I asked Enes whether he enjoyed his job. He laughed, and said he had joined up when he dropped out of university, pursuing an English literature degree, little guessing that he would end up on the front line of a civil war. His marriage to a policewoman had broken down. Here, he had fallen in love with a Kurdish girl, but neither her family nor his would accept the relationship.
‘No one enjoys being a policeman in Turkey!’ he said. ‘But here it is worse. In any other area, when I finish my shift I am a normal person. Here, I’m always looking behind me.’
He had a very different view of the militants to Murat in the cemetery, who insisted his brother was just a kid playing at protest. There were about forty PKK fighters left inside Sur, Enes said, and the police were waiting for them to surrender. But the ones who remained there were the hardest of the hard core – the crack-shot snipers and expert bomb-makers. The young guys throwing Molotov cocktails had been weeded out long ago. The ones who were left were professionals, armed with rocket-propelled grenades, sniper rifles and land mines.
Eventually, inevitably, Turkey won in Diyarbakır. It took months and almost none of the militants came out alive. The whole area was left in ruins. Again and again, I saw the same thing repeated. Each time it was announced that a curfew had been lifted I raced to the town to report before too much of the clear-up began. It became so predictable that I struggled to find fresh ways to write about it for the newspaper, but each time I entered a newly devastated town, the wide eyes of the children and the sight of the elderly wandering around expanses of flattened masonry stunned me. Yet at the same time as this war was sweeping through the region, destroying almost everything it touched and displacing hundreds of thousands of people, Europe was handing billions of euros to Turkey in a sweetener to stop refugees flowing from its shores on the other side of the country.
A cloak of secrecy hangs over what really happened in south-eastern Turkey after the ceasefire broke down: who the militants were, who armed them, and how many civilians were caught in the crossfire. Time and again I managed to reach people who might give me an insight, like a doctor who was charged with carrying out the autopsies on the bodies brought out of Cizre. He told me that all were charred beyond recognition, and seemed willing to give a full interview – and then abruptly changed his mind and stopped answering my calls.
It was not only the Turkish government who tried to hide and fudge what was happening. So did the PKK leadership, who insisted that the youth militants were not under orders from them. By the time the ceasefire broke down the main Kurdish party was Selahattin Demirtaş’s HDP, which had stormed to electoral success in June 2015 by appealing to liberal Turks as much as to Kurds. But it too was picked apart by the conflict. Demirtaş refused to criticise the violence while other members of his party openly praised the PKK militants. Some even went to the funerals of PKK suicide bombers who had slaughtered dozens of civilians in Ankara – and were promptly charged with terror offences. Even then, they were unrepentant.
‘As the parliamentarian for this city, I have the responsibility to participate in most funerals,’ Mehmet Ali Aslan, the deputy for the Kurdish town of Batman and one of those charged, told me. ‘However the children died, we have a responsibility to their mothers.’
I pushed him on whether he would do the same if the bombers had carried out their act of terror for Al-Qaeda or Isis, rather than for the PKK. After dodging the question for more than ten minutes, he eventually conceded that he wouldn’t.
The HDP released daily lists of the dead in the south-eastern towns, insisting that all were civilians. They were not.
Back in Silopi, one of the first towns to fall under curfew as the new whirlwind of violence hit, I tried to untangle the case of Necati Öden, an eighteen-year-old whose bloodied body appeared on Twitter with a soldier’s boot in the background.
‘That is how we found out he was dead,’ said Öden’s sister, Aysel, when I met her in January 2016, days after the military operations had finished. Bloated cow carcasses were still strewn around their neighbourhood; the underground water pipes exploded by roadside bombs. Families were returning to find that the militants had used their homes for shelter, and that the police had shot them – in situ – in their struggle to dislodge them.
Nine days after Necati’s photo appeared online, his family were permitted to collect his body from the government mortuary and bury him in a small and hurried ceremony in his home town. The Turkish government said he had died as he fought alongside the PKK. His family, meanwhile, insist that he was not a militant, but was summarily killed by security forces as part of a campaign of collective punishment against the young men of Silopi.
‘They had covered his whole body up to his face and would not let us open the sheet to see what happened to him,’ said Aysel. ‘They’re not only killing the militants – they’re killing the young men like my brother, too.’
The photo of Necati’s body was thought to have been taken and first posted by a policeman who then deleted his account; after that, it was shared thousands of times. It became a rallying call for both sides – those who rejoiced that a dangerous terrorist had died, and those who claimed him as an innocent Kurdish civilian killed by the Turkish state.
The 36-day crackdown in Silopi, the first major operation of the war, left a fog of fear over the town. The PKK’s graffiti still covered the walls in the neighbourhoods at the centre of the fighting, yet only one person I spoke to – a businessman who refused to give his name – would admit to knowing anything about the militants.
‘Every single person in Silopi knows someone who is with the PKK or the youth,’ he said. ‘The people who fought here are sons of this town.’
This is the life Necati Öden appeared to have been leading. By day he worked on the minibuses ferrying foot passengers back and forth across the Habur border crossing with Iraq, six miles down the road from Silopi. As his family spoke about him they held out photos of a smiling young man wearing the fashionable clothes and haircut of any normal teenager.
I have taken those cross-border minibuses countless times as I have travelled in and out of Iraq. During Turkey’s ceasefire years, as the PKK switched its attentions to other parts of the region, you could be sure that your driver would blast out pro-PKK music on his stereo. (One particular favourite in those times was a thumping tune with a chorus that endlessly repeated biji biji YPG – ‘long live the YPG’. Its video shows the militia’s gunmen on the front line and participating in huge North Korean-style military parades.) Meanwhile, Necati’s Facebook page was a shrine to Kurdish militancy. A picture of a Kurdish fighter with the flag of the Syrian YPG was emblazoned across the top, and he described himself as a YPG sniper. Does that mean he was a member, or even had any contacts with the PKK? Not necessarily – it could have easily been teenage bravado. But Silopi is a place where smuggling, poverty and PKK militancy come together in a poisonous tangle. Those same minibuses are used to bring contraband cigarettes and tea, and probably much else, from Iraq into Turkey, the drivers stuffing their loot into custom-made spaces around their vehicles at the same time as they are carrying passengers. Other smuggling routes running through the mountains that cradle the Habur crossing are used for weapons and drugs. In both cases, the PKK takes huge cuts from the profits. For young men growing up in such places, life at all levels is intertwined with the PKK – it’s not a black-and-white case of being in the militia or out.
After five months of escalating violence the police announced a total curfew in Silopi on 14 December 2015. The Öden family’s neighbourhood, which had been laced with IEDs and explosive-filled trenches by the PKK’s local youth militants, was at the deadly heart of the ensuing battle. ‘Not even a cat could move outside without being shot at,’ Aysel said.
Necati remained there as the rest of his family fled to a safer area – they were hazy about the reasons why, insisting that he had wanted to stay in the house because he wanted to protect it. Seventeen days later he was dea
d. His family say he was hunkering down in the house, and trying to find a way to leave the area. The Turkish government was unequivocal in its response.
‘He was a PKK member,’ said the government official whom I contacted about the case. Generally he was a chatty guy willing to talk through the nuances of any situation. Not this time: ‘There is no further comment to make.’
Victory in Diyarbakır, Silopi, Cizre and the other towns of the south-east has not brought any rest for the Turks; still, the PKK fights on in the countryside, killing Turkish soldiers and policemen almost daily. It has also brought its terror campaign to western Turkey with a series of car bombings that have killed scores of people in Istanbul and Ankara. Meanwhile, the YPG has grown into a powerhouse in Syria, where it is no longer an outlying militia but the world’s best hope against Isis. Kobanî, always more of a fairy tale than a news story, has already been twisted into a great myth. Those of us who were there saw that the YPG was on the verge of miserable defeat at Isis’s hands until America steamed in with its game-changing airstrikes. Now, to hear the revisionists and propagandists speak of it, you would think the Kurds had managed to grab huge territories in Syria with Kalashnikovs and guts alone, rather than with the backing of the world’s mightiest military.
Turkey’s Kurds don’t have such victories to brag of – only a new chapter to add to their litany of grievance and revenge. It will make for another festering wound when future PKK leaders want to radicalise a new generation. No one believes another peace process could begin any time soon.
On a bright Saturday afternoon in September 2017, I wander through Diyarbakır with my friend Xezal, a small, wide-smiling Kurdish woman with the gentle soul of an artist. The city is recovering. Thick crowds of shoppers throng the pavements and the kebab sellers are frying their delicacies on portable griddles. In the windows of the jewellery shops, the bright gold bangles and necklaces that Kurdish brides deck themselves out in for their wedding day dazzle behind the glass.
Xezal and I have spent three days shuttling between artists, activists and politicians in the city, building a story of how Erdoğan won and then lost the love of Turkey’s Kurds. The heart of Diyarbakır has been decimated and the fledgling civil society that was beginning to blossom under the peace process has been crushed. Yet everyone, from an illiterate grandmother standing in the ruins of her home in Sur to a lawyer in his leather-trimmed office, tells us they had once hoped the pious man from Rize might be different.
‘When the AKP came to power in 2002 most people were uneasy about their approach. But they said they were different and gave signs of change,’ says Gule Ulusoy, an actor from Diyarbakır. ‘There were Kurds, secularists, nationalists among them. We thought it could be a coalition. But now we realise that it was all a project of Erdoğan. He was just building power. At the start he was close to the Kurds. Now he has changed to being a nationalist. It is all for the benefit of him.’
Diyarbakır’s municipality, a citadel of Demirtaş’s HDP, has suffered great waves of closures and sackings since the breakdown of the peace process. In the wake of the coup attempt the crackdown has accelerated. The HDP mayor has been arrested and replaced with a government appointee. Kurdish and Armenian signs put up before 2015 have been removed. Xezal’s husband, a teacher, has already lost his job. She works for the council’s culture department and she fears that she could be next. We have spent the afternoon with Gule Ulusoy and a group of other actors who used to work for Diyarbakır’s municipal theatre, once the hub of the city’s colourful arts scene. Thirty-three of them were sacked at a stroke on New Year’s Eve 2016 by the trustee appointed by the government to run things.
The trustee had claimed that the actors did not have the diplomas required to be working in a public sector job. The actors say they have been punished for putting on plays in the Kurdish language to sold-out audiences three times a week. It was only in the Erdoğan era that the ban on Kurdish had been lifted. Now, still under Erdoğan, it seems to be crashing down again, even if the government would never formally re-impose it.
Determined to continue, the sacked actors have rented a space in the basement of a decrepit shopping centre next to the main council building. The chain stores and more upmarket boutiques have long abandoned this place; all that are left are the bargain stores selling cheap plastic tat. It looks an unlikely place for high culture. But the actors have lucked out here – this basement space was once a theatre and the stage and seating are still intact. Their ticket sales just cover the rent.
‘In legal terms the Kurdish language is not banned. But there are still people who claim it is an “unknown language”,’ says actor Ruknettin Gün. ‘This is what happens when Islamist governments come to power – the first thing they do is to close down all the culture.’
An art gallery and a cultural centre in Diyarbakır have also been shuttered, as has the city theatre in nearby Batman. For a short while, a television network dedicated solely to broadcasting children’s cartoons dubbed into Kurdish was taken off the air. The Diyarbakır Film Festival has been cancelled, and the archives of the Mesopotamian Cultural Centre destroyed. An independent cinema in Batman was closed by government decree, and then gutted in an unexplained fire. Several Kurdish-language institutes have been closed.
Meanwhile, a statue commemorating twelve-year-old Uğur Kaymaz and his father Ahmet has been removed from the spot where it had stood in Kızıltepe since 2009. Even the Kurds’ ultra-Islamic party, HUDA-PAR, who once supported Erdoğan in almost everything he did, now accuse him of reverting to the old mindset of the Turkish nationalists.
‘The AKP’s position on the Kurdish issue has become like that of the Kemalists,’ says HUDA-PAR’s president, şeymus Tanrıkulu. ‘To say that they are totally Kemalist would not be true, but they support the Kemalist system. There are two columns to it: firstly Turkish nationalism, and secondly secularism. In our history many ethnic groups have been rejected by that system. Now, we see that the AKP’s policy and approach has not changed anything. They said that the Kurdish language would be formalised in the constitution but nothing was done. Recently, they have started to move far away from these topics. They are using the language of the nationalists.’
Xezal and I walk across Diyarbakır’s open plaza, where Sheikh Said’s rebels were hanged by the Turkish state in 1925 and where the first Kobanî protests kicked off eighty-nine years later, towards the old walls that mark the perimeter of the city’s latest tragedy. A black-and-white rendering of Atatürk peers out over the crowd of early evening shoppers from the top of one of the wall’s watchtowers. I ask Xezal how today’s Kurds feel about the founder of the republic.
She bursts out in a peal of laughter. ‘I think we have started to like him more,’ she says. ‘Compared to Erdoğan, he was perfect.’
9
THE COUP
14 July 2016
One day before the coup
People had been warning that it was coming – though rarely openly, and not in so many words.
‘This is coup shit,’ friends told me as we spoke about the tumult that was spreading across Turkey like cancer throughout 2015 and the first half of 2016 – the refugee crisis, the breakdown of the PKK peace process, and then the terror attacks. First there was the dustbin bomb in Diyarbakır in June 2015, then a month later the suicide bomber in Suruç. In October 2015 came the deadliest terror attack in the history of the Turkish republic – 109 people blown apart by two suicide bombers in the heart of Ankara during a peace rally. Then the carnage reached Istanbul. One bomber blew himself up next to a group of German tourists outside the Blue Mosque in January 2016, and another two months later next to an Israeli group on İstiklal, the grand boulevard running through the heart of the city. In June two men blasted their way into Atatürk airport with assault rifles and then detonated their explosive packs. All in, the terror attacks left more than two hundred dead in the space of thirteen months: to people whose lives are ruled by opaque forces, these things are
never unlinked. Each of Turkey’s previous coups had been preceded by similar chaos.
Two people were bold enough to say what everyone was thinking: Mehmet and Ahmet Altan, renowned journalists and brothers. When they appeared on the panel of a chat show on the evening of 14 July 2016, they spoke about the likelihood of the army again intervening in Turkish politics, as it had so many times before.
‘Whatever the developments were that lead to military coups in Turkey, by making the same decisions, Erdoğan is paving the same path,’ Ahmet Altan said.
‘It is not certain when it will take its hand out of the bag and how it will take its hand out of the bag,’ Mehmet added.
A day later they were proved right. But this time the coup would be different. The generals would come out the losers and by the end of Turkey’s darkest night, Erdoğan’s power would be galvanised further. And the Altan brothers, instead of being lauded for their foresight and plain speaking, would find themselves accused of sending subliminal messages to rally the coup-makers. They were both sentenced to life imprisonment. Though their convictions have since been overturned, Ahmet Altan remains behind bars.
15 July 2016
The schizophrenic coup
The coup attempt of 15 July 2016 lasted a little over twelve hours and played out in real time on social media and live television. There could have been no better backdrop for the tanks and bullets than the bridge over the Bosphorus, nor a more obliging set of protagonists than the Turks who rushed out to defend Erdoğan against the soldiers. As the newspapers went to press on Friday night it seemed that the coup was succeeding: the generals had taken over state television and Erdoğan’s whereabouts were unknown. But by the time the first editions were on the newsstands the next morning, the soldiers had been kicked back to their barracks and Erdoğan was addressing crowds of his cheering supporters outside Istanbul’s Atatürk airport.
Erdogan Rising Page 22
