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Law far from compensating terror-stricken citizens
Aiming to address the issue of justice and coming to terms with the past, Mesut Yeğen, who teaches at the sociology department of Middle Eastern Technical University (ODTÜ), said the research was conducted in the southeastern province of Van where Compensation Law No. 5233 was put into practice to repair the damage caused by terrorism and counterterrorism measures.
“We wanted to see how the law works in the field,” he said on Thursday at a panel discussion in which Turkey’s Kurdish question was addressed. “The Law and Justice Dimension: Reconstructing Citizenship” was organized by the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV) as part of a two-day conference, “Politics, Institutions and Citizenship in a Changing Turkey: Is It Possible to Live Together?”
Yeğen pointed out that in the 1990s more than 1 million people were internally displaced, and more than 3,000 villages and smaller residential areas were emptied in the Southeast, which had a population of about 6 million at the time.
“This means one in every three people was a victim of forced migration. This is a catastrophic situation. But unfortunately, society has not perceived it this way,” he said, adding that displaced people were not even given directions for where to go.
“They were just told, ‘Go!’” Yeğen said. “The judiciary not only closed its eyes to the human rights violations in this process, it was also an accomplice.”
Later in the 2000s, there have been cases filed by Kurdish lawyers from Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), advocacy activities at the European Parliament and initiatives undertaken by the Kurdish diaspora in Europe, Yeğen said, all of which give the Kurdish question a transnational dimension.
“As finding a democratic solution to the problem has become a basic condition for Turkey’s European Union membership, Turkey has had to develop laws and policies to address the Kurds’ demands for equal justice, peace and citizenship,” Yeğen said.
One of those was the Compensation Law, but as Yeğen stressed, it did not even include compensation for emotional distress, and the amount given to people who qualify under this law is insufficient for them to even build a house.
The fieldwork by Yeğen and Dilek Kurban, a program officer for TESEV’s democratization program, involved interviews in Van with 86 internally displaced persons, most of whom were Kurdish and all of whom applied under the Compensation Law. Some of the interviewees were former or active village guards, and some were civilian Kurds. Additional interviews were conducted with heads and members of damage assessment commissions and the lawyers of applicants to the Compensation Law.
Summarizing the result, Yeğen said the state’s view of the issue is not about serving citizens and individuals who have endured great pain and suffering as a result of the state’s wrongful policies -- considered essential components of coming to terms with the past.
“Unfortunately, citizens do not have a reaction to that attitude. They don’t say ‘How come our state can do this to us?’ They say that the state caused them great suffering and the suffering still goes on. Ironically, they expect it,” he said.
In addition, he said there are several reasons that discourage the return of people to their old lands, such as the continuing security problem and demands from the authorities that they be village guards if they return. But the Compensation Law applies to everybody who is qualified, not only citizens who are willing to return to their former places of residence.
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