Challenges to the ethnicity regime in Turkey: Alevi and Kurdish demands for recognition, 1923–1980

Abstract

Introduction, Puzzle, and the Argument

As late as the 1980s, it was a crime in Turkey to claim that a people called “Kurds” exist because such a claim was seen as tantamount to propagating “separatism” and even “terrorism.” In the officially sanctioned publications, Kurds were described as Turks who forgot their origins and language or simply as “mountain Turks.” In the immediate aftermath of the 1980 military coup, it was infamously argued that “Kurd is a sound that your boot makes when you walk on the snow,” pointing to the source of the “confusion.” Şerafettin Elçi, a former Minister of Irrigation and Public Works in the 1970s, served two and a half years in prison in the early 1980s for publicly stating that “Kurds exist, and I am a Kurd.” The Turkish Labor Party was closed down for declaring that a people called Kurds lived in Eastern Anatolia, in its 4th Party Congress in 1970. İsmail Beşikçi, a sociologist, served seventeen years in prison for publishing his research on the Kurdish ethnic identity in Turkey. In 2004, Turkish state television (Turkish Radio and Television, or TRT), began broadcasting in Kurdish and four other minority languages (Arabic, Bosnian, Circassian, and Zaza) every day on its third channel (TRT 3). Starting on January 1, 2009, TRT inaugurated an entire new channel, TRT 6, which broadcasts only in Kurdish. What explains this radical transformation in state policies toward ethnicity in Turkey?