Kurdish villages depopulated by Turkey

Since 1984, the Turkish military has embarked on a campaign to eradicate the Kurdistan Workers Party; by the year 2000, some 30,000 people had died and two million Kurdish refugees had been driven out of their homes into cities.

[4] Human Rights Watch has documented many instances where the Turkish military forcibly evacuated villages, destroying houses and equipment to prevent the return of the inhabitants.

[4] An estimated 3,000 Kurdish villages in Southeast Anatolia[3] were virtually wiped from the map, representing the displacement of more than 378,000 people.

[4] During the 1990s, the Turkish military reportedly deployed the US manufactured helicopters Sikorsky and Cobra to drive out the Kurdish population from the villages.

These include commissioning a national survey on the number and conditions of IDPs, drafting a national IDP strategy, adopting law on compensation, and putting together a comprehensive pilot action plan in Van Province and 13 other south-eastern provinces addressing rural and urban situations of displacement.