The west is ready for the EU. The east is lost in the past
Much of Turkey is still a world away from Europe, culturally and economically
Helena Smith in Soguksu
Friday November 5, 2004
The Guardian
Some time, way back, time stopped in Soguksu. Here, high in the
mountains of Turkey, close to the border with Iran, the lives of
carpet-weaving girls are measured solely in knots. Behind the
breezeblock walls of impoverished homes, on slushy streets overrun by
sheep, their dreary regimen is dictated at birth. Most will never
venture beyond the wide asphalt road that crosses the Kurdish village
before winding into the arid horizon.
At about the same time that the sun in Turkey’s ancient east is
casting a reddish evening glow, the people of Kusadasi, nearly 1,000
miles west, are preparing to enjoy an evening in an Aegean nightspot.
Francine Quataeft from Belgium has spent the day sunbathing, rubbing
cream over her skin. Later, on Bar Street, a raucous strip of pubs,
tattoo and piercing parlours, brash Turkish boys will try to coax her
into having a “free massage.”
Turkey is the size of France and Britain combined, and Soguksu is as
culturally removed from the country’s coastal resorts as it is from
the continent of Europe.
“People here live at the same time, but they do not live in the same
time,” says Dogu Ergil, a political sociologist at Ankara University.
Most Turks enthusiastically support their country’s goal of joining
the EU. Yet to cross Turkey is to discover a country as much in
conflict with itself as with those who oppose its eventual EU
membership.
In towns and villages along the ancient Silk Route – despite the
homogenising intentions of modern Turkey’s founder, Kemal Ataturk –
you encounter voices that are as diverse as the state’s rich mosaic of
ethnic and religious groups. Mention the east to Turks in the west,
where shanty towns brim with Anatolian migrants, and often you get a
mouthful of disdain.
“In Turkey there are different climates and different peoples,” says
Mustafa Kualoglu, a guide showing tourists around the ruins of
Ephesus, Turkey’s best-preserved ancient city.
“We are not one race, because everybody conquered us. In the west we
have Mediterranean weather and are European. In the east, near the
Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi borders, people have a culture that is
basically very hard, very Arab.”
As debate continues over Turkey’s fitness to join the EU, many Turks
are asking how much of their country will ultimately be acceptable to
the union.
“The dark, backward side of Turkey scares the Turks who live on the
bright side of the country and the Europeans alike,” says Prof Ergil.
Different country
In Soguksu, which has been under the command of fundamentalist sheikhs
since Ottoman times, few have heard of the EU. Only one man in the
village of 2,700 has been to university.
Like many of Turkey’s 12 million ethnic Kurds, the girls who weave
colourful kilims in a chilly room on Soguksu’s treeless outskirts do
not speak enough Turkish to follow events conveyed by the community’s
sole concession to modernity – the satellite dish.
Of the EU, one girl says: “No, I don’t think I know that place. Do
they have sheep?” Like the rest of the group, her birth has never been
registered, and she has not received an education.”Do people marry
there?” she asks. “Do they believe in God? What do they eat?”
Outside the workshop, Bekir Bingol, a father of 15, says he has heard
that Europe is “very clean”. He adds: “But I’ve got the brains to know
that all these mountains and all these hills don’t belong
there. Anyway, I wouldn’t want my daughters not keeping our
traditions. If they got other ideas they might not read the Qur’an.”
Mr Bingol’s neighbour, Ali Cicek, agrees. “In real life we’ve never
seen anything like it,” he says. “How can we even dream of such stuff?
Once I went to western Turkey and it was beautiful, but it really felt
like a different country.”
Soguksu is almost two hours north of the formerly Armenian city of
Van, one of Turkey’s most primitive regions and certainly its
poorest. It has become a no-go area during the country’s bitter
campaign against Kurdish separatists. Forced marriages have prompted
at least five newlyweds to take their lives since September. With 70%
of the population unemployed, most barely scratch a living from the
land.
But although it is awash with refugees and smugglers, Van is also on
the mend. The EU has launched an aid programme and, as in other towns
in Turkey, civil society has undergone a revolution.
Zozan Ozgokge, who runs Van’s EU-backed women’s association, says:
“Before I even put up our new group’s sign, women were lining up
outside the office door. Sometimes, we’ve had women rushing in here in
their slippers, after being beaten by husbands, fathers, uncles and
even their sons. Before, these women rarely left their homes.”
At 26, Ms Ozgokge is typical of a new generation of bright ethnic
Kurds now improving lives in what once seemed like eastern Turkey’s
irredeemable badlands.
“When I was at university, western Turks would sneer and ask if I
lived in a tent,” she says. “They had seen so many TV documentaries
that portray eastern Turkey in a very bad light, but for Kurds Europe
has been a salvation.”
Under Turkey’s drive to meet EU membership criteria, she says, human
rights have improved to such an extent that most Turkish Kurds have
turned their backs on the prospect of violence solving their problems.
Prof Ergil identifies four types of Turks: the global Turk who lives
abroad (numbering 500,000); the well-off international Turk, who reads
the foreign press (5.5 million); and the rural and urban parochial
Turks (30 and 35 million respectively) who are desperate to improve
their lot.
“The first two categories can communicate with each other and the
outside world, and for them Turkey is just like a European country,”
he says. “The other two have absolutely nothing in common with the
first, but they are very supportive of Turkey joining the EU. Frankly,
these people are like cannonballs chained to the ankles of this
country. It has to drag them in its race towards civilisation.”
Universal change
Poverty is almost everywhere in Turkey. Go into the nationalist
heartlands around Ankara, the capital, and you’ll find villages such
as the tiny Kabaca, still struggling without water, drains or
sewerage.
“I’m always quarrelling with my neighbours about the cesspit because
they say it stinks,” says Asyia Unsal. In 74 years she has never
visited Ankara, a two-hour drive away.
“I’m old, and carrying water to my house all these years has made me
ill,” she says. “I don’t know anything about Europe and I don’t care
about it. What I want is water and drains.”
But things are also changing fast in the country’s backwaters. Four
hours south of Ankara, through the plains of central Anatolia, is
Konya, the origin of the Sufic mystics known as whirling
dervishes. For years, guidebooks have described Konya as one of
Turkey’s most religiously conservative and backward cities.
Every day, Muslim pilgrims from across the Middle East pour in to pray
before the marble mausoleum of the Mevlana, who founded the sect and
whose progressive views and liberal writings helped reshape Islamic
thought. But at night, illicit bars swing with young men drinking the
local firewater, testimony to the residents’ unexpectedly easy take on
life.
“The Mevlana preached tolerance among all cultures,” says the mayor,
Tahir Akyurek, who was elected with the ruling Islamist AK
party. “That is what I’d like to think Konya, and Turkey, can give to
Europe.” His office is lined with models of the new women’s shelter,
fire station, and whirling dervish centre being built in the town.
Often, the only image Europeans have of Turkey is the impoverished
Anatolians who flock to the west as labourers. “That’s how the world
knows Turkey,” says Prof Ergil. “It has no knowledge of the modern
Turkey, where people live very much like other Europeans.”
Bringing the two Turkeys together, he says, is not an impossible
mission. “It’s not a matter of will, because ethnic Kurds even more
than Turks want to join the EU,” he adds.
“Whether Turkey succeeds or not is more a matter of technical
expertise, of economic, educational and industrial development, than
anything else.”