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How did you know Hakkari?
by Etyen Mahcupyan
Geography is the most natural way of separating societies from one another. While mountains and rivers divide people, they lead to the development of different cultural fabrics and in time to cultural introversion and to settled societies mentally separated from each other.
However, sometimes history overcomes geography and brings together what geography separated. Hakkari is such a place. Tied to the rest of Turkey by only one door, it is a region you can enter only by going over a river and reach only by climbing mountains. It is a separate region within the southeastern province.
The Kurdish issue also confronts you with a different face in Hakkari. After decades of being pushed around, today these misplaced people who have thronged to the city are worn out. A bankrupt and helpless municipal government is trying to serve a population that has almost tripled. Since they are restricted to animal husbandry because only 5 percent of the land is arable, they have now lost all their flocks and are imprisoned in the city. They rank last place in the country in education and to losing sick relatives while they are taking them to nearby towns for treatment. But this city, which has been an open prison for years, is still hanging on to life and trying to hang on to Turkey. It is a settlement where shops are amazingly full of goods, where young people liven up the streets, where there is almost no gender segregation and where there are at least ten Internet cafes on an avenue 100 meters long.
However, this appearance is not sufficient to hide the existing poverty and suppression. Tens of thousands of people who do not know or like urban culture are awaiting the future blessings of fate in this cramped cul-de-sac of opportunity. Due to the curtailment of construction work, the only thing average people can do to earn money is transport and porter work. However, there is also a large amount of smuggling. With fuel tanks that have been enlarged, everyday an average of 700 trucks bring fuel oil across closed borders. The government not only closes its eyes to this activity, it has organized it according to single and double license plates. You can see this as an indication of good intentions. However, the government has an additional application: While trucks caught in the Hakkari provincial borders are punished for “smuggling,†beyond these borders suddenly a free zone for illegal profit appears. The government is careful to earn illegal profit outside of Hakkari.
This distinction does not surprise people from Hakkari. In a place where guards are favored and people are forced to call their own relatives “terrorist,†they know the government has another face behind the smiling image of a state that builds roads, provides water, and produces social and cultural projects. For this reason, the “return to villages†law has not made much difference. People want to return to their villages, but on the one hand, there is fear of the guards and, on the other hand, there is the painful question of what will happen if the government has these villages vacated again in the future.
While the government is trying to deal with the Kurdish issue - which is at an impasse nationally - through the intention of locally producing goods and services by sending “suitable†governors to the region, Hakkari has a new governor. However, it is my general impression that the governor is too sensitive on the subject of his keeping rehabilitation activities in his own office and not sharing them with the people. The government is still far from Hakkari because it is mentally far from Hakkari. After all that has happened here it can be clearly seen that the authorities have totally lost here. Both the state and the PKK have lost this society. The people of Hakkari have managed to stay on their feet without being tied to anyone, to stand with honor and still be able to smile. So much so that when it is time to leave, you have the strange feeling that you belong to this distant region.
29.12.2006
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