Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

232 islamic political identity in turkeyin southeastern Turkey could be solved by the deethnicization of the state andits separation from Turkish nationalism and the cultivation of Islamic solidarity.He called on the state and people to subordinate their particular identitiesand interests to a broader Islamic identity and interest. 80 In stressing Islamicidentity, many Kurdish politicians argued that the sources of the politicizationof Kurdish identity were the militant secularism and ethnic Turkish nationalismof the Kemalist Republic, which naturally led to the alienation of manyKurds. For example, Nurettin Akta7, an RP deputy from Gaziantep, said: “if wedon’t openly question this established system [Kemalism], we cannot Wnd asolution. Many mistakes have been made during the painful shift from an ummabasedstate to a nation-based state.” 81 In his yearly reports, Fethullah Erba7 arguedthat the “disestablishment” of Islam was the main cause of this ethnicconXict. According to Erba7,those generations who were raised during the Ottoman period hada common Islamic identity and values for coexistence. Thosegenerations raised under the Kemalist educational system with theindoctrination of secularism and nationalism are nationalist andsee themselves separate from the Turks. This Republican Kurdishgeneration Wrst joined the Revolutionary Cultural Society of theEast [DDKO: Devrimci Do:u Kültür Ocaklarì] and then the PKK. 82In addition to these cultural explanations of the problem, another group withinthe RP saw the Kurdish question as being mainly an economic one. For example,Ömer Vehbi Hatipo:lu, a prominent RP deputy, argued that the problem onlycould be solved if the economic disparity between the southeast and the west ofthe country were eliminated. 83The main problem for the RP was its dual self-declared goals: restructuringthe political system and restoring state power. The Wrst goal captured thedesires and hopes of the Kurds and other discontented groups. With this goalin mind, the RP oVered breathing room and a forum for Kurds to express theiridentity, interests, and goals. Turkey’s Kurds sought the deethnicization of thestate, but this objective was in conXict with the RP’s goal of consolidating the“Turkish” state based on an “authentic” (Islamic) identity. Erbakan, for example,was conscientious in using the term millet (a group of people bound by Islam),not ulus (an ethnolinguistic nation in Kemalist terminology), for the people ofTurkey without making any reference to its Turkish or Kurdish origins. Hestressed the idea of fatherland and Islam as the bases of nationhood.Beginning with the 1991 election, the RP began to distance itself from itsformerly principled and inclusive approach to the “Kurdish question.” To proveits Turkish nationalist credentials to secular critics, it did not nominate a Kurdish-Muslim-oriented candidate from the southeastern region. After the March 1994local elections, the party sent a fact-Wnding mission to the region; under thechairmanship of 6evket Kazan, it published its report on August 21, 1994. 84 Thereport called on the state to open democratic spaces for Kurdish groups andassociations, utilizing and consolidating religious networks as crosscuttingbonds, allowing education in the Kurdish language, and giving more power to