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.”