Dehumanization on Twitter in the Turkish

Abstract

This article examines the dissemination of images of mutilated and humiliated dead bodies of ‘others’ and reactions of Twitter users to these images as dehumanizing practices. When the peace negotiations between the Turkish state and Kurdish PKK failed, numerous images of mutilated and humiliated dead bodies of PKK militants were disseminated by Twitter accounts apparently used by members of the Turkish security forces. The author focuses on two controversial cases from 2015 and immediate social media reactions to those images in order to demonstrate how dehumanization of Kurdish militants played out in the case of Turkey.

Keywords

animalization dead bodies dehumanization sexism social media Turkish–Kurdish conflict

Introduction

The ongoing ceasefire between Kurdish PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê or Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and Turkish security forces had come to an end after the Turkish general elections of 7 June 2015. As an immediate result, Turkish military forces launched a series of attacks on the Kurdish region of Turkey, which resulted in the destruction of Kurdish-populated cities such as Cizre, Sur, Silvan, Silopi, Varto, Nusaybin and Yüksekova, the deportation of Kurdish people, prolonged curfews and the death of hundreds of civilians. Since then, numerous violent images and videos have been disseminated via unofficial social media accounts related to Turkish security forces. Two of these cases, especially, sparked a heated debate in Turkey: the case of Ekin Wan and the case of Hacı Lokman Birlik.

The photograph of the naked and bloodied dead body of a woman was circulated on social media on 15 August 2015. The photograph depicts standing men whose faces are not visible and the dead woman lying before their feet. The woman was identified as Kevser Eltürk, alias Ekin Wan, a PKK militant. On 3 October 2015, the video of a dead PKK militant called Hacı Lokman Birlik became viral. In the video, the dead body of Birlik is tied to a military vehicle by a rope and dragged along the streets of the city of Şırnak. Images of Ekin Wan and Birlik sparked protests and discussions all around the world and resulted in various reactions on social media.

Dehumanization is painting the other as ‘less-than human’ and in many cases trivializing their lives compared to the ones whose ‘human’ status is not in dispute. Mutilating, torturing and humiliating dead bodies of ‘others’ is an important way of depriving the living members of the same community from their humanness. Social media channels, such as Twitter, play an important role in this process for two main reasons. Firstly, they are highly efficient platforms for disseminating the images of mutilated and humiliated dead bodies so that the optimum number of people can see them; secondly, these platforms allow user interaction which permits them to actively participate in the dehumanization process, something that was not possible with traditional media channels such as television or print newspapers.

This article examines the dehumanization process of PKK militants in Turkey. To this end, it examines dehumanizing Twitter posts in relation to the previously mentioned cases. It starts out by briefly introducing the literature on dehumanization, the place of mutilating, torturing and humiliating dead bodies in dehumanizing practices, and media performances in relation to the dehumanization. It subsequently presents the background against which this case unfolded. After that, it delves into the case and examines the images, their media representations, and social media reactions from different audience(s). It classifies the immediate dehumanizing posts on Twitter into six distinct categories and analyzes the ways in which dehumanizing practices manifest themselves in this specific context. Finally, it highlights a series of elements that may open up new avenues for future research.

Dehumanizing the ‘other’

It has been suggested that ‘an important way in which others may be denied full humanness is in an animalistic sense in which they are seen as not having risen above their animal origins; that is, they are seen as less than human’ (Esses et al., 2013: 522). Haslam et al. (2009: 63) call this practice ‘animalistic dehumanization’ and state that it has, at its core, an implicit ‘likening of people to animals and the ascription of relatively bestial or barbaric characteristics to them’. The authors describe another type of dehumanizing practice which they call ‘mechanistic dehumanization’ in which humans are objectified or seen as machine-like (p. 64). Both animalistic and mechanistic forms of dehumanization involve ‘perceiving others as less than human, likening them to beasts or unfeeling objects, and treating them with inhumanity’ and these practices are especially common ‘in times of war, genocide, and ethnic conflict’ (p. 56). Butler (2004: 78) focuses on the reduction of human beings to animal status as a dehumanizing practice and claims that the human is defined against the figure of an ‘animal’. Here, we can infer that the binarism of ‘us’ and ‘others’ is linked to the binarism of ‘human’ and ‘non-human’. The ‘other’ is usually considered ‘less human’ and in many cases ‘more animal-like’. When Adelman and Ruggi (2016: 911) state that ‘both women and people marked as “racial others” have been associated with the body’, rather than with the culture, it can be inferred that this association with ‘body’ denotes being ‘less human’ than those who are being associated with ‘culture’. After all, as Peggs (2014: 17) identifies, ‘an essential difference between humans and other animals is established in the perception that humans, unlike other animals, have transcended their biology; it is precisely this transcendence that is said to define the human as human.’

Likening certain groups of humans to animals as a way of dehumanization was noted by various scholars. Steuter and Wills (2009: 9) underline the place of ‘orientalism’ in those media practices. In their view, this rhetorical framing ‘draws upon long-standing binaries by which the West defines the East as alien to its norm; the barbaric East is seen, through its essential nature, as fundamentally opposed to the civilized West’. They show the systematic dehumanization of Muslims in Canadian media by showing how media reports about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq regularly use animal-related metaphors such as hunt, trap, snare, net and corral (p. 13). In another work, Dalsklev and Kunst (2015) demonstrate how the Roma were likened to animals in Norway. The authors show that the Roma were depicted as ‘disgusting’ in Norwegian media and established a relation between feelings of disgust and dehumanization. Vaughan-Williams (2015) examines the animalization of ‘irregular’ migrants in Europe. Here, it is shown that the migrants in formal detention centers felt that they were treated like animals. Vaughan-Williams finds ‘animalised imagery and metaphors’ both in irregular migrants’ testimonies and in European official discourses (p. 9). Barrett (2017: 240) analyzes the animalization of Africans in Britain and shows that the dehumanization of Africans was done in two ways: by likening them to animals, and by likening them to children. Kovacevic (2017) explores the animalization practices in Chile during the military dictatorship and shows how the Chilean media repeatedly used verbs such as ‘exterminate’ for killing members of the opposition and also called them by animal names, such as dogs or rats. Romero Morales (2018) investigates the animalization of Moroccan people in the Spanish colonial narrative. Some examples of dehumanization of Moroccan people are when they were called ‘cornered animals’, ‘savage creatures’ and ‘monkeys’ (p. 150). Chu and Huang (2019) examine the animalization of Paiwan people by Japanese NHK and the way in which they were depicted as savages and uncivilized.

The process of dehumanization during wars and conflicts may be explained in different ways. Steuter and Wills (2009: 9) claim that ‘images emphasizing the Otherness of the enemy are fundamental to wartime discourses because they create the preconditions necessary to military action.’ According to Hall (1996: 5), ‘identities can function as points of identification and attachment only because of their capacity to exclude, to leave out, to render “outside”, abjected.’ Adams (2018: 53) suggests that ‘the concept of the beast functions to justify perceiving some people as other and disempowering them.’ Laclau (1990: 32) considers that ‘an identity’s constitution is always based on excluding something and establishing a violent hierarchy between the two resultant poles’, such as black–white or man–woman. This hierarchy manifests itself as a difference between ‘civil–uncivil’. Here, we can recall the quote from Durkheim (1995: 214): ‘It is these things that give man his distinctiveness among all creatures, for man is man only because he is civilized.’

Alexander (2006: 50) states that ‘the civility of the self always articulates itself in language about the incivility of the other.’ He talks about a ‘we-ness’ that transcends particular commitments, narrow loyalties, and sectional interests (p. 43). The question here is to decide on who is included in this ‘we’, and subsequently, who is not. Winkler et al. (2018) refer to a similar phenomenon when they claim that ISIS uses images of dead bodies in order to construct in- and out-group members. Butler (2009: 74) takes it further when she claims that ‘there are norms, explicit or tacit, governing which human lives count as human and as living, and which do not.’ According to Butler (2004: 78), the language with which Afghan militants were described suggests that these individuals ‘may not be individuals at all’, ‘they are effectively reducible to a desire to kill’, and ‘regular criminal and international codes cannot apply to beings such as these.’

Mutilating, torturing and humiliating dead bodies have been a crucial part of dehumanizing practices. Gregory (2016: 946) presents various examples from Afghanistan perpetrated by US soldiers. In his view, the violence towards dead bodies in Afghanistan ‘did not simply kill the victims, but was complicit in a dehumanizing logic that left them unrecognizable as human beings and erased any trace of their individuality’. What Gregory says is closely related to the statement made in court by Steven Green, a US soldier who raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdered her along with her family: ‘I wasn’t thinking these people were humans’ (Daily Mail, 2010).

Yalçınkaya (2016: 60) states that these practices on dead bodies contain a message for the survivors. This message indicates that the living bodies that are similar to the dead ones cannot be killed since they were never human in the first place. Etöz (2016: 97) seems to agree with this statement when she says that if dead bodies lay on the street for days, being attacked by dogs, or could not be buried properly, as was the case in Kurdistan, this meant that the community to which those dead bodies belong is also dying. Mutilating and humiliating dead bodies serve to trivialize and dehumanize not just the dead, but also the living bodies of the ‘others’.

Graphic evidence of dehumanizing practices towards dead bodies is disseminated in the form of photographs and videos on both traditional and social media. Butler (2004: 146) considers that ‘the media’s evacuation of the human through the image’ must be understood ‘in terms of the broader problem that normative schemes of intelligibility establish what will and will not be human, what will be a livable life, what will be a grievable death’. For Butler (2009), ‘grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters’ (p. 14) and war can be considered as ‘dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not’ (p. 38). She acknowledges the role of images in making this division, noting that ‘the photograph is not merely a visual image awaiting interpretation’, but itself is ‘actively interpreting’ and ‘sometimes forcibly so’. Thus, according to Butler, the question for war photography ‘concerns not only what it shows, but also how it shows what it shows’ (p. 71). Butler (2004: 20) criticizes Sontag’s (2004) idea that ‘a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.’ Butler (2009: 84) considers the photograph as a ‘promise that the event will continue’.

Kuntsman (2012: 1) mentions the day-to-day online interactions ‘in which the violence of racism and nationalism was normalized into the mundane, sprinkled with “smileys”’. She develops the term ‘cybertouch of war’ which refers to ‘the emotional and informational intersections between on- and offline military violence, the mediation of wars and conflicts, and the affective regimes that emerge in cyberspace’ (p. 3). According to her, online communication is ‘saturated with passion, that virtual conflicts move us, and that our use of digital media is about affective investment, as much as it is about information, storage of data or form of communication’, and violence can touch us ‘through the monitors of our computers and mobile phones, whether by creating an immediate emotional response (sadness, rage, pain, compassion, indifference, etc.) or by leading to long-lasting changes in the ways we remember and experience war and conflicts’ (Kuntsman, 2010: 9–10). It is important to consider the emotional aspect of online communication and social media interaction when thinking about hundreds of photographs taken by Turkish security forces in war-torn Kurdish towns. Indeed, numerous photographs from the region depicting mutilation and humiliation of both living and dead bodies were published in the following months on social media accounts apparently owned by individuals from Turkish military and police forces (Protner, 2018a).

Scholars have shown that the social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, allow the political participation of citizens (Blevins et al., 2019; Castelao and Viveros, 2014; Ghobadi and Clegg, 2015; Haciyakupoglu and Zhang, 2015; Harlow et al., 2017). This participation results in the ‘contact’ of many citizens with their ‘others’. Practices of dehumanization through social media are especially impactful considering that, unlike traditional media, social media are a constant part of the daily lives of many users. As this study shows, social media may also allow the users to actively participate in dehumanizing practices.

Both animalizing and mechanizing forms of dehumanization categorize the ‘other’ as ‘less-than human’, and legitimize discrimination by trivializing their lives. Agamben (1998: 8) was referring to the figure of ‘homo sacer’ from Roman law in order to explain the sovereign sphere as ‘the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice’. This figure is included in the juridical order by a double exclusion which meant that ‘homo sacer’ can be killed but not sacrificed. The specific characteristics of ‘homo sacer’ were the unpunishability of his or her killing and the ban of his or her sacrifice (p. 73); in this way, he or she was excluded from both the profane and the sacred world. Agamben argues that the life that may be killed is ‘politicized through its very capacity to be killed’ (p. 89). Mutilation and humiliation of dead bodies may be considered in relation to this power over life and death. It is plausible to think that, by committing these acts, the dead bodies (and living bodies that are in the same category) are excluded as ‘bodies of others’. Mutilation and humiliation of dead bodies underline the ‘unpunishability’ of the murderer and the ‘unsacrificeable’ character of the victim. They go even further and trivialize the lives of ‘others’ by allowing disrespect to their dead bodies; disseminating graphic images that depict those dead bodies via social media may be considered as a way of ensuring that the images will ‘touch’ as many people as possible. These acts may result not only in exclusion from the juridical system or from the society, but also from the category of human. By investigating audience reactions on social media to these images, it is possible to deduce the impact and effects of dehumanizing practices on civilian populations.

The Turkish–Kurdish conflict

The Kurds are often referred to as the largest stateless people in the world (Ozsoy, 2013: 103). Kurdistan is divided between Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. In all of these countries, Kurdish people faced systematic assimilation, torture, massacres and state persecution. In Turkey’s case, the Kurdish Question has existed since the first years of the Republic. The Sheikh Said Rebellion occurred in 1925, approximately 15 months after the foundation of the Republic and it was followed by another Kurdish rebellion in Ağrı (1930) and then the Dersim Rebellion (1937). Turkey is currently in an armed conflict with the Kurdish rebel group, PKK, which was founded in 1978 by Abdullah Öcalan.

Many of the founders of the PKK were former members of Turkish socialist parties, and PKK identified itself as a Marxist–Leninist national liberation movement (Yarkın, 2015: 31). Even though its main objective was ‘ending Turkish colonialism’, it did not target the state apparatus in its earlier years and instead targeted ‘the agents and informants, those security force members who captured and tortured PKK members, landlords and tribal chieftains, and the members of those rival organizations which attacked the PKK’ (Yegen, 2016: 8). On 15 August 1984, PKK declared guerrilla warfare and launched its first major attack against the Turkish military (Yarkın, 2015: 31). Even though the PKK abandoned the target of an independent Kurdistan (Yegen, 2016: 11), the armed conflict is still ongoing.

The Turkish state and PKK agreed on a ceasefire in 2012. The main actors in this peace process were ‘then-Prime Minister and now-President Erdogan, PKK leader Öcalan, the Intelligence Service of Turkey, and the PKK cadre’ (Baser and Ozerdem, 2019: 11). On 22 March 2013, Öcalan’s letter calling on the PKK to declare a ceasefire and withdraw from within Turkey’s borders was read out at the Newroz celebration in Diyarbakır, the biggest Kurdish city. The following day, PKK declared a ceasefire (Hakikat Adalet Hafıza Merkezi, 2015). Following the call of Öcalan, the PKK began to withdraw its units from Turkey in May 2013 (Aktoprak, 2018: 149). However, as Bakiner (2019: 481) states, ‘despite calls from PKK leaders for legal guarantees, the first one-and-a-half years of Turkey’s peace negotiations were not covered by any legislation.’ Also, as Rumelili and Çelik (2017: 280) state, ‘the process remained exclusively focused on the talks between the PKK and the Turkish state, but failed to include measures to promote the construction of new narratives and routines around which an altered sense of ontological security could develop.’ It has been argued that ‘Turkey’s peace negotiations were marked by the remarkable absence of civil society representation’ (Bakiner, 2019: 483).

Before the 2015 elections, pro-Kurdish HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi or People’s Democratic Party), which is a democratic alliance of Kurdish political actors in Turkey with other minority political actors and a large part of the Turkish left, increased its popularity throughout the country. As a result, HDP members and offices have been attacked in various parts of Turkey. From 23 March to 5 June 2015, ‘the number of ambushes, attacks, threats and police raids carried out on HDP election bureaus/vehicles, candidates, rallies and workers has reached 176’ – 5 people died in these attacks, while 522 people were injured. ‘Instead of preventing these attacks, the exact opposite course of action was adopted’, and 185 HDP members were detained while 33 of them declared that they were tortured in detention (Hakikat Adalet Hafıza Merkezi, 2015). HDP was the first pro-Kurdish political party to overcome the 10 percent national electoral threshold on 7 June 2015. It is one of the most influential political parties of Turkey (Kaya and Whiting, 2019) and, as of 2019, the third biggest political party in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, holding 67 of the 600 seats.

After the June 2015 elections in which HDP obtained 13.1 percent of the votes (which means an increase of approximately 7.5%) and AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi or Justice and Development Party) obtained 40.8 percent (which entailed a loss of approximately 9%), the peace process was terminated and President Erdoğan called for snap elections for 1 November 2015. On that occasion, AKP obtained 49.5 percent of the votes and HDP 10.76 percent. When the peace process failed, ‘the violence and destruction of Kurdish-majority cities . . . returned with unexpected intensity’ (Protner, 2018b). Turkey announced a military operation against PKK on 24 July 2015 and, as the operations continued, the images from the war began circulating on social media (İbrahimhakkıoğlu, 2018). Both the photograph of Ekin Wan from August 2015 and the video of Hacı Lokman Birlik from October 2015 were part of this circulation.

On 15 August 2015, the image of the dead body of a woman surrounded by Turkish soldiers circulated on social media. Later, the woman was identified as Kevser Eltürk, alias Ekin Wan, a PKK militant. The photograph depicts her naked and bloodied dead body lying face down. The body is completely naked and, even though she is lying face down, her face is still somewhat visible. There are three men in the photo whose faces are not seen. Another controversial case of torture and humiliation of a dead body occurred in October 2015, when the dead body of Hacı Lokman Birlik was dragged on the streets of Şırnak while tied to a military vehicle. Later, it was revealed that his body was shot 28 times (telesur English, 2015). Birlik was 24 years old and he was the brother-in-law of HDP MP, Leyla Birlik. Following the military operations of the Turkish government, local Kurdish leaders in Şırnak had declared autonomy which resulted in the destruction of various parts of the city. The military confrontation in Şırnak between the Turkish security forces and Kurdish self-defence units came to be known as the Şırnak Clashes, and resulted in numerous human rights violations committed by Turkish officials.

Agamben (2005) defines the ‘state of exception’ as ‘an anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without law’ (p. 39). In his view, in the ‘state of exception’, the normative aspect of the law is abolished while a governmental violence claims to replace it (p. 87). For Agamben (1998: 168–169), ‘the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule’ is the concentration camp, which shows the relation between the ‘state of exception’ and dehumanization considering the dehumanizing features of the concentration camps of the 20th century. A state of emergency declared in the Kurdish cities also served to worsen the situation and created grave practices of dehumanization in the said cities. Agamben (2005: 80) mentions the figure of ‘hostis iudicatus’ who was a ‘public enemy’ but differed from ‘hostis alienigena’ who was a foreign enemy and protected by the ‘ius gentium’ (law of the people). This situation allows the sovereign to strip these ‘enemies’ of any kind of protection by suspending the law and therefore make way for their ‘legal murder’. It is possible to suggest that the constant suspension of law in Kurdish cities contributed to dehumanizing practices by marking the Kurdish bodies as ‘others’ that are protected by neither the national nor the international law.

Both of the cases should be read in relation to the hate speech on Turkish media in framing the Turkish–Kurdish conflict and hate speech towards ethnic and religious minorities in the Turkish public discourse. As Aktoprak (2018: 148) states, ‘the media has played an important role as one of the main instruments of authoritarianism under the AKP government, accompanied by the near-monopolization of the media by the government.’ Popular TV series, such as Şefkat Tepe, Tek Türkiye and Kurtlar Vadisi, have produced constant hate speech towards the Kurdish people and other ethnic minorities. Misvak, an islamist ‘humor’ magazine, has produced constant examples of hate speech in recent years. An example is a cartoon published on 6 October 2017, which depicts four men ‘lying on the ground wearing female underwear, made from the national flags of the USA, Israel and Germany’ (Nas, 2018: 82–83). The men are supposed to be PKK militants and one of them speaks with a ‘Kurdish accent’. Numerous pages of Misvak contain xenophobic, homophobic, misogynist, racist and speciesist content (p. 82). It has also been shown that various advertisements from Turkey depict the Kurdish people from an orientalist gaze, representing them as immature, childish and backward cultural others (p. 74). Hate speech in AKP’s later years in Turkey has been produced by social media channels (Saka, 2018), different websites (Gençoğlu Onbaşi, 2015), print newspapers (Deveci and Binbuğa Kınık, 2019), among others, and there are many cases in which opposition figures have been targeted by national, local, and social media (Tören and Kutun, 2018). This resulted in a promotion of the polarization in the country by painting the ‘other’ as the ‘enemy’ (Adaklı, 2015: 16), which was exempt from legal protection and can be killed or tortured without the fear of legal sanction.

Images of dead bodies on Twitter

Both cases have sparked furious reactions in Turkey, especially among the Kurdish population. The treatment of dead bodies caused indignation and anger. However, as images went viral on social media, numerous insulting and celebrating comments were also made by social media users. Since this was especially common on Twitter, this article presents certain trends of these commentaries in order to paint a clear picture of the situation. It examines Twitter entries about both Ekin Wan and Hacı Lokman Birlik.

This article aims to unravel the ways in which dehumanization of PKK militants in Turkey plays out and the place of disseminating graphic images of mutilated and humiliated dead bodies in dehumanizing the ‘other’. It should be emphasized that this article is not interested in determining the frequency of dehumanizing practices but it focuses on how dehumanizing practices occur. The dataset is relatively small and similar to other works based on relatively small datasets, therefore the aim of this article is ‘not to produce generalizable results, but rather to understand complex human issues’ (Latzko-Toth et al., 2017: 212).

In the case of Ekin Wan, the author looked at all Twitter posts with the hashtag ‘#gerillaekinvanonurumuzdur’, which was the only hashtag about the case that was trending. Since the aim was to examine immediate reactions, this article chooses to work on entries from the first week, hence limiting the search between 15 and 22 August. The author also searched for the names ‘Ekin Van’ (since the Turkish alphabet does not contain ‘w’ this is how the name usually appears in Turkish posts), ‘Kevser Eltürk’ and ‘Kevser Ertürk’ (this typo was common among Twitter users). Later, some repetitive entries from frequently posting users were discarded. In this way, the author located 1091 insulting, celebrating and threatening Twitter posts in Turkish about the case of Ekin Wan. In the case of Hacı Lokman Birlik, the author examined all Twitter posts with the hashtag ‘#KürtlerUnutmayacak’ which was created after a Twitter post of HDP co-leader Selahattin Demirtaş and was globally trending on Twitter. Demirtaş shared the photograph of Birlik on 4 October 2015 on Twitter with a note that read ‘Look closely at this photo. It was taken in Şırnak the day before. Let no one ever forget this as we will not’ (Turan, 2019: 213). Later, Twitter users created this hashtag which means ‘Kurds will not forget’. Other than this hashtag, the author have also collected Twitter entries which contain the name ‘Hacı Lokman Birlik’ or the hashtags ‘#LokmanBirlik’ and ‘#HacıLokmanBirlik’. The author searched for insulting, celebrating and threatening Twitter entries from 3 to 10 October, discarded some repetitive entries from frequent users and located 452 posts in total. Later, these posts were processed in a RQDA qualitative data analysis program and coded according to six different categories: animalization, dehumanization (other), discriminating religious references, racism, sexism and wishing and/or celebrating death.

The posts in which PKK militants and/or Twitter users that criticize the images were likened to animals were coded in the category of animalization. A category of ‘dehumanization (other)’ was created for posts in which words such as ‘dirt, garbage, creature etc.’ were used to denominate bodies or the use of words such as ‘gebermek’ which replaces the verb ‘die’ in a very rude manner. ‘Discriminating religious references’ refer to when PKK militants, Kurdish people, or certain Twitter users were called ‘non-Muslims’ in order to ‘insult’ them or when users stated that the dead militants now must be in hell, or that Allah will damn them. The category of racism was created for explicitly racist posts. Considering the trends, the author created four codes under this category: racism against Armenians, racism against Jewish people, racism against Kurdish people in general, and racism (other). This last one contains racist posts against other ethnic or racial groups (Germans, Europeans, foreign people in general), posts that contain racist insults such as ‘soysuz’, ‘kansız’, or ‘kanı bozuk’ (a literal attempt to translate these insults may be ‘raceless’, ‘bloodless’ and ‘foul blooded’), or posts that contain Turkish supremacist remarks. The category of sexism consists of five different codes: celebrating rape, feminization (of male militants and male users), insulting physical traits (a common example is saying that Ekin Wan is so ugly that she was not worth raping), sexual insults and threatening with rape. Finally, the category of ‘wishing and/or celebrating death’ contains posts that celebrate the death of militants, wishing death for other people (Twitter users, Kurdish politicians etc.), or threatening with death.

The ‘mainstream’ media chose to ‘ignore’ both cases. The image of the dead body of Ekin Wan was disseminated on 15 August, but none of the 25 largest newspapers in circulation in Turkey mentioned the case on their front page on 16 or 17 August. Images of Hacı Lokman Birlik were disseminated on 3 October 2015. On 4 October, only 1 of the 25 largest newspapers in circulation in Turkey mentioned the case of Birlik on the front page (Cumhuriyet) but it did not use any images. However, on 5 October, after the Twitter message of Demirtaş, 4 of the 25 largest newspapers in circulation in Turkey mentioned the case on their front pages (Cumhuriyet, Zaman, Bugün and Taraf) and all of them used the image, but the other 21 newspapers did not mention the case on their front page. If one of the reasons for working on Twitter posts is the possibility of user participation in dehumanizing practices which permits agency that does not exist in the relationship between the reader and mainstream print newspapers, another reason is the ignorance of war images depicting the military crimes of the Turkish army in the mainstream media.

Dehumanization of the ‘enemy’

In the case of Ekin Wan, a total of 1091 Twitter posts were examined. The number of Twitter posts that contain elements from the categories can be seen in Table 1. In the case of Birlik, the total number of posts was 452, breakdown of the posts according to categories can be seen in Table 2.

Table 1.

Categories and number of posts in Case 1.

Categories	Animalization	Dehumanization (other)	Discriminating religious references	Racism	Sexism	Wishing and/or celebrating death
Number of posts	341	166	114	184	608	242

Table 2.

Categories and number of posts in Case 2.

Categories	Animalization	Dehumanization (other)	Discriminating religious references	Racism	Sexism	Wishing and/or celebrating death
Number of posts	123	51	52	292	118	72

Animalization

A common example of animalization was calling the dead bodies ‘leş’ which is explicitly used for dead bodies of animals in Turkish. In the case of Ekin Wan, among the 341 Twitter posts that were coded as ‘animalization’, in 106 posts users use the word ‘leş’ for dead bodies of humans while in the case of Birlik, the word ‘leş’ was used in 28 of the 123 posts. In the case of Ekin Wan, dogs (150 times), pigs (29 times), donkeys (12 times), and monkeys/gorillas (11 times) were the animals that were referred to most frequently while, in the case of Birlik, dogs (59 times), donkeys (11 times), pigs (5 times), jackals (5 times), reptiles (3 times) and ticks (3 times) were the animals that were referred to the most. These references contain likening references to these animals, stating that certain humans (PKK militants, Kurdish people, sympathizing Twitter users, etc.) are inferior to these animals, or explicitly wishing for the dead bodies (or the living members of the groups) to be raped by these animals or accusing Kurdish people of bestiality with these animals. In the case of Ekin Wan, in 29 posts, people were referred as ‘sürü’ (Turkish word for flock, herd and pack) while, in the case of Birlik, the number was 12.

Dehumanization (other)

An example of this category is likening dead bodies to ‘garbage’. In the case of Ekin Wan, there are 13 posts that refer to her as ‘garbage’ or refer to her murder as ‘cleaning’. In 82 posts, the verb ‘gebermek’ which is an extremely rude word replacing ‘to die’ is used. In many posts it is stated that the dead bodies do not belong to humans, PKK militants are not humans, and they are disgusting. PKK militants are likened to excrement and dirt. In the case of Birlik, 9 posts used the verb ‘gebermek’ and 8 posts referred to human bodies as dirty and killing them as ‘cleaning’. In different posts, PKK militants and/or Kurds are likened to objects that are used by the ‘enemy’ such as the USA, Israel, Armenian people, European countries, etc.

Discriminating religious references

In this category, there are various posts which state that PKK militants, or users that criticize torture and murder of them, are heathens, atheists, heretics, uncircumcised (distinctive feature of Muslim men), etc. Religious insults also belong to this category. In the case of Ekin Wan, 16 posts denominate people as atheists while among the common insults towards non-Muslim people, ‘gavur’ only appears once while ‘kafir’ appears three times. In the case of Birlik, people are denominated as atheists (15 times), Yezidis (3 times) and Alevis (3 times). Here, both ‘gavur’ and ‘kafir’ only appear once.

Racism

As previously stated, four different codes were used in this category: racism against Armenians, racism against Jewish people, racism against Kurdish people in general, and racism (other). In the case of Ekin Wan, a striking finding is that the most common among these posts were racism against Armenians even though the case does not involve any Armenians. The number of posts that were coded in each sub-category can be seen in Table 3 (case of Ekin Wan) and in Table 4 (case of Birlik).

Table 3.

Sub-categories of racism in Case 1.

Sub-categories	Armenians	Jewish people	Kurdish people	Racism (other)
Number of posts	76	14	69	45

Table 4.

Sub-categories of racism in Case 2.

Sub-categories	Armenians	Jewish people	Kurdish people	Racism (other)
Number of posts	95	14	175	38

Using ‘Armenian’ to ‘insult’ people is a common trend among the posts. In the case of Ekin Wan, in 68 posts people (users or militants) are called Armenians in order to ‘insult’ them. There are posts that criticize people for ‘serving to Armenians’, using the ‘Armenian genocide’ as an example to threaten Kurdish people, and insulting Armenians for no apparent reason. This number was 95 in the case of Birlik. Racist posts about Jewish people are also similar in which ‘Jewish’ is used to ‘insult’ people or people are criticized for supposedly ‘serving to Jewish people’. There is one case in which a user states that ‘even Jewish people are human compared to you’ in regard to Kurds. Almost all Twitter posts were racist against Kurdish people at some level, but the sub-category of racism against Kurdish people is coded when there are specific insults that apply to the whole ethnic group. These include insulting Kurdish people in general, mocking their language and their accent when they speak Turkish, suggesting genocide against Kurdish people, or advocating for a population exchange in order to ‘clean the country’ from Kurds. These posts are more common in the case of Birlik, since the hashtag was named ‘Kurds will not forget’ therefore it received more responses against the Kurdish people as a whole.

The sub-category of ‘racism (other)’ includes insults such as ‘soysuz’, ‘kansız’, or ‘kanı bozuk’, all of which underline racial inferiority. In the case of Ekin Wan, ‘soysuz’ (raceless) appears 26 times, ‘kansız’ (bloodless) 4 times, and ‘kanı bozuk’ (foul-blooded) 3 times. One user mentions the name ‘Adolf Hitler’ in order to threaten Kurds while there are many xenophobic posts in which different countries such as the US (6 times), England (3 times), Germany (once), and Europe in general (2 times) are used as an insult. In the case of Birlik, there are 26 posts in which a common racist stereotype appeared when people mocked Kurds for supposedly not paying their bills. Here ‘soysuz’ was used 9 times, ‘kansız’ 5 times, and ‘kanı bozuk’ twice. Xenophobic posts here are about the US (11 times), England (3 times), France (3 times), Germany (once), Russia (once), and Europe in general (4 times). There are also two racist posts about Greeks and one racist post about the Roma.

Sexism

The category of sexism consists of five different codes: celebrating rape, feminization, insulting physical traits, sexual insults, and threatening with rape. The number of posts that were coded in each sub-category in the case of Ekin Wan can be seen in Table 5, and in the case of Birlik in Table 6.

Table 5.

Sub-categories of sexism in Case 1.

Categories	Celebrating rape	Feminization	Insulting physical traits	Sexual insults	Threatening with rape
Number of posts	80	60	73	449	32

Table 6.

Sub-categories of sexism in Case 2.

Categories	Celebrating rape	Feminization	Insulting physical traits	Sexual insults	Threatening with rape
Number of posts	Does not apply	16	0	100	8

The posts that celebrated that Ekin Wan was raped and were mocking about the possible rape were coded in the sub-category of ‘celebrating rape’. These 80 posts contain various entries that celebrate Turkish soldiers for the alleged rape of Ekin Wan. Feminization of male PKK militants was especially common, an example was ‘joking’ about the nakedness of Ekin Wan’s dead body by stating that it might be to determine her sex since all members of PKK wear skirts, or saying that her skirt might be robbed by male militants. In 50 different posts it is mentioned that male PKK militants wear skirts or fistan (traditional Kurdish woman’s clothing). In the case of Birlik, feminization appears in 16 different posts, and 15 of them are references to wearing ‘skirts’ or ‘fistan’. Insulting physical traits included posts saying that Ekin Wan was ugly, hairy, or looked like ‘a man’. A common example was saying that she is ‘too ugly to rape’, which occurs in 15 different posts. There were other ‘jokes’ among the posts that included saying that the bullet that killed her must have been drunk. It is striking that there is not a single post in the case of Birlik which falls under this category.

In the case of Ekin Wan, 449 different posts were coded as ‘sexual insults’. This is also due to the fact that these kinds of insults are highly common in the Turkish language but the difference between the cases (41.15% of total posts vs 22.12% of total posts) show that this was not the sole reason. Finally, threatening with rape occurred both towards female PKK militants, Kurdish women in general, and specific Twitter users. No legal action was taken against those who were making threats to people on Twitter that they would ‘rape them’.

Wishing/celebrating death

This category contains posts that were celebrating deaths of PKK militants and wishing death on other people. In the case of Ekin Wan, 132 posts were coded as ‘celebrating death’ while 140 posts were coded as ‘wishing death’. There are many posts in this category which contain photographs of other dead PKK militants. Among the users, there is a person who uses his real name on Twitter and boasts of killing some of ‘those’ during his military service and cutting off the ears of his victims. In the case of Birlik, 41 posts were coded as ‘celebrating death’ while 42 posts were coded as ‘wishing someone dead’. Again, no legal action was taken towards these people.

Discussion

Animalization was common in both cases since 31.25 percent of the posts in the case of Ekin Wan and 27.21 percent of the posts in the case of Birlik contained it. Indeed, animalization of Kurdish people was common throughout the history. An example from Turkish literature is the novel Dersimli Kız (The Girl from Dersim) written by Niyazi Ahmet during the military operations in the Kurdish-populated city of Dersim in 1938. Throughout the novel, people of Dersim are likened to animals, such as dogs or livestock (Başaran İnce, 2016). Seyit Rıza, alleged leader of the Dersim Rebellion, also makes an appearance and, when he enters the scene, the people of Dersim start throwing themselves to the ground and kissing his feet (p. 58). The objective of this scene is to highlight the contrast between animal-like Kurds and the rational Turks.

The numbers of racist posts about Armenian people were common in both cases. Especially in the case of Ekin Wan, there are more racist posts about Armenian people (76) than about the Kurds. There are also various posts that liken PKK militants to Jewish people. This was done to ‘dehumanize’ PKK militants since Armenian and Jewish people are considered ‘less human’ by many in Turkey. The same can be seen in religious references because most Sunni Muslims do not consider an ‘atheist’ equally human to a ‘Muslim’.

Sexist posts about Ekin Wan include both insults for her physical appearance, and threats to rape her or women ‘like her’. As Morris et al. (2018: 1) claim, women are objectified through their physical appearance. This may result in a more mechanistic dehumanization when women are considered more ‘physically attractive’, or it may result in a more animalistic dehumanization when women do not comply to the society’s so-called ‘beauty standards’, especially if the said women are in a position to be discriminated against for their class, race, or ethnicity. It is important to note that 55.72 percent of the posts in the case of Ekin Wan were coded under the category of sexism while, in the case of Birlik, the percentage is 26.1 percent. Feminization of male militants occurred frequently as a way of ‘humiliating’ them, from which it can be inferred that ‘man’ is considered more ‘human’ than the woman by many of the commenting Twitter users.

Numerous users stated that Kurds have a high birth rate and used this information to trivialize the lives of Kurdish people. The posts also included threats of genocide, gang-rape, and the like. These threats were not really necessary, after all as Butler (2009: 76) says, ‘some humans take their humanness for granted, while others struggle to gain access to it.’ The ‘others’ are usually aware of their precariousness even when they are not reminded of it. But these images were not made solely to remind the ‘others’ of their otherness. These dehumanizing practices serve to group people as ‘us’ and ‘others’ which is why they can be considered as practices of exclusion.

One of the most famous government-supporting journalists in Turkey, Fatih Tezcan, published a Twitter post on 6 September 2015 in which he called PKK militants ‘mountain whores’, and said that there will be at least 300 ‘leş’ from them. Islamist ‘humor’ magazine Misvak published a comic strip during military operations which depicts dead bodies of Kurdish militants being swept towards the sewers by Turkish soldiers. Among the Twitter posts about Ekin Wan and Birlik there were posts from public figures and local politicians from various political parties. These examples are important since they hint that the animalization of Kurdish militants and sexist insults against them are acceptable and public figures can make these comments without fear of any backlash. As of 2019, such Twitter posts are still visible which means that the users did not face any criticism that would force them to delete the posts. Ünlü claims that what legitimized the physical violence in Dersim was the symbolic violence which painted the people of Dersim as savages and less than human. As a result, the military operations were presented by the media as ‘civilizing operations’ (Ünlü, 2018: 201–202). In this sense, the role of media performances did not change drastically since 1938 when it came to the Kurdish question and it seems that dehumanizing practices about the Kurdish people (and also about women, LGBTI communities, Armenians, Jewish people, Alevis, etc.) are acceptable and they play an important role in the politics of the ruling class in Turkey. While depicting the mutilated dead bodies of the ‘others’, the images in both cases also mark the living bodies of ‘others’ as vulnerable and worthless.

Concluding remarks

This article argued that the dissemination of graphic images of dead bodies during wars and ethnic conflicts is a practice of dehumanization of the ‘other’, which also serves to unite those who are considered part of ‘us’. By mutilating, humiliating and torturing dead bodies, the living bodies that are in the same category are also being deemed worthless. In the case of dead bodies of women, mechanisms of racism and sexism work together. Ekin Wan was insulted for her physical appearance but at the same time she also became the target of sexualized slurs. Feminization of male militants occurred frequently as a way of ‘humiliating’ them. It is obvious that all forms of discrimination are closely linked and racism, sexism, religious and ethnic discrimination, and speciesism are mostly intertwined. Transcending binarisms such as ‘human–nonhuman’, and ‘us–other’ seems fundamental in order to eradicate racism and sexism.

Dehumanizing practices in times of war make it extremely difficult to achieve successful reconciliation and peace. When people think in the binary mode of ‘us–others’, they are not able to see the ‘other’ as a being worthy of negotiation since the ‘other’ is considered ‘less than human’. This aspect of dehumanization has not been studied thoroughly in the last failed peace process of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict. It would be an intriguing area for further research. Examining the effects of dehumanizing practices of exclusion on polarized societies may allow us to establish strategies for reversing these processes and achieving lasting peace in regions scarred by wars and conflicts.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editor Dr. Katy Parry and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. He also wants to thank Isaura Castelao-Huerta for her comments and her support.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Serhat Tutkal

Author biography

Serhat Tutkal is a PhD candidate in Human and Social Sciences at the National University of Colombia and he is part of the research group titled as ‘Colombian group of media discourse analysis’ (Grupo Colombiano de Análisis del Discurso Mediático). He holds a Master’s Degree in Political Science from Ankara University. His research is concerned with political violence and the ways in which it is legitimized or delegitimized. He is especially interested in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict and the Colombian conflict.

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Dehumanization on Twitter in the Turkish–Kurdish conflict

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Dehumanizing the ‘other’

The Turkish–Kurdish conflict

Images of dead bodies on Twitter

Dehumanization of the ‘enemy’

Animalization

Dehumanization (other)

Discriminating religious references

Racism

Sexism

Wishing/celebrating death

Discussion

Concluding remarks

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

ORCID iD

Author biography

References