Letter Concerning Turkish Minister of Interior's Comparison Between Writing in Support of Kurdish Rights and Terrorism

[CAF logo. Image from MESA website] [CAF logo. Image from MESA website]

Letter Concerning Turkish Minister of Interior's Comparison Between Writing in Support of Kurdish Rights and Terrorism

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[The following letter was written by the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA).]

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Office of the Prime Minister
Başbakanlık
06573 Ankara, Turkey
Via facsimile +90 312 417 0476

Dear Prime Minister Erdoğan:

I write on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) of North America and its Committee on Academic Freedom in order to express our dismay and concern at recent remarks by Turkish Minister of the Interior (Içişleri Bakanı) Idris Naim Şahin that compared writing and publishing ideas in support of Kurdish rights to terrorism. These assertions inappropriately conflate peaceful advocacy for Kurdish rights with acts of violence. They also evince a disregard for principles of academic freedom and freedom of thought and expression that exacerbate the climate of intimidation resulting from the recent spate of government arrests and detentions of academics, researchers, journalists, and publishers who voice support for the rights of the Kurdish community in Turkey.

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 3000 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.

In an address to the Marmara Management Federation (Marmara Yöneticiler Federasyonu, or “MAYFED”) at the Grand Cevahir Hotel on 7 August 2012, Minister Şahin stated that “the nation’s state of emergency is not limited to the field of battle but also includes the battle of the pen in Istanbul and the battle of the book in Istanbul.” [“Ülkenin olağanüstü gündemi sadece çatışma alanı ile ilgili değildir bu çatışma Istanbul’da kalemle devam ediyor, Istanbul’da kitapla devam ediyor.”] He went on to say that there is no difference between mortar shells lobbed in the southeast of the country and texts in the service of Kurdish rights written in Ankara. In the same speech, he also characterized the lawful political party that serves as the de facto representative of Kurdish interests, the BDP (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi - the Peace and Democracy Party), as a puppet political party, going on to suggest that it is an extension of terrorist organizing. Further, his most recent comments only add to his existing record of treating artistic and scholarly expression as an extension of terrorism – in December he was quoted in another speech arguing that whether painted on a canvas, written in poems or published in scholarly articles, texts advocating Kurdish rights amount to “terrorism propaganda.” Minister Şahin’s characterization of writing, publishing and political organizing as extensions of violent activity or terrorism erases the cardinal distinction between the pen and the sword on which all forms of freedom of expression, association, and thought are premised.

We are distressed that a member of your government’s cabinet is willing to publicly elide the distinction between non-violent expression and terrorism in this manner. If indeed this represents your cabinet’s approach to freedom of thought, then your government’s stance is anathema to the most important prerequisites of academic freedom. By claiming equivalency between free speech and violence, Minister Şahin is endorsing the targeting of individuals for exercising freedoms that are legally protected by Turkey’s consent to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

This letter follows a recent letter that I sent to you on behalf of CAFMENA concerning the case of Müge Tuzcuoğlu, whose right to academic freedom was violated by your government as a direct result of the conflation of peaceful activities with advocacy of violence. Actions such as these make it appear that the Turkish government has undertaken a campaign to inhibit the dissemination of knowledge about the conditions affecting the Kurdish community in the country. Government efforts to silence scholars, journalists, and publishers who voice support for the rights of Kurdish citizens in Turkey send a chilling message to Turkey’s scholarly community, Kurdish communities in Turkey and beyond, and to scholars working on the region, wherever they may be based. We are very concerned about what seems to be an ongoing campaign to treat all advocates of a peaceful political solution to the Kurdish problem as potential terrorist threats.

I respectfully ask that you and members of your government exercise greater caution in making public statements that suggest that the Turkish government intends to criminalize peaceful advocacy, free expression, and exchange of ideas and opinions concerning the rights of the Kurdish community. I also urge you to take note of mounting international condemnation of the erosion of democratic rights and freedoms in Turkey.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.  I look forward to your positive response.

 

Sincerely,

Fred M. Donner
MESA President
Professor of Near Eastern History, University of Chicago

 

cc: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Cumhurbaskani, Abdullah Gül (Turkish president)
      Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Baskani Cemil Çiçek (President of the Turkish National Assembly)
      Turkish Justice Minister, Adalet Bakani Sadullah Ergin

 

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412