A street in Diyarbakır. Author's photo collection. The situation of the Kurds in a drastically changing Middle East has received little attention in academia and less in the media despite their growing impact on regional and international politics. The biggest stateless people living in the Middle East are on the verge of a new status, not only in Iraqi Kurdistan, where a referendum for independence takes place on September 25, 2017, but also in Syria and Turkey. In Syria, Kurds have fought an organised and effective struggle against the IS. In Turkey, they have suffered a massive destruction of Kurdish cities, displacement of half a million Kurds and eradication of all forms of legal entity by the Turkish state. Then there is Iran. This week’s short series looks at current political struggles of the Kurds in four neighbouring countries. Mehmet Kurt, series editor.
“The colonial world is divided into compartments [...] the colonial world is a world cut in two (Fanon, 2001).”
In the recent period starting in July 2015, with the sudden end in peace negotiations between the Turkish state and the Kurdish mainstream movement, we have witnessed an intensification of violence in Turkey Kurdistan. Kurdistan unlike the Occupied Palestinian territories does not exist on world maps. However, it does exist in the minds and hearts of its people. In this paper, I examine the new modalities of power emerging in neocolonial geographies more precisely, the spatial configurations of colonialism in Diyarbakır – de facto capital of Turkey Kurdistan. In doing so, I raise the question of whether this is an internal war getting worse day by day? If not, is it a colonial occupation, in the sense that the war is not in this country (in Turkey) but somewhere else (in its colony). Can we approach the Turkish state`s current policies by deploying a neo-colonial narrative?
