Retrieving The Dignity of A Cosmopolitan

31
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY

Retrieving the dignity of a
cosmopolitan city: Contested
perspectives on rights,
culture and ethnicity in
Mardin
Zerrin zlem Biner
Abstract
This article aims to contribute to the understanding of post-conflict
processes in Turkey by focusing on the discourses and practices following
the city of Mardins bid to become a World Heritage Site. It intends to show
how cosmopolitanism becomes a contested and dominant discourse for the
locals of the city (Kurds, Arabs, and Syriac Christians) to re-articulate the
history of the inter-communal relationships and to create a negotiating
ground with the state, in order to recover from the moral and economic
injuries of the military conflict during the 1990s. In doing so, the article
discusses the effects of the accumulated events of past and present on the
production of different forms of power relations between the state and its
subject-citizens in the post-conflict context of Mardin, Southeastern
Turkey.
Keywords: public secrecy, 1915 massacres, emergency law, cosmopolitanism,

post-conflict process, Mardin
Zerrin zlem Biner, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology,
Advokatenweg 36, 06114, Halle-Saale, Germany, biner@eth.mpg.de.
Authors Note: This article is based on my doctoral research conducted in Mardin between July 2001 and
October 2002, and between August and September 2003, and drafted as a chapter of my PhD
dissertation, entitled Attached Citizens: Subjectivity and Violence in Southeastern Turkey. The
chapter was presented at the EASA conference in Bristol in September 2006, in the Berliner Seminar
in Berlin in May 2007, and later on at Thinking through Turkey: Theorizing the Political Workshop
in Cambridge in June 2007. Earlier drafts significantly benefited from the comments of Yael Navaro-
Yashin, Jane Cowan, Caroline Humphrey, Zafer Yenal, Biray Kolluolu-Krl, Mark Baer, Esra zyrek,
Umut Yldrm and Saeed Ur rehman. I want to thank all of them.
New Perspectives on Turkey, no. 37 (2007): 31-58.

32 Zerrin zlem Biner
Truth is not a matter of exposure which destroys the secret, but a

revelation that does justice to it. (Walter Benjamin)1
As one Mardinite said, this city has always been a witness, but could never
have been a homeland (vatan) for anyone. Situated on the top of a hill like
a castle and covered with gigantic stone houses, each in itself like a fortress
surrounded by high walls, the city of Mardin looks like one body with
many eyes gazing out onto the Mesopotamian plain and Syria. The city lies
at the crossroads of Syria, Iraq and Central Turkey, controlling the routes
from Diyarbakr to Mosul in the East and from the plain of Harran to
Aleppo in the West.
At the top of the city stands the castle. In the social and historical
imagination of the Mardinities, the Mardin castle was the origin of life in
the city and the sphere of the sovereign in the multiple yet contradictory
narratives that chronicle the citys name and reveal the battle between
different ethnic and religious communities over the historical
representation of Mardin. According to Syriac Christians, the citys name
has its origins in the Syriac words Merdi (pl. Merdin, castle).2 According
to Armenian historians, the name originates from the Armenian word
Mardi, meaning martyr or warrior, and refers to the Armenians who
sheltered in Mardin in the aftermath of the conflicts of the year 351.3
Based on ethnographic work I conducted in Mardin, Southeastern
Turkey, this article focuses on the multiple and intertwined discussions
about the representations of the city following Mardins bid to become a
World Heritage Site. In doing so, the article shows how, under the influence
of a global discourse of culture, ethnicity and rights, cosmopolitanism
becomes a dominant yet contested discourse for the locals of the city (Kurds,
Arabs and Syriac Christians) in their attempts to re-articulate the history of
inter-communal relationships and to negotiate with the state in order to seek
recognition for their difference and recover from the moral and economic
injuries of the military conflict between the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party)
and the Turkish armed forces. The main goal of the article is to contribute to
the understanding of the post-conflict processes in Turkey.
The Kurdish conflict that has marked social, political and economic life in
Turkey during the last two decades took a new turn in 1998, as a result of a
unilateral truce by the PKK and the subsequent arrest of the PKK leader,
1 Quoted in, Michael Taussig, Defacement (New York: Routledge, 1999), 2.

2 Gabriel Akyz, Mardin linin Merkezinde Civar Kylerinde ve lelerinde Bulunan Kiliselerin ve Manastrlarn
Tarihi (stanbul: Kent, 1998), Hanna Dolapn, Tarihte Mardin (stanbul: Hilal Matbaaclk, 1971).
3 Suavi Aydn, Mardin: Airet, Cemaat, Devlet (stanbul: Trkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakf,
2000).
33
Abdullah calan, in 1999. These crucial events in the history of the conflict

initiated a post-conflict process, a transition process from war to peace that
has opened up spaces for new discourses and practices concerning the
redefinition as well as the resolution of the Kurdish problem.4 With the
international community closely scrutinizing the truce, the Turkish state
has moved to transform the region legally and politically. The emergency
law was gradually dismantled,5 and soon after the region turned into an
object of spectacle and a place of political pilgrimage for Kurds and Syriac
Christians who wanted to return to their evacuated villages, as well as for
human rights activists, journalists, academics, local and international NGO
agents, supranational organizational actors and state officials who variously
wanted to report the experience of violence under the emergency law and
implement projects to improve conditions in the region. In 2003, following
the enactment of the Re-instatement into Society Law (Topluma
Kazandrma Yasas),6 designed for the members of illegal armed
organizations who might turn into state witnesses, the PKK declared the
break of the unilateral truce, based on the Turkish states continuation of
militarized and non-constructive policies towards the conflicts resolution.
This, in turn, accelerated the military conflict, resulting in deaths, injuries
and a rise in human rights violations in the region. Despite these significant
changes that perpetuated the political tensions, the discussions
surrounding the practices and discourses pertaining to the post-conflict
processsuch as the re-articulation of the minority category, the
redefinition of political and cultural rights, the implementation of
rehabilitation and development projects, and the adoption of a general
amnesty lawcontinued to dominate Turkeys political agenda.
4 For recent studies on the post-conflict process, see the articles in the special issue of New Perspectives
on Turkey 32, (2005), especially, Bilgin Ayata and Ykseker Deniz, A Belated Awakening: National and
International Responses to the Internal Displacement of Kurds in Turkey, New Perspectives on Turkey,
no. 32 (2005), Zeynep Gambetti, The Conflictual Transformation of the Public Sphere in Urban
Space: The Case of Diyarbakr, New Perspectives on Turkey, no. 32 (2005), Murat Somer, Defensive
vs. Liberal-nationalist Perspectives on Diversity and the Kurdish Conflict: Europeanization, the
Internal Debate, and Trkiyelilik, New Perspectives on Turkey, no. 32 (2005). For a particular discussion
on Mardin on this topic, see, Kerem ktem, Faces of the City: Poetic, Mediagenic and Traumatic
Images of a Multi-Cultural City in Southeast Turkey, Cities 22, no. 3 (2005).
5 Following the PKK insurgency driven by the claim to the right to self determination, the Turkish state
enacted an emergency law in 1987 in Southeastern Turkeyin the provinces of Bingl, Diyarbakr,
Elaz, Hakkari, Mardin, Siirt, Tunceli, Van, Adyaman, Bitlis, Batman, and rnakenforcing a
martial law including regular curfews, roadblocks, identity controls, and the maintenance of the
village guard system.
6 The Reinstatement into Society Law was similar to the juridical mechanism of plea-bargaining in that
members of the terrorist organisations would receive amnesty and a reduction of their sentence
in exchange for becoming state witnesses. I have dealt with the effects of this legislation elsewhere.
See, Zerrin zlem Biner, From Terrorist to Repentant: Who is the Victim?, History and
Anthropology 17, no. 4 (2006).
In the midst of these developments, in 2001, the Turkish Ministry of

Culture nominated Mardin to be considered by UNESCO as a World

Heritage Site. This initiated the implementation of rehabilitation projects
aiming to restore the city, to reconstruct its historical and cultural prestige,
and to open it up to cultural tourism. From the states perspective, the
Ministry of Cultures bid attests to its civilizing initiative in the region
under the supra-national monitoring of the European Union.
The discourse on Mardins possible status as a World Heritage Site
changed how both insiders and outsiders viewed the city. The national
media promoted a new image of the city, with the aim of enhancing
Mardins bid. If this bid were successful, Mardin would be the third ancient
city to achieve the accolade, after Jerusalem and Venice. In these
representations, Mardin was portrayed as a remote and mystic city of the
Turkish Orient with a unique architectural heritage, and as a kind of
Babylon with a peaceful co-existence of its multi-religious and multi-
lingual communities. In this discursive space, Syriac Christians were
portrayed as the local ancient Christian community, authentic yet
unknown subjects waiting to be re-discovered. Their presence was
indicated through representations of their religious practices or through
descriptions of their return to ancient lands after their long stay in Europe.7
In addition to this national media coverage, there was an outpouring of
both intellectual and artistic works which underpinned the construction of
the popular view of Mardin in the imagination of the urban middle classes.
The Mesopotamia Trilogy (Mezopotamya lemesi) of the well-known
author Murathan Mungan was among the most influential and popular
representations. Having grown up in an extended and influential Arab
family of Mardin, Mungan styled himself as Western Easterner and
construed Mardin as a peripheral space, not only in the sense of its
relationship to the center on the rural-urban axis, but also in the sense of its
position on the outer margins, where it accommodated people who had
experienced various conflicts, tensions and sufferings in the most hidden,
convoluted and mysterious ways. All these tensions and pain were
transformed into an Eastern epic through Mungans writings which shaped
the popular image of Mardin in particular and of Mesopotamia in general.8
7 For the representations of Mardin in the mainstream media, see, for example, Emel Armutu,
Mardin Geleceinin Hayalini Kuruyor, Hrriyet, 6 April 2003, Mardin UNESCO Aday, Zaman, 16
April 2001, Azat zkeskin, Tatan Bir Sevda: Mardin, zgr Politika, 9 March 2002. For recent
media representations of the same genre, see, among others, especially, Esra Danacolu, Mardin:
Kayp Zamann ehri, Atlas, no. 143 (2004), Handan Demiralp, Tan Fsldad Kadim Dua:
Mardin, Chi November 2005.
8 Murathan Mungan, Geyikler, Lanetler: Mezopotamya lemesi 3 (stanbul: Metis, 1992), Murathan
Mungan, Mahmud ile Yezida: Mezopotamya lemesi 1 (stanbul: Metis, 1992), Murathan Mungan,
35
The literary and visual productions of the Economic and Social History

Foundation of Turkey (Trkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakfi) were
also important sources contributing to the dominant representations of
Mardin for the metropolitan audience. Photographs of Mardin and its
surroundings, taken by Bnyad Din, were first shown at the Mardin
Museum and later displayed in stanbul. The exhibition was effectively
advertised and became a significant cultural event, well-attended by
stanbuls intellectual elite. Accompanied by the epic poems of Refik
Durba, the collection was entitled The City of Stone and Faith (Tan ve
nancn ehri).9 In due course the title of this exhibition served as slogan for
the promotion of the city.10
The circulation of discourses on the accentuated cosmopolitanism of
Mardin created a mirroring effect on the rhetoric of the Mardinities about
their own city. As an elder local dignitary said at a City Council meeting,
Mardin was the only city in the Ottoman Empire where discrimination
according to religion and language did not exist. Before the foundation of
the United Nations, we were portraying the unity of cultures that the
United Nations is now appealing for.11
In the summer of 2001, when global and national interest in Mardin
reached its peak, Muslims showed their Syriac Christian neighbors to the
outside world as vital evidence for the citys cosmopolitan face. Visitors
were encouraged to seek out and interact with Syriac Christians as part of
their tourist itinerary and ask shopkeepers whether they would be able to
see any Syriacs in the city. Restaurant owners refashioned their menus,
offering a selection of Syriac dishes. Music shops decorated their windows
with posters of a recent compilation album of traditional and religious
Syriac music. The images of churches and monasteries, priests and
patriarchs, were made into postcards and, along with the stone-built
houses, came to be the dominant images of Mardin.
Having travelled through militarized Kurdish towns and villages and
feeling oversaturated by the excessive talk and images about cosmopolitan
life in Mardin, I began to wonder what all those people in the city of Mardin
meant by cosmopolitan? What are the implications of a politically
volatile border city, located in the zone of military conflict between PKK
Parann Cinleri (stanbul: Metis, 1999), Murathan Mungan, Taziye: Mezopotamya lemesi 2
(stanbul: Metis, 1992).
9 Refik Durba, Tan ve nancn iiri Mardin (stanbul: Tarih Vakf, 1998).
10 There are many other literary and visual works recently produced on Mardin. See, among others, Filiz
zdem, ed., Tan Belle Mardin (stanbul: YKY, 2005). Since this article focuses on the constitutive
events in the immediate aftermath of Mardins nomination, I confine my analysis to the first
influential representations of the city.
11 This and further references and descriptions derive from my field notes.
and Turkish armed forces and governed under emergency law for over a
decade, being designated as a World Heritage Site? What does it reveal and
at the same time hide about the relationships between different ethnic and
religious communities who lived under emergency rule and were subjected
to different forms of power as unrecognized minority citizens?
Before I analyze the effects of post-conflict discourses of
cosmopolitanism on the different communities positions in the city, I
want to underscore that the appropriate question here is not whether
ethnicity is the main factor determining the identity of minority subjects,
leading to a conflict with the official ideology. Notwithstanding the
significance of these questions, it is important to note that academic works
studying the Kurdish problem based on the framework of the dichotomy
ethnicity/nationalism take for granted the polarized accounts of political
experiences, which in turn can obstruct the recognition and understanding
of the effects of violence on the production of different forms of power
relations between the actors in the conflict.12 Here, I suggest not to confine
the analysis of the post-conflict process to the categories of ethnicity and
nationalism, but rather to study it by exploring the social imaginaries that
are rooted in the construction of political subjectivities.13 Aretxaga defines
12 For significant examples of this perspective, see, among others, Martin van Bruinessen, Shifting
National and Ethnic Identities: The Kurds in Turkey and in the European Diaspora, Journal of Muslim
Minority Affairs 18, no. 1 (1998), Chris Houston, Islam, Kurds and the Turkish Nation State (Berg:
Oxford, 1998), Kemal Kirii and Gareth Winrow, The Kurdish Question and Turkey (London: Frank
Cass, 1997), Robert Olson, ed., The Kurdish Nationalist Movement in the 1990s: Its Impact on Turkey
and the Middle East (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), Mesut Yeen, The Turkish State
Discourse and the Exclusion of Kurdish Identity, in Turkey: Identity, Democracy, Politics, ed. Sylvie
Kedourie ( London: Frank Cass, 1996). For a recent example of a historical and ethnographic study
based on the framework of ethnicity and nationalism, see, ktem, Faces of the City., Kerem
ktem, Incorporating the Time and Space of the Ethnic Other: Nationalism and Space in
Southeast Turkey in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, Nations and Nationalism 10, no. 4
(2004). For a sociological analysis of the political and analytical categories in the study of the Kurdish
issue, see, Nee H. zgen, Snr, Devlet, Airet: Airetin Bir Etnik Kimlik Olarak Yeniden nas,
Toplum ve Bilim, no. 108 (2006).
13 For critical ethnographic examples analyzing on the effects of violence and the forms of subjection in
the context of political violence and terror, see, Begonia Aretxaga, Maddening States, Annual Review
of Anthropology 32 (2003), Begonia Aretxaga, Playing Terrorist: Ghastly Plots and the Ghostly State,
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (2000), Begonia Aretxaga, Shattering Silence: Women,
Nationalism and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997),
Yael Navaro-Yashin, Confinement and the Imagination: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in a Quasi-
State, in Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World, ed. Thomas Hansen
and F. Stepputat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), Yael Navaro-Yashin, Life is Dead
Here: Sensing the Political in No Mans Land, Anthropological Theory 3, no. 1 (2003), Nancy
Shepherd-Hughes, The Genocidal Continuum: Peace-Time Crises, in Power and the Self, ed. M.J.
Mageo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Michael Taussig, Culture of Terror, Space
of Death: Roger Casements Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture, Comparative Studies
in Society and History 26, no. 3 (1984), Michael Taussig, Terror as Usual: Walter Benjamins Theory
of History as State of Siege, in Nervous System, ed. Michael Taussig (New York: Routledge, 1992).
37
the imaginary as the cultural repository of unconscious discourses and

images, modes of thinking and feeling.14 In her formulation, the
imaginary as a cultural repository is not static or ahistorical; rather, it is re-
constituted through the change of meanings and shared symbols entailed
by the transformation of culture. From this theoretical stand, she argues
that the account of political subjectivity should go beyond re-counting the
narratives of political experience and try to capture the possibility of
understanding how the collective and social imaginary works. To do this,
she suggests looking at the accounts of personal and collective histories,
histories that include not only conscious narratives but also forgotten
episodes and hidden discourses, which in turn draws the attention to the
obscured in relations of power.15
Derived from this theoretical framework, this article discusses the
discourses and practices of the post-conflict process in Mardin, by
exploring the social and political imaginaries embedded in the fragments of
the personal and collective histories of people from different ethnic and
religious backgrounds. This aims to serve several purposes. First, by
including the accounts of Arabs and Syriac Christians, I wish to draw
attention to the experience of the conflict from the perspective of different
religious and ethnic minorities. Secondly, by conveying the narratives of
the contradictory and intertwined experiences of people, the article hopes
to offer an alternative framework that will go beyond the dichotomy of
ethnicity/nationalism and bring to light different forms of power relations
between the state and its subject-citizens.
I need to note that this article does not aim to undermine the historical
meaning and influence of cosmopolitan life in Mardin. Rather, its goal is to
challenge claims regarding the alternative and inclusive character of the
discourse of cosmopolitanism, as it is employed in the post-conflict
political context of Mardin. It hopes to convey the narratives around the
experience and imaginary of episodes of violence and processes of
exclusion. Although it does not offer a wider historical framework, I wish
to remind that the evasive narrative of violence lies in recognizing and
catching the moments of revelations of the experience, as well as in the
endless effort of following the hidden connections between them.
First, I will present a brief history of Mardin to explain the spatial and
social transformation of the city through the events that led to continuities
as well as ruptures in the cosmopolitan past of the city. In the second and
third part of the article, I will try to show how locals use the discourses and
14 Aretxaga, Shattering Silence, 8.

15 Ibid., 18.
practices produced in the context of the rehabilitation projects, in order to

re-articulate the inter-communal relationships and create a ground to

negotiate with the state. I argue that, despite their use as strategic tools,
these discourses are not only based on meta-narratives, but also on
fragmented, contradictory and repetitive narratives that move between
past and present, revealing the connections between the unresolved issues
of the past and the current power relations between the communities and
the state. Borrowing a term from Michael Taussig, I will call these
discourses terror talk.16 Taussig defines terror talk both as the
regulative and productive effects of terror and describes its capacity to
produce distancing and fluctuating narratives that simultaneously reveal
and conceal the accounts of terror. Taussig argues that terror talk fixes the
boundaries by constructing dogmatic certainties, while at the same time
revealing the uncertainties of a diffuse, decentred randomness.17 Post-
conflict life in Mardin has been permeated by multiple and contradictory
terror talks, loaded with questions about the representation of
cosmopolitan life in Mardin, desire for recognition, legitimacy of state acts,
as well as a sense of injustice and sentiments of fear and anger.
For the local Arab elites of the city, the selection of Mardin as World
Heritage Site was significant, since it was the only way to lift the stigma of
being a space of terror and underdevelopment that Mardin had fallen into
and also to regain their economic and social prestige as urban elites, which
had been eroded by the migration and later economic domination of
villagers in the city. Life in the city of Mardin was tranquil during the time
of the terror (terr).18 Nothing happened here, was the perennial
statement they gave in response to the curiosity of post-conflict visitors.
According to local Arabs, they were loyalist because they were conscious
citizens (bilinli vatandalar). As was explained to me, this consciousness
required them not only to refuse an alliance with separatist groups, but also
to keep the Pandoras Box of the city closed and not to give its secrets away.
This, in turn, was contingent on obedience to the common yet implicit rule
of the city, known as not done, not seen, not heard.
For Syriac Christians, this process was crucial since it helped them
reclaim ownership over their cultural heritage and gain recognition for
their ethnic and religious identity without being accused of being traitors.
Like their Arab neighbors, the Syriac Christian community of Mardin,19
16 Taussig, Terror as Usual.

17 Ibid., 16.
18 While Arabs and Syriac Christians refer to the military conflict between the PKK and Turkish armed
forces as terror (terr), Kurds refer to it as events (olaylar) and/or war (sava).
19 For a detailed analysis of the historical and political conditions of the Syriac Christians in Turkey, see,
39
composed of between fifty and sixty families, knew that conditions in

Mardin required them to keep their knowledge of the past within the
community and not to reveal it publicly. Rooted in the 1915 massacres, the
Syriacs implicit knowledge of cosmopolitan life in Mardin has hinged on
the memory of the massacres, conversions, and displacement of people, as
well as confiscation, evacuation and redistribution of objects and
property.20 In their view, they had been subjected to atrocities precisely
because they were Christians. Despite their submission to the ruling
authority, they suffered because they were equated with Armenians and
lived in the same region as the Kurds. Nevertheless, they have strategically
submitted to the rule of silence in the city. They have remained distanced
and reserved in their interaction with the Muslim communities and
continued their closed life around and behind the church walls.
For the Kurds, the habitual silence of the city has a different
connotation. It is to conceal the devastating effects of the events (olaylar)
in the city. Mardin has been governed under the emergency law that
abolished human rights and perpetuated unrestricted military and police
control over the city, further empowering them in their arbitrary actions
against the citizens. Given the violent events of both past and present, the
popular notion of Mardin as a peaceful cosmopolitan city is an illusion
according to many of Mardins Kurdish locals.
Following Taussig, I will qualify the domain of knowledge in Mardin
as public secrecy.21 Describing the indispensable relation of secrecy to
power, Taussig argues against the oppositional dichotomy between
secrecy and truth. In his view, there is no such thing as a secret, but it is
public secrecy that lies at the core of power.22 Taussig refers to the
notion of know[ing] what not to know and know[ing] what not to
speak.23 In his view, public secrecy stands for a limit vital for the
survival of the subjects in their dependency on power and, thus,
maintains a borderline where the secret is not destroyed through
exposure but subject to a different revelation, while leading to a form of
concealment.24 In other words, public secrecy resists being divided into
oppositional pairs of truth and secrecy and endures in a space of
Yakup Bilge, Gemiten Gnmze Sryaniler (stanbul: Zvi-Geyik, 2001), Ahmet Tan, ed.,
Sryaniler ve Sryanilik, 4 vols. (stanbul: Orient Yaynlar, 2005).
20 For a comprehensive and influential account on the effects of the 1915 massacres on the Syriac
community, see, Gabriel Yonan, Asur Soykrm: Unutulan Bir Holocaust (stanbul: Pencere Yaynlar,
1999).
21 Taussig, Defacement. Michael Taussig, Defacement.
22 Ibid., 7.
23 Ibid., 51.
24 Ibid., 8.
ambivalence where it facilitates the co-existence of oppositional and

conflicting social forces.25
In the context of Mardin, public secrecy has been a necessity for survival
under the state regime. The Turkish state, in the post-conflict context, has
required its citizens to refashion their social memory and to accept roles
necessary to enter into the symbolic order of the nation state. However, this
has been a complicated process, since public secrecy is not a static form of
knowledge. Rather, it constantly changes through events that lead to the
experience of death, fear of loss, and conformity to a new reality.26 In the
post-conflict political context of Mardin, the Arab and Syriac Christians, on
the one hand, adopted the discourse of cosmopolitanism as the idealized
image of the city and complied with the official discourse, by putting a
distance between the Kurds and themselves and eliminating references to
the military conflict from the contemporary representations of the city. On
the other hand, they deface the dogmatic certainty of this discourse by
revealing their experience of loss, exclusion and marginalization,27 through
the fragmented narratives that move between past and presentnamely,
between the 1915 massacres and the political violence experienced under
the emergency law. In this political context, local Arabs have articulated
their position as witnesses. They were neither involved in the 1915
massacres nor in the separatist acts of the PKK. The Kurds have been less
reluctant to acknowledge their involvement in the 1915 massacres as
perpetrators. In political circles, the 1915 massacres are referred to as
historical evidence of the atrocities that the Turkish state committed
towards its minorities. In this political imaginary, which has been
perpetuated by PKK discourses, both Kurds and Armenians were the
victims of state genocide and it is important that they acknowledge each
others suffering and give each other support in their political struggle with
the Turkish state. However, they have accused local Arabs of
discriminatory attitudes intended to exclude them from the city and of
compliance with the states repressive measures during the course of the
events. Perceiving themselves as the most victimized group of all, Syriac
Christians have used the discourses surrounding the citys cultural
heritage as a hegemonic tool to reveal what belonged to them and what was
taken from them by the state and their Muslim neighbors. In doing so, they
have been cautious so as not be equated with the Armenians and blamed as
traitors. Their discourses about their omnipresent submission to authority
25 Ibid., 64.
26 Taussig, Culture of Terror, Space of Death.
27 Taussig, Terror as Usual, 16.
41
and their ownership over the cultural heritage have often been devoid of

any reference to the presence of the Armenians who lived as majority
Christian population in the city until the 1915 massacres.
City of castles
In 2001, at a time when the Ministry of Culture applied to UNESCO,
Mardin was a socially and spatially segregated city, with Kurds composing
the majority of the population, along with Arabs and Syriac Christians.
Despite the citys popular image of houses, churches and mosques huddled
together, the castle has remained the dominant image of Mardin for the
locals. That is to say, in the historical and political imaginary of the locals
Mardin always was and still is the castle of the sovereign, a castle-city
composed of many fortified neighborhoods divided by mental, political
and social borders.
In the view of Arabs and Syriac Christians, who refer to themselves as
the citys natives (yerli), the city neither subverted nor challenged state
sovereignty. This is a city of minorities and has always been like that, an
elderly Arab man said. The trouble was created down the hill by the
Kurds, was the public statement reiterated to differentiate the Arabs and
Syriac Christians subject-position from that of the Kurds. The tension
between the Kurds and Arabs is rooted in the historical experience of the
conflicts and negotiations between nomadic tribes and landlord families to
demarcate the internal borders separating the center from the periphery.
This, in turn, has underpinned the segregation between the urban and the
rural (in Kurdish bajari and gundi, respectively), the first being associated
with the Kurds, while the latter is associated with the Arab and non-Muslim
populations. Under Ottoman rule, Arab landlords predominantly
consolidated their power in Mardin by collecting taxes and subsidizing the
local army as the local representatives of Ottoman authority, and by fighting
against the Kurdish tribes that threatened the city with frequent attacks.28
In the nineteenth century, the social and political structure of the city
underwent drastic changes as a result of the governments heavy-handed
measures. The Kurdish tribal leaders emerged from these local conflicts
with increased power and autonomy and were invited to collaborate with
the central authority in order to repress local uprisings.29 In this context,
several Kurdish landlords played a role in provoking a public uproar against
the non-Muslim population, which in turn led to a conflict that ended with
the massive extermination and displacement of the Armenian population
28 Aydn, Mardin.
29 Ibid.
in 1915.30 As the main road between the northern provinces of Van,

Erzurum, Bitlis and the cities of Syria led through Mardin, thousands of
deportees were gathered and pushed through the city, some of whom were
abducted by villagers and sold to prominent local families. Armenians were
erased from the city. Of necessity, those who remained converted to Islam
or pretended to belong to the Syriac Christian community. Most of the
property of Armenians as well as Syriac Christians, including houses and
churches, were either appropriated by the state and turned into military
buildings, hospitals, schools and prisons, or distributed to the Muslim
migrant population, who had been expelled from their hometowns after
the Balkan Wars, and sold to leading local families. This was justified under
the law of emval- metruke (abandoned properties) which legalized the
appropriation of the property of Armenians and Syriac Christians who did
not return within a certain time period.31
Following the establishment of the Republic, the city was re-designated
as the center of the main province, being the seat of administrative
government for all the Kurdish towns and villages which in the Ottoman
era had been historically and politically significant. The old Arab families
regained their positions in the bureaucratic system of the new state;32 they
were put in charge of promoting and implementing the new regimes
reforms, as well as of surveying their efficacy in both public and private.33
This, in turn, reproduced the historical segregation between Kurds and
30 For the critical yet different studies on the historical connections between the politics and policies of
the Ottoman Empire and the 1915 massacres, see, Taner Akam, Trk Ulusal Kimlii ve Ermeni
Sorunu (stanbul: letiim, 1995), Hamit Bozarslan, Baz Karlatrma Unsurlar: Ermeni ve
Yahudilerin Yok Edilmesi, Birikim, no. 193-194 (2005), Selim Deringil, In Search of a Way Forward,
Armenian Forum 1 (1998), Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation
of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), Ahmet nsel, Ermeniler,
Dmanlar ve nsanla Kar lenen Su, Birikim, no. 193-94 (2005).
31 Bozarslan, Ermeni ve Yahudilerin Yok Edilmesi., Soner aaptay, Kim Trk, Kim Vatanda? Erken
Cumhuriyet Dnemi Vatandalk Rejimi zerine Bir alma, Toplum ve Bilim, no. 98 (2003), nsel,
Ermeniler., ktem, Incorporating the Time and Space of the Ethnic Other.
32 In 1925, Kurdish uprisings started against the new regime, prompting new measures which now
targeted the Muslim non-Turkish population of the region in general, and Mardin in particular. See,
Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State: The Political and Social Structure of Kurdistan
(London: Zed Books, 1992). Many members of the extended and influential Arab and Kurdish
families of Mardin were exiled, while some of the leaders of Kurdish tribal families were executed as
a result of the verdicts of the Tribunal Courts. See, Aydn, Mardin. Some of the accused escaped to
Syria or Iraq in order to avoid execution and returned to the city after the general amnesty in 1928.
Yet, the Syriac Christians as well as the Armenians who had fled between 1915 and 1919 were exempt
from the general amnesty under the aegis of a law that decreed a ban on citizenship for subjects who
did not participate in the independence war but rather left Turkey and did not return until 24 July
1923. See, aaptay, Kim Trk, Kim Vatanda?.
33 These reforms included changing the dress code and placing sanctions on the use of the Kurdish
and Arabic languages, thereby promoting the use of Turkish as the official language, and establishing
the community houses as the main institutions of the Republican Party.
43
Arabs as gundi and bajari, the first being suppressed and marginalized, the

latter being supported by the new state so as to represent the face of the
Republic and to mediate the conversion of Mardin into a secular, modern,
Turkish city.
The change to the multi-party system in 1946 prompted new social and
economic transformations in the city. The politics of the Democratic Party
which came to power in this period disrupted earlier measures and gave
rise to conditions that led to political and economic mobility in favor of the
repressed subjects of the Republican regime.34 In the 1950s, Mardin, like
other cities in Turkey, received its first flow of migrantsmainly Kurds and
Mahallamis from villages and nearby towns.35 Despite the discriminatory
acts of the Arab locals, the newcomers of 1950s managed to adapt to the
conditions of city life. They learned as well as taught their children Arabic,
the lingua franca of the city, and lived in mixed neighborhoods together
with Syriac Christians. Getting caught up in the smuggling operations
across the Syrian border, the Kurdish families as well as the Mahallamis
became major operators, so that they gradually acquired both economic and
political power in the city.
The out-migration of Arab families started in the 1960s and accelerated
in the 1970s, due to economic reasons related to the increasing
peripherilization, as well as the loss of their economic and political power.
The migration of Syriac Christians started in the 1940s, following the
enactment of a law that ordered Christians to be recruited into the army.
Vividly remembering the 1915 massacres, the majority of Syriac
Christians left Mardin and escaped to Qamishl, Syria, which had already
been a place of exile for Syriac and Armenian survivors and protagonists of
the Kurdish uprisings and blood feuds. Migration intensified in 1974 due
to the local harassment during the Cyprus War. With the acceleration of
the conflict between the PKK and the Turkish armed forces, conditions of
daily life worsened for Syriac Christians and Arab locals. In order to avoid
being caught in the crossfire, Syriac Christians precipitously left the city.
Mardin experienced the conflict in a way different from other cities in
Southeastern Turkey. On the one hand, the city was a base for the air force
and the national intelligence agency and became, by default, a sanctuary for
34 Ayhan Aktar, Varlk Vergisi ve Trkletirme Politikalar (stanbul: letiim, 2002), Aydn, Mardin.
35 The word Mahallami (Arabic, meaning coming from a thousand neighborhoods) refers locally to
an Arabic-speaking community which migrated from the villages around Midyat, a town close to
Mardin. Syriac Christians call those Christians forced to convert to Islam by the Ottoman leadership
in the middle of the nineteenth century Mahallamis. They were believed to be mild-mannered people,
a trait that could be taken as proof of their Syriacness. However, contrary to the Syriacs claims about
the Mahallamis roots, the local Arab elites accused Mahallamis of being bandits and held them
responsible for creating chaos and disorder.
the families of military officers and state authorities. On the other hand, it
was a major settlement area for Kurdish families who had been forced to
leave their villages under emergency law. In the process, and because of their
alleged support for the PKK, some of the already established Kurdish families
were subjected to constant interrogations and acts of repression by the state.
This, in turn, heightened their social and economic marginalization. At the
same time, the displaced Kurdish villagers filled the vacuum of old locals in
Mardin. As they arrived, Kurdish families began to create fortified
neighborhoods on the outskirts as well as next to the old cemeteries of the
city. Arabs and Syriac Christians mapped these areas as places of poverty and
violence. In the social imaginary of the old inhabitants, these spaces were
reminders of the absence and loss of the citys imagined qualities.
Notwithstanding its internal conflicts, in 2001, with its new
representation as the mystic, remote Babylon-like city of the Turkish Orient,
Mardin became the center of attraction for post-emergency-law visitors,
cultural tourists, as well as national and international experts who aimed to
implement various projects to rehabilitate the city in a way that would
enhance Mardins bid to become a World Heritage Site. The following
sections will focus on the analysis of the discourses and practices produced
through two projectsthe Mardin Participatory Rehabilitation Project, and
the Mardin City Councilwhich were the leading projects implemented
immediately after the citys nomination by the Ministry of Culture, aiming
to initiate transformative actions enhancing Mardins application.
Public performance for creating a face for Mardin

The Mardin Participatory Rehabilitation Project (MERDINAR) was
launched by experts working for the Southeastern Anatolian Project (GAP),
the United Nations Development Project (UNDP) and stanbul Technical
University (T); financially, it was supported by the Swiss
Government.36 The project consisted of several research projects, the
writing of a tourist guide book, and the implementation of a pilot
restoration project. The official aim was to protect the citys cultural
property, to emphasize its historical heritage, and to re-construct its
historical prestige. In the project leaders view, the citys architectural
heritage was the historical product of the Mardins cosmopolitan urban
culture. For that reason, the aim of the project was not to restore the city
but rather to rehabilitate it.37 The notion of rehabilitation was explained by
36 See www.merdinar.itu.edu.tr for the work carried out under this project.
37 Oya Akaln, Mardin Katlmc Kentsel Rehabilitasyon Projesi Yaam Biimleri Aratmas (Ankara:
NUVIS, 2001), 7.
45
referring to the meaning of the term in Ottoman Turkish (iade-i itibar),

which signifies the retrieval of dignity. In their view, iade-i itibar could be
possible by maintaining the conditions that would help Mardinites to
regain the experience of living in a city where they could acknowledge their
historical experience as well as each others cultural values.38
The main component of MERDINAR was a restoration scheme
implemented by groups of architects from stanbul and Mardin. These
architects worked both on the restoration of the shops on the market
known as Sipahiler ars and on drawing up plans for the historical
houses in certain demarcated zones. They executed critical assessment
studies for the buildings in the preservation zone, collected archival
material on the history of these designated buildings, and produced official
documentation on Mardins urban architecture, to be submitted to
UNESCO as part of the official application. During this process, the citys
urban fabric was analyzed by experts who revealed the complexity of the
spatial networks demarcating the boundaries between neighborhoods,
squares and houses. The ongoing architectural project raised official and
public consciousness about the historical and economic value of the
monumental sites and historical houses in Mardin. Supporting the
implementation of the project, the local governor took first action to
organize ceremonial demolitions of the unsightly additions to historical
buildings in the presence of a public audience. This was followed by other
local events: The owners of private property demolished additions to their
houses which did not fit into the original plan.
Alerted by these sudden changes, owners and inheritors of these ancient
houses returned to claim their property rights over the buildings. This turn
of events in particular revived the tensions between tenants and owners and
opened up channels for both Syriac Christians and Armenians to reclaim
their old properties now occupied by Muslim tenants. At this time, the
implicit public knowledge of how to differentiate a Christian house from a
Muslim house began to be aired. Prominent figures within the Syriac
Christian community attempted to share their knowledge of churches and
monasteries with architects and international NGO agents, so that they
would receive international support to claim their lost property.
Houses have the capacity to reveal the unspoken tensions between the
Muslim and Christian communities. For the big Arab families, the houses
were the embodiment of their social and economic capital. For the Syriacs,
they were proof of their essential yet broken roots in the city. Like their Arab
neighbors, the Syriac Christians of Mardin believed themselves to be the
38 Ibid.
real Mardinites as the builders of the citys cultural and architectural

heritage. Despite the fact that they were invisible to the public, they
considered themselves the ancient inhabitants of the city, claiming to know
the real history of the place. Through references to their past, they claimed
to know what people from other communities seemed to have forgotten.
The Syriac Christians perceive themselves as the most victimized
group. Despite their submission to the ruling authority, they were
subjected to atrocities, precisely because they were Christians. In their
view, they have suffered because of being equated with Armenians and
living in the same region with the Kurds. Syriacs are the only Christian
community not entitled to use the rights given to other non-Muslim
minority subjects under the Lausanne Treaty which the Turkish state
signed at the end of the Anatolian War in 1923. The common explanation
is that after long negotiations with state authorities, the representative of
the Syriac community dropped the request to be awarded minority rights,
precisely because Syriacs did not want to be perceived as a minority; rather,
they wanted to be treated as Turks. However, their submission to state
authority did not guarantee them protection. They were continuously
subjected to the harassment and abuse of their Muslim neighbors; this, in
turn, accelerated their emigration to foreign lands.
While walking with two Syriac Christian friends, Daniel and Mihail,
towards a recently vacated house, they described to me the history of the
old stone houses that had belonged to Syriac families. Daniels interest in
the history of the Syriac Christians and his commitment to church
activities made him a popular young person in the community. He had
spent most of his life in Mardin and, like all other Syriac children, had been
nurtured on the memory of seyfo (sword), the word used within the
Syriac-Christian community to refer to the 1915 massacres.39 He was
conscious of the fact that many people of his parents generation and his
own had fled from Mardin because of their painful memories of seyfo and
because of their fear of further abuse and humiliation. Most of his friends
and relatives were living in the diaspora and suffered from having lost their
culture and existing in permanent limbo. That is why, for him, the only
way to remain an authentic Syriac was to continue living in Mardin.
Daniel had a vivid memory of the stories told to him about the houses in
Mardin as well as close-by villages and towns. There are many stories of
Syriac houses and churches turned into ghostly places haunting their
occupiers. He recalled the story of a house in a town close to Mardin, which
previously had belonged to a Syriac family and was later confiscated and
39 Kurds and Arabs refer to the 1915 massacres as ferman (order).

47
used as a prison. This house maddened the prisoners, he commented

provocatively. The building came to a tragic end. One night, the prisoners
were awakened by the sound of someone crying, and although they
searched the building, they could not find where the crying came from. For
many nights afterwards, the crying returned, getting louder and louder.
The prisoners could not sleep, finally were driven mad by the haunting
sounds and set the building on fire. One church in the northern part of the
city had been changed into a mosque at the beginning of the 1920s and
used for a while without any major changes to it. Later, however, in order to
differentiate it from the nearby church and to mark its conversion to Islam,
one of the Muslim family foundations decided to add a minaret to the
building. Yet, it was never completed because every attempt to build the
minaret failed: Each time the tower collapsed. For Daniel, this was proof
that the church resisted to conversion. Only in 2003 could a stable minaret
be constructed. Even so, the mosque has not found peace because,
according to a local rumor, ever since its construction, a beam of light from
an unknown source falls on it every night.
After a long walk through the valley, we came to the house which
Daniel and Mihail wanted me to see. It had been built by two Armenian
families. The heads of the families were exiled and killed during the 1915
massacres. The house was later sold by their widows to two familiesan
Arab family and a prominent Syriac Christian family. Later, the Syriac
Christian family bought the whole house and lived there until the 1960s.
After the 1960s, some parts of the house were occupied by Muslim
families. Ultimately, following a long battle, it was vacated in recent times.
We passed from the courtyard into the big common room. Daniel went
upstairs to check other parts of the house, while Mihail and I pointed out
familiar architectural details we recalled from other houses. Daniel
rejoined us and filled the empty room with his historical imaginary of a
Christian house, reading the illegible or even invisible detailsincluding
the decorative carvings surrounding the windows, the size and the color of
the doors, the shape of the door knockers and door handles, the special
patterns on the ceiling in the main room, and the hidden doors and
passages that connected the rooms. Daniel explained that this spatial
arrangement and interior decoration were signs of particular tastes, habits
and customs which required an implicit knowledge of a particular life style
unknown to gundis (villagers). In that sense, these dwellings are signs of an
urban culture created in Mardin; this culture has disappeared because of
the flight and out-migration of Syriac Christians.
Although the Muslim, mainly Arab, elites of the city have found the
Syriacs implicit yet cynical remarks troubling, thinking that Syriacs have
been fabricating these facts, in order to assert their identity based on the
cultural heritage and to damage the cosmopolitan image of the city, they
have preferred to remain silent about the previous lives of the houses and
their possible connections with Syriac or Armenian families. In Mardin, old
local Arab people are more reluctant to speak about the events. They
significantly distanced themselves from the Kurds, perceiving themselves
as witnesses and protectors, while condemning the Kurds for being the
perpetrators. In their view, this is related to the essential character of the
Kurds who are ignorant and subversive in the face of authority. As a
middle-aged Arab man said, Kurds found the courage and the power of
subversion through being involved as protagonists in the massacres.
Having a different historical and political imaginary, many of the Kurds are
open to acknowledge their involvement in the 1915 massacres. Although
kinship is the most common trope, they usually use to refer to their
involvement; it is not the only one. In particular, young people are insistent
on revealing the involvement of their elder family members in the
abductions and massacres and do not hesitate to refer to the event in
recounting their family biographies.
In daily life interactions, Kurdish families are less reluctant to answer
the questions of curious visitors regarding the ownership of the houses
which they have come to occupy for years. On some occasions, they
welcome anonymous visitors who want to see their houses. When asked to
talk about the past of a house, they occasionally acknowledge the original
owners, but more often mention the distinctively Christian aspects of the
housesuch as icons, tunnels, and basements.
A Kurdish family who has settled in an old Armenian monastery seems
to have used to the flow of people coming into the yard to visit the old
church and the cemetery located in the monasterys garden. Passing
through the hallway to the garden, the children of the family first take
visitors to the cemetery in the front garden and point out the inscriptions
describing the priests buried inside the walls. Later, under the gaze of the
family members, visitors walk through the rooms of the monastery which
have been transformed into the familys rooms. Meanwhile, a male
member of the family might point out the broken icons or damaged images
on the walls or ceilings of the old church. In case the visitors are female, the
young or middle-aged women of the family occasionally accompany the
tour and share their implicit gendered knowledge of the interior of the
house. Leaving the young man and children behind, the women lead female
visitors to the intimate corners of the house to point out the residual details
of the monastery, niches that conceal sculptures in the form of grapes or
pigeons, crosses, candleholders, and graffiti, all hidden behind the carpets,
49
piles of pillows, blankets, family photos and kitchen towels of the present

occupants.
The Armenian locals who left Mardin years ago and settled in stanbul
are also closely following the process. They have a different approach than
the few Armenian families who still live in the city. While the remaining
ones continue to pretend to be Syriac Christians and reiterate the same
implicit remarks about the abduction of women and the confiscation of
propertyand in that sense not differentiate their experience of violence
from that of Syriac familiesthe Armenian families who left the city in the
1950s are extremely critical, not only towards the Muslim locals of Mardin,
but also towards the Syriac Christians whom they perceive as silent
collaborators. In their view, many of the monuments, churches and stone
houses which are now reclaimed by Syriac Christians actually belonged to
Armenians. They argue that, benefiting from the official condemnation of
Armenians and the disavowal of their cultural and historical presence,
Syriac Christians took over their cultural and historical heritage and stood
out as a unique and authentic Christian community in post-emergency
Mardin.40
The ownership of the cultural heritage is not the only hidden debate
revealed through the discourse of cosmopolitanism. The discussion about
the representation of Mardin as a cosmopolitan city has perpetuated the
tension between the Kurds and Arab locals who were actively involved in
MERDINAR. The following section will focus on these discussions
conveying the politics of the recently formed civil society organizations in
Mardinthe City Council and the Democracy Platform.
Conditions for becoming a civil society

The City Council was established in response to the UNDPs demand to
meet particular requirements for a successful UNESCO application.41 It
was expected to be a self-governing body, comprised of non-governmental
organizations and individuals independent of any bureaucratic and
governmental institutions. The Council has been a fragile forum. The chair
of the Council, the head of the lawyers association in Mardin, once
mentioned that the idea of providing a non-institutional platform where
people would gather to express their opinions sounded at first like a pipe
40 For a discussion on the ownership over the cultural heritage in Turkey, see, Tomas erme, Talk
Zanaat ve Mimarisiyle Mardin ehri, Tarih ve Toplum, no. 200 (2000), Tomas erme, Zengin Eski
Kent Dokular Birikimine Sahip Mardin, Tarih ve Toplum, no. 217 (2002).
41 City Councils were established as city-wide participatory platforms under the project entitled
Localizing the UN Millennium Development Goals in Turkey through the Local Agenda 21
Governance Network. For the full text of the project, see, http://www.la21turkey.net/dl/en/pro-
doc.pdf
dream, given the political conditions and sensitivities in Mardin. The

Councils first meetings were held with the local governor and the head of
police being present. A couple of months later, the latter withdrew from the
Council because the project leaders and the UNDP agents expressed their
concern about the civilian nature of the City Council as a non-institutional
public sphere being lost. Thereafter, the meetings have been chaired by the
mayor of the city.
The Councils permanence would be important if it were to serve the
interests of all the involved agents, even if those interests were divergent. It
consisted of a selective and carefully appointed group of locals, mostly from
old local Arab families who had agreed on an agenda on how to push
Mardins bid to become a World Heritage Site. The council provided a
forum for a discussion of the necessary steps and strategies. In this way, it
became a space for encounter and negotiation between locals and expert
teams over the control of the means and ends of MERDINAR.
The members of the City Council employed the discourse of
cosmopolitanism as the dominant representation of the city. In this context,
the discourse of political violence that had marked Mardin for the previous
two decades was replaced by a discourse of authenticity, in which the nexus
of difference could be articulated through a particular notion of culture.
Their definition was correlated with the UNESCO definition, of culture as
being composed of remote islands crafted and formed through history,
without being subjected to any change and interaction.42 At the same time,
it reiterated the premises of a nationalist historiography in which Anatolia
was construed as a mosaic of cultures within a fixed notion of time and
space. As the mayor of the city said at a City Council meeting in 2002,
Mardin is the only cosmopolitan city where people from different ethnic
and religious backgroundsArabs, Kurds, and Syriac Christianshave lived
together peacefully since Ottoman times. He proudly pointed out that he
himself was the child of a Kurdish father and an Arab mother, that they lived
in Mardin, and that they spoke three languages, Kurdish, Arabic and
Turkish. He emphasized that neither historical nor political
transformationincluding the last events of terror (terr)had been able to
destroy the peaceful and harmonious life in Mardin.
There are historical and political reasons for underlining the excessive
yet strategic use of the term of cosmopolitanism. For the local Arab elites,
42 In his critical reading of UNESCO reports on the notion of cultural pluralism, Eriksen highlights
UNESCOs approach in which culture is a self-evident category that lacks contextualization, obviates
the politics of meaning-making and underestimates the politics of identity. Thomas H. Eriksen,
Between Universalism and Relativism: A Critique of the UNESCO Concept of Culture, in Culture
and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. J. Cowan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
51
the selection of Mardin as the World Heritage was crucial, since this project

had the potential to remove Mardin from the hegemonic discursive spaces
of terror and underdevelopment and to create a channel to negotiate with
the state. Arab locals were feeling resentful and angry about being
represented by the subversive and separatist acts of the Kurds. We
witnessed so many things but we were never part of them, was the
perennial claim of the local Arab notables, trying to stress their submission
to the state and, hence, their non-involvement in the so-called terror
events. In their view, this project would lift the stigma of being rural,
ignorant and separatist and help them gain recognition for the ownership of
the citys cultural heritage. This, in turn, would distance them from the
villagers and uphold their prestige as the urban elites, a prestige that was
eroded due to migration and, later, the political and economic domination
of Kurds and Mahallamis in the city.
On another level, the discourse of cosmopolitanism created a space in
which the state and the members of the City Council seemed to rally
around the unified objective of making Mardin a World Heritage Site. From
the states perspective, the Ministry of Cultures bid cast a potentially
favorable light on the Turkish state regarding the allegations of intolerance
towards ethnic and religious minorities. As the local governor of Mardin,
Temel Koaklar, put it at a City Council meeting held with UNDP and
ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) experts
present, Mardin is not the capital of Anatolian civilization, but more. It is
the capital of world civilization. It is a monument of living history. It is an
open-air museum. The city is the most striking example of the Republic of
Turkey, where the sound of the ezan [Muslim call to prayer] and the sound
of the church bells come together. We are proud of creating a Mardin
together where only culture and history are spoken about.
For Kurds, the contemporary discussions about the cosmopolitan
history and cultural heritage of the city was just another way to disguise
the citys real problemsthat is, the human rights violations during the
times of conflict. In the view of a middle-aged Kurdish man, the
cosmopolitan and mixed (kark) structure of Mardin was the main
reason for the silent and submissive nature of the city. There has never
been a collective movement in the city, as people from different ethnic and
religious backgrounds have not trusted each other. The fear of being
humiliated or spied on has been a constant feeling for Kurds since the
times when Arab locals came to dominate and exclude them from the city.
Many of his friends had been arrested, having been informed on by people
whom they presumed to be from the other communities. The Kurdish
fortresses located on the edge of the city were kept under surveillance, and
Kurds were subjected to sudden house searches and arrests under

emergency rule.
Even if such fear and suspicion did not exist, he added, there was
always the possibility of being misunderstood and hence stigmatized as a
Kurdish nationalist in such public meetings [i.e. City Council
meetings].According to him, the response to a Kurd in this context would
be different from the response to an Arab, given that Kurds are viewed with
greater suspicion. The main problem was that, although the City Council
was supposed to act as the public voice in the city, it was, in fact, not
representative. As things were, the common perception was unfavourable
towards the elitist structure of the City Council, because it ensured that
only representatives of certain interest groups in Mardin were heard, which
in turn excluded everyone else from the approved public forum.
This is the predominant view of the members of the Democracy
Platform, part of a political network that has begun as a civil disobedience
movement in response to the political violence under emergency law. In
Mardin, it is composed of twenty-five civil society organizations, including
various trade unions, chambers of different professions (such as doctors,
architects, engineers), human rights organizations and political parties
associated with the pro-Kurdish Democratic Peoples Party (DEHAP).
Hence, the Democracy Platform is an opponent of the City Council in terms
of what it represents within this polarized view of politics. It condemns the
politics of the City Council as being aligned with the official discourses of
both national and international agents, as a result of which it is indifferent
to the Democracy Platforms suggestions and projections. According to the
members of the Democracy Platform, by denying the effects of the political
violence, the City Council has failed to come to terms with the real
problems in Mardin and, therefore, has been unable to find urgently
needed solutions. The Democracy Platform has defied the popular notion of
Mardin as merely a historical site waiting to be restored. In their view,
Mardin is still governed under a state of emergency that abolishes human
rights and perpetuates the unrestricted military and police control over the
city, further empowering them in the practice of arbitrary actions against its
citizens. Thus, in the view of the members of the Democracy Platform, the
public space created by the City Council is an illusion. The extent of the
reach of the state and its rules of order are not publicly revealed.
However, the Democracy Platform itself is also a closed body. Based on
a core group of five members, each of whom represent a civil society
organisation, they convene the wider memberships only when deemed
necessary. They claim to be open to all parties. The chair said, We invited
the X and Y organizations to be part of the platform and to attend the
53
meetings. They never responded and, moreover, they reported us to the

vali (governor). As one of the doctors added, The Democracy Platform
was always marginal, but also was very much marginalized. The
Democracy Platform views the City Council as the state authorities
constructed arena, a position diametrically opposed to their own.
According to one of the architects involved with both the City Council and
the Democracy Platform, the vali (local governor) was pulling the strings
of the civil society movement. Therefore, the Democracy Platform is a
conditional forum within which to act, and also the last one capable of
effecting change.
In Mardin, the effects of the last twenty years of conflict have been
pervasive. There is no sphere of life that has remained untouched by either
the imagined or the real effects of the political violence. Two contradictory
yet complementary positions exist within this public imaginary. When one
is labelled as either pro-or anti-state, this also makes the other
simultaneously anti- or pro-PKK. This political discourse underlines the
polarization between the City Council and the Democracy Platform in
terms of what they are said to represent. In these discussions, culture and
ethnicity are used as two separate categories to formulate the axes of
difference and exclusion. The City Council defines the distinctive character
of the city through the category of culture under the influence of UNESCO
and UNDP, while abandoning ethnicity as a legitimate category for
articulating the difference. On the other hand, the Democracy Platform
uses the language of human rights to produce a temporal and fixed notion
of collective identity,43 thereby creating a forum for the defence of the
cultural and political rights of oppressed groups, namely the Kurds. It is
within this context that I suggest that the City Council and the Democracy
Platform have become extended forums for the ongoing historical and
political disputes between Kurds and Arabs.
Mardins application for selection as a World Heritage Site was
submitted to UNESCO at the beginning of 2003. A few months later, when
the news came that the bid had failed, the people of Mardin were shocked.
According to the official explanation, the application did not fail but rather
was withdrawn because of not being able to submit the required
documents to UNESCO. Despite the official explanation, the local
dignitaries of Mardin blamed the failure of the bid on the negative report by
43 For a comprehensive and critical debate on the anthropological discussions regarding the distinction
of culture and rights, see, Jane Cowan, ed., Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Rachel Sieder, Rethinking Citizenship: Reforming
the Law in Post-War Guatemala, in States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the
Postcolonial State, ed. Thomas Hansen and F. Stepputat (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
the Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), an international non-

governmental organization of professionals dedicated to the conservation

of the worlds historic monuments and sites. The report gave a detailed
picture of the historical and geographical character of Mardin, often
comparing it to other World Heritage Sites, and highlighted the distinctive
character of Mardin as the religious and historical site of Syriac Christians
and as capital of the Artuqids from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century.
Although in this respect the report confirmed the historical value of the
city, it did not actually support the application. There were two main
reasons for this. First, although Mardin was represented as the center of
Syriac culture and the capital of the Artuqids, the Deyrlzafaran Monastery
and the Kasmye Medrese were not demarcated on the map of the ancient
part of the city. Second, the authentic historical urban structure was in a
state of decay. Due to the mass migration from the villages, the historical
urban buildings had not been well protected and were badly damaged. The
city walls were eroding, and the castle had been marked as a military zone.
Historical houses had been altered to accommodate the construction of
additional shops which had been built to cope with the increased demand
brought on by the migration into the city.
Mardins local dignitaries were irritated by the report which they
perceived to be politically biased. They argued that the aspects on which
ICOMOS had focused (such as the effects of migration on the urban
landscape) were utterly political and unrelated to the main objectives and
goals of UNESCO. They claimed that the exclusion of the Deyrlzafaran
Monastery and the Kasmye Medrese from the map of the ancient city had
not been intentional, but rather related to the demarcation and
documentation of the city zone by the municipality, which had not been
changed because of re-planning costs. Trying to remain upbeat, the new
secretary of the City Council said, We will try again. This time, instead of
the whole of the ancient city, we will apply for the candidacy of certain
historical sites.
MERDINAR came to an end in 2003. Due to the start of the war in Iraq,
which affected the flow of visitors to Mardin, and also the failure of the
UNESCO bid, Istanbulites and international agents withdrew from the
city. Yet, this did not stop the Mardinites efforts to seek support for the
promotion of the citys cultural heritage. The renovation projects
continued and turned into a new business sector run by local architects.
The City Council was re-structured and now headed by a stable group of
local elites who continued to act as correspondents of the legitimate and
civil platform in Mardin, pursuing networking and lobbying activities with
the aim of maintaining the citys popularity and finding financial resources
55
for upcoming projects. In doing so, the discourse of cosmopolitanism has

not lost its centrality in the local and national representation of the city.
Rather, it has begun to resonate with the discourse of development, sharing
the images and cultural meaning of poverty and inequality, which in turn
has led to the design of new projects targeting the allegedly rural
population of the citythat is, Kurdswith the aim of improving their life
standard and facilitating their adjustment to urban life.
Concluding remarks
I have attempted to show fragments of personal and collective histories
underlying the experience and imaginary of cosmopolitanism in Mardin. In
this ethnographic context, produced under the rubric of terror talk,
cosmopolitanism functions in a fluctuating manner. On the one hand,
adopted by the local Arab elites as a survival strategy, the discourse of
cosmopolitanism absorbs and conceals the effects of political violence and
is employed as an unchallenging alternative to the state discourse of
nationalism. With claims to continuity, locality and authenticity,
cosmopolitanism works parallel to the state discourse of nationalism in its
capacity to decide where the boundary lies between insider and outsider
a boundary which finds its solid expression in the distinction between
culture and ethnicity. On the other hand, the discourse of
cosmopolitanism as a dominant representation of the city contradicts itself
and de-establishes certainty and normality, revealing the violent ruptures
engendered from the accumulated events of past and present. It is this sense
of slippage, of a contradictory movement between opacity and clarity,
emergency and normality, security and fear that constitutes the bulk of the
ethnographic material.
The protagonists of this ethnography narrated the memory of the 1915
massacres and the conflict between the PKK and the Turkish armed forces
in the form of public secrecy, which subsequently reveals and conceals the
violent effects of these historical and political processes on their personal
and collective histories. Within this context, I argue that what gives the
relationship its character of complicity in the form of public secrecy is not
only fear and caution in the face of state repression, but also the overlapping
quality between the limits of the states discourse of nationalism and the
historical and political tensions embedded in inter-community
relationships within the cosmopolitan life in Mardin. The effects of the
1915 massacres contain a hidden relationship of complicity, which in turn
affects the reconstruction of cosmopolitanism as a political discourse and
reveals its link with the discourses of nationalism in its imaginary of
Christians (in particular Armenians) as the subjects of exclusion. In
addition, having perpetuated the polarization between Kurds and Arabs,

the effects of the military conflict have given way to another form of
complicit relationship between the local Arab elites and the state, which
has found its expressions in the consensus of excluding the experience of
political violence from the citys representation. Here, the use of
cosmopolitanism is not only based on the desire to gain recognition for the
citys cultural and historical heritage, but also on fear and the wish to
escape the labels of terror and danger. As a result, cosmopolitanism, as
envisaged by the local Arab elites, mirrors the state discourse on
nationalism in its imaginary of culture as a homogenous, fixed and given
entity, situated in a continuity without internal changes and contradictions
and free from any reference to the histories of violence; as a place where the
ideal image of Mardin coexists with the ideal image of the Turkish state,
constructed under the surveillance of an international entity called
UNESCO.
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31

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY

Zerrin zlem Biner

Keywords: public secrecy, 1915 massacres, emergency law, cosmopolitanism,

New Perspectives on Turkey, no. 37 (2007): 31-58.

Truth is not a matter of exposure which destroys the secret, but a

revelation that does justice to it. (Walter Benjamin)1

1 Quoted in, Michael Taussig, Defacement (New York: Routledge, 1999), 2.

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In the midst of these developments, in 2001, the Turkish Ministry of

Culture nominated Mardin to be considered by UNESCO as a World

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the imaginary as the cultural repository of unconscious discourses and

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY

14 Aretxaga, Shattering Silence, 8.

practices produced in the context of the rehabilitation projects, in order to

re-articulate the inter-communal relationships and create a ground to

16 Taussig, Terror as Usual.

composed of between fifty and sixty families, knew that conditions in

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY

ambivalence where it facilitates the co-existence of oppositional and

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in 1915.30 As the main road between the northern provinces of Van,

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY

Public performance for creating a face for Mardin

referring to the meaning of the term in Ottoman Turkish (iade-i itibar),

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY

real Mardinites as the builders of the citys cultural and architectural

39 Kurds and Arabs refer to the 1915 massacres as ferman (order).

used as a prison. This house maddened the prisoners, he commented

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY

Conditions for becoming a civil society

dream, given the political conditions and sensitivities in Mardin. The

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Kurds were subjected to sudden house searches and arrests under

meetings. They never responded and, moreover, they reported us to the

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY

the Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), an international non-

governmental organization of professionals dedicated to the conservation

for upcoming projects. In doing so, the discourse of cosmopolitanism has

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY

addition, having perpetuated the polarization between Kurds and Arabs,

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY

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