“They are still plundering the graves of the Armenians!” Bişar murmured clicking his tongue, a middle-aged Kurdish friend, during a debate on the discovery of more mass graves –graves where Kurdish guerillas and civilians who were executed extra-judicially by the security forces in the 1990s are buried. For many people who had spent their childhood in Western Turkey, the Armenian massacres of 1915, and their grave-sites, are not frequently a topic. During my MA fieldwork, I was astonished to see how fresh many Kurds’ memories on the Armenian massacres were in Van, an eastern province of Turkey bordering Iran. Almost a century has passed since 1915, yet the stories and the ruins of the Armenian massacres have not ceased to haunt the collective memory of the Kurds. In this paper I argue the following: 1) My informants overtly transgressed the official denial of genocide with overwhelming expressions of shame and guilt because of their belief in the complicity of their predecessors in the Armenian massacres, 2) historical memory with respects to the Armenian genocide had been radically undone and redone by the PKK movement of the past thirty years, and 3) even in the absence of transmitted stories, the remnants of Armenians figured as mnemonic devices enabling them to imagine the Armenian past of the city of which they did not have a personal recollection. Through the study of a particular locality in which violence of the past bleeds into the violence of the present, this paper makes a contribution to current debates on political violence, memory and materiality in this extremely tumultuous part of the Middle East.

Kurdishness at Peace with Islam: Indigenization and the Kurdistani Approach to Post-Conflict Articulations of Kurdish Identity in Turkey The end of armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state has brought striking changes to the landscape of the Kurdish self-imagination. A whole new generation of Kurdish intellectuals, not beholden to the PKK but not hostile to it, either, are emerging to advance a new formulation of identity politics. They call it the “Kurdistani approach” and it is being articulated in such relatively autonomous spaces as the new social media, and under institutional umbrellas like the civil society organization “Mazlumder”. Through my recent participant observation in the field and interviews with several of these rising Kurdish opinion-makers, I have noticed a couple of areas where their thinking is distinctive, and reflects a new current in the popular imagination of Kurds of Turkey. One is the return of religious identity. In the past, religiosity was instrumentalized against Kurds by the Turkish state and shunned by the PKK. In the new, post-PKK climate, pious intellectuals see a chance to reclaim Islam and use it differently. As the self-serving exploitation of religion by Turkish nationalists recedes or fractures, Kurds are beginning to publicly reintegrate their Islamic/Shafii traditions into their larger identity. This is both a strategic move and a major step in the indigenization of the Kurdish politics. A second distinctive trait of the new Kurdistani discourse is the tendency to reframe Kurdish identity not in terms of a deterritorialized individual identity, but by reference to a larger cultural-geographical entity, Kurdistan. This move imagines Kurds not as citizens of the Turkish state who simply happen to be Kurdish, but as a people to be reckoned with on its own terms. The retrieval of “peoplehood” seeks to relieve Kurdish identity politics of the unnecessary weight of ideologies (be they leftist or Islamist). Reference to Kurdistan as an anchor of identity prevents the Kurds from being swamped by Turkish cultural/political hegemony, even as they remain active participants and stakeholders in the new Turkey. Relying on interviews with key figures of this emerging intellectual movement and close reading of their media appearances over the past two years, especially since the start of the current peace process in March 2013, this paper contributes to the elucidation of new Kurdish identity discourse, which promises to be highly influential in shaping the Kurdish world in the coming decade.

On March 15, 2011, Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish-populated city in Turkey, woke up with a large brand new tent erected by the pro-Kurdish party, BDP (Peace and Democracy Party, Baris ve Demokrasi Partisi). Inspired by the occupation of “Tahrir Square”, in the wave of the Arab Spring, the massive tent was erected in the main park of the city as part of a larger project of ‘civil disobedience’ which demanded ‘the immediate release of hundreds of Kurdish politicians, the right to educate in Kurdish, an end to military operations against the PKK (Partiya Karkeran Kurdistan, Kurdistan Workers Party) and the abolishment of Turkey’s 10 percent election threshold for parliamentary representation. Within one week, tents of pro-Kurdish party began to appear in the main urban quarters of several other cities in Turkey, along with daily-organized protests, and they remained until May 2011. This project of ‘civil disobedience’ is one such urban project where the pro-Kurdish party aims to stage a protest against the Turkish state and conceptualize an alternative Kurdish movement through intervention of urban space. This paper examines the following main questions: 1) How do we explain rising Kurdish urban mobilization in Turkey? 2) To what extent have the Kurds of Turkey staged their own Arab Spring? I argue that urban space has been essential for the pro-Kurdish party in institutionalizing Kurdish movement and prompting the agenda of Kurdish nationalist discourse, particularly since the late 1990s. In this vein, I analyze the very urban practices of the pro-Kurdish party and its local administrations in order to explore the emergence of new political Kurdish subjectivities in the context of rising Kurdish nationalism in Turkey. The paper is based on a series of research trips conducted in Diyarbakir and Batman provinces in Turkey between 2007 and 2012 (including during the 2011 protests). The main sources include participant observation, in-depth interviews, government speeches, and other qualitative sources.

In this paper, I will draw on ethnographic research conducted in Turkey, beginning in 2011, to explore the ways in which Kurdish university students are “claiming,” defining, and understanding “Kurdishness,” or what it means to be Kurdish in Turkey. After the emergence of the modern Turkish Republic in 1923, the state instituted a series of nation-building reforms aimed at modernizing, Westernizing, secularizing, and homogenizing the Turkish citizenry. These reforms spanned a wide range of topics, yet at their core was the idea of promoting the ideal of a “pure” Turkish nation, what has been called “Turkification” (Navaro-Yashin 2002; Houston 2008; Güvenç 2011). In the process, entire groups of the ethnically diverse citizenry of Turkey either chose or were forced to identify as “Turkish.” In recent years, however, the Turkish state has begun a series of reforms, including the establishment of a Kurdish language television station and the opening of Kurdish language programs at a handful of universities, which have resulted in more public acceptance of the Kurdish population of Turkey. While in Turkey, I heard some people criticizing these reforms as political moves, rather than actual, substantive change. However, at the very least it seems that claiming Kurdishness is no longer a completely taboo subject Turkey. I intend to explore Kurdish university students’ claims to the Kurdish collective identity category, and their negotiation of Kurdishness in the Turkish city. I find that Kurdish university students seem to be particularly concerned about their place as Kurds in Turkey, as they continue to be reminded of their marginalized status in Turkish society. I will examine ties between identity and collective memory as expressed through students’ narratives of and nostalgia for the collectively remembered past, as well as descriptions of their everyday lived experiences in the present and their hopes for the future. My analysis of claiming Kurdishness will help to augment recent scholarship on identity and ethnicity in Turkey.