On one of my first evenings in Istanbul last October I was a little disoriented and overwhelmed by my linguistic handicap in an energetic new city. In my hotel room, I gave up on cable television after I heard Jack Nicholson spouting fluent Turkish. Everything was dubbed; everything translated. My linguistic experience of South Asia, where colonization had turned the English language into a lingua franca, was of little use here. Turkish Twitter was in Turkish. I lay in my semi-dark, cramped room staring at the screen of my phone. Photographs of soap opera stars and politicians were trending.
A slightly dark photograph began appearing repeatedly. The photograph was shot on a cellphone camera after sunset in Sır
ak, a rebellious Kurdish town around a thousand miles from Istanbul, on Turkey’s border with Syria. In the photograph, a black armored Turkish police car is driving through a dimly lit street. Half the letters of a Turkish bank are visible from a billboard; a white car is parked in front of the bank; two blurry stores seem open for business. On the empty, cobbled street, the armored car is dragging the corpse of a man. The dead man is wearing dark colored trousers and a red shirt. His feet are bound together, his arms tied to his sides. A thick rope around his neck disappears into the back door of the police car. I found some tweets in English. The Kurds talked about the brutality of the Turkish forces; the Turks described the dead man as a PKK terrorist. The corpse of Sırnak çonveyed the brutality of a Joseph Conrad story from a colonial outpost.
A few months later, I met M, a young Kurdish researcher in Istanbul who worked part-time as a translator for journalists. I asked him about the photograph. “Haci!” M shouted, overcome by agitation, his face hardened by the memory. “You saw what they did to them!” The dead man in the photograph was Haci Lokman Birlik, a 29-year-old actor, filmmaker, and activist from Sırnak. “I know his brother,” M told me. “I will try to reach him.”
A few days after the photograph appeared, a video of Birlik’s body was released on the Internet. Propagandists for the government had tried to dismiss the photograph as a fake, but the video suggested otherwise: An invisible policeman filmed it from the rear of the armored car driving on a desolate street. Birlik’s body bobbed behind the armored car. His feet drew straight lines in the dust. Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu ordered an investigation into the images, but not into the circumstances of Birlik’s death or the desecration of his body. Davutoğlu insisted Birlik was a PKK terrorist who was killed while “attacking the police with a rocket launcher.” Turkish security officials explained in Turkish papers that Birlik’s body was dragged through the streets because the policemen feared he might have been wearing a suicide vest.
On a November afternoon, I flew with M to Diyarbakır, the de facto capital of the southeastern Kurdish region. Diyarbakır spread over miles on a flat-topped plateau. Dark brown squares of sunbaked, harvested fields and distant rows of apartment blocks grew as the plane landed. The airport was a modernist cage of steel and glass built during the Erdoğan years. Thousands of apartment blocks in pastel colors rose along the smooth highway to the city. “The apartments came up in the last fifteen years,” M said.
I checked into a hotel in Sur, the historic heart of Diyarbakır built upon a plateau overlooking the River Tigris. Grim, black walls of basalt built by the Byzantines circled the old city and reflected the mood. Dark green armored cars of the Turkish special police were parked by the black fortifications. In the afternoon, M and I followed a cobbled street leading to a bustling market by the medieval Great Mosque of Diyarbakır. Armed policemen in bulletproof vests stood on street corners. Old Kurdish men drank tea and talked in the courtyard of the black stone mosque.
We stepped into a street filled with kebab houses, tea shops, and spice merchants. The alley was quiet, a little edgy. It turned abruptly onto a desolate cobbled street lined with modest stone and brick houses. A boy ran past us; a woman in a hijab disappeared into a house. It was eerily quiet. Graffiti on the walls celebrated Kurdish victories in Kobanî and Rojava.
A white tarpaulin curtained off the street. A pile of sandbags blocked the rest. A small trench had been dug in front of the tarpaulin. “The barricades!” M said. I felt the fear in his voice. He instinctively turned back, as if to check any police movement. “An operation can happen there anytime.” Under the banner of the PKK’s youth wing, the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement, known as the YDG-H, teenagers took over numerous neighborhoods in Kurdish towns and cities in southeastern Turkey and ran them as “liberated zones.” To keep the Turkish forces at bay, the YDG-H had dug trenches in alleys and put up barricades and bunkers to maintain control. They planted landmines and bombs and attacked Turkish troops who dared wander into these areas. In Turkish eyes, it was an echo of Rojava, the autonomous Kurdish region in Syria, an unacceptable challenge to Turkish sovereignty. Erdoğan’s retaliation was merciless. Turkish troops closed off Kurdish towns and neighborhoods and shelled them to smithereens; curfew was the Turkish euphemism for obiliteration.
But for all the violence, it was the killing of Helin Şen, a 12-year-old girl, that had stunned Diyarbakır a month earlier. “She was my first child, my clever girl,” her mother, Nazmive Şen, told me. She had a younger boy and a girl. Her husband drove a taxi. Şen, a housewife in her mid-thirties who grew up in Sur, found her neighborhood on the edge after the June 2015 elections. Nazmive delayed her grocery shopping for an hour or two every time she heard a gunshot. “The curfews began after Erdoğan lost,” she said, adjusting her floral headscarf. “He was punishing us for his loss.” The third round of curfew in early October, a few weeks before the November 2015 elections, was four days long. She filled a small pool in their garden in anticipation of water shortage. On the first day of the curfew, her sick husband was hospitalized. She stayed in Sur with their three children. The fighting was so intense that she couldn’t even walk half a block to a neighbor’s house to get bread.
On the fifth day, Sur was calm. Nazmive bought fruit, vegetables, tomatoes, and oranges from a greengrocer. She returned home with her purchase. Jannat, her younger daughter, was sleeping; Kadir, her son, was sitting around. Someone mentioned the bakery had opened. “I had no bread,” Nazmive recalled. Helin, her oldest, was in seventh grade. After the growing tensions, Nazimve had moved Helin to a school outside Sur. She had walked her to the new school for one day. The second day, the curfew began and the school was closed, so she brought Helin with her.
On the street, Helin was walking on her right; some female relatives were walking on the left. There were no men on the street. “Police suddenly opened fire,” she recalled. “I didn’t know what to do. I stood in the middle of the street in shock.” A neighbor pulled Nazmive into her house. Nazmive woke up to Helin’s absence and lunged toward the street. “I saw her lying in the street, in blood.” Police were still shooting; her neighbors pulled Nazmive back. “I couldn’t pick up my daughter’s body.” Her neighbors called for an ambulance, but nobody responded. “Helin was lying on the street for two hours,” Nazmive told me. She didn’t see Helin’s body, her face before the burial. She couldn’t bear it. “Those policemen had blood in their eyes,” she told me. “I remember their eyes.”
After Helin’s death Nazmive and her family moved out of Sur to another neighborhood in Diyarbakır. Her husband Ekram had sold his taxi and was struggling with depression. They lived in a modest two-bedroom apartment in the Baglar area, which had grown after the war in the 1990s had displaced more than two million Kurdish villagers. A few days after the burial, the police summoned Nazmive to testify about Helin’s death. The police wanted her to sign papers saying YDG-H militants had killed her daughter. “They offered us money, told Ekram they would get him a job.” Nazmive and Ekram refused.
Although the Kurdish nationalist movement is dominated by Marxist ideas, a large number of Kurds are practicing Muslims. Nazmive sought consolation in religion. “Alhamdulillah, we are Muslim! We might not get justice in this world but in the next world, Helin’s killer will have to account for it.” Her eyelids had swollen from crying. She paused for a while. A bemused expression appeared on her face. “You came from Istanbul?” she asked me. I nodded. She looked at me searchingly. “Will you write? Will you write all of this?”
On a bright, quiet morning I left for Silvan, a town 50 miles northeast of Diyarbakır. The road followed the steep descents and elevations of plateaus rising and falling like waves between the two places. Immense expanses of rich, brown fields spread to reach the bright, azure horizon. Mulberry groves and tiny hamlets of pink and white houses appeared every few miles, as if a painter of stark landscapes had an afterthought to soften the texture of his canvas. The road was empty except for an occasional tractor or military truck. A range of low, barren hills rose in the distance. It was the land I had first imagined in the work of Yasar Kemal. “The rich earth yields a crop three times a year. Each plant is huge. It is twice, three times, five times larger than in other soils. Even the colors of the flowers, of the brilliant green grasses, of the trees are different,” Kemal wrote in his 1969 novel, They Burn the Thistles.
Silvan, a town of 90,000 people, announced itself with a row of yellow and white apartment blocks. A supermarket, a bank, and a pharmacy gave the town square a domesticated, everyday vibe. I noticed an outlet for Aygaz, the Turkish cooking gas provider, whose trucks announced their arrival with a nursery rhyme-style jingle. Pine trees grew outside the multi-floor Silvan municipal building, which dominated the scene. The HDP ran the municipality, which gave the Kurds some say in their daily lives, although the administrative heads of the provinces were not elected officials but governors appointed by Ankara. Those administrators controlled most of the finances and the security apparatus. Turkey had remained a state with a strong center.
After the collapse of the peace process, as the battles between Kurdish rebels and the Turkish military engulfed the towns and cities in southeastern Turkey, Kurdish mayors in scores of towns read out a declaration of autonomy—a symbolic rejection of Turkish authority, a sign of protest, and an implicit demand for greater federalism. Erdoğan saw the autonomy declarations as a sign of Kurdish separatism and responded by arresting several of the mayors. Most of the Kurdish-controlled municipalities had two co-mayors—a man and a woman—owing to the tradition of gender equality in the Kurdish national movement. Yuksel Bodakci and Melisah Teke, the mayors of Silvan, were arrested, and Turkish prosecutors were seeking life imprisonment for them.
The mayor’s office was a large, bare room. A photograph of Bodakci hung on a wall. A sheaf of papers and a book were lying on the mayor’s table as if the incumbent had just stepped out for coffee. A black swivel chair behind the large wooden table was empty. Kerem Canpolat, the acting mayor, a balding young man in a blue suit, sat with a few colleagues on low chairs in front of the mayoral table. “The mayor’s chair belongs to Yuksel Bodakci,” Canpolat told me. “I can’t sit there while she is in prison.” His words took me back to the ancient Sanskrit epic Ramayana and its protagonist, Rama, the prince of Ayodhya, who is exiled from his home for 14 years after machinations by his stepmother, who wants the royal throne for her son, Bharata. On being offered the throne, Bharata shocks his mother by placing the wooden sandals of Rama on the throne until he returns from his exile.
A short walk from the municipal building, a neighborhood of several hundred spacious but simply built homes presented a concrete picture of the nature of war. The streets were thick with wreckage of walls, roofs, windows, and doors shredded and blown apart by mortars and tanks. Cranes and bulldozers pulled at the debris. Workers gingerly picked up pieces of electric cables from mud; others stared wistfully at the burned, mangled electrical poles. The afternoon sun created tunnels of light through the holes bored into brick walls by thousands of bullets.
A young couple stood impassively on the porch of their house. Mortar shells had shredded the front wall; a subsequent fire had covered it in thick layers of soot. Mangled iron bars stood in burned windows. The living room was charred like a coal pit. They smiled helplessly. Another house, where Zozan Donmez lived with her husband and four children, had a wide hole blown into a wall on the first floor. She had moved with her family to her sister’s house when the military began the siege of Silvan. Kurdish fighters had taken refuge in her house while they were away; she had returned a week later to a ruin. “Some trees were being cut at Gezi Park in Istanbul and thousands of people came out on streets,” Donmez said. “In Turkey, when a tree is attacked, people come out. But our lives here have no value. They destroyed our trees, our homes, our everything.”
Every element of domesticity had been broken, burnt, violated, and the loss of everything she had collected and built over the decades welled up old, suppressed memories. Donmez, who is a pious Muslim, turned stiff and spoke about something she hadn’t spoken about for decades. “My grandfather was an Armenian. He was converted to Islam in 1915,” she said. “He was a little boy, his parents were killed, and somebody adopted and raised him as a Muslim.” Turkey brimmed with such secret histories. The Armenian boy grew up as a Kurdish Muslim man and his son—Donmez’s father—inherited the political legacies and traumas of the Kurds—another ethnic group battered by Atatürk’s republic. “A long time ago, my father was in his village. His house was also burnt down by the army after they said he and the villagers supported the PKK,” Donmez said. “This is the third time they have attacked our home.” She spread her hands plaintively, as if in prayer. “I don’t think my children will accept the same oppression.” Donmez slowly turned away and began picking up shards of broken glass.
The military assault on Silvan had been remorseless, echoing the famous phrase of Tacitus, “They make a desert and call it peace.”
Diyarbakır is a city between war and peace, between the casbah and the suburb. I was on my way back to the hotel after spending a morning in a shopping mall full of branded outlet such as Colins, Yves Rocher, and Starbucks in a newly affluent part of city when M called and told me that Haci Lokman Birlik’s brother was here.
Mehmet Birlik, a tall, imposing man, sat toward the back in a popular restaurant. His faded denim shirt, camera bag, and careless gray hair lent him the air of a wildlife photographer from the movies. “Haci!” Birlik rubbed his face with his hands and took a deep breath. “The war began too early for him.”
Haci was the youngest of six siblings, born in 1986 in Şırnak. Their father worked for the local public health department. When Haci was six years old, the Turkish military massacred 50 people in the town. “They rained such intense destruction on the town of Şırnak in August 1992 that all but two or three thousand of the town’s 35,000 inhabitants reportedly piled their belongings onto wagons and trucks and abandoned the town,” a report by Human Rights Watch read.
The Birliks moved to Mersin, a port city on the Mediterranean coast of southern Turkey, about 500 miles from Şırnak. They lived in a rented house near the Mersin shore, which attracted large gatherings of townsfolk. A displaced family from Hakkari, a town near Iranian and Syrian border, lived in a shop next door. A scuffle occurred on the crowded boulevard nearby; police opened fire. Haci was playing outside; a girl from the Hakkari family took him inside their home. They were trembling. “She later told us that Haci began consoling them and telling them that what happened in Şırnak was much worse,” Birlik recalled.
In 1995, after three years in Mersin, they returned home to Sırnak. Birlik stopped studying after high school and ran a café. Turkey has compulsory military service, which begins at twenty for men who have not graduated from college. The Kurds resent the service, and Haci enrolled in an undergraduate program to delay it. In the following years, Haci got involved in ecological and trade union activism and emerged as a popular organizer for the Kurdish cause. In 2009, during municipal elections, Haci helped organize a rally of about 10,000 people in Şırnak for the main pro-Kurdish party, which led him to a seat on the Şırnak city council. Unfortunately, soon after that thousands of Kurdish activists and politicians were arrested and accused of being members of an umbrella organization with links to the PKK. The number of people arrested was much greater than the prisons could accommodate, so they stuffed 20 inmates into cells that normally housed 6. Haci and his brother were both arrested; they shared a prison bed, taking turns sleeping.
In the summer of 2013, as the Öcalan-Erdoğan peace process strengthened hopes of a solution to the Kurdish dispute, Haci was released after three years in prison. “I came out six months later,” Birlik recalled. “Haci went back to working with the trade unions.” A year later, ISIS attacked the Yazidis, a minority group with Kurdish ties, in the Sinjar region in northeast Iraq, close to Kobanî and Turkey’s Syria border. Yazidi men were massacred and their women were turned into sex slaves. Kurdish fighters from the Rojava canton in Syria battled ISIS and opened a safe passage for the Yazidis; tens of thousands of Yazidis crossed the border and found refuge in the Kurdish cities and towns in southeastern Turkey. As desperate Yazidis arrived in Şırnak, Kurdish activists, including Haci, reached out and helped them set up a camp.
The end of the peace process in the summer of 2015 turned Haci and many other young Kurds into armed rebels, as they began setting up barricades in the neighborhood of Dicle to defend the community from the Turkish military. On the evening of October 3, Birlik was home waiting for his wife Leila, a member of the Turkish Parliament who had been elected as the HDP candidate from Şırnak.
A gun battle was raging in another neighborhood between the Kurds and the military. Leila had gone there to try to help the civilians and monitor the situation when she received a phone call informing her that someone had been killed in Dicle, where there had been fighing. “A policeman tagged her on Twitter and said, ‘We killed your brother-in-law,” Birlik recalled. “‘Come get his body.’” The police had tossed Haci’s body outside the hospital and kicked it around in the open. “He had two long range bullets in his legs and 26 short range bullets in his face and chest,” Birlik recalled. “He was 28 years old and they had shot him 28 times.” Birlik never found out how his brother died.
The war in the southeast got worse after I left. Between the winter of 2015 and the summer of 2016, Erdoğan’s military operations against the Kurds killed hundreds and destroyed tens of thousands of homes. Sur was rubble. Nuseybin was rubble. Cizre was rubble. Mardin was rubble. Every Kurdish town seemed to have been turned into Silvan.
The young Kurdish rebels who had manned the barricades in Silvan were either killed or pushed into the mountains of Qandil in Iraq. The International Crisis Group estimated that 519 Kurdish fighters, 517 security personnel, and at least 271 civilians were killed between July 2015 and June 2016. About 200 others couldn’t be identified. Turkish air force jets continued bombing PKK camps in the Iraqi mountains; no reliable numbers of the deaths there were available. “The trenches they dug have become their graves and the bombs they planted to divide the nation have exploded in their own hands,” Erdoğan said at a meeting with the families of soldiers killed in battle.
Erdoğan’s war is winning the PKK recruits as bleak tales of war crimes spread among the Kurdish populations. If the Kurds had sung ballads of the valiant battle to save Kobanî from ISIS, a new generation is growing up to elegies for Cizre, a town of 100,000 people, about four hours from Diyarbakır, where more than a hundred people who had sought shelter in basements were killed. “The buildings were shattered by artillery, tank fire and street fighting, according to local people,” Jeremy Bowen, a correspondent with the BBC, reported. “When the curfew ended and the fighting stopped, Turkish security forces sent in bulldozers to level the ruins.”
Turkey’s Kurds speak of Cizre with horror, and many believe that the Turkish army had burned the people in the basements alive. No independent investigations were carried out. I was told that the Kurdish youngsters fighting behind the barricades were mostly born during the Turkish military campaigns of the 1990s. Kurds call them “the children of storm.” There is increasing worry that stories of Erdoğan’s war against the Kurds will create another militant generation.
The war has boomeranged from the Kurdish periphery to the Turkish center. In February 2016, Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, a radical splinter group of the PKK, bombed a convoy of buses in Ankara and killed 28 military personnel and 2 civilians. A month later, a car bomb near the prime minister’s office in Ankara killed 37 people. In June, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons attacked another bus carrying policemen in central Istanbul and killed 12 people. Turkish television broadcast long funerals of the soldiers killed in battle.
Nationalist feelings and hostility toward Kurds have intensified, yet a few journalists, activists, and academics have spoken out against the military operations in the southeast. Academics for Peace, a group of Turkish scholars and teachers from across the country, lent their names to a petition titled, “We Will Not be a Party to This Crime.” Around 1,100 academics from 90 Turkish universities and 355 academics from other countries signed the petition. They spoke out against the sieges of Kurdish towns, the denial of basic amenities to besieged citizens, and they bemoaned the use of weapons associated with wartime. “We, as academics and researchers working on and/or in Turkey, declare that we will not be a party to this massacre by remaining silent and demand an immediate end to the violence perpetrated by the state,” the professors declared. They called upon the Turkish government to grant independent observers access to the areas of conflict and to return to peace negotiations.
The next day President Erdoğan harangued them in a televised speech. “Hey, you so-called intellectuals!” Erdoğan said. “You are nothing like intellectuals. You are ignorant and dark, not even knowing about the east or the southeast.” Sedat Peker, the mob boss imprisoned during the Ergenekon trials who had repositioned himself as a supporter of the AKP since his release, posted a threat on his personal website. “We will spill our blood, and we will take a shower in your blood,” Peker wrote.
Several academics were arrested. A campaign smearing them as supporters of terrorists ran in pro-government newspapers. One newspaper printed photographs and names of hundreds of the signatories. Across Turkey, university authorities started disciplinary proceedings against the signatories. Police began searching houses. Crosses were painted on the doors of certain professors at a university in Ankara.
Having vanquished the military establishment, the Gülenist press, the Kurdish insurgents, and the intellectual elite, Erdoğan set his sights on Selahattin Demirtaş and the politicians of the HDP, who had so humiliated him in the June 2015 elections. In May 2016, Erdoğan pushed through a bill to stop granting members of Parliament immunity from prosecution, which would allow HDP lawmakers to face charges under Turkey’s broad and vague anti-terror laws.
If members of the HDP were convicted, fresh elections would be held for their parliamentary seats. The political climate of intense nationalism, oppositional disarray, and Erdoğan’s supremacy over all Turkish institutions is likely to ensure landslide victories for the AKP. The electoral support for constitutional changes for the executive presidency that Demirtaş denied Erdoğan last year seems close to the strongman’s grasp.
On a recent summer morning, Demirtaş, who has been dealing with one of the most volatile periods of his political career, was flying out of Turkey on a work trip. He agreed to meet me at an airport lounge reserved for the Turkish government elite. Demirtaş was working on his iPad in a corner of the plush waiting lounge. A small man with a prominent nose and a boyish smile, Demirtaş was at ease in a light linen jacket and blue trousers. He transformed as he spoke about the military operations in the southeast; suppressed anger bubbled under his words. “The Turkish state is not fighting the PKK, it is fighting the Kurds,” Demirtaş said, his voice calm and deliberate. “The military operations are against the Kurdish people. They want to decimate Kurdish politics, they want to eliminate Kurds as a collective, turn us into obedient subjects.”
Since the end of the peace process and the eruption of all-out war, Demirtaş and his colleagues had spent most of their time in the southeast seeking to stand by their people. They had little material influence but they had spoken out against the operations and sought an end to violence. “When I went to Cizre, it was an occupied city, a city completely destroyed. The state had shown its most inhuman face,” he said.
Demirtaş sees the latest insurgency as part of a long war between the Kurds seeking their own future and the Turkish republic trying to subdue and transform them into submissive citizens. He feels the Kurds have been lonely and powerless ever since Atatürk founded the Turkish republic in 1923, but he draws strength from the political successes of the Kurds in northern Iraq and Syria, where they have established de facto autonomous regions and earned the support of the United States. “We are not alone,” he said, although his words seemed to be aimed at convincing himself.
The revocation of immunity posed a serious danger to Demirtaş and his colleagues, as they face likely prosecution and banishment from Parliament. “A judge can easily find a reason to send us to prison,” Demirtaş said. He had decided to challenge the revocation law in higher courts, and he seemed strangely hopeful. “A totalitarian leader without a mask is easier to fight,” Demirtaş told me. “He won’t determine the future of Turkey.” I wasn’t so sure.