Kurds as a homo sacer figure in Middle Eastern sovereign states
sardar aziz
Work in progress
After Agamben’s (1995) work the figure of Homo Sacer is not an archaic Roman figure anymore. She or he is the product of the modern sovereignty, lives her or his life at the edge: swinging between life and death. This modern form of sovereignty diffused to the Middle East and established itself through, wars, colonial policies and treaties. But the diffusion was not complete. If the Middle Eastern sovereignty was a copy, it did not look like the origin fully. Consequently a form of State emerged different from western model of, democratic, liberal, contractual based state. This State is neither modern nor traditional. I conceptualise it as a Failed Modern State. Despite their different experience with occidental modernity; the Middle Eastern states are sharing the failure to be modern. Therefore, this new conceptualization denotes all the Middle Eastern States. Theses while they diffused the occidental modernity in various ways, they had no intention to be modern, i.e. to establish a state that organises the society in order to serve its own population. Consequently, to build an occidental modern form of; society, citizen, constitution, State, remain to be the dream of their badly informed intellectuals. While they could not use the occidental methodology to modernise their tradition, they also failed to accomplish their own form of modernity. The emerged failed modern state is a state that holds both modernity and tradition in parallel. These two, to paraphrase Georges Dumézil they become the two heads of the sovereign. “Undoubtedly, these two poles stand in opposition term by term” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004:388), but their opposition provides the sovereign tools for survival. They become the mode of communication between the sovereign and the masses. They create the permanent state of civil war both virtual and actual. They prepare the ground for the state of emergency. These states, especially the Arab states, to paraphrase Burhan Ghalyun’s (1993) title, ‘are states against their own people’. They suffer from multidimensional crises; crisis of governance, of identity, of development and many others.
In order to comprehend the multilayer crisis of these states, one has to assess the circumstance of minorities within the boundary of these states. Here there are two concepts to be considered: one is boundary or border the other is minority. The border as a modern form regulation, limitation is strange and new to the historical and cultural background of the region. If international borders in general are never completely just, then the most unjust borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. They are as Ralph Peters (2006) put it ‘blood borders’. The drawing of border mushroomed some states out of nowhere such as Jordan and made other people totally vanish from political geography, such as Kurds. Consequently, every state in the region ended up to have either an ethnic(s) or religious minorities. Since these states were mostly handed in from the colonial power into the local elites, based on their traditional worldview, the local elite, considered the state and the people as their booty or property. Therefore, the state became the personal property of the elite. As a result a form of political theology, as Carl Schmitt understand it, materialized. For Schmitt, political theology is the structure of political concepts as related to their origin in theological concepts. Within Schmitt’s view of the political, the theological notion of God transfers to the political sovereign a final and total authority in the person of a main decision-maker in extreme emergencies, an “exception-bearer” with whom the power of the state ultimately lies. The notion of the Absolute in religion is used in conceptualizing the Absolute in the state, starting with the “divine right of kings” and extending to the crisis of Schmitt’s own time (Gary, 2007: 176). This ownership made the newly emerged elite to emulate the divine power. Within this formula there was/is no room for multiplicity, for citizenship, for difference. Allah in Islamic illmi-kalam theology is the one who there is no separation between his amr imperative and khalq creation ((کن فیکن. “The Initiator of the heavens and the earth: to have anything done, He simply says to it, "Be," and it is (2:117) بديع السموات والأرض وإذا قضى أمراً فإنما يقول له كن فيكون. This form of power rejects negotiations, consultations, listening to different view, consent and ultimately regards people as slave. The emerged sovereigns took this as the ultimate form of exercising powers, consequently they did not accept the modern idea of separation of power, and they made themselves permanents and absolute holder of sovereignty. This metalizes in many shapes and forms. Some of the sovereign figures even do not accept the idea of having a deputy, the possibility of being replaced, those who have it they have reduced them to a powerless figure. The intolerance towards the idea of being replaced, is originates from imagining oneself as divine. Say: He is God alone: God the eternal (Koran, 42:1).
If the sovereign is divine then the state has to fulfil his desire. Therefore, accordingly, it has to be homogenise, uniform and run by a strong centralised power. To achieve this use of violence is required. For the sovereign figures to imagine themselves as figures who are related or they are doing what the prominent Islamic figure did or continuing what they did is common practice. Through his analysis of the monuments in Iraq during the reign of Saddam Hussain, Kanan Makiya, (1991) confirms this practice. For instance through the Victory Arch monument Saddam Hussain inamgines himself as Sa’ad ibn-abi-Waqas an honoured companion of the prophet Muhammad (1991:11). One who imagines himself as divine, to exercise the power of divine, does hesitates to kill, as Ali Hassan Majid put it: ‘The armed forces must kill any human being or animal present’. In this, to use Calrl Schmitt’s favorite word, situation, there is no room for law or accountability. It is the absolute manifestation of the state of exception. "I will kill them all [Kurds] with chemical weapons. Who is going to say anything? Fuck them! The international community, and those who listen them” (quoted from Cockburn 2007).
Thus as Arab Human Development Report (2009: 53) put it these state are “source of risk to life and freedom, instead of guaranteeing human security, it turns into a major threat to it”. In this particular circumstances the sovereign sphere, as Agamben (1995:) put it “is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life -- that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed. The group that are more vulnerable for the state’s threat are the minorities. The minorities are people with small p. People in these state whether it called sha’b, umma, khlq, halk, were the creation of the sovereign. As Agamben put it in his short article what is people he states
It is as if, in other words, what we call people was actually not a unitary subject but rather a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the _People_ as a whole and as an integral body politic and, on the other hand, the _people_ as a subset and as fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; on the one hand, an inclusive concept that pretends to be without remainder while, on the other hand, an exclusive concept known to afford no hope; at one pole, the total state of the sovereign and integrated citizens and, at the other pole, the banishment.
Agamben reiterates that in Home Sacer (1995)
Every interpretation of the political meaning of the term "People" must begin with the singular fact that in modern European languages, "people" also always indicates the poor, the disinherited, and the excluded. One term thus names both the constitutive political subject and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics
This summaries most specifically the Kurdish experience in the Republic of Turkey. Kurds throughout the history of that entity has been the people with lower case p. The endless pejorative name calling and every way of killing with impunity confirms that. Kurds has been called mountain people, backward, pre-modern, shit nation, and lately according to Mesut Yeğen (2007) Jewish. Other has also regarded the Kurds in Turkey as a homo sacer. For Anna Secor (2006) the area that Kurds live in is in the state of exception. They exist on the threshold of the law, included within its force-field 'by the sheer force of (their) exclusion from it. According to her ‘the Kurds whose villages are located primarily in the southeast of Turkey are designated as homo sacer as a result of both their embodied differences and the location of these abnormal bodies within specifically demarcated geographic regions.
To regard the Kurdistan in Turkey as a exceptional place where Agambeian state of exception is permanent confirmed by both Kerem Öktem’s (2006) article ‘Return of the Turkish “State of Exception’, and Nicole F. Watts’ (2010) article ‘Re-Considering State-Society Dynamics in Turkey’s Kurdish Southeast’, however the latter tries to argue that the situation has modified. While the former argues “reviewing the brief history of Turkish democracy since the 1950s, one could safely argue that the notion of ‘emergency as a rule’ has been a structural determinant of Turkish politics”.
The emergency state or the exceptionality of the sovereign is not only applies to Turkish state. Syria is officially in the state of emergency since 22 December 1962. When it was introduced it was suppose to apply “to those exceptional cases in which there is an internal or external threat to the survival of the nation” (Al-'Ismi, 2005). But the exception which always emerges as an exception is as Walter Bnjamin (1940) told us the rule. The exceptionality is unlimited in both durations and applications, as confirmed by Alkarama human rights organization report (2010) “in reality, this legislation allows for broad emergency powers – especially for the security forces - without being subject to control by a judicial authority”. The state of exception presents itself as an inherently elusive phenomenon, a juridical no-man's land where the “suspension of the entire existing juridical order” (Agamben, 2005).
The exception makes homo sacer. To be homo sacer is to have no right to be political. Being political is to have a place in the polis. Agamben quoting from Aristotle’s politics
Among living beings, only man has language. The voice is the sign of pain and pleasure, and this is why it belongs to other living beings. But language is for manifesting the fitting and the unfitting and the just and the unjust. To have the sensation of the good and the bad and of the just and the unjust is what is proper to men as opposed to other living beings, and the community of these things makes dwelling and the city (1253a, 10-18).
Therefore banning the language by the sovereign is not only the matter of expression or multicultural, it is in its essence dehumanising man and disallowing the manifestation of what is ‘the fitting and the unfitting and the just and the unjust’. There is a passage in Musa Anter’s famous memoir, Hatıralarım demonstrates this clearly. Anter writes:
The villagers used to take wood to Mardin to sell. They transported it by donkey. They would sell the firewood for about 50-60 kuruş. If the donkey and the saddle were in good condition, they could sell it for 5-6 lira. To make the donkey go while riding it, Kurds say 'ço'. Poor Kurds who didn’t know Turkish and who didn’t know anything about this would say 'ço,' and the gendarmes would stop them and beat them up for speaking Kurdish. When the Kurd – speaking Kurdish -- tried to defend himself against this, they would prosecute him and charge him with a crime.
Something like this happened to one of my mother’s relatives. His donkey and firewood were confiscated and sold (to pay the fine). He received 5 Turkish lira for them, but his fine was 12 lira. So he was jailed for two days and beaten up. Three and a half months later when the tax collectors came to our village, they wanted him to pay the remaining seven lira outstanding on the fine and said that if he didn’t pay, they would seize his house and belongings. Of course the gendarmes came along with the tax collectors. My uncle was able to pay the fine by selling a few of his sheep. This incident didn’t just happen to my uncle, it was commonplace. If there was a documentary archive of crimes in Mardin you would find a great many of this sort of disgraceful document (Anter 1991: 29).
Minorities are the abandoned, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order (Agmaben, 1998: ). To borrow from Agamben (1998) they are been ‘included through exclusion’
Work in progress
After Agamben’s (1995) work the figure of Homo Sacer is not an archaic Roman figure anymore. She or he is the product of the modern sovereignty, lives her or his life at the edge: swinging between life and death. This modern form of sovereignty diffused to the Middle East and established itself through, wars, colonial policies and treaties. But the diffusion was not complete. If the Middle Eastern sovereignty was a copy, it did not look like the origin fully. Consequently a form of State emerged different from western model of, democratic, liberal, contractual based state. This State is neither modern nor traditional. I conceptualise it as a Failed Modern State. Despite their different experience with occidental modernity; the Middle Eastern states are sharing the failure to be modern. Therefore, this new conceptualization denotes all the Middle Eastern States. Theses while they diffused the occidental modernity in various ways, they had no intention to be modern, i.e. to establish a state that organises the society in order to serve its own population. Consequently, to build an occidental modern form of; society, citizen, constitution, State, remain to be the dream of their badly informed intellectuals. While they could not use the occidental methodology to modernise their tradition, they also failed to accomplish their own form of modernity. The emerged failed modern state is a state that holds both modernity and tradition in parallel. These two, to paraphrase Georges Dumézil they become the two heads of the sovereign. “Undoubtedly, these two poles stand in opposition term by term” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004:388), but their opposition provides the sovereign tools for survival. They become the mode of communication between the sovereign and the masses. They create the permanent state of civil war both virtual and actual. They prepare the ground for the state of emergency. These states, especially the Arab states, to paraphrase Burhan Ghalyun’s (1993) title, ‘are states against their own people’. They suffer from multidimensional crises; crisis of governance, of identity, of development and many others.
In order to comprehend the multilayer crisis of these states, one has to assess the circumstance of minorities within the boundary of these states. Here there are two concepts to be considered: one is boundary or border the other is minority. The border as a modern form regulation, limitation is strange and new to the historical and cultural background of the region. If international borders in general are never completely just, then the most unjust borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. They are as Ralph Peters (2006) put it ‘blood borders’. The drawing of border mushroomed some states out of nowhere such as Jordan and made other people totally vanish from political geography, such as Kurds. Consequently, every state in the region ended up to have either an ethnic(s) or religious minorities. Since these states were mostly handed in from the colonial power into the local elites, based on their traditional worldview, the local elite, considered the state and the people as their booty or property. Therefore, the state became the personal property of the elite. As a result a form of political theology, as Carl Schmitt understand it, materialized. For Schmitt, political theology is the structure of political concepts as related to their origin in theological concepts. Within Schmitt’s view of the political, the theological notion of God transfers to the political sovereign a final and total authority in the person of a main decision-maker in extreme emergencies, an “exception-bearer” with whom the power of the state ultimately lies. The notion of the Absolute in religion is used in conceptualizing the Absolute in the state, starting with the “divine right of kings” and extending to the crisis of Schmitt’s own time (Gary, 2007: 176). This ownership made the newly emerged elite to emulate the divine power. Within this formula there was/is no room for multiplicity, for citizenship, for difference. Allah in Islamic illmi-kalam theology is the one who there is no separation between his amr imperative and khalq creation ((کن فیکن. “The Initiator of the heavens and the earth: to have anything done, He simply says to it, "Be," and it is (2:117) بديع السموات والأرض وإذا قضى أمراً فإنما يقول له كن فيكون. This form of power rejects negotiations, consultations, listening to different view, consent and ultimately regards people as slave. The emerged sovereigns took this as the ultimate form of exercising powers, consequently they did not accept the modern idea of separation of power, and they made themselves permanents and absolute holder of sovereignty. This metalizes in many shapes and forms. Some of the sovereign figures even do not accept the idea of having a deputy, the possibility of being replaced, those who have it they have reduced them to a powerless figure. The intolerance towards the idea of being replaced, is originates from imagining oneself as divine. Say: He is God alone: God the eternal (Koran, 42:1).
If the sovereign is divine then the state has to fulfil his desire. Therefore, accordingly, it has to be homogenise, uniform and run by a strong centralised power. To achieve this use of violence is required. For the sovereign figures to imagine themselves as figures who are related or they are doing what the prominent Islamic figure did or continuing what they did is common practice. Through his analysis of the monuments in Iraq during the reign of Saddam Hussain, Kanan Makiya, (1991) confirms this practice. For instance through the Victory Arch monument Saddam Hussain inamgines himself as Sa’ad ibn-abi-Waqas an honoured companion of the prophet Muhammad (1991:11). One who imagines himself as divine, to exercise the power of divine, does hesitates to kill, as Ali Hassan Majid put it: ‘The armed forces must kill any human being or animal present’. In this, to use Calrl Schmitt’s favorite word, situation, there is no room for law or accountability. It is the absolute manifestation of the state of exception. "I will kill them all [Kurds] with chemical weapons. Who is going to say anything? Fuck them! The international community, and those who listen them” (quoted from Cockburn 2007).
Thus as Arab Human Development Report (2009: 53) put it these state are “source of risk to life and freedom, instead of guaranteeing human security, it turns into a major threat to it”. In this particular circumstances the sovereign sphere, as Agamben (1995:) put it “is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life -- that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed. The group that are more vulnerable for the state’s threat are the minorities. The minorities are people with small p. People in these state whether it called sha’b, umma, khlq, halk, were the creation of the sovereign. As Agamben put it in his short article what is people he states
It is as if, in other words, what we call people was actually not a unitary subject but rather a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the _People_ as a whole and as an integral body politic and, on the other hand, the _people_ as a subset and as fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; on the one hand, an inclusive concept that pretends to be without remainder while, on the other hand, an exclusive concept known to afford no hope; at one pole, the total state of the sovereign and integrated citizens and, at the other pole, the banishment.
Agamben reiterates that in Home Sacer (1995)
Every interpretation of the political meaning of the term "People" must begin with the singular fact that in modern European languages, "people" also always indicates the poor, the disinherited, and the excluded. One term thus names both the constitutive political subject and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics
This summaries most specifically the Kurdish experience in the Republic of Turkey. Kurds throughout the history of that entity has been the people with lower case p. The endless pejorative name calling and every way of killing with impunity confirms that. Kurds has been called mountain people, backward, pre-modern, shit nation, and lately according to Mesut Yeğen (2007) Jewish. Other has also regarded the Kurds in Turkey as a homo sacer. For Anna Secor (2006) the area that Kurds live in is in the state of exception. They exist on the threshold of the law, included within its force-field 'by the sheer force of (their) exclusion from it. According to her ‘the Kurds whose villages are located primarily in the southeast of Turkey are designated as homo sacer as a result of both their embodied differences and the location of these abnormal bodies within specifically demarcated geographic regions.
To regard the Kurdistan in Turkey as a exceptional place where Agambeian state of exception is permanent confirmed by both Kerem Öktem’s (2006) article ‘Return of the Turkish “State of Exception’, and Nicole F. Watts’ (2010) article ‘Re-Considering State-Society Dynamics in Turkey’s Kurdish Southeast’, however the latter tries to argue that the situation has modified. While the former argues “reviewing the brief history of Turkish democracy since the 1950s, one could safely argue that the notion of ‘emergency as a rule’ has been a structural determinant of Turkish politics”.
The emergency state or the exceptionality of the sovereign is not only applies to Turkish state. Syria is officially in the state of emergency since 22 December 1962. When it was introduced it was suppose to apply “to those exceptional cases in which there is an internal or external threat to the survival of the nation” (Al-'Ismi, 2005). But the exception which always emerges as an exception is as Walter Bnjamin (1940) told us the rule. The exceptionality is unlimited in both durations and applications, as confirmed by Alkarama human rights organization report (2010) “in reality, this legislation allows for broad emergency powers – especially for the security forces - without being subject to control by a judicial authority”. The state of exception presents itself as an inherently elusive phenomenon, a juridical no-man's land where the “suspension of the entire existing juridical order” (Agamben, 2005).
The exception makes homo sacer. To be homo sacer is to have no right to be political. Being political is to have a place in the polis. Agamben quoting from Aristotle’s politics
Among living beings, only man has language. The voice is the sign of pain and pleasure, and this is why it belongs to other living beings. But language is for manifesting the fitting and the unfitting and the just and the unjust. To have the sensation of the good and the bad and of the just and the unjust is what is proper to men as opposed to other living beings, and the community of these things makes dwelling and the city (1253a, 10-18).
Therefore banning the language by the sovereign is not only the matter of expression or multicultural, it is in its essence dehumanising man and disallowing the manifestation of what is ‘the fitting and the unfitting and the just and the unjust’. There is a passage in Musa Anter’s famous memoir, Hatıralarım demonstrates this clearly. Anter writes:
The villagers used to take wood to Mardin to sell. They transported it by donkey. They would sell the firewood for about 50-60 kuruş. If the donkey and the saddle were in good condition, they could sell it for 5-6 lira. To make the donkey go while riding it, Kurds say 'ço'. Poor Kurds who didn’t know Turkish and who didn’t know anything about this would say 'ço,' and the gendarmes would stop them and beat them up for speaking Kurdish. When the Kurd – speaking Kurdish -- tried to defend himself against this, they would prosecute him and charge him with a crime.
Something like this happened to one of my mother’s relatives. His donkey and firewood were confiscated and sold (to pay the fine). He received 5 Turkish lira for them, but his fine was 12 lira. So he was jailed for two days and beaten up. Three and a half months later when the tax collectors came to our village, they wanted him to pay the remaining seven lira outstanding on the fine and said that if he didn’t pay, they would seize his house and belongings. Of course the gendarmes came along with the tax collectors. My uncle was able to pay the fine by selling a few of his sheep. This incident didn’t just happen to my uncle, it was commonplace. If there was a documentary archive of crimes in Mardin you would find a great many of this sort of disgraceful document (Anter 1991: 29).
Minorities are the abandoned, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order (Agmaben, 1998: ). To borrow from Agamben (1998) they are been ‘included through exclusion’
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