Progressive Historians: History For Our Future

by Gordon Taylor | 6/01/2008 12:54:00 AM

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.

Labels: Gordon Taylor

The Stones of Chal

by Gordon Taylor | 5/26/2008 10:34:00 PM

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:

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.

[Cross-posted at The Pasha and the Gypsy]

Labels: Cukurca, Gordon Taylor, Hakkari, Kurdistan, tas evler, Turkey, W.A. Wigram

The Turkish Right Comes to Canada

by Gordon Taylor | 5/23/2008 01:02:00 PM

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 The Pasha and the Gypsy.]

Labels: Gordon Taylor

"intihar etti"

by Gordon Taylor | 4/30/2008 11:45:00 PM

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 (7 March 2008) 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.

Labels: Gordon Taylor

My Life in Art ( Attic peninsula, 1970)

by Gordon Taylor | 4/23/2008 12:00:00 AM

"Take that, Gringo!" [Fernando Sancho]

[cross-posted at The Pasha and the Gypsy]

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 and a woman. The young man was very pretty, in the standard Mediterranean mode: dark hair and eyes, medium height. He wore the uniform of the Greek Army, with a Sam Browne belt and a holstered pistol on his hip.
"Is that Fernando Sancho?" I whispered to Michael.
"Him? No, that is Christos. Christos Erosoglou."
"Where is Fernando Sancho?"
"He is in his bed, I think."
"Do you know this--Christos Whatzisname?"
"Ja ja, he is a big star. Ze last film ve shot him. Ze film before than one I broke his arm." Michael smiled slyly.
Stavros sidled over, still carrying his notebook. Once again he assessed our costumes and corrected a couple of my more egregious rumples. Michael leaned toward him.
"Who is the girl?"
"Italian. Gina Malaconti." Michael shrugged his shoulders, to which Stavros added, "She is new."
We assessed Gina with masculine curiosity: red hair, slender body--attractive enough, certainly, but not the Italian earth-mother one might have hoped for, and not really as pretty as her male co-star. She was, however, laboring under the handicap of bobbed 1940s hair and a not-very-attractive cotton print dress. Gina looked blank, uncomfortable. Perhaps it was the presence of all the masculine curiosity that we exemplified. Perhaps she was a blank in real life.
Eliadis barked orders and the shooting began, a series of short scenes with minimal dialogue. The Greek soldier and the girl had sought shelter in the cave, and would ostensibly rendezvous there with Cretan guerillas. Christos spoke Greek, and after considerable coaching Gina responded, haltingly, in the same language. They went through a tedious series of set-ups and scenes. After every one Eliadis would say "En doxi," and they would move on. They never did more than one take per scene. Especially interesting was the acting technique used by our Greek star. "Quaint" charitably described it. On his last night out at the theater, Abraham Lincoln probably saw acting of exactly this sort: raised eyebrows, heavy mugging, the gestures of a semaphorist.
They were shooting in 16mm for blow-up to 35. The camera didn't seem to have much in the way of various focal lengths, nor was there a boom to move it about. The cave floor was highly uneven, and there weren't a lot of places where the tripod would work. Neither actor spoke loudly, nor did anyone call for silence on the set, and it soon became apparent why. There was no sound equipment whatsoever in the cave. They were shooting a silent film.
"This is a Spanish-Italian-Greek production," Stavros explained, as they started a new set-up with the ancient camera. "Later we do dubbing."
I thought for a moment, then looked at him. "Why do we need to learn dialogue?"
Stavros looked at me as if I were brain-damaged. "Eliadis is one good director. He wants it perfect."
No answer was possible. At this point Eliadis turned to Stavros and rattled off a long paragraph of instructions in Greek. He looked at us as he did so.
"Come," said Stavros, starting for the outdoors. "We get ready."
Dawn had passed into mid-morning. At the mouth of the cave, dark gray had given way to a lighter shade of the same color. The sharpness and cold of the rocks, however, had not changed. There, standing in for the ever-scrupulous Eliadis, Stavros directed us for our big scene.
Together we hashed it out. Michael stood the taller of the two of us, and Eliadis had indicated that he should be in charge of our team of assassins. They also only had one submachine gun, so that had to go to Michael. Evidently I would assassinate Christos by eviscerating him with my bare hands.
"O.K.," said Stavros, turning to me. "You speak German?"
"No."
"You can learn German if he writes it?"
"Sure." The closest I had come to German was a recording of Tannhäuser highlights. "O du mein holder abendstern" I knew virtually by heart; otherwise, nothing.
Stavros was talking to me. "O.K. You come in this side of the camera, Michael comes in over there." He arranged us accordingly. "You say, 'Put your hands in the air. Stay, don't move around.' Then you say, 'Take his gun.' Michael will go to take the gun from Christos. He says, 'You don't look so good now,' something like that. Then he talks to Gina. He says, uh, 'Is anybody waiting?' Something like that. Gina says No, nobody comes. Then Christos says to her, 'You know these man?' She doesn't say nothing. Michael says, 'Go outside now', something like that. Scene is finish. En doxi?"
"En doxi."
No problem. I had played this scene at least two hundred times during childhood using cap-guns. Stavros gave Michael a couple of scraps of paper, and for the next five minutes they stood and finalized the dialogue, while Michael made a German translation.
There was one minor problem. I was reluctant, however, to point it out. After all, Pallis Athena Films was paying me 350 drachmas for this day's work, which came to just under $12 American. This wasn't as paltry as it seemed: the average restaurant meal was about sixty cents; a litre of retsina set you back 33 cents. I was not exactly in a position to start telling people their jobs; still, it seemed obvious that Stavros had switched roles for Michael and me. Michael stood three inches taller; Eliadis had clearly indicated that he would be superior to me. So why was Stavros giving me lines telling Michael what to do?
The clouds seemed tantalizingly close to parting as we set to work. When learning nonsense syllables it is hard not to let the mind wander, and I was already rehearsing the hilarious and witty report that I would deliver to my girlfriend over that night's retsina.
For twenty minutes we marched up and down, each on his patch of rock, packing in the lines. Like Bela Lugosi, who learned his lines phonetically when he played Dracula, I kept on talking. A couple of times Michael and I would stop and throw lines at each other; but then we would always go back to our pacing.
"This is stupid," Michael said at one point. We had just run through our dialogue again; we felt ready.
"How are your feet?" I asked.
"They are like--eiss! Same word in English, ja?"
"Same. What's stupid?"
"If you have a glass--a mirror--you will see yourself. We look like--idiots."
"In acting you always look stupid. It's part of the deal."
"The deal?"
"The bargain. The arrangement. The ménage. They give you something; you agree to look stupid."
"Like with women!"
I hesitated. I had never felt quite comfortable with the sort of bonhommie that involved standing around and trading generalizations, most of them cynical, about women. But Michael was different. Sylvie, I had learned, was his obsession. Small, dark-eyed, and voluptuous, she had taken over his life the previous summer. Michael, penniless, had been forced to return to Bavaria, but after a few months he found that he could not stay away. And so, with the determination of the hopelessly besotted, he had gathered together the few Deutschmarks he possessed and set out after Sylvie on a Velo-Solex, a one-cylinder moped so puny that it had to be pedaled over hills. On this pitiful vehicle Michael had crossed the Alps and ridden the length of the Balkan peninsula. All for Sylvie, the beautiful Francaise with the amazing body.
I had hesitated when Michael brought women into our discourse, but my discomfort did not last long. As a shaft of sunlight pierced the clouds, Stavros emerged from the cave's mouth and shouted to us to come up. With a last look at my scrawled list of gibberish, I followed Michael back into the cavern.
Inside, the golden-orange stalactites awaited, and we marched before the lights.
"Yanni!" Stavros summoned.
A handsome and attentive young man approached me carrying a tiny bottle of white liquid. He smiled coyly as he showed me the bottle.
"Latex," he murmured.
I gave myself over to him. With a small brush he painted a swab of the stuff two inches down my right cheek, then pinched the flesh together until it stuck.
"Now I make you ugly," Yanni said.
He almost sighed as he said it. He seemed to take my looks so very seriously. After the white gum had set, Yanni took another reddish-brown bottle and proceeded to daub on the darker color. In the end I owned a sabre-scar worthy of a Prussian aristocrat.
Soon Eliadis set to work pushing us around. I would enter on the left; Michael on the right. We had secured our German Army helmets with chin straps.
"Where is the gun?" Eliadis barked at me.
"I don't have a gun," I said.
Eliadis turned to Stavros. He was so annoyed that he forgot to speak Greek. "No gun! Give him gun!" he yelled.
Stavros yelled back, as did the head cameraman, the same gray-haired guy who told me that I was not in Hollywood. Eliadis returned the compliment. Three or four crew members replied at the same time. The message, even in Greek, was clear: there was no gun for me; one submachine gun was all they had. Recriminations ensued. Eliadis turned to Christos, who was standing beside us, with Gina, in the middle of the scene. No one had bothered to introduce us to our colleagues, but then, this was not a company that put a lot of effort into etiquette. Eliadis pointed to the holstered pistol at Christos's side and asked him to turn it over. Christos, quite understandably, objected. How were the German soldiers going to come in and disarm him if he was already disarmed? When they reached for the pistol in his holster it would be gone! No problem, said Eliadis, pointing to Michael: when he takes away the gun the other one (he pointed to me) won't be on camera and you can use the pistol then.
This seemed to clear things up for the moment. Christos unholstered his service revolver and turned it over to me, and one of the grips came up to assure me that it was empty.
"En doxi," said Eliadis. It was time for a brief run-through. At our director's command Michael and I came on barking our lines in the best Prussian manner. Eliadis gave the cue, and action:
"Hold it!" I think I said in German. "Put your hands up and don't move!" I looked at Michael. "Take his gun; be careful."
"No! No!" said Eliadis, "No!" We stopped; Eliadis continued. He pointed to Michael. "You talk first. You are the leader. You give orders to him."
"I wrote this with Stavros," Michael protested. "This is what he told me."
"Stavros is not director: Eliadis is director. It's O.K. You change parts."
"I don't know his words," I said.
"It's O.K., it's O.K.; you learn it. En doxi?"
"En doxi."
My suspicions were right: Stavros had assigned our roles incorrectly. Michael and I exchanged slips of paper, and Eliadis gave us a couple of minutes to look them over. This meant that after forty-five minutes of learning one load of phonetic units I now had a totally new cargo to cram aboard. Immediately I forgot about my cold feet and started to pace nervously about the chamber, mumbling in what was presumably German. A bizarre thought occurred to me. Was this really the language of Goethe, I wondered, or had Michael played some cruel joke upon us? I remembered my friend Bobby, a nuclear physicist and professed Marxist from Turin, whom I had met the previous summer in Turkey. He claimed that while staying with a family in Toronto he had, in the guise of language instruction, drilled their children in Italian vulgarities, including the notion that "Va fangulo" meant "Have a nice day" if they ever got an audience with the Pope. What if--? I looked at Michael: he did seem quite obscenely casual about the situation. It was very hard to concentrate on my lines.
Meanwhile Stavros walked over, pulled another piece of Michael's "script" from his notebook and gave it to Gina. This was to be her reply, in German, when one of us asked her if anyone else from the Partisans was waiting outside. Gina's dark eyes narrowed as she beheld Michael's Teutonic scrawl. She cast about her for guidance, but Eliadis had walked away to talk to the cameraman. The scene had dissolved into a collection of shadows: grips, directors, cameramen and actors, all conversing in the dark corners of the cave. For me at least, the morning's employment seemed to be lurching toward a climax. I continued pacing as I tried to stuff my head with German dialogue for a silent film to be dubbed in later by someone else speaking Greek, Italian or Spanish. Only Michael, sole Deutschophone in the cave, leaned back against an outcrop and relaxed: a soldier of the Reich shod in white sneakers, confident in his ability to reel off something harsh and Teutonic when the time came.
For her part, Gina seemed as flummoxed as I. She stood smoking a cigarette, a wool coat draped around her shoulders, and looked again at Michael's handwriting. Gina read the German words, sucked hard on her filter tip, and blew a jet of smoke into the light. She looked up, and across ten feet of gloomy cavern our eyes met. The moment of recognition passed in an instant, but it was no less real for that. She had seen enough.
The gaze of l'Italiana, though filled with anger, was not directed at me. If there was a moment, I think, when Gina foresaw the sundering of this Gordian knot of incompetence, that was it. Gina must have known what would happen. She could see the lot of us gathering two minutes later, our lines unlearned, slouching toward Fubaristan. She knew we would run through the lines to no avail, and that when asked to speak her own brief response she would hesitate, sputter and begin shouting at Eliadis, at Christos Erosoglou and anyone else who would listen.
"Why should I do this?" she would demand, her Italian dander rising to the stalactites, "There is no sound! Who cares?"
And with that the whole thing would stop. I think she knew that she could bring down all the jury-rigged direction of Eliadis with a stomp of her foot, that in the end, as the cameras rolled for their first and only take, Michael would enter shouting in German, that I would disarm Christos with an American-accented sneer, that I would accost Gina in English, receive a reply in Italian and provoke a wounded response from Christos in Demotic Greek. All this I am sure she could foresee, and that is exactly the way it happened.
With a look of disgust, Gina Malaconti took the note containing her German lines, mashed it into a ball, and sent it flying into a crevice behind a stalagmite.

Eight months after my death on the Sounion road, the movie appeared. A Friday night in October witnessed the gala premiere, complete with cast, crew, and visiting dignitaries. To this I was not invited. The following night, however, I was.
This second night was a kind of poor man's premiere, an event for the plebs but by invitation only. Christos Erosoglou, to his credit, showed up and was rewarded with a chorus of squeals from girls in the audience. He was, however, the only cast member I could see. The producer wasn't there, the director didn't show, and neither did Stavros, who, no doubt, had gone off to UCLA film school as planned. I had seen the producer, Johnny Pallis, only once, when he showed up for a shoot at the Army radio station wearing light blue slacks, tan loafers, and an aloha shirt whose breast pocket strained to hold a 2-inch brick of new 1000-drachma ($33) notes. Why he carried these no one could explain. (Eliadis and the crew simply laughed about it when Pallis had gone.) Maybe they were for bribes; perhaps the large Cadillac he drove didn't suffice for self-advertisement; perhaps, like a Bedouin woman, he had taken to wearing his wealth for adornment. Or maybe he thought that movie moguls dressed that way.
Michael, likewise, absented himself. He and Sylvie, rumor had it, had broken up for the final time during the summer, and he had disappeared soon after. The breakup's climax, we heard, came at midnight outside Sylvie's apartment, when he appeared, Kowalski-like, shouting her name into the void. We found it hard to believe that he had returned to Munich on the Velo-Solex, but anything was possible. His father, a wealthy Bavarian businessman, had previously (another rumor) disowned him. Like so many in the expat community, he had drifted out of our consciousness, never to be seen again.
The theater was on Patission, several blocks past the National Museum. My girlfriend Carol and I arrived to find a sparse crowd and little in the way of hoopla. The seats were threadbare, and they sagged in the middle; but unlike American theaters this one did not have a floor that was coated in congealed soda pop. All in all I found it shabby but genteel, a fitting place to show a cheap melodrama about the War.
After the arrival of Christos, and with no introduction, the film began. In brightest red, over black-and-white newsreel footage of diving airplanes, belching naval guns, and marching troops, the credits rolled. Since they were in Greek, they looked like a vast assemblage of collegiate fraternities and sororities splashed across the screen. But one line in particular caught my attention, and when we saw it Carol and I dissolved in laughter.
The moment, however, passed quickly, and within minutes we were hacking our way through this salt mine of a film. Bad movies can be fun, but "Crete Aflame" was work. First of all, it was in Greek, a language Carol spoke fairly well but of which I remained ignorant. This made it necessary to look at the actors' faces for artistic rewards, and that produced only embarrassment. Fernando Sancho spoke well and wore his Cretan guerrilla costume with great panache, but he was the only person I could see with even the slightest hint of screen presence.
At last came my scenes. My character awoke at night in a straw-filled stable, as a burst of Morse Code cut the silence. I was a German agent, and the traitor Maria was making contact. Carol elbowed me: "You look smashing!" she whispered. Onscreen I donned a set of headphones over my blonde locks, and within seconds I had returned a coded message using a field wireless set. Soon the four of us gathered in the cave, and I was in a shapeless uniform and steel helmet speaking Greek with a disembodied growl.
"Which one is you?" Carol asked.
Cut to the Sounion road, where in quick succession I marched Christos out into the rocks, cocked the slide on my Schmeisser, and was riddled by bullets from a posse of partisans.
"Are you sure that was you?" Carol asked, as we left the theater minutes later, explosions rattling the speakers.
Well might she ask, for my death scene, that climactic moment with which I began this account, had been shot with such an ancient, inadequate lens that I appeared to be some fifty yards away, a tiny figure rolling around in the bottom of a gravel pit.
"At least the credits were good," I replied.
She agreed. They were, in fact, sublime. For there is something magical about the Greek alphabet, with its angular forms and antique associations: a movie screen filled with its characters gives a classical dignity even to lowest forms of art. So it was when those names started appearing in the opening credits of "Crete Aflame." Page after page, screen after screen they rolled, as the newsreel guns roared, the airplanes went down in flames, and the Panzers rolled. And to see, resplendent in the midst of all that Greek, one's own name in plain Latin characters: well, no wonder we laughed. The next time, I might even work for noth--no, scratch that: next time, my fee goes through the roof.

* With the exception below, I have cleverly disguised the name of the production company and its personnel.

** Fernando Sancho was, in fact, a veteran Spanish actor who enjoyed a long career in Euroschlock. IMDB.com lists an astounding 237 movie credits for him, beginning in 1944 and ending in 1990. The titles alone make his entry worth a visit, as they include such classics as "Requiem for a Gringo"[1968], "Too Much Gold for One Gringo"[1972], "Watch Out, Gringo! Sabata Will Return!"[also 1972], "If One is Born a Swine"[1967], and, "And the Crows Will Dig Your Grave"[1972 again]. If you are so inclined, feel free to insert the word "gringo" in the final two entries. In "Django Shoots First"[1966], Sancho even played a character named "Gordon"--or perhaps "Gordo", as he was noticeably stocky. Sancho, born in 1916, died in Madrid in 1990.

Labels: Gordon Taylor

A Boy and His Arm -- II

by Gordon Taylor | 4/17/2008 07:30:00 PM

I didn't want to publish it at first. I was, frankly, being too sensitive. But by now the image has been all over the world: and who am I to hide from reality? Demonstrators in virtually every European nation have put this photo on banners or in websites by the score, and the nondescript name "Cuneyt Ertus" (joo-nate air-toosh) now gets Google hits in the thousands. The boy has been discharged from prison, and the pro-Kurdish/pro-PKK news services have all published interviews with him. His experience is exactly as one would have expected -- fear,confusion, brutality, and pain -- but it bears repeating. And still there is no one in the mainstream Turkish or American media that has paid the least attention.

The most extensive interview is here, with a photo of "C.E." (his face obscured) and his father Hussein. Cuneyt, who still cannot use his right arm, showed great emotion as he recounted the events. "On March 22," said Cuneyt, "I went down to the market. I didn't know that Newroz events were going on, and I found myself in all this confusion. The police came right to me and collared me. Three policemen. Then they started manhandling me. First they twisted my arm. My arm went out of place [dislocated]. Then they took me to the Emniyet headquarters in a police vehicle. In the van they continued beating me; 3 or 4 of us were riding together. Inside the vehicle they called us "kufur" [infidels: an insult] and continued to hit us." At the station, Cuneyt recounts, the beating continued with kicks and truncheons aimed at the genitals.

And so it continued. At the station, for hours, the detainees were all kicked, beaten, and insulted. "Apo's [Abdullah Ocalan's] bastards" was one of the more choice insults, along with the opinion that they were no better than "filthy infidels." After the first day's interrogation Cuneyt was let go. "I couldn't sleep," he said, "from the pain in my arm." The very next day, however, while in the center of town again [For God's sake, Cuneyt, why did you go there?--g.t.], Cuneyt was again arrested, taken to the Emniyet and beaten. "They showed us their guns. Then before our eyes, they took the bullets out of their magazines, put them between the fingers of our hands, and then crushed our hands around them. That was extremely painful." From the Hakkari Emniyet, Cuneyt was transported to a prison in Bitlis, a city many miles away. Still he could not escape the beatings. His dislocated arm kept him in excruciating pain. No one was allowed to see him, neither aid workers nor his family nor lawyers. His fellow prisoners, he says, could see what pain he was in and tried to help him, but they could do nothing to stop it. Meanwhile, the casual beatings continued. "In prison from time to time they would let us out into the fresh air. Both going out and coming in they would hit us," Cuneyt says. "They treated us like animals."

While very happy to be reunited with his son, Huseyin Ertus is, as one might expect, outraged at the treatment he received. "My son is very young," Huseyin noted, "and he committed no crime at all. And yet, in plain view of everyone, they turned him around and broke his arm. This is a disgrace to humanity...There is no excuse for it at all." Cuneyt's father, meanwhile, is quite worried about the injuries he has received. He will be searching for treatment. In the published photographs Cuneyt is shown with no cast, sling, or bandages of any kind on his arm. "My humanity," said Huseyin Ertus, "tells me that no one should have to go through this kind of pain."

The facts are plain for all to see, yet of course the Turkish government will deny them, if they even deign to acknowledge the case. As for the U.S. government, we know them well enough. Turkey, after all, is "a vital partner in the War Against Terror."

Labels: Cuneyt Ertus, Emniyet, Gordon Taylor, Hakkari, Kurdistan, Kurds

Anatolia Revisited

by Gordon Taylor | 4/13/2008 10:53:00 PM

There's always news from Turkey, where repression bears down, emotions run hot, and something is always boiling over. (Rather like the rest of Planet Earth, but at a greater concentration.)

First, there is information about Cuneyt Ertus, the 15-year-old boy whose arm was mangled on-camera by a security agent during recent Newroz demonstrations. After his arrest in Hakkari, the boy was taken to prison in Bitlis, many miles away and a long day's drive for his parents and lawyers, at the west end of Lake Van. His case has only recently been adopted by Amnesty International, who urged members to write Turkish officials about him. Today Cuneyt was released, and after inspection at the State Hospital in Van he was allowed to go home to Hakkari. It remains to be seen what long-term injuries, if any, he sustained. We'll come back to this story if new information is posted.

Next there is pleasant news: not exciting, not troubling, just--nice. In the southeast, on the Iraqi border, the town of Silopi sits amid a triangle of land bounded by the Tigris on the west, the Khabur and Hezil rivers on the south and east, and to the north the mass of Cudi Dağı (pron. Judi Daah), a mountain about which I have written before. The Khabur River provides the town's biggest source of income, for on the north side of that stream sits the only border gate between Turkey and the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Here the Turkish Army is massed in a threatening (and useless) array, and here the Iraq-bound trucks sit baking in the sun for days and weeks, in a line ten miles long. Between the trucks on one hand and Turkish tanks on the other, Silopi's people eke out a living.

This weekend Silopi is celebrating neither trucks nor rivers but their mountain. These people know the "genuine" landing-place of Noah's Ark, after all; it has been part of local tradition for thousands of years, long before a European traveler tagged the other, Armenian, mountain as the Biblical Ararat. And since they know the story, they are using this springtime of rising water in the Tigris to celebrate the second annual "Silopi Cudi Noah Culture and Arts Festival." Sporting the slogan, "Art Comes Alive with Cudi," the festival features visiting musicians, folk dancers, and art exhibits (including one at the local prison entitled "Freedom Behind Walls"), as well as plenty of mayors from nearby towns to shake hands, make speeches, and give it an official air. (Most of these politicians and artists, by the way, had to pass through military check-points in order to get there.) Give these people credit, folks. In the least likely of places, they are celebrating the life they have.

For other news, I'll first put in a link to Mizgin, who has her own post about America's "model democracy" for the Middle East. Of war and repression there is always news aplenty, and Cuneyt was not the only victim of Newroz violence. Yuksekova, another mountain town near the Iranian border, was rocked by the Newroz events. Two people were shot to death by police during the week of demonstrations, and now a third, Fahrettin Sedar, 37, has died of bullet wounds in the hospital at Van. According to reports, over 600 vehicles accompanied his body on its return journey to Yuksekova, and 10,000 people walked with his family to the cemetery. The crowd shouted pro-PKK slogans and made repeated calls for revenge. One of the slogans, "Youth to Botan, Freedom to the Country" made reference to the mountain district where the PKK makes camp and fights a lot of its battles. (Bohtan [or Botan], a geographical area shared by Turkey and Iraq, was the emirate ruled by the Bedr Khan family, prominent figures in Kurdish nationalist history.)

Given this kind of anger, we can perhaps believe a PKK spokesman named Bozan Tekin, who, during a recent interview with Agence France-Presse, claimed that guerrilla ranks have now swollen to between eight and ten thousand fighters. [Same thing posted at Rasti.] Obviously there is no way to confirm this figure; however, I think it's significant that he made the boast at all. Previously the guerrillas have claimed about 5,000 soldiers. Even if we cut his estimate considerably we have to say that it jibes with recent PKK announcements which told of new graduating classes at their "military academy" in the mountains. This shows that the war is likely to get worse, not better. When PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was captured in the late 1990s, an anonymous American diplomat was quoted as saying that, with his capture, "ninety percent of Turkey's excuses for not solving the Kurdish problem are now gone." That was almost ten years ago, and the PKK was on the ropes. Now the Turks have managed to build up the PKK's strength from nearly nothing to a reputed 10,000. Tebrik ederim, beyler. Many congratulations indeed.

The Turks' big offensive of late February to March had scarcely ended before new clashes were reported by both the Turkish Army and the PKK's website, and they have continued into April. I have no intention of rehashing press releases by either side, but what is remarkable is the geographical scope of the clashes: not only their number, but the widely separated places in which they have occurred. The PKK has claimed attacks in a swath of territory stretching from Hatay (formerly the Sanjak of Alexandretta), on the Mediterranean, to Mt. Ararat, on the Armenian and Iranian borders. The Besta Mts. clash (in Sirnak, just north of the Iraq border) seems to have been the biggest, with (says the PKK) twenty Turkish soldiers killed, one Cobra helicopter downed, and four PKK guerrillas (including photographer/filmmaker Halil Uysal) dead. Further north, in Tunceli (Dersim) province, the PKK reported an attack by one of their YJA-STAR units: in other words, girls in pony tails carrying Kalashnikovs and looking to blow your head off. (They will do it, too; but they will also die, as several have done already in 2008.) All this, as I've said, will get worse. One pro-PKK newspaper, Ozgur Gundem, is already reporting that a joint operation is being planned by the Turkish Army and Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Their aim: probably PKK and PAJK (anti-Iranian Kurds) installations in the region of Qandil Mountain. Such an operation, of course, will not succeed; it will, if anything, only succeed in killing more sheep and goats.

I'll close with links to three stories.

First, the horrific. The nude body of a young Italian artist, Pippa Bacca, was found this weekend in bushes near the town of Gebze, on the Sea of Marmara south of Istanbul. The details are too painful to recount. The mass-market daily Hurriyet proclaimed in a headline, We Are Ashamed! This BBC link tells her story. I will only say this: DO NOT HITCH-HIKE IN TURKEY. Do not do it. Turkish peasants are the kindest of people. Any village will take in a traveler and treat him as an honored guest. The Turkish transportation system has been designed to accomodate every class of passenger. It is easy to find cheap transport. Ordinary Turkish workers and peasants simply do not understand it when middle-class kids from rich western nations come to Turkey and beg for rides. Especially this would be true if they were girls dressed up in bridal gowns as a stunt. DO NOT HITCH-HIKE IN TURKEY. PAY THE FARE AND RIDE A BUS.

Next, from the Times of London, the story of Yakup Satar, a Crimean Tatar, aged 110, who was Turkey's last living soldier from the Great War. Now they are virtually all gone. Highly recommended.

And last, in a week which saw the death of that phoniest of heroes, Charlton Heston, we get the story of Ragip Zarakolu [also at Rasti], a Turkish publisher who has spent a lifetime making books and going to jail for having made them. I've said in past posts that if the Nobel Committee wanted to find qualified recipients for the Peace Prize, they could come to Turkey and find a dozen more qualified than Al Gore in less than a day. Ragip Bey is one of those people.

Labels: Cuneyt Ertus, Gordon Taylor, Kurds, PKK, Turkey