Atatürk’s Children: Turkey and the Kurds
Jonathan Rugman
Roger Hutchings
Cassell
For more than a decade, rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, have been at war with Turkish security forces, a conflict that has claimed more than 19,000 lives. Whilst the PKK says that it is campaigning for the cultural and political rights of Turkey's Kurdish minority, the Turks counter that they are fighting terrorists who want to tear their state apart.
As the war has escalated, there has been an exodus of civilians from the Kurdish area of south-east Turkey. Severe human rights abuses have multiplied and the list of people declared missing or dead has grown rapidly.
Here is a compelling introduction to Turkey's Kurdish problem, focusing on the lives of those caught in the crossfire. Eyewitnesses to the PKK war are given the chance to tell their stories alongside powerful images, and the book includes a history of the PKK, fast emerging as one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations confronting Europe.
Ataturk's Children is the product of many harrowing trips to the battle zone by Roger Hutchings, the award-winning war photographer, and Jonathan Rugman, Istanbul correspondent of the Guardian and the Observer. Through words and pictures, they provide an unprecedented account of one of the most violent and under-reported conflicts in the Middle East.
Jonathan Rugman graduated from Cambridge with a First in English and then joined the BBC as a trainee in radio and television news and current affairs. After stints on several BBC programmes including Panorama and Newsnight, he was appointed the BBC World Service's Ankara correspondent in 1991. In 1993 he moved to Istanbul as a correspondent for the Guardian and Observer. He has report-ed from the Caucasus, Central Asia and Middle East and is a frequent visitor to the Kurdish area of southeast Turkey.
Roger Hutchings has been working as a freelance photojournalist since 1982, specializing in reportage and contributing to many international publications. He has spent three years photographing the conflict in former Yugoslavia and has made frequent visits to Turkish Kurdistan. His work has attracted wide recognition and he has won many awards including: Nikon Photo Essay 1991; Nikon News Photographer of the Year 1992; World Press, People in the News, first prize 1994; Amnesty International Photojournalism Prize 1994; Canon Photo Essay Award, runner up, 1995.
Contents
Acknowledgements / 10
Foreword / 11
Introduction: A landscape of burnt villages / 13
Chapter 1: Turkey's Kurds – who are they? / 21
Chapter 2: The rise of the PKK / 27
Chapter 3: The Kurdish genie out of the bottle / 37
Chapter 4: Ataturk's children / 73
Select bibliography / 79
Voices from the Crossfire / 80
The Wild East: Photo essay by Roger Hutchings / 96
Map of Turkey showing mainly Kurdish provinces governed under emergency rule.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Andrew Mango and David McDowall offered encouragement and advice, with the latter's work on the Kurds (see Bibliography) proving invaluable for my first chap¬ter. Ferhat Boratav, Ragip Duran, Andrew Finkel and Ismet Imset passed useful comment on the manuscript. Declan Kelly at the BBC World Service news infor¬mation department and Jonathan Sugden of Amnesty International helped me with my research.
Where my own records have not been sufficient, I have relied on the published reports of several journalist colleagues, especially Aliza Marcus of Reuters and Hugh Pope of the Independent. Many of the 'Voices from the Crossfire' reproduced here began life in a BBC Radio File on Four documentary, broadcast in 1994.
I would especially like to thank Demet Kafes^ioglu for her painstaking translations from Turkish. Simon Tisdall at the Guardian and Ann Treneman at the Observer encouraged my exploits in the Wild East and gave me time off to write this book.
Jonathan Rugman
Foreword
The problems of a former empire are many. If Britain and France have encountered difficulties in finding their new place in the world, then Turkey, where the political structure is more precarious and the economy weaker, deserves our sympathy even more. Ever since its European ambitions were rejected with some brutality, Turkey has been obliged to think of itself as an Asian power instead. It has had to search for its Isamic, Central Asian and Middle Eastern identity once more, while keeping faith with the secular vision of Kemal Ataturk: no easy task.
Like most other powers that have laid down the imperial burden, Turkey has had great difficulty with the fundamental question any nation has to answer: who are we? In terms of ethnicity and culture Turkey is varied, complex and inter¬mixed. Yet the myth which Ataturk bequeathed to his fellow-countrymen insists that there is a single ethnic group, the Turks. Nowadays the effects of this myth can be brutal; it can never, in the long run, be successful. While Turkey gives no legal recognition to its large Kurdish minority, the problem that dissident Kurds pose for the Turkish state cannot be solved.
Just about every country which has tried to subsume separate ethnic identities into a single dominant nationality has failed in the long run. The Russians tried to pretend that Belorussia and the Ukraine were mere localities; the English hoped to eradicate the Welsh and Irish languages, and the Austrians Czech, Slovak and Serbian, by punishing those who spoke them; the Chinese have tried to wipe out Tibet as an identifiable entity by forcing Tibetans to intermarry with ethnic Chinese. None has succeeded and Turkey's long efforts this century to destroy Kurdish sentiment by denying that there are any such people as Kurds cannot suc¬ceed either.
This book by Jonathan Rugman and Roger Hutchings is not uncritical. No one who knows the PICK as they do could possibly be starry-eyed about the violent response to Turkish persecution. Nor is it possible to avoid becoming exasperated by the self-defeating machinations of the more legitimate Kurdish groups, as they make their deals and alliances and then promptly break them. Merely because they are persecuted and denied their proper rights does not mean that the Kurdish polit¬ical leaders must necessarily be saints.
The short-termism of Kurdish politics is in the sharpest contrast to the majestic sweep of their history. Anyone who has driven through the mountain valleys of Kurdish northern Iraq in the springtime knows how magnificently the wild wheat, oats and barley spring up across the meadows: precursers of the domesticated vari¬eties which the entire world eats today. There are towns and cities in Kurdistan which are as old as Jericho and Jerusalem, perhaps older; and there are tumuli that represent settlements which are older still. The history of the Kurds stretches back to this period; they, it seems, built the cities and first grew the crops. The Kurds have a separate language and culture, separate costume, a separate consciousness. The vagaries of imperialism have carved lines across their territory and divided them between Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. In the great conferences which fol¬lowed the First World War it was only ill chance which prevented their joining the other ethnic groupings that were awarded national independence. Now the national urges and anxieties of the four countries where they mainly find themselves bar them from nationhood; but not, it seems reasonable to assume, forever.
Jonathan Rugman is a friend and former colleague of mine. He and Roger Hutchings, who has taken these haunting pictures of one of the most beautiful regions on earth, have together produced the best definition for an English-speak¬ing readership of what it is to be a Kurd.
John Simpson
BBC Television Centre
London
December 1995
Introduction
A landscape of burnt villages
Smoke was rising from the village of (Jelebi as we walked towards it. A thin layer of snow was hardening on the surrounding fields, and the sky was bleeding red from a winter sunset. As we drew nearer we could see that all the houses had been destroyed by fire. They were still smouldering. One man, sifting with a spade through the ashes of his smoking home, said everyone else had fled. 'The Turks beat us and kicked us, then they burned the houses down,' the man said in Kurdish before returning, almost robotically, to his digging.
Once they could see that we had not been followed by Turkish soldiers or police, several other Kurds who witnessed the destruction of (Jelebi trudged over the hills from a neighbouring village to join us. 'We'll tell you what happened but don't use our names,' said one. 'If the Turks know our names, they will take us to prison or kill us here.'
Around three hundred Turkish soldiers dressed in green woollen balaclava face- masks had arrived in Qelebi, five days before the photographer Roger Hutchings and I got there in February 1994. The soldiers were angry because the residents had refused to become village guards - local Kurds paid to combat rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party or PICK, which is fighting for a Kurdish state in southeast Turkey.
After burning down Qelebi's houses, the soldiers set the village's tobacco ware-house alight. The mud and straw building poured with smoke until it was reduced to a giant open-air ashtray, scorching the earth black. Then the soldiers killed all the poultry and cooked up a barbecue, before leaving the Kurds searching in the dark for the charred remnants of their livelihood.
Kurds in Çelebi told us that they supported what they called the 'outside people' or PICK. Sixteen people had joined the rebels since 1988, another eight were in prison on charges of helping them. The villagers were staying with friends nearby, but said they would soon take their families and surviving possessions to Diyarbaktr, the biggest town in southeast Turkey. 'The choice is simple,' said one man. 'Either we fight for the government or we leave. Otherwise the Turks will burn our houses down again.'
…..
Jonathan Rugman
Roger Hutchings
Atatürk’s Children
Turkey and the Kurds
Cassell
Cassell
Wellington House
Atatürk’s Children
Turkey and the Kurds
Foreword by John Simpson
Jonathan Rugman
Roger Hutchings
Foreword by John Simpson
Cassell
Wellington House
125 Strand
London WC2R OBB
215 Park Avenue South
New York
NY 10003
© Jonathan Rugman and Roger Hutchings 1996
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
First published 1996
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0 304 33383 2 (hardback)
0 304 33384 0 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rugman, Jonathan.
Ataturk's children: Turkey and the Kurds / Jonathan Rugman, Roger Hutchings.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 0-304-33383-2. — ISBN 0-304-33384-0 (pbk.)
1. Kurds—Civil rights—Turkey. 2. Turkey-Ethnic relations.
3. Turkey—Politics and government—1980- 4. Kurdistan Workers' Party.
I. Hutchings, Roger. II. Title.
DR435.K87R84 1996
323.1'19159—dc20 / 95-31967
CIP
Typeset and designed by Ronald Clark
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cambridge University Press
