qSibel Yükler/JINHA

ANKARA – The Turkish state’s policies of war in Kurdistan have targeted human lives. But at the same time, they have worked to seize the shared past of many peoples. Roza Zümrüt, co-chair of the Diyarbakır Chamber of Architects, spoke with JINHA about the state’s tactics of attacking Kurdistan’s cultural heritage in an attempt to remake history and urban space.

Districts like Cizre, Silvan, Silopi, Derik and Nusaybin saw a brutal state war in the 1990s. Now, the state has targeted these same districts’ cities—not just their populations, but also their cultural heritage and collective memory of place. A people constantly subjected to massacre now finds the state attempting to take revenge even on their past.

Occupying states often irreversibly devastate the cultural heritages of various identities and beliefs, destroying the trace of a shared past that state sovereignty cannot tolerate. Recent examples of this policy range from ISIS’ attack on the city of Palmyra to Turkish state forces’ devastation of historic buildings in Sur, the old district of Diyarbakır bounded by kilometers of ancient basalt fortifications—the sur, or city walls.

The 24-hour curfew imposed for weeks in the Sur district has led to serious damage, often deliberately inflicted by state forces, on the dozens of historic sites encircled by Diyarbakır’s walls (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). These include the Four-Legged Mosque; Surp Giragos Church; the Armenian Catholic and Protestant Churches; the Pasha Hamam; the Yogurt Bazaar; the Arab Sheikh Mosque; the Kurşunlu or Lead Mosque; and parts of the city walls themselves.

Recently, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has brought the issue of cultural destruction under the state blockade to the attention of Turkey’s Parliament. JINHA spoke about the attacks with Roza Zümrüt, co-chair of the Diyarbakır Chamber of Architects.

Roza called the dramatically rising levels of violence against Kurds and other elements of the opposition an attempt by the dominant power “to protect its unitary structure,” an approach that does not shrink from turning cities into all-out war zones.

“The official ideology has tried to other, repress and standardize the Kurdish people,” said Roza. “This is a people who live together with other peoples in Mesopotamia, where humanity’s first settlements were constructed and urban practice was first experienced.” Roza noted that the cultural heritage of Kurdistan was the accumulation of the long-term practices of people of multiple nations and beliefs, living together.

Roza called the state’s attacks on this in places like Diyarbakır and Silvan an attempt to “write their own history of power.” She called attention to the sudden recent emergence in Turkey’s mainstream media of discussions of the “urban transformation” of Diyarbakır.

“The state has mobilized all its instruments of war in order to attack architectural works, which are the concrete form of this cultural memory; urban sites; and the civilian population. There’s increasing destruction. And we see that by way of the mainstream media, precisely the urban transformation discourse that is impossible in this environment is being brought into play.

“With all of this, we can see that what’s really aimed at here is the fabrication of urban sites that can be supervised, that can be brought under control at any time desired. This is the vehicle for the state to attempt to be sovereign, to write its own history of power,” said Roza.

Roza said that the attacks were not only on the people’s demands relating to forms of government (that is, the declaration of self-government by residents of these cities).

“At the same time, in this new form, this is producing a new discourse of power that utilizes architecture and city planning,” said Roza. “Foucault says that ‘a whole history remains to be written of spaces, from the great strategies of geo-politics to the little tactics o the habitat, institutional architecture from the classroom to the design of hospitals, passing via economic and political installations.’

“Today, in order to write their own history, the AKP and state powers themselves will not just leave things at destruction,” Roza said. “As they build what comes next, they will be fabricating their economic structure, pervaded with the production-consumption relationships of the world’s neoliberal ideology, a structure that can be supervised and surveilled.”

(fk/cm)