Aysegul Arslan*

Amidst the extreme summer heat in the drylands of Urfa province in Southeastern Türkiye, the harvest season is starting at full speed, and thousands of seasonal agricultural workers – entire families – are ready to immigrate to work long hours in the fields. When temperatures regularly reach 40 ℃, agricultural work is extremely exhausting. Even though the exact number of people is unknown, most estimates suggest that at least one million people are engaged in seasonal and temporary informal agricultural labor in Türkiye. Most of them are landless Kurds from the Urfa city of Southeastern Türkiye and the majority neither own nor have access to land to earn their livelihoods. Every harvest season, thousands of landless Kurdish seasonal and temporary agricultural worker families migrate informally from the gecekondu districts, which are houses or shelters constructed quickly without proper legal permissions in Urfa city, to work in both Urfa’s rural areas and other regions in Türkiye. Most landless Kurdish seasonal agricultural workers do not have employment contracts and they are paid below the national minimum wage.

To examine landless Kurdish agricultural workers who continue to maintain their lives in the gecekondu districts of Urfa city, I conducted field research in 2018-2019, focusing on the neighborhoods Hayati Harrani, Ottoman, and Sirrin. During the research, I analyzed the effects of dispossession, displacement, and re-proletarianization, as well as the “poverty and deprivation” experienced by landless Kurdish seasonal agricultural workers who reside in the city’s rural periphery. These neighborhoods are part of the gecekondu districts of Urfa city, residents struggle with unemployment and poverty. Many Kurdish peasants have migrated to these city outskirts, seeking better livelihoods. Nonetheless, their lives and livelihoods have not changed substantially because as they were landless in the past, they have remained landless in the present. Living in the gecekondu districts of Urfa city, they have limited options. Their primary strategy is to engage in agricultural seasonal work, as they believe it to be the most viable source of income. However, this is just the beginning of a more intricate story!

A Story about the Landlessness of Kurdish Agricultural Workers in Urfa

The long story of the landlessness of Kurdish agricultural workers in Urfa starts back a bit further. This story of landless Kurdish agricultural workers in Urfa includes social and spatial tensions between state authority and Kurds, rural transformation, and rural-to-urban migration from the Ottoman Empire period to the present. In other words, this story depends on their social and political statuses rooted in their historical and societal background. The stories of landless families who migrated from the aghas’ village of Urfa to the gecekondudistricts of the city begin with the rural transformation process in the mid-twentieth century.

Since the 1960s the rural transformation in Urfa, Kurdish chieftains who are feudal large landowners (aghas) have become employees or “modern aghas” while landless and wageless peasants (maraba) and sharecroppers (ortakçı, yarıcı and cenan) have been transformed into seasonal and temporal agricultural workers. This transformation deepens the process of social and class differentiation among Kurds. In other words, this process is a production of space encompassing the commodification and transformation of traditional agricultural relations of production and the reproduction of existing inequalities (ethnical and class issues) among the peasant classes. Thus, spatial change in the agricultural labor system needs to be thought of as a social-political dilemma.

In the rural transformation in the Southeastern region of Türkiye, traditional (pre-capitalist) agrarian lifestyles have led to the integration of landowners, small-scale and landless farmers into modern (capitalist) production relations as commodity producers. And this transformation implies a shift from labor being primarily tied to local communities or familial units to becoming a marketable commodity bought and sold through wages. And it also involves changes in the power dynamics between agricultural workers and landowners with structural and specific contexts related to socio-political and economic relations (Arslan and Sengül, 2021). Thus, landless Kurds who worked on the aghas’ lands were spatially separated from land in rural areas of the Urfa. And then most landless Kurds had to migrate from rural to urban areas for access to a better life. However, there was no change in their living standards, and they continue to face poverty and deprivation in the gecekondu districts of Urfa city.

Living in Urfa’s gecekondu districts, they had only one solution, which was to turn yet again to seasonal agricultural work. Consequently, throughout the rural transformation process, the expansion of capitalist agricultural dynamics has increased the demand for seasonal wage labor in farming for Türkiye’s other regions. The Kurdish landless peasants have become the labor reserve filling both the landowning Kurds in Urfa and other regions’ agricultural labor demands.

Landless Kurdish peasants have had to abandon their land through exposure to violence (both forced migration pressure by the securitization politics of the Turkish government and aghas) in this process. There are three key dimensions needed to analyse this phenomenon: Dispossession, displacement and re-proletarianization. Even if the dispossession, displacement and re-proletarianization process has been dependent on “economic conditions”, the heart of the matter is historical and socio-political in Urfa. The main characteristics of the legacy inherited from the Ottoman Empire, are uneven land distribution and the prominent power of Kurd landowners. Thus, Urfa city has the highest number of landless Kurdish peasants of all Kurdish cities.

The dispossession of landless Kurds in Urfa has been a complex and persistent problem throughout the region’s history. With a significant portion of the land owned by feudal aghas, many Kurdish peasants have historically found themselves without land and basic livelihood opportunities. Dispossession not only undermines the economic security of Kurdish landless but also perpetuates existing social and class inequalities. The struggle for land and livelihood rights remains a pressing issue in Urfa, as Kurdish landless individuals continue to grapple with the historical and contemporary implications of dispossession.

The UNCHR defines the term displacement as a person or group subject to migratory movement in which an element of coercion exists, including threats to life and livelihood, whether arising from persecution, conflict, generalized violence or human rights violations. In the case of Kurdish agricultural workers, it implies that they are compelled to leave their homes or communities in search of employment elsewhere by the Turkish government’s securitization politic and the Aghas’ despotism. There are two dimensions of displacement in Urfa. The former is the dissolution of the dependent relationship between the aghas and the sharecroppers. Prior to migration, landless Kurdish peasants were “workers who depended on aghas” since they migrated, they have been labouring as “wage workers”. The other dimension of displacement is the forced migration from other provinces with Kurdish populations to Urfa city. One significant driver of forced migration in Southeastern Türkiye has been the conflict between the Turkish Armed Forces (Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri) and Kurdish separatist groups, primarily the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). That protracted conflict, which began in the 1980s, has resulted in the widespread displacement of Kurdish populations in 14 provinces in the East and Southeast of Türkiye namely Adiyaman, Ağrı, Batman, Bingöl, Bitlis, Diyarbakır, Elazığ, Hakkari, Mardin, Muş, Siirt, Şırnak, Tunceli and Van.

The landless Kurds who had to leave their homes are among the Kurdish peasant classes that were most affected by forced migration and rural transformation process. The re-proletarianization dynamics suggest that the primary means of earning a livelihood for landless Kurds remains agricultural labor, which is considered a form of proletarian labor in the gecekondu districts of Urfa city. In other words, the landless Kurds who both were freed from the servitude of the aghas’ and exposed to forced migration, have relocated, and work as seasonal agricultural workers in the gecekondu districts of Urfa city. The displaced and resettled landless Kurds living there have no option but to do seasonal agricultural work. In this way, the re-proletarianization dynamics on landless Kurds’ labor have been maintained because these Kurdish seasonal agricultural workers are used as a source of cheap labor, Therefore, it is not a coincidence that wage labor in much of Türkiye’s agriculture is based on Kurds’ living in the gecekondu districts of Urfa city labor.

*Aysegul Arslan is a PhD at the Firat University in Turkey and a visiting fellow at the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University. She is scheduled to speak at the workshop titled “Contentious Politics in Kurdish Studies: Land, Nature, and Infrastructure”, September 1 2023. For more information and the program, see: https://ruralsociologywageningen.nl/category/events/ 

References

Arslan, A. Sengul, M. (2021). Seasonal Agricultural Work in Terms of Landless Peasantry Efforts to Migrate to the Urban Space: A Sample of the Sanliurfa, Çalışma ve Toplum 2, 1233-1261.

Movie Recommendations on seasonal migration

Akad, Omer Lutfi. (Director). (1973). Dügün (The Wedding) (film). Erman Film. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0261668/.

Colgecen, Nesli (Director). (1985). Zügürt Aga (The Agha) (film). Mine Film. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0201368/.

Goren, Serif; Guney, Yilmaz (Directors). (1982). Yol (The Road) (film). Cactus Film and DFK Films. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r92jcOepRmk.

Ghobadi, Bahman (Director). (2000). A Time for Drunken Horses (film). Lorber Films. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0259072/.

Oz, Kazım (Director). (2014). He Bû Tune Bû (Once Upon a Time) (film). Yapim 13 Film Production, Al Jazeera Turk TV. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3596274/.