Sur: against state violence in Turkey – an interview with former mayor Abdullah Demirbas
February, 2016. A family leave the Sur district in Diyarbakir, among tens of thousands displaced by fighting. Murat Bay /Press Association. All rights reserved. Abdullah Demirbas was born in 1966 in the city of
Diyarbakir (or Amed), Kurdistan. From 2004 until 2012, he served as mayor of
Diyarbakir central Sur District, which has been largely destroyed in recent
months by Turkish military assault.
While news of Sur’s destruction spread globally via social
media, its profound cultural and historical significance is less widely known.
For thousands of years, Diyarbakir has stood as the cosmopolitan heart of the
Mesopotamian region. Sur is the city’s oldest neighborhood, with official records
dating the city back over 3,000 years. However, local experts suggest that it
is far older. Before its destruction, Sur was a lively and colorful place with
narrow streets, cool shade, thick stone walls, narrow passageways, and
luxuriant gardens. As a richly articulated living history, Sur shattered the
stereotype of the Middle East as intellectually backwards and culturally empty.
During his tenure, Demirbas led social and cultural
projects to renew Sur and preserve not only its material and architectural
legacy, but also the livelihood and culture of its inhabitants. He helped
establish the Council of Forty, a multi-faith forum across Amed’s religious
communities, as well as a civil monument to the Armenian genocide, the only one
of its kind in Turkey[1]. In
2012, Demirbas was forcibly removed from office and arrested for using the
Kurdish language in a municipal proceeding. Earlier this year, he relocated
from Amed to Istanbul, where he teaches philosophy and politics in a local
public school.
In the following interview, Demirbas and I discuss the
history of Sur, as well as the recent waves of state violence, repression and
the threat of civil war in Turkey. This was conducted remotely over two
sessions and with the help of a translator. The text is edited in some places
for length and clarity.
Eleanor Finlay (EF): Can you tell
me about Amed before 2004?
Abdullah Demirbas (AD): When we (the BDP) took
over in 2004, Amed was not in very good shape. It was actually a devastated,
abused place. But during those ten years time, we did much restoration of
churches, mosques, and synagogues for example; including
an Alevi mosque and a Yazidi temple. We
made plans to preserve Sur as a whole, which had never been done by any previous
governments or mayoralties. Our plan was to rebuild Sur as it was before the
1930's, with close resemblance to the original. As part of this merging of
Diyarbakir’s many cultural roots, we also constructed multicultural
institutions.
While we were doing all of this
planning and reconstruction, we also paid close attention to our own democratic
values and made sure that people were joining in and giving their opinions on
these issues. We asked the people, we asked the NGOs, as well as the
architects' chambers and stakeholders in related fields. So we went to the
Council of 40, and we made the plans in full consultation with them.
EF: Say more about the Council of
Forty? This is a religious council?
AD: Yes, that's right. This is a unique council in Turkey. Gender
equality and ethnic and religious equality are its ruling principles: so there are
Armenian, Syrian, Kaldani, Alevi, even Turkmen representatives among its different
contesting views. If we have to summarize, we were trying to make Sur reflect its own historical roots, because it is estimated that Sur
is historically over eight or nine thousand years old and that over thirty-three
different cultures have thrived there. Sur is the largest part of Diyarbakir,
making Diyarbakir a multi-cultural, multi-identity, and multi-vocal city. But
this remarkable diversity was denied at the foundation of the Turkish Republic,
which consists only of a single nation, with a single language, and a single
religion. So we wanted to rehabilitate all of these diverse fragments which
have been under the shadow of destruction and keep them alive for the future.
The philosophical aspect to this is the
belief that the world is a flower garden; and that there are different flowers,
different colors, different shapes; that we have to "live and let
live" in that world. That's our perspective, and we wanted to make it a
reality. We also wanted to give a model of peace to the Middle East, because
the Middle East is constructed of different linguistic, religious, and racial
groups. We plan to make Diyarbakir, and especially Sur, the center of Middle
Eastern peacemaking.
EF: How did the monument to the
Armenian Genocide come about?
AD: We constructed
a monument marking the genocide for the first time ever in Turkey, in 2013. In
our opening speech, we declared that we are sharing in the pain of the
genocide, to ensure that it won't be lived ever again. In order to rule, the
Turkish state has pushed different religions and different ethnicities one
against the other, in an approach based on divide and conquer. However, our view
is that there have been mistakes in the past, and we have to face up to these
mistakes, apologize for them, and look forwards together.
We know that some of our ancestors,
Kurds, during the Armenian genocide, were used as tools in these massacres by
the Turkish state. We apologized by constructing this monument, and we asked
the Turkish state to apologize to Christians, Armenian Christians, Assyrian
Christians, Yezidi Kurds, Jews and Alevi, and also Muslim Kurds as well. If we
can face the past correctly together, we can face a true future together, and
we can live together. That's the reason why we built the genocide monument.
EF: How did the municipality address
the liberation of women?
AD: For the
first time in Turkey, we introduced female management and a Council of Women as
well within the municipality. As we say, women are half of life, so we want to
have women joining in life in their freedom. Because women are half the
population, we want them to take their rightful place.
While I was running the administration
of Sur, in 2005, we made a decision that if a worker of the municipality is
abusing his wife, the city will cut the salary of the man, giving that sum directly
to the female partner. If he then continues to abuse his wife, we asked him to
vacate the job, replacing him in that post with his wife. If the man has two
wives, we fire him and give the position to the first wife. We also gave salary
bonuses to parents who educated their daughters in school.
We believe that in order to fully achieve
women's freedom, they must also have their own economic freedom, so we launched
projects that brought women into the labour force. One of these projects is the
Tandoori house project. In houses constructed by the municipality, women were
making Tandoor bread, and they were making a living selling this bread to the
market and shops. We also promoted the cultivation of tomato, peppers, and
eggplants on the rooftops of people’s houses, where women could harvest them
once they were dried in the summertime. We did this in order to introduce a
system of organic agriculture, using the original seeds of these products as the
basis for a seeding program.
Thousands flee after a curfew is imposed to 'restore public order', Sur, January 2016. Murat Bay /Press Association. All rights reserved.EF: What is happening now in the war that is raging in
Turkey?
AD: The ‘peace process’ came to an abrupt end last April, and
as a result there is a huge conflict going on right now. Turkey is on the verge
of civil war. Erdogan plans to be not only president but sultan in Turkey, and
because the HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party)[2] crossed the election threshold on June 7, this impeded
Erdogan’s path toward the presidency and the sultanate. So he began a war of
vengeance. The bombing of the Diyarbakir meeting just before the June election,
the bombing of Suruj, and the murder of the two (Turkish) police officers,
these were the triggers of the war. Because there were no third-party observers,
the two sides do not trust each other and a civil war has broken out in the
streets.
But we are now discussing the answer
more than the question, and it is worth talking about the question. This is the
century-old Kurdish question and the whole challenge for democracy in Turkey.
The government’s main strategy for Sunnizing the country, for creating a Sunni
Muslim state, depends on expanding the war. Because of these dreams of
dictatorship, they have inflicted great suffering on the people, on society and
the environment. Already, over 300,000 people have had to relocate. Most of the
cities’ structures and infrastructure have been destroyed. In Cizre and
Diyarbakir, many world heritage sites have been totally demolished. The
socio-economic balance, which was already very out of kilter, has been totally
upended again. We cansum up: that because of his dream of dictatorship, Erdogan
has started a civil war.
EF: Did the PKK set out to break with
the peace process and what role did Abdullah Ocalan play in the ensuing
conflict?
AD: From the beginning, because there was no third party
observer, neither party trusted the other. Now that the process seeking a
solution has not only unravelled but become an “un-solution” process, the PKK
has increased its attacks and its violence.
Mr. Ocalan has been in solitary confinement
since April 2015, such that not even his lawyers can visit him. So he’s out of
the picture. And this is one reason for the violence, because he cannot
intervene to stop it in its tracks. When Mr. Ocalan was included in the
negotiations, all of the violence was stopped. When the Turkish state ceased
meetings with him, and isolated him, violence with the state increased. We
might well conclude that if he were still involved in the solution process,
this violence would not have happened. So it is our wish to see him involved in
this process again.
EF: How do
the EU and US regard this isolation of Ocalan?
AD: Currently
they have not objected to it other than very feebly. Because of public
pressure, the CPT delegation (the Committee for the Prevention of Torture,
Council of Europe) met with him at the end of April, but there has been no
press announcement to that effect so far. And they only went to see his conditions,
not to involve him once again in the peace process.
The US has not acted as a mediator in
this process, yet the US is the only actor who can be effective in this role.
The US should step forward, because the development of peace and democracy in
Turkey will initiate stability in the Middle East region as a whole, and things
will go much better for the different ethnicities and beliefs trying to live
together in harmony in the Middle East.
The Kurds and Mr. Ocalan advocate
diversity and multiculturalism, multi-racialism, multi-religious-ism, and real
secularisim. But the current state in Turkey is radically Islamicized and
Turkified. They have supported at various times, ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other
Islamic extremist groups. This scares the Shia, Armenians, Jews, Christians,
and Alevi, who only number 600 of those who are left, as well as other ethnic
and religious minorities, because the current Turkish state does not tolerate
difference. So our wish is that the EU and US should pressure Turkey into restarting
the peace process again.
For the past century, Turkey has had
this problem. And the reason for this is Turkey’s official ideology, which
holds that everybody in Turkey is a Turk; their language is Turkish, their
culture is Turkish, and they are all Sunni Muslim, so that all cultural and
racial and religious differences must be obliterated. In the last period of the
Ottoman Empire, even Iranians and Assyrians were targets of genocide. After
that, in the Republic, they started on Kurds in Dersim and the Republic of
Agur, because these were the people who were rejecting this monocultural,
unitarian identity. They had to be destroyed, even without any open rebellion,
just because they declared that they were not the same. None of these problems
have ever been solved.
EF: In your view, what is the
solution to the current situation?
AD: First of
all, we should have a new constitution which is liberal, democratic, and for
universal civil rights in Turkey. In this constitution, all the different
ethnic and religious and gender-based differences should be accommodated.
Everybody should have the right to be educated in their mother language. All
the religions and beliefs in Turkey should have the right to be represented
openly. The protectorate system, which is only deployed in Kurdistan, should be
abolished, and the state should face up to its past, its bloody history, and
apologize to the Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Kurds, Jews and Yazidi, as well
as the Alevi Turks. In fact, such a new constitution would also be seen as
meeting the EU’s constitutional demands.
The final thing to say is that we ask
the intellectual community, academicians, and the whole of international public
opinion to pressure Turkey both institutionally and culturally to stop this violent
process and return to peace. We invite them to support our policies of
environmentalism and gender and sexual equality, because it is our firm belief
that especially female independence is the main bulwark of freedom in society.
Moreover, multilingualism should find favour in every state.
[1] The monument has since been
destroyed.
[2]
HDP and BDP
share the same ideology and are allied. However, HDP functions at the national
level, while BDP is focused on the North-Kurdistan region.