On the weeks leading up to a UN conference on human settlements, Istanbul’s local authorities in preparation, decided to get rid of the stray dogs living on the European side of the city by poisoning them. The summer of 1996 is remembered grimly by the people living in the city. Two other violent displacements took place adjacent to the removal of the dogs from the city’s display. Survivors of these pogroms remind us, in times of crisis our most mundane encounters become political.
In the spring of 1996, Istanbul was getting ready to host United Nations’ Habitat II conference on human settlements. The main theme was officially announced as addressing two things: «adequate shelter for all» and «sustainable human settlements development in an urbanizing world». The official announcement specifically indicated that the conference puts human beings at the center of its concerns for sustainable development. It also indicated that those concerns are not separate from a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature. Conference organizers wanted to take it as an opportunity to address issues about participatory democracy in the tense political environment of the mid-90s in Turkey. Non-governmental organizations and actors were invited to participate in meetings at many levels including preparations, information sharing, writing a national report, and implementation.
In Istanbul, there was an ideological controversy between the local authorities, the municipality, and the central government. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1996, preparations for the conference were hasty in, especially in the neighboring streets and squares of the conference space. During the week of the conference, there were massive security measures next to the ongoing amelioration works. Armored tanks and buses full of police were passing through the streets. Roads were cordoned off and closed to traffic. In the same weeks, stray dogs in Istanbul were poisoned with strychnine-injected meatballs placed in parks and on street corners by the municipality. At first, the poison affected cats and pet dogs. Stray dogs came after them, but the extent of the poisoning was not limited to these. Habitat II preparations have rendered certain communities and non-human animals as removable objects for the sake of constructing a pure and unified nationality to be displayed for the Western gaze of foreign participants of the UN conference. This specific logic of power created particular distinctions; and within these distinctions, the one who is supposedly close to ‘nature’ became the object of extreme violence. A couple of singular events have disrupted this holistic frame of power.
I
In spring 1996, in the days following the poisoning of the dogs, Emel Yıldız, an alleged animal rights activist in 90s and a former film star of 60s cinema, took to Taksim Square shouting and yelling. The following day, she was all over the evening news. She was called Panter Emel (Emel the Panther) due to her sensitivity to dying species. But this nickname – which she embraced – was also to suggest and mock her brash attitude towards the people that she targeted. Her impulses were regarded as aggressive, but also, she was implicitly mocked and accused of being that outspokenly angry about «some animal matter». A few people targeted Emel’s personality directly saying that animal rights would be a just cause only if Emel was not an advocate for it. This was a time when animal rights protests were perceived in Turkey as devoid of any political connotation. The demands were not considered political, or even serious.
It was at a similar time when the Saturday Mothers – a group of people initially gathering in Galatasaray, Istanbul to demand answers on their forcefully disappeared relatives – were banished from the Taksim-Galatasaray area and the transgender residents of Ülker Street were thrown out of their apartments by brutal force that Emel and her friends were taking to the square and shouting out for the poisoned dogs. The way that police treated Saturday Mothers and Emel’s friends was quite different. Emel and her friends were able to shout because theirs was not considered to be a political issue – apparently political meant «threatening» or «dangerous» for Turkey in the 90s. They were not exposed to physical violence. The lack of attention somehow expanded the boundaries of what is sayable for Emel. So the day after the dogs were poisoned, Emel asked to give a press release regarding the «Habitat cleaning». Habitat organizers arrived early, just before the reading of the press release to meet Emel at the appointed room. Emel came in with big, black, plastic bags in her arms. Dead bodies of the poisoned dogs were inside them. She threw the bags on the table that Habitat organizers were standing behind, the table for the press release. Emel said: «This is what you accomplished.» The head of the organization was hospitalized the next day, due to stress and gastric bleeding. When the dead bodies of the dogs were brought into the room, they brought a moment of crisis inside the Habitat II organization. There is no available official record regarding the poisoning of the dogs in 1996, except a newspaper column from 2 June 1996 reporting that the head of the general coordinator of Habitat II, is in hospital due to gastric bleeding.
The crisis in the Habitat II organization was the crisis of a hegemonic language of human rights and democratic transactions’ incompatibility with a governmental power to decide who should live and who should be discarded. From the opening of such a crisis, other bodies, very political bodies indeed, become visible.
II
Beyolu, a former wasteland with its excessive dogs, is burdened with the histories of displacement. Transgender women lived in Ülker Street between the years 1991- 96, until they were targeted by the police in a pogrom in the spring of 1996, a few weeks before Habitat II.
In the 90s, the existing transphobia forced transgender women to live together as a community, both because they could convince only a certain number of landowners to rent apartments to them and also for communal safety. The transgender women of Ülker Street in 1996 were both actors of a collective form of living and witnesses to multiple outbursts of violence in the same period.
Transgender women started to move into houses on Ülker Street around 1991. They were already living in the streets neighboring Ülker Street before the 90s but were forcefully evicted by the police. Any encounter with the police meant guaranteed assault. Police organizations had strong nationalist and conservative tendencies which were put to use to inflict criminal charges. But still, the years between 1991 and 94 were the «golden years» of Ülker Street. It was the period when, in this relatively safe environment, trans women were able to take control of their own working conditions while continuing to have good relationships with their neighbors living in apartment houses. Every woman was a sex worker, but there was no third party who made profit out of the women’s work. There were no shifts that regulated their work time. Women did not share their income with anyone else, as they owned their own labor, but most of the time they shared their income among themselves, so they had a common cashier. They themselves decided when to work. At its most populated times, nearly a hundred trans women were living there. Ülker Street was a ghetto, but evval a survivor of the Ulker Street pogrom says that living in the ghetto was not an entirely demeaning situation. Although forcing a community to live in a ghetto is a violation of a fundamental right, evval argued that in terms of their conditions, it provided trans women with a certain space for freedom, power, and agency to look after each other and protect themselves.
In evval’s testimony, this space of freedom, their relationships with their indispensable pet dogs, and the routine police attacks follow each other. This is how she tells it:
«We were truly living on that street. It was our actual home. We were living and socializing there. We had really good relations with the neighbors, and were friends with some of them. At the time that we were most populated, a hundred girls were living there. It was like the setting of an Almodovar movie. Of course, there are good and bad sides to being in a ghetto. We had our own way of living there. You could have seen a girl going to the grocery store with her makeup all over her face, in her nightgown, at ten in the morning. Everyone had a dog. Hundred girls, each of them owned a dog. These dogs copulated with each other so much that we started to think that a whole new breed unique to Ülker Street was coming up. Like, ülker terrier. All those strange breed dogs began to appear. And of course, police raids were continuing… And the way that the police attacked! It was in such a way that you would think that it is not as if you are a thief or murderer or something. They attacked you with their full means.»
Police raids were somehow routine. Especially when there was a change in the administration of the Beyolu police department, an entirely new wave of raids would start. It was referred to as an attack against illegal elements: drug dealers, thieves, and the transgender sex workers of Ülker Street. evval says that she almost started to believe at some point that they were doing something seriously harmful in that place because the means of the attacks were horrendous. Police broke into houses by taking off the doors and inflicting severe physical violence. evval remembers one day when police from the special task forces broke into her apartment on the third floor from her living room windows, climbing the emergency stairway in full gear. She says that they were not treated like thieves, murderers, or any petty criminal; that it was something else. Then it came out that the Beyolu police department had asked permission from the counter-terrorism bureau claiming that suspicious men were visiting these apartments, and they got permission to break the doors. After that, transgender activists and residents organized a press conference saying that they were not terrorists, so there was no legal basis for breaking into houses by taking off the doors. The streets where transgender women lived were defined as criminal areas in Beyolu in the 90s which enabled the arbitrary use of violence to be embedded in everyday life, making it arduous for transgender women to continue to live in that zone. The police were already able to inflict violence arbitrarily upon women in Ülker Street, but
the authority gained by a counter-terrorism discourse opened the gates for unprecedented levels of violence and the power to inflict it.
evval says that in the mid-90s Ülker Street and its adjacent Kazancı, Bakurt and Pürtela streets were in fact «criminal» areas, the police were not the only source of violence. It was difficult for women to walk on Kazancı Street after midnight. Yet they were strong and intact enough as a community to defend themselves. Protecting each other from abuse was possible. It was also financially possible to live on Ülker Street. Rents were very cheap around Cihangir. The ones with money were even able to buy a house and financially secure the rest of their lives. As a result of the safe and eligible conditions, Ülker Street drew in transgender migrants. According to evval, at the time of Habitat II, Ülker Street was already overpopulated due to its relatively safe environment for them. Istanbul was attracting LGBT and transgender migrants. When the population increased, the residents started to hear rumors that the landowners who rented their apartments to transgender women were being threatened by other inhabitants of the neighborhood. And finally, they saw attacks on other neighbors by the police, foretelling about the upcoming pogrom. Starting from the beginning of the 90s, they were living in Ülker Street with African migrants who had started to come to Turkey from West, East, and Central Africa due to financial or political reasons.
African immigrants lived in Istanbul for diverse reasons such as asylum seeking, irregular migration or transitory migration were in a legally ambiguous situation, as Turkey did not legally accept refugees from non-European countries and did not welcome migrants who did not have «Turkish roots». The lack of a clear-cut legal basis for their stay, the weakness of asylum seekers’ social networks, and the difficulty of getting into Europe prolonged the Africans’ stay in Turkey, leading them to engage in a variety of survival strategies that ended up in poor living conditions due to a paucity of income earning opportunities since the beginning of the 1990s.
Transgender women witnessed their neighbors being dragged out of their homes first. They witnessed and recognized the order of conduct. The first ones to be removed were the African immigrants, and then the transgender women. And in their abject positioning, they were able to witness the pain of others. At the same time, women witnessed the dogs being poisoned when they were evacuated from Ulker street in 1996. They became wit(h)nesses to each other’s pogrom. In Turkey in the 1990s, sometimes the police would destroy the records verifying physical assault on transgender women on purpose. The existence of such records would have been important to have a legal basis to claim rights. In the lack of factual grounds for the recognition of such injustice, official archives cannot provide a basis for justice. But what happened here between the women, the African neighbors and the stray dogs calls for a wit(h)nessing – a state of «being with», as well as witnessing – that cannot be recorded by an archive.
III
Another work of wit(h)nessing was going on, on a spot approximately 900 meters away from Ülker Street. During the spring of 1995, the relatives of people who had disappeared – now, the Saturday Mothers or people – began to meet in front of Galatasaray High School on a central street in Beyolu, after the discovery of the tortured body of Hasan Ocak. Hasan Ocak had forcefully disappeared and his body was found two months later in a common graveyard in Istanbul. After Ocak’s body had been found, a group of women, human rights activists, inspired by Argentina’s Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, decided to silently sit in Galatasaray Square each Saturday as a means of protest, demanding that those missing under custody must be found, that those responsible must be tried and that the crimes must not be repeated.
In the Spring of 1996, Habitat II came with a series of raids by the police and continued through the summer. One of the participants, Filiz says that at that time they only thought that the attacks were just to prevent them from protesting, that they did not come to think of it as an ideological measure to erase the political potential belonging to that certain part of the public space. Now, she says, with regard to the events of the last few years, including the Gezi Park resistance and its violent breakup, it is more clear that Beyolu is a highly politicized public space. Being in Beyolu is not only about being able to be heard and seen from that part of the city. Protesting in Beyolu takes your act to the realm of the political.
When the relatives and human rights activists met in Galatasaray Square with inspiration from Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, silently demanding to know the whereabouts of the forcefully disappeared or telling their stories, it was the first time that the systematic disappearances both in Istanbul and in Kurdish cities became visible to the public eye. Sometime around the 13th week, relatives of the people who had disappeared in Kurdish districts joined the Mothers. When these 20 or 25 women arrived, they opened the conversation for the faili meçhul («perpetrator unknown») cases in Northern Kurdistan from the years 1992 and 1993. Their way of relating bridged the experiences of different cities and made it visible that the state attacks do not only silence the opposition but also deny the existence of the political potential of a movement. Filiz says that when the police interfere with demonstrations, it interferes to obstruct such truth. Saturday Mothers showed practically that caring for others has political meaning.
Throughout the 90s, Beyolu became a politicized space of unexpected encounters for the exilic dogs, humans, migrants, Mothers, relatives, and transgender women and created a space of intimacy that is shared with a stranger to the self. After the pogrom, the departing transgender women asked their trusted neighbors to look after their dogs. Abject bodies can be a keeper of historical memory for the injured other if the site for a novel wit(h)nessing can be created.
By Eda Tarak
Eda Tarak is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her current research focuses on environmental effects of freight shipping on coastal landscapes in the Eastern Mediterranean within an analysis of capital, labor, and the logistics. The published text above is an excerpt from her MA thesis at Bogazici University, Department of Sociology.