Le Ray 435ceremonies, and for years afterward soldiers were not allowed to circu-
late on their own within the city. This event crystallized the ability of the
PKK to challenge the state’s spatial production at the core of the city itself
and marked a tremor in the power balance. It also strongly affected the
regime of coexistence between inhabitants and state agents, towards more
discipline, violence and segregation. The security forces and their fami-
lies were now, more systematically than ever, living in segregated areas,
protected by fencing and armed keepers. Among Tunceli inhabitants,
pregnant women, young girls and children were, from that moment on,
under specific suspicion and suffered more frequent identity controls and
associated humiliations. During this war, inhabitants and state agents thus
did not have many opportunities to practically define and adapt rules of
coexistence. Former categories of identification became largely inopera-
tive in a context where the grid “friend” versus “enemy” quashed all oth-
ers, based on criteria and tests of loyalty that, moreover, never completely
guaranteed that one would not quite arbitrarily shift from one category to
the other.
ronically enough, in December 1996 (five months after the suicide I
bombing), a statue commemorating human rights was inaugurated in
front of the same square, in the presence of both the city mayor, the chief
of security [emniyet müdürü] and the governor of the province [vali]. This
statue, 2.5 metres high, represents a sitting woman, face and arms raised
to the sky. From her hands, a dove takes flight. The statue, the display
of which had been planned one year earlier by request of the mayor of
Tunceli, Mazlum Arslan, to the then-President of the High Council for
Human Rights, was supposed to commemorate the forty-eighth birthday
of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This inten-
tion, however, was rapidly overwhelmed as the statue’s meaning remained
open to conflicting interpretations.^26 The chief of security and the gover-
nor, inaugurating the monument, wanted it to stand for the condemna-
tion of “Kurdish terrorism” and, as such, symbolize the (moral) legitimacy
of the war they were fighting and the violence they were using. For others,
this statue in the shape of a woman honored the memory of the young
suicide bomber and her sacrifice to liberate them from Turkish oppres-
sion.^27 These conflicting interpretations over the statue’s meaning, both
locally and nationally as rumor spread that it celebrated the memory