#turkification

''Asimilasyon, haklı nedenlere dayanmayarak hakim güçlerin bir ulusu kendi hakim kültürü içerisinde eriterek, özümleyerek ortadan kaldırma süreçlerinin tümüne denir. Amaç, ezilen halkın ulusal benliğini güçsüz bırakmak, zedelemek, o ulusun dilini, kültürünü, geleneklerini, ulusal kurumlarını, kısacası o ulusun ulus olmasını sağlayan yani başka uluslardan farklılıklar gösteren tüm değerini ortadan kaldırmaktır; yani insanı bir kültürel varlık olarak öldürmek, kendi değerleriyle donatmak, onu kendi istekleri doğrultusunda yeniden eğitmek, kendine katmak olarak bilinen asimilasyon süreçleri, bugün özellikle Türkiye'de Kürt halkını ortadan kaldırmak, tarihin sayfalarından silmek için geliştirilen yoğun çabalardır.''

Armenian survivors recalled…Muslims settling in the late summer of 1915 in villages that were formerly theirs. Local officials saw to it that these Muslim settlers were allocated the best houses of the deported Armenians. One such example of settler colonialism is the village of Tell Ermen in Diyarbakır province, the entire Christian population of which had been massacred during July 1915. Tell Ermen was then repopulated with Circassians and Chechens. Since the settlers already had ploughs and oxen, all they needed for subsistence farming was seed: the War Ministry ordered 1,000 cups of barley and 300 cups of wheat from the storage depots to provide the requisite seeds. When the Chechen population surpassed Tell Ermen’s capacity, the construction of a new village was ordered for them in September 1918. Later Tell Ermen, which means “Armenian hill” in Arabic, was renamed Kızıltepe (“red hill”). Nowadays, the town bears not a single physical trace of its Armenian past.

Turkification.

The creation of a homogenous Turkish nation as criteria for "western-ness" required the dilution of the largest culturally and linguistically distinct non-Turkish people: the Kurds. This "civilisational necessity" became even more pronounced when significant homogenisation was achieved by the extermination of most Armenians between 1915-1916 and the move of approximately 1.2 million Greek Orthodox Christians to Greece and 500,000 emigrating from Greece to Turkey as part of a population exchange between the two countries (Akçam, 2004: Aktar, 2000: 17-55). Here we can talk about an evolving double stigma: Not only did Kurds emerge in official perception as ethno-linguistic aliens within the national body, they were also deemed "insufficiently civilised." Prior to the establishment of the Turkish republic, Atatürk had referred to “Ottoman country being the homeland of Turks and Kurds” and emphasised the “inseparability of the Kurds from the Ottoman nation” (Yeğen, 1999: 116). He had also pragmatically talked about a possible autonomy for Kurds in order to guarantee their continued support in the War of Independence against European occupying powers (McDowall, 2000: 196). In the decades following the creation of the republic, with the intensification of the nation building process, the Kurds ceased to exist as a distinct ethnicity in official discourse and a systematic forced assimilation campaign followed.  Ernest Renan cogently remarked in 1882 that “forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.” Homi Bhabha, in his discussion on the “foundational fictions” upon which all nations are built, argues that the “strange forgetting” Renan refers to “constitutes the beginning of the nation’s narrative” (see Bhabha, 1990: 11, 310). In Turkey, the making of the Turkish nation went hand in hand with the “forgetting, postponing and cancelling” of the Kurdish ethnic identity (Yeğen, 1999: 120). Kurds were no longer members of a “sibling nation”, but “Mountain Turks”, who had “forgotten” their Turkishness or were in “denial” of their Turkish origins and who needed to be told the “truth.” This had occurred because of the Kurds’ proximity to Iran, resulting in a degenerate language mixed with Persian. The Kurdish language, traditional dress, folklore and any expression of Kurdish culture were banned and reconstructed as “Turkish”. Kurdish peasants, who could only communicate in their own mother tongue, were heavily fined for each Kurdish word they used (Nezan, 1993: 73- 74). All references to a territory called “Kurdistan”, which had been widely acknowledged during the Ottoman era, were removed from maps and official documents, and Turkish names gradually replaced the names of Kurdish towns and villages. Most rural Kurds only became aware of the new Turkish names of their villages through contact with the Turkish gendarmerie. The Law on the Unification of Education, mentioned earlier, closed all religious schools and effectively banned the teaching of non-Turkish languages (Kirişçi and Winrow, 1997: 95-96). The “fixing” of the discursive space in order to eliminate the expression of a distinct Kurdish identity was extended through the inscription of nationalist symbols onto the physical space, especially in the Kurdish provinces, through spatial Turkification. The “nationalisation” of the land was to assist the transformation of its inhabitants. Mountains, hills, schools and official buildings were inscribed with the symbols of the Turkish flag, the crescent and star, as well as chauvinist slogans such as “How happy is the one who says I am a Turk” (Ne mutlu Türküm diyene), “One Turk equals the whole world” (Bir Türk dünyaya bedeldir) and “One language, one people, one flag” (Tek dil, tek halk, tek bayrak). This went hand in hand with the destruction of historical artefacts or monuments that in anyway referred to the Kurds or indicated a Kurdish presence (see for example Serdî, 1994: 188-189). The removal of Islam as a “social glue” highlighted ethnic divisions and Kurds came to face not only religious restrictions but also cultural and linguistic extinction. As a response to these developments, there were several Kurdish revolts which in turn intensified Turkification and brutal state coercion. The revolts were interpreted and represented as the will to re-introduce the Ottoman order and as a reactionary threat to the “civilising reforms” and the consolidation of the power of the modern Turkish state. The Kurdish rebellions accelerated the nation-building process and generated a persistent image of the Kurds as culturally backward, socially tribal, religiously fanatic, economically lagging and an internal threat to the territorial integrity of Turkey.

The process of the reproduction of Orientalism within Turkey refers to the way in which the Turkish nationalist elite, the Kemalists, imagined the Turkish nation and construed the ethno-religiously diverse society inherited from the Ottoman Empire. It is the process whereby Kemalism approached the society it emerged from, and the conditions that gave rise to it, through an Orientalist and Eurocentric reasoning and logic (Kahraman, 2002: 177). Meltem Ahıska has called this process Kemalism’s “Occidental fantasy”, which “evoked a ‘lack’ in 'the people’ upon which organised the 'desire’ to fill it” (2003: 365). Put differently, one can argue that in the absence of direct Western colonialism, the Kemalists took on what I call the “White Turkish Man’s Burden” in order to carry out a civilising mission on a supposedly backward and traditional Anatolian society enslaved by the retrograde influence of Islam. By assuming the Orientalist narrative and re-enacting it in the form of a Turkish Orientalism “indigenous” to Turkey, the Turkish ruling elite negated the Ottoman past for its “backwardness” and “religiosity”. The Kemalists rejected the Orient and assigned to Islam the definition of Orientalness, thus equating westernisation with de-Islamisation (Sayyid, 1997: 68-69). In the name of what the Kemalists called, “reaching the contemporary level of civilisation” (muassır medeniyet seviyesine erişmek), this project was carried out through the agent of the nation state with speed and from above, eliminating the opportunity to seek change in any way other than through mimicking “the West.” In this sense, the essentialisation and homogenisation of “the West” normalised the unequal power relations within Turkey, reflecting the pragmatic interests, expectations and the dominance of the secular Westernised elite, giving way to a “cognitive dissonance” between the value system of the elites and the rest of the population (Göle, 1997: 86). The civilisational divide between the modernising urban elite and the subaltern rural population assigned a paternal role to the Kemalists, who constantly perceived the Anatolian masses as backward, primitive and infantilised Others. It is therefore not surprising that the state is imagined in Turkey through the familiar and familial image of the Father State (Devlet Baba), constructing and defending “the common good”, punishing and rewarding accordingly, irrespective of societal consensus (Heper, 1985: 102-3; Delaney, 1995: 177- 179). This power relation is constructed in accordance with the Orientalist presumption that the “natives” cannot rule or represent themselves and they therefore need to be ruled and represented. The Kemalist mantra of the 1930s, “For the people, despite people” (Halk için, halka rağmen) is therefore not coincidental. While exalting the ideal of the “Turkish nation”, Kemalist discourse constructed the society inherited from the Ottoman Empire as “different”, as “lacking” and in need of transformation, simply “that which causes defeat” (Soğuk, 1993: 374). The Kemalist elite took on the paternalistic Orientalist view that they must, as the rightful teachers, educate Islamic, ethnic, tribal and rural Others deemed to be outside the sphere of Western modernity. Nationalist intellectuals who understood positivist Western science and technology played a key role in the production and institutionalisation of knowledge and believed they held the responsibility of bringing “modernity” to the masses. In the words of the founder of modern Turkey and the “Father of the Turks”, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: “We will live as a progressive and civilised nation in the arena of civilisation […] We will take science and technology from wherever it is and insert it in the head of each member of the nation. There is no restriction and condition on science and technology […] If [ignorance] is not eliminated, we will stand on the same spot […] If something is standing on the same spot, this means that it is going backwards (Atatürk, 2006: 388).” Historically, the Kemalist civilising mission involved the creation of a homogenous Turkish nation that urgently needed to rid itself of its “Orientalness.” This involved the othering of its Ottoman past, of rural and tribal structures, and in particular the ethno-religious plurality of the society (Bora, 1998: 39-42). These were constructed as anachronisms of the old Ottoman order and what made Turkey “different” from the West. The ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity of the society were constructed as a source of instability and a barrier to progress. The Orientalist gaze of “the West” played a foundational role in Kemalist self-definition, in the way that they imagined the Turkish nation, claimed hegemony and exercised power. As Meltem Ahıska has outlined, “the impact of the West on the Turkish nationalists was more than a mere import of Western concepts and techniques and was not just a movement of ‘modernity’ in time and space, but a ‘performance for the imagined Western audience’” (2003: 367). The radical Kemalist reforms of the 1920s and 1930s, as the continuation of the Tanzimat reforms in the late 19th century Ottoman Empire, were implemented with this “audience” in mind and it was very important for the Kemalists that Turkey “appeared” to be Western for this panoptic gaze. The Westernising reforms were wide-ranging and non-negotiable and their implementation was considered as a top-down process. The authorities ignored the multitude of voices that existed within the boundaries of the new state when trying to mould them into loyal nationalist citizens. The reforms involved the appropriation of “Western norms, styles, and institutions, most conspicuously in education, law, social life, clothing, music, architecture, and the arts […]” (Bozdoğan and Kasaba, 1997: 4). Through exposure to Kemalist nationalist discourse citizens would be influenced by the reforms and consequently reinforce the authority of the state. The establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 was central to the draconian reforms that aimed to eliminate the socio-political legacy of the Ottoman Empire. The caliphate, religious foundations, ministries, courts, schools, dervish orders, sects and brotherhoods were all abolished. In 1924, the Law on the Unification of Education (Tevhid-i Tedrisat Kanunu), with its roots in Ottoman reforms, secularised the school system and introduced mixed sex education. The 1925 Hat Law (Şapka Kanunu) prohibited the veil and the traditional Ottoman headwear, the fez. The nationalist and secularist reforms signified the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish nation-state and from Islam to nationalism, with the “cult of Atatürk” substituting Islam as “Turkey’s religion” (Navaro-Yashin, 2002: 188). Under the Ottoman Empire different Muslim ethnicities had been united by their common religion. Islam had functioned as the cohesive element in Ottoman society, but having replaced such a role for Islam in the new republic, Kemalism launched a program of Turkification. It was hoped that forced assimilation would guarantee the loyalty of the citizens to the nation-state and prevent ethnic separatism. It would also weaken European colonial influence and interference, which had resulted in the traumatic downfall and partition of the Ottoman Empire, leaving a deep scar on the minds and collective memory of the Turkish elite. It has been argued that Atatürk saw ethno-religious pluralism as a major flaw in the Ottoman system because this “had led to the search for independence and autonomy by groups such as the Armenians and the Kurds, which had resulted in self-mutilation” (Muller, 1996: 175). The authoritarian nationalist military officers, bureaucrats, academics, journalists and intellectuals who formed the nucleus of the Kemalist elite were profoundly affected by European thought and assumed with their European predecessors and contemporaries that nations were the only legitimate means of organising a state. A nation, they were convinced, could only consist of a society that shared the same ideal, language, territory and culture. Since Western modernity, superiority and strength was defined by homogenous nation-statehood and militarism, systematic Turkification became Kemalism’s very own civilising mission.

The process of the reproduction of Orientalism within Turkey refers to the way in which the Turkish nationalist elite, the Kemalists, imagined the Turkish nation and construed the ethno-religiously diverse society inherited from the Ottoman Empire. It is the process whereby Kemalism approached the society it emerged from, and the conditions that gave rise to it, through an Orientalist and Eurocentric reasoning and logic (Kahraman, 2002: 177). Meltem Ahıska has called this process Kemalism's "Occidental fantasy", which "evoked a 'lack' in 'the people' upon which organised the 'desire' to fill it" (2003: 365). Put differently, one can argue that in the absence of direct Western colonialism, the Kemalists took on what I call the “White Turkish Man’s Burden” in order to carry out a civilising mission on a supposedly backward and traditional Anatolian society enslaved by the retrograde influence of Islam. By assuming the Orientalist narrative and re-enacting it in the form of a Turkish Orientalism “indigenous” to Turkey, the Turkish ruling elite negated the Ottoman past for its “backwardness” and “religiosity”. The Kemalists rejected the Orient and assigned to Islam the definition of Orientalness, thus equating westernisation with de-Islamisation (Sayyid, 1997: 68-69). In the name of what the Kemalists called, “reaching the contemporary level of civilisation” (muassır medeniyet seviyesine erişmek), this project was carried out through the agent of the nation state with speed and from above, eliminating the opportunity to seek change in any way other than through mimicking “the West.” In this sense, the essentialisation and homogenisation of “the West” normalised the unequal power relations within Turkey, reflecting the pragmatic interests, expectations and the dominance of the secular Westernised elite, giving way to a “cognitive dissonance” between the value system of the elites and the rest of the population (Göle, 1997: 86). The civilisational divide between the modernising urban elite and the subaltern rural population assigned a paternal role to the Kemalists, who constantly perceived the Anatolian masses as backward, primitive and infantilised Others. It is therefore not surprising that the state is imagined in Turkey through the familiar and familial image of the Father State (Devlet Baba), constructing and defending “the common good”, punishing and rewarding accordingly, irrespective of societal consensus (Heper, 1985: 102-3; Delaney, 1995: 177- 179). This power relation is constructed in accordance with the Orientalist presumption that the “natives” cannot rule or represent themselves and they therefore need to be ruled and represented. The Kemalist mantra of the 1930s, “For the people, despite people” (Halk için, halka rağmen) is therefore not coincidental. While exalting the ideal of the “Turkish nation”, Kemalist discourse constructed the society inherited from the Ottoman Empire as “different”, as “lacking” and in need of transformation, simply “that which causes defeat” (Soğuk, 1993: 374). The Kemalist elite took on the paternalistic Orientalist view that they must, as the rightful teachers, educate Islamic, ethnic, tribal and rural Others deemed to be outside the sphere of Western modernity. Nationalist intellectuals who understood positivist Western science and technology played a key role in the production and institutionalisation of knowledge and believed they held the responsibility of bringing “modernity” to the masses. In the words of the founder of modern Turkey and the “Father of the Turks”, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk:  "We will live as a progressive and civilised nation in the arena of civilisation […] We will take science and technology from wherever it is and insert it in the head of each member of the nation. There is no restriction and condition on science and technology […] If [ignorance] is not eliminated, we will stand on the same spot […] If something is standing on the same spot, this means that it is going backwards (Atatürk, 2006: 388)." Historically, the Kemalist civilising mission involved the creation of a homogenous Turkish nation that urgently needed to rid itself of its “Orientalness.” This involved the othering of its Ottoman past, of rural and tribal structures, and in particular the ethno-religious plurality of the society (Bora, 1998: 39-42). These were constructed as anachronisms of the old Ottoman order and what made Turkey “different” from the West. The ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity of the society were constructed as a source of instability and a barrier to progress. The Orientalist gaze of “the West” played a foundational role in Kemalist self-definition, in the way that they imagined the Turkish nation, claimed hegemony and exercised power. As Meltem Ahıska has outlined, “the impact of the West on the Turkish nationalists was more than a mere import of Western concepts and techniques and was not just a movement of ‘modernity’ in time and space, but a ‘performance for the imagined Western audience’” (2003: 367). The radical Kemalist reforms of the 1920s and 1930s, as the continuation of the Tanzimat reforms in the late 19th century Ottoman Empire, were implemented with this “audience” in mind and it was very important for the Kemalists that Turkey “appeared” to be Western for this panoptic gaze. The Westernising reforms were wide-ranging and non-negotiable and their implementation was considered as a top-down process. The authorities ignored the multitude of voices that existed within the boundaries of the new state when trying to mould them into loyal nationalist citizens. The reforms involved the appropriation of “Western norms, styles, and institutions, most conspicuously in education, law, social life, clothing, music, architecture, and the arts […]” (Bozdoğan and Kasaba, 1997: 4). Through exposure to Kemalist nationalist discourse citizens would be influenced by the reforms and consequently reinforce the authority of the state. The establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 was central to the draconian reforms that aimed to eliminate the socio-political legacy of the Ottoman Empire. The caliphate, religious foundations, ministries, courts, schools, dervish orders, sects and brotherhoods were all abolished. In 1924, the Law on the Unification of Education (Tevhid-i Tedrisat Kanunu), with its roots in Ottoman reforms, secularised the school system and introduced mixed sex education. The 1925 Hat Law (Şapka Kanunu) prohibited the veil and the traditional Ottoman headwear, the fez. The nationalist and secularist reforms signified the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish nation-state and from Islam to nationalism, with the “cult of Atatürk” substituting Islam as “Turkey’s religion” (Navaro-Yashin, 2002: 188). Under the Ottoman Empire different Muslim ethnicities had been united by their common religion. Islam had functioned as the cohesive element in Ottoman society, but having replaced such a role for Islam in the new republic, Kemalism launched a program of Turkification. It was hoped that forced assimilation would guarantee the loyalty of the citizens to the nation-state and prevent ethnic separatism. It would also weaken European colonial influence and interference, which had resulted in the traumatic downfall and partition of the Ottoman Empire, leaving a deep scar on the minds and collective memory of the Turkish elite. It has been argued that Atatürk saw ethno-religious pluralism as a major flaw in the Ottoman system because this “had led to the search for independence and autonomy by groups such as the Armenians and the Kurds, which had resulted in self-mutilation” (Muller, 1996: 175). The authoritarian nationalist military officers, bureaucrats, academics, journalists and intellectuals who formed the nucleus of the Kemalist elite were profoundly affected by European thought and assumed with their European predecessors and contemporaries that nations were the only legitimate means of organising a state. A nation, they were convinced, could only consist of a society that shared the same ideal, language, territory and culture. Since Western modernity, superiority and strength was defined by homogenous nation-statehood and militarism, systematic Turkification became Kemalism’s very own civilising mission.

If one person murders another, then takes over that murdered person's property and possessions, he would be living off the proceeds of his crime. Once authorities discover his crime, he would be found guilty--by any court, anywhere--and then sentenced, punished, and forced to return the unlawfully obtained property and possessions. But if a people murders another people, and takes over the property and possessions of the murdered people, it seems that different rules apply, and the guilty--and their children--can continue living off the proceeds of the crime. It also seems that their successors can continue to threaten the successors of the murdered people with new murders, if, that is, they dared to mention the murder, or dared to demand the return of their property and possessions. This is the evolving saga of the Turkish and Armenian peoples from 1915 to today.  The 1915 murder of a people--or perhaps, more correctly, the attempted murder of a people--not only resulted in wiping out the Armenians form their 4,000-year-old homeland within a matter of 1-2 years, but also initiated an ongoing process of wealth, property, and asset transfer from the Armenians to the Turks. This process, started in 1915 by the Ittihadist leadership of Ottoman Turkey, continued uninterrupted with the successor Turkish Republic for many decades using various legislative decrees. It was completed with the total and legal Turkification of all Armenian assets and properties--of the Armenians' economic presence--in Anatolia.