13

mm

Kurdish Studies Archive ⸭ Content Vol. 9 No. 1 2021

Special Issue Mass violence and the Kurds
Guest Editors Uğur Ümit Üngör, Ayhan Işık
Editorial
Uğur Ümit Üngör and Ayhan Işık, Mass Violence and the Kurds: Introduction to the Special Issue 1

Vol. 9
Research articles
Naif Bezwan, The State and Violence in Kurdistan: A Conceptual Framework12

No. 1
Adnan Çelik, Keep Your Mouth Shut in the Day and Your Door Shut at Night.’ Intra Kurdish

Kurdish Studies
Violence in the Shadow of the State: The Case of Hizbullah in Kurdistan of Turkey 49
Mehmet Polatel, The Armenian Massacre of 1895 in Bitlis Town 78

2021
Özgür Sevgi Göral, Memory as Experience in Times of Perpetual Violence: The Challenge of
Saturday Mothers vis-à-vis Cultural Aphasia103
Interview
Marlene Schäfers, Feminism, Gender and Power in Kurdish Studies: An Interview with
Prof. Shahrzad Mojab
Obituary
Nodar Mossaki, In Memoriam: Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul (1934-2019), Iraqi Kurdish Man of Letters
129
Archive
and Soviet-Trained Scholar151
Book reviews
Special Issue Mass violence and the Kurds

Kurdish Studies Archive

Guest Editors Umit Cetin,
Political Violence and the Kurdish Conflict: A Review173
Zerrin Özlem Biner, States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey
Salih Can Açıksöz, Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey
Marlene Schäfers Celia Jenkins, and Suavi Aydın
J. Andrew Bush, Between Muslims: Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan182
Metin Atmaca
Mneesha Gellman, Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic Minority Rights
Movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador185
Vera Eccarius-Kelly ⸭ Vol. 9 No. 1 2021 ⸭
Seevan Saeed, Kurdish Politics in Turkey: From the PKK to the KCK188
Michael M. Gunter
Mohammedali Yaseen Taha, Media and Politics in Kurdistan. How Politics and Media are
Locked in an Embrace 192
Kerem Schamberger
Philip G. Kreyenbroek and Yiannis Kanakis, "God First and Last": Religious Traditions and
Music of the Yaresan of Guran. Volume I: Religious Traditions 195
Martin van Bruinessen
Seyedeh Behnaz Hosseini, The Yārsān of Iran, Socio-Political
ISBN 978-90-04-70039-0 changes and Migration 199
Hamidreza Nikravesh

Mohammed Ihsan, Nation building in Kurdistan: Memory,

Genocide and Human Rights 204
Uğur Ümit Üngör

9 789004 700390 [Link]/ksa

Kurdish Studies Archive
Kurdish Studies Archive
Editor-in-Chief
Prof. Martin van Bruinessen, Utrecht University, Netherlands
Associate editors
Dr Welat Zeydanlıoğlu, Kurdish Studies Network, Sweden (managing editor)
Dr Sacha Alsancaklı, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris-3, France
Hanifi Barış, University of Aberdeen, UK
Dr Djene Rhys Bajalan, American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, Iraq
Dr Wendelmoet Hamelink, Orient Institute, Istanbul, Turkey
Dr Janet Klein, University of Akron, USA
Schluwa Sama, University of Exeter, UK
Dr Ergin Öpengin, University of Bamberg, Germany
Dr Marlene Schäfers, Ghent University, Belgium
Assistant editor
Beja Protner, Cambridge University, UK
Book review editor
Ethem Çoban, American University, Washington DC, USA
Copy-Editor
Naomi Houghton, Sweden
Editorial Advisory Board
Prof. Christine Allison, University of Exeter, UK
Prof. Joyce Blau, Kurdish Institute of Paris, France
Prof. Hamit Bozarslan, EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), Paris, France
Prof. Michael Gunter, Tennessee Technological University, USA
Prof. Keith Hitchins, University of Illinois, USA
Joost Jongerden, Wageningen University, Netherlands
Prof. Robert Olson, University of Kentucky, USA
Prof. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Åbo Akademi University Vasa, Finland
Ibrahim Sirkeci, IBBS, UK
Prof. Gareth Stansfield, University of Exeter, UK
Prof. Abbas Vali, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey
Prof. Lale Yalçın-Heckmann, Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
Editorial Review Board
Dr Mohammed M. A. Ahmed, Ahmed Foundation for Kurdish Studies, USA – Dr Minoo Alinia,
Uppsala University, Sweden – Dr Bilgin Ayata, Free University, Berlin, Germany – Dr Osman
Aytar, Mälardalen University, Sweden – Dr Bahar Başer, University of Warwick, UK – Dr Derya
Bayır, GLOCUL, Queen Mary University of London, UK – Prof. Ofra Bengio, Tel Aviv University,
Israel – Dr İpek Demir, Leicester University, UK – Prof. Vera Eccarius-Kelly, Siena College,
USA – Dr Barzoo Eliassi, University of Lund, Sweden – Dr Andrea Fischer-Tahir, Zentrum
Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany – Dr Zeynep Gambetti, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul,
Turkey – Dr Cengiz Günes, Open University, UK – Dr Gülistan Gürbey, Free University, Berlin,
Germany – Prof. Geoffrey Haig, University of Bamberg, Germany – Dr Choman Hardi, University
of Oxford, UK – Prof. Almas Heshmati, Korea University, South Korea – Dr Chris Houston,
Macquarie University, Australia – Dr Khalid Khayati, Linköping University, Sweden – Dr Michiel
Leezenberg, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands – Dr Kamran Matin, University of Sussex,
UK – Prof. Shahrzad Mojab, University of Toronto, Canada – Dr Liza M. Mügge, University of
Amsterdam, Netherlands – Prof. Leyla Neyzi, Sabancı University, Istanbul, Turkey – Prof. Hakan
Özoğlu, University of Central Florida, USA – Prof. David Romano, Missouri State University,
USA – Dr Clémence Scalbert-Yücel, University of Exeter, UK – Thomas Schmidinger, University
of Vienna, Austria – Dr Farhad Shakely, Uppsala University, Sweden – Dr Jaffer Sheyholislami,
Carleton University, Canada – Prof. Jordi Tejel, The Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland –
Dr Uğur Ümit Üngör, Utrecht University, Netherlands – Prof. Nazan Üstündağ, Boğaziçi
University, Istanbul, Turkey – Dr Östen Wahlbeck, University of Helsinki, Finland – Dr Nicole F.
Watts, California State University, USA
Kurdish Studies Archive
Special Issue: Mass violence and the Kurds

Guest editors

Uğur Ümit Üngör

Ayhan Işık

volume 9-1 (2021)

LEIDEN | BOSTON
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 Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 1–11
Kurdish Studies
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Editorial: Mass Violence and the Kurds –

Introduction to the Special Issue

Uğur Ümit Üngör | ORCID: 0000-0001-7125-118X

Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, NIOD Institute,
University of Amsterdam, Herengracht 380, 1016 CJ, Amsterdam
[Link]@[Link]

Ayhan Işık | ORCID: 0000-0003-4352-1941

Visiting Scholar, Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University
Rotterdam 12 Kortenaerkade, 2518 PT, The Hague, The Netherlands
ayhnisik@[Link]

Introduction

This special issue of Kurdish Studies focuses on the 20th-century mass violence
that took place in Kurdistan, of which the Kurds were often victims and at
times also perpetrators. The issue brings together a series of articles engag-
ing with the historical backgrounds, causes, courses, and consequences of
those episodes of violence, and aims to make a contribution to this debate
by looking at the Kurds’ (specifically, northern Kurdistan under Ottoman and
Turkish control) encounter with modern mass political violence from a vari-
ety of perspectives. The articles address issues germane to mass violence and
the Kurds, by offering theoretical engagement as well as empirical recreation.
This introductory article pleads for more in-depth research that uses different
approaches towards violence; comparison by juxtaposition, diachronic per-
spectives, and studies on transnational transfer of justifications and practices
of violence by political elites.
Thereafter, we open with Naif Bezwan’s article, which provides a new per-
spective on the problem of colonial state rule and violence in Kurdistan, by
examining four major massacres of Kurds in the Kemalist period. He argues
that colonial violence can be disaggregated into ideological, ethnocidal and
genocidal violence, all of which converged on establishing direct coercive
control over the Kurds in Turkey. Mehmet Polatel’s article focuses on the 1895

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© Uğur Ümit Üngör and Ayhan Işık, 2021
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2 Üngör and Işık

massacres of Armenians in the town of Bitlis, in which a varied group of per-

petrators killed large numbers of local Armenian civilians. The article chal-
lenges conventional understandings of the Hamidian massacres and nuances
both the involvement and resistance of certain Kurdish tribes during the kill-
ings. Adnan Çelik examines the violent conflict between the Hizbullah and
the PKK in the 1990s, by unpacking the binary political cleavage between
these two armed groups. Çelik’s research unsettles monocausal explanations
of Hizbullah by placing it in a long-term context of Kurdish politics, which
has seen a number of ideological ruptures, of which the 1990s is one instance.
Finally, Özgür Sevgi Göral situates the phenomenon of forced disappearances
within the broader context of state violence against Kurds and memory spaces
from the perspective of the dialectics of secrecy and visibility. She follows the
trajectory of the Saturday Mothers in Cizre, and argues that their performances
constitute acts of memory making. We hope that this special issue will offer
food for thought and a step up to future studies and discussions of the Kurds’
encounter with political violence.
The issue also includes two other important articles. First, an interview with
Professor Shahrzad Mojab, who is co-founder of the Kurdish Women’s Studies
Network (KWSN), conducted by Marlene Schäfers. The interview follows up on
the discussion initiated by a group of Kurdish women who drew attention to
male violence and harassment within Kurdish Studies through an anonymous
letter. As we made clear in the editorial of the journal’s October 2020 issue,
this is a discussion that Kurdish Studies deems important. In the interview,
Mojab reflects on her personal and professional involvement with Kurdish
women, and speaks about gender relations and power in Kurdish society and
academia. Secondly, an obituary of Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul, written by Nodar
Mossaki. Rasul was trained in literary studies in the USSR, in a period when
Kurdish Studies flourished there. Studying the early modern Kurdish poet
Ahmed Khani, and dimensions of Sufi theosophy in Kurdish literature, Rasul
stands out as an ambitious scholar who went beyond standard Soviet treat-
ments of literary works. The issue concludes with book reviews and a review
article, many of which discuss works related to violence.

The Kurds and Mass Violence

The Kurds’ experience with modern mass violence is long and complex.
Whereas Kurds lived under the Kurdish Emirates for centuries in pre-national
conditions in the Ottoman and Persian empires, the advent of nationalism and
colonialism in the Middle East radically changed the situation. World War I
was a watershed for most ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire, such as the

Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 1–11

Editorial 3

Kurds, and some political minorities such as Armenians and Assyrians suf-
fered genocide – including at the hands of Kurds. Moreover, the post-Ottoman
order precluded the Kurds from building a nation-state of their own. Kurds
were either relegated to cultural and political subordination under the Turkish
and Persian nation states, or a precarious existence under alternative orders
(colonialism in Syria and Iraq, and communism in the Soviet Union). The
nation-state system changed the pre-national, Ottoman imperial order with
culturally heterogeneous territories into a system of nation-states which began
to produce nationalist homogenisation by virtue of various forms of popula-
tion policies.
In Syria, Iraq, and Turkey, Kurds became victims of these policies, which, in
some infamous cases, veered towards genocide and genocidal massacres. After
the establishment of the Turkish Republic, the Kemalist government launched
violent and invasive ‘Turkification’ policies, for example by suppressing the
Sheikh Said rebellion of 1925 and the Ağrı rebellion of 1930 through genocidal
massacres. This was followed in 1938 by the genocide in Dersim, which went
beyond mass murder and also included forced cultural assimilation. In 1946,
the declared Republic of Kurdistan centred in Mahabad, Eastern Kurdistan,
under Iranian control, was similarly suppressed by Iranian state. Also, after
the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Khomeini’s apparatus of violence suppressed
a Kurdish uprising by executing thousands of combatants and civilians. In
Iraq and Syria, Kurds suffered from similar forms of ‘Arabisation’, ranging from
genocidal to non-violent but discriminatory policies. Possibly the most violent
collective experience the Kurds had with violence was in Iraq, where Saddam
Hussein’s Anfal campaign of the 1980s culminated in several chemical massa-
cres, including infamously at Halabja in 1988. Counterinsurgency in Northern
Kurdistan in the 1990s brought more violence to those areas, resulting in mas-
sacres, environmental destruction, and mass displacement. Finally, the implo-
sion of the Iraqi and Syrian states from 2003 and 2011 on, respectively, brought
more political violence to the Kurds in both societies. In Iraq, the ‘fratricidal
war’ between the two political parties (PDK and PUK) killed tens of thousands
in what amounted in some cases to clan cleansings. Ultimately, in both Iraq
and Syria, ISIS attacked Kurdish civilians indiscriminately and committed a
full-blown genocide against Yazidis in the summer of 2014.
All in all, the twentieth century was an overall violent century for the Kurds
and Kurdistan – as it was for much of the post-Ottoman territories. It started
with the devastation of World War I, continued with western colonisation and
consequent subjugation in three different nation-states, and ended with civil
wars and massacres. Thus, for the Kurds, mass violence is a chronologically
extended, complex, and intertwined story, with multiple perpetrators, but
overall, the same group at the short end: themselves. Some of this violence

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4 Üngör and Işık

aimed to absorb the survivors into society, other forms of genocidal violence
attempted to excise the community from it. The scholarship on much of this
violence still stands to gain a lot from in-depth studies of the historical back-
grounds, causes, courses, and consequences of those episodes of violence, and
must offer analyses of the experiences of victims, survivors, and perpetrators
through primary sources and eyewitness accounts. These categories are of
course continuously shifting, merging, and diverging, but regardless of their
precise constellations and contradictions, violence against civilians remains a
widespread phenomenon across Kurdistan.

Mass Violence: Fruitful Research Directions

Mass violence research is an eminently interdisciplinary field of study, which

has influenced Kurdish Studies from the very beginning. Among the pioneers
of the field were social scientists such as Hamit Bozarslan and Martin van
Bruinessen, who published insightful pieces about the Kurds’ encounter with
violence, already in the violent 1990s (Bozarslan, 1999; van Bruinessen, 2000).
It is crucial to place research on mass violence and the Kurds in a comparative
perspective, due to the rapidly accumulating developments in the field of vio-
lence research. Mass violence is not simply the plural of murder, in which one
person grabs a weapon and kills another person. On the contrary, civil wars,
massacres, and genocides are complex processes of explosive political forces,
and in addition to accurate, detailed empirical research, they also require com-
parison for the sake of calibration. We cannot know how widespread the PKK’s
mobilization of guerrillas was without comparisons with, say, Colombia or
Sri Lanka. We cannot hope to understand Saddam’s genocide without a com-
parison with other genocides around the same time, such as in Guatemala or
Biafra. With a certain regularity, publications appear that attempt to more fully
integrate increasing historical factual knowledge with comparative-theoretical
insights. Such studies set out similarities and differences, highlight correla-
tions, recognise patterns, and uncover mechanisms. Comparisons can also be a
rewarding and worthwhile effort, because research on violence without models
or theories runs into its limits rather quickly. Without a theoretical perspective
or minimal conceptualization, one runs the risk of tracing only superficial sim-
ilarities rather than delving deeper into parallel biographies, analogous struc-
tures, and similar developments. In other words, empirical density cannot be
a substitute for clear argumentation. Digging for and locating relevant factual
material is important, but the raw materials must be sufficiently integrated
into a study as a whole. In the field of mass violence research, three approaches
have so far been paramount: juxtaposition, diachrony, and transmission.

Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 1–11

Editorial 5

Juxtaposition is the comparison of events or processes by placing them side

by side and analysing them. Historians and political scientists have compared
different cases of political violence through juxtaposition. The differences and
similarities between the cases can provide a sharper picture of the peculiarity
of the individual cases. They can also generate intellectual cross-pollination by
making the researcher aware of specific themes. At best, this leads to a sharp-
ened understanding of the phenomenon, but often carries with it the disadvan-
tage of historical decontextualization. A good example of successful comparison
by juxtaposition has been the fairly recent flurry of edited volumes comparing
Stalinism with Nazism (Basle, 2001; Geyer, 2009; Kershaw & Lewin, 1997). In
both cases, young elites from aggrieved social groups came to power through
violent revolutions. Both systems leaned on a dictatorial system that permeated
personal life. Both were led by dictators who wielded demagogic, charismatic
leadership. Both established concentration camps in which first political oppo-
nents, then entire ethnic groups disappeared. Both employed radical political
ideologies based on utopias of collective identity. Both did not hesitate to use
violence against their own civilian populations. In addition to these similarities,
the comparisons naturally revealed essential differences, such as the direction,
nature and scale of the violence. These types of studies are useful for Kurdish
Studies, in that so far, the Kurds’ experience with violence has been treated as
uniquely different and has not been incorporated enough in juxtaposition-style
volumes, whether on state violence, civil war, or insurgency.
A second approach is the diachronic one: in this perspective, scholars want
to understand why mass violence occurred repeatedly within one society. The
history of Germany in the first half of the twentieth century captures the imag-
ination the most, with the Herero genocide, First World War, Armenian geno-
cide, Second World War and the Holocaust all occurring in the time span of
only 40 years. Other examples abound: a long-term perspective on the history
of Chechnya, Algeria, and Serbia also suggests that violence has been a recur-
ring phenomenon within those societies. This kind of exercise quickly runs the
risk of falling into Orientalist stereotypes about exotic regions with inherently
violent cultures such as ‘the Balkans’ or ‘the Caucasus’, or ‘martial races’ such as
Kurds, Sikhs, or Zulus. Culturalist caricatures such as these not only romanti-
cise the perpetrators, but also downplay the experiences of the victims, who are
portrayed as expendable masses of illiterate peasants or anonymous villagers.
It is much more useful to ask the question: How did earlier phases affect later
episodes of violence in terms of political culture, interstate power structures,
or widespread mentalities? Mark Biondich and Max Bergholz’s in-depth stud-
ies of political violence in the Balkans impressively takes on the twin Balkan
wars of 1912–1913, World War I, World War II, and the Yugoslav civil war of the
1990s (Bergholz, 2016; Biondich, 2011). According to them, this succession of

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6 Üngör and Işık

violent episodes has been, on the one hand, a product of externally imposed
crises such as wars and occupation regimes. On the other hand, the conflicts
have also been caused by internal continuities in the political cultures such
as the lack of an overarching Yugoslav or Bosnian identity or the unprocessed
traumas of the preceding episode of violence. So too, for the Kurds, the dia-
chronic approach can yield important insights: in at least three periods in the
modern era (1880–1896, 1915–1938, and 1984–1997), northern Kurdistan became
the scene of large-scale violence, inter-ethnic, intra-ethnic, and against the
authorities. To what extent were the earlier phases influential on later phases?
Should we imagine this as a genetic, direct influence, or a genealogical, imag-
ined influence in which later generations harked back and utilised the past to
mobilise for violence? Only a focused, diachronic study can offer explanations.
The third approach, transfer, focuses on what political elites learned from
each other during and after periods of crisis and violence. This type of trans-
national transfer can occur between neighboring countries like the most well-
known bipolar international conflicts that escalate to war and often carry the
risk of war and violence: Turkey-Greece, Germany-Soviet Union, Cambodia-
Vietnam, Serbia-Croatia, Iran-Iraq, Japan-China, India-Pakistan. However,
transference in interstate polarisations can also occur across time and space,
without direct contact between antagonistic states. Recent research has sug-
gested that the international handling of the violence against minority popula-
tions and ‘ethnic cleansings’ in the post-Ottoman and post-Romanov territories
between 1912 and 1923 served as a model for Eastern Europe between 1939 and
1946. In particular, the population exchange between Greece and Turkey (1923)
served as a guideline in the multiple population shifts between Germany,
Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania (Bloxham, 2008). Transnational transfer and
influence can also be person-specific. Saddam Hussein is widely known to have
idolised Stalin. Saddam had visited Stalin’s dacha in Abkhazia in the 1970s, had
books on Stalin specially translated into Arabic for his personal library, and
had even modeled his workroom and bedroom after Stalin’s (Aburish, 2001).
It is plausible that partly because of this, Saddam understood the importance
of propaganda and ideology to legitimise state violence. In any case, his party
purges through show trials and summary executions, his unrestrained cult of
personality, and his extensive network of secret security as intelligence ser-
vices resembled Stalin’s tellingly. Not to mention the violence: the collective
branding of Iraqi Kurds as traitors, followed by categorical violence, neatly fol-
lowed Stalin’s script for the Chechens in 1944. As an eminently transnational
ethnic group with a large diaspora, transfer has affected the Kurds profoundly.
All in all, these approaches can serve as useful templates in future research
of Kurds and violence, and can open new lines of research in which we can not

Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 1–11

Editorial 7

only understand the state of the Kurds better, but we can also use the fate of
the Kurds to understand the world better.

Paramilitarism: a Very Kurdish Problem

Kurds have had a complex history of confrontation with and involvement in

mass violence for more than a century. During much of this period, they have
been in a condition of constant resistance in their territory of Kurdistan, which
is to say the area where they reside as the majority people, divided for several
decades now into four states (Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran). Kurds have gener-
ally been victims of mass violence, but sometimes perpetrators. In this spec-
trum of violence, the role of paramilitary groups, further to that of the official
security forces of the states, has been extremely significant.
There are various, quite different definitions of paramilitary formations.
Paramilitarism is mostly used for pro-state armed groups other than the offi-
cial military and police institutions (Üngör, 2019, p. 6). Among the basic crite-
ria that define paramilitarism generally are, beyond weaponisation, their ties
with states, hierarchical and organisational structures, ambiguous (il)legal and
(un)official positions, extra-legal actions and violence, plausible deniability, and
economic expectations and relations. Scholars refer to these pro-state armed
groups with different names: “vigilante,” “militia,” “pro-government militia,”
“death squad,” “paramilitary,” and so on (Alvarez, 2006; Campbell, 2002; Carey
& Mitchell, 2017; Kowalewski, 1991; Mazzei, 2009). Alex Alvarez’s definition is
one of the most revealing: “these organizations are created in order to engage
in acts of collective violence” (Alvarez, 2006, p. 5). In other words, these groups
are generally used against dissident civilians during a state’s internal conflicts.
Paramilitary groups have had a very critical role in the mass violence
inflicted on Kurds in northern Kurdistan (or Turkish Kurdistan, or southeast
Turkey). The Kurdish links to paramilitarism there are twofold. The first is that
the Kurds have been the target of violence committed by paramilitary groups
formed by the Turkish state elite since late Ottoman times. Second, the state
elites have formed various pro-state paramilitary groups from the Kurds at dif-
ferent times.
During the Ottoman Empire, in 1891, Sultan Abdulhamid II established
the Hamidiye Light Cavalry Regiments (Hamidiye Hafif Süvari Alayları) from
Kurdish tribes as an auxiliary or paramilitary force. The main goals of the
establishment of the regiments was to control two communities (targeting
Armenian organisations, controlling Kurds) and to protect the eastern impe-
rial border (Klein, 2002). The Hamidiye regiments are known to have carried

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8 Üngör and Işık

out pogroms and massacres together with regular Ottoman troops against
members of Armenian movements and Armenian peasants in the east, espe-
cially during 1894–96.1 The most widely known paramilitary force in the late
Ottoman period was the Special Organisation (Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa) that was
founded in 1914 on the initiation of members of the Turkish nationalist party
the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti). The
Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa was deployed as death squads that were activated in differ-
ent parts of the Empire, especially during the genocide of non-Muslims in the
east and forced displacement of Greek people (Kieser, 2014; Üngör, 2011).
The ideology of the state elites after the pre-WWI Balkan Wars transformed
dramatically into a pan-Turkism. The idea of pan-Turkism held among the CUP
elites and Turkish intellectuals began to be expressed very clearly at this time.
(Dündar, 2008, pp. 59–60) This idea would develop into a major ideological
source for the groups that would found the Republic. The genocide and massa-
cres of non-Muslim and non-Turk people between 1913 and 1922 were a direct
expression of this homogeneous society idea of the authorities of the Empire,
for which purposes the paramilitary forces were actively used.
After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, the CUP
abolished itself, along with Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa. Former members of the CUP
organised a new paramilitary force replacing the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa (Shaw
& Shaw, 2002, p. 340; Zürcher, 2004, p. 135). In addition to the organisations
established by the CUP leaders, pro-state gangs were also used against the
non-Turkish and non-Muslim populations. Topal (Lame) Osman’s gang was
one of them. He was the leader of a notorious local band that was an effective
paramilitary force during the transitional government period (Ankara hükü-
meti, 1920–23). Topal Osman and his gang perpetrated massacres against the
non-Muslim communities (Greek and Armenian) around the eastern Black
Sea coast (Frunze, 1978, p. 18). They also committed massacres against Alevi
Kurds in Sivas province (Bulut, 2013, p. 114), and against the Koçgiri Kurdish
and Pontus (Greek) resistances (1919–21), two uprisings against the Turkish
national struggle in the final days of the Empire (Kahraman, 2004, pp. 267–275;
Yerasimos, 2010, pp. 345–417). Thus, Topal Osman and his gang became part of
the Turkish nationalist struggle led by Mustafa Kemal (Bulut, 2013).
After the establishment of the Republic, Kurdish organisations launched
several uprisings against the state. During the Koçuşağı rebellion in Dersim
(Tunceli), some Alevi Kurd tribes fought against the other rebel tribes as militia

1 (Klein, 2002, p. 158) “There are conflicting reports about Zeki Pasha’s hand in the massacres.
Some reports claim that he attempted to stop them where he could, while others allege that
he was the responsible party, giving orders to the Hamidiye and the regular troops he com-
manded to murder and plunder.”

Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 1–11

Editorial 9

forces alongside the Turkish army (Genelkurmay Belgelerinde Kürt İsyanları: I,

2012, pp. 237–262). When the tribes and organisations revolted against the
state, the rival tribes or local militia groups would support the state, such as
during the Koçuşağı rebellion in 1926 and the second Ağrı operation in 1927
(Genelkurmay Belgelerinde Kürt İsyanları I, 1992, pp. 289–310).
Mobilisation of the masses to perpetrate a pogrom involving state-backed
paramilitary forces was experienced many times by non-Muslim communities
and Alevi Kurds in different periods of the Republic. The Thrace Pogrom of 1934
targeted the Jewish community, the Istanbul Pogrom of 6–7 September 1955
targeted non-Muslims, especially Greeks who lived in Istanbul (Güven, 2005).
Alevis, particularly Kurdish Alevis, were another target of the Turkish paramili-
tary forces, extreme right-wing militias, and vigilantes, especially after the 1960s
(Ertan, 2008; Sinclair-Webb, 2003; Tunç, 2015). In the 1970s, leftist groups, trade
unions, Kurdish organisations, and the Alevi community all made significant
progress in terms of their (political) organisation (Aydın & Taşkın, 2014). For the
state’s ruling elites, these groups comprised a threat that needed to be eliminated.
Two types of paramilitary groups were mainly used to deal with perceived
threats to the state, especially during the pogroms and against dissidents (left-
ists, Kurdish, Alevi groups) mostly from the 1950s onward. One of them was
the Mobilisation Research Council (Seferberlik Tetkik Kurulu, STK, 1952), later
renamed the Special Warfare Department (Özel Harp Dairesi, ÖHD). The other
was Idealist Youth (Ülkücü Gençlik), which can be considered the vigilante organ-
isation of the Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP), and
included some Islamic youth groups. These two types of paramilitary groups
and varieties as perpetrators have been widely discussed as having played an
important role in the use of mass violence committed alongside the official
security forces (Bora & Can, 1991; Söyler, 2015; Ülkücü Komando Kampları, 1997).
Paramilitary groups and their mass violence crystallised particularly
against Kurdish civilians in the 1990s. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partîya
Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) launched a war against the Turkish state in 1984,
and state elites both formed new paramilitary groups and transformed and
used some of the existing ones. These were the Gendarmerie Intelligence and
Counter-Terrorism Organisation (Jandarma Istihbarat ve Terorle Mucadele,
JITEM), Village Guards (Köy Koruculuğu), the Police Special Operations Unit,
or Special Teams (Polis Özel Harekat Timleri), and Hizbullah. These groups,
along with the official security forces, were responsible for the intense violence
that took place in Northern Kurdistan in the 1990s. These groups were pre-
dominantly involved in the elimination of pro-PKK civilians, involving, among
other things, enforced disappearances, unsolved murders and torture. The
members of two of these groups (Village Guards and Hizbullah) were almost
entirely Kurdish (Işık, 2020).

Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 1–11

10 Üngör and Işık

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the feedback of the peer reviewers and proof-
readers, as well as support of Wendelmoet Hamelink and Welat Zeydanlıoğlu
in the realisation of this special issue. We would also like to thank the transla-
tors of the abstracts, Aram Rafaat for Sorani, Mahir Tornap for Zazaki, and Hêja
Netirk, Sacha Alsancakli, Esat Şanlı and Kübra Sağır for Kurmanji.

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 Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 12–48
Kurdish Studies
Archive
[Link]/ksa

The State and Violence in Kurdistan:

a Conceptual Framework

Naif Bezwan | ORCID: 0000-0002-4605-2784

Senior Research Fellow, Vienna, Austria and Honorary Senior Research
Associate, Bloomsbury, London, United Kingdom
nbezwan@[Link]

Abstract

This article interrogates the use of state-organised violence against the Kurds by focus-
ing on four major cases of mass violence conducted in the early republican era in
the 1920s and 1930s. Through the examination of the key processes and major poli-
cies, the study explains state violence as historically and causally related to the logic
and imperatives of imposing and maintaining direct rule over the predominantly
Kurdish-inhabited territories in post-Ottoman Turkey. To better understand the nature
of state violence, I present three mutually reinforcing and interconnected concep-
tual pathways: integral colonisation, incorporation by nation-destruction and colo-
nial violence. The paper argues that the strategies of state formation and expansion
into Kurdistan along with the coercive policies of creating a unitary and homogenous
Turkish nation took the form of integral colonisation. This process, while laying the
foundations for the politics of incorporation by nation-destruction, co-existed with
and informed by the use of colonial violence. Disaggregated into ideological, ethno-
cidal and genocidal violence, colonial violence is thus referred to as underlying mecha-
nism behind the recurrent use of state violence in Kurdistan.

Keywords

colonial violence – direct rule – incorporation – integral colony – partition – reordering

of the Middle East – state violence

Published with license by Koninklijke Brill BV | doi:10.1163/9789004700406_003

© Naif Bezwan, 2021
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
The State and Violence in Kurdistan: a Conceptual Framework 13

Dewlet û şidet li Kurdistanê: Çarçoveyeke têgînî

Bi vekolîna çar mînakên sereke yên tundiya girseyî ku di destpêka heyama komarî,
yanî deheyên 1920ê û 1930ê de rû daye, ev nivîsar li ser bikaranîna şideta dewletê ya
li dijî Kurdan radiweste. Di ber nirxandina pêvajoyên esasî û siyasetên bingehîn re,
ez şideta dewletê wek diyardeyeke weha rave dikim ku, ji aliyê dîrok û egerên wê ve,
têkildara mantiq û pêdiviyên ferzkirin û ragirtina hukmdariya rasterast a dewleta
Tirkiya pişt-osmanî ye li ser erdên ku pirî nifûsa wan Kurd in. Ji bo ku çawaniya şideta
dewletê bêhtir were fêmkirin, ez sê rêbazên têgînî pêşberî xwendevanan dikim ku
girêdayî hev in û hev du jî xurt dikin : mêtingeriya tevahî, daxilkirin bi riya xirakirina
neteweyî û şideta mêtinger. Di meqaleyê de, ez piştgiriya vî fikrî didim ku stratejiyên
sazkirin û berfirehkirina dewletê ya li Kurdistanê, li gel polîtîkayên zordar ên avakirina
neteweyeke tirk a yekpare û mitecanis, bi şikla mêtingeriya tevahî hatin meşandin. Vê
pêvajoyê hem bingeha siyasetên daxilkirin bi riya xirakirina neteweyî danî, hem jî tev
li bikaranîna şideta mêtinger hat xebitandin û vê şidetê bandor jî lê kiriye. Li nav şideta
komkujî, nijadkujî û îdeolojîk dabeşbûyî, şideta mêtinger bi vî awayî wek alava binyadî
ya bikaranîna mukerrer a şideta dewletê li Kurdistanê tê nîşandan.

Dewllet û tundutîjî le kurdistan: çwarçêweyekî

têgeyiştin

Ebistrakt: be serincdan leser çwar dosîyey gewrey tudutîjî ke leseretay qonaxî komarîda,
le deyekanî 1920 û 1930 piyadekiran, em witare le bekarhênanî ew tundutîjîye ke dewl-
let le dijî kurd rêkîxistuwe. Twêjîneweke le rêgay hellsengandinî prose binerretîyekan
û polesîye serekîyekan, ewe rûndekatewe ke tundutîjî dewllet wek mêjû û hokar
peyweste be lojîk û binemakanî sepandin û parastinî hukmrranî rastewxo le turkyay
post-’usmanîda beser ew herêmey ke zorîney danîştwanî kurdin. Bo baştir têgeyîştin
le sruştî tundutîjî dewllet, min sê rêçkey têgeyîştinî yekgir û pêkewe grêdraw amade
dekem: kollonîzekirdnî tewawkarî, girtinexo le rêgay wêrankirdnî-netewe we tundutîjî
kolloniyallî. Witareke argumêntî ewe dekat ke stratîjî pêkhênanî dewllet û firawankirdnî
bo kurdistan hawkat legell siyasetî serkutkerane bo pêkhênanî netewey turkî yekgirtû
û çunyek forrmî kolloniyalîzey tewawkarî wergirtuwe. Em proseye, le katêkda berdî
binaxey siyasetî girtnexo le rêgay wêrankirdnî-netewe, hawkat bû legell we denasrêtewe
be bekarhênanî tundutîjî kollonyallî. Be polênkirdnî bo tundutîjîyekanî aydiyolojî,
etnosayd û cînosayd, bemcore tundutîjî kollonyallî amajeye bo bûnî wek mîkanîzmêkî
binerretî pişt bekarhênanî dûbarey tundutîjî dewlletî le kurdistan.

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14 Bezwan

Introduction

There is no Kurdish problem where a Turkish bayonet appears. (Vakit

7 May 1925, Turkish newspaper, cited in McDowall 2017, p. 200)

The conduct of mass violence, along with the periodic deployment of vari-
ous emergency regimes, has a long history in the Kurdish region. Indeed, no
single Kurdish generation has been spared from state violence in one way or
another over the past century or so.1 Apart from relatively short periods of lib-
eral openings and reforms of some sort, state violence, and non-compliance
to it, has shaped, and continues to shape, the lives of substantial segments of
Kurdish society.
The present study is an attempt to shed some light on this puzzle by set-
ting out a conceptual framework that explains the use of state-organised mass
violence in Kurdistan by looking at the intersection of state formation and
expansion, direct rule and the politics of nation-building, and various forms
of resistance.
While aiming to provide a conceptual framework for understanding the
historical and contextual conditions for the roots, recurrence and durabil-
ity of the state-organised violence, this article builds on multiple theoretical
approaches and insights generated by scholars working on violence. Generally,
mass violence here is referred to as indicating widespread physical violence
against non-combatants, including killings, and other atrocities such as “forced
removal or expulsion, enforced hunger or undersupply, forced labour, collec-
tive rape, strategic bombing, and excessive imprisonment” (Gerlach 2010,
p. 1ff.). As this study focuses on instances of state-organised mass violence, it
takes up the insights generated by scholarly work on state criminality which
are essential for a proper understanding of the nature of state crimes (Kramer
2016; Green et al. 2004; Rothe & Kauzlarich 2016; Anderson 2016). This lit-
erature provides an indispensable line of argumentation for addressing state
crimes, the criminogenic structures through which such crimes are conducted
as well as the question of impunity, responsibility, personal motivation, and
structural logic behind state-organised violence. It denotes crimes perpe-
trated by states, directly and indirectly, as “criminogenic”, i.e., crime-producing

1 While writing this article, the Kurdish society once more is going through one of the most
threatening periods of its modern history in the face of multiple military campaigns carried
out by the Turkish military and affiliated Jihadist groups. Immediately after the American
withdrawal from Syria, on 9 October 2019, Turkey launched its hitherto biggest military
assault against the Kurds in Rojava, in north-eastern Syria.

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The State and Violence in Kurdistan: a Conceptual Framework 15

structures whereby the denial of responsibility or even the commission of

crimes is considered as part of the statecraft of the perpetrating state and its
officials. As Anderson notes, “in genocidal states deviant behavior is actually
normative” which explains how, by perpetrating or condoning “the commis-
sion of normally criminal acts” authoritarian states become themselves crimi-
nogenic or crime-producing (2016, p. 85).
Equally, for an enhanced understanding of violence, Galtung’s conceptuali-
sation of “direct, structural and cultural violence” is still essential (Galtung 1969,
p. 170 ff; Galtung 1990). In addition, Spivak’s concept of “epistemic violence” is
important in that it brings into focus the constitution of “the colonial subject
as Other” and “the asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its
precarious Subjectivity” (Spivak 2010, p. 35). Kalyvas’ idea of desegregating vio-
lence and linking it to order are also very inspiring for this study as it allows us
to focus on the logic and dynamics of violence in relation to the type of order
(2006, p. 19 ff; Kaylvas et al. 2008 p. 14). The intersectionality of violence and
nation-building is central to the approach taken by Bloxham and Gerwarth
(2011, p. 2). While linking violence with nation-building, they conceptualise
political violence as emanating from the generation of new forms of state
power seeking to homogenise societies by resorting to ethnic cleansing and
genocide if deemed necessary (Bloxham & Gerwarth 2011, p. 138 ff).
It is this particular type of violence the present study seeks to explain, i.e.,
violence executed by state authorities as part and parcel of the strategies of
nation-building, imperatives of homogenisation, the imposition of direct
rule and ethnic domination. This will be referred to as colonial violence, and
comprises the politics of denial, domination and destruction, as well as the tar-
geting of the agency, identity, territorial and communal make-up of Kurdish com-
munities for the purposes of imposing and maintaining direct rule via special
regimes and associated policies of assimilation, displacement and social engi-
neering. These processes and policies, while rendering state violence with an
inherently colonial character, I refer to as incorporation by nation-destruction
which is offered as a key mechanism responsible for the roots and recurrent
uses of state violence as well as for providing perpetrators with impunity.
Conceptualised as the primary concept, colonial violence is then referred to
as existing along a continuum from ideological, to authoritarian, to ethnocidal
and genocidal violence.
As indicated above, this study empirically focuses on four successive cases
of mass violence: Koçgiri (1920–1921), the mass violence committed during and
after the Sheikh Said-led resistance (1925), Zilan (1930) and Dersim (1937–1938).
Koçgiri, Zilan and Dersim are regions in which uprisings and mass violence
took place, whereas Sheikh Said is the name of the leader of the insurgency

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16 Bezwan

and shall indicate state violence conducted during and in the aftermath of
this uprising. The cases are taken as exemplars of the politics of incorpora-
tion by communal destruction executed through a combination of ethnocidal
and genocidal violence. They occurred at the intersection of state formation,
expansion, homogenising and nationalising strategies of nation-building
rigorously undertaken by the emergent republican regime in post-Ottoman
Turkey. All four cases demonstrate the pattern of repression and resistance, or
“dialectics of domination and resistance”, involving Kurdish movements and
the sovereign powers ruling over Kurdistan (see Vali 2020, v ff.).
The cases involve forms of non-compliance to the politics of denial and
domination by demanding the national and/or cultural rights and claiming
agency. This is, however, not to suggest that the cases are identical, or represent
a kind of duplication or re-enactment of the same over a period of time. For
one thing, they are located within different regional and geographical settings
(Bozarslan 2008, p. 341 ff; Watts 2000). And for another, the cases are varied in
terms of the level of organisation, resistance as well as political and national
demands involved. While differing in scope and intensity, in all four cases the
ethnic domination is met by the dominated, claiming their agency and desire
for forms of self-rule, a core demand which has been, and remains, central to
all the Kurdish discontent and uprisings.
Finally, and more importantly for the purposes of this article, all four cases
involve state-organised mass violence which was conducted in the early repub-
lican era and evolved over two decades. The first two cases are then referred
to as ethnocidal (Section III below), and the latter two cases as genocidal vio-
lence (Section IV), executed by a combination of negationist, assimilationist
and eliminationist strategies targeting the Kurdish communities in their agen-
tial capabilities and qualities, as well as their national and territorial integrity.
I use the term ethnocidal violence in cases where the emphasis is primarily
placed on policies aiming at the destruction of communal agency, identity
and culture, whereas genocidal violence refers to “selective extermination”.2
By that, I mean the use of mass violence within a territorially delineated space
where violence is conducted in a “group-selective” and “group-destructive”

2 Bellamy identifies three basic pathways for the justification of mass atrocities: denial, mili-
tary necessity and ideology of selective extermination. The latter has provided “a moral
framework that underpinned the justificatory arguments employed by some of the leading
twentieth-century proponents of genocide” (Bellamy 2012, p. 161). Governed by the “civilising
mission” doctrine, the ideology of selected extermination “is based on a consensus within
a given political community that certain groups are not entitled to moral and legal protec-
tion and may therefore be legitimately subjected to indiscriminate violence” (Bellamy 2012,
p. 180).

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The State and Violence in Kurdistan: a Conceptual Framework 17

manner but is limited in scope as it focuses on a selected region (cf. Straus 2012.
p. 554 ff; 2016, p. 19ff.).3
Both ethnocidal and genocidal violence used in the cases under review are
further characterised by politicide and exemplary repression. The former refers
to targeting rebels or potential rebels, that is, “killing where the intended tar-
get is the entire leadership and potential leadership class of a more generally
victimized and feared group” (Mann 2005, p. 16). Whilst the latter refers to the
policy of “putting an entire city to the sword in order to cow other cities into
submission” (ibid.).
Contrary to the argument that suggests a mutually exclusive relation
between ethnocide and genocide, I endorse the view that considers both as
belonging to the category of “murderous ethnic cleansing” (cf. Mann 2005. p. 17).
As such, they are coterminous, as they share essential features that overlap
with each other, but are not interchangeable. Similarly, Harff and Gurr define
both genocides and politicides as “the promotion and execution of policies
by a state or its agents which result in the deaths of a substantial portion of a
group” (Harff & Gurr 1988, p. 360). In genocides, they contend, “the victimized
groups are defined primarily in terms of their communal characteristics, i.e.,
ethnicity, religion, or nationality. In politicides the victim groups are defined
primarily in terms of their hierarchical position or political opposition to the
regime and dominant groups” (ibid.).
As we will see below, the cases presented here, and indeed all cases of
Kurdish uprisings, are commonly referred to in Turkish official historiography
as “banditry” or “revolts” (isyans) etc., not least in order to justify the use of
mass violence (see Section II). Working on political violence in Kurdistan, or
indeed any aspects of the Kurdish society, one is permanently reminded of
what Walter Mignolo describes as one’s own positionality in the “geo-politics
of knowledge” (2011, p. 17) and “epistemic disobedience” from a decolonial
perspective (2009 p. 160). After all, there is a fundamental difference between
studying political violence from the perspective of those subjected to it, or
those who justify and rationalise its use – be it by referring to the exigencies
of the state and nation-building, by assigning the violent actions to the realm
of necessity, or by rendering the outcomes of violent policies to the intended

3 This understanding is roughly equivalent with Semelin’s distinction between ‘destroying to

subjugate’ to ‘destroying to eradicate’ (Semelin 2012, p. 28). The former refers to annihilating
a group partly in order to force the rest of the group into total submission, while the latter
involves eliminating the targeted group from a more or less extensive territory controlled
or coveted by a state. “These two processes,” Semelin maintains, “often overlap in the same
historical situation” (ibid.).

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18 Bezwan

consequences. To study the former, i.e. the targeted groups, without stripping
them of their agency, and the latter without falling into the affirmative logic
through which state-organised violence is justified remains the most challeng-
ing task for scholars working on violence.
The cases addressed in this study are taken to represent forms of “non-
compliance”, or collective resistance to imposed rule by demonstrating the
absence of the rulers’ legitimacy (cf. Hechter 2013, p. 21). As the study focuses
on the early Republican era (1923–1945), the examination will methodologi-
cally take the form of historical process tracing, understood as “a key technique
for capturing causal mechanism in action”, while generating historical-
comparative explanations (Bennett et al. 2015, p. 9). Process tracing allows
systematic and contextualised comparisons while paying attention to the sig-
nificance of considering alternative explanations and gathering diverse and
relevant evidence (cf. Mahoney et al. 2009, p. 363).
The remainder of this article is structured as follows: the first section pres-
ents the concept of integral colony to address background conditions and to
identify mechanisms through which the state violence in the 1920s in Turkey
was enacted. Section II addresses the relationship between official ideology
and violence and the ways in which the Kurds are depicted by the state dis-
course. Sections III and IV focus on the four cases of mass violence presented
above by explaining how, for what purposes, under what conditions, and by
means of which policies mass violence was carried out by the Turkish Republic
during the 1920s. Finally, I will conclude by summarising the main insights and
indicating some research desiderate.

Becoming an Integral Colony

Having outlined the types of violence relevant to this study, this section
focuses on the historical and contextual conditions through which this vio-
lence was generated. It does so by laying out the concept of integral colony
which is understood as the key enabler for the arbitrary exercise of state power
and the conduct of mass violence. In order to better understand how this came
about, I will first consider the wider context of state formation, state expansion
and nation-building as they played out in the post-Ottoman Middle East, and
how this affected the status of the Kurds and Kurdistan within the emergent
nation-states in general, and within the Turkish republic in particular.
As briefly addressed elsewhere by this author (2018, p. 64ff), World War One
(1914–1918) led to a violent process of reconfiguration of the political space in
the entire Middle East through a combination of direct and indirect rule by

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The State and Violence in Kurdistan: a Conceptual Framework 19

the victorious Western powers in the 1920s. Syria and Iraq received French and
British mandatory rule respectively, while in post-Ottoman Turkey a republi-
can regime was promulgated, and in post-Qajar Iran a new dynastic regime
was established (Vali 2020).
In each of these states the Kurds “became a status-less minority, not because
they constituted a numeric minority in their own territories where they had
an overwhelming majority, but because they were deprived of equal rights
with the dominant Persian, Turkish and Arab communities” (Bozarslan 2018,
pp. 12–13). The result has been “a regime of inter-state domination” informed
by “an inter-state security regime which defined the region-wide Kurdistan as
a zone of permanent regime of exception” (ibid.).
The break-up of the Ottoman Empire resulted in, among other things, the
“partition of Ottoman Kurdistan” (McDowall 2017, p. 115). This process was
then officially completed by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) between Turkey and
the victorious powers of the First World War, and the ensuing international
border agreements. The first border treaty was signed between Turkey and the
mandatory State of Syria and France in May 1926, followed by border agree-
ments between Turkey and the Mandatory state of Iraq and Great Britain in
June 1926, and between Turkey and Iran in January 1932. The agreements not
only involved redrawing state boundaries, but also security-related arrange-
ments targeting the Kurds as potential destructors of the emerging post-war
status quo (Bezwan 2008b, p. 270, Bezwan 2018, pp. 63–64).
For the purposes of this paper, however, the most crucial and durable out-
come of the complex processes of imperial/colonial reordering and territorial
engineering of the Middle East was the fact that the states whose ruling elites
were antagonistic towards the Kurdish national aspirations and rights, became
legally entitled to rule over Kurdish communities. Once endowed with sover-
eignty over the respective part of Kurdistan, they became engaged in the rig-
orous imposition of direct rule over the Kurdish-inhabited territories during
the course of the 1920s. The most crucial turning point in this process was the
signing of the Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923, in which Turkish sovereignty
over substantial portions of Kurdistan in present-day Turkey was recognised.
Put differently, the processes of redrawing the territorial borders, of state
formation and expansion into ‘peripheral’ regions in the Middle East became
materialised as forced incorporation of the Kurdish territories into the newly
established states in the 1920s, often by use of mass violence.4 This inaugu-
rated what Christopher Houston has succinctly called as “an anti-history of

4 In the introductory chapter to the edited volume “Right-Sizing the State: The Politics
of Moving Borders”, Brendan O’Leary defines “right-sizing” the state as referring “to the

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a non-people” (2009, p. 19). The peculiarity of the Kurdish case lies in the
fact that Kurdish communities emerged out of the process of turning the
political geography of the post-Ottoman Middle East into “nation-states” as
a non-nationality with non-status.5 This provided the background for integral
colonisation through policies and practices which targeted the communal
rights and existence of the Kurdish population.

Integral Colonisation and Mass Violence

If there were still some positive approaches towards the Kurds during the cru-
cial period from the dissolution of the Ottoman empire (1918) to the proclama-
tion of the Turkish Republic in 1923 (cf. Olson 1991, p. 21ff.), with the signing
of the treaty of Lausanne things changed dramatically. One of the last public
statements on the Kurdish situation with reference to “some kind of auton-
omy” (bir tür muhtarlık) was made by Atatürk on 16–17 January 1923, whereas
the constitution adopted by the Grand National Assembly in April 1924 did not
allow for any autonomy of any sort (Olson 1991, p. 26ff).
With the benefit of hindsight, one can conclude that pursuant to the bal-
ance of power and the level of power consolidation, a shift from what can best
be called “benevolent colonialism” to “integral colonialism” took place, both of
which can be found in an official document: Draft law for a proposed autonomy
of Kurdistan as debated in the Grand National Assembly on 10 February 1922.6
What makes this document, which offers “an autonomous administration
for the Kurdish nation in harmony with their national customs”, so striking
is twofold: first, the drafters rightly recognised the Kurds as a nation with its
own identity and territory so that there is no misrecognition, no denial, no
dismissal of the Kurd as “Mountain-Turks”, as was the case during the course
of the 1920s. Secondly, for the purposes of this paper more importantly, the
proposed “government of Kurdistan” in this document is cast in clear colonial

preferences of political agents at the centre of existing regimes to have what they regard as
appropriate external and internal territorial borders” (2004, p. 2).
5 With the idea of non-recognised colony, I draw on İsmail Beşikçi who has famously noted
that the Kurds have far less than “the status of a colony” and that Kurdistan is not “even a
colony” (Kürdistan sömürge bile değil). This laconic and thought-provoking statement was
meant to bring into focus the peculiarities of the Kurdish situation. He himself has analysed
the Kurdish predicament by developing the concept of “interstate colony” (Devletlerarası
Sömürge) (Beşikçi 1986, p. 10 ff).
6 This document was first brought to light by historian Robert Olson entitled Draft law for a pro-
posed autonomy of Kurdistan as debated in the Grand National Assembly on 10 February 1922,
F.O. 371/7781 Eastern (Turkey) E3553/96/65, no. 308). Telegram from Sir H. Rumbold to the
Marquess Curzon of Kedleston commented and cited in Olson & Rumbold 1989, p. 55 ff.).

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The State and Violence in Kurdistan: a Conceptual Framework 21

terms, with the Kurds given a dominated status within an officially recognised
tutelage system of governance. Put differently, it is about a form of colonial
rule that was pretty much in accord with the Zeitgeist of the 1920s where colo-
nialism took the form of indirect rule, as was the case with the instruction of
mandatory regimes throughout the Middle East and elsewhere. The manda-
tory regimes were famously stipulated by Article 22 of the Covenant of the
League of Nations of 1920, with “the ideological foundations of the mandates
demanded that colonial rule combine with paternalistic structures of liberal
rule” (Provence 2017, p. 270; see also Anghie 2004, p. 121).
It goes without saying that this “benevolent colonialism”, that is, a regime of
a Governor-General appointed by the Turkish Grand National Assembly over-
seeing “the government of Kurdistan” with Turkish as the only official language
(document cited in Olson & Rumbold 1989, p. 55 ff; see also Olson 1991, p. 24 ff.)
was accompanied by the attempts to contain and fatally undermine a genu-
ine constitution and development of a Kurdish movement (see the Koçgiri
case below). However, as indicated above, parallel to the consolidation of the
Kemalist regime in post-Ottoman Turkey, all promises of recognition even by
submission under a tutelage regime were incrementally abandoned in favour of
strategies of denial, domination and destruction, which targeted the political
agency as well as the national and cultural makeup of the Kurdish commu-
nity. For example, in a conversation in November 1926 with the then British
colonial high Commissioner in Iraq, Sir Henry Dobbs, Mustafa Kemal (later
Atatürk) was quoted as saying that “‘self-determination’ rights and minority
rights could be talked about, but such rights were necessarily the rights of nations”
adding: “The Kurds are still a tribe in commerbunds [kuşaklar boyu]; they will
remain unable to administer [yönetme] themselves” (cited in Olson 1991, p. 26.
footnote 10).7
The colonial logic of this statement needs no further explication: the aim
to withhold from the people the right to administer themselves by using
violence and take it as absence of their capacity to govern themselves.8 In
governmental terms, however, this meant moving away from the proposed
regime of Governor-General with Kurdistan having an officially recognised
status, or autonomy of any sort, to the establishment of exceptional and

7 This conservation is referred to by the British ambassador in Ankara Sir George Clerk in his
telegraph of November 1926 to the British Foreign Office (commented and cited in Olson 1991,
p. 26. footnote 10.).
8 The colonial logic that flows out of this assessment is running like a leitmotif throughout the
history of colonial thinking which comes down to the point that tribes or colonised peoples
cannot represent themselves.

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exceptionally coercive emergency regimes, among others, the regime of

“Inspectorates-General” (Umûmî Müfettişlikler),9 which became the primary
form of governance and mode of direct rule in Kurdistan from 1927 to 1952
(see Section II.3).
I explore this process by presenting a new concept, the concept of inte-
gral colonisation and colony. By that, I mean a specific type of domination by
which the territories and communities that have been subject to the incorpo-
ration into the dominant society are construed as integral to the state and thus
indivisible from its territorial and national integrity, without being recognised
as communities in their own right or accorded to any public status. As such, an
integral colony is a non-entity, devoid of any status or recognition, as it is quite
literally interned into the body politic of the sovereign power and denied a
socio-political existence of its own. It is important, however, to emphasise that
the concept of integral colony is not understood as static or a one-size-fits-all
concept, but as a conceptual variable10 that looks at the different levels of colo-
niality, as well as at the methods and structures of domination, their ideologi-
cal justification, along with variant policies and strategies that inform colonial
politics. It takes into account both processes of change and continuity from a
historical perspective by explaining how policies and practices targeting the
Kurdish communities have been shaped, reshaped, sometimes reduced, at
times normalised, and repeatedly resumed and reinforced.
Integral colony is then referred to as entailing (i) ethnic domination,
(ii) the politics of impunity, (iii) the politics of non-recognition, (iv) a politi-
cal economy based on de-development,11 building state coercive capacity and

9 On 1 January 1928, the First Inspectorate General (Birinci Umumi Müfettişlik) was estab-
lished, comprising the provinces of Bitlis, Diyarbakır, Van, Hakkari, Mus, Mardin, Urfa and
Siirt, with Mahmut Tali Öngören as its first Inspector-General. The Second Inspectorates-
General was established on February 19, 1934, covering the provinces of Kırklareli, Edirne,
Tekirdağ and Çanakkale and Edirne as headquarters. On August 25, 1935, the Third
Inspectorate-General was installed covering the provinces of Ağrı, Kars, Artvin, Rize,Trabzon,
Gümüşhane, Erzincan, with Erzurum as headquarters. The Fourth Inspectorate-General
was set up on June 6, 1936 that included Tunceli, Elazığ and Bingöl provinces with Elazığ as
its centre.
10 On conceptual variables see Nettl’s article (1968). He offers to conceptualise state as con-
ceptual variables for the sake of identifying “more or less stateness” in order to better
examine consequences of different levels of stateness (cf. 1968, p. 591 ff.).
11 The concept of “de-development” was first coined by Sara Roy in an article on The Gaza
Strip “defined as a process which undermines or weakens the ability of an economy to
grow and expand by preventing it from accessing and utilizing critical inputs needed to
promote internal growth beyond a specific structural level” (Roy 1987, p. 56). For the rel-
evance of the concept of de-development in relation to the Kurdish regions see Yadırgi

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The State and Violence in Kurdistan: a Conceptual Framework 23

elite co-optation. While generating the systematic use of political violence,

these features are referred to as foundational to the nation-states ruling over
Kurdistan and as mechanisms that produce mass violence. Differences are
then understood as ones of degree and not of kind.
The features indicated here shall be briefly explicated and related to each
other. The first concept, ethnic domination, refers to the regimes of control and
coercion mostly provided by the periodic deployment of martial law, state of
emergencies and/or military rules and war-making. While in itself exceptional,
the government of the integral colony is in many respects the very embodiment
of “the colonial exception” (Chatterjee 2017, p. 90).12 As such, it should either be
calm and obeyable or must be silenced and governed by exceptional regimes
of various forms. An integral colony cannot be governed other than by variant
regimes of control and coercion as indicated by the “Inspectorates-General”
(Umûmî Müfettişlikler) along with many other emergency regimes (see below).
Given the frequency, recurrence, and durability of emergency regimes and
use of violence in dealing with the question of Kurdistan, the political and
administrative regimes of the states in question, as I have argued elsewhere,
take the form of a dual state, that is, a “normative state” approach towards the
dominant ethnicity and “prerogative state” approach against the Kurds and
non-core minorities at large. Whilst the former is not entirely dismissive of
the principles of democratic governance, the latter operates as an apparatus
of domination that denies equal rights, recognition and protection by target-
ing the agency, identity, territorial and communal make-up of Kurdish society
through deployment of special regimes and associated policies of assimilation,
displacement and social and demographic engineering (Bezwan 2008b).13

(2017, p. 58 ff), and to Iranian Kurdistan see Mohammadpour and Soleimani (2020,
p. 4 ff).
12 Chatterjee uses the term “imperial prerogative” to indicate colonial exception: “The
imperial prerogative”, he suggests, “is the power to declare the colonial exception”
(Chatterjee 2017, p. 89). As underlined by Chatterjee’s the government of a colony essen-
tially consists of two kind of pedagogies, namely “a pedagogy of violence and a pedagogy
of culture”, so that “[T]colony must either be disciplined by force or educated [‘civilized’]
by culture” (Chatterjee 2017, p. 90).
13 The concept of the dual state, conceptualised as the “Normative State” (Normenstaat) and
“the Prerogative State” (Maßnahmenstaat), was first coined by Ernest Fraenkel. The for-
mer refers to the arbitrary and unbounded use of state powers and acts as “the jurisdiction
over jurisdiction” (2017, p. 57), whereas the latter accounts for self-imposed restraints or
some sort of government by law, especially in matters deemed lying outside the domain
of the political or mainly related to the well-functioning of the economy (p. 71 ff.). By
addressing this problem, Fraenkel’s empirical focus was on Nazi Germany. But since the
first publication of his book entitled The Dual State in 1941, many scholars, including the

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This provides the institutional and ideological basis for the conduct of vio-
lence and the politics of impunity. By politics of impunity, I mean the lack of
remedial justice mechanisms for addressing and redressing the injustices com-
mitted by the state and its officials. As such, impunity is part and parcel of state
crimes at large, that is, a type of “criminality organized by the state [which]
consists of acts defined by law as criminal and committed by state officials in
the pursuit of their job as representatives of the state” (cited in Kramer 2016,
p. 233; see also Green et al. 2004, p. 2). State crime involves “an act or omission
of an action by actors within the state that results in violations of domestic
and international law, human rights, or systematic or institutionalised harm
of its or another state’s population, done in the name of the state regardless
of whether there is or is not self-motivation or interests at play” (Rothe &
Kauzlarich 2016, p. 102).
As Das and Poole strikingly put it, drawing on Agamben, “law produces cer-
tain bodies as ‘killable’ because they are positioned by the law itself as prior
to the institution of law” (2004, p. 12). Impunity, then, is the mechanism that
puts life in question by producing a category of eliminable lives, while refus-
ing any remedial justice. As will be discussed below, an early example of how
such impunity was explicitly legislated for was law No. 1850 – also known as a
law on crimes committed in the zone of rebellion (cf. McDowall 2017, p. 206) –
which was passed in 1931 in response to a Kurdish insurgency, the Ağrıdağı
isyanı (Mount Ararat resistance). Revealingly enough, this law has never been
abolished and has been invoked as late as in the recent case of armed clashes
between Turkish security forces and allegedly PKK-affiliated groups following
the collapse of peace talks in the summer of 2015. As indicated by a UN-Report,
some 2,000 people were killed during security operations from July 2015 to
December 2016 in the Kurdistan region and over 355,000 were displaced (cf.
UN-Report 2017. p. 5). During this period, the domestic protection of human
rights in South-East Turkey, the UN-report maintains, “has effectively been
non-functioning since at least July 2015” (UN-Report 2017, p. 3).14
The politics of non-recognition points to the denial of national and cultural
rights, and refusal of their non-violent accommodation. Contrary to the offi-
cial account that presents assimilation as a benevolent act, providing a kind
of ‘equal opportunity’ for the inclusion into Turkishness, assimilation indeed

author of this paper, have referred to, expanded on, and modified it for the purposes of
comparative analysis of authoritarian regimes with deceptively devised dual structures
and hybrid features (Fraenkel 2017 (1994), p. 4ff.).
14 See the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in
February 2017.

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The State and Violence in Kurdistan: a Conceptual Framework 25

contains an eliminatory dimension as it targets a territorially concentrated pop-

ulation with explicit national aspirations, agential claims and qualities as well as
a history of struggle for self-rule. Given that, to paraphrase an idea formulated
by Wolfe, assimilation can be a more effective form of elimination than con-
ventional forms of killing (cf. Wolfe 2006, p. 402).
Predicated on geo-ethnically oriented territorial politics, the political econ-
omy of integral colonialism, except for moments of welfare state approaches
during periods of reform, is essentially grounded in three dominant strategies.
First, it is mainly concerned with building state coercive capacity.15 Second,
it involves the politics of de-development, designed for resource extraction
and exploitation, combined with low levels of investment in social and eco-
nomic infrastructure and human development, which has created abysmal
disparities, inequalities and injustices in the use and allocation of vitally
important resources and infrastructures in Kurdish regions, a policy which is
particularly relevant, but not limited, to the Kurdish region. Finally, third, it
entails co-optation, i.e., “the capacity to tie strategically relevant actors (or a
group of actors) to the regime elite”, which involves both formal institutions
and informal ties mostly based on clientelism and patronage (Gerschewski
2013, p. 22 ff).
In the Kurdish case, co-optation mostly occurs through informal relations
based on clientelism and patronage as opposed to democratic participation
and just allocation of resources for much-needed public investments in social
and economic infrastructure and reasonable development. Elite co-optation
is thus intended to serve regime stability and deepen the proverbial intra-
Kurdish division provided by the integral colonialist policies presented above.
As argued by Cunningham, states target internally divided movements by
employing both a “divide and conquer” and “divide and concede” strategy,
using concessions as strategic bargaining tools without settling the underlying
dispute (2011, p. 295 ff.).
It goes beyond the scope of this article to analyse in any detail the relevance
of the concept of integral colony for Kurdish regions across four states. Yet,
framed as a dynamic and relational concept, the notion of integral colony
may offer a better understanding of the common Kurdish predicament as
an essentially integral colony, without failing to notice their asymmetrical
level of development and different trajectories. For example, given the pres-
ence of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), Kurdistan/Iraq, one would

15 In recent literature, the concept of state capacity is taken to mean “extractive, coercive,
and administrative capacity” (White 2018, p. 130), which is built on the works of Skocpol
(see also Skocpol 1985, p. 16) and Mann (2008, p. 355; see also 2012b, p. 13).

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reasonably assume that it would not fit into the category of integral colony.
And yet, as the concerted political and military actions of Iran, Iraq and Turkey
concerning the independence referendum in 2018 have clearly demonstrated,
the KRG remains within the matrix of an integral colony. Both Kurdistan in
Iran16 and Kurdistan in Turkey are essentially governed as integral colonies,
whereas Kurdistan n Syria lies somewhere in-between: between acquiring a
status of its own and an eminent danger of being integrally recolonised, as
indicated by the efforts of the Assad regime to recapture the control of the
Kurdish region and the ongoing Turkish invasion and military campaigns.
Understood as a dynamic and relational socio-political concept, the con-
cept of integral colony can cast light on many of the political, ideological,
and status-related peculiarities and conundrums surrounding the question of
Kurdistan, without neglecting the differences in the level of coloniality, and
the ways in which the features presented above come together to inform the
overall politics of each of the sovereign powers towards the Kurds. As such,
the concept of integral colonialism may better explain why exceptional
regimes have become, and remain, essential to the exercise of sovereign power
in Kurdistan, and why they have been invoked at every critical juncture for
long periods of time from the 1920s onwards up until today. Second, it helps
make sense of the apparently inclusive and civic, yet deeply racialised and
pronouncedly ethno-integralist ideological discourses of the states involved.
Third, it offers an explanation as to why the Kurdish national communities
across four ‘host states’ are depicted as an integral part of “the territorial and
national integrity” of the states in question, while simultaneously portrayed as
an existential threat par excellence to the very integrity they are supposed to be
part of. Fourth, it allows us to identify the structural and ideological obstacles
behind the notorious rejection of peaceful and negotiated forms of accommo-
dation throughout the history of the four states.
Taken together, while rooted in ethnic domination, non-recognition, impu-
nity, and a political economy based on de-development, building state coercive
capacity and elite co-optation, integral colony provides institutional and ide-
ological foundations for the conduct of state-organised violence against the
Kurdish communities. Working from this frame of reference, this study will
explain state violence as historically and causally related to the forced incorpo-
ration of Kurdistan by policies targeting the very stuff of which the historical,
cultural, linguistic properties of the Kurdish community are assumed to consist

16 For Iranian Kurdistan see Vali (2020); Mohammadpour and Soleimani (2020). The latter
authors define the Kurdish situation in Iran as an “internally colonised community by the
sovereign Perso-Shi‘a state” (2020. pp. 1–13).

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The State and Violence in Kurdistan: a Conceptual Framework 27

of, as well as the socio-economic, demographic and political foundations on

which the existence of the Kurds as a territorially concentrated national com-
munity is believed to be founded. The official ideology of the state plays an
important role in that. In what follows, I will consider this issue by focusing on
the ways in which the Kurds have commonly been depicted by Turkish state
discourse. The main features of this, however, can be found in the official dis-
courses of the other ‘host’ states as well.

Ideology and Violence

Although the link between ideology and violence is open to different inter-
pretations, there is a widely shared understanding on the justificatory func-
tion of ideology (cf. Maynard 2014, p. 822 ff.). Ideologies, it is argued, delimit
legitimate in-groups and illegitimate out-groups (cf. Straus 2011, p. 549). It is
further argued that, although ideology in itself does not provide a sufficient
explanation of atrocities, it supplies the perpetrators of violence with motiva-
tion, legitimation and rationalisation by labelling victims as dangerous threats
or guilty criminals, while euphemistically reframing killing as “self-defence” or
“serving the revolution” (cf. Maynard 2014, pp. 825–829). It is quite safe to say
that there is no single case in the history of political violence and mass killings
where the use of violence was not preceded and /or accompanied by attempts
at dehumanising and demonising the groups that were targeted.
For lack of a better term, I use “ideological violence” to indicate the whole
range of discursive practices that are systematically deployed to hurt and
harm members of an outgroup, and the cultural values that the individuals
and communities view as constitutive of their identity. As such, it involves the
intentional infliction of social harm to the out-group.17 The term ideological
violence is useful in so far as it directs our attention to the workings of ideolo-
gies and thus to the ways in which they are related to the use of mass violence.
As for the Kurdish context, ideological violence is taken to mean a wide
range of discursive practices aimed at distorting, misrepresenting, dehumanis-
ing, and devaluing the communal existence, identity and rights of the Kurds.

17 “The consequences of out-group devaluation” Verdeja points out, “can take many forms,
ranging from the limitation of citizenship rights to systematic harassment, incarcera-
tion, or even expulsion. In its most extreme form, and with sufficient commitment and
resources from the state, it can result in massacres, and ultimately in genocide. The stron-
ger the devaluation, the more probable it becomes that members of the in-group will see
violence as a legitimate response” (Verdeja 2012a, p. 315).

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As such, it can be seen as composed of three main elements: narratives of

tribalism-banditry-backwardness, civilising mission, and toponymical engineer-
ing. The accounts of tribalism-banditry-backwardness are leitmotifs which
run through the whole edifice of the official state ideology around the Kurdish
identity. The terms “backward”, “bandit”, “tribal” are employed with the aim of
“the removal of the Kurdishness of the Kurdish question” (Yeğen 1999, p. 563).
The state discourse does not misrepresent the Kurdish identity, rather, it enun-
ciates it “in terms of reactionary politics, tribal resistance or regional backward-
ness, but never as an ethno-political question” (Yeğen 1996, p. 216 ff.). While
lacking an analytical value, the concept of tribalism is “rooted in attempts to
present colonial domination as a rational agent while ascribing irrationality to
resisting forces” with a tendency towards delegitimising claims to equal treat-
ment, rights and nationhood (Mohammadpour and Soleimani 2019, p. 17).
By building on narratives of tribalism-banditry-backwardness, the second
salient aspect of ideological/epistemic violence can be described as a mis-
sion to ‘civilise’ the Kurds. In the early republican context, this colonial idea
was framed as “the Kemalist civilising mission [which] involved the cre-
ation of a homogenous Turkish nation that urgently needed to rid itself of its
‘Orientalness’” (Zeydanlıoğlu 2008, p. 5 ff.). This was invoked by the Kemalist
centre to construe the non-Turkish population of the eastern provinces “as
primitive and inferior, fit for colonial rule by a Turkish master nation which
operated in the name of progress and rationality” (Üngör 2008, p. 32).
The third element informing ideological violence can be described as a
politics of “toponymical engineering” (Öktem 2008, p. 3.) which was achieved
through the introduction of a policy by the Kemalist government which led
to the Turkification of the names of thousands of villages and landforms
(Kezer 2015, p. 144). This “renaming of place names” Öktem argues, “coincided
with larger attempts at demographic engineering through ethnic cleansing
and forced migration” (2008, p. 5), and has been described as “reconquering
Turkey through toponymic erasure” (Kezer 2015, p. 116). The toponymic era-
sure constitutes a common and recurrent feature of state expansion, whether
within or outside territorial borders,18 and is aimed at removing what would
possibly bear testimony to the existence of targeted groups and their uproot-
ing also in geographical terms.
The ideational features and institutional practices presented above are
taken to constitute “ideological violence” grounded in the antithetical other-
ing of an out-group and the justification of measures intended to target that

18 On motives and meaning of Turkification of geographical names in the context of parti-

tion of Cyprus island in 1974 (see Navaro 2012, p. 6).

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The State and Violence in Kurdistan: a Conceptual Framework 29

group. In its relation to violence, the official state doctrine produces two major
intended consequences: systemic production of misrecognition – defined as “a
form of institutionalized subordination, and thus a serious violation of justice”
which results in “status injury” (Fraser 2000 p. 114 ff; 2013, p. 177) – and social
harm at both the individual and communal level (for a discussion on social
harm see Pemberton 2015, 22–34 ff.).
One important function of the state discourse on the Kurds has been to
negate the Kurdish communal existence in its national and territorial dimen-
sions by simultaneously enacting policies that precisely aim to suppress that
which has been fiercely denied. This marks the points at which state ideologi-
cal discourse turns into ideological violence insofar as it lowers the threshold
and/or prepares the ground for the use of violence in more tangible, direct
and destructive ways. The workings of ideology presented above will become
clearer when considering the cases of state-organised mass violence.

The Use of Ethnocidal Violence

This section addresses two cases of mass violence as instances of ethnocidal

violence, namely Koçgiri, the first Kurdish uprising before the inception of the
Turkish republic in 1923, and the 1925 Sheikh Said rebellion, the first uprising
following the establishment of the republican regime. In both cases, the quest
for self-rule was met with mass violence, which targeted the leadership as well
as the communal existence of Kurdish society.

The Case of Koçgiri (1920–1921)

If we locate the major cases of state-organised mass violence targeting the
Kurds at the intersection of regime formation, nation-building, and the insti-
tution of direct rule over the Kurdish-populated areas, the case of Koçgiri, an
essentially Alevi Kurdish uprising in the Koçgiri region, constitutes a major
event involving the politics of incorporation by communal destruction.
The Koçgiri resistance provides a paradigmatic example of non-compliance
to the imposed rule by the emerging Kemalist movement in the process
of the dissolution of the Ottoman state, and a genuine expression of self-
determination. Motivated by the quest for self-government and international
agreements such as Treaty of Sevres (10 August 1920), in which an autonomous
Kurdistan was stipulated, the uprising was launched in the wider Dersim (pres-
ent day Tunceli) region in November 1920. As observed by Olson & Rumbold.,
by July and August 1920, the Kurds were attacking Turkish ammunition ship-
ments, police stations, and military convoys (cf. Olson et al. 1989 p. 40 ff). On

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15 November 1920, a five-point declaration was sent to the Kemalist govern-

ment in Ankara, which included two principle demands: to stop the practices
of forced incorporation and to recognise Kurdish demands for self-rule (Olson
et al. 1989, p. 43).19 Whilst the government responded by claiming that it was
in agreement with these demands, this was little more than an “effort to buy
time”, as it simultaneously sent further troops to Sivas (ibid.). Finally, follow-
ing an armed confrontation in December 1920, when a director of a local post
office was assassinated, clashes between the Kemalists and the Kurds began
in February 1921, which led to the declaration of martial law in the region on
11 March 1921.
According to a report dated May 31, 1921, which was conducted by the Sivas
governor Tepeyran “132 villages were burned and devastated, hundreds of
people killed, their goods and livestock plundered, and that many villagers,
frightened by the repression, took refuge in the mountains, where they died
of starvation and misery. Tepeyran harshly criticised the killing of numerous
people, including innocents” (Massicard 2009, online edition).20
Reliable estimates on the total number of Kurdish civilians murdered by the
military campaigns are lacking. Nevertheless, we can glean some reliable infor-
mation from a parliamentary commission of inquiry (Koçgiri Tahkikat Heyeti)
that was setup to investigate the atrocities, mainly at the demand of the Kurdish
members of the General Assembly. The commission drew up a report on the
situation, which is still prevented from public access, in which the dimensions
of mass killing are explained in plain terms. According to the commission’s
report, 1703 Kurdish households and 107 villages were completely destroyed
by the military and paramilitary forces involved in the campaign. More than
1000 combatants were killed during the clashes and many women were raped.
Soldiers were officially instructed to take possession of the whole properties,
from livelihood to livestock to the valuables of the Kurds living in the region of
insurgency (cf. Kizildag-Soileau 2018, pp. 228–232)
The report also made the recommendation that two key executors of the
mass violence, Nurettin Paşa, the army commander responsible, along with

19 “1) The Ankara government should state whether or not it accepted officially the promise
of Kurdish autonomy as agreed by the Sultan’s government in Istanbul. 2) The Ankara
government should inform the leaders of the Dersim who wrote the declaration of their
attitude towards the administration of an autonomous Kurdistan. 3) All of the Kurdish
prisoners in jail at Elaziz, Malatya, Sivas and Erzincan should be freed. 4) Turkish officials
must be withdrawn from all areas with a Kurdish majority. 5) The Turkish military forces
sent to the Koçgiri region should be withdrawn” (cited in Olson et al. 1989, p. 43).
20 [Link]/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/repression
-[Link] accessed on 25, August 2019.

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The State and Violence in Kurdistan: a Conceptual Framework 31

the commander of the paramilitary forces Topal Osman, be brought to jus-

tice because of the atrocities they committed. This did not happen, not least
because Mustafa Kemal himself took them under his protection, promoting
Nurettin Paşa to the Supreme Military Council and later to the position of mem-
ber of parliament (1923), and installing Topal Osman as the first aide-de-camp
(bodyguard) of the president (cf. Kizildag-Soileau2018).
The Koçgiri case constitutes the first major instance of mass violence under
the emerging Kemalist rule before the inception of the republican regime in
1923. What makes this case striking is the coloniality of violence at the intersec-
tion of an emerging regime, and its attempts to expand state sovereignty into
the Kurdish region by the use of mass violence. Amid promises of the recogni-
tion of cultural and political rights, Kurdish aspirations for self-government
were met with violence by the Kemalist regime. This marked the onset of what
in this study is referred to as the politics of incorporation by nation-destruction.
Revealingly, this politics did not end with the termination of the uprising, as
one would have expected. Rather, this pattern of violence, namely the disman-
tling of the leadership in combination with the use of exemplary repression,
was significantly amplified both in scope and intensity when the first major
instance of Kurdish resistance to the Kemalist republican regime occurred just
two years after the inception of the Turkish republic in 1923.

The 1925 Sheikh Said Rebellion

As indicated above, after Turkish sovereignty over substantial portions of the
Kurdish inhabited territories was secured by the treaty of Lausanne (1923), a
politics of domination and denial ensued. There was, as observed by histo-
rian Olson, “no mention of Kurdistan and Kurds in the treaty of Lausanne”
(Olson 1991, p. 30 ff.). Once endowed with sovereignty, the Kemalist regime
rigorously began to impose direct rule over Kurdistan in the 1920s. During this
period, the politics of incorporation by nation-destruction became the preva-
lent mode of managing the conflict and an essential part of Turkish nation-
building.
This state of affairs provoked a broad-based resistance initiated by an alli-
ance of Kurdish intellectuals, officers, civil servants, and clergy under the lead-
ership of Sheikh Said (Üngör 2008, p. 29). On 4 March 1925, the government
enacted an extraordinary law, the Law on the Maintenance of Order (Takrir-i
Sükün Kanunu) which went far beyond counterinsurgency measures. It con-
ferred on the government “virtually absolute powers for the next two years,
powers which were renewed until they were no longer necessary and were
finally allowed to expire on 4 March 1929” (Ahmad 2003, p. 58). The govern-
ment banned activities of any organisation, and any publications deemed

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32 Bezwan

to cause disturbance to law and order (Zürcher 2017, p. 172). The emergency
regime initiated a period of violence targeting both the Kurdish insurgency,
and Turkish opposition. Indeed, opposition across the entire political spec-
trum was effectively silenced with the closure of leftist, liberal, and conserva-
tive parties and the prohibition of any dissenting newspapers and periodicals
(Üngör 2011 p. 21).
The outbreak of the rebellion entailed an element of calculated provoca-
tion by the Ankara government, probably with the intention to precipitate the
rebellion at a premature stage. On 8 February 1925, a clash took place in Piran
in the province of Diyarbekir when Turkish gendarmes attempted to arrest a
group of outlaws who had sought the Sheikh’s protection. Considering this
an insult against his dignity and authority, the Sheikh refused to hand them
over. At the gendarmes’ insistence, a fight ensued whereby two soldiers were
wounded, and one was killed. This peculiar event marked the start of the rebel-
lion (McDowall 2017, p. 194 ff, Ozsoy 2013, p. 197 ff.). In response, Ankara mobil-
ised some 50,000 soldiers and spent nearly a third of its annual budget while
negotiating “with the French authorities to gain use of the southern railways,
in order to suppress the revolt” (Bozarslan 2008, p. 339 ff).
After an initial success in taking control of some areas, including some
important cities, the rebellion was crushed in April 1925 followed by the arrest
of Sheikh Said and the leading figures of the movement. On June 29, he and
forty-six of his leading cadres were sentenced to death and were hanged the
next day (Olson 1978 et al. p. 205). The dead bodies of Sheikh Said and his asso-
ciates were then unceremoniously thrown in a ditch which was then filled with
concrete and dirt (Ozsoy 2013, p. 192). In order to prevent his grave becoming
a shrine, or a locus of memory and identification, its exact location was never
disclosed and remains a mystery to this day.
The death penalties were ruled by the so-called “Independence Tribunal”,
which was specifically designed for the Kurdish region – the Law on the
Maintenance of Order established two tribunals, one for Kurdistan, called
“East Independence Tribunal”, the other for the rest of the country (McDowall
2017, p. 192). These tribunals were endowed with full powers of life and death,
replaced the military courts, and carried out the martial-law decrees (cf. Olson
et al. 1978, p. 203).
As observed by Elizabeth Kolsky in the case of British India, colonial rule
tends to develop an “unequal system of law” that combines lawfulness with
lawlessness with the aim of providing the colonial masters with impunity (2010,
p. 30; also p. 231.). Indeed, once stripped of its normative contents and discon-
nected from the justice, the law may well become an instrument of coercion

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The State and Violence in Kurdistan: a Conceptual Framework 33

and terror. This is what exactly happened with the Law on the Maintenance of
Order and ‘the East Independence Tribunal’.
During the insurgency an almost “genocidal state of mind” took shape in
Ankara (McDowall 2017, p. 200). As McDowall notes, the revolt “marked the
beginning of ‘implacable Kemalism’ [whereby] systematic deportation and
razing of villages, brutality and killing of innocents, martial law or special
regimes in Kurdistan became the commonplace experience of Kurds when-
ever they defied the state” (McDowall 2017, p. 198). Yet, as with every major
historical event involving mass atrocities and state crimes in Turkey, there are
either no documents available or the existing ones are only selectively acces-
sible to the researchers, if not forbidden altogether. Given the fact that even
the information on the exact location of the Sheikh’s grave has been with-
held to today – despite the continuous efforts by his family members and the
wider Kurdish constituencies, it is only logical that the data on the atrocities
committed are missing or lacking. However, according to the Kurdish sources
compiled by McDowall, “in the winter of 1926–27, 200 villages with a popula-
tion of 13,000 were razed, while in the whole period 1925–28 almost 10,000
dwellings were razed, over 15,000 people massacred, and more than half a mil-
lion deported of whom some 200,000 were estimated to have perished” (2017,
p. 200). According to another Kurdish account, altogether 206 villages had
been destroyed, 8758 houses burnt, and 15,200 people killed (see Ungör 2012,
p. 129).
Following the destruction of the resistance movement, on 8 September 1925,
Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) authorised the creation of the Reform Council for
the East (Şark İslahat Encümanı) to devise policies to deal with, once and for
all, any potential separatist threat (Üngör 2008, p. 29; Yadirgi 2019, p. 143). The
final report approved by parliament on September 24, 1925, “was nothing short
of a radical expansion of existing Young Turk fantasies and methods of social
engineering”, with one of the leading members of the council, Cemil Uybadın,
explicitly defining the approach adopted as a “colonial administrative method”
(cf. Üngör 2008, p. 30).21
Indeed, the types of policies recommended in this and similar reports can
best be termed as a “Turkish colonial archive” involving security, displace-
ment and reform technologies of rule (on the notion of colonial archive see

21 This confidential report alongside with many others were compiled and commented by
Mehmet Bayrak in a series of publications which are of crucial importance for under-
standing the nature of Turkish politics towards the Kurds (for a summary see Yadirgi 2019,
p. 143).

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34 Bezwan

Stoler 2017, p. 52 ff). Once established, “the knowledge accumulated in the

colonial archive could and indeed was activated in different geographical areas
closer to ‘home’” (Bloxham & Gerwarth 2011, p. 19).
On the whole, with their logic of reform, security and emergency, the Law
on the Maintenance of Order along with the East Independence Tribunal and
the Eastern Reform Plan set forth the parameters in terms of which the suc-
cessive Turkish governments have shaped their policies and practices vis a-vis
Kurdish movements and Kurdish society. It has thus provided the governments
with what can best be called as a paradigm of colonial exception that has been
invoked at every critical juncture up until today. Relatedly, it inaugurated a
period of political warfare in dealing with the Kurdish issue, a process that
is still ongoing. As stated by Dierk Walter in the context of European colo-
nial politics, political warfare was justified by the colonial powers under the
guise of counterinsurgency and was “designed to facilitate a military solution
to a political problem – namely the imposition of foreign rule” (2017, p. 108).
All that meant a more aggressive and coercive phase of incorporation of the
Kurdish regions into the Turkish “national body”.
Put differently, while laying down the ideological and institutional frame-
work for the conduct of mass violence, the Law with its accompanying mea-
sures set in motion a period of political warfare, an increase in colonial policing,
and a rigorous imposition of a one-party state with Mustafa Kemal as eternal
leader. The combined effects of these events manifested themselves in the
relentless imposition of direct rule in Kurdistan – now more explicitly framed
and accompanied by the politics of incorporation by nation-destruction. It is
to this politics and its devastating outcomes that I turn in the next section.

The Use of Genocidal Violence

In recent decades, there has been an increased emphasis on the politics of

nation-building and its relations with political violence including genocidal
violence (cf. Biberman & Castellano 2018. p. 107 ff, Verdeja 2012b, p. 83 ff.).
Drawing on scholarly insights, I use genocidal violence to indicate the selec-
tive, partial, or wholesale extermination of a group.22 As will be argued below,

22 This distinction between partial and total genocide, while indicated in the UN-Genocide
convention, was first introduced by Robert Melson. Referring to “the intentional destruc-
tion, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, as provided by
Article 1 of the UN-genocide convention of 1948. Robert Melson suggests that the distinc-
tion rests both on the physical and cultural dimensions of group destruction. “If total

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The State and Violence in Kurdistan: a Conceptual Framework 35

in the Kurdish context, genocidal violence is enacted as a cumulative process

which arises from the logic, contingencies and exigencies of regime formation
and consolidation on the one hand, and the imposition of direct rule on the
Kurdish regions on the other.
One crucial development in this process was the establishment of the
regime of the Inspectorates-General (Umûmî Müfettişlikler, 1927–1952). These
inspectorates were established as “regional governorships whose author-
ity prevailed over all civilian, military, and judicial institutions under their
domain” (Çaǧaptay, 2006, p. 47). The official justification for the establishment
of these regimes “was to divide the country into large regions” in order to “opti-
mize the country’s administration by decreasing the numbers of provinces”
(ibid.). Approved by parliament in June 1927, the First Inspectorate-General
(Birinci Umumi Müfettişlik) was then put into praxis in the Kurdish region in
January 1928. The Inspectorates-General can be seen as a paradigmatic exam-
ple of regimes of coercion and control (see Bozarslan 2008, p. 242; Kocak 2003;
Bezwan 2008b, p. 276 ff; Üngör 2012, p. 134 ff.). For more than three decades,
the Inspectorates-General would become the primary structure of dominance
over Kurdistan, providing the institutional form through which the politics of
incorporation by communal-destruction would be executed.
One important feature of these truly colonial techniques of rule has been
an ethnically classified racialised territorial politics. Put differently, these
inspectorates were only established in regions without Turkish majorities,
that is, in territories that were either predominantly inhabited by the Kurds or
having substantial portions of non-Turkish and/or non-Muslim minorities.23
Unsurprisingly, many of the inspectors-general along with the inner circle of
the Kemalist regime had their background in the CUP (Committee for Union
and Progress), with some of them having served as members of the “Special
Organisation” (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa), the primary executor of the Armenian

genocide implies (a) the extermination of a group, or (b) the mass murder of larger faction
of its member together with the destruction of its cultural and social identity, then partial
genocide is less drastic. It stops short of intending the total extermination of the mem-
bers of groups, and, though it may affect the identity of a group in some dimensions, it
does not attempt to destroy completely its cultural and social identity in all of its aspects”
(Melson 1992, p. 29). “Partial genocide” Melson concludes, “means to use mass murder
in order to coerce and to alter the identity and the politics of group, not to destroy it”
(Melson 1996, p. 28). In the same vein, Melson refers to atrocities in Iraqi Kurdistan and
Bosnian as cases of partial genocide (cf. 1996, p. 166 ff.).
23 For example, the 1934 pogrom in Thrace targeting the Jewish community was executed
under this regime with Ibrahim Tali Öngören as the inspector-general, assuming pow-
ers “including supreme command of the police, military forces and gendarmerie”
(Bayraktar 2006, p. 101; Kezer 2015, p. 114).

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genocide. With this ruling elite now firmly at the helm of state power without
any significant internal or external constraints, the use of political violence
became more and more genocidal.

The Case of Zilan

The ever-increasing policies and practices of denial, domination and destruc-
tion once more led to further resistance in 1930 called Ağrıdağı isyanı (Mount
Ararat resistance). Again, on the pretext of crushing the insurgency, the
Turkish military conducted an extensive military campaign on the Zilan Plain
in August 1930 (McDowall 2017, p. 204 ff.). As a result, tens of thousands of
civilians were killed, the region was almost completely destroyed and depopu-
lated with any resettlement banned until the 1980s (Ulugana 2010, p 80 ff).
According to the semi-official media outlet Cumhuriyet, 15,000 “bandits”,
mostly civilians were eliminated (cf. Ulugana 2010, p. 142ff.).
One year after the atrocities, on 20 July 1931, a law (No. 1850) was enacted by
the Kemalist government expressly legislating impunity, thus exempting the
perpetrators of mass killing from any investigation (McDowall 2017, p. 206).
Accordingly, any acts that were committed during the response to the insur-
gency between 20 June 1930 and 1 December 1930 were simply not classed as
crimes (cf. McDowall 2017, p. 206; Bulut 2015, p. 106). As indicated above, this
law has never been abolished.
The infamous statement made on 18 September 1930 by the then Minister
of Justice, Mahmut Esad Bozkurt, is as much revealing as it was symptomatic
of the official understanding of the politics of ethnic dominance, denial and
destruction at work during that time: “It is my opinion, my belief that this coun-
try in its inner self is Turkish. Whoever is not authentically Turkish has only one
single right in the land of Turks and that is to be a servant, a slave” (cited in
Ergil 2013).
The mass violence in Zilan, and the way it was executed, foreshadowed a sig-
nificant change in the cumulative use of violence, extending its scope beyond
the destruction of leaders and exemplary repression. It marked a shift from
ethnocidal violence to genocidal violence as it involved the “selective extermi-
nation” of the population of a whole area.
One critical juncture in this genocidal process was the Law on Deportation/
Settlement of 1934, which allowed for the mass deportation of entire cat-
egories of peoples, with the Kurds as the main target (cf. Bezwan 2008b,
Üngör 2008). The deportations and resettlements were implemented accord-
ing to racial criteria as expressly set forth in Article 7 of this law which states:
“‘those immigrants who belong to the Turkish race’ might settle wherever they

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The State and Violence in Kurdistan: a Conceptual Framework 37

wished, whereas ‘immigrants who do not belong to the Turkish race had to
settle as instructed by the government” (quoted in Jongerden 2007, p. 175 ff;
Çaǧaptay 2006, p. 72). The 1934 Settlement Act was not only an instrument to
quell insurrection in the Kurdistan region, but “part of a larger, positive objec-
tive of creating a homeland of the Turks” (Jongerden 2007, p. 174).
This deportation and depopulation of large areas by using ethnic classi-
fication and a racially hierarchised yardstick, the Law on Settlement indeed
presents a paradigmatic example of a “right-peopling” by deportation and
demographic engineering (cf. O’Leary 2004, pp. 29–34 ff). By targeting non-
Turkish communities, it further reinforced the unequivocally racist territorial
politics of the “Inspectorates-General” regime. Not surprisingly, this law came
into being at a time when the consolidation of the Kemalist regime was at its
zenith. The Republican People’s Party, historian Zürcher observes, “had estab-
lished a power monopoly and, at the party congress of 1931, Turkey’s politi-
cal system was officially declared to be that of a one-party state” (2017, p. 177).
Indeed, as scholar of nationalism Hans Kohn notes, the entire power of the
state was vested in the President Mustafa Kemal alone (Kohn 1933, p. 143.).
Such were the circumstances when the Dersim region was targeted.

Dersim
If the mass killing in the Koçgiri region was located at the onset of the emerg-
ing Kemalist regime, the targeting of Dersim coincided with a time when
regime consolidation was at its zenith. The concentration of power in the
hands of a ruling elite, in the form of a one-party state without any effective
counter forces was compounded by an increasingly expedient international
environment due to the rise of fascist movements and regimes across Europe
and elsewhere. This provided the rulers with an extremely propitious internal
and external environment which was used to intensify state expansion and
nation-building, if necessary, by communal destruction.
The process of targeting Dersim – a mountainous region, which had,
according to official estimates in the 1930s, a total population of nearly 80,000
(cf. Kieser, 2012 online Dersim Massacre, 2011) – lasted several years, and went
through many stages with ever increasing levels of violence. By 1935, a “reform
plan” entitled Dersim Islahatı was adopted, predicated on a combination of
military intervention and social engineering (cf. Türkyılmaz 2016, p. 164 ff.). On
December 25, 1935, Parliament approved the Law for the Creation of Tunceli
(Law 2884), a sweeping “package of reforms that placed Dersim under a newly
created Fourth Inspectorate headed by a governor-general with absolute
administrative and legal authority” (Watts 2000, p. 15).

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Whilst Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) declared in parliament in November 1936

that Dersim was Turkey’s most important internal problem, a number of
statements made by other senior figures in the Kemalist regime made clear
how they viewed, and intended to deal with, this problem. For example,
according to the then Turkish General Staff Marshall Fevzi Çakmak “Dersim
could not be won over by compassion but had to be treated as a Dahili Koloni
[Internal Colony]” (Türkyılmaz 2016, p. 170), and perhaps more explicitly
Minister of the Interior Şükrü Kaya described the region as a ‘disease’ which
required ‘radical treatment’ (cf. Levene 2013, p. 17). Revealingly, the mili-
tary campaigns in Dersim were preceded by “the construction of roads and
bridges, and of police posts and government mansions in every large village”
(Bruinessen 1994, p. 13). These infrastructural measures were accompanied
by “a more systematic program of Turkification that would better incorporate
Dersim’s inhabitants into the fabric of the new nation and reduce the cul-
tural power of the local leadership” (Watts 2000, p. 16). The Secret Decision of
the Council of Ministers on the Punitive Expedition to Dersim of 4 May 1937
even spoke of “a final solution to the perpetual rebellions in Dersim” (van
Bruinessen 1994, p. 8).
The mass killing proceeded in two main stages. The first military campaign
(Tunceli Harekati) officially began on 21 March and ended 22 September 1937,
whereas the second (described by the regime as a “disciplinary campaign” or
tedip harekâtı) lasted from the 1st of June until the end of August 1938. During
the first campaign in spring 1937, the violence mainly targeted armed groups,
whereas with the campaign of summer 1938 massive violence was employed
against the whole population (Kieser, 2012 online Dersim Massacre, 1937–1938;
2011). This represented “something new to the 1930s: the desire and the
(perceived) ability to eradicate local power structures from the ground up”
(Watts 2000, p. 25). Strikingly, the most lethal violence was executed in the
absence of any significant insurgency – notably after Seyid Riza, the leader
of the insurgency, along with his son and five other leaders, were hanged on
18 November 1937 (cf. Aslan 2018, p. 108).
There is still an ongoing debate about the total number of people that were
exterminated and deported, as the relevant official documents remain largely
inaccessible. According to official sources 5,000 to 8,000 people were killed,
whereas critical sources indicate that almost up to 30,000 people were mas-
sacred (cf. Boyraz and Turam 2016, p. 411; Aslan & Osztovics 2018, p. 29 ff.).
Citing military sources, Watts indicates that in the space of just 17 days dur-
ing the second campaign, “Turkish armed forces had removed 7,954 people
‘dead or alive’ (ölü veya diri) from the affected regions”, adding that “more than
3,500 people were forced into internal exile in other parts of the country [with]

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The State and Violence in Kurdistan: a Conceptual Framework 39

the remaining population … left under the supervision of “nine new barracks,
eight new military posts, five administrative office buildings, and 92 official
houses”” (Watts 2000, p. 27).
Scholars have provided a number of different explanations for the mass vio-
lence in Dersim. Besikçi was the first who qualified the mass killing in Dersim
as genocide which was motivated by the imposition of a colonialist regime
upon the Dersim region as a part of a wider carve-up, and colonisation of
Kurdistan (Beşikçi 1990, p. 67 ff.). Van Bruinessen in turn has described the
Dersim campaign as “a deliberate intent to destroy rebels and potential rebels,
and this was part of a general policy directed toward the Kurds as such. But
this policy is more appropriately termed ethnocide, the destruction of Kurdish
ethnic identity” (Bruinnessen 1994, p. 8).
Watts views the Dersim massacre as a “particular response to a new phase of
intense Turkish “statification” that began in the early 1930s with an internally
expansionary state seeking more “integrated domination”’ (Watts 2000, p. 8).
For Yüksel, it “highlights the ability of institutional and geographical setting to
shape repertoires of state coercion. When a particular form of state ideology
interacts with a particular form of institutional and geographical setting, the
consequences can be inconceivably devastating” (2008, p. 37).
Genocide scholar Levene has characterised the genocidal assault on Dersim
as the final action in a particular anti-Kurdish sequence (2013, p. 2), arguing that
it represents a “colonial-style military massacre” with campaigns that made
“no discrimination at all between combatants and non-combatants” (Levene
2013, p. 14). As with many cases of genocide, the aim was not necessarily to
kill “until every last one of them was dead but certainly until their ability to
be viable as an ongoing and independent community had been extinguished”
(Levene 2013, p. 14). Compared to the Armenian genocide in 1915, “the genocide
perpetrated against the Turkish Kurds of the Dersim area in 1936 was essen-
tially partial and local” (Levene 2005, p. 203). The point, he maintains, is not to
promote a hierarchy of suffering but simply to remind that genocides are not
all the same in scope or scale (ibid.).
Dersim was perceived as the ultimate test for finalising the state forma-
tion and expansion by creating a homogeneous, unitary and ethno-integralist
Turkish nation. It was depicted as the last portion of an ‘unruly’ and ‘unci-
vilised’ land to be conquered and ruled over at any price, ultimately through
the use of genocidal violence. With this genocide, Kurdistan was finally con-
quered. The politics of incorporation by nation-destruction, which have been
identified as a key mechanism of the state-organised violence, seemed to have
achieved its goals. Kurdistan was, as it were, condemned to be ruled as an inte-
gral colony.

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Conclusions and Discussion

This study has set out to develop a conceptual framework for identifying the
origins, driving forces, and mechanisms of violence in Kurdistan by relating
state violence to the partition of the predominantly Kurdish inhabited terri-
tories in the 1920s, their forced incorporation under the sovereignty of newly
founded states, and the nature of direct rule established in Kurdistan, while
locating both violence and direct rule in the broad context of the Turkish poli-
tics of state expansion and nation-building. Where the imperatives of creating
a homogeneous nation-state and the political opportunity structures at the
domestic and international levels coincided, the use of violence took the most
vicious form. The more expedient the internal and external circumstances
for crushing the uprisings were, the more rigorous the policies and the more
destructive the outcomes.
To more precisely capture the objectives of, and variations in, the use of
state violence, I have then desegregated the colonial violence into ideological,
ethnocidal, and genocidal violence, arguing that these forms of state organised
violence correspond to public policies of negation, assimilation, and elimina-
tion that have to varying degrees been targeting the Kurds throughout their
modern history. This framework has proved to be instructive in identifying the
objectives of violence and its variations over time in connection with special
regimes of domination and wider state policies targeting the Kurdish society.
One key insight of this study is that neither the origins and nature nor the
causes, recurrence and durability of state-organised violence can properly be
understood without understanding the coloniality of order and violence in
relation to the Kurds and Kurdistan. To further elaborate on this point, I then
argued that the Turkish state expansion and nation-building was enforced
through the colonial incorporation of Kurdistan into the Turkish body politic,
turning Kurdish areas into an integral colony to be governed, if deemed nec-
essary, by the use of state-organised violence alongside periodic deployment
of variant regimes of control and coercion with impunity for serious human
rights violations and atrocities.
I have outlined the concepts of integral colony, defined its key characteristics
and indicated its heuristic value for the study of state violence, ideology, order,
politics and conflict in relation to the Kurds. As a dynamic and relational frame
of reference, the concepts of integral colony and colonisation I have referred to
above entail the politics of ethnic domination, non-recognition, impunity, and
a political economy based on de-development, building state coercive capacity
and elite co-optation.

Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 12–48

The State and Violence in Kurdistan: a Conceptual Framework 41

Certainly, we need more comprehensive and comparative studies in order

to reach a deeper understanding of the cases of genocidal violence against
the Kurdish communities. To this end, it is essential to study the peculiarities
of the cases of interest, their contextual and structural conditions, the pat-
tern of relations between perpetrators and victims, the role of ideologies, the
spatio-temporal dynamics of genocidal processes as well as differences in the
execution and outcomes of each instance of genocide (cf. Levene 2005, p. 67;
Verdeja 2012a, p. 314; Straus 2012, p. 551 ff.; Harff and Gurr 1988, p. 360 ff.).
While relating the emergence, recurrence and durability of violence to the
colonialist nature of sovereign power in Kurdistan, further research is needed
to highlight the role of elite co-optation, internal division, geographical setting
as well as the type and level of organization on the part of the Kurds. Based
on the insights drawn from the present analysis, the following points deserves
a particular emphasis: First, the instances of genocidal violence in Kurdistan
provide strong evidence that no boundary can be drawn between ethnocidal
and genocidal violence and that the shift from the destruction of ethnic iden-
tity to selective extermination easily occurs provided that internal and external
circumstances are favourable.24 As Bellamy notes, “[g]enocide and mass atroci-
ties persist partly because perpetrators continue to believe that they can justify
such killings to themselves and get away with the violation of shared norms by
offering justifications that help to secure sufficient legitimacy” (Bellamy 2012,
p. 180). Second, the Kurdish case highlights the importance of an approach that
focuses on spatial and temporal dynamics and thereby understands genocide
as the outcome of a dynamic process of decision-making and as a “complex
systems-based phenomenon that unfolds slowly” and does “not follow one
particular developmental path” (Rosenberg et al. 2016, p. 6). Finally, the con-
cept of “genocide by attrition” seems to be particularly relevant to the Kurdish
situation, as it indicates “the slow and complex process of annihilation that
reflects the unfolding phenomenon of mass murder of a targeted group, rather
than the immediate unleashing of violence and death” (ibid.). One implica-
tion of this analysis is that the scourge of genocidal violence remains critically
relevant to Kurdish society.

24 Space constraints do not allow to consider the instances of genocidal campaigns in

Kurdistan, but suffice it to say that the pattern of selective extermination is evident in
all cases of genocidal campaigns in Kurdistan, from Zilan to Dersim to Anfal (Hardi 2011;
Ihsan 2017, p. 122 ff.) to Halabja (Ihsan 2017, p. 126 ff.) to Shingal as the most recent case of
genocide committed against the Ezidi-Kurdish community in 2014.

Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 12–48

42 Bezwan

In view of the tragic history presented in this study, and the current Turkish
military campaigns at home and abroad, it is clear that what is needed is a
negotiated and internationally supported resolution that would help overcome
this century-old politics of non-recognition, forced assimilation, and selective
extermination by anchoring the cultural and political rights of the Kurdish
population, and by addressing their aspiration for democratic self-government
within a democratic and pluralistic framework.

Acknowledgements

I would first like to express my gratitude to both anonymous reviewers for their
comments and suggestions. This article, along with several others, has been
concluded during a period of two years while I was migrating from one uni-
versity to another in Austria. The research for, and writing up, of this article
was mostly done during my time at the University of Innsbruck. I would there-
fore like to thank my colleagues at the Department of Political Science and the
head of department, Professor Martin Senn, for their warm reception. I would
also like to extend my thanks to Professors Gudrun Hentges, Erol Yildiz, and
Wolfgang Meixner for offering me the fellowship that provided me with the
time and opportunity to work and conduct my research. Finally, I would like to
thank Professor Uğur Ümit Üngör and Dr Ayhan Isik for inviting me to a very
stimulating workshop held on 15 November 2018 in Amsterdam, from which
this special issue emerged. Without their patience and perseverance, this spe-
cial issue would not have been possible.

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 Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 49–77
Kurdish Studies
Archive
[Link]/ksa

‘Keep Your Mouth Shut in the Day and Your Door

Shut at Night:’ Intra-Kurdish Violence in the
Shadow of the State
The Case of Hizbullah in Kurdistan of Turkey

Adnan Çelik | ORCID: 0000-0001-8979-8220

Post-doctoral researcher, Sciences Po Lille (MESHS),
2 rue des Canonniers BP 80217-59002 Lille Cedex, France
[Link]@[Link]

Abstract

This article focuses on the main three limitations of the current studies on Hizbullah,
an Islamist organisation in Turkey operative during the 1990s: the lack of historicisa-
tion of the trajectory of Hizbullah and its members, the lack of consideration of the
spatial dimension of its spread and the absence of grounded studies about how it has
functioned at the local level. Taking the case of Silvan, a small town in the province
of Diyarbakir, the article investigates and analyses Hizbullah’s repertoire of action in
the shadow of the state, the degree of coercion it achieved in different spaces, its tar-
gets, and its conception of the world. The paper argues that the extremism and inten-
sity of the PKK-Hizbullah violence is said to have expressed a completely new type of
intra-Kurdish conflict within the long intra-Kurdish conflict history.

Keywords

conflict studies – Diyarbakir – Hizbullah – Intra-Kurdish conflicts – internal war –

Kurdistan – PKK – Silvan – situations of violence – Turkey

Published with license by Koninklijke Brill BV | doi:10.1163/9789004700406_004

© Adnan Çelik, 2021
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
50 Çelik

‘Bi roj devê xwe, bi şev deriyê xwe bigre’ Şiddeta di

navbera Kurdan de ya li ber Siya Dewletê: Meseleya
Hizbilla ya li Bakûrê Kurdistanê

Ev gotar li ser sê kêmasiyên sereke yê vekolînên heyî yê li ser Hizbilla hûr dibe ku, ew
rêxistineke îslamî ye û di salên 90’î de li Tirkiyê di fehliyetê de bû: kêmasiya dîrokîki-
rina boçûna Hizbilla û endamên wê, kêmasiya lêfikirîna li ser rehenda mekanî ya belv-
abûna wê û tunebûna vekolînên bingehîn yê ku li ser wî tiştî bisekine ku were fêm
kirin bê ev rêxistin di warê herêmî de çawa dixebitî. Gotar bûyerên li Farqîna Amedê
qewimîne wek mînakekê digre û repertuara kiryarên Hizbilla, yê di bin siya dewletê de
bûn, lêpirsîn û analîz dike. Wê heta çi radeyê li mekanên cûda, zora xwe dabû qebûl
kirin, hedefên wê çi bûn, û fêmkirina wê ya cîhanê çawa bû? Ev xebat îddia dike ku
ev tîrbûn û zêdebûna şiddeta PKK-Hizbilla tê wê wateyê ku bi vê pevçûnê di dîroka
pevçûnên di navebera Kurdan de şêweyeke pevçûnê ya bi temamî nû afirî.

‘le rojda demit dabxe û dergakeşit le şewda dabixe’:

Tundutîjî nawxoy kurd le jêr sêberî dewlletda: keysî
hîzbulla le kurdistanî turkya

Em witare sernic dexate ser sê sinûrdarî serekî ke le twêjînewekanî êsta leser hîz-
bulla hen, ke rêkxirawêkî îslamîye le deyey 1990 da le turkya çalak bû: kêmasî bedîrok
kirdnî rêçkey hîzbulla w endamekanî; kêmasî le leberçawgirtnî rehendî cêgeyî billaw-
bûnewey hîzbulla we ‘xiyabî twêjîneweyekî binerretî derbarey çonîyetî karkirdnî rêkx-
iraweke le astî lokallîda. Be leberçawgirtinî keysî sîlvan, ke şaroçkeyekî biçukî parêzgay
diyarbekre, babeteke le kerestey karekanî hîzbulla lesêberî dewlletda dekollêtewe
legell radey ew zoremilêkirdney le şwêne ciyawazekanda encamî dawe, amancekanî
we têrrwanînî bo cîhan. Perraweke argumêntî ewe dekat ke degutrêt tundrrewî û çirrî
tundutîjî pekeke-hîzbulla derbirrîne bo derkewtinî corêkî tewaw niwêy milmilanêy
nawxoy-kurd lenaw mêjûy milmilanêy dûrudirêjî nawxoyî kurdîda.

Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 49–77

‘ Keep Your Mouth Shut in the Day and Your Door Shut at Night ’ 51

‘Peroj fekê xo, peşewe keyberê xo bigîre’ Sîya

Dewlete de Şîdeto Mîyankurdkî: Kurdîstanê Tirkîya
de Mesela Hîzbullahî

Na meqale giranî dana hîrê kêmasîyanê bingeyênan ser ke no dem cigêrayîşê derheqê
Hîzbullahî de, rêxistinêka Tirkîya ya îslamîste ke serranê 1990an de fealîyet kerdêne,
estê: kêmîbîyayîşê tarîxkerdişê raygehê Hîzbullah û endamanê ci, kêmîhesibnayîşê
rehendê cayî yê vilabîyayîşê ci û kêmbîyayîşê cigêrayîşanê bibingeyan derheqê
gureyayîşê ci yê hêremî de. Bi nimûneyê Sîlvanî, şaristanêkê qezaya Dîyarbekirî yo qij,
na meqale repertuarê Hîzbullahî yê aksîyonî binê sîya dewlete de, dereceya îcbarî ke
Hîzbullah cayanê cîya-cîyayan de reşto ci, hedefê Hîzbullahî û fehmkerdişê Hîzbullahî
yê dinya, înan ser o cigêrayîş û analîz kena. Nuşte de munaqeşe beno ke zereyê tarîxê
dergî yê lejanê mîyankurdkîyan de ekstremî û giranîya şîdetê PKK-Hîzbullahî kerd ke
tewirêkê lejê mîyankurdkî yo nîp-newe vejîyo meydan.

Introduction

This article looks at the violence of Hizbullah, an Islamist organisation in Turkey

operative during the 1990s. It focuses on the case of Silvan, a small town and
county in the province of Diyarbakır, in the south-east of the country. Against
the background of a bloody war between the state and the Kurdistan Workers’
Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK), there was a violent upheaval in this
small town with urban uprisings (serhildan) and their repression that lasted
for nearly four years during the early 1990s. This turmoil included violence in
the form of an intense intra-Kurdish conflict between Hizbullah and the PKK
in the context of the situations-limites. Its impacts still linger to this day, in the
local memories and in everyday life. Although the collective memory of the
‘years of fire’ – salên şewatê in Kurmandji, an expression commonly used by
witnesses to describe the period – is often identified with state violence and its
devastating consequences, these climaxed with and were transcended by the
emergence of Hizbullah and its intense conflict with the PKK as both organisa-
tions sought to dominate the public sphere.
Despite its evident ties to the state, however, Hizbullah’s existence and influ-
ence in the 1990s cannot be simply reduced to its (effective) role in the counter-
insurgency war. In fact, the rapid emergence and expansion of the organisation
during the 1990s remains largely unexamined. Hizbullah in Turkey is rather
much a ‘black box’, whose opening is therefore pursued here.

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In this article, I first establish a socio-historical narrative that locates or

spatialises the development of Hizbullah. Then, I provide a description of the
forms of violence at the peak of the conflict between the members of Hizbullah
and the other inhabitants of the Kurdish region where the organisation man-
aged to establish itself. A specific focus is placed on the polarisation resulting
from the conflict between Hizbullah and the PKK, and its consequences for
the social climate in the region. Finally, I present an anthropological approach
with regards to subjectivities developed within Hizbullah. The source mate-
rial for this comprises songs written by members of this community. To my
knowledge, apart from some comments made by Mehmet Kurt (e.g., 2017),
these have so far been neglected in studies on Hizbullah. The paper concludes
with a reflection on the radical nature of the conflict between the PKK and
Hizbullah, which does not appear to fall within the usual pattern or traditional
interpretation of intra-Kurdish violence. Rather, I therefore argue, the extrem-
ism and intensity of the PKK-Hizbullah violence is said to have expressed a
completely new type of intra-Kurdish conflict within the long intra-Kurdish
conflict history.1
In fact, cleavages and conflicts between the Kurds are as many as they are
varied. This article focuses on the study of one of the most violent of those, the
one arising from the emergence of a new violent actor in the area in the 1990s,
Hizbullah. The aim is to shed an investigative light on it precisely through its
various ruptures and continuities with the preceding intra-Kurdish cleavages
and conflicts.

The victimo-mémoriel Regime and Concealment of

Intra-Kurdish Conflicts

A significant portion of the academic efforts in the field of Kurdish studies are,
consciously or otherwise, motivated by a national construction perspective.
These studies aim to show the existence and unity of the Kurdish people as well
as criticise the abuses committed against them. Mainly dominated by macro
approaches, meanwhile, many of the contemporary studies tend to emphasise

1 This research, originated from my PhD dissertation (Çelik 2018), is based on a literature com-
prising local and national press articles, academic research, and reports and files, to support
and frame my field experience as a researcher, following ethnographic and oral history meth-
ods. In addition to many informal conversations and casual observation, this study is based
on a corpus of 106 formal interviews, mostly conducted between 2012 and 2017. The majority
of these interviews took place in Diyarbakır city and three of its provincial districts or coun-
ties: Kulp, Lice and Silvan; a few were conducted in Istanbul and Paris.

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the prism of inter-ethnic conflict, which has two consequences for the ‘Kurdish
issue’: the emergence of a ‘victimo-mémoriel’ regime2 based on state violence
and the extinction or at least minimisation of Kurdish heterogeneity.
While the victimo-mémoriel regime prevalent among Kurds is mirrored
in many academic works focusing on state violence, the relative silence of
researchers on the subject of intra-Kurdish conflicts is striking. Nevertheless,
there are a few studies constituting an exception to the general limitations
of a more macro approach, with its lack of interest in intra-ethnic cleavages.
Mehmet Orhan’s (2015) work was one, focusing on intra-Kurdish violence in
Turkish Kurdistan. Studies by Cuma Çiçek (2016), Mustafa Gürbüz (2016) and
Mehmet Kurt (2017) were three more important books on intra-Kurdish con-
flict. Although the intra-Kurdish cleavages were not at their heart, other papers
providing useful insights and information have included those by Beşikci
(1970), van Bruinessen (1992), Arslan (1992), Bozarslan (1997), Tejel Gorgas
(2007), Üngör (2011), Jongerden (2012), and Jongerden and Verheij (2012).
It is important to stress the density and diversity of conflicts in Turkey’s
Kurdish region in the 20th century, conflicts themselves reflected by the perva-
sive presence of fratricide and treason in the mémoriel regime and representa-
tions of Kurds. The birakujî (Kurmandjî, lit.: ‘fratricide’) is a dominant subject
in daily conversations and political speeches, as well as in Kurdish oral culture,
mythological narratives, literature and music. In this regard, poets, writers and
musicians should be given credit before sociologists, anthropologists and his-
torians for paying attention and giving voice to a great number and wide range
of cases depicting the birakujî theme. It is not a coincidence that the long divan
written by the famous Kurdish poet from Iraq, Abdulla Peşêw, during his brief
return from exile in 1994 is entitled ‘Birakujî’ (Peşêw, 2014).
It could be argued that the term ‘birakujî’ refers precisely, with a strong
moral and dramatic charge, to what we qualify in more socio-ethnological
terms as ‘intra-Kurdish’ conflict. The dynamics of these internal conflicts are
indeed crucial in Kurdish society. They pre-date the better-known struggles
that have sprung up between Kurds and other social and political entities,
although those are also part of the multiple and complex interrelations that
can hugely compromise attempts at clear identification of the primary dynam-
ics as distinctly ‘internal’ or ‘external’.

2 The notion of a victimo-mémoriel regime is taken from the philosopher and political scientist
Johann Michel. The victimo-mémoriel regime operates as a binary with a plural or fragmented
conception, logically dependent on the other and carried by particular, minority or minori-
tised groups, transmitting the memory of violence or denial to which their members have
been subjected (Michel 2015, 10).

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The 1990s: a Subject Matter Too Often Reified

Clarifying the Hizbullah-PKK conflict requires us to take a step outside the

dominant conceptual frame employed for the description, analysis and
writing of the history of the 1990s. By presenting this period as exceptional,
many writers make it stand alone, apart from previous historical narratives,
as if this decade were self-enclosed by its unique character. Obviously, with
its acts of violence implemented in the framework of a counter-insurgency
war, the grammar of the victimo-mémoriel regime has been rightly privileged
in the interpretation, remembrance and memorialisation of the ‘years of fire’,
whether in the context of human rights and civic practice, in literature, cinema
and contemporary art, or in testimonies and academic works. Here, though,
I will follow the approach of works such as that of Bahar Şahin Fırat (2004),
who, without denying the specificities of the 1990s, insists on the need to study
them in respect of the structural and thematic continuities of their configura-
tions with those of previous periods.
I will also add that the tendency to present this decade as a ‘block’ leads to
a concealment within that of its multiple, dynamic and complex causal and
interrelated patterns and their relations to what went before and came after.
Typically, in reconstituting the different historical sequences of the decade,
we notice the peak of the conflict, that moment when all forms of violence
and arbitrariness are concentrated, corresponds more or less and with some
local variations to the period 1993–96. These four years tend to thus represent
the whole decade, displacing and relegating the period as a whole to a sec-
ondary level in individual memories as in different historiographies, moving
these out to the 1980s and even early 1990s. The four years not only become
characterised as the climax of the broader period dubbed as the ‘revolution-
ary popular struggle’ but also include the feeling of imminence of ‘the victory
of Kurdish people’.
Studies on Hizbullah usually suffer from related limitations that result in
a similar effect, with a strong focus on the most extreme aspects (mostly of
the violence) and conceptual frames (mainly theoretical), to the detriment of
efforts to historicize and concretely integrate the context at the local level. This
presents major obstacles to proper analysis and assessment, which a micro
approach may afford opportunities to partly remedy. Arguably, the main three
limitations of the current studies on Hizbullah are the lack of historicisation
of the trajectory of Hizbullah and its members, the absence of consideration of
the spatial dimension of its spread, and the dearth of grounded studies about
how it has functioned at the local level.

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In this context, the years 1980 and 1990 can be jointly taken into consid-
eration as constituting an essential historical sequence, the main element
of which is the deployment of war between the PKK and the Turkish State.
The 1980s are important to understand what dynamics fed on for what would,
in the 1990s, become a ‘total war’ (an increased degree and intensity of vio-
lence). During this period, the PKK, which at the beginning of the 1980s was
just a marginal and relatively isolated actor, became the main agent driving
the multifaceted construction of a counter-hegemony scaled up through the
idea and ideal of ‘Kurdistan’ at the beginning of the 1990s. The establishment
by the state of the ‘Temporary Village Guard System’ (Geçici Köy Koruculugu
Sistemi, or koruculuk) to fight the PKK, which involved the incorporation (pay-
ment and arming) of certain Kurdish civilians into the security system, was
without doubt the most important event in terms of intra-Kurdish conflicts
from the mid-1980s.
This was far from being the first instance of Kurdish recruitment into a para-
military system effected by the central state to fight other Kurds. Furthermore,
binary readings of the increasing recruitment of village guards during these
two decades are standard, made according to the traditional split between
friend and enemy or loyalty and treason dominant among the main belliger-
ents fighting for the hegemony in Kurdistan, the Turkish State and PKK. Yet,
this would fail us in our desire to understand the reality. That is, an in-depth
understanding of this phenomena is not possible if one conceals the diversity
of motivations and contexts that pushed some individuals or entities (families,
tribes, villages) to commit to and withdraw from the system (and sometimes to
recommit), or the diversity of forms and actual practice of this commitment.
In this respect, a dual prism of the micro-local and a long-term perspective
turns out to be a valuable observation tool.
We should also take into account the new dynamics of the 1970s and, more
generally, the ruptures, continuities and transformations affecting intra-
Kurdish cleavages since the end of the Ottoman period, to describe and explain
the processes that overlapped and combined in its last quarter. We then see the
linkage of different forms of violence that had spread out across the Kurdish
space – specifically, the state violence against Kurdish actors, sheikh-led tribal
and other rebellions, violence among Kurdish organisations and political
groups (the 1970s is emblematic here with its clashes between ‘factions’) – and
the violence that those groups inflicted against Kurdish civilians. It is essential
here also to ensure that the dynamics of the clashes and the nature of the tar-
gets of the violence we qualify as ‘intra-Kurdish’ should neither be seen inde-
pendently of the state violence nor totally linked to it. Whether, in the case of

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clashes between the korucu or Hizbullah and the PKK or in the case of violence
employed by any of these against civilians, the dimension of an instrumentali-
sation of actors by the state within the framework of paramilitarisation and
the counter-guerrilla coexists with the endogenous intra-Kurdish dynamics.

Hizbullah: Black Box of the Years of Fire

Despite the research on Hizbullah in Turkey – also referred to as ‘Kurdish

Hizbullah’ and ‘Turkish Hizbullah’ – especially since the 2000s, years which
coincide with the reorganisation of its partisans in the civilian field after the
death of their leader, Hüseyin Velioğlu, this organisation remains one of the
more important ‘black boxes’ of the 1990s. Its linkage with third parties (in par-
ticular the Turkish and Iranian states) and development of an extreme urban
violence (especially between 1992 and 1995) remain obscure. I will first present
a summary of the state of available knowledge on Hizbullah, and then a review
of aspects often neglected in works on the organisation, mainly its sociological
background and the spatial context of its emergence and its expansion (albeit
without claiming anything definitive in regard to these). Subsequently I will
investigate original sources – including some that are rather different than the
ones usually mobilised – drawing on songs and testimonies produced by this
movement in order to reconstitute parts of its regime of subjectivity as well as
the social climate it has installed via its attempts to take control of daily life in
its entirety through the governmentality of bodies and lifestyles.

Historical and Political Roots of Hizbullah

Other than journalistic files and interviews conducted by certain magazines

and newspapers or reports prepared by the security forces, there was no work
done on Hizbullah during the 1990s. It was after the death of its main founder
and leader, Velioğlu, on January 17th, 2000 in a special police-forces ambush,
that a wave of publications emerged on Hizbullah. Based on the official indict-
ment of the Hizbullah trial, these journalistic works (Bulut and Faraç 1999;
Çiçek 2000; Demirel 2000; Çitlioğlu 2001; Çakır 2011; Çetinkaya 2011) and police
trainee memoirs from the police academy (Gürtekin 2008; Yıldırım 2012) tend
to repeat information filtered by security agents. Apart from these sources, a
small number of academic works (Dorronsoro 2004; Gürbüz 2013; Kurt 2017;
Işık 2020) and publications on Hizbullah itself (Yılmaz, Tutar and Varol 2011;
Bagasi 2014) were also published.

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Hizbullah could be considered as an emanation, in exaggerated form, of a

trend with deep historical roots in Kurdish society, one that takes Sunni Islam
as the main component of its identity. During the Sheikh Said Rebellion in 1925,
in alliance with Kurdish nationalists and with some of the traditional elites who
mobilised in order to safeguard their power vis-à-vis state centralisation efforts,
this ‘Kurdish Muslim movement’ rebelled openly for the first time against the
Kemalist regime in the new republic. This came as a response to the secularist
shift of the young Turkish republican elites, expressed in the abolition of the
caliphate, the ban of madrasas and brotherhoods and the attempt to impose
Westernisation in the new country. After the brutal repression of Sheikh Said
and his followers, this tendency would survive in many social areas, albeit in a
marginalised fashion, like all expressions of political Islam in Turkey. One part
was derived mainly from the two Islamic movements, Nakshibandi and Nurcu
(followers of Nursi). Most groups and individuals in this category did not origi-
nally distinguish between Turkish and Kurdish identities and forged alliances
with the major Turkish-nationalist, right-wing (and extreme right-wing) politi-
cal parties. Attracted by the conservatism of these parties, the Sunni Kurds
were co-opted by their administrations and bureaucracies.
Throughout the century, this tendency was also observed in the madra-
sas, which continued to operate underground in Turkish Kurdistan at least
until the 1970s (cf. Bruinessen 2000; Şengül 2009; Yüksel 2011). At the end of
the 1970s, however, a division emerged in this trend. The majority of Muslim
Kurds, traditionally linked to the Nakshibandi sect (tariqa) or the Qadiriyya
but now affiliated with the Nursi religious community (Cemaat of Nurculuk),
remained integrated into the Turkish national political parties by voting or by
being elected into one of the main, legally recognised, parties. However, the
remaining Muslim Kurds, although small in number, were deeply influenced
by the movement of the Islamic Revolution rising in neighbouring Iran.
It is therefore worthwhile following the path and the influences of the
cadres of Hizbullah in this context. At the national level, among numerous
associations fighting communism and driven by the state since the begin-
ning of the Cold War, the Associations for Fighting Communism (Komünizmle
Mücadele Dernekleri) brought together ‘idealists’ (Turkish far-right national-
ists, ülkücü) and Islamists, who played a central role in the creation of two
of the networks behind Hizbullah, the National Turkish Student Union (Milli
Türk Talebe Birliği, MTTB) and the Raiders Association (Akıncılar Derneği). The
former would become home to many future state cadres of the incarnating
Turkish-Islamic synthesis, such as ex-president Abdullah Gül and the current
Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – and also Hüseyin Velioğlu, during
his university years at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Ankara. At the end

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of the 1970s, Velioğlu had founded a group named the ‘Community of Islamic
Scholars’ (Cemaata Ulemayên İslâmî), which worked for the establishment of
an Islamic State in Turkey (Kurt 2017, 19). The two organisations (MTTB and
Raiders) were both influenced by the writings of the Muslim Brotherhood, in
particular those of the radical and reactionary Islamists Hasan al-Banna and
Sayyid Qutb, which they helped to disseminate in Turkey.
The fight against communist subversion, the leitmotif of the shift to right-
wing politics in Turkey following the trend all around the world at that time,
was a common topos between the authorities in power and the different
movements of political Islam. Simultaneously, the victory of the Islamist revo-
lutionary movement in Iran inspired a revival of Islamist ideology on a global
level, far beyond the Shiite world. In Turkish Kurdistan, this major event coin-
cided also with the ‘final crisis’ of madrasas, which looked set to disappear
under the joint battering of two decades of competing alternative systems in
the fields of education and religion. The school education included the devel-
opment of public schools (mektep) in Kurdistan, while in the religious field
the competition had been doubled since the 1950s with both the state voca-
tional schools for imams (İmam Hatip) and the development of cemaats as a
new religious form.
By the end of the 1970s, a reorientation took place of the players and net-
works created during years of clandestine madrasa activities as related to the
Kurdish and statist political fields. The cleavage between those coming from a
madrasa religious education (medreseli) and those educated in state schools
(mektepli) contributed to the constitution of a restricted circle of ‘orphans of
the Ummah’. This group was always going to be receptive of the fundamen-
talist and radical thesis of Hizbullah, in particular of Hüseyin Velioğlu (him-
self educated in Turkish public schools), seeking in the first place to recruit
from the old madrasas circle. This seemed to them to embody, in the image of
Iranian revolution, a possible reconciliation and alliance between the Muslims
with a Quranic educational background and those who had studied in modern
schools (Kurt 2017, 86).
In sum, the socio-political situation emerging in the late 1970s and espe-
cially the 1980s, under the dual influence of regional (international) and
Turkish (internal) evolutions provided a suitable context for Hizbullah’s organ-
isation as a militant Islamist group. On the global scale, there was the encour-
agement of Islamist and conservative movements within the framework of an
anti-communist and anti-Kurdist struggle between the 1950s and 80s, while on
the local scale, there was the promotion of Kurdish Islamist movements within
the framework of the ideology of a Turkish-Islamic synthesis in the south-east
of the country after the coup d’état in 1980. These comprised the double engine

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behind the emergence and spread of organisations such as Hizbullah. In the

Kurdish region, moreover, one must add the vacuum left by the extinction
of the madrasas as among the local factors that facilitated radical Islamist
organisations.
Velioğlu founded his organization in 1979 with three of his old madrasa
instructors (seyda). The name ‘Hizbullah’ would be adopted later on. Many
young seydas influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood joined Hizbullah from
the start, during its first years (Kurt 2017, 21). The Brotherhood would keep close
relations with the Iranian regime until the end of the 1980s, despite the unease
created in Velioğlu’s mind by the Hama massacre in 1982, when Iran gave its
tacit support to the Syrian state’s brutal crushing of a rebellion by the Muslim
Brotherhood there. The Hama massacre was a key event in the orientation of
Hizbullah’s ideology towards clandestine and violent action, particularly in the
repressive Turkish political context following the 1980 coup and imposition
of military control. Notably, the massacre convinced Mullah Ahmed of the
need for an armed struggle against the ‘infidel’ (Kafir) regimes; Ahmed was a
member of Muslim Brotherhood who had taken refuge in Mardin in south-east
Turkey and was known to strongly influence Velioğlu (Uslu 2007; Kurt 2017).
At the same time as blocking democratic political activities was regarded as
antithetical to and thus threatening the secular state, the regime that emerged
from the 1980 coup and subsequent political developments also secretly
encouraged Islamist movements as a ploy to counteract the left and prevent
any resurgence of the annihilated leftist and Kurdish movements (as well as, to
a lesser extent, those of the far-right). The encouragement of state-sponsored
‘white terror’ was continued through the 1980s with the emergence and exten-
sion of the PKK in the eastern part of the country. Clearly, this was a politi-
cal context that particularly favoured the emergence of an organisation like
Hizbullah.

Territorial (Geo-Social) Context: Geography of Hizbullah

Hizbullah did not appear just anywhere, but in a quite precisely defined area
of south-east Turkey (Kurdistan): The Batman-Diyarbakır-Mardin triangle.3
Without forcing an artificial causality, we can see how a conjunction of
factors might have contributed to make of the area a choice location for
Hizbullah since the triangle is characterised by the convergence of at least

3 Along with a very small development in the Bingöl and Tatvan region (before 1995).

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three geo-demographic particularities. First, it was in that area where urban

and demographic development was highest in the entire Kurdish region, with
spectacular economic and population growth in a very short period of time.
Second, it was there that the civil rebellion (serhildan) movement was the larg-
est and had erupted earliest, which could be linked also to the topographic
character of the area with its vast plains, poorly suited for the development
of guerrillas. Third, this was the only area in Turkish Kurdistan where a small
non-Muslim community (Yezidis, Syriacs, Armenians) had survived. The
worldview of Hizbullah members indicates the importance of this last factor.
As indicated, the rapid urbanisation of this triangular territory had been
supported by economic factors. Primarily, these were the early development of
intensive agriculture in the easily irrigated land there alongside the presence of
a thriving industry (oil refinery in Batman), which encouraged further capital
development and the concomitant need for a workforce. The populations here
had largely imbibed a Kurdish politico-cultural ideal. For example, it was in
Silvan that the first of the protests dubbed the ‘eastern rallies’ (doğu mitingleri)
was organised – and during which the Kurdish sensitivity of the local medreseli
played a central role. In the context of the development of the Kurdish move-
ment, the civil protest actions in this area were massive and early.
The PKK initiated numerous hunger strikes, staged guerrilla funerals and
engaged in symbolic actions such as boycotting schools and the protest per-
formance of closing shutters (kepenk kapatma); thus, these forms of engage-
ment became the favoured modes of action of the serhildan in the early 1990s.
In the lowland cities, where there was little support for violent propaganda
and the use of weapons, the PKK placed greater emphasis on mobilising civil-
ians in collective protest against state policies. Cities such as Silvan, Nusaybin,
Cizre, Batman and Diyarbakır were at the heart of the first wave of serhildan in
March 1990 (cf. Güneş 2013).
Then, the uprooting and disintegration of traditional ties due to the rural
exodus (urban migration) intensified and extended in the wake of the armed
conflict, which saw the rural base of the PKK targeted and thousands of vil-
lages emptied by the Turkish state forces (cf. Jongerden 2007). This brought
together tens of thousands of displaced persons in the counties of Diyarbakır,
Silvan, Batman, Mardin, Nusaybin, Kızıltepe and Cizre, forming a large social
base that was supportive of the guerrilla movement. But the newly urbanised
youth of this mass emigration also provided a recruitment pool for Hizbullah.
Hizbullah’s recruitment was in fact quite homogenous, consisting mainly of
young men (15 to 25 years old) with a secondary but not university education
(except for Velioğlu), and coming from middle-class families recently settled
in the city. In fact, from a sociological point of view, as the involvement of the

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(former) medreselis decreased after the first five years within the organisation –
many seydas who had joined Hizbullah left it due to increasing disagreements
with its functioning and newly violent orientation – we can talk of a ‘double
recruitment’. That is, the bulk membership of the organisation now came to
be composed of two broad categories as specified by class: on the one hand,
there were employees, tradesmen and civil servants (middle class), and on the
other, landless peasants/smallholders and the recently urbanised youth (work-
ing class) (Dorronsoro 2004, 11).

Switching to Armed Violence: Polarisation of the

PKK-Hizbullah Conflict

Before exploring the role of third parties – namely, the Turkish state – in the
deployment of Hizbullah in the Kurdish conflict, we should briefly turn our
attention to the 1970s, where we can find roots for the confrontational mind-
set that would unfold among the Hizbullah as well as PKK supporters. A con-
test among different revolutionary Kurdish factions had flourished in the first
half of the 1970s – factions that competed both ideologically and materially,
including for recruitment and thus development of a social base in Kurdistan.
This began to take a violent and fatal turn in the second half of the decade
(Orhan 2015). Whilst the confrontations in the majority of Kurdish towns
tended to be polarised between two or three leftist factions with very close ide-
ologies, in Batman, the fight that crystallised was between two political poles,
each on one side of a political spectrum. There was revolutionary Kurdism,
represented by the faction that would become the PKK, at that time known
either as the ‘Revolutionaries of Kurdistan’ (Kürdistan Devrimcileri) or ‘Apocu’
after their leader, Abdullah Öcalan – and on the other side, there was the
Islamist conservative trend, represented by the local branch of the MTTB.
Recalling this period, Velioğlu testified that the MTTB, long established
in the city, reacted to the arrival of this Kurdish leftist and nationalist activ-
ism, which had managed to quickly create a base among young workers and
landless peasants, by becoming more politically active. They started to work
at street level to intensify their propaganda and recruitment efforts. PKK and
MTTB supporters thus fought to occupy the field, occasionally mobilising their
militants in tense clashes, particularly between 1977 and 1979. Then, in 1979, the
assassination of the newly elected pro-Kurdish mayor of Batman, Edip Solmaz,
triggered a deadly wave of PKK violence against the Raman tribe, which col-
laborated with the state and had been responsible for Solmaz’s assassination.
Although primarily intended to avenge the killing of Solmaz, this violence was

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also aimed at gaining attention (hence sympathy and generally broadening

the social base of support) and presenting a show of strength (consequently
establishing a monopoly on violence in the city and province). We will see how
much this defeat contributed to Velioğlu’s understanding of the founding role
of violence and to his decision to use it himself, this time for the benefit of the
cause of Islam.
During this time of intra-Kurdish conflicts resulting from political fragmen-
tation and ideological hostility, Hizbullah also did not shy away from using
violence against its immediate competitors, namely other Islamist groups. In
the end of 1980s, aggression against leaders of other religious groups became a
preferred mode of action for Hizbullah. Many former seydas, who had joined
and then left, were threatened. In the 1990s these attacks became deadly: 22
local imams were killed by Hizbullah between 1990 and 1993, probably because
of their resistance against the monopolisation of Hizbullah in their mosques.
Grouped after 1983 around its bookstore in Diyarbakır named İlim (lit.: science,
knowledge), Hizbullah was sometimes referred to as such, as distinct from the
other two locally influential Islamist groups, Menzil (Range) and Vahdet (Unity)
(Çakır 2011; Kurt 2017). But these last two would gradually be eliminated. Thus,
Hizbullah has, like the PKK, also succeeded in becoming a dominant player in
its ideological field (Kurt 2017, 16).4
In the early 1990s, and despite the counter-insurgency war led by the Turkish
army and supported by a plethora of special (security, paramilitary) organisa-
tions and tens of thousands of korucu, the Kurdish movement was at its peak.
The networks and dynamics built during the previous decade had led to a
massive mobilisation, while the guerrilla controlled vast ‘liberated zones’ in
mountainous territories and enjoyed dense networks of supporters and mili-
tia in cities. Employing and furthering this territorial and social control, the
PKK implemented ‘revolutionary violence’ against ‘traitors’, ‘collaborators’ and
‘agents’ through its ‘people’s courts’. The sense of an imminent and irreversible
historical victory of the Kurdish people was widespread, and there was a great
respect, with admiration and fear interwoven, for the male and female guerrilla
fighters. Overall, the process of monopolising legitimate oppositional violence
in the name of the Kurdish people was successfully accomplished by the PKK.
In that period, the ‘triumphant regime of subjectivity’ that had characterised

4 In 1993, when the Menzil leader Findan Güngör criticised Hizbullah’s violent policies and
killing of civilians as well as its open war with the PKK (after all, the PKK was an organisation,
albeit an enemy, fighting against the secular regime, which was ‘outside Islam’ [tağuti rejim]),
Hizbullah killed him and more than 150 other members of the Menzil group (Çakır 2011;
Faraç 2002).

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the PKK since its beginning spread among the population, carried along by a
kind of euphoria of struggle. The more state repression intensified, with its
‘scorched earth’ and the ‘dirty’ counter-insurgency methods, the more the PKK
struggle was morally raised (relatively, justified) and gaining the (Kurdish)
public’s sympathy as well as prestige (for its material success). Symbolically if
not militarily (since this was a high point from which it was brought down by
state power), the PKK was becoming hegemonic in Kurdistan. This situation
was unacceptable for Hizbullah supporters, whose political projects and world
vision were so opposed.
The escalation towards deadly violence first developed symbolically. At the
peak of the serhildan, Hizbullah members began to ostensibly challenge the
PKK in public spaces, refusing, for example, to join the collective action of
lowering their shop shutters. The PKK went on the offensive, confident in its
power and given the nature of this oppositional organisation, perceived as
reactionary, fanatical and instrumentalised (or just created) by the state. On
May 17th, 1991, an attack was aimed at Şerif Karaaslan, a Hizbullah official in
İdil, nowadays a district of Şirnak (Karaaslan escaped but his parents were
killed). A few months later, in the same city, on December 3rd, 1991, Hizbullah
responded by killing Mikhail Bayro, a PKK official of Syriac origin. From that
date on, reciprocal assassinations took place, with 13 killed in the following
month (Çelik 2018, 583).
The first assassination carried out in Silvan, the area under study here,
was conducted by Hizbullah in February 1992. Before that date, the townsfolk
had generally regarded the few members of Hizbullah there as sofîk (diminu-
tive of ‘sofu’, meaning ‘bigot’ and denoting a certain contempt with a touch
of humour). In response to the killing, however, the spontaneous reaction of
ordinary people, of traders and suchlike banding together, was to chase after
the armed men as a lynch mob (the men were caught but not killed). The first
deadly retaliation by the PKK took place on March 31st, 1992, with the assassi-
nation of the local Hizbullah leader, Hacı Biçer. After that, the county of Silvan
especially and province more generally became a battlefield. If an assassina-
tion were committed by one of the organisations in the morning, there was
generally a response in kind from the other party by the afternoon.
On June 26th, 1992, following a series of civil assassinations initiated by
Hizbullah in the cities, the PKK started an attack in the Silvan village of Sûsa
(Yolaç). Ten men were killed while leaving a mosque that was also claimed to
be used as a Hizbullah organisational base and arms warehouse.5 The ‘Sûsa

5 Serxwebûn, July 1992, n° 127, p. 24.

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massacre’ was a turning point for Hizbullah. According to my interlocutors, far

from being intimidated, they radicalised their challenge and displays of power,
and decided to install the ‘rule of ten for one’ supposedly from the Quran,
according to which each death in their camp should be avenged by ten in the
enemy’s. Hizbullah’s room for manoeuvre in what was now its back base of
Sûsa was such that it constructed cemeteries in tribute to its martyrs there and
initiated pilgrimages for them every 26th of June.
In nearly all the counties where Hizbullah had a militant base, the follow-
ing four years saw bloody conflicts and civilian deaths. We do not have the
exact numbers, but according to Rusen Çakir (2011, 70) over 700 hundred peo-
ple were killed (some 500 were PKK-affiliated and 200 Hizbullah). According
to my observations on the ground, however, the number must be much more
than that. In Silvan alone, there were over 300 people killed during this con-
flict (cf. Parlak 2014). Mehmet Kurt (2017, 31) states that the accurate number
should rather be in the thousands. In the urban areas concerned, where it was
difficult to get the regular army or the korucu involved against thousands of
mobilised civilians, the climate of terror built with these murders escalated
rapidly to bring a sharp end to the serhildan protest movement.
The collaboration of Hizbullah with the Turkish state became expressed
as ‘Hizbul-kontra’ and considered by the pro-Kurdish movement as a fact of
public notoriety. The systematic impunity enjoyed by those responsible for
murders, who were captured and yet released by the police, was highlighted
by all my interlocutors who witnessed or were victim of Hizbullah violence.
It remains unclear and officially unproven exactly which sector(s) of the state
and counter-guerrilla forces were directly involved in this collaboration, but
there was little doubt in the public mind as a whole (and certainly among
Kurds and leftists) that material assistance and information sharing were pro-
vided by the various (official, semi-official, and clandestine) security forces to
Hizbullah supporters, as argued by various journalists and researchers (e.g.
Bulut and Faraç 1999; Çakır 2011). Some officers and officials from the Turkish
state have themselves mentioned ‘the use of Hizbullah against the PKK’
(Işık 2020, 81–82).
Certainly, we cannot understand the transition to violence and rise to prom-
inence of Hizbullah, which is an ultra-minority in Kurdistan, without taking
its state support into account. Nevertheless, it would be simplistic to consider
Hizbullah as a pure creation of the Turkish state. As we have seen, long-term
historical dynamics were also at the root of the organisation’s emergence, and
the conflict that broke out in the 1990s did reflect an internal divide in the
Kurdish society. Hizbullah had its own political agenda, which was also in fine
hostile to the Turkish state, as evidenced by the aftermath of these events – a

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feeling that was mutual insofar as the Islamist movement was antithetical to
the Kemalist regime of the Republic, still in place at the heart of governance.
The reality is rather that the instrumentalisation was reciprocal; each used the
other for its own, essentially unrelated purposes.

Hizbullah’s Subjectivity Regime and Its Consequences for

Daily Life

Beyond the geopolitical dimension of the conflict and instrumentalisation

of Hizbullah by the Turkish state in its own ‘dirty war’ against the Kurdish
movement, it seems important to insist also on the social climate generated
by Hizbullah practices and the nature of the hostility it developed against
the PKK. Regarding the first point, there are several particularly gruesome
testimonies that attest to the social climate generated, from which just a few
examples will suffice. On the second point, oral sources will be employed to
investigate Hizbullah’s world (especially its sense of identity and relation-
ship to Kurdishness) in light of the perception it conveys in particular about
non-Muslims.

‘Keep Your Mouth Shut in the Day and Your Door Shut at Night!

The places where Hizbullah supporters managed to organise themselves and

make their influence visible gradually expanded and diversified. First, it was
able to use weddings. These were perfect vehicles not only as social (family)
occasions that could give concrete form to the Hizbullah vision of the world
in the public arena, but also for recruiting young people. Celebrated in the
Hizbullah style, weddings drew the lines of a renewed and more radical vision
of Islam (prohibition of dances in which men and women hold hands, with
musical instruments such as the davul (drum) and the zurna (a shrill, reeded
pipe) removed in favour of the tambourine alone, replacement of traditional
songs by religious songs (only) and a specific dance move on the refrain
‘İnşallah, Maşallah, Hizbullah’ (‘Godwilling, Glory of God, Follower of God’).
In the Silvan region, these traditional novelties were initiated in the village of
Sûsa (Yolaç), then in Bilbil (Gündüz) before spreading to other villages. Then, in
mosques, through a combination of threats, violence and sometimes murder,
Hizbullah managed to create an atmosphere of fear among the imams, who
stopped resisting its recruitment efforts (in Diyarbakır, for example, Hizbullah
activities spread from a handful of mosques at first to almost all of them by the

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mid-1990s (Kurt 2017, 129–30). Finally, in junior and high schools, Hizbullah
supporters organised themselves to be in the same classes, some voluntarily
repeating a school year so as to organise the newcomers of the following year.
They targeted in particular the students’ lifestyles, mostly through threats and
physical sanctions. Girls regarded as wearing improper clothes or behaving
inappropriately were targeted. A t-shirt leaving arms uncovered or conversa-
tions with boys would lead to ‘warnings’, or worse (one punishment was the
throwing of corrosive acid into the faces of recalcitrant girls). Boys as well as
girls would be reprimanded for displaying attitudes that were too casual, either
in terms of gender relations or towards religion. In Silvan, Hizbullah activists
gradually succeeded in dissuading a large number of families from sending
their girls to school.
The expression ‘the time when you had to keep your mouth shut during the
day and your door shut at night’ was used on various occasions and in vari-
ous forms by my interlocutors in Silvan. This expression seems an excellent
metaphor for the atmosphere created by Hizbullah. Even though it was the
civilian leaders of the PKK who were the first to be fatally targeted in Silvan,
this violence then spread to ordinary people who had been politically active
since the 1970s: doctors, teachers, municipal employees, clergymen critical of
Hizbullah, ordinary people, in fact, along with women considered to be dress-
ing too openly (açık, unveiled, and/or in clothes considered ‘indecent’, ‘shame-
less’ or ‘provocative’). Even a misplaced gesture could transform into an act
punishable by death. The expansion of the political targets of this wave of vio-
lence nearly paralysed daily life in the town, with Hizbullah practices includ-
ing anonymous threats on the phone, tracing signs on house doors, tracking
individuals, intimidating certain people or families to leave the city, and con-
fiscating property and houses for the benefit of its members. Neighbours dis-
trusted one another; anyone might be an informant.
The testimonies collected for the period 1992–97 recall ideal-typical descrip-
tions of the civil war. Extreme facts are found, such as a son, a member of
Hizbullah, who hanged his father because he ‘did not live as a true Muslim’, or
a father who refused to attend his sons’ funerals, or brothers in the same family
killing one another for their respective commitments to the PKK or Hizbullah,
leaving widows forced to continue to live together. According to the responses
in my interviews, everyone locked themselves in their homes by four o’clock in
the afternoon (i.e., before dusk in the winter). The number of times the expres-
sion ‘from fear’ (korkudan) appeared in the testimonies of my interlocutors in
Silvan is striking (e.g. ‘terrified, no-one came to the funeral’; ‘out of fear, my
uncle did not dare to take me to the hospital’; ‘petrified, no-one wanted to
give blood [for a blood transfusion to a young high school girl who had been

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attacked by her Hizbullahcı classmates]’; ‘we were so frightened that we didn’t

even go to visit her grave’; ‘no one greeted me because they were afraid,’ etc.).
Hizbullah’s modus operandi has left its mark on people’s memories with its
brutality and its high level of organisation and its professionalism. Its preferred
methods of execution were to shoot the victim with a single shot to the head
(with a Takarov pistol), or sometimes to club the victim to death with a machete
(sator). The risk of being beaten or killed was sometimes perceived as prefer-
able to that of being kidnapped and held prisoner in underground dungeons
dug by Hizbullah in its military base in Sûsa, where people were interrogated
and tortured. It should also be noted that there is a recurring reference to a
‘blacklist’ drawn up jointly by the state and Hizbullah with the names of those
who were to be disappeared, characteristic of the climate of that era. In the
public eye, Hizbullah was associated with the Gendarmerie Intelligence and
Counter-terrorism Service (Jandarma İstihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele, JİTEM),
therefore to the State.6 This added to the feeling of extreme fear, of helpless-
ness, and perhaps explains the low proportion of individual revenge killings
following the murder of relatives, contrary to the tradition of vendetta among
Kurds. As one witness from Silvan put it: ‘If you take revenge, the Hizbullah
people [Hizbullahçı] are confident in the support of the state and destroy you
and your family’.

‘You Send the Girls to the Mountain for the Yezidis and
the Armenians’

In this last part, attention is drawn to a neglected aspect of Hizbullah ideol-

ogy: the particular antipathy – hatred, revulsion, despising – displayed towards
PKK supporters as part of a particular framework of interpretation. Here, we
see political enmity as religious fundamentalism of a moral nature as much as
a religious racism based on identity. This thus requires a reading of political
opposition whose roots are centuries old. The study of the lyrics of some songs
produced by the Hizbullah movement afford us a gateway into this.
The form and content of the artistic or aesthetic productions of or linked to
a movement may contain valuable indicators to its world view. In the absence
of other oral, or even written sources for the 1990s, the song recordings left by
Hizbullah allow us greater access to the more emotional and subjective dimen-
sions that helped to mobilise its supporters. Here, I will focus on the way in

6 See (Söyler 2015; Işık 2019) for this paramilitary organisation.

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which the organisation perceived and defined itself with regards to the major
question that inflames the region: Kurdishness. Excerpts from songs dedi-
cated to the Hizbullah ‘martyrs’ of Silvan are used, as well as two songs specifi-
cally composed for Abdullah Öcalan, namely, ‘Hey, Servant of Armenians’ (Ey
xulamê Ermeniya) and ‘Sergeant/Foreman of the Workers’ (Çawîşê Emela).
The songs/chants selected come from two series of albums named ‘Martyrs’
Caravan’ (Şehitler Kervanı) and ‘The Gospel of Islam’ (Mizgîna Îslam) produced
by Hizbullah. The two series consist of about fifteen albums containing over a
hundred songs. These particular songs have been chosen for their relevance
to this fieldwork, as the ‘heroism’ of some members from Silvan is mentioned,
and because Hizbullah’s emblematic discourse on the PKK is a repeated theme.
Here is an extract from the song Martyr Salim (Şehid Salim), dedicated to
Salim Fidancı, killed in Sûsa by the PKK on April 3, 1992:

Oh, the communist traitor, the corrupted infidel […]

They dishonoured Muslims for Christians and Yezidis,
They turned villages and mountain caves into brothels.

And a few lines from the songs written against Öcalan:

You follow the Yezidis and the Armenians, you work for Europe,
You send the girls to the mountains for the Yezidis and Armenians,
At night you go on rampage for the Yezidis and Armenians,
Never will the Yezidi and Armenians be our masters,
No-one has ever seen you kill a Yezidi or an Armenian,
The Hizbullah of the Kurds, Kurdistan arisen to extract the Yezidi and
Armenian seed,
For the Yezidi and Armenians, you deluded the Kurds with a web of lies

It is evident that the PKK is here associated with everything that damages Islam:
communism, atheism, immorality (the ‘girls’ in the mountains transformed
into ‘brothels’, lies), the West (‘Europe’), and, above all, with almost obsessive
redundancy, the Yezidis and Armenians. This emphasis contrasts strongly with
the lack of observation on the subject in the literature. For example, Mehmet
Kurt (2017), the first author of a seminal book on Hizbullah, mentions antise-
mitic elements in the perception of this movement but the author does not
elaborate enough on religious racism (i.e. prejudice against other, non-Sunni
sects and ethno-religious minorities).
For Hizbullah, the general perception of the PKK under Öcalan’s leader-
ship is manifestly that of an evil organisation that persecutes Muslim Kurds in

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favour of the infidel interests. Hizbullah’s Sunni identity takes precedence over
any other sense of belonging and identity. Kurdishness is rendered invisible
through this Sunni-centred prism. For Hizbullah, a Kurd is a Sunni Muslim.
Yezidi, Alevi, Christian or Jewish Kurds are (or would be) an impossibility,
unconsidered, unimagined even.
These excerpts are quite representative of the samples located. In many
songs on the lives and deaths of militants, the words ‘Yezidi’ and ‘Armenian’
are used as insults to express hatred, contempt and enmity. This emphasis
echoes three historically and geographically rooted processes. First, the social
hierarchy of the Ottoman period was established according to religious affili-
ation. The equation of Muslim with Sunni, and the idea of the superiority of
Sunnis over non-Muslims, accompanied by the supposed nineteenth-century
‘treason’ of non-Muslims, has, among other things, justified the 1915 geno-
cide. Then comes the layer added by the Republic of Turkey since its War of
Independence in the 1920s.
While the first Kurdish nationalists were attempting to claim an indepen-
dent Kurdistan in Sèvres (where the new map for control of the ex-Ottoman
lands, including Anatolia, was drawn), the Kemalists, from their side, mobil-
ised most of the region’s elites by wielding the threat of a treaty that would
‘transform Kurdistan into Armenia’ (Karabekir 1960, 14) (thus provoking the
first and most sustained intra-Kurdish divide of the contemporary period).
This fear drew implicitly on the register of guilt about the role of the Kurds
during the genocide, and the subsequent confiscation of Armenian property
from which they benefited (Bozarslan 2015, 473–474). This psycho-discursive
register was reactivated each time Kurdism gained ground. Notably, when the
PKK declared war on the Turkish state, the state propaganda missed no oppor-
tunity to bombard public opinion throughout the 1990s with alleged links pre-
sented as facts that connected the PKK and the Armenians – and this after
initially presenting the PKK as a branch of the Armenian Secret Army for the
Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) (Hoffmann 2002; Sengul 2014).
It is therefore in the context of a longue durée historical heritage, in per-
fect harmony with the representations disseminated by the central state,
first Ottoman and then Turkish, that the hateful Hizbullah representations
of Christians/Armenians need to be placed. Similarly, the PKK is reported as
‘Marxist’, ‘communist’, ‘atheist’ and ‘in the service of these Armenian dogs’.
Hizbullah’s discourse presents the PKK as led by ‘the Yezidis and Christians’.
However, this addition of Yezidis to the hate speech is a specificity of Hizbullah
and linked to the demographic particularity mentioned above regarding the
Batman-Mardin-Diyarbakır triangle, one of the regions of Kurdistan where,
as mentioned, non-Sunni populations continued to live (namely those who

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escaped the 1915 genocide and subsequent ‘cleansing’ policies). Syriacs

(Süryani), despite persistent discrimination and violence throughout the
twentieth century, maintained their community as well in this triangle, with
Mardin as their center.
The members of these groups, though in much smaller numbers, provided
a concrete base for the ordinary hatred accumulated in the daily practices of
the majority Sunni neighbours. This presence was used as a political lever by
Hizbullah, especially when the PKK began to propose a multicultural, histori-
cal and political approach (insisting on the coexistence of different commu-
nities in the Kurdish area since antiquity). From that point of view, it is no
coincidence that three of Hizbullah’s first victims were a Syriac (Mihail Bayro),
Yezidi (Hüseyin Pamukçu, killed in the Yezidi village of Feqîran, in Batman)
and Armenian (Yakup Yontan, Armenian dentist killed in Kızıltepe).
Many other remarks and observations may be studied in this broad context,
particularly regarding the perception and the construction of the ‘self’ and
the ‘other’ in the subjectivity deployed by Hizbullah. One interest here derives
from the common points with successive state ideologies that the organisation
used to ensure the completion of their shared politics of division within differ-
ent minoritised entities under their domination. Another is that some of these
representations continue to be shared by considerable portions of Kurdish
society in Turkey, which, in their own nationalism, cannot pull away from
an exclusive, excluding and sometimes racist vision (in its ethnic or religious
plan), or from the country’s construction as if there were no models other than
that implemented by the Republic in the making of the Turkish nation state.

Years of Fire: Matrix of an Absolute Hostility in

Intra-Kurdish Conflicts

I end the main work of this piece with some reflections that aim to place the
Hizbullah-PKK conflict in the more general framework of the intra-Kurdish
divides of the twentieth century to show it as a radically new form of hostility.
I will skip here, despite its founding nature, the first major intra-Kurdish divide
of the century (the one that positioned the first Kurdish nationalists around
Şerif Pasha as opposed to the majority of the Kurdish elites who had joined
Mustafa Kemal during the negotiations of the Sèvres and Lausanne trea-
ties). This preceded the foundation of the Republic, and the division mainly
involved some members of the exiled elites and thus did not, strictly speaking,
split Kurdish society.

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For the republican era, three moments may be identified as particularly

potent for the entry of a new dimension in intra-Kurdish conflict. Sheikh
Said’s revolt in 1925 was the first. The Kurdish players then were divided for the
first time on the question of loyalty to or rupture with the Turkish State and
Kemalist elites, with whom they had unanimously stood alongside during the
War of Independence. The fundamental fact of importance here is the repre-
sentation of a basic division in Kurdish society that is still operative today: on
the one side the rebellious, on the other one the statists.
The second major moment of rupture cannot be positioned so precisely, for
it took place somewhere in the 1970s, when the configuration of intra-Kurdish
conflicts appears to have been completely transformed. Politicisation within
the factions illustrates this transformation: new forms of loyalty appeared;
they were no longer rooted in concrete interdependencies and community
relations (tribe, village, family, etc.) but rather focused on abstract causes.
The principle of membership, despite an overlap with previous cleavages, was
above all individualistic. Moreover, still under the influence of politicisation,
many cleavages were made explicit and were reinforced. The ‘Kurdish cause’
no longer allowed for neutrality; unity was not possible between Kurdish revo-
lutionaries and right-wing Kurdish nationalists.
It is in this narrative context that the third major rupture occurred, with
the emergence of Hizbullah in the 1990s. While the ideological divide under-
lying the conflict in which the members of this organisation were involved –
primacy of religious identity versus primacy of ethnic identity – was far from
new, the intense and extreme violence of the clash reveals the emergence of
an absolutely new form of intra-Kurdish conflict. We can describe this with
Schmitt’s (2007) categories around the notion of a war of partisans. In this
model, the conflict involving Hizbullah is the first appearance of a hostility
of a more absolute type (as opposed to real hostility, which can be used to
describe the conflicts, ‘partisans’ in the Schmittian sense, of the Kurdish fac-
tions in the 1970s). Between the PKK supporters and members of Hizbullah,
violence manifested itself in the form of an internal/civil war that fragmented
social units to the smallest degree (to the level of individual dwelling and per-
son), recalling historical and philosophical descriptions of situations of stasis
(cf. Agamben 2015). In contrast, the conflict between the PKK members and
people engaged as korucu should be dealt with differently.
Relatedly, clashes between the factions were not of incompatible interpre-
tations of the world, and dialogues between them and the transfer of members
from one to the other were possible. When we analyse the reciprocal discourses
and behaviours of korucu and the PKK members towards each other, we see

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that these were not of an absolute hostility (and sometimes not even a real hos-
tility). Recognition of the circumstantial nature of the commitments and the
emphasis on the burden of constraint appear repeatedly in the interviews con-
ducted in the course of the research for this study. Contrary to the situation of
the korucu, there was often enough a quite apparent difficulty experienced on
the part of interlocutors attempting to explain their commitment to Hizbullah.
Consciously or not, they would tend to address this intra-Kurdish conflict in a
specific way, but the multi-factor considerations they invoked when it came
to talking about a variety of commitments generally just disappeared in the
case of Hizbullah in favour of monocausal explanations (Hizbullah as a para-
military actor created from nothing by the Turkish State, or as an embodiment
of religious fanaticism whose success could only be understood through the
mental pathologisation of its members).
The traumatic memory that arises when mentioning just the name
‘Hizbullah’, makes it evident that the word operates as a signifier for horror and
death. This is the case in Kurdistan far beyond the geographical area where
Hizbullah members were active. There was a relative easing of the conflict at
the end of the 1990s, and since the 2000s new dynamics emerged – in par-
ticular the reorganisation of the Hizbullah movement in the civil sphere, with
its legal party (Hüda-Par), together with the reorientation of the PKK move-
ment towards a ‘confederalist’ project aiming above all at democratisation and
concerning itself with the organisation of the civil society (a project where it
also reached out to former members of Hizbullah). Yet, these have not given
rise to a real work of confrontation with the past on the Hizbullah side, nor of
recognition and self-critique vis-à-vis the violent practices of the 1990s. On the
contrary, at each moment of tension, the organisation has not hesitated to use
the memory of these practices as more or less veiled threats.
As we saw in October 2014, during demonstrations in support of the city of
Kobanê besieged by Islamic State forces and against the Turkish government
accused of supporting the jihadists, in a situation of crisis this memory can
be reactivated instantly. We can interpret the fact that Kurdish demonstrators
went to the offices of pro-Hizbullah associations and attacked individuals and
that Hizbullah militants there used their weapons to shoot demonstrators as
instantiating and emblematic of a sudden, apparently instantaneous reacti-
vation of the habitus of the partisan war of the 1990s, even after some 15 years
of apparent calm. Despite the efforts made by both sides to move the conflict
to a lower threshold of intensity, the perception of the other as an absolute
enemy easily resurfaces in the absence of memory work, of facing, making
conscious and coming to some sort of reconciliation with the wounds and

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hatreds of the past. In such moments of crises this intra-Kurdish divide all
too easily returns to the irreconcilable character in which it was conceived, a
quarter of a century earlier.

Conclusion

This article has challenged the existing tendency in the literature to

de-historicise and de-spatialise the emergence of Hizbullah, as if this organisa-
tion suddenly just materialised in Kurdistan in the 1980s from out of nowhere
and was located nowhere in particular. Rather, it emanated from the politi-
cized Kurdish Islamist sphere, identified primarily as three spaces of socialisa-
tion under the secular Republic of Turkey: the clandestine madrasas led by
sheikhs attached to one of the two tariqas Nakshibandi and Qadiriyya, with
the new confraternal forms represented by the cemaats, notably those of the
Nurcu movement from the 1950s, and the parties and organisations of the
Turkish right and extreme right, in which Islamism developed in the second
half of the 20th century.
Then, Hizbullah emerged at the end of the 1970s from an interplay between
internal and external dynamics. This involved the ideas and practices of the
Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s and the Islamic revolution of Iran in 1979
along with the madrasa crisis in Turkey, the rise of a Kurdish movement
(anchored on the left) and the tacit encouragement of the Islamist groups
by the 1980 coup regime to block this movement, all of which paved the way
for the propagation of Islamist activism. In the case of the two principal
Islamist groups that managed to create a social base in Kurdistan (Menzil
and İlim/Hizbullah groups), the new class of mektepli formed within the
Turkish Right (notably the MTTB and Akıncılar) outmanoeuvred part of the
medreselis, following the example of what had occurred a few years earlier
among the leftist Kurdish factions. As in the case of the Kurdish left, rivalry
between the Islamist factions led to a process of the monopolisation of vio-
lence by one of them.
These three factors facilitated the emergence and spread of Hizbullah in a
relatively limited region, identified as the Batman-Mardin-Diyarbakır triangle.
This is the area where the most rapid urbanisation and demographic increase
took place in Kurdistan, which, consequently, created a suitable recruitment
pool for Hizbullah. Due to the topographical character of the region, the
Kurdish guerrilla could not perform guerrilla warfare in this zone and mostly
operated through serhildans, most of which were quelled by the mobilisation

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74 Çelik

of Hizbullah’s violence. Lastly, non-Muslim communities (Yezidis, Syriacs,

Armenians) had remained in this region until the early 90s, unlike in any other
part of Turkish Kurdistan.
Taking Silvan in the 1990s as a focus, this article investigated and analysed
Hizbullah’s repertoire of action, the degree of coercion it achieved in differ-
ent spaces, its targets, and its conception of the world. The specific focus on
music recorded by Hizbullah in that period, especially the lexical fields used,
has shown how Hizbullah depicted itself in relation to others, which evidences
the importance of a long-held, deeply rooted ethno-confessional dimension.
By identifying PKK with non-Muslims (Armenians, Yezidis, Syriacs), Hizbullah
reactivated a century-old hatred and reproduced the state discourse about
non-Muslim minorities. Hizbullah’s discourse turned into a more explicit
expression of hatred and anger towards these communities as well as the PKK
and its leader partly as a result of the PKK’s attempted de-Sunnisation of the
historiography of Kurdistan by including non-Muslim groups. The abundance
of the use of ‘Yezidis’ and ‘Christians’ (especially Armenians – filleh) as insults
in these songs and accusations of the PKK spreading Christian and Western
values are also indications of the nature of this hostility.
Finally, I have argued that the war between Hizbullah and PKK in the
1990s resulted in a new form of intra-Kurdish conflict. To conceptualise this
new type of conflict, I have utilised the Schmittian concepts developed in the
Theory of the Partisan (2007). In previous intra-Kurdish conflicts, as I have
explained, the level of hostility had not exceeded the ‘real’ enmity, but the
escalated violence and notorious executions by Hizbullah turned this hostil-
ity into an ‘absolute’ enmity. The physical field of the battle was extended to
all areas of daily life. The micro-climate of terror created by this fragile and
fraught situation together with the widespread distrust between neighbours,
even between family members and certainly the presence of informants, led
to self-censorship and self-limiting of even the slightest gesture. Thus, under
these circumstances, it was better to close your mouth during the day and your
door at night to be able to maximise one’s chances of survival.

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 Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 78–102
Kurdish Studies
Archive
[Link]/ksa

The Armenian Massacre of 1895 in Bitlis Town

Mehmet Polatel | ORCID: 0009-0007-0684-4107
Non-Resident Research Affiliate, Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced
Genocide Research, University of Southern California, 650 West 35th Street,
Suite 114, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2571, USA
mehmetpo@[Link]

Abstract

This article explores the Bitlis massacre of 1895 and its aftermath with a particular
focus on the role of local actors and Ottoman state elite in shaping the unfolding of
this event. Through an in-depth examination of archival documents, it emphasizes
the importance of local networks and dynamics in shaping the developments on the
ground. Exploring the differences in the approaches of local and central Ottoman
officials and political elites towards the treatment of the initiators of the massacre,
the article reveals that there were explicit disputes among Ottoman authorities which
were seemingly resolved after the Sultan Abdülhamid II imposed his will and ensured
total impunity for the local perpetrators.

Keywords

local powerholders – mass violence – state-society relations – the Armenian question

Komkujiya Ermeniyan ya di sala 1895an ya li Bedlîsê

Ev gotar li ser sê nuqsaniyên sereke yê vekolînên mewcûd yê li ser Hizbilla hûr dibe
ku, ew rêxistineke îslamî ye û di salên 90’î de li Tirkiyê di fehliyetê de bû: kêmasiya
dîrokîkirina boçûna Hizbilla û endamên wê, kêmasiya lêfikirîna li ser rehenda mekanî
ya belvabûna wê û tunebûna vekolînên bingehîn yê ku li ser wî tiştî bisekine ku were
fêm kirin bê ev rêxistin di warê herêmî de çawa dixebitî. Gotar bûyerên li Farqîna

Published with license by Koninklijke Brill BV | doi:10.1163/9789004700406_005

© Mehmet Polatel, 2021
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
The Armenian Massacre of 1895 in Bitlis Town 79

Amedê qewimîne wek mînakekê digre û repertuara kiryarên Hizbilla, yê di bin siya
dewletê de bûn, lêpirsîn û analîz dike. Wê heta çi radeyê li mekanên cûda, zora xwe
dabû qebûl kirin, hedefên wê çi bûn, û fêmkirina wê ya cîhanê çawa bû? Ev xebat îddia
dike ku ev tîrbûn û zêdebûna şiddeta PKK-Hizbilla tê wê wateyê ku bi vê pevçûnê di
dîroka pevçûnên di navebera Kurdan de şêweyeke pevçûnê ya bi temamî nû afirî.

Komellkujî ermenîyekanî şaroçkey bîtlîs le

sallî 1895

Em witare sernic dexate ser sê sinûrdarî serekî ke le twêjînewekanî êsta leser hîz-
bulla hen, ke rêkxirawêkî îslamîye le deyey 1990 da le turkya çalak bû: kêmasî bedîrok
kirdnî rêçkey hîzbulla w endamekanî; kêmasî le leberçawgirtnî rehendî cêgeyî billaw-
bûnewey hîzbulla we ‘xiyabî twêjîneweyekî binerretî derbarey çonîyetî karkirdnî rêkx-
iraweke le astî lokallîda. Be leberçawgirtinî keysî sîlvan, ke şaroçkeyekî biçukî parêzgay
diyarbekre, babeteke le kerestey karekanî hîzbulla lesêberî dewlletda dekollêtewe
legell radey ew zoremilêkirdney le şwêne ciyawazekanda encamî dawe, amancekanî
we têrrwanînî bo cîhan. Perraweke argumêntî ewe dekat ke degutrêt tundrrewî û çirrî
tundutîjî pekeke-hîzbulla derbirrîne bo derkewtinî corêkî tewaw niwêy milmilanêy
nawxoy-kurd lenaw mêjûy milmilanêy dûrudirêjî nawxoyî kurdîda.

Qirkerdişê Armenîyan ê 1895î yê Şaristanê Bidlisî

Na meqale giranî dana hîrê kêmasîyanê bingeyênan ser ke no dem cigêrayîşê derheqê
Hîzbullahî de, rêxistinêka Tirkîya ya îslamîste ke serranê 1990an de fealîyet kerdêne,
estê: kêmîbîyayîşê tarîxkerdişê raygehê Hîzbullah û endamanê ci, kêmîhesibnayîşê
rehendê cayî yê vilabîyayîşê ci û kêmbîyayîşê cigêrayîşanê bibingeyan derheqê
gureyayîşê ci yê hêremî de. Bi nimûneyê Sîlvanî, şaristanêkê qezaya Dîyarbekirî yo qij,
na meqale repertuarê Hîzbullahî yê aksîyonî binê sîya dewlete de, dereceya îcbarî ke
Hîzbullah cayanê cîya-cîyayan de reşto ci, hedefê Hîzbullahî û fehmkerdişê Hîzbullahî
yê dinya, înan ser o cigêrayîş û analîz kena. Nuşte de munaqeşe beno ke zereyê tarîxê
dergî yê lejanê mîyankurdkîyan de ekstremî û giranîya şîdetê PKK-Hîzbullahî kerd ke
tewirêkê lejê mîyankurdkî yo nîp-newe vejîyo meydan.

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80 Polatel

Introduction

In the years between 1894 and 1897, the Armenian population in different parts
of the Ottoman Empire became the targets of mass violence. Among the atroc-
ities committed in this period were mass murders, pillages, rapes, and abduc-
tions; around 100,000 Armenians were killed, and many more were uprooted.
In the past, these massacres were predominantly discussed within a state-
oriented framework that focused on the intent(s) of Sultan Abdülhamid II and
on the motives and deeds of the Hamidian regiments. Recent scholarship, how-
ever, has focused on the variety of the perpetrators and their motivations, with
the involvement and response of the authorities rendered by ‘thick’ descrip-
tion. Certainly, the massacres cannot be reduced to the outrages of Hamidian
regiments, which were, by definition, state functionaries. Recent scholarship
has also eschewed geographical generalisation, preferring to focus on particu-
lar locations or localities for in-depth study.1
Among the massacres of 1894–97, those that took place in the fall of 1895
were a little unusual in that they targeted both urban and rural Armenian pop-
ulations and they unfolded sequentially, like a narrative, one after the other
in apparently causal fashion, one seeming to prompt the next. In this article,
therefore, I focus on the development and aftermath of a single massacre –
namely, the one that occurred in Bitlis town and the villages around it – both
to describe events and ascertain responsibility and also as a case study in this
spatio-temporal context of narrative unfoldment.
Investigating this case of mass violence in its complexity, I first explore the
ways in which it was shaped through the relations and negotiations of its main
actors. Local and regional conditions and dynamics and their articulations are
identified as crucial factors. I show that the Bitlis massacre was carried out by –
with the active involvement of – a diverse group, including religious authori-
ties, urban notables, and some Kurdish tribes. Religion did not only serve as a
means of legitimation, since religious authorities were themselves at the fore-
front of violent mobilisation. Second, I reveal significant differences and con-
flicts among the central and local Ottoman authorities concerning what needed
to be done about the local power holders in the aftermath of the massacre.
Military and civilian authorities at the local level and local and state-appointed
leaders were also at loggerheads because of their differences over the arrest

1 For the massacres, see Melson, 1982; Walker, 1990; and Kieser, 2005. For recent studies focus-
ing on different localities, see Verheij, 2012, 2018; Miller, 2015; Polatel, 2016; Gölbaşı, 2018;
Kurt, 2018; Mayersen, 2018; Sipahi, 2018; and Altıntaş, 2018.

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The Armenian Massacre of 1895 in Bitlis Town 81

of the leading perpetrators. In the end, it was Sultan Abdülhamid II and his
unique position as sultan that determined the outcome, ensuring impunity.

The Historical Context

The nineteenth century was a period of great transformations for the Ottoman
Empire, as well as for the Eastern provinces, like Bitlis.2 From the early nine-
teenth century, the central government started to curb the political power and
autonomy of Kurdish mirs, the local leaders and landholders. By the last quar-
ter of the century, the mirlik system, which involved the formal recognition of
local autonomy, was gone. This process did not bring about the total replace-
ment of local by central authority, however. Rather, there was a power vacuum
created by the final abolition of mirliks, which was soon filled with the rise
of alternative local powers, like religious authorities and then tribal leaders
(Bruinessen, 1992; Ateş, 2013; Atmaca, 2019).
Local dynamics in the eastern provinces were also affected by fiscal and
legal centralisation efforts. While pushing for an increased share of agricultural
revenues through new measures and forms of taxation, the state did not try to
abolish the hafir (protection money) practice, according to which non-Muslims
were required to pay annual sums to local, Muslim power-holders. Thus, many
Armenian peasants began to suffer double taxation.3 Further, while the Land
Code of 1858 paved the way for the registration of miri lands in the names of
peasants who cultivated them, many local Muslim power-holders in the eastern
provinces were able to dispossess the smallholders – including Armenians –
and register the lands under their own names (Astourian, 2011; Polatel, 2017).
Another important development of the mid-nineteenth century was the
rise of Ottomanism. With the Tanzimat and Islahat Edicts, the Ottoman state
took important steps towards recognising the formal equality of its male sub-
jects, regardless of religion. Indeed, during this period, which continued until
the consolidation of the Hamidian regime and its pan-Islamist policies, the
official recognition of Muslim supremacy and dominance seemed to be ended.
Some Muslims in different parts of the Empire were considerably disturbed
by these developments, of course, which threatened their dominant positions
(Davison, 1970; Akçam, 2007; Aksan, 2007).

2 Ottoman provinces in the nineteenth century were generally named after their urban centre,
so, in this case, ‘Bitlis’ stood for both.
3 For the changes in the tax system and its impact on the ‘Armenian Question’, see Özbek
(2012).

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82 Polatel

In the 1860s and ’70s, the Armenian Patriarchate submitted various petitions
to the Porte concerning cases of oppression, humiliation, and land grabbing
targeting Armenians, especially in the eastern provinces (Antaramian, 2020,
pp. 135–140). Despite the official commitment of the state to provide security
of life, property, and honour for all Ottoman citizens on an equal basis, how-
ever, the central government did not adopt any measures to actually provide
this security (Polatel, 2017, pp. 92–4). Then, the Russo-Ottoman War and ensu-
ing Ottoman defeat introduced a new dynamic to the reform issue, since one
of the conditions for Russian withdrawal from the occupied regions in the east
was the adoption of a reform scheme that would improve the conditions of
Armenians. Upon the involvement of Britain in the peace settlement negotia-
tions, the Russo-Ottoman agreement was revised, but the Berlin Treaty of 1878
still obliged the Ottoman state to enact a reform program (Zürcher, 2004, p. 74).
Sultan Abdülhamid II had come to power in 1876, at the height of multiple
nationalist uprisings in the Balkans. The political strategy that the new sultan
began to implement after consolidating his rule was very different to that of
Ottomanism, as he sought to create and base policy around a pan-Islamist bond
with his Muslim subjects. Instead of merely dealing with local power-holders
at the peripheries of the Empire, he attempted to ensure their loyalty by cre-
ating new institutions, like the tribal school and the Hamidian regiments (in
1891), which incorporated the local elite into the state in novel ways (Duguit,
1973; Deringil, 2000; Klein, 2011, pp. 20–51). The internationalisation of the
Armenian question, non-implementation of reforms and continuing oppres-
sions in the eastern provinces paved the way for the formation of Armenian
revolutionary organisations in the 1880s. This political activism generated a
significant degree of fear among the Ottoman ruling elite as well as among
Muslim local power-holders (Libaridian, 2011; Suny, 2015).
In the first half of the 1890s, there were various incidents of violence against
Armenians, especially in rural regions. There were some major events, like the
Sasun massacre (Polatel, 2016, pp. 179–98; Altıntaş, 2018, pp. 224–51; Miller, 2018,
pp. 97–123). After this event, the reform issue once again entered the interna-
tional diplomacy agenda. In May 1895, the Great Powers sent memoranda to
the Porte to push for the implementation of reforms. On 30th September, the
Hnchags organised a demonstration in Istanbul demanding the implementa-
tion of reforms. Clashes between the protesters and police were followed by
attacks on the Armenian inhabitants of the city by Muslim mobs. Then, an
Ottoman official in Trabzon was wounded by a gunfire. According to Ottoman
authorities, the culprit was an Armenian, although the incident could also
have been staged, according to British consular staff. Regardless, it was follow-
ing this that a massacre targeting Armenians occurred in the city (Verheij, 2012,

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The Armenian Massacre of 1895 in Bitlis Town 83

pp. 95–6). On 17 October, the Sultan accepted the reform scheme. The series of
massacres that included the massacre in Bitlis town started after this develop-
ment and continued until late-November.
In these massacres, Armenians and sometimes Syriacs in rural areas as well
as in a number of urban centres – Erzincan, Gümüşhane, Bayburt, Diyarbekir,
Harput, Erzurum, Sivas, Kayseri, Urfa and Antep – were targeted (Walker, 1990,
pp. 156–64). The massacres generally started with a clear signal – like a gun-
shot fired on a Friday when Muslims had gathered in mosques for the Friday
prayer. In all cases, there was a stark disparity between the number of Muslims
and non-Muslims who lost their lives. This is apparent in the accounts of all
kinds of actors, including those of Ottoman officials, British consular staff,
Armenians and missionaries (Deringil, 2012, p. 214).4
One of the important questions concerning these massacres is related to
responsibility and agency. In some earlier accounts, the massacres were con-
sidered to be ordered by the Sultan. As underlined by Deringil (ibid.), it is highly
improbable that Abdülhamid II, who was a politically cautious leader, would
have given any official instruction, but there is ample evidence that he pro-
vided support for the perpetrators by ensuring impunity. The timing and serial
nature of these massacres and the fact that they went unpunished all goes to
indicate that they were not incidental outbursts. On the other hand, studies
focusing on different localities implicate a wide range of local actors – from
sheikhs to urban notables, some of whom would later become members of the
CUP elite – suggesting the importance of specific factors and local agency in
accounting for each individual event.

An Overview of Actors and Their Connections

There were a number of local actors involved in the massacre in Bitlis town
and its aftermath. Among them were religious authorities affiliated with the
Naqshibendi-Khalidi Order, like Hacı Tayyip from Muş and Sheikh Mehmed
Emin.5 This order had spread widely in the eastern provinces during the 19th
century. Hacı Tayyip, one of the successors (halife) to Salih Nehri, one of the
most important leaders of the Khalidi Order, was a religious leader and a
teacher with a considerable reputation (Çakır, 2017, p. 37). Sheikh Emin, one
of the most important figures in the massacre, was a native of Şirvan, a dis-
trict in Bitlis province. In various documents sent to the central government

4 For historiographies of the massacres, see Verheij (2012) and Gölbaşı (2015).
5 For the Khalidi order and its rise in Kurdistan, see Bruinessen, 1992, pp. 222–34.

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84 Polatel

in November and December 1895, the acting-Governor, Ömer Bey, and the
Commander emphasised that Sheikh Emin was a greedy person concerned
about his material interests (menfaatperest), who had ridden to prominence
through his connections to the Khalidi sheikh, Muhammed Küfrevi.6 At that
point in history, Sheikh Küfrevi, a successor of Seyyid Taha of Hakkari/Nehri,
was over 100 years-old and one of the highest religious authorities in the
Ottoman East. Sheikh Emin was related to Sheikh Küfrevi by marriage – his sis-
ter Fatma was Küfrevi’s wife. According to a letter written by an Armenian from
the region, there was an increase in the number of outsiders in the town in
the days before the massacre, including dervishes, mullahs, fakhis, and sheikhs
(Hnchag, 1896). These people may well have been connected with the religious
networks in which Sheikh Emin and Hacı Tayyip enjoyed significant influence.
Another group involved in the massacre comprised the local inhabitants,
including some urban notables. One of these was Hacı Necmeddin, a promi-
nent figure in the town and member of its administrative council. Necmeddin,
who had a close relationship with Emin, had a personal group of brigands
under whose protection he would travel. In the Hamidian period, he amassed
a fortune by seizing the properties of Armenians – indeed, he was a person
of limited means until the mid-1880s (Polatel, 2017, p. 236). Necmeddin had
personal connections with the Mirza Bey family and Mirza Bey’s son Musa Bey,
the leaders of Kurdish groups in the region of Mutki and Huyt. Necmettin’s wife
was a daughter of Mirza Bey and a sister of Musa Bey, who was already infa-
mous for his violence against Armenians (Cholet, 1892, p. 238; Kévonian, 2015).
Apart from Hacı Necmeddin and his sons and helpers, a number of other local
notables were also involved in mass violence in Bitlis town. These included the
Mayor, Hacı Yasin, his son Yusuf, and İbrahim, another local official, who were
all under the influence of Sheikh Emin.7
Another important group involved were tribal Kurds. Ottoman, Armenian,
and British sources underline that there was a heavy presence of tribal Kurds in
the town during the massacres and that they were involved in the atrocities. In
reports sent to the central government by Ottoman officials, it was recognised
that Hamidian and non-Hamidian tribes were killing and pillaging Armenians
across the province. In the initial Ottoman reports, it was also stated that at
the time of the massacre in Bitlis town, there was a large number of Kurds

6 Başkanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (Ottoman Archive of the Presidency, BOA): [Link] 33/75, cipher
telegram from Ömer, acting Governor of Bitlis and Şemsi Pasha, Commander of Eighth
Division to the First Secretary of the Palace, 20 Teşrin-i Evvel 1311 [1st November, 1895].
7 BOA: [Link] 77/62, telegram from Ömer, acting Governor of Bitlis, 3 Teşrin-i Sani 1311
[15th November, 1895].

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The Armenian Massacre of 1895 in Bitlis Town 85

who had gone there for trade purposes.8 This external group was identified by
the British vice-consul as comprising Kurds from Mutki – that is, Kurds affili-
ated with Musa Bey’s family.9 Kurds from Mutki and Huyt were also identi-
fied by Armenians as participants in attacks against Armenians in the Muş
region (Troshag, 1896) and by the District Governor of Muş, Feham Bey.10 Jelle
Verheij’s (2018, pp. 125–59) study on the massacres in Hizan and Şirvan (north-
ern Bitlis) shows that Kurds from Mutki were also active in those massacres.
Thus, we can see this group as a mobile force involved in cases of mass violence
all across Bitlis, if not beyond. As noted by Toygun Altıntaş (2018, pp. 76–7),
Emin was ‘the greatest protector’ of Musa Bey; the two men were so close that
during the infamous Gülizar incident, Musa had placed the Armenian girl he
had kidnapped to be kept at Emin’s house.11
After this brief sketch of local actors and their inter-relations, we can turn
to the connections between these and the central government. Urban notables
involved in this event were already formally incorporated within the official
apparatus because they held important positions in the local administrative
structure. Sheikhs were not also a group alien to the state. Religious centres
organised around tekkes functioned like socioeconomic compounds in the
sense that the production of goods for sale was also a part of everyday life in
these centres. Since the mid-nineteenth century, various Khalidi centres in the
region had been exempted from taxes. The central government had also put
sheikhs affiliated with such tekkes on a salary and provided periodical sums
for the living expenses of their disciples and visitors (Kavak, 2013; Çakır, 2016).
Specifically, Sultan Abdülhamid II had a close relationship with the Khalidi
Sheikh Ahmed Ziyaeddin Gümüşhanevi, one of the most influential repre-
sentatives of the Order in the capital (Özsaray, 2018, pp. 503–504; Eyice, 1987,
p. 484). When Khalidi Sheikh Küfrevi of Bitlis died in 1898, the Sultan ordered
the construction of a tomb for him, sending Bitlis an Italian architect for this
task (Çoruh, 2015, p. 149).
The Mutki and Huyt Kurds also had some connections to Istanbul. Mirza
Bey’s family was related by marriage to Bahri Pasha. A native of Muş, Bahri
Pasha held a number of important public offices in the 1890s, serving as a

8 BOA: [Link] 619/7, telegram from Ömer, acting Governor of Bitlis, 15 Teşrin-i
Evvel 1311 [27 October 1895], and BOA: [Link] 130/97, cipher telegram from Şemsi Pasha,
Commander of Eighth Division, 15 Teşrin-i Evvel 1311 [27 October 1895].
9 The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA): FO 195/1887, Vice-Consul Hampson
to Consul Cumberbatch, 28th October, 1895.
10 BOA: DH.ŞFR 184/3, Feham, District Governor of Muş to Ministry of Interior, 1 Teşrin-i
Sani 1311 [13th November, 1895].
11 See also Kévonian, 2015.

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86 Polatel

District Governor in Istanbul, Governor of Harput, member of the Council of

State, and then as the Governor of Adana (Demirel, 2016, pp. 208–9). During
this period, Musa Bey, who had held various government posts in the region,
was in exile in Medina because of various acts of violence committed upon his
orders against Armenians and two American missionaries, George Knapp and
Dr Reynolds, in the 1880s. Still, this particular family relation and links of simi-
lar nature might have given the Mirza Bey group, the leaders of a considerable
Kurdish population in the Mutki and Huyt region, useful means of connection
with central authorities. Thus, there were various connections among the local
actor groups involved in this massacre, and among them and Istanbul. Bitlis
was admittedly far from Istanbul, but it was not an isolated island.
Finally, an important actor involved in the unfolding of this case was act-
ing Governor Ömer Bey, who was later appointed as Governor of Bitlis. A
career bureaucrat, Ömer Bey had served in various state agencies, including
the Ministry of Finance. Before his appointment in Bitlis, he had also served
briefly in the investigation commission tasked with investigating the Sasun
Massacre.12

The Massacre in Bitlis Town

The summer of 1895 was a period of worry and anxiety for Christians in Bitlis.
An incident that took place in a coffee house provides insights concerning the
situation on the ground. In the beginning of July, a man named Halit threat-
ened non-Muslims, claiming that the Christians would be ‘cut off’ in three
days, starting with outsiders.13 Halit was briefly taken into custody but released
shortly after. Around the same time, George Knapp wrote a letter to the British
consulate reporting on some sort of growing Muslim society in the town.14
Knapp was worried because people associated with this society were vowing
to shed blood if a reform scheme were to be accepted. British consular officials
in other places, like Muş and Erzurum, also reported the formation of similar
associations in their regions, noting again that these people were preparing for
violent action and also that they were encouraged in this direction by various

12 BOA: İ.DH 1196/93597, Decree, 27 September 1306 [9th October 1890] and BEO: 561/42044,
Sublime Porte to Ministry of Interior, 17 Kanun-ı Sani 1310 [29th January 1895].
13 TNA: FO 424/183, extract from private letter, 31st July, 1895.
14 TNA: FO 424/183, extract from private letter, 10th July, 1895.

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The Armenian Massacre of 1895 in Bitlis Town 87

low-level officials and religious sheikhs.15 These notes sent before the outbreak
of the massacres indicate a level of Muslim mobilisation across a broad region
in the summer of 1895, including in Bitlis. An interesting point concerning
this mobilisation is the timing. In his examination of the Harput massacre, Ali
Sipahi (2018, pp. 71–2) shows that there were rumours of an oncoming massa-
cre and a situation of underlying excitement in June–July 1895, with anxieties
reaching a new height in October. In Bitlis, similarly, the massacre-threat inci-
dent took place in July but nothing happened until the end of October.
After the Istanbul Hnchag demonstration on 30th September, Hacı Tayyip,
who was based in Muş, travelled to Bitlis. According to an account published
in Hnchag, the official organ of the Hnchag party, he left Muş, visited various
villages and Kurdish groups, gave them instructions, and then arrived in Bitlis
(Hnchag, 1895). There, he held meetings with sheikhs and urban notables.
According to this account, concrete plans for the Bitlis massacre were made
at these meetings. A similar claim is found in a letter written by an Armenian
eyewitness in the immediate aftermath of the Bitlis massacre (Troshag, 1896).
This letter also identifies Hacı Tayyip as an organiser of the violence, noting
that the objective of his Bitlis visit was to provoke people into massacring
Armenians and pillaging their goods with the help of local sheikhs. The British
vice-consul Charles Hampson in Muş also identified him as a ‘great source of
danger’, a truly fanatical person with much influence among Muslims (House
of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1896b, p. 3). An important point here is
that the complaints were not confined to the Bitlis case; Hacı Tayyip was also
accused of provoking violence in other parts of the province, including Muş.
Before the massacre, there was a sense of panic among Bitlis Armenians. As
in other places where such atrocities occurred, there was increased Muslim
armament before the massacre, accompanied by gun searches and disarma-
ments by state forces targeting Armenians. Worried by the increased weaponry
and open threats, Armenians from the town went to the Prelate, requesting
him to meet with acting Governor Ömer Bey. On that Thursday, one day before
the massacre, the Prelate met with the acting Governor and reported the anxi-
ety as well as some of the deeds of Muslims that had caused them to panic.
Ömer Bey told the Prelate that he had taken every precaution and showed him
a telegram from the Sultan concerning the reform scheme. A disturbance was
unexpected and impossible; he was personally responsible, even for the ‘feath-
ers of a chicken’ belonging to Armenians (Hnchag, 1896). Upon this assurance,

15 TNA: FO 424/183, Vice-Consul Hampson to Consul Graves, 26th August, 1895, and Consul
Graves to Sir P. Currie, 3rd September, 1895.

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88 Polatel

fears receded somewhat and around half of the Armenian bazaar folk decided
to open their shops the following morning.16
The massacre in Bitlis town started around noon while Muslim men were
in mosques for Friday prayer. It was reported that the number of Muslim men
in the town was much higher than usual – ten times more, according to an
Armenian who described the massacre (Hnchag, 1896). Observing the num-
ber of people circulating in the town and the extent to which people going
to the mosque were armed as well as the fact that Muslims were locking up
their shops before going to the mosque, Armenians in the bazaar began to
hastily close their shops. Yusuf, son of Mayor Hacı Yasin, upbraided one of the
Armenian shopkeepers. Two other Armenians witnessing this incident fled
from their shops. As two police officers (zaptiye) were chasing them, Yusuf
fired his gun.17 The massacre started after this. Armenians who could not flee
or find shelter were killed by a number of Muslims flowing from mosques
with the participation of soldiers and police officers. The violence then spread
to the neighbourhoods. It is understood that the main killing continued for
more than a day. In the later phase of the massacre, regular forces were on the
ground but Armenians and missionaries were still besieged in their homes.
Some Armenians who took shelter in two hans were evacuated after a cou-
ple of days and taken into custody with the claim that they had started the
whole event.
According to Knapp and the District Governor of Muş, Feham Bey, the death
toll was more than 500.18 According to an account published in Troshag, the
journal of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, 170 local merchants and
shopkeepers, 300 artisans and craftsmen, and 380 others were killed (Troshag,
1896). There was a similar estimate in Hnchag, which noted the number of
Armenians immediately killed on site as between 500 and 850. While 300
Armenians were identified and properly buried, the remaining bodies, it
was claimed, were burnt by the government to make identification impos-
sible. According to this account, many of these people were later buried in
Turkish cemeteries (Hnchag, 1896). According to the missionaries in the town,
to the best of their knowledge, just a single Muslim person was killed in the
massacre.19 The joint assessment of six embassies regarding the death toll in

16 TNA: FO 424-184, Mr. Knapp to Vice-Consul Hampson, 6 November 1895.

17 TNA: FO 424-184, Mr. Knapp to Vice-Consul Hampson, 6th November, 1895.
18 TNA: FO 424-184, Vice-Consul Hampson to Consul Cumberbatch, 29th October, 1895; and
Mr. Knapp to Vice-Consul Hampson, 6 November 1895.
19 TNA: FO 424-184, Vice-Consul Hampson to Consul Cumberbatch, 3rd December, 1895.

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The Armenian Massacre of 1895 in Bitlis Town 89

the Bitlis town was around 800 people (House of Commons Parliamentary
Papers, 1896a, p. 323). Two days after the start of the massacre, the acting gov-
ernor reported that 38 Muslims and 139 Armenians were killed in the event.20
Later, the Ottoman authorities adjusted these numbers, lowering the total for
Armenians to 136.21 The lack of any kind of substantial attention to identifying
the victims as well as the perpetrators points to the attitude of the government,
that is, as directed towards sweeping things under the carpet. It is impossible
to know the exact number of people who lost their lives in Bitlis. However, it is
clear that there was tremendous violence, and a stark disparity in the numbers
of Muslims and Armenians who were killed.
As noted, the intensely murderous period of the massacre in Bitlis town
continued for more than a day. It is understood that after this initial phase, the
event continued as pillage and violence of lesser intensity. More than a week
after the massacre, Knapp reported that missionaries and Armenians were
‘practically under siege’.22 On 7th November, the Armenian Bishop reported
that Armenians in the city were still unable to leave their homes.23 The
accounts of acting Governor Ömer Bey support the claim that the disorder in
the centre continued for several days. On the 27th, two days after the outbreak
of the massacre, he reported that efforts to stop the pillage were ongoing and
that the local authorities were working to restore order.24

The Aftermath of the Massacre

After the massacre, the Armenians were put under extreme pressure. Those
placed in custody were forced to sign a document (mazbata) stating that they
had attacked the mosque during the Friday prayer and were solely responsible
for what happened. As noted by Edip Gölbaşı (2018, pp. 46–8), this was a com-
mon practice, used by the authorities after massacres in many places.

20 BOA: [Link] 619/7, telegram from Ömer, acting Governor of Bitlis, 15 Teşrin-i
Evvel 1311 [27th October, 1895].
21 BOA: [Link] 9/2, report by Sadeddin Pasha, İbrahim Bey and Cemal Bey, 3 Kanun-ı
Sani 1311 [15th January, 1896].
22 TNA: FO 424-184, Mr. Knapp to Vice-Consul Hampson, 6th November, 1895.
23 BOA: [Link] 619/15, Agob, Armenian Prelate of Bitlis to Secretariat of the Palace, 26
Teşrin-i Evvel 1311 [7th November, 1895].
24 BOA: [Link] 619/7, telegram from Ömer, acting Governor of Bitlis, 15 Teşrin-i
Evvel 1311 [27th October, 1895].

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90 Polatel

In his examination of the Harput massacre, which occurred a fortnight later,

Ali Sipahi scrutinises the changes in the narrative constructions of this event
over time. He emphasises that the Harput massacre was narrated as a Kurdish
invasion by various actors during the massacre and its immediate aftermath
and that Kurds disappeared from these accounts in the following months. In
the Bitlis case, Armenian and British accounts written during or just after the
massacres had recognised the participation of Kurds who were not towns-
people in the massacre (Troshag, 1896).25 The Kurds in these accounts were
identified as having come from Huyt and Mutki, although they were not, in
this case, presented as invaders. The presence of these Kurds and their engage-
ment in widespread looting was also recognised in the reports of the acting
Governor and the Commander in the region written two days after the start
of the massacre.26 According to these reports, the Kurds had carried out acts
of pillage and theft, although they had just happened to be in town for trade
purposes. In both the Bitlis and Harput cases, Kurds and the widespread pil-
lage and theft linked to them had disappeared from the Ottoman state narra-
tive by early 1896. In the report of the Commission written in January, there
was no mention of outsiders.27 The widespread pillage and theft reported by
Ottoman authorities during the event was completely omitted from this later
account and the whole issue of material damage was discussed in relation to
fires started by Armenians.
The development of the Ottoman narrative is also interesting in terms of
the details of the Bitlis case. In the first report written by acting Governor
Ömer Bey, the case was framed as self-defence on the part of Muslims – a fram-
ing that was common among Ottoman authorities. According to this account,
Armenians had attacked unarmed Muslims in mosques and the Muslims had
‘defended themselves with stones, sticks, as well as the guns that they force-
fully took from the hands of Armenians’. It was noted that this attack could
have caused a ‘very grave incident’ had this not been prevented.28
Two days later, a revised narrative appeared in which the attack on
mosques was not mentioned. In this version, it was just noted that Armenians

25 TNA: FO 424-184, Vice-Consul Hampson to Consul Cumberbatch, 29 October 1895 and

Vice-Consul Hampson to Consul Cumberbatch, 6th November, 1895.
26 BOA: [Link] 619/7, telegram from Ömer, acting Governor of Bitlis, 15 Teşrin-i
Evvel 1311 [27th October, 1895], and BOA: [Link] 130/97, cipher telegram from Şemsi Pasha,
Commander of Eighth Division, 15 Teşrin-i Evvel 1311 [27th October, 1895].
27 BOA: [Link] 9/2, report by Sadeddin Pasha, İbrahim Bey and Cemal Bey, 3 Kanun-ı
Sani 1311 [15th January, 1896].
28 BOA: [Link] 33/13, cipher telegram from Ömer, acting Governor of Bitlis, 13 Teşrin-i
Evvel 1311 [25th October, 1895].

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The Armenian Massacre of 1895 in Bitlis Town 91

had attempted to revolt. The question of why they would revolt upon the
acceptance of a reform scheme they were demanding was not considered.
Apparently, Armenians had laid goods in their stores on the street to provoke
local and outsider Kurds into pillage as a tactical ploy and then started fires in
the bazaars. They had also spread the rumour that Muslim neighbourhoods
were under attack in order to disperse the Muslims, who had run to their quar-
ters, but nothing had happened there due to the intervention of authorities.
In the meantime, the fires were also extinguished. While the security forces
were in the Muslim neighbourhoods, some ‘excited’ tribespeople had stolen
goods from a couple of Armenian and Muslim shops. This narrative was also
repeated in the telegram of the military commander who wrote to the centre
on the same day as the acting Governor.29 In both of these accounts, it was
underscored that Armenians had achieved their objective concerning theft. In
other words, they had managed to get their goods stolen. It is also noteworthy
that these accounts made no mention of missionaries.
On 7th November, the Armenian Bishop wrote a note to the Patriarchate
describing the massacre in Bitlis town and ongoing acts of massacre and pil-
lage in the surrounding areas, stressing that Armenians were being forced
into signing documents that they had caused the acts of murder and theft.
According to the Bishop, a just commission could definitely find the initiators
of this barbarity.30 In his response to the claims of the Bishop, acting Governor
Ömer Bey slightly modified his narrative. In this third version, the Bishop him-
self was accused of having been one of the organisers of the alleged Armenian
revolt. According to the acting Governor, the objective of the Armenians was
to carry out a general massacre of Muslims, and those who attacked villag-
ers around the town were also Armenians dressed as Kurds.31 At this moment,
Ottoman authorities were in frequent correspondence on the attacks made by
Hamidian and non-Hamidian tribes in the province. A couple of days earlier,
Ömer Bey himself had written to the Grand Vizier about the acts of murder
and pillage carried out by these tribes in the province.32 Thus, the refutation in
the Bitlis case was not the result of a lack of knowledge or suspicion but an act
of conscious manipulation.

29 BOA: [Link] 130/97, cipher telegram from Şemsi Pasha, Commander of Eighth Division, 15
Teşrin-i Evvel 1311 [27th October, 1895].
30 BOA: [Link] 619/15, Agob, Armenian Prelate of Bitlis to Secretariat of the Palace, 26
Teşrin-i Evvel 1311 [7th November, 1895].
31 BOA: [Link] 619/15, cipher telegram from Ömer, acting Governor of Bitlis, 28 Teşrin-i
Evvel 1311 [9th November, 1895].
32 BOA: [Link] 338/87, telegram from Ömer, acting Governor of Bitlis, 19 Teşrin-i Evvel 1311
[31st October, 1895].

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92 Polatel

Another account of the massacre was written by the investigating Com-

mission on 15th January, 1896. In this last version, as well as the omission of
outsider Kurds and acts of looting mentioned, there was a different actor com-
position. Now, the main culprit was the American missionary in Bitlis, George
Knapp, who had been completely absent from the earlier accounts of the Otto-
man authorities. This time, the alleged Armenian revolutionary activity was
presented as a much more organised effort, led by Knapp, and there was not a
single transgression on the part of Muslims, who had just defended themselves.
Other correspondences among the Ottoman authorities tell a different story.
In the accounts of both the Commander and acting Governor written two days
after the outbreak of the massacre, it was written that they were ‘tending to
the matter in a way that would not cause excitement on the part of tribes’.33
Considering that not a single Muslim was taken into custody during or after
the massacre, we can interpret this as a phrase by which the authorities
on the ground were implying that they were covering it up. A couple of days
later, they wrote a joint request to the centre.34 In this telegram, they noted
that while they were doing all they could to ‘ease the tension’,35 a man called
Sheikh Emin was openly spreading words that were leading to excitement,
transgressions and very grave incidents. They underlined that this man was
saying that the blood of Armenians was waste (heder) and their property and
honour was violable (mübah). Clearly, Sheikh Emin was issuing fetwas declar-
ing Armenians harbis (people of war) and thus beyond the protection of
Ottoman law. According to the acting Governor and the Commander, it was
not appropriate for the authorities on the ground to take measures against
him, but there was an urgent need to have him removed from Bitlis. Thus, they
requested the central government to invite Emin to Istanbul under a pretence
in order to prevent a ‘misunderstanding’ on the part of the people. It is striking
that despite the fact that they were sure beyond doubt that Emin spreading
such talk and abolished the rights of non-Muslims in Bitlis, the Commander
and the acting Governor did not attempt to arrest him and just requested the
central government to intervene.

33 ‘aşayir ve kabailin galeyanını müeddi olamamak esbabıyla iştigal edildiği.’ BOA: [Link]
619/7, telegram from Ömer, acting Governor of Bitlis, 15 Teşrin-i Evvel 1311 [27 October,
1895] and BOA: [Link] 130/97, cipher telegram from Şemsi Pasha, Commander of Eighth
Division, 15 Teşrin-i Evvel 1311 [27th October 1895].
34 BOA: [Link] 33/75, cipher telegram from Ömer, acting Governor of Bitlis and Şemsi
Pasha, Commander of Eighth Division to the First Secretary of the Palace, 20 Teşrin-i
Evvel 1311 [1st November, 1895].
35 ‘heyecanın izale ve teskini ile geceli gündüzlü iştigal olunmakda.’ (Ibid).

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The Armenian Massacre of 1895 in Bitlis Town 93

In the days following the outbreak of the massacre, acting Governor

Ömer Bey continued writing to the central government about Emin. On
4th November, he reported that Sheikh Küfrevi was not himself because of his
old age. The acting Governor underlined that Emin had come to Bitlis from a
village and rose to prominence because of his relationship to Sheikh Küfrevi.
He had established an aura of divinity, and worked for his personal interests
behind ‘the veil of sheikhdom’. Moreover, he was spreading the aforemen-
tioned incitements that would surely be dangerous. Based on this, Ömer Bey
repeated his former request for Emin’s removal, emphasising the urgency of
the matter.36
On the 7th, the Grand Vizier informed the acting Governor that removing
Emin from Bitlis was not an appropriate measure because it ‘would prob-
ably break the hearts of the Muslim population’. Acting Governor Ömer was
ordered to politely explain the existing political situation to Emin. Could it be
hoped that he would show good will towards such reports and advise and stop
his conduct? Was his reported conduct ‘harmful taking the place and time’ into
consideration?37 The acting Governor was ordered to consider these questions
and report back immediately.
This order is most revealing. Despite the fact that Emin had publicly
announced Armenians to be fair prey according to religious law and that the
local authorities had insistently requested his removal from Bitlis to restore
order, the central government behaved as if nothing had happened – as if
Emin had not made public declarations against Ottoman laws, the Ottoman
understanding of sharia and sultanic prerogatives during and after a massacre,
moreover, in which hundreds of Ottoman subjects were killed. Emin’s words
were not significantly ‘harmful’ in the eyes of the government. The acting
Governor and the Commander were merely ordered to politely report the situ-
ation to him and explore whether he would take their advice with good will.
Clearly, his fetwas were not regarded by the central government as breaches
of the law and the authority of the Sultan even though they appear to have
been quite obviously incompatible with the basic norms of the rule of law. This
strengthens the argument that the Porte essentially provided covert support
for the perpetrators of the massacres more generally.
On 11th November, the acting Governor sent another telegram to the central
government, reporting that he had politely informed Emin about the current

36 BOA: [Link] 619/13, cipher telegram from Ömer, acting Governor of Bitlis, 23 Teşrin-i
Evvel 1311 [4th November, 1895].
37 BOA: [Link] 619/13, cipher telegram from Grand Vizierate to the Province of Bitlis,
29 Teşrin-i Evvel 1311 [11th November, 1895].

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94 Polatel

political situation on numerous occasions but his ideas and conduct were
unchanged and he was an absolute hindrance against the restoration of order
and reform. On the previous day, a grave incident had almost occurred because
of him, which was prevented at the last minute thanks to the measures of the
Commander. According to the acting Governor, many Muslims in the town
actually disliked Emin; therefore, his leave would not cause discontent but
rather relief for the majority of them. On this basis, acting Governor Ömer
repeated his request for Emin’s removal from the city under some pretence.
He would send Emin away with respect in such a way that no-one would think
he had been ‘removed’. Ömer Bey insisted that the well-being of the state and
Bitlis required this measure.38
The acting Governor waited four days for an order. On the 15th, he decided
to send another telegram, which constitute the most explicit account given
by Ömer. This time, he named three additional persons, all officials affiliated
with the local government, as people sharing the same ideas as Emin. These
were Mayor Hacı Yasin, his son Yusuf, who was also on the local administrative
council, and another local official, named İbrahim. As mentioned before, it
was Yusuf who had fired the signal shot that started the massacre. In his note,
the acting Governor did not specify the details of their activities but noted
that these four men were all ‘interest-seeking’ persons who continuously acted
on their ideas that were against the sacred law (hukuk-ı mukaddese) of the
Sultanate, and the honour and peace of Islam (namus ve selamet-i İslamiyete
mugayir). They were preventing the lowering of tension, hindering the govern-
ment investigation and prosecution related to the attempted rebellion, firing
up the public and provoking and emboldening tribal people. Because the four
men were so insistent on behaving in this way, the acting Governor thought
that their behaviour could no longer be explained by personal interest alone.
This, he argued, implied the extent to which they were the servants and help-
ers of foreigners.39 Thus, their removal was an absolute and urgent necessity.40
This document is exceptional in terms of its explicitness. Hundreds of
people were massacred in the Bitlis town and the disturbance continued for
weeks. The government, however, did not directly accept these facts, and in
a telegram from the same period, acting Governor Ömer Bey openly refuted
the claims of the Armenian Bishop, who had begged him to provide safety and

38 BOA: [Link] 77/62, cipher telegram from Ömer, acting Governor of Bitlis, 30 Teşrin-i
Evvel 1311 [11th November, 1895].
39 ‘… ecanibe hizmet ve muavenet derecelerini ima eder …’
40 BOA: [Link] 77/62, telegram from Ömer, acting Governor of Bitlis, 3 Teşrin-i Sani 1311
[15th November, 1895].

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The Armenian Massacre of 1895 in Bitlis Town 95

‘aman’ (Islamic protection that terminates harbi status). However, this tele-
gram shows that Ömer was not comfortable with the situation, at least not
with the extent and duration of violence. In his terms, what was going on was
against the sacred law, and honour and peace of Islam. The judicial and admin-
istrative process was not working because of Sheikh Emin and some urban
notables who were ‘intervening’. The acting Governor did not specify the form
of this intervention or what he thought they were trying to do. However, taking
the accounts of local Armenians and missionaries into consideration, it can be
reasoned that the pressure put on Armenians from different groups to procure
false evidence was primarily applied by these people, who had significant posi-
tions within the local government.
Five days later, the Commander sent the central government another
telegram, which shows us that there were significant divergences of opinion
between military and civil authorities on the ground.41 In this telegram, the
Commander stood by his earlier statement concerning Emin. He did not repeat
the fetwa issue but confined himself to referring to his earlier correspondence,
emphasising that Emin was putting the government in a difficult position. The
Commander did not mention sacred or religious law. Apparently, his concern
focused on the interests of the state as he understood them.
In this document, the Commander noted that Emin was a khalif of Sheikh
Küfrevi and his brother-in-law, and ‘all unruly Kurds in the provinces of Van,
Bitlis, Erzurum and Diyarbekir’ were his followers – in other words his flock.
If he were forcefully removed from Bitlis, ‘a second excitement would take
place’ (ikinci bir heyecanın vukuu), yet his presence in Bitlis also seemed inap-
propriate. Thus, he should have been invited to the capital on some pretence,
under the guise of honorary promotion. This part of the Commander’s assess-
ment was not so different from that of the acting Governor, but the alleged
importance attributed to Emin is striking. The second part of his assessment
is even more interesting. The Commander accepted that the remaining people
reported by the acting Governor were of the ‘interest-seeking’ type. On the
other hand, he argued that they had not carried out any specific abuses that
would affect the investigation and prosecution. The last sentence of this tele-
gram is also striking. The commander wrote, ‘In the name of truth and loyalty,
I declare that the reasoning and activities on the basis of which the warning
of the seat of the Governorate about them [the men in question] are built are
clear to me.’42 The Commander was certainly accusing the acting Governor

41 BOA: [Link] 77/62, cipher telegram from Ahmed Şemsi Pasha, Sekizinci Fırka Kumandanı,
8 Teşrin-i Sani 1311 [20th November, 1895].
42 Ibid.

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96 Polatel

and taking a firm stance to guard the men involved in the massacres, but what
was clear to him is not clear to us.
In December, the central authorities discussed the requests of the acting
Governor and the Commander. On the 3rd, the Commander-in-Chief wrote to
the Grand Vizierate, noting that it was necessary to invite Emin to the capital
in an appropriate manner because of the local situation.43 On the 25th – so,
almost a month later – the Grand Vizier submitted the decision of the Council
of Ministers concerning the matter to the Sultan. Emin’s case was separated
from the three local officials (Mayor Hacı Yasin, Yusuf, and İbrahim), who
were exonerated (it was noted that there was no need to punish them). The
accounts and complaints of the acting Governor concerning Emin were omit-
ted from the decision. It was just noted that the local Commander wanted
Emin to be invited to Istanbul as a guest because he was causing difficulties for
the operations of the government but his arrest might cause further tension
in the region.44 Thus, Emin’s acts and discourse were not officially regarded as
transgressions of law but as a managerial problem.
On 22nd December, the Commission headed by Sadeddin Pasha left Muş
for Bitlis, purportedly to investigate the events. According to the British vice-
council in Muş, the Commission had openly threatened Armenians there
with ‘extermination if they intrigued’, and ‘warned them against expecting
foreign intervention’.45 In Bitlis, the Prelate submitted a report to Sadeddin
Pasha about the murders, pillage, forced conversions, and illegal arrests of
Armenian notables. The Pasha’s account of the meeting suggests that he prac-
tically interrogated the Prelate rather than gathering information and taking
his complaints into consideration.46 On the day of Sadeddin’s arrival, Ömer
Bey had reported to the centre that the 46 Armenians in custody were charged
on the basis of their confessions with engagement in revolutionary activity
and wounding with the intent to murder. According to the same report, the
Armenian Prelate was also a revolutionary and a participant in the rebellion
because he was found in the same place with those who had confessed their
crimes. According to Ömer Bey, it would be against logic that the prelate was

43 BOA: [Link] 77/62, Commander-in-chief to the Grand Vizierate, 21 Teşrin-i Sani 1311
[3rd December, 1895].
44 BOA: [Link] 77/62, Decision of Council of Ministers, 13 Kanun-Evvel 1311 [25th December,
1895].
45 TNA: FO 424/184, Sir P. Currie to the Marquess of Salisbury, 24th December, 1895.
46 BOA: [Link] 133/75, telegram from Sadeddin Pasha, 15 Kanun-ı Evvel 1311 [27th December,
1895].

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The Armenian Massacre of 1895 in Bitlis Town 97

not one of them.47 Thus, during his meeting with Sadeddin, the Prelate was
also treated as a suspect.
A couple of days after the arrival of Sadeddin, the Grand Vizier sent a sur-
prising order to the acting Governor. This order reflects the commands of
Abdülhamid II – after the local state representatives, both civilian and mili-
tary, had requested the removal of Emin from Bitlis. According to this order,
the respect and obedience of Kurds to such sheikhs demanded no explanation;
the majority of the Kurdish population in the eastern provinces were the fol-
lowers of Sheikh Emin; thus, he could not be invited to Istanbul. Such a move
would break people’s hearts and lead to undesired incidents. Thus, Ömer Bey
was to properly inform the Sheikh regarding the degree of the Ottoman gov-
ernment’s faith and trust in people who possessed power and dignity like him-
self. Ömer was ordered to bring the Sheikh to the side of the government by
giving him honours. This would ensure that the Sheikh would serve the state
appropriately.48 Instead of applying a measure like chastisement, which was
deemed unsuitable in the context of the situation, the central government had
decided to benefit from Emin’s influence because this would not cause com-
plaint by any party involved. Armenians or British consuls, it seems, were not
even parties to be rhetorically taken into consideration. Just before this order
was sent, the acting Governor Ömer Bey was appointed as Governor and deco-
rated with a very prestigious medal (Osmaniye 1st rank) (House of Commons
Parliamentary Papers, 1896b, p. 16).
After this turn of events, Ömer Bey stopped sending telegrams about Emin
or local notables. His remarks regarding the honour and peace of Islam or the
sacred law of the Sultanate also became things of the past. He took an active
part in the marginalisation and dishonourable discharge of Feham Pasha – the
District Governor of Muş who had prevented the massacre there (House of
Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1896b, p. 16). In the spring, American mis-
sionary Knapp was accused of organising an Armenian rebellion in Bitlis and
briefly arrested. He temporarily left the region, although no official charges
were brought against him. The Prelate was tried and sentenced to capital pun-
ishment. The top document in the official file concerning his case was the brief
massacre account in which he had demanded aman. In line with the general

47 BOA: DH.ŞFR 186/32, cipher telegram from Ömer, acting Governor of Bitlis to the Ministry
of Interior, 10 Kanun-ı Evvel 1311 [22nd December, 1895].
48 BOA: [Link] 619/13, Grand Vizierate to the Province of Bitlis, 20 Kanun-ı Evvel 1311
[1st January, 1896].

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98 Polatel

amnesty regulations, his sentence was later reduced to 15 years imprisonment

(Altıntaş, 2018, p. 297).
In the March of 1897, then Governor Ömer Bey wrote an interesting telegram
to the central government. He explained that Sheikh Emin and a group of local
notables, including Mayor Hacı Yasin and İbrahim along with Hacı Necmeddin
and his larger household were corresponding with Kurdish tribes and other
Kurdish peoples around Muş and other regions, and a man named Murad from
Dagestan; together, they were fomenting a rebellion. He underlined that these
people had illegally accumulated considerable power and wealth, by settling
their armed men on the lands they had seized. This time, at another Friday
noon, they had found some boars, set them free running towards the Bitlis
town centre and firing weapons behind them to drive them into the people
and cause pandemonium. According to the Governor, the ploy was thwarted,
but it was necessary to immediately remove at least the most dangerous men
in this group from the city for the sake of order.49 In the months that followed,
the urban notables he complained about wrote several letters of complaint
against Ömer Bey to the central government. After investigating the matter,
the Council of Ministers decided to switch the placements of the Governors
of Bitlis and Mamuretülaziz and to exile Hacı Necmeddin to Diyarbekir. In the
summer of 1898, however, before this decision was implemented, Ömer Bey
passed away.50

Conclusion

This examination of the Bitlis massacre has shown that mass violence against
Armenians in Bitlis was carried out with the active participation of a num-
ber of local actor groups who were linked to one another through various
ways. In this case, urban notables, tribal Kurds, and some religious authori-
ties were directly involved in the organisation and execution of the massacre.
In fact, declarations and fetwas similar to that of Sheikh Emin were reported

49 BOA: DH.ŞFR 206/39, cipher telegram from Ömer, Governor of Bitlis to the Ministry of
Interior, 19th March, 1313 [31st March, 1897].
50 BOA: [Link].M 33/29, telegram from Abdülhalim, son of Hacı Necmeddin, Bahri, son
of Şemseddin, and Tevfik, son of Yasin; BOA: [Link] 90/47, decision of the Council of
Ministers, 3 Kanun-ı Evvel 1313 [15th December, 1897]; and BOA: BEO 1168/87552, Grand
Vizierate to Commander-in-chief, 20th July 1314 [1st August, 1898].

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The Armenian Massacre of 1895 in Bitlis Town 99

from across the region during the massacres. This study supports the view of
the massacres as a related series of events. Emin was not an ordinary sheikh
but one of the top religious authorities within the Khalidi order, renowned as
the spiritual leader of the majority of Kurds in the Ottoman East. The words
and actions of Hacı Tayyip and Sheikh Emin indicate that the role of local
power holders in the unfolding of the massacres of 1894–97 should be clearly
acknowledged. However, this does not mean that all the massacres that took
place in this period can be explained with reference to this particular religious
network – because there were also massacres in regions like Sivas, Konya and
Trabzon which were beyond Emin’s zone of influence.
A number of factors seems to have played a role in shaping the context of
the Bitlis massacre. Violent mobilisation on the basis of religious difference
was clearly crucial. The resurgence of the reform issue which fed the fears
of losing dominance among Muslims also seems to have played a role. Also
important were material motives, explicitly attributed by the (then) acting
Governor Ömer Bey to tribal Kurds who were involved in pillage during the
massacre and to local notables who grabbed the lands of Armenian peasants
after the massacre. Thus, there were multiple factors shaping the unfolding of
this massacre.
This study has also revealed differences among the Ottoman authorities in
the immediate aftermath of the massacres. Emin was seen as a trouble-maker
both by the civilian and military authorities on the ground. However, their
requests for his removal were dismissed by the Porte – despite the fact that mil-
itary and civilian authorities in Istanbul, including the Commander-in-Chief
and the Council of Ministers also supported the demands of local authori-
ties. This does appear to show the extent to which Abdülhamid II imposed
his will on the Ottoman bureaucracy during the massacres. He was the final
decision-maker and his decision was to reward the Sheikh – despite the fact
that he had declared the fundamental rights of Bitlis Armenians to be violable.
This supports the argument that the Sultan’s will and agency played an impor-
tant role in shaping the context and outcomes of the massacres of 1894–97.
What is unique about Bitlis is that the local initiators of this massacre were
actually identified by the acting governor and commander, who began to fight
over the right course of action that would be taken against them. Probably,
Bitlis was not the only case where the massacre was covered up, but it may be
the only case where the cover-up took place alongside explicit disputes among
Ottoman authorities concerning the substance and implications of the sacred
law of the Empire.

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100 Polatel

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Richard E. Antaramian, who kindly read the first-draft of
this paper, for his comments and suggestions. I also thank the two anonymous
referees of the Kurdish Studies Journal for their feedback and suggestions.

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 Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 103–128
Kurdish Studies
Archive
[Link]/ksa

Memory as Experience in Times of Perpetual

Violence: the Challenge of Saturday Mothers
vis-à-vis Cultural Aphasia
Özgür Sevgi Göral | ORCID: 0000-0002-5446-3014
Research Fellow, French Institute of Geopolitics (IFG), Université Vincennes
Saint-Denis (Paris VIII), 2, rue de la Liberté, 93526 Saint-Denis Cedex, France
ozgursevgigoral@[Link]

Abstract

The 1990s saw major developments within the Kurdish movement in Turkey, both
politically and militarily. The Turkish state responded with a new repertoire of vio-
lence, characterized by irregular warfare methods. This article situates the phenom-
enon of enforced disappearance, employed by the state as part of its asymmetric
strategy, within the broader context of memory space and everyday experience. For
this, I follow the trajectory of the sittings of Saturday Mothers as performances, focus-
ing on the case of Cizre. First, the phenomenon of enforced disappearance is situated
within the historical background of the Kurdish conflict in the 1990s. Then, the Cizre
and Istanbul Saturday Mothers’ sittings are compared in terms of memory making
and the politico-symbolic sites they produce scrutinized as memory knots (nœuds de
mémoire), tying the past to present and personal to political. Finally, I endorse the
introduction of a novel term, cultural aphasia, to broaden and deepen the memory
debate. Thus, through a focus on human and social relations, emotions and experi-
ences, forms of state violence are revealed as continuously reproducing specific politi-
cal subjectivities and struggles in everyday life.

Keywords

cultural aphasia – enforced disappearance – memory making – state violence –

Saturday Mothers

Published with license by Koninklijke Brill BV | doi:10.1163/9789004700406_006

© Özgür Sevgi Göral, 2021
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
104 Göral

Bîrewerî wekî tecrubeyek di demên tundiya

domdar de: vexwendina meydanê ya Dayikên
Şemiyê ya li hemberî afaziyaya çandî

Salên 1990an di tevgera Kurdî ya li Tirkiyeyê de hem ji hêla siyasî û hem jî ya leşkerî
ve bûn şahidê pêşveçûnên mezin. Dewleta Tirk bi repertuvareke tundî ya nû ku xwedî
karaktera rêbazên şerê bêpergal bû bersiv da. Ev gotar, diyardeya kujernediyariyê ku
dewletê ew wekî perçeyeke stratejiya xwe ya asîmetrîk bikar dianî, di qadeke firehtir
a bîreweriyê de û di çarçoveya tecrubeya jiyana rojane de dinirxîne. Ji bo vê yekê, bi
hûrgilîbûna li ser mînaka Cizîrê, ez rewşa roniştinên Dayikên Şemiyê wekî performans
dişopînim. A yekem, diyardeya kujernediyariyê di paşxana dîrokî ya pevçûna Kurdan
a 1990an de hatiye bicihkirin. Piştre, roniştinên Dayikên Şemiyê yên Cizîr û Stembolê
ji hêla çêkirina bîreweriyê ve tên berawirdkirin û cihên siyasî-sembolîk ku ava kirine,
ew cih, wekî girêkên bîreweriyê (nœuds de mémoire) ku do bi îro ve û takekesiyê bi
siyasetê ve girê dide tên lêkolîn. Herî dawî, ji bo berfirehkirin û hûrgilîkirina nîqaşa
bîreweriyê ez bikaranîna termeke nû ya bi navê afaziyaya çandiyê guncan dibînim. Ji
ber vê yekê, bi hûrgilîbûneke li ser têkiliyên mirov û civakiyan, hest û tecrubeyan tê
dîtin ku şêwazên tundiya dewletê di jiyana rojane de bi awayekî domdarî bi çêkirina
kirdewarî û têkoşînên sîyasî yên taybet eşkere dibin.

Bîrewerî wek ezmûnêk le katî tundutîjî

berdewamda: berengarî daykanî şemme beramber
lallî kultûrî

Deyey newetekan pêşkewtinî serekî lenaw bizavî kurdî le turkya, lerrûy siyasî û ser-
baziyewe, be xowe dît. Dewlletî turk be kerestey tazey tundutîjîyewe, ke be mîtodî
cengî narrêk denasrêtewe, wellamî dayewe. Em witare dyardey winbûnî zoremlê
dexaterrû ke wek beşêk le sitratijî nahawsengîyaney dewlletda û le çwarçêwey firawa-
ntirî fezay yadewerî û ezmûnî rojaneda bekarhatuwe. Bo emeş, be sernic xistne ser
keysî cezîre, min şwên pêy rêçkey nimayişî danîştnekanî daykanî şemme hellde-
grim. Yekem, diyardey winbûnî zoremlê dekewête naw paşxanî mêjûyî kêşey kurd le
deyey newetekanda. Dwatir, berawirdî nêwan danîştinekanî daykanî şemmey cezîre
û estenboll le rûy yadawerîsazî dekat we ew pêge siyasî-sîmboliyaney berhemî dênin
wek grêy bîrewerî depişkinêt, (nœudis de mémoire) bestnewey rabirdû be êstawe w
kesî be syasîyewe. Le kotayîda, bo firawankirdin û qullkirdnewey dîbeytî yadewerî,

Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 103–128

Memory as Experience in Times of Perpetual Violence 105

pêşkeşkirdnî zaraweyekî nabaw, lallî kelturî, pesend dekem. Bemcore, le rêgey tîşk xist-
neser peywendîye miroyî û komellayetîyekan, soz û ezmûnekan, şêwekanî tundutîjî
dewllet wek dûbare berhemhênanewey berdewamî babetî û xebatî siyasî diyarîkraw le
jyanî rojaneda aşkra dekrêt.

Wextê şîdetê bêpeynî de xatira bena tecrube: duştê

afazîya kulturkîye de mucadeleyê Mayanê Şemeyî

Serranê 1990an de tevgerê kurdan Tirkîya de xeylê averşîyayîşê girsî dîyî, hem
hetê sîyasetî ra hem kî hetê leşkerîye ra. Dewleta tirke bi repertuarê şîdetî yo newe
cewab da ci, taybetmendîye kî usûlê cengî yê bêserûberî bîyî. Na meqale fenomenê
vîndîkerdişanê zoranîyan ke hetê dewlete ra sey parçeyê stratejîya xo ya asîmetrîke
xebitnîyayî, ey keno zereyê kontekstê hîrayî yê xatirgeh û tecrubeyanê rojaneyan. Seba
naye, ez sey performansî raywanîya roniştişanê Mayanê Şemeyî taqîb kena, tede giranî
dana Cizîre ser. Verê, fenomenê vîndîkerdişanê zoranîyan zereyê tarîxê lejê kurdan
ê 1990an de ca beno. Dima, roniştişê Mayanê Şemeyî yê Cizîre û Îstanbulî hetê xati-
rasazîye û nîşangehanê sîyasîyan ra yenê têveronayene ke sey girêyê xatirayan (nœuds
de mémoire) etud benê û vîyarteyî bestnenê nikayî, şexsî kî bestnenê sîyasî. Peynîye
de, ez wazena termêko newe bidî naskerdene: afazîya kulturkîye. Wina munaqeşeyê
xatirayan bibo hîrayêr û xorînêr. Coka giranî dîyena têkilîyanê komel û însanan, hîs û
tecrubeyan ser ke tewirê şîdetê dewlete eşkera bibê sey subjektîvîyî û mucadeleyanê
cuya rojanî yê sîyasîyanê taybetîyan ê ke timûtim xo zêde kenê.

Introduction

Suphiye Durgut is the wife of Süleyman Durgut, who was forcibly disappeared
on July 14, 1994 in Cizre. She was 29 when her husband was disappeared, and
she has since struggled hard to look after her family, raise her six children, and
continue her everyday life. She also weaved a politico-symbolic thread of resis-
tance into her resilience, melancholy, and care, with her acts of remembrance,
for Suphiye Durgut attended each and every sitting of the Saturday Mothers
in Cizre.
The action of the Saturday Mothers (Kurdish: Dayîkên Şemîyê; Turkish:
Cumartesi Anneleri) – is a silent sit-in protest where the wives and mothers
of the disappeared gather each Saturday in Cizre center. They hold the photo-
graphs of their vanished relatives, those who were forcibly disappeared, often

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106 Göral

tortured and generally assassinated by state-supported forces and paramilitar-

ies. Holding up the photograph of her husband, disappeared and presumed
dead, is a profound act of commitment for Suphiye, something sacred. “When
you kill someone,” she explains, “you are destroying a sculpture made by God.”1
This article situates the phenomenon of enforced disappearance within a
broader context of state violence, memory space, and everyday experience. To
this end, I follow the trajectory of the sit-in protests of the Saturday Mothers
in Cizre, a city in the province of Şırnak on the River Tigris, close to the Iraqi
border. The performances of the Saturday Mothers of Cizre, I will argue, not
only reveal quotidian and resilient forms of political mobilisation and acts of
memory-making, but also highlight patterns of state violence, colonial hierar-
chies, and the dialectics of secrecy and visibility. Thus, I seek to unpack these
different components embedded in the act of forcibly disappearing people.
First, I will analyse the historical background of the 1990s, when the Kurdish
conflict with the Turkish state entered a new phase and rose to a new level
of violence. I situate the phenomenon of enforced disappearance within this
phase, with a specific emphasis on Cizre. Then, I will explore the trajectory and
the performances of the Saturday Mothers and scrutinize the politico-symbolic
sites they produce as nœuds de mémoire (lit.: knots of memory). My aim is to
reveal some of the political subjectivities and struggles produced and repro-
duced by the response to different forms of state violence in the context of
various temporalities in everyday life, focusing on human and social relations,
networks, emotions, and experiences.
The findings analysed here are based on fieldwork carried out at the Truth
Justice Memory Center (Hakikat Adalet Hafıza Merkezi), a national NGO focus-
ing on human rights violations in Turkey, where I worked as the Director of
the Memory Studies Program. The empirical findings are derived from 248
semi-structured interviews (188 in Kurdish and 60 in Turkish) conducted
between 2012 and 2015, together with four focus group discussions, mostly with
the relatives of the disappeared but also with lawyers, politicians, and activ-
ists. This fieldwork was conducted in Kurdish cities such as Diyarbakır, Şırnak,
Mardin, and Batman, as well as in Istanbul. For the purposes of this article,
I focus on the interviews related to Cizre. I also draw on my personal obser-
vations of Saturday Mothers sittings that I attended over an extended period
in Cizre and Istanbul. In addition, I have analysed the press releases of the
Istanbul Saturday Mothers (2009–20) and Cizre Saturday Mothers, obtained
either through the Hafıza Merkezi archive or through other online resources.

1 Interview, Cizre, September 2013.

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Memory as Experience in Times of Perpetual Violence 107

Finally, I should note that the interviews and focus group discussions were
conducted at different political junctures during the still unresolved con-
flict. They would certainly be quite different in many aspects were they to be
repeated today. However, the main responses and statements made by the
interviewees remain highly pertinent in respect to their general approaches to
memory-making efforts. These perspectives were formed through deep experi-
ences that extended and developed over a long time. Indeed, the recent turn of
events – in which the conflict flared up once again and was again characterised
by extreme state violence – has only, on the whole, sharpened memories and
further contributed to a sense of perpetual violence.

Background: Armed Conflict, State Violence, and Memory-Making

The conflict in Turkey between the Kurdish Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên
Kurdistan, PKK)2 and the Turkish armed forces commenced in 1984 and has
thus shaped and reshaped the country’s political and cultural landscape for
well over three decades now. It has not only constructed the political space
through its different forms of violence, with the wide-ranging repertoire of
state oppression, the guerrilla actions and military confrontations, and the
secretive, off-on political negotiations, but it has also established a contentious
space of memory, narrative, and truth. It was in the 1990s that this conflict
gained momentum, with a massive wave of politicisation and mobilisation
throughout Kurdistan. In other words, there was a constant increase in popu-
lar support for the guerilla forces in the region [which began to control large
swathes of territory in the rural areas (Jongerden, 2007)], the emergence of
new collective challengers voicing politico-legal demands [that were closely
aligned to the PKK’s political program (Watts, 2014)], and the formal entry
into the political arena of the People’s Labor Party (Halkın Emek Partisi, HEP)
(Ölmez, 1995).3

2 For the ideological roots, and political trajectory of the PKK see Joost Jongerden, and Ahmet
Hamdi Akkaya. “Born from the Left: The making of the PKK.” In Nationalisms and Politics in
Turkey Political Islam, Kemalism and the Kurdish Issue, edited by Marlies Casier and Joost
Jongerden, 123–142. London New York: Routledge, 2011; Hamit Bozarslan, “‘Neden Silahlı
Mücadele?’: Türkiye Kürdistanı’nda Şiddeti Anlamak.” In Türkiye’de Siyasal Şiddetin Boyutları,
edited by Güney Çeğin ve İbrahim Şirin, 149–164. Istanbul: İletişim, 2014.
3 For the concept of the new collective challengers, see. Nicole F. Watts, Sandıkla Meydan
Okumak, Türkiye’de Kürtlerin Siyasi Yolculuğu (Istanbul: İletişim, 2014), 85–113.

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108 Göral

This political conjunction was interpreted as a period of sovereignty crisis4

by the state apparatus, and a novel counter-insurgency politics was imple-
mented in response. The regime of State of Emergency (Olağanüstü Hal,
OHAL), in which a regional governorship was instituted and equipped with
very wide-ranging powers, brought a shield of impunity for state forces. The
acts and practices of state agents operating under the jurisdiction of the gov-
ernorship were taken outside the sphere of law (Human Rights Watch, 1990:
13–16). Meanwhile, the military apparatus was restructured for asymmetric
warfare, with newly established counterinsurgency groups involving the par-
ticipation of Kurdish ex-guerilla fighters (“repentants”) and village guards
(civilians enrolled for state militia activities)5 alongside state security and
intelligence personnel. A novel and crucial state actor appeared on the scene,
named the Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counterterrorism Unit (Jandarma
İstihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele Birimi, JİTEM).
Although JİTEM’s existence was denied for many years, this semi-formal
organisation became more active and prominent following the end of a cease-
fire that had been called in 1993. Thereafter, the team of the then President
Süleyman Demirel, Prime Minister Tansu Çiller, and Chief of General Staff
Doğan Güreş introduced a special counterinsurgency security strategy entitled
‘Territorial Dominance and the Expulsion of the PKK from the Region,” aiming
to cut the strategic link between the civilian population and the guerillas. As a
direct result of this major shift in strategy, there was a surge in the number of
enforced disappearances, extra-judicial and arbitrary killings, and overall gross
human rights violations perpetrated on the civilian population (Tezcür, 2010:
780; Göral, Işık and Kaya, 2013: 18–21).
As one of the most ancient settlements in the Şırnak region, and a partic-
ularly active center for political struggle within the ideological and political
hinterland of the PKK, Cizre became a crucial site of politicisation and, conse-
quently, an immediate target of state violence. A broad spectrum of forms of
state violence were implemented in Cizre during the 1990s, which became a
“center” of enforced disappearance. These disappearances targeted members
(known or alleged) of the PKK’s militia and, more generally, those who were
active in the Kurdish political movement. Particularly vulnerable were those
that supported Kurdish armed groups logistically and worked to establish mili-
tary and political links among the guerillas and local people.

4 For an analysis of the notion of sovereignty in its complex and contradictory forms see
Thomas Blom Hansen, and Finn Stepputat. “Sovereignty Revisited.” Annual Review of Anthro-
pology 35, (2006): 295–315.
5 For an analysis of the village guard system see Balta, Yüksel, and Acar 2015.

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Memory as Experience in Times of Perpetual Violence 109

Distribution of Enforced Disappearances in Şırnak by

Year and District
Center Beytüşşebap Cizre Güçlükonak İdil Silopi Uludere

ͺͲ
͹Ͳ
͸Ͳ
ͷͲ
ͶͲ
͵Ͳ
ʹͲ
ͳͲ
Ͳ 1980- After Date Total
1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999
1990 2000 Unknown Figures
Center 2 0 2 3 1 3 2 2 0 2 1 0 18
Beytüşşebap 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2
Cizre 3 1 1 14 48 2 1 1 1 0 0 0 72
Güçlükonak 2 0 1 6 15 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 24
İdil 0 2 0 4 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 14
Silopi 7 1 1 14 10 21 8 2 1 0 2 0 67
Uludere 0 2 0 0 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 6

Figure 1 Distribution of enforced disappearances in Şırnak, by year and district

Source: Göral, 2017: 112

According to a tentative list prepared by Hafıza Merkezi, some 203 people

were forcibly disappeared in Şırnak between the 1980 coup d’état, which sig-
naled the beginning of armed conflict, and 2015. As shown in Figure 1, enforced
disappearances were implemented throughout the province during the 1990s,
but this was concentrated in the mid-decade period starting from 1993, in line
with the new counterinsurgency strategy. Systematic disappearances in Şırnak
declined after 1996, although the practice was not totally stopped until the first
decade of the 2000s. As the chart also shows, the district of Cizre is where
the largest number of disappearances were perpetrated in Şırnak. A total of
72 people were forcibly disappeared from Cizre during the period covered.
Süleyman Durgut was one of those individuals.
From the outset of the deadly counterinsurgency strategies and the imple-
mentation of the program of enforced disappearances, those affected worked to
find the bodies, hold the perpetrators accountable, and preserve their memory.
Enforced disappearances and other forms of state violence implemented dur-
ing the 1990s were perpetrated on a people whose experiences were already sup-
pressed, distorted or ignored by the hegemonic national and collective Turkish

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memory. However, they were not only passive receivers of these omissions and
suppressions; they actively participated in a struggle over memory. The result-
ing manifestations, public gatherings, and political claims thus produced differ-
ent forms of memory-making and commemorations in the already contentious
memory space of the Republic of Turkey. One of the most important symbols of
memory-making was the gatherings of Saturday Mothers.

“Until My Last Breath, after the End of This World”:

the Saturday Mothers

Organised and participated in by relatives of the disappeared, the Saturday

Mothers stands as one of the longest and most important civil initiatives of
memory in Turkey. It was first organised on May 27, 1995, at Galatasaray Square,
on İstiklal Street, a prime location in the downtown area of Taksim, which is a
central part of the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul. Galatasaray Square is frequently
used by human rights activists. The origins of the protest lay in the search for
one of the forcibly disappeared in Istanbul, Hasan Ocak, which ended when
his tortured body was found in a common grave.6
While Hasan Ocak’s relatives and human rights activists, mainly from the
Human Rights Association (İnsan Hakları Derneği, İHD), were looking for him,
they found in the registers of the Forensic Medicine Institute, by mere coin-
cidence, some documents referring to another disappeared person, Rıdvan
Karakoç (Göral, Işık, and Kaya, 2013: 55). On May 27, 1995, inspired by Las
Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and with the leadership of Hasan Ocak’s
family, human rights defenders and families of the disappeared gathered in
Galatasaray Square and began the sittings of Saturday Mothers, or People
(Günaysu, 2013).7
The Saturday Mothers would gather every Saturday at noon, sitting on
the cobbled ground with the photographs of the disappeared in their hands,

6 Disappeared on March 21, 1995, Hasan Ocak was actively involved in a radical leftist organi-
zation and was a widely known local political figure in his neighborhood. Ocak’s body was
found on March 26, in a forest outside the city; even though an investigation was conducted
there, the body went unidentified and was interred in a common grave. His family was able
to identify him from the records of the Forensic Medicine Institute and located the severely
tortured body two days later (İHD, 1994).
7 According to the initial organizers, “Saturday People” was first used; feminists participating in
the organization of the first sittings had insisted on this name. Although a little inaccurate,
the popularly known name of “Saturday Mothers” is mostly used here for ease of reference
and because it is used as standard in Cizre, the case studied.

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silently demanding to learn what had happened and to have those responsible
brought to a court of law. The action was repeated each week at the same time
and place, occasionally with red clover in hand; there were no slogans, just
photographs, stories of the disappeared, and a final press declaration empha-
sising the demand for truth and justice. Despite constant state pressure –
suffering violent police interventions in the sittings, being taken into custody,
and being severely criminalised and threatened by various institutions – the
participants continued their silent vigil for 200 weeks. During this period, the
Saturday Mothers became one of the most important civil initiatives in Turkey,
prompting people from widely differing political stances to examine the phe-
nomenon of disappearances.8
The Saturday Mothers can thus be regarded as a local response to Turkey’s
Kurdish issue, manifesting the struggle over memory in the context of the con-
flict at the time, the mid-1990s. The 1990s and, more broadly, the post-Cold War
period was generally marked by this endeavor of facing past atrocities and a
struggle for the democratisation of collective memories. Conflicts of memory
in Spain and France, over the civil war and colonial experience respectively,
the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the fall of junta regimes in South
America, all represent this global struggle for the establishment of a new and
more pluralist memory tendency (Rousso, 2016: 272).
Argentina is one of the most significant examples of this trend in the sense
that it was the leading country in the struggle for the disappeared, producing
the iconic political figures of the Plaza de Mayo Mothers and Grandmothers.
Scrutinising these women’s performances, Diana Taylor (2003: 171) pointed out
the huge impact of the demonstrations, which created a new form of protest.
The peculiar combination of gender, family, and politics brought together
statements of intimate and personal experience with political utterances in
the public realm.
Following this Argentinian model, the Saturday Mothers in Turkey created
their own peculiar form of protest, revealing critical insights into the phenom-
enon of disappearance. By displaying symbolic gestures and treating politics
as a performance – including, always giving the front place in the sitting to
the families of the disappeared, telling the story of one forcibly disappeared
each week, using the formalised personal details and depiction of the time and
place of the disappearance, and reiterating the names of the perpetrators and
the responsible political authorities – the silent sittings also served to produce
a public memory of the disappearances. Significantly, the protests meant that

8 For a comprehensive account of the commencement of Saturday Mothers/People see

Günaysu, 2013.

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one of Istanbul’s most important spaces became haunted by the figure of the
disappeared.
A number of performative, even iconic, aspects of the Saturday Mothers’
protests – the photographs of the disappeared, the Kurdish mothers sat at the
front in their black or white headscarves, and the endless reiteration of the
stories of the disappeared and the names of the perpetrators – strengthened
the impact of the action. Although the protests in Turkey were similar to those
in Argentina in several ways, the latter case followed an army coup in the cap-
ital and represented mostly an urban and educated middle-class stratum of
Argentinian society. In the case of Turkey, however, those forcibly disappeared
after 1990, individuals supposedly connected to the insurrectionist PKK, were
mostly Kurds, living in the geographical and societal margins. Memory struggle
for the relatives of the disappeared in Kurdistan, therefore, had a more compli-
cated structure due to the ethnic identities and political affiliations of the dis-
appeared. Despite the powerful effect they were able to achieve, on March 13,
1999, the sittings were suspended by the families due to the severe repression
endured (Ocak, 2016).
On January 31, 2009, the Saturday Mothers/People sittings recommenced
in Istanbul, following the drafting of the indictment of the Ergenekon and
Balyoz cases, two high-profile legal actions in which high-ranking military offi-
cers were accused of plotting against the government and organising a coup
(Avşar: 2013, 33–159). Since perpetrators of the enforced disappearances were
reckoned to be among the accused, the primary demand of the Saturday pro-
tests was this time the extension of these legal cases to include the crime of
forcible disappearance. It was therefore a concrete demand for accountabil-
ity and justice that initiated the recommencement. Following the action in
Istanbul, building on the momentum gained as a result of the Ergenekon and
Balyoz cases, Saturday actions were held in a number of Kurdish cities, includ-
ing Diyarbakır, Batman, Yüksekova and Cizre.

The Saturday Mothers of Cizre and noeuds de mémoire

Meltem Ahıska (2014: 164) defined the memory-making process of the Saturday
Mothers as the creation of a counter space, in the sense that it appropriated the
public space with a countermovement. Based on Cynthia Milton’s deployment
of the notion of memory knots, which “make the engagement with the past and
the memorialization of traumas intensely difficult,” Ahıska argues that two
aspects are crucial in Turkey: the knots have a spatiality (being embedded in
specific geographical areas) and point out the lack of language for the people

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Memory as Experience in Times of Perpetual Violence 113

afflicted by violence – hence, the countermovement of Saturday Mothers as a

spatial appropriation (ibid.: 165–66). I will also use the concept of noeuds de
mémoire for a deeper understanding, but I will be following Michael Rothberg’s
definition (2010: 7):

[Memory is] ‘knotted’ in all places and acts of memory are rhizomatic
networks of temporality and cultural reference that exceed attempts at
territorialization (whether at the local or national level) and identitar-
ian reduction. Performances of memory may well have territorializing or
identity-forming effects, but those effects will always be contingent and
open to re-signification.

I argue that, notwithstanding the spatial appropriation of the Saturday

Mothers in Cizre, their performance exceeds all sorts of identitarian reduc-
tions through a specific elaboration of the personal and the political during
their performances. The memory knots they make tie the personal with the
political, as well as the past to the present (and future).
Cizre’s Saturday Mothers are and always have been quite different from
the protesters in Istanbul. In the metropolis, there is a heterogeneous crowd
comprised of relatives of the disappeared, human rights defenders, activ-
ists, and politicians, whereas the crowd is much more homogeneous in the
predominantly Kurdish city, comprising mainly of wives and mothers of the
disappeared. Around 20–30 women, wearing the traditional black burkas of
Cizre, gather each Saturday in front of the central police station. There is no
formal turn-taking for telling stories of the disappeared, which is in contrast to
Istanbul, where the choice is made prior to the demonstration by an İHD com-
mittee. The gatherings at Cizre still exhibit an informal arrangement, however;
approximately five relatives narrate their stories each week.
The person narrating her story stands up while the others stay seated on
the ground showing their photographs. Sometimes they carry more than one
photograph. If, for some reason, a relative is unable to go to the demonstra-
tion themselves, she organises for the photograph to be sent, and the others
will show it for her. The women call these sittings “holding-up-the-photograph”
(Fotograf rakirin [Kurdish]). During the Cizre narrations, plainclothes police,
mostly two officers dressed as civilians, watch the action and videotape the
group. After the sitting, these police officers ask someone chosen from the
crowd to translate what has been said into Turkish.
There is no determined hour for the sitting of Saturday Mothers in Cizre
as there is in Istanbul. The weather may be extremely hot in Cizre, so they
alter the gathering time in line with the seasons. During the summer, the Cizre

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gatherings tend to occur toward nine o’clock in the morning, whereas in the
fall the Mothers gather around lunch-time. At the end of the sitting, the press
release is read. This is far shorter and plainer than the one read in Istanbul,
and the reading is performed by a man from the local Mesopotamia Solidarity
with the Relatives of the Disappeared Association (Mezopotamya Yakınlarını
Kaybedenlerle Dayanışma Derneği, Meya-Der).9

Bearing Witness, Bearing Pain

Suphiye Durgut’s husband, Süleyman, was detained several times by the Cizre
JITEM team before his disappearance, on July 14, 1994. Reportedly, the JITEM
team tortured him extensively: he was stripped and beaten, then put in cold
water, and parts of his body were cut with blades; members of the team put out
their cigarettes on his body, gave him electric shocks and forced him to drink
his own urine. As an imam and thus firm believer, he pleaded for help in the
name of God and the Prophet Mohammed during these sessions. Members of
JITEM team responded by saying that there was no God or Prophet Mohammed
there and continued.10 Suphiye had wished that her husband would be killed
once and for all rather than being subjected to these torture sessions, and she
expressed as much during one Saturday Mothers sitting when it was her turn
to speak.
Almost all the participants and attendees at the Cizre events are women,
except for a smattering of men looking on from MEYA-DER or the Kurdish
movement. The Cizre Saturday Mothers thus disclose the gendered aspect of
memory-making and mourning processes in a striking manner. Although the
majority of the first protestors in the context of Istanbul’s Saturday Mothers/
People were women too, the individuals gathering there comprised a much
more mixed group. In Cizre also, the women are mostly wives, who narrate
their stories very often swearing to God that they will continue to look for their
disappeared until their last breath, after the end of this world. Clearly, this
establishes a powerful iconography.
Against the discriminatory distribution of mourning in the public sphere
(Butler, 2009: 75), these Saturday women claim to be the bearers of mem-
ory and mourning in the public sphere, but their exercise in memory and

9 MEYA-DER is a grassroots organisation established in the Kurdish region in 2007 to sup-

port relatives of the disappeared in their daily struggle and create networks of solidarity
among the families.
10 Interview, Cizre, September 21, 2013.

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Memory as Experience in Times of Perpetual Violence 115

mourning are quite differently characterised to that of the metropolis. The

dress code of the Cizre women reflects a religious belonging, and their use
of the Kurdish language as the sole language of narration establishes their
ethnopolitical position. They narrate the stories of their loved ones, name the
perpetrators and ask for justice, tell their experiences of hard work after the
disappearance and ask after the whereabouts of their loved ones. This narra-
tive borrows from the power of the intimate social relations in the sense that
they narrate the specific catastrophe of the disappearance through a language
of the truncated family.11
Radically different from widowhood, however, the narration of these women
is expressed in the peculiar horror of disappearance, through the liminal-
ity imposed. These are women (partially) unrecognised as widows, and thus
without the attached status, caring for children who transcend the category
of orphan. The absence of a grave to visit on the requisite holy days is a con-
stant wound in the familial memory. Thus, the narrative of the truncated fam-
ily, mainly the narration of the suffering and struggle of women and children,
becomes sayable according to the political specification of the disappearance;
otherwise, these kinds of issues would be closed to the public gaze, kept as
secrets of the familial life.
The peculiar catastrophe and liminality of disappearance are constantly
reiterated by the Cizre Saturday Mothers during their sittings. This notion of
liminality, the ambiguous status of both the disappeared and the wife and
children of the disappeared, is mainly narrated through an emphasis on the
absence of the grave. The women stress that they want to have the bones of
their loved ones (Em hestiyê xwe dixwazin). The horrible despair created by
the absence of a grave, and the eternal uncertainty about the fate of the disap-
peared, is expressed through some commonly repeated themes and enduring
concerns, namely the impossibility of putting flowers on the grave or praying
there together with the children.
The performance of Saturday Mothers is essentially based on repetition. The
same demands are always made, the same stories narrated, and the names of
the same perpetrators are spoken – and the theme of the absence of a grave
is indeed one of the determinant themes in this ritual of remembrance. The
absence of graves also shapes the lives of Saturday Mothers in a more material
fashion since they follow closely each and every excavation, all mass grave and
other sorts of unearthings. The possibility of finding a grave is, in a way, a hope-
ful event since it would end the painful uncertainty about the disappeared

11 Gatti (2012) indicates a very similar use of the concept of family in the Argentinian
context.

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(Göral, 2013: 75). The demand for a proper grave, therefore, is an urgent call for
the re-humanisation of the disappeared through the recognition of his dignity
and his family’s right to mourn properly.
The mourning is omnipotent, though. Mourning is performed and displayed
through a gendered division of labor not only during the sittings of Saturday
Mothers but also in the course of everyday life in Cizre. Wearing solely black
headscarves and clothes, not attending weddings or feasts, not laughing, mar-
rying children without ceremony, and not participating in any public celebra-
tion were the most common symbolic performances that I witnessed. There
were also other recurrent characteristics – such as a sense of shame when feel-
ing happy, swearing to God to never forget the disappeared, even after death,
and talking with the disappeared for hours in the night – which might all be
interpreted as personal performances of mourning. As the carriers of mourn-
ing, the Saturday Mothers were ceaselessly performing symbolic and material
acts to prove that they did not forget, despite a “public prohibition of mourn-
ing” (Nichanian, 2003: 112).
Attending closely to the press statement and speeches of the Saturday
Mothers of both Istanbul and Cizre reveals another dissimilarity between the
two. In Istanbul, the tone of the press statements and individual speeches of
the relatives of the disappeared is very much in line with the hegemonic human
rights discourse of Turkey’s oppositional circles. In Cizre, however, the meta-
language of human rights does not prevail. Firstly, as noted – and except for
the brief press statement read at the end of the sitting – all the women speak
in Kurdish. These speeches in Kurdish do not, therefore, speak to the political
center of Turkey. There is no recourse to the vocabulary of rights but rather a
unique amalgam of quotidian experiences, religious curses, commitment to
the affiliation of the disappeared, and a more political statement elaborated
with experiences of everyday life. The women making these speeches are well
aware that they are at the margin; instead of formulating a call to the state they
intone words of loyalty, commitment, experience, and political belonging.

Memory as Experience

Along with the loss of the grave, another crucial component of the narratives
of the Saturday Mothers is the emphasis on economic difficulties. In Cizre, the
absence of the disappeared was always remembered through economic diffi-
culties, since the area is generally poor and, in most cases, the disappeared was
the breadwinner of the house. After the disappearance, according to their own
words, the women were kneading dough for other people, milling their grains,

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and becoming their cook; they were going to others’ farms for work when their
breasts were full of milk for their infants and then emptying their breasts in
these farms; they were selling the milk and its cream from their sheep, doing
farm-work with their children after they had grown up, collecting cotton and
nuts; they were doing all the hard labor from Iraq to Van, being among Turks,
being among those who killed us; doing everything that men were doing and
thus becoming men (Kaya and Bozkurt, 2014: 28–62).
Thus, the experiences and feelings of the families of the disappeared, the
feelings of absence and catastrophe, were always intertwined with other expe-
riences, such as poverty, discrimination, and suffering due to social class dif-
ferences. As argued by Diane Nelson (2006: 118) in the context of Guatemala,
“[W]e must always think of inter/actions among the imagined and lived body
of the bleeding nation, between indigenous rights and the project of nation
building, among class war, race war and utopian imaginings, of the simulta-
neity of modernity and tradition, and between real bodies and social fantasy,
solidarity and critique.”
The memory of the disappearance was similarly constructed through sev-
eral interactions; the disappeared and the disappearance were always remem-
bered in a complicated network of labour, politics, everyday experiences,
discrimination, and poverty. Thus, the disappearance, instead of standing
alone in the family history as a moment of tragedy now passed, was situated
within a complicated, reverberating nexus of acts and experiences. Narratives
of women, therefore, reflected a peculiar pendulum of the personal and the
political; aspects of the personal were always narrated in an interwoven man-
ner with aspects of the political.
While depicting the melancholy, loneliness and sense of loss following a
disappearance, or the fruitless and interminable search for justice, suddenly,
reference would also be made to the release of Abdullah Öcalan or the return
of the PKK guerrillas in dignity. The raising of children in severe economic dif-
ficulties was easily and swiftly directed to a discussion of the political conten-
tions around education in the mother tongue, one of the main demands of the
Kurdish movement in Turkey denied by the state. The story of a family moving
to another city in Kurdistan was narrated in connection with the demands of
the Kurdish movement for “democratic autonomy” under a new constitution.
The political was thus constantly expressed through the narrative of the mun-
dane details of everyday life. The famous motto of the feminist movement, that
the personal is political, was specifically elaborated by the wives of the disap-
peared, both in the same manner as in the women’s movements, but also in an
idiosyncratic way that combined the acknowledgment of the disappearance
and the ethnopolitical conflict of Turkey’s Kurdish issue.

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According to Frantz Fanon (in Mbembe, 2007: 37), memory and language
concerning the past and present, identity, and death are inherently related to
experience. In other words, memory is not something that is solely remem-
bered but is rather experienced continuously, viscerally. John E. Drabinski,
while interpreting the concept of memory in Fanon’s writings, also emphasises
its crucial place as a notion inherently related to time, politics, and subjectivity
(2013: 16):

Memory, politics, identity, and the new – Fanon crafts an important story
across these terms, creating a sense of relationality for the sake of another
world, politics, humanity, and ultimately, time. The oppressed must share
a time, which, in the end, means that they must simultaneously remem-
ber everything and forget too much.

Thus, memory as concrete experience refers to a peculiar understanding of

time – past, present, and future – where politics and subjectivity are simul-
taneously generated. It is of the temporal, a moment in time, yet permanent,
enduring. The oppressed must remember everything and forget too much. In
Cizre, women participating in the Saturday Mothers protest narrate their quo-
tidian experiences, and all of life’s difficulties, in the same speech with which
they are commemorating their loved ones. The memory of the disappeared is
not solely repeatedly remembered, but also continuously experienced, through
the everyday experiences of the post-disappearance period.

Dialectics of Secrecy and Blatancy: the Pact of Public Secrets

Another crucial component of the narratives at play and work in the sittings
of Saturday Mothers is the insistence on the fact that these enforced disap-
pearances occurred with the knowledge of the people, in the context of the
coexistence of secrets and blatant show. Indeed, the meticulous calculation
of knowing and not knowing, and the simultaneity of hiding and blatantly
showing were at the heart of the enforced disappearances, which, as was the
case elsewhere during the 1990s, created the dialectics of secrecy and visibil-
ity in Cizre.
On the one hand, the enforced disappearances were part of a secret regime
whose structuring, functioning, and ambition was, according to rumors, solely
known by certain important statesmen. On the other hand, the functioning of
the Cizre JITEM team was visible and blatant. The detentions would occur in
urban centers during the day and in a routine fashion, involving the reiteration

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of what became symbolic gestures and images. These included the use of
white Renaults, bearded men wearing snow masks, and the sound of the radios
used by these men. Then, the bodies of the disappeared, when found, were
largely left either at the places of execution, casually buried and covered by
rocks, anonymously thrown into a common grave, and found on the roadsides,
on unused land outside of the villages, on waste-land near to military zones,
in wells, cesspools, and construction sites – that is, poorly hidden or plainly
unhidden, deposited in sites where they were easily seen. Thus, the specific
horror of the enforced disappearances, the “erasing violence” expressed by
Banu Bargu (2014: 44), would be an inadequate notion unless understood in a
broader manner through the dialectics of this blatant carelessness, this openly
furtive, macabre show.
The dialectics of secrecy and visibility as a discursive politics of enforced dis-
appearances is characterised by Michael Taussig (cited in Gordon, 2008: 75) as
a “public secret,” something known about but unspoken and unacknowledged.
Enforced disappearance is simultaneously public and secret; known, heard, or
felt in a way but unstated and inadequately recognised: “everyone must know
just enough to be terrified, but not enough either to have a clear sense of what
is going on or to acquire the proof that is usually required by legal tribunals or
other governments for sanction” (ibid.: 110). Thus, there develops an implicit
agreement about what everyone knows but does not say, a type of pact of pub-
lic secrets.
The pact of public secrets constructed around the enforced disappearances
in Kurdistan was a prime example of this. People in Cizre and elsewhere in the
region were generally aware that there were kidnappings, torture, and killings
going on, but their acknowledgment was discredited by the complicated struc-
tures of the colonial hierarchies. More importantly than that, and confirming
the pact, these deadly strategies became normalised and legitimised for the
majority of the population, since there was almost no protest or demonstra-
tion against the deadly strategies of the state, with the exception of the mass
demonstrations (serhildan) of the Kurdish movement in Kurdish cities during
the 1990s.12
The sittings of Saturday Mothers should also be interpreted as a way of
unpacking the pact of public secrets, both in Istanbul and in Cizre, although
in slightly different manners. In Istanbul, the participants of the sittings them-
selves are designed as a space of encounter, an encounter between, on the
one hand, the mothers and wives of the disappeared seated at the front of

12 For a detailed analysis of mass Kurdish mobilization, including serhildan see Güneş, 2012.

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the crowd with the photographs of their loved ones in their hands, and, on
the other hand, the people passing by on the famous İstiklal Street. Thus, the
Istanbul sitting aims to engage the heterogeneous community of cultural con-
sumers and suchlike, walking around the metropolitan space of Taksim square
and the Beyoğlu district on a Saturday noontime, with a vocabulary of law,
legality, and citizenship.
The sitting of Cizre, inherently more homogeneous, does not aim to speak
to a crowd. It does not claim a space of encounter. Rather, it situates itself as
an act of loyalty and resistance. The choice of the place of the sittings in Cizre,
in front of the police station, is clearly selected to signify the political framing
of the Saturday Mothers. They do not desire to inform, convince or change any
unknown interlocutor’s mind; instead, their concern is to express their exis-
tence and perform their storytelling as an act of visibility and loyalty in the
struggle against state violence:

We go there every Saturday. In front of the police station, we choose

this place deliberately. We wanted to say to the Turkish state, “We’re not
scared. We’re here to annoy you. We’re here to tell you the things that you
know very well. We’re here to say to your face that you are the murderers
of our husbands. […] Even if nothing changes, even your Turkish courts
do not decide for us, your Turkish police do kill us, your Turkish press do
not hear us, we are here. We will tell their stories until the end of our lives,
inshallah.”13

Forms of insistence, repetition, and resilience represented by the Cizre

Saturday Mothers as practices of memory-making are crucial to a broader
understanding of the memory space and the memory debate of Turkey. For a
long time, it has been argued that the Turkish state and society were amnesic
and that the contentious memories of the 1990s – which so deeply affected its
southeastern, Kurdish region – were forgotten or unseen in the western part of
the country. I claim, however, that the term amnesia is inadequate to describe
the memory space of Turkey and its relation with the 1990s.14 I will use a term

13 Interview, Cizre, 13.10.2014.

14 One can even talk of a memory boost instead of amnesia in this context, insofar as differ-
ent contentious narratives on state violence positively flourished in Turkey during the
2000s. Esra Özyürek (2007: 3) interprets this thus: “Yet, at the turn of the twenty-first
century, cultural practices are replete with memory, and people relentlessly struggle over
how to represent and define the past. The growing laments about amnesia attest to the
shared desire to have even more memory in Turkey.”

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interpreted by Paul Bijl (2012) in his analysis of colonial violence in Indonesia

in relation to the Netherlands.
Scrutinizing colonial memory and forgetting in the Netherlands and
Indonesia, Bijl argues that total amnesia is not possible by definition; we
always know that there is something that we forgot. Thus, according to Bijl,
memory and forgetting should not be conceptualised as a binary opposition
and forgetting should not be held equal to absence; the memory and forget-
ting occur as simultaneous acts. Thinking the case of Turkey and the memory
space in respect of the memory-making along with forgetting and erasures
related to Kurdistan promises productive outcomes. The selectiveness of the
components of forgetting, meaning components delineated by discursively
produced silences and non-recognition, reveals the content of the pact of pub-
lic secrets. The pact of public secrets renders forms of state violence and their
broader consequences unmemorable, a conceptualisation that has essentially
been accepted and strategically unquestioned by the larger part of Turkish
(non-Kurdish) society.
Inspired by and with reference to Ann Laura Stoler, Paul Bijl suggests using
the notion of cultural aphasia instead of amnesia. Rather than a forgetting, this
is a “dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary
that associates appropriate words and concepts to appropriate things” (Stoler,
cited in Bijl, 2012: 449). Cultural aphasia has also a direct link to memorability;
unlike amnesia, which is mostly perceived and understood in terms of mem-
ory and the remembering/forgetting binary, in cultural aphasia, “the lack of
language inhibits the production of a memorable past” (Bijl, 2012: 449).
The concept of cultural aphasia, therefore, opens up a space for thinking
about the dominant frames of remembrance and how these produce some
experiences as memorable and others as non-memorable – meaning not
remembered as fact because of a political or other context that renders this
ideologically impossible. In short, cultural aphasia refers to the memory-
making process as the production of a certain type of memory content. Highly
pertinent to the memory debate of the contentious histories of Turkey and
Kurdistan, this is also, I believe, very much in resonance with the struggle of
Saturday Mothers. Participants of Saturday Mothers challenge cultural aphasia
and its lack of a vocabulary, with appropriate words and concepts to appropri-
ate things, through their own performances of memory-making. Telling and
repeating the story of the disappearance, naming the perpetrators, narrating
concrete experiences of the post-disappearance period, altogether establish a
performance of resilience, which constantly attacks the voids and refusals of
the cultural aphasia.

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Everyday Politics, Belonging, and Memory-Making

The Saturday Mothers of Cizre also represent a center of moral and political
authority in both Kurdish society and the Kurdish political movement. Unlike
Istanbul’s Saturday Mothers/People, where, despite the majority of Kurdish
relatives, there is nevertheless a heterogeneity of relatives of the disappeared,
all of the participants of Cizre are personally, directly, and very consciously
affiliated with the Kurdish movement, as a matter of self-identity that also
helps to keep the memory alive. The Kurdish political movement itself has a
specific moral and political hierarchy amongst its members and its dead, based
on different organisational networks.
From my fieldwork observations and based on my interviews, I can claim
that the most valued families are those of the martyred guerrillas; the family
of a fighter who lost his or her life is defined as a value family (değer ailesi).
Then comes the families whose members were influential local leaders and
died (were killed) in the struggle. The families of the disappeared seem to rank
next. In any case, they represent an important center of gravity in the existing
inner circles of power in the Kurdish political movement. This moral power
has significant political outcomes. If, for instance, they veto one of the parlia-
mentarian candidates from their electoral region, it is very unlikely that this
person will be named candidate.
Not every family of the disappeared has the same status in the existing
schemes of the moral hierarchy, however. Those with a closer relationship
to the Kurdish political movement, or with more guerrilla participation, and
those who contribute (im)materially to the movement have more influence.
Socio-economic strength, being part of a respected family or tribe and of a
larger network also contribute to high-level status. The families with lesser
ethical-political authority tend to experience a less well socially integrated and
melancholic process.
Several Saturday Mothers were also politically and socially mobilised after
the disappearances. Some of them went into the ranks of the Kurdish move-
ment’s legal political party, and some of them began to struggle in different
Kurdish NGOs, while others again became local political leaders. During the
Kurdish conflict, women from both sides were deployed in different ways under
the influence of Turkish and Kurdish political mobilisations, based on martyr-
dom, motherhood, and other types of familial, personal, and political labels.15

15 For a thorough analysis of women’s mobilisation during the Kurdish conflict from both
sides, see Ahıska, 2006; Aslan, 2007; Çağlayan, 2007; Şentürk, 2012; Göker, 2015.

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Politicisation in the ideological milieu of the Kurdish movement brought

with it a crucial process of empowerment and the flourishing of new subjec-
tivities for Kurdish women. Those Kurdish women involved in the Kurdish
political movement gained a paradoxical power, in the sense that they attained
a recognised status, but only within the limits of the dominant values and
paradigms of the movement. This, in fact, is a common feature of women’s
mobilisation in different social movements. However, the moral authority of
Saturday Mothers goes somewhat beyond these limitations, largely because
it transgresses and transcends the existing conventions of the nationalist and
leftist politics and their associated organisations. They have, for instance, the
right to criticise the movement’s concrete political tendencies, or the ruling
elite, without being suspected of wanting to leave or harm the movement.
For instance, as the carriers of mourning and as the preservers of the moral
values of the movement, the Saturday Mothers of Cizre were closely following
the BDP participants in the ongoing trials of perpetrators of disappearances.
They were criticising the recruitment policies of their municipality, stating
the municipality was ignoring the children of the value families. In a way, the
women were transforming the status attributed to them as stable carriers of
mourning to intervene in daily politics with a certain authority.
However, this transgressive effect and power should not be overemphasised.
First, not all Saturday Mothers are imbued with such authority; those who are
distanced from the Kurdish political movement, the poorer ones, the lonelier
ones with less social, communitarian, and familial resources and networks,
are further marginalised in a powerless situation. Poverty is not a limit per se,
but it delimits the possibility of mobilisation and, in turn, restricts access to
material and immaterial resources. Also, there are important restraints to this
transgression. The ethico-political debt owed both to the guerrillas and the
“martyrs” of the movement operates as an important demarcation line con-
cerning the expression of criticisms vis-à-vis the daily political issues, guiding
Saturday Mothers back to their primary role of mourning and remembrance.
In a way, this primary role also consists of several transgressions. During the
sittings, by their reiterated narratives, they produce and represent a specific
form of memory in which a unique mixture emerges. Suphiye Durgut was a
typical example of such uniqueness. On the one hand, she names all the per-
petrators of her husband’s disappearance, one-by-one, and on the other hand,
she relates how she regularly dreams about Süleyman. She swears to God,
saying that she will continue to call the perpetrators to account and to pay
for what they did, even after her death. She narrates the story of Süleyman,
of his repeated detentions, his political beliefs, the cruel torture that he was

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subjected to, his relationship with his children, and his honesty, uniqueness,
and perfection.
Suphiye’s narrative thus oscillates between the mundane details of everyday
life and the demands of the Kurdish political movement. Its power stems from
the fact that she interprets something so personal using vocabularies of law,
justice, and religion. She knots a memory of mourning, witnessing, and belong-
ing. At the end of our interview, Suphiye spoke about her dreams, about how
her husband was coming to her dreams. Listening to her oaths before God, one
would believe that her soul really would continue to struggle after her death.
One would believe in the possibility of an afterlife hearing her powerful words
of longing and belief, and one might well put one’s faith in a divine justice.

Conclusion

Currently, the Saturday Mothers have suspended their gathering in Cizre.

Following the curfews commenced after the summer of 2015, the neighbor-
hoods where most Saturday Mothers participants lived were destroyed in
the latest round of state violence, acts of urbicide16 that included curfews
and blockade, multi-force operations and paramilitary incursions involving
state snipers and mercenaries, the shelling and raising to the ground of entire
neighborhoods.17
Some of the wives and mothers migrated to other cities, while others are
now preoccupied with rebuilding their houses and continuing with everyday
life. The immediacy of the current situation has also revealed that the dead of
the now, those of the curfews, are intertwined with the dead of the past, those
of the 1990s. Carrying solely the photographs of loved ones disappeared and
killed during the 1990s seemed to be undoable for the relatives of the latest
civilians killed by the state. They continued to gather for a couple of weeks
after the raising of the curfew and carried the photographs of their husbands,
sons, brothers. After a few weeks, however, they terminated the gatherings.18

16 Literally “violence against the city,” the term “urbicide” in political theory has been used
extensively to analyze multifaceted forms of political violence in the urban space, in the
context of an armed conflict (Graham, 2003: 63–78; Abujidi and Verschure, 2006: 126–54).
17 For the details of the urbicide of Cizre see. İnsan Hakları Derneği, Türkiye İnsan Hakları
Vakfı, Diyarbakır Tabip Odası, Pratisyen Hekimlik Derneği, Şırnak’ın Cizre İlçesinde
04.09.2015 Tarihinde Başlayan ve 12.09.2015 Tarihinde Sona Eren Sokağa Çıkma Yasağı ve
Meydana Gelen Hak İhlalleri İnceleme Raporu, 15 Eylül 2015.
18 Personal communication, members of Cizre Meya-Der, December 10, 2016.

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In Istanbul, the sittings continued longer, although not at the usual place but
in front of the main İHD building there.19
Using the case of Cizre, I have examined the production of memories in
relation to enforced disappearances in Kurdistan during the 1990s. I claimed
that such production of memories has unpacked the pact of public secrets
and overcome cultural aphasia through the creation of a language of recog-
nition, acknowledgment and responsibility in the memory knots that tie the
personal to the political, and temporality to endurance. For this, the perfor-
mances of Saturday Mothers have been crucial. The peculiar position of the
Cizre Saturday Mothers, and their employment of a ritualised political protest
and intimate, emotive claim to truth and justice, can be interpreted as a form
of resistance to the official national and colonial memory. Memory is produced
in Cizre on a daily basis, with different traces and signs, both material and
immaterial, through simultaneous erasure and exhibition, including not only
victimhood but also resilience, persistence, and political mobilisation.
In Turkey, various official security agencies implemented violent counterin-
surgency strategies that specifically targeted the civilian population, and other
official, semi-official, and pro-state militias, paramilitaries and public organ-
isations ensured the feasibility of such strategies. They were implemented with
the implicit and explicit cooperation of most media outlets, academic institu-
tions, and representative bodies, including NGOs. This cooperation was also
acknowledged and constantly emphasised by the relatives of the disappeared.
Remembering the forcibly disappeared, therefore, meant holding power to
account by narrating the story, by performing the ethical and political duty
of publicly going against the grain on behalf of the disappeared, presumed
dead. These narratives and memories of enforced disappearance became
organically intertwined with current life experience, which they intimately
informed. Experience reverberates and recurrence continues to prevail in the
memory-making processes of Kurdish society and their impact on the Turkish
civil society and body politic. Memories of the 1990s, therefore, do not repre-
sent the 1990s as a distant and terminated historical period but rather contex-
tualise this period as tightly knit with the deadly experiences of the present. In
general, for the relatives of the disappeared, narrating the 1990s is rather an act
of ethical and political loyalty, which necessarily transcends the moment and
takes memory out of time.

19 Following the introduction of pandemic restrictions, the demonstrations have been

transformed to a virtual format.

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Memories of the 1990s in the west of Turkey are completely different from
those in Kurdistan. In western Turkey, there is a crucial lack of acknowledgment
and recognition of the violence of the past, as a result – or rather function –
of cultural aphasia. This un-acknowledgement is an actively produced non-
memory, in which events and experiences far away were not just forgotten but
expunged from the Turkish national narrative, meticulously distorted, manip-
ulated, and erased. Official representations of Kurdistan during the 1990s –
as well as at the recent moment, when the Kurdish conflict intensified once
again – serve to block the production of alternative vocabularies through the
routinised reproduction of the vocabulary of terrorism, nationalism, and eth-
nopolitical criminalisation.
It was this vocabulary that determined the officially memorable parts of the
1990s and systematically rendered invisible other experiences and representa-
tions, mainly the state oppression and violence. With the production of such
vocabulary established through the intermediary of the asymmetrical political
landscape, it has been easier for larger societal segments of the western parts
of Turkey to collectively decide not to even know, let alone speak about, its
relentless and violent histories – and not to consciously have to do that.
“Cultural aphasia,” therefore, becomes an appropriate term with which to
characterise the material basis of the pact of public secrets, of the known but
unspoken, and not adequately acknowledged and recognised. Diverse forms of
Turkish state violence implemented in Kurdistan throughout the 1990s were
essential components of the colonial effect. The dehumanised bodies of Kurds
challenging the existing sovereignty of the Turkish state in novel forms of
political mobilisation and belonging, deserved, in this respect, torture, beating,
displacement, execution and disappearance. Apathy and un-acknowledgment
also made possible the endurance of the violent strategies (Göral, 2017: 316).
Recently, the recommencement and re-intensification of the Kurdish con-
flict has aggravated the cultural aphasia further, merging present with past in
the memory and non-memory. The dead bodies found lying in the streets of
Cizre from 2015 have made it even more difficult to develop possibilities for a
vocabulary of recognition and acknowledgment. Direct rule from the center
has been reimposed in another iteration of the permanent state of emergency
as the norm rather than the exception, further extending and deepening the
experience of perpetual violence. As all the women that I interviewed empha-
sised in one way or another, the past always navigated within the present in
Kurdistan, restless, determined, and haunted. Yet, the political performances
of the Saturday Mothers have already opened up a space to deal with this past
and present, to construct a new vocabulary vis-à-vis the aphasia and establish
new links between state violence, acknowledgment, and responsibility.

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 Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 129–149
Kurdish Studies
Archive
[Link]/ksa

Feminism, Gender and Power in Kurdish Studies:

an Interview with Prof. Shahrzad Mojab

Marlene Schäfers | ORCID: 0000-0001-8992-7926

British Academy Newton International Fellow, Faculty of Divinity,
University of Cambridge, West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9BS, United Kingdom
ems66@[Link]

Abstract

In this interview, Prof. Shahrzad Mojab reflects on her longstanding personal, politi-
cal, and intellectual engagement with Kurdish women. Twenty years after publishing
the ground-breaking edited volume Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds (Mazda
Publishers, 2001), Mojab assesses the complex relation between Kurdish Studies and
feminism and evaluates current discussions regarding gendered power relations in
Kurdish scholarship. Gender relations in Kurdish society and in Kurdish Studies can
only be understood, she insists, when taking into account how gender intersects with
capitalism, class, colonialism, nationalism, and patriarchy. Through her personal trajec-
tory, the interview offers insight into the historical developments that have facilitated
Kurdish women to increasingly be included in Kurdish Studies as both researchers and
research participants.

Keywords

capitalism – feminisms – gender and class relations – Kurdish Studies – Kurdish

women – nationalism – patriarchy

Published with license by Koninklijke Brill BV | doi:10.1163/9789004700406_007

© Marlene Schäfers, 2021
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
130 Schäfers

Femînîzm, zayend û hêz di Xebatên Kurdî de:

Hevpeyvînek ligel Prof. Shahrzad Mojab

Di vê hevpeyvînê de, Prof. Shahrzad Mojab eleqeya xwe demdirêj a şexsî, siyasî û entele-
ktuel ya ligel jinên kurd nîşan dide. Bîst sal piştî weşandina Women of a Non-State
Nation: The Kurds [Jinên Neteweya Bêdewlet: Kurd] (Weşanên Mazdayê, 2001), Mojab
têkiliya tevlîhev a di navbera Xebatên Kurdî û femînîzmê de; û nîqaşên nûjen yên di
derbarê têkiliyên hêzê yên reng-zayendî yên di akademiya kurdî de dinirxîne. Têkiliyên
zayendî yên di civaka kurd û Xebatên Kurdî de, ew îdia dike, hew ew çax dikare were
fehmkirin ku bê qebûlkirin ka çawa zayend bi kapîtalîzm, sinif, kolonyalîzm, netewper-
werî û bavsalariyê re tevlîhev e. Bi rêgeya xwe ya şexsî, ev hevpeyvîn pêşkêşiya fehmeke
bûyerên dîrokî dike ku rê vekirin jinên kurd bi hejmareke zêde, hem weke lêkolîner
hem jî weke beşdarên lêkolînan bikevin nav Xebatên Kurdî.

Fêmînîzm, cender û hêz le twêjînewey kurdîda:

Dîmaneyek legell profîsor şehrezad mocab

Lem dîmaneyeda, profîsor şehrezad mocab tîşk dexateser têkellîye kesî û siyasî û
hizrîye dûrudrêjekanî xoy legell jinanî kurd. Bîst sall dway billawkirdnewey bergî
pêşenganey “jinanî netewey-nadewlletî: kurdekan (dezgay bllawkirdnewey mazda,
2001), mocab peywendî allozî nêwan twêjînewey kurdî û fîmînîzm helldesengênêt û
giftugoy êstaş derbarey peywendîyekanî cenderî le twêjînewey kurdîda denrixênêt.
Ew pêleser ewe dadegrêt ke tenha katêk detwanîn le peywendî cênderî le komellgay
kurdî û le twêjînewey kurdîda têbgeyn ke ewe leberçaw bigrîn ke çon cênder legell
sermayedarî, çîn, kolloniyalîzm, nasiyonalîzm, we pyawsalarî yekdebrrêt. Le ruwangey
rêrrewî şexsî xoyewe, çawpêkewtneke tîşk dexate ser ew peresendne mêjûyyaney ke
karasanî bo jinanî kurd kirduwe ta ziyatir bixrêne naw twêjînewey kurdî hem wek
twêjer û hem wek beşdarbûy twêjînewe.

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Feminism, Gender and Power in Kurdish Studies 131

Kurdnasîye de femînîzm, cinsîyet û hêz:

Prof. Şahrzad Mojab reyde roportajêk

Nê roportajî de Profesore Şahrzad Mojab angajmanê xo yo kesî, sîyasî û roşnvîrîyo derg

ke cinîkanê kurdan ser o da, ey ana ra ziwan. Vîşt serrî weşanayîşê eserê xo yê înovatîfî
Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds (Cinîkê Neteweya Bêdewlete: Kurdî, Weşanê
Mazda, 2001) ra pey, Majob têkilîya komplekse mabênê kurdnasîye û femînîzmî de
û munaqeşeyê ke no taw zereyê cigêrayîşanê kurdan de derheqê têkilîyanê cinsîyet-
kerdeyan de yenê kerdene, înan erjnena. A israr kena ke têkilîyê cinsîyetî yê komelê
kurdan û kurdnasîye tena fehm benê eke merdim çatrayîrê cinsîyetî bi kapîtalîzm, sin-
ife, kolonyalîzm, neteweperwerîye û patrîarkîye kî tey bihesibno. Pê raywanîya Majob
a şexsîye no roportaj roştî dano averşîyayîşanê tarîxîyan ke cinîkanê kurdan rê rayîr
kerd ra ke ê hîna zêde hem sey cigêrayoxan hem zî sey hetkaranê cigêrayoxan tewrê
kurdnasîye bibê.

…
In memory of Amir Hassanpour, Mirella Galleti, and Maria O’Shea.
The remarkable contributors to Women of a Non-State Nation: The
Kurds who left us far too early!

∵
Introduction by Marlene Schäfers1

In July 2020, a group of female scholars in Kurdish Studies published an

anonymous letter in which they denounced the prevalence of male violence
and sexual harassment in academia, including in Kurdish Studies, and called
for solidarity with and support for women targeted by those in positions of

1 Shahrzad Mojab is Professor at the Women and Gender Studies Institute and the Depart-
ment of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education, at the University of Toronto. She is also
the Director of Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity and former Director of the Women
and Gender Institute, both at the University of Toronto. Ontario Institute for Studies in Edu-
cation, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1V6, Canada. Email: [Link]@
[Link].

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132 Schäfers

power. The letter set in motion wide-ranging discussions about the difficulties
(Kurdish) women scholars face within Kurdish Studies, the power relations
that pervade this field of scholarship, and the steps that need to be taken to
make Kurdish Studies more equitable and inclusive. At the journal of Kurdish
Studies, these discussions have forced us to reflect in depth about how our edi-
torial decisions and processes play a role in the construction and maintenance
of gendered power relations – and about how we may turn them into a force
for change.
One person who has been central to what she calls the “Kurdish #MeToo
movement” that ensued after publication of the anonymous letter is Shahrzad
Mojab, Professor at the University of Toronto and one of the leading schol-
ars on Kurdish women and feminism. Professor Mojab not only circulated the
anonymous letter on behalf of women scholars, but she has also played a lead
role in devising an action plan to address the issues raised by the letter. One
core element of this plan has been to (re)launch the Kurdish Women’s Studies
Network, which has led to a year-long (and still ongoing) series of online pan-
els showcasing the scholarship of women in Kurdish Studies that has been
convened and chaired by Mojab over the course of the academic year 2020–21.
As much as these initiatives respond to current developments, they build on
a much longer legacy of feminist struggle both within and outside of Kurdish
academia. It is to shed light on these historical trajectories that Kurdish Studies
has invited Shahrzad Mojab for this written exchange with associate editor
Marlene Schäfers. An over four-decade long history of doing research with and
on Kurdish women allows Mojab to add historical depth and critical reflection
to the ongoing discussions on gender and sexual harassment in Kurdish Studies.
Twenty years ago, she published the edited volume Women of a Non-State Nation:
The Kurds; a ground-breaking book that would establish “Kurdish women” as
a recognizable subject area within English-speaking feminist scholarship and
initiated what has since become an entire field of knowledge production. As
Mojab insists, this field is an inevitably politicized one, as it is forced to reckon
with Kurdish women’s (often marginal) positionality within power relations
dominated by capitalist, colonial, nationalist, and patriarchal forces. Together
with Amir Hassanpour, Shahrzad Mojab has also been involved in meticulously
documenting and archiving the knowledge produced by and about Kurdish
women, resulting in the remarkable volume Women of Kurdistan: A Historical
and Bibliographic Study that is forthcoming later this year with Transnational
Press London. Twenty years after the publication of Women of a Non-State
Nation and on the eve of the publication of this decades-long bibliographic
project on Kurdish women, it seems only pertinent, then, to assess the place of
gender and feminist scholarship in Kurdish Studies.

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Feminism, Gender and Power in Kurdish Studies 133

Kurdish Studies: Twenty years ago, you published Women of a Non-State

Nation: The Kurds, an edited volume that was the first to devote sustained
attention to the place of women in Kurdish politics, society, and culture. Could
you tell us about what motivated you to put the book together back then and
what kind of an impact you think it has had?

Shahrzad Mojab: The “story” of this book, so to speak, is the story of me

and the Kurds; a personal encounter which began in the mid-1970s with life
transforming consequences: personally, politically and intellectually. It began
when I met Amir Hassanpour on the campus of the University of Illinois at
Champaign-Urbana, where he was a doctoral student and I was in my first year
of graduate school. Let me first briefly describe the political milieu of the cam-
pus to contextualize the significance of this encounter.

The campus hosted one of the most radical chapters of the Iranian Student
Association (ISA), a member of the World Confederation of Iranian Students
(WCIS). In my second term of study, I began attending reading groups orga-
nized by ISA members, including Amir, on Iranian history, national liberation
movements, communist movements, and Marxist philosophy. In these reading
circles I learned the Marxist dialectical, historical, and materialist method of
analyzing, synthesizing, dialogue, debating, and presentation. The ISA was not
preoccupied with Iran only. Growing in the context of the revolutionary atmo-
sphere of the 1960s and contributing to it, the ISA turned away from a national-
ist movement into an internationalist one. The ISA was an active participant
in the anti-Viet Nam war movement, the struggles of workers, civil rights,
Indigenous peoples, women’s and national liberation movements especially
in Dhofar (Oman) and Palestine (Matin-Asgari, 2002). It was in the reading
groups of the ISA that I learned about a radically different version of Iranian
and world history that I had never been exposed to before. The dynastic and
violently nationalistic history that was taught in the educational institutions
of Pahlavi Iran was replaced with a history in which people became the mak-
ers of their own destiny. I learned about the history of the Kurdish Republic
of 1946, the Azerbaijan Republic of 1945–1946, the CIA-Coup of 1953, the class
and gender nature of nation, state and nationalism, and on capitalism, colo-
nialism and imperialism. Neither these historical events nor the vocabulary
to speak with and address these world conditions existed in my previous
educational experience. Truly, I was marked by this experience for the rest
of my life.
Amir and I returned to Iran, like thousands of other Iranian students, to join
the 1979 revolution. As I have written elsewhere, “Esmail Khoi, an Iranian poet,

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134 Schäfers

has beautifully, meaningfully, and metaphorically captured my experience of

participating in the 1979 revolution in Iran:

The joy of a raindrop

and the sorrow of it in a swamp.”

That is, “joyously watching the life-giving raindrop [revolution], only to

abruptly recognize its horrid fall into the abyss” – the coming into power of
the Islamic regime in Iran (Mojab 2015, p. 7). The Islamic State embarked on
its brutal suppression immediately after assuming power. The suppression
included the imposition of the veil on women, military aggression against
national minorities such as Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmans, the persecution of
followers of the Bahá’í faith, the detaining, imprisoning, and killing of the left,
both secular and religious Mujahedeen, banning the publication of newspa-
pers and books expressing dissenting views, brutally censoring art in all its
forms, and finally closing down the universities with a massive purge of aca-
demics, students, and staff to “purify” the nation through the Islamicization of
knowledge and thought.2
I went to Kurdistan soon after the ceasefire between the Islamic regime
and the resistant Kurdish forces in November 1979 and stayed there until
the summer of 1980. This was my first trip to this region of Iran. I was born
in Shiraz, but mostly raised and went to school in Tehran. Although I came
from a middle-class, educated, and enlightened family inspired by the ideas of
democracy, secularism, rights, and equality, they nonetheless remained deeply
vested in the monarchical national modernity of “Iranianness.” Therefore, my
original conception of the Kurds and Kurdistan was constructed by the offi-
cial Iranian state narrative of the Kurds as “pure” and “original” people of Iran
and as “brave fighters,” though deeply “tribal,” “primordial,” and “traditional.”
The hegemonic ideological superiority of “Persianness” made us complicit in
cultural and political suppression of all nationalities in Iran, in particular the
Kurds. I have not yet fully written about my experience of being in Kurdistan,
though while being there, I kept detailed daily notes of my observations, in
particular of gender relations. Those notes were lost as we had to move around
due to the ongoing war and security concerns. Only a few hand-written pages
are left. Neither have I written about my short-lived peshmerga year, including
participating in the resistance movement of the city of Sanandaj, also known

2 For the suppression of universities, see my doctoral dissertation The State and University:
The “Islamic Cultural Revolution” in the Institutions of Higher Education of Iran, 1980–1987
(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1991).

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Feminism, Gender and Power in Kurdish Studies 135

as Sine, in early 1980. This resistance lasted for 24 days; it has been registered
in the annals of political history in Iran as “The 24 Days of Resistance in Sine,”
when the city was renamed “Red Sine” or the “Brave Sine” by the people. This
was an entry into lives, aspirations, history, and culture of the Kurdish people
with no return for me. It was an encounter that became the basis for under-
standing the entanglement and contradictions of nationalism and feminism.
I learned the Sorani Kurdish language and immersed myself in the culture
and history of Kurdistan to overcome my Persian national chauvinism and
embraced the ideals of Marxist feminist internationalism.
The Islamic regime conducted a gradual, but unyielding, suppression of
revolutionary opposition throughout the country. Thousands of activists
were arrested, and many were executed, which marked the 1980s massacre of
political prisoners in Iran (Mojab, 2007; Mojab, 2019; Mohajer, 2020).3 We were
forced into exile in 1983 and returned to a chilly academic environment on
the campus of the University of Illinois. It was a depressing return to a place
we had left with much revolutionary hope. The ISA office was no longer there;
friends were gone, some had been executed in Iran or were in prison. I began
my doctoral program in Educational Policy Studies and a newly established
Women’s Studies program.4 It was in Women’s Studies that I found a space
to think through my experience of a “defeated revolution,” to reflect on the
question of nationalism, emancipation, and feminism. It was in that program
that I got to know Ann Russo and Lordes Torres, the co-editors with Chandra
Mohanty of Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Mohanty, Russo
& Torres, 1991). It was through them and a group of radical Black feminists that
I learned about patriarchal racism, colonialism and capitalist imperialism. They
encouraged me to speak to and write about the relationship between state,
ideology, patriarchy, religion, class, ethnicity, nationalism, and feminism as
lived and resisted by Kurdish women and women in Iran following the revolu-
tion of 1979. One of my first graduate course papers, Women in Politics and War:
The Case of Kurdistan, was published as part of the Women in International
Development Publication Series (Mojab, 1987). This paper marked the begin-
ning of a distinct research trajectory in my scholarly pursuits.
Steadily I started building a catalogue of literature on Kurdish women in
the 1990s; a method that I learned during my graduate studies in the Women’s

3 See also my research website on political prisoners in The Art of Resistance in the Middle East:
[Link] [Link].
4 Bernice A. Carroll was my supervisor and mentor who edited the seminal book Liberating
Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (1976, Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois
Press).

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136 Schäfers

Studies program. This reference work progressed with ebb and flow due to
complex personal and professional lives of both myself and Amir, who also
enthusiastically collaborated with me on this project (Mojab & Hassanpour,
forthcoming). It was in the context of compiling, documenting, and archiving
this body of literature that the International Kurdish Women’s Studies Network
(IKWSN) was initiated. As was stated on its inaugural brochure, the IKWSN was
founded in the fall of 1996 “… as a response to a growing need for opening a
space for Kurdish women in international debates on women’s rights, women’s
studies, and promoting gender justice among the Kurdish communities in the
diaspora and the Middle East”. The story of this collective effort is still untold,
although I reflected on its rise and demise in two articles (Mojab, 1997 and
2000). Nonetheless, reviewing my meticulous archive of the letters and folders
of this unique experience makes me realize the need for a deeper historical
contextualization of this initiative. It was envisioned during the era following
the First Gulf War of 1991, the rise of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and
the 2003 occupation of Iraq by Western imperialist forces, led by the US. These
events had, and still continue to have, an immense impact on the Kurds, in
particular Kurdish women, throughout the region. Therefore, it is important to
revisit the achievements and challenges of this network while we are (re)trying
to (re)build a new one.
Thus, to address the core component of the question, that is, the “motiva-
tion” for editing Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds, I had to rush through
this unwritten account of my encounter with the Kurds, their history, culture,
and struggle. As is evident, the “motivation” was not circumstantial, it was a
political and scholarly commitment. I stated in the introductory chapter of the
book (pp. 12–13),

there is a cycle of exclusion which prevents the formation of a tradition of

research on Kurdish women: no faculty members specializing in Kurdish
women’s studies, no students to write papers and dissertation, no library
collection, no research grants, and no publishing interest.
In spite of the formidable obstacles to the development of Kurdish
women’s studies, individual researchers of very diverse backgrounds,
women and men, Kurds and non-Kurds, have engaged in research in this
area. This book provides access to some of this literature.

Therefore, the book was not an isolated effort. It was, rather, a component
of a cohesive politicized knowledge production on Kurdish women which
needed a reference work and a network of scholars. The book has been influ-
ential and well-received, well-read, and well-cited. Yet, it continues to be the

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Feminism, Gender and Power in Kurdish Studies 137

only anthology in the English language. It was translated into Turkish (Mojab,
2005a) and several chapters were translated into Persian and Sorani Kurdish.
Nevertheless, I only have a partial list of the translations as some were even
translated without my knowledge or permission. The book made “Kurdish
women” a recognizable “subject” in the field of women’s studies in the Middle
East and North Africa. For instance, in 2000 I was invited to join the newly
formed Editorial Board of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures not
only for my work on women and revolution in the Middle East but also for my
research on Kurdish women. I wrote the main entry on “Kurdish Women” for
this encyclopaedia (Mojab, 2005b) and was invited to write the entry of “Layla
Zana” in the Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa (Mojab,
2004). The book was also introduced in Al-Raida Journal published by the Arab
Institute for Women at the Lebanese American University, in Beirut, Lebanon.
While working on Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds, I was also
co-editing Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism
and Nationalism (Bannerji, Mojab, & Whitehead, 2001). This book aimed at
a more robust feminist critique of postcoloniality and subaltern studies by
focusing on the relationship between gender, nationalism, class, colonialism,
and patriarchal moral regulations. It also covered diverse historical periods in
distinct places such as India, Kurdistan, Ireland, and Finland. We wrote in the
Introduction that the book is (pp. 4–5)

intended as an implicit – and often explicit – critique of post-structural

and post-colonial approaches to Third World nationalism, most of which
tend to erase all forms of social inequality except for an overarching
divide between colonizer and colonized. These gaps in post-structural
and post-colonial approaches are especially apparent in the way that
culturally mediated class and status relations have been ignored in the
constitution of gender relations in the domestic sphere.

My chapter in this book, “Conflicting loyalties: Nationalism and gender rela-

tions in Kurdistan” (pp. 116–152), employed a Marxist feminist approach to
delineate the dialectics of property relations, social formations of feudal-
ism and capitalist modernity, gender relations and nationalist movements
in different historical periods in Kurdistan. The chapter, therefore, frames a
broader understanding of nationalism, feminism, class, colonialism, and
anti-colonialism. The process of concurrent editing and co-editing of these
two books primarily taught me that there is no monolithic nationalist thought
nor an undifferentiated women’s experience of society, history, and culture.
From a Marxist perspective, as is discussed by Amir Hassanpour (2015, p. 253),

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138 Schäfers

the diversity of “nations” or “patriarchies” is inevitable owing to their

socio-historical nature, each formed or created under particulars condi-
tions; however, human thought, enabled by language, is capable of grasp-
ing universals in the midst of particulars. Every patriarchy is inevitably
particular in the sense that it emerges in a distinct historical context
owing to variation in consciousness, culture, geography, class system,
ethnicity, and so on … It is possible, however, to depict universality in the
particularity of patriarchies.

I hope that with the proliferation of research and publication on/by Kurdish
women in the near future, there will be more writings on gender relations, sex-
uality, and areas related to visual and performing arts, film and literature such
as memoirs, novels and poetry. Nonetheless, I think a careful, creative, and
well-thought thorough theorization of the relationship between gender, class,
colonialism, capitalist imperialism and the politics of everyday resistance and
encounter of Kurdish women with patriarchy, poverty, and the state should
constitute the core of future research.

KS: One thing that stands out from today’s perspective when looking at
Women of a Non-State Nation is that while it features a good number of women
authors, none of the female authors are Kurdish or from Kurdistan. What were
the reasons for this and what does it tell us about the gendered power dynam-
ics within Kurdish Studies?

Mojab: The interdisciplinary nature of the book is best represented in the

eleven chapters of the book. The connecting core of the collection is the sub-
ject matter of “women in Kurdish society.” However, authors approached this
generic topic from various historical, anthropological, linguistic, legal, and
cultural frameworks. Therefore, the book was thematically organized around
three “perspectives” of Historical, Political and Legal, as well as Social, Cultural
and Linguistic. As was stated in the introductory chapter, “I did not suggest any
framework, theoretical or methodological, for the contributors to follow. The
chapters reflect, to a large extent, the state of research on Kurdish women at
the turn of the century” (p. 13). Indeed, the gender and national identity of the
contributors implied who was studying Kurdish women and gender relations
in English. Knowledge of English and capability to produce research and schol-
arly writing in this language was a key requirement. Eight of the contributors
are women and three are men and of the total of eleven contributors, three are
from the Middle East region and only two are Kurds.

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Feminism, Gender and Power in Kurdish Studies 139

Who is writing what and for whom or, put differently, “whose voice,” “whose
experience” or “who is being represented by whom” are important epistemo-
logical and methodological considerations in all strands of feminism. However,
my approach is not to fetishize “identity” and I have always searched for a
method of inquiry to explicate the dialectical relationship between feminist
consciousness, ideology, praxis, and positionality (Mojab & Carpenter, 2019).
No doubt, the feminist theoretical approach focusing on the “identity” of a
speaker as presenter of experiences has made important contributions to our
understanding of patriarchy. Politically, however, this identity-based approach
has mostly fragmented women’s movements on the basis of “identity” lines and
inevitably propagated the idea of cultural relativism. This cultural relativist
fragmentation on the basis of the particularization of women’s identity-based
demands has contributed to the (re)formation and (re)production of oppres-
sive and exploitative relations of power, including nationalism.
So, the question of who is writing, representing, or speaking for/on/with
Kurdish women in this anthology, for me is more a question of epistemology
than identity. Twenty years ago, these authors were rigorously researching
gender relations in Kurdish society, history, and culture. The Europeanness of
some of the authors facilitated access to fieldwork in the region, to archival
materials, and to available knowledge in Western languages. This is a privilege
that could potentially be addressed in the realm of the politics of knowledge
production, in particular when a study is conducted in a geographical space
where a nation lives under the condition of genocide, linguicide, and femicide.

KS: The last decade or so has seen an increasing presence of Kurdish women
scholars in academia. How do you think this has changed the scholarship on
Kurdish women, including the kinds of questions that are being asked, con-
ceptual approaches taken, and topics focused on? How might this also have
changed the way in which scholarship itself is conducted, in terms of methods
of inquiry, forms of dissemination, and the very forms of scholarly interaction?

Mojab: I recently wrote in the introduction of Women of Kurdistan: A Historical

and Bibliographic Study (Mojab & Hassanpour, forthcoming) that,

I am not a Kurd. I claim neither internal or external researcher relations

to Kurdish women, nor the “informant” of the culture and lived experi-
ences of Kurdish women. I have, however, developed a long and lasting
solidarity with the struggle of Kurdish women. I have been in this move-
ment for more than three decades, and over the years have conducted

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140 Schäfers

extensive research with, and among, Kurdish women in the mountains of

Kurdistan with women peshmergas, in the women’s community centres
in Kurdish cities of Bakur and Bashur,5 and in the Kurdish diaspora in
Europe and North America. I recall vividly when I presented my first paper
on Kurdish women at the 1994 MESA annual conference (Mojab 1994b).
Professor Nikki Keddie, a prominent historian of the Middle East with
expertise on women and Iranian history, dismissed my paper and com-
mented that “Kurdish women’s experience can’t teach us anything new.”
I decided to dedicate my intellectual and political life to a struggle whose
longevity, perseverance, and vitality continues to marvel us all to this day.

It is in this context that I argue Kurdish women, as a subject of inquiry and

as an agent of social change, are no longer dismissible or ignorable in most
disciplines of social sciences or humanities. The most relevant instantiation
of this point is the study of women in the Middle East, where the experiences
of Kurdish women, even if we only focus on the last three decades, are folded
into all forms of social and historical challenges and contradictions, ranging
from capitalist-imperialist wars, to the rise of authoritarian theocracies and
religious fundamentalism, continuous genocide, heightened nationalism, or
massive displacement internally, regionally, and internationally. These are
larger structural forces which are maintained and (re)produced by internal
patriarchal, class, and nationalist political forces, including the neoliberal cap-
italist ideologies of most Kurdish political parties. The ways in which Kurdish
women live through, resist, and survive these conditions continuously and
simultaneously should give us a lot to think through the theoretical and politi-
cal consequences of our analysis of these violent composites of forces. I have
often mentioned that under these regional and global conditions the study of
Kurds and Kurdish women should go beyond its framing as a “question,” which
is dominant in male-centred political science and international relations dis-
courses and the title of many scholarly contributions. Indeed, we can perceive
of Kurdish women’s experience as an “answer” to crucial questions of how
to free the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) from the subjugating local,
global, and transnational forces of patriarchal capitalism. Kurdish women con-
stitute the hub of all contradictions in this globalizing world. Subjected to the
brutal violence of the nation-states of the Middle East and their genocides and
ethnic cleansing projects, suffering from the violence of “their own” national
patriarchy, and dispersed throughout the world. Thus, Kurdish women are in a
unique position to distance themselves from male-centred ethnic, nationalist,

5 North and South Kurdistan, used in Kurdish to refer to Turkish and Iraqi Kurdistan.

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Feminism, Gender and Power in Kurdish Studies 141

and religious politics, and to join forces which do not compromise with patri-
archy. I know that Kurdish women and Kurdish women’s studies are at the
margins of transnational feminism and the international feminist movement,
even though there is considerable potential for forging solidarity if we can
overcome all forms of identity-based fragmentation of the movement.
The proliferation of knowledge production by Kurdish women, even though
only a limited sample is available to us in English or other Western languages, is
exciting. The presence of a dynamic and creative Kurdish female intelligentsia
in diaspora, their connection to the “homeland,” the way technological innova-
tions have facilitated an instantaneous communication, all have contributed to
the revitalization of the debate on gender relations, sexuality, democracy, and
freedom in Kurdish Studies and Kurdish societies. As someone who is inter-
ested in the use of arts as a method of knowledge dissemination, I am inspired
by the methodological originality in recent research work by emerging Kurdish
women scholars. These include films, animations, photo-story, poetry, short
stories, and memoirs. My hope is that emerging Kurdish women scholars will
contribute actively to a newly initiated series on Kurdish Studies with Peter
Lang where I am the series editor,6 as well as enthusiastically participating in
the recently re-instituted Kurdish Women’s Studies Network.

KS: How do you think Kurdish Studies need to change in order to be more
accommodating to Kurdish women and their scholarship? How do you see
new developments in Bakur and Rojava7 and the involvement of women in the
armed struggle impacting scholarship by/on Kurdish women? And in this con-
text, what are your thoughts on jineoloji as a science of women as it has been
developed by the Kurdish movement over recent years?

Mojab: My response to this question is organized under two interrelated sec-

tions of Kurdish Studies and feminism and Kurdish Studies and Jineoloji.

Kurdish Studies and Feminism: Feminist knowledge has effectively chal-

lenged all previous knowledge systems as androcentric undertakings. It has
also established that knowledge production is a site of struggle under condi-
tions of unequal power relations. Thus, Kurdish Studies is no exception. Women
of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds is framed on the basis of this understanding,
hence my emphasis on the dialectical co-determinacy of nationalism and fem-
inism. This conceptual analysis is further developed in the forthcoming book,
Women of Kurdistan: A Historical and Bibliographic Study, which archives and

6 For more information on the book series see [Link]

7 North and West Kurdistan, used in Kurdish to refer to Turkish and Syrian Kurdistan.

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142 Schäfers

details more than a century (from the end of the 19th century to the first few
years of the 21st century) of Kurdish women’s history, life, and struggle. The
book clearly depicts the ways Kurdish women’s lives are embroiled in webs
of contradictions, which have yet to be recorded and understood in all their
complexity. We wrote (Mojab & Hassanpour, forthcoming),

While disruptions of their [Kurdish women] lives within the twentieth

century are spectacular, continuities are equally startling. They went
through the disintegration of the Ottoman empire, several genocides,
ethnic cleansing, unbridled sexual violence by the state, the permanency
of patriarchal rule, the rise and fall of socialism in Caucasia and Central
Asia, the destruction of rural life, large scale displacements, the com-
ing to power of theocracy, direct Western colonial rule, and new rounds
of dispersion throughout the world. One trend in the lives of Kurdish
women is the failure of the modernizing projects of the nation-states to
transform them into the “Iranian woman,” “new Turkish woman,” “new
Iraqi woman,” or “Muslim woman.” Decades of forcible assimilation have,
in fact, contributed to the formation of the polity of “Kurdish woman.”

The historical sketch, in conjuncture with the proliferation of knowledge

on/by Kurdish women, challenges the Western Orientalist view of Kurdish
women, and women in the Middle East and North Africa, in general. The male-
centred nationalist gaze on gender relations and sexual orientation should be
contested in Kurdish Studies. No discipline in the social sciences and humani-
ties can ignore the feminist canon. The interdisciplinary nature of Kurdish
Studies makes it even more crucial to draw and borrow, theoretically and meth-
odologically, from feminist bodies of knowledge. Yet, feminism is not a unified
body of knowledge, each presents distinct epistemological and methodologi-
cal approaches. I have built my scholarship on Kurdish women on the basis of
Marxist feminist analysis (see Mojab, 2015; Mojab & Carpenter, 2020; Carpenter
& Mojab, 2011; Carpenter & Mojab, 2017). Marxist feminism, as a body of knowl-
edge and praxis for the transformation of social relations of power, offers us
theoretically, methodologically, and philosophically powerful analytical tools
to study Kurdish language, history, culture, literature, films, politics, sexuality,
geography, family, architecture, etc. Conceptually, it can also shape our analysis
of state, nation, borders, class, race, ethnicity, coloniality, and sexuality.
I would like to suggest two concluding points here: First, feminist analysis
should be considered as an integral component of social analysis regardless of
what strands of feminism are being employed. The depth and the breadth of
analysis are determined by the power of theory. For instance, liberal feminism

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Feminism, Gender and Power in Kurdish Studies 143

produces partial analysis of gender relations and offers limited legal reform
within existing patriarchal racist capitalist relations, hence politically is only
capable to reform certain aspects of oppressive gender relations. Second, we
should refrain from feminist theoretical instrumentalization in Kurdish Studies.
By “instrumentalization” of feminist theories, I mean using theories to only
name an experience without thoroughly analyzing the relations that constitute
the experience. For example, the use of feminist “standpoint theory,” “intersec-
tionality,” “abolitionist feminism,” “transnational feminism,” or “decolonization”
theories are a naming exercise and not an exploring one. As Cynthia Enloe
argues, we have to develop a habit of “feminist curiosity” to be able to observe,
explain, and resist oppressive and exploitative relations of power (Enloe, 2004).
Kurdish Studies and Jineoloji: In Rojava, as well as in the diaspora, a host of
activities are underway to implement and promote Jineoloji as a theory and
method to achieve gender equality and gender representation.8 Rojava women
put up a valiant resistance against the dark forces of theocratic misogyny. In
the realm of theory, however, their idea is ambiguous. No doubt, one cannot
expect the newly established Rojava cantons to abolish patriarchy and private
property while their very existence is threatened by ISIS, Turkey, Iran, Iraq
(KRG), and other adversaries such as China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. Certainly,
there is much to celebrate in every advance that women make in overcoming
patriarchy in Rojava and elsewhere. Nonetheless, I do not see in Jineoloji any
critique of feminist body of knowledge that warrants its advancement. Jineoloji
as a pedagogical method or radical praxis to transform gender relations in fam-
ily, community, and society is an innovative tool. But it will be a nativist or
nationalist politics if we argue that Kurdish women can only advance in their
struggle for emancipation if they can create their own theory, knowledge, his-
tory, and consciousness. In my understanding, Kurdish women’s struggle, like
that of women all over the world, is both rooted in their patriarchal society
and in an international patriarchal regime with ties to colonialism, capitalism,
imperialism, and fundamentalism. Resistance to this global order and to the
states carved up by imperialist powers out of the remnants of older empires
continues in our time. Serious analysis of Jineoloji in Kurdish Studies can make
valuable contributions to feminist praxis. It should be done though not as a
nationalist or nativist women’s project nor on the basis of a constructed myth
in the evolution of Kurdish history, society and culture.
Let me end the response to this question by raising another complex issue in
the relationship between Kurdish Studies and feminism. Recently, it is common
to evoke the notion of “decolonization” as a theoretical possibility or a radical

8 For more information on Jineoloji and further resources see [Link]

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144 Schäfers

gesture of solidarity with Kurdish women. But I understand decolonization as

both a process and an outcome. Colonization instated so much structural, psy-
chological, and cultural harms over the centuries and in various geographies
that de/anti-colonization requires considerable structural transformation
supplemented by robust forms of conscious political agency. If we understand
colonization as a relationship to (re)produce the condition of enduring subor-
dination and as a system of patriarchal racialized class collaboration, what a
de/anti-colonial approach can unravel is the inextricable forms of the liveability
of life in order to support our radical feminist efforts to become active seekers
in de/anti-colonial resistance struggles in the realm of knowledge production
and praxis.9 I know that this is a tall order, and therefore I just added this here in
order for us to ponder on the true project of “decolonization” of Kurdish Studies,
in particular through the prism of revolutionary Marxist feminism.

KS: You supported and circulated the recent anonymous letter about sexual
harassment and male violence in Kurdish Studies, and the action plan taken
thereafter. What are your ideas about ways to counter sexual harassment in
Kurdish Studies and creating an atmosphere in which sexual harassment and
violence are actively countered? How would you respond to some of the reac-
tions which say that Kurdish Studies is politically vulnerable and its reputation
could be harmed by the letter?

Mojab: When I was approached by a group of Kurdish women scholars to

join them to discuss, strategize, sign, and advocate for confronting sexual vio-
lence in Kurdish Studies, I did not hesitate. It was heart wrenching to hear
their stories, it was painful to observe the toll abuse and sexual harassment has
taken on their physical and mental well-being as well as their academic work.
Regrettably, I was not surprised but certainly was outraged and disturbed. My
reaction was based on two factors: One was that some of the egregious cases
discussed by these colleagues were known among a small circle for years but
remained a “hushed” matter. Second, I have participated in debates on sexual
harassment policy over the last three decades in Canadian universities and
have contributed to drafting these documents. However, I have also witnessed
the ways institutions have the ideological and political capacity to reinvent
themselves through the very policy mechanism designed to disrupt sexist and
racist relations of power.

9 For a Marxist analysis of de/anti-colonization see Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks:
Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minnesota: University Minnesota Press, 2014).
James Le Sueur’s The Decolonization Reader provides a useful general overview (New York:
Routledge, 2003).

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Feminism, Gender and Power in Kurdish Studies 145

The reaction to the well-articulated statement on sexual harassment in Kurdish

Studies was comparable to other such cases ranging from expression of strong
support and commitment to work towards the eradication of all forms of
harassment in Kurdish Studies to challenging the “anonymity” of the state-
ment or expressing some discursive challenges which on its own was an act of
perpetuating forms of violence. These positions were expressed by both men
and women. However, I consider the rationale of the political “vulnerability”
of Kurdish Studies as a form of violence in itself. This is an old and tiring rea-
soning refuted in other cases such as male violence in communities of color or
among Indigenous or Black populations. These are ideological “tricks” to mask
the existing reality of patriarchal violence and its inner relations with other
social forms and institutions of power. Kurdish Studies can and should play
a leading role in combating male violence, in spite of not despite its “political
vulnerability.” Fighting male violence in Kurdish Studies is a mode of resisting
the dominant nation-state’s patriarchal, colonial, and nationalist domination.
However, there is another related issue that I think is important to be
addressed here. I was personally confronted on my involvement with this
important matter. I was told “leave the Kurdish Studies to the Kurds and instead
advocate for a similar cause in Iranian Studies!” This position is another form
of racist, nationalist, and male violence. Again, with much regrets, this was not
the first time that my scholarly work in Kurdish Studies has been dismissed in
such a harsh racist manner. My extensive research on “honour killing” among
the Kurdish population in the region and in diaspora has received a similar
treatment (Mojab, 2012; Mojab & Abdo, 2004). In this world view of particular-
ized individuals, cultures, identities, or nations, patriarchy remains untouched.
In the name of challenging the “othering” of cultures, this theoretical and
political approach is “othering” oppositional views which confront the exer-
cise of power, male power in particular. In other words, the proponents of this
nationalist/racist view prefer to remain silent about patriarchal violence, espe-
cially when it is perpetrated by “men of their own.” There is, thus, an attempt
to isolate “honour killing” or sexual harassment from the patriarchal culture
of Kurdish society and Kurdish Studies. This is done by, among other things,
reducing violence to an isolated incident, an individual behaviour not rooted
in patriarchy as a regime or system. This view does not even allow for a serious
theoretical departure from orientalism or colonialism in Kurdish Studies. A
radical departure requires the abandoning of the epistemological and theo-
retical dictates of nationalism, racism, cultural relativism, and sexism.
The statement on “Male Violence and Sexual Harassment in Kurdish Studies”
was followed by some concrete “Proposed Plan of Actions” which included
six recommendations: 1) Reinstitute the Kurdish Women’s Studies Network.
2) Actively invite women to take different roles in academic conferences such

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146 Schäfers

as chairing a session, be a discussant or a commentator. 3) Mentor junior

scholars in publishing, teaching, research projects, and journal review process.
4) Host seminars/webinars to discuss gender relations in all areas of Kurdish
Studies. 5) Host seminars/webinars for women students and researchers to
present their work. 6) Recruit women as editors and reviewers, in particular in
the journal Kurdish Studies. I know that some of these recommendations are
well underway, however, we still have a long way to go to create a Kurdish cul-
ture of research, study, and knowledge production free from fear of male sex-
ual harassment. Therefore, it is admirable that women scholars took this first
and necessary step to begin the Kurdish “Me Too” movement. There should be
unwavering support for them, and it is our responsibility to cultivate a culture
of care and cooperation free from all forms of violence.

KS: You are also an important contributor to the Kurdish Women’s Studies
Network and the lecture series that has continued throughout the academic
year 2020–21. How do you evaluate the series and its impacts?

Mojab: As stated above, the idea of reinstituting the Kurdish Women’s Studies
Network (KWSN) was a proposed concrete action following the circulation of
the statement. The response was overwhelming and exciting. In a short span of
time, I received more panel and paper presentation proposals than could even
fit in a year-long lecture series. This level of encouraging response was only
realized through an informal network of those who participated in the ini-
tial planning of the lecture series. I should emphasize the key role of Kurdish
women scholars in the work of KWSN.

The lecture series included nine panels with 32 paper presentations covering
a wide range of topics such as politics, state violence, literature, ethnography,
language, religion, diaspora, art, stories, love, sexuality, resistance, trauma,
war, and prison. Sessions were attended by 40 to 100 participants. A dynamic
scholarly collaboration among presenters and participants has been estab-
lished and ideas of new research partnership are being cultivated. This burst of
knowledge production is remarkable. It is a new beginning to push the bound-
aries of Kurdish feminist knowledge production and with it, the entire canon
of Kurdish Studies. This work should be sustained and certainly needs to be
expanded. It can take different forms beyond lecture series such as method
workshops, or a theory reading circle, art club and story café. We all should
contribute to the vitality of the KWSN’s efforts.

KS: How do you think scholars based at academic institutions in Europe and
North America that have a lot of economic and cultural capital can or should

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Feminism, Gender and Power in Kurdish Studies 147

be productively engaging with scholarship developed by women in Kurdistan,

who are in many ways in structurally much more vulnerable positions?

Mojab: There is a lot that can be done. It requires hard work to convince academic
institutions to allocate adequate resources to build, promote, and advocate for
Kurdish Studies and Kurdish women’s studies. Though this is not only a finan-
cial matter, as with anything related to the Kurds or the Palestinians, it is deeply
political too. For instance, Amir Hassanpour and I on several occasions received
copies of letters written directly to the President of the University of Toronto
from the Turkish embassy opposing our effort in inviting scholars to campus or
organizing panels, workshops, or seminars on this matter. The University, invok-
ing the academic freedom policy and its commitment to freedom of expres-
sion and ideas, has always defended us. Several factors also contribute to the
position of the University: the enormous popularity of Amir as a teacher who
never compromised on his political and intellectual views on the right of the
oppressed nations to defend themselves and fight for their rights, including the
Indigenous people of Canada, Black peoples, Kurds and Palestinians as well as
his international reputation as an outstanding Marxist Kurdish scholar, which
was a major consideration in housing his unique archive at the University of
Toronto’s library, the first multilingual archive at the Robarts Library. I have con-
tinued Amir’s legacy, and with the steady support from Toronto’s Department of
Near and Middle East Civilizations in the last three years, I have organized lec-
ture series, arranged for the first course on “Introduction to Kurdish Language
and Literature” (taught by Professor Jaffer Sheyholislami in the summer of 2020)
and the course “Kurdish Women: History, Resistance, and Popular Culture” to be
taught in the summer of 2021. I think it is safe to claim that the University of
Toronto is becoming a hub of Kurdish Studies in North America. I have initiated
conversations with the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University
of Toronto to sponsor the Kurdish Women’s Studies Network Lecture Series as
well as the course on Kurdish women.

In addition to programmatic efforts, we also should advocate for graduate

level scholarships, post-doctoral opportunities, visiting scholars’ programmes,
and co-designing projects to provide research training for Kurdish women.
Mentorship in surviving and thriving in academia is an essential component
of these initiatives. Finally, the Kurdish community in diaspora certainly can
play a major role in partnering with academic institutions to advance Kurdish
Studies.
Having outlined these possibilities, let me end by reminding ourselves of
the colossal destructive forces that Kurdish women, much like women in the
entire MENA region, are facing today. Women are subjected to the harshest

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forms of national, religious, and gender oppression as well as being dispos-

sessed and displaced by capitalist imperialism. However, Kurdish women
have already made their own history by resisting these forces. This universal
encounter of women in MENA (with all its particularities) with colonialism,
capitalism, and imperialism should and could constitute a common/collec-
tive feminist narrative and praxis of revolutionary resistance where Kurdish
women could play a vital role.

Acknowledgments

Marlene Schäfers initiated and pursued this interview. I am most thankful for
her encouragement and patience with me as I was thinking through her com-
plex set of questions under a stressful and demanding time of online teach-
ing and working. Sara Carpenter read and commented on the ways I have
developed my ideas, topics, and theoretical approaches discussed in these
responses. I am most grateful, as ever. Many thanks also to Wendy Hamelink
for her careful editing work.

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 Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 151–172
Kurdish Studies
Archive
[Link]/ksa

Obituary

∵
In Memoriam: Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul
(1934–2019), Iraqi Kurdish Man of Letters and
Soviet-Trained Scholar
Nodar Mossaki | ORCID: 0000-0001-8268-006X
Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian
Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation
nodarmossaki@[Link]

Abstract

The literary scholar Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul (1934–2019) was one of the greatest Iraqi
Kurdish scholars trained in the Soviet Union. He was one of a cohort of Iraqi students
who received scholarships for study in the USSR in the wake of the 1958 coup that
overthrew the Iraqi monarchy, and his time in the USSR coincided with the period of
flourishing of Kurdish studies there. Rasul’s PhD dissertation analyzed the develop-
ment of Kurdish literature within a schematic Marxist-Leninist developmental frame-
work. In his major work, however, which focused on Ahmed Khani and his Mem û
Zîn, he went well beyond the standard Soviet treatment of literary works and focused
especially on the dimensions of Sufi theosophy and other Islamic content in the work.
In this respect, Rasul’s work stands out as a rare exception in Soviet Oriental studies.
It remains one of the most ambitious studies of the early modern Kurdish poet Khani.

Keywords

Ahmed Khani – Kurdish literature – Mem û Zîn – Soviet Kurdology

Published with license by Koninklijke Brill BV | doi:10.1163/9789004700406_008

© Nodar Mossaki, 2021
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
152 Mossaki

Professor Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul (Izzedîn Mustefa Resûl), the famous scholar
of Kurdish literature and folklore, passed away in Sulaymaniyah on October 3,
2019. Rasul held a PhD and a postdoctoral degree (Doktor nauk) from the Soviet
Academy of Sciences, and for several decades in the second half of the twenti-
eth century he played a seminal role in the study, translation, and publication
of Kurdish literature. His research interests concerned a wide range of issues
in Kurdish literature and folklore. However, he will probably be remembered
best for his path-breaking work on Ahmed Khani (Rasul 1979), which is based
on his postdoctoral (Doktor nauk) dissertation defended in 1977 in Moscow,
at the Institute of Oriental Studies (IOS) of the Academy of Sciences of the
USSR.1 One cannot but agree with Kamal Mirawdeli (2012: 13) that this “mas-
sive encyclopedic study of Mem û Zîn” is certainly “the best-ever study of
Ahmadi Khani’s work.” However, Kurdish studies scholars have yet to under-
take the painstaking work of analysing his rich legacy. Even though it has been
acknowledged that Rasul provided the “first full-length monographic study of
MZ [Mem û Zîn]” (Leezenberg, 2018: 86; see also Leezenberg 2019), the analy-
sis put forward in this work has not received the attention it deserves on the
part of specialists of Khani (Mirawdeli, 2012: 31). This is most likely due to the
fact that Rasul’s book was published in Arabic only, while his dissertation in
Russian never appeared in print.2
In this article, I would like to dwell briefly on some aspects of the Soviet
stage of Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul’s biography, which played a major role in his
formation as a scholar. Given existing limitations associated with the lack of
direct access to most Russian-language material, it remains a critical task for
the study of Rasul’s scholarly legacy to acquaint the wider English-speaking
audience with his publications and the materials written about him from the
Soviet Union.
Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul was born in 1934 in Sulaymaniyah into the family
of Mullah Mustafa Sefwet Deleja, who in turn descended from a well-known
Kurdish family of Muslim clerics and acted as imam and Friday preacher in

1 The Doktor nauk (“Doctor of Sciences”) degree in the USSR and the post-Soviet countries
roughly corresponds with the Habilitation (Dr. habil.) degree adopted in Germany and some
other countries. It is a precondition for promotion to a professorship. The Soviet equivalent
of the PhD degree is the Kandidat nauk (“Candidate of Sciences”) degree.
2 Rasul’s book was published in Turkish translation only almost 30 years after its publication in
Arabic, in 2007, making it available to many Kurdish readers in Turkey and Europe. The only
authors who seriously engaged with Rasul’s study are Kamal Mirawdeli, who also translated
parts of it, including Rasul’s conclusions, in his own book (2012: 37–52), and Rasul’s Turkish
translator, Kadri Yıldırım. The Sufi aspects of Mem û Zîn to which Rasul paid much attention
were more recently also studied by Yıldırım (2011: 57–87).

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the local mosque.3 In Sulaymaniyah, there is still a mosque named after Rasul’s
grandfather, Hajji Mala Rasul (Hacî Mela Resûl). His father taught Izzaddin to
read and write even before he entered elementary school at the age of five. He
combined daytime learning in school with traditional Islamic education at his
father’s hujra in the evenings. In middle school, in 1947, he became a young
sympathiser of the newly founded KDP (Partî Demokratî Kurd, in 1952 renamed
Partî Demokratî Kurdistan). In 1948, his father sent him to study Islamic law
in Baghdad, where he soon came under the influence of a Communist Party
cell at his Shariah college. He joined the Iraqi Communist Party in 1949,
which may be the reason why he was forced to leave college and returned
to Sulaimaniyah. After completing high school there in 1951, he enrolled in
Baghdad’s Higher Teachers’ College.4 In his second year, in March 1953, he was
expelled from college for taking part in political demonstrations.5 Once again
returning to Kurdistan, Rasul became a schoolteacher in Qeladize, about 75
kilometres north of Sulaimaniyah, where he conducted political activities as
a Communist Party member. Due to his underground political activities, he
was forced to leave Iraq in 1956 for Syria, where he studied Arabic literature
for two years at the University of Damascus. Syria was then known to be a
haven for young Kurdish activists from Iraq because of its greater freedom for
cultural and political activities. In 1957, Rasul was among the Kurdish students
from Syria and Iraq who established the Society of Kurdish Students (Komela
Xwendekarên Kurd) in Damascus. In Syria, Rasul improved his Kurmanji,
which in turn led to his deep interest in the classical Kurdish literature written
in this dialect.
After the revolution of July 14, 1958, which overthrew the monarchy and
established republican rule in Iraq under Abd al-Karim Qasim, Rasul returned
to Baghdad. In October of the same year, he was reinstated at the University of
Baghdad’s Teachers’ College and enrolled for another year in the department
of Arabic literature. In November 1959, he was awarded the BA degree, after
which he started working at the Ministry of Education.

3 In some interviews, however, Rasul gave not 1934 but 1935 as the year of his birth. Biographical
information has been culled from the obituary on Basnews (2019) and various published
interviews with him (Keskin, 2015; Kurdsat, 2007a; Kurdsat, 2007b; Kurdistan24, 2019).
4 This was one of several colleges then operating in Baghdad, which were to merge into the
University of Baghdad in 1958. The Higher Teachers’ College was then incorporated as the
College of Education.
5 As stated in the University of Baghdad’s Certificate No. 2067 of June 4, 1977, which we found
in Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul’s Habilitation file, he was expelled from the college under Order
No. 698 of March 15, 1953, for “political activities.” The certificate also indicates the subjects
he was studying and the grades he received.

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Soviet Scholarships for Iraqi Kurds and Kurdish Studies in the

Soviet Union

After the revolution of 1958, the USSR – with which the new leadership of Iraq
had established bilateral relations – began to allocate places for students from
Iraq at its universities. By early 1961, one in eight of all Iraqi students and train-
ees studying abroad did so in the Soviet Union.6 They no doubt studied a wide
range of subjects, but it was significant that a number of them were invited to
pursue Kurdish studies. No other country stimulated Kurdish studies, for fear
of antagonising the Arab, Persian and Turkish governments.
In 1960, Rasul was one of a small group of Kurdish students who were given
the opportunity to carry out doctoral research on Kurdish history and culture
in the USSR. Other members of this group were Ma’ruf Khaznadar, Kamal
Mazhar Ahmad (M. A. Kamal’) and Nasrin Fakhri. They were soon to be joined
by Kawis (Kaykaus) Kaftan. By 1965, they had all obtained their doctorates
(Rasul, 1963a; Khaznadar, 1963; Kamal’, 1963; Nasrin 1965; Kaftan, 1963), and
both Rasul and Kamal’ later also obtained their Doktor nauk degrees, which
very few other students from Asia and Africa did. They and Khaznadar contrib-
uted much to Soviet Kurdology and were to establish themselves as prominent
Kurdish scholars in Iraq.
For a year, Rasul studied Russian in Moscow, after which he was given the
choice of continuing graduate studies in Leningrad or Baku. In the former,
there was the recently established “Kurdish Cabinet” (Kurdskij kabinet) of the
Leningrad branch of the Institute of the Peoples of Asia.7 Baku had a more
modest academic establishment, but it was where emigrants from Iranian
Kurdistan had settled after the collapse of the Republic of Mahabad (January–
December 1946). These included Rahim Ghazi (Russian transliteration: Ragim
Gazi) and Ali Gelawêj (Kalavesh), both of whom had already received PhD
degrees in Baku (Gazi in 1954, Kalavesh in 1955). Gazi and Kalavesh persuaded
Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul, Kamal Mazhar Ahmad and Nasrin Fakhri to choose
the Azerbaijani capital, assuring them that, given an increase in the number
of graduate students at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of

6 The news bulletin Kurdish Facts and West-Asian Affairs in its March 1961 issue (Nr. 4, p. 13)
cited statistics according to which 6415 Iraqis were students or trainees abroad on January 1,
1961. Almost two thirds of them studied in four countries: Britain (1851), USA (928), USSR
(779) and West Germany (544). In the following issue, it reported that 99% of the Iraqi stu-
dents in the USSR studied in Moscow, Baku and Leningrad (Kurdish Facts and West-Asian
Affairs, Nr. 5, April 1961, p. 13).
7 In the 1960s, this was the name of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of
Sciences. On its “Kurdish Cabinet”, see Kurdoev, 1972: 392–399.

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Sciences of Azerbaijan, it would be possible to open a department of Kurdish

studies there. Ma’ruf Khaznadar and Kawis Kaftan, on the other hand, opted for
Leningrad, pursuing their research and obtaining their doctorates in the frame-
work of the “Kurdish cabinet.”8
From the early 1960s onwards, Baku became an important centre of Soviet
Oriental studies, with a small group of Kurdish specialists working in differ-
ent departments. Besides Ragim Gazi and Ali Kalavesh, there were three other
Kurdish scholars here: Gusejn Gasanogly Alyshanov, a specialist of the poetry
of Abdullah Goran, Zumrud Shafieva, who studied the different genres of
Kurdish poetry, and Shamil Askerov, who subsequently defended a PhD the-
sis on the work of Cegerxwîn. Rasul carried out his doctoral research and in
June 1963 he obtained a PhD in philology from the Department of Literature of
the Middle East, Faculty of Oriental Studies, Azerbaijan State University (ASU,
now Baku State University). His dissertation was published a few years later in
Arabic in Lebanon (Rasul, 1966), in what he later described as a poor transla-
tion. It was nonetheless reissued without major changes in Erbil in 2010.
The PhD dissertation showed the clear marks not only of Rasul’s own wide
reading of Kurdish literature but of the general literary training he received in
the Soviet Union. Long after his return to Iraq, he remained highly appreciative
of the Russian tradition of literary criticism. He translated a volume of Russian
theoretical studies of Oriental literatures into Arabic (Rasul, 1991), and as late
as 2007 he proudly showed an interviewer some of the Russian books from his
personal library – including both fiction and literary criticism – that he valued
highly (Kurdsat, 2007b).
While Rasul’s thesis, entitled “Realism in Kurdish Literature after World
War II (based on Iraqi Kurdistan),” was specifically dedicated to Kurdish real-
ism, it also included an analysis of various genres and aspects. It should be
noted that by this time, only two major overviews of Kurdish literature were
in existence, both published in Baghdad and focusing mainly on Sorani litera-
ture: Alaaddin Sajjadi’s History of Kurdish Literature (1952) and Rafiq Hilmi’s
Kurdish Poetry and Literature (1941, 1956). Rasul’s study differed from those of
his predecessors in that he adopted a theoretical framework and more system-
atically distinguished between various genres. The value of Rasul’s work was

8 Ma’ruf Khaznadar prepared his PhD thesis under the supervision of Kanat Kurdoev
(Khaznadar, 1963), after which he worked as a researcher in the “Kurdish cabinet” until 1968
and published his PhD thesis as a book (Khaznadar, 1967), which is briefly summarised by
Landau, 1975: 196–197. Khaznadar published a Russian translation of a collection of short
stories by Kurdish writers including Fadil Nizam ad-Din, Ibrahim Ahmad, Hussein Huzni
Mukryani, Kawis Kaftan, Shakir Fattah, Alaaddin Sujadi, Ma’ruf Khaznadar, and Piramerd
(1968).

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enhanced by the fact that he had access to many unpublished manuscripts

by Kurdish authors with whom he was personally acquainted and which he
thus first made known to the scholarly world (Rasul, 1963a: 3). The work also
demonstrated his vast knowledge of folk literature; he quoted many passages
of oral epics from memory (Rasul, 1963a: 6).
Having a religious background, yet being a communist, Rasul adopted a
balanced view of the role of Islam in the Kurdish movements in Turkey and
Iraq. Without disavowing the communist struggle against religion, he duly
noted the absence of anti-religious themes in modern Kurdish literature. Rasul
believed that it would have been a mistake for the Kurdish communists to use
anti-religious slogans. That would only have elicited the “dissatisfaction of the
people, especially the peasants, and would have alienated them from the revo-
lutionary movement” (Rasul, 1963a: 16). In this sense, Rasul’s work was not only
literary but also had political undertones, discussing the peculiarities of the
religious and feudal situation among the Kurds of that time as departing from
the standard framework of materialism.
The early 1960s were the heyday of Kurdish research in the USSR. As observed
quite early by the Soviet orientalist Naftula Khalfin, the presence of Kurds from
abroad, especially from Iraq, in the Soviet Orientalist departments stimulated
their Soviet colleagues (Khalfin, 1966: 157). Another consequence of their pres-
ence was that the Kurdish national struggle became a primary subject on the
Kurdological research agenda, not only for the Iranian and Iraqi Kurds but also
for established Soviet scholars including Khalfin himself, who wrote a major
study on nineteenth-century imperial rivalry over Kurdistan and its impact on
Kurdish uprisings (Khalfin, 1963).9
Diplomatic and political relations with the countries that controlled parts of
Kurdistan were no doubt a factor that hampered the development of Kurdish
studies, in the Soviet Union as well as elsewhere. Moscow’s special relation-
ship with Iraq, however, encouraged the USSR not only to welcome Kurdish
students in its academic institutions but also to bestow academic respect-
ability on the study of the Kurdish national movement, as the Soviet leader-
ship wished to draw on the dissent between the Kurds and central authorities
to further promote the USSR’s goals in the region, especially after the fall of
Qasim’s left-leaning regime in 1963. The academic achievements of the Iraqi

9 See the following works by foreign and Soviet Kurds writing on aspects of the Kurdish national
movement: Gazi, 1954; Kaftan, 1963; Kamal’, 1967; 1969; Mgoyan, 1963. An Arabic translation
of Khalfin’s 1963 study was serialised the KDP’s Arabic journal al-Ta’akhi in Baghdad and
became the first Soviet work to be translated into Turkish and influence debates in Kurdish
circles in Turkey (1976).

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Kurdish students were hailed in Soviet media for propaganda abroad. Thus,
the widely circulated Soviet journal Aziya i Afrilka segodnya (Asia and Africa
Today), one of the most important channels of Soviet propaganda in Asia and
Africa (Kirasirova, 2015: 30–31; Kitrinos, 1984: 63), printed a report on Rasul’s
thesis that is worth quoting in full:

The young Iraqi scholar and Kurd Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul successfully
defended his PhD thesis in philology at the Azerbaijan State University
[…] The topic of the thesis is “Realism in the Modern Kurdish Literature of
Iraq.” The author emphasizes that the young literature of Iraqi Kurdistan
reflects the life of the common people, their struggle for their national
rights, and is actively involved in the movement of the peoples for peace.
Kurdish writers strive to create socialist realism literature. (Anon., 1963)

The journal did not limit itself to this note and soon after published a letter
by Rasul that was very critical of Iraq. In the editorial section, he was intro-
duced as “a young Iraqi scholar and philologist of Kurdish nationality, and
the author of the first scholarly work on the literature of Iraqi Kurdistan.”
According to the author, his letter is “a voice of protest against military opera-
tions in Iraqi Kurdistan.” Rasul condemned the “shameful and dirty war of the
Iraqi government,” led by the Ba’ath party and the “agents of colonialism from
the countries of the aggressive CENTO block,” suppressing “by fire and sword”
the “free and peaceful people” and carrying out “fascist scorched earth tactics
in Kurdistan.”10 In the letter, Rasul wrote that “the Kurds of Iraq are deeply
grateful to the Soviet Union (…) for its strong support of the just struggle of the
people of Iraqi Kurdistan for their essential rights and their right to national
self-determination” (Rasul, 1963b). Next to Rasul’s letter, a letter of a similar
nature by Kanat Kurdoev was published (Kurdoev 1963).

Party Work, Travel, and Academic Employment in Iraq

After having obtained his PhD degree, Rasul lived for another year in Moscow,
studying party work, philosophy, and economics, after which he was sent by

10 CENTO (Central Treaty Organization), also known as the Baghdad Pact, was a Cold War
military alliance formed in 1955 by Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey and the United Kingdom.
Many Kurds perceived that fear of Kurdish claims was a driving factor of the alliance.
Under Qasim’s revolutionary regime, Iraq withdrew from CENTO in 1959. It was finally
dissolved in 1979. (Editors’ note.).

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the Iraqi Communist Party to Sofia to work on a radio broadcast to Iraq.11

In 1965, Rasul returned to Iraqi Kurdistan, becoming a peshmerga of the Iraqi
Communist Party, and spent a year in the village of Dilman (near Haji Omran),
at the base of KDP leader Mustafa Barzani.
Towards the end of 1966 he left Kurdistan for Baghdad, where a more accom-
modating regime had taken over, and where he took up a teaching position
in the Kurdish Department at the University of Baghdad which was founded
in 1959. As he later claimed, it had been Barzani himself who recommended
him for this position.12 He lived in Baghdad for about fifteen years, during
which he published a monograph on Kurdish folk literature (Rasul, 1970, 1987)
and numerous shorter articles on classical Kurdish authors in the Kurdish
and Arabic-language press in Baghdad. These included a series of articles on
Ahmed Khani on which he was to build in his postdoctoral work. In addition,
Rasul authored school textbooks on Kurdish literature published by the Iraqi
Ministry of Education, as well as editing diwan of Kurdish poets. He also gave
a series of talks about Kurdish literature on Baghdad radio (Rasul, 1977a: 13).

Return to the USSR for Postdoctoral Studies

In 1976, Rasul returned to the Soviet Union to continue his studies, this time
not in Baku, which was not equipped for advanced Kurdish studies, but in
Moscow, at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of
the USSR. The archive of the institute holds Rasul’s personnel file, which con-
sists of four documents assembled in 1976. The file includes basic biographical
information, such as his surname, name and patronym, date of birth, place of
birth (the city of Sulaymaniyah, Iraq), nationality (Kurd), social background
(religious family), language skills (Kurdish, Arabic, Persian, Russian, English),
academic degree and academic title (Kandidat nauk, Dotsent [PhD, Associate
professor]), and the address of his residence in Moscow. In a letter dated
16 September 1976, the Ministry of Higher Education of the USSR informs the
IOS that Rasul had been granted a state-funded scholarship for a period of one
year, to be trained in the field of Kurdish literature at the Institute. The amount
of the scholarship was 200 rubles per month, which constituted a significant
sum in the USSR at that time, exceeding the average wage in the country.

11 In this interview, Rasul does not mention in which specific institution he studied these
subjects; this was most likely one of the Soviet Communist Party schools.
12 Rasul claimed this in his interviews (Keskin, 2015; Kurdistan24, 2019).

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Rasul began his stint as a trainee (Russian stazhior) at the IOS on 30 Sep-
tember 1976. A year later, he obtained the academic degree of Doktor nauk
(Dr. habil.) with a dissertation about the intellectual and spiritual dimension
of Ahmed Khani’s work (Rasul, 1977), which soon also was published in Arabic
in Baghdad (Rasul, 1979). As the IOS archives show, this was not the subject he
had initially agreed to write about. According to his case files, he was supposed
to write a thesis on the subject of “Socialist realism and its influence on Kurd-
ish literature.” In other words, he was expected to continue the research that
had yielded his PhD thesis in Baku. Given the limited time available, such a
drastic change of topic is unusual. The high quality of the work he submitted as
his Doktor nauk thesis suggests that much of the work had in fact already been
prepared in advance before he arrived in Moscow, so that he only needed to
resolve minor technical aspects of the Russian text during the allotted period.
He provides several indications that this was the case. In the summary (avtore-
ferat) of his dissertation, he lists the articles in Kurdish and Arabic on the work
of Ahmed Khani that he had published in Iraq in the early 1970s.13 He also
states in the thesis that his Arabic book on Ahmed Khani had already been
accepted for publication at the University of Baghdad (Rasul, 1977: 15), and in a
later interview he claims that he had already had the book ready before his trip
to Moscow (Kurdistan24, 2019).
No less curious is another circumstance of his defence. The official oppo-
nents of his defence were Gazanfar Yusifogly Aliyev, a well-known expert
on the work of Nizami Ganjavi and the Persian-language literature of India,
the Kurdish scholar and linguist Cherkes Khudoevich Bakaev, author of a
Kurdish-Russian dictionary and specialist of the dialects of the Kurds living
in the USSR, and Halyk Huseynovich Korogly, a scholar of Persian literature
and the literature of the Turkic peoples. This means that only one of the oppo-
nents had a background in Kurdish studies though not in Kurdish literature.
Undoubtedly, a scholar of Persian literature, especially one with expertise in
Nizami, whom Khani consciously emulated, was well placed to evaluate Rasul’s
research. Still, it is worth recalling that there were also two highly qualified and
well-known specialists of Kurdish classical literature in the Soviet Union in
those years, both working in Leningrad. Margareta Rudenko, the most authori-
tative scholar on Ahmed Khani’s work, died a year before Rasul submitted his
thesis, but the luminary of Kurdish literature Kanat Kurdoev was then the
head of the Kurdish section in the Leningrad branch of the IOS. It is unknown
why Kurdoev did not participate as an official opponent in Rasul’s defence.

13 These are listed among his publications in the bibliography at the end of this article.

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However, according to Zara Yusupova, Rasul regularly came to Leningrad and

worked with Kurdoev on his thesis.14

Studying Ahmed Khani in the USSR

Rasul’s Habilitation thesis was only published in Arabic. Although some years
ago a Turkish translation by Kadri Yıldırım was published (Rasul, 2007) and
parts of the conclusions are quoted in English by Kamal Mirawdali (2012),
the substance of the work remains inaccessible to many scholars interested
in Khani’s work. I will therefore present a brief overview of the main points
developed in the study. In order to situate this work in its proper context, I will
first very briefly point out some trends in Soviet Kurdish studies.15
Kurdology was not just an academic enterprise but also an instrument of
Soviet ethnic policy, a tool for shaping a Kurdish culture and, in a broader sense,
a Kurdish nationality in the USSR. The institutionalisation of Kurdish studies
as a field of research separate from Iranian studies was akin to a “secession” of
the Kurds, even if only within the framework of Soviet Oriental studies, and
this conditioned the demarcation of valid subjects of research as well as the
recruitment of research personnel. Attaining status as a full-fledged specialisa-
tion, Soviet Kurdology was supposed to ensure a systematic, and more impor-
tantly, a politically “correct” (i.e., patriotic) study of the Kurds. In this regard,
large-scale work was launched in the field of Kurdish linguistics, the study and
critical description of manuscripts and literary works, various issues in medi-
eval history and folklore, as well as questions on the recent history of the Kurds,
especially the emergence of a national movement and liberation struggle.
The outstanding achievements of Soviet Kurdish studies notwithstanding,
it is important to note that this process was accompanied by research that
understated the extent to which Kurdish culture was shaped by its interaction
with Persian, Arabic, and Turkish culture and the pervasive influence of Islam.
While some early contributions to Soviet Kurdology indicate that research
might have developed in a direction that took more explicit account of the
Islamic aspect of Kurdish culture, the academic climate of the later period
did not favour attention to the Kurdish contributions to Islamic literature and

14 Author’s interview with Russian Kurdologist Zare Yusupova, December 25, 2015.
15 Obviously, this is a multifaceted topic worthy of its own investigation. Peculiarities of
Soviet Kurdish studies were considered by Leezenberg (2011, 2015). Here, I will limit
myself to stating those aspects that are most relevant.

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culture.16 Yet, the overall atheistic tone of Soviet Kurdish studies was dictated
not only by the ideology of the state, as the separation of the Kurds from Arabic,
Persian, and Turkish culture also represented an important means to create an
independent Kurdish history. In this regard, as noted by Michiel Leezenberg,
Kurds were described “as a primarily oral and folkloric nation – isolated from
the wider cosmopolitan Islamicate … culture” (Leezenberg, 2015: 748).
It is therefore not surprising that Soviet scholars studied Khani’s Mem û Zîn
primarily as Kurdish national epic – rather than, for instance, an allegory with
strong religious overtones. This was the approach of the influential Joseph
Orbeli, who administered the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad from 1934 to
1951 and was to establish and lead the Kurdish cabinet in Leningrad in the
late 1950s and 1960s. In his view, Mem û Zîn was “a creation of the Kurdish
community, done many centuries before Ahmed Khani” (Orbeli, 1938: 5).17 It
is noteworthy that in the same year, a great expert in Persian literature, Oleg
Vil’chevskij, published a translation of selected parts of Mem û Zîn in Russian
(Vil’chevskij, 1938).
However, the first Soviet scholar to extensively study Ahmed Khani was
Margareta Rudenko, who defended her PhD thesis on Mem û Zîn in 1954 and
later published several articles on the subject. She later published a critical
edition of Mem û Zîn, based on her comparison of nine different manuscripts,
with a Russian translation and an extensive preface (Rudenko, 1962). In her
studies, Ahmed Khani is represented first and foremost as a Kurdish national
poet, without discussion of his place in the Islamic literary tradition. While
deeming the Moscow edition of Mem û Zîn to be the best, Rasul has been criti-
cal of Rudenko’s failure to understand the various Islamic aspects of the poem
(Kurdsat, 2007b). It is also worth noting that in 1976, the year before Rasul
defended his thesis, a translation of Mem û Zîn into Azerbaijani by Shamil
Askerov was published in Baku in a large print run (Askerov, 1976). However,

16 In 1930, Arab Shamilov (Erebê Şemo), who was at that time a promising young scholar
and would soon go on to write the very first Kurmanji Kurdish novel (Şivanê Kurmanca,
Yerevan, 1935), published an article describing Kurdish religious practices (Shamilov,
1930). The article focused on the life of Sunni dervishes in Kurdistan and described their
zikr ritual. Shamilov was not himself a Muslim; he belonged to a Yezidi Sheikh family,
who had migrated to Armenia from the Kars region, which had become a part of Turkey
after World War I. Almost the entire Kurdish intelligentsia of the former USSR, especially
in Kurdish studies (as a branch of Oriental studies) and in Kurdish culture, art, and litera-
ture, consisted of Yezidis who were primarily from Armenia or, less often, from Georgia.
17 The fact that Khani adopted a widely known folk tale as the basis for his literary work is
well known. The relationship of Khani’s work and the various oral versions of Mem û Zîn
is studied by Chyet (1991: 52–63).

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as Rasul noted in the long summary of his thesis, “the first chapter, in which
Ahmed Khani addresses God and the prophet Muhammad and expresses his
world view with its Sufi interpretation, is missing [from this translation].”
It is against the backdrop of these studies that Rasul conducted his research
on Mem û Zîn, placing this work for the first time within a broader literary,
religious, and cultural context, which to some extent made up for the lack of
attention given to religious subjects in Soviet Kurdish studies.18 Without mini-
mising Mem û Zîn as a classic of Kurdish literature, Rasul analyses the poem
from the point of view of the philosophical conception of the Kurdish Sufi
poet and as one of the greatest monuments of Sufi poetry. In his first (PhD)
thesis Rasul had only attempted to reconcile the nationalism of the Kurds with
their religiosity, appealing to a Lenin quote about “granting freedom of reli-
gion” to overcome possible objections (Rasul, 1963: 16). In his second work, he
further reflects on the relationship of Kurdish nationalism with the Islamic
tradition. In that sense, both the strong religious training he received from his
Sufi father and his scholarly training in the USSR contributed to the creation of
this foundational work.

Khani and His Sufism in Rasul’s Analysis

The thesis has a standard structure, with an introduction, five chapters, a

conclusion, bibliography, and appendix. Rudenko’s translation of Mem û Zîn,
with Rasul’s corrections, is appended to the thesis. In terms of content, the
thesis can be roughly divided into two parts. The first part deals with the social
and political situation in Kurdistan at the time of the poem’s composition.
The author analyses the depiction of the Kurdish people’s life in Mem û Zîn,
comparing it with historical sources. The analysis moves away from the Soviet
historiographical tradition in which Kurds are presented as a backwards and
predominantly rural people (Rudenko 1954: 8). This part also includes sections
in which Rasul indulges in a detailed examination of Ahmed Khani’s use of
literary imagery, rhyming schemes, and determines the originality of the text
and literary life in Kurdistan.
The second part of Rasul’s dissertation focuses on Kurdish ethnography as
reflected in Mem û Zîn, including an analysis of wedding ceremonies, funer-
als, hunting parties, food, weapons, kinship relationships, music, the festival

18 See Leezenberg (2011: 98). It should nonetheless be noted that lack of interest in the
Islamic aspects of Kurdish culture is characteristic of the entire field of Kurdish studies,
and not only those produced in the USSR.

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In Memoriam: Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul ( 1934–2019 ) 163

of Newroz as well as Ahmed Khani’s relationship with the rulers and the poor,
his philosophy, and Sufi literature. These aspects are considered exclusively
through an analysis of the poet’s Sufi ideas.
In the introduction, Rasul indicates that he presents “the first attempt to
explain Sufism in Kurdish poetry from the perspective of Marxist philosophy”
(Rasul, 1977: 13). However, the thesis lacks the promised Marxist analysis. In
general, the work can hardly be considered a worthy example of the Soviet
Marxist historiography of that period. Rasul’s approach to the question of
classes was quite shallow and remained essentially limited to the quotation
of a few passages from the poem and their comparison with statements by
Karl Marx. Very originally, though, Rasul attempts to demonstrate that Kurdish
society had attained a high level of social and economic development, which
he characterised as feudalism with the beginnings of capitalist relations and
bourgeois society. Analysing the term muxlīm (from the Arabic root ghalima,
‘to be excited by lust’) found in Khani’s description of the wedding of Siti and
Tajdin, Rasul notes that Bozarslan in his Turkish translation correctly connects
it with prostitution.19 This, he argues, points to the presence of capitalist rela-
tions in the region, since “feudal tribal traditions threaten with death those
who engage in prostitution, and socialist society destroys the causes of its
emergence, that is, this phenomenon is characteristic only of a capitalist soci-
ety” (26). He also finds evidence of capitalist thinking in various allegories and
plots, and describes the social groups present at that time in Kurdistan.
Rasul begins his discussion of literary life in Kurdistan with the claim that the
literature in the Avestan and Pahlavi languages can be considered as “Kurdish
literature of the pre-Islamic period,” because the Kurdish language supposedly
shares the same connection with these two languages as does modern Persian.
Yet, he suggests that this is not an argument for “affirming this [Avestan and
Pahlavi] literature as the source of written Kurdish literature (in the period
after the establishment of Islam) for both Kurds and others, since this con-
nection has been broken for centuries” (34–35). Highlighting the significant
contributions of the Kurds to the Arabic literature of the Abbasid period and
to the Persian literature of the Samanid period, and, to a slightly lesser extent,
to the Turkish literature of the Ottoman Empire, Rasul discusses what can
be considered the beginnings of Kurdish literature in the Kurdish language

19 Rasul takes Rudenko’s translation as a basis for his analysis, but specifies that Rudenko
did not always manage to convey the meaning correctly. At the same time, he considers
Mehmed Emin Bozarslan (1968) to be the “most knowledgeable translator” and the “most
accurate in understanding the essence of the text and its meaning,” despite his imperfect
knowledge of the Persian language (Rasul, 1977: 9).

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164 Mossaki

itself, pointing to the Luri quatrains of Baba Tahir Hamadani (11th century),
as well as to literature in the Gorani dialect, beginning with Mala Pareshan
in the 14th century.20 Rasul concedes that these dialects are not always con-
sidered as Kurdish by linguists, but argues that most of the tribes that speak
these dialects identify themselves as Kurds, regardless of the degree of linguis-
tic proximity to Kurdish. For this reason, it is appropriate to consider their oral
and written literature as “part of the Kurdish literature, because both Luri and
Gorani have influenced and are influencing the development of Kurdish lit-
erature and its dissemination in [Iranian and Iraqi] Kurdistan” (35–37). With
regards to Kurmanji literature, Rasul notes that Luri and Gorani did not influ-
ence Kurmanji and that, accordingly, the development of literature in that dia-
lect should be considered separately.
Analysing the legacy of Ahmed Khani’s predecessors (Ali Hariri, Faqi Tayran,
Malaye Jaziri), Rasul tries to define their role in Oriental literature by draw-
ing parallels and underscoring elements borrowed from classical Sufi litera-
ture by Kurdish poets, while also showing the preservation of the folk poetic
metre typical of Kurdish songs and Kurdish oral literature. In that sense, he
defines the poetry of Faqi Tayran as an “intermediate link” between Oriental
classical literature and Kurdish oral literature, considering it a step “towards
the classical literary perfection observed in Malaye Jaziri” (45). As for Malaye
Jaziri, he played a unique role in the formation of Kurdish poetry, putting it on
par with the master pieces of Oriental literature and disproving the “claims
of underdevelopment” levelled at the Kurds (47). Rasul notes that he created
the first Kurdish diwan modelled on the Persian classics. Moreover, Jaziri not
only adapted Persian metres to the Kurdish language, but he also introduced
elements (for example, the “additional” form or mustazad) that influenced the
development of the Oriental diwan (47). In general, while demonstrating the
similarities between the philosophical subjects, allegories, and poetic forms
used by these poets as well as by Khani, Rasul notes that the author of Mem û
Zîn was mostly influenced by Faqi Tayran’s Sufi-inspired poetry.
Rasul also paid special attention to the author’s motives, seeing the nation-
alistic aspects of Khani’s work less in the specific verses where he calls for a
Kurdish king than in the fact that composing the poem in Kurdish instead of
Persian or Turkish constituted an act that demonstrated the author’s “very
close connection with his people” (61). Khani took upon himself the task,
Rasul argues, to present his people as capable of earthly and divine love. In this
sense, Khani acted as “a politician and agitator, defending his nation from the

20 Mala Pareshan Dinawari, one of the first Kurdish poets, wrote in Gurani and was a Sufi.

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In Memoriam: Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul ( 1934–2019 ) 165

accusations of enemies that the Kurds know only war and bloodshed. Khani
showed his people to be capable of experiencing love and tenderness, remark-
ing that the weapons in their hands are only a means to fight against backward-
ness and grief” (61).
Rasul also finds an analogy of Kurdistan’s division between the Ottoman
and Persian empires in Khani’s metaphor of language as a coin. Rasul recalls
that Kurdish emirates had in the past minted their own coinage but that this
symbol of sovereignty was suppressed by the powers that conquered them.21
He points to Khani’s desire to see the Emir of Botan as a Sultan minting his
own coins that will have worldwide currency, and to his juxtaposition of the
copper of Kurdish and the gold and silver of Persian, Arabic and Turkish:

Speaking of Kurdish literature and his own work, Khani compares his
poem with a copper coin and says that money faithfully represents the
power of the sovereign who minted it. If the Emir [of Botan] follows wise
policies, these Kurdish coins will cease to be local and will be accepted in
all markets for conversion into gold coinage. […] Khani wrote his poem in
the Kurdish language, which is the language of ordinary people. It is not a
gold or silver coin but one of simple copper, which large merchants may
refuse to accept but which is widely used by the common people (30).

Addressing the question of Mem û Zîn’s originality, Rasul brushes aside the
presence of folkloric plots and tales in the poem (to which his Soviet col-
leagues gave much importance) as a peripheral issue and asserts that Khani’s
achievement consisted of the sophisticated literary form he imparted on the
story of Mem and Zin and other pre-existing stories (67). Rasul also examines
Khani’s poetical style in detail, showing that although he followed the rules of
classical Oriental literature in terms of rhyming schemes, length of qasidas,
beyts, and rhetorical techniques, he developed his own original style within
these constraints. Comparing Khani’s work with other examples of Oriental
classical literature (notably Nizami and Fuzuli), Rasul for example shows how
many rhetorical techniques appear in a single beyt (distich) and points out
structural differences between Khani and his fellow poets (73–74). He also pays
special attention to the musical sound of beyts and analyses the use of parono-
masia (wordplay).

21 Sharafkhan Bidlisi’s Sharafnama mentions the minting of coins (sikka) and the mention-
ing of the emir in the Friday sermon (khutba) as the signs of the degree of independence
held by some of the early emirates. (Editors’ note.)

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166 Mossaki

The chapters devoted to ethnography and Sufi philosophy, in the second

part of Rasul’s thesis, are the most significant. This part begins with an anal-
ysis of Ahmed Khani’s attitude to rulers in general. Rasul notes that Khani’s
attitude towards the ruler is more critical than that found in other Oriental
classics, explaining this not only through Khani’s position as a national poet
who holds the emir responsible for the fate of his native people, but also with
respect to the author’s position as a Sufi, whose philosophy is based on “total
denial and total condemnation,” and the understanding that it is impossible to
establish a just peace on earth (129–130). Although Rasul writes in detail about
Khani’s desire to have a wise sovereign for his people, for Khani, the Emir of
Botan represents all rulers: this is the “Sufi ending” of the poem. Khani’s con-
temptuous Sufi stance towards the ruling class becomes clear in the last parts
of his poem, when his hero Mem refuses to visit the Emir, in order to show that
“only in God does he see the eternal sovereign” (136).
Rasul argues that Khani’s formal allegiance to Sunni Islam did not prevent
him from seeking inspiration from beyond the legalistic learning of the Shafi’i
school of law, in Sufism as well as philosophy and even in the pre-Islamic reli-
gious traditions of Kurdistan. He discusses at length Khani’s Sufi views on
money, justice, equality, distribution of wealth, and luxury. The concept of
friendship and brotherhood as it appears among the poem’s protagonists is
also given a Sufi emphasis: Tajdin prefers his friend Mem over all of his rela-
tives (139). Man’s dependence on the sun appears in Khani as a symbol for
the Sufi’s love for God: Rasul digresses on the cult of the Sun and its sacred
place in Sufism, adding that “Khani’s Sufi views show traces of the influence
of Zoroastrianism and Yezidism,” without further elaborating on this question
(161). Rasul shows a progression in Khani’s references to God, beginning with
verses from the Quran, then proceeding to the views of other Sufis and poets,
and at the end offering his most personal views (164). Mem û Zîn opens with an
invocation in which Khani addresses God directly. Analysing this invocation,
Rasul finds common ground with the Sufis Ahmad al-Ghazali and Ibn Arabi as
well as the philosophers Ibn Sina, al-Farabi, Ibn Rushd, al-Kindi, Aristotle, the
Alexandrian philosophers, Plotinus and the Mu’tazilis (167–180).
The question of Satan in Khani’s work is of particular importance to Rasul in
understanding the poet’s worldview. Satan and the forces of darkness appear
in Mem û Zîn in the person of Mem’s rival, Bakr, who in Khani’s account is an
ambivalent figure: evil and yet rewarded by God. Rasul places his analysis of
Khani’s Bakr against the background of the early Sufis al-Hallaj, al-Maqdisi and
Ahmad al-Ghazali, who also made Satan an ambiguous force.22 He shows that

22 An excellent overview of Sufi interpretations of Satan’s ambivalent cosmological position

is given by Peter J. Awn (1983). (Editors’ note.)

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In Memoriam: Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul ( 1934–2019 ) 167

Khani’s view of Satan is different than that of these authors. He suggests that
for Khani the good can only exist due to the presence of evil. Satan therefore
has an essential role to play. In Mem û Zîn, the villain Bakr, who is the cause of
Mem’s death, is ultimately defeated by Mem’s loyal friend Tajdin. Khani writes
that Bakr, although he personifies evil, goes to heaven, for through his actions
he played a part in carrying out God’s design for Mem and Zin. Nor did Tajdin
commit a sin in killing Bakr, for he was ignorant of this divine mystery. Both
Bakr and Tajdin were, in fact, manifestations of specific divine attributes (186).
Rasul perceives here an influence of Zoroastrianism, which he believes to
have as one of its core concepts “the harmony of opposite spirits – the spirit of
good and the spirit of evil” (198). Khani’s world view, he asserts, borrows eclec-
tically from classical Sufism, Zoroastrianism, and various schools of Muslim
doctrine. In questions of free will versus predestination, Khani appears in
most passages close to the radically fatalist Jabriyah but elsewhere closer to
the more moderate Ash’ariyah.23

Khani interprets everything people do as predestined. Moreover, he

expresses a similar point of view on natural phenomena, even those in
plants and minerals. (203)

Rasul tries to unravel the controversy of Khani’s position as an absolute fatalist

in the question about the situation of the disintegrated and divided Kurdish
people, who find themselves clutched in the grip of the Ottoman Empire and
Iran. Rasul shows that Khani wants a different future for his people, but as
a fatalist, he understands that any future, like the present, is predetermined
(207–208).
The thesis examiners were in unanimous agreement that none of the
famous Persian Sufi poets had ever been honoured with such an analysis in
Soviet literature.24 The analysis of the poem’s text and its comparison with
other classic examples of Oriental literature was particularly appreciated by
the jury. At the same time, it should be noted that none of the examiners dis-
sected the second part of the thesis, and some even admitted lacking the nec-
essary qualifications. Some comments were made on Rasul’s Marxist method
and his approach of the class question, which were criticised as simplified and
confusing.

23 The Jabriyah was a school of Muslim theology that affirmed predestination in its most
radical form. The Ash’ariyah (which nowadays represents the majority of traditional
Muslims) formulated a compromise between free will and predestination.
24 Gazanfar Aliyev’s comments to this effect are preserved in Rasul’s files at the IOS.

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168 Mossaki

Conclusion

Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul’s work remains the only research in Soviet and Russian
Kurdish studies in which Ahmed Khani’s Mem û Zîn, a monument of Kurdish
literature which has played such a significant role in the development of
Kurdish nationalism, was studied in connection with Sufi theosophy and
Islam. It should be noted that Rasul could not wholly ignore the ideological
reality of the Soviet state, which explains why the title of his dissertation does
not in any way hint at a discussion of the religious aspects of Ahmed Khani’s
work. By contrast, the title of the Arabic book published on the basis of this
thesis directly ties the Kurdish poet to Sufism (Rasul 1979).
After defending his Habilitation thesis in Moscow, Rasul returned to
teach at the University of Baghdad but was dismissed in the early 1980s. He
then taught at Salahaddin University in Erbil and, in 1992 was elected to the
Parliament of Kurdistan as an independent candidate appearing on the list of
the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (Yekêtiya Nîştimanî Kurdistan, YNK). However,
Rasul’s political career was brief, and he then entirely focused on teaching at
the University of Sulaimaniyah from the mid-1990s onwards.
The world of Kurdish science, arts and letters has suffered a major loss with
the passing of Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul. We say goodbye to a great scholar and
patriot of Kurdistan and one of the brightest intellectuals of the vibrant era of
Kurdish studies in the USSR.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors for their
valuable comments that significantly improved the final version of this paper.

Bibliography

Works by Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul

(The author was unable to retrieve all bibliographic details of Rasul’s publications in
full, but has provided the most comprehensive information available)

Rasul, I. M. (1963a). Realizm v kurdskoy literature posle Vtoroy mirovoy voyny (po
materialam Irakskogo Kurdistana) [Realism in Kurdish literature after World War II
(based on Iraqi Kurdistan)]. (Dissertation summary (Avtoreferat), also unpublished
doctoral dissertation). S. M. Kirov Azerbaijan State University, Baku.

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In Memoriam: Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul ( 1934–2019 ) 169

Rasul, I. M. (1963b). Pravoe delo oderzhit pobedu [Just cause will triumph]. Aziya i
Afrika segodnya, 10 (October), 29.
Rasul, I. M. (1966). al-Wāqi‘īyah fī al-adab al-Kurdī. [Realism in Kurdish literature].
Beirut: al-Maktabah al-‘Aṣrīyah. [Reprint: Kurdistān al-‘Irāq: Dār Aras lil-Ṭibā‘ah
wa-al-Nashr, Erbil 2010.]
Rasul, I. M. (1969). Ali Hariri’s life and work (in Kurdish). Daftari Kurdawari 2.
Rasul, I. M. (1970). Edebî folklorî kurdî: lêkolînewe [Kurdish folk literature: a study].
Baghdad: Dār al-Ǧāḥiẓ.
Rasul, I. M. (1971). Khani and Kurdish writing (in Kurdish). Nūsarī Kurd 4.
Rasul, I. M. (1972a). Khani and Kurdish literary criticism (in Kurdish). Nūsarī Kurd 5
[Arabic translation: Al-Ta’akhi, Baghdad, January 1972].
Rasul, I. M. (1972b). Mem û Zîn: original poem or borrowing? (in Kurdish). Nūsarī
Kurd 6 [Arabic translation: Al-Ta’akhi, Baghdad, April 1972].
Rasul, I. M. (1972c). About the work of Ahmed Khani (in Arabic). al-Aǧīal, April 1972.
Rasul, I. M. (1972d). Faqi Tayran’s life and work (in Kurdish). Maǧallat kulliiyat al-adab 15.
Rasul, I. M. (1973). Ali Bardashani’s life and work (in Kurdish). Maǧallat kulliiyat
al-adab 16.
Rasul, I. M. (1974). Khani’s life path (in Arabic). Shams Kurdistan, January 1974.
Rasul, I. M. (1977). Akhmadi Khani – kurdskiy poet i myslitel’ (1650–1707). [Ahmadi
Khani – Kurdish poet and thinker (1650–1707)]. Habilitation thesis (Philology).
Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Moscow.
Rasul, I. M. (1979). Ahmadi Khani 1650–1707: sha’iran wa mufakkiran faylasufan wa
mutasawwifan [Ahmadi Khani (1650–1707): As a poet, thinker, philosopher and
mystic]. Baghdad: Matba‘at al-Hawadith.
Rasul, I. M. (1987). Dirāsah fī adab al-fulkulūr al-Kurdī [A study of Kurdish folk lit-
erature]. Baghdad: al-Jamhūrīyah al-‘Irāqīyah, Wizārat al-Thaqāfah wa-al-I‘lām, Dār
al-Thaqāfah wa-al-Nashr al-Kurdīyah.
Rasul, I. M. (trl.) (1991). al-Masā’il al-naẓarīyah fī al-ādāb al-sharqīyah [translation of
Z. Berzing (ed.) (1969) Teoreticheskie problemy vostichnykh lliteratur (Theoretical
problems of Oriental literature), Moscow: Nauka]. Baghdad: Āfāq ‘Arabīyah.
Rasul, I. M. (2007). Bir şair düşünür ve mutasavvıf olarak Ehmedê Xanî ve “Mem û Zin”.
Transl. Kadri Yıldırım. Istanbul: Avesta.

Archival Materials
Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. (1976). Personal file
of Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul. 4 pages.

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Shamilov, A. (1930). Kurdskie dervishi [Kurdish Dervishes]. Ateist 59, 41–46.
Vil’chevskij, O. L. (1938). Mam i Zin: Kurdskaya povest [Mam and Zin: A Kurdish tale].
In A. K. Borovkov (ed.) Skazki narodov Vostoka, (99–119). Moscow and Leningrad:
Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR.
Yıldırım, K. (2011). Ehmedê Xanî’nin Fikir Dünyası. Istanbul: Ağrı Kültür Yardımlaşma
ve Dayanışma Derneği.

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 Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 173–206
Kurdish Studies
Archive
[Link]/ksa

Book Reviews

∵
Political Violence and the Kurdish Conflict:
a Review

Zerrin Özlem Biner, States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in

Southeast Turkey, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020, 264 pp.,
(ISBN 9780812251753).

Salih Can Açıksöz, Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political

Violence in Turkey, Oakland: University of California Press, 2020, 272 pp.,
(ISBN: 9780520305304).

Political violence, war, and dispossession are realities that have resoundingly
shaped Kurdish life worlds, identity, and self-understanding throughout the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Being denied a place within the order of
sovereign nation-states that arose from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire has
had tremendous consequences for Kurdish populations in Turkey, Iran, Iraq
and Syria, the four main countries occupying different parts of the Kurdish
heartlands. Without a recognized political status, Kurdish communities have
been subjected to projects of annihilation, integration, and assimilation by the
states ruling over them. These projects have often employed different forms
of violence in order to facilitate the establishment of national sovereignty,
ranging from the physical and embodied to the epistemic and symbolic. They
have relied on violence to simultaneously exclude Kurdish subjects from and
assimilate them into the fabric of the nation-state. How such violence has
shaped the life worlds and subjectivities, discourses and practices, aspirations
and imaginations of Kurds and other “minorities” is a question that a grow-
ing body of anthropologically inspired scholarship has begun to explore over

Published with license by Koninklijke Brill BV | doi:10.1163/9789004700406_009

© Marlene Schäfers, 2021
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
174 Book Reviews

recent years. Much of that scholarship has focused on the Turkish context, and
the present two volumes to be reviewed here are no exception. Nonetheless,
they provide precious new insights into the complicated effects of sovereign
violence. Importantly, they approach the so-called “Kurdish question” not as
a self-contained instance of ethnic conflict but as embedded in broader histo-
ries and logics of political violence in Turkey. The Kurdish conflict in this way
becomes a vantage point from where to explore the complex relations between
different “minority communities” situated at the margins of the nation-state
(Biner) and the militarization of public life in Turkey and the kinds of mascu-
line subjectivities it produces (Açıksöz).
Zerrin Özlem Biner’s ethnography States of Dispossession masterfully shows
how Kurdish life realities in contemporary Turkey are intricately intertwined
with broader histories of dispossession, including those of the 1915 Armenian
genocide and the violence perpetrated against other Christian communities
throughout the twentieth century. The book focuses on what Biner calls the
period of “violent peace” between the lifting of the state of emergency (OHAL)
in the Kurdish regions in 2001 and the return to full-blown violent conflict in
2015. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Mardin dur-
ing that period, Biner is interested in how life is remade in the aftermath of war
and violent loss at the “margins” (understood both geographically and meta-
phorically) of the Turkish state. Biner uses Turkey’s bid to register Mardin as
a UNESCO World Heritage Site as an entry point to investigate how the city’s
Kurdish, Arab and Syriac inhabitants have carved out new life trajectories dur-
ing a fragile peace period that witnessed the rise of commercialized multicul-
turalism and the aggressive implementation of neoliberal urban policies. She
traces how Mardinites engage with the new forms of value created by these
developments and how they often ending up entrapped in relationships of
debt and obligation. Mardin emerges from her account as a centre of fantasies
of progress, development, and enrichment, while continuously being haunted
by the violence, losses and absences of the past.
Biner draws on a well-known corpus in anthropological and political theory
to conceptualize the ambiguity, suspicion, and mistrust that protracted conflict
has inserted into the everyday lives of her interlocutors. Key interlocutors are
Veena Das, Michael Taussig, and Michael Lambek, as well as Giorgio Agamben
and Judith Butler. Crucially, for Biner ordinary life is not simply a space of
hope, recuperation or healing after decades of violent conflict, but rather a
space of complicity and enduring ruination. Drawing on Lauren Berlant, Biner
holds that the Mardinites she interacts with are “cruelly attached” to the very
forces that cause their injury and dispossession, making them complicit in

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the ongoing ruination of the built environment – mainly through digging for
treasures – in the hope of social and political mobility, which mostly fails to
materialize. Six ethnographic chapters demonstrate how such cruel attach-
ments are (re)produced across a range of sites including Mardin’s stone houses,
the law and the land.
Following the introduction, which sets out the theoretical concerns and
analytical framework of the book, chapter 1 introduces the reader to the city of
Mardin. It provides a history of the region’s different religious and ethnic com-
munities, highlighting the violence and dispossession that Armenian, Syriac
and Kurdish communities have been exposed to over the course of the twenti-
eth century. The chapter further zooms in on the various heritage-making proj-
ects that ensued in the early 2000s, including most prominently the UNESCO
World Heritage bid. Biner shows how these projects’ promotion of an apoliti-
cal notion of multicultural harmony have imbued the stone houses of Mardin’s
old city with novel forms of value tied primarily to heritage tourism and fos-
tered the rise of new elites (mainly ethnic Arabs and Kurds).
Chapters 2 and 3 then present ethnographic accounts of how this new value
is articulated through fantasies of treasures that many Mardinites believe are
embedded beneath the stone walls and grounds of their houses. In chapter 2,
we get to know Veysi Bey, a local expert digger for treasures who is convinced
of the presence of underground riches while remaining permanently indebted.
Together with Veysi Bey, Biner explores the Old City where digging has become
an obsession for many, even if one that is shot through with anxiety. Houses
have their own agency here: they reject paint, shake when violated and cause
premonitory dreams. Access to their value passes through their ruination via
digging; a bind that ties hope to anxiety, wealth to dispossession.
Chapter 3 moves on to explore in more detail the jinns (cin) that guard the
treasures of Mardin’s stone houses and routinely prevent their appropriation.
The chapter gives fascinating ethnographic insight into how jinns manifest
as snakes or scorpions, how they appear in dreams and can be tamed in ritu-
als of hypnotization. Treasures and the jinns that protect them are in Mardin
never directly attributed to the Armenian genocide or to the displacement of
Christian populations. Stories about them are seldom critical of official his-
toriography, nor do they upend ethno-religious hierarchies. By foregrounding
these ethnographic facts, Biner circumvents a perhaps all too easy interpreta-
tion that would read jinns as instances of subaltern consciousness or coun-
terhegemonic discourse. Nevertheless, her ethnography suggests that histories
of violent dispossession constitute a moral subtext to stories about treasures
and the jinns that guard them. Stories about jinns, Biner maintains, may not

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critique or even recognize genocidal pasts but they open up a space of encoun-
ter between past owners of imagined treasures and those seeking to appropri-
ate their riches.
Chapters 4 and 5 then take us beyond the realm of the Old City into the
surrounding countryside to bring into view the complicated relationships of
Mardin’s Syriac communities with their Kurdish neighbours and the Turkish
state. Chapter 4 introduces us to İsa Bey, a Syriac from Mardin who has spent
much of his life outside Turkey. He is one of many Syriacs in the diaspora who
invested their hopes in a return to their villages, spurred by the end of vio-
lent conflict and government promises made in the early 2000s. Biner follows
İsa Bey in his attempts to reclaim Syriac land and property around the nearby
town of Midyat. Rejecting traditional patronage relations with Kurdish tribal
leaders and villagers, İsa Bey works instead through a legal framework of rights
and duties in order to counter the ongoing dispossession of his community.
Throughout endless bureaucratic and court battles, İsa Bey insists on relating
to the state as a rights and property-bearing citizen.
Chapter 5 focuses on the struggle by the Syriac Mor Gabriel Monastery
against encroachment on its land by both local Kurdish tribes and the state.
A close reading of the history of this struggle illustrates the Syriac commu-
nity’s precarious position that leaves them at the mercy of interventions by
both local and state actors, highlighting the fragility of the law as a purveyor
of rights. Against this backdrop, İsa Bey’s insistence on the framework of the
law appears as a “cruel attachment” that relies on an optimistic mobilization
of hope in the face of its continuous disappointment.
The final chapter then returns to the Kurdish conflict and its repercus-
sions in times of alleged peace. Here, Biner provides a brilliant analysis of the
Turkish state’s Compensation Law, introduced in 2004 to award compensa-
tion for material losses incurred as a result of the conflict between the Turkish
armed forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). By making the right to
compensation conditional upon applicants’ renunciation of state responsibil-
ity for any damage suffered, Biner argues, the law never functioned as a way of
offering accountability for state violence perpetuated throughout the 1990s.
Quite to the contrary, as it entitled members of the military forces and police
officers to the same compensation rights as forcefully displaced Kurdish vil-
lagers, the law erased any difference between victim and perpetrator. But not
only that, the state has further proceeded to recuperate the money for com-
pensation from convicted PKK militants and their families, thus having its own
benefit regime bankrolled by those it considers insurgent citizens. As Biner
argues, rather than producing reparative justice, the law in this way becomes

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a debt-producing machine that mortgages the present and future of Turkey’s

Kurdish citizens.
The book closes with an epilogue, in which Biner reflects on the warfare
that has returned to the Kurdish regions with the collapse of the peace pro-
cess in 2015. Recounting intimate episodes in the lives of her Mardinite friends,
she gives insight into the despair and resignation caused by renewed warfare.
For Biner, these episodes illustrate the “continuum of violence” that mark the
region and its inhabitants.
States of Dispossession makes important contributions to the study of con-
temporary life in Turkey’s Kurdish regions. The way in which it investigates
questions of violence and dispossession through the vantage point of the built
environment and the agency of spiritual forces is a welcome move away from
the focus on social movements and political parties that prevail in the study
of the Kurdish conflict. Focusing on the complex relations between Syriacs,
Kurds and the state in Mardin, it evades dichotomies that would oppose Kurds
to Turks, victims to perpetrators, resistance to oppression – dichotomies that
continue to pervade much scholarly literature and public debates. As such, this
excellent book will be of interest to scholars of Kurdish, Armenian and Syriac
studies and all those with an interest in modern Turkey’s regime of governing
difference. With regard to the latter, one might have expected the author to
engage more thoroughly with the literature detailing the emergence of minori-
ties and sectarianism as a mode of governance in the post-Ottoman world in
order to flesh out the historical underpinnings of the very different relations
Kurdish and Syriac communities have with the Turkish state. Moreover, while
the author identifies what she calls the “tribal order” as key for the compli-
cated relations Kurdish Mardinites have with the state and the Syriac com-
munity, particularly scholars in the field of Kurdish studies might have liked to
see a more detailed account of how this tribal order is organized and comes to
exercise power. Finally, readers might wonder whether the characterization of
the Kurdish region as a “space of death” (16) subjected to an unrelenting “con-
tinuum of violence” risks reducing the complexity of everyday life in a region
that sees humour, pleasure and joy complexly intersect with suffering, harm
and injury.
Salih Can Açıksöz’s Sacrificial Limbs provides an entirely different perspective
onto the reverberations of Turkey’s Kurdish conflict by taking us from Mardin
to Istanbul, from the lives of Kurdish and Syriac minoritarian citizens of Turkey
to those of its Sunni-Turkish majority. An ethnography of how discharged sol-
diers who have been permanently disabled fighting against PKK guerrillas seek
to rebuild their lives in the metropole, Sacrificial Limbs is a brilliant analysis of

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how the sovereign violence unleashed in the framework of the Kurdish con-
flict constructs masculine subjectivity and ultranationalist political agency in
contemporary Turkey. Açıksöz departs from the understanding that military
service – a central rite of passage for men in Turkey – constitutes a contract
between male citizens and the state that secures sovereignty for both sides.
While men sacrifice their lives in military service to protect the nation’s sov-
ereignty, they are promised their own realms of petty sovereignty in turn, as
military service allows men to enter into employment, become property hold-
ing subjects and figure as heads of households. For disabled veterans, however,
this promise of sovereignty is broken. As much as they are in public discourse
celebrated as courageous heroes who have made great sacrifices for the nation,
in their everyday lives they face stigmatization for their disability, often accom-
panied by a loss of real income and dependency on family care and state ben-
efits. Rather than sovereign masculine subjects, veterans emerge from military
service as gender non-conforming bodies, situated dangerously close to the
figure of the equally disabled and dependent beggar. Drawing on scholarship
in political philosophy, feminist and medical anthropology as well as disabil-
ity studies, Açıksöz traces how disabled veterans encounter this dilemma and
seek to remake their sense of masculinity, many turning to ultranationalist
politics in the process. Veterans’ personal quest for masculine sovereignty in
this way becomes entwined with nationalist attempts at restoring state sover-
eignty, their dismembered bodies giving material form to nationalist anxieties
about the dismembered nation.
Açıksöz develops this argument over six chapters which are based on find-
ings from fieldwork with disabled veterans carried out in Istanbul between
2005 and 2008. Chapter 1 introduces readers to the realities of Turkish mili-
tary service. It depicts military service as an embodied and affective experi-
ence which deeply invests soldiers’ bodies with symbolic value. Based on the
recollections of his interlocutors, Açıksöz vividly reconstructs how “being on
the mountains” feels like for military conscripts: the bodily exhaustion, the
boredom, the anxiety and rush of the fight, the nearness of death. Açıksöz ties
these experiences to historical shifts in military strategy that have seen Turkish
soldiers adopt elements of guerrilla warfare. As conscripts become engaged in
a mimetic exercise of “becoming guerrilla,” the mountains turn from a space of
othering into one of magical realism. Soldiers imagine them to be populated by
cyborg guerrillas with supernatural powers and seductive yet deadly Kurdish
female “terrorists.” Fantasies of sexual promiscuity amongst Kurdish guerrillas
abound, alongside ideas about emasculated Armenian fighters. Uncanny pre-
monitions, warnings and dreams accompany raw violence, in this way sacral-
ising loss and injury and setting the stage for the experiences of failure and
stigmatization that follow when conscripts return not victorious but injured.

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Chapter 2 conceptualizes military service as foundational for both mascu-

line and state sovereignty. It shows how the promise of attaining masculine
sovereignty over property and the family through military service is broken
for disabled veterans, who often experience themselves as emasculated and
infantilized as a result of their disability and the dependency on family and
welfare benefits it entails. Açıksöz outlines how veterans have been increas-
ingly sacralised in public discourse over the 1990s, ushering into a new regime
of health, welfare and political benefits aimed at taking care of the nation’s
celebrated heroes. According to Açıksöz, the aim of this regime is to restore
disabled veterans as sovereign citizens and (re)productive bodies through a
range of technoscientific and socioeconomic interventions, including the
provision of high-end medical care and income-producing work (mostly via
jobs at government offices) as well as subsidized leisure facilities and even IVF
treatment. The state in this way seeks to pay back the debt that it has accrued
with veterans following the sacrifices they have made during military service.
Chapter 3 outlines in detail how disabled veterans stand at the intersection
of two axes of value, being at the same time venerated for their sacrifice and
potentially abject for their disability. Açıksöz shows how veterans virulently
seek to distinguish themselves both from street beggars and the disabled, since
being perceived as either would misrecognize the sacrificial nature of veter-
ans’ disability, which is precisely what renders them national heroes with near
sacred status. In campaigning to alleviate the grievances that veterans never-
theless experience on a daily basis as a result of their disability, they conse-
quently turn neither to rights-based activism via disability advocacy groups
nor to class-based mobilization, but to ultranationalist politics that is con-
cerned, above all, with the restoration of national sovereignty, hence promis-
ing the recognition of veterans’ sacrifice.
In chapter 4 Açıksöz outlines how disabled veteran activism takes form via
a detailed ethnography of two veteran associations in Istanbul, one the offi-
cial veteran association that stands in close contact with the state, the other
an informal lobbying group founded by the mothers of martyrs and veterans.
He shows how these associations, each in their own way, function as sites for
non-medicalized responses to experiences of loss and injury, allowing veter-
ans to find a sense of belonging and intimacy in a context where their every-
day lives are laced with experiences of masculine failure and stigmatization.
Associations in this way create durable “communities of loss” that are highly
amenable to ultranationalist mobilization.
Chapters 5 and 6 then turn to the forms that such mobilization takes as
veterans pursue a vengeful politics that demands that Kurdish and Armenian
“enemies of the nation” are made to pay a deadly price in return for the sac-
rifice veterans have made during their military service. Açıksöz details how

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the commuting of the death sentence for Abdullah Öcalan provoked a “sac-
rificial crisis” amongst veterans, who felt themselves betrayed by a state for
whom they had sacrificed their limbs and now expected returns. Many took to
protesting the decision by taking off and displaying their prosthetic limbs, the
material proof of their sacrifice for the nation. Over time, Açıksöz argues, dis-
sident intellectuals like Orhan Pamuk, Perihan Mağden and Hrant Dink have
become surrogate sacrificial victims instead of Öcalan. Detailing the enjoy-
ment his veteran interlocutors derived from being involved in protests against
these figures, Açıksöz masterfully captures the affective undercurrent of a sac-
rificial political logic that is intent on violently remaking national sovereignty.
Finally, chapter 6 investigates the complicated relations that tie veterans to
the state through both economic and nationalist debt. As Turkey’s health care
system has taken a neoliberal turn, veterans are increasingly looking to pri-
vate providers for their prostheses, often racking up considerable debt in the
process. Açıksöz focuses on several mediatized scandals when banks allegedly
repossessed veterans’ prostheses to cover these debts. The national outcry that
followed underlines how sacrificial logics of nationalism render the embodied
sacrifice of the soldier incommensurable with neoliberal accountability. As
the central transcendental value of the secular state, militarized self-sacrifice
accrues debts that can never be repaid, rendering the state forever indebted
towards its veteran subjects.
In the epilogue, Açıksöz charts the course that imaginaries of nationalist
sacrifice have taken in Turkey since the end of his fieldwork. While disabled
veterans were pushed to the back of the political scene during the peace nego-
tiations with the PKK, the return to warfare in 2015, the failed coup attempt of
2016 and the Turkish military invasions in Syria have rendered sacrificial logics
once again central to the performance of state sovereignty.
Sacrificial Limbs brings together meticulous ethnographic insight with rigor-
ous conceptual analysis to shed light on the sacrificial logics that underpin the
gendered and militarized iterations of Turkish nationalism. Açıksöz has writ-
ten a beautiful ethnography that provides rare insight into the intimate lives
of the protagonists of ultranationalist politics. It is a book that approaches its
interlocutors with critical empathy, seeking to understand and lay bare what
propels them to become protagonists in deadly violence. It makes for indis-
pensable reading for anyone interested in the political logics that drive Turkey’s
authoritarian militarism as it takes shape in the Kurdish regions and beyond.
While much has been written about the ideological underpinnings and politi-
cal actors of Turkish nationalism, this book gives much needed insight into the
embodied, gendered and affective structures that underpin it.

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One question that may nevertheless arise, particularly for scholars of

Kurdish studies, concerns the fate of Kurdish conscripts in the Turkish armed
forces. Even if Açıksöz may not have done research with Kurdish veterans, one
wonders how they feature in the eyes of his interlocutors and within the army
as an institution. If sovereignty is enacted through a sacrificial bond between
the state and its (male) citizens, are Kurdish conscripts – as ever suspect citi-
zens in Turkey – confronted with a pressure to (over)perform their loyalty to
the nation and the sacrificial bond it relies on? Is their commitment to the sac-
rificial logics of sovereignty an object of doubt on the part of their comrades in
arms? Or does Turkish and Kurdish conscripts’ shared experience of military
service lead to ties of cross-ethnic friendship and male bonding? Posing these
questions might allow to further elaborate how military sacrifice becomes a
central pillar of state sovereignty through the complex affective landscapes it
generates – traversing loyalty and devotion, suspicion and betrayal – and how
such affects powerfully shape (male) subjectivity in contemporary Turkey.

Marlene Schäfers | ORCID: 0000-0001-8992-7926

University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
[Link]@[Link]

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182 Book Reviews

J. Andrew Bush, Between Muslims: Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan, Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 2020, 240 pp., (ISBN: 9781503611436).

This book focuses on the everyday lives of various Kurdish individuals who con-
sider themselves as Muslim but having decided to turn away from devotional
piety. The author observes these individuals and analyses their discourses on
piety, religion, and secularism in light of several theories of contemporary
anthropology. Bush compares and contrasts these individuals’ “ordinary lan-
guage” with Kurdish Sufi poetry, Quran, and Hadith (traditions of the Prophet
Muhammad). The language of the book is rich with vocabulary much perti-
nent to the topic as he employs Kurdish poetry and Islamic history to mold his
engagement with his interlocutors into a meaningful text.
The book is the culmination of three years of ethnographic and archi-
val research in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, more specifically Silêmanî
(Sulaimaniyah) and Hewlêr (Erbil). The author started visiting the region a
year after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and each time he returned there
throughout a span of nearly a decade, he witnessed the dramatic changes in
the region. Consequently, his book focuses on six various figures, each one
treated in a chapter: a middle-class mother in her late fifties, an imaginary
beloved existing only in poetry, a husband with a tendency of polyamorous
romance, a revivalist preacher trapped between the West and the East, a father
with an authority in the family, and finally a reader who will read the book
with the “perspective of their own ordinary relations”. Each of these figures are
somewhat connected with one another not personally but through textures of
Islamic tradition.
The author regards the hucre (madrasa) as the center for the Islamic tra-
dition’s production of knowledge. It is the main historical institution, which
produces not only Arabic grammar and Islamic doctrine but also aspects of
piety in everyday life. Beyond that, in the nineteenth-century it also served
as a center for Kurdish classical poetry. The Sultan in the late Ottoman period
sponsored the hucre in an effort to preserve Islamic legitimacy. The institution
also became a place for resistance against the British occupation of Iraq and
later an incubator for Islamic movements in Kurdistan. The author engaged
Islamic scholars, melas, and attended classes on Arabic morphology in the
hucre while conducting fieldwork.
By focusing on devotional piety in Iraqi Kurdistan, the author challenges –
without sideling it – the common view that the Kurdish nationalism and
politics are more important than the dynamics of Islamic tradition for under-
standing the process of identity making and social life. The author chooses to
Kurdish Studies Archive
Published with license by Koninklijke Brill BV | doi:10.1163/9789004700406_010
© Metin Atmaca, 2021
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
Book Reviews 183

use “Islamic traditions in Kurdistan” instead of “Kurdish Islam” in order to show

that the Kurds experience Islam not in isolation but rather in engagement with
Arab, Turkish, and Persian Muslims. He also emphasizes that Iraqi Kurdistan
has a distinct political history from other parts of Kurdish regions because it
does not perceive religious piety as a threat to its political identity even though
leftist ideas have shaped the Kurdish national movement there (p. 17).
The author analyses extensively the relationship between the Muslim poet
as “lover” and the non-Muslim subject (kafir) as “beloved” in classical poetry
from the early nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth centuries. As the
author subtly and succinctly states, in Kurdistan “poetry is commonly recited
throughout the course of everyday life” and “like the language of preachers
and politicians, poetry in Kurdistan is not only a language of art and beauty
but also of power and knowledge.” Thus, the author perceives Kurdish poetry
“neither a decorative mode of expression nor merely a subject of inquiry” but
“an analytical frame through which to approach the study of religious differ-
ence” (p. 22).
The poetry, particularly classical poetry, is apparent in the everyday life of
Iraqi Kurds as opposed to that of the Kurds in Turkey, where people have little
knowledge of poetry in Kurdish because of state’s suppression of the language.
For a long time, more specifically between the fifteenth and eighteenth centu-
ries, the poets of Kurmanjî Kurdish dominated the literary milieu of Kurdistan.
For the last two hundred years, since Sorani Kurdish started to be used as a
medium of communication in the region as Baban emirs sponsored local
literati, poetry became part of everyday life. Especially the poetic tradition of
Silêmanî sets the region on a different stage from the rest of Kurdistan. Bush
presents some of vivid scenes of this liveliness of poetry and the meaning of it
for the locals. Bush also shows how the tradition of poetry collections (diwan)
remains alive as the process of making of it continues between the editors
and readers.
The author makes effort to understand Kurdish poetry in its own context
instead of looking into it through the prism of the Anglophone scholarship.
He compares Kurdish poetry with Persian classical poetry in order to show the
parallels between both in terms of tropes, which in Kurdish poetry are mostly
shaped under the influence of Persian figures like Sa’di, Hafez, and Attar.
In addition to other individuals, Bush introduces the reader to a Kurdish
man, Newzad, who turns away from piety but not Islam. Newzad presents his
perspective of religious difference between not only Muslims and Christians
but also between Sunni Muslims and Shi’ite Muslims. The man employs clas-
sical Kurdish poetry to justify his turning away from piety, thus treating it as

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a “library that is sometimes plundered or looted, where concepts travel so far

from their homes as to be almost unrecognizable” (p. 103).
The Sufi landscape of Kurdistan was transformed during the nineteenth
century with the secularization of Iraq and later during the twentieth century
under the influence of Kurdish nationalism. Salafism filled the void that came
about after Sufism diminished after the 1980s. Bush presents this transforma-
tion by an exposition of ordinary relations between individuals and people
around them, offering a larger picture of religious landscape through the anal-
ysis of these relations in the light of rich poetic literature and anthropological
studies.
Besides ordinary individuals, the author focuses on a radical preacher, Mela
Krêkar. After massacres of Kurds in Halabja by Saddam’s forces Mela Krêkar
became one of the leaders of Islamic Movement of Kurdistan. In 1991 he left
for Sweden as a refugee and later was imprisoned in Norway and Italy because
of his links with radical groups. The author tests, compares and contrasts the
material he collected during his ethnographic fieldwork. He focuses on indi-
viduals such as Newzad’s brother to try to understand whether their doc-
trine (‘eqide) was shaped by Mela Krêkar, who has a much wider audience in
Kurdistan. By focusing on Mela Krêkar’s sermons in detail, he shows how the
preacher is not as conservative as he is perceived by many but is a revivalist.
Some of his views, such as his stance with the family relations, may even have
been influenced by secular liberalism. Although he is a Salafi, at the same time
he employs Sufi piety as well as Kurdish poetry in his preaching.
All in all, this is a beautifully written account of various individuals that one
may come across in Iraqi Kurdistan’s everyday life. The author meticulously
puts together his material, which he collected in fieldwork along with the rich
collection of the poetry he closely studied. The book could have included a
map of the region and some images of the cities and the people included in
his fieldwork. On the other hand, by leaving such images out, the author might
have intended to force the imagination of the readers and make them to “think
comparatively” through the prism of “their own everyday lives” by relating “to
others across lines of religious difference” (p. xv).

Metin Atmaca | ORCID: 0000-0002-4792-9592

Social Sciences University of Ankara, Turkey
metinatmaca@[Link]

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Book Reviews 185

Mneesha Gellman, Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic minority rights

movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador, London and New York: Routledge,
2018, 226 pp., (ISBN: 9781138597686).

In Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic minority rights movements

in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador, Mneesha Gellman examines communal
mobilization patterns to advance cultural rights. Her complex study centers on
theories of social movement, memory studies, and the power of the narrative
voice in relation to violent historical pasts that propel marginal communities
to differing levels of activism. In a range of socio-political contexts, Gellman
dissects how and under what conditions cultural mobilizers (rather than ordi-
nary members of communities) pursue claims-making activities to advance
language rights. Gellman presents a succinct analytical model to categorize
narrative productions for social mobilization among four Latin American
communities and two ethnic groups in Turkey. It is noteworthy that in both her
introductory and concluding sections, she acknowledges the need for more
extensive decolonization work that ought to shape research with and among
indigenous and marginal communities. For instance, she suggests considering
participatory action research as a way to integrate indigenous voices as equal
partners rather than relying on the voices of communal mediators.
Gellman identifies and grapples with research limitations that are frequently
encountered in political ethnographies by affirming the significance of reflec-
tive discussions related to the positionality of researchers and growing security
concerns for research participants. Such methodological reassessments are
long overdue for researchers engaged in political ethnographies among mar-
ginal communities. This is also the case in the field of Kurdish Studies, where
Gellman’s remarks should reverberate intensively as systematic repression
by state agents and efforts to silence the marginalized have been magnified
over time. For a fuller discussion related to such debates, critical researchers
(and graduate students) should consult Methodological Approaches in Kurdish
Studies: Theoretical and Practical Insights from the Field (2019) edited by Bahar
Baser, Yasin Duman, Mari Toivanen, and Begum Zorlu (this reviewer contrib-
uted to the collection).
Over a period of four years (2009–2013) Gellman pursued qualitative
interviews and engaged in extensive participant observation across six dif-
ferent communities located in Mexico, El Salvador, and Turkey. Her analysis
is grounded in a comparative historical approach that analyzes under what
conditions community activists might pursue institutional types of claims-
making, centered on the notion of participating in avenues provided and
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186 Book Reviews

granted by state agencies. She also explores under what conditions community
activists pursue extra-institutional claims-making efforts, which can include
both non-violent and violent means. It turns out that her selected case study
communities rely on many diverse opportunities to claims-making in an effort
to coerce and shame states, yet only some frontline activists engage in vio-
lent means. This outcome, of course, also reflects the particular selection of
her case study communities and the type of access states grant to carry out
research. Furthermore, it also matters if states engage in long-term and sys-
temic cooptation efforts or if ongoing patterns of violence shape communal
narrations, and if a supportive international audience exists that might mag-
nify specific voices.
Her rigorous case study project offers fascinating insights into political
behaviors among cultural activists within three (in some cases now formerly)
democratizing countries. Her first community is located in Mexico and focuses
on Tzotzil indigenous members in Acteal, Chiapas, where villages continue to
struggle against the consequences of extreme socio-economic marginaliza-
tion, systemic racism, and structural violence. Tzotzil speakers show clear
evidence of high levels of mobilization through claims-making activities and
their reliance on intensive memories of state violence. Gellman contrasts the
mobilization of this Tzotzil community to the Triquis in Oaxaca, which dem-
onstrate mobilization, yet not to the same level as the Chiapanecan commu-
nities. Similarly, in her other Latin American examples, she contrasts Nahua
in Sonsonate to Lenca in the Department of Morazan, El Salvador. Nahua
community leaders are mobilized and oriented toward public claims-making
through assertions of language protections. This stands in contrast to her
findings among Lenca communities, who have pursued a more cautious and
private approach to remembering the extreme waves of violence they experi-
enced. Many Lenca claim a mestizo background today (Spanish-speaking and
belonging to the ethnically mixed majority population), perhaps in an effort to
escape the profoundly anti-indigenous racism that often marks their position
in Salvadoran society (as well as across the border in Honduras).
Any researcher familiar with the complexities of communal narratives and
language claims in Latin America may wonder how the other two case stud-
ies related to Dersim Alevi Kurds and Armenians in Istanbul were selected as
comparative case studies. Dersim Alevi Kurdish accounts, however, allow for
parallel perspectives and can be related to narrated experiences by genera-
tions of Tzotzil community members in terms of their violent encounters with
state agents and their high levels of cultural mobilization. The case study focus
on Armenians in Istanbul reminds us of some of the grim experiences with

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Book Reviews 187

cooptation, silencing, and systematic assimilation that both Nahuat speakers

and Lenca have encountered in El Salvador.
Ethnic minority communities, a term Gellman critically examines in rela-
tion to Dersim Alevi Kurds, pursue diverse approaches to collecting narratives
that explain how communities demand cultural rights. While most rigorous
comparative studies related to minority communities offer an assessment of
governmental policies in reaction to mobilization, we rarely gain such diverse
narrative insights into how decisions are made by activists within specific
mobilized minority communities. Gellman’s approach offers deeply meaning-
ful ways of integrating activist voices, even if the political framing of the case
studies can appear outdated by now (her field work was carried out a few years
ago). Gellman provides us with detailed mobilization accounts that link state
violence to claims-making approaches and informs our understanding of how
communal rights protections are shaped by particular activists in differing
communities.
Her interdisciplinary and comparative approaches require us to recognize
that many of us lack significant expertise in one area or another, which can
be a barrier in the comparative field (this reviewer, for example, has spent
extended periods of time among only four of the six communities discussed
in this study). While comparative approaches are essential to grappling with
questions related to patterns of mobilization for cultural claims, they may also
raise challenges for communities (or frontline activists) by questioning nation-
alist claims to uniqueness, originality and authenticity. A project that com-
pares six communities and integrates such extensive field work into a larger
framework requires the researcher to be deeply committed over a period of
many years. Gellman’s contribution highlights the significance of linking com-
munal claims-making across states that are driven to pursue assimilation and
homogenizing policies – a constant across these diverse cases. Gellman’s work
provides us with various paths forward by offering an outstanding analytical
structure that brings together collective narratives of mobilization in the face
of memories of state violence. Kurdish Studies could benefit from more such
detailed cross-national and comparative narratives in the future.

Vera Eccarius-Kelly | ORCID: 0000-0002-2206-6559

Siena College, United States
veccarius-kelly@[Link]

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Seevan Saeed, Kurdish Politics in Turkey: From the PKK to the KCK, London
and New York: Routledge, 2017, 150 pp., (ISBN: 978-1-138-19529-5 (hbk);
978-1-315-63848-5 (ebk)).

In his fast-paced, informative analysis, Professor Seevan Saeed begins by

asserting, “the main concern of this book is answering the question of why the
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has transformed itself into the Union of Com-
munities in Kurdistan (KCK)” (p. 2). He quickly explains, “that the answer … is
that the PKK failed to achieve its objectives through a purely political struggle.
In the wake of this failure, the Kurdish national struggle transformed into the
KCK, because … [it] delivered on social and cultural development and strate-
gies that promoted Kurdish nation building in the context of the Turkish state
rather than armed struggle as the only response to establish an autonomous
and sovereign Kurdish nation state” (pp. 2–3). Indeed, “during a period of ten
years, this change has visibly occurred through establishing hundreds of civil,
cultural, social and political autonomous organisations that have different
aims and structures and all are under the umbrella of the KCK” (p. 136). Thus,
“the KCK has been established on the ashes of the PKK” (p. 8). However, despite
these successes around its new policy of Democratic Autonomy – which Saeed
defines in part as “a bottom-up project … alternative for the state” (p. 63), the
KCK ironically has been “less successful in the process of internal democratisa-
tion within its structure” (p. 136).
The author divides his book into six concise chapters bookended by an
introduction and conclusion. In the introduction, he details his methodol-
ogy: “I undertook forty qualitative interviews for this research with the key
players of the movement within and outside Turkey between June 2011 and
September 2015 … [and also used] several governmental documents and poli-
cies on the southeast of Turkey” (p. 5). In addition, the list of references follow-
ing each chapter and bibliography at the end further illustrate Saeed’s wide
usage of secondary sources. Later, however, he explains that “the reason for
focusing mainly on the Western academic literature is the lack or limitation of
free and unbiased studies in Turkish, Iranian and even universities in Arabic
countries with regard to the Kurdish question” (p. 16).
In the first chapter, Saeed presents his theoretical approach, elaborates
upon such key concepts used frequently in the book as nationalism and nation,
Kurdish nationalism, and social movements, and engages in a useful literature
review, among others. He tells the reader, “the rationale behind utilizing social
movement theories is that the KCK as the movement of the Kurdish national
struggle is regarded as a social movement in this book” (p. 21). “The specific
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Book Reviews 189

focus in this book is to analyse the Kurdish national struggle, or more specifi-
cally, institutional evolution and transformation (as a social movement) in the
specific context of northern Kurdistan/southeastern Turkey” (p. 23). The second
chapter critically examines the historical background of the Kurdish national
struggle throughout Kurdistan, but particularly in what is now Turkey, where
Saeed engages it as a reaction to Turkish nationalism. Possibly unwittingly,
Saeed seemingly agrees with Turkey’s claim that the Syrian-Kurds’ Democratic
Union Party (PYD) and its militia the Peoples Defense Units/Womens Defense
Units PYD/YPG/YPJ are largely operating under the PKK, when he writes: “The
PYD, the YPG and the YPJ are all under the hegemony and umbrella of the
KCK” (p. 39). Similarly, he also agrees with the Turkish government’s claim that
the legal, peaceful pro-Kurdish Peoples Democratic Party or HDP, that still has
some 50 MPs in the Turkish parliament, is under the PKK: “What is important
to be said here is that the HDP … is directly under the hegemony and direc-
tion of the KCK” (p. 10). The only reason Saeed could admit this is his belief
that the KCK actually was new and different from its supposed predecessor,
the PKK.
Citing S. Toprak, Journal of Forensic Sciences, 2009, Saeed mentions, “that in
Turkey there are forty-nine different identifiable ethnic and religious minori-
ties” (p. 44). However, this figure is much lower than the one given earlier in the
mammoth study of 659 pages by Peter Alford Andrews, Ethnic Groups in the
Republic of Turkey, 1989: “In Turkey there are seventy-two and a half peoples”
(p. 18), the fraction referring to the Roma. Saeed also lists the well-known claim
that the “30–40 million” (p. 32) Kurds “are the largest ethnic group of state-
less people in the world” (p. 32). However, this assertion ignores the more than
70 million stateless Tamils in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and elsewhere.
Chapter 3 narrows the discussion specifically to the history of the PKK and
more recently the KCK. The author begins his chapter with Abdullah Ocalan’s
rather arcane claim/insight: “The Kurdish people simultaneously exist and
do not exist. The Kurds are human being[s], yet they are not. There are more
paradoxes of this kind” (p. 50). Saeed tells us, “Arguably, [the imprisoned PKK
leader] Ocalan himself is obsessed by the theory of conspiracy. He sees every
political step around him and against the Kurds through the spectacles of
conspiracy theory” (p. 55). When the present reviewer visited the PKK leader
in March 1998 in what was then his Syrian redoubt, he also noted how often
Ocalan referred to developing events as a “game.” Problematically, Saeed
asserts, “most of the founders of the PKK … were from non-Kurdish ethnic
backgrounds. It is fascinating that … the founders of Turkish nationalism …
were mainly Kurds and other ethnic minorities” (p. 59).

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Saeed also claims, “There are several characters on the scene that have no
real powers. Nonetheless, there are some hidden actors that have essential
invisible powers” (p. 73). The author applies this specifically to the Kurds and
the KCK. Whether these specifics are examples of the chapter’s opening arcane
Ocalan citation or not may simply be part of the mystery. Thus, for what it
is worth, Saeed presents a detailed organization chart of the KCK on page 71
that may or may not detail where the real power is in the organization. He
also claims, incorrectly in the opinion of this reviewer, that the Kongra-Gel
(Kurdistan Peoples Congress), which supposedly acts as the legislature of
the KCK in distinction to the Kurdistan National Congress (KNK), which sup-
posedly acts as a more broadly-based congress for all the Kurds, is located
“mainly … in the Kurdistan mountains” (p. 66). In actuality, both legislative
bodies meet periodically in Brussels.
The fourth chapter looks at how the KCK has changed civil and legal activ-
ism since it supposedly succeeded the PKK in 2005. “Under the umbrella of
the KCK, there are hundreds of organisations from small to medium and large
in size” (p. 77), including “even smaller parties such as Hak-Par and KADEP …
working directly or indirectly, compulsorily or voluntarily under the control …
of the KCK” (p. 77). This is largely so as the PKK/KCK in effect has created a
parallel state within the official one.
In Chapter 5, Saeed examines the KCK’s two main projects: The Road Map
and Democratic Autonomy. The former involves the Kurdish armed strug-
gle entering “a period of inaction,” establishing a “Truth and Reconciliation
Commission,” and the Turkish government “approving the legality of the KCK”
(p. 101). The latter comprises “Ocalan’s post-state ideas” (p. 102). It means,
“Empowering [the Kurdish] people without touching the border and sover-
eignty of the Turkish state” (p. 111). In other words, Ocalan claims that “the
process of the nation building can be developed without going through the
process of … building the nation state” (p. 47) as supposedly “the KCK does not
want to harm the sovereignty of the states that Kurdistan has been divided
into” (p. 80). However, “it is difficult to discuss … democratic autonomy, since
even the authors of the project seem to define it in contradictory terminolo-
gies” (p. 111). They “do not understand what Democratic Autonomy exactly
means” (p. 113). Not surprisingly, “implementation of this project is unbearable
by the Turkish state” (p. 111).
In the sixth and final chapter, the author critically offers further comments
regarding the reasons behind the transformation from the PKK to the KCK. This
segues into what might be the book’s biggest misconception – supposedly its
major theme – that the KCK has succeeded the PKK. Despite Saeed’s repeated
emphasis on the one-dimensional PKK having been submerged into the new

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multi-dimensional KCK since 2005, time and developments have demon-

strated that the name PKK has stuck, while that of the KCK has not. Indeed,
even senior PKK members have told such to this reviewer.
So why was there the attempt to change the name? Certainly, one reason
was to remove the PKK from the Turkish, U.S., and EU terrorist lists, a maneu-
ver that failed. Another reason for the attempted name change, as Saeed
emphasizes, was to reflect the PKK’s new, much larger role. Thus, what this
book really involves is an analysis of how the PKK has grown and evolved into a
much larger, multi-dimensional organization. The book’s subtitle should sim-
ply be altered to reflect this reality. Then most of what Saeed has written would
remain valid. Furthermore, the manuscript is often repetitious and would ben-
efit from a final editing for fluency in English. This having been said, one might
counter that repetition can be the source of knowledge, while this reviewer
would never be able to pen even a sentence in Kurdish or Turkish. In his own
way, the author communicates very successfully.
This book also has a list of abbreviations (acronyms), bibliography, and
index. The author represents a rare combination of an academic and activ-
ist participant whose knowledge and intuitive insights will reward the close
reader with a deep understanding into the Kurdish movement in Turkey. His
study will be useful for academics, government practitioners, and the intel-
ligent lay public.

Michael M. Gunter | ORCID: 0000-0002-6069-9146

Tennessee Technological University
MGunter@[Link]

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Mohammedali Yaseen Taha, Media and Politics in Kurdistan. How Politics

and Media are Locked in an Embrace, London: Lexington, 2020, 145 pp.,
(ISBN: 9781793611031).

Research on Kurdish media is still in its infancy. While its role in the creation
of Kurdish identities has received some attention (see e.g. Sheyholislami, 2011),
and Hassanpour’s Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan, 1918–1985 (1992) is
still the frame of reference for all media researchers in this field, questions of
communication studies on the structural nature of Kurdish media have so far
been underexposed. This is now changing with Media and Politics in Kurdistan
by Mohammedali Yaseen Taha. At least for Southern Kurdistan. His analysis
of the media system in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) provides exciting
insights into the structure of Kurdish media, the interplay between journalism
and politics and their dependence on ruling parties. More specifically, on the
central political actors in the region, especially the Kurdistan Democratic Party
(KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).
Using the framework of Hallin and Mancini’s Three Models of Media and
Politics (2004) and its four dimensions – media market, political parallel-
ism, journalistic professionalism and the role of the state – Taha’s research is
designed to connect to international discussions on media systems. The author
counters the accusation of the purely Western perspective of this approach
by including a fifth dimension: the historical development of the KRI media
system, which Voltmer (2013) also calls path dependency. “To understand
the way in which the media have developed in the KRI, a thorough under-
standing of the political and cultural history of the region (…) is required”
(Taha, 2020, p. 68). Therefore, in chapter 2 Taha traces the parallel develop-
ment of the media and the political system in Southern Kurdistan (since 1992
known as KRI) from 1961, the beginning of the “mountain rebellion” (p. 46)
until 2014 and “the media of autonomy” (p. 58). In doing so, the author partly
slips into a very strong focus on the political side, which would probably not
have been necessary in such detail. This could also be due to the fact that he
himself sat in parliament as a member of the KDP from 2013 to 2018. All in
all, the structure of the book is stringent and logical and is divided into four
major chapters.
The methodological approach is a triangulation of document analysis (legal
texts, newspaper articles, archives), a questionnaire that was answered by 131
journalists and 57 members of parliament (almost 50% of all elected parlia-
mentarians!), and six interviews with experts (p. 11). Who exactly he inter-
viewed, however, is not revealed. Thus, he refers to an appendix at the end of
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Book Reviews 193

the book (p. 12). However, this aforementioned appendix is missing. Overall,
the book would have deserved better editing. There are repeated references to
appendices that do not exist, unnecessary repetitions (e.g. p. 67), inaccuracies
in dates (e.g. in the information on the duration of the September Revolution,
pp. 46–48), missing page references in citations, incorrect bibliographical
references in the index and missing names (e.g. at p. 77 the surname of the
Kurdistan editor Bedirxan is missing) and a confusing arrangement of tables
(e.g. p. 104). This nit-picking, however, does not diminish the relevance of the
book. For even if the empirical material cannot be viewed due to the miss-
ing appendices (and could probably only be made partially accessible for data
protection reasons), Taha has created a data basis that is unique in previous
research on KRI media.
For here the author’s political background proves to be a tremendous advan-
tage: open access to politicians and journalists of the KDP, but also of other
parties. Against this background, Taha succeeds for the first time in empirically
proving the direct control of the press by the media departments of the par-
ties or individual politicians. For instance, in one of the conducted interviews
Ako Mohammed, Rudaw’s Director General, says: “Mr. Nechirvan Barzani is the
main support for this institution and it belongs to him” (p. 72). In other words,
the President of KRI owns the best-equipped media group in Kurdistan and
thus an important instrument maintaining his and KDPs power. Such state-
ments could have put journalists in KRI in distress so far. For example, the
independent journalist Kamal Chomani narrowly escaped imprisonment in
2018 because he had publicly assigned K24 to Masrur Barzani, nowadays the
prime minister of the KRI. Now journalists like him can refer to this publi-
cation. Nevertheless, Mohammed denies any contact between Rudaw and
the KDP and does not see himself as an official political party media (p. 72).
Taha suggests the term “semi-party media” for these media. The term “shadow
media”, coined by Chomani (2014), could also be appropriate here. That is,
media that claim to be independent, yet are backed by powerful politicians
and parties. Also, the statement of Azad Hamadamin, Secretary General of
the Kurdistan Journalists’ Union, according to whom “more than two hundred
pieces of land have been distributed by the syndicate to its journalist mem-
bers” (p. 99) to ensure their loyalty in this institution controlled by the KDP
and PUK is remarkable and would not have been possible without the trust of
the interview partners in the researcher. The focus of the analysis is mainly on
KDP and PUK media, but the New Generation Movement (NRT) and Gorran
(KNN) play a small role. It is not clear why media close to the PKK, such as the
Roj News news agency based in Slemani, is not mentioned at all. Although the

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194 Book Reviews

PKK does not play a role in KRI at the parliamentary level, it does play a role in
the everyday political life.
Taha classifies the KRI media system in the (Western influenced) grid,
developed by Hallin and Mancini, of the polarized pluralist model, with small
press markets, a high level of politicization, a low level of professionalism, and
strong state intervention, but critically notes that a final classification would
only be possible “as long as full attention is paid to the specificity of each case”
(p. 12). Here it has to be discussed whether the last point of the state interven-
tion in KRI is correct at all, in a situation where it is difficult to talk about state
structures, the control over the Peshmerga is still in the hands of the parties
and the KRI area is divided into a “yellow” and a “green zone”.
All in all, the book offers a great gain in knowledge for communication sci-
entists, but also for scholars interested in the close relationship between poli-
tics and journalism not only in Kurdistan.

Kerem Schamberger
Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany
[Link]@[Link]

References

Chomani, Kamal, Independent media fades in Iraqi Kurdistan, Ekurd Daily, 2014.
[Link]
Hallin, Daniel C. and Paolo Mancini, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media
and Politics, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Hassanpour, Amir, Nationalism and language in Kurdistan, 1918–1985, San Francisco:
Mellen Press, 1992.
Sheyholislami, Jaffer, Kurdish identity, discourse, and new media, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011.
Voltmer, Katrin, The Media in Transitional Democracies, Cambridge: Polity, 2013.

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Book Reviews 195

Philip G. Kreyenbroek and Yiannis Kanakis, “God First and Last”: Religious
Traditions and Music of the Yaresan of Guran. Volume I: Religious Traditions, by
Philip G. Kreyenbroek, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2020. XIV+188 pp.,
(ISBN 9783447114240).

This slim volume was apparently written to accompany a presumably more

substantial and fieldwork-based study of the ritual and musical practices of
the Yaresan (also known as Ahl-e Haqq) of Guran by the ethnomusicologist
Yiannis Kanakis that is still forthcoming. Kreyenbroek, a specialist of Iranian
religions, has written on the Iranian background of the Ahl-e Haqq reli-
gion and Yezidism before and returns here to some of his favourite themes.
His studies of Yezidism, written in collaboration with knowledgeable Yezidi
intellectuals, have established themselves as authoritative overviews of the
state of the art and works of reference (Kreyenbroek, 1995; Kreyenbroek and
Rashow, 2005). A work of similar scope and ambition on the Ahl-e Haqq reli-
gion would certainly be welcome. In the thirty years that have passed since the
last book-length attempt to present a synthetic overview (Hamzeh’ee, 1990),
much new information has become available. Many primary sources, which
had long been kept hidden from outsiders, have become more widely avail-
able through printed editions of kalām, the sacred texts in which the tenets
of this religion are expressed. A modest number of anthropological studies
(by Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Navid Fozi and Martin van Bruinessen) investigate how
myth and ritual interact with social relations among the Guran Ahl-e Haqq.
The most important recent contribution, based on extensive fieldwork among
the Guran and reflecting access to the inner world of the Ahl-e Haqq, is the
PhD research by the ethnomusicologist Partow Hooshmandrad (2004), which
remains as yet unpublished apart from a brief article (2014).
These and many other works are listed in the bibliography and some are
summarily referred to in the text, but nowhere does Kreyenbroek engage criti-
cally with them. He does not attempt a synthetic overview but instead offers
a more modest collection of materials for the study of the Ahl-e Haqq religion
(Yaresanism or Yāri, as he often calls it). The book is a rather quaint miscellany
of bits and pieces of information on Yāri, some parts very interesting but, in
spite of the book title, not all of them concerning the Guran. The author’s own
relevant fieldwork consisted of a visit to the Kaka’i village of Hawar in Iraqi
Kurdistan, which represents another, and in his view older, tradition of Yāri
than the Guran tradition. For his understanding of the Guran Yaresan, he leans
heavily on a single knowledgeable informant in the diaspora, Sayyed Fereidoun
Hosseini, and on a written systematic exposition of the Yaresan belief system
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196 Book Reviews

by the latter’s father, Sayyed Wali, who was a knowledgeable kalāmkhwān

though not a widely recognized authority on doctrine. Extracts from Sayyed
Wali Hosseini’s “exegesis” are translated in an appendix.
Kreyenbroek devotes a considerable part of the book to a search for origins
of the Yaresan religion (which he argues have to be sought in a non-Zoroastrian
variety of Western Iranian religion) and the comparison of isolated elements
of Yaresan cosmology with older Iranian ideas. In fact, he appears more inter-
ested in Yaresan texts and traditions for the light they may shine on older
Iranian religion than for their own sake. Thus he proceeds to “construct a hypo-
thetical Indo-Iranian myth of creation which is similar in many ways to that
found in the Yāri tradition” (p. 11) – note the “hypothetical”: the argument is
highly speculative and moreover hardly relevant to the Yaresan belief system.
Central to this myth is the primordial sacrifice of a bull, which Kreyenbroek
keeps referring to throughout the book (pp. 11, 17, 27, 81) although it has no
place in Yaresan kalām or oral tradition. Bull sacrifice was most strikingly pres-
ent in the Roman cult of Mithras, which had followers among the soldiers on
Rome’s Iranian frontier (encompassing part of present Kurdistan) two thou-
sand years ago and in which Kreyenbroek shows a strong interest (pp. 16–17).
There is, however, no indication that Mithraism left any traces in the later
Yaresan religion – unless we take as such Kreyenbroek’s speculation that the
concept of Satan as the Peacock Angel in Yaresanism and Yezidism may “[go]
back to that of Mithra, who […] is said to be ‘both wicked and very good to
men’” (p. 27).
The direct origin of the Peacock Angel concept as well as the idea that
Satan is a tragic rather than evil figure and never lost God’s favour, however, is
more likely to be found in Muslim cosmologies and Sufi texts of the classical
period, where both are well attested (Awn, 1983). It is of course possible that
these ideas ultimately have Iranian origins, but Muslim and Christian thought
in the medieval period reflects many other influences. This is also true of the
Yezidi belief system, as Eszter Spät (2010) and Artur Rodziewicz (2014) have
shown, in pointing out remarkable parallels with classical Greek and espe-
cially Hellenistic ideas. An exclusive focus on Iranian religions as the template
for Yaresanism may obscure as much as it illuminates. For understanding the
emergence and early history of the Yaresan community I would suggest that
much is yet to be learnt from a stronger focus on Muslim thought and Sufi
practices of the period of upheaval during and following the Mongol con-
quests, roughly 1250–1500 CE.
In a chapter on “mythical” and “factual” history, Kreyenbroek attempts to
reconstruct the history of the community from its sacred texts and oral tra-
dition. He sees Soltan Sahak and his companions, who appear in myths as

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Book Reviews 197

manifestations of God and is angels, as historical persons who established the

first Yaresan community in Perdiwar (near Hawraman) and Baba Yadegar as
one of two rival successors to leadership. He believes that it was Baba Yadegar
who led most of the community south towards Dalahu, the present home of
the Guran Yaresan. The other would-be successor, Shah Ebrahim, is associ-
ated with Baghdad but his descendants constitute one of the holy families
(khāndān) present in many Yaresan communities, notably in Iraq as well as
Iran. (Many of the other khāndān are affiliated with Baba Yadegar.) The small
community in Hawar that Kreyenbroek briefly visited claims descent from a
group that migrated west from Perdiwar. Its traditions differ significantly from
those of the Guran, and he assumes that they represent the original Perdiwari
belief system.
Among the sacred texts, Kreyenbroek distinguishes between Perdiwari and
later kalām. He pays most attention to the former group, and only lists the titles
of some of the later ones, although among the Guran these are better known
than the Perdiwari kalām and quoted more often to explain a point of belief.
For the teachings contained in the later kalām, he depends on the very general
observations by Sayyed Fereidoun and the “exegesis” by Sayyed Wali Hosseini.
Sayyed Wali was one of the men that I have elsewhere called “systematizers”
of the tradition, who organized the disparate and often mutually incompatible
narratives of the kalām into a coherent and meaningful whole. His synthesis
appears to correspond closely with that of Ka Karim, the most knowledgeable
kalāmkhwān in the household of Sayyed Nasreddin, the pir (highest religious
authority) of the Guran (Bruinessen, 2014).
Given the author’s interest in kalām as the most authentic embodiment of
Yaresan religious ideas, his dismissal of the most substantial body of relevant
scholarship, the work of Mohammad Mokri, comes as something of a sur-
prise. Mokri edited, translated and annotated a large number of Gurani kalām,
Perdiwari as well as later ones, in a series of books and journal articles (in the
Journal Asiatique). This includes the one often considered as the earliest expo-
sition of Ahl-e Haqq cosmology and sacred history (Mokri, 1977). Kreyenbroek
refers to another version of this text (51, 55) but largely ignores Mokri, citing
only some of his other work. In the introduction he briefly mentions the exis-
tence of Mokri’s editions of kalām and remarks that the nature of Mokri’s
comments “suggests that his approach to religion was strongly informed by
sociology” (4), which apparently was sufficient reason not to engage with
them. I also find it hard to judge the quality of Mokri’s translations and inter-
pretations, but he was in close contact with Yaresan over a long period of time,
and his work is the only systematic presentation of kalām in a western lan-
guage. Any serious study of Ahl-e Haqq kalām will, in my opinion, have to start

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198 Book Reviews

with a reappraisal of Mokri’s monumental oeuvre, whatever the final verdict

will be on his interpretations.
The book under review is neither “strongly informed by sociology” nor very
systematic, and its value consists mainly in the odd bits and pieces of infor-
mation it contains. These include the author’s notes on Hawar, notes on the
treatment of the community in Iran by the authorities of Islamic Republic,
and several self-representations by prominent Yaresan, notably Sayyed Wali
Hosseini and his son, as well as the translation of a document prepared by
the late musician and religious authority from Sahne, Sayyed Khalil Alinezhad,
in response to an inquisitive interrogation by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards on
Ahl-e Haqq doctrine and ritual obligations.

Martin van Bruinessen | ORCID: 0009-0009-4965-6485

Utrecht University, Netherlands
[Link]@[Link]

References

Awn, P. J. (1983). Satan’s tragedy and redemption. Iblis in Sufi psychology. Leiden: Brill.
Bruinessen, M. van (2014). Veneration of Satan among the Ahl-e Haqq of the Gûrân
region, Fritillaria Kurdica: Bulletin of Kurdish Studies, 3–4, 6–41. [Link]
[Link]/?en_fritillaria-kurdica.-bulletin-of-kurdish-studies.-no.-3-4,77.
Hamzeh’ee, M. R. (1990). The Yaresan: A sociological, historical and religio-historical
study of a Kurdish community. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz.
Hooshmandrad, P. (2004). Performing the belief: Sacred musical practice of the Kurdish
Ahl-i Haqq of Guran. (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis). Berkeley: University of California.
Hooshmandrad, P. (2014). Life as ritual: devotional practices of the Kurdish Ahl-i Haqq
of Guran. In Kh. Omarkhali (ed.), Religious minorities in Kurdistan: beyond the
mainstream (pp. 47–64). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Kreyenbroek, Ph. G. (1995). Yezidism. Its background, observances and textual tradi-
tion. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Research Publications.
Kreyenbroek, Ph. G. and Rashow, Kh. J. (2005). God and Sheikh Adi are perfect. Sacred
poems and religious narratives from the Yezidi tradition. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Mokri, M. (1977). La Grande Assemblée des Fidèles de Vérité au tribunal sur le mont
Zagros en Iran (Dawra-y Diwana-Gawra). Paris: Klincksieck.
Rodziewicz, A. (2014). Tawus Protogonos: Parallels between the Yezidi theology and
some ancient Greek cosmogonies, Iran and the Caucasus, 18, 27–45.
Spät, E. (2010). Late antique motifs in Yezidi oral tradition. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias
Press.

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Book Reviews 199

Seyedeh Behnaz Hosseini, The Yārsān of Iran, Socio-Political changes and

Migration, Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 229 pp., (ISBN 978-981-15-2634-3).

This book consists of five chapters. In the first chapter, “Research Overview”,
Hosseini elaborates on the theoretical framework of her research, literature
review, methodology, data analysis as well as challenges which she experienced
while working on the topic. The main purpose of this research is “to under-
stand how beliefs and ethnic identity between Yārsāni are expressed through
diaspora” (p. 3). She seeks to find out what happened to the ethnic-religious
identity of the Yāresān1 once they departed Iran, their homeland, and settled
to Sweden. Qualitative interviews with more than 120 participants in Iran, Iraq,
and Sweden provide the data for her research.
The second chapter revolves around ‘Identity and Diaspora.’ Applying the
concept of “transnationalism”, Hosseini asserts that the Yāresān in Sweden
define their identity such that they feel no border between themselves and
non-Yāresān Kurdish people from Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. Also, based on this
definition, they can accept ethnically diverse Yāri believers, like Turk and
Persian Yāresān, as their own. The political and social freedom in Sweden
encourages some Yāresān to be involved in political activism. As an example,
she mentions “The Yārsān Democratic Organization” whose task is to pursue
“political and social rights for Iranian and Iraqi Yārsāni” (p. 73).
The predominant theme in chapters three, ‘Yārsāni Religious Practice and
Identity’, and four, ‘Yārsāni Religious Innovation and Transformation’ is the
Yāri religion and its transformation under the influence of external factors. In
these chapters, Hosseini seeks to elucidate the historical context in which the
Yāresān community and Yāri religion have survived and redefined their iden-
tity despite the external forces in Iran and Sweden. Moreover, she explains how
they have overcome tensions and have come up with new definitions for their
religious identity.
In the last chapter, ‘Yārsāni Community and the Internet’, the author points
to a fascinating topic: how Yāresān have implemented social media (in this
case, Facebook) to rebuild and revive their identity, which has been under
assimilative policies for centuries. She examines how the freedom on the

1 The author uses Yārsān, and Yārsāni as its adjective form; however, based on the local pro-
nunciation of this word, I preferred to use Yāresān for the community and, as the Kalāms
suggest, Yāri for the religion. In the text, wherever I have quoted directly from the author, her
opted form has been kept.

Kurdish Studies Archive

Published with license by Koninklijke Brill BV | doi:10.1163/9789004700406_015
© Hamidreza Nikravesh, 2021
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
200 Book Reviews

internet, which is neither under the authority of Seyyeds, the traditional reli-
gious leaders of the community, nor the political pressures of governments like
the Islamic Republic of Iran, has enabled the Yāresān to redefine their identity.
The author coins the term “facebook shrines” (p. 155) to refer to spaces where
one might virtually engage in religious activity and discussions.
To address the main question of this research, i.e., how the religious identity
of the Yāresān has changed by living in the diaspora, it is essential to show how
“living in diaspora” (external factor) has impacted the “individual/communal
interpretation” (subjective religion) of the Yāri religion (objective religion).
While Hosseini’s study is a pioneering work on the Yāresān community in the
diaspora, it suffers from a number of problems:
As a general critique of the epistemology of this book, the author occasion-
ally failed to keep the distinction between subjective and objective religion.
Subjective religion applied to the world of individual ideas and sentiments
which each and every believer might have held. Indeed, subjective religions
are individual interpretations of objective religions. Almost any culture has a
segment that can be objectively denominated religion. These areas of human
culture have their institutions, rituals, and specified rules to obey by the fol-
lowers. All these aspects are tied together through certain structures of myth
and belief about humans, gods and the universe (Kaufman, 1958: 58–9). In the
course of history, religions can transform objectively, i.e., some new institu-
tions, ideas and sources may have emerged and some old beliefs, concepts and
rituals may have been abandoned. To describe the factual history of a religion,
since the goal is to describe the facts not the individual judgments, it is crucial
to select the appropriate sources.
Particularly in chapter three and four, Hosseini gives an account of the his-
torical transformation of the religion, which she tends to consider as “assimi-
lation”. From her rather essentialist viewpoint, the Yāri religion has roots in
“Indo-Iranian” (p. 2) and “Persian religions” (p. 20). This religion remained
intact, she reveals, until the Safavid era during which the religion was “assimi-
lated” under the force of Shi’a Islam. By this time, Ali as “the first prophet of
Shi’a” (the consentaneous title for Ali, however, is Imam not Prophet) (p. 137)
has permeated the Yāri religion and, subsequently, he was praised by the
believers. She does not support these claims with any credible historical data
such as documents, narrations or reports. Since they are not supported by any
references to any historical sources, it seems that the author got these ideas
from her interviewees. As a matter of fact, the Iranologists in the 20th century
who studied the Yāresān community explained certain similarities between
the ancient Iranian religions and the Yāri religion. Following the Islamic

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Book Reviews 201

Revolution of 1979 in Iran, the Yāresān community experienced the oppres-

sive policies superimposed by the Islamic government. As a reaction, many
educated Yāresān, based on the scholarly works of Iranologists, coined a new
identity for the Yāri religion, which hitherto consisted of certain Sufi elements
and Islamic concepts. In their interpretation, Yāri religion is a pure outcome
of ancient Iranian religions and has no affiliation with Islam which was the
dominant religion after the Islamic revolution. This idea has a loud echo in
Hosseini’s work and might have entered her works through her interviews. The
epistemological problem occurred when the author objectified these ideas
and narrated the factual history of the Yāri religion based on these subjective
sentimental ideas.
In contrast to the inspiration the author received from the ideas of her inter-
viewees, when the reader seeks to know more about those individual’s ideas
in the second and fifth chapters, they do not frequently appear in the volume.
However, the author has already claimed that this book is written based on 120
qualitative interviews, roughly 50 direct references are made to the interviews
throughout the book. The sporadic direct references to the interviews, which
are sometimes missing the key information about the age, gender, place, and
background of the interviewee, may increase the risk of generalization and
even petitio principii. It is hard for the reader to follow the voice of interviewees
in many passages, and this results in an unclear image of what she is supposed
to offer: the transformed interpretation of the believers living in the diaspora.
Some passages in the book have no reference, neither to the interviews, nor to
secondary sources. In such cases, it is not clear who is talking, the author or the
anonymous interviewees. Instead, the book is interpolated with references to
many theoretical works which may distract the reader from the main line of
the book.
To explain what the Yāri religion is as an objective system of ideas and
concepts, the author has mostly, if not always, relied on secondary sources.
Almost no references are made to the original verses which are believed by
the community to be holy, i.e., Persian/Kurdish Kalāms; the only exception is
one single verse in Gūrāni on page 180, which has been transcribed incorrectly.
Moreover, on some occasions, a critical assessment of the data presented in
the secondary sources is missing, which results in presenting confusing, and at
times, contradictory information on the Yāri religion. For example, she writes
that the Yāri religious corpus, Kalāms was transmitted orally until 700 years
ago, when the followers started writing down their religious teachings (pp. 62,
182). In contrast to this, she later states that the transition from oral to written
transmission happened most likely in the “nineteenth century” (p. 94).

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202 Book Reviews

Writing on the geography of the Yāresān’s homeland, she posits that they
are now “especially concentrated in Hūrāmān, Iranian Kurdistan” (p. 2).
However, as Kreyenbroek (2020: 33) reports, while the community did origi-
nally emerge in Hawrāmān, no Yāresān community currently exists there.
Some inaccuracies occurred in the linguistic data she provides, for example
the author considers Gūrāni a Kurdish language (pp. 18, 22, 53, 135) while since
K. Hadank and O. Mann’s groundbreaking publication of 1930, Die Mundarten
der Gûrân, it has been commonly accepted that Gūrāni and Kurdish are two
separate languages belonging to the northwestern branch of new Iranian lan-
guages. In another passage, she writes that by the time Yāresān had converted
to Islam, their language had shifted to “Kurmanji” (p. 18). Even if we accept the
reality of such a linguistic shift, which is not supported by any historical evi-
dence, Kurmanji speakers in Iran live in northern Khurasan and partly in west-
ern Azerbaijan; no Kurmanji speakers live in the Yāresān regions (Blau, 1989
:327–9.). Finally, some proper names have been written incorrectly and partly
inconsistent. Among all, Sultan-Sahak (p. 20), Sultan Isaac (p. 21), San Sahak
(p. 22), and Sultan Suhak (p. 177) are all referring to one single proper name.
The author transcribed Kurdish sound /-aw-/ as ‘ū’ which is unusual; for exam-
ple, Hūrāmān (p. 2) instead of Hawrāmān [although once occurred inconsis-
tently as Hoorami (p. 10)] or Gūreh (pp. 98, 130, 131, 144) instead of Gawra.
All in all, despite the novelty of her topic, the author generally fails to deal
with the proposed subject properly. On the one hand, the epistemological
issue in question has hindered her from showing why and how living in dias-
pora changed the Yāresān understanding of their religious heritage. On the
other hand, when it comes to the Yāri religion itself, her secondary knowledge,
which is gained from various, and at times contradictory, sources fails to pro-
pose a transparent image of this religion.

Hamidreza Nikravesh | ORCID: 0000-0001-7895-5833

Free University of Berlin, Germany
[Link]@[Link]

References

Blau, Joyce. 1989. “Le Kurde”. In Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum, 227–335.

Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag.
Hadank, Karl and Oskar Mann. 1930. Die Mundarten der Gûrân, besonders das
Kändûläî, Auramânî und Bâdschälânî. Berlin: Verlag der Preußischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften.

Kurdish Studies Archive 9 (2021) 173–206

Book Reviews 203

Hosseini, Seyedeh Behnaz. 2020. The Yārsān of Iran, Socio-Political Changes and
Migration. Palgrave Macmillan.
Kaufman, Gordon D. 1958. “Philosophy of Religion: Subjective or Objective”. Journal of
Philosophy 55 (2): 57–70.
Kreyenbroek, Philip G. and Yannis Kanakis. 2020. God First and Last, Religious Traditions
and Music of the Yaresan of Guran. Volume 1: Religious Tradition. Wiesbaden:
Harrossowitz Verlag.

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204 Book Reviews

Mohammed Ihsan, Nation building in Kurdistan: Memory, Genocide and Human

Rights, New York: Routledge, 2017, 194 pp., (ISBN: 9781472466792).

The Kurds’ experience with mass violence is a long and bloody one. The
nation-state system that replaced the pre-national, Ottoman imperial order
of culturally heterogeneous territories into a system of homogeneous nation
states produced nationalist population policies across the new states. Indeed,
the twentieth century was a grim period for the Kurds and Kurdistan. It started
with the devastation of world war, continued with western colonization and
the subsequent subjugation in three different nation states, and ended with
civil wars and massacres. Thus, for the Kurds, “genocide” is a chronologically
extended, complex, and intertwined story, with multiple perpetrators, but with
the same victims: themselves. Kurds experienced mass violence in culturally,
politically, and sociologically different societies under various state ideologies:
communism, colonialism, and Islamism, but especially ethnic nationalism.
Some of this genocidal violence aimed to assimilate the survivors into soci-
ety, other forms of genocidal violence attempted to excise the community
altogether.
In Syria, Iraq, and Turkey, Kurds became victims of these policies, which
veered towards genocide and genocidal massacres in some infamous cases.
The Kemalist government launched violent and invasive ‘Turkification’ poli-
cies after 1923, for example by suppressing the Sheikh Said rebellion of 1924
through genocidal massacres. This was followed in 1938 by the genocide in
Dersim, which went beyond mass murder and included forced cultural assimi-
lation of the Kurdish tribes in the region. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979,
Ruhollah Khomeini’s apparatus of violence suppressed a Kurdish uprising by
executing thousands of combatants and non-combatants. In Iraq and Syria,
Kurds suffered from discriminatory ‘Arabization’ under the two Ba’athist
regimes, ranging from genocidal to non-violent state policies. Possibly the
most violent collective experience suffered by the Kurds was in Iraq, where
Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign of the 1980s culminated in several chemical
massacres, including infamously at Halabja of 1988.
Mohammad Ihsan has written a book that examines the Kurdish experi-
ence with genocide under the Iraqi Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein.
Ihsan, British-trained in International Law and Middle Eastern Studies, was
Minister for Extra-Regional Affairs from 2005 to 2011, Minister for Human
Rights, President of the General Board for Disputed Areas in Iraq, International
Investigator for Genocide crimes in Iraq from 2001 to 2005, and Kurdistan
Representative to the Federal Government in Iraq from 2007–2012. As such,
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Book Reviews 205

he is well-placed to offer a broad overview of genocide in Iraq, and the book

indeed covers a broad range of Iraqi mass violence against Kurdish civilians:
from the Arabization policies of the 1970s, to the destruction of the Faylee
Kurds from 1980 onward, to the clan massacre of the Barzanis in 1983, through
the entire Anfal campaign, and of course the chemical massacres. Each of
these episodes are treated as sub-elements of a broader Baathist genocide
against Kurds. Ihsan concludes with a discussion of Kurdish nation-building
and transitional justice efforts in Iraqi Kurdistan. The book is topped off with
a long appendix with primary sources (mostly official Iraqi state documents
outlining the violence), and a series of maps.
Ihsan’s book is based on a wide range of vital primary documents and deep
oral history interviews with key actors, for example Judge Mohammed Al
Uraibi, who sentenced Saddam Hussein. The major strength of the book lays
in its empirical depth: each chapter can be read separately to acquire a quick
but comprehensive understanding of that genocidal episode. With painstak-
ing detail and critical examination of official documents, Ihsan lays out the
harrowing fate of tens of thousands of Kurds, for example in this comment by
Saddam Hussein himself when asked about the fate of the Barzani men:

The Barzanis spread their treachery to other families. They are involved in
this crime and became guides for the Persian Army helping them occupy
Iraqi land. Some who called themselves Barzanis co-operated with them
so they have been severely punished and have gone to hell. (p. 153)

He concludes most chapters with a discussion of how the violence was dealt
with in the post-2003 era. He intersperses his detached analytical gaze with
intimate personal observations on the ground, for example when he toured
the country in expeditions searching for mass graves in the desert, or testified
against Saddam in his court case. There is even an occasional photo of himself
sifting through bones in a search for forensic evidence.
The book has some weaknesses as well, mostly regarding its conceptual
engagement. First, it does not go much beyond Stanton’s “10 stages of geno-
cide”, a fairly static model that sees each ‘phase’ of genocide as following on
a previous in a linear, escalating process. Second, Ihsan, being a lawyer, often
uses monochromatic legal perspectives: who was guilty, who was responsi-
ble, what did the court decide, etcetera. Third, he is often kowtowing to the
Holocaust, and ponders to what extent Arabization was like Aryanization, or
whether Ba’athist genocide was like Nazi genocide – without much further
thought into what this means. Finally, Ihsan is not very critical toward the

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206 Book Reviews

concepts of “sectarianism” and “de-Ba’athification”: sectarian identities were

produced by violence, not the other way around, and de-Ba’athification was
abused as a tool after 2003 to settle scores and disenfranchise large parts of
Iraqi society. Whereas Saddam’s genocide against the Kurds was obviously a
product of Arab nationalism and anti-Kurdish sentiment, there is little dis-
cussion in this book of Kurds who collaborated with Saddam, and only one
reference to the “Jash” (p. 82), the pro-regime Kurdish militia. Finally, Ihsan
also makes some sweeping statements, such as: “it is clear that the old Iraq
is over and that the Iraq some politicians have in mind is not feasible and
certainly not auspicious for the Kurds” (p. 138). He ends with the normative
non-sequitur of Kurdish independence as an appropriate political response
to the genocide that Kurds suffered.
All in all, this is a useful, relatively short book that provides a good overview
of how the Iraqi genocide of Kurds was masterminded by Saddam Hussein and
his henchmen. Saddam’s Arab-nationalist ideology, hostile to Israel, Iran, and
Turkey, also saw Iraq’s minorities as “internal enemies” and existential threats
to Iraqi-Arab unitary statehood. The consequences of this ideology for the
Kurds was fatal, and this book offers solid explanations how and why.

Ugur Ümit Üngör | ORCID: 0000-0001-7125-118X

NIOD Institute, University of Amsterdam
[Link]@[Link]

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Kurdish Studies Archive ⸭ Content Vol. 9 No. 1 2021

Special Issue Mass violence and the Kurds
Guest Editors Uğur Ümit Üngör, Ayhan Işık
Editorial
Uğur Ümit Üngör and Ayhan Işık, Mass Violence and the Kurds: Introduction to the Special Issue 1

Vol. 9
Research articles
Naif Bezwan, The State and Violence in Kurdistan: A Conceptual Framework12

No. 1
Adnan Çelik, Keep Your Mouth Shut in the Day and Your Door Shut at Night.’ Intra Kurdish

Kurdish Studies
Violence in the Shadow of the State: The Case of Hizbullah in Kurdistan of Turkey 49
Mehmet Polatel, The Armenian Massacre of 1895 in Bitlis Town 78

2021
Özgür Sevgi Göral, Memory as Experience in Times of Perpetual Violence: The Challenge of
Saturday Mothers vis-à-vis Cultural Aphasia103
Interview
Marlene Schäfers, Feminism, Gender and Power in Kurdish Studies: An Interview with
Prof. Shahrzad Mojab
Obituary
Nodar Mossaki, In Memoriam: Izzaddin Mustafa Rasul (1934-2019), Iraqi Kurdish Man of Letters
129
Archive
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Book reviews
Special Issue Mass violence and the Kurds

Kurdish Studies Archive

Guest Editors Umit Cetin,
Political Violence and the Kurdish Conflict: A Review173
Zerrin Özlem Biner, States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey
Salih Can Açıksöz, Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey
Marlene Schäfers Celia Jenkins, and Suavi Aydın
J. Andrew Bush, Between Muslims: Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan182
Metin Atmaca
Mneesha Gellman, Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic Minority Rights
Movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador185
Vera Eccarius-Kelly ⸭ Vol. 9 No. 1 2021 ⸭
Seevan Saeed, Kurdish Politics in Turkey: From the PKK to the KCK188
Michael M. Gunter
Mohammedali Yaseen Taha, Media and Politics in Kurdistan. How Politics and Media are
Locked in an Embrace 192
Kerem Schamberger
Philip G. Kreyenbroek and Yiannis Kanakis, "God First and Last": Religious Traditions and
Music of the Yaresan of Guran. Volume I: Religious Traditions 195
Martin van Bruinessen
Seyedeh Behnaz Hosseini, The Yārsān of Iran, Socio-Political
ISBN 978-90-04-70039-0 changes and Migration 199
Hamidreza Nikravesh

Mohammed Ihsan, Nation building in Kurdistan: Memory,

Genocide and Human Rights 204
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