Dilek Kurban

I was among the guests of a TV show where a group of women were discussing the Kurdish issue before the July 22 elections. We as five women who were hosted by Şirin Payzın and Ece Temelkuran discussed the Kurdish issue from various perspectives. Upon telling how she was utterly shocked when an elderly Kurdish woman she had encountered in one of the houses on a street in Tarlabaşı, where the victims of forced migration live, had kissed her hand, Ece Temelkuran asked me the following question: “What did the displaced people bring with them when they migrated to Istanbul?”

I remember having great difficulty in answering her question. This must have been so apparent that a couple of days later I received an e-mail from an audience. Sidar Gülen, with whom I have corresponded for a while and got the chance to meet at a conference on the Kurdish issue in Diyarbakır, had responded to the question, to which I could not give a meaningful answer, on my behalf while watching the program. With her consent, I would like to convey the answer of Sidar Gülen, who herself is a victim of forced migration, as a belated answer to Ece Temelkuran’s question.

“I am answering Ms. Ece’s question (that hand kissing Kurdish woman portrait in Tarlabaşı!) as a migrant Kurdish woman: A new city means creating a self from scratch. You start everything from the beginning so you have no past. Not having a past… When this is beyond your own will, when your dough is being baked in a bowl, your child’s laundry drying on a string… When Istanbul is a word connoting distance… When you have no time to visit your neighbor… What does it mean to set off to Istanbul without having the chance to take your shoes? Doesn’t it exactly mean that you are nothing, that you no longer exist? A foreigner coming to your doorway used to know that s/he wouldn’t allow you to kiss their hands before if they are younger than you. This is what leaving everything you have behind and migrating exactly means.”

Every migration, in a way, means ‘creating a self from scratch’. This is not only so for compulsory or forced migration, but also for migrating with one’s own will. Although the life left behind may be difficult, it is at least familiar while the migrant faces uncertainty, the loss of one’s past, and rootlessness. This is of course not always something negative. Uncertainty and rootlessness may be exciting if one has migrated with their free will, even better if the case is brain drain. The situation, on the other hand, is quite different for the people who have been torn away from their lands without their will and have been ordered to evacuate their villages immediately and without any preparation. From 1984 to 1999, in the East and Southeast regions of Turkey, approximately one thousand people who were forced to migrate from the villages and farms, most of which were evacuated by the security forces, bid farewell to their native lands for good, leaving their dough in its baking bowl, their laundry on string, their animals in the fields, barns, warrens, their products in farms, their family photographs on the walls of their homes, and their shoes on their porch. One million people, mostly Kurds but also Yezidis, Syrians, and Arabs, have been taken out of their homes and thrown away to the streets, left behind by their own state for the sake of “struggle with terrorism”. The society also overlooked the people whom the state had victimized. One million people became migrants overnight. People both without a past and a future, both without a yesterday and tomorrow, both in pain and hopeless…

A number of researches have been conducted on this issue commonly known as ‘compulsory migration’ in Turkey – despite the fact that most of them are ‘forcibly’ conducted – and which is named as ‘internal displacement’ in the international literature. The outcome of these investigations, the results of which are very similar, are portraits of people trying to cling on to city life while struggling with depravity, poverty, exclusion, and discrimination. A million people who, in the words of Sidar Gülen, ‘become nothing’ and ‘no longer exist’; people trying to survive despite the state. People who used to manage their own land, make a living with their own production, who had a restricted yet voluntary and willful relationship with the city suddenly became the reluctant and dishonored inhabitants of that city. A million people had to learn that they had to pay for obtaining bread, that electricity and water is no longer free. They faced hunger. They had difficulty in making both ends meet when farming and animal husbandry which were necessary and sufficient for making a living in villages was regarded as redundant and insufficient in city life.

Although growing in number, studies on forced migration is quite limited. Apart from a small quantity, most research has been conducted years after the migration and has rather general findings due to the complexity, dimension of, and little contemplation on the issue. We still don’t know much about the demographic differentiation of the effects of forced migration on people. The migration process has certainly affected men and women, adults and children, youth and the elderly in different ways and degrees. There is, however, no sufficient data on this issue. Under such a state where the issue of forced migration is recently accepted and no meaningful policies regarding the victims have been developed, we can only make some general assumptions on the women of forced migration. The political dimension of the issue will continue to precede and eclipse the social and economic dimensions in an atmosphere where the Kurdish issue is left unsolved and continually deteriorates. As a matter of fact, many women with whom we have talked during our fieldwork gave politically shaped answers, just as the men we have interviewed, as to what they expected from the state: general amnesty, peace… Unemployment and poverty are also among the answers that women have mentioned regarding their problems. Nevertheless, how migration has affected women still remains as a question mark.

The nexus of forced migration and women is so complex that it cannot solely be understood from a feminist perspective. There is no doubt that forced migration has a different effect on women. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons between the experiences of men and women, however, bear the danger of setting a hierarchy between each experience. Regarding the connection between forced migration and the Kurdish issue, such hierarchization can lead to a certain political interpretation of the issue. The objections of many Kurdish women’s organizations in the region to the ‘outer’ analysis of the problem done by researchers and feminist activists is increasing and becoming heard day by day. We can of course reject these objections, but we cannot ignore them. Interpreting the situation of the women of forced migration without taking into account the Kurdish issue is not only insufficient and even misleading, but also constitutes a problematic political standpoint.

The aim of the subject may not be as such, but most of the time how we are perceived is more significant than what we aim to do.

From Amargi- Issue 7