Necmettin Türk*
Control and access to land and related natural resources have been systematically used against Kurds by the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish state as key disciplinary tools to consolidate state presence and to advance its colonial exploitation and assimilation processes. The Kurdish Freedom Movement (KFM, Tevgera Azadiyê ya Kurd) has developed an ecological struggle against these policies as an essential element of its politics to decolonize the state’s control mechanisms over land and resources through commitment to ecological and democratic principles with the objective of creating a new ethic and aesthetic of national liberation.
Kurdistan’s land has shaped Kurdish socio-economic, political, and diverse cultural structures and cosmologies. Thus, land is not only the material basis of livelihoods and needs, but also the foundation of families/tribes’ social identity, moral values, meaning and memory, and the spiritual relationship between nature and Kurds. Kurdistan’s traditional socioeconomic structure has predominantly been based on small-scale peasant and nomadic/seminomadic animal husbandry.[1] The control of land/natural resources has occupied a central space in empires and nation-states’ policies concerning population, territory, exploitation, and labour as a socio-spatial design and colonization/re-territorialization process. The Ottoman Empire reshaped the geography of Kurdistan, committed Assyrian and Armenian genocides, and confiscated their land and property. The modern Turkish state has continued these colonial policies even more aggressively against Kurds. Both tribal and religious have challenged the centralization of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish nation-state building process. That is why the Turkish state has intentionally and strategically attacked and tried to break the bond between Kurds and their land. In doing so, the state targeted the land-based socioeconomic and tribal political structure of the Kurdish people through the Plan for the Reformation of the East (1925) and the Resettlement Law (1934), which aimed to abolish the aşiret (tribal system), and shaykhs, dedes and sayyids as religious elements[2], which had preserved Kurdish culture and identity for thousands of years. These legal and administrative arrangements have gone hand-in-hand with genocidal massacres, and the prohibition/assimilation of Kurdish culture. Several significant Kurdish uprisings for territorial rights have been brutally oppressed by the state between 1925 and 1938.[3]
After the 1930s, there was effectively a period of silence in Kurdish history, until the so-called Eastern Meetings (1967-68) and a few Kurdish political movements emerged in the 1970s. However, the first real challenge for the Turkish state was the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partîya Karkeren Kurdistan, PKK), founded by Abdullah Öcalan and a group of students in 1978, which launched an armed and social struggle against landlords in North Kurdistan and then against the state itself in 1984. The PKK received great support from peasants,[4] 82.2 per cent of whom were landless, with 2.4 per cent of landlords owning more than 1,000 acres of land, a legacy of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish state early dispossession and resettlement policies.[5] This armed conflict has evolved into a civil war and resulted in the destruction of thousands of villages, the deaths of tens of thousands of people and displacement of millions.[6] The rise of the PKK has shown that Turkish state’s genocidal massacres, and prohibition on Kurdish culture have failed to turkify Kurds. Therefore, the state has adopted ecocidal policies as a new technique of cultural genocide, to profoundly transform the socio-spatial environment of the Kurds through methods such as the Southeast Anatolia Project, in Turkish the Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi (GAP), which was inaugurated in the 1970s.[7] The project consists of 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric power plants of various sizes on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, and extensive irrigation canals and reservoirs to irrigate 1.8 million hectare of land.[8] The GAP has become a profitable project for the state regarding control of natural resources, population, borders, source of energy and cash crops, and cultural assimilation of Kurdish territory.[9] The state has also committed systemic acts of dispossession, displacement, and ecological destruction as a counterinsurgency technique through ongoing deforestation, extractivism and security dams.[10]
Displacement and dispossession through warfare and development have resulted in not only proletarianization, poverty and assimilation of Kurdish peasants, but also the grabbing of the land and property of these victims by pro-state corporations, families, and so-called Village Guards in many cases. Against these genocidal and ecocidal policies concerning management of land and related resources the KFM has intertwined paradigms of Democratic Confederalism with Social Ecology, based on the ideas of its leader Abdullah Öcalan[11], in order to decolonize Kurdish territory and to communalize resources as a political and social emancipation process in its national liberation strategy.[12] The KFM formulates this as, “Let’s communalize our land, our water and our energy, let’s build a democratic, free life!”[13]. Thus, ecology has become an ontological ethos in KFM’s paradigm to create a communal economy and to implement democratic resource management, as well as to deconstruct all forms of hierarchies and the ecocidal structure of the nation-state and Capitalist Modernity.[14]
Necmettin Türk is a PhD Candidate in the Working Group “Critical Geographies of Global Inequalities” at the Institute of Geography, Hamburg University, Germany. He is scheduled to speak at the workshop titled “Contentious Politics in Kurdish Studies: Land, Nature, and Infrastructure”, September 1, 2023. For the complete program, see: https://ruralsociologywageningen.nl/2023/05/23/contentious-politics-in-kurdish-studies-workshop-land-nature-and-infrastructure/
[1] Selahettin, Erhan “The social structure in the GAP region and its evolution”, International Journal of Water Resources Development 13, no. 4 (1997).
Leila M. Harris, “Irrigation, gender, and social geographies of the changing waterscapes of southeastern Anatolia”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, no. 2 (2006).
[2] Fernandes, Desmond. “Modernity and the linguistic genocide of Kurds in Turkey”. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 217 (2012), 88-90.
[3] Adalet, B. (2022). Agricultural Infrastructures: Land, race, and statecraft in Turkey. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 40(6), 975–993. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758221124139
[4] Güneş Murat Tezcür, “Violence and nationalist mobilization: The onset of the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey”, Nationalities Papers 43, no. 2 (2015): 254–255.
[5] Dogu Ergil, “Eastern Problem”, private research report (Istanbul: Turkish Association of Chamber and Exchange, 1995), 10.
[6] Bilgen, “A project of destruction, peace, or techno-science?”, 4.
[7] Steve Tataii, “Turkey’s GAP project is an ethnic and cultural genocide against Kurds”, Ekurd Daily,March 31, 2010, http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2010/3/state3706.htm.
[8] Bilgen, “A project of destruction, peace, or techno-science?”, 1.
[9] Harris, “Irrigation, gender, and social geographies of the changing waterscapes of southeastern Anatolia”.
Karapınar, B. (2005). Land inequality in rural southeastern Turkey: Rethinking agricultural development. New Perspectives on Turkey, 32, 165–197.
[10] Jongerden, Joost. “Dams and politics in Turkey: Utilizing water, developing conflict”. Middle East Policy 17, no. 1 (2010): 137–143.
van Etten, Jacob, Joost Jongerden, Hugo J. de Vos, Annemarie Klaasse and Esther C.E. van Hoeve. “Environmental destruction as a counterinsurgency strategy in the Kurdistan region of Turkey”. Geoforum 39, no. 5 (2008): 1786–1797. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.05.001.
[11] Öcalan, A. (2017). The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan. London: Pluto Press.
[12] Sustam, E. (2021). ‘Ecological Self-Governmentality in Kurdish Space at a Time of Authoritarianism’, in Ecological Solidarity and the Kurdish Freedom Movement, Stephen E. Hunt (Eds). (1st ed. 2021 ed., pp. 41-60). Lexington Books- Rowman & Littlefield Publishing.
Pimbert, M.P. (2021). ‘Regenerating Kurdish Ecologies through Food Sovereignty, Agroecology, and Economies of Care’, in Ecological Solidarity and the Kurdish Freedom Movement, Stephen E. Hunt (Eds). (1st ed. 2021 ed., pp. 115-132). Lexington Books- Rowman & Littlefield Publishing.
[13] Sustam, ‘Ecological Self-Governmentality in Kurdish Space at a Time of Authoritarianism’, 42.
[14] Öcalan, A. (2011). Democratic Confederalism. International Initiative Edition. Oakland: PM Press.
Rural Sociology Wageningen University 