Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
DOI 10.1515/ijsl-2012-0050
Desmond Fernandes
1Introduction
In recent years, a number of scholars, drawing upon a range of case studies and
wider structural analyses, have engaged in a number of debates and concluded
that genocide inclusive of linguistic genocide and modernity are closely
interwoven (Hinton 2007: 420). They have argued that modern discourses on development, modernization and western science as well as key meta-narratives of
modernity (advancing the teleological myth of progress and civilization), the
gardeners vision (Bauman, cited in Noakes [2010: 1]) and the very categorization and standardization of national languages (crucial to the biopolitical formation of global populations under the system of modern nation-states) have all
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l egitimated and effected policies and practices that have been genocidal (inclusive of linguistically genocidal) in their nature and scope.
These studies are of considerable relevance to linguists who are engaged in
linguistic human rights advocacy and who are seeking to analyze how and why
linguistically genocidal policies, educational programs and practices have been
conceptualized and implemented (and often legitimized) by nation states as part
of wider cultural and physically genocidal plans to westernize, develop, modernize and civilize societies. This paper presents the key conceptual findings of
Visvanathan (1988), Solomon (2010) and Havemann (2005) and integrates them
for the first time into a case study analysis of the genocide of Kurds in modern
Turkey.
The findings of this study emphasize the manner in which genocidal (inclusive of linguistically genocidal) processes in Turkey against the Kurdish Other
have not been accidental by-products of the states modernity project: they have
been central aspects of the drive to transform society. Linguistic genocide, in this
sense, is analyzed within the wider context in which Kurds have been geno
cidallytargeted. The presentational style that has been adopted which is used
in a number of journals, papers and academic publications by scholars such
asBourke (2000), Ahmed (2003), Shoup (2006), Banerjee (2007), Laing (2008),
Zeydanlolu (2008, 2009), Uarlar (2009) and Skutnabb-Kangas (2010)
extensively draws upon selective and block quotations to highlight key findings.
This study emphasizes the value and relevance of reflecting upon the manner
in which the linguistic genocide (alongside other forms of cultural and physical
genocide) of Kurds in modern Turkey has taken place at a time when, all too
distressingly:
The Turkish state still persists in branding such debate as thought crime
(Fernandes 2010a).
Many visiting as well as resident genocide scholars, linguists, journalists,
academics, MPs, editors, publishers and human rights analysts in Turkey
have been reluctant to even address the Kurdish modernity and/or genocide
(inclusive of the linguistic genocide) question due to the oppressive situa
tion that exists (Beiki 2009: 2; Fernandes 2007, 2010a).
People who have dared to engage in such thought crime have found them
selves being removed from their university posts in Turkey or (if they are
visiting Turkey) denied entry to the country or detained, deported and
subjected to harrowing, lengthy and expensive court cases, criminalization,
death threats and/or even murder by state inspired forces (Fernandes 2007,
2010a, 2010c; KHRP 2010). As Rafferty (2005: 1) confirms: The Kurdish
question otherwise known as the genocide of ... Kurds is one of the
most contentious issues in Turkey today.
77
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Linguistic genocide is prohibiting the use of the language of the group in daily
intercourse or in schools, or the printing and circulation of publications in the
language of the group. This was how linguistic genocide was defined in Article
III(1) of the final draft of what became the [Genocide] Convention (SkutnabbKangas 2000: 1). Although this article was voted down for questionable political
reasons when the Convention was finally accepted, those states then members
of the UN were in agreement that this was how the phenomenon could be defined (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000: 1). Policies of assimilation aimed at eradication
of indigenous/minority education which linguistically, often also culturally
result in transference to the majority group, can also be held to be genocidal,
according to Articles II(e) and II(b) in the present convention (Skutnabb-Kangas
2000: 1) and Lemkin (Docker 2004: 13).
Ethnocide, as defined by Lemkin (who coined the term alongside genocide)
and several other scholars, is often held to be synonymous with the term and
phenomenon of genocide (Lemkin 1944; Lukunka 2007). Constructive genocide
is defined in the following manner:
In some instances, racism becomes so dangerous and extremist that it becomes directed
against the very existence of a people nationally, ethnically, and culturally, and thus partakes of some of the attributes of genocide without the direct acts of [physical] annihilation.
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Racism ... which denies the very existence of its victims, can safely be termed, in law, constructive genocide. When a people ... are not recognized as existing, when they are denied
their homeland, their national existence and identity, and the basic rights and fundamental
freedoms accorded to other peoples what, in such circumstances, remains of them and for
them as a people? They become non-people and the individuals non-persons. Is this not in
effect ... constructive genocide? (Al-Qasem 1977: 13)
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As he argues:
In fact, if concepts could ever be death warrants, the above glossary could be regarded
as genocidal.... Lurking quietly within modernity-as-a-scientific-project is the idea of
triage.... If progress demands the summoning of the Other into modernity, triage is the
dispensing with of the Other.... Societies and cultures are now being destroyed because
they are considered refractory to the scientific gaze.... The western encounter with the
other ends in its eventual logic as erasure.... Science [in this context] has no place for
thedefeated except as objects of an experiment.... Social triage ... is a deliberate decision
or act of a state to define a target group such as a minority within its territory as dispensable.The decision, however, must also be articulated on rational grounds. For, though triage is genocide, it involves the rational imposition of death on those regarded as refractory
to the scientific gaze. It is in this sense that the term helps us to understand the particular
quality of violence of which scientific rationality is capable. (Visvanathan 1988: 259, 271,
272)
For Visvanathan, the nation-state cannot permit ethnicities which serve as competing sites for power.... The Hobbesian project which encapsulates modernity
as a creation myth was literally a contract between state and science to manufac-
81
ture the idea of a mass society of equal and uniform individuals. Modern society
was monocultural in more ways than one (Visvanathan 1988: 276). With the realization of such projects, as May (1999: 1, 2) has observed: Not surprisingly,
education as a key institution of the nation-state has played a central part
historically in the subjugation of indigenous languages and cultures and the related assimilation of indigenous peoples into the dominant or common language
and culture of the nation-state. In the process, indigenous languages and cultures were specifically proscribed, demeaned and diminished indeed, often
subjected to linguistic/constructive genocide and linguistic imperialism (Fernandes 2010a) by the state via its education system.... Consequently, indigenous languages when acknowledged as existing, that is and cultures
[often] came to be constructed as antediluvian and unnecessary in the modern
world a vestige of primitive cultures best left in the past. In contrast, national
languages and cultures or, more specifically, the languages and cultures of
dominant ethnic groups were viewed as the apogee of modernity and progress
(May 1999: 1, 2).
For Solomon (2010: 44): Historically-speaking, it goes without saying that
language policy has been a critical tool for the creation of the modern nationstate and a constant site of state intervention. Indeed, in what has virtually
been a universal process, modern nation-states have established themselves
linguistically by the elimination of difference through standardization along
with the concomitant displacement of minority populations and the appropriation of minority lands (Solomon 2010: 44). And education, as Alvarado (2010:
1) observes, is such that it plays a vital role in shaping both language standardization and its primacy over alternative language use.
For Solomon (2010: 45), looking at the history of modern linguistic trans
formation, postcolonial writers have shown not only how the colonial and postcolonial state mobilized language in the creation of invented traditions, but
also how the establishment of national literary and linguistic traditions ... in
metropolitan social formations originated as a technique of colonial governance
in which other languages were often subjected to linguistic imperialism and
linguistic/constructive genocide. To Havemann (2005: 57, 59), colonization is a
key feature of modernity in which indigenous peoples:
... have been [perceived as] chronic obstacles to modernization to be overcome by whatever
means typically by violence concealed behind liberal legalities.... Modernity [in this
context] ... generates waste: both the physical detritus of industrialisation ... and those
human beings who impede the level of growth and degree of order required. For centuries,
such people have been disposed of on a genocidal scale. The survival of the modern form of
life depends on the proficiency and dexterity of the techniques for waste disposal of both
kinds. (Havemann 2005: 57, 59)
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Certainly, it needs to be recognized that, within these types of ideological frameworks and planning contexts, cultural destruction even in the post-1945 period
has become an accepted key process that has often been advocated in par
ticular modernization-linked development programmes. Escobar (1994: 4) has
revealed the way in which one of the most influential documents of the postSecond World War period on development, prepared by a group of experts convened by the UN with the objective of designing concrete policies and measures
for the economic development of underdeveloped [Third World] countries,
suggested indeed, factored in no less than a total restructuring of un
83
For Visvanathan (1988: 280), then, the example of the elimination of the Ache
Indians in Paraguay has raised in a fundamental way the problem of genocide
through development. The process of resettlement, involving slow death through
deculturation, does fall within the clauses of the Genocide convention. Item three
of the Genocide convention of the UN includes: Deliberately inflicting on the
group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole
or in part. Consequently, to remove tribal people from their natural habitat
would be cultural ethnocide.... The fact [is] that the laboratory state now deems
certain cultures dispensable (Visvanathan 1988: 280) and, in this respect, the
notion of calculated dispensability, of erasing people from the commons of the
world (Visvanathan 1988: 280) becomes a rational, modernizing bureaucratic/
accounting consideration (Neu and Therrien 2003). Rojas (1996: 1), in reviewing
Rostows 1960 modernization theory which has so influenced Turkeys Cold
and post-Cold War development-cum-counter-insurgency programme in the predominantly Kurdish East (Fernandes 2010a) has observed the manner in which
it conceptualizes action against opponents of its top-down development vision.
Social disturbances which may take place in the form of peaceful agitation,
political violence, nationalism, revolution or guerrilla warfare are perceived to
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85
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In practical terms, Turkish Orientalism was crystallized in Kemalist pseudoscientific theories: These theories were disseminated widely throughout society,
especially in school textbooks, and still continue to influence the discourse of
Turkish nationalism today (Zeydanlolu 2008: 164). The application of torture
in a genocidal context (Fernandes 2010a) has also been directly linked to the
making and maintaining of Turkey as a homogenous nation-state of Turkish
speakers (Zeydanlolu 2009: 76).
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the Turkish Historical Foundation. The aim of the foundation was to create a
national [modern] education in the service of political aims (Uarlar 2009: 121,
122).
To Uarlar: Every attempt by the Turkish elite to eliminate the hegemony of
the Kurdish elite over the Kurdish people also aimed to destroy the political, economic and social elements of Kurdishness, as well as the consciousness of Kurdishness among the people.... It is not so striking that the Kurdish language was
targeted in the service of [modern] nation and state building (Uarlar 2009:
125).
In terms of the painful adjustments that were deemed to be necessary to
progress to the level of contemporary civilization, certain Kurdish sources have
estimated that over half a million [Kurdish] people were deported, of whom
nearly half died en route between 1925 and 1928 alone (Lustgarten 2003: 6). During the aftermath of the failed Sheikh Said uprising of 1925, seen by many as a
nationalist and religious response by Kurdish factions to the secular and Turkification linked reforms of the modern state (Leicht 1998; Fernandes 2010c), Randal
(1999: 121) has concluded that hundreds of Kurdish villages were burned, and
between 40,000 and 250,000 peasants died in the ensuing pacification. Over
thenext dozen years or so, perhaps a million Kurdish men, women and children
were uprooted and shipped to Western Anatolia. Large parts of the Kurdish
population were sent to concentration camps in the western provinces (Frodin
1944: 5).
The Turkish Prime Minister reportedly stated in 1938: We will carry out a
military operation in Dersim.... There will be an extermination action.... Our
army ... will begin maneuvers in the area, ridding it of its inhabitants. In this
way, the problem will be pulled up by its roots (Dersimi 1999 [1952]: 289). Atatrk,
in a speech at the opening of parliament in 1936, similarly clarified that: We have
to remove this abscess [Dersim, renamed Tunceli in Turkish] at its roots. To deal
with this problem, we will give wider powers to the government (White 2000:
79). Such powers led to further genocidal massacres, slow death measures,
Turkish place name-changing, forced assimilation and forced resettlement (Fernandes 1998, 2010c).
In linguistically and culturally genocidal terms, in March 1924 i.e. one year
before the first Kurdish rebellion/uprising the public use of Kurdish and the
teaching of Kurdish was prohibited. Influential Kurdish landowners and tribal
chiefs were forcibly resettled in the west of the country (Zrcher 2004: 178). Modern law courts refused to accept Kurdish (Fernandes 2010a). Article 12 of the 1924
constitution also closed the Parliament to the Kurds who would resist forgetting,
delaying or canceling their identity and language (Uarlar 2009: 121, 122). Turkish place names began to replace Kurdish ones (McDowall 1996: 191).
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According to the 1925 Plan for the Reformation of the East, the cities and
towns where Kurds live were listed, and speaking Kurdish there was banned
(Bayrak [1993: 486, 487], cited in Malmisanij [2006: 6]). Kurdish speakers found
themselves being fined according to a tariff for every Kurdish word spoken (Fernandes 1998). Kurdish language, music and national costume were outlawed....
Like it or not, everyone within Turkeys borders were by legislation declared to be
Turks. The words Kurds and Kurdistan like Armenia and Pontus were forcibly
erased from dictionaries and literature even as many slogans were coined: One
Turk is worth the whole world!... Turkish blood is clean, pure and superior!
(Baksi 1986: 103). Broadcasting and publishing in the Kurdish language was prohibited (Fernandes 2010c) even as the newly established nationalist institution
called Peoples House (Halkevi) would gear Turkish identity and Kemalist ideology to the popular audience (ngr 2008: 33).
The compulsory adoption of surnames in 1934 served to turn numerous
Kurdish families into Trks, ztrks, Tatars, or zbeks (Van Bruinessen 1997: 6).
Alnak reiterates the view that Turkification of Kurds via the schooling system
and forced resettlement were core objectives advanced by nn and Marshal
akmak during the 1930s (nderolu 2010: 1). For Jongerden:
In the 1930s and 1940s, government policy in Dersim ... resembles the conquest and
occupation of enemy territory.... The building of an educational structure was given
priority.... It was even suggested that Kurdish children be sent to boarding schools where
they would speak exclusively in Turkish.... Right up to the present day, boarding schools
are established in the Kurdish areas in order to have more control over the childrens education and to enforce a switch of their identity. (Jongerden 2003: 77, 78)
In Dersim, after the 19371938 genocidal onslaught, the Turkish army kidnapped
many Kurdish children who were under the age of seven and placed them in Turkish families in western Turkey (Koivunen 2002: 99). The Tunceli law ensured
that educational establishments engaged in assimilating orphan Kurdish girls
strictly enforced the teaching of Turkish, whilst banning the Kurdish language
(Fernandes 2010a). The Resettlement Law of the 1930s, moreover, abrogated
any legal recognition of Kurdish tribes and their leaders, thus permitting the automatic sequestration of their immovable assets. All settlements in which Kurdish
was the mother tongue were to be dissolved, and the displaced Kurds were to be
resettled as part of the Turkification drive in localities where they would
make up no more than 5% of the population.... It was further prescribed that
those who speak a mother tongue other than Turkish will be forbidden to form
villages, quarters or groups of artisans and employees. The intention was to destroy Kurdish identity and language in its entirety (Lustgarten 2003: 7). The
law also aimed at the dismembering of the Kurdish community even down to the
91
family unit. It has been judged that parents, married sons and married grandsons
shall be evicted to different areas (Turkish Human Rights Association 1996: 19).
Other culturally and physically genocidal plans, policies and practices have
been evident since the 1930s (Fernandes 2007, 2010a). Forty nine Kurdish intellectuals, for example, were arrested in 1959 as part of a wider initiative that was
aimed at intentionally murdering 1,000 Kurdish intellectuals (Anter 1991). During
the 1990s, Kurdish intellectuals were once again subjected to assassination and
disappearance (Fernandes 2010a). During the 1940s, a report by the Inspector
General of the First Inspectorate recommended that more Kurdish leaders from
the East be deported even as Turkish language boarding schools for Kurdish
children were to be constructed, where all traces of Kurdish culture and language could be expunged (McDowall 1996: 209, 210). The 1949 Provincial Administration Law further authorized the changing of names of places and this
authority was used quite liberally. Moreover, article 16 of the 1972 Population Law
prohibited giving Kurdish names to new-borns (Yeen 2008: 3).
After the 1960 coup, the military regime in 1961 systematically started to
change Kurdish place names into Turkish and establish regional boarding schools
in order to assimilate the Kurdish population (Uarlar 2009: 129). The Forced
Settlement Law that was passed at the time stipulated that this was done in
order to carry out certain social reforms that would demolish the order of the
Middle Ages that exists in Turkey (Zeydanlolu 2008: 65). General Grsel, as
head of the military regime, lauded a book ... which claimed that the Kurds
were in fact of Turkish origin, and declared whilst standing on an American tank
that: There are no Kurds in this country. Whoever says he is a Kurd, I will spit in
his face (Zeydanlolu 2008: 64, 65).
Waves of place name changing, indeed, occurred and were initiated
[even] under so-called liberal governments (Jongerden 2009: 10). Various government initiatives were aimed at stopping Kurds from listening to foreign broadcasts in Kurdish and even accessing Kurdish educational courses internationally
(Fernandes 2010c). Uarlar (2009: 133, 134) confirms that the military administration (19803) banned strictly the use of Kurdish language.... The assimilation
of Kurdish children into the Turkish language was fostered through the dissemination of compulsory schooling. The Kurdish names of villages that [had] remained intact after the changes of the 1960s were adjusted into Turkish. Kurdish
families were forced to give Turkish names to their children, and this pressure
was still being applied during the first decade of the 21st century (Fernandes 2007,
2010c). Torture has continued to be applied in a genocidal context (Fernandes
2010a), even as Article 89 of the post-coup constitution prohibited the right of
Kurds to political representation.... The constitution also legally enshrined the
ban on the Kurdish language (Zeydanlolu 2009: 81).
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Helsinki Watch (1990: 37) has further detailed the manner in which, in May
1989, the National Security Council launched a campaign denying the existence
of a distinct Kurdish nation and a Kurdish language. Pamphlets were issued and
distributed to schools in the south-east to reinforce this message. SkutnabbKangas (cited in Fernandes [2006: 34]) concluded in 2002 that Turkeys policy
still fit[ted] two of the definitions of genocide in the UN International Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.... [What is happening] is genocide, according to the UN definition.... In addition, Turkey is of
course also committing linguistic genocide according to the specific definition on
linguistic genocide. More recent assessments have drawn the same conclusions
(Skutnabb-Kangas 2005, 2010; Skutnabb-Kangas and Fernandes 2008; SkutnabbKangas and Dunbar 2010). Even by mid-2010, Cengiz Aktar confirmed that teaching Kurdish at [public] school[s] is not at all on the agenda of the government
and state (Aktar 2010: 1).
With regard to the nature of the states genocidal policies in Turkish Kurdistan between 19841997, some estimates suggest that over three million Kurds
were forcibly displaced and subjected to mental harm, tens of thousands of people were killed, over 4000 settlements were fully or partially destroyed and thousands of people disappeared (Fernandes 2010a, 2010b). In development terms,
too, the Southeastern Anatolian Project has been used to facilitate an ethnic and
cultural genocide against Kurds (Tataii 2010; see also Fernandes 2010a). The
genocidal actions of the Turkish state during the 20002010 period have also
been recognized, as such, by a number of genocide scholars, policy analysts, lawyers, human rights campaigners, political organizations and movements (Fernandes 2010a, 2010b, 2010c). To Gerger (cited in Cudi [2010: 1]), writing in August
2010: The US seems to have reached some sort of an understanding with the
governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) concerning the Kurdish issue:
The previous state strategy was to nationalist-Kemalists, total liquidation through
violence.... Now with the active aid of president Obama, the liberal coalition under the
AKP government tried Alm which meant a new phase liberal phased liquidation....
[But] even this created serious cleavages within the ruling classes and now it seems that
they have met again at the old strategy of nationalist total liquidation through force and
violence. (Cited in Cudi [2010: 1])
6Conclusion
It is evident that Kurds in Turkey have been subjected to linguistic and other
forms of genocide. Social triage, the Hobbesian project and the vivisectional mandate have all been evident. The influence of modernity in shaping and legitimiz-
93
ing the genocidal process in Turkey has been substantive. For Schulter, it is important to recognize that:
... while the European Holocaust of 19391945 against Jews and other inferior peoples
rightly serves as an ideal case of genocide, the persecution of ... the Kurds under the Turkish Republic, is also genocide in the original and proper sense of the term as coined by the
jurist Raphael Lemkin ... Turkish policy in Northern Kurdistan ... might serve as an example of the attempted cultural destruction of a national pattern by forced ... Turkification. In fact, Lemkins original description of genocide, with its focus not only on the systematic slaughter and starvation of the Jews but also on the imposition of the German
language in places such as Luxembourg, might have cited Turkish policy in Northern Kurdistan. (Schulter 2000: 1)
Today, culturally and linguistically genocidal policies and practices are still in
place and the spectre of physical genocide looms once again (Fernandes 2010a,
2010b). For Havemann (2005: 61): It may be comforting to claim that genocide
was a facet of early/simple/industrial modernity and that it does not happen any
more. The law, state and dominant culture selectively forget, engaging in historical denial: they deny the immediacy of genocide and ethnocide or that what went
on in Australia, for example, ought to be described as genocide. However,
modernization has always produced and legitimated atrocities and suffering....
In Australia, he concludes as I do in this article with regard to Turkey the
apparently civilizing imperatives of modernity ... amount to genocide.... Until
we overcome denial by acknowledging the truth, we can never get to the place
called reconciliation (Havemann 2005: 61, 79).
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