Competition Over Dersim’s Collective Identity in the Turkish Diaspora

Prisons have been important “sites of clarification” for Dersim’s intelligentsia and their politicisation, who have been key actors in constructing, re-constructing, and competing over the definition of Dersim’s collective identity. Dersim, a province in eastern Turkey, is a conflict zone where rival movements have not only been fighting against the central state authorities (e.g. the Ottoman Empire or the Republic of Turkey), but they have also been competing amongst themselves. Dersim is also known to be the “castle of the left” in Turkey. The leftist ideology, however, had a dual impact on Dersim’s collective identity. On the one hand, it caused a lack of emphasis on the particularities of the history and identity of Dersim, focusing solely on the Marxian class perspective and relying on inaccurate descriptions of 1937-38 events (e.g. rebellion, resistance). On the other hand, it provided a basis upon which Dersim community eventually developed their identity awareness and organisational skills, both of which served them in promoting their own particular history and in insurgent activities especially from the late 1980s onwards. Arguably, the leftist ideology helped Dersim community realise their repression, and organise effectively, but as the left was hampered in Turkey and around the world, these skills were used to frame and organise identity-based movements. Nonetheless, there is no direct transition from class-based movements to micro-nationalist, identity politics, but the two continue to interplay. This paper relies on 56 in-depth interviewees I conducted with Dersim’s intelligentsia (i.e. academics, authors, musicians, filmmakers, lawyers, journalists, politicians, civil society administrators) in Turkey and Europe between 2014 and 2015. 42 of my interviewees have had formal and informal links to illegal organisations at some point in their lives. 39 of my interviewees have been arrested at least once in their lives, 26 of them claimed they had been tortured in custody, 9 said they had suffered mistreatment. However, the impact of prisons was more than these numbers suggest. Through the life histories and memories of my interviewees, I will show the experience of arrest, imprisonments, mistreatment, and torture had consequences not for the people who personally experienced it, but also for their family members, whose experiences then (re-)shaped their political standpoint and activities.