The nineteenth-century traveler Isabella Bird had a first impression similar to mine: "[T]he city impresses one as ruinous and decayed; yet it has a large trade, and is regarded as one of the most prosperous places in the Empire." I thought of those words as I wandered the city"s streets, with its noticeable quotient of opium and heroin addicts-deposited here from all over Iran by the Islamic regime, some said.
Once an important stop on the trade route between Persia and Baghdad, Kermanshah dates back to about the fourth century A.D., when it was home to Sa.s.sanian kings, who established Zoroastrianism as the state religion. Later, the town"s vulnerable location made it an easy prey for Arabs in the seventh century, Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century, Mongols in the thirteenth century, and Iraqis in the twentieth century. Kermanshah suffered some of the worst of the heavy bomb and missile attacks during the Iran-Iraq War.
During the nineteenth century, Kermanshah was considered to be the capital of Persian Kurdistan and boasted a robust Persian cavalry, made up mostly of Kurds trained by French officers. Then a walled city with a moat three miles in circ.u.mference, Kermanshah was also a stop for pilgrims en route to the holy Shiite sites of Najaf and Karbala, in what is now Iraq. By the late nineteenth century, at least 150,000 pilgrims and 8,000 of their dead relatives annually pa.s.sed along the Kermanshah road, the latter headed for burial at the holy sites.
Many visitors still pa.s.s through Kermanshah, often stopping to see Taq-e Bostan, one of the most famous archaeological sites in Iran, dating back to the A.D. 600s. Built around a dark grotto, red walls carved with fine, giant bas-reliefs depict the Sa.s.sanian king Khosrow II on a royal hunt, with men riding horses and elephants, chasing stags and boar. Nearby stands Ardeshir II, receiving a wreath of friendship from the Zoroastrian G.o.d Ashura Mazda, while Ahriman, the G.o.d of darkness, lies defeated under his feet.
Behind Kermanshah looms Bisotun, a mountain upon which more famed bas-reliefs and inscriptions are carved. In 1838, the British soldier Henry Rawlinson, dangling from the end of a rope, copied down Bisotun"s inscriptions and deciphered the Old Persian words.
The mountain is at least equally known for its connection with Farhad and Shirin, heroes of one of Iran"s most beloved ancient tales, claimed by both Persians and Kurds. In one of the story"s versions, Shirin, the beautiful wife of King Khosrow, falls in love with Farhad, a simple stonecutter. Desperate not to lose his queen, Khosrow consents to give her to Farhad if he can bring the waters of Bisotun to her castle, Qasr-e Shirin-the ruins of which still stood on the outskirts of a city of the same name until the Iran-Iraq War. Farhad"s love gives him great strength, and he rapidly cuts a pathway through the mountains, constructing an aqueduct. He has almost succeeded at his impossible task when the frantic Khosrow sends him a message claiming that Shirin has died. An anguished Farhad jumps to his death, and Shirin dies of a broken heart.
Some Iranian Kurdish scholars attribute the doomed love affair to the tensions between the fierce Kurds of the mountains and the more docile Kurds of the plains, the latter often influenced by outsiders to betray their traditions and culture. In this interpretation, Farhad defaces the mountains, the Kurdish heartland, for his love of Shirin, who is in turn guilty of encouraging him in his task, at times with lies. Betrayal has been a Kurdish theme for centuries.
WHILE IN KERMANSHAH, I at first stayed with Kajal, the married sister of Arash, the physics teacher from Sanandaj. Their siblings, Darya and Askhan, had traveled with me to Kermanshah because they said they wanted to visit their sister. I suspected that the timing of their trip had much less to do with them than it had with me. In the gracious Iranian Kurdish tradition, my every need was subtly being taken care of.
Kajal spoke good English, as did a number of the family"s friends, some of whom helped me find my way around the city. Together we visited the archaeological sites, the central bazaar, an upscale shopping district, a poor quarter, and a boarded-up Sunni mosque, the only major Sunni mosque in the Shiite-dominated city. Its outspoken and prominent cleric, Molla Mohammed Rabi"i, had been killed in December 1996-"in disputed circ.u.mstances," according to Amnesty International-resulting in riots that had left at least several others dead and the mosque permanently closed.
Talking to Kermanshah"s citizens, I learned more. Historically, the relationship between the city"s Sunni and Shiite Kurds has ranged from poor to hostile. The Iranian government has used religion as a wedge between them; religion has proven to be more central to many Kurds" ident.i.ty than ethnicity. Both groups have looked down upon one another, and the Sunni Kurds have resented the fact that only Shiites are appointed to positions of power-as is the case all over Iran. The country is officially 94 percent Shiite, with its 5 percent Sunni minority often treated as second-cla.s.s citizens, so much so that some Sunnis convert to Shiism in order to move up socially and economically.
During and after the Islamic revolution, the Shiite Kurds wanted nothing to do with the struggle for Kurdish autonomy being waged farther north in Sanandaj and Mahabad. Many, in fact, agreed to fight against the Sunni Kurds, while among the most enthusiastic of the Revolutionary Guards during the Iran-Iraq War were Ahl-e Haqq.
All this lulled the Islamic regime into taking the loyalty of its Shiite and Ahl-e Haqq Kurds for granted. But in 1999, a curious thing happened. The arrest of Abdullah calan, leader of Turkey"s PKK, led to huge demonstrations on the Kermanshah streets, with some Kurds, as elsewhere in the world, burning themselves in protest. Even bigger rallies also took place in other Iranian Kurdish cities, with thousands gathering in Sanandaj, for one, but it was Kermanshah that caught the Iranian government completely by surprise. Apparently, Kurdish nationalism was no longer limited to its Sunni Kurds. Apparently, its Shiite Kurds were starting to feel at least as much Kurdish as Shiite. And perhaps the Islamic regime itself had encouraged this development, as Iran had aided and harbored the PKK during Turkey"s civil war, hoping to clip its neighbor"s growing influence in the region.
Just what, if anything, did those pro-calan protests portend for the future of the Iranian Kurdish movement? Many Iranian Kurds I met seemed to feel that although their situation was not good, it was tolerable, at least compared to Turkey and Iraq under Saddam. On the other hand, thousands of Iranian Kurds, recently forced out of their villages by economic desperation, were now living rootless, alienated lives in crowded slums-ripe conditions for ferment.
AMONG THE KURDS I met in Kermanshah was the Najafi family, who invited me to stay with them. The Najafis were Hawraman, and had many relatives living in the isolated, mountainous Hawraman region, one of the most traditional Kurdish areas still left in Iran. They could help me travel to the Hawraman capital of Paveh, and even promised to take me to No Sud, the smugglers" town on the Iran-Iraq border.
The Najafi parents, Lotfallah and Maliha, were a middle-aged couple with three grown sons. Lotfallah, a gruff and hearty man of many opinions, dressed in Western clothes outside the home, but wore baggy Kurdish pants around the house, as did many Iranian Kurdish men. Maliha, who was often silent, wore traditional dresses both indoors and out. The couple"s youngest son, Asoo, spoke moderately good English and often served as my translator. Tensile and intense, Asoo was studying for the nationwide university entrance exams, hoping to become a civil engineer.
One morning at daybreak, Lotfallah, Asoo, and I left Kermanshah for the Hawraman mountains. The plan was for Lotfallah to drop Asoo and me off in Paveh and then return to Kermanshah in time to go to work. In Paveh, Asoo and I would look up one of their relatives, who would drive us through the rest of the province.
We headed west down the still-dark streets and out past an oil refinery, Lotfallah already pontificating, while disconcertingly breaking off now and again to burst into song-a constant habit. Initially, I had thought it indicative of a poetic side to his bl.u.s.tery character, but as time went on, I realized that it had more to do with frustration, as he often started singing after a diatribe against his low salary or the government. And he wasn"t singing just anything. His husky, mournful s.n.a.t.c.hes of song, laden with mystery, were an exclusively Hawraman form of music called siachamana, meaning "black eyes," dating back to the Zoroastrians, though the significance of its name has been lost. Traditionally, the music was performed with the singer cupping his hands behind his ears, as if listening to the G.o.ds, and its heart-wrenching sound was unforgettable. I"d heard it only once before, in Halabja, where a man with a cancerous growth disfiguring his face had welcomed my companions and me into his rose-filled garden with a song as heavy with longing as an echoing call to prayer.
The land outside Kermanshah was rich agricultural territory, sprinkled with ancient combines and tractors, and the occasional village or dairy farm. Small rocky peaks poked up dead ahead, higher peaks behind, and, as we dove into them, Lotfallah broke off his talking and singing to ask me about the "red Americans"-a favorite topic among the Kurds, who see the Native Americans as a people much like themselves. In Turkey, especially, I met Kurds who knew an enormous amount about Native Americans, with large collections of their literature and music.
We plunged into an ocean of tan triangular mountains, bobbing around us as our battered car groaned its way along. Women and schoolchildren waited for buses all along the roadside. Nearer Kermanshah, they had been dressed in dour chadors, but now bright traditional Kurdish clothes flashed by.
Villages built of clay homes with sleepy window lids climbed up steep mountainsides. Many had blue window frames and doors; some had balconies and ladders; and the roofs of one row often served as patios for the next, as the tiers receded, as evenly as a wedding cake.
Arriving in Paveh, we stopped at the home of a man I"d met at the Sanandaj conference, a well-educated professional who was an expert on the region. I didn"t have his address, but Lotfallah knew where he lived. We knocked on his door at about seven-thirty A.M.-much too early to be calling upon a stranger, in my opinion, but considered the norm among some Iranians, who usually rise at dawn to say morning prayers.
As soon as the door opened, I realized that I had made a mistake. My erstwhile host had been cordial at the conference and on the phone when I called to confirm my visit, but I had sensed some hesitation in his manner. Seeing his sagging face, I now realized that, like Mr. K in Sanandaj, he really wanted nothing to do with me. He hadn"t expected me to take him up on his invitation.
Nevertheless, he invited us in and bustled around for the next forty minutes or so as he got his children up and prepared breakfast, while his wife dressed for work. He talked mostly to Lotfallah and Asoo the whole time, barely acknowledging me, while I shifted uncomfortably, wondering how I should handle things when the activity quieted down.
To my surprise and relief, my host broached the subject of my presence himself immediately after his wife and Lotfallah left for work. "I am sorry, but I can"t talk to you long, and I can only talk about the environment. This is a troubled area. The authorities will ask me later why you are here."
"But I"m not here to talk about politics," I said. "I"m mostly interested in the Hawraman culture."
"It doesn"t matter. Last year, after a j.a.panese lady researcher was here, I was arrested."
My heart sank. How could I go bungling around so naively, putting others at risk?
And yet, how could I have known? He"d invited me to visit him-twice. The Iranian authorities knew what I was doing in Kurdistan. I"d stated the purpose of my visit on my visa application. Many Iranian Kurds had also strongly urged me to visit the Hawraman area, saying that as long as I stuck to people and culture, and avoided politics, everything would be fine. But since when do theory and reality coincide?
"But you are here now," our host said, "and the authorities didn"t keep me long. Ask your questions."
In fits and starts, I began, starting with queries about the environment, as he had requested. But as we quickly exhausted that subject and branched out into others, he didn"t object, and he began talking more and more freely, with little urging on my part.
Iran"s Hawraman region encompa.s.sed about fifty villages and, together with the Hawraman region of Iraq, had been a "field of war" ever since the days of the Safavids and Ottomans, he said. Because of the region"s isolation, extreme even for Kurdistan, the Hawraman people had maintained their independence for many decades after most Kurds. During the reign of Reza Shah (1923 to 1941), one Hawraman leader, Jafar Soltan, fiercely fought off the Iranian government for fourteen years. And during the 1970s and early 1980s, the area served as the clandestine headquarters for the Kurdish political parties. That changed by the middle of the Iran-Iraq War, when the Revolutionary Guards overran the district, but the region was still regarded with great suspicion by the regime.
Because of the Hawramans" isolation, they had always been exceedingly self-sufficient, growing and making everything they needed, including their own hand-woven clothes and shoes, known as klash, which they now sold throughout Kurdistan. And the Hawramans" self-sufficiency had also gone far beyond the physical, to encompa.s.s the creation of a rich repository of unique folktales, folk remedies, songs, games, and ceremonies. Some of the greatest of the latter celebrated the life of Pir-e Shahriyar, a holy Zoroastrian linked with Mythra, the ancient G.o.d of light and the sun. On the anniversary of the Pir"s death, hundreds converged on his mountain slope grave, playing the daf and chanting. And though the Hawraman were Muslim, they still honored Mythra on the fortieth day of winter, with sacrificial blood spilled at the first light of dawn, and hundreds of men dancing ecstatically in circles to the beating of the daf.
When our host was growing up in the 1960s, many Hawraman traditions were still flourishing, but over the past few decades, their prevalence had steadily diminished. The villages were no longer self-sufficient; few told stories anymore, and even the festivals were not as well attended as before.
The Hawraman culture also had its dark side. Life for women was especially hard. They worked long hours and had few rights, with families often forbidding girls to go to school. Honor killings still took place, usually in secret, with many villagers believing that the victims deserved what they got.
The region had its share of more modern problems as well. Men sought work in the south, leaving their families alone for large chunks of the year. Others worked as smugglers, risking their lives to cross the mine-studded border mountains, patrolled by the Revolutionary Guards, who killed perhaps a half-dozen men every year. The quality of the natural environment was worsening, too, through water pollution, air pollution, and deforestation.
Our host would like nothing better, he said, with longing in his eyes, than to take us out into the remote Hawraman countryside. But he was under constant surveillance because of his political activities in the 1980s. It would also be extremely difficult for Asoo and me to travel into the villages alone. Villagers would be suspicious of us, for one thing, but, more to the point, the authorities would stop us. If we wanted to protect ourselves, and travel on to the town of No Sud, where Asoo"s relatives lived, as we had planned, we needed to go directly to the authorities upon leaving him to obtain permission.
That would be a good idea, Asoo agreed, a bit vaguely. He had often traveled in the region, but never with a foreigner. I was suddenly struck by the fact that he was only seventeen years old and we were both neophytes here.
Taking leave of our host, we did as he advised, descending into the heart of Paveh to enter a dark, utilitarian building that housed the region"s administrative government. Here, we were pa.s.sed from one office to another by unsmiling, bearded men in loose, long-sleeved shirts and sandals. Some picked up the phone after studying my pa.s.sport, to talk with their higher-ups, and I could understand much of their conversations: No, no, she has no official doc.u.ments, just a visa. She says she is a writer. She is alone. She is American. It sounded suspicious even to me. It was strange that I was here at this time, with my country on the brink of war with Iraq, less than thirty miles away. With a sinking heart, I grew more certain that permission to go to No Sud would be denied, when one especially unpleasant-looking man suddenly washed his hands of us by sending us down the street to the local police department.
Here, we were greeted with equal unfriendliness and suspicion, especially after one officer discovered a slight irregularity with my visa. But then a higher-up arrived and, with a beaming face, ordered up more rounds of tea. "We are so happy you are here. Writers are always welcome in Iran." He handed us a letter granting us permission to proceed to No Sud and told us to call him should we run into trouble.
WITH THE LOGISTICS of the trip finally taken care of, we took a quick look around Paveh, a web of b.u.mpy roads and brick-cement buildings spread up and down steep hills. Carpets hung from balconies, tractors cruised, and most of the men wore billowing pants with c.u.mmerbunds. Most of the women wore chadors. Behind the town rose Atashgah, a rugged peak that was once a sacred Zoroastrian site.
After a simple lunch of rice, yogurt, tomatoes, and flat bread, we headed west, to be sure to arrive in No Sud before sundown. The road leading there, threading around some of the highest mountains in Kurdistan, was too treacherous to travel after dark. It had no guardrails or lights, and along the forty-five-kilometer stretch were exactly 274 turns-many of them dangerous, said our driver, who traveled the route often.
We made stops along the way in a few roadside villages. In one, an old man with a bristly mustache and lopsided turban said that before the Iran-Iraq War, his village had housed 105 families, but now held only thirty-five. Most had left to look for work in the cities.
"Do you know the history of the Hawraman people?" he then asked. "We are the descendants of Rostam"-the hero of Iran"s national epic, the Shahnameh-"who once lived near Mount Damavand, near Tehran. But Darius the Mede expelled us, and we ran away here, to the safety of the mountains. We have lived here for thousands of years."
The old man"s story made me think of the Avroman Parchments. Found in a cave in the Hawraman mountains, carefully preserved in a jar, the doc.u.ments date back to the first century B.C., and record the sale of a vineyard in both Greek and Parthian. One way or another, this was an astonishingly ancient land.
And the mountains were as advertised: one steep surging peak after another, many wider and smoother than the mountains I"d seen in Iraq, but just as breathtaking and formidable. On a late afternoon in October, slopes were bristly and brown, with few trees, but with a golden sheen of plumpness and plenty. Far beneath their rounded humps, the Sirwan River meandered along, en route to the Darbandikhan Dam in Iraq, while a silver slip of road curled and uncurled up ahead, playing hide and seek among peaks and valleys.
No Sud itself emerged around a final bend just as the sun was setting, at the end of a curved road that cut a fine brown line along a red cliff. Sailing around the semicircle, we cruised into town, slowing to a crawl as we pa.s.sed through a plaza crowded with men and boys in baggy pants, then squeezed our way down a painfully narrow street along the edge of a cliff. Directly ahead plunged a valley, followed by a wall of mountains-Iraq. Directly behind lived Asoo"s relatives.
They enthusiastically ushered us inside. We were just taking seats on the floor when the police arrived. We had been in town less than five minutes. Who was I? What was I doing here? The family looked tense, and my heart pounded. However, upon hearing the purpose of my visit and where I was from, the police beamed. Welcome, they said, we are proud to have an American writer in our town. Come visit us tomorrow for a gla.s.s of tea.
We never did make that visit, and, on the way back to Paveh the next afternoon, we were stopped by a group of grim Revolutionary Guards. Iran"s police and Revolutionary Guards are two distinctly separate groups, and though we"d pa.s.sed through other Revolutionary Guard checkpoints without incident, this squad paid little attention to our letter of permission from the Paveh police. They also refused to give the friendly captain we"d met a call. They didn"t like my presence in the region. A guard then climbed into our car to accompany us all the way back to Paveh, a two-hour drive-dashing my hopes of visiting more villages. He was surly and menacing when he first got in, making me wonder if my luck in Iran had run out at last. What would happen when we reached Paveh? But as the miles rolled by, the guard lightened up and, when we arrived, spoke briefly to his commander, who waved us on our way.
Asoo"s uncle was a burly shopkeeper in his sixties, dressed in baggy pants and a turban, married to a much younger woman wearing a turquoise caftan -his second wife, whom he had married after his first had died on the dangerous PavehNo Sud road we had just traveled. They lived in two rooms on the second floor of the spare house, while his son, daughter-in-law, and grandson lived in two matching rooms below.
Our host in No Sud Though a man of little formal education, Asoo"s uncle was well versed in the region"s history, and he told me many complicated tales involving the Hawraman leader Jafar Soltan, who had resisted Reza Shah"s army. He also spoke about the years of the Iran-Iraq War, when Qa.s.semlou and his KDPI forces were based in and near No Sud, and the town was subsequently flattened. Once, No Sud had been many times the size it was now.
I had noticed No Sud"s emptiness, but hadn"t guessed its cause. It disturbed me to think that newcomers such as myself could come to a place like this and see it only as it was, with no inkling of all that had gone before.
The son who lived downstairs had been a victim of the Islamic regime, Asoo whispered. He"d simply disappeared one day two years earlier, and no one in the family had known where he was until his release from prison six months later. After eight years of surveillance, the authorities had suddenly decided to arrest and torture him for his political activities ten years before.
As we talked, night fell. Dinner had come and gone, and we were relaxing over fruit and gla.s.ses of tea, when the clip-clop of hooves sounded outside. Minutes later, more hooves clopped by, and then more and more, until it sounded as if an entire cavalry was arriving. Indeed it was: The nighttime"s smuggling activities were beginning.
When I"d heard about the smuggling between Iran and Iraq, I"d envisioned small groups working covertly together, trying not to draw attention to themselves. I was completely unprepared for the scene that greeted me when we stepped outside. Hundreds of men and mules had gathered in the central square and in a lot down the hill, bathed in a wan yellow light. Many men were saddling up with blankets and ropes, or checking their cell phones-used to warn one another of danger en route-while milling about were a few businessmen, who would later ship the illicit goods into Iran"s interior. Smuggling in No Sud was no clandestine operation; it was a town affair. Everyone knew about it, even the authorities, who, for all their hara.s.sment of the smugglers, were blatantly looking the other way. I hardly needed proof of that but got it anyway, when I spotted an armed guard actually sitting on the edge of the plaza, watching the men, looking bored.
Hadn"t I noticed the big banks in town? my hosts asked, after I voiced my astonishment at the sight of the guard. There were two of them, both multistory and built within the last two years. A town the size of No Sud, with no legitimate business to speak of, hardly needed one big bank, let alone two.
Although smuggling between Iran and Iraq had existed for decades, it became big business only about five years before, the smugglers told me. Some of the goods entering Iran-which included cigarettes, tea, alcohol, and electronics-were originally from Turkey; others came directly from Iraq. The Kurds sometimes smuggled goods in the other direction as well, out of Iran and into Iraq, but that was more unusual.
To travel to and from Iraq took six hours each way, with the men leaving about nine P.M., to return the following morning. On average, a man earned 6,000 tomans ($5), for his night"s work, hardly enough to warrant risking his life-not all of the authorities were looking the other way, and there were mines to watch out for. However, there were few other ways to make a living in No Sud.
Each of the Iranian border towns specialized in the smuggling of different goods. No Sud had the tea and banana market all locked up, while other towns concentrated on alcohol or electronic goods. Of course, to smuggle alcohol and electronic goods was much more lucrative than to smuggle tea and bananas, the men acknowledged when I asked, but it was a lot more dangerous. They wanted to come home to their wives.
"What about Ansar al-Islam?" I asked. "Are they a danger for you?" The terrorist organization"s headquarters were just over the border, not more than ten miles away.
The men shrugged. Not really, it seemed.
"Are they operating here in Iran?"
One man laughed. "Iran is too smart to let them operate here," he said.
It was getting late, and the smugglers started to leave, to be instantly swallowed up by the darkness beyond. What lay ahead of them that evening, I wondered as I watched them slip away, some so very young, many very thin.
Asoo, his uncle"s son, and I climbed up a steep set of stairs to an old fountain. Surrounded by a garden, it had been a favorite haunt of Jafar Soltan, the Hawraman leader. It was also one of the only places in No Sud that had not been destroyed during the Iran-Iraq War, Asoo said, as we bought bottles of orange soda from a woman in a purple velveteen dress. She had been weaving a pair of klash, the traditional Hawraman shoes, when we came up, and went back to her work as we took seats in the unlit garden. Empty now, it was crowded during the day with men playing cards and backgammon. The late day, that is. With almost everyone in No Sud involved in the nighttime smuggling trade, most people slept in until afternoon. This was no ordinary world.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.
"Happy Is He Who Calls Himself a Turk"
THE ROOM WAS DARK AND A LITTLE MUSTY. THE DAY WAS fading, the sounds from the street growing dim. The half-dozen middle-aged women around me, all wearing white muslin head scarves edged with lace, leaned forward a bit in their chairs. Their kerchiefs gave them an angelic look, but their eyes were haunted.
They went around the room one by one, as if they were telling stories around a campfire. Nezahat started things off, but only after lighting a cigarette and, before her story was finished, lighting another.
She and her family had moved from their village to Diyarbakir, the unofficial Kurdish capital in southeast Turkey, years before the fighting between the Kurds and the Turks began. They found a place to live on the edge of town and were eking out a living as shopkeepers when their oldest daughter became involved with politics. At age twelve, the girl saw Turkish gendarmes mow down two next-door neighbors in cold blood, a sight she never forgot. At age nineteen, when the PKK leader Abdullah calan was arrested, she burned herself in protest . . . at home. Her mother, the only other person in the house at the time, was unable to do a thing; her daughter was engulfed in flames. She rushed the girl to the hospital, but it was too late-"she was a martyr." Nezahat"s face was impa.s.sive, but her hands shook as she lit her third cigarette.
Seniha was next. Her son had joined the PKK at age fifteen. He was martyred one year later, she said. He died in Lice, a town just outside Diyarbakir that was all but flattened by the Turkish forces in 1993, in a rampage following a PKK attack. He was killed with twelve other friends from school; they had all joined the PKK together and were probably buried together in a ma.s.s grave. She and the other mothers only learned of their sons" deaths seven months after the fact, by which time it was too late to know where the grave was or claim the boys" bodies, authorities told them.
Sakine had once had five sons. One died in a prison hunger strike protesting conditions there, one was killed while fighting with the PKK, and one died in a traffic accident. Another was arrested in 1979, tortured, and repeatedly "raped with sticks," she said. Freed in 1992, he fled to the mountains ten days later to fight again, saying he couldn"t stand the quiet at home. She hadn"t heard from him since. She had lost her husband because of him and the son who died in prison. Her husband forbade her to visit their sons in jail, saying that respectable women don"t visit jails. When she disobeyed, he divorced her. Now, she had only one son left at home, and she was very afraid for him. How could she keep him safe?
The women called themselves the Peace Mothers, and they were trying to reach out to Turkish as well as other Kurdish mothers who had lost loved ones in the civil war. "All we want is peace," said one of the women in the now almost dark room. Sounds from outside had ceased, but someone near me was weeping.
TURKEY"S KURDISTAN WAS a land of ghosts. I felt it as soon as I arrived, and the feeling lingered long after I left. The Kurdish-Turkish civil war may be over, but its footsteps are still echoing down streets, sneaking up from behind, as remembered a.s.sa.s.sins" bullets crack out. Ghostly victims are still being dragged into anonymous cars or lined up in rows to be shot. Long-destroyed villages are still burning, invisible young men and women are still dying. And another kind of ghost is here as well-alive on the outside, but dead on the inside, living in vast city slums, their homes and villages destroyed, their loved ones disappeared.
The Kurdish-Turkish civil war that raged in southeast Turkey from 1984 to 1999 was one of the greatest underreported stories of the late twentieth century. During its long, vicious course, about thirty-seven thousand Turkish soldiers, Kurdish guerrillas, and civilians were killed, between 1 million and 3 million Kurds rendered homeless, and over three thousand Kurdish villages destroyed-almost as many as were destroyed in northern Iraq. Yet throughout-and even today, as the war"s aftermath and human rights abuses continue-most of the world scarcely noticed.
The seeds of the Kurdish-Turkish civil war were sown shortly after the founding of the modern Republic of Turkey. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and World War I, the Turks had found themselves in a humiliated position, with the Allies planning the breakup of their territories, promising different lands to different peoples. Some of the best parts of Anatolia, the Turkish homeland, were to go to Christian peoples, while the Muslim Turks themselves were to be relegated to a small, semibarren region with no access to the sea. There was even talk of giving territory to the Kurds.
Just when it seemed as if things couldn"t get much worse, they did. The Greeks, with the encouragement of the British, took over Smyrna (now Izmir), home to a large h.e.l.lenic population, and began invading farther east. For the Turks, this was the last straw. Galvanized by the idea of a former subjected people inhabiting prized Turkish territory, they organized under the Ottoman general Mustafa Kemal, who"d previously served with heroic distinction in the Dardanelles campaign, to wage the 1919 to 1922 Turkish War of Independence. By the time it was over, the Turks had successfully driven the British, French, and Greeks from their homeland.
Mustafa Kemal rose to become not just a national hero, but "Atatrk," or "Father of the Turks," a near G.o.dlike figure who would in effect rule Turkey unilaterally until his death in 1938. A westernized career officer, Kemal sat down with the Allies in 1923 to hammer out the Treaty of Lausanne, which established the Republic of Turkey. He then began propelling his bankrupt land into the twentieth century as rapidly as he could, outlawing the Islamic veil, replacing the Arabic alphabet with the Roman, and building what would become a robust modern economy. With a parliament and const.i.tution, the new republic was based on democratic principles, but with the authoritarian legacy of the Ottoman Empire still lingering and Kemal hailed as a savior, most Turks were happy to see their new president take on all-encompa.s.sing powers.
Initially, the Kurds supported Kemal, fighting alongside his forces in the war of independence and taking heart in the Treaty of Lausanne, which declared all citizens of the new republic equal before the law "without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race or religion." But already in 1922, Kemal had abolished the old sultanate system, which had helped to sustain the aghas" authority. In 1924, he began a pitiless campaign to a.s.similate the Kurds.
His aim was to create an indestructible nation-state with a monolithic Turkish ident.i.ty, one that could never again be almost torn asunder by foreigners. To do so, he needed to deny the existence of the country"s largest minority, making up one-fifth of its population; the only minorities recognized by the new republic were its small non-Muslim ones. On March 3, 1924, all Kurdish schools, a.s.sociations, publications, and religious organizations were banned, the use of the Kurdish language was forbidden in the courts and government offices, and the word Kurdistan was excised from official doc.u.ments. Kurdish dress, music, and names became outlawed, and, most incredibly of all, Kurds were declared to be "mountain Turks who have forgotten their language." Kurds who did not call themselves Kurds could still rise high in Turkish government and society, but any Kurd who dared utter his or her true ident.i.ty risked arrest, torture, and imprisonment. As late as 1979, when a former minister of Public Works declared, "In Turkey there are Kurds. I too am a Kurd," he was sentenced to two years and four months imprisonment with hard labor.
March 3, 1924, also saw the abolition of the Islamic Caliphate, turning Turkey into a fully secular state and severing the religious link between Kurds and Turks that had united them for centuries. Many Kurdish Muslims, as well as Turkish Muslims, were deeply offended; they had not waged war to live in a secular state.
The events of 1924 led to Turkey"s first modern Kurdish revolt, under the leadership of Shaikh Said of Piran. The shaikh and his forces succeeded in capturing over one-third of the Southeast before Turkish troops rushed in to suppress the uprising. Shaikh Said and dozens of others were hanged, thousands of civilians killed, thousands more deported, and hundreds of villages burned, establishing a precedence of cruelty in Turkish-Kurdish relations.
Two more major Kurdish uprisings followed in 1930 and 1937 to 1938, one in the foothills of Mount Ararat, and another in Dersim, now known by the Turkish name of Tunceli-many Kurdish place names have been replaced with Turkish ones over the decades. Again, thousands of civilians were killed-perhaps forty thousand in Dersim alone-and large regions evacuated. As many as 1 million Kurds were displaced between 1925 and 1938. Southeast Turkey was placed under military rule, and the revolts ended as the Turks forced the Kurds into an uneasy submission for the next thirty years.
A Turkish newspaper correspondent who visited Dersim a decade after the uprising wrote: "The place was desolate. . . . There are no more artisans, no more culture, no more trade. . . . If you speak to [the people] of government, they translate it immediately as tax collectors and policemen. We give the people of Dersim nothing; we only take."
Atatrk marginalized the Kurds yet further by "proving" a mythical Turkish history that declared that all the world"s civilizations had been founded by the Turks, and that all languages derived from the "Sun Language," whose closest modern descendant was, of course, Turkish. Kurdish was said to contain only eight hundred words, and so was not a real language, while the word Kurd was said to have come from the sound of crunching snow-kart, kurt, kart, kurt-that the early Turks made while walking over snow in the Southeast"s mountains. Many Turks, still reeling from the humiliations of the early twentieth century, eagerly embraced such absurd nationalist theories, which were taught in the schools and continued to be propagated long after Atatrk"s death. Chauvinist sayings such as "A Turk is worth the whole world" became woven into the very definition of what it meant to be a loyal citizen of Turkey.
Life in Kurdistan improved somewhat in the 1950s, following Turkey"s first free general election. Exiled aghas and shaikhs were allowed back into the region and began to accrue their old power, with some entering politics, while also becoming estranged from their const.i.tuents as they took up residence in the cities. A limited amount of cultural expression was also allowed. Nonetheless, Kurdish political parties continued to be outlawed, and the Southeast remained mired in poverty; the government did little to develop the area, although a good system of roads was built-the better to police the Kurds.
In 1960, a military coup overthrew an authoritarian civilian government and, surprisingly, inst.i.tuted a new liberal const.i.tution that gave the Turks much more democracy than before. However, the new const.i.tution also established the powerful National Security Council, composed of an equal number of military and civilian members, but usually headed by a four-star general, designed to oversee the civilian government. In 1971 and 1980, the Turkish military staged two more coups.
The 1960s was a turbulent decade in Turkey, as left-wing students and other radicals organized large, antigovernment demonstrations, leading to ma.s.s arrests. However, it was the 1980 coup that brought about the harshest modern clampdown on human rights. Staged to end the violence between left- and right-wing radicals that had begun two years earlier, resulting in over five thousand deaths, the coup led to the adoption of another new const.i.tution. This one inst.i.tutionalized the power of the military, sharply curtailed civil liberties, and outlawed all political parties. The military junta also cruelly enforced and augmented the ban on the Kurdish language, while sending troops into the Southeast to arrest and interrogate tens of thousands of "political suspects."
Unbeknownst to the Turkish authorities at that time, however, Kurdish history was about to enter a whole new phase. Abdullah calan and his followers had formed the Kurdistan Workers" Party (PKK). A tragic civil war was in the offing.
M Y TOUR OF Turkey"s Kurdistan did not begin in the Southeast, the Kurds" traditional homeland, but in romantic, sophisticated Istanbul to the northwest-seemingly as far away from Kurdistan as it is possible to get and still be in Turkey. But Istanbul is also the world"s largest Kurdish city, as it is home to about 2 million Kurds, out of a city population of 12 million. The Kurds started migrating to Istanbul and other western Turkish cities when the evacuations of their villages began in the 1920s. What started as a trickle grew to a stream in the 1960s and 1970s-due mostly to economics-and to a flood in the 1980s and 1990s-due to the civil war. At least a third of Turkey"s estimated 14 million Kurds, out of a total country population of 70 million, now live in its western cities, including Ankara, Adana, Mersin, and Izmir, as well as Istanbul.
Most of Istanbul"s more recent Kurdish migrants are uneducated, unable to speak Turkish, and desperately poor. To Turkey"s credit, however, many of the migrants who arrived in the 1960s and 1970s have become solidly middle cla.s.s, their educated children working professional jobs. Well a.s.similated into mainstream Turkey, these Kurds live lives much like urban dwellers in any other modern capital, with all the accoutrements that go with it-computers, cell phones, nightlife, music, casual s.e.x, Western fashion.
While in Istanbul, I stayed with one such middle-cla.s.s Kurdish family, who lived in a pleasant neighborhood on the city"s outskirts. The parents, Elif and Yakup Sevinc, were originally from a village in the Bingl region- a northern, hardscrabble Kurdish province. They had moved to the capital over thirty years before. Elif was unable to speak anything but Kurdish when she arrived, while Yakup knew only the basic Turkish he"d learned while in the army. Yet they"d done remarkably well, not only living in a comfortable, modern apartment, but also becoming the proud parents of three well-educated sons. Ali, an economist, lived nearby with a family of his own; Atilla, now also known as Alan, had emigrated to New Jersey, and Aydin was a university student.
Ali and his English-speaking cousin Sheri, an architect, picked me up soon after my arrival to whisk me to my temporary home, where Elif was waiting. Round and motherly, with a lovely face always wreathed in smiles, and always ready with a hug, she took attentive care not only of me during my visit, but, it seemed, of the whole world all the time, as she cooked up enormous traditional Kurdish/Turkish meals for everyone every evening. All followed, of course, with fragrant tea served in tulip-shaped gla.s.ses. Elif had been to New Jersey to visit her son Atilla the year before and had just started taking literary cla.s.ses, painstakingly writing out her homework at the kitchen table in the late afternoons. Whenever I thought of all the twists and turns her life had taken, I felt in awe.
In yet more of the generous Kurdish hospitality that I encountered everywhere, the rest of the family was also waiting for me. Ali would serve as my occasional chauffeur and informal historian, Yakup would introduce me to various friends, and Sheri and her English-speaking friend Sedef-an Azeri Turk whose family was originally from Iran-would serve as my interpreters. Most of all, Aydin, the youngest son, a tall and lanky man with an irrepressible smile, essentially took more than a week out of his life to help me navigate Istanbul and its difficult transportation system. Aydin"s bedroom was a testament to his many pa.s.sions, filled with books by Mehmed Uzun, a foremost Kurdish writer from Turkey; various Kurdish folk instruments; recordings of both Kurdish music and American rock and roll; posters of Che Guevara and the NBA, and the anarchists" flag. "I am a Communist and an anarchist," he proudly told me.
But for all these trappings of success and well-being, the more time I spent with my adopted family and their friends, the more I learned that, as usual, more than one reality was operating here. Yes, the family and their friends had done well, and, yes, they did not have to worry about chemical attacks, harsh Islamic laws, or Turkish gendarmes burning their villages, as did their fellow Kurds in Iraq, Iran, or Turkey"s Southeast. However, what they had achieved had come at a steep price. The usual one: hard work. And an unusual one: a decades-long denial of who they were.
Although my new friends were, in fact, closer to their heritage than many middle-cla.s.s Kurds in western Turkey, none of the younger generation spoke Kurdish. It was outlawed while they were growing up, as was Kurdish music and all other forms of Kurdish cultural and political expression. Like most urban Kurds now in their twenties, thirties, and forties, they had gone through school pretending they were Turk. And although that pressure originally came from outside, it was also internalized. To be Kurdish back then was humiliating and worse, as everyone "knew" that the Kurds were stupid and dirty, they were ugly and dark, they were aggressive and primitive-animals, really.
"I hated being Kurdish growing up," one thirty-something said to me. "I tried not to think about it, and I never said I was Kurd-I didn"t even want my mother to come to my school conferences, because she spoke only Kurdish and then my friends would know."
"There was a boy I liked very much, and finally one day I told him I was Kurd," said another. "But he didn"t believe me. He said, "Don"t talk about yourself this way! It"s like swearing! Kurds are ugly and stupid. You"re too beautiful and smart to be Kurd." "