“What exactly are the authorities so afraid of?” I had asked Nihat, Celil’s journalist friend in Batman. The ban on visiting villages didn’t make any sense. The story of the destroyed villages had been out for years, and I hardly needed to be physically in a village to talk to victimized villagers. “In fact, it is senseless,” Nihat agreed. “It’s just a way of controlling people.”
Mehmet’s home was cool and small, with a thin rug on the floor and bedding piled up along one wall. His wife and grown daughters brought refreshments—fresh cheeses and yogurts, flat bread and tea—while he brought out a notebook. Inside were pages crammed with comments from his many earlier visitors—most Israeli, some European and Australian, and a few Japanese and American. Many had stayed in his home for a night or two, and some had stayed for weeks. “Not for money,” Mehmet beamed proudly. “Never, never. Everyone is free.”
Mehmet was eager for us to stay with him, too, and was disappointed to learn that we had an earlier engagement. “Not for money, not for money,” he kept saying anxiously, only somewhat mollified when we promised to try to return another day.
We were almost finished with our third round of tea before we learned that Mehmet’s village was picturesque on the outside only. Although it had not been destroyed during the war, only half of its forty-odd houses were occupied, and of those, about half belonged to village guards. In earlier years, Mehmet himself had been pressured into becoming a guard, but had fled to safety in Istanbul for two years, successfully moving back in 1994. Now, he ignored his village guard neighbors, and, mostly, they ignored him.
But not always. Sometimes, they harassed him or had him arrested, asking him why he brought so many foreigners into the village, and why he charged them no money. “They do everything for money, so they think money is everything,” he said bitterly.
THE ROAD BETWEEN Tatvan and Van ran flush along Lake Van, blinding cobalt waters to one side, dull tan hills to the other. En route, about sixty miles from Tatvan and a mile offshore, glittered rocky Akdamar Island, home to Akdamar Kilisesi, or Church of the Holy Cross. One of the region’s most famed historic attractions, built by the Armenians in A.D. 921, the church was reachable only by motor boats that ran only when enough people had assembled. Disembarking from a bus in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, Celil and I despaired of reaching the island for many hours, when suddenly a dozen other waiting people—Kurds, Turks, and foreigners—materialized out of nowhere. They had been waiting for us.
“Tamara, what happened to your lover?” Celil sang as we puttered away from shore, and told me the island’s legend. Tamara, the beautiful daughter of an Armenian priest, fell in love with a Muslim boy. Every night, she lit a lamp in an isolated spot and he swam out to the island to meet her. But one night, the lovers were spotted, and the next night, Tamara was locked in her room. Others then set out in a boat, with a lamp, to cruelly lead the Muslim boy farther and farther away from shore until he drowned.
Akdamar Kilisesi was notable for its vivid relief carvings, most in superb condition, depicting biblical stories: Adam and Eve, Jonah and the whale, Abraham and Isaac. And on the mainland across from the island, written in large white boulders on a hill, read the words: THE FATHERLAND CANNOT BE DIVIDED.
VAN WAS THE area’s largest city, population five hundred thousand. Set back some distance from the lake, it boasted a modern, busy downtown in which fashionable young men and women in leather jackets bumped shoulders with poor villagers and a few older women draped in black—the first completely “covered” women I’d seen in Turkey. Celil, who had never been in Van before, had an instant negative reaction to the place. “It doesn’t smell Kurdish,” he said, while I remembered a warning from Mehmet. “Be careful in Van, there are many plainclothes police there.”
Crowning a hill on the edge of the city loomed the ruins of an enormous, unwieldy Citadel, dating back to the ninth century B.C., when Van was the capital of the Kingdom of Urartu, an alliance of tribes especially known for their skilled metal work. Often at war with their neighbors the Assyrians, the Urartians fell from power in the sixth century B.C.
Celil and I visited the Citadel in the late afternoon, shortly after our arrival in Van. Steps carved in rock led to the fortress and halfway up were cuneiform inscriptions praising a Urartian king. On the summit stretched a long expanse of ruins that included several towers and funeral chambers.
But it was the ruins visible at the base of the Citadel’s far side that interested me more. An eerie patchwork of foundations and pillars stretching deep into the darkling plain, these ruins marked the site of the old city of Van, destroyed during World War I, when the Ottomans ordered the deportation of the entire Armenian population. A bloody orgy of massacres and enforced marches began, leading the terrified Armenians to barricade themselves into their city. The Ottomans, with the help of Kurdish tribesmen, then laid siege, ultimately destroying Van and slaughtering untold thousands of innocent civilians. After the founding of modern Turkey in 1923, a completely new Van was built, about three miles east of the old site.
Perhaps it was this tragic earlier history, and not the most recent Kurdish-Turkish struggle, that gave Van its slippery feel. This was an artificial city, built almost overnight and largely without the people that had once formed its heart and soul. The Armenians had lived in the Van area since the sixth century B.C. The land belonged as much to them as it did to the Kurds.
TUCKED INTO THE far southeastern corner of Turkey, just hours from both the Iraq and Iran borders, was the town of Hakkari. Surrounded by some of the country’s highest peaks, it was said to be one of the most beautiful places in Kurdistan. It was also said to be difficult to visit. The 130-mile-long road between Van and Hakkari was studded with military checkpoints, while in the town itself, visitors were usually met by the police the moment they arrived and escorted around town until they departed.
Nonetheless, Celil and I left for Hakkari late one afternoon, just as the sun set, boarding another of the sleek buses that roamed the countryside. The road twisted and turned from almost the moment we left Van and a bus attendant came down the aisle, splashing out the perfumed hand wash that is a common amenity on Turkish buses. About an hour later, we passed beneath the eerie white ramparts of Hoşap castle, built by a Kurdish agha in 1643. Isolated atop a rocky outcropping, the Citadel was lit by floodlights, a seeming reminder of the still-lingering power of the tribes.
Though I was worried about the military checkpoints, the enforced stops—five in all—were uneventful, albeit time-consuming. At each, gendarmes boarded the bus and collected identity cards from my traveling companions and my passport. Sometimes they took everyone’s ID, sometimes only a select few, sometimes they checked names against lists, sometimes they searched luggage bins, sometimes they paid extra-close attention to me, sometimes they ignored me. But every time they climbed on board, everyone in the bus became preternaturally still.
Watching the gendarmes, I noticed how young most were—late teens or early to mid twenties. Many were probably nervous if not terrified to be here, in unsettled enemy territory. The Turks as well as the Kurds had lost many thousands in the civil war, and the three-year-old peace was still tenuous.
“He looks horrible,” Celil said of one gendarme, a stocky, muscular young man with blue cheeks and a grim, clenched jaw. But I couldn’t agree, and pitied him his job, climbing aboard bus after bus filled with hostile passengers.
By the time we disembarked in Hakkari, it was after ten P.M., and no policemen were in sight. But they knew we were here, Celil assured me; the guards at the checkpoints would have called. The cold streets were poorly lit, dusty, and empty, with black mountains on all sides and a black sky flecked with mica overhead. Celil and I hurried into one of the town’s only two hotels, a wan place with a lobby as empty as the town and a sleepy desk clerk, who did his best to welcome us.
The next morning, the same clerk was on duty, along with two policemen now stationed in front of the hotel and
others across the street. They looked Celil and me over when we stepped outside, but made no attempt to follow as we wandered down the block.
Downtown Hakkari consisted of one short main street lined with run-down storefronts, many of which were abandoned. Rising up here and there were building projects in various stages of completion, while at the end of the town trotted a large statue of Atatürk on horseback, surrounded by Turkish flags and a banner trumpeting words that I had seen placarded all over the Southeast: HAPPY IS HE WHO CALLS HIMSELF A TURK. Hakkari’s population had more than tripled in size during the 1990s—from about thirty-five thousand in 1991 to well over one hundred thousand in 2002—as displaced villagers flooded in, but at ten A.M., the streets were still largely empty. White-blue peaks, as perfectly triangular as in a child’s drawing, ringed the cold, lonesome scene—inaccessible crags and precipices, high valleys deep with snow.
Partly for lack of anyplace else to go, Celil and I stopped into the local DEHAP campaign office, a large hall where a few men in baggy suits with long coat jackets milled about. Mehmet, a small man with a lopsided face and alcohol on his breath, welcomed us in English, a language he’d taught himself while imprisoned for seven years in the 1980s. He’d once been a successful businessman, with a bookshop and restaurant, but imprisonment, bad luck, and the war had changed all that.
He did still have a young and beautiful wife, however, whom he’d like us to meet. In fact, she and the rest of the family were getting ready to go to a wedding, or, more precisely, to pick up a bride in a nearby village for a wedding the next day. Would we like to come along?
So it was that an hour or so later, Mehmet, his wife, Medya, their ten-year -old son, another relative, Celil, and I were crammed into a taxi heading out of Hakkari. I was paying, to Mehmet’s great embarrassment. I am very sorry, he said over and over again that morning, but you see how it is, we have no work, we have no money.
We spiraled down the mountain at a rapid clip, the slopes of other nearby mountains seemingly close enough to touch. Piney treetops were dusted with powder until we neared the bottom, where winter gave way to a still-green valley, centered on the Zab River. We came to a checkpoint. One of the lead cars stopped to offer a bribe, and the rest of us sailed by unharassed.
Medya was indeed young and beautiful—I’d had my doubts—and seemed beside herself with excitement as we cruised along, snapping her fingers, clapping her hands, singing snatches of a Kurdish song. We were going to pick up the bride! Tomorrow would be a wedding! Tall and slim, green-eyed and chestnut-haired, Medya was dressed in a two-piece gown of bright lilac beneath, velveteen black, purple, and green on top. She wore five or six gold necklaces, lipstick and mascara, while cinched around her waist was a silver belt. Every few minutes, she climbed up to sit halfway out the car window, shout and wave the “V” for victory sign.
She wasn’t the only one. Women in cars in front and behind us did the same, twirling handkerchiefs in the air. We were part of a cavalcade of fourteen vehicles, with a Toyota truck in front equipped with a video camera pointing backward, and many of the cars draped in streamers of the familiar red, yellow, and green. “See what I mean? Every wedding is like a small demonstration,” Celil said, as people by the roadside returned our victory signs. He nudged me. One of the people flashing back the “V” had been an armed village guard. Often pressed into service against their will, many village guards secretly supported the Kurdish nationalist movement.
We followed the Zab River for ten or fifteen miles before pulling off onto a muddy road crowded with vehicles. Parking, we joined a throng of people pouring from the cars and down surrounding slopes to converge on a simple house by a rushing stream. An electric band played and women were dancing. Like Medya, all were dressed in long, luscious, deep-colored gowns as they held hands, bent, swung, and swayed, while the men, drearily ordinary in Western dress, watched from the sidelines.
Medya and I joined in the dancing for a while—the same saypah step I knew from Iraq and Iran—and I took pictures. Then the music abruptly changed and some ran toward their cars. The bride was coming out! They wanted to be ready to follow in the cavalcade. Others waited as a woman draped in a sheet dyed yellow, red, and green was helped down the stairs and into a waiting wedding car. Her head, face, and body were all completely covered, and would remain so until she was in all-women’s company in Hakkari. When she was finally uncovered, she would not smile, as Kurdish brides should not give the impression they are eager to marry.
We drove back the way we came, with much singing, laughing, clapping, flashing of victory signs, and climbing halfway out car windows. Medya seemed even more excited than before, and several times I was afraid she might fall out of the car altogether. But we made it back safely and retired to the groom’s home for lunch. A sea of shoes had already collected outside the door by the time we arrived, and a boy was turning their toes around, so that all would be pointing forward when the guests left.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON , back in the DEHAP campaign office, now buzzing with activity, Celil and I were besieged by dozens of men and women, all eager to tell us their stories. We formed a large circle of chairs at one end of the room, and everyone began talking at once, some tripping over their words in their haste to get them out. They had so much to say, and so few had listened—Hakkari seldom received visitors. Gaunt faces, hollowed-out cheeks, and unblinking eyes surrounded me.
The villagers’ stories were similar to others I’d heard. “Before, we were all okay,” said a man from the village of Kavalkoy. “Even the poorest family in our village had a hundred sheep, enough to live on. We made our own yogurt and cheese, and bought only sugar and clothes from the city. But now, we are ninety percent unemployed and have nothing.”
Even more than most I’d talked to, the hardest thing for many of the Hakkari-area villagers to endure was the loss of their livestock. The Kurds’ economic mainstay for centuries, livestock was especially important in the region as it was not conducive to farming. But the gendarmes had either stolen the villagers’ animals outright or forced the villagers to sell them at low prices. “We sold them in a hurry because we were worried about our lives,” said a man from a village near Çukurca. “And sometimes the buyers came from the Western cities and paid by checks that were no good.”
Later, I learned that in 1984, the province of Hakkari had contained 5 million livestock; by the late 1990s, it contained less than one-half million. In 1970, livestock had accounted for 12.3 percent of Turkey’s GNP; by 1997, it accounted for 2.2 percent.
Because of Hakkari’s critical position near the Iran and Iraq borders, it was also subject to especially harsh surveillance and security measures. According to the villagers, the town was surrounded by barbed wire, mines, and watchtowers, from which the gendarmes kept track of all movement, using thermal cameras to determine when large groups of people got together. “Until the election process started six weeks ago, we couldn’t gather in large groups like this,” said a DEHAP representative. “Five or more people was considered illegal. And for wedding ceremonies, people had to ask permission.”
The election process was proving to be fraught with difficulty as well. Gendarmes were preventing DEHAP representatives from traveling out into the countryside to campaign, and villagers were being intimidated into voting against the Kurdish party. A report from the London-based Kurdish Human Rights Project later estimated that as many as twenty-five thousand people had been prevented from voting in the Hakkari region in the 2002 elections.
But such practices were not government policy, a young Kurdish journalist from Hakkari told me a few days later in Istanbul. “Turkey wants the elections to be free and fair,” he said. “Turkey wants to join the European Union. But Hakkari is far away from central government and election observers. In Hakkari, the gendarmes and village guards make the law.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Kurds Among Nations
WHEN I FIRST STARTED SERIOUSLY RESEARCHING THE KURDS in early
2002, many Americans barely knew who they were. Just over a year later, that dramatically changed. Anyone paying even the slightest attention to the war in Iraq knew that the Iraqi Kurds were the most stalwart of American friends, providing peshmerga militias to fight alongside the U.S. troops, welcoming the occupying soldiers with an unadulterated joy—in contrast to the Arabs’ far more ambivalent stance—and, in the months of escalating violence after the war’s official end, offering what was still Iraq’s only real safe haven. Soldiers serving elsewhere in the country went to Iraqi Kurdistan for R&R.
Any American paying even slightly more attention to the war also knew that there were issues between Turkey and the Kurds. On March 1, 2003, the Turkish Parliament voted against providing troops to help invade Iraq— a bold and democratic act (over 90 percent of Turkish citizens were against the war) that infuriated the United States, which had taken that support for granted. Democracy was all fine and good, the United States seemed to be saying in its unfortunate message, as long as it supported U.S. policy, but a different story altogether when it did not. One of Turkey’s major objections to the war was the fear that it might encourage Turkey’s Kurds to fight for more autonomy, perhaps joining together with the Iraqi Kurds to try to form a separate, independent Kurdistan.
As much as I had adamantly believed in the necessity of ousting the Baath regime, I was against the war or, rather, against the arrogant manner in which the war was waged. I believed that with more adroit diplomacy and more time, the United States–Britain alliance would not have had to go it alone, and the removal of Saddam Hussein could have been undertaken by a larger coalition of allies, if not the United Nations. I saw then, and see now, the winning of a short-term victory for the United States at the cost of a long-term defeat for the entire world, a deepening of the already tragic East-West divide that will have repercussions for decades to come. Even in the best-case scenario—the quick establishment of a strong democracy in Iraq—I failed to see how exactly that would bring about a fundamental shift in the region, with other despotic regimes following suit, as the neoconservatives argued. I also questioned America’s long-term commitment to the Iraqi people and was horrified by the obvious lack of postwar planning, made most manifest by the insufficient number of troops in the country, leading to much unnecessary death and destruction.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 44