A group of international academics, lawyers, trade unionists and activists travelled to Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast as election observers to witness the country’s epochal elections to be held on 14 May. In a series of articles to be published every day in Medya News until the elections, Emma Müller, a member of the UK delegation, shares the international election observers delegations’ findings from the ground.
Emma Òr
We started the day, just like every day, with a communal breakfast. Even though the works are hard for everyone at the party, the candidates, local counsellors and helpers always find the time for a brief chat and a çay (tea). Afterwards, some of us made our way to a rally in a large town outside Diyarbakır (Amed), called Bismil.
After some difficulty getting through the police barriers, we were inside the fenced-off area, chatting to supporters of the Yeşil Sol (Green Left) Party and waiting for the candidates to give their speeches. We could see the campaign van trying to get into position, transporting the candidates and its roof acting as a platform on which the speakers could address the crowd. The van was being blocked by two military vehicles. Although we couldn’t see what was happening, I can only assume there were fierce negotiations between the party members and the police.
This gives an insight into a police tactic that we have experienced numerous times here (and in other countries, albeit to a lesser degree). To simply delay as much as possible at times when there is the potential for collective excitement or energy with the intention of boring and disempowering the mass of people.
In this instance, they failed. There was ecstatic cheering, whistling and chanting as the van was finally let through and got into position. One by one the candidates made their way through a hatch onto the roof – each one receiving a fresh burst of applause. Again and again the same sentiment came through: we are here to fight fascism, stand with us.
From conflict to gentrification
At lunch time we were shown around the old city of Sur, a place that has been thoroughly destroyed by the city wars of 2015. After two-year-long peace negotiations broke down, as a result of the Turkish state preventing Kurds to send help to Syria’s Kurdish-majority city of Kobane during the siege by the Islamic State (ISIS), several towns and city districts declared autonomy in 2015. During a shootout in Sur between the police and the patriotic revolutionary youth movement, (connected to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party [PKK]), Tahir Elçi was assassinated by the police.
Tahir Elçi was a lawyer who was giving a press statement calling for the end to violence between the Turkish state and the PKK when he was shot. The tower where he was murdered still stands today, showing the bullet holes from the bullets that killed Elçi. As a response massive protests erupted, shouting “You cannot kill us all” and eventually ending in the siege of Sur that lasted from the 3rd of December until the 15th of March.
Today the old city of Sur is partly rebuilt as part of a general process of gentrification. The former small streets are rebuilt widely and instead of small independent shops, expensive cafes and chains mark the street. The Turkish state is doing its best to hide the violence and resistance that took place in these streets.
Wealth doesn’t erase daily discrimination for Kurds
This day ended with a trip to a new suburb of Amed. The city is in a constant state of expansion, as more people flock to it from the countryside, and as refugees from the central district of Sur resettle after the destruction of their homes. This pushes the fringes of the suburbs further from the city, to the far side of the Hevsel Gardens UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The suburb we visited today has a markedly different physical appearance to the other areas we have visited: this was not the poor inner-city of Sur, or the towering copy-pasted apartment blocks of the new town. Rather, it was composed of individual villas that could have been found on a Mediterranean beach resort, angled cleverly to ensure each one had commanding views across the Tigris Valley to the city beyond. The streets are patrolled by private security, and the only schools to be found are private. By any classical view of politics, this region should be solidly conservative territory. But the reaction on the doorstep here was no different to that we received in the smallest rural village, or in central Sur.
Just like in the villages, children ran along the streets carrying Yeşil Sol flags, campaigners and constituents greeted each other as old friends, and residents invited us in, this time for cold drinks on a hot evening, instead of the otherwise ubiquitous çay. In the past, this area has voted solidly for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and is expected to do the same for Yeşil Sol. On the doorstep, prospective voters knew that this was their party.
We asked the campaigners and one of the party members who lived in the area, why this was: in a rich area, why were the people still solidly supportive of an anti-capitalist party? The answer: the state doesn’t see them as rich, it just sees them as Kurds, and it represses them just the same. The people we were speaking to know that. And they haven’t forgotten the last 40 years, what their people have suffered, and what their own relatives still do suffer. Even if they are residents of a wealthy suburb, their parents live in the same villages as before, experiencing the same oppression. And in any event, even if the people of this suburb were wealthy, they were not bourgeois. These people are well-off doctors and engineers. Even though there is a clear class system, it isn’t as simple as that. Every Kurdish person experiences the daily discrimination being of a minority, and even though there are clear class differences among the Kurds, this experience still creates a sense of unity. That said, the reality that there are Kurdish people who have become enmeshed in the wider oppressive dynamics of the state and capital as the oppressors are undeniable, yet even if some Kurdish people can do well for themselves, it remains Turks who are economically dominant.
See also: Election Diaries – 2: Kurdish dances as form of resistance
