The common understanding of space tends to portray particular locations and social events that take place in these locations as stage-play relationships. Locations at different scales, such as the city, square, street or private households are understood as platforms through which social relations like political conflict, work or leisure time take place. This perception anchors the social and the spatial in separate instances that exclude one another; consequently, it brings us to the conclusion that space has no definitive influence over social relations and that events and the social shapes the spatial in a unidirectional fashion.
However, each social relation constructs its own spatiality as space simultaneously determines the respective social relation’s character and quality. For example, both power and resistance are constructed, experienced and transformed in relation to the qualities of a specific location. A more creative approach must begin with recognizing the constitutive character of space in social relations.1 In order to be able to grasp political processes, representations and subjectivities, we have to focus on the conceptions, strategies and imaginations that lie behind the spatialities produced by these processes.
This perspective provides us with an opportunity to make sense of the logic behind the emergence of important urban centers in Kurdish geography, such as Suriçi, Cizre and Nusaybin, as the specific location of security operations and armed conflict after the ceasefire process recently expired once again. This way, we can avoid misinterpreting the new circumstances we are experiencing today simply as a spillover of military-political conflict from the rural to the urban – in other words, as a mere relocation or a field-shift.
In this article, I will attempt to carry out an analysis by using this perspective and focusing on the strategy of space employed by the state/AKP (Justice and Development Party) in Suriçi, the historical city center of Diyarbakır, where an uninterrupted curfew has been in place for three months now. I turn my focus to the period before the current situation, which can be called urban warfare. My main points of emphasis are the continuities in the politics of space envisioned, and to a certain degree implemented, by the political powers that be concerning the Kurdish cities in the 2000s. This focus on continuities will lead us into the conclusion that the roots of political-spatial imagination behind the current strategy, which can simply be called depopulation, extend all the way back to the days in which the armed conflicts did not yet exist.
Regenerating Suriçi
Suriçi is the location of a dual-layer struggle since last summer. The first layer is obviously the level of physical intervention and struggle. Inhabited by 30,000 people before the clashes started, six neighborhoods (Cevatpaşa, Fatihpaşa, Dabanoğlu, Hasırlı, Cemal Yılmaz and Savaş) located in the eastside of Dağkapı-Mardinkapı axis in Suriçi have been under an official curfew since December 2. In the remaining nine neighborhoods, a de facto curfew is in place. Considering the reports by official institutions, witness accounts reflected in newspapers or photos, it is not hard to observe that there are an intentional policies of depopulation taking place and total destruction of the built environment, in addition to losses of life in the district.2
In the meantime, we observe an insistent discourse of reconstruction/regeneration by the political powers that be during this process. First, reminiscent of the infamous slogan used during the Republic Rallies in 2007, headlines of a pro-government daily newspaper Star read: “TOKİ, Get to Work!” According to Star, the damage inflicted upon the districts targeted by security operations was going to be compensated through projects implemented by the Mass Housing Administration (TOKİ).3 The news article established a direct link between the terrorist incidents and unplanned urbanization. In addition, in order to terminate the incidents for good, the article called for the expansion and completion of urban renewal project that had been going on intermittently since 2009 in certain sections of Suriçi. At the beginning of February, Prime Minister Davutoğlu’s statement that “Sur will be rebuilt as Spain’s Toledo” followed the first call.4 Apparently chosen as the “cradle of civilizations” that brings three monotheistic religions together, the Toledo reference showed that the reconstruction plan envisioned for Diyarbakır had a ‘historical’ aspect. Not surprisingly, a few days later during the press conference that announced the ten-point Action Plan to Combat Terrorism, Davutoğlu revealed preparation efforts for a new legal arrangement that would make “the regeneration of cities that maintain their historical texture” possible.5 Such an arrangement has yet to be finalized as of today. However, claims about an administrative meeting that discussed a possible project concerning Suriçi surfaced on certain news channels at the end of February.6 According to the news reports, the meeting was organized by the Diyarbakır provincial office of the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization with the participation of Ministry’s central and provincial administrators, representatives from Prime Ministry Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), and certain local construction contractors. A two-tiered plan was discussed in this meeting. The first part involved the construction of a public housing project for 11,000 residents by TOKİ. A significant part of the project would be reserved for the people who had forcibly left their homes in Suriçi. The second part of the plan had to do with an urban disaster relief camp, which would be constructed by AFAD for the period of security operations.
It is difficult to estimate the final form and feasibility of such initiatives at the moment. As the government practices have demonstrated in recent years, this process would probably be carried out in a highly centralized and nontransparent fashion. We cannot talk about a specific legal arrangement or draft projects that were shared with the public. Moreover, and more importantly, these types of renewal plans are not independent from the reactions of different local actors, i.e. the life course of the present balances of power. In fact, the representatives from the armed wing of the Kurdish political movement already stated that they would consider these kinds of initiatives as a “cultural genocide.”7 In fact, there is not much that we know for sure, only highly speculative pieces of information and some limited propaganda material concerned with creating an air of legitimacy at the moment. Therefore, in a climate where physical violence negates any kind of concern for legitimacy, instead of interpreting such statements by the government and reaching categorical conclusions (e.g., restoration of civilization or neoliberal shock doctrine), let us try to analyze the discursive moves of the government through the filters of production processes of space prevalent in Suriçi during the 2000s.
Struggle for hegemony
In February 2011 a delegation composed of Mustafa Toprak, the Governor of Diyarbakır at the time, and members of the parliament from Diyarbakır of the ruling AKP visited the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization in Ankara. As far as is to be understood from the press coverage, their aim was to demand from the Ministry further steps to speed up the urban renewal project, which was already in progress in Suriçi, and Dicle Valley Project, essentially a recreational area project. The delegation complained about the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) cadres, who held metropolitan and provincial municipalities, for intentionally stalling the process. Furthermore, the delegation emphasized the strong ties between these spatial interventions and the fate of ceasefire process, which was at the top of public agenda at the time (and would discontinue later with the leaking of the Oslo talks). Parliamentarian Cuma İçten stated that:
When the resolution process is over, we know that Diyarbakır will host a significant flow of people. We want people to see a habitable city when they arrive. We are eager to finish the landscape planning around our historical landmarks and prepare our city for domestic and international tourism.8
These words revealed the fundamental motive behind the urban renewal projects kick started by two separate memoranda signed by the Governorship, TOKİ, Metropolitan and Sur district municipalities in October 2009. Accordingly, the main goal of the projects that were eventually expected to trigger a complete transformation in Suriçi after renewing İçkale and its surroundings and larger areas of Alipaşa and Lalabey neighborhoods was to demolish slum areas, diminish the area population by transferring title holders to the public housing project constructed in Çölgüzeli region, and increase the visibility of historical landmarks. In more technical terms, the main motivation was to ensure a tourism-focused economic growth by redefining Suriçi’s cultural and historical landscape.
This goal is the unique expression of the merger between AKP’s particular strategy in the 2000s of building hegemony over Kurdish population and the “social development” paradigm nationally adopted at the same period by development agencies, which were singlehandedly responsible for the construction of its institutional-administrative architecture. This paradigm presumes that the road towards regional development is paved by highlighting the values and assets supposedly owned by singular localities.9 The application of this paradigm to the Diyarbakır case suggests a conclusion that the only solution to the city’s underdevelopment problem, which has been growing throughout the republic’s history, is tourism. As a matter of fact, after the announcement of Diyarbakır as the regional “center of attraction” in 2008, as a part of Ninth Development Plan and Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP) Action Plan, more systematic steps towards the implementation of a tourism-based growth strategy, which is being coordinated by the Karacadağ Development Agency, can be observed. Very expensive and comprehensive initiatives such as the restoration of monumental landmarks (e.g., Ulu Camii and the historic city walls) were actually introduced as a part of this strategy.
Despite the complaints about the BDP’s uncooperative approach mentioned above, it is possible to say that municipality administrators and cadres of the period shared a similar perspective on tourism-based economic growth. One can claim that during these years of hopeful atmosphere regarding the silencing of armed violence, a gradual reconciliation on this perspective was emerging between the state institutions, local capital, and certain sections of the Kurdish movement that held the municipal administration of the city. The foundation of this reconciliation was built on the expectation that Diyarbakır would become a regional attraction center over time; in other words, the Diyarbakır capital that left the city because of war conditions would return and the city would attract a qualified workforce thanks to the development of a physical spatial infrastructure. In this way, the construction business capital that constituted the backbone of the city’s already limited economic structure would have more opportunities for investment and the city’s employment structure, which was characterized mostly by unskilled and temporary jobs, would at least be relieved by new job opportunities in service sector. Moreover, the AKP would create new areas of legitimacy for itself by representing the benevolent face of the state. Before the re-escalation of political tension in 2015, this vision had a limited success in creating spatial results. Commercial activity that had concentrated around the north entrance of Suriçi was beginning to spread towards the southern parts; the number of new investments like hotels and cafes had increased; real estate transfers and renovations at a single parcel scale accompanied large scale structural renovations. Despite the fact that demolitions in the project areas were partially completed and the construction of new buildings was yet to start (i.e., these projects were actually unsuccessful), a modest revival in tourism-related activities in the remaining parts of Suriçi was achieved.
However, this gradual and fragile state of reconciliation was not immune to the struggle that was going on at administrative-institutional and ideological-symbolic levels between the state and the Kurdish political movement. Firstly, the tough and long run struggle over the division of political sovereignty turned any intervention that would determine the city’s, and therefore, Suriçi’s spatial formation, into a topic of ruthless contention. In a conjecture where two contrasting strategies of hegemony struggled to survive simultaneously, the administrative structure of the city presented a dual character. This situation was transforming spatial interventions such as transformation projects in slum areas, restoration practices or Dicle Valley Project into entangled fields of struggle. While the Kurdish movement was using the municipalities it held during the process after 1999 as leverage for the construction of what Nicole Watts10 called an “alternative governmental presence,” the governorship functioned as if it were the parallel municipality of the city. At certain times, even an institution like TOKİ, which prioritized short run profitability as a criterion for every project it undertook, had accepted delays and cost increases in its Suriçi operations with the assumption that these would be “prestige projects” that could yield results only in the middle and long run. Meanwhile, the central public administration was trying to by-pass the municipality by increasing its fiscal and administrative capacity at the local level. This intricate struggle process first resulted in state institutions’ de facto disruption of the Dicle Valley Project, which was originally developed by the municipality. The second development was the re-appropriation of the Project by the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization, and eventually the complete expulsion of the municipality from the process.
The practices in which the ideological struggle based on the elements of cultural and historical identity reconstruction was most visible were the restoration projects that had become a sort of competition between the municipality and state institutions. The selection of monumental landmarks in Suriçi, such as Ulu Camii, Surp Giragor Armenian Church, or the Cemilpaşazade Family mansion occurred not only because of their architectural qualities, but because they also reflected the contemporary interpretation of the historical meanings engraved on them. As the Kurdish movement was reconstructing Diyarbakır (which it envisioned, in Zeynep Gambetti’s words, as “the capital of Kurdish identity”) as a cultural-political center, it also took physical and symbolic steps towards the decolonization of Kurdistan, which had been coded as a colony in the political discourse developing since the 1970s.11 On the one hand, the desire to revive the “local pride”12 determined the new political discourse, as was the case with the campaign for the city walls’ candidacy for the UNESCO cultural heritage list. On the other hand, there was a reference to the past multicultural structure of the city that was in line with Kurdish movement’s contemporary political discourse. In opposition to this powerful counter-hegemonic discourse, the AKP reactively emphasized Islamic brotherhood and tried to fill the vacuum left behind by the outdated Kemalist paradigm with the notion of religious community in order to win the Kurdish community’s consent at the political level. As a result, a series of monumental buildings, which have now all been destroyed by the armed clashes, had been reinstituted as cultural entities that rewrote history stone by stone.
Double promise: Service and authority
When one reads the process summarized above with the focus on the political power’s spatial strategy, it can be seen that the hegemonic approach it aspired to achieve was constructed over two intertwined promises. First, there was the AKP’s desire to encounter the terrifying perception of the state by Kurds, dominant in the 1990s, with a “benevolent” image. As Ceren Özselçuk suggests in her analysis of the service ideal as a “privileged empty signifier” of the AKP’s populist discourse, both liberal utilitarian elements and a civilizational discourse with Islamic references are simultaneously mobilized as a part of this promise.13 Within the context of Diyarbakır and Kurdish geography, this promise reflects a specific political assumption and expectation. Accordingly, Kurds who live in a modernizing city and experience the taste of middle class life would break off with Kurdish political movement that has appropriated their will by violence and find their political representation in the AKP, which has distanced itself from the denial and massacre policies of the past and has recognized the existence of the Kurdish population.
Of course, the processes that constitute hegemony, which succeed to the extent that they resonate with daily desires, expectations, and values, never completely exclude means of coercion. Intending to produce consent through the promise of service, AKP had never completely got rid of its authoritarian character during this period, especially since it aspired to hinder the Kurds’ poor opportunities for political mobilization from below. This was exactly the reason why references to Suriçi, and other districts like Bağlar or Benusen, which were all formed by forced migration, sustained by a very dense population with limited material resources, and naturally, provided the most militant cadres of Kurdish movement’s grassroots organizational efforts, were always made through a discourse of risk and security. The real objective in these neighborhoods, which were besieged discursively at certain times by using a language of law and order against widespread robbery and drug abuse, and at other times by employing an expert narrative on the lack of quality in structural stock and earthquake risk, was to disintegrate the urban poor’s material resources, and eventually limit their capacity to act collectively.
Despite occasional conflicts, these two promises could be simultaneously mobilized throughout the 2000s and made the manufacturing of consent possible to the extent that they overlapped with the counter-hegemony strategy developed by the Kurdish movement. Since the movement’s objective of rebuilding Diyarbakır as a cultural-political center involved both a vision of decolonization and a desire for modernization, the conflicts at the administrative or symbolic level did not impede Suriçi’s spatial and social transformation.
Nevertheless, for the AKP, the sustainability of a “competitive coexistence” situation depended on two concurrent conditions. Firstly, the enthusiasm of Kurdish community, which was not just limited to the field of political action, and its material and symbolic resources, should have been under control. Secondly, as the lines of distinction and differentiation became salient in urban space, a differentiation should have followed at the level of political preferences.
The paradoxical result of Kurdish movement’s efforts to rebuild Diyarbakır at imagined and physical levels was that they produced completely reversed outcomes. As opposed to family elders who experienced forced migration before, the poor not only held on to urban spaces, but they also transformed them into the primary field of their cultural and political struggle. The middle classes that were supposed to drift apart from the Kurdish movement as they tasted the perks of modern living, continued to vocalize their desire for Diyarbakır’s reconstruction as the capital city of Kurdish identity, louder and in solidarity with the urban poor.
In conclusion, it is possible to interpret the state violence that emerged during last summer as the crystallization of the fundamental objective aspired to by the promises of service and authority; in other words, it is an effort to reach the goal of transforming class distinctions in urban space into political distinctions through an open and unregulated use of force. The destruction of Suriçi today means achieving the differentiation, which had been envisioned in the previous context through construction, via different instruments.
1 David Harvey, “Contested Cities: Social Process and Spatial Form,” Transforming Cities: Contested Governance and New Spatial Divisions, ed. Nick Jewson and Susanne MacGregor (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 23.
2 A report prepared in January provides a preliminary account of the damage in clash zones: Güneydoğu Anadolu Bölgesi Belediyeler Birliği, Bölgesel Hasar Tespit Raporu: Ağustos 2015-Ocak 2016 [Regional Damage Assessment Report August 2015-January 2016], (Diyarbakır, January 2016).
3 “TOKİ Göreve,” Star, December 22, 2015.
4 Nihal Bengisu Karaca, “Başbakan Davutoğlu operasyon sonrasını anlattı,” [Prime Minister Davutoglu explains what follows the operation] Habertürk, February 1, 2016.
5 “Başbakan Davutoğlu ‘Terörle Mücadele Eylem Planı’nı açıkladı,” [Prime Minister Davutoglu announced the ‘Action Plan to Combat Terrorism’] Hürriyet, February 5, 2016.
6 “Sur’da yıkım sürerken TOKİ görevde!” [TOKI is on duty, as the destruction continues in Sur] DİHA, February 23, 2016, http://dicle-news.pw/tr/news/content/view/501557.
7 Hüseyin Ali, “Şehirlerimize dokunma!” [Do not touch our city!] Özgür Gündem, February 26, 2016.
8 “Çevre ve Şehircilik Bakanlığı’nda Diyarbakır Sorunları Masaya Yatırıldı,” [Problems of Diyarbakir were Talked Over in the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization] Konut Haberleri, February 18, 2011, http://konuthaberleri.com/haber_yazdir_.php?detayID=31484.
9 Nilay Özok-Gündoğan, “‘Social Development’ as a Governmental Strategy in the Southeastern Anatolia Project,” New Perspectives on Turkey, no. 32 (2005); Ayşe Seda Yüksel, “Rescaled Localities and Redefined Class Relations: Neoliberal Experience in South-east Turkey,” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 13, no. 4 (2011).
10 Nicole F. Watts, Activists in Office: Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), p. 142.
11 Zeynep Gambetti, “Decolonizing Diyarbakır: Culture, Identity and the Struggle to Appropriate Urban Space,” Comparing Cities: The Middle East and South Asia, ed. A. Kamran ve M. Rieker (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 99.
12 Ibid., p. 109.
13 Ceren Özselçuk, “‘İktidar Boşluk Kabul Etmez’: AKP’nin Hizmet İdeali ve Popülizm Üzerine,” Türkiye’de Yeni İktidar Yeni Direniş içinde, ed. Yahya M. Madra (İstanbul: Metis, 2015), pp. 81 ve 83.