Official Archives of State Violence: Parliamentary Inquiry Commissions on State Violence in Turkey

The proposed research aims to analyse the forms and processes of knowledge production on state violence by the parliamentary inquiry commissions during the 1990s. The 1990s in Turkey characterise a decade of systematic state violence that has been unaccounted for. During the state of emergency declared in the Kurdish region in 1987 following the start of the armed conflict with the Kurdish armed group PKK, thousands of political killings and forced disappearances took place along with widespread torture, arbitrary prosecutions and mass forced displacement.

The extra-legal security units mobilised to fight against the PKK were also involved in organised crime. Besides the atrocities against Kurds, political activists and critical journalists who questioned the extra-legal acts of the state similarly faced criminalisation and violence. Despite the gravity of the atrocities in that period, there has been no effective mechanism to account for them.

Criminal cases remained futile, with the majority resulting in the acquittal of the defendants. Notwithstanding the official denial and impunity, parliamentary inquiry commissions were frequently utilised in the aftermath of several acts of violence involving state actors in the 1990s.

Parliamentary inquiry commissions are rare platforms where state violence is held under scrutiny by various parties including victims, witnesses, experts and state representatives. Representatives of different political parties working as commissioners gather and debate documentary and testimonial evidence to produce a final report establishing the facts and making policy recommendations.

Regardless of their effectiveness and the official policy on the atrocity in question, once the inquiry commissions are formed they serve as crucial spaces for knowledge production on state violence. Departing from scholarly studies that consider parliamentary or public inquiries as simply replenishing official discourses and legitimising the state, I consider them as mechanisms of knowledge production offering insights on the state, form of governance and state violence at a particular historical period.

This project focuses on eight inquiry commissions set up to investigate the acts of violence committed by the special units within the military and police, and state sponsored paramilitary groups during the 1990s. I will analyse how the inquiry commissions produce knowledge on state violence, on the basis what documentary and testimonial evidence and through what verification and validation procedures.

I will also analyse the truth claims of the parties involved and the rhetorical devices and discourses they use to construct their claims. Analysing the ways in which they define the state and state violence and they produce their truth claims will provide a greater understanding on the extent to which they challenge or contribute to the dominant truth regime in Turkey.

The knowledge production processes of inquiry commissions cannot be discussed separately from the emotions that emerge during that process. Defining commissions as both epistemological and affective sites, I will analyse the affective aspects of the commissions, and how the emotions that emerge during the inquiries affect the knowledge production processes.

To achieve these, I will analyse the texts gathered and produced by the selected commissions which are kept in the Parliament Archives. These include their final reports, the hearing notes, documentary and testimonial evidence, and the media reports. I will analyse not only the content of the texts, but also their form, my subjective experience during the archival research and the political and historical context in which the archives were created and accessed.

In addition, I will conduct interviews with the commissioners and clerks of both the selected commissions and the current ones to better understand the administrative and operating procedures of the commissions.