The destruction of Kurdish cities in Kurdistan-Bakur/Turkish Kurdistan
In the autumn of 2015 youth organisations in Turkish Kurdistan started arming themselves, putting up barricades and digging trenches in poor quarters of towns. The Turkish army sieged on them with tanks and fighter jets. 350,000 people ended up being made homeless and hundreds of civilians were killed (no one knows exactly how many, estimates start at 250).
This summer I was arrested after I visited the city Nusaybin, parts of which were still a war-zone at the time. Even though little covered by international news, I had been aware of the wholesale destruction of Kurdish cities in Turkey's East (1). At the time of my trip three cities were still declared off-limits by the military (2). In Nusaybin, the latest all-day curfew had been lifted only three days before I arrived.
As soon as I stepped off the minibus that took me there, I was met with total destruction. It was shocking, I had never seen such a thing with my own eyes. In the very town centre, a fence with clearly visible “don’t enter” signs divided the main street. On the one side, normalcy seemingly prevailed: people were ambling down the sidewalk, stopping to look at shops. On the other side, a bombed-out warscape met the eye. While a few houses were entirely reduced to rubble, most of them were partly damaged in some way. They were burnt out, missed walls or window panes, or at least showed traces of gunfire. Since this was a border town, it would have been easy to think that the other side of the fence was Syria – it was not. This was Turkey, this was what the Turkish army had done to its own people. I tried to find a place to eat, but there weren’t any. It sounds almost laughable, but all the eateries had been on that side of the street, you could still see the signs dangling outside completely destroyed interiors.
Sine the only place I found was a pastry shop, I ended up drinking tea and eating freshly baked biscuits instead of having lunch. I started talking to another customer. He told me he and his family, his wife and four children, had gone to live in the village with his elderly parents when the fighting began. When the all-day curfew was lifted three days ago, he came to check on their home and saw that it had been destroyed. Since then, he came every day to the city. It was clear to me why he showed up: he came to resist. To show the military, “this is our city, you are not driving us away”.
I went for a walk through a few backstreets that were accessible. The fighting had left its traces there, too. There were a lot of people busy cleaning up the shards, repairing what they could, trying to quite literally pick up the pieces and begin again. A group of people loitered around the fence, looking wistfully at what remained of their homes on the other side. Two preteen girls told me their stories. They said that at the beginning of the all-day curfew in March, their families moved to the outskirts of the city. There, they were in safety. But they heard the war planes and the bombs from afar, and they saw the towers of smoke rise over their old part of town.
A man came from the other side, climbing through a hole in the fence carrying a television set. “That’s my house, just look at it!”, he said to me, putting down the TV in the dust at his feet and pointing to the burnt-out carcass of the building he had just come out of. He was smiling valiantly, as if it was a joke. I shook my head with sadness. When I saw his facial expression change from a fake kind of happy to a real kind of distressed I immediately regretted not playing along. It was hard to know how to react.
The girls had said their homes had been bombed with war planes. It did not surprise me. How else do you transform buildings of several floors into complete ruins? “In some places bodies are still stuck underneath the rubble. The police do not allow relatives to pick them up. The stench when walking past is sickening”, a woman told me. Already when entering the town, I had been shocked to see one of the most badly affected neighbourhoods from the minibus. I got a good overview of the extent of the destruction while riding past. A large plume of smoke was rising from it. The young woman on the seat next to me remarked: “the bloodshed is not over. The police have hidden bombs inside some of the houses. They do this to kill people who return. Only last week a woman and her daughter died. Opening the door to their fridge set off an explosive device.” (3)
It felt like a kind of duty to jot down verbatim everything people told me. Documenting these horrors seemed like the last thing I could do. At that moment I did not know that later I would be arrested, and everything I wrote would be used against me. I could not know one policeman would go into a long rant, outraged that I dared to write about these events. To him, the fact that the military did what it did was completely normal. The reprehensible thing was talking about it. “What if I came to Germany and talked about the Holocaust? How would you find that?”, he snorted.
I ended up spending three nights in the cell on the police station. Then, I was brought to a deportation centre, from where I was sent home another four days later.
(1) http://mpc-journal.org/blog/2016/02/22/the-untold-story-of-kurdish-repre...
(2) http://www.haberturk.com/gundem/haber/1262897-hakkari-ve-sirnakta-sokaga...
(3) http://rudaw.net/turkish/kurdistan/190720161