By Uygar Baspehlivan
International news is rife with articles and analyses of Turkey’s renewed conflict with Kurdish secessionists in its South Eastern province. However, what we have not seen reflected in the media are the cultural implications of this reignited conflict over the Kurdish minority. Specifically, the Turkish government’s project towards limiting Kurdish language from the public space is not new, but rather makes sense in the context of a hundred-year state-led project. Erdogan’s new nationalism and the aftermath of the 15th of July coup brought novel conditions and problems that warrant fresh analysis. This article will look at how the linguistic policies of Erdogan’s government since 2013 have seen a renewed attempt at enforcing Turkey’s linguistic nationalism and will deliberate its further implications for Turkey’s ethnolinguistic minorities.
Language and Turkish nationalism
Ever since the late 19th century, language has grounded and fed Turkish nationalism’s most basic assumptions, justifying a project to put language under the state control and disseminate the same standardized language to the public as a means of consolidating the nation’s homogeneity.[1] Ataturk – and later Kenan Evren’s statist linguistic policies – established the fabricated Turkish language as a primary reference of identity and deployed it as a means to produce a sense of the nation. The extension of state-produced language in the Anatolian space naturally necessitated the assimilation of the region’s many local languages and dialects. Numerous historical languages were lost in the process, from Laz to Circassian. One of the resisting languages has been in a conflict of survival for almost a hundred years – Kurdish.
In 1924, under a policy named the ‘Eastern Reform Plan’, Kurdish citizens of Eastern Turkey were forcefully moved to other regions of Turkey so as to divide the Kurdish populace, thereby preventing a linkage of space and communal language. Being denied an open public space to speak their language, the idea was to assimilate Kurdish citizens into the national culture so that their language would be lost, reifying Turkey’s linguistic homogeneity. This policy of linguistic assimilation was consolidated and institutionalised with the 12 September 1980 coup. The Turkish language was constitutionally declared as the official state language and the publishing and spreading of written material in any other ‘native language’ was banned. The term `native language`, in this instance carries a significance in it that should not be neglected. As with the cases of Basque and Sicilian, when a language is not carried onto succeeding generations as a native tongue, its extinction becomes almost inevitable. Attempting to eliminate the native status of Kurdish and making Turkish the only spoken language in the state effectively denies Kurdish identity and consequently a Kurdish future. The walls of Diyarbakir’s famous E-type prisons bear a slogan that perfectly exemplifies this era of linguistic identity conflict: ‘Speak Turkish, Speak Plenty‘.[2]
When Recep Tayyip Erdogan first rose to power in Turkey in 2002, his promises on minority reform and legislation on language brought hopes. Further, several reforms were made in accordance with the expectation of the EU accession process. These included allowing TV programmes in minority languages and facilitating the learning by Turkish citizens of minority languages. However, as expected, there were several setbacks to these alleged reforms. The decision to allow TV programmes in minority languages were accepted only on the condition that ‘there would be no children’s programmes, no minority language teaching programmes, and that all programmes would be subtitled or simultaneously translated into Turkish’. In the decision to disallow linguistic education programmes, the recurrence of the ‘native language’ problem carried on from Evren’s policies. The learning of Kurdish by children was perceived as a threat to the nation’s linguistic homogeneity. The condition of simultaneous translation similarly indicates a reluctance to allow exclusive Kurdish-speaking zones. Therefore, we can argue that the limited reforms – which were important nevertheless- came with severely constraining conditions. A free space was created but put under the direct regulation of the state and its linguistic policies.
Today, after the 15th of July coup attempt, in the extended period of the state of emergency, we see the return of Evren’s and Kemal’s explicit linguistic nationalist policies. The Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) short period of Kurdish tolerance ended when Kurdish political party People’s Democratic Party (HDP) won seats in parliament and precluded AKP’s road to a majority. Following the re-ignition of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)-Turkish army conflict in the Southeast, Erdogan’s rhetoric took an unambiguously nationalistic tone. This spelt bad news for the linguistic gains the Kurdish communities made in the last decade. The state of emergency saw many Kurdish language TV channels and newspapers being shut down, restricting the public’s access to the language. The reason for these acts is presented as disseminating propaganda for the terrorist group PKK. In this decision, we witness an act of identity-making invested on language. This establishes a direct link between the Kurdish language and terrorism. As a result, people speaking the language- aka the Kurds- are indirectly and symbolically linked to war and terrorism. Recent events suggest that the Kurdish language is being inscribed in a normative dimension. In other words, as it is the language spoken by ‘terrorists’, the language and the overall linguistic group becomes ‘evil’, which produces the perfect conditions for a total domination of the linguistic space by the state –and here the state of emergency is a key discursive and practical facilitator.
These acts designed to capture linguistic space were supplemented by the return of denialist policies –not of denying the very existence of the Kurdish language like in the 1930s, but the denial of its legitimacy. In 2013, at the very start of AKP’s nationalist turn, Kurdish phrases began to be excluded from official documents. When HDP Member of the Parliament Hasip Kaplan used several Kurdish words in his speech on budget plans, the official transcript stated: ‘here the speaker used several words that are not Turkish’. Similarly, when he used a famous Kurdish idiom, it was recorded as a saying in an unknown language.[3] Besides inscribing the language a normative quality, the nationalist turn in post-2013 Turkey included taking the minority language out of Turkish political discourse, effectively denying and proscribing political agency if expressed in Kurdish. Ergo, to exercise political agency – one of the central assets of citizenship – it became symbolic and compulsory to conform to the linguistic expectations of the nation.
Policies to prevent Kurdish from becoming a ‘native language’ persist in Erdogan’s new nationalist Turkey. State policies are not simply directed towards the assimilation of the political wing of the Kurdish movement, but the assimilation of its culture, denying the space for the community to flourish. In service of this policy, many Kurdish Culture Centres were shut down.[4] But in line with policies pertaining to native languages, in February of 2017 day care centres funded by the Diyarbakir municipality called Zarokistans were suddenly closed down by means of an executive decree.[5] This restrained the capacity for Kurdish to be cultivated as a ‘mother tongue’, thereby denying cultural/communal affiliations to transpire between the Kurdish minorities of Turkey. Presumably, by reducing the number of people who would know Kurdish by birth, any sense of Kurdishness as established by language can be undermined.
Conclusion
Erdogan’s new nationalist Turkey has brought back Kemal’s linguistic nationalism. It sees the retraction of minority rights reforms made under Erdogan’s own leadership and pursues a re-enactment of Ataturk and Evren’s statist nationalism,. In representing Kurds as the primordial Other of the Turkish nation, disciplining the minority language becomes a means to promote and enforce homogeneity. Ranging from limiting the political visibility of the Kurdish language to seemingly minor acts such as closing down day care centres, Turkey’s return to nationalist policies that govern language as a means to ensure that Turkey’s modern existence and future are predicated on only one identity.
Uygar Baspehlivan is a graduate of War Studies at King’s College London. He is about to commence his postgraduate studies in Theory and History of International Relations at the London School of Economics. His research interests include nationalism, critical theory, and film theory
Notes
[i] Senem Aslan, “Citizen, Speak Turkish!: A Nation in the Making”, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Volume 13, 2, (2007), 245-272
[ii] İsa Tekin, “E-Tipi Hilton Diyarbakır Cezavi – Türkçe Konuş Çok Konuş”, (Ankara: Peri Yayınları, 2012)
[iii] I.N. Grigoriadis, “Türk or Türkiyeli? The reform of Turkey’s minority legislation and the rediscovery of Ottomanism”, Middle Eastern Studies, 43:3, 426.
[iv] http://t24.com.tr/haber/kurdistandan-sonra-kurtce-kelimeler-tutanaklardan-ayiklandi,245861
[v] Ibid.
Feature image credit: AP from https://www.businessinsider.com.au/turkey-may-support-independent-kurdistan-2014-7