Sociologist Engin Sustam, an academic at Paris 8 University, spoke to ANF about the Peace and Democratic Society process.
The first part of this interview can be found here.
Violence and nationalist pathology must be abandoned
In the current peace dynamics you are studying, how are the transforming political consciousness, identity quests, and demands for representation within Kurdish society shaping the process? In what ways does this transformation reshape the social foundations of peace?
One of the most important conditions for institutionalizing peace is for the state to abandon the conceptual commission framework it has constructed at the institutional level. Rather than discourses centered on national solidarity, brotherhood, and democracy, there is a need to articulate a framework grounded in shared life, a common language, and a shared constitution, one that can generate social trust and institutionalization. Only then can we face a process in which representation exists and reckoning becomes possible.
What I mean is this. Both societies carry deep and serious traumas. In particular, there has been a long-standing pathology affecting Turkish society since 1923. There is an intergenerational and transgenerational transmission of racism, violence, and nationalist pathology, and this pathology must be fully repaired.
Kurds, too, have endured a trauma since 1921, and that trauma also requires repair. Therefore, the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) as well as all other parties, in other words all actors within legal politics, must persistently emphasize the constructive dimension of this process and frame their demands accordingly.
They must say this clearly to the state. The politics built on a language of threat must be abandoned. The discourse that portrays the state as powerless, unable to stand alongside those labeled as terrorists or outlaws, must be left behind. Likewise, the mindset represented by headlines such as the one published by Milliyet newspaper in the 1930s, declaring that an “imagined Kurdistan is unknown here,” must be rejected. In today’s context, it is imperative to construct a different language, a different imagery, and a different search for dialogue.
This also necessarily requires the involvement of the Republican People’s Party (CHP). It must be insisted that the process be carried out collectively with all its actors, including the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the CHP, and the DEM Party. Only in this way, I believe, can the process move away from being a military operation or a security issue and become fully civilianized.
Confronting truth must stand at the center of the process
Given the memory, trauma, and fragile social structures produced by periods of conflict, how should the dimensions of truth, confrontation, and repair be addressed in peacebuilding? Where does the recognition of social memory stand in this process?
All this stands at one of the most fundamental points of the process. As in peace processes across the world, emotions such as anger, fear, hatred, and despair, together with the entire chain of experiences stretching from Zîlan, Dersim, and Koçgirî to Suruç, Sûr, the events of 2015, and Taybet Ana, have produced an immeasurably horrific legacy and a devastating memory. We now need to confront this legacy and begin to heal it. One of the most important ways to do so, even if I repeat myself, is to democratize and socialize this issue.
Because one of the strongest ways to re-examine all experiences, whether dramatic or not, is to include the issue within the law with people recognized as subjects. By subject, I mean this. Kurds have a desire for liberation, and that desire for liberation means the realization of justice. It means helping to restore dignity. This encompasses the accumulated traumas of thousands of people since 1921, not only over the past fifty years, from the Dersim massacre of 1937 to the Zîlan massacres of 1930 to 1933, and extending to the present. All of these are profoundly disturbing. They are traces of memory that a society seeking to move beyond war must turn back to and confront.
One of the most important elements that can gradually enable the healing of these traces is social practice. Looking at the 2013 to 2015 period, one of the most significant shortcomings was the state’s failure to relinquish part of its sovereignty, to legislate the process, to establish a new nomos, and thus to bring the issue into the civilian sphere. Yet to confront dramatic social processes, you must encounter the people who lived through these experiences. You must speak with them, and their lives must be secured.
The artist Christian Boltanski, in his installations on catastrophe and the destruction of Jews, once said, “My entire life has been deeply affected by the Holocaust. That is why I always tried to strengthen the lives of those who lived through it, and I kept asking one question: Why did we survive? Why are we alive today?” This is precisely the question we must also ask. We must ask it by looking at the recent past, at what happened in 2015, at Suruç, Ankara, and the massacres in many other cities. How will we read all of this? How will we confront it? How did we survive?
For those who survived to make this confrontation possible, and if we consider memory as a process in which absence corresponds to presence, we must do something in our cities and through our memories to fill the void left by forgetting and to make what has not been confronted visible. This can only be achieved through a truly constitutive subject. It can be realized through a constitutive institutionalization, in Antonio Negri’s sense of the term.
The element that can make all this possible is, of course, guarantees. A framework of guarantees must be established, one that includes not only the state but all of its institutions, that makes justice possible, and that enables a genuine civilian confrontation.
A new social contract is needed
How do you envision the new phase that has begun today evolving into a social contract in the long term, or what kind of social contract should it be?
I think this is what I would say. I spoke earlier about the pathology and trauma experienced by Turkish society and by Turkish–Kurdish relations. Precisely for this reason, there is a need for a socio-psychoanalytic social contract.
What I mean is that any new phase must, of course, be grounded in a democratic social contract. For example, this social contract must also include ecological peace. When you look at the Kurdish context today, this becomes clear across many parts of Kurdistan. Most recently, if we consider the process in Erzincan (Erzingan), where a Canadian gold mining company devastated the entire geography through cyanide pollution, the point becomes evident.
There is no difference between the ecological destruction in Mount Ida, the ecological devastation along the Black Sea, and the ecological destruction in Kurdistan. These geographies belong to everyone. Therefore, what we call shared or common life requires a social contract capable of establishing a common language.
In this respect, there is an important example before us: Rojava. The Rojava Social Contract is so democratic and advanced that, when viewed through the dynamics of the twenty-first century, it moves beyond an alliance based on brotherhood toward an alliance based on friendship. Brotherhood is a concept inherited from the French Revolution and is rooted in a masculine and patriarchal legal imagination. The moment one says “we are brothers,” a hierarchical structure is already implied.
The concept of fraternité in French explicitly refers to male brotherhood. For this reason, we need to move beyond it. We must leave behind this memory of absence and patriarchy and carry the social contract onto a ground that genuinely creates a new space of liberation.
This requires something genuinely new. It cannot be achieved by merely amending certain articles of the existing Turkish Constitution. What is needed is a social contract capable of preventing the emergence of a new war, halting new mechanisms of violence, and blocking the return of entrenched coup traditions. These are the traditions that Öcalan describes through the concept of habitus, which repeatedly reassert themselves to generate new forms of politico-economic power.
Peace Academics must be included in the process
You are an academic who was victimized for advocating peace. In today’s historical moment, what role do you think academia should play, and what should be the role of academics who were previously targeted in this process?
The Academics for Peace emerged as a collective around 2012 and became more visible during the 2013 to 2015 period. The group sought to operate across a wide range of issues, from the situation of political prisoners to initiatives defending the right to speak Kurdish. During the violence that unfolded in 2015 and 2016, the Academics for Peace positioned themselves clearly against the prevailing logic of war. They were an autonomous, spontaneous, and ultimately temporary formation.
Yet the words they spoke were powerful and deeply resonant. And precisely for that reason, many were dismissed from their jobs, uprooted from their lives, and forced into exile. In this new period, I believe there is once again a profound need for the Academics for Peace.
It is essential to ensure that all these colleagues are able to return to their academic positions. We are speaking of hundreds of academics who lost their jobs simply because they demanded peace and opposed war. They were blacklisted and subjected to social lynching. Many were also forced out of their homes and countries.
Today, many of them are working in entirely different fields. For this reason, I believe that one of the most important symbols of a functioning peace process would be concrete steps that enable the Academics for Peace to contribute once again. Much like political prisoners who will be released, these academics are communities capable of contributing meaningfully to the process. We are all part of this process.
It must therefore be stated clearly that they are among the actors and subjects of this process. In my view, the state must speak openly and courageously with the Academics for Peace. I am not referring to any political party here, but to the state itself, because it was the state that destroyed these people’s lives. This injustice must be addressed through law. An academic should not be dismissed or publicly targeted simply for expressing opposition or exercising a democratic right. This must be legally guaranteed.
An academic cannot be neutral. An academic position is always political. Sometimes this political stance offers a perspective that allows us to read the social sciences differently. At other times, it stems from being attentive to what is happening in the country we live in. The war in Kurdistan compelled us to take a position.
If there is now a genuine effort to end the war in Kurdistan, and if the guns have fallen silent, an organization has dissolved, and a truly significant process has begun, then a strong symbolic step is needed to ensure that these risks do not re-emerge and that the country does not return to the old cycle. In my view, inviting the Academics for Peace to parliament would be such a step. They should be included in commissions related to the process.