378 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013

New perspectives on Forced Migration and Return to

Village in Kurdistan-Turkey

Joost JONGERDEN1

Introduction

The destruction and burning of thousands of rural settlements by the

Turkish army and paramilitary forces and the forced migration of hundred

thousands, if not millions of (mostly) Kurdish villagers is one of the most

painful and pressing issues in Turkey today. Though the evacuations date

back to the end of the 1980s, more than 25 years ago, they did not climax

until the beginning of the 1990s and still continued into the beginning of the

2000s. The issue has left a heavy legacy, socially, politically, and

economically.

The international community has largely ignored the issue of forced

displacement by associate country/candidate EU member and NATO ally

Turkey, in spite of the fact that international human rights organizations

1 Joost Jongerden is a rural sociologist by training who obtained his PhD in social sciences in 2006. He is associated to the Sociology and Anthropology of Development section of Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His research interests focus on socio-spatial and socio-political analysis of rural transformations, with a strong focus on Kurdistan and Turkey. He teaches courses in sociological theory and the sociology of place. Key publications are: “Ideological Productions and Transformations: the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Left,”special issue of the European Journal of Turkish Studies, Issue 14, 2012, with Marlies Casier (eds.), and Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870-1915, Leiden and Boston, Brill Academic Publishers, 2012, with Jelle Verheij (eds). For a full list of publications, aww http://wu.academia.edu/JoostJongerden

Tunceli Üniversitesi 379 reported the village evacuation and destruction and the forced

displacement that went with it (KHRP 2002, HRW 1994, 2002, 2005, 2006).

In Turkey too, the main political parties and public opinion in general have

remained unconcerned and continue to disregard the issue, though the

issue of village evacuation and destruction and forced displacement has

been raised by various organizations over the years, such as by the HRA

(Human Rights Association), Göç-Der (Immigrants’ Social Solidarity and

Culture Association) and TESEV (Turkish Economic and Social Studies

Foundation).

Much has been said about forced migration and the underlying village

evacuation and destruction, and yet several issues remain unclear or

undisclosed. For example, although the number and location of evacuated

and destroyed rural settlements is agreed, it seems, the number of people

affected is still disputed, with estimations and calculations ranging

anywhere between 400,000 and 4,000,000 people. Still unresearched are

the effects of the massive displacement on local networks of production

and markets: we know that peasant production systems have been

disrupted and destroyed, but we know little of the exact scope of the effects

of the evacuation of rural settlements on the regional economy. The

eviction not only came with the demolition and burning of property (farm

buildings, orchards, etc., see also Etten et. al. 2008), but also brought

about a destruction of the activity-spaces of the peasant economy. The

particular way in which peasants organized production and reproduction,

linked with markets near and far, has not been documented and assessed.

And then there is the issue of responsibilities: the villagers were not

displaced and their settlements destroyed by an anonymous force, but by

an army with a chain of command and acting officers: there remains a need

for justice, such as through an independent commission of inquiry and

possible court prosecutions. This relates to the issue of compensation,

which was not resolved with the adoption of a compensation law for the

displaced in 2004 to recompense for pecuniary losses. The law proved to

be a politically biased and limited reparative effort, and not so much

contributing to a reconciliation as to an antagonizing of relations among the

380 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 Kurdish displaced (TESEV 2005; Kurban 2012). Last but not least, we face

the issue of what may be called the ‘biographical disruption’, referring to the

destabilization, questioning and reorganization of individual and community

life by a subject after the onset of forced displacement. How do people deal

with the psychological consequences and social repercussions of the

displacement, the violence and insecurity, the loss of livelihood and assets,

and how has and will all this affect the (re)organization of individual life

narratives and broader social relations?

Although these are all important issues, however, they are not the

issues I will address in this contribution. Here, I would like to draw attention

to the issue of return, and again, not to focus on security concerns or

numbers, which are discussed elsewhere (KHRP 2002, HRW 2002, 2005,

2006), but rather to look at some of the socio-economic and demographic

issues we should take into consideration when talking about return and

return-to-village programs. Related to this, I would also like to problematize

the ‘rights’ approach (right-to-return discourse), which, as I will argue, does

not protect and empower displaced persons, but surrenders them to the

state.

The structure of this paper is as follows. First, I will say a few words on

the process of forced migration in the 1990s, giving a very brief impression

of the scope of village evacuations, followed by a brief discussion of

government plans concerning return. After that, I will discuss the problem of

return in the context of changing agricultural policies, which seriously

undermined the possibilities for peasants of earning a livelihood, and,

connected to that, I will discuss household income strategies, resulting in

an analysis of multi-settlement, rural-urban living structures. In the final

section, I will discuss the rights discourse, and, in the conclusion, I will

sketch an idea of an alternative research and policy agenda on return.

Tunceli Üniversitesi 381

Backgrounds

As part of its counter-insurgence operations, the Turkish Armed Forces

evacuated and destroyed rural settlements on a large scale. According to

official figures, 833 villages and 2,382 small rural settlements, totaling

3,215 settlements, were cleared in fourteen provinces in the East and

Southeast, namely Adiyaman, Ağrı, Batman, Bingöl, Bitlis, Diyarbakır,

Elazığ, Hakkari, Mardin, Muş, Siirt, Şırnak, Tunceli, and Van (Oyan et al.

2001). In these provinces, the total number of rural settlements (villages

and hamlets) had been 12,737 (Doğanay 1993: 6–7). In other words,

around a quarter of all rural settlements in the East-Southeast region of

Turkey were emptied. Numbers provided by the HRA in Turkey and the

Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP) suggest that most evacuations

occurred in the period 1991-95, peaking in 1993–94 (Jongerden 2010).

The approximate number of settlements evacuated and destroyed is

not really in dispute, but the number of people affected has been a subject

of great controversy. Government sources are extraordinarily precise. They

report that during the 1990s, the total number of came to 384,793 people.

Human rights organizations, however, claim that Turkey deliberately

presents low numbers to camouflage the magnitude of the displacement

(HRW 2002: 25), and have estimated the number of displaced to be as high

as three to four million (i.e., ten times the government figure) (KHRP 2002).

Other calculations tend more towards 1.5 million (Aker et al. 2005: 8) or put

the figure at between 950,000 and 1,200,000 (Tezcan & Koç 2006). Since

reliable statistics are not available, the number of displaced persons is

necessarily a rough estimate.

The resettlement of the rural population did not take the form of a

scheme, in the sense of an elaborate and systematic plan of action

encompassing the provision of shelter and the reconstruction of livelihood

and/or granting of compensation, and for the execution of which specific

personnel and resources were allocated. Rather, the evacuation of villages

was organized in the form of what may be termed ‘rural-to-urban

resettlement tracks’—in essence, the various routes from rural to urban

382 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 settlement entities along which people were forced to move, without

support or assistance from the authorities (Jongerden 2007). In contrast to

a scheme, tracked resettlement is little more than a collection of local and

regional routes from hamlet and village to town and city.

The evacuation and destruction of villages was haphazard but

orchestrated. The concern of the military was to clear the villages. They

were not concerned with what happened to the people after eviction, and in

the towns and cities the hundreds of thousands and more of the displaced

were just left to their own devices. Most first found a temporary place to

stay (such as with relatives in a local town) and longer-term shelter after

that (in a main city in the region, such as Van, Batman, or Diyarbakir, or a

city outside the region, like Mersin, Antalya or Istanbul), mainly through

chain-migration and self-help. The chain-migration mechanism implied that

the evacuees selected urban centers that had already been established as

settlement destinations by their relatives or hemşehri(people from the same

place of origin). The self-help method implied that they would re-establish

themselves in the urban entities through informal support networks.

The evacuation and destruction of villages should not be considered a

side-effect of the counter-insurgency of the Turkish Armed Forces, but one

of its primary constituents, intended to contribute directly to the

“environmental deprivation” of the guerrilla (Jongerden 2007, 2010). It was

a means of destroying the guerrilla’s physical and social environment,

intended to force the enemy combatant into either isolated retreat (high in

the mountains, across the border with Iraq, or Syria) or undesired, hastily

planned combat in urban environments. In other words, space was not a

background for the actions of the Turkish Armed Forces, as it had been in

the initial phase of the war (up until 1991), not an abstract grid on which

events occurred, but rather, as Eyal Weizman (2007: 7) put it, “[t]he

medium that each of their actions [sought] to challenge, transform or

appropriate.” By reorganizing rural space, the army intended to establish

territorial control and suppress the insurgency.

The smoothing of rural space by means of village evacuation and

destruction was a necessary step for the army to achieve the desired

Tunceli Üniversitesi 383 spatial contraction, but it was not in itself sufficient. Permanent semi-

manned checkpoints as well as temporary mobile checkpoints were

established to divide the space and create a matrix of control. Though

checkpoints may initially emerge as a series of tactical responses on the

part of military officers, they can come to assume an overall strategic lay-

out (Weizman 2007: 146). This matrix of control enabled the supervision

and regulation of movements of people and goods. Young men and women

whose identity cards showed that they were from another area were

questioned, the types of goods taken into (or from) an area were checked,

and the quantities subject to limitations in order to cut off supplies to the

PKK (Marcus 2007: 222). It is important to note that such measures as

village evacuation and destruction, the burning of belongings and the

environment, and restrictions on the movement of people and goods only

are possible in a context of a state of exception2.

Plans and Practices

In 1995, the issue of village return entered the political agenda, when a

coalition government of the True Path Party (Doğru Yol Partisi, DYP) and

the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) proposed a

return-to-village program in the context of the Southeast Restoration

Project (Güneydoğu Onarım Projesi, GOP). Not much information is

available about this program, although it was reportedly a blueprint for the

organization of a gradual return to those evacuated villages where security

could be provided (Jongerden 2007, 2010). Return was first publically

mooted even while the war was ongoing and evacuation and destruction of

villages continuing to take place. Evidence suggests that this and

subsequent return plans, among others, aimed to embed military strategies

of control through reconstruction and development plans for the war-

affected region (Jongerden 2007). In 2001, a so-called master plan for

2Martial Law and State of Emergency regulations have ruled the Kurdistan region in Turkey almost continuously between 1927 and 2002, a situation in which civil rights are abandoned and civilians faced a range of grave human rights abuses.

384 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 return was drafted under Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit, leader of the

nationalist Democratic Left Party (Demokratik Sol Partisi, DSP), named the

East and Southeast Anatolia Return to Village and Rehabilitation Project

Sub-Regional Development Plan (Doğu ve Güneydoğu Anadolu Bölgesi

Köye Dönüş ve Rehabilitasyon Projesi Alt Bölge Gelişme Plan).3

In this master-plan, it was acknowledged that the evacuation of

villages and the displacement of people had inflicted much suffering, but

without taking this as an opportunity for facing the pains and suffering or as

a starting point for a process of reconciliation. Rather cold-heartedly, the

evacuation and destruction was considered an opportunity for engineering

a new settlement structure. Therefore, it was reasoned, a plan for

reconstructing the region should be concerned not merely with ‘return’ (of

villagers to their homelands), but also with the creation of the conditions by

which the ‘forced migrants’ could become more productive, both for

themselves and for ‘their country.’ Employing the traditional analysis of the

3Never published, the master-plan was composed of twelve volumes, one per identified war-affected province (Batman, Bingöl, Bitlis, Diyarbakır, Elazığ, Hakkari, Mardin, Muş, Siirt, Şırnak, Tunceli, and Van); not included were Adiyaman, Ağrı, Elazig, Erzincan, Erzurum, Kars, or Malatya (see also Map 1). Each volume, of 100 to 120 pages, contained four parts. The first part, the Definition and Scope of the Return to Village and Rehabilitation Sub-Region Plan (Köye Dönüş ve Rehabilitasyon Alt Bölge Planının Tanımıve Kapsamı), set out the conceptual framework. The second part, Planning Organization and Focus GroupActivities (Planlama Çalışmasının Yöntemi ve Odak Grup Çalışmaları), gave the results of the focus group interviews, including quantitative information on pre- and post-migration work and income, and qualitative information in the formation of opinions concerning the return-to-village process, the support expected from the authorities, and ideas about a future, post-return reality. The third part, a Sub-Regional Development Plan (Alt Bölge Gelişme Planı Yöntemi ve Raporu), was the most extensive (covering almost half of each report), and comprised a feasibility study that assessed the local socio-economic, agricultural, geological, and climatologic variables. The fourth and final part was an investment action plan. Parallel to the twelve provincial volumes, a Summary for Administrators (Yönetici Özeti) was prepared for each province, serving, in effect, as proposals for pilot projects (Oyan et al. 2001). These pilots include an assessment of development potentials, an action plan, and a budget (mainly for road construction, the supply of drinking water and electricity, and the construction of boarding schools for children and of Turkish language and handicrafts education centers for Kurdish women).

Tunceli Üniversitesi 385 countryside settlement issue—that there were too many small, thinly

dispersed settlements, a view long held among Turkey’s would-be nation-

builders—the evacuation was seized upon as providing an opportunity for

the development of a new structure that would be more ‘rational’ and ‘vital’:

Apart from the social and economic problems, the event of

evacuated villages in East and Southeast Anatolia has created new

opportunities and dynamics for the formation of new standards that

can accomplish a new rural settlement pattern; for the transition

from dispersed and unsuitable settlement units towards settlements

units of sustainable size and potentials. (Oyan et al. 2001: 1).

In this narrative, the evacuation and destruction of rural settlements

was transformed from an act of displacement into a context that provided

opportunities for the creation of something new. The aim of the plan was

the development of the region, in which the past appeared as irrelevant,

allowing a separation of the issue of displacement (the irrelevant past) from

the issue of rehabilitation (the desired future).

Others too have argued that the discussion on forced migration and

return took place “within the framework of a policy discourse centered on

‘regional development’ and a ‘technical’ agenda of development,” thus

disentangling internal displacement and return from the Kurdish issue

(Ayata & Yükseker 2005). Though presented thus in a depoliticized

language, the master plan was certainly political in its intended effects.

Essentially, it was concerned with a reconstruction of rural space that would

facilitate better central control and, as was implicit in its discourse,

contribute to the crafting of nationhood (Jongerden 2007, 2010). When the

concept of ‘rehabilitation’ was used, this did not refer to a rehabilitation of

the displaced (by means of a recovery of their livelihood), but to the

treatment of perceived structural disabilities in the settlement structure of

the region hampering effective administrative control, namely, the many

small rural settlements, their dispersed distribution, and the perceived lack

of local level, inter-settlement articulation. It is in this context that the

evacuation of small rural settlements was considered an opportunity for the

design of an ‘improved’ (i.e., integrated, more productive) settlement

386 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 structure. As such, the plan was supposed to contribute to a process of

state-building.

Planners focused not only on state-building but also on nation-building.

The engagement of the Turkish state with rural space reveals a historical

concern with the identity of its population beyond the ability to exercise

control. The conversion of local villagers into national subjects had been

considered to be contingent on the (re)organization of rural space since the

early republican period. Thus, we refer to ideas about turning peasants into

Turks by spatial means, through the construction of settlements which

would make the village folk talk and behave like (as) Turks. This may be

explained through an archeology of the basic concepts used in the

reconstruction plans (Jongerden 2007, 2010). In brief, it was assumed that

the traditional, allegedly self-contained (Kurdish) space would gradually

dissolve to be replaced by a modern, integrated (Turkish) space. In

conclusion, the state’s idea of reconstruction in the war-affected

countryside in the Kurdistan region in Turkey was intimately linked to a

grander strategy of establishing effective control and crafting a Turkish

nation. The plans were poorly implemented, revised, and abandoned with

subsequent change of governments, but given ample evidence about the

way the depoliticized and technical reconstruction discourse is intimately

linked with the pursuit of particular political objectives, the intention to forge

a cultural Turkish identity through and under state-control in the rural areas

is manifest (Jongerden 2007).

Livelihoods: return and employment opportunities

Research has tended to focus on the living conditions of the displaced

after their arrival in cities. Forced migration has been associated with,

among other things, the loss of livelihood, social exclusion and othering,

and poverty (e.g., Dogan & Yilmaz 2011, Darici 2011). According to Çelik

(2007),two issues need close scrutiny in any discussion about economic

problems arising from forced migration. The first of these is that many

forced migrants “formerly subsisted on agriculture and animal husbandry in

Tunceli Üniversitesi 387 their villages, and it is not generally possible to practice either of these

activities as a means of livelihood in cities.” The skills they have for

engaging in agriculture and animal husbandry do not match the skills

required for workin the city, as a result of which many of the forced

migrants have ended up un- or underemployed, with unskilled and

underpaid jobs, for example, as waiters, informal waste collectors or

construction workers. Forced migration also, it is claimed, led to an

increase in child labor, mainly in the street, in the form of washing car

windshields or selling chewing gum or tissues (Gün 2010).

The limited employment opportunities in the city are not only a result of

the mismatch between the skills required by potential employers and those

offered by forced migrants, who thus only offer their labor power, but are

also the result of neoliberal policies. Previously, in the period from the

1950s to the 1980s, there was a high probability that villagers who

migrated to the cities would increase their standard of living over time.

Extended family loyalties and locality (hometown/village) solidarity provided

support (shelter, work) to newcomers, who were thus able to improve on

their difficult initial conditions and aspire to a higher standard of living. As

the earlier arrivals started to be able to maintain themselves, so did their

families and other newcomers follow and establish themselves, a process

referred to as ‘rotation poverty’ (Öztürk 2011). The ‘gap’ left behind by

those who rose up the social ladder (social mobility) was filled by the new

migrants in a cycle that continuously repeated. However, the forced

migrants entering the cities in the 1990s did not have the same

opportunities for social mobility as their predecessors, and many became

trapped in poverty. Not only did the probability for forced migrants of

increasing their standard of living decrease over time, but hopes faded

further as forced migration became associated with a deterioration of living

conditions. There are four important reasons why these rural migrants

have had reduced opportunities for social mobility and are now more likely

today to find themselves trapped in poverty (Gambetti & Jongerden 2011).

The first is the commodification of land, which took place as a result of

neoliberal policies, and tremendously affected access to the city for the

388 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 rural migrants. In the past, the migrants could relatively easily claim

(‘squat’) land and create their own housing without incurring overly high

costs. Today, however, land has become a scarce commodity that the

state, municipalities, and private construction and investment companies

want to ‘develop’ for profit by building housing estates and business and

shopping centers. For the barely established but growing evacuee families,

it has become not only more difficult, but sometimes virtually impossible to

find land on which to build a dwelling. Today, they are dependent on the

private housing market, which is relatively expensive.

The second major problem the newcomers were faced with is

employment. Not only are industrial job opportunities reduced, but, with the

neoliberal downsizing of the state, particularly after the coming to power of

the AKP, public sector job opportunities started to disappear too. This has

gone hand-in-hand with an expansion of the informal labor market. As

Öztürk (2011) concludes, “The proportion of workers unregistered and

uncovered by social security institutions currently stands at nearly 30% in

cities and over 45% overall,” which means that a “large part of the current

unregistered worker population is composed of adults who have recently

migrated to cities and have a lower level of education.”

Third, reduced or more insecure income generally damaged the

traditional support networks based on kinship and hemsehrilik, which

negatively affected their capacity to help migrants maintain themselves in

the city, including those forcible moved there. Fourth, in the case of Kurdish

migrants, however, who were forced to leave their villages as a result of the

village evacuation and destruction strategy of the Turkish Armed Forces,

we also have to take the following issue into consideration, namely that the

migration was accompanied in most cases by a complete destruction of

their rural livelihoods. This not only left these migrants with empty hands

when they arrived in the city, but also with no possibility of getting long-term

assistance from those who stayed behind. While rural migrants generally

can receive support through things like food sent from the family farm and

temporary reverse migration opportunities in times of economic crisis, for

Tunceli Üniversitesi 389 the forced migrants there was simply no-one left in the villages to support

them like this.

Altogether, these difficulties gave rise to the settling of a generalized

‘permanent poverty’ among newcomers to the city that was greatly

compounded for those coming from destroyed villages in the Southeast

(see also Öztürk, Hilton and Jongerden, forthcoming). And we observe,

therefore, not only horizontal (geographic) displacement, but also

downward vertical (socio-economic) displacement (TESEV 2007: 258; Gün

2010), an issue also treated in the case of Diyarbakir by Yüksel (2011).

Yet for those attempting return, there are new problems, livelihood

difficulties that they did not have to face prior to their evacuation. Clearly,

re-establishment as a peasant is difficult because most of the displaced

have to start from scratch: they arrive back to find their fields and houses

ruined. Furthermore, community facilities and services like health care and

education facilities and water and electricity supplies were similarly

destroyed or fell into disrepair or just remained unsupplied. Again, neo-

liberal policies have negatively impacted returnees by undermining their

ability to make a living from agriculture. Briefly, agricultural policies over the

last decade have operated in the following way. Price supports have largely

been replaced by direct financial support on the basis of land-ownership

resulting in a lowering of returns for agricultural products, with reduced

farmer incomes and their strong fluctuation causing insecurity. While

income was reduced, the costs of agricultural inputs increased, resulting in

a ‘squeeze’ (Van der Ploeg 2008: 130).4 Unsurprisingly, farmers generally

are having increasing difficulty in maintaining themselves in rural areas

through their agricultural income. The upshot is a rise in the already

relatively high level of rural poverty, increasingly pushing farmers and their

household members to the city in order to find alternative sources of

income (Özturk 2012: 186). In the Karacadağ region in the southeast, we

even observed informal waste-collection in Istanbul to be preferred to over

4 See also http://www.jandouwevanderploeg.com/EN/publications/articles/the-peasant-mode-of-production-revisited/

390 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 local work in agriculture, which surely indicates the low and/or unreliable

returns that farmers may face there. In this context, and apart from

obstacles presented by the military and paramilitary forces, a return to

village and to agricultural production for forced migrants, the majority of

whom were previously small-scale peasants, is particularly difficult, and all

the more so since they have not been able to adapt over time to the new

conditions, but face them all at once, from the outset along with all the other

problems—including social and psychological—when trying to reestablish

their lives.

Settlement patterns: the spatial context of return

There is little research on the issue of return. The evidence there is

suggests that not all segments of the population return in equal proportions

and that young men and young families in particular are underrepresented

among the returnees. Furthermore, it transpires that people do not

exchange their urban accommodation for a rural one; instead, it appears

that what may be identified as dual or extended settlement patterns emerge

(Jongerden 2007). There is not only no coming back to an earlier condition,

as the discussion on livelihood (above) indicates, but also no coming back

to an earlier place as such, but rather the development of new ways of

organizing living and working space—a development, it may be noted, that

is crucially bottom-up, determined by ordinary people, rather than the top-

down imposition of planning by the authorities such as that described

(above). This is not surprising if one thinks of return in the context of

rural/urban settlement patterns that have been emerging in Turkey over the

last three decades, as indicated by three issues.

The first issue concerns population. During the period of the Republic,

the share of Turkey’s population living in ruraltowns, villages, and hamlets

has plummeted. The relative decline of the rural population began in the

1950s, with urban industrialization and, in the countryside, the

modernization (mechanization) of agriculture. Along with the general

population rise, however, the rural numbers also continued to increase until

Tunceli Üniversitesi 391 1980, when over 25 million people were recorded as living at the

countryside. After that though, the absolute figure also started to decline,

and really quite rapidly over the past decade of agricultural neoliberalism. In

fact, the number of people living in rural areas now is down to less than 18

million people, back to the level of fifty years ago (Table 1).

Table 1. Population of Turkey

Total

(million)

Rural

(million)

Rural

(%)

1

927

14 10 76

1

940

18 13 76

1

960

28 19 68

1

980

45 25 56

2

000

67 23 35

2

010

73 18 24

Source: Öztürk (2012: 140)

Since the 1950s, therefore, the historical 3:1 rural-to-urban population

ratio in Turkey has inverted to today’s 1:3 split. This marks the ‘success’ of

a state policy initially aimed at an urban (service and industry) based

economic growth and later functioning as a massive assault on the peasant

mode of production. Manifestly, this is not a favorable context for village

return.

The second issue to look at is that of a changing demographics. The

general trend is for the young and healthy to move to the cities to find work

and offer better education possibilities for their children, with the village

populated by the elderly, those who stay or who return after retiring, along

392 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 with those who do not have the capacity or desire to face the demands of

urban struggle for housing and income. The number of the rural elderly is

currently growing quickly in both absolute and relative terms, rapidly

changing the shape (widening the upper section) of the rural age pyramid.

During the 2007–10 period alone, for example, the proportion of elderly

people (age 60+) in rural areas rose from 12.7 to 15%, a relative increase

of 15% in just three years (Özturk 2012).

Third, together with the process of migration, people develop a ‘dual

life’ settlement pattern: they switch between village and city, developing a

bicentric pattern of settlement in which household income and subsistence

may come from different sources. Economically, this emerging practice of

dual life is mediated by a transformation of agriculture and relative income

differences between agriculture and other economic activities. In the

context of family and wider social networks, lived spaces are created that

span geographically distant places and develop into multivalent living

structures, in which individuals move (primarily) among places of origin and

work. Localized hamlet/village-to-town/city and rural farming oriented

mobilities, as well as practices linked to the development of

urbaniteretirement/summer villages, combine to develop an overarching

rural-urban connectedness, generalized as dual settlement or multiplace

hybrid life(Öztürk, Hilton, Jongerden forthcoming).

The main thrust of this analysis for the present subject can be can be

expressed in the statement that life-phase based mobility and the

development of multi-place living practices should be taken into account

when discussing return policies and plans for the displaced. Return is not

about going from the city to the village, but about maintaining a relationship

between the two.

The right to return

Finally, I would like to turn to the issue of the right to return. Several

studies have indicated that the displaced express the desire to return.

According to a survey carried out in the context of the earlier discussed

Tunceli Üniversitesi 393 master plan, more than 90 per cent of all respondents indicated their desire

to return home, to the settlements from which they had been evacuated,

with even more, 98 percent, rejecting the proposal that they be resettled in

settlement than other their own (Oyan et al. 2001). This has been

interpreted in terms of the idea that evacuees have a right to decide for

themselves whether to return or not: “Return to village is expressed as a

political imperative, and, therefore, the wish to return is actually the wish to

have the right to return” (Yükseker 2007: 177). This right to return has been

discussed in the context of the broader framework of human rights within

the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, principles that “restate

and compile human rights and humanitarian law relevant to internally

displaced persons.”5

Article 2 of the Guiding Principles defines displaced persons as

“persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to

leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of

or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized

violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters,

and who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border.”6

These principles “identify rights and guarantees relevant to the protection of

persons from forced displacement and to their protection and assistance

during displacement as well as during return or resettlement and

reintegration” (Kurban 2007: 64). Among these, it is stated that “Every

human being shall have the right to be protected against being arbitrarily

displaced from his or her home or place of habitual residence” (Principle 6),

that “Displacement shall not be carried out in a manner that violates the

rights to life, dignity, liberty and security of those affected” (Principle 8), and

that “States are under a particular obligation to protect against the

displacement of indigenous peoples, minorities, peasants, pastoralists and

other groups with a special dependency on and attachment to their lands”

(Principle 9).

5http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IDPersons/Pages/Standards.aspx

6http://www.idpguidingprinciples.org/

394 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013

The Guiding Principles place the main responsibility for the provision of

protection with the state and impose the following four obligations: 1)

protection from displacement (Principles 5–9); 2) protection during

displacement (Principles 10–26); 3) provision of post-displacement

humanitarian aid and assistance (Principles 24–27); and, 4) facilitation of

return, re-settlement, and re-integration (Principles 28–30).7 Related to

return, it is stated that the “primary duty and responsibility [is] to establish

conditions, as well as provide the means, which allow internally displaced

persons to return voluntarily, in safety and with dignity, to their homes or

places of habitual residence, or to resettle voluntarily in another part of the

country” (Principle 28). It is the displaced person who has the right to

decide whether to return or to settle elsewhere, while the state is

responsible for developing the circumstances necessary for the return or

resettlement of IDPs and to facilitate the reintegration of both IDPs who

have returned and those who have resettled. This principle has also been

emphasized by the ECtHR in its judgmentDoğan and Others—that is to

say, return constitutes only one of the options foreseen for a durable

solution, and IDPs have the right to return as well as the right to remain

where they are (Kurban 2007: 64).

In short, the main responsibility for the provision of protection from

displacement and aid during displacement and the provision of assistance

and the facilitation of return after displacement lies with the state. Yet this

‘right to return’ as a human right may be described as something of a

paradoxical project, something to which Hannah Arendt drew our attention

as early as 1951. The original need for these human rights, Arendt argues,

was created by the mass-displacement and movement of populations

during and after the Second World War. Large numbers of people had

become stateless: they were not under the authority of the states from

where they had fled, but were also not recognized as members of the

states to which they had fled to. In short, these were people who lived

under control of a state but without having citizenship. Thus, the human

7 Ibid.

Tunceli Üniversitesi 395 rights approach emerged in a context of rights deprivation, in a state of

exception.

The Kurds found themselves in a situation of deprived citizenship

rights after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey as a nation-state:

they had fallen under the control of a (newly established) state, but were

not considered part of that nation (included, but not belonging, see Hemel

2008). Kurds had become non-citizens and were as to-be-colonized, pre-

citizens living in a state of exception (Yegen 2011).

The present-day problem of those who were displaced by force from

their homes in the 1990s, whose homes were burned, livelihoods

destroyed, is the problem of those who found themselves in a state in

which were made non-citizens. As Kurds, they did not have a political

status, and their loss of home cannot be thought of in disconnection from

their being in a nation-state to which they did not belong. This, of course,

remains a contentious issue, as witnessed by the ongoing failure to resolve

political issues around Kurdish identity (Casier et. al. 2011).

Essentially, the problem with the project of human rights, and thus also

that of the Guiding Principles, is that it grants rights to those whose rights

have been abandoned under a state of exception, and that the very social

agent (the state) that is responsible for the abandonment of these rights

under state of exception regulation is made responsible for the application

of human rights regulations. This is a paradox. “Either the rights of the

citizen are the rights of man—but the rights of man are the rights of the

unpoliticized person; they are the rights of those who have no rights, which

amounts to nothing”—or else “the rights of man are the rights of the citizen,

the rights attached to the fact of being a citizen”—which means that “they

are the rights of those who have rights” (Rancière, cited in Hemel 2008:

20). So, as Arendt (1951: 384) puts it: “If a person or a group of people are

under the authority of a state but are not full members of a state, there is

nothing in the world that can or will stop the state from doing whatever it

likes with them.” This is why concerns such as return and compensation

should be dealt with in relation to the Kurdish issue as an issue of

citizenship. One cannot expect that a state will protect the human rights of

396 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 the very people, the Kurds, it has defined as non-citizens, and rule under a

state of exception.

The lack of extension from Doğan and Others only highlights the

power of the state here. Although a national authority may be ostensibly

bound by international commissions and conventions and called to task by

individual extra-national court judgments, these do not necessarily impede

its general behaviour in substantive issues—just as, indeed, Turkey’s

membership of the UN and signatory status to the Universal Declaration of

Human Rights did not greatly affect its original determination to evict,

displace and destroy the property of its own (technically, supposedly)

citizens without due notice or recompense as a strategy of war and without

any declaration of such.

Instead of conclusions: an alternative research agenda

One conclusion we may draw from these findings is that there is no

necessary conclusion if this involves the return generally imagined and

sometimes engaged in (arguably, depending on the notion of what is being

returned to): we should not, that is, assume to think of and facilitate return

as a simple movement from the city to the village, but in the context of

changing policies and age-differentiated multi-place living structures. The

issue of return should not only be discussed in the context of obstacles

raised by authorities (denial of permission, refusal to re-establish services,

etc.) or obstruction by the army, fear of and attacks by village guards, and

the continuing danger posed by the presence of landmines. The

implementation of return policies should also be considered in the context

of the marginalization and poverty trap of evacuees in the city, together with

the changing agricultural policies and the decreasing importance of

agriculture in income generation for rural households, the changing

demography of villages and cities, and the inter-linkages and multi-place

settlement patterns that are emerging with spatial mobility. These issues

are not yet researched and should be addressed in a research agenda on

return.

Tunceli Üniversitesi 397

In this final section, however, I would also like to return to the critical

evaluations made by Hannah Arendt on the issue of human rights and the

nation-state. These may at first sight present a disenchanting perspective,

but they may also challenge us in a productive fashion. This brings me to

what Murray Bookchin calls “the greatest single failing of movements for

social reconstruction,” namely, the “lack of a politics that will carry people

beyond the limits established by the status quo” (Bookchin 1991: 3). For

Bookchin, such a social reconstruction has to reach beyond the focus of the

nation-state and be based on an active citizenship (Bookchin, 1990: 13;

1991: 7).

Bookchin projects his political imaginary for the recovery of humans as

active citizens onto the idea of confederalism, defined as “the interlinking of

communities with one another through recallable deputies mandated by

municipal citizens’ assemblies,” regarded by Bookchin as an “alternative to

the nation-state” (Bookchin 1991: 7). Elsewhere, Bookchin defines

confederalism as “a network of administrative councils whose members are

elected from popular face-to-face democratic alliances, in the various

villages, towns, and even neighborhoods of large cities”. According to him,

confederalism reaches its fullest development in relation to a project of

autonomy, “when placing local farms, factories, and other enterprises in

local municipal hands,” or, “when a community …. begins to manage its

own economic resources in an interlinked way with other communities.” In

this model, the economy is placed in the custody of the confederal councils,

and thus “neither collectivized nor privatized, it is common.” As such,

confederalism and autonomy are key-notions in Bookchin’s “radically new

configuration of society” (Bookchin 1990: 4, 9. 11). It is a similar vein, of

course, that the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan outlined what he

called a project of ‘radical democracy,’ based upon the self-governing

capabilities of people themselves (Akkaya & Jongerden 2013; Jongerden &

Akkaya 2013).

The aim is to transcend a statist mentality and to reestablish

democracy, not as a future promise but as a do-it-yourself; a self-

empowerment of people comprising their development of autonomous

398 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 capacities and assets. The challenging question—and it takes some time to

get to this—is how to think of return within such a context of democratic

confederalism and democratic autonomy? This is not only interesting as an

intellectual exercise, but also important in creating new perspectives, new

ideas, new approaches to and maybe new solutions for a pressing problem

that has not been properly faced within the context of the state and rights

over the last few decades.

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