Turks, Kurds, Prophecy and Reality
ر\يت حممه
خرجت من ظلمه
فوقعت بأرضي تهمه
فاكلت منها كل ذات جمجمه
Oracle Satıh would contort his entire body like a piece of fabric during his agony-filled, jinn-possessed séances. As if he had no bones at all. He would mostly express his prophecies in a rhymed form. The above verse is one of Satıh the oracle’s famous prophecies and is said to have foretold the Abyssinian invasion of Yemen.
‘I saw a thing, blackened from fire
It emerged from the darkness,
Fell into the land of Theme,
And devoured everything with a skull there.’
In recent days, the Kurds have become the main topic of public debate due to the dissolution of the PKK. Just like in the last fifty years of Türkiye’s history and just like in the the first fifty years…
However, despite being the main topic, Turkish society’s understanding of Kurds continues to be shaped more by fiction than reality. This situation, that is, seeing the Kurd as the subject of a fictional world that is shaped far from reality, is not unique to Turks or other members of our society; Kurds, likewise, perceive themselves from within a fiction that is far from reality. Academia, media and the arts’ elites, and state bureaucracy are no exception. In most people’s minds, the image of the Kurd is like what the oracle Satih received from his jinnee and muttered; a medieval bandit who has burst onto the glittering street from an amorphous, dark, frightening history.
There could be lengthy debates on how these images have formed. However, saying that Kurds, in terms of both social organization and daily cultural life, and most importantly, due to the language barrier have been ‘kept’ in a sheltered castle, away from Turkish modernization, is not far from the truth. It’s clear that both the Republican elites and Kurdish political elites agreed on this situation. In response to the assimilation policies imposed with the Republic, Kurdish political elites, for a long time and often tied to religion, considered the Kurdish language a kind of sanctuary. Against the imposed Westernization of the Kemalists, Kurdish leaders developed a practice that could roughly be summarized as ‘Stay Kurdish, Stay Muslim.’ The ‘political tribe’ built within the PKK universe, based on a radical/nationalist, anti-religious and Kurdish-language-purified ideology, has maintained this isolation through serious ‘community pressure’. Similarly, the state elites also saw it as essential for the success of the nation-state project that the Kurds, as the ‘discrete’ component of the new nation-state they were trying to create, were not seen much.
As a result, the perception regarding Kurds, which is mostly constructed by the media and art elites in connection with the ‘sinister’ concepts like crime, rebellion, terror, violence, reactionism, religion, peasantry, rural, tribe, conservatism and a series of similar concepts, has become almost the common perception of the society. The two major uprisings in the early years of the Republic, Sheikh Said and Dersim, along with the bloody terror of the past fifty years, have been ruthlessly exploited to create this imagery. Although these images are rooted in painful realities, the Kurdish perception constructed and injected into society via media and art elites remains far from true and it is fictional. And no matter how striking it is, fiction always contains a distortion of reality. You don’t need to be a oracle like Satıh to say that this distorted reality that touching ordinary citizens and serving as a false “tranquillizer” for the state’s significant interests, anxieties, and fears. It’s also no secret that these fictional images, constructed through the distortion of reality, have legitimized a broad spectrum of interests, from bureaucracy to business, politics to economy, under the umbrella of ‘division’ fears and the pressures built upon them.
Yet neither the Kurds nor the rest of our nation, referred to as the ‘Turkish Nation,’ live within a ‘reality’ that matches these fictional images. Moreover, reality is a phenomenon with almost infinite aspects. The dynamic and transformative power of life continually reshapes everything, including reality itself. Even an individual’s personal experiences of change over a single lifetime are more than enough to understand that a rigid, cult-like reality cannot truly exist.
Although the idea that states are built upon a singular ethnic structure has been prominent in the West for over two hundred years, it is a relatively new notion for us. The demographic uniformity that makes sense as one of the main pillars of the state, gains meaning only in relation to the state’s capacity for control. In the West, the formation of nation-states was essentially a kind of business and investment project led by nobles and elites. In fact, most nation-states in the West were founded through wars funded by these very classes. What they call democracy is, more or less, just a system in which these investors become ‘partners’ in sovereignty. Thus, war, which used to be a kind of aristocratic ‘sport’, becomes a duty of the ‘citizen’ who is obliged to be loyal to the nation in return for their citizenship rights (suffrage, security). At this point, the nation-state had acquired the capacity to control all societal resources and was backed by a massive, cumulatively strengthened bureaucratic apparatus and an ideological discourse that legitimized its control. In this model, ethnic uniformity as the definition of ‘nation’ becomes critically important. These so-called ‘nations,’ which are almost entirely ‘imagined communities,’ are constructed through historical narratives and essentially function as ‘investment’ fields.
However, demography, in the biological sense, exists not through ‘ethnicity’ but within a cultural universe rooted in geography and history. These cultural roots and codes, which display great continuity and vitality, are referred to as ‘millet’ (religion-defined community) in the Islamic cultural universe and have no direct connection to ethnicity. Therefore, the societal structure formed by history and geography on these lands and the state built upon it, is not a ‘business’ state in the Western sense, but a ‘value-based’ state, a state characterized by its generosity. Perhaps for this reason, mainstream nationalist ideologies in Türkiye have almost always been ‘shy’ when it comes to emphasizing race and ethnic roots. Even Kemalism, the founding ideology of the Republic, had to define the issue in vague terms such as “those who feel themselves Turkish” rather than focusing on lineage or origin. The concept of Turkishness in most nationalist circles, much like religion, resembles a belief system one can adopt or leave voluntarily. Therefore, we can confidently say that the definition of the nation, which is one of the state’s foundational pillars, is not based on ethnicity or lineage but on shared values. Indeed, during the early years of the Republic, the main unifying element of our nation was not ethnic structure but the Islam. Ethnic structures, languages, and regional differences are the natural colors and innate rights of the nation that must be most protected. Thus, safeguarding the rights and laws of each ethnic group inherent to the ‘nation’ is a fundamental condition of being a nation.(1)
In this context, it is essential that the Kurds, who have been subjected to heavy pressure and assimilation since the founding of the Republic, be understood not through the fictional world described earlier, but through their own reality. The fact that the decades-long PKK terrorism is finally coming to an end will clearly lead to not only a noticeable sense of relief and joy among both Kurds and the rest of our nation but also considerable surprise. It is clear that PKK terrorism has created a two-sided ‘comfort’ zone in Turkish politics. Now, with the dissolution decision, it has become clear that this ‘comfort zone’ has been disrupted, that serious tectonic tremors have been experienced in politics, and that it is no longer that easy to consolidate the social layers that are easily controlled by the rote learning created by this fictional comfort.
The Kurdish community or those living within the PKK universe, will experience the confusion and astonishment of moving out of a ‘victim’ mentality. Similarly, many political ‘tradesmen’ and ‘sectors’ that have made their living through terrorism will fall into a deep void. Indeed, it is observed that this development, which the core centers and ideological ‘owners’ of the state apparatus stand behind with great determination, has for now caused vague grumblings in various layers of the state, politics and media elites.
In fact, it is the reality of the Kurds that causes vague concerns in the background of the dissolution of an archaic terrorist organization whose era has come to an end and whose lifespan has come to an end. Cities that had largely become ‘refugee camps’ in the darkness of the 1990s now dazzle with their shining avenues, bright and airy neighborhoods, and a significantly transformed, modernized population, shaking the existing images in the minds of both ‘Kurds’ and ‘Turks’. With a noteworthy rise of the middle class, urbanization rates matching the national average, and families that once had 8–10 children now having one or two, similar to the rest of the country, the Kurdish society is becoming visible with the fog of PKK terrorism disappearing. This population, which is no less than the population called Turkish with its loyalty to the country, its protection of the homeland, and its self-confidence, now stands before our society with the ability to express itself, to voice its own truths, and to live in its own naturalness. Most likely, it will be the Kurds who are first to experience the astonishment of this truth.
Instead of confronting the reality of the Kurds in Türkiye and the region and seeking ways to make them partners/co-sovereigns in the state, the ominous prophecies of retired governmental officials who do not want any partners, with the feeling of medieval feudal lords who invested in war and became partners in the state, and the so-called state elites who benefit from them, are now nauseating. Because neither the state in these lands is what they think it is, nor do they have the qualifications or authority to dominate the state. It would not be right to compare these people, who make prophecies under the ominous shadow of a terrorist organization that has become bankrupt after 50 years, with expert oracles like Satih, but what these retired people do is nothing more than prophecies.
These people, who are so far removed from reality that they cannot see that the disgraceful dictatorial regime they established a century ago based on lies and fictions has been eroded and collapsed by the peaceful and patient attitude of the people, are actually in the same position as the PKK retirees with whom they are frightening the people. There is only one way that both sides know: spreading fear.
But our nation is no stranger to these games. Both the PKK, which has been making the nation bleed by putting political solutions, democracy and peace before everything else for fifty years, and those who roll their eyes and stuff their cheeks with fake cries of ‘homeland’ and ‘nation’, can cause nothing but harm to this nation.