February 2008: The mirror of illusion smashed

Wednesday, 05 March 2008, 03:55 EST
29 February 2008: The mirror of illusion smashed

By Zafer Yoruk
The Kurdish Globe

There will be a lot to be said on the reasons, results and the consequences of the recent Turkish incursion in Kurdistan, most of which will unfold in time.

The Turkish Chief of Staff, when stating that the decision to retreat was not taken under the US pressure but it was the result of a "military evaluation", effectively admits the first defeat of the Turkish army in a battle since the First World War. It can be justly foreseen that the immediate consequence of this will be another boost in the aggressive nationalist hysteria in Turkey as a first reflex to suture the wound inflicted upon the national pride. It is also legitimate to argue that as physical violence cannot represent anything more than a weakness, nothing can be achieved through blood or war. However, this defeat on the battleground can lead to some lessons, that may prevent the repetition of war and the blood that has been spilt may eventually worth something. In order to argue this optimistic assertion, an outline of the trajectory of the recent escalation of the Turkish nationalist hysteria is necessary.

Between 1984 and 1999, an undeclared war against the revival of Kurdish identity had been carried out by the Turkish political establishment. However, the Turkish discourse during this war, as represented by the mainstream media, was based on a persistent denial of war. Since the Kurds did not exist according to the Turkish State, there could have been no war at all. Instead of a "national war" mobilisation, official circles were very careful to present the Kurdish conflict as a temporary episode of breached state security. PKK in particular and the Kurdish movement in general were never portrayed as menacing the Turkish nation's integrity; instead, they were systematically downplayed as "a handful of isolated terrorists". As Leonard Cohen's lyrics go, a war immediately broke out "between those who say there is a war and those who say there isn't". This discourse on war, that is, "no war", continued until Ocalan's capture in 1999. During this "no war", more than 30,000, mostly Kurdish civilians were killed, tens of thousands of Kurdish villages were destroyed and more than three million Kurdish people were forcibly displaced. The involvement of the Turkish media in this "no war" was not so much different from that of the Turkish jet pilots, death squads or ultranationalist-Mafioso gangs. Silence and disinformation were the most favoured media tactics. A comparison is probably possible with France during the Algerian War. In the early 1960s, when the North African minority of Paris rioted in protest of the 'dirty war' in Algeria, Jean Paul Sartre was screaming: "corpses are floating in the River Seine; look in the militant press if you want to see the truth." In the 1990s, there was a small militant press in Turkey who tried to report the view from the other side. But this press has been under systematic persecution: their members were systematically murdered or convicted to lengthy prison sentences for fabricated charges and harassed on a daily base by the Turkish police and gendarmes. When the judicial/political/economic pressure on the distribution of the products of this press fell short, the State would not hesitate to bomb their central offices, as in 1994.

In contrast, since 2003, when the Turkish Parliament effectively voted the country away from the possible spoils of the US invasion of Iraq, the media tactics have shifted to the opposite, to an exaggeration of "war". The PKK has been systematically presented as a far larger military threat than reality. So, ironically, once again a war broke out "between those who say there is a war and those who say there isn't", but the sides of each assertion have radically shifted to the opposite. Although at the outset of this nationalist upheaval there was no significant military conflict going on inside the country, it didn't take long for the agitated Turkish psyche to be confronted with the PKK violence.

It is in this environment that a storm of popular nationalist hysteria rapidly picked up to challenge the earlier (1999-2003) climate of democratic moderation regarding the Kurdish question. By 2005, a total climate change had completed, consising of strong anti-American and anti-Kurdish sentiments pumped up by various conspiracy theories and exaggerated nationalist discourse. The spirit of the times was rather embarrassingly symbolised with Hitler's Mein Kamph along with a book titled Crazy Turks becoming a best-seller around the country. Another popular cultural product was a movie titled Valley of the Wolves Iraq which broke Turkish movie industry's box-office records of all times with more than four million viewers. The movie narrates the adventures of Turkish secret agents, who enter Northern Iraq and kill dozens of Kurds before assassinating the commander of the US forces in Iraq. With this theoretical/ideological preparation at hand, the Turkish public soon entered into a psychology of war, with lynch attempts around the country on democrats and Kurdish political activists and intellectuals. Among numerous similar incidents, the attack on the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk by a nationalist lynch mob during his trial for "degrading Turkishness", and the murder of the Armenian journalist Hirant Dink received extensive international coverage.

It is this hysteria, or what the Kurdish psychiatrist Dr. Isik Iscanli diagnosed as "national narcissism", which has been ignited to its limits with the recent cross-border attempt of the Turkish troops. She also interprets the systematic abuse of Kurdish identity by the media and public as perverted attempts to satisfy a built-in sadistic drive. ( İnterview with Dr. Iscanli, Roj TV, 1 March 2008.)

If the nationalist hysteria blended with the psychic mechanisms of perversion, sado-masochism and narcissism was carried to its limits with the recent military conflict, then it is impossible for the consequences of this conflict to trigger any further nationalist escalation, but they could well be presenting the possibility of a therapeutic process. As in any therapy, the first thing to understand is what we are facing, and I think Iscanli's diagnosis of "national narcissism" can provide us with fertile grounds.

Professor Murat Belge wrote about a decade ago that the Turks were the only nation that loved rather too much to try to convince each other about the virtues of their nation through nationalist propaganda. This feature, he related to the fact that the Turks have no outside audience but themselves. In fact, the lack of an outside object to project the libidinal energy lies at the foundation of the definition of narcissism. When the boundaries between self and the other become ambiguous in favour of the self, a superficial inflation of the ego leading to a belief of omnipotence becomes inevitable. In fact, this whole process of narcissism originates from the weakness of the ego, as an attempt to cover over the reality of the fixation of the self-formation or identity-building process at a primitive stage. Therefore, any insight into Turkish "national narcissism" is bound to reveal the problem of premature identity.

Narcissism is defined by Sigmund Freud as an erotic attachment to a pathologically weak but artificially overinflated ego, which, when forced to its limits of abnormality, can lay the premises for the development of various forms of psychosis, including megalomania, schizoid paranoia, extreme depression, schizophrenia, etc. Moreover, according to the findings of the psychoanalytic thinking, the artificial overinflation of the ego always requires the existence of a mirror in which the ego projects and perceives a far larger image of its real self. Ironically, the mirror plays an essential role not only in the emergence of narcissism but also in the cure of this abnormality. We know this since Freud's case study of a 19 year old patient, who persistently resisted therapy until that moment when she smashed all the panes of glass in a door. Freud wrote down, after this incident, that "a cure has become possible". Now, without going into detail, it is necessary to note down that the glass door obviously symbolises a mirror that needs to be smashed for a cure to become possible, since it is in this mirror where the narcissistic subject has managed to reproduce her megalomaniac image. Consequently, in case of "national narcissism", it becomes necessary to identify what plays the role of this narcissistic mirror. All the indicators point to the direction of the suffering of the Kurdish people in Turkey, when one looks for the illusionary mirror of narcissism of the Turkish psyche. If so, then 29 February 2008 is the moment when this mirror was finally smashed, and "a cure has become possible".

It is precisely due to the existence or not of this mirror that the democrats of Turkey view the struggle for the Kurdish rights and the struggle for a democratic Turkey as one and the same thing. The future of Turkey will be determined by the fate of the Kurdish question and for this reason their struggle is of special importance for all the progressive people in Turkey. Moreover, the Kurds of Turkey constitute not only the most oppressed (here, I'm not merely referring to state violence but the systematic denial of identity, culture and language through the 20th Century by the Turkish political establishment) but also the largest portion in one country of the Kurdish people in the world. Consequently, the fate of the Kurdish struggle in Turkey will also determine to a large extent the fate of the Kurdish people all around the world.

After this emphasis on the importance of the Kurdish struggle in Turkey, some criticism and lessons for the future can be derived. Firstly, it should be emphasised again and again that for the second time in modern Turkish history, Kurdish political movement has gained parliamentary representation in July 2007 elections. Everybody knows the famous saying, "War is a continuation of politics with different means". Now, the opposite of this statement must also be true, that is, "Politics is the continuation of war with peaceful means", and this is the precise description of the current situation of the Kurdish question in Turkey. The Kurds have fought a prolonged war against the policies of denial and violent exclusion of the Turkish state, and it is, along with a number of other factors, this war, this violent and painful confrontation with consequences of immense suffering, that successfully opened the current space of political representation. DTP (Democratic Society Party) deputies have now the historical mission to advance this war by peaceful means. Certainly we cannot load the whole burden on the Kurdish deputies, who are after all only the tip of that gigantic iceberg called the Kurdish political will in Turkey. It is therefore the task of Turkey's Kurdish movement as a whole to reorganize and reorient themselves according to the needs of this decisive - and long due at least since 1999 - transition from the era of what Gramsci called the 'war of manoeuvre' dominated by the military conflict to the era of the 'war of position', that is, of political struggle.

One major difficulty in such reorientation is that for some time, there has been a war within the Turkish political establishment between the Kemalist and anti-Kemalist elements. This war has escalated during the recent months around a dispute on the election of the new president. It looks in the first glance as if the anti-Kemalist bloc has won an important victory in the July elections and the subsequent election of the first Islamist President of the Turkish Republic, and that they are on their way to important constitutional-structural reforms, which can lead to the elimination of the Kemalist establishment for good. This, however, is only the surface and I'm afraid that Kemalists will not go without a bang. They have proved to be capable of turning the tables in so many coups-d'Etat, and a similar dirty resistance is imminent by all criteria. Looking at the developments, including the most recent attempt to invade Northern Iraq, it will not be difficult to derive that today, the Kurdish movement is unfortunately trapped in the midst of this power struggle. I expect similar provocations by the Kemalist military-bureaucratic elite to escalate in the near future and the Kurds of Turkey should find a way out of their current location as the object (and the scapegoat/excuse) of this dangerous conspiracy. It seems to be impossible to indicate any way out except for emphasising the significance of what I have already suggested above, that is, the necessity of a clear-cut transition in political orientation from 'war of manoeuvre' (military conflict) to 'war of position' (political struggle).

Thus far is for the Kurdish movement but most of the burden is once again on the Turkish intelligentsia. In a situation where heavy wounds have been inflicted by the Kurdish resistance on both poles of the Turkish national identity or, to be more precise, to the Turkish oligarchy, including the pseudo democratic Islamists and the Kemalists alike, the democrats of Turkey have no choice but to seize the moment. We need to make clear one thing that the question here is for the people of Turkey to give up for good the completely immoral (and politically disastrous) choice that they relied on for more than a century, following its formulation by one of the founders of racist Turkish nationalism, Omer Seyfettin as follows: 'the nations who do not oppress the others are bound to be oppressed'. It is time to opt for its ethical opposite, that is the great internationalist Karl Marx's motto: 'a people oppressing another people cannot be free'. This is primarily an ethical choice with grave political consequences. For instance, history has so far proved time and again the correctness of Marx over the types of Seyfettin around the world, and therefore the superiority of the internationalist argument over the nationalist one. Turkey is no exception. So far, people of Turkey only manufactured their own chains by participating in the elimination, exclusion and oppression of other people. And they can only be free after the freedom of the peoples that they currently oppress. In short, the real, long-term, political and ethical interests of the people of Turkey lie in siding with the Kurdish self-determination and this is a matter of democracy, human rights and ethics.

What I am suggesting to the Turks and Kurds alike can be wrapped up in a simple phrase: Let's smash this mirror of illusion! Either of us have nothing to lose but our chains since this is the only way ahead for the democratisation of Turkey and the liberation of the Kurdish people one and the same time. A lot of glass has been smashed by the 29 February 2008, hundreds of young people from the Turkish and the Kurdish sides have sacrificed their bodies for something that their souls believed in deep down: the fraternity of the Kurdish and the Turkish people.

Source:Kurdish Globe