Turkey's Kurds

Ali Kemal Özcan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134211296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Kurdish Worker's Party (PKK) is examined here in this text on Kurdish nationalism. Incorporating recent field-based research results and newly translated material on Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK's long-time leader; it explores the nature and the organizational working of the party, from its growth in the late 1970s to its recent shrinkage. A variety of issues are addressed including: * the views and philosophy of Abdullah Ocalan
* the successes and failures of the PKK in bringing about the Kurdish opposition in Turkey
* the role of PKK's philosophy of recruitment, organizational diligence, use of arms and other contextual factors in Kurdish resistance
* factors involved in the development of the nationalism of the Kurds in Turkey.The text also reappraises the Kurdish movement in Turkey and presents insights into the nature of Kurdish social structure, thinking, and the particularities of the Kurdish ethnic distinctness.

1 Nationalism

Distilling the Cultural and the Political

Societal historiography has been exceedingly fragile against the triumphant advances of history. This appears to be one of the greatest vulnerabilities of historiography with regard to the recorded affairs of humankind’s overall socio-political trajectory. The vast literature on the ‘twin’ concepts (nation and nationalism) represents an utterly victimized portion of this trajectory.

This chapter revisits general theorization on ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ to provide a conceptual framework for interpreting facts about the PKK. I also aim to escape the trap engendered by the ‘mongrelization’ of these main concepts as they concern my argument.

The literature is overwhelmingly engaged with the faces, types or taxonomies of the ‘elusive’ concept of nationalism. Here, I endeavour to single out the genuine face. A firm abstraction of the cultural from the political is necessary, I maintain, to distinguish nationalism as realpolitik from the needs and rights – and even deviancies – of ethnic masses. In order to achieve an understanding that can avoid the elusive aspects of nationalism, I argue that a total withdrawal of cultural devices from theories about nationalism is needed. The context of the debate, therefore, concerns itself with the working of national politics instead of its wording.

The PKK emerged as an illegal organization in the late 1970s, claiming a national liberation struggle for the Kurdish ‘nation’ within the official borders of Turkey. Its programme is a ‘Kurdicized’ copy of those customary communist parties that undertake a nation’s ‘national’ liberation as an ‘initial stage’ of the ultimate socialist revolution. The ideology by which the PKK formulates this initiative’s aims and objectives is a Middle-Eastern translation of traditional Marxist socialism. So for the purposes of interpreting the nature and dynamics of the ethnic resistance movement that the party generated and led, we should begin by outlining a general theoretical framework.

Insofar as this study’s primary unit of analysis is a political party that claims to be ideologically Marxist-socialist and programmatically undertaking a ‘national’ emancipation, we need to revisit the concepts of nation and nationalism alongside their communist conceptualization. By doing this, we will be able to outline the equivocal nature of the organization’s claims about its ‘national liberationism’ and ‘socialism’. This will, hopefully, sharpen our analytic focus – as the nature of Kurdish nationhood itself is also susceptible to further equivocalness.

Because the organization under study claims to be Marxist-socialist, the ‘national question’ of Marxism must also be incorporated. A great deal of theorization on ethnicity, nation and nationalism in the Marxist tradition excludes the ‘large’ nationalism – namely, the national politics of preexisting states for preserving and/or furthering their market interests in hinterlands or peripheries. Also, as an unavoidable logical extension of this, the nationalism of ‘small’ nations is generally evaluated as ‘progressive’ or ‘good’, and consequently the tradition has tempted to present nationalism in terms of a healthy/morbid dichotomy. This, in turn, has locked Marxists into the self-contained ‘enigma’ of the ‘national question’ for it has never been possible to distinguish the healthy from the morbid. It is thus my concern to ‘immunize’ my reasoning against the additional enigmas arising from the Marxist mainstream approach to a national question, as well as the ones already present in general conceptualizations about nation and nationalism.

When becoming involved in such a debate, it is important not to further complicate ‘vulnerable’ concepts, because the particular literature is not just confusing but also convoluted. The classification of ‘types’ of nationalism and a generally recognized consensual definition of the concepts continue to be deeply controversial – no matter how fast the literature grows. Because the central concepts are inherently problematic, the boundaries and main objectives of my arguments need to be stated here. I shall begin with a brief and selective combing of the conceptualizations offered by mainstream scholars in the field.

As a final introductory remark: despite the occasional overflows beyond modernity in various respects, it is overwhelmingly acknowledged that nations and nationalism are – either as contingently invented or unavoidably emergent – entities of modernity’s industrialization. Favouring neither the former nor latter accounts, I share the view about the time-line, and therefore do not find it a prerequisite to incorporate a discussion on segmental timing into the argument.

Distilling the ‘Mongrelized’ Twin Concepts of Modernity

Although they are largely elided, scholarly attempts to decouple the ‘twins’¹ do exist. David McCrone, in his recent attempt to focus sociological scrutiny on this subject, The Sociology of Nationalism, summarizes part of the problem by, first, alluding to the suggestive coupling statements by writers such as R. Miles, W. Connor, S. Bruce, L. Greenfeld and S. Hall. Of these, Connor – when justifying why he did not simply call his collection of essays ‘nationalism’ but ‘ethnonationalism’ – claims that ‘there is no difference if nationalism is used in its pristine sense’ (McCrone 1998: 22). Bruce draws lessons from the case of ‘Scottish nationalism’ by deducing that ‘it is precisely the lack of a single identity of a “people” with common ancestors, common language, shared religion and a glorious history which prevented nationalism emerging in Scotland when it was doing so in the twentieth century’ (ibid.: 22–23). Likewise, Greenfeld also couples ethnicity with nationalism, and says that

‘nationality’ became a synonym of ‘ethnicity’, and national identity is often perceived as a reflection or awareness of possession of ‘prim-ordial’ or inherited characteristics, components of ‘ethnicity’, such as language, customs, territorial affiliation, and physical type.

(Cited by McCrone 1998: 23)

According to McCrone’s interpretation, Miles more radically argues that ‘“nations” have no independent existence outwith the discourse of nationalism’ – just as in the pairing of race and racism (ibid.: 25). In Anthony D. Smith’s work National Identity, this identity is defined and distinguished from the principal set of other identities by basing it on the ethnic entity of social man (Smith 1991: 19–42). Smith, however, devotes the larger share of the book to studying nation and nationalism, for he, too, inter-weaves the twin phenomena with the ethnic catalyst. In fact, the term ‘ethnicity’, McCrone reminds us, has been referred to as a social scientific concept ‘only in the mid-twentieth century’, and made its ‘official appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary as late as the 1970s’ (McCrone 1998: 24), although it is clear that this phenomenon began to steer the modern period of history over one and half centuries beforehand. In the face of these and many other similar arguments, Hall states that there is ‘a great deal of work to do to decouple ethnicity, as it functions in the dominant discourse, from its equivalence with nationalism’ (ibid.: 25).

In the wide-ranging debates on nation and nationalism, the competing arguments trying to distinguish or merge the cultural and political ‘components’ of the phenomenon occupy much space. Students of nation and nationalism will encounter, in Nairn’s metaphor, a Janus-like entanglement when plunging into the literature. We will come back to this. But before that, in order not to vacillate between the ‘twins’, it seems more viable to handle them one by one, and to begin with ‘nation’. A Turkish saying asks: ‘If meat starts to become smelly you salt it; if salt smells, what then do you do?’ Since disagreements arise about both concepts, we need, so to speak, to ‘decontaminate’ the ‘salt’ first.

Nation

The definition of ‘nation’ is more problematic among scholars than the question of ‘the nation’ (or the ‘national question’) itself as the emphatic politics of the past two centuries. Is an exhaustive definition of this elusive-evasive concept possible? This is the question that every author of a study endeavouring to address the subject begins by posing. The question is a simple but dazzling one: what is a nation?

Smith talks of ‘the chimera of universally valid, once-for-all definitions’ pursued by ‘earlier writers’ which, he believed, ‘were not pinning down the same elusive “essence”’ (Smith 1983: 165). McCrone complains about the absence of ‘neat definitions of key concepts’ at which ‘the student of nationalism can quickly become disillusioned’. He adds, ‘There simply is no agreement about what nationalism is, what nations are, how we are to define nationality’ (McCrone 1998: 3). Seton-Watson felt driven to conclude, ‘no “scientific definition” of a nation can be devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists’ (Seton-Watson 1977: 5). Anderson recalls this observation of Seton-Watson, while in search of support for his argument (Anderson, 1983: 13). While Nairn finds it a ‘by nature ambivalent’ phenomenon (Nairn 1981: 348), Gellner names it an ‘elusive concept’ (Gellner 1983: 7), and so forth. Or, from the same perspective expressed in reverse, Hobsbawm, in the final paragraph of his influential work Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, concludes that

‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ are no longer adequate terms to describe, let alone to analyse, the political entities described as such, or even the sentiments once described by these words.

(Hobsbawm 1990: 192)

So the central source of competing standpoints among social scientists and historians is the question of whether ‘nation’, as a societal phenomenon, is primarily a cultural entity facing back into history or a political entity based in the present with a futuristic outlook. Because of this divergence of views, it is vital to glance at the most condensed definitions by the recognized scholars in the field. This will hopefully show how to conceptualize the phenomenon and illustrate the concerns behind the shifting approaches to it, owing to the ‘evasiveness’, ‘elusiveness’ or ‘equivocalness’ of the concept ‘nation’. A juxtaposition of the main arguments – bearing the historical order in mind – will help us address the ‘question’ of the nation.

The Most Discussed Definitions of Nation

In his seminal lecture in 1882, ‘What is a nation’, Ernest Renan provides the most realistic, if not revealing, picture of the ‘nation’ as the realpolitik of the adolescent bourgeoisie. Even if his standpoint is characterized by a vindication of the French Revolution in the face of the Germanic nationalism that overemphasized ethnic-primordial ties, the approach is free of self-deception and the temptation to play with the facts. Renan eliminates the widely recognized criteria and reduces them to a single impetus for the invention of a nation. Elements such as ‘race, language, religious affinity, interests, geography and military exigency’ are ‘insufficient’. That is, they are by no means compulsory prerequisites of a nation: a soul is what makes nations:

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which strictly speaking are just one, constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the common possession of a rich legacy of memories; the other is the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to continue to value the heritage that has been received in common.

(Renan, in Woolf 1996: 57–58)

Renan, while implying the cultural background of the ‘soul’ by emphasizing the ‘common legacy’ that existed in the ‘past’ of a would-be nation, rewrites a slight racial base. Nonetheless, in context, he tends to state that, if needed, a nation may well be imagined, manufactured and invented from a collection of ethnicities in a newly discovered land or in newly made satellites with a newly proclaimed official language made of all ethnies’ languages.

For Renan, the determinants attributed to the pasts of a nation, race (in the sense of ethnic stock) and language are also artefacts. ‘Race, as we historians understand it, is something that is made and unmade … and Europe’s first nations are essentially mixed blood.’ He continues: ‘nothing is more false’ than languages, to which additional political importance is attached by almost all scholars, ‘as signs of race’ (Renan, in Woolf 1996: 54, 55). To sum up, nations are politically and socially constructed communities by ‘strictly one’ impetus – a soul, a spiritual principle in Renan’s definition.

Otto Bauer, one of the earliest theoreticians on the ‘national question’ in the Marxist tradition, defines the nation in terms of ethnic-primordial roots – just in the sense of cultural natio independent of any political aspect. He calls this ‘a psychological theory of nation’ (Bauer, in Woolf 1996: 78), from which Stalin derives his notorious ‘spiritual’ definition. Bauer, in effect, defines ethnicity but calls it ‘nation’. ‘A nation’s inherited qualities are nothing other than the sedimentation of its past, its history frozen, so to speak’, according to Bauer (ibid.: 61). He thereby reaches the ‘condensed’ definition of his conceptualization: ‘The nation is the totality of people bound by the community of destiny in a community of character’ (ibid.: 71). When one replaces the ‘nation’ with ‘ethnicity’, or adds the suffix ‘ality’ to it, then no questions remain. But the essay’s title is ‘The Nation’ and it is subtitled ‘The Concept of Nation’ before the formulation above appears. Moreover, Bauer traces the nation as far back as our earliest humanization from an anthropological perspective, by relying upon Marx’s teaching of materialistic conception:

A nation does not come into being at the early stage at which men merely seek their food without having to work for it and support themselves by simply appropriating or occupying ownerless property they find, but instead at the stage where man extracts the goods he requires from nature by labour. The emergence of a nation and the special characteristic of each nation is thus determined by people’s mode of labour, by the means of labour they deploy, by the productive forces they control and the relation of production they enter into. It is Karl Marx’s historical method which has enabled us to solve the great task of understanding the emergence of every single nation, as part of mankind’s battle with nature.

(Bauer, in Woolf 1996: 64)

The argument proceeds with little involvement in the cultural and political debate. This is because he is engaged in a discussion about rights (of self-determination) for the ‘oppressed nations’. He devotes the rest of his argument to the conceptualization of ‘national sentiment’ and ‘national consciousness’. But we should not solely attribute his conception of nation ‘as a community of culture’ (ibid.: 69) to Marxist understanding. For example, the views of Williams, a radical anti-nationalist historian with a pro-Marxist approach, are in sharp contrast to Bauer’s:

Nations have not existed from Time Immemorial as the warp and the woof of human experience. Nations do not grow like a tree; they are manufactured. Most of the nations of modern Europe were manufactured during the nineteenth century; people manufactured nations as they did cotton and shirts.

(Williams, in Woolf 1996: 192)

This is Stalin’s definition of ‘nation’ which, despite his harsh critique of Bauer, was copied from Bauer’s psychological theory: ‘A nation is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture’ (Stalin 1936: 8; italics as original).

Stalin arrives at the definition above following a sequential set of four ‘characteristic features’: language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up or the ‘spiritual complexion of the people … which manifests itself in peculiarities of national culture’ (ibid.: 7). It is not easy to situate the definition in either cultural or political categories, as it seems to be a ‘made to measure’ definition in search of ‘criteria’ that comply with the ‘right of self-determination’.

More interestingly, it is followed by what we might call a mechanical or mathematical condition. ‘It must be emphasized that none of the above characteristics is by itself sufficient to define a nation. On the other hand, it is sufficient for a single one of these characteristics to be absent and the nation cease to be a nation’ (ibid.: 8; emphases added). It also must be emphasized that this well-known essay by Stalin was arranged under Lenin’s tutelage – and Lenin’s pragmatic politics – for the purpose of vindicating the ‘right of self-determination for nations’ which was believed to overcome the ‘national question’. The essay is crucial, not because of its scholarly merit but because the politics and intellectual circles of the ‘communist world’ were dominated and guided by it until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The next clear political conception of nation is presented by the political theorist Elie Kedourie, with no reference to an ethnic ingredient – like Renan. ‘A nation came to be understood as that body of persons who could claim to represent, or to elect representatives for, a particular territory at councils, diets, or estates’ (Kedourie 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Nationalism: distilling the cultural and the political
• 2. The seeds of Turkey’s Kurdish question
• 3. Enter the PKK
• 4. The discourse and objectives of the PKK
• 5. Sources of motivations: the organization and the individual
• 6. The rise and fall of the PKK: questions, confrontations and the impasse
• 7. Conclusion
• 8. Epilogue: apparent obscurity
• Tables
• Appendix 1: Questionnaire
• Appendix 2: The basic constitutional schema of the PKK
• Appendix 3: List of self-immolations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index