BİA, Turkey
Dec 29 2006
Tariq Ali Diary on Diyarbakır and More
The PKK decision offers the possibility of genuine reforms and
autonomy, but this will happen only if the Turkish army agrees to
retire to its barracks. Economic conditions in the Kurdish areas are
now desperate.
London Review of Books
22/11/2006 Tariq ALI
BİA (London) – It was barely light in Istanbul as I stumbled
into a taxi and headed for the airport to board a flight for
Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish city in eastern Turkey, not far from
the Iraqi border. The plane was full, thanks to a large party of what
looked like chattering students with closely shaved heads, whose
nervous excitement seemed to indicate they’d never left home before.
One of them took the window seat next to my interpreter. It turned
out he wasn’t a student but a newly conscripted soldier, heading east
for more training and his first prolonged experience of barrack-room
life, perhaps even of conflict.
He couldn’t have been more than 18; this was his first time on a
plane. As we took off he clutched the seat in front of him and looked
fearfully out of the window. During the flight he calmed down and
marvelled at the views of the mountains and lakes below, but as the
plane began its descent he grabbed the seat again. Our safe landing
was greeted with laughter by many of the shaven-headed platoon.
Only a few weeks previously, some young soldiers had been killed in
clashes with guerrillas belonging to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party
(PKK). It used to be the case that when Turkish soldiers died in the
conflict, their mothers were wheeled on to state television to tell
the world how proud they were of the sacrifice. They had more sons at
home, they would say, ready and waiting to defend the Fatherland.
This time the mothers publicly blamed the government for the deaths
of their sons.
Diyarbakir is the de facto capital of the Turkish part of Kurdistan,
itself a notional state that extends for some six hundred miles
through the mountainous regions of south-eastern Turkey, northern
Syria, Iraq and Iran. Turkish Kurdistan is home to more than 14
million Kurds, who make up the vast majority of the region’s
population; there are another four million Kurds in northern Iraq,
some five million in Iran and a million in Syria.
The Turkish sector is the largest and strategically the most
important: it would be central to a Kurdish state. Hence the paranoia
exhibited by the Turkish government and its ill-treatment of the
Kurdish population, whose living conditions are much worse than those
of the Kurds in Iraq or Iran.
Kurdish language and culture were banned at the foundation of the
unitary Turkish Republic in1923. The repression intensified during
the 1970s, and martial law was imposed on the region in1978, followed
by two decades of mass arrests, torture, killings, forced
deportations and the destruction of Kurdish villages.
The PKK, founded by the student leader Abdullah Öcalan in 1978, began
a guerrilla war in1984, claiming the Kurds’ right to
self-determination within (this was always stressed) the framework of
a democratised and demilitarised Turkish state. By ‘democratisation’
Kurds mean the repeal of laws used to harass minorities or to deny
them basic political rights. The constitution, for example,
established in 1982, requires a party to get 10 per cent of the vote
nationally before it can win parliamentary representation – the
highest such threshold in the world. Kurdish nationalists
consistently receive a majority of the votes in parts of eastern
Turkey but have no members of parliament.
When, in 1994, centre-left Kurdish deputies formed a new party to get
over the 10 per cent barrier, they were arrested on charges of aiding
the PKK and sentenced to 15 years in jail.
An estimated 200,000 Turkish troops have been permanently deployed in
Kurdistan since the early 1990s, and in 1996 and 1998 fierce battles
resulted in thousands of Kurdish casualties. By February 1999, when
the fugitive Öcalan was captured in Kenya – possibly by the CIA – and
handed over to Turkey, more than 30,000 Kurds had been killed and
some 3000 villages burned or destroyed, which resulted in a new
exodus to Diyarbakir; the city now has a population of more than a
million.
At the end of 1999, after heavy American lobbying, the EU extended
candidate status to Turkey, with further negotiations conditional on
some amelioration, at least, of the Kurdish situation. The pace of
reforms accelerated after the election of Recep Tayyip Erdogan ‘s
government in November 2002. In 2004, the Kurdish deputies who had
been arrested ten years earlier were finally released, and a
Kurdish-language programme was broadcast for the first time on state
television. In line with EU cultural heritage provisions, restoration
work began on the old palace in Diyarbakir – even while Kurdish
prisoners were still being tortured in its cellars.
My host, Melike Coskun, the director of the Anadolu Cultural Centre,
suggested a tour of the walls and the turbot-shaped old town. We
picked up Seymus Diken, cultural adviser to the recently elected
young pro-PKK mayor. He took us to a mosque that was once a cathedral
and before that a pagan temple where sun-worshippers sacrificed
virgins on large stone slabs in the courtyard. It was a Friday during
Ramadan and the mosque was filling up. The majority belonging to the
dominant Sunni Hanafi school occupied the main room while the Shafii
prayed in a smaller one.
We then visited three empty Christian churches. The first was
Chaldean, built in 300 ad, and its brick dome was exquisitely held in
place by intertwined wooden arches. The second, which was Assyrian,
was square, and even older, with Aramaic carvings on the wood and
stones. The caretaker lives in rooms attached to the church and grows
vegetables in what was once the garden of the bishop’s palace.
Hens roamed about, occasionally laying eggs beneath the altar. The
Armenian church was more recent – 16th century – but without a roof.
It was a more familiar shape, like a Roman Catholic church, and the
priest confirmed that the Armenians who had once worshipped here were
Catholics. Seymus began to whisper something to him. I became
curious. ‘It’s nothing,’ Seymus said. ‘Since my triple bypass the
only drink I’m allowed is red wine and there is a tiny vineyard
attached to a monastery in the countryside. I pick up a few bottles
from this church. It’s good wine.’ This was strangely reassuring.
We walked over to the old city walls, first built with black stone
more than 2000 years ago, with layers added by each new conqueror.
The crenellated parapets and arched galleries are crumbling; many
stones have been looted to repair local houses. From an outpost on
the wall, the Tigris is visible as it makes its way south. Seymus
told me that he had been imprisoned in the palace cells by the
Turkish authorities.
‘The next time you come,’ he promised, ‘this building will be totally
restored and we will sip our drinks and watch the Tigris flow.’ In a
large enclosed space below the wall there was an exhibition of
photographs of Diyarbakir in 1911. The images, of a virtually intact
medieval city, seemed to have little interest in the people who lived
there but concentrated on the buildings.
The photographer was Gertrude Bell,who later boasted that she had
created modern Iraq on behalf of the British Empire by ‘drawing lines
in the sand’. These lines, of course, also divided the territory of
the Kurdish tribes, which claim an unbroken history in this area,
stretching back well before the Christian era.
The first written records come after the Arab Muslim conquest. In the
tenth century, the Arab historian Masudi listed the Kurdish mountain
tribes in his nine-volume history, Meadows of Gold. Like most of the
inhabitants of the region they converted to Islam in the seventh and
eighth centuries, and were recruited to the Muslim armies.
They were rebellious, however, and took part in such uprisings as the
Kharijite upheavals of the ninth century. (The Kharijites denounced
the hereditary tradition as alien to Islam and demanded an elected
caliph. They were crushed.) The Kurds settled around Mosul and took
part in the epic slave revolt of the Zanj in southern Mesopotamia in
875. This, too, was defeated. Subsequently Kurdish bands wandered the
region as mercenaries. Saladin’s family belonged to one such group,
whose military skills soon propelled its leaders to power. During the
16th-century conflicts between the Ottoman Empire and the Safavids
who ruled Iran, Kurdish tribes fought on both sides. Inter-tribal
conflicts made Kurdish unity almost impossible.
When Gertrude Bell visited Diyarbakir in 1911, Muslims (mostly Kurds)
constituted 40 per cent of the population. Armenians, Chaldeans and
Assyrians, groups that had settled in what is now eastern Turkey well
over a thousand years before the Christian era, remained the dominant
presence. Istanbul was becoming increasingly unhappy with the idea of
such a mixed population, and even before the Young Turks seized power
from the sultan in 1909, a defensive nationalist wave had led to
clashes between Turks and Armenian groups and small-scale massacres
in the east.
The Armenians began to be seen as the agents of foreign countries
whose aim was to dismember the Ottoman Empire. It’s true that various
wealthy Armenian (and Greek) factions were only too happy to cosy up
to the West during the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, but much of
the Armenian population continued to live peacefully with their
Muslim neighbours in eastern Anatolia. They spoke Turkish as well as
their own language, just as the Kurds did. But Armenian nationalist
revolutionaries were beginning to talk of an Armenian state and the
communities increasingly divided along political lines.
Kurdish militia was set up by the sultan to cow the Armenians, and
then Mehmed Talat, the minister for the interior (who would be
assassinated by an Armenian nationalist), decided to get rid of them
altogether. The Kurdish irregulars carried out the forced expulsions
and massacres of 1915 in which up to a million Armenians died.
Melike told me that her grandmother was Armenian, and that Kurdish
families had saved many lives and given refuge to Armenian women and
children who had converted to Islam in order to survive. Two years
ago Fethiye Çetin, a lawyer and a historian, published a book about
her grandmother, who in old age had confessed to Çetin that she
wasn’t a Muslim, but an Armenian Christian. The book was launched at
the cultural centre Melike runs. ‘The hall was packed with women who
had never been near our centre before,’ Melike said. ‘After Fethiye
had finished so many women wanted to speak and discuss their Armenian
roots. It was amazing.’ Çetin writes that her grandmother was a
‘sword leftover’ child, which is how people whose lives had been
spared were described: ‘I felt my blood freeze. I had heard of this
expression before. It hurt to find it being used to describe people
like my grandmother. My optimism, which was formed with memories of
tea breads, turned to pessimism.’
The political logic of ultra-nationalism proved deadly for both
victim and perpetrator. The aim of the Young Turks had been to expel
the non-Muslim minorities with a view to laying the foundations of a
new and solid unitary state. The exchange of populations with Greece
was part of this plan.
In 1922 Atatürk came to power and made the plan a reality under the
slogan ‘one state, one citizen and one language’. The language was
Latinised, with many words of Arab and Persian origin cast aside very
much like the unwanted citizens. Given that virtually the entire
population was now Muslim, the secular foundations of the new state
were extremely weak, with the military as the only enforcer of the
new order. The first blowback came with the 1925 Kurdish uprising.
Then, as now, religion could not dissolve other differences. The
rebellion lasted several months, and when it was finally put down all
hopes for Kurdish autonomy disappeared. The Kurds’ culture and
language were suppressed. Many migrated to Istanbul and Izmir and
other towns, but the Kurdish question would never go away.
I had been invited to give a lecture in Diyarbakir on the Kurdish
question and the war in Iraq. Four years ago, while the war was still
being plotted in Washington, Noam Chomsky and I were invited to
address a public sector trade-union congress in Istanbul. Many of
those present were of Kurdish origin. I said then that there would be
a war and that the Iraqi Kurds would whole-heartedly collaborate with
the US, as they had been doing since the Gulf War, and expressed the
hope that Turkish Kurds would resist the temptation to do the same.
Afterwards I was confronted by some angry Kurds.
How dare I mention them in the same breath as their Iraqi cousins?
Was I not aware that the PKK had referred to the tribal chiefs in
Iraqi Kurdistan as ‘primitive nationalists’? In fact, one of them
shouted, Barzani and Talabani (currently the president of Iraq) were
little better than ‘mercenaries and prostitutes’. They had sold
themselves successively to the shah of Iran, Israel, Saddam Hussein,
Khomeini and now the Americans. How could I even compare them to the
PKK? In 2002 I was only too happy to apologise. I now wish I hadn’t.
The PKK didn’t share the antiwar sentiment that had engulfed the
country in 2003 and pushed the newly elected parliament into
forbidding the US from entering Iraq from Turkey. But while Kurdish
support for the war was sheepish and shame-faced in Istanbul, no such
inhibitions were on display in Diyarbakir.
Virtually every question after my talk took Kurdish nationalism as
its starting point. That was the only way they could see the war.
Developments in northern Iraq, or southern Kurdistan, as they call it
in Diyarbakir, have created a half-hope, half-belief, that the
Americans might undo what Gertrude Bell and the British did and give
the Kurds their own state. I pointed out that America’s principal
ally in Turkey was the army, not the PKK.
‘What some of my people don’t understand is that you can be an
independent state and still not free, especially now,’ one veteran
muttered in agreement. But most of the people there were happy with
the idea of Iraqi Kurdistan becoming an American-Israeli
protectorate. ‘Give me a reason, other than imperial conspiracy, why
Kurds should defend the borders which have been their prisons,’
someone said. The reason seemed clear to me: whatever happened they
had to go on living there. If they started killing their neighbours,
the neighbours would want revenge. By collaborating with the US, the
Iraqi Kurdish leaders in the north are putting the lives of fellow
Kurds in Baghdad at risk. It’s the same in Turkey. There are nearly
two million Kurds in Istanbul, including many rich businessmen
integrated in the economy. They can’t be ignored.
As I was flying back to Istanbul the PKK announced a unilateral
ceasefire. Turkey’s moderate Islamist government must be secretly
relieved. The PKK decision offers the possibility of genuine reforms
and autonomy, but this will happen only if the Turkish army agrees to
retire to its barracks. Economic conditions in the Kurdish areas are
now desperate: the flow of refugees has not stopped and increasing
class polarisation is reflected in the growth of political Islam.
A Kurdish Hizbullah was formed some years ago (with, so it’s said,
the help of Turkish military intelligence, which hoped it might
weaken the PKK), and the conditions are ripe for its growth. Its
first big outing in Diyarbakir was a 10,000-strong demonstration
against the Danish cartoons. If things don’t change, the movement is
bound to grow. (TA/EU)
* This article of Tariq Ali was published in London Review of Books
on 16 November.