In Turkey, as elsewhere, militaristic values
are not simply imposed from above but
are also an established part of the dominant
culture and thus reproduced and perpetuated
within the (civilian) society via institutions
and social practices of different
kinds. Military service and the rituals and
social meanings with which it is invested
give perhaps the clearest indication of
this and form the subject of this article.
A deeper understanding of the social
power of such an institution may serve
towards showing why in Turkey it has
proved extremely difficult to elicit mass
support for a conscientious objection
campaign and why, even in a climate of
war, the CO movement has remained so
marginalised.
There is currently no possibility in
Turkey of opting to do civilian service in
place of military service and conscientious
objection is not recognised (the case of
Osman Murat Ülke and others who have
organised the CO campaign in Turkey are
by now well known to PN readers and
internationally). The normal period of
military service is 18 months as a private,
though for those (for example, university
graduates) who are eligible to do service
as a reserve officer there are slightly shorter
periods of service (currently 16 months)
and for those who are eligible to be reserve
officers but nevertheless opt to do their
service as a private, the duration of military
service is reduced to eight months.
Punishments for evasion of service,
non-compliance or flouting of regulations
are many and may entail prison sentences
of varying lengths. In this context, it
should be mentioned that public criticisms
of the armed services also constitute
punishable offences and potentially entail
prison sentences.
Defining masculinity
Some clear aspects of the social meaning
of military service for males can be traced
in the combination of practical and
notional sanctions that apply to those
who have not undertaken their service.
One important restriction operates in
relation to formal fulltime employment,
since employers in different fields consistently
seek employees who have completed
their military service.
A social restriction of a different and
less formal kind also operates in the case
of marriage. While it is much harder to
generalise about this, many families - and
women themselves - would not favour
marriage until the prospective husband
has completed his service.
Failing to perform military service can
pose a limit on the ability to travel out of
the country by legal means and, more significantly
still, efforts to evade military
service generally mean avoiding various
kinds of registration of residency and, as a
result of this, make the obtaining or
renewing of various documents, like passports,
a virtual impossibility.
The implications of this issue are many
but, in short, some of the most basic
rights of the citizen are withheld: with no
officially registered residency, inclusion
on the electoral register, and hence the
right to vote, is denied.
Rites of passage
The moment of departure for military service
has for many years been the familiar
stuff of Turkish films and soap operas.
Like everything else, how it gets marked
depends on the social position of the family.
The popular and less inhibited lower-class
version sees the gathering at bus stations
all around the country of great family
parties, sometimes with musical
accompaniment in the form of davul
(drum) and zurna (a wind instrument),
the waving of Turkish flags, and the boy
hauled up and swaying on the shoulders
of elder brothers and uncles, looking like
the overwhelmed and bemused adolescent
that he usually still is.
As far as the attention he suffers and
the energy of the occasion, he will probably
not have experienced anything like this
since the hours before his circumcision
(known in Turkey as sünnet), some twelve
to fifteen years earlier, when he was
paraded around relatives and shrines in
the embroidered finery of his "little
prince" costume with turban-like hat,
fake fur-trimmed satin cloak and sash
proclaiming in big letters "Masallah" ("As
God wishes"), clutching a toy sceptre in
one podgy hand and a bag of sweets in
the other and, before facing the terrifying
moment of mutilation, encouraged to feel
his full importance over his sisters in the
eyes of doting parents and senior relatives.
The night before departure to the army
is often spent with friends, and resembles
nothing so much as a stag night before
marriage, with a nationalist flavour to it,
or an ecstatic group of football fans after
the match. Large groups of young men
hanging out of the windows of cars which
race dangerously through the centre of
town decorated with huge Turkish flags
and hooting their horns, shout "En büyük
asker bizim asker" (meaning both "our
army is the greatest" and "our soldier is
the best soldier", since asker means both
army and soldier), or more ominously, "He
is going to the army and he will return."
Among many petty bourgeois and middle-
class families in big cities today the
send-off is passed in more restrained ways.
Indeed, in describing the ways departure
for military service is marked and the
social meanings the institution is inscribed
with, social divisions are inescapable.
Class
As has been shown in various studies of
masculinity, class background is highly
significant when it comes to questions of
how different images of masculinity are
valued: physical endurance and stamina
which go with labouring or factory-floor
jobs are inevitably more valued qualities
among working-class men, for whom
their bodies and the skill of their hands
are their main economic assets, than they
are for white-collar men working in office
environments where knowledge of certain
technologies and organisational principles
are what are valued.
Interviews with young men of different
backgrounds in Turkey, however, would
seem to indicate that in fact the associations
of masculinity with militarism are
generally so powerful that endorsement for
military service cuts across social divisions.
And yet this endorsement is clearly an
ambiguous one. While military service is
publicly celebrated and strongly associated
with manhood, "manly" duty, and a sense
of self-sacrifice for a nation whose very
existence is said to be under threat (from
Kurdish separatism), in private it would
seem that many young men's feelings
about it are much more ambiguous, with
significant numbers simply avoiding service.
Some of those who are evading are
against it for political reasons of varying
shades, though almost no political party
that wants to survive has dared openly
advocate resistance to service.
Generating consent
Perhaps the ultimate success of the army in
controlling responses to and inducing con-sent
among much of the population
becomes evident in the lack of criticism of
the army by even those who have lost conscript
sons in combat. Indeed with the trial
of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, the "relatives
of the martyrs" (sehit yakinlari) as they
came to be known, began to be systematically
organised and used to voice anti-PKK
sentiments at every opportunitymost
notably in the court where some of the
families sat while Öcalan was being tried.
The increasing focus in the course of
the 1990s on the relatives (particularly
mothers) of soldiers who died in action
was also in some sense perhaps an attempt
by circles close to the army to match and
counteract the visibility that the relatives
and friends of the "disappeared" had commanded
in their "Saturday Mothers"
(Cumartesi Anneleri) campaign, based on
the Argentinean Mothers of the Plaza di
Mayo campaign, and treated at least by
the Turkish police and courts as a front
for "separatist" activities. The image of a
mother grieving for her dead son should
be emphasised as carrying a resonance and
impact in Turkish society, as in other
places, that favours its appropriation for
political ends.
The political climate in Turkey since
the late 1990s has been characterised by a
rising tide of ultra-nationalism, in part a
backlash among some circles against
potential European Union membership
and the threat to certain interests it
would entail. One of the institutions
most likely to lose out if membership
does ever materialise would be the armed
forces, but in the present there is little
evidence to suggest that the power of this
institution is being significantly challenged
from within Turkish society.
This article has attempted to give an
account of the continuing social endorsement
for, and investment in, military service
as a rite of passage to manhood. The
space for challenging the popular equation
of militaristic values with exemplary masculinity
has remained limited. While
powerful institutions do not forsake their
position willingly, less tangibly the culture
which they have helped to create, and
which in turn reinforces and sustains
their authority, does not find expressions
of resistance easily.
Notes:1 Quoted from Zafer Üskül, Siyaset ve Asker
(Politics and the Army) in the Study Centre on Turkey report, Türkiye'de Ordu ve Insan Hak-lari Ihlalleri: TSK ve uygulamalarina iliskin 1998 yili panoramasi (The army and human rights violations in Turkey: a survey of the Turkish armed forces and its activities in 1998), Amsterdam: Study Centre on Turkey, July 1999: email: sot@antenna.nl, p1 Emma Sinclair-Webb is a sociologist based in Istanbul. For a longer article on the same theme by the same author, see Mai Ghoussoub & Emma Sinclair-Webb (eds) Imagined Masculinities:
Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East (London: Saqi Books, 2000). This book
was reviewed in PN 2443 on gender and militarism (June-August 2001). See http://www.peacenews.info/issues/2443/review_ghoussoub.html
).
