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In Restoration, A Violent History Unearthed

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  • In Restoration, A Violent History Unearthed

    IN RESTORATION, A VIOLENT HISTORY UNEARTHED

    The International Herald Tribune
    March 29, 2012 Thursday
    France

    Remains in citadel raise questions about Turkey's ambitious museum plan

    by SUSANNE G�oSTEN
    DIYARBAKIR, Turkey

    ABSTRACT

    A historic citadel is being made into an ambitious museum, but human
    remains found there have turned the project into a contested rather
    than galvanizing event.

    FULL TEXT

    Crouched on the back of a fleeing bull, a mighty lion digs his claws
    into the flanks of its prey, sinking his teeth into its neck for the
    kill. The limestone bas-relief, set into the basalt gateway arch of
    the Diyarbakir citadel, carries a message as clear today as it was
    800 years ago, when the Artuqids, a Mesopotamian dynasty that then
    ruled the region, carved it into the fortress gate.

    And until recently, the warning remained real. "When someone was
    taken in there, we knew he would not return - not as a human being
    anyway," Nevzat Ozgen, a Diyarbakir resident, said in an interview
    this month, about the walled citadel at the heart of this ancient
    city in southeastern Anatolia.

    A staging post for the Turkish Army's long-running fight against
    Kurdish rebels, Diyarbakir served as capital of the emergency rule
    region in Turkey's southeastern provinces throughout the 1990s and
    until the state of emergency was lifted in 2002.

    The citadel in those years housed police and military headquarters,
    prosecutors, courts and a notorious prison, complete with torture
    chambers.

    "When I first walked in here after the citadel was vacated in 2005, I
    was so horrified I backed out again," Zafer Han, an art historian with
    the Diyarbakir Museum, said during a tour of the site this month. "The
    cramped cells, the scribbles of the prisoners on the walls - it was
    as if I could hear the screams of humans still echoing in there."

    Now, sunlight streams through the prison building, revealing the
    Artuqid masonry exposed when the prison cells were demolished as part
    of an ongoing refurbishment project - conceived to draw tourism and
    jobs to the region during a hopeful period when fighting eased in
    the early part of this century.

    In an adjoining building is the former headquarters of the Gendarmerie
    Intelligence and Anti-terror Organization, Jitem, a paramilitary
    intelligence service suspected in thousands of 1990s political
    murders. The partitions between offices have been torn out to reveal
    the mangers of cavalry horses stabled here in Ottoman times.

    Restoration of nearby Ottoman-era courthouses and an Ottoman armory is
    nearly complete, while a 4th-century Byzantine church in the citadel,
    last used as a weapons depot by the Turkish Army, has already been
    expertly restored and readied as an exhibition space.

    On completion, planned for the end of this year, the restored citadel
    will open to the public as one of the most ambitious archaeological
    museums in this part of the world.

    "It is a conservator's dream, a chance to showcase to the world the
    rich history of an 8,000-year-old living city," Nevin Soyukaya, an
    archaeologist and the director of the Diyarbakir Museum, said in an
    interview this month.

    Founded in neolithic times, as a tumulus overlooking the citadel
    attests, and known in antiquity as Amida, Diyarbakir is one of the
    oldest continually inhabited cities in the world.

    Ruled at times by great empires like the Assyrians and the Byzantines,
    at other times by local dynasties, it stood at a crossroads of
    civilizations, linking Mesopotamia with the empires to the east
    and the north. Coveted, fought over and repeatedly changing hands,
    "Diyarbakir has always been able to blend the various cultures in
    its melting pot to create a culture all its own," Ms. Soyukaya said.

    Her museum's storerooms are overflowing with priceless artifacts
    unearthed in archaeological digs around the region, she said.

    These will soon find a new home in the citadel. Besides an exhibition
    tracing the history of the city, the museum will house displays
    exploring the history of agriculture, whose origins in the area
    between the Euphrates and the Tigris date back thousands of years,
    as well as religion, architecture and other subjects, all illustrated
    by artifacts from the area.

    The museum complex will also include a conservation and restoration
    laboratory housed in the former prison; seminar rooms, workshops and
    an education center; and a restaurant and café. "We want this to be
    a community center, a living museum," Ms. Soyukaya said.

    But grim reminders of the past keep cropping up. This year, workers
    digging a ditch for the museum's plumbing found human skulls and bones
    near the former prison's walls. In all, the remains of 38 people were
    unearthed from the ditch, which remained cordoned off and guarded as
    a crime scene this month.

    A forensic report commissioned by the prosecutor's office last month
    said the bones were at least 100 years old, but many in the city are
    not convinced.

    "I think my father's bones may be there," said Mr. Ozgen, the
    Diyarbakir resident. He said his father, Fikri Ozgen, was grabbed in
    the street outside his house by police officers and hauled away on
    the morning of Feb. 27, 1997.

    "We never heard from him again," said Mr. Ozgen, 44. But circumstantial
    evidence led him to believe, he added, that his father had been
    imprisoned in the citadel before being killed because a son,
    Mr. Ozgen's brother, had joined the Kurdish rebels in the mountains.

    "I have written to the Ministry of Culture asking it not to turn
    that site into a museum," Mr. Ozgen said. "How could one visit such
    a museum?"

    He has also applied to authorities for a DNA test to be performed
    on his blood and on the bones found in the citadel, but has had no
    answer. At the Diyarbakir branch of Turkey's Human Rights Association,
    it is a familiar story. "We have received numerous calls from people
    whose fathers were taken away by Jitem in the 1990s and never seen
    again" and who now hope to find their remains in the citadel, Serdar
    Celebi, a lawyer and board member of the association, said in an
    interview this month.

    "But we have also received calls from others whose grandfathers went
    missing during the Sheikh Said rebellion," he added, referring to
    a 1925 rebellion of Kurds against the Turkish Republic, which was
    quashed. "The courthouses were there at the time, too."

    Historians have raised another possibility: that the remains might
    be those of Armenians massacred in 1915.

    "To us, the important thing is not so much which particular massacre
    these bones are from," Mr. Celebi said. "The important thing is to
    face up to the fact that the state has always slaughtered people here."

    Still, Mr. Celebi's association supports the plans for the museum
    in the citadel: "It's a wonderful project, it can contribute to the
    recovery of this city by drawing tourists from Europe," he said.

    Work on the museum is to continue at full speed to meet the target
    of opening next year, even as forensic scientists work to ascertain
    the origins of the human remains, Turkey's culture minister, Ertugrul
    Gunay, said in an interview in Istanbul last month.

    "If they turn out to be victims of a massacre, we will definitely
    commemorate them with a plaque, a memorial site," Mr. Gunay said. "But
    we are hoping it proves not to be so."


    From: Baghdasarian
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