Filiz Deniz: Why Ahlat?

Rastinews — Reading the news that 371 Meskhetian Turkish families evacuated from the war zone in Ukraine had been resettled in Bitlis's Ahlat district, what caught my attention wasn't the number 371. It wasn't the fact that Meskhetian Turks were being brought to Turkey, either.

It was Ahlat.

Why Ahlat?

Asking that question doesn't require ignoring the exile Meskhetian Turks have lived through. Quite the opposite — anyone who knows what exile means should be more careful here, not less. Stalin drove the Meskhetian Turks from their homeland in 1944 and scattered them across the Soviet Union. Decades later, some of them found themselves in Ukraine, this time in the middle of a war. Turkey evacuating them and providing shelter isn't, in itself, what I'm questioning.

What I'm looking at is the place the state chose.

When a state resettles people en masse, the question "why here?" matters — especially in a country like Turkey, where resettlement carries heavy historical baggage.

The memory of the region around Ahlat makes that question unavoidable.

Bitlis and its surroundings are among the oldest Kurdish settlement areas. Ahlat is no exception. This is a region that bore some of the heaviest consequences of the conflict in the 1990s. It hasn't been so long since villages were emptied and people were torn from their homes and land and scattered into the big cities. Some of those people still haven't been able to return to their villages; some of those who did return never managed to rebuild the lives they had.

When the state carries out a new, mass resettlement in a place like this, the past comes to the table on its own.

And the choice of Ahlat is nothing new.

Back in 2016, Meskhetian Turks brought from Ukraine were also resettled in Ahlat. At the time, the district governor of Ahlat was asked the same question: why Ahlat?

His answer deserves a second reading today.

He explained that Ahlat had historically served as a gathering and reception point for Turkic tribes arriving in Anatolia, then added that if capacity allowed, "state thinking" would decide to settle even more families there.

That phrase — "state thinking" — matters.

Because ten years later, here we are, back in Ahlat.

This time it's 371 families. There's a broader resettlement program in place, and the plan calls for a thousand families to be settled in Ahlat in total.

So the 2016 choice wasn't a temporary fix. At the very least, it's hard to call it that anymore.

What stands out even more is that reports from those same years said Meskhetian Turks would farm and raise livestock in villages in the region "emptied by terrorism."

It's hard not to dwell on that phrase.

"Villages emptied by terrorism."

A village doesn't empty itself. The people living in it don't vanish overnight, all at once. Those villages had owners. They had houses, fields, cemeteries, memories.

Where did they go?

Why did they go?

Were they able to return?

Were those who wanted to return given houses, land, credit, livestock, agricultural support?

Call a village "empty" without asking these questions, and you write the people out of the story. All that's left is a plot of land available for replanning.

This is where my real objection begins.

Ahlat today isn't seen merely as a district of Bitlis. In recent years it has been unmistakably turned into a political and historical symbol. Along with Malazgirt (Manzikert), it has been placed at the center of the government's narrative of the Seljuks, of conquest, of "Anatolia's gates opening to the Turks." The presidential compound built in Ahlat is one of the most visible signs of this.

Every year, the state's top leadership comes here. Speeches are given. The refrain of a "thousand-year homeland" is repeated.

In a district defined by all of this, explaining the mass, multi-year resettlement of Meskhetian Turks — whom the state recognizes as "ethnic Turks" — purely by the availability of vacant TOKİ (Turkey's state housing authority) units feels insufficient to me.

The ready-housing factor is real, of course. During the first resettlements, Meskhetian community representatives themselves said that available mass housing had shaped the choice of Ahlat and Erzincan.

That's plausible.

But in state decisions, practical needs and political preferences don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Anyone familiar with Turkey's resettlement history knows this well.

From the Republic's earliest years, where and how the population would live was never purely a social question for the state. Resettlement doubled as a tool of identity and security policy. Even reading the language of the 1934 Settlement Law today makes that plain. Kurds are among the communities that have lived with the consequences of these policies.

That's why the current resettlement in Ahlat can't be assessed in isolation from history.

But I don't want to reach an easy verdict here, either.

There's no document on record stating "settle Meskhetian Turks here to alter Ahlat's Kurdish population." Writing this up as a settled fact without such a document would be a different matter altogether.

But it's also clear there are serious questions waiting to be answered.

Why has the state favored Ahlat for the resettlement of Meskhetian Turks for close to a decade now?

In setting the target of a thousand families, was Ahlat's existing population makeup and local balance taken into account?

What is the ownership history of the land used for the new settlement areas?

Are village pastures being used?

Was the local population's opinion sought?

And, most important to me: why hasn't the state mobilized the same resources for the return of people once forced to leave this region — or if it did, what came of it?

Without answers to these questions, dismissing demographic concerns isn't right.

Demographics isn't just a matter of figures on a population table. It has consequences that reach from which language will be heard more on the street a few generations from now, to local politics, to land ownership, to cultural memory.

I don't think even a single sentence directed against Meskhetian Turks belongs here.

They didn't design this policy.

They, too, are a people who have known exile.

Pitting people once loaded onto train wagons and torn from their homeland against another people today would be a grave injustice, both historically and morally. Nor is there any point asking the families resettled in Ahlat, "Why did you come here?"

The question should be put to the state, not to them.

Why Ahlat?

Maybe the answer really is ready-made housing.

Maybe it's economic and agricultural planning.

Maybe the historical and political meaning the state has attached to Ahlat in recent years played no part at all in this choice.

All of that is possible.

But with Turkey's resettlement history, the memory of forced displacement in the 1990s, the political symbol Ahlat has become in recent years, and a resettlement policy pursued in the same place since 2016 all standing side by side, no journalist can be expected to look past them.

Sometimes a story's real substance lies not in the answer it gives, but in the question no one asks.

In the news that 371 families were resettled in Ahlat, that question, for me, remains the same:

Why Ahlat?