Interestingly, there was not even one ditch in the Diclekent or Kayapınar districts of Diyarbakır, where many prominent figures like Selahattin Demirtaş, Altan Tan live.

Most of the PKK’s funders are businessmen living in Diclekent and Kayapınar, where you can find very luxurious restaurants, coffees and houses. In a sense, the PKK could not touch their lives, their comfort zone. While these financiers were responsible for the PKK’s operations, they lived in neighborhoods far removed from the consequences of their funding.

Sociological Gap in Diyarbakır

We could not easily say that Diyarbakır’s sociology is fine now. The people of Diyarbakır look a bit tired and confused. Tired of being instrumentalized by the PKK and the HDP. But somehow people are trying hard to return to their ordinary lives.

When we walked around the streets of Sur, we saw that people could finally open their shops up, because the PKK, which used to intimidate them into closing their shops to send a political message, was no longer around. Another interesting situation is that interest in any gatherings or protests has gone down. In 2015, for Nowruz celebrations, almost 200,000 people gathered in Diyarbakır, however in 2016 only 18,000 people gathered to celebrate the festival, despite frequent calls from the HDP and the permission of the Governor of Diyarbakır. Can we conclude that people were afraid of going out and celebrating Nowruz? Absolutely not, we can conclude that people are very tired and from now on they just look for peace in Diyarbakır. Nowruz, a traditional new year celebration, used to turn into a pro-PKK protest praising all types of violence and threats against Turkey’s solidarity. Because of this over politicized and violent discourse at the festival in Diyarbakır, people no longer want to participate in this so-called “cultural celebration.”

One evening during our stay in Diyarbakir, Aysel Tuğluk, HDP’s leading deputy, was taken into the custody. I was around the Diyarbakir Court House incidentally, and surprisingly, there was no one in front of the courthouse for protesting this decision. I checked media coverage to see if people were not aware of it, but in fact there was plenty of breaking news about the detention. Yet there was not even one person to protest. In short, the people of Diyarbakır ran out of patience, and they have no tolerance for any calls for violence or clashes. They just want to return to their normal lives without any terror, any clashes, and any threats from the PKK and HDP.

The people of Diyarbakır ran out of patience, and they have no tolerance for any calls for violence or clashes.

They are silent and passive to all the things happening around them. This current situation in Diyarbakır is a kind of sociological gap. People have some ideological and political hesitations about what they really should do. Some of those I met put lots of stress on the question of what would happens if the government sits at the negotiating table with the PKK again? Despite the all anti-terror operations, all the political discourse against the PKK and HDP, people are still keeping this possibility in their mind. And they are afraid of this scenario, in which the PKK gets control again and takes revenge on the people. The government must gain the confidence of the people about these fears; otherwise this gap could create a boomerang effect against the normalization process of the city.

The Need for a Social Risk Map

To capture the full Diyarbakır picture, there is an urgent need for a social risk map of Diyarbakır. Mapping the social risks in the city, actually in the region as well, is the most important preliminary work before applying social policies. This means putting together a general picture of potential risks to the communities of Diyarbakır. An index could be developed to figure out the most fragile parts of the social structure, which may include: average household income, the unemployment rate (especially for youths), mobility over one year, drop-out rates at schools, crime rates and so on. After this, the most fragile parts can be identified, and social policies can be applied according to this index.

For now, the Governor and the municipality conduct some social projects for youth in particular. To build more sport centers and to renovate youth centers in the city, the Ministry of Youth and Sport has recently provided 16 million TLs. The Ministry of Family and Social Policies also provides similar funds for rehabilitation works. This support is very significant, but still needs to be systematized by the social risk map created, according to the social needs of the city.

Academics living in Diyarbakır point out that young people are radicalized by the racial and violence oriented narratives of the PKK and HDP.

While doing this, there are two important priority areas: education and religious affairs. Almost all people we met in Diyarbakır, academics, public authorities, NGOs pointed out these two significant areas. If the government and local authorities could create long-term coherent policies for education and religious guidance, normalization could be achieved in Diyarbakır. Otherwise in a couple of years, we may witness the same clashes in the city’s ancient streets.

Academics living in Diyarbakır point out that young people are radicalized by the racial and violence oriented narratives of the PKK and HDP. This increases the anxiety of the youth in the city, and makes them vulnerable to being instrumentalized for street clashes. Now families are looking for alternatives to save their children from the threat of the PKK and HDP. Public authorities and NGOs have to put forth alternatives to rehabilitate the young people of Diyarbakır. Actually at this point, Kurdish youth need to have a new dialogue without any type of violence or hatred. What Kurdish youth really needs is to have a positive agenda to focus on their future’s plan, especially in terms of education and employment. In brief, any social policy or project that does not reach the youth will not succeed in ensuring a normalization process for the communities in Diyarbakır.

The devastation of an historic city with an unplanned urban landscape and uncontrolled growth, including poor and non-developed urban slums, has brought with it new challenges as well as opportunities. Europe saw a great renewal and reconstruction of its historic cities after World War II. It supplied the builders with ample chances for creating cities equipped with modern streets, sanitation systems and innovative lodging. City planners, composed of miscellaneous scholarly disciplines like social and urban history, geography, architecture and town planning and political science, created functionally differentiated separate zones of housing, industry, culture, government and recreation. This way of reimagining Europe’s cities was common to both fascist and democratic countries.

Needless to say, urban reconstruction is a complex task with enormous potential for conflict that policy-makers have to tackle.

Needless to say, urban reconstruction is a complex task with enormous potential for conflict that policy-makers have to tackle: the clearance of the rubble and debris, financing the renewal project, the allocation of building material and labor, the extent of the possibility of historic cities being amenable to urban renewal during reconstruction, the creation of new streets and social amenities, the possibility of planning the city with functionally distinct zones in order to keep housing, commerce, industry and culture separate, deciding about the population density, the dilemma of building historic cities with a modern conception while keeping its traditional fabric intact, and the like. On top of all, there are two crucial questions: Who will make decisions for the city? The central government, the local town authorities, or private individuals? And how will priorities be determined vis-a-vis urban needs?

All of the queries listed above inform the debate sparked by the Sur Renewal Project (Sur İhya Projesi) initiated by the AK Party government. The Council of Ministers took the decision of  “urgent expropriation” of 6,300 parcels scattered along 15 neighborhoods of Sur, which included the building of the Sur Municipality, some hotels, and the Cemil Pasha Mansion in March 2016. This decision was contested by the Diyarbakır Bar Association before the Higher Administrative Court (Danıştay) and is still awaiting a final decision. Former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu had announced the Sur Renewal Project in Diyarbakır on April 1, 2016. According to what Davutoğlu said, the project will be based on the consent of, and reconciliation with, the local residents. The starting point of the project is UNESCO’s 2015 decision, which placed the city within the scope of World Heritage Sites, and the 2012  Reconstruction Plan for Conservation that involved both the central government and the Diyarbakır Greater Municipality as its executive partners.

Rebuilding Sur while retaining its traditional fabric is an indispensable element of the project. The participation of Sur residents in the relevant decisions throughout the process would be taken as a must, and their ownership rights would be protected. Inner Sur would be restored in accordance with its multi-faith and multicultural character, and be organized as a tourist attraction. The facade of houses in Gazi Street, the main street of Sur, will be renovated by using Diyarbakır’s local and historic basalt stones. “We’ll rebuild Sur so that it’s like (Spain’s) Toledo: everyone will want to come and appreciate its architectural texture” said Davutoğlu. However, the pro-PKK Diyarbakır Municipality and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) argued against the governmental discourse of “renewal of the city by keeping its history intact.” Let’s go over these arguments and to which degree they can be substantiated.

During the period of multi-party democracy, no democratic government resorted to the forced deportation of the Kurdish people. Democracy is not amenable to forced social engineering. The forced displacement in the 90s, and other forced settlement policies were all enacted under military rules. Therefore, the argument that the rebuilding project for Sur envisions a change to its demographic structure by allowing and encouraging non-Kurds, especially Arabs, (possibly Syrian emigrants) politically unsympathetic to Kurdish nationalists  to occupy the district has no relevance whatsoever. Most of the refugee camps established for the Syrians are not situated inside the Kurdish majority areas, and not all of the refugees are Arab. Therefore, the claim that through various bureaucratic and financial means, the poor Kurdish residents who fled the city will be prevented from coming back has not materialized and has proven to be merely ideological propaganda. The government’s concern is to create public places to comfortably live, not to unman the district and turn it into a well-protected high security place, a sort of open prison, as has been suggested. Pushing poor people from where they live and replacing them with more affluent people may indeed be one of the most common way to develop desirable urban areas. However, the government’s declaration that no right-holder in Sur will be pressured to agree to an option that they do not want has publicly falsified this assertion.

The government’s concern is to create public places to comfortably live, not to unman the district and turn it into a well-protected high security place.

Similarly, the claim that the Project will ruin the historical-cultural texture of the city and its collective memory has no relevance, given the political and civilizational imagination inspired by the “Toledo model.” Sur was already the commercial heart of the city and there is no sense in arguing that “more trade and less housing” is something undesirable. The fact that TOKİ, the government’s housing and reconstruction agency, was declared not to be a constituent of the rebuilding in Sur, and that every building will be treated on a case by case basis, both in terms of ownership rights and architectural features, refute the allegations of “gentrification by military force” and “economic opportunism.”

To be sure, the rebuilding process will be based on an urban plan more amenable to state security control, and this is legitimate to the full. The Toledo model seems to well reflect the multicultural character of the city while paying attention the Seljuki-Ottoman cultural imprint, aiming not to conceal but to expose the Muslim heritage, in contrast to the HDP municipality which pushed this legacy to the back under the pretext of “multiculturalism.”

It is obvious that the rebuilding process secures a fresh opportunity for the AK Party government to reinforce its political legitimacy. The declaration of the region as “a risky area,” and accordingly, taking the decision of “urgent expropriation” indicate the government’s intention not to make Sur a habitat for the rich but to create a safe haven both for the state and for Sur dwellers in commercial, cultural and security terms.

All of the arguments against the project have proven to be groundless, given Davutoğlu’s statements regarding Sur, with the declared model for the renewal being the city of Toledo, an ancient multicultural city rebuilt after the Spanish Civil War. The non-involvement of TOKİ in the reconstruction process, the adoption of the pillars of the UNESCO World Heritage Site and the 2012 Reconstruction Plan for Conservation as the obligatory framework for the renewal, the participatory character of the process and the declared sensitivity of the government for the retention of the historic city while paying enough attention to modern technical facilities, the involvement of not only architects and engineers but also art historians, anthropologists, sociologists, urban designers and social policy experts, all combine to create hopes for the rebirth of a devastated city out of love and respect for historicity, multiculturalism, democratic participation and, without a doubt, a reemergence of the feeling of security for life, liberty and property.