Citizenship Under The Ottomans and Kemalists

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Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists: How

the Kurds were excluded
Paul J. White
Convenor, Kurdish Study Group , Deakin University , Melbourne, Australia

Published online: 16 Nov 1999.
To cite this article: Paul J. White (1999) Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists: How the Kurds were excluded,
Citizenship Studies, 3:1, 71-102, DOI: 10.1080/13621029908420701
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Citizenship Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1999
Citizenship under the Ottomans and

Kemalists: How the Kurds were
Excluded
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PAUL J. WHITE
This article examines the relevancy of concepts of citizenship as tools for
analysing and comprehending minorities in ethnically complex societies. Taking
the Kurds of Turkey as a case study, this article traces the evolution of civil
society from the Ottoman empire through to the modern Turkish state, using a
human rights-based definition of citizenship. The changed situation of the Kurds
is shown in each epoch and appropriate conclusions are drawn. The complex
diversity among the Kurds themselves is also noted. Finally, an assessment is
made of the applicability of what could be called Weberian and Neo-Weberian
concepts of citizenship.
Studies of citizenship frequently discuss why a given society is an example of
a particular interpretation of the notion of citizenship. This present article, in
contrast, examines whether citizenship is relevant at all in better understanding
the Kurds of Turkey. Long denied national or even cultural rights, this group of
Kurdish people only won the legal right to speak their language in public in
1991.
For the purposes of this article, citizenship and human rights are understood
to be inevitably tied to the French revolution and the emergence of the nation
state. Human rights are considered to pertain to one's status as a human being,
probably expressed most succinctly in the United Nations's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Human rights were developed in the period since World
War II, for persons not having access to natural rights, such as children.
Individual rights are understood as rights pertaining to one's status as an
individual. The emergence of notions of citizenship was part of the modernisation of the nation state.
This article seeks to elucidate the problem of citizenship in ethnically complex
societies, taking the Kurds in Turkey as a case study. The article begins by
discussing different ways of defining citizenship, in order to show the potential
scope of the term 'citizenship' for this discussion. It is argued that a human
rights-based definition of citizenship is the most appropriate. Max Weber's work
relevant to citizenship is then considered, exploring his claim that citizenship
was limited to the West, at least in premodern societies, since factors given by
Weber might still be activeand relevanttoday. Then, moving further along
Paul J. White, Convenor, Kurdish Study Group, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.
1362-1025/99/010071-32 1999 Carfax Publishing Ltd
71
Paul J. White
the timeline, the emergence of modern, Kemalist, Turkey is sketched, and the
invention of Turkish citizenship discussed. The evolution of the Turkish state
from 1923 up to the present day is traced, and the citizenship status of the Kurds
in Turkey assessed, using relevant human rights-based criteria.
Forms of Citizenship
Political sociologists like Bryan S. Turner (1986), Ralf Dahrendorf (1994) and
others argue that concepts of citizenship both describe and explain the different
types of relations between individuals and groups (citizens) in a given society
and their state. Some of the more recent writers (see Donati, 1995, pp. 155-73)
on this concept stress the importance of distinguishing between Western varieties
of citizenship and forms of citizenship emerging in the developing countries like
Turkey.
In Western parliamentary democracies, therefore, freedom and equality have
arguably been the dividend flowing to individual citizens, in return for their
acceptance of certain fundamental behavioural norms. Citizenship has been the
result of an unspoken social contract between individuals and the statethe
product of a complex balancing of the evolving interests and powers of
individuals and authority.
Citizenship implies being part of a community, which itself determines what
the rights and obligations of persons joining it are. (Some political sociologists,
most notably Ralf Dahrendorf (1959, 1994), insist that citizenship is a relation
only between individuals and the state, but most scholars view it as something
linking discrete groups of peoplecommunitiesand the state.) The nature (and
quality) of citizenship in a given community is indicated by whom the latter
admits or excludes from such membership.
As the examination of concepts of citizenship has again become popular with
scholars, new theories of citizenship have emerged, based on different notions of
the rights and obligations of the respective players. Thomas H. Marshall (1965),
for instance, invented the term 'social citizenship', to describe his vision of
post-Depression, postwar welfare state economies, driven by Keynesian theories
and enjoying full employment. Marshall's theories have been critically defended
and extended by Arthur Okun (1975), and Bryan S. Turner (1986) against the
intellectual and political opponents of the welfare statethe economic 'monetarists', like Milton and Rose Friedman, who advocate 'economic citizenship'
(Friedman and Friedman, 1980). If social citizenship is based on strong state
intervention in the economy, then economic citizenship is its exact opposite.
Typically, this school of citizenship theorists favours the state opting out of all
economic roles, including welfare provision, to leave an open field for the market
to operate. State compulsion inhibits natural economic and social development,
they argue. Only liberal economic policies (in the purest form, no compulsory
taxes and no government subsidies) can deliver political freedom, because only
economic liberalism is based on the free cooperation between individuals.
The notion of reciprocal rights and duties generally remains a common thread
in several conceptions of citizenship. Of these, social citizenship and economic
citizenship, in particular, form two of the principal poles in this continuing
72
Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists

debatewith countless varieties of each. Within these very broad parameters, it
can be said that modern (post-1923) Turkey at first constructed a form of
citizenship which was fundamentally within the general parameters of social
citizenship, before shifting sharply to a type of economic citizenship from the
1980s onwards, following the apparent failure of the initial policy. A complex
new crisis has exploded, however, due to the inability of monetarism and
economic citizenship to cope with the extreme cultural, political and economic
issues currently animating Turkey's Kurds, through in some way incorporating
them into mainstream, that is, civil society. All this will be discussed further
below.
Given how it rests on strong state economic intervention, T.H. Marshall's
notion of 'social citizenship' might seem to be the most useful for understanding
the problems of a minority in modern Turkey. This is, after all, a state whose
founder, Atatiirk, remarked: 'Our people are naturally etatist because they see it
as their right to demand from the state all sorts of remedies to their problems'
(Shaker, 1995, p. 10). Turkey was based from the 1930s right through to as
recently as 1980 on virulent government economic intervention. Marshall
advanced highly refined theories of citizenship, regarding societies with modern,
Western developed economies, especially the former British welfare state. This
is hardly directly relevant to societies such as modern Turkey, however, which
has never managed to be a comparable 'welfare state'.
Turner and others who have sought to develop work like that of Marshall
further have pointed to some of the lacunae in modern citizenship theories, such
as the special problems of excluded minorities such as the Kurds of Turkey:
In general, these problems of minority groups can be seen as one
version of the problem of cultural minority status in a worldpolitical system which is still largely organized around states.
Stateless people (such as the Kurds) aboriginals and cultural
minorities fall outside of the paradigm or institutions generated by
the state. (Turner, 1986, p. 14)
Turkey is a paradigmatic case of what Turner (1986, p. 16) calls 'the limitations
of citizenship in ethnically complex societies', which he believes shows 'that a
new discourse of human rights ... may be required to transcend the difficulties
of contemporary nationalist polities'. Turner also remarks on the difficulty in
separating 'the debate about citizenship from a range of related issues such as
the nature of democratic participation, the analysis of social rights, the legitimacy of the public order and the nature of the state in the human societies'. In
short, he concludes, it is problematic distinguishing 'the study of citizenship
from the study of rights' (Turner, 1994, np), since any investigation of the latter
'necessarily' raises questions concerning the latter.
This article will therefore examine the limitations of citizenship for the Kurds
of Turkey by means of a human rights-based definition of citizenship, since this
seems the most appropriate vehicle to accomplish the task of analysing a
marginalised population group in an ethnically complex state. Other notions of
citizenship will also be considered, as appropriate, to discern their relevance to
the project in hand.
73
Paul J. White
The Oriental City
Before considering this specific problem of rights and citizenship however, it is

necessary to deal with an even more elementary problem: how relevant has this
whole discussion of citizenship ever been to Middle East societiesspecifically
to Turkey's Kurds, in this case? For, ever since Max Weber, it has been widely
assumed that citizenship, while not without some legacy in both ancient society
and the medieval city, was nevertheless a phenomena limited to the West. In his
General Economic History, for instance, Weber stressed that the concept of
'citizens as holders of political rights' was rarely seen outside of the Occident,
and 'unknown to the world of Islam' (Weber, 1927, pp. 316-16 and see
pp. 1226-27, & 1244).
For Weber, prior to the modern period in the East 'autonomous administration' of the city was virtually unknown:
Autonomous administration of the city was unknown or merely
vestigial. Most importantly, the associational character of the city
and the concept of a burgher (as contrasted to the man from the
countryside) never developed at all or existed only in rudiments.
(Weber, 1968, p. 1227)
The main Islamic settlement examined by Weber, to prove the non-appearance
of the city in the Western sense is the holyand quite uniquecity of Mecca
(Weber, 1968, pp. 1231-3). He does, however, cite the following:
in the Constantinople [Istanbul from 1453] of the Islamic Middle
Agesi.e., up into the nineteenth centurymerchant guilds and
corporations are the only representatives of bourgeois interests.
Besides them we find the purely military associations of the
Janissaries [Yenigeri] and the Spahis [Sipdhis] and the religious
organizations of the Ulemas and the Dervishes, but no general
corporation of the burghers. (Weber, 1968, pp. 1233-4)
Weber's point was that in the Muslim East, the forms of consociational life
which emerged in the West did not flower. To be distinct from a merely arbitrary
encampment of unconnected buildings, he stipulated, it must undergo a certain
economic development, to provide a basis for intra-community links to flourish.
Specifically, commerce and industry must develop to the point where the city
was the centre for these activities and had acquired a certain amount of economic
autonomy, instead of being dependent upon princes, lords or other aristocrats for
provisions, self-defence or law and order. In short, the city's inhabitants had to
develop a common life:
To develop into a city-commune, a settlement had to be of the
nonagricultural-commercial type, at least to a relative extent, and
to be equipped with the following features: 1. a fortification; 2. a
market; 3. its own court of law and, at least in part, autonomous
74
law; 4. an associational structure (Verbandscharakter) and, connected therewith, 5. at least partial autonomy and autocephaly,
which includes administration by authorities in whose appointment the burghers could in some form participate. In the past,
such rights almost always took the form of privileges of an
'estate' (Stand); hence the characteristic of the city in the political
definition was the appearance of a distinct 'bourgeois' estate.
(Weber, 1968, p. 1226)
Absolutely crucial to the advent of cities and citizenship was the ability of the
emerging city to rely upon its own resources for purposes of defence. Weber
explains how citizenship in the city state of ancient Western society required
participation in the city's soldiers' guild. By the middle ages, however, 'the
center of gravity of military technique in the early middle ages lay outside the
cities, in the knighthood. Nothing was equal to an armed feudal host'. This was
the period of the steady loss of autarkical autonomy for the city states, prior to
the emergence of the nation states. The impetus both for this and for the
development of modern cities in the West was the emergence within settlements
of revolutionary 'brotherhoods in arms for mutual aid and protection', such as
the Italian popolo (Weber, 1927, pp. 319-22, 324, 336-7; Weber, 1968,
p. 1302).
In the East (including the Middle East), however, development took a quite
different route, for two principal reasons. In the first place, in the East, the
princely army originated before the city. ('The occidental city is in its beginnings
first of all a defense group, an organization of those economically competent to
bear arms, to equip and train themselves.') In the East, 'the royal official and the
army officer' were central 'from the beginning', while both were initially absent
in the Occident. In the West, in sharp contrast, defence was the work of the
religious brotherhood. The inability of the East to develop in this same manner
was economically based, connected to the ruling bureaucracies' monopoly of
vital resources, especially water. Thus, everywhere else apart from the West, the
development of the city by self-equipping revolutionary brotherhoods was
blocked by royal and/or military bureaucracy (Weber, 1927, pp. 320-2).
The second reason given by Weber for the non-appearance of cities outside of
the West is due to the nature of 'ideas and institutions connected with magic'.
Unlike in the West, where cities formed around revolutionary brotherhoods
which shared certain sacred rituals, in the Orient people were frequently
'ceremonially alien to each other'. In the West, in contrast, Christianity shattered
the taboos and 'magical' obstacles between people, since it developed into a
truly universal religion, which had a universalising effect on social life (Weber,
1927, p. 322).
In the Occident, the 'taboo barriers ... magical totemic, ancestral caste props
of the clan organization' which obstructed 'confraternization into a city corporation' were absent, according to Weber, due to the combined effects of
mercenary soldiering and other forms of association, which 'seem ... to have
broken the strength of the exclusive clan and magical ties'. (Weber, 1968,
pp. 1243-4).
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Paul J. White
But, Weber also adds, on the other side of the globe:
Islam, by contrast, never really overcame the divisiveness of Arab
tribal and clan ties, as is shown by the history of internal conflicts
of the early caliphate; in its early period it remained the religion
of a conquering army of tribes and clans. (Weber, 1968, p. 1244)
For all these reasons, Weber maintained that the concept of citizenship was
historically unrealisable in Middle Eastern societies. After Weber, sociologists
such as Turner have generally maintained the same attitude, questioning how
relevant the concept of citizenship is to the Muslim civilizations of the Middle
East (Turner, 1993, p. vii).1
Robert Nisbet clarifies this vexed matter further, somewhat, by pointing to the
difference in individual/state relations between the premodern Western and
Oriental states, claiming that the bureaucratic Asiatic state 'did not often seek to
supplant but rather to work with and through the deeply rooted social structures'
(Nisbet, in Turner, 1994, pp. 7-8). He adds:
There was not, nor could there have been, in the Asiatic state
citizenship as this is understood in the West from the sixteenth
century on, for the degree to which individual lives in Asia were
contained by clan, village and caste was the degree to which these
lives were in but not of their political orders (Nisbet, 1994, p. 8).
Citizenship in the Oriental City
How relevant are the arguments of Weber et ah to the realities of Ottoman
society? The first thing which must be said is that Weber and the Neo-Weberians
have painted their picture with extremely broad strokes. Societies throughout
virtually the entire premodern eastern hemisphere are classified the same, on the
basis of an examination of very few of them. Muslim societies are judged by
Weber himself primarily by the example of one quite unique society, that of
Muslim Arabia.
It is therefore tempting to dismiss Weber's verdict on the inapplicability of the
citizenship paradigm to anyone in Ottoman Turkey. The accuracy of the
Weberian paradigm can best be appraised following the presentation of a
tangible outline of the dynamics of Ottoman society.
It is clear that the transaction of loyalty in exchange for certain rights was at
once both complex and quite straightforward in Ottoman society. Sunni Muslims2 owed sole, unmediated loyalty to the Sultan-Caliph, who was simultaneously their religious and political chief (Karpat, 1982, pp. 388-9). 3 In return,
they were guaranteed the Sultan's protection. From the fifteenth century,
non-Muslim subjects were beholden to the Sultan as the head of state, in return
for the Sultan's pledge to protect them, (primarily through ensuring social and
political stability), and to allow them to constitute distinct ethnic-religious
communities {millets), with their own leaders. This system was applied even
down to the smallest administrative unit, the village, where the village head, or
76
muhtar, was responsible directly to the state, not the villagers (Karpat, 1988,
p. 39).
Well aware that their limited confessional authority existed due to the Sultan's
permission, the millet leaders directed their flocks towards political loyalty to the
Sultan. In the final analysis, therefore, 'citizenship' in the Ottoman empire rested
on a religious basis.4 This did not neutralise ethnic self-identification, however,
since this, while subjugated to religion, was simultaneously welded to religious
identity, which both legitimised and elevated it (Karpat, 1988, p. 43).
The Muslims were not organised as a millet, and the Muslim mufti had
insignificant administrative clout, since the Muslims were directly administered
by the government:
While the Ottoman government took its legitimacy from Islam
and enforced, to the extent possible, Islamic legislation, it did
not identify itself politically and ideologically with the Muslim
community until the nineteenth century. As a ruling group the
Ottoman elites had as little to do with ordinary Muslims as with
the non-Muslims, (see Karpat, 1988, p. 43)
The Muslim community was relatively privileged compared to the millets, but
most Muslims (whether ethnically Kurdish or Turkic) had very little power:
Only in the nineteenth century did [the average Muslim] begin to
consider the government and the state 'his'. At that time, under
the pressure of Western imperialism, the state-Islam relationship
was politicized and popularized and thus became the basis of a
new national-Islamic identity, (see Karpat, 1988, p. 45)
Within the very heterogenous Muslim community, ethno-linguistic sub-groups
such as the Kurds were formally recognised as the boz millet (grey nation) with
Kurdish lords being given a worthless certificate (berdt). Ethno-linguistic distinctiveness was acknowledged, but meant nothing politically. And:
Although in practice various groups, especially in the countryside,
did maintain ethnic and/or linguistic distinctiveness, the emphasis
on religion as the foundation of the community, and the co-opting
into the ruling system of the Muslim tribal chiefs, heads of
prominent families, and communal leaders, reduced the bases of
the appeal of ethnic and linguistic consciousness, (see Karpat,
1988, p. 45)
Among the Kurdsor, more accurately, among those generally considered
Kurds by scholars and Kurdish nationalists alike in the present erathe position
was even more complex. Most of the Kurds were Muslims, and therefore
automatically rendered homage to the Sultan on the same basis as other Muslims
throughout the empire. A sizeable minority of those generally regarded as Kurds,
however, always rejected this transaction. Based in the Dersim (modern Tunceli)
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Paul J. White
region of Anatolia, these Ottoman subjects had a distinct religious and community identity as Alevisadherents of Aleviism, a (non-Muslim) breakaway
from Shi'a Islam. A minority of ethnically Turkic Ottoman subjects also adhered
to Aleviism. While some Alevis succeeded at times in attaining quite elevated
positions for themselves, the dominant pattern was for them to suffer periodic
persecution. They tended to be excluded from citizenship, due to their rejection
of Islam and their suspect status as agents of the heterodox Shi'a empire of the
Safavid Shah in neighbouring Persiathe Ottomans' traditional enemies.
A series of hesitant modernising reforms began under Western pressure in the
1820s, aimed at both appeasing Europe and countering its encroachments on the
empire, culminating in the 1839-71 Tanzimdt (reform) period. As Haldun Giilalp
(1995, p. 176)5 points out, the rights and status of the non-Muslim subjects
meaning the recognised ethnic-confessional millets-were not equal to those of
the Sunni Muslims in this Sunni Muslim empire. The modernisations opened an
Islamic Pandora's Box by conceding equality in rights and status to these
communities, at the very time when the Sultan-Caliph was increasingly unable
to protect the economic interests of the Muslim merchants and craftsmen from
the West's virulent commercial encroachments in rural Anatolia. In reaction:
Islam became the ideological weapon, not of the modernizing
elites, but of opposition movement. It became the ideological
discourse of the 'people', who were alienated by the modernizing
elites and who perceived these transformations as the penetration
of alien, Western influences. This was not merely a matter of
perception. The class base of the opposition movement to the
Ottoman modernizing reforms was the economically displaced
small merchants and producers (craftsmen, etc.) in the provincial
towns and the countryside. (Gulalp, 1995, p. 176)
From 1876, a 'constitutional opposition' movement, the Young Ottomans,
emerged, to attempt to solve the crisis in the empire. The Young Ottomans
curbed the sultan's power, and dissolved parliament. The real target of this
movement was economic and commercial, however. Abolition of the taxfarming systema source of great personal income to some senior military men
and Ottoman bureaucratswas blocked by the Young Ottomans. A number
of fiscal and commercial measures were enacted by the Young Ottomans
including a new land code which impacted directly on the agrarian Kurds,
by recognising private property. This opened the door for the mass of Kurds to
be actually deprived of land ownership, a privilege increasingly reserved for
Kurdish and Turkish agas (large landlords).
Citizenship for the Muslim Kurds under the Ottomans was clearly a very
limited concept, at best.6 Political rights in this premodern society were primarily
restricted to a very small group of men in and around the Sultan-Caliph's court.
As Muslims, nevertheless, the Muslim Kurds had more rights and better status
than members of the millets. But this, it must be stressed, was not as Kurds,
since they were identified by their religion. The Muslim Kurds happily embraced
this, since this endowed them with the same rights as other Muslims in the
78

empire. There is evidence, however, that the Dersira-based Alevis (the so called
'Alevi Kurds', or 'Kirmanc', as they call themselves) were by no means as
content. While the Muslim Kurds were enjoying limited 'citizenship' under the
millet system, however, these so called 'Alevi Kurds' were frequently put to the
sword by the Sultan, together with Alevi Turkic subjects.7 Another Anatolian
ethnic minority, generally included under the category of 'Kurds', the Zaza, are
related to the Kirmanc but have long been Sunni Muslims. The Zaza were in a
safer situation, since they were granted admittance of the dominant Muslim
group, provided they paid their taxes and did not rebel against the SultanCaliph's authority. They thus shared the same very limited 'citizenship' rights as
other Sunni Muslims during the Ottoman era.
Invention of Turkish Citizenship

Deposed from power by Sultan Abdiilhamit II, the activist military officers of the
Young Ottomans re-emerged as the more radical Young Turks. The new
movement seized power militarily in 1908. The Young Turk regime attempted
to save the collapsing empire through establishing a protected domestic market,
and creating a 'surrogate bourgeoisie' (Keyder, 1987, p. 53).
The traditional 'citizenship' transaction under the Ottoman sultans, as already
shown above, delivered the support and loyalty of most of his varied subjects to
the Sultan of the day. While it still worked, it was an excellent institution. When
the empire began to shrink and collapse, however, the Young Ottomans sought
to step into the breach by enacting a number of administrative reforms and
offering a new ideological creation, to replace traditional Ottoman 'citizenship'Ottomanism. Giilalp explains: 'The notion of "Ottomanism" was promoted in an attempt to develop an identity of nationhood despite the multiplicity
of religious groups' (Gulalp, 1995, p. 176).
'Ottomanism' was an attempt by certain elite Ottomans to replicate capitalist
Europe's dynamism, by emulating its nationalist fervour. But Ottomanism was
quite unlike Western nationalism; it was a strange, vague, conception of loyalty,
based for the first time (within the Ottoman empire) on territory, instead of
religion, but 'bereft of the emotional and cultural attachments embodied in the
European concept of nation and nationality' (Karpat, 1982, p. 391). A nationality
law formally establishing this new notion was announced in 1869 (Karpat, 1982,
p. 391).
In contrast, the successful 1908 rebellion of Young Turks tried to save the
empire by realigning it on the basis of Turkish nationalism. Ominously, this
implied that citizenship would now only be offered to Turks. The Young Turks
succeeded in instilling Turkish nationalism into Turks, but there was a price for
this. If Turkish nationalism were now the leit-motif of the empire, it was
inevitable that non-Turkic peoples became subject nations. This fed particularist
nationalisms throughout the empire (Zirinsky, 1968, pp. 30, 31).8
The Young Turks vigorously pursued forcible Turkification and national
centralisation and economic development vigorously, thereby fostering greatly
the creation of an indigenous Turkish national bourgeoisie (Jwaideh, 1960,
pp. 296-7; Keyder, 1987). The Ottoman Muslims traditionally had a disdain for
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Paul J. White
commerce, trade and industry, leaving that to the Christians (Greeks and
Armenians) and Jews in major cities, especially Istanbul. Instead, the Muslims
monopolised the countryside. As Gulalp points out, however, this 'ethnic
division of labour' rendered the Ottomanist project of state unification very
difficult to achieve. As a result, '[m]aterial conflicts within the Ottoman Empire
began to be articulated in ethnic and religious terms' (Gulalp, 1995, p. 176);
Paradoxically inspired by the Young Turks' national idealismand yet
repelled by their practice of forcible TurkificationKurdish nationalists now
began to organise in the cities for the first time.9 Meanwhile, building on the
Young Turks' daring declaration of particularist Turkish nationalism, a new
notion of unitary nationalist citizenship based on Kemalismthe ideology of the
elite which guided the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1922)was biding
its time. Crucially, the class base of this elite 'was, principally, the Muslim
land-owners and the newly emerging Muslim commercial bourgeoisie' (Gulalp,
1995, p. 177):10
The basis of Kemalism was territorial nationalism. This was
different from both the Islamist and the ethnic/racial models of
nationalism, and was much closer to the original Ottoman
nationalism. Turkey was a geographical concept, and the Turkish
people were (ideally) defined as those living in that territory... In
this sense, the Kemalist version of Turkish nationalism was an
updated variant of the earlier notion of Ottoman nationalism, now
made possible by the expulsion on the non-Muslim elements
[except for the Alevis] from the territory defined as Turkey.
(Gulalp, 1995, p. 177)
The new Turkish Republic established in 1923 briefly allowed a nominal
presence within the state for Islam. By early 1926 a modernising process of
secularisation was completed, however. Turkey's state was now sanctified by
nationalism, in place of the Ottoman empire's legitimating ideology of Islam.
Citizenship was now based on radically new foundationsadherence to the
Turkish nation state.
For Atatiirk and other founders of the Turkish Republic, the sine qua non was
always that they were establishing the nation state of the Turks. That is why,
ever since the first constitution of the Turkish Republic in 1924, all citizens'
rights have been made contingent upon 'The Supreme Principle of EthnicNationalism' (Muller, 1996, p. 174). Six principles or 'arrows' of Kemalism
were adopted: republicanism, nationalism, populism, statism, secularism and
reformism. Even the strikingly modem-sounding civil code of 1926 talks of
political, social and economic modernisation as a project of 'the Turkish nation'
(Muller, 1996, p. 174)." Article 2 of the current (1982) constitution formulates
the conditions whereby the benefits of modern citizenship may be enjoyed as
follows:
The Republic of Turkey is a democratic, secular and social state
ruled by law, respecting human rights in the spirit of social peace,
80

of national solidarity and of justice, bound to the nationalism
of Atatiirk and founded on the principles pronounced by the
preamble. (Muller, 1996, p. 176)
This 'Preamble' to the 1982 Constitution notes the 'inseparable' link between
the military and 'the Turkish Nation', and alleges that the 1980 military
intervention occurred 'in response to a call from the Turkish Nation ... when the
approach of a separatist, destructive and bloody civil war unprecedented in the
Republican era threatened the integrity of the eternal Turkish Nation and
motherland and the existence of the sacred Turkish State'.
This Preamble also commands all to practice 'absolute loyalty' to the
document's 'letter and spirit', including to Turkish nationalism 'as outlined by
Atatiirk ... and in line with the reforms and principles introduced by him'. It
outlaws:
thoughts or opinions contrary to Turkish National interests, the
principle of the existence of Turkey as an indivisible entity with
its State and territory, Turkish historical and moral values, or the
nationalism, principles, reforms and modernism of Atatiirk ... 12
Muller comments further:
[Turkish ethnic-n]ationalism is also entrenched in Article 26,
paragraph 3, and Article 28, paragraph 2, of the 1982 constitution,
which give the legislature the powers to adopt laws that prohibit
the use of certain languages. These provisions find further concrete expression in the several provisions concerning the National
Security Council13 and its powers, in the provisions on limitations
of human rights and in the spirit of the provisions of the [Kurdish
insurgency] emergency law. (Muller, 1996, p. 174).
Indeed, the present constitution even explicitly outlaws ideas which challenge
the indivisibility of Turkey within its current borders, its history (as re-invented
by the Kemalists) or 'Atatiirk's nationalism'that is, the ideology of Kemalism
itself. Taken as a whole, the constitution undoubtedly upholds the equality
before the law of all subject to Ankara's ruleprovided these latter accept more
or less unquestioningly the Turkish ethnic-nationalist basis of their citizenship.
Despite all its mutations since the 1920s, Kemalism has continued to determine
the unitary ethnic-nationalist character of citizenship in Turkey.
This is not to say that other nationalist and ethnic particularisms in Anatolia
failed to emerge. Beginning with the Sheikh Ubaydallah rebellions (1879-1881),
which were a product of the dawn of nationalism among a section of the Kurds,
rebellions byor in the name ofthe Kurds erupted repeatedly. Thus, 1920 saw
the Kockiri rebellion of the Dersim Kirmanc, and 1925 the Sheikh Said uprising
of the Zaza. While only the 1930 Agri Dag rebellion was arguably ethnically
Kurdish, many other rebellions of the period in Anatolia were fought in the name
of Kurdish nationalism, by Kirmanc and Zaza insurgents who saw their main
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Paul J. White
problem being to cut themselves loose from Turkish nationalism and realised
that their own separate identity was a complete mystery to the Western outsiders
whose support was required. Taking advantage of the international recognition
the Kurds had achieved in the post-World War I Sevres Treaty, and believing
they faced extinction, the leaders of the doomed 1938 Kirmanc rebellion in the
Dersim region even appealed to the League of Nations in the name of the Kurds
for international assistance.
It was not until quite recently that Kurdish nationalism managed to develop
a strong movement of its own, the Partiya KarkerSn Kurdistan (PKKKurdistan
Workers Party). This emerged in embryonic form in the mid-1970s. A PKK
guerilla force has been operating since 15 August 1984.
From the earliest days of the Turkish Republic, Atatiirk's conception of
unitary ethnic-nationalist citizenshipKemalismhas made 'Turkishness' synonymous with the Turkish nation state. Historyeven Ottoman historywas
systematically rewritten, to create an invented heritage of timeless Turkish
greatness (Muller, 1996, p. 175). The idea was propagated by the Kemalist
magazine Kadro that there was only one 'race' in Turkey, the Turks, and one
language, Turkish. Slogans were popularised to buttress the regime and its
unitary ethnic-nationalist projectsuch as 'one party, one nation and one leader'
('bir party, bir ulus, tek lider'), 'The only friends of Turks are Turks' ('Turk' tin
Turk'ten baka dostu yoktur') and 'One Turk is worth all the world' ('Turk
dunyaya bedeldir'). A theory was adopted at one of several pseudo-scientific
conferences convened by the Kemalists in the 1930s, the 'Sun-Language
Theory', according to which Turkish was 'the mother of all languages', and 'the
superior Turkish race' was consequently the 'mother of all civilisations and
races' (Beikci, 1978).
Turkey's entrance into the world community, and the years since that time,
have compelled the Turkish state to cease upholding the untenable 'SunLanguage Theory', and, as will be shown shortly, cultural reforms have even
permitted the Kurdish language to be legally spoken in non-official situations.
More than this, however, no Turkish government has been permitted to venture.
The powerful Turkish militaryit is the second-largest army in NATOmaintains a stern eye on civil society at all times, to ensure that the essentials of
Kemalism as it sees it remain in place. The alleged inability of civilian
governments in 1960, 1971 and 1980 to guarantee a unitary Turkish state
animated by Kemalism has been used by the generals to stage military interventions on each of these occasions. A further intervention by the military in March
1997 was only avoided by the government agreeing to implement a list of
demands from the generals.
Human Rights and Kurdish Citizenship
Following the 1960 coup, the military ensured that its authority would be
ultimately beyond question by other sections of the state, by establishing a
National Security Council (NSC) to direct the defence of 'national security',
and the indivisibility of Turkish territory and people, according to Kemalist
principles. Better informed on 'national security' than any civilian cabinet
82
could ever beand with the clout to enforce its viewsthe NSC easily
became 'the primary decision-maker' on the Kurdish question (Gurbey, 1996,
pp. 12-13).
In Kemalism's initial, 'pure' or 'classical' form, Kurds and other minorities
simply did not and could not exist. The young Turkish Republic declared: 'There
are no Kurds in Turkey, but mountain Turks, and each person who lives within
the borders of Turkey is considered a Turk' (cited in Ozoglu, 1993, p. 115).
Since this time, a combination of external human rights pressure (from the
European Community, which Turkey very much wants full membership of) and
internal insurgency and popular protest by its Kurdish minority, has forced some
changes to the original Kemalist package.
The human rights watchdog Amnesty International reports how vital sections
of the 'Anti-Terror Law' (Law 3713), under which Kurds had in the past been
prosecuted for 'separatism' were abolished:
In April 1991 Articles 141, 142 and 163 of the penal code were
repealed and the relatively small number of prisoners of conscience were released. Law 2923 was repealed at the same
time and this was soon followed by the publication of Kurdish
language newspapers, books and many collections of Kurdish
poetry, although education and broadcasting in Kurdish remained
illegal.14
'Nevertheless', Amnesty continues,
Activities contained within that law's widely drawn definition of
'terrorism' include non-violent forms of political dissent. Article
142 ('disseminating propaganda undermining national pride') was
replaced with the similar offence of 'separatist propaganda' under
Article 8 of the Anti-Terror Law.
Article 8 of the Anti-Terror Law 'punished any expression of separatism,
whether violent or not, with long terms of imprisonment and heavy fines'.
Prosecutions under the revamped Article 8 rose dramatically from mid-1993
onwards. Pro-Kurdish campaigners such as the Turkish sociologist Ismail
Beikci, and other academics, such as Fikret Bagkaya, were prosecuted and
punished for 'separatist propaganda' after simply describing Turkey's Kurds as
a discrete ethnic group. Amnesty also points out: 'Thought-crime does not even
have to be committed on Turkish soil to be punished under the Anti-Terror
Law'. Mehdi Zana, the Kurdish former mayor of Diyarbakfr, told the European
Parliament:
Like all Kurds sentenced for the crime of 'separatism', I have
been stripped of my political rights for life... I should perhaps
make it clear that while I continue to campaign peacefully for the
recognition of the rights of the 15 million Kurds living in Turkey,
I am not a member of any party or movement.
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Paul J. White
The supposed 'reform' of Article 8 in October 1995 managed to leave 'separatist
propaganda' as an offence, ('even when the defendant has in no way advocated
violence'). Amnesty denies that the amendments to Article 8 represent a real
change to Law 3713, pointing out that some sentences have been shortened and
a few even suspended, but that new prosecutions under this extremely broadly
interpreted law continue.
Kurds and other minorities in Turkey who threaten Turkey's 'indivisibility' in
the mind of Turkey's generals have serious problems securing equitable treatment before the law. This is evident from the courts' attitude towards the torture
of suspects. The intrusion of the military into the State Security Court is
undeniable, given that all cases are presided over by a military officer. This is
the court which hears the bulk of more or less overtly 'political' cases. Amnesty
International has sharply condemned the Turkish judiciary for what, objectively
speaking, amounts to complicity with torture. In a section sub-headed 'Failure of
the Judiciary', the same account relates how one defendant told a court that he
had been tortured during interrogation. 'What did you expect, sweets?' was
reportedly the reaction of the judge, according to Amnesty which adds: 'Judges
and prosecutors who fail to investigate allegations of torture make up the next
link in the torture system'.
Torture is illegal under Turkish law. Nevertheless:
State officials carry out torture, 'disappearance' and extrajudicial
execution and other gross violations because they know they will
escape punishment. They are protected by police and gendarmerie
officers of high rank, by prosecutors, by courts, by Turkish law
itself, and by the silence of the international community. Prosecutions are very rarely opened against human rights violators even
when there is strong evidence. The message to the perpetrators is
clear.
The US Department of State's country report on human rights in Turkey for
1995 adds: 'There is no guaranteed access to an attorney under the law for
persons whose cases fall under the jurisdiction of the State Security Courts ...'
(US Department of State, 1996). Constitutional or other legal guarantees of a fair
trial and access to reliable legal counsel are frequently not worth the paper they
are written on. As Amnesty International reports: 'In the eight years following
the military coup of 12 September 1980 ... over 60,000 political prisoners were
convicted after unfair trials'. The courts have not become qualitatively fairer
since 1988, either, despite the passage of legislation supposedly making them so.
Of course, not only Kurds suffer at the hands of the authorities in Turkey. The
periodic persecution of the Alevismost of whom are actually ethnically
Turkishhas already been mentioned, as have the country's four military
interventions into politicsthe coups of 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997. Yflmaz
Ensaroglu, President of the conservative Mazlum Der human rights organisation,
argues that human rights violations in Turkey have a legal basis in the increasing
limitations on freedoms and rights with the revised constitutions issued in the
wake of the 1960 and 1980 coups:
84
When we look at our constitutional history we see that with each

new constitution, rights have been more and more curbed. And
the 1982 Constitution defines human rights as being 'within
the limits brought by this Constitution'. (Turkish Daily News,
1997d).
The independent Turkish Daily News concurs with Ensarogu's basic ideathat
the human rights situation has become progressively worse with time (Turkish
Daily News, 1997c). A TDN interview with the slightly left-wing Insan Haklari
Dernegi (IHDHuman Rights Association) President, Akin Birdal, also paints
a steadily worsening situation for all inhabitants of Turkey. Interestingly, Birdal
in effect repeats Ensaroglu's accusation concerning the country's Constitution,
claiming that 'the Constitution in effect holds the state sacred and everything is
set up for the protection of the sacred state', instead of individual rights being
guaranteed by the Constitutionand sacrosanct above all (Turkish Daily News,
1997c).
In Turkey it is the military authoritiesabove all the National Security
Councilwhich still secretly makes the most important decisions in all spheres.
It will be shown below how the increasingly serious insurgency in the Kurdish
region has provided such forces with a rationale for functioning in this manner.
In the name of 'fighting separatism', even death squads apparently linked to both
the state and organised crime have emerged. But this has had startling effects on
the life of all who live within Turkey's frontiers. One such consequence is the
inevitable carry-over of the links between police and organised crime gangs to
life outside the Kurdish region. The situation is now so serious that a national
newspaper has stated in an opinion piece: 'There is seldom an organized
crime in which a member of the police is not involved' (Turkish Daily News,
1997c).
Kurds are therefore not the only group in Turkey who risk torture if they are
taken into police custody. The endemic, almost systematic, practice of torture by
police and security authorities indicates that any suspect in police hands stands
the serious risk of torture. It would appear that Kurds face the biggest danger of
suffering such treatment, however.
According to Amnestyand other human rights monitors such as Human
Rights Watch/HelsinkiKurds risk beatings and imprisonment not only for
writing or demonstrating against the Kemalist 'indivisibility' of the state, but
even for merely being suspected of these offenses by police or security
authorities. 'Many detainees have described how police officers "play with their
guns" by putting them to the heads or in the mouths of those they are
interrogating'. All such detainees face an extremely high danger of torture by the
authorities:
Detainees held under the Anti-Terror Law are at greater risk of
torture, because they can be held longer in incommunicado
detention and they have no right under Turkish law to access to
legal counsel. The Anti-Terror Law has such wide scope that it is
used daily to detain people who join non-violent demonstrations,
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Paul J. White
work for legally authorized political parties, or write for legally
authorized journals. People detained under the Anti-Terror Law
not only frequently allege torture in police custody, they also
frequently die in police custody as a result of torture.
In the six years to January 1996 more than 90 people died in
custody, apparently as a result of torture by police or gendarmes.
In most cases no official action has been taken against those
responsible.
Kurds also face the danger of extra-judicial torture or execution, as Amnesty

again reports:
Most of the 'disappeared' are Kurdish villagers with no history of
political activity, detained during the course of security raids on
suspicion of giving food or shelter to PKK members. Many
families of the 'disappeared' fear their relatives have died under
torture, or that they were arbitrarily killed in reprisal for the
deaths of soldiers in clashes with the PKK.
The fortunes of the parliamentary voice of Kurdish nationalism in Turkey is
indicative of the rapidly decaying political situation. HEP was outlawed by
Turkey's Constitutional Court in August 1993. The court alleged that HEP
advocated separatism. The ex-HEP MPs quickly formed an interim replacement
organisation, the Ozgiir Demokrasi Partisi (Free Democracy Party-OZDEP),
which was very soon renamed simply the Demokrasi Partisi (DEP). By the end
of 1993, however, DEP also found itself under investigation by the Constitutional Court. DEP was outlawed on 16 June 1994, and a total of eight DEP
MPs jailed for treasona crime carrying the death penalty in Turkey.15 HEP has
since been succeeded by a party calling itself HADEP (People's Democracy
Party), which attempts to campaign around the same pro-Kurdish policies as its
predecessors.
HEP and its successor parties also had to contend with violent extra-legal
opposition to themselves. The US Department of State remarks:
In the past 2 years, at least 54 members of the DEP and its
predecessor, the HEP, have been assassinated. Amnesty International (AI) states that it has received persistent and credible
reports of members of security forces threatening to kill Kurdish
activists (US Department of State, 1994a).
Turkey's insan Haklan Dernegi (Human Rights Association) states that unsolved
political 'murders at the hands of Turkish death-squads claimed 967 victims
among the Kurdish population since the beginning of 1990 until October
1993' i6 Le a c i e r s a n c j members of DEP's latest successor, HADEP, have also
been harassed, beaten and murdered. Three HADEP members were killed near
Kayseri in September 1996, for instance, on their way home from a party
86
congress. And, like its predecessors, now HADEP is facing legal dissolution by
the state (Couturier, 1996).
Such acts are committed by the police, gendarmerie (jandarma) or the
armyor shadowy ultra-Kemalist death squads apparently linked to both the
state and organised crime. In late 1992, the National Security Council adopted
a scheme it believed would eliminate the PKK problem for good. The mainstream Turkish journalist Ismet Berkan has just revealed what many have
suspected over the past four yearsthat the so-called 'mystery killings' of recent
years have not been perpetrated by persons unknown, but by an outfit set up by
the state apparatus itself. According to Berkan:
The author of these lines was permitted to see a National Security
Council document which laid down the plans for the formation of
an organisation of this nature with the names of some individuals
who could take part in it. Abdullah Cath was one of those names.
The others included the members of the Special Teams [crack
Turkish units], some soldiers and some friends of Mr. Cath.
(Berkan, 1996)17
Berkan also states that the offices of the pro-Kurdish Ozgu'r Ulke were bombed
in several cities by this secret grouping: 'some of the bomb-throwers were
caught by Istanbul Police, but they were released immediately by orders that
came from the "top" ' (Berkan, 1996).
This revelation is even more startling than it might at first glance appear; not
only is the NSC accused by an eminently respectable, moderate source of
unlawful death squad activities, but also of organising these with the assistance
of none other than the likes of Abdullah Cath. Cath was, even then, near the top
of Interpol's 'wanted' list, for helping to set up the failed assassination attempt
on the Pope in 1981. He was a leading figure in the Turkish Mafia, with close
connections to the neo-fascist Milliyetci Hareket Partisi (MHP or Nationalist
Action Party)also known as the Grey Wolves (Bozkurt) and 'Idealists'
(Ulkuciiler). The MHP have frequently been accused of having directly
infiltrated various mainstream political parties and even the armed wing of
Turkey's state apparatus. The MHP has frequently been linked to political
murders, carried out on behalf of the state. Human rights experts in Turkey
blame this organisation for more than 5,000 murders.
The Kurds are denied impartial due process of law, and the protection of the
Turkish state from arbitrary assassination, unfair imprisonment or kidnapping. In
addition, the war between the PKK and the Turkish state endangers all Kurds.
It is not an exaggeration to assert that the whole dynamic of the conflict between
the Turkish state and the Kurds of Turkey is moving perilously closer to all-out
civil warespecially in the light of two failed unilateral ceasefires by the PKK,
and the failure of the timid initiatives of the Ozal period during the 1980s, and
the declaration of 'total war' on both sides (see White, 1997, pp. 205-36).
Gulalp, who manages to completely ignore the crisis in relations between
Kurds and the Turkish state while examining Turkish civil society, nevertheless
describes a more general political crisis setting in, after what he sees as the
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Paul J. White
exhaustion of the 'nationalist-statist' model of development, which combined a

strong state economic sector and industry protection with 'welfare policies that
had redistributionist and socially egalitarian outcomes' (Gulalp, 1995, p. 177).
This convinced the military to lend its practical support to a radical economic
restructuring in 1980. The benefits of economic policy now fell squarely on 'a
limited section of society', in place of the former egalitarianism. Instead of the
former 'belief in the welfare state that takes care of its citizen', the state now
promoted 'belief in the supremacy of the market mechanism' (Gulalp, 1995;
pp. 177-8):
The ideals of state interventionism and protectionism were displaced by the rule of individualistic competition. The decline of
nationalist and statist policy also brought about a crisis in the
popular ideology which supported nationalist-statist developmentalism. The state could no longer claim the loyalty of its people.
Secularist legitimation was undermined together with the collapse
of the conviction that the state would deliver and that the common
national interest of development would be protected. (Gulalp,
1995, p. 178).
Turkey's Kurds were especially big losers from this sharp switch in economic
policy. The economically weakest unitsworkers, unemployed, small producers
and the economically 'marginal population' (which include most of the inhabitants of the south and south-east)saw their real incomes drop sharply. erif
Mardin estimates that the share of wages in the national income dropped from
around 35% in 1976-1978 to around 20% in 1983-1986 (Mardin in Keyder,
1987; p. 225)18 for example. A large proportion of Kurdish workers are employed in the illegal cash-in-hand 'informal' sector of the economy, who would
have been especially vulnerable to these wage-cutting measures.
Irrespective of whether they work in either the formal or the informal sector,
however, Kurdish workers are caught tight in an acute poverty trap, with very
little chance of escape. Many are forced to have two or three occupations simply
in order to feed themselves and their families (Lloyd, 1982, pp. 65-9).
Ozal's economic reforms caused subsistence farming to shrink 'to almost
nothing' (Lloyd, 1982, pp. 65-9). This is a factor of immense impact to the
predominantly rural Turkish Kurds. Another observer is even more specific,
commenting on the fate of farmers growing crops which are found in Turkey's
Kurdish regioncotton and tobacco.19
It is significant to observe that for these two commodities, the
rapid depreciation of the Turkish lira during the 1980s has been
beneficial to the exporters, but not to the farmer and that the price
deterioration for the producers of these crops is not directly
related to adverse external terms of trade movements. (Boratov,
1990, p. 215; emphasis in original)
88

Writing of the Kurdish villages of eastern Anatolia in 1988, therefore, Don
Peretz noted:
Only a small number of Turkey's 40,000 villages have been

swept into the modernization era. Those in the east and in remote
mountain regions have not yet been affected. There the wooden
plow is still the most commonly used agricultural implement, and
age-old custom and superstition continue to dominate the routine
of peasant life. (Peretz, 1988, p. 199)
Muslims had lost the privileges they received as Muslims when Atatiirk imposed
secularism, but were promised the strong support of the devlet-baba (literally,
'father state'), through the imposition of the other elements of his Kemalism.
Thus although Giilalp ignores the chronic problems of 'under-underdevelopment' and cultural and national suppression arguably suffered by the Kurds, he
is unquestionably correct to point to the dynamic inherent in the state's radical
economic restructuring since 1980 as a serious source of alienation from the
devlet-baba?0
In short, after a very brief comparatively liberal period at the end of Ozal's
administration, Turkey has returned, in practice, to the Kemalist policy of
Turkish ethnic-nationalist citizenship, based on 'one race' and 'one people'.
Citizenship is not on offer for those Kurds who attempt to exhibit their
Kurdishnessor for those unfortunate to live in areas targeted for forcible
evacuation by the military. It is difficult to see how such persons are included
in citizenship by the Turkish state.
None of the foregoing is meant to imply that Turkey's leading Kurdish
nationalist faction, the PKK, is itself beyond reproach. On the contrary: the PKK
has been accused of a string of extremely serious human rights abuses, with
fellow-Kurds being the victims, in most cases, including using child soldiers,
generally kidnapping recruits for its guerilla force and committing civilian
massacres. These all require further examination below.
Children and the PKK
One barometer of the PKK's human rights record is arguably the history of the
organisation with respect to children. The PKK has been accused by other
sources of abducting children en masse, and press ganging them into military
service. (Children are defined as youth of any age who are under 18 years old.)
What is the truth in this matter? It will be best to begin by examining tfie whole
question of PKK forced recruitment to its guerilla wing, the ARGK.
The first claims of PKK forced recruitment occurred in 1987, just prior to the
growth in the organisation's popularity in Turkey's Kurdish region. By 1989,
after the PKK issued its "Compulsory Military Service Law", reports of forceful
recruitment began to be splashed across the front pages of Turkish newspapers
with great frequency.
According to the PKK 'Law', ARGK military service was compulsory for all
'Kurds living in the [Kurdish] region who were approaching the age of 18 and
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Paul J. White
who were bachelors, or those who were married but had not yet been recruited
into the Turkish army'. This ARGK/PKK recruitment campaign is said to have
climaxed in September 1989, 'with guerillas reportedly kidnapping as many as
102 people in 10 days', 'Although most of the PKK's compulsory recruitment
in this period appears to have concentrated on the 18-25 age group', in an
attempt to counter government recruitment to the army and the Village Guards.
During the same year, however, guerillas are reported to have taken 14 children
from a hamlet in Hakkari province, aged 11 to 15, who 'are assumed to have
joined the movement'. Seven others claimed by Turkish newspapers as alleged
child abductees later in the year were later found to be 'aged over 18 and the
news report was only propaganda material' (Imset, 1995).
Ismet, who has had access both to Turkish and ARGK military commanders,
considers that many PKK abductions could have been genuine enlistments to the
ARGK, disguised as kidnappings. The steadily rising popularity of the PKK
among village Kurds from the late 198Os/early 1990s onwards (Imset, 1995) was
met with increasingly severe measures by Turkish security forces against the
families and villages of suspected PKK recruits, such as the torching of their
villages. For a number of reasons, 'It was definitely in the interest of the family
and the person taken by the PKK to be reported as kidnapped', whether this was
true or not. The PKK also claims that it has been forced to temporarily close off
recruitment to its guerilla force at several points since 1991, due to an inability
properly to train the large numbers of recruits coming forward (ARGK/PKK
commanders, pers. comm., Lebanon, June/July 1992 and Imset, 1995).
These circumstances make it quite difficult to assess objectively the extent of
such PKK abductionseven without considering possible distortion by the
Turkish media. A report issued by the State of Emergency Governors' Office in
1991 claimed 'that a total of 1202 people had been abducted by the PKK
between 1987 and 1989 and that 573 of the abduction victims had returned to
their villages. It said that 629 had remained with the guerillas' (Imset, 1995).
Indeed the PKK itself admits having combatant child guerillas in its ranks.
The PKK's official diaspora publications Berxwedan and Serxwebtin began
carrying reports from as early as at least 1991, extolling the virtues of children
joining the guerillas, and reporting that children as young as 14 years of age had
died in armed combat for the ARGK. Other children have died while involved
in militant demonstrations in Kurdish cities, quite possibly as members of the
PKK's (occasionally armed) political front, the ERNK. Serxwebun (1991, p. 70)
acclaims the memory of 'Ku?uk Baran' (Little Baran), aged 'about 14-15 years',
'Kamuran' around the same age (Serxwebun, 1991, p. 103), and female fighters,
'Mahabad', (Serxwebun, 1991, p. 154) and 'Ayfer', (Serxwebun, 1991, p. 230),
both aged 15. The same publication also carries pictures of some other dead
guerillas (Serxwebun, 1991, pp. 88, 173, 265), who appear to be much younger,
butperhaps significantlyno age is given for these children. Imset (1995)
cites instances reported in the PKK press of children joining the guerillas at 13
years old and dying within a couple of years. Since about 1993, in fact, the
PKK's recruitment propaganda has increasingly been angled at very young youth
(Berxwedan, 15 February 1995, in Imset, 1995).
90

Children have been more actively involved in PKK armed activities since late
1994, as a 1995 PKK article admits:
It is possible to spot 10-11-12 year old children among the ranks
of the guerillas today. Now, the children of Kurdistan are joining
the guerillas even without the chance of growing up. They all
want in their hearts to fight in the mountains soon as possible.
Among them are those who have run away from their houses.
They are aware that the only solution to create a free Kurdistan
is to join the guerilla ranks and to fight. (Berxwedan, 15 February
1995, in Imset, 1995)
The same article reports that children are being more actively involved in
children's committees, in both rural and urban segments of the Kurdish region.
These committees, it adds, have 'started to organize in the form of military
divisions' (Berxwedan, 15 February 1995, in Imset, 1995). The article continues:
around 1000 children aged between 7 and 14 held a meeting
during which a decision was jointly taken to begin military
organizing activities and establish children's committees which
will be similar to the guerilla organization. The decision ruled that
these committees will organize for the time being on the training
level and that after the age of 14, volunteers would transfer to the
ranks of the guerilla. (Berxwedan, 15 February 1995, in Imset,
1995)
It does not take much imagination or even military expertise to appreciate the
value of young, highly agile peasant youth in a hit-and-run guerilla war
conducted in their native, highly mountainous terrain. As already shown, it is
difficult to assess what proportion of these have been abducted against their will.
On the other hand, most children growing up in Turkey's under-underdeveloped
Kurdish regionits poorest, least developed provinceshave little to look
forward to, except eventually to serve as conscripts in the Turkish army, against
their own people. As the PKK grew in strength and apparent credibility and
popularity from the late 1980s/early 1990s, it is therefore understandable why at
least some youth felt they had nothing to lose by joining the guerillas instead.
While the extent of child recruitment would seem to have been exaggerated
by the Turkish state and media, it is clearly undeniable that children perform
armed roles in the ranks of the PKK. Recruitment to the ARGK may indeed have
been forcible in many cases prior to the late 1980s/early 1990s, but that does not
seem to have been the case since then. Ordinary Kurdish villagers are now in an
abominable situation, however. If their youth do not fulfil their military service
obligations to the Turkish state (plus, subsequently, become Village Guards if
'requested'), the familyif not the entire villageface savage reprisals from
security authorities. On the other hand, if Kurdish youth do their military tour
of duty, they risk being involved in inflicting such violence on other Kurdish
villagers. Both Ankara and the PKK have their elaborate, competing nationalist
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Paul J. White
arguments to justify their actions, but inevitably it is the ordinary Kurds who are
crushed between these two immovable forces.
Terror
Few terms are as emotive in political discourse as the epithet 'terrorist'. The
charge of engaging in 'terror' is universally denied by all types of insurgent
groups, which typically claim that their organisation 'cannot' be terrorist, since
it is fighting on behalf of the oppressed and therefore operates with the
overwhelming support of 'the people'. Even if this last claim is true in particular
cases, however, this is hardly an objective way of defining terrorism. The
simplest, universally accepted definition of the phenomenon 'terrorism' is that
used by the US Department of State:
The term 'terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated
violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to
influence an audience. (Wilcox Jr., 1995)
The Department of State has repeatedly classified the PKK as 'a vicious terrorist
organization'. The PKK has been accused of a number of abuses by Western
human rights bodies, including 'summary executions, indiscriminate fire and the
intentional targeting of non-combatants' (Human Rights Watch, 1995; Section
VI). The attacks on school teachers are sometimes defended by the PKK as
necessary to remove government 'intelligence agents' from the Kurdish area of
Turkey. The sheer scope of this practice mocks this explanation.
According to Imset (1992, p. 82), schools in Turkey's Kurdish south-east
became a major PKK target by 1987. According to 'officials' he cites, some 137
schools were allegedly burnt down and 18 teachers killed by the PKK during the
period 1987 to the end of August 1989. By the end of 1989, an estimated 10,000
children (mostly in villages) had been left without educational premises. Meanwhile, teachers were increasingly refusing to work in the area. Attacks upon
unarmed teachers are ultimately only 'defensible' by the most strident Kurdish
nationalist discourse. (The PKK argues that all instruction is not only in the
Turkish language, but that its content is very heavily Kemalist and Turkishchauvinist in general.) Assessment of many other forms of alleged terror by the
PKK is more complicated, however. These alleged terrorist practices by the PKK
will now be examined.
It is accepted on all sides that the PKK was guilty of at least some episodes
of unjustified killings of civilians when it first commenced armed operations,
such as the massacre of the entire households of individual Village Guards. PKK
commanders and guerillas have personally admitted as much to this author
(ARGK/PKK commanders and guerillas, pers. comm., Lebanon, June/July
1992). On their side, supporters of the Turkish state have claimed that the PKK
has consistently been guilty of large-scale violent atrocities. Two issues arise
here, which even further complicate affairs: a vital question of definition and the
matter of alleged 'black propaganda'.
92

A radically different definition of the term 'civilians' is used by the PKK and
its opponents. Ankara typically defends the Village Guards (korocular) as
civilians who have been given arms (and a monthly salary of TL25 million
approximately Aus$ 190.00) by the state to defend their villages against PKK
'bandits'. The state thus portrays them as humble security guards. This whole
question has become far less abstract since mid-1997, when thousands of
korucular were used by Turkish troops to ferret out PKK guerillas in secret bases
in Iraq's Kurdish region. A Turkish military spokesman, General Erol Ozkagnak
told the Washington Post in mid-1997:
Turkish troops, backed by air power and aided by a paramilitary

village guard force and a collaborating Iraqi Kurdish faction, have
cleared several large PKK camps along a wide swath of Iraqi
territory between the city of Zakhu and the Iranian border. An
estimated 5,000 guerrillas were based in the camps. (Washington
Post, 1997)
Later in 1997, up to 3000 korucular were deployed by Ankara in Iraq's Kurdish
region (Middle East Security, 1997; Turkish Daily News, 1997b).
The PKK is at great pains these days to show that it has abandoned its initial
patterns of behaviour. In January 1995, therefore, the PKK made a series of
public statements, pledging in future to abide by the humanitarian laws and rules
specified under the Geneva Convention (Amnesty International, 1995). In an
interview with a European pro-PKK news agency (KURD-A, 1995), an ARGK
spokesman even claimed that these days the guerillas announced their presence
at villages through loud hailers, asking korucular not to fight, before commencing hostilities.
Lord Eric Avebury, Chairman of Britain's Parliamentary Human Rights
Group, has contributed to this debate, noting:
The PKK were certainly guilty of attacks on non-combatants
during 1992, as they had been in every year since 1984. But they
selected their targets carefully, and no other observer [apart from
Turkish authorities] has ever suggested that they murdered journalists. Helsinki Watch had unverified reports of the killing of
village guards, informers, 'state supporters' and the relatives of
such people, including women and children, as well as some
murders where the reasons were unexplained. The sources of
these reports were not given, but some at least were from the
authorities, who regularly portrayed atrocities committed by the
security forces and village guards as having been committed by
the PKK. A residue of the allegations was doubtless true, however, and the prohibition on 'violence to life and person, in
particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and
torture', prescribed by Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions for
persons taking no active part in the hostilities, has been widely
ignored by the PKK from time to time. (Avebury, 1995, p. 11)
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Paul J. White
Another source, Amnesty International, estimated in 1995 that the position was
much worse, stating that literally hundreds of prisoners and civilians, including
children, have been killed by the PKK (Amnesty International, 1995). Nonetheless, the frequency and seriousness of such incidents does certainly appear to
have declined seriously since the organisation's initial days. (This is perhaps
encouraging, but does not absolve the PKK of culpability for any past or present
violations, of course.) Despite thisand despite the PKK's often elaborate
efforts to assure international opinion that it has ceased such outrageous
behaviour completelythere are indications that such incidents still continue to
occur, albeit with much less frequency. The Turkish Daily News reported
incidents in early 1997, for instance, in which four teachers at Hantepe, in
Diyarbakir province, were apparently killed by the PKK, and four others in
Bardakci, in Erzurum province, narrowly escaped another PKK armed attack
(Turkish Daily News, 1997a).
A Matter of 'Black Propaganda'

Reliable, objective, information of human rights violations is a notoriously
difficult commodity to acquire with respect to this conflict. The PKK has
frequently alleged that security forces carried out killings, which were then
blamed on the guerillas. One well-known casemany others could be citedis
that of the Diyadin massacre in July 1993, in which 26 villagers (including 14
children) were murdered at Diyadin village, in Van province. Both the newspaper Ozgur Gu'ndem and the local PKK commander denied PKK involvement
and blamed the massacre on crack Turkish army Ozel Tim (Special Team)
forces. Witnesses told the Turkish Daily News that the Special Teams were
behind both this massacre and an earlier one, which had also been attributed to
the PKK (Turkish Daily News, 1993 and see Kutschera, 1994, p. 14).
ARGK Urban Terror
What then of allegations that PKK violence has randomly targeted unarmed
civilians in western Turkey? In December 1991 the PKK firebombed a Turkish
department store in Istanbul. The organisation is suspected of several 1992 bomb
attacks on large corporations with links to the United States. Furthermore, a
statement by the PKK and allied groups formally announcing the end of the PKK
ceasefire on 8 June 1993 concluded with the PKK's promise in June 1993 to
'intensify' the war 'to an unimaginable extent'. This would be achieved by
hitting tourist targets, including tourists themselves (New York Times, 1991),
even if this meant '15,000 to 20,000' could die (Imset, 1993). Some tourist sites
and hotels were apparently bombed in Istanbul and in coastal resort cities. (Some
tourists were injured in these attacks, during 1993 and 1994, while two were
killed.) However, 19 Western tourists kidnapped by the ARGK were all released
unharmed shortly afterwards (US Department of State, 1995).
These are not isolated examples of the type of ARGK urban operations which
the PKK's military wing carried out sporadically until comparatively recently.
94

Such actions appear to have already ceased before the PKK sought coverage
under the Geneva Convention and its Protocols in 1995. Nevertheless, the
organisation is on record as committing what, by any objective benchmark, were
'terrorist' operations, since they targeted unarmed persons for the purpose of
politically influencing an audience.
By the PKK's own standards, of course, these actions might now be considered unwise (since they resulted in no good political results) but not
'terrorist'. Imset has pointed out that 'the PKK has a different kind of mentality'
(Imset, 1993b). Having 'warned' urban Turks that the PKK would bring the war
to western Turkey if its demands were not met, and having similarly cautioned
tourists internationally from holidaying in Turkey, the PKK claims 'the right to
refer to any individual who "violates" its ban as a target' (Imset, 1993b).
While the PKK's behaviour has, again, undoubtedly been reported in a
distorted and exaggerated manner in many instances, there can be no doubt that
the organisation is terrorist, in terms of the definition of terrorism accepted
earlier. That is, the organisation has engaged in 'premeditated, politically
motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets ... intended to
influence an audience'in this case the authorities in Ankara. Unarmed school
teachers and other civilians, such as the families of Village Guards, have been
killed by the PKK, for the purpose of intimidating persons opposed to the PKK
and its nationalist goals. There is evidence that the organisation has attempted to
minimise such outrages since 1995, but these continue to break out from time to
time.
Conclusions
The different phases of Kurdish citizenship have now been shown. In the
Ottoman empire, Kurds were part of the mainstream Sunni Muslim community,
forming a component of this dominant community. Like other Sunni Muslims
within the empire, they owed sole, unmediated loyalty to the Sultan-Caliph, who
was simultaneously their religious and political chief. In return, they were
guaranteed the Sultan's protection. Society was founded on a religious basis,
with ethnic loyalties being recognised, but only becoming significant in the
nineteenth century, due to the external stimulation of Western imperialism.
There were no notions of nationalism anywhere within the Ottoman empire, for
most of its six and a half centuries of existence. It took the rise, flowering and
expansion of capitalism in the West for ethnic identity to become a political
issue.
The constitutional reforms of the Young Ottomans resulted in two calamities
for the Kurds. Firstly, these reformers replaced the empire's traditional 'citizenship' package with a new deal'Ottomanism', based on loyalty principally to
territory, instead of to the Sultan and Islam. And, secondly, other reforms meant
most Kurds were deprived of their land. Taken together, these measures made
an increasing number of Kurds question just what there was left for them to be
loyal to. These Kurdish disasters coincided with the dawn of nationalism among
a section of the Kurds. Beginning in 1879, the Sheikh Ubaydallah rebellions
were the first product of these intersecting developments.
95
Paul J. White
The Young Ottomans left most Kurds dispossessed and with confused
loyalties. From 1908, the Young Turks tried forcibly to realign the empire on the
basis of Turkish nationalism. Citizenship would now only be offered to Turks.
Not surprisingly, this only further provoked Kurdish nationalism.
The empire's defeat in World War I and its imminent dismemberment by the
victors in 1919 opened the door to the Turkish nationalism known today as
Kemalism. The Kemalists took the notion of Turkish nationalism, but modified
this to an ideology based on an ardent attachment to the territory of a new
nation, Turkey, in which, ideally, there was only one people to be recognised,
Turks, and one language, Turkish.
Kemalist Turkey separated mosque and state, completely secularising the
latter. Citizenship was now based on adherence to the Turkish nation state and
harsh penalties have been meted out ever since for even suggesting that Kurdish
self-determination be discussed. For Turkey's state was now sanctified by
nationalism, in place of the Ottoman empire's legitimating ideology of Islam.
Not surprisingly, rebellions against the Kemalists byor in the name ofthe
Kurds erupted repeatedly up until 1938. For the next three decades or so, Kurds
were economically disadvantaged, culturally repressed and expressly prohibited
from expressing their own, distinct identity. Life was hard for most Kurds, who
lived in often very isolated rural communities. But, as long as they did not wave
the Kurdish flag they were permitted to live in peace by the Kemalist authorities,
and guaranteed certain basic necessities. This was arguably a very minimalist
form of citizenship, but it was that, nevertheless. Quite obviously, this was still
not citizenship of the Kurds as Kurds.
The combination of economic recession, the influence of Western post-1968
leftist radicalism, Third World 'national liberation' insurgencies and the shock of
two military interventions (in 1960 and again in 1971) encouraged the development of leftist movements in Turkey, from which a number of Kurdish
nationalist movements emerged, including the PKK. The latter expanded into a
formidable guerilla force in the wake of the 1980 military coup and the radical
monetarist-style economic restructuring which commenced earlier the same year
and was enforced by the coup-makers.
This war has escalated to the point where both sides in the conflict have now
declared 'total war', with the Turkish state now even accused of collaboration
with the Turkish Mafia in order to eliminate Kurdish nationalism. Caught in the
middle, Turkey's Kurdsthough often sympathetic to the guerilla insurgents
would probably prefer to be left in peace.
From mid-1993, however, Kurdish, Zaza and Kirmanc villagers were being
forcibly removed from their villages, which were frequently burnt. Even before
this, the Kurdish city of irnak and several Kurdish towns were completely
destroyed by Turkish troops. The forcible village clearances have continued up
until the present time. An estimated 3 million Kurds are now homeless, and
without even the dignity of living in what they consider to be their native land.
Permitted only in 1991 legally to speak their language, they can still not do
so completely freely, since exercise of this right in the present charged atmosphere opens them to accusations of being 'PKK agents'. Turkish Kurdistan has
been devastated by over a dozen years of ever worsening war, which has claimed
96

in excess of 22,000 casualties. Persistent attempts by comparatively moderate
Kurdish nationalists in the Turkish parliament to resolve the conflict peacefully
have only resulted in Kurdish parties being illegalised and MPs and activists of
these parties being jailed, if not hunted and murdered by death squads. Even the
suggestion that a peace deal must be stuck between the insurgents and the
government is enough to merit a jail sentence (probably accompanied by
torture), as this threatens the 'indivisibility' of the Turkish state. Two unilateral
ceasefires by the PKK insurgents have been ignored by Ankara, as have several
overtures by the European parliament. In the final analysis, the Kurds, as Kurds,
have no right to negotiation over their identity. As Kurds, they are excluded from
citizenship by the Turkish state, if this is to be measured in rights enjoyed by
them. The issue of the reciprocal obligations by Kurdish citizens does not arise,
since Kurds are denied a free choice of not only the type of state they wish to
live in, but the most basic right to affirm their own national identity.
As discussed at the beginning of this article, citizenship implies being part of
a community, which itself determines what the rights and obligations of persons
joining it are. Indeed, as also stated earlier, the quality of citizenship in a given
community is indicated by whom the latter admits or excludes from such
membership. The ruling elite of the state of Turkey, however, has demonstrated
that it is prepared to go to quite extreme lengths to prevent the establishment of
any sort of reciprocal citizenship agreement between it and the Kurds of Turkey.
The former editor of the daily Milliyet (sacked and prosecuted on the orders of
the Armed Forces General Staff for satirising Atatiirk) has poignantly expressed
the quality of 'citizenship' enjoyed by Turkey's own Kurdish internal refugees.
His account is all the more effective when one remembers that the writer is a
Turk, not a Kurd:21
There are millions of people who boast of being Turkish and of
being citizens of this State. For myself, I am not proud of being
Turkish and a citizen of this stateI am ashamed of this race and
citizenship. Looking in the mirror, it is not my own face I see but
people in rags, shivering in the cold, eating any garbage they can
find in the Hakkari public rubbish dumps. Starving people hunting
for a piece of half chewed bread or a bone with some scraps of
meat still attached they have discovered amongst the onion peels
or remains of soup, squashed tomatoes or rotten fruit; old women
wearing plastic bags in place of shoes searching through the dump
in the hope of finding one or two mouthfuls of bread; children
fighting over a bit of bread; at the sight of this spectacle I am
ashamed of myself, my race, my Republic and my country.
When will you understand that a State that dislikes its own
citizens cannot defend its own territory?
For myself, I do not think that one can defend territory by
starving its inhabitants. If, on these lands which you claim to
97
Paul J. White
possess, the people are decimated by hungerthen it means that
these lands have long since lost their owners.
By condemning people to ferret through garbage cans, like
starving animals, to find their sustenance, to die of hunger in the
middle of public rubbish dumps, we in fact destroy our own
humanity and our State.
There is then nothing left to save. But, henceforth I am ashamed
of being Turkish; I am ashamed of my citizenship and of my
humanity.
You who are not ashamed, you who boast of your race, of your
State, you who starve people, you the masters of the State, the
defenders of the State, the praise-singers of the State, look at
yourselves in the mirror. You will only see a public rubbish dump
in which starving people struggle to survive.
It should be apparent that one does not experience 'social citizenship' living on
a rubbish dump or in the shadow of a death squad. Strong state intervention into
the lives of Kurds in Turkey has quite obviously not resulted in economic
and political stability and the security of the welfare statethe three factors
which can weld a voluntary community together into a functioning, socially
co-operative whole. 'Social citizenship' would therefore not seem to be a useful
tool for better understanding the nature of the relationship between Turkey's
Kurds and the Turkish state.
'Economic citizenship' does not apply either, however, for Turkey's state has
been highly intrusive into all aspects of Kurdish life in Turkey. Further, the
backbone of this statethe highly politicised Turkish armed forceshas repeatedly demonstrated its powerful determination to maintain a highly interventionist
profile. While it is true that Ankara launched a drive for privatisation and
monetarist-type policies in 1980, the state has been unable to absent itself from
economic life. In fact, President Ozal's privatisations did not begin until the
mid-1980s, then, just before the 1987 elections, he reverted to the Keynesianism
of his predecessors (Seyduoglu, 1996). Further privatisations have taken place
since this time, but the state's pivotal role in the economy has not fundamentally
altered (see Shaker, 1995, pp. 39-41).
Also, as already shown, contrary to the predictions of the partisans of
'economic citizenship', the period since the beginning of economic reforms has
seen a serious deterioration in both the economic fortunes and human rights
enjoyed by the Kurds, instead of an expansion of those rights.
A human rights-based definition of citizenship seems to be the best vehicle to
analyse a marginalised population group like the Kurds, in an ethnically complex
state, such as Turkey. Some of the problems inherent in attempting to apply any
notion of citizenship to Ottoman society has been shownnot the least of which
are the facts that political clout was held in this society by a very small group
of menyet it does seem that the different sectors of society had more or less
clearly defined rights and obligations. Within this complex setting, the Kurds in
98

fact enjoyed membership of the dominant community group. (Other ethnic
groups often confused with the Kurds did not fare as well, with the Kirmanc
especially facing repeated bloody persecution.)
The Kurds' relationship to the state and to Turkish society deteriorated more
or less steadily with the deterioration and collapse of the Ottoman empire, and
its subsequent replacement with the Turkish Republic. From the point of its
foundation in 1923, this state has been adamant that it is a state only for Turks.
On any sort of objective assessment of human rights, it is quite clear that the
Kurds are excluded from citizenship in Turkey.
Notes
1. See also Turner's 'General Commentary', in Bryan S. Turner and Peter Hamilton (editors), Citizenship:
Critical Concepts, where it is argued 'that citizenship is essentially a product of modern politics, that is
the socio-political consequence of the French and industrial revolutions', and denies that non- Western
societies could have contributed to the universal emergence of citizenship.
2. Aleviism and the Alevis are discussed below and also, (in more detail) in Paul White (1995).
3. Karpat adds, elsewhere (Karpat, 1988, p. 43):
To the Ottomans, government was the art of ruling the unruly, reconciling the irreconcilable, and creating harmony out of ethnoreligious discord. The method it selected to
accomplish these ends was that of reinforcing the religious and social differences among
its subjects, with clearly defined boundaries designed to minimise trespass and the
resulting intergroup strife, while guaranteeing its communal rights, so that these groups
would not feel oppressed either by the central government or by other groups.
4. 'Millet', in fact, originally meant the way of life pursued by a group of people, guided by their religion.
5. Glalp cites H. slamolu-nan (1987).
6. Turner (1986, p. 134) argues that citizenship can only be as broad as the boundaries of a given society.
In narrow premodern society, therefore:
citizenship was restricted to a small group of men who were typically property owners and
who controlled the political process by virtue of their wealth. Slaves, women and children
were excluded by virtue of their dependent status on property owners as bearers of
political rights. Political rights were exclusionary and controlled access to resources. By
contrast, obligations were restricted to those who performed duties on behalf of the
citizenry within a city-state.
7. Sultan Selim I's 'Inquisition1 against the Dersim Alevis is a case in point. Beginning in 1512, it culminated
in the massacre of forty thousand Kirmanc in 1514. See Moosa (1987, p. 45) and Shaw (1976, 1:
pp. 67-8).
8. Zirinsky adds (1968, pp. 30, 31) that Kurdish nationalist activity was not as prolific as that of Arabs and
Armenians in the Ottoman empire.
9. Arab nationalists in the Levant behaved similarly, against the Ottomans. See Zeine (1960), especially
pp. 79-80.
10. Glalp cites F. Ahmad (1984) as the source of this information.
11. The civil code states: 'We must never forget that the Turkish nation has decided to accept modem
civilization and its living principles without any condition or reservation'.
12. All citations here from the 'Preamble' of the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey. Downloaded from
the Embassy of the Republic of Turkey, Washington, DC, USA at the following URL, on 23 March 1997:
http://www.turkey.org/turkey/p_consti.htm.
13. The National Security Council is discussed in the next section.
14. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations from Amnesty International in this section are taken from the
Amnesty International Special Report, Turkey: No Security Without Human Rights (Amnesty International,
1996).
99
Paul J. White
15. As it turned out, massive international pressure prevented this penalty being applied. Ever sensistive to the
European Union, Turkey has even later released two jailed MPs when the question of Turkey's
membership of the European Customs Union came up for the vote in 1995. Most of the jailed MPs are
still imprisoned, however. See also Insan Haklan Dernei statements (nd, probably both 1993); Amnesty
International (1994a, b) and Middle East International (1994).
16. See the nsan Haklan Demei statements (nd, probably both 1993); Amnesty International (1994) and
Middle East International (1994).
17. Berkan adds: 'I write these lines based on the document that was shared with me with the condition that
I do not make a copy of it or take notes about it. I was told to read it fast and I did'.
18. Boratov (1990, p. 206) comments on:
the picture of a substantial decline on wagesboth in absolute and relative terms

during the 1980s. Between the highest level in the 1970s (1977 or 1979 [for state and
private sector employees respectively]) and 1985, the decline in real wages is 52.1 per
cent and 28.6 per cent for all employees and for manufacturing workers respectively.
See also Boratov (1990, p. 209 Table 9.5).
19. Cotton crops are found especially in the vicinity of the town of irdir in Turkey's Kurdish region, while
tobacco crops are found throughout the Kurdish region in Turkey.
20. Gulalp is quite mistaken, however (Glalp, 1995, pp. 178-80) to paint the rise of political Islam in Turkey
from the 1980s onwards as some sort of 'progressive' or even 'post-modern' critique of Kemalism. As the
bigoted (and carefully pre-planned) massacres of Alevis in Sivas (1993) and Istanbul (1995) show, the
'new' Islamists retain all the reactionary prejudices of their pre-1980 counterparts.
21. S. Seydou (1996), distributed by the Comit' International pour la Liberation des Deputes Kurdes
Emprisonnes en Turqie presided over by Mme Danielle Mitterrand.
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Citizenship Under The Ottomans and Kemalists - How The Kurds Were Excluded

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Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists: How

Convenor, Kurdish Study Group , Deakin University , Melbourne, Australia

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Citizenship Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1999

Citizenship under the Ottomans and

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Before considering this specific problem of rights and citizenship however, it is

Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists

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Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists

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Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists

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Invention of Turkish Citizenship

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Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists

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Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists

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Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists

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When we look at our constitutional history we see that with each

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Kurds also face the danger of extra-judicial torture or execution, as Amnesty

Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists

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exhaustion of the 'nationalist-statist' model of development, which combined a

Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists

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Only a small number of Turkey's 40,000 villages have been

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Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists

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Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists

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Turkish troops, backed by air power and aided by a paramilitary

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A Matter of 'Black Propaganda'

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Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists

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Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists

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Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists

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the picture of a substantial decline on wagesboth in absolute and relative terms

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Citizenship under the Ottomans and Kemalists

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