Turkey has been positively regarded by the West as a model of Muslim

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1 The Securitization of the Kurdish Minority in Turkey: Ontological Insecurity and Elite s Power Struggle as Reasons of the Recent Re-Securitization Maurizio Geri Old Dominion University Norfolk, VA Abstract This article analyzes the treatment of the Kurdish minority by the government of Turkey. The uninterrupted power of the AKP (Justice and Development Party/ Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) that since 2002 has created a de facto dominant party democracy (today going toward totalitarianism) and is implementing a strategy of securitization (Buzan, Waever, & de Wilde, 1998) of the issue of the Kurdish minority since the interruption of the ceasefire with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) in July The article argues that this strategy has been implemented for three main reasons: the reduced ontological security (Giddens, 1991) of Turkey because of the recent violent conflicts in Syria and Iraq, the risk of loss of power of the ruling party and the elites (Snyder, 2000) because of the recent entrance in the Parliament by the HDP (People s Democratic Party, a pro-kurdish party), and the ideological threat posed by HDP to the AKP regime (a left-wing progressive ideology opposed to the moderate Islamist ideology of AKP). The purpose of this study is to fill a research gap in the area of why the post-july 2015 era constitutes a new context shaping the AKP s perception and management of the Kurdish issue. The methodology followed in this research is a qualitative case study analysis based on process tracing of the recent Turkish treatment of the Kurdish minority and, in particular, the recent events of the second part of 2015 and the beginning of The article starts with a brief historical overview of Turkish democracy and a theoretical overview on the securitization theory. Then, it analyzes the past and current securitization of the Kurdish issue, arguing that the causes of the recent intensification of this securitization since the summer of 2015 have to be found in these three factors: the low level of ontological security of the state; the fear of losing the power by the AKP ruling elite; and the threat to the political ideology of the AKP posed by the HDP. The Turkish Democracy: Between Inclusion and Exclusion Turkey has been positively regarded by the West as a model of Muslim democracy only since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The country did not hold democratic elections until 1950; and even if it formally established itself DOI: /dome Digest of Middle East Studies Volume 26, Number 1 Pages VC 2016 Policy Studies Organization. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

2 Digest of Middle East Studies as a democracy based on a multiparty system, the military seized power several times in the second part of the twentieth century, when some concerns, in particular regarding secularism, were worrying the elites. Turkey experienced military coups in 1960 and 1980, and military memoranda, or soft coups that deposed elected governments in 1971 and In 1996, Turkey had its first pro-islamic government since 1923, but the military blocked it with the soft coup and the Constitutional Court banned Islamist parties until Therefore, even though Turkey has been one of the only two democratic countries in the Middle East since the beginning of 1900, with the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 (the other country being Iran with its Persian Constitutional Revolution in 1905), it is only with the beginning of the twenty-first century that the Turkish state started to be on the right track for a final step toward a substantial democracy. The Justice and Development Party) attained power in 2002, representing the first moderate Islamist party (even if it defines itself as conservative democratic ) elected in the country without an intervention of the army or the Constitutional Court. The AKP has been ruling Turkey since then very successfully, both in terms of politics and moreover of economy. However, perpetual electoral victory is not a good sign for democracy, as Przeworski (2000) and others have argued about the need for alternation in power (in particular if the use of power becomes increasingly exclusionary and authoritarian). During the years, Turkish democracy became a de facto dominant party system as the AKP-held office for four terms including the last one which started in November 2015 and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been Prime Minister for three terms, is currently Turkey s President. The Erdogan presidency is turning the Turkish democracy toward a de facto totalitarianism, with a crackdown on liberties and opposition voices, in particular after the elections of summer 2015 and the coup attempt in summer President Erdogan is also trying to create a presidential system that could further weaken democratic institutions in Turkey, signing probably the end of the Turkish model of Muslim democracy. But how did Turkey arrive at this point? Briefly we can say that at the beginning of its rule, the AKP tried to build a gradual conservative democracy without confrontation with the power of judiciary and military actors at least until the 2007 elections when the AKP grew in electoral support and started trying to reduce the power of the old secular and nationalist Kemalist establishment. After 2007, the AKP gradually worked toward developing a new social contract in order to rewrite a civilian constitution together with different forces (the last constitution of Turkey had been written by the Army in 1982). But after the following elections in 2011, when the AKP realized that its growing power could soon reach the absolute majority in Parliament, it postponed the constitutional writing process to wait for a majority position in order to change the constitution with minimal input from other forces. This plan was blocked in the elections of July 2015, because of the success of the pro-kurds People s Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi/HDP), a leftist secular party that gave voice, not only to the 188 Securitization of the Kurdish Minority in Turkey

3 Spring 2017 Kurds, but also to the young segment of the population that was concerned about the authoritarian and Islamist, even if moderate, drift of the regime. This can be considered the turning point in the strategy of the AKP toward the Kurdish minority, as this study will explain later. This process of increasing popular support for the AKP as well as political power for the party went together. After 2011, a process of authoritarian drift began to be carried out, with the AKP and Erdogan increasingly using their power to reduce freedom of speech and assembly and attack critical media and human rights activists. This shift in strategy was caused, not only by the positive results of the 2011 elections, but also by the international events of the Arab Spring. The turbulence of the Arab Spring made the AKP government worried about possible internal repercussions, in particular with the increased internal tensions with the G ulen movement 1 and the Gezi Park protests in 2013, which represented the increased frustration of the youth with the Turkish regime. This process that could be called of authoritarization of policies created significant polarization in the country population at two level, one social and one ethnic. At the social level on one side, there are the young forces of civil society, often more leftist oriented; and on the other side, the most religious and conservative part of population. At the ethnic level, there are two main nationalist souls in Turkey, those who identify as ethnic Turks and those who ethnically identify as Kurds. This often, but not always, overlaps with another polarization between Turkish citizens, among those who support the Kurdish requests for some form of self-rule like public education in Kurd and some territorial autonomy and those who believe that these requests represent a substantial menace to Turkish unity and national identity. Today, therefore, Turkey is no longer considered by scholars, or by international indexes, as a really effective and substantive democracy. For example, the Democracy Index of the Economist Intelligence Unit, a recognized index on democracies in the world, defines Turkey as hybrid regimes between democracy and autocracy. 2 Freedom House 3 instead, (FH) in its 2015 survey Freedom in the World, considers Turkey as a partly free country ( electoral but not liberal democracy). This evaluation, the FH survey states (p. 13), is due mainly to political interference in anticorruption mechanisms as well as in the media and judiciary system (like raids and arrests against media affiliated with Erdogan s opposition), along with greater tensions between the majority Sunni and the minority Alevis, but also as a lack of inclusion of Kurds. Furthermore, the recent fight against DAESH/ISIS at the border, which began in 2015, but intensified in 2016, pushed the AKP to have to deal with very important national security threats, caused by the state failure of its two bordering countries, Syria and Iraq. Given these conditions, the relationship between the Turkish state and its biggest minority, the Kurds, has been deteriorating, with the ceasefire that began in 2013, breaking down in This led to the restarting of what has been for several times in the past, a securitization process of this minority, considered by the regime a national security threat. But this has not always been the case during the AKP rule. Geri 189

4 Digest of Middle East Studies Since 2002, the AKP has started a process of inclusion of the two groups that had been traditionally excluded by the Turkish secular Kemalist philosophy: the Islamist group, the conservative pious people, with the symbolic lift of the ban on headscarves and other policies in favor of a moderate Islam, and the Kurdish minority, with the legislation of new laws that allowed, for example, the Kurdish language to be used for the first time in private schools and broadcasting. As Cavanaugh and Hughes (2015) put it, the AKP, together with the HDP, brought the Kurdish issue back in politics from the political cold. But, as this article argues, while the first process of inclusion of the conservative part of society worked successfully and is still on-going, the second process, the inclusion and equal participation of Kurdish minority in the Turkish polity that seems to eventually lead to a peace process with the PKK, has been reversed since the summer of 2015, with a securitization process put in place by the same AKP that had started its inclusion. And the reasons have to be found in the growing power of Kurdish political representation, both abroad (in particular in Syria) and domestically (with the HDP party) and the consequent threat to the ontological security and the elites power of the Turkish government. But before to analyze this process we need to understand the securitization theory and its application. Securitization Theory: Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde The securitization theory is a critical theory based on a broadening process of security concepts formulated by the Copenhagen School after the Cold War. The broadening of security still considers states as the main actors of security but at the same time, instead of limiting security to the national-military area, it divides it into five sectors: military, environmental, economic, societal, and political (Buzan et al., 1998). This distinction of classical threat perception of an enemy state, and the traditional security studies based on a rigorous national security philosophy, could not represent the post-cold War situation anymore. With the growth of intrastate conflicts and global threats like migrations, pollution, terrorism and epidemics, an international relations theory is needed to expand the security concept to other spheres (Buzan & Hansen, 2009:187). On this path, the school created the securitization theory, meaning when a state labels something only as a security issue, it gives it a sense of urgency that justifies extraordinary measures to deal with it outside the political arena. Therefore, the securitization process requires extreme measures that make an issue a question to be dealt only with repression not in the marketplace of ideas. Buzan et al. (1998), described specifically securitization as an extreme version of politicization (p. 23), a process that happens when one issue is promoted from a politicized arena inside the sphere of public policy and governance to a securitized arena, framing the issue as an existential threat that can be treated only through emergency measures. When this happens, the issue passes from the political area 190 Securitization of the Kurdish Minority in Turkey

5 Spring 2017 the public discourse where everything can be negotiated and addressed by policies to a non-political but politicized space beyond the ordinary norms of the political domain, looking only for extraordinary security measures. According to Buzan et al. (1998) the process of securitization is based on three specific elements: 1) the referent objects objects that can be existentially threatened. The state and the nation (the sovereignty and the identity) that represent the traditional middle level limited collectivities (p. 36); 2) the securitizing actors, such as governments, political elite, military or civil society, that do the so-called security speech act (p. 40) declaring the referent object as existentially threatened; and 3) the functional actors the actors that influence the decisions on security, who have a stake in the issue, like a private company or a political party that will benefit from the securitization process. Therefore, not only the state, but all the parts of the polity and the society participate in the process of securitization in a way or another. With this in mind we can now analyze the Turkish case; what follows is a brief discussion on how the securitization theory can be applied to the Kurdish case. The Securitization of the Kurdish Issue As stated earlier, this article starts from the premise that Turkey has recently reintensified the strategy of securitization of the Kurdish minority, in particular, in the southeastern part of Turkey. But the current process of securitization of the Kurdish people in the region is not unique in Turkish history. Specifically, some scholars argue that in the past, the Turkish state has created a state of exception 4 (Agamben, 2005) for the Kurdish minority (Kadioglu, 2013). Agamben states that every citizen is partly homo sacer, 5 in the sense that every citizen is subject to inclusion and/or exclusion depending on the political moment. For the Turkish republic, Kadioglu (2013:143) argues, the Kurds are predominantly homines sacri because, as she states: the rhetoric of the need to preserve a state with its nation has consistently contributed to the justification of the state of exception (p. 156). In addition, other scholars have discussed a state of exception within the context of Turkey. Kurban (2014) for example argues that since the establishment of the Republic in 1923, some form of state of exception was operative in Turkey most of the time (p. 346). The state of exception therefore can be considered as one of the tools of the extraordinary measures typical of the securitization process that has been carried out in different moments of Turkish history toward the Kurdish minority. Using the Buzan et al. (1998) structure, we can clearly see how the Kurdish minority has been securitized since the foundation of the Republic, but in particular since the creation of PKK, and recently re-securitized, again putting the Kurdish issue above politics, in the realm of extraordinary measures. But in order to more fully understand the current conditions, it is necessary to put them in the conceptual framework of the three elements of securitization, together with the extraordinary measures taken. Geri 191

6 Digest of Middle East Studies Regarding the referent objects objects that can be existentially threatened in the Turkish case they can be defined as the sovereignty and the identity of the country. Turkish sovereignty and identity are perceived as existentially threatened by the Kurdish claim for regional autonomy and cultural rights. With respect to the securitizing actors, these have been primarily the Turkish governments, with its political elite that have been using the so called security speech act to declare the referent object (sovereignty and unity of the country) as existentially threatened in order to escalate the conflict with the PKK and stigmatize the political wings of the Kurdish minority to avoid channelizing Kurdish requests in the political arena. In addition, the Turkish military has been a securitizing actor through the militarization of the Kurdish region and the conflict itself. Finally, the functional actors the actors that influence the decisions on security as they have a stake in the issue can be identified with the non-state actors. Examples of these are the mass media, which contribute to the divisive narrative of us-them and delegitimizes the political factions of the minority as groups supporting the terrorists, or solely wanting separatism (Erdem, 2014). But functional actors are also political parties that have benefited from the securitization process. These include all of the AKP, but also other political parties present in Parliament, including the Republican People s Party and the Nationalist Movement Party. These parties compete for power as all parties do and so they strongly benefited from the securitization of the Kurdish minority, that limited the possibility of creating and empowering a party that could represent their legitimate demand (this actually has been blocked also with the 10% threshold in the Turkish Parliament, the highest threshold in the world to avoid representation of minorities). The extraordinary measures taken by the securitizing actors are represented by the total war strategy carried out by the Turkish security forces against the PKK. This led to an increasingly state of exception or state of emergency that had several consequences among which the killing of hundreds of civilians besides the PKK fighters; the destruction of parts of Kurdish cities, in particular Cizre (Soguel, 2016), but also others like Sur, Silopi, Idil, and Nusyabin; the imposed curfews in many towns; and the forced displacement of population. This has resulted in the intervention of international human rights associations who requested Turkey to stop its abusive use of force in the Kurdish areas (Soguel, 2015). The European Union and the rest of the international community, however, remained relatively silent about Turkey s disproportionate use of force, because of the needed support from Turkey in the refugee crisis and the war against Daesh/ISIS. Other extreme measures included the targeting of the pro-kurdish political parties (Bayir, 2014). Before 2015, these attacks were represented by the ban of Kurdish parties like the Democratic Society Party or the KCK trials in Since the June 2015 elections, the repression has been based on charges filed by President Erdogan and the AKP accusing the HDP of supporting terrorism, with the aim to take out the parliamentarian immunity from the elected HDP legislators and so nullifying 192 Securitization of the Kurdish Minority in Turkey

7 Spring 2017 their presence in the Parliament. This goal was reached in May 2016, when the Turkish parliament voted to strip the lawmakers immunity (Peker, 2016). The targeting of human rights, civilian and bar associations can be also considered extreme measures. The Erdogan regime has increased this targeting gradually since 2011, much more since the summers of 2015, and finally with the failed attempted coup of summer One emblematic targeting of this kind has been the assassination at the end of November 2015 of a prominent Kurdish lawyer, Tahir Elci, leader of the Kurdish Bar Association. Elci had been arrested for saying that the PKK was not a terrorist organization 7 one month before. This shows how today in Turkey the Kurds are a security concern, not only as guerillas and militants (that could be explained through national security reasons), but also as activists, political parties, and in general, as a civilian population protesting against the militarization of the region. Even academicians have been targeted recently, hundreds of them have been put under investigation for signing a petition asking the government to stop the violence in the Southeastern region (Redden, 2016). In addition, the few local journals that have opposed the Erdogan regime and have denounced the AKP war on Kurds have been targeted. This is especially true for the Zaman, ajournal supported by the G ulen movement, before with the arrest of some of its journalists and finally imposing a state administrator since March 2016 (resulting in the journal s ceasing its criticism of the government). This process increasingly resembles the end of the Sri Lankan civil war between the Tamil and the government, when in 2009, the Sri Lankan Army decided to carry out a final offensive to end the Tamil resistance, destroying the Tamil villages and killing tens of thousands of civilians in the process. The Sri Lankan government also carried out a final crackdown on independent journalism, activists and politicians, to end with the Tamil terrorism. The AKP today says that there is a terrorist problem, not a Kurdish problem, in Turkey. Therefore, the securitization process of the Kurdish minority is aimed at reducing the Kurdish issue to a security-militarized problem a terrorist problem, concentrating on attacking the militant organization coming from this minority, the PKK, and delegitimizing the rest of the minority in its social and political expressions. This has the outcome of both repressing the civilian population of the region and attacking the political expression of the PKK party. This has helped Turkey to erase elements of legitimacy of the Kurdish requests, based on a value rationality of dignity and self-identity as Varshney (2003) defined it blocking any possibility of channeling their demands and abandoning the armed struggle for a political inclusion. This process has been a common trend in the Middle Eastern states since the end of the Ottoman Empire that created a securitization of minorities requests, targeting non-state actors like militant groups that fought for their self-determination (from Hezbollah to Hamas), and labeling them always as terrorist organizations, with the support of the international community. The securitization of Kurds has been closely scrutinized because of Turkey s desire to join the EU. The EU has repeatedly asked Turkey to change course on its treatment of Kurds. Unfortunately, Geri 193

8 Digest of Middle East Studies the intensification of this process after the end of the ceasefire in 2015 taken together with the war in Syria and the refugee crisis in Europe, leading to a reduction in pressure from the EU on Turkish domestic issues. Turkey now symbolically and geographically represents a buffer for the EU against Daesh/ISIS expansion and also for millions of refugees. These conditions have contributed to Turkey s increased freedom to implement re-securitization strategies of the Kurdish minority. Nevertheless, the new turn of Turkey toward authoritarianism after the failed coup in summer 2016 could change the cards on the table. But let s see now what have been the specific causes behind this re-intensification of the securitization process of the Kurdish issue. The First Cause of the Re-Securitization of the Kurdish Issue: Low Ontological Security In securitization theory, there are five different sectors of security: military, environmental, economic, societal, and political. All of these sectors are touched by the securitization of the Kurds, but this study concentrates in particular on the last two sectors, the societal and the political. The societal sector of security, the sector that creates a sense of security for a community of people with a shared identity (identity security) (Buzan et al., 1998:120) can be characterized by horizontal or vertical competition (p. 121). The former is related with the threat of neighboring cultures, the latter with the threat coming from above or below the state, which is from a wider identity (e.g., the EU case) or a narrower one (e.g., the case of a local actor). The Kurdish case represents a case of vertical societal securitization, with a narrower identity of an ethnic minority that threaten the Turkish identity. One could fairly argue, based on the securitization theory, that one of the causes of Turkey s current securitization of the Kurds is related to the security of identity, and so with the ontological security of the Turkish nation. Turkey as a state, along with its representative government, feels an ontological concern in its national identity that is not allowing her to accept any type of Kurdish policies of autonomy (either as democratic autonomy or in another form) seen as a clear threat to the security of itself. The ontological security concept was first introduced by Anthony Giddens (1991) and later transferred to the International Relations (IR) field by Jennifer Mitzen (2006) and Brent J. Steele (2008). The ontological security in IR refers to the needs of the states to have a secure notion of the self in the sense of its national state identity, like in some way an existential security. Every state has different ontological interpretations of security depending on its history, geography, culture, and so forth. If a state s notion of the self and its position in the world is stable, it has a stable ontological security; otherwise, it becomes unstable and is at risk of being undermined. This level of security can change with time, in particular with the disruption of routines, which make the state feel anxious by the changes. 194 Securitization of the Kurdish Minority in Turkey

9 Spring 2017 Turkey, for example, has experienced an unstable ontological security at its foundation after the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire and with the risk of dismemberment before the Turkish war of independence in some way similar to the implosion of the Soviet Union. 8 This lack of ontological security for fear of foreign invasion (sometimes called also the Sèvres syndrome ), 9 but also because of disruption in the previous routines (from a Middle Eastern identity, Turkey went toward a Western identity and imposed a secular model) has contributed to the initial securitization of the Kurdish minority, who are considered an internal enemy. Later, around the middle of twentieth century, when the Kurdish issue seemed to be under control, Turkey experienced a stronger ontological security and so the repression was not so strong. The recent PKK insurgency led to reduced ontological security (with a consequent increase in securitization). Although the new pluralistic approach of AKP in the framework of the EU candidacy seemingly reinforced its ontological security, it has recently been reduced again. This reduction has been influenced by the failure of two bordering states (Iraq and Syria) and the creation of two Kurdish autonomous regions in those states (Southern Kurdistan in Iraq since 2005 and the Western Kurdistan in Syria since November 2013). More recently, the resistance of Kobane in 2015, where the PKK s assistance to the Syrian Kurds of YPG (People s Protection Unit) had again raised the fear of a Kurdish statehood that could include a part of current Turkey has also reduced the state s ontological security. The Kurdish issue, therefore, has come to the forefront of Turkish security again within the context of the Turkish insecurity of the self. This is based on the fear of a Northern Kurdistan to be created in Turkey by some external forces supporting the PKK, and of potential fragmentation of sovereign territory that could result in a loss of national unity (C elik, 2015). Again the Sèvres syndrome impacted the actions of Turkey, as to say it with Guida (2008): this paranoia (also) inevitably leads to irrational overreactions and apparently irrational behaviors by the masses and by politicians (p. 37). This national fear represented one of the principal causes of the process of securitization, and in particular of its recent re-intensification, besides the historical structural reasons that blocked Turkey from the inclusion of minorities. Put another way by Kinzer (2008): something about the concept of diversity frightens Turkey s ruling elite. It triggers the deep insecurity that has gripped Turkish rulers ever since the Republic was founded in 1923, an insecurity that today prevents Turkey from taking its proper place in the modern world (p. 10). Second Cause: Elite Self-Interest and the Power Struggle for the Government of Turkey There are other causes, related in particular to the domestic politics, which we can analyze with respect to the recent intensification of the securitization of the Kurdish minority. A fundamental reason can be found in the elite s interests and the power Geri 195

10 Digest of Middle East Studies struggle for the government of Turkey. Drawing from scholars of ethno-nationalist theories (Gill, 2005; Marx, 2002; Snyder, 2000) we see how the elite often promote exclusive nationalist policies once they fear the risk of loss of power, and so it is the elite s interests that mostly determine a state s approach to ethnic minorities. Snyder (2000; Mansfield & Snyder, 2005) famously argued that transition to democracy brings more ethnic conflict because of nationalism supported by parties pandering for votes, in particular when there are no preconditions like an adaptable ruling elite or liberal elements such as rule of law and a free press. This theory can be used for the Turkish case not at the beginning of the AKP ruling, when the approach was more inclusive and less nationalist, but more so during the last elections, when the resort to nationalism was used to thwart the power of parties like HDP supported by ethnic minorities. Marx also argues that the elite intentionally use nationalist policies to create inner group cohesion. Gill, who studied religious minorities, further argues that the politicians and religious actors make a rational cost-benefit analysis and then decide on restrictions against the minorities when this benefits their power. Therefore, one could expect that the elite will follow an accommodative and inclusive or a repressive and exclusive approach depending on which one in that moment supports more of their power and their political survival. So we should ask what has been the situation of the Turkish ruling party, the AKP, with its strategy to maintain and increase political power since it came to power in 2002? The AKP, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who won the elections in 2002, has a long term political plan to build a new, powerful Turkey with a strong presidential system and a conservative Islamist approach to politics and social life. The AKP needed the support of the majority of the population to carry out this plan, including the Kurds of the Eastern regions, which generally voted for pro-kurdish parties. The party was on the right path to have this support in the following elections in 2007 and 2011 when it kept increasing the percentage of the votes in the Kurdish region (even if reducing its seats because of how the electoral system is structured in Turkey). Fewer people voted for the pro-kurdish parties in those two elections, which entered the Parliament after presenting themselves as independent candidates in an alliance with left wing parties such as the Thousand Hope Candidates in 2007 and the Labour, Democracy and Freedom Bloc in This showed that the AKP strategy was working well. Erdogan accepted the initiation of a peace process with the PKK when he considered it beneficial for his regime in order to get more votes from the Kurdish minority which he needed to reach the absolute majority. This was somewhat facilitated after Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of PKK who has been in jail since 1999, said that he was no longer interested in independence, or even democratic autonomy, but instead, cultural rights (Daloglu, 2013). According to Tekdemir and Goksel (2015), the peace process started because the AKP understood that the conflict could not possibly be resolved via the conventional approach of the Turkish state that securitized the issue and resorted to measures such as launching military operations against the PKK, arresting its sympathizers, 196 Securitization of the Kurdish Minority in Turkey

11 Spring 2017 imposing martial law in predominantly Kurdish provinces and banning successive pro-kurdish political parties on charges of supporting terrorism (Tekdemir & Goksel, 2015). But the recent re-securitization make this argument flawed. Others, like Deniz Serhatli, argue that the Syrian Crisis and the Kurds autonomy formation in Syria was the main motivation behind starting the peace process. Turkey, in other words, by initiating the peace process, attempted to prevent the Kurds from forming an autonomous region in Syria and also aimed to convince them to work with Ankara against the Bashar al-assad regime. But if this was the reason behind the peace process, an attempt to block the autonomization of a Kurdish region in Syria, why after two years since its initiations and 13 years since the start of an accommodative approach to the Kurdish issue by the AKP, did the government changed its strategy after June 2015? The actual reason for the peace process seems to have been more a political calculation to reach the absolute majority, because the strategy changed when this calculation appeared wrong. The AKP, inverting its growing trend, lost its relative majority for the first time in the election of June 2015, and with it, its dream to reach the absolute majority needed for its desired constitutional revision. The plan had to be postponed because of the surprising success of the pro-kurdish HDP Party. The AKP strategy of granting cultural rights to Kurds and trying to create a dialogue with PKK had not worked. What seemed an opportunistic approach of Erdogan and the AKP to the peace process with PKK did not bear the expected fruits. Some analysts speculated that Erdogan actually had already suspended the peace process shortly before the June elections when he saw it did not fit with its strategy anymore and it was not bringing increased popular or electoral support (Sunday s Zaman, 2015). But why had many Kurds voted in June against the AKP, inverting after many years, its growing trend, and then switch back to voting for the AKP in November 2015? There can be many reasons, and to analyze them is not the objective of this article, but briefly we can say that the new HDP inclusive approach toward minorities and any diversity was very helpful for its relative victory in June, while the AKP securitization approach, with the goal of instilling fear of instability and chaos, also was very helpful for its relative victory in the snap elections of November. There can be other reasons too. According to some scholars (Cagaptay, 2015), the Kurdish community all over Turkey started to vote in mass for HDP in June 2015 because Turkey refused to help the Kurds in Kobani, Syria which borders Turkey, when in September 2014, DAESH/ISIS entered causing terrible bloodshed. Others argue that a diversity of minorities not solely the Kurds that had supported AKP in the past, were the ones that shifted their votes. Therefore, the Turkish multiculturalism had saved Turkish democracy by supporting the HDP (Feffer, 2015). Whatever the case, one thing is evident: in order to recuperate the votes of the moderate Kurds lost in June, Erdogan and the AKP decided to not follow the peace process, which was representing a strategy that did not follow its political policies. It is difficult to say who broke the truce first, the government or PKK, but the government is always Geri 197

12 Digest of Middle East Studies the actor that should maintain the negotiations alive when there is a risk of failing, so it is the government that decided to go back to the securitization of Kurdish minority, including its main representative political actor, the HDP. The first thing that President Erdogan did, as the election results blocked the AKP from forming a new government, was to appeal to the impossibility of a coalition government and call for snap elections in November. Usually these kinds of elections result in increased majorities for the party already in power, as they are called by that party at an advantageous time for the electoral campaign. The goal of Erdogan in the meantime was to make a strong campaign against the HDP, based on delegitimization and stigmatization of the HDP, guilty of not clearly detaching itself from the violent struggle of PKK. After the HDP entered the Parliament in June, its 80 parliamentarians elected had been reported by Erdogan to the judiciary, with the accusation of supporting terrorism (Zunini, 2015) and losing the parliamentary immunity in May Indirectly helping this strategy, the HDP was not able to launch an active campaign between June and November 2015, in particular because of the security threats, to convince the population of its condemnation of the PKK attacks, or of its ability to contribute to a stable peace process for a solution of the Kurdish issue. Actually the worst terrorist attack in Turkish history happened in Ankara during the electoral campaign in October, at a rally being held by several Trade Unions and the HDP to protest against the growing conflict between the Turkish Armed Forces and the PKK (in which more than 100 people died, including two HDP candidates). This attack had the effect of blocking the HDP from leading rallies during the campaign, making it difficult for the HDP to win votes in the following November elections and, thus, contributed to increasing polarization and instability in Turkey (The Economist, 2015). DAESH/ISIS had been considered the perpetrators of the attack, but the HDP accused the government and some part of the deep state of being behind. The results of this strategy of targeting the HDP party have been that the elections of November 2015 could no longer be considered completely free and fair, as in the past. The perception of unfairness was exacerbated by Erdogan s crackdown on free and open reporting by the press (Shaheen, 2015). The HDP lost votes, although it maintained its presence in Parliament, and the AKP regained its absolute majority. The strategy worked well, despite the fact that now to make constitutional changes, which require either 2/3 of Parliament or 331 MPs plus a referendum, the AKP will need the support of other parliamentarians (it has 316 MPs), but this does not seem difficult. All these evaluations confirm that the change of strategy of the AKP, with the recent intensification of the securitization of Kurds, has been caused by the need of the AKP ruling elite to regain the political power lost in the former elections, in order to guarantee not only its political survival, but also the possibility of carrying on the program of building a powerful government for the transformation of a Turkish future in a Presidential Republic and a global power, with a new Islamist, even if moderate approach, to politics. 198 Securitization of the Kurdish Minority in Turkey

13 Spring 2017 Third Possible Cause: Political Ideological Threat Finally, there is a third possible cause in this change of strategy related to the political securitization (besides the societal one). The HDP, heir of the former pro- Kurdish parties, has an anticapitalist, antinationalist, and pro-minority rights identity with a secular vision of society opposite to the Islamist moderate vision of the AKP. To lose the possibility of absolute majority because a pro-kurdish party passed the threshold of 10% represented not only a defeat, but a humiliation. It was not only a threat to political power but, specifically, a threat to political conservative ideology for the AKP. All this because the HDP itself represents a menace to the AKP identity as it challenges basic foundations of the new Turkey with an Islamist, even if moderate, identity that the AKP tried to build. Going back briefly to the securitization theory of Buzan et al. (1998), it is important to remember that in the political sector of securitization, there are nine types of threats, but one in particular is relevant to the Kurdish case: the intentional threats to (weak) states on political-ideological grounds (p. 156). Therefore, the political securitization, separately from the societal, military, environmental, or economic securitization, is based also on a threat against the ruling party s political ideology; and in the HDP case this threat was evident. Among other things for example, the HDP has a co-presidential system of leadership, with one chairman and one chairwoman; it guarantees a 50% quota to women and 10% to the LGBT community; and it has a secular modern progressive identity very different from the conservative Islamist identity of the AKP. Besides this, the HDP has been defined sometimes as the political wing of the PKK and some scholars even believe that the HDP could represent the Sinn Fein of PKK (Aybet, 2015). Even if the relationship between the two actors is not at all clear, the fact that the HDP is considered close to the PKK could represent a threat to the AKP political ideology, being not only a secular and leftist party, but even possibly being related to the Marxist alternative of the PKK, to the liberal economic ideology of AKP. We can argue, therefore, that besides the low ontological security of Turkish state, and the electoral results of June 2015, that the political ideological threat posed by the HDP may have contributed to the shift of the government strategy toward the Kurds, the end of the peace process and the re-securitization of the Kurdish issue. Conclusion The general conclusion on the re-securitization of Kurdish minority, in particular since the end of 2015 and beginning of 2016, is that the strategy used by the AKP is not helping to solve the Kurdish issue and, in fact, seems to represent a huge challenge for the inclusive democratic future of Turkey. Especially because this strategy hinders the path to a full and liberal democracy in Turkey, by obstructing freedom of the media (Turkey is ranked 149 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index, 2015) and in general suppressing freedom of speech and assembly Geri 199

14 Digest of Middle East Studies (worsened since the failed military coup of July 2016). These strategies have polarized the political debate and exacerbated the social conflict between a more modern, liberal, and young population and the moderate Islamist regime created by the AKP. All these challenges, together with the war against Daesh/ISIS, the failing states of Syria and Iraq, and the refugee crisis, highlight the need for a greater stability in Turkey and a social peace for its people. It also highlights the need for a major role for the European Union, which might go back to put pressure on Turkey for the inclusion of minorities and, specifically, for a solution relative to the Kurdish conflict. Only through starting a new inclusive policy toward Kurdish minority will Turkey be able to promote social peace and equal participation the only path for a stable and sustainable democratic future for the country and the region. Notes 1. The G ulen movement is a religious and social movement guided by a Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah G ulen. At the beginning of the AKP government, G ulen was a supporter and friend of Erdogan but, at the time the relationship deteriorated. Today G ulen has been exiled to the United States, the movement is referred by Turkish government as the G ulenist Terror Organization (FETO) and a state administrator has been running the G ulen newspaper Today s Zaman since March Accessed August 20, 2016, pdf. 3. Accessed August 20, 2016, A state of exception is similar toa stateofemergency, whenastate transcends the rule of law in thenameofthepublic goodpassing fromademocratic system to a de facto authoritarian regime. 5. Homo sacer, from the Latin sacred man, was a figure of Roman law representing a person who was banned and might be killed by anybody. 6. The KCK or Group of Communities in Kurdistan was an organization founded to put into practice Ocalan s ideology of Democratic Confederalism. 7. Erdogan accused the PKK for the killing but many people protested in the capital defining it a homicide of the regime as there was no reason why the PKK should have kill someone who was legitimizing the PKK itself. 8. Actually, Russia too can be considered with a low level of ontological security today, and this could be also one of the reasons of the current degradation of the relationship between the two states besides great power politics. 9. The Sèvres syndrome is the Turkish ontological fear that external forces try to weaken or split Turkey, in reference to the Treaty of Sèvres where the Allied powers after WWI decided the partition of the Ottoman Empire, including Turkey (see Guida, 2008). References Agamben, G. (2005). State of exception. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Aybet, G. (2015). Turkey: For peace to succeed, PKK and HDP must part. Middle East Eye. Retrieved from Securitization of the Kurdish Minority in Turkey

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