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“ADULTS SEE POLITICS AS A GAME”: POLITICS OF KURDISH CHILDREN IN URBAN TURKEY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2013

Haydar Darıcı
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Abstract

This article explores the political subjectivity of Kurdish children in urban Turkey. Often referred to as “stone-throwing children,” since the early 2000s Kurdish children have entered Turkish public discourse as central political actors of the urban Kurdish movement. I suggest that the politicization of children can be understood in the context of transformations in age and kinship systems within the Kurdish community that were shaped by the forced migration of Kurds in the early 1990s. Focusing on the experiences of Kurdish children in the city of Adana, I argue that memories of violence transmitted by displaced parents, combined with the children's experiences of urban life, including exclusion, discrimination, poverty, and state violence, necessitate a reevaluation of how childhood is conceived and experienced within the Kurdish community. In a context where Kurdish adults often have trouble integrating into the urban context, their children frequently challenge conventional power relations within their families as well as within the Kurdish movement. In contrast to a dominant Turkish public discourse positing that these children are being abused by politicized adults, I contend that Kurdish children are active agents who subvert the agendas and norms of not only Turkish but also Kurdish politics. The article analyzes the ways Kurdish children are represented in the public discourse, how they narrate and make sense of their own politicization, and the relationship between the memory and the postmemory of violence in the context of their mobilization.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , November 2013 , pp. 775 - 790
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

NOTES

1 Scholarship on the Kurdish movement, most of which is by political scientists and historians, has focused largely on the changing ideologies and practices of the PKK. See, for example, White, Paul, Primitive Rebels or Revolutionary Modernizers? The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey (London: Zed Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Gunter, Michael M., The Kurds and the Future of Turkey (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997)Google Scholar; McDowall, David, A Modern History of the Kurds (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996)Google Scholar; and Marcus, Aliza, Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence (New York: New York University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. A few scholars have looked at the activities of legal political formations, including political parties and NGOs. See, for example, Gambetti, Zeynep Caglayan, “The Conflictual (Trans)formation of the Public Sphere in Urban Space: The Case of Diyarbakir,” New Perspectives on Turkey 32 (2005): 43–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Watts, Nicole F., Activists in Office: Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2010)Google Scholar. This article focuses on another register of resistance, the radical mobilization of young people in urban sites, through ethnographic analysis, which has thus far been limited within Kurdish studies.

2 Gürbilek, Nurdan, Kötü Çocuk Türk (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2001), 45Google Scholar.

3 Ibid.

4 http://www.radikal.com.tr/haber.php?haberno=183107 (accessed 1 April 2006).

5 http://hurarsiv.hurriyet.com.tr/goster/haber.aspx?id=4167043&tarih=2006–03–29 (accessed 29 March 2006).

6 http://bianet.org/bianet/insan-haklari/134475-akco-cocuklar-icin-kurum-bakimi-son-secenek (accessed 2 December 2011)

7 http://www.radikal.com.tr/turkiye/atis_serbestcocuklar_sizi_anne_babanizdan_daha_cok_seviyoruz-909396 (accessed 21 November 2008)

8 İnsan Hakları Derneği, “Faaliyet Raporu,” May 2008, http://www.ihd.org.tr/images/pdf/diyarbakir_faaliyet_raporu_2008.pdf.

9 Yıldırım Türker, “Altaylı Geliyor”, Radikal Gazetesi, 8 December 2008, http://www.radikal.com.tr/Default.aspx?aType=RadikalYazarYazisi&ArticleID=911907&Yazar=YILDIRIM%20T%C3%9CRKER&Date=08.12.2008&CategoryID=97.

10 Hughes, Nancy S. and Sargent, Carolyn, “Introduction,” in Small War: The Cultural Politics of Childhood, ed. Hughes and Sargent (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998), 11Google Scholar.

11 Ibid.

12 Collins, John, Occupied by Memory: The Intifada Generation and the Palestinian State of Emergency (New York: New York University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., 61.

14 Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK, was arrested in 1999 and imprisoned in solitary confinement on İmralı Island. He is allowed to meet only with his lawyers, whom he has told that he has been exposed to violence and received death threats in prison. When this was made public, Kurdish children organized demonstrations in many cities in Turkey. See http://bianet.org/english/insan-haklari/110329-ocalanin-avukatlari-imralida-kotu-muamele-sorusturmasi-istiyor (accessed 10 June 2013).

15 http://www.yenieksen.com/haber/siyaset/ta-atan-cocuklara-alece-rehabltasyon/3843.html; http://www.gazetediyarbakir.com/haber-377-Travma-yasayan-cocuklara-ritimli-rehabilitasyon.html (both accessed 20 June 2013).

16 I used pseudonyms to protect my interviewees. This is also the case for the name of the neighborhood.

17 Çelik, Ayşe Betület al. Zorunlu Göçle Yüzleşmek: Türkiye'de Yerinden Edilme Sonrası Vatandaşlığın Inşası (Istanbul: TESEV Yayınları, 2006)Google Scholar.

18 For a detailed analysis, see Darıcı, Haydar, “Politics of Privacy: Forced Migration and the Spatial Struggle of the Kurdish Youth,” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 13 (2011): 457–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 See, for example, Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1965)Google Scholar; Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John, “Reflections on Youth, From the Past to the Postcolony,” in Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa, ed. Honwana, Alcinda and de Boeck, Filip (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Neyzi, Leyla, “Object or Subject? The Paradox of ‘Youth’ in Turkey,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 33 (2001): 411–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Steedman, Carolyn, Childhood, Culture, and Class in Britain: Margaret Mcmillan, 1860–1931 (London: Virago Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Das, Veena, “Voices of Children,” Daedalus (1989): 262–94Google Scholar; and Reynolds, Pamela, “Not Known Because Not Looked For: Ethnographers Listening to the Young in Southern Africa,” Ethos 60 (1995): 158–81Google Scholar.

20 Gambetti, “The Conflictual (Trans)formation of the Public Sphere.”

21 Ibid., 51.

22 Ibid.

23 Peteet, Julie, “Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada: A Cultural Politics of Violence,” American Ethnologist 21 (1994): 31–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Collins, Occupied by Memory.

24 Comaroff and Comaroff, Reflections on Youth.

25 Darıcı, “Politics of Privacy.”

26 Aksu-Koç, Ayhan, “Some Connections between Aspect and Modality in Turkish,” in Temporal Reference, Aspect and Actionality, ed. Bertinetto, Pier Marco (Torino, Italy: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1995), 271–89Google Scholar.

27 Hirsch, Marianne, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29 (2008): 103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Ibid, 112.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 107.

31 Piot, Charles, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 17Google Scholar.

32 Ibid., 18.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid., 19.

35 Üstündağ, Nazan, “Kürt Gençleri Müzakerede,” Radikal Iki Gazetesi (2010): 1Google Scholar.