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The AKP and the Kurdish News Media
Abstract
This chapter will examine how the dire state of news media freedom in contemporary Turkey intersects with the Kurdish issue. It starts with the initial optimism of AKP’s relationship with the Kurds, which was hailed as a new beginning based on religious kindred and a mutual distrust of the Kemalist establishment. However, this changed once the Kurdish mainstream political parties began to be a threat to ongoing AKP power. The subsequent KCK investigations were aimed at quelling the nascent grassroots Kurdish movement before it gained momentum. Journalism was included with the KCK operation but it was not the government’s primary target and instead was included more as a deterrent to the reporting of wider KCK illiberality. However, more recent persecution of Kurdish journalists has securitised journalism as “terrorism” in order to delegitimise its message and that of the Kurdish movement as a whole, particularly the HDP. Accordingly, any reporting of the Kurdish issue has been deemed to be in favour of political violence—rather than merely about it.
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This study explores the competition for Turkey's Kurdish vote through the instrumentalization of religion, ethnicity and victimhood in political competition. This becomes possible through the study of rally speeches of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP), the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi – BDP) and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi – HDP), in Turkey's June 2011 and June 2015 general elections. The AKP campaigns framed the resolution of the Kurdish issue along with an updated version of the ‘Turkish Islamic Synthesis’. The issue of ethnicity was toned down in contrast to the idea of common victimhood of pious Turkish and Kurdish Muslims in republican Turkey. On the other hand, the BDP/HDP moved from a more ethnic-oriented and exclusive identity approach in 2011 to a more inclusive, liberal and extrovert agenda based on a civic definition of Turkish national identity in 2015. Religion and victimhood appear as the two most enduring symbolic resources for political party mobilization.
Turkey has lately been in the midst of trying to resolve its three-decade old struggle with the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK). Elaborating on the history of this conflict, this study analyzes why previous attempts to resolve it failed and why other conflict-resolution opportunities were not taken until 2007. It devotes particular attention to the emergence and failure of the latest resolution process and analyzes prospects and challenges of a potential resolution by analyzing the context, content, and conduct of Turkey's latest peace attempt. This study finds, first, that the PKK has been open to a negotiated settlement since 1993, but the state regime rejected reconciliation and pursued unilateral military solutions until 2007, when Turkey finally recognized the military stalemate and costly deadlock. Second, it argues that what really forced Turkey to search for a resolution are—in addition to the hurting stalemate—recent national and regional power shifts, which have also destabilized the resolution process itself. Third, this study asserts that despite the ripe conditions for resolution, the context and the content of the latest process revealed crucial deficiencies that require a complete restructuring of the central government as well the need to develop greater institutionalization and social engagement for a potential conflict resolution. Finally, this study claims that the nature and characteristics of the current phase of the conflict, as they stand, indicate significant fragilities and spoiling risks due to both internal and external dynamics and actors, as recent developments have indicated in the failure of the latest resolution attempt.
Based on a continuous and relational understanding of state-formation, as conceptualized by Charles Tilly, and inspired by Gramsci’s formulation of ‘war of position’, AKP regime in Turkey can be identified as a process of (re)-entrenchment. The AKP’s original claim to de-securitize the state–society relationship in Turkey has re-entrenched, re-aligned and re-institutionalized positions of power and democratic participation within the state to overcome the old-guard and establish its own hegemonic rule. The conspicuous disappearance of a booklet from 2013, i.e. the Silent Revolution, that was supposed to be the historical documentation of the AKP’s ambitious original claims from all AKP-related media effectively indicates its abandonment of these goals. This document reveals the contentious (re)entrenchments while the party ascended to power challenging deep-rooted security-oriented positions of the statist nationalism. This ascent to power was indeed a ‘war of position’ during which international opportunities created by the EU were effectively navigated and legislation and executive actions a) pertaining rule of law, human rights and freedoms, administrative accountability and transparency, b) economic and social reforms regarding vulnerable social groups, anti-corruption measures and labour relations, c) de-securitization and civilianization of government agencies and d) issues of Kurdish citizens were utilized as ‘trenches.’
This essay explores the relationship between the collapse of negotiations between Turkey and the PKK and the rupture between the governing AKP and its former ally, the Cemaat or Gülen Movement. This schism transformed both the AKP regime and Kurdish politics. This article traces the shifting narratives of key actors in this process. It also identifies the multifaceted underpinnings of the political violence that erupted and disrupted the resolution/peace process. In the end, the peace/resolution process was a (re)entrenchment, or inadvertent re-positioning of violent means of suppression against Kurdish politics in Turkey, beyond the particular intentions, beliefs, ideas and attitudes of all parties.
This article will examine A.K.P. (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) discourse surrounding ‘terrorism’ and political violence in Turkey since 2014, concentrating on issues pertaining to the Kurdish question. It explores whether the Turkish government has used its state powers for countering political violence to neuter political opposition in various forms. It analyses the public discourse of the A.K.P. elite to argue that the Turkish government has redefined ‘terrorist’ to mean ‘opponent’. This highlights a discursive strategy of associating perceived threats—the P.Y.D. (Partiya Yekitiya Demokrat), the H.D.P. (Halklarin Demokratik Partisi), Academics for Peace and Amnesty International—with terrorist actors: the P.K.K. (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan) and Islamic State (I.S.). Taking a critical theoretical approach using securitization theory it explores the underlying power structures at play within this scenario to argue additionally that having initially de-securitized the role of I.S. in Turkey the A.K.P. has, since 2015, re-securitized I.S. for its own purposes including the ongoing delegitimization of its opponents. Ultimately, the widening and apparent malleability of the ‘terrorist’ label in Turkey should be seen as both a symptom of the country’s authoritarian drift since 2007 and a means of sustaining it further.
In the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Kurds were promised their own state. However, several factors meant that this dream never became a reality, and the land of the Kurds was divided. Amid a sense of a loss of identity, the Kurds started to fight for their social and political rights. 'Kurdish Politics in Turkey' argues that the Kurdish struggle has largely been a failure, and that the emergence of the Unions of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK) has been a direct result of this. The book examines the success of the KCK and how it has transformed this Kurdish struggle in Turkey from a one-dimensional political movement, to a multi-dimensional social movement.
Turkey held two consecutive parliamentary elections in an interval of five months that produced entirely different results. The June 7 elections saw the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) lose its parliamentary majority and the rise of the Halkların Demokratik Partisi (HDP) as a game-changer. Following the collapse of coalition talks, the subsequent snap elections held on November 1, 2015 took place under a dramatically different context, being marked with issues of security and stability that trumped the issues that were decisive in the June 7 elections, such as the economic slowdown, growing authoritarianism, and allegations of corruption. The electorate's search for a stable and strong government, the AKP's adjustments in an apparent response to the criticisms of the electorate, and the mistakes made by opposition parties gave the AKP the opportunity once again to form a single-party government after the November 1 elections.
The siege of the northern Syrian town of Kobane was lifted in January 2015. The Kurdish defenders there had triumphed against Islamic State (IS). The conflict then moved on. It moved on, though, with the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western powers having adopted, almost by default, the Kurds as proxy fighters in this conflict. The Kurds, however, are a divided and fractious nation spread across three states and historically famous for fighting among themselves. In employing the Kurds as proxies against IS, as this article shows, these Western powers must be aware of the unintended consequences that can result.
One of the most important secular political movements in the Middle East, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) underwent a profound transformation in the 2000s. What the PKK has experienced in this period was a comprehensive restructuration of its organization, ideology and political-military struggle, changing its course towards a project of radical democracy. In this article we explore the content of this new project, and its practical implications. Through this discussion, our study addresses a gap in Turkish and Kurdish studies. Only few studies deal explicitly with the political ideology of the PKK. The data for this article has been collected through a study of Öcalantextquoterights defence texts and his textquoteleftprison notestextquoteright, along with key PKK documents, such as congress reports, formal decisions and the writings of its cadre, such as Mustafa Karasu. We conclude that the project for radical democracy is based on the conception of textquoteleftpolitics beyond the state, political organisation beyond the party, and political subjectivity beyond classtextquoteright and can have the opportunity to change the centralist tradition in Turkish political system as well as the statist and class reductionist political thought in the Left in Turkey.
Turkish state actors have used mainly military means to first suppress the Kurdish rebellions and then to end the PKK violence from 1984 onwards. However, after the AKP came to office in 2002, the government challenged the hardline state policy and initiated a Kurdish opening. This policy has the ultimate goal of disarming the PKK and resolving the Kurdish question. However, the Kurdish opening so far has failed to bring about the desired policy outcomes because the parties to the Kurdish question have been highly divided on the side of both the state and the Kurds in Turkey.
This article explores the suppression of press freedoms in Turkey under the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government in the late 2000s. Drawing upon analyses of laws and legislation, surveys, reports, and interviews with journalists, it demonstrates how press censorship in Turkey has been activated through a dispersed network of state power, commercial forces, and self-censorship. The article brings together critical analyses of state power, surveillance, corporate media, and self-censorship, and sheds light on the AKP's financial sanctions on media conglomerates, its instrumentalization of a major political investigation known as the Ergenekon, and its crackdown on Kurdish journalists on charges of terrorism.
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