Famous for its imposing ancient basalt walls, Diyarbakir otherwise unscrolls its long history with only modest fanfare. Today’s city rests upon what is likely one of the oldest settlements on earth — one that served as a strategic centre for the Upper Tigris River Valley for as long as 5,000 years. A cavalcade of empires have ruled it, including the Romans, Arabs, Persians, Selçuks, Turcomans, and Ottomans. As recently as the mid-nineteenth century, Diyarbakir’s population was almost half Christian and home to a polyphony of peoples, including Assyrians, Armenians, Arabs, Chaldeans, Alevis, and Jews.
With 665,000 residents, this now predominantly Kurdish city is the de facto capital of the troubled southeast. It was here that the first Kurdish rebellion of 1925 largely played itself out, and here that its perpetrators were later tried and hung. During the fighting of the 1980s and ’90s, it was a hotbed of separatist activity, and in the Turkish mind it became deeply associated with pkk terrorism — a reputation it has yet to shake.
There’s a Soviet quality to the newer apartment blocks of Diyarbakir’s suburbs, west of the city walls, where I located the offices of the Tigris News Agency (diha). Another jet scrambled the heavens as I sat in a video editing suite with Veysi Polat, diha’s director. He and his colleagues were reviewing footage sent to them by the pkk. Onscreen, about five score pkk fighters were marching in a tranquil, green mountain valley. The reporters were debating what to do with the tape, which was clearly propaganda intended to show that morale remained high despite the tensions.
Journalism has never been easy in the southeast, especially for members of the Kurdish media. Military checkpoints and restricted areas make information gathering difficult, and journalists are frequently prosecuted for publishing stories critical of the military. Four of diha’s correspondents were serving jail sentences as a result of their reporting. The agency was also facing a court case for suggesting that the army had burned an area of forest so it could better survey the surrounding area.
“It’s difficult to get real news here,” Polat said. “We take what the government says, compare it with what our reporters and contacts in the villages say, and sift out the reality.” I asked if pkk sources could be trusted. “When you take what the pkk reports about an incident initially and what is later confirmed to be true, the pkk often proves to be more reliable than the government. But in the end, we trust only our own reporters.”
In the aftermath of the October ambush, the Turkish media was reporting that upwards of 100,000 troops had moved into the southeast, but locals insisted most had already been there, at the behest of Yasar Büyükanit, the hard-line chief of the Turkish General Staff. Many in the east believed Büyükanit’s machinations had provoked the pkk.
Electorally, the akp has done well in Kurdish areas, taking almost half the vote, thanks to the party’s willingness to address cultural and economic issues here. Many traditionally minded conservative Kurds also share the akp’s Islamic values. But the akp was risking alienating its Kurdish con-stituency by allying itself with the military. Some in Diyarbakir were sympathetic, though, arguing that the rebels were setting back progress on Kurdish civil rights and the economy. “The state is like your father,” a middle-aged man who had fled to a Diyarbakir gecekondu (shanty) neighbourhood in the 1990s told me. “When you turn against him, you are going to have problems.”
Despite the mobilization, a tenuous détente prevailed. There were fewer incidents of Kurds being harassed on the street, and the city was calm. I asked Polat how he saw the security situation for Kurds. “In Diyarbakir, we don’t have racist, nationalist attacks like those in Istanbul and elsewhere,” he said, “but it doesn’t mean we’re safer. There are 100,000 Turkish troops here. You never know what can happen. We’ve seen too much before.”
Intent on visiting the ostensible heartland of the Kurdish resistance, I rented a taxi and left Diyarbakir, crossing the Tigris, a sluggish little watercourse bending below the black ramparts of the city. The two-tone browns of undulating fields consumed much of the horizon, interrupted only by the foothills in the hazy distance. These fields are famous for their watermelons — the biggest, sweetest melons in the world, people bragged to me.
The rural southeast is home to another conflict between the state and the Kurds, this one over resources. The Southeastern Anatolia Project (gap), launched in 1980, is a massive dam-building exercise in the Euphrates and Tigris basin. With many of the project’s twenty-two dams already completed, including the pharaonic Atatürk Dam, the world’s ninth largest, the system is improving agricultural irrigation and dramatically expanding electricity generation capacity throughout the region. The benefits are thus far most noticeable west of the Euphrates, where crops are bursting and the city of Gaziantep is luring manufacturers with the promise of cheaper power. But the dams have also submerged villages, adding to the thousands of Kurds previously forced to relocate. Across the southeast, the tips of old minarets pierce the shimmering surfaces of newly created lakes, marking the watery graves of abandoned Kurdish settlements.
We drove on for an hour, on patchy, unmarked roads branching off the main highway, finally pursuing one to the village of Kocaköy, where I was to meet Sabri Tanrikulu. A nimble man, Tanrikulu scurried over the rubble of his family’s former home like a mad archaeologist half his fifty years. “Here was our kitchen,” he said, “and this is where we kept our livestock.” The ruin was surrounded by similarly demolished dwellings. A handful were intact: new domiciles, made either of poured concrete or mud and stone, with scraps of metal fastening everything together.
On a December morning in 1992, Tanrikulu was fiddling with the television antenna on his roof when the Village Guard militiamen arrived, an army unit not far behind. He thought little of it at first, since the guard — made up of compliant but sometimes coerced locals, including Kurds — frequently patrolled the road that cut through the town of some 100 families. But this time, the cars halted in a storm of dust outside the school. Guardsmen sprang into action, firing shots into the air and at random houses. A bullet winged past Tanrikulu as he fell to the roof.
Women and children fled frantically for open fields and neighbouring villages as the guards rounded up the men. Tanrikulu was held at the schoolyard with the others, guns trained on them as they lay on their stomachs. Limestone dust was laid down throughout the village, from home to home, stable to coop. Soon it was set alight. The chilly morning sky blackened. A helicopter spun overhead, whorling up smoke and dust. Livestock burned alive in their stalls.
Kocaköy was one of more than 3,000 villages in the Kurdish southeast that stood empty by the mid-1990s. There was rarely ever a warning, nor any explanation other than that a town was suspected of being friendly to the pkk. The dispossessed migrated across the country, part of a million-strong tide that bloated the gecekondu neighbourhoods of Istanbul, Izmir, Adana, and, closer to home, Diyarbakir and Batman. It’s a tide that has yet to cease fully, as Kurds continue to forfeit their lands so they can search for work or because of the gap.
The soldiers and militia fled Tanrikulu’s smouldering town at dusk. He walked to the next village and located a tractor he had rented to a friend, then returned home to collect what clothes had escaped the fire. He then drove his tractor sixty kilometres to Diyarbak?r, where he reunited with his wife and daughter.”
The city was suddenly full of new people,” he told me. “My problems were just like everyone else’s.” Accommodations and work were in meagre supply, but he found space for his family and took jobs wherever he could. He drove a bus, sometimes as far as northern Iraq, and did construction in Izmir, living away from home for months at a time.
We broke for lunch with Tanrikulu’s uncle, who had returned four years ago and built a clean, spacious concrete bungalow for his family, one of about twenty-five clans that now reside in Kocaköy. We bowed deeply to the old man out of respect for his having completed the hajj. Hanging up my coat in the cushion-lined living room, its bare walls unadorned but for a calendar, I noticed a framed photograph of a young man in military uniform on a side table. It clearly wasn’t a Turkish army uniform. I nipped out to wash my hands, and when I returned the picture was gone.
Over a lunch of cucumber, fresh yogourt, flatbread, and tea, we discussed the pkk. In the wake of October 21, nationalist politicians were demanding that the pro-Kurdish dtp publicly denounce the pkk as terrorists. But as a dtp official in Istanbul told me, this was impossible; every Kurd, he said, knows someone who has gone off to fight for the pkk. “How can you denounce your brother or sister, your sons and daughters?”
Tanrikulu felt the same. “Just calling them terrorists does not solve the problem,” he said. “The suppression of Kurdish identity, the violence — this is what created the pkk. I have a friend, a doctor, who joined. Why would he give up the city to live in the mountains, sacrificing normal life, eating only what’s available? It’s a hard life. So we have to ask why 3,000 guerillas are hiding in the mountains.”
Like almost every Kurd I spoke with, Tanrikulu had long ago given up on the idea of statehood. This is no longer even the professed goal of the pkk, though the Western media often reports otherwise. Still, it is a favourite bogeyman of Turkey’s nationalists, who argue that recognition of Kurdish distinctiveness could eventually sever the country. But the mass migrations of the 1990s rendered partition all but impossible. And most Kurds don’t even speak Kurdish anymore, thanks to decades of suppression. “Ask 90 percent of Kurds,” insisted Tanrikulu. “They don’t want to live in a different land. It’s impossible to divide Turkish and Kurdish anyway. Where are the most Kurds living in one place? Istanbul. You can’t solve by simply dividing.”
