Gaziantep is a city with no beginning and no end. As his story. Ancient human settlement, passed through many hands, the destinies of different people are leaning against each other as the dead in a mass grave. The memory has many languages \u200b\u200bthat do not understand each other. The last of its elderly has seen so many he has left only a god to ask account of the sense of it all. And the speed of change is rising. Gaziantep today, one of the centers of production and Turkey's most important business. On its territory there are four industrial clusters of small and medium-sized enterprises that make the economy more dynamic and expanding Europe. The textile and food production drive, and are a source of employment in a position to just under farming and stock raising, local roots and optimized by means of machinery and engineers. The famous "factories", the promise of work and dignity for the armies of hungry arms in all countries with an emerging economy, there are. Here and in Diyarbakir, Sirnak not, not in Hakkari, a majority Kurdish areas affected by the fighting and a latent injury that leads to the consequent lack of confidence investors. Gaziantep instead enjoys a good reputation, not only for the pistachios and the food but also for being faithful to the directives Kemalists, at least superficially. The last attack, thirty people dead and destroyed a police station, dating back more than ten years ago. Currently, it is often cited as a symbol of Turkey's economic growth. The city is also involved in one of the largest regional investment plans in the world, the GAP (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi), a major project under development involves the construction of twenty-two dams on the Tigris and Euphrates, contingent in South East for the production of electricity and to facilitate the irrigation of desert areas. Other categories action plan consist of investments for the cultural enhancement of these key areas in tourism. The aim of the government, as well as to attract foreign capital, is raise the standard of living in areas east of the country, historically considered the weak link in society and the economy. Will be guaranteed employment and social inclusion, say politicians from Istanbul and Ankara. The illusion of inclusion that continues to attract masses of immigrants from Gaziantep to villages and countryside. The population has soared in just over fifty years: from about three hundred thousand people in the middle of last century, has reached to over one million and a half today, according to figures officers, in reality many more. It is not only the charm of the growing metropolis, with its European-style houses, pubs beer and five-story shopping centers, to serve as a magnet. With the industrial organization of agricultural labor economy of the remote villages and settlements has been altered, causing a progressive impoverishment. The wave of modernization has devastated the lives of farmers and shepherds have become foreigners in their own home, living fossils, although they are still the majority. Another process that has gone on since the founding of the Republic is the displacement of the inhabitants of entire villages in the east by the army. In the first half of the twentieth century, operations were aimed at the response to continued Republican power, and were taken to redistribute the Kurds in Turkey as well wear out the drive. The mass transfer also affect the other part of the country from west to the central government sent in all offices and schools in Eastern officials and their families who spoke only turkish, teaching to address the state with due language. Among the eighties and nineties, however, thousands of Kurdish villages were razed to the ground in order to remove the popular support, spontaneous or forced, the guerrillas of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party), political party and paramilitary claiming rights autonomy Kurds, who for thirty years and engages with the institutions of the Turkish war inside the country. To guerrilla ambushes and mines, the army responded with reprisals and bombings in an attempt to flush out the PKK from the mountains on the border with Iraq. To date, there are over forty thousand deaths clashes and attacks. War, poverty and deportations have increased dramatically in major Turkish cities, transforming them into monsters protean of endless suburbs built by wild palazzinari. Istanbul, with a population of over fifteen million inhabitants, of whom two million are Kurds, is the symbol of the uncontrolled process. Even Gaziantep, in its furthest reaches, it expands out of order: the popular buildings are scattered like a flock in the moonscape of rubble and pastures. The space there is for now, and is ground relentlessly. In other areas of the city, climb the hills, the largest Kurdish ghettos, made up of cubicles or just miserable huts, the antithesis to the achievements of economic slow-growing middle class, which symbolizes the aspiration for social status up to the majority the dispossessed.
"Remember, in the east there is only three things: dust, dirt and hypocrisy," he says Prof. Nuri sitting at his desk in his study. Age of indecipherable not old and no longer young, medium height, physical dry, his hair turn a smoky gray with white spots like milk, which sometimes has thin lips smiling but as per agreement, without force, without joy. He teaches sociology at the University of Gaziantep public for ten years, is originally from Kurdish Kilis, a village on the Syrian border, surrounded by minefields. Often invites me to drink the coffee that you do on a hot plate, a passion. Not the turkish coffee, we would point out, but the long, aqueous an American car. On the walls, I recognize the familiar face of Gramsci in a photo in black and white. There are also Adorno, Balzac, Rousseau and Yashar Kemal. The picture Atatürk, omnipresent in all public offices, is missing here, and this absence speaks for itself. On the opposite wall, a poster with a drawing of a woman dancing the flamenco in a symphony of colors. Nuri I often talk about the time he was in Spain to hold a conference on rural villages in the Middle East, with a touch of pride. Gaziantep, a country that considers the outskirts of the province, is the close. Since, however, does not think, here have a family, two children growing up and his studies, tasks that are given. Behind those gray eyes flecked with green, there are conclusions and seeing bitter cold on the state of things, gained by dint of consuming shoes around the city between the asphalt and gravel roads villages. It combines the fingers before his face and looks sideways at me, quietly nestled in the calculation of someone used to judge who is in front, before you speak. Can be open with me. "I will tell you at university, but know that the wheel turns with the blood of civilization. The reason is simple: a people, a culture, a State needs to survive. If the state lacks a different culture, a minority, is considered deviant, and is destined to disappear. Create a State does not mean that killing another or bend those who oppose it. Cancel them, like here a hundred years with the Kurds ... the Kurds ... the ideas that lead to a state not born in rural areas, life there is repeated identical in itself, outside of history. And that's where we come from the countryside, the consciousness of people has come when we have decided to remove it. Kurdish tribes in the nineteenth century they waged war with each other for a piece of land ... probably live in isolation has preserved the language and customs, at the bottom of the narrow-mindedness is also a method of survival, but today is our conviction. " I feel the anger of Nuri hovering in the room. A lucid anger that spares nothing to both parties, as an orphan raised accusing parents and guardians of the world that have left and who has not had time to change. "You know what the Turkish identity? the face of power. And power is not the means, but the end. The identity must be produced and enhanced to ensure obedience, people must love the fact that Turkish and nothing else ... A mechanism set in motion by the founder of this State. Now, the power states in humans in two ways: with the triumph and humiliation. To understand the triumphalism take the national memory, a historian who has nothing. A sampling of events because of very short memories and oblivion, a few other things repeated endlessly and completely removed ... they kill half of a village and changed the name to make it forget, how did that today is called Dersim Tunceli While ... Instead, battles of liberation, the death of martyrs, the flag, the life of Atatürk is the religion that all must confess. Is taught from childhood, to school children repeat "I mutlu turkum diyene" (turkish happy is he who can say, the most famous sentence of Atatürk), read it over the mountains and on the streets and eventually end up believe it! '. The coffee in the cup is over, Nuri is quick to fill it again. Go and have a look in the hallway, then closes the door. Our eyes meet, accomplices, and sat down again. He does not want to be bothered or do not want others to feel. "The humiliation is more practical and more subtle. Made The Kurds feel a social handicap. Kurdish equivalent of primitive, undeveloped. Nobody gets to work if you speak only Kurdish, and if you want to study, books that are in our language can be counted on one hand. These are the same Kurdish families who want their children to forget where they come from, and the terrible thing is that they do for their own good. Are you proud to be Kurdish, you are an enemy of the fatherland, for surely you are conspiring to divide, you're the terrorists. The government propaganda has grown more than a generation in hatred, the young Turks of Kurdish language now automatically connect to the bombs and the soldiers killed, they feel discomfort when they hear it on the street. What remains to be done to a Kurd who wants to integrate? Put the past behind and embrace the symbols of the Republic. It's called assimilation, and even while you're in, you realize it you do to survive ... I have been able, by separating the Kurds from the past have divided them in this. " Nuri say to the current AKP government, the Islamic party line, seems willing to open themselves to claims of greater cultural rights to Kurds. The "national pact of brotherhood" towards minorities and the recognition of the existence of a "Kurdish question" are steps in this direction. Even the opening of the first Kurdish television channel last year and the repeal of laws against publications newspapers and videos in Kurdish augur well. "I do not have much hope. The tension has eased, it is true, but the conditions of our exclusion of the slower we are destined to disappear, have not changed. This country, from its birth, is under the control of the military, which does not cede power easily. There is the Republic, but until 1950 there was a single party. Later, the little democratic process was three times interrupted by coups, and in 1980 the Army has rewritten the constitution. There are still laws like Article 301 that punishes insulting Turkish identity and homeland, in practice self-criticism is banned ... The constitutional law against those fomenting separatism is a pillar of this order. The Kurdish party DTP was closed for alleged contacts with the PKK, good job! Now the square have left only the extremists ... The same climate of suspicion and fear surrounding those who provide information or simply manifest. Journalists uncomfortable slamming into them with a pretext. They have no problem even with kids, you know how olds crowded prisons? This would be a country that aspires to join Europe? The AKP is doing his interests, wants to broaden its electoral base as possible. At the bottom is a neurotic middle class and the afternoon goes to the mosque to do the namaz and evening looks TV drinking beer ... The AKP is putting up a new center of power by placing his men in the places that count and discrediting their enemies. They stink of patriarchy, defend Islamic ideology that attracts acclaim but only interested in money ... there is too much hypocrisy. Too much. " Nuri looks out to the scattered clouds. The pessimism of this man is probably realistic given from having integrated with the blood and pain the art of judging. He was lieutenant in the army for seven years before becoming a professor, sent east to fight the "terrorists". He speaks reluctantly, and only once managed to cavargli a fragment of memory: "In the mountains ... you feel lost, those huge spaces, the snow, you stick to the orders and classmates. I was young, I knew vaguely that I was betraying the Kurds, but I needed to prove turkish. I fought and I've seen ... the torture, the abuse, I have seen the truth. Our enemy was not less. In war the first thing to die are the ideal ... We have done some horrible things over there ... in the end I despised my soldiers, and even myself. As long as the field I do not forgive. " I do not know if it was the coffee or his words to make me come up with a pounding tachycardia. I feel suffocated, the walls shrink around. Do I have the white face, because Nuri me a pat on the back and says he quit. We smoke a cigarette outside, with students who crowd the paths of the university. We stay there for a while ', no more talking, just looking around.
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