Newroz Fire and Our Coming Spring

By Murat Cem Mengüç

Speculations about a possible Kurdish Spring started long ago and after the terrible events of the Newroz celebrations in Turkey during the last week, even members of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) started to speak about it. Assistant Secretary of the AKP, Hüseyin Çelik mockingly stated that “spring doesn’t arrive for the Kurds alone.” He is right, but only ironically. A spring is on its way, and it is neither constructed by the Kurds alone, nor will be a spring well remembered by them exclusively. Following the daily Fırat News, one observes that the fire of Newroz is lit everywhere, fed by many, and threatens to burn more than the Kurds. For all we know, Kurds may be the only ones who know how to jump over it.

Turkey is on the brink of an ethnic civil war. US and EU watch Turkey like a patron observing his protégé, and still depict AKP as a moderate Muslim democratic party. They also insist Turkey is a universal example of how Islam should be politicized. On the ground, however, at least two Islamist movements govern the Turkish political scene, and they enjoy feeding the divisions among its peoples.

Besides AKP, and probably more important than AKP, there is a phenomenon called cemaat, a Sunni Muslim movement, formed around the US based theologian Fetullah Gülen. I call them cemaat (masses), because that is what they call themselves, otherwise they are known as Güllenists, or Gülen Movement. Historically speaking, cemaat and the AKP can be explained as a uniform entity, and come any election, they partner to defeat oppositions. However, they have slowly separated their paths as well.[1] AKP has governed Turkey nearly a decade, and successfully. It is a pro-capitalist, pro-globalization, right wing conservative entity, and it is a solidified political institution. It receives immense amount of respect both domestically and internationally. It is not a movement with religious tendencies. Its leadership possesses a consciousness formed through their interactions with other Turkish political institutions, such as the Turkish military and the Turkish judicial elite. They are in the position of power, and believe they are in charge of Turkey’s future. In contrast, the mentality of the cemaat, which is a much more organic and elusive entity, is less concentrated. Its ideals are shaped around the teachings and the statements of a spiritual leader. Its agenda is neither conclusive nor institutionalized. Its members want to influence the immediate Turkish politics and the global Sunni/Muslim scene. It seeks change through grassroots organization and media. Finally, cemaat is led by a man who lives in exile, whereas AKP is led by a group of technocrats who live in the Turkish capital. In short, if cemaat is searching for more power, and believes it can be more powerful, AKP thinks that it has now become the power.

As one reads the Stratfor Papers, it becomes obvious that the paths of AKP and the cemaat parted long ago. These papers suggest that the two groups remain symbiotic but don’t act together. However, Occidentally wired international media, along with the stereotype loving US and EU political elite observe AKP and the cemaat as a uniform phenomenon. Even the well informed agencies like Al Jazeera, who supposed to be an expert on the affairs of the Middle East is confused. When it cares to invite a Turkish scholar to compose a piece about the AKP or Turkey, it still strikes the same note of uniform Turkish Islam, such as in the case of Pınar Kemerli's recent opinion piece.[2] (In all honesty, Al Jazeera does a better job covering the British Premiership than the Kurdish insurgency in Anatolia and the Turkish politics in general.)

Kemerli’s case shows that aside from the outsiders, the insiders also make the same mistake. Even the journalist Ahmed Şık, who was just released from prison after being arrested for writing (though not publishing) a book about the cemaat, still refers to the Turkish Islamists as a uniform entity.[3] Whether because the Turkish secular intellectuals not yet grasped the multifaceted nature of Turkish Islamism, or not yet recovered from the shock of having lost the leadership of their country to a religious conservative movement, persistence of this view shows how alienated the educated secular elite and the common masses of Turkey have grown.

The important thing is the confrontation between AKP and the cemaat conceives everyone else almost irrelevant. Especially the non-Sunni religious minorities of Turkey are used as gambling chips. The Kurds are perfect example of this. They practice a different form of Islam and inhabit a region bordering the Syrian Shia dictatorship which is now exterminating its Sunni population. AKP gained its popularity in the Kurdish region when it introduced a program called “Kurdish Opening.” This opening promised a series of laws to recognize Kurdish civil rights. It also promised to unarm the militant Kurds without budging to the PKK. Presently, the “Kurdish Opening” collapsed, because cemaat leaked a sound recording of the secret dialogs between the PKK and AKP, which were not supposed to happen. They did so, to teach AKP a lesson. AKP was being spear headed under the authoritarian leadership of the Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdoğan.

Anything that plays the Turks against the Kurds, or the Kurds against the Turks also plays into the hands of AKP and the cemaat. Anything that grabs the daily attention, allows the Islamisation of the Turkish politics continue with less public out-cry. Moreover, AKP and the cemaat benefit well from being conceived as a uniform entity, because it makes them look even more powerful.

At the turn of the millennium, when AKP came to power, it was with the help of the cemaat, but due to economic factors which dictated the real politics in Turkey. By the mid 1990’s, membership talks with the EU clearly indicated that the archaic banking and tax laws in Turkey had to be reformed. After a disastrous economic collapse in 2001, AKP was able to emerge as the only party which could form a majority government, and willing to enact reforms. If it rose to power with the help of the cemaat and its grassroots strength, its later popularity was a result of many other factors. The banking and tax reforms AKP enacted were originally drafted by a Turkish economic genius Kemal Derviş, who is now the Administrator of the United Nations Development Program. These were designed to make Turkey a partner to the ongoing globalization, and they were very simple but strict recommendations. They brought Turkish economy up to par with the international capitalism in terms of its business laws. Surely, Turkish economy performed well afterwards and continues to do so. AKP became a temporary solution for the needs of a country which was long ruled by non-reformist institutions.[4] It became a political device employed by the middle and the upper class capitalists who sought a dependable capitalist order. If the previous political institutions were willing to enact similar reforms, there would have been no AKP in Turkey today, at least not one that could have achieved a majority government.

If one observes the rise of AKP to power from this perspective, one could see that the religious versus secular aspect of the Turkish political confrontations are coincidental, and I will argue, sometimes artificial. Religiosity and secularism cuts across the entire Turkish society, and have many facades. They are not denominators, and if considered denominators, they create more confusion than clarity. The depiction of Turkish Islamisims as a uniform front by the international and the domestic politicains and the intellectuals both feed the Turkish identity crisis, and allow a play field for the likes of AKP and the cemaat to manipulate the Turkish political scene. The fact that there exists a power struggle between AKP and the cemaat proves that there are many levels of Muslimness in operation. I believe this spring, it is this power struggle that will keep the Newroz fire burning.

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[1] A good recent editorial on the subject was penned by Emre Uslu. http://www.taraf.com.tr/emre-uslu/makale-akp-ye-kizilcahamam-kampi-sart.htm

[2] A good recent piece was penned by Pınar Kemerli, in which she depicts the Turkish Islamists as a uniform political entity. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/201212985551607740.html

[3] http://taraf.com.tr/haber/bir-yil-sonra-nihayet.htm

[4] See, Hakan Yavuz, “Is There a Turkish Islam? The Emergence of Convergence and Consensus” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 24, No. 2, October 2004.

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From the field: Devastating, horrible news--Anthony Shadid dies with his boots on in Syria

I have been reading Anthony's House of Stone, his pitch perfect and beautifully wrought chronicle of his struggle to bring his ancestral home in Marjayoun back to life. The last phone conversation I had with him was a couple of years ago in Lebanon. I reached him in south Lebanon, where he was described himself captured by challenge of restoring his great grandfather's house. I will have more to say about the book shortly, but for now I must simply express my profound sadness about Anthony's death. So many who crossed paths with him will be pained by the loss of this gifted, brave and astounding man.

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Resurgent Arab Islam need not be unsettling

By Emile Nakhleh and Augustus R. Norton

[Cross-posted with "From the Field" and Boston Globe's "The Angle", where it was first published December 11, 2011]

In the wake of the youth-directed “Arab Spring,” which rocked the Middle East to its core and felled autocratic governments in several countries, Islamic political parties are poised for an historic resurgence across the region — and that is neither surprising nor necessarily alarming.

Popular mass demonstrations, “Days of Rage,” have been the hallmarks of the season that dislodged dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and exposed the fragility of fierce but unpopular regimes across the Arab world. Youthful demonstrators in quest of dignity, hungry for jobs, and fed up with corruption formed the vanguards.

But because Arab rulers did not allow serious opposition parties, the best organized opposition groups were often Islamist movements. While they did not launch the Arab Spring, they lent resilience and discipline to the demonstrations. These movements are deeply insinuated in the contours of daily life in Arab societies, and now are emerging as early victors in what Arabs are calling al-sahwa (the awakening).

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In the Desert of American Politics

Murat cem Menguc

 

Something universal is also particular, for it applies to all particularities, universally. In contrast, something particular remains particular, for it does not apply universally. This seems to be the most important lesson history can teach us, as in his 1964 lectures titled Freedom and History, philosopher and a founder of the New School in New York, Theodor Adorno argues so. Adorno postulates that until people become a victim of history, that is, until they are taught a universal lesson about themselves, they do not realize they were living in a vacuum. Such big lesson rarely comes in a non-violent form and the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest camp at the Zuccoti Park, which lasted for two months, was one such precious lesson.

The OWS protests started in September 17, when about 1700 people marched to voice their criticism against the Wall Street. These men and women were greeted by a heavy police presence, and a group of people sipping Champaign on a balcony across the street from the New York Stock Exchange, mocking the protest. A handful of the protesters who had earlier decided to camp in the Chase Plaza, from which they were barred, cleverly moved to the Zuccoti Park, were they set a camp. I was blessed with the fact that Zuccoti Park was where I transferred from subway to bus during my daily commute, and started to interact with the camp three days after it was formed. In the beginning there were about two dozen protestors and on twitter, they amassed less than 2000 followers (today approximately 200,000 people them on twitter, and on November 17 they were able mobilize 32,000 people, whose protests were watched on live stream by over 650,000 people).

Initially, I was surprised by the lack of media coverage of the protest and I joined them after being disturbed by an image the New York Times published, which depicted it as a juvenile orgy, or a summer rave. I emailed a few columnists about this and asked why they could not talk about the protest rather than mock it with such images. Clyde Haberman wrote back “Actually, we’ve covered them every day, in the newspaper on Sunday and every day on City Room, our on-line blog. Aren’t we endlessly told that on line is where young people read these days?” So, according to Mr. Haberman, this protest was about young people, to whom his newspaper catered electronically, whereas the print readers, who were presumably older, did not need to know about it. Ginia Belefante was more articulate, stating that she was working on a large piece to be published on September 25, and asked me if I was involved or observing it from afar. I am an occasional visitor, I replied and she quickly assured me that the protest was not as relevant as I believed, and if I had spent enough time around it, I would have realized that they were an aimless bunch. When I pointed to her how the Guardian hired Amy Goodman to write a column about it, she replied that they got their facts wrong. When I asked her which facts and who got them wrong, the Guardian or Amy Goodman, and supplied her with a list of facts that I was familiar with, such as the harassment and the arrest of dozens of activists and the confiscation of recording devices and computers from the camp by the New York Police Department (NYPD) which started from day one, she stopped responding. The day before Belefante’s essay was published, NYPD kettled, beat and arrested numerous protesters and journalists. It also used pepper spray, illegally. Upon the publication of her essay, Belefante was heavily criticized for her lack of consciousness, understanding and solidarity with the movement, for she still insisted that the OWS was a useless rant.

I have never been a fan of the New York Times, and subscribe to it because my wife thinks it keeps me away from my laptop. The OWS episode made it obvious that they too lacked a clear understanding of what was taking place. At that time, the OWS was partially organized by a group of alternative media/internet activists, who were the creators of an very successful magazine titled Adbusters. This anti-commercialist journal of activism generated decent advertising revenues to support itself. For the initiation of the OWS, Adbusters joined forces with the Internet activists (or hactivists as they became known) the Anonymous. This coalition constituted an alternative media and network team far from incompetent or aimless. One of their participants whom I have interviewed for our Occupy Wall Street Oral History Project explained that the main goal of the protest was to start a paradigm shift, to make masses question the virtue of capitalism and unregulated market economy. The fact that they were able to talk about a paradigm shift alone showed how articulate they were, and that they knew a peaceful movement had to establish its strength via discourse. From the very beginning they treated Internet and independent media was their best options for spreading the movement and organizing something both local and international. They also knew that the spirit of revolution was everywhere, from Bahrain to Detroit.

During the following weeks, the OWS became a New York tourist and celebrity attraction. Being criticized for his handling of the Brooklyn Bridge protest, where 700 protesters were kettled and arrested, Mayor Michael Bloomberg was humiliated. In that environment, the camp attracted the presence of Naomi Klein, Slavoj Zizek, Cornel West, Michael Moore and Al Sharpton. Noam Chomsky paid tribute to them, and Paul Krugman wrote several columns praising their economic focus. All along the profile of the average protester remained diverse. On a regular day, the overnighters rose from their sleeping bags, around 10 am, and hit the lines for free cigarettes, coffee and breakfast.  Children came with their parents, to do painting and reading workshops. A crowd of public yoga and meditation enthusiasts rolled their mats near the drum circle. Working group meetings about finance, small business and legal advice attracted punks with mohawks as well as men in suits. Around early afternoon, almost without fail, a celebrity made an entrance. Crosby and Stills played a set. The tent that housed the library was donated by Patti Smith. Russell Simmons dragged Kanye West into it. Most days came to close with a big dinner and the 7 pm General Assembly. Afterwards there was live music, the drum circle and other casual late night gatherings. The media team of the OWS recorded almost everything and made it available, often live through Global revolution TV. New Yorkers joined the occupation at their convenience. The civil disobedience was the new black, as they said. Some spend their lunch hour there, making friends, talking politics or simply hanging around. Others came after work, for the General Assembly or the party. On the weekends, there were larger marches, like the one on October 15 that took over the Times Square.

All along, the NYPD circled the park resembling a pack of wolves, looking for a lonely sheep who wondered far from the herd. I saw a woman being arrested for writing “Good morning NYPD” on a sidewalk across the street from the park. A police officer told three protesters that if a fourth person who also wore the Vendetta mask joined them, they will be all taken in. Yet, nobody was intimidated. Except the chief of NYPD, Raymond Kelly, who loved to brag about his men’s capability of shooting down planes and whose son worked as a local Fox TV anchor that hates the OWS. Except the mayor Bloomberg, the 12^th richest men in the US and whose girlfriend sat at the board of trustees at the Brookfield Properties which owns the Zuccoti Park. Except the Wall Street and its close servants like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.

During his address, Zizek told the protesters “communism is dead, but the commons are alive,” and he was cheered full heartedly. In a televised interview, the Republican hopeful Mitt Romney declared the OWS was “class warfare,” and banners were raised declaring that yes, he is right, this is class warfare. My favorite sign read “Screw with us, we multiply.” A week after the Brooklyn Bridge arrests, and two days after some 50,000 protesters flocked the Foley Square, on October 7, Friday, the irony of watching Bertold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music wasn’t lost on the New Yorkers either. When Macheath delivered his final speech on the third act, declaring he was only a small criminal in comparison to the bankers and industrialist who took the society they lived in as a hostage, the audience treated him with a strong applause.

We started the OWS Oral History Project in this environment. The first person I interviewed was an anarchist and an MIT drop out, who described himself as an activist photographer. He had an untamable energy. All my life I have been told I was smart, he said. But I found myself a family for the first time in here and I will never walk out on them. Another interviewee was a female priest from New Jersey, who brought vegan food to the protesters for dinner. Many of them are vegetarians, she informed me, and many are vegans. She said after delivering them the food, she collected memorabilia from the camp and send them to her son who had to move to China, because there were no jobs in US. One woman was flown in from California by legal marijuana growers who were disappointed with the federal law that banned their practice. They promised to fly me to every single OWS protest in the country, she said, so that I can communicate their support. On the night of November 15, I met an iron worker from California. He came to New York for a short term contract, because there were no jobs where he lived. I rented an apartment in a noisy neighborhood, he joked so come to OWS to find some peace and quiet. He said he missed his Harley Davidson and going fishing the most, but it was time to protest.

When I left the park, there were hundreds of people. Some were returning from their daily assemblies and workshops, and heading for the food line. The library was packed. Six or seven hours later, in a coordinated federal effort, with the assistance of FBI and CIA, some 18 different OWS camps around the US were attacked by the police (and about which the President Barak Obama was most probably briefed). I watched the NYPD raid the Zuccoti Park, get it washed with Clorox, pressure hose the whole scene and surround it with barricades, on my laptop. Although a judge ruled against this eviction, the mayor Bloomberg up held it until he found another judge to rule in his favor, and guarantee that there will be no tents or tent like structures. By 3 pm, a great crowd had gathered outside the park, waiting for the final verdict. On the Internet, the activists’ camera focused on a group of police officers and private security guards who stroll the empty park, along with a half a dozen of pigeons. This negative image of the previous day, where by the people of the camp were kept outside and the police of the outside were gated in, was an extremely disheartening thing to look at. Where once lived and grow an alternative political life, now stood a clean concrete desert. It was as if liberty wondered off, and we were left to wonder if it will ever return and in what shape.

On November 17, the liberty returned, and according to the NYPD’s estimates, it was 32,000 people strong. Those of us who became involved knew that the OWS was not about tents and sleeping bags. In New York, at the aftermath of 9/11, the experience of political inclusion became fragmented especially for the liberal minded. Since 9/11, New York resembled a disjointed puzzle, which struggled to keep itself together, as popular conservatism and gentrification tore apart its multicultural fabric. The US mainstream media perpetuated an appalling ignorance of the World’s people, economy, politics and history. Like Zuccoti Park, many public spaces were privatized, patronized and patriotized, often with blunt expressions of Americanism that had outright fascist tones. Political solidarity became a personal matter, meaning that it had to be experience behind closed doors, and only in the company of one’s immediate family and friends. The OWS camp at the Zuccoti Park changed that. Here, political solidarity did not go home, and stayed in the public sphere. It refused to be privatized. For those of us who were caught in its orbit, who kept going back to meet with more people, exchanged political ideas, and paid respect to the hundreds of men and women who slept on a concrete floor for two months in the name of something they believed in, this camp was a liberty square. Its existence proved that in the desert of US politics, someone rode something as distinctly American as a Harley Davidson, and he was our brother. Today that experience must be put on paper in the past tense, which confirms that something happened. Many of us believe that it was for better.

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Kurdish Spring (zanga zanga)...

Manipulated Irish Spring soap box cover, 1998, by Murat Cem Menguc.

Most of the Turkish ruling elite, meaning the Turkish Military, the state servants and the business elite consider the country an exceptional place. This sense of Turkey being an exceptional place is something they share with other countries, with whom they identify themselves. In other words, there is a global sense of superiority, an illusion of thinking oneself above and beyond the influence of history and Turkey is part of it.[1] One could suggest that this is a late NATO superiority complex, shared by the ruling elite of USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece, but in a very similar fashion, the communist block also believes they now live in a historical epoch that the past is past and done with.

What some called as the end of the marriage of democracy and capitalism, and the beginning of a nasty divorce, or bringing of the crony capitalism and neo-liberalism to their knees by mass protests and uncertain markets, makes the global illusion Turkey suffers from an even more unmaintainable fiction.[2]

Added to this, as I have argued in my previous entries, Turkey also suffers from a sense of reverse orientalism; its ruling elite consider Turkey to be a subject of an ongoing colonialism, led by US and EU.[3] This reverse orientalism helps Turkish ruling elite to undermine the influence of history further, for it deliberately erases the historical fact that Turkey has been a colonial power itself, and has occupied other people’s lands, from the consciousness of its citizens. State supervised institutions, such as Turkish History Association and its practices are a prime example of this attitude. But not only the secular and Kemalist, as well as the conservative and Islamist political establishment position Turkey as an Oriental victim of the Occident, although cross dressing it like a European state whenever it fits their agenda.

The intellectuals in Turkey see the country as a place far superior to the Middle East, and almost always postulate their theories about this from their comfortable flats in the Western cities like Istanbul and Ankara. Observers from other nations, be it journalists or diplomats, almost always do the same. Yet Istanbul is like nothing that one would find in the rest of the country, and more than half of Turkey’s territories lie to the East of Ankara. It is therefore not a surprise that this East of Ankara is where the Turkish ruling elite always reminds Turkey that it is not beyond the influence of history.

Take a ruler and put it on a Turkish map, choosing Bingol, where the most recent suicide bomb attack by the Kurdish separatists took place as your first reference point.[4] Then align your ruler with any of the following predominantly Kurdish cities, Urfa, Biyarbakir or Erzurum. What lies to the East is where the Occidental Turkey colonized and massacred many Orientals, be them Kurdish or Armenian. The so called Kurdish issue, or problem, meaning what the gutless Turkish politicians and their followers cannot call the Kurdis insurgency or revolution, represents a nightmare in this context.

Among those who suffer from the above mentioned and possibly NATO induced self-superiority, being historically exceptional means having beaten the threat of communism, hence risen above the threat of people’s revolution. Yet, Kurds, as we all know, are very fond of PKK, which is a communist party. Kurds are popularly socialist, since 1980’s, and the last three decades convinced three generations of Kurds to adopt a socialist discourse for their independence.[5]

AKP can imagine itself as the ruler of the Turkish colonies, but its history in Kurdistan only adds up to a decade. Until very recently, AKP was also considered a tolerated party, rather than an elementary political institution, hence owing its existence to the disappointments of the general population with the existing political parties rather to the virtues of AKP.

Since June 2011, ethnic confrontation in Turkey, the Turkish occupied parts of Cyprus has become a daily fact. To top it all, AKP started to harbor a Syrian opposition movement, arming them against Assad, within the Kurdistan.[6] One wonders where the PKK will end up in this chaos. In the past, they have considered Syria an ally.

In short, it is no longer a question whether it is zanga zanga time in Kurdistan. A Kurdish spring is being talked about already.[7] In the age of civil disobedience, there will be those who taught greater lessons. Don’t be surprised if the exceptional Turkey falls prey to a not so exceptional conflict.

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[1] A recent essay by Radikal columnist Cengiz Candar discussed this issue in a similar vein. http://www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalYazar&ArticleID=1069159&Yazar=CENG%DDZ%20%C7ANDAR&Date=12.11.2011&CategoryID=97&Rdkref=6

[2] In the following interview, Slavoj Zizek mainly voices these opinions. http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/talktojazeera/2011/10/2011102813360731764.html

[3] http://icga.blogspot.com/2011/03/reverse-orientalism-of-turkish-left.html

[4] http://www.todayszaman.com/news-261412-mother-saves-dozens-of-lives-in-bingol-suicide-bombing.html

[5] A good example is the Firat News, one of the most popular Kurdish news sites at the moment. http://www.firatnews.org/

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/world/europe/turkey-is-sheltering-antigovernment-syrian-militia.html?pagewanted=all

[7] http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2011/10/2011102272338493300.html

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