Much of the intense activity that I was witnessing was due to the upcoming parliamentary elections. Overall, too, the Turkish Republic was a more liberal society than its neighbors, with Istanbul women in particular living independent lifestyles much like women in the West. But the primary cause behind the Kurdish women’s involvement—the license that had gotten them out of the house in the first place—was the PKK. Though most Kurdish women in Turkey still lived highly circumscribed lives, the rebel group had dramatically changed the image of women by welcoming them into its guerrilla army. Women guerrillas had their own camps and commanders—albeit few in the highest ranks—and Öcalan frequently spoke out in support of women’s rights, often comparing the oppression of women in Kurdish society to the national oppression of the Kurds. “We want to put an end to the stereotype of the old-fashioned kind of Kurdish woman; it is vile,” he once said.
Öcalan’s feminist consciousness had been largely raised by his wife, Kesire Yildirim, whom he married in the late 1970s. Yildirim was an original member of the PKK’s first Central Committee and a member of its Politiburo for a decade. She and Öcalan divorced in 1987, and she fled to Sweden, after apparently trying to replace him as Politburo chairman. Thereafter, Öcalan accused her of being a Turkish agent, but he did not backpedal on his championship of women’s rights.
In the PKK army, guerrillas of both sexes were expected to put the Kurdish cause before all individual desires. Men and women were encouraged to postpone marriage and children until after the Kurdish revolution was won, and sexual activity and even fraternizing between the sexes was discouraged. These last strictures came out of the party’s Marxist-Leninist philosophy, which denounced courtship and marriage as bourgeois concepts made hopelessly exploitative by capitalist societies, but also fell nicely in line with traditional Kurdish mores.
That afternoon, Celil and I made our way to the back of the women’s headquarters. About two dozen young women crowded in a room, all making up flyers and posters. In its corner sat the only older woman among them, a small, toothless grandmother wearing a traditional blue dress with a knitted blue vest. Every time I looked at her, she broadly grinned and flashed me the victory sign. Later I learned that she had been arrested the year before and tortured for four days with electric shocks for taking part in a demonstration.
Seeing the roomful of young women reminded me of a mid-1990s description of a women’s PKK camp that I’d read: “There are women everywhere; single files of them, in combat gear, carrying rifles. . . . The astonishing thing is how young they all are; most in their teens, the oldest in their late twenties, unsmiling, earnest, youthful faces, some with rimless glasses, their hair pushed up beneath berets and tied in ponytails.”
Replace the combat gear and berets with pants and sweaters, the rifles with pens, and the description applied to the scene before me. Many Kurds in Turkey, like their Iraqi and Iranian counterparts, had been telling me that the time for fighting was over, the time for politicking begun, and here was one small proof of that happening—the estimated five thousand PKK fighters still in hiding in northern Iraq notwithstanding.
Emblematic of the changing status of women was Jiyan Giya, whom I met a few days later in Batman. Now a capable-looking, confident woman of about forty, with a few wisps of gray hair in her black ponytail, Jiyan had married her first cousin at age thirteen, as per her father’s wishes, and had two children. As a young bride, she was filled with anger toward her father and fear of her husband, but she never questioned the arrangement. Then, sometime in her twenties, she discovered the PKK. A few of her younger friends joined as guerrillas, and she supported the movement from home until she was arrested in a raid in 1992. Her husband divorced her, and her children were raised by relatives. She remained imprisoned for ten years, during which time she was tortured, rarely saw her children, and went on four hunger strikes.
She was also sexually abused, she said—though she gave me no particulars. Sexual abuse is not uncommon in Turkish prisons; a 2003 Amnesty International report stated that women detainees were frequently stripped naked by male officers during questioning, often forced to undergo “virginity tests,” and sometimes raped. Speaking out against such abuse was extremely difficult, as it seldom led to justice and often led to ostracism. As in Iraq, the concept of preserving one’s “honor” prevailed.
Jiyan had been released only a few weeks before we met.
“How does it feel to be outside again?” I asked, marveling at her calm manner and stylish appearance.
“When I came out, I saw that everything has changed,” she said. “I hardly know my children anymore, and every place has been destroyed. Of course, it’s very good to be outside, but I also feel I have entered a bigger prison, especially when I see the conditions of women. I did not see the conditions of women so clearly before.”
A FEW HOURS WEST of Diyarbakir were Batman and Hasankeyf, one a sanitized oil town reeking of death, the other a fairy-tale mountain retreat straight out of Lord of the Rings. Celil and I left Diyarbakir to visit both one morning, heading first to the magical town.
We drove across a dusty land, barren hills flanking either side. Animal carcasses lay by the road and the smell of petrol filled the air. Then we entered a shallow gorge and the wide, lazy Tigris River appeared, caves speckling the cliffs above. A wedding caravan flashed by, adorned with red, green, and yellow streamers. “Every wedding is like a small demonstration,” Celil said with a grin.
Approaching Hasankeyf
The caves became more numerous and suddenly, there was Hasankeyf—an entire town built into hundreds of caves honeycombed up a mountainside. On top soared a delicate, pointed minaret, while in the Tigris below hulked two flat-topped pillars that had once supported an enormous bridge.
One of the oldest settlements in Turkey, dating back at least five thousand years, Hasankeyf is overlaid with a mosaic of civilizations, including the Assyrians, Sumerians, and Romans. It was the Byzantines who first turned the natural fortress into a thriving town, augmenting its cave dwellings with stone castles and palaces. Later, Hasankeyf was ruled by a powerful Kurdish family, the last remnant of the Ayyubid dynasty, descended from Salah al-Din. The family’s patriarchs minted their own coins and reigned over the surrounding countryside for centuries.
Celil and I had lunch at an inviting riverside restaurant at the base of Hasankeyf—each “table” a floating platform, covered with rugs and cushions. Around us flowed the mighty Tigris, which I had first crossed on my way into Iraqi Kurdistan many months before. Known as the Diçle in Kurdish, the Tigris is celebrated throughout northern Kurdistan. “Oh! Thou River. Let the river run, let the river run. . . . This is greatness,” goes one folksong.
Celil and I ascended to the town via a staircase tunnel that burrowed up through the mountain to open into a cave on top. Walking out, we found ourselves surrounded by dozens more caves, most part of a giant outdoor museum, complete with teahouses and souvenir shops, though some caves were still occupied. At the crest of one hill were the ruins of the Grand Palace, said to once hold four hundred rooms, while at the crest of another were the ruins of the Great Mosque, originally built as a church. The place thronged with tourists, domestic and foreign.
Though it seems inconceivable, Hasankeyf is currently being threatened by the possible construction of the Ilisu Dam, a project that also promises to submerge about one hundred Kurdish villages and much farmland, displace thirty thousand villagers, and destroy dozens of archaeological sites. Plans for the dam were unveiled decades ago, but it is still in its planning stage, as it has elicited worldwide controversy. Some foreign governments that were once interested in funding the project have pulled out, thanks to the hard lobbying work of concerned activists.
The Ilisu Dam is part of Turkey’s Southeast Anatolia Development Project, better known as GAP, itself highly controversial. An audacious, $30-billion plan to harness the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers for energy and irrigation purposes, GAP calls for the con
struction of twenty-two dams and nineteen hydroelectric plants, some of which have been built. Turkish politicians initially presented the project as one that would benefit the Kurds, by providing employment, but many experts believe that the opposite is the case, as most Kurds do not have the skills necessary for the jobs, and a total of over seventy thousand Kurds would be displaced by the project. In addition, GAP has elicited heated protest from Syria and Iraq, whose water supplies would be drastically cut by the dams. Water, some experts say, may become as valuable as oil in the Middle East in the decades to come and the cause of the region’s next great wars.
CELIL AND I wandered the storybook town, stopping here for a glass of tea, there for pastry—much needed fortification, as it turned out, for Batman, where the horrors of recent life in Turkey’s Kurdistan hit me especially hard.
In and of itself, the city wasn’t especially bad to look at, though nondescript. Largely established over the past half century, after the discovery of oil in its nearby hills, Batman centered on a downtown built of wide thoroughfares lined with modern three- and four-story edifices. Banks and businessmen’s hotels stood on many corners, along with restaurants and Internet cafés. The banality was deceiving.
Upon arriving in town, Celil and I headed straight to the branch offices of Yeniden Özgür Gündem, the pro-Kurdish newspaper, to look up Celil’s friend, journalist Nihat Çelik. Gendarmes were lounging in a Jeep in front of the building, keeping a hostile eye on a DEHAP campaign office next door, outside of which an especially large number of men were assembled on the usual four-legged stools, sipping tea. Above them flapped the small, triangular campaign flags. No women were in sight.
Several of the men came up to welcome me. When they heard where I was from, they asked me what the American people—not the U.S. government—thought about the suffering of Turkey’s Kurds.
Perhaps I was too honest.
“How can the American people not know about our suffering?” they cried. “We have been shouting for the last twenty years. Why hasn’t America heard us?”
The hallway leading into the newspaper’s office was lined with over a dozen black-and-white photographs. I had been in Kurdistan long enough to know what that meant.
The paper had started life in 1992, the year after the ban on the Kurdish language was lifted, though it was written in Turkish, in order to reach a wider audience. Initially known as simply Özgür Gündem, it was closed down in 1993, to be followed in succession by a long line of other publications, each bearing a different name, but all essentially the same paper.
From the beginning, the newspaper was dedicated to publicizing the human rights abuses committed by the Turkish security forces in the Southeast. Sometimes called the “PKK daily” by its critics, it had at times run a column penned under a false name by Öcalan—politics for which it paid a heavy price. The newspaper offices were bombed, its papers confiscated, and its employees arrested, tortured, and killed, as they were accused of supporting the PKK. By April 1994, seventeen of the paper’s journalists and distributors had been assassinated or disappeared.
Five of the murdered journalists, including one woman, were from Batman, and their ghosts cast a pall over the newspaper’s worn offices as Nihat, Celil, and I sipped tea and talked. Since the end of the civil war, the paper had broadened its coverage to include more stories on culture and social issues, but its dedication to covering human rights abuses continued unabated. Threats to the paper had dwindled and no journalists had been killed by unknown assailants since the mid-1990s. However, the Özgür Gündem staff still navigated the city’s streets with great caution, never venturing out into empty areas or after dark alone.
They weren’t the only ones. During the civil war, the Batman area had been the assassination capital of the Southeast, with over 180 civilians killed in 1992 to 1993 alone. The assassins had often been men in masks who killed in broad daylight, either riddling their victims with bullets or approaching from behind, to shoot once in the back of the head. Among the most famous of their victims had been Mehmet Sincar, a Kurdish politician gunned down with a fellow politico one Saturday afternoon in 1993 while walking through the Batman bazaar. The police escort that was with the men mysteriously disappeared just moments before the shootings, convincing the Kurds that the state was behind the killings, while the state blamed Hezbollah.
Unrelated to the far-better-known Shiite group of the same name based in Lebanon, Hezbollah was a small Islamist group headquartered in the Batman area in the early to mid 1990s. An Islamic revival was then taking place in the region, with local religious leaders arguing that the PKK and traditional politics had failed, and radical Islam was the answer. Yet curiously enough, of the approximately five hundred journalists, human rights activists, and professionals indeed believed to have been murdered by Hezbollah by late 1993, all were actively pro-Kurdish, and none of their killers have ever been found. Many Kurds and outside observers believe that Hezbollah and the Turkish state were working together, certainly at the local level and possibly nationally as well.
The killings abruptly stopped in 1995. “It was as if a rope had been cut,” one Batman resident said. “For years, there were six, seven killings a day, and then, suddenly, there were none. If it had been a true ideological movement, the killings would have stopped more gradually.”
EYE DOCTOR AND writer Shakir Kakaliçolu was an unusual man. Of Turkish ethnicity, he had moved to Batman from the Black Sea region twelve years before, because he wanted to live “where there were troubles” and he could do some good. I knew that he had spent time in prison—due, I assumed, to his writings. I was wrong: Kakaliçolu had been imprisoned because of his medical work. Accused of treating PKK guerrillas, he was first jailed in 1995 and held seven months, during which time he was “systematically tortured,” he said. In the following three years, he was arrested twenty more times and sometimes imprisoned. Finally, things got so bad that he fled to Germany in 1998 for three years, returning after the war ended. He was still followed by the civilian police and his phone was tapped, but as he said: “Medicine doesn’t care if one man is Kurd, another Turk, one guerrilla, another gendarme. It is a doctor’s job to help all people.”
Artist Fevzi Bilge was another unusual man. One of the founders of the Mesopotamia Cultural Center in Istanbul, he had lived most of his life in Turkey’s western cities, only moving to Batman three years before. A teacher as well as an artist, he had come because he saw “great potential for art in Batman,” and was now giving art classes. “The people here are hungry for art,” he said, after showing me his rich, deeply colored paintings. “They have suffered much and have much buried inside. I want to help them express themselves. For many years, I lived in Istanbul and improved only myself. But now I am finished with that.”
Abdul Rahman G. was extraordinary as well, though for considerably different reasons. Originally from Dikbayir village outside Batman, Abdul Rahman had been pressured to become a village guard. When he refused, he was forced to leave his village by his brothers who had become guards. Resettling in Batman, he became a member of the pro-Kurdish political party, then known as HEP, and was arrested seventeen times. In 1993 to 1995, the police also raided his home three times, and once he, his wife, and children were all arrested together, herded into one room, and ordered to take off all their clothes.
Then in 1997, Abdul Rahman was arrested again, imprisoned for three months, and tortured with electrical shocks. And ever since, he had been impotent. “They kept threatening to take away my sexuality, and then they did it,” he said, squirming in his seat as he spoke and Celil, also squirming, translated. “I don’t know how they did it, maybe they injected something?” He didn’t know about these things—did I?
He had told his story to a human rights lawyer and now his case was before the European Court of Human Rights, he said—or hoped. Many of the villagers I spoke with told me that they had or were planning to take their cases to the European Court, with many, I suspecte
d, having no real idea of what the process entails and no definite plans to apply. Yet the European Court represented a hope hung onto tightly, in much the same way that Iraqi Kurds held onto their idealized image of the United States.
“I never did anything wrong,” Abdul Rahman concluded. “I was never a guerrilla and there are no guerrillas in my family. My only crime was refusing to be a village guard. And being Kurdish.”
NIHAT, CELIL’S JOURNALIST friend, helped us find our way around Batman during our stay. Thirty years old, with a beard and glasses, dressed in jeans and a flak jacket, he was knowledgeable, compassionate, and deeply committed to both his profession and the Kurdish cause.
During our first evening in Batman, Nihat took Celil and me to a tea-house with a large garden, lit by sickly yellow lights, where we sat on four-legged stools, ordered multiple rounds of tea, and bought a bag of salted watermelon seeds from a passing vendor. I was the only woman in the place, as I was the only woman in almost all the teahouses and restaurants I entered in Batman. Most of the city’s restaurants didn’t even take women, and I saw virtually no women out after dark. Batman’s ambience was far different from lively Diyarbakir, where I’d seen many women on the streets and some modern young couples eating out alone together, at least during the day near the university.
Batman’s rigid sexual codes were due to the youth of the city and its huge influx of refugees in the wake of the war, Nihat said. At only fifty years old, Batman had developed no urban social structure to speak of, and so the arriving refugees had imprinted their traditional, patriarchal values on the city, rather than the other way around, as was usually the case with rural to urban migration. However, at the same time, Batman’s lack of a social structure also meant that the arriving villagers had even less solid ground beneath them than did most war refugees. Which probably helped account for the city’s extraordinarily high suicide rate, most committed by women.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 42