Kurdish Studies

Behrouz Boochani's No Friend but the Mountains comprises of multiple genres wrapped in one book: it is at once a poetic memoir that records the lived experience of an illegally imprisoned refugee, a testimony to the horrors and systematic torture that takes place at the Australian border-industrial complex, and a critique of the detention and border regimes in general. The book was written in Persian from behind the fences of Manus Prison on a smuggled mobile phone. For years, Boochani was sending WhatsApp messages to the translator, Omid Tofighian, himself a member of a persecuted socioreligious community of Iran and a migrant in Australia. Working with consultants and engaging in close collaboration and creative philosophical discussions with the author, Tofighian has done an excellent job with the translation and editing of the text messages. The book is a literary masterpiece, at once personal and analytical, politically critical and lyrical, brutally realistic and surrealistic, introspective and decolonial; a new creative genre, termed by Tofighian (2018a) as "horrific surrealism."
Access: https://www.humanmovement.cam.ac.uk/blog/book-review-behrouz-boochani-2018-no-friend-mountains-true-story-illegally-imprisoned-refugee

Türkiye'de öteki olarak yaşayanlar, öteki olarak yaşarken hangi sorunlarla karşı karşıyalarsa, öldüklerinde de neredeyse aynı, hatta daha ağırlaşmış bir biçimde, aynı sorunlarla baş etmek zorunda kalmaktadırlar. Hayattayken, içinde bulundukları sorunlarla baş edebilmek için çeşitli yöntemler geliştirme olanağına, en azından teorik olarak sahip olan ötekiler, ölümleri halinde ne yazık ki bu teorik olanağı da yitirmekte ve ölü bedenleri, çoğunluğun, devletin, kamu gücünün ya da aile gibi çeşitli toplumsal kurumların kendi zihniyetlerine uygun pratiklerince ele geçirilmekte ya da bunlara terk edilmektedir.

Ölü-bedenlerin çırılçıplak teşhiri, intikam almak ve korku vermek amacıyla yerde sürüklenmesi, uzuvlarının koleksiyon malzemesi yapılması, cinsel ve bedensel bütünlüklerine ölüm halinde müdahale edilerek sözüm ona normalleştirilerek definleri, ölü-bedenin dinselliğine uygun defin törenlerinin engellenmesi, kamu gücünün çoğunlukçu dinsellik, cinsellik ve etniklik referanslarıyla belirli defin biçimlerini dayatması bu bağlamdaki kimi genel örneklerdir.

Ötekilerin, cinsel, etnik ya da dinsel olarak ötekilik deneyimlerine sahip kesimlerin ölüm karşısında karşı karşıya kaldıkları deneyimlerini konu alan bu kitap, okurunu bu deneyimlerin kavranabileceği bir dilin olanaklılıklarını yoklamaya ve ortak olmaya çağırıyor.

Katkıda bulunanlar: Abdurrahman Aydın, Achille Mbembe, Ayhan Yalçınkaya, Barış Annesi, Evren Balta, Ganimet, Gökçen Alpkaya, Hişyar Özsoy, Mustafa Arıkan, Teodora Hacudi, Zeliha Etöz.

In Abdullah Öcalan's many writings from prison, he rarely uses the word 'sovereignty', however, it lurks behind many themes in his political thought. This essay seeks to construct a theory of sovereignty in Öcalan's political thought through an analysis of his most widely cited pamphlet 'Democratic Confederalism'. I then turn to the theater of North and East Syria to see how sovereignty operates and examine three tensions to this vision of sovereignty in a world of sovereigns.

Themes and Perspectives
MARTÍNEZ BRAWLEY, E. & ZORITA, P. − Past and Current Realities about Mexican/Latino Immigration. Looking Beyond the U.S., 3-16
LÓPEZ-SALA, A. & GODENAU D. − Controlling Irregular Immigration at the European Union's Southern Maritime Border. An Emerging System driven by “Migration Emergencies”, 17-35
GALLEGO, M., GUALDA, E. & REBOLLO, C. − Women and Refugees in Twitter: Rhetorics of Abuse, Vulnerability and Violence from a Gender Perspective, 37-58
FONZO, E. − Use and Abuse of History and Memory: the Istrian-Dalmatian Exodus and the Current Refugee Flows, 59-78
KARAGÖZ, Z. − The Kurdish Diasporic Mobilization in France: From a Restricted Political National Frame to a Translocal Sphere of Contention? The Case of Kurds in Marseille, 79-100

Comments and Debates
MANGONE, E. & PECE, E. − Europe / Mediterranean: Media Treatment of the Immigrant, 101-111

Reviews and Reports
BIANCHI, L. − A Grounded Theory for Unaccompanied Foreign Minors in Italy: the Case Study of Egyptian Minors, 113-118
D’ANGELO, G. − Review of Esodi e frontiere di celluloide. Il cinema italiano racconta le migrazioni. Edited by L. Trapassi & L.Garosi. Florence: Franco Cesati, 2016, 119-122
LEHMANN-MURIITHI, K. − Report on Cultural Psychology: A new science of the human nature, Yokohama 2016, 123-128

As an individual I have many components. I can define myself in many ways depending on the context. I am a homosapien, a monotheist, Yahya’s and Matine’s father, a husband, a Turkish author, a philosopher, a lawyer, a skeptic, a believer, a democrat, a conservative, an American, a political activist, a reformist, a chess-player, a copywriter, a poet, a handyman, a Macintosh user, a teacher, . . . and I am also a Kurd. I am not sure how being a Kurd ranks among the manifold ingredients that makes up my personality, but recently it became one of the important characteristics. Why? Because I have realized that I am denied of this identity. I have also witnessed that many others who share the same culture and heritage are oppressed and killed just because of being born in a Kurdish family.

I am a Kurd who is less articulate in his mother tongue compared to the other four languages that I have learned, namely, Turkish, Arabic, Persian and English. I am a Kurd who lost his 21 years-old brother 19 years ago in Istanbul to the racist bullets of Gray Wolves or Turkish Nationalist militants. (3) I am a Kurd who was put in the same prison, for writing on religious-political issues, with the murderers of his brother and almost lost his life to the knives and teeth of Nationalist Grey Wolves! I am a Kurd who was systematically tortured in Turkish prisons (4) because of refusing to recite the Turkish Anthem that contains lines, such as, “I have lived free since eternity; which psychopath dare to chain me.”(5) I am a Kurd who was compelled to chant “Happy is he who can call himself a Turk”(6) and declare that “A Turk is worth the entire universe”(7) throughout elementary, middle and high-school years.(8) I am a Kurd whose Kurdish father prohibited the Kurdish language at home in order to survive in a city where being Kurd was regarded as being ignorant and lower class.(9) I am a Kurd who now enjoys eating rice with fork, unlike Kurds who prefer a spoon. I am a Kurd who wrote scores of books in Turkish and English, but none in Kurdish.

Article Info © 2021 International Journal of African Studies. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Abstract Identity politics shape 21 st century politics together with political polarization and politics of hate around the globe. The world is moving towards further segregation, xenophobia, and social stratification with the rise of populist leaders. Although the fear of being under attack by the Other is ostensible predominantly in the West, this paper examines the ways non-Western hegemonic nation states demonstrate similar discriminatory attitudes within their national borders. Such divisive attitudes result in many socioeconomic and political conflicts; however, the most urgent outcome manifests itself as threats to national security or civil unrest. Furthermore, the divisive nature of establishing hegemony by marginalizing a certain group affects that same group more than others depending on a given time and place. In this sense, the case of Kurds in Turkey and the Tuareg in the Sahara-Sahel provides the necessary context to elucidate the central role identity politics play in the current political climate. Even though the similarities between the two groups are not apparent at first glance, it is argued that their struggles are similar in relation to their hegemonic environments.

In early December 2020, at least eight people were killed and hundreds of others were injured during violent protests in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) sparked by deteriorating economic conditions and the government’s failure to pay public sector salaries. Seven of the dead, including a 13-year-old boy, were killed when security forces opened fire on demonstrators. The offices of parties from across the political spectrum were torched in towns outside the major cities and in Sulaimaniya. The government arrested protest organizers and shut down a television station that was covering the demonstrations. Freedom of expression in the KRI was dealt another blow on Feb. 16, when a court in Erbil sentenced five independent journalists and activists to six years in prison on charges of “endangering the national security of the Kurdistan Region.” Critics argued that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) used the trial and the harsh sentences as a way to silence dissent and that the evidence presented was obtained through coercion.

Stories like these rarely break out beyond the local press, and analysis about the KRI is all too often driven by elite-centered narratives that do not properly account for the opinions and social realities of the broader population. This does a disservice not only to the ostensible subjects of reporting and analysis about the Kurdistan Region but also reinforces misperceptions about Kurdistan that have major policy implications.

This article will examine the social and political dynamics that currently shape the Kurdistan Region, explore the problem of elite-centered reportage, seek to explain why counternarratives are generally obscured, and propose a refocusing of reporting and analysis in a way that takes public opinion and social realities seriously.

In this article, I use border crossings between Syria, Turkey, and Iraq during the period from 1995 to 2006 to examine the modern state, identity, and territory at border crossing points. Borderlands represent a site where the core powers of states can display the reach, scope, face, and preferred expressions of their identities. Border crossing points between modern states that make strong ethnolinguistic and/or ethnosectarian identity assertions, as do the states on which I focus here, are often charged sites where the state may seek to impose a certain identity category on an individual, an identity that the individual may or may not claim. Kurdistan, the non-state area recognized by Kurds as their ethnic/national home, arcs across the states, and most of the people meeting at the borders are ethnically Kurdish. The state may deny hybridity, or use hybridity, especially multilingualism, for its own purposes. Ethnolinguistic and other collective identity categories in Syria, Turkey, and Iraq are assigned according to patrilineal descent, which means that singular categories are passed from one generation to the next. These categories are made much less malleable by their reliance on descent claims through one parent. In such a milieu, ethnic identities may be a factor to a greater degree than if their state systems allowed for more ethnic flexibility and hybridity.

From February to September 1988, Iraqi Kurds were subjected to a genocidal operation by the Iraqi government, known as the Anfal operation. The operation lasted just over seven months but it had a devastating impact on most parts of rural Kurdistan in Iraq, resulting in the killing of thousands of Kurdish civilians. Most scholars have overlooked the multiple strategies, dimensions of and motivations for the operations and have mostly focused on and/or examined the military and genocidal dimensions of the operation. This article examines some of data and documents as well as secondary sources related to the Anfal operation directly or indirectly. It scrutinizes the pattern of casualties and disappearances of the Kurdish civilians during operations in order to identify and explain the motives of the Iraqi state. It argues that although the Iraqi government's objectives and intentions were multidimensional, two dimensions were the primary ones; the first one security and the second identity. In the Security-Anfal the intention was to overcome the Kurdish rebel groups; however, in the Identity-Anfal the key motive was the de-Kurdification of the Kirkuk province in order to Arabize the areas of Iraqi Kurdistan that were strategically significant economically and politically. Anfal is an Arabic term meaning 'the spoils' and is the name of the eighth sura (verse) of the Quran, where the name of the Anfal operation originated. This verse was allegedly revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the wake of the battle of Badr in 624 AD. The name was used by the Iraqi government for a series of brutal military operations carried out against Kurdish rebel groups and civilians in the rural areas of Kurdistan in Iraq. These operations lasted just over seven months, from February 23, 1988 to September 6 of the same year and took place in eight stages. During the campaign, Iraqi Kurds in the targeted areas were subjected to killings and ethnic cleansing described as Kurdish genocide (Human Rights Watch, 1993). The Anfal operation was part of a large-scale and carefully coordinated military campaign that involved a range of actors, including the Iraqi Infantry and Mechanized divisions, the Iraqi Military Intelligence units, the Iraqi

Le livre d'Adnan Çelik et Namık Kemal Dinç, Diyarbakır 1915, sera bientôt disponible en librairie, traduit en français par les soins d'Ali Terzioglu et Jocelyne Burkmann, et publié par les éditions de L'Harmattan. Etienne Copeaux a participé à cette entreprise par un travail d'édition, d'adaptation et d'annotation pour faciliter la lecture par des non-spécialistes de la Turquie.

This is a study of peripatetic adaptation in the Mêrdîn area (Tk. Mardin) in southeastern Turkey based on ethnographic fieldwork in the town of Nisêbîn (Tk. Nusaybin). There is a limited literature focusing on peripatetic adaptation. In this literature, peripatetic adaptation is defined as a mode of subsistence characterised by non-food production (thus a large degree of dependence on other humans as resources for food acquisition) and the use of calculated patterns of spatial mobility to manage these resources. As a mode of subsistence, it is on a par with others such as hunting-gathering, pastoralism, and horticulture. This study examines the transformation of the peripatetic lineages in the Mêrdîn area from around the mid twentieth century up to the present time. By the mid twentieth century, the peripatetic lineages in the Mêrdîn area existed in a binary. Non-peripatetics (in this study, mainly horticulturalist Kurds) viewed tent-dweller peripatetics as strangers whose livelihood was based on sieve- making and “begging,” while they considered village-dweller peripatetics to be familiar musicians. The adaptation of the tent-dweller peripatetics, who are the main focus of this study, underwent a transformation from this time onwards. Charity-seeking, previously the main domain of peripatetic subsistence, declined, and peripatetic men moved largely towards music-making, an activity formerly associated with village-dweller peripatetics. This transformation resulted in shifting the binary categorisation of peripatetics towards a conflation of the two categories, or even a duality. This transformation is completely missing from the existing literature on peripatetics in the Mêrdîn area or generally in Kurdistan. This study will investigate the sources of the transformation of tent-dweller peripatetics’ adaptation. It will focus on the changes leading to this transformation, their impact on the area’s peripatetics and their human resources, and peripatetics’ responses to these changes. Investigation into the two domains of peripatetic economy in the area, i.e. entertainment-related activities and charity-seeking, will reveal the crucial role economic and social concerns and motivations have played, on the part of peripatetics themselves, in the transformation of their adaptation.

The establishment of modern Iran in 1925 accelerated a centralisation policy, which resulted in the oppression of Iran’s national and cultural diversity. Under such unfavourable conditions, Kurdish fiction had a stuttering start with only three works since the publication of the first Kurdish novel in 1961 up until 1991, when the number of Kurdish fictional works produced in Iran began to increase steadily. This article addresses the question of commitment and aesthetics in Kurdish prose fiction by examining a short story collection and three novels published between 1961 and 2002. Whereas the earlier Kurdish writers primarily viewed fiction as a medium for cultural preservation and national liberation, around the turn of the 20th century a generation of Kurdish writers appeared who were as equally concerned with aesthetics as with politics.ABSTRACT IN KURMANJIÇîroka kurdî: Ji nivîsîna berxwedanê bo pabendiyeke estetîkAvakirina Îrana modern li sala 1925an lez da siyaseta navendîkiri...