Proving injustice: Smuggler killings, impunity work, and vernacular counterforensics in Turkey's Kurdish borderlands

Abstract

Kurdish smugglers have been targeted and killed by security forces in Turkey's Van borderlands systematically and with impunity. In response, the killed smugglers’ families and their lawyers conducted what I call vernacular counterforensics—the forensic examination both of the killings and of the legal authorities’ failure to investigate them properly. Associating the Kurdish borderlands with terrorism, the legal authorities often avoided collecting evidence on the killings to make potential perpetrators remain unknown or legally authorize the killings. By documenting this impunity work through their counterforensics, Kurdish complainants and lawyers demonstrated the judiciary's complicity in the systemization of state anti-Kurdish violence. While anthropological studies show that criminal law operates by individualizing violation claims and perpetrators, vernacular counterforensics illustrates a distinct use of criminal law that reveals, rather than blurs, the state crimes’ systematic-collective aspects. Rather than differentiating technoscientifically produced crime scene evidence from the political circumstances of state crimes, Kurdish complainants and their lawyers used the selective production of such evidence to corroborate the killings’ unlawfulness and their systematic-collective character. This dual use of forensic evidence permits us to rethink analytical and methodological premises that view forensic evidence as fully verifiable and universally applicable and contrast it against contextual and contingent knowledge forms.