In his opening speech to the parliament on November 1, 1936, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk drew attention to the Dersim Question, which he depicted as an abscess in the midst of the motherland pressing for immediate treatment at all cost. This powerful speech however, was not responding to an unusual situation since Dersim was oddly calm these days. Rather, it was the official declaration that despite the calm, as an ethnically non-Turk, religiously non-Sunni, “uncivilized”, and “medieval-like” territory, Dersim by “essence” defied the new Republic that wished to characterize itself as a modern, western-oriented but definitely Turkish civilization. Consequently, Republican officials implemented a disciplinary plan whereby the punishment and acculturation of Dersim were treated as consecutive and interdependent phases, which would begin with the military operation in 1937, continue with the establishment of law, order and schooling in Dersim. In this paper I would like to talk about the Elaz?? Girls’ Institute [EGI], a boarding school for the girls of Dersim, opened in 1937 during the operation. Sidika Avar, a less publicly acknowledged figure served as the principal at EGI between 1939-1957 and assumed several duties that ranged from recruitment of the girls to their cleaning, teaching Turkish to overseeing their chastity. This paper is a study of EGI, S?d?ka Avar and gendered disciplinary schooling policies in Dersim, based on documents from the Prime Ministry’s Republican Archives, official reports, newspapers, journal, oral interviews and memoirs. Thereby, the goal is not simply to illustrate the mindset of exclusively male political elite who turned to forced education of the “rebels’” daughters as a militaristic measure but more importantly highlight the active roles assumed and played by the “heroines” of the nation during this period. I argue that as its archetype, S?d?ka Avar co-opted the premeditated, violence-ridden, disciplinary education policies and transformed them into a single-handedly and affectionately carried out project of maternal colonialism. Sidika Avar, who was informed and inspired by the American-Protestant missionary model, described herself as a Turkish missionary, and devoted her life to be the proper mother to the non-Turk and “savage-like” girls of Dersim, forsaking her responsibilities for own biological daughter. Focusing on the “ work of the women for the nation” this presentation breaks the dichotomy of peaceful, passive, homemaker women/mothers versus violent, state-making, colonialist men, and examines maternal colonization as it unfolds over forcefully removed girls, their biological mothers and the future of the Dersim Question itself.

This paper examines the interplay between feminism and ethnic identity in the context of the Kurdish women’s peace movement, which emerged during the 1990s and 2000s. Drawing from in-depth interviews and participant observation, I seek to understand how feminists negotiate and forge different identities in the peace movement and in what ways women’s ethnicity and gender-based rights claims clash. I argue that even though feminism functions as an encompassing cultural and political discourse to build a peaceful relationship between two conflicting sides, the Turkish state and Kurdish militants, these women’s emphases on creating a collected memory through remembering past traumatic events—which Kurds have been experiencing since the establishment of the Turkish nation state—make ethnic identification more effective and dominant in the movement than feminism. Regarding this social movement’s antimilitarist and antiviolence political standpoint, I am concerned with understanding how new political subjectivities position themselves in the context of the ethnic conflict between Kurdish militants and Turkish military forces. Not much effort has been made by state officials and non-governmental institutions and organizations to end this ongoing ethnic conflict, yet feminist women in diverse organizational settings are making attempts to consolidate peace between the two conflicting sides. For the structure of this project, I explore the experiences of women by situating their individual narratives in theoretical approaches related to gender, agency, and social movements. Bridging the literature on women and peace with scholarship on collective memory and social movements, this study contributes to the understanding of “intersectionality in practice” and the constraints social movement actors face in the processes of negotiating their social divisions and constituting activism across different identities.

The last ten years have been marked a remarkable shift in the conditions that the Greek-Orthodox in Istanbul have experienced. Starting from 2005 when a major conference was allowed to took place that brought together older members of the community that had fled abroad with those who remained, a series of reforms have given new hope for the regenarion of the delapidated community. The return of the Orphanage to the Patriarchate based on an ECHR desicion, the permission to the same institution to hold ceremonies in various religious sites all over the country, peaking with the service on August 15, for tha last two years at Soumela monastery, the laxity in the monitiring of the few remaining community schools and most importantly, the change in the law on endowments in 2008 and the gradual return of property that had been ceased by the state are the most remarkable developments in this respect. This paper adresses the particular changes as apparent instances of democratisation in a context however of increasing authoritarian implementations in other parts of the society and seeks to the reflect of the political expedience that might explain such a paradox.