Turkey betrays its ancient Romani community
No thanksgiving to Turkey: Istanbul's urban redevelopment has not been kind to the city's centuries-old Romani inhabitants (illustration: Damian Le Bas)
It's the gateway to Europe, the last port of Asia, and the route that the Romani people passed through 1,000 years ago on their way to the Europe that millions of them would make their home.
Today, though, Istanbul is not a welcoming place to be Romani. The Turkish government does not take kindly to people professing any ethnicity other than "Turkish", a category that the country's Romanies, with their different language and Indian culture, do not fit easily into.
Yet for over half a millennium, many of those who didn't continue the long march into Europe had found a home in the village of Sulukule in Istanbul's Fatih district. In recent years, and in spite of stern objections from UNESCO and human rights observers, this historic community was wrenched from its home by forced purchase orders, so their basic but familiar housing could be bulldozed to clear the way for new and, to them, unafforable homes.
The Guardian's Constanze Letsch reported on the situation yesterday, exposing the disgusting truth that Sulukule's Romani residents were made to accept 500 Turkish Lira per square metre for land that would be sold on at 7 to 9 times that price once redeveloped. Many of the area's historic residents have been forced out of their ancestral neighbourhood by these moves, which are now entering their closing stages.
Yet this situation did not develop overnight. By mid-2008 Time Magazine had informed its readers that Sulukele was being steadily cleansed of its ancient ethnic minority, the imperial tactics of its redevelopers not preventing them from referring to the new homes they were building as "Ottoman-style" houses.
Academic and Romani man Adrian Marsh, who lived with the Sulukule community and saw the prejudice they faced first-hand: this included anti-Romani discrimination in schools and the workplace, and hospital maternity wards with separate rooms for "Gypsy women". He explained to Time magazine that "What we have is the most religious municipality in the country confronting what it deems to be a historically irreligious, immoral group", an image of the Roma which holds fast even when they themselves are the victims of mass injustice, such as the "slum clearances" of Sulukule which preceded the redevelopment of the area.
Istanbul is over 1,000 miles from the tragedy currently unfolding in Van in the east of the country, yet the area is still prone to earthquakes: this was cited as one pillar of the need to redevelop the Sulukule neighbourhood, whose Romani inhabitants have been moved on by an upheaval of a different and premeditated kind.