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The AKP’s engagement with Turkey’s past crimes: an analysis of PM Erdoğan’s “Dersim apology”

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Notes

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15857429; http://www.voanews.com/content/turkey-issues-first-official-apology-for-1930s-mass-killing-of-kurds--134404153/148632.html.

  2. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2011/11/201111245211148456.html; http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/150058#.UN6lNULzLBI.

  3. This process has been exhaustively analyzed in Bayraktar’s (2010) work on how the Armenian Genocide has been presented in the Turkish media between 1973 and 2005. She concludes that while a liberalization of discourse has occurred since 2000, genocide denial continues in a more sophisticated manner. Another compelling analysis of Turkish public debate has been put forwards by Erbal (2012) with her critique of the “apology campaign” that was initiated by Turkish intellectuals in 2008. Ayata (2008) has analyzed the compartmentalization of the Armenian, Kurdish, and Alevi issues in Turkish intellectual debates as an effort to protect existing power asymmetries within the hegemonic discourse. Hakyemez and Çelik (2012) have provided a neoliberal critique of Turkish liberal’s engagement with the Kurdish conflict. While these works analyze the role of liberal intellectuals and the Turkish public debate regarding minorities, our focus in this piece is directed toward the official state narrative.

  4. On a plain level, it suffices to point out that merely 1 month after Erdoğan’s “apology” statement, the Turkish military carried out a brutal civilian massacre in Roboski in the province of Şırnak in December 2011, killing 34 Kurdish children and young adults.

  5. A similar argument is pushed forward by Zırh (2012) in his comprehensive documentation on how Dersim was debated in the Turkish press during 2009 and 2011.

  6. See Erdoğan 2012, Mütemadiyen Ic Mihraklar available at http://azadalik.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/mutemadi-ic-mihraklar-alevilik-uzerine-notlar-2/#_ftn1.

  7. Up until the Armenian Genocide in 1915, Dersim also contained a large Armenian population.

  8. There is a heated debate among Kurds, Turks, and Dersimis whether Zazaki is a language of its own, or merely a dialect of Kurdish. This debate is driven more by present political concerns than by an engagement with the Zazaki language. Linguists have determined that Zazaki is a distinct language based on its syntax, roots, and vocabulary (Blau 1989; Kehl-Bodrogi 1998). Within Dersim, some part of the population identify themselves as Kurds, others identify themselves as Zazaki. Yet, what unites both groups is the overarching Alevi identity. Due to their ethnic Kurdish and Zazaki identities, Dersim-Alevis also differs from Turkish Alevis, which constitutes the majority among the approximately 10–15% Alevi population in present-day Turkey.

  9. From Ottoman Sultan Yavuz Selim (1515–1520) onwards, 108 military incursions by the Ottoman state took place into Dersim, which was refusing to pay taxes and to be enlisted in the Ottoman army (Hür 2012). Particularly during the reign of Abdülhamit II (1876–1909), after failed attempts to assimilate Alevis into Sunnis, Dersim was increasingly regarded as a “problem” and internal enemy by Ottoman officials. In particular, their amicable relations with the Armenians were perceived as a potential danger due to the fear that instead of becoming Sunnis, they could become Christians (Akpınar et al. 2010).

  10. In Turkish, the word “tunc-eli” can mean both, as the word “el” means both hand and land. The official account maintains that due to the natural resources in Dersim, the name bronze land was chosen, while some historians interpret it also as iron fist. In this paper, we will use throughout the name Dersim for the region and the province, unless we want to demarcate or highlight the official narrative. In those cases, we will use Tunceli and put it in quotation marks.

  11. Due to the institutional denial of this issue, there is little academic research on the subject so far. To our knowledge, only one genocide scholar has systematically engaged with the Dersim Genocide (see Üngör 2008), while a few other scholars within Kurdish Studies have sporadically written on the issue (see, e.g., van Bruinessen 1994; Mc Dowall 2005). The first book that examined systematically the Dersim events was by the sociologist Ismail Beşikçi, “The 1935 Tunceli Law and the Dersim Genocide” (1990). Even though the Turkish state keeps its archives closed in this regard, several government reports and official documents are publicly available as well as oral accounts of generals and military officials who participated in the incursion. Particularly, the abduction of girls has been well documented, which already qualifies these actions as genocide according to the Genocide Convention of 1948. A group of lawyers in Turkey compiled a file with all available official documents and accounts of survivors and submitted it to the International Criminal Court in November 2012, with the intent to legally establish that Dersim 1938 qualifies as a genocide and to seek legal remedies (http://www.bik.gov.tr/uluslararasi-ceza-mahkemesi-ne-dersim-basvurusu-haberi-16853/).

  12. The book title of a recent edited volume on Dersim captures this very well: “Dersim-the secret shared by all” (Aslan 2010).

  13. For a short overview on the situation of Alevis visavis the Turkish state today, see Alemdar and Çorbacioglu (2012).

  14. The CHP was the first political party of the Republic founded in 1923 which ruled by an authoritarian single-party regime Turkey until the transition to a multiparty system in 1945.

  15. Many Turkish columnist and intellectuals have employed this metaphor, just to mention one example: In 2010, Tunceli University organized a Dersim Symposium, during which the political scientist Prof. Baskin Oran who gave the keynote brought up the Stockholm Syndrome issue; see http://baskinoran.com/makale/BASKIN_ORAN-Dersimsempozyumu.pdf. The use of this pathologizing term for people from Dersim shows the degree of ignorance toward genocide survivors living under a regime of denial.

  16. For an excellent analysis of how the AKP has been using the Dersim issue for electoral reasons during 2009–2011, see Zırh 2012.

  17. http://www.economist.com/node/18621453.

  18. While the content of this interview was circulating for at least two decades, it was only in 2010 that a journalist revealed that it was actually Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu which had conducted this interview. (http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/15608090.asp).

  19. http://www.milliyet.com.tr/Siyaset/SonDakika.aspx?aType=SonDakika&KategoriID=12&ArticleID=1162470&Date=16.11.2009&b=Kılıçdaroğlu:%20Oymen,%20geregini%20yapsin.

  20. For a more detailed account in this regard (see Zirh 2012).

  21. For a lucid analysis of this paradigm shift and the ensuing debates in Turkey, (see Kahraman 2010).

  22. For an overview of Turkey's liberal intellectuals enthusiastic approval, see http://www.todayszaman.com/columnist-263818-erdogans-apology.html. Opinion makers of the old state elite, however, were raising the rather accurate question that if Turkey's PM describes Dersim as a massacre, how would he term the “other thing,” referring to the Armenian Genocide; http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/default.aspx?pageid=438&n=if-dersim-was-a-massacre-how-about-the-other-2009-11-20.

  23. In How To Do Things With Words ordinary language philosopher J. L. Austin lists the utterance “I apologize” among the performative sentences that “do things by saying” Yet, he stresses that “it is far from being usually, even if it is ever, the sole thing necessary if the act is to be deemed to have been performed.” (1975: 8). Apology is a convention that could be accomplished only if it follows the rules that govern this convention and is uttered in appropriate circumstances. There is a substantial literature on apology speech that could not be covered within the limits of this paper. See for sociolinguistic analysis of apology Olshtain and Cohen (1983), Scher and Darley (1997). For an overview on the politics of apology (see Erbal 2012).

  24. The analysis of Erdoğan’s speech is based on the media recordings of his entire speech that is available on Internet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er-d6piTO8I. The quotes are based on our translations.

  25. This placing of the single responsibility for all evil on Kemalism is part of a larger rescue effort to promote Islam and the Ottoman Empire as an example of tolerance (Ayata 2012). The repeated remark by PM Erdoğan that “our ancestors do not commit genocide” in response to international demands to recognize the Armenian Genocide may thus eventually result in an “Armenian apology” similar to the “Dersim apology” by the AKP government. As long as the AKP does not view Muslims capable of mass violence, it can be generous toward apologies for past crimes as it does not require any self-critical confrontation by the AKP. The explicit satisfaction of PM Erdoğan that the trial against the perpetrators of the Sivas Massacre—some of them key party functionaires within the AKP—was dropped in 2012 demonstrates this point further.

  26. This notion is drawn from Marc Nichanian’s Historiographic Perversion (2009) in which he provides a cutting-edge analysis of the discourse of the Armenian Genocide.

  27. The metaphor of poison is drawn from Veena Das’ work on Language and Body in Life and Words (2007).

  28. Cited in http://www.evrensel.net/news.php?id=18006.

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Ayata, B., Hakyemez, S. The AKP’s engagement with Turkey’s past crimes: an analysis of PM Erdoğan’s “Dersim apology”. Dialect Anthropol 37, 131–143 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-013-9304-3

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