PART III

The Actualities of
Everyday Life
CHAPTER 5

Decolonizing Diyarbakir: Culture, Identity

and the Struggle to Appropriate Urban
Space
ZEYNEP GAMBETTI

C
ityscapes are intriguing in that they both carry and efface the
traces of history. The history of the social production of cultures
is inscribed in the material environment not only through
human artifices such as buildings and monuments, but also through the
very ordering of space itself. Material arrangements always act on
constructed space, altering, reconstituting or destroying it in the process.
It is in this way that the city comes to embody the successive histories
of command over the production and arrangement of space. Following
Lefebvre’s (1991) fundamental insight into the relationship between
representation and spatial practice, the city can indeed be conceptualized
as one of the constitutive elements of collective representations of
identity, gender, class and nation. As Ana Maria Alonso puts it,
‘[t]emporalization and memory-making mediate the identity of people
and heritage in space just as the representation and organization of space
mediates the identity of people and heritage through time’ (Alonso 1994:
387). To study the city so as to track the effects of struggles over space
amounts then to investigating into the conditions of possibility of
identity and belonging, since specific places in the city are marked as
bourgeois or proletarian, male or female, sacred or profane, identical or
different through struggles for command over space. Every city thus
lends itself to numerous narratives depending on the type of struggle,
the choice of narrative itself being part of the process of investing the
material environment with a particular memory while excluding
others.
98 COMPARING CITIES

In this respect, narrating the recent history of Diyarbakir, the informal

capital of Turkey’s southeastern region, from the perspective of the
struggle over ethnic/national identity is a choice that leaves out gendered
narratives or class narratives. The event of the takeover in 1999 of the
municipality by HADEP-DEHAP1 accounts for the choice of this
particular perspective. This was the first time that a political party
representing the Kurdish resistance movement took hold of a state
institution wielding local power.
It is in fact possible to subject the case to two parallel readings. On
the one hand, Diyarbakir is a city that has long been subjected to the
homogenizing strategies of the Turkish nation-building project. Turkish
nationalism as inscribed into the Kemalist doctrine sustains a
homogenizing view of the nation. Recent studies have shown how ethnic
nationalism and xenophobia are integral components of the Kemalist
notion of citizenship.2 Camouflaged beneath a political discourse of
citizenship is the idea and ideal of Turkishness. The ethnic underpinnings
of nationalism in Turkey not only generate conceit towards other
members of the nation (Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Jews, Greeks, etc.),
but also sanction ethnic, linguistic and religious purification attempts
(Kirişçi and Winrow 1997: 103–104).3 De-emphasizing the ethnic denial
of the Kurds by Republican nationalism, Mesut Yegen argues, on the
other hand, that for the revolutionary, secular, modernist and centralist
Kemalist elite, the Kurds represented the Ottoman past that the Turkish
Republic wanted to obliterate: dreams of Kurdistan provoked by foreign
powers against which Mustafa Kemal’s forces had fought a war of
independence, religious sentiment that secular Kemalism strove to
replace by faith in the nation-state, a feudal social structure that resisted
bureaucratic modernization, and cultural heterogeneity that refused to
be incorporated into the nation-building project (Yeğen 1999: 568,
2002: 884–885). The two perspectives converge in recognizing that the
result of Republican practices was the de facto exclusion of the Kurds qua
Kurds from the Turkish nation-building project.
Diyarbakir’s urban space thus lends itself readily to a reading that
uncovers some of the strategies identified by Öktem that spatially efface
the culture of the ‘other’. Studying the disjunction between the
heterogeneous history of the locality and the homogenous present of the
nation, Öktem places a double emphasis on temporal and spatial
 DECOLONIZING DIYARBAKIR 99

strategies of homogenization—or, rather, on the interrelation of the

two:

This model will distinguish between three clusters of administrative measures

aimed at the ‘appropriation of the material heritage of the “other”—that is,
the eliminated or the disenfranchised ethnie—the ‘transfer of capital to an
emerging national bourgeoisie’ and, last, at ‘the reconstruction of the
“other’s” heritage’. It also proposes three strategies aimed at the incorporation
of time through the imposition of the temporality of the nation-state; these
are: the ‘creation and dissemination of a hegemonic historiography’,
‘toponymical strategies of renaming’ and the ‘inscription of ethno-nationalist
symbols’ on the topography. (Öktem 2004: 561)

The model provides an extremely useful framework through which to

analyze the politics of othering in southeastern Turkey, where a large
multi-ethnic territory was incorporated into the nation-building project
through the purification of what Öktem calls the ‘cosmopolitan heritage
of a place’ (2004: 560).
On the other hand, Diyarbakir also shows signs of a reverse process
of cultural decolonization-cum-recolonization. It is not yet a postcolonial
city, but one caught between the process of cultural decolonization and
the simultaneous process of neoliberal (global) colonization. The
municipality is using its institutional power to reverse the Turkification
of the city. The subsequent re-appropriation of urban space points to the
gestation of a counter-power that operates through the hierarchical
reordering of space according to an alternative imaginary of Diyarbakir
as the capital of Kurdish identity.
While studies on Kurdish migrants or on disciplinary strategies and
homogenization in large conglomerates such as Istanbul constitute a
significant body of literature (Cf. Houston 2001; Secor 2004; Seufert
1997), there has been little focus on the effects of urban transformation
on the lives of Kurdish citizens in the Southeast. This study looks at the
urban politics of nationalism and identity in a city heavily populated by
Kurds with the aim of exploring the dynamics of ‘Kurdish place-making
as a process of constructing spaces and stories in cities already thoroughly
gendered, nationalized and memorialized’ (Houston 2005: 103).
Furthermore, it will show how the renegotiation of Diyarbakir’s culture
and history constructs a foothold or ground within Turkish territory for
a Kurdish identity that has largely been constituted through a violent
100 COMPARING CITIES

struggle with the Turkish state. Diyarbakir cannot be studied solely by

focusing on micro strategies of resistance amongst excluded populations,
as anthropological studies tend to do. The sheer weight of the
municipality as a state institution that forcefully opens up a space for
Kurdish culture and identity largely surpasses the narrow limits of
everyday subversion because it furnishes subversion with agency, vision
and coordination. For, even though it may be true that ‘people subvert,
lucidly or practically, the intentions of states and their planners, and
cities are partially constituted through the very resistance their built
environments provoke’ (Houston 2005: 103), in Diyarbakir, ‘people’
have two opposing sets of planners and agencies to resist or to enforce.
The municipality, in fact, both embodies and constructs a form of
collective action that consciously aims to modify the existing urban
environment.
Nevertheless, the poverty and misery caused by massive migration to
the city, especially in the 1990s, when the Turkish armed forces raised
the dose of violence it used against the rural population, has presented
a stumbling block in the way of the re-appropriation of urban space.
Immigration in two big waves, in the 1970s mainly for economic reasons
and in the 1990s for political reasons, flooded Diyarbakir in the span of
30 years. The most striking wave was undoubtedly the one in the 1990s.
According to a Göç-Der (Immigrants’ Association for Social Cooperation
and Culture) report, as many as 3,438 villages were burnt or forcibly
evacuated by security forces since the beginning of the war in the eastern
and southeastern provinces (Barut 2001: 12). Many villagers also fled
for being caught up in cross-fire between the PKK and the Turkish army.
Diyarbakir’s population nearly tripled, despite the fact that outgoing
migration to western Turkish cities or to Europe was also high.4 Problems
such as unemployment, poverty, lack of infrastructure, health care and
hygiene grew out of proportion with the second wave of migration.
Former villagers, with little or no mastery of the Turkish language in the
case of women, were forced to settle in an unfamiliar urban environment
that created a whole new set of social problems, not only for the
immigrants themselves but also for the urban texture. Various strategies
of governmentality are deployed both by the state and the municipality
to cope with the sheer number of the migrants. The outcome is the
development of a complex game of interdependencies between the
central government, the municipality and national or transnational
 DECOLONIZING DIYARBAKIR 101

capital. The latter is called into being as a mechanism of governmentality

by the very plight of the migrants. While migrant populations are coping
with the forced transformation from rural migrants into urban actors,
how the rivalry between power and counter-power shapes their responses
to deprivation and marginality while at the same time instigating
political passivity and inaction is a question that needs to be addressed
in evaluating the decolonization process.
This chapter will first explore the physical urban space in view of signs
of assimilation and subsequent re-appropriation. The cultural revival and
decolonization process, initiated by the DEHAP municipality but
proliferating through the activities of a plethora of social actors, will be
the next focus. A detour through the slums of Diyarbakir will finally
provide the ground for a discussion of the limits of decolonization and
of the challenges facing both the municipality and the city as a whole.
It should be noted at the onset that Diyarbakir is a unique case that
does not compare well with other cities in the Southeast. Its status as the
informal Kurdish capital has been constituted through the recognition
European parliamentarians and politicians have lent the city throughout
the civil war. Istanbul-Ankara-Diyarbakir is the now familiar trajectory
of European delegations to Turkey. Diyarbakir is thus a micro cosmos as
well as an example of provincial cosmopolitanism.

THE COLONIZED CITY

Diyarbakir’s actual layout reflects its transformation to a significant
degree. The historical city is surrounded by impressive walls harbouring
a formerly central quarter, Suriçi, which is divided into four equal slices
by intersecting arteries. Relatively low apartment buildings border the
main trade roads, while the remaining parts of Suriçi are residential
labyrinths of serpentine alleys and two-storey houses. Suriçi is thus a real
enclave, probably constructed before the Christian era, and sits atop of
cliffs that follow the contours of the Tigris Valley below. The inner
spatial arrangement carries the traits of the traditional Anatolian city that
sprung up spontaneously, with little or no planning (Acun 2002: 259).
The historical area is presently inhabited by immigrants from villages
and smaller towns around the city and is one of the poorest quarters.
Skimpily clad children play in the narrow alleys. Women in white head
coverings and colourful baggy pants squat at doorsteps to knit or talk to
102 COMPARING CITIES

each other in Kurdish. Suriçi also used to harbour the darkest of elements
in Diyarbakir: the army headquarters, the State Security Court and the
(in)famous Diyarbakir prison. These are rendered invisible by an inner
fortress, whose entrance used to be barred by military signs and road
blocks.
A relatively large town even at the turn of the twentieth century,
Diyarbakir overflowed the enclave into a new quarter sprawling outside
the walls and stretching the city westward from the 1930s onward. With
its modern buildings and large roads, the new quarters (Yenisehir or,
literally, ‘New City’) are where the civilian authorities and modern
business is now located. The Metropolitan Municipality, the Governor’s
Office, a high-brow commercial zone ironically called Ofis, and the
branches of various political parties unions are all in Yenisehir. It is in
this zone that the effects of modernization and globalization are felt the
most. The MMM Migros Hypermarket, Kentucky Fried Chicken, the
Dedeman Hotel Tower, and the Galleria Shopping Mall with its movie
theatres and cultural centre are visible at first sight. Surrounding this
zone are districts that were virtually nonexistent until the early 1960s.
The most striking is Baglar, a huge district of almost 400,000 inhabitants,
constructed on former orchards as the Turkish name indicates. These
outgrowths of the city are sad echoes of the massive migration into the
city, for the most part after 1980. Finally, several kilometres away from
the city centre, at a good distance from the centre and the immigrants’
quarters, stand artificial cités, or residential apartment blocks. Some were
constructed to house the influx of immigrants; some were and are being
constructed for the upper class city dwellers who no longer want to mix
with immigrants in the city centre. Complete with green areas and
grocery stores, the cités stretch Diyarbakir further out into the
countryside. With such names as Polat Millennium, they strikingly
resemble Istanbul’s posh cités, with the single exception that formerly
pastoral villages that somehow resisted the assault may occasionally pop
up between the 15–20 storey apartment blocks to shock unsuspecting
visitors such as myself.
Although this layout corresponds to the ‘normal’ pattern of urban
growth that can be observed in other cities in Turkey and elsewhere, a
closer look reveals what Öktem calls the strategies of destruction and
neglect ‘directed at exterminating the ‘other’ as a material and historical
 DECOLONIZING DIYARBAKIR 103

entity and to render its traces in space and time invisible’ (Öktem 2004:
567).
The destruction of the local history of Diyarbakir began immediately
after the crushing of the rebellion of the Kurdish leader Sheik Said by
the forces of the Republic in 1925. The central government exiled
hundreds of members of the most powerful Kurdish families in
Diyarbakir to western Turkish cities (Beysanoglu 2001: 1026). The East
of the Euphrates River was declared a forbidden zone for foreigners
without proper permission from government authorities (Beysanoglu
2001: 1063). But the actual physical destruction came in 1931, when
the local governor of Diyarbakir decided to demolish part of the walls
surrounding the city on grounds that the city could not ‘breathe’ during
the hot summer months (Beysanoglu 2001: 1035–1037; Diken 2002:
40–42, 87–93). The 12-meter high, 3.5-meter thick ancient walls at
Dagkapi and Mardinkapi, the northern and southern gates of the city
respectively, were torn down by dynamite to allow air currents within
the Tigris Valley to traverse the city. In addition, the local population
was encouraged to use the basalt stones that constitute the walls as
construction material. Thus, two of the 82 towers linking the walls now
stand like jagged teeth against the sky. The destruction was curbed in
1932 by the personal efforts of a foreign archaeologist, Albert Louis
Gabriel, who contested the logic of the enterprise and pleaded with the
central authorities to preserve the historical heritage.
Shadowed by this clearly visible destruction scheme, a more
inconspicuous process of effacement through neglect was also taking
place, this time directed against the traces of non-Muslim presence in
the city. The belfry of the Saint George Armenian Church, the largest
in Diyarbakir, was already torn down before the deportation en masse of
the Armenian population in 1915. In the Republican era, the spaces of
existence, worship and memory of the non-Muslim population, mainly
Armenians, Syriacs and Chaldeans, were entirely left to the up keeping
and financial support of the Christian communities, themselves shrinking
drastically owing to pressures by the state. It comes as no surprise, then,
that the Saint George Church’s rooftop fell in the 1990s (Fig. 1) and the
Syriac cemetery became a garbage dump.
104 COMPARING CITIES

Fig. 1: Saint George Church.

The material destruction of othered cultures and their lieux de

mémoire usually takes on a violent character. A subtler alternative to total
destruction is the reorganizing of urban space (Öktem 2004: 567). One
such example in Diyarbakir is the former Municipality square, where the
first leftist protests and Kurdish rallies took place in the 1960s and
1970s. The first non-Kurdish political party to publicly recognize the
existence of a Kurdish population in eastern Turkey and discuss the
‘Kurdish problem’ was the left-wing Turkish Workers’ Party (TIP) in its
fourth congress in 1970 (Kirişçi and Winrow 1997: 114). The
universalizing discourse of Marxism—class struggle, workers’ rights,
rights of oppressed peoples—was able to encompass the Kurdish problem
while at the same time liberating it from the local (and archaic) confines
in which it had been trapped by the Kemalist discourse. But the
following decade was marked by what came to be known as the ‘East
Meetings’. Kurdish students in universities in Istanbul and Ankara and
Kurdish intellectuals rejected the ‘eastern populism’ propagated by
governments and leftist groups alike (Bozarslan 2002: 855–856). They
called attention to the plight of Kurds qua Kurds, and not as economically
 DECOLONIZING DIYARBAKIR 105

backward Turkish citizens. The Diyarbakir branch of the DDDK

(Revolutionary Society of Eastern Culture) was founded in January 1971,
but was very short-lived. The formation of an autonomous Kurdish
movement was impeded by the March 1971 ‘coup by memorandum’.
Although the generals mainly targeted leftist groups, they ordered the
imprisonment of several Kurdish leaders. The Diyarbakir prison
paradoxically became a site for discussion and debate. The radicalization
but also the fragmentation of the Kurdish movement ensued (Bozarslan
2002: 856–857).
In Diyarbakir, the East meetings would take place in the square
immediately outside the Grand Mosque (Ulu Cami), itself converted
from a Christian temple. The square is now a quasi-useless space with
several glass pyramids (Fig. 2) and functions primarily as roof and source
of natural light for an underground shopping mall constructed by a
former mayor from the Fazilet Party. No trace is left of its revolutionary
past. The Diyarbakir Military Prison, on the other hand, was rendered
invisible within the inner fortress, strictly forbidden to unauthorized
visitors and civilians until 2005. There are at present plans to evacuate

Fig. 2: Glass pyramids at Ulucami Square.

106 COMPARING CITIES

the last military garrison and convert the fortress into a tourist attraction
(Çekül Vakfı 2004). The fate of the prison is as yet undecided, but it
will most probably become a five-star hotel. As in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet
prison, which is now the Four Seasons Hotel, tourists will dine and wine
in candlelight in a building in which, reportedly, torture was systematic,
as one inmate recounts:

Each one of us would be lowered into the sewerage. We would be kept in

the shit till we couldn’t breathe anymore. Every inmate at the Diyarbakir
prison went through this. Anyone who says he didn’t drink or eat that shit
is probably lying so as not to lose face. (Duzel 2003: 2)

The effacing of local history and culture is part of a strategy of

concealment, according to Houston, that is the denial of ‘the very
existence of Kurds, or that ‘Kurdishness’ signifies any referent’ (2005:
117). Öktem (2004: 565) defines destruction and subsequent
reconstruction as the incorporation of space, or the spatial/geographical
incorporation of the othered culture. The incorporation of time, on the
other hand, takes on the spatial aspect of the imposition of ‘the
temporality of the nationalist project on the geography and the collective
memory’ (Öktem 2004: 567). This strategy, which marks space with the
symbols of the dominant culture, also takes on a highly visible character
in Diyarbakir. Two examples are worth mentioning. A huge bright red
arch over one of the roads leading into the Governor’s Square in Yenisehir
carries the inscription: ‘Ne Mutlu Türküm Diyene’ (‘What a joy it is to
say ‘I am a Turk’’). The saying belongs to Atatürk, revered as the founder
of the Republic. The second striking symbol (Fig. 3) is the giant mural
of Atatürk in military attire painted on the side of an 11-storey officers’
club at Dagkapi Square, right at the entrance to the historical quarters.
As Atatürk eyes the square from above, an inscription reads: ‘Those
from Diyarbakir, Van, Erzurum, Istanbul, Thrace, and Macedonia are
the children of the same race, the veins of the same ore.’ 5 The mural is
actually the reproduction of a photograph of the leader, taken before the
declaration of the Republic, when he was the triumphant commander
of Ottoman troops fighting the British navy in the straights of
Dardanelles in the First World War.
 DECOLONIZING DIYARBAKIR 107

Fig. 3: Giant mural of Atatürk at Dagkapi Square.

These spatial practices are actually not infrequent throughout Turkey.

Arches with Atatürk’s sayings greet visitors at the main entrance of most
provincial towns. The lieux de mémoire of the Turkish Republic or sites
occupied by major units of the armed forces are marked by inscriptions
onto natural space. The hills of Gallipoli or the rocky cliff above the
commando training camp near Isparta are examples of the latter. ‘What
a joy it is to say ‘I am a Turk’’ and ‘A Turk is worth the whole world’ are
the sayings that are most often used, but one also encounters flags or
soldier silhouettes carved onto rocks. They serve to reinforce the
founding Turkish imaginary of strength and superiority by reiterating
and visualizing it. But in the southeastern provinces, these practices
acquires a new meaning, carrying out the double function of relegating
Kurdishness to an inferior status vis-à-vis Turkishness and inscribing the
presence and power of the central state into local space. In the Dagkapi
example, Atatürk’s body treading a rock does not only represent the
bodily integrity of the nation as conceptualized in time and space, and
the arch at Governor’s square is more than a banal technique of
identification through interpellation. In Diyarbakir, they stand for the
108 COMPARING CITIES

will to efface the other’s cultural identity—through the enforced

internalization of its defeat, subjugation or impotence. They provide
material testimony to the official policy of denying the existence of a
Kurdish identity.
In Diyarbakir, spatio-temporal colonization through the reconstruction
of urban space is not new, although Turkey’s economic turn towards
neoliberalism in the 1980s has significantly accelerated as well as
metamorphosed the urban transformation scheme. The new districts in
Yenişehir and beyond, erected according to urban planning schemes,
clearly reveal the imaginary underlying the Turkish nation-building
project: modernization and rationalization. Echoing the de-
Ottomanization of Turkish cities in line with the architectonics of the
Republic, a visible order permeates the ultra straight ranks of the streets
and boulevards of Diyarbakir’s new quarters. Combining the
commercialization of land and the subordination of cityscapes to the
singular logic of Kemalist modernization,6 Yenisehir no longer embodies
the heterogeneous temporalities of the past and the present. The
fragmentary coexistence that still marks Dagkapi Square, the main point
of entry into the historical quarter, is effaced in the new settlements in
favour of a modernist perspective or, in Harvey’s terms, an ‘objective
spatial representation’ (1990: 245), itself a political and economic
imperative of capitalist rationality. The vanishing lines in Yenisehir point
towards a predictable future where there are no surprises, no out-of-place
elements: time is predictable, calculated, orderly and even.7 In the mental
map of Diyarbakir, Dagkapi Square marks the border between the
modern moment epitomized by Yenisehir and the uneven temporalities
of the historical-cum-immigrants’ quarters. At Dagkapi, a horse-drawn
cart, a street vendor clothed in traditional Kurdish head covering and
baggy trousers, a secular woman and one in a black veil may still
encounter one another. All levels of duration coexist: historical time, the
time of emotions, of memory and of oblivion. No such thing at Ofis,
the preferred destination of the young and fashionable. An artificially-
created colour spectrum of insignia and logos decorate the main
commercial street. The Sanat Sokagı, off the main avenue, is a clean and
orderly replica of European-style artisans’ streets. This is where the
modern verges on the postmodern in Harvey’s sense: Ofis is the epitome
of the fragmentation and commercialization of public space.
 DECOLONIZING DIYARBAKIR 109

In striking contrast, the Surici or Baglar is spatially marked by disorder

and the temporality of the present. Activity is governed by survival
strategies and the heteroglossia of untamed subjectivities. Buildings show
signs of temporal adjustment to life in the city: ground floors have been
around long enough to receive plastering and even some paint, but
vertical lines are broken by odd additions or the raw bricks of illegally
erected floors. The streets are not spaces that separate the public from
the private, but outright extensions of the private: they can be occupied,
appropriated and used, just like the electricity cables on lamp posts.
Streets are children’s playgrounds, while front doors are women’s living
rooms, used for the purpose of beating bulgur, gossiping, choosing brides
or merely socializing. If Ofis is a milieu of ‘escape, fantasy, and
distraction’ (Harvey 1990: 300), Surici and Baglar are the spaces of
subversion. Like Bhabha’s pedagogical discourses that subvert the
pedagogical temporality of the nation (Bhabha 1990: 297), these
settlements introduce two types of dissonance into the standardized
spatio-temporal configuration of Kemalist modernization. First, the
immigrants populating Surici and Baglar denaturalize the effective
identification of state, nation and space. They disrupt the inscription of
state power on space by twisting or disregarding regulations concerning
urban existence. They further defy the cultural homogenization project
by forming pockets of Kurdish culture within a space that the state
intends to mark with Turkishness. As villagers, they were formerly
invisible to the geopolitics of urban nationalism; now, their very presence
in the city as immigrants disturbs the frontiers of visibility/invisibility
within the space of nationalist practices. Diyarbakir is large enough for
the separation of migrants’ quarters from the rest of the city, but not
large enough for a successful politics of segregation. Exclusion and
resistance coincide and overlap in these spaces. This is, in itself, an
indication of the limits of incorporation of heterogeneity by any
dominant culture.

DECOLONIZATION, OR THE CITY AS MONUMENT

The Kurdish movement was unable to resist through political means the
forced Turkification of Diyarbakir. The Turkish state’s response to the
armed uprising of the PKK (Workers’ Party of Kurdistan) in 1984 was
the declaration of Emergency Rule in ten provinces. An Emergency
110 COMPARING CITIES

Governorship, referred to as the ‘Super Governor’, was established in

Diyarbakir to coordinate the state’s activities in the provinces in question.
What was officially called a ‘low-intensity war’ took the lives of over
30,000 people, half of which were civilians. Large-scale repression
accompanied the war. Hundreds were detained at public meetings or in
their organization offices and charged under Article 8 of the Anti-Terror
Law outlawing advocacy of separatism. Writers, journalists and political
activists who challenged the government’s policies were prosecuted using
Articles 168, 169 and 312 of the Turkish Penal Code. Human rights
defenders were tried on ‘manifestly fabricated charges’ of membership
of, or support for, the PKK. According to Amnesty International reports,
multitudes of people ‘disappeared’ in security force custody and scores
were reported to be ‘extrajudicially executed by members of the security
forces’ (Amnesty International 1997). Two thousand people have
purportedly disappeared in Diyarbakir alone. In addition, curfews
outlawed the streets and public places at nights in the provinces under
Emergency Law.
The reappropriation of a space for Kurdish identity within the city
could therefore only be achieved through culture. The DEHAP
municipality played a central role in shifting the axis of struggle from
the political to the cultural—or rather, in politicizing Kurdish culture at
the local level. One effect of this emphasis was the reordering of the
cityscape. Another was the opening up of spaces of expression and
activity that were unimaginable five years ago.
Culture is still a domain that is widely considered as non-political,
the latter mainly carrying negative connotations (‘being political’ is the
same as ‘being ideological’ in Turkish popular culture or, worse, it is
being opportunistic). The de-Turkification of the city by the DEHAP
municipality was facilitated by the 1995 initiative of the CEKUL
Foundation, a civil society organization, to mobilize several state
institutions around a project to restore the ancient city walls (Diken
2001: 97–98). The walls were reinvested with fresh meaning when they
were transformed into monuments through one of the first major
infrastructural projects undertaken by the DEHAP municipality (the
other was sewage works) (Diyarbakir Metropolitan Municipality
2002: 9).
The project consisted first of bulldozing purportedly 500 small
establishments, tea gardens and shabby restaurants ‘littering’ both sides
 DECOLONIZING DIYARBAKIR 111

of the walls. In their place, the municipality built parks with elaborate
walks and occasional benches. The ‘cleansing’ operation, as it was called,
cost the municipality approximately $4.7 million. In a city where funds
are extremely rare owing to the unwillingness of the central government
to financially aid a municipality that is run by a Kurdish party, spending
this amount of money on an aesthetic enterprise seems irrational and
irresponsible at first sight. But such was the importance of the walls in
affirming Diyarbakir’s non-Turkish past that, although the walls did not
represent Kurdish culture as such,8 the enterprise took on political
significance. In its Diyarbakir maps, tourist brochures and website, the
municipality took care to drive in the message that the walls were the
second longest after the Great Wall of China and the most important
heritages of humanity. In 2003, the walls were the central elements of a
campaign to get Diyarbakir listed under the Seven Wonders of Anatolia
contest sponsored by a private entrepreneur. The walls came to represent
a history that went unacknowledged in Turkish nationalist discourse and
historiography.
Clearing the squatters and having the walls illuminated at night not
only served to unearth the local pride that was under cover for decades,
but also to reconstruct it. In the municipality’s bi-weekly bulletin, the
only page that is in Kurdish almost always covers the city’s historical
buildings and sites, although the pages in Turkish focus on projects
undertaken in various infrastructural areas. Diyarbakir is thus being
constituted as a monument, a place that compels admiration and respect.
Not unlike the cleaning out of the local Anafiotika community adjacent
to the Acropolis in Athens, a hierarchy of space that aims at drawing
boundaries between the monumental and the social underlies the
‘authoritative assessments of order and propriety ruling the specific area
around the monument’ (Caftanzoglou 2000: 45). The consecration of
the ancient walls thus has the double effect of constructing local pride
as well as of transcending it. The confines of the local and the particular
(the Kurdish problem in Turkey) are transcended in such a way as to
articulate Kurdishness to world cultural heritage (the universal or the
global). From identity as a problem to identity as an affirmation,
Kurdishness thus also de-articulates itself from the big ‘Other’, the
Turkish state.
After having first downplayed and then abandoned its separatist
claims, the Kurdish movement had actually opened up a space of
112 COMPARING CITIES

connection with the larger public in Turkey through the nodal point of
‘human rights’. In Diyarbakir, the latter discourse is not discarded, but
it is articulated to the discourse of world heritage. This is exemplified in
the choice of setting for the History Foundation’s Human Rights
exhibition in May 2004: it took place in one of the underground
chambers of the Keçi Tower in the ancient city walls. The re-articulation
provides the Kurdish movement with a different set of signifiers. Instead
of being narrated in terms of violence, exile and oppression, Kurdish
identity is narrated in terms of historicity and monumentality. Instead
of being other-determined and using the language of victimization, the
municipality’s discourse in Diyarbakir appropriates the other’s language
and asserts Kurdish identity as grandeur and glory. Instead of the
evocation of a homeland-to-be or a homeland beyond Turkish territory
(northern Iraq for most), Diyarbakir is attributed with the symbolic
charge of being a homeland, a home city. Instead of being bounded by
ethnicity in the sense of kinship-related affiliations, what is being
constructed is an alternative self-representation that links the history of
a particular place to world culture and creates a different sense of
belonging.
An icon of the city himself, the writer Seyhmus Diken sees the
reinvestment of Diyarbakir with cultural meaning as the endeavour to
implant a consciousness of belonging to city culture. He is nevertheless
critical of the tendency to equate Diyarbakir with Kurdish identity only.
Armenians and non-Muslims, he says, are the absolute ‘others’ of the
regime—even more so than the Kurds. Their culture and history should
not be effaced by the municipality:

Kurdifying Diyarbakir would amount to narrowing the city down. Centuries

ago, this city’s walls were once enlarged to allow room for Syriacs migrating
from Iraq. Half of the population was composed of non-Muslims in the
1870s.

In line with this idea, the municipality decided to reverse the state’s
strategy of ‘destruction through neglect’ of the non-Muslim heritage.
This move contradicts the practices of other non-systemic municipalities,
such as those run by religious parties: ‘recent efforts of municipalities or
state agencies to conserve the historical heritage of multicultural city
centres open the way to a complete reinvention of this heritage. As
 DECOLONIZING DIYARBAKIR 113

vernacular architecture is renewed, references to the non-Muslim history

of the building, such as crosses or inscriptions, are eliminated’ (Öktem
2004: 567). In Diyarbakir, in contrast, there are plans to reconstruct the
Armenian Saint George Church and a recent initiative by the municipality
to rehabilitate the Syriac cemetery was met with satisfaction by the Syriac
community (Diyarbakir Belediyesi Bülteni 2004: 3).
One of the earliest attempts by the municipality to reinvest public
space with Kurdishness and initiate this general climate of cultural revival
was the children’s festival organized in 2000, a year after DEHAP was
elected. The festival was a ‘first’ in several respects: it was the first time
that Kurdish songs were to be sung in public, in an authorized activity.
It was also the first time when the DEHAP municipality worked in
cooperation with a public institution, the Çocuk Esirgeme Kurumu
(Child Protection Institute). The latter, whose Ankara head offices were
predominantly social democratic, apparently did not share the hegemonic
power’s mistrust of DEHAP. Unsurprisingly, the activity was eyed
suspiciously by the representative of the central administration, that is,
by the governor.9 The governor did not allow the children to march in
the streets, but let the festival proceed.10 In the fall of 2002, the children
of Diyarbakir were again to become the first to break a taboo. They were
invited to paint a mural on one of the municipality’s side walls following
1 September World Peace Day (Fig. 4). Among matchstick figures and
flowers, they scrawled peace and brotherhood slogans in Kurdish over
the wall. The opening of the mural was a local event. As expected,
though, the Diyarbakir governor discouraged President Ahmet Necdet
Sezer’s wife from participating, as her participation would have attracted
the national media to the opening.
These were small but important steps in the way of depolarizing
public space and breaking the homogeneity to allow room for local
identity and culture. But the real ‘event’ has undoubtedly been the
Culture and Arts Festivals organized by the municipality from the year
2001 onwards. In the first festival, the governor did not allow for singing
in Kurdish. The whole city was tense; hundreds of policemen,
gendarmerie and heavily armed soldiers served to prevent outbreaks.
None occurred. Open-air concerts, street plays, poetry readings, movies
and other activities turned the city into a huge fair. From the
municipality’s point of view, this event heralded the emergence of a new
114 COMPARING CITIES

Fig. 4: World Peace Day mural.

form of politics. In the words of a municipal counsellor and member of

the municipal assembly:

Culture and arts festivities soften people up and give them a sense of
belonging to the city, a sense of the joys of being metropolitan, of belonging
to Diyarbakir. It gives people the impression that Diyarbakir is not a rural
area but a city. State officials are instinctively attracted to that feeling. Even
the policemen who were rather tense the first year started moving their feet
to the rhythm of the music in the following years… All these were significant
in that they demonstrated to public opinion, to the state and to everyone
how the Kurdish problem could be solved.

The municipality thus not only allowed the Kurdish language to

reinvest open public spaces, but also became the first public institution
to permit Kurdish to be spoken inside and to print posters in Kurdish.
This can be considered as the reversal of ‘the social production of aural
space by the Kemalist City’ (Hurston 2004: 14). With respect to the
Kurds, this aural production had taken the form of an outright ban of
the Kurdish language in schools, public places, publications, street or
 DECOLONIZING DIYARBAKIR 115

village names, and even child names, as well as its broadcast on radio or
TV, by successive laws ever since 1924 and name-change operations were
executed in the 1930s, 1960s and 1980s. The official designation for
Kurds is that they are ‘mountain Turks’ and their language is a ‘border
dialect’ of Turkish. With the lifting of the ban on publications in Kurdish
in 1991, the cultural revival that had begun in the Kurdish diaspora in
Europe since the second half of the 1980s could gradually also find its
way into Turkey (Van Bruinessen 1998: 46).
It is interesting to note that Turkish is the vernacular in Diyarbakir,
whereas this is not the case in, say, Batman. Seyhmus Diken accounts
for this by saying that speaking Kurdish was considered ‘backward and
rural’ among the Kurdish residents of Diyarbakir. As the latter have
completely internalized the Turkish state’s hierarchy of values, speaking
Turkish provided them a means to identify as civilized city dwellers.
Diken remembers his mother scolding him for speaking in Kurdish to
children from rural background.11 Reinvesting the city by re-appropriating
the cultural heritage thus meant re-appropriating the language.
Diyarbakir had to become Amed or Amid, its Sumerian name. This was,
in a way, a reversal of the strategy of containment mentioned by Houston
(2005: 117): ‘the Republic enunciates the existence of Kurds but
attempts through legislation and other means appropriate to this
enunciation to denigrate and transform that social space.’
The end of the armed conflict and the election of DEHAP to the
municipality thus saw the emergence of a new tug-of-war between the
state and the Kurdish movement. The new form of struggle, through
culture and festivals, brought together local actors that were at best
indifferent and at worst antagonistic to each other. Although no attempt
at recognition or negotiation was taking place at the level of the central
state, several state institutions began working together with pro-Kurdish
groups at the local level. These eventually prompted the local governor,
a representative of the central state, to budge from his previously held
position of strict denial and uncooperativeness.
The end of the armed conflict had in fact shifted the site of struggle
onto the terrain of culture and language throughout Turkey. Especially
since the last half of the 1990s, the Kurdish movement engaged the state
into a series of actions and reactions concerning such issues as the use
of Kurdish letters such as ‘x’ and ‘w’ in public places and in names (these
letters do not exist in the Turkish alphabet), campaigns for the right of
116 COMPARING CITIES

education in the mother tongue, the right to give children Kurdish

names, etc. The Diyarbakir Gendarmerie’s explanation of this shift of
terrain in the complaint it filed to the provincial prosecutor is highly
telling in this regard:

In relation to efforts to abuse the EU adjustment laws as well as to demands

for education in the mother tongue and for Kurdish language courses before
and after the so-called peace campaign in view of a democratic solution [to
the Kurdish problem], there arose the need to obtain information concerning
individuals who have applied to population registrars and to civil courts for
name changes. (Sik 2003)

According to the gendarmerie, these activities were signs that the PKK
was using ‘all resources available at home and abroad to create an ethnic
Kurdish identity’. But while this immediate association of any
manifestation of Kurdish cultural identity to PKK activity is still an
official reflex, it did not stop the invasion of Turkish public space by
Kurdish language and culture, especially in Diyarbakir.
The municipality, for instance, runs a theatre that became the first to
perform plays in Kurdish. Naturally, the posters for the play were also
in Kurdish and were hung in that all sorts of public spaces. The terrain
having been gained through the activities of the municipality, other
groups and institutions sprang up to open cultural centres, perform
plays, publish literary journals, open bookshops and project unorthodox
films.12 Despite the lifting of the ban on Kurdish, books in Kurdish were
quasi-inexistent in bookshops in Diyarbakir until 2000. At present, there
are quite a few sell publications in Kurdish as well as in Turkish. After
having been closed down innumerable times by state authorities since
1991, the Dicle-Firat Cultural Centre reopened its doors in April 2003. 13
Striking are signs prohibiting smoking and other warnings in the centre
where Kurdish wording precedes Turkish wording. The centre hosts a
café, a library, and a folklore dancing, music and theatre workshop.
Kurdish periodicals are sold in the café.
The opening up of the space also invited in new actors. The Diyarbakir
Arts Centre (DSM), a private-sector initiative mainly involving a group
of artists, intellectuals and businessmen from Istanbul and from
Diyarbakir, opened its doors in 2002. The centre was established as a
private company and began inviting Istanbullites to lecture, give
seminars, organize scenario-writing and photography workshops. The
 DECOLONIZING DIYARBAKIR 117

professed aim of the centre was to de-emphasize typical categories of

separation of peoples employed in Turkey: instead of the ‘us and them’
or the ‘here and there’ divides, the DSM was to promote the idea of ‘all
of us’ (Altınay 2002). Initially eyed with suspicion by both the state and
the Kurdish movement, the DSM became a forum for art that distanced
itself from antagonistic politics and gained a good reputation in
Diyarbakir. It also became visible in other parts of Turkey, mainly via
national newspapers. This success can partially be explained by the
involvement of nationally renowned intellectuals in the project. Through
these connections, the centre actually succeeded in bringing western
Turkish academia and artists into contact with Diyarbakir’s own
intellectual circles as well as with its public.
The desire to depoliticize culture was not solely imported from
western Turkey, though. Certain local groups also expressed this desire,
but the plight of the literary magazines Çorba and War illustrate the
difficulties of being ‘in the middle’. Çorba was the first humorous
magazine to be published in Diyarbakir since the closing of Amida, a
publication of the Diyarbakir Association of Writers and Artists. Çorba
sold about 1,000 copies when it first came out. Alternative—and more
politically oriented—magazines appeared shortly after. Çorba found it
difficult to survive as a ‘middle ground’. It underwent a name change
and became Aksan (Accent). The aim was to emphasize the magazine’s
belongingness to Diyarbakir culture, where Turkish is spoken with a
particular accent. But the editors of Aksan continued to insist that the
need to reflect the local culture and history of the region should not
overshadow the fact that ‘it is necessary to acknowledge that this place
has a new language now’ (Evrensel 2002). In contrast, War set out with
the aim of becoming a Kurdish-language resource focusing on arts,
culture and folklore. Its lack of political engagement was initially met
with suspicion. All literary publications until then generally advocated
the party line, either explicitly or implicitly. War’s success was assured
when, after the fourth issue, it became clear that the editors were
committed to culture and would not align themselves along political axes
(Diken 2001: 42–43).
Despite the continual pressure to prove the propriety of one’s
intentions, the very fact that a non-aligned interest in art and culture
can acquire visibility within the space of the city is significant. The
impact of this transformation may tentatively be deduced from the
118 COMPARING CITIES

avowedly reduced tension generated by cultural events. DSM managers

point out that for a year or so, each guest lecturer would be bombarded
by the public with the disturbing question as to where they were during
the war. Would they have had the courage to be in Diyarbakir? The
tension seems to have eased, although the question still carries
considerable weight. Particularly surprising for an outside observer, for
instance, were the tone and wording of the interaction that took place
during a poetry-reading event at the Diyarbakir Arts Centre in February
2004. Both the poet Kemal Varol and the spectators took great pains to
choose their words and to avoid explicit references. The questions
addressed to Varol actually had serious implications: why was he writing
in Turkish? What did it mean to be a Kurdish poet? Varol was on the
defensive when he admitted to having been assimilated, although the
way he put it was as such: ‘I have been to Turkish schools. Only when
I start dreaming in Kurdish again will I be able to write poems in
Kurdish.’
Another sign of the impact of depolarization is that Kurdish
intellectuals or writers such as Mehmet Uzun, Muhsin Kızılkaya and
Yılmaz Odabaşı who were critical of the PKK-HADEP line are now
being invited to public events. Mehmet Uzun, for instance, held three
talks in Diyarbakir during the Literature Festival organized by the
municipality and each talk was jam packed with listeners.
This type of encounter is bound to transform the rigidity of identity
construction in the city. Identities that were formed during the war and
because of the war can eventually be rearticulated so as to allow for
difference without losing the cutting edge offered by the resistant ethnic
identity.

MIGRATION, OR THE LIMITS OF APPROPRIATION

It is in fact poverty, more than polarization, which indicates the limits
of the re-appropriation of Diyarbakir. This part of the chapter focuses
on Hasirli, one of those zones that fell out of the temporality of
modernization, to discuss the dilemmas and problems facing
decolonization.
Hasirli was, as it is popular to say in Turkey (and not only in the
Kurdish provinces) ‘forgotten by the state’. Situated within Surici, it is
exclusively populated with immigrants and gypsies. The ‘strategy of
 DECOLONIZING DIYARBAKIR 119

dispossession’ mentioned by Öktem seems to manifest itself here. The

inhabitants of this zone seem to be among the ‘wretched of the earth’:
dispossessed, excluded, rendered invisible. Paradoxically, however,
visibility and urbanization have penetrated Hasirli through the social
activities of the DEHAP municipality, the purported rival of state-led
Kemalist modernization. Thus it can be said that the dialectics of
subjectivation and subjectification are at play: the municipality, elected
by the Kurdish population in Diyarbakir, simply had to move in to fill
in the places left vacant by the central state institutions and, in doing
so, contributed to transforming the migrants into urban actors.
Hasirli’s specificity stems from the fact that it was the first site in
which the municipality implanted its pioneering social project for
migrant women with the aim of alleviating problems stemming from
poverty and lack of infrastructure. The White Butterflies Center (Fig.
5), modelled after a similar project in Sweden, consists of a laundry and
a tandırevi, where women use specially designed bread pits, or earthen
stoves, to cook the flattened dough they prepare at home. Over 350
households are served by the project.

Fig. 5: White Butterflies Center.

120 COMPARING CITIES

The temporality of modernity imposes itself on immigrant women

through the project. Owing to spatial limitations, women were asked to
come in only once a week on a particular day and time determined by
the staff so as to avoid queues and conflicts of schedule. This became a
major source of headache when the women began arguing with the staff
or with each other to have access at the day and time of their own choice.
In the words of one of the social workers: Most of them acted in an
incredibly selfish manner. They found it difficult to understand that
when the municipality offers a service, this does not mean that the place
is theirs.
It took a long time to make the women accept any time schedule.
This was, in other words, a difficult process of adjustment between two
different modes of behaviour, one of them functioning as a disciplinary
mechanism. Most of the women of Hasırlı do not speak any Turkish.
This is an indication that they have not received formal education.
Timetables did not belong to their discursive universe.
After having eventually gained the confidence of Hasırlı’s women, the
staff then began to strike up conversations on health, child education
and environmental issues while the women waited for their laundry. This
practice, although slow in producing wide-reaching results, provided an
important space of contact with an otherwise excluded group. The centre
is designed in such a way as to provide a hall, equipped with a TV and
tea-making facilities, for women to sit while waiting for their laundry to
be washed. Children have a separate playroom so that the women can
talk to each other without being disturbed. Thus, besides the front door,
the centre is actually the only public space available for women to
communicate with each other since they are not allowed in coffee houses,
a popular public meeting space for men. The centre can be said to
provide an example of how the municipality responds to the basic needs
of the multitude—in this case, the women’s need for cooking and
washing—while simultaneously articulating new needs for them, such as
the necessity of regular health check-ups, birth control, alphabetization
and even official marriage.14
The new needs and unfamiliar pressures that being a city-dweller
exerts on rural immigrants is exemplified in the anecdotes on ironing.
In addition to the washing machines set up in the centre, the initiators
of the project thought that a set of ironing facilities was also necessary.
What was not taken into consideration was the fact that immigrant
 DECOLONIZING DIYARBAKIR 121

women were not familiar with fancy industrial irons—or worse, not
familiar with irons at all. Pride and suspicion stopped them from asking
how to use the machines. But several incidents illustrated how ironing
was gradually enforced as a necessity on the women. A woman who
refused to use the iron was beaten up by her husband on grounds that
his sweater was wrinkled. After having mistakenly washed her laundry
at 90 degrees, another woman was panic-stricken to see the head covering
of her husband shrunken and wrinkled up. Social workers figured out
that the only way for her to avoid getting beaten back home was to
neatly iron the scarf, but the woman had to be taught how to do so. The
pressure exerted in the way of learning how to iron actually had two
sources: the husbands and the school teachers. Men who now had to
find work in the city acquired the habit of dressing up according to the
urban requirements of ‘being presentable’. This boomeranged back on
the women in the form of a pressure to learn how to iron. School
teachers, on the other hand, exerted the same indirect pressure, this time
through children. Migrant children are being taught about cleanliness,
orderly appearance and smooth collars in the schools; they accordingly
obtain praise or scolding from their teachers.
The earthen bread pits were also a source of dilemma. In the words
of a highly-placed municipal counsellor: Bread pits belong to the
countryside. These people have to learn how to live in the city. They
shouldn’t have been allowed—worse, encouraged—to maintain these
traditions in the city.
The social worker responsible for the project defends the idea by
arguing that the women needed to cook their own bread instead of
having to buy it: Even if the tandirevi hadn’t existed, the women would
have dug their own pits in their back yards anyway. Many women and
children were injured because they fell into the pit. By providing them
with waist-high earthen pits, the project has also taken care of that
problem.
Social workers boast the merits of the centre: ‘They [the women and
children] didn’t even say ‘good morning’ at the beginning. Now, they
have acquired the habit of greeting us before going on with their
business.’ ‘Even those women who own a washing machine want to come
to the centre. They do this either to socialize, or not to be left out of the
event, or simply to economize water and detergents.’
122 COMPARING CITIES

Can the project be considered liberating? Without doubt, the centre

provides the women with the means of leaving the confines of their
houses. But for some, it brings the frustration of not being permitted to
go, mainly on grounds that they live too far away and that the streets of
the city are too dangerous according to their husbands. Men, in fact, eye
other men with suspicion and cannot stand the idea of their wives
walking all the way up to the centre all alone.
The situation seems much more ambiguous than the social workers
would like to admit. The discourse of poverty seems to have confiscated
all other subject positions in Hasirli and Ben u Sen, where the
municipality’s second laundry centre is located, immediately outside the
ancient walls. In the words of women who frequent these centres,
poverty paradoxically opens up—only to close down again—the
possibility of agency. ‘Poverty is not a fate!’ Uttered in a tone of utmost
defiance as well as of bottled up hostility towards what the interviewer
represents (she is a ‘modern’, educated, urban woman and doesn’t speak
Kurdish), this injunction is an outright denial of the naturalness of the
condition of poverty. That poverty is imposed is a common discourse in
Diyarbakir. Kurds hold the Turkish state responsible for the economic
‘backwardness’ of the region as a whole, either in the form of a wilful
stinginess in channelling funds and investment towards the region, or in
the form of the forced evacuation of villages where the primary source
of livelihood was the soil and the animals.15 The mayor himself, in
interviews to newspapers or public speeches, incessantly underlines the
idea that poverty has been politically imposed on the Kurdish people
through forced migration (Ülkede Özgür Gündem 2004). In the social
imaginary, the solution for poverty lies not in the impersonal laws of
economics, but in political will-formation. The underlying perception is
that the Turkish economy is sufficiently endowed to invest in the
Southeast, had the will to do so existed.
Citizenship becomes the key signifier when lamenting the lack of will
on the part of the state: Aren’t we also citizens of this country? Then why
does [Prime Minister] Tayyip [Erdoğan] continue to turn a blind eye to
us? We have been oppressed for so long.
The ultimate purveyor of employment is, paradoxically, the state: the
ultimate solution to the problem of poverty is the perceived source of
the problem. Whereas the state was the ‘other’ during the heat of the
armed conflict, women preferring to die or be beaten up by their
 DECOLONIZING DIYARBAKIR 123

husbands rather than to take their complaint to the police, 16 the state
seems to have metamorphosed into the purveyor of goods and services.
The inability of the municipality to attract neither state funds nor private
investment to the province could account for the shift in the locus of
hope from the ‘we’ (Hürriyet 2002)17 (the municipality as local
representative of the Kurdish population) to the ‘they’ (the state as the
official administrator of all citizens in Turkey). The plea, therefore, takes
the shape of a demand: ‘Provide us with work!’
Agency seems to be conceptualized as what others are capable of:
‘Make our voices heard’. The interviewer is a bridge, a means of
communication with a state mechanism that is totally absent from the
region except in the form of army and police. Diyarbakir’s slums are at
the margins of a world that detains the key to the solution of the
problem of poverty. Voices have been suppressed, not only through
intimidation strategies or outright oppression, but also through the
extraordinarily high threshold in parliamentary elections, designed to bar
the way for parties failing to obtain 10 per cent of the national vote. 18
As Kurdish parties having no access to parliament, the suppressed ‘voices’
of the Kurds cannot be heard. The interviewer is thus placed in a
position of intermediary.

– Provide us with work, and we’ll work. Men and women, we’ll work
together, in the same factory if we have to.
– Do you participate in political activities to change the situation?
– No. My husband is somewhat conservative. He doesn’t allow me.

Although defiance and demand could in theory translate into political

agency, they are actually blocked by the discourse of poverty. When asked
what would happen or what kind of a life would ensue, what new
attitudes to life would follow the resolution of the problem of poverty,
silence takes the place of an answer. There are no fantasies other than
the overcoming of poverty, no horizon beyond that of poverty.
There is, however, a striking difference between Hasirli and Ben u
Sen. DEHAP’s presence is heavily felt in the latter centre where,
alongside municipal social workers, a DEHAP representative acts as
(informal) manager. He takes on an interventionist attitude, relating how
some of the principles that the social workers would like to implant in
the centres are flawed. The intent to teach the women to take turns
124 COMPARING CITIES

seems unacceptable to the representative. He narrates how he had a row

with the manager for having turned down a woman who wanted to use
the laundry without waiting for her turn. The beneficiaries of the
laundry are seen as DEHAP’s constituency; they should not be alienated
in any way. Another ground for intervention is, admittedly, the private
lives of the women who use the Ben u Sen laundry. The representative
tells the story of how, acting as a member of the neighbourhood
committee, he convinced the husband of a woman not to beat her up.
Although this story is narrated with pride as if to demonstrate the ethical
leadership of the political party, the representative chooses not to
comment when asked why the neighbourhood committee does not
intervene in another case, that of a young girl whose father will not allow
her to continue her education on grounds that there are too many boys
hanging out around the school. The silence seems to point at the limits
of DEHAP’s power: it does not go as far as to risk the contestation of
its authority.
The party uses the Ben u Sen laundry as a ground for recruitment.
For years, the Kurdish movement and its successive parties and
organizations had hailed villagers and urbanites as political subjects and
urged them to participate in the fight against the Turkish state. Now the
discourse has shifted—locally, at least—to the meeting of the demands
of the people, the alleviation of poverty and the raising of life standards.
The neighbourhood committees in both Hasirli and Ben u Sen address
such issues as opening a cultural centre, a library and a football field or
paving the roads, all of which demand funding, from the municipality,
from the state or from private donors.
On the one hand, therefore, the rationalization of time and space
allows for those at the margins of Diyarbakir to participate in the nation’s
universalistic universe by providing access to the skills of urban life
(indirectly, as far as women are concerned) and to the national pool of
funds. On the other hand, there is a marked tendency towards the
particularization and localization of the possibility of agency. Do
Diyarbakir’s slums point to the privatization of the excluded ethnie? The
question of ‘how the organization and representation of space is
implicated in ethnic formation and inequality, in state strategies of
asymmetric incorporation and appropriation, and in the complex
dialectic between hierarchy and egalitarianism, heterogeneity and
homogeneity, in the imagining of nations’ (Alonso 1994: 393–394)
 DECOLONIZING DIYARBAKIR 125

must, given the present limits of this study, remain unanswered for the
time being.

CONCLUSION
As the case of Diyarbakir demonstrates, local constructions of identity
do not necessarily overlap with those in national space. The lost traces
of the heterogeneous cultures of the city may be recovered unevenly by
powers that are brought into existence by the very process of enforced
homogenization. The contours of this reconstruction, both of space and
of identity, are determined by the specific topography of the locality. The
strategies available to social and political actors vary in accordance with
the field of possibilities delivered by the city with its past as well as its
present. In Diyarbakir, the presence of monumental walls and a long
cosmopolitan history provided the municipality with the possibility of
articulating Kurdish culture to world heritage. It was thus able to
produce a discourse of grandeur—with the accompanying subjectivity
of belonging. It used the monuments as props to organize cultural
festivals, thereby dissipating the sordid atmosphere that reined the city
during the war. As such, it animated the ‘heritage’, bringing it alive and
stamping it with the promise of a better future. How far the sense of
belonging could—and can—reach will nevertheless be demonstrated by
the plight of the migrants that now constitute two-thirds of the city’s
population. As well as struggling with the various agents of the Turkish
state to open up a space for Kurdish culture and identity, the Kurdish
movement will also have to address the demands of the worse-off among
the migrants. That task cannot solely be accomplished through festivals.
Although culture does provide a temporary space for unity, the city is
still marked and divided by economic constraint.
The conditions of possibility of the re-appropriation of urban space
in Diyarbakir were not produced locally, of course. The PKK’s unilateral
ceasefire in 1998 and Turkey’s aspiration to become a full member of the
European Union, as well as the change of direction and strategy within
the Kurdish movement itself, have all enabled the city’s transformation
into a haven of activism and Kurdish cultural expression.
And yet, the dynamics initiated by the municipality point to two gaps
in available theorizing. As important and meaningful it is to study the
plight of migrant Kurds in western Turkish cities, the construction of
126 COMPARING CITIES

Kurdish identity through economic and political othering no longer

seems to apply to spaces inhabited mainly by Kurds, especially where the
institutionalization of the Kurdish movement has taken place. And
second, this very institutionalization carries with it the possibility of
‘normalization’ in the Foucauldian sense. Having become a norm-making
power that struggles to implant its own marks on space and to construct
its own subjectivities, the DEHAP municipality’s path now crosses those
of other normalizing powers, primarily that of global capital. The effects
of neoliberal globalization on the Kurds in Turkey will not be the same
in Diyarbakir and Istanbul.

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NOTES

1. DEHAP is the last in a series of banned and subsequently renamed Kurdish parties.
When the party won the municipal elections it was called HADEP. For practical
purposes, I will use the acronym DEHAP from now on. For the legalization of the
Kurdish movement through successive parties, cf. Barkey 1998.
2. Cf. particularly Oran 1996 and Parla 1995. Andrew Mango (1999), is largely
sympathetic of Atatürk’s pragmatism, but nevertheless documents how he either
encouraged or turned a blind eye to the violent repression of the Kurds in
southeastern provinces by the government.
3. An early example is the 1934 Settlements Law dividing the population into three
groups: Turkish-speakers of Turkish ethnicity, non-Turkish speakers belonging to
Turkish culture (Albanians, Circassians, Pomacs, Tartars, etc.), and non-Turkish
128 COMPARING CITIES

speakers who do not belong to Turkish culture. The declared aim of the law was to
‘create a country that speaks one language, and thinks and feels in the same way’.
4. There are contradictory statistics about Diyarbakir’s population. According to the
municipality, the city now hosts over a million inhabitants, up from around 300,000
in 1993. The official figures of the State Statistics Institute (DİE) indicate a rise
from nearly 600,000 in 1990 to over 817,000 in 2000.
5. ‘Diyarbakirlı, Vanlı, Erzurumlu, İstanbullu, Trakyalı, Makedonyalı hep bir ırkın
evlatları, hep aynı cevherin damarlarıdır.’
6. I use the expression Kemalist modernization to depict the simultaneous processes
of top-down nation-building (the modern political project) and economic
rationalization through the slow but sure development of capitalism in Turkey.
7. I owe this argument to Hasan Sen, a Ph.D. student at Bogazici University who is
from Diyarbakir himself.
8. The origins of the walls are unknown, but is assumed that they were built in the
third century BC by the Hurris.
9. The governor was not aware of the fact that the Çocuk Esirgeme was among the
organizers, according to an Istanbul businessman who co-sponsored the festival.
Once it became clear that the institute was cooperating with the municipality, they
allegedly received a warning from the governor’s office.
10. The following year, it was the governor who decided to take up the issue of children.
He invited the Istanbul-based Association for the Development of Social and
Cultural Life to tackle the problem of children living in the streets in Diyarbakir.
But the association ended up cooperating with the municipality and the Cocuk
Esirgeme instead.
11. A tragicomic anecdote about the hegemonic culture’s hierarchy of values is the
following: in a public bus in Istanbul, a commuter reportedly said ‘What a primitive
language!’ upon overhearing two other commuters speaking Kurdish.
12. An example is the case of the Galleria cinema and cultural centre. Earlier, there were
only a few cinemas in Diyarbakir showing mainly pornographic movies. The
Galleria cinema manager Mehmet Çetin chose to opt for box-office as well as art
films. He projected the Iranian Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi’s ‘A Time for
Drunken Horses’ in 2003. As many as 20,000 spectators flocked to the cinema
(Hürriyet, 13 June 2003). Ghobadi was invited to give a talk in Kurdish at the
Diyarbakir Art Centre in the Galleria, without notifying the Diyarbakir governor.
13. Like the legal Kurdish parties, the centre underwent a name change, dropping the
former name Mezopotamya Cultural Centre. Name change is, admittedly, one of
the resistance strategies used by the Kurdish movement. After being banned in
several European countries, the PKK also changed its name to become the Kongra-
Gel.
14. A large number of families do not register their girls upon birth, thus depriving
them of an ID card. When the girls come of age, they are simply married by the
local imam, owing partially to custom and partially to the lack of official papers. In
contrast to this, the municipality has recently arranged for the marriage of 50
couples in the Hasırlı neighbourhood.
15. For a detailed study of the political economy of Turkey’s Southeast, see White
1998.
 DECOLONIZING DIYARBAKIR 129

16. Interview with Nebahat Akkoç, chairperson of KA-MER, a local women’s rights
organization dealing mainly with the so-called ‘honour killings’ and domestic
violence.
17. Asked who they will vote for in the 2002 parliamentary elections, women vendors
at Diyarbakir’s Baglar district market are reported to have said: ‘We will vote for
ourselves, of course’. The idea that the DEHAP mayor is ‘one of us’ often comes
up in conversations with locals and municipal workers alike.
18. DEHAP obtained 6.14 per cent of the national vote in the 2002 general elections,
mainly owing to the high amount of votes the party obtained in the southeastern
provinces (56 per cent in Diyarbakir, for example). The party would have had
around 30 deputies in parliament had it not been for the 10 per cent national
threshold. The 1.9 million votes that went to DEHAP were thus ‘wasted’ (Radikal
2002).