Printer-friendly VersionBy Zafer Yörük
The Kurdish Globe
In the wake of the June 2007 general elections, euphoric Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan announced to his functionaries that he wanted Diyarbakir in the approaching municipal elections. Driven by their leader's desire, the AKP deputies adopted a line of systematic degradation of the DTP deputies in the Parliament. The AKP tried to force the Kurdish deputies to 'confess' and condemn from the Parliament bench the 'crimes' of the PKK publicly announcing that until this 'confession' is obtained they would carry on ignoring the existence of DTP representatives in the Parliament. AKP hostility against the Kurds reached to its peak in March 2008 particularly in Hakkari and Van, when the police opened fire on Newroz demonstrators, killing two and injuring many. Many children were arrested during the disturbances, and charged by the Turkish courts according to Anti-Terrorism Act. Erdogan declared at the time that child or adult whoever disturbed the order would be punished appropriately. The trial of hundreds of Kurdish children for charges of 'terrorism' continues, with dozens of them still held in prison for more than a year by now.
AKP's post-election strategy aimed to push DTP to the margins of political legitimacy and occupy their place as the 'proper' representatives of the Turkey's Kurdish population. This strategy has been pursued through a discourse of 'politics of service' presented as the opposite of 'identity politics'. The AKP was accusing the DTP of pursuing a blind line of identity politics in the expense of serving their electorate's interests, whereas the AKP was allegedly concerned exclusively with serving the Kurdish people. Being deployed abundantly by the AKP, the term 'service' has almost become an 'empty signifier', difficult to associate with a content or meaning beyond ambivalence. What 'service' included in practice were the distribution of coal, foodstuff and in some Kurdish provinces furniture, refrigerators and washing machines to the public by the government appointed governors. In addition to these 'charitable' or 'bribery' activities, 'politics of service' also contained a covered threat: if the Kurdish people voted for the DTP mayoral candidates in the local elections, the AKP controlled funds of the central government would never be available to them.
AKP's pre-election Kurdish Mania
The discourse of the 'politics of service' accompanied the AKP's transition from post-election depressive episode to the pre-election manic phase. While charity distributions by pro-Islamist government officials gained an unprecedented momentum in the Kurdish provinces, the Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan announced in a broken Kurdish accent the opening of the Turkish State Broadcasting Institute's new TV channel (TRT-6/ Shesh), which would exclusively broadcast in Kurdish. Allocating the Turkish state funds for Kurdish broadcasting was, according to Erdogan, had nothing to do with 'identity politics', but it should be perceived as another government 'service'.
AKP's 'service' discourse, consisting of the elements of 'divine bribery' and terrestrial threats, which boiled down in practice to the classical 'carrot and stick' tactics, backfired in the Kurdish provinces. In the municipal elections of 29 March 2009, the DTP won most of the Kurdish provinces, substantially increasing their vote, while the AKP failed to repeat their performance of July 2007 general elections.
AKP's post-election Depression leads to the Kurds' repression
It did not take long for the Prime Minister to announce the commencement of his government's predictable post-election stress disorder, or the 'depressive episode' of the AKP's ongoing bipolar disorder, by accusing the DTP functionaries in the Kurdish provinces with bullying and threatening the Kurdish electorate. The implication of this vengeance seeking statement has immediately materialized in a wave of arrests targeting DTP cadres around Turkey. The detainees included a number of top officials of the DTP's party structure along with many party officials and grassroots Kurdish activists, who are charged with clandestine PKK activities within the party.
While the shock of the DTP arrests and the Kurdish protests were still fresh, the news of the resignation of the Kurdish singer Rojin from TRT-Shesh has brought a new dimension to the political climate. Rojin's agreement to present the main day-time show of the TRT-Shesh had received extensive publicity, and therefore her resignation was also a significant event. Rojin declared on her resignation that the TV administration's attitude towards her had fundamentally changed after the elections and that she had been bullied, threatened and her authority as the producer and the presenter of the show had been breached by the administrative intervention.
While the launching of the TRT-Shesh had been welcomed by most of the Kurdish opinion leaders, the skepticism towards this development had also been expressed by the same circles. They pointed out the pessimistic possibilities of this channel turning into a government propaganda channel in an additional language, and of this development being an exclusive electoral investment, not expected to be lasting long. The Kurdish skepticism seems to be vindicated by the recent developments.
Diagnosis and Prospects
If the medical model of bipolar stress disorder helps us to explain the AKP's Kurdish policies particularly before and after elections, then a prediction of the developments of the near future also becomes possible. Predicting the future, however, requires a further diagnosis regarding the nature of AKP's 'politics of service'. Although the AKP has systematically denounced the line of 'identity politics', it should be noted that doing politics is impossible without appealing to certain identities, and therefore all politics is to a certain extent identity politics, or put in Althuserrian language, there is no outside of identity politics. It is therefore more appropriate to investigate the AKP's identity appeal concealed within their discourse of 'service', rather than concluding prematurely (as many AKP advisors do) that in the recent municipal elections the politics of service was defeated by DTP's identity politics.
Through many years in office, AKP has developed the posture of a conservative-liberal centre-right party. However, it is not an urban myth that this posture has been built around a backbone of political Islam. To pursue an analogy to its limits, if the liberalization of Turkey's political system is a programmatic expression of AKP's 'politics of service', then the Islamisation of Turkish society is the political implication of AKP's understated Islamic identity. The grammar of AKP's approach to the Kurdish question does not simply consist of a play of 'service' against 'identity' but it is derived mainly from the historical and universal discourse of political Islam, based on a belief that the feeling of attachment to a larger community of believers could override differences based on ethnic identity. To put in simpler discourse, the AKP has pursued deep down a certain type of identity politics towards the Kurdish electorate, calling the Kurds to unite with other ethnicities of Turkey under the extensive umbrella of being Muslim. It is precisely this call to Islamize in the expense of the freshly recognized Kurdish identity that has been decisively refused by Turkey's Kurds in the recent elections. The Kurdish people's message clearly emphasizes that they are not prepared to accept the call by any overriding identity politics, which has the potential to harm their Kurdish identity, for the award of which they had to sacrifice so much.
The AKP's post-election depression is therefore far deeper than it seems. It is not simply the loss of votes in the Kurdish provinces but the bankruptcy of the project of political Islam imagined by the AKP circles as capable of providing the appropriate cure for the wounds of the Kurdish conflict. The immense dimensions of this failure must be responsible for the traumatic perception of the prime minister and the AKP officials of their electoral failure, and the government's symptomatic aggressive turn against the representatives of Kurdish political identity. The DTP's electoral victory in the Kurdish provinces, regardless of its immediate political discourse and implications, indicates that the Kurdish people of Turkey are not prepared to compromise their invaluable Kurdishness as a political identity, no matter how sweat the carrot is and how mighty the stick might be.