During the armed conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), and most intensively between 1991 and 1995, Turkish security forces cleared rural settlements across the mainly Kurdish south-east under emergency rule. Human Rights Watch documented troops and gendarmes surrounding villages, burning houses, stored grain, orchards and livestock, often after residents refused to join the state-armed 'village guard' militia, which numbered roughly 45,000 men by the mid-1990s; the government said evacuations were required to deny the PKK logistical support and that some villages were burned by the PKK itself. Turkish state figures record 378,335 people displaced from 820 villages and 2,345 hamlets, while a 2006 survey commissioned by the Turkish government from Hacettepe University put the total at 953,680 to 1,201,200 and Kurdish organisations claim up to three million; roughly 3,000 settlements were depopulated. Most of the displaced moved into Diyarbakir, Van, Batman and other regional cities and into Istanbul, Mersin and Izmir, where they formed large impoverished peripheries. The European Court of Human Rights repeatedly found Turkey responsible for the destruction of homes and property in these operations, and a 2004 compensation law and a village return programme produced limited returns; Human Rights Watch reported in 2002 that returns were being obstructed by village guards and unmet claims.
Turkish security forces emptied and burned Kurdish villages and hamlets in south-eastern Anatolia during the conflict with the PKK
The emergency-rule region covered Diyarbakır, Hakkari, Mardin, Siirt, Şırnak, Batman, Bingöl, Tunceli, Van and Elazığ with Adıyaman, Bitlis and Muş as neighbouring provinces; their 1990 census totals sum to roughly six million. Displacement estimates diverge sharply: the Turkish government has cited about 380,000 evacuated from some 3,000 settlements, while parliamentary and human rights inquiries and Human Rights Watch put the total between one and three million.
No defensible death toll attaches to the evacuations themselves, which were principally expulsions rather than killings; they took place inside a wider conflict whose total dead the Turkish General Staff and independent tallies put at roughly 30,000-40,000 including combatants between 1984 and 1999. Human Rights Watch separately documented 'disappearances' and extrajudicial killings during and around the evacuations, in the hundreds rather than thousands.
Human Rights Watch and the European Court of Human Rights documented the burning of homes and crops, and Human Rights Watch also recorded disappearances, arbitrary detention and torture during the evacuations.
Turkey