ABSTRACT
I enter this chapter on law, violence, and the state of exception through the door of a poem, a poem I have “found” in the translation of a 2003 focus group interview with a 27-year-old Kurdish man who migrated from southeastern Turkey to Istanbul in 1994. 1 The speaker is a refugee from the violent conflict that has wracked Turkey's southeastern provinces since the mid-1980s. The clash between state security forces and the PKK, a militant Kurdish group with a Marxist-Leninist philosophy, led to the loss of an estimated thirty thousand lives and the displacement of at least one million people. 2 Around 3,500 villages suspected of harboring PKK were evacuated and burned by the Turkish military during the height of the conflict in the 1990s. The official “state of emergency,” declared in 1987, was finally lifted in 2002 from the last of the sixteen southeastern provinces, though the state continues to maintain a heavy security presence in the region. 3 In the narrative to follow, the speaker refers to being asked to be a “guard.” The village guards were Kurdish residents recruited by the state to help fight the PKK. These local recruits, in combination with the security forces, were called “Special Teams.” Many of those who lived in Turkey's southeast found themselves caught between the PKK and the Special Teams, forced to choose sides, spend time in jail, or flee.
