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2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

5. Politics of Neutrality, Human Rights and Armed Struggles: The Turkey Example

Author : Ozan Kamiloglu

Published in: Human Rights as Battlefields

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on an NGO from Turkey, Insan Haklari Dernegi, to follow how changing discourses of human rights are being translated, adopted, and debated by human rights activists. This brings into focus the political nature of adoption of Amnesty International’s (AI) changes in its mandate after the Yokohama meeting. The history of activists plays a role in the adoption of a dominant discourse of human rights, leading to changes in human rights meanings. Consequently, debates over the adoption of AI’s line indicate the depoliticizing effect of dominant discourses and a local resistance to it. These debates show how consideration of structural problems is being converted into bodily violence of victims, which leads to ethicization of the political this chapter supports.

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Footnotes
1
Most of the work of the association and its structure can be seen from http://​en.​ihd.​org.​tr/​. Unfortunately, the bulletins that are the main material of this chapter are not digitalized and published only in Turkish. All translations in this chapter are mine.
 
2
For more information on the results of this meeting, see Amnesty International Report. 1992. Available at: https://​www.​amnesty.​org/​en/​documents/​pol10/​0001/​1992/​en/​.
 
3
Steven L. Robins (2008, p. 2), in the South African context focusing on the struggle between the emancipatory politics and rights speech over the same period of time, states that “[r]adical keywords and concepts such as socialism, national liberation, class struggle, people’s revolution, resistance to racial capitalism and colonialism-of-a-special type, were replaced with tamer words such as rights, citizenship, liberaldemocracy, nation-building, transformation, black economic empowerment (BEE) and so on.”
 
4
Some of the seminal works are Costas Douzinas (2007), Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Samuel Moyns (2012), The Last Utopia, and Wendy Brown (1995) States of Injury.
 
5
Some relevant examples of literature on the human rights and the Third World are Upendra Baxi (2006) The Future of Human Rights, José-Manuel Barreto (2013) Human Rights from aThird WorldPerspective: Critique, History and International Law, Martti Koskenniemi, “Colonization of the ‘Indies’: The Origin of International Law?” in La idea de América en el Pensamiento Ius Internacionalista del Siglo XXI, ed. Yolanda Gamarra (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2010) and “Empire and International Law: The Real Spanish Contribution,” University of Toronto Law Journal 61 (2011), and also Arturo Escobar, “Imperial Globality and Anti-Globalisation Movements,” Third World Quarterly 25 (2004): 210.
 
6
Statute of Amnesty International is amended by the 20th International Council meeting in Yokohama, Japan, August 31–September 7, 1991, and defined a mandate that is for either the promotion of certain goals or opposition to certain practices. The points raised in this press release found place in the mandate of AI.
 
7
The number is approximate and taken from the Parliamentary Research Committee Report, Cilt 2, September 2012. See also Info-Turk, Monthly Bulletin, October 1988, and Kayasu v Turkey, no. 64119/00, ECHR 2008.
 
8
For information about hunger strikes before held by Kurdish independence movement particularly. See: Bargu, B. (2014). Stave and Immolate, Colombia Unıversity Press, New York.
 
9
For a full list of hunger strikes and death fasts in this period, Ertugrul Mavioglu Asılmayip da Beslenenler: Bir Eylül Hesaplaşması [Those Who Were Not Hanged but Fed: Settling Accounts with September 12]. Istanbul: Babil Yayinları, 2004. And Bargu, B. (2014). Stave and Immolate, Colombia Unıversity Press, New York.
 
10
Lois Whitman (1989, p. 114) states “The group has been indicted ten times, charged with violations of the Associations Law because of its press conferences, statements and conferences. (…) In 1987, for example, a case was brought against 18 TAYAD directors in connection with a demonstration in front of Sagmalcilar Prison.”
 
11
This is the expression used by Hüsnü Öndül, Akademi Notları, presented in the Human Rights Academy Diyarbakır Branch seminars, 2016. Available at: http://​www.​ihd.​org.​tr/​akademi-egitim-notlari-dort-insan-haklari-konusu/​. Accessed Dec 18, 2017.
 
12
Thousands of people gathered for IHD’s first meetings in Istanbul, Diyarbakir and Izmir, and this mobilization was directed toward the goals of ending torture, calling for a general political amnesty and the abolition of death penalty (IHD. 2008). For more information see “History of Human Rights Association (IHD).” Available at: http://​en.​ihd.​org.​tr/​index.​php/​2008/​12/​08/​history-of-human-rights-association-ihd/​. Accessed Dec 18, 2017.
 
13
The bulletin has been published whenever possible, commonly two or more each year. Also, there was a special edition for Yokohama debates in this period.
 
14
Drawing borders of ‘Westernhuman rights discourses’ is always difficult, given that, as this chapter tries to show, there is a constant translation and (re)appropriation of human rights discourses between actors and institutions. I follow definition and descriptions of José-Manuel Barreto (2013). He highlights “the Eurocentric theory of human rights presents itself as objective and universal and, while it assumes exclusive authority and legitimacy, it condemns a Third World approach to impossibility or silence. […] This predisposition is accompanied by a tendency to give a notorious and unfair weight to the events occurring in Europe. This is the case in Hegel’s philosophical notion of “universal history,” from which Asia, Africa and the Americas are excluded. By framing human rights in conceptions of history based exclusively on European milestones the theory of rights remains within a Eurocentric horizon of understanding. Having been born out of the experience of bourgeois revolutions, European theories of human rights deal mainly with relations between state and society, or between governments and individuals, putting aside the problematic of interactions between empires and colonies.” In this sense, what ‘Western’ corresponds is not necessarily geographical, but about narrations of history, universals and eventually power.
 
15
Fırst publication of the Yokohama Declaration was in the IHD Bülteni (Bulletin of Human Rights Association). 1993. Sayı 49–50.
 
16
Kanar makes reference to a general dogmatism of the left, rather than any particular one.
 
17
Bulletin of Human Rights Association, 1994, pp. 56–57.
 
18
Arturo Escobar (2011) in Encountering Development, on the notion of development underlines, “Perhaps no other idea has been so insidious, no other idea gone so unchallenged.”
 
19
How to define the actions of armed groups (human rights abuses, or breaches of local or international criminal law) is an important and relevant discussion (Dudai and Mcevoy 2012).
 
20
For an application of how the ethical turn has been reflected to transitional justice processes see Robert Meister (2011).
 
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Metadata
Title
Politics of Neutrality, Human Rights and Armed Struggles: The Turkey Example
Author
Ozan Kamiloglu
Copyright Year
2019
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91770-2_5