The pages of my notebook are smeared black with soot. The room I am standing in is a burnt-out husk. The family who used to live here are gathered in the doorway, stunned.
‘A shell came through the wall,’ says one of the young men, as deadpan as if he is reeling off the week’s shopping. ‘Then they shot our water tank up, so we stayed in the room built onto the roof. And then finally we went to another neighbourhood.’
It is the first time the family, a collection of matriarchs in white headscarves, their quiet, wet-eyed husbands and their sportswear-clad sons, have dared return to their devastated house. Their furniture, accumulated over decades, is destroyed. Light peeks in through gaping holes in the walls. Masonry and broken glass litter the floor, alongside dusty scraps of fabric and pages ripped from schoolbooks.
I had been on a road trip across south-eastern Turkey with two photographer friends when we got the news about Cizre. This region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, populated mostly by ethnic Kurds, boasts the kind of landscapes I remember from primary school Bibles: huge dusty outcrops and shepherds herding flocks of sheep through the mountains. We had visited Hasankeyf, an ancient cave town, and Mardin, a fortress city built high on a rock. We sipped wine brewed by local Assyrian monks as the sun set over the plain leading down to the Syrian border. And then one of us, I don’t remember who, looked at the news and saw that the town of Cizre, an hour’s drive to the east, had been reopened after almost three months under Turkish military curfew. We drove there at top speed, calling every government contact we could think of, and bargained our way through the army and police checkpoints with our press cards.
On the outskirts of Cizre, battered commercial neighbourhoods with every window smashed, we keep something of our holiday joie de vivre. But it vanishes as soon as we find the Yağarcık family staring goggle-eyed at the remains of their home.
The young men lead us to the roof where they had sheltered, up staircases treacherous with damage and debris. Up here, we find scraps of the battle, bullet and shell casings glinting in the early spring sunshine. This family never chose to be on the front line. Armed teenagers loyal to the PKK built barricades and laced the streets with explosives in a bid to keep police out of the neighbourhood. At first, there was little reaction from the state. Emboldened, Cizre’s local government, run by a party with hazy links to the militants, declared autonomy and started a trend. The pattern was soon repeating itself across south-eastern Turkey.
The state’s response, when it came, was brutal. In December 2015 Turkish tanks and special forces surrounded Cizre and other towns and ordered the civilians out. Artillery and air strikes pummelled the militants and anyone else who remained. A son points to the army base on the hillside, less than a mile away, where the Turkish tanks were stationed. It has a clear line of sight to the Yağarcıks’ home, where they had been planning to hold weddings for three of their children this year.
The whole of this side of the street has suffered the same fate. Shells have punched holes through concrete, leaving buildings looking like Swiss cheese. The PKK militants have scrawled their slogans on the walls: Biji Apo! (‘Long live uncle!’, the nickname for Abdullah Öcalan, the militia’s leader and founder). Turkish soldiers later daubed their response: Piç (‘Bastard’), next to a crude rendering of the Turkish star and crescent.
There is worse to come.
‘This is the good part of the town,’ a pair of young children tell us with awful gaiety as we gawp at the remains of an office building spilling out onto the ruined street. They point down the road to another neighbourhood, called Cudi, which they say took the brunt of the battle. As we turn off down the side street, down littered pavements past the ruined frontage of a hotel I once stayed in, a stunned old woman staggers towards us talking gibberish and pleading with the sky. Dark blue armoured police cars prowl up and down the street, sending the people on the pavements shrinking back towards the twisted shop shutters. I wonder why no one is talking. Then the cloying tang of decay hits the back of my throat.
A throng has gathered around a pile of rubble on Bostancı Street, men scratching furiously at an opening in the ground. Swarms of flies congregate around little hillocks in the dust. It used to be a house, this mound of grey rubble.
‘Journalists? Come down here!’ shouts one man, and the crowd parts to let us down into the basement. It is tar black, claustrophobic and sinister, and I can taste the hot aroma of death. Men are sifting through charred body parts and bones, silent as they dig and pass their finds between them. But the crowd around the entrance is appalled.
‘We pulled out a boy no older than my son!’ shouts one man, pointing to a wide-eyed kid of about seven.
‘Where is Europe? Where is America? Where is the world?’ screams another, an old man, crazed and spittle-flecked with rage. ‘We know why they keep silent – they are scared Erdoğan will send more refugees to Europe.’
Others start throwing us snippets of the rumours flying around Cizre – of glimpsed sightings of paramilitary gangs pouring petrol over houses and torching them, of the numbers who have died in basements like these. One woman tells us there are sixty corpses down here. Another says there are twenty-seven, and that there are two more basements full of bodies on this street alone.
I flash back to a month earlier, when I managed to contact a group of people sheltering in a Cizre cellar. There was terror in the voice of the woman I spoke to over a fuggy mobile phone line. She told me of the shells raining down on the place and the four decomposing bodies lying down there with them – people who had died of their injuries.
‘All the buildings around us have collapsed, there are massacres occurring. We have no medical supplies left and there is nothing we can do for the injured,’ she said. They had been in there for four days. I was never able to reach her again.
‘This is a war crime, a fucking war crime,’ says Yusuf, a fellow journalist, dazed as he shoots photos of the horror. This is worse for him, a Turk faced with the brutality of his own. We leave Cizre before the sunset curfew comes down and drive back up the road to Mardin. Our glasses of Assyrian red wine leave a bitter taste this evening.
‘In Yüksekova we had been warned of the danger of Kurds and bears,’ wrote Robin Fedder, The Times’s ‘Traveller in Kurdistan’, in November 1965. Fedder was journeying to Turkey’s south-easternmost reaches, the mountainous province of Hakkari sandwiched between the Iranian and Iraqi frontiers. His trip was possible only with the authorisation of the district governor, and with the help of two local guides and six ponies who transferred Fedder and his voluminous luggage across the harsh landscape. The region had just been opened up to foreign travellers for the first time since 1925. A new road had been built through Hakkari, and it seemed like a fresh chapter was opening in this long-tortured place – the perfect moment for an intrepid correspondent.
Yet the Turks’ old wariness of the Kurds, those tribal people with the fearsome warrior reputations, had not abated. The governor had insisted that one of the guides carry a gun. Had he himself ventured from his comfy office in urban Yüksekova up into the wilds of Hakkari he may have discovered, as Fedder did, that the guns the Kurdish men carried were ‘merely status symbols’. Neither were the bears as scary as the legends had it: though Fedder spotted several, they all seemed to run away from him as quickly as possible.
It was only two years after the foundation of the Turkish republic, in 1925, that the Kurds revolted against the new order. They continue to do so today, the violence undulating according to popular sentiment and world events. The original Kurdish rebel was Sheikh Said, a tribal leader whose war was as much about winning superiority over the other Kurdish clans as about revolting against the Turkish state. Today, Abdullah Öcalan is the Kurdish cipher – a student of politics who graduated from the elite Ankara University into the stormy milieu of militant leftism. The PKK, the organisation he founded in 1978, blended Marxism-Leninism with Kurdish nationalism and quickly attracted scores of followers. At the same time, Öcalan took care to rub out his detractors and rivals, leaving the PKK as the jealous, sole vanguard of the Kurdish struggle. By the time he was arrested in Kenya in 1999, Öcalan was the PKK’s undisputed leader and Turkey’s public enemy number one. The PKK, which had quickly morphed from an intellectual movement into a violent one, was locked in a struggle with the state in south-eastern Turkey that had already left more than thirty thousand dead.
A fifth of Turkey’s eighty million population are ethnic Kurds, with their own mother tongue and culture. Their politics is often tribal and insular; whatever rivalries and rows they may have between themselves, the outsider’s criticism is met with furious resistance. I have discovered it myself on a number of occasions. Once I was branded a Turkish agent and a closet Islamic fundamentalist because I wrote articles documenting allegations of war crimes committed by a PKK-linked group in Syria. On another occasion, an erudite and friendly lawyer in Diyarbakır, Turkey’s biggest Kurdish city, exploded into sudden rage when I brought up the nepotistic tendencies of Masoud Barzani, then president of Iraq’s Kurdish region.
‘You need to read the history and then come back to me!’ the lawyer shouted. ‘In the past the Kurdish system was a federation of clans. That’s why people don’t understand the situation in the Kurdish region!’
Five minutes later he had cooled down and was apologising profusely.
‘We Kurds tend to have emotional reactions,’ he smiled.
When the Turkish republic was declared in 1923, scores of ethnic and religious minorities were captured within its huge new borders, more than 1,600 miles of frontier cutting across the Middle East, the Caucasus and Europe. As well as the Kurds, there were Armenians and other Christian minorities who had sat out the bloody purges of 1915. There were Alevis, followers of a schism of Shia Islam considered heretical by many hardcore Sunnis. There were others who spoke Arabic, Laz and Kurdish dialects like Zaza as their mother tongues. Greek, Balkan, Roman and Asian blood goes into the mix of this nation that boasts native blue-eyed blondes as well as dark eyes and olive skin. Turkey was – and still is – a genetic and cultural kedgeree.
Atatürk and the builders of his new republic tried to paper over the fractures with a narrative of Turkishness that mixed truth with hearty doses of mythology and pseudo-science. The landscape of the new nation, ruined by years of war, needed urgent rebuilding – but so too did the minds of its citizens. In order to bring his people together and make them loyal to the new system, Atatürk needed a narrative of a Turkish history that could downplay the importance of the Ottoman Empire – not easy, since it had been the Anatolian paradigm for the past six centuries – and root the Turks firmly in the soil they now stood on. So, as the towns and cities were reconstructed in a blaze of high modernism, archaeologists, historians and linguists began hunting for Turkey’s new past.
In 1930, on Atatürk’s orders, a committee was founded to create the comprehensive history of the Turks. Most of its members were bureaucrats, not historians. They won their places on the committee because they were favourites of Atatürk, and had proved their dedication to the nationalist cause. Within months, the committee published its Outline of Turkish History, a tome which was in some parts a transcription of Atatürk’s own streams of thought, and in others a mish-mash of translated foreign-language histories of the Turks – although only the cherry-picked bits. Overall, it was carefully constructed to tell a story of the Turks as a nomadic people of Aryan blood who had originated in central Asia and then migrated westwards in search of better climates for the growing of crops. They brought their genetics, culture and language with them. Islam was something that came later, and the Ottoman Empire an unfortunate glitch in the otherwise glorious march of Turkish progress. According to the Outline, not only was Turkish culture the greatest in the world, it was also the fountain from which all other cultures sprang. The Outline became the main history textbook for all schoolchildren aged between fifteen and eighteen.
Atatürk was also determined to reform the language to make it a tongue of pure Turkish, by purging it of its (many) foreign words. Turkish had previously been considered the rough street vernacular of the peasant, inferior to the poetic and often incomprehensible High Ottoman spoken by the elite. But Atatürk was dogged in his drive to ‘bring out the genuine beauty of the Turkish language and to elevate it to the high rank it deserves among the world languages’. First, in 1928, he switched the alphabet from Arabic to Latin. Then he held drinking-table meetings to come up with new words to fill the numerous gaps in the now-stripped-back Turkish language, reportedly keeping a blackboard in his dining room so he could scribble down any ‘Eureka’ moments his guests might have over the entrées. Finally, in 1932, he launched the Turkish Language Society, tasked with sieving away the impurities and moulding what was left into the ideal language.
In a series of biannual summits attended by the world’s most eminent linguists, the society hammered out a theory of Turkish language based on an obscure academic paper by Dr Hermann Kvergic, which Atatürk had stumbled across and then seized on. The Austrian Kvergic held that the origin of all languages was the primitive noises made by prehistoric man in response to patterns of nature, such as the sunrise. The bit that gripped Atatürk was Kvergic’s note that these sounds formed the bedrock of the Turkish language – therefore handing it, in Atatürk’s mind at least, grounds to claim itself as the wellspring. He melded this idea with the notions outlined in the Outline to claim that the Turks were a people who had travelled west, following the sun to their final home in Anatolia; this was named the ‘Sun Language Theory’. And in conveniently circular fashion, the central claim that Turkish had evolved from the original language of prehistoric man meant that architects of the new Turkish could suck in foreign words when needed, since all foreign languages were ultimately descendants of the Sun Language anyway.
Archaeology followed history and linguistics. The Ottomans had opened their first archaeological collection in 1846 during an era of Western-inspired reforms, focusing heavily on the Hellenistic era of the ancient Greeks as proof of the empire’s European links. The first projects of the republican era, though, looked for Turkey’s deep past, something that could root the Turks firmly on the land inside their new borders. Focus shifted from the Hellenes to the Hittites, the Bronze Age people who populated much of what is now modern-day Turkey, Syria and Iraq around 1600 BC. That was well before the Seljuk Turks arrived in Anatolia from the east in the eleventh century; nevertheless, researchers were quick to spot evidence of Turkish influence. The Hittite language, which was slowly being decrypted, was claimed to be a precursor of modern Turkish. Scores of sun-shaped trinkets were found at one burial site, adding credence to the idea that the Hittites were the sun-worshipping forefathers of the Turks. Other renderings revealed swastika shapes woven into the designs – more apparent evidence of the Hittites’ Turkish roots, since the emblem had also been found on mosaics in central Asia. There were scores of digs on Hittite settlements around Ankara and through central Anatolia in the 1930s, and many of the Western archaeologists working on these sites were also keen to establish links between their finds and present-day Turkish culture. Eminent American archaeologist Erich Frederich Schmidt, of the Oriental Studies department of the University of Chicago, wrote in 1931:
The fundamental features of Anatolian houses have not changed very much since these early, long-forgotten people built their houses at the Alishar site [in central Anatolia]. The present Anatolian houses, with their brick walls on stone foundations and their flat-topped roofs composed of beams, layers of branches and mud, may still illustrate the buildings of their predecessors some five thousand years ago.
Such was the pull of the legend that the Hittite sun was used as the emblem of Ankara from 1974 until 1995, when it was redesigned as a silhouette of a mosque with its lower parts fashioned into a star and crescent. Today, you can find it on the seal of the Turkish parliament and presidency.
Atatürk’s obsession with finding a link between Turkish blood and Anatolian soil did not grow in a vacuum. The inter-war period was the age when empires were crumbling and nations encouraged to shape their own destinies. In his fourteen-point manifesto for world peace, drawn up in 1918 during the throes of the Great War’s great hangover, US President Woodrow Wilson stated that nations should have the right to determine their own path. But the populations of the nations he explicitly named in his plan were all indigenous to the land they lived on. The Turks, on the other hand, had been scattered across a huge sweep of the world until the implosion of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the war drew them back to Anatolia. At the same time, millions of non-Turks who had lived in Anatolia for centuries had been slaughtered and expelled. No wonder Atatürk felt he had something to prove.
European Christendom, relieved that the Ottoman Empire was finished, had a vested interest in encouraging the success of Atatürk’s Türkishness project. Sir Denison Ross, a distinguished linguist from London’s School of Oriental Studies (later SOAS), talked with Atatürk about his theory for two hours at a 1936 linguistics conference, and came away saying that the Turkish president had held his own against all his academic attempts to tear holes in his ideas.
Behind the scenes, though, the thinkers were quickly losing faith in the Sun Language Theory – as, according to some versions of the history, was Atatürk himself. The introduction of the theory at the 1936 conference had been met with incredulity from many of the attending academics, despite Ross’s generous recounting. Kvergic himself was surprised, when he visited Ankara, to learn of the ways his theory had been interpreted. By the time Atatürk died in 1938 the Sun Language Theory was almost completely discredited, and quietly died with him. But its legacy remains.
‘What is remarkable is that a large proportion of these new words [created by Atatürk and his linguistics cadre], instead of being regarded as an abstract academic exercise, have been absorbed into the language,’ recorded The Times’s correspondent in Ankara in 1961, twenty-three years after Atatürk’s death. ‘To such an extent has the language been changed that the speeches of Atatürk himself made in the 1920s are today almost incomprehensible to the modern generation.’
Today the science of genetics can offer fascinating insights into who the Turks actually are – and they are not the people depicted in the Outline. A 2011 study by two American geneticists found that the closest cousins of contemporary Turks are the Jordanians, and that they share more DNA with Britons than they do with central Asians. Another study by a Turkish researcher in 2006 found that central Asian genes make up only 22 per cent of twenty-first-century Turkish DNA.
Yet the idea of a Turkish bloodline, carried into the modern-day country from central Asia, has not died out: the most dogmatic of today’s Turkish nationalists still believe they are part of a pure race that originated in the steppes of the east. I once sat with two Turks from the Black Sea town of Trabzon, a well-known nationalist hotbed. One was tall, blond and blue-eyed, and had TÜRK in the runic letters of the early Turkic languages tattooed across the back of his neck. The other had just come back from Syria, where he had lost the ends of all the fingers on his left hand in a mortar blast. Such was his belief in the integrity and superiority of the Turkish bloodline that he had volunteered to fight alongside a Syrian rebel militia made up of ethnic Turkmen, a minority who often speak Turkish as their first language. He was short and swarthy, and showed me reams of photos of himself in the war zone, channelling Rambo. In one, he was wearing camouflage, shades and a bandana, flashing the wolf hand-sign adopted by Turkish nationalists with one hand and brandishing a huge knife in the other. I caught glimpses of other photos of him petting kittens as he scrolled through his macho collection.
Over two hours and many strong teas in a smoky café next to the Bosphorus, the two told me their theories about the common genetics of all Turkic people stretching from western China to Aleppo, and how all should be united in a single state. I wondered whether they had ever stood together in front of a mirror …
Neither cared much about the broader Syrian conflict; both were horrified, in the classic way of the bigoted nationalist, at the number of refugees who had fled the war into Turkey, some three million by that time.
‘Why are they all here and not fighting?’ said the tall one.
‘Fighting for whom?’ I asked.
He didn’t have an answer.
The war that the shorter man had gone to fight was one of Turkish honour, not Syrian revolution – although the Syrian Turkmen didn’t see it the same way. He had returned from Syria not only minus his fingertips but also with his faith severely dented. The Turkmen were too religious, he said, and not quite Turkish enough for his taste. They had a bad habit of scooping up food from communal dishes using flatbread in the Syrian fashion, and of lapsing into Arabic when they were talking between themselves. Still, he attributed that to their personal failure to stay faithful to their true Turkish roots rather than to the natural mixing and assimilation that the Turkmen had done over their ten centuries among Arabs.
But though the invaders from central Asia left little of their DNA in Anatolia, their impact on the culture – and language in particular – was colossal. Modern Turks share genetics with their neighbours to the west, but language with their neighbours to the east – an unusual phenomenon, since sets of genes and languages tend to stick together. Various forms of Turkic languages are found in Siberia, western China, the central Asian Stans and the Caucasus, while Azerbaijani is comprehensible (albeit comical) to Turks. Why the Turkic tongue caught on to such an extent in Anatolia even though the people who brought it did not spread their genetics is still not fully known. Maybe it is this lingering insecurity that has made language one of the most violent battlefields in modern Turkey.
Murat Akıncılar slaps a pile of books down on the table. They don’t look much like revolutionary literature. Their covers are a blaze of primary colours: depictions of donkeys, lions and bears. The text inside is big and bold and, although I can’t read Kurdish, it is clear that much of it is written in verse.
‘We have collected all the children’s stories, riddles, poems, songs and puzzles,’ says Akıncılar, a linguistic researcher in the Turkish Kurds’ de facto capital of Diyarbakır, as we flick through the glossy pages. ‘Some are in Kurmanji [another of the Kurdish dialects spoken in eastern Turkey], some are in Zaza. We have spoken to eight hundred and fifty-four grandparents in fourteen provinces, thirty-two districts, two towns and seventy-six villages.’
It is the first collection of folklore in a language that has often had to battle for its survival. Kurdish in its many forms is spoken across a stretch of the Middle East that spans Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, as well as parts of Armenia and Azerbaijan. It shares its roots with Persian, and has picked up influences from all the other languages it lives alongside. In Turkey, it is the mother tongue of between fifteen and twenty million people.
Yet for many years Kurds were discouraged or outright banned from speaking their language. The first constitution of the independent and internationally recognised Turkey, signed off in 1925, enshrined that all Turks are equal before the law. It guaranteed freedom for any religion, sect, ritual or philosophic conviction – but it also gave strong statements about who a Turk should be. ‘The religion of the Turkish State is Islam; the official language is Turkish,’ it reads. Soon after, we discover that while all citizens over the age of thirty can stand for election to parliament, those who cannot read or write Turkish are ineligible. The oath the president takes has him swearing ‘to contend with all my strength against every danger which may menace the Turkish nation, to cherish and defend the glory and honour of Turkey’.
The sky-high illiteracy rates at the birth of the republic – estimated by UNESCO to be almost 90 per cent in 1927 – offered an opportunity for the nation builders. Over the coming decades, the Turkish state set up various compulsory literacy classes that taught the republic’s citizens not only how to read and write, but also how to be good Turks. There were also campaigns run by university students against non-Turkish speakers (primarily non-Muslim minorities), and exhortations from Atatürk himself.
‘A person who says that he belongs to the Turkish nation, should, primarily and absolutely, speak Turkish,’ he said in one speech. ‘If a man who does not speak Turkish claims his loyalty to the Turkish culture and community, it will not be correct to believe him.’
The Kurds, as the new republic’s largest linguistic minority, found themselves on the front line. That they were largely Sunni Muslims also meant they couldn’t swerve the Turkification project in the way that non-Muslim minorities could. Meanwhile, the Sun Language Theory proffered its own explanation for Kurdish, claiming that the Kurds were a Turkish tribe who had forgotten their native language because of their geographical isolation in the mountains and close proximity to Persian lands. When the Sun Language Theory was abandoned, its Kurdish aspects were replaced with even more preposterous ideas. In 1948, teacher Mehmet şerif Fırat published The Eastern Provinces and the History of Varto, a cod history that repeated the claims that the Kurds were of Turkish origin. Thirteen years later, it received the seal of approval from the Ministry of Education, who republished it with a ‘fake news’ foreword stating that it was ‘backed up with scientific evidence that cannot be refuted’.
Also in the 1940s, Fahrettin Kirzioğlu published The Historical Turkish-ness of Kurds, which claimed that the tribes of the east were simply ‘mountain Turks’. It was a thesis that wafted in the winds of ultra-nationalism until 1980, when the army launched the third coup of the modern republic. In 1982, on the orders of the generals, it was adopted as state policy with a law that banned any language apart from Turkish. For the next nine years, Kurds could be arrested for even speaking their mother tongue or giving their child a name that included the letters X, W or Q (which exist in the Kurdish alphabet, but not in Turkish).
Over decades the Kurdish language went into retreat, particularly in the cities and among more educated circles. Part of this was down to the natural way that minority languages slip into the background as they become less useful for trade and as populations migrate and mingle. But as time went on, the crackdown also became more concerted. Little attention had been paid to clamping down on Kurdish in the first years of the republic. But by the post-coup 1980s, nationalist politicians and journalists worked up such a fury about Kurdish being included as a ‘mother tongue’ on the Turkish census that it was removed altogether.
It was in this atmosphere that Abdullah Öcalan, a leftist firebrand with only a perfunctory grasp of Kurdish himself, gathered a group of his comrades in a village hall close to the south-eastern town of Lice. It was 1978, Öcalan was twenty-nine years old, and his life had already taken some radical twists. Born on the very edge of Turkey’s Kurdish lands, he had initially planned to become a professional soldier. When his application to staff college was rejected, he instead became a minor bureaucrat and from there applied to university. He was offered a place at Ankara to study political science – but had already begun to delve into the world of militant leftist politics. In Istanbul, where he had worked as a clerk, he joined the Revolutionary Eastern Cultural Hearths, a Kurdish-slanted offshoot of a larger Marxist organisation. In 1972 he was jailed for seven months for handing out fliers for banned groups, and on his release became even more deeply entwined with his extra-curricular activities. His spell behind bars added an outlaw mystique to his natural charisma, and he began to build a personal following. After holding several small meetings in Ankara, he and his band of disciples decided to take their revolution to the south-east.
Öcalan soon proved to be a ruthless leader, as happy to slaughter his comrades as he was his rivals. Of the twenty-two people invited to the PKK’s inaugural Lice meeting, seven were later killed on Öcalan’s orders; a further five fled from the group after being accused of treachery, including Öcalan’s own wife. The group made such swift work of launching their campaign of extortion and murder across the south-east that within a year Öcalan was being discussed in the parliament back in Ankara. In 1979 he fled into the open arms of Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, a ruler who depended on the patronage of Soviet Russia and was quick to spot an opportunity to rile NATO member Turkey. From his comfortable new base in the Syrian capital Damascus, Öcalan exhorted tens of thousands of young Kurds back in Turkey to take up arms and die for his cause.
Over the next three decades an estimated forty thousand people, both Kurds and Turks, perished in the war between PKK and the state. The south-east, always the poorest part of Turkey, remained trapped in poverty, and tens of thousands of Kurds migrated to the cities of the west, where many became estranged from their culture – ironic, since Öcalan’s professed aim was to revive and champion Kurdish traditions. Scores of villages were destroyed in army operations, and the rural population poured into the cities. As hard as the PKK pushed, the Turkish state pushed back harder. It seemed as though south-eastern Turkey had sunk into a cycle of endless violence.
I took my first trip to south-eastern Turkey in 2013. It was on a whim: I needed a break from Syria and was curious to see Turkey’s Kurdish region. But as I was making my travel plans I realised that Newroz, the spring equinox celebrated by Kurds with huge pyres in the spirit of Bonfire Night (but with fewer safety precautions), was falling on the weekend I would be in Diyarbakır. Even better, the revelries would be the backdrop to the announcement of a new PKK ceasefire – the fruit of Erdoğan’s years of hard bargaining with the group.
The parade ground on the edge of Diyarbakır is ringed by the kind of drab high-rises that make up much of the city’s outer suburbs. They are not old and decrepit in the way that London’s tower blocks are; instead, they are new and decrepit. Most were built in the last thirty years – it is shocking to see photos of Diyarbakır in the seventies, when its old core was all that existed, an intricate warren of alleyways surrounded by towering 3,000-year-old black basalt walls. Cheap paint peels from concrete in the onion rings of new suburbs surrounding the old city. Inhabitants still string up red peppers to dry in the sun on their tower block balconies, as they would in the gardens back in their villages.
Yet the crowd that poured into the parade ground on that hot Sunday afternoon was one of the most colourful I have ever seen. Almost everyone was decked out in red, green and yellow, the colours of the Kurdish flag, like tropical birds set loose in a concrete jungle. The women’s dresses and headscarves were embellished with hundreds of sequins dazzling in the sunshine. High-pitched ululations, the tongue-wagging cry you usually hear at weddings, pierced the warm air. Young men linked hands to do the Kurds’ traditional shoulder-shrugging, side-stepping dance. There were seas of flags emblazoned with the Kurdish sun – and, everywhere, images of Abdullah Öcalan.
Today, four decades after his murderous entrance into Kurdish politics and almost two decades since he was last seen in person, Öcalan has been deified almost to the extent of Atatürk. You can find his broad mustachioed face gazing down from banners across the Kurdish-inhabited regions of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran alike. Unlike Atatürk, though, he only strikes two poses – one smiling, one not. In both, the eyes are dark and unreadable. Whenever I see a picture of Öcalan, I think of Big Brother. Invisible but omnipotent, Öcalan’s physical absence only adds to his power.
Öcalan was arrested in 1999 after his long-term relationship with Hafez al-Assad broke down. For years Öcalan had trained his fighters in Palestinian camps, with logistical help from Assad. He also used Syria’s Kurdish areas, abutting the Turkish border, as a place for his own fighters to regroup. It was inevitable that Turkey would eventually grow impatient with Assad’s patronising of Öcalan and the PKK. In October 1998, Turkey moved its tanks to the border and threatened war with Syria should it refuse to give him up.
Assad immediately booted Öcalan out. For three months the PKK leader did a merry-go-round of countries he hoped might give him shelter but all of them, from Belarus to Italy, told him he wasn’t welcome. Finally he hopped into Greece – another neighbour with a grudge against Turkey – and caught the ear of an official sympathetic to his cause. The Greek intelligence services hatched a plan to transfer Öcalan to South Africa, where he could claim asylum and remain out of Turkey’s reach.
First, they took him to the Greek embassy in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, where they began preparing the next step of his escape. But there the plan went awry. The Kenyan authorities cottoned on to what was happening, and began questioning the Greek intelligence officers accompanying Öcalan. The Greeks, startled, ordered Öcalan to leave the embassy. He refused. After a brief diplomatic dust-up, the Kenyans offered Öcalan a plane to the country of his choosing. He was chauffeured to the airport in a Kenyan diplomatic car and led into a private jet – where he was handcuffed, blindfolded and gagged by Turkish agents who had been tipped off by the Kenyans. The US embassy in Nairobi had been bombed by Al-Qaeda just six months earlier. Kenya had no soft spot for foreign terrorists on the run.
Öcalan was taken back to Turkey and put on trial for treason on İmralı, an island fifty miles from the coast of Istanbul. In court he looked like a high school maths teacher behind bulletproof glass – greying and receding, with nerdish specs and an ill-fitting suit. Relatives of Turks who had died at the PKK’s hands packed into the courtroom draped in Turkish flags and screamed abuse at him. Öcalan looked hangdog and withered – a different man to the warlord who had gloated at Ankara for twenty years.
In court, Turkey was expecting a tyrant’s tirade. Instead, it got a rambling game of freedom bingo. Öcalan mentioned peace 78 times in his forty-page defence statement; democracy 144; democratic 269. He offered glowing praise of Britain, which he said had the ‘best applied constitution in the world’, though Britain doesn’t actually have a constitution. He explained his own version of the history of Anatolia and Mesopotamia, in which the Turks from central Asia arrived in a region already heavily populated by Kurds. The Kurds, being more settled than the nomadic Turks, absorbed the newcomers, so that although the upper echelons of politics were controlled by Turks, society was Kurdish through and through. From the tenth century to the nineteenth, Turks and Kurds lived in harmony and brotherhood, only turning against one another as the Ottoman Empire began to decay.
Öcalan – cleverly – did not blame Atatürk for the misdeeds done in his name. The first president had imposed national unity because it was necessary to counter the divide-and-rule tactics of Turkey’s enemies, Öcalan said, while Sheikh Said and the other leaders of the 1925 revolt were ‘narrow-minded separatists’. Öcalan traced the republic’s original sin against the Kurds back to İsmet İnönü – Atatürk’s comrade, successor and fall guy. He claimed that İnönü, through his intellectual inferiority and weakness, had set the republic on the path to tyranny.
Öcalan’s biggest shocker came on day one: he apologised, and offered to make peace. If found guilty he would face the noose, but said he could order his gunmen to lay down their weapons if his life were spared. He finally admitted to the charges that he had received training and weapons from Greece. The PKK continued its attacks as the trial went on and some of its supporters branded Öcalan a traitor. ‘We feel betrayed, crushed. Öcalan no longer speaks for the Kurdish people. He has no role left for solving the Kurdish issue,’ one told the Economist.
Regardless of his offer, Öcalan was found guilty of treason, separatism and murder and sentenced to death in June 1999. Twelve days into the new millennium, however, the Turkish government – a coalition led by secularist Bülent Ecevit – decided to give him a stay of execution. Öcalan, his ego revived, was grandiloquent in his response: ‘If they execute me, the EU candidacy, the economy and peace will all go down,’ he said. ‘I am a synthesis of values, not just a person. I represent democracy.’
Ecevit was quick to outline the provisos: ‘We have agreed that if the terrorist organisation and its supporters attempt to use this decision against the high interests of Turkey, the suspension will end and the execution process will immediately begin.’
The PKK, recognising the real threat to Öcalan’s life, gave orders for its fighters to withdraw from Turkish territory. In a written statement its central committee said it was ready to negotiate with Ankara. It dropped the word ‘Kurdistan’ from names of its various political and armed wings, and said it would no longer be seeking Kurdish independence through armed struggle but would promote Kurdish rights through democratic forums. Not everyone was convinced: the Turkish press was cynical; the nationalists were still screaming for Öcalan’s execution and, inevitably, there was a split in the PKK. In the south-east, the conflict rumbled on.
When Erdoğan’s AKP shot to power in 2002, one of its first goals was to take Turkey into the European Union – and for that to happen, things had to change in the south-east. But Erdoğan’s enthusiasm to bring peace and new freedoms to the Kurds was not just lip service paid to give Turkey a leg-up into the EU: he and his party were genuinely different.
In August 2005, twenty-seven months into his prime ministership, Erdoğan went to Diyarbakır for the first time. He delivered his speech to a puny crowd, yet it was widely covered in the media and sparked cautious hope for millions. He pledged more democracy for the Kurds, more freedom to speak their language and practise their culture, and acknowledged that past Turkish governments had made severe errors. ‘Denying mistakes that have been made in the past is not what strong states should do,’ Erdoğan said. ‘The Kurdish problem does not belong to a certain part of this society alone, but to all of it. It is also my problem.’
The old nationalist and secularist order were aghast. The opposition howled, with the loudest protests coming from Deniz Baykal, then head of Atatürk’s CHP.
‘Of all the leaders up to today, Erdoğan is the bravest,’ Necdet İpekyüz, a Kurdish analyst with a political think tank in Diyarbakır, told me in September 2017. ‘He said the same thing here as he did in Rize. All the others – Baykal, Çiller [former prime minister from a nationalist faction], Erbakan [former prime minister and leader of Refah, Erdoğan’s original party] – they said one thing here and then something different in western Turkey.’
Erdoğan said the same thing everywhere – and acted on it. Seven months before his visit to Diyarbakır, the state had broken its silence on its treatment of Kurds for the first time. Lawyers brought a case against the Turkish security forces for the killing of a truck driver, Ahmet Kaymaz, and his twelve-year-old son, Uğur, in the south-eastern town of Kızıltepe in November 2004. The last time Uğur’s mother saw Uğur alive, he was being pinned to the ground by Turkish policemen. He was later found with nine wounds to the back of his neck from bullets shot at point-blank range. The army said he had been killed during a firefight. The family’s legal team disagreed. ‘There is serious evidence suggesting that the murder of Ahmet Kaymaz and Uğur Kaymaz is an extrajudicial killing,’ said Tahir Elçi, one of the lawyers.
These incidents were numerous and notorious. Everyone in Turkey’s south-eastern regions was familiar with the sight of white pick-up trucks prowling the villages. Anyone pulled into one of those pick-ups disappeared into a black hole. In the same month as Kaymaz and his son died, a mass grave was discovered close to Diyarbakır. Eleven people who had been marched out of their village by soldiers in 1993, never to be seen again, were found shunted into this hole, their skeletons recognisable to their families because they were still dressed in the clothes they had been wearing the day they disappeared.
To report such things in Turkey had long been impossible. Much of the south-east region was off-limits for journalists. Those who did go there would struggle to find an editor willing to publish their stories. And the newspapers that did run the stories would almost certainly be closed down.
But now the leftist news title BirGün shattered the secrecy, publishing articles on the Kaymaz killings and the bodies found in the mass grave in early 2005. Erdoğan’s government responded not by shutting down the newspaper, but by firing the deputy police chief of the province where the father and son had been killed and opening an investigation. In the same year, Turkish state television opened its first Kurdish-language television channel with the slogan: We are under the same sky.
Over the next thirteen years, the Turkish government, the intelligence services, Öcalan and PKK commanders began negotiating. The violence still ebbed and flowed in the south-east, the talks often staggered and suspicion lived on in both camps. Details of secret discussions between the Turkish government and the PKK in the Norwegian capital Oslo between 2008 and 2011 were leaked, most suspect by Gülenists working within the system and desperate to derail the peace process. The news caused uproar among Turkish nationalists, and Ankara temporarily called off the negotiations.
Meanwhile, prison turned out to be the best image boost Öcalan could have wished for. Frozen in time at the moment of his conviction and never seen again after he was led down to the cells in İmralı, where he has remained in solitary confinement, he managed to shapeshift from a squirming warlord trying to save his own skin into a kind of philosophical deity. Apart from the rebels who split from the mainstream PKK, the vast majority of his followers stuck with him. That his ensuing statements over the next decade came from a prison cell, to be read out by someone else, gave them a weight and clout that his long-winded and rambling defence statement did not. He was no longer a person of the real world, prone to gaffes, mistakes and rivals. He could insulate himself from whatever atrocities his terror group might carry out from then on. And he could claim to have joined the ranks of Mandela and Gandhi as a political prisoner of conscience.
It was this Öcalan 2.0 whose spirit, if not person, was there on the Diyarbakır parade ground in March 2013. A buzz whipped around the crowd as a speaker came on stage to read Öcalan’s message, each sentence met with cheers:
Today we are waking up to a new Turkey, Middle East and future … We have come to a point where we say let the arms silence, and opinions and politics speak … I, myself, am declaring in the witnessing of millions of people that a new era is beginning, arms are silencing, politics are gaining momentum. It is time for our armed entities to withdraw from the Turkish border.
At the end, the huge Newroz bonfire was set alight, and the throngs began their whooping and dancing again. The aroma of a million knock-off cigarettes hung in the air, accompanying the woodsmoke. From the stage, where I had blagged my way into the press pen, the crowd looked like a field of whirling colours under a sky of azure blue. Back out in the midst of it I felt a mixture of two feelings I had never before put together: euphoria and pure terror. The ecstasy was clear on people’s faces, but the mass was surging uncontrollably. Young men were pushing at the metal barriers around the stage, making them buckle almost to the ground. There were tiny children stuffed between the revellers – at one point I looked down to see the sweet face of a small girl smiling up at me from my feet, despite my nose being just an inch from the man in front. I was sure that, at any moment, something would set off a stampede. The organisers said a million people had come to hear the announcement. Everyone who was there – hundreds of thousands at least – seemed to be pushing to get to the front.
I fought my way out to where the pack was a little thinner and found a group of dancing young men. Given the elation that surrounded us and the grins that plastered their faces, I thought they would have been enthused about what had just happened. But amid the ululations and reedy music blasting at distorted levels from the boom boxes, they proffered a lukewarm response.
‘He didn’t say much, he was just trying to appease,’ one said, pausing from his dance to light a cigarette.
His friend wiped drops of sweat from his hairline and chimed in. ‘All he said is that the fighters should leave, nothing else. We have hope but we don’t trust the Turkish government.’ Then he smiled even broader, and broke into crystal-clear English. ‘Welcome to Kurdistan!’
The ceasefire would last little more than two years.