Carina Thuijs is het slachtoffer van terrorisme geworden.
I Carina Thuijs (Doetinchem)
II Theo Thuijs - Wil Ditters (Wijnbergen)
III Theodorus H Thuijs - Grada M Harmsen (Wijnbergen)
IV Gradus Thuijs - Johanna Hendrina Kaal (Wijnb)
V Theodorus Thuijs - Alberdina Hoebink (Wijnb)
VI Jan Tuss (Thuss) - Gerharda Senhorst (Wijnb)
VII Theodorus Tussen - Reinera Ticheloven (Wehl)
VIII Hendrik Thus - Hendrina Martens (Oer)
IX Gerardus Thuss - Hendrina Messingh (Oer)
Paper presented at Boas/Benedict Graduate Student Conference,
Columbia University, New York, 25 March 2000 Death of a Community: KIzIlbaI-Alevi Predicament in 1990s Istanbul
Aykan Erdemir. I am staring at the picture of a dead anthropologist on a warm Sunday afternoon in ?ahkulu Sultan cloister in Istanbul. It is the second day of the annual youth festival organized by the K?z?lba?-Alevi youth of this waqf (pious endowment). The dead anthropologist is Carina Thuijs, a Dutch woman who was one of the 37 victims of the Sunni extremist mob who burned a hotel full of mostly left-wing Alevi intellectuals and artists as they were attending an Alevi festival in Sivas, six years ago on a hot July afternoon. Carina?s picture framed in red, stands next to the pictures of other victims on the stage, who have been commemorated as Alevi martyrs for the last six years. A group of youngsters are verbally reenacting the events of that day as they read aloud the slogans of hate hurled at the victims of that bloody festival. Although this performance is very different in form and style than the Shi?i taziya reenactments of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn in Karbela, there is still an uncanny familiarity. The ancestors of these K?z?lba?-Alevi youth have for hundreds of years preserved the tradition of performing mersiye poetry in their cem ceremonies lamenting the ruthless massacre of Imam Husayn and his entourage by the Umayyad caliph Yazid?s forces. What unites these two different reenactments is the theme of death at the hands of tyrants.
I am standing next to an old Alevi man, who must have migrated to Istanbul from one of the eastern Anatolian provinces within the last couple of decades. Earlier that day he was complaining about the festival to the people around him: ?What kind of a program is this? These youth should talk about the 12 Imams and the Ehli Beyt (the household of the prophet) instead of this other stuff.? Less than an hour after these complaints, the Sivas commemoration reached its climax on stage as an Alevi youth cried out the curses of the Sunni mob setting the hotel on fire: ?We lit the hellfire. We are burning the bitches!? At that instance I noticed the same old man, his face buried in his handkerchief weeping loudly, streams of tears flowing down his cheeks. His face was no different than the faces of the religious elders whom I had seen earlier that week in a cem ceremony: their faces buried in their handkerchiefs crying out loud as they listened to the zakir (the lute player) singing the mersiye lamentations which climaxed as the tyrant Yazid?s man Shimar decapitated Imam Husayn.
These two reenacted events, although thirteen centuries apart, one in the heat of the Karbela dessert, the other in the fires of an Anatolian town, weld the diverse experiences of 20 million people together to form a somewhat united Alevi community. These two killings, deaths at the hands of tyrants, paradoxically contain the very possibility of the community?s unity, survival and reproduction in the global killing fields of late capitalism.
K?z?lba?-Alevi communities in Anatolia comprise what one might call syncretistic and heterodox groups of Muslims who are related to the twelver Shi?i version of Islam. K?z?lba?-Alevis, who belong to the Caferi school, are variously composed of Turkish, Zaza and Kirmanji speaking groups. The population estimates for K?z?lba?-Alevis in contemporary Turkey range between 15 to 20 million (20 to 30 percent of Turkey?s population) and the K?z?lba?-Alevis in Europe, Australia and the US are believed to be over a million people. K?z?lba?-Alevis have a long history of persecution in the period of Ottoman rule, in part due to their support of the rival Safavids. This was one of the reasons why the K?z?lba?-Alevis remained marginal and peripheral, while increasingly turning to the secrecy of gnostical forms and esoteric teachings. Although the Sunni persecution of the K?z?lba?-Alevis did not cease in the republican era, most K?z?lba?-Alevis continued to support the secular Turkish republic with the expectations of becoming equal citizens. However, the Sunni religious and nationalist conservatives have identified the 3K (Kürt [Kurd], K?z?lba?, and Komünist [Communist]) as the main threats to the Turkish state, and continued the exclusion and persecution of the K?z?lba?-Alevis. The capitalist development in the countryside and the urban centers beginning in 1950s resulted in the mass migration of rural K?z?lba?-Alevis to the cities, and the subsequent inter-communal clashes which led to mass killings of K?z?lba?-Alevis in 1970s and 1990s. Inspired by the left wing political teachings, the K?z?lba?-Alevis began to question and redefine their identities and political loyalties. The Kurdish insurgency and the guerrilla warfare led by the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) in the Southeast Anatolia, which left more than thirty thousand people dead during the 1990s, and the growing Sunni extremist opposition, forced the conservative state elite to lighten its tight hold on the K?z?lba?-Alevis, encouraging a secular and Turkified form of tame Alevism to flourish as a precautionary measure against Kurdish separatism and Sunni extremism. The cultural ?revival? [1] of Alevism and the advance of Alevi identity politics during the 1990s manifested itself through the explosion in the number of Alevi cloisters, lodges, publications, radios, and civic organizations [2].
?ahkulu Sultan cloister, which is the setting of my talk, is one of the pioneer institutions of K?z?lba?-Alevi cultural revival in Turkey. Founded on the ruins of a Bekta?i lodge in Merdivenköy, ?stanbul, which is locally believed to date back to a 14th century Ahi serhad tekkesi (frontier lodge), this site has been recently renovated and reinvented as an Alevi-Bekta?i cloister by a K?z?lba?-Alevi pious endowment. With four to five thousand visitors a week, this site is currently the leading K?z?lba?-Alevi institution in Istanbul.
I will now briefly present my reading of the political economy of the post-1980 Turkey in order to expose the structure of the networks of hegemonic power operating in the Anatolian setting. This in turn would empower my audience to situate the techniques and discourses surrounding the revival of Alevi identity while enabling them to proceed with their own readings -which could very well be counter to my readings- of the material which I am going to present.
It has been customary to start the histories of liberalization of the Turkish economy in the last two decades, with the military takeover in September 12th, 1980. However, both to contextualize the coup d?état, and also to emphasize the process leading to it, I will briefly discuss the 1970s. Turkey at that time had an import substitution economy, with a manufacturing sector protected from foreign competition by high tariffs and customs regulations. Throughout the 1970s, the oil crisis, the US embargo, high inflation, shortage of basic consumer goods, and the climaxing armed clashes between right and left wing extremists destablized the economy, legal system and the multi-party democracy. In this turmoil, the conservative prime minister Süleyman Demirel attempted to introduce measures which called for a liberalization of the Turkish economy along the lines of typical austerity plans dictated by the International Monetary Fund. Since the civilian authorities did not have the political power to implement these austerity measures, on September 12th, 1980 the army was drawn into the picture, in Ça?lar Keyder?s words, to ?usher? in a regime that became identified with orthodox policies counseled by the International Monetary Fund and applied in the hope of restructuring the economy toward greater openness and liberalization? (Keyder 1999:13). This ?ushering? was enforced by the military at enormous human costs. Within four years ?178,656 people were detained, 64,505 formally charged, 41,727 convicted and 326 death sentences passed. Of those sentenced, 25 were executed? one of whom was under the age of 18 (Pope and Pope 1997:152). Not surprisingly, the survival of such a brutal and despotic military regime was facilitated by Western complicity. As Pope and Pope argue:
Strong backing from Washington was another key element in the junta?s success, with the United States anxious to prove to weak-willed Latin American governments that its austerity-led IMF packages could fix inflation-ridden economies. During those years Turkey was receiving nearly one billion dollars a year of American assistance, third in the world after Israel and Egypt. Within months of the coup, new American and British credits were approved (1997:151).
This US-backed junta banned political parties, labor unions, civic associations and mass organizations, annulled the constitution, conducted mass detention, torture, extra-legal executions, and caused more than a million dissidents to leave the country to seek political asylum in Europe and elsewhere. The second half of the 1980s witnessed the boom in the Turkish economy as it turned into an export oriented one under the guidance of president Turgut Özal?s conservative doctrines, an odd mix of neo-liberal and populist cocktail with a twist of Islamic flavor. This boom was accompanied by the decline in the real wages for middle and lower classes, chronic hyperinflation, skyrocketing foreign debt, widespread corruption, deunionization of the workers, undermining of the rule of law, and the rising Islamic extremism encouraged by the government?s propagation of a conservative ideological frame, properly named, Turkish-Islamic synthesis. [3]
The 1990s were marked by the Gulf Crisis and the intensification of the Kurdish insurgency led by the PKK. The recession of the economy and increase in the foreign debt were accompanied by thousands of extra-judicial executions, many more being declared ?missing? under police custody, growing Islamic extremism as well as the intensifying Turkish and Kurdish nationalisms. Millions of workers were left unemployed; many more peasants in East and Southeast Anatolia were forced to leave their villages which were then burnt mostly by the state security forces to destroy the logistical base of PKK?s guerrilla insurgency in the region. Meanwhile a massive but unsuccessful privatization campaign blocked the access of the lower classes to government subsidized services in health, education and social security. This political economic process went parallel to the increased monopolization of the printed and visual media which have managed to keep labor unions out of their workplaces up to this day. [4]
The major cultural and social phenomenon of these two decades of turmoil were the establishment of neo-liberal identity politics as the central hegemonic discourse which then became the only legitimate avenue to claim individual ?rights? in the language of ?injuries to be the redressed.? Following Wendy Brown (1995) I argue that such a replacement of ?freedom as a collective project? (1960s and 1970s in Turkey) with the Nietzschean ressentiment, even if it is just a discourse of, and not yet a practice of, ?redress? (1980s and 1990s in Turkey), is a regulatory technique of containment. That is one of the reasons why the early 1980s, which was the peak of the junta?s repression, also witnessed the flourishing of liberal feminism and environmentalism which were then joined by Kurdish, Alevi, Islamic and other identity politics. These developments were applauded as the institutionalization of civil society and multiculturalism in Turkey by many intellectuals and scholars. For example, according to Nilüfer Göle:
In terms of the state-society relationship, the post-1980 era has been a turning point in Turkish political development. During the 1980s, the autonomization of civil societal elements from the grip of the center ? became even more pronounced ? Only in the 1980s did future-oriented revolutionary political utopias lose their appeal, a change that permitted a more diverse spectrum of political participants. Women, ecologists, veiled students, and homosexuals and transsexuals appeared on the political scene? (1994: selections from pp.213-222).
Göle does not find it odd, that this ?autonomization of civil-societal elements? were coinciding with wide-spread detentions, torture, extra-judicial executions, impoverishment and exploitation. Yael Navaro-Yashin, in her astute critique of the discourse on civil society in Turkey, points out the major problem with such interpretations.
