378 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 New perspectives on Forced Migration and Return to Village in Kurdistan-Turkey Joost JONGERDEN1 Introduction The destruction and burning of thousands of rural settlements by the Turkish army and paramilitary forces and the forced migration of hundred thousands, if not millions of (mostly) Kurdish villagers is one of the most painful and pressing issues in Turkey today. Though the evacuations date back to the end of the 1980s, more than 25 years ago, they did not climax until the beginning of the 1990s and still continued into the beginning of the 2000s. The issue has left a heavy legacy, socially, politically, and economically. The international community has largely ignored the issue of forced displacement by associate country/candidate EU member and NATO ally Turkey, in spite of the fact that international human rights organizations 1 Joost Jongerden is a rural sociologist by training who obtained his PhD in social sciences in 2006. He is associated to the Sociology and Anthropology of Development section of Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His research interests focus on socio-spatial and socio-political analysis of rural transformations, with a strong focus on Kurdistan and Turkey. He teaches courses in sociological theory and the sociology of place. Key publications are: “Ideological Productions and Transformations: the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Left,”special issue of the European Journal of Turkish Studies, Issue 14, 2012, with Marlies Casier (eds.), and Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870-1915, Leiden and Boston, Brill Academic Publishers, 2012, with Jelle Verheij (eds). For a full list of publications, aww http://wu.academia.edu/JoostJongerden 379 Tunceli Üniversitesi reported the village evacuation and destruction and the forced displacement that went with it (KHRP 2002, HRW 1994, 2002, 2005, 2006). In Turkey too, the main political parties and public opinion in general have remained unconcerned and continue to disregard the issue, though the issue of village evacuation and destruction and forced displacement has been raised by various organizations over the years, such as by the HRA (Human Rights Association), Göç-Der (Immigrants’ Social Solidarity and Culture Association) and TESEV (Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation). Much has been said about forced migration and the underlying village evacuation and destruction, and yet several issues remain unclear or undisclosed. For example, although the number and location of evacuated and destroyed rural settlements is agreed, it seems, the number of people affected is still disputed, with estimations and calculations ranging anywhere between 400,000 and 4,000,000 people. Still unresearched are the effects of the massive displacement on local networks of production and markets: we know that peasant production systems have been disrupted and destroyed, but we know little of the exact scope of the effects of the evacuation of rural settlements on the regional economy. The eviction not only came with the demolition and burning of property (farm buildings, orchards, etc., see also Etten et. al. 2008), but also brought about a destruction of the activity-spaces of the peasant economy. The particular way in which peasants organized production and reproduction, linked with markets near and far, has not been documented and assessed. And then there is the issue of responsibilities: the villagers were not displaced and their settlements destroyed by an anonymous force, but by an army with a chain of command and acting officers: there remains a need for justice, such as through an independent commission of inquiry and possible court prosecutions. This relates to the issue of compensation, which was not resolved with the adoption of a compensation law for the displaced in 2004 to recompense for pecuniary losses. The law proved to be a politically biased and limited reparative effort, and not so much contributing to a reconciliation as to an antagonizing of relations among the 380 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 Kurdish displaced (TESEV 2005; Kurban 2012). Last but not least, we face the issue of what may be called the ‘biographical disruption’, referring to the destabilization, questioning and reorganization of individual and community life by a subject after the onset of forced displacement. How do people deal with the psychological consequences and social repercussions of the displacement, the violence and insecurity, the loss of livelihood and assets, and how has and will all this affect the (re)organization of individual life narratives and broader social relations? Although these are all important issues, however, they are not the issues I will address in this contribution. Here, I would like to draw attention to the issue of return, and again, not to focus on security concerns or numbers, which are discussed elsewhere (KHRP 2002, HRW 2002, 2005, 2006), but rather to look at some of the socio-economic and demographic issues we should take into consideration when talking about return and return-to-village programs. Related to this, I would also like to problematize the ‘rights’ approach (right-to-return discourse), which, as I will argue, does not protect and empower displaced persons, but surrenders them to the state. The structure of this paper is as follows. First, I will say a few words on the process of forced migration in the 1990s, giving a very brief impression of the scope of village evacuations, followed by a brief discussion of government plans concerning return. After that, I will discuss the problem of return in the context of changing agricultural policies, which seriously undermined the possibilities for peasants of earning a livelihood, and, connected to that, I will discuss household income strategies, resulting in an analysis of multi-settlement, rural-urban living structures. In the final section, I will discuss the rights discourse, and, in the conclusion, I will sketch an idea of an alternative research and policy agenda on return. Tunceli Üniversitesi 381 Backgrounds As part of its counter-insurgence operations, the Turkish Armed Forces evacuated and destroyed rural settlements on a large scale. According to official figures, 833 villages and 2,382 small rural settlements, totaling 3,215 settlements, were cleared in fourteen provinces in the East and Southeast, namely Adiyaman, Ağrı, Batman, Bingöl, Bitlis, Diyarbakır, Elazığ, Hakkari, Mardin, Muş, Siirt, Şırnak, Tunceli, and Van (Oyan et al. 2001). In these provinces, the total number of rural settlements (villages and hamlets) had been 12,737 (Doğanay 1993: 6–7). In other words, around a quarter of all rural settlements in the East-Southeast region of Turkey were emptied. Numbers provided by the HRA in Turkey and the Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP) suggest that most evacuations occurred in the period 1991-95, peaking in 1993–94 (Jongerden 2010). The approximate number of settlements evacuated and destroyed is not really in dispute, but the number of people affected has been a subject of great controversy. Government sources are extraordinarily precise. They report that during the 1990s, the total number of came to 384,793 people. Human rights organizations, however, claim that Turkey deliberately presents low numbers to camouflage the magnitude of the displacement (HRW 2002: 25), and have estimated the number of displaced to be as high as three to four million (i.e., ten times the government figure) (KHRP 2002). Other calculations tend more towards 1.5 million (Aker et al. 2005: 8) or put the figure at between 950,000 and 1,200,000 (Tezcan & Koç 2006). Since reliable statistics are not available, the number of displaced persons is necessarily a rough estimate. The resettlement of the rural population did not take the form of a scheme, in the sense of an elaborate and systematic plan of action encompassing the provision of shelter and the reconstruction of livelihood and/or granting of compensation, and for the execution of which specific personnel and resources were allocated. Rather, the evacuation of villages was organized in the form of what may be termed ‘rural-to-urban resettlement tracks’—in essence, the various routes from rural to urban 382 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 settlement entities along which people were forced to move, without support or assistance from the authorities (Jongerden 2007). In contrast to a scheme, tracked resettlement is little more than a collection of local and regional routes from hamlet and village to town and city. The evacuation and destruction of villages was haphazard but orchestrated. The concern of the military was to clear the villages. They were not concerned with what happened to the people after eviction, and in the towns and cities the hundreds of thousands and more of the displaced were just left to their own devices. Most first found a temporary place to stay (such as with relatives in a local town) and longer-term shelter after that (in a main city in the region, such as Van, Batman, or Diyarbakir, or a city outside the region, like Mersin, Antalya or Istanbul), mainly through chain-migration and self-help. The chain-migration mechanism implied that the evacuees selected urban centers that had already been established as settlement destinations by their relatives or hemşehri(people from the same place of origin). The self-help method implied that they would re-establish themselves in the urban entities through informal support networks. The evacuation and destruction of villages should not be considered a side-effect of the counter-insurgency of the Turkish Armed Forces, but one of its primary constituents, intended to contribute directly to the “environmental deprivation” of the guerrilla (Jongerden 2007, 2010). It was a means of destroying the guerrilla’s physical and social environment, intended to force the enemy combatant into either isolated retreat (high in the mountains, across the border with Iraq, or Syria) or undesired, hastily planned combat in urban environments. In other words, space was not a background for the actions of the Turkish Armed Forces, as it had been in the initial phase of the war (up until 1991), not an abstract grid on which events occurred, but rather, as Eyal Weizman (2007: 7) put it, “[t]he medium that each of their actions [sought] to challenge, transform or appropriate.” By reorganizing rural space, the army intended to establish territorial control and suppress the insurgency. The smoothing of rural space by means of village evacuation and destruction was a necessary step for the army to achieve the desired Tunceli Üniversitesi 383 spatial contraction, but it was not in itself sufficient. Permanent semimanned checkpoints as well as temporary mobile checkpoints were established to divide the space and create a matrix of control. Though checkpoints may initially emerge as a series of tactical responses on the part of military officers, they can come to assume an overall strategic layout (Weizman 2007: 146). This matrix of control enabled the supervision and regulation of movements of people and goods. Young men and women whose identity cards showed that they were from another area were questioned, the types of goods taken into (or from) an area were checked, and the quantities subject to limitations in order to cut off supplies to the PKK (Marcus 2007: 222). It is important to note that such measures as village evacuation and destruction, the burning of belongings and the environment, and restrictions on the movement of people and goods only are possible in a context of a state of exception2. Plans and Practices In 1995, the issue of village return entered the political agenda, when a coalition government of the True Path Party (Doğru Yol Partisi, DYP) and the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) proposed a return-to-village program in the context of the Southeast Restoration Project (Güneydoğu Onarım Projesi, GOP). Not much information is available about this program, although it was reportedly a blueprint for the organization of a gradual return to those evacuated villages where security could be provided (Jongerden 2007, 2010). Return was first publically mooted even while the war was ongoing and evacuation and destruction of villages continuing to take place. Evidence suggests that this and subsequent return plans, among others, aimed to embed military strategies of control through reconstruction and development plans for the waraffected region (Jongerden 2007). In 2001, a so-called master plan for 2 Martial Law and State of Emergency regulations have ruled the Kurdistan region in Turkey almost continuously between 1927 and 2002, a situation in which civil rights are abandoned and civilians faced a range of grave human rights abuses. 384 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 return was drafted under Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit, leader of the nationalist Democratic Left Party (Demokratik Sol Partisi, DSP), named the East and Southeast Anatolia Return to Village and Rehabilitation Project Sub-Regional Development Plan (Doğu ve Güneydoğu Anadolu Bölgesi Köye Dönüş ve Rehabilitasyon Projesi Alt Bölge Gelişme Plan).3 In this master-plan, it was acknowledged that the evacuation of villages and the displacement of people had inflicted much suffering, but without taking this as an opportunity for facing the pains and suffering or as a starting point for a process of reconciliation. Rather cold-heartedly, the evacuation and destruction was considered an opportunity for engineering a new settlement structure. Therefore, it was reasoned, a plan for reconstructing the region should be concerned not merely with ‘return’ (of villagers to their homelands), but also with the creation of the conditions by which the ‘forced migrants’ could become more productive, both for themselves and for ‘their country.’ Employing the traditional analysis of the 3 Never published, the master-plan was composed of twelve volumes, one per identified war-affected province (Batman, Bingöl, Bitlis, Diyarbakır, Elazığ, Hakkari, Mardin, Muş, Siirt, Şırnak, Tunceli, and Van); not included were Adiyaman, Ağrı, Elazig, Erzincan, Erzurum, Kars, or Malatya (see also Map 1). Each volume, of 100 to 120 pages, contained four parts. The first part, the Definition and Scope of the Return to Village and Rehabilitation Sub-Region Plan (Köye Dönüş ve Rehabilitasyon Alt Bölge Planının Tanımıve Kapsamı), set out the conceptual framework. The second part, Planning Organization and Focus GroupActivities (Planlama Çalışmasının Yöntemi ve Odak Grup Çalışmaları), gave the results of the focus group interviews, including quantitative information on pre- and postmigration work and income, and qualitative information in the formation of opinions concerning the return-to-village process, the support expected from the authorities, and ideas about a future, post-return reality. The third part, a Sub-Regional Development Plan (Alt Bölge Gelişme Planı Yöntemi ve Raporu), was the most extensive (covering almost half of each report), and comprised a feasibility study that assessed the local socio-economic, agricultural, geological, and climatologic variables. The fourth and final part was an investment action plan. Parallel to the twelve provincial volumes, a Summary for Administrators (Yönetici Özeti) was prepared for each province, serving, in effect, as proposals for pilot projects (Oyan et al. 2001). These pilots include an assessment of development potentials, an action plan, and a budget (mainly for road construction, the supply of drinking water and electricity, and the construction of boarding schools for children and of Turkish language and handicrafts education centers for Kurdish women). Tunceli Üniversitesi 385 countryside settlement issue—that there were too many small, thinly dispersed settlements, a view long held among Turkey’s would-be nationbuilders—the evacuation was seized upon as providing an opportunity for the development of a new structure that would be more ‘rational’ and ‘vital’: Apart from the social and economic problems, the event of evacuated villages in East and Southeast Anatolia has created new opportunities and dynamics for the formation of new standards that can accomplish a new rural settlement pattern; for the transition from dispersed and unsuitable settlement units towards settlements units of sustainable size and potentials. (Oyan et al. 2001: 1). In this narrative, the evacuation and destruction of rural settlements was transformed from an act of displacement into a context that provided opportunities for the creation of something new. The aim of the plan was the development of the region, in which the past appeared as irrelevant, allowing a separation of the issue of displacement (the irrelevant past) from the issue of rehabilitation (the desired future). Others too have argued that the discussion on forced migration and return took place “within the framework of a policy discourse centered on ‘regional development’ and a ‘technical’ agenda of development,” thus disentangling internal displacement and return from the Kurdish issue (Ayata & Yükseker 2005). Though presented thus in a depoliticized language, the master plan was certainly political in its intended effects. Essentially, it was concerned with a reconstruction of rural space that would facilitate better central control and, as was implicit in its discourse, contribute to the crafting of nationhood (Jongerden 2007, 2010). When the concept of ‘rehabilitation’ was used, this did not refer to a rehabilitation of the displaced (by means of a recovery of their livelihood), but to the treatment of perceived structural disabilities in the settlement structure of the region hampering effective administrative control, namely, the many small rural settlements, their dispersed distribution, and the perceived lack of local level, inter-settlement articulation. It is in this context that the evacuation of small rural settlements was considered an opportunity for the design of an ‘improved’ (i.e., integrated, more productive) settlement 386 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 structure. As such, the plan was supposed to contribute to a process of state-building. Planners focused not only on state-building but also on nation-building. The engagement of the Turkish state with rural space reveals a historical concern with the identity of its population beyond the ability to exercise control. The conversion of local villagers into national subjects had been considered to be contingent on the (re)organization of rural space since the early republican period. Thus, we refer to ideas about turning peasants into Turks by spatial means, through the construction of settlements which would make the village folk talk and behave like (as) Turks. This may be explained through an archeology of the basic concepts used in the reconstruction plans (Jongerden 2007, 2010). In brief, it was assumed that the traditional, allegedly self-contained (Kurdish) space would gradually dissolve to be replaced by a modern, integrated (Turkish) space. In conclusion, the state’s idea of reconstruction in the war-affected countryside in the Kurdistan region in Turkey was intimately linked to a grander strategy of establishing effective control and crafting a Turkish nation. The plans were poorly implemented, revised, and abandoned with subsequent change of governments, but given ample evidence about the way the depoliticized and technical reconstruction discourse is intimately linked with the pursuit of particular political objectives, the intention to forge a cultural Turkish identity through and under state-control in the rural areas is manifest (Jongerden 2007). Livelihoods: return and employment opportunities Research has tended to focus on the living conditions of the displaced after their arrival in cities. Forced migration has been associated with, among other things, the loss of livelihood, social exclusion and othering, and poverty (e.g., Dogan & Yilmaz 2011, Darici 2011). According to Çelik (2007),two issues need close scrutiny in any discussion about economic problems arising from forced migration. The first of these is that many forced migrants “formerly subsisted on agriculture and animal husbandry in Tunceli Üniversitesi 387 their villages, and it is not generally possible to practice either of these activities as a means of livelihood in cities.” The skills they have for engaging in agriculture and animal husbandry do not match the skills required for workin the city, as a result of which many of the forced migrants have ended up un- or underemployed, with unskilled and underpaid jobs, for example, as waiters, informal waste collectors or construction workers. Forced migration also, it is claimed, led to an increase in child labor, mainly in the street, in the form of washing car windshields or selling chewing gum or tissues (Gün 2010). The limited employment opportunities in the city are not only a result of the mismatch between the skills required by potential employers and those offered by forced migrants, who thus only offer their labor power, but are also the result of neoliberal policies. Previously, in the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, there was a high probability that villagers who migrated to the cities would increase their standard of living over time. Extended family loyalties and locality (hometown/village) solidarity provided support (shelter, work) to newcomers, who were thus able to improve on their difficult initial conditions and aspire to a higher standard of living. As the earlier arrivals started to be able to maintain themselves, so did their families and other newcomers follow and establish themselves, a process referred to as ‘rotation poverty’ (Öztürk 2011). The ‘gap’ left behind by those who rose up the social ladder (social mobility) was filled by the new migrants in a cycle that continuously repeated. However, the forced migrants entering the cities in the 1990s did not have the same opportunities for social mobility as their predecessors, and many became trapped in poverty. Not only did the probability for forced migrants of increasing their standard of living decrease over time, but hopes faded further as forced migration became associated with a deterioration of living conditions. There are four important reasons why these rural migrants have had reduced opportunities for social mobility and are now more likely today to find themselves trapped in poverty (Gambetti & Jongerden 2011). The first is the commodification of land, which took place as a result of neoliberal policies, and tremendously affected access to the city for the 388 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 rural migrants. In the past, the migrants could relatively easily claim (‘squat’) land and create their own housing without incurring overly high costs. Today, however, land has become a scarce commodity that the state, municipalities, and private construction and investment companies want to ‘develop’ for profit by building housing estates and business and shopping centers. For the barely established but growing evacuee families, it has become not only more difficult, but sometimes virtually impossible to find land on which to build a dwelling. Today, they are dependent on the private housing market, which is relatively expensive. The second major problem the newcomers were faced with is employment. Not only are industrial job opportunities reduced, but, with the neoliberal downsizing of the state, particularly after the coming to power of the AKP, public sector job opportunities started to disappear too. This has gone hand-in-hand with an expansion of the informal labor market. As Öztürk (2011) concludes, “The proportion of workers unregistered and uncovered by social security institutions currently stands at nearly 30% in cities and over 45% overall,” which means that a “large part of the current unregistered worker population is composed of adults who have recently migrated to cities and have a lower level of education.” Third, reduced or more insecure income generally damaged the traditional support networks based on kinship and hemsehrilik, which negatively affected their capacity to help migrants maintain themselves in the city, including those forcible moved there. Fourth, in the case of Kurdish migrants, however, who were forced to leave their villages as a result of the village evacuation and destruction strategy of the Turkish Armed Forces, we also have to take the following issue into consideration, namely that the migration was accompanied in most cases by a complete destruction of their rural livelihoods. This not only left these migrants with empty hands when they arrived in the city, but also with no possibility of getting long-term assistance from those who stayed behind. While rural migrants generally can receive support through things like food sent from the family farm and temporary reverse migration opportunities in times of economic crisis, for Tunceli Üniversitesi 389 the forced migrants there was simply no-one left in the villages to support them like this. Altogether, these difficulties gave rise to the settling of a generalized ‘permanent poverty’ among newcomers to the city that was greatly compounded for those coming from destroyed villages in the Southeast (see also Öztürk, Hilton and Jongerden, forthcoming). And we observe, therefore, not only horizontal (geographic) displacement, but also downward vertical (socio-economic) displacement (TESEV 2007: 258; Gün 2010), an issue also treated in the case of Diyarbakir by Yüksel (2011). Yet for those attempting return, there are new problems, livelihood difficulties that they did not have to face prior to their evacuation. Clearly, re-establishment as a peasant is difficult because most of the displaced have to start from scratch: they arrive back to find their fields and houses ruined. Furthermore, community facilities and services like health care and education facilities and water and electricity supplies were similarly destroyed or fell into disrepair or just remained unsupplied. Again, neoliberal policies have negatively impacted returnees by undermining their ability to make a living from agriculture. Briefly, agricultural policies over the last decade have operated in the following way. Price supports have largely been replaced by direct financial support on the basis of land-ownership resulting in a lowering of returns for agricultural products, with reduced farmer incomes and their strong fluctuation causing insecurity. While income was reduced, the costs of agricultural inputs increased, resulting in a ‘squeeze’ (Van der Ploeg 2008: 130).4 Unsurprisingly, farmers generally are having increasing difficulty in maintaining themselves in rural areas through their agricultural income. The upshot is a rise in the already relatively high level of rural poverty, increasingly pushing farmers and their household members to the city in order to find alternative sources of income (Özturk 2012: 186). In the Karacadağ region in the southeast, we even observed informal waste-collection in Istanbul to be preferred to over 4 See also http://www.jandouwevanderploeg.com/EN/publications/articles/thepeasant-mode-of-production-revisited/ 390 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 local work in agriculture, which surely indicates the low and/or unreliable returns that farmers may face there. In this context, and apart from obstacles presented by the military and paramilitary forces, a return to village and to agricultural production for forced migrants, the majority of whom were previously small-scale peasants, is particularly difficult, and all the more so since they have not been able to adapt over time to the new conditions, but face them all at once, from the outset along with all the other problems—including social and psychological—when trying to reestablish their lives. Settlement patterns: the spatial context of return There is little research on the issue of return. The evidence there is suggests that not all segments of the population return in equal proportions and that young men and young families in particular are underrepresented among the returnees. Furthermore, it transpires that people do not exchange their urban accommodation for a rural one; instead, it appears that what may be identified as dual or extended settlement patterns emerge (Jongerden 2007). There is not only no coming back to an earlier condition, as the discussion on livelihood (above) indicates, but also no coming back to an earlier place as such, but rather the development of new ways of organizing living and working space—a development, it may be noted, that is crucially bottom-up, determined by ordinary people, rather than the topdown imposition of planning by the authorities such as that described (above). This is not surprising if one thinks of return in the context of rural/urban settlement patterns that have been emerging in Turkey over the last three decades, as indicated by three issues. The first issue concerns population. During the period of the Republic, the share of Turkey’s population living in ruraltowns, villages, and hamlets has plummeted. The relative decline of the rural population began in the 1950s, with urban industrialization and, in the countryside, the modernization (mechanization) of agriculture. Along with the general population rise, however, the rural numbers also continued to increase until 391 Tunceli Üniversitesi 1980, when over 25 million people were recorded as living at the countryside. After that though, the absolute figure also started to decline, and really quite rapidly over the past decade of agricultural neoliberalism. In fact, the number of people living in rural areas now is down to less than 18 million people, back to the level of fifty years ago (Table 1). Table 1. Population of Turkey Total Rural Rural (million) (million) (%) 1 14 10 76 1 18 13 76 1 28 19 68 1 45 25 56 2 67 23 35 2 73 18 24 927 940 960 980 000 010 Source: Öztürk (2012: 140) Since the 1950s, therefore, the historical 3:1 rural-to-urban population ratio in Turkey has inverted to today’s 1:3 split. This marks the ‘success’ of a state policy initially aimed at an urban (service and industry) based economic growth and later functioning as a massive assault on the peasant mode of production. Manifestly, this is not a favorable context for village return. The second issue to look at is that of a changing demographics. The general trend is for the young and healthy to move to the cities to find work and offer better education possibilities for their children, with the village populated by the elderly, those who stay or who return after retiring, along 392 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 with those who do not have the capacity or desire to face the demands of urban struggle for housing and income. The number of the rural elderly is currently growing quickly in both absolute and relative terms, rapidly changing the shape (widening the upper section) of the rural age pyramid. During the 2007–10 period alone, for example, the proportion of elderly people (age 60+) in rural areas rose from 12.7 to 15%, a relative increase of 15% in just three years (Özturk 2012). Third, together with the process of migration, people develop a ‘dual life’ settlement pattern: they switch between village and city, developing a bicentric pattern of settlement in which household income and subsistence may come from different sources. Economically, this emerging practice of dual life is mediated by a transformation of agriculture and relative income differences between agriculture and other economic activities. In the context of family and wider social networks, lived spaces are created that span geographically distant places and develop into multivalent living structures, in which individuals move (primarily) among places of origin and work. Localized hamlet/village-to-town/city and rural farming oriented mobilities, as well as practices linked to the development of urbaniteretirement/summer villages, combine to develop an overarching rural-urban connectedness, generalized as dual settlement or multiplace hybrid life(Öztürk, Hilton, Jongerden forthcoming). The main thrust of this analysis for the present subject can be can be expressed in the statement that life-phase based mobility and the development of multi-place living practices should be taken into account when discussing return policies and plans for the displaced. Return is not about going from the city to the village, but about maintaining a relationship between the two. The right to return Finally, I would like to turn to the issue of the right to return. Several studies have indicated that the displaced express the desire to return. According to a survey carried out in the context of the earlier discussed Tunceli Üniversitesi 393 master plan, more than 90 per cent of all respondents indicated their desire to return home, to the settlements from which they had been evacuated, with even more, 98 percent, rejecting the proposal that they be resettled in settlement than other their own (Oyan et al. 2001). This has been interpreted in terms of the idea that evacuees have a right to decide for themselves whether to return or not: “Return to village is expressed as a political imperative, and, therefore, the wish to return is actually the wish to have the right to return” (Yükseker 2007: 177). This right to return has been discussed in the context of the broader framework of human rights within the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, principles that “restate and compile human rights and humanitarian law relevant to internally displaced persons.”5 Article 2 of the Guiding Principles defines displaced persons as “persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border.”6 These principles “identify rights and guarantees relevant to the protection of persons from forced displacement and to their protection and assistance during displacement as well as during return or resettlement and reintegration” (Kurban 2007: 64). Among these, it is stated that “Every human being shall have the right to be protected against being arbitrarily displaced from his or her home or place of habitual residence” (Principle 6), that “Displacement shall not be carried out in a manner that violates the rights to life, dignity, liberty and security of those affected” (Principle 8), and that “States are under a particular obligation to protect against the displacement of indigenous peoples, minorities, peasants, pastoralists and other groups with a special dependency on and attachment to their lands” (Principle 9). 5 http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IDPersons/Pages/Standards.aspx 6 http://www.idpguidingprinciples.org/ 394 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 The Guiding Principles place the main responsibility for the provision of protection with the state and impose the following four obligations: 1) protection from displacement (Principles 5–9); 2) protection during displacement (Principles 10–26); 3) provision of post-displacement humanitarian aid and assistance (Principles 24–27); and, 4) facilitation of return, re-settlement, and re-integration (Principles 28–30).7 Related to return, it is stated that the “primary duty and responsibility [is] to establish conditions, as well as provide the means, which allow internally displaced persons to return voluntarily, in safety and with dignity, to their homes or places of habitual residence, or to resettle voluntarily in another part of the country” (Principle 28). It is the displaced person who has the right to decide whether to return or to settle elsewhere, while the state is responsible for developing the circumstances necessary for the return or resettlement of IDPs and to facilitate the reintegration of both IDPs who have returned and those who have resettled. This principle has also been emphasized by the ECtHR in its judgmentDoğan and Others—that is to say, return constitutes only one of the options foreseen for a durable solution, and IDPs have the right to return as well as the right to remain where they are (Kurban 2007: 64). In short, the main responsibility for the provision of protection from displacement and aid during displacement and the provision of assistance and the facilitation of return after displacement lies with the state. Yet this ‘right to return’ as a human right may be described as something of a paradoxical project, something to which Hannah Arendt drew our attention as early as 1951. The original need for these human rights, Arendt argues, was created by the mass-displacement and movement of populations during and after the Second World War. Large numbers of people had become stateless: they were not under the authority of the states from where they had fled, but were also not recognized as members of the states to which they had fled to. In short, these were people who lived under control of a state but without having citizenship. Thus, the human 7 Ibid. Tunceli Üniversitesi 395 rights approach emerged in a context of rights deprivation, in a state of exception. The Kurds found themselves in a situation of deprived citizenship rights after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey as a nation-state: they had fallen under the control of a (newly established) state, but were not considered part of that nation (included, but not belonging, see Hemel 2008). Kurds had become non-citizens and were as to-be-colonized, precitizens living in a state of exception (Yegen 2011). The present-day problem of those who were displaced by force from their homes in the 1990s, whose homes were burned, livelihoods destroyed, is the problem of those who found themselves in a state in which were made non-citizens. As Kurds, they did not have a political status, and their loss of home cannot be thought of in disconnection from their being in a nation-state to which they did not belong. This, of course, remains a contentious issue, as witnessed by the ongoing failure to resolve political issues around Kurdish identity (Casier et. al. 2011). Essentially, the problem with the project of human rights, and thus also that of the Guiding Principles, is that it grants rights to those whose rights have been abandoned under a state of exception, and that the very social agent (the state) that is responsible for the abandonment of these rights under state of exception regulation is made responsible for the application of human rights regulations. This is a paradox. “Either the rights of the citizen are the rights of man—but the rights of man are the rights of the unpoliticized person; they are the rights of those who have no rights, which amounts to nothing”—or else “the rights of man are the rights of the citizen, the rights attached to the fact of being a citizen”—which means that “they are the rights of those who have rights” (Rancière, cited in Hemel 2008: 20). So, as Arendt (1951: 384) puts it: “If a person or a group of people are under the authority of a state but are not full members of a state, there is nothing in the world that can or will stop the state from doing whatever it likes with them.” This is why concerns such as return and compensation should be dealt with in relation to the Kurdish issue as an issue of citizenship. One cannot expect that a state will protect the human rights of 396 2. Uluslararası Dersim Sempozyumu –Eylül 2013 the very people, the Kurds, it has defined as non-citizens, and rule under a state of exception. The lack of extension from Doğan and Others only highlights the power of the state here. Although a national authority may be ostensibly bound by international commissions and conventions and called to task by individual extra-national court judgments, these do not necessarily impede its general behaviour in substantive issues—just as, indeed, Turkey’s membership of the UN and signatory status to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not greatly affect its original determination to evict, displace and destroy the property of its own (technically, supposedly) citizens without due notice or recompense as a strategy of war and without any declaration of such. Instead of conclusions: an alternative research agenda One conclusion we may draw from these findings is that there is no necessary conclusion if this involves the return generally imagined and sometimes engaged in (arguably, depending on the notion of what is being returned to): we should not, that is, assume to think of and facilitate return as a simple movement from the city to the village, but in the context of changing policies and age-differentiated multi-place living structures. The issue of return should not only be discussed in the context of obstacles raised by authorities (denial of permission, refusal to re-establish services, etc.) or obstruction by the army, fear of and attacks by village guards, and the continuing danger posed by the presence of landmines. The implementation of return policies should also be considered in the context of the marginalization and poverty trap of evacuees in the city, together with the changing agricultural policies and the decreasing importance of agriculture in income generation for rural households, the changing demography of villages and cities, and the inter-linkages and multi-place settlement patterns that are emerging with spatial mobility. These issues are not yet researched and should be addressed in a research agenda on return. Tunceli Üniversitesi 397 In this final section, however, I would also like to return to the critical evaluations made by Hannah Arendt on the issue of human rights and the nation-state. These may at first sight present a disenchanting perspective, but they may also challenge us in a productive fashion. This brings me to what Murray Bookchin calls “the greatest single failing of movements for social reconstruction,” namely, the “lack of a politics that will carry people beyond the limits established by the status quo” (Bookchin 1991: 3). For Bookchin, such a social reconstruction has to reach beyond the focus of the nation-state and be based on an active citizenship (Bookchin, 1990: 13; 1991: 7). Bookchin projects his political imaginary for the recovery of humans as active citizens onto the idea of confederalism, defined as “the interlinking of communities with one another through recallable deputies mandated by municipal citizens’ assemblies,” regarded by Bookchin as an “alternative to the nation-state” (Bookchin 1991: 7). Elsewhere, Bookchin defines confederalism as “a network of administrative councils whose members are elected from popular face-to-face democratic alliances, in the various villages, towns, and even neighborhoods of large cities”. According to him, confederalism reaches its fullest development in relation to a project of autonomy, “when placing local farms, factories, and other enterprises in local municipal hands,” or, “when a community …. begins to manage its own economic resources in an interlinked way with other communities.” In this model, the economy is placed in the custody of the confederal councils, and thus “neither collectivized nor privatized, it is common.” As such, confederalism and autonomy are key-notions in Bookchin’s “radically new configuration of society” (Bookchin 1990: 4, 9. 11). It is a similar vein, of course, that the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan outlined what he called a project of ‘radical democracy,’ based upon the self-governing capabilities of people themselves (Akkaya & Jongerden 2013; Jongerden & Akkaya 2013). 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