Joost Jongerden contributed with two chapters to the book “A Hundred Years of Republican Turkey: A History in a Hundred Fragments” edited by Alp Yenen and Erik-Jan Zürcher and published by Leiden University press. One of these chapters, “The Return to the Village: Turkey’s State-Building in Kurdistan” discusses Turkey’s efforts to change the rural settlement structure in the Kurdish East and Southeast.

As part of its counter-insurgency strategy to reclaim the countryside in southeast Anatolia from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK), the Turkish Armed Forces evacuated and destroyed rural settlements on a massive scale in the 1990s. According to official figures, 833 villages and 2,382 small rural settlements, totalling 3,215 settlements, were evacuated and destroyed in fourteen provinces in the east and southeast of Turkey. Several plans for resettlement or the controlled rural return of Kurdish villagers had already been made and discussed when the evacuations took place. It took until 2001, however, for a comprehensive plan to be released, one that, as it turned out, was more concerned about the settlement structure in Turkey than with the forced migrants, and this must be seen against the background of the Kemalist elite in Turkey, which has been preoccupied with the production of places and people as bearers of Turkish identity since the establishment of the Republic.

People thought to be infringing on the new national order were subjected to physical erasure (the Armenian genocide), removal (population exchanges with neighbouring countries), and assimilation. In the context of the latter, the Kemalist nation-builders considered the small and dispersed settlement structure to be a barrier to bringing in “civilisation”. To accomplish this mission, a reduction in the number of villages by means of a concentration of the population into larger units was considered necessary so the state could down-scale administration costs and increase central bureaucratic control over the population. In 1963, 1983, and 1987, costs were calculated for a complete overhaul of the settlement structure by means of “village unification,” while in the 1970s, using the terms “Merkez-Köy” (Centre-Village), “Tarım-Kent” (Agriculture-City), and “Köy-Kent” (Village-City), models were developed for the purposes of administrative clustering and modular urbanisation.

It was in this context of perceived tensions between, on the one hand, the extension of the state’s bureaucratic network into the countryside and, on the other hand, the high number of villages and their dispersed make-up that the evacuation of villages in Turkey’s southeast was considered an opportunity. The counter-insurgent clearing of the countryside there created an “opportunity” to redesign the countryside so that the state could more effectively penetrate the daily lives of the inhabitants of rebellious areas. As such, the East and Southeast Anatolia Region Village Return and Rehabilitation Project Sub Region Development Plan can be analysed not only as an extension of a military counterinsurgency through development planning, but also as the resuscitation of a Kemalist nation-building fantasy. In that fantasy, the Kurdish question is one of control and assimilation.    

You can read the full chapter here: https://www.academia.edu/108265905/The_Return_to_the_Village_Turkeys_State_Building_in_Kurdistan