A LAND APART
by Christopher Frey
Walrus Magazine
12 Aug, 2008
Canada
Can Turkey fulfill its promise as a bridge between East and West when
its own peoples stand divided?
WEST
See Carolyn Drake’s photo gallery from the Turkish town of
Hasankeyf.Galip Karayigit was bursting at the seams, both sartorially
and emotionally, as he held on to the statue of Ataturk at the centre
of Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Four more men hung on with him, each
exhorting a separate section of the crowd with the same message:
Turkey’s honour and security are at stake.
Karayigit, a burly, perspiring textile factory manager, leaped down
from the pedestal. Another man supported him, like a fellow soccer
player after a hard-fought match. "I felt very sad when I heard
the news this morning," he said. "I felt like the whole world had
fallen around me." He was referring to an early-morning ambush by the
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (pkk) near Daglica, six kilometres from the
Iraqi border. Twelve Turkish soldiers had been killed, and another
eight were captured. Then, later that day, ten civilians had been
injured when their minivan drove over a land mine believed to have
been laid by the pkk.
Many of the divisions that define modern Turkey appeared to have
dissolved that twenty-first of October, 2007. From Istanbul to
Adana, streets pulsed with rallies demanding action, justice for the
"martyred" soldiers, and a definitive end to the "Kurdish problem." The
most unlikely of allies suddenly discovered a common cause: young
rightists flashed the proto-fascist salute of the nationalist Grey
Wolves next to pious middle-aged Muslim women in head scarves,
old-school communists, and political agnostics. They poured down
major thoroughfares by the tens of thousands, marching beneath the
patriotic red blanket of a supersized Turkish flag. The attack itself
was hardly a rare occurrence — only two weeks earlier, thirteen
soldiers had been killed in a similar ambush. But on this Sunday,
something resembling consensus jigsawed into place.
An endless surge of excitable young men followed Karayigit, clambering
atop Ataturk as though battling for a spot on a raft. Most singled
out Turkey’s allies for blame, soliciting anti-European Union and
anti-American chants and jeers. According to Karayigit, so-called
friends and neighbours were abandoning the country in its time
of need. The French, the Americans, the British, the Russians —
all have had to deal with terrorism or insurgents, yet all were now
counselling restraint and, in some cases, Karayigit believed, providing
outright support to the pkk. "We only want the same power to defend our
country," he said. Word spread that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
was holding an emergency meeting of the country’s generals; the Turkish
parliament had passed a resolution that week authorizing the military
to cross into northern Iraq and attack the pkk’s mountain havens.
The Turks were already feeling embattled before this latest pkk
ambush. In early October, an American congressional subcommittee
had recommended that the US government officially acknowledge the
Armenian genocide and Ottoman culpability for it — a subject Turks
are loath to revisit. And accession talks with the European Union were
prompting shots at Turkey’s human rights record and its military’s
habit of meddling in government.
There was perhaps fair reason for Turks to feel, if not slighted, at
least undervalued. As a secular democracy with a population that is
99 percent Muslim, Turkey is uniquely positioned to play a mediating
role between the Islamic world and the West. Despite the country’s
lack of natural resource wealth, its mighty construction and shipping
conglomerates are involved in major infrastructure projects across the
Middle East and Central Asia. And while it has remained mostly loyal
to its traditional allegiances with the United States and Israel,
Turkey has recently worked to repair relations with Iran, Syria, and
Russia — a thaw that could have substantial benefits for the West. For
instance, a pipeline is being proposed that would bring Iranian gas
through Turkey to Europe, and Erdogan was a key figure in secret peace
talks between Israel and Syria earlier this year. Turkey’s strategic
importance has only increased with the demise of the Cold War, and
yet the country has often seemed to serve primarily as the West’s
put-upon sparring partner, taking flak from outsiders while mediating
a diverse population with strong and often polarized perspectives on
their country and its role in the world.
As the sky bruised into evening, demonstrators continued to surge
toward Taksim, where they coalesced with still more mobs. I followed
one of the offshoots as it continued up Cumhuriyet Street. Partway
along, an elderly Kurdish beggar was splayed haplessly in the mob’s
path, cradling a small child in a bright cloth. The chanting and
gesticulating marchers briefly parted around her, oblivious, like
water gushing around a rock, then came together again.
Istanbul seemed stage-directed for the unfolding theatrics. Looming
everywhere over the city, on massive banners and from bunting
suspended above the streets, was the visage of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
who founded the Turkish Republic in 1923. His mischievous semi-smile
and upturned eyebrows were often accompanied by one of the Orwellian
dicta for which he was famous — most commonly "How happy is the one
who says, ‘I am a Turk.’" The line, inscribed in the country’s oath of
allegiance, is a sore point for Kurds and other ethnic minorities. A
fifteen-year-old student in the country’s southeast was indicted in
2003 for inciting hatred when he instead recited in front of his class,
"Happy is he who calls himself a Kurd."
Ataturk’s is perhaps the only twentieth-century personality cult
that still plays a decisive role in a country’s politics. His name
is invoked daily by the Kemalist secular nationalists who dominate
Turkey’s judiciary, military, and sections of its civil service, to
beat down those who question the limits placed on religion in public
life, or who challenge the notion of "Turkishness." He remains the
embodiment of the revolution and its highest aspirations.
A believer in scientific positivism and a fan of French civilization,
Ataturk sought to remake his newly independent nation into a modern,
westward-looking state. His first reforms were radical ones, designed
to disestablish Islam from politics and public life: he abolished
the caliphate that had ruled the Turks for some 400 years, moved the
capital from the traditional Ottoman centre of Istanbul to Ankara,
and shut down the country’s religious courts. He also expanded rights
for women, granting them access to education and later the vote,
then enacted a hat law that circumscribed the wearing of religious
headgear such as the fez or head scarf. In 1928, he instituted a
new, Latin-based Turkish alphabet, on the grounds that Arabic was
a vestige of archaic Islamic influence, and ill suited to Turkish
pronunciation anyway.
The concept of Turkishness, however, stands as perhaps Ataturk’s
most dubious and slippery bequest. In Ottoman times, "Turk" was an
epithet, akin to calling someone a rube. Later, during the early
days of the republic, the term referred simply to citizenship and
geography. By the early 1930s, Ataturk had come to believe that the
nation needed to be defined more strongly. His plan was to introduce
a civic religion of sorts — something that could sustain the social
cohesion traditionally provided by Islam.
Influenced by H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, he convened a
historical society to investigate the roots of the Turks, charging
academics with devising a collective narrative of origins. It
was generally understood at the time that the nation’s ancestors
were the invading Oghuz Turkic nomadic tribes of Central Asia, who
arrived in Anatolia around the eleventh century. His people’s status
as somewhat recent arrivals to their homeland became an obsession for
Ataturk. Those Sumerians, Armenians, Kurds, and others who had lived in
and around Turkey for thousands of years, leaving plentiful evidence
of their existence? Well, Ataturk decided, they were actually Turks,
too. (The leader’s undisciplined intellect and fondness for late-night,
raki-fuelled colloquia with friends sometimes led him to strange
theories, including one that posited the Turks as the forebears of
all peoples.) By asserting that these diverse ethnic groups were cut
from the same cloth, Ataturk denied Turkey’s multicultural past and
present, setting it on a fractious path that continues to threaten
both its security and its role as a link between East and West.
In the days following the pkk ambush, the forty-five-year-old Kurdish
journalist Salih Sezgin rarely left his fourth-floor office at the
newspaper Gundem. He felt safer there than at home. From his desk,
he could poke his head out the window to scan the streets for shady
characters, or see who was buzzing in. Occasionally, in the late
afternoon, he would leave for a brisk, head-clearing stroll.
On the fifth day after the soldiers were killed, Sezgin paused
briefly on Istiklal Caddesi, a bustling and very European boulevard
lined with brand name boutiques and restaurants on Istanbul’s western
flank. A small rally was taking place, to demand that Turkey leave
nato. Turning away from the protesters, he shuffled along narrow
side streets, finally taking a seat at a café next to Ali Turgay,
Gundem’s twenty-something publisher. A stout, diminutive man possessing
a gentle, rounded face framed with days-old stubble and a comb-over,
Sezgin had the air of a struggling shopkeeper. "I spent nineteen
years in prison," he joked. "I never look very healthy."
Gundem had recently had its right to publish suspended by Turkish
authorities, who feared that the paper’s pro-Kurdish reporting would
embolden critics. For a few days, the pair had been able to get
stories onto the paper’s website, which had seen its traffic surge
from a daily average of 10,000 hits to 80,000 during the crisis. But
then the government blocked that, too, forcing them to use another
url. Days later, hackers broke into their server, causing it to crash,
and the website was gone again.
Had they been able to publish, Turgay and Sezgin would have
been reporting the growing incidence of attacks against Kurdish
citizens. According to the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (dtp),
its constituency office in Istanbul’s Fatih neighborhood had been
firebombed; other dtp offices across the city had to be protected
by police from angry mobs. In Kadiköy, a Kurdish student was taken
to hospital after an attempted lynching; in other neighbourhoods,
homes belonging to Kurdish families were singled out with derogatory
markings. Some of these events were making it into the mainstream
media, but most were not. Kurds in Istanbul were talking about a return
to the grim days of the 1980s and early ’90s, when skirmishes between
the military and the pkk forced thousands from their villages in the
country’s southeast, destroying the region’s economy and social fabric,
and resulting in more than 35,000 casualties. The armed clashes of
October were hardly on that scale, but rumours and reports of personal
attacks were nevertheless keeping people indoors. "It’s enough just
to have darker skin to get harassed on the street," said Sezgin.
He leaned forward over his tea. "The problem is that everyone sees
the Kurdish problem as an ethnic problem. But we are a part of this
country. We are part owners; we now live all across Turkey; we are
not simply an ethnic minority or immigrants. Turkey’s problem is not
an ethnic problem; it’s an identity problem."
During the War for Independence, Ataturk openly acknowledged that
the Kurds would eventually need their autonomy. He may have done so
for strategic reasons: the war was being fought to regain Turkish
territory and sovereignty lost with the signing of the Treaty of
Sèvres (1920) between Ottoman representatives and governments of the
Allied Forces. For the Kurds, the treaty was ostensibly a good thing
— it included a mandate for a Kurdish state — but they nevertheless
fought alongside Ataturk’s Turkish forces, believing they were acting
as Muslim brothers against Christian occupiers from Britain, France,
Italy, Armenia, and Greece. (They had also participated in the 1915
genocide against ethnic Armenians.) Yet after the republic was founded,
Ataturk never spoke of them in public again.
The autocratic nature of the modern Turkish state is very much a
product of the persistent tension between the two groups. On the same
day the caliphate, whose symbolic religious authority had united the
Turks and Kurds for centuries, was abolished, all Kurd-centric social
organizations were banned, too. The first Kurdish rebellion of 1925,
a response to this suppression and to Ataturk’s attack on Islam,
was the pretext for the Kemalists’ consolidation of power. Martial
law was imposed across Turkey, empowering the government to close
newspapers, persecute journalists, and deny the right of "reactionary"
or "counter-revolutionary" groups to assemble. The rebellion also
hastened the imposition of single-party rule, which lasted until 1950.
Until recently, the state officially denied the existence of the
Kurds as a separate ethnic group, identifying them euphemistically
as "mountain Turks." It banned the recording and performance of
Kurdish-language songs until 1991, and between 1983 and 1991 even
made it illegal to speak Kurdish in public. Elected officials in
the southeast are still prosecuted for slipping Kurdish into the
performance of their public duties.
Reforms introduced as part of the EU accession process have led to
modest progress in recent years: for the first time, some schools
are permitted to teach Kurdish, and the prohibition against
Kurdish-language radio and television broadcasts was lifted in
2002. But the state still zealously monitors pro-Kurdish media such
as Gundem and blocks access to popular websites, notably YouTube and
ones using the blogging platform WordPress.
The idealization of Ataturk, however, and the violence and censorship
it justifies, fly in the face of the pragmatism he preached. "We
do not consider our principles as dogmas contained in books said to
come from heaven," he once told the National Assembly. He feared the
fanaticism inspired not only by religion, but by politics.
One could sense, in the wake of the pkk ambush, something more
existential at stake than just the quarrel between Turks and
Kurds. Militarily, the fight had mostly devolved into a low-grade
regional conflict since the capture of pkk kingpin Abdullah Ocalan
in 1999. Rather, the outrage on the street reflected deep-seated
uncertainty about Turkey’s sense of itself and how it interacts with
a globalizing world.
In May, just prior to the escalation of the pkk conflict, the country
had emerged from a polarizing political crisis. The governing Justice
and Development Party (akp), an organization with Islamic roots,
had put forward Abdullah Gul, a former foreign minister, as its
presidential candidate, prompting Turkey’s military leadership —
enshrined in the constitution as the protector of the state’s secular
character, and the instigator of four coups since 1960 — to contest
Gul’s selection. The brass criticized him for comments he had made in
the early 1990s questioning official secularism, and more symbolically
for the fact that his wife wears the hijab. A constitutional court
blocked Gul’s appointment, prompting new elections in July, but
these returned the akp with an even larger majority, and increased
the party’s share of the popular vote from 34 to 46 percent. The
military boycotted Gul’s swearing-in.
Despite the akp’s Islamist bent, the party has proven itself to be the
most adept and progressive manager of Turkey’s affairs in decades — a
moderate, broad-based organization whose policies more closely resemble
those of the centre-right Christian Democrats in Europe than Hamas or
Hezbollah, and that draws support from across the political and ethnic
spectrums. The akp has successfully wrestled with the chronic inflation
that plagued the economy, dramatically increased foreign investment,
and implemented the strongest steps yet to fight corruption in the
public and private sectors. It also stepped up accession talks with
the European Union and made substantive overtures to the country’s
Kurdish population. In the symbolic debate over the hijab, meanwhile,
it positioned itself as a defender of individual freedoms, overturning
the law that prohibited women from wearing head scarves on university
campuses.
Although Kemalists accuse the akp of secretly harbouring a radical
Islamist agenda, the only evidence of this has been the implementation
of dry zones in a few conservative neighbourhoods by local party
officials, and a quickly rescinded attempt to criminalize adultery
nationwide. Nonetheless, secular nationalists have gone to absurd
extremes in their efforts to discredit the akp. A quartet of
bestselling exposés last year asserted that the party’s leaders
were in fact Zionist Mossad agents. More recently, after a statue of
Ataturk astride a horse was vandalized in Denizli, the town’s mayor
appeared at a press conference, holding up a photograph of the damaged
statue. "As you see, the penis of the horse Ataturk sits on has been
broken," he said. "We think akp cadres have broken the penis."
The pkk attacks, however, united the two sides. Wounded by its recent
loss of face, the military saw an opportunity to reassert itself,
while the akp had to demonstrate that it could handle a terrorist
threat. The rest of the world, though, and particularly the United
States and Europe, urged Turkey to proceed carefully. The Americans,
who had reason to fear that a military incursion into northern
Iraq would destabilize that country’s most secure region, agreed to
provide intelligence about pkk positions there. But the perceived
lack of support from Europe was more aggravating, and it fed into
Turks’ frustration with the EU accession process. Leaders such as
France’s Nicolas Sarkozy had already made alienating comments, while
other officials had expressed fears that if Turkey were granted full
membership it would become the second-largest nation in the EU after
Germany, with 17 percent of the assembly’s vote. The West’s pressuring
of Turkey to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, to improve treatment of
its Kurdish citizens, and to back off from the dispute over Cyprus were
also irksome. Turks have yet to work out these issues for themselves.
Over 70 percent of Turks once supported the bid for EU membership,
but recent surveys indicate that fewer than half are still in
favour. Proponents of EU membership, such as Sedat Laciner, director
of the Ankara-based International Strategic Research Organization,
have grown discouraged by the EU’s inclination to move the goalposts
for admission, and to undercut internal support for accession with
meddlesome and untimely criticism. "The EU so crudely pressures and
humiliates Turkey that the Turkish politicians cannot defend their
pro-EU stances, and the non-democratic forces are emboldened," he
wrote in an op-ed column in the autumn of 2006.
Such critiques, Laciner argued, undermine Turkey’s potential influence
as a moderator between Islam and the West. For instance, the country’s
most popular Islamic movement, Gulen, is expanding into such places
as Nigeria, Indonesia, and Pakistan, where it serves as a moderate
and modern counterpoint to extremist groups. "Turkey’s participation
could have proved that the West is not solely a Christian Club and
that the West could have genuine cooperation with the Muslim world," he
wrote. Instead, the perceived double standard Turkey faces has become
a tool for radical Islamists and secular nationalists alike, each
arguing that Europe will never deal with Muslims and Turks as equals.
A s yet another demonstration-filled day got under way in the
streets below, an odd celebration was taking place in Gundem’s
office. One of the paper’s younger reporters had just been convicted of
"denigrating Turkishness," thanks to a recent article he had written
about Ocalan. "It was decided I will get one year in prison," he told
me. But everyone was smiles and laughter, as though this were merely
another episode in an elaborate running joke. "Every day we publish
a paper, they open another case against us."
It was unlikely that the reporter would serve a day of his sentence;
rather, he would seek refuge outside the country, as many do. Which
is why it felt like a going-away party, or perhaps a rite of
passage. Sezgin, however, wasn’t sharing in the good spirits. "I
don’t wish anyone to go through what I went through," he said.
Sezgin was seventeen years old when he was thrown in Diyarbakir prison,
Turkey’s most notorious penitentiary. It was September 1980. The
National Security Council had just dissolved the government in the hope
of securing a country wracked by factional terrorism. In the aftermath
of the coup, the army instituted a crackdown on Kurdish militants. The
murder of two police officers in Diyarbakir spurred mass arrests that
netted Sezgin as a suspect. On scant evidence, he was convicted of
murder and sentenced to death. Through the intervention of the EU,
his sentence was commuted to twenty years.
Guards at Diyarbakir prison regularly asked new arrivals, "Do you
want a room with television and shower or a regular room?" Sezgin soon
learned that "shower" meant a hole in the ceiling that allowed sewage
to pour constantly into the cell. To amuse themselves, guards sometimes
ordered prisoners to roll around in it. This was the "television" part.
Sezgin estimates that about sixty of his fellow inmates died
from hangings, hunger strikes, suicides, or fatal injuries due to
torture. He wept as he recounted being ordered to clean an area where
guards had stashed a friend’s dead body in the garbage for him to
find. Survival, he said, was paramount. "The sense of belonging to
my people gave me an aim, so that I wanted to live. They forced us
to march to Turkish songs, put pictures of Ataturk in our cells. They
try to make you a Turk, but you remain a Kurd." During his sentence,
Sezgin taught himself to read and write. He wrote a memoir of prison
life, Hanging Nights, published pseudonymously, which eventually
earned him some notoriety and launched his career as a journalist.
By the time he was released, in 1999, the struggle for Kurdish
rights had changed. pkk leader Abdullah Ocalan had been captured and
was trying to fashion himself, unconvincingly, as a Middle Eastern
Nelson Mandela. The exodus of the Kurds from more than 3,000 villages
during the fighting had transformed them from a predominantly rural
to an urban people. Like many Kurdish activists from the 1970s and
’80s, Sezgin considered himself a Marxist and a separatist, but the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War shifted his
ideology. "We were sad when the Soviet Union fell, because it was
something we thought we were fighting for," he said. "But then we all
learned more about the kind of oppression the communist countries put
on their people. Within such a society, it would have been no better
for the Kurds."
The pkk kept to its hard-line Marxism, but for moderate Kurds the
ideological vacuum was filled by globalization, which they saw
as an opportunity to build a more equitable society within Turkey
while consolidating a pan-Kurdish identity beyond it. "As Kurds, we
are happy to accept that borders should be less important," Sezgin
said. "We are living in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran. More open borders
should make it easier for us to travel and visit our relatives, and to
work. With technology, too, it should make it easier for us to discuss
the issues that affect us. An open society is what many of us want."
For a people often cited as the world’s largest ethnic group without a
state of its own, scattered across four nations historically hostile to
their interests, the notion of diminished borders still resounds. This
is especially the case with EU accession, given that improvement of
Kurdish civil rights is one of the conditions attached. As one former
prime minister has commented, "Turkey’s road to the European Union
goes through Diyarbakir."
EAST
There were few signs on the city’s streets that it was a national
holiday. A few perfunctory-looking flags flew on Diyarbakir’s office
buildings and mosques, but the genteel morning bustle persisted as
usual, oblivious to the Republic Day celebrations happening across
the country, or the frequent thunder of jets taking off from a nearby
military base — the primary staging point for reconnaissance and
bombing missions into Iraq.
Famous for its imposing ancient basalt walls, Diyarbakir otherwise
unscrolls its long history with only modest fanfare. Today’s city rests
upon what is likely one of the oldest settlements on earth — one that
served as a strategic centre for the Upper Tigris River Valley for as
long as 5,000 years. A cavalcade of empires have ruled it, including
the Romans, Arabs, Persians, Selcuks, Turcomans, and Ottomans. As
recently as the mid-nineteenth century, Diyarbakir’s population was
almost half Christian and home to a polyphony of peoples, including
Assyrians, Armenians, Arabs, Chaldeans, Alevis, and Jews.
With 665,000 residents, this now predominantly Kurdish city is the de
facto capital of the troubled southeast. It was here that the first
Kurdish rebellion of 1925 largely played itself out, and here that
its perpetrators were later tried and hung. During the fighting of
the 1980s and ’90s, it was a hotbed of separatist activity, and in
the Turkish mind it became deeply associated with pkk terrorism —
a reputation it has yet to shake.
There’s a Soviet quality to the newer apartment blocks of Diyarbakir’s
suburbs, west of the city walls, where I located the offices of the
Tigris News Agency (diha). Another jet scrambled the heavens as I sat
in a video editing suite with Veysi Polat, diha’s director. He and his
colleagues were reviewing footage sent to them by the pkk. Onscreen,
about five score pkk fighters were marching in a tranquil, green
mountain valley. The reporters were debating what to do with the tape,
which was clearly propaganda intended to show that morale remained
high despite the tensions.
Journalism has never been easy in the southeast, especially for
members of the Kurdish media. Military checkpoints and restricted areas
make information gathering difficult, and journalists are frequently
prosecuted for publishing stories critical of the military. Four of
diha’s correspondents were serving jail sentences as a result of their
reporting. The agency was also facing a court case for suggesting
that the army had burned an area of forest so it could better survey
the surrounding area.
"It’s difficult to get real news here," Polat said. "We take what the
government says, compare it with what our reporters and contacts in
the villages say, and sift out the reality." I asked if pkk sources
could be trusted. "When you take what the pkk reports about an
incident initially and what is later confirmed to be true, the pkk
often proves to be more reliable than the government. But in the end,
we trust only our own reporters."
In the aftermath of the October ambush, the Turkish media was reporting
that upwards of 100,000 troops had moved into the southeast, but
locals insisted most had already been there, at the behest of Yasar
Buyukanit, the hard-line chief of the Turkish General Staff. Many in
the east believed Buyukanit’s machinations had provoked the pkk.
Electorally, the akp has done well in Kurdish areas, taking almost
half the vote, thanks to the party’s willingness to address cultural
and economic issues here. Many traditionally minded conservative
Kurds also share the akp’s Islamic values. But the akp was risking
alienating its Kurdish con-stituency by allying itself with the
military. Some in Diyarbakir were sympathetic, though, arguing that
the rebels were setting back progress on Kurdish civil rights and the
economy. "The state is like your father," a middle-aged man who had
fled to a Diyarbakir gecekondu (shanty) neighbourhood in the 1990s
told me. "When you turn against him, you are going to have problems."
Despite the mobilization, a tenuous détente prevailed. There were
fewer incidents of Kurds being harassed on the street, and the
city was calm. I asked Polat how he saw the security situation for
Kurds. "In Diyarbakir, we don’t have racist, nationalist attacks like
those in Istanbul and elsewhere," he said, "but it doesn’t mean we’re
safer. There are 100,000 Turkish troops here. You never know what
can happen. We’ve seen too much before."
Intent on visiting the ostensible heartland of the Kurdish resistance,
I rented a taxi and left Diyarbakir, crossing the Tigris, a sluggish
little watercourse bending below the black ramparts of the city. The
two-tone browns of undulating fields consumed much of the horizon,
interrupted only by the foothills in the hazy distance. These fields
are famous for their watermelons — the biggest, sweetest melons in
the world, people bragged to me.
The rural southeast is home to another conflict between the state and
the Kurds, this one over resources. The Southeastern Anatolia Project
(gap), launched in 1980, is a massive dam-building exercise in the
Euphrates and Tigris basin. With many of the project’s twenty-two dams
already completed, including the pharaonic Ataturk Dam, the world’s
ninth largest, the system is improving agricultural irrigation and
dramatically expanding electricity generation capacity throughout
the region. The benefits are thus far most noticeable west of the
Euphrates, where crops are bursting and the city of Gaziantep is
luring manufacturers with the promise of cheaper power. But the
dams have also submerged villages, adding to the thousands of Kurds
previously forced to relocate. Across the southeast, the tips of
old minarets pierce the shimmering surfaces of newly created lakes,
marking the watery graves of abandoned Kurdish settlements.
We drove on for an hour, on patchy, unmarked roads branching off
the main highway, finally pursuing one to the village of Kocaköy,
where I was to meet Sabri Tanrikulu. A nimble man, Tanrikulu scurried
over the rubble of his family’s former home like a mad archaeologist
half his fifty years. "Here was our kitchen," he said, "and this is
where we kept our livestock." The ruin was surrounded by similarly
demolished dwellings. A handful were intact: new domiciles, made
either of poured concrete or mud and stone, with scraps of metal
fastening everything together.
On a December morning in 1992, Tanrikulu was fiddling with the
television antenna on his roof when the Village Guard militiamen
arrived, an army unit not far behind. He thought little of it at first,
since the guard — made up of compliant but sometimes coerced locals,
including Kurds — frequently patrolled the road that cut through
the town of some 100 families. But this time, the cars halted in
a storm of dust outside the school. Guardsmen sprang into action,
firing shots into the air and at random houses. A bullet winged past
Tanrikulu as he fell to the roof.
Women and children fled frantically for open fields and neighbouring
villages as the guards rounded up the men. Tanrikulu was held at
the schoolyard with the others, guns trained on them as they lay on
their stomachs. Limestone dust was laid down throughout the village,
from home to home, stable to coop. Soon it was set alight. The chilly
morning sky blackened. A helicopter spun overhead, whorling up smoke
and dust. Livestock burned alive in their stalls.
Kocaköy was one of more than 3,000 villages in the Kurdish southeast
that stood empty by the mid-1990s. There was rarely ever a warning,
nor any explanation other than that a town was suspected of being
friendly to the pkk. The dispossessed migrated across the country, part
of a million-strong tide that bloated the gecekondu neighbourhoods
of Istanbul, Izmir, Adana, and, closer to home, Diyarbakir and
Batman. It’s a tide that has yet to cease fully, as Kurds continue to
forfeit their lands so they can search for work or because of the gap.
The soldiers and militia fled Tanrikulu’s smouldering town at dusk. He
walked to the next village and located a tractor he had rented to
a friend, then returned home to collect what clothes had escaped
the fire. He then drove his tractor sixty kilometres to Diyarbak?r,
where he reunited with his wife and daughter."
The city was suddenly full of new people," he told me. "My problems
were just like everyone else’s." Accommodations and work were in meagre
supply, but he found space for his family and took jobs wherever he
could. He drove a bus, sometimes as far as northern Iraq, and did
construction in Izmir, living away from home for months at a time.
We broke for lunch with Tanrikulu’s uncle, who had returned four years
ago and built a clean, spacious concrete bungalow for his family,
one of about twenty-five clans that now reside in Kocaköy. We bowed
deeply to the old man out of respect for his having completed the
hajj. Hanging up my coat in the cushion-lined living room, its bare
walls unadorned but for a calendar, I noticed a framed photograph of
a young man in military uniform on a side table. It clearly wasn’t
a Turkish army uniform. I nipped out to wash my hands, and when I
returned the picture was gone.
Over a lunch of cucumber, fresh yogourt, flatbread, and tea, we
discussed the pkk. In the wake of October 21, nationalist politicians
were demanding that the pro-Kurdish dtp publicly denounce the pkk
as terrorists. But as a dtp official in Istanbul told me, this was
impossible; every Kurd, he said, knows someone who has gone off to
fight for the pkk. "How can you denounce your brother or sister,
your sons and daughters?"
Tanrikulu felt the same. "Just calling them terrorists does not
solve the problem," he said. "The suppression of Kurdish identity,
the violence — this is what created the pkk. I have a friend,
a doctor, who joined. Why would he give up the city to live in the
mountains, sacrificing normal life, eating only what’s available? It’s
a hard life. So we have to ask why 3,000 guerillas are hiding in
the mountains."
Like almost every Kurd I spoke with, Tanrikulu had long ago given up on
the idea of statehood. This is no longer even the professed goal of the
pkk, though the Western media often reports otherwise. Still, it is a
favourite bogeyman of Turkey’s nationalists, who argue that recognition
of Kurdish distinctiveness could eventually sever the country. But the
mass migrations of the 1990s rendered partition all but impossible. And
most Kurds don’t even speak Kurdish anymore, thanks to decades of
suppression. "Ask 90 percent of Kurds," insisted Tanrikulu. "They
don’t want to live in a different land. It’s impossible to divide
Turkish and Kurdish anyway. Where are the most Kurds living in one
place? Istanbul. You can’t solve by simply dividing."
s we took one last stroll around the village, we encountered another
elderly couple who had returned to Kocaköy. They wanted to talk
about the commission of Turkish officials that arrived two years
ago to interview the villagers. The pair said they’d been offered
compensation for their hardships. "The commission promised me 7,000
lira [about $5,700]," said the man. "Others here were told 5,000
or 3,000 lira." The small gesture of redress, he argued, was merely
intended to placate European Union observers who were also visiting
Kocaköy. "I accepted the government’s offer and signed a piece of
paper. That was two years ago, and I’m still waiting."
WEST
M y friend Yagmur was circling a quartet of life-sized plaster
statues depicting a Pakistani terrorist and a pretty dame in various
explicit embraces. I was back in Istanbul, taking in the final day of
its tenth biennial. Many of the artworks on display across the city,
presented under the banner "Optimism in the age of global war," were
conceptual, prankish attempts to be topical, riffing on terrorism,
cultural homogeneity, global capitalism, and war. But they seemed to
have little to do with local realities.
Among the few exceptions was the most popular work in the
entire exhibition: a series of eighteen posters, each depicting
a different caricature that played on "How happy is he who says,
‘I am a Turk.’" Beneath a line drawing of a Kurd, for example, it
read "How ______ for the one who says, ‘I am a Kurd.’" The public was
invited to scribble words in the blank space, as well as on the poster
itself. There were prints of an Armenian, a homosexual, a communist,
a longhair, a secularist, a prostitute, and even he who simply says,
"I don’t care." People were scrawling their remarks right off the
posters and onto the temporary wall on which they were mounted.
–Boundary_(ID_ApvRJBqUOtgro5Do8L2aiA)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress