See Carolyn Drake’s photo gallery from the Turkish town of Hasankeyf.
Karayigit, a burly, perspiring textile factory manager, leaped down from the pedestal. Another man supported him, like a fellow soccer player after a hard-fought match. “I felt very sad when I heard the news this morning,” he said. “I felt like the whole world had fallen around me.” He was referring to an early-morning ambush by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (pkk) near Daglica, six kilometres from the Iraqi border. Twelve Turkish soldiers had been killed, and another eight were captured. Then, later that day, ten civilians had been injured when their minivan drove over a land mine believed to have been laid by the pkk.
An endless surge of excitable young men followed Karayigit, clambering atop Atatürk as though battling for a spot on a raft. Most singled out Turkey’s allies for blame, soliciting anti–European Union and anti-American chants and jeers. According to Karayigit, so-called friends and neighbours were abandoning the country in its time of need. The French, the Americans, the British, the Russians — all have had to deal with terrorism or insurgents, yet all were now counselling restraint and, in some cases, Karayigit believed, providing outright support to the pkk. “We only want the same power to defend our country,” he said. Word spread that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was holding an emergency meeting of the country’s generals; the Turkish parliament had passed a resolution that week authorizing the military to cross into northern Iraq and attack the pkk’s mountain havens.
The Turks were already feeling embattled before this latest pkk ambush. In early October, an American congressional subcommittee had recommended that the US government officially acknowledge the Armenian genocide and Ottoman culpability for it — a subject Turks are loath to revisit. And accession talks with the European Union were prompting shots at Turkey’s human rights record and its military’s habit of meddling in government.
There was perhaps fair reason for Turks to feel, if not slighted, at least undervalued. As a secular democracy with a population that is 99 percent Muslim, Turkey is uniquely positioned to play a mediating role between the Islamic world and the West. Despite the country’s lack of natural resource wealth, its mighty construction and shipping conglomerates are involved in major infrastructure projects across the Middle East and Central Asia. And while it has remained mostly loyal to its traditional allegiances with the United States and Israel, Turkey has recently worked to repair relations with Iran, Syria, and Russia — a thaw that could have substantial benefits for the West. For instance, a pipeline is being proposed that would bring Iranian gas through Turkey to Europe, and Erdogan was a key figure in secret peace talks between Israel and Syria earlier this year. Turkey’s strategic importance has only increased with the demise of the Cold War, and yet the country has often seemed to serve primarily as the West’s put-upon sparring partner, taking flak from outsiders while mediating a diverse population with strong and often polarized perspectives on their country and its role in the world.
As the sky bruised into evening, demonstrators continued to surge toward Taksim, where they coalesced with still more mobs. I followed one of the offshoots as it continued up Cumhuriyet Street. Partway along, an elderly Kurdish beggar was splayed haplessly in the mob’s path, cradling a small child in a bright cloth. The chanting and gesticulating marchers briefly parted around her, oblivious, like water gushing around a rock, then came together again.
Istanbul seemed stage-directed for the unfolding theatrics. Looming everywhere over the city, on massive banners and from bunting suspended above the streets, was the visage of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded the Turkish Republic in 1923. His mischievous semi-smile and upturned eyebrows were often accompanied by one of the Orwellian dicta for which he was famous — most commonly “How happy is the one who says, ‘I am a Turk.’” The line, inscribed in the country’s oath of allegiance, is a sore point for Kurds and other ethnic minorities. A fifteen-year-old student in the country’s southeast was indicted in 2003 for inciting hatred when he instead recited in front of his class, “Happy is he who calls himself a Kurd.”
Atatürk’s is perhaps the only twentieth-century personality cult that still plays a decisive role in a country’s politics. His name is invoked daily by the Kemalist secular nationalists who dominate Turkey’s judiciary, military, and sections of its civil service, to beat down those who question the limits placed on religion in public life, or who challenge the notion of “Turkishness.” He remains the embodiment of the revolution and its highest aspirations.
A believer in scientific positivism and a fan of French civilization, Atatürk sought to remake his newly independent nation into a modern, westward-looking state. His first reforms were radical ones, designed to disestablish Islam from politics and public life: he abolished the caliphate that had ruled the Turks for some 400 years, moved the capital from the traditional Ottoman centre of Istanbul to Ankara, and shut down the country’s religious courts. He also expanded rights for women, granting them access to education and later the vote, then enacted a hat law that circumscribed the wearing of religious headgear such as the fez or head scarf. In 1928, he instituted a new, Latin-based Turkish alphabet, on the grounds that Arabic was a vestige of archaic Islamic influence, and ill suited to Turkish pronunciation anyway.
The concept of Turkishness, however, stands as perhaps Atatürk’s most dubious and slippery bequest. In Ottoman times, “Turk” was an epithet, akin to calling someone a rube. Later, during the early days of the republic, the term referred simply to citizenship and geography. By the early 1930s, Atatürk had come to believe that the nation needed to be defined more strongly. His plan was to introduce a civic religion of sorts — something that could sustain the social cohesion traditionally provided by Islam.
Influenced by H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, he convened a historical society to investigate the roots of the Turks, charging academics with devising a collective narrative of origins. It was generally understood at the time that the nation’s ancestors were the invading Oghuz Turkic nomadic tribes of Central Asia, who arrived in Anatolia around the eleventh century. His people’s status as somewhat recent arrivals to their homeland became an obsession for Atatürk. Those Sumerians, Armenians, Kurds, and others who had lived in and around Turkey for thousands of years, leaving plentiful evidence of their existence? Well, Atatürk decided, they were actually Turks, too. (The leader’s undisciplined intellect and fondness for late-night, raki-fuelled colloquia with friends sometimes led him to strange theories, including one that posited the Turks as the forebears of all peoples.) By asserting that these diverse ethnic groups were cut from the same cloth, Atatürk denied Turkey’s multicultural past and present, setting it on a fractious path that continues to threaten both its security and its role as a link between East and West.
In the days following the pkk ambush, the forty-five-year-old Kurdish journalist Salih Sezgin rarely left his fourth-floor office at the newspaper Gündem. He felt safer there than at home. From his desk, he could poke his head out the window to scan the streets for shady characters, or see who was buzzing in. Occasionally, in the late afternoon, he would leave for a brisk, head-clearing stroll.
On the fifth day after the soldiers were killed, Sezgin paused briefly on Istiklal Caddesi, a bustling and very European boulevard lined with brand name boutiques and restaurants on Istanbul’s western flank. A small rally was taking place, to demand that Turkey leave nato. Turning away from the protesters, he shuffled along narrow side streets, finally taking a seat at a café next to Ali Turgay, Gündem’s twenty-something publisher. A stout, diminutive man possessing a gentle, rounded face framed with days-old stubble and a comb-over, Sezgin had the air of a struggling shopkeeper. “I spent nineteen years in prison,” he joked. “I never look very healthy.”
Gündem had recently had its right to publish suspended by Turkish authorities, who feared that the paper’s pro-Kurdish reporting would embolden critics. For a few days, the pair had been able to get stories onto the paper’s website, which had seen its traffic surge from a daily average of 10,000 hits to 80,000 during the crisis. But then the government blocked that, too, forcing them to use another url. Days later, hackers broke into their server, causing it to crash, and the website was gone again.
Had they been able to publish, Turgay and Sezgin would have been reporting the growing incidence of attacks against Kurdish citizens. According to the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (dtp), its constituency office in Istanbul’s Fatih neighborhood had been firebombed; other dtp offices across the city had to be protected by police from angry mobs. In Kadiköy, a Kurdish student was taken to hospital after an attempted lynching; in other neighbourhoods, homes belonging to Kurdish families were singled out with derogatory markings. Some of these events were making it into the mainstream media, but most were not. Kurds in Istanbul were talking about a return to the grim days of the 1980s and early ’90s, when skirmishes between the military and the pkk forced thousands from their villages in the country’s southeast, destroying the region’s economy and social fabric, and resulting in more than 35,000 casualties. The armed clashes of October were hardly on that scale, but rumours and reports of personal attacks were nevertheless keeping people indoors. “It’s enough just to have darker skin to get harassed on the street,” said Sezgin.
He leaned forward over his tea. “The problem is that everyone sees the Kurdish problem as an ethnic problem. But we are a part of this country. We are part owners; we now live all across Turkey; we are not simply an ethnic minority or immigrants. Turkey’s problem is not an ethnic problem; it’s an identity problem.”
During the War for Independence, Atatürk openly acknowledged that the Kurds would eventually need their autonomy. He may have done so for strategic reasons: the war was being fought to regain Turkish territory and sovereignty lost with the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) between Ottoman representatives and governments of the Allied Forces. For the Kurds, the treaty was ostensibly a good thing — it included a mandate for a Kurdish state — but they nevertheless fought alongside Atatürk’s Turkish forces, believing they were acting as Muslim brothers against Christian occupiers from Britain, France, Italy, Armenia, and Greece. (They had also participated in the 1915 genocide against ethnic Armenians.) Yet after the republic was founded, Atatürk never spoke of them in public again.
The autocratic nature of the modern Turkish state is very much a product of the persistent tension between the two groups. On the same day the caliphate, whose symbolic religious authority had united the Turks and Kurds for centuries, was abolished, all Kurd-centric social organizations were banned, too. The first Kurdish rebellion of 1925, a response to this suppression and to Atatürk’s attack on Islam, was the pretext for the Kemalists’ consolidation of power. Martial law was imposed across Turkey, empowering the government to close newspapers, persecute journalists, and deny the right of “reactionary” or “counter-revolutionary” groups to assemble. The rebellion also hastened the imposition of single-party rule, which lasted until 1950.
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