Conclusion: The Continuity of the Reliable and Deniable Paramilitary History in Turkey

Summary

The Turkish state was built with the support of the continuity of an ideologically reliable, institutionally deniable paramilitary legacy. Although the government systems have changed, from the Empire to Republic and from a single-party regime to a multi-party system, for over a hundred years, Turkish state elites have regularly used paramilitary groups as a deterrent, as an intimidatory and punitive tool against opposition, especially the Kurds. Enjoying the monopoly on the use of violence that defines the modern state is incomplete for Turkey as well as for Middle Eastern states in general since the monopoly on violence is shared with subcontractor paramilitary groups. Therefore, these reliable paramilitaries, which are used against groups that the state encodes as opponents or enemies, are among the strongest yet at the same time most invisible pillars on which the country is built.

Paramilitary groups are used across the globe as a pro-state apparatus in internal conflicts and domestic problems. Although state elites use these groups mainly to suppress dissident voices within the country, they sometimes employ paramilitaries as part of state strategy abroad. Additionally, paramilitary groups have not only been exported abroad, but also imported, as seen in the conflicts that razed Kurdish cities in 2015–16. Some groups that fought alongside Turkish forces in the Syrian civil war were brought into the fighting in the Kurdish provinces. There was also testimony in my interviews that many people in the paramilitary groups used in the 2015–16 conflict were over the age of fifty. One of my interviewees, a politician who witnessed the conflicts both in the 1990s and in 2015–16, explained this situation as follows:

In one of his speeches, just before [the destruction of] Cizre, Erdoğan said, ‘We will utilise our experienced operation forces, our security forces who have worked in the region before, when we destroy these trenches.’ Then we saw 50–55 year old men, with grey hair, with automatic weapons in their hands, shouting Allahu akbar. Those called experienced were people who had served in Kurdistan in the 1990s.