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

If I post a picture of someone in a PKK guerrilla uniform, it usually means that an obituary will follow. So it is with this young man, whose serious gaze and professor's spectacles make us wish that we could have known him. We didn't, of course, but in fact we've seen his work before.



Last October, in one of my first posts on this forum, I put up a series of photographs which I had dug out of the back pages of the PKK's website, www.hpg-online.com/tr/. They showed ancient carvings and grave markers in the Besta Mountains of Turkey's Sirnak province, including a tunnel carved from solid rock. The shots astounded me, and they interested others as well. They seemed to be a revelation even to pro-PKK bloggers like Mizgin and Hevallo, both of whom linked to PH and commented on the images. I had no idea, of course, who the photographer was. Now, with reports of fighting in those same mountains, and the deaths of four guerrillas, I have found out.

His name is Halil Ibrahim Uysal, and among the guerrillas he is quite well known. He joined the PKK in Germany, where, like so many other Kurds, his parents had no doubt gone seeking a better life. We can only imagine the sacrifice that he made, to leave behind the education and comfort of German society. In fact, he was one of many who have made the retro-migration from Western Europe to the mountains of Kurdistan in order to fight with the guerrillas of the PKK. (Even native Germans, and at least one Swiss, the son of a High Court judge in that country, have joined up.) Now Halil's parents have made the migration too. According to the Firat (Euphrates) News Agency, they have arrived in the town of Sirnak to claim their son's body.

Halil seems to have had an affinity for his chosen terrain. His PKK code name was Halil Dağ ("Halil Mountain"), and he wrote about his mountains as well as photographing them. I used a lot of images from the PKK's website (see some of them here), and it now seems likely that quite a few of those were actually made by Halil. But it is as a filmmaker that Halil won his biggest audience. Hevallo, at this post, gives a synopsis of the three films that Halil made while living in the mountains, and provides video clips as well.

I have not, I confess, ever seen Halil's films. Turkish newspapers have dismissed them as propaganda, and by their standards of course they are correct. But to Turkish nationalists anything (including this post) is vicious pro-terrorist propaganda when it dares to depict the soldiers of the PKK as human beings. Well, guilty as charged. The young man above looks like a human being to me.

Toprağı bol olsun. Rest in peace, Halil Bey.

Labels: Besta, Gordon Taylor, Halil Uysal, PKK, Sirnak

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.

Labels: Gordon Taylor, Kurdistan, Kurds, Nestorian Christians, PKK, Turkey, Turkish Army

The "friends of Aynur" would of course be her fellow guerrillas in the HPG, or PKK, as it's usually called. Here are a few of them, photographed at a conference (probably in an unheated tent) on Kandil Mt. in Iraq. Spread upon the table: the flag of the PKK. Standing and smiling is Dr. Bahoz Erdal, the nom de guerre of a Syrian Kurd named Huseyin Fehman, reputedly a hardliner in the PKK. I do not know why he is called 'Dr.', whether this is an M.D. or Ph.D. or just an affectation. Erdal is the headquarters commander of the guerrilla army, and as we will soon see, their chief spokesman in times like these. The actual commander of the HPG is Murat Karayilan (Murat "Blacksnake"), a longtime associate of Abdullah Ocalan ("Apo"), the smiling, burly (and kind of cross-eyed) man whose picture flanks the dais. Ocalan is, of course, the former leader of the PKK who is now serving a life sentence on an island in the Sea of Marmara. To Erdal's left sits a woman I cannot identify: undoubtedly a commander of the women's forces. To her left, a baby ibex (mountain goat) kept as a pet by the Kurds of the HQ camp on Kandil. (It is shown in several other pictures at their website.)

Soon I'll talk more about Aynur, the female guerrilla whose picture began this series, but first the news. As of this writing the Turkish Army has not invaded northern Iraq, sparking an all-out war with the Kurdish Regional Government. That's the good news. However, more details are emerging about Sunday's clash between the PKK and the TSK (Turkish Armed Forces), and those details don't seem to favor the Turks. Bahoz Erdal has labeled as a "lie" the Army's statement that 34 guerillas were killed. Erdal is saying that in fact the PKK killed 35 Turkish soldiers. (No exact numbers about PKK casualties.) Moreover, they have given out the names of 8 Turkish soldiers who surrendered and are in their custody. Among the weapons captured, they claim, were an "A-6" grenade launcher, three M-16 rifles, and three G-3 (Belgian, I believe) assault rifles. One soldier was slightly wounded, but the rest are evidently OK. The PKK (unlike the Turkish Army) has no history of abusing or torturing prisoners, so it's expected that eventually these men will be set free. That's what has happened before when soldiers fell into the guerrillas' hands. In Turkish cities, meanwhile, demonstrators from the extreme-nationalist (a euphemism for fascist/nazi) elements of Turkish society are calling for an immediate invasion of Iraq.

To see another of photo of B. Erdal, try this. More details, and a resolutely pro-PKK attitude, are available at a blog by Mizgin, a young Kurdish-American woman who "takes no prisoners," as current parlance will have it. From her posts it is obvious that Mizgin knows firsthand the experience of being a Kurdish woman in Turkey. Some of those facts, along with more images, will help us understand more about the brief life of Aynur Evin in coming posts.

Labels: Abdullah Ocalan, Bahoz Erdal, Gordon Taylor, HPG, Kurdistan, PKK, Turkey

More bad news from the southeast of Turkey:

10/21/07 (AFP) The Turkish general staff said in a statement that fighting erupted in a mountainous region in the province of Hakkari after PKK rebels infiltrated from northern Iraq and attacked soldiers on patrol shortly after midnight Saturday.

Sixteen Turkish soldiers were wounded in the fighting near the village of Daglica, almost on the Iraqi border in Hakkari province.

Clashes were continuing, with helicopters providing air cover, the army said. Troops were monitoring the rebels' escape routes and heavy artillery was pounding 63 likely targets, it said.

The general staff first reported 23 PKK rebels killed, then increased the number to 32, bringing the total number of dead in the fighting to 44.

A senior PKK leader in northern Iraq said the rebels had captured a group of soldiers, but Gonul swiftly denied the claim.

None of these dispatches ever contain much in the way of images. In this case I'll provide one--a very old one. Above is a photo of the village of Oramar, in the mountains of Hakkari province in what was then the Ottoman Empire. I have never been able to get a definitive attribution for this photograph, but I believe it was taken circa 1910 - 1912 by Capt. Bertram Dickson, R.A., at that time H.M. Consul at Van, in eastern Anatolia. This village, then a home for Nestorian Christians, is now called Daglica on official Turkish maps. This, in other words, is where the attack described above happened.



In the photograph we can get glimpses of the village at the lower left and right. If you look closely you can see the flat-roofed houses that are typical of the mountains, with one poplar showing itself (left) and, most important, the terraces where the villagers farmed tiny garden plots. Notice the rock strata that been heaved up. This is major tectonic country, where the Arabian Plate grinds up against the Eurasian Plate. And, as you can imagine, it does not lack for earthquake faults.

Note the phrasing by the Turkish General Staff: "fighting erupted after PKK rebels infiltrated from northern Iraq." Well yes, they probably did come from Iraq at some time, but this makes it sound as if they had come specifically for this ambush. That, as I've indicated before, just doesn't happen. The PKK fighters don't just stroll across the border for a few hours and then go back. They basically live in Turkey, and evidently for quite long periods of time. Just look at that crumpled heap of mountains. Now imagine walking over it, or through it. And imagine trying to find someone there who is determined to get lost. "Heavy artillery," the article goes on, "was pounding 63 likely targets." Oh sure it was. I'm sure they could find at least sixty-three rocks in the area to aim at. Anything else would have been somebody's village. And those too they don't hesitate to target.

As for the village's present name, Daglica, that too tells a story. The Turkish alphabet doesn't translate well to Internet software like Blogger. (If I were to type in the proper characters they wouldn't reproduce correctly anyway.) It's pronounced Dah-luh-jah. It means, more or less, the "little place in the mountains." In the last fifty years the government of Turkey has gone through the Kurdish southeast and Turkified as many place names as it can get away with. Thus Oramar is gone, and this bland label has been slapped on. If you look at Susan Meiselas's book, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, you can see a picture (page 364) of a village called Ormanici that was razed by the Turkish Army in their anti-PKK campaigns in the 1990s. The name "ormanici" means "in the forest" in Turkish. In the photograph there is scarcely a tree in sight. The place used to be called Bane, but keeping that name meant that the government would have to admit that there were other people besides Turkish-speaking peasants there. And so, in 1960, some bureaucrat in Ankara probably came up with the name "Ormanici" even though he'd never seen the place. Of course, the people too have to have Turkish names. Anything that is traditionally a Kurdish name is strictly forbidden.

More images later.

Labels: Gordon Taylor, Hakkari, Kurdistan, Nestorian Christians, PKK, Turkey

I want to look again at this beautiful girl and try to figure out the usual--who, what, why. But current events keep getting in the way. As everyone knows, the Turks have massed--what, 60,000?--troops on the border, and they're threatening to go into Iraq after the PKK. In other words, they want to go to where Aynur is standing in this photograph.

What everyone doesn't know is--this is absurd. The bulk of the PKK forces are not in Iraq anyway: they're in Turkey. And they're certainly not going to hang around their home base on Kandil Mt. (approx. 12,000' alt.) waiting to be attacked. What's more, the Turks' tanks are useless in this terrain, and they would have a very hard time staging a helicopter-borne raid 100 miles into Iraq--which is where Kandil is located. This is a tough army, the PKK. They walk everywhere. They move at night, live in caves, and subsist on caches of food. They strike at Turkish military targets hundreds of mountain-strewn miles from their base on Kandil Mt., and they flee on foot. If they survive, that is. Many do not. The HPG web page features complete rosters of their martyrs, year by terrible year. And yet, despite all their losses, they seem to find no trouble attracting young people not only from Turkey, but also from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Armenia, France, and Germany. And they are unique because, in the Muslim Middle East, they use women as the equals of men.



Before we look at Aynur's life, and try to figure out how it could end so tragically, I'd like to take a closer look at the right-hand photograph itself. Obviously, it is springtime: green grass is peeking through, and yet no leaves have appeared on the scrub oak in the background. Then there is her clothing and equipment. First, the shoes. They look like good quality merchandise, with nylon laces, leather uppers, and thick rubber soles for walking (quietly!) in the mountains. Obviously the HPG provides well, for these are a lot better than the stuff I've seen Turkish peasants wearing. Next, the shalvar (or shalwar), the wide pantaloons that are traditionally worn by mountain Kurds. These are essential for climbing steep slopes--try doing it in tight jeans sometime. Around her waist is the cummerbund (Persian: kemer-i-band) that the Kurds always wear. The uniform shirt and photographer's vest are also standard guerrilla issue for PKK/HPG fighters. All in all, let's take note--she has good, sturdy clothing. These are not cheap. When I was at Ani, the ancient Armenian city on the Soviet border, in 1977, the Turkish soldier who showed me around, a conscript, was literally in rags--patched-up, sewn-together, frayed-at-the-cuffs rags. His rifle was an American M-1 Garand rifle, WWII-issue, no doubt handed down to the Turks for their participation in the Korean War. Aynur, by contrast, looks sharp indeed. If you look at the left photo above, Aynur's head shot before the flag of the PKK, you can even see the manufacturer's name sewn into the lining of the shirt. And of course, she has a Kalashnikov--doesn't everybody? In a 1990s issue of Harper's (you'll have to trust me; I don't remember the issue #), the Harper's Index listed the price of a Kalashnikov in Uganda: two chickens. That's how hard they are to get.

I am blogged out for the night. Tomorrow we'll return to Aynur and try to guess why she would end up where she did. From there we'll move out to other images from the mountains and the stories they have to tell.

Labels: Gordon Taylor, Iraq, Kurdistan, PKK, Turkey, women soldiers