The fixed sum proposalWith the exception of a few contemporary reports by human rights organizations and local newspapers and some judgments at the ECtHR, the internal displacement of at least a third of a million Turkish citizens was conducted entirely off the record. Many of the victims are illiterate or semi-literate. The entire economy of the southeast was, and still is, largely informal. In this context, applying a compensation system based on scrupulous paper-based accounting is likely to result in very unfair decisions. While it is understandable that the government would want to avoid payment of illegitimate claims for compensation, the current approach appears less intended to ferret out a few unjustified claims than an attempt to deny appropriate levels of compensation to the overwhelming majority of legitimate claims. Arbitrary withholding of funds will further delay the return or integration of the displaced, and the sheer capriciousness of the system as currently operated, far from contributing to the stated purpose of the law—reconciliation and “healing of wounds”—seems likely to stoke jealousy and a sense of grievance in the local population. A.Z., a villager from Suçıktı village, near Kocaköy in Diyarbakir province, gave an account which typifies much of what is wrong with the application of the Compensation Law—the ostentatious but meaningless show of “objective measuring,” and arbitrary rules aimed at limiting state liability—but goes on to suggest a sensible fixed sum of compensation might be more acceptable. “The mufti who works on the commission was measuring the ruins of my house. The area was 180 square meters, but they put down 80 square meters. When I questioned this, he told me ‘We don’t pay for the courtyard.’ All our houses are like Diyarbakır houses—built round a central open area. We argued while he was on one end of the tape-measure and I was on the other. If the mufti had said, ‘Let’s forget about this business with the tape-measure. Let’s put the tape aside and make a fair figure, which we can give to all the applicants,’ then I think people would have accepted.”78 Almost all the lawyers and villagers interviewed by Human Rights Watch favored a standard payment of a fixed sum per household per year of displacement, at least over the system as it currently operates. Diyarbakır lawyer Habibe Deyar:
Providing compensation calculated on a scale per year of displacement would inevitably result in comparative injustices, since some homes destroyed at the original displacement were more valuable than others, and some families lost far more than others because of their inability to access their lands. Relinquishing objective assessment of each individual case is a departure from strict justice. However, as indicated above, the existing system already inflicts much greater comparative injustices, and some people who have suffered enormous losses have been excluded from payments or quite arbitrarily bargained down to derisory sums. Also, the current system already sets aside strict justice. The scrupulous measurings of the damage assessment commissions are merely a performance of fair play, since even at their most generous, the sums these commissions were paying were far below what any fair court would rule as appropriate compensation for the gross abuses inflicted by state officials and the resulting severe and chronic hardships. If the purpose of the “effective remedy” was to get useful sums into the hands of displaced people so that they can make a fresh start by integrating in the cities or returning to their former homes and way of life, the present arrangement is a failure and a fixed sum system appears more promising. |