CES EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN AND EUROPEAN STUDY GROUP
RESOLVING TURKEY’S KURDISH ISSUE: A PATHWAY TO EU MEMBERSHIP
A Discussion with Dr. Levent Koker April 21, 2015
The Eastern Mediterranean and Europe Study Group at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University brings together scholars, policymakers, and practitioners with expertise on the Eastern Mediterranean region – Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian Territories, and Turkey. This Study Group focuses, in particular, on how contemporary geopolitical and cultural factors are reshaping the dynamic, reflexive relationship between the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe.
This event was made possible with the generous support of the Embassy of the Republic of Cyprus in Washington, D.C.
Eastern Mediterranean and Europe Study Group
Resolving Turkey’s Kurdish Issue: A Pathway to EU Membership Overview Turkey has been searching for a new Constitution, which is also a search for a new polity. Resolving the Kurdish issue and ‘EU conditionality’ have been the main motives behind this search. There exists, however, an “impasse” caused by a “nationalist” polarization in the political public sphere. That is to say that Turkey has been divided between Islamist-nationalism (AKP) and Kemalist-nationalism (CHP/MHP), both of which are not conducive for resolving the Kurdish issue on multiculturalist democratic grounds that will reinforce Turkey’s prospects for full EU membership. This talk will provide a critical examination of this situation of “nationalist impasse” and an evaluation of the key role of the Kurdish political movement on the way to constructing a new democratic polity in Turkey.”
SPEAKER Dr. Levent Koker
Professor of Public Law, Atilim University Law School, Ankara
CO-CHAIRS Dr. Elizabeth H. Prodromou
Visiting Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution, The Fletcher School for Law & Diplomacy, Tufts University
Dr. Payam Mohseni
Iran Project Director and Fellow for Iran Studies, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government
Minda de Gunzburg CENTER FOR EUROPEAN STUDIES at Harvard
TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS In 2001, before the AKP’s ascent to power, Turkey made constitutional amendments to enhance the rights and freedoms it granted to its citizens in the framework of its legal system, but more importantly in 2004 probably one of the rare moments of a coalescence between the main opposition parties CHP and the party in power then, AKP, made an amendment in Article 90 of the Turkish constitution and added a clause stipulating that if there is a conflict between international human rights agreements duly put into effect and statute laws, then the international agreements would prevail over them. So this, actually, from a legal and political point of view [was] an acceptance of a transitional phase to post-national or even supranational constitutional agreement. But the authors of this amendment were not aware of what they had been doing I think at that time because what I’m going to emphasize today is that Turkey has been struggling for the past 8 or 9 years since the crisis we had in presidential elections of 2007 in the parliament, Turkey has been trying to write a new constitution and the final attempt to re-write the Turkish Constitution to give the country a totally new one. The attempt started in late 2011 but failed, and the constitutional drafting committee in the parliament dissolved itself in late 2013 because Turkish politics is marked by the dominance of nationalist ideologies and what I would like to call a nationalist impasse is now existing in the Turkish political case.
In order to explain what I mean by nationalist impasse let me refer to a very recent incident in parliament. As we all know, we are coming close to the centennial commemoration of the Armenian genocide in the 24th of this month and every time the Turkish government gets very excited [to see] who is going to use this “g-word,” and I am the one using it now but I’m not an important person, I’m just an academic so it’s not very influential for any governmental purposes but if President Obama for example uses this g-word it will be some kind of an earthquake effect and that’s what the nationalists think. However, the Pope referred [to it], in a very indirect way actually, he said “usually referred as genocide, the first genocide of the 20th century” which is a very modest claim, in fact I argue that it was the first genocide of the 20th century. There happened other genocides maybe in the past, the way this g-word is discovered by Lemkin, I think one of the factual references was this Armenian massacre, or tragic event called Medz Yeghern by our Armenian friends in the past became a model for the conceptualization of genocide.
So, three political parties in the Turkish Parliament with the exception of the pro-Kurdish, now kind of leftist Kurdish coalition-type organization, HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party), they didn’t sign this declaration but all the parties of the establishment, I would say, the party in power, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Republican People’s Party (CHP) and Nationalist Action Party (MHP), they all signed the declaration, criticizing the Pope for his reference to the Armenian massacre of 1915 as the first genocide of the 20th century. Otherwise, if you leave aside this unity of the party groups in the parliament, they are kind of polarized in their other political views. When it comes to issues like the Armenian issue or maybe we can include the Cyprus issue for that matter they might somewhat get united around what they call national interests but when it comes to internal politics, how to define nationality, how to define the Turkish political system, the rights and individuals, Turkey’s relation with Europe, Turkey’s position and its obligations in the Council of Europe, or Turkey’s prospective full membership in the EU, they have different viewpoints, different perspectives. Sometimes they really polarize on certain issue that make the conflict more acute and endanger democracy in that sense. And resolving the Kurdish issue is a critical point where these nationalist positions somewhat unfold.
Before going into the details of what I have said, let me explain very briefly what I mean by nationalism. Nationalism is a term with many different meanings as you know, but here I use Ernest Gellner’s definition of nationalism as a political ideology which aims at establishing or maintaining the unity of the nation as cultural entity and the state as a political entity. So, I think he used to refer to this formula as a kind of marriage, nation being the bride and the state being the groom, I don’t why it was that way but that was what the late professor Gellner was referring to. In the Turkish case, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the early 20th century, there was actually a kind of bureaucracy, a relatively intact political apparatus that was able to govern the society within the newly drawn by the 1923 Lausanne treaty, but the definition of the nation was under dispute because in the early 1920s, the founders of the
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RESOLVING TURKEY’S KURDISH ISSUE - A PATHWAY TO EU MEMBERSHIP... Transcript of Proceedings
Turkish Republic, not only Kemal Ataturk but others in the grand national assembly at that time, they were trying to redefine the Turkish nation in accordance with the religious notion of the Arabic word Millet in the Ottoman past, because Millet meant a religious community in the Ottoman system, and in the 1920s when the grand national assembly which was then carrying out the national struggle, as they called it that way, “milli-mücadele”, nation meant for them Islam. The Islamic people or the individuals who are Muslims were members of the nation and this is how the Lausanne treaty was written and then signed by the parties. According to the Lausanne treaty, there was a Part 3 which [includes] protection of minorities and minority in the Turkish context means non-Muslim. So Turkish citizens who are not Muslims are members of minority groups and they are the only minorities, thus if you are a Muslim then you cannot be deemed as minority, according to Lausanne and the Turkish positive law.
Almost three months after the signing of Lausanne, Turkey proclaimed a Republic. Turkey became a Republic in October 1923, the Lausanne Treaty was signed in July 1923 and after the proclamation of the Republic, a new constitution was written in 1924 and citizenship had to be defined. I really want to stress this point, because the definition of citizenship is a large part of what you understand by nation as a cultural unity in the sense Gellner defined the term nationalism, so how the Republicans, the founders of the Republic in the 1924 constitution defined the nation, the Turkish nation, what they said or which terms they used. Article 88 of the first constitution of the Republic says that every individual belonging to the people living in Turkish territory is considered to be a Turk regardless of his/ her race or religion but only a Turk in regard to citizenship, nothing else. So when you look at the assembly proceedings, the speeches made when this article was debated in the parliament, in the initial formulation of this article, “in regard to citizenship” clause did not exist. The initial clause was that every individual living on Turkish soil is considered to be a Turk regardless of its race or religion or ethnicity or religion, so everybody is classified as a Turk. But in the assembly, some deputies objected and said that we cannot call an Armenian or a Greek or a Jew a Turk just because they are living in Turkey, for they are Armenians, Greeks, or Jews by origin, but for Muslims no problem, Muslims are Turks, but non-Muslims, they have their own ethno-religious identifications. So we have to have another clause here, every individual living on Turkish soil is regarded as a Turk, only in regard to citizenship, i.e. regarding the legal bond with the state, so Turk is a name given to the legal bond between a non-Muslim individual to the state, so it’s your identity card. It says you’re Turkish because you’re a Turkish citizen but you are a Jew or a Greek, and this has some practical consequences in the treatment of non-Muslims in due course. That’s another story, a story all sorts of discrimination.
Now the question is: what happened to the Kurds? Kurds are not non-Muslims, they are Muslims. So Kurds became Turks. So this is part of why Kurds rebelled in 1925 under the banner of “we want the caliphate back, we want sharia back” which is deemed to be a reactionary movement of the feudal eastern and southeastern Agha, or landlord regimes, but which was in fact an uprising of maybe a Kurdish nationalist movement in the making perhaps.
So, this is one important aspect of how Turkish nationalism came about in the beginning because there is an ambivalence here. What do we mean by Turkish nation, is it an ethnic definition or is it a religious definition? If we leave aside the non-Muslim minorities whose rights are protected by the Lausanne Treaty, an example can be given on this issue on the ban on using the Kurdish language as a language of instruction in primary and secondary schools in Turkey or even in higher education as mother tongue. According to the current constitution’s Article 42, no language other than Turkish can be used in schools as a language of instruction for Turkish citizens as their mother language, but we all know there are significant numbers of people in Turkey whose mother languages are not Turkish, as referred in the Lausanne treaty they are regarded as “Turkish citizens of non-Turkish speech”. These are not only non-Muslims but they are Muslims of non-Turkish speech whose mother tongues are different and the largest group of which are the Kurds.
So, acceptance of the Kurdish language as a distinct language can be used in public has been a very recent phenomenon. Beginning with the establishment of the Republic, oppressive measures against the use of Kurdish language in public as part of assimilationist policies came about to culminate under the military regime of 1980 which entrenched a kind of outright ban on using Kurdish language in broadcasting or publication, even in telephone comPage 2
Minda de Gunzburg CENTER FOR EUROPEAN STUDIES at Harvard
munications and prisons for example, you cannot communicate if you are a prisoner with your mother in Kurdish but the mother doesn’t know anything but Kurdish, so, like many human rights violations, it’s very inhumane. We learn of these incidents, how nationalism developed in Turkey and the way the people think of nationalism and these political groups in parliament, three of them already mentioned, I want to stress again that the HDP is an exception as it was in its attitude regarding the Armenian genocide issue, but the other three parties, the AKP, CHP, and MHP, they all share the common nationalist perspective as to the integrity of the nation together with the state. But, how can we explain, then, if this is the case, the differences between these three political groups? Is it possible to argue that this explanation is rooted in the initial ambiguity regarding the definition of nationhood. As I said, there was this ambiguity between ethnic and religious dimensions of national culture rendered uncertain how the state would define the new nation in the process of nation building.
So we have two broad approaches regarding the definition of national culture in Turkey, one is the Islamic definition, Turks are Muslims, and Muslims are Turks so far as the population in Anatolia are concerned. This includes the Kurds obviously as well, so if there is a problem, the current government, the Justice and Development Party coming from an Islamist political background whose Islamist political agenda has gained more visibility recently, does not have much difficulties in accommodating itself to the demands of the Kurdish groups. What do the Kurdish groups want? Actually, they make two important demands from the political sphere in Turkey. One is the recognition of Kurdish as a mother language, instruction in mother language, maybe recognition of Kurdish at a more progressive level as a second official language in certain regions in Turkey like the Spanish example, but this latter demand is not much voiced. The only recognition demand is education, Kurdish as an educational language and a language of public activities or transactions in municipal or local administrative bodies. This is one thing. The other thing they demand is some degree of local autonomy which the Kurds prefer to call “democratic autonomy” and in this case, a reference is made to the European charter of the autonomy of local administration or local government which was signed and ratified by Turkey in the early 1990s with some reservations and the Kurds demand that these reservations must be lifted. So if you lift these reservations, the central administration or the central government of Turkey will be required to negotiate on issues of financial and personal sources of the local governments with the representatives of local people, not only in the Kurdish regions obviously but in all other parts of Turkey.
So, in view of these two demands: recognition of Kurdish language, which means recognition of Kurdish culture obviously, and at this juncture religion or belief enters the picture to make things more complicated: Kurds are Muslims but most Kurds are Shafi’is—it’s a different sect within the Sunni school—most non-Kurds are Hanafis and we have this, well I don’t know the details of this denominational distinction, for, I have to admit I’m not a very religious person nor an expert in theology, but the issue here is an issue of fundamental rights and liberties. In Turkey, with the establishment of the Republic, the old Ottoman office of Shaykh al-Islam is abolished and in spheres of morality, prayers, and other religious practices, the authority is given to the hands of a general directorate of religious affairs which is attached to the office of the Prime Minister and this is still going on, and it has caused problems for Shafi’i Kurds as well who don’t want to be dominated by the practices of the “diyanet”, the religious directorate in the central administration. There also comes in the Alevi issue in Turkish politics which is also one of the main dimensions of cultural pluralism in Turkish politics.
So the resolution of this Kurdish issue based on these demands requires a total re-writing of the Turkish constitution. Why? Because, from a practical point of view, although the existing1982 constitution has been amended seventeen times it hasn’t resolved any substantial issue in Turkish politics. Maybe these amendments helped for us in Turkey to encounter in a more open manner that these kinds of issues do exist and we have to strive more and make the constitution in a totally new manner to solve them. The Turkish constitution, on the other hand, has a very firm nationalist base: if you read the preamble of the Turkish constitution it begins with the claim that the constitution determines the eternal existence of the Turkish nation and the Turkish state which are kind of regarded as sacred entities, so this doesn’t fit into “the concept of constitution”, because constitutions don’t determine states, they restrict and put limitations on states to protect individuals’ rights and freedoms. So, the rule of law and constitutions are concepts that go hand in hand, the definition of the state as a sacred entity to be protected eternally is not something that we expect from a constitutional document.
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RESOLVING TURKEY’S KURDISH ISSUE - A PATHWAY TO EU MEMBERSHIP... Transcript of Proceedings
The constitution defines itself on nationalist grounds. It refers to the sacredness of the state and the nation unity, etc. but on top of that the constitution refers to “Ataturk nationalism,” I think you all know Ataturk in the founder of the modern Turkish Republic and Ataturk’s nationalism is something that is referred to in the constitution, but no definition of this nationalism is given. We have to look into how the judicial practices define this term and when we look at these practices especially the jurisprudence of the Turkish constitutional court, this is defined as the existence, protection of a unitary state, a unity of territory, some degree of decentralization is permitted but regional autonomy etc. will be against the constitution from this perspective. So, like the ban on wearing headscarves is unconstitutional, etc. From these jurisprudential elements, we arrive at a relatively modernized definition of Turkishness as entrenched in the constitution. Now, this modernized form of Turkish nationalism with, from a Kurdish perspective, strong ethnic Turkish emphasis creates problems obviously but this modern Turkish nationalism is defended in the political sphere by the CHP. I don’t know if they have made any substantial changes recently but when I look at their election declarations, made public last week, I think they don’t mention education in mother tongue or they just mention that we are going to permit each Turkish citizen to learn the language of his or her mothers, but this is something that is already permitted thanks to AKP’s reforms. But this modern form of nationalism is secularist, ethnic based Turkishness, etc. This is represented by CHP and its obviously large constituency which is about a third of the Turkish electorate.
Then we have this AKP type of political position, the reformism of the AKP fits into this picture of its Islamist tendencies because this Ataturkist nationalist official ideology of the Turkish state is challenged by the Islamist government now so that can explain why or how AKP made some reforms permitting for example use of Kurdish language in, for example, broadcasting. We have a TV broadcasting channel now broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in Kurdish. We now have ministers, for example, in Turkey who are coming from Kurdish background. The minister of finance for example who is a very educated man, educated in London, England I think and married to an English lady on top of that if I’m not gossiping. And he made a two hour presentation in Turkish Kurdish TV in Kurdish because he’s of Kurdish background and can speak Kurdish. These are the things that are very new for the Turkish public and in the beginning when AKP made this reform regarding the Kurdish language, its use in public broadcasting, etc. it was also approved by the chief of general staff, one of the representatives of the Turkish army which probably lost its age-old power in Turkish politics but still it was somewhat influential in those days and the representatives of the general staff, he said broadcasting in Kurdish broadcasting is [an] un-harmful cultural opening. So, they approved. So, from this statement we understand they might be harmful cultural openings which AKP doesn’t touch and is not willing to touch. AKP has its limits.
Regarding the issues experienced by non-Muslims: Many non-Muslim foundations face issues regarding property rights, i.e. issues stemming from the 1936 confiscation or issues regarding the ban on their acquisition of new real estate. The Halki Seminary (the orthodox educational institute of the Patriarchate) issue, the issue of its forced closure in early 1970s, on the other hand, remains still unresolved. Regarding these issues, the AKP made some progress, some reforms, we all know that. This does not mean that AKP is seeing non-Muslim Turkish citizens as proper citizens but they see them citizens with some defects but still citizens so they have to be given some rights. But citizens with certain defects is not their language, their language is the old language, the “zhimmis,” they were treated as zhimmis in the Ottoman past, which is sometimes mentioned as a sign of Ottoman tolerance to different groups but zhimmi is not a proper term we want to use in a current rule of law constitutional state. AKP in its reformist days, it was able to make reforms giving rights to certain disadvantaged or oppressed groups within this political Islamist framework of its ideological background whereas CHP was against all these reforms in the past, now they somewhat fluctuate. I don’t know what their exact position is and they don’t say much. They have an Armenian candidate in Istanbul on top of the list, probably she is going to be elected but still there are some voices within the party saying that you cannot speak like this lady, for example. They are trying to discipline her and her statements in public. We’ll see, the CHP is trying to change but cannot accommodate all of the changes.
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Minda de Gunzburg CENTER FOR EUROPEAN STUDIES at Harvard
The MHP on the other hand is an influential political force in Turkish politics and actually that party, the Nationalist Action Party, a party of the far right if I may use the old cleavages, the old terminology, it is the party of the far right, its name is nationalist but it defines nation as what we call a Turko-Islamic synthesis, it is not as secular and as modern as CHP and the Kemalists are but it is not coming from an Islamist background like the national view perspective. So it has a kind of synthesizing—Turkic tribes, before they came to Anatolia, the Oghuz Turks, etc. these were all ancient Turkic tribes, they were obviously polytheistic in their religious beliefs, as he MHP explains it. They also believed in a sky-god, a god up in the sky, something like that, and that shows that even before Turks converted to Islam, the Turkic tribes, they were Muslims but they were not knowing themselves that they were Muslims, etc. but Islam was there, not historically. But these are ideological anomalies when you enter into synthesizing effects as such but still the party, this nationalist action party always makes its choice on the side of the status quo so it is perfectly in the service of the establishment and so it’s against the AKP’s “Islamism” and other demands that they are trying to change the constitutional system.
So we have the HDP now, the fourth major group and which somewhat stands out as an exceptional force in Turkish politics, it’s now gaining strength as the public opinion polls suggest but you never know, there are always some mistakes made the researchers but in the last presidential elections, the leader of this party Demirtas, garnered some 9.8% vote which is slightly below the 10% threshold if the threshold can be overcome by this party then we’ll see a major breakthrough in Turkish politics after the June 7th elections. If not, then if this party fails to overcome the threshold then AKP might garner enough seats to amend the constitution unilaterally albeit with the approval of the population [through] a referendum. In that case, we might see some severe debates or unwanted incidents in Turkish political life to block Erdogan’s ambitious hyper-presidentialism I would say. He wants presidentialism, he pronounces the word presidentialism but what he wants is hyper-presidentialism but he says it’s Turkish-style presidentialism, a more eloquent way of representing his ambitions I guess and this seems to be quite unlikely for the moment but we don’t know how an electorate of 52+ million would behave in the weeks to come.
Thank you very much.
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