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Waiting for justice amidst the remnants: urban development, displacement and resistance in Diyarbakir

2021; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1469-8676.13083

1469-8676

Sardar Saadi,

Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East

This paper looks into the lives of displaced people and their material bonds with the past while waiting for justice during exceptional times in Diyarbakir, Turkey's Kurdistan. Diyarbakir is known for its central location in the Kurdish conflict in Turkey for many decades. In August 2015, the old city of Diyarbakir called Sur joined other resisting cities and districts in the Kurdish region of Turkey, where Kurdish militants built barricades all around their controlled neighbourhoods against the state's violent attacks and declared autonomy. Months after the beginning of the resistance, the Turkish state managed to take back control of Sur after heavy clashes between Turkish security forces and Kurdish militants. All the resisting neighbourhoods of Sur were razed to the ground, and close to 24,000 residents were displaced. Since then, a massive urban transformation project for Sur has been in the making. The everyday survival of the displaced people from Sur depends on the ways they negotiate with the state in a long process of waiting. Bringing together different accounts of waiting, I intend to shed light on temporal dimensions of forced displacement embedded in the remnants of the past and shaped by present history of subjugation and state violence. Cet article examine la vie des personnes déplacées et leurs liens concrets avec le passé, alors qu'elles attendent la justice dans des circonstances exceptionnels à Diyarbakir (au Kurdistan, Turquie). Diyarbakir est connue pour sa position centrale dans le conflit kurde en Turquie depuis plusieurs décennies. En août 2015, le quartier historique de Diyarbakir (connu sous le nom de Sur) a rejoint d'autres villes et quartiers en résistance dans la région kurde de Turquie, où les militants kurdes ont construit des barricades tout autour de leurs quartiers contrôlés. Ayant créé ces barrières contre les attaques violentes de l'État, ils ont déclaré leur autonomie. Plusieurs mois après le début de la résistance, l'État turc a réussi à reprendre le contrôle de Sur après de violents affrontements entre les forces de sécurité turques et les militants kurdes. Tous les quartiers résistants de Sur ont été rasés et près de 24 000 habitants ont été déplacés. Depuis lors, un projet massif de transformation urbaine de Sur est en cours d'élaboration. La survie quotidienne des déplacés de Sur dépend de la manière dont ils négocient avec l'État au cours d'un long processus d'attente. En rassemblant différents récits d'attente, je mets en lumière dans cet essai les dimensions temporelles du déplacement forcé. Celles qui sont ancrées dans les vestiges du passé et façonnées par l'histoire actuelle de l'assujettissement et de la violence d'État. Hasan's11 All names of the people mentioned in this paper are pseudonyms. family is among thousands of families that were displaced from their homes in Sur, the old city of Diyarbakir,22 Sur is one of four districts of the city of Diyarbakir. The interior part of Sur district that is surrounded by a historical fortress is called Suriçi. after the urban armed clashes between Kurdish militants and the Turkish security forces started in their neighbourhoods in November 2015. Their new apartment, where Hasan with his wife and their two children had resettled, was only 10 minutes' walking distance from their old neighbourhood, which had been obliterated and they could not visit. The last time Hasan and his wife were at their old house was in March 2016, when the round-the-clock military curfew was lifted on Sur for only a day for the people to collect whatever remained from their houses. When I first met him, Hasan showed me some pictures and videos on his phone that he took during that very last visit. Their house had partially burned down, and most of their furniture was destroyed. 'Not much was left', Hasan said. But they still took all they could anyway. The first time I visited Hasan's family, he was impatient to show me a room where he stored their furniture from their old house in Sur. As soon as I got to their apartment, he insisted that I should first see that room and then we could chat and have tea. He led me into a room full of dusty household items: a fridge with its door detached from it and kept on its side; a stove and a gas cylinder; a large brown wooden cabinet unit with shattered glass doors; a toddler's bed filled with pillows of different sizes and colours; a queen bed on which carpets, mattresses, duvets, blankets, and sheets were stacked; a big electric heater with broken heating bars; a few household items and two large cardboard boxes on the floor; a tall round vase with discoloured plastic flowers; a large flat-screen TV; a few white plastic chairs; a white desk with a computer case on top of it; and beside the case, an old computer monitor with a hole right in the middle of its broken screen. My eyes were locked to that screen for a few moments, and Hasan was quick to notice. 'They shot at the screen. The bullet must still be inside', Hasan said. 'Do you know whose bullet?' I asked him, and he responded with conviction 'of course, I know'. Hasan told me that he has carefully documented these items from their old house. 'All of these are evidence of what they have done to us. I live with them, but there comes a time when others will look at them as well'. Hasan said except for some of the blankets and mattresses, they haven't made use of the items stored in this room. Yet, everything in that room had a reason to be there. Hasan and many displaced families that I met in Diyarbakir were in a state of limbo, not knowing their fate during the exceptional times that Turkey, and particularly Diyarbakir, was going through. They were involved in multiple legal cases, and to comply with requirements of their cases and other bureaucratic paperwork, they were obliged to meet exact dates and timelines put in place by officials while they had no medium to (re)make time in their favour in order to get the response they expected. The many forms of waiting that dominated their relationship with the state were deeply embedded in everyday life: waiting for the removal of the curfew and having access to old places; for value estimation of their properties and what they had lost; for the outcome of their legal cases at each stage; for any development in other cases that they knew of; for officials to give them a call or send them a letter; for upcoming appointments; for finding a lawyer they could trust; for their lawyer to give them a response; for a response that could make a change in their life; for a life that could be peaceful and just or at least close to what they had in the past; and ultimately, for justice in a time that may never come. The waiting experience dominating Hasan and other displaced families lives is shaped by a past that remains materially in different forms of rubble and remnants. The embodiment of a ruined past in the everyday material forms in which these displaced families inhabit brings up the vital question that Ann Stoler asks: 'what they do about what they are left with' (2013: 12). This paper evolves around this question and follows the materiality of displacement in the lives of the displaced people in Diyarbakir during the times of waiting. I argue that the possibility of justice is the primary engine that makes waiting bearable for the displaced, but the displaced person's endurance is filled and materialised with the bonds they develop with the 'leftovers' of the past (Stoler 2013). On the one hand, these remnants of material belongings help anchor a dearly held past that is 'idealized and harmonious' (Brun 2015: 24). At the same time, they are held on to because they serve as evidence for the infinitely deferred future, when the hope is that justice will be served. This paper looks at the remnants of Sur and materiality of displacement from a more recent anthropological inquiry into ruins, ruination and rubble. Stoler shifts discussions around ruin to the process of ruination as a 'political project that lays waste to certain peoples, relations, and things that accumulate in specific places' (2013: 11). For Stoler, the focus is beyond the gaze at the 'ruins of empire' and more about the question 'how people live with and in ruins', which in turn takes us to 'the politics animated, to the common sense such habitations disturb, to the critiques condensed or disallowed, and to the social relations avidly coalesced or shattered around them' (2013: 12–13). While she looks at 'imperial debris' around the world and its effects on the people left with them, I argue that ruination in a political project of displacement produces unexpected material bonds beyond ruined places. Lefebvre would make an important contribution here that space does not disappear but leaves traces (1991: 164). And more importantly, space evolves through bodies surrounding them, and as Lefebvre puts it succinctly, 'it is by means of the body that space is perceived, lived, and produced' (1991: 162). My research is interested to see what the ruined homes of displaced people in Diyarbakir leave for them, and how they carry what has remained for them in their displaced times as personal mementos from a life destroyed. I ask how do these 'leftovers' of the life before displacement offer rupture into the never-ending presence of the present time and their waiting for justice in a future they hope for? How do the displaced people find and attach meaning to the remnants of a past not so distant and ruined homes not too far, and how do they remember through them? What exactly are these leftovers? Gaston Gordillo (2014) distinguishes between ruin and rubble by looking at how abstraction in space is produced in their connection with the past. While rubble is rendered as insignificant matter that is going to be removed, ruin comprises value for its pastness and mostly is considered as heritage (Gordillo 2014: 10). The material remaining of Sur I examine here are neither ruins nor rubble; as the signs of continuity of the place in the displaced people's lives, their value of pastness is crystallised by personal memories of the space that no longer exists. For those displaced, remains of Sur have a significant afterlife, especially during a time spent in waiting. I consider waiting as an important factor here that shapes the 'constellation of rubble' (Gordillo 2014: 11). The afterlife of leftovers surviving destruction is nuance in their role and meaning. They become personal mementos, as Carol Kidron (2009) shows in the case of a spoon from Auschwitz, to remember the past through them and to pass on the embodied memories attached to them. They mark the time and place of suffering; 'melancholic objects' that Yael Navaro-Yashin (2009) speaks of. I think remnants of Sur accumulate all these meaning in their afterlife of destruction. But I will argue that beyond all this, these remnants are also both witness to grief and testaments to a home ruined. They are kept for a time they are looked at. Waiting for the time of justice – and maybe return to their home, a home – is the curse that the displaced live with. The leftovers that I examine in this paper are of different nature and symbolic value. I begin with the story of a mulberry tree that represents a home that no longer exists. But it also speaks for a history of soil, territory and injustice against excluded people in an unresolved sovereignty project. Mulberry trees have become witness to a city in ruins that was once distinguished by its glory and diversity, and a place for mutual existence of different nationalities and religions; a memory that has been wiped out of the city in the process of Turkish-Islamic nation-building. But like many trees in literature and especially Victor Turner's milk tree in The forest of symbols (1967), the mulberry trees of Diyarbakir condense other meanings around ruined livelihoods. From a mulberry tree to broken household materials of Hasan and other remnants of Sur in the lives of my interlocutors, I trace different trajectories of ruination in Diyarbakir. It is also important to note that my interlocutors in this paper are mainly men; I address the gendered nature of displacement, dispossession and waiting in Kurdistan elsewhere.33 For example in my PhD dissertation (Saadi 2020). I first met Hasan in December 2016. It was during the last phase of my ethnographic fieldwork in Diyarbakir for my doctoral dissertation. This was one of the most repressive times in the history of the Turkish republic. Just a few months had passed since the failed coup of July 2016, and the entire country was in the state of emergency. Waiting for 'normalisation' was the dominant mood in the country, but in Diyarbakir the wait had started before the failed coup. Diyarbakir had been going through extraordinary times since a year before the failed coup. In the late summer of 2015, many neighbourhoods in Sur joined resisting cities and districts in the Kurdish region in declaring 'self-rule zones', where the Kurdish militants had built barricades around their controlled neighbourhoods against the state's continuous attacks on their communities. Military curfew against Sur, which is still partially in place,44 By November 2019. practically separated this part of Diyarbakir from the rest. Months after the beginning of the resistance, the state managed to take back control of this district after heavy clashes between Turkish security forces and Kurdish militants. Many neighbourhoods were severely damaged. According to a report published by Amnesty International,55 'Turkey: displaced and dispossessed: Sur residents' right to return home', https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur44/5213/2016/en/ (accessed 6 July 2018). close to 24,000 residents of Sur were displaced, more than 2,000 houses were destroyed or damaged, and a number of civilians were killed. In March 2016, following urban clashes in Diyarbakir, the Turkish government issued an order to expropriate most private properties in Sur. Since then, an urban development project for Sur has been in the making, demolishing the entire district of Sur (except for historical sites and structures) in order to rebuild it anew. Hasan's family and other displaced families were stuck in a condition of being that was not only determined by their spatial displacement but also within temporal constraints that profoundly disrupted their life course. They developed day-to-day survival strategies as they were negotiating with the state on the streets, court halls, municipality and government offices for the possibility of return to their old neighbourhoods, to rebuild their houses, and for fair compensation of what they had lost. They were put in a long process of waiting through which many transformations occur in their living experiences and in their understandings of their relationship with the state power. These transformations are not always in the ways that are desired by the sovereign (Feldman 1991; Hage 2009; Brun 2015). In fact, different forms and acts of resistance take place in this process of waiting, which are marked by the memories of displacement and conditioned within a history of subjugation and state violence. Many of those I met engage in active refusal (cf. Simpson 2014) against a resolution process offered by the state that is based on a much lesser monetary compensation of what they had lost or were about to lose in Sur. Seeking justice in a Kafkaesque legal and bureaucratic process that could take more than a decade was the more acceptable and dignified option that many had taken, and Hasan's endeavour to collect evidence of what his family had been through was in preparation for this quest. Making people wait, Bourdieu (2000) famously says, is the essential part of the way domination works. Waiting is not equally distributed, and one's ability to intervene in time is relational, especially when it comes to socio-political contexts where one's position in power and capital relations determines the length and environment of waiting. As Auyero observes in his remarkable ethnographic study of waiting among urban poor for welfare benefits in Argentina, 'waiting is stratified, and there are variations in waiting time that are socially patterned and responsive to power differentials' (2012: 27). It is in this stratification of waiting time and the power to make one wait that subordination is reproduced, and uncertainty of the future dominates the passing through of 'the here-and-now' in which history is dismissed for the sake of progress (Benjamin 1940). In the case of Diyarbakir, waiting is embedded in many traumatic experiences of war, state violence, displacement, dispossession and oppression. While they wait for a possible justice to come, they also, as Ghassan Hage puts it, 'wait out' the misery of the presence they are in. Hage defines 'waiting out' as 'a specific form of waiting where one is not waiting for something but rather waiting for something undesirable' to end (2009: 102). As Cathrine Brun discusses in the case of Georgian internally displaced people, 'people in protracted situations of displacement often live their lives in a present and at a place where they do not want to be. They dream about a future they cannot reach, which often lies in the past and is represented by the places and lives they were forced to leave' (2015: 23). The current stories of waiting in Kurdistan are not separated from the long-awaited justice for the Kurds, minorities and those excluded in the Turkish republic. The latest Kurdish rebellion led by the Kurdistan Workers Party, PKK (Partîya Karkerên Kurdistan), has been going on since the late 1970s. The PKK initiated an armed resistance in 1984, and Turkish military operations in the Kurdish region in response have cost more than 40,000 lives. During the war in Kurdistan in the 1990s, more than three and a half million people were internally displaced in the Kurdish region (see Jongerden 2007). Diyarbakir's central location in the Kurdish region of Turkey made it a primary host city for hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Kurds. Diyarbakir's population almost tripled from 300,000 to close to 800,000 in less than a decade (Ayata and Yükseker 2005). The PKK declared a ceasefire in September 1998, months before its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, was captured. This ceasefire, with many ups and downs, was followed by negotiation efforts to pacify the situation in Kurdistan. A relatively peaceful condition in Kurdistan after the ceasefire provided a great opportunity for a shift in Kurdish resistance with the aim of self-determination toward urban spheres of legal politics, municipalities and civil society. Since the 1999 municipal elections in Turkey and the major victory of the pro-Kurdish legal political parties in the municipalities of the Kurdish region and most importantly Diyarbakir metropolitan municipality, a victory subsequently repeated, municipalities have been unofficial administrative bodies of the Kurdish movement in the region (Watts 2010). They provided an operational space for the Kurdish movement to implement their new political agenda of building a Kurdish 'democratic autonomy' in the Kurdish region based on principles of radical democracy (Akkaya and Jogerden 2012). Diyarbakir has been in the centre of this urban turn in the Kurdish movement. The historical status that Diyarbakir has among the Kurds has made this city an important site of the struggle for self-determination. The Turkish state has been particularly keen to suppress and contain the Kurdish movement in this city. Much academic research, such as studies of the legal and institutional politics in the Kurdish movement (Watts 2010), spatial transformations and 'decolonisation' of urban spaces in Diyarbakir by the pro-Kurdish municipality (Gambetti 2009) and transformations in Kurdish political subjectivity (Özsoy 2010), has shown the significance of the urban turn in Kurdish politics and the role the city has played in Kurdistan in the last two decades. The events of 2015 and the process afterward directly targeted this turn. In a promising attempt to find an end to the conflict, in the spring of 2013 negotiations between the Turkish government and the PKK's leader Öcalan started. It was short-lived, with an ultimate violent end in 2015. In general elections in June 2015, the left-wing pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party, HDP, made a historic win by securing 13% of votes and for the first time passing the 10% threshold. The AKP lost its majority government after over a decade. Furious at the Kurdish political movement, the Turkish government under the AKP's rule conducted a country-wide campaign of arrest and repression, and the state violence against Kurdish politicians, activists and civil society reached an unprecedented level. In the summer of 2015, Kurdish youth militants started a campaign of establishing autonomous neighbourhoods and districts in different cities of Kurdistan against violent and continuous attacks by the Turkish security forces against their neighbourhoods and spaces of organising. This move was later called Berxwedana Xweserî or 'self-rule resistance'. In Diyarbakir, six neighbourhoods of the eastern part of Sur (Cemal Yılmaz, Cevatpaşa, Dabanoğlu, Fatihpaşa, Hasırlı and Savaş neighbourhoods) took part in this resistance. Soon after, round-the-clock curfews were declared against these urban pockets of resistance, and Turkish security forces started a full-range attack against them. The military takeover in Kurdistan was completed by the spring of 2016. After the failed coup of 15 July 2016, the crackdown against the Kurdish movement began in urban, legal and civil society spheres. Hundreds of Kurdish politicians, including mayors, city council members, members of parliament and members of pro-Kurdish political parties, were arrested. Eighty-three pro-Kurdish municipalities (including Diyarbakir) were occupied by government-appointed trustees (Kayyums) and hundreds of non-governmental organisations, collaborative initiatives between municipalities and civil society, and Kurdish media outlets were shut down. In a matter of a few weeks, what Kurds had achieved in urban spaces since 1999 was taken away. There are many stories of violent destruction to be told about Diyarbakir, histories of destruction and genocide that left their own remnants. These remnants from earlier genocidal politics cannot be separated from the current rubble of Sur. As of March 2017, those parts of Sur where 'self-rule resistance' took place continued to be under curfew despite the fact that only bare ground was left behind. Satellite images from Google Maps and a very few blurry photos of the city from above taken by passengers on planes on their way in or out of Diyarbakir airport have been the only sources showing the level of destruction in Sur. Except for a few historical buildings, the rest of the eastern residential part of Sur was completely destroyed. In many cases, even historical ruins of Sur were destroyed and re-ruined. Sur is surrounded by astonishing walls, commonly called Diyarbakir fortress, most of which have survived destructions and remain intact. These walls, with the ancient farms beside its eastern fronts on the banks of the Tigris river (called Hevsel Gardens), were inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in the summer of 2015. Içkale is the inner part of Sur that is separated from the rest by another wall. It is where old governmental and administration buildings, historical structures, and Diyarbakir's former notorious prison where Sheikh Said, the leader of the first Kurdish rebellion after the foundation of the Turkish Republic, was held before being executed in 1925 in Dağ Kapı Square (also known as Sheikh Said Square) of Diyarbakir. Outside the administration quarter of Içkale is where the centuries-old Hz. Suleyman Mosque is located. The urban renewal plan started from this part of Sur in a project called the 'Urban Design and Landscape Project in Içkale Valley', developed by the Ministry of Environment and Urban Development. This ministry is the official body in charge of renovating Sur. When I first visited Diyarbakir in 2013, an entire neighbourhood surrounded this mosque, but that has now disappeared. It is right now buried under green spaces of a modern-design recreational park. Along with building this park, some structures inside the government quarter were renovated and turned into buildings for the Diyarbakir archaeology museum and other touristic attractions. In the spring of 2017, the government opened Içkale to the public. I visited this area a few days after the opening. The entrance to Içkale was through police checkpoints and under the gaze of security forces guarding from the walls. Visitors had overcrowded the area, and most of the people were trying to climb the fortress to see the destruction inside Sur on the other side of the walls separating the rest of Sur from Içkale. The eastern part of Sur visible on top of the walls was the area where curfew was in place. I followed the crowd and went on top of the fortress. The Tigris river and gardens on its banks were at the foot of the external side of the walls. Inside, all I could see was open ground with some dispersed damaged structures and buildings, among them the historical Kurşunlu Mosque, and some trees. People on top of the wall were all looking at the open field, and you could hear sighing and muttering. A few piles of rubble remaining from the demolition of houses were still visible in corners. I noticed an old man sitting on the edge of the wall faced toward the levelled ground and his back to the newly built park. He was still and quiet, with a Tasbih (Muslim prayer beads) in his left hand woven between his fingers. I told myself he must be an old resident of Sur, and he might have something to tell me about what he was looking at. I quietly sat beside him and offered him a cigarette; he accepted. We shared a few moments of silence until he pointed his finger to a tree with newly opened green leaves on its top branches. 'My house was right there. This is either our tree or my neighbour's', he said. I asked some questions about him and his house, but his look was only toward that tree. 'What kind of tree is it?' I asked. He quietly responded 'mulberry', and continued 'in a few weeks, it is going to fruit. It used to give at least five kilos of mulberry. My daughter-in-law used to make mulberry jam from them'. He told me he has been eagerly waiting to see what happened to his house after they left, and since the opening of Içkale, every morning he comes to where he was sitting and looks at his tree. He said he only wished to have a home around it again (see Figure 1). Source: Photo by author A week after this encounter, the government blocked access to the wall with more fences and security forces after the great interest from visitors coming to Içkale to just go on top of the walls and look at the other side. The old man's mulberry tree was not far away from where we were sitting, but it was beyond his reach, most likely forever. His story of such a profound loss displayed the trauma in the city that was submerged under exceptional circumstances of the state of emergency. Borrowing Cathy Caruth's words, it was in every definition an 'unclaimed experience' that exhibited itself in each encounter between place, time and bodies, all implicated in a long-standing conflict (Caruth 1996). That mulberry tree could in fact be a window to a troubling past that perhaps even the old man was not aware of; a past that was forcefully erased from the memory of the city, and the few remnants of it were vanishing. The mulberry season in Diyarbakir starts in May. Walking down toward the old city on Gazi Street from Dağ Kapı Square, it is possible to pass many vendors sitting under the shadow of mulberry trees and selling mulberries in different colours on their trays. Mulberry trees are plentiful in this city. It is (or was) one natural element of the backyards of many old houses in the old city. Around the city's central parts, you can find sidewalks covered with sticky and brownish spots from the sweet juice of mulberries fallen from trees along the way. After meeting that old man from Sur, I was trying to learn about the story behind the many mulberry trees in the city, and quite a few times in small conversations with shopkeepers I asked 'Why are there mulberry trees in front of your store?' No one had a clear answer. Later I found out the impressing yet tragic history behind them. Mulberry trees tell the story of a disturbed past of a city that is condemned to forget. Leaves of mulberry trees are crucial for breeding silkworms, and Diyarbakir was an important centre of raw silk production on the Silk Road. For centuries, silk production was a traditional craft primarily mastered by skilled Armenian and Assyrian residents of the city. In the last decades before the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and especially in 1915, Diyarbakir was one of those places where the genocide of Armenians and Assyrians took place (Şengül 2014). Today, except for a few families, they no longer exist in Diyarbakir and neither does silk production in its traditional from.66 There are new attempts by the government to promote the silk industry in Diyarbakir province. Yet, mulberry trees continue to fruit all around the city. After the takeover of Diyarbakir, the AKP government decided to raze Sur completely and reconstruct another one instead of restoring damaged houses and structures in Sur based on their traditional layout. The AKP had all the legal, extra-legal, financial and logistical support it needed, and the state of emergency after the failed coup of 15 July was the best cover it could find to suppress any form of protest against its plan.