Demonstration against the Turkish president Erdogan. Demotix/Elena Aquila. All rights reserved. The violent attack on a peaceful pro-Kurdish rally in Ankara on 10 October is shocking, heinous and not an anomaly. It is part of a broader historical and contemporary trend: Kurds have long been exposed to different forms and degrees of violence in Turkey and the wider Middle East.
Kurdish experiences of secular-Kemalist and Islamist rule in Turkey show that Kurds cannot rely on the current political framework in Turkey to achieve their political rights. This is because their political voices and claims are widely interpreted as undermining the forces that are assumed to maintain the unity and territorial integrity of Turkey. Kurdish voices – including those expressed in peaceful rallies – are perceived by many to be a direct challenge to ethnic Turks, unsettling their ability to be the spatial managers or governors of the Turkish state and the Turkish nation. Indeed, Turkey’s principle of political organization is best categorized as an ethnocracy: it ethnicizes citizenship and stipulates rights on ethnic bases.
In an ethnocracy, the principle is that a state of and for a particular ethnic identity claims ownership of the state, controls its citizenship and has a monopoly on power. In contrast, the Kurdish movement opposes the national order where ethnic Turks are perceived to be the masters of the state and enjoy the dominant position through determining conditions of belonging to the state, and the distribution of rights and resources. In this sense, recognising Kurdish rights is conceived as making Turkey less Turkish and more Kurdish. This explains why many ethnic Turks are intimated by the word ”Kurdistan”, as our research about the Kurdish diaspora shows.
