The Turkish government tried to keep the Kurdish conflict under wraps as long as it could. Even to admit that there was a conflict, after all, meant that Turkey would have to acknowledge its Kurdish population. The first reports in the Western press started appearing in 1987, but coverage was limited. Most of the reports, often delivered through Turkish news agencies, simplistically dismissed the conflict as a “separatist” issue.
The West had little serious interest in scrutinizing what was going on inside Turkey. As one of the Middle East’s few democracies, albeit an imperfect one, and the only Muslim member of NATO, Turkey was a major Western ally in a part of the world where allies were scarce. The country had recently played a vital role in the Gulf War, and was, ironically, providing the bases needed for Iraqi Kurdistan’s air patrols.
In addition, the PKK had engendered little goodwill for Turkey’s Kurds internationally. Not only had the guerrilla group slaughtered many hundreds of innocent civilians at home, but it had also committed terrorist acts in Europe. Germany and France outlawed the PKK as a terrorist organization in 1993, and Germany had two international warrants out for Öcalan’s arrest.
Turkey was also the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid, though well behind Israel and Egypt. Between 1985 and 1996, the United States sold Turkey $8.7 billion worth of weapons, making commerce another powerful reason to turn a blind eye on its human rights abuses.
As journalist Kevin McKiernan describes in his award-winning documentary Good Kurds, Bad Kurds, it was as if the United States had divided the Kurds into two distinct groups. “Good Kurds” were Iraqi Kurds who opposed the common enemy Saddam Hussein and were the innocent victims of lethal chemical attacks, rendering them worthy of millions of dollars of international aid. “Bad Kurds” were the Kurds of Turkey who waged war against a stalwart American friend, the Turkish government, rendering them unworthy of any attention at all. No matter that a near-equal number of Kurdish villages had been destroyed by both the Turkish and the Iraqi militaries, or that Turkey’s Kurds—who outnumber Iraqi Kurds three to one—had been suffering under extraordinary civil rights abuses for the past seventy years. And no matter that many of the U.S. weapons being supplied to Turkey were being used against its own civilian Kurdish population.
Also, little wonder that I found little support for the United States while traveling through Turkey’s southeast. Many Kurds there had grown up in terror of the sound of U.S. Black Hawks, Hueys, and Cobras, the army helicopters used to land Turkish troops in their villages. And although the Turkish troops did not typically kill large numbers of civilians during the evacuations, the Turkish Air Force at times used F-16s and other fighterbombers, supplied and equipped by the United States, to attack Kurdish villages.
For a brief moment in 1993, peace seemed within reach. Öcalan declared a cease-fire and was no longer advocating separatism, while President Turgut Özal made various overtures toward the Kurds. But Özal died suddenly of a heart attack before serious negotiations took place, and the fighting resumed, to endure almost without remittance until 1998, when Öcalan, still in Syria, offered the government a unilateral cease-fire. By then, the PKK was on the defensive. The villages in which its forces had once found food and shelter were destroyed and its guerrillas were increasingly inexperienced, dying before they learned how to fight.
Turkey responded to Öcalan’s offer by amassing troops on Syria’s border and demanding that he be expelled. Quietly, the PKK leader fled to Moscow, and then, in a dizzying tale of international intrigue, sought asylum in Italy, the Netherlands, and Greece, before landing in Nairobi, Kenya, on February 2, 1999, expecting to move permanently to another African nation a few days later. But on February 15, he was abducted on his way to the airport and handed over to waiting Turkish special forces, who flew him back to Turkey, blindfolded, handcuffed, and drugged. Who turned him in? The Kurds blamed the Greeks, under whose protection Öcalan had been traveling, while the Greeks blamed the Kenyans. The Kurds also blamed Israeli and U.S. intelligence, although both denied playing any “direct” role in the affair.
Word of Öcalan’s arrest set off waves of protest across the Middle East and Europe, as tens of thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets, with some attacking Greek and Kenyan embassies, and others setting themselves on fire. Turkey incarcerated Öcalan on Imrali Island, holding him incommunicado for nine days and allowing him virtually no access to his lawyers. The state then rushed his case through the courts in a trial denounced as unfair by human rights groups at the time and by the European Court of Human Rights since. The PKK leader was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. But in August 2002, Turkey, which has not executed anyone since 1984, outlawed the death penalty altogether, and Öcalan’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
The PKK officially disbanded in April 2002, to re-form as the Kurdish Freedom and Democracy Congress (KADEK). KADEK advocated the pursuit of Kurdish rights through democratic means until September 2003, when it called off its unilateral cease-fire, saying that the Turkish government had failed to respond with reciprocal goodwill. In November 2003, the Kurdish group renamed itself once again: it was now the People’s Congress of Kurdistan (KONGRA-GEL).
WESTERN JOURNALISTS AND others who have met Öcalan invariably describe him as tyrannical, egomaniacal, ruthless, dogmatic, and not particularly bright. He has been compared to the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet and the Cambodian butcher Pol Pot, and the PKK is often equated with Peru’s vicious Shining Path. Independent human rights organizations have repeatedly denounced Öcalan, and his handiwork is abhorred by many Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, along with humanists everywhere.
Yet to most Kurds in Turkey, Öcalan is a hero. He gave them back their identity, pride, self-respect, and hope. For all the atrocities that the PKK committed, many Kurds reason, the Turkish state committed far more. Öcalan may have made mistakes, some Kurds admit, but he gave us a voice and he gave us power. In effect, Öcalan has become more a symbol than a flesh-and-blood man.
Some regard the Kurds’ veneration of Öcalan as indicative of their inherently brutal and vicious nature. See how the old and cruel tribal ways have festered in the modern era, they say. Yet that veneration can be read in another way: as an indication of how desperate conditions in Turkey were prior to the civil war.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Alone After Dark
TO FLY FROM ISTANBUL TO DIYARBAKIR TAKES JUST OVER an hour, but to leave the storied Turkish port with its romantic mosques, rococo palaces, and cobalt blue waterways to enter the struggling, overpopulated Kurdish city with its hulking basalt walls and tight-lipped crowds is to replace tourist brochures with reality, commerce and glamour with the grim aftermath of war. On the surface, life in Diyarbakir has returned to normal, as traditional Kurds crowd bazaars and teahouses and modern Kurds congregate in cheery restaurants, offices, and the town’s new bookstore. But just beneath the surface, wounds are gaping and raw.
Diyarbakir, capital of a province of the same name, sits near the western edge of Turkey’s southeast, atop a plateau upon which Kurds herded giant flocks of sheep and cultivated small farms for centuries. During the time of the Ottomans, the province was home to the Gray People, a nomadic confederation of Kurdish and Turcoman tribes, numbering about seventyfive thousand, who wintered in Syria and summered farther north, while next door lived the Black People, an equally large nomadic group. The Diyarbakir province is one of twelve southeastern Turkish provinces that are generally designated as predominantly Kurdish, although the region, like northern Iraq, has long been home to Armenian, Assyrian, Chaldean, Yezidi, Arab, and Turkish communities as well.
Flanked by the Tigris River, which once froze solid enough in winter to support crossing herds of camels, Diyarbakir was founded around 1500 B.C. The city’s most recognizable landmark is its medieval wall, which once ringed the entire town and still stands in many parts. Probably first built by the Romans, the presen
t walls date from the early Byzantines. At almost six kilometers long, the wall is said to be second in length only to the Great Wall of China.
Most of Diyarbakir today sprawls outside its historic walls, but within the old city still winds a maze of narrow, twisting streets and alleyways lined with ancient mosques, churches, and residences inhabited by some of the town’s oldest and poorest families. Often gathered beneath one old city gate are dozens of grizzled men with pushcarts selling fruits and vegetables, while in the teahouses near the bazaar cluster hundreds more men in suits or baggy pants with knitted caps, sitting on low, four-legged stools as they sip, smoke, and talk.
Foremost among the city’s many historical attractions are two mosques, the eleventh-century Ulu Camii, built around a lonesome rectangular plaza, and the sixteenth-century Nebi Camii, sporting the alternating black-and-white stone banding that is characteristic of old Diyarbakir. House museums with lovely courtyards are open to the public, while other historic sites are undergoing a brisk sprucing-up as the city eagerly, wistfully, awaits what it hopes will be the start of a more prosperous era, one filled with guidebook-toting tourists, rather than arms-bearing “special forces.”
SHORTLY AFTERMY arrival in Diyarbakir, I called on Suzan Samanci, a Kurdish novelist. A blond woman with wide cheekbones, round cheeks, observant eyes, and a ready smile, Suzan was the author of four books and wrote a column for the pro-Kurdish newspaper, Yeniden Özgür Gündem, or “New Free Agenda.” Divorced, she lived with her two school-age daughters in a spacious modern apartment in a new section of the city. Suzan spoke no English, but we instantly fell into a writers’ conversation about books and publishing, communicating through the help of her fourteen-year-old daughter, an aspiring filmmaker.
The daughter of civil servants, Suzan finished her first novel in 1990 and, with no connections in the literary world, published the book herself, through a poor-quality publishing house. Despite this, the book—which dealt with the problems of women in the Southeast—had been widely discussed, and her subsequent novels were published by first-rate Turkish houses. Her books had been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Kurdish, and one of her short stories had appeared in an English collection of Turkey’s writers published by PEN International. She had won Turkish literary awards and was regularly invited to writers’ conferences in Europe.
Like my friends in Istanbul, however, Suzan’s success had come at a high price. In her case, that price had been estrangement, both from her former husband and the general Kurdish community. “Many in our society disapprove of what I do,” she said, as she served me kadayif, a delicious Diyarbakir pastry made with walnuts and pistachios. “They think I should just sit quietly at home, have children, entertain guests. My neighbors gossip about me, and I have few people I can talk to about books.” She usually spent her mornings writing, her afternoons reading, and her evenings with her children.
Although Suzan had never been imprisoned because of her writings, she had been arrested and beaten in 1991 for taking part in an antigovernment demonstration. She had also been tried and fined in State Security Court for having the audacity to say in public that no one rebels without a reason.
SUZAN AND SEVERAL of her English-speaking friends, who dropped by during my subsequent visits, filled me in on Diyarbakir’s recent history. As the unofficial capital of Turkey’s Kurdistan, the city has long been known for its rebellious politics, and after the 1980 military coup, suffered a disproportionately harsh crackdown on civil rights. However, Diyarbakir’s darkest modern period really began only with the murder of Vedat Aydin in July 1991. A popular high school teacher and politician, who’d been jailed for ten weeks in 1990 for giving a speech in Kurdish at a Human Rights Association meeting, Aydin was taken from his home one evening by three men professing to be plainclothes policemen. Three days later, his body was found by a roadside, the back of his head punctured, his legs broken, and bullets lodged in his chest.
Aydin was the fourth human rights activist attacked by unknown assailants in the Southeast within a three-week period. Unexpectedly, his funeral attracted an outpouring of over twenty thousand Kurds. The event turned into an enormous pro-Kurdish demonstration, with the coffin draped in the red-yellow-and-green Kurdish flag and many shouting pro-PKK slogans. Young Kurds started throwing stones at the barricades set up by Turkish security. Masked special forces returned the overture by shooting indiscriminately into the crowd, killing six people and wounding about a hundred others.
“The masked teams shot many people,” Suzan said. “And every day afterward, people were taken into custody. They never came back. Many journalists disappeared, and, in 1993, the chairman of the Human Rights Association, Metin Can, and a doctor, Hasan Kaya, were killed. Their bodies were found under a bridge.
“Many intellectuals, teachers, and journalists were assassinated. Assassins killed on the streets in daylight, or they raided at night at two A.M. Every day, maybe eight people were killed on the Diyarbakir streets—and more in Batman, maybe ten in Batman.
“There were special forces on every corner. The forces said, Give us information, and we will give you a good job. But we pretended we were blind and deaf. No one went out on the streets unless he had to. We went to work or school and back, no more. Parents asked their children to look out to see who was on the street before they went to work. Women waited at home, and if their husbands or children were even five minutes late, they became very afraid. This went on for years, until the end of 1995. And even today, when we hear a car brake suddenly or hear footsteps behind us, we become afraid.
“But now, because of the war, we are strong. War makes of many people, one people. The war woke us up, we learned lots of things. Now villagers want to be doctors and lawyers, we want our own language.”
ON A QUIET, rubble-filled street not far from the old city walls stood the offices of the Human Rights Association (HRA). Headquartered in Ankara, HRA has been publicizing and fighting against human rights abuses in Turkey since 1986. Independent and member supported, the organization has weathered the assassinations of fourteen members, numerous office bombings, and constant threats, as it has challenged the state on many issues. HRA publishes monthly reports on human rights violations, and has about fourteen thousand members and thirty-four branch offices.
Arriving at the HRA offices early one morning, I met Selahattin Demirtaş, a soft-spoken lawyer and chairman of the association’s Diyarbakir branch. HRA took down the clients’ testimonies and tried to help them seek justice through the courts, Demirtaş explained. However, that was often a near-futile battle, as the Turkish state had immense power, especially in the Diyarbakir and Sirwan provinces, where Emergency Rule was then still in effect. Implemented in the Southeast in 1987, Emergency Rule gave the state the right to hold suspects incommunicado for thirty days and took away the right to appeal, along with other strictures. Emergency Rule had been lifted elsewhere in the Southeast and would be lifted in Diyarbakir and Sirwan the month after I left, but even so, its effects were still heavily lingering everywhere. “There is no difference between before and after Emergency Rule—nothing has changed,” a group of human rights lawyers later told me in Batman, where the law had been lifted, though, tellingly, none of the lawyers could remember exactly when.
Many laws in Turkey worked against the individual. Lawyers could not speak with their imprisoned clients alone, for example—a guard had to be listening—or remain with their clients during prosecutors’ examinations in the State Security Courts. But HRA could record what they heard and saw, release press reports, keep international human rights organizations informed, and take cases to the European Court of Human Rights.
The Diyarkabir branch of HRA had recorded fifty-three types of human rights violations over the past fourteen years. The worst types, including assassinations, disappearances, and the destruction of villages, had occurred primarily during the civil war, but the office still received occasional reports of burned homes or murders by un
known assailants. Torture by the police and gendarmes, though not as rampant as before, was still systemic, and, of course, there was no freedom of expression.
However, one of HRA’s most urgent current problems had arisen only since the end of the war. With the cessation of hostilities, the hundreds of thousands of displaced villagers—officially only 380,000, but more realistically, at least 1 million—naturally wanted to go home. But to return to their homes, the villagers first had to receive permission from provincial governors, permission often denied for “security” reasons. When it was granted, it was usually done so only after the villagers signed a form relinquishing all rights to compensation. Many also required the villagers to tick a box for their reason for migration, with alternatives ranging from “employment” to “health” to PKK-instigated “terror”—no box for “gendarmes.”
Complicating the problem were the village guards, who had taken over many of the evacuated villages and fields. There were now as many as ninety thousand village guards controlling much of the countryside and preventing villagers from returning. Over the past year, the HRA offices had been receiving frequent reports of returning villagers badly beaten and in some cases killed by the village guards. An October 2002 Human Rights Watch report stated: “Villagers are extremely wary of heading back into an unstable countryside where their former neighbors, sometimes from rival tribal groups, are paid and licensed by the government to bear arms.”
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 40