Letter by our vice co-chair Mr. Hişyar Özsoy regarding systematic destruction and depopulation of Şırnak to representatives of various institutions including European Parliament, UN High Commission for Human Rights, Council of Europe, European Neighbourhood Policy& Enlargement Negotiations, European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy:
The city of Şırnak in Turkey’s Kurdish southeast has been targeted by a coordinated destruction campaign of the Erdoğan-AKP regime. Over the past seven months, the city was evacuated by ninety-five percent and eighty percent of its built urban environment was razed to the ground under a constant round-the-clock curfew, which was recently extended until the end of November 2016. Throughout this process, the government has not only violated its Constitutional obligations and international law, but also aggravated the humanitarian toll of this destruction by obstructing any civilian relief efforts as well as the efforts of deported Şırnakis to survive outside the curfew zone.
While entry into Şırnak remain prohibited at large, for the past few days the government’s assault on IDPs who took refuge in the city’s rural hinterland has taken a more dramatic turn. On October 21, the provincial Gendarmerie Special Operations units launched raids across the makeshift tent camps set up by IDPs, ordering them to evacuate the area for good in three days. On October 23, the tents in the village of Dereler were shot from the police helicopters. On October 24, the tent camp at the Kumçatı County, where over five thousand deportees from seven hundred households had taken shelter, was one again raided and razed.
Whereas these assaults testify to Erdoğan-AKP regime’s policy to depopulate Şırnak completely and permanently, we invite the concerned international community to stay sensitive and alert toward the ongoing organized destruction of the city.
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Şırnak is a long-time symbol of the unlawful repression of Kurds by Turkey’s national-security establishment. During the counter-guerilla warfare in the 1990s, the province was dubbed by state authorities as “Republic of Şırnak” – a metaphorical expression of the abrogation of the rule of law within its borders, and was exposed to most arbitrary forms of state-sponsored violence, including extensive burning down and evacuation of the city center in Spring 1992, hundreds of extra-judicial executions, unidentified political murders, and enforced disappearances throughout the decade.
The most recent national-securitist crackdown on Şırnak has followed President Erdoğan’s renewed “no compromise” policy of war against the Kurdish movement. Between August 2015 and February 2016, a de facto state of emergency reigned in the city, when its two major districts, Cizre and Silopi, were under military siege. Following the lifting of the siege in Cizre, during which over 250 civilians were killed, military violence was extended to the city center. Between mid-February and mid-March, 65,000 of the total 69,000 residents of Şırnak city were deported en masse, impromptu, and allegedly as a temporary protective measure for pending operations against an urban militia unit of the PKK.
The military operation was launched on 14 March under an indefinite curfew. For the next eighty-two days, the city was continuously and indiscriminately shelled; seven of its twelve residential neighborhoods were overwhelmingly ruined, and dozens of prayer and built heritage sites were burnt and bulldozed. The five thousand residents who were allowed to remain in the city, including a significant number of village guards and their families, were chronically deprived of basic goods and services for the entirety of operations.
On 3 June, the Ministry of Interior announced the full eradication of militia presence and completion of “anti-terror” operations in the city. However, the curfew in Şırnak prevailed, and the city’s destruction has since continued under other pretexts and means. Between June and August 2016, the city was designated “residential training zone” by the General Directorate of Gendarmerie. Over the two-month-long military field exercises, those residential neighborhoods that had survived the siege with relatively less harm were also largely destroyed. In late August, the Government contracted the clearing up of ruined urban environment to a private construction firm, which has furthered urban and property destruction in Şırnak by demolishing hundreds of standing residential units and business complexes. According to government figures, 7000 residential units have been completely destroyed in Şırnak since the start of the curfew in March, while most standing houses and buildings became completely insecure for habitation.
The Erdoğan-AKP regime has been maintaining this wholesale destruction of Şırnak with no governmental accountability and with total impunity granted to the security establishment. Strikingly, the two highest-ranking gendarmerie generals, who coordinated the city’s destruction together with the provincial governor, were recently arrested on charges of plotting the abortive military coup of July 15, and yet their actions in Şırnak were exempted from criminal investigation. Whereas all venues of legal complaint against government’s policies are closed-off, our party’s proposal to set up a joint parliamentary commission to investigate the situation in the city and the lives of Şırnaki IDPs was declined by the votes of AKP MPs, although the other two parliamentary groups endorsed it.
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Complementing this organized assault on Şırnak since the start of mass deportations in February 2016 is the government’s refusal to fulfill its humanitarian obligations for which international law prescribes liability. For the past eight months, the 65,000 deported Şırnak, who were illegally cut off from their habitat, have been trying to survive under conditions of severe physical, socio-economic and emotional deprivation in the city’s vicinities.
The sheer fact that over 16,000 IDPs have taken refuge in the largely demolished towns of Silopi and Cizre, and that another 6,000 have been trying to hang on to life in the makeshift tents around the city in chronic need for shelter, nutrition, medicine and infrastructural services, is testament to both the Şırnaki people’s determination to return to their homes and their lack of resources to look for secure living alternatives away from home.
It is with this background that the government’s latest assaults on the tent camps of deportees in Şırnak’s vicinities should be understood as the continuation of an integrated policy of ending possibilities of life in Şırnak for Şırnakis. HDP MP for Şırnak, Ms. Aycan Irmez, and the city’s ousted elected mayor, Serhat Kadırhan, who were present during the razing of the Kumçatı tent camp on October 24, stated that the Turkish gendarmerie units ordered the over 5,000 Kurdish tent dwellers to evacuate the area immediately and permanently, and “go as far as to Iraq, if need be.”
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Since August 2015, nine city centers and thirty-five towns in the Kurdish region have been targeted by the Erdoğan-AKP regime for militarist destruction under days-to-months long round-the-clock curfews. This total securitization of the region has been declared both unconstitutional and in fundamental conflict with basic principles of human rights and international humanitarian law in dozens of assessment reports by local and international actors of concern; including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN Committee against Torture, the rapporteurs of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and European Parliament for Turkey as well as several independent local and international human rights organizations.
With the destruction and depopulation of Şırnak nearing completion every passing day, we call on the relevant United Nations and Council of Europe agencies and the broader international humanitarian community to take immediate, concrete and effective action to urge the AKP government end the curfew in Şırnak, stop urban destruction, allow the return of IDPs with full recovery of their properties, and develop a comprehensive urban and humanitarian reconstruction plan in coordination with local governments, the civil society, and the people of Şırnak.
Hişyar ÖZSOY
Vice Co-chair of HDP in Charge of Foreign Affairs
Member of Parliament
25 October 2016