Adile Hanım: A Climate Lesson for a People Torn From Their Land — Where Is the DEM Party Taking Its Kurdish Base?

Rastinews — Antalya is hosting two summits this week. The first belongs to states: the UN Climate Change Conference, COP31, is underway with Turkey as host. The second belongs to "peoples." The Peoples' Climate Summit, billed as an alternative gathering "beyond COP31," runs November 14-18 in Antalya.

The DEM Party is throwing its full weight behind the second summit. The party's poster lists sixteen names alongside Co-Chair Tülay Hatimoğulları, including MPs from Muş, Van, Bitlis, Ağrı, Hakkari and Batman. The party's Ecology Commission has declared that the climate crisis stems from capitalist relations of exploitation. The summit will even include a workshop titled "Fuel of War."

On paper, none of this is objectionable. The climate crisis is real. My objection isn't to climate action — it's to the timing and the direction.

Look back over the past year and a half. In the "Terror-Free Turkey" process, launched at Abdullah Öcalan's call and carried out jointly with the state, the demands Kurdish society has carried for decades were buried one by one in silence: education in the mother tongue, constitutional guarantees, autonomy, status. Almost no one is raising these from a podium or a screen anymore.

So what is that base being offered instead? Ecology.

Channels that broadcast to Kurdish audiences now seem to have flipped a switch in unison, filling their schedules with ecology programming. "Let's meet at the peoples' climate summit" has become a routine line in the broadcast rotation. We never saw a mobilization like this for education in Kurdish. We never saw a campaign like this for the municipalities seized by state-appointed trustees.

The real question is this: what does it mean to tell a people stripped of their land to "protect their land"?

This population did not leave its land by choice. In the 1990s, Kurdish villages were emptied one after another. A 1993 report by the Human Rights Association (İHD) listed 874 villages and hamlets partially or fully evacuated that year alone. By the end of 1993, districts such as Silopi, Şırnak and Eruh had lost every village but one village-guard settlement.

In Lice and Kulp, the toll was heavier still — almost no inhabited village remained in either district. Years later, the European Court of Human Rights ruled on the Lice case. In 2004 the court found that Turkey had violated the Convention over the destruction of homes and property by security forces and the absence of an effective remedy.

The numbers remain disputed. The Diyarbakır Bar Association put the figure at 3,211 villages and hamlets evacuated between 1990 and 1997. The parliament's Human Rights Inquiry Commission gave a figure of 3,688.

Dersim's forests carry a separate wound. Between September and November 1994, roughly a third of Dersim's 399 villages — 137 of them — were partially evacuated or set ablaze during military operations. Researchers at Lund University have studied the forest fires in Dersim over the years; their findings point to a meaningful link between the clashes and the fires.

Villagers were caught between two fires. When the guerrilla war began, both the PKK and the state demanded that villagers take sides. Those who refused lost their land, and so did those who complied.

Those who lost their land landed on the edges of cities. Diyarbakır's population, 380,000 in the 1990 census, reached 1 million by 1994. Mersin grew from 422,000 to 1 million, Adana from 927,000 to 2 million. There was no development story behind this surge — only informal settlements and unemployment.

Kurdish labor then became Turkey's cheapest labor.

Look at the hazelnut groves. According to a 2014 study by the Support to Life Association, two-thirds of seasonal migrant farmworkers speak Kurdish as their mother tongue. From Urfa to Çukurova, from Konya to the Black Sea coast, Kurdish families stand behind every harvest — families living in tents, traveling in the back of trucks, taking their children to the fields instead of school.

These workers are not only exploited; they are beaten. On September 4, 2020, sixteen Kurdish workers traveling from Mazıdağı in Mardin to Sakarya were attacked by an employer and villagers. According to the workers' testimony, the employer called them a "pack of dogs." In 2018, 39-year-old Kadir Sakçı was killed in Sakarya after being attacked on the street for speaking Kurdish.

The same scene repeated three months ago. More than seventy workers and their families, traveling from Cizre and Silopi to pick hazelnuts in Bektaşlı village in Zonguldak's Alaplı district, were attacked twice with stones and clubs over two days, on August 22 and 23. Footage showed children sitting in the back of a pickup truck also being targeted with stones and clubs.

Construction sites tell the same story. In 2017, mostly Kurdish workers from Bingöl working on a TOKİ housing project in Nallıhan were attacked by a group of roughly 100 people, who threw one worker off the building's balcony. In Bodrum, three workers from Kurtalan in Siirt were attacked with shotguns, machetes and iron bars at a construction site for speaking Kurdish.

Those who fall from scaffolding often don't even make the news. According to data from the Workers' Health and Safety Watch (İSİG), at least 835 workers died in the first five months of 2026 alone, with construction and agriculture the deadliest sectors.

Then there were the sandblasting jeans workshops. In the 2000s, in backstreet workshops across Istanbul, young workers sandblasted denim and left their lungs behind. The death toll from silicosis in Karlıova district alone, in Bingöl, had climbed to 32 by this past May — 32 young graves from a single district.

Now set this picture beside the podium in Antalya. The children of a people whose villages were burned, who were beaten in hazelnut fields, who fell from scaffolding, who left their lungs in denim workshops, are being told to "protect your air, your water, your land" — as if they had emptied those villages themselves, as if they had taken to the roads of the Black Sea for pleasure.

Recall one line from the summit's rhetoric: without your massive industries and giant corporations, there would be no need for oil either. That's a true statement. But there is no massive industry in Kurdistan. What fell to Kurdistan's share was being that industry's cheapest workforce. The Kurdish provinces' problem is not carbon emissions. Their problem is burned villages, felled forests, dams, quarries and ruined farmland. In other words, politics again.

Severing ecology from the Kurdish issue and recasting it as a universal theme is the most elegant way of not talking about the Kurdish issue. No one says "we've given up on Kurdish-language education." People are simply talking about something else now. The base is kept busy, its energy redirected elsewhere.

What I take from all this is this: the summit in Antalya is more than a climate gathering. It is an attempt to rewrite the Kurdish political subject's vocabulary of demands — "peoples" instead of national rights, "living spaces" instead of status, "the planet" instead of Kurdistan.

Ecology is a Kurdish issue too. But this people's ecological memory does not begin with melting glaciers — it begins with a burning village. A climate podium that does not discuss the right of return to emptied villages, the forests of Dersim, or the workers beaten in hazelnut fields is not telling the story of what happened to Kurds. It is covering it up.