Amnesty wants end to Kurdish banishment

DIYARBAKIR, TURKEY— Turkish authorities have forcibly evicted tens of thousands of people in security operations in a predominantly Kurdish district of southeastern Turkey, a human rights group said Tuesday.

Amnesty International said authorities have prevented their return by expropriating and demolishing homes in a policy that may amount to collective punishment.

Amnesty’s Europe director, John Dalhuisen, said that “a year after a round-the-clock curfew was imposed in Sur, thousands of people remain displaced from their homes, struggling to make ends meet and facing an uncertain future in an increasingly repressive atmosphere.”

Turkish officials have claimed the vast security operations and 24-hour curfews in Sur and other predominantly Kurdish areas were necessary for security reasons — to root out fighters linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey, the U.S. and the European Union consider a terrorist organization.

PKK-linked and -inspired militants, many of them youths, had dug trenches, raised barricades and booby-trapped areas in neighbourhoods where they sought to claim autonomy, including in Sur, a walled-off, historic district in the city of Diyarbakir, which is widely seen by Turkey’s Kurds as their regional capital.

A ceasefire between the Turkish government and PKK collapsed in July 2015. As the conflict escalated, large sections of Sur, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, were placed under curfew in December 2015.