Our Demands As of Our Last Meeting
Our Demands as of Our Last Meeting[1]
In my neighbourhood where poverty prevails and subsistence is hard, people have NOT committed any crime. My people subsist solely on collecting plastics, boxes and papers from garbage cans. By demolishing our own houses ourselves, we have shown how respectful we are to the law because we are such a people[2] that we always support the law and our municipality. The people who have lost their homes are really aggrieved citizens. The state is supreme. We have always been altruistic before our governors. The state should not dismiss people from their homes, from their own environment. If our municipality needs our residence, we demolish our homes ourselves for sure. Yet, if our residences are merely to be demolished because Roma, we, are living there, then, this strife of these people will be against our governors, against the people who made this order.
There can be new housing here. New houses with two flats in accordance with European requirements can be built here. If there is no permission for housing here under any condition, then, we demand new estates in place of the demolished houses and for the 40 citizens who had residency papers:
(1) 20 with land allocation documents
(2) 14 demolished houses
(3) We demand houses to be given to the families, 40 people in total, who were tenants in these demolished houses if there will be new parcels in another district.
If it is to be standard land allocation, the Bilgi University will undertake the construction of houses. The Chamber of Architects will do the planning without demanding money. Construction will be funded by European Union. Yet, since we did not find the lands in the Alibeykoy area suitable, the land issue hasn’t solved there yet.
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On behalf of 50 households populated by 500 people in total living in a Romani neighbourhood in Yahya Kemal in Kagithane district
We refer this issue for your own comments.
Issue:
Some municipalities arrange shelters for even street dogs to live in a dignified fashion[3], even some wild animals which are said to be endangered are sheltered in our country. Those so-called animal rights advocates, among them one who even has beaten a man pretentiously in the witness of 75 million people[4] just because he hanged a dead crow on a tree, are all silent when the gecekondus[5] are being destroyed and when people are dismissed from their own houses by the municipality and police force. My people are in misery. These people subsist on collecting papers, plastics. What landlord will rent his place to a household of 7 to 8 people? Even if they found a place, they would waste away in trying to pay the rent. In Turkey Romanies are being forced to revert to be nomads. Reversion will start.
How can a person subsisting on junk live in an apartment? How much money do we make anyway? We cannot pay that rent because we cannot afford it. We cannot afford to build houses on estates. The most beautiful thing in this world is a place where one can live peacefully with his children. The places we will shelter are not apartments, flats of your dreams. What we demand is one or two apartment houses in gecekondu form where we can live in peace. … [illegible]
[1] This is almost a direct translation. Although I worked through some sentences, I did not corrected all the inconsistency in meaning and grammar and left it mostly as it had written in the way the author used Turkish.
[2] In original, he uses the term Millet here by which he refers to an ethnic group or to folk or a people. It is usually kept as it is in academic translations because colloquially and literally the term now means nation whereas it has been used (and still being used in academia) as a term in Ottoman administrative law denoting subdivisions of different ethnic groups or quarters populated mostly by one religious or ethnic group where the district ruled internally by the religious leader of this ethnic group.
[3] Here the author uses deforms the colloquially used meaning of the word for that can corresponds to ‘humanitarian’ as an adjective to denote the way animals should live.
[4] The event was captured on TV
[5] Gecekondus are shanty houses built illegally by their residents on a land that is owned by someone else or the government. The direct translation of the word means “settled over one night.”