“The government says that fifty-one thousand people have returned to their villages, but this is not true,” Demirtaş said. “Only a very few have returned. But even if it was true, fifty-one thousand is a very small number” compared to the displaced hundreds of thousands.
Unable to return to their homes, villagers continued to live crowded together in abominable conditions, usually on the outskirts of large cities, as I had witnessed in Istanbul. Diyarbakir’s population had swollen from about three hundred thousand to over 1 million in the past decade. Throughout Turkey, the refugees were receiving almost no relief from the government or foreign aid organizations, and went largely without adequate nutrition, housing, health care, or schooling for their children, most of whom were growing up nonliterate, like their parents. Unemployment was rampant, as was depression.
Also escalating in the last year was the problem regarding Kurdish names. Between January and September of 2002, HRA-Diyarbakir had recorded thirty-nine instances of families wanting to give Kurdish names to their children, only to have their requests turned down by the birth registrar’s office. Parents were told that a new rule was in effect and such names were not in line with Turkey’s culture and traditions.
I thought of Turkey’s August 2002 decision to allow limited Kurdish broadcasting and education rights. Much had been made of that ruling in the press, but here in the hinterlands, a more basic right was being newly curtailed. It was as if the state was giving the Kurds a signal not to make too much of the new reforms.
Demirtaş walked me down the hall to meet one of his colleagues, Muharrem Erbey, a writer and culture buff as well as a lawyer. As a boy growing up in Diyarbakir province in the 1960s, Erbey had heard many itinerant troubadours, or dengbej, he told me. They had often stopped by his family’s home. But now, tragically, most were gone. “During the war years, we couldn’t pay attention to art,” he said. “We had to fight to survive, and day by day, we lost our culture. Now people say it is a ‘luxury’ to be interested in culture. But what is the Kurdish identity without culture?”
Not that the dengbej tradition had completely died out. A few of the old masters still lived, and an arts-and-culture festival featuring dengbej had been held in Diyarbakir the previous year. Yet the only traditional Kurdish art form that had truly flourished in the last decade was dancing. The PKK guerrillas had danced in the mountains before and after raids, and when honoring fallen comrades.
A FEW DAYS LATER, I met a third Diyarbakir lawyer, Sezgin Tanrikulu, a cofounder of the Diyarbakir branch of HRA and the recipient of a Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. He had received that award mostly for simply staying alive and staying put, he told me with a curt laugh. Six of his lawyer friends had been killed between 1990 and 1995, “for nothing else than defending human rights,” he said. He himself had been indicted several times for his activities as a so-called “terrorist lawyer.” During the height of the civil war, even communicating with an international human rights group had been considered evidence of terrorist support.
A strikingly handsome man with thick dark hair, a mustache, and a decisive manner, Tanrikulu was especially known for taking cases to the European Court of Human Rights. He had been one of the first Kurdish lawyers to do so and had written a book to help guide colleagues through the process—an arduous one, not least of all because the statute of limitations on many of the crimes was running out. Only since the end of the civil war had most Kurds been able to speak out about the atrocities committed against them years earlier. And even when the Kurds presented and won their petitions against the state security forces, as they had in over forty judgments against Turkey issued by the European Court between 1996 and 2002, it rarely made much difference. “Every time we win a case, Turkey apologizes and says it will change, people will be punished, but there is no change,” Tanrikulu said. “No one is punished, and the laws remain the same.”
A . C ELIL KAYA was a buoyant law student with a dimpled smile. Usually dressed in blue jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt, and jean jacket, he spoke excellent English, Turkish, and Kurdish—the latter not a small point, as most educated young people in Diyarbakir, despite its virtually all-Kurdish population, did not speak Kurdish. As in Istanbul, it had been drilled out of them in the schools.
Celil (pronounced je-leel) lived with two sisters in a high-rise apartment on the edge of the city, while their parents lived in another apartment nearby—an unusual arrangement in Kurdistan, where parents usually liked to keep a closer eye on their children, especially unmarried daughters. Celil’s father was a shopkeeper, while one of his sisters was a high school teacher, and another, a recent college graduate with a degree in folklore. Like Aydin in Istanbul, the siblings lived surrounded by Kurdish-language books and music, and represented the new generation, celebrating rather than hiding their ethnicity.
Before meeting Celil, I had been struggling to find my way around Diyarbakir. Few people in the city, including the HRA lawyers, spoke any English. Even fewer people would speak English when I traveled outside Diyarbakir, I was told. Many Kurds in Turkey were nonliterate; English was not taught regularly in the schools, as it was in Iraq, and, of course, my beginner’s Persian did me no good here.
I therefore hired Celil as my translator and guide. It was the first time I had worked with a full-time translator/guide, and I was loath to give up the more serendipitous experience that traveling alone provides. Yet to penetrate the Southeast to any depth on my own would have been very difficult, especially since I had less than three more weeks to spend in the region.
On our first afternoon together, Celil took me up on the city’s ancient walls, to view the surrounding Mesopotamian plain, a green-and-brown tabletop with the Tigris River running through it. Pointing to the far-off ruins of the Pira Deh, or Ten Door, Bridge, Celil sang a Kurdish folksong about two lovers, one a poor Muslim boy, the other the daughter of an Assyrian priest, who plan a secret rendezvous under the Pira Deh. “Under the bridge, where it is very black, Suzan come look for me,” Celil sang, confirming to me that I had indeed hired the right guide.
While on the city walls, Celil gave me a brief history of Turkey’s Kurds. Some of his words still stick in my mind. “Thirteen million Kurds cannot be terrorists,” he plainly said. Also, like virtually every other Kurd I met in Turkey, Celil was adamantly opposed to a U.S. attack on Iraq.
From the city walls, we traveled on to what had already become my most frequent stop in Diyarbakir—a neighborhood DEHAP, or Democratic People’s Party, campaign office. Turkey’s parliamentary elections were heating up, and the pro-Kurdish DEHAP party, like all parties in Turkey, had opened up numerous temporary offices all over the country in order to further its campaign. Everywhere I traveled, I passed through streets overhung with thousands of flapping triangular flags, imprinted with party logos, while on sidewalks fronting party offices sat dozens or sometimes hundreds of people on four-legged stools with woven tops, passionately arguing politics and drinking tea.
For the Kurds, it was all a heady and novel experience. Up until recently, they had not been legally allowed to congregate in large numbers. Even more important, for the first time in decades, many Kurds felt that the elections had a shot to be fair.
DEHAP was a new party, formed by former members of an earlier pro-Kurdish party, HADEP, or People’s Democracy Party, together with two small, non-Kurdish parties, because Kurds were worried that HADEP might be banned from the elections on charges of acting as the PKK’s political wing. More than one Kurd had told me that DEHAP/HADEP was to the PKK what Sinn Féin was to the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. But so far, the news had been good, and would remain good, as a later attempt by Turkey’s chief prosecutor to disqualify DEHAP was turned down by the courts.
To earn seats in the Turkish parliament, a political party must win at least 10 percent of the vote. Most outside observers were not expecting DEHAP to receive more than 7 or 8 percent—in the end, it would receive only 6.2 percent—but any doubts
of anything less than a resounding victory were seldom expressed in my presence.
“Welcome, welcome,” the enthusiastic DEHAP campaigners said whenever I appeared in their doorway, sometimes with Celil, sometimes not, as someone rushed over with glasses of tea. The large, airy, temporary office was a popular meeting place, and always teeming with people. Traditional Kurdish music was usually playing over a loudspeaker, although once I was startled to hear the familiar voice of Joan Baez singing, “We shall overcome.”
Despite my warm welcome at the DEHAP office, and others like it elsewhere in the Southeast, being there sometimes made me feel desperately ill at ease. As a stranger, I never had any idea to whom I was speaking, or, more to the point, what he or she had lived through. As we exchanged pleasantries and political opinions, I often felt pain creaking around me, pain that usually remained unrevealed yet delineated everything, making every word I uttered seem beside the point.
I had arrived in Turkey’s Kurdistan at an excellent time, the DEHAP campaigners told me. Not just because of the elections themselves, but also because, with all the activity, I would be less likely to be harassed by the Turkish authorities. The elections had thrown everything out of kilter, with no one knowing who would be in power next, and so the police and gendarmes weren’t paying quite as much attention as usual to life on the street. The authorities might also be mistaking me for a pre-election observer, as other real election observers would be arriving within a few weeks, though I saw no other foreigners while in Diyarbakir.
The campaigners’ words eased some of my worries. I hadn’t been sure how the authorities would react to my presence in the region. Up until about two years earlier, foreign journalists had been banned from the Southeast, and one English woman I heard of, a teacher previously living in Diyarbakir, was thrown out about nine months earlier simply for expressing too much interest in Kurdish affairs. Before leaving for Turkey, I was advised by Kurdish Americans to keep as low a profile as possible and to try to pass myself off as a tourist. I wasn’t especially concerned about my safety—as an American, the worst that would probably happen to me was deportation. Even so, I didn’t want to leave Turkey before I was good and ready.
Despite my good timing, however, there was still a significant chance that I was attracting unwanted attention, as Celil frequently warned. He often spoke of how I should be prepared to be taken “under custody” and advised me to e-mail my notes home whenever I could, just in case. Won’t it be worse for you if we are stopped? I asked one day. He shrugged. As a Kurd, he was used to being harassed. Besides, he grinned, he would disavow any knowledge of my activities should I be hauled away; he was just an innocent translator doing his job.
AS IT TURNED OUT, Celil and I were under surveillance only once that I knew of, and then only in a desultory fashion, during a visit to a shantytown on the outskirts of Diyarbakir. We had arrived from the downtown by bus, and met our guides at another temporary DEHAP office, from which we plunged into a dispirited hillside neighborhood, built of cement shacks overshadowed with a web of electricity wires.
We visited several different families, including one from Nadera village, near the town of Kulp. Nadera had once been a large and prosperous place, with over twenty-five hundred inhabitants and thousands of acres of fertile farmland, the family said. But one day in 1993, the gendarmes surrounded the village, forced all the men to lie on the floor, and tied their hands behind their backs. Eleven men were taken away, never to be seen again, and the rest let go, but not before all their houses and fields were burned to the ground and their animals herded off.
The villagers had tried to stay together at first, moving en masse in three groups to Kulp, Diyarbakir, and Muş. Later, economic desperation forced them to disperse, so that they were now spread out over many different cities. “We barely even recognize our own cousins anymore,” sighed the patriarch Mehmet, in a lament that struck me as characteristically Kurdish.
The Nadera family, numbering fourteen, now lived in a cement-block house with three small rooms, thin rugs, television, and dozens of boxes and bags piled up in the corners. Mehmet and his sons had only intermittent work, while the older children collected iron to help earn money and the women stayed home. Life in the city was especially hard on the women, everyone agreed, because there was no place for them to go. The men could at least leave the house to look for work or socialize in the teahouses.
“What was your village like?” I asked the family, and for the first time, I saw light in their eyes.
“It was a beautiful place, a mountain place, with lots of trees, nuts, fruits, and a river,” they said, all speaking at once. “You can’t even imagine the paradise! We had thirty donums3 and one hundred sheep, and some of our neighbors had had much, much more. We grew tobacco and wheat, and fruit and nuts. And we never knew cancer or diabetes, like we do now in the city. . . .”
On our way back to the DEHAP office, we passed a half-dozen beaming women who flashed us the “V” for victory sign, apropos of the upcoming election. The women wore their finest dresses, rich with vibrant color, as they were returning from a DEHAP celebration, and on their foreheads were small, blue tattoos, most of a geometric design. Tattoos were still prevalent in many parts of rural Kurdistan and were made with ash and a new mother’s milk, Celil said.
Only when we neared the DEHAP office did we see the unmarked white car—characteristic of the plainclothes police—across the street, two burly men inside. I still would not have noticed them if the conversation around me hadn’t abruptly stopped.
“Hide your notebook,” Celil said. As I did so, the car backed up, so as to be partially hidden behind an obstruction.
Returning from a DEHAP celebration
“Are they here for us, or DEHAP?” I asked.
“Us, DEHAP, both,” he said. “It’s best not to pay attention.”
We walked to a nearby bus stop, along with about a dozen gaunt men, who came out of the DEHAP office to say good-bye. The men had greeted us warmly when we’d first arrived and were now solemnly shaking my hand one by one, or placing their hands over their eyes, and saying “Ser chaow, ” the Kurdish expression that means “on my eyes,” or rather, “at your service.”
It was in the grassy lot across from the bus stop that Musa Anter’s body had been found one day in September 1992, the men told me. A foremost Kurdish journalist, author, and intellectual, and outspoken proponent of Kurdish rights, seventy-four-year-old Anter had been lured into the area by a young man who feigned interest in renting one of his fields. The Turkish authorities blamed the murder on Islamist extremists, but made virtually no attempt to solve the crime, with Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel remarking shortly thereafter, following other similar mysterious assassinations, “Those killed were not real journalists. They were militants . . . they kill each other.”
By the time the minibus arrived, the white car was gone, and we didn’t see it again, although I kept a close eye out. Just another day in Kurdistan, Celil said, shrugging.
IN THE CENTER of old Diyarbakir reigned three historic churches, one Chaldean, one Assyrian, and one Armenian. At the Chaldean sanctuary, a caretaker gave me a long and informative tour of the ornate building, just as if we were in the middle of peaceful, tourist-filled Paris or Rome. At the Assyrian church, a surly custodian reluctantly roused himself to show me an intimate, third-century chapel. And at the Armenian site, an arthritic old man with a curly white mustache shook himself out of a catnap to unlock a gate opening into an enormous ruined cathedral, filled with rows upon rows of gaunt black pillars and arches, reaching toward the open sky.
Of Diyarbakir’s once-thriving Christian communities, only about thirty Chaldean families, fifteen Assyrian families, and ten or twelve Armenians in total were left. All three groups had been decimated by the Turks’ campaigns against the Christians, often carried out with the help of the Kurds.
For centuries, Kurds and Christians, and especially Armenians, had shared the Anatolia platea
u, often relatively peaceably so, despite tension and sporadic hostility between them. But by the late 1800s, the Kurdish tribes were exploiting and sometimes terrorizing the minority Christians, and in 1894 to 1896, the Ottomans ordered the Hamidiye, militias composed of Kurdish tribesmen, to repress an Armenian rebellion against taxation. The Hamidiye did so, and then extended their raids to other Armenian villages, to massacre at least a thousand civilians.
By far the worst massacres occurred during World War I, however, when the Ottomans suddenly ordered the evacuation of the Armenians from Anatolia, out of fear that they would side with the Russians, who hoped to seize the region and turn it into a Russian-Armenian state. An estimated 1.5 million Armenians were then either massacred outright by Ottoman soldiers, with the help of Kurdish tribesmen, or else died during brutal enforced marches east to the Caucasus. Many terrified civilians also fled south into what would become Iraq and Syria, as the massacres grew to include all Christian groups and some Kurds, who also lost tens of thousands in the campaign.
The Armenian massacres were a massive crime against humanity, the first major ethnic cleansing of the twentieth century. Yet the Republic of Turkey, though not responsible for the killings, continues to deny they ever happened, instead calling them part of a civil conflict instigated by rebel Armenians. The United States does its share to collude in the denial, as proposals in the U.S. Senate to observe an Armenian American day are repeatedly defeated by politicians and lobbyists reluctant to offend a critical major ally. In 2000, a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives to officially label the massacres “genocide” was tabled.
IN THE CENTER of new Diyarbakir hummed the creaky, third-floor headquarters of the women’s branch of DEHAP, thronging with so many people that Celil and I could barely get through the door when we arrived one afternoon. I had visited other women’s centers in Istanbul, and would visit more elsewhere in the Southeast, yet every time, I was astonished anew by the enormous number of involved Kurdish women in Turkey—far more than in either Iraq or Iran. Most of the women were under twenty-five if not under twenty, and invariably dressed in pants or jeans, with no makeup and with simple hairstyles.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 41