Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  As I stare at the hillside, I realize that there are women everywhere: single files of them, in combat gear, carrying rifles, running up the goat tracks toward the heights; others descending the goat tracks and disappearing, one by one, into what appears to be a large mess tent, dug into the hillside; while other female warriors, their hair pinned up beneath berets, mount guard on hill redoubts above me. The anxious-looking French-speaking “liaison officer” who sticks by me explains. “We are having a women’s conference.”

  He leads me up the goat tracks to the mess tent. Inside, fluorescent strip lights hang from the roof—there must be a generator in the camp, but how did they ever get it up the road? In the stark white glow, I see about a hundred women, ranged neatly on rough-hewn benches grouped around a central podium. Red, yellow, and green banners—the Kurdish colors—hang from the roof of the tent. They say, “Long Live Apo, Long Live the PKK.” In one corner, a woman is standing and is in the midst of a long, quiet, apparently reproachful speech, while the other women listen quietly, some taking notes. The astonishing thing is how young they all are: most in their teens, the oldest in their late twenties, unsmiling, earnest, youthful faces, some with rimless glasses, their hair pushed up beneath berets or tied in ponytails; all in the shapeless baggy uniforms worn by the men; Kalashnikovs leaning on their knees or resting on the corner of a bench, the whole atmosphere tense with earnest, adolescent attention.

  It is a self-criticism session, my liaison officer whispers. He and I are the only males in the tent. Some recent guerrilla raids, he says, went wrong and lives were needlessly lost because of errors in tactics and strategy. That is what the women are speaking about. One by one the girls rise to their feet and deliver little speeches, their heads down, their voices modest and sober, unrhetorical, controlled, but, to my ears, full of the plaintive, even anguished tone of true believers whose faith is being sorely tried.

  The gathering recesses for fifteen minutes, and the girls pair off in twos, roll cigarettes, and then stroll up and down, arm in arm, whispering and smoking. I follow them and get talking to a warrior girl named Milan. She is older than many of them—perhaps twenty-five—with brown hair buried beneath exactly the sort of gray deer-stalker-style forage cap I remember from newsreels of Leon Trotsky in the Russian Civil War. She wears the baggy trousers of the fighters, and a pair of Puma running shoes, and she has “Long Live Apo” neatly embroidered in red thread on the right breast of her military jacket. Apo is Apo Ocalan, leader of her party. Have you ever met him? I ask. But of course, she says, blushing with pleasure and embarrassment. She trained as a guerrilla fighter in Ocalan’s camp in the Bekáa Valley in Lebanon. “That was where I learned Marxist dialectics, military tactics, and Kurdish.”

  Kurdish? I am astonished. Milan smiles and walks some distance in silence along the parade ground of rough stones that has been dug out of the hillside. “You see,” she explains, “I was born in Australia. In a suburb of Melbourne, actually. I didn’t know I was Kurdish until I was seventeen.” Now that she has said this, I pick up the Australian lilt in her accent. She apologizes again. “Forgive my English. I have not spoken it for four years.”

  How does a suburban Australian girl end up as a Marxist nationalist guerrilla in the hills of Kurdistan? Some longing for a certainty, powerful enough to pull up a life by the roots, must be at work here.

  “It began when I asked my parents why I had this name. Milan. They told me it was Kurdish, but I didn’t know what that meant, and they couldn’t tell me. Fortunately, the Party had contacts in Melbourne.”

  So I begin to see it—an Australian teenager, living inside a culture beyond roots, beyond the past, suddenly discovers that she has some. She discovers she has the most painful kind of national belonging there is, to a people who have no nation of their own.

  Melbourne is not a place for causes. Going with the Party is the most radical thing a Melbourne girl could possibly have done, and that is why she did it. She suddenly sees her life’s vocation so clearly. She is young: the very extremism of the Party, the radical nature of the call it makes upon her, is so imperative, that she succumbs immediately.

  Within months of finding out about the PKK, she has left her family behind and is living in tent barracks in the Bekáa. When the Party judges her ready, when she finally speaks the language of the nation she calls her own, they spirit her across the border to winter in the mountain passes and train for action. All she will say that casts light on this alchemy inside herself is that when she is here, in the mountains, she feels— here she pauses for words and looks out at the peaks—“close to life.” More silence, then she says, “I am alive here.”

  But, I say, pointing to Iran, which lies just a kilometer away across the river below us. “There’s a lot of death here, too.” The Iranian gun positions overlook the camp. “But that is why,” she says, “life is precious here. That is exactly why I could lose it at any time.”

  With a suburban clumsiness of my own, I persist. “But how did you manage here? Life is hard.” She stops, kicks a piece of mountain shale with her shoe. “Yes,” she says, “we only had these on our feet this winter.” I am looking down at her white Pumas. My liaison officer has already pointed out to me the hobbling gait of a young man who lost all his toes to frostbite. “Sometimes there was two feet of snow. I was often sick. My body is not ready for it,” she says, self-reproachfully, as if wishing she could jettison its Australian education in comfort, the inner softness that steals upon you when you live the life of the full refrigerator and the sunny beach. “Soon I will be ready for combat.” Already this gentle, soft-cheeked girl could kill me, would kill me, if her leaders ordered her to.

  I want to hear the motors of indoctrination turn in her, and so I ask her what makes the PKK different from the other Kurdish parties in the struggle. “They are tribal parties, who have made their peace with the traditional feudal and patriarchal nature of Kurdish society. We are the only party of the masses. We want to change the tribal, feudal, and patriarchal nature of our society.”

  Is that why so many young women join? “Feminism is at the center of our Party. We want to change the condition of women in Kurdistan. First, we want to change it within the Party itself. Then we want to change it outside, for all Kurdish women.” She does speak like this, in soft, fervent sentences that seem to come from outside herself, from the authoritative heart of the Party, from all those hours in airless tents in the Bekáa, studiously writing on rough-hewn benches.

  “Does he listen to you?” I suddenly ask, meaning Apo, the leader, the great one, whose name is lovingly embroidered in red thread on her breast. “Oh yes, oh yes. He has encouraged the women to think for themselves, to speak up and make their voices heard.” This is not said in a forced or mechanical way, but with zealous credulity.

  But Apo says a lot of things, and the path of his wisdom has a jagged and uneven shape. He began the armed struggle in 1984 with attacks not only on Turkish civilian targets but also on so-called Kurdish collaborators. Then, when these tactics proved too grisly even for his own supporters, he abandoned them and directed his guerrillas against military rather than civilian targets. At first he was hostile to the creation of the Kurdish enclave; then he changed his mind and supported it. Sometimes he has practiced peace with the Iraqi Kurdish groups, sometimes war. One wonders whether, in Milan’s mind, the path of Apo’s wisdom still runs smooth, or whether there is some tiny grit of doubt, deep down, in the machinery of incantation that whirs so smoothly as she talks. But casting for the doubt within her is perhaps a waste of time. What compels her about Apo, what makes her embroider his name, and, like all the men and women in the camp, place smiling pictures of him, like icons, in the corner of every tent, is that he has released them from doubt and from the burden of a questioning self. Milan’s cause all but abolishes the division between individual and group. She has embraced a kind of belonging so intense that those who share it may look like mental salves to an outsider like myself.
To themselves, they seem at last to be free. For that is what is most striking about Milan, as she smiles, shakes my hand and dashes back to the mess tent: she is truly happy here.

  I soon discover that she is not the only one here who has returned from exile or expatriation. My own liaison officer, a rather gentle, soft-spoken, and apologetic young man, who seems slightly ill-at-ease with the gun on his back, turns out to have been born among the Kurdish Gastarbeiter in Germany. He served as the Party’s representative in Spain and France without ever having lived in Kurdistan itself. His fellow liaison officer, a bluffer, more outgoing kind of man, turns out be from Dortmund, and later, when we are sitting on the floor in their bare adobe-walled dormitory, drinking tea, they talk longingly of the expatriate world, and how isolated they feel high up in the mountains. Every evening, they take out their small Sony shortwaves and pull in the distant voices of Europe, especially the Turkish service of the BBC. With Milan, I had sensed how a cause could become a completely satisfying form of belonging. With those men, with their slightly shamefaced questions about whether I had ever been to Dortmund, had I ever been to such and such Kurdish restaurant in Frankfurt, I sensed nationalist belonging, high up on these Kurdish hillsides, as a kind of nobly chosen imprisonment.

  When we have drunk many glasses of tea together, by the light of the spirit lamp hung over their horsehair pallets, I ask the men whether it is possible to fall in love during the revolution. I see that I have touched a nerve. This is a guerrilla camp, under military discipline—there is no place for relationships here. Marriage and children are out of the question. “As long as Kurdistan is not free, we are not free to love and marry,” says my French-speaking liaison officer, with an unhappy look on his face. (When I report this remark to Behjet, on my return, he sighs and shakes his head. He is used to PKK political correctness and he has no time for it. “A man who tells you he will not marry until Kurdistan is free is simply a man who does not want to marry.”)

  It is time, they suddenly tell me, rising to their feet, to take me to see the camp commander. He is, I now learn, none other than Apo Ocalan’s younger brother, Osman. We make our way down along the goat tracks that snake this way and that in the darkness. The rain clouds have cleared and the sky framed by the mountains is lit with stars.

  The leader is reclining on a horsehair pallet, eating his dinner beneath a portrait of his brother. He is playing with his rice, sopping it up with a piece of nan, tossing extra rice back onto the plate with a bored flick of his hand. There is a large silver service revolver in his waistband, just visible beneath his black leather jacket. He is a brawny man, like his brother, and he doesn’t like the foreign media. “You all call us terrorists,” he barks, when I sit down. “We are fighting for Kurdistan, and you call us terrorists,” he repeats, with a half-scowl, half-smile. It’s a game, this baiting, and it must go on until the matter of who will dominate the interview is settled to the leader’s satisfaction.

  “I didn’t climb all the way up this mountain in the rain to interview terrorists,” I reply, and he grunts and looks away. His men hover in the doorway, waiting for a signal to take his plates away. He waves his finger, and they dart about clearing away the dishes, while the leader wipes the rice from his heavy black mustache.

  I ask him why the Ocalan family joined “the struggle.” We were poor, he replies, and the Turks treated us like dirt, that’s why. My brother was smart in school, he always had the best grades, and he figured out that we had to fight. “That’s why we are here.” He looks down as he speaks, answers tonelessly and woodenly, suddenly the younger brother who doesn’t write the lines, just speaks the ones that his smarter big brother thinks up. He says a lot more, but I switch off and wonder to myself, as I look at him, indolent bandit king at ease, how much nationalism there is in his motivation, how much pure banditry. What seems clear is that for him the ends matter much less than the means. The ends—a free, socialist, feminist Kurdistan—are better left to his brother, to true believers. He is obviously more interested in the means. It is the guns, the AK-47s, that speak for him, that speak to him.

  Next morning, the guns begin speaking. I am led into the next valley, along a goat track, past sentries and lookouts, to a second training camp, to see a live ammunition practice. Ocalan is not there. The commander is an amusing gray-haired old fox, who sits cross-legged in the middle of his American army tent, with his officers around him, eating a dish of fried mint leaves, mixed with tomato. He orders a brigade to attack a redoubt below, and then sits back to watch the show, inviting me to join him, cross-legged beside him. Behind me, squatting on a slope, are several hundred guerrillas, silently observing us both.

  His soldiers are so terribly young, I think, as the attack begins. A rocket-propelled grenade, shoulder-launched from behind a rock below me, spatters harmlessly against the basalt face of the mountain opposite, sending up a plume of shale. I try to keep from starting as the machine guns open up on the white flag flying over the redoubt under fire. Under the cover of this hail of fire, members of the platoon begin sneaking forward, hiding behind rocks, edging forward on hands and knees, Kalashnikovs or pistols in their hands. The smack and thud of bullets into the dirt around them, the whine of ricochets, the afterblast of more grenades set the enclosed space of the mountain valley echoing. In a minute the leader of the platoon is at the base of the redoubt, and I see him lob a grenade up, see it pause in the air and then explode with a gray and unreal puff of smoke as in the movies. When the leader of the platoon grabs the white flag and then sets fire to the straw-bales inside the redoubt to announce its capture, the massed guerrillas on the hills behind me break into applause and chants of “Apo is our leader! Apo is our leader!”

  Later, when their commander has dismissed them at the parade ground, and they are all dancing, in a semicircle, arm over arm, chanting war songs, their Puma-clad feet pounding out a shared rhythm in the dirt, and the dust is rising around their shapeless brown trousers, I find myself struck by a sense of having seen this all before. Was it some footage of a Vietcong camp in the jungles of Vietnam? Was it with Che Guevara in the Bolivian mountains? Or was the echo in my mind much older, back to the grainy footage of the mountain guerrillas of China, on Mao’s Long March?

  I had managed, by climbing to the highest and remotest peaks of Kurdistan, to find a by now nearly forgotten relic of twentieth-century nationalism: the guerrilla army waging a war of so-called national liberation, complete with Marxist texts, the wooden vocabulary I had heard from Milan, the red flags, the fervent communitarianism of this collective dance, and, above all, the abdication of the self before the all-powerful leader. I had supposed that the end of the Cold War had marked the end of all that. But it turned out to be alive and well in the mountains of Kurdistan. In its anti-feudal, anti-tribal rhetoric, in its feminism, it purports to be modern. Marxism, after all, is a form of modernism. But this is a game with shadows, for what, at the end of the twentieth century, seems more unmodern than a movement still in pursuit of a radiant tomorrow which half of the world is just awakening from as from a nightmare?

  As I leave the camp, bound now for Turkey and then for home, two thoughts occur to me. The first is that, between these guerrillas’ visions of what a free Kurdistan should look like and Muhyeddin’s, there is little ground for compromise or reconciliation. When nationalist visions are in such a degree of contradiction, the usual result is war. Nationalism, as a rhetoric of modernity, has proved no more effective than tribalism in uniting the Kurds. Indeed, nationalism, when viewed from this Kurdish mountaintop, seems like a form of tribalism, and one can only predict that tribal wars over the meaning and direction of the Kurdish struggle will continue for a long time to come.

  The second thought—since the PKK is a Turkish movement, directed entirely at the Turkish occupation of the Kurdish homeland in southern Turkey—is that this particular guerrilla movement is influenced by nothing so much as by the style and ferocity of its enemy, the Turkish army. I kne
w I had seen the weapon in Ocalan’s brother’s belt somewhere before. It was a Turkish military service revolver. Same arms, same ruthlessness. Nationalist movements and the state security forces that fight them often end up inside the same culture of violence. Enemies sometimes resemble each other as closely as brothers. That was the hypothesis I wanted to test, as I descended from the Kurdish mountain-tops, said my farewells to Behjet and Taha, and recrossed the frontier into Turkey.

  WITH THE FERRETS

  Feret has an eager and forgettable young face. He wears interrogator’s shades and a .38 in his shoulder holster. He is twenty-four years old and he is with Turkish special forces. I ask him what the special forces do. He smiles and says it is against regulations to tell me. But today he is taking me into the mountain villages where the Turkish army are fighting “the terrorists”—his word for the PKK guerrillas. He talks American. “No way the terrorists are gonna win. No way.”

  While he is out assembling the escort—an armored car and two Land Rovers full of Turkish soldiers—I tell my Kurdish driver that there is a small rodent, with sharp incisors, which London’s East End gangsters are reputed to stick down the trousers of their enemies. My Kurdish driver smiles thinly, says nothing.

  Southeastern Turkey is a land of opportunity for young ferrets. The whole area is like Northern Ireland, a vast military camp: the helicopters drone overhead; F–16s on strafing or reconnaissance runs scream over the tops of the Kurdish villages; armored personnel carriers and tanks squat astride every major rural road crossing; in the Kurdish market towns, there is a man with a walkie-talkie in every café. I have been shadowed for days. They lurk behind the pillars of the inner courtyard in the hotel. When I venture out in a car, they are just behind in small white Renaults, with video cameras, recording what I see, whom I speak to.