The House That Saddam Built: Protest and Psychiatry in Post-Disaster Turkey

Following a series of devastating earthquakes that struck western Turkey in 1999, the Iraqi Red Crescent Society donated ten million dollars worth of oil to assist those displaced by the earthquakes. The aid, designated specifically for low income residents who had been renters at the time of the earthquake, funded the construction of an apartment complex on the hills surrounding the city of Izmit. The building of the apartments—known locally as “Saddam’s Homes”—would mark the beginning of a decade-long campaign by the provincial government to evict its residents, an effort that only slowed when one of the residents set himself on fire in 2011. In this article, I explore how the struggle of the residents of Saddam’s Homes against the provincial government emerged out of a distinctive convergence of seismic activity, psychiatric expertise, and bureaucratic regimes of property and charity in postdisaster Turkey. The article draws particular attention to the ways that their activism engaged a range of psychiatric discourses that had become prominent in the wake of the earthquake, discourses that were both a component and byproduct of the enormous humanitarian psychiatric apparatus that descended on the region following the earthquake to provide psychological aid to survivors.