"My castle has
been demolished"
Hacer Foggo,
Buldozing roma settlement in Turkey for luxury investements 07/12/2009 - When the last house in Sulukule was bulldozed on 12 November, Gülsüm Bitirmiş, born in 1956, was crying out after her house, where she was born and raised, after her memories and her childhood: “my castle has been demolished”. Meanwhile, the officials of Fatih Municipality had already set off with their truck, loaded with her belongings, which would be put in the storage of the municipality. Later that week, the preparations for the construction of luxurious housings in Sulukule started.
The investor landlord, who would settle in the luxurious housing with an underground parking garage to be built in, where Gülsüm Bitirmiş’s house used to be, probably supports “the expansion of Roma people out of Sulukule”. Likewise, the new owners of the shopping center to be built in where Asım Hallaç’s grocery store used to be before it was bulldozed, probably heaved a sigh of relief when this last Roma resident was displaced out of Sulukule.
Yet, Mr. Bayraktar, the president of Mass Housing Administration, had made promises for the realization of the alternative project and for the relocation of Roma people back to Sulukule. Bayraktar did not keep his promise and worse still, he made some remarks such as “the concern of Sulukule people is not housing”, “We created new rentable areas with the demolitions of gecekondus”. All of the houses in Sulukule, known as the second Roma settlement on earth, were bulldozed and turned into an empty space thanks to the cooperation of public authorities, which, all in all, ignored the human factor. Thousand years old Roma history has been destroyed.
"The patter of tiny feet"
After that Sulukule was turned into an empty land, it is not only the investors, who heaved a sigh of relief. Legitimized with discourses about “urban customs”, “urban culture”, “blighted area” and with that “a modern and "healthy" urban life is necessity”, “The laundry should not be hang out in the streets”, “people should not sit out at the doorsteps”, “people should not make music in the streets, weddings should not take place in the streets”, the demolitions in Roma neighborhoods – 300 houses in Sulukule, 240 in Küçükbakkalköy and 40 in Yahya Kemal Neighborhood- also comforted some “democrat” literate people, who are in love with Istanbul and lovesick for gated communities.
While
the city is being rebuilt in line with their tastes and preferences,
everything in the neighborhoods, where Roma people and urban poor used to live for years, was
razed down by the bulldozers: the
patter of tiny feet, the custom of drinking tea at doorsteps,
tea houses and everything.
Là aussi il y a comme une
différence de valeurs .....
vous avez dit "valeurs" ?
