Relatives of Sevil Sevimli, a 19-year-old French student of Turkish descent who was arrested and detained in Turkey on suspicion of links with an outlawed far-left extremist group, look at family pictures[/caption]Sözde [SURZ-deh] adj. so-called (pej.)
A key piece of Turkish official jargon, much used by bureaucrats, policemen, court officials and others whose job it is to decide what the public should and should not think, this word has the effect of rendering the noun that follows it invisible to the user (and sometimes to the hearer too).
As a straightforward pejorative, sözde has a longish history (cf. Sözde Kızlar - 'so-called girls' - the title of a 1930 novel which describes the sticky end in store for young women who 'rebel against their families and their neighborhood' by, for example, expressing a desire to dance the tango). From 2000 onwards, however, it began to undergo a transformation, taking on the almost magical qualities described in the paragraph above. The classic example of this is of course sözde Ermeni soykırım, or 'the so-called Armenian genocide.' (Some would argue the correct phrasing should be Ermeni sözde soykırım, since it is the existence of a genocide that the Turkish state questions, rather than the Armenian ethnicity of the Armenians.)
The word quickly found a broader use. In March 2005, the Turkish army issued a statement describing a handful of Kurdish youths filmed burning the Turkish flag as 'so-called citizens.' As the war waged by armed Kurdish nationalists flared up again in 2004 after five years of relative peace, the reality of almost every aspect of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was put into question. Newspapers and politicians and policemen talked about the PKK's 'so-called flag', its demands for 'so-called democratic autonomy', and its 'so-called ruling committee.' More counter-intuitive usages have occasionally been noted: references to the PKK as 'the so-called terrorist group' or the announcement, made by police in the city of Urfa this March, that they were banning celebrations of 'the so-called birthday' of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. One imaginative news presenter has even been heard to refer to the PKK as the 'so-called PKK', not a bad conjuring trick for a group whose war has killed well over 40,000 people since 1984.
Sözde now seems to have become a sine qua non of Turkish legal vocabulary. Take the 176-page indictment of Sevil Sevimli, the young French Turkish woman who came to Turkey as an Erasmus student last year and now faces 32.5 years in jail for being a senior member of a left-wing terrorist group. One of her lawyers, quoted by the columnist Kürşat Bumin, says sözde is used 128 times, and quotes some of the usages: 'so-called commemoration ceremonies', 'so-called birthdays', 'so-called guerrilla', 'so-called respect' for 'so-called terrorist leaders.' One of the actual crimes Sevimli is accused of is 'making propaganda for the [terror] group by waving its so-called flag at a demonstration.'
'If you take sözde away from them, I'm not sure they can write indictments any more, to be honest', says the lawyer, with the mixture of sarcasm and disbelief common to Turks who are immune to the word's more magical effects.
