Writing the USA as Imperial Power
This chapter deals with the rise of anti-Americanism within Kurdish nationalism in the 1970s, the PKK’s discourse on the Turkish state as a puppet of US imperialism, and the PKK’s so-called war against US imperialism in the Middle East, respectively. By c
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Writing the USA as Imperial Power
A civil society organization, Halkevi (People’s House),1 strongly sympathetic to the PKK, joined the Newroz celebration organized in Ankara in 2005. During this conviviality, Halkevi General Secretary Mustafa Coşar spoke to the crowd: “We should know that Dahhak haunts the Middle East and it represses, subjugates and destructs fraternal peoples of the region in our age. In today’s world, the cruel Dahhak is American imperialism and its regional collaborators.”2 The demonstrators from Halkevi were also carrying a placard that read, “Cruel Dahhak is American Imperialism”. According to the legend, Dahhak was a cruel ruler with snakes coming out of his shoulders. Since the brains of humans fed his snakes, Dahhak ordered two young humans to be sacrificed each day. The people escaped to high mountains to hide and their children grew up there in safety. One day, a blacksmith named Kawa whose son was to be killed for snakes turned those people into an army and led them down from the mountains to put an end to evil Dahhak and its huge army.3 The re-inscription of this legend, of course with some revisions and omits, into the contemporary Newroz celebrations turned it into a resistance and identity narrative for the Kurdish nationalism in Turkey. But why did the USA have a central place in speeches and placards during Newroz celebrations? How did the narrative equating the USA with Dahhak become solidified as a common sense or go right down into the depths of Kurdish society?
© The Author(s) 2017 A. Balci, The PKK-Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s Regional Politics, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42219-0_4
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A. BALCI
Unlike the popular opinion in Turkey according to which the PKK was supported, armed, and trained by the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency, one of the principal intelligence-gathering agencies of the USA),4 one of the dominant signifiers of the PKK was American imperialism, especially during its founding and early years, namely the late 1970s and 1980s. It was a dominant signifier not only because founding documents of the PKK allocated many pages for the description of US imperialism in order to justify the “armed revolutionary war” against the Turkish state but also because US imperialism functioned as a nodal point by traveling through all other counter-narratives on Kurdish history, the status of woman in Kurdistan, and Kurdish geography. More important, discourse of the PKK regarding US imperialism played a significant role in the reconstruction of Kurdish identity “as a hegemonic ‘resistance subject’ at the expense of other such possible identifications”.5 This was the case for three reasons. Firstly, it was the centrality of US imperialism in the PKK’s discourse that pitted the post-1980 Kurdish political subject against the Turkish state and traditional Kurdish institutions. Secondly, the delegitimization of the Turkish state and traditional Kurdish institutions through references to US imperialism carved empty spaces from which this new Kurdish political subjects started t
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