Helmut's Story

Helmut Hainzlmeier, a 65-year-old Bavarian mountain-climber [pictured above, right, with his companions], was one of three German tourists kidnapped from Mt. Ararat by a PKK platoon on July 8. He was released along with his companions on Monday July 21. They have now returned to Germany.

When the story first broke, Reuters Television did a report from Bavaria. Here is a partial transcription, which gives some background on Mr. Hainzlmeier, who evidently volunteered to be a hostage. Following that I have reprinted an interview with Helmut Hainzlmeier from the German magazine Stern, which I translated via Google and then cleaned up using a German dictionary. Thus I am responsible for any errors. The details are sparse but vivid: lava caves, a bear's den, and guerrillas who "knew very well where they wanted to go."



[Reuters Television]

Elsewhere in Germany, a friend of one of the kidnapped tourists
described him as a man who had his feet firmly on the ground.

Otto Kneitinger, who runs a hotel in the small southern German town of
Abensberg in Bavaria where at least one of the kidnap victims is from, told
Reuters Television "he is a serious person and a super buddy."

"There aren't a lot of people like him around. That explains why
he volunteered to be a hostage, instead of the others. He is a great person
and that's one reason why he will master this. I just know," Kneitinger
said.

According to Kneitinger, the kidnap victim, identified in the local
paper as Helmut Hainzlmeier, "volunteered to be a hostage, instead of the
others."


And now the interview, from Stern:

Helmut Hainzlmeier is back home. For 13 days he was in the captivity of the Kurdish terrorist [sic] organization PKK. In an interview with stern.de he speaks about the hijackers, a failed transfer and his fear of the Turkish army.


Mr Hainzlmeier, how are you?

I feel very good.

You were in the hands of the PKK almost two weeks. Can you describe this time?

It was tough, no doubt. In particular, the "walking-tours" -- if you want to call it -- in the night. We changed our location almost daily, always at night. During the day, we slept and ate.

Did you have a rough idea where you were?

We had often clear starry nights. Ararat we always had in sight. Even the Polar Star I always saw. We moved towards the east and came to a bear's cave. We were there three nights.

How big was the group?

It varied between four and nine PKK members. Up to 15 people alternated being with us. It seemed as if every four kidnappers belonged together.

The constant change of location sounds like aimless wandering.

The hijackers knew very well where they wanted to go. Everywhere they had a kind of base; lava caves, for example. Before the border with Iran, they knew well that the Turkish army there had cut off the routes. That is why we then cut back again in the direction of Ararat. They had to stay in the area of the mountain. The military kept out of that region -- thank God, in our view.

Why?

We saw a direct clash of the kidnappers and the Turkish army as the biggest danger. That would be disastrous.

Otherwise you had no fear?

I never feared for my life. We had to trust the PKK statement that they viewed us as guests. We heard Deutsche Welle [German Radio] just about every day. We were kept informed.

Still, 13 days in captivity must have been gruelling.

We learned that on Monday a week ago a transfer - always the hijackers spoke of an "event" - failed. They wanted to deliver us to neutral mediators, so it could be objectively determined if were not pleased with the PKK. Almost one week later, it worked.

How will you spend the next few days?

I want especially one thing: peace.


Interview by Martin Rutrecht


Article 22 July 2008
Stern.de

Fire Burn, Cauldron Bubble

"I am not making this up."
--Dave Barry

Things remain at a rolling boil in the kitchen of Turkish politics. Like the Janissaries, whose signal act every time they revolted was to run to the galley and overturn their soup kettles, some of today's actors seem ready to throw over the whole apparatus at any time. I won't attempt to make sense of it; rather, I'll point you in the direction of those better equipped to try. Most of these stories are old news to Turkey-followers. But like a good off-color joke, they keep on giving.


First and most important (I guess), the duly-elected government of Turkey, headed by the AKP, or Justice and Development Party, is about to be tossed out in a coup conducted by hardline secularists of the judicial branch. This will happen in a couple of weeks. In Turkey judges and prosecutors live, like the Army, in their own little Green Zone of the mind, perpetuating the power of the authoritarian state (i.e., themselves) no matter how nonsensically contorted their rulings have to be. Saban Kardas, in Eurasia Daily Monitor, gives a rundown on the closure case, as does Turkish Politics in Action. Everybody agrees that the court decision will oust the AKP and outlaw its leaders, including the current Prime Minister, and practically everybody thinks it will lead to political chaos. Eventually the chaos will subside, and that weird mutation, the Turkish State, will marshall its spastic limbs and stagger on, but nobody knows exactly how. At the same time as the AKP case, the "pro-Kurdish" party in Parliament, the DTP (Democratic Society Party), is also in danger of being closed. Like the "mildly Islamist" [don't ask; it's like a "moderate Republican"] AKP, they're expected to form the same party under a new label, just as they and so many other banned political parties have done so many times before.

Then we have Ergenekon. This is not, as you might expect, a Klingon ruler. Nor is it a new virility drug. It is, in fact, the name given to what is either (a) a bunch of right-wing thugs who just talk a lot and occasionally kill somebody, or, (b) a bunch of right-wing thugs who have formed a massive conspiracy to overthrow the duly-elected government. For more, see here and here. But wait, you say, wasn't overthrowing the government what we were just talking about? Right, but that was judges. They will overthrow the elected government legally, i.e., by arbitrary judicial force. Ergenekon (allegedly! allegedly!) wanted to use arbitrary force of a more traditional kind, like finding liberals and anyone else they didn't like and putting a bullet between their eyes. Turkish Politics gives a rundown on this gang, and as readers might remember, I did a few paragraphs about them a couple of months ago.

In Turkey, besides the earth-shaking cases, there is always plenty of news on the micro-legal front. Here it's impossible to choose the stories, so thickly do they lie upon the ground. There's Bulent Ersoy, for example, a transsexual singer and television hostess who is in trouble for having said that, if she were able to have a son, she would not want him to go to war in the Southeast against the PKK. Obviously this is "Discouraging people from military service"--a major no-no. Then there's YouTube, which is constantly being banned in Turkey for allowing people to post unflattering videos about Ataturk. Another defendant, a newspaper reporter (there are already 23 [!] of them in jail), has been sentenced to six years in prison for contacting the PKK, even though he was proven (by the police!) to be nowhere near the scene of the crime at the time it was committed. This is truly a classic. Details here.

Elsewhere (at Istanbul's Ataturk airport, presumably in the Ataturk Customs Hall, close to the Ataturk Men's Room) the Fatherland was barely saved from subversion when a seven-year-old boy named Welat was denied entry. His crime? The little twerp sports a name that begins with W. The letters Q, W, and X are forbidden, you see, in Turkey. (If your name is Xavier Kumqwat, don't even think about going.) Welat, born in Germany to Kurdish parents with dual German-Turkish nationality, tried to sneak past customs and immigration, but luckily the little terrorist was caught and sent packing back to Dusseldorf.

And speaking of juvenile delinquents, in June Turkish prosecutors once again proved their mettle when they hauled into court a children's choir from Diyarbakir in the Southeast. The kids' offense: singing a song in Kurdish. God knows how many W's and X's it must have contained. Not only did they do this, but they did it in a foreign country, specifically the Queer People's Republic of San Francisco, where they were attending an international choral festival in the fall of 2007. In a rare display of judicial flabbiness, the Diyarbakir court acquitted them. The woman who catalogues their sheet music, however, will probably get life.

Amid this legal maelstrom, the war continues in the East of Turkey, with daily clashes big and small. Just this week the PKK announced that they had shot down two Sikorsky helicopters, with one downing caught on video. See Mizgin's announcement here. If and when she posts a link to that video, I'll update this posting to include it, and we can all sit around and watch combat porn.

Meanwhile, the 3 German climbers captured on Mt. Ararat last Thursday (7/11) are nowhere to be found, even after a week of intensive search by the Turkish Army. Some people (i.e., me) have noted that, with the recent massively-publicized release of Ingrid Betancourt in Colombia, this is hardly the time for the PKK to be taking hostages if they want Europeans to think of them as "freedom fighters" rather than "terrorists." (Americans don't even know they exist, so it doesn't matter what we think.) However, my feeble opinion cuts no ice with the PKK, and take them they did. In Germany, chagrined Kurdish associations are calling for their release.

It should be noted that the German climbers were taken at Camp #1, or Yesil (Green) Camp, the main camping place on the standard summit route for tourists on Mt. Ararat. Ararat (16,950') is basically a long hike to the summit, with no technical difficulty involved except the possibility of oxygen sickness. Lots of people do it. Moreover, as Mizgin Yilmaz has pointed out, having just visited the area, the vicinity of Ararat is crawling with police and military. And yet, the PKK team just walked into the camp about 10 P.M. and took the climbers. And now they can't be found. This on a mountain that's totally bare--not a single tree anywhere to hide behind.

But of course it's not as simple as that. Ararat is big. Very big. And actually there are two of them. The second, or Lesser Ararat, is over 12,000 feet at its summit, and thus is itself a formidable peak. Put these two volcanoes together and cover their slopes with hectare upon hectare of black, ugly, fissured lava, and you end up looking into an abyss. Think, by comparison, of Steve Fossett's plane and all the effort that went into finding it, to no avail. And it was yellow! The PKK, au contraire, do not wear bright colors.

In fact, the slopes of Ararat and neighboring peaks have proven to be ideal guerrilla country for over a century. At the beginning of the 20th century Armenian guerrillas of the Tashnak, a revolutionary organization based in Russian territory, used these slopes and surrounding areas extensively. Later, in the 1920s, Ararat was the base for a revolt of the Jelali Kurds, a major tribe in the area. So after a week on the run, the PKK and their captives could be anywhere. And just 35 miles to the southwest, easy walking distance for guerrillas, another volcano offers even better cover.

This other volcano is Tendurek. It looks, as you can see from the above photograph, like a giant paint ball splattered upon the moonscape of eastern Turkey. Tendurek, though high enough (11,500') is not iconic like Ararat or other famous volcanoes, such as Mts. Rainier, Shasta, or Fuji. No lovely cone adorns the skyline, with a perpetual patch of snow to lend it grandeur. Tendurek is a shield volcano, rather like Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii. Tendurek spews (or spewed, for its last eruption was in 1850) liquid lava, not ash, and this lava has spread over a vast area in the surrounding terrain. W.A. Wigram, an Anglican missionary who lived in Van before the Great War, describes Tendurek's lava flows:

The lava flows from Mount Etna, which are out and away the most magnificent in Europe, are not to be compared for a moment with the twenty miles square of "black glacier" that have streamed from the fissures of Tendurek Dagh.

And here, their importance to the Armenian guerrillas of the Tashnak:

Nature aided the Tashnakists, by giving them practically inexpugnable strongholds in the land, with ready exits into Persian territory. The great crater of Nimrud [Note: Nemrut, at west end of Lake Van], some six miles across, was one of their refuges; and this is paved for much of its area with a maze of corrugated lava whence no man who knows the runs can be dislodged. Here are also hot springs, just of a temperature to sit in comfortably, in which some of these fellows actually lived for weeks during an Armenian winter, with the thermometer far below zero. They had rigged up an ingenious arrangement, so that they could lie in the water and sleep with their heads above the surface.

Their strangest stronghold, however, was the giant lava­flow of Tendurek. Here either the lava has streamed from great horizontal fissures, or possibly the whole mountain has been blown away by the discharge of an accumulation of energy. Whatever the cause, an area some twenty miles square [Note: "twenty miles square" = 400 sq. miles] has been covered with a sea of black lava; which has split and fissured in every direction as it cooled, and now resembles nothing so much as a gigantic black glacier. It is a place where any number of men, and any amount of stores, could lie Perdu for as long as they wished; for there is an abundant supply of water in the crevasses. One edge of the field is admittedly in Persian territory [Note: not now, I believe, since the border was adjusted during Ataturk's time.], and so cannot be policed, even if it were a simple matter to put a cordon round such a place. All the guns of the empire might bombard the stronghold to the crack of doom without inconveniencing its occupants, except by an occasional lucky shot; and the garrison could issue from it at any point to cut up any isolated post. It is an absolutely ideal guerrilla stronghold; for men can move from end to end of it unseen, while every movement of the besieger is conspicuous to them on the bare downs that surround it. [Wigram, The Cradle of Mankind]

That's Tendurek. Less than a month ago, on June 25, 2008, three guerrillas of the PKK, two women and one man, were killed there. As I said, this is just 35 miles--or less--from Ararat. And the Germans are nowhere to be found. Today's press release from the PKK says that continued military operations by the Turkish Army are jeopardizing the security of the hostages. This does not mean that the PKK is threatening to kill the Germans. It means that if the TSK manages to corner the guerrillas and their captives, all bets are off. Everyone who knows the Turks knows that they don't negotiate and they don't take prisoners. Captured PKK fighters are usually shot in cold blood, and their bodies have been mutilated, which has included decapitation. Thus, there is no reason for them to surrender. And with no surrender, the German tourists would be right in the middle.

[also posted at Progressive Historians]

Nazim's Story

Sirnak, SE Turkey: "Happy is He Who Says, I Am a Turk."

Long ago I read a review by John Updike of "They Burn the Thistles," by Yasar Kemal, a novel dealing, as do most of that writer's works, with the lives of Kurdish villagers in the Cukurova, the rich agricultural plain at the base of the Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey. My memories of the review are dim, but as I remember, Updike found the book heavy going. The sheer weight of human suffering and violence described in its pages soon left him surfeited. At one point he wondered how human life, in such a country, "was scarcely even possible."

I have probably not quoted Updike's words accurately, but of his sentiments I have no doubt. For I share them. It's hard to talk about this place, Turkish Anatolia, and I for one have not nearly the stamina needed to become a consistent, long-term commentator about it. The temptation is great simply to wash one's hands of people caught in such circumstances, especially among the urban and rural poor. The combination of backbreaking work, extreme poverty, a cruel social system, and a government both oppressive and relentlessly self-congratulatory, all combine to cripple many of its victims beyond hope of succor. And yet their generosity to the stranger, plus the fact that so many manage to liberate themselves--through education, hard work, and sheer luck--and, moreover, to actually go forth into the world and make real and positive contributions, means that for me, at least, the history and people of Anatolia are just too special to ignore.



I found the following courtesy of Kelly Stuart, a playwright and faculty member at Columbia University. It was published on the website of Barnhill, a psychotherapy partnership in Wembley Park, England. Specifically, the page dealt with trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, and the use of poetic language in psychotherapy to treat it. Nazim's is a simple story, one that could be told by many millions of village boys and girls. I imagine I'm scarcely the first to feature it online. But it bears repeating. I have inserted [notes] in several places, which are explained at the end of the text. The following appears in the original paper:

The Medical Foundation Caring for Victims of Torture is a U.K. human rights organisation . Survivors and their families are provided with medical and social care, practical assistance, and psychological and physical therapy. The Medical Foundation also raises public awareness about torture and its consequences. The majority of clients are people who have fled their countries because of persecution. Interpreters are needed for much of the work, including talking therapies.

Richard McKane (poet & interpreter) and Paul Burns (psychotherapist) started to work together with Nazim, a survivor and a client of Medical Foundation, over two years ago, after the National Health Service had referred him. Nazim has also been supported at the Medical Foundation by a doctor, a psychiatrist, a neurologist, the Asylum and Legal Teams and been part of a writing group. Paul and Richard have helped Nazim to obtain better housing, education and social support in the wider community.

The original link is here:


Nazim’s Prose Memoir: A Kurdish Childhood in a Turkish Village

(Part of this account was written in a Medical Foundation Writing Group and part comes from psychotherapeutic work. Both were translated by Richard McKane.)

I came into the world unaware of the world’s badness, ugliness and beauties. I grew up in a humble family in an unfortunate village without a hospital or shop, far from the city and in winter the roads were closed for five months. If, God forbid, you got ill, either the old women would give you medicines or the Hoja [1] would read things over you and blow on you and with luck you’d live through it.

Spring was incredibly beautiful, nature became festive, the trees and flowers opened out, the meadows turned green. The birds celebrated, the waters swelled and flowed noisily. Children’s voices, birdsong and the sound of the trees swayed by the wind mixed together on all sides.

But it was a pity that we were not able to experience these beautiful things to the full as a Kurdish, Alevi child [2]. Ethnic Turks in the village looked down on Kurds, and Sunni Moslems looked down on Alevis. Often mothers or older brothers would come and break up those good childhood games or they’d move away from us and say ‘Come little one, these are dirty, bad people, don’t play with them.’ As for me I wondered what was dirty about me and couldn’t find anything. Yes, the clothes I wore were a little different, but these clothes were what my ancestors or grandparents had worn.

We had sheep and together with my elder brother we took them to graze. Before dawn my mother would come to my bedside and say: ‘Come on little one, you’ve got to go to the lambs.’ I used to say to myself: ‘God take my soul’, because I was still a child, a baby of six years old, and I had started to get to know the difficult life of looking after lambs. We were given ‘omach’, a flaky bread made by the village women which you slice and spread with butter.

We gave all the lambs different names and when we called them by their names they came up to us bleating. Believe me, there is no better thing. All your tiredness is taken away, especially when you play the shepherd’s pipe and they listen as you share your woes and talk to them. And when it’s time to go back with the sheepdog, the lambs get in a single line with you calling them behind you as they make their way home to their mothers.

I first saw a dead person at about the age of seven. Turkish soldiers brought a body down from the mountains to our village and made the adults gather round to identify it. With the other children I climbed onto the roof of a house [3] to see what was going on. I saw it was a man from the village aged about 25 who had been shot in the head and chest. The entry wound was very small and the exit wound very large. I could see the parents of the man looking on and not acknowledging that this was their son. I felt more sorry for the parents than for the son.

At the age of 8 or 9 I first witnessed my home being raided and also around this time my uncle was shot while working in his fields. Kurds in the village were pressured by the guerrillas to provide food and threatened if they did not. The Turkish authorities and forces also used terror to stop any support being given to the guerrillas.
Before I was born the village had more people but then many had left because of terrorism. Four uncles had gone to Germany, and my father went to France for four years when I was 10.

My paternal grandfather and uncle had been both been shot dead by government forces. I do not know the circumstances but they had both served long prison sentences for their political views. The Turkish authorities would not allow their relatives to bury these two men in the village. Perhaps they feared a crowd gathering to mourn. Raids on Kurdish houses became frequent, both by Army Special Forces and heavily armed police. After the age of 9 I witnessed about a raid a month while I was living in the village. A typical raid would begin early in the morning, just before it was light. Between 150 and 200 armed men would drive in trucks to near to the village then make their way on foot so as to give no warning. They would position themselves in teams of 10 to 15 at each Kurdish house, including on the roofs of the houses. Once all were in position each house would be entered at the same time without warning. Doors would be kicked in and most of the men would rush in carrying automatic rifles and begin searching all of the rooms, throwing things to the ground. They would find adults and children in bed or in nightclothes. If anyone asked what was going on or said anything else they were hit with the butt of a rifle. At other times, beatings would be inflicted at random. I regularly saw my father and other relations beaten during these raids.

The worst violence that I witnessed would take place in the village square. After some raids older men up to the age of 60 were bound hand and foot. Then with the whole village looking on they would be kicked and hit dozens of times with rifle butts and heavy belt buckles.

I was first detained and tortured when I was 15. After a raid I was taken with my parents and older brother to a police station. I was held there for three days in a bug-infested, damp and cramped cell with four others. In the cell there was a drain covered by a grill used as a urinal. The guards routinely ignored pleas for access to toilet for defecation. No food was provided. Those who had money could buy water.

Throughout the stay I could hear the screams of other people being tortured until they lost consciousness. On my first day I was taken from the cell, blindfolded, and taken to the torture room. I was made to remove all of my clothes and my hands were tied to an iron bar above me so that I was forced to stand on my toes. I was asked about guerrillas, which I did not know much about. As my answers were not the ones the interrogators wanted to hear, the beating began. I was first hit with a truncheon on my right wrist with such force that the arm was broken. When I later went to hospital for treatment of the wrist, it had to be re-broken in order to set it correctly. This wrist is still painful.

I was also hit with a wet rope on the back and then falaka [4], beating on the soles of the feet. Falaka by itself is a very painful form of torture, but after the beating stopped, I was made to put my feet into cold water. This felt like being slashed with a razor. After falaka my feet were swollen for at least 10 days and I could not put any weight on the soles of my feet.

The torture lasted about one hour altogether. I think it may have ended sooner because the torturers realised from the swelling of my wrist that they had broken it.

With torture your whole soul changes. You were a clean, innocent kid and you became a rough child out to protect yourself, Nazim. Your way of looking at other people changes. You don’t trust closeness. You can’t tell anything to even the closest people. They would be upset for someone else and they wouldn’t have anything that they could do for you.

I was tortured a second time at the age of sixteen and then at intervals I have regularly been assaulted and tortured. I have never supported violence, but in Turkey even belonging to a legitimate opposition party is dangerous. When I was conscripted into the army I was tortured for reading a liberal newspaper.

Towards the end of my time in Turkey I received death threats. If I did not become an informer I would be killed.
---------------------------------------------
[1] hoja -- village imam; religious teacher
[2] Alevi -- a sect separate from both Sunni and Shi'a Islam.
[3] roof -- village houses have flat roofs.
[4] falaka -- the bastinado

Spreading Out, Hunkering Down

This place--Giresun, on the Black Sea Coast--is a long way from Kurdistan. The mountains are greener, the trees more plentiful, the summer heat not nearly so lethal. It is more like the Pacific Northwest than the Middle East. Fruits grow in abundance hereabouts. The Roman general Lucullus, according to legend, brought the first cherry tree back to Europe from this very port--then called Cerasus. But hazelnuts, not cherrries, now predominate. Turkey's Black Sea Coast is the Persian Gulf of hazelnuts. "The Turks control everything," a Washington State filbert grower once told me. "Every year, until they set the price they want, I have no idea whether or not I can make a profit." And it's not just nuts. That Italian olive oil that you bought last week? You don't really think it's Italian, do you? Or olive, for that matter. Don't be surprised if it contains a big glug of hazelnut oil from these same shores.

This is, in short, a province humming with commerce, the last place one would expect a guerrilla war to arrive. And yet it has.




Here is the map posted at hpg-online.com, the official website of the PKK's armed force, the HPG. Just your standard Mapquest item, but with a difference. The blue expanse is the Black Sea. At the far right of the map, past Hopa, you can see the frontier between Turkey and Georgia. Between the towns, hemming in the roads, are mountains. (If you think of Turkey as nothing but mountains, you won't be far wrong.) The map tack shows the location of the latest clashes between PKK guerrillas and the Turkish Army, near Gumushane, a major town on the highway between Erzurum and Trabzon. Previously they were directly southeast of Giresun--beyond, in other words, those peaks in the above photo. According to the PKK, 3 Army soldiers were killed and 4 wounded in the fight, which took place on 28 June. All in all, the PKK's "war tally" for June, just issued, claims 66 clashes across a wide slash of territory, with 158 Turkish soldiers killed, many more wounded, and a flurry of forest fires deliberately set by the Turkish Army. A PKK unit even attacked a police barracks in Hakkari province, in retaliation, they said, for police brutality against young Cuneyt Ertus during the Newroz celebrations.*

All the casualties, of course, are unverifiable, and since guerrillas rarely take and hold ground, the PKK themselves would have a hard time counting the dead. 158 is an improbable number. But numbers are not the point. The point is in the geographical spread. A PKK unit (or units) is operating near the shores of the Black Sea. Further south, near Erzincan and Tunceli, many other guerrillas have long been active. Add to these units further east, near Kars on the border with Armenia, and the geographical spread becomes amazing. From Mt. Ararat, at the Armenia-Iran border, to the mountains behind Iskenderun, on the Mediterranean, all of this is territory that has seen PKK-government fighting in the past six months. For a guerrilla army that moves solely on foot and supplies itself with hidden caches, this is astonishing. The PKK, which by the year 2000 seemed almost finished, has come back, with new recruits coming in all the time and plenty of angry, unemployed teenagers waiting in the wings. For this, as so many have stated so many times before, the Turks have no one to blame but themselves.

The guerrillas, meanwhile, are using the Internet for all it's worth--as long as, that is, their website doesn't succumb to vandalism by the Turkish government. Several new portfolios have recently been posted on the HPG website, and I recommend them to anyone curious about these people and their world. [Just go to hpg-online.com, and click 'Foto Galeri' on the right.] One photograph shows the late Halil Uysal, the German-born PKK film maker and photographer, sitting in a plastic-roofed shelter using a laptop connected, no doubt, to the Internet. In the background are other guerrillas working on other laptops. And these laptops and the websites they serve are fed by digital cameras, shooting both stills and video, as well as press releases, essays, and poems posted by men and women in the ranks.

Two videos in particular have shown up recently. The first shows an attack by some 150 PKK guerrillas, one of the largest they have ever made, on a Turkish military outpost in the mountains of Semdinli, near the Iraqi border. This happened in May. In the video we can see the guerrillas, men and women, hiking through the mountains. We see their mules and their weapons, but also we see the terrain. On a mountainside a pillar marked "TC" (Turkiye Cumhuriyeti: Republic of Turkey) denotes the border. As the guerrillas prepare to attack, with the target far below in a gorge, and a gun emplacement high above it to provide covering fire, we get glimpses of the scenery: naked spires flecked with snow, a Yosemite-like rock wall that must be thousands of feet high. As night falls and the attack begins, the video becomes more frenetic: streams of tracer rounds dance about; a shaky handheld camera moves here and there; an ammunition store in the army outpost is burning out of control. It was, claimed the PKK, their first "aerial" attack.

The second video is shorter, more intense, and more brutal: a piece of combat porn rather than a revealing look behind the headlines. Amid a din of small arms fire, in broad daylight, two big army trucks are ambushed on a mountain road somewhere in Turkey. The first comes round a bend into a wall of bullets. It veers off the road and plunges into a ravine directly below the photographer, its wheels pointing skyward. Immediately the camera looks up. Another truck is coming around the same bend. As the lens focuses and zooms in, we can plainly see the pocks and splintering of multiple hits on the front and windshield of the vehicle. The truck stops, and for some reason, amid this hail of bullets, the passenger door opens and a soldier falls out onto the road. Immediately he picks himself up, but by this time the driver has put the truck in reverse and is backing wildly away. The soldier, alone and in the open, runs for his life. All around him the road is erupting in spurts of dust. He jinks left, then right, then left again, his feet bracketed by gunfire as he chases after the truck. He makes it off the road into the low brush, where by now the truck is even farther away, weaving in reverse amid the scrub. And there, with no hint of the man's fate, the video ends.

And who perpetrated this violence? Well, it could have been someone like this:



Or maybe this guy.



"Defeat this!" he seems to be saying. After all, this war is at 24 years and counting. Meanwhile, as of 3 July 2008 General James Cartwright, vice-chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, is in Turkey to confer with the generals on intelligence-sharing, weapons-buying, and "rooting out" the PKK. Just fifteen minutes from my house, at the south end of Boeing Field, expensive new Boeing AWACS planes with "Turkish Air Force" printed on their sides are being prepared for just such service. As if there is any mystery. As if any ordinary person couldn't tell you that if you treat your citizens decently, respect who they are, and become the European democracy that you claim to be, perhaps you'd get somewhere in "rooting out" these problems.

Ah, but I am so naive. It's so much easier just to buy AWACS planes.

---------------------
*Revenge seems like the last thing Cuneyt would need. He needs therapy for his mangled arm--and anonymity.
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[Cross-posted at progressivehistorians.blogspot.com]

The Ferocious Past

The Ferocious Past
Dr. Grant of Kurdistan: 1807-1844

By John Agresto

Mr. Agresto, former president of St. John's College, Santa Fe, New Mexico, is currently interim provost of the new American University of Iraq-Sulaimani, in Iraqi Kurdistan. Previously he served as senior higher education advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, 2003-2004. In the fall of 2008 he will be a visiting professor at Princeton University. This article appears as the preface to the paperback edition of Gordon Taylor's Fever & Thirst: An American Doctor Amid the Tribes of Kurdistan, 1835-1844 (Academy Chicago Publishers). Previously posted at History News Network, 19 May 2008.


Everything seems so different now. From my room here in Sulaimani, in Kurdish Iraq, I can look down the street to the dilapidated green domed Shiite mosque and, from there, to the more prosperous Sunni mosque not too far behind it. Up the street is the Kurdish Cultural Center next to the Chaldean Catholic church, next to the headquarters of the Communist Party. Overlooking it all is a heavily treed compound that everyone says is the CIA headquarters. No one seems to think twice about any of this; religion, tribe, sect, nationality, politics...in this part of Kurdistan they all seem to coexist peacefully, even happily, together.

Compared to the world described in this extraordinary book, things seem different, things are different. The Kurds of Iraq, once surely one of the most ferocious people anywhere, have calmed down a good bit. Getting a job, owning a Nissan dealership, visiting Europe, flirting and being flirted with...all these are more important these days than cutting off your neighbor's ear. Commerce, trade, and money-making have worked their wonders on this part of the world, and turned peoples' attention to less sanguinary pursuits. Islam - never as fanatical here as in other parts of the Middle East - remains a mildly cohesive rather than a divisive element. And nationalism, Kurdish nationalism, exercises an attractive force that erodes, dissolves , many of the petty differences that only recently separated tribe and village and family.

Beyond politics and nationality, even the ancient religious landscape seems to have been erased by time. Asahel Grant, M.D., the great protagonist of this book, went to minister to the "Nestorians." But even among serious Christians, who these days knows anything about the Nestorians? No matter that these Christians were the offshoot of the first great and lasting divide in Christendom, dating back to 431 AD, when the Church of the East separated itself from the rest of Christianity. No matter that, for a while, these Nestorians - "Assyrians" as we refer to their remnant today --might even have been Christianity's dominant branch, with Nestorian churches thriving as far away as China, India, Japan and Tibet. But that was then, and surely times have changed.

So maybe everything is different now, and maybe Gordon Taylor's book is simply a beautifully written, impeccably researched, compellingly told historical curiosity. But... why do I have this odd feeling this book is more than that?

Perhaps, as the French might say, the more things change the more they remain the same. Look again at the Kurds. It wasn't all that long ago that half the Kurds of Iraqi Kurdistan, under the banner of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, called upon their arch-enemy, Saddam Hussein, to help them exterminate their political rivals in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Not to be outdone, the PUK, in turn, called upon the hated Iranians to help them in destroying the KDP. And now, fifteen years later, a political alliance brings both parties together, based, as always, on newly-perceived shared interest. And the cycle called History rolls on. More importantly, perhaps Americans haven't changed much, either. Look at Asahel Grant -- physician, missionary, and educator - improver of the body, the soul, and the mind. Asahel Grant epitomizes everything admirable, everything naive, and everything almost incomprehensible to the rest of the world, about the American spirit.

In some ways, the Kurds of this book are unremarkable. Tribesmen warriors, with all the brutality of the unconquered world in which they live, they display all the virtues and all the many vices that are catalogued in all stories, travelogues, and histories since the start of writing. Perhaps the amazing thing about the Kurds is not the ferocious picture of them in this book, but what they seem to have become of late.

Nor, perhaps, should we be too surprised by the character of the Nestorians, even though Asahel Grant, in his most American naiveté, was initially taken aback by their un-Christian like natures. (How else to describe a sect so rife with murderers, thieves, swindlers, and extortionists?) Despite the fact that most of us would like to think otherwise, that there are serious religions and serious religious sentiment without a shred of morality is a fact of life.

No, for me at least, the most amazing thing about this more than amazing book is Asahel Grant, the American. We meet the good doctor with a swollen face, bleeding himself with a lancet. We meet him in the sixth year of his sufferings. He has already lost his wife and two infant daughters to the ravages and diseases of Kurdistan. Yet he bleeds himself, and rides on. Why? Simple answer - To bring some semblance of literacy and education, some medical relief, and some moral support to an ancient Christian denomination that civilization seems to have passed by.

But, again, why? Why should Asahel Grant care so much about people he barely knows to lose his wife, his children, his health, and ultimately his life over them? In a world these days where we so easily talk about the common threads of our humanity, how all of us are really the same, why does Asahel Grant, the American, seem so different? Why is he concerned about the health of - of all people! --Kurds? Why does he exhaust himself over the education of children not his own? Why does he care if these "Nestorians" fall under the sway of the pope or not? Why are their bodies, their minds and the freedom of their spirits of any concern to him? To be sure, not one of the people he ministers to would have given up all they possessed to cross the ocean and climb the hills to minister to Asahel Grant. So why? Why does he do it?

This is hardly an idle or academic question in my life. When I look out my window here in Kurdistan I see more than buildings. Not missionaries exactly, but I do see Americans setting up schools, starting clinics, laying sewer pipe, helping to build roads.... All with lives elsewhere, all with families left behind. Like Asahel Grant, none of them are here for money or oil or politics or honor or acclaim. What's the idea or the idealism that drives them? Is it the same vision of Humanity that drove Grant? I think it is, though I'm not sure what to call it. Nor do I fully know exactly why it's there.

Perhaps the Kurds are changed from what they were in 1840. For sure the Nestorians are pretty much gone. But Asahel Grant seems still to be around, with all his idealism, all his boundless energy, all his up-to-date technology, all his mistakes, and, all too often, all the failures that come from his misplaced good intentions. Fever and Thirst, like any great book of biography and history, is hardly a book just about the past, hardly a curiosity at all.

In saying that, I have only touched on one of the wide-ranging themes of this book. Yet, even if we resist succumbing to any of the grand and perplexing themes of the book, the fascinating thing about Fever and Thirst is that we can easily take in its hundreds, its thousands of wonderful details. "Phlebotomy"? Here it is. Ever wonder what the sweet that Kurds and Arabs call Manna from Heaven is made of? That's right...aphid secretions. (Sorry to say, I read it here after I had eaten it.) Need to know about gallnuts or mercury poisoning or the proper use of leeches? No worry; they're all here. Or perhaps you had forgotten that lions roamed Iraq until the 1920's? From philosophy to botany to politics, religion and medicine -- I now know how the first reader must have felt upon opening Diderot's Encyclopedia.

The Stones of Chal

On things asleep, no balm

~T. Roethke

Residents of even the tiniest, most insignificant places can love the relics of their past. And when they speak out to defend them, people of good will should take notice.

Readers who know about Turkish affairs will assume that I'm referring to the town of Hasankeyf [discussed here, here, here, and here.], the latest in a series of historical treasures that Turkey's Dam Builders seem determined to inundate. But in fact I'm talking about Cukurca (chew-koor-ja), a town in southeast Turkey situated on the Greater Zab River, with the Iraqi border immediately to the south. Its name in Turkish means a "hollow" in the mountains, a good label for its position among the close-packed border ranges. Before being Turkified, Cukurca's name was Chal (rhyming with doll), and until the 20th century, when the Turks began extending their power into central Kurdistan, it was ruled by a Kurdish Agha. Like so many rulers in this region, however, the Agha of Chal held sway over more than just one ethnic group. While Kurds have always held a large majority within the geographical abstraction known as Kurdistan, there were, until the 20th century, substantial numbers of Jews and Christians to add to the mix. Of this Chal was an excellent example.

In The Cradle of Mankind (1914, 1922), the Anglican missionary W.A. Wigram noted that the Agha of Chal, "an old man", was the Ottoman Mudir (supervisor) of his district, which was part of a larger trans-riverine region known as Berwar. But the Ottoman government no more ruled these mountains than did the Agha: both were shepherds over a flock of cats. Wigram writes:

[The Agha] is also a Sufi by religious profession; and both of these circumstances should make for respectability; for the Mudir is put there to keep order, being lowest on the scale of local governors, and Sufis are usually supposed to be quiet mystics. Many of them are so in fact, and most interesting religious philosophers to talk with; but this man is noted for being on the whole the most crafty murderer in the country-side. It is of course something to rise to eminence in a profession so crowded as that peculiar one is locally; but perhaps that is not the most remarkable thing about this particular Agha. He is the only man of the writer's acquaintance who keeps a really large herd of domestic Jews. Chal village is largely populated by men of that race; and they are to all intents and purposes the serfs of the Agha--his tame money-spinners. The writer was even offered full rights in one of them for the sum of five pounds.

Such was the position of these mountain Jews. They were rayah, or "subjects", in local parlance, rather than ashiret (independent tribesmen). Though cribbed and confined, at least they enjoyed a settled feudal position under a lord who (in theory at least) would go after anyone who troubled them. "There are other chiefs who keep 'tame Jews' in this fashion," Wigram wrote, "though not on the same scale as does the wise man of Chal." Wigram, in observing this, reminds the reader that at one time all the Jews of England were the personal property of the King. Indeed, before the Exodus to Israel (after 1948), Jews could be found in all the towns of Kurdistan. There they plied the same trades associated with them in the Christian West: bankers, accountants, money-lenders, shopkeepers, workers in metal, jewelery, and other crafts. When they lived in villages, Jews lived essentially the same life--subsistence farming, stock breeding--as Christian and Kurdish rayahs. In 1850, near the mountain town of Bashkale, south of Lake Van, the archaeologist and explorer Austen Henry Layard came upon a tribe of Kurdish nomads whose clothing and adornments seemed slightly different from others he had met. Then he realized his mistake: these were not Kurds at all but Jews, living in the same black tents that their ancestors had carried with them in the Sinai. This was, as far as I know, the last documented encounter with Jewish nomadism in modern history.

Kurdish Jews spoke Syriac, or neo-Aramaic, a modern version of the same language spoken in Palestine and across the Near East in the time of Jesus. This same Syriac was also--and still is--the language of Kurdistan's Christian population, those "Nestorian" or "Assyrian" Christians which first the American Asahel Grant (1835) and later the English cleric W.A. Wigram went to contact. The Nestorians (Nasturi) were ashiret, the only independent Christian tribesmen in Kurdistan, and they dominated the ranges and narrow gorges to the north of Chal. These people were Christian; but in this context, do not think of St. Francis of Assisi: think rather of Vito Corleone.

The societal patterns of the Kurds were mirrored by those of the mountain Nestorians. An English-speaking reader coming from a middle-class and (at least culturally) Christian background, one habitually biased toward the underdog, might tend to assume that the Nestorians were somehow "nicer" than the Kurds. This--at least at first--was the assumption of the missionaries. It is, however, a dubious proposition. "Blood for blood" was the code by which the mountain Nestorians lived, a code no different from that of [the Kurds]. Frederick Coan, D.D., an American missionary in [Kurdistan] during the last decades of the nineteenth century, loses no love on behalf of the Kurds, and yet in his memoirs (Yesterdays in Persia and Kurdistan, 1939) he gives ample evidence of both sides' willingness to engage in robbery, murder, and subterfuge. His missionary father, Rev. George Coan, wrote in 1851: "The Nestorians are continually embroiled in quarrels. My very soul was made sick by their endless strifes." Close examination of other travelers' stories reveals that they were often just as wary of the Christians as they were of the Kurds. [In fact,] the Muslims of surrounding areas were petrified by the thought of entering their domains. Asheetha, the district where Asahel Grant built his home, was notorious for its plunderers and thieves. W.A. Wigram relates that one tradition among the mountain Nestorians involved raiding Jewish villages every year on Good Friday, in retribution for the death of Our Lord. This he relates as evidence of the mountaineers' boyish energy and high spirits. The reaction of the Jews he does not record. [F&T]

Today the Christians are gone, along with the names of their tribes and villages. Only on the Iraqi side of the border do Assyrian villages remain, and many of these have been abandoned due to shelling by the Turkish Army. The same applies to Kurdish villages as well. Faced by random bombardment, for local people the practice of animal husbandry has become next to impossible. In places where Turkish planes have bombed, villagers report hundreds of goats dead, not from the blasts themselves but from something that appears to have poisoned the grass. Goats' milk, a major part of the mountaineers' diet, now makes them ill. Recently a delegation from the Red Cross came to the mountains to take samples from the dead animals. So far no verdict has been issued. Said one Kurd villager in Iraq, "The Turks have done far more to us than Saddam ever did."

On the Turkish side of the border, things are no better. Villages have been forcibly evacuated by the army to deny help to the PKK guerrillas, a policy that has driven Kurds to the larger cities and towns, where they have little chance of employment and lots of time to demonstrate against a government they detest. In Cukurca, a sub-province (ilce) of Hakkari, the population declined drastically during the 1990s, and it remains low today. Indeed, there is little reason to stay. What was once a sleepy backwater has become an artillery base, where Turkish guns fire across the border at "suspected PKK positions" and make life unpleasant for the inhabitants.

This has taken a toll not only on the residents of Cukurca, but on the main thing that makes their town unique: the ancient buildings and stone houses on the citadel rock in the heart of the village. Look again at the photograph which leads this post. Now look at this drawing of Chal:

This was done by Edgar T.A. Wigram, brother of W.A., probably around the year 1910, when the two men were part of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Mission to the Assyrians of Kurdistan. It clearly shows the same citadel rock and the same houses as those in the modern color photo.

And remarkable houses they are. They range between two and four stories in height, and the quality of their stone work far surpasses that of houses usually put up in the mountains. The stone houses of Chal have endured for centuries--some sources say for 1500 years. Not so the peasant houses of Kurdistan, which usually consist of a rectangular excavation in the earth (for earth-sheltered weatherproofing), walls of rough stone stuck together with mud, and a flat roof of poplar logs and branches, plastered over with mud. In earthquakes these dwellings are death-traps. The stone houses of Cukurca, however, live on, their corners sharp and well-laid, their joints secured with lime mortar. Nearby is a large cistern, built to supply the citadel. It's not known who built them (the Emir Saban Medrese, a Muslim madrasa in the town, dates from Ottoman times), but if Chal village was "largely populated" by Jews it's a reasonable assumption that they not only lived in the stone houses but had a hand in their construction.

What time and earthquakes could not do, however, the Turkish Army is completing with its artillery. Their explosive shells may land miles away, but the shock waves from the guns begin in Cukurca. I have never heard a large cannon. Sources tell us that during the Great War their noise carried far from the Western Front and could easily be heard across the Channel in southern England. The thought of multiple batteries surrounding my neighborhood, hammering at the sky throughout the day, fills me with horror. So it has been in Cukurca. Now cracked and increasingly fragile, the houses have been forcibly evacuated by government authorities. But to the anger of residents, nothing is being done to preserve them.

"These houses shine a light into history," says Ziro Koc (pron. coach), a longtime resident. "Their destruction is something that cannot be accepted." Ziro Bey is afraid that one more military operation will cause major damage, and he like others in the town urges the government to embark on an emergency effort to preserve them. These structures, after all, cling to the sides of a very steep slope. Meanwhile, there is little or no employment in the town. Its reason for existence, the surrounding villages and their produce, have evaporated. "Cukurca," says another resident, Faruk Aksac, "is the possessor of many historical and beautiful things. But all this beauty has fallen under the shadow of war." Like so much else, the stone houses of Cukurca appear to be going downhill fast.

The Turkish Right Comes to Canada

Note: I post this simply as an illustration of what happens in Turkey all the time, and quite often at universities, where gangs of toughs will attack Kurdish or liberal student groups. This kind of attack is a trademark of the Turkish right, the "ulkuculer", or "idealists" of the MHP, the Nationalist Action Party. I have a feeling, however, that they picked the wrong country to do it in. This is one case where I'm sure the Mounties will get their man.

Bloody attack at cafe

By Renato Gandia

Edmonton Sun, 23 May 2008

A mob rampaged through a west-end cafe in a bloody attack yesterday that sent three men to hospital.

After the bloodshed, angry Kurds pointed the finger at their Turkish neighbours.

"This attack is a well-organized hate crime against Kurds by racist people," said Metin Yesilcimer, who rushed to the scene as soon as he heard about the violence.

Two men in their 40s and one in his 50s were taken to hospital with non life-threatening injuries after a group of 20 to 25 armed men stoned Ankara Cafe at 15960 109 Ave., and assaulted eight people with metal batons, knives and stones, said eyewitnesses.

"They are like Nazis. They are Turkish Nazis," said Yesilcimer, who said he was speaking on behalf of the victims.

STORMED THE CAFE

Just before 4 p.m., about eight construction workers were playing cards, drinking coffee and watching television when the attackers suddenly stormed the cafe.
"Somebody could have been killed here today," Yesilcimer said.

Cuma Yuksel, 40, sustained a bloody cut above his left eye, Halil Ekinci, 50, had a swollen arm, and Riza Med, 42, had a bruised nose after they were beaten with wood and metal sticks.

The attackers fled before cops got to the scene.

The owners were left to clean up smashed glass, droplets of blood and broken chairs and tables.

Thirty minutes earlier, an unknown man surveyed the cafe, said Yesilcimer.

"He came, looked around and I was kinda feeling something bad was going to happen."

He left the cafe and 30 minutes later, he got a call about the vicious assault.

Jalal Mardin, 31, said he was not surprised by the violence because of the history between Turks and Kurds. That's why he left Turkey six years ago and came to Canada as a refugee.

The Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, has fought for self-rule in Turkey's southeast since 1984.

The fighting has killed tens of thousands of people since then.

About 30 outraged Kurdish men met at the cafe last night to discuss their next move.

NO RETALIATION

Yesilcimer said they are not planning to retaliate.

"Nobody can guarantee that, but some individuals would be too angry they might retaliate.

"We want to be as peaceful as possible."

Mardin said most of the men at last night's meeting were refugees who wanted a new life in Canada.

"Most of these people have lost their relatives back home. They know what war is. They suffered from our country and they don't want to see this kind of conflict again in Canada."

Damarys Chavez, the 31-year-old wife of the cafe owner, said she now fears for the safety of her 2 1/2-year-old daughter who sometimes stays at the restaurant.

Police were investigating, but no arrests had been reported by the time of publication.

[Cross-posted at Progressive Historians.]

Mountain Images and More

The following writing and commentary by Gordon Taylor appeared at Progressive Historians. Listed by most recent first. Click on titles to read.

A Boy and His Arm II
Continues the story of Cuneyt Ertus, the boy in Hakkari whose torture by police was caught on video and broadcast over the Internet.

Anatolia Revisited
A collection of items describing the current state of war in Turkish Kurdistan.

Mountain Boy
Halil Uysal: photographer, filmmaker, guerrilla. Rest in peace.

A Boy and His Arm
The case of Cuneyt Ertus.

Another Day at the Office
More about police thuggery during Newroz 2008

A Day at the Office
Police brutality in Hakkari caught on camera.

The Red Arrow
Comments about the River Tigris.

Enemies Wanted: Inquire Within
Turkey's unique brand of paranoid nationalism.

Twenty-six Below
February 2008: Turkey's ground offensive against the PKK.

Updates from the Battle
Just what it says: dispatches from Turkey's Feb 2008 offensive.

Today the Struggle
February 2008: Turkish Army makes a move into Iraq.

Philippe Dudoit: Photos from the Ravines
A French photographer captures unique images of PKK guerrillas.

Riding the High Horse
Barham Salih, Kurdish-American, comments on Turkish nationalism.

Paranoia Inc.
Who else? Turkish etatists and their delusions.

The Twenty Million-Dollar Sheep Hunt
The Turkish Air Force hunts Kurds, and kills sheep instead.

Merry Christmas
News of the season from a snowbound place.

The Genuine Article
Noah's Ark: the "real one" and the fake.

La Gioconda Perduta
The death of Aynur Evin and its possible meaning.

Alice in Turkeyland
Living a lie in Turkey.

"Babes in Kurdland"
Images of women among the PKK guerrillas.

The Back of Beyond: Mountain Images 8
Photos taken by PKK guerrillas, notably Halil Uysal (see "Mountain Boy").

The Return of the Karduchoi
Mysterious artifacts recorded by guerrillas.

Turkish Army Captives
Images of Turkish soldiers taken captive by PKK: October 2008.

The Friends of Aynur: Mt. Images 4
The world of PKK guerrillas, focusing on people.

Oramar: Mt. Images 3
A clash in the Hakkari mountain village of Oramar; captives taken.

More Moonlight
More about Aynur, the Kurdish female guerrilla, and her friends.

Moonlight in the Mountains
A look at a guerrilla, her equipment, and her motivation.

"intihar etti"

Guerrilla Girls: Kandil Mountain.

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, 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 her grandeur. The place: Cizre, 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.

My Life in Art (Attic Peninsula, 1970)

"Take that, Gringo!" [Fernando Sancho]

My death came in a blaze of gunfire, as bullets splintered the rocks, my Schmeisser machine pistol burped its last, and I fell twisting and screaming into the dirt. It was, in other words, a happy ending: we got it in one take, using only a few feet of 16mm Ektachrome, a minimum expenditure of 9mm blanks, and one string of powder caps lain across the ground to simulate the ricochets. Yes, I hammed it up shamelessly during my death scene, which resulted in a nasty gash on my right index finger when I pitched onto the karstic limestone of Greece. But the hero was saved from my Nazi villainy, and the good guys prevailed. As for my accomplice, a red-haired traitor named Maria, she was taken out and shot. All the while, behind the rocks some 300 yards away, the tourist buses enroute to the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, where Byron's famous graffito stands chiseled into the marble, rolled past undisturbed.
This was kinematographia, as perpetrated under the Colonels' junta. Political subservience garnered the money; speed, economy, and convenience ruled the show; hard-core nationalism sold the tickets; and I was making twelve dollars a day.


It had begun before dawn on a Monday, when we gathered outside the offices of Pallis Athena Art Films*. The building, a four-story lump of brown stucco and concrete, lay in a seedy district near the Bouboulina Street Police Headquarters, a place of notorious grimness in the heart of Athens.
My friend Michael, who got me the job, was waiting out front when I arrived. Michael came from Munich, but with his fine features and brown hair he might have looked at home anywhere from the Urals to Big Sur. I met him and his French girlfriend Sylvie at a Lenten festival in Thebes, only a week after my arrival from England. Michael was tall, and he looked good in uniform, especially a Wehrmacht uniform, so the Greeks made use of this talent. He had done two other movies for Pallis Athena, and in both he played Nazis. In the film immediately preceding "Crete Aflame," the movie we were now shooting, he had commanded a firing squad; before that he tortured prisoners.
Michael, clad in jeans, a leather jacket, and a filter-tipped cigarette, was pacing back and forth on the sidewalk as I approached. When he saw me, he stopped and smiled. "Good," he said. "You came." The cigarette glowed red as he sucked hard, then blew smoke into the dark.
"What's happening?" I asked.
I looked around. Lights were on in a second-story office above us. On a wall I could see what looked like a movie poster with Greek characters splashed across it in red. This was the nerve center of Johnny Pallis's film-making operations. Pallis, Michael told me, was in tight with the junta; this allowed him to find production money that eluded others.
"Stavros says, we wait."
Stavros, Michael explained, was the assistant director. He ran the show for Eliadis, the famous director whom Johnny Pallis had hired to make the film.
It was cold that morning: I had walked over from my room on Tsakalof Street, near Kolonaki Square. In the markets of Athens, trucks were arriving heaped with citrus from Crete and the Peloponnese, but this tropical abundance could not hide the fact that we were getting uncomfortably close to frost. As a babble of Greek filled the air about us, Michael and I paced and shivered. Men arrived, talked, went inside, then came out again. Some of them got into cars and drove off. None brought enlightenment.
"What scenes are we doing today?" I asked.
"Ve don't know."
I considered this.
"Well, do you know where we're going?"
"Somevhere." Michael pointed his cigarette in a vague southern direction. "Sometime, they just go anywhere and shoot."
"You're kidding."
"Ja, ja. They get in ze truck, they look around and find a place. Then they shoot."
"I hope they have a script."
"Don' vorry, Gordon." Michael waved his cigarette and took another drag. "They vill tell everything."
The pacing continued as cold seeped into our feet. More men came; more left. After fifteen minutes a Ford van pulled up. When new it had been white. A man got out, flung open the side door, and in a rough Hellenic voice issued what seemed to be a command.
"Let's go," Michael said.
With difficulty, we slid onto bench seats that were surrounded by piles of electrical cable and equipment. Two other men occupied the front seats, chain-smoking crew members who either spoke no English or, at five in the morning, had no desire to do so. Michael knew only a little more Greek than I, so with that and the cold any conversation was stillborn.
At that hour the streets were deserted, so we moved fast. Athens in 1970 had few electric signals; they relied upon roundabouts and policemen to control traffic at major intersections. At 5:15 A.M. the place was a Greek motorist's dream. I had no idea where we were going, and neither did Michael, but we were obviously headed away from the harbor of Piraeus toward the east side of the Attic peninsula. After passing through Philothei and the far suburbs of Athens we slowed at a junction in the road. The van's headlights flashed upon an arrow pointing right, and in that arrow appeared the word "SOUNION". We turned south and followed.
By the time our van hit the Sounion road we had left the lights and traffic of the city behind, and hints of daylight emerged from the jagged hills and scrubland to the east. A light drizzle had fallen, and broken clouds dominated a gray sky. I was cold, cramped, and hungry. From my seat on the floor I couldn't see much, but what I did see was Mediterranean landscape, the same thing I had known from years in Turkey: limestone rock, scrubby sage and thyme on the hills, vineyards and olive trees, and an occasional village with whitewashed houses. This part of Attica is called the Mesogeion--literally, the land in the middle (of the peninsula). Every taverna in Athens featured huge barrels of retsina, the wine that is to Greece what JP-4 is to the United States Air Force. The best retsina came from the Mesogeion, and no meal was complete without it.
Fifteen minutes later we turned off the asphalted Sounion highway and headed west up a dirt road. A mountain lay ahead, now visible in the dawn light, and the track began to climb.
This was not a road in the sense used by engineers. Men had not designed or built it; they had quarried it and left it to decay. Steadily but in pain, the van ground upward. An amazing dawn now erupted in the east, a dawn that grew bigger, colder, and more vehement at every turn of the path. The van switched back, spun its wheels in the scree, bounced and grabbed for traction as we ascended to the sky. The golden moat of the Aegean opened beneath, and beyond that the black serrations of Euboea glowered in the light. Inky clouds hung over the summit, while about us the dew-slicked rocks had begun to glow.
After several more miles of abuse, our van came to a dieseling halt on the mountainside. All we could see was wet rock. The clouds over the summit had pulled a curtain across the liberating sunrise. The result was a darkness so extreme it might have been created on a soundstage. As gloom and damp reclaimed the earth, we pushed open the side door and began our day's employment.
I stomped my feet and looked about. Half a dozen cars had parked on the mountainside; nearby a small generator was thrumming, and we could see its cables snaking through the rocks into a bank of fog. Stavros appeared, a cleanshaven, portly young man with shoulder-length hair. He carried a notebook and raised his right hand in greeting.
"You wait," he told us. "Eliadis will come later. I will bring the uniforms."
Besides "Crete Aflame," the current opus, Eliadis had also directed Michael in his previous two films. Stavros supplied further details. The film immediately preceding this had won the Greek equivalent of an Academy Award. Called "To Die in Patras", it dealt with the Resistance in the Peloponnese. Before that he made "The Martyrs of Navplion", which portrayed the Resistance in another part of the Peloponnese. After "Crete Aflame" Eliadis was set to make a film about a German atrocity in the Peloponnesian town of Kalavrita in 1943. Its title: "Weep for Adonis".
"He is very famous," Michael said.
For all of two seconds I was impressed, and then a shiver coursed through me. I looked about for a souvlaki stand, a coffee vendor--anything. All we had was the generator and a bunch of rocks. It was a little after dawn on what looked to be a long day.
"Who's the star?" I asked.
"Fernando Sancho," said Stavros. "He's a big star in spaghetti westerns in Spain." The name, like "Yvonne DeCarlo" or "Lola Montez," sounded too good to be true. Any rational person had to suspect a pedestrian origin lurking behind this romantic moniker: some truant youth, perhaps, from Basking Shark, New Jersey, who had grown a mustache, doused his hair with oil, and run off to the Mediterranean to begin a new life. Fernando Sancho indeed.** After some more small talk, during which Stavros revealed that he would soon be at UCLA Film School, the assistant and his notebook disappeared up the mountain.
We had been told to wait, but standing around on spiny rocks at six in the morning is nobody's idea of fun. Anything seemed better than freezing in place, so with that in mind Michael and I decided to follow the electrical cables up the mountain. The summit (and the formerly glorious dawn) were totally lost in the fog by this time, so it came as a surprise when we came upon the mouth of a cave and a group of crewmen standing in front. Before we could enter, Stavros appeared with a pile of black leather belts and gray German army uniforms draped over his arm. This was a happy sight.
The uniforms were standard-issue Nazi memorabilia, probably purchased at close-out somewhere in Hollywood and used endlessly to revisit the Second World War. The stuff I got was much too big for me, but that was fine because I didn't want to take off my other clothes anyway. I removed my windbreaker parka, pulled on a pair of pants that were big enough for Sergeant Schultz in "Hogan's Heroes," donned a tunic and a jacket over that, then put my parka back on for good measure. Then came the crowning touch: a black steel helmet with an iron cross. I felt a little bit warmer and probably would have been fine, except that my feet were blocks of ice.
"Boots?" asked Michael. "Do you have boots?" Michael wore tennis shoes; I had on a pair of tan work boots.
"No boots," said Stavros. "Not necessary. We shoot--" He groped for the word, couldn't find it, then pointed to his knees and jerked his hand upward. Torso shots only. We could have been in satin toe shoes for all they cared.
At this point a well-fed man of middle-age emerged from the cave. He stopped and talked briefly with one of the grips, who was down on the ground working with the electrical cables, then came over to us. The man wore jodhpurs with short riding boots, and a brown leather jacket over a safari shirt. His thinning hair was combed straight back, and a few curls of it survived above the collar of his coat. He walked over and held out his hand.
"I am Eliadis," he announced.
We were pleased to meet him. Michael he greeted first, and when I took the hand of Eliadis I got the squishy warmth that passes for a handshake in this part of the world. This experience is disconcerting to the average American, who has been taught to squeeze the bejeezus out of anything at the end of a man's wrist. I'd encountered it before with Turkish peasants, but I never got used to it.
Eliadis inspected the two Nazis. Michael repeated the "boots?" question, but Eliadis said he didn't care. He declared us adequately dressed, and began giving us the situation.
"This is story. Boy and girl are inside. They are running from the Germans. The boy loves girl, but girl is a spy. She tells you where they are comings. You come here to kill the boy. En doxi?"
"En doxi." We nodded our heads obediently.
"Do we have lines to speak?" asked Michael.
"Yes, yes, you tell him to put hands up--it's O.K."
"Is there a script we can study?" I asked.
"No script--don' worry 'bout that. You write the words. It's O.K. En doxi?"
"En doxi." We said this without assurance.
"Don' worry. I come back later and we will talk about it. It's O.K." And with that Eliadis strode back into the cave.
A gray-haired, rather handsome man was kneeling by the mouth of the cavern. He had a black cloth bag on the ground before him and was doing something in the bag with a reel of new Ektachrome. He looked up at us.
"This isn't Hollywood," he said in American English.
"What do we do?" I asked.
"Nothing. You do what he said: you wait."
And that's what we did. According to available testimony from the film industry worldwide, this is the chief activity of 90% of the people at any given time on a movie set. Other companies, however, have been known to provide folding chairs, heated trailers, and catered food: what might be called Waiting Lite. Pallis Athena Films had nothing in the budget for that. This was Serious Waiting; not, perhaps, the Heavy Industrial Waiting imposed upon political prisoners, those chained in dungeons, and Aztec human-sacrifice anointees, but waiting of a very high level indeed. In the absence of useful activity we brutalized our feet in an attempt to restore circulation: back and forth, stomp, stomp, to and fro, jump, jump, while Michael sucked on hot cigarette smoke and I did an occasional burst of sprinting in place. Despite the effort my toes stayed pretty much where they were, in that painful state between normality and frostbite.
Most of the activity was taking place inside the cave, where we couldn't see it. Electrical problems--lights, test, connections--were holding things up. The generator rumbled on; the sun remained behind its frigid shroud. An hour and a half after our arrival word drifted out that they were starting. With what? I wondered. We had seen no other actors around, nobody in costume. Michael and I followed the cables into the hole in the mountainside.
Great cave, I remember thinking: Really great cave. And it was: a fabulous place to wear animal skins and hang out with someone prehistoric while cooking up a mastodon; or, on a more contemporary level, an excellent rendezvous for a band of Partisans on the lam from the Germans. A narrow passage that sloped first up, then down, led through jagged rocks into the heart of the mountain. Twenty yards in we came to a great room in the rock, with stalactites hanging from a high ceiling. The walls glowed like a shopping mall in December. People were waiting. The battered camera, set up on a wooden tripod, looked like one that D.W. Griffith could have used.
As cinematic verisimilitude, the glowing walls of the cavern resembled the orchestra that swells whenever a Hollywood couple go out on a sailboat and start singing to each other. Blues, oranges, yellows: every gel in the rack had been pulled out. The boy and girl fleeing the Nazis had just happened to pick a grotto with the best lighting east of Lourdes. The sheer gaudy glory of it all made me forget the dankness and hearken back to my youth. In summer the Ames High School Band would give concerts at the shell in the park (amazing, I know, but true), and our family would always go to sit on the grass, eat popcorn, scratch mosquito bites, and listen to the music. Besides the popcorn and the mosquitoes I especially remember the banks of concealed lights in the band shell, and the way they would be altered to suit the musical mood. A Souza March? Flip on the white bulbs all the way. Something romantic by Rodgers and Hammerstein? Use the warmer tones. Something sombre? The blues. Thanks to the the grips of Pallis Athena Films, who had bathed the cave walls in enough wattage to accompany the "Liebestod" from Tristan und Isolde, the band shell of my youth was reborn.
Stavros was leaned over conferring with the cameraman when we walked in, while in the middle of the chamber Eliadis stood talking to two young people, a man