by Robert Fisk
I didn’t know. I’d boarded the helicopter “Captain Hook” told me to take. Or I thought I did. It dawned on me then that I was on the wrong helicopter. Or rather— it took a few seconds in the din and rain to grasp this—that as a journalist I was clearly on the right helicopter. Whatever was happening, it had to be more exciting than another food drop. I leaned towards lantern-jaw. So where are you from? I asked. “U.S. embassy, Ankara, most of these guys are CIA. You aren’t supposed to be here!” I stared at him. And I grinned. In fact, I positively burst into laughter, so loudly amid the cabin noise that even lantern-jaw gave me a smirk. I leaned towards his ear again because now it was my turn. “Jesus Christ!” I said. And he gave me a more friendly smile. “You,” he said, “have got yourself one hell of a fucking story.”
The chopper barrelled across the landscape, leapt through the cracks in the mountain chain, climbed with breath-sucking speed into the clouds and raced along the snowline, its passengers staring in front of them like men possessed. We were heading east at an astounding speed. I pulled my laminated map from my sack and traced the miles by laying my outstretched finger against the mountains. We were heading directly towards the Iranian border. Lantern-jaw took my map and turned it towards me, his own finger on a tiny name printed in italics. “Yasilova,” it said. I squinted at the map as the Apache jerked between two walls of rock. If a helicopter ever came into contact with rock, Lancaster had told me, the rock “always wins.” And we were moving far faster than the old Chinook.
In one moment, we had soared through dark blue skies and then sideways into a cloud bank to emerge scarcely 5 metres from the tops of pine trees. The Apache had an astounding ability to “skid” in the air, to turn corners like a car and to flatten out and swoop like a bird at a patch of rock. And I remembered all those burned-out tanks and armoured vehicles and cars across the sands of southern Iraq and realised, yet again, that the Iraqis never had a chance of surviving. This was death by computer, the same computer upon which our lives now depended in this mechanical wasp. Yasilova. It meant nothing to me. The Iranian border ran just a fingernail to the right of the name. And then we descended.
The CIA men and the embassy guards—I guessed they were all the same— checked their ammunition and held their weapons across their chests as we came whupping down a fairytale valley of soft grass and spring-leaved trees and a small river that moved in a torrent over the landscape. There were refugees below us, dirty tents and men and women looking up at our Apache and then, straight in front of us as the doors opened, the soldiers of two great armies pointing their rifles at each other, Turks to the left, British Royal Marines to the right, the Turks manning a machine gun on one side of the river and the green berets of the Brits moving through the lighter green of the grass, weapons at the ready. As the rotors cut and the CIA men sprang out of the helicopter, lantern-jaw tapped me on the knee. “Your guys and the Turks are about to go to war,” he shouted. And he shot me a real big smile. “I told you you had a great fucking story!”
I was out of the chopper like a rat, running for my life with the Americans, down towards the river where a Royal Marine radio operator was struggling with his back-pack through the mud in the direction of the Americans. The Turks were running up the eastern bank of the river, shouting and pointing their guns at us. High up on an escarpment 25 kilometres to the east, along the ridge-line of a great white mountain, lay the Iranian border. What, I wondered, did the Islamic Republic make of this?
Some of the CIA men were splashing through the river towards the Turkish troops, many of whom were standing beside piles of bedding and mattresses and boxes of food. The rest were running in front of me towards the British. And then we were among the British. “What’s your position?” one of the Americans shouted at a young officer. “Have you exchanged fire?” I saw the soldier shake his head. “Not yet,” he said. “You’re not going to,” the American replied. And then a British marine with a Home Counties accent touched my sleeve. “Are you by any chance a reporter?” he asked, and when I nodded, he actually smiled. “Bloody good—we need a reporter here.” I could hardly believe my ears. The British Ministry of Defence spent much of its time trying to keep journalists away from real stories like this. In fact, ever since I’d worked in Northern Ireland, the ministry had taken a particular dislike to my reporting. But this was not controllable. This was Planet Earth—albeit of a cold and mountainous variety—and something very odd was going on. Why were British soldiers about to shoot at Turkish soldiers for the first time since Gallipoli?
Surgeon Lieutenant Peter Davis of the Royal Marine Mountain and Arctic Warfare Cadre was the only doctor ministering to 3,000 refugees—some of whom were standing around us with a mixture of awe and terror—and he explained what had happened with the precision and speed of all professional soldiers. “The Turkish soldiers have been stealing the refugees’ food and blankets, so we had to stop this and we’ve been standing off, locked and loaded ever since.” I looked across the river to the huge pile of water boxes and blankets that stood guiltily next to the Turkish troops. The Kurdish refugees—many of them Assyrian Christians, some of whom had fled all the way from Baghdad—stood with the British whom they obviously regarded as their protectors. The Turks had just stolen another sixty boxes of water from these homeless refugees, and for several minutes the outnumbered British and Americans had been forced to watch the Turks stealing more blankets, bed linen and food, all of it supplied by international charities. The British wanted to fly all 3,000 Kurdish refugees out of Yasilova to protect them from the Turks—but a Turkish officer had refused them permission to fly. Now Davis and his men were piling what was left of the Kurds’ food onto an RAF Chinook parked by the trees to take it out of the Turks’ reach. They were going to fly the relief supplies away from the refugee camp.
There were Americans who had been here with the British for a week and all of them, along with the marines, told a story of successive Turkish army looting throughout the entire period. A British captain was shaking with anger as he spoke. “The Turkish soldiers here are shit,” he said. “They don’t seem to care what happens to these Kurds—and it’s the Turks who are supposed to be running this camp. They take whatever they want. One of them said to me: ‘It’s better to starve the Kurds—that way, we can control them.’ I can’t let that happen.”
The scandal at Yasilova camp had gone unreported, partly because it was so remote, partly because it had only now degenerated to the verge of open military hostilities, and partly because of the natural desire of the coalition armies—who had known about this disgrace for days—to maintain good relations with Turkey. When British and American troops first arrived at Yasilova camp, the Turks were in sole charge. “The Kurds were in a pitiful state,” an American said. “They were suffering from acute diarrhoea. There were no medical services given by the Turks. The place was on the verge of a cholera outbreak.” It was still the most squalid of the camps. The place reeked of sewage.
At least a hundred of the refugees were begging the British and Americans to take them to Europe because, they said, they were about as frightened of the Turks as they were of the Iraqis. “We have relatives in Austria, in Sweden, in America,” one young woman pleaded with me. “For God’s sake, tell them we are here.” There were dark stories in the camp, that the Turks were trying to divide up the families and charge them for transport to another camp to the west. The British were still piling their food supplies onto the Chinook, heaping boxes of water and blankets onto a pallet beneath the machine. “If the refugees can’t have it, we’re damn well not going to let the Turks take it,” one of the marines said.
I flew out on the RAF helicopter along with the food, a sick child, a Kurdish woman looking for her lost son and a Kurdish man who had been wounded in the eye during the uprising. We dropped them off at Zakho and flew on to Diyarbakir, where I now had a hotel room. I called Harvey Morris in London and told him I had a story for the front page—which is where the scandal
of Yasilova appeared next morning.
I knew the Turkish authorities would resent the report. With a million Kurdish refugees on their frontier, the Turkish army felt it was losing control of the relief operation—in reality, it did not have the resources to maintain it—and in Turkey, any criticism of the army can be regarded as a crime. This was part of the legacy of Atatürk, whose own military career at Gallipoli was part of the legend upon which modern, secular Turkey had been built. But Turkey also wanted to join the European Community—as it then was—and could scarcely deny the truth of what had happened at Yasilova. Or so I thought.
I spent the next day back in the air, travelling with the American Chinook crews around Zakho, but when I returned again to Diyarbakir, a British relief worker told me that “the Turks are very angry and I’d let your office know if I were you.” I called Harvey. “Of course the Turks will be angry,” he laughed. “You’ve offended their bloody army. Call me if you have any trouble.” Trouble came two hours later with a knock on my bedroom door. I opened it. In front of me stood the hotel manager, a small Kurdish man, but behind him stood two tall, unsmiling men in black leather jackets. “I am sorry to bother you, Mr. Fisk, but some policemen are here to talk to you.”
The police spoke no English, I no Turkish, so the diminutive Kurd assured me that they came as “friends” and would like me to visit the police station. I was to take my belongings with me. I lifted the phone, and—as the policemen protested—dialled London and got through to my foreign editor, Godfrey Hodgson. I told him in one sentence what had happened, that I suspected this might be more serious than we had imagined, and asked him to call my elderly parents in Maidstone to tell them we had a problem. Bill and Peggy would not want to hear this on the radio.151 Trailed by a colleague from the Daily Mail, I was driven to the police station, where a portly police inspector invited me to sit in his office. “You are here as a guest of the police inspector,” my luckless hotel manager explained. “You have not been arrested.” In that case, I said, I would like to take tea with the police inspector. He scowled. Tea arrived after half an hour. From the wall above him, Atatürk scowled down at me too.
So did Paul O’Connor, the British embassy’s second secretary in Ankara. “They want to question you about your report,” he said coldly. “My advice is to say nothing.” What quickly became apparent, however, was that the police were considering formal charges against me for defaming the Turkish army—I suspected that this was a military order to the police, not an instruction from the interior or foreign ministries in Ankara. One of the cops told me, with considerable pleasure, that defaming the army carried a sentence of ten years. I sat in the inspector’s chair, remembering Midnight Express and cursing “Captain Hook.” My chopper ride with the CIA was having unpleasant repercussions.
More policemen entered the room. The inspector took several telephone calls, glancing at me as he listened to the speaker. A plain-clothes cop arrived with a massive old German typewriter and began to root through my bag, slowly extracting my toothbrush, spare blanket, chocolate bars and—to my despair—a book on Armenian history. It was now one in the morning. O’Connor drooped with tiredness. He asked that I be allowed back to my hotel. The inspector said he had no power to permit this. The cop with the typewriter then announced that my interrogation would begin. O’Connor objected. But I decided that an interrogation might be just the thing to end this farce. I asked him to translate; which, to be fair, he wearily agreed to do, struggling to stay awake. The construction of the Turkish language is such that each sentence has to be completed before it can be translated. It would be 4:45 in the morning before this nonsense was over.
When did I first enter Turkey? Had I entered the country from any place other than Habur (the border crossing from Iraq outside Zakho)? Did I come to Diyarbakir directly from Ankara? Did I work for The Independent ? Did I write an article in The Independent on 30 April 1991? Is there another Robert Fisk on the paper? Did I have any other article published in The Independent on 30 April 1991? This was witless stuff, infantile, ridiculous. I began to realise why the Turks could not suppress the Kurdish revolt in southern Turkey. It was also quickly becoming obvious that the police version of my story came not from my own paper but from the reports of Turkish correspondents in London who had recycled my report back to Istanbul and Ankara.
Did I see Turkish soldiers stealing water? Did I take pictures of this? I understood this question. If I had photographs of the Turkish army looting, then the prosecution would collapse. So they needed to seize those pictures. But I didn’t have any. I kept replying that the answer to their questions could be found in my article in The Independent. Did I see Turkish soldiers stealing helvar? O’Connor struggled to translate this exotic commodity which turned out to be a form of Turkish biscuit that I had never seen let alone tasted in my life. More cops now arrived and—despite O’Connor’s presence—stood around me, each holding wooden coshes in their hands. The inspector said that I might like to spend the night in the basement of the police station. “This is getting a bit heavy,” O’Connor muttered. Then came the moment I had been waiting for:
COP: In the article in the newspaper Independent on 30 April 1991, and which bears your name, is it true that the aid in Yasilova camp has been looted by Turkish soldiers?
FISK: My father always told me that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was one of the titans of the twentieth century. I believe my father was right. Unfortunately, some of your soldiers at Yasilova did not obey the high standards and principles set by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish nation.
Suddenly, the atmosphere changed. I silently thanked Bill Fisk for all those boyhood history lessons. I’m not at all sure that Atatürk was a titan (or that Bill thought so), but I was quite prepared to become his admirer for the inspector and his friends. They began to talk to one another with great animation. Swooning with tiredness, O’Connor told me they would probably now allow me to return to my hotel. The word “deport” popped up in their conversation. And I knew why. If my argument was going to be a rousing condemnation of the way in which the Turkish army had turned its back on the father of the nation—a man whose integrity I would defend against the army—then there could be no prosecution and no court case. And so it came to pass.
A few hours later, I was solemnly informed that I would be deported, and O’Connor trotted off to buy an air ticket. Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Murat Sungar announced Fisk’s imminent departure from the homeland; “his existence in Turkey is no longer needed because of his prejudiced, biased and illintentioned reporting,” he said. It was a bumpy flight back to Ankara and I had to comfort one of the two Turkish cops guarding me because he had never travelled in an aircraft before. But “Captain Hook” ’s decision to put me on the Apache was now rippling the pond. The Turks ordered that the British Royal Marines should also be deported and claimed that they had roughed up a local Turkish official. The Ministry of Defence immediately “redeployed” them south of the border and inside Iraq. Journalists’ organisations protested. The European Commission demanded an explanation from the Turkish ambassador to the EC in Brussels. One of AP’s executives in New York sent me a two-liner: “Hard to imagine the quality of the meals in a jail in Diyarbakir. You’re probably envying the Kurdish refugees about now.”
The problem was that the Kurdish refugees had already disappeared from this ridiculous saga. It was the honour of the Turkish army that was now at stake. The Turkish army’s chief of staff, General Dogan Gures—who should have been disciplining his soldiers at Yasilova and protecting the Kurds—thundered that my perfectly accurate report was “planned, programmed propaganda.” But what was I supposed to have done? Declined to board the helicopter at Salopi? Ignored the evidence of my own eyes at Yasilova? Censored my own reporting in the interests of Western–Turkish relations? At Ankara, I was put aboard a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. “You’re the man who’s being deported, aren’t you?” the stewardess greeted me. “You must have
been telling the truth.”
Which is what I wanted to go on doing in northern Iraq. But how to return there now that Turkey was closed to me? I flew back to Beirut and drove to Damascus, where the former subjects of the Ottoman empire were more than happy to oblige. I explained my predicament to Mohamed Salman, the minister of information—to be disgraced by the Assad regime eight years later—who suggested I visit a certain General Mansour, in charge of Syrian army intelligence in the border city of Kimishli. I drove the length of Syria, back to the Turkish border—I could actually see the Turkish flag outside General Mansour’s window—and he arranged for a squad of Syrian troops to take me down to the Tigris River where it flowed out of Turkey and formed the border of Syria and northern Iraq. An old man in a wooden boat was waiting in the dawn light and the Syrian soldiers waved goodbye as he rowed me silently across the great expanse of pale, soft water to the other shore where three peshmerga Kurdish guerrillas were waiting for me. Sister Syria—as Assad’s nation was called with dubious affection in Lebanon—had friends inside Kurdistan. “Mr. Robert?” one of the Kurds asked. “We are here to take you to Zakho.” And so I returned to the story of the Kurdish disaster.
It was now late spring. The Americans and the British were planning to leave. The United Nations had arrived with their observers to “protect” the Kurds. Yet only by extending “free” Kurdistan farther south could the Americans close down the refugee camps in which the Kurds had eventually been induced to live after leaving the mountains. Soon the Kurds would be attacked again, usually by Turkish troops and pilots who would, in the coming years, bomb Kurdish villages where they believed guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, were hiding. Turkish soldiers would enter Zakho in contravention of all their agreements with the Western allies. And Saddam would strike back against the Kurdish exiles in northern Iraq whose plots to assassinate the wretched dictator—it was all part of a hopeless CIA conspiracy—miserably failed. So while the Americans tried to leave northern Iraq, they had to push farther south to set up more “safe havens” for the Kurds. They approved of new Kurdish negotiations with Saddam. They were now enthusiastic to work with the Baathist regime—or “the government in Baghdad” as they preferred to call it—in order to withdraw. Suddenly, the Americans needed Saddam’s cooperation.
