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Turkey's Kurds Return to Villages, but with Uncertain Future |
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Saturday, 7 January 2012For a long time, Sirri Karabas has thought of moving his family back to their village in Sirnak in southeastern Turkey.
The 52-year-old Turkish Kurd lost his home and was uprooted during the deadly crossfire between the PKK and Turkish security forces in the first half of the 1990s, forcing him to flee to Sanliurfa.
"I've been able to return to Sirnak a few times, but I couldn't even find where our village Kirkkuyu was," he told SES Türkiye.
Thanks in part to UN and EU pressure, the government initiated a campaign to support the return of people to their villages. Karabas and his former neighbors can return to their homeland village now, but Karabas says "there is no life, no hope and trust for the future left in Kirkkulu now."
According to the Turkish Interior Ministry, approximately "half of the people who had to abandon their villages for security reasons have returned home."
The return of 187,861 people was made possible by the Return to Villages and Rehabilitation Project carried out in 14 provinces around Turkey, the state-run Anatolian Agency reports.
But some local politicians, such as Akin Birdal, former Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) MP and member of the parliamentary commission for human rights, are wary of the official numbers.
"The conditions that might speed up the people's return have not been created yet," he told SES Türkiye, adding that the death of 35 civilian Kurds in an airstrike last week shows why it is still not safe for people to return.
However, Sanliurfa Justice and Development Party (AKP) MP Yahya Akman insists that the government's planning and financing of the return to villages "has been very adequate and, as a result, these programs have been largely successful".
"The region is safer now and the quality of life is increasing," he told SES Türkiye.
Gareth Jenkins, an Istanbul-based analyst, agrees that the overall security situation in southeastern Turkey has improved considerably over the last 15 years.
"It is now much safer and it is a long time since the Turkish security forces deliberately burned down a village," he says.
Although some people have returned and tried to rebuild, most of the evacuated villages are still empty, he says. "If you travel to southeast Turkey today you can still travel for many kilometers through an empty landscape with nothing but the blackened ruins of burned villages to show that people once lived there."
"It is not just the buildings that have been destroyed by the forced evacuations and the conflict with the PKK. A way of life has also been lost," he adds.
Birdal explains one outcome of the war in the southeast has been that animal husbandry in the region is now only a fraction of what it was 20-25 years ago.
Moreover, analysts such as Joost Jongerden, a rural sociologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands who has written several books on Kurdish forced migration, emphasizes that the number of people affected by village evacuation has been the subject of great controversy. Human rights organizations claim that Turkey deliberately presents low numbers to camouflage the magnitude of the displacement.
"Reliable statistics on displacement are lacking and to be able to assess the success of plans for return it is necessary to document accurately the original problem and to have reliable statistical data. This is not possible at the moment," he told SES Türkiye.
Jongerden adds that official information on return is in most cases very difficult to verify, as the government does not give precise information on how it defines return, who are counted as returnees, or who returned where and when.
"Yes there is return, but I have not encountered much government supported return," he said. |
Saturday, 7 January 2012
SETimes
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