Economic marginalization of Turkeys Kurds:The failed promise of
modernization and reform.
Paul J. White
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, April 1998, Vol. 18, Issue
1, pp.139-58.
Abstract:
Provides an analysis of the political economy of Turkeys Kurdish
region in the Kurdish east and south-east of Anatolia. In-depth
look at the growth of Kurdish Land ownership; Details on Turkeys
economic reforms and their impact on the Kurdish Region.
Introduction
The causes of alienation of the Kurds in Turkey from the Turkish
nation state are manifold. Prominent among these is the economic
marginalization of the Kurdish people and the region. This article
shows that within Turkey which is itself a developing country, a
marked disparity exists between its Kurdish region and western
Turkey.
We begin our analysis by describing the political economy of
Turkeys Kurdish region in the Kurdish east and south-east of
Anatolia, in order to provide the basis for an examination of the
notion that economic reform involving privatization of public
sector enterprises leads eventually to prosperity and expanded
economic equity and makes political reform (or democratization)
possible. Thus, the development of modem Turkeys economic life, and
specific trends such as sharecropping and the out-migration caused
by the growing mechanization of agriculture are considered. The
fortunes of industrial development in Turkeys Kurdish region are
then examined for the Kemalist period prior to 1980, enabling the
discussion to then focus on the present period of economic reform
and privatization. Throughout this paper, the evolving economic
condition of this region will be presented against the backdrop of
overall developments in Turkeys economy.
From Nomadic Livestock-Raising to Sedentary Farming
At the end of the nineteenth century, the economy of the Kurdish
tribes was still dominated by nomadic sheep-breeding. As Lazarev
has noted, however, this period also saw the beginning of the end
for Kurdish feudal tribalism with the disintegration of
kindred-tribal relationships and the marked stratification of
property within each tribe, as determined by the number of heads of
large and small livestock owned by each tribesman.[1]
As nomadic animal husbandry declined, the former nomads settled
down as ordinary ploughmen and shepherds, differing very little
from Armenian, Turkish, Iranian, or Iraqi peasants.[2] Data
compiled by the British Foreign Office in 1863 indicates that 40%
of land in Anatolian Kurdistan was in private hands by the late
1850s, with the remaining 60% being either government-owned or
waste land.[3] This was a change from only 20 years earlier, when
the land had begun to be wrested from the Koordish Beys.[4] The
same source, which appears to be indicative of land tenure
arrangements at this time throughout Anatolian Kurdistan, implies
that private land ownership was concentrated in the hands of
comparatively few land owners.[5] Thus, in 1863 Diyarbakr (the
paradigmatic region cited) the private land was held in parcels of
various sizes, as shown in Table 1.
TABLE 1. Percentage distribution of private farms by sizein
Diyarbakir in 1863[6]
50-100 acres100-500 acresOver 500 acres
20%30%50%
Issawi estimates that the rent paid on land by peasants in
Anatolian Kurdistan in 1858 equaled 15-20% of the annual produce[7]
In Diyarbakr, he adds that: The owner of the land and water
received 14 per cent of the net produce, the rest after deduction
of all expenses being shared equally by the capitalist who supplied
the seed, the labourer who prepared the ground, and the gardener
who tended the plants?[8]
A British official on the spot reported on sharecropping
arrangements to the British Foreign Office, in 1858 and states
that: The owner of land either lets it to a farmer, or cultivates
it himself by means of hired labourers, or cultivates it in
partnership with a farmer or several small farmers to whom the
proprietor advances a certain sum of money and the necessary seed.
The farmer finds the animals and labour; and after the harvest, the
net produce, all taxes having been paid, and the advance in money
refunded, is equally divided[9]
The area in the Ottoman Empire corresponding to the modern
Turkish state also saw much livestock-raising. Animal husbandry was
particularly popular in the Kurdish part of this area. Issawi
reports that very few attempts appear to have been made to improve
cattle-raising methods during the nineteenth century. The work was
hard and returns were few especially in Kurdistan, where the wool
was reportedly coarser. Grazing land was frequently owned by
capitalists, who employed shepherds,[10] degrees who in return for
2 1/2 piastres for each sheep gave them all the lambs wool and 1
1/2 okes of butter and 1 1/2 of cheese for every sheep.[11]
The eruption of World War I saw Ottoman Turkey still a
predominantly pre-capitalist economy albeit one co-existing
uneasily with both feudal and capitalistic economic forms. The
defeat of the Central Powers (including the Ottomans) inevitably
resulted in the overthrow of the Ottoman system, and its
replacement by Kemal Ataturks modernizing capitalist regime in
1923.
The 1920s were a key period for the economy of Turkey as a
whole. It was during this period more specifically between 1923 and
1929 that the young Turkish Republics economy was integrated into
the world economy.[12] Even so, as one observer has noted, Turkish
capitalism developed not due to the internal dynamics of Turkish
society, but as a result of a process originating outside Turkey
itself. World capitalism, first used Turkey as a market, then as a
place for investment. We shall examine below how this led to the
destruction of the Anatolian handicrafts market, by a flood of
cheap imported Western goods.[13] The comparative underdevelopment
of this region was the upshot of these developments.[14]
In the under-developed regions of todays world, some of the
relations of production can, even now, appear feudal or
semi-feudal. Provided the economy of the country is dominated by
capitalism, however, pre-capitalist enterprises are capitalist
since they are subordinated to capitalist laws of motion.[15]
Boratov asserts that a backward, primitive capitalism dominates the
economy in Turkey today, while Zulhkif Aydin comments with relation
to Turkey and the world economy that:
Today capitalism has acquired a universal character; the
pre-capitalist appearance of the family farm should not let us
believe that this constitutes a mode of production Capital controls
the conditions of reproduction of the peasant family farm.[16]
While the Turkish economy remained subordinate to those of
industrialized states, it is nonetheless true that, overall, it
experienced a leap forward in both agricultural and industrial
sectors, productivity and techniques.[17] But the same was not true
for Turkeys Kurdish region. In the Kurdish east and south-east,
agriculture remained at subsistence level throughout the 1920s.
Large landowners continued to dominate in Turkeys Kurdish
region.[18] The form of labour in these areas remained
sharecropping, which survived as a quasi-feudal tenancy arrangement
[19] while small peasant holdings predominated in the rest of the
new Turkish state.[20] In fact, notes Keyder excepting Eastern
Anatolia, all peasant families held some land.[21]
Growth of Kurdish Land Ownership
In south-east and eastern Anatolia, agriculture is still the
principal economic activity.[22] Kurdish peasants in the mountains
now overwhelmingly own the land they farm [23] although, as will be
shown, this has not meant prosperity for most of them. For one
thing, plots of land tend to be ridiculously small and unable to
support a family. Until as recently as the 1950s and 1960s, Kurdish
peasants living on the plains were frequently yarc sharecroppers
who paid the landowner a fixed proportion of the crop, which could
vary from 10 to 80%.[24] Other plains dwellers, were agricultural
workers, who received a small fee for working under the supervision
of the landlord or his bailiff.[25] Many sharecropping agreements
came to an end with the gradual introduction of mechanization into
agricultural production from the 1950s onwards.[26] A surplus
labour force began to appear, as landlords were compelled to free
peasants they could no longer usefully employ. Former sharecroppers
in both the mountains and the plains of Turkeys Kurdish region
increasingly became transformed into seasonal agricultural workers,
or were forced to migrate either to Kurdish cities or to the west
of Turkey, if not out of the country altogether.[27]
Figures for the distribution of land holdings have shown little
variation for the period 1950-1980. Statistics can be misleading,
however. The depredations of factors such as absenteeism, renting
and sharecropping arrangements and the illegal use of public lands
led to a decrease in the amount of cultivated land. By 1973,
landless families constituted 30.1% of total rural households. This
figure is almost double the ratio of landless families to landed
families for Turkey as a whole. Some 66.4% were farmers, mostly
sharecroppers, while the remainder were labourers, probably
seasonal labourers or artisans.[28]
Very large land holdings have been a feature of the region since
the sixteenth century. Some families continue to own entire
villages.[29] In 1980, for example, 59.9% of the total lands were
owned by only 11.6% of the total households. However, 56% of the
land owning households owned only 8.7% of the total land.[30]
Aydin comments:
Sharecropping plays an important role in reproducing the
political and economic power of landlords, some of whom are also
tribal leaders. It is through sharecropping arrangements that
landlords strengthen their political dominance, which in turn
enables them to have access to credits, fertilisers, etc. and
therefore to intensify their economic dominance over the
sharecroppers.[31]
In eastern Anatolia, 79.3% of landless households engage in
sharecropping or renting arrangements. This supports the view that
landlords try to tie the landless poor to the land in order to
secure a labour force for peak seasons. Although only 6.2% of
landowning families, absentee landlords nevertheless control 57.3%
of the total land in south-east Anatolia. In Diyarbakr vilayet,
rich absentee landowning families control 88% of land, despite
themselves constituting a mere 3% of the provinces landowning
families. Absentee landlords might also engage in commercial
activities in the towns of the Kurdish region, or even in western
Turkey. This tends to further drain capital which could be used for
development out of the region and send it westwards.[32]
The unique geography of much of Turkeys Kurdish region also
takes its toll. In the mountains, where land is scarce and
ploughing is still done by oxen drawing wooden ploughs,
agricultural production is scarcely above subsistence level. The
low returns from even cash crops, like tobacco, provide little
incentive for an expansion of agricultural production.[33]
The use of modern farm machinery in the plains has transformed
the relations of production: while small and middle land owners
generally cannot afford to buy tractors and harvesters, a new
phenomenon is the urban entrepreneur who hires out the machinery to
landowners in exchange for a percentage (8 or 10%) of the crop.
Frequently such an entrepreneur is also a money-lender and obliges
the landowner who borrows money from him to rent out his land to
him (in return for 50% of the crop) until the debt has been paid
back.[34]
Nomadism -once a phenomenon involving entire towns is now
comparatively rare.[35] Some villages of peasants in the lower
mountain regions with larger flocks may still practice
semi-nomadism moving to cooler summer pastures (zozan), where they
live in tents for the duration of the season, apart from brief
trips back to their village when appropriate.[36] However, in
Turkeys Kurdish region, notes van Bruinessen, there are several
[fully] nomadic tribes.[37]Industrial Development in the Kurdish
Region
Industrial development has taken a long time even to commence in
Turkeys Kurdish region. In the seventeenth century, we are told,
many towns in Anatolian Ottoman Kurdistan were centres of
craftsmanship and trade, as well as seats of government and centres
of learning.[38] However, the population of these towns was largely
non-Kurdish.[39]
Foreign enterprises played the major role in developing Turkish
industry. The way for foreign industrial and commercial
intervention on a large scale had been laid by the signing of the
Capitulations, a series of accords in which the Ottomans ceded
certain privileges to foreign business. Foreign business developed
particularly strongly following the Anglo-Turkish Commercial
Convention of 1838, to the point where foreigners had both
completely unrestricted access to the economy and preferential
tariff arrangements.[40]
Industrial development began its torturous path in Turkish
Kurdistan during the nineteenth century. One observer lists the
principal export industries in Diyarbakr in 1889 as:
coppersmith work, iron foundries, tanning, silk and cotton
weaving, and silkworm breeding. The other handicraftsmen, such as
tinsmiths, smiths, saddle-makers, masons, timber workers,
carpenters, shoemakers, etc. make only articles needed for local
consumption. Except for saddle-making, all of these crafts are
undertaken exclusively by Christians, who constitute half the
population of Diyarbakr.[41]
Early in the nineteenth century, the Christian and Jewish
artisans had begun to disappear, with few Kurds remaining who had
mastered these crafts by the early twentieth century.[42] Since the
1830s, cheap foreign imports from Europe had begun to compete with
local handicrafts, anyway. And village craftsmanship was
increasingly replaced with simple mechanized industry.[43] However,
the lack of infrastructure and primitive nature of this industry
means it remains peripheral to other economies in the region and
ill-equipped to compete with neighbouring industry.[44] One
observer estimates that the insignificant nature of industry in
this city amid the damage wreaked by foreign competition by 1889
indicated that Diyarbakirs fragile industrial base was within
course of disappearing.[45] Naturally, this did not just happen in
Kurdistan; there was a general decline in industry throughout the
entire Ottoman Empire from this period onwards.[46] Ironically, it
was probably a measure of the extreme economic backwardness of
Anatolias Kurdish region that the hand-spinning of locally produced
raw cotton into yam continued into the 1890s.[47]
By the mid-1920s, industry was beginning to be transformed, due
to the injection of merchant capital investment, through most of
the new Turkish Republic. One useful index of industrial growth as
well as itself being a motor for further development is the growth
of the railways system. In Turkey, as in other developing countries
in their early phase of development, the railways experienced
notable growth. But, once again, such growth was not uniform.
Keyder notes that the distribution of railways exhibited an evident
inequality between the market-oriented western regions, the
surplus-producing interior, and the subsistence-farming east,
north-east, and south-west.[48]
Meanwhile, those Kurdish feudal landowners who had managed by
this time to accumulate some capital invested it in small industry
and commerce in the big cities. They thus acted as mediators for
the Turkish bourgeoisie, in marketing some of the latters goods. In
the cities of Urfa, Gaziantep, Diyarbakr and Mardin, these feudals
controlled 70% of the agricultural land, while they constituted
only 7.5% of the total peasant families.[49]
The comparatively more numerous and economically more advantaged
population, the range of industrial crops and railway network of
western Anatolia were all factors militating in favour of the
industrial concentration in this region. In other words, the
existing higher level of economic development in this region were
important reasons for it to experience a continuing higher level of
industrialization than the Kurdish areas.[50]
In 1927, the Western Turkish cities of Istanbul and Izmir
accounted for 40% (816 establishments), out of a Turkey-wide total
of 2052 industrial establishments employing more than 10 persons.
(Ten employees is usually the benchmark defining a factory, as
opposed to a simple workshop.[51] Overall, 25.7% of all industrial
employment was in Istanbul and Umir.[52] By the late 1930s,
according to another estimation, there were something like 414
large manufacturing establishments, only seven of which were in
Turkeys Kurdish region. These establishments represented a mere
1.7% of the total in Turkey as a whole[53]
Turkey one of the first states in the Middle East to begin to
industrialize has done so, in a highly uneven manner. The economic
history of the post-Ottoman state has experienced at least three
distinct phases. Beginning with its founding in 1923, up until 1950
can be described as the period of devletcilik-etatism, or massive
state intervention into the economy, including Five Year Plans
modeled on those of Stalins Russia, commencing in 1934. During this
period, state economic enterprises (SEEs) were developed, due to a
perceived insufficiency of entrepreneurial skills and capital
accumulation in the private sector and the belief that SEEs were
the engines of industrial and regional development[54]
Like some other developing countries, the young Turkish state
justified its strongly interventionist role in the economy
ideologically: industrial catching-up, economic sovereignty, and
social equity were all given as the raisons dtre of public
enterprise, relegating the private sector thereby to a decidedly
subordinate role. The private sector was depicted as weak, given to
speculation and profiteering, and prone to sell out the national
good through alliances with national capital. Radical Kemalism held
out the prospect that some day a truly nationalist, enlightened,
far-sighted entrepreneurial bourgeoisie might emerge, one, however,
that would always play a supporting role in strategies laid down by
the state.[55] The Izmir Economic Congress of 1923 laid down the
framework for the state to work as the handmaiden to the nascent
private sector[56] The Congress:
drew up the Principles of Economic Contract, which emphasized
the mutual responsibilities of labor and capital in building
economic sovereignty. The contract embodied ... what is now ...
commonly referred to as corporatism, and it became a lasting
feature of the Turkish political economy. In that spirit, in 1925,
all leftist organizations were banned, unions placed under state
control, and the right to strike denied. The state maintained
direct control of a number of monopolies in tobacco, alcohol, salt,
matches, sugar, and petroleum. In addition, the first modern SOEs
(state-owned enterprises) were founded in tobacco processing, wool
milling, cotton weaving, silk spinning, and sugar beet
refining.[57]
Behind all government initiatives in this period lay the goal of
fostering private industry. By 1932 there were almost 1500
industrial enterprises.[58] The introduction of ISI
(import-substituting industrialization) in Turkey was a
comprehensive and strategic response to the international economic
crisis of the 1930s.[59] It was also, importantly, a response to a
perceived crisis in national self-assertion in the face of dominant
industrial powers. The designers, aware of the structural
impediments talked frequently of skipping stages and leaping
directly into the industrial age.[60]
The introduction of ISI, Waterbury argues, was an inclusionist
process, that is, one which facilitated the construction of a broad
constituency to sustain this policy as opposed to the reforms of
the 1980s onwards (to be dealt with later), which have evoked broad
opposition, (typically trade unions, the military, the state sector
itself, and the salariat) with only a narrow constituency
supporting them.[61]
The period from 1950 to the first military coup of 1960 saw the
dominant emphasis shifting to the development of private enterprise
-albeit with prodigious amounts of government and international
investment and loans to both industry and agriculture.[62] Adnan
Menderes whose Demokrat Partisi (DP) had won the 1950 election on a
platform of privatizing many SEEs[63] was unable to carry out this
policy due to opposition from key groups in society. Industrial
development by SEEs actually increased during the Menderes
administration, while that of private firms decreased.[64] The
clash between the new DP and the old Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi
founded by Atatrk reflected the conflict between a newly assertive
alliance of private interests, created by etatism, and the old
military-bureaucratic alliance that had founded the
republic.[65]
The 1960s and 1970s saw a re-imposition of devletcilik although
this time administered by a modernizing republican technocracy.[66]
A State Planning Organization (SPO) was constituted in the early
1960s and new Five Year Plans were drawn-up.[67] Throughout the
1970s, however, the new style devletcilik began to give way to the
privatisation and parcelling-up of state agencies[68]
As state-owned enterprises failed to make profits and only
worsened balance of payments problems in Turkey during the 1960s
generating inflationary claims on the public purse the governments
initial response was deficit financing and external borrowing, so
as not to compromise distributional arrangements.[69] Wage-earners
and poor farmers throughout Turkey suffered, but the Kurdish east
and south-east was particularly affected, with the average
household income in the Kurdish southern provinces earning only
74.8% of the country average income in 1968, and the east 83.4%,
while Istanbul earned 259.4%, and Ankara 162.0%. Five years later,
in 1973, the south had managed some small improvement, earning a
figure of 86.7%. The figure for the east slumped dramatically,
however, coming in at only 67.5%, while Istanbul earned 162.7% and
Ankara a still respectable 123.5%.[70]
In less than a decade Turkeys debt grew almost five-fold, going
from $3.3 billion in 1973 to $15.3 billion by 1980. The situation
was exacerbated much more by the second surge in oil prices during
1978-1979, which pushed Turkey to the brink of default.(71) This
led to an initial response which was an attempt to streamline and
rationalise the statist experiments, to replace redistributive
state socialism with cost-effective state capitalism.[72]
Turkeys Economic Reforms and their Impact on the Kurdish
Region
The end result, by 1978-1979, was a severe economic and
political crisis at home, and an external accounts crisis, which
was dealt with through a military take-over and the authoritarian
implementation of a structural adjustment program and a shift to
export-led growth.[73] Keyder argues that the military stepped in
to oversee the economic tasks of accumulation, following the 12
September 1980 coup, adding that the states legitimacy, already
eroded in the eyes of the social groups excluded from the populist
equation, declined parallel to its growing privatization, during
the 1960s and 1970s.[74] This seems an accurate assessment,
although one which can be easily misinterpreted, to give the
military full responsibility for the economic reforms of 1980
onwards. In actual fact, it was the coalition government of Adalet
Partisi (Justice Party) headed by President, Suleyman Demirel,
which on 24 January 1980 initiated radical measures aimed at
breaking the back of very serious balance-of-payments, and
hyperinflation.[75]
At the heart of the radical new economic policy package was the
decision to end devletcilik.[76] Arguably, the failure of Demirels
coalition to implement the new economic policies was a major factor
in convincing the generals to act on 12 September 1980.[77] The
military endorsed the new policy package, however, allowing the man
behind it, the US-trained economist Turgut zal, to remain in charge
of its implementation.[78] zal forcibly lowered wages and declared
strikes illegal, subsidized exports and devalued the Turkish lira,
in a ruthless drive to deliberately shrink Turkeys domestic market.
In such a climate, only the larger, robust enterprises survived.
Protests from the smaller capitalists aside, Keyder estimates that
the bourgeoisie as a whole was quite willing to trade off the
economic and political problems of this period for restricted
democracy, ideological hegemony, and a disciplined labour
force.[79]
The economically weakest units workers, unemployed, small
producers and the economically marginal population (which include
most of the inhabitants, of the south and south-east) saw their
real incomes drop sharply. Serif Mardin estimates that the share of
wages in the national income dropped from around 35% in 1976-1978
to around 20% in 1983-1986.[80] Social spending on health,
education and so forth, was cut drastically in the same
period.[81]
Turgut zal combined these tough economic reforms with political
reforms aimed at building a constituency which would support the
economic changes because they benefited directly from these. This
constituency (an enlarged middle class) would be an electoral
buttress for the government against the opposition of poor farmers
and workers, who would suffer materially from the same economic
measures. The privatization of public housing beginning in the
mid-1980s, for instance, both provided the government with revenue
and pleased the middle class, who were able to buy this
housing.[82] zal also significantly liberalized trade and foreign
exchange dealings.
What sector or sectors of Turkish society benefited from these
reforms? Investigating income distribution and equity in the
reformed Turkish economy (since these are key indicators of the
evenness and depth of the reforms benefits), leads Hansen to
catalogue what he believes are uncertainties about the effects of
strategy change and reforms in income distribution.[83]
Ozals economic reforms caused subsistence farming to shrink to
almost nothing.[84] This is a factor of immense impact to the
predominantly rural Turkish Kurds. Another observer commenting on
the fate of farmers growing crops which are found in Turkeys
Kurdish region cotton and tobacco[85] points out that for these two
commodities, the rapid depreciation of the Turkish lira during the
1980s has been beneficial to the exporters, but not to the farmer
[86]
It is true that Ozal appeared to soften the impact of his
economic reforms in the countryside through the application of
support prices (that is, prices established through intervention by
public agencies). Boratov speculates, however, that these were
manipulated in such a way so as to keep intact the adverse price
structure which had emerged during the crisis years; and, at worst,
(has) been deliberately used to depress them even further.[87]
[Under] conditions of declining real prices and increased
supplies to the market, as in Turkish Kurdistan during the 1980s,
Boratov continues, peasant farmers should be expected to run into
increased and even extreme indebtedness to cover costs.[88] There
was a political price for the drastic post-1980 economic
restructuring, however. In the earlier, Kemalist, model, economic
development had managed to more or less incorporate the various
social classes and marginal (ethnic) groups into the economic,
political and cultural projects of the dominant elite within the
Turkish state as a whole.[89] (Given their long standing level of
chronic under-development, the Kurds were probably the least
integrated, but their position was still quite different from that
which stands today).[90] [Turkish] Nationalism, and its claim for a
single integrating principle within political borders, seemed to
work.[91] In contrast, the Kurds since 1980 have arguably felt more
left out, less like participants in the Turkish economy and society
than ever before.
If this is so, it could indicate that the earlier hopes of
economic liberalism leading almost inexorably to political
liberalism (or democratization) were ill-placed, if not naive.
Certainly, there has never been any basis for an economic quick fix
in modern Turkey. Turkish politicians have been unable to solve the
countrys intractable economic problems since the 1950s.
zals privatizations began in the mid-1980s, until, just before
the 1987 elections, he realized that his middle class support base
was too small to provide sufficient electoral support.[92] He
therefore reverted to the Keynesianism of his predecessors, pouring
around US $2 billion into the countryside (including, presumably,
the Kurdish east and south-east).[93] Waldner points out that this
unfortunately led to the triggering of renewed inflation, resulting
in austerity budgets that caused a decline in prices on the Turkish
stock market ... The need to secure electoral support, in other
words, undermined economic reform.[94]
A variety of Keynesianism therefore returned in 1987, as
subsequent administrations failed to grasp the hot potatoes of
economic reform and privatisation.[95] In early 1994, Turkey
therefore faced a new economic crisis, triggered by a run on the
Turkish lira and spiralling interest rates. The Turkish lira
plunged from TL 11,000 to the US dollar in June 1993, when Prime
Minister Ciller took office, to TL 38,000 in early April 1994.[96]
According to the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
the crisis stemmed from years of loose fiscal and monetary policies
that had exacerbated inflation and allowed the public debt, money
supply, and current account deficit to explode. Two leading US
credit agencies downgraded the countrys economic rating in response
to the January crisis.[97]
On 5 April 1994, Prime Minister Tansu Cillers government
announced a harsh austerity rescue package, aimed at slowing the
ballooning inflation rate, by dampening domestic demand through
steep price rises, one-off taxes and spending and public sector pay
cuts as well as also fostering real growth, by closing down or
privatizing several SEEs. It was hoped that this would attract new
foreign investment capital to the country.[98] Three months later,
the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which strongly supported the
austerity package, pledged USS 740 million in stand-by credit to
assist the recovery process.[99]
Inflation was reduced by these measures, but stood at 130%[100]
by December 1994, with the annual inflation rate being 126%.[101]
Turkeys domestic debt began to grow alarmingly moreover, as Ankara
sought funds to repay the IMFs short-term loan on schedule. The
government subsequently applied for a further IMF loan, principally
aimed at financing a social safety net program for workers, who
would lose their jobs once the state companies they are employed by
are privatized.[102]
Spending cuts included sharp cuts in essential services such as
public health leading to the claim in the editorial of a leading
Turkish daily newspaper at the time that state hospitals could not
even provide ... patients with bandages and had to tell them to buy
these because of a lack of funds.[103] Despite Cillers austerity
program:
real GDP dropped an estimated 5% for the year as a whole, the
worst decline in Turkeys post-war history. At the same time, the
government missed key 1994 targets stipulated in the IMF agreement;
the budget deficit is estimated to have overshot the governments
goal by 47%; the total public sector borrowing requirement likely
reached 10-12% of GDP, rather than 8.5% called for in the program;
and the Turkish liras value fell 5% to 7% more than
expected.[104]
Meanwhile, it was reported that the governments so called
incentive payments for the first five months of 1994 totalled TL13
trillion (USS 34,210,526.32 at April 1994 rates), a staggering
figure.[105] An official from the Foreign Trade Undersecretariat
commented: In fact one should not inquire about which sectors are
given incentives but about which sectors are not. It would be much
easier to find out.[106]
Nevertheless, Cillers austerity program managed to secure some
dividends. An examination of the implementation of the 1994
austerity package the following year, by the international finance
and investment firm Morgan Stanley, concluded that Turkey had
managed to pay off USS 10 billion of its foreign debt during 1994.
An American financial agency raised Turkeys economic status from
stable to positive. International economic experts especially
praised the great rise in currency reserves. The reserves of the
Central Bank without gold have risen 90% since the beginning of the
year to US$13.51 billion.[107]
Perhaps the most appropriate comment on the success of the
governments economic management during 1994 was made by the prime
minister herself, who reportedly purchased real estate in the
United States for investment purposes, after becoming PM. As one
Turkish daily put it, this could indicate that Ciller herself does
not believe in the future of Turkey.[108]
Despite the incentive payments to industry in the middle of a
supposed austerity drive, the government did not cushion the
Kurdish region from the sharp edge of its economic policies. Some
months after the governments austerity package had been released in
1994, the government announced that Kurdish eastern Anatolia would
be exempt from certain aspects of its austerity program. A booklet
issued by the office of Prime Minister Ciller stated: The released
funds will be used to develop agriculture, animal husbandry,
energy, roads, housing, forestation and manufacturing.[109] In
December 1994 however, a reliable source reported that economic
activity in south-eastern Turkey had dropped considerably.[110] The
reality is that the shooting war between Turkish authorities and
the PKK is itself a powerful disincentive to new, developmental
investment,[111] not to mention a massive drain on the public
purse.[112]
The economy of the Turkish state as a whole is backward by world
standards. To say that the economy of Turkeys Kurdish region is
comparatively much less developed again is certainly significant.
Furthermore, as is often the case in such situations of
under-development, it can be added that under-development begets
further under-development.[113] The singular paucity of
infrastructure, and low level industrial development in Turkeys
Kurdish region, makes it difficult in the best of economic climates
to attract development capital. Aydin points out that the transfer
of the surplus produced in the region to the developed western part
of Turkey is the prime reason behind this underdevelopment
...[114]
A vicious circle is thus begun which seems to spin even more
ruthlessly in the wake of a harsher climate in the world economy in
general. This, in turn, arguably alienates Kurdish citizens of the
Turkish state further from the universalizing Kemalist myth of
Turkish nationalism. Nor has the circle been broken in the period
since Cillers 1994 austerity drive. Little real new economic
development would have occurred in Turkish Kurdistan during that
time. Furthermore, given the under-underdeveloped economic
character of the Kurdish region, it is important to consider how
any policy of general economic restraint must have a particularly
severe impact on this region. Most workers in Turkeys Kurdish
region are employed in a very few large SEEs, in several very small
workshops, or in the largely poverty-stricken informal economic
sector. Of all these, the highest paid are those in the few large
SEEs with a presence in Turkeys Kurdish region, such as Tekel, the
state tobacco and liquor monopoly. Yet these workers, as public
sector employees, would not have been immune from the estimated 40%
cut in earnings suffered by all public sector workers during the
year.[115] Apart from a very few large land owners, most of the
economically active Kurds in the Kurdish regions agricultural
sector are very poor often destitute sharecroppers. In virtually
none of these cases do these Kurds have adequate savings to
insulate them from further adversity during harder economic
times.
Turkeys economy remains vulnerable. The inflation rate
oscillates around the 80% mark and the state is still burdened with
back-breaking debt repayments.[116] (The treasurys debt rose almost
25% during the first four months of 1996 alone, to USS 30
billion).[117]
Despite blockage of several privatizations in the Constitutional
Court by nationalist and pro-worker-posturing opposition parties,
parliament passed legislation on 24 November 1994, according to
which USS 5 billion of state assets would now be privatized.[118]
The money from these transactions is to be:
used for one of three purposes: restructuring additional
enterprises in preparation for privatization; paying off
outstanding debt; or funding unemployment insurance. Proceeds may
not be used to cover budget deficits. Bids for block sales of two
enterprises the airport ground handler Havas, and the textiles
concern, Sumerbank were issued in January.[119]
Very little of this is of benefit to the Kurds, however. Since
mid-1993, at least two million Kurds have been forced out of not
only over two thousand villages by the Turkish military in
increasing numbers, but also out of several cities. From the middle
of 1993 the PKK and the Turkish authorities declared total war
against each other. The authorities in general, tend to
increasingly regard all Turkish Kurds as either the enemy or at
least a potential enemy. This is borne out by the treatment Kurds
in a Kurdish region have suffered since mid-1993, as discussed
later.
Probably the only Kurdish city not to have been attacked by the
Turkish military is Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish city in Turkey.
Diyarbakir has suffered severe economic stress, however, due to now
being swollen many times its size with unemployed (and
unemployable) Kurdish refugees. The Turkish military attacked the
regional capital of Lice on 22 October 1994, during which the city
was flattened. The city of Cizre, like Lice, was also attacked by
the Turkish army. Turkish special units, the death-squads, aimed
their attacks on this city. Before this, the cities of Yuksekova,
Diyadin, Akinova, Cizre, Kulp, Varto and Sirnak, as well as several
other cities, were reportedly destroyed by the bombardments of
security forces.[120]
The United States Department of States human rights report on
Turkey for the year 1994, asserts that the Turkish government
security forces forcibly evacuated and even burned down 2297
villages, and displaced two million people. Resettlement and
compensation from the government was hard to come by and even the
promised aid for 1994 was not disbursed, while there was little
provision for assistance in the 1995 budget.[121]
In July 1994, the State Department report continues, Turkeys
Minister for Human Rights announced a government emergency aid
program to be applied in 22 provinces in the east and southeast and
more economic support to the region.[122] This is the Turkish
governments policy of economic development for the Kurdish region,
referred to above. Writing in early 1995, the report continues: To
date, few villages have been resettled.[123]
At least two million recent Kurdish refugees are now crammed
into the conurbations of western Turkey. All of these refugees have
been forcibly transferred from their villages and some towns. In
almost all cases they do not have the necessary liquid (or easily
liquefiable) assets, necessary for a new life in the city. Swollen
with all these refugees from the Kurdish war, Turkeys cities are no
haven for the unemployed. As described earlier, thousands of
villages and even some entire cities have been forcibly evacuated
by the military, and often then destroyed.
This recent influx of Kurdish refugees into the cities of
western Turkey has added to the earlier waves of Kurds from the
east arid south-east of Anatolia over the past four or five
decades. The continual mechanization of agriculture throughout
Turkey from the 1950s onwards had a side-effect of seriously
depleting the total number of Kurds living in Turkeys Kurdish
region. Mechanization, in turn, affected social differentiation and
stratification throughout rural Turkey as a whole. As each tractor
replaced 10 to 50 peasants or rural labourers,[124] this
accelerated rural exodus to cities and towns.[125]
While the region as a whole has been losing people through
out-migration, some centres within the region notably Diyarbakir,
Mus and Bitils grew from inmigration, between 1955 and 1960.[126]
If the recent massive transfers are taken into consideration, 75%
of people in Turkey now live in cities.[127] With unemployment and
inflation both running at extremely high, alarming levels even
before this recent mass exodus from rural centres westwards,
Turkeys economy was already in dire straits. It is not hard to see
the extreme difficulty which the masses of sharecroppers (most of
whom have only primary school education) would face surviving
economically in the current economic situation.
There appear to be real constraints on the degree to which
Turkey can realistically economically modernize itself. Time and
again, the need of Turkish political elites to secure the political
support of various social interest groups has meant that economic
reform projects remain incomplete even though these become more
difficult economically and less palatable politically, the longer
they are left unresolved.
The Promise of GAP
This grim picture of industrial development in Turkeys Kurdish
region has not so far considered the promise of the Gneydou Anadolu
Projesi (GAP, or Southern Anatolia Project). GAP is a massive
industrial undertaking consisting of 12 large scale projects, six
in the Euphrates and six in the Tigris regions with 22 subsidiary
projects designed to benefit Turkeys Kurdish region. However, even
though it is so very ambitious and large scale, one may ask if this
project would be capable of the miraculous social and economic
transformation of Turkeys Kurdish region, that it is designed to
bring about.[128] Successive Turkish governments have heavily
promoted GAP, both at home and abroad, saying it would enrich the
project area (which is within Turkeys Kurdish region) and all of
Turkey. Turkish authorities state that the project area will
experience a 17-fold increase in income creating 1.6 million jobs
in the technical and agricultural sectors of the project area.
According to the newspaper Cumhuriyet (9 March 1989), a 50-60%
increase in cultivable land is hoped for in the project area. By
the year 2002, GAP is supposed to generate increases in agriculture
by 20%, in the services sector by 10% and in industrial production
by 8%. In addition, authorities aim to at least slow down the rate
of out-migration from the Kurdish region to the west of Turkey and
beyond.[129]
A number of political goals are also hoped for by Ankara. The
government hopes that economic development resulting from GAP will
help it to minimize the number of political adherents to extremist
Kurdish nationalist groups.[130] The continued guerrilla activity
by the PKK in the project area, however, is a strong disincentive
for prospective industrial investment. Energy produced through GAP
will therefore tend to flow to the west of Turkey, not to Turkeys
Kurdish region.[131]
Similarly, dreams of local peasants benefiting from vast new
expanses of agricultural land opened up through irrigation also
seem to be an illusion. Land reform legislation is not planned in
conjunction with GAP. Flooding has already led to the displacement
of entire villages.[132] In such cases, it is reported that
compensation is paid only to the owners of flooded land, not to the
sharecroppers who cultivate the land. The latter received only
small sums for their houses.[133] Entire villages were relocated as
complete units in very few instances.[134] This has provoked new
migration to the western part of Turkey. Irrigation from the
project has therefore tended to have only negative social and
economic effects on inhabitants of rural Turkeys Kurdish region so
far.
Furthermore, the costs of GAP are massive each year [135] with
little apparent economic benefit now or for quite some time to
come. At 1991 prices, according to Osman Tekinel, GAP is equal to
Turkeys annual budget ... and is 60% for irrigation and 40% for
energy production. This massive outlay obviously leaves much less
potential government funding available for promoting specifically
Kurdish economic growth and development. Tekinel comments that
development in Turkish agriculture as a result of GAP will occur in
the ukurova and especially the Mersin region. Both of these areas
are outside, however.[136]
Considerable technical problems have already caused terrible
delays in completing each stage of GAP. The project was supposed to
finish in 1994. Yet, after talking to engineers and architects on
the spot in 1991, Turkish journalist Arslan Baser Kafaoglu
concluded that the whole project would not be completed until 2013!
During the same trip, Kafaoglu discovered that more than the 2,000
workers employed on the project were not from Urfa or Adiyaman, but
miners from Zonguldak and Sivas.[137]
Kafaoglu also questions the extra production and economic
activity expected to result from GAP. He points out that no
provision has been made for the extensive infrastructure needed to
accompany this, claiming that GAP is also technically
defective.[138]
For all these reasons, therefore, it must be concluded that,
despite its magnificent promise, the Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi will
be of little direct economic benefit, in the final analysis, to the
inhabitants of Turkeys Kurdish region. It represents not so much
the development of Turkeys Kurdish region, but a further
development of western Turkey.
Devletcilik and Stunted Industry
The picture of the effects of industrialization on Turkeys
Kurdish region thus appear disarmingly simple. Kurdish industry has
remained permanently stunted.[139] This means a bitter continuing
fight for survival with other, more advanced, industrial centres
elsewhere in the Middle East.[140] This continues to impose a cruel
burden on those employed in Kurdish industry, for they are
exploited more severely as social legislation is evaded on a large
scale.[141] In some ways, Turkeys Kurdish regions stunted economic
development deserves the name of under-development rather than
development. Industrial progress is blocked.[142]
Michael M. Gunter, whose book The Kurds in Turkey:/t Political
Dilemma, is, in the large part, a plea for critics of Turkeys
treatment of the Kurds to be more understanding of the dilemma of
the Turkish state,[143] has offered some of the most damning
evidence of the under-development of Turkeys Kurdish region. Gunter
writes that:
there, of course, can be no doubt that south-eastern Turkey
suffers from serious problems of economic under-development. The
CIA Report, for example, stated that the eastern provinces have
received only 10% of state industrial investment and only 2% of all
commercial investments. What is more, hospitals and educational
facilities are thinly spread in the east. Unemployment is well
above the national average. Illiteracy in Turkish among the Kurds
is high as 80%; and electricity, piped water, and passable roads
are non-existent in more than half of the villages.[144]
Van Bruinessen notes that Kurdish villages are not connected
with each other (except by foot-paths) but with district capitals
and the state capitals. From any given village in Kurdistan it is
easier to reach Amsterdam than most other villages. Kurdish
villagers who have never even seen a town before have been forced
by economic pressures to immigrate to the highly industrialized
West.[145]
The type of bold economic reform attempted by a developing
country such as Turkey requires a more or less steady flow of
investment funds to facilitate industrialization. This creates
serious political dilemmas for the ruling elite who depend on their
own predominant agricultural sectors as the principal sources of
savings to finance industrialization. However, in the process of
development, rural living standards stagnate, new industries face
inadequate domestic (especially rural) demand and are too
inefficient to enter into exports, and losses are covered by
deficit financing and foreign borrowing.[146] As Turkeys ruling
elite has sought to push the country as a whole towards economic
modernization, it is the rural sector which carries an inordinate
proportion of the burden. Turkeys rural sector is much larger than
its Kurdish region, of course. However, the Kurdish region is
overwhelmingly rural, and the most backward sector of the Turkish
economy as a whole, and continues to remain so.
Conclusion
Our investigation reveals that the Kurds in villages, towns and
cities in Turkeys Kurdish region have benefited the least and
suffered the most from the countrys economic reforms to date.
Turkeys unprecedented urbanization, caused by economic pressures
and the militarys policy of forcible village clearances, has
resulted in appalling economic conditions leading to overcrowding,
poverty and unemployment. Kurdish villagers recently arrived from
south-east Turkey are arguably the least likely to find employment
in Turkeys swollen cities and make a place for themselves in the
crowded urban environment.
Thus, Turkeys developmental dilemma is doubly bitter for the
Turkish Kurds. If a sharp turn towards aggressive and equitable
economic reform is not taken before very long, the Kurds face the
worst consequences of all from a deepening unemployment crisis and
the return of uncontrollable inflation. However, if (or more
likely, when) a return to a program of strong, ongoing, economic
reforms is made, the danger is that this will now need to be so
drastic as to be impossible to implement without a return of the
same sort of political regime which supervised the last serious
bout of economic liberalization and adjustment in 1980-1983. In
other words, it might require a further period of direct military
rule, and the suspension of Turkeys fragile parliamentary
democracy. This also seems to be the lesson of the massive strike
movements of 1994 and 1995 in opposition to Cillers half-hearted
austerity drive. The practical ramifications of direct military
rule for all of Turkey, however, are certain to make life even more
precarious for the Kurds.
Whatever economic policies are pursued in Turkey, history seems
to be telling us, at the very least, that the Kurds appear destined
to derive the least benefit from them. Nor have political
liberalization and democracy flowed inexorably from economic reform
and liberalization for the Kurds. Having already missed out on
constructing their own nation-state, at least two million Turkish
Kurds have now also even lost the right to live in their own
village, town or city. The inhabitants of Turkeys Kurdish region
have become the worst casualties of Turkeys problematic attempts at
integration and economic reform.
NOTES
1. M. S. Lazarev, Kurdistan i Kurdskaya Problema (Moscow, 1964),
in The Economic History of Turkey. 1800-1914, ed. Charles Issawi.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, pp. 65-66.
2. Op. cit., p. 66.
3. Op. cit., p. 207.
4. Op. cit., p. 221.
5. From Table 2, Percentage Distribution of Farms by Size
(Acres), 1863, in op. cit., p. 203.
6. Op. cit.. See also p. 221.
7. Op. cit., p. 207.
8. Op. cit., p. 208.
9. Op. cit., p. 220.
10. Op. cit., p. 271.
11. Issawi, Op. cit..
12. The Ottoman Empire participated in the world economy, of
course, especially during the nineteenth century. It did so as a
still largely pre-capitalist economy, however. See Caglar [Caglar]
Keyder, The Definition of a Peripheral Economy: Turkey 1923-1929,
London: Cambridge University Press & Paris: Editions de la
Maison des Sciences de lHomme, 1981, p. 180.
13. Zulkuf Aydin, Underdevelopment and Rural Structures in
Southeastern Turkey: the Household Economy in Gisgis and Kalhana,
London: Published for the Centre for Middle Eastern & Islamic
Studies, Ithaca Press, 1986, pp. 28-29. See also Rosa Luxemburg,
The Accumulation of Capital, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1971, chapter XXX, especially pp. 439-445, for a theoretical
discussion of the phenomenon of capitalist penetration and
domination of an economy from the outside.
14. Aydin, (op. cit., p. 45), argues that The regional
under-development in Turkey is not a result of racist state policy,
but is an outcome of the uneven development of Turkish capitalism.
Aydin, (op. cit., pp. 24-28) also crificises the internal
colonialism model of Gunnar Myrdal (Economic Theory and
Underdeveloped Regions) and others, like the Turkish sociologist
and supporter of the PKK, Ismail Beiki (Krtelin Mecburi Iskan), who
explain Kurdish underdevelopment as a consequence of racist
domination of Kurds by Turks, rather than in class terms: There
must be something more than ethnicity as the main cause of the
regional underdevelopment in eastern and south-east Anatolia. In
fact, concludes Aydin, it can be shown that dominant classes in
Eastern Anatolia have benefited from their incorporation into the
state apparatus in Turkey.
15. See Jarius Banaji, Modes of Production in a Materialist
Conception of History, in Capital and Class, number 3, Autumn,
1977, pp. 1-44.
16. Aydin, op. cit., p. 11.
17. Keyder, op. cit., passim.
18. Commenting on how the historical background lies at the
roots of todays unequal land distribution in eastern Anatolia,
Aydin comments (op. cit., pp. 16-17):
Todays large estates and small peasant holdings have been
structured by this specific historical development of landownership
in the region. Yurtluk/ocaklk and serbest mr-i miranlk lands
constitute the basis of todays large estates, whereas the lands
tax-farmed out to mltezims and worked by reayas constitute the
basis of small peasant holdings. For the reayas became the owners
of the land over which they had only usufructuary rights before the
Republic.
19. Keyder, op. cit., pp. 13 & 19.
20. Keyder, op. cit., p. 14.
21. Op. cit., p. 15. Stress in original.
22. Aydin, op. cit., p. 13.
23. Maarten van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State. On the
Social and Political Organisation of Kurdistan. Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Utrecht. Rijswijk: Enroprint/Secondprint, 1978, pp.
22-23.
24. Van Bruinessen, op. cit., and Majeed R. Jafar,
Under-Underdevelopment. A Regional Case Study of the Kurdish Area
in Turkey, Helsinki: Social Policy Association, 1976, p. 63.
Keyder, (op. cit., p. 16), adds: In 1952, 32% of the peasant
families in all of Turkey could be considered as middle peasants.
Aydin (op. cit., p. 6), cites 1963 census figures which indicate
that share-cropping families were then 15% of all fanning families
in Turkey.
25. Van Bruinessen, op. cit., p. 23. See also Ghassemlou,
Kurdistan and the Kurds, Prague: Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences
& London: Collets, 1965, p. 117 (footnote) & Hasan Yildiz,
Un pays sans frontire: le Kurdistan, Paris: EVRA-KOM, 1992, p.
85.
26. For a treatment of an earlier period of agricultural
commercialisation, see Aydin, op. cit., pp. 32-34. For a concise
examination of the effects of the mechanisation of agriculture
throughout Turkey, see Ronnie Margulies and Ergin Yildizoglu,
Agrarian Change: 1923-1970, in Turkey in Transition, New
Perspectives, ed. Irvin C. Schick and Ertugrul Ahmet Tonak,
especially pp. 278-285 & also Kemal H. Karpat, Structural
Change, Historical Stages of Modernization, and the Role of Social
Groups in Turkish Politics, in Social Change and Politics in
Turkey. A Structural-Historical Analysis, ed. Karpat, pp. 58ff.
27. Van Bruinessen, op. cit., p. 23. See also Jafar, op. cit.,
p. 64 & Yildiz, op. cit., p. 85. The extent of out-migration
will be discussed later in this article.
28. Aydin, op. cit., pp. 59-62.
29. This is a legacy of the old Ottoman yurtluk/ocaklik
system.
30. Aydin, op. cit., p. 59.
31. Aydin, op. cit., p. 61.
32. Aydin, op. cit., pp. 61-62. See also Ismail Beiki, Dogu
Anadolunun Duzeni: Sosyoekonomik ve Etnik Temeller, Ankara: Yurt
Kitap Yaym, 1992, pp. 90-95.
33. Van Bruinessen, op. cit., pp. 22-23. See also Jafar, op.
cit., pp. 60-63, 65-66 & 66-67, for a more specific discussion
of the depressed state of agriculture and livestock production in
Turkish Kurdistan up to more recent times.
34. Van Bruinessen, pp. 23-24. See also Lazarev, op. cit., in
Issawi, op. cit., p. 66.
35. Van Bruinessen, op. cit., p. 24. See also David McDowall,
The Kurds, London: Minority Rights Group, Minority Rights Group
report No. 23, new edition, 1989. p. 8, as well as Stephen C.
Pelletiere, The Kurds: An Unstable Element in the Gulf, Boulder and
London: Westview Press, 1984, p. 18, and Mehrdad Izady, The Kurds:
A Concise Handbook, Washington, Crane Russak, 1992, pp.
229-231.
36. Van Bruinessen, op. cit., p. 24. Van Bruinessen adds (p. 25)
that these tribes generally have a number of zozan, which they use
consecutively.
37. Op. cit., pp. 24-25.
38. Op. cit., p. 26.
39. Op. cit..
40. Peter Beaumont, Gerald H. Blake & J. Malcolm Wagstaff,
The Middle East: A Geographical Study, London: John Wiley, p.
430.
41. Report by Bertrand, Turquie dAsie (1889), in Issawi, op.
cit., p. 305.
42. A.D. Novichev, Ocherki Ekonomi Turtsii, in Issawi, op. cit.,
p. 300, cites the report of an observer who states that, by the
early twentieth century, Diyarbakr formerly so renowned for the
production of velvets, satins and silk stuffs, do [es] not now
produce a tenth part of what they yielded from 30 to 40 years
ago.
43. Op. cit., pp. 26-27 and Issawi, op. cit., p. 272-278. See
also Issawi, op. cit., p. 298, who cites a British officials report
about Diyarbakir in 1840: in Diyarbakr, which formerly had 2,000
looms, there exist but a few hundred looms half employed.
44. Report by Bertrand, in Issawi, op. cit., pp. 305-306.
45. Bertrand, in Issawi, op. cit. See also Yildiz, op. cit., pp.
83 & Jafar, op. cit., pp. 54-58. Aydin (op. cit., p. 30)
states: As a result of this free trade, Ottoman manufacturing
industry collapsed and Ottoman Turkey became integrated into the
world system through trade.
46. See Sevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European
Capitalism, 1820-1913. Trade, Investment and Production, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 82 and 108-129, for a
discussion of the general decline of the centrally important
Ottoman cotton industry.
47. See Donald Quataert The Age of Reforms, in An Economic and
Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914, edited by Halil
Inalcik and Donald Quataert, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994, pp. 906-907.
48. Keyder, op. cit., p. 29.
49. Yildiz, op. cit., p. 85.
50. Beaumont, et al., op. cit., pp. 430 & 440-443.
51. Keyder, op. cit., p. 56.
52. Keyder, op. cit., p. 51. See also Beaumont et al., op. cit.,
pp. 431-432. For a general discussion of the development of
industry in Turkey see Aydin, op. cit., pp. 34-37.
53. Jafar, op. cit., p. 54. Jafars definition (op. cit., p. 42)
of Turkeys Kurdish region comprises of the following 14 provinces:
Adiyaman; Agri; Bingol; Bitlis; Diyarbakr; Elaz; Erzincan; Hakkri;
Mardin; Mu; Siirt; Tunceli [Dersim]; Urfa and Van.
54. Mehmed Bilgic, Privatization: The Case of Turkey; in
Privatization and Development, ed. Steve H. Hanke, San Francisco: a
publication of the International Center for Economic Growth,
Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1987, p. 104. Initial
growth was real, but nonetheless slow. According to Z. Y. Hershlag,
(Turkey: The Challenge of Growth, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968,
footnote number 4, p. 121), Turkeys per capita income grew by 19%
in constant prices between 1929 and 1939.
55. John Waterbury, Exposed to Inuumerable Delusions. Public
Enterprise and State Power in Egypt, India, Mexico and Turkey, New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 4-5. See also pp. 36-37
of the same text.
56. Waterbury, op. cit., p. 37.
57. Op. cit.
58. Op. cit., p. 38.
59. Op. cit., p. 25.
60. Op. cit.
61. Op. cit.
62. Beaumont et al., op. cit., pp. 433-441. Jafar, op. cit., p.
52, notes that most of the 269 machine-operated plants, employing
some 17,000 workers were destroyed or severely damaged during World
War I or Turkeys independence war. By 1927, modem industry was, for
all intents and purposes, next to non-existent, less than 4% of
existing factories employing 10 workers or more each.
63. The DPs 1950 election program stated (taken from: Waterbury,
op. cit., p. 42):
The basis of our economic and financial views, it can be said,
is to shrink as much as possible the state sector and to broaden as
much as possible the private enterprise sector and to provide it
security.
64. See Anne O. Kreuger, Foreign Trade Regimes and Economic
Development: Turkey, New York: Columbia University Press for the
National Bureau of Economic Research, 1974, p. 7.
65. Waterbury, op. cit., p. 42.
66. alar Keyder, State and Class in Modern Turkey. A Study in
Capitalist Development, London: Verso, p. 224 & Beaumont, et
al., op. cit., pp. 439440.
67. Kreuger op. cit., pp. 9-10.
68. Kreuger, State and Class in Modern Turkey, p. 223.
Significantly, Kreuger reports (op. cit., p. 10) that the Second
Five Year Plan (1968-1972) featured greater incentives upon
incentives in the private sector.
69. Op. cit., pp. 5-6.
70. This information is from a table from evket Pamuk, Income
Distribution in Turkey, 1986 (unpublished), cited in Bent Hansen,
The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity and Growth: Egypt and
Turkey. Oxford: Published for the World Bank by Oxford University
Press, 1991, p. 277.
71. Op. cit., pp. 77-78.
72. Op. cit. , p. 6 .
73. Op. cit..
74. Keyder, State and Class in Modern Turkey, p. 223.
75. Waterbury (op. cit., p. 77) states that Turkeys debt trebled
in less than a decade.
76. Bahri Yilmaz [Ylmaz] summarises the January 1980 Basic
Decree (Decree 8/168) and its two amendments of 16 May and 8
October 1980 which stipulated the economic liberalisations as
follows:
An initial 33% devaluation of the Turkish Lira against the US
Dollar and the adoption of a partly flexible exchange-rate policy
followed by frequent devaluations; export-promotion measures; the
liberalization of external trade and payment regulations;
consolidation of Turkeys private non-guaranteed commercial debts
and the introduction of a new foreign investment policy a
restrictive monetary policy; a high interest rate over the
inflation rate aimed at increasing domestic savings and at improved
resource allocation; reorganization of SEEs through substantial
price increases and the elimination of price controls coordination
of economic policy oriented and responsible ministries and
departments for increasing the efficiency of political
decisions.
77. There is also evidence, of course, that it was certain
powerful international bodies such as the OECD and the IMF who
heavily influenced zals original policy package. See: Bent Hansen,
op. cit., pp. 385 and 387; Mehmet Ali Birand, The Generals Coup in
Turkey: an Inside Story of 12 September 1980. Translated by M. A.
Dikerdem, London: Brasseys Defence Publishers, 1987, Chapter 8,
passim and Yilmaz, op. cit., p. 6.
78. Hansen, op. cit., pp. 383-385.
79. Keyder, State and Class in Modern Turkey, p. 225.
80. Serif Mardin, Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish
Politics?, in Dedalus, Winter, 1973, quoted in Keyder, op. cit., p.
225. Korkut Boratov (Inter-Class and Intra-Class Relations of
Distribution under Structural Adjustment: Turkey During the 1980s,
in The Political Economy of Turkey. Debt, Adjustment and
Sustainability, ed. Tosun Aricanli & Dani Rodrik, 1990, p. 206)
comments on:
the picture of a substantial decline on wages both in absolute
and relative terms during the 1980s. Between the highest level in
the 1970s [1977 or 1979 for (state and private sector employees
respectively)] and 1985, the decline in real wages is 52.1% and
28.6% for all employees and for manufacturing workers,
respectively.
See also Table 9.5, in Boratov, op. cit., p. 209.
81. Keyder, State and Class in Modem Turkey, p. 225.
82. David Waldner, Avoiding the Inevitable Pain. The Politics of
Turkish Economic Reform, in Middle East Insight, volume XI, number
3, (March-April, 1995), p. 40.
83. Hansen, op. cit., pp. 419-420.
84. Op. cit., p. 423.
85. Cotton crops are found especially in the vicinity of the
town of Irdir in Turkeys Kurdish region, while tobacco crops are
found throughout the Kurdish region in Turkey.
86. Boratov, op. cit., p. 215. Emphasis in original.
87. Boratov, op. cit., p. 217.
88. Boratov, op. cit. Boratov bases this statement on a 1984
field study of the ukurova region by F. and A. S. Doruel.
89. Keyder, State and Class in Modern Turkey, p. 226.
90. Beaumont et al., after noting that the south and south-east
are the least urbanised areas of the Turkish state, comment that
The most urbanised regions are those which received heavy public
investment during the 1960s. See Beaumont et al., pp. 441-443.
91. Keyder, State and Class in Modern Turkey, p. 228.
92. Waldner, op. cit., p. 39.
93. Op. cit.
94. Waldner, op. cit.
95. As Waldner explains (op. cit., p. 41): Financing the
government deficit is achieved at the cost of high inflation, which
in turn exacerbates Turkeys nagging trade defecit. Furthermore (op.
cit.):
Control over a large public sector is a powerful tool of
patronage, allowing the government to institute policies that
elicit electoral allegiance. Privatizing the public sector, on the
other hand, would ultimately cause economic hardships for millions
of voters. The government that reforms the economy, in other words,
is undermining the basis of its electoral success.
96. Waldner, op. cit., p. 39.
97. US Central Intelligence Agency, CIA Factbook: Turkey,
downloaded on 18 December 1996, from:
http:cliffie.nosc.mil/~NATLAS/wfb/T/Turkey/html
98. Amberin Zaman, Knight Ridder Financial News, Ankara, 12
December 1994.
99. US CIA, op. cit. & Amberin Zaman (op. cit., 12 December
1994), who puts the IMF loan at only $US 720 million.
100. Amberin Zaman (op. cit., 12 December 1994).
101. US CIA, op. cit.
102. Amberin Zaman (op. cit., 12 December 1994).
103. Editorial by Ilnur Cevik, Turkish Daily News, 11 August
1994, Does Citizen Osman believe iller?
104. US CIA, op. cit.
105. Turkish Daily News, 11 August 1994.106. Op. cit.
107. Handelsblatt, 11 August 1995.
108. Cevik, op. cit.
109. Reuter (Ankara), 13 September 1994.
110. US CIA, op. cit.
111. A PKK bomb caused $US 40,000 damage to an oil pipeline
owned by the state oil company, in one incident alone, on 14
December 1994, according to Reuter (Ankara), 19 December 1994.
112. Expenditure by the Turkish military in 1994 alone on the
Kurdish war amounted to more than 12 billion German marks ... This
figure was quoted by a government minister, according to one noted
Turkish writer. (Yasar Kemal, Der Spiegel, issue number 2/95.)
113. See the discussion of this point in Jafar, op. cit., pp.
80-81, & 131-133, the table on p. 104, which compares
employment in large manufacturing industry across Turkey, region by
region, and the examination of gross disparities in the provision
of infrastructure and basic services in the Kurdish region,
compared to western Turkey, on pp. 108-27.
114. Aydin, op. cit., p. 7.
115. Handelsblatt, op. cit. The plight of public sector workers
provoked extensive public sector strikes throughout Turkey in late
1994, involving up to 400,000 workers.
116. Turkey has 80% annual inflation and gaping budget and trade
deficits according to Reuter, Ankara, (3 October 1996). See also
James Wyllie, Turkeys new posture: change or continuity? in Janes
Intelligence Review, 1 September 1996, who writes that annual
inflation exceeds 80% while the service of government debt eats up
37% of the budget.
117. Kyle Pope, Turkey Government Shake-Up May Help Stock
Market, Investors Say, in the Wall Street Journal, 26 June
1996.
118. Waldner, op. cit.
119. Waldner, op. cit.
120. Institut Kurde de Parris, Information and Liaison Bulletin,
After Mountain Villages: the Turkish Army Bombards and Destroys
Kurdish Cities, August/September 1993, p. 3. The Diyarbakir branch
of the Insan Haklar Dernei compiled an 8 page List, by Name, of
Kurdish Villages Evacuated by Force and Destroyed by the Turkish
Army, up until August 1993. This list is reproduced in Institut
Kurde de Paris, Information and Liaison Bulletin, (August-September
1993, pp. 20-27).121. US Department of State, Turkey Human Rights
Practices, 1995.
122. US Department of State, op. cit.
123. US Department of State, op. cit.
124. Yildiz, op. cit., p. 92.
125. Karpat, Structural Change, in Karpat, op. cit., p. 58 and
van Bruinessen, op. cit., p. 23. See also Jafar, op. cit., pp.
87-90. Hershlag, op. cit., pp. 29-30, discusses demographic change
on a Turkey-wide basis, as does Frank Tachau, Turkey, The Politics
of Authority, Democracy and Development, New York: Praeger Special
Studies/Praeger Scientific, Praeger, 1984, chapter 7, passim.
126. Erol Tumertekin, Turkiyede I Gcler, cited by Aydin, op.
cit., p. 58. See also Table 46 in Ta, Turkiye Kurdistani Ekonomik
ve Sosyal Yapi, no place: 1985, Ozgrlk, Yolu Yayinlari, p. 182.
This is entitled: 1975-1980: Proportion of Net Migration in Turkish
Kurdistan, and claims to be based wholly on Turkish government
statistics.
127. James Wyllie, (op. cit.) states:
More than half of Turkeys people are under 25 but growth is too
low to provide employment. The country is urbanizing at an amazing
rate. In 1945, only 18% of the population were city dwellers; now,
it is over 75%. Ten years ago, Istanbuls population was 5.5
million; now, it is over 12 million.
128. Erhard Franz, Das Gneydou Anadolu Projesi/GAP in
Stichworten, in Dokumentation der Internationale Konferenanz
Menschenrechte in Kurdistan, Bremen, 1989, p. 187.
129. Franz, op. cit., pp. 188-189.
130. Franz, op. cit., p. 191.
131. Franz, op. cit., pp. 195-196.
132. Franz, op. cit., p. 197.
133. Op. cit.
134. Op. cit.
135. Op. cit., p. 198.
136. Osman Tekinel, Possible Effects of GAP on the Economy, in
Newspot Turkish Digest, 23 May 1991, p. 2. See also Franz, op.
cit., pp. 191-193.
137. Arslan Baer Kafaolu, Proje Mi, Balon Mu?, in Demokrat
magazine of April 1991, pp. 44-45.
138. Kafaolu, op. cit., p. 45.
139. This is not to deny that Turkey as a whole is not
under-developed, compared to the industrialised West, of course.
(See The Political Economy of Income Distribution in Turkey, ed.
Ergun zbudun and Aydn Ulusan, New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980,
passim.) The point is that the Kurdish region is chronically
underdeveloped, even compared to western Turkey.
140. Van Bruinessen, p. 27.
141. Op. cit.
142. Op. cit., p. 28. See also Issawi, op. cit., pp. 272-278.
Aydn comments (op. cit., p. 18):
the underdevelopment of eastern Anatolia (including
south-eastern Anatolia) is the result of the regions integration
into the capitalist economy. Capitalism develops unevenly: while
bringing about development in one part, it causes underdevelopment
in another part.
143. Michael M. Gunter, The Kurds in Turkey. A Political
Dilemma, Boulder: Westview Press, 1990, p. 127.
144. Gunter, op. cit., p. 125. The August 1979 CIA report he
refers to is a secret document seized during the occupation of the
United States Embassy in Tehran in 1979. It was entitled The
Kurdish Problem in Perspective. See also Jafar, op. cit., p.
77.
145. Van Bruinessen, op. cit., pp. 28-29.
146. Waterbury, op. cit., p. 70.
This is an electronic version of an article published in the
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 1998 Copyright Taylor &
Francis. The Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs is available online
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