From a History of Exclusion to the Securitization of the Kurdish Issue: A Step of Democratic Regression in Turkey

Introduction: Inclusion versus Exclusion of Minorities in Democracies

The inclusion of minorities has been considered throughout history to be a very important feature for stable and prosperous democracies. Alexis de Tocqueville (1835), almost two centuries ago, cautioned democracies about the risk of “tyranny of the majority”. In the past, however, the definition of democracy in the literature was mostly based on a minimalist approach, as an “electoral democracy”, requiring contestation – that is, free and fair elections – and autonomy of the government (Dahl 1971; Przeworski 2000). Today a broader and substantial definition of the “quality of democracy” is considered among scholars, for what can be labelled a “substantial”, “meaningful” or “liberal” democracy. Larry Diamond (2004), for example, speaks about four key elements for a democracy to be called as such: a political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; the active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life; the protection of the human rights of all citizens; and a rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens. Diamond and Morlino (2004) argue specifically that there are about eight dimensions in which democracies may vary in quality: freedom, rule of law, vertical accountability, responsiveness, equality, participation, competition, and horizontal accountability. Therefore the equal treatment of minorities is again considered important. Others, like Fareed Zakaria (2003), speaking about “liberal democracies”, argue that when the majority of an electorate deny rights to minorities they produce an “illiberal democracy”. Consequently, even today, the most important criterion to measure the depth and quality of a democracy seems to be the extent to which a democratic system is able to include all the parts of a polity and so also its minorities. Inclusiveness is an essential part of a functioning, effective and legitimate democracy and in order to reach this inclusiveness, as Robert Dahl (1971) suggests, a democracy needs “liberalization besides participation”. Dahl, in his “Polyarchy”, argued that inclusiveness (participation) should precede the public contestation. This means that inclusive institutions and a multiparty system should predate the mass elections to make a transition to democracy successful and stable.

There is evidence to support the argument in favor of inclusiveness in literature on conflict studies as well as in democracy studies. Mansfield and Snyder (2005), following Dahl’s theory, argued that new democracies are actually more likely to have instability and to initiate wars or intrastate conflict, for this reason. Their politics of democratizing are more likely to exhibit characteristics like exclusionary nationalism and nationalist ideology because rules, habits and institutions of competitive politics are not established before the holding of elections. Mansfield and Snyder (2005) found the following:

Where mass electoral politics developed before the institutions to regulate political competition were in place, transitions were prone to conflict (…) Elites tended to feel threatened by political change and leaders often deployed nationalism as a justification for intolerance and repression.

(pp. 8–9)

Furthermore, in sociological as well as political literature, the inclusion of minorities through cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism has been considered beneficial for a democratic state, making it more stable and prosperous. Gutmann (2004) for example argued that individual and group rights should both exist in democracy, and identity politics should not be suppressed but made to flourish, supporting justice and democracy for all groups. Kymlicka (2001) also claimed that nationalism and multiculturalism should not be considered incompatible; on the contrary, minority rights should supplement human rights with some form of power-sharing (like federalism for example) that would guarantee more justice for national minorities. Finally, Miller (2000) agrees that nationalism and cosmopolitanism are not necessarily in contrast, as the principles of nationality can accommodate the demands of minority nations and does not necessarily lead to secessionism. Therefore, we can fairly conclude that literature across a wide variety of fields considers inclusiveness an essential part of a functioning, effective and substantial democracy. ^[1]

If we look at the practice of democracy, not only to its literature, inclusiveness can be considered the barometer of a successful transition to democracy, in all areas of the world but in particular in the Middle East, where nation states have been built in the past with a mixture of ethnic minorities after the colonial times. Indeed, as Picard among others argues (2015, p. 57) the “respect for minority rights has become – together with women’s rights – the barometer of a successful transition to democracy” in the region. In the Middle East, the inclusion of minorities has been always an Achilles’ heel, and this can be considered one of the main domestic reasons why this region, in contrast with the rest of the world, has not been touched by democratization processes until recently. Some scholars speak of “Arab exceptionalism” because the possible fourth wave of democratization, ^[2] with the recent Arab Spring, has failed apart from the Tunisian case – that was in fact an inclusive process, today having a coalition government between the Islamist party Ennahda and the secular party Nida Tounes. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as “Muslim exceptionalism” in the sense of an incompatibility between Islam and democracy, as Huntington has superficially argued in the past, with a stereotypical depiction of a modern secular and democratic West versus a traditionally unsecular and undemocratic Islamic world. There is plenty of evidence today showing that reality is much more complex, and obviously democratic Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia as well as less obvious Muslim democracies such as Senegal or Tunisia, debunk this argument. The issue related to the viability of a democracy, therefore, is not about the religion or the culture of a particular country but rather the way in which the institutions and the elites are able to build a truly inclusive democracy for all the citizens, giving to everyone the right to participate to the polity. The necessary and sufficient condition for a substantial and meaningful democracy, in any country as much as in a Muslim majority country of the Middle East, must be the integration of all citizens, with an equal participation in the nation state for all, including minorities.

Nevertheless, as Akturk (2015) argues, being that some kind of “religious nationalism” sits at the base of the foundation of many modern Muslim Middle Eastern states, distinct from the “ethnic nationalism” of European states, we need to be careful in using the nationalist theories based on European cases for the Muslim Middle Eastern nation states. According to Akturk, for example, Turkey, like Pakistan and Algeria, was founded because a multiethnic Muslim population was reunited against non-Muslim opponents in order to create a new state based on a religious war (jihad). After that, however, the now-independent governments of these Muslim states founded the state on a secular and monolingual nation-state model, which pushed Islamist or ethnic separatist movements to challenge the state itself, as in the case of the Kurds: “instead of an Islamic state with a religious legal system and multiple official languages accommodating the ethnic diversity, they adopted a single official language and a secular legal system” (p. 785). For example, adopting a single official language, in particular the language of the majority of the population, was a symbolic action of internal homologation and assimilation towards one national identity dominated by the majority. There was an historical “disjuncture” at the origins of these nation states, including Turkey, that led to a crisis of legitimacy (in a “path dependent” way) and so led to several challenges in the form of Islamic and ethnic separatist movements. Therefore, the Middle Eastern Achilles’ heel with minorities could be a consequent of the post-colonial European territorial design based on secularism and nationalism that excluded Islamist and ethnic realities. The analysis of this process is out of the scope of this study, but is important to take it into account to understand the historical reasons for the current difficulties of democratizing countries in the Middle East. Also, according to other scholars such as Kymlicka and Pföstl (2015), there are three legacies that created the current situation and struggle of the minorities in the Middle East: the Millet legacy, ^[3] the colonial legacy, and the post-colonial nation building legacy based on the Western secular nationalist state centric model. Turkey had all of them, if we consider the Tanzimat reforms, with their concentration on individual rights instead of communal rights, as a form of “soft colonization”. This therefore has not been an easy base for the modern Turkish democracy to start to be more inclusive of its minorities.

The Kurdish Issue and the Turkish History of Exclusion

Turkey, even if it did not pass through a colonial time like the rest of the territories of the Ottoman Empire, was threatened by Western powers with dismemberment after WWI. This threat convinced the general Mustafa Kemal, later self-nominated “Atatürk” the “father of the nation”, to fight a war of independence between 1919 and 1923, when the Turkish Republic was finally created. The war started when the country was occupied by Western forces and was fought against proxies of the Allies (France, UK, Italy, Greece and Armenia) that had decided the partition of Turkey in the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920. The new Republic, as a reaction to the foreign threat, was founded therefore on a strong sense of nationalism to create a united and secular Turkish state, following the ideology of Kemalism, ^[4] with one people, one language and one state.

The two most important features of the new Turkish Republic identity since 1923, with a 360 degree shift from the Ottoman identity, became the exclusionary nature of its nationalism and also the insistence on Western secularism – or a particular form of it, the “assertive secularism”, which aims to exclude religion from the public sphere (Kuru 2007). Therefore, since its founding, Turkey has always suffered for its lack of inclusion of minorities, both religious (Kilinc 2014) and especially ethnic minorities (Yegen 2007). The Turkish new Republic gave legal status only to small ethnic groups and at the same time religious (non-Muslim) minorities: Armenians Catholics, Greek Orthodox and Jews. The Kurds were left out because Turkey refused to recognize any ethnic minority within its borders based on the belief that this could have threatened the nationalist model of the Turkish state. Ethnic Albanians, Pontics, Kurds, Arabs, Bosniaks, Circassians and Chechen people, many of them coming from the lands lost by the Ottoman Empire, also started to be considered Turkish under Turkish law, assimilating into the Turkish identity even if they were still ethnically distinct from Turks (Kinzer 2008).

As a reaction to the Kurdish exclusion in the foundation of the mono-nationalist Republic, in 1925, the Sheikh Said, a famous Sufi Naqshbandi religious and a Kurdish leader, mobilized tens of thousands of people in a rebellion against the Turkish government. Two years later another Kurdish rebellion, this time secular nationalist in character, broke out in Agri. These rebellions were repressed resulting in thousands of casualties, as they were considered threats to the foundation of the new Republic (Kadioğlu 2013). Between 1937 and 1938, the Turkish military also killed around fourteen thousand people, in the Kurdish Alevi region of Dersim, for which recently Erdoğan asked forgiveness (Akturk 2015, 780). After WWII and the start of multi-party system in Turkey, political parties tried to engage with Kurdish leaders in order to find allies (Barkey/Fuller 1998, 77) but they didn’t allow Kurds to have their “Kurdishness” represented in the Parliament, creating the highest threshold for a party to enter a parliament in the world: ten percent. This lack of political channeling of the Kurdish minority later contributed to the creation of the Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan or the Kurdish Workers party (PKK), which was also building on the revolutionary left movements in Turkey.

Half a century after the foundation of the Republic, in 1974, a group of Kurdish activists called “The Revolutionaries of Kurdistan” started a campaign for Kurdish rights. After the government crackdown on this movement in 1978, the PKK was founded. A few years later in 1983, during this period of military rule, a new law (2932) was incorporated into the constitution prohibiting the use of Kurdish language “in the expression and dissemination of thought” (Art. 28) aiming for the final Kurdish assimilation. This renewed offensive against Kurdish identity, together with armed clashes and crackdowns by the government, caused the PKK to begin a full scale insurgency in 1984. Since then, 45,000 people have been killed and the war is one of the highest-scale conflicts today, with an increased involvement of the civilian population in the Eastern region. In addition to the casualties, the conflict created many refugees and internally displaced people. The displacement of Kurdish citizens, with forced migration out of villages under attack or curfew, has increased the asymmetrical power relationship between the state and the Kurdish population, often caught in the middle of the conflict between the state and the PKK. The number of Kurdish villages depopulated in Turkey between the 1980s and 1990s is estimated to be around three thousand, with the displacement of almost 400,000 people. ^[5] In total, however, the number of Kurdish refugees sums up to three million people today, an estimated million of which were still internally displaced as of 2013. ^[6] The causes of the depopulation and displacement included village raids and forced evacuations by the Turkish state’s military operations and the PKK attacks against unsupportive Kurdish clans, and recently even the destruction of Kurdish towns as Cizre by the Turkish security forces. In addition, the poverty, of the southeastern region, conflict notwithstanding, made many Kurds to migrate to the rest of the country or abroad, but in general, the armed conflict between Turkish Army and the PKK serves as the primary cause of migration.

Therefore, as we can see, the militarization of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, and with it the “securitization” of the Kurdish issue, has been shifting up and down for a long time in particular since 1984, and recently, since mid-2015, it has re-intensified. Only the Turkish President Turgut Özal approached the conflict by means other than military and seemed open to a new inclusiveness in the Turkish state, not necessarily based strictly on one nation, one language, and one state of Kemalism. Unfortunately Özal died in office in 1993 and an exhumation in 2012 found evidence of poisoning. A retired general accused of assassination, Levent Ersöz, has been recently acquitted of murdering Özal. ^[7] Nevertheless, since the Justice and Development Party (in Turkish: Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) the first Islamist though moderate party to arrive to the power in Turkey in 2002, things seemed to have improved for the Kurds. It seemed that the democratization of Turkey finally could have brought a real process of inclusion, not only of the “Islamist” identity of Turkey, exemplified by the most pious and conservative people excluded at the foundation of the Republic, but also of the ethnic pluralism of the country, with its ethnic minorities always excluded, in particular the Kurds.

Indeed, the AKP, because of its increased interest in the EU membership, started to speak a language of “Diversity within Unity”, similar to the European motto, and proposed to accept the religious, linguistic and ethnic differences of the country in a vision of a new pluralist society (Soner 2010). The party initiated several legislative changes that, besides softening the secular nationalist state policies – for example, removing the ban on headscarves – increased the number of multiethnic policies, like broadcasting and publishing in Kurdish, Arabic, Zaza and other minority languages (Akturk 2012). The shift in attitude and policy was so evident that in March 2013, Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK leader in jail since 1999, announced the end of the armed struggle and the beginning of a ceasefire and peace talks with the government. Unfortunately, however, something went wrong and two years after, in July 2015, the ceasefire ended after Turkey started to bomb the PKK positions in Iraq as a reaction to the Suruç bombing attack that targeted leftist Kurdish supporters’ activists and was blamed on an ISIS-affiliated group. The PKK resumed attacks on Turkish police officers and the government retaliated with the bombing of PKK positions in the Turkish Eastern region. With the conflict also came the alienation and polarization between the Kurds of the Eastern region of Turkey, and the Turkish state among demonstrations and political assassinations, in addition to crackdowns on media and academicians. Some scholars even argue that the Turkish state lives a “state of exception” in the definition of Agamben (2005). A “state of exception” is like a “state of emergency”, when a state transcend the rule of law in the name of the public good and so goes from a democracy to an authoritarian regime. Following this concept, Ayşe Kadioğlu (2013) argues that the Kurdish issue is a clear case of “state of exception”.

This article argues that Turkey has applied the strategy of securitization of the Kurdish minority, in particular in the geographical region of southeastern Turkey, in different periods of the past and in full scale today, not only causing suffering to the population, often caught between the PKK fighters and the Turkish army, but also jeopardizing the substantiality and meaningfulness of Turkish democracy which is still not able to solve this minority issue with more inclusiveness.

Securitization Theory Applied to Minorities: The Kurdish Case

The securitization theory is a critical theory based on a “broadening” process of security concepts, formulated by the “Copenhagen School” after the Cold War. According to the securitization theory, when a state labels something as a security issue, it gives it a sense of urgency that justifies extraordinary measures to deal with it, outside of the political arena. Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde (1998), in their book that launched this theory, described securitization as an “extreme version of politicization” (p. 23), a process that occurs when one issue is promoted from a non-politicized arena (when the state does not deal with it, only the civil society does) to a politicized arena (entering the sphere of public policy and governance) and finally to the securitized one, turning the issue into an existential threat that cannot be treated in the political arena but only through emergency measures. When this happens, the issue passes from the political sphere (the “market place of ideas” where everything can be negotiated and addressed by policies) to a “non-political but politicized” space, beyond the ordinary norms of the political domain, which is based on extraordinary security measures. As Buzan et al. note, “security is the move that takes politics beyond the established rule of the game and frames the issue either as a special kind of politics or as above politics” (p. 23). The ability of extraordinary security measures to avoid the political discussion is thus the most important feature that characterizes the securitization process.

The process of securitization is made specifically of three elements: a) the referent objects, objects that can be existentially threatened, most importantly the state and the nation (that means the sovereignty and the identity) that represent the traditional “middle level limited collectivities” (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998, 36); b) the securitizing actors, such as governments, political elites, military or civil society, that perform the so called “security speech act” (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998, 40) declaring the referent object as existentially threatened; c) the functional actors, those that influence the decisions on security, that has a stake in the issue, like a private company or a political party that will benefit from the securitization process.

Among others, one scholar that has already studied the securitization of Kurds is Birdisli (2014). He claims that the Kurdish demands for autonomy and identity in Turkey have been perceived as a threat to national integrity, therefore the state has used extraordinary measures during the history of the Republic via securitization that exacerbated the conflict and caused thousands of civilian casualties. The extraordinary measures include first and foremost the military intervention, but also the consequent changes of demography, with thousands of Kurds forced to resettle in Western region, or go into exile outside Turkey, in particular after the military coups. Another extraordinary measure has been political restriction, with 58 political parties banned between 1924 and 2009; eight of them were related to the Kurdish question. The last effect of these extraordinary measures includes the assimilation of the Kurds by the nationalist education system, with the teaching of one nation and one identity (Birdisli 2014, 9/10).

Following the theory of Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde (1998), we can apply the securitization structure to determine if and how the Kurdish minority has been securitized at different times since the foundation of the Republic, and in particular since the creation of PKK. Using the model of securitization, we can see how recently the AKP government passed the Kurdish issue from the political sphere to the security sphere, in order to deal with it as a security issue above and outside politics, and so in need of extraordinary measures.

As said, the first element needed to determine if the securitization theory can be applied to a case is based on the referent objects, objects that can be existentially threatened. In the Turkish case, these objects are represented by the state and the nation in itself, the territorial and sovereign unity of the country. The sovereignty of the Turkish state and its identity are felt as existentially threatened by the Kurdish movement for autonomy or independence. The securitizing actors have primarily been the Turkish government, with its political elites who have used the so called “security speech act” to declare the referent object (state, unity and identity of the country) as existentially threatened, in order to escalate the conflict in a militarized and securitized way, avoiding channeling Kurdish requests in the political arena. 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 like mass media that contribute to create the narrative of “us-them” and delegitimize the political factions of the minority as groups supporting the terrorists or merely wanting independence(Erdem 2014). Functional actors, however, are also political parties that have benefited from the securitization process, today including AKP and the other political parties present in Parliament: the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). These parties compete for power, as all parties do, and so strongly benefited from the securitization of the Kurdish minority that limited the possibility of creating and empowering a party that could represent their legitimate demands, at least until today. This has also been blocked with the 10 % threshold in the Turkish Parliament, the highest threshold in the world exactly to avoid giving representation to minorities.

Finally, regarding the extraordinary measures of the securitization process, it is important to note the total concentration of efforts in the armed conflict with the PKK, resulting in the killing of militants and fighters, but also of hundreds of civilians, as well as the forced displacement of population (see Kurban 2014). This has resulted in intervention from some parts of the international community, mostly international civil societies such as human rights associations requesting the cessation of the “abusive” use of force in Kurdish area (Soguel 2015) but not so much from the European Union, which is closing one eye because of the refugee crisis that requires the help of Turkey, or that of intergovernmental institutions such as the UN or others, to be solved. The “state of emergency”, created repeatedly in the Kurdish region and increased recently with several curfews imposed in different Kurdish towns in the latter part of 2015, can also be considered an extraordinary measure. “Extreme” measures by the AKP political regime, however, can also include the targeting of the pro-Kurdish political parties (Bayir 2014), in particular the legal attacks in order to eliminate these parties, such as the ban of Democratic Society Party or the KCK trials in 2009, ^[8] or at least to repress them, such as the charges filed by Erdogan against the HDP in 2015, with the accusation of supporting terrorism. In addition, the targeting of human rights associations, media and academics can be considered extreme measures and the AKP government has been increasing this targeting since 2011 but mostly since summer 2015. One of these attacks has been the assassination at the end of November 2015 of a prominent Kurdish lawyer, Tahir Elci, leader of the Diyarbakir bar association, who had been arrested one month before for saying that the PKK was not a terrorist organization but rather an armed political movement with a popular support base (Salih, NYT 12/1/2015). Erdogan accused the PKK to be behind the homicide, but many people protested in Istanbul defining it a homicide of the government.

The attack and delegitimization of non-mainstream media that have been criticizing the regime on the conduct of policies towards the Kurdish minority or other issues, happened with the incarceration of journalists including, for example, those of Cumhuriyet, one week after that Turkish newspaper had won the Press Freedom Prize from Reporters Without Borders, as well as the Zaman, a journal supported by the Gülen movement, with the arrest of some of its journalists and finally the imposing of a state administrator since March 2016, with the result that the journal is not anymore critical of the government today. Even academicians have been targeted: hundreds have been recently put under investigation for signing a petition asking the government to stop the violence in the Southeastern region. ^[9] This process, unfortunately, 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 conduct a final offensive to end the Tamil resistance, destroying the Tamil villages and causing tens of thousands of civilian casualties, and the government made a final crackdown on independent journalism, activists and politicians, to end the “Tamil terrorism”.

Therefore, the securitization process of the Kurdish minority aims to reduce the Kurdish issue to a security-militarized problem, concentrating on attacking the militant organization of this minority, the PKK, but also in some way repressing its social and political side. This has helped Turkey to erase elements of the legitimacy of the Kurdish requests, based on a “value rationality” of dignity and self-identity, as Varshney (2003) defined it, blocking any possibility to channel their demands and abandoning the armed struggle for political inclusion. This process has actually been a common trend in the Middle East states since the end of the Ottoman Empire: securitization of minorities’ requests, targeting non-state actors such as militant groups that fought for their self-determination (from Hezbollah to Hamas) and always labeling them as “terrorist organizations” with the support of the international community.

To conclude, we can say that the securitization theory can be applied to the Kurdish case as there is evidence that support it. This is jeopardizing the democracy in Turkey and is not helpful for the future of the country. Today, Turkey is no longer considered, by scholars or by international indexes, as a real effective and substantive democracy because of the treatment of Kurdish minority, as well as the crackdown on freedom of expression and media. The Economist Intelligence Unit, for example, defines Turkey as a “hybrid regime” between democracy and autocracy in its 2015 Democracy Index, while Freedom House (FH) considers Turkey to be a “partly free” country (“electoral” but not “liberal” democracy) in its 2015 index. Therefore, it is time for Turkey to get back on track on its democratization process, at least if it is still interested in remaining a member of the community of democracies around the world.

Policy Recommendations: De-securitize, Manage Securitization or Emancipation?

The recent democratic regression of Turkey affects not only the level of inclusiveness, and thus the “substantiality” and “meaningfulness” of Turkish democracy, but also the process of Turkish integration in the European Union (EU), a process that has long been in the making and has been delayed because of the Turkish treatment of minorities. Both of the two most recent EU Turkey progress reports on Turkish EU candidacy filed in 2014 and 2015 state that the dialogue between the government and representatives of minorities continues to develop but is not yet enough. The 2014 Report says that, with respect to the previous year, “there was no change in the legal framework: Turkey considers Turkish citizens as individuals with equal rights and only recognizes non-Muslim communities as minorities, in line with its interpretation of the Lausanne Treaty. However, in addition to providing full equality for all citizens, this approach should not prevent Turkey from granting specific rights to citizens on the basis of ethnic origin, religion or language, so that they can preserve their identity. Sustained work is needed to prevent and punish hate speech or crimes targeting minorities or people belonging to minorities”. ^[10] With respect specifically to the Kurdish population. the report says that, “regarding cultural rights, there were positive developments regarding using mother tongues and a steady and welcome normalization of the use of Kurdish in public”, ^[11] but that “the government has not taken forward its January 2013 plans to legalize the provision of public services in languages other than Turkish – notably, Kurdish – as recommended by the Council of Europe”. ^[12] Finally, regarding the settlement process, “on 11 June, the Turkish parliament adopted a law to “bring a stronger legal foundation to the settlement process” aiming at a solution of the Kurdish issue”. ^[13] In the 2015 report, the limited cultural rights are still criticized, but the most important issue is the solution of the Kurdish conflict, with the war between Turkey and the PKK that unfortunately restarted in the summer of 2015: “There were numerous casualties among civilians and members of the security forces. It is imperative that the Kurdish peace process resumes. It remains the best opportunity in a generation to solve a conflict that has claimed far too many lives. The new government needs to give priority to making progress towards democratization and reconciliation.” ^[14] Unfortunately the peace process has not resumed yet. On the contrary, the war in the Eastern region is getting worse according to the report: “there were disquieting reports of alleged severe human rights violations committed by security forces. More than 20 civilians were reportedly killed during a 9-day curfew imposed on the town of Cizre. Tensions also increased across the country, with several attacks on media outlets and HDP party headquarter and offices. The authorities took actions curtailing the free exercise of media freedom during the period.” ^[15] Some International NGOs such as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International went even further with the denunciation of human rights violations and civilian casualties caused by the Turkish government. This “lighter” pressure of the EU today on Turkey, with respect to other representatives of the international community, might have several different causes, particularly the refuges crisis in Europe that needs the support of Turkey, but also the conflict with ISIS that keeps expanding, and needs Turkey as the bastion against this threat. So it is clear that the EU keeps pushing Turkey towards greater inclusion of minorities, in particular the Kurdish minority, to improve its situation for the possible future integration, but there is a lack of strong criticism or condemnation for some acts that may have permanently jeopardized the democratization process of Turkey, such as the continued securitization of the Kurdish minority, often caught in the middle of the conflict between the PKK and the Turkish government. In any case, the EU strongly suggests that Turkey channel the Kurdish issue to a political arena, for a peace process, including for example the HDP, the pro-Kurdish party, sometimes considered the political wing of the Kurdish minority, which has had an important success in the last elections. On the contrary, however, this party has recently been ostracized, delegitimized and attacked.

Therefore, following the EU requests of more inclusiveness and respect for minority rights, the policy recommendations for the solution of the Kurdish issue that this article makes are of three types: based on the arguments of Wæver (1995), Paul Roe (2004), and Aradau (2004) the article recommends that in order to go back to the path of democracy and stability, Turkey would need either to de-securitize the Kurdish minority issue, “manage” the securitization in liberal democratic forms, or create politics of universality and recognition in a new emancipatory course.

The first argument is based on the “normalization” of the minority issue. The desecuritization process is supported by the Copenhagen School itself and in particular by Wæver (1995) in order to go back to the political arena and deal with the issue by political means. Unfortunately there is little discussion in the literature on how to de-securitize. As Wæver (1995) argues:

The problematique locks people into talking in terms of ‘security’ and this reinforces the hold of security on our thinking, even if our approach is a critical one. We do not find much work aimed at desecuritizing politics which, I suspect, would be more effective than securitizing problems.

(p. 57)

Desecuritization is more effective but also more desirable for democracy, according to Wæver, for its “democratic-ness”, because emergency politics are often related with secrecy and unaccountability, more autocratic than democratic forms of government. As Wæver again (2000) states:

in some democratic perspective, ‘de-securitization’ is probably the ideal, since it restores the possibility of exposing the issue to the normal haggling and questioning of politicization, but if one is actually concerned about something, securitization is an attractive tool that one might end up using as a political actor

(p. 251)

Desecuritization may happen in three ways according to Wæver. First of all, avoiding the “speech act” of talking about an issue in terms of security; to do this, for example, the militaries should not talk about that domestic or foreign policy issue as otherwise they will use securitizing speech. Secondly, keeping “the responses in forms that do not generate security dilemmas and other vicious spirals” (Wæver 1995, 253) and so creating more trust among the parts, to open space for political solutions. Finally, desecuritization is simply the opposite process with respect to securitization: shifting the issue out of emergency and back into the normal bargaining process of the political arena, with a re-articulation process.

Such “reconstructivist” approach of desecuritization, telling a “new story” of the minority group as an alternative to the negative stories coming from the state narrative, would make room to go back to political space and thus normalize minority rights. This would potentially be a good possibility for the Turkish government that could bring back the issue of the Kurdish minority in a peace process and in a negotiated solution. Unfortunately this solution doesn’t seem the most probable right now, as the Turkish government seems to want to deliver a final blow to the PKK at any cost – again, more similar to the Sri Lankan than to the Irish, Spanish or Indonesian cases.

The second possibility to solve the securitization problem could be management of the securitization. Paul Roe (2004), analyzing this solution, argues that minorities have a certain “societal security-ness” based on minority identity that, if removed, would threaten the minority existence in itself: “In seeking to maintain their collective identity, minorities are necessarily imbued with a certain ‘societal security-ness’, which, if removed, results in the death of the minority as a distinctive group” (p. 279). The author therefore suggests not to de-securitize but to manage the securitization. This means putting in place certain mechanisms that guarantee the existence of the minority and at the same time guarantee the existence of the state framework as well. As he says: “Management in this sense is about ‘moderate’ (not excessive) securitization, about ‘sensible’ (not irrational) securitization. Where societal security dilemmas occur, management is about ‘mitigating’ or ‘ameliorating’ them, not transcending them” (pp. 292–3). And again:

the minority can feel secure when certain provisions/legislations/mechanisms are put in place that will guarantee its existence (in identity terms), while similarly the majority can also feel secure in the knowledge that the minority will thus work (politically, economically and also societally) within the existing framework of the state.

(p. 293)

Therefore, for Roe, minorities need to remain securitized, as otherwise they would lose their identity. This is because maintaining policies that guarantee the security of the minority and the majority is important, as by maintaining their security they also guarantee their existence. Consequently, to manage the securitization means to normalize minority rights and regulate minority-majority relations with democratic tools. Nevertheless, this could not be enough to create a real democratic and inclusive polity and society, as the minority remains securitized and so excluded by the polity, while to create a real inclusiveness neither the minority neither the majority have to base their mere existence on a security approach, based on existential threats that have to be put under control.

Therefore the third and final policy recommendation for Turkey to improve its treatment of the Kurdish minority could be the most appropriate for a democracy that wants to grow towards more inclusive and universal principles. This recommendation is based on the emancipation concept proposed by Aradau (2004), who argues that desecuritization has to be confronted politically and not analytically (as the Copenhagen School suggests). In particular, she considers the concept of emancipation based on democratic principles of universality and recognition that is alternative to both the desecuritization process and the emancipation with security (with an exclusionary logic of security) espoused by the Roe approach. The emancipation for Aradau doesn’t necessarily mean the autonomy of the minority, or the decentralization of the national territory, but the recognition of the minority with full citizenship, within an inclusive process of the polity and the society:

Any claim made by minorities, for example, for studying and having institutional access in their own language should not be made in terms of claims to autonomy or secession, but rather in terms of the constitutional rights that already exist and which concern equally and indifferently all citizens”.

(p. 404)

Therefore, the emancipatory strategy can be applied only to minorities that are an integral part of the political community, not to migrants or refugees for example. This seems the most appropriate approach for Turkey, one that refuses any form of regional autonomy for Kurdish region, but could accept the extension of cultural rights to Kurds (with Kurdish language in public schools for example and not only private ones) or the possibility for Kurds to have their own party with national government aims may be in the future, without fearing a possible request of independence by this minority.

In conclusion, even if the last approach seems the most suitable to the Turkish case, being solicited in that sense by the EU in order to get closer to membership, all three approaches have a similar goal: the inclusion of the Kurdish minority inside the political community. Either desecuritizing the minority and bringing the issue back to the political arena, managing the minority issue with democratic tools, or giving full and equal citizenship to the minority in an emancipatory process, the Kurdish minority needs to be fully integrated into the future Turkish state, society and also Constitution that the AKP wants to reform after more than 30 years since the Army drafted it in 1982.

To get back on track on its path of democratization, towards a real liberal and meaningful democracy for all, Turkey needs to respect minority rights and be inclusive with its biggest ethnic non-religious minority, as otherwise not only will the integration in the EU have to wait, notwithstanding the help that Turkey may receive in the fight against DAESH-ISIS or the refugee crisis, but the complete integration of Turkey into the international community of democracies will also have to be postponed to an uncertain future.