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TUZLA, Turkey,
July 6 (AFP) - For the scond time in 30 years, the
Kekilik brood are rebuilding their family home in
this Kurdish village in southeast Turkey -- it was
first destroyed by an earthquake in 1975, then
burned down by the army in 1995 during the 15-year
war with Kurdish rebels.
Now, in 2005 and six years after Ankara allowed
evacuated villagers to return home following a lull
in fighting, much of the settlement still looks like
an archaelogical dig and some families live in sheds
made of nylon sheet, plastic and tin plates.
The six Kekilik girls carry water from a nearby
fountain and go to school to another village because
the government has yet to rebuild the one in Tuzla,
one of 3,000 rural settlements the army destroyed in
the 1990s for supporting and hiding guerrillas of
the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
The four sons live and work in Diyarbakir, the
central city of the region, to feed the crowded
household whose farmland and fruit trees also
perished when soldiers set Tuzla on fire one night
in 1995 and herded its dwellers away.
"This is our home. We want to live here," said
Feride Kekilik as her daughters washed pans in a
makeshift kitchen made of nylon sheets with branches
for cover outside their roofless two-room house.
Two years after applying, the family is still
waiting for government aid and is rebuilding the
house with its own scanty resources.
The plight of at least 380,000 people who share the
Kekiliks' fate is closely watched by the European
Union, which Turkey is seeking to join, and
nourishes local mistrust in Ankara's efforts to mend
fences with its Kurds.
The government says a third of the displaced people
have returned to their homes, but civic groups
monitoring the problem say the rate is lower.
The slow pace of the return is blamed on the
near-wilderness the already destitute villagers face
when they come back from urban shanty towns, as well
as inadequate and arbitrary support by the
government.
Another major obstacle is the threat posed by
so-called village guards, Kurdish militias armed by
the government to fight the rebels, who have usurped
evacuated homes and farming land.
"The village guards have been cultivating or renting
the farmlands. They have profited from the war,"
said Selahattin Demirtas, the head of the Human
Rights Association in Diyarbakir.
Militia members have been implicated in the killing
of at least eight returnees.
Under pressure by the EU and the United Nations,
Ankara is now drawing up a plan to speed up and
facilitate the returns.
It is also accelerating payment of compensation,
albeit modest, to people who have suffered material
loss from the conflict, alarmed by the prospect of
being swamped by demands for much higher sums after
victims began taking their cases before the European
Court of Human Rights, Demirtas said.
The return process, however, has been seriously
jeopardized by a sharp increase over the past
several months in renewed fighting between the army
and the PKK, which called off a five-year unilateral
truce with the government in June 2004.
"The thought of being displaced and ruined once
again is a great source of discouragement for the
people," Demirtas said.
AFP
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