Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [88]
Early on the morning of 2 September 1977, Sabri walked along the potholed mud road to the edge of the neighborhood with his wife and sons, aged 5 and 10. He told the boys to gather stones, sticks, anything that could be thrown. The police arrived in squadrons, wearing white helmets and bulletproof vests, with their pistols drawn. They were joined by armored vehicles, behind which came the bulldozers. The battle lasted all day. By the end, 12 residents of May 1 had died, dozens had been hospitalized, and their neighborhood had been demolished.
The houses would be rebuilt, but Sabri’s life did not get easier. Although his politics, like those of most Alevis at the time, were on the left, he was alarmed by the deadly terrorist extremism that had been taken up by the second-generation youths of the arrival city. Militant groups from the right and left and various religious factions seized control of gecekondu neighborhoods, declaring them “liberated zones,” whether their residents were sympathetic to their cause or otherwise. The walls of May 1 became covered with slogans of feuding leftist and Maoist militant groups: Revolutionary Way, Liberation, the Progressive Youth Association. “They built a kind of military base here, in the middle of the neighborhood, and after that the soldiers were here all the time,” says Mehmet Yeniyol, who came here as an idealistic 35-year-old teacher and helped build the first school, in 1977. “Before they built it, even the municipal police couldn’t get into this neighborhood. It was guerrilla war.”
In the media, in Parliament, and in academic discussions, Sabri and his neighbors had become symbols of the looming showdown between villagers and urbanites. Gecekondu people were no longer described as rural migrants but as a potentially threatening population who were destroying the values, institutions and social order of the city.”7
But those who were watching closely at the time realized that these weren’t backward village cultures reproducing themselves on the edge of town: This was an entirely new politics, born in the outskirts by the children of rural immigrants, shocking to their largely apolitical peasant parents. “These young people have no meaningful role in our society, few opportunities for work and have dissociated themselves from the values of their traditionalist families,” an Istanbul psychiatry professor concluded in 1978. “They feel isolated and powerless and are easy prey for the extremists.”8
The social order on the outskirts broke down further. Sabri found that his people’s committee was dividing its energies between the utopian task of rebuilding a neighborhood for poor villagers and the rather dirtier work of staving off threats of further demolitions and increasingly violent incursions from conservative and Islamic groups from neighboring migrant settlements. Gangs patrolled the streets, beating up young men who had the wrong political affiliations or, perhaps worse, no affiliations at all.
THE OLD CITY TAKES CONTROL OF THE ARRIVAL CITY
One afternoon in 1978, the committee, and the neighborhood’s utopian ambitions, were blotted out of existence. Sabri describes the event as a dark mystery: “Five right-wing guys came into a coffeehouse here, claiming that the whole neighborhood was originally their property. They were swearing, and they were armed. I wasn’t there, this is what I heard. There was a fight, and these guys’ dead bodies were discovered in the stone mines.” A police investigation—what Sabri calls a conspiracy—blamed the people’s committee, and Sabri in particular, for the five murders. With help from his network of villagers, he fled, leaving his wife and children alone in their gecekondu house in the center of the neighborhood. For the next three years, he lived in hiding