Internally displaced persons

During the war 1984-99, the army destroyed three thousand villages in South-East Turkey. There are now about three million internally displaced persons in Turkey. Their return to their villages is an issue which has been under discussion for years. Until now very few practical steps have been taken.

In the constitution, the state should repay war damages to the victims (Constitutional law 5084). According to Mazlum Der, compensation of the losses and returning to villages are two separate issues and this law deals only with the first one. There is not yet any full scale plan as to how the great number of internally displaced persons could return to their villages.

According to the European Commission, it is of great concern that Turkey has not executed many judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (from now: ECHR) by means of ensuring payment of just satisfaction, or reversing decisions that have been made in contravention of the ECHR. (EC 2004a, 12).

Advocate Murat Timur says that the state has paid according to the decisions of ECHR. If it had not done this it would have immediately hampered Turkey's negotiations with the EC. (Timur 2004). But it is very difficult to get any court decision about the damages, either from a Turkish court or ECHR. The main problem is that when a villager would like to make an application to court to get compensation according the law 5084, it is very difficult to show that his property was distroyed by the army. There are no public documents about the warfare. (Göc Der 2004, Mazlum Der 2004.)

According to law 5084, for example, the price of human life is 8 000 Euro. If the relatives can prove that an innocent person was killed by the army during the war, the state must pay them 8 000 Euro. Mazlum Der and Göc Der find this a very cheap price for human life. The killed persons were often family fathers who took care of three generations in joint families. 8 000 Euro does not compensate the economical losses of the family when they lost their bread winner.

When the state talks about the return of the immigrants (as they are officially called in Turkey) to their villages, it assumes that everybody wants to go back to their village. According to Göc Der this is not the case. Most of them want to return, but not all. Elderly people who have spent most of their life in the village want to go back. But many of the teenagers who have grown up in slum areas in cities find rural life very strange, and they do not have any abilities in agricultural work. Göc Der says that help to the internally displaced people must be arranged in two categories: help for those who want to return to the country side and for those who want to stay in the cities.

Kongra Gel ended its cease fire in June 2004. During my journey there were almost daily news about battles and army operations against the guerillas in the South-East (Tunceli, Sirnak and Hakkari areas). Göc Der states that peace is a necessity before people could return to their villages. It hopes that the EC would understand that the problems of the internally displaced persons cannot be solved without solving the Kurdish question. Many people hoped that the Kurdish question would receive as much attention as the Cyprus situation in the EC, because the various problems of the Kurds are connected .