A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Part 18

"In high school, the teachers said many bad things about Kurds," said one young filmmaker. "You could protest, but if you did, you would get hurt. Or you could say nothing, but then you ended up with psychological problems-I know many who were affected in this way. So I tried to find a third way. I didn't volunteer I was Kurdish, but if someone asked, I admitted it."

A similar scenario played out in the business world, with men and women denying their origins in order to both survive and get ahead. "We never told anyone we were Kurdish," said an owner of a large factory. "We were ashamed, and we wouldn't have had any business partners or customers if we had."

Arriving in the cities in desperate economic straits, most of the earlier generation of Kurdish migrants gave little thought to a.s.serting or savoring their ethnicity. They just wanted to get ahead and see their children do well. And if that meant that their children had to speak Turkish, and pa.s.s for Turk, so be it. Teaching their children the Kurdish ways and language made little sense, especially since it could get them all in trouble, and they themselves didn't know how to read or write Kurdish anyway. So the parents continued speaking together in Kurdish while their children spoke together in Turkish, each having only an imperfect knowledge of the other's language and world.

I couldn't even begin to imagine the effects of all this. I thought about the brutal mistreatment of African Americans and other minorities in the United States and its numerous, deep-rooted repercussions: psychological, sociological, economic. But here was a people not only subjected to a harsh prejudice and repression at every turn, but also forbidden to even admit who they were, indeed forced to pretend to be the "enemy"-though many Kurds have close Turkish friends, adding another complicating layer to the mix. Whole generations had been "pa.s.sing" for what they were not, with all the psychological baggage that that entails.

Generations had also been irreparably distanced from one another, sometimes in more ways than one. With Europe then in dire need of manual labor, and travel between Turkey and Europe relatively easy, more than 1 million Kurds migrated to the continent between 1950 and 1980, some three hundred thousand heading to West Germany alone.

Among them had been the father of Sheri, the architect; he was also my hostess Elif's brother-in-law. He, his wife, and three oldest children had arrived in Istanbul in the late 1950s, to live in a three-room apartment with three other families. For nine years, he earned a meager wage serving tea in a bank; then he heard that the Ford Motor Company was hiring workers in Germany. He applied, was hired, and departed for the European country, where he'd bunked in dormitories together with ma.s.ses of other Kurdish men for fifteen years, returning home to visit his family just one month a year.

As with Elif and Yakup, the strategy had worked, and worked well, though the emotional toll must have been tremendous. Now retired, Sheri's father had managed to provide his family with a comfortable house and educate all six of his children. In addition to Sheri, two of his daughters were teachers, another was studying to be a journalist, and one of his sons was a mechanical engineer. His second son's career was harder to categorize, as he'd just been released from jail after serving five years due to his involvement with an illegal socialist political party. Not that his case had gone to trial: in Turkey, political suspects are incarcerated before trial and, because the legal system is so slow, are often in jail for years before their cases are finally heard.

Sheri's journalist sister had also run into problems with the Turkish state. She worked for Freedom Radio, which had been shut down eight months earlier for broadcasting Kurdish songs that promoted separatism, or so the authorities said.

"Our parents ask us, Why are you doing this? Why don't you just get good jobs, keep quiet, and make money?" Sheri said. "But we cannot."

Like many Kurds in Turkey under forty, and many over forty as well, she and her siblings were through pretending to be something they were not. The civil war had changed all that.

FOR MANY NONPOLITICIZED Kurds living in western Turkey, the s.h.i.+ft largely began in 1991, when President Turgut zal convinced the parliament finally to lift the ban on the Kurdish language and folkloric music recordings. Almost alone among Turkish politicians, zal recognized that unless the government softened some of its harsh Kurdish policies, the civil war then escalating in the Southeast-to reach its peak in 1992 to 1995- could literally tear Turkey apart. The language ban reversal caused an uproar among the parliamentarians-who pa.s.sed it nonetheless-yet in reality it was a limited measure, as it permitted only private speech, already taking place in the street. The ban on Kurdish broadcasts, education, and modern song lyrics continued. But by repealing the ban, Turkey was at last admitting that it had a Kurdish population. This alone was cause for widespread celebration among Kurds.

However, at the same time, the parliament also inst.i.tuted a harsh new ant.i.terror law. The ruling allowed the authorities to imprison anyone suspected of "disseminating separatist propaganda" or otherwise threatening national security. It was used to sentence hundreds of writers, publishers, musicians, and other nonviolent "offenders" to long prison terms simply for disagreeing with the government's Kurdish policies. One of the most outrageous cases involved Ismail Beiki, a sociologist of Turkish ethnicity who had already spent years in prison prior to 1991 for merely defining the Kurds as a separate ethnic group. He was sentenced to one hundred-plus years under the new law for continuing to write about Kurds. Even Turkey's best-known novelist, Yaar Kemal, who is part Kurdish, was prosecuted under the law and handed a twenty-month suspended sentence in 1996 for publis.h.i.+ng a pro-Kurdish essay in a German magazine.

Nonetheless, as the 1990s progressed, other small positive changes in everyday Kurdish life in western Turkey occurred. The word Kurd started appearing in the newspapers-"I couldn't believe my eyes, I never thought I would see it," one young Istanbul Kurd said to me-and Kurdish music and other forms of cultural expression became more prevalent. Most of all, ordinary Kurds increasingly flaunted rather than hid their heritage-as indeed, more politicized Kurds had been doing since the 1980s, if not before; many Kurds had been working for more rights by peaceful political means long before the rise of the PKK.

By the time of my visit to Turkey in the fall of 2002, the political situation for the Kurds was continuing to ease. Turkey was working to improve its civil rights record, in the hopes of being admitted to the European Union. The previous August, the parliament had approved a reform package allowing the Kurds limited broadcast and education rights, while also outlawing the death penalty. The ant.i.terror law was still in effect, but the accused were usually fined rather than imprisoned. However, the Turkish government still did not officially recognize the Kurds as a minority and continued to deny them many basic civil, cultural, and political rights. Brutal police tactics, inhumane prison conditions, heavy censors.h.i.+p, and the constant threat of arrest and torture continued.

THE MESOPOTAMIA CULTURAL CENTER, devoted to Kurdish culture, was housed in a humble building on the Istiklal, one of Istanbul's most famous streets. From early morning until well past midnight, the thoroughfare teemed with enthusiastic tourists, beefy businessmen, and boisterous young Turks.

One afternoon, Aydin and I climbed the worn stone steps that led to the center-my first visit of many, as it was the meeting place of choice for many Kurds. We entered a dark, smoky room crowded with small tables, around which dozens of serious, bright-eyed, mostly young men and women were gathered-drinking tea, smoking, and pa.s.sionately discussing things Kurdish. To one side was a shop that sold Kurdish CDs and books, while in back and upstairs were theaters, a recording studio, workshops, and offices.

The Mesopotamia Cultural Center was established in 1991, just after the ban on the Kurdish language was lifted, and it had branches in about a half-dozen other cities. Yet the centers were constantly being closed down, accused of "disseminating separatist propaganda," with the main Istanbul branch itself in danger of being shuttered at the time of my visit, pending a court decision. In the meantime, however, business was proceeding as usual, as hundreds of Kurds congregated daily in one of the few large Kurdish centers allowed in Istanbul.

And this, I would discover, was one of the curious things about Turkey's Kurdistan. For all the country's harsh repression, there was a tremendous amount of activity going on. Though it might have taken the Kurds of Turkey longer to get there than the Kurds of Iraq and Iran, they had become a politically mobilized people. In Iran, the Kurds I met had seemed much more subdued, while the Iraqi Kurds were now in a different stage, with organization coming more from above than from below. In Turkey, gra.s.sroots workers were everywhere, toiling tirelessly for more Kurdish rights, often at great personal risk. Their pa.s.sion reminded me of the middle-aged KDP and PUK officials I'd met in Iraqi Kurdistan, those who risked everything for the Kurdish struggle.

I was also in Turkey at an unusual time, having arrived just six weeks before the November 2002 parliamentary elections, which would bring to power the Justice and Development Party, a moderate Islamist party. The election would take the world by surprise, as it swept out the entrenched old guard and gave Turkey a one-party government for the first time in years.

That afternoon, Aydin and I met with the Mesopotamia's director, Zubeyir Perihan, and a half-dozen musicians, filmmakers, and actors. We gathered together in a creaky office beneath a poster of Sarya, an actress who died for the Kurdish cause.

The musicians described constant hara.s.sment-of being arrested following concerts, of being charged fifteen times the going rates at recording studios, and of having to choose the words to their songs with great care, lest they be accused of inciting separatism. Their hero was ivan Perwer, the most famous of all Kurdish singers, who defied the Turkish state in the mid-1970s by singing Kurdish songs in a public stadium, causing the crowd to go wild. Thousands of police stormed the stadium, but Perwer's many fans helped him escape to Germany.

The actors spoke of being arrested after one 1997 performance and imprisoned for forty days, though they had permission to stage the play, and of a civil servant who lost his job for attending the performance. And a filmmaker, Seva Boyraz, told of making a short film with his colleagues called The Land, about forced migration from the villages, and entering it in the 1999 Ankara film festival, where it was accepted. Until, that is, the president of the festival saw the film and prevented its screening. calan had just been arrested; the atmosphere in Turkey was tense. The Ministry of Culture then also banned the film, and it was still illegal in Turkey, though it had been screened in thirty or forty international film festivals.

Seva' hero was Yilmaz Guney, the director of Yol, or The Road, a film set in the Southeast that shared the Palme d'Or award at the 1982 Cannes International Film Festival. Guney wrote the film's script while in prison for a murder that he apparently did commit. He smuggled the screenplay out and it was filmed under the direction of his collaborator, Serif Goran. Yol was banned in Turkey until 1992 but, for various financial and technical reasons, was not shown publically until 1999, when it was screened around the country-an apparent sign of a loosening political climate.

One of the best-known artists challenging Turkey's censors.h.i.+p policies at the time of my visit was musician and composer Sanar Yurdatapan. With other artists, writers, and intellectuals, Yurdatapan-who is Turkish, not Kurdish-had devised an unusual, and devious, campaign of producing a constant stream of pamphlets (forty-two by late 2002) that deliberately flouted Turkey's censors.h.i.+p laws. Each pamphlet was produced by dozens of joint publishers, meaning that the Turkish judiciary had to initiate separate trial procedures against each and every publisher for each and every booklet-a time-consuming process that resulted in much negative publicity for the Turkish authorities and, often, acquittal for the publishers, though Yurdatapan had been imprisoned twice for brief periods. As Yurdatapan later told me, chuckling, "Every year on January 23, our 'birthday,' we publish a pamphlet, cut a cake, and send pieces to the judges, to the police. This will be the start of the end of military rule in Turkey."

ON A DESOLATE hill on the outskirts of Istanbul, in an area known as Bagcilar, stretched a poor neighborhood cobbled together out of rough cement apartment buildings, hovels built of clay and sticks, dirt-streaked mosques, and litter-speckled empty lots in which boys played soccer. To reach Bagcilar from the city center took two hours by multiple buses, a trip that some of its residents took daily, to work or to look for work.

Arriving in Bagcilar one morning, Aydin, our interpreter Sedef, and I met three women by prearrangement. We wound our way back through dirt streets, watched by skinny men in baggy pants and old women in dazzling dresses, white muslin covering their heads. The atmosphere was tense, the result, someone said later, of constant police surveillance and occasional raids. The neighborhood was home to many PKK families.

Climbing several flights of stairs, we entered an echoing, unlit apartment, where we were welcomed by more women, teenagers, and children, and ushered into a spartan living room. Around its edges sagged broken sofas, while on the walls hung black-and-white photographs of fathers and sons-thick hair brushed back, dark eyes s.h.i.+ny, frames draped with black. I could have been back in northern Iraq.

Our hosts were an extended family, originally from villages near Bitlis, in the heart of the Southeast, who had migrated to Istanbul in 1994, after their villages were burned. Most were middle-aged women, dressed in floralpatterned gowns and long vests similar to the ones I'd seen in Dohuk. The Kurds of Dohuk and those of southeastern Turkey share a similar dress, food, and traditions, as well as the Kermanji dialect. The women's lovely muslin head scarves edged with lace were an almost exclusively Turkish custom, however. Some of the head scarves covered only the head, while others wrapped around the head and the chin, turning faces into cameos.

We took seats, as teenage boys and girls bustled in with gla.s.ses of tea, and one boy sat down in the middle of the room with two teapots, at the ready for refills. Other children, women, and relatives crowded into the room. Faces blended into one another, as our hosts began to talk, their words translated first from Kurdish to Turkish by a young woman for Aydin and Sedef's benefit, and then from Turkish to English by Sedef for my benefit, an unwieldy process and constant reminder of the language divide between the Kurdish generations.

Fatma, a strong-featured woman dressed in blue and green, spoke first. "One night in 1994, the Turkish gendarmes knocked on our door, tied up my husband, took him to the river, and shot him," she said matter-of-factly. "He was the fifth and last man to be killed in our village that day. They took all the gold jewelry in the house and put a gun in my baby grandson's mouth. They said they would kill him, too-he would grow up to be PKK. But they let him live. They pushed everyone into the center of the village. Tanks surrounded us, and we thought we would be killed. Instead they burned our houses and fields, and took all our animals. We went to the next village, where people helped us, and later, we came to Istanbul. We came for work, but there is no work."

"Do you get any aid?" I asked.

Fatma laughed curtly. "No. The government does nothing, and we have no foreign aid organizations here."

I thought of the many Anfal victims I had met in Iraq. Fatma's story mirrored theirs. But the Iraqi Kurds had the whole world in their corner, while the Kurds of Turkey had no one.

Nazdar, an equally strong-featured woman, spoke next. "My husband was a shaikh, and one day, the Turkish police arrested him-they said he was helping the PKK," she said. "They tortured him, pounded nails into his feet. After four months, they let him go. They told him not to leave the house. But he went to the mosque-he thought he could go to the mosque-and the gendarmes came and killed him. . . . The next day, the police ordered me to sign a piece of paper. I can't read, but I was afraid and I signed. The paper said my husband's death was a suicide."

Nazdar's daughter then joined the PKK. Age seventeen, the girl left the house one afternoon to visit a neighbor and never returned. Nazdar hadn't heard from her in five years. "And now our village is burned. Where will she go if she comes home?"

Mesut, a slight young man, had been twelve years old when the family fled to Istanbul. As a child growing up in the village, he'd watched friends a few years older than he pressured into supporting the government, arrested after guns were planted in their homes, or kidnapped by the PKK to become guerrillas. In school, his teachers, who spoke only Turkish, constantly praised the legacy of Atatrk, and beat those children who didn't go along. "Happy is he who calls himself a Turk," the teachers made the students say, repeating the country's favorite maxim. The teachers also hara.s.sed students who wore Kurdish clothes, and encouraged children to spy on others and report those who spoke Kurdish.

Sedef and I exchanged glances. As an Azeri Turk, she was as far removed from and disturbed by the Kurdish stories as was I. Like most Turks, she knew next to nothing about what had been happening in the Southeast over the past two decades. The war had not been covered by the Turkish press and, even now, was rarely written about in any depth.

"Do you want to go back to your villages?" I asked our hosts.

"Of course," they said. They hated city life, and they missed everything about their villages, from their orchards to their animals. But they could not go back unless they signed a piece of paper saying that their villages had been destroyed by the PKK, not the Turkish gendarmes, and this was something they would never do.

"How do you feel about calan now?" I asked. I'd heard that the PKK leader's decision to declare a cease-fire following his arrest in 1999 was deeply resented by some of his followers, who felt they'd lost too much to settle. And other Kurds, or so I'd read, blamed the PKK as much as they did the Turkish state for all they had suffered-an impression that I would gradually learn was badly out-of-date.

There was an awkward pause and nervous glances toward the door. Not because of any ambivalence, but because calan's name wasn't usually brought up so openly. It wasn't safe; people could always be listening. Even now, the police could drop by any time, to question what I was doing here.

"Apo is still very close to us," said one of our hosts.

"I would go to the mountains and fight with him myself, except my eyes are not so good," said a grandmother, and the room burst out with laughter.

ABDULLAH CALAN, BETTER known to his followers as "Apo," or "uncle," was born in 1948 in the southern province of Urfa, a mixed Kurdish-Turkish area. The son of a peasant, raised in the Kurdish village of merli, he grew up speaking Kurdish but forgot most of it as a teenager. "I think and plan completely in Turkish," he once said.

After attending a technical high school in Ankara on a state scholars.h.i.+p, calan entered the prestigious Faculty of Political Sciences at Ankara University in 1971. Here, he mingled with other young, disaffected Kurds and Turks, with whom he organized a Maoist group whose goal was a socialist revolution in Turkey. Dropping out of college, he moved back south to Diyarbakir. In 1978, with eleven others, he held the first PKK congress. In stark contrast to the earlier tribal-based Kurdish movements of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, this Kurdish party was a left-wing ideological group, based on Marxist-Leninist principles, whose targets included not just the state's forces but also the Kurdish aghas and landlords "representing the chauvinist cla.s.s." The PKK declared that there could be only one solution to the Kurdish question-a completely independent Kurdish nation-state, to be obtained through whatever means necessary.

In September 1980, the Turkish military staged its third coup in twenty years. By then, Apo and his followers were gone, to Syria and the Bekaa Valley, where they set up boot camps for young volunteers. Focused as much on political indoctrination as on guerrilla warfare, the camps attracted Kurds of all socioeconomic cla.s.ses and both s.e.xes from all over the world, though the vast majority were poor and Turkish. The war tactics that recruits learned were brutal, while their own lives were held in light regard; Apo once told an American journalist that the PKK could "afford to lose" 70 percent of its recruits in battle within a year of completing their training. calan himself took up residence in Damascus, driving to the camps in his Mercedes, surrounded by bodyguards.

The PKK launched its first successful cross-border operation in 1984, attacking two military outposts in Turkey's southeast. Other successful raids soon followed, often carried out by less than ten rebels at a time. They targeted the Turkish forces and its "accomplices"-i.e., Kurdish landlords, and, later, village guards, or civilian militias recruited from tribesmen loyal to their progovernment chieftains.

Meanwhile, the Turkish gendarmes hara.s.sed Kurdish villagers by the tens of thousands, subjecting many to torture and harsh prison terms. This often had the opposite of its intended effect, provoking many to join the rebels. The country had returned to civilian rule in 1983, but rather than address the Kurds' many legitimate grievances, a move that might have defused the escalating conflict early on, the new government met violence with violence, inst.i.tuting a ma.s.sive military buildup and counterinsurgency campaign in the Southeast. As early as 1986, forty-five thousand Turkish troops were stationed in Kurdistan, a figure that would grow to two hundred thousand by the early 1990s.

In 1988, the conflict entered a new, more tragic stage, as casualties began to mount. The PKK began burning Kurdish schools and a.s.sa.s.sinating Kurdish teachers and civil servants, accusing them of promulgating the government line. The guerrilla group was now also in the habit of arriving in villages and demanding food, shelter, and money. Villagers who did not cooperate were severely beaten and, in some cases, ma.s.sacred. Some teenage boys and young men were kidnapped and forced to join the guerrillas.

The villagers found themselves in an untenable position. If they refused to cooperate with the PKK, they suffered brutal reprisals. But if they did cooperate, they suffered equally horrific consequences. Martial law was now in effect throughout the Southeast, and the Turkish military forces had sweeping powers. Without warning, gendarmes would suddenly descend upon Kurdish villages to beat, arrest, torture, and, in some incidences, slaughter innocent victims. Suspects could be retained for thirty days without trial; press reports regarding the state violence were banned; people could be deported out of the region at the governor-general's will.

The campaign to recruit village guards also escalated. Each community was expected to provide a platoon of men, who were armed and paid by the local gendarmes, to keep the PKK out of their village. Communities who refused to become village guards were viewed as PKK sympathizers and subject to yet more violence.

The Kurds became a deeply divided community, with some families supporting the PKK, others becoming village guards, and others still trying to remain neutral. But as the Turkish government did absolutely nothing to protect its ordinary Kurdish civilians-most nonliterate and living in numbing poverty, with a per capita income less than half the national average- and the military committed human rights abuse after human rights abuse, gra.s.sroots support for the PKK grew. Young women as well as men joined the movement, which eventually recruited over thirty thousand guerrillas between 1984 and 1999, and more Kurds began speaking out. The failure of the Turkish government to extend aid to the Iraqi Kurdish refugees crossing into Turkey postGulf War also inflamed many Kurds in Turkey, who ultimately extended that aid themselves. The PKK's image in the Southeast slowly began to change from that of a marginal outlaw group into one of a nationalist movement.

In 1991, the ban on the Kurdish language was lifted and the government made some gestures toward the Southeast, saying that it would "recognize the Kurdish reality." But at the same time, the infamous ant.i.terror law was implemented and b.l.o.o.d.y attacks by both sides confounded any moves toward reconciliation. Popular demonstrations broke out. Villagers who refused to become village guards disappeared, a.s.sa.s.sinations took place on public streets in broad daylight, and the destruction of the villages dramatically escalated. Before 1992, about three hundred villages had been destroyed; between 1992 and 1995, that number grew to over three thousand, as hundreds of thousands of villagers saw their homes burned to the ground, their crops destroyed, and their animals confiscated before their eyes; some saw loved ones killed.

The brutal work of the PKK also continued. Between 1992 and 1995, the group is believed by Human Rights Watch to have committed at least 768 extra-judicial executions, including teachers, civil servants, and political opponents, along with some children and elderly men and women. Nonetheless, the Kurds' support for the PKK grew exponentially, as pride in Kurdish nationalism soared, even among the many millions who deplored the group's tactics and had no interest in Marxism or separatism. Whatever its faults, the PKK promised to deliver what had hitherto been only a dream: equal civil liberties and the right to call oneself "Kurd."

Inflaming the Kurds' escalating nationalism was the increasingly well-doc.u.mented fact that the Kurdish countryside was being destroyed primarily by the Turkish military, not the PKK, as the government liked to claim. A 2002 Human Rights Watch report, typical of many similar reports released over the past decade, reads: "Most displaced [Kurds in Turkey] were driven from their homes by government gendarmes and by 'village guards' " in "an arbitrary and violent campaign marked by hundreds of 'disappearances' and summary executions."

The Turkish government tried to keep the Kurdish conflict under wraps as long as it could. Even to admit that there was a conflict, after all, meant that Turkey would have to acknowledge its Kurdish population. The first reports in the Western press started appearing in 1987, but coverage was limited. Most of the reports, often delivered through Turkish news agencies, simplistically dismissed the conflict as a "separatist" issue.

The West had little serious interest in scrutinizing what was going on inside Turkey. As one of the Middle East's few democracies, albeit an imperfect one, and the only Muslim member of NATO, Turkey was a major Western ally in a part of the world where allies were scarce. The country had recently played a vital role in the Gulf War, and was, ironically, providing the bases needed for Iraqi Kurdistan's air patrols.

In addition, the PKK had engendered little goodwill for Turkey's Kurds internationally. Not only had the guerrilla group slaughtered many hundreds of innocent civilians at home, but it had also committed terrorist acts in Europe. Germany and France outlawed the PKK as a terrorist organization in 1993, and Germany had two international warrants out for calan's arrest.

Turkey was also the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid, though well behind Israel and Egypt. Between 1985 and 1996, the United States sold Turkey $8.7 billion worth of weapons, making commerce another powerful reason to turn a blind eye on its human rights abuses.

As journalist Kevin McKiernan describes in his award-winning doc.u.mentary Good Kurds, Bad Kurds, it was as if the United States had divided the Kurds into two distinct groups. "Good Kurds" were Iraqi Kurds who opposed the common enemy Saddam Hussein and were the innocent victims of lethal chemical attacks, rendering them worthy of millions of dollars of international aid. "Bad Kurds" were the Kurds of Turkey who waged war against a stalwart American friend, the Turkish government, rendering them unworthy of any attention at all. No matter that a near-equal number of Kurdish villages had been destroyed by both the Turkish and the Iraqi militaries, or that Turkey's Kurds-who outnumber Iraqi Kurds three to one-had been suffering under extraordinary civil rights abuses for the past seventy years. And no matter that many of the U.S. weapons being supplied to Turkey were being used against its own civilian Kurdish population.

Also, little wonder that I found little support for the United States while traveling through Turkey's southeast. Many Kurds there had grown up in terror of the sound of U.S. Black Hawks, Hueys, and Cobras, the army helicopters used to land Turkish troops in their villages. And although the Turkish troops did not typically kill large numbers of civilians during the evacuations, the Turkish Air Force at times used F-16s and other fighterbombers, supplied and equipped by the United States, to attack Kurdish villages.

For a brief moment in 1993, peace seemed within reach. calan declared a cease-fire and was no longer advocating separatism, while President Turgut zal made various overtures toward the Kurds. But zal died suddenly of a heart attack before serious negotiations took place, and the fighting resumed, to endure almost without remittance until 1998, when calan, still in Syria, offered the government a unilateral cease-fire. By then, the PKK was on the defensive. The villages in which its forces had once found food and shelter were destroyed and its guerrillas were increasingly inexperienced, dying before they learned how to fight.

Turkey responded to calan's offer by ama.s.sing troops on Syria's border and demanding that he be expelled. Quietly, the PKK leader fled to Moscow, and then, in a dizzying tale of international intrigue, sought asylum in Italy, the Netherlands, and Greece, before landing in Nairobi, Kenya, on February 2, 1999, expecting to move permanently to another African nation a few days later. But on February 15, he was abducted on his way to the airport and handed over to waiting Turkish special forces, who flew him back to Turkey, blindfolded, handcuffed, and drugged. Who turned him in? The Kurds blamed the Greeks, under whose protection calan had been traveling, while the Greeks blamed the Kenyans. The Kurds also blamed Israeli and U.S. intelligence, although both denied playing any "direct" role in the affair.

Word of calan's arrest set off waves of protest across the Middle East and Europe, as tens of thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets, with some attacking Greek and Kenyan emba.s.sies, and others setting themselves on fire. Turkey incarcerated calan on Imrali Island, holding him incommunicado for nine days and allowing him virtually no access to his lawyers. The state then rushed his case through the courts in a trial denounced as unfair by human rights groups at the time and by the European Court of Human Rights since. The PKK leader was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. But in August 2002, Turkey, which has not executed anyone since 1984, outlawed the death penalty altogether, and calan's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

The PKK officially disbanded in April 2002, to re-form as the Kurdish Freedom and Democracy Congress (KADEK). KADEK advocated the pursuit of Kurdish rights through democratic means until September 2003, when it called off its unilateral cease-fire, saying that the Turkish government had failed to respond with reciprocal goodwill. In November 2003, the Kurdish group renamed itself once again: it was now the People's Congress of Kurdistan (KONGRA-GEL).

WESTERN JOURNALISTS AND others who have met calan invariably describe him as tyrannical, egomaniacal, ruthless, dogmatic, and not particularly bright. He has been compared to the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet and the Cambodian butcher Pol Pot, and the PKK is often equated with Peru's vicious s.h.i.+ning Path. Independent human rights organizations have repeatedly denounced calan, and his handiwork is abhorred by many Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, along with humanists everywhere.

Yet to most Kurds in Turkey, calan is a hero. He gave them back their ident.i.ty, pride, self-respect, and hope. For all the atrocities that the PKK committed, many Kurds reason, the Turkish state committed far more. calan may have made mistakes, some Kurds admit, but he gave us a voice and he gave us power. In effect, calan has become more a symbol than a flesh-and-blood man.

Some regard the Kurds' veneration of calan as indicative of their inherently brutal and vicious nature. See how the old and cruel tribal ways have festered in the modern era, they say. Yet that veneration can be read in another way: as an indication of how desperate conditions in Turkey were prior to the civil war.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

Alone After Dark TO FLY FROM ISTANBUL TO DIYARBAKIR TAKES JUST OVER an hour, but to leave the storied Turkish port with its romantic mosques, rococo palaces, and cobalt blue waterways to enter the struggling, overpopulated Kurdish city with its hulking basalt walls and tight-lipped crowds is to replace tourist brochures with reality, commerce and glamour with the grim aftermath of war. On the surface, life in Diyarbakir has returned to normal, as traditional Kurds crowd bazaars and teahouses and modern Kurds congregate in cheery restaurants, offices, and the town's new bookstore. But just beneath the surface, wounds are gaping and raw.

Diyarbakir, capital of a province of the same name, sits near the western edge of Turkey's southeast, atop a plateau upon which Kurds herded giant flocks of sheep and cultivated small farms for centuries. During the time of the Ottomans, the province was home to the Gray People, a nomadic confederation of Kurdish and Turcoman tribes, numbering about seventyfive thousand, who wintered in Syria and summered farther north, while next door lived the Black People, an equally large nomadic group. The Diyarbakir province is one of twelve southeastern Turkish provinces that are generally designated as predominantly Kurdish, although the region, like northern Iraq, has long been home to Armenian, a.s.syrian, Chaldean, Yezidi, Arab, and Turkish communities as well.

Flanked by the Tigris River, which once froze solid enough in winter to support crossing herds of camels, Diyarbakir was founded around 1500 B.C. The city's most recognizable landmark is its medieval wall, which once ringed the entire town and still stands in many parts. Probably first built by the Romans, the present walls date from the early Byzantines. At almost six kilometers long, the wall is said to be second in length only to the Great Wall of China.

Most of Diyarbakir today sprawls outside its historic walls, but within the old city still winds a maze of narrow, twisting streets and alleyways lined with ancient mosques, churches, and residences inhabited by some of the town's oldest and poorest families. Often gathered beneath one old city gate are dozens of grizzled men with pushcarts selling fruits and vegetables, while in the teahouses near the bazaar cl.u.s.ter hundreds more men in suits or baggy pants with knitted caps, sitting on low, four-legged stools as they sip, smoke, and talk.

Foremost among the city's many historical attractions are two mosques, the eleventh-century Ulu Camii, built around a lonesome rectangular plaza, and the sixteenth-century Nebi Camii, sporting the alternating black-and-white stone banding that is characteristic of old Diyarbakir. House museums with lovely courtyards are open to the public, while other historic sites are undergoing a brisk sprucing-up as the city eagerly, wistfully, awaits what it hopes will be the start of a more prosperous era, one filled with guidebook-toting tourists, rather than arms-bearing "special forces."

SHORTLY AFTERMY arrival in Diyarbakir, I called on Suzan Samanci, a Kurdish novelist. A blond woman with wide cheekbones, round cheeks, observant eyes, and a ready smile, Suzan was the author of four books and wrote a column for the pro-Kurdish newspaper, Yeniden zgr Gndem, or "New Free Agenda." Divorced, she lived with her two school-age daughters in a s.p.a.cious modern apartment in a new section of the city. Suzan spoke no English, but we instantly fell into a writers' conversation about books and publis.h.i.+ng, communicating through the help of her fourteen-year-old daughter, an aspiring filmmaker.

The daughter of civil servants, Suzan finished her first novel in 1990 and, with no connections in the literary world, published the book herself, through a poor-quality publis.h.i.+ng house. Despite this, the book-which dealt with the problems of women in the Southeast-had been widely discussed, and her subsequent novels were published by first-rate Turkish houses. Her books had been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Kurdish, and one of her short stories had appeared in an English collection of Turkey's writers published by PEN International. She had won Turkish literary awards and was regularly invited to writers' conferences in Europe.

Like my friends in Istanbul, however, Suzan's success had come at a high price. In her case, that price had been estrangement, both from her former husband and the general Kurdish community. "Many in our society disapprove of what I do," she said, as she served me kadayif, a delicious Diyarbakir pastry made with walnuts and pistachios. "They think I should just sit quietly at home, have children, entertain guests. My neighbors gossip about me, and I have few people I can talk to about books." She usually spent her mornings writing, her afternoons reading, and her evenings with her children.

Although Suzan had never been imprisoned because of her writings, she had been arrested and beaten in 1991 for taking part in an antigovernment demonstration. She had also been tried and fined in State Security Court for having the audacity to say in public that no one rebels without a reason.

SUZAN AND SEVERAL of her English-speaking friends, who dropped by during my subsequent visits, filled me in on Diyarbakir's recent history. As the unofficial capital of Turkey's Kurdistan, the city has long been known for its rebellious politics, and after the 1980 military coup, suffered a disproportionately harsh crackdown on civil rights. However, Diyarbakir's darkest modern period really began only with the murder of Vedat Aydin in July 1991. A popular high school teacher and politician, who'd been jailed for ten weeks in 1990 for giving a speech in Kurdish at a Human Rights a.s.sociation meeting, Aydin was taken from his home one evening by three men professing to be plainclothes policemen. Three days later, his body was found by a roadside, the back of his head punctured, his legs broken, and bullets lodged in his chest.

Aydin was the fourth human rights activist attacked by unknown a.s.sailants in the Southeast within a three-week period. Unexpectedly, his funeral attracted an outpouring of over twenty thousand Kurds. The event turned into an enormous pro-Kurdish demonstration, with the coffin draped in the red-yellow-and-green Kurdish flag and many shouting pro-PKK slogans. Young Kurds started throwing stones at the barricades set up by Turkish security. Masked special forces returned the overture by shooting indiscriminately into the crowd, killing six people and wounding about a hundred others.

"The masked teams shot many people," Suzan said. "And every day afterward, people were taken into custody. They never came back. Many journalists disappeared, and, in 1993, the chairman of the Human Rights a.s.sociation, Metin Can, and a doctor, Hasan Kaya, were killed. Their bodies were found under a bridge.

"Many intellectuals, teachers, and journalists were a.s.sa.s.sinated. a.s.sa.s.sins killed on the streets in daylight, or they raided at night at two A.M. Every day, maybe eight people were killed on the Diyarbakir streets-and more in Batman, maybe ten in Batman.

"There were special forces on every corner. The forces said, Give us information, and we will give you a good job. But we pretended we were blind and deaf. No one went out on the streets unless he had to. We went to work or school and back, no more. Parents asked their children to look out to see who was on the street before they went to work. Women waited at home, and if their husbands or children were even five minutes late, they became very afraid. This went on for years, until the end of 1995. And even today, when we hear a car brake suddenly or hear footsteps behind us, we become afraid.

"But now, because of the war, we are strong. War makes of many people, one people. The war woke us up, we learned lots of things. Now villagers want to be doctors and lawyers, we want our own language."

ON A QUIET, rubble-filled street not far from the old city walls stood the offices of the Human Rights a.s.sociation (HRA). Headquartered in Ankara, HRA has been publicizing and fighting against human rights abuses in Turkey since 1986. Independent and member supported, the organization has weathered the a.s.sa.s.sinations of fourteen members, numerous office bombings, and constant threats, as it has challenged the state on many issues. HRA publishes monthly reports on human rights violations, and has about fourteen thousand members and thirty-four branch offices.

Arriving at the HRA offices early one morning, I met Selahattin Demirta, a soft-spoken lawyer and chairman of the a.s.sociation's Diyarbakir branch. HRA took down the clients' testimonies and tried to help them seek justice through the courts, Demirta explained. However, that was often a near-futile battle, as the Turkish state had immense power, especially in the Diyarbakir and Sirwan provinces, where Emergency Rule was then still in effect. Implemented in the Southeast in 1987, Emergency Rule gave the state the right to hold suspects incommunicado for thirty days and took away the right to appeal, along with other strictures. Emergency Rule had been lifted elsewhere in the Southeast and would be lifted in Diyarbakir and Sirwan the month after I left, but even so, its effects were still heavily lingering everywhere. "There is no difference between before and after Emergency Rule-nothing has changed," a group of human rights lawyers later told me in Batman, where the law had been lifted, though, tellingly, none of the lawyers could remember exactly when.

Many laws in Turkey worked against the individual. Lawyers could not speak with their imprisoned clients alone, for example-a guard had to be listening-or remain with their clients during prosecutors' examinations in the State Security Courts. But HRA could record what they heard and saw, release press reports, keep international human rights organizations informed, and take cases to the European Court of Human Rights.

The Diyarkabir branch of HRA had recorded fifty-three types of human rights violations over the past fourteen years. The worst types, including a.s.sa.s.sinations, disappearances, and the destruction of villages, had occurred primarily during the civil war, but the office still received occasional reports of burned homes or murders by unknown a.s.sailants. Torture by the police and gendarmes, though not as rampant as before, was still systemic, and, of course, there was no freedom of expression.

However, one of HRA's most urgent current problems had arisen only since the end of the war. With the cessation of hostilities, the hundreds of thousands of displaced villagers-officially only 380,000, but more realistically, at least 1 million-naturally wanted to go home. But to return to their homes, the villagers first had to receive permission from provincial governors, permission often denied for "security" reasons. When it was granted, it was usually done so only after the villagers signed a form relinquis.h.i.+ng all rights to compensation. Many also required the villagers to tick a box for their reason for migration, with alternatives ranging from "employment" to "health" to PKK-instigated "terror"-no box for "gendarmes."

Complicating the problem were the village guards, who had taken over many of the evacuated villages and fields. There were now as many as ninety thousand village guards controlling much of the countryside and preventing villagers from returning. Over the past year, the HRA offices had been receiving frequent reports of returning villagers badly beaten and in some cases killed by the village guards. An October 2002 Human Rights Watch report stated: "Villagers are extremely wary of heading back into an unstable countryside where their former neighbors, sometimes from rival tribal groups, are paid and licensed by the government to bear arms."

"The government says that fifty-one thousand people have returned to their villages, but this is not true," Demirta 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.

Demirta 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 ident.i.ty 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.