A 'Discourse of Truth' from the Turkish State on the Kurds

[Published in French on susam-sokak.fr on January 19, 2013]

At the end of April 1998, the General Staff of the Turkish Army organized, on the premises of the Ziraat Bank on Istiklal Street in Istanbul, an exhibition on "The Turkish Armed Forces in their fight against terrorism", which aimed to denounce the violence of the "terrorist organization" – namely, the PKK. Visitors were given a document printed on glossy paper entitled "How the terrorist organization deceives our people". There is no mention of any publisher or printer, but since it was distributed as part of an exhibition organized by the army, whose "guides" were officers, there is no doubt about its origin. Four pages of texts, several photos, and a map: the whole can be considered as a discourse of the army, one of these "discourses of truth" of which Foucault speaks in his lecture at the Collège de France on January 14, 1976: "Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power” ¹.

1 "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France, 5). New York, Picador; First edition (December 1, 2003), 336 pages. Trans. David Macey. Foucault's lecture is available in English on https://archive.org/stream/01.MichelFoucaultSocietyMustBeDefended/01.%20Michel%20Foucault%20-%20Society%20must%20be%20defended_djvu.txt (accessed on November 22, 2022).

A senior officer shows President Demirel the exhibition (Türkiye, April 26, 1998).

Anyway, the state origin of the document is revealed by the very place of its distribution, but also by the use of "we" (biz) or other possessive forms (“our” – expressed in Turkish by the suffix -miz and its variants), which create, between the enunciator (addressor) and the reader (addressee) a community made of all the elements herewith connoted.

The document's texts all begin with an invocation that I prefer to translate in an unusual form to remain closer to Turkish: “Our dear brothers!” (Sevgili kardeşlerimiz), “Our dear fellow citizens!” (Sevgili vatandaşlarımız), and above all “Our great people!” (Yüce halkımız) and “Our great nation!” (Yüce milletimiz). Turkish leaders of all levels use such phrases when addressing citizens they rule, formulations that denote the enunciator's high rank.

The list of the other words connoted by the possessive form is highly interesting. They are: "state", "constitution", "security forces", "homeland", "investors"; "combat", "village guards", "blood"; "youth", "young girls", "honor", and "freedom". Thus the community is defined as a nation, a territory, and its people; and above all its state and its institutions that lead the fight to protect it. They form the overall "we" of the discourse, the overall community to which “we” do belong: "We will continue our fight", "We believe that our great people...", "Our great people are intimately linked to their state and their armed forces". The "others", designated as "they" (onlar), are always "the terrorist and separatist organization", its "elements" and "cadres", supported by external enemies, Armenian and Syrian. But the Kurds themselves cannot be referred to as "others", since they are part of the community defined as "our people" in the title; this is why part of the text aims to deny any otherness to the Kurds of Turkey.

The army's document includes three types of discourse: textual, iconographic, and cartographic.

The textual discourse denies the existence of a Kurdish otherness by resorting to the historical rhetoric of Turkish nationalism, as it was established at the end of the nineteenth century and taken up by Atatürk himself under the name of the "Turkish thesis of history" (Türk Tarih Tezi). The word "Kurd" would be the name of a Turkish tribe originating in Central Asia or in the upper Yenisei basin and thus would merely designate nomadism. Since the 1930s, the school tries to convince the citizens of the Republic of Turkey that everything coming from Central Asia is supposed to be Turkish. Accordingly, the Turkish origin of the Kurds would be undeniable; moreover, as asserted in the document, "they have the same customs, the same crafts, the same beliefs, the same culture".

This line of argument is completed by a map I believed to belong to a past era when Atatürk tried to reinterpret history in order to “prove” a Turkish origin for the world's civilizations and languages as a whole. It is a map of the Eurasian continent, entitled “The place of the Kurdish tribe in Turkish history and geography”. Since the 30s, it places the “original hearth” of the Turks south of Lake Baykal, from where the Turks have spread while founding empires, such as those of the Celestial Turks (Göktürk), the Seljuks and the Ottomans. This part of the argumentation is, to this point, in conformity with historical knowledge.

But the interpretation of the Kurds' history is more surprising. Mingled with the Turks, according to this map, the Kurds are supposed to have settled everywhere along the route of the Turks’ migrations, from south Siberia to Hungary, from Transoxiana to Mesopotamia. Their course is figured with arrows originating from their historical “hearth” (Kürt boyunun yurtları), which is, allegedly, the same as that of the Turks.

So in 1998, it was amazing for me to observe a reappearance of this pseudo-historical rhetoric, which in fact dates back to the years 1890 and became the official historical discourse in Turkey in 1931. But its use by the army at the end of the century is not really surprising, since the rhetoric has been almost continuously used in the polemic aiming to deny the existence of the Kurds as a people or a nation. In 1998, we were witnessing the third high point of the use of this rhetoric.

At first, the “Turkish History Thesis” was formalized in a series of history textbooks for high schools (1931), then approved by a solemn History Congress (1932), where historians, archaeologists, and linguists, Turkish and foreigners, exercised their complacency to the regime ¹. One year later, the "History Thesis" was applied to the Kurds by an intellectual of Kurdish origin, Şükrü Mehmet Sekban, in a pamphlet published first in French in 1933, La Question kurde. Sekban presents the allegedly Central Asian origin of the Kurds, their belonging to the Turkish or Turanian "race", and concludes: "In reality: Turk, Kurd, these are only first names, Touranian is our family name". This booklet was translated into Turkish and published in Turkey the same year and has been reissued constantly since 1979 ².

The second high point was during the 1980s, when many academics at the orders of the power were enlisted to apply the conclusions of the "History Thesis" even more precisely to the Kurds, to "prove" that the Kurds are Turks and that the Kurdish language is nothing but a Turkish dialect.

And finally, the same type of discourse reappeared at the very end of the 20^th century, in the context of war.

Such continuity proves that, nearly 70 years after its genesis, the pseudo-historical rhetoric of Atatürk's time was not forgone; that it could still serve the state in its will of denying any non-Turkish identity; and it conversely proves that the negation of the presence of any otherness (Armenian, Kurdish, Greek) in the Anatolian territory was indeed the primary function of the "History Thesis", as well as the aim of the Guide. The continuity of the discourse illustrates that of the cultural homogenization policy (historical, sociological, linguistic) and the negationism that accompanies it. Sociologist Ismail Beşikçi, one of Turkey's most persecuted intellectuals, was the first or one of the first to violate the taboo on this aspect of Atatürk's cultural policy by analyzing it from the perspective of the Kurdish question ³.

The other texts of the document deny any discrimination against the Kurds and assert that they are not second-class citizens, "as claims the separatist terrorist organization. (…) Regardless of their origin, our citizens are equal before the law. They can attend the schools of their choice - and they do. They can enter the profession they like - and they do. Nowhere, at no time, are they discriminated against. There are no obstacles or discrimination in employment or salaries. They benefit from the freedom of conscience, thought, and economic activity. On the contrary, our investors have all kinds of opportunities in southeast and east Anatolia thanks to our state. Would we want the separatist terrorist organization to turn us into slaves of communism by preventing our people in the region from benefiting from infrastructure, access to education, health services, and employment, in short, by starving them?".

"We do believe that our great people are not worthy to suffer an inhuman and anachronistic regime, and, together with our people, we will continue our fight until the destruction of the terrorist organization (…). Our citizens have lived together for so long, they are so intertwined that it is impossible to separate them (…). We swear on honor that we will protect our beautiful homeland and freedom until the last drop of our blood."

The other texts denounce the methods of the "organization" like the "so-called popular courts", the forced recruitment - including of young girls “offered to Armenian and Syrian cadres”, the racketeering of the population, the requisition of goods, clothing, equipment, the destruction of villages and schools, the murder of teachers and imams, and so on.

"They alone are responsible for the unsolved political murders (…). They kill people, under the guise of honor killings. They kill each other for rivalry and power, and then they accuse the state of these murders. They kill esteemed people because of their moral authority over the population. Dressed in police and army uniforms, they loot, destroy and burn down the villages. (...) Whereas conversely, the state does open roads, build factories, and provide water and electricity, education, health, and hygiene services. So the state's commitment to providing security ceaselessly ameliorates the living conditions of our people."

“(…) From now on, the separatist terrorist organization will not be able to deceive our people with its lies. Our great people are closely linked to their state and armed forces. No force will be able to hinder the development and progress of modern civilization.”

1 See my book Espaces et temps de la nation turque, CNRS-Éditions, 1997 (Online: https://books.openedition.org/editionscnrs/35303). And that of Büşra Ersanlı, İktidar ve Tarih. Türkiye'de "Resmi Tarih" Tezinin Oluşumu (1929-1937), [Power and History. The Genesis of the These of "Official History" in Turkey], Istanbul, Afa Yayınları, 1992, 230 p. (republished in 2003 by İletişim).

2 Sekban, Chukru Mehmed, La question kurde. Des problèmes des minorités, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1933. Sekban, Şükrü Mehmet, Kürt Meselesi Safahatından. Ottoman Turkish translation from French, with commentary by Refik Hilmi, Vatan Matbaası, 1935; id., Kürt Sorunu, Kon Yayınları, Ankara, 1979.

3 Beşikçi, İsmail, “Türk Tarih Tezi”, “Günes-Dil Teorisi” ve Kürt sorunu, Ankara, Çağlar Matbaası, 1977, 257 p. [Yurt Kitap-Yayın, Ankara, 1991; İsmail Beşikçi Vakfı, 2013]. See also https://www.susam-sokak.fr/article-le-reveil-du-kurdistan-imaginaire-d-ismail-besik-i-108170075.html Accessed on November 29, 2022).

The document opens with a photomontage that presents soothing and innocent images of people living in untroubled rurality, where women are dressed in traditional costumes, and little girls quietly spin wool. Some villagers dance the halay with a suited man who may be the local schoolteacher; other men bargain for a sheep at the market. These are clichés of a peaceful country, of a loyal population that is supposed to be only "deceived" by the "separatist terrorist organization".

The message is clear: the “organization” - never designated as the PKK – acts against people's life and against the state's engagement. Thus, two images are supposed to reveal the “true” face of the organization. On the one hand, destructed building materials; on the other hand, a woman lamenting near the corpses of three children. Contrastingly, two other photographs display the state's commitment: the Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates river (one of the largest in the world), and snowplows clearing a mountain road.

In 1998, the war was lasting since 14 years, and the damage was awful: tens of thousands of casualties, countless massacres, thousands of villages destroyed or emptied of their population, shantytowns increasingly growing in the cities, worrying militarization of the society by a proliferation of civil auxiliary groups known as the “village guards”, and, almost every day in the media, reports on soldier funerals. While the army was fighting in the southeast against the PKK, the Turkish secret services were hunting down his leader, Abdullah Öcalan (Apo), who had fled into Syria, then to Italy, and finally to Kenya, where he was abducted by a special commando in February 1999. Turkey then got the impression of entering a new era of peace.

Fifteen years have passed [when I wrote this article in 2013] since an orderly soldier handed me this document at the exhibition's exit on Istiklal Street, and the war is entering its twenty-ninth year. The "discourse of truth" produced by the state has not masked anything. It has been totally ineffective and destructive and has floated over the country like a phantom representation, a legend that only the extreme right wanted to believe in. Since 1998, the state imprisons more and more of those who refuse any manufactured "truth".

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