Guest
contributor, Gokce Baykal, a doctoral candidate in the Rutgers University Department of Political
Science, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, and an adjunct
faculty member 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
Erdogan (Prime Minister Recep Tayyip 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 Post Office in Diyarbakir, one of the eastern province of
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. Between 2002-2006, the CCT
program was under World Bank’s Social Risk Mitigation Project funded through
World Bank loans. Then, after March 2006, upon receiving a lot of support,
positive evaluations, the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi-Justice and
Development Party) government decided to continue with the program. Since the
World Bank loan period ended, the government has begun to fund the program
through Social Solidarity Fund (SYDTF)budget. Whereas the number of population
targeted around 1 million in the original document, after the government has
initiated payments through state funds, as of March 2009, approximately 3
million people benefit from the Program.[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.
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 caricature roughly translates as follows:
LEFT:
You will vote in this cabin. Hope it reminds you something.
Source: Girgir- http://www.vekarikatur.com/beyaz-esya/
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.”
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 and its
practices transform the region, specifically the city of Diyarbakir into proje
mezarligi (project cemetery). Cities like Diyarbakir, 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 “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 mushrooming Islamic charity
foundations, political reforms towards Kurds, which have been designated as the
Kurdish Opening (Kürt Açılımı), and backed by negotiations for European
Union membership, may also explain the party’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, 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’ 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.
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