User:Stevertigo/Turkish atrocities against Kurds
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not necessarily under this title.豎眩svThat's the traditional pattern. Invaders quite typically use collaborators to run things for them. They very naturally play upon any existing rivalries and hostilities to get one group to work for them against others.
It's happening right now with the Kurds. The West is trying to mobilize Iraqi Kurds to destroy Turkish Kurds, who are by far the largest group and historically the most oppressed. Apart from what we might think of those guerrillas, there's no doubt that they had substantial popular support in southeastern Turkey.
(Turkey's atrocities against the Kurds haven't been covered much in the West, because Turkey is our ally. But right into the Gulf War they were bombing in Kurdish areas, and tens of thousands of people were driven out.)
Now the Western goal is to use the Iraqi Kurds as a weapon to try and restore what's called "stability"-meaning their own kind of system-in Iraq. The West is using the Iraqi Kurds to destroy the Turkish Kurds, since that will extend Turkey's power in the region, and the Iraqi Kurds are cooperating.
In October 1992, there was a very ugly incident in which there was a kind of pincers movement between the Turkish army and the lraqi Kurdish forces to expel and destroy Kurdish guerrillas from Turkey.
Iraqi Kurdish leaders and some sectors of the population cooperated because they thought they could gain something by it. You could understand their position-not necessarily approve of it, that's another question-but you could certainly understand it.
These are people who are being crushed and destroyed from every direction. If they grasp at some straw for survival, it's not surprising- even if grasping at that straw means helping to kill people like their cousins across the border.
That's the way conquerors work. They've always worked that way. They worked that way in India.
It's not that India was a peaceful place before-it wasn't. Nor was the western hemisphere a pacifist utopia. But there's no doubt that almost everywhere the Europeans went they raised the level of violence to a significant degree. Serious military historians don't have any doubts about that-it was already evident by the eighteenth century. Again, you can read it in Adam Smith.
One reason for that is that Europe had been fighting vicious, murderous wars internally. So it had developed an unsurpassed culture of violence. That culture was even more important than the technology, which was not all that much greater than other cultures.
A still "harsher test" of the doctrine (of intervention in defense of human rights) was the reaction to the acceptance of Turkey as a candidate for membership in the European Union in December. The ample coverage succeeded in overlooking the obvious issue: the huge terror operations, including massive ethnic cleansing, conducted with decisive U.S. aid and training, increasing under Clinton as atrocities peaked to a level far beyond the crimes that allegedly provoked the NATO bombing of Serbia. True, some questions were raised: a New York Times headline read: "First Question for Europe: Is Turkey Really European?" (Stephen Kinzer, Dec. 9). The U.S.-backed atrocities merit a phrase: Turkey's "war against Kurdish rebels has subsided," just as Serbia's far lesser "war against Albanian rebels" would have "subsided" had the U.S. provided Belgrade with a flood of high-tech weapons and diplomatic support while the press looked the other way.
http://www.hri.org/news/greek/apeen/2001/01-05-21.apeen.html http://kurdistan.org/AKIN/ernk-missile.html http://www.wesleyan.edu/hermes/prev/may99/L.htm http://www.ocnus.net/artman/publish/article_3213.shtml http://www.ocnus.net/artman/publish/article_3213.shtml http://www.lalkar.demon.co.uk/issues/contents/mar19999/kurds.htm
Abdullah Ocalan
Freedom for Ocalan
Freedom for the Kurds
By David Morgan
The kidnapping by Turkey of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), has provoked the justified outrage of Kurds throughout the world. The underhand methods used and the images of his maltreatment that were released by Turkish television illustrate the true barbarism of the Ankara regime for all to see. It will become ever more difficult for Turkey's western backers to cover up for its atrocities and war crimes in the future.
Ocalan's capture was a totally illegal act of international banditry carried out by Turkish agents with the full collusion of the CIA and MOSSAD, the result of Turkey's strategic alliance with the US and Israel. Turkish intelligence simply would not have been able to pull off such a major operation alone.
One outcome is certain. The apprehension will be met with the fiercest resistance by the Kurdish liberation movement led by the PKK. The immediate response of the Kurds has been impressive and demands the full support of progressive forces everywhere.
The biggest demonstration London has seen since the 1980s took place on 20 February when around 10,000 Kurds from all parts of Kurdistan (Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran) marched to Trafalgar Square in a massive display of solidarity with Ocalan.
There must be more events like this with the left and the trade-union movement joining them in support and by this putting more pressure on New Labour to change its pro-Turkish policy which is the very opposite of anything resembling "ethical".
The Kurds have spoken out with one voice for the immediate release of their courageous Kurdish leader who has given them hope, dignity and the ability to call themselves Kurds again after decades of oppression. The world outrage and mounting resistance since Ocalan's apprehension shows the utter failure of the policy of the US which has been to try to detach Ocalan and the PKK from the Kurdish people.
It is in fact the tribal leaders of Iraqi Kurdistan, especially the KDP of Massoud Barzani, who are becoming more alienated from their people by signing the Washington Accord and denying Ocalan assistance, since his expulsion from Syria last October.
It is becoming apparent that the agreement with the Iraqi Kurds, which included clauses against the PKK, was one aspect of an international diplomatic conspiracy against the PKK which culminated in the arrest of their leader. Certainly the PKK itself believes this. Washington itself has made carefully worded statements to the effect that it was "not directly involved" in the operation in Kenya.
Washington and its craven allies in Europe have been bent on portraying Ocalan as a terrorist in order to whitewash the atrocities committed by their NATO partner – Turkey. Since the Cold War, Turkey has been firmly a part of the western imperialist camp, a source of stability in the Middle East for the West, built up as a regional power and supplied with arms from the US, Britain and the rest of Europe.
It first persuaded the West to give it assistance by exaggerating the threat it faced from communism, now it uses the threats of Islam and terrorism to keep the channel of military supplies and financial aid flowing.
The genocidal war it has been fighting against the Kurdish people, who amount to over 20 percent of the population of Turkey, has ultimately been carried out on behalf of western governments. All their hands are steeped in the blood of the Kurds spilt in Turkey's dirty war. Of that there can be no doubt.
The full details surrounding the PKK leader's abduction in Kenya by Turkish agents have yet to be investigated but the clear complicity of Greece and the Kenyans was straight away apparent.
The Greek betrayal in particular provoked an immediate response all over Europe with the occupation of the Greek Embassy in London's Holland Park and the self-immolation of the 15-year-old Kurdish girl, Nejla Kanteper, gaining sympathetic coverage in the British media and shocking the British public into paying attention to the Kurdish plight.
Such acts of self-sacrifice indicate the strength of feeling for the cause of Kurdish liberation among the people and their understanding of how the Kurdish nation has been the victim of repeated betrayals throughout its history. The arrest of Ocalan is just the latest example.
If there can be any positive aspect to this shameful episode in international relations, it will be seen in the increasing unity and determination of the Kurdish resistance. Newroz (New Year) on 21 March has traditionally become the start of increased activity.
This year there is greater reason than ever for the spark of resistance to be ignited all over Turkey. Kurds in Europe have been urged to employ all legal means to raise the level of activity, in Turkey all means necessary are now legitimate.
Europe and the US must be held responsible for any catastrophic consequences following on from the arrest of Ocalan. They had the opportunity to play a role in finding a peaceful resolution of the Kurdish question when Ocalan came to Rome last November. He then expressed hi willingness to stand before an impartial international court of justice, but Europe did not want to intervene and remained silent while Washington continued to call Ocalan a terrorist and Turkey clamoured for his extradition. All appeals from the Kurdish side were rejected, including a list of modest demands on basic human rights in Turkey.
It is undoubtedly the cowardice and callousness of western politicians who bear the greatest responsibility for all that follows from now on. It is hard to exaggerate the sense of betrayal now felt by all Kurds.
Turkey prosecutes Chomsky publisher for essay on Kurds By Robert Fisk, Middle East Correspondent - 24 January 2002
Noam Chomsky, one of America's greatest philosophers and linguists, has become the target of Turkey's chief of "terrorism prosecution". Scarcely two months after the European Union praised Turkey for passing new laws protecting freedom of expression, the authorities in Ankara are using anti-terrorism legislation to prosecute Mr Chomsky's Turkish publisher. Fatih Tas of the Aram Publishing House faces a year in prison for daring to print American Interventionism, a collection of Mr Chomsky's recent essays including harsh criticism of Turkey's treatment of its Kurdish minority.
Mr Chomsky, a linguistics professor at Harvard, is planning to fly to Turkey for Mr Tas's first court appearance on 13 February and has already written to the offices of the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, pointing out that amendments to
Turkish law were supposed to have provided greater freedom of expression, not less.
Mr Chomsky plans to visit the Turkish city of Diyarbakir to meet Kurdish "activists" and it will be a test of Turkey's freedoms to see if he is allowed to visit the area.
In one of his essays, originally a university lecture, he says that "the Kurds have been miserably oppressed throughout the whole history of the modern Turkish state ... In 1984, the Turkish government launched a major war in the south-east against the Kurdish population ... The end result was pretty awesome: tens of thousands of people
killed, two to three million refugees, massive ethnic cleansing with
some 3,500 villages destroyed."
This, according to the Turks, constitutes an incitement to violence. Mr Chomsky has been suitably outraged, regarding the trial as part of a much broader wave of repression directed against Kurds appealing for greater use of the Kurdish language. Bekir Rayif Aldemyr,
Turkey's chief prosecutor, claims that the Chomsky essay "propagates separatism".
A spiky, inexhaustible academic of Jewish origin who has been an inveterate critic of Israel and especially of the United States, Mr Chomsky's condemnation of Turkey's treatment of the Kurds - and of the vast arms shipments made to Turkey by the United States - was
bound to enrage Ankara.
Mr Chomsky describes the prosecution as "a very severe attack on the most elementary human and civil rights". The EU, so impressed by those changes in Turkish law last November, has remained silent.
Urgent Action
(WAN/IFEX) - In an 11 February 2002 letter to Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, WAN and the World Editors Forum expressed their serious concern at the prosecution of publisher and editor Fatih Tas. According to reports, Tas, owner and editor of the Istanbul-based Aram Publishing Company, is due to appear in court on 13 February on charges of publishing "propaganda against the indivisible unity of the country, nation and State of the Republic of Turkey". The charges relate to the publication of a lecture given by American linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky on 4 March 2001 in Toledo, Ohio. The lecture was entitled "Prospects for Peace in the Middle East" and Chomsky criticised the United States government for its support of alleged human rights abuses perpetrated by Turkey against its Kurdish minority. In September, Aram Publishing Company, a publishing house known for its support of Kurdish human rights issues, published a translated collection of Chomsky's essays and lectures under the title "American Interventionism". The collection included the transcript of the Toledo lecture. The indictment quotes two passages from the Toledo lecture: first, Chomsky's description of Turkey's treatment of the Kurds as "one of the most severe human rights atrocities of the 1990s" and, second, his remark that the Kurds "have been miserably oppressed throughout the whole history of the modern Turkish state but things changed in 1984. In 1984, the Turkish government launched a major war in the Southeast against the Kurdish population...tens of thousands of people killed, two or three million refugees, massive ethnic cleansing with some 3,500 villages destroyed." Recommended Action Send appeals to the prime minister: - reminding him that Tas's prosecution is a clear breach of his right to freedom of expression, which is guaranteed by numerous international conventions, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Turkey is a party. The covenant states: "Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print" - calling on him to ensure that Tas's prosecution is halted immediately and that all charges against him are dropped - urging him to do everything in his power to ensure that Turkey fully respects its international obligations to freedom of expression Appeals To The Right Honourable Bulent Ecevit Prime Minister Ankara, Turkey c/o HE Consulate General in France Email: tcparbsk@worldnet.fr Please copy appeals to WAN.
http://www.haroldpinter.org/politics/politics_kurds.shtml
http://www.afsc.org/pwork/0109/010916.htm
Agneta Norberg, a long time-peace activist, journalist, and member of Women for Peace, serves as vice chair of the Swedish Peace Council, an umbrella organization for peace groups in Sweden.
"When I am in Sweden I am a Kurd.
When I go home to Turkey I am a Turk—otherwise I face a lot of problems." Selim, a Kurdish schoolboy of ten, introduced himself at my first lesson. I was teaching Swedish for immigrants in a school in a suburb of Stockholm in 1984. Asking Selim about his language and his country was a turning point in my life. I began to study the political situation in Turkey. I found out many things. Not only was his Kurdish language forbidden in Turkey, but his country, Kurdistan, was divided into five parts. The biggest part of the Kurdish population live in Turkey. Each part of Kurdistan is ruled by a government oppressing the Kurdish people. In 1980 there was a bloody military take over in Turkey and thousands of refugees, mostly Kurds, escaped to Sweden and other European countries. I also learned that the US and Germany are deeply involved in equipping and training Turkey’s police force, its secret police (MIT), its military, its paramilitary troops, and its torturers.
German Support
Shortly after the military coup in 1980, Germany donated a million deutschmarks to Turkey to arm its police force. This aid was sustained in the following years, and Germany has offered training as well. The electronics firm Siemens equipped the police stations with computers and organized seminars on computer and video surveillance for the Turkish police. Since 1955 there have been contacts between German counter-intelligence and the Turkish secret service, MIT, helping Turkey to track "terrorists and separatistºs" who seek political asylum.
There are many historical links between Turkey and Germany that illuminate the present policy in Turkey. For instance, the origin of the party Millietci Hareket Partisi, now part of the Turkish government, can be traced back to the second world war when the Nazi government financed the formation of a Nazi group within the Turkish army. One of its earliest and most enthusiastic members was a young officer named Alparslan Turkesh, who went on to lead the ultra-nationalist Millietci Hareket Partisi from its inception in the sixties until 1997 when he died.
The US in Turkey
After the second world war, Turkey was considered by the US to be an extremely important strategic springboard in to Soviet Union and the Middle East. President Truman generously gave Turkey 400 million dollars in 1947. The money was meant for buying arms and military equipment from the US.
Turkey has played a central role in many international crises. It contributed some thousand troops in the Korean war 1950. US nuclear missiles deployed in Turkey, close to Moscow, were the instigation for Kruschev’s deployment of nuclear weapons in Cuba, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis. And during the Gulf war, Turkey’s Incirlik airfield was the launching pad for bombing of Iraq.
When the US-oriented regime fell in Iran, the Americans and their military bases were expelled. Therefore, in March 1980, US and Turkey signed an important military treaty. It included military bases in Turkey under US control plus electronic listening posts and radar. The treaty was signed four months prior to the military coup that brought the Turkish armed forces back into power. Today Turkey, Israel, and the US have developed a close military cooperation.
September 12, 1980
"Our boys have done it!" cheered Paul Henze to his friends in Washington the day after the military coup. Paul Henze was the CIA director in Ankara. The horror and cruelty that followed were unimaginable: 171 human beings were tortured to death; over 200,000 political activists, journalists, authors, and teachers were tried in military court; 23,000 organizations were closed, and 30,000 people escaped and were spread over Europe. Books were destroyed and newspapers shut down. Today there are 10,000 political prisoners in Turkish prisons.
US Weapons against the Uprising
In 1984 the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) started an armed struggle against the Turkish oppression, with about 300 guerrilla troops. In 1994 the number had grown to 15,000. Hundreds of thousands among Kurdish poor peasants were sympathizers. In 15 years of fighting between PKK and the Turkish Army, nearly 40.000 lives have been lost—more than in the conflicts on the West Bank and in Northern Ireland combined. But the Kurdish uprising is seldom mentioned in western media. The civil war in Turkey represents in fact the single largest use of US weapons anywhere in the world by non-US forces according to Bill Hartung of the World Policy Institute. In 1992 and 1993 the Pentagon quietly sent an enormous amount of military equipment to the Turkish army at no cost. Military assistance has included the use of American soldiers. In 1998 a US team was sent to train the Turkish Mountain Commandos, a unit whose chief function is to fight Kurdish guerrillas. In 1998 a US company was negotiating to sell 10.000 electro-shock weapons to the Turkish Police despite its documented record of practicing electro-shock torture.
Village Destruction and Forced Evacuation
In March 1997 I traveled in a minibus together with seven friends through the mountains of Kurdistan in the southeast of Turkey. Martial law was proclaimed in the whole area since 1980 and in almost all towns curfew prevails. To be safe we had gotten permission from the minister of foreign affairs in Ankara to make this journey. Our driver gave me the first of many testimonies about the terror. "I am from the district of Kulp," he started. "The villages there have been burnt to the ground several times. In 1992, 65 villages were put on fire on one day. In the whole county of Kulp there were earlier 70.000 people. Today there are only 4-5000. Those who dare to stay in the villages face very hard conditions. In 1988 Özel Tim (Special Forces) came to my village to enroll me as a village guard. That means you get a rifle and a uniform from the state and you are supposed to kill your brothers. When I refused they threatened me to take me to the mountain, dress me like a PKK guerrilla, put a gun in my arms and kill me.
Refugee camp. Photo: courtesy HADEP, Turkey, hadepgm@yahoo.com In 1992 they came back and destroyed my house with a grenade thrower. I tried to escape with my friends in my minibus. The military stopped us and ordered us to go out. The bus was totally destroyed by a rocket. The commander pointed at the bus and said ‘So, you don’t want to be a village guard? Look at your bus! Remember, the bus was destroyed by PKK.’ After this I moved to Diyarbakir. My cousin stayed in Kulp and became a village guard. Six month ago he was killed by Özel Tim for suspected connection with PKK."
Abdullah Öcalan
Abdullah Öcalan led the Kurdish uprising for 15 years from his headquarters in Syria. He was expelled in 1998, and after trying to get asylum in different countries he went to Nairobi where he was arrested in a joint effort by Mossad, MIT, and the CIA. British "Aims Ltd." was involved as well. The Kurdish people took to the streets in Turkey and in Germany as well in protest. I happened to arrive in Istanbul on the same day Öcalan was brought to Turkey, and I witnessed the brutal police control of the people.
On June 29, 1999, Abdullah Öcalan was sentenced to death by hanging according to Article 125 of the Turkish criminal code. The Turkish government has to this day hesitated to enforce this verdict as it would create an uproar among Kurdish people. It would also make it even more difficult for Turkey to become a member of the European Union. Turkey is a candidate for European Union today, but has a long way to go before it has fulfilled all the demands from the EU to get rid of its terrible record of human rights abuses, torture, state terror against the Kurdish people, and the death penalty.
Prison Hunger Strikes
Today the ultra-nationalists are strong in Turkey, with powerful representation in the government. In spite of the ongoing brutality, the people are resisting, demonstrating, organizing, and eventually being imprisoned. In the effort to liquidate the left and the Kurdish nationalists, the government is modernizing prisons to meet its rising needs. In the old prisons the inmates could communicate with each other. The newly built so-called F-type prisons are based on a cell-type system. Since October 2000, more than 1000 political prisoners all over Turkey have participated in a hunger strike in protest against the new F-type prisons and isolation. The Turkish Security Forces raided 20 prisons across the country last December in order to break the resistance of the political prisoners who refused to be transferred to the F-type prisons. Thirty-two political prisoners were killed, and hundreds were maimed, tortured, and raped. Twenty-five prisoners have died from fasting, and still the Turkish government refuses to negotiate with the prisoners and their families to find an acceptable solution and close the F-type cells.
Gece Kondu
In Turkish, "Gece" means night and "kondu" means built. So gece-kondu refers to houses built quickly in the night. The slum. In December 2000 I visited Turkey to learn about the situation of those who are internal refugees. Women, children, and the elderly are driven away from their villages in the mountains and scatter outside the big cities. My friends brought me in their car to one of these places. When we arrived it was dark and raining. We balanced on a plank across an open, smelling sewer ditch and saw the light from a window. We were welcomed in a warm and light room and Mariam, our hostess, offered a glass of tea. After finishing our tea, I asked her what brought her and her children to this place.
"I am 40 years old. I come from Van, a town in Eastern Turkey. I have lived here for six years with my children. We were forced to leave our home because the police in Van terrorized us all the time. They searched our home during the nights looking for weapons. They brought my husband to jail and tortured him with electricity. We have five children. Our eldest son Murat is killed in the war. Our next son Mehmet is in the mountains. Our third son Ali was on his way to join the guerrilla when he was caught by the military and imprisoned. He was tortured. He is still in prison in Diyarbakir. Our daughter Mehtap is seventeen and our son Onur is thirteen. We live here together and we help each other to survive. My husband Ibrahim is in jail in Tokat not far from Ankara. He has been imprisoned for six years now. My mother lives in Van. I cannot afford a telephone so I don’t know if she is well. I am very thankful to you for coming the long way from Sweden and asking us how we live. There are many people in Turkey who don’t know under what hardships people in the their own country are forced to live."
We stumbled further along the stinking ditch and another woman welcomed us to her little house. Emine, a mother of four, introduced her children and told her story:
"I am Emine. I am 31 and we come from Cizre in eastern Turkey. We have four children and I have given birth to all of them here without any help from a midwife. My husband has been arrested more than ten times. All we want is to return to Cizre but there are terrible things going on there and we don’t dare go back. I will give you an example. Many people were arrested, suspected for being sympathizers to PKK. When they were released from arrest they went by bus towards their home in Siirt. After a few miles’ drive there flew a helicopter above the bus and dropped a bomb on the bus. Seven of them were our relatives. People who wanted to save them out from the burning bus were hindered by soldiers. All people in the bus died. You have to tell this."
About Water
Hasankeyf, in Eastern Turkey, is an ancient town that will soon be under water. I am one of the lucky who have had the opportunity to see this peace of wonderful arcitechture built about the same time as Collosseum in Rome. Many people have protested to save this historical monument but in vain. The enourmus GAP (South East Anatolia Project) has to go on. Many Israeli engineers are working at the project and when finished it will serve Turkey´s and Israel’s need for water. Those who suffer from this project are the Kurdish people. It is extremely important for the Turkish state to keep the area under control, and the oppression of the people is severe. Huge areas are already under water. In addition, the policy of USA, Israel, and Turkey towards the neighboring countries Syria and Iraq is to use the water supply as a tool for political blackmailing—the ‘water threat’ was used against Syria when Öcalan was forced out of the country. But water isn’t the only reason for denying Kurdish people their rights. ‘Black gold’—oil and gas—is another reasons for control. There are plans to draw pipelines from Kaukasus through Eastern Turkey and Kurdistan to Ceyhan at the Mediterranian Sea in the south of Turkey.
Spread the Knowledge
"You have to tell this," Emine said, and that is what I have tried to do. The more we know about the reality for people who are suffering from US and German policy, the more we can direct our protests. The knowledge about these things are not commonplace in our country. I have written a booklet about the horror, which is now a study book for Young Left in Sweden. Those enthusiastic young people have launched a protest campaign across Sweden against the atrocities, and asked people not to visit Turkey as tourists. With friends I have started a support group for Kurdish women who are routinely raped in prisons. We are planning to go to Eastern Turkey next spring.
There are many brave organizations in Turkey we can cooperate with. But above all, it is important to spread knowledge about Turkey’s oppressive government. I have met US tourists in Ankara, and have been amazed at their lack of knowledge about the US’s controlling role in Turkey. I can only share my experiences with you, and only you can help by sharing them with others who must know.
By Lee Gardner
Good Kurds, Bad Kurds: No Friends but the Mountains, Directed by Kevin McKiernan, At the Charles Theatre, April 29, 4 P.M. Kevin McKiernan thought he could relax. It was 1991, and the veteran freelance photojournalist, returning from covering Saddam Hussein's post-Gulf War repression of Kurds in northern Iraq, had just crossed the border into southeastern Turkey. Back on NATO-controlled soil, he fell asleep in the back of his taxi.
"Suddenly there was a gun muzzle in my face," he recalls. The rude awakening came courtesy of Turkish soldiers at a roadblock. After a tense encounter, McKiernan was sent on his way. He pushed on to the Turkish city of Diyarbakir, where "there were cops all over the street and Kurds up against the wall. And I said, 'What's going on here?'"
McKiernan had stumbled onto Turkey's ongoing repression of its own Kurdish minority, which makes up about 20 percent of the country's population of approximately 63 million. A half million of Iraq's Kurdish refugees had fled to a country where, unlike in Iraq, Kurdish dress and language are outlawed and Kurds are not allowed to run their own schools or media. While Saddam Hussein had used poison gas on a Kurdish village in 1988, killing thousands, the Turkish military has evacuated and leveled hundreds of Kurdish villages, leaving 2 million people homeless. The Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) has been fighting a guerrilla war against the Turkish army in the southeastern mountains, but even in cosmopolitan Istanbul at the opposite end of the country, Kurds and supporters of their cause live with the threat of censure, arrest, and death.
McKiernan says he was struck by "the irony of the disproportionate coverage [of the Kurdish struggle]. The same things were happening to people on both sides on the border, but only one side was getting any coverage." Back in the States, he contacted television network-news outlets that he had sold stories to in past, such as ABC's Nightline, and tried to interest them in the Turkish Kurds. "They took me to lunch, patted me on the back, and told me it just wasn't on the radar," he says. Still, he couldn't let it drop.
Almost a decade later, McKiernan has turned his obsession with the story into Good Kurds, Bad Kurds: No Friends but the Mountains, a documentary he wrote, produced, and directed that details one of the most underreported stories of the '90s. McKiernan spent a good deal of the decade hiking through the mountains with PKK guerrillas, collecting eyewitness accounts of torture and helicopter attacks, and getting the Turkish side from government spokespersons in Istanbul and Ankara, the country's capital. The film even features an interview with Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader convicted by the Turks of treason in 1999 and currently awaiting execution.
But Good Kurds, Bad Kurds also brings the story back to America and down to the personal level through the struggles of a family of Kurdish immigrants based in the filmmaker's hometown of Santa Barbara, Calif. One of the most compelling threads of McKiernan's story involves Kani Xulam, a member of that family who travels to Washington to lobby Congress while he fights off U.S. government attempts to deport him back to Turkey. (Xulam's case remains unresolved; if he is eventually refused political asylum and deported, McKiernan contends, "he wouldn't survive -- there'd be no question of that at all.")
As the film makes plain, the U.S. response to pleas from Turkish Kurds has depended largely on U.S. political and economic interests. In the film, Bill Hartung of Washington, D.C.-based think tank the World Policy Institute opines that in the eyes of the Clinton administration, the Iraqi Kurds who make Saddam Hussein seem like even more of a villain are "good Kurds"; the Kurds who resist U.S. ally Turkey and its policies are "bad Kurds." Iraqi Kurds get U.S. aid; their Turkish cousins are attacked by the U.S.-supplied Turkish army.
In a way, McKiernan says, it's not surprising that the mainstream American media is only now beginning to pick up on the story. The major area of Turkish/Kurdish conflict is geographically remote, and access is limited by the Turkish government. And even as the world becomes more and more of a global village, U.S. news agencies focus less and less on international stories.
"When the Berlin Wall came down [in 1990], there was something like seven and a half minutes of foreign news" a night on network news shows, McKiernan says. "Now you get this scan of world capitals. In fact, NBC has eliminated the category of foreign news [during its nightly broadcast], saying if something is justified [for coverage] they'll go into it in depth. And all this happened during the O.J. Simpson/Monica Lewinsky era, when there was a tabloidization of news."
The Ocalan case has focused more world attention on the issue, but McKiernan is not optimistic about chances for a peaceful resolution in the near future. The Turkish government is sticking to a hard line, even though its Kurdish policy could endanger the country's proposed acceptance into the European Union. If Turkey keeps rejecting moderate solutions and keeps the pressure on its Kurdish population, McKiernan predicts, things could get even uglier.
"This has been called terrorism, but it's pretty traditional guerrilla war -- a country war," he says. But if the army continues to displace rural Kurds and force them into cities, "the Kurds will become more sophisticated as urban people, so there will be real terrorism some time in the next generation or two."
Americans are not the only ones who are relatively unaware of the plight of Turkish Kurds. After a recent screening at a film festival, McKiernan found himself debating a Turkish woman who insisted his film was "exaggerated." When he asked if she had been to the area in question, she said she had not. In addition to the war against the Kurds, the filmmaker says, in Turkey "there is also a war on information. It is illegal for Turkish press to show the funeral of a Turkish soldier, because that would confirm that there was a war going on."
As a young correspondent McKiernan covered the 1973 Native American standoff with federal authorities at Wounded Knee, S.D., and he sees parallels between the Turkish Kurd conflict and America's Indian wars. Given firsthand accounts of 19th-century atrocities against the Sioux and other tribes, he says, "people back East in the 1850s wouldn't have believed it either, and they wouldn't have traveled there or seen any reason to. Yet people had a very strong opinion about what was going on out there.
"I just don't believe that the Turkish people themselves would go along with the atrocities that take place if they had any personal experience. But it's way beyond their experience and their belief. They just don't know about it."
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