of their emotional ties. As oppression was directly related to the political identity of

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individuals, defining the sample on a basis of political identity arose almost as a natural requirement.

Social Characteristics of the Sample The time period that constitutes the focus of this study imposed two types of homogeneity in terms of the social characteristics of the sample. Those who experienced the coup in person and who are expected to remember the coup period competently were to be adults so as to maintain the ability to construct socially bounded, yet idiosyncratic frames of memory. This aspect of the study inevitably brought about the identification of a certain cohort composed of persons that were already adults when the coup was staged. The age range varies between forty-five and seventy by 2010 when the fieldwork was conducted—this was between fifteen and forty when the coup was staged. The majority (eighteen out of twenty-nine) are in their fifties while four in their sixties (two being sixty years old and two in their early sixties) and five in the first half of their forties. Interestingly, each of the five participants in their early forties was among those who vividly remembered the period and provided integral plots of their experiences. Another homogeneity that the temporal focus of the study imposes is related to the educational status of the participants. The majority were university/college students when the coup was staged and have received a higher education with two M.A. degrees, eighteen university-educated, three college graduates and two with associate degrees. Only three of them are less educated than the rest with two high school graduates and one participant with a secondary school degree. The relatively homogenous educational status and high rate of having received higher education is related to the nature of engaging in politics in the 1970s which can be explained through: [i] the considerable interest towards politics among university students: the political movements beginning in the 1960s were mostly populated by university students and this feature of engaging in politics, particularly left-wing politics, continued until the coup (and, in turn, they were the most vulnerable to military oppression)77, [ii] spaces of making politics: in relation to former, universities were the most dynamic spaces of political struggle, [iii] the right-wing’s efforts to counterbalance left-wing’s political and ideological domination: even though established as district organisations, the most populated youth branch of the Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi], Idealist Hearths [Ulku Ocaklari] emerged as the bodies that would counterbalance the leftwing’s domination in universities, [iv] political leadership: the left-wing

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organisations populated by university students also led the labour movement. The level of education also echoed the current class positions. This draws attention to the fact that almost half of participants are retired; this is expectable when the cohort in which they are located is considered. Thirteen of these are retired after holding mid-rank positions and whitecollar jobs; only one participant is retired from a blue-collar job (worker). Among all, only two are housewives—even though one is a university graduate and holds an administrative position in a political party. One of those who are still working occupies a high-ranking official position, and three run their own businesses (two small retailers and one in the entertainment sector). Nine still occupy white-collar jobs requiring professional training (teacher, lawyer, journalist, tourist guide, and engineer). Journalism, in particular, requires highly developed intellectual capabilities and interests and an accumulation of cultural capital which is acquired, rather than inherited (a majority have lower or lower-middle class family backgrounds), through academic training (Bennett 2010, xviixxi). The academic training which enabled change in social positions also “[positioned their] habitus into new conditions” (Bourdieu 2010, 175). Levels of education, cultural capital and current class positions naturally project on the current social lives, habits and tastes designated by habitus, the “unifying principles which underlie [these] and give them a particular social logic” (Bennett 1984, xix)78. However, habitus not only organises practices, but also organises “perception of the social world” (Bourdieu 2010, 170) and this was particularly observable in participants’ capabilities for organising plots, contextualising experiences and systematising interpretations of the relation between the social/collective frames informing memories and their experiences. Religious identity comes into question when the specific features of engaging in right and left-wing politics in Turkey is considered. The rightwing politics, the idealist movement in particular, always had close ties with Islam, particularly after the 1980s partly due to the introduction of Turkish-Islam synthesis as the main ideological reference to politics. Although a quest for religious identity was not included in the interview questions, I was able to observe very frequently-made references to Islam and Islam-inspired linguistic conventions during our conversations. Accordingly, all of the right-wingers are faithful Muslims practicing religion to varying extents. The relation between political identity and religion is not that clearly observable in other participants. None of the left-wingers explicitly revealed their religious affiliations—believer, agnostic or nonbeliever—during conversations. In accounts by the non-

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politically affiliated, there were no clearly identifiable references as was the case in left-wingers’ accounts. However, the current political positions of non-politically affiliated participants provide an idea of religious practice. Despite never being organised under a certain organisation or a developed political belonging, these define their political positions as moderate left/social democrat or left-wing79. Herein, the distance from conservatism plays a central role in transforming religion into a cultural phenomenon diffused in daily lives which is organised according to secular principles, whilst the religious belief is maintained and religious practice is presumably pursued to different extents. When it comes to ethnic identity, there are some points to be made regarding possibilities of revealing and explicitly mentioning ethnic identity in Turkey. The dominant frame designating the “legitimate” identity is “Turkishness” necessarily articulated with innate membership to the Sunni sect of Islam; this solid and, to some extent, unquestionable assumption also lies at the heart of Turkish nationalism and Turkish rightwing politics in which Islam is deeply diffused. Any quest for ethnic identity would provoke “sensibility” in this group as identity is essentially perceived as monolithic and “ascribed” or “given”—not constructed—and draws on claims of “racial” and religious origin. Despite exceptions, the majority of the participants are of Turkish origin as ethnic identity did not play a role specifically in designating the empirical scope of the study. However, a quest for ethnic identity was not included in the questionnaire; I either had foreknowledge about or was able to infer references to one’s ethnic identity other than Turkishness—Caucasian, Garapagag Turk and Kurdish—in some participants’ accounts.

The Phases of the Fieldwork Establishing Contact with the Participants I contacted the participants on the basis of a snowball sampling; however, owing to pre-arrangements made prior to the fieldwork, I had already reached a few key-participants both from the left and right-wings. My former political affiliations with the left-wing and my social network enabled me to enjoy convenience in reaching left-wingers. However, despite the key participants, I faced several obstacles in reaching and contacting right-wingers due to a series of complications. These complications arose from my position as a complete outsider to the right-wing community, the gap between the linguistic conventions (parole barrier)80, my affiliation with a foreign university81 and participants’

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attempts to achieve foreknowledge on the researcher before the interviews (“Googling” barrier)82. Evenly distributed divisions between male/female and three political groups, left-wing, right-wing and non-politically affiliated, twenty nine people were in-depth interviewed83. The interviews were conducted in two large cities, Ankara and Istanbul. The overwhelming majority of the participants were contacted in Ankara due to reasons of spatial convenience. The sites where interviews took place were usually decided by the participants and the majority were conducted in participant’s workplaces and homes.

Interview Questions and the Temporal Implications of the Fieldwork The interview questionnaire was composed of three sections: the first section was designed to gather the demographic information. The second section that addressed the participants’ remembrances immediately prior and subsequent to the coup enabled them to present a free narrative of their initial recollections. This section opened with a question about their life before the coup which generally became widely ramified for collecting details depending on the expansiveness of the answer. The following question, whether they remembered the night the coup was staged, aimed at provoking flashbulb memories which would facilitate further remembrance of their experiences throughout the free narrative they constructed. The third section that represented a temporal consistence queried the specific aspects of coup remembrances. The questions in this section and their order were modified or reformulated depending on the quality of the communication, participant’s educational status and the flow of the conversation when needed. The forthcoming referendum brought about some additional questions that were generated by enthusiasm about speaking on the heated political agenda. The fieldwork continued for approximately six months between March and September 2010 and the period coincided with the fierce emerging public debate on the coup’s legacy. This was generated by the referendum to be held in September 2010 in which certain amendments to the militaryissued 1982 Constitution were to be made. As the Turkish government propagated the amendments in an effort to “come to terms with the coup past” the period prior to the referendum enabled the stimulation and revision of coup memories due to the intense public debate and encouraged participants to speak of the issue.

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Conducting the Analyses Some of the themes of analyses emerged immediately after the fieldwork and proved necessary to include in the analyses. For instance, “destruction of sites of memory” was one of the topics which participants were most intent to speak on. The interview questionnaire included a prompt about the issue; however, both the high frequency of referring to the topic and the common vivid remembrance of it introduced “destruction of sites of memory” as an essential theme in the analyses. Besides, as it was a strong proof of the coup’s activities in regulating memory, it provided me with opportunities to uncover the regime of remembering the coup introduced. Some of these themes indicated the main orientations in each group’s construction of collective frames; to exemplify, the inclination to attribute the coup’s staging to anonymous external (international) actors was one of the dominant and visible dispositions in right-wingers’ accounts. In the first instance, I planned to employ these as separate themes; however, the more I was drawn into the analysis process, the more clearly I recognised that there are other identifiable themes in groups’ accounts which, when considered together, constituted integrity and homogenised the collectively permuted plots. If I continue with the same example, in rightwing accounts the frequent emphasis on the lack of the control in the course of the events that finally ended in the staging of the coup and the international conspiracy scenarios in which the coup is understood as a “play” on Turkey were apparently intertwined themes; the co-existence of these themes procured the convenience in identifying the main features of the plot in right-wing collective accounts. In other words, the themes more or less common in accounts enabled me to juxtapose and consider them as integral stories. The accounts that represented a narrative form underwent thematic narrative analysis, the focus of which is “‘what’ is said more than ‘how’ it is said, the ‘told’ rather than the ‘telling’” (Riessman 2005, 3). The thematic analysis proved to be functional in identifying “common thematic elements” across the accounts of the research participants (ibid). The analysis was also applied to in-group narratives, the collective memories of three groups, and enabled the construction of typologies and the identification of common elements within the collective frames employed.

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A Self-reflective Account on Claims of Value-free Research and Impartiality Claims of a value-free social science research and impartiality have been long challenged by anti-positivist factions in the social sciences. Mies (1983, 68) calls for partial identification with the “research objects”, casting aside the postulate of value-free research and assumptions that the researcher’s own presuppositions could simply be separated from the study of the “social”. In this context, I shall declare that I adopted certain postulates and priorities within certain ethical conventions which bring about issues of partiality. My partiality primarily aroused from my own political position as a left-wing/socialist individual. Moreover, my habitusoriginated former familiarity with the left-wing individuals’ coup experiences which played a fundamental role in generating motivation for conducting such a study imposed conscientious intricacies on me that caused particular difficulty in achieving distance to the accounts of leftwingers. My partial identification with them occasionally distracted my efforts to maintain self-possession while, for instance, recalling the story of 1928 born Felat Cemiloglu who had all his teeth pulled after his release from Diyarbakir Prison where he was tortured by being forced to eat human faeces, or in regarding such a story of cruelty against another human: .

“He was holding the tail of a rat of this size, and was wagging it. I felt down from the chair on my back. And as soon as I fell down they started to hit the rat on my face, and—just like the cat smashes the rat into pieces— they pulled the rat into pieces [through hitting his face], poked it into my mouth, and made me eat it. I said, ‘I would do anything you want, just take me to the ward, let me change my clothes, pull round, and wash up’. [They take him to the ward]. I asked the ward keeper for a razor blade, ‘I will shave’ I said. I poured as much water as I could on my body, particularly into my mouth, I was trying to clean up the dirt on [inside] me. I walked towards the bunk at the end [of the ward], I said ‘friends, instead of betraying, I’m killing myself for the revolution and for my people’. I bladed myself in the neck” (Radikal 8 April, 2012)84.

The difficulty of achieving distance and digesting left-wing stories echoed in my epistemological and methodological oscillations between “giving voice” and “making the stories the subject of analyses”. I have delayed the former until a follow-up study. Lastly, rather than detracting from the value of this study, my awareness of my partiality, I believe, provides it with a reflexive quality once reflexivity is defined as the “critical examination of and accounting

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for the [researcher’s] own narrative impositions on the course and outcome of the investigation” (Morawska 1997, 58). My apparent biases can also be interpreted as a call for antithetic and challenging studies on coup memory by researchers from different political positions.

CHAPTER FOUR THE MNEMONIC LEGACY OF THE COUP “’History always talks’. But for the present at least, dialogue with it is something to be fought for, not taken for granted” (Hirschkop 1986, 113).

The search for the personal/collective memory of the coup is by no means detached from its prevalent representations. Consequently, the accounts are to be conceived of in connection with the various representations of the coup. However, all components of the mnemonic legacy do not necessarily play constitutive roles in the construction of personal and collective memories. On the one hand, the strength of the relation between the existing works and memories varies depending on political groups. Whereas there is an apparent interaction between— official or challenging—representations and personal/collective memories in one group, others either remain inactive in circulating representations that would contribute to the consolidation of collective memories. On the other hand, the efficiency of representations is closely related to possibilities/facilities of circulation: while some components have been capable of reaching a wider public and contributing to memory construction, certain components remain rather neglected and barely catch the attention of its audience. Even though it is not entirely possible to deduce direct and clear-cut connections between representations and audience—inclusive of the participants of the study—an assessment on the mnemonic legacy of the coup enables the provision of answers to a series of questions regarding the content, efficiency and credibility of the official representation that still plays a relatively important role in informing coup memory; the challenges against the official representation; the means the political groups employ in circulating collective memories; the temporal shifts which enabled a more efficient circulation and diversification of memory works; the actors contributing in the construction of the coup memory; and the ignored, neglected or the silent subjects of memory construction. This chapter relies on a selection of representations of the coup. Although the chapter seems to be organised according to the forms of representation, these actually reflect their temporal development. The

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official representation of the coup that was in circulation and was highly effective in informing collective frames throughout the 1980s, is presented here through a selection of official documents. The collaborative role of the mainstream press in the reinforcement of official representation is also briefly demonstrated. In the second section, I focus on the journalistic accounts, the emergence of which was supported by the legal end of military rule up until the end of the 1980s. These works fulfilled a “curtain opening” function in terms of terminating the monopoly of the official representation. Some of them also preceded and encouraged subsequent efforts to portray the atrocities of the coup. The third section focuses on the memory works that were produced during the 1990s and 2000s; the content of those works produced in these decades differ to a great extent with regard to their content. As such differentiation did not occur in a vacuum, this section also demonstrates the political and social basis that enabled the emergence of these works. Both decades have distinctive features in that while the 1990s was characterised by the limited and implicit attempts to produce novel representations, the “narrative opening” (Hart 1996, 78) in the 2000s enabled the “memory boom” that was distinguished by a significant diversification in memory works as well as the consolidation of collective memories. Besides written accounts, while the visual means of representation became unique forms in reaching the wider public, the establishment and the activities of the commemorative/generational organisations played decisive roles in shaping and consolidating collective memories, particularly those of the left-wing. The fact that the memory works reviewed in the below sections were primarily produced by left-wing or left-leaning actors raises questions about the apparent passivity of right-wing actors in circulating their collective memory. Thus, in the following section, I discuss the possible reasons for the right-wing’s silence. The last, but not the least, issue I focus on is the absence of the voices of female witnesses which clearly indicates the monopoly of the male narrators in the construction of coup memory. The prevailing dominance of the male witnesses in the present makes absence of women’s voices much more remarkable. So the last section provides a discussion on the issue as well as a brief review of the features of existing accounts by women.

1980s and the Official Representation of the Coup The documents of the National Security Council which signaled the military’s discontent with the circumstances of formal politics and later

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announced the motivations/justifications of the coup constituted its very first components of official representation. The coup was officially represented as [i] the unique “solution” to political instability during the 1970s, [ii] a means for overcoming the economic crisis and [iii] as the route to ending the ongoing armed conflict between opposing political groups85. The rise of the so-called “reactionary”/Islamist movement was also employed as a supportive argument by the National Security Council. These were to some extent factual developments rather than “fictive” excuses, but it soon became clear that there was a significant gap between the coup’s justifications and the cruelty and the scope of its applications as well as the exhaustive transformation it preceded. The official representation of the coup proved dominant particularly during the 1980s. Dominant representation indicates a particular “power and pervasiveness” and should be located in a relational context of institutions (Popular Memory Group 1982, 207). In this vein, building alliance with the mainstream press and subsequently being reinforced by it, the official representation played a significant role in winning consent regarding the coup’s legitimacy. Immediately after the coup, the efficiency of official representation was crystallised in two critical events: the first was the 91,4 percent rate of affirmative votes in the referendum in which the 1982 Constitution—it was issued by a National Security Councilcontrolled commission—and the presidency of Kenan Evren were affirmed (Turkish Statistical Institute date unspecified). The controversies on the reliability of the referendum is not fully capable of providing an answer to the extent to which official pressure to vote “yes” played a decisive role in each single voter’s choice. The second was the vote rate of the political party established and led by a retired general and explicitly promoted by the National Security Council which was, nevertheless, 23,3 percent (ibid). The rate, though not higher than that of the winner of the general elections, implied popular support for the coup, the implications of which—in this way or that—were experienced as unexceptional and became noticeable in social life. The very first document signalling probable military intervention into politics was the admonitory letter sent to the president on 27th December 1979 on behalf of the Turkish Armed Forces. This letter, which later reached parliament, aimed at “warning the parliament” of several issues each of which would later constitute the main justifications of the coup: “The Turkish Armed Forces decided to warn the political parties about their incapability of offering solutions for the political, economic and social problems of our country, preventing the anarchy and separatism to reach an extent that threatens the unity of the country […] and their pursuit

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Chapter Four of the uncompromising attitudes due to barren political controversies. […] The anarchists and the separatists are rehearsing for a nationwide uprising in the country. Turkish Armed Forces, being aware of the duty and the responsibilities assigned to it, […] insistently demands the political parties […] to give prominence to our national interests, collaborate […] against movements aiming to demolish the state such as terror and separatism” (Dinckal date unspecified, 7-8, emphasis added).

The letter was published in national newspapers shortly after it reached parliament and was the last document to be issued prior to the coup which was staged approximately eight months later. The first notice by the military that announced the military coup on 12th September 1980, at 04:00 am, bears a symbolic quality as it contained the gist of subsequent military declarations: “The aim of the operation that is being carried out is to defend the integrity of the country, provide national unity and solidarity, avoid a probable civil war and fraternal fight86, to re-establish the authority and the presence of the state and eliminate the motives that interfere with the functioning of the democratic system” (Resmi Gazete 12 September, 1980, emphasis added).

While the two declarations mainly emphasised armed conflict and the frailty of the parliamentary system, Kenan Evren’s first press conference on behalf of the National Security Council presented an elaborated account of the rationales of the coup which included the rise of the “reactionary”/Islamist political party as another of its justifications (Dinckal date unspecified, 33). In Evren’s speech, delivered on 16th September 1980, it was stated that the meeting in Konya pointed to the dimensions the “reactionary” political party had reached, claiming to have raised “public attention” to its extent as well as having enabled the public to recognise the “danger” generated by the rise of the Islamists. While the initial texts predominantly sought to provide justifications for the coup, in the following years, the National Security Council, having established the basis for its legitimacy, also aimed to ensure the continuity of official representation and maintain its dominant role on memory. Evren’s 24th October speech, delivered with the purpose of publicising the 1982 Constitution, indicated the military’s determination to control “what to remember”, and by implication, what to (not) forget, about the coup: “Yes, my dear citizens, some appear to have forgotten the period before the 12 September [coup] since they regained comfort in current conditions of peace and quietude, order and security. Some of them have forgotten the past probably as they have a weak memory or they personally did not come

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to grief before 12 September. […] Some, through making the Turkish citizens forget the living death and the pain and grief they suffered, the flutter and the hopelessness they fell into before 12 September, are striving to discredit the precautions that we tried to take for the future of the state and the society and to prevent the repetition of history so that they can turn Turkey back to the same circumstances” (ibid, 47, emphasis added).

The speech, clearly indicating the sovereign authority of the military over memory, epitomises the principles of the “rules of remembrance” (Zerubavel 1996, 286) it introduced: what to remember about the present —the “peace and quietude” and “order and security” as a consequence of the coup—is only possible through not forgetting a past framed as the “flood of blood and grievance” and the “living death and the pain and grief”. In the apparent contrast between past and present lies the coup’s expediency. The text also signals the military’s intolerance against the immediate or projective—though minor—oppositional representations that could potentially jeopardise or deviate from the official representation. Considering the present relative credibility of the official arguments, the military can be said to have managed to establish a solid basis for its “rules of remembrance”. The mainstream press significantly assisted the military in building the official representation87. Whilst the first news announcing the spread of the coup echoed the official representation, the press maintained its strict adherence to the official line and reinforced it further in the following years. The first anniversary of the coup was represented as a national “celebration” in the headlines of the national newspapers: Milliyet, expressing the public gratitude to the army, used the headline, “Thank you Mehmetcik”88. That of the newspaper Tercuman was “Peace is one year old”. The text beneath the headline advocated popular support for the military: “[w]e repeat the same wish we made last year. Let Allah help our army” (cited in Cemal 1986, 369-370). The vocabulary of the text on Hurriyet’s front page mirrored the mnemonic principles envisaged by the military: “Hand in hand, arm in arm, we are running to the glorious days… Not forgetting the past, we will the reach the future… How have we passed over the bloody rivers, we have held our breath near the cliffs… And now, yes, here we came to the flat lands” (ibid, emphasis added).

The individual military members occasionally attempted to remind society of the legitimacy of their activities in view of the subsequent years; however, they remained rather feeble attempts and attracted little attention

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(Evren, 1990, 1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1991d, 1992, 1994, 1997; Bolugiray 2002). Between 1990 and 1992 Kenan Evren published his six volume memoirs. Although the volumes were intended to present the general’s full biography, five out of six focused on his service during the coup period commencing from its staging (1980) and ending with the completion of his tenure as president (1989). The official representation maintained, and still maintains, its authenticity for some. Yet its monolithic and exclusionary nature inevitably evoked challenges that, though exceptional, began to flourish towards the end of the decade89.

“Opening the Curtain”: Journalistic Works towards the End of the Decade The relative freedom of expression enabled after the transition to civilian rule in 1983 was solely enjoyed by prominent journalists who were considered by the military as the “legitimate witnesses of the coup”. Due to seemingly operating “democratic” conventions and the military’s so-called adherence to the liberal ethics of journalism, military intervention into press activities was relatively suspended during the period of civilian rule. Consequently, the initial publications, which do not amount to more than a few, are predominantly composed of journalistic works. As exceptions, these works mainly focused on the pressure applied to the press during the period of military power (Cemal 1986) and presented descriptive-documentary accounts of periods prior and subsequent to the coup (Birand 1984; Mumcu 2007 [1987]). Another strand was composed of the writings of journalists who were either individually subject to the coup’s legal and political oppression due to their political orientations, or who were subsequently tried as a result of the works they produced in the coup’s wake (Calislar 1989; Tusalp 1986a, 1986b, 1988). The works in the second strand are of particular importance as they constituted the kernel of oppositional works produced in the 1990s and 2000s. The first work, produced as early as 1984, was the journals of Mehmet Ali Birand, a leading journalist who maintained his interest in the coup period in the following years. Birand, though implicitly, undermined the claims of legitimacy forwarded by the National Security Council while asserting that “there are no countries in the world that had been able to solve its problems through military regimes” (1984, 21). Birand’s work paved the way for similar journalistic attempts and was followed by the chronicles of Hasan Cemal (1986) who, unlike Birand, rather revealed the coup’s continuous efforts to control the press. Ugur Mumcu (2007 [1987])

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aimed at revealing the unlawful aspects of the military throughout the period it remained in power90. These three works called attention to the “dark sides” of military power and the possibility for the emergence of more challenging journalistic accounts in subsequent years. The democratic conventions that enabled the circulation of these works did not operate for more oppositional works: the producers of the works in the second strand who instead documented the coup’s practical cruelty suffered from legal sanctions before and after their attempts. Oral Calislar (1989) portrayed prison life through an explicit description of the inhumane treatments against detainees. Erbil Tusalp (1986a) revealed the physical and psychological violence carried out by the military through the testimonies of those who had suffered. His work can be assessed as the very first account of the personal experiences of torture and maltreatment. Tusalp (1986b) continued his pursuit through the disclosure of documents portraying the practical violation of human rights. Tusalp’s attempts pioneered works framed by the human rights perspective in assessing the coup’s cruelty. His first two works were followed by a detailed account of the results and the political implications of the coup and was published in 198891.

The Latecomers in the 1990s and the “Narrative Opening” in the 2000s Despite the coup’s long terms implications, the 1990s appeared to be the decade in which its traces began to fade in Turkey’s public life due to the abandonment of legal restrictions, the commencement of regular operations in political life, and the relative stability of the economy. Kenan Evren’s presidency bore a symbolic character in its representing of the coup’s visible effects until tenure expired in 1989 and he was succeeded by a civilian candidate. The nationwide martial law that had overwhelmed daily life was suspended in 1987. The last implication, but by no means the least, was the 1991 introduction of an amendment to Law for Combat against Terror (Ansay and Wallace 2005, 180) that enabled release on probation for the majority of politically affiliated detainees. The resulting massive release also meant an end to the physical elimination of the coup’s legal witnesses and spontaneously gave rise to the would-beauthors of subsequent memory works. Despite these series of developments, the 1990s was somewhat characterised by efforts to implicitly narrate the “damages” wrought following the 12 September. The field of perceptions of the past is “always open to contestations” (Popular Memory Group 1982, 207). Due to efforts to introduce fresh

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personal and collective “stories” about the coup in the 1990s, to a considerable extent the official representation lost its credibility. The attempts of those journalists who retrieved the relative freedom of expression after the elimination of legal constraints continued in the 1990s (Arcayurek 1990 [1986]; Yetkin 1994; Birand et al. 2006 [1999]). In this decade, journalists were able to publish and circulate works presenting more expansive and detailed accounts on the legal and political implementations of the military power during the 1980s. Particularly, the introduction of arguments undermining the legitimacy/credibility of the official representation in Birand’s work still constitutes one of the main sources for researchers dealing with Turkey’s recent political history. The 1990s were also distinguished by the use of fiction as a means of presenting personal stories. Despite some exceptional attempts (Argav 1997; Gunersel 1999) that preceded the memory works in the 2000s92, the use of fiction in the 1990s indicated the implosion of the traumatic experience, the intensity of which posed obstacles to providing straightforward accounts of the personal experiences of potential authors among the coup’s sufferers. Cemal (1986, 239), while observing the sudden and dramatic increase in the number of emerging literary journals publishing stories and narratives in the 1980s, similarly indicates that these journals not only offered ideal means for exposing personal experience in an implicit fashion, but also spontaneously appeared as a means of resistance against the legal constraints of the 1980s. However, perhaps more convincingly, the use of fiction in this period implies the writer’s efforts to overcome the mental—rather than legal—constraints in narrating the abovementioned intense coup experience. While a series of novels (Baydar 1998; Cicekoglu 1990; Arslanoglu 1997) that, in a way, communicated with personal experience were published, previously written and published novels in the 1980s were reprinted several times (Pamuk 1983; Tekin 1986; Agaoglu 1988) throughout the following decade. The 2000s can be considered as a “narrative opening” with regard to its enabling “[the] opportunity for new political stories to be told, featuring new plots and non-traditional characters” (Hart 1996, 78). Not only did politically affiliated sufferers emerge as novel actors demanding public recognition of their atrocious experience, but were also empowered to attain the appropriate means for representing their experience in an explicit fashion. The memory “boom” in the 2000s was indisputably enabled by a reversal in the mentality of Turkish politics and its penetration by a novel actor, the conservative/liberal Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi]. The party prioritised its liberal aspect particularly

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during its initial period of power in order to include prominent liberal figures in its innovative historical bloc. Although, it was not until the 2010 referendum93 that the public debate on the legacy of the 12 September coup was introduced, the Justice and Development Party’s [Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi] discourse on settling accounts with the (Kemalist) past in order to undermine the legitimacy of the eighty year ideological/political dominance of the Kemalist elites in such a way involved the 12 September coup in “settling the accounts with the past” debate. While the significant increase in the literary works continued in the 2000s (Eroglu 2000; Devecioglu 2004; Yasar 2006; Isiguzel 2008)94, more importantly, the publication of single-author memoirs at intervals and continual publication of a number of edited memoirs appeared as the more remarkable efforts made in exposing sufferers’ experiences. The common feature of these works is their function in altering the individual implosion of pain and trauma that featured in the literary works of the 1990s. With regard to their ability to assist in coping with the personal “damages” due to coup experiences, they can be considered as means of “healing” through making the private and intimate experiences of pain and suffering public. More importantly, the emergence of edited works not only made personal experience a subject of struggle within memory politics, but it also became incorporated into and consolidated collective memory, particularly that of the left wing. Throughout 2000s, the “marginalisation and the exclusion” (Bruner 1997, 269) of the memories of sufferers were finally replaced by the mnemonic “return of the repressed” and it has been the decade of the “memory boom” which introduced novel actors employing original forms in their presenting of personal and collective accounts. While consecutive accounts dealt with the experiences of “ordinary” sufferers, Ongider’s work (2005) relied on interviews with prominent left-wing figures whose accounts, besides exposing personal experiences, framed subsequent assessments on the coup’s political and economic consequences. It was followed by the seminal and comprehensive work of the journalist/activist Ertugrul Mavioglu who in person was among the witnesses of the coup’s atrocities. Composed of three volumes and published consecutively between 2006 and 2008, his works constitute the most expansive sources so far that examine the coup in legal terms through detailed testimonies of “ordinary” sufferers. Karaca’s (2008) work appeared as a unique attempt to reveal the experiences of probably the most neglected segment of sufferers, the refugees, who were forced to migrate mostly to Europe to overcome the severe legal sanctions. Most of these works found more

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durable and potent repercussions in public due to the increasing legitimacy of speaking about the coup after 2010. The memory “boom” had reached its climax by the 2010 referendum. The heated agenda also pulled popular culture figures into the debate: published in September, the month the referendum would be held, the works of Sezer and Dizman (2010) and Akman (2010) were composed of accounts by publicly known figures. Asan’s work (2010), which included a collection of accounts from a wide range of witnesses, was published in the same month. The intense public debate itself, alongside the engagement of popular figures, allowed the anonymous and disinterested readers to become acquainted with the coup’s legacy and memory. Among all these, Delikanli and Delikanli’s (2013) oral history work with family members left behind the imprisoned came to fore; leaning toward a tacit aspect of remembering the coup—postmemory—another glaring feature of this work was its composition of accounts by “ordinary” people. However, both the authors and witnesses of the above referred works are identified with left-wing or left-leaning political positions. While the “edited books trend” in the 2000s significantly contributed to the construction and consolidation of left-wing collective memory, the same cannot be said for the right-wing. This was partly due to the protracted silence of the right-wing in relation to the coup. The authors of these exceptional attempts after 2010 (Okuyan 2010; Kursat 2012) demanded to be individually counted and recognised in the public debate through exclusively revealing their individual experience, rather than speaking of a collective experience. Thus, the extent to which these works actually played a part in the construction of the right-wing collective memory is controversial.

Visual Memory of the Coup Feature films shot throughout the 2000s were highly efficient in introducing distant audiences to events through stories of the coup and suggested frames for constructing its memory. The number of films, the narrative of which somehow touch both the coup itself and coup-related experiences, stands at around thirty (Kanat 2010). However, in accordance with the temporal shifts observed in published works, the explicitness of the films’ narratives often differed widely depending on the period in which they were shot. Whereas feature films only made implicit references to the coup in the 1980s, in the 1990s and 2000s the coup constituted the very focus of their narratives.

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These popular films also proved capable of shaping/contributing to the frames informing coup memory for the subsequent generations who were discovering the coup experience for the first time. It is interesting to note that two films on the 12 September coup—Vizontele Tuuba (2003) and My Father and My Son [Babam ve Oglum] (2005)—are amongst the most seen Turkish films of all times; while the former was watched by more than two million moviegoers (International Movie Database data unspecified), the latter’s audiences exceeded this number at 3,839,589 (Box Office Turkiye date unspecified). Although, the high box office ratings are partly due to their popular narratives and famous directors, the directors’ preferences of narrating the coup experience—instead of less controversial issues—also indicates general audience interest in couprelated stories. My Father and My Son [Babam ve Oglum], which narrated the subsequent life of a left-wing moribund suffering from serious health problems due to torture in prison, attracted great interest among audiences despite their political affiliation95. Albeit seen by a relatively limited number of moviegoers, Homecoming [Eve Donus] (2006) and International [Beynelmilel] (2006) were two films centring upon far more opposing narratives by engaging with the left-wing memory. These films critically represented the violent aspects of the coup and the constraints imposed upon both the individual and public life during the coup years. Although not a popular genre and attracting little broad audience attention, documentaries, unlike films, play a particular role in solidifying collective memories of politically affiliated groups. They are mostly produced for purposes of keeping memories of the coup’s (politically affiliated) sufferers’ alive by politicising the coup experience and generating a common spirit of comradeship among veterans through commemoration. Almost certainly, the only exception among such featured works is the documentary entitled The 12 September [12 Eylul] (1996) that was shot by a group of journalists in 1998 and which has remained the primary “objective” visual source on the coup. The documentary owes its “objectivity” to its exclusion of politically affiliated “ordinary” figures and its reliance on interviews with mainstream (parliamentarian) politicians and the central military actors of the coup. In presenting a “day-by-day” account of the coup’s organisation and placing particular emphasis on its “inevitability”, the documentary, through imposing truth claims, expands the frequently referred gap between “History” and memory. Representing the coup as an inevitable consequence of the conflicts within the military and instability in parliament, the documentary also to some extent echoed and vivified the official representation that still prevails in the imagination of the non-politically affiliated/disinterested audience.

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The left-wing groups and the generational/commemorative organisations spent considerable effort in circulating testimonies through documentaries. However, the documentaries’ capability to reach wider audiences to a large extent remains limited due to financial difficulties and political obstacles. Because of their exclusively politically-committed perspective, they fall short of reaching anonymous audiences. Nevertheless, due to the potential promised by the internet, a wide range of short documentaries and testimonies produced by commemorative organisations have reached beyond the usual community-specific audiences. Similarly, the documentary Diyarbakir Prison No: 5 [Diyarbakir 5 No’lu, 2005], by Cayan Demirel that draws on the testimonies of ex-detainees of Diyarbakir Prison was seen by 83,000 watchers on YouTube by November 2014. Besides, such works are frequently included in schedules of commemorative events. However, there is an apparent gap between the circulation and the broadcasting possibilities of documentaries representing politically diverse narratives. While the circumstances of left-wing works are as described above, the documentary, Labyrinth of the Shahs [Sahlarin Labirenti], that presented a conspiracy inspired right-wing narrative of the coup, was broadcast on the public broadcasting channel in 2008. This sixty hour anticommunist inspired documentary relying on accounts of journalists as well as the testimonies of prominent right-wing figures, some of whom were condemned for murder, caused public controversy over the reliability of the claims it presented96. Although the right-wing narrative has been only recently incorporated into the social frames due to individual efforts and state led organisations, individual left-wing actor’s relative competence in the country’s cultural life97 occasionally engenders episodic intersections between popular works and the left-wing political ethos. The recent trend in period serials focusing on Turkey’s near history has emerged as one example of such intersection. These popular and widely watched TV serials constitute popular, though indirect, means for memory politics and occasionally generate controversies around the representations of actors between the left and right-wing communities. For some ten years, several serials focusing on the period between 1950s and 1980s—which coincides with the period during which left-wing politics was steadily on the rise—have been broadcasted in prime-time in Turkish television. The majority of these serials’ protagonists, located in a social or familial context, represent politically affiliated individuals or political supporters as sufferers of legal complications, wrong doing, and the maltreatment typical of politically controversial periods (Emre Cetin

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2014, 2470-2471). Within the serials’ narratives, implicit references are made to the coup’s atrocities. It was not until 2009 that a TV serial temporally centring on the coup years and narrating the experiences of its left-wing protagonists was produced. Broadcast on a national TV channel and attracting remarkable audience interest, the serial, My Heart Won’t Forget You [Bu Kalp Seni Unutur mu] visualised prison life and torture in the coup years very explicitly. Having triggered controversies around its representations of both actors and the applications of military power—whether or not the representation of torture was exaggerated or the serial equally represented actors on opposing sides — the serial was soon to become subject to legal sanctions and financial difficulties (inabilities to attract advertisers or to find sponsors) imposed by state organisations and investors. The secretary general of the National Security Council—in an intervention to the social frame offered by representation—made a declaration announcing the military’s discontent with the serial concerning the way the military and legal constraints the coup introduced were being represented in the serial (Posta 10 October, 2009). Following this, the serial received a warning from the Radio and Television Supreme Council with the justification that it included “numerous torture scenes”. The short-term implication of the military’s declaration and the warning was the discontinuation of the thirteen episode serial in the following months. As a consequence of the audience interest the serial attracted, the discontinuity was countered by a petition against official interventions, but it remained ineffective.

Memory Politics: Self-Conscious Actors, Collective Action Organisations Established in 2005 in Ankara, the Federation of the Revolutionary 78 Generation [Devrimci 78’liler Federasyonu] constitutes the central organisation in the construction and representation of left-wing collective memory. Owing to awareness of collective action on memory politics gradually being raised by the organisation, left-wing veterans formed local branches in different regions of Turkey. Despite not being established with the specific aim of becoming actors in memory politics—the organisations also served as a social environment for those with whom the coup experience is shared—the recent activities of the organisation are framed as collective responses against the official labour of oblivion and obliteration. Thus, in time, the organisation began to employ a discourse

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of challenge against “false” representations of the coup and reinforced its role as a significant actor in memory politics. The most widely participated activities of the organisation are the commemorative events held on the coup’s anniversaries. The series of events that usually take place in central venues in Ankara include film and documentary screenings, panels, forums and exhibitions. The organisation recently campaigned to make a temporary exhibition centred on the coup experience permanent. The project aims at founding “12 September, The Museum of Shame” in order to attract and introduce a wider public to the coup’s atrocities and its political implications, both of which are central components of the left-wing collective memory98. On 12th September each year, the organisation invokes a demonstration in which left-wing individuals, parties and organisations participate regardless of whether these demonstrations achieve its primary purpose. The organisation also uses its website effectively in communicating with its audience through testimonies, documents and broadcasting documentaries. Having made an official application to become an intervener, the organisation actively takes part in current legal proceedings. The unofficial 78 Generation Foundation for Cooperation and Solidarity [78’liler Yardimlasma ve Dayanisma Vakfi] functions as a community of solidarity involved in both financially and socially assisting the coup’s (left-wing) sufferers and their families (M. A. 2010). Although not an active component of memory politics, among the foundation’s activities include the offering of scholarships to coup sufferers’ children, providing financial support for the disabled (due to torture) and organising occasional gatherings for members99.

Collective Actions Following the Jurisdiction Process: Between Coming to Terms and a Symbolic Jurisdiction The bill of indictment drawn up by the Ankara Criminal Court in December 2011 triggered a fierce discussion as to the scope and aim of the jurisdiction. The indictment accused the members of the National Security Council of staging the coup, amending the Constitution and closing parliament (Hurriyet 10 January, 2012). The right-wing groups represented by the nationalist party demanded the inclusion of other official actors in jurisdiction. The left-wing associations, individuals and groups, besides asking for inclusion also supported the accusations of perpetrators of crimes committed against individual sufferers. They also called for an expansive coming to terms process by recognition of the

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coup’s political and economic implications which are believed to have led the country down a socio-economic cul-de-sac. Through the initiation of the jurisdiction, right-wing individuals and groups emerged as novel actors and demanded recognition as “victims” within the so-called “coming to terms” process. Despite their previous passivity in dealing with the issue, they took part, for the first time, in demonstrations held during the court sessions. Prominent right-wing figures were officially approved as interveners in legal proceedings. Rather than being self-conscious collective actions, the right-wing effort can be assessed as a cyclical political manoeuvre against populist efforts by the Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi] and attempts to be counted in the ongoing debates around the coup’s legacy. Despite propagation attempts by the Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi] to vote “no” in the 2010 referendum, the penetration of right-wing figures into the public debate was promoted by formal politics100. Informed by knowledge of how countries with previous coup experiences underwent a process of coming to terms with events, left-wing organisations and individuals regarded themselves as legitimate “interlocutors”—rather than “victims”—within legal procedures. The legal limits set by the bill of indictment that were characterised by a judicial and conspiratory understanding of the coup, were met with frustration and dissatisfaction. The left-wing groups not only called for a “crimes against humanity” perspective to be adopted101, but also demanded a socially and politically expansive vision of “coming to terms”. Besides political and human rights organisations102, numerous individual criminal complaints appeared as indicators of the social discontent towards the coup’s past. The number of the criminal complaints is estimated to be around 3,000. The left-wing organisations’ calls for inclusion of lower-rank official figures in jurisdiction found its repercussions as the prosecution offices in fifty nine cities are acknowledged to have attempted to carry out separate investigations and file claims against individual official actors involved (Atas 2012). Regarding the experiences of different appearances of political violence in various parts of the world, the search for truth and justice and collection of testimonies can be assessed as binary practices. One significant attempt informed by a fundamental frame of coming to terms and reconciliation is the establishment of Diyarbakir Prison Truth Investigation and Justice Commission [Diyarbakir Cezaevi Gercekleri Arastirma ve Adalet Komisyonu] in 2007. Specialists including journalists, legal practitioners, and medical experts etc. in the commission worked on

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the inhumane treatments and torture carried out in Diyarbakir Prison. Besides the legal aspect of the issue, those psychiatrists and psychologists involved assisted sufferers in overcoming mental damages caused by atrocious prison experiences. Having interviewed approximately fourhundred and fifty ex-detainees of Diyarbakir Prison and collecting a bulk of documents related to the issue, the commission prepared an eighthundred page detailed report concerning the coup’s criminal applications in Diyarbakir103. Additionally, encouraged by the commission, sevenhundred ex-detainees made individual criminal complaints to the Diyarbakir Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office which promptly responded with decision for investigation. The commemorative activities and series of legal steps taken so far constituted effective instruments for carrying out memory politics. Organisations’ efforts to publicise/circulate collective memory, to actively participate in the public debate, and to engender an individual and collective consciousness in order to attain appropriate legal means, secured the ground for discussing and disclosing the coup’s illegitimacy. In addition, individual and organisational efforts encouraged those who had suffered yet had not been willing to make their voices heard thus far.

Two Specific Issues: Absent Voices in the Coup Memory The Silence of the Right-wing Except for journalistic work that rather aims at providing historical accounts of the sequence of events before and after the coup, the memoirs and edited works are produced by those on the left-wing, visual works either represent left-wing characters or are composed of the testimonies of left-wing sufferers. The lack of voices speaking on behalf of the rightwing sufferers of the coup demands reflection on this particular issue. Efforts by nationalists/idealists to circulate the coup memory remained the exception (Ugurtekin 1993; Oztunc 2008). Being published by local publishing houses that had insufficient means of distribution, the impact of these isolated works remained limited to enthusiastic right-wing readers. Besides, there is an apparent disproportion in terms of the works published after the memory “boom” triggered by the referendum-inspired public debate after 2010. The recent trend in the publication of “edited books” caused no discernible reverberations amongst the right-wing. The authors of the few books that had been recently published mainly aimed at presenting the individual aspects of their own experiences (Okuyan 2010; Kursat 2012). These isolated works appear not to have even attracted the

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attention of right-wing readers and drew little interest from the wider public. The most referred to books by those on the right-wing are two fictional works by Cayir (2006) and Isinsu (2008) both of which portray the painful, though “heroic”, experiences of right-wing militants before and after the coup. One reason that provides some explanation for the right-wing silence, I believe, is the unrevealed ambivalent attitude of right-wing sufferers towards the state. Provided that the portrayal of the alleged painful experiences associated to political affiliation presupposes defying and questioning the state apparatus, the right-wing’s inherent loyalty to the state is to be considered as one aspect of their hesitation in explicitly revealing their coup memories. Although rare, individual attempts have been made towards questioning the state which caused political divergence within the right-wing, such questioning has never been articulated to the right-wing collective memory. Hesitating in such questioning, existing right-wing works most frequently target left-wing politics that is believed to have been responsible for the right-wing’s suffering due to the “political violence they generated”. In other words, while the right-wing authors position themselves as the “innocent” party in the violence and deny voluntarily becoming involved in its carrying out, left-wing actors are frequently condemned as the actual political offenders the activities of whom led the military to stage the coup. This even results in an aggressive attitude among right-wing authors in terms of the left-wing’s determination to represent memories; such determination is usually explained through an emphasis on inequality in reaching intellectual means of representation as well as through the left-wing actors’ dominance in the culture industry. The description of one recent memory work by an idealist/nationalist author illustrates such aggression directed to left-wing efforts: “Claiming that the left-wing staff and supporters of the separatist terror were the main target of the savages of the 12 September [coup], that they were tortured and annihilated, by implication, that the coup was staged against the left-wing and that the coup did not harm the idealists have almost been in fashion […] since 12 September 1980. These claims also constitute a continuation and the powerful means behind left-wing hostility against the idealists104. […] This hostility that resulted in the murder of thousands of idealists still continues in the minds of the left-wing staff. These staff propagated and still propagate the idea that the idealists were affiliated to the savage cadres of the 12 September coup by means of the press” (Kursat 2012).

The text explicitly reveals right-wing rage and displeasure at the efficient circulation of left-wing memory. The author, in the name of his

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idealist/nationalist peers, condemns “the left-wing staff” and accuses the left-wing generally of obfuscating the suffering of right-wing supporters through continuous and efficient efforts to represent personal and collective memories. The long-term right-wing silence is also strictly connected to the specific relation between identity and autobiography; the “relationship between identity and autobiography is not that autobiography […] reflects a pre-given identity: rather; identities are produced through the autobiographical work” (Lawler 2007, 13). Thus, the ambivalence in terms of political identities and subjecthood presented by the right-wing poses obstacles to their efforts to reveal the integration of their coup experiences in autobiographies. As I have discussed elsewhere, the coup’s unexpected and inexplicable oppression against the right-wing resulted in the very disappointment of right-wing individuals that disrupted the integrity of the self-narrative. Thus, the traumatic feature of right-wing experiences impedes the construction of integrated autobiographies. While attempts to overcome the confusion and frustration within the right-wing have been made through scenarios of conspiracy, the subject itself and the (political) identity it is equipped with lose their significance and become ambiguous within such understandings of the coup.

Ignored Female Existence: Were All Witnesses Male? “When the history of menarche is widely recognised as equal in importance to the history of monarchy, we will have arrived” (Stearns, cited in Himmelfarb 1997, 51).

As all military prisons had separate wards populated by women; as these women are acknowledged as suffering equally from the physical and oral violence as did their male peers; and as it was the women waiting in long queues in front of military prisons to visit husbands, brothers, and fathers; as the male nationalists had their “idealist sisters”105 and the revolutionaries their “sister companions”.... the answer to the opening question is an emphatic “No”. However, that which women’s stories specifically offer the social/collective memories of the coup, and the ways they deviate from or reinforce the manifest features of memories remained tacit until recently. Except for two early works (Yildiz 2011 [2001]; Erdogdu Celik 2005) that barely caught interest due to being published by small publishing houses with limited distribution, and several accounts included in edited books (Onal 2005; Selek 2005; Goregenli 2005; Camli 2006; Genc 2008: Ilteris 2008), the lack of the female story of the 12 September coup within the

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literature can be interpreted through a series of considerations varying from the relative, yet prevailing, absence of female actors in Turkish politics, to the unequal opportunities existing in the public sphere, from the voluntary exclusion of women from the intellectual milieu to the overall invisibility of existing female actors in politics. What makes the absence of women’s voices within coup memory literature intriguing is the fact that the period prior to the 1980s was a high point in the participation of women in politics, particularly in the leftwing, despite their exclusion from administrative positions (Tekeli 1989, 23). Thus, it appears that whereas the political history of the 1980s is made both by men and women, it was solely written by the men. This absence was sustained by a very simple, though problematic, historical fact: regardless of the side as politics is monopolised by men being involved in politics in the 1970s presupposed that women “undress” their genders106. Thus, the self-perception of politically affiliated actors, including the women themselves, was strikingly non-gendered. One should regard the rhetoric of “sisterhood” that was prevalent both among the right and leftwing male actors as clear indicators of the genderlessness of political practice in the 1970s. The below account of a female revolutionary epitomises the very nature of being involved in politics as a woman during the coup years: “I was not quite aware of it [my own gender] in those years, but if you wanted to say ‘I am here’ in a [political] movement, you needed to become slightly mannish. I do not think that there was a separation as woman-man within the then revolutionary movements. It was a completely nongendered mass; we can neither say man nor woman. However, women somehow had to resemble the men in order to compete with the men, in order to take part in that movement” (Genc 2008, 404, emphasis added).

When one considers the existing accounts, it can readily be noticed that while, though exceptionally, women’s accounts are included in left-wing collective memory works, the narratives of women in right-wing memory works, coupled with the overall silence of right-wing actors, are scarce. The exceptional inclusion of women in left-wing works reveals a significant point in terms of the authors/narrators of the accounts: while the accounts of “ordinary” male political actors are naturally included in any means of circulation of memory, the women involved in edited memoirs and documentaries owe this opportunity to their prominent positions within the intellectual community and their privileged status in making their voices public. The women whose stories come to be included in left-wing memoirs are currently journalists (Onal 2005), writers (Selek

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2005) or scholars (Goregenli 2005). Berktay (2011, 279) righteously concludes that “women's issues” were not a part of the Turkish left-wing agenda before the 1980s, and that the political actors did not consider this to be a theoretical problem that needed to be dealt with, in that the subordination of women was not thought to be a specific problem in its own right. Tracing the exceptional voices of female narrators included in edited left-wing memoirs, one can infer the promising distinct feature of these women’s accounts. The women’s accounts are potent in contradicting the normative messages within existing memory works (Personal Narratives Group 1989, 13), and actually promise to constitute counter-memories against the non-gendered feature of left-wing collective memory. I derived the below account revealing the potential of women’s stories through a particular emphasis on the doubled violence against women’s bodily integrity —both as a human and a woman—from an edited memoir. The violence the narrator describes exposes that which was oriented towards the very nature of the female body that per se detaches women’s experiences from that of their male peers’. She ironically emphasises the equality between women and their male peers while declaring that “we were equal with men, but only with regard to the torture and beating”: “Menstruation arising from the very nature of each woman had become a kind of torture for us. Because of stress, most of our friends could not get on their periods, and accordingly were suffering from disorders. Extreme irritability, putting on weight, perspiration etc. Every month, the ones that had their period were almost praying for not having it. Because it was prohibited to keep precautionary supplies such as cotton, cloth or pads. The friends in their periods either told this [to the prison guards] themselves or informed the person in charge in the ward. She called the prison guards and we obtained some cotton while giving an oral report to the guard. We gave the oral report as such: ‘Nuran ÇamlÕ, born in 1961 in Mus. I am in my period. Can I have some cotton, my commander?’” (Camli 2006, 144, emphasis added).

With regard to women’s accounts in right-wing memoirs, the women’s absence is not solely caused by their limited participation in the movement, but also arises from the masculine feature inherent to their narratives. The following account included at the very end of an edited memoir immediately prior to the appendices not only narrates the “heroic” resistance of a man, not a woman, but also coheres the manly epic feature of the right-wing narrative of the coup. She narrates the resistance of a right-wing man against the torture by policemen to force him to confess or to name some of his friends:

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“Contrary to what they [the police] expected, the defendant was really resistant. No matter what they would try… And they tried. But whereas anyone who was tortured surrendered in fifteen minutes and even accepted that they killed the Pope107, this resistant man did not even utter a word even after half an hour. He was only moaning: ‘Allah Allah’, and sometimes saying ‘La Ilahe Illallah Muhammeden Resulullah’108 and nothing more” (Ilteris 2008, 268, emphasis added).

However, the opportunities offered by “bottom up” perspectives of oral history and memory studies could encourage novel ways of revealing women’s stories both concerning the coup and the recent political history of the country. The emergence of recent works that focus on women’s prison experiences (Akbas 2011; Yildiz 2011 [2001]; Kolektif 2011) is also stimulated by the increasing visibility and significance of the feminist movement in recent years. Even though the number of emerging works still remains limited, they could serve as incentives for prospective memory works composed by women that aim to present the story of the women.

CHAPTER FIVE COLLECTIVE REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING: THE DESTRUCTION OF SITES OF MEMORY AND ENGAGEMENT WITH DIFFERENT “STORIES” OF THE COUP

The substantial controversy surrounding the 12 September coup period contributes to a significant differentiation amongst its remembrance. The coup period constitutes one of the most controversial issues in Turkey’s near history for a number of reasons: firstly, the coup’s original intention was the revision of political power mainly aimed at generating the basis for a fundamental political and economic transformation: in the course of this transformation, the coup’s determination to bring about the physical and ideological elimination of certain political groups, and promotion of others, resulted in different perceptions among members of those political groups who had suffered different inhumane (physical and mental) damages and who had made different political inferences concerning the coup. Secondly, the military coup naturally realised its motives through adopting anti-democratic and lawless methods which later became publicly disputable issues. Thirdly, on the narrative level, different memories of the coup has been subject to temporal shifts; while its official representation maintained a relative credibility throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s in particular constituted the setting for the introduction of new challenges. One needs to initially understand the “rules of remembrance” (Zerubavel 1996, 286) mainly determined by the military power’s absolute control during the 1980s. In this chapter, I aim to demonstrate the military power’s efforts in generating exclusive and oppressive “rules of remembrance” by means of destroying memory sites varying from books to personal belongings in an attempt to guarantee its control over remembering. This chapter also deals with the collective memories of

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political groups; the boundaries between collective accounts are spontaneously genuine/intrinsic and synthetic/extrinsic. On the one hand, the differences between various group accounts can readily be identified as in-group interaction naturally homogenises the content of the presented accounts. On the other hand, identifying the main premises of collective accounts—to some extent—pre-requires the researcher to reconstruct the narratives in such a way that the boundaries between them can be clarified and be easily distinguishable. With such purpose in mind, focus also falls on resolute differences rather than weak overlappings between collective memories. The last section is devoted to an assessment of the possibilities and complications of interactions between collective memories of political groups which, to a large extent, remain limited and current status of the coup memory for the purpose of familiarising the reader with up-to-date accounts of the relation between recent legal attempts at “coming to terms” with the coup and collective memories.

Destruction of Sites of Memory States that maintain certain political regimes employ the obliteration and reconstruction of the past as efficient methods of eliminating discontent and conflicts. Totalitarian regimes constitute distinct cases in terms of the “systematic ways [they employ] to deprive [their] citizens of their memories” (Connerton 1989, 14). The military power behind the coup not only monopolised the potency to determine what to remember, but also employed certain means for enhancing forgetting. In this section, I reveal the military power’s insistent efforts to “fix” a certain remembrance of the coup through destroying any mnemonic bearers that would facilitate the maintaining of integral self-narratives that enhance personal and collective remembrance and which function as temporal bonds between generations109. The coup’s destructive activities concerning memory had long-term implications; one participant, while speaking about her children, relates the fear and hatred that was instilled against books and carried across consecutive generations: the example suggests the broader consequences of the coup’s destructive effects: “Imagine a child living there. A child in the fifth or sixth grade, she’s seeing her parents hiding the books. Does she dare to read? She sees her parents being humiliated because of their books. She sees them being hit with the gunstock on heads and backs while being asked ‘why is there a book as such here?’ Does that child even dare to read again?” (Feray-W53-RW)110.

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Twenty-seven out of twenty-nine participants of the study revealed that they had destroyed certain objects shortly after they learnt about the coup due to fear of widespread house searches. Such objects vary from books to periodicals and magazines, from photographs to particular personal belongings. Hardly anyone was exempt from the searches being carried out by military officers as the progressively expanding political paranoia resulted in everyone being treated as potentially “guilty”. While photographs, books and political magazines were destroyed individually, larger numbers were confiscated by the officers with the justification of “public security”. The expression “inconvenient books” directly referred to book of political content as well as sexually abusive publications. A few striking examples provide an idea of the scope of the so-called “book hunting”: the amount of “inconvenient” books that were delivered to Turkey Cellulose and Paper Factories Ltd. for recycling was so high that the factory would not accept the storage and subsequent recycling of the confiscated bulk. Similarly, with the order of Martial Law Commandership, 133,000 books—transported in seven trucks—that were confiscated from storage at the Science and Socialism Publishing were burnt in the Mamak Military Quarters in 1982 (Ayasli 2011, 96; Birand et al. 2006, 165). These two massive military operations are exclusive of the amount of books destroyed individually. One aspect of the destruction was the production and social promotion of the distinction between political “convenience” and “inconvenience”. It had become a daily act for newspapers and the official TV channel to display the faces and identities of left-wing militants representing them as “terrorists” and “anarchists” that “threaten the unity of the country”. The exposition of left-wingers as “threats” clarified the definition of the “politically inconvenient”. So, even without a direct oral promulgation, people readily recognised that they should avoid any possible political identification with the left-wing. Sengul narrates that she immediately set out to destroy some of her books by a well-known left-wing writer known for his fierce and overt defence of atheism and his strong reaction against the coup as soon as she learnt of its advent: “Yes, of course, all of them were burnt. Despite that I was a wife of a military officer and that we were living in the military quarters, we’ve burnt all books of Aziz Nesin111 in the bathroom [inside the water heater]” (Sengul-W-63-NPA).

Sengul was married with a mid-rank military officer, however she did not think this status would exempt them from the house searches. Like

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many others the burning of her books was her very first revealed remembrance of the coup early in the course of our interview. In some instances the “hunting down of political inconvenience” revealed itself in extreme acts: Nurten, a sixty year old participant with no political affiliation had worked as an elementary school teacher in a provincial city at the beginning of the 1980s. Like many, she remembers her impulse to search through her house in order to decide whether she had anything to hide or destroy. She had no more than a couple of books which she thought, unlike Sengul, she did not need to conceal on account of her husband’s occupation, which provided her house a kind of exemption from the house searches. However she exemplifies the extreme form the pursuit of “inconvenience” took through recounting an experience of one of her friends: “No, we didn’t have anything to hide. I’d one or two books of Nazim Hikmet112, they were in the cupboard. I didn’t hide them, I mean. But, a librarian friend of mine [told me a story about this]. They’re going to the, I mean, to the library, they’d identify the banned publications there, either police or military officers, I don’t exactly know who they were. The man [the officer] is opening the Turkish-Turkish dictionary, ‘it’s written communist inside this’, he says (laughing). We’re now laughing at this as a quip. And he says, ‘let’s include this [the dictionary] among the banned publications’. I mean, these kinds of people investigated the books” (Nurten-W-60-NPA).

The coup’s intervention into memory even expanded towards the revision of the Turkish language as it is recognised that the content of Turkish dictionaries published by official institutes—Institution of Turkish Language—were also modified by the military in the coup’s wake in order to remove anything “inconvenient”—the word “communism”—inside them113. The house searches were also intended to be military interventions into the private sphere and consequently generated social fear and concern for security. Persons feeling fear and suspicion towards each other produced their own means of avoiding danger of arrest or being treated as potentially “guilty” in the form of a denunciation mechanism. This soon became an efficient means of release from the paranoia that was generated by the military government. Family members of arrested or imprisoned people became the open targets of this mechanism. Family ties also served as underlying reasons for suspicion, and the houses of formerly arrested or imprisoned people became initial targets for officers in charge of house searches. Murat’s two brothers were imprisoned during the 1980s; he tells how he and his family members acknowledged the likely possibility that

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the rest of the family would be searched and in all probability arrested. Even though Murat was only a fifteen year old school boy when the coup was staged, he remembers lucidly that he and his family immediately rid themselves of the books that belonged to his imprisoned brothers: “There were books and magazines left by my elder brothers, I took them to the garden and buried them. They’re still in the garden. But I’ll take them out one day, I’m just forgetting. [For thirty years] I haven’t taken them out, just in case. Because, I mean, they were busting the houses and were hauling people in beyond all question because of the books or magazines they kept [at home]. I remember this very clearly” (Murat-M-45-NPA).

Politically affiliated people were equipped with the knowledge that social relations would also serve as “chains of suspicion”; Tahsin, from the left-wing, was not arrested but spent a part of his life living almost as a fugitive. He relates how he had to move away from the place he used to live and stay in his friends’ houses for a certain period due to the everpresent danger of arrest. However, his stay caused concern for the household as allowing suspicious persons to stay in one’s home also meant danger for the homeowners. Tahsin acknowledged his potential arrest would also cause danger for his friends, so he left and soon became deprived of his social relations. Consequently, the first thing he remembers doing is to destroy any proof of his social bonds: “[F]irstly I destroyed my address book immediately. I carried the books in my friend’s house to another friend who was less political. We destroyed some organisational publications. I mean, the ones that we’d formerly read, we’ve burnt, destroyed them” (Tahsin-M-54-LW).

The oppression resulted in the dissociation of social bonds and sudden detachment from social groups. People became anxious about contacting politically affiliated friends, as Tahsin narrates below. Through fear towards each other people who had political pasts or who were still engaged in the pursuit of politics became socially isolated. During our interview, Metin spoke about his months in prison without even a slight tendency to dramatise the event. It was only once in a story of an encounter with his friends after he was released from the prison that he used the expression “trauma” through which it can be inferred that experiencing social isolation and exclusion was probably the hardest aspects of daily life after the coup:

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“I was walking in a street in Kizilay [the largest square in Ankara], a friend of mine that I knew very well saw me and turned a blind eye to me, he was scared of greeting me. It was such a huge trauma…” (Metin-M-54-LW).

Photographs, a convenient means for the military of detecting social and political networks, were immediately destroyed. Hamit had been deeply engaged in right-wing politics and as a result spent years as a fugitive to avoid arrest. He expresses his interest in photography which he mentions he developed after becoming a “free” individual. He is now forty-eight and mentions that he is currently almost “obsessed” with taking photographs; he is now far more enthusiastic in “documenting” the remainder of his life which appears as a pastime that compensates for the years he could not possess personal belongings: “There isn’t, of course, I mean for example, I’m addicted to photography now, I mean, I’m fond of photographing everything, but everything. I’m always taking the camera with me; I take photographs wherever I go. Because I currently have no photographs of my past. I mean, because of our families’ unnecessary114 fears, they had all been burnt; all the photos had been destroyed. I’d a bookcase full of books, for example, in my own house, in my room, they were all gone. All of them had been destroyed.” (Hamit-M-48-RW).

The fear of endangering friends’ lives—merely on the basis that they were in the same photograph as the person under suspicion—also encompassed earlier life spans. Some thought that they needed to destroy photographs depicting past times reaching back to as early as their teens. The fear continued until there was “nothing left” from past lives, as is the case with Metin and Gulay who are currently married to each other. Their relationship began a few years after the coup almost as an implication of a sense of social solidarity despite the coup’s overall socially disintegrating effect. They have shared a common life now for more than twenty years, but together they emphasise their “pastlessness”, the much interrupted integrity of their self-narratives, due to coup’s destructive effect: Metin: “No, no, no…” Gulay: “Nothing left from us. Even my photos taken when I was in high school had gone.” Metin: “Mine too. I’d burnt all my photos. Before all, I’d burnt them.” Gulay: “We’ve even burnt the photos taken at the student picnics. Because they could investigate us retrospectively. Now there’s nothing left from my high school years.” Metin: “Me, neither. There’s nothing left.”

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In some instances, the searches served as an excuse for arrests, if not a direct reason. If military officers were eager to arrest the person whose place was subjected to a search, then they would “invent” grounds during the search that would serve as a proof for accusing the person of being involved in political “inconvenience”. The ambiguity of the “inconvenience” practically enabled the search officers to relate any written object or image to political affiliation, and take it as proof against him/her. As it was mainly political identities and ideas that attracted punishment during the coup, rather than deeds, objects implying one’s political identity were considered dangerous. Mumtaz, a sixty-year old participant with no political affiliation narrates how the mechanism of the “invention of guilt” operated: “There’s no place to hide, I mean, and what are you going to hide? What… you can readily be hauled in because of a Larouse, what are you… I mean, the officer surely comes to haul you in for anything. Even if it’s not you who put it [any object of ‘guilt’] there, they can report that something is found. What would you hide?” (Mumtaz-M-60-NPA).

Mumtaz emphasises the arbitrary character of house searches; Gunseli of the left-wing, on the other hand, recounts a friend’s case who had experienced unjust surveillance due to an “invented guilt”: “You have leaflets at home, [the house-searchers say]. [My friend] says ‘I looked at [the place], there was a leaflet of the Revolutionary Way [Devrimci Yol]’. And she thinks whether she’d taken one [leaflet when they were distributed] on the street, and whether one single leaflet may have remained in a notebook because she thought she would later read it. But she says [there was] a bundle of them [not a single one], of the leaflets. And she says, ‘these are not included in the report [that you gave to me], but you included it in your report, you’ve added them on later, the item lists [of the two reports] are different’. And my friend was kept [in the police station] for twelve days for nothing” (Gunseli-W-60-LW).

Despite their unjust, arbitrary and abusive character, house searches continued to be a commonplace element that reflected the tragic nature of life during the coup. Social fear expanded to such an extent that people were impassive in their reactions to the military’s violent penetration into private sphere. Cihan, a fifty-four year old left-wing participant whose life became extremely difficult after a family member suffered permanent

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physical injury from heavy torture, mentions that the house searches became familiar components of daily life, and describes her complex emotional condition during a search of her family home. In our interview, Cihan told that our interview refreshed her memory; she seemed to have felt surprised that she could recall certain things she thought had been completely erased from her memory. When she was recounting the house searches she appeared to experience a shock-like feeling and an emotional disturbance as she realised the gap between her current life and life during the coup: “We [she, her brother and father] were not at home, the police was searching for us, and my mother burnt most of them [books] then. The rest was left but… If I knew then what I currently know… We feel the need to keep diaries now or I mean, to preserve our books. In those days… I’ve just remembered. Neither my father nor [my brother] or I tended to preserve our books or thought that they [the policemen] were committing a huge crime while taking them [our books] away. Did we find it so usual? Or did all these remain insignificant while all those serious and tragic things were being lived? Was it why we weren’t even mentioning it? I mean, when the police came to look for us, my mother… on the carpets… There’s a pain started on the right side of my head, but it’ll be fine shortly. Err… they’re [the policemen came to search the house] stubbing out their cigarettes on the carpet…” (Cihan-W-54-LW).

However, any kind of oppression dialectically produces resistance practices against itself. Regardless of the extent to which these resistance practices succeeded, some participants, even under such threatening conditions and at the expense of risking their lives, invented their own ways of resisting against the destruction of books and consequently, forgetting. Gunseli (W-60-LW), for instance, mentions that she and her husband carried their books to a (probably non-politically engaged) relative’s house which they believed would be more secure. She and her husband currently possess their large personal libraries at home. Metin, whose description of destroying his photographs is as quoted above, tells that he had to burn the publications of the organisation he used to be affiliated to as he thought keeping them would directly lead his undergoing heavy torture during possible interrogation. But, even though his arrest was relatively imminent (and he was shortly arrested), he refused to burn the books and found a way of keeping them—yet, despite his best efforts he could not prevent their destruction: “I hid all the books, and there were also audiocassettes at home, I took and hid them. There was a… in the theatre hall I used to work. There was a

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Chapter Five place at the top of the building in which the footlights of the hall were mounted. No one knew there. Only the technical team or the theatre staff. As I was working there, I was aware of the secret place in the hall [and hid the books there]. […] However, later on a colleague had to denounce it, and then they [the military officers] confiscated them all” (Metin-M-54LW).

Feray, similarly states that: “I didn’t have the heart to burn the books, I chose to bury them”. Then, she tells how she carefully laboured to hide her books: “Many [people] burnt them. I couldn’t. We dug [the ground of our garden] as deep as a grave; we put the books in plastic bags and buried them. Thanks god, we’d a garden […] Then, I found them, and lifted them from the ground. Some were in bad condition, I had to bin them. Some of them, unfortunately… gone, I mean, rotted in the ground. Actually I’d covered them very well, yet, somehow, they’d dampened. Many were rotten, I mean, more than a hundred books were destroyed” (Feray-W-53-RW).

Yaprak’s account below constitutes a more dramatic form of resisting against forgetting. She narrates her desperate effort “not to forget”. Despite her unavailing determination to memorise the content of her books in order to avoid forgetting, she now thinks that her efforts proved to be useless: “Books, yes, books. After, after the 12 September, there were lots of books at home, and in winter we had a stove, yes, stove at home. I was sitting in front of the stove at nights, was reading the books in an effort to memorise them, and was tearing the pages to throw them into the stove one by one. By this way, I read plenty of books. Read, throw the page. Read, tear and burn it. And of course I was crying while doing this, I was actually learning by heart (laughing ironically). Just a book, so what? They’re gone [one by one], all books were destroyed. […] But I don’t even remember a single line of it now, that’s to say, it didn’t work” (Yaprak-W-50-LW).

Some resistance practices against the destruction were in vain while some others partly served their purpose. Hamit (M-48-RW) who described how he lost all his books as well as his photographs also articulates how he currently employs a retrospective method to retrieve the personal belongings that he had lost. In a contented manner, he tells that he again started to collect books, and that he currently has a large personal library that contains around ten thousand books. Regarding his personal belongings, besides frequently taking photographs in his current life in order to get even with the personal losses in his past, he also comments:

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“I don’t have photographs of the past, I mean, the ones taken with my friends. Now I’m trying to reach my old friends and to recollect the [photos] which I’m in, I’m trying to recollect them, I mean, the old photographs of mine”. (Hamit-M-48-RW).

The direct effects of this memory regime are clearly visible in the memories of non-politically affiliated participants as one can readily recognise the parallels between these accounts and the official representation of the coup. However, political affiliation proves to make a difference in collective memories; the resistance against the memory regime crystallises in the accounts of right and left-wingers that deviate from and challenge the claims of official representation. At this point, three aspects provide an explanation for such resistance: firstly, solid experiences of direct oppression, such as imprisonment, maltreatment and injustice encouraged the politically affiliated participants to deprecate the official claims and invest effort to presenting “truths” about what the coup actually meant both on personal and collective levels. In this way, “not forgetting” became the core of a political struggle in terms of the coup memory. Secondly, long-years of imprisonment resulted in replacement and substitution of military-destroyed sites of memory by alternative memory sites which were not necessarily material objects; the bodies of the ex-detainees, for instance, and the existence of fellow sufferers who bore the “damages” of imprisonment and torture experiences transformed into sites of memory. Thirdly, a common past and political affiliations woven together in the experiences of members of the same political groups, and the sharing of common stories strongly contributed to the remembering—as opposed to the forgetting promoted by the military— and, thus, the construction and consolidation of contested collective stories. These three aspects should certainly be considered while reflecting on the possibilities of political groups’ resistance against the memory regime compelled by the military power.

Defining the Boundaries of Collective Memories: Engagement with Different “Stories” of the Coup Rather than purely individual recollections that “lack the authority to persuasively tell their version of past”, participants present a “repertoire with other voices” (Zelizer 1995, 226)—pre-constructed narratives— which are inevitably acquired through social contacts and the circulation of personal and collective memories (media, published memoirs, films, documentaries etc.). The homogeneity of memories amongst political

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groups crystallise particularly in efforts to answer questions concerning the possible motivations, perpetrators, and the results/implications of the coup. I commence this section with the memories of non-politically affiliated participants which, to a large extent, bear parallels with the official representation. Then, my focus shifts to the memories of right-wingers who interpret the coup as an outcome of a prescribed scenario “performed” by sometimes unidentified agents. And finally, the analysis takes the left-wing memory as its central point which appears as the most identifiable of all three in terms of providing unequivocal and clear-cut arguments about the coup through locating it in a politico-economic context.

Playing Along with the Official Representation: A Form of Forgetting The “intervention” of the military into politics represents almost a political “tradition” in Turkey; in such “militarised” milieu of politics, politically conflictual and economically unstable periods used to generate the expectation of a military coup in the country. Prevalent armed conflict, political violence and the proclamation of martial law in 1978 caused “ordinary” citizens to expect a probable coup with feelings of anxiety and discontent towards the lack of security increasing day by day. Such expectations and initial reactions by non-politically affiliated individuals later had a decisive role in the construction of coup memories. The official representation exclusively inserted itself as the unique and true “story” of the coup, particularly in the 1980s115. Besides destroying the sites of memory, attempts to impose the official representation by means of censorship and organised strategies of obliteration (Popular Memory Group 1982, 209) worked together to accomplish forgetting. Thus, the extent of commitment to official representation actually corresponds to the extent to which the military managed to accomplish forgetting. For the non-politically affiliated who individually worked to reflect on and make sense of “what was actually going on” in Turkey in the first days of the coup, the only source of information were either limited hearsay information or the news broadcast on official radio and TV channel. The credibility attributed to the official representation was coupled with the relative political stability and security the coup enabled in the subsequent few years. Unless their personal experiences conflicted with what they previously believed about the coup, and unless they or their

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acquaintances had unfavourable experiences later due to military oppression, most participants were inclined to adopt the main arguments of the military representation as to the reasons and motivations behind the coup. Interestingly, thirty years after the coup—when legal attempts towards the jurisdiction of the perpetrators were made in 2010—while some of them seem to have revised their accounts and retrospectively reconsider the experiences that enabled them to eventually reach a “realisation” of what the coup actually caused and resulted in for the country, some others’ memory appears to have remained tacit to a large extent. Gunay, for instance, still attributing credibility to the official representation, emphasises the futility of legal attempts and “coming to terms” with the coup: “So what is going to happen if they judge [the military cadres], what are they going to gain with it? […] So what?! Assume that we’d judged [them], what will we attain, where are we going to go back to? [means whether judging them will retrospectively prevent the past happenings]” (Gunay-W-50-NPA).

Relief and a regained sense of security almost appeared as reflexes to the coup due to the prevailing armed conflict and acts of violence that were claimed to have reached an alarming level. Gunay was a twenty-year old university student with neither political affiliation nor sympathy for any political side when the military coup was staged. She tells of how she had barely an idea about what a military coup was when she heard that one had been staged. She narrates that her university years were overshadowed by the burden of taking care of her cousins who were affiliated to different political organisations, and of feeling concerned for them unless they attended gatherings in her family home at weekends. Her father, a highranking bureaucrat, required all the cousins to gather together at weekends as he was also concerned and felt responsible for their security. These gatherings appeared to be a way of keeping them under control and avoiding probable surveillance due to their political affiliations. Gunay is now 50, and her account about the morning of 12 September reveals her anxious state of mind and her search for relief: “I couldn’t know what a military coup was. But my father sat down and explained to me. [I ask whether she remembers how he explained]. Yes, I remember. [He told me] that everything would end, that this nightmare would finish. Because we [she and her family] suffered a lot when my elder brother was a student [in university], [remembering that she was also a university student] not because of me. We were always on pins and needles, the continuous fear that something would happen [to him]. Back

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There is a discernible predisposition towards the official representation in her account; starting from the first announcement of the coup, its main motivation was expressed as “putting an end to the armed conflict” that was represented as “the anarchy and terror on the streets”116. According to the official representation, the period “before” and “after” the coup presented a clear contrast117 in that it was represented as having terminated the insecurity, danger and economic and political instability that had existed before it was staged. Her commitment to the coup’s representation as a “salvation from the disaster” can readily be identified in her use of expressions such as “nightmare”, “pins and needles”, or “fear” concerning the pre-coup period. In the course of her account, her commitment to the contrast between “before” and “after” is also revealed while she is referring to conditions in the post-coup period: “Not for me, personally, but when I think on it [the coup] for the sake of the society, I always think, I consider the hearts that burnt, it did their heart good. It avoided more [happening]. Perhaps many more hearts would be burnt [if the coup had not been staged]. It ended these, it didn’t do anything else. Oh, and we [the country] regressed a bit, but thanks to Ozal, he promptly cleared up, I mean, he channelled people into a different direction” (Gunay-W-50-NPA).

Gunay, like many participants, particularly those grouped into no political affiliation, repeatedly expresses her gratitude to the coup for the termination of acts of violence. Whilst remembrance of the coup’s objective and success in ending violence is something widely referred to, other components of the official representation, such as its “offering a solution to the parliamentarian crisis and loss of democracy” and “working for the prosperity and development of the country”—though exceptions remain—are usually neglected or overlooked. The emphasis on regained security, it seems, is primarily reinforced by the remembrance of the personal experiences of anxiety that permeated daily lives. Sermin expresses her feelings of fear and anxiety towards the “fight” in the streets; She draws a comparison between “before” and “after” the coup—as does Gunay—and highlights her preference for the “peace” the coup introduced despite the limited nature of her daily life after the coup. Expressions such as “terror” and “brother shot brother” are direct references to the official

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representation. She places particular emphasis on the fact that her feelings were shared with many of her friends and acquaintances: “Er, 12 September… before it… things happened in Turkey… You couldn’t safely walk on the street, you couldn’t go to work easily, felt scared each moment, terror culminated. It was a period when brother shot brother. So, actually, a majority of people gladly welcomed the military’s seizing of power. This is the fact. I mean… OK, [you] can’t go out, your life is limited, your freedom is limited, and many other things, but you somehow didn’t have your freedom either [before the coup] for a long time in this country, because of terror. So, very bad feelings… No one said ‘oops, why did this happen?’ We didn’t either. We didn’t either” (SerminW-58-NPA).

Other components of the official representation are not always disregarded; Veli, for instance, places particular emphasis on the national assembly’s impotence in legislation and its inability to elect a President. He used to work as a mid-ranking bureaucrat before the coup; but was discharged shortly after. The justification provided for his discharge was his “general attitude and behaviour” but, according to him, the real reason behind it was his place of birth. He was born in an eastern province and was assumed to be of Kurdish origin. As a probable consequence of his experience of discharge and financial and the spiritual damages it brought, he occasionally incorporates left-wing discursive elements to his account. Hence, his account is not consistent in its compliance to the official representation, but he implies his enthusiastic expectation for a coup while referring to its “inevitability”: “The atmosphere was so stressful, my daughter, we were waiting for it [the coup]. They couldn’t elect, I mean, elect a president. The assembly was a complete [mess]… I mean, now we’re condemning the martial law, but there was no other solution on that date. I mean, there was no way out. There was such a conflict; they somehow couldn’t elect the president. And the martial law [referring to the military] said ‘Enough man!’ (laughing) The military doesn’t [seize power] for no reason. […] I mean, it was expected, it didn’t happen suddenly and without a reason…. We weren’t pleased of course…” (Veli-M-70-NPA).

Veli’s account oscillates between emphasising the inevitability of the coup and, on the other hand, condemning it. The in-between positions of some participants against the coup, and the inconsistency in the accounts are to some extent due to the steps the current political power took towards the jurisdiction of the perpetrators that—regardless of actual intentions and motivations—generated an atmosphere convenient for questioning the

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coup’s legitimacy. Also the oppression and suffering the coup caused in lives of those left-wingers were so indisputable and visible that Veli and some others in the same group have difficulty in approving the coup without some hesitation. The left-leaning elements of their narratives also have to do with their present political positions; Veli defines himself as a “moderate social democrat”, but adds that he is not “extreme”. As a prerequisite of his current political position he opposes the 12 September coup; however, the social democrat political identity in Turkey does not necessarily pre-require opposing all military power; on the contrary, supporting the military as a political body is an intrinsic component of a social democrat political identity118. When Veli is asked about his projective attitude towards potential coup in the near future, he says: “I wouldn’t be pleased”, but right after he tends towards contradiction: “Actually we need one119. But it’s not something good. Because we [the Turkish Republic] would completely be [discredited] in the presence of foreign countries”. When I ask whether he means that “a coup is not a political solution”, he answers: “Of course it is not. But under such conditions, [a coup] is needed in Turkey. Because there is currently something like a dictatorial regime [in Turkey]”. While making such points, Veli fails to recognise that he offers one dictatorial/totalitarian power in substitution for another. The lack of political vision for radical opposition to military coups has a decisive role on participants’ memories of the 12 September coup. Although they are unable to credit the coup without evident hesitation, they do emphasise that the then conditions in Turkey constituted a “requirement” for a coup. Burhan’s account resembles that of Veli. Like Veli, Burhan defines himself as a “social democrat”. The focus of his accounts shifts slightly towards the official arguments concerning armed conflict and “fraternal fight”. Similar to Veli, he holds to an ambivalent attitude while emphasising the social despair that used to exist before the coup. Although his familiarity and implicit sympathy for left-wing politics can easily be discerned from his account, it does little to suffice detachment from the official representation: “It was a complicated period. It wasn’t clear who is doing what. It wasn’t clear where Turkey was being led to either. I’m not a junta supporter, I don’t like it, but at a certain point it prevented the ongoing situation. […] I mean, this is a long story… On the other hand, I think where we would be if the coup wasn’t staged [implies negative expectations]. Or which direction we would go in? It was so difficult to estimate it. Because, there was Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi] on one side, you know, and it was a complete supporter of America [US]. On the other

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side, there were the young revolutionaries struggling for independence [of the country]. And among them, there were PKK, Revolutionary Youth [Dev-Genc], Ala Rizgari [another Kurdish organisation] and others. It was a complicated situation. And from time to time, these [the members of the left-wing organisations] were battling against each other. They were fighting tooth and nail” (Burhan-M-4-NPA).

Seeing the popular support and the adoption of official claims in the eyes of its fierce opponents—the politically affiliated people—enables clear recognition of differentiations in the accounts. Gulay of the left-wing who stayed under surveillance for twenty-days in a police station and later in Mamak Prison, tells an anecdote about an encounter with her acquaintances after the coup who, interestingly, previously sympathised with left-wing politics: “Let me tell, it was about a month after [the coup], I mean, after those curfew orders [during the day time] finished, I was going somewhere, I went out, walking on the street. I [came across] a husband and wife who lived in an area that they [the left-wing militants] worked [for propaganda and organisation]. They cheered up when they saw me. And said ‘Ohh, it’s nice to see you! Congrats!’ and I thought they had a reason for saying so. I asked ‘Why [did you say] congrats?’. And they said, ‘Incidents have finished, the military has come. There’s no right or left now. No one does harm to each other. We’ll live in relief, live in peace. This was what we wished for’. And that family, that husband and wife were ones that the leftwing [militants] thought of as people who they could visit [for staying occasionally], who could help, and the revolution would be told to other people through them. And they said ‘Congrats!’ That day I was amazed! […] I never forget that shock” (Gulay-W-54-LW).

Gulay’s account of her parents—one of their two sons and a daughter were imprisoned shortly after the coup—presents an example of the coup’s memory in the previous generation: she narrates that her parents were pleased about the coup despite sacrificing three of their children. The family’s commitment to the coup is barely challenged by their personal experience—having three children imprisoned: “My father, for example, my mother, uncles and neighbours, lots of people, even in those days of curfew order, [said] ‘Thank god! We wouldn’t be able go out, but, anyway, everything would finish, our children wouldn’t be in trouble’. They were scared. They didn’t know what the military coup [actually] meant, but as they thought that it [the coup] would allow their children to avoid being misled and seek to destroy each other, to kill each other or to be waylaid, attacked, they welcomed it. And they said [to me],

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In comparison to the accounts presented above, a clear difference is evident in accounts of those politically affiliated who were directly subject to the oppressive applications of the coup, particularly in prisons. A comparative reading of the above accounts and that of right and leftwingers clearly demonstrates the points of differentiation in terms of the frames informing their memories.

The Right-Wing Memory: Conspiracy, the Loss of the Self as a Political Agent and “Foreign Powers” in Charge British conspiracy writer and journalist David Aaronovitch asserts that people feel the need for conspiracy theories when a social perception of despair and trauma emerges (9/11: Science and Conspiracy 2009). Aaronovitch employs such arguments while seeking explanations for emergent conspiracy theories that US citizens gave credence to in efforts to make sense of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. His argument provides an insight into understanding right-wingers’ commitment to a conspiracy-inspired coup narrative. Regardless of its proportion, both the right and left-wing suffered military violence. However, it was relatively unequivocal when it comes to understanding such violence by the state for left-wingers. Their political objective to overthrow the political power and establish a new political system led to their becoming the target of military oppression. By implication, their questioning of the oppression mainly relies upon the injustice of the treatments they suffered. The majority of right-wingers, on the other hand, mention having had great difficulty in signifying the state’s attitude towards them as they overwhelmingly assumed that they struggled against the left-wing “terror” in the name of the state. The right-wingers’ self-perception was that they were patriots who assisted and supported the state in overcoming the “danger of communism” that was assumed to threaten the “integrity of the motherland”120. Yeliz’s account is composed of a lucid description of how they used to consider their position in the nexus of the military, the state and their left-wing “enemies”. She makes a comparison between the right-wing’s expectations of the coup and the coup’s subsequent attitude towards them:

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“Oh, firstly, I mean, [we thought] the shedding of blood would be stopped. Something positive. I mean, you don’t presume that the military would have an [oppressive] attitude against you. Well, all in all we are the people who struggled for the unity and the solidarity of this country, we are struggling against the danger of communism that Turkey was up against, we risk our lives for this purpose, we’re defending the unity and the independence of this country. This is how we perceive ourselves, how we describe it. If the coup is staged, of course we think that the traitors, and those [left-wingers] who were involved in armed actions, and shed blood for making Turkey the satellite state of Russia [USSR]121, that those would all be stopped” (Yeliz-W-50-RW).

Yeliz speaks in the name of her fellow right-wingers122: their very belief that they “worked for” the sake of the state shortly turned into the cause of their oppression. Their rapid degradation from “heroes/heroines” to being regarded as “traitors” constitutes one aspect of the right-wing’s difficulty in signifying the legal action against them. Similarly, Irfan, a fifty-seven year old right-wing participant tells of having found himself subject to great adversity; he was torn between individually safeguarding himself (through becoming a fugitive) and maintaining communitarian solidarity through surrendering to the military force of the “sacred” state he believed he had voluntarily “worked for”: “Our view then of the state, well, the state is sacred for us and can be died for. […] The state is the father. We can be slapped by him [by the state]. He is the father; he can either punish or love [us]. […] And so, there’s a coup staged, we’re in love with the state, why would the state [harm] us? I mean, the army, the army is our army […]. The army is sacred, the state is sacred, the army came and seized the power. We’re already the enemy of communism, so is the army. Then why would it punish us? […] While discussing this, some friends suggested taking precautions [for selfsecurity]. [They suggested] getting lost for a while, becoming fugitives. But a group of friends say no way! It’s our state, if they [the army] seek us, we should say ‘we’re here’ and we should surrender. A small group suggests [getting lost]. I was one of them. In fact, I was the one initiating such a topic [of discussion]. But I couldn’t muster up any support” (IrfanM-57-RW).

Neither Yeliz’s nor Irfan’s expectations of the coup were proximate to their subsequent experiences. The gap between expectations and actual experiences emerges as the very cause of right-wing trauma. The belief in conspiracy triggered by traumatic experience has two symptoms in rightwing memory: firstly, their perception of self, both as individuals and as the members of the same political group, as “patriotic” and conscious

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political agents suddenly transformed into persons who lost sight of the essence of their political identities; for instance, some thought they had been “used” within a prearranged scenario. The significance of their acts (fighting and agitating against the “danger of communism”) appears to be undermined by the military’s oppression against them. Secondly, the perpetrators of the coup were “externalised” and liability was attributed to “foreign powers”. Here, within the attribution of the “inexplicably brutality” to the unknown “other” is obviously related the imagination of a nation within a hostis vs. inimicus framework (Schmitt 2007)— particularly in the right-wing’s claim that conflicting political groups were indeed the “children of the same district”, and the armed conflict was rather a “fraternal fight”123 provoked by foreign “others”. The first symptom can be discerned from Irfan’s account; he defines his and his fellows’ then position through an analogy that spontaneously highlights their incapability in grasping the “whole” story in which rightwingers are excluded and isolated, and losing the sight of the meaning of their present and past activities: “Well, you cannot assess what is going on in that heated atmosphere, but then you look back to see what happened after the coup… we were like the fish inside the aquarium. We can see the aquarium, but not out of it. […] Today, there’re incidents that we have on our conscience, those that we know without freaking out. […] Sometimes knowing [the truth] is a burden for the person. You buy it [referring to being deceived] when you don’t know [the truth]. It’s not good to know. If we used to know what we know now, we would regard 12 September as excruciating. [In those days] you [we] can comment on it as expansively as the aquarium you [we] were living in allows” (Irfan-M-57-RW).

The analogy Irfan builds between his and his fellows’ then position and the “fish in an aquarium” (they could only “see” what they were allowed to) refers to the common belief that the right-wing militants actually had limited sight of the series of incidents each of which is thought to be a part of a “secret scenario”—refers to “truth” in Irfan’s account—played out by anonymous power groups—this later appears as the second symptom of the conspiracy, the externalisation of anonymous perpetrators. Irfan never explicitly mentions “being used”124; however, his insinuation about having been deceived (“you buy it when you don’t know”, or “if we used to know what we know now”) refers to right-wing assumptions about the instrumentalisation of their past activities. The belief about the instrumentalisation of acts and actors is further reinforced by right-wing prison experiences: Irfan, like many others, was imprisoned in Mamak Prison that was populated by hundreds of left-

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wingers. After the coup, the prisons became the sites in which opponent sides became familiarised with each other. The individual actors of both political sides, for the first time, experienced the human encounters with each other freed from the atmosphere of armed conflict. As a consequence of the “mix and pacify” military strategy in prisons, Irfan and his fellows shared cells with their left-wing former “enemies”125. The occasional intensification of military oppression in prisons led to occasional/momentary solidarity between sides. Both the commonality of the military’s attitude towards sides and sporadic instances of solidarity reinforced the rightwing belief that the armed conflict between sides was in fact promoted by leading military actors who were controlled by the abovementioned anonymous power groups. The possible answers to the question of to what power group/s were the right-wingers referring to when asserting that their acts were “instrumentalised” imply the second symptom of the belief in conspiracy —the externalisation of the coup’s perpetrators. Most right-wingers, though there remain slight modifications, still maintain commitment to Turkishness, the Turkish state, and loyalty to the Turkish army. As a critique of Turkish state tradition by the right-wing drawing on coup experiences would endanger the internal consistency of the Turkish nationalist discourse126, such obstacles are overcome through attributing liability to “foreign others” (out of “us”) and identifying those as perpetrators. Thus, while speaking about actors (the members of the National Security Council) who staged the coup, right-wingers exceptionalise the generals who are neither believed to represent the Turkish nation nor Turkishness. Accordingly, the generals were not the actual perpetrators of the coup; in Irfan’s conspiracy-inspired account they maintain their anonymity: “But there’s an invisible hand there […]. And while all this was happening, [there is a hand there] that condones the death of those people. And finally in one single night, though 11th September was a day with bombs, with explosions [in streets], no single bullet is fired on the morning of 12th September. Then, we should definitely think about this, we should scrutinise what the hell this is. Then it was the same hand who promoted these explosions, and also who stopped it at a stroke. [The question is] [h]ow do you define your position there?” (Irfan-M-57-RW).

According to Irfan, the “invisible hand” refers to a “foreign power” in collaboration with “some” generals who promoted the social discontent that was generated by the prevalent violence and armed conflict (“the same hand promoted these explosions”). To him, the sudden termination

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of incidents of violence was contributable to the “invisible hand” which carried out its share of the task (“[it] also stopped it at a stroke”) which confirms his assertion. He does not clarify the identity of the “invisible hand”; however Zahit, drawing upon a nationalist/anti-communist reading of history127 indicates the role of the Soviet Union—probably alluding to Soviet activities in Eastern Europe after the war—that he believes to have supported Turkish left-wing organisations during the 1970s due to its expansionary policies. To him, the interventions of Soviet Union into Turkish politics paved the way for the military coup: “Under the Cold War conditions, a Marxist process was operated in Turkey. Utilising the convenience the 1960 Constitution offered128, I do think the revolutionary—I insistently repeat it—the invasive Marxist movements maintained massification. And this… I mean, I think the 12 September started with the play of the foreign powers, and then joined the domestic powers” (Zahit-M-48-RW).

However, the identity of implied “foreign powers” does not necessarily originate from nationalistic historiography or worked out historical data, but is rather determined by the ideological requirements of the present in compliance with Turkish nationalist ideological frameworks concerning the status of the Turkish state in international relations. The “foreign actor” is frequently “picked” among the foreign “others” the existence of which is the raison d’être of nationalism. Current Islamic-liberal power in Turkey enjoys a hegemonic position among the Islamic states of the Middle East; Israel’s exceptional position in the territory, its cruel military interventions into Muslim Palestine, and its threatening diplomatic discourse against Iran generate a certain antagonism between Turkey and Israel which makes Israel one actor in a series of popular international conspiracy stories throughout the country. Aysegul, for instance, credits current conspiratory inspirations and “picks” Israel as the possible perpetrator of the 12 September coup: “[International actors are involved in the coup]. Because [Turkey] could not deal with such a process for such a long time. Because they [the sides involved in armed conflict] are already armed, each of them is armed…. I mean… (laughing). Turkey is usually [treated as] the scapegoat. I don’t know, it may be [international actors may be involved in]. It may be others. It may be Israel or anyone else. I cannot know. Allah knows it…” (Aysegul-W-52-RW).

The United States also occupies a specific position in the conspiratory patterns. However, rather than the US’s political/ideological interferences

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in shaping politics particularly in the “underdeveloped” world (through indirect promotion of US-backed military coups as was the case in Chile or its direct military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan) which makes the involvement of the US a strong component in left-wing memory129, right-wingers, as Feray mentions below, relate such an intervention to the power of the “nationalist youth” in the 1980s: “There’s a word from an American army officer. He says ‘why would we avoid the coup [in Turkey]? To leave the [political power] to Turkes [the leader of the nationalist party]?’ Look, these expressions have never been disclaimed, never disclaimed. Then, what do these words indicate? There’s an upsurge of the nationalist youth. It really snowballed. They [foreign powers] wanted to stop it. […] If [the number of] the young people growing up with the nationalist consciousness is increasing, I think, this is unfavourable to some. They should stop it, and they did so. [If you ask me] who did it? They were of course the members of the Uncle Sam” (FerayW-53-RW).

On one hand, right-wing allusions to US involvement could be thought of as a point of convergence between right and left-wing memories in terms of the coup’s perpetrators. On the other hand, and more likely, such convergence facilitates the right-wing deliberations on their own as being just as much “victims” of the coup as the left-wingers. While the right-wing accounts presented here mainly focus on the period prior to the coup, the left-wing narrative—as presented in the next section—rather centres upon the transformation after the coup in its social, economic and political aspects. Focusing on the process prior to the coup appears as a right-wing introspection as an effort to relieve their internal trauma; right-wingers mainly tend to question “why the coup happened”, and more importantly, the gap between what they believed they were doing before the coup (the patriotic attempt of supporting the Turkish state in its “struggle against communism”) and the oppression they experienced. Seeking logic for such a gap mainly results in an eclectic style of retrospection in which the “us” and the perpetrators are focused upon; nonetheless, the period subsequent to the coup—including the political/economic transformation it facilitated, and its inherent injustice— is somewhat neglected. Even though causality is pursued to some extent, ignoring the subsequent period leaves issues concerning the coup’s objectives concretised particularly after it was staged, to contingency. Currently, particular attention to the right-wing memory of the coup should be paid as the same conspiratory style and contingent conception of the coup plays a dominant role in the recent process of the jurisdiction of the perpetrators.

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The Left-Wing Memory: From Structural Transformation to Social and Personal Paralysis The accounts of the left-wing participants are unexceptionally composed of an amalgamation of their personal experiences—frequently of anxiety, hiding or fugitiveness, arrest, imprisonment—and a larger frame in which they locate the coup. The interrelation between two parts provides the leftwingers with the opportunity to overcome the coup’s detrimental effects on personal lives both in the past and present. Unlike those of the rightwing, for instance, left-wingers avoid conceiving of their experiences within the semantic realm of “trauma”; equally, they fiercely object to seeing themselves as (passive) “victims” of the coup. The 12 September coup constitutes the moment of both a political defeat and a decline in the personal pasts; however, except for a few, such aspects barely become distinct components of left-wing memory. The distance from conceptions such as “trauma” or defeat is frequently achieved through considering past experience as only a single, minute factor in the huge collapse the coup and the military were imposing upon. Left-wingers frequently contextualise their experiences through a conception of the coup as a project towards the fundamental transformation of the country, pre-requiring the physical and ideological elimination of leftwing politics. Hereby, their experiences lose their unique and weighty character and rather become a part of thousands of social implications of the transformation. Tahsin’s account provides an illustration of such contextualisation framing left-wing memory. He was neither arrested nor imprisoned during the coup years. However, the inevitable consequence of avoiding arrest or imprisonment would be to pursue life as a fugitive, as did Tahsin. While he was living as a fugitive, he tells of how he continuously felt the proximity of arrest. Tahsin focuses on his personal experience of fugitiveness in the second part of his narrative. First he presents the context in which he locates his own experiences: “But, all in all, it was the political and economic reorganisation of the state, of the structure that was generated by a requirement of the system. It’s clear who needed it, who performed. So, the perpetrators are clear as well. [I ask who he thinks the perpetrators were]. Well, the perpetrators of the 12 September coup… I mean, all in all, this is something out of dispute as, the 12 September, the masters of this system required a new configuration and they organised it. And, in this respect, they are the perpetrators. The forces of the system [I ask what he means by the “forces of the system”]. I mean,

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in our sense, I still maintain my belief in this, the ones that economically dominate the country” (Tahsin-M-54-LW).

The contextual understanding of the coup in terms of “class struggle” is made manifest via clearly identifiable discursive elements that are frequently referred to in left-wing collective memory130. Such aspects are clearly distinguished in Tahsin’s account above; he avoids seeing himself as a character enacting a personal story of decline, but rather as an active agent of the ongoing struggle against, in his words, “the forces of the system” and understands his experience as an effect of the defeat that the “opponent forces” sustained. Then, follows Tahsin’s account of his personal experience; the narrative is initiated by the description of his despair in the first days of the coup and continues with an anecdote that epitomises the contextualisation of personal experience: “For instance, a friend with whom we spent [our] time together, but had no connection to us [our organisation] was arrested. And it had kept us up at nights for two months. You can’t know what his attitude [towards the police interrogation] would be, what he would do, whether he would name names or not. We’d made a deal with the friend I was staying with: come hell or high water, unless something happens [refers to being arrested], we’d come back home at evenings. One evening he didn’t show up. I don’t know what happened, and I couldn’t sleep till morning. Then I left home in the morning, where would I go? That huge Ankara had been such a small place for me. Nowhere, there’s nowhere to go. If you say, all right, I break the connection [with the organisation and the companions], it’d be all right. But no, if you didn’t [there’d be no place to go]. There I felt that, the huge Ankara became a hole in the wall. [Here he jumps to another day] With our Circassian community [he is of Circassian origin], I went on a tour. And God damn, the back of my trousers was ripped, and there you feel… people are having fun, laughing, I can’t. My trousers are ripped, and my head is full of troubles, such a conflict, and you feel angry [for the conflict between his situation and other people’s who were having fun], and so on. […] I mean all those were terrible things, but what we’d lived outside cannot even be compared to what those imprisoned people experienced inside regardless of the cause of their imprisonment. Inside [the prison] was the hell itself” (Tahsin-M-54-LW).

In the first part of his account Tahsin speaks of his fear and anxiety of being arrested. However, relating these, he is diffident in describing his experience as “pain” as he believes his experience “outside” was actually incomparable with that of fellows “inside”—as he refers to at the end of the narrative. In the second part of the narrative (regarding the tour with the Circassian community), Tahsin, through telling the story of an

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ordinary day, refers to a symbolic contrast (between people who are “having fun” and himself) between the experiences of those who welcomed or, at least, barely cared about the coup, and others who were oppressed and suffering. His situation (as a young man with ripped trousers in the middle of a crowd) symbolises the position of the politically affiliated left-wingers. His anecdote connotes the total decline of the political struggle he was involved in which had been in its heyday immediately prior the coup. Another symptom of the contextual understanding of past experience emerges through the awareness that the coup’s primary aim was counteracting left-wing politics131. Zeynep, while talking about her initial feelings when she was first informed of the coup, clearly expresses her awareness of what it would mean for those with left-wing sympathies— and thus, by implication, for her as an individual: “We were the people who also experienced the 12 March [the previous military coup that took place in 1971], we were people of such consciousness. And we were waiting with the consideration that anything can happen in Turkey at any time. […] In the upcoming days, we were continuing to go to work, we had the will to do something [against the coup], we were gathering together [under the counter], we were commenting on future possibilities. […] But we were aware that the circle around us was tightening. There was no single day that we didn’t hear that one of our friends was arrested. One by one, the circle was tightening, I mean for the people like us [she refers to the organised left-wingers]. We were being caught one by one” (Zeynep-W-53-LW).

The emphasis on the coup’s determination to counteract left-wing politics is also evident when Zeynep comments on the coup’s so-called balanced attitude towards both political sides. To Zeynep, the arrests and the imprisonments of people from the right-wing were “just for obfuscating [that the coup was against the left-wing]”. She concludes that the period subsequent to the coup proved that it had been the right-wing who were promoted and supported by the coup. Similarly, Sabahattin (M52-LW), after highlighting the coup’s counteraction against left-wing politics, refers to the military’s oppression against the right-wing that, to him, was rather for “reorganising, bringing deviant ones into line and warning them they could do nothing without the order and the approval of the state”. Here Sabahattin refers to the temporary function the state attributed to the nationalist/right-wing militants in fighting the left-wing. Both Zeynep and Sabahattin locate their personal experiences within the overall aggression of the coup against the left-wing; both of them spent significant, agonising, periods of their lives in prisons, and suffered from

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physical and emotional damage during and after the coup. Zeynep was arrested in 1981, and after being subject to surveillance for more than a month132 was transferred to Mamak Prison where she remained for two years. She is now fifty-three, married with two children and retired. While narrating in a calm manner the story of her release from prison and the health problems caused by the torture she experienced, she emphasises her sense of resistance and determination about maintaining her physical and emotional integrity both of which were enabled by her acknowledgement that what she experienced was only a part of the organised effort to repress the left-wing: “Beyond exploring the guilt, they [the police] took pleasure in torturing. Torture was important for them. And of course we’d experienced them all. (She pauses for a while). […] Well, it was so hard for me, but it [what caused the physical injury] was being hung. I would like to tell you about something very interesting. I fell down from the hook, they may have hung me up wrongly, I don’t know. I just remember lying down fainted for hours. But the most humoristic side of the story is that… after being released from Mamak Prison, I was taken to the hospital for medical care […] There […] said the MD (she is laughing) ‘It’s impossible! Either xrays are mistaken or she shouldn’t walk, shouldn’t be able to walk!’ […] The man [MD] was terrified, and just repeated ‘No, this patient shouldn’t be able to walk!’ But I’m walking, there’s no problem at all. I mean, after the fall [from the hook], there’d been a heavy damage to my waist [spinal cord]. But I [learnt there that] I’d lived with such damage for two years [in Mamak Prison]. […] But what I’m trying to tell is that we’d such a resistance, this is the point. If you have to walk, you walk [even in such a condition]133” (Zeynep-W-53-LW).

In the course of her narrative, Zeynep mentions that she currently maintains her relations with her fellow female prisoners who had witnessed the same cruelty. She relates how they share their memoirs and writings through an email group, and they occasionally gather together. Their group appears to serve as a means of sharing the common experience. She seems to have developed a sense of humour with regard to her past experiences as a consequence of these gatherings during which the traumatic and tragic nature of past experiences fades away, and are transformed into tragicomic narratives the protagonists of which are the participants in the gatherings. As well as a strategy of getting through all these painful memories, these gatherings also serve as a reminder that “all that happened happened to them all”. Different participants employ different methods while dealing with coup experiences. Sabahattin, for instance, tells of his efforts to shoot a

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feature film about the coup, probably drawing on his own experiences as well as the knowledge he gained through his social surroundings. Sabahattin was the participant who had remained in prison the longest— approximately sixteen years, between his early twenties to late thirties. Below he tells of his mental and emotional situation during the period he spent considerable effort to build a new life after his release in 1996: “You live in a fire for fifteen years. Actually… you’re conscious when you’re in that fire. You’re in a fire as a result of your opponent position [your resistance]. You’re not terrified with being in that fire. I mean, it could be death [I could have been killed] or anything else or this or that. I was already aware how strong the power was, the power you [we] opposed, I am still aware of it. I’d [known through a series of experiences] how cruel, merciless, and how savage that power can be. So, neither did we over exaggerate being in the fire, nor I personally did. I think, most of my friends didn’t do so either. […] We’re OK with being in the fire. It’s like the fire of hell, I mean there… We’ve already settled the issue in our minds, I mean, we’ve already solved it in mind” (Sabahhattin-M-52-LW).

Like Zeynep, Sabahattin remembers his experiences of oppression as an inevitable result of his conscious political choices. This, in combination with self-retrospection as active political agents, appears as the very cause of the apparent continuity of left-wing political identities. Although they are not actively engaged in politics at present, the overwhelming majority of left-wingers maintain their past political preferences, which in turn, prove to be influential on past emotional choices as well as on present ones about social relationships134. The continuity in left-wing political identities is also related through an understanding of the coup as the initial moment of a project of political and economic transformation that still continues in terms of its permanent legal and political implications. Yaprak’s account presents an illustration of such perception of continuity: “[…] I mean, it’s something like becoming paralysed. I mean, think of a child growing up each day, it’s like his getting paralysed. Like the defect in the pituitary gland, the growing of a child suddenly stops in one phase or another. It’s something like that. If it [the coup] had not happened, I do believe that this would have been a real democratic country. So much time has passed [since then]. It stopped and prevented everything, but everything… We’ve lost a lot [with regard to the prosperity of the country]… The adversities we’re experiencing [as the citizens of Turkey] today, I believe, are the very products of the 12 September and the period subsequent to it” (Yaprak-W-50-LW).

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Yaprak interprets the persistence of the coup on both social and political levels; however, the coup’s continuity is also interpreted through self-assessments specifically in terms of social relationships. In the above sections, the socially isolating interferences of the coup were mentioned. Yet, unlike right-wingers, due to the perception of past coup experiences projected on the present, left-wingers still feel themselves deprived of the political bonds that used to play a decisive role in their social relationships. Cihan interprets the coup’s projections onto her present social relationships: “They [her friends] reproach me and say ‘always politics, always politics. You speak about nothing else’. Politics as a word has been taught to be something with a bad image [since the coup]. I’m becoming terribly tired [says with strong emphasis] of telling that politics is not that [something with that bad image], [politics] encompasses all spheres of the life. I recognised that I’m so tired of persistently telling this. This is the wound the 12 September inflicted on people. […] the 12 September inflicted a very deep wound. I mean, our ties with people were cut. The revolutionaries of those days are still excided [isolated]. Unless they [the revolutionaries] integrated themselves to the system, all of who think as I do… it’s very… I mean, I think they’re having great difficulty in communicating [with people who are unlike them]” (Cihan-W-54-LW).

The perception of continuity—the past projected on to the present—is coupled with the abovementioned acknowledgement of the commonality of coup experiences. The perception of continuity and commonality of experiences also provide left-wingers with moral courage in enduring and overcoming the coup’s permanent effects on daily life in the present. At this point, Cihan’s situation constitutes a significant case as the coup’s effect on her life has an irretrievable, perpetual appearance: for approximately twenty years, Cihan has been responsible for caring for her brother who became paralysed due to torture. Her daily life and practice at present are organised according to her shifts of caring. While telling of the coup’s effect on her current life, “we [the family members] even didn’t feel the need to speak about these [troubles]” she says, adding: “I mean, as what happened to [my brother] was many times more than what happened to us, things that may be important to others [referring to the troubles she and her family faced] have been less than unimportant for us”. The left-wingers avoid framing their past experiences with senses such as, for instance, regret, perceiving themselves as “victims” of a past atrocity or “exceptionalising” their experiences. On the contrary, some of them rather interpret their past experiences during coup years as gains. To them, despite the coup’s detrimental effects on their lives, personal losses

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and violence they suffered during the coup years are seen as a turning point significantly contributing to the development of their personalities. As a result of her coup experiences, Zeynep for example, mentions that she has gained certain abilities for overcoming usual troubles in life and its her experiences of atrocity that have provided her with life quality in present: “Well, this is what the 12 September changed in my life: firstly, it really gave me a spirit of struggle. Believe me, I really… For example, what did [my experiences in] Mamak [Prison] give me? Mamak gave me determination. I successfully utilise such determination while bringing up my children now. The more resistant, the more determinant, the clearer you are, the [more possible that] you get the good response from it. [12 September] taught me [what] friendship [is], I mean, it gave me quality of life. Perhaps we’ve lived through very bad things during it, but we also achieved our future quality of life thanks to it. The 12 September [also] gave me positive things” (Zeynep-W-53-LW).

Gulay, on the other hand, refers to a more fundamental impact as she believes her coup experiences had a constructive and formative effect on her personality: “[After my coup experiences] I managed to say that I’ve an opinion, openly defend my opinion, and convince others about it. I think this is my gain. I’ve got through this much trouble, but perhaps the biggest gain is in the formation of my personality. When I try to find out a positive aspect in all those painful [experiences], I can infer this easily [that her experiences during the coup contributed to her personality]. I mean, I really learnt to say that I’m a subject, I also have opinions, I can express them, I can say that yours is not right, I can discuss it with you, show you what is true, I can make it right, and I exist. For the first time [during my experiences in 12 September] I challenged people, I fought them, and I felt that I’m getting stronger and stronger through fighting. The more I opposed, the more my personality developed. I mean, these are good things” (Gulay-W54-LW).

Gulay’s experiences during the coup appears to have had an existential effect on her whole life and personality; in the course of her narrative, she tells the story of her overcoming the fear of being rearrested (and consequently once again being imprisoned and subject to torture) after her release from Mamak Prison. She identifies the specific moment, which she locates in the centre of the story, as one in which she conquered her personal fear, challenged the cause of her fear, and transformed her whole

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life. The moment, she says, became a memory she frequently recalls whenever she finds herself in distressing circumstances: “When they knocked at the door and took me away that night—it’s a moment like, I mean, that everything finishes, that you lose anything you have; you’re treated as if you’re not a human. The things that you saw and lived there [in the police station and prison] make you feel that you’re not yourself anymore. You find yourself in a terrible… and that affects your mental state very badly. [Even after I was released] my eyes were opening at the same hour [I was arrested], and [I was hearing] footsteps, I felt as if the door was being knocked on, I mean, I was feeling whatever I felt that night. This continued during […] the whole winter […]. One summer night, suddenly again my eyes were opened wide, I felt panicked and I was sweating blood. Then I asked myself how long I was going to live this [more]. I said [to myself] I should overcome this, I decided at that very moment. I got out of the bed, opened the door, and I stood in the garden. I shouted ‘I’m here, come and take me!’ I mean, I felt that I should defy this. I decided just then and went out to the garden. […] And I challenged [them] there. I looked around; nobody was coming [to take me]. And the nightmare finished, I slept tight. I woke up the night after again, but [I felt] more peaceful. I again went out [to the garden] more decisively, and I said ‘I’m here’. I did this [for a week]. And then, I was able to sleep like a log, and the nightmares finished. […] I think this had been a kind of [strategy of self-defence]. Even today, whenever I feel distressed, I always remember that [moment]. [I calm myself down] through saying to myself ‘once in the past, you’ve relieved yourself from such a thing without someone’s help’, I mean, I could have freaked out, […] I could have become an [mentally] unhealthy person. That challenge… [Perhaps I learnt] at that very moment being fearless and that one shouldn’t be scared of such things. […] I don’t have such fears anymore” (Gulay-W-54-LW).

The experience of such transformative life spans is also of particular importance in that most of these people were in their early twenties when the coup was staged and therefore these had considerable effects on their endeavour to become adults. These young people matured through their atrocious experiences during times they spent in prisons, or, at least, as fugitives in efforts to survive.

An Assessment on the Interaction between Collective Memories and the Current Status of Coup Memory Particular attention should be paid to the interactions and contestations between collective memories. Yet, the interaction between them remains to a large extent limited—with the exception of the prevailing effect of the

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official representation on accounts of non-politically affiliated participants. Such interactions and contestations take place in a surrounding that is precisely exposed to power relations. Though “raw”, current period of jurisdiction of perpetrators provides a convenient ground to make inferences and observations, concerning the contestations between collective memories and the political power that to large extent steers the course of contestations. This section focuses on the possibilities of interaction between different collective memories and also offers a glance at the last developments in the jurisdiction process.

On the Possibilities of Interaction between Collective Memories Despite the repertoires commonly employed by members of different political groups, what constitutes the basis for the disparate nature of collective memories and the limited and/or weak intersections between them? The question is to be answered through considering three aspects related to the group members’ preferences for social contacts, the similarities/differences of past experiences of groups and the course of inclusive/exclusive shifts in the public sphere. For the members of the politically affiliated groups, it is the political identities to a large extent play decisive roles on their preferences regarding social contacts. The social environment of members of the right and left-wing groups—apart from family members and workfellows, or any other social contacts related to their occupations—are populated by individuals from the same political community. Moreover, acquaintances since the coup years have particular impacts on preferences for social relationships. Most politically affiliated participants emphasise a certain intimacy with friends from the same political community, particularly those with whom they have long-term mutual acquaintance. At this point, personal coup experiences play a central role; coup experiences, constituting an excessively intimate subject to be shared during daily encounters, cements the members of the political communities which, by implication, means, to an extent, minimising social contacts with others. With regard to those with no political affiliations, despite the crosspolitical social environment they inhabit, the coup experience is an ordinary component equal to other experiences in the past. The less the decisive role that coup experiences play on past and present lives, perhaps with more difficulty in terms of less details when they are remembered—is also explanatory of the apparent effect of the official representation on accounts of the non-politically affiliated.

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The weak interaction between the memories of each group is also related to similarities and differences between past experiences. The experiences of imprisonment, arrest, torture and maltreatment are naturally constructive of potentially opponent accounts of the coup. Such atrocities experienced by politically affiliated participants result in a more eager attitude towards revealing the cruel aspects of the coup. For those who suffered from such applications, the official representation is characterised indisputably by a lack of reliability; however, official arguments to a considerable extent maintain their credibility for those who did not personally experience these cruel applications. This, in turn, brings about less “immunity” to the official discourse. Limited interaction between memories has also to do with the exclusive and marginalising shifts in the public sphere—politically affiliated actors’ participation in media-generated public debates on the coup’s legacy was enabled only after the legal process was initiated—that normally constitutes the platform on which competing constructions come across. This was further reinforced by the right-wing’s long-term silence on the coup as well as the limited impact of efforts by left-wing veterans who had earlier engaged in the struggle of reconstructing the past through commemorative/generational organisations due to a relative lack of selfconscious actors engaging in a struggle over memory.

On the Current Status of the Coup Memory The referendum held on 12th September 2010 addressing amendments in the twenty-six articles of the 1982 Constitution, including the removal of the 15th Article that banned the retrospective jurisdiction of coup’s perpetrators, generated a public debate regarding its legacy, and provided the citizens with the means to revise their memories and contentions about the coup. The proportion of affirmative votes in the referendum was 57,88 percent135. As a consequence of the referendum results, the Turkish government initiated the jurisdiction of two perpetrators of the 12 September 1980 coup on 4th April 2012. The two members of the National Security Council are currently accused of ruling out the Constitution of the Turkish Republic and eliminating the Turkish Grand National Assembly. The jurisdiction turned to becoming an attempt to bring the perpetrators to account for their acts against the state, not against the society. The “coming to terms” rhetoric of political power is to be interpreted as a continuation of the memory politics by the Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi], which is oriented towards “rewriting history” or, say, offering a new reading of history, challenging, in

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particular, the Kemalist historiography. The vision of political power and the legal frame that informs the current “coming to terms” process play an important role in shaping the public perception of the coup’s past. The bill of indictment drawn against the members of the former National Security Council reveals that the coup is conceived rather as a contingent historical event that was accomplished by individual military actors—the two members of the National Security Council—who had been discredited as persona non grata. Due to the lack of a vision of human rights, and conception of the coup as a crime against humanity, the two generals are retrospectively accused of provoking acts of violence with the purpose of staging an “arbitrary” military coup. Thus, the legal process has turned into an act of detecting certain events in a conspiratory fashion, and the committers of the acts of violence transformed into “un”self-conscious actors. The legal, and thus public, conception of the coup that to a large extent excludes the left-wing collective memory framed by a crime against humanity vision draws significant parallels with the conspiratory understanding informing right-wing collective memory. Another similarity is their common focus on the period before the coup, and their exclusion of efforts to question the military practices including the issues of injustice and violation of human rights. The commonalities between the legal/public framing and right-wing memory also mean the sudden penetration of right-wing actors into the public sphere. This was made possible by the implicit call from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the right-wingers to stake an equal claim on acting as primary interlocutors—and “victims”—self-confidently locating themselves at the centre of the current process. The left-wingers naturally maintained a stance against the new involvement of the right-wingers in the jurisdiction process and the limitation of jurisdiction with two high-ranking generals, the two members of National Security Council. A few months after the bill of indictment was drawn up, on 27 January 2012, some left-wing and generational organisations, left-wing/socialist parties and NGOs made a press statement voicing their opposition to the limitation of jurisdiction, mentioning that its inclusion should be expanded (Bianet 27 January, 2012). The two generals, Evren and Sahinkaya, obtained medical reports from the hospitals in which they were receiving treatment, and expressed that they would not participate in the hearings until the last one, in which the final judgement on them would be passed (Bianet 13 September, 2012; 17 January, 2013). The final hearing was held on 18 December 2014, and both defendants were sentenced to heavy penal servitude for life for the admonitory letter they released on December 1979 to “warn parliament”

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and for staging the coup on 12 September 1980. With the release of the admonitory letter, the court decreed that the generals had “intended to overthrow the Constitution and the National Assembly, thus precluding its functioning”. Under Turkish Penal Code No: 765 Article 146, the generals were also accused of “altering, changing or abolishing the Constitution of the Turkish Republic and annulling and forcibly outlawing the National Assembly, the formation of which drew on the Constitution”. Due to the defendants’ good conduct and behaviour throughout the jurisdiction, their penalties underwent discretionary mitigation, and were converted to penal servitude for life. Furthermore, in line with the Military Penal Code, the court decreed that they were to be stripped of their military ranks (Bianet 18 June, 2014).

CHAPTER SIX PERCEIVING THE PAST THROUGH THE PRESENT: ON GENERATION

A discussion on generation proves to be a productive topic vis-à-vis participants’ signification processes of temporality as it provides clues to the perceptions of past and present as well as the relation of (dis)continuity between the two. Generation also stands in-between the personal recollections and the collective frames they are engaged in. Analyses of collective memories that are presented in previous sections rather reveal clear-cut and, to a large extent, shared/acquired frames of interpretations of the past. In this chapter, a discussion on generation, on the one hand, has enabled me to retrieve the personal aspects of past experience, and on the other, facilitated the elucidation of the interplay between collective frames and personal experiences. Generation referring to the intellectual baggage that makes up the consciousness of its members as well as the aspect of the cohort requires a discussion of commonalities that enables us to coin a certain group as a generation. Yet, generation also stands in the centre of the differentiation between the groups and the boundaries they construct between each other. Employing generation as a concept in this chapter, thus, fulfils two functions: one related to the “mortar” joining the members together drawing on conceptual assets of generation theory, and the other, through employing specifications within generation theory, facilitating the elucidation of differences between three groups belonging to very much the same generation. What is striking about above accounts is their apparent “genderlessness”. In collective accounts it is, to a certain extent, the absorption of gender identities through membership of political communities. However, when it comes to personal recollections, for instance in analyses of patterns of retrospection, while the diverse personal experiences or political identities mark clear differentiations between the accounts, gender barely proves to

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play a role informing the content of the accounts. I drew a similar conclusion about the mnemonic legacy of the coup, particularly with regard to published memoirs which were characterised by the lack of women’s voices136. The apparent “genderlessness” inherent to selfperceptions of who experienced the coup, particularly from politically affiliated groups is, I believe, partly due to the “genderlessness” of the existing mnemonic literature, as the accounts presented here are to be conceived of as interacting with circulating representations. Another explanation that provides a basis for “genderlessness” arises from the specific nature of the generation within which these participants of the study are chronologically included. The social and the political essence giving shape to the consciousness of this generation exclude gender as central to self-perception as well as politics. In other words, the period when members of these generations were politically active (1970s) preceded the times in which gender-based/gender-sensible politics were introduced and achieved visibility in Turkey towards the end of the 1980s.

Reviewing Generation In its most prevalent form, generation is used as a means to “make sense of differences between age groupings and to locate […] persons within historical time” (Pilcher 1994, 481). The simplest and mundane understanding of generation indicates the homogenous age range of a group of people and considers the temporal overlap between the lives and the historical repertoire of the related period. The former actually indicates “cohorts” while the second aspect—the intellectual baggage of a cohort— constitutes both the essence of generation and the core of the discussion in this section. Unlike the cohort as a sole unit of statistics, “a generation is a sociological reality, consisting of a cohort, significant proportions of whose members have experienced profound historical events” (cited in Kertzer 1983, 133). The common experience and its interpretation by a cohort is referred to through terms making more or less the same emphasis on “collective knowledge” as consisting of memories of events regardless of whether they are “directly experienced or learned about from others” (Schuman and Corning 2000, 914). Biggs (2007, 696), for instance, refers to the “membership of a particular age group sharing certain social and historical characteristics”. Klecka (cited in Kertzer 1983, 137), rejecting a conception of generation through dividing society into “equal interval birth cohorts”, emphasises “common exposure to historical events during [the] period of most intense political socialization”. Mannheim (1998,

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182) locates “participation in the common destiny” at the heart of the problem of generation. Regarding the common experience and interpretation of social surroundings, Mannheim (2011) distinguishes between memories that are appropriated and those personally acquired. Accordingly, the members of a generation are not only in a position to experience the same events and data etc. (personally acquired memories) (ibid, 95), but also rely upon “the great similarity in the data making up the consciousness of its members” (appropriated memories) (ibid, 97). The participants of this study are regarded as members of a generation in the sense that they are “[members of] a particular age group sharing certain social and historical characteristics” (Biggs 2007, 696). Considering the relation between social change and generation, here generation is understood on the axis of the rapid and fundamental social change that the 12 September coup introduced. The ages of the participants vary between forty-five and seventy; when generation is solely conceived as cohorts, like for instance composed of eight or ten years intervals, it is arguable that there are three generations among them. However, I argue that these cohorts actually belong to the same generation when the wideness of the historical event in question is considered. The 12 September and its horizontal and vertical implications has a unifying effect on cohorts which together constitute a generation.

The Critical Period and “Fresh Contacts” The findings of research by Schuman and Scott (1989:377) confirms the hypotheses that “the memories of important political events and social change are structured by age and […] that adolescence and early adulthood is the primary period for generational imprinting in the sense of political memories”. Adolescence or early adulthood is frequently considered as the “critical period” in which “the events have their greatest impact on memory” (Schuman and Corning 2000, 916). The experience acquired throughout this period also overlaps with the “fresh contact” of any new generation to a novel cultural heritage which also implies making a fresh selection through ignoring some of the data related to the past that used to make up the consciousness of previous generations. In Mannheim’s terms, “fresh contacts play an important part in the life of the individual when he is forced by events to leave his own social group and enter a new one” (Mannheim 1998, 171); in its narrow sense, fresh contacts refers to “new beginnings” in one’s own biography. Studies by developmental and cognitive psychologists (Schuman and Scott 1989,

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361; Schuman and Corning 2000, 917) arguing that “the teens and twenties constituted the period in life that yielded the largest number of memories” (ibid, 917)137 confirm this. Twenty-seven out of twenty-nine participants of the study were in their adolescence or early adulthood when the coup was staged. The age range in 1980 varies between fifteen and thirty-three. This is accorded by another aspect of “fresh contact” in the sense of a “shift in social relations” (Mannheim 1998, 172). Except for two, these twenty-seven participants were either university students or at the very beginning of their careers in 1980. These two constitute critical periods in which one breaks off familial ties, enters a new network of social relations primarily determined by one’s own choices and builds herself as an independent individual. This also provides some explanation for politically affiliated participants’ to engage in politics despite the parents’ protectionist attitude towards their children due to the conditions of violence. The period of adolescence and the instance of establishing “fresh contacts”, in this vein, refers to the period in which these young individuals gained their independence and made their preference in favour of getting involved in politics.

Similarity of Location What is the impact of consciousness on one’s defining herself as a member of a generation? In an effort to answer this question Mannheim (1998, 166-167) distinguishes between generations “as mere collective facts [and] concrete social groups” (ibid, 165). Social location which indicates the “unity [within a certain generation that] is constituted essentially by a similarity of location of a number of individuals within a social whole” (ibid, 167) is independent from individual’s self-awareness about her position; it is primarily determined through a common positioning “[within] the social and historical process” which “limit[s] them to a specific range of potential experience predisposing them for a certain characteristic mode of thought and experience, and a characteristic type of historically relevant action” (ibid, 168). Mannheimian social location can be associated with the notion of Zeitgeist “[referring] simply to some general cultural qualifications of a period” (Bruce and Yearley 2006, 323) and defining the possibilities of potential thought and action in a given historical period. I suggest thinking of the similar social locations of individuals in terms of limits of socialisation and polarised political atmosphere before the coup. The boundaries of the socialisation processes for those young adults were mainly designated by the atmosphere within the higher education

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institutions to which an overwhelming majority was affiliated. Engaging in politics on different levels, discussing politics in daily conversations, sympathising with political action or being affiliated to a political organisation played a central role in styling the social life. The similarity of location was also consolidated by the spatial commonalities and their decisive role in defining daily encounters as universities constituted centres of political action throughout the 1970s. An overwhelming majority of the participants were college and university students when the coup was staged. In a sense, the political atmosphere within the universities potentially pulled individuals into politics in that highly-politicised milieu. Apart from higher education students, some were young adults at the beginning of their careers establishing “fresh contacts” within the world of white-collar labour which was also highly-politicised thanks to the efforts by the politically engaged employee associations and trade unions. Furthermore, the polarised political atmosphere and the rising social and political conflict forged individuals to take sides within the social context they were embedded and political conflict functioned as a vacuum absorbing each individual which imposed making choices between adopting a political attitude for or against a political camp. Some nonpolitically affiliated participants speak of being excluded due to a lack of clear-cut political positions or their ambivalent political views and attitudes. Thus, this atmosphere posed a “negative delimitation” “[restricting] the range of self-expression” and practice out of different modes of political involvement (Mannheim 1998, 169).

Period Effect as “Joiner” Among Cohorts Knowledge of an event depends on the extent of its impact as “some events may be so wide that no single cohort, defined in terms of a small number of birth years, develops appreciably greater knowledge than others” (Schuman and Corning 2000, 921). The wide and long-term impact of an event on consecutive cohorts is coined as “period effect”. The more the event is unusual and novel, the wider the period effect and the more it is of interest to a variety of cohorts (ibid). The 12 September is to be thought of as a process with long-term implications, rather than a brief time period, the main feature of which is the military’s seizing of power and temporarily suspending formal legislative and executive functions. As I presented in an earlier chapter, the coup not only imposed a legal oppression upon the “inconvenient” masses, but it also fundamentally transformed the daily life, particularly through martial law, over-inclusive interventions into daily life and its restrictive outrage. Martial law

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extended over the time the military was in power until 1987 and played a central role in designating every aspect of daily life. The unchanged essence of the coup that was informally projected on parliamentarian politics and the neo-liberal transformation had a visible effect on lives. The consumption habits, for instance, prove to be clear and prompt indicators of the sudden economic shift; one of the participants, Sengul, referring to the sudden change in her consumption habits actually defines the projection of Turkey’s articulation into world capitalism in her personal life: I mean, it’s like… Turgut Ozal introduced liberal, I mean, a liberal economy. Then, for instance, we acquainted ourselves with stuff like toilet paper or paper napkins. Those were great for us! Now [imported] from Europe to us… Everyone used to buy Marlboro from smugglers [before transition to the open economy] (Sengul-W-63-NPA).

Gunay’s talk, similarly implies the change in the “spirit” of the era. Her account illustrates the replacement of that spirit by the delusion of economic advancement due to the diversification of consumption goods and the social enthusiasm in terms of consuming it generated: “There’s been retrogression, but thanks to Ozal, he immediately cleared things up. He channelled people to other directions […] Different things happened, I mean, in terms of economy. People’s things, I mean, worldviews changed […] People tended towards different things. Well, perhaps we weren’t leading an affluent life, but at least everyone was on the same economic level. People could do with less, they were abstinent. But then, they became more insatiable. Things began not to satisfy people. Because [there was much more to consume then]. […] So, they began to ignore [moral] things. I mean, the quality of their humanity changed. Before 12 September, it was honesty and making a living the hard way that was the quality [of humanity]. The [person] after the 12 September was, like, I mean, how to say, who has an eye to the main chance” (Gunay-W50-NPA).

The period effect is further reinforced by the extent to which an event is “reborn as a new one” so that the memory of it maintains competition with that of the subsequent events (Schuman and Scott, 1989:367). As its legal, political and economic impositions and their social reflections permeated in current social and political contexts of the country, the imprint of the 12 September coup is still pervasive.

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The Acceleration of Social Change and Generation Entelechy Dilthey’s distinction between qualitative and quantitative (interior) time “has profound consequences for the concept of generations and their measurement” (Pilcher 1994, 486). In Mannheim, the understanding of generation, the assumption of homogenous time intervals or the imposition of an objective rhythm for a generation to emerge in is replaced by the assertion that “[the emergence of] a new generation style depends entirely on the trigger action of the social and cultural process” (Mannheim 1998, 191). Herein, Mannheim relates the social change/generation connection to the capability of a generation to establish formative principles. The crystallisation of these formative principles is made possible through “a realization of potentialities inherent in the location” (ibid). At this point Mannheim’s “generation entelechy” is relevant: “When as a result of an acceleration in the tempo of social and cultural transformation basic attitudes must change so quickly that the latent, continuous adaptation and modification of traditional patterns of experience, thought, and expression is no longer possible, then the various new phases of experience are consolidated somewhere, forming a clearly distinguishable new impulse, and a new centre of configuration. We speak in such cases of the formation of a new generation style, or of a new generation entelechy” (ibid).

Generation entelechy is a convenient tool to elucidate the formative and interpretive principles of the generation of participants, but particularly the cohort born in the 1950s. The frequent emphasis on common experience, but more importantly common values, in each of the three groups indicates that entelechy actually constitutes a moral frame guiding practice. In Ahmet’s (M-53-LW) terms, this moral frame is associated with “idealism”138 which is replaceable with something else in another account: “I’m a member of the seventy-eight generation. Couldn’t we be otherwise? [he implies being less morally-oriented] No, we couldn’t. Our personalities did not comply with this. We even couldn’t imagine such things. I mean, asking for compensation for the costs we’d paid. Because it’s an idealist generation. In fact, even the idealist of that period was an idealist. Today you see just a few idealists who hit the jackpot. The Islamist of the period was idealist as well. There might be very few who were promoted from mujahid to contractor” (Ahmet-M-53-LW).

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Generation entelechy is produced through intergenerational relations; the system of values and the moral frame guiding this generation, when its internal dynamics are set aside, also owes to the previous consecutive generations that took over the moral and ideological baggage of the Turkish national salvation and its republican heritage. Each generation, for Clain, is committed to a socially structured system of values, lifestyle preferences, existential meanings and ideological references all of which point to a broad idea about “what is fair” (cited in Biggs, 2007:696). Thus, the entelechy of this generation is to be thought of in relation to a “moral economy” that provides the opportunity to revise “the iterative relationship [between generations in] the creation of knowledge” (ibid). However, the rapid transformation and the fluidisation/acceleration of life in 1980s Turkey actually jeopardised this entelechy which is defended occasionally at the cost of maintaining the status quo and falling into a moral conservatism.

Relevance of Education There is a strong correlation between transcending the boundaries of personal experience and the competence to remember public events. The findings of research by Schuman and Scott (1989:364) reveal that “[…] the most powerful background factor that accounts for the lack of historical memory is education” and most of their respondents “with no apparent memory of [public] events or changes are located among those without college education” (ibid). The period effect generated by the nature of the 12 September coup is the primary factor in eliminating the cohort effect which, contrary to period effect, refers to the constitution of homogenous responses to historical events within a generation and differentiation of it from other generations (Rusow cited in Kertzer 1983, 130). However, the reduction of the cohort effect also owes to the high levels of education (Schuman and Scott 1989, 364) of the participants which provides them with the capability of contextualising the coup experience regardless of the frames informing the collectively established plots. Another symptom that displayed the relevance of education is the participants’ capacity to lucidly remember the events before and subsequent to the coup. Educational capital is further reinforced by political engagement and membership to political groups which enables intellectual exchange and consolidation of groups’ collective memories.

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Political Groups as Generation Units: Boundaries between Groups and Identity Construction Even though Mannheim assigns common social location as the broadest surface on which a generational community unites, he suggests that “sense of location phenomenon falls short of encompassing the generation phenomenon in its full actuality” (1998, 181). Similarity of location, in the sense of “participation in the common destiny” (ibid) is too broad a perspective that engenders the ignoring of close inspection into the boundaries between generational communities, the formative rules that give generations their actual character and the interaction between the members of a generation. In search of narrowing the criterion through which a generational community is identified, Mannheim conceptualises “generation as an actuality” in which “a concrete bond is created between members of a generation by their being exposed to the social and intellectual symptoms of [a] dynamic destabilisation” (ibid, 182-183)139. Generation as an actuality is only possible when; “[Individuals] participate in the characteristic social and intellectual current of their society and period, and […] have an active or passive experience of the interactions of forces, which made up the new situation” (ibid, 183).

Mannheim conceptualises this specification as “generation units” and the political groups identified in this study actually constitute different generation units as, even though they experienced the “same concrete historical problems”, they “[built] up the material of their common experiences in different specific ways” (ibid, 184-185). Mannheim (ibid, 187) attributes particular importance to antagonisms in identifying generation units. Antagonistic groups are characterised by discrepant intellectual data in working out the experience140. There may exist “a number of differentiated, antagonistic generation units” within one generation which constitute an “actual” generation “precisely because [these units] are oriented towards each other, even though only in the sense of fighting each other” (ibid). Therefore, antagonisms that help in clearly identifying generation units are to be interpreted as sources of the boundaries political communities build between each other and, accordingly, as the base for processes of identity construction.

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Political Antagonisms, Ineluctable Identities and “Taking Sides” A discussion on generation units also enhances the emphasis on “political subjecthood” which is to some extent ignored when an individual is thought to belong to a certain generation only because s/he is born within a certain cohort. Membership to generation units enables placing more emphasis on agency and conscious action for embodying the “typical experience” of an era through active participation in a certain movement or current. Political groups involved in this study constitute generation units as the intellectual baggage originating from the groups’ ideological references and political visions differ to an extent that generates distinct interpretations of their specific historical location and experience. These diverse intellectual repertoires naturally generated diverse responses to the structural contexts in which they were embedded. The (political) antagonisms further reinforced the recognition of delimitations of the political communities and identities. The barely escapable appeal of engaging in politics was almost a natural outcome of the ongoing political and economic crisis throughout the 1970s. The more the crisis became perennial, the more concrete the political identities and groupings became. This significantly contributed to the political polarisation, the last phase of which was the political violence dominating the streets. Political antagonisms were also meant to be a precise definition of the political engagement. Thus, the polarisation was not exclusive of people with no clear political interests or those who “stayed clear” of politics. In such a milieu of high politicisation “taking sides” almost appeared as an imperative. An account by a participant describing her first years in university—around 1978—epitomises the physical reflection of political antagonisms on daily life: “And yes, many students were not attending the uni. They didn’t have the chance to do so. [If you ask] what happened when we went to the uni., the lecturer came for her lecture… In the middle of the lecture hall stayed the apolitical ones, I mean it’s not possible to be apolitical, but the students who didn’t belong to any of the sides, who just wanted to spend proper university years, just cared about graduating. […] On one side, sat the idealists and the revolutionaries on the other. And we sat in the middle desks. […] One side says ‘whoa!’… and the other side yells ‘how dare you say that!’. Then they attempt to attack each other. They drew close to our side [in the middle of the hall] and they went at it hammer and tongs. The lecturer would up the stakes. Then they would come to blows and it finishes. […] Trouble, a fight each day. Someone is wounded each day and

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However, the boundaries and the identities dialectically embodying and embodied by each other have much do to with the consciousness and self-recognition of a certain generation unit which may be assessed with regard to unit’s capability to instil its “spirit” in the public sphere and progressively make the former generations more receptive to it. For Mannheim (1998, 189-190): “[A certain] generation unit may produce its work and deeds unconsciously out of the new impulse evolved by itself, having an intuitive awareness of its existence as a group but failing to realise the group’s character as a generation unit [whilst some] groups may consciously experience and emphasise their character as generation units […] which already manifested many of the characteristics of the modern youth movement”.

The politically affiliated groups constitute members of conscious generation units due to the clear boundaries they established between “them” and “others”: the strong feeling of belonging and groupness. The non-politically affiliated group, on the other hand, can be seen rather as an unconscious generation unit due to the blurred boundaries separating them from others. Even though they have self-awareness of belonging to a certain generation, the boundaries are frequently drawn through presumptions about passively being exposed to the series of events throughout the period, particularly different appearances of the rapid social transformation the country underwent in the 1980s. The boundaries between the groups are primarily identified by collective identities which are constructed through the “fabrication, rearrangement, elaboration and omission of details about the past” (Zelizer cited in Lorenzo-Dus and Bryan 2011, 283). These modifications are realised in the cultural repertoires created and accessed by group members and the cultural context they are embedded in. However, the role of past experience and the boundaries it generated is barely neglectable while understanding the modification of the past as the past experience constitutes the basis for subsequent modifications on “how it is told”.

The Relevance of Past Experience, Concrete Groups and Building Boundaries Mannheim (1998, 187-188) refers to concrete groups as clearly identified through “partisan integrative attitudes” and characterised by the

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affinity among the responses the unit members give in a specific historical moment (ibid, 187). This affinity “[does] not come into being spontaneously”, but through the “personal contact among individuals”: the concrete groups are sub-units characterised by “a mutual stimulation [within] a close-knit vital [generation] unit [which] inflames the participants and enables them to develop integrative attitudes” (ibid). Concrete groups are composed of individuals who are closely linked to each other and together generate common ethical and political signposts informing their responses and attitudes. These constitute the “nucleus” of the generation units and the origins of “the most essential new conceptions which are subsequently developed by the unit” (ibid, 187). The concrete groups shaping the principles of generation units are most influential when “they formulate the typical experiences of the individuals sharing a generation location”. (ibid, 188). The past experiences of the politically affiliated represent typicality as their past experiences barely deviate from the common experience specific to political groups. This can be confirmed through the content of the memory works produced subsequent to the coup (visual sources such as documentaries and published memoirs, edited volumes etc.). The parallels participants build between their own experiences and the content of these works, and the convergence between the individual accounts constitute the basis on which the collective frames informing groups’ memories are built. The “partisan integrative attitudes” which Mannheim finds central in defining concrete groups are naturally immanent in the internal conventions of the politically affiliated groups. Personal contacts and close bonds between members were central to communal interactions. Membership of political organisations in the past also assured common perceptions about, and the types of, establishing relations with the outer world. Although left-wing politics displayed an organisational diversity, the atmosphere of political polarisation and the ever-increasing political antagonisms generated introverted communities primarily built on precise exclusion and negation of the “other”—the opponent. The same is applicable to the right-wing community, yet the monolithic organisational structure within right-wing politics significantly facilitated building a close-knit community. However, concrete groupness is barely observable within the members of the non-politically affiliated group. The social heterogeneity of this group, lack of the unifying effect of ideological frames, absence of identifiable contacts between members, the discrepancy and individual specifity of coup experience hinder treating this group as a concrete group.

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The Present and the Memory-Identity Relationship It is “those who lived through [a certain event]” who have the greatest knowledge about it and there appears “a gradual loss of knowledge from that time through cohorts more and more distant from it” (Schuman and Corning, 2009, 940). However, Mannheim (1998, 173) emphasises that “past experience is only relevant when it exists concretely incorporated in the present”. In the present context this incorporation is possible in two ways: “as consciously recognised model” and “as unconsciously ‘condensed’, merely ‘implicit’ or ‘virtual’ patterns’” which refer to the transformation of a material to “fit a prevailing new situation”, or “hitherto unnoticed or neglected potentialities inherent in that material are discovered in the course of developing new patterns of action” (ibid, 173174). The incorporation of the past to the present which naturally encourages reflections on the memory-identity relationship, and more specifically— when the dialectical relation between the two is taken for granted—the coup memory of groups and its formative influence on current identities. The nostalgic essence of generation in right-wingers’ accounts— which shall be clarified in following sections—standing between past and present implies the effort to fold an identity from the ruins of the past which is characterised by the traumatic coup experience and its involuntary transmission into current identities. The nostalgia emerging from the influence of a “shattered past” is strictly bounded with efforts to restore an old and integral identity that excluded ambiguity and distrust and represented itself through defining lucid boundaries between “them” and “us”—the latter always thought to be “on the right side” and aligned with the state. The coup experience is dispersed within the community which is normally expected to crystallise the boundaries separating groups. However, the search for a solid (political) identity is often such a desperate act that generational identity prevails and transcends the limits of the political. Recognition of the vanity of the strictly built political boundaries between them and “old enemies” (the left-wingers), the content of generation is expanded to encompass the whole cohort regardless of the past and present political positions. Nevertheless, they are frequently aware of the lack of such broadly defined generational identities including each individual of the cohort by the left-wing and the distinct lines between them and their left-wing peers drawn by the latter. Being aware of the exclusive perception of generation by the left-wing community, one of the right-wing participants reproaches left-wingers while speaking about the two groups’ unequal capabilities to represent their memory:

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“[I]t tells about us but does not actually tell us, we say. I don’t mean mentioning us, but the sense of “us” there […] We couldn’t express ourselves [our coup experience] sufficiently. The left-wingers either did not tell about us or attempted to portray us as collaborative, as collaborative of the state or as a branch of it when they did. We regarded it as, I mean, do they still bear the same grudge? Isn’t being executed together enough for them [the left-wingers]? Isn’t having suffered from the same cruelty in the same [prison] cells enough for them?” (Irfan-M-57RW).

The lack of a mnemonic repertoire that contributes to consolidating the right-wing identity further reinforces assumptions about the presumably aggrieved political identities. It is not just the lack, but also the unintentional distance from such repertoire—say, for instance, the lack of cultural capital or reading habit—that also hinders possible efforts to carve out novel and solid identities from the remnants of the past boundaries. Another participant, again referring to the lack of right-wing perspectives within the coup’s representations, complains about the right-wing’s incapability to incorporate coup memory into the current boundaries drawn between opponent groups: “These are things to be noted in history. If you don’t tell, then someone [the left-winger] would tell it instead and would tell it however she knows. [She] would tell however she knows or tells it partially. You’ve got to tell it […] so that someone who reads it will say “God! So the idealists endured these [as well as the left-wingers]. And then, another friend will write, then you’ll compromise and perhaps make a synthesis out of it. Then, [the reader] will realise that this is the fact. If I don’t write, then there’ll be only one-sided [left-wing produced] sources to read” (Feray-W53-RW).

Almost on the contrary, coup experience is central in building boundaries by the left-wingers. Having experienced the coup is attributed central importance in unifying the group and even the coup experience itself turns out to become an identity. Due to the over-inclusive feature of coup experience within the group that has a formative effect on individual identities, generational identity often overlaps with political identity, and is even constructive of it in some instances. Ever-present appearance of the coup and its prevalent reflections on current lives constantly restores the boundaries between the generation they mention belonging to and others. The content of the coup experience is unexpectedly discreet here; most of the left-wingers either prefer not to speak about their past sufferings, such as maltreatment in prison or torture, or speak of someone else’s story of

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brutality that they witnessed. These aspects of coup experience almost constitute a secret; but a secret known by each member of the generational community. The boundaries are further clarified through an implicit—or often unconscious—presumption that having experienced and witnessed this violence constitutes a privilege that enables one to belong to a certain community. The strict boundaries of the community also owe to the cultural repertoire the members have access to. It seems that there is a widespread awareness of different forms of mnemonic legacy of the coup. However, it is usually the popular forms—feature films and TV serials—that attract particular attention. Despite being shot by left-wing or left-leaning directors, these productions that attract wider audiences rather enlarge or contribute to blurring the boundaries of the groups. Thus, these do not allow for clear inferences about its diffusion into left-wingers’ coup remembrance. A more specific influence is observed through the generational organisations about which an overwhelming majority of the participants have some knowledge while there are only a few who actively take part in these organisations. These exclusively left-wing populated organisations also represent the overlapping of the generational and political identities. A more recent development that enabled the revision of the boundaries between politically affiliated groups was the penetration of official attempts to “come to terms with the coup” in the agenda. This process significantly influenced the positionings of the left and right-wings and revivified the past antagonisms and the delimitations of the past. The emergence of novel sources—edited volumes and memoirs produced by left-wing or left-leaning persons, in particular—whilst consolidating leftwing collective identities, were met with a frustration that was already present in the right-wing due to the incapability of representing memory. The lack of political affiliation in the past and the presumably common experience of efforts to adapt to the rapid transformation following the coup generates an overarching definition of generation and generational identity in non-politically affiliated participants. The content of the cultural repertoires reached so far is often romanticised and articulated in a broad sense of nostalgia. Unlike left and right-wing, these participants’ memories are not delimited by specific and individual experiences of legal and political oppression despite their awareness of what happened in the coup period.

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Generation: Between Past and Present “We’ve lived what some wanted us to live. A generation disappeared. Truly, a generation was destroyed” (Mansur-M-51-RW)141.

Politically significant periods produce generations which are usually commemorated with reference to the decade the generation used to be politically active in. The 68 Generation, the Western equivalent of which appeared to be probably the most politically ambitious about “changing the world”, constitutes the most publicly known example of a group of politically active people being perceived as a generation in Turkey. It was conceived by subsequent generations, particularly by the members of the 78 Generation, as a prototype of such a generation equipped with political values and objectives. However, the experiences of the 68 and 78 generations’ political activities of which ended in military coups, enabled “being a generation” to be identified with a state of suffering from unjust treatment or grievance. Although I was aware of the abovementioned aspect long before embarking on this study, I had presumptions about whether the membership to a generation was my own imposition on groups in this study. Yet, the self-definitions of participants as members of a “generation” appeared as a preference made through many of their own accord. However, there remain significant differences between groups in terms of how they define a generation: the generation for right-wingers is overwhelmingly situated in the past, rather than the present. Moreover, I recognised that the majority of right-wingers attribute positive values to the generation they believe themselves to be a member of. Their understanding of temporality—specifically the relation between past and the present as well as the essentially positive feature they ascribe to their past—led me to reflect on their accounts in connection with Ostovich’s (2002) conception of nostalgia. When it comes to the left-wingers, I concluded that common experiences both in the past and the present are central to their perception of generation. The common experience-based continuity between past and present owes much to the perception of the coup period as a historical moment the implications of which still prevail. Thus, the generation in left-wing accounts centres upon the common past experiences of oppression and isolation that still affects present lives. For the non-politically affiliated, generation, similar to right-wingers, again appeared as a means for nostalgic reflections on the past. However, I believe, such tendencies rather corresponded to Boym’s (2011) conception of nostalgia as a common symptom of our age that is immanent to modernity and the notion of progress. Thus, here the feature of nostalgia

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rather correlates to a certain type of reactionism against the rapid transformation of the country after the coup.

The Generation in the “Frozen Past”: Disappointment, Appraisal and Nostalgia The “generation” in right-wing accounts is characterised by two interrelated features: firstly, the generation is not perceived as an existing social unit in the present, but is rather fixed in a “frozen past”. Here, the “frozen past” refers to an isolated part of time that is never succeeded by the present. Secondly, a generation fixed in the past is essentially attributed with positive qualifications—which, in some instances, reach the extent of what I call a “mythology of perfection”—that are perceived as the “common values” of that generation. These “common values” often emerge as self-sacrifice, honesty, self-consciousness and so forth. Ostovich (2002, 240) suggests understanding nostalgia as an “awareness of distance between the past and the present, an awareness that something has been “shattered”’, and adds: “living among the debris of the past, the nostalgic’s challenge is to construct a world and an identity out of this debris” (ibid, 244). Considering the nature of right-wingers’ coup experiences, the shattering aspect lies in the “shock-like” feature of the coup in their lives. Shock, if described as a “short, sudden blow”, the past “shock-like” experience has two facets: on one side—referring to the “blow”—lies the experience of huge disappointment the right-wingers convey due to the unexpected oppression of the coup that eventually led to a traumatic perception of the coup’s past; on the other side, lays the temporal finitude of coup experience—relating to the short and sudden feature of the shock. The “coup period” refers to a temporally short period of time for right-wingers142. This is mostly owing to the opportunity rightwingers/nationalists found for re-gathering and legal representation through the establishment of several right-wing parties during transition to the civilian period143. Most right-wingers tell of having been able to contact fellow right-wingers and being able to resume their social and political life once they were released from the prisons144. Positive features attributed to the past generation vary: in Yeliz’s account, these features symbolise a kind of “purity” that even goes beyond the political community that was belonged to. Yeliz currently defines herself as a “Turkish nationalist and idealist”. She acknowledges that whatever has been experienced painfully in the past resulted from one’s political affiliation, but she eliminates the role of her political engagement and “exonerates” the coup period from politics:

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“[Our generation] was very honest, you know? […] I can admit this to you, but with very decent emotions, there’s no politics in the minds, I was already from the Idealist Hearth [Ulku Ocagi] before the 1980s” (YelizW-50-RW).

While affirming the past generation, Yeliz inevitably runs into an apparent contradiction: while she mentions that “there [was] no politics in the minds” of their generation, in the following sentence, she highlights that she was already politically affiliated before the coup. It is apparent that it was the political objectives that directed her life. Yet, Yeliz, in an effort to underline the essentially positive nature of the past generation, ignores her political position and values that were central in shaping her past life and which are still present today. Comparison with the present generation and the emphasising of the contrast between the two appears as another means for highlighting the “perfection” of the past generation. Seyhan, who together with her sons and husband is currently affiliated to the nationalist party, has a specific opportunity to make comparison between her children (present generation) and members of her generation both of whom belong to the same political community. To her, what distinguished the members of her generation were their noble goals, intellectual competence and consciousness: “I mean, when I compare [our generation] with the present one, [our generation] read much, kept the feet on the ground but… […] Really, [our generation] loved their country, I mean, wanted to enhance their country, I think these people were as such” (Seyhan-W-RW-50).

While Seyhan’s account exemplifies the negation of the present in order to reveal the (speculative) gap between two generations, in which the preceding one is ascribed favourable features—reading much, keeping their feet on the ground and aiming to enhance the country—that of Zahit epitomises all inherent features of the right-wing conception of generation: the disappointment that constitutes one reason of shock-like (shattering) experience145, is manifested by the generation’s fixation in the past and the “mythology of perfection” built around it. Zahit, unlike in the past, is currently not actively engaged in the movement, but rather remains a fringe supporter. Speaking about his generation, he mentions that: “I don’t like speaking about the past. For instance, you’re the first I’m talking to [about the past]. […] A period had passed. I don’t see it as a period to be ashamed of, personally, but as a period to be proud of, in terms of my personal history, I see it [this period] something to be proud

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For Zahit, the “past is passed”; emphasising his preference not to speak of it, he underlines his detachment and commitment to the present. Being a member of a generation, though by implication, is a matter of the past. His account transforms into an epic appraisal while he reveals “pride” in his own past—“the idealists as Ulubatli Hasans”. However, reference to “Ulubatli Hasan” actually indicates a certain ambivalence: on the one hand it refers to the dignity of the past, yet, on the other implies the sacrifice of the generation through connoting the murder of one—Ulubatli Hasan—by the “enemy” for the sake of the country, reminding the right-wingers of their then self-perception as “fighters against communism”. The emphasis on “sacrifice” underpins the tendency for appraisal of the past generation. For Irfan, a highly respected member of the nationalist community which, as far as I could infer, regards him as almost a “heroic veteran” of the nationalist movement, “shock-like” past events fill in the gap between his bitter experiences throughout his long imprisonment and their very cause, the state he used to deem as “father”147, as “sacred” and as “something to die for”. Emphasising the gap between his views of the past and subsequent experiences, he refers to a stanza of a poem: “we noticed that our father [the state] took the same side with his killer [communists]”. And his generation who witnessed the disloyalty of the state, it seemed to him, was sacrificed within a prescribed scenario that characterises the right-wing memory148: “Now you turn back and assess it again, and you say, there was such a generation that believed in something, sacrificed their future for what they believed. [The members of that generation] are expelled from their schools, from their jobs […], they believed in something. […] Then sacrificed their freedom, I mean, they were arrested, imprisoned, shot, sacrificed their lives. A prodigious energy… […] Actually, this generation was the cream of Turkey” (Irfan-M-57-RW).

If the traumatic feature of right-wing experience arising from the collective frame of disappointment about the past is sidelined, it could be expected that the understanding of temporality—specifically the past and present relationship—would be characterised by continuity, particularly their opportunity to resume their political lives through the official end of the military power is considered. Despite the long-term and still prevailing rupture in lives, such continuity is observed in accounts of left-wingers.

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The “Damaged” Generation: The Commonality of Past and Present Experiences In accounts of left-wing participants, it is the common past experience of scattering and isolation, the repercussions of which still prevail in present life, that has a binding power on the members of the generation. The coup is perceived to be a “moment of rupture” that refers to a fundamental change in lives: efforts to establish a “new life” are preceded by long periods of imprisonment, fugitiveness, disintegration and isolation. The irreversibility of the deprivation of political and social milieus that had a central importance in shaping lives is epitomised in Metin’s (M-54-LW) account: when I ask him when his life became stabilised after his period of fugitiveness, he replies: “[s]tabilised? It depends on to what extent I can [currently] call it stabilised”. The commonly experienced “moment of rupture” that is perceived to have a decisive effect on current lives of participants appears as the very cause of the continuity between the past and present. Zeynep, while speaking about her generation, centres upon the constitutive effect of the common experience in the past and in the present. While politically defining herself, she declares that: “we couldn’t manage to be socialists”, implying the destructive and the defeating effect of the coup on her generation. Her life was disrupted for several years following imprisonment and subsequent health problems due to torture. When asked, she readily situates herself in a generation, and highlights the current appearance of that generation in her present life: “I mean we’re a group of friends that carry the life away [overcome the difficulties of the life after the coup] at the present, so are the people we currently maintain our relationships with. And there are of course ones who disappeared. I don’t mean physically disappearing. I mean the ones who couldn’t carry the life away, find a job [...], get through the university and they’ve disappeared, and we couldn’t reach them. Because we’ve struggled to survive for a while, I mean, for a job, a life, marriage” (Zeynep-W-53-LW).

For Zeynep, her generation—delimited with the left-wingers—is composed of those who managed to re-establish a life and some others that “disappeared”. What connects Zeynep to the members of her generation is the commonality in terms of the subsequent attempts to stabilise lives through making the effort to “survive” despite the destructive effect of the coup. In the course of her account, I came to understand that she conceives of establishing a new life as a process that extends over time. She tells of

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having done temporary jobs, endeavoured to overcome financial and health problems in an effort to build a life of her own. Her narration of the long-term psychological implications of her experiences—anxiety arising from the traumatic experience of torture—also indicates a process that binds the past and present: “[...] it was something that began right after I was released and continued until recent years… (stays silent for a while). When I saw someone wearing police uniform, I was vomiting. I mean, this is still the most difficult thing to speak about” (Zeynep-W-53-LW).

Despite the difficulty she experiences in telling me, in the course of her account I realise that she shares such past experiences with “old friends” and recounts how together they made efforts to document the torture they experienced in Mamak Prison; sharing past through gatherings, besides having a therapeutic effect, is central to the apparent connection between those members in the present. “It’s true that I feel much more comfortable with my companions, friends whom I’ve known since then [1980s]. I mean, it’s true that I’m less hesitant when I’m with them” says Metin (M-54-LW) while talking about his relations with members of his generation. To him, the sincerity that lies at the heart of their relationship is a result of the common “damage” received. Despite the intervals in relationships, he says he feels “as if [he] has a blood tie” with them: “It’s a damaged149 generation, at least. A generation that received the severe blow of 12 September, a damaged generation. Received a severe blow, seriously, took a great knock from 12 September. And the effects of it continued for years or perhaps still continue for some [of us]. […] Thus, they [the members of the generation] have so much in common” (MetinM-54-LW).

The consecutive use of terms such as “damage”, “severe blow” and “great knock” implies the depth of the past experience that currently constitutes the essence of the intensity of his relationship with his fellows. In the course of his account he provides an explanation for what he defines as the “continuing effects” of the coup in the present: “[The continuing effect] is, to say the least, being scattered. All of us are scattered. I mean, everyone experienced it. [I don’t know] how to explain… everyone paid a certain price for the struggle they used to be involved in” (Metin-M-54-LW).

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Then, he refers to the projection of “the price” paid in his contemporary personal life: “Well, it’s like constantly living warily. I mean… I mean… I, personally… I was feeling somehow anxious. And perhaps, I still feel it. A constant effort to protect yourself, a constant concern. Like, paying particular attention each time I speak to someone. Like, hiding and protecting yourself each time you socialise. […] And the anxiety [the coup experiences caused] turns to be a behaviour pattern in time […] And I believe, for anyone who defines herself as a left-winger or democrat, such anxiety is always at the back of their mind” (Metin-M-54-LW).

He repeatedly refers to the apparent repercussions of his coup experiences at any moment in the present. Tahsin, like Metin, points to the “scattering” of a generation. While speaking about what the coup meant in the lives of members of his generation, he falls into silence for a while in an effort to find appropriate terms for expressing the depth of the past experience: “Some of us were scattered, some of us… words fail me… [actually not some of us], it’s all of us. And I can barely define myself politically at the present. But, in any case, I believe that we can still speak the same language with the persons from that generation” (Tahsin-M-54-LW).

In Tahsin’s account, the coup experience is unexceptionally common for all and constitutes the basis for “speaking the same language”, the convenience he expresses to feel in communicating with members of his own generation. However, Sabahattin is rather uncertain about the unitary effect of the past experience in the present. To him, it is only past experience that is common; the individual processes of political transformation that the members underwent subsequently undermined the commonality in terms of worldviews: “We can speak about a common experience [in the past], of course. But anything was lived personally. Anything was put aside personally. I mean, personally, each of us had our own inner payoff, and gave different meanings to them [past experiences]. The common experience in the past, that’s right. But when you consider the present perceptions and worldviews, we don’t have much in common at all” (Sabahattin-M-52LW).

Considering Sabahattin’s conclusion, I should refer to a particular difference in his present life in comparison to three former participants:

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unlike others, Sabahattin is currently engaged in a political community mostly populated by left-wing veterans who suffered the detrimental effects of the coup. His continuing correspondence with these people enables him to witness the process of transformation they underwent due to a sense of defeat. Thus, while for others it is the implications of the damage received from the coup that constitutes the present commonality among members, for Sabahattin, it is the collective experience of transformation—though it has a dispersing effect—that is central to such commonality. It is interesting to note that the above narrators, Zeynep, Metin, Tahsin and Sabahattin, are currently married either to partners they lived through the coup period with or persons whom they have known since the coup years. Zeynep, Metin and Sabahattin stayed in the same prisons with their spouses to-be. Tahsin narrates that he and his current wife had a connection before the coup, and despite the interval in their relationship due to Tahsin’s period of fugitiveness, they came together at the end of this period and were married. Such preferences concerning intimate lives enable the conclusion that the commonality of the past experiences of a generation is deeply embedded in participants’ inner lives and plays crucial roles for current social relations.

The Generation as Longing for the Past The personal experience-based feature of the generation barely appears as a decisive constituent for the understanding of generation for participants with no political affiliation. This is partly because of the lack of the “solidness” of coup experience in their lives. By “solidness”, I refer to the harshness and disruptive feature of experiences that caused a profound shift in personal life; it is not personal suffering due to political and social disintegration or imprisonment that frames the memories, these people are somewhat remote witnesses of a crucial political, economic and social shift in the country’s near history, rather than the sufferers of such atrocities. However the “common value” based aspect of generation in this group is parallel to the understanding among right-wingers. On the one hand, the generation becomes a tool to indicate the virtues of the past (generation) and the lacking and imperfections of the present (one). On the other hand, dignifying the past generation appears as a means for an implicit protest against the rapid transformation of the country particularly after the coup. Born in the 1950s, the generation that the majority of the participants belong to have lived through some five decades, the majority of which

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bore no witness to such fundamental political, economic and social transformations as the decade following the 12 September coup was to see. The members of this generation, who were already young adults when the coup was staged, for the first time witnessed the replacement of “humanistic values” with the increasing significance attributed to financial values, the emergence of the ongoing war between the PKK (Kurdish national salvation organisation) and the Turkish army that resulted in the death of tens of thousands of people150, or the ever-increasing importance of the popular culture that gradually overwhelmed cultural life in following decades151. Speaking of generation, for this group, serves as a means of expressing the longing for an “innocent” past that preceded the abovementioned appearances of profound transformation. Here nostalgia embedded in their accounts refers to what Boym (2011, 452) coins as “a symptom of our age” commonly suffered due to the “[refusal] to surrender to the irreversibility of time”. For Boym, “nostalgia and progress are […] doubles and images of one another” (ibid). The projection of rapid transformation in daily life during the 1980s can also be interpreted as the concretisation of a Western sense of progress152. Nostalgia represented through the perception of generation in this group is distinguished from that of right-wingers as it appears as a pure longing for the past that becomes an implicit (and perhaps unconscious) resistance against the acceleration of a transformative process. The comparison of the past and present generations and the tendency to celebrate the virtues of a past generation frames the account by Turan who defines himself as a “social democrat”153 and “nationalist”. When asked, he says in a proud manner that he sees himself as “a member of the 78 generation”: “Our generation is one that loved its motherland and people, didn’t put forward its own interests. […] The self-indulgence and the selfishness of the new generation… We, as the 78 generation, were interested in [many things varying from] the National Independence War to political memoirs […] We used to read, but these new ones, they don’t read. […] Of course, what we call the 68 and 78 generations were not like the present generation. The present one that is currently grown up only thinks of itself, its comfort, and dignifies nothing but its personal interests. Three fourths of them are as such” (Turan-M-53-NPA).

The differences between avoiding putting “forward one’s own interest” or of “loving the motherland”, and “selfishness” or “dignifying personal interests” marks the apparent gap between the political values of former

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generations originating from a “national salvation” ideology and the retrogression of a worldview that was superseded by the increasing importance of “saving the self” promoted by the ideological implications of neo-liberalism. Moreover, Turan’s emphasis on the past generation’s commitment to learning the past—“we were interested in [many things varying from] the National Independence War to political memoirs”— reveals the contrast he builds between two understandings of temporality; neglecting the past refers to commitment to the present—that became synonymous with the future (Huyssen, 1995:7)—within the ideology of progress. However, during our interview, Turan referred to his son a few times who, as far as I can infer, is around his mid-twenties; while speaking of him, he says, in a manner as if he is avowing himself, that he advised his son to “avoid messing with things”—referring to “avoiding engaging in politics”. Turan mentions this advice in relation to the frequently referred to “deficiency” of the present generation that is largely interpreted as one outcome of the depoliticisation brought about by the 12 September coup. Thus, through his mentioning of his discontent with the present generation, he implies his (and probably his generation’s) partial responsibility for their current situation. The emphasis on the decline of the “national salvation” ideology by the allegedly sudden shift in Zeitgeist through referring to the present generation’s oblivion to the past also frames Gunay’s account. Unlike Turan, she does not assume responsibility for the present: “I only managed to raise Ataturkist154 youngsters. That is all. That’s all that I could give them” she says, and then continues: “Well, actually I do not regret that they have been far away from the fight [between the political sides]. But I wish they had been more informed about things… […] I wish they’d been aware of the realities of this state, this country, of their recent past. But actually they’re not” (Gunay-W-50NPA).

In Gunay’s account, the coup marks the turning point that detached two generations; however, such detachment does not necessarily indicate a negative aspect of the coup as manifested in the pleasure Gunay expresses to have felt due to the elimination of the “fraternal fight”. On the one hand, Gunay refers to the depoliticisation originated “deficiencies” of the present generation, while on the other hand she underlines that it is the coup’s disincentive interventions into society and politics that enabled her children’s distance from the “fight”. The depoliticisation that is claimed to stand between the past and present generations is frequently noted by the non-politically affiliated. In

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Sermin’s account the emphasis on depoliticisation is further amplified through details that clarify the distinctness of two generations: “I mean, I see things from my own frame, of course. We were, at least, people who read, researched or questioned things or looked for better. We were more idealistic. When I compare [us] with the present [generation], there’s no such thing now. […] The majority is less educated, more amenable to being ruled, they easily accept whatever they say, and they’re apolitical. I mean, I don’t know, they’re very formalist. Actually I feel sorry about it” (Sermin-W-58-NPA).

The features that Sermin attributes to the present generation are clearly related to the self-conscious policy of depoliticisation by the military power. Interestingly, in the course of her account, Sermin, like some other non-politically affiliated participants, frequently referred to the ongoing violence in the streets through narrating a few of her experiences and underlining her approval of the coup’s function of eliminating such action. The coup’s eliminating “interventions” into politics concretised in its efforts, most apparently, to ideologically annihilate the left-wing constitute the main cause of depoliticisation. However, the non-politically affiliated commonly approve the coup’s success in ending the so-called “fraternal fight”. This reveals apparent contradictions in their reflections on the coup. On the other hand, the common emphasis on the political apathy of the present generation due to depoliticisation policies—which is interestingly not referred to in accounts of politically affiliated participants—requires particular attention: this, I believe, represents a contact point with leftwing collective memory arising from conscientious—rather than political—weight felt due to acknowledgement of the apparent “solidness” (suffering) in left-wing individuals’ experience. That is to say, such emphasis appears as a means for paying symbolic compensation to those who suffered as the personal/social relief alleged to have felt by these participants is counterbalanced with the pain of others.

CHAPTER SEVEN PATTERNS OF RETROSPECTION “I’m now living the same [coup] day after thirty years. I mean, thirty years have passed, but I’m still living the night of 12 September. Or living in 82.” (Mansur-M-51-RW)

In his chapter “patterns of retrospection” refer to the distinctive patterns participants employ in regarding the past which emerge as a consequence of achieving a certain distance from the past. Here, I focus on the reflexivity between participants’ coup experiences or those of the subsequent periods and the social frames that inform, shape and homogenise their retrospections. It becomes clear that distinctive personal experiences, such as discontinuity in political identities, or confrontation with the possibilities of critically reflecting on the coup’s legacy and the subsequent cultural repertoires related to the coup, enable differentiations among recollections. Acquiring a distinctive pattern in dealing with the past is made possible through an individual’s idiosyncratic attempts to come to terms with the past as well as establishing a certain distance from it. Here, I focus on the reciprocation between political identities, memory and experience. Although political identities and collective frames—to some extent—designate the patterns of retrospection, personal experiences and the impact on reflections on the past also play a significant role in its shaping. I define four patterns of retrospection each of which appears as a different method of distancing oneself from the past. Detachment, which refers to a relatively more critical outlook of the past, is manifested by presenting an integrated account of the past due to recognition of its multifaceted texture. Even though the participants resolutely embrace past political positions and practices, they seem to reflect on the past through, in some instances, ascribing novel meanings to the past experiences. Regret that is closely related to the discontinuity in the political identities refers to a profound shift in the meaning of past experience; they rather appear to have discovered unprecedented and distinct aspects of personal pasts which they were not fully capable of realising when they were deeply embedded in previous experiences. Despite currently being involved in politics, their past and present political identities are

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diametrically opposed. Victimhood, which is predominantly employed by right-wingers, is strictly connected to the right-wing frame that is characterised by claims of conspiracy and the subject’s alleged lack of control over past events. Transformation represents a profound shift in participants’ views of the past characterised by a former commitment to the official representation, inactivity and adoption of a submissive attitude towards the coup succeeded by encounters with alternative and transforming narratives. The table below provides a compact outlook of the four patterns of retrospection outlined above: PATTERNS OF RETROSPECTION

The Political Identity of the Participant when s/he experienced the coup The Dis/continuity of Political Identity Subsequent Experiences

Detachment

Regret

Victimhood

Transformation

Left-wing Right-wing

(Formerly) Right-wing

Right-wing

No political affiliation

Continuity

Discontinuity

Continuity

Continuity

Efforts to neutralise the coup’s affects in personal lives subsequent to experiences/witnessing imprisonment

(Self)Transformation

Progression and promotion by the state

Gaining awareness and reaction

Table 1. Patterns of Retrospection

Detachment “Detachment” is distinguishable in accounts of those who elaborated their perspectives on the causes, motivations and results of the coup. Although they currently maintain past political identities, they underline the regression due to different appearances of the coup’s long-term social

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and political implications in their current lives. These people, being fully aware of the discrepancy between the past and present, frequently imply what it is that separates the two. Sabahattin’s account, in this aspect, is of particular importance as he remained in prison for approximately sixteen years. Currently fifty-two, he still defines himself as a socialist. Indicating the distance he has covered since the past, “I would have been more prepared against the coup, and would not have hesitated over how to act” he says when asked about what he would do differently if the coup was staged today. Sabahattin points to “a common state of mind”—a certain “discomfort”—peculiar to those who experienced the coup in similar ways; however, similarity in past experiences does not necessarily generate common reflections of the past, and, by implication approximate present lives. “But, has it resulted in the same for everyone, has it had the same effect on everyone? No, it hasn’t necessarily. I mean, one living through that period, assumes it hasn’t been lived. Today [she’s] leading a different life, in a different way. Even doesn’t want to mention that period, or feels uncomfortable when it’s mentioned. This is very human. It is very understandable. She doesn’t see it how I see, she doesn’t have to. It’s normal. But I think a considerable mass feels a discomfort. I believe it’s a positive discomfort. I think it’s good for people to feel it” (Sabahattin-M52-LW).

Sabahattin owes his detachment from the past to the very discomfort he describes. Throughout his entire account he is strictly committed to the left-wing collective frame; however, despite the shared frame, to him, the personal aspects of past experiences and its impact in the present are diverse. Zeynep who shares similar experiences, presents the focus of her detachment from the past more explicitly through clearly indicating “what she left behind”: “I’m also involved in this social regression. So, I mean, under this regression, I don’t want my kids to be a fighter as I was. No, not in this country… I mean, this is a regression, we’re currently living it. I mean, I used to see the life through such a frame that, as I said, we were facing death each day. But I don’t want my kids to be like that. Is this regret for what I lived? No, on the contrary, I’ve never regretted what I lived for. […] However, incidentally, I ask myself to what extent having done all this has been useful for this country. Nothing! […] The struggle of kids is never enough, and will never be so. As I’ve currently recognised it, I never waste [my kids], I mean, colloquially, never waste [them]” (Zeynep-W-53-LW).

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Zeynep’s account represents ideally the personal effort to “come to terms with the past”. She explicitly questions the “pros and cons”—that done rightly and wrongly—of the past: the gap between her past acts and what she envisages for her children clearly demonstrates the distance she has achieved from the past. Retrospection on the past by means of reflecting on whether they would ever consent to their children to doing the same, at this point, appears as the unique point in which gender plays a role in differentiating accounts. Comparison between the personal past and their children’s present serves as a litmus paper in some female participants’ efforts to describe naked feelings about the past: Zeynep describes her disappointment with her political efforts in the past through identifying the possible political “struggle” of her children as “wasting them”. Feray’s account presents several similarities. Feray from the rightwing is currently fifty-three, has three children, and still defines herself as an idealist: “Because we’d done politics consciously in those times… I don’t regret at all. I mean, despite all these, I don’t regret being involved in politics. I’m still involved, I see what’s wrong. I’m, we’re [with my husband] sharing these with our kids, thinking on how it should have been” (Feray-W-53RW).

Feray—though not explicitly—mentions a “certain mistake” or that “things should have been done in a different way”. Like Zeynep, she (and her husband) concludes that their children should avoid the repetition of these mistakes in the present155. “The same mistakes” refer to political violence in Seyhan’s account; it is her thoughts on political violence that detaches the past from the present: “Yes, of course, [my views] had changed. We were young back then, we were delikanli156, were more aggressive [she laughs]. Like, braver. When they said “go and shoot that [person]”, you [we] would do it without hesitation. But today, you think on it. Why? Is it needed? Perhaps in sometime or other, you’d like the person who you shot” (Seyhan-W-50RW).

Seyhan attributes the rawness of her past acts—which is strikingly exemplified in the shooting of a person—to immaturity and inexperience; however, it is obvious that it is not the age, but rather questioning the meaning of her past acts and the intellectual distance she achieved in time that enabled her detachment from the past.

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The common feature in this group is having spent effort in subsequent lives to neutralise and smooth away the effects of the coup. This effort is partly related to in/direct prison experiences which transform a spatial gap (between “inside” and “outside”) into a temporal one (between past and present). Sabahattin spent one third of his life in prisons and Zeynep around two years. Feray’s husband was imprisoned at intervals until 1982 and had to spend his life as a fugitive in those times he was not in prison. The legal sanctions against ex-detainees de facto continued after the legal sanctions; both Sabahhatin and Feray’s husbands were inducted into compulsory military service, as was the case with most male ex-detainees who had not previously completed their service157. Sabahattin and Zeynep had long striven to find permanent jobs and to establish an orderly, settled life. Seyhan narrates that she met her prospective husband during her visits to prisons together with her fellow idealists. In/direct experience of imprisonment or having witnessed the arduous lives of detainees contributed to the detachment from past experiences in that imprisonment usually enables them to identify the concrete spatial and temporal gap between the past and present.

Regret Regret manifests itself in the accounts of the participants the political identity of whom underwent significant alteration after the coup. Such alteration did not emerge as a consequence of a sudden and deep mental or intellectual shift, but rather as a result of their long-term experience within the former political movement they were affiliated to. Mansur and Hamit both of whom used to be actively involved in the nationalist movement before the coup—besides avoiding using political self-definitions such as “nationalist” or “idealist”—currently locate themselves in diametrically opposed positions. Mansur (M, 51, RW) says “for me, the human rights [movement] has been a field of solution” in his efforts to rebuild his belief in politics. When I ask Hamit (M-48-RW) how he defines himself politically, he replies that “I define myself as Hamit”, and following my insistence on a more tangible definition, “democrat” he adds, “revolutionist, democrat”158. Hamit became acquainted with the nationalist movement in his teens; while telling about this life-stage he implies that his political identity developed as an implication of his family’s religious identity—referring to somehow having blindly become attached to the idealist movement159. For Hamit the coup symbolises whatever he “overshot” in life:

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“I mean, say I’m sixteen-seventeen, probably seventeen. I mean, in the best years of our lives, I remember the 12 September [coup] as a fugitive sufferer. I mean, before living a real life, before finishing school, far from your homeland. I was in Ankara on 12th September, and in my memory, I mean, the military officers, arrests, scattered families, wasted futures, I mean these are what pop into my mind when you say 12 September. I mean, symbolically, tortures, custodies, fear, these…” (Hamit-M-48-LW).

Despite the atrocities Hamit mentions above being commonly made associations among most politically affiliated participants, what differentiates Hamit’s account from the rest is that he regards the coup as an obstacle imposed upon “living a real life” and “finishing school”—and explicitly expresses his regret for the latter. In the same vein, he identifies the lives of those politically affiliated as “wasted lives”—referring to the meaninglessness of past acts. Mansur similarly underlines “un”self-consciousness regarding his past political choices: “[w]e were sticking around as idealists” he says160. He refers to the coup’s meaning and its consequences as spontaneously corresponding to losses the coup caused in his own life: “We were saving the motherland, communists were going to conquer it [says, allegorically]. And what? […]. I mean, it was like a teeter totter, like a match, one from you [your side] and one from them [were shot]. […] I mean, we’d lived its results, still living. Thirty years passed since then, it seems as if there’s no trace left. But no, there is, and it’s never possible that no trace is left. I mean, as a person, you cannot [pursue] your education properly […]. All in all, you cannot realise yourself in this life… I mean, telling this, telling this theoretically is very difficult” (Mansur-M51-RW).

Mansur currently has difficulty in signifying the “match-like” conflict between the two sides; the analogy he makes between “match”/“teeter totter” and political violence is ironical in terms of the gap between their risks as he is well aware of what he actually refers to is the loss of a human’s life. The parallels between Hamit’s and Mansur’s accounts are easily recognised: like Hamit, Mansur feels sorry for not being able to “realise himself” and “pursue his education”. Another common feature of Hamit’s and Mansur’s accounts is their identification of a definite past “moment of estrangement” which refers to a certain experience that led them to revise their political choices for which they risked their lives. These moments mark the instances when their political self-transformation began. Hamit narrates this moment in a sincere—and occasionally intimate—way; calling me by my first name to

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make me focus my attention on the fact that this is first time he is speaking of that moment: “Actually, Ms. Goze, perhaps I’ve never told it to someone else, and I didn’t have the possibility to write […], but while those people were being shot, particularly before the 12 September, we were entering our [own] house with guns, you always feel the fear of being killed, I mean, and people who hadn’t been involved [in this conflict] were being killed. There emerged a hassle; a peasant was shot or something else. I mean, when I saw the corpse of a peasant for the first time after an armed conflict, I was finished that day, with regard to the ethos, that day I actually, anything inside me had finished. At that moment I said, a completely innocent person found himself in the middle of an armed conflict and died, a poor peasant. […]. His legs were swinging from the rear deck of a military cemse161. I mean, anything for me, the idealist ideology or so, everything had finished. That image finished anything for me […]. Okay, I said, this job finished for me” (Hamit-M-48-LW).

The moment Hamit describes marks the initial point of his estrangement; the course of the shift in his beliefs, to him, continued throughout his period of fugitiveness during which he felt obliged to act as a committed idealist as he had to stay in a house inhabited by fellow idealists. Staying in a place inhabited by members of the nationalist community reinforced his regret as it simultaneously meant the lack of “a receptive and appreciative listener” (Plummer, 1995:120) that underlines the point of telling a story. The long delay in possible relief by sharing his estrangement and receiving support might have reinforced his regret and his subsequent dissociation from the community. The “moment of estrangement” in Mansur’s life coincides with an encounter between an ex-detainee (himself) who in person experienced torture and a prison officer who (a fellow idealist) most probably served as a torturer in Diyarbakir Prison: “[…] When I was released from the prison in 1986, I went to my hometown. There [I encountered] an idealist who […] told me about Diyarbakir Prison, how they tortured the Kurdish people there. After [hearing] this, I’ve never told someone what I’d lived through in Mamak [Prison]. Because I was very ashamed… Because in Mamak… [The man told me] what they’d done [to the detainees] in Diyarbakir, I mean, that bastard was telling this as though to make me relieved, I mean, like “bro, they [tortured] our idealist brothers, but we’d done much worse to them [Kurdish-left-wing detainees]”, very shamefully… But as I said, I listened [to what they had done in] Diyarbakir from that officer, the boy was telling this to set my mind at ease. His commander made him do all those

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[tortures] and I was ashamed, I’d never talked about Mamak [Prison] again” (Mansur-M-51-RW).

The encounter appears to have shaped his prospective political transformation which underpins his feeling of regret, as, throughout our interview, Mansur repeatedly referred to his life in prison which enabled him to realise that the conflict between left-wing and right-wing turned out to be meaningless. The prison officers, Mansur came to believe in during this period, tortured regardless of the detainees’ political affiliations. Thus, the repeatedly referred shame he describes as having felt during his dialogue with his fellow idealist—further reinforced by his silence against him—arises from his fellow’s continuing belief in the hostility between the sides and his “pride” in torturing a person on the basis of his political identity. “Moment(s) of estrangement” in both Mansur’s and Hamit’s accounts are related to witnessing the cruelty against fellow humans that resulted in difficulty in ascribing a meaning to such acts; this feature of their experiences provides clues to their subsequent efforts to define themselves in a “supra-political position”—engaging with the human rights movement —that goes beyond political antagonisms. Neither Mansur nor Hamit explicitly mentioned that they currently hold regret for the past, probably due to the strong negative connotations of the expression162. Regret also implies failing to maintain an integrated self-narrative. However, the term refers to “[the] feeling of sadness, repentance or disappointment over an occurrence or something that one has done or failed to do” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2012). As the analysis relies upon the researcher’s interpretation rather than the literal expressions of the participant, through several aspects of these two accounts I concluded that Hamit and Mansur are deeply embedded in the feeling that “things could/should have been arranged in somewhat a different way”. Such interpretation is further reinforced when their subsequent political transformation is considered.

Victimhood “Victim” is originally a religious term that refers to “person or an animal killed as a sacrifice” (Online Etymology Dictionary 2012); however, its use in mundane language is actually a metaphor that refers to a “person who is tricked or duped”, or to “[one] who has come to feel helpless and passive in the face of misfortune or ill-treatment” (Oxford Dictionaries 2012). The emphasis on “sacrifice” in the word’s religious meaning is of particular importance, as the theme “victimhood” dealt with

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in this section is strictly connected to a group of participants’ selfperception as “sacrifices” for an anonymous, but potent purpose or body. The reader should remember the frame informing the right-wing collective memory discussed elsewhere163. In order to avoid repetition, I shall briefly refer to the loss of the self as political subject, and the disappointment due to the state’s attitude towards the right-wing that eventually led to a conspiratory understanding of the coup which subsequently characterised right-wing memory. These components were also clearly identified in the understanding of generation discussed above. In this section, relying upon the main premises of right-wing memory, but particularly on claims concerning the “loss of subject as political agent” that crystallises in alleged lack of willpower and consent, I demonstrate “victimhood” as a pattern of retrospection that is inherent in some of the right-wingers’ interpretations of the past. Zahit, currently forty-eight, was at the centre of the nationalist movement and was one of 587 defendants in the trial against members of the Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi]. He describes himself as a proud participant of the nationalist struggle “against communism”164. However, the self-perception as “victim” lies in the very ambivalence between his alleged self-conscious participation—that concretises in his “pride”—in the nationalist movement and the lack of willpower he claims to have had concerning his personal past: he highlights his involuntary involvement in the armed conflict in which “he [coincidentally] found himself”165. His description of the accidental nature of his past acts is further supported by evidence demonstrating the lack of will and consent in his involvement in armed conflict: “The ones who threatened me were my childhood friends. They were, and we were pushed into an atmosphere of [political] polarisation. I mean, we saw one or more or many assets166 of the society transformed into two opponent poles through various ways. We were not very willing about this. I mean, we were playing football and wanted to go on to play, but… We’ve found ourselves within an armed conflict. […] But suddenly, I don’t know what happened, there appeared an ideology… A political process was managed, and in this process, our friends were pulled apart from us and were made to side against you [us]” (Zahit-M-48-RW).

Zahit’s account above actually epitomises the main symptom of selfperception as “victim”: the ambivalence that paves the way for “victimhood” concretises in the discrepancy between the offence he mentions to have been charged with after the coup—“I was charged with homicide or rather encouraging homicide”, he says—and the metaphors of

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“childhood” or “children playing football”. These metaphors are incorporated to connote the innocence of the (to-be) active subjects of the armed conflict who are claimed to have been “pushed into an atmosphere of political polarisation” by anonymous subjects/bodies in which they had “not [been] willing” to take part. The metaphor of “childhood” is also strictly connected with claims of abuse or exploitation implicitly attributed to the coup and which eventually “ruined” the innocence of childhood. Similar ambivalence can be identified in his expression—“there appeared an ideology”—as his past affiliation with the nationalist community plays a decisive role on his current political interests and his social relations. His self-perception as a sacrifice, as almost a “scapegoat” “picked” from the right-wing, arises from the very retrospection of the past in which the subject was involved “un”self-consciously: “I mean, the arrest… If it was not a military commission, not a court that judged the Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi], but a normal one, I mean, I would have been tried without arrest, and even been released in the prosecution office, just like my friend who was in the same boat with me. But that was what they’d done. I mean, we were the [chess] pawns picked for the trial of Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi]” (Zahit-M-48-RW).

Mustafa, currently forty-six, is regarded by his fellows as one of the major figures in the construction and the circulation of the right-wing memory. To him, the armed conflict was a result of the “pre-determined conditions” set by the “intelligence services and their tools”: accordingly, the slaughters due to ethnic/religious/political conflicts that resulted in the death of masses were instruments to “maturate the conditions for the coup”. In Mustafa’s account, rather than him personally, the rightwing/nationalist community as a whole is identified as the “victims of the coup”: speaking of the moment he was informed about the coup, “[w]hen we heard about the news that Turkes [he refers to the leader of the nationalist party who refused to surrender to the military despite the National Security Council’s announcement calling the political party leaders to surrender soon] was sought, we said “Alas! The coup was staged against us, against the idealist movement’” he says. “Then, we recognised that it was staged only against the idealist movement”. It is the above conception of the coup that provides the basis for a communally generalised (“us”) perception of “victimhood”: “On one side sensational murders, on the other side bombs are exploding, masses are being provoked, it was just a rehearsal of a civil war. Then, some intelligence services and their tools, both on the right-wing and left-

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Mustafa similarly implies the non-liability of (particularly right-wing) political actors as violent acts were actually “conducted” for a specific purpose—indicating a process in which the “conditions for the coup” would “maturate” and then the “button” was pushed. As an implication, Mustafa highlights the accidental nature of his past acts; the only cause that led (his) past acts was the temporal and spatial “coincidence” of subject(s) with the above described conditions: “I wish that such times would not ever be lived. We actually didn’t want to live those at all. All those were the conditions in Turkey, we just ran across those conditions” (Mustafa-M-46-RW).

In Seyhan’s account the lack of willpower and the consent of subjects—on the contrary she refers to the conscious involvement of actors while saying “we’d spilled blood”—is replaced by the disenchantment of the right-wing despite their ever-present support for the state (disappointment), combined with an enduring residual loyalty. In her dramatised description of the past, the indisputable victimisation of the right-wing is clearly identified: “We thought we had been hard done by. Because we loved this country… We’d have done anything for this country. We’d spilled blood, we’d sacrificed our lives, we’d wept, and we’d been tortured. Those were all for the perpetuity of the country, of the Turkish Republic. [Those were in order] for it to live for good. And I think, that 5000 martyrs, look it still lingers in my nostrils, my eyes fill with tears whenever I remember, I cry. We didn’t deserve, we didn’t deserve these. I think we didn’t deserve” (Seyhan-W-50-RW).

I noted elsewhere that, unlike left-wingers, right-wingers retrieved their social ties and political organisations shortly after the coup. Located in a more expansive context, nationalism and nationalist politics overthrew its relatively marginal position prior to the 1980s. The ideological pattern of nationalism was articulated in right-wing discourse and has enjoyed ideological support from mainstream politics since then167. Moreover, the nationalist party itself also reached political saturation in terms of its vote proportions after the 1980s168. The ideological advancement was clearly

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identified by prominent figures of the Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi] and was epitomised in the expression used in one of the court sessions during the trial of party members: “We are the only political group who are in prisons despite their opinions being in power”169. At this point, an apparent contradiction arises due to the coexistence of the self/communal perception as “victims” and the increasing predominance of nationalism after the coup. In her Crisis and Everyday in Post-socialist Moscow, Shevchenko observes a similar contradiction in the self-perceptions of “younger Russians who had succeeded in taking advantage of newly emerging opportunities [within the job market]” (2009, 52) and being more able to adapt to the new social order—rather than those who are more vulnerable socially to the restructuring—who “align themselves with the victims of the ongoing restructuring rather than with those, like themselves, who rode the wave of the post-Soviet economy” (ibid). Accommodated in this study’s context, it is interesting to note that it is the left-wingers who decidedly refuse to conceive of themselves as “victims”, but rather the right-wingers who clearly identify themselves as such. Shevchenko also posits that the rhetoric of victimisation is employed by those “whose professions coincided with the most widely agreed upon sites of disorganisation and collapse” (ibid, 84). Her inference calls for reflection on the relationship between self-victimisation and reorganisation and the alteration in the physical structure and ethos of the nationalist movement. The absorption of the ideological frame of the nationalist movement by novel components of right-wing politics resulted in the nationalist party’s loss of its monopoly over the politics of nationalism. Furthermore, revision by the nationalist movement of its ideological relationship with the state due to the traumatic coup experience generated a partition in the nationalist movement which remained as a monolithic body until the 1980s. The shift in nationalist ethos is also a consequence of the degeneracy the movement underwent after the 1980s particularly due to establishing connections with the Turkish mafia and paramilitary forces that were organised against the Kurdish uprising. The degeneracy also generated a public perception that drew parallels between corruption, illegal activities and the nationalist movement170. Establishing the connection between the nationalist past and present improves the political/social frame informing the pattern of retrospection as “victims”.

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Transformation “We gained the right to play volleyball [after the coup]” (Gunay-W-50-NPA).

Transformation refers to significant shifts in, particularly non-politically affiliated participants’ interpretations of the past. Occasionally preceded by or coexisting with commitment to official representation, such shifts in interpretations are related to two major advances in terms of coup memory: the subsequent encounter with alternative/counter coup memories constitutes one aspect of the transformation in interpretations. Circulated through popular forms, particularly by means of visual representation, these narratives attracted significant audience interest171. The second instance of the shift in interpretations is recent official attempts towards “coming to terms” legally with the coup’s legacy. Preceded by the emergence of fierce public debates on voter preferences in the 2010 referendum for amendments to the 1982 Constitution, the interviews also constituted an opportunity to revise/reconsider views of the past. Apart from these advances that contributed to transformations/modifications in social frames informing coup memory, some participants also refer to subsequent personal experiences or to witnessing those of others as instances that spontaneously imposed pressure on their conscience and triggered certain “turns” in their views. The gap between the past views—usually informed by commitment to the official representation—and the subsequent transformation is clearly identified in Burhan’s account. The residual traces of the official representation are still distinguishable in his narrative: “That period was far too complicated. Actually it wasn’t clear who did what. It wasn’t clear where Turkey was dragged into. I’m not in favour of the junta, but at some point it prevented the incidents […] I think where we would be unless the coup was staged. Or where would we go? It was difficult to guess it” (Burhan-M-45-NPA).

Burhan oscillates between previously embraced views of the coup mainly drawing on the official claims and his hesitation about being regarded as a “junta supporter”. Expressions such as “preventing the incidents”—refers to the coup’s self-legitimating argument concerning “ending the armed conflict”—and “being dragged into”—implies the emergent atmosphere of social fear and anxiety which was claimed by the military as the justification to seize power — indicate the previously accustomed/adopted opinions about the coup. The subsequent “turn” in

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Burhan’s views is related to his background and personal experiences: he narrates how he experienced the coup in his village located in a highly politicised and left-wing dominated eastern city mostly inhabited by Kurdish citizens172. Despite his ever-present commitment to the official claims—which also enables one to maintain belief in the legitimacy, inevitability and materiality of the coup—Burhan’s witnessing of the experiences of his left-wing acquaintances/fellow villagers constitutes an initial instance of more critical reflection on the coup’s activities: “Yes, they took [arrested] many [left-wing] youngsters of our village. They [the military officers] tortured them a lot. Really… […] They suffered from heavy torture” (Burhan-M-45-NPA).

Besides witnessing the experiences of his left-wing acquaintances, Burhan’s subsequent encounter with alternative, particularly left-wing, memories that was coupled with his personal experiences as a peasant and worker173 enabled him to achieve recognition of the coup’s long-term implications the repercussions of which appear to have materialised in his life: “Of course, we were deprived of many of our rights, for example, the rights of the workers, the peasants, many things happened”, he suggests. Next, he communicates the experiences of those who suffered and led lives in common with his own: “Well, their [sufferers] bodies were already injured when they were released from the prison. And what can you do with such a body?! They couldn’t become breadwinners. […] And the effects of the coup had long continued on the lives of those people. Some were imprisoned, some were tortured, bodies injured… And when they were released, they couldn’t find jobs, and those lived in poverty” (Burhan-M-45-NPA).

The commonality of those lives and that of Burhan’s—finding a job and making a living—enabled him to approximate the experiences of coup’s sufferers. The perception of one’s body as unique capital led Burhan, himself a worker, to anticipate the sufferers’ deprival of a healthy body due to torture and maltreatment in prisons. Herein, Burhan’s identification with such individuals prompts him to realise what the coup actually meant for sufferers. However, it is also revealed that the possibilities of questioning/opposing the recently staged coup were eliminated by the then social ties combined with the occupational positions. The social fear of isolation and endangering one’s security and suspicion held against each other and the social content the coup was thought to accomplish, particularly through eliminating acts of violence, generated a “spiral of silence” (Noelle-

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Neumann, 1993) that obstructed the expression of opponent ideas. The more the obligatory silence was restraining in the past, the more the participants were inclined to revise their retrospections in the present. Sengul, currently sixty-three, was obliged to remain unresponsive to the coup due to her husband’s occupational position—a middle-rank military officer. Her social environment was populated by families of military officers inhabiting military quarters she had lived in. Speaking of the “spiral of silence” due to her military-dominated social surrounding, she seems to feel dejected: “I had to act as if I was neutral [against the coup] as I was a military officer’s wife”. Her current assessment of the obligatory silence she had maintained reveals her retrospective disapproval: while speaking about her welcoming attitude towards the coup, Sengul appears as if she is confessing to “a mistake” she made in the past: “I was glad for not going to the work [when I learnt about the coup in the morning]. Of course, there’s been a great public fervour. Certainly, we […] joined the fervour too. You spontaneously join it. Something happened, but what? You’re aware of nothing” (Sengul-W-63-NPA).

The fervour Sengul mentions refers to the social climate—of content and relief—in the first years of the coup which was particularly inclusive of those who lacked social contacts with the politically affiliated individuals who were immediately exposed to the coup’s oppression. However, she narrates that she was excluded by her colleagues who were immune to the military-propagated claims of social content and relief on the basis of her background as a military officer’s wife. The social exclusion in the workplace which she tells of bitterly experiencing, coupled with witnessing the execution of seventeen-year old Erdal Eren174, imposed pressure on her conscience and appear as specific instances— she describes the latter as a moment of “waking up”—that triggered the revision of her views: Sengul: “Do you know when I woke up? I may mistake for the boy’s name, was it Erdem?” Me: “[Do you mean] Erdal Eren?” Sengul: “Yeah! [I woke up with] the execution of that sixteen, seventeenyear old boy. Above all… when they [the military leaders] said that the boy should be executed for deterring the others…” (Sengul-W-63-NPA).

Erdal’s execution represents a symbolic quality in incorporating the illegitimate and inhumane aspects of the coup in coup memory175. Having referred to the preliminary instances that paved the way for a critical

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retrospection, Sengul describes a gradual transformation that continued and culminated over time. In the course of her account, she refers to the break in the “spiral of silence” enabled by her husband’s retirement from the army in the 1990s. This period also resulted in her exit from the military-based sociality that spontaneously enabled her to establish contacts with those who have different coup experiences. Encounters with alternative narratives circulated by means of popular forms176 and achieving familiarity with those who directly witnessed the coup’s cruelty, Sengul reports as having allowed her to retrospectively re-assess the plot in her memory. While speaking of her views on “coming to terms” with the coup and the projective jurisdiction of the perpetrators, Sengul amalgamates the sum of revised elements in her memory with the mediagenerated public debate on the coup’s legacy. The years-long restraint on expressing her ideas and the subsequent gradual transformation, the phases of which were revealed above crystallises in the phantasmagoric—though savage and revenge-like—way she suggests for coming to terms with the coup: “You’d jam them [the perpetrators of the coup] all in a stadium. [You would put them in] the lion’s den177, you’d set [people] upon them. They’d either present their vindication or be torn to pieces. As he [Kenan Evren] hurt me, the people would [hurt] him. I know, what I say is so cruel but that period… […]. I’d say, ‘why did you make me burn my books? Answer this’. And like, you’d say ‘why did you torture my son? Look, he’s lying on the bed now. He’s physically disabled, he pees his pants. Answer this!178’ He should answer the questions of each of us one by one. He’d vindicate, if he can. […] He should give my books back. […] I burnt them because I was scared. Look, what I’m saying! I was hurt just because of the books. [This is nothing when compared with the] people who were hurt as they lost their loved ones. No one can account for such sin” (Sengul-W-63NPA).

Sengul’s phantasmagoric account of compensating for the coup’s residues in her life and those of her social contacts represents an emotional climax in her retrospective assessment that eventually led to her transformation. Each instance that progressively prompted the transformation of her views is clearly identified in her account—the gap between her obligation to remain silent to avoid risking her husband’s position in the military and witnessing the suffering of others. Sengul’s revenge-like suggestion goes beyond those of the politically affiliated who suggest more tangible and realistic ways to come to terms with the coup despite their experiences of cruelty.

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The course of Mumtaz’s transformation draws parallels with that of Sengul. Mumtaz narrates that he could never explicitly demonstrate his reaction against the coup due to his position as a middle-rank, though prestigious, government officer. Retrospectively assessing his attitude against the coup in the past, he reveals that “I said things that I shouldn’t say. But I also avoided doing things that I should normally do”. However, having remained within the “spiral of silence” for a certain period, in 1983, Mumtaz tells of being discharged on the basis of his assumed ethnic origin179. His temporary unemployment significantly risked the welfare of his family until 1989. Only after long years of legal struggle, he retrieved his job. Besides his own experience of discharge and still being sanctioned through repeated assignments (for the purpose of expelling), Mumtaz’s subsequent social contacts with those sufferers—with, for instance, exdetainees of Diyarbakir Prison the testimonies of whom revealed the very “inhumanity”—represents instances of the transformation in his retrospection. When asked about his potential attitude to a hypothetical future coup, the process embodied by his own experiences and those of his social contacts that stands between his past unresponsiveness and transformation crystallises in his clear-cut answer: Me: “How do you think you would currently react against a military coup?” Mumtaz: “In this age, now, under these conditions?” Me: “Yes.” Mumtaz: “I’d get on the tank. […] I’m currently against all coups. I mean, perhaps I might have seen it differently in the past because that I was young, but now I’m against coups of any kind. [It doesn’t matter] whoever stages it” (Mumtaz-M-60-NPA).

CONCLUSION

“Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future” (Bakhtin 1984, 166).

This study has examined the memory of the 12 September 1980 coup which was experienced discrepantly by individuals and different political groups due to the uneven distribution of oppression by military power. The distribution of the oppression which underpinned the disparity among coup experiences and memories was the result of the coup’s interventions into the everyday life of society through segregating those who believed they had been released from a series of societal, economic and political complications by the coup’s staging and those who were deemed as jeopardising the envisaged profound transformation. While the members of the left-wing groups were harshly eliminated through means of severe political oppression, the right-wing—the re-emergence of which was promoted to counterbalance the left-wing’s political dominance—underwent an “alignment” by the military power. Different coup experiences are considered as the basis for the different collective frames informing coup memory. What makes the study of memory not “merely ‘rich’, but significant and ‘representative’ in some stronger and more definite sense” is that it enables regarding “a larger account” produced by “social individuals […] [speaking] out of particular positions in the complex of social relations characteristic of particular societies at particular historical times” (Popular Memory Group 1982, 234). Thus, while examining the coup memory, rather than focusing on one single aspect, I have presented a multidimensional account through navigating around a series of relationalities central to memory construction. The nature of memory construction entails regarding the interplay between memory and identity, representation, forgetting, experience and present contexts. I have aimed particularly to demonstrate how collective frames informing the memory of different political communities were crystallised. Although the balance between the collective and individual falls towards the former in this study, I have also been cautious in not over-privileging collective frames over individual

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recollections that would potentially generate the disempowerment of individual remembrances in the face of the social/collective determination of memory construction. Some of the issues raised by this study correspond to the broader field of investigation into memory. Regarding the memory/forgetting relationship, I have argued that forgetting cannot be literally “measured” as the prerequisite of such attempts suggests the imposing of unfounded truth claims and making assumptions on the “truthfulness” of a certain version of the past. Forgetting, I believe, can be better conceptually handled and operationalised through establishing connections between official/dominating/exclusive/marginalising representations of the past that directly, or indirectly, promote forgetting as imposing a certain remembrance. At this point, inspired by Nora’s dictum, I shall mention that we speak so much of forgetting because it is simply indefinable in nature. The relationship between memory and forgetting is to be further elaborated. Another problematic relationality is between the individual and collective constructions of memory. I attempted to make room for the potential conflict between individual recollections and the collective frames. However, one remains so enchanted by the idea that the former is determined by the collective frames that she tends to neglect pursuing the individual dimensions of memory construction. It is true that studying individual remembering is to some extent pressurised by cognitive examinations; yet, even so, social science research has much to say about individual remembering. Although the main focus of the study is not on generation and generational memory per se, the use of generation as a category of analyses generated some useful questions regarding the historical location of these participants, its relation to social change and, more importantly, the function of the segmentation within the generation in boundary building and identity construction processes. The expansive discussion on “generation units” in particular, proved useful in a closer inspection of the interaction between existing cultural repertoires, their constructive role in collective frames, and more importantly the capacity of both to inform the identities of group members. An investigation into the social change the coup introduced encourages more expansive works both on the nature of an event and the constitution of generations. The period effect brought about such rapid social changes—particularly those introduced by structural re-formations—and its role in expanding generations through conjoining several cohorts encourages the revision of existing understandings of generations as monolithic and immanently homogenous

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social units. Such assumptions of homogeneity also underpin the “totemic” value attributed to the generations, particularly to those that pioneered, witnessed—or were more likely simply caught up in—wide social transformations. Facilitated by the identification of participants on the basis of political identities, I hope this study contributes to attempts to demonstrate the internal segmentations within the generations and its relevance to the construction of collective frames. My attempt to present a larger account of the coup memory may have risked presenting a more focused view on a more specific aspect of coup memory. Despite the interventions by actors of memory politics, frames of coup memory are still to an extent tainted by the claims of official representation. Thus, for instance, the focus on the military power’s efforts in distorting and obliterating the coup remembrance could be more deeply focused. This is partly due to the lack of studies on coup memory providing a ground on which more focused studies could be built. This is one of the limitations of this study. Despite limitations, this study also has a particular strength: Passerini (2010, 459) recommends maintaining the “tension between the practice of […] discipline and the political and social situation in which [one lives]” besides self-questioning on how the conducted work “relates to social justice and how can it serve as a resource for the future”. On the one hand, this study can be regarded as standing in-between sociological research and the current dynamics of politics of coup memory—to which it is a contribution. This is not only enabled by the function it fulfils in crystallising the collective frames informing coup memories that have so far remained unelaborated, but also by contextualising them in terms of past and present appearances of political power. On the other hand, this study constitutes a resource for projective practices of seeking justice and compensation for past atrocities and wrongdoings. We are currently in a historical moment in which personal coup stories are more open to revision through linking with collective memories and public history; current conditions provide a ground for individuals to become inclined to “jump at the chance to connect themselves with a meaningful cosmos” within recent history (Lowenthal 1985, 197). On one side lay the insistent efforts to maintain the endurance of official claims; one of the members of the National Security Council (Tahsin Sahinkaya) denied the court’s authority to charge and try him on the court session held on 21st of November 2012 in which Kenan Evren, the leader of the military coup, declared that he would conduct the same act—staging the military coup—if it were today. In a session of the Military Coups Investigations Commission held within the National Assembly, a member

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of the assembly, previously a casualty of the coup, for the first time confronted his torturer who insistently avoided expressing his regret about his past actions (Bianet 5 June, 2012). On the other side, there have been significant shifts in public perceptions regarding the coup’s legacy: recent poles reveal that the overwhelming majority of Turkish citizens who displayed their support for the 12 September coup through approving the presidency of General Kenan Evren in 1982, declare that they would now pour out into the streets to react against a possible coup (Radikal 10 May, 2012). The date this book was completed coincided with the times of the final court judgement in the trial of the two generals, when they were sentenced to heavy penal servitude for life. An appeal process will probably follow, but at the moment, the curtain seems to have been brought down on this symbolic trial. From the very beginning, the value attributed to these developments was based on the possibility it introduced in terms of reconsidering the past, not on that the justice will finally be served. However, the efforts to reshape the past is uninterrupted. There is a constant shift in the nexus of power, collective memories and the extent of contestations among them. Despite resolute and self-conscious efforts, the left-wing components are still far from playing central roles in memory politics which, in turn, leads to the prevailing marginalisation of left-wing collective memory. Significant convergence is observed between the “forensic” vision characterising the official attempts and the conspiratory frame informing right-wing collective memory. This also crystallises in more concrete political attempts which, for instance, are exemplified by recently-made legal arrangements for enabling the release of those rightwing individuals still imprisoned due to the offences they committed prior to the coup (Radikal 2 June, 2012). Regarding such developments, one can infer that “the power of collective memory can increase with time, taking on new complications, nuances and interests” (Zelizer 1995, 217). Thus, this study may be assessed as a pervasive attempt to highlight possibilities and raise novel issues in terms of the projective examinations of coup memory. I consider the study of memory as an emancipatory practice as it provides its subjects with possibilities for vocalising their own versions of the past beyond the limits posed by coercive/official historiographies. By the same token, it facilitates the empowerment of the remembering/reconstructing subject over and against approaches that privilege power and ideology—and thus, leave no room for agency (Fisher 1997, 312-313) and possibilities of resistance against a certain construction of the past. Despite the particular attention paid to the

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collective determination of remembrance in this study, I have avoided treating the subjects as “victims” of the subordinating process of military oppression. However, victimhood to some extent bears a sense of cohesion and may be potent in politically mobilising those communities believed to be “victimised”180, yet such characterisation is very likely to jeopardise the emancipatory and empowering possibilities offered by memory work and lead disempowering the subject in the face of a certain appearance of structure. Assuming the self as victim, I believe, is synonymous with quitting the scene of history. In the same vein, I retained a distance from the “trauma theory” that has significantly developed and became prominent as a “key framework within memory studies” (Radstone and Schwarz 2010, 8). The particular emphasis on “unspeakability” and “silence” (ibid), by implication, fulfils a subordinating function as “those silences can be ‘so open to interpretation and projection that […] they preclude therapeutic listening in favour of ascription and appropriation’ by any external political force” (cited in Radstone and Schwarz 2010, 9). Once the study of memory is conceived as potent to penetrating struggles over how a certain part of the past is to be remembered and the victim vs. witness/subject equation is built in favour of the latter, two approaches, I believe, would prove to be useful in studies giving prominence to these postulations. The Bakhtinian framework that poses “unfinalisability”—and which may be utilised as a central premise to the struggles over “stories” of the past as synonymous with “the struggle for the future” (Weine 2006, xxi)— opens up possibilities for maintaining the “balance between structure and freedom” (ibid, xxiii). In the context of the study of memory, such understanding introduces the accounts of sufferers and their testimonies as “polyphonic and dialogic narratives” (ibid, 104) that are potent to interfere in the allegedly “finalised” and exclusive regimes of memory. This also paves the way for articulating academic research to memory politics. Even though past experience is conceived of as “traumatic”, a Bakhtinian understanding of narrative/memory emancipates its subjects from the distorting and appropriating implications of trauma frameworks. In concrete terms, it offers the possibilities of displacing the “unspeakability” by means of “unfinalisability”. This promising and hope-inspiring approach avoids conceiving of the catastrophes of our age as end points of lifelines; on the contrary, the catastrophe turns into a past happening “marked by many shades of many colours [as] the experience inevitably contains many views, many voices, and all kinds of crucial choices” (ibid, 96).

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The reconciliation processes that countries with experiences of past (socio-political) abuses and wrongdoings underwent have much to say about the coexistence and collaboration of political practice and pursuit of memory (re)construction. Herein, collective memories become means for re-establishing and securing social justice as well as the processes of reconciliation. Moreover, in such processes the memory/identity relationship comes into prominence; once the building of social justice and reconciliation is conceived of as “new beginnings”, the interplay between the identities and collective memories reaches its climax as the construction of novel identities out of the “ruins of the past” would primarily require the practice of remembering—as well as forgetting (Norval 1998, 255). In such contexts, the project of constructing/solidifying threatened identities becomes synonymous with constructing memory (Megill 2011, 195). “[M]emory wave and uncertainty [of identities] go together” and “in the recall of deeply troubling communal events”, “[the] sense of weak or threatened identity [would appear as] a common feature uniting evocations of ‘memory’” (ibid, 194). Allocated in the memory of Turkey’s 12 September coup context, these two approaches collaboratively promise future hope for the practice of memory politics which is likely to achieve innovative dynamics in the forthcoming period. The principle of “unfinalisability” secures the plural nature of collective memories and their influence over the wider public’s perception of the coup, which is currently—and unfortunately— overwhelmed by indecent defences of official claims and the political power’s perfunctory and ostensible attempts of “coming to terms” with the coup which is characterised by a conspiratory pursuit of “detecting” past events. The polyphonic and dialogic conception of memory construction— both in terms of political and academic practices—would prove efficient in enhancing the potentials of collective memories in posing challenges to conservative inclinations in terms of discussions of the past. Such practical collaboration would also clear the way for the binary operation of practices of coming to terms and truth-telling—the kernels of which crystallise in recent efforts such as, for instance, the establishment of Diyarbakir Prison Truth Investigation and Justice Commission [Diyarbakir Cezaevi Gercekleri Arastirma ve Adalet Komisyonu]. In terms of memory/identity construction processes, the encouragement of revealing the past elimination of left-wing individuals by means of military oppression may well contribute to the revision of left-wing identity which, for over thirty years now, has been in permanent “crisis” due to official efforts of marginalisation and overwhelmed by a sense of defeat since the 12 September coup.

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Lastly, two novel empirical focuses, I believe, constitute priority for projective works on memory of the 12 September coup. Currently, there is an adult generation, including the author of this study, that has never fully recognised, and could never completely understand, what the “rupture” the 12 September coup caused both in terms of individual lives and what the socio-political transformation of the country was meant to be. Although the 12 September coup remains as a “spectre”, the shadow of which falls on every single practice of their lives due to the profound transformation it introduced, the quest into coup remembrance by the subsequent generation has remained tacit so far. In all probability, we are remotely acquainted with the myth of the “darkness” the coup introduced through being the audiences of the coup’s various representations and have grown up with the stories of pain and suffering of our parents, their friends or acquaintances. A comparative reading of the memory of the members of the generation who in person experienced the coup, and that of the subsequent generation—which is actually the memory of the coup memory, or “postmemory” (Hirsch 1996, 2012)—would be a practical attempt towards completing the picture of the coup’s mnemonic legacy. Although the pursuit of memory enables establishing connections between past experience and present contexts, oral history would prove an accomplished means for revealing a full temporal delineation of the experiences of the coup’s sufferers in their subsequent lifespans and collaboratively engage with memory work in further investigations into contextualising and focusing on different aspects of their experiences. “The evidence of life history” writes Paul Thompson, “can only be fully understood as a part of a whole life” (1981, 292) and oral history would facilitate establishing more concrete and profound connections between memory and experience. In 1995 the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission that invited survivors to tell their stories received 27,000 statements by victims and more than 8,000 submitted subsequent to the closing of the call (Weine 2006, 142). The ethos and scopes of Apartheid’s cruelty and Turkey’s 12 September coup are of course incommensurable. However, though superficial and ostensible, the slightest attempt to officially “come to terms with the coup” led 3,000 individuals to make official applications and file claims for the violation of their rights and dignities throughout the coup. Determination to maintain a mnemonic struggle both in terms of political and academic pursuits and to resolutely expose the coup’s cruelty would encourage more to do the same. History consists more of reopenings and upsurges than closures and conclusions.

NOTES

1

The first significant event to be organised by the foundation was the Oral History Workshop in 1993, with the guest scholar being the widely acknowledged oral historian Paul Thompson. 2 Two more events warrant mentioned here as early examples of large urban memory works that were open to the public. HABITAT II, Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements was held in Istanbul on 3-14 June 1996. This international interest generated a series of events, one of which was the Housing and Settlement in Anatolia-A Historical Perspective Exhibition, in which the lifestyles, intercultural interactions, architecture and interior decorations of settlements in Anatolia were visualised [Tarih Vakfi June 14, 1996]. Istanbul: A World City Exhibition, similarly, presented visually different aspects of the city’s social history [Tarih Vakfi, June 17, 1996]. 3 See p. 63, The Latecomers in the 1990s and the Narrative Opening in 2000s, and p. 107, On the Current Status of Coup Memory. 4 Akal (2003), Ozgen (2003), Ozturkmen (2003), Ahiska and Yenal (2004), Aksit (2005), Senol Cantek (2003), Bora (2005), Ozyurek (2001, 2006, 2007). 5 Andreas Huyssen was invited to the workshop as keynote speaker. 6 Besides these written works, a number of workshops were organised in Middle East Technical University in 2000 with the collaboration of scholars and documentarians, contributing further to the development of an overall record of oral history. This modest organisation received much greater interest than was expected, attracting many participants from outside the city (Senol Cantek 2014). 7 This was the alleged result of an officially provoked delirium. The people of Istanbul were informed, untruthfully, as it would turn out, that the house in which Mustafa Kemal was born in Thessaloniki—home to the Turkish consulate at the time—had been bombed the day before. This delirium manifested in a wave of attacks against Istanbul’s non-Muslim communities and the looting of their properties. Churches, synagogues and monasteries were not spared from the assault. These attacks were actually organised to intimidate the non-Muslim communities and to force them to abandon their property and flee the country. 8 The operation carried out by Turkish Armed Forces in 1938 in which more than 10,000 Kurdish-Alevi people were killed, and around the same number were forced to migrate. One of the most dramatic aspects of the massacre was the abduction of Kurdish-Alevi children from their communities to be adopted by Turkish families as a long-term assimilation policy. 9 The 2011-dated work is an edited book on the Armenian Genocide, with contributions from many scholars working on the topic. See in Semelin C. et al., eds. Resisting Genocide: The Multiple Forms of Rescue. London: Hurst, 2011. See also Gocek, F. M. “Through a Glass Darkly: Consequences of a Politicized Past in

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Contemporary Turkey”, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 617 (2008b): 88—106 for a reading of Turkish historiography through three significant problems in the past. 10 The Gezi Park protest of June 2013, which escalated into a revolt against the oppressive policies of those in power in the following days, started out as a demonstration against the demolition of a park in the heart of Istanbul that is considered as a symbolic site associated with the architecture of young Republic. This was a symbolic intervention into the past by the government, which considered the building of the park in 1940 to have been an attempt to symbolically eliminate the Ottoman legacy. Their intention was to rebuild the Topcu Military Barracks [Topcu Kislasi] after demolishing the park. 11 Published in Turkish in 2014. 12 For example, the Women’s Studies department in Istanbul University carried out an oral history project with twenty-eight women who were pioneers of their time in different areas, while the corresponding department in Ankara launched a project in which a study was made of the grandmothers of the students who were registered in the program. The relevant program in Ankara University strongly encourages student projects on women’s history, and spends considerable effort in gathering audio and visual material to build an archive of women’s history. 13 As an implication of the capitalist crisis the world’s most developed capitalist economies were experiencing, Turkey’s economic instability grew to an extent that it caused extensive public discontent, and promoted a popular sympathy towards left-wing politics. The Prime Minister’s declaration in 1977—“We are currently having the difficulty to borrow seventy cents”—is frequently referred to while mentioning the economic bottleneck at the end of the 1970s. 14 Despite the interlude in Turkey’s agreements with the IMF, Turkey entered into several stand-by agreements with the IMF between 1978 and 1980 (Erdinc 2007, 107). Until Turkey proved capable of fulfilling the requirements of a structural economic transformation in 1980, the relations between the IMF and Turkey did not gain stability. 15 The stabilisation programme emphasised such points as institutional changes for reformulating economic policy, devaluation of the Turkish Lira, liberalisation of trade, encouraging an export-oriented economy, elimination of state subsidies, increasing interest rates, and promotion of foreign investments (OECD cited in Eralp et al. 1993). 16 The level of the wages of unionised labourers was higher than white-collar workers in Turkey during the 1970s. An international comparison between wages in Turkey and those of other under-developed countries also proved that the level of the wages of the working classes were higher in Turkey due to the high level of unionisation (Keyder 1990, 74). 17 The left-wing/socialist organisations attempted to support lower class people in overcoming the scarcity of the goods. It has been recorded that one of the left-wing organisations, Revolutionary Left [Devrimci Sol], hijacked the trucks of the large corporations producing and distributing consumer goods, and distributed the goods free to the public several times (Mavioglu 2008, 87).

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The 24th January Decisions were initially issued as a circular letter delivered to those public offices through which decisions became publicly known. The main economic orientations of the circular letter in terms of the rights of the working classes were the abandonment of the system of the collective bargaining, and imposition of a centrally framed, uniform type of contract. As a reaction against these, the unions confederated by Confederation of Revolutionary Unions of Labourers [Devrimci Isci Sendikalari Konfederasyonu] initiated prevalent industrial actions. A few months before the coup, around 60,000-70,000 workers were involved in the actions (Mavioglu 2006b, 58). 19 The Turkish Worker’s Party [Turkiye Isci Partisi] had organic relations with the largest revolutionary trade union of the country, Confederation of Revolutionary Unions of Labourers [Devrimci Isci Sendikalari Konfederasyonu], and pulled 300,000 votes in the general election of 1965, and fifteen candidates of the party were elected to the parliament. The 1965 elections were the first general elections the party participated in (Belge, 1990:169). A month after the memorandum, approximately 2000 people were arrested among whom were academics, the leaders of Confederation of Revolutionary Unions of Labourers [Devrimci Isci Sendikalari Konfederasyonu], Turkish Worker’s Party [Turkiye Isci Partisi], and the Turkish Union of Teachers [Turkiye Ogretmenler Sendikasi] (Hale 1994, 197). The Turkish Worker’s Party [Turkiye Isci Partisi] and the Islamist National Order Party [Milli Selamet Partisi] were “closed down by the Constitutional Court for expressing pro-Kurdish and Islamic fundamentalist policies respectively” (ibid, 197). Besides the large operation against the left-wing organisations, the memorandum’s most symbolic attempt appeared to be the execution of three young revolutionaries. The executions mainly aimed at menacing the left-wing organisations and its members. The three young men in their early twenties— Deniz Gezmis, Huseyin Inan and Yusuf Arslan—who were condemned of being members of the illegal socialist organisation, Army of Turkish Public Salvation [Turkiye Halk Kurtulus Ordusu], were executed on 6th May 1972. 20 Since the establishment of Republic in 1923 and until 1989, except for one, all successive presidents were of military origin. The military “custom” regarding the presidency was that the Chief of the General Staff would “automatically succeed to presidency” once the tenure of the existing president had expired (Hale 1994, 204). 21 The amnesty that enabled the release of thousands of left-wing activists is still employed as a popular argument by the right-wing opinion leaders concerning the 12 September coup in that it is deemed as one of several “crucial mistakes” that led to the staging of the coup in 1980. The amnesty was granted by the socialdemocrat Republican People’s Party [Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi] (Tinc 1998). 22 The political parties were not even capable of nominating candidates, and numerous tours for the election were being repeated. In April 1980, Kenan Evren, the Chief of the General Staff who had met with the Prime Minister gained the impression that the problem regarding the election of president would not be sorted out soon (Dursun 2005, 85). According to Evren’s memoirs, he contacted the Assistant Chief of the General Staff and instructed him to complete all the preparations for a military coup (cited in Dursun 2005, 85).

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After the 1980s, as there had been no significant success in re-formation in the left-wing movement, the right-wing youth organisations remained in legal boundaries. However, it is acknowledged that the state employed the paramilitary organisations against the Kurdish ethnic upsurge. Members of the paramilitary were involved in a series of murders of journalists, writers, political leaders and “ordinary” peasants of Kurdish origin during the 1990s. During this decade, the system of koruculuk (the armed native guards who either volunteer or are selected by the police or military officers to be employed as the members of the paramilitary organisations) presented an example of the state’s relations with the paramilitary. 24 It is argued that the United States attributed particular significance to Turkey’s position in the territory in terms of the empowerment of the anti-communist front against the Soviet Union (Oran 2003, 11). Ideological support and armament of the opponents of the Anti-American regimes constituted the core of the US’s international policy. This policy was put into effect in various parts of the world from Afghanistan (Asia) to Nicaragua (Latin America), from Angola (Africa) to Cambodia (Far Asia) (ibid, 12). Such assertions drive one to reflect on the relation between the US’s international policy and the armament of the anticommunist/nationalist movement in Turkey. 25 The offender behind the bombing incident in Istanbul confessed his act and expressed his regret to his sister soon after the incident. He was killed immediately after his confession by another nationalist militant. Ali Yurtaslan, an ex-nationalist militant and a repentant, expressed that the TNT bomb thrown at the students was procured from a senior rank in the Turkish Army by Abdullah Catli (Birand et al. 2006, 72). Abdullah Catli who became the vice president of the Idealist Hearths [Ulku Ocaklari] (youth organisation of Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi]) in 1978, was acknowledged as one of the most significant names in the counter-guerrilla/paramilitary organisations until his death in a traffic accident in 1996. He, together with Haluk Kirci, another nationalist, was also accused of the incident in Ankara (ibid, 73). 26 Sivas (13,2%), Kahramanmaras (15,5%) and Corum (12,7%) (Agaogullari 1990, 230). 27 Members of an alleged Islamic sect that has idiosyncratic conventions of worship. Some regard Alevism as a distinct religion in its own right. The Alevi identity constitutes the religious “other” in Turkey and Alevis frequently suffer from political and religious oppression. 28 Kenan Evren, the would-be-perpetrator of the coup expressed the army’s annoyance at the local government in his declaration: “We are flying over Samsun [a city near Fatsa]. Do you know what they told us there? [They said] sir, fly high over Fatsa. Otherwise they may shoot from below” (cited in Birand et al. 2006, 120). 29 Before the coup, the parliamentarian political party leaders acknowledged that the 24th January Decisions could not be implemented under the democratically functioning parliamentarian system. The leader of the Republican People’s Party [Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi], Bulent Ecevit, while explaining his opposition to the decisions, declared that the model envisaged by the decisions could not be

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implemented unless the democratic system is totally suspended (Dursun 2005, 55). It is controversial to what extent the voters had the freedom to vote throughout the referendum. Several published testimonies reveal that voters’ will was suppressed throughout the referendum. Mavioglu cites one of such testimonies: “For me, one of the most tragic aspects of the 12 September was the experiences during the 1982 referendum. For the first time, I’d been a voter in the referendum. When we were on the way, my aunt told me that the one whom said ‘no’ would be blacklisted, and added that our houses would be busted because we’d say no. I objected to her, but I’d also heard such a rumour in those days. In order to avoid being blacklisted, people had to say yes for that darkness” (Mavioglu 2008, 49). 31 Turgut Ozal was not a novel actor for Turkish politics; before the coup, he was nominated by the Islamist-motivated National Order Party [Milli Nizam Partisi] for the general elections in 1977. Before Ozal was elected as the prime minister in 1983, the military had already commended the national economy to him through assigning him for the implementation of 24th January Decisions. Regardless of Ozal’s political past, the military’s preference in appointing him for the implementation indicates its determination in articulating the Turkish economy in the international economy (Oran 2003, 16). 32 While interpreting the figures, it is important to consider that the total population of Turkey in 1980 was approximately 45,000,000 according to the general census data provided by Turkish Statistical Institute. 33 Articles 141, 142 and 163 of the Turkish Penal Code were originally derived from the Italian Penal Code that was in effect during the fascist regime. The articles respectively banned “the organisations that envisaged the domination of one social class over another”, “the praise and propagation of communism”, and “following the sharia” (Mavioglu 2006b, 71). 34 In total eleven detainees died in two hunger strikes. In 1981, five detainees died in Diyarbakir Prison. In 1984, two in Diyarbakir, and four in Sagmalcilar Prisons died (Soyer 2001). 35 Deaths due to torture were officially recorded as “death due to suicide”. 36 Besides the thirty-nine tons of books that were burnt, forty tons were collected in military repositories and destroyed (Birand et al. 2006, 167). 37 This “form” of torture was particularly experienced by the detainees of the Diyarbakir Prison—probably the one in which the inhumane violence of the coup was most visible—which was specifically designed for people of Kurdish origin. The torment and inhumane treatment against the Kurdish detainees is usually interpreted as one of the causes leading to the establishment of the PKK as many people who were released from prison are known to have joined the PKK guerillas in the 1980s. Some of the current Kurdish political leaders are known to have been imprisoned in Diyarbakir. The information is also chronologically confirmed through the date of the first massive attack of the organisation in 1984. The testimony of an ex-detainee of Diyarbakir Prison illustrates such interpretation: “Ever after, I’m pretty sure that they did all that violence because we were Kurdish. […] The Diyarbakir hell was specifically designed to destroy the Kurds. Through oppressing the personalities of the Kurdish detainees, they aimed at 30

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imposing their power on all Kurds. They aimed at subjugating the Kurdish people in the eye of the Kurdish detainees” (Mavioglu 2006a, 128). 38 Yilmaz’s work (2013) provides the most remarkably detailed account on systematic and organised violence in prisons. 39 The last one was a nationwide law introduced by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and aimed at preventing parents’ tendencies to name their children after prominent revolutionary persons who were killed in the 1970s. This was an attempt to intervene in a commemorative practice as the people usually preferred such names in order to memorialise their dead friends. This intervention well exemplifies the fact that the military employed any possible method of breaking the mnemonic chain between generations. A similar attempt was to change the names of public places such as streets and squares: for instance, “Hurriyet Meydani” (Freedom Square) was re-named as “Beyazit Meydani” (Beyazit Square) (Cemal 1986, 447). Beyazit is the name of an Ottoman emperor. 40 The political definition “Idealist” is derived from the name of the youth organisation of the Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi], the Idealist Hearths [Ulku Ocaklari]. Most of the right-wingers use this definition for themselves and it is perceived as being synonymous with the definition “nationalist”. 41 Due to Code No: 1402, 1253 academic members and 3854 teachers were discharged. 95 percent of these were known to be left-wingers (Birand et al. 2006, 167). 42 The reason behind the ban on news about suicides was to avoid conflicting news as the deaths due to torture were officially recorded as death due to suicide. However, a journalist (Cemal 1986, 493) indicates that it was also strictly forbidden to publish any news about the suicides of ordinary people. The official statistics of the rate of suicide between 1980 and 1983 cannot be accessed. 43 The coup’s so-called “balanced attitude towards the left and the right-wings” should be scrutinised here: it is true that the penal oppression of the coup was also inclusive of the right-wing/nationalist individuals and organisations. However, there appeared three major differences regarding the coup’s attitude against the two political sides. The first difference was concerning the offence the right-wing politically affiliated individuals were charged with: while the left-wing individuals were tried for “changing the constitutional order through establishing organisation” (article 146 of the Turkish Penal Code) and were punished with penal servitude for life or execution, the right-wing individuals (those who were not tried within the main trial against the Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi]) were accused of “starting armed gangs”, received five-eight years imprisonment, and were released towards the end of the 1980s (Birand et al. 2006, 178-179). (Some were tried separately for each crime they committed and were punished with longer periods of imprisonment [Radikal 2 June, 2012]). Secondly, there was a huge gap regarding the amount of people from both sides who were judged and condemned. The number of left-wing affiliated people executed between 1980 and 1984 was two times more than those of the right-wing. The number of the detainees who stayed in Istanbul military prisons in October 1980—just a month after the coup—was 1,681 from the left-wing and eighty-eight from the right-wing

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(Birand et al. 2006, 179). According to the official military records, 12 claims were filed against right-wing/nationalist organisations, while those against left-wing numbered 134. By 11 September 1981, 14,000 left-wingers and 347 right-wingers were being tried (Okuyan 2010, 345). Thirdly, the aftermath of the two political movements in the thirty years following the coup, differed to a great extent: the leaders of the Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi] soon gathered together in the Conservative Party [Muhafazakar Parti] and Motherland Party [Anavatan Partisi], and then re-established their party in 1985. However, the coup appeared to be an absolute ideological defeat for the left-wing. 44 “Repentance” was also officially promoted among the detainees. Persons were convinced to become repentant through heavy torture and violence. The information gathered from the declarations of the repentant was used for arresting people and for provoking confrontation during interrogations. As well as being broadcasted by the official TV channel, the detainees were also exposed to the declarations of the repentant through amplifiers situated in the corridors of the military prisons. It is mentioned that the repentant were also employed for striking power against the Kurdish guerillas in later periods (Mavioglu 2006a, 136). 45 The detainees were frequently deprived of their visitation rights due to arbitrary excuses. Even if they were not, the detainees and their visitors—who may only be persons that shared the same surname with the detainee—were constantly harassed and interfered during the visits which sometimes lasted only for a few minutes. It was compulsory to speak Turkish during the visits and such military imposition prevented the communication between the Kurdish detainees and their mostly monolingual visitors of Kurdish origin (usually parents and siblings) in Diyarbakir Prison (Zeydanlioglu 2009, 84; Mavioglu 2006a, 117-128). 46 The testimony cited by Mavioglu also mentions that the office of the Neuropsychiatry Association was latter crushed and demolished by the Revolutionary Left [Devrimci Yol] militants (ibid). 47 A testimony confirming this is as follows: “We’d eventually recognised that a third lieutenant MD, though he diagnosed them with different illnesses, prescribed the same medication for any of our friends who visited the infirmary. So much time had passed for us to finally recognise to relate the increase in our consumption of the syrup the name of which we’d never heard before […], and the prolonged periods of sleep we fell into in the ward. […] Then, we’d collected all the syrup bottles and binned them. As soon as we gave up taking the syrup, we got rid of our unavoidable sleeping seizures that usually started at noon” (ibid, 37). 48 “Kemalism” is an expression derived from the name of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the leader of the national salvation war. “Kemalist nationalism” refers to a particular version of Turkish nationalism that privileges the ideological premises of nation building process. 49 The impact of such psychological torture on the right-wing was also confirmed by the right-wing participants of this study. The discontinuity in the political identities of the right-wing/nationalist individuals, their traumatic conception of imprisonment experiences, and their orientation towards Islamist or Islamicmotivated politics after being released from prisons may be interpreted in connection with the use of nationalist symbols as means of persecution.

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Usually unlicensed, single-floor houses built in the poor, suburban areas of the large cities populated by the working class people who migrated from eastern provinces of the country. The left-wing organisations in the 1970s fiercely defended the inhabitants of such territories, and opposed the planned demolition initiated by the local administrations. 51 LeGoff classifies five periods in the history of memory: 1.(Prehistory) Undeveloped “memory practices” in orality. 2. (From prehistory to antiquity) From oral traditions to writing that enabled “commemoration and documentary recording”. 3. (Middle Ages) “The Christianisation of memory” and the emergence of the distinction between liturgical and lay memory in collective memory. 4. (From the Renaissance to present) The emergence of the printing press, the massive growth of collective memory that disabled the individual from assimilating it totally, and the emergence of— what Nora (1989; 2006) calls “lieux de mémoire”—libraries, museums, archives etc. and their use in establishing national identities. 5. (20th Century) “Revolution in memory” generated by the invention of new technologies that transformed the storage of memory, as well as the ways we remember. (Le Goff 1992, 68). 52 Hutton periodises four phases of memory accordingly: 1. Orality 2. Manuscript literacy 3. Print literacy 4. Media literacy. Nevertheless, it is controversial to what extent it would be a tangible attempt to ascribe decisive roles to phases from orality to literacy, as both LeGoff and Hutton do; Lowenthal (1985, 194), for instance, objects to the sharp distinction between oral and literate societies while reflecting on the progress of memory and condemns it as a myth that was ‘controverted by much evidence’. 53 The term “collective memory” was first used in 1902 by Hugo von Hoffmannstahl who referred to “the damned up force of our mysterious ancestors within us” and “piled up layers of accumulated collective memory” (Schieder 1978, 2 cited in Olick and Robbins 1998, 106; Klein 2000, 127). However, Hofmannstahl’s mention rather appears to be an exceptional one. 54 Warburg, writes Weissberg (1999, 16), “speculated about the possibilities of kollektives Gedachtnis, or collective memory”. Although he seemed to be familiar with Halbwachs’ work, it is not accurately known whether Halbwachs was influenced by his writings (ibid). 55 To Hutton (1994, 150), Halbwachs’ indication of dreams as “pure individual memory” is related to his acquaintance with Freud. Halbwachs employed Freud’s theory of dreams to discredit Freud’s account on memory at the heart of which laid unconscious “repetitions” (repetitive dreams which are the unique path to “unlock the psyche’s secrets”) that brings forward the images which still continue to shape our present understandings. However, Halbwachs located “recollection” through which images of the past are consciously reconstructed and revised according to our present understanding in the centre of his conception of memory. However, it remains controversial under what condition, except for a hypothetical state (in the case of Emile of Rousseau or Locke’s tabula rasa), a pure individual memory can exist, as dreams themselves also reflect the inherently social experiences of the individual. Thus, it is impossible to designate dreams as such, as there is no purely individual experience that inherits no social aspect.

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Zerubavel (2003, 37) mentions the practical reflection of the discontinuity between past and present in everyday life, and identifies it as a modern symptom triggered by the “tremendous acceleration of social and technological change” (ibid, 38). 57 History, like memory cannot be ascribed to be objective as it also exploits the past. Yet the difference is that “the basis of the exploitation [by history] cannot be arbitrary” (Schwartz 1982, 396), as official history, in particular, is obviously supposed to “exploit the past” for legitimising a certain power for present purposes of producing consent. 58 When compared with collective memory, forgetting even has a diversity of uses as can be illustrated in active, cultural, escapist, passive, productive, scientific, selective, social and voluntary “forgettings”. (Olick et al. 2011, 485). Connerton (2008), for instance, refers to “seven types of forgettings”. When we regard the relative novelty of the term forgetting and collective memory, it is possible to conclude that new formations within social sciences usually inspire distinctions and ramifications. 59 Cultural memory marks the interrelation between people’s memories and preconstructed cultural forms in the process of people’s construction of their relation with the past (Schudson 1995 cited in Misztal 2003, 12). Assmann and Czaplicka (1995), suggest the term cultural memory as an attempt to build connections between “three poles” of “memory”, “culture” and “society” (ibid, 130); cultural memory is defined through delimitations of history (as a science) and what they call “communicative memory”, which refers to collective memory in the sense of memory based on daily contacts (ibid, 126). Unlike communicative memory, cultural memory is distinguished by “its distance from the everyday” (ibid, 129). The horizon of cultural memory does not change, it is fixed in “fateful events of the past” the memory of which “is maintained through cultural formation [refers to what Lowenthal (1985, 238) defines as relics, natural features and human artefacts that have a commemorative quality] and institutional communication [practice]” (ibid). In his subsequent work, Assmann (2011) elaborated the notion of “cultural memory” that “refers to the exterior dimensions of human memory” (ibid, 5). In accordance with his former work in which he coined the term, cultural memory is defined through its differentiations from—except from the communicative memory I referred to above—mimetic memory (refers to habit memory) and the memory of objects (ibid, 5-6). Social memory means “organised cultural practices supplying ways of understanding the world and providing people with beliefs and opinions which guide their actions” (Misztal 2003, 12). Also see, Fentress and Wickham (1992). Public memory is defined as the “memory that occurs in the open, in front of and with others” and is to be distinguished from other terms like collective or social memory (Phillips 2004, 3). Besides its exhibitive quality, to Casey, it is “bivalent in its temporality” as it stands between the past and the future: “it is both attached to a past […] and acts to ensure a future of further remembering of that same event” (2004, 17). To Bodnar, “public memory is a body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand both its past, present and by implication, its future” (cited in Wertsch 2002, 33). To Aleida Assmann (2006), employing more practical categories instead of “collective memory” would be a

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solution to overcome the ambiguities around the term. She offers four “formats of memory”, being individual, social, political and cultural (2006). The first refers to a cognitive/neurological understanding of memory and includes “procedural” (habitual), “semantic” and “episodic” memories. Social memory is shared memory and is collective memory inspired. It is organised from down to top. Political memory, on the other hand, is transformed social memory; it is “homogenous” and “institutionalised” top-down memory. Cultural memory refers to the total of stored information in libraries, museums and the like; cultural memory goes beyond the poles of remembering and forgetting as it is always potentially accessible (ibid, 211-221). 60 Koselleck’s (2004) distinction between subjective and objective truth confirms Sontag’s conclusion. Whilst subjective truth is defined through the specific memories and unmediated experience of the individual, objective truth is, for Koselleck, the reconstruction done by professional historians to understand the past. And ideology lies between the experiential (subjective) truth of the individual and the scientific (objective) truth produced by the historian (Assmann 2008, 5253). In such an understanding of ideology, no distinction lies between collective memory and ideology as collective memory is to be thought of as a part of the “objective truth” due to its socially constructed nature and transformation of individual experience through mediation. 61 Sontag actually ignores two aspects that are to be regarded in conceiving of memory: one that individual remembering is by no means immune to the social/collective frameworks regardless of whether they are imposed or negotiated, and two that, collective memory, as also empowering its subjects in constructing the very collective frames and as the construction process is readily bidirectional, promises democratic opportunities to its subjects when compared with ideology. 62 The same concern about the inadequacy of defining memory as “beyond the individual limits” appears to stand even fifteen years after Zelizer made the above point. “Though it is now widely […] accepted that memory’s purchase extends beyond the bounds of the individual” write Radstone and Schwarz (2010, 6), “the question of how the social dimensions of memory are to be theorised continues to provoke debate”. 63 For Nora, these are the “origins and the sources of memory” destroyed through a series of historical developments such as the “disappearance of peasant culture”, “the apogee of industrial growth”, the emergence of new nations, ethnological upheavals due to colonial violation, process of “interior decolonisation [effecting] ethnic minorities, families and groups that until now have possessed reserves of memory but little or no historical capital” (1989, 7). 64 Yerushalmi (2011) makes a similar conclusion with regard to the modern status of Jewish memory and history. In his account, the memory and the history of the Jewish people used to coexist due to the immanent mnemonic nature of the Jewry: “the injunction to remember [was] felt as a religious imperative” and equipped the Jewish people with the intergenerational ability to acknowledge past events through commemorative actions (ibid, 202). It is in modern times that “for the first time, a Jewish historiography divorced from Jewish collective memory and, in crucial respects, thoroughly at odds with it” appeared (ibid 206, emphasis added).

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A survivor of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Wiesel’s (1990, 7) dictum epitomises the untellable feature of the Holocaust: “[h]e or she who did not live through the event will never reveal it. Not really. Between our memory and its reflection there stand a wall that cannot be pierced. The past belongs to the dead and the survivor does not recognise himself in the words linking him to them”. 66 Assmann (2008, 54) also indicates that the terms memory and identity spontaneously proved to be increasingly popular both in academic and political realms. 67 Some may find this transformation, to some extent, exaggerated, but there now exists, for instance, a Japanese generation of young people who developed “unknown cognitive capabilities” as “they are able to watch several programmes on computer screens [and can] simultaneously […] grasp the narrative structures [of all]” (Connerton 2009, 86). 68 In this distinction, certain similarities and differences can be drawn between each mode of forgetting: while the reactive and coercive forgettings are related to social surroundings (political power, the media or the trajectories of modern life), and directly related to the subject’s interaction with them, the other two (ethical and desperate) are bound with the consciousness and the will of the individual as well as her internal reflections. As a consequence, while the formers are essentially social, the others are rather individual. 69 Connerton refers to sudden unemployment in relation to its impact on the change of a person’s standard biography; however, his assertion is far more encompassing at this point, as he adds, “[w]ith the elimination of standard individual biography the metanarrative of History comes to be fractured, if not eliminated, too” (Connerton 2009, 77). 70 LeGoff (1992, 161) similarly explains the increasing value of memory against forgetting through “the fear of losing memory in a kind of collective amnesia” in 20th century. 71 My assertion applies to certain communities of memory which had been previously oppressed, had suffered from certain acts of discrimination, subordination or had previously been subject to an injustice. I am referring to the direct sufferers, or the “victims” of such oppression. I needed to specify the context of my assertion as it would be controversial to charge the each member of any community of remembering, in the case of, for instance, a religious community or a nation that had already established itself, the legitimacy of which is not questioned, under no threat of subordination, or has itself become the implementer of subordination. 72 However, we need to separate the dominance of a representation and that of memory: memory is a product of a more complex set of relations in which representation constitutes only one of the components. The relation between the representation and memory is that both of them are subject to a continuous interplay in which each of them provides basis for the other while both of them constantly make a transforming effect on other. 73 Several stimulating accounts on the history and the growing popularity of the concept of “identity” in the social sciences discourse indicate the work of Erikson (1994 [1968]) that coined the term “identity crisis” (MacKenzie 1978; Gleason

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1983; Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Bendle 2002). Regarding the dramatic increase in the number of identity-related studies after 1980s, racial, ethnic and gender studies are coined ironically as the “holy trinity” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 3). The writers indicate that between 1990 and 1997, the number of the journal articles including “identity” or “identities” in their titles doubled in amount (ibid, 38). 74 Bendle (ibid) indicates that the term may be used as referring to: (1) “In terms of similarity and difference involving social, racial, ethnic and gender categories; (2) In contextual terms that vary with one’s social situation, providing a multifaceted experience; (3) In cultural categories reflecting contemporary conceptions of identity; (4) In terms of one’s subjective sense of self, possibly based on notions of an ‘inner life’; (5) In terms of the social performance of self-hood; (6) In terms of ‘narratives of self’, understood as stories one tells about who one is; (7) In psychoanalytical terms, where identity and the self are felt to be constrained by unconscious structures of the mind”. 75 Thus, politics is enabled by the “incompletion of society” or the impossibility of the “fullness of society” (Laclau and Zac 1994, 37). 76 The 12 September coup and the economic, political and social processes that led to it can be well located in the context of questions of legitimacy as the process prior to the coup actually appears as a historical moment of economic and political crisis that eventually resulted in the macro-level (re)formative attempts. Furthermore, the construction of different (and conflicting) political identities should be conceived in the context of such crisis; the more the crisis turned to be perennial and raised questions of legitimacy, the more the political identities concretised. On the other hand, the differentiation among the narratives, particularly of the left and right-wing participants, may also be read as the narratives of divergent processes of identification which are essentially designated through their positions against the political power. 77 A considerable section of the left-wing who suffered oppression in the 1971 memorandum, for instance, were again university students. One of the most symbolic acts of the memorandum, the execution of three revolutionary young men on 6th of May 1972 exemplifies this as all three were university students. Even though never reconsolidated to the same extent that they were in the 1970s, student movements also constituted the most dynamic part of public opposition after the coup. 78 In this study, habitus-based qualities were best observable in left-wing participants’ homes. Most of the interviews with right-wing and non-politically affiliated participants took place in their workplaces or other more formal places they identified. However, due to my trust-based relations and smoothing effect of reciprocal confidentiality with the left-wingers, I interviewed seven out of ten in their homes and mostly in their living rooms. In some participants’ homes it was the middle class preferences of furnishing, in others’ the large libraries that were clear references to middle-class positions and habitus based tastes and preferences. 79 The definition of left-wing in non-politically affiliated participants’ accounts does not overlap with that of left-wing/politically affiliated. The former rather refers to social democrat/democrat/secular identity.

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My lingual preferences from time to time affected participants’ first impressions of me during the arrangement of interviews. The right-wing participants used a strong traditional and religious language frequently referencing the Muslim way of life. While, for instance, confirming the time/date for the interview, some said “With the consent of Allah, we can meet on the suggested date”. After a certain time, I started to use similar idioms in order to establish a more efficient communication with them. This reinforced trust towards me and belief in confidentiality of the interview. 81 An anecdote would illustrate this barrier: a female scholar who previously enabled me to reach two right-wing female participants called me on the phone and shared her concerns about some students’ “bad intentions” to produce politically “divisive”, hostile, anti-nationalist works or their being encouraged by their supervisors to do so. I was asked whether my supervisor was of Slavic/Jewish origins. I was surprised but shortly recognised that I had undergone a “Google” search which had led to my web page on the University of Essex website in which the ethnic/religious identity of my supervisor could be inferred. The Slavic/Jewish origins were identified with communism due to the communist past of Eastern Europe and frequently conflicted with anti-communist reflexes of rightwing/nationalist participants. 82 The intentions to achieve foreknowledge echoed in “Google” searches with my name that returned papers about LGBTT issues or in left leaning periodicals and conference presentations. Their search occasionally generated prejudice about my “impartiality” which I never claimed to have. 83 The only group composed of nine participants—five males and four females— was the right-wing. This is not only related to the complications I experienced in reaching right-wing/female participants, but also bears a symbolic quality in representing the overall lack of women within the right-wing political movement in the 1970s and 1980s. This is mostly caused by the traditional/Islamic culture inherent in right-wing politics and the religious/paternalistic conception of women as identified with mothers, sisters and daughters of nationalist men, rather than comrades. 84 The above incident was told by Remzi Ercanlar who was imprisoned in Diyarbakir Prison during the coup years. 85 These were broadly explained in an officially prepared book in 1991, according to which, the aims of the “operation” was to: “[i] preserve national unity, [ii] maintain the security of life and property through the prevention of anarchy and terrorism, [iii] establish and preserve state authority, [iv] maintain social peace, national tolerance and cooperation, [v] operationalise the secular republican regime, based on social justice, individual rights and freedom and human rights [vi] and finally, re-establishing civil authority in a reasonable period of time after the completion of legal regulations” (Secretary General of National Security Council 1991, 205). 86 The emphasis on the terror, anarchism and separatism in the previous declaration that directly denotes the left-wing movement turns into an emphasis on “civil war and fraternal fight”, an alternative definition which is inclusive of the other side of

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the armed conflict, the right-wing politics. The shift should be conceived of in connection with the coup leaders” search for plausibility and legitimacy. 87 Despite the legal and practical oppression against the press, its attitude towards the military coup cannot be explained solely through the legal constraints, the selfcensorship and the extraordinary situation during the coup period. The press’ attitude also reflects its lack of critical frames of assessment, its political commitment to the formal politics and its voluntary participation in the legitimisation of the coup, and finally, its structural dependency on capital relations. The prominent capital owners expressed their strong support for the military coup soon after it was staged. 88 The expression “Mehmetcik” refers to the members of the Turkish army and has a religious connotation as the expression comes from the name of Mohammed, the prophet of the Sunni sect of Islam. 89 To illustrate, Baskin Oran’s (1989) book that—in a way—reversed the general’s aim to defend and justify the coup presented his speeches and declarations without comments with an implicit assumption that the content of the texts themselves revealed their senselessness. Currently, whereas one must dig through second hand book stores to obtain the general’s memoirs, Oran’s work was published five times between 1989 and 2006. Oran was one of the 120 dismissed academicians due to the Martial Law Code No: 1402. 90 Mumcu was assassinated allegedly by a fundamental Islamist organisation in 1993. There are still certain controversies around the unsolved murder implying the involvement of the “deep state” (refers to state guided paramilitary organisations) in Mumcu’s murder. Mumcu was one of the prominent journalists working on the issues of international (Islamist) terror, intelligence services, international dimensions of drug trafficking and relations between police, mafia and state in Turkey. 91 Tusalp was later tried according to Article 142/3 of Turkish Penal Law, “making propaganda for destroying and weakening national feelings” in 1990 (Milliyet, 18 October, 1990). 92 The capability of these publications to reach anonymous readers remained limited as they were mostly published by left-wing, small scale publishing houses. Most of these books are currently out of print. In a search to reach these works, I was led to the large second-hand bookstores which sold them for very low prices, as they are only asked for by collectors or readers in their efforts to obtain these publications for academic or journalistic purposes. 93 On 12th September 2010, a referendum addressing amendments to the 1982 Constitution was held. The amendments included the removal of the article banning the retrospective jurisdiction of members of the National Security Council. The affirmation of the amendments initiated the jurisdiction of the coup’s perpetrators. 94 For a discussion on the literary works on the 12 September which constituted the subject of a series of literary critique works, See Argin 2008; Naci 2012; Ozger 2012. 95 The only feature film that implicitly provides a right-wing account of the coup is 1998’s Where the Rose Grows [Gulun Bittigi Yer] shot by an acknowledged right-

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wing director. However, while the film was not even mentioned by the rightwingers, the two most popular films were seen by the majority including the rightwingers who mentioned to have enjoyed My Father and My Son [Babam ve Oglum]. 96 The official channel was sentenced to pay a remarkable amount of compensation to the family of Hrant Dink, an Armenian journalist murdered by a racist in 2008, as he was portrayed as a member of the Armenian terror organisation, ASALA (Bianet 2 March, 2010). 97 This is partly due to the financial difficulties and social constraints the coup imposed upon left-wing individuals. This resulted in left-wing ex-activists’ penetration into the culture and entertainment industries thanks to their cultural capital in 1980s and 1990s. 98 The campaign includes a petition that calls for supporting the organisation’s efforts for founding the museum. In the declaration that explains the purpose of the petition, one can readily identify the use of the memory politics discourse: “The dominants spend efforts for obliterating, destroying, ignoring and encouraging forgetting the history. Even though, we know that one who has no past, would not have a future either. Thus, we have to tell the truths about history, and reinforce the truth through information, documents and any material in order to avoid forgetting it. In other words, we have to construct the social memory” (Devrimci 78’liler Federasyonu 2012, emphasis added). The expression “social memory” actually refers to collective memory in this context; the language of memory politics is a completely recently set terminology in current Turkey, and “collective memory” does not have much use in public language. This project is currently supported by Hafiza Merkezi [Memory Centre]. 99 The Initiative for 78 Generation [78’liler Girisimi] is another commemorative group that emerged as a result of a split between the members of the Federation of Revolutionary 78 Generation [Devrimci 78’liler Federasyonu] and the founders of the group in 2005. According to the Chair of the federation, the causes of the split between the federation and the initiative draws on: [i] the initiative’s exclusive commitment to group belonging [ii] its amorphous structure—the federation is mentioned to centre upon “collective reason” and “collective action” [iii] the difference between the two in terms of the political visions of the jurisdiction process (Atas 2012; Kanat 2012). 100 The speech the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, delivered on 20th July 2010 to propagate “voting yes” in the referendum bears a symbolic quality as it generated the public perception that the right-wing actors are as legitimate witnesses of the coup as the left-wing sufferers. Delivering the speech, Erdogan cried while making quotations from the letter of Mustafa Pehlivanoglu, the rightwing militant who was executed together with a left-wing detainee on 7th October 1980. 101 Turkey should have been expected to provide a legal response to the coup much earlier as it joined the United Nations in 1945 and approved Charter of the United Nations that imposes the requisition to administer criminal justice against crimes against humanity. Additionally in the Penal Code passed in 2004, crimes against humanity are clearly defined in Articles 76, 77, and 78 (Ulgen 2012).

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The criminal complaint made by the Human Rights Association on 13th September 2010 defined the coup as a crime against humanity and constituted one of the most detailed inventories on judicial statement of the coup. 103 The report of the commission announced an expansive list of the offenders of the torture and the inhumane treatments in Diyarbakir Prison including the leaders of military coup and members of the National Security Council. 104 Alparslan Turkes, the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi] made the same claim in an interview, in which he mentioned that the coup was staged against Turkish nationalism (Okuyan 2010, 370). 105 However, it is frequently emphasised by my right-wing/nationalist male and female participants that the population of women among the nationalist activists was significantly low. 106 This is also related to the image of women in the Turkish left-wing. Women were thought to be more prone to “bourgeoisification” and to “join in” with capitalism, being more attached to the consumer culture; and so their behaviours and apparel had to be kept under control (Berktay 2011, 281). 107 “Killing the Pope” refers to the assassin who attempted to kill Pope Jean Paul II in 1981 in Italy, but who did not succeed. The assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, was a foremost idealist/nationalist militant who escaped from prison to abroad after the coup. He was interrogated 128 times and finally convicted and imprisoned until his release in 2010. 108 An Islamic prayer which means “Allah is unique and Mohammed is his prophet”. 109 My prior knowledge of the coup’s interventions into memory constituted one of my early motivations for conducting this study. My motivation was also a result of a memory of my own: Approximately ten years ago, I, with a group of friends, went to the summer house of a friend’s parents in order to spend a week of our summer vacation. The house was located in one of the relatively unpopular regions of a Turkish southern-coast city. At night, in order to arrange beds, we opened one of the deep and large cupboards in which the quilts and pillows were kept. While trying to lift down things, we recognised that there were a number of books hidden in the back of the cupboard. Those were old books that were published some thirty years ago, smelling of age and humidity. With curiosity we all started to poke around the books, and shortly recognised that these were previously banned books of Lenin, Mao Tse-tung or some revolutionary leaders of Turkish origin. Then, we unravelled the story of the books: after the friend’s parents bought this house around 1980, they carried their “inconvenient” books to the summer house in order to keep them out of the house where they spent the whole year except for a few weeks in summer. I am not sure whether the house-searches continued late into the 1980s, but their act rather appeared as a reflex against the danger of experiencing trouble because of their books. Such reflex is not surprising as the members of the family in person had already experienced the atrocities of the coup during its first years. 110 The abbreviations in order; participant’s pseudonym, the gender (M/W), the age, and finally the political group the participant belongs [RW (Right-wing), LW (Left-wing), NPA (No political affiliation)].

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Aziz Nesin later became a part of the intellectual resistance against the coup through the Petition of Intellectuals on 5th March 1984. The letter that was signed by approximately 1300 intellectuals and was submitted to the Presidency and Speakership of Parliament demanded the enhancement of human rights for democratisation (Bianet 2 June, 2003). 112 Nazim Hikmet is a world renowned Turkish socialist poet who lived and died in exile. 113 The National Security Council abolished the autonomy of the Institution of Turkish Language and Institution of Turkish History soon after the coup (Oran 2003, 21). 114 From the expression “unnecessary”, I infer that Hamit’s family house was not searched by the officers. However, his family destroyed all his books and photographs in order avoid risking their son’s security. 115 I avoid repeating the claims of the official representation. See p. 59, Official Representation of the Coup. I will briefly remind the reader of these claims in footnotes where needed. 116 I should remind the reader of the sources in which such arguments were made by the military. The admonitory letter given initially to the President on 27th December 1979, and then to the Turkish Great National Assembly in January 1980 calls the political parties to “prevent the anarchy and separatism to reach an extent that threatens the integrity of the country” and “make provisions against any kind of movements aiming at demolishing the state such as terror and separatism”. Similarly, in the first announcement that promulgated the coup on 12th September, it said that: “the aim of the operation that is being carried out is to […] avoid a probable civil war and fraternal fight” that referred to the armed conflict between the political sides. 117 Such a contrast can be identified in Kenan Evren’s speech which he delivered to publicise the new Constitution on 24th October 1982: “Yes, my dear citizens, some appear to have forgotten the period before the 12 September since they regained comfort in current conditions of peace and quietude, order and security.[…] Some, through making the Turkish citizens forget the living death and the pain and the grief they suffered, the flutter and the hopelessness they fell into before 12th September, are striving to discredit the precautions that we tried to take for the future of the state and the society in order to prevent the repetition of the history so that they can make Turkey return to the same circumstances” (Dinckal date unspecified, 47). 118 The political representative of social democrat/moderate left-wing politics in Turkey is the Republican People’s Party [Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi] which was established by the founding elites of the young Turkish Republic in 1919. Although other political parties were established at intervals that aimed at representing social democrats, they did not prove permanent, and thus, social democrats are still represented by the Republican People’s Party [Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi]. The leaders of the war of independence between 1919 and 1923 became the founding cadres of the Republican People’s Party [Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi] that enjoyed the one party regime until 1946. The ideological and organic relationship of the party to the military was never suspended. Thus, a political

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sympathy towards the military, militarism and military coups, particularly because the military coups are believed to have prevented the reactionist/Islamist political movements and political powers, is an inherent component of social democrat political identity. 119 He implies that the military should act against the ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi]. 120 Yaprak, a left-wing participant, mentions her awareness of the trauma of the right-wing people while she is speaking about the different effects of the coup on opposite sides: “Well, yes, the right-wing groups were affected very badly as well. And their case is more desperate. I’m hearing and reading about it nowadays, their tragic regret, the sense of being deceived, being used by the state is their dominant feeling. Their pain is perhaps different, deeper, more killing. When you make a quantitative comparison, I mean with regard to the number of people who died, were tortured, suffered, lost, the forfeit of the left-wing is much more, but at least the left-wingers knew [were aware of] what they demanded, and what they would undergo; it was a kind of devotion of their lives, a struggle to death. For the rightwingers, there’s much more disappointment, more frustration. Nowadays, I feel sorry for them [the right-wingers] more. You’re being deceived at some point, and I think they’ve lost their belief in the state, I don’t know. These are what I’ve heard lately” (Yaprak-W-50-LW). 121 Naming the Soviet Union as “Russia” is a discursive preference of the rightwing, most probably in order to underrate the Socialist Republic and avoid mentioning the “Soviets” or the word “Socialist”, and implies that they did not recognise the Soviets as an independent state. 122 She currently holds an administrative position in the nationalist party. 123 Such an emphasis on the “fraternal fight” could be interpreted as a convergence to the official representation. On the one hand, this convergence is natural when the relation between the right-wing politics and the state is considered. On the other hand, the remaining content of the right-wing memory clearly diverges from the official representation. 124 Unlike Irfan, Hamit who ended his affiliation with right-wing politics clearly mentions that they were “used”: “Of course, I mean, it happened. People were used regardless of whether they were used voluntarily or unintentionally” (HamitM-48-RW). 125 “Mix and pacify” was a strategic application of the military in all of the prisons of the martial law that accommodated left and right-wing militants in the same wards and cells, and aimed to separate both sides from their fellows in order to avoid unity against the prison administration. On the individual level, the application mainly aimed at pacifying politically affiliated detainees. 126 In the 1990s, the nationalist movement underwent a separation between the traditional nationalism that maintained its loyalty to the state, and the Islamicleaning nationalists that revised their commitment to the state. 127 According to such a reading of history, Turkey’s in-between position between the opposite camps during the Cold War, but particularly in the 1970s, attracted the Soviet Union’s interest in incorporating Turkey into the socialist Eastern bloc; thus, it supported the left-wing/revolutionary movements in Turkey in order to lead

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to a socialist revolution. This is why the then politically affiliated right-wing militants used to believe that they actually struggled against the “Soviet Unionimported communism”, while being involved in the armed conflict against the leftwing organisations. 128 It is a frequently employed right-wing argument that the 1960 Constitution offered “excessive freedom” which paved the way for the rise of left-wing politics. 129 The role of the US has long remained a controversial issue within the frames offered to provide an understanding located in an international context about the coup in Turkey (Birand 1984; Candar 2000:130-132; Yetkin 2006). Growing from the journalist M. A. Birand’s (1984) assertion about the dialogue between Paul Henze who was in charge of the CIA Turkey Unit in the 1980s, and US President Jimmy Carter, the US has been discussed as the instigator or the direct perpetrator of the coup in Turkey. Regardless of whether the argument is employed as a part of a conspiracy theory or not, possible US involvement in the coup is a significant issue worth taking into consideration in any effort to figure out the coup through an economic-political frame. 130 To concretise, most participants mention the declarations of the prominent capitalists/investors concerning their pleasure with the military’s “intervention” into the ongoing armed conflict and the left-wing uprising. These names are employed due to the symbolic meaning they possess in representing the class that promoted and supported the coup against the uprising left-wing/labour movement. The name of Halit Narin, for instance, who was the then Chair of The Confederation of Turkish Employers Union [Turkiye Isveren Sendikalari Konfederasyonu] is most frequently referred to; the participants mention his declaration about the coup in which he directly addressed the workers while saying “It was the working class who has laughed for twenty years, and yet it is our turn to laugh now”. Halit Narin was actually implying the “immoderate freedom” guaranteed by the 1960 Constitution that provided relatively broader rights to association and freedom of expression that enabled the significant development in public opposition, level of social organisation and politicisation during the 1960s and 1970s. Such intellectual and social development also triggered class awareness and enabled the political interaction between the working classes and left-wing politics. Narin’s declaration can be interpreted as the indicator of his consciousness and awareness that the coup would promote the domination of employers on the working classes through depriving the working classes of their rights, and that the development of the labour movement generated by the left-wing organisations would soon be prevented. 131 The claim of having been the primary target of the coup was also shared by right-wing participants. The left-wing participants interpret the right-wing claim as an effort to be counted in the story of oppression, and introduce themselves as the so-called “victims” of the 12 September coup, and thus, as a pretentious and populist attempt. For most of the left-wing participants, the coup actually promoted right-wing politics, particularly the nationalist and Islamist components of it. 132 The maximum period of surveillance in police stations was gradually increased after the coup; in 1981 the maximum period that one could be kept under surveillance was ninety days. Most of the left-wing participants mention that they

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opted for being transferred to the prisons after surveillance as the torture in police stations was beyond all bearing. However, it is acknowledged that the physical and psychological torture continued in prisons as the detainees were legally treated as private soldiers according to the regulation introduced by the military after the coup. Thus, after a certain date they were forced to wear uniforms, give oral reports and respect the military hierarchy. 133 Zeynep continues further to describe the torture she and her friends suffered to make me comprehend despite what she felt the sense of resistance: “So… Well… The torture was barbarous. Your eyes are blindfolded. People were screaming with hellish voices. They were flushing pressurised water on you. And in a moment in which you’re completely blind, they were sexually abusing you. Abuse, I mean, even seeing your friends naked may be a kind of abuse. It [the perception of abuse] varies from one person to another. […] There you witness all these. People were fastened to the radiators along the corridor, attached on their back [there is a piece of paper on which was written] “No food shall be given”. So… (she sighs). A ceremony of [any type of] heavy torture” (Zeynep-W-53-LW). 134 It is also significant that seven out of ten left-wing participants are married with partners whom they have known since the coup period (some of them also experienced imprisonment together with their partners), and who are of the same political identities. Two out of the rest three left-wing participants are not married. 135 Despite the referendum was publicly conceived as a matter of expressing the content/discontent about the current political power of the Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi], the result of it can still be interpreted as an indicator of public discontent about the legacy of the 12 September coup and its long-term defects. 136 See p. 76, Ignored Female Existences: Were all Witnesses Male? 137 Schuman and Corning (2000, 920) suggest “clarify[ing] the span of the supposed critical age”. Quoting Erikson (1950), they mention that “memories for personal events should refer primarily to the time when participants were ages 2029 years” whilst memories for public events that were not individually experienced have a binding power between the ages 10-19. 138 The term “idealist” used here without italics refers to person guided by ideals. 139 The dynamic destabilisation, which a generation as an actuality owes its emergence to, is measured through the extent to which the problems of younger generations are reflected back upon the older one (ibid, 180-181). Thus, the dynamism of society should be thought of as referring to the younger generations’ capability for widely influencing society in terms of their demands and projections. 140 Mannheim exemplifies this situation through referring to the differing meanings of “freedom” for liberal and conservative generations (ibid, 195). 141 The abbreviations in order; participant’s pseudonym, the gender (M/W), the age, and finally the political group the participant belongs [RW (Right-wing), LW (Left-wing), NPA (No political affiliation)]. 142 Here, I shall recall one specific feature of right-wing collective memory which is its apparent focus on the period prior to the coup while recalling their coup experiences. While the “coup period” refers to a time that still continues through its long-term implications for left-wing participants, for the non-politically

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affiliated participants, the “Ozal period” (1983-1989) is often associated with the coup period and is recognised as its continuation. 143 After gathering under substitute political parties, Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi]—formerly closed by the military power—was reestablished under a different name in 1985. 144 The majority of right-wingers received five to eight years imprisonment and were released before the end of the decade. 145 Zahit (Zahit-M-48-RW) implies his disappointment in the course of his account: “[I]n the region I used to live [in the coup days], the state proved incapable of providing security for its citizens (…). [When the coup seized the power I thought that] the army would finally intervene into all those and that the state would act against the things [communism] that we had to struggle for”. However, his expectations were not fulfilled and he was struck by several years of imprisonment. 146 Ulubatli Hasan is claimed to be the Ottoman soldier who took part in the Conquest of Istanbul in 1453, and to be the first to climb the walls of the city to place the Ottoman flag on it. However, right after placing the flag that represents the first instance of the dominance of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul, it is claimed he was killed by a rock thrown at him by Byzantine soldiers. 147 Here, “father” refers to a paternalistic conception of the state which is an inherent tendency in Turkish nationalism. 148 Refer to Irfan’s narrative of the coup in previous chapter: “[T]here’s an invisible hand there […]. And while all those were happening, [there is a hand there] that condones the death of those people”. See p. 99. 149 Here, he uses a specific term (“darbeli”) that cannot be translated into English as the words “blow” (as in “deliver a major blow”) and “coup” are homonyms in Turkish. I use “damaged” instead to provide a closer meaning for the term he uses. 150 The establishment of the PKK is usually thought of in relation to the coup’s violent oppression against the Kurds particularly in the Diyarbakir Prison. See Chapter 1 for more details. 151 The dominance of popular culture was primarily enabled by the proliferation of private means of media towards the end of the 1980s. The son of the then President Turgut Ozal was one of the first to establish and own a private channel and its establishment was followed by an increase and diversification of private channels. Similarly, opinion journalism was alternated by the emergence of tabloid newspapers in the 1980s. 152 Such progress and articulation of Western modernisation also crystallises in the mutual agreement between Turkey and Western Europe that “Turkey is a part of Europe” in the 1980s, particularly after Turkey’s initiation of the European Union full membership process in 1987. 153 Here, this political term slightly deviates from its Western meanings in Turkish context. “Social democrat” is mainly used for the supporters of the statist, Kemalist, and authoritarian Republican People’s Party [Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi] that is also the founding political body of the Republic. Thus, social democracy in Turkey does not necessarily coincide with libertarian and egalitarian values.

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The political idiom that is derived from the name of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the leader of the national salvation war and the establishment of the Turkish Republic. “Ataturkism” is used above as a referent of the national salvation ideology. 155 It is worth noting here that both Zeynep and Feray particularly emphasise that their dominant feeling about the past is not regret at all. For both of them, it seems of particular significance to avoid the researcher’s inference that they regret for their past acts, but rather recognise that something is altered in their present views. 156 In Turkish, the word delikanli refers to a young man who is not expected to act reasonably or consistently. Seyhan’s use of this male-specific word for selfdescription implies her gender-neutral perspective. 157 A considerable number of the detainees were composed of university students around their early twenties, and compulsory military service is conventionally completed after graduation. 158 Then, he clarifies what he means by “revolutionist”; it is not in a left-wing sense, but rather refers to the “will to change”; “We [I] inherited the positive sides of it” Hamit says. 159 It was almost conventional in the provincial towns that the children of Sunni families were inclined to be involved in the idealist movement, while those of the Alevi families sympathised with left-wing politics. This convention still prevails to some extent. 160 Like Hamit he mentions the inevitability of becoming an idealist as the university he was affiliated to was mostly populated by idealist students. 161 The idiom used in the 1980s to refer to the GMC branded military vehicles. 162 Mansur, for instance, mentioned that his experiences within the nationalist/idealist movement served as a “school for him”. 163 See p. 96, The Right-Wing Memory: Conspiracy, The Loss of the Self as a Political Agent and “Foreign Powers” in Charge. 164 In a part of his account which was quoted in above sections, Zahit emphasises his consciousness and will regarding his political position in the past, while saying “[I see it] as a period to be proud of, in terms of my personal history. […] I see all the idealists as Ulubatli Hasans in this period”. 165 According to his account, the first time he undertook action with the nationalists was when he was called by his neighborhood friends to defend the national flag that was speculated to be hauled down by the communists. 166 He presumably means the political groups by this expression. 167 Nationalism ideologically and physically advanced due to racism motivated popular reaction against the uprising Kurdish movement from the 1980s on. 168 Whereas the vote proportions of the Nationalist Movement Party [MIlliyetci Hareket Partisi] in 1969 and 1973 general elections had been 3% and 3,4% respectively, it increased to 8,2% in 1995, 18% in 1999, 8,4 in 2002 and 14,3 in 2007. Despite its instability, it is clear that there is a significant increase after 1980s (Turkish Statistical Institute date unspecified). 169 This expression was used by Agah Oktay Guner, vice president of Nationalist Movement Party [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi] in 1981. 170 This led to the Nationalist Movement Party’s [Milliyetci Hareket Partisi] effort to improve its public image by the end of the 1990s.

186 171

Notes

Refer to Chapter 4 p. 68, Visual Memory of the Coup. Even though published works, memoirs and novels, barely aroused the interest of participants, TV serials and feature films seem to have largely attracted attention. The relative disinterest in published works is related to the overall relative lack of reading habit, rather than a generalisable disregard. Eight out of ten participants with no political affiliation express to have seen films or watched TV serials on the coup. One of the most watched films that reached the highest box office ratings, My Father and My Son [Babam ve Oglum], was seen by six out of eight participants. Five of them were keen watchers of TV serials, particularly the most recent one, My Heart Won’t Forget You [Bu Kalp Seni Unutur mu], and express their frustration about the serial’s discontinuation of broadcasting. 172 Burhan exemplifies the over-inclusive domination of left-wing organisations while narrating that the only family known to have sympathised with the nationalist party was forced to migrate from the village before the coup. 173 He reports how he moved to a big city in order to find a job—the unemployment rate is significantly high in Kurdish cities—when he became an adult, and to have started to work after a period of financial difficulties. 174 Erdal Eren was a high school student at the age of seventeen when he was executed on 13th December 1980. According to his ID card, he was born on 25th September 1964 and his actual age was seventeen. Although the execution of a person younger than eighteen was prohibited by law, Erdal’s age was raised in order to clear the way for his execution. Before his execution, he declared to some journalists that he required a bone test in order to prove his age, but it was rejected by the court martial. Regarding Erdal’s execution, Kenan Evren, the leader of the National Security Council, made a declaration in order to legitimise the act, and asked, “Should we feed him instead of executing?” 175 The illegitimate execution found repercussions in popular culture as, for instance, around ten popular songs were composed and sang in memory of Erdal Eren. 176 Sengul mentions that she was a keen watcher of the TV serial, My Heart Won’t Forget You [Bu Kalp Seni Unutur mu], and she had seen a few films on the coup. 177 “The den” was a part of the systematic torture in Mamak Prison. Located in the centre of the entrance hall and visible to all other detainees staying in different wards, the “newcomers” were accommodated in the den in order to enable initial deterioration. Yet, I am not certain whether Sengul is referring to this application above. 178 Here, she refers to one of her close friend’s family member who has been laid up with paralysis due to torture. 179 Mumtaz was born in Tunceli, an eastern city overwhelmingly populated by the Kurdish, and thus, was “treated as inconvenient” by the military administration. However, Mumtaz mentions that he is not of Kurdish origin, but was born in Tunceli as the son of Turkish parents. 180 See, for example, Oushakine (2006) for the politically mobilising potential of “pity as status quo” through transformation into the “politics of pity”.

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APPENDIX A SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SAMPLE

F

F

F

F

F

M M

M

M M

ZEYNEP

CIHAN

GUNSELI

YAPRAK

METIN HASAN

SABAHATTIN

TAHSIN AHMET

Gender

GULAY

206

54 53

52

54 55

50

60

54

53

54

Current Age

24 23

22

24 25

20

30

24

23

24

Age in 1980

Business admin in entertainment sector Tourist guide Freelance journalist

Retired LEFT WING MEN Lawyer Journalist (admin)/ Columnist

Retired

Retired

Financial Advisor

LEFT WING WOMEN Teacher

Occupation

Social Characteristics of the Sample Left-wing

Appendix A

Left-wing Socialist

Left-wing/socialist

Left-wing Left-wing

Left-wing/Feminist

Communist (affiliated)

Communist (affiliated)

Between social democrat and socialist

Left-wing (“Unstable”)

Self-political definition

M. A./PhD Candidate University University

University University

University

Associate degree

University

University

Associate degree

Educational Status

F F

F F

M

M

M

M

M

FERAY AYSEGUL

SEYHAN YELIZ

HAMIT

IRFAN

MANSUR

ZAHIT

MUSTAFA

Gender

46

48

51

57

48

50 50

53 52

Current Age

16

18

21

27

18

20 20

23 22

Age in 1980

Retired/ Business development/ Organiser Psychologist/ Officer Retired/ Journalist, writer

Close to a nationalist party Idealist/Turkish nationalist (affiliated)

Independent (neither right nor left)

Retired Idealist (affiliated) House wife/Political Turkish nationalistparty admin. idealist (affiliated) RIGHT WING MEN Journalist/ Democrat Columnist Small retailer Idealist

Idealist Idealist

Self-political definition

RIGHT WING WOMEN Retired House wife

Occupation

Social Characteristics of the Sample Right-wing

The Weight of the Past: Memory and Turkey’s 12 September Coup

High School

M. A.

University

College

University

University University

College High school

Educational Status

207

F

F

F

F

F

M

M

M

M

M

GUNAY

SERMIN

NURTEN

LEYLA

BURHAN

MURAT

MUMTAZ

TURAN

VELI

Gender

SENGUL

208

70

53

60

45

45

69

60

58

50

63

Current Age

Retired

Retired

Retired

Retired

Retired

40

23

30

25

15

Retired

Retired/small retailer

Public admin.

Engineer/businessman

Retired/estate agent/musician

Social democrat/moderate

University

University (military)

Social democrat/(Kemalist) nationalist

University

Secondary school

University

Social democrat

Social democrat

College

University

Left-wing

University

Social democrat

University

University

Left-wing (“Not extreme”)

Social democrat

Left-wing

Educational Status

Moderate left

NON-POLITICALLY AFFILIATED MEN

39

30

28

20

33

Age in Occupation Self-political definition 1980 NON-POLITICALLY AFFILIATED WOMEN

Social Characteristics of the Sample Non-politically affiliated

Appendix A

APPENDIX B PARTICIPANTS’ PERSONAL EXPERIENCES OF OPPRESSION

Name

GULAY ZEYNEP

Personal Experience of Oppression Left-wing Gender Age Political Experience of Oppression of affiliation Self and Close Ones (Imprisonment, Discharge, Arrest, Exile, Fugitiveness due to danger of arrest, Disqualification for Official Vacancy, Loss of Close Ones) F 54 Left-wing Arrest, Imprisonment, Discharge and Disqualification for Official Tenure F 53 Left-wing Arrest and Imprisonment

CIHAN

F

54

Left-wing

GUNSELI

F

60

Left-wing

Short-term Fugitiveness and Disqualification for Official Tenure N/A

YAPRAK

F

50

Left-wing

N/A

METIN

M

54

Left-wing

Arrest and Imprisonment

HASAN SABAHATTIN

M M

55 52

Left-wing Left-wing

TAHSIN

M

54

Left-wing

Fugitiveness and Arrest Fugitiveness, Arrest and Imprisonment (Long-term) Fugitiveness

210

Name

FERAY AYSEGUL SEYHAN YELIZ HAMIT IRFAN MANSUR ZAHIT MUSTAFA

Appendix B Personal Experience of Oppression Right-wing Gender Age Political Experience of Oppression of Self Affiliation and Close Ones (Imprisonment, Discharge, Arrest, Exile, Fugitiveness due to danger of arrest, Disqualification for Official Vacancy, Loss of Close Ones) (Husband) Imprisonment F 53 Rightwing F 52 RightLoss of close ones (two brothers, wing before the coup) F 50 Right(Husband-to-be) Imprisonment wing F 50 Right(Husband) Occasional Fugitiveness wing and Imprisonment Fugitiveness (Long-term) and M 48 Rightwing (Brother) Imprisonment M 57 RightImprisonment wing M 51 RightImprisonment wing M 48 RightImprisonment wing Imprisonment M 46 Rightwing

The Weight of the Past: Memory and Turkey’s 12 September Coup

Name

SENGUL GUNAY SERMIN NURTEN LEYLA BURHAN MURAT MUMTAZ TURAN VELI

211

Personal Experience of Oppression No political Affiliation Gender Age Political Experience of Oppression of Self and Affiliation Close Ones (Imprisonment, Discharge, Arrest, Exile, Fugitiveness due to danger of arrest, Disqualification for Official Vacancy, Loss of Close Ones) F 63 No N/A political affiliation F 50 No N/A political affiliation F 58 No N/A political affiliation F 60 No N/A political affiliation F 69 No Arrest (short-term) political affiliation M 45 No N/A political affiliation M 45 No (Brothers) Imprisonment political affiliation M 60 No Discharge and Disqualification for political Official Tenure, (subsequent) Exile affiliation M 53 No Discharge political affiliation M 70 No Discharge political affiliation