Ashe lay in bed, watching the rain beat the ivy against his bedroom window. He’d woken feeling guilty. Somehow, his casual relations with Amanda and the explosion in Hertfordshire had become fused. Had the blow to his head been some kind of punishment? The idea was absurd, but he couldn’t quite get rid of it.
Was his memory playing tricks? He could remember the row with Amanda but little else until the meeting at the Tower. Something had happened in between; he was sure of it.
Now there was Melissa. What was her part in all of this? They’d kissed; they’d watched the sun set over the Cheshire Plain. She’d wanted more. He’d wanted more, but something held him back. Was it guilt, or something else?
A parcel tumbled onto the hall carpet.
Ashe tore open the jiffy bag to find a bundle of printed papers: a list with some explanatory notes.
Aslan had been true to his word: a list of names. Two columns:
| 1: Lodge Members. | 2: Guests. |
Ashe sat, naked and cross-legged on his sheepskin rug, sipping a glass of champagne as he worked his way carefully down the list.
There had been many guests at the Kartal Lodge on that fateful March night in Istanbul: several Jewish businessmen, some police officials, a few visitors from Sweden and Germany, a Turkish Buddhist, someone called Baba Sheykh, and, most interestingly to Ashe, a number of Kurdish politicians based in Istanbul. These Aslan had underlined in red, adding some supplementary printed notes on an appended sheet. The names were:
Hatip Semdin
Sabri Gunay
Resit Yazar
Ali Yildiz
The supplementary notes, evidently compiled by someone in Aslan’s team who wrote excellent English, were instructive. Colonel Aslan had decided to give Ashe a basic lesson in Turkish politics.
In the early 1980s, a minority of Turkish Kurds, mostly in southeastern Turkey, began campaigning for recognition as a distinct culture, demanding the right to use their own language and enjoy their own literature and traditions. The Turkish Constitution did not recognise anything but Turkish identity within its boundaries. Even the use of the Kurdish language – Kurmanji – was forbidden.
A small minority of Kurds agitated for self-government. These agitators, and persons sympathetic to them, were accused of imperilling national unity and Turkish identity. Acts of terrorism began. Atrocities on both sides escalated quickly; many innocent people suffered.
By the mid-nineties over 30,000 people had died in the conflict; hundreds of villages had been forcibly evacuated. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds had been resettled to other parts of Turkey. Many suffered hard times.
Until 1991, Kurds operated within the national parties, particularly the Social Democratic People’s Party, the SHP. The SHP was sympathetic to full Kurdish equality. After the ’91 elections, a number of Kurdish deputies formed their own party, the Labour Party (HEP).
Ashe checked the guest-list names and saw that two of those deputies – Resit Yazar and Ali Yildiz – had been invited to the Masonic Lodge that night.
In April ’93 the HEP was declared illegal, but by then the deputies had already formed a new pro-Kurdish party: the Demokrasi Partisi. The Democracy Party was also banned in 1994. It was succeeded by the Halkin Demokrasi Partisi, or HADEP.
HADEP is widely recognised as the moderate voice of Kurdish aspirations in Turkey, in contrast to the illegal pro-Kurdish party that supports armed resistance and acts of terror. That illegal party is the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK.
The PKK revoked a ceasefire declaration in 2003. The Turkish government estimates that there are currently between 4,500 and 5,000 PKK guerrillas across the Turkish border in the ‘safe zone’ or autonomous Kurdish Region of northern Iraq. In effect, they have been protected both by the UN and by US firepower since the first Gulf War.
Iraqi Kurds do not favour the PKK’s methods, because the PKK threaten the Iraqi Kurds’ own position, compromising their own desires for independence. As a result of the PKK’s presence, Turkish troops crossed the border into Iraq with very different objectives to those of American troops in the region.
The Americans wish to secure broad Iraqi Kurdish support for a democratic settlement in Iraq. The Turkish premier, Erdogan, has accused the United States of double standards in its definition of its war against terror, because the USA gave no encouragement to the annihilation of PKK guerrillas in northern Iraq. The Turkish government perceives little effective difference between the PKK and al-Qaeda, since al-Qaeda is prepared to exploit the PKK cause as a means of destabilising Turkey’s secular Constitution.
Aslan had added another note, but already Ashe felt like he was poking about in a hornets’ nest.
Last week, Turkish police raided the office of the legal Kurdish nationalist party, HADEP, in Istanbul. Twenty-four arrests were made – some as a result of the raid, others after protest marches for Kurdish rights. Among those arrested were Hatip Semdin and Sabri Gunay – both of them visitors to the Lodge on the night of the bombing.
What could Ashe conclude from this information? Who had most to gain from the deaths of Semdin, Gunay, Yazar and Yildiz? Islamic radical terrorists, or Turkey’s military and security interests? It was unkind of Aslan to leave his new friend with this dilemma. The issue was complicated even further by the new question. Who had most to gain from blowing up a British intelligence advisory committee investigating threats to British interests in Istanbul?
There were other questions: what were four Kurdish politicians doing at a Masonic Lodge in Istanbul in the first place? However much the Lodge prided itself on representing a modern, secular, even progressive Turkey, a country open to the world, it was absurd to think a Turkish Lodge would promote Kurdish rights, even indirectly. Urban, secular-minded Turks frequently associated Kurdish rights with a reactionary, rural, fundamentalist Muslim culture. For many ‘Westernised’ Turks, the Muslim traditionalist demand that Islamic girls wear the headscarf epitomised the issue of encroaching backwardness.
Aslan’s last note – almost valedictory in its plainness – was a simple fact, but ambiguous in its implications:
Resit Yazar and Ali Yildiz are currently in Iraq, sought by Turkish agents for observational purposes.
No further information is available.
Aslan was clearly urging Ashe to see a link between the Kartal Lodge bombing and the atrocity at the Tower. But where was the link? Aslan pointed to Iraq; the clue rested with Yildiz and Yazar.
The conclusion seemed inescapable. Ashe should go to Iraq. Find them. See what they were doing – and what they knew. Had not even the PM recommended that ODDBALLS concentrate its energies on Iraq? Nothing could be simpler.
Nothing could be more dangerous.
Go to Iraq? The whole wide world was aware of the perils in Iraq: a country split open like the belly of a stricken dragon, fought over by any number of interests.
Ashe knew whom he should contact. His hand stopped by the phone. Just hold on, Ashe. Think. Think. What would Loveday-Rose have advised? Thinking of the archdeacon made him think of Melissa.
Melissa. Another life; another promise. Melissa… The good life; friends, family, invitations above the fireplace, the bosom of society; cosiness, children, holidays, breezing into country pubs, gazing into each other’s eyes, growing old comfortably.
Bollocks.
The voice of the archdeacon came into his head. ‘You must face what you fear.’
Faith. It was a risk.
Ashe found himself dialling an old number.