“Shelled, then bulldozed, then compulsorily purchased. This is called forced displacement,” John Dalhuisen, Amnesty’s Europe and Central Asia director, stated on Twitter, noting that just one year ago, 24,000 people lived in the district. “No one does now.”
Dalhuisen toured the city along with the Secretary General of Amnesty, Salil Shetty, and Amnesty’s Turkey researcher, Andrew Gardner.
One sight they viewed was the four-legged minaret, where Kurdish lawyer Tahir Elci was shot and killed in November 2015. The minaret is screened off and the Amnesty researchers had to obtain special permission to go behind the screen.
Sur is still under a curfew imposed by the Turkish army in early December.
The Turkish military is carrying out operations it claims are against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and armed youth groups associated with the PKK. It has declared curfews in multiple Kurdish towns in the southeast of the country and deployed heavy artillery on the streets.
Hundreds of civilians have been killed, according to monitoring groups.
In February, Diyarbakir’s governor, Hüseyin Aksoy, agreed to suspend fire for one and a half hours over a couple of days in order to allow civilians to surrender and leave the city. But many residents refused to, citing distrust in the authorities.
“Why should they surrender? They are civilians, their houses are there,” said Mehmet Karatay who had brothers living in Sur. “They did not want to abandon them because they were afraid of losing everything they have.”
Ankara has pledged to rebuild areas damaged by the fighting though in some neighbourhoods, they have forcibly evicted residents, bulldozing their homes and then purchasing them to ensure residents do not return home.
Shetty, on Twitter, called the Turkish state actions “disproportionate,” noting that half a million Kurds have been displaced.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), an international body producing information about internally displaced people around the world, puts the number of displaced in Turkey’s southeast at 945,000.
Earlier this month, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, expressed concern about the situation in Turkey’s southeast, particularly Cizre, and urged Turkey to allow his office access to the region, pointing to a lack of information on what exactly was happening in the mainly Kurdish cities and towns.
“In 2016, to have such a lack of information about what is happening in such a large and geographically accessible area is both extraordinary and deeply worrying,” Zeid said. “This black-out simply fuels suspicions about what has been going on. I therefore renew my call for access for UN staff and other impartial observers and investigators, including civil society organizations and journalists.”
Ankara has repeatedly come under fire for muzzling the press in Turkey. Many local journalists have been arrested, and several foreign journalists have been detained and deported from the country.
The decades old conflict between the PKK and Ankara was reignited in July last year when a ceasefire and negotiations broke down.
