Meetings in Autumn
by Gordon Taylor | 10/11/2009 03:17:00 AM
Lalish circa 1850.


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

Meanwhile, another newspaper article reminds us of a far less famous event. As I write this, the Yezidis’ Feast of the Assembly is nearing its climax. Every October 6-12, when not kept away by war and violence, Yezidis from around the world make their annual pilgrimage to Lalish, a.k.a. Sheikh Adi, a tiny complex of temples, shrines, and tombs in the hills north of Mosul. From F&T:
The classic description of Sheikh Adi comes from Henry Layard, who in the fall of 1846 took time off from his dig at Nineveh to attend the Feast of the Assembly, the annual gathering of the Yezidi clans. Layard, himself not a clergyman and with no official need to pass judgment on “devil-worshippers,” simply recorded what he saw: a festival abundant with beauty and devoid of debauchery, with oil lamps sparkling among the olive groves by night; dancing maidens; the music of flutes and tambourines and the chanting of priests; crowds of white-robed Yezidis; giggling maidens with their black hair plaited in glass beads and gold.
And who are the Yezidis? Definitely not “devil-worshippers,” as they have been labeled for centuries. Those who know about Turkey and Kurdistan, especially those who have read a certain book by me, will need no introduction. The Yezidis speak Kurdish, and yet, after years of strife with their Kurdish neighbors, they do not really consider themselves Kurds. In recent years their villages have suffered greatly from terrorist truck bombs, probably set by Sunni Arab jihadists, and they still live in fear. But they too, have shown their own violent side, as when two years ago a Yezidi girl was caught on video being stoned to death by her Yezidi relatives. (Her crime? Wearing jeans, being seen with a Sunni Arab boy.) In recent decades much more has been learned about their religion, a mixture of angel worship, Zoroastrianism, and other elements. Still, no one can really say where their religion comes from, and as to the origin of their name, whether Yezidi, Ezidi, and Yazidi, the multiplicity of theories leads one to believe that, in all likelihood, none of them are correct.

Cross-posted at The Pasha and The Gypsy.

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Deep Waters: Life and Death in the Perkins Family, 1834 - 1852
by Gordon Taylor | 8/23/2009 02:11:00 AM
Lake Urmia: Six out of nine were buried here.

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Baby in the Iron Womb
by Gordon Taylor | 4/09/2009 03:34:00 AM


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

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

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


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

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

Obama then moved on to the main event: friendly persuasion and flattery. There were references to Turkey's democracy, a dubious concept, as well as to the friendship between our two peoples--which really is a lie, since I doubt that more than five Americans out of a hundred could find Turkey on a map. (Hell, they can't even find their own country!) Here the message was, Let's Cooperate. The two nations, he said, were working together for peace and prosperity, as was appropriate. Obama affirmed U.S. support for Turkey's EU candidacy. (Which he can do because he knows that France and Germany will have the guts to tell them No.) Cliches like Resolute Ally, Responsible Partner, and Bridges Over the Bosphorus were given the requisite airing. Two Turkish basketball players were duly noted. Obama praised the Turks for their progress (non-existent) on penal code reform, as well as for their establishment (scorned by most Kurds) of a TV station broadcasting in Kurdish. This is where it began to get interesting:
These achievements have created new laws that must be implemented, and a momentum that should be sustained. For democracies cannot be static: they must move forward.
In other words, We know that you've passed a few laws. But you have to make them work; otherwise it's just an empty form. (Which is the game, Turkey-watchers know, that the Turks have always played.)
Freedom of religion and expression lead to a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state, which is why steps like reopening the Halki Seminary will send such an important signal inside Turkey and beyond. An enduring commitment to the rule of law is the only way to achieve the security that comes from justice for all people. Robust minority rights let societies benefit from the full measure of contributions from all citizens.
Note: "a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state." This is the toughest sell of all, the idea that the freedoms Turkish officials fear so greatly could actually strengthen their beloved, all-important Turkish State. This is the heart of the matter. And the Halki Seminary? It's an interesting gambit, a reference to a long-closed seminary near Istanbul which the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate desperately needs to have reopened if it is going to sustain itself in its ancient home. If you really become a democracy, Obama is arguing, you become stronger. And upholding minority rights is the key.
I say this as the President of a country that not too long ago made it hard for someone who looks like me to vote. But it is precisely that capacity to change that enriches our countries. Every challenge that we face is more easily met if we tend to our own democratic foundation.
Note: "that enriches our countries"; using the language of inclusion to cajole the listeners into going along. Obama then moved on to admission of past American sins, like slavery, in order to slide into that most treacherous of quicksands, the Turkish treatment of Armenians.
Human endeavor is by its nature imperfect. History, unresolved, can be a heavy weight. Each country must work through its past. And reckoning with the past can help us seize a better future. I know there are strong views in this chamber about the terrible events of 1915. While there has been a good deal of commentary about my views, this is really about how the Turkish and Armenian people deal with the past. And the best way forward for the Turkish and Armenian people is a process that works through the past in a way that is honest, open and constructive.
No one, I submit, is ever going to make a more diplomatic, nuanced statement about this subject. With this Obama and his speechwriters have slipped through a narrow opening indeed. If the "full and frank exchange of views" of diplomatic doublespeak were taken literally, a visitor might have said, "Grow up, people, and stop being afraid. Yes, the murderers of a million Armenians were your ancestors, but the ordinary Turks who worked to save their Armenian neighbors were also your ancestors, as were the army units which refused to participate, and the Ottoman generals and officials who refused to go along. Ataturk himself called it a 'shameful act.' So what is your problem?" Obama would never have said such a thing, but for what he did say he deserves credit.

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

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

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

And so it goes.

Cross-posted at The Pasha and the Gypsy.

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"Bitirin şu Allahın belası savaşı" [Update]
by Gordon Taylor | 10/08/2008 12:55:00 AM
It's Turkish, and it is the most direct and forceful headline you will ever see. "End this Goddamn War," it says. It appeared today (10/5/08) in the Istanbul daily "Taraf," and the accompanying text was written by one of Turkey's most courageous liberal editors, Ahmet Altan. The Turkish Army, with all its vaunted prowess and NATO weapons, has suffered a major catastrophe this weekend in the mountains of Kurdistan. The PKK rebels are claiming 65 Turkish soldiers killed, including several officers, with a loss of 9 of their own fighters. The attack, they say, was recorded on video. The Army is claiming otherwise: 15 soldiers lost, 23 PKK killed. Anyway you look at it, it's a heavy toll. The government and press of Turkey are in an uproar, and access to pro-Kurdish websites has been blocked.

As I've said before, a rational government could end this war by negotiation in a month.

Read all about it at Rasti, the website of pro-PKK blogger Mizgin Yilmaz.

P.S. Unlike the CNN we get here, CNN International occasionally has stories that are of real interest. Recently one of their correspondents posted a story about the women fighters of the PKK. For a really depressing insight into the Turkish nationalist mind at work, check out the Comments.

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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:

Photobucket

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]

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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."


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The Red Arrow
by Gordon Taylor | 3/23/2008 04:39:00 AM

The photo fairly cries out for a violent metaphor. And yet, far from being a Biblical plague, the color is good news. Rain has been falling in northern Mesopotamia and Anatolia, and the farmers are smiling. Streams and torrents have tumbled from the mountains, swelling the Tigris. Lowland wadis have sprung to life, while snow has stuck to the high peaks. All these have churned the river's sediments near Cizre (pron. jeez-ray) into a display of red.



But there's also red in the cities of Turkey's southeast: red with yellow and green, to be exact. These are Kurdish political colors, associated as they are with the Democratic Society Party (DTP), a pro-Kurdish parliamentary group, as well as the outlawed PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), its men's and women's guerrilla forces (HPG and YJA), and its affiliated political organizations. All this has come together in the great New Year/Equinox festival known as Newroz among the Kurds, Nevruz to the Turkish government (which bans the letter w, but decided that Nevruz was of "Turkish" origin), and Nowruz to the Iranians.

The symbolic event of Newroz is the bonfire. These have been set alight all over the southeast, as well as in the rest of Turkey, and over them the young men leap to celebrate the New Year and their own bravery. With this Newroz, there have been the usual pro-PKK demonstrations and the inevitable assaults by police. No one notices it, of course, in the western media. Millions of people have gathered across the southeast, and a staunchly pro-tourist paper like the Turkish Daily News has scarcely taken notice. But the "pro-Kurdish" papers are bringing in stories from everywhere. The holiday has come close on the heels of the Turks' 21 February cross-border invasion, which many, if not most, now consider to have been a significant victory for the PKK over the Turkish Army. "Are they settling accounts?" asked one headline at the radical-left paper Ozgur Politika, referring to the police assaults. Violence has broken out in Van, with one woman run over by a police panzer, and many more there have been injured. Unrest has spread to Syria as well: in Qamichli, a town as close to Turkey as Tijuana is to the U.S., three Kurdish youths have been shot and killed by Syrian police after Newroz-related demonstrations. Everywhere the Kurds are feeling their power, and every time another demonstrator is shot or clubbed, they have more reason to riot. "Peace, Democracy, and Freedom" read one large banner in Diyarbakir. "It is enough," read many others. In the mountains of Iraq, the leaders of the PKK guerrillas have called for dialogue with the Turkish government, the third time they have done so (by my count) since the end of the latest invasion on March 1. No reply has been vouchsafed by the gods of Ankara.

In the Tigris itself, the red color indicates another kind of bleeding. The suspended sediments mean erosion, and the erosion continues because this is a wounded land, whose mountains long ago were stripped bare by centuries of sheep- and goat-breeding, human habitation, and neglect. Goats, after all, will eat anything. In the Seattle area, they are hired to get rid of the Himalaya blackberry, a vine as thorny as anything in Creation. Trucked to a site and contained by a portable electric fence, in mere hours these beady-eyed ruminants can pick a briar patch clean. Multiply them into the millions, spread them out over a country the size of France, give them a millenium to work, and you have a landscape like Turkey's, nibbled to the point of extinction. Attacked by such beasts, as well as by their ravenous accomplice, Mankind, with his hunger for construction timber, firewood, and charcoal for metallurgy, the forests of Asia Minor and Kurdistan didn't have a chance. To these plagues have now been added the Turkish Armed Forces, who have burned forests in the southeast in order to deny cover to PKK guerrillas. All this happens despite the efforts of Turkey's Forestry Ministry and private foundations, who have, in some places, created near-miracles of reforestation. But reforestation doesn't happen overnight in a country the size of Turkey. With little to hold the soil in place, and with all that red liquid draining from the land, the violent metaphor becomes too obvious to repeat, too manifest to ignore.

Such a life-symbol as this river, however, means more than temporal politics. The name Tigris comes to us via the Greeks and is unknown to the people who live along its banks. [Note: The Turks also have their own name for Greece, which they call Yunanistan. A special gold star will be awarded to the first person in class to post a comment and tell us why.] The Turks and Kurds call the Tigris Dicle (deej-lay), their form of the Arab Dijla, and the Old Testament Hidekel (Genesis 2:14), one of the rivers of Eden, and the "great river, which is Hiddekel" (Daniel 10:4) by whose banks Daniel received a prophetic vision of the Messiah. Of the two great Mesopotamian rivers, the Euphrates (Firat) is the longer, but the Tigris carries more water and was historically of greater importance as an avenue of commerce. It is along the Tigris that the cities gathered: Diyarbakir (Amida, or Amed), Mosul, Nineveh, Ctesiphon, Seleucia, Tikrit, Samarra, Baghdad. Trade goods floated downstream on rafts known as kelek, craft that were made to order and varied in size according to the weight of their cargo. Here I may as well quote myself, [with asides] from Fever and Thirst:

The Tigris, now well on its way to being choked with hydroelectric dams, was then [1839] navigable from Diyarbakir south to the Persian Gulf using keleks, rafts constructed of fresh-cut poplar logs lashed to inflated goat skins. The rafts were made and operated by the kelekjis, a caste of men who specialized in the trade. The largest, says [American missionary] Thomas Laurie, used some three hundred skins, the smallest thirty-two. Before railroads and motor trucks, these rafts delivered the goods: grain, hides, wool, gall-nuts, dried fruits and nuts. Each was made to order and used one time only. At Baghdad (or Basra) the rafts were dismantled and the timber sold, and the deflated goatskins, heaped on the backs of camels, traveled north to be used again.

Eight years after [Dr. Asahel] Grant’s visit [1839], Austen Henry Layard, the pioneer Assyrian archaeologist, used massive versions of these same rafts to transport his finds, including the giant 20-ton limestone bulls now at the British Museum, to Basra, at the head of the Persian Gulf. In Nineveh and its Remains (1849), Layard describes their construction.

The skins of full-grown sheep and goats are used. They are taken off with as few incisions as possible, and then dried and prepared. The air is forced in by the lungs through an aperture which is afterwards tied up with string. A square framework, formed of poplar beams, branches of trees, and reeds, having been constructed of the size of the intended raft, the inflated skins are tied to it by osier and other twigs, the whole being firmly bound together. Care is taken to place the skins with their mouths upwards, that, in case any should burst or require filling, they can be easily opened by the raftmen. Upon the framework of wood are piled bales of goods, and property belonging to merchants and travellers. When any person of rank, or wealth, descends the river in this fashion, small huts are constructed on the raft by covering a common wooden takht, or bedstead of the country, with a hood formed of reeds and lined with felt. In these huts the travellers live and sleep during the journey. The only real danger to be apprehended on the river is from the Arabs; who, when the country is in a disturbed state, invariably attack and pillage the rafts.


Arabs may have been one danger, but there were others as well. Surely the best description in English of a raft voyage down the Tigris is by E.B. Soane, in his 1912 To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise. Deflated goatskins, rapids, and potshots by Kurds along the riverbank all figure into his narrative, and the people of Cizre, he claimed, had "a reputation for roguery, treachery, and lawlessness"--a reputation, I might add, which was conveyed to me personally before I visited the town in 1977. In 1676, Charles Petis de la Croix (fils), an envoy of Louis XIV to the Shah of Persia, took passage on a kelek down the Tigris. South of Cizre, he was especially discomfited by the "roaring of lions," though this did not prevent him from feeling joy at seeing so many of them along the riverbanks. Indeed, Asiatic lions were a regular feature of life along the Tigris until well into the 19th century. Then it became the old depressing story, as high-powered breech-loading Martini and Mauser rifles, with the new smokeless cordite powder and brass cartridges, became ubiquitous among the desert Arabs as well as the mountain Kurds. The corpse of a female lion, the last known in Mesopotamia, was found along the Karun river in the Khuzestan province of Iran, near Basra, in 1944.

The photograph above shows the Tigris near the Turkish town of Cizre, formerly known by its full Arabic name, Jezirah ibn Omar, the "island of the son of Omar." A few miles upstream, opposite Cizre, the Ten Thousand Greeks under Xenophon (400 B.C.) were forced by the terrain (cliffs hemming in the river) to detour east into the mountains, where they had the misfortune to meet the famous Karduchoi, predecessors of the Kurds. Strabo, the 2nd century A.D. Greek geographer, says that "Tigris" derives from a Median word meaning "the arrow" ((Geography 11.14.8). And thereby hangs another tale.

Strabo called it the "the arrow" not because of its straightness (God knows) but because of its fabled power and force, especially with regard to its imagined birthplace, the Lake of Van. Lake Van is not the source of the Tigris, but it's easy to see why Strabo could have imagined that it was. Lake Van sits high in the mountains, at an altitude of 5400 feet, rimmed by peaks that are higher still. It is (according to the Blue Guide to Turkey) the world's largest soda lake, some 70 miles across at its widest point and 1500 feet down at its deepest. Though undrinkable, the water does support a variety of carp, which is harvested by the locals. Van has no outlet. Strabo, however, thought otherwise. He identified it by the name "Arsene," or "Thopitis," and he noted correctly that "It contains soda, and it cleanses and restores clothes." South of this lake was a wild range of mountains known to the ancients as the Niphates. This range figures in Milton's Paradise Lost; it is upon their peaks that Satan alights when he returns to earth to have his vengeance on mankind. Strabo writes:

The Tigris flows through this lake after issuing from the mountainous country near the Niphates; and because of its swiftness it keeps its current unmixed with the lake; whence the name Tigris, since the Median word for arrow is "tigris." And while the river has fish of many kinds, the fish in the lake are of one kind only. Near the recess of the lake the river falls into a pit, and after flowing underground for a considerable distance rises near Chalonitis [a place now unknown--g.t.].


In fact, the waters of Lake Van can go nowhere. There they sit, blue, promising, but ultimately unusable, contained sometime during the Pleistocene Era (10,000 to 2 million years ago) by a massive outpouring of lava from a volcano at the west end of the lake. And here, at last, is a metaphor that I can flaunt with pleasure. For though it is easy to see the Kurds of Turkey's southeast in the turbid, crimson, and vital currents of the River Tigris, I myself see them more as the waters of Van: hidden, remote, penned in behind their mountains by solid rock, straining with the potential to break out and down.

In April 1975 a friend and I took the ferry from Van, on the east end of the lake, to Tatvan, on the west. From there a bus carried us over the short mountain barrier to Bitlis, a few miles southeast. It was in Bitlis, on a gray day in April, with snow lying about in patches, that I could feel the real power of Van, a power that lay as much in its invisibility as in anything else. Bitlis lies in its mountain setting astride a series of ravines, each of which pulses with water. It's a city with history behind it. A great chronicle of Kurdish history, the Sharafname, was written by a man of Bitlis. On a far sadder note, the family of William Saroyan came from Bitlis too. From there the road followed the Bitlis water downhill through a great gash in the earth, but it followed by a path scratched from the mountainsides: a rolling, front-row balcony seat above a theatre of desolation. Of course there should have been forests, but forests are too soft for this country. Instead we had massing clouds above and yawning emptiness below, and ahead the dappled badlands of what would become the Tigris valley.

The climax of this trip came not in Diyarbakir ("Black Amid"), our destination, and not in the town of Silvan, where a watch repairman took me aside and instructed me in the facts of Kurdish nationalism. It came half an hour out of Bitlis, where we could still feel the waters of that immense lake jostling at the hills behind. There at a bend of the road a truck had gone over. It had not fallen far, and no one was injured, but the results were spectacular. The load: vegetable oil, a hundred fat square tins of the stuff, scattered across the slope, glistening with a dull silver against the sky. All it required was a figure cloaked in black, carrying a scythe in his bony hand, to complete the picture of yet another minute human gesture brought to ruin. The truck no doubt was eventually righted, and the tins of vegetable oil found their way to kitchens across the province. But at the time it felt like a curse, and it still gives me a shudder today. That huge lake behind me and the long road down to the Tigris: just one more item in a long list of metaphors.

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Enemies Wanted: Inquire Within.
by Gordon Taylor | 3/09/2008 03:50:00 PM


Turkey Renames "Foreign" Animals

Mar 4, 2005

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey has renamed some animal species, saying foreign scientists opposed to its territorial integrity had chosen their former names with ill intent, the Environment Ministry has said.

A sheep species previously known as Ovis Armeniana was renamed Ovis Orientalis Anatolicus. A species of red fox (found in the country's Kurdish area) was renamed as Vulpes Vulpes rather than Vulpes Vulpes Kurdistanica.

"Unfortunately there are many other species in Turkey which were named this way with ill intentions. This ill intent is so obvious that even species only found in our country were given names against Turkey's unity," the statement said.



This is the Turkish Nationalist reality: foreigners, enemies all, putting offensive Latin names on animals--animals!--in a subtle, insidious effort to divide and rule the fatherland. You have to be taught to believe in this kind of thing. Carefully taught. From year to year, actually. And if it has to be drummed in your dear little ear, well, so much the better. In fact, nationalist paranoia can be considered an integral part of Turkish educational policy. A Peace Corps friend, while teaching on the Black Sea coast of Turkey in the 1960s, once made the mistake of correcting students' test papers during a school assembly called to commemorate the life of Ataturk. He may as well have urinated on Fred's tomb, such was the horror and outrage that ensued. Only after the most delicate negotiations was he allowed to stay in the country. Such stories are not the exception in Turkey: they are the norm.


And yet, let us repeat again, this is a nation that thinks it should join the EU. In fact, economically speaking, it has a chance. Since Turkey opened up, under the presidency of Turgut Ozal beginning in the 1980s, the country has made enormous strides in all areas of commerce. It is now a genuine economic power. But politically? "Ossification" is here the operative word; ossification, as in the formation of bone, the calcification of soft tissue, especially in the brain. Nowhere is this more visible than in the execution of Turkey's war against the PKK.

First, some good news. In the eastern city of Van, the Oramar Eight are free, having been released, pending their eventual trial, on Saturday February 2. "Oramar Eight" is my Crusading Liberal coinage (as in, "Free the Oramar Eight!") for the unfortunate Turkish soldiers who, having surived a PKK attack on 21 October 2007 in the mountain village of Daglica (Oramar), found themselves marched off into Iraq by the guerrillas, held in caves for a month, repatriated, then imprisoned by their own army for, among other things, having "deserted to a foreign country." These young men, all but one of whom are draftees, sat for 3 1/2 months in a military prison before their case's first hearing on 2 February 2008. During this time their parents remained desolate and angry, having received no words of comfort from the Army either during their sons' captivity or their imprisonment. Meanwhile, the case was sealed under an official news blackout. Now, suddenly, the clouds have opened an inch, and the question is, Why were these boys charged in the first place? The answer seems obvious: they were deliberately frightened as an example to others. Their major offense: being alive; not getting themselves killed on October 20. This sorry episode illustrates perfectly the ethos which has always governed the Turkish Army and, thus, the State itself. It says: the Turkish State has no real friends. Everyone, at home and abroad, is either an enemy or a potential enemy, and the only possible loyalty is that which has been purchased by the relentless application of threats and punishment. These boys did not prove to be adequate enemies of the State's enemies; therefore, they themselves became enemies.

At the other end of the country, there's better news. In Istanbul the government has cracked down on a right-wing gang whose members include a retired army general as well as various lawyers, journalists, organized-crime figures, and active members of the military. There was even a representative from something called "The Turkish Orthodox Patriarchate," which is in reality an ultra-right fringe group originally founded by a family of renegade Greeks. These people called their organization Ergenekon, after a mythical land in Central Asia from which, according to legend, sprung the progenitors of the Turkish race. The gang has been implicated in murder and terrorist attacks, several of which were made to look as if they were Islamist in origin. Mustafa Akyol, writing in the Turkish Daily News, wrote, "One of their prominent members, retired colonel Fikri Karadag, is reported to have gone mad with the fact the Education Minister, Hüseyin Çelik of the AKP [Justice and Development, the ruling party] cabinet, is a man whose mother is Kurdish and whose father is Arab." If--and it's a big if--the government vigorously pursues the case against these men, it could deal a major blow to right-wing terrorism in Turkey. But if, as many believe, the state is only rounding up these men to impress the outside world, after which it will let them go on a technicality and allow other, similar gangs to proliferate, it will show once again that nothing has really changed in Turkey. Turkish commentators say "wait and see," so that's what we'll have to do. The Ergenekon gang's most famous leader, a retired General named Veli Kucuk, is a well-known figure on the extreme right. Before Hrant Dink's murder (January 2007) he threatened the victim over the telephone some half a dozen times. (Threatening phone calls are evidently legal in Turkey, because nothing was done to stop him.) The gang is also implicated in other murders. We must not forget that Hrant Dink, an Armenian journalist, was only the latest in a long, dismal string of assassinations aimed at journalists and intellectuals, virtually all of whom were of Turkish Muslim origin.

Like most racists, Kucuk looks nothing like the person of his fantasies. Real Central Asian Turks look like Mongols. Veli Kucuk looks like what he is: a central Anatolian, very much like all the other peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, including the Greeks. The General, in other words, is a pure-blood Central Asian Turk the way that Goebbels was a blonde Aryan. Like other extremist fantasies (Mussolini's Roman warriors, Hitler's Valhallan gods, the NRA's modern self-reliant frontiersmen) the image collapses under the simplest of scrutiny. In fact, he is the son of an Anatolian village farmer. As such he represents the strengths and pathologies of the Turkish Officer Corps, its equality of opportunity coupled with systemic brainwashing and fanaticism.

Just before the Ergenekon gang's arrest, Turkey witnessed another happy event: the visit of a Greek Premier, Constantine Karamanlis, for the first time in 49 years. Of the many points of disagreement between two countries, not one was addressed or resolved. On the other hand, nothing happened, which was itself a triumph. Everyone seemed happy that the visit had come off at all, with no ugly nationalist demos to mar the occasion. One of the most depressing aspects of the Turkish scene during the last fifty years has been the virtual disappearance of the Greek population (called Rum by the Turks; Romios by the Greeks) in Istanbul after the pogroms of 1955. They've now dwindled to some 2,000 people, most of whom are old. (The Armenians, by contrast, are almost flourishing, with a population of 50,000 [est.] and active schools for their children.) The Turkish Daily News, in several articles published before Karamanlis's arrival, noted a number of young Greeks who have emigrated from their homeland and made careers in Istanbul. Annual trade has risen from virtually nothing a few years ago to over $2 billion now. In short, individual human beings have moved ahead even as their governments remain stuck in place.

But it is the recent war in northern Iraq that now dominates the headlines. In considering it, we should admit the universal truth; that no one really "wins" a war. Yet it is the case that in war one side may lose less than another. In the eight days of Turkey's recent fight against the PKK guerrillas, it seems obvious that the PKK lost a lot less than did the Turkish Army (known by its Turkish initials, the TSK). I'm not referring just to the number of casualties, though that is an important indicator. The TSK claims that they lost 24 soldiers. The PKK claims they lost 9, and they have posted the pictures of those "martyrs" online. The PKK claims they killed approx. 125 TSK soldiers; the TSK claims over 200 PKK "terrorists" killed. Neither side, in reality, has any way of proving that they killed that many. However, the PKK has published an accounting of the weapons and materiel garnered in the operation, as well as photographs and video of the Cobra helicopter which they shot down, and that accounting is impressive: multiple weapons, large numbers of day and night binoculars, personal equipment, ammunition, etc. Moreover, they are in exactly the same position they were before the operation, and in fact are inducting new recruits, as this item from their website shows. Equally disturbing to the Turks must be this story, in which a guerrilla, code-named Rubar Andok, writes, "This operation showed many things, among them the Turkish soldiers' cowardice, their lack of experience, and their willingness to run away from the battle." He says that by the end of the second day of the invasion, the TSK forces were basically surrounded, and by the final day, with the Turks in retreat, it was like "a holiday." In another PR coup for the guerrillas, a Washington Post story, just published, complete with photos and video, shows them in a better light than ever before. The Jamestown Foundation, certainly no friend to terrorism, has stated, as nearly as they ever will, that the PKK got the better of the encounter. In fact, their correspondent even states the obvious; that negotiations would be a better way for the Turks to go.

America's Centcom commander, Admiral William Fallon, concluded much the same thing. The reaction from Turkish commentators: the Americans must be mad. Turkey's Ambassador to Washington, Faruk Logoglu, soothingly told the readers of Today's Zaman that all was well, huge gains had been made against the PKK, and no one should worry. Cengiz Candar, in the Turkish Daily News, concurred. Only the far right nationalists were really angry, and they were offended because the Army had ended the operation too soon, at the direction of--shame!--the Americans. Among Turkey's self-muzzled press, such deep denial ruled the day. Their attitude: the TSK has told us that they killed hundreds of terrorists. Obviously they are correct. The PKK is a terrorist organization; government policy says so. Therefore, we do not negotiate with terrorists. All of this is explained by Mizgin, who has assembled several posts so damning that even the Turkish General Staff is reading them.

Among the Kurds, however, something far different is going on. In the east, the west, and the south of Turkey, they are marching and in fact have been on the march since before the TSK started bombing Iraq late in 2007. "Edi Bes'e!" is the slogan: "It is Enough!" Scores of demonstrations in every city and town of the east, and including Istanbul, Izmir, and Ankara, have rocked the country. Demonstrators have been run over by police panzers and beaten to death. March 8, International Women's Day, saw an unprecedented outpouring of anger from women who are sick of the war and want to stop it. And is the PKK unpopular among the Kurds? Not really. Scenes from the funeral of one guerrilla who died in the fighting showed a huge turnout. This was in Adana, biggest city in the south of Turkey and the home of Incirlik Air Base, where American fighters are based. "Thousands" of people showed up on this day and made a pilgrimage to the traditional "taziye cadiri," or "condolence tent," set up for the parents of Aydin Isik, a PKK fighter who died in the recent invasion. "He died a martyr for the Kurds and Kurdistan," said his mother, Perihan Isik. And on it goes.

The solution is obvious, yet no one chooses to see it. The President of Iraq, a Kurd named Jelal Talabani, has just made his first official visit to Turkey. During the visit he drank the same Kool-Aid as everyone else. At Fred's tomb he (a secular socialist) laid a wreath and prayed that Allah would bless Ataturk (an atheist) in heaven. As for the PKK, he said, their presence in northern Iraq would no longer be tolerated. As everyone knows, Jelal Talabani, George Bush, and the commanders of the TSK have no way of making the PKK leave. As Talabani, now grown immensely fat after his days as a guerrilla fighter, waddled back onto his official plane, those Kurds who weren't laughing were calling him a toady and a traitor.

And the Americans? Hell, we invented Kool-Aid. On 2 February 2008, in Ankara, the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, Ross Wilson, stated that the Turkish air strikes had had a "genuine effect" on the PKK. (Note that on February 21 the PKK met the invading Turks with all their forces intact.) But "dropping bombs won't deal with this problem completely," Wilson added, though he carefully avoided the term "political solution." Using such a phrase would not do for a diplomat; its frankness would involve too steep a climb into the dizzying heights of rational discourse. "Political solution" would imply that the Turks might talk with Kurdish politicians and the PKK, or otherwise treat them as ordinary persons might. The solution, Wilson said, is "something for the Turkish government to decide." This is a finely tuned way of saying, "We know they're crazy. But they buy a lot of bombs, planes, and helicopters from us, and we're not going to stop them." For the fact is, the Turkish Army is prepared to make war forever, and no one in the civilian government is in any position to tell them otherwise.

On March 1, the day after the Turkish withdrawal from northern Iraq, the PKK proposed peace talks with the Turkish government, with officials from the Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq as intermediaries. Nechirvan Barzani, one of their leaders, has accepted the role of intermediary if the Turks approve. The Turks did not deign to respond. As Dana ("What's the Cuban Missile Crisis?") Perino chirped: "I don't know. Maybe they [the Turks] talk to terrorists. I know we don't!"

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Turkish Army Captives (Mt. Images 5)
by Gordon Taylor | 10/23/2007 01:09:00 PM



Here are the latest pictures of the eight captive soldiers of the Turkish Army, captured by PKK fighters after their battle near Oramar (Daglica) early in the morning of 21 October 2007. These pictures bear the stamp of Ozgur Gundem (Free Agenda), a pro-Kurdish newspaper in Istanbul. They evidently were posted first by Firat Haber Ajansi (Euphrates News Agency), a pro-PKK outlet. I have been unable to connect either to Firat or to the website of the HPG/PKK. Probably they are swamped by Turks looking for news. Note the rugged terrain and narrow, vegetation-choked canyons where they are hiding. These are the former haunts of the Nestorian (aka, Assyrian) Christian tribes who inhabited these mountains for many centuries until they were driven out during the First World War.

P.M. Tuesday note: The HPG website is now claiming that they downed a "Sikorsky-type" helicopter during fighting on Monday.

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