Le Ray 439accused or suspected to have hosted or fed a member of the guerrilla,
which concretely encompasses most of the villagers inhabiting the region
in 1994, would be denied financial or material redress.^36 Villages to be
rebuilt were carefully selected, mapping the degrees of loyalty and disci-
pline displayed towards the state. The village of Güneybaşı, for example,
was among the first to receive funds for the reconstruction of houses and
served as a showcase for the implementation of the redress and recon-
struction policy. A drinking fountain was inaugurated there in September
2004, shortly before the promised twenty-four houses in July 2005, in the
presence of the governor, military chiefs and the head of the police, as
well as one deputy and a city mayor. This fountain commemorates the
“martyrs,” “eight citizens slaughtered by the terrorists of the PKK” in
August 1993 and July 1997 in the village, “just like the Armenians slaugh-
tered our citizens in front of the mosque in 1915”; it made of this pilot
village “the best example of the state healing the wounds caused by terror-
ism.”^37 Again, this fountain and its plaque are there to recall the inhabit-
ants—those attending the ceremony or discovering it through media as
well as those passing by in their daily circulation—to the “proper” behav-
iors and discourses, to the “legitimate” terms (martyrs/terrorists, slaugh-
ter/healer state) and the relevant wider context of understanding (that
is, that the PKK like the Armenians before them are a threat to the true
Turkish nation and its territory) needed to discuss a related issue or to
differentiate the victims from those responsible for violence, as well as the
good and deserving citizens from the bad ones. This fountain, like official
buildings, monuments, replanted forests or the inscription of nationalist
symbols and slogans on mountains, constitute the nodes reordering the
environment to produce publicness: they command a specific regime of
discursive and practical engagement to be seen or heard, in conformity
with the principles of justice and legitimacy defined by the state agents.
But in the context of postemergency rule, adherence to this promoted
public grammar was to be rewarded rather than secured through threat
or repression.^38 Reconstruction policy provided the local state agents with
tools to both encode the environment and offer these rewards. Spatial
meaning-making is thus a full-fledged element of the process of produc-
tion and dissemination of the state-sponsored public grammar, one that
is all the more efficient when the state does control spaces critical to the