Afrin, a a mostly Kurdish city in northwest Syria, has entered a second year of occupation by the Turkish state and its Syrian Islamist proxy militias.
Since the occupation began, Turkish and militia forces have pursued racist and assimilationist policies that can only be understood as social engineering intended to create a hegemonic and monolithic national identity
Ankara’s aggressive rhetoric toward Kurds, within Turkey and in Syria, is delivered under the guise of Turkish national security. In 2016, Ankara utilised the failed coup, which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called a gift of God, to declare a state of emergency and attempt to crush all opposition and political rivals in the name of national security.
German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt defines the state of exception (i.e. the state of emergency) as a moment in which the rule of law becomes unnecessary in the public and national interest.
In its latest annual report on Turkey, U.S.-based rights campaigner Human Rights Watch said the new presidential system lacked sufficient checks and balances against the abuse of power, greatly diminished the powers of parliament and consolidated presidential control over most judicial appointments.
Erdoğan has purged legal institutions, suppressed freedoms, and arrested political rivals, turning the country into a prison for anyone who utters an opposing voice. Based on that, it is irrational to cite national security to justify human rights violations in Turkey and in Afrin.
For the past century, the highly centralised nature of the Turkish nation-state has remained unchallenged by all ruling political parties with the exception of President Turgut Özal, who died in 1993 amid political negotiations with Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan.
Özal sought to implement an alliance with the Kurds in northern Iraq, and perhaps Syria, by guaranteeing Kurdish rights through decentralised autonomy
In 2016, Erdoğan began talking about extending Turkey’s borders to what he said were those drawn up in the National Pact (Misak-ı Milli), a 1920 agreement between Turkish nationalists that set out what they hoped would be the borders of the new country that would emerge after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The nationalists envisioned a country that would include present-day Turkey as well as the Ottoman province of Mosul in Iraq and much of northern Syria, both areas where many Kurds live.
Unlike Özal, whose aim was to embrace the Kurds of Syria and Iraq in an alliance, Erdoğan has attempted to displace Kurds from Afrin and replace them with extremist Sunni Arab groups. Now the Turkish president has proposed setting up what he calls a safe zone on the Syrian side of the Turkish border east of the River Euphrates. Erdoğan intends to occupy northern Syria and realise the National Pact, destroying the administration there, which is based on gender equality, coexistence, and democracy.
Turkey’s occupation of Afrin can be seen as the first step towards the realisation of the National Pact. Since the occupation began, the Turkish state has systematically pursued policies of forced displacement, aiming to eliminate Afrin’s Kurdish identity and re-populate the area with Syrian Sunni Arabs under the pretext of resettling Syrian refugees and displaced people.
To achieve this goal, the Turkish state has embraced a two-step process. The first step is recruiting non-Turks, mainly Sunni Arabs and foreign Islamist extremists, such as those from Central Asia.
Much like the Ottoman Empire, Turkey has used this tactic in an attempt to socially engineer a country that nationalists, including Erdoğan, define as being made up of “one nation, one flag, one religion and one language”.
Next, Ankara and the militias it supports erode Kurdish identity in Afrin by eliminating Kurdish language institutions and teaching Turkish instead. In order to uproot the memory of Kurdish culture, they have destroyed monuments and removed Kurdish symbols.
In Afrin, Turkey seeks the annihilation of local cultural, economic, educational and political systems that reflect the culture of its Kurdish population. Perhaps without the absence of the rule of law in Turkey, the Turkish state could not attempt to make these assimilationist and demographic changes in Afrin.
The oppressed Kurdish people of Afrin have sought in vain for legal measures that might deter these policies. Their situation makes one think of the Latin phrase Homo sacer, which refers to a cursed people set apart from normal society.
For some inexplicable reason, the Kurds of Afrin seem to have been excluded from the 21st century framework of human rights and international legal protection.
