The Stone-Throwing Children
This story comes from Today’s Zaman, printed on 03 January 2010, Sunday. It illustrates a situation that many tourists are not aware of – the internal problems of Turkey. I published this story on the Imagine Istanbul website because it deals with the Human Rights of the Child in Turkey. For every action – there is a reaction to the action. There is nothing without a cause, nothing without a reason.
Stone-throwing children: Turkish kids would be traumatized by our story
Assistant Professor Nazan Üstündağ from Bosporus (Boğaziçi) University thinks the biggest question for those Kurdish children known as the “stone-throwing children” is why the Turkish public hates them without knowing them since these children define their goal as establishing peace.
Üstündağ and Haydar Darici, who has submitted his master’s thesis on these children to the cultural studies department at Sabancı University, are two of the very few academics who have paid attention to these children.Üstündağ underlines that the children are not controllable by anyone, including their own families, contrary to the general perception about them.
There is a general belief in society and the media that these children are directed by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is listed as a terrorist organization by the US, the EU and Turkey, or the now-defunct pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP).
Recently, the governor of Adana, İlhan Atış, said there are around 200 children who have participated in illegal demonstrations in Adana. He maintains that if their families are unable to stop them from participating in illegal activities, the children will be taken into the custody of the state and put in orphanages.
According to Ministry of Justice statistics for 2008, more than 550 children had violated the Anti-terror Law, which treats these children as adults.
As one of the first steps of its democratization initiative, the government decided on some legislation that would prevent these children from facing charges and being convicted as adults. The draft was later withdrawn after the outbreak of violent demonstrations protesting the imprisonment conditions of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, who is serving a life sentence on İmrali Island in the Marmara Sea.
Children of forced migration
In an exclusive interview with Sunday’s Zaman, Üstündağ challenged the general ideas about the stone-throwing children, for example, that they participate in protests because they are paid or that it would be possible to prevent them if they were given candy.
Üstündağ says she met and talked with these children but also utilized much of the fieldwork conducted by Darici, which indicates that the children are the children of forced migration even if some of them were not born at that time:
“During the period between 1992 and 1999, 3,489 rural settlements were evacuated by the Turkish army, leading to the forced displacement of approximately 2 million people. The children we watch on TV throwing stones at the police are predominantly the children of these migrants. Most of these children have not physically experienced forced migration, but they have inherited the memories from previous generations,” she says and adds that these children come from very poor families that have a long history of police harassment and who suffer urban isolation.
“They live in segregated neighborhoods where the population is predominantly Kurdish, often work as street peddlers or provide unsecured labor to firms and factories. Although almost all of them are enrolled in school, their dropout rates are high and attendance low.”
Üstündağ underlines that drug abuse and petty crime is common among these children and that being detained on charges in relation to this or for political reasons is often an important turning point in their lives, whereby their marginalization becomes something recognized and punished by the law. She emphasizes that for most of these kids, the street is their only home. Being poor, their homes are small, allowing only girls to be at home in the daytime. At night they become the source of further problems.
“Their fathers have lost their masculinity in the urban environment, symbolically. They cannot find any work. Their authority and wisdom in the village has been replaced by ignorance and bafflement in the city. Hence, they continually feel threatened and betrayed. Children in this context become the embodiment of the forces that marginalize them. Their street-smarts and their vocabulary become the objects of unending debates and discussions, leading to their alienation from home. It is in public spaces where they create the environment necessary for their independence, be it through drug use or political activity.
She underlines that those children take themselves seriously and want others to do the same. “Irrespective of their involvement with drugs or the extent of the non-political illegality in which they are involved, most of these children define themselves as political subjects who fight for Kurdish rights and identity. Indeed, they see themselves as the pioneers of the Kurdish struggle. They believe they are the primary carriers of a resistance whereby politics is defined as being about life and death rather than about negotiation, interest and concession.”
Opposed to family, Kurdish politicians and everything
Üstündağ stresses that the biggest fear these children have is assimilation and the loss of the ability to resist and that they are not only opposed to the state but also to the Kurdish middle classes. They are at odds with previous generations, who they regard as having become impotent and fearful in an urban context. Interestingly enough, and contrary to general belief, they also have objections to the actors in Kurdish politics.
“They accuse Kurdish political actors of failing to take them seriously and of seeing them as an obstacle to the peace process. They argue that legal Kurdish actors speak to Turkish people and the state instead of speaking to them,” she says.
Üstündağ underlines that those children are very well aware of the image the public has of them and says the biggest question for them is why the Turkish public hates them without knowing them, despite the fact that they are fighting and throwing stones at the police, who prevent the establishment of an equitable and honorable peace between people.
“The interviews that Darici conducted show that these children are well aware of the public discourse that surrounds them. Anger rather than irony characterizes their reaction to this discourse, showing their wish for recognition and their disillusionment as a response to the lack thereof. Far from being persuaded by the PKK or DTP in return for money, the kids feel an ambiguity in their activities, not knowing whether their actions facilitate or prevent the Kurdish opposition achieving their goals. Indeed, in most of the protests, rather than backing them up, the DTP adopts a discourse which they feel is aimed at ‘domesticating’ them and at brushing their political subjectivity aside.”
Girls head to mountains before throwing stones
Üstündağ emphasizes that these children are boys; girls are usually confined to home because the possibility of a girl being arrested is unacceptable since it could lead to dishonor. “The state and its institutions are seen by most Kurdish people as alien. Hence, the presence of girls among strangers in police custody would bring shame to a family even if they were not sexually harassed. It is interesting to note that while it is frequently boys who have been arrested that end up joining the PKK, girls directly “go to the mountains” without having any previous criminal record, and they are by no means looked down upon. We interpret this to mean that families see the PKK as a private space compared to the alienated space of the state. Nevertheless, most girls find other ways of “getting out of the home.” In the entire region, the effect of religion is increasing by creating spheres for women where they can interact, learn, talk and contemplate in segregation.”
‘Grownups think politics is a game’
Üstündağ underlines that it wouldn’t be correct to judge these kids in terms of modern conceptions of children. “Here, we are talking of people who work, who carry the responsibility of family and who have encountered state oppression and suffering at a very early age by physically experiencing it or by inheriting memories from previous generations. They are well aware of the discrimination they face outside of their neighborhood. They engage in political discussion and analysis. Darıcı quotes one child as saying that grownups think politics is a game. As I mentioned earlier, politics is a matter of life and death in these neighborhoods. It is about where you will find work, with whom you will interact, in which language you will speak, who you will run from and who is to blame for your dispossession and misery in the urban environment,” she says and adds that this does not mean these children do not play; they do, but in their own way.
“Their play is also often political, as in when they chase the children of teachers or army officers near the neighborhood, or organize against child gangs that harass them.”
In response to the question of whether these children would be an obstacle to a solution when they become adults since they are nationalists, Üstündağ says these children are no doubt different from Turkish children in the city but also different from Kurdish middle-class children. They have not experienced any kind of childhood that would resemble the childhood of older PKK members, and their nationalism is not destructive.
“After the events of March 2006, Osman Baydemir said on TV that [these children] are unknown to the DTP and an enigma for him. In that sense their childhood is one that has developed out of the systematic atrocities that the Turkish state has committed against the Kurdish population since the mid ’90s. Kurdishness for them is the most important dimension of their identity. However, organizing one’s life around Kurdishness, as long as this does not present itself in a discourse of supremacy and exclusion, is not equal to nationalism. On the contrary, in one of my encounters children wanted me to explain why Turks hate them so much even though that feeling is not reciprocal. They don’t understand how we do not ‘see’ the truth of their situation and the ‘justice’ of their struggle. In one of the films made about them, children are shown warning the director not to show the film to Turkish children. They express concern that their story would traumatize them. In such spontaneous encounters, it becomes obvious that their Kurdishness has not yet evolved into a destructive form of … nationalism. It should also be remembered that their Kurdishness is very much informed by the memories of previous generations. Many of them say that they can access drugs and engage in petty crime because the PKK hasn’t been present in the urban sphere since 1999. From what they have gathered from stories they have listened to, the PKK is not only a political but also a moral leader that defines how a Kurdish person should act. While continuous struggle is part of that definition, so is soberness, labor, community, environmentalism and gender equality. Nevertheless, how these manifest themselves in the bodies and behavior of these children cannot be controlled by the PKK or any other actor. They have almost complete sovereignty in fashioning their own activities since there is no respected authority in these areas except the partial authority of the DTP,” she said.
When it comes to what to do with these children to improve their situation, what kinds of projects can be implemented, Üstündağ thinks adults should open up avenues whereby they can directly represent themselves. “I don’t believe in the projects implemented up until now that attempt to change and mold these kids according to our own belief of what children should be like. I think we have to take their agency seriously and learn from them — their experience and struggle. We have to open up avenues whereby they can directly represent themselves and participate in politics and policy-making processes since they are the ones who will primarily suffer or benefit from them. I think this is a path that not only the state should take but also the DTP. We cannot simply treat their ideas as immature given everything I have said here. This does not mean that they should be judged in courts in the way adults are. I don’t believe that what they do is criminal. But that question aside, laws that differentiate between children and adults not only differentiate between them in terms of accountability but also in terms of their different physical abilities to endure, of their different potential to change.”
Source: www.todayszaman.com/
