The Turkish state repeatedly harasses and imprisons elected Kurdish politicians, and bans their party every few years. Previous incarnations of DEHAP include HADEP and DEP. Each saw its leadership arrested, its offices shut down and membership proscribed. Every time this happens, the activists regroup and reorganise, launching a similar party with a different name. By the time we arrive in town with Mehmet Ali, DEHAP has also been closed down, with the Democratic Society Party (DTP) taking its place.
We have arranged to meet Ferhat at a press conference of the DTP. Three floors up a dirty stairwell from the Turkish equivalent of a pound store, the two-room office with smoke-blackened windows is crammed with plastic chairs, the walls lined with posters. Eighty leading members of the party have just been arrested across Turkey on trumped-up terrorism charges. The state is trying to shut down the DTP, so local party offices across the country are denouncing the arrests and proclaiming their loyalty to the cause. Here, fifteen members crowd around the single brown desk to pose for a local TV camera while reading aloud a solidarity statement. They all know that this could be enough to have their names added to the blacklist. The risk is obvious, as everybody in the room has had to run the gauntlet of twenty armed policemen surrounding the entrance to the building. Three uniformed soldiers video us as we walk up the stairs. Mehmet Ali explains that they are from the Jandarma Information Terror Control unit.
But imprisonment is not the greatest risk for those active on Kurdish issues. The windows of the office do not let in much light, because they are covered in black scorch-marks – evidence of a recent attempt to firebomb the party’s headquarters. The attack followed a public pro-Kurdish rally on the street outside, at which Turkish Nationalists threw stones at the speakers.
After the press conference, Ferhat takes us to his favourite café on Kongre Caddesi – Congress Street, one of the many Kurdish establishments constantly threatened with bankruptcy due to the boycotting of their premises by Turkish government employees. In a town dominated by the army and its ancillaries, this has a big impact on trade. Ferhat’s age is hard to determine because of his skinniness and cheeky grin, and also because he is always moving – whether smoking, on his phone, or talking politics. He is supposed to run the family hardware store, but it appears this has to wait until he is not busy supporting villagers or babysitting his three-year-old niece.
In the 1990s Ferhat studied sociology at Eskişehir University, until obliged to drop out because his family did not have the money to support him. He was conscripted into the military and posted to Edirne in western Turkey, on the Greek border, where the military sends known leftists and Islamists. While he was there, a friend in the records office showed him his file: it dated back to primary school. There were numerous references to his being ‘antisocial’, which Ferhat finds ridiculous. ‘Antisocial!’ he snorts. ‘They should just write that I was political.’
Ferhat spends his life under surveillance. When he moves around Ardahan or visits villages outside, he is usually followed by unmarked Jandarma cars. He points out of the café window to one parked nearby, whose exceptionally long antenna is a giveaway. His home was raided by the police without warning a few months before, but his mother managed to save his computer by sitting on it. He jokes about how his friends are used to being filmed, but it clearly places strains on many of his relationships.
We sit drinking coffee at the Formica tables. He expects the police to listen in to everybody’s phone calls today because of the press conference, so he plans to wait until the next day before ringing people to arrange meetings: ‘They’ll probably be listening tomorrow as well, but maybe not.’ Despite his nonchalant descriptions of police harassment, Ferhat currently faces two major prison sentences. In one case he is charged with referring to Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdish resistance movement in solitary confinement on a prison island, as ‘Mr Öcalan’.
We talk specifically about his arrest and torture in May 2004. He believes that it was the direct result of his having raised issues about the BTC pipeline. In Turkey, he explains, those opposing a ‘national project’ of this status are frequently denounced as enemies of the state. His words remind us of Mayis in Azerbaijan.
BTC KP 774 – 961 KM – HASKÖY HOÇVAN, TURKEY
A dolmuş – a shared minibus taxi seating sixteen passengers – carries Mehmet Ali and us south across the plateau and slowly up the valley. To our right the waters of the Kura meander through the grassland. This river will become the Mtkvari as it flows through Georgia, before regaining its name as the Kura in Azerbaijan. Snow falls, veiling the landscape. Clusters of low homes lie near to the road. In the early twentieth century, before the Armenian genocide, these villages were predominantly Armenian; now they are mostly Kurdish. For much of the winter, this road is closed and the snowbound communities are largely cut off from the town. To us, the high banks of snow on the verges represent midwinter; but to the locals on this bus they mark the arrival of spring.
Ferhat has spent much time supporting complaints about the pipeline raised by communities near Ardahan, and we are heading for Hasköy-Hoçvan, one of the largest villages, which gives its name to the county. When we arrive, the heart of the village is a sea of mud, churned up by cows. The herding of cattle is the core of farming in this region, with the cows driven up to the high mountain pastures, or yayla, in the summer and then back to the villages in winter. We pick our way across the mud to the village tearoom and wait for another lift. Twenty men sit playing cards in air thick with cigarette smoke. The room is quiet except for the slap of cards on tables.
Suddenly the tinny sound of a Tannoy outside interrupts the calm. We look around furtively, concerned that it is a message broadcast by the military police. On a visit we made four years previously, Jandarma walked into a meeting in this same room and demanded explanations. But no, this is an announcement from loudspeakers on the mosque, the public address system for the village. Mehmet Ali translates: ‘The wolf has eaten a cow, number ninety-seven.’ A wolf, hungry at the end of winter, must have taken a small cow. These communities are far more vulnerable to the elements than we are used to.
We leave, again in a dolmuş, hoping to avoid the attention of the police. As we turn a corner on the village street, we pass in front of a large concrete building, surrounded by wire-mesh fences. Several storeys high, with newly painted walls, it is a Jandarma barracks, guarded by sentry boxes and helmeted soldiers holding automatic rifles. The base dwarfs the school across the street.
BTC KP 777 – 964 KM – ÇALABAŞ, TURKEY
The minibus turns off the main road through Hasköy-Hoçvan County, and follows a winding stream towards the village of Çalabaş. The turf-roofed homes have been built into the hillside, making them nearly invisible from above; cows graze on the roofs. The sixty families in the village survive by keeping cattle and geese.
Walls of dried cow dung stand upright, solidly packed into piles, each stack some six metres long and two metres high. This is fuel for heating and cooking in the winter months. The entire plateau is largely treeless, so wood is scarce. There is no gas supply, and electricity is intermittent. Among the houses, the narrow track that is the village’s main street runs up to the communal tap. Women and girls balance buckets on their heads, carrying water home.
Next to the tap stands the village store, run by Ali Kurdoğlu – Ali ‘Son of a Wolf’. The small dark room feels like a cave. Neatly stacked boxes of Ülker biscuits, Signal toothpaste and Uhu glue line the shop, although most people come here to buy Viceroy or Anadolu cigarettes. The faces of film director Yılmaz Güney and Ahmet Kaya, a famous Kurdish singer and poet, stare down from the walls. Handwritten sayings and short poems have been taped to the low beams, although the lack of light makes them hard to read. Benches run along the edge of the room, making this the village’s social space. ‘There is no internet in Çalabaş. That’s why my small shop is more than a shop – it’s a cultural centre.’
Ali is slightly hunchb
acked, with a small twisted frame. He moves with a limp. He is a local champion of Kurdish rights and a vocal opponent of the pipeline. A close friend of Ferhat’s, he also faces a potential three-year imprisonment for his activism.
Ali says that Çalabaş has been hit particularly hard by the pipeline because of the village’s Kurdish identity. He has heard that Turkish Nationalist villages received better compensation for land expropriated by BTC and SCP, as well as larger community investment projects, including mosques and morgues. Expressing dissent is far more dangerous for a Kurd from Çalabaş than for a Turk from nearby Kurtulpınar, he says. Despite the dangers, the villagers from Çalabaş had attempted to protest against the construction, blocking bulldozers and stopping work.
As he serves the occasional customer, Ali explains how the two pipelines, BTC and SCP, run either side of Çalabaş, cutting through the fields where wheat and barley grow in the summer. ‘We are truly living in an energy corridor – the alley between the energy flows. This is a strategic area.’ Having an invisible ‘strategic area’ imposed on your community is a sad fate. We understand his point, having recently witnessed the Executive Power at Hacalli in Azerbaijan, and the troops of the Ministry of Interior at Tsikhisdvari in Georgia.
The present is already difficult, with Jandarma forces repeatedly harassing him for speaking out. He receives threatening phone calls and is often taken into custody, usually after visits by international delegations. His phone is tapped – the police want to be clear that ‘they know what’s going on’. In 2005, Ali was interviewed by the British civil servant ‘Dawson’, or rather Duncan Lawson, during the same journey that took him to Azerbaijan. Days before the visit, Ali was phoned by the provincial governor’s office and ordered not to say anything critical. He expects that he will receive more hassle tomorrow, following our visit. But, he shrugs, ‘they don’t scare me. They want to dissuade others from coming forward.’
A set of weighing scales sits on Ali’s counter, alongside a small black-and-white TV and, on top of it, three publications: a Kurdish literary magazine published by a friend in İstanbul, the DTP party manifesto, and the Turkish Republic’s constitution. Ali explains that he refers to this last document regularly when defending himself against police harassment. It brings to mind Mayis’s staunch use of the Azeri constitution against the secret policeman in Hacalli.
Ali believes that if the war between the government and the PKK escalates, life in Çalabaş will become more dangerous. Many homes are close to the pipeline route, and the military would use Çalabaş’s location and the conflict as an excuse to increase pressure and control.
As we talk, the door is flung open and a man in uniform stands silhouetted in the entrance. We are suddenly on tenterhooks. ‘Police? Jandarma?’ But the man in the blue jacket with yellow trim smiles broadly. He is from Pall Mall cigarettes, here on a stock-take. He punches a few details into his handheld digital recorder, turns down the offer of tea, and heads on.
Mehmet Ali says that he is surprised to find a man with Ali’s articulate political views in a tiny village like this. It turns out that Ali is a returnee, having lived for thirteen years in İstanbul – where he worked in a print shop, wrote poetry and was actively involved in Kurdish politics – before coming back to Çalabaş (a rarity in itself) in 2004, and opening his shop. He still writes – Kurdoğlu is his pen name – publishing poetry and articles on his walls, in local newspapers and online. Despite feeling a deep affinity with Çalabaş, he is torn between staying and leaving again for the big city.
A combination of poverty and state harassment has driven many villagers away. Some 550 families from Çalabaş now live in İstanbul – almost ten times the number remaining in the village. Others have moved to İzmir and Ankara, while the more mobile have made it to Berlin and London. Most of those in İstanbul have ended up in the vast, sprawling Kurdish suburbs, including the gecekondus – shacks built on squatted land, often adjacent to landfill sites. Ali describes how Çalabaş is considered varoş – a disadvantaged and poor area – but he feels that most of those who leave end up merely in another, more distant varoş.
HARINGEY, NORTH LONDON
Haringey’s Green Lanes is hectic. Kurdish and Turkish corner stores with boxes of oranges and tomatoes piled high on the pavement outside stand next to packed cafés and restaurants serving freshly baked lahmacuns, pides and lentil soup. Off the busy road, a side street ends below a railway embankment. Tucked between the last house and the grey palisade fencing is a squat two-storey building that houses the Kurdish Community Centre. A mural of the smiling face of the imprisoned leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, welcomes visitors. Inside, the centre is dominated by a large hall. A small café booth serves piping-hot sweet tea for 20p. Kurdish flags and framed photographs of fallen resistance fighters – many from London – adorn the walls. A large poster demands ‘Freedom for Öcalan – Peace in Kurdistan’.
The hall often contains just a handful of men chatting, or kids participating in after-school Kurdish-language classes. But today the room is heaving. It is February, and the month of celebrations marking Newroz – Kurdish New Year – has just begun. In Turkey, Newroz parties are frequently banned and shut down. Here in exile, the Kurdish community can welcome in the New Year at will, so the hall is filled with families enjoying themselves. Songs are sung about lost lovers and hopes for freedom. Speeches remember those who cannot be here, sitting in prisons far away. Several youth groups perform traditional dances at the front, but each dance ends with most of the room joining in.
A Platform-organised exhibition of photographs and poetry from along the route of the pipeline stands upright on white display boards. The faces of Ali in Çalabaş, the muhtar (mayor) of Hasköy-Hoçvan, and Mayis in Baku, stare out at the festivities. Adults guess where the photographs were taken by the landscape. Three nine-year-old boys choose their own interaction with the exhibition by taking biros to the prints and crossing out all Turkish flags in the background. Other frenzied children chase around the room, playing tag and dodging the dancers. The old sit on plastic chairs clapping to the music.
All the while, we are watched over by images on the walls of the young Kurdish women and men of Haringey who chose to return to their homelands and go up into the mountains, never to return.
BTC KP 780 – 967 KM – HACI ALI, TURKEY
Poor farmers always make room for a calf in their home, close by the fire, next to where they lay their own beds. They bed the calf in fresh grass mixed with flowers. The hut then smells of spring flowers, of grass, of calf-dung and of the young animal. The smell of a calf is like the smell of milk. If anyone opened his hand wide to caress an ear with the palm, he would feel a pleasant thrill, it was so soft and cool.2
Yaşar Kemal, İnce Memed, 1955
The River Kura winds between these isolated Kurdish villages, twisting into loops and meanders, leaving oxbow lakes to serve as memorials to its past course. Jackdaws probe the fields in search of seeds and larvae as herds of cattle wander the plain. We cross the pipeline again, spotting the marker posts – punctuation points in the vastness. The wind blows light snow across the road.
There is a strange mist rising from the land. We peer at it though the bus windows and realise it is steam rising from the newly ploughed fields of black earth – both near to the road and far away at the base of the mountains. The landscape has three strata: black earth, grey steam, white mountains.
Half an hour’s journey from Çalabaş, our dolmuş turns off the road and pulls into another village, stopping on the muddy street between more turf-roofed houses. In the distance boys in blue-and-black uniforms are returning from school. A pair of women in their bright headscarves stand out against the low grey sky.
The people we are visiting are in close contact with Ferhat, but travelling out of Ardahan with him would have drawn too much attention from the Jandarma, so we have arrived in the village of Hacı Ali with Mehmet Ali. We meet with two farmers who guide us to some rough g
razing land about 200 metres from the houses. Under it flows one of the pipelines. Unlike in Azerbaijan and Georgia, its course across the land is dramatically obvious. The pipe has just been covered in a mound of rocks and earth some two metres high – an earth barrier stretching away in both directions. Crossing this mound involves clambering up on all fours and carefully sliding down the other side; our arms and clothes are soon brown with mud.
For a short while we stand on the other side of the mound, staring at it. The boulders make it look like a construction site where work is still taking place. In Azerbaijan and Georgia, once the pipeline was buried, the topsoil of the fields was carefully reinstated in order that the route should be barely noticeable. Why the difference here? The answer lies in the fact that this is not, we realise, the route of BTC – which runs nearby – but that of its younger twin sister, the SCP. The pile of boulders reflects a difference in the financial and legal structures around the two pipelines. For the first 692 kilometres from Baku, the two siblings lie parallel in one ditch. At the Turkish border, however, SCP separates from BTC. The state oil company BOTAŞ has responsibility for the construction of BTC, and after that its operation – but it does so under the Turnkey agreement, the contract from the pipelines’ owner, BTC Co. In contrast, BOTAŞ not only constructed and operates the SCP, but also owns the pipeline in Turkey. The land that covers BTC and SCP might have been reinstated with the same care, but the two different owners have enforced different standards. The two pipes continue to run near one another until they reach Erzurum, but often on different sides of hills and villages. Now we realise that distinguishing the two is going to be easy, as the scar left above the gas line is so much clearer. The pipe has been ‘buried’, but that is the extent of the reinstatement works. This explains why everywhere along the route villages are full of complaints about the doğal gaz boru hattı – ‘natural gas pipeline’.
The Oil Road Page 25
