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| Kurds waiting for CCTs |
Guest
contributor, Gokce Baykal, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political
Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, and an adjunct
faculty at New York University’s Department of Politics, is currently writing her
dissertation, “Giving Money to the Poor: The Political Payoffs of Allocating
Conditional Cash Transfers in Turkey: Making Clients or Citizens?”. She has conducted
in-depth interviews with Roma and Kurdish people in Tekirdag and Diyarbakir who
benefit from poverty alleviation programs.
“We
have been waiting in a line since 6 a.m. to get our cocuk parasi (child money). I have no idea about the amount of
money I will get or the amount of time I will have to wait. Tell (Prime
Minister Recep Tayyib) Erdogan to fix this situation. You ask what poverty is. I’ll tell you. Poverty is waiting, waiting all
your life,” said Ruken, 25, who has 4 children, forcing a smile on her face.
Ruken
is one of the hundreds of poor Kurdish women who waited in front of Surici, the
Diyarbakir Post Office in eastern Turkey, to benefit from Sartli Nakit Transferi (Conditional Cash Transfers or CCTs).
In exchange for
meeting certain requirements, such as sending their children to school, paying
monthly visits to health centers, the government makes regular payments to needy
families. After the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi/Justice and Development Party) decided
to use state funds to initiate the new CCT program, the number of population was
initially targeted at around 1 million Turks.
By March 2009, the number had already reached over 3 million people.[i]
This
enormous increase coincided with the sharp differences in the geographical
distribution of these payments. The CCTs are distributed disproportionately in
the eastern provinces, especially Turkey’s southeastern and eastern Anatolian
regions, where the majority of population is Kurdish. Figure 1 shows the allocation of CCTs according
to regions between 2003-2009.
Fig.
1: The Allocation of Conditional
Cash Transfers According to Regions (2003-2009 March)
This
disproportionate nature of the allocation of CCTs can be explained by the
deteriorating economic conditions in Turkey’s Kurdish regions which are
characterized by rising poverty and high unemployment rates. Indeed, according
to a World Bank report, 39% percent of Turkey’s citizens who live on an income
of a little over $2.00 per day are located in southeastern Anatolia.[2]
However,
other regions suffer from poverty rates just as high as those with a majority
Kurdish population. According to Turkey’s
State Planning Institution, the poverty
rate for the west Black Sea region (47.4%) is close to that of northeast
Anatolia (%50.2), which is populated primarily by Kurds.
Along
with CCTs, the amount of social assistance allocated to Kurdish regions has
significantly increased under AKP rule. During
the last local elections in 2009, one Kurdish city, Tunceli, made news headline. Many newspapers published pictures of
officials from the Tunceli Governor’s Office distributing new refrigerators,
washing machines, desktop computers and furniture in poor neighborhoods. This
phenomenon is not something new. Indeed ruling AKP government has been long
accused by opposition parties and the media of using state funds to win votes.
The country’s Supreme Election Board (Yuksek Secim Kurulu-YSK) filed a criminal complaint against the AKP and foundations that give handouts to electorates to attract their votes. Following the election day, many Kurdish women who benefited from these programs remember receiving an SMS message from Prime Minister Erdogan thanking them for supporting AKP.
Indeed, the AKP’s popularity among poor Kurdish women, especially that of its leader, Prime Minister Erdogan, is much higher compared to Kurdish men. One local volunteer working in the Gunisigi Store, a local government association, which donates second hand clothing to the needy, shared the observations she had during the elections. “If a woman wants to vote for AKP party, they want to cast their vote alone, I mean without their husband’s knowledge. Many of them do so.”
The caricature
roughly translates as follows:
LEFT:
You will vote in this cabin. Hope it reminds you something. RIGHT: ?!
Various
poverty alleviation programs targeting the poor, such as microcredits and
diverse “development” projects conducted by public-private cooperation, have
grown at a rapid pace in the Kurdish majority regions. However, according to
local NGOs and research “think tanks” working in the region, this “development”
rhetoric, which emphasizes proje
mezarligi (“significant projects”), and its policies, have only a limited impact
in cities like Diyarbakir.
Cities
like Diyabakir, and other Kurdish towns, have been turned into a laboratory, where
poor Kurdish people become the objects of social experiments embedded in the state’s
mushrooming poverty relief programs in the region. Actually, none of these social assistance
programs addresses the root causes of poverty. Rather they reduce poverty to simple economic
terms, purposely ignoring the historical and political origins of the problem. The state fails to acknowledge the historic
injustices that Turkey’s Kurdish population has endured and the pervasive political,
cultural and social discrimination that still exists.
The
“poverty as an economic problem” discourse has contributed to the formulation
of temporary solutions and that poverty can only be solved through economic
means such as economic growth, job creation and through various
“development” projects. Attempting to
treat endemic poverty through temporary solutions has a great potential to open the door to all sorts of political manipulation because it fails to meaningfully empower the people who these policies are supposed to help.
Because
of the rise in the number of poverty relief programs, the AKP has enjoyed a gradual
increase of support among the Kurds. According to survey conducted by KONDA, 47%
of those who voted for Kurdish Party DEHAP in 2002 elections changed their
voting preference to the AKP in the next general elections in 2007.[3]
Beyond the AKP’s uneven distribution of social assistance
programs and its mushrooming Islamic charity foundations, political reforms towards
Kurds, which have been designated as the Kurdish Opening (Kürt Açılımi), and
backed by negotiations for European Union membership, may also explain the oarty's
shift.
This
proposed reformist approach for reducing tension between the Turkish government and
Turkey’s Kurdish population includes allowing Kurdish language classes to be
taught in schools, Kurdish language to be used in the broadcast media, and a
partial amnesty for many members of the PKK (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan/Kurdistan Workers Party) who have surrendered
and pledged to no longer take up arms against the state. Some of these compromises by the AKP led
government have even led to the opening of the first state-run Kurdish language TV channel, TRT 6.
However,
this reform process came to a halt with the recent renewal of conflict between the
Turkish military and PKK guerillas, which has resulted in a growing number of
casualties on both sides, the arrest of Kurdish local mayors and journalists,
trade unionists, human right defenders, and also of university students accused
of being members of the KCK (Koma Civakên Kurdistan-Union of Communities in Kurdistan)[4].
At the beginning of October 2011 the number of those detained since April 2009 had
reached 7,748 Kurds, of whom 3,895 suspects were placed in pre-trial detention.[5]
With
political reforms now stagnating, and the Kurdish regions experiencing increased
repression, public and/or charity funded social assistance programs targeting the
poor have slowed or grown at an uneven pace. Ethnic minorities and/or poor people are often
treated as homogenous entities, with the state ignoring their internal social
stratification and cultural differentiation which in turn leads to different political
responses among these groups to these programs.
If
we take local political and social processes and different identities such as
religion into account, the politics of poverty can be more clearly understood. Within the Kurdish community, each group experiences
social welfare programs differently. These programs have certainly had the most significant
impact on the meaning of citizenship for the poor.
Interviews
I conducted within two poor neighborhoods, Huzurevleri
and Fatihpasa in Diyarbakir, both of
which have large concentration of urban poor, confirm the uneven distribution
of resources within the poorest sectors of Kurdish society. The AKP receives most of its votes from the Huzurevleri district in Diyarbakir,
where the party’s headquarters is located, and therefore this support seems to
facilitate people’ access to material benefits distributed by the
government.
In
this district, it is common to hear comments like, “I love Erdogan like my
father,” or “He is the father of the poor,” or, “By the way, he looks like my
beloved uncle.” Remziye, like Ruken, who has seen some benefit from the state’s
social assistance programs, confirms the government’s construction of welfare clientelism by saying, “I can’t
deny the assistance AKP provides. Indeed I’m proud of being Kurdish but we
can’t betray Erdogan.” She added without any hesitation “He is a devout Muslim
and according to our religion, helping the poor is a good deed. God bless him!”
Remziye’s
very sincere statements, and Ruken’s understanding of poverty, remind me of Auyero’s
description of poor people’s experiences waiting in the welfare office as a
site of “intense sociability amidst
pervasive uncertainty”. This
vertical exchange between the poor and the state “persuades the destitute of
the need to be patient, thus conveying the implicit state request to become
compliant clients.”[6]
The
“haunting specter of clientelism” argument is nothing new in Turkish politics.
Especially during elections, news coverage has always been dominated by the
accusations against political parties - especially governing party - allocating
favors such as coal, food packages, clothing and appliances to poor people in
exchange for support.
The
AKP’s practices of providing social assistance targeting Turkey’s Kurdish
minority reinforce and reproduce the caricature of the poor, which portrays them
as naïve and easily pleased by those who provide material benefits. It also underscores the ruling elites’s efforts
to creating its own sociopolitical base and voting bloc among the Kurds which sets
“good” Kurds vs. “bad” Kurds, where the former is pictured as poor devout
Muslims, and more importantly decent and “loyal” citizens.
[1] Esenyel, Caner. 2010. The
Cases on Implementation of Conditional Cash Transfers from Turkey and the World
(Turkiye’de ve Dunyada Sartli Nakit Transferi Uygulamalari), Unpublished Social
Assistance Expertise Thesis, submitted to General Directorate of Social
Assistance and Solidarity, Ankara.
[2] World Bank.
2003. Turkey: Poverty and Coping After
Crises. Report No. 24185. http://www.wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2003/08/20/000160016_20030820130639/Rendered/PDF/241850TR0SR.pdf accessed on October 23, 2012.
[3] KONDA. 2007. Survey of Political Trends, Istanbul:
Konda, reported in Yoruk, Erdem. 2012. “Welfare Provision as Political
Containment: The Politics of Social Assistance and the Kurdish Conflict in
Turkey,” Politics and Society, 40
(4):523.
[4] There are many
rumors on what the KCK means. Cengiz Candar, who is a journalist working on
Kurdish issue for at least three decades define the KCK as an “executive organ
within which the parties and organizations, including the PKK and others that
are associated with the PKK in other regions populated by Kurds (Iraq, Syria,
Iran) are coordinated. It is found within
the democratic confederationalism principle of Abdullah Öcalan by
re-organizing the PKK. The concept of democratic confederationalism developed
by Öcalan is suggested both as an alternative to nation-state and as a model
for the solution to problems in the Middle East.” http://bianet.org/bianet/siyaset/131077-iki-bucuk-yildir-gundemdeki-kck-nedir accessed on
February 28, 2013.
[5] http://www.bianet.org/bianet/siyaset/133216-30-ayda-kckden-7748-gozalti-3895-tutuklama accessed on
December 12, 2012.
[6] Auyero, Javier.
2011.“Patients of the State. An Ethnographic Account of Poor People's
Waiting", Latin American Research
Review, (46:1):5-29.
1 comment:
I'm really dissapointed in our government today as they can see the problem but they have no solution about it.
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