Ghost Villages (1)

Strange archaeology, strange places are these 3800 ghost villages in Turkish Kurdistan, emptied of their population, often burned by the "security forces" to compel the inhabitants to choose their side. A human and cultural disaster, a total political failure for the army and the government.

[originally published in French on June 20, 2015:

https://www.susam-sokak.fr/2015/06/esquisse-n-56-villages-fantomes-1.html]

The last inhabitants of Budamış (district fo Eruh) posing among the ruins in 1989. Milliyet, August 17, 1989

In Southeastern Turkey, more than 3800 villages have been evacuated or destroyed since the war between the Turkish army and the PKK began in 1984. Often the villages have been burnt or bombed. And those merely left behind by their inhabitants are now so ruined by thirty years of abandonment that one could take them for some antique archaeological sites. Nature quickly destroys, the rain dissolves earthen walls and lime binder, the snow makes the flat roofs collapse, and frost and vegetation disjoin the stones; often, people of the neighborhood finish the work by using the ruins as a quarry.

In the satellite images provided by Google Earth, and with an experienced eye, one can easily spot these disappeared villages. A sense of topography and geography, and a habit of the terrain make easier the understanding of the satellite image. In areas that were hardest hit by the war, around Şırnak, Eruh, Kulp, Kığı, or Lice, for example, it is sometimes enough to navigate the images, virtually following a dirt road that climbs across the mountain. If the image was taken in summer, the pastures are yellowed by drought; the presence of a green patch of vegetation - before total desiccation in a few decades - indicates an old irrigation network connected to a caught spring, where the probability of a human settlement is high. There, one can find ruins, or often just their foundations, which draw, on the image, a precise plan like a cadastre. Sometimes, one can clearly distinguish still inhabited houses, recognizable by their metal sheets or concrete roofs, very clear or shiny in the image. Nearby, blue tarpaulins sheltering fodder are clearly visible, and numerous paths and well-trodden trails testify to a remnant of activity.

Such a virtual walk opens to a better understanding of the region, the relief, the slopes, and the valleys. But it is also possible to use the testimonies available in the press of the time, or from the current press, because these ghost villages are often mentioned again on the occasion of legal proceedings brought against the State by the expellees, or about return movements. They can be found through search engines by using keywords such as "boşaltılan köyler" (evacuated villages), "mecburi göç" (forced evacuation), "köye dönüş" (return to the village), or on the websites of expellees' associations, the main one being the Göç Edenler Sosyal Yardımlasma ve Kültür Derneği (Göç-Der, Association for Social and Cultural Mutual Aid to Displaced Persons), etc. Once you have found a testimony about the fate of a village, you just need to fill in its name on the Google Earth search engine.

Even more directly, there are lists of these evacuated or destroyed villages, notably the one compiled on Wikipedia. Out of a sense of patriotism, the authors of the list have given the place names in Kurdish, which are not taken into account by Google Earth. However, it gives a precise idea of the geographical distribution of the facts of war, the density of destruction, and therefore the migration phenomenon in certain sectors.

The devastated villages are not always located in the mountains, in isolated, vulnerable places, or places suitable for fighters' withdrawal. They are also situated in visibly opulent regions, near irrigated plains, and in this case, the rural exodus, typical of our time, is not sufficient to explain the abandonment.

In the '90s, official sources and the mainstream press did not keep the destruction secret, but they exclusively gave voice to witnesses accusing the PKK. Actually, such destructions were perpetrated by the rebels, in the case of villages refusing food and shelter, or even money, demanded by the fighters; villages being subjected to the control of "village guards"; or being too easily worth to be used as a base for the operations of the "security forces" (güvenlik güçleri, a term that loosely refers to the army, the gendarmerie, the police, the "special forces" and the "village protectors").

But in fact, the PKK had little interest in destroying villages or expelling people out, because it needed the resources of the countryside, food as well as livestock, fodder, and recruits. Conversely, the "security forces" had an interest in destroying villages or expelling their inhabitants, implementing the old scorched earth policy, by which one seeks to deprive the enemy of any possibility of refuge, support, supply, and recruitment. The Turkish army has demarcated areas of operation that have been transformed into no-go zones, as the French army did during the war in Algeria (1954-1962). The comings and goings were strictly controlled, and any movement of men, livestock, or goods was suspect and treated as such. Often, even grazing was forbidden, as well as the transport of foodstuffs, so that life was made impossible for the villagers, who had to leave "voluntarily" to survive. More radically, the army has compelled by force the evacuation of many villages in the areas of operation.

The destruction of villages or houses by the "security forces" was widely operated as a form of reprisal: an attack on a "protector", a gendarme, a teacher, or any representative of the state, and the entire population was suspected of aiding the enemy - and the village was burned. The same applied to villages that refused to provide "protectors”. The army's doctrine was clear: on September 21, 1989, in Van, General Recai Uğurluoğlu had warned "It's yes or no; either you are with us, or you are with the PKK" (quoted in "Report on Protectors - Koruculuk raporu" of Göç-Der, 2013). And when the population was divided, when only a part paid into the "protection" system, the other inhabitants were expelled.

When finding a ruined village on Google Earth, one must verify, wherever possible, the period of the abandonment. Indeed, not all rural depopulations are due to war, especially in the mountains: a landslide, the decrease of water sources, and, more generally, extremely harsh living conditions (many of these villages are at more than 5000 ft) may have pushed the inhabitants to seek a better life, as it was the case in the whole Mediterranean.

A good way of checking the date of decline or ruin of a locality was, until recently, the official website yerelnet.org.tr, which provided the census figures for each of the villages in Turkey since 1985 [unfortunately, this site no longer exists in 2022]. Most of the time, the evolution of the population of a ruined village confirms what we suspected: the fall of the population (a sudden drop in population, divided by two, by five, by ten, or the total disappearance from the statistical tables) is well situated between 1990 and 2000, with sometimes a recovery which very rarely reaches the level of the population before the evacuation. These data make allow us to avoid possible confusion between villages evacuated at the end of the 20th century and others, particularly Armenian ones, abandoned at the time of the genocide. A rapid decrease in the population during the last decade of the 20th century leaves no doubt as to the cause of the phenomenon: the war, obviously, incited the population to flee.

Regarding a village, of which a satellite image has been detected, one may be lucky enough to find other sources, photographic and textual. Times have changed, people move more freely in most of the former war zones, and former inhabitants, or their children, return to the village, at least for the sake of memory, and take pictures that they "post" on Google Earth. These can be a godsend. They give information about the landscape at different seasons, and about the state of the houses, and often the author gives the Kurdish name of the place. They can refer to more extensive albums that concern several villages, or to sites or Facebook pages themselves linked to a “Göç-Der”. Thus the discovery of a village on Google Earth can be the beginning of a dizzying search, which can lead, for example, on YouTube, to documents such as super-8 movies shot before the destruction.

Moreover, the photos are sometimes commented on by people from the same village, or, if the place is close to military facilities, by former soldiers who served there in the 1990s.

Hopefully, the search on the satellite image can therefore lead to a small constellation of data, including newspaper articles of the time, posted in the archives of daily newspapers like Milliyet or Hürriyet. But one needs to be lucky: many villages have no photos, and their names do not give any results in a search engine.

Several stages, several situations, can be observed between desertification and population recovery. To the villages whose statistics die out around 1995 correspond ruins that are sometimes barely discernible on satellite images, such as Kalkanlı (province of Van), with 230 inhabitants in 1985, 47 in 1990, 5 in 2011; or Pazarköy (province of Nusaybin), 94 inhabitants in 1985, 46 in 1990, uninhabited in 1995. In this region of Nusaybin, as early as 1996, half of the villages were evacuated (Cumhuriyet, 16 November 1996).

Kalkanlı (left) and Pazarköy (right) around 2015 (Google Earth) - Click to enlarge

Conversely, some villages recovered a population level almost equivalent to the previous situation; often, in this case, the village has been rebuilt in the neighboring, in the form of a housing estate with one-model houses, aligned, and easily discernible in the satellite images; in the surroundings, blue spots indicate the tarpaulins that protect the fodder, as in Kocadağ (province of Nusaybin), which population remained stable, around 250 people.

Kocadağ (Nusaybin) in 2011. On the left, general view. On the right, zoom on the ruins (Google Earth) - Click to enlarge

It is also the case for Budamış, in the district of Eruh, a ruined village where only one family did remain. Twenty other people were transferred nearby into a newly built village, but all others have left for Ceyhan, near Adana, 400 miles further West. In 1989, Turgay Gözdereliler and Tunca Bengin, reporters of Milliyet, visited Metin Dündar and his six children, the last inhabitants of the ruined village of Budamış. “We lived very well until 1985”, he said. “We had electricity, and there was even a telephone in the village. But the PKK activists harassed us, they requisitioned money and food supplies. Those refusing were menaced with death, and at any moment we feared an attack. They warned us: Look at the neighboring villages, already ruined, we'll do the same here!” (Milliyet, 10 and 17 August 1989).

Budamış in 2010. On the left, the ruins of the old village. On the right, a general view showing the old (above) and new (below) villages - Click to enlarge.

On the other hand, the village of Çetinkol (Eruh) experienced a population revival between 1985 and 1990; undoubtedly, inhabitants of neighboring villages took refuge there for a time before leaving elsewhere: the population rose from 273 inhabitants (1985) to 304 (1990) before dropping to 78 in 2012. People live now in a new-built village. These kinds of allotments were built under the protection of the army or directly by it, after the phase of relative pacification that followed the arrest of Öcalan, the PKK leader, in February 1999. It might be villages whose population had sided with the state.

Çetinkol. The ancient village in 2010, and the new-built Çetinkol - Click to enlarge

Somewhere between these extremes, we observe in many cases houses or entire neighborhoods inhabited and maintained, in the middle of the ruins, as is the case in Göllüce (district of Darende, Malatya) which has lost three-quarters of its population, but where about sixty people remain in a dozen houses; or Hedik (Lice) which went from 305 to 30 inhabitants living in a few houses.

Göllüce (left) and Hedik (right), respectively in 2015 and 2011 (Google Earth) - Click to enlarge

While the conservative media and official sources incriminate the PKK, the report on the “village guards” issued by Göç-Der in 2013 provides other explanations: very often, after evacuating a village, the guards themselves settled there with their families and got their hands on the “abandoned” properties, the fields, the livestock – provided it had not been slaughtered - under the protection of their tribe and with the complicity of the state. This is how many villages escaped total abandonment.

But, obviously, such confiscations are a decisive obstacle to the repatriation of the expellees. The protectors, many of whom have committed crimes, fear acts of revenge and do everything to prevent their return, including death threats or even murder. The Koruculuk Raporu gives some examples.

In 1993, a man named Yusuf Ünal was expelled from his village of Nureddin (Nordin), in the province of Muş, for refusing to join the ranks of the protectors. He returned home in 2002 to make hay. He was killed, along with his brother and his son (Koruculuk Raporu, p. 11, quoting Özgür Politika, July 10, 2002).

In 1994, the village of Uğrak (Cadê in Kurdish), 350 inhabitants, (district of Bismil, Diyarbakır province) was evacuated by force. The protectors settle there: in 2000, the village counts 70 people. But in 2002, a court allows the lawful inhabitants to return and ordered the protectors to give the land back to its owners. The latter went to the village under the protection of the gendarmes, but very quickly three people were killed, including a six-year-old child (Koruculuk Raporu p. 11, quoting Milliyet of 28 September 2002). In 2015, 123 people were living in Uğrak.

In 1995, a man named Hayrettin Yıldırım was expelled from his village, Kaşyayla (Sason, Batman), allegedly for security reasons. In 2004, he decided to return there, with his 10 children. But the protectors had occupied his land. He settled temporarily in a nearby village but was beaten and seriously injured by a group of protectors (Koruculuk Raporu p. 10).

It is possible to enter quite deeply into the life, and the rebirth if the case, of a village, thanks to the research tools I mentioned - and all those I am unaware of. Rich monographs are possible, which should of course be complemented by fieldwork, on the spot, and not by means of images. I would like to mention two places that I spotted during my virtual walks on Google Earth and that are documented on the Web.

Yediyaprak or Hergulê (3 miles west of Eruh, not far from Budamış) was a large village built on a hillock, in a hilly environment. It was totally destroyed and is in a timid recovery after having gone from 248 inhabitants (1985) to 70-80, thirty years later. In spite of the great number of documents on the Web and my attempts to contact Internet users, I remain ignorant of what exactly happened. But for some years now, houses have been built, visible on satellite images.

By typing the words "Yediyaprak Hergule" on a search engine, one obtains many results such as, at least, one Facebook page; some websites contain photos, slideshows, short films, and music (https://www.facebook.com/hergule56, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6NpKMtCfdX2XM1I6HGbGEg). You can also access some photos through Google Maps.

From left to right and top to bottom: General vertical view of the old ruined village and the new houses; view of the ruins; views of the old village by "hergule" and "TheEruh" posted on Google Earth in 2009 - Click to enlarge

Someone named Murat has collected music videos all dedicated to the village of Yediyaprak. Another site, TheEruh, contains compilations illustrated with photos of the place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEDQJ8dqNAA.

Murat's short film "Hayalim, özlemimsin Hergulê" (I miss you Hergulê, you are my dream) expressed strong nostalgia and documented the movement back to the village. Another video, on Murat's Youtube channel, featured a bunch of kids pretending to sing "Roj Naçe" by Şahe Bedo in playback, with the ruins of the village as a backdrop. [Unfortunately, this Youtube account has been closed and these videos are no longer available in 2022].

Thanks to Google-Earth, I discovered another very particular case, about six miles south of Eruh, an important village, established on a slope, upstream rich irrigated gardens so green that it can be spotted from very high on satellite images. In the immediate vicinity, forming a V with the old village, a neighborhood of aligned new houses. To the northwest, almost at the junction of the two branches of the V, one can spot a fortified military post.

Dağdöşü (Eruh). On the left, a general view; on the right, the ruins of the old village (Google Earth) - Click to enlarge

This is Dağdöşü or Bikêt, one of the first villages attacked by the PKK on August 15, 1984, because it is the seat of a command center of the gendarmerie, which is in Turkey an elite troop that played a great role in the repression of the Kurdish movement. The original village is largely ruined. If you look closely, only the lowest parts of the village, the areas that would have been difficult to reach except on foot or by mule from the road above, may have simply been abandoned. For it is certain that the new upper village was built by the army. The gendarmerie is a real fortress.

Under such protection, the population, from 500 in 1985, increased to more than 1000 by 2000 as the place received the population of two other villages (Hürriyet, 8 February 1999). Up to 1,500 people crowded into the old village, with 2 or 3 families per house, until the army built the new one. Were these villagers really threatened by the PKK, or did the army impose the regrouping? In any case, for the villagers, the protection was reinforced, in the immediate vicinity of the fortified post, and for the army the control was facilitated, especially since it is a village of "protectors": this is, at the time, the condition sine qua non to continue to live in a village.

Views of the new village of Dağdöşü, taken by military personnel in the 2000s - Click to enlarge

Before the suppression of Panoramio on Google-Earth, there were a lot of photos of Dağdöşü on the site. And their comments, all posted by former soldiers who had served there before, were very instructive. Fifteen years later, some of them complain about the hard life, far from everything. The construction of the new village, in 2000-2001, absorbed a large part of their activity: "In every stone, there is our job. I wish now that these people, our compatriots, continue to live quietly there, and that they enjoy their new village”. One of them had photographed a scene, probably a wedding, in which the inhabitants are dancing the halay to the sound of musicians who are standing, almost invisible, in the shadow of a house. The houses are sadly similar and gray. From place to place, the peasants have made piles of fodder. The pastures, above the village, are immense.

In the comments on the photos, a former soldier complains about the commander of the post, colonel Harun Çapur, "whom we were afraid of him as of God"; another responds to him harshly, and occasionally one can read between the lines what was the life of the soldiers and villagers: "I see what kind of guy you are. I'll tell you: who is the commander who had the grunts build concrete houses to replace the peasants' mud houses? Who was the commander who walked in front of everyone with the mine detector? Who was the commander who went in front of the convoy? Which commander said 'Any bullet that hits one of my soldiers is like being hit myself'? Which commander created a gendarmerie, a school, and modern houses in the village? Which commander restored the water supply because the terrorists had cut it off? What was the name of the commander who protected the poor? Who gave money from his pocket to the penniless soldier who went on leave? He was a hero and a father to the soldiers, that was Harun Çapur." (comments dated October 2, 2009).

Is it necessary to pledge allegiance to the army to live a normal life? This is what journalist Ferai Tınç tries to make believe, in a report published in Hürriyet on February 8, 1999. Presumably summoned by the army for a communication operation, she arrives at the scene by helicopter. Immediately, she leaves to visit a carpet workshop, created for the girls of the village, all dressed, for the circumstance, in traditional velvet flowered dresses: a gift from colonel Harun Çapur... The workshop is directed for the moment by a military person, and the soldiers themselves draw the patterns from which the girls are inspired.

Ferai Tınç tries to describe a "return to life" after a period of misery and danger gendered by “terrorism”. Now the men can return to the fields and make hay. On the flat roofs of the houses, the Turkish flag, and television antennas: 80 sets in the village. The school has 186 students, half of them girls. The journalist then writes as if she were the spokesperson for the prefect of Siirt, and talks about the mobilization for education in the province and particularly in the district of Eruh.

The state opened a four-story educational center in Dağdöşü, one of which is equipped with computers; there they learn computing, English, and prepare for university exams. According to the journalist, the war is won, because "the biggest enemy of the PKK was civilization, there should not be any sign of civilization in the village. That's why they were cutting the water: civilization comes with water."

Ferai Tınç however confesses at the end of the article that she took this walk in the company of the famous colonel Harun Çapur and colonel Yurdaer Okan, commander of Eruh garrison...

"The young people of the region, she writes, whether Turkish, Arab or Kurdish, have only one desire: to live as human beings. This is the business of all of us. It is every Turk's concern. Do we really need to be sheltered by a fortress in order to 'live like human beings'?

When I wrote the first draft of this article, in June 2015, the Kurdish movement was in the hope of a resolution, in the frame of the “Dolmabahçe peace process”. It was not the result of the military operations, but of a process of controlled democratization, a peaceful revolution. I was too in the hope that the resolution of the Kurdish conflict would enable a democratization of the whole country. I don't know how the population of Dağdöşü voted for the general elections on June 7, 2015, but the Eruh district, as a whole, has voted massively for the pacifist and democratic party, whether it is the BDP in 2011 (with the election of Gültan Kışanak, who then became mayor of Diyarbakır from 2014 to 2016) or the HDP in 2015 (78.5% of the votes).

My opinion, like that of many people, was illusory. The peace process was broken by the government in August 2015, the electoral process was impeded during the summer and autumn of the same year, and the winter of 2015-2016 witnessed an unprecedented outbreak of State violence against the urban positions of the Kurdish movement. There is no doubt that a good part of the young people who defended the districts held by the PKK in the towns was the children of the expellees from the "ghost villages".

(Next article: Ghost Villages (2) - Forced Migrations click here

Some sources:

http://www.gocder.com/,

http://www.akdenizgocder.org/,

http://amedgocder.org/

http://ku.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikarh%C3%AAner:Erdal_Ronahi/Gund%C3%AAn_%C5%9Fewit%C3%AE

http://www.bianet.org/system/uploads/1/files/attachments/000/000/893/original/koruculukraporu2013.pdf?1372945510

Aytar Osman, Hamidiye Alaylarından Köy Koruculuguna, Istanbul, Medya Günes Yayınları, 1992, p. 183.

Ferai Tınç, « Başladığı yerde bitiyor PKK », Hürriyet, February 8, 1999.

Göç Edenler Sosyal Yardimlaşma Ve Kültür Derneğİ « Türkiye'de Koruculuk Sistemi: Zorunlu Göç Ve Gerİdönüşler” İstanbul 2013 22 p. http://www.bianet.org/system/uploads/1/files/attachments/000/000/893/original/koruculukraporu2013.pdf?1372945510)

Au Kurdistan turc, une étrange archéologie - Susam-Sokak

Ce diaporama illustre l'esquisse n° 56 "Villages fantômes". Ce sont des villages évacués ou brûlés entre 1984 et 1999, au cours de la guerre entre les "forces de sécurité" turques et le PKK...

https://www.susam-sokak.fr/2015/06/au-kurdistan-turc-une-etrange-archeologie.html

The War Against the Kurds - The Village Guards (1) - Susam-Sokak in English

This article was initially published on susam-sokak.fr, on March 29, 2014] By simply adding a few sentences to an almost obsolete law, the Özal government instilled into Turkish society paramilitary

https://susam-sokak-in-english.over-blog.com/2021/03/korucu.html

Varto, 1996. Several Narratives for a Fictitious Assault - Susam-Sokak in English

Varto is a little town of the Mush province, 30 miles north of the chief place, north-west of the lake of Van. Away from the main roads, it lies 4500 feet high on the first slopes of the Bingöl ...

https://susam-sokak-in-english.over-blog.com/2021/02/varto-1996.1.html

http://www.bianet.org/system/uploads/1/files/attachments/000/000/893/original/koruculukraporu2013.pdf?1372945510