Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  The parade ground on the edge of Diyarbakır is ringed by the kind of drab high-rises that make up much of the city’s outer suburbs. They are not old and decrepit in the way that London’s tower blocks are; instead, they are new and decrepit. Most were built in the last thirty years – it is shocking to see photos of Diyarbakır in the seventies, when its old core was all that existed, an intricate warren of alleyways surrounded by towering 3,000-year-old black basalt walls. Cheap paint peels from concrete in the onion rings of new suburbs surrounding the old city. Inhabitants still string up red peppers to dry in the sun on their tower block balconies, as they would in the gardens back in their villages.

  Yet the crowd that poured into the parade ground on that hot Sunday afternoon was one of the most colourful I have ever seen. Almost everyone was decked out in red, green and yellow, the colours of the Kurdish flag, like tropical birds set loose in a concrete jungle. The women’s dresses and headscarves were embellished with hundreds of sequins dazzling in the sunshine. High-pitched ululations, the tongue-wagging cry you usually hear at weddings, pierced the warm air. Young men linked hands to do the Kurds’ traditional shoulder-shrugging, side-stepping dance. There were seas of flags emblazoned with the Kurdish sun – and, everywhere, images of Abdullah Öcalan.

  Today, four decades after his murderous entrance into Kurdish politics and almost two decades since he was last seen in person, Öcalan has been deified almost to the extent of Atatürk. You can find his broad mustachioed face gazing down from banners across the Kurdish-inhabited regions of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran alike. Unlike Atatürk, though, he only strikes two poses – one smiling, one not. In both, the eyes are dark and unreadable. Whenever I see a picture of Öcalan, I think of Big Brother. Invisible but omnipotent, Öcalan’s physical absence only adds to his power.

  Öcalan was arrested in 1999 after his long-term relationship with Hafez al-Assad broke down. For years Öcalan had trained his fighters in Palestinian camps, with logistical help from Assad. He also used Syria’s Kurdish areas, abutting the Turkish border, as a place for his own fighters to regroup. It was inevitable that Turkey would eventually grow impatient with Assad’s patronising of Öcalan and the PKK. In October 1998, Turkey moved its tanks to the border and threatened war with Syria should it refuse to give him up.

  Assad immediately booted Öcalan out. For three months the PKK leader did a merry-go-round of countries he hoped might give him shelter but all of them, from Belarus to Italy, told him he wasn’t welcome. Finally he hopped into Greece – another neighbour with a grudge against Turkey – and caught the ear of an official sympathetic to his cause. The Greek intelligence services hatched a plan to transfer Öcalan to South Africa, where he could claim asylum and remain out of Turkey’s reach.

  First, they took him to the Greek embassy in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, where they began preparing the next step of his escape. But there the plan went awry. The Kenyan authorities cottoned on to what was happening, and began questioning the Greek intelligence officers accompanying Öcalan. The Greeks, startled, ordered Öcalan to leave the embassy. He refused. After a brief diplomatic dust-up, the Kenyans offered Öcalan a plane to the country of his choosing. He was chauffeured to the airport in a Kenyan diplomatic car and led into a private jet – where he was handcuffed, blindfolded and gagged by Turkish agents who had been tipped off by the Kenyans. The US embassy in Nairobi had been bombed by Al-Qaeda just six months earlier. Kenya had no soft spot for foreign terrorists on the run.

  Öcalan was taken back to Turkey and put on trial for treason on İmralı, an island fifty miles from the coast of Istanbul. In court he looked like a high school maths teacher behind bulletproof glass – greying and receding, with nerdish specs and an ill-fitting suit. Relatives of Turks who had died at the PKK’s hands packed into the courtroom draped in Turkish flags and screamed abuse at him. Öcalan looked hangdog and withered – a different man to the warlord who had gloated at Ankara for twenty years.

  In court, Turkey was expecting a tyrant’s tirade. Instead, it got a rambling game of freedom bingo. Öcalan mentioned peace 78 times in his forty-page defence statement; democracy 144; democratic 269. He offered glowing praise of Britain, which he said had the ‘best applied constitution in the world’, though Britain doesn’t actually have a constitution. He explained his own version of the history of Anatolia and Mesopotamia, in which the Turks from central Asia arrived in a region already heavily populated by Kurds. The Kurds, being more settled than the nomadic Turks, absorbed the newcomers, so that although the upper echelons of politics were controlled by Turks, society was Kurdish through and through. From the tenth century to the nineteenth, Turks and Kurds lived in harmony and brotherhood, only turning against one another as the Ottoman Empire began to decay.

  Öcalan – cleverly – did not blame Atatürk for the misdeeds done in his name. The first president had imposed national unity because it was necessary to counter the divide-and-rule tactics of Turkey’s enemies, Öcalan said, while Sheikh Said and the other leaders of the 1925 revolt were ‘narrow-minded separatists’. Öcalan traced the republic’s original sin against the Kurds back to İsmet İnönü – Atatürk’s comrade, successor and fall guy. He claimed that İnönü, through his intellectual inferiority and weakness, had set the republic on the path to tyranny.

  Öcalan’s biggest shocker came on day one: he apologised, and offered to make peace. If found guilty he would face the noose, but said he could order his gunmen to lay down their weapons if his life were spared. He finally admitted to the charges that he had received training and weapons from Greece. The PKK continued its attacks as the trial went on and some of its supporters branded Öcalan a traitor. ‘We feel betrayed, crushed. Öcalan no longer speaks for the Kurdish people. He has no role left for solving the Kurdish issue,’ one told the Economist.

  Regardless of his offer, Öcalan was found guilty of treason, separatism and murder and sentenced to death in June 1999. Twelve days into the new millennium, however, the Turkish government – a coalition led by secularist Bülent Ecevit – decided to give him a stay of execution. Öcalan, his ego revived, was grandiloquent in his response: ‘If they execute me, the EU candidacy, the economy and peace will all go down,’ he said. ‘I am a synthesis of values, not just a person. I represent democracy.’

  Ecevit was quick to outline the provisos: ‘We have agreed that if the terrorist organisation and its supporters attempt to use this decision against the high interests of Turkey, the suspension will end and the execution process will immediately begin.’

  The PKK, recognising the real threat to Öcalan’s life, gave orders for its fighters to withdraw from Turkish territory. In a written statement its central committee said it was ready to negotiate with Ankara. It dropped the word ‘Kurdistan’ from names of its various political and armed wings, and said it would no longer be seeking Kurdish independence through armed struggle but would promote Kurdish rights through democratic forums. Not everyone was convinced: the Turkish press was cynical; the nationalists were still screaming for Öcalan’s execution and, inevitably, there was a split in the PKK. In the south-east, the conflict rumbled on.

  When Erdoğan’s AKP shot to power in 2002, one of its first goals was to take Turkey into the European Union – and for that to happen, things had to change in the south-east. But Erdoğan’s enthusiasm to bring peace and new freedoms to the Kurds was not just lip service paid to give Turkey a leg-up into the EU: he and his party were genuinely different.

  In August 2005, twenty-seven months into his prime ministership, Erdoğan went to Diyarbakır for the first time. He delivered his speech to a puny crowd, yet it was widely covered in the media and sparked cautious hope for millions. He pledged more democracy for the Kurds, more freedom to speak their language and practise their culture, and acknowledged that past Turkish governments had made severe errors. ‘Denying mistakes that have been made in the past is not what strong states should do,’ Erdoğan said. ‘The Kurdish problem does not
belong to a certain part of this society alone, but to all of it. It is also my problem.’

  The old nationalist and secularist order were aghast. The opposition howled, with the loudest protests coming from Deniz Baykal, then head of Atatürk’s CHP.

  ‘Of all the leaders up to today, Erdoğan is the bravest,’ Necdet İpekyüz, a Kurdish analyst with a political think tank in Diyarbakır, told me in September 2017. ‘He said the same thing here as he did in Rize. All the others – Baykal, Çiller [former prime minister from a nationalist faction], Erbakan [former prime minister and leader of Refah, Erdoğan’s original party] – they said one thing here and then something different in western Turkey.’

  Erdoğan said the same thing everywhere – and acted on it. Seven months before his visit to Diyarbakır, the state had broken its silence on its treatment of Kurds for the first time. Lawyers brought a case against the Turkish security forces for the killing of a truck driver, Ahmet Kaymaz, and his twelve-year-old son, Uğur, in the south-eastern town of Kızıltepe in November 2004. The last time Uğur’s mother saw Uğur alive, he was being pinned to the ground by Turkish policemen. He was later found with nine wounds to the back of his neck from bullets shot at point-blank range. The army said he had been killed during a firefight. The family’s legal team disagreed. ‘There is serious evidence suggesting that the murder of Ahmet Kaymaz and Uğur Kaymaz is an extrajudicial killing,’ said Tahir Elçi, one of the lawyers.

  These incidents were numerous and notorious. Everyone in Turkey’s south-eastern regions was familiar with the sight of white pick-up trucks prowling the villages. Anyone pulled into one of those pick-ups disappeared into a black hole. In the same month as Kaymaz and his son died, a mass grave was discovered close to Diyarbakır. Eleven people who had been marched out of their village by soldiers in 1993, never to be seen again, were found shunted into this hole, their skeletons recognisable to their families because they were still dressed in the clothes they had been wearing the day they disappeared.

  To report such things in Turkey had long been impossible. Much of the south-east region was off-limits for journalists. Those who did go there would struggle to find an editor willing to publish their stories. And the newspapers that did run the stories would almost certainly be closed down.

  But now the leftist news title BirGün shattered the secrecy, publishing articles on the Kaymaz killings and the bodies found in the mass grave in early 2005. Erdoğan’s government responded not by shutting down the newspaper, but by firing the deputy police chief of the province where the father and son had been killed and opening an investigation. In the same year, Turkish state television opened its first Kurdish-language television channel with the slogan: We are under the same sky.

  Over the next thirteen years, the Turkish government, the intelligence services, Öcalan and PKK commanders began negotiating. The violence still ebbed and flowed in the south-east, the talks often staggered and suspicion lived on in both camps. Details of secret discussions between the Turkish government and the PKK in the Norwegian capital Oslo between 2008 and 2011 were leaked, most suspect by Gülenists working within the system and desperate to derail the peace process. The news caused uproar among Turkish nationalists, and Ankara temporarily called off the negotiations.

  Meanwhile, prison turned out to be the best image boost Öcalan could have wished for. Frozen in time at the moment of his conviction and never seen again after he was led down to the cells in İmralı, where he has remained in solitary confinement, he managed to shapeshift from a squirming warlord trying to save his own skin into a kind of philosophical deity. Apart from the rebels who split from the mainstream PKK, the vast majority of his followers stuck with him. That his ensuing statements over the next decade came from a prison cell, to be read out by someone else, gave them a weight and clout that his long-winded and rambling defence statement did not. He was no longer a person of the real world, prone to gaffes, mistakes and rivals. He could insulate himself from whatever atrocities his terror group might carry out from then on. And he could claim to have joined the ranks of Mandela and Gandhi as a political prisoner of conscience.

  It was this Öcalan 2.0 whose spirit, if not person, was there on the Diyarbakır parade ground in March 2013. A buzz whipped around the crowd as a speaker came on stage to read Öcalan’s message, each sentence met with cheers:

  Today we are waking up to a new Turkey, Middle East and future … We have come to a point where we say let the arms silence, and opinions and politics speak … I, myself, am declaring in the witnessing of millions of people that a new era is beginning, arms are silencing, politics are gaining momentum. It is time for our armed entities to withdraw from the Turkish border.

  At the end, the huge Newroz bonfire was set alight, and the throngs began their whooping and dancing again. The aroma of a million knock-off cigarettes hung in the air, accompanying the woodsmoke. From the stage, where I had blagged my way into the press pen, the crowd looked like a field of whirling colours under a sky of azure blue. Back out in the midst of it I felt a mixture of two feelings I had never before put together: euphoria and pure terror. The ecstasy was clear on people’s faces, but the mass was surging uncontrollably. Young men were pushing at the metal barriers around the stage, making them buckle almost to the ground. There were tiny children stuffed between the revellers – at one point I looked down to see the sweet face of a small girl smiling up at me from my feet, despite my nose being just an inch from the man in front. I was sure that, at any moment, something would set off a stampede. The organisers said a million people had come to hear the announcement. Everyone who was there – hundreds of thousands at least – seemed to be pushing to get to the front.

  I fought my way out to where the pack was a little thinner and found a group of dancing young men. Given the elation that surrounded us and the grins that plastered their faces, I thought they would have been enthused about what had just happened. But amid the ululations and reedy music blasting at distorted levels from the boom boxes, they proffered a lukewarm response.

  ‘He didn’t say much, he was just trying to appease,’ one said, pausing from his dance to light a cigarette.

  His friend wiped drops of sweat from his hairline and chimed in. ‘All he said is that the fighters should leave, nothing else. We have hope but we don’t trust the Turkish government.’ Then he smiled even broader, and broke into crystal-clear English. ‘Welcome to Kurdistan!’

  The ceasefire would last little more than two years.

  8

  PEACE, INTERRUPTED

  October 2014

  Kobanî, northern Syria

  It started going wrong at Kobanî, the small Syrian town that, for a month in the autumn of 2014, filled the world’s television screens.

  In September, Isis launched a huge offensive. At the time, the Islamic death cult was at the zenith of its power. In the space of three months it had stormed into Iraq, declared itself a caliphate, and massacred the Yazidis, an ancient polytheistic Kurdish sect living in the mountains near Mosul. Now it had set its sights on Kobanî, a Kurdish enclave in northern Syria. Isis had the town surrounded from every side except the north, where it abutted Turkey, and in the space of a couple of days, almost 200,000 terrified people streamed across the frontier. The fields were parched from the last fierce blasts of the summer sun, and it made an apocalyptic scene. Old women with tribal face tattoos stumbled across the scrub clutching jars of home-pickled olives they refused to leave behind for the hated enemy. Farmers tried to bring their livestock with them, and tough men cried as they realised they would not be allowed to take their animals across the border.

  A small band of Kurdish fighters armed only with rockets and assault rifles stayed behind in the town to stave off the attack. They belonged to the Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (People’s Defence Forces, or YPG) – a militia that, up to now, had played at the fringes of Syria’s war. In this increasingly black conflict, where hope was fading fast and good guys were in short supply,
the YPG looked like they could be the much-needed heroes. Their ideology was secular, leftists and ecologists and women fought alongside men in their ranks. They had already won the world’s admiration a month earlier in Sinjar, where they saved tens of thousands of Yazidis by beating a path through Isis territory and opening a route to safety.

  The YPG was a newish incarnation of a group that boasted a long relationship with Syria and the Assad family – the PKK. After the Newroz ceasefire announcement in March 2013, most of the PKK’s veteran fighters had left Turkey. Some of them went to northern Iraq, where the group has a long-established stronghold in the remote Qandil mountains. Others hopped into Syria, across a border so artificial that in places it dissects towns, and so porous that people-smugglers could cut you a deal for a return journey for just $100. In Syria the PKK fighters joined the fledgling project started when Salih Muslim, a Kurdish politician from Qamishli who had been living in exile in northern Iraq, returned to Syria at the start of the uprising at the invitation of Bashar al-Assad.

  Soon after Muslim and Assad met in Damascus in April 2011, Syrian government forces began withdrawing from the country’s Kurdish-majority region, a large sweep of strategic territory, rich in oil and at the waypoint between Aleppo and Mosul. That allowed Assad to focus his military manpower on the fight against the rebels in other areas, safe in the knowledge that the country’s two million Kurds were being kept in line by a friendly militia. There was also a second purpose to Assad’s renewed warmth for the PKK – in the tried and tested way, it provided the perfect tool to needle Turkey, which had quickly thrown support to Syria’s armed opposition.