Turk Army Ruins Kurdish Economy; Di

[stk at schism.antenna.nl]

]------------------------------ forwarded message -----------------------------
akin at kurdish.org (AKIN) writes:

TURKEY: TROUBLED CITY'S DISPOSSESSED TORMENTED BY DISEASE, HUNGER

Copyright 1997 Inter Press Service
Inter Press Service

February 25, 1997, Tuesday

LENGTH: 1119 words

BYLINE: By Nadire Mater

DATELINE: DIYARBAKIR, Turkey, Feb. 25, 1997

BODY:
For the dispossessed and destitute Yavuz family, pride nearly proved fatal
this week.

The Yavuz family are Kurds, one of many families forced from their homes in
the Turkish southeastern countryside by war and economic strife, condemned
to a miserable refuge in the shanty towns surrounding the region's main
city.

"We had nothing to eat for seven days," said father Mehmet Yavuz, formerly
a shepherd, taken with the rest of his family to a local hospital on Feb.
23. "Before then our neighbors used to give us food, but we were so
embarrassed to beg food from them that we locked ourselves in the house,"
he says.

Red Crescent officials here say family members were suffering from typhoid
as well as hunger. And their case is proving increasingly typical, they
add, as the tens of thousands like Mehmet, who fled rural poverty 15 years
ago to come to the city, have been joined by hundreds of thousands more
forced out of their homes in the course of the 13-year conflict between
Ankara's security forces and the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party
( PKK) .

"They moved to Diyarbakir fifteen years ago due to economic difficulties at
home" says Dr. Necdet Ipekyuz of the local Physicians Chamber, who visited
the Yavuz family in the city public hospital.

"But the father has been jobless for six months thanks to the increased
competition for jobs from the hundreds of thousands of newly emigrated
villagers. They are stricken by hunger and typhoid," he says. "Imagine the
plight of the new arrivals. Some have not been able to find work for more
than two years."

The city has been filled to bursting point by the security forces' policy
of forced depopulation in the disputed southeast, designed to starve the
PKK cadres of local support. Between 1992 and 1996 an estimated 2,600
villages in the war zone were cleared, displacing some three million men,
women and children. City officials say the city population has swelled from
380,000 in 1995 to 1.5 million in 1997.

"Those who emigrated in 1992 ended up peddling goods on the streets," says
the director of the Diyarbakir Red Crescent, Mehmet Aydin. "But there is no
future for anyone on the street; they are simply starving, vulnerable to
all kinds of diseases."

"We are afraid that starvation and disease might become an epidemic unless
urgent measures are introduced," warns Diyarbakir Human Rights Association
deputy branch chair Vedat Cetin. "Seventy- five percent of the city's
workforce is unemployed and scores of families, many with ten or more
members, are forced to seek survival in one single room, without fuel and
food in this killing cold."

Charity drives organized by wealthy citizens from Diyarbakir recently
resulted in a grim spectacle -- televised nationally -- as hundreds fought
for the food parcels. "Having seen these scenes, no human being can abstain
from
aiding these people," says businessman Celal Polat, who launched the aid
drive for Diyarbakir's poor.

However, rather than addressing the poverty at the root of the problems,
Turkish officialdom was more concerned with the ethics of the media's
decision to broadcast film of the chaos and what they called the
irresponsibility of the charity organizers for staging the handouts without
official backing.

Yet there was a repeat of the scenes a week later when the state organized
a clothing handout in the city shanties. "A similar panic occurred," said a
city social welfare official. "We are now planning to deliver the second
hand clothing packages direct to the doors of those in need."

"No one should be surprised by the present situation in Diyarbar," says
Yavuz Onen, chair of the Turkish Engineers and Architects Chambers Union
(TMMOB), a professional body which has made a special study of the social
disaster looming around the city.

"We exposed the situation in our June 1996 report on Diyarbakir, based on
extensive research and factual data," he says, "yet it was neglected by the
authorities as usual."Based on a careful survey of 1,072 Diyarbakir
inhabitants, the TMMOB estimates that Diyarbakir's population has increased
by 116 percent in the last six years, including the estimated 327,000
people who fled to the city after the start of forced depopulation in 1992.
Fifty-eight percent of these said their home villages had been burnt down.

The new arrivals are moving into a city already tormented by social crisis.
TMMOB estimates that nearly 71 percent of the city's economically active
population aged between 12 and 65 years is seeking work. Of those working,
58 percent are in temporary jobs and nearly 65 percent live and work
without social protection.

Against a national Turkish per capita income of $ 2,600, 52 percent of the
population of Diyarbakir lives on just $ 100 a year or less. "The collapse
of economic life, the heavy blows inflicted to livestock farming and
agriculture, the destruction of forests over 13 years of war, and the
government's forced depopulation policies," says Onen, "have made
sustainable life in both city and countryside impossible in the southeast."


The state's own figures point up the massive disparity between Turkey's
booming northwest and its troubled southeast. A recent report by the
Turkish
state statistics institute (DIE), based on 1994 figures, estimated that
Istanbul's share of the national wealth was twice that of all 20
southeastern provinces put together.

"Why is the state surprised," asked Erdogan Kalker, an Istanbul worker of
Kurdish origin who believes that the poorest fifth of the city's populace
are mainly Kurdish as well. "The DIE report explicitly exposes everything.
The institute is run by the state so that they should have long known the
situation."

However the scale of the problem and the ever-present threat of major
disease has made the state think again about its habitual policy of
ignoring the issue. Turkish Minister of State Sacit Gunbey now blames
"70-year-old economic policies," while the Minister of State for the
southeast, Salim Ensarioglu, cites the undeclared war in the region. "This
is a disaster," he recently told reporters here.

"The health services and the Diyarbakir municipality and even the governor
are trying to do their best to help the Yavuz family since their plight has
been publicized," Ipekyuz says. "But how can one expect all individual
families to be aided by individual effort?"

He expects the problem to go on as long as war and migration continue. "The
basic remedy lies not in curing single typhoid cases but in eliminating the
general conduits that cause the disease -- poverty and substandard health
provision."


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