The Absent Present Law
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663917738044 |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The Absent Present
Law: An Ethnographic
Study of Legal Violence
in Turkey
Deniz Yonucu
Freie Universita
¨t, Berlin and the Leibniz-ZMO
Abstract
This article, which draws on the case of 10 young socialists from the urban margins of
Istanbul, who were arrested as the result of an anti-terror operation in 2007, provides an
ethnographically grounded analysis of Turkey’s anti-terror law by examining the threat it
poses for the population. Contrary to widespread complaints about a supposed state of
lawlessness in Turkey, the article suggests that law, indeed, exists as an overwhelming
and ever-present force in the lives of country’s alleged internal enemies (i.e. Kurds,
socialists, Alevis, non-Muslims), hanging over their lives like the sword of Damocles.
Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s debate on the similarities between law and myth, the
article demonstrates that the ambiguity, illegibility and unpredictability of Turkey’s anti-
terror law bestows upon the law a mythical and/or sovereign force that controls one’s
present and future, and hence one’s fate. The article also argues that the anti-terror
operations that started to take place in the urban margins against Kurdish activists and
socialist Alevi youth as early as 2007 were harbingers of a growing lawfare in Turkey,
which gradually shifted to the center over the course of years.
Keywords
Anti-terror laws, law and fate, legal violence and mythical violence, trial, Walter Benja-
min, Alevis
Corresponding author:
Deniz Yonucu, Freie Universita
¨t, Berlin and the Leibniz-ZMO, Germany.
Email: deniz.yonucu@gmail.com
Social & Legal Studies
2018, Vol. 27(6) 716–733
ªThe Author(s) 2017
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0964663917738044
journals.sagepub.com/home/sls
On October 8, 2007, two men – Haydar, a 22-year-old socialist , and an undercover
policeman whose official identity was unknown to Haydar at the time – started to quarrel
on the busiest street of Narova,
1
a working-class neighborhood in Istanbul. Most Nar-
ovans are Alevis, a historically stigmatized belief group in Turkey, and the neighbor-
hood, like the other predominantly Alevi-populat ed working-class neighborhoods of
Istanbul, is known for being a base for socialist organizations. The quarrel started shortly
after Haydar noticed that a stranger was following him. He turned around and started
yelling at the man, asking who he was and why he was following him. Soon the two men
began brawling and a crowd gathered around them. Another man from the crowd who
turned out to also be an undercover policeman leapt into the fray to help his colleague.
This led others to join in either to protect Haydar or to separate the two parties. At one
point, one of the undercover policemen fell to the ground and his walkie-talkie slipped
out of his pocket. Haydar then realized that the man whom he had hit was an undercover
policeman and he shouted, ‘He’s a cop!’ to warn his friends, whereupon the fight ended.
As witnesses later testified at the trial, the confrontation lasted for approximately ten
minutes.
That night, 2000 heavily armed policemen from anti-terrorism units accompanied by
several military vehicles went to the neighborhood and raided a number of houses and
cafes. They took Haydar and nine of his friends, all of whom were members of the same
legal socialist organization and active members of a neighborhood association in Nar-
ova, into custody on the charge of being members of an outlawed Marxist organization
that is considered to be a ‘terrorist’
3
organization by Turkey. They were also charged
with assaulting policemen and seizing a policeman’s gun, all supposedly upon the orders
of the organization. They were held in custody for 3 days without questioning, and then
they were jailed in high security cells. Five of them spent four and half years and the
remainder spent 6 years in pretrial detention.
2
Although it was not proven that all of them
were with Haydar at the time of the confrontation and despite the fact that there was no
material evidence connecting them with a so-called terrorist
3
organization aside from the
testimony of police and a secret witness, in 2013, all 10 of them were sentenced to
26 years of imprisonment. After the court’s decision, those who were granted pretrial
release before the ruling left the country and became political refugees in Europe, and the
others remained in prison.
Haydar and his friends were among the first group of ‘terrorist’ convicts detained after
the amendments made in 2006 to Turkey’s anti-terror law originally passed in 1991. In
line with global trends in terror legislation (Eckert, 2008; Hoffman, 2004), Turkey’s anti-
terror law has a very vague and broad definition of terror (Bargu, 2014; Belge, 2006).
4
The 2007 amendments retained the broad, vague definitions of terror stipulated in the
law while increasing the number an d scope of crimes that can be conside red to be
terrorist offences. They also made it much easier to apply the law, increased the length
of punishments for alleged terrorist acts, legalized breaches of fair trial rights, and paved
the way for the categorization of political crimes as terror crimes (Ersanlı & O
¨zdog
˘an,
2011; O
¨zbudun, 2014).
5
After the operation against Haydar and his friends, several other
anti-terror operations were carried out which targeted pro-Kurdish activists and socialists
in the predominantly Alevi-populated working-class neighborhoods of Istanbul and in
Turkey’s Kurdistan. While in 2005, there were 273 ‘terror’ convicts in Turkey’s prisons,
Yonucu 717
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