Kurdish villages depopulated by Turkey


The number of Kurdish villages depopulated by Turkey is estimated at around 3,000. Since the beginning of the Kurdish-Turkish conflict in 1984, the Turkish military has embarked on a campaign to eradicate the support base of the Kurdistan Workers Party, a militant Kurdish opposition group, in Turkish Kurdistan. As a result, by the year 2000 some 30,000 people had been killed, and two million Kurdish refugees driven out of their homes by the state.

Background

Much of the countryside in southeast Turkey has been depopulated by the Turkish government, with Kurdish civilians moving to local defensible centers such as Diyarbakır, Van, and Şırnak, as well as to the cities of western Turkey and even to western Europe. The causes of the depopulation included the poverty of the southeast, and the Turkish state's military operations. Human Rights Watch has documented many instances where the Turkish military forcibly evacuated villages, destroying houses and equipment to prevent the return of the inhabitants. An estimated 3,000 Kurdish villages in Turkey were virtually wiped from the map, representing the displacement of more than 378,000 people.

Depopulated and demolished towns and villages

According to the Humanitarian Law Project, 2,400 Kurdish villages were destroyed and 18,000 Kurds were executed, by the Turkish government. Other estimates have put the number of destroyed Kurdish villages at over 4,000. In total up to 3,000,000 people have been displaced.
The Kurdish Human Rights Project divides the depopulation of villages in 5 phases.
An estimated of 1,000,000 are still internally displaced as of 2009.

Government compensation

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre stated in 2009 that the Turkish Government has taken "notable" steps to address the internal displacement situation. These include commissioning a national survey on the number and conditions of IDPs, drafting a national IDP strategy; adopting law on compensation and putting together a comprehensive pilot action plan in Van Province and 13 other south-eastern provinces addressing rural and urban situations of displacement.