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Among Smugglers,
Partisans, and Bombers: Through the wilds of Kurdistan to the beginning of
spring. Observations in the Turkish/Iranian/Iraqi border region.
By Nick Brauns
The commander of the Turkish military police, the “Jandarma”, receives us
at the checkpoint on the road from Van to Hakkari with the bearing of a
colonial officer: “What do you want in Hakkari? Only terrorists and
barbarians live there. You should go to Antalya; that’s the place for
tourists.”
The province of Hakkari, in the Iranian/Iraqi border region, is the
poorhouse of Turkey. 7,121 square kilometers in size, and 266,061
inhabitants. A tourist guide from the newspaper “Milliyet” says “The
Hakkari region is the most mountainous and desolate corner of our country.
It is surrounding by impassable mountains, without roads. The mountains
that enclose the area on all sides reach a height of up to 4,000 meters. (…)
In many places, the valleys turn into narrow gorges. Even in summer, not
even motorcycles can reach the tiny settlements and villages.”
In the autumn of 2005, a series of bomb explosions shook Hakkari. The
center for the attacks was Semdinli, the most remote town in Turkey, by the
Iranian border. First, on 1 September, World Peace Day, a hand grenade was
thrown. Two months later, 100 kilograms of explosive concealed in a truck
detonate in front of a shopping passage. A crater in the street, and the
ruins of the building, still attest to the force of the explosion, which
injured 23 people. Then, on 9 November, a hand grenade was tossed into the
“Umut” [“Hope”] bookshop, located only a few meters from the devastated
shopping center. One customer was killed, and 15 other people injured.
The special aspect this time: Passers-by were able to apprehend the fleeing
perpetrators. Their identity documents showed them to be non-commissioned
officers of the military intelligence service. Additionally, a turncoat
from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was also captured. In their getaway
car were found, in addition to weapons and attack plans, a list with the
names of 105 people who ostensibly supported the outlawed PKK. At the very
top, marked in red, was written “Seferi Yilmaz” -- the owner of the
bookshop.
A revolt then broke out in Semdinli, Hakkari, Yuksekova, and other Kurdish
towns. Barricades were set up, armored personnel carriers were attacked
with Molotov cocktails, and a police station was stormed. Police shot into
the crowds and killed a number of people. The largest demonstration, with
up to 80,000 participants, took place in the town of Yuksekova. The
building façade of the Zagros Shopping Center still shows bullet-holes from
the slaughter. The legend “Zagros”, the Kurdish name of a mountain range,
has in the meantime been removed on the direction of the military.
In this corner of Turkey, the young people, in particular, have nothing
more to lose. “We’ve had it with school” they answer to questions as to
what they’re doing with themselves. And they go on: “We support Abdullah
Ocalan.” They claim they would sacrifice their lives for the PKK leader,
incarcerated on the Imrali prison island, and see “Apo”, who was abducted
from Kenya in an intelligence agencies’ plot in 1999, as their synonym for
a better life.
In the Hope Bookshop
The trip from Yuksekova to Semdinli leads for several kilometers over a
broad, absolutely straight road. The roadway was at one time a secret
landing strip for the United States in the second Gulf War in the beginning
of the 1990s. Washington wants to reactivate it for an attack against Iran.
This depends, in the final analysis, on Turkey.
The vibrant town of Semdinli lies in the midst of high, snow-covered
mountains. Some of its residents have, through smuggling, come to
prosperity. Men in baggy pants with cloths tied around their heads stand
around leaning on off-the-road pickup trucks or fan themselves with
commercial documents. A white car follows us slowly. No strangers ever
escape the notice of the military intelligence service.
The “Umut” bookshop leas in a passage on the main street. Yilmaz, the
bookshop owner on the hit-list of the secret service people, is happy when
he hears that we write for a Marxist daily newspaper. The 43-year-old man
explains that he has been a socialist since the age of 15. He joined the
PKK as far back as 1977. He explains that “You can’t fight fascists without
force.” At that time, the organization was almost unknown. “The people here
in Kurdistan were uneducated, and couldn’t read. Lenin had the newspaper
“Iskra” [“The Spark”]; the PKK went to the villages in order to raise
people’s consciousness.”
The armed uprising of the PKK began on 15 August 1984, when guerrilla units
attacked the Kurdish towns of Eruh and Semdinli. In Semdinli they shot up
the Turkish military guard post with machine guns and rockets. Several
soldiers and officers were killed and wounded. When the guerrillas then
passed out leaflets in the coffeehouses and hung up banners with slogans
and martyrs of the PKK, Yilmaz, then 21, was with them. Shortly thereafter,
a captured comrade, under torture, informed on him. Yilmaz was captured and
sentenced to 15 years imprisonment in the notorious military prison of
Diyarbakir.
When he was finally freed in the year 2000, he opened the “Umut” bookshop. Today
he doesn’t have to educate people any longer with a gun in his hand. The
young people from Semdinli and the surrounding villages come into his
bookstore. “Selling books is not important. The important thing is that the
young people read and learn.” In the selection available are both
non-fiction and novels in Turkish and in Kurdish, as well as books on Karl
Marx, Sigmund Freud, the Russian Revolution, and the Iraq War. And also
lots of Russian literature. Tolstoi and Chernichevski are among Yilmaz’s
favorite authors.
“We will light up Turkey starting from Semdinli” – this was the ambitious
motto of this years Newroz festival, celebrating the Kurdish New Year of 21
March. But in Semdinli, the military banned the festival. Instead, with great
participation both by the population and by several mayors from the Kurdish
“Democratic Society Party” (DTP), the renovated “Umut” bookstore was
re-opened. The re-opening was made possible by donations of books from
booksellers and socialist writers such as Ragip Zarakolu. Osman Baydemir,
the Metropolitan Mayor of the city of Diyarbakir, commented that “Sometime
a book can change a person’s entire life. Perhaps a bookseller will now
change the future of Turkey.”
In the bookshop hang copies of the attack plans seized from the
perpetrators. And in the display window one can see books spattered with
blood and damaged by fire. Upon our departure, Yilmaz quotes from Heinrich
Heine: “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human
beings.”
Smugglers’ Paths
I meet Mesut and Hamit in the taxi to the Turkish-Iranian border post at
Esendere. They are on a shopping trip. Their shopping list includes digital
cameras, DVD-players, and computer equipment. In Iran, they will buy the
hi-tech goods cheaply, and then bring them into Turkey on horseback over
hidden paths. Smuggling from Iraq is also lucrative, ever since the USA set
up a customs-free zone there. A mule costs 2,000 euros. Entire villages
have pooled their money in order to buy themselves a few horses. In just a
few years, poor peasants have reached prosperity via these hidden paths.
Shortly before the border, the taxi turns off into a farmyard. Here
flourishes the black market. A boy fills the tank with cheap gasoline from
large canisters. The fuel came over the border on horseback earlier, and I
think of the movie “A Time for Drunken Horses”. The Iranian-Kurdish
director Bahman Ghobadi portrayed in this film, which won the “Golden
Camera” prize, the touching fate of orphan children who hire themselves out
to accompany the heavily laden pack animals.
The border gate at Esendere offers contrasts: Pictures of Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk, the founder of Turkey, and of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader
of the Islamic revolution in Iran, hang opposite one another. Yet there
prevails a rather friendly atmosphere between the Turkish border guards and
their Iranian counterparts dressed in green uniforms with gold buttons. Everyone
here profits from the smuggling. Within visual range of the checkpoints men
load sacks full of sugar, tea, and tobacco into a shed. And in the bazaar
in Yuksekova, soldiers pay with cartons of cigarettes.
But it is not only gasoline, sugar, and digital technology that is smuggled
in the Iranian/Iraqi/Turkish border region, but harder goods as well. Amid
the hilly landscape with its poor peasant villages stand ostentatious,
garishly colored villas. They belong to the big-time dealers, grown rich
from the drugs path out of Afghanistan, which leads through Iran into
Turkey. If peace should return to the region and the military presence be
reduced, fear some war profiteers, the lucrative business would suffer. This
consideration may constitute a possible motive for the bombings in
Semdinli.
Checkpoint
From Yuksekova to Sirnak lie less than 300 kilometers. Yet the minibus
takes almost ten hours for this distance. This is due not to the boulders
that have to be moved from the road by excavating equipment, or the
snowdrifts up to three meters high all along the road. We were stopped
eleven times at checkpoints. We fill sorry for the Kurds traveling with us;
they have to wait while our travel documents are copied out longhand each
time. Soldiers searched through our baggage several times. On the walls of
the guardposts hang the photographs of wanted guerrilla fighters and the
Turkish People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front. The large number of young
women among the wanted is noteworthy.
Particularly aggressive are the soldiers at the Serbest barracks, located
in the midst of snow-decked mountains. In the mid-1990s, the guerrillas had
attacked this barracks and killed more than 20 soldiers. Machine-pistol
ready to fire, an officer from Istanbul lectured us that there is no
Kurdish problem in Turkey, but only a terrorist problem.
Village Guards
Over and over again we see collections of great piles of stones along the
road. These had once been villages. Because their inhabitants had been
suspected of supporting the PKK, they were driven out and their houses
leveled to the ground. The driver of the “dolmus” (shared taxi) turns the
cassette-player up – a song against the “Village Guards”. These armed men
were at one time put into the fight against the guerrillas by the large
landowners and the state. In the newly constructed houses with tin roofs
there now live only such Kurdish militia men and their families. Many of
them are themselves people who have been driven out of their previous
villages. First their livelihoods were taken from them, and then the state
bought the desperate men. 400 Liras (around 260 euros) of monthly salary
amount to a fortune in this area.
Army landrovers pass by. Beside soldiers sit also Village Guards with the
traditional Kurdish “pushi”, like the Palestinian scarf. Yet it seems that
there has been a change in thinking among many of the men who have been put
into action against their own people. Two
men who invite us for tea tell us “We are ashamed to be Village Guards.”
They take the money from the state, but for the past six years have not
taken part in any military operations.
Almost half of the approximately 8,000 Village Guards in Hakkari would vote
for the Kurdish Parties DEHAP [Democratic People’s Party] or DTP, according
to Hasan Ciftci, of the local DTP committee in the area.
“Don’t be deceived; on the outside, I’m a Village Guard, but at heart I’m a
Kurd.” The man with the prominent hooked nose, who appeared to have
appeared out of nowhere, wears traditionally green baggy pants. His glance
sweeps to the ridges of the nearby chain of peaks. Up there on the
Turkish/Iraqi border, which runs right through Kurdistan, patrol
“peshmergas” [Kurdish irregular fighters] of the Kurdistan Democratic
Party, which is a co-ruler in occupied Iraq. The Barzani tribe, of the
President of Iraqi Kurdistan, Mas’ud Barzani, numbers among the winners of
the US war against Iraq. The man tells his story. He is a smuggler. In
order not to be driven away from his land, he had to agree to become a
Village Guard.
Now he regularly visits the camp of the PKK that is only a short distance
on the other side of the border. Naturally, the Turkish military is also
aware of the camp. Yet out of fear of the United States, it does not attack
it.
The road runs in places for a few meters in Iraqi territory. At one
checkpoint on the Habur River stands a white station-wagon. In its rear,
explains a soldier, there had been 25 Kalashnikov automatic rifles. A
Kurdish “agha” (feudal landowner) wanted to smuggle these weapons into Iraq
in order to arm his private army. Things went awry because his contact man
in the Gendarmerie was not at the checkpoint. The car was confiscated, but
its owner was set free.
The closer we come to the town of Sirnak, the more massive becomes the
military presence. In the 1990s, there was a liberated zone, controlled by
the guerrillas, here in the Besta region. Yet by using modern night-vision
equipment and driving out the local population, the army succeeded in
retaking the area. But Sirnak still has strategic significance for the
guerrillas. Coming out of their camps in Northern Iraq, the PKK fighters
have to pass through a narrow area from the Cudi Mountains into the Gabar
Mountains.
At a checkpoint in Uludere we see eight-wheeled armored personnel carriers.
They are just coming back from an “operation” against the guerrillas,
explains the commander. “All from Germany” notes the commander proudly, in
terms of the origin of the vehicles. The German government has always
denied that armored vehicles provided by Germany are utilized, contrary to
the agreements, against the Kurdish population.
Poison Gas Attack
In late March, the guerrillas’ main headquarters reported a poison gas
attack by the Turkish military. A PKK camp in the mountains of Mus was
reported to have been attacked. 14 fighters were killed. The funeral
processions for these guerrillas mobilized tens of thousands of mourners in
Diyarbakir and other cities. Police opened fire. Just as in the early
1990s, people are now using the word “serhildan”. This is the Kurdish for
“revolt”.
Translated from German by KurdishMedia.com; originally published in
“Junge Welt”, 15 April 2006. Original German text available at
http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/isku/AKTUELL/2006/15/097.htm
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