Sere Giran: Being a Kurd in the Turkish Prison

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Nov 11, 2013 Turkey
[Hasan Kaçar. Image via imza.la/hasta-tutsak-hasan-kacar-a-tahliye-karari-istiyoruz] [Hasan Kaçar. Image via imza.la/hasta-tutsak-hasan-kacar-a-tahliye-karari-istiyoruz]

Sere Giran: Being a Kurd in the Turkish Prison

By : Çağrı Yoltar

Şerê Giran*: Being a Kurd in the Turkish Prison 

22 October 2013

12:30pm: Cemil Bayık, KCK (Koma Civaken Kurdistan, Group of Communities in Kurdistan) Executive, declares that the ten-month-long peace negotiations between the Turkish state and the Kurdish movement have come to a halt. 

12:48pm: PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, Kurdistan Worker’s Party) leader Abdullah Öcalan—sentenced to life in prison by Turkish courts, and held in solitary confinement in an island prison called Imrali Cezaevi since 1999—communicates via his brother: “If the Turkish state authorities do not visit me once again (concerning the peace negotiations), I suppose this indicates that peace talks are over for them, and thereby it is over for us too.” (Özgür Gündem)

30 September 2013

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announces the government’s new democratization package. The package also contains amendments regarding the Kurdish Question in Turkey. Kurdish circles in social media declared the package void.

3 January 2013

Ayla Akat Ata and Ahmet Türk, pro-Kurdish BDP (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi, Peace and Democracy Party) members of the Turkish Parliament, visit Imrali Island Prison to meet with Abdullah Öcalan. This visit is considered to be the landmark initiating the so-called peace talks between the Turkish authorities and Abdullah Öcalan.

18 November 2012

In response to the call of Abdullah Öcalan, Kurdish political prisoners end their massive hunger strike, which they started on 12 September 2012. The strike was declared to protest the solitary confinement of Abdullah Öcalan, the ban on legal defense and education in Kurdish, and prison conditions.

October 2012

Hasan Kaçar—sentenced to life in prison for being a member of the PKK—is on a hunger strike in Rize Prison. Despite unbearable bone pains (he is a long-time sufferer from ankylosing sponylitis, a severe rheumatic disease), and despite the objections of his family and his comrades in the prison, Hasan is on a hunger strike. Yet neither resistance, nor sickness, nor the prison conditions that turn his sick body into a self-torturing device, is new to him. 

It is the early 2000s. Hasan is a dynamic youngster, associated with the Hakkari branch of the then-pro-Kurdish legal party, DEHAP (Demokratik Halk Partisi, Democratic People’s Party). The Turkish police take him into custody a couple of times. Police threaten him in jail: “We see you around all the time. Don’t ever think that you’ll get away with such minor custodies. Once you turn eighteen, we will take you and lock you up for good.”

Now Hasan is nineteen. The year is 2003. One dark night, at three in the morning, the police raid Hasan’s home. Hasan is accused of throwing a sound bomb into a public building. Turkish police blockade Hasan’s house. That night, only his three younger sisters and little brother are at home. Special anti-terror forces armed with machine guns leave nowhere unsearched: the pages of books, closets, mattress piles, carpet underlays, every little hole....Hasan is not home. Anti-terror forces build a virtual police station at Hasan’s home: until Hasan is captured, there is no way out of the house for the members of household; anyone who happens to get in is held there by force. The police threaten Hasan’s little sisters and brother, as well as his other relatives: “Wherever he is, find and bring him to us! Or none of you can get out of this house. Your elder brothers will lose their jobs! We will become a thorn in your flesh! Do not ever dare to call lawyers! You will find him and bring him to us!”

A couple of days after the police raid, Hasan is arrested. On a piece of official paper, signed at a Turkish police station, writes his statement. He admits to throwing a sound bomb, and to some other, latterly associated accusations. At that time, Hasan’s family is, in their own terms, apolitical. They know neither how to get a good lawyer, nor the ways to deal with incessant police threats. Legal proceedings last for years. The verdict is read in 2008: Hasan Kaçar is convicted and given a life sentence.

Hasan has been in prison since 2003.

He is initially kept at Muş Prison, then transferred in turn to Bitlis, Van, Rize, and Istanbul Metris Prisons. While he is in Van, he starts suffering serious health problems. Severe prison conditions do not leave him any room for being free of sickness. The unrelieved pain he suffers leaves his body out of breath, sleepless. The new communication ban implemented by the prison authorities keeps him totally away from his family, even from seeing them within prison walls. Hasan is exposed to every sort of dishonorable conduct by prison guards….He writes dozens of petitions to prison authorities, demanding an end to these unacceptable, inhumane prison conditions. All remain pending. On 6 September 2007, in protest of all this oppression, Hasan takes his blanket, wraps it around his body, and sets it on fire.

Five years later…Hasan’s wounds have healed, leaving patches of burn marks on his skin. The year is 2012. Kurdish political prisoners start a massive hunger strike. Hasan is also on a hunger strike, among the second group to begin. He hasn’t eaten for thirteen days. He hasn’t taken his medication. His face is pale, his body crumpled. His comrades demand that he end his strike: his body is simply not healthy enough to bear hunger for who knows how long. His family is anxious, waiting. Brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins cannot eat either. No food is fixed at homes. The hunger strike by the first group of prisoners hits its forty-fifth day. And yet there is no sign pointing to an honorable end in sight. There is no indication that the government will take any favorable steps to meet the demands soon—soon enough to end the strike before the swiftly approaching first death. Hasan is furious. He cannot bear the scene that he sees around him. It is as if everyone is waiting for a dead body to open its ears to the voice of the Kurdish cause that he whole-heartedly believes in and resists for. Hasan contemplates: “if what they wait for is a dead body….If what it takes is a dead body to have them hear, and to respond to the scream of this just cause, I can give it to them.” He takes his medications, but this time, it is to end the hunger strike.

Hasan’s liver fails. He is hospitalized. It takes a long, tense ride for his family to get to the hospital in Rize. After arduous efforts, they finally get permission to see Hasan in the hospital room. Hasan’s younger sister Asiye is worried, yet excited. She will be in the same room with Hasan for the first time in nine years. Just before she gets into the room, the Turkish soldier accompanying her pronounces: “Please, no Kurdish inside!” Asiye objects in vain: “But Kurdish is not banned in Turkey anymore. I don’t say it; the President and Prime Minister say so.” The soldier doesn’t even listen. Afraid that her objections may prevent her from seeing Hasan, Asiye helplessly succumbs to soldier’s order. But she has a request: Hasan shouldn’t even notice that she has agreed to this ban on Kurdish. The soldier and Asiye enter the room. Hasan lies in a glass room, alone. Both his hands and his feet are handcuffed to the bed frame, and his body is tied to the mattress. He can move only one of his hands. At first sight, Hasan doesn’t recognize Asiye. Asiye, unsure about how to communicate with Hasan within a three-minute restriction, holds his hand. Hasan begins talking, silently, slowly. He speaks in Kurdish though: “Çawan î? Baş î?” Asiye responds, telling him that she is well, and she wants him to be well too. All is quickly said in Kurdish. Just before she finishes her words, Asiye feels the soldier’s finger tip on her shoulder. “Haven’t I told you not to speak in Kurdish! Please, no Kurdish!” Hasan’s eyes burn with anguish and anger. He nods to Asiye: “Get out!”

Hasan’s condition is serious. They transfer him to a hospital in a bigger city, Trabzon. Now the family keeps its watch in front of another “high-security” hospital room. They are interrogated by each policeman and soldier passing by the hall: “Who are you? Do you think the same way as he does?” Police also “inform” the family about the necessary precautions that need to be taken during their stay in Trabzon: “You shouldn’t wander around the city, except the places designated by us. People may lynch you. Don’t get us into trouble with anyone!” Asiye has connections with various NGOs in Trabzon, but she does not call any of them. She simply does not want to put them at risk either. Not having a place to stay even for a night, Hasan’s family leaves Trabzon the same day that they arrive. 

Just after her return from Trabzon, Asiye risks being a target of Hasan’s harsh reaction, and writes a petition to the President of Turkey, explaining how it is impossible for Hasan to survive prison conditions, and asking for his release. A petition written as a last resort, without the knowledge and consent of Hasan…a(nother) petition still pending… 

October 2013

It has been a couple of weeks since the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced the government’s democratization package; ten months since the peace talks between Turkish authorities and the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan started; eleven months since the Kurdish political prisoners’ massive hunger strike—generally considered to give way to the peace negotiations—was ended. 

Hasan Kaçar is in Istanbul Metris R-type Prison, sitting in a wheelchair. His weak, insufferably aching body still could not slow down his uncompromising resistance. Yet the current political conjuncture in Turkey and Kurdistan presents him with an insoluble dilemma. Yes, a strong public awareness campaign may lead to his release, to a proper treatment of his sickness, hence to an end of his intolerable pain. And yet he does not want a campaign organized around his own name, around his own suffering body. Such a campaign would make it seem as if it were the individual tragedy of a sick inmate, as if all that he and his family have gone through is independent of the decades-long, collective struggle that Kurds have waged against the situation in Kurdistan…

Asiye is in search of a solution that would have both Hasan and other sick prisoners released. She visits every Turkish authority, every NGO, every politician that she can reach. She hopes: “If I find a way for Hasan, maybe we can follow the same path for other sick prisoners too.”

More than eight thousand Kurdish political prisoners are in Turkish prisons: 154 of them are nearing death, 526 of them are sick….Thousands of Kurdish families are in front of Turkish prison gates. They are waiting despite freezing cold and burning hot weather; despite poor economic conditions that make prison visits unaffordable to many of them; despite all sorts of humiliating treatment they receive from Turkish authorities….Rumors of an upcoming hunger strike are on the street. Forthcoming local elections are on the agenda of politicians. Questions about the prospects of peace negotiations are in the newspapers. Have the peace talks come to a halt? Is the war going to start again? Are there going to be new clashes, new guerilla and soldier deaths?

But where are those voices asking other questions in a silent conscience? In order to have the Turkish authorities free sick prisoners, do we have to wait till a dead body triggers a pang in the mainstream public conscience? In order for political prisoners to have their voices heard, do they have to go on a death fast? Why do those who cheer this last eight-month-long period without guerilla and soldier deaths as the biggest achievement of the peace negotiations say or do nothing significant for the freedom of Kurdish political prisoners, some of whom are facing death? What is a negotiation? What is peace? What is war? What is freedom?

* Heavy war/struggle (in the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish)

[An earlier version of this article was published in Turkish on T24. The English translation is by the author. For more information about Hasan Kaçar, and to sign a letter of support, click here.]
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Jul 9, 2013 Lebanon
Zeynep Gambetti By :
Zeynep Gambetti

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]