Political mobilization in Turkey in the 1970s: the case of the Kahramanmaraş incidents

Abstract

This thesis examines the low-intensity civil war in Turkey in the 1970s by exploring the background of the conflicts and massacres that occurred in Kahramanmaraş on 22-25 December 1978. The emergence of radical left/socialist movements was witnessed along with the rise of a workers' movement, peasant struggles and student opposition from the mid-1960s onwards. The extreme rightist movement that organised itself as an anti-communist reaction to that rise and became a mass movement in the mid-1970s in parallel to the search for alternatives among the parts of the population that lived in central and eastern Anatolia who were bothered by the cultural modernization and economic expropriation of the capitalist modernization. This thesis discusses the Kahramanmaraş Incidents by analysing the effects of this division on the both national and local levels. Emphasizing the political side of this division separates this work from essentialist approaches that perceive the events only as a religious and ethnic conflict by removing the events from the context of the 1970s. The second aim of the thesis is to cast light upon the traumatic effects of the efforts of the power holders for the loss of memory after the 12 September coup d'etat, by following the traces of the Kahramanmaraş Incidents in the collective memory. The traumatization of the collective memory, while it has sought to erase the radical alternatives of the 1970s from popular memory, has also had the effect of increasing the risk that Turkish society will face events similar to the ones in Kahramanmaraş once more. Therefore, this thesis carries out the idea of an intervention into the traumatized social memory through an analysis of the political struggles in the 1970s on both the national and regional levels.