A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Part 19

A strikingly handsome man with thick dark hair, a mustache, and a decisive manner, Tanrikulu was especially known for taking cases to the European Court of Human Rights. He had been one of the first Kurdish lawyers to do so and had written a book to help guide colleagues through the process-an arduous one, not least of all because the statute of limitations on many of the crimes was running out. Only since the end of the civil war had most Kurds been able to speak out about the atrocities committed against them years earlier. And even when the Kurds presented and won their pet.i.tions against the state security forces, as they had in over forty judgments against Turkey issued by the European Court between 1996 and 2002, it rarely made much difference. "Every time we win a case, Turkey apologizes and says it will change, people will be punished, but there is no change," Tanrikulu said. "No one is punished, and the laws remain the same."

A . C ELIL KAYA was a buoyant law student with a dimpled smile. Usually dressed in blue jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt, and jean jacket, he spoke excellent English, Turkish, and Kurdish-the latter not a small point, as most educated young people in Diyarbakir, despite its virtually all-Kurdish population, did not speak Kurdish. As in Istanbul, it had been drilled out of them in the schools.

Celil (p.r.o.nounced je-leel) lived with two sisters in a high-rise apartment on the edge of the city, while their parents lived in another apartment nearby-an unusual arrangement in Kurdistan, where parents usually liked to keep a closer eye on their children, especially unmarried daughters. Celil's father was a shopkeeper, while one of his sisters was a high school teacher, and another, a recent college graduate with a degree in folklore. Like Aydin in Istanbul, the siblings lived surrounded by Kurdish-language books and music, and represented the new generation, celebrating rather than hiding their ethnicity.

Before meeting Celil, I had been struggling to find my way around Diyarbakir. Few people in the city, including the HRA lawyers, spoke any English. Even fewer people would speak English when I traveled outside Diyarbakir, I was told. Many Kurds in Turkey were nonliterate; English was not taught regularly in the schools, as it was in Iraq, and, of course, my beginner's Persian did me no good here.

I therefore hired Celil as my translator and guide. It was the first time I had worked with a full-time translator/guide, and I was loath to give up the more serendipitous experience that traveling alone provides. Yet to penetrate the Southeast to any depth on my own would have been very difficult, especially since I had less than three more weeks to spend in the region.

On our first afternoon together, Celil took me up on the city's ancient walls, to view the surrounding Mesopotamian plain, a green-and-brown tabletop with the Tigris River running through it. Pointing to the far-off ruins of the Pira Deh, or Ten Door, Bridge, Celil sang a Kurdish folksong about two lovers, one a poor Muslim boy, the other the daughter of an a.s.syrian priest, who plan a secret rendezvous under the Pira Deh. "Under the bridge, where it is very black, Suzan come look for me," Celil sang, confirming to me that I had indeed hired the right guide.

While on the city walls, Celil gave me a brief history of Turkey's Kurds. Some of his words still stick in my mind. "Thirteen million Kurds cannot be terrorists," he plainly said. Also, like virtually every other Kurd I met in Turkey, Celil was adamantly opposed to a U.S. attack on Iraq.

From the city walls, we traveled on to what had already become my most frequent stop in Diyarbakir-a neighborhood DEHAP, or Democratic People's Party, campaign office. Turkey's parliamentary elections were heating up, and the pro-Kurdish DEHAP party, like all parties in Turkey, had opened up numerous temporary offices all over the country in order to further its campaign. Everywhere I traveled, I pa.s.sed through streets overhung with thousands of flapping triangular flags, imprinted with party logos, while on sidewalks fronting party offices sat dozens or sometimes hundreds of people on four-legged stools with woven tops, pa.s.sionately arguing politics and drinking tea.

For the Kurds, it was all a heady and novel experience. Up until recently, they had not been legally allowed to congregate in large numbers. Even more important, for the first time in decades, many Kurds felt that the elections had a shot to be fair.

DEHAP was a new party, formed by former members of an earlier pro-Kurdish party, HADEP, or People's Democracy Party, together with two small, non-Kurdish parties, because Kurds were worried that HADEP might be banned from the elections on charges of acting as the PKK's political wing. More than one Kurd had told me that DEHAP/HADEP was to the PKK what Sinn Fein was to the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. But so far, the news had been good, and would remain good, as a later attempt by Turkey's chief prosecutor to disqualify DEHAP was turned down by the courts.

To earn seats in the Turkish parliament, a political party must win at least 10 percent of the vote. Most outside observers were not expecting DEHAP to receive more than 7 or 8 percent-in the end, it would receive only 6.2 percent-but any doubts of anything less than a resounding victory were seldom expressed in my presence.

"Welcome, welcome," the enthusiastic DEHAP campaigners said whenever I appeared in their doorway, sometimes with Celil, sometimes not, as someone rushed over with gla.s.ses of tea. The large, airy, temporary office was a popular meeting place, and always teeming with people. Traditional Kurdish music was usually playing over a loudspeaker, although once I was startled to hear the familiar voice of Joan Baez singing, "We shall overcome."

Despite my warm welcome at the DEHAP office, and others like it elsewhere in the Southeast, being there sometimes made me feel desperately ill at ease. As a stranger, I never had any idea to whom I was speaking, or, more to the point, what he or she had lived through. As we exchanged pleasantries and political opinions, I often felt pain creaking around me, pain that usually remained unrevealed yet delineated everything, making every word I uttered seem beside the point.

I had arrived in Turkey's Kurdistan at an excellent time, the DEHAP campaigners told me. Not just because of the elections themselves, but also because, with all the activity, I would be less likely to be hara.s.sed by the Turkish authorities. The elections had thrown everything out of kilter, with no one knowing who would be in power next, and so the police and gendarmes weren't paying quite as much attention as usual to life on the street. The authorities might also be mistaking me for a pre-election observer, as other real election observers would be arriving within a few weeks, though I saw no other foreigners while in Diyarbakir.

The campaigners' words eased some of my worries. I hadn't been sure how the authorities would react to my presence in the region. Up until about two years earlier, foreign journalists had been banned from the Southeast, and one English woman I heard of, a teacher previously living in Diyarbakir, was thrown out about nine months earlier simply for expressing too much interest in Kurdish affairs. Before leaving for Turkey, I was advised by Kurdish Americans to keep as low a profile as possible and to try to pa.s.s myself off as a tourist. I wasn't especially concerned about my safety-as an American, the worst that would probably happen to me was deportation. Even so, I didn't want to leave Turkey before I was good and ready.

Despite my good timing, however, there was still a significant chance that I was attracting unwanted attention, as Celil frequently warned. He often spoke of how I should be prepared to be taken "under custody" and advised me to e-mail my notes home whenever I could, just in case. Won't it be worse for you if we are stopped? I asked one day. He shrugged. As a Kurd, he was used to being hara.s.sed. Besides, he grinned, he would disavow any knowledge of my activities should I be hauled away; he was just an innocent translator doing his job.

AS IT TURNED OUT, Celil and I were under surveillance only once that I knew of, and then only in a desultory fashion, during a visit to a shantytown on the outskirts of Diyarbakir. We had arrived from the downtown by bus, and met our guides at another temporary DEHAP office, from which we plunged into a dispirited hillside neighborhood, built of cement shacks overshadowed with a web of electricity wires.

We visited several different families, including one from Nadera village, near the town of Kulp. Nadera had once been a large and prosperous place, with over twenty-five hundred inhabitants and thousands of acres of fertile farmland, the family said. But one day in 1993, the gendarmes surrounded the village, forced all the men to lie on the floor, and tied their hands behind their backs. Eleven men were taken away, never to be seen again, and the rest let go, but not before all their houses and fields were burned to the ground and their animals herded off.

The villagers had tried to stay together at first, moving en ma.s.se in three groups to Kulp, Diyarbakir, and Mu. Later, economic desperation forced them to disperse, so that they were now spread out over many different cities. "We barely even recognize our own cousins anymore," sighed the patriarch Mehmet, in a lament that struck me as characteristically Kurdish.

The Nadera family, numbering fourteen, now lived in a cement-block house with three small rooms, thin rugs, television, and dozens of boxes and bags piled up in the corners. Mehmet and his sons had only intermittent work, while the older children collected iron to help earn money and the women stayed home. Life in the city was especially hard on the women, everyone agreed, because there was no place for them to go. The men could at least leave the house to look for work or socialize in the teahouses.

"What was your village like?" I asked the family, and for the first time, I saw light in their eyes.

"It was a beautiful place, a mountain place, with lots of trees, nuts, fruits, and a river," they said, all speaking at once. "You can't even imagine the paradise! We had thirty donums3 and one hundred sheep, and some of our neighbors had had much, much more. We grew tobacco and wheat, and fruit and nuts. And we never knew cancer or diabetes, like we do now in the city. . . ."

On our way back to the DEHAP office, we pa.s.sed a half-dozen beaming women who flashed us the "V" for victory sign, apropos of the upcoming election. The women wore their finest dresses, rich with vibrant color, as they were returning from a DEHAP celebration, and on their foreheads were small, blue tattoos, most of a geometric design. Tattoos were still prevalent in many parts of rural Kurdistan and were made with ash and a new mother's milk, Celil said.

Only when we neared the DEHAP office did we see the unmarked white car-characteristic of the plainclothes police-across the street, two burly men inside. I still would not have noticed them if the conversation around me hadn't abruptly stopped.

"Hide your notebook," Celil said. As I did so, the car backed up, so as to be partially hidden behind an obstruction.

Returning from a DEHAP celebration "Are they here for us, or DEHAP?" I asked.

"Us, DEHAP, both," he said. "It's best not to pay attention."

We walked to a nearby bus stop, along with about a dozen gaunt men, who came out of the DEHAP office to say good-bye. The men had greeted us warmly when we'd first arrived and were now solemnly shaking my hand one by one, or placing their hands over their eyes, and saying "Ser chaow, " the Kurdish expression that means "on my eyes," or rather, "at your service."

It was in the gra.s.sy lot across from the bus stop that Musa Anter's body had been found one day in September 1992, the men told me. A foremost Kurdish journalist, author, and intellectual, and outspoken proponent of Kurdish rights, seventy-four-year-old Anter had been lured into the area by a young man who feigned interest in renting one of his fields. The Turkish authorities blamed the murder on Islamist extremists, but made virtually no attempt to solve the crime, with Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel remarking shortly thereafter, following other similar mysterious a.s.sa.s.sinations, "Those killed were not real journalists. They were militants . . . they kill each other."

By the time the minibus arrived, the white car was gone, and we didn't see it again, although I kept a close eye out. Just another day in Kurdistan, Celil said, shrugging.

IN THE CENTER of old Diyarbakir reigned three historic churches, one Chaldean, one a.s.syrian, and one Armenian. At the Chaldean sanctuary, a caretaker gave me a long and informative tour of the ornate building, just as if we were in the middle of peaceful, tourist-filled Paris or Rome. At the a.s.syrian church, a surly custodian reluctantly roused himself to show me an intimate, third-century chapel. And at the Armenian site, an arthritic old man with a curly white mustache shook himself out of a catnap to unlock a gate opening into an enormous ruined cathedral, filled with rows upon rows of gaunt black pillars and arches, reaching toward the open sky.

Of Diyarbakir's once-thriving Christian communities, only about thirty Chaldean families, fifteen a.s.syrian families, and ten or twelve Armenians in total were left. All three groups had been decimated by the Turks' campaigns against the Christians, often carried out with the help of the Kurds.

For centuries, Kurds and Christians, and especially Armenians, had shared the Anatolia plateau, often relatively peaceably so, despite tension and sporadic hostility between them. But by the late 1800s, the Kurdish tribes were exploiting and sometimes terrorizing the minority Christians, and in 1894 to 1896, the Ottomans ordered the Hamidiye, militias composed of Kurdish tribesmen, to repress an Armenian rebellion against taxation. The Hamidiye did so, and then extended their raids to other Armenian villages, to ma.s.sacre at least a thousand civilians.

By far the worst ma.s.sacres occurred during World War I, however, when the Ottomans suddenly ordered the evacuation of the Armenians from Anatolia, out of fear that they would side with the Russians, who hoped to seize the region and turn it into a Russian-Armenian state. An estimated 1.5 million Armenians were then either ma.s.sacred outright by Ottoman soldiers, with the help of Kurdish tribesmen, or else died during brutal enforced marches east to the Caucasus. Many terrified civilians also fled south into what would become Iraq and Syria, as the ma.s.sacres grew to include all Christian groups and some Kurds, who also lost tens of thousands in the campaign.

The Armenian ma.s.sacres were a ma.s.sive crime against humanity, the first major ethnic cleansing of the twentieth century. Yet the Republic of Turkey, though not responsible for the killings, continues to deny they ever happened, instead calling them part of a civil conflict instigated by rebel Armenians. The United States does its share to collude in the denial, as proposals in the U.S. Senate to observe an Armenian American day are repeatedly defeated by politicians and lobbyists reluctant to offend a critical major ally. In 2000, a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives to officially label the ma.s.sacres "genocide" was tabled.

IN THE CENTER of new Diyarbakir hummed the creaky, third-floor headquarters of the women's branch of DEHAP, thronging with so many people that Celil and I could barely get through the door when we arrived one afternoon. I had visited other women's centers in Istanbul, and would visit more elsewhere in the Southeast, yet every time, I was astonished anew by the enormous number of involved Kurdish women in Turkey-far more than in either Iraq or Iran. Most of the women were under twenty-five if not under twenty, and invariably dressed in pants or jeans, with no makeup and with simple hairstyles.

Much of the intense activity that I was witnessing was due to the upcoming parliamentary elections. Overall, too, the Turkish Republic was a more liberal society than its neighbors, with Istanbul women in particular living independent lifestyles much like women in the West. But the primary cause behind the Kurdish women's involvement-the license that had gotten them out of the house in the first place-was the PKK. Though most Kurdish women in Turkey still lived highly circ.u.mscribed lives, the rebel group had dramatically changed the image of women by welcoming them into its guerrilla army. Women guerrillas had their own camps and commanders-albeit few in the highest ranks-and calan frequently spoke out in support of women's rights, often comparing the oppression of women in Kurdish society to the national oppression of the Kurds. "We want to put an end to the stereotype of the old-fashioned kind of Kurdish woman; it is vile," he once said.

calan's feminist consciousness had been largely raised by his wife, Kesire Yildirim, whom he married in the late 1970s. Yildirim was an original member of the PKK's first Central Committee and a member of its Politiburo for a decade. She and calan divorced in 1987, and she fled to Sweden, after apparently trying to replace him as Politburo chairman. Thereafter, calan accused her of being a Turkish agent, but he did not backpedal on his championship of women's rights.

In the PKK army, guerrillas of both s.e.xes were expected to put the Kurdish cause before all individual desires. Men and women were encouraged to postpone marriage and children until after the Kurdish revolution was won, and s.e.xual activity and even fraternizing between the s.e.xes was discouraged. These last strictures came out of the party's Marxist-Leninist philosophy, which denounced courtship and marriage as bourgeois concepts made hopelessly exploitative by capitalist societies, but also fell nicely in line with traditional Kurdish mores.

That afternoon, Celil and I made our way to the back of the women's headquarters. About two dozen young women crowded in a room, all making up flyers and posters. In its corner sat the only older woman among them, a small, toothless grandmother wearing a traditional blue dress with a knitted blue vest. Every time I looked at her, she broadly grinned and flashed me the victory sign. Later I learned that she had been arrested the year before and tortured for four days with electric shocks for taking part in a demonstration.

Seeing the roomful of young women reminded me of a mid-1990s description of a women's PKK camp that I'd read: "There are women everywhere; single files of them, in combat gear, carrying rifles. . . . The astonishing thing is how young they all are; most in their teens, the oldest in their late twenties, unsmiling, earnest, youthful faces, some with rimless gla.s.ses, their hair pushed up beneath berets and tied in ponytails."

Replace the combat gear and berets with pants and sweaters, the rifles with pens, and the description applied to the scene before me. Many Kurds in Turkey, like their Iraqi and Iranian counterparts, had been telling me that the time for fighting was over, the time for politicking begun, and here was one small proof of that happening-the estimated five thousand PKK fighters still in hiding in northern Iraq notwithstanding.

Emblematic of the changing status of women was Jiyan Giya, whom I met a few days later in Batman. Now a capable-looking, confident woman of about forty, with a few wisps of gray hair in her black ponytail, Jiyan had married her first cousin at age thirteen, as per her father's wishes, and had two children. As a young bride, she was filled with anger toward her father and fear of her husband, but she never questioned the arrangement. Then, sometime in her twenties, she discovered the PKK. A few of her younger friends joined as guerrillas, and she supported the movement from home until she was arrested in a raid in 1992. Her husband divorced her, and her children were raised by relatives. She remained imprisoned for ten years, during which time she was tortured, rarely saw her children, and went on four hunger strikes.

She was also s.e.xually abused, she said-though she gave me no particulars. s.e.xual abuse is not uncommon in Turkish prisons; a 2003 Amnesty International report stated that women detainees were frequently stripped naked by male officers during questioning, often forced to undergo "virginity tests," and sometimes raped. Speaking out against such abuse was extremely difficult, as it seldom led to justice and often led to ostracism. As in Iraq, the concept of preserving one's "honor" prevailed.

Jiyan had been released only a few weeks before we met.

"How does it feel to be outside again?" I asked, marveling at her calm manner and stylish appearance.

"When I came out, I saw that everything has changed," she said. "I hardly know my children anymore, and every place has been destroyed. Of course, it's very good to be outside, but I also feel I have entered a bigger prison, especially when I see the conditions of women. I did not see the conditions of women so clearly before."

A FEW HOURS WEST of Diyarbakir were Batman and Hasankeyf, one a sanitized oil town reeking of death, the other a fairy-tale mountain retreat straight out of Lord of the Rings. Celil and I left Diyarbakir to visit both one morning, heading first to the magical town.

We drove across a dusty land, barren hills flanking either side. Animal carca.s.ses lay by the road and the smell of petrol filled the air. Then we entered a shallow gorge and the wide, lazy Tigris River appeared, caves speckling the cliffs above. A wedding caravan flashed by, adorned with red, green, and yellow streamers. "Every wedding is like a small demonstration," Celil said with a grin.

Approaching Hasankeyf The caves became more numerous and suddenly, there was Hasankeyf-an entire town built into hundreds of caves honeycombed up a mountainside. On top soared a delicate, pointed minaret, while in the Tigris below hulked two flat-topped pillars that had once supported an enormous bridge.

One of the oldest settlements in Turkey, dating back at least five thousand years, Hasankeyf is overlaid with a mosaic of civilizations, including the a.s.syrians, Sumerians, and Romans. It was the Byzantines who first turned the natural fortress into a thriving town, augmenting its cave dwellings with stone castles and palaces. Later, Hasankeyf was ruled by a powerful Kurdish family, the last remnant of the Ayyubid dynasty, descended from Salah al-Din. The family's patriarchs minted their own coins and reigned over the surrounding countryside for centuries.

Celil and I had lunch at an inviting riverside restaurant at the base of Hasankeyf-each "table" a floating platform, covered with rugs and cushions. Around us flowed the mighty Tigris, which I had first crossed on my way into Iraqi Kurdistan many months before. Known as the Dile in Kurdish, the Tigris is celebrated throughout northern Kurdistan. "Oh! Thou River. Let the river run, let the river run. . . . This is greatness," goes one folksong.

Celil and I ascended to the town via a staircase tunnel that burrowed up through the mountain to open into a cave on top. Walking out, we found ourselves surrounded by dozens more caves, most part of a giant outdoor museum, complete with teahouses and souvenir shops, though some caves were still occupied. At the crest of one hill were the ruins of the Grand Palace, said to once hold four hundred rooms, while at the crest of another were the ruins of the Great Mosque, originally built as a church. The place thronged with tourists, domestic and foreign.

Though it seems inconceivable, Hasankeyf is currently being threatened by the possible construction of the Ilisu Dam, a project that also promises to submerge about one hundred Kurdish villages and much farmland, displace thirty thousand villagers, and destroy dozens of archaeological sites. Plans for the dam were unveiled decades ago, but it is still in its planning stage, as it has elicited worldwide controversy. Some foreign governments that were once interested in funding the project have pulled out, thanks to the hard lobbying work of concerned activists.

The Ilisu Dam is part of Turkey's Southeast Anatolia Development Project, better known as GAP, itself highly controversial. An audacious, $30-billion plan to harness the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers for energy and irrigation purposes, GAP calls for the construction of twenty-two dams and nineteen hydroelectric plants, some of which have been built. Turkish politicians initially presented the project as one that would benefit the Kurds, by providing employment, but many experts believe that the opposite is the case, as most Kurds do not have the skills necessary for the jobs, and a total of over seventy thousand Kurds would be displaced by the project. In addition, GAP has elicited heated protest from Syria and Iraq, whose water supplies would be drastically cut by the dams. Water, some experts say, may become as valuable as oil in the Middle East in the decades to come and the cause of the region's next great wars.

CELIL AND I wandered the storybook town, stopping here for a gla.s.s of tea, there for pastry-much needed fortification, as it turned out, for Batman, where the horrors of recent life in Turkey's Kurdistan hit me especially hard.

In and of itself, the city wasn't especially bad to look at, though nondescript. Largely established over the past half century, after the discovery of oil in its nearby hills, Batman centered on a downtown built of wide thoroughfares lined with modern three- and four-story edifices. Banks and businessmen's hotels stood on many corners, along with restaurants and Internet cafes. The ba.n.a.lity was deceiving.

Upon arriving in town, Celil and I headed straight to the branch offices of Yeniden zgr Gndem, the pro-Kurdish newspaper, to look up Celil's friend, journalist Nihat elik. Gendarmes were lounging in a Jeep in front of the building, keeping a hostile eye on a DEHAP campaign office next door, outside of which an especially large number of men were a.s.sembled on the usual four-legged stools, sipping tea. Above them flapped the small, triangular campaign flags. No women were in sight.

Several of the men came up to welcome me. When they heard where I was from, they asked me what the American people-not the U.S. government-thought about the suffering of Turkey's Kurds.

Perhaps I was too honest.

"How can the American people not know about our suffering?" they cried. "We have been shouting for the last twenty years. Why hasn't America heard us?"

The hallway leading into the newspaper's office was lined with over a dozen black-and-white photographs. I had been in Kurdistan long enough to know what that meant.

The paper had started life in 1992, the year after the ban on the Kurdish language was lifted, though it was written in Turkish, in order to reach a wider audience. Initially known as simply zgr Gndem, it was closed down in 1993, to be followed in succession by a long line of other publications, each bearing a different name, but all essentially the same paper.

From the beginning, the newspaper was dedicated to publicizing the human rights abuses committed by the Turkish security forces in the Southeast. Sometimes called the "PKK daily" by its critics, it had at times run a column penned under a false name by calan-politics for which it paid a heavy price. The newspaper offices were bombed, its papers confiscated, and its employees arrested, tortured, and killed, as they were accused of supporting the PKK. By April 1994, seventeen of the paper's journalists and distributors had been a.s.sa.s.sinated or disappeared.

Five of the murdered journalists, including one woman, were from Batman, and their ghosts cast a pall over the newspaper's worn offices as Nihat, Celil, and I sipped tea and talked. Since the end of the civil war, the paper had broadened its coverage to include more stories on culture and social issues, but its dedication to covering human rights abuses continued unabated. Threats to the paper had dwindled and no journalists had been killed by unknown a.s.sailants since the mid-1990s. However, the zgr Gndem staff still navigated the city's streets with great caution, never venturing out into empty areas or after dark alone.

They weren't the only ones. During the civil war, the Batman area had been the a.s.sa.s.sination capital of the Southeast, with over 180 civilians killed in 1992 to 1993 alone. The a.s.sa.s.sins had often been men in masks who killed in broad daylight, either riddling their victims with bullets or approaching from behind, to shoot once in the back of the head. Among the most famous of their victims had been Mehmet Sincar, a Kurdish politician gunned down with a fellow politico one Sat.u.r.day afternoon in 1993 while walking through the Batman bazaar. The police escort that was with the men mysteriously disappeared just moments before the shootings, convincing the Kurds that the state was behind the killings, while the state blamed Hezbollah.

Unrelated to the far-better-known Shiite group of the same name based in Lebanon, Hezbollah was a small Islamist group headquartered in the Batman area in the early to mid 1990s. An Islamic revival was then taking place in the region, with local religious leaders arguing that the PKK and traditional politics had failed, and radical Islam was the answer. Yet curiously enough, of the approximately five hundred journalists, human rights activists, and professionals indeed believed to have been murdered by Hezbollah by late 1993, all were actively pro-Kurdish, and none of their killers have ever been found. Many Kurds and outside observers believe that Hezbollah and the Turkish state were working together, certainly at the local level and possibly nationally as well.

The killings abruptly stopped in 1995. "It was as if a rope had been cut," one Batman resident said. "For years, there were six, seven killings a day, and then, suddenly, there were none. If it had been a true ideological movement, the killings would have stopped more gradually."

EYE DOCTOR AND writer Shakir Kakaliolu was an unusual man. Of Turkish ethnicity, he had moved to Batman from the Black Sea region twelve years before, because he wanted to live "where there were troubles" and he could do some good. I knew that he had spent time in prison-due, I a.s.sumed, to his writings. I was wrong: Kakaliolu had been imprisoned because of his medical work. Accused of treating PKK guerrillas, he was first jailed in 1995 and held seven months, during which time he was "systematically tortured," he said. In the following three years, he was arrested twenty more times and sometimes imprisoned. Finally, things got so bad that he fled to Germany in 1998 for three years, returning after the war ended. He was still followed by the civilian police and his phone was tapped, but as he said: "Medicine doesn't care if one man is Kurd, another Turk, one guerrilla, another gendarme. It is a doctor's job to help all people."

Artist Fevzi Bilge was another unusual man. One of the founders of the Mesopotamia Cultural Center in Istanbul, he had lived most of his life in Turkey's western cities, only moving to Batman three years before. A teacher as well as an artist, he had come because he saw "great potential for art in Batman," and was now giving art cla.s.ses. "The people here are hungry for art," he said, after showing me his rich, deeply colored paintings. "They have suffered much and have much buried inside. I want to help them express themselves. For many years, I lived in Istanbul and improved only myself. But now I am finished with that."

Abdul Rahman G. was extraordinary as well, though for considerably different reasons. Originally from Dikbayir village outside Batman, Abdul Rahman had been pressured to become a village guard. When he refused, he was forced to leave his village by his brothers who had become guards. Resettling in Batman, he became a member of the pro-Kurdish political party, then known as HEP, and was arrested seventeen times. In 1993 to 1995, the police also raided his home three times, and once he, his wife, and children were all arrested together, herded into one room, and ordered to take off all their clothes.

Then in 1997, Abdul Rahman was arrested again, imprisoned for three months, and tortured with electrical shocks. And ever since, he had been impotent. "They kept threatening to take away my s.e.xuality, and then they did it," he said, squirming in his seat as he spoke and Celil, also squirming, translated. "I don't know how they did it, maybe they injected something?" He didn't know about these things-did I?

He had told his story to a human rights lawyer and now his case was before the European Court of Human Rights, he said-or hoped. Many of the villagers I spoke with told me that they had or were planning to take their cases to the European Court, with many, I suspected, having no real idea of what the process entails and no definite plans to apply. Yet the European Court represented a hope hung onto tightly, in much the same way that Iraqi Kurds held onto their idealized image of the United States.

"I never did anything wrong," Abdul Rahman concluded. "I was never a guerrilla and there are no guerrillas in my family. My only crime was refusing to be a village guard. And being Kurdish."

NIHAT, CELIL'S JOURNALIST friend, helped us find our way around Batman during our stay. Thirty years old, with a beard and gla.s.ses, dressed in jeans and a flak jacket, he was knowledgeable, compa.s.sionate, and deeply committed to both his profession and the Kurdish cause.

During our first evening in Batman, Nihat took Celil and me to a tea-house with a large garden, lit by sickly yellow lights, where we sat on four-legged stools, ordered multiple rounds of tea, and bought a bag of salted watermelon seeds from a pa.s.sing vendor. I was the only woman in the place, as I was the only woman in almost all the teahouses and restaurants I entered in Batman. Most of the city's restaurants didn't even take women, and I saw virtually no women out after dark. Batman's ambience was far different from lively Diyarbakir, where I'd seen many women on the streets and some modern young couples eating out alone together, at least during the day near the university.

Batman's rigid s.e.xual codes were due to the youth of the city and its huge influx of refugees in the wake of the war, Nihat said. At only fifty years old, Batman had developed no urban social structure to speak of, and so the arriving refugees had imprinted their traditional, patriarchal values on the city, rather than the other way around, as was usually the case with rural to urban migration. However, at the same time, Batman's lack of a social structure also meant that the arriving villagers had even less solid ground beneath them than did most war refugees. Which probably helped account for the city's extraordinarily high suicide rate, most committed by women.

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, pa.s.sed 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, G.o.d appeared to him in a revelation and told him to travel into the Land of Darkness, to the Water of Life. Obeying, he pa.s.sed 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 princ.i.p.ality, with the Turkish sultan relying heavily on the advice of a n.o.ble 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 elebi spent months in the emirate in the mid-1600s. In his Seyahatnameh, he describes it as composed of several districts, including the fertile Mu plain, and controlled by an elite confederation of twenty-four tribes, united by a mir. Ruling over dozens of lesser tribes, who provided the princ.i.p.ality 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 const.i.tution" 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 elebi.

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 s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 b.u.mped. 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 elebi, 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, elebi 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, a.s.ses, dogs, goats." Celil and I saw only two old men in baggy pants, no c.u.mmerbunds or turbans, sitting on their haunches, pa.s.sing the time of day, and a younger, vaguely menacing loiterer.

Descending from the castle, we pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.s 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 ma.s.sacres 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?"