ROME, Feb 14 (IPS) – Geology explains the horrible earthquake that shook Turkey and Syria on February 6 with tutorial coldness: the Arabian, Eurasian and African plates strain the Anatolian plate. On the floor, geopolitics resorts to ideas like “fault”, “stress” or “fracture” to elucidate issues too. When one appears at Turkey, each disciplines’ maps can simply overlap one another, with a loss of life toll calculated within the tens of hundreds.
The earthquake’s epicentre lies in a chasm that has been widening since World Warfare I (1914-1918), when the Kurdish folks had been left stateless. Over 40 million Kurds stay unfold throughout the borders of Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq.
Half of them reside within the southeastern area of Turkey. It isn’t by probability that the damaged North-South socioeconomic divide in Anatolia really reveals itself from west to east.
Tour operators provide two primary vacationer packages: touring the west of the nation in clockwise or anti-clockwise instructions.
The east isn’t an possibility, even should you miss the astonishing Neolithic archaeological web site of Gobekli, or the supply of the Tigris and Euphrates, amongst different treasures.
Truly, “Kurdistan” has all the time been a taboo phrase for the Turkish nationwide narrative, which favours euphemisms akin to “the southeast” to discuss with that a part of the nation. In any case, what identify may be given to what would not even exist?
For many years there was no speak of Kurds, however of “mountain Turks.” Their language, Kurmanji, nonetheless has not reached newspapers or colleges. There may be certainly a tv channel in Kurdish – there are round fifty in neighbouring Iraq – however it’s authorities funded. Accordingly, there´s no deviation from the official discourse.
With out leaving the epicentre of the earthquake, town of Kahramanmaras owes its identify to the Turkification of its unique Maras (of disputed origin) to which is added the Turkish Kahraman, “hero”. Additionally, higher not search for “Amed” on maps when making an attempt to get to Diyarbakir, Turkey’s primary Kurdish metropolis.
These are simply two of the hundreds of examples that talk of this drive to erase all “overseas” traces from the maps. The following step is to do it bodily. The town of Hasankeyf, a 12,000-year-old archaeological treasure as soon as protected by UNESCO, was fully flooded in 2020.
As we speak, Hasankey lies out of attain underneath a community of dams via which the water provide from the Tigris and the Eufrates to Syria and Iraq is commonly lower off.
Probably the most trendy cities usually are not spared both. Within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties, hundreds of Kurdish cities had been burned down by the Turkish Military within the battle towards the Kurdish guerrillas of the Kurdistan Staff’ Get together (PKK).
Within the wake of the umpteenth army operation launched by Ankara in 2015 and 2016, the rubble in a number of of them was paying homage to that of the final earthquake. As soon as once more, the civilians then took the worst half.
“You aren’t Kurdish, you might be Armenian and we’re going to do the identical we did to you 100 years in the past,” this reporter heard a Turkish police officer shout over a loudspeaker throughout the curfew enforced on the Kurdish metropolis of Cizre, in September 2015.
Two earthquakes (in 1912 and 1914) introduced what was to grow to be the primary genocide of the twentieth century, when greater than one million and a half Armenians had been swallowed by that very same fault.
As we speak, in Turkey there are barely 60,000 castaways from that Eurasian plate, and the waves are nonetheless hitting neighbouring Armenia, which stays sandwiched between two Turkic states (the second is Azerbaijan).
“How completely happy is the one who says I’m a Turk,” learn murals throughout Turkey, paraphrasing Kemal Ataturk, the controversial father of the republic. “The homeland is indivisible” can be a recurrent one.
The cruelest paradox decrees that the nation celebrates its first hundred years of existence slit open. Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdo?an has already declared a state of emergency for 3 months in ten devastated areas.
The complaints that reduction doesn’t arrive pile up, creating an much more precarious scenario for over three million Syrian refugees who´ve crossed the border to Turkey because the battle began in Syria in 2011.
The earth has burst underneath their toes after greater than a decade because the battle broke out in his nation. They’re probably the most direct victims of the Arabian plate, the one ruled by autocrats akin to Bashar al Assad in Syria, Common Abdulfatah al Sissi in Egypt or the satraps of the Persian Gulf.
All of them share with Erdo?an an obsession with perpetuating themselves in energy and an unique discourse on which to articulate their respective nation fashions.
Extra paradoxes in historical past make Erdo?an come to energy within the aftermath of the Izmir earthquake in 1999 -it left greater than 17,000 deaths-, and the final one occurred on the eve of decisive elections subsequent Might.
However maybe the deepest fault is that of democracy.
After greater than 20 years in energy, Erdo?an had shielded his re-election by disqualifying Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul and his most direct rival within the opposition Republican Folks’s Get together (CHP).
He had additionally outlawed the third political pressure, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Get together (HDP). Their leaders, Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yüksekda?, have been in jail since 2016.
“If my mom tongue is shaking the foundations of your state, it in all probability signifies that you constructed your state on my land,” mentioned Musa Anter, a Kurdish journalist and author assassinated by Turkish intelligence brokers in 1992.
Add to that the brutal jolts of geology, and catastrophe is served.
© Inter Press Service (2023) — All Rights ReservedAuthentic supply: Inter Press Service
