One day in the mid-1940s, Sıdıka Avar, accompanied by members of the Turkish gendarmerie, visited a small Kurdish village in the mountains to convince the villagers to send their daughters to her boarding school. Avar was the director of the Elazığ Girls’ Institute, which was founded on Atatürk's orders after the Kurdish rebellion in Dersim in 1937. Its mission was to educate girls and to disseminate the Turkish language in a region where the majority of girls were not sent to school and the majority of the population did not speak Turkish.Footnote ¹ She began explaining to a group of villagers the purpose of the school. A man interrupted her: “They will be given to men in Ankara and Elazız without marriage,” referring to why he thought the state wanted to recruit the girls to the school. Avar explained that this was impossible, showing them the students she brought with her as examples. “The government takes them to defile the Kurdish seed,” said another. Avar tried to convince them that the state did not interfere in issues related to marriage and considered it a private matter that was the decision of the parents. A villager said, “We are satisfied with our condition. What will the state do by educating our girls?” Avar explained the importance of educating girls for the well-being of families. “What is the government's advantage out of this?” asked another. “Why does the state care if I live well or not?” Irritated, Avar explained, “Each household is a child of the state, the government. If there is no family, can there be a nation? If there is no nation, can there be a state? Therefore, states are based on nations, nations on families, and families on individuals.” Seeming unconvinced, one villager said, “Well, lady, we don't have any girls in this village. Will the state take them by force?” Another jumped in, “Don't they think that if the state tries to take our girls by force, there will be a rebellion here?” These remarks infuriated Avar. She reminded her audience of the army's power and how it crushed the previous rebellions in the region. The next morning, Avar found an empty village, as all the villagers had gone to work in the fields before she woke up. She left without recruiting any girls for the school.Footnote ²

Avar's experience with the villagers provides clues about the shape of state–Kurdish relations in the early republican period. During the authoritarian single-party era (1923–50), this relationship can be seen as an uneasy encounter between a modernist, transformative state and a minority ethnic group that lived predominantly in rough, peripheral regions and was accustomed to a considerable degree of autonomy in managing its affairs. As the state elite tried to establish centralized political authority and build a national identity, it faced serious resistance in the Kurdish regions. Sixteen of the eighteen revolts that broke out in the early republican period involved the Kurds.Footnote ³

In the last two decades, following the emergence of the Kurdish insurgency and the subsequent intensification of the state–Kurdish conflict, there has been a growing scholarly interest in state–Kurdish relations in the early republican period. Many scholars have analyzed how the founders of the state conceived of Turkishness and Kurdishness.Footnote ⁴ Several researchers have written on the assimilationist policies that the Kurds were subjected to during this period, which ranged from forced resettlement to linguistic homogenization.Footnote ⁵ Other studies have analyzed the Kurdish rebellions and the state's response to them.Footnote ⁶ Many primary documents showing the state elite's intentions to pacify, control, and transform the Kurdish regions have been published.Footnote ⁷

The dominant sense in this literature is that the Turkish state was strong and highly autonomous, carrying out a comprehensive and repressive nation-building project. Many analyses interpret the state's military power as evidence of state strength. Studies of the Kurdish rebellions in the early republican period bolster this image of a strong state in the face of a fragmented and weak Kurdish society. Some accounts emphasize the harshness of the state's military operations and the draconian measures following them to explain why these revolts did not take the form of an organized and permanent ethnic resistance until the 1980s. It is assumed that the military successfully repressed Kurdish resistance and that the Kurdish areas came under the direct control of the Turkish state. For instance, Kirişci and Winrow argue that the government consolidated its rule over the Kurdish areas, and many Kurds seemed to have been assimilated by 1939.Footnote ⁸ Similarly, Van Bruinessen asserts, “By the late 1930s, the eastern provinces were pacified. Every Kurdish village of some size was closely controlled by a Turkish police post. . . . The government policy of forced assimilation seemed to bear fruit. In the towns, everyone spoke Turkish, and Kurdish nationalist sentiment seemed to disappear altogether.”Footnote ⁹

Although the high level of state coercion to which the Kurdish areas were subjected during periods of rebellion can hardly be denied, the assumption that such coercion automatically led to high levels of state control over these areas is problematic. The state elite's intention to remake the Kurds is not evidence of successful state domination. Yet many scholars have analyzed state laws and the discourse of political leaders while overlooking the question of how and to what extent such policies and ideals were implemented on an everyday basis. This neglect of how policies fared on the ground and overemphasis on extraordinary times in relations between the Turkish state and the Kurds have led scholars to overestimate state power.

In this article, I challenge the strong state image portrayed in these studies and call attention to the wide gap between what the state wanted to do and what it actually could do in the Kurdish regions. As Joel Migdal argues: “States have become a formidable presence in their societies, but many have experienced faltering efforts to get their populations to do what state policymakers want them to do. States are like big rocks thrown into small ponds: they make waves from end to end, but they rarely catch any fish.”Footnote ¹⁰ This article focuses on the challenges that the central state encountered in the Kurdish regions and its ineffectiveness in shaping the society as intended. Drawing on the “state in society” approach, it argues that state power should not be conceptualized independently of the social context and that the extent of actual policy implementation is crucial to understanding the level of state capacity.Footnote ¹¹

Based on archival research of official documents sent from the Kurdish areas to the state's center in the 1930s and 1940s, I argue that the highly intrusive and comprehensive character of the Turkish nation-building project hardly achieved an “integrated domination”Footnote ¹² over Kurdish society in the first three decades of the Turkish Republic. At the local level, some of the policies dictated from the state's center were completely ignored, and others were followed halfheartedly. The center had neither complete control over its officials nor the necessary manpower and financial resources to transform these regions. This failure does not mean that the policies were inconsequential. Increased state presence and attempts to impose new state goals gradually changed Kurdish society but mostly in ways that were unintended by the state elite. In addition, the process of change was not a unidirectional one. It was a mutually transformative process, as the locals changed the behavior of state officials to the detriment of state capacity. In their day-to-day interactions, many state officials moved beyond their outsider positions and became members of the communities they sought to transform. Maintaining a boundary between state and society in these local arenas was a constant concern of the central state.

In this article, I make extensive use of primary documents from the Prime Minister's Republican Archives in Ankara. The majority of these documents consist of reports written by the parliamentarians of the Republican People's Party (RPP) who traveled in the eastern provinces, where the majority of the Kurdish population lived, to inspect the working of state institutions and to gather information about the political atmosphere of the region. Others are reports and letters sent to the state's centers by local officials working in the eastern provinces. One institution whose activity reports have been critical to this research was the People's Houses, founded in 1932 by the single party with the aim of spreading the ideals of the regime to the masses. Through its activities, which ranged from organizing conferences and theater performances to establishing libraries, it played a major role in the attempts to modernize the region and assimilate Kurdish speakers into Turkishness. By 1949, there were 76 People's Houses and 759 People's Chambers, as they were called in the rural areas, operating in the eastern and southeastern provinces.Footnote ¹³

I first explain the types of challenges that Kurds presented to state and nation building in the early decades of the Turkish Republic and discuss policies that were formulated to consolidate state rule in Kurdish areas and integrate Kurds into the envisioned Turkish nation. In the second, third, and fourth sections, I discuss three major reasons why the state failed to meet its goals in the Kurdish areas: the state's ideological rigidity, the shortage of resources and dedicated personnel, and the society's co-optation of state officials.

KURDISH AREAS OF DISSIDENCE AND THE IDEAL OF THE “EXTREME MAKEOVER”

After the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the state under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the RPP carried out an ambitious program of state centralization and nation building. It aimed at imposing direct rule over society, at dominating it without any intermediaries. It also aimed to create a homogenous nation, an attempt that went beyond the creation of an official, national history, the dissemination of one common language, and the creation of certain national symbols and holidays. The state elite sought an “extreme makeover” of society in accordance with the norms of Western modernism and came to be involved in the private lives of its citizens to create new national subjects. What people ate, how they dressed, how they looked physically, how they presented themselves in public space, and what language they spoke became objects of state regulation as the state elite adopted a highly thick definition of Turkishness.

The state's objectives turned out to be the most comprehensive in the Kurdish areas, because there it encountered not only the largest linguistic minority but also deeply rooted tribal and religious solidarities. Kurds were centered in what I call “areas of dissidence,” which present a high capacity for resistance to state domination and control.Footnote ¹⁴ These areas are in rough terrain with inaccessible mountains and difficult climate conditions. The geographical characteristics of the eastern and southeastern provinces of Turkey, where the majority of the Kurdish-speaking population lived, made them especially difficult for the central authority to penetrate and control. As Van Bruinessen writes, “The heart of Kurdistan consists of forbidding mountains that have always deterred invading armies and provided a refuge to the persecuted and to bandits.”Footnote ¹⁵ The populations were organized into tight clans or tribes, as a result of which strong local hierarchies competed with central rulers for social control. Tribal chiefs, large landowners, and religious authorities enjoyed high levels of prestige and power to mobilize collective action within their communities. Finally, a distinct culture, marked by a separate language, created a powerful basis for autonomy in these areas.

State rulers perceived the strong authority of local leaders such as religious sheikhs and tribal chiefs over the population as an indication of backwardness and a challenge to the state's power. As Yeğen underlines, “That their political loyalty was to the tribe; that they would not perform military service; that they were not so enthusiastic in paying taxes to the central power; that they were ignorant. These were the ‘facts’ perceived by Turkish nationalism when it looked at the Kurds and the territory inhabited by them.”Footnote ¹⁶ State elites associated these regions with religious conservatism, reactionary politics, economic underdevelopment, sociocultural backwardness, and lawlessness. In a typical manner, one state official described the Kurds in 1941 as “a population which the sheikhs of religious brotherhoods and sects and tribal aghas deprived of human law and kept away from civilization by attaching them to superstitions, false beliefs, and totems for centuries.”Footnote ¹⁷ Another state official wrote that Kurds had a character that “is brusque, selfish, fearful, gets angry easily, kills easily, and worships only power.”Footnote ¹⁸ The state elite deemed it necessary to emancipate this population from the bondage of tribal and religious loyalties. It was believed that assimilating Kurds into Turkishness would not only make them part of a unified and strong nation but would also elevate them to a higher level of civilization.

Kurds constituted the largest non-Turkish-speaking minority in the country. According to the 1927 census, 1,184,446 people out of a total population in Turkey of 13,629,488 declared their mother tongue as Kurdish. In 1935, the number of Kurdish speakers had increased to 1,430,246 out of 16,157,450 people. Around 70 percent of the Kurdish speakers did not know Turkish, and around 75 percent of them lived in the eastern and southeastern provinces of Turkey. In eight provinces—Diyarbakır, Elazığ, Bitlis, Beyazıt, Mardin, Siirt, Van, and Hakkari—Kurdish speakers constituted a majority.Footnote ¹⁹ Such a high proportion of non-Turkish speakers created serious concern among state elites.

Turkification involved, first and foremost, the spread of the Turkish language among non-Turkish speakers. This was related to a large-scale linguistic engineering project that included purifying Turkish of foreign vocabulary and grammar, changing the script from Arabic to Latin, collecting words that were used in everyday speech and old Turkish texts to create a new Turkish vocabulary, and Turkifying personal and geographical names.Footnote ²⁰ The new Turkish language implied a radical rupture from the Ottoman past, which state elites associated with backwardness and ignorance. They considered the pluralistic character of the Ottoman Empire to be the main reason for its dissolution and perceived the spread of a common language as indispensable for political and cultural unity. As Şükrü Kaya, the minister of interior, stated: “The biggest responsibility of a government is to assimilate all who live within its boundaries into its own community . . . While many people did not assimilate [in the past], the Ottomans suffered from that.”Footnote ²¹ Elsewhere he explained that assimilation should produce “a country which would speak one single language, think and feel alike.”Footnote ²²

Transforming the way people looked and Westernizing their outward appearance, familiarizing them with Western music, promoting physical exercise, and educating peasants about agriculture and public health constituted some of the other efforts of the state-directed makeover project. The People's Houses in the cities and the People's Chambers in the rural areas were opened as cultural centers to inform citizens about the new regime's ideology and to familiarize them with Western values, lifestyles, and habits. These institutions sponsored conferences, exhibitions, concerts, and tea parties; organized field trips; staged theater plays; formed sports teams; and offered public classes to educate and civilize the masses. The People's House of Elazığ, for instance, offered piano and violin classes, established a jazz orchestra, and organized dance parties every month.Footnote ²³ In one of its village excursions, the People's House in Hakkari worked to teach the national marches to peasants and to improve their sense of rhythm by making them listen to music on the radio.Footnote ²⁴ In the eastern and the southeastern provinces, the Kemalist missionaries worked hard to change the outward appearance of the locals, who insisted on wearing their traditional garments. Some municipalities went beyond the law and banned the wearing of baggy trousers (şalvar), which were commonly worn in the east.Footnote ²⁵

Increasing women's education and public visibility was another goal of the regime. Educated, unveiled, and Western-looking women were seen as both symbols of national ideals and the transmitters of those ideals to future generations and thus as crucial to the regime's survival. The People's Houses offered classes for women on topics such as childcare, housework, and hygiene. Many activities of the People's Houses were intended to create an opportunity for men and women to mix socially. This was a difficult task in the Kurdish areas, which were predominantly rural and conservative. The low number of women who would work at the People's Houses in the eastern provinces constituted a major problem for the Kemalists, who tried to close this gap by enlisting the spouses of state officials.Footnote ²⁶

The state had other concerns besides assimilation and Westernization, including breaking down the tribal structure, settling nomadic tribes, weakening the prestige of religious authorities, preventing illegal border crossings, and disarming the population. These led it to initiate even more drastic measures to control and shape the Kurdish areas. Starting in 1928, the state established three regional governorships, called General Inspectorates, that were charged with pacifying the turbulent areas and were given extraordinary powers over all administrative, judicial, and military institutions in Kurdish regions. They were centralized administrative structures that would respond with swift military action to armed opposition, aid the government in transforming the regions socially and culturally, and coordinate the state's efforts to expand its power. The state also undertook a policy of resettlement, which aimed not only at assimilating Kurds by dispersing them among Turkish speakers but also at uprooting the influential tribal leaders and religious sheikhs from their homelands. The most comprehensive and ambitious resettlement law was passed in 1934; it gave the Ministry of the Interior the authority to settle nomadic tribes and to transfer tribal leaders, confiscate their property, and provide them with land and accommodations in their new locations of settlement.Footnote ²⁷

Nevertheless, the stated goals of the regime and the measures it initiated give only a partial picture of actual state practice in the Kurdish areas. An analysis of state documents indicates the state elites’ constant frustration with the performance of local government institutions and their feeling of helplessness in addressing the unintended consequences of state policy. The Turkish state was much less powerful in reaching out to the Kurdish areas and imposing its rule on the society than some important studies imply.Footnote ²⁸ Far from conveying a strong state image, the interdepartmental reports written by the RPP inspectors, the heads of the People's Houses, and the inspectors general of the region were full of complaints about the lack of a unified sense of mission among the state cadres and expressed their helplessness in Turkifying Kurds and securing their loyalties to the regime.

The state's center not only failed to dominate the Kurdish regions but also was incapable of controlling and disciplining its own employees. While officials’ illicit or close relations with local groups and individuals threatened state autonomy, their abuses and aggression pushed the locals even further from the regime. The implementation of many policies was not complete, well coordinated, or unitary. Ideological rigidities produced contradictory goals, and the efforts to achieve these goals fell short of success. These problems undermined the state's capacity to control, dominate, and shape the region and presented serious dilemmas for the state elite working in the center as well as in the Kurdish regions, curtailing the desired effects of the large-scale reforms initiated during the single-party era, despite increased state presence in Kurdish daily life.

IDEOLOGICAL RIGIDITY

Although the Turkish state greatly expanded its presence in the Kurdish areas through the military and bureaucracy, this presence turned out to be quite inefficient and limited, partly due to the state's rigid conception of nation building. The highly comprehensive scope of the social-engineering project and the state's uncompromising attitude in its efforts to create a homogenous nation weakened its ability to adapt to the challenges of Kurdish society and thus to control and transform it. Turkey's efforts at nation building thus challenge simplistic instrumentalist approaches to nationalism that see it as a tool for consolidating the state's rule over society.Footnote ²⁹ The rigidity with which the Turkish state pursued nation building undermined its efforts to build efficient state rule in Kurdish areas. I am not arguing that building a nation can never contribute to building a state, but the Turkish case shows that efforts at nation building can actually weaken a state's ability to exercise effective social control. State-led nationalisms take many different forms. Rather than thinking of state and nation building as positively correlated, it is more useful to study how different forms of nation building may subvert or support state building.

The Turkish state's rigid conception of nation building is most clearly shown in its uncompromising language policies. The language issue was one of the main subjects of reports written on the Kurdish provinces. The policy dictated from the state's center did not tolerate bilingualism, even in the short term, and required the complete eradication of minority languages from the public as well as the private sphere. The main reason for such rigidity in language policy was the state elites’ constant fear of territorial dissolution, separatism, and disloyalty to the republic. For them, a different language was evidence of a different nation within the state's boundaries that might eventually ask for self-determination. Such mistrust of Kurdish speakers resulted from a general feeling of insecurity among state elites who had experienced the gradual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of new nation–states within the old territories of the empire. Kurdish speakers were perceived as a major threat, especially after the first revolts in Kurdish areas in the early 1920s. What the state elite feared most was the rise of a Kurdish nationalism allied with an imperialist Western power with the aim of seceding from Turkey. Almost every report sent to Ankara from the Kurdish areas addressed this fear and contained comments about Kurdish speakers’ questionable loyalty to the republic. “People of this province do not yet believe that they are part of the Turkish nation,” wrote a parliamentarian who inspected Siirt, a city in southeastern Turkey, in 1940. “They look at Ankara with awe and admiration, but Ankara does not lie at all in their hearts. Therefore, during insecure times we should pay more attention to and act prudently about this province.”Footnote ³⁰

Although interdepartmental documents, which were not publicly accessible, explicitly referred to “Kurdishness” and the Kurdish language, official Turkish discourse denied the existence of a separate Kurdish identity until the 1990s. According to this latter viewpoint, Kurds were “mountain Turks” who had forgotten their Turkishness as a result of the multiethnic structure and noninterventionist policies of the Ottoman state.

The state aimed to spread the Turkish language among non-Turkish speakers primarily through compulsory mass education and military service. Because of the geographical inaccessibility of the eastern provinces and insufficient resources, however, the state lacked the means to achieve high levels of schooling and to conscript all eligible men into the army. This led many local administrators to use more direct means of fostering acquisition of Turkish, such as banning Kurdish on the streets. The People's Houses worked hard to make people speak Turkish. Some established “committees for the dissemination of Turkish,” which organized teachers and youth in the countryside to teach the language. Some went beyond such practices. For instance, a committee in Mardin was formed to monitor whether people spoke Turkish in their homes.Footnote ³¹ Certain administrators also tried to create positive inducements to motivate people to learn Turkish; the People's Chambers in the villages of Diyarbakır organized contests to test people's knowledge of Turkish and gave cash awards to the winners.Footnote ³²

Despite all efforts, the administrators of the People's Houses continuously complained about the lack of interest in the Turkish language classes.Footnote ³³ This was hardly surprising. Economic payoffs, which typically constitute the main incentive for assimilation, were slim for Kurdish speakers in the first decades of the republic. The majority lived in rural areas, and their prospects of using the Turkish language for social mobility were miniscule, given low educational opportunities and the weak economic integration of the Kurdish regions with the rest of the country.Footnote ³⁴ After an inspection of state institutions in the eastern provinces, Secretary General of the RPP Memduh Şevket Esendal recommended the establishment of more People's Houses and Chambers in the southeast but added that the payoff would be minimal given the difficulty of the task of spreading Turkish.Footnote ³⁵ Esendal was right. Even as late as 1965, half of Kurdish speakers did not speak Turkish.Footnote ³⁶

Because the Turkish state required the exclusive use of the Turkish language in the official and private domains, local state officials found it very difficult to communicate with residents of the eastern provinces. The language policy dictated from the state's center firmly discouraged the learning of Kurdish by bureaucrats and teachers as well as the appointment of translators in state bureaus. Such solutions would not force people to speak Turkish and would also run counter to the official denial of the existence of a separate Kurdish language. Because the administrators at higher levels considered Kurdish loyalties to the Turkish Republic suspect, the appointment of state employees who were native to the region was also not favored.Footnote ³⁷ A report entitled “Şark Islahat Planı” (The Reform Plan for the East), which was prepared by the government immediately after the Sheikh Said Rebellion in 1925, explicitly stated that Kurds should be kept out of the bureaucracy, the gendarmerie, and the judiciary operating in the east.Footnote ³⁸

The communication barrier could thus not be overcome in the short term during the single-party period. The inability of state officials to communicate with the locals led to three major problems that undermined state capacity to control and transform the region. First, the formation of a modern, centralized state necessitated the collection of detailed information about society in order to direct and control it, but the language barrier hindered state officials’ ability to collect information about Kurdish society. As James Scott states, “The great cultural barrier imposed by a separate language is perhaps the most effective guarantee that a social world, easily accessible to insiders, will remain opaque to outsiders.”Footnote ³⁹ The administrators of the region openly acknowledged this problem. In a long 1943 report, First Inspector General Avni Doğan underlined the failure of the reform projects planned for Turkey's eastern regions and complained about the state's lack of information about Kurdish society. He wrote that the governors were unable to obtain even basic information such as the number of tribes in their regions, who the tribal leaders were, which of them participated in rebellions against the state, and how many weapons they possessed. According to him, the linguistic gap was one of the most severe problems the administrators encountered. He emphasized that the district governors were unable to understand the problems of the locals, whose language they did not speak. To ensure the success of the reform projects in the region, Doğan's suggestion was to form groups of experts who would analyze the living conditions, opinions, values, economic activities, and social environment of the Kurdish masses in detail.Footnote ⁴⁰

Second, state officials’ inability to communicate with the locals created serious administrative problems. In 1939, in a report sent from Hakkari, a city close to the Iraqi border where the overwhelming majority of people spoke Kurdish, the chairman of the People's Houses wrote that people had difficulty explaining themselves to the Turkish administrators and could communicate with them only through the help of their fellow townsmen. He noted that unofficial and arbitrary translations could lead to unfair decisions, especially in court.Footnote ⁴¹ Similarly, after his visit to the eastern provinces, Secretary General of the RPP Memduh Şevket Esendal wrote that it would not be feasible to open party branches in these areas because very few people knew Turkish, particularly in the countryside. As late as 1938, the RPP did not have branches in the Kurdish provinces, although it was organized in other provinces of Turkey. “In this regard, these provinces stand out as if they were patched on our country, not only seemingly but also in reality,” wrote Esendal.Footnote ⁴² He also complained about not being able to talk to the local residents in places he visited. His conversations took place mostly with high-level bureaucrats who were sent to the region from the state's center.Footnote ⁴³

Finally, the communication problem curtailed the spread of the new state ideology and reforms in Kurdish areas. In other words, the state's uncompromising attitude toward monolingualism contradicted its efforts to reach into and transform the private lives of Kurds. The reports sent from the People's Houses operating in eastern Turkey often called attention to the futility of their efforts to educate and “civilize” people due to miscommunication problems with local residents. When representatives of the “Village Development” sections went to the Kurdish villages, they needed the help of interpreters to talk to people. They noted that their inability to communicate with the villagers impeded real progress.Footnote ⁴⁴ Only portable radios could attract the villagers’ attention and ensure their attendance at the activities of the People's Houses.Footnote ⁴⁵ The lack of popular interest and attendance in the activities of the People's Houses constituted the central complaint in the inspectors’ reports. An inspector who visited Hakkari wrote that the People's House looked as if it were the meeting ground of only a few state officials.Footnote ⁴⁶ Many inspectors pointed out that the People's Houses and Chambers existed only in name.Footnote ⁴⁷ The language gap was an important factor behind the locals’ indifference to the People's Houses. The chairman of the People's House in Mardin wrote to the regional inspector of Muş that conferences and theaters were highly ineffective in raising people's cultural level because the majority did not speak Turkish and did not understand what was propagated in these activities.Footnote ⁴⁸

The uncompromising attitude and inflexibilities of the regime in its effort to create a linguistically homogenous nation augmented challenges that state officials encountered in the Kurdish regions and undermined their ability to penetrate those regions. Although officials tended to perceive ideological firmness as a sign of state strength, there is considerable evidence in official correspondence that such firmness limited state officials’ options and restricted their ability to find practical solutions to the problems of state control. In the early republican period, the state-led nation-building process contradicted the imperatives of state building in the Kurdish areas.

STATE EMPLOYEES ON THE GROUND

The Kemalist makeover project relied heavily on state officials’ commitment and sacrifice for the enforcement of its ideals and their diffusion among the masses. Because the scope of this social-engineering project was extensive and resources limited, it needed zealous and dedicated personnel whose work would go beyond the daily tasks of state bureaucrats. The ideal state official was expected to organize and take part in extracurricular activities, through which s/he would reach people and demonstrate the dos and don'ts of daily life according to the principles of the regime. State employees in local areas, along with their families, were expected to be active members of the People's Houses, to attend and organize their activities, and to act as civilized, modern individuals through their lifestyle, behavior, and outlook. Nevertheless, the state was unable to satisfy its own employees’ needs in the hard to reach and underdeveloped Kurdish regions, while the Kemalist ideology failed to find enough support among them. The result was a bureaucratic cadre of unenthusiastic officials whose efforts failed to meet the center's expectations and even undermined them.

The Kemalist ideals of social engineering did find considerable appeal among some people, who considered themselves the state's missionaries and worked with great devotion to further the state's aims.Footnote ⁴⁹ As Erik Zürcher writes,

In the Kurdish areas, nevertheless, the number of such Kemalist missionaries was miniscule even within state institutions, let alone within the larger society. Poverty, isolation, and the difficult geographic and climatic conditions of the Kurdish provinces made them the least popular places of appointment for state employees. In many official reports the Kurdish areas are referred to as “culturally underdeveloped areas” or “provinces of deprivation.” Working in these provinces involved hardships that many officials were not willing to endure. An RPP inspector who prepared a report on Hakkari in 1941 wrote that the state employees considered themselves to be living in exile and sought opportunities to leave the region as soon as possible. “In this province, I did not encounter any state employee who is committed to his position and responsibilities with sincere and high ideals and patriotism. As a result, a defect within the whole administrative system could be seen.”Footnote ⁵¹ He added that the People's House in Hakkari did not operate adequately because of the indifference of local officials to its activities.Footnote ⁵² Similarly, in a letter sent to the General Inspectorate, a member of the People's House in Muş complained that the institution was turned into a coffeehouse because of its members’ indifference to other activities.Footnote ⁵³ First Inspector General Avni Doğan reported in 1943 that many of the administrative and military positions in the east were still empty. He wrote, “Nothing substantial is being done to inculcate our language and culture to the people. The state institutions deal with everyday tasks solely on paper.”Footnote ⁵⁴

In a similar vein, Secretary General of the RPP Memduh Şevket Esendal portrayed two types of state officials in his report on the eastern provinces. The first group consisted of the ideal state employees, who sincerely embraced the ideology and reforms of the state and tried to disseminate them to the masses by working actively in the People's Houses and establishing good relations with the locals. The second group comprised those who were dissatisfied with their posts in an underdeveloped region, were tired of living in difficult conditions, worked minimally, and counted the days until they could leave the region.Footnote ⁵⁵ Esendal wrote that the majority of state employees in Tunceli and Elazığ belonged to the second group, whom he called “old type bureaucrats.” “They try to kill their time, do not care whether their job is done well or not, and are not hopeful about their country's future. I have not seen anyone who is fierce and passionate among them,” he wrote.Footnote ⁵⁶ According to Esendal, many local state officials were uneducated and did not have a modern mentality. The Kemalist ideals seem to have hardly influenced many of them. He complained that some of the bureaucrats were so religious that they could act as sheikhsFootnote ⁵⁷ and reported that the inspector general in Tunceli, where a major Kurdish rebellion took place in 1937, did not have the necessary cadres to transform the region. The inspector general described the majority of state employees as useless and reported that the main achievement in the region was the collection of arms from the people and the restoration of law and order. He added that in terms of modernization and Turkification, not much could be done.Footnote ⁵⁸ In a report written in 1943, an RPP inspector wrote that in many small towns and villages the role of the People's Chambers was limited to assisting the community of state employees and providing them with temporary housing.Footnote ⁵⁹

Along with bureaucratic disinterest in the Kemalist project, state officials’ disdain and maltreatment of the locals undermined the state's aims to integrate Kurds into the new order. In his long and detailed report, Doğan complained that state officials were corrupt and intentionally created difficulties for the locals and treated them unfairly. Doğan was aware that the behavior of state officials was hurting the state's efforts to establish its authority and legitimacy. He asked the government to appoint honest, experienced, and capable people to the Kurdish region and to improve the state officials’ working conditions as well as their salaries in order to prevent corruption.Footnote ⁶⁰ The difficult conditions of the Kurdish regions were considered a primary factor behind inappropriate acts of state employees. Although ameliorating the living and working conditions of state officials was a continuous concern of the inspectors’ reports, the state's center failed to address it due to a shortage of financial resources. One inspector complained about the lack of schools where state employees could send their children.Footnote ⁶¹ There were neither enough teachers nor enough buildings to solve the schooling problem. Another wrote that state employees did not bring their families because the roads were closed for months in the region.Footnote ⁶² Since spouses of male state officials were expected to familiarize the locals with modern female roles, this was considered a problem. Lack of decent housing for state employees, inadequate and overcrowded state offices, shortage of food and fuel, and low salaries were seen as serious problems that curtailed the state officials’ commitment to their jobs. Resentment against the state's center was thus not limited to the locals; there was considerable dissatisfaction and apathy among lower-level state officials who were sent to underdeveloped regions.

The local officials’ dissatisfaction, coupled with their preconceived views of Kurdish ignorance, backwardness, fanaticism, and opposition to government, led to the mistreatment of the local population and the scapegoating of Kurds. The implementers working at the local level put different meanings into the Kemalist project and interacted with the Kurds in different ways. While the same project gave some state officials the motivation to improve the Kurds’ living standards and to integrate them into the majority, for others it provided an excuse to insult, mistreat, and oppress the local population. In her memoir, Sıdıka Avar, with whom I began this article, complains about the negligence of Turkish teachers and their supercilious attitude toward Kurdish students. She recalls that teachers and workers in her school called the Kurdish students “mountain bears” or “tailed Kurds,” inflicted harsh punishments on them, and forced them to do the janitors’ jobs, such as cleaning the toilets. She writes that teachers should be tolerant, accommodating, and enthusiastic in order to assimilate students who are different in customs, manners, and ways of thinking and to attach them to Turkishness. She asks the Ministry of Education to send teachers willing to serve in this school and who will intensely work with the students outside class hours.Footnote ⁶³ State officials’ mistreatment of the locals was apparently such a common problem that the fourth inspector general banned the use of the word “Kurd” as an insult.Footnote ⁶⁴

Reports on the Kurdish areas also point to the problem of coercion and use of physical force by state officials and the gendarmerie. One consequence of the Kurdish revolts and the state's increased efforts to control these regions was the heavy militarization of the area, which intensified the arbitrary and abusive behavior of state officials and security forces. Far from consolidating state authority, these practices undermined the efforts to build legitimacy for the system in the long term. Emin Erişirgil, a parliamentarian who visited Tunceli (Dersim), Bingöl, and Elazığ provinces in 1943 called attention to frequent beatings of locals by the gendarmerie.Footnote ⁶⁵ Ali Reşat Göksidan, a parliamentarian from Hakkari, wrote in 1943 that people's complaints about the gendarmerie were common in the eastern provinces. “I have listened to many complaints about the gendarmerie from this vicinity's people who are very poor and whose benefit from land is only through vineyards. These complaints are about the gendarmerie's practice of extorting produce from vineyards by force,” he wrote. “Although people seem quiescent and compliant in their relations with the state, such compliance is based on fear rather than love (for the state),” he added. He emphasized that it was necessary to put an end to the use of exile, imprisonment, and other coercive practices in such a sensitive region.Footnote ⁶⁶ Many party inspectors stressed that such repressive acts actually undermined the state's ability to integrate the Kurds into the Turkish Republic. Another RPP inspector who wrote a report on Hakkari in 1942 stated that the gendarmerie constituted the main subject of complaints among the people. According to him, members of the gendarmerie acquired wealth through smuggling, obtained food supplies from poor peasants by force, and otherwise maltreated the people.

Muzaffer Akpınar, an RPP parliamentarian from Balıkesir who inspected the rural areas of the Erzincan district in 1939, stated that 90 percent of the taxes had already been collected but that they were collected by extreme use of force, such as whipping people. “People shout, ‘The government is coming!’ and they begin to flee when they see the gendarmerie and the tax-collector in the villages of Tercan,” he wrote. “The people are quiescent and loyal. It is necessary to put an end to these situations. What a pity and shame!”Footnote ⁶⁸ Although coercion in tax collection is part of the usual tension between the state and its citizens, excessive and arbitrary violence conducted by the gendarmerie hurt state efforts to secure Kurds’ loyalty to the regime. Another parliamentarian, who wrote about Tunceli, warned that the stability and order that was achieved in the region after the military operation to quell the 1937 rebellion could actually be misleading and temporary.

The militarization and bureaucratization of the Kurdish areas not only increased the level of state presence and intrusiveness in people's lives but also intensified the arbitrary and abusive behavior of state officials and security forces. The lack of a unified sense of mission among state cadres in the eastern provinces as well as their excesses and abuses resulted in a cacophony of different state practices and worked to the detriment of state capacity. Rather than consolidating the government's authority, these practices undermined the efforts to build legitimacy for the system and fomented further animosity toward the republican regime among the Kurds. Although the state could eventually secure public order and monopolize coercive means during the single-party era, it did not achieve its goal of transforming Kurdish identity, customs, norms, and systems of meaning.

EVERYDAY ATTEMPTS TO CONSTRAIN STATE POWER

In the Kurdish areas, the Turkish state encountered a serious dilemma over achieving state penetration while maintaining state autonomy. Preserving a distance from the local community undercut its efforts to learn more about the society and risked inefficient state rule and loss of control. When the state actually reached into Kurdish society and established an effective presence in everyday Kurdish life, however, it often jeopardized its autonomy. Increased interaction of state officials with locals in the far corners of Turkey was not a linear process in which the state shaped the society through coercion or indoctrination. In fact, the process through which the state tried to impose its dominance over the society became a mutual process of transformation. While the state attempted to regulate the private lives of its citizens in Kurdish areas, the local society also tried to mold state employees and institutions in accordance with its own interests and norms. A blurred boundary between the state and society was one of the unintended consequences of increased state presence in everyday life.

Within high-level administrative circles, concern that the state's autonomy from society could be threatened at the local levels was quite common. This is why state employees who were native to the region were suspect, and many reports specifically advised against their appointment in state institutions operating in the Kurdish provinces.Footnote ⁷⁰ Inappropriate relations between state employees and locals were frequently brought up in official reports. One of the reasons administrators did not trust state employees who were native to the region was the fear that local power holders, such as religious sheikhs and tribal leaders, would be able to use their prestige over state employees. Such ties could pave the way to corruption and the seizure of state institutions by local centers of power. Lower-level bureaucrats’ support for Kurdism (Kürtçülük) or for religious opposition movements and their close relationships with the influential figures of the region were constant fears of the state elite. In his 1943 report, First Inspector General Doğan described tribal leaders as influential power figures who continuously tried to use state officials to further their own interests:

The development of close relations between state employees and locals was considered detrimental to the imposition of state dominance over society. Government employees were expected to stay aloof from the societies they governed. Such detachment, nevertheless, was difficult to preserve, especially in small towns and villages. The mingling of state employees with the locals made the effective implementation of state policies difficult. In 1937, First Inspector General Abidin Özmen called attention to the state's failure to weaken the tribal system in the Kurdish provinces and wrote about the close and friendly relations between local administrators, religious sheikhs, and tribal leaders.Footnote ⁷² A document written by First Inspector General İbrahim Tali in 1930 to the Interior Ministry pointed to the unintended consequences of long-term appointments of gendarmerie officials to the region. He wrote that some officials formed intimate relationships with the locals after spending long years in the region and that they did not take their jobs seriously enough. He emphasized marriages between members of the gendarmerie and local women, which resulted in the involvement of state officials in conflicts between families or tribes and created serious problems as officials used their positions to favor one side against the other. The inspector general asked the ministry to rotate members of the gendarmerie every three years.Footnote ⁷³ In another report on the town of Hani, one of the centers of the Sheikh Said Revolt, RPP inspector Münir Soykam wrote about a schoolteacher who was indifferent to the activities of the local People's Chamber. The teacher was the brother-in-law of a sheikh who was hanged after the revolt and became friends with members of other families that had fought against the state. The inspector was also bothered by the gendarmerie officer, who had lived in the town for a long time and established close relations with the town's residents. He suggested that both be appointed to other provinces to prevent them from acting against republican principles.Footnote ⁷⁴

There is significant evidence in the interdepartmental reports that corruption and the formation of illicit ties with the locals by members of the bureaucracy and the military directly obstructed the main goals of the state. One such goal was to make people recognize the state boundaries that had been newly drawn after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The prevention of smuggling constituted an important effort to consolidate these boundaries. During the Ottoman period, the main economic interaction of the Kurds in modern-day Turkey had been with cities such as Aleppo, Damascus, and Baghdad. As the new state borders were drawn, this interaction between Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria was legally subject to certain regulations and restrictions that the locals were reluctant to recognize, and it thus continued as illegal exchange. According to Mesut Yeğen, through smuggling, “Kurds demonstrated a reflexive resistance to the consolidation of a national Turkish economy, for smuggling was a de facto challenge to the project of nation building.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Efforts to put an end to smuggling fell short of success, and Kurdish merchants found ways to incorporate state officials into their illegal activity. An RPP parliamentarian who inspected the People's House in Hakkari in 1942 reported widespread rumors that many gendarmerie officers allied with smugglers to accumulate personal wealth. He added that this was why smuggling continued.Footnote ⁷⁶ Another RPP inspector called attention to similar illicit acts by the gendarmerie in 1944:

In a 1943 report, yet another RPP inspector wrote that little of what was collected as taxes and revenues was deposited into the treasury's account: “There has been a large amount of corruption. Local state employees easily agreed with the locals whom they knew. Very few of those who abused their position could be taken to court.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Certain documents written on the People's Houses present evidence of the capacity of Kurdish society to mold the practices of these institutions in unexpected ways. As a result, the participation of locals in the activities of the People's Houses created a dilemma for the state elite. While people's active involvement and daily use of the Houses’ facilities were much desired, in places where the Houses succeeded to draw people within their ranks they ran the risk of being transformed into different spaces. Far from operating as cultural and educational centers, many People's Houses were reported to have turned into coffeehouses, where people killed their time and played cards, dominos, and backgammon.Footnote ⁷⁹ In a letter of complaint, a citizen from a small town in Urfa wrote to the RPP's center that the library of the town's People's Chamber was hardly ever open and that the locals used its main room as a coffeehouse. “In rare instances when the library is open, it is impossible to read a book because of the noise of this place,” he wrote. He added that people were even allowed to wear clothes that “represented backwardness” despite the ban on wearing traditional garments in the People's Chamber.Footnote ⁸⁰ In Ergani, a province of Diyarbakır, it was reported that people performed their ritual prayer in the People's House, an act that ran counter to the secularizing mission of the Houses. After the letter was received, the act was harshly condemned by First Inspector General Doğan.Footnote ⁸¹

The Turkish state was caught between the two difficult tasks of achieving state penetration and maintaining state autonomy. Many state officials at lower levels moved beyond their outsider positions and became members of the communities that the state's center had asked them to transform. Certain People's Houses sometimes achieved high levels of local participation but at the price of turning into different spaces from those planned. The potential of the locals to transform state institutions and employees according to their own liking was a continuous concern of the state elite. The state's center not only failed to achieve an “integrated domination” over Kurdish society but also had limited control over the acts of its own functionaries, especially at the lower levels. In the authoritarian single-party era, Turkish state institutions could not remain independent of local influences, which undermined attempts to achieve broad social control and transform Kurdish society.