Police prevent protestors walking to Diyarbakir's Sur using teargas and wter cannon, December 2015. Demotix/ Avni Kantan. All rights reserved.The Turkish military operation against the PKK in Southeast Anatolia continues with no end in sight. While Kurdish locals are leaving the targeted areas in droves, plans for urban renewal have been waiting in the wings.
The relationship between crises and profit-making has already been pointed out by Canadian journalist Naomi Klein in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein describes how public and private investors utilize economic depressions, natural catastrophes and wars in order to push their neoliberal agendas. As such, urban historian Megan French-Marcelin describes New Orleans a decade after Hurricane Katrina swept through the city as the “most neoliberal city in the United States.” Once the center of the American Civil Rights Movement, most of New Orleans inner city is today gentrified. Many of the former residents have not returned after being forced to evacuate their homes and have thus left Louisiana’s capital to investors.
There is, thankfully, no natural catastrophe taking place in Turkey these days. Rather, a humanitarian and cultural crisis is ensuing. In fights between the Turkish armed forces and the PKK, large parts of the historical Sur district in the Southeast Anatolian city of Diyarbakir have been reduced to dust. Not only are places on UNESCO’s World Heritage List being destroyed but so also are residential areas. Hence, the larger part of the population has already left Sur. The district has been under curfew for over a month now. A few weeks ago the pro-government newspaper Star reported that the profit-oriented public mass housing administration TOKİ will, after the district has been “cleansed from terrorists,” tear down the old and damaged buildings and replace them with modern, “luxurious” TOKİ apartments. The historical areas of Sur will at the same time be restructured for touristic consumption.
