Article

Social & Legal Studies

1–18
The Absent Present ª The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663917738044
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Study of Legal Violence
in Turkey

Deniz Yonucu
Freie Universität, 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 Universität, Berlin and the Leibniz-ZMO, Germany.
Email: deniz.yonucu@gmail.com
2 Social & Legal Studies XX(X)

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-populated 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 terrorist3 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 and scope of crimes that can be considered 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 & Özdoğan,
2011; Özbudun, 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 3

that number reached 12,897 in 2011 after the large-scale operations that targeted Kurdish
activists, who were accused of being members of the Koma Civaken Kurdistan (Kurdi-
stan Communities Union, KCK), an umbrella Kurdish liberation organization (Iğsız,
2014: 29).6 In 2016, that figure has rose to 18,173 ‘terror’ suspects.7
This article draws on the findings of an ethnographic study that included courtroom
observations, neighborhood ethnography, in-depth interviews with ‘terror’ suspects and
convicts, and those who became a witness to their judgment processes as well as human
rights lawyers and legal scholars was conducted between 2010 and 2012 with subsequent
visits made to Narova and similar neighborhoods in 2014 and 2015. It analyzes the case
of Haydar and his friends to provide an ethnographically grounded analysis of the
operations, manifestations, and effects of Turkey’s anti-terror law. Although there has
always been a culture of ‘illiberal judiciary’ (Coşkun, 2010) in Turkey, which targets the
minorities (Bayır, 2016; Kurban, 2003) and ‘prioritizes the security of the state over
democracy and civil liberties’ (Tezcür, 2009: 307, see also Babül, 2012; Bargu, 2014;
Belge, 2006; Hakyemez, 2017), the country has recently witnessed a new ‘lawfare’
which is the ‘use of penal powers, administrative procedures, states of emergencies,
mandates and warrants to discipline [ . . . ] subjects by means of violence’ (Comaroff and
Comaroff, 2009: 36, 37), against the opposition. This new trend, of course, cannot be
seen as being independent of the global turn toward ‘a reclassification of domestic
conflicts into the anti-terrorism strategy’ (Eckert, 2008: 8). By illustrating how this
lawfare has been experienced by the stigmatized working-class Alevi segment of the
population in the country’s urban margins, this article takes up the issue of the simulta-
neous absence and presence of the rule of law.
My goal is to show how this contradictory state of law that creates a sphere of
ambiguity has paved the way for the law to be experienced as an ever-present ‘demonic
force’ (Benjamin, 1996a) – inconceivable and a frightening reality that holds power over
individuals as if it were fate (see also Agamben, 1999: 149). To put it another way, by
approaching the anti-terror laws both as a technique of governance that seeks to control
and pacify the population through intimidation and as a sovereign power ‘that exercises
autonomous and exclusive control over lives, deaths and conditions of existence’
(Comaroff and Comaroff, 2007: 35), this article demonstrates that what at first might
seem to be a ‘suspension of law’ (Agamben, 1998, 2005; Schmitt, 1985) can actually be
an example of an ever-increasing control over lives through the use of legal tools.

Legal Violence, Myth and Fate

In explaining how the law becomes an ever-present and threatening sovereign force in
the lives of the targeted populations, I draw on Walter Benjamin’s arguments on the
similarities between legal violence and mythical violence. In his analysis of legal vio-
lence, Benjamin argues that there is a structural similarity between legal and mythical
violence (Benjamin, 1996b, Ross, 2014, Friedlander, 2015). For Benjamin this structural
similarity is based on “the arbitrary and ambiguous character of fate at play in each”
(Ross, 2014: 96). Mythic violence “bursts upon” its targets, “from the uncertain and
ambiguous sphere of the fate” (Benjamin, 1996b: 248). Accordingly, what grants the
4 Social & Legal Studies XX(X)

legal violence a mythical character, in other words a god-like force that rules mortals’
fates, is its ambiguity and unpredictability.
The unfathomable and unpredictable anger of the gods, which can neither be made
sense of rationally nor be predicted in advance, threatens mortals as potential targets of
violence or reduces them to potentially punishable subjects. In other words, the power
and anger of the gods, whose truth cannot be ascertained by human capacities, haunts the
present and future of human beings as fate. Likewise, for Benjamin (1996b), the
“deliberate ambiguity” of law and “the indeterminacy of the legal threat” (Derrida,
1992) transform law into something like fate. That is to say, the uncertainty generated
in the legal sphere “makes [law] all the more threatening, like fate” (Benjamin, 1996b:
242, Ross, 2014, 48.) And, when law becomes ambiguous, it becomes tied to the realm of
mythical gods. In the following sections of this article, by providing an ethnographic
grounding for these theoretical associations I illustrate the ways by which the ambigu-
ousness and/or absent presence of Turkey’s current anti-terror law bestows upon it a
mythical and/or sovereign force that controls the fate of the targeted populations.

Ethnography in the Margins

As Das and Poole (2004) have noted, the margins inhabited by the stigmatized, dispos-
sessed, and dishonored segments of the populations are not peripheral places. Rather,
margins are a ‘necessary entailment of the state’ (p. 4). In a similar fashion, Wacquant
(2008) has argued that urban margins are places where various governmental techniques
‘are concretely being assembled, tried and tested’, so that they can be exported elsewhere
(p. 56). Following up on that line of thought, scholars argued that the study of the
margins is crucially important in understanding the operations, manifestations, and
effects of state power (Asad, 2004; Auyero, 2011; Das, 2011; Tsing, 1994). Similarly,
a close study of Narova and the other predominantly Alevi-populated working-class
neighborhoods of Istanbul (such as Gazi Mahallesi, Bir Mayıs Mahallesi, Okmeydanı,
Nurtepe, and Gülsuyu) reveals that such neighborhoods have been the harbingers of the
emerging and shifting forms of state violence in Turkey’s non-Kurdish provinces.
Turkey’s Kurdistan, which also stands in the margins of the state and the country, has
a different and more difficult relationship with the traditions of the state and its violence
in Turkey due to its specific condition that can be considered as an internal colony of
sorts (cf. Beşikçi, 2004).
Alevis are a historically stigmatized minority group and were subjected to several
waves of massacres during the Ottoman era and in modern Turkey (Massicard, 2013;
Karakaya-Stump, 2017; White and Jongerden, 2003). Throughout various periods of
Turkish history, they have been subjected to assimilationist policies that sought to turn
them into docile Turkish subjects/citizens or stigmatize them as internal enemies who
threaten the well-being of the nation (Açıkel and Ateş, 2011; Dressler, 2013; Koçan and
Öncü, 2004; Özyürek, 2009; Sökefeld, 2008; Tambar, 2014). Due to the stigmas asso-
ciated with Alevi and working-class identities as well their political leanings toward the
left, the residents of working-class neighborhoods with a high Alevi population have
never been seen by the ruling elites of Turkey as ‘deserving citizens’ (Aslan, 2004, 2005;
Aslan and Şen, 2011; Yonucu, 2014). In the 1970s, for instance, at the height of working
Yonucu 5

class mobilization, such neighborhoods were among the main targets of police and
military violence. They were among the places where the footsteps of the approaching
coup of 1980 were first heard through large-scale operations targeting socialist residents
several months before the coup actually took place (Aslan, 2004). In the early 1990s, in
parallel with the growing leftist revival in the country, such neighborhoods were put
under militarized spatial control and turned into zones of a ‘state of emergency’ where
checkpoints, semi-regular house raids, and the constant patrols of military vehicles
became a part of everyday life (Yonucu, 2011). The middle classes of Istanbul were
unfamiliar with such actions until the widespread Gezi uprising of 2013, during which
time military vehicles started patrolling their neighborhoods as well.
Lastly, socialist and pro-Kurdish activists in these neighborhoods were among the
first targets of the recent lawfare against the opposition. That is to say, the anti-terror
operations that started to take place in these neighborhoods as early as 2007 were
harbingers of an ever-growing lawfare which gradually started shifting to the center
over the course of years, now targets members of the opposition from various class,
ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds. In light of this situation, I approach the case
of Haydar and his friends as one that is indicative of what first became visible in the
margins and later expanded to encompass the entire country. By taking a close look at the
case of Haydar and his friends, I offer an in-depth analysis of the operations of the anti-
terror law and their subsequent implications.

Methodology
The research for this article is primarily based on ethnographic research carried out in
Narova and in courtrooms. The participants in this study consented to be interviewed in
the knowledge that the information they gave might appear in an academic publication. I
held 85 in-depth interviews with Narova residents of both sexes between the ages of 18
and 75, and I engaged in informal conversations with dozens of residents as well as the
friends and relatives of suspects. I also conducted 20 interviews with the residents of
similar neighborhoods.
The story of Haydar and his friends attracted my attention during the first months of
my fieldwork in the winter of 2010. Haydar and his friends were respected figures
within the community. They were active members of a local socialist association that
was fighting against the increasing drug use and drug dealing in the neighborhood.
They also worked in collaboration with other pro-Kurdish socialist groups and had
succeeded in bringing the residents and various local organizations together and in
creating a culture of solidarity (for this process, see Yonucu, forthcoming). The anti-
terror operation that targeted them had a significant impact on the local residents, as it
made them feel powerless against the state. Citing the example of Haydar and his
friends many residents complained about the operations carried out in the name of the
anti-terror law and said that they felt defenseless. For many, the case was indicative of
the ways that the anti-terror law was being used arbitrarily and how people with no
obvious connections to so-called terrorist organizations were being put behind bars as
‘terrorist’ convicts.
6 Social & Legal Studies XX(X)

In 2011, during the second year of my field research, five of Haydar’s friends –
Halil, Eylem, Hüseyin, Orhan, and Zafer, all of whom were arrested along with him –
were granted pretrial release. When we first met at a dinner party approximately 2
weeks after their pretrial release, they told me and the other guests about their experi-
ences, going into great detail about what they experienced. Their stories had a strong
influence on me and I decided to include their case in my research. During my field
research, I kept track of the trial of Haydar and his friends as well as several other anti-
terror trials being held at special assize courts, which dealt with ‘crimes against the
state’. I attended three of the hearings of Haydar and his friends in 2011 and 2012. In
addition to neighborhood and courtroom ethnography, the data used in this article are
based on my examinations of the official transcriptions of the hearings of Haydar and
his friends, as well as in-depth interviews with 20 suspects (including five of Haydar’s
friends) who were on pretrial release during my fieldwork. To back my findings, I also
had discussions with legal scholars and conducted interviews with 15 human rights
lawyers. Human rights associations such as the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey
followed the developments in their cases and included reports about them in their
yearly reports. However, those efforts did not garner much public attention. The story
of those young activists from the margins largely remained a marginal story. Other
anti-terror operations that have been carried out in Narova and similar neighborhoods
in subsequent years have for the most part been ignored by the press and remain
unknown.

The Ambiguous Case of Haydar and His Friends

When I met with Halil, Eylem, Hüseyin, Orhan and Zafer, they were certain that they
would not be sent back to prison and that their friends, who remained in prison, would be
released soon. Both they and their lawyers thought that they had been held unjustly and
had already paid a very high price: four and half years of pretrial detention in prison.
During our conversations, which lasted hours, it became clear to me that their case still
seemed inconceivable to them. As I listened to their narratives, on various occasions, I
realized that their feelings oscillated between hope and despair throughout the entire
process of judgment and detention. That oscillation was caused by the ambiguity,
unpredictability, “illegibility” (Das, 2004) and seeming randomness of the entire pro-
cess. The excerpt below, which is from a conversation I had with three of the young men
– Eylem, Halil, and Orhan, who were cellmates for four and a half years – provides some
insights about their initial confusion:

Halil8: Everything was weird from the beginning. They [the police] should have interro-
gated us after taking us from our homes to the detention center. But they did not do that.
They did not ask us any questions. At that point, I began to suspect that something weird was
going on. But I did not understand.

Eylem9: I did not suspect anything in the beginning. I thought that we would be
released within a month. I thought it was just a warning and that they were trying to
scare us and to tell us to stay away from politics.
Yonucu 7

Halil: I thought that we should expect worse than that. The police were from anti-
terrorism units. I thought that they might keep us longer, maybe for a year. When I told
them [his friends who were arrested with him] about what I thought, these guys [he
points at his friends] were mad at me. They were all like, ‘What! One year? Are you
crazy? That’s ridiculous! That can’t happen! It’s impossible!’
Orhan10: I was thinking, ‘Okay, this is a fascist state. We know that. But, still,
one year is too much. They won’t do it. There is no evidence. They’ll release us
within a month’.
As the subsequent years led to more ambiguous and inconceivable developments,
their bewilderment and oscillation between optimism and pessimism continued. They
believed that the court would need material evidence to prove them guilty. However,
aside from the testimony of the police and a ‘secret witness’,11 along with a CD promot-
ing an outlawed Marxist organization which was claimed to have been found at the
apartment of one of the accused, there was no evidence about their connections to a
terrorist organization. The lack of evidence against them made them feel optimistic
about the progress of the case. Still, the judge’s dismissal of evidence that had the
potential to prove them innocent undermined their optimism. For instance, in the first
year after their detention, the policeman’s gun that was included in the evidence was
found at someone else’s apartment and that person had no connection to Haydar and his
friends. At first, this development pleased them. At one of our meetings in the summer of
2011, Eylem, Halil, and Orhan told me that they and their lawyers believed that after this
development, the terror accusations against them and the accusations regarding the
seizure of a policeman’s gun would be dropped and that they would be released soon.
As he explained their excitement about hearing that the person who had the police’s gun
had been found, Eylem, the youngest of them, said:

We even had a small celebration in our cell after we heard that the gun had been found. We
had cake and chips. The New Year was approaching, we thought we would be out by the
New Year and celebrate it with our friends and family.

However, to their astonishment, things did not go as they expected and the accusa-
tions against them were not dropped. To make matters even more incomprehensible and
ambiguous, the person who had the policeman’s gun was released after spending a year
in pretrial detention. ‘Everything was so bizarre’, Orhan, Eylem’s cellmate, argued and
explained their astonishment in the following terms:

On the one hand you think that there is the law. They searched for and found the man
who seized the gun. It was not like they put us in jail and they did not care about us
anymore. There was progress in the case. But on the other hand, such progress did not
lead to any changes. They found the gun, yet they continued to accuse us of seizing it
[from the policeman].

In his reading of Benjamin’s understanding of ambiguity, Friedlander (2015) notes,

‘what is ambiguous does not stand still, it is in a constant [state of] trembling or oscilla-
tion’ (p. 180, footnote 26). The oscillation of Haydar’s friends’ feelings between hope
8 Social & Legal Studies XX(X)

and despair was brought about by the continuing oscillations in the case. As I explain
below, these oscillations between the seeming functioning and lack of functioning of the
law and between the law’s promise of justice and its sudden withdrawal of such a
promise gradually paved the way for Haydar and his friends to experience the law as
an inconceivable ambiguous force that guided their fate. Another development that
further strengthened the ambiguousness of the case and provoked contradictory senti-
ments was the judge’s attitude regarding the decisions of the first two prosecutors who
had dealt with the case.
In Turkey, prosecutors appointed to the cases of the alleged crimes against the state
are notorious for simply taking the testimony of the police at face value (Inanıcı, 2011:
21). However, to the surprise of the accused and their lawyers, the first two prosecutors
of the case argued that ‘there is not sufficient information or evidence for an accusation
that the assault was planned in advance by a terrorist organization and that the assaul-
ters acted on behalf of a terrorist organization’. As they told me in one of our con-
versations, Eylem, Orhan, and Halil, as well as the others, once again felt optimistic
about the progress of the case and that development made them believe that ‘the law is
in charge and seeking out the truth’. However, at both hearings where the prosecutors
stated their objections to the policemen’s accusations, the judge ruled that there was
‘cause for strong suspicion of guilt’ and a ‘well-grounded suspicion of evasion of
justice and tampering with evidence’. The judge, however, did not state the grounds
for the suspicion that supposedly justified his decision. As I discuss below, the case
was finalized with a third prosecutor who slept or pretended to sleep during the
hearings.
Orhan spoke of the swift oscillation in his feelings between joy and despair when he
heard the first prosecutor’s decision and the judge’s response to it:

When the first prosecutor announced his decision at the hearing and said that he did not
think that we are members of a terrorist organization, I was so happy. We all got very
excited. I remember that all ten of us looked at each other with joy in our eyes when we
heard the prosecutor’s words. ‘This is it!’ we said. ‘We are out now! This nonsense is over!’
I thought that there was still a state of law and that they [the lawmakers] could not simply
ignore the truth. But fifteen minutes later after the break, the judge’s decision was
announced. I can’t tell you how I felt at that moment. It was as if they were playing with
our emotions. The prosecutor, who is on the state’s side – the police’s side – did not find us
guilty. However, the judge did not change his decision. We could not talk to each other on
the way to the prison. One moment we were celebrating our release and the next moment we
were back in prison.

This ambiguity – which boils down to an uncertainty of meaning and intentions – was
generated by a way of implementing the law, which is not unique to the case of Haydar
and his friends. Turkey’s anti-terror law often maintains a sphere of ambiguity by giving
contradictory impressions to the accused, their defendants, and the witnesses of their
experiences. All of the 15 lawyers I interviewed told me that long ago they gave up trying
to find any logic behind the accusations and punishments levied against their clients.
Also, they all complained about the uncertainty illegibility surrounding the application
Yonucu 9

of the law and lamented the fact that they do not have much influence over processes of
judgment (see also, Bora and Kozağaçlı, 2012).
On the one hand, the implementation of the law gives the impression that it is geared
toward seeking out the truth – that is, lawmakers collect evidence for and against the
accused, prosecutors do not always simply repeat the police’s testimony (though they
often do), and the accused and their lawyers are brought before the court during regular
hearings to make their defense. However, as Iğsız (2014) argues, the judges of terror
trials are notorious for ‘making convictions on the basis of “evidence” such as incon-
clusive digital material, unreliable witnesses, inconsistent witness accounts or objects
like keffiyeh or books [ . . . ] as evidence of links to terrorist activities’ (p. 30). In
addition, as I witnessed in the case of Haydar and his friends, even the material
evidence that could prove one innocent can easily be disregarded by lawmakers. This
contradictory way of implementing the anti-terror law, which gives the impression that
the law both functions and does not function, gives rise to a ‘demonic ambiguity’
(Benjamin, 1996c), making the law an utterly inconceivable force. I refer to this
simultaneous presence of two opposing states as the ‘absent presence’ of the law. The
absent presence of the law, which actively produces ambiguity, is also performatively
produced and displayed during court hearings.

Law’s Absent Presence/Ambiguous Presence in the Courtroom

Critical legal scholars and anthropologists have highlighted the performative aspects of
trials and the similarities between theaters and courtrooms (Ertür, 2016; Dahlberg, 2009;
Grunwald, 2012; Kaplonski, 2008; Merry, 1994; Umphrey, 2011). Especially in the case
of crimes allegedly committed against the state, ‘trials embody and perform claims about
the authority of the state’ (Grunwald, 2012: 55). In his study of the show trials in
Mongalia for instance, Kaplonski (2008) has shown how the trials of enemies of the
state ‘exist not to prove guilty or innocent but, rather, as stages of enactment of state
power’ (p. 330). In what follows, I draw on my courtroom observations of the hearings of
Haydar and his friends to demonstrate how lawmaker’s performances enact the state
power through the performative absent/presence of the law. The absent presence of the
law, which is performatively displayed by lawmakers during the hearings and the legal
authority that represents the state, takes on a mythical character.
I attended three consecutive hearings concerning Haydar and his friends during the
course of my fieldwork. As is in the case of most ‘terror’ trials, Haydar and his friends’
individual files were combined and the hearings were held collectively.12 There were
approximately three hearings held each year and they were taken to the court once in
every 3 or 4 months throughout their period of pretrial detention. The hearings were
almost identical; they started at least 2 hours late, they did not last more than 20 minutes,
and the prosecutor either slept or pretended to sleep while the accused and their lawyers
made their defense.
The hearing I elaborate on in this article was attended by 41 people, including 22
friends and relatives of the accused, 6 soldiers, 3 defense lawyers, 1 prosecutor, 1 head
judge, 2 assistant judges, myself and 5 of the accused, who were then still in pretrial
detention. The other five accused, who were on pretrial release at the time, did not attend
10 Social & Legal Studies XX(X)

the trial. Because of the delay, two of the defense lawyers had to leave the courtroom for
another hearing, which meant that they did not have a chance to speak. The hearing
lasted approximately 15 minutes. At the judge’s request, it began with the defense. The
accused stated that they had nothing to add to their previous defenses. Only Devrim, who
was then 23 years old, read a defense speech, which he had prepared in his cell:

After having been in prison for five years for a crime I did not commit, I will not
explain to you why I am innocent. I am quite aware that you also know that I am
innocent. You keep me in prison on purpose. If demanding democracy and human
rights is a crime, then you are free to punish me. What is taking place right now is
a serious threat to the future of this country.

As Devrim was talking, none of those representing the law in the courtroom appeared
to be paying any attention. The head judge was cowering behind his laptop, audibly
flipping through some files. The two assistant judges were busy with their laptops and
not once did they look up. The prosecutor’s head was down and his eyes were closed as
Devrim spoke, giving the impression that he was asleep. After Devrim finished speaking,
the head judge raised his head from his laptop and asked the remaining lawyer whether
she had any questions or comments about her defendants. The lawyer asked the judge
why H., one of her defendants, was on pretrial release while her other defendant, Y.,
whose alleged crime was exactly the same as the defendant, H., was still being held in
prison. The judge ignored her question. Neither of the assistant judges raised their heads
or looked at the attorney. The prosecutor went on sleeping or pretending to sleep. It was
as if the lawyer and Devrim were speaking to an empty room. An invisible wall seemed
to exist between the two parties which prevented the judges and the prosecutor from
seeing the accused and their lawyers and hearing their voices. After Devrim and the
lawyer spoke, without making any comments about Devrim’s speech, the judge turned to
the prosecutor and asked him how he wanted to proceed. The prosecutor opened his eyes
when the judge spoke to him. Immediately he demanded that five of the accused, who
were then in pretrial detention, continue to be detained. At all three hearings, after the
prosecutor announced his decision, the soldiers led the accused away. The lawyers and
the audience were then asked to leave the courtroom and wait outside.
What I have described here is not the exception. The prosecutors and sometimes even
judges who sleep or appear to be sleeping, closing their eyes and ears to the accused and
their lawyers, and the assistant judges who pay no attention to what is going on in the
courtroom are now the norm during ‘terror’ hearings or hearings that concern the oppo-
sition in Turkey.13 As we left the waiting room, an elderly man whom I knew from the
neighborhood and whose son was also in prison turned to me with deep sorrow and anger
in his eyes and asked, ‘What are they trying to do? Why are they holding these trials?
Why do they bring us in here?’ I heard such questions many times after the hearings. I
also left the courtrooms with similar questions in my mind after each and every hearing I
attended: What do these hearings tell us? What is their purpose?
The half there/half elsewhere (sleeping, hiding behind a laptop, shuffling through
documents) nature of the judiciary in courtrooms represents the simultaneous absence
and presence, or ambiguous presence, of the law during such trials. While the absent
Yonucu 11

presence of the judiciary creates the impression that the law is not in charge and/or
suspended, the injustice that has a fundamental impact on the present and future of the
accused takes place within the sphere of law – the courtrooms – where the law appears as
a force unbound by justice. Hence, although many complain about lawlessness, violence
(i.e. being locked up in solitary confinement for years without trial, the desperate feeling
of being unheard and rendered invisible in the courtrooms) is made possible and
approved of by representatives of the law and justice. In this way, courtrooms become
stages of performance where the ideology of law gives way to raw cruelty.

Law as a Sovereign Threat

As I argued above, for Benjamin, what makes legal violence resemble mythic violence is
the ambiguity generated within the legal sphere. As Friedlander (2015) notes, ‘the threa-
tening character of mythic violence is evident first in the impossibility of clearly char-
acterizing what would lead to the entanglement in fate’ (p. 169). In the case of the trial of
Haydar and his friends (but also in the case of countless other anti-terror trials held in
Turkey), the lack of clarity during the judiciary process and in the courtrooms makes it
impossible to understand what exactly led to the guilt/crime and how the punishment of the
guilt/crime will take place – in other words, how ‘fate’ will become manifest. In other
words, the inconceivable nature and ‘frightening reality’ (Benjamin, 1996b) of legal
violence transforms it into a demonic mythical force (Friedlander, 2015: 170). In effect,
the law (and the authority of the state it guards) takes on a sovereign character.
Halil’s defense speech (cited below), in which he portrays himself as defenseless
animal and the lawmakers as hunters, demonstrates how those who have been subjected
to legal violence experience the law as a threatening force that seeks to take lives. Halil,
like his nine friends being tried, strongly believed that he would be released during the
early years of his detention. He and his lawyer had made detailed explanations at the
court about why he was innocent and where he actually was at the time of the event. He
even submitted his phone records to the court that proved that he was not anywhere near
the location of the quarrel. All the same, the judge did not take this information into
consideration. In effect, as the years passed, like his friends, he too began to lose faith in
the law. During our interview when he was on pretrial release, Halil told me:

At one point, you understand that making a defense is pointless. They don’t care about what you
or your lawyers say. Once, instead of making a defense, I told the judge a story. I asked him if he
knew the story of the monkey and zebra. Of course, he did not respond. I started telling the story:
Once upon a time, in a very big forest there was a crow that was perched in a tree. It saw a
monkey running very quickly so it yelled after the monkey, saying, ‘Hey monkey! Monkey!
Why are you running so fast? What happened?’ The monkey yelled back at the crow as he was
running: ‘I heard that hunters are around and they are shooting all the zebras’. The crow was
confused. ‘But you aren’t a zebra’, it said. ‘Why are you running away?’ The monkey replied,
‘Ah! By the time I proved that I’m not a zebra I’d already be dead’.

With this story, Halil was making an analogy with the representatives of the law and
hunters/killers who take lives. He was also making an analogy between himself and the
12 Social & Legal Studies XX(X)

powerless animals that are killed by hunters. In his story, the (representative of) law
appears in the forest as a life-threatening power. It not only threatens those who are not
the ‘official’ targets of its violence but also makes the other ‘animals’ that do not even look
like zebras think of themselves as potential targets. Halil was thus telling the judge that he
was not the one whom the (hunter/killer) law was searching for. He knew it did not matter.
Those who act in the name of the law are not interested in the truth. Like the hunters who
were not concerned with finding zebras (the actual target), the law was also not after the
truth. The hunters/lawmakers wanted to take lives and nothing more. In this way, Halil’s
story emphasized the relationship between the law and the ‘take life or let live’ (Foucault,
2003) aspect of sovereignty, and in effect he was saying that in his experience, the law is a
(sovereign) killer who is the ultimate decision maker of one’s fate. Similarly, Halil’s story
also points to the ‘demonic’ force of the law, which threatens those who are deemed guilty
as well as others who, like the monkey, consider themselves to be possible targets of this
violence. He underlines the connections between the impending punishments inherent in
mythical violence and the threatening force of law(fare).

The Impending Punishment

In her reading of Benjamin’s analysis of the relationship between law, fate, and ambi-
guity, Ross (2015) argues that:

. . . the (u)ncertainty of fate is one that is shown to have concrete existential effects.
Life lived under the pallid light of mythic ambiguity produces an anxiety-ridden state
in which the fear of punishment at every turn is overwhelming. The evasion of the
judgment of fate is not experienced as a relief, but only as postponement of certain,
impending punishment.

During my field research, I observed that many youths in Narova and similar neigh-
borhoods see themselves as potential targets of the law and that they are awaiting
‘impending punishment’. As more and more people were arrested, more and more youths
from Narova and neighborhoods like it were filled with anxiety as they waited for
‘impending punishment’. That is to say, the anti-terror law not only punishes the accused
but their entire social circles. Hence, the law becomes an ever-present force in the lives
of many, threatening to ‘destroy’ their lives. A lot of young people I interviewed told me
that they would not be surprised if the police came and arrested them during the inter-
view, suggesting that they believed that they could be arrested at any time. They also
noted that living in Narova and neighborhoods like it is already seen as a crime by the
representatives of the law. As Nalan, a young university student from Narova, told me:

In Narova, every single young person thinks that he/she already has one foot inside [prison].
It is the same in Gazi or Okmeydanı. Just sitting and drinking tea at the office of a
neighborhood association can be considered a crime for them. They’ll ask, ‘Why did you
go there? What were you talking about?’ They do not want us to think, criticize or come
together. Plus, if you are from Narova, you are already guilty for them. You do not need to
do anything else. To live here is a crime in their eyes. We are all terrorists for them . . .
Yonucu 13

Waiting for impending punishment is even more difficult for those who have been
arrested and then granted pretrial release. The durations of pretrial releases are arbitrary,
and it usually takes years for cases to be concluded. So for those who have been released
but whose cases have not yet been concluded, waiting is very difficult. Youths who were
on pretrial release when I interviewed them told me that they feel like their lives are in a
state of suspension. Ali, a 27-year-old construction worker, said:

I feel as if my life is totally fragmented. I was a college student when I was arrested. I was in
prison for three years in pre-trial detention. It has been three years since I was released. I
want to go back to university. But my case is not closed. I have no idea about the punishment
awaiting me. It could be two years, five years, even ten years or more. It is hard to know.
And I have to work, I have to support my family. I will be able to get a better job if I finish
college. But I can’t make any plans about that. Actually, I can’t make any plans for the
future anymore. I have a girlfriend. I am twenty-seven years old now and we want to get
married. But how? If we get married, we will move into a new house together. We will have
to buy furniture. But what if I have to go back to prison? We will take out a loan to buy
furniture and then what? I would be leaving my wife with a debt to pay. I want to have
children. But, what if? It is always the same: What if? What if? What if? It’s impossible to
make any plans.

As these examples demonstrate, the law exists in the form of overarching power
over those who have been targeted by the judiciary and who considered themselves to
be the next target. As the anti-terror haunts the lives of the youth of Narova and the
other ‘internal enemies’ of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma
Partisi, AKP) administration, many experience difficulties in making plans. The ambi-
guity, illegibility, and unpredictability of the law transform it into an overwhelming
and threatening sovereign power that controls the present and future.

Conclusion
In this article, by focusing on the case of a group of young socialists from the margins of
Istanbul, I discussed the operations and effects of Turkey’s current anti-terror law and
illustrated how the unpredictability and illegibility of the law, paves the way for it to be
experienced as a god-like force that controls one’s fate. The ambiguity of the law, which
is symptomatically expressed in the form of simultaneous absence and presence of the
lawmakers in courtrooms, may be seen as an indicator of lawlessness. However, I argued
that the case of Turkey’s anti-terror law shows us that what at the first sight may seem to
be lawlessness may actually entail an ever-increasing control of lives through legal tools.
As more and more lives (and life choices) become bound to the law, ever-growing
numbers of people experience the law as a sword of Damocles hanging over them.
Today, especially after a state of emergency was declared after the allege coup
attempt in July 2016, as more and more citizens from privileged ethnic and class back-
grounds (namely middle and upper class “Sunni” Turks) have been put behind the bars as
‘terrorist’ suspects, discussions about law and lawlessness have become increasingly
common in public and private debates in Turkey. The case I analyzed in this article,
14 Social & Legal Studies XX(X)

which got started in 2007, occurred a decade before widespread complaints about law-
lessness in Turkey began to be made. However, in those years, several anti-terror oper-
ations were carried out against the country’s marginalized and stigmatized working-class
socialist Alevi and Kurdish populations. Those operations were harbingers of increasing
lawfare and the pervasive use of legal tools to suppress and threaten the opposition, not
to mention stigmatizing them as terrorists. The large-scale KCK trials might give the
impression that the anti-terror law targeted deep-rooted oppositional groups that are
capable of creating a counter-hegemonic block and challenging the state’s sovereignty.
After all, the KCK operations began soon after the electoral success of the pro-Kurdish
Peace and Democracy Party (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi) in Turkey’s Kurdistan (Bayır,
2014). However, the case of Halil and his friends along with numerous other cases
targeting the residents of Narova and similar neighborhoods demonstrate that the AKP
administration indeed considers all sorts of oppositional acts that gained the sympathy of
the people, especially when they are carried out by stigmatized segments of the popula-
tions, such as Kurds and Alevis, to be a threat to its sovereignty. Hence, this article also
argues that if we want to understand state formations and reformations, we need to take
the margins more seriously. Margins, as Das and Poole (2004) emphasize, are not
exceptional places where exceptional things happen; rather, they give us insights about
what is yet to come and provide clues about the operations of power and sovereignty. For
that reason, the anti-terror operations that targeted people like Halil and his friends,
people who are not well-known figures at the national level but influential figures in
their local circles, hint at what has become obvious only very recently – that the AKP
government is intolerant of all types of oppositional activism carried out by ‘internal
enemies’ no matter how small scale and local they might be.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Banu Karaca, Esra Demir, Esra Özyürek, Gülşah Kurt, Mehmet Rauf Kesici,
Michael Allan, Nidhi Mahajan and anonymous Social & Legal Studies reviewers for providing
valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. I appreciate financial assistance provided by
the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Middle East Research Competition of the Ford Foundation, Free
Education, Culture and Arts Foundation of Turkey, and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation during
the research, writing and editing stages of the article. I presented earlier versions of this article at the
Berliner Seminar of the Research Program Europe in the Middle East-The Middle East in Europe
(EUME) and LawNet Workshop in Bern. I appreciate the questions and comments I received on
these occasions. This article is dedicated to the underprivileged youth of Turkey, who are deprived of
ethno-religious and class privileges and feel it their responsibility to fight for justice.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: Wenner-Gren Foundation, Middle East Research Competition
of the Ford Foundation, Free Education, Culture and Arts Foundation of Turkey and Alexander
Yonucu 15

von Humboldt Foundation provided financial support for the research and authorship of this
article.

Notes
1. Narova is a pseudonym for an actual neighborhood in Istanbul. The name of the neighborhood
and the names of the interlocutors have been changed to protect the identities of the individ-
uals mentioned.
2. Pretrial detention has become a norm in Turkey’s anti-terror trials. The duration of pretrial
detentions is inconsistent and unpredictable, ranging from months to years.
3. Since the concept of terror is highly contested and ‘mystifies rather than illuminates’ (Mah-
mood, 2001: 578), I prefer to use the term in quotation marks.
4. Article 1 of the law defines terrorism as:
any kind of act done by one or more persons belonging to an organization with the aim of changing
the characteristics of the Republic as specified in the Constitution as well as its political, legal,
social, secular and economic system, damaging the indivisible unity of the State with its territory
and nation, endangering the existence of the Turkish State and Republic, weakening or destroying
or seizing the authority of the State, eliminating fundamental rights and freedoms, or damaging the
internal and external security of the State, public order or general health by means of pressure, force
and violence, terror, intimidation, oppression or threats.

5. For a detailed analysis of the 2006 amendments see: Turkey’s Anti-Terror Laws: Threaten-
ing the Protection of Human Rights. Kurdish Human Rights Project, Briefing Paper) Avail-
able at: http://www.khrp.org/khrp-news/human-rights-documents/doc_download/166-
turkeys-anti-terror-laws-threatening-the-protection-of-human-rights.html (last accessed 16
October 2017).
6. The KCK trials led to the imprisonment of thousands of Kurdish activists, a significant
percentage of those whom were active members and/or supporters of the pro-Kurdish
Peace and Democracy Party, some members of which were parliamentarians (Bayır,
2014).
7. Information available at the webpage of the Ministry of Justice: http://www.adlisicil.adalet.
gov.tr/Istatistikler/1996/2016acilanozel.pdf (last accessed August 13, 2017).
8. Halil was 26 years old when he was arrested. He was working as a civil servant at a university
at the time.
9. Eylem was an 18 years old university student when he was arrested.
10. Orhan was 22 years old when he was arrested. He was a construction worker.
11. For a critique of secret witness testimonies in Turkey see: Turgay, 2011.
12. Such group hearings are known as ‘sack trials’ (torba yargılama), and they became quite
widespread after 2007. In some trials, 40 or 50 people have been tried together.
13. One of the most dramatic examples to the sleeping judges is the jugde of the case publicly
known as the Ethem Sarısülük case. Ethem Sarısülük, a young Alevi man, was shot to death by
a policeman, during the Gezi Uprisings of Summer 2013. The judge of the case was photo-
graphed while he was sleeping during one of the hearings. In spite of the judge’s misconduct,
he continued to serve as the judge of the case in the following hearings. See: http://www.
diken.com.tr/gezide-oldurulen-ethem-sarisulukun-davasi-uyuyan-hakimle-devam-edecek/
(last accessed August 1, 2017).
16 Social & Legal Studies XX(X)

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