No Justice for Kurds: Turkish Supremacy and Kurdophobia

Abstract:The Kurds, as the world’s largest stateless nation, are subjected to extreme violence, discrimination, hostility, and racism in contemporary Turkey. I formulate this around the concept of Turkish supremacy and explain how this supremacy is historically rooted, institutionally reinforced, and socially reproduced in the racist habitus of Turkey. Kurdophobia is integral to Turkish supremacy, which needs to invoke racism against Kurds to sustain its position.


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supported terrorism and fabricated events to spread propaganda.

They further alleged that the bar associations and the pro-Kurdish
People's Democratic Party (HDP) aimed to create chaos through "this manipulation," just as they had when the HDP offices in İzmir and Marmaris were attacked a few months before. The Yeni Şafak article failed to mention that these earlier attacks were carried out by ultranationalist Turks with the intention to commit mass murder of 40 party members during a planned meeting later that day (AFP 2021).
The statements by state authorities and their media apparatuses following these racist attacks share features that I characterize as "Turkish supremacy": singularization of systemic racist attacks (münferit), manipulation of facts as purely personal (şahsi) and "judicial" (adli) but not ethnically motivated and racist, media distribution of essentialized state and perpetrators' narratives, dehumanization of Kurdish victims, silencing and discrediting of Kurdish testimonies, and provision of impunity to perpetrators, which encourages further attacks. Turkish supremacy is historically rooted, institutionally reinforced, and socially reproduced in the racist habitus of Turkey. This racist habitus can be best understood via the concept of "Kurdophobia," an intertwined phenomenon of hostility, fear, intolerance, and racism toward Kurdish people, culture, and language among Turkish supremacists and the wider Turkish society. Kurdophobia is integral to Turkish supremacy, which needs to invoke racism against Kurds to sustain its superior position.

HOW KURDS ARE MADE INTO INTERNAL OTHERS
Racism was integral to the Turkish nation-building process, beginning with the late Ottoman period. Selim Deringil observes that the late Ottoman Empire adopted a colonial stance toward the peoples of the empire's periphery, engaging in "borrowed colonialism," "the civilizing mission mentality of the late Ottomans and their project of modernity as reflected in their provincial administration" in Libya.
The "White Man's Burden wearing a fez," Deringil suggests, was a result of the weakening position of the Ottoman Empire against 926 social research Western colonialism (2003,. In his seminal article, "Ottoman Orientalism," Ussama Makdisi notes that "there has been a reluctance to discuss representations of otherness advanced by non-Western regimes" and explores "how Ottoman resistance to Western imperialism engendered its own interrelated forms of Orientalist representation and domination that existed simultaneously at the center and the periphery" (2002,795). He suggests, "Ottoman Orientalism was not inadvertent but a pervasive and defining facet of Ottoman modernity" at a time when the defining political discourse of the empire shifted from religion versus heresy to modernization versus backwardness .
Nationalism was central to this new construct, first in the form of Ottoman nationalism and later Turkish nationalism, through a process of Turkification following the partition of Arab states from the empire. The Armenian Genocide in 1915 and other subsequent massacres of non-Muslim minorities (Greeks, Assyrians) in the early twentieth century laid the foundation for the Turkification of the newly established republic. Barış Ünlü formulates this transition around the two interconnected "contracts" of Muslimness and Turkishness by which selective privileges are granted. The earlier "Muslimness contract" had two essential components: to be a Muslim and thereby to benefit from privileges; and to be complicit in and/or silent about what happened to Armenians and other non-Muslim constituents of the late Ottoman Empire. By 1925, Ünlü suggests, the Muslimness contract was narrowed down to the "Turkishness contract," as now one also had to be Turkish, or to perform and declare loyalty to Turkishness, in order to benefit from the privileges. The other major modification to the contract was that compliance and silence extended to matters relating to the Kurds and the state's violent practices towards them (Ünlü 2016, 399-400): As per the Turkishness Contract, every Turk or Turkified individual would potentially benefit even though she or he is not an active signatory, meaning that not every  (Yadırgı 2017, 165-73). Major repressive policies, such as the establishment of general inspectorates (Umumi Müfettişlik) in 1928, were enacted at this time for the remaking of Kurdish society (Aslan 2011, 80). The 1934 Settlement Law extended this effort by dividing the Kurdish region into three zones to (1) increase the Turkish population in Kurdish majority areas (zone one), (2) assimilate Kurds by exiling them to Turkish majority areas (zone two), and (3) depopulate certain areas and prohibit resettlement of any sort (zone three) (Yadırgı 2017, 182). Even though this law was not fully implemented and the general inspectorates were terminated in 1952, the Kurdish region remained under de facto martial law and was ruled by states of emergency law.
From the 1920s to the 1990s, the state policy was to deny the existence of Kurds (who were claimed to be "mountain Turks"), prohibit the usage of Kurdish language, and suppress any cultural expression 928 social research of Kurdishness in public space. What was at stake was Kurdish nationhood (Bayrak 2014), but the official Turkish state discourse framed the Kurdish national struggle as a question of regional underdevelopment or a tribal reaction to the project of modernization (Yeğen 1999). Through this construct, the Turkish state positioned itself as "the savior of the Kurds" from their backward, feudal, tribal, and religious oppressors, while also denying Kurdish existence altogether.
After the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) began its armed strug- It is against this backdrop that Kurdish ethnic identity has become racialized, with a host of negative attributions regarding their physical appearance, accent, morality, criminality, and civility (Ergin 2014, 329-32). This Kurdophobic language portrays the Kurds "as culturally backward, intrinsically incapable of adapting to 'modern city life,' naturally criminal, violent and separatist people," while casting "the increasing number of Kurds in Western Turkish cities as the 'Kurdish invasion'" (Bora 2006, 78, cited in Saraçoğlu 2009. Cenk Saraçoğlu claims that anti-Kurdish sentiments in Turkish spaces can be formulated as "exclusive recognition," which exhibits four common features. First, this anti-Kurdish discourse recognizes the Kurds as a separate group, which is at odds with the state's assimilationist discourse. Second, this discourse excludes the Kurds via negative attributions and stereotyping. Third, these perceptions are justified based on "superficial contacts with and observations of Kurdish migrants in the everyday life of Turkish cities." Finally, these 930 social research pejorative labels are used exclusively against the Kurds, but not other minorities (Saraçoğlu 2009, 642). It should be noted that this "exclusive recognition" is a result of the failure of the assimilationist policies and in no way implies progress in the Kurdish struggle for recognition and equal rights. Rather, it indicates how pervasive racism has become in Turkish everyday life.

TURKISH SUPREMACY AND KURDOPHOBIA
Turkish supremacy is historically rooted, institutionally reinforced, and socially reproduced. It relies on the assumed "Whiteness" of the Turks in a racialized metaphor of privilege and subordination. In the political lexicon of Turkey, Whiteness and Blackness are utilized by politicians across the secularist and Islamist spectrum to criticize the elitist position of the rival political group in order to position themselves as being for the ordinary people, who are metaphorically "Black." The binary of "White vs. Black Turks" was once utilized by the Islamists against the secularists, yet has more recently been reversed by the Islamist AKP government's consolidation of power, as now the Islamists are the new "Whites" (Güner 2021).
This relational dichotomy excludes the Kurds. Following the same racialized metaphorical lexicon, I suggest that Turkish supremacy ensures its own "Whiteness" while relegating Kurds, so long as they retain their Kurdish identity, to "Blackness." In this construct, Kurds are prevented from having access to the social mobility allowed to Turks. I draw my claim from the consistency of the superior position afforded to Turks, whether in the case of the progressive modernity of early republican secularist Turks or in the case of the more recent neo-Ottomanist nationalism of Islamist Turks. In each case, the Turkish White man's burden persists in its effort to assimilate Kurds into its own political construct (secularist modernity, Kemalism, socialism, Islamism, etc.), while preserving the superior position of the Turks.
For the first half of the twentieth century, the Kurds were construed as backward, internal others to be assimilated into modern

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Turkishness. Kemalists attempted to create a monolithic Turkish nation that disregarded the country's ethnic diversity. Once the Islamist nationalist parties and coalitions assumed power in the 1980s, and more recently in the 2000s, the construct shifted to an Islamic fraternity and neo-Ottomanism that aims to assimilate Kurds into an Islamist ideology in which Turkish supremacy and the subordinate position of the Kurds are to be sustained. In both instances, the Kurds are forcibly "invited" to subordinate to a superior position. In the neo-Ottomanist Islamist claim of "religious fraternity," for example, Turks are assigned as the leaders of the Islamic ummah (community) as an extension of the Ottoman past (Türkmen 2021). In this construct, the and severely wounded seven people. The racist assailants, well aware of the impunity previously provided by state authorities in similar situations, even told the victims to "call the police and let them come help you" during the attack. They were right. When the police arrived at the scene, they pinned the blame on the Kurdish family. Only 10 of the 60 assailants were detained, of which only six were arrested. Two months later, on July 9, four others were released at the first court hearing, leaving only two under arrest. Ten of the assailants were even provided a civil protection order by the court. In the ruling, the court stated that this decision was made on the grounds of "conscien- For all these reasons and due to the principles of justice, fairness, and moderation, and on the grounds of our conscientious opinion, the suspects Yahya Çalık and Veli Keleş have been released via judicial control. 2 It was by this "conscientious opinion" of the Turkish justice system that the Dedeoğulları family was murdered three weeks later. In the days leading up to the murder, Barış Dedeoğulları told Mezopotamya Agency: The physical attacks have now turned into verbal attacks.
Those who received a civil protection order from the court come to the front of our house every day, swearing sexist insults and leaving. We have now given up hope on security and the justice system. I know better now that there is no justice for Kurds. We do not know what to do. My sister's arm is broken, she will not be able to use her hand for the rest of her life. Where is justice? There is justice for Article 216 of the TCK is in place for this exact purpose: to ensure that Turkish supremacy is institutionally reinforced. Critical voices are controlled and punished to bolster the state's justification.
It is almost always a Kurd or a member of a non-Turkish/non-Sunni minority who is charged with "inciting the public to hatred and hostility"-a public that does not include the Kurds. Indeed, there are other articles of the TCK that protect Turkish supremacy. Article 301, for example, punishes insulting Turkishness, the Turkish nation, or Turkish state institutions with up to two years in prison. Insulting the Kurds or other minorities is considered "freedom of expression" by the Turkish supremacist justice system. This is how Turkish supremacy is produced and protected via institutions and maintained through impunity provided for such racist attacks.
Finally, Turkish supremacy is also socially reproduced. Turkey's racist habitus, formed over the century since its founding, is manufactured by the state and its institutions to be distributed via education and media apparatuses. The veneration of Turkishness begins at an early age with the recitation of the pledge at school (which ends with "how happy one is who says I am a Turk"), while all other ethnic and religious identities go unmentioned. The fiction of Turkish superiority also entails that Turkey is surrounded by internal and external enemies, and minority labels such as Kurd, Armenian, or Jew are leveraged for humiliation and insult. As Bariş Ünlü observes, a Turk does not necessarily have to sign the Turkishness contract to 936 social research be able to benefit from the privileges afforded to them. A Turk need not fear as long as they maintain silence and complicity in public (Ünlü 2016, 400), whereas a Kurd is expected to perform their loyalty to Turkishness at every turn in order to avoid stigmatization as a terrorist, separatist, or backward, feudal, tribal, bigot. These performances lead many Kurds to seek refuge in universalist ideologies such as socialism, Islamism, and humanism. "We are all members of the same ummah and we are brothers and sisters," "we are all human,"

UNWRITTEN CODES: EVERYDAY KURDOPHOBIA
Kurdophobia dates back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, when the Kurds were the only remaining ethnic majority that was not successful in the struggle for liberation, which sparked a strong "fear of separation" among the founders of the Turkish state. The assimilationist strategies employed to fight this fear were not fully successful, except in creating fear, hostility, and hatred within Turkish society toward the Kurds, whose subjectivities, in turn, were shaped by this new racist habitus. The racialization of Kurdish ethnic identity hastened with the Kurdish migration to western Turkish cities for financial or Turkish Supremacy and Kurdophobia 937 security reasons. Before this, the Kurds were mainly a distant image in the minds of Turks, barbaric and uncivilized people who had to be tamed and civilized. After the mass migration of the 1990s amid the intensifying conflict between the state and the PKK, Kurds became "baby killers," "separatists and terrorists," "unreliable and untrustworthy," "dirty and immoral" people. It became an urgent matter to protect Turkish people from these "uncivilized" people, who were now invading Turkish spaces. This rhetoric of invasion reveals the unwritten Turkish supremacist codes that rule over Kurdish lives.
These unwritten codes become manifest in the division of "good" and "bad" Kurds. The exact definition and boundaries of this division are elusive, shifting according to the oppressor's interests at any given moment. A useful analogy can be found in Malcolm X's distinction between "the house Negro" and "the field Negro." The "house Negro" is an enslaved person who is living in or close to the master's house and has a symbiotic relation with him, whereas the "field Negro" can only thrive if the suppression and exploitation of the master ends. 4 Similarly, the "good Kurds" are the ones "who do not look like the Kurds" and are loyal to their oppressor's interests.
They work hard to free themselves of any association with Kurdishness (dress, accent, culture, hometown, politics, etc.), and are relatively integrated into the system of Turkish supremacy. They have internalized racism and are hostile toward "bad Kurds," who remind them of what they once were. The "good Kurds" are at the forefront of every political ideology because they need to prove themselves as devotees of the oppressor's cause. They sacrifice themselves for the "Islamic ummah," "socialist revolution," or "the indivisible unity of the homeland." Still, they are met with suspicion and are reminded of where they come from at times of crisis. 5 The "bad Kurd," on the other hand, is anyone who does not willingly abide by the Turkishness contract. Among the "bad Kurds" are those willing but unable to become "good Kurds" because they are "too dark skinned," "too hairy," "too accented" or lack the necessary means to assimilate because of the structural inequalities 938 social research shaping their conditions. Nonetheless, the "bad Kurds" are not necessarily political Kurds, nor must they hold a strong notion of Kurdish ethnic identity, but they are shaped by their Kurdish habitus and easily detectable in Turkish spaces. The "bad Kurds" are generally underprivileged Kurds, although it does not mean that privilege is a guaranteed way out from stigmatization and Kurdophobia. However, underprivileged Kurds are more vulnerable to stigmatization and easily detectable by the Turks, state authorities, and security forces.
In a recent conversation with a group of Kurdish men in their late thirties, I asked if they had encountered any bad treatment or were reminded of their Kurdishness in the last month. "I am never allowed to forget my Kurdishness," one of them replied. Another told us how he was stopped and searched at a security checkpoint when he was driving toward western Turkey recently: "They saw that my car's plate number is from Mardin and singled me out among many others driving by. You know how I look [referring to his dark skin and bushy beard], so they invited me inside a tent for a detailed search.
They even called for a search dog for my car. The police officer who came with the dog asked me what I do, so I told him that I am a teacher. Surprised, he asked why I hadn't said so earlier and let me go." "But you are not a teacher," I replied. "I know," he said, "but if you are a Kurd, you should know how to navigate." I asked him how he felt about the police. "You ask questions as if you are not a Kurd yourself. We never go to the police, you know that." "I know, I know.
Just wanted to ask for the record," I replied. "I still feel uneasy whenever I enter a governmental building or see a police officer. I use my best Turkish and behave very respectfully to avoid trouble," he continued. "Did you realize that there are so many checkpoints, and they stop you on each of them when you leave the Kurdish region, but they do not do that when you come in? As if we live in another country," a third one pointed out. The fourth in the group responded, "How tough we have become because of the collective sufferings we endured. This is our advantage, we can find our way even in the hardest conditions, but a Turk cannot. I laugh out loud at the little problems Turkish Supremacy and Kurdophobia 939 that they cannot endure." The last one in the group said that he was asked to define what terrorism is when he recently interviewed for a government position. "They eliminated me because they did not like my answer. They are afraid of us," he said.
In this focus group interview, everyone had a recent experience with discrimination. The level of perceived injustice was obvious from their responses, and they had a strong sense of collective suffering and identity. They were all aware of racialization and profiling of the Kurds, although they did not necessarily frame it as such.
Instances of racialization based on physical appearance, accent, and birthplace when asked for an ID card by security forces-or when İdil district of Şırnak. The driver of the vehicle was never put in custody. He was set free after testifying that he was not driving fastno further investigation necessary (Rudaw 2021). According to the Human Rights Association (İnsan Hakları Derneği, İHD), Mihraç was the fortieth Kurdish civilian to die in such "accidents" since 2008 in the Kurdish region, whereas only two civilians died under similar conditions in western Turkey during the same time period (IHD 2019).
At least 17 of these "casualties" were children and six of them were women, and none of the perpetrators faced deterrent sentences by the Turkish courts. Nihat Eren, the head of Diyarbakır Bar Association, claims that such deaths are a result of the policies of impunity and ineffective investigation stemming from the belief that such indictments could harm the image of the police, who are in the region to maintain security. 6 Again, what is at stake is Turkish supremacy and its well-protected domains against Kurdish civilians. Justice becomes a secondary concern, if any, and every aspect of Kurdish lives becomes securitized. Barış Dedeoğulları's statement before his murder along with his family members in Konya was not only a personal observation but a collective cry of the Kurdish people, who are well aware that "there is no justice for Kurds" in Turkey.

CONCLUSION
This was only a month in the life of Kurds in Turkey. As the internal others of Turkish supremacy, Kurds have never been at peace under the Turkish ethno-national state and its assimilationist and oppressive policies. The late Ottoman Empire's project of "borrowed colonialism" against its internal others in the periphery might have failed, yet its orientalizing gaze and its "civilizing mission" survived into the Turkish Republic and continued to evolve. Turkish supremacy, rooted in the notion of the indivisibility of the nation, viewed the Kurdish struggle for unity and liberation as a separatist threat and sought to discredit and suppress Kurdish leaders and insurgents as "bandits" or "terrorists," while putting an entire population under century-long policies of denial, assimilation, and Kurdophobia.

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Presenting the Kurdish struggle for liberation, recognition, and equal rights as backward and reactionary against the progressive modernity of the Turkish nation-state required massive material, institutional, and discursive mobilization. Kurdophobia, integral to the reproduction of this supremacist mentality, became widespread with the mass migration of Kurds to western Turkish cities during the "dirty war" of the 1990s. Previously, Kurds had been a matter of concern mainly for the state and its apparatuses, but now they occu- The coalition between the Islamist AKP and ultranationalist MHP has found a fertile ground for electoral success by inciting nationalist sentiments and reinforcing Turkish supremacy against the Kurds. It is in this political climate that Kurds are murdered and discriminated 942 social research against on a daily basis while the true nature of this systemic Kurdophobia is painted over as "Islamic fraternity" or "anti-imperialist struggle" by the political components of Turkish supremacy.
More recently, this discriminatory repertoire toward internal others has also provided a blueprint for anti-refugee sentiment and xenophobia across the country. While Kurds were being targeted by racist attacks in the summer of 2021, Syrian and Afghan refugees in Turkey were also targeted. In the Altındağ district of Ankara, a whole Syrian neighborhood was raided by thousands of Turkish civilians while the security forces stood by. Syrian stores and houses were burned down or destroyed by the "angry crowds'' who accused Syrians of escaping the war rather than fighting for their country.
It seems that Turkish supremacy has found its new internal others in the Syrian and Afghan refugees, as they are described in pejorative terms, humiliated, and dehumanized as uncivilized and barbaric people invading Turkish cities and stealing Turkish jobs. Turkish supremacists are using the same vocabulary against the Syrian and Afghan refugees that they have been using against the Kurds for decades, although the newly arriving Syrians and Afghans retain some linguistic and cultural rights not afforded to Kurds. The extent of this xenophobia and its intersections with the well-established system of Kurdophobia in Turkey need further investigation beyond the capacity of this paper and will be dealt with in another publication. Demanding the release of these two people means praising the criminals. It means that you are complicit in these crimes, and you are a traitor." 6. https://www.dw.com/tr/13-yılda-40-kişiyi-öldüren-zırhlı-araçlargerçekten-gerekli-mi/a-59107178.