The Pasha and the Gypsy

"given to the earth"

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 08:34:00 +0000

"Given to the earth" is a literal translation of the Turkish idiom for being buried ("toprağa verildi"), which is seen often in Turkish (and especially Kurdish) news outlets reporting on the endless war between the PKK and the Turkish government. In these papers and websites, someone is always being "given to the earth," as if the dirt of Anatolia felt an insatiable hunger for human flesh. I made this musical collage in about a week, combining images from a multitude of online sources and Philip Glass's haunting music for "The Hours." W.H. Auden famously wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen," and he was probably right. If this minor attempt at art results in anything, it is likely to be only a transient sense of awe. Turkey's police state remains the same. Formerly it was run by the "security forces" in collusion with statist prosecutors and judges, and the ever-changing "democratically-elected" governments only pretended to rule. Now the "deep state," as it is known, is under new ownership. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AK Party play at being democrats, just as before, but as 2012 begins they have convincingly taken over the machinery of repression. My few readers will know current events in Turkey as well as I. If my brief video collage survives in "the valley of its saying" (Auden again) for a day or two, that will have to suffice.

Middle Earth?

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 08:05:00 +0000

Sine Dağı, Zab Gorge, Hakkari. Photo by Tahir Yilmaz

Sometimes real things do not seem real at all. They appear to be constructed, as if a designer in Hollywood sat down before his computer and assembled them, exaggerating reality for cinematic effect. Such is this photograph, which I found on Google Earth. It shows a section of the Cukurca-Hakkari highway in the gorge of the Greater Zab River, as photographed by Tahir Yilmaz. The bridge is modern, and it has to be, for it carries heavy trucks, tanks, and materiel for the Turkish Army. Its concrete slab is the only jarring note in a mythic landscape. In the 1950s, before this road existed, the English traveler Freya Stark passed through the Zab gorge. She wrote this:

As the day waned, we seemed to be entering a prison between the beetling crags. Their summits led towards what looked like gulfs of a dark conflagration, because of the flame-like soaring outlines of the rock. Satanic was the word. I hunted for it and found it, thinking that no living flame but some stationary fire long petrified and dead, with no alteration within it but decay, can alone picture the immobility of Hell. The sun by day and the moon by night travel here far away, not unseen but sterile, and the stars can get no answer from dead heights. Ruin alone seemed to depend from those tiered buttresses untouched by vegetation. The sides of the great gorges of Euphrates...are polished like the pillars of a temple, but here the masses of the mountains crumble away in pleats of shale and lie at the feet of all their precipices as baseless, shifting, and nameless as sand. [Riding to the Tigris, 1958]

The man who framed this picture was, I believe, as much a poet as Dame Freya herself. I am grateful to both of them for their efforts.

South of Van (II): More from Mahmut Özdemir

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 03:58:00 +0000

In this world, so unhappy in so many ways, beauty is where you find it. In this case I have chosen to find it in the photographs of a schoolteacher from southeast Turkey. From the town of Hizan, in Bitlis province at the west end of Lake Van, Mahmut Özdemir has explored his small corner of the world with a digital camera and posted the results on Panoramio.com. (See my previous post.) The results are remarkable. Mahmut Bey not only knows how to frame a picture, he knows when to take it. The above shot is of Akhtamar Island in Lake Van, with the mountains of Artos Dağı in the southeast, behind the town of Gevaş. This is a standard subject for tourist photos, but I'll include it anyway. The grandeur of the scene is best viewed at Panoramio.

In the mountains behind the southwest shore of Lake Van, Mahmut Bey found this village. Called Nüh, it may once have been Armenian, like so many places hereabouts. (Like the entire nation of Turkey, this is a place with a past.) Now of course it is Kurdish. But even when these lands were part of the ancient Armenian empire, the names by which it was known--Corduene, Gordyene, Kardu--indicate that the Kurds' ancestors were always here. Note the mountain setting, the terraced fields, the poplars grown for their timber, the dwarf oaks clinging to the rocks. This is a village that would be buried in snow for much of the winter, and probably subject to avalanches as well. Its houses look more prosperous than average, and a close-up look confirms the impression:

In the lower left those are electric poles poking up above the fields, and on the rooftops, satellite dishes! The houses appear multi-storied, but some of the space, no doubt, is used for keeping animals in the winter.

Here is another place near Hizan, the valley of Nurs. This is probably more famous than any other place in the area, because it is the birthplace of Said Nursi (1877-1960), one of twentieth-century Turkey's most prominent Muslim theologians and religious leaders. So famous was he, and so powerful his appeal, that after the military coup of 1961, Alpaslan Türkeş, a famous militarist and leader of the fascist right in Turkey, dug up Said Nursi's body and made it disappear completely. The map-makers in Ankara, as usual, have done their best to erase any memory of a person they don't like, and Nurs village is now officially called Kepirli. Of course, this has had no effect whatsoever on the reverence felt for Said Nursi, who preached a brand of Islam that should be open to scientific thought and innovation. In fact, many of the present government that rules Turkey could be called followers of Said Nursi, and his disciple Fethullah Gülen.

This is the village of Nurs itself, and this humble structure is the mosque of "Bediüzzaman" ("Wonder of the Age", his nickname) Said Nursi. I'll close this mini-gallery with three classic shots.

This needs to be enlarged to get the full effect. Anyone who has visited Anatolia knows this as the classic scene it is. And this:

Needs no introduction.

And with this, the final image I'm going to post, we'll close our look at Hizan and environs. For which I say,

Thank you, Mahmut Hoca!

South of Van (I): Diocletian's Castle (?)

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Sun, 29 May 2011 08:45:00 +0000

Gayda Valley, Gerzevil Mt. Photo by Mahmut Ozdemir

To the traveler, Anatolia means mountains. Not literally, of course: in Greek the word means "dawn," or "place of the dawn," much as the Levant, from the French, denotes a place where the sun is "rising." But if you set a person down anywhere in Anatolia and order him to check all the points of the compass, it is unlikely that he can proceed thirty miles in any direction without encountering either a mountain or, at the least, a very high hill. Truly, they define the country.

Unlike the Americas, with the Andes, the Rockies, and the Sierras, Turkey has few distinct and linear mountain ranges. It might be said that the entire country is one big mountain range, extending into the Greek Islands (which are a sunken range) and on into mainland Greece and the Balkans. Even the Taurus, certainly a discrete range between Konya and the Mediterranean, begins in a mass of peaks by the Aegean and disperses into an undifferentiated jumble as it proceeds eastward. But if there are not ranges, there are certainly massifs galore, rugged regions where outside travelers have rarely explored and only the local people (or PKK guerrillas and their pursuers) know their way around.

Such a place lies south of Van, the massive high-altitude lake that is one of the jewels of eastern Turkey. Lake Van (alt. 1648 m., approx. 5400 ft) lies in the middle of mountains and was formed by a mountain--Nemrut Dağı, the extinct volcano whose lava flows at the west end sealed off a valley (aeons ago) and prevented all that water (its max. depth is 451 m., almost 1500 ft.) from joining with the Tigris. South of the lake are more mountains, and it is among those that the photograph above was taken.

I cannot understate my admiration for this picture, a perfect assemblage of light and shadow recorded by Mahmut Özdemir, a school teacher in Hizan, Bitlis. Mahmut Bey knows what he's doing, as anyone can see in the gallery of beautiful pictures posted here. His photographs represent that massive widening of human perspective made possible by digital cameras and the Internet. In previous posts I have displayed photos taken by PKK guerrillas during their wanderings. By posting these the guerrillas have provided a startling look at places that very few people could ever see. The Turkish government, for those who bother to look, is doing the same thing, as are an abundance of new online Turkish newspapers which concentrate on news at the local level. All Turkish provinces, and most sub-provinces, maintain websites, and all of them, like the online newspapers, sport a "Foto Galeri" devoted to local images. Like the PKK's images, much of the content of the government websites is public relations (or propaganda, to those on the other side). But that doesn't mean it is without value. Only by wading through scores of poor and mediocre photographs can you find jewels like the one above.

Mahmut Bey's photo shows Gerzevil Dağı and the Gayda valley, a sparsely populated corner of Bitlis province, south of Lake Van. This unknown valley is as good a place as any to begin the story of lands that few outsiders have traversed.

My story begins with Wigram. In The Cradle of Mankind (1911 and later editions), W.A. Wigram, a priest and emissary of the Church of England, wrote one of the defining accounts of Central Kurdistan and the "Nestorian" (or "Assyrian") Christian mountaineers, who inhabited the high mountains of Hakkari, near what is now the Iraqi-Turkish border. Wigram also wrote about the area south of Lake Van, and in doing so he raised questions that have intrigued me for years. The English travel writer Freya Stark referred to one of them in her book Riding to the Tigris (1958). In The Cradle of Mankind, Wigram refers to the ruins of an ancient fortress, laid out in a perfect square of the Roman type, which lies "somewhat to the west of the Urmi-Van road." Here, in its entirety, is the paragraph:

Somewhat to the west of the Urmi-Van road, and up among the highest of the mountains, stands one interesting memorial of the past. One particular valley runs down from the edge of lake Van to the Tigris; a pass open practically all the year round, between the plain of Mesopotamia and the Armenian plateau. It should be a highroad for commerce; but the Kurds who live in it are too turbulent to allow any traveller to pass that way as a rule, and it is very little known in consequence. It was a passage of strategic importance, however, in the days when Rome held Nisibis as her frontier post on the Persian border; and when Armenia was a buffer state of most uncertain loyalty, between the Roman and Sassanid Persian empires. Hence it was a road to guard; and Roman engineers planted upon it one of the grandest of Roman fortresses, which stands to this day practically unruined. Diocletian, who fortified this strategic frontier, was probably its builder; and it must have been evacuated when Jovian ceded the provinces to Persia some fifty years after his day. Since then it has remained derelict, for anyone to occupy who cared; and so it stands still-one of the grandest Roman relics anywhere.

The "Urmi-Van" road, an ancient caravan track, still is the main highway between Van, in Turkey, and Urmia [Urumiyeh] in Iran. He mentions having visited this ruin in the company of the English military consul in Van and says that the local Kurds had taken it over, building their stone houses in the rubble. Freya Stark, referring to this Roman castle and the nebulous directions given by Wigram, confessed her bewilderment at where it could be.

In 1979, provoked by this mystery (so minor that it might be called a mysterette), I too got into the act. I knew that Freya Stark was still alive, and I knew that she lived in Asolo, in northern Italy. I had no other address for her, but I wrote a letter anyway. Had anyone found this fortress? I asked. Did she have any further clues about where it might be? I included kind words, of course, and the necessary apologies for having intruded. At the time Freya Stark was 86 years old--she would live to 100--and of course I expected no reply at all.

Still, there it is, a sheet of light blue airmail stationery with a printed address, pasted in one of my old notebooks. The date is handwritten: 10/3/79 (10 March 1979). The address says, "Via Canova, Asolo; Treviso. Tel. 52732". Dear Mr Taylor, it begins,

I should be so delighted if you could find that Roman fortress. All I can tell you is that it is not along the track from Julamerk [i.e., Hakkari] to the Tigris along which I rode, & that it was not found by the young Scot who was Captain of HMS Mercury & went hunting about for it in that tangle of the Kurdish hills. It must of course be on one of the tracks that wind among the tangle of valleys that mark the Iraqi-Persian border (unsafe just now I should say).

Who this Scotsman was, I cannot say, but I do know that his "ship", HMS Mercury, was in fact a "stone frigate", a shore station for signals training, and not a floating vessel. Dame Freya is certainly off the mark when she says that the fortress "must of course" be among the valleys that mark the Iraqi-Persian border. Those valleys are not "somewhat to the west" of the road mentioned by Wigram; they are east of it. In fact, as I now believe, the "Roman fortress" mentioned by Wigram is at the western end of Lake Van, very close to Mahmut Özdemir's home.

The critical clue comes from that young military consul mentioned offhandedly by Wigram. After the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, the Ottoman government was forced to accept the presence of British military consuls in its eastern provinces. Their job, ostensibly, was to observe the Turks' adherence to the Treaty of Berlin, especially their treatment of religious minorities (i.e., Armenians). For obvious reasons, the presence of these officers became a great source of humiliation to Turkish nationalists. In fact, these consuls, like other members of the English aristocracy, were in general more sympathetic to the Muslims than they were to the Armenians. Greater scholars than I will know about the political work of these men; I am concerned about the time they took for that most English of hobbies, Oriental exploration.

Two English consuls (that I know of; there may have been others) published excellent articles about their journeys in Kurdistan between 1878 and 1914. The first, Capt. F.R. Maunsell, R.A., read papers at the Royal Geographical Society in 1894 and 1901. His 1901 paper, "Central Kurdistan," is available online through jstor.org. He drew wonderful maps as well, and one of them can be found at the University of California-Berkeley library, where I obtained a photocopy in 1976. [Note: Maunsell called this area "Central" Kurdistan; the subtitle of Wigram's book refers to it as "Eastern" Kurdistan; and modern Kurdish nationalists call it "Northern" Kurdistan. I have no opinion on the matter.]

It is a second consul, however, that W.A. Wigram would have known. Capt. Bertram Dickson, R.A., appears to have succeeded Maunsell as British consul in Van. Like Maunsell, Dickson explored the region and presented a paper about his travels at the Royal Geographical Society. Unlike Maunsell, however, he took photographs, one of which was used in my book Fever and Thirst. His article "Journeys in Kurdistan", published in the Geographical Journal of April 1910, puts to rest once and for all any mystery about Wigram's Roman castle.

Jezire and Mukus were Roman outpost provinces in the time of Diocletian [A.D. 284-305], and it is interesting, while travelling, to pick out traces of their occupation. In the picturesque valley of Khizan [Hizan] is what I believe to be a Roman fortress, in a wonderful state of preservation; this may very possibly have been the capital of the Roman capital of Moxene, lying between the buffer states of Armenia and Mesopotamia.

Jezire (Cizre) is near the Iraqi border, on the Tigris. Mukus, a village near Hizan, is an obvious derivation from Moxene (or Moxoene), a province of ancient Armenia. It retained its ancient name (Müküs) on Turkish maps until the 1980s, when the government map-makers in Ankara Turkified it into its present name, Bahçesaray. Dickson is obviously speaking about the same fortress as Wigram. Rev. Wigram says this about their visit:

The writer once visited the spot, in company with the British military Consul of Van; being attracted both by the interest of the building itself, and also by a story that there was a hoard of ancient documents in some unknown tongue in one of the rooms of the castle. The tale is quite probably true, though the documents may be of any date; but the present owner of the place politely denied all knowledge of them. His guest was a marvel of erudition, he declared, but had been misinformed in this particular; and so he changed the subject to something that interested him more. This was the Consul's Mannlicher rifle, a beautiful tool that always excited envy everywhere, and was invaluable as a topic of conversation. Our host examined it, dandled it, played with it; and finally proposed a fair exchange-that rifle against his newly married wife! A deal which the Englishman rather ungallantly declined.

Both Dickson and Wigram relate that the local Kurds built their homes ("hovels" is the actual word used) in the walls of the castle using its stones. Dickson describes the castle at length (250 yards square, walls originally about 25 feet high and 15-20 feet thick, with towers), leaving no doubt about its reality. The reference to Diocletian makes sense as well, for that Roman emperor spent much of his rule living in Asia Minor (in Nicomedia, now Izmit, near Istanbul), visiting Rome only once. (There is no record, however, that he ever visited this particular fortress in Armenia.) Before the end of the 3rd century, the Roman general Galerius fought a major war with the Persian Empire to regain control of Armenia, their client state, and this remote province would have been near the center of the action. External threats loomed everywhere in Rome's waning centuries. The building of fortifications in the Empire's borderlands was a major preoccupation of Diocletian during his twenty-one years as Emperor, as Freya Stark notes in her Rome on the Euphrates. In eastern Asia Minor, she writes (p. 305),

"[T]he number of troops was more than quadrupled and the accent was placed on forts and garrisons. The diminished legions were multiplied to about sixty, and new and smaller ones with effectives of one thousand men were created. Early in the fourth century we find them still based on Melitene [Malatya] and Satala [Gümüşhane], on Trebizond [Trabzon] for the Black Sea convoys, and in Armenia. [my emphases]

Obviously Dickson and Wigram are on the right track. If it looked like a Roman fortress, and was laid out like a Roman fortress, it probably was a Roman fortress. Hizan is not, strictly speaking, along an easy, direct route to the Bohtan Su, the river Centrites of ancient times, which would quickly take the traveler to the Tigris and Mesopotamia. Still, it possessed one advantage for an army garrison in those remote valleys: it provided sustenance.

This, in another Mahmut Özdemir photo, is Hizan (the Gayda valley) today. It is the kind of place where grain could grow, and where you could quarter a sizable garrison. It only remains to show another photograph, not by Mahmut Özdemir but by Jelle Verheij, a Dutch scholar and historian who has a knack for going to exactly the places that I want to go. Here is his photo of what I believe to be Wigram and Dickson's Roman fortress:

This is Eski (Old) Hizan, and the place, according to Jelle Verheij, is called Kayalar (lit., Rocks) by the locals. The tower is there, as the English travelers described, as are the Kurds' houses built among the ruins. I can find no other photos that give a sense of the fortress's size. Still, it seems obvious that this is Wigram's Roman castle, wondered about by Freya Stark and now found through the invention of digital cameras and the Internet.

In my next post I will explore further this area south of Lake Van, beginning with the Roman general Lucullus and possibly earlier, with a mountain-top shrine that so far is undocumented.

Addendum. Pursuant to comments, please note: For further information, see the Wikipedia article about Roman concrete: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete. In the article it specifically mentions that the concrete was seldom left bare and always had a facing on it. Among the facings mentioned was Roman brick set in a herringbone pattern. Now look at Jelle Verheij's photo again. Are those stones? Or are they Roman bricks that have eroded into irregular shapes? Either way it seems likely that this is Roman concrete construction. Among other things, how else would it have lasted so long? Further comments welcome.

A Vacancy in the Kurdosphere

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:10:00 +0000

Cengiz Candar in Yuksekova, SE Turkey

As mountain snows melt and war returns to the east of Turkey, one person is missing from the ranks of those who describe events, analyze trends, and translate important documents of that never-ending conflict. Mizgin Yilmaz, the vehemently pro-PKK proprietress of Rasti, has not posted a word in her domain since February 15 of this year. No one knows where she has gone, or why. For that matter, no one ever knew who she really was, or where she lived. But one thing is certain: this is unusual behavior in one who has usually posted at least 3-4 times a week.

I have read Mizgin's blog regularly since I first came upon it several years back. It really is necessary reading. (Even the Turkish General Staff logs on regularly.) No one else among pro-Kurdish bloggers is able to summon her range of offbeat sources and translate them so deftly into English. Thanks to her, I was able to locate the website of the PKK and copy from it photographs which now have been passed along to other sites on the Net. Thanks to her, I think I now have a much better grasp of the Turkish reality. Of course, she is not "fair and balanced." No one would ever mistake Mizgin the Blogger for a warm, cuddly person. I, who am anything but a radical leftist--Hey, I just want people to be happy! ;)--have sometimes been appalled by what seems almost a bloodthirstiness in her writing, as if all the enemies in her world deserved to be liquidated immediately. To Mizgin, Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey is Katil Erdogan, Murderer Erdogan; any website with a positive word to say about Turkey's government is "pro-terrorist." But seldom if ever have I thought that I wasted my time reading her blog.

Now Rasti is vacant, a space on the web with a big question mark over it. In her last post of February 15, Mizgin translated a column by Cengiz Candar, in Radikal, in which the author, a prominent journalist and good guy of long standing among Turkey's liberals, analyzed the situation in Turkey's Southeast and saw clearly that the promises of 2009 were rapidly turning to dust. Now his fears have become real. The old cycle of attack and revenge has begun anew. Turkey's government, concentrating on a long-overdue reform of Turkey's Constitution, has been unable or unwilling to deliver on its promise of democracy for the Kurds. Obviously, Mizgin wrote, with an ominous link to the website of the PKK, "there is only one path left."

Meaning what? We don't know. But something about this prickly, ferocious woman has earned our affection. So while the wishes for her safety and well-being accumulate in her Comments, I will remember her by re-posting her translation of Cengiz Candar's article in Radikal. Read it, and know reality.

Oppression and Disappointment in the Southeast
by Cengiz Candar
Translated by Mizgin Yilmaz

If you make your way to the Southeast often--and not only talk to officials but also particularly have a relationship with the street--if you open up your heart and listen to the region's people, there is a result that you can easily arrive at: the ruling party's regional parliamentarians are not representing the region in Ankara but are representing Ankara and their party in the region.

I've stated this on every occasion when I met with important people in the state and in the government. The AK Party's Southeastern parliamentarians are not representing their regions; they do not convey the pulse of the Southeast to Ankara. Whenever they go to their election districts, they represent Ankara and their party.

Therefore, PM Erdogan's statement, "There are 75 Kurdish parliamentarians in my party," or the AK Party's receiving the greatest amount of votes in the region doesn't mean anything.

Have you ever heard these 75 "Kurdish" parliamentarians open their mouths to say anything about the Kurdish question? Have you ever heard them mention the unbearable oppression in the region in Ankara in front of the public?

A couple of days ago, Diyarbakır's Special Heavy Penalty Court convicted a fifteen-year-old girl called Berivan for "throwing stones at police" in addition to "cheering party slogans" during the events that took place on 9 October in Batman. She was convicted to 13.5 years at the first hearing. Yes, at the very first hearing.

Since she was a minor, the court showed mercy and reduced its punishment to seven years and nine months! At the event [during the protest in Batman], Berivan's face was covered with a scarf but police were determined that the girl with the scarf was Berivan. That girl with the scarf may very well be Berivan; but while there is more solid and concrete evidence for the generals who gathered to overthrow the government, which is a crime against the state, and while they've been released pending trial, have you ever seen any Southeastern AKP parliamentarian object to Berivan's conviction of 13.5 years for stoning police and cheering party slogans?

Do you know that there are over 1,000 children in prison in the Southeast?

In a condition where belief in justice is damaged so deeply, can we talk about the "Democratic Initiative" or the "National Unity and Brotherhood Project"?

In the Southeast there is no justice but oppression!

The other day, one of the members of AKP's executive council told me that in the council meeting PM Erdoğan was informed that people in the Southeast are very happy and very excited about the ongoing events [the "democratic" initiative]. Based on the PM's sources, everything is going well in the Southeast. Whereas the contrary is the case and the "political decision maker" [Erdoğan--i.e. Turkey's "decider guy"] is being deceived or prefers being deceived. Again, another piece of information I received from a similar source: AK Party's executive council is expecting very important incidents about Kandil around Newroz. If there are AKP members that believe this, I'm curious about what planet they're living on. Newroz is only one and a half months away; is there any indicator that thousands of armed people from Kandil will come and surrender?

Well, is there any little indication of a general amnesty to come out for the ones at Kandil? There are only two possibilities left so far. 1) America and Iraqi Kurds will have a joint military operation and finish PKK's military existence--for those who believe this, they are living in a dream. 2) The ones at Kandil disappear unexpectedly.

There are no such situations and there isn't the slightest sign that these will happen.

Meaning, within one and a half months, related to Kandil, it is impossible for any incident to happen, for PKK to disarm. A "climate" for such a thing has been removed in Turkey anyway. In the region [Southeast], in addition to 1,000 children, more than 1,000 people in political groups, including elected mayors, have been arrested.

The PKK members who came from Kandil three months ago are free; mayors have been handcuffed and arrested for having connections with PKK.

There are two ways to make the armed cadres give up on armed struggle:

1. Regarding Kurdish identity, you have to take such unilateral democratic steps that will remove the armed group's masses of supportö and the support will completely be removed. There won't be support of the masses for armed forces.

2. Open up ways for armed groups to become involved with peaceful [without arms] politics.

Until now, regarding the first, there are positive but insufficient steps. Regarding the second, just the contrary is being done. Elected people, who are involved with peaceful politics, are jailed. It is a politics of "to the ones in the cities calling 'go to the mountains'; meanwhile, to the ones in the mountains, 'stay there'" is being made.

The "negative atmosphere" and the "disappointment" in the region were reflected to Ankara as "information to the state in the governors' meeting". The governors in the East and Southeast told Interior Minister Beşir Atalay that, "initially, the democratic initiative raised expectation and excitement to their peaks in the region. Citizens became very hopeful. When the package ["democratic" initiative's packages] was presented, a serious disappointment took place. The citizens are expecting more concrete steps."

They are right.

For months, we have been saying and writing this. I forgot exactly how many articles I wrote specifically about this issue and specifically in this way. The governors who work in the region mentioned that our people's expectation became lively in March of last year due to Abdullah Gül's statement of "soon there will be good things on the Kurdish question" and with the initiative, their expectation is at its peak.

President Gül said those words to three journalists--of whom I was one--in the plane on the way to Tehran. Since that day, I am among those who've been keeping an eye on the pulse of the region. I spent a remarkable amount of the summer months in the Mardin, Van, Doğubeyazıt, and Kızıltepe regions. On 1 August [2009], I was among the attendees for the Kurdish Workshop. One month later, in September, I traveled 1,000 kilometers between Diyarbakır and Şemdinli.

Today's atmosphere is 180 degrees different from the atmosphere of those days.

It is as much a deep disappointment and negative atmosphere [now] as it was equally positive in those days.

How in the world will "national unity and brotherhood " come about without including our Kurdish citizens who live in the Southeast, who want to join with great enthusiasm and an expectation of an optimistic future?

How will a "national unity and brotherhood" will come about from a region where 1,000 children are currently living lives of misery in prisons?

The Interior Ministry said "İnşallah, soon good things are going to happen" to the governors and wanted them to wait for a while. I wish this problem could be solved with "İnşallahs" and empty promises. This is not a kind of problem that can be solved with "İnşallahs" and "Maşallahs".

And god forbid the potential of the disappointment is so great as to overwhelm the struggle against the junta members in Ankara and Istanbul, and to overwhelm Turkey's successful foreign politics that present Turkey as a "rising regional power".

PM Erdoğan needs to open up his eyes to the ongoing things in the Southeast and, without any delay, he must change track.

On the Origins of 'Istanbul'

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 01:46:00 +0000

Author’s note: The following article is contradicted by a Wikipedia article on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Istanbul. All who read my article should see that one as well. It seems well researched and makes sense, and it may very well be the more correct of the two. But I like my own arguments.
Warning: any comments on this subject that promote hatred or nationalism will be instantly rejected.

Why did Constantinople get the works?
Nobody knows but the Turks.

--1950s novelty tune

Actually, it's quite easy to figure out why the Turks changed Constantinople's official name in the 1930s. The old one was obsolete. No one had called the city by those five (actually six) syllables for centuries, at least not in ordinary speech. (In Greek newspapers, where they haven't yet recovered from 1453, it is still resolutely 'Konstantinopolis.') Stamboul, it was called, or Stambul in other spellings. The Turks heard the m as an n, which made a bit of difference in the spelling, and they added an i at the beginning: other than this, they were simply making official what had been common parlance for centuries. Still, there is confusion. Why Istanbul? It looks so different from Constantinople. Where did it come from? Even a proper English tome like the John Murray Guide to Turkey, 1853 edition, noted this question. One answer, they reported, derived from the city's Greek residents. It came, they said, from 'eis ton polis,' Greek for 'it is the city,' a reference to the exalted place which Constantinople has long held in the Greek imagination. In many places, including the Wikipedia article cited, this explanation for Istanbul's origin survives to this day.

In the Wikipedia article, the conclusion is only slightly expanded. Istanbul, the author says, comes not only from ‘eis ton polis,’ but from ‘stin polis,’ meaning ‘to the city,’ supposedly a common reference which became enshrined as its name. But this seems unsatisfactory to me. It raises other questions, which make it necessary to go back to the beginning and consider the whole phenomenon of cities and their nicknames.

One thing should be obvious: over time all long names get whittled down to one or two syllables. English-speakers, especially Americans, know this. A small example, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, is simply 'Hoptown' to people to live down there. Elsewhere Philadelphia is Philly; Los Angles is LA; San Francisco (to outsiders, at least) is Frisco. The compression works in other ways too: New York is often 'Nyawk,' almost a monosyllable, to Manhattan doormen; Milwaukee is 'Mwaukee,' with a beginning consonant that is really a fused m and w; and New Orleans is 'Nawlins.' English-speakers abroad have done the same thing, with Kuala Lumpur becoming 'KL' and Dar-es-Salaam just plain 'Dar.' Somehow the lovely Italian word Livorno became 'Leghorn,' a really boring breed of chicken. Even Constantinople, we must remember, long and unwieldy as it is, is still an Anglicized abbreviation of the Greek Konstantinopolis.

The same thing has happened in Turkey. Turkish, like English, tends toward short words. (The long words one sees in Turkish prose are root words adorned with the suffixes that give the language its meaning.) And the old names are often pared down, like those in English. Pick up a map of Turkey and look. Nicaea is now Iznik; Hadrianopolis is Edirne; Phocaea is Foca; Sardis is Sart; Trebizond is Trabzon; Heraklion is Eregli; Caesarea is Kayseri; Sebastaeum is Sivas; Iconium is Konya. And then there is Niksar. This little town in Tokat province, originally called Neocaesarea, has shrunk from six syllables to two. [Remember that the modern English pronunciation of Caesar is quite different from the original Latin, which would more closely resemble the German 'kaiser' or the modern Turkish Kayseri; thus the k in Niksar.]

So, one might ask, if the Turks can get Niksar out of six-syllabled Neocaesarea, why can't we get Istanbul out of Konstantinopolis? (Well, there's that matter of the 'i' at the beginning, but we'll get to that later.) Still, skeptics must admit that kon-STAN-ti-no-POL-is (it actually sounds rather nice, spoken with an Greco-Italian swing) has the two requisite syllables in it to produce, with a bit of softening, the word Stamboul. In the 4th century, when Constantine so generously gave his name to Byzantium, which he had previously dubbed New Rome, it’s doubtful that the common people paid any attention. As official legends grew, however, about Constantine and his conversion to Christianity (In Hoc Signo Vinces, and all that), and with the increasing Christianization of the Roman Empire, the succeeding centuries would have seen the new name take hold. No name like this six-syllable monster, however, could have remained intact for very long. Remember, communications at that time were primarily oral. Only a minority could read and write. There were no mass media, no print, television, or Internet, to establish a word like Konstantinopolis and preserve it, the way words like Philadelphia are now kept intact by constant repetition in news datelines and over the air. Ordinary people, communicating with each other through speech, would have taken over very quickly from the emperor Constantine and his ego. The full name could have yielded, in succession, con-stant-polis, stant-polis, stan-poli, and stamboul; or, just as likely, it could have shortened itself to stamboul in a year or less. Or it could have become mixed up with the common expression, ‘stin poli,’ as the author of the Wikipedia article would have it. We simply don’t know.

But if Konstantinopolis contains the seed-syllables of Stamboul, -stan- and –pol-, and today’s Turkish cities show a consistent pattern of abbreviation from older names, why then are we attributing the origin of Istanbul to phrases like “it is the city” and “to the city”? It doesn’t convince me. I for one believe that Istanbul’s name is probably derived from Constantinople, pure and simple, the same theory that the Wikipedia author says is now “obsolete.”

But a problem remains: the ‘i’ at the beginning of Istanbul. It is out of place, an extra syllable, and there is no precedent for it in Konstantinopolis. But this is easily explained. The objection ignores a fact about the Turkish language: Turkish abhors consonant combinations (e.g., st-, sp-, sk-, kr-) at the beginning and end of words. For example, my own dictionary, the Langenscheidt New Standard Dictionary: Turkish (2006), contains no Turkish words beginning with sp- that are not foreign loan-words. Look at these: spam, spekulasyon (speculation), spekulatif (speculative), sperma (sperm), spesiyal (special), spiker (speaker), spiral (spiral), and several words derived from spor (sport, sports). This last is a very common word in today’s football-mad Turkey, being appended to the names of cities all over the country (Bursaspor, etc.) to name their clubs. And many Turks, try as they will, cannot quite manage a consonant combination that is alien to their native tongue. S-por, they pronounce it, as if an extra vowel had been slipped in, much like the English word support, and it is often spelled that way (sipor, with the Turkish dotless I). The same pattern extends to st- words (stad, standart, statuko [status quo], steysin [station], striptiz [guess!]), pr- words (pratik, prenses, prifiks [prix fixe], profesyonel), and kr- words (krem, kredi, krater, kritik).

When possible, Turkish-speakers try to get around these consonants. By adding an extra vowel at the beginning of some foreign loan-words, Turkish-speakers get a running start, as it were, to get into a word. Examples of this abound, beginning in the city of Istanbul itself. Directly across the Bosphorus, on the Asian shore of Istanbul, lies the former village of Scutari. (Please, do not pronounce it ‘scootery,’ as if the place abounded in Vespa dealers.) Scutari is where Florence Nightingale established her hospital during the Crimean War, but now it is called Uskudar, with the final i dropped and an extra vowel added at the beginning. The same thing happens in Macedonia, where Skopje is called Uskub by the Turks, and a Slav is Islav. In Europe the list goes on: Scotland (Iskocya); Sweden (Isvec); Switzerland (Isvicre); and Scandinavia (Iskandinav). In Turkey the city of Smyrna (Smirni) has become Izmir; the southwestern town of Sparta is now Isparta; and the Greek island of Kos, called Stanchio in Middle Ages, is called Istankoy. The pattern extends to Greek loan-words that are not place-names, like spasm (ispasmoz), spinach (ispanak), and sphinx (isfenks), as well.

One last thing. “Ockham’s razor,” the rule of thumb introduced in the Middle Ages by the logician William of Ockham, states that “entities should not be multiplied beyond what is necessary,” and thus, “the simplest solution is usually the best.” The simple fact is this: when cities are nicknamed, the components of those nicknames come from the city’s original name. This is the simplest way to look at the shortening of a city’s name. Thus, to me it makes no sense to come up with an alternate theory for the naming of a great city like Istanbul, when a simpler theory is readily found and logically defensible. So, Istanbul is derived from Konstantinopolis. Why not?

The Baby in the Iron Womb (continued)

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:24:00 +0000

A sign of reality?

This isn't a good time for an American to evaluate the politics of another country. We sit here with all our faults exposed: lunatic "tea-baggers" on parade; our economy trillions in debt; our politicians determined to prove their spinelessness or their stupidity, or both. But in Turkey, what a year 2009 has been: a year of hope and despair; of war and cease-fire; of initiative and inertia. It began in the spring with a political campaign, and democracy's most common ploy: an attempt to buy votes. The election: a nationwide poll for local officials. Across the southeast, and especially in the province of Dersim (Tunceli), Turkey's ruling AK Party called up their bankers, loaded up the trucks, and started delivering prizes to local voters. There is a great tradition of this sort of thing in western democracies. In England it used to be free ale. In 19th century America, it was free whiskey and cider. More recently, among big-city political machines, hams or turkeys went out by the thousands. In the southeast this spring it was refrigerators.

For the AKP, however, it didn't work out. The Kurds took the refrigerators from the AKP and voted for the other party, the DTP, or Democratic Society Party, which won big victories in local elections across the Kurdish southeast. The Turkish state responded in the usual way: they started arresting officials of the DTP. The charge: "supporting terrorism." This is what all DTP members are accused of: they won't denounce the PKK and its guerrillas as a "terrorist" organization; therefore, they are "supporting terrorism." Never mind that the PKK is a bunch of armed people organized in military units, dressed in uniforms, attacking another bunch of armed people in military units and also dressed in uniforms. The Turks insist that this makes them "terrorists." Never mind that the civilian politicians of the DTP all know families who have lost a child fighting in this war, or know people who have been driven out of their villages by the Turkish Army, or know people who are either in the PKK or have been involved with them: they must, in spite of this, denounce practically everyone they know as a "terrorist."

By May, Barack Obama had come and gone, repeating the usual State Department-Pentagon boilerplate about Turkey's "vibrant democracy" and fight against "terrorism." Abdullah Gul, President of Turkey, declared in May that, “Whether you call it a terror problem, a southeastern Anatolia problem or a Kurdish problem, this is the first question for Turkey. It has to be solved.” The AKP government, backed by business interests and hungry for its pending EU application to be approved, began to make noises about sincerely wishing to improve the lives of its Kurdish citizens, openly admitting that things had to change. In June, however, appearing at a news conference in Washington, D.C., the Turkish Armed Forces Chief of Staff stated quite plainly that his forces had no intention of making peace, and would fight on until the last terrorist was killed.

Nevertheless, by July and August, Prime Minister Erdogan and his associates seemed bent upon doing the impossible: bringing democracy to Turkey. They were calling their program, still undefined, as the "Kurdish opening." More Kurdish broadcasting hours; the restoration of Kurdish names for villages and towns; endless optimistic discussions in the news media: everything, it seemed, was going the right way, and with the PKK abiding by a unilateral cease-fire, the war seemed abated.

Except it wasn't. Low-grade conflicts continued, and the Turkish Army never stopped shelling across the border toward PKK positions in northern Iraq. Human rights monitors reported the same patterns of harassment and abuse among the populace. By the end of August the nationalist opposition was speaking out, saying that the nation was "one" and always would be, and Gen. Ilker Basbug, the Chief of General Staff, repeated that he had no intention of making peace with anyone.

In October, joy erupted. At the directive of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned PKK leader, a group of PKK fighters came down from the mountains and crossed through the Khabur border gate between Iraq and Turkey. Turkish officials allowed them entry and did not arrest them, and they proceeded through Cizre and on to Diyarbakir. What followed were surely the most extraordinary days in the history of Turkey's Kurds. Masses of people flooded the roads and streets in the PKK group's path, waving banners and shouting with happiness. Peace truly seemed possible.

But this was Turkey, and nationalist Turks were offended. The celebration was "unseemly." The Army, nationalist politicians, and parents of dead Turkish soldiers did not approve. The Democratic Society Party (DTP) was accused of orchestrating the spectacle. Which of course they did. And why shouldn't they? This was the first time in thirty years that young PKK fighters had come back to their families in anything but coffins. How could the Kurds of the southeast NOT celebrate this occasion? They would have to be made of stone not to feel the importance of these events. Anyone who goes to the website of Firat (Euphrates) News, http://firatnews.com, and enters into its Search (Arama) window the word "taziye," can see why. There they are, hits by the hundreds. Taziye means "condolence," and it refers to the "condolence tents" which are erected for grieving families to receive visitors after (a) their son or daughter has been killed fighting with the PKK, (b) their child has been killed by a mine or a stray mortar shell, or (c) their husband or child has been found murdered. At Firat News page after page of "taziye" hits roll by, and anyone with the decency to look will see why the Kurds of Turkey's southeast would feel justified in displaying their happiness at seeing their children come back alive.

But it was the opening needed by Turkish nationalists. For years they had been waiting for first the AKP, and then the DTP, to be closed by the Constitutional Court. In 2008 the AKP had barely escaped closure, and after their reprieve the Erdogan government had a chance to change the laws that have made Turkey, in the common phrase, "a graveyard of political parties." Not only did they not do so, they did not try. In the aftermath of the PKK return celebrations, the court went ahead with the case against the DTP.

In the meantime, in the absence of any sign of peaceful intent from the Turkish Army, and after losing a score of their guerrillas to air, artillery, and ground attacks from the Turks, the PKK officially abandoned their cease-fire. Still, they did not pursue an active campaign of aggressive attacks. That ended in early December, when a group of PKK fighters, acting on their own initiative, ambushed a Turkish patrol in the province of Tokat in central Anatolia, alarmingly close to Ankara. Nationalist anger erupted, and within days the results came down in the case against the DTP.

The conclusion was foregone. The DTP was closed, and its leaders were barred from participating in politics for five years. All twenty of the DTP's members in Parliament resigned their posts in protest. And the cities of the southeast have exploded in what one Kurdish newspaper called "waves and waves" of riots, protests, and violence.

But it's a humble shepherd who I find, thanks to a friend, is the quintessence of all this absurdity. Abdullah Isnac (is-notch) must be the lowest-ranking municipal employee ever to get in trouble for a political demonstration. The Taraf newspaper uses the word "coban" to describe him, a word which in English, at least, has rather positive connotations. Really, it means that he looks after animals. In this case, it is stray cows that have wandered away from their owners and are blocking the streets of Sirnak, that town behind the Cudi mountain whose name means "Noah City" (shehr-nakh), after the landing-place of the Ark. In the indictment of the DTP, he is identified as a "politican" and is barred from politics for five years. So perhaps this is the way 2009 ends for Turkey, with the story of a poor shepherd, the lowliest of city employees in the southeastern town of Sirnak, a man whose job it is to round up stray cows from the city streets and return them to their owners, a man who despite his insignificance is mentioned by name in the most important judicial decision of the year and forced to "keep out of politics" for the next five years. Thus has history repeated itself, and ended again in farce.

Has Turkey totally regressed on the Kurdish question? No one can say that. The AK government says that they will stick by their program, and maybe they will. The Kurds most definitely are not going back to where they were. Near Diyarbakir, road signs (see above) point to villages whose Kurdish names are reborn. In the same city, a little girl has opened a home school to teach her classmates how to read and write Kurdish. In the Turkish parliament, a Kurdish politician has risen to describe, in candid terms, the genocide of 1915 against the Armenians. Despite police repression, people have long since ceased to be afraid of expressing their opinions or their identity. In the mountains, the PKK claims that 800 new recruits have graduated from their training camps in the past nine months. In Turkey, no one is backing off.

News from Hypocristan

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 08:27:00 +0000

As we were saying...

What is there to think about stories like the one below? Ahmet Davutoglu, the Foreign Minister of Turkey, stands up before a microphone and says something so totally, so stupidly, so demonstrably untrue that one can only gape and wonder if he will be Oscar-nominated as Best Actor in a Supporting Role.

Here's the background. A Turkish dramatic series presented on a state-run television channel shows Israeli troops deliberately shooting at and killing Palestinian children. Israel cries foul. Ahmet Bey says, "But Turkey does not censor." This of course is false. A quick look at the comments following the linked article will show the American reader just a few of the many media outlets that have been banned by the Turkish authorities, from YouTube to the works of Richard Dawkins. But the real question is, Why does the Turkish government continue to act this way? Why do they blandly tell these lies? Why do they promote their police state to the world as a "vibrant democracy"? Having just gone through the Bush II Administration, and faced with the ever-burgeoning popularity of such beings as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, Americans are in no position to give themselves a pass on this. (Think of how many times George W. Bush claimed he didn't say something that he was quite plainly videotaped saying.) But there's something so Turkish about the blandness with which Turkish government officials put out these statements about their own uprightness and morality. Contrast this with the American style. Tad Friend, writing about Hollywood in 12 October 2009 edition of The New Yorker, says,

"Hollywood's leaders work with the understanding that facts are not fixed pillars but trial balloons that you inflate with the gas of vehement assertion."

The gas of vehement assertion. How I wish that I had written that phrase. How I wish that I could buy some of that and put it in my car. It could run forever.

Davutoğlu: Turkey is not a country that censors

ISTANBUL – Daily News with wires Friday, October 16, 2009

Foreign Minster Ahmet Davutoğlu on Friday responded to complaints from Israel about the depiction of Israeli armed forces in a Turkish television series on a state-run channel. “There is no censorship in Turkey,” Davutoğlu said in a press conference Friday before he departed for Bosnia, according to broadcaster CNNTürk. “TRT [Turkish Radio and Television Corporation] is an autonomous institution. The television series’ producers are also an independent company. It is not in the ministry’s mandate to advise them.”

He criticized Israel as the actual source of tension, referring to the country’s attack on Gaza last year. “Turkey has been working toward creating peace in the region, and it was Israel that put our chances of creating peace at risk by attacking Gaza.” He cited women and children suffering the most from the incidents. He recalled that Turkey was mediating between Israel and Syria last year, but said, “We will not be silent about what happened in Gaza,” according to the Anatolia news agency. The Israeli ambassador to Turkey was expected to visit the Foreign Ministry later Friday to express his government’s concerns about the television series.

The final stroke, the smack to the forehead, comes in the Comment form at the end of the article. Note:

"Submitted comments must be approved by Daily News staff to ensure they are in accordance with Turkish law. Comments that violate Turkish law will not be published."

And Orwell laughs again.

Meetings in Autumn

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 07:42:00 +0000

Lalish circa 1850.

The headlines tell the tale: Armenia and Turkey, at last, have made a kind of peace. At a meeting in Zurich on 10 October 2009, protocols were signed which, if approved by each country’s parliament, will lead to a normalization of relations. After a long flirtation chaperoned by the Swiss, a history-making visit by Turkey’s President to a football match in Yerevan, and a ceremony that stalled for over three hours at the last minute, it took the combined ministers and ministrations of France, Switzerland, Germany, NATO, Russia, the EU, and the US (kudos esp. to Hillary Clinton), all of them smiling through clenched teeth and, no doubt, rolling their eyes, to hammer together this union between a rusty nail and an ironwood plank. Next step: a football match in Turkey, to be attended by Serge Sarkisian, President of Armenia. If, as seems likely, the Turkish police can keep order at the match (my guess: one out of every three attendees will be a plainclothes officer), expect a ponderous, lurching march thereafter toward the goal of rapprochement. Sworn enemies on both sides will continue to make trouble (a recent tour by Sarkisian of Armenian settlements in Europe, the US, and Russia was accompanied by cries of “Traitor!”); still, observers are cautiously optimistic.

Meanwhile, another newspaper article reminds us of a far less famous event. As I write this, the Yezidis’ Feast of the Assembly is nearing its climax. Every October 6-12, when not kept away by war and violence, Yezidis from around the world make their annual pilgrimage to Lalish, a.k.a. Sheikh Adi, a tiny complex of temples, shrines, and tombs in the hills north of Mosul. From F&T:

The classic description of Sheikh Adi comes from Henry Layard, who in the fall of 1846 took time off from his dig at Nineveh to attend the Feast of the Assembly, the annual gathering of the Yezidi clans. Layard, himself not a clergyman and with no official need to pass judgment on “devil-worshippers,” simply recorded what he saw: a festival abundant with beauty and devoid of debauchery, with oil lamps sparkling among the olive groves by night; dancing maidens; the music of flutes and tambourines and the chanting of priests; crowds of white-robed Yezidis; giggling maidens with their black hair plaited in glass beads and gold.

And who are the Yezidis? Definitely not “devil-worshippers,” as they have been labeled for centuries. Those who know about Turkey and Kurdistan, especially those who have read a certain book by me, will need no introduction. The Yezidis speak Kurdish, and yet, after years of strife with their Kurdish neighbors, they do not really consider themselves Kurds. In recent years their villages have suffered greatly from terrorist truck bombs, probably set by Sunni Arab jihadists, and they still live in fear. But they too, have shown their own violent side, as when two years ago a Yezidi girl was caught on video being stoned to death by her Yezidi relatives. (Her crime? Wearing jeans, being seen with a Sunni Arab boy.) In recent decades much more has been learned about their religion, a mixture of angel worship, Zoroastrianism, and other elements. Still, no one can really say where their religion comes from, and as to the origin of their name, whether Yezidi, Ezidi, and Yazidi, the multiplicity of theories leads one to believe that, in all likelihood, none of them are correct.

A State of Injustice

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:54:00 +0000

The following article was written by Mizgin Yilmaz, proprietor of Rasti. Mizgin virtually always writes in a state of high dudgeon, and she is virtually always justified in doing so. Such is the case this time. Note: be sure to check out the links she has posted. They are highly instructive. Again, this is a state which expects to be part of the European Union.

[TSK is the Turkish Armed Forces. OHAL refers to the emergency martial-law regime in the Kurdish southeast of Turkey.]

Cross-posted at The Pasha and The Gypsy and Progressive Historians.

THE STATE OF INJUSTICE

"A kingdom founded on injustice never lasts."
~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca.

Picture this: A seventeen-year-old guy picks up his seventeen-year-old girlfriend after school and takes her to his family's large home. The guy kills the girl, decapitates her with a saw and chops up her body, stuffs the body parts into a suitcase and guitar case, gets a driver to take him to a dumpster on the other side of town and disposes of the body.

The guy's father is picked up by the police on charges of abetting the crime and the mother flees the country.

Six months after the murder, the guy turns himself in to the police.

What do you think should happen to a guy like this? Would it make any difference if you knew that the murderer was a member of one of the richest families in the country?

If this story plays out in Turkey, which it did, the murderer will be charged in juvenile court--because he's only seventeen--instead of being tried as an adult.

More on the murder at Zaman and another at Bianet. Note that the first of those articles claims the father of the murdered girl is quoted as thanking the police and government for helping to capture the murderer. However, that's not at all the same guy who was on NTV on the day of the surrender, yelling to know what kind of deal had been made between the government and the very rich kid's family.

On the other hand, if you're a ten-year-old kid growing up in another part of the country, in a family that was probably forcibly displaced from their home back in the 1990s, and you're a Kurd, you're going to get very different treatment from the state:

In Adana alone, some 155 children are facing trial, 67 have been convicted and five have begun to serve their sentences, says Ethem Acikalin, head of the local branch of Turkey’s Human Rights Association. All were charged under article 220/6 of the penal code, which criminalises “acting on behalf of a terrorist organisation”. The cases are tried in adult courts.

Or then there was Cizre:

If Turkish prosecutors have their way, Yilmaz, a soft-spoken 16-year-old with a teenager’s pimply face, could spend up to seven years in jail for having joined a demonstration early last year in the town of Cizre, in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast.

Yilmaz (the name has been changed to protect his identity) has already spent 13 months in jail awaiting trial, although he was recently let out on bail. Although he joined a demonstration that took place after the funeral of a young boy who had been run over by a police armored vehicle during an earlier protest, prosecutors say the event was organized by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and are charging the boy with supporting a terrorist organization.

"In each appearance in court, we were telling the prosecutors that we are children, that they should let us go back to our lives," says Yilmaz.

Yilmaz is one of hundreds of minors, some as young as 13, who have been arrested and jailed in Turkey over the last few years under strict new anti-terrorism laws that allow for juveniles to be tried as adults. Some have even been accused of "committing crimes in the name of a terrorist organization" for participating in demonstrations that prosecutors charge have been organized the PKK.

If you're the police and you torture a Kurdish kid in broad daylight, in front of media cameras, then have no fear! Your case will be dropped.

Then there are the activities of the ironically-named "Children's Day" in Hakkari.

Or, as happened several days ago, if you're a fourteen-year-old Kurdish girl gathering feed for her sheep, you can just be blown to bits by TSK mortar fire. At least Ceylan's mother was able to pick
up the pieces of her daughter that were left so that they could be buried. The cover-up is already ongoing because no prosecutor arrived at the scene of the crime and he cites "security zone" (i.e. OHAL) as the reason for helping TSK to cover up its murder of this Kurdish child.

Kevin Costner and the Shallow State

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:23:00 +0000

(Not Kevin Costner)*

I almost called this "Dances With Wolf-men," a reference not only to a famous movie but to the Turkish nationalists' favorite wild beast. My regular readers (all six of them) would have immediately caught on, but I feared that newcomers might not get it. And so I went instead with the above title, an even more obscure reference, a play on a certain politician's first name. In any case, here's the news: Kevin Costner seems to have endorsed the Turkish government's Kurdish "move," and in doing so has ruffled the fur of the nationalists.

No one seems to know why Costner did it. I myself learned long ago (in 1966, to be exact) never, EVER, even to hint in a public place that you might know something about Turkish politics. (But that's another story.) Costner didn't know this. He and his band (don't ask me to remember their name) played a gig in Istanbul a couple of years ago, and as a result he was booked this year to do an ad campaign for Turkish Airlines. Now he was asked to say that he endorses the current government's Kurdish "move" (we still don't know what it is, really) because he knows the Turkish Government "respects human rights." The result was this:

Opposition leader blasts Hollywood actor’s support to Kurd move

Sunday, September 27, 2009

ANKARA – Hürriyet Daily News

CHP leader Deniz Baykal responds to American actor and director Kevin Costner’s support of the government’s Kurdish opening. ‘Why are you interfering in Turkey’s domestic affairs? Do your job as actor,’ says Baykal

The main opposition leader has blasted famous Hollywood actor Kevin Costner’s open support to the government-sponsored Kurdish initiative over the weekend, labeling it as interference in the country’s domestic politics.

“Why are you interfering in Turkey’s domestic affairs? Do your own job as an actor. Who are you, my brother? What do you know and speak?” said Deniz Baykal of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP.

Baykal criticized the government for seeking remedy from Hollywood actors.

“The prime minister is hiding the truths from the public regarding the opening. He has a project on his mind and plans to make it accepted slowly in the face of possible reactions from the nation. Is it the prime minister’s job to deceive people?” asked Baykal.

“They [government officials] have found an actor from Hollywood to make it amiable. I don’t know how they convinced him [Costner] to come out and say ‘I support the opening.’ Why are you interfering in Turkey’s domestic affairs?” said the CHP leader, referring to the actor. “If you now put a map in front of him [Costner], believe me he cannot spot where Şırnak is,” he said.

U.S. actor and director Costner, who visited Turkey in 2007, voiced support for the government’s Kurdish move. Ruling Justice and Development Party’s, or AKP, deputy chairperson Edibe Sözen said last week Costner had been invited for the party’s general congress on Oct. 3 but the actor was unable to attend.

Debate over language

The CHP leader also criticized the government’s approach toward language. He said a person could come from a different origin, tribe, race or ethnic identity but “all of us must establish a unity under a common language.”

He continued: “What is the prime minister doing today? He is initiating a conflict on the language unity. The state’s duty is to teach the official language to everyone and help it to develop and strengthen. The state is not in a position to accept another language and present it as a rival to the official language. Turkey’s official language is Turkish and it will remain so.”

‘Aim is to split nation,’ says MHP

Opposition Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP, leader Devlet Bahçeli, in a message issued on Language Day over the weekend, said those who support a second language aimed at splitting up the nation. He argued that beginning to use other languages than Turkish would speed up the process of weakening the Turkish language.

“It should not be ignored that the equal use and spread of a different language besides Turkish in the public domain could lead to the formation of a new nation out of the blessed presence of the Turkish nation, spoiling the thousand-year nation truth,” the MHP leader said.

Minister defends

In the eastern province of Van, Industry and Trade Minister Nihat Ergün commented on the government’s “democratic opening” commission. He said: “When you use the name ‘Suzan’ it doesn’t split the nation. Will the name ‘Zozan’ split it?”

Explaining the government’s move to businessmen and representatives of non-governmental organizations, the minister said there was a state that understands its citizen, instead of a state that doesn’t understand its own citizen. “That’s the case and that’s the process,” he said.

“Why do you ban people from using their local names? Why can’t you use the name ‘Zozan’? We would get divided. Why did we ban the name Berivan for a girl? The birth registry clerk didn’t write it because it was banned,” said Ergün.

The minister said there were differences in Turkey and asked to “let the people exist with their own colors.”

This is not all bad. Anyone who can provoke the anger of such as Deniz Baykal and Devlet Bahceli certainly deserves some credit. These are nationalist politicians, one (Baykal) of the "social-democratic" left (though Social Democrats in Europe disown him), and the other (Bahceli) slightly to the left of Genghiz Khan. One (Baykal) has taken as a surname the name of a lake in Siberia. (Don't ask. Maybe his ancestors were mosquito-herders [sinekci?] in that region, known for the heft and meaty qualities of its insects.) The other (Bahceli) carries an even stranger name. His first name (Devlet) means "State" in Turkish. This is like someone in English calling himself Government Jones. Much has been made of the "deep state," that combination of security forces and right-wing gangs that holds such power in Turkey. Devlet Bahceli, with his shrill warnings against language Armageddon, could be called the Shallow State.

Still, Kevin, I would advise a swift retreat from the Turkish political scene. An Ataturk biopic? Forget it. It will never get made, and if made it will do zero box office. An appearance at the AKP general congress in October? Oh my God, you made the right choice. Anything--your kids' ballet, the H1N1 flu--will do as an excuse for that one.

Meanwhile a government minister, of all people, seems to making sense. Kurdish names, he says, will not split the nation. But do Kurds actually name their kids "Zozan"? Zozans are nice places, of course, summer pastures and favorite places of Kurds and (when they're called yaylas) all Anatolian people. But I didn't know it was a name. Call me ignorant. But please, don't ever call me "State."

--------------
*Bozan Tekin, PKK commander

Alphabet Nationalism

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 07:09:00 +0000

A friend has written to me, offering this translation of a recent column by Sevan Nişanyan, in the Turkish daily Taraf (http://taraf.com.tr) . I am pleased to post it here, with some editing for usage. My own comments follow.

Alphabet Reform

Sevan Nişanyan - 19.09.2009

Turks are the most incomparable nation in history: okay, fine, we all know that.

But did you know this particular "incomparable" side of Turks?

Turkish is the only language in history which has used eight different alphabets. The closest language to this record is Persian, and it only used four alphabets. The languages in third place have all used only two. I don't remember one that used three.

When they first put Turkish in writing in the 8th century, they used the Köktürk alphabet. It was a home-made alphabet fitting the language. Less than a hundred years passed and Uygurs adapted the Soğd [Sogdian] alphabets and used them for Turkish. Then, when half of the Turks became Buddhist, the Brahmi alphabet imported from India became popular. In the 11th century, the Arabic alphabet was adopted for compliance with Islam and was used for 800 years. In the 20th century, half of Turkish peoples picked or had to pick the Latin alphabet [Turkey] and the other half the Cyrillic alphabet [Soviet Union].

In addition, there is quite a rich Turkish literature written with Armenian and Greek alphabets starting in 14th century.

Now, can you tell me the MEANING of this issue? In the end, an alphabet is a practical communication tool, a signaling system. But at the same time, an alphabet is the most basic, most identifying element of a culture and civilization. In a sense it's a commonality deeper than language and religion. The Greek alphabet has not changed in 2800 years and has probably been the only unchanged element of being Greek. The Hebrew alphabet hasn't changed in 2600 years and has become one with the Jewish national identity. The Latin alphabet was the foundation of Roman Empire and its continuation, Western European civilizations, for 2400 years. Likewise with Arabic alphabet, was with the Chinese, Hindu, Amharic, and Armenian alphabets as well.

So, how are we going to interpret the Turks' changing of alphabets, as if they were changing socks?

And there is more. In history, the only nation that has collectively committed to four major religions -Christianity, Judaism,* Buddhism, and Islam- is the Turks. Years ago Cemal Kafadar mentioned this during a chat, but I didn't pay much attention. Now that I think about it, it's an extremely interesting situation. (http://taraf.com.tr/makale/7506.htm)

And yes, despite the drab ending to the column, this is an "interesting situation." Actually, I think he forgot one alphabet. The Nestorian Christians from Mesopotamia and Persia (the same people who settled in the high valleys of Hakkari among the Kurds) sent missionaries to Turkestan and Mongolia over the course of many centuries in the early years of the Christian era. Many Turkish-speaking peoples became Christians, and there are grave stones from Turkestan that are written in Turkish using the Aramaic (Syriac) alphabet, the same alphabet still used by the Suryanis in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. So unless someone corrects me on this, I suppose we can make it nine alphabets.

Language is the important thing. In fact, it's been obvious for centuries that there are very few real Turks in Turkey. Kazakhs, Turkomans, Uzbeks, Uygurs: these are all distinctly Central Asian Turkic peoples with Asian features. Today's "Turks" are simply Anatolians who speak Turkish, or who have begun speaking Turkish after giving up their native tongues. (Turkish Nationalists are people who think that all non-traitorous Anatolians are Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslim "Turks.") It's the language that has endured, not the Turkic peoples themselves. Mother Anatolia, that great enveloping land, swallowed up the Turks that migrated from Central Asia and kept their language. Why? Because Turkish makes an excellent common language. Its basic structures are simple, without gender and declensions. (What a relief it must have been after the devilish complexities of Byzantine Greek!) It can easily acquire loan words from other languages, and it has, by the thousands. It has a special talent for taking foreign words and making them into verbs, adverbs, and adjectives. Asahel Grant, the 19th century American physician who is the protagonist of my book Fever & Thirst, stated the case clearly in a letter he wrote home from eastern Anatolia in 1841. Everyone in his caravan, he wrote, whether, Kurd, Armenian, or Turk,** "they all speak Turkish, and in this I converse, think, and dream." (p. 163)

Thus Turkish was, and is, the language of Anatolia. It's the language that's important, not an imposed notion of racial purity.

*The Turkic Khazars of southern Russia and the Crimea adopted Judaism.
**(When 19th century travelers referred to individuals as "Turks," they usually turned out to be Albanians, Circassians, or Bosnians.)

Deep Waters: Life and Death in the Perkins Family, 1834 - 1852

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 08:23:00 +0000

Lake Urmia: Six out of nine were buried here.

The piece that follows was written for the Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies. The readers of that journal, small as it is, would know immediately the name of Justin Perkins. Justin Perkins, D.D., was a pioneer American missionary in Iran, then still known as Persia. For the Nestorian Christians (now called Assyrians) of Urmia and the mountains of Hakkari, in Turkey (the snow-flecked mountains in the above photograph), he made a revolution, working with native helpers to create a written version of their modern Syriac dialect, and translating into that new written language the ancient Aramaic texts which they used in their church services but could not understand. Besides the New and Old Testaments in modern Syriac, Perkins translated numerous religious tracts, as well as texts for the mission school in geography, natural science, and history. In English he wrote several accounts of his mission years in Persia, the most useful of which is Eight Years in Persia (1841).

Deep Waters
Life and Death in the Perkins Family, 1834-1852

Like snow upon the desert’s dusty face…
--Fitzgerald: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

In a letter dated 29 January 1849, Justin Perkins, senior missionary at the American Mission in Urmia, made one of his regular reports to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Boston.[1] Among other things, he discussed the recent conquest of Hakkari, central Kurdistan, by Ottoman Turkish forces. Perkins exulted in the Turks’ defeat of Nurullah, the last independent Kurdish Mir of Hakkari. Calling Nurullah a “monster, ” Perkins said of his downfall, “The right hand of the Most High has at length put a ‘hook’ in the nose of this modern ‘Assyrian.’” Besides this interesting choice of label, Perkins’s 29 January letter contained news of a more personal nature. His youngest child, Fidelia, he revealed, had died only six days earlier. This meant one more heartbreak for Perkins and his wife, Charlotte. Fidelia, aged eleven months at her death, was the fifth child that they had buried in Persia. Charlotte’s previous child, Jonathan, born just three years earlier, had lasted only two months. The remaining Perkins children, Henry, age five, and Judith, soon to be nine, continued to thrive. But the fact was, these were only two out of seven.[2]

For Justin and Charlotte Perkins, trouble began at the dock before their missionary careers had even started. Perkins, deathly ill and having almost missed his embarkation, had to be carried aboard in a litter on the day, 21 September 1833, that their ship sailed from Boston. To add further insult, immediately out of port the ship was hit by storms. Still, after a rapid passage and a winter in Istanbul, by June 1834 Justin and Charlotte Perkins (aged 29 and 25 respectively) were aboard caravan horses riding from Trebizond to Tabriz, by way of Erzurum.[3]

News of murders by the Jelali Kurds, raiding along the caravan route west of Ararat, led to a detour into Russian-held Georgia and Armenia. This detour, projected to last six days, stretched to four weeks as Russian officials did everything they could to harass, rob, and delay the unfortunate newlyweds. Charlotte spent her twenty-sixth birthday (Aug. 2) in quarantine with her husband, listening to travellers being flogged by the Russian police just a few feet from their tent. For the rest of his life Justin Perkins would contrast the behavior of this “Christian” power with that of the Turks, whose kindness and hospitality he always appreciated.[4]

August 14 found the two stranded again, without passports and in a new quarantine, by the banks of the river Aras (Araxes). Two hundred feet of rapidly moving water separated them from Persian territory. Daytime temperatures reached 110 degrees F. outside their flea-ridden tent. In desperation Perkins wrote an appeal to the British Ambassador, in residence with the Persian Court at Tabriz, and gave it to a Persian courier who was crossing the river. That night, to their surprise, the Russians returned their passports. By the end of the next day they had been ferried across the Araxes, and soon help came in the form of a letter from Sir John Campbell, H.M. Ambassador to Persia. They had travelled but a short distance when the Embassy’s physican, Dr. William Riach, arrived on horseback to assist them. By August 23 the Perkinses were ensconced in the British Embassy, Tabriz, where Campbell told the Americans, “My house is open to you.”

Charlotte Perkins, however, had by then fallen gravely ill. Only three days later, without any previous hints (e.g., ‘expectant,’ ‘delicate condition’) from Perkins to alert the reader, he announces (in Eight Years in Persia) that she was delivered of a baby daughter. Prostrate with convulsions, vomiting, and fever, Charlotte was not aware that she had given birth until three days later. Thus was born their first Persian child, Charlotte Nisbet Perkins.[5]

Baby Charlotte died within months, and she was buried in Tabriz. According to Justin Perkins, his wife never really recovered from the accompanying sickness. By 14 April 1836, when Charlotte Perkins gave birth to her first son (named William Riach, after the physician who rode to their rescue on the Araxes), the missionaries had set up permanent quarters in Urmia, on the western shore of the lake. Dr. Asahel Grant and his wife Judith arrived in 1835, and they were followed by William Stocking, Albert Holladay, and their wives.

Here began the great labors, and here too came the unending bouts of illness. Accounts by Perkins and Dr. Grant make it clear that, during those first years, the Americans were never truly in good health. In January 1839, Judith Grant, wife of the good doctor, became the first to succumb. She left behind three children. On July 23 of the same year, Charlotte Perkins’ second son, Justin Humphrey, eleven months, expired as well. The year 1840 began with the Children’s Holocaust. First, one after the other, went the twin daughters of Judith and Asahel Grant, seventeen months old; then, on January 31, Charles Stocking, eighteen months; on February 2, Catharine Holladay, nineteen months; and finally, on February 7, William Riach Perkins, aged three years ten months, went to his grave.

Faced by this loss the mission lay “desolate,” as Perkins wrote, and once again Charlotte Perkins found herself childless. But she was also pregnant, and on 8 August 1840 she gave birth yet again, to a daughter named Judith Grant Perkins, named not only after Dr. Grant’s wife but also after her maternal grandmother. By this time, however, the body and spirit of Charlottle Perkins had begun to crumble. In early 1840, Justin Perkins wrote to the American Board informing them of his wife’s condition:

“Probably few, if any, have left America with health and constitutions more perfect than Mrs. P. possessed when we came to this country. And few, you are aware, have been subjected to exposures and trials to surpass hers, particularly in the early part of our missionary experience. The result is that her originally fine constitution is broken down, and an alarming disease seems to be settling upon her. You may recollect the sufferings which Mrs. P. encountered on our way to Persia, and the very severe sickness she experienced immediately after our arrival at Tabreez. Recovery from that sickness seemed entirely beyond the reach of hope for some time; nor did she ever fully recover from the effects of it. Though she has since enjoyed tolerable health much of the time, still, to one previously acquainted with her, it has always been obvious that her constitution was irreparably injured by her sickness at Tabreez. The climate of Oroomia has affected her seriously. Often has she suffered severe attacks of fever; and she has been so much afflicted with ophthalmy, during a considerable part of our residence here, as to be unable to read and write. Mrs. P.’s repeated bereavements, in the death of our three children, have also borne heavily upon her already impaired constitution. Each has been more severe than the previous, in proportion to the increased age of the loved object removed, and has given to her system a correspondingly more serious shock.”

Perkins now goes on to deliver the most alarming news of all:

“The result of these sicknesses and trials is that for the last two years and a half, Mrs. P. has had symptoms of epilepsy, and within the last two months she has had two severe attacks of that disease. The last occurred a few days ago, since the death of William, our only child. The symptoms have appeared when her system has become febrile, which is very often the case with us all, in this climate.”[6]

In this context “epilepsy” probably means “fits” and little else. It’s hard to know what to think of this diagnosis, which must have been made by Asahel Grant. Grant was an early nineteenth-century physician, which is to say that he basically knew nothing. Grant himself suffered from almost daily vomiting caused by an overdose of calomel (mercurous chloride) which he had taken while stricken with cholera.[7] Another clue is the word “febrile,” which refers to the malaria that was endemic to Urmia, and which affected all the missionaries. Severe malaria can produce effects beyond fever, including delirium, coma, convulsions, and, of course, death. On the other hand, it may not have been malaria at all. Perkins may have found a medical word, epilepsy, to disguise reality; namely, that under the hammer blows of disease, birth, and bereavement his wife was simply going mad.

In any case, Perkins knew that he had to get Charlotte out of the country if he was going to save her life. Dr. Grant, feeling the same way about his only remaining child, a son, left the mission on 7 May 1840 to carry the boy to safety in America. For neither man was it an easy decision. Justin Perkins, as senior missionary and chief of of the Biblical translation effort, felt keenly the pangs of guilt. When he left America, he declared, he had intended never to return, barring a “calamity.” On 17 November 1840 the other members of the mission wrote to relieve him of his guilt. In a jointly signed letter the four ordained missionaries plus Edward Breath, their newly-arrived printer, urged him to take “our dear afflicted sister” back to America “by the first safe opportunity.” That opportunity did not come until 5 July 1841.

Nothing yet had come easily to Justin and Charlotte Perkins, and the journey back to the United States proved as troublesome as anything they had so far endured. Stolen horses; rough roads; fleas and vermin; the return of Mrs. P.’s illness as they crossed the Black Sea mountains; all these were bad enough: but the voyage from Smyrna in the brig Magoun laden with 15,000 drums of figs set new records for futility. A passage estimated at sixty-five days maximum by their captain, twice the normal eastbound speed, stretched out to one-hundred and nine days before they reached New York, as storm after storm barred their way west. At last, on 11 January 1842, Justin and Charlotte Perkins, their bouncing toddler Judith, and Mar Yohannan of Gavalan, Perkins’ great friend and associate, arrived at dockside in New York and “sallied forth into Broadway.”[8]

By 21 December 1844, when her third son, Henry Martyn Perkins, was born, Charlotte Perkins had lived more than four years without giving birth or seeing the death of a child. It was the longest such period in eleven years of married life. By then the Perkins family had returned to Urmia, where the myriad tasks of mission administration, translation, and preaching once more took over Justin Perkins’s life. But this time their situation was different.

After Judith Grant’s death in 1839, in the face of continuing deaths and disease, the Americans determined to build a ‘health retreat’ somewhere near Urmia. They chose Seir, a low mountain just west of the city. Seir had what they needed: proximity, altitude, and separation from the alleged ‘miasma’ below. A Kurdish village existed nearby, as did a powerful spring of clear water. (The latter, though they didn’t know it, was surely the healthiest thing about the place.) In the first months of 1841, before their departure for America, Justin Perkins spent nearly every day supervising the construction of the mission buildings at Seir. As one who had spent the first eighteen years of his life on a farm in Massachusetts, he knew how to work, and he knew how to build. The result—missionary residences plus a boys’ seminary for the training of native preachers—would be home for himself and his family during their remaining years in Persia.[9]

These were years that saw an explosion of activity at the mission. Edward Breath and his press had begun operations, eventually turning out not only religious tracts but books on mathematics, geography, and natural sciences, translated into Syriac. Fidelia Fisk arrived, and with her the expansion of girls’ education. Perkins’s Biblical translations were published, the New Testament in 1846 and the Old Testament in 1852, and David Tappan Stoddard brought out his Grammar of the Syrian Language (1855). At regular intervals religious fervor gripped the schools, while from 1844-45 the family of Mar Shimun (Auraham XVII), seeing their power threatened, began a campaign of threats and violence against the missionaries and their supporters.

Through all this, in accounts of the mission’s work, Charlotte Perkins remained invisible, which is to be expected. We have already seen, in Eight Years, the extreme reticence with which Justin Perkins treated his wife’s existence, particularly regarding the baby which miraculously emerged when they reached Tabriz. And Charlotte was, after all, a nineteenth-century missionary wife, little given to notoriety. But Charlotte is still there in the grim statistics of child mortality, giving birth and watching as more of her progeny find an early grave: Jonathan Edwards Perkins, 22 January 1846 to 14 March 1846; Fidelia Fisk Perkins, 8 February 1848 to 23 January 1849. Which brings us once again to that grim statistic: five out of seven.

But two of her children, Judith and Henry, continued to prosper and defy the odds. Judith, who turned ten in 1850, was the special light of her parents’ eyes. This was the little girl who had learned to walk on the deck of the fig-laden Magoun, as the brig fought its way westward in the autumn of 1841. To her, at the end of Eight Years in Persia, her father devoted an entire paragraph, the only one of his children to receive the honor.[10] She was, he said, “contented and happy to the last” on the ship, skipping about even in gales. Now growing up rapidly, the model of youthful good looks, intelligence, and politeness, she was becoming the child they had always dreamed of, and simply because I have singled her out for attention the reader will know that she is doomed.

Her story is told in The Persian Flower: A Memoir of Judith Grant Perkins, written and compiled by Joseph G. Cochran (the first of that distinguished family to serve in Persia) and published in Boston in 1853. Modern readers find the book a hard slog, as long accounts of someone’s goodness and perfection, overladen with Victorian religiosity and a style which belabors the obvious, do not make for lively reading. Yet beneath its surface lies a story that deserves retelling. And Judith’s story is, without doubt, the climactic event of the Perkins family tragedy.

In early September 1852, immediately after the events related in The Persian Flower, Justin Perkins sat down and wrote a letter to the American Board.[11] Across the top, in a hand which appears to be that of Perkins, someone has written “Job 19:21.” The word ‘Job’ is not a good omen, and indeed the verse cited reads, “Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me.” What follows is surely one of the most painful letters that any parent has been forced to write.

Judith Perkins, aged twelve in August, embraced the summer of 1852 with all the enthusiasm a child can summon. A new teacher, Miss Martha Ann Harris,[12] had come out from the United States to establish a school for the mission children. These now numbered seventeen, eleven of whom were old enough to go to school. So excited was Judith at news of her teacher’s arrival that she was allowed to ride to Khoi, several days away, with a welcoming party to escort her into Urmia. To Judith’s delight, for seven weeks thereafter she enjoyed the privilege of attending school with a real professional teacher. In the middle of August the Perkins family received distinguished foreign visitors, members of a military commission sent to determine the true line of the Persian-Ottoman border. These included Col. Fenwick Williams, R.A., who only a few years later, during the Crimean War, would earn fame as Williams Pasha, commander of Turkish forces during the Siege of Kars.[13]

Toward the end of August word came that three members of the mission, returning from America, had arrived in Trebizond (Trabzon) on the Black Sea and would be making their way toward Persia. It was customary for the Americans to send a party to meet their associates along the caravan route, and since no one else was available Justin Perkins agreed to undertake the journey. He was reluctant, having ridden the same “weary” route so many times before, and being then in the midst of printing the Old Testament in the dual-column Peshitta-Syriac translation. Also, cholera had been present that summer in Urmia, and he felt misgivings about leaving the health retreat at Seir. He agreed to go on condition that he could take his family, “for the benefit of Mrs. Perkins’s health.” Judith, of course, was ecstatic at the prospect of an adventure.

Leaving Seir on 30 August 1852, the Perkins family proceeded northward in short stages. By September 2 they were camped outside the city walls of Khoi, where, despite news that there was cholera present, they sent an attendant inside to replenish their supplies of water. I write “despite the news” because now, of course, we know that cholera resides in impure water. In 1852 they knew no such thing. (Robert Koch, future discoverer of the cholera bacterium, was then only nine years old.) Instead, they saw pestilence in “the slight haze of the cholera atmosphere,” in the phrase of Fidelia Fisk.[14] At sunrise the next morning, the family moved on.

The ascent from Khoi was some ten miles long, and very gradual. Justin Perkins had already described the pass in Eight Years in Persia, when in 1841 he, Charlotte, and the baby Judith had ridden up the mountain while enroute to America. The route taken by the Perkins family is now a forgotten track through an area where the peaks rise over 3000 meters. A newer motor road lies somewhat to the east. In the present political climate no one would venture where the Perkins family rode unless he planned to cross the mountains illegally into Turkey. In 1852, however, it was the standard way from Urmia to the main Trebizond-Tabriz caravan route, which it joined south of Mt. Ararat.

All was happiness as the four Americans made the gentle ascent of the pass. Just before the summit, Perkins reported meeting two French leech merchants, entering Persia in search of that commodity, by then hunted to near-extinction in Europe. In his account of the journey Justin Perkins remembers everything—meals, food, scenery, villages, people, and above all Judith’s reactions to all she experienced. At the summit there was a view to the north, where Judith was overjoyed at the sight of Ararat in the glow of a rising sun. Some two hours after that, on the rocky downhill ride, the ordeal began.

Several miles after a mid-morning stop for refreshment, Judith, gone deathly pale, announced that she felt ill. Within seconds she had jumped from her pony and doubled over with vomiting. The spasms, repeated over and over, left the girl barely able to stand. Justin and Charlotte, frightened, managed to get Judith back on her horse, and soon they were in pursuit of their muleteers, who were some 3-4 miles ahead at the village of Zurabad (which they called “Zorava”) with the group’s tent and supplies. After an anxious ride, Perkins carried his daughter into the hastily-pitched tent and set to work.

Justin Perkins was a literate, observant man, and probably no better account exists of Asian cholera, experienced in all its nineteenth-century horrors. By then the disease had only been known for a few decades, having spread from its home in northeast India through the opening of trade routes and increased pilgrimage. Cholera spread its particular terror because of the power of its symptoms and the swiftness with which they overcame the victim. Vomiting and watery diarrhea, so severe that over a pint of fluid per hour may be lost, take hold of the patient and squeeze him dry. Unless the fluids are replaced, the patient soon goes into shock and dies of dehydration.

Zurabad lies on the banks of the Aq Chai, a stream flowing from nearby mountains which mark the Turkish frontier. There, quite literally in the middle of nowhere, Perkins attempted to treat his daughter. At his command were potions no better than a peddler’s snake oil, yet sanctified by the fact that physicians used them regularly. He gave Judith laudanum, then camphor, and she continued to purge. Calomel, a purgative—surely the last thing needed—came next. Diarrhea, which Perkins called “evacuations,” shook her repeatedly. By this time Justin knew that the disease must be cholera, yet Charlotte continued in denial. At one point, in his frenzy Perkins dropped the vial of laudanum. Frantic searching ensued, but it was lost in the jumble and turmoil of the tent. Perkins gave her paregoric (camphor and tincture of opium) instead. Most helpfully, he gave her as much soda water as she could take, but the convulsions continued. “The disease,” he wrote, “moved on like a giant, with irresistible force.” Holding up a cross, Perkins directed his daughter to fix her eyes on it. “Yes, Poppa, I will try,” she told him in a hoarse, raw voice.

Morning gave way to afternoon and then to evening. Their attendants and muleteers grew restless. Cholera carried a powerful curse, with which no one wanted to be associated. In Zurabad news of the sickness had spread, and panicked villagers, refusing to sell them either food or fodder, ordered the travelers to move on. At one point Perkins found a villager willing to take a message to Urmia, but the others in Zurabad, fearing any association with the diseased girl, refused to let him go.[15]

As light lengthened on the peaks, Perkins remained “almost crushed with anxiety,” yet he worked on. Judith’s system had gone into shock. The purgings came less often, as there was little left to purge. Eight-year-old Henry had remained outside, frightened and alone, during the worst of the crisis. When he came inside the tent a wrenching scene ensued, as the boy found it hard to accept his older sister’s possible death and wished, as did all of them, that the trip had never happened. Other such scenes marked the coming hours: weeping; professions of faith; further attempts to revive and comfort Judith; a spreading numbness in her limbs; admonitions to goodness and faithfulness; farewells; prayers for miracles and forgiveness; even a terrifying symbolism, as night fell and a wild beast (a bear or wild boar: they never knew which) prowled the darkness just outside their tent.

At three A.M. Saturday, 4 September 1852, Judith Perkins took her last breath. It had been seventeen hours since the onset of symptoms. Justin and Charlotte, sobbing and exhausted, fell asleep beside the wreckage of their daughter.

At daylight Charlotte rose to wash Judith’s body and dress her for burial. Late in the night, Judith, in a whispered request, had asked to be interred beside her little sister Fidelia. Despite the distance—and the summer heat—her parents never considered anywhere else but Seir. So Judith returned home on the back of a mule, wrapped inside a thick felt shepherd’s cloak that was lashed tight with willow whips. An extortionate muleteer had to be paid off, and a mob of villagers, threatening to stone them, had to be kept at bay; but at last, about ten o’clock, the procession set out for Urmia.

Not until the morning of the sixth did Austen Wright, the mission doctor, receive the note. “We are in deep waters,” Perkins had written. “Our precious Judith is just gone of the cholera.” Consternation erupted, but the missionaries, riding quickly to meet them, held out hope. A longer note confirming the girl’s death arrived as they made their way northward. The terrible caravan arrived in Urmia the next morning. On Tuesday afternoon, September 7, Judith was laid in her grave on the slopes of Mt. Seir.

The aftermath can only be imagined. “My pen refuses to tell the desolation of our home,” Perkins wrote to Boston in his letter. It was the ultimate blow. He added, “Arrived at such an age, she had become as our right hand, as well as the joy of our hearts.” He at least would have duties to busy himself, as the Old Testament translation was still making its way through the printer. With Charlotte it was different. Out of seven children she had one left. She was forty-four years old, and would never have another. Five years later, which seems an eternity under the circumstances, she left Persia “enfeebled” by bad health, her missionary life finished at last. Henry accompanied her. Justin followed in 1858.

But for Justin Perkins, missionary life was not finished. After an interlude in America, and a round-trip by steamer to England, during which he lectured at Oxford, he set out again for Persia in 1862. Not until 1 June 1869 did he leave Urmia for the last time. He left Persia as he had left America in 1833: very ill and not knowing if he would live or die. But this time the transport was different. After the overland trip to Trebizond, it was steam all the way: to Istanbul, Smyrna, and Marseilles; by train to Paris and the Channel; and finally, by steamship from Liverpool to New York. And when he arrived in Brooklyn, by now deathly ill, who should be there to nurse him but his wife, Charlotte. With Charlotte at his side, Justin Perkins died in Chicopee, Massachusetts, on 8 December 1869.[16]

The last chapter in the life of Charlotte Perkins seems almost impossible. But it is there on page 113 of the Missionary Herald, March 1898 (Vol. XCIV, No. III). Under “Deaths” it reads: “December 15, 1897, at Woolwich, Maine, Mrs. Charlotte Bass Perkins, widow of the Rev. Justin Perkins, D.D.” Born in 1808 in Stowe, Vermont, residing with her son, Rev. Henry Martyn Perkins and his family, in Woolwich, Maine, “in the ninetieth year of her age, she passed to the heavenly home.” Charlotte had outlasted them all. Despite a torrent of sorrow and disease, born during the Presidency of Thomas Jefferson and died in that of William McKinley, she had almost spanned the century. And it is not too much to hope—indeed, it seems likely—that during her final days she was blessed with the presence of Henry’s oldest child, an eighteen-year-old girl named Judith Grant Perkins.[17]

_________
1. Missionary Herald, June 1849. Vol. XLV, No. 6.
2. List of graves at Seir cemetery by George Moradkhan of Urmia, 1957. Letter to author by Mary Cochran Moulton, 14 February 2003.
3. Justin Perkins. A Residence of Eight Years in Persia. Andover, 1843.
4. Eight Years, p. 108; pp. 111-112; p. 122.
5. Named not only for her mother but for Charlotte Nisbet, wife of an English army officer, who cared for the baby during her mother’s long convalescence.
6. Eight Years, p. 461-2.
7. See Gordon Taylor, Fever and Thirst, p. 79-80
8. Eight Years, p. 491.
9. Eight Years, p. 421. Entry for June 21.
10. Eight Years, p. 491.
11. Papers of the ABCFM (microfilm). Research Publications: Woodbridge, Conn., 1982-85. Reel 555, Item no. 199.
12. Martha Harris latter married Rev. Samuel Audley Rhea, d. 1865. In 1856, in the company of her husband, she became the first Western female to visit the Assyrian ashirets of Hakkari. (Not even the great English travelers Isabella Bird, Gertrude Bell, and Freya Stark, went this far into the high mountain districts of Kurdistan.) She is buried in Memikan, Gawar (near Yuksekova), where she died in 1857.
13. See, among many sources: Humphry Sandwith, M.D. A Narrative of the Siege of Kars. London, 1856.
14. Persian Flower, p. 117.
15. In the end he did leave the following morning.
16. Henry Martyn Perkins. The Life of Justin Perkins, D.D., Pioneer Missionary to Persia. Chicago, 1887.
17. The Missionary Herald for the year cited now available online at Googlebooks. Judith Grant Perkins, Henry’s firstborn child, is first seen in the Census of 1880, when her father was a preacher in Illinois.

[Cross-posted at Progressive Historians]

The Triumph of Stupidity (USA ver.)

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 02:49:00 +0000

Johann Hari of The Independent (UK) has so dexterously dissected the current "healthcare debate" in the US that I cannot help but post the results here. Perhaps most interesting is his inquiry into why some Americans, and especially the Republican hardcore right (i.e., virtually everybody remaining in the party), so willingly embrace what are obviously lies and stupidity. He attributes it to the habit of religious faith, so obviously prevalent in the US. Whatever the reason, it must be stated that this kind of hysteria, the hunger for scapegoats, plots, and enemies, has a long history in the United States. For a more complete rundown, see Gustavus Myers' "History of Bigotry in the United States" and Rick Shenkman's "Just How Stupid Are We?" The English, the Masons, the Catholics, the Jews, the White Slavers, the foreign plots, the Irish, the French, the Negroes, the Communists, the Black Helicopters, the United Nations, the New World Order, the Federal Government: you name it, at one time or another large numbers of Americans have been hysterical about it. Johann Hari is especially, and appropriately, cutting about Pres. Obama's continued attempts to make nice with these people. It's a fool's errand, and I definitely do not want the President to go on playing the fool.

Republicans, religion and the triumph of unreason

by Johann Hari. The Independent, Wednesday, 19 August 2009

Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."

The election of Obama – a black man with an anti-conservative message – as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.

When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view – to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation – has swollen. Now it is all they can see.

Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and – at the same time – that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.
These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence – here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper – can pierce this conviction.

This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanise the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed – with a straight face – that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.

You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves – and 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" – and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.

The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some 70 per cent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved.

A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly noticed a clause in the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would like care to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary. Many people want it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumour that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched to include the disabled, like Palin's youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his existence. It was flatly untrue – but the right had their talking-point, Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright evil", and they were off.

It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly – while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.

These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS".

This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed – as one Republican congressman put it – that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.

It's a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy – reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution – could be a useful corrective. But that's not what these so-called "conservatives" are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy that serves as a thin skin covering some raw economic interests and base prejudices.

For many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely cynical manipulation. One of Bush's former advisers, David Kuo, has said the President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as "nuts" as soon as they left the Oval Office. But the ordinary Republican base believe this stuff. They are being tricked into opposing their own interests through false fears and invented demons. Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured – and then complained he had no health insurance. I didn't laugh; I wanted to weep.

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" – which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has had a two-pronged strategy: conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has (shamefully) assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying in public that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma". Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them.

This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people or the greediest constituencies. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."

However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan could be – shrill, baby, shrill.

WSJ: "Stealth Shop is Starbucks in Disguise"

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 03:35:00 +0000

"It's about time," says Hamal Ali (r., above, with narghile). "I like the new decor better." Rev. N. Hoja (c.) agrees.

[Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2009] Starbucks Corp. is scrubbing its name from a Seattle location in favor of the store's street address, in a test that could yield more stores that resemble a corner coffee shop, instead of a global coffee giant.

The store, a former Starbucks that was targeted for closing, is called 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea. It will also serve wine and beer and host live music and poetry readings as it seeks to take on more of a community vibe.

The chain plans to start by remodeling at least three Seattle-area stores with names based on their addresses or neighborhood. If successful, Starbucks plans to expand the trial to other markets.

ISTANBUL. 20 June 2010. [Pasha-Gypsy Istanbul Bureau]

The recent decision by Starbucks Corp. to "camouflage" its branches is finding a welcome reception in Turkey, company sources say. "We've had a very positive response so far," says Ali Gazoz, the company's general manager for Turkey. "Men especially find it a welcome change."

Here in Istanbul, where "coffee culture" originated centuries ago, coffee-drinking was always a men's activity, at least in public. Then came Starbucks, with its milky concoctions, its too-friendly barista girls, and its boys who also called themselves baristas. The result was culture shock on a massive scale.

"I remember when they bought out the old coffee shop," said Hamal Ali, a neighborhood porter, at a Starbucks by the Blue Mosque. "It was quite a shock." He paused to puff on his hookah. "Girls!" he ejaculates: "They had girls turning milk into foam--and they tried to tell us it was coffee." Especially disgusting, said Mr. Ali, was the fact that it was cow's milk. "I prefer sheep," he says. "Sheep are best." His friends at the Sultan Ahmet Starbucks, all of them male, chime in with similar tales, all invoking the name of the One True God and expressing their loathing for the initial Starbucks experience. "When I asked for a narghile," says Ali, holding up the mouthpiece of his water pipe, "they told me that smoking wasn't allowed. Allah give them trouble!"

Mr. Gazoz, who learned to love Starbucks coffee when he was an intern at Microsoft, admits that triple grande peppermint mochas were a tough sell in some neighborhoods. For one thing, in American Espresso English, "mocha" means "cheap Hershey's pseudo-chocolate syrup," while in the Middle East, Mocha is the port in Yemen where Turkish coffee comes from. And then there was the decor.

"Where were the stools?" asked Yusuf Biyikli, another porter who always drops by to sip medium-sugared Turkish coffee (with extra mud) during his morning break. "I don't mind sitting on my haunches, but if I can't squat, I need a stool. Those plush chairs were ridiculous."

"Our interior designer was from Italy," Mr. Gazoz admits. "He had worked for Valentino in the past, and he didn't understand our needs." Now, thankfully, that era is gone. The coffee-house still bears the Starbucks logo, though now it is more discreetly displayed. And the regular customers (photo, above) are back.

"This time we got a designer from the Armenian border," Mr. Gazoz told us. "He specializes in subterranean villages." The wood, unfinished yet rich and shiny with age, was recycled from a coffee-house in Urfa that had been bombed by State Security Forces, and the window glass, also recycled, was re-grimed using a patented process. Authentic cobblestones, hand-hewn by political prisoners, were set in a special pattern to make them as treacherous as possible. "No more high heels," says Mr. Biyikli, grinning.

Just one thing bothers the denizens: the identity of the man in the fez, who can always be seen lurking mysteriously in the window next to the logo. "Who is he?" asks Hamal Ali, "I never see him do anything." To which his friend Nasreddin Hoja, a local imam, replied, "I think it must be the Prime Minister!"

"Actually," says Mr. Gazoz, joining in the hearty laughter, "it's a hologram." The slightly sinister illusion, he says, comes in handy in case his regular customers are gone and the neighborhood girls think about coming in. "Anything," he says, "to keep the past from returning."

Ararat: An Addendum

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:03:00 +0000

Mount Ararat (Agirî)/ by Sevan Nişanyan

Note: Sevan Nişanyan is a prominent Turkish intellectual, a hotelier, and a writer of several guide books to Turkey. In the following short article, which can be considered an Addendum to my post, The Five-Thousand Meter Fantasy, he fills in some interesting facts about the origin of Ararat's Turkish name, Ağrı Dağı. Above all, he talks about the most irrational thing about Ararat; namely, that its name means "the mountain of pain." Obviously he's correct; it must be a Turkified version of a Kurdish name. For more about Urartu, simply do a Google search.

This article was sent to me by Zerkes, who blogs at zerkesorg.blogspot.com. He also very kindly provided the translation. The original was in the Kurdistan Post. I have altered some of the syntax, as well as adding notes.

How can there be a mountain named Ağrı (Pain) for God's sake? What pain, whose pain? Agir means "fire" in Kurdish. Agirî is the adjective form [of Agir] making it [Mount Ararat] the "mountain of fire." It's obvious the Turkish name came from this word. The most recent volcanic activity [in Mount Ararat] was recorded in 1840, when it emitted smoke. But I couldn't find out when the name [Agirî] was used first.

The mountain's Armenian name is not Ararat, but Masis. Ararat is a common Hebrew name in the Torah for the mountain-country today called "Eastern Anatolia". In Genesis 8:4 it's written that Noah's Ark, landed on the MOUNTAINS of Ararat: "And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat." Notice that it is plural, not singular [MountainS]. Later on, they reasoned and decided that Agri/Masis would be the one [where Noah's Ark landed] and they named the mountain as Ararat. However, Mount Cudi near Sirnak [Sirnex] is more likely [for the Ark to land]. When one looks north from the Middle East, the first mountain of the mountain-country is Cudi. If Euphrates [Ferat] and Tigris [Dicle] flood high up to the sky and you manage to swim, logically, you will find yourself on top of Cudi.

Ararat's Assyrian name is Urart, and with normative suffix -u, it becomes Urartu. The name Urartu is preferred in the scientific community because Henry Layard who deciphered the Assyrian Language and Archibald Sayce who read the Van [Wan] inscriptions used this name. However, using Ararat instead of Cudi is equally correct. Both of them are exonyms; just like us [Turkish speaking individuals] calling Deutsch Alman and Hungarians calling us Német, all "names given by outsiders". At that time, the peoples who lived in Van [Wan] and governed the whole mountain country named themselves as Khald* or Xald and their country as Nairi** or Bianili [beyanî/biyanî in Kurdish means "foreign" or "foreigner"]. Their neighbors in the south, Sami, called
the country Ararat/Urartu. Why they used that name, nobody knows.

Conclusion: A) A lot peoples passed through that country, B) they were not all Turkish, C) they were not all Kurdish or Armenian either. One feels the need to be a little modest when he puts things into the perspective of three thousand years.

[* Khaldi was the name of their principal deity. **Lake Van, to the Urartians, was called the Sea of Nairi. --G.T.]

Apologies

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Wed, 06 May 2009 22:03:00 +0000

Life, as you can see, blooms afresh in Seattle. This includes weeds, and grass, which occupy me far more than I would wish. And soon I will be heading to the Midwest, for Mothers Day. Thus my apologies to anyone who comes to this blog looking for new material and new insights. When I post things here I try to make them a summation, an encapsulation of events that will be readable for more than a few days. Right now there is too much going on in Anatolia and Kurdistan for me to begin to keep up. For now, patience please. I'll be back.

24 April 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 06:06:00 +0000

220 Armenian Intellectuals Exiled in 1915 Commemorated

Bawer ÇAKIR
Bianet.org
24 April 2009

On 24 April 1915, over 200 Armenian intellectuals were exiled and then killed. The Human Rights Association commemorated this loss to Armenian, Ottoman and Turkish society.

The Human Rights Association’s (İHD) Committee against Racism and Discrimination commemorated 24 April 1915, the day that Armenians worldwide recognise as the beginning of the forced exile of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire, with an event in the Tobacco Depot in Istanbul.

On that day, 139 Armenian intellectuals were arrested in Istanbul and forcibly taken to Çankırı and Ayaş in central Anatolia. They were then killed.

A loss for all of society, then and today

Lawyer Eren Keskin spoke at the event entitled “24 April 1915 and Armenian Intellectuals: They were arrested, they were evicted, they did not even get a grave stone.”

She said that the death of these intellectuals represented a loss not only for the Armenian language, culture, thought and science world, but also for the Ottoman society of the time and for “the world of all of us today.”

An exhibition displayed stories and pictures from a book entitled “Memory of 11 April”, written by Teotig in 1919 and dealing with the deaths of the intellectuals.

Music eliminating borders

The commemorative event started with a concert of the Kardeş Türküler folk group which performed songs in Armenian, Kurdish, Suryani, Arabic and Turkish.

The group members said that they had fulfilled a wish of murdered Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in December, when they had organised a tour in Armenia together with the Turkey-based Armenian choir Sayat Nova.

“We saw that the Ararat mountain embraces Yerevan just as much as it does Ağrı province.”

Keskin said, “We, who believed what we were told, and who stayed quiet even if we did not believe it…we are all guilty.”

Stories of lives cut short

Publisher Ragıp Zarakol and members of the Bosphorus Performance Arts Society (BGST) theatre department read life stories and poems of and by Rupen Sevag, Siamanto (Atom Yerjeyan), Taniel Varujan, Teotig (Teotoros Lapçinyan) and Krikor Zohrab, all of them killed in 1915.

Around 100 people attended the event, among them Hrant Dink’s widow Rakel Dink and his brother Orhan Dink, journalist Sarkis Saropyan, academic Ayşe Gül Altınay and lawyer and IHD branch head Gülseren Yoleri.

After Zarakol recounted the life of Armenian musician Gomidas, Keskin ended the commemoration with a quote from the musician:

“It was spring, but here it was snowing.”

Istanbul - BİA News Center

Turkey: Confessions of a "Dirty War"

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:31:00 +0000

Abdulkadir Aygan is a man with no life and no future, and his youth was spent as an assistant in Hell. He only stays alive, it seems, in order to bear witness. The first of two articles below comes from Le Monde, and I bear responsibility for the translation and its inadequacies. The second appeared first in Taraf, a Turkish newspaper, and it subsequently appeared in English translation at Bianet.org. Welcome to the world of JITEM and the people it employs.

Turkey: the ghosts of a "dirty war."

Guillaume Perrier & Olivier Truc, Le Monde, 13 April 2009

A recluse in a village "somewhere in the south of Sweden," Abdulkadir Aygan lives under the protection of the Swedish secret services. And for good reason: this refugee makes Turkey tremble with each of his revelations. Formerly a member of the Kurdish PKK rebels, he was "turned" by the Turkish Army in the 1990s. He then collaborated with JITEM, a secret unit of the gendarmerie [Turkey's rural military police force -ed.] charged with carrying on the anti-terrorist struggle. For six years he took part in crimes perpetrated in the southeast of Turkey, at the height of the "dirty war" conducted by the army against Kurdish rebels and a population accused of supporting them. Abdulkadir Aygan left Turkey in 2003. Today, he speaks.

"I was hired as an antiterrorist functionary in September 1991, registry number J27299," he says, in his Swedish home. With compelling detail, he reviews the torture sessions and summary executions of militants, suspected of supporting the Kurdish cause, of which he was a witness. Hundreds of unexplained murders and abductions were committed in southeast Turkey between 1987 and 2001. "There are close to 1500 known people who disappeared," estimates Sezgin Tanrikulu, a human-rights lawyer in Diyarbakir, "5000 including unexplained murders."

In Turkey, the testimony of Abdulkadir Aygan has revived the inquiry concerning these disappearances, and has raised hope among the victims' families. The body of Murat Aslan, a young man of 25 who vanished in 1994, was recovered ten years later, burned and buried beside a road. "We arrested him at a cafe, after someone denounced him to us, and led him to the local office of JITEM," Aygan remembers. "A corporal who was an expert in torture hung him from the ceiling by his hands, with weights on his feet. He beat him. He was kept three or four days without food. Me, I evaluated the information he gave." According to Abdulkadir Aygan, Murat Aslan was finally sent to Silopi [a town on the Iraqi border], then led to the banks of the Tigris. "He was blindfolded and handcuffed. The junior officer, Yuksel Ugur, shot him, and Cindi Saluci doused him with gasoline and set him on fire. It was thanks to my testimony that his body could be recovered for his family and identified through a DNA test."

The repentant gendarmerie officer also describes "death wells," as they've been called by the Turkish press: pits on the property of Botas, the state petroleum pipeline company, in which seven bodies were thrown in 1994 after having been dissolved in acid or burned. He also states that three trade unionists, arrested the same year and taken by agents to Abdukerim Kirca, the director of JITEM in Diyarbakir, were taken to Silvan [a town north of Diyarbakir] and killed by the latter official with a bullet to the head. "We take what he says very seriously," explains Nuseviran Elci, an activist in Silopi [and president of the Silopi Bar Association]. "After verification, everything that Aygan says turns out to be correct."

The ex-member of JITEM is far from having given up all his secrets. He says that he fears for his life, in Sweden, where he has received threats: Turkey is demanding his extradition to be tried for the murder of Kurdish writer Musa Anter in 1992. "I'm ready to be judged wherever or whenever, but not in Turkey," he responds. "That demand is made in order to silence me."

Since March 9, investigation into the disappearances has taken on a new dimension. On the request of attorneys who base their demands on Aygan's statements, Turkish justice has finally ordered excavations around Silopi, the last town before the Iraqi frontier, and in the region of Diyarbakir. The "death wells," situated close to the principal military barracks of Silopi, and on the property of Botas, have been explored. Like graveyards in many villages, here tens of bone fragments, a green glove, knotted cords, fragments of clothing, a human skull have been discovered.

The trauma, still living, from the crimes committed in the region has resurfaced as a result of the excavations. "People here have known about these crimes for years," says Elci the attorney. From the kebab seller in the central square to the local chief of the AKP, party of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, all have lost a close relative. Even in Silopi, population 15,000, at least 300 people have been taken away and disappeared.

Ahmet vanished one morning in 1998 after leaving his home. "He was a photographer, married, and father of three children. We never saw him again," says his father, Enver, with tears in his eyes. After the disappearance, the old man remembers having been interrogated by an official of JITEM. "I've thought of nothing else for six years," he says. "Bring back the body of my son." A while ago, having seen television pictures of men digging in the earth for evidence, Enver pushed open the door of the local Human Rights Association: "I thought that, with this Ergenekon affair that is so prominent now, they might have new information."

Tongues have been loosened since the launch, in 2007, of an inquiry into the Ergenekon network, a shadowy military-nationalist power planted within the Turkish state and suspected of having fomented coups and assassinations. Since October 2008, 86 persons - military officers, academicians, journalists, politicians, and mafiosi - have been charged before a special tribunal in Istanbul, with having formed a plot, presumably against the government. Since July, 56 other suspects have been hauled into court. Tens of others could follow.

The existence of the Ergenekon network is not a surprise: Turks have spoken for years about the "Deep State" to describe this ultranationalist network. Dismembered by waves of arrests, the network could pierce the mystery surrounding some of the darkest affairs of recent Turkish history, such as the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink...or the toll taken by JITEM in the Southeast. "The founders of Ergenekon were also members of JITEM," Abdulkadir Aygan emphasizes. "Sometimes Ergenekon also used mafia chiefs to carry out its missions. For example, against business owners who they were told to assassinate. One part of the victims in the Southeast was killed by JITEM, but also by other services of the police, the gendarmerie, or the army, and even by the MHP, the far-right nationalist party."

"More than 80 families of the disappeared have broken the silence since December," estimates Nusirevan Elci, who, each week, sees new dossiers arrive. "The Ergenekon investigation has made new witnesses come forth, and it should be concentrated in the southeast: it would recover many actors in this history." To the surprise of inhabitants, numerous high-ranking military officers who were posted in the region during the disappearances, between 1987 and 2001, have been arrested these last weeks: Major Arif Dogan, called "the angel of death," or former general Levent Ersoz, famed for his cruelty.

On March 23, it was Colonel Cemal Temizoz who was questioned. The former chief of JITEM in Cizre, he has been named by suspects as the commander of many abductions. His name brings chills to attorney Elci: "People turned from their path to avoid having to face him." No one dares any longer to take the path which traverses the little roadside village of Kustepe. Empty of its inhabitants and surveyed by three "village guardians," Kurdish militia members supplied by the army, it could be equally shelter or charnel house. The investigators discovered here a large number of bones. "Horse bones, nothing more," grunts one of the village guards, armed with a Kalashnikov and drawing a zero in the air.

"At that time, fear kept us from talking. We risked being killed in our turn," explains Salih Teybogan, a peasant of Silopi. His brother, who worked at the frontier post, was taken while entering his house, and his car was found burned, "two hundred meters from Botas." Several months later, three bodies were retrieved from a well, under an old restaurant, now derelict. "We are going to do DNA tests," says Salih Teybogan. "Things are changing. When I understand that they are going to open the graves, I am coming to reclaim my rights."

The "death wells" affair perhaps sounds the end of impunity for these crimes, perpetrated until very recently. In Istanbul and Diyarbakir, the Saturday Mothers - the Turkish equivalent of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires - have resumed their weekly demonstrations demanding the return of their disappeared children. "Now, we have to have a real truth and reconciliation commission," believes the lawyer Sezgin Tanrikulu. "The problem is, the old members of JITEM are still there, in the bosom of the army."

Colonel Abdulkerim Kirca, named by Abdulkadir Aygan as killer of at least a dozen Kurds during the 1990s, was found with a bullet in his head in January, before he could be interrogated. Officially, it was a suicide. At his funeral, all the upper crust of the headquarters staff was in attendance.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Chilling Account of JITEM Murders

Abdülkadir Aygan, a former PKK member who then worked for the clandestine JITEM gendarmerie organisation for nine years, now lives in Sweden. Taraf reporter Neşe Düzel talked to him there.

ND: How many years did you stay with the PKK?

AA: I was with the PKK from 1975 to 1985. My connection to the PKK started when I was a high school student in Adana and continued when I left school in 1977.

Did you go up the mountains?

In Turkey I did not, but I stayed in all the PKK camps in Northern Iraq, what is called Southern Kurdistan. I was working as a messenger and guide. I carried important messages from and to a PKK leader called Duran Kalkan and the leaders of other camps. I also took provisions to the camps from villages and guided groups from one camp to another. I guided the group that came to Turkey from the Mahzun Korkmaz camp and carried out the attack in Şemdinli Eruh in 1984, I brought them to the Turkish border. They entered Turkey and attacked.

This was the PKK’s first attack. How did you then join JITEM (Gendarmerie Anti-Terrorism Intelligence)?

I left the PKK in 1985 because I had had enough of the executions within the organisation. The last drop for me was an attack on a hamlet. No one was going to be left alive. I had done the reconnaissance for the attack. One day before the attack I fled from the PKK and told the villagers about the plan. When the villagers saw me with my guerrilla clothes and gun, they called the gendarmerie (security force attached to the army which polices rural areas). They came to the village with a military helicopter and took me.

I will ask you later why you left the PKK. You said that you were fed up with the executions. Did the PKK not look for you later, did they not try to punish you? You informed on them.

I informed on them. I was questioned for 50 days in Siirt, and I wrote a 17-page statement. The superiors in Ankara said, “He has been in the organisation for such a long time, he has got a past. 17 pages is not enough.” The questioning officer told me to write more, so I wrote around 130 pages. In 1977, I was responsible for the military wing of the PKK in Nizip…

At that time you allegedly killed six young nationalists. Did you write about those murders?

No. I did not write about the murders I committed against those we called fascists in Nizip. I wrote about the PKK camps I had stayed at abroad and about the PKK militants I knew. I did not write about any villagers who gave us food. During questioning, they showed me the written statement of Sabri Ok, a high-ranking leader they had caught previously. He had explained everything anyway. Later, Sabri Ok became PKK officer for prisons. They claimed that he had carried out a self-criticism later. But what he wrote in his statement was no different from what an informant would write. The difference to me was that he did not apply for informant status. I did, and I benefited from the Remorse Law. I was taken to Diyarbakır prison.

How did you protect yourself from the PKK members in Diyarbakır prison?

I went to the informants’ cell. They held those who gave themselves up and turned informant in a different place, not among the PKK members. That’s why it was not dangerous inside. Outside is dangerous.

How did you join JITEM?

Because of the Remorse Law I stayed in prison a third of my 15-year sentence. In 1990, I was released. They immediately took me to the military, because I had deserted to Southern Cyprus during my military service in Cyprus. They sent me to Kars to complete my military service in a tank unit. One day a soldier in the battalion said, “Colonel Arif Doğan called on the phone for you. He will call again.”

Arif Doğan is one of the prime suspects in the Ergenekon trial, currently in detention, is he not? Bombs and guns were found at his home and office.

Yes. Up to then, I had never heard of Arif Doğan, and I still have never met him face to face. I only talked on the phone. He was the Diyarbakır JITEM head. He called me again. He told me that Cem Ersever was with him and had recommended me to him. I had met Major Cem Ersever at the Siirt Regiment when I was questioned. I had chatted to him. He was a person who knew a lot about the PKK.

How many years did you work for JITEM?

Nine years. It was 1990…They said, as if they were doing me a favour, “you are doing your military service in Kars, but your family is in Osmaniye. If you want, we can have you brought to Diyarbakır, closer to your family, and you can do your military service in the gendarmerie.” I agreed. At that time there was no mention of JITEM. […]

How did you interpret this special interest from a commander?

I thought that Cem Ersever wanted me in order to make use of my experience. First they took me from Kars to the Privates Education Regiment in Silvan, where they brought other informants too, Ali Ozansoy, Hüseyin Tilki, Ali Timurtaş, Hayrettin Toka…Then they sent us to JITEM in Diyarbakır, but we did not know it was JITEM. We thought we were going to do our military service under the command of the Diyarbakır Gendarmerie for Public Security. We were five, six people…We thought that we were supposed to wear civilian clothes because of our special status, our experience with the organisation, but…

At that time, who was Diyarbakır JITEM commander? Arif Doğan?

No, he had gone, and Cem Ersever had taken his place. His deputy was Aytekin Özen. It was Ersever who told us that we had come to JITEM. “This is JITEM. You will be under my command, wear plain clothes. When you collect intelligence and go on operations, you will wear arms for your own protection.” Just think, the other soldiers had G3 rifles, we were given guns.

How long did you work for JITEM?

It started when I was a soldier in 1990. When I finished my military service, I continued with JITEM as a civil servant until 1999. First they planned to employ us as terrorism experts, then as expert sergeants. But then they turned us into civil servants.

I don’t understand…

They applied Law No 657 on Civil Servants and really made us civil servants. We were officially intelligence officers. The same laws applied to us as to a post office employee, and we had been turned into civil servants working for the military. We had pay slips, taxes, and the right to compensation and a pension. We got a wage, just as a noncommissioned officer, or a JITEM commander got a wage. For instance, I had a look at the pension fund website on the Internet, under the name Aziz Turan…If I work another fifteen years, I can retire.

Your name was changed to Aziz Turan, and Abdülkadir Aygan was registered to have died in combat, is that right?

Yes. My criminal record was also cleaned.

How many activities did you take part in when you worked for JITEM?

They called them “operations. For instance, a criminal was identified. Normally what happens? The security forces catch this person on demand of the prosecution and the prosecution takes that person to court. The person, depending on the crime, goes to prison or not. But JITEM operations were not like that. There were local agents and informants among the people. They told JITEM about those providing the PKK with provisions or having contact with the organisation. Then JITEM did its job.

What does “do its job” mean in JITEM speak? Killing?

“Doing its job” means “illegally taking a person to JITEM, questioning them, killing them and getting rid of the bodies by burning or burying them.” The importance of the operation depended on the importance of the person to be killed. The JITEM commander sometimes informed the Gendarmerie Public Security Gendarmerie Command, and they sometimes informed the Emergency State Governor’s Office, and sometimes they were not informed.

During your time at JITEM, how many people did you take and kill like that? Did you commit unsolved murders?

If you ask me how many of these events I witnessed, around 30…Not all JITEM commanders were the same. Some ordered these kind of things, some did not. Some only asked for intelligence reports and the organisation of informant and agent networks. Also, I had a lot of duties in JITEM.

Such as?

I interpreted when our commanders met with Barzani and Talabani (then the Iraqi Kurdish leaders of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Kurdistan Patriots’ Union). At one point I picked up the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmergas wounded in clashes with the PKK and brought them to the airport to be taken to Turkish military hospitals. I translated documents that came into the hands of JITEM into Turkish. I cracked codes. That is why I did not take part in all JITEM operations. But from what I have heard and seen, I would claim that 80 percent of the unsolved murders and crimes in the region were carried out by JITEM.

There is talk of 18-20 thousand murders without known assailant.

I think that is an exaggeration.

How many people do you think were killed by JITEM?

I can only guess in Diyarbakir, not in other provinces like Elazığ, Van, Mardin, Batman… They also had JITEM. During the ten years I was in Diyarbakır, there might have been 600 to 700…but this is a guess.

As a JITEM employee, did you kill anyone?

I do not want to answer this question.

During the time you worked for JITEM, there was a peak in murders without known assailants. How many murders did you witness?

Yes, this was the time with the most murders. They started in 1993 and continued until 1997, until the Susurluk event. Especially in those four years, there were many murders.

Who was Diyarbakır JITEM commander at that time?

JITEM commander was Abdülkerim Kırca, and Diyarbakır JITEM team commander was Zahit Engin. I personally witnessed around 30 operations during that time. But there are hundreds of operations and murders during that time that I did not take part in or witness. Our group carried out around 30 to 40. And then there were the ones that the Diyarbakir team did under the command of Zahit Engin.

Did all JITEM operations end in death?

They all did. I will tell you an interesting story. There was a young man called İhsan Haran, he was said to be a PKK member. His family had migrated to Diyarbakır from an emptied village in Lice. […] He was taken to JITEM and questioned. Then he was taken in the direction of Silvan, and he was left on a piece of land, with a bullet in his head. Later I heard from commander Abdülkerim Kırca that he did not die from that bullet. He walked to Batman and went to hospital. He then reported what had happened. The Batman team was informed, and they told the Diyarbakır team.

And?

They called Kırca on the phone and told him. He said, “Okay, take him to your team immediately, wait. We are coming.” Kırca told me this himself.

Why would a commander tell you this?

He was accusing the ones carrying out the first execution of having botched the job. He said, “The idiots did not kill him. The guy went to the city and to hospital. We went again and completed the job.” Abdülkerim Kırca took some staff with him to Batman, and they took the young man to the plot of land again and killed him. […]

Did you witness this young man’s killing?

I witnessed the first execution. Kemal Ümlük and expert sergeant Yüksel Uğur were there. They took him behind a heap of earth and killed him at night. I did not see who killed him. He was questioned at JITEM and then taken to the plot of land by car.

Why was he killed?

Because he was supposed to be a PKK member…In the Diyarbakır area JITEM generally got its information about the PKK from informer Serpil Toprak. She also worked for JITEM as a civil servant. For instance, it was she who made JITEM take a young man called Mehemt Salim Dönen and his uncle from Silvan. She saw them at a military hospital. The young man was undergoing his medical examination prior to starting his military service and had come with his ncle. Serpil told me that we should call the commander and tell him. Kırca was having dental treatment at Dicle University hospital. We called him. “Do the necessary and take him. I’m coming.” We went to the military hospital by car and took the young man and his uncle to JITEM. The commander came from the dentist’s and started the questioning.

How were they killed?

The uncle had no connections, but we also took him so that he could not report anything. Uncle and nephew were strangled at JITEM and thrown out on the Silvan road.

Did commander Abdülkerim Kırca strangle them?

No, he gave the command. Sometimes when there was questioning with torture, the commander stayed in the room, sometimes he went to his own room and had a drink. These murders were always carried out at night, and torture was carried out after work hours in the evening, when the regular soldiers had gone back to their ward. There were ordinary soldiers working as tea makers, post officers for JITEM during the day. […] There were other military units and institutions in the area. They were not supposed to hear the sound from the torture. […]

How many people from JITEM stayed behind for a night shift for torture and executions?

Depending on the job, four to five people.

How and by how many people were the victims strangled?

With a strangling wire or a cable, sometimes a strong TV cable. Either two or three people strangled them. Torture lasted one or two nights. They were not killed immediately. So that they would not die without making a statement, they were given a slice of bread.

The young man who was killed with his uncle, had he not left the PKK?

Seeing as he was going to the military, he had left the PKK, because a PKK member does not go to the army. Especially not someone who had a higher position…But even if they had left the PKK, they were killed by JITEM. For example, there was a young university student called Servet Aslan. He had a girlfriend called Fatma from Mersin. There was no accusation made about the girl, she was not involved. Following a statement by civil servant informant Serpil, these two university students were taken in after being found walking hand-in-hand in Diyarbakir city. The young man had never gone to the mountains, and he had his girlfriend with him.

What does that mean?

They were in love and they were leading a normal life. A PKK militant would never walk through Diyarbakır city hand-in-hand with a girlfriend. But although the young man cried and said he was not with the PKK…

They were also killed?

Yes, they were also killed…There was a Sergeant Major called Mehmet Çapur. Kırca gave the command. The young couple were taken in the direction of Sivas. They were killed and thrown at the roadside. They were questioned and tortured for two days before. Abdülkerim Kırca himself tortured that girl.

Where is the informant Serpil Toprak now?

She was transferred to Erzurum, where she continued as a civil servant and also completed her nursing education which she had interrupted before. JITEM organised her college registration. We heard that she married a lecturer there.

When you took people outside of the city to kill them, did you put them in the boot of the car?

Sometimes we took them in the backseat, between two members of staff. Sometimes we took them covered in a coat, as if they were ill.

How far out of the city did you go to kill them?

For example, İdris Yıldırım was taken from Silopi (a district in Şırnak) and taken to Elazığ, 150 km away. The reason was that the JITEM employee responsible for his capture lived in Silopi and feared suspicions. He was killed far away in order to protect a JITEM informant. His body was burnt so that no one would identify him.

Who did you work with at JITEM?

From 1990 I worked for Cem Ersever and his deputy Aytekin Özen for about two years. When they left, Cahit Aydin and his deputy Nurettin Ata took their places. Then Abdülkerim Kırca came. I worked with him the longest. Normally each commander stayed two years, but he stayed three, four years. I also worked with Ali Yıldız and Cemal Temizöz.

Did you only witness what Abdülkerim Kırca did? What did the others do?

The most murders happened during Kırca’s time. There were some during Cem Ersever’s time, but not so many. For example, the next commander, Ali Yıldız, acted politically. He never said in front of informants, “Take this person in.” He acted as if there was only normal intelligence reporting. But the Diyarbakır JITEM team led by Zahit Engin was under his command, and they constantly took people to JITEM, questioned them and killed them. We saw and heard about this. People were screaming in the cells and later disappeared. There was a waste container behind the building. We saw how Şehmuz Çavuş or others from the team took the clothes and personal belongings of people there and burnt them. (ND/EÜ)

* This interview was published in Taraf newspaper on 27 January 2009. The headline was changed by bianet.

Taraf newspaper - İstanbul

29 January 2009, Thursday

Neşe DÜZEL

The Baby in the Iron Womb

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 07:33:00 +0000

One treads carefully in the Turkish presence. Turkey is no joke.
--Jan Morris

It's a tough audience, the Turkish parliament. Say the wrong thing and you'll quickly discover the disadvantages of growing a mustache. The above photograph was taken 21 December 2008 after a Kurdish deputy of the Democratic Society Party (DTP) got up and told his fellow MPs that it was high time for Turkey to face up to the Armenian Genocide of 1915. As a Kurd, of course, he had his motives for this deliberate provocation: he knew that until the Turks confronted the truth about 1915, they would never recognize reality about the Kurds. It was a gutsy move. He, his DTP party colleagues, and millions of other people are still waiting for something other than a fist in the face.

On April 6, in Ankara, Barack Obama faced the same uncertainties. You could see it on the videos: the tiniest dent in that iron assurance we have come to expect of him. Perhaps it was because Michelle, his partner in world conquest, had left him to be with their daughters back home. In any case, he seemed slightly hesitant as he spoke to the Turkish parliament. "Who are these people?" one can almost hear him thinking; or, perhaps he was mesmerized by the sight of all those mustaches. This was not an easy crowd, nothing like those cheerful Europeans in Prague and London, delirious at having found a U.S. President who actually seemed to have a brain in his head. Most of Obama's Ankara speech, said reports, was greeted with silence.

But, to begin with a generalization, it was as good a speech as one could expect, given the occasion. In it nuance, nonsense, diplomacy, and willful disregard of reality found equal expression. Someone from the military-industrial-diplomatic complex worked hard on this text, and it showed.

First, the nonsense. Those who take a jaundiced view of Turkish nationalism can find plenty of it in Obama's words. He began his speech with the usual--a homage to Ataturk, the Republic's founder--by referring to the morning's signal event, the requisite wreath-laying at Fred's tomb. Here his restraint was admirable. At no point did Obama point out the absurdity of a free and quasi-democratic people, a NATO member and EU-aspirant, bowing and scraping before a personality cult that rivals that of Kim il-Sung.

Obama then moved on to the main event: friendly persuasion and flattery. There were references to Turkey's democracy, a dubious concept, as well as to the friendship between our two peoples--which really is a lie, since I doubt that more than five Americans out of a hundred could find Turkey on a map. (Hell, they can't even find their own country!) Here the message was, Let's Cooperate. The two nations, he said, were working together for peace and prosperity, as was appropriate. Obama affirmed U.S. support for Turkey's EU candidacy. (Which he can do because he knows that France and Germany will have the guts to tell them No.) Cliches like Resolute Ally, Responsible Partner, and Bridges Over the Bosphorus were given the requisite airing. Two Turkish basketball players were duly noted. Obama praised the Turks for their progress (non-existent) on penal code reform, as well as for their establishment (scorned by most Kurds) of a TV station broadcasting in Kurdish. This is where it began to get interesting:

These achievements have created new laws that must be implemented, and a momentum that should be sustained. For democracies cannot be static: they must move forward.

In other words, We know that you've passed a few laws. But you have to make them work; otherwise it's just an empty form. (Which is the game, Turkey-watchers know, that the Turks have always played.)

Freedom of religion and expression lead to a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state, which is why steps like reopening the Halki Seminary will send such an important signal inside Turkey and beyond. An enduring commitment to the rule of law is the only way to achieve the security that comes from justice for all people. Robust minority rights let societies benefit from the full measure of contributions from all citizens.

Note: "a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state." This is the toughest sell of all, the idea that the freedoms Turkish officials fear so greatly could actually strengthen their beloved, all-important Turkish State. This is the heart of the matter. And the Halki Seminary? It's an interesting gambit, a reference to a long-closed seminary near Istanbul which the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate desperately needs to have reopened if it is going to sustain itself in its ancient home. If you really become a democracy, Obama is arguing, you become stronger. And upholding minority rights is the key.

I say this as the President of a country that not too long ago made it hard for someone who looks like me to vote. But it is precisely that capacity to change that enriches our countries. Every challenge that we face is more easily met if we tend to our own democratic foundation.

Note: "that enriches our countries"; using the language of inclusion to cajole the listeners into going along. Obama then moved on to admission of past American sins, like slavery, in order to slide into that most treacherous of quicksands, the Turkish treatment of Armenians.

Human endeavor is by its nature imperfect. History, unresolved, can be a heavy weight. Each country must work through its past. And reckoning with the past can help us seize a better future. I know there are strong views in this chamber about the terrible events of 1915. While there has been a good deal of commentary about my views, this is really about how the Turkish and Armenian people deal with the past. And the best way forward for the Turkish and Armenian people is a process that works through the past in a way that is honest, open and constructive.

No one, I submit, is ever going to make a more diplomatic, nuanced statement about this subject. With this Obama and his speechwriters have slipped through a narrow opening indeed. If the "full and frank exchange of views" of diplomatic doublespeak were taken literally, a visitor might have said, "Grow up, people, and stop being afraid. Yes, the murderers of a million Armenians were your ancestors, but the ordinary Turks who worked to save their Armenian neighbors were also your ancestors, as were the army units which refused to participate, and the Ottoman generals and officials who refused to go along. Ataturk himself called it a 'shameful act.' So what is your problem?" Obama would never have said such a thing, but for what he did say he deserves credit.

So for the Greek patriarchate and the Armenian Genocide, two touchy subjects, we can give Obama decent marks. He went on to make a statement which was, for America's tone-deaf news media, a big deal: "[T]he United States is not at war with Islam." And he made a pitch for Turkey's cooperation in Iraq and Afghanistan. But for Turkey's biggest problem, the Kurds, Obama was as silent as a Turk at Easter. True, he had declared himself in favor of "robust minority rights." But in a Turkey defined by the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, "minority" does not apply to the Kurds. Unlike Jews, Greeks, and Armenians, 15 million Kurds do not have official "minority" status in Turkey. They are full-fledged citizens, indigenous residents of Anatolia for thousands of years, who have a culture and language that has never been recognized by the Turkish Republic.

In a short meeting with Ahmet Turk, vice-chairman of the DTP and the "grand old man" of Kurdish politics in Turkey, Obama expressed "sympathy" for the Kurds but said what he had to say, that violence was not a solution for the Kurdish problem. As he said this, Turkey's Kurdish provinces were still reeling from the latest outbreaks of police violence, which left two Kurds dead and a Kurdish female deputy of the DTP injured after being beaten by the state's "security forces." Despite these almost daily reports, it is still official U.S. policy that the PKK, which has made repeated offers of negotiation, is a "terrorist group"; and the Turkish government, which rarely sees a head that doesn't deserve beating or an F-16 that isn't worth buying, is a beacon for democracy in the Middle East.

So nothing really has changed. Obama's speech made some intriguing gambits, and the symbolism of meeting with Kurdish MPs, a group that has been shunned up to now, will no doubt resonate; but without straight talk and an abandonment of the lavish armaments contracts that are the true core of Turkish-American relations, nothing ever will change. Like a baby in an iron womb, Turkish democracy has gestated for decades without hope of accouchement. Turkey's governance has always had one goal: to maintain the state and its power. And the pattern continues. For the sake of the all-important State, political parties have been closed, papers shut down, reporters imprisoned, YouTube prohibited, websites darkened, letters of the alphabet proscribed, and thought crimes punished. While murderers of liberals and ethnic minorities, caught red-handed, go unpunished, people who speak the simplest truths are arraigned and convicted within weeks. Inquiries into the most blatant thuggery drag on, without resolution, for years. Judges render verdicts that defy common sense, then retire to drink tea out of tulip-shaped glasses.

And so it goes.

The Five Thousand-Meter Fantasy

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Massis

People never seem to tire of the Noah myth. It has it all: the hopeless depravity of mankind (always a popular theme) complemented by the contrasting goodness of Noah complete with flowing white locks and beard; the "I'm-fed-up-with-all-this-fornicating" pronouncement from God; the mighty cubit-stretching labor on the big round boat; then the parade of all those darling animal couples, plus the Flood itself. And ending it all, we get not a bang, not a whimper, but a wonderfully satisfying crunch as the Ark comes to rest on "Mt. Ararat," after which the survivors get to go forth, procreate, and become sinful all over again.

There must be something magical about this tale; why else would so many people spend so many years searching, wrinkling their brows, and stroking their chins in perplexity over the "Legend of the Lost Ark," the "Mysteries of the Great Ararat," or whatever. Other traditions, Jewish and Islamic, also tell Noah's story, but only American Christians, it seems, are so keen on it that, every few years, some well-heeled evangelical businessman (or, once, an ex-astronaut) will open up his wallet and mount a pseudo-scientific expedition to that heap of Kurdo-Armenian rock known as "Mt Ararat." The Ark enthusiasts never quit. They are, after all, not that far theologically from the people who find Jesus on the scorched exteriors of carbohydrates. They have seen--they say--images of the Ark in aerial photographs. They've analyzed fragments of wood. They've done carbon-dating and spectography. They've puzzled and pondered and pretty much done everything they could to find an answer. They are, dare I say it, just a little bit of cuckoo. As Dave Barry has noted, there is a very fine line between the words "hobby" and "mental illness."

The shares of Cuckoo Inc., however, are always in a bull market, and the Noah business will never go out of style. Readers who want to confirm this can find a nicely-done history of Ark searches at Wikipedia. My favorites (of course) are the hoaxers, especially George Jammal, a guy in California whose splinter from the Ark turned out to be wood he found on a rail-bed, then aged at home in his oven using various sauces. The image this evokes, that of museum graybeards closely inspecting the artifact, wondering why it would smell faintly of teriyaki, never fails to brighten my day. If, however, you're educated (i.e., an elitist liberal humanist snob), you know that the Genesis flood myth is just one of many in the world, the most famous being that of Gilgamesh. And you know that the "Mt. Ararat" of eastern Turkey has nothing to do with a Mesopotamian flood story. That, and the "Real Honest-to-God Landing Place," are what this piece is all about.

First, let me assure you: it will not be extensive. All I have is a few pictures of the Genuine Article--one taken by a dead Englishwoman, two others by Kurdish outlaws. What "Genuine Article"? A fair question. To answer it, I'll start off by raiding my own cupboard. The following passage is taken from the Notes (p.336) at the end of Fever and Thirst:

Here it must be said that few knowledgeable travelers take seriously the claims of "Mt. Ararat" in Turkey to be the resting place of Noah's Ark. In the Middle East, only the Armenians regard the "mountains of Ararat" (Genesis 8:4) to be this particular peak. The name "Ararat" in the Old Testament clearly denotes a country or geographical area, not a specific mountain, and the three A's in the name are an important indicator. During the early Christian era, when scholars were trying to translate Biblical texts in Aramaic, which does not have vowels, into Byzantine Greek, which does, they ran into problems with unknown words. When dealing with the story of Noah's Ark, they came upon a name they did not recognize: a place denoted by the symbols for -R-R-T. In the absence of a clear answer, they gave up and inserted -A- in the three slots indicated. Thus "Ararat" was produced. We now know this ancient country by its more accurate name: Urartu, a kingdom centered upon Lake Van which was a rival to Assyria. Thus, an accurate translation of Genesis would say that Noah's Ark landed on the "mountains of Urartu," which is no more specific than saying "the mountains of Switzerland." (Additional note: the Peshitta, the ancient version of the Bible used by the East Syrian Church, states that Noah's Ark landed on the "Turé Kardu"; i.e., the mountains of the Kurds.)

But, you may object, the mountain in question is still called "Ararat." Why is it called that if it isn't the right one? Because that isn't the mountain's correct name. In fact, it was a European, William of Rubruck, who first stuck that label on it in the 13th century A.D., and it was Europeans thereafter who perpetuated the mistake. The Armenians, then and now, called it Massis, even though, after they became the first officially Christian nation, in 301 A.D., they adopted this imposing peak as the landing-place of Noah. Still, to them it is Massis. This is why, when you drive the streets of south Glendale, California, through the largest concentration of Armenians in the U.S., you see signs on the storefronts saying things like "Massis Laundry," "Massis Bakery," or "Massis Armenian Grocery." A mountain as imposing as this one (photo above) needs no Ark legend to justify its status as a national symbol.

Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) was far too intelligent to take the King James Version at face value. In the spring of 1909 the great explorer found herself at Judi Dagh (Cudi Dagi) near the town of Cizre, just east of the Tigris in southeast Turkey. On 14 May she wrote to her mother in County Durham:

On the first [day here at Judi Dagh] I climbed up into the hills and saw a very ancient fortress on a crag - Assyrian I suspect for there was an Assyrian stele below it. My guides were the Protestant priest, Kas Mattai, and his brother Shim'an...I walked through the oak woods on the mountain sides all the morning with Kas Mattai and it was so wonderfully beautiful that I determined to have another day of it and go to a summit.

Even in May, the Tigris valley heat is merciless, and Miss Bell could not resist the idea of making for the summit:

So yesterday we set off at 4 and climbed through the oak woods for 2 hours and then we came out onto the mountain tops where the snow was still lying in great wreaths and the high mountain flowers were in bloom. There were few of the real alpines - perhaps I wasn't high enough up for them - but the great beauty was the bulbs.

Gertrude Bell was English, and like any English writer worthy of the name she could not resist a thorough (and tedious) identification of every flower that she encountered. At last, however:

But I forgot to tell you what it was I came out to see - I wasn't just taking the air in the mountains, I went up to look at - the Ark.

That's right: the Ark. She had climbed up Judi Dagh to find "Noah's Ark." Gertrude, in her rambling way, goes on to explain:

There is a large body of opinion in favour of this [Judi Dagh] having been the place where it alighted and I also belong to this school of thought partly because, you see, I have seen the Ark there and partly because, since the Flood legends are Babylonian, it's far more likely that they chose for their mountain the first high mountain that they knew (which is this Judi Dagh) rather than a place far away in remote Armenia.

Right. In other words, the people who set down these legends lived in the plains of Mesopotamia. The present-day "Mt Ararat" of eastern Turkey was located far away from any that they knew. They did, however, know those sizable ranges which hemmed in the north reaches of the Tigris. And the first and most visible of these was Judi Dagh, Mt. Judi, crowding in against the left bank of the great river. That is why, of the ancient sources, one (the Koran) specifically identifies Judi as the landing place of the Ark, and two others call it "the mountains of the Kardu" and "the mountains of Urartu," which amounts to the same thing.

We got up to the Ark about 9 - it was a most wonderful place from which you could see the whole world, though I must confess there isn't much of the Ark left.

An understatement, as we can see from Miss Bell's photograph (above). Obviously this is not the Ark per se, merely a ziyaret, a place of pilgrimage, for those who come to pay homage to Nebi Nuh, the Prophet Noah. It was periodically used as a monastery for solitary anchorites who came to read the Scriptures and meditate. By Gertrude Bell's time it was abandoned and open to the sky. Until modern times, accounts tell us, this was the place where people of the three monotheistic faiths, Christian, Muslim, and Jew, met for a sacrificial feast every September to honor Noah. Modern wars and frontiers have put an end to that tradition. Gertrude's idyll ended with a presage:

We stayed [at the Ark] many hours, lunched and slept and looked at the view and breathed the delicious cold air. And at last reluctantly we came down and walked back for a long way over the tops of the hills. And here we had a little adventure. We met some Kurdish shepherds who had brought their flocks up to the top of Judi Dagh in order to avoid paying the sheep tax; and they took us for soldiers and we had to explain the true situation amidst rifle shots.

Kurds with rifles, on the lookout for Turkish soldiers. How little has changed. But now those Kurds are young men and women, often educated people from the cities, and in their back pockets they carry digital cameras:

This is Judi Dagh in the 21st century: the shrine of Nebi Nuh, the prophet Noah, identified as such in the online photo galleries of the "People's Defense Forces," the HPG, the armed force usually known as the PKK, which has been fighting the Turkish Army on these slopes since the 1980s. Nothing in its shape resembles Gertrude Bell's "Ark," for indeed this is not the same place. Bell, as she notes in her book "Amurath to Amurath," had no desire to leave the cool summit and descend the southern slopes of the mountain to visit this place. Inside, according to the PKK website, we find "Noah's grave":

Like most such artifacts it is more impressive from a distance than up close; and who would wish to go down on his knees, sift through the grains of earth, and deliver a scientific judgment on its legend's authenticity? I can see why an archaeologist would find meaning and excitement in such an endeavor. For me, the magic is in the distance; the mystery is its own reward.

And that other mountain, the Five-thousand Meter Fantasy on the Armenian border? Close up it is black rock and lava flows, useful only for tour guides, hobbyists, guerrillas, and Kurds who have flocks to graze. Me, I'm on Judi's side.

Note: This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, at Progressive Historians.

The Mona Lisa of Kurdistan

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 09:02:00 +0000

Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain.
--Randall Jarrell, "90 North" (1942)

Aynur ("moonlight") is her name, and though you can't see it, in her right hand she carries an AK-47. She died, aged 23, on 30 September 2005, somewhere on the slopes of Cudi Dagi (pron. Judi Dah), a mountain just north of the Iraqi-Turkish border and immediately east of the River Tigris. It was, said the PKK dispatch, the result of an accident, not combat. A fall? It's certainly possible. Something else? The imagination recoils. Anything could have happened, including many things that don't bear thinking about. At least she wasn't ripped apart by gunfire. "And I am glad," some Turkish draftee's mother might say, "that she didn't get a chance to kill my son."

A draftee may very well have feared Aynur, for she had joined what is probably the most formidable women's army in the world. Still, it's hard to look at this beautiful girl with anything but pain and regret. Her youth has been cut off, and for what? (Always a fair question when talking about war, and always impossible to answer.) But say this for Aynur: she had a life. It may have been short, and it may have ended badly, but it was a life. She didn't spend it covered by a black tent, looking at the world through two slits in the cloth. She didn't "dishonor" her family by getting raped, or falling in love, or smiling too often, thus obliging her father, or brothers, or other "restorers of the family honor" to throw her off a cliff, shoot her, throw her in a river to drown, or mash her face to a pulp with rocks. On a more humdrum level she didn't get worked to death carrying eight children, picking cotton in 100-degree heat, or serving as a beast of burden for a husband chosen by her family. She didn't have to follow the cows around on hot summer days, picking up their warm shit in her hands and forming it into cakes to be burnt for fuel in the winter. Hell no to all of this. She had friends in high places. She got to be a guerrilla.

Aynur was born in 1982 in Siirt, capital of the like-named province in southeast Turkey. Siirt, mainly a Kurdish town, with a few Turks and Arabs for good measure, lies in the mountain-rimmed valley of the Bohtan River, a tributary of the Tigris which rises in the high mountains to the south of Lake Van. We can't tell from the martyrs registry at HPG-Online whether Aynur was born in the town itself or in a neighboring village. It could have been either one. For the last thirty years and more, the story of Kurds in southeast Turkey has been one of westward migration: from war-ravaged village to town, from the town to the large cities--Ankara, Izmir, Istanbul--and from those cities to Europe. It is one of the great migrations of history. Istanbul, with 2 million Kurds, is now the largest Kurdish city in the world. Kurds turn up on Greek Island shores and in the streets of Athens. They've been videotaped bursting out of a detention camp in Calais and storming (unsuccessfully) the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. In 2001 one refugee ship, a decrepit Cambodia-registered hulk, was pointed at a beach on the French Riviera, between Cannes and St. Tropez, set on course to ground itself, and abandoned by its Greek crew, who made their escape in a speedboat. Packed onboard were 908 Kurds from Iraq and Turkey, including three babies who had been born enroute. Aynur's family were probably on the same kind of journey, refugees from poverty and war in the East. We can assume this because of where she joined the PKK--on 1 October 2002, in Istanbul. This is a long way from Siirt.

Why did she go off to war? Why would she leave behind the possibility of middle-class happiness--of education, marriage, and a family? And it is, indeed, a possibility. Turkey's burgeoning middle class is full of such success stories. It could have been for a hundred reasons, from youthful idealism to anger to despair. Perhaps she was already betrothed to someone that she hated. That may have been reason enough. But the important question is, why did she find the PKK attractive? And why do young Kurds continue along the same dangerous path?

Many Kurds, after all, would find mountain life totally repugnant. They are known traditionally as a mountain people, but now most are city-dwellers. A rebel group needs discipline to keep its soldiers in line. This requires ideology, the kind of indoctrination that needs regular attendance at meetings where boredom is not allowed. But Turkey's Kurds have plenty of experience with boredom and indoctrination, having faced it all their lives at school. Now, instead of Ataturk-worship, love of The Charismatic Leader (Abdullah Ocalan, or "Apo") is required. Love of one's opposite-sex comrades is (alas!) forbidden, but once again, they are coming from a society that has perfected sexual repression. Though not without its bucolic compensations (see past posts), the romance of mountain life must wear off quickly. In "Mehmed's Book," by Nadire Mater, Turkish soldiers complain of the huge, ravenous ground fleas native to the East, and it's unlikely that these would affect PKK fighters any less. Above all, it is Hobbesian in the extreme--that is, if Hobbes's nasty, brutish world included high-powered assault rifles, digital cameras, satellite phones, and regular postings of casualties on the Internet.

Life in the PKK is not summer camp. You can get killed just traveling to the mountains, and after you're there, killing is the name of the game, with a high probability that you too will end up as a corpse, and a mutilated corpse at that. Turkish commandos, all professional soldiers or highly trained volunteers, have made a reputation for it. In the '90s, photos appeared on the Internet showing members of the Hakkari Mountain Commandos posing with the severed heads of PKK guerrillas, whose blood stained the snow. In "Mehmed's Book," one returned soldier described how the Bolu Commandos obtained the distinctive key rings worn in their belt loops. These in fact were the severed ears of PKK guerrillas, which had been soaked overnight in Coca-Cola to eat away the flesh. The remaining cartilage formed the perfect shape for stringing keys.

If mutilation isn't deterrent enough, there is the brutal truth of what modern weaponry can do to the human body. Here it's best not to linger. But one often-ignored fact must be mentioned. The high-velocity ammunition fired by modern assault rifles, especially the American M-16 and its derivatives (including the "Bushmaster" used by John Muhammad, the D.C. Sniper), produces gaping, catastrophic exit wounds. These are not the neat, precise kills produced by deer rifles. By their very nature they are mutilating weapons.

So why do volunteers continue to make their way to the mountains, to join up and die? I can think of a lot of reasons, including a simple, unforced comradeship that is evident in so many of their photographs. But sooner or later it comes down to one thing: the nature of the Turkish State.

The people of the Republic of Turkey have been laboring for 84 years to establish a prosperous, unified nation-state, and despite formidable obstacles--a landscape packed with barren mountains, minimal arable land, and few natural resources--they have succeeded to a remarkable degree. When I was in Turkey, beginning in 1965, it was not unusual at all to see peasants harvesting grain by hand and threshing it on stone floors, using ox-drawn wooden sledges whose runners were studded with flints. To get rid of the chaff, they did what people had done for millennia: pitch the grain into the air and let the wind carry it away. In Ankara, horse carts made most of the deliveries, and peasant boys, even in the middle of the day, could be seen huddled with flocks of sheep on the traffic islands. Now, an ad in the 17 Nov. 2007 Economist exhorts: "Invest in Turkey: Population of 70 million...400,000 university graduates per year...17th largest economy in the world...6th largest economy in the EU...Average GDP growth of 7.4% per year..." Even allowing for the hyperbole of such ads, it is obvious that the wooden sledges are gone forever.

Then there is the unity, the State-enforced Turkishness which is supposed to dominate all. In one important way, this ideology is totally justified. In 1841, while traveling alone in the far east of Anatolia, an American physician, Dr. Asahel Grant of Waterville, New York, wrote a letter home. There were, he said, forty people traveling in his caravan:

"Not one with whom I can exchange a word in my native language, but Turks, Armenians, and Koords as they are, they all speak Turkish, and in this I converse, think, and dream."

As Grant noted, Turkish truly is the language of Anatolia, and it has been for close to a millennium. With its relative simplicity and regularity (no irregular verbs, no gender problems in its nouns and adjectives, no complicated verb declensions), Turkish makes an excellent common language, and the ease with which it can adopt foreign loan words is truly remarkable. The Kurdish PKK guerrillas use Turkish for their press releases and website. Their jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan, speaks excellent Turkish. Under the Ottoman Empire even the Greek Christians of Anatolia spoke Turkish, and their churches featured inscriptions in the Turkish language--written using the Greek alphabet. After 1923 these Turkish-speaking "Greeks" were shipped off to Greece in the great population exchange which followed the Treaty of Lausanne, and Greek-speaking "Turks" came to Turkey. In Turkey, no matter what the province, the Turkish language dominates--and will for a very long time.

One central fact should be remembered when we look at the Republic of Turkey and its desire that all its citizens call themselves Turks. This is the fact that in 1923, when the Republic was declared, Turkey contained a large number of Muslim refugees, peoples driven from their homelands during the previous century of Ottoman wars. Among them were Georgians, Circassians, and other Caucasian tribes. ("Circassian" and "Caucasian" being in fact umbrella terms covering many separate linguistic groups.) From the Balkans came Pomaks (Bulgarian Muslims), Bosnians, Albanians, and Macedonians. Greek Muslims came from Crete, the Greek Islands, Thrace, and the mainland. Tartars came from the Crimea, and Azeri Turks from Azerbaijan. Even Mustafa Kemal himself, later Ataturk, was a kind of refugee, since his birthplace, the city of Salonika (now Thessaloniki) was no longer in Turkey. Given these facts, and the commonality of the Turkish language, it is quite logical that the Nationalists of Mustafa Kemal would say to this diverse group, "Now we will call ourselves Turks."

All, that is, except for one group. They also--the men at least--had long used the Turkish language as a medium of trade and intercourse. But the Kurds were an indigenous Anatolian people, with their own languages, dialects, songs, and traditions. In fact, they had lived there long before the Turkish language arrived. Even in the Haymana plateau, immediately to the west of Ankara, there existed Kurdish tribes who were native to the area. And there were so many of them, so many who had fought faithfully with the Turks during a multitude of wars. For immigrant Georgians, Albanians, etc., voluntarily assuming a Turkish identity made sense. But for millions of Kurds who had always lived in Anatolia it made no sense at all. It is not possible to turn Italians into Germans by passing a decree; nor did it work for the Kurds.

And yet, that is precisely what Turkish Nationalist governments set out to do. When Freya Stark passed through Hakkari in the 1950s, she noted that officials never used the word "Kurd." Usually they were "the local people"; officially they became "Mountain Turks." One allegation held that their name ("Kurt" in Turkish) was just an anagram for "Turk." According to official mythology, this name was imitative. It snows a lot in the East of Turkey, after all, and when people walk on its crusted surface their boots make a sound like "kurt-kurt-kurt." As simply as that, their origin was explained. They were really just Turks who crunched the snow. As for their language, this was dismissed as gibberish, a muddied-up version of Turkish. Its use was forbidden: in the street, in school, in business--theoretically everywhere, even in the home.

This last insult was the least tolerable of all, for there is nothing that defines a human identity more than the language he speaks. Not for nothing is this called his Mother Tongue. Language gives us birth; it shapes our primal relation with our selves, our friends, the world in which we live. Also, on a more practical level, it is called our "mother tongue" because it is in those sounds that we first speak to our mothers. And even in a relentlessly male culture like Turkey, no one is more important than the mother of the family. In Turkey, when a person's "ethnic" background is in doubt, you don't ask for a label. You ask what language he speaks to his mother.

Kurds who grow up in such a system become like seedling oaks sprouting in pavement. Consider the case of Serafettin Elci. Born in Cizre, on the Tigris near the Iraqi border, in 1938, he went to university and grew up to become a thoroughly-assimilated Turkish Kurd. After years in Parliament, from 1979-80 he served as Minister of Public Works in the government of Bulent Ecevit. Finally, he got fed up, and in 1979 he uttered the unspeakable. "I am a Kurd," he said. "There are Kurds in Turkey." For this he spent two years in prison. Now he is a free man, and he is left alone by the authorities. But it's safe to assume that he will never again be a government minister.

Then there was the massacre of Guclukonak (Pron. Gootch'-loo-ko-nock), in 1996. In a report by Amnesty International the facts are laid out, and their essence is such that no adjective really does them justice. Briefly, this is what happened. In January 1996 a minibus carrying eleven Kurds, most of them affiliated with the Village Guards (Kurds recruited by the government), was attacked by persons unknown near the village of Guclukonak, in southeast Turkey. The van was riddled with gunfire and set ablaze. All eleven men died. The PKK, or "Kurdistan Workers Party," was immediately accused of the massacre, and the Turkish media accepted their guilt unquestioningly. But the facts didn't add up.

For one thing, the minibus had been attacked on a road that was very close to two military checkpoints, in an area right next to the Tigris River and a guard post on the opposite bank. As a nearby villager noted, they had to be "birds or earthworms" to get away unseen. Next, the victims showed no sign of having tried to escape the fire. Moreover, their identity cards had all survived the blaze, and there was no indication that the cards had been through any kind of fire, especially one fueled by gasoline.

In view of these and other suspicious facts, a delegation from several non-governmental organizations (trade unions, human rights organizations, etc.) came out to inquire. Their report, presented in April, stated the obvious: that the security forces were deeply implicated in planting and suppressing evidence, and that an independent government agency should begin an immediate investigation. When nothing was done after a year, three members of the delegation repeated their statement. Their reward: indictment by the state prosecutor on charges of "insulting the military and security forces." After a short trial they were convicted and sentenced to ten months imprisonment. No one from the military, meanwhile, was ever charged in the Guclukonak massacre. To this day it is referred to in the media as an example of PKK terrorism.

Consider this tale and a thousand injustices like it, and imagine their collective impact. Imagine that you, like Aynur, are a youth of Kurdish background living in Turkey. It is possible that you have attended school, though it might not have been well-equipped with instructors or modern equipment. But even if you received a good education you aren't likely to forget the language of your mother, and you'll be even more disinclined to tolerate the relentless self-congratulations of a State which continues to beat up your friends. So you hope for a normal life in your own beloved homeland, the kind that newspapers, television, and the Internet have flashed in front of you: higher education, perhaps, a decent job, and a family, to name but a few. Like anyone your age, you are prey to a thousand notions, enthusiasms, and misconceptions, and nowhere is it easy to see a way through the fog of state brutality and propaganda. Meanwhile, looming above you, blotting out the sun, your government bears down like a giant hydraulic press, whose bearing plate, waiting to crush you, is etched with the grey visage of Father Turk. If you think this is an unattractive prospect, you are right. And yet you must make a choice:

"When you and yours have absolutely no future, when you have seen and suffered unspeakable horrors, when you can see no way forward, it is very comforting to find a simple, straight way forward, and it is even an added bonus that this path does not involve critical thinking." (Paul White, Lecturer in Kurdish Studies, Deakin University, Australia)

This is why, despite all the Turks' American bombs and high-tech gadgetry, the PKK continues to gain recruits. And it is, we can assume, why the beautiful Aynur lies in an unknown grave, on the original mountain of Noah.

Note: This is a rewritten version of a post which originally appeared at www.progressivehistorians.com.

All the Instruments Agree

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 07:51:00 +0000

Hrant Dink, d. 19 January 2007

But in the importance and noise of tomorrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom;
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

--W.H.A., "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" (d. January 1939)

The Second Anniversary of Disgust

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 09:39:00 +0000

Note to readers: This piece was originally published a year ago at ProgressiveHistorians.com. Today is not only Martin Luther King Day, and the day before Barack Obama's inauguration. It is also the second anniversary of another murder. Read on.

As I write this, the good and decent people of Istanbul (NOT the people in the photo) are marking the first anniversary of Disgust. This is not the ordinary disgust felt when people perceive the thousand injustices of daily life; it was the emotion they felt when, on 19 January 2007, the Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink was gunned down in front of his newspaper's office in central Istanbul. This was no ordinary crime. It was predictable and preventable. The killer was easily found. The police, who could have forestalled it, did not. Instead, some of them gathered around the crime's teen-aged perpetrator after his capture and congratulated him. (Two of the officers got in trouble for this--not for having congratulated the murderer, but for having leaked the images to the media.) The Istanbul police were warned of the killer's departure from Trabzon, his hometown on the Black Sea, and they were told of his mission. Yet they did nothing. Several officers have been charged, but serious consequences seem unlikely. In the aftermath, banner-waving football fans in central Turkey expressed solidarity with Hrant Dink's killer, and a nationalist singer wrote a song commemorating the deed.

It's all in a day's work for Turkey's nationalist thugs, its police, and the good people who are forced to live with them. Anyone looking at today's Turkey has to think wistfully of Al Gore and the Nobel Prize. Certainly I respect the man and his global warming campaign. But the more I look at the Turkish political scene, and the more I dig into websites and read news items, the more it seems to me that I could find a hundred better candidates for the Nobel just by flying to Turkey and taking a week to meet people. I've said before that in Turkey "the average liberal has more courage than a thousand Americans," and if anything this seems an understatement. Real courage has to be measured against the degree of danger it faces, and nowhere is that danger more extreme than in the Republic of Turkey.

People of the American "left" (for so it must be punctuated--there is no real Left in this country) are fond of pinning the "fascist" label on people like George Bush and his crowd, while the right (not in quotes) has come up with Islamofascists as their catch-word. In fact, neither side has a clue. If you want to meet real fascists, go East, young man. There, in any Turkish town you care to name, you can find the genuine article in half an hour.

Turkish nationalism must be experienced to be believed. Americans, always in search of a new catch phrase, may talk about someone's "take no prisoners" attitude, but they never stop to think what the phrase really means. It's a military order: it says, "Attack and kill. Even if someone tries to surrender, kill him anyway." In Turkey the soldiers of the Right, whether they call themselves Grey Wolves, Idealists, or Commandos, truly take no prisoners. Trained in camps, closely allied with the police and the army, they confront a hostile world with guns at the ready, their minds alert to the slightest hint of disrespect, their eyes always on the lookout for liberal traitors. Hrant Dink was only the latest in their string of hits.

To the Turkish ultra-nationalist, enemies lurk everywhere. He knows this because he learns it in school. Were there Kurdish revolts? No, there were only religious outbreaks fomented by the British. That's what it says in Turkish history books. Do the Greeks plan to re-invade Turkey? Of course. Everyone wants to attack Turkey: they're just waiting for the chance. The Turkish writer Mustafa Akyol recounts the plays he and his schoolmates performed. Rather than Outlaws or Indians, their bad guys were always the English, the French, or the Greeks. I remember one fanatic, a shop-owner whom I met in Amasya, an historic town in Anatolia. When he perceived that I was a foreigner, I replied that, yes, I was an American. "There are lots of Armenians in America," he muttered. "Not that many," I replied, looking around for the exit. On the shop walls were posters of mounted, mustachioed warriors wading exultantly into battle. He thought about my reply for a moment. "In America you have Jews," he said with contempt. "In Turkey, we have Armenians." With a shiver I scurried out.

Intellectuals as well can be trained to participate in the national paranoia. One incident in particular comes to mind. One summer in the 1960s I and some 200 other college graduates found ourselves at an Ivy League college, training to become Peace Corps English teachers in Turkey. Visiting lecturers instructed us in language, history, and culture. One of the topics, inevitably, was the Cyprus problem. One professor, whose last name was obviously Greek, briefed us on the history of the controversy. The next night we got the "Turkish" side.

The man chosen to deliver this address (I'll call him Turan) was one of the kindest and most delightful of men. A scholar perfectly bilingual in Turkish and English, as well as a polished translator into both languages, Turan moved with aplomb in the worlds of academe, business, and literature. The PCVs, myself included, came to know him well, for he had assisted in our training from the beginning. I was, quite simply, in awe of the man.

On the night appointed for Turan's address I took my place in the lecture hall and waited with great interest, my pencil and notebook at the ready. Turan was introduced. Then, smiling, he strode to the lectern and proceeded to deliver the most appalling speech I have ever heard outside the documentaries of Leni Riefenstahl. When he began, Turan pitched his voice slightly below a scream. There, for the next thirty minutes, it remained. Occasionally it dipped somewhat in pitch; more often it rose into a keening wail. Never did it present the slightest coherent argument for a "Turkish position" on the Cyprus problem. Turkish babies were starving; this was clear. Turkish houses were destroyed. Turkish women were being violated. Turkish men were slaughtered. And, yes, Turkish babies were still starving. As a speech, it was quite effective at one thing: it kept the question-and-answer period to a minimum. No one had the least interest in asking questions of someone who had spent the last half hour shrieking at us. (Imagine a press conference in Nuremberg: "Excuse me, Mr. Hitler: could you explain a bit more your position on the Jews?") Afterward, as we stood in line for coffee and cookies, I spied Turan with several embarrassed-looking Volunteers. He smiled at me and nodded, seemingly eager to talk. Somehow I managed a smile, but I knew that talking was out of the question. With my empty notebook in hand, I found a convenient exit.

Turan, of course, was a gentleman. A tone-deaf and rather obtuse gentleman, perhaps, but there was little chance that he would use a knife in the ribs as a political argument. Turkish fascists aren't like that. Codes of behavior don't count when the very survival of the State is in question. [Note: the leader of their party, the Nationalist Action Party, even has "state" as a first name: Devlet Bahceli.] There is, of course, the murder of Hrant Dink to serve as an example, but this past year has seen a rash of nationalist attacks against Kurds, liberals, and Christians. In Turkey not a day goes by that the State security and judicial apparatus don't make a mockery of common sense. To this is now added the incident of the Blood Flag.

In Kirsehir, which I remember as a rather nondescript town in central Anatolia, twenty-one high school students, boys and girls, met after school in the autumn of 2007. There, using blood from their pricked fingers, they dyed a Turkish flag and sent it as a gift to the commander of the Turkish Armed Forces, Gen. Yasar Buyukanit. In an accompanying letter they declared their willingness to shed their blood, all of it, in the service of the nation. The General was delighted and moved. "Truly," he declared, "we are a great nation."

Others weren't so sure. Mustafa Akyol, writing in the Turkish Daily News, compared this banner to the Blutfahne, or "blood flag", of the Nazis, a relic of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch which was carefully preserved and presented at Nazi Party rallies. And the physicians and public health authorities, always spoilsports in this sort of thing, weighed in with horror at the notion of so much blood being mingled in such unsanitary conditions. All in all, it was the kind of incident that is all too common in a country where police power and nationalism reign supreme.

In my last post, I opined that Turkey, given its present balance of political power, has no chance whatever of joining the EU. Indeed, they can only succeed if the European Union gives in and does away with all its requirements for the respect of human rights, and the necessity for elected officials to exert control over the police and armed forces. If they do that, no problem: the Turks will get in whenever they want. And who knows? It may happen, and I for one hope it will.

It takes an Iraqi Kurd, however--in fact, an Iraqi Kurd transplanted to the United States and anointed with a Ph.D. in English--to expose the full absurdity of this quest. Sabah Salih, a Professor of English at Bloomsburg (State) University in Pennsylvania, delivers the goods in the December 25, 2007 edition of the Kurdistan Observer. He calls it "The World's New-Year Message to Turkey," and those who enjoy invective, served piping hot, are in his debt.

"Your nationalism," he begins, "or what’s more grandly referred to in Turkey as state or national ideology, continues to behave as though the world begins and ends with Ankara." He continues:

The problem with this chest-puffing nationalism is not just that it is outdated and autocratic and stuck in the same kind of mindset that gave us two world wars; it is rapidly turning the word Turk into an ugly word.

The high horse of jingoistic self-righteousness that you’ve been riding for all these years is good only at self-deception, but self-deception cannot be a substitute for reality.

To this there is nothing to add. But of course Dr. Salih will also talk about his people, the Kurds:

You’ve got to understand that the Kurd is a Kurd for exactly the same reasons that a Turk is a Turk; Kurds are neither mountain Turks, nor Turks of any kind--they never have been, they never will be. And did I hear you use the term “people of Kurdish origin”? This is definitely not as nasty as the other term, but, as we all know, this term too is designed to misrepresent the Kurdish situation. How could it be otherwise? Your nationalist DNA is all over it. It is yet one more reminder that you still cannot bring yourself to treat the Kurds the way you yourself expect to be treated.

We can draw two conclusions from your treatment of the Kurds: one is that you have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to democracy; and two, it is obvious to us that your nationalism has been the incubator of your Kurdish problem. You have given the Kurds no choice but to fight back--and, unless you start treating them decently, fighting back they will.

Of course, none of this is helped when George Bush, fool that he is, praises Turkey for its "vigorous democracy" and does everything he can to perpetuate the Kurdish war.

Going on a bombing spree against Kurdish villages may satisfy your appetite for bloodletting; unleashing hate on Kurdistan may even make you feel better. But this will only confirm what the Kurds have been saying all along about you: that the solution to the Kurdish problem lies not really with the Kurds but with you; continue with your racist mindset and the problem will become bigger and bigger. It has already engulfed one generation of Kurds and Turks alike. Do you really want another generation of your people to be consumed by this conflict, day in and day out asking what W. H. Auden aptly asked decades ago: “What do you think about . . . this country of ours where nobody is well?”

And at last he strikes at the heart of the matter:

And another thing: You want to join Europe? Beyond the obvious, have you asked yourself what Europe means? Europe is first and foremost a state of mind: the product of two hundred years of fighting against and rejecting and ridiculing the very nationalism that still defines your way of thinking. You ask the Kurds who have taken up arms against you to “repent” and surrender. But isn’t repentance, with its roots in religious orthodoxy and bigotry, the very opposite of what the European consciousness has been all about? For to repent is not just a matter of admitting guilt; it is also committing oneself to a type of thinking that belongs in dictatorships and theocracies, not democracies.

To which I can only say: Happy New Year.

P.S. Mizgin at Rastibini has more, including photographs of the victim, the killers, the survivors.

P.P.S. 1/19/2009. The inquiry into Hrant Dink's murder continues. No one has been tried, no one convicted. Several police officers have been implicated. Hrant Dink's widow, and his many friends, all wait for justice.

"She Committed Suicide"

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Taylor) — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 08:37:00 +0000

Guerrilla Girls: Kandil Mountain.

Note: The following is an update to one of my first entries on this blog. When I posted "intihar etti" (Turk. "he/she committed suicide") on 30 April 2008 there were no comments. This disappointed me, because I thought that it was one of the better things I had written. Having read it again, I continue to think so. Now, in an amazing development, things have changed--slightly--for the better in Turkey. Read to the end to find out the latest. --g.t.

Some smiles can kill, some will break your heart; and it's easy to see that the picture above fits into the latter category. In October 2007, when I started posting online at Progressive Historians, I began by writing about a young PKK soldier code-named Devrim Siirt, who died on Cudi (Judi) Mountain, SE Turkey, in 2005. Her photograph aroused the same feelings--delight, sorrow, confusion, anger, more sorrow--that I feel when looking at these girls. Who are they? What path brought them to this snowy place, where life is hard and violent death a real possibility? I asked similar questions about Aynur, the beautiful girl who became "Devrim Siirt." Her ending was sad, I noted, but she probably had attained some glimpse of happiness and freedom. And it could have been so much worse. She could have died alone.

She could, in other words, have committed suicide. "On mourra seul," Pascal wrote: "We Die Alone" it is rendered in the title of David Howarth's classic book of wartime adventure. An alternate translation, "One dies alone," makes it sound aristocratic, part of a code that, like it or not, all of us must follow. But while the act of dying is of necessity something that we go through on our own, few people would deny that the presence of friends makes it seem a little more attractive, a little more human. In fact, the title of Howarth's book, which concerns a man who ultimately survives, tells only half the story. "We die alone," it should say, "but we live on with the help of others."

This is why suicide--and I am not speaking of suicide bombing, a low and repulsive act--is such a crushing event. When the remains have been carried away, and the last tears are fallen, we are left with the image of a human being, desolate and solitary, slouched in some dusty corner where her (or his) final thoughts are too terrible to contemplate.

And yet, it is an image that won't go away, especially to anyone who bothers reading the headlines from Kurdistan. One night recently I was scanning Firat News, the pro-PKK news service, for items of interest, and a story jumped out at me. The dateline was 19 April. A "young girl" had committed suicide (intihar etti, in Turkish) in a village in the southeast of Turkey.

The young lady in question was named Nazli, and she was seventeen. On the previous night, it was reported, she had taken the opportunity when the house was empty to go into a room and, using a rope, had hanged herself from the ceiling. The family found her when they returned.

This, of course, is as sad as death can get. And yet, something about it doesn't sound right. "The inquiry is continuing," said the story. Well, yes. But probably it won't continue very far. What can the police (or in this case, the military gendarmes who keep watch over Kurdish villages) do? They could start by asking the family why they all just happened to be gone at that moment. (This was in a dirt-poor village, in a high-altitude region called Baskale, where the temperature was probably near freezing and there surely wasn't a great tradition of going out on the town at night.) They could ask where Nazli got the rope, and whether or not she had been depressed. They could ask about family conflicts. They could ask if she had "dishonored" the family in some way.

The last question is the most important, for Nazli's death has all the hallmarks of the latest trend: compulsory self-administered honor killings. I refer, of course, to the Kurds' disgrace, a tradition that ranks right up there with genital mutilation, Indian bride-burning, and all the other ways in which women are brutalized, exploited, and murdered in the name of rules that were made up by men. Until a few years ago, "honor killings" in Turkey were not strictly classified as murder. If a girl did something to "disgrace" the family, such as wearing the wrong clothes, seeing the wrong boy, etc., then the family would get together and choose one of the girl's brothers, usually the youngest, to kill her and take the rap. If the boy was young enough, and below the age of majority, he would usually escape with a mild sentence.

Now the game has changed. The Turkish government, in response to demands from the European Union, has considerably stiffened the penalties. (Note that only demands from the EU got them to do it.) Life in prison is now the mandatory sentence. But this hasn't stopped the honor killings. Now the girls are required to kill themselves.

Think of it: "You have dishonored us. Only you can cleanse this stain from our family. Kill yourself." Now try getting it as a text message on your cell phone. That's the opening of a 17 July 2006 story from the New York Times. The girl in the story, Derya, got as many as 15 of these text messages a day from her uncles and brothers. In the end she got lucky and found a women's organization in Batman, her home town (pop. 250,000), that took in girls like her. But that only happened after she had tried without success to drown herself in the Tigris River and hang herself with a rope. (An uncle cut her down after the last attempt: presumably not the same uncle who initially texted her and told her to off herself.)

These stories are only the crocodile's eye peeking up from the river; the rest of the beast will show itself any time you choose. In this case, it's a matter of going to the "Ara" window ("Search" in Turkish) of Firat News and typing the words "intihar etti" in the blank space. A tap on the key and there it is: page after miserable page.

The stories don't all concern young girls, though they are a big part of it. Worldwide the majority of suicides are males. Though not the majority in Kurdistan, male suicides are plentiful enough. A disturbing number of them are young Kurds who have been drafted into the Turkish Army. These young men are especially vulnerable, subjected as they are to endless harangues about Ataturk, the Fatherland, and the superiority of the Turkish race, and this after having witnessed police brutality as a regular part of growing up. On April 3, for example, a young man in Istanbul set himself on fire rather than go into the Army, while only the day before a Kurdish soldier in Edirne (Adrianople), near the Greek-Bulgarian border, ended his life with a bullet. On April 1 Firat News summarized five suspicious Army deaths in the previous two months, and the headlines go on from there: a gendarme shoots himself near Baskale, a sergeant does it with a hand grenade, another soldier shoots himself in Diyarbakir, another in Silopi, on the Iraqi border. All this leads Firat News to dub the Turkish Armed Forces "the world's most suicidal army."

In Kurdistan, however, it is still the women and girls who commit the majority of suicides. In Diyarbakir, for example, from 1996 to 2001 fully 58% of suicides were women and girls, and similar rates hold true for other provinces in the region. Again, this goes directly against patterns documented throughout the world. In 2006 the U.N. sent a Turkish woman, Prof. Yakin Erturk, a Special Rapporteur on violence against women, to the southeast of Turkey to investigate the rash of female suicides. "The majority of women in the provinces visited live lives that are not their own," she reported: "Diverse forms of violence are deliberately used against women who are seen to transgress [the conservative patriarchal] order. Suicides of women in the region occur within such a context."

No surprise in any of this. Prof. Erturk goes on at length in the language of a sociologist, and she is unable to point to an exact link between the suicides and honor killings. But the message is clear: to be a woman in Turkey is bad enough; to be a woman in the Southeast is to court death. The bright spots are few. Women are organizing, often at great risk; NGO's are popping up, providing shelter and counseling to girls in danger. A nationwide organization, "The Purple Roof," based in Istanbul, works to provide resources. But still, the suicides go on.

All of which brings us back to the guerrilla girls and their smiling faces. Obviously they have put themselves in grave danger. If life is hard in places like Diyarbakir and Batman, it is twice as hard in the caves and rocks of the Zagros range. But these young women made a choice. They used their free will, such as it was, and went to the mountains.

And they are not the only ones who are striking out. Tuesday's (4/29/08) Kurdish papers carried a story about another woman, a traditional Kurdish woman who should have been passive but was not: a woman almost Sophoclean in the grandeur of her response. The place: Cizre, formerly Jezirah ibn Omar, a city on the Tigris near the Iraqi border. A totally Kurdish town, except for the Turkish troops that occupy it. The red banners with white lettering are stretched across the streets like a taunt: "How happy is he who calls himself Turk." This is as pro-PKK a place as you will find in the Southeast. In the '90s the two sides fought gun battles in the streets. On Monday an Army delegation arrived, carrying the body of Pvt. Mesut Sanir, killed in action among mountains near the town of Bingol. The private, the army messenger told his mother, had "fallen a martyr" in the battle.

But Kumru Sanir, the boy's mother, was having none of it. "My son has not fallen a martyr!" she told the spokesman. "You send brother to fight against brother and kill each other, and then you come to tell us he is a martyr. My son is not a martyr!" The soldiers, looking embarrassed, said nothing. The boy's older sister was equally bitter, noting that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, sends his children to school in America, "while he sends ours to fight in the mountains." The older sister says nothing about her plans for the future, but we can be sure that she is weighing her options.

Postscript. With regard to honor killings, a Turkish court has actually done something right. This astounding development can be read about here. Briefly, the facts are these. In Diyarbakir, SE Turkey, a girl was raped and impregnated, and she was given shelter in a local hospital. After her baby's birth, she was forced to return home. A younger brother, under orders from the family, shot and killed her. A Turkish court, in an absolute first, has sentenced the entire family to life in prison for her murder. It may not be much, but it's a start. (See the same story at Rasti.)