Though no real data was available, suicide among women was up all over the Southeast, but especially in Batman. The reasons were many. Crowded into poverty-stricken shantytowns, many village women were profoundly alienated, unable to either enter into the new world in which they found themselves or leave their pasts behind. They couldn’t relate to the television that some took so much pleasure in, or communicate with the Turkish-speaking officials in offices and citizens on the street. Their old neighbors—the ones they once shared ribald jokes with, swore in front of, traded gossip with—were gone, and their emotions and feelings went unexpressed. A rise in the suicide rate is also typical at the end of a conflict, one doctor told me, as the initial relief that one has survived subsides and repressed fears and depression come to the fore.
Kurdish women in Turkey usually committed suicide by hanging themselves or jumping from high structures; sometimes, they shot themselves. Though these last deaths were suspect. They could be honor killings, which were widespread in the Southeast, especially in the wake of dislocation and war. Some experts estimated that at least two hundred women and girls were killed by family members each year in Turkey, though those numbers, as in Iraq, were highly speculative. The murders were often committed by minors, forced to kill their sisters or cousins by their parents, as they would receive reduced prison sentences—a pattern that may now change, as Turkey, like Iraqi Kurdistan, passed reforms in June 2003 that did away with reduced prison terms for honor killings.
Turkey was a land split in two, and not just between its Turks and its Kurds, but between its modernity and its tradition, its democracy and its repression. Half of Turkey was firmly twenty-first century, the other half claustrophobically feudal. Turkey was a genuine democracy in some ways, a brutal military state in others. The civil war had brought out all the country’s darker tendencies. Perhaps now, with peace, there was hope for change.
When Celil and I left Batman, Nihat walked us to the bus station, just a short stroll from the downtown. But instead of leaving us there and returning to the town on foot, he climbed onto the bus with us, to have the driver drop him off in front of his office. It was already ten P.M. To walk back alone after dark was too dangerous.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Not for Money
ACCORDING TO KURDISH LEGEND, ALEXANDER THE GREAT once had two horns growing out of his forehead. He could not get one hour’s rest for the pain they caused him, and none of his physicians could cure him. One day, God appeared to him in a revelation and told him to travel into the Land of Darkness, to the Water of Life. Obeying, he passed the Sea of Dark and entered the province of Diyarbakir, where he drank from the Tigris. Its waters relieved his pain, though the horns remained. Continuing, he came upon the springs of today’s Bitlis, located deep in the narrow Taurus Valley, and spent seven days drinking from their pure cold waters. On the seventh day, one of his horns fell off.
He summoned his treasurer, a man named Bedlis, and ordered him to erect an impregnable citadel on the cliff by the springs. The treasurer constructed a fortress with high walls upon which astrologers performed magical incantations. Returning from his conquests, Alexander approached the completed castle, but Bedlis forbade him entrance. Enraged, the Greek warrior laid siege. For forty days and forty nights, a fierce battle stormed, and on the forty-first day, a swarm of yellow bees the size of sparrows emerged from a cave at the base of the fortress and descended on Alexander’s army. All fled in despair, including the commander. Whereupon, Bedlis put the keys of the castle in a jeweled pouch and with countless treasures and gifts went to Alexander, kneeling at his feet. He had done as his master had commanded, he said, and built an impregnable fortress that even the greatest of warriors could not conquer. Alexander forgave him and named the castle in his honor.
BITLIS WAS ORIGINALLY an Armenian town. But sometime in the twelfth century, Kurdish nomads took possession of the mountains surrounding it, and, in 1207, it fell to the Ayyubids. Four hundred years later, Bitlis rose to become a preeminent Ottoman principality, with the Turkish sultan relying heavily on the advice of a noble Bitlis statesman and scholar, Idris Bitlisi. It was Bitlisi who persuaded the sultan to offer the Kurdish princes semiautonomy in exchange for paying taxes and providing militias—a move that greatly aided the Ottomans in their battles against the Safavids. Later in the century, the town was home to another foremost Kurdish scholar, Sharaf Khan Bitlisi, who wrote the 1597 Sharafnameh, a history of the Kurdish tribes.
The famed Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi spent months in the emirate in the mid-1600s. In his Seyahatnameh, he describes it as composed of several districts, including the fertile Muş plain, and controlled by an elite confederation of twenty-four tribes, united by a mir. Ruling over dozens of lesser tribes, who provided the principality with its fighting forces, the confederation’s members were “not brave and warlike like the other Kurds, but sophisticates, men of learning and culture, with henna on their hands and beards and antimony on their eyes.”
A center of commerce, craftsmanship, and learning, seventeenth-century Bitlis boasted 110 prayer niches and over twelve hundred shops, most dedicated to making weapons, weaving, and working leather. To one side rose the main citadel, which contained three hundred houses, while around it clustered seventeen city quarters, containing five thousand houses, seventy primary schools, twenty dervish lodges, nine caravanserais, seventy fountains, and at least seven palaces. Thousands more homes, summerhouses, orchards, and elaborate gardens—in which parties were held “day and night”—blanketed the surrounding hills.
As for the Bitlis people, they lived to be great ages, with men of “ruddy complexion and strong constitution” still hunting and riding horses when they were close to one hundred years old. Women were always well covered and kept strictly in the harem. “If they see a woman in the marketplace, they kill her,” writes Çelebi.
CELIL AND I arrived in Bitlis, about 150 miles northeast of Diyarbakir, one cool, azure autumn day, climbing out of a sleek, air-conditioned bus and into a raggedy marketplace. Dilapidated fruit and vegetable stands lined dark cobblestone streets, while dirty snatches of streams emerged between litter-strewn alleyways and under footbridges. Hundreds of grizzled, unemployed men, many in knitted skullcaps, sat on four-legged stools crowded so closely together that knees, elbows, and shoulders bumped. Overhead, triangular campaign flags flapped. Bitlis’s days of power and prosperity were long gone.
Shouldering our overnight bags, Celil and I wandered through a twelfth-century mosque and sixteenth-century caravanserai, both once celebrated by Çelebi, now dank and dour. We followed a footpath up to the ruins of the castle overlooking the city. From there, I could see that Bitlis had a beautiful setting, built into a narrow valley, with cliffs, mountains, and poplar groves all around. But its former romance had been lost.
Of the citadel, too, there was little left. Only the retaining walls and a few ramparts still stood, and I could not even begin to guess where once had stretched the castle’s central square. There, Çelebi had once watched entertainers bewitch crowds with “magician’s bowls, fire, bodily prowess, maces, bottles, cups, jugs, hoops, games of hazard, somersaults, shadowfigures, puppets, bowls, tightropes, monkeys, bears, asses, dogs, goats.” Celil and I saw only two old men in baggy pants, no cummerbunds or turbans, sitting on their haunches, passing the time of day, and a younger, vaguely menacing loiterer.
Descending from the castle, we passed a rooftop upon which three middle-aged men sat, sipping tea. They called out to us. It was the first welcome we had received in Bitlis. Most of the town had barely seemed to notice us, and no one had made eye contact.
“We’re leaving Bitlis,” the men said, after we had shared a glass of tea. “There’s no work here and too many villagers have moved in. When we were young, Bitlis had many fine families and was famous for its honey and tobacco. That was a tobacco factory.” They pointed to a long white building on a hill across the valley. “But now, most of the old families have moved out.
The factory has closed. And the villagers are too ignorant. They can’t read or write. They vote for shaikhs. This is an insult for us! Bitlis was once famous for its learning!”
“Shaikhs?” I asked. I’d heard that the Bitlis area, along with Van to the east, Hakkari to the southeast, and Urfa to the southwest, was one of the most tribal regions in Turkey’s Kurdistan, but this was the first I’d heard of shaikhs.
“Didn’t you notice all these political parties?” the men said, pointing with disdain to the flapping campaign flags. “They’re all controlled by shaikhs—all except DEHAP. The shaikhs are the cause of all our troubles, they are why we have not entered the industrial age.”
Later, I learned that after the abolishment of the Kurdish emirates in the mid-1800s, Bitlis became a center for fanatic Naqshbandi Sufi shaikhs, where influence continued, albeit in a milder form. Before the late 1800s, Bitlis had been home to Kurds, Turks, Armenians, and other minorities, all living side by side. But as the old order fell apart, the shaikhs’ fanatical preaching led to massacres of the region’s minorities, while at the same time, giving rise to major Kurdish uprisings against their Ottoman overlords.
“What about the aghas?” I asked the three men. “Do they still have power?”
“Yes, of course—aghas, shaikhs, they’re all the same,” they said. “All they care about is politics and money.”
Though I wasn’t in the Southeast long enough to penetrate its tribal culture, I remembered the men’s words often as I continued my travels. Because once outside Diyarbakir, especially in an election season, the close association between the Kurdish aghas and politicians was obvious—indeed, many Kurdish tribal leaders were politicians, with many living in Ankara, the center of Turkish government. Such an association also existed in Iraq, of course, and to a lesser extent in Iran, but it was more out in the open in Turkey, in part because it is a more democratic country, with its back-office machinations more visible, and in part because many parties—not just two, as in Iraq—were vying for the tribal vote. Which Kurdish aghas were bargaining with which political parties was speculated on in the Turkish press during my visit, as the tribes, many numbering in the tens of thousands, with many nonliterate members, would vote largely as instructed by their leaders.
Historically, most Kurdish aghas have sided with the Turkish state during elections, voting for its rightist political parties, and against leftist KurdishTurkish parties—one of several complex reasons why DEHAP won only 6.2 percent in the 2002 parliamentary elections. Proponents of the status quo, the last thing most aghas want is any threat to their position, which has grown more powerful than ever since the mid-1980s, thanks to the village guard system. Aghas who provided the state with village guards were offered ample rewards, while also gaining armed control of the countryside—as in earlier, more unruly centuries, when the Kurds were known for their brigandry. Though nominally under the command of the Turkish military, village guards were in actuality controlled by no one, and free to act with impunity, attacking everyone from suspected guerrillas to rival tribal members.
Yet even without the village guards, the Kurdish tribes have been gaining rather than losing strength in Turkey since World War II, according to experts. In 1946, Turkey became a multiparty democracy based on a district system, meaning that the parties had to build grassroots support if they wanted to survive. In the Southeast, this meant winning over the Kurdish tribes. Politicians began offering aghas business contracts and other rewards in return for blocks of votes, and choosing tribal leaders as local candidates. Rival aghas joined, and continue to join, rival parties, often switching allegiances from election to election, depending on which party offered what. Traditional tribal interests and conflicts have become tightly entwined with modern politics.
FROM BITLIS, CELIL and I caught another spic-and-span bus, this one heading farther east, to Tatvan, on the shores of Lake Van. Built in the nineteenth century, Tatvan was the easternmost stop for trains arriving from Istanbul and Ankara, whose wares were loaded onto ferries to travel on to Van, a larger city farther east. During the civil war, the railroad also transported Turkish troops.
A long, skinny town, Tatvan wasn’t much to look at, but Lake Van glittered like the world’s largest sapphire, twisting and turning in the sun’s lengthening rays as our bus pulled into town. One mile above sea level, Lake Van is the second-largest lake in the Middle East, covering 1,425 square miles. Snowcapped mountains flank its waters to the west, southeast, and north, while farther north soar the Greater and Lesser Mount Ararats. Often bathed in an extraordinary silver-white light, the entire region was formed by volcanoes, with Lake Van created when huge lava flows blocked the area’s western drainage. With no outlet, the lake’s waters are brackish, home to only one fish, a kind of herring.
Celil and I checked into a cheap hotel, had a cappuccino in a modern café, and read our e-mails at an Internet center. Despite Tatvan’s apparent isolation, it had all the modern conveniences. Then Cecil gave Nevzat Turgut a call on his cell phone. Nevzat was a well-known local businessman to whom we had an introduction.
Fifteen minutes later, a tall, balding man in a suit and tie arrived to take us to his home. He held his head at an awkward angle, due to a pain in his neck, caused by a misjudged dive he’d taken as a young man. He’d seen several doctors in Istanbul and tried physical therapy, but nothing helped; the pain always came back.
Nevzat had been arrested for periods in 1980, 1990, 1993, and 1995, he told us in good English soon after we arrived in his large but threadbare home, smelling of a kerosene heater and poverty. The reason for his arrests? Suspected separatist activities, of course. He’d been imprisoned in 1980 because of his involvement with a trade union, and in 1995, because of his work with a pro-Kurdish political party. But the 1990 and 1993 arrests had been the most unfair, coming about simply because he owned campsites from which German tourists were kidnapped by the PKK. “Because I was the owner, they said I also must be PKK,” he said. “But why would I kidnap people from my own campsite?”
Nevzat was no longer in the campsite business, and he had leased out a small hotel he owned in order to serve as head of the Tatvan business association. It was a tricky, often exasperating job that involved acting as liaison between local businessmen and the authorities. But despite Nevzat’s many problems and difficult history, he hadn’t given up his dreams and hopes for his people—not by a long shot. He planned to run for mayor, perhaps in the next election.
“If I were mayor,” he said dreamily. “I would give animals to all the people and send them back to their villages. If I were mayor, I would build factories for jobs and hotels on the lake and restaurants and ski resorts. I would put more fish in the lake so people could eat more protein, and bring in credit banks so people could start businesses. I would improve the schools and start a university. I would build an amusement park, if I were mayor . . .”
THE NEXT MORNING,Celil and I stopped by Tatvan’s tourist office, equipped with an information officer and glossy brochures. Before the early 1990s, the Lake Van area had attracted its share of intrepid travelers, mostly backpackers and lovers of the outdoors. Some had even continued visiting during the height of the civil war and since its end, tourism was on the rise.
At the office, we met Mehmet, a large, sunburned man with a tan-and-white shirt stretched tight over a paunch, dirty maroon jacket, bad teeth, and a rusting minivan, seemingly held together with paper clips and rubber bands. Looks were deceiving; Mehmet was an experienced and honorable guide, with a great fondness for foreigners, and his van was capable of going anywhere. “The first time, everyone is only a passenger with me,” he said in broken English, as Celil and I joined him on the front seat. “But the second time, they are my guests, they stay in my house—free.”
Heating water atop Mount Nemrut
Mehmet drove us along the lonely western shore of Lake Van, blue waters lapping against black sand, and on up Mount Nemrut, an inactive volcano whose lava flows
had helped to create the lake. Up top, in an expansive crater, lazed yet more lakes—one large and deep blue; another smaller, darker blue; and a third, murky green. Hot springs bubbled in parts of the green lake, cooking a dead frog, while around us rustled the red, gold, and brown colors of autumn. Poplar trees with spinning yellow leaves, round as coins. Cattails with rusty stalks and gray plumes. Russet-colored grasses.
Otherwise, Mount Nemrut’s slopes were covered with black volcanic residue and devoid of human life. Until, that is, we came across a cluster of young women in traditional dress washing clothes by a stream. One fed a fire built beneath a heavy cauldron of water, others laid out clothes on rocks to dry. They froze when they saw us, only slowly coming back to life as we said hello.
Behind the volcano was Mehmet’s picturesque village, straight out of a storybook, scattered over a gradual slope with long views of Lake Van. Fat haystacks twice as tall as humans rose between enclosed compounds, homes made of clay and cement, and a small mosque with a pretty minaret. Several women squatted in the sun, baking bread or washing clothes, while a man on a tall handmade ladder repaired an electricity line. On the slope above the village grazed hundreds of sheep, some goats. Young women in bright colors moved among them, milking the goats.
Finally, I have arrived in a Kurdish village in Turkey, I thought. Visiting villages in the Southeast wasn’t so easy. Aside from the fact that many settlements had been destroyed during the war, the highways were guarded by gendarmes and the byways by village guards. Our bus had pulled into two military checkpoints en route to Tatvan—all identification papers collected and examined—while along the smaller roads, travelers were usually asked whom they were planning to visit and why. As a foreigner, I could only cause trouble for people by arriving in their village.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 43