Three Turkeys

By bus from Diyarbakir to Gaziantep, Turkey — Monday, Oct. 27

Sebnem Duyar, 30-something Istanbul native, manager of the four-star Class Hotel in Diyarbakir

Sebnem Duyar would probably stand out anywhere. With her giant mane of frizzy auburn hair, her easy, crooked smile and forearms coloured by Asian tattoos, she's never been one to blend easily into crowds.

But of late, the attention she gets on the streets has made her increasingly uncomfortable.

"My grandparents used to say that Diyarbakir is the Paris of Turkey," she said of the ancient walled city to that she has been relentlessly fighting to see added to the country's flourishing tourist trail. "But unfortunately, the situation is getting worse here in the southeast of Turkey."

Especially for liberal, working women like her. While the city is very safe, the growth of political Islam in the country has increased the pressure on women like Sebnem to conform to conservative social norms. Staunchly secular, she won't wear the Islamic headscarf. Which means she either braves the stares or go straight from the hotel to home. Saturday night, she sat alone in the lobby bar of her own hotel, chatting with staff and guests long after it was necessary for her to be there.

"I can go anywhere in Istanbul, not here. Most women in Diyarbakir are housewives, so people here look at me like I'm an alien. If I want to go some place with (male) friends who are not my boyfriend, that's not a very good idea."

Like many secular Turks in this deeply divided state, she lays the blame on the ruling Justice and Development, or AK, party. "They will never represent me," she said.

Abdullah Demirbas, 41, Kurdish leader and ousted mayor of the old city of Diyarbakir

In another country, it would have been an innocent enough gesture. But Abdullah Demirbas knew he was courting trouble when he sent New Year's greeting cards to his constituents that were written in Turkish, English and Kurdish.

The Kurdish language is banned from official use in Turkey, and Demirbas was unsurprised when he ended up before a judge to defend his actions. He says he has 20 outstanding cases against him - most of them for linguistic offenses he incurred by trying to offer services in Kurdish while he was mayor - that could put him behind bars for as long as 60 years.

Demirbas says that when he appeared in court, the judge focused on his illicit use of the letter 'w' in the Kurdish new year's greeting of "sersala we piroz be." Turkish is the only official state language, Demirbas was sternly reminded, and there is no 'w' in the Turkish alphabet.

Absurdly, it didn't seem to bother the court that there was also a 'w' in "Happy New Year" - the English greeting that was printed on the same cards.

"The judge said we could use it in English, but we could not use a Kurdish 'w'," the ex-schoolteacher told me with a rueful smile when I visited him at the office of his Democratic Society Party (known by it Turkish acronym, DTP) in the old city of Diyarbakir. The DTP is the political wing of the outlawed PKK militia that has fought the Turkish army for 24 years, demanding independence for the country's estimated 12 million Kurds.

Six months after he sent the trilingual New Year's greetings - and after further offending the higher authorities by polling Diyarbakir residents on which language they'd prefer to be served in (72 per cent said Kurdish) - Demirbas was removed from office.

The fight for Kurdish rights in Turkey, however, is far from over. Nearly every day in the past week has seen fresh demonstrations in Diyarbakir and other cities, organized by the DTP to protest the alleged mistreatment of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Demirbas, who is investigating the legalities of running again in municipal elections next year, says Turkey's heavy handed attempts to suppress Kurdish nationalism will never succeed.

"Turkish public policy, since 1923, is one people, one society, one language, one flag and one religion," he told me as a heavy rain pounded the stone roof of his office. "This policy is not suitable to the realities of the Turkish republic."

Bayran, 42, part-time labourer and resident of the guest house attached to the Halilur Rahman mosque in Sanliurfa

Bayran doesn't have a very sophisticated understanding of why the Turkish economy is in crisis these days. What he does know is some rich people in Istanbul and Ankara made mistakes, and now the amount of work available for an occasional labourer like him has dried up to perhaps one job a week.

Bayran lives in the deeply conservative city of Sanliurfa, near the Syrian border. Most nights he sleeps in the spartan guesthouse attached to the giant mosque that marks the birthplace of the Prophet Abraham.

(Abraham's stay here was apparently eventful. The story goes that a nefarious King Nimrod tried to have our Abraham immolated on a funeral pyre, but God cleverly intervened, turning the fire into water and the burning coals into fish. A thick school of bread crumb-craving fish inhabits the Lake of Abraham in Sanliurfa today.)

Bayran wears tattered clothes, but a wide smile, as he leads a foreign visitor through the mosque complex. He empties his pocket to show he has only three Turkish lira - the cost of a bed for the nigh at the mosque guesthouse - but steadfastly refuses offered money at the end of his guided tour.

This is his Turkey: poor, devout and conservative. The political concerns of Sebnem Duyar and Abdullah Demirbas have no connection to his reality.

He's a staunch supporter of Prime Minister Tayyep Recep Erdogan and the AK Party. "Not just because they are religious, but because they are honest," he tells me earnestly. "They are on the path of righteousness."

One war zone to another

By taxi through southeastern Anatolia - Saturday, Oct. 25

The most surprising thing about crossing from northern Iraq into southeastern Turkey, which in the Kurdish narrative are two parts of Greater Kurdistan, is that you still feel as though you're in occupied land. In fact, the Turkish military presence here is more obvious than the combined presence of the United States, the Iraqi army and the Kurdish militias in on the other side of the border.

As we drove towards the city of Diyarbakir and into a gathering thunderstorm, Kemal and I were pulled over at a succession of checkpoints and twice made to get out of the car so my bags could be hand-searched. At each base, a makeshift machine-gun post had been constructed underneath Turkey's red-and-white crescent-moon flag. Armoured personnel carriers patrolled the highways.

To an extent, the security measures are understandable. While it was quiet today, southeastern Turkey has effectively been a war zone for much of the past 30 years, a place where hostilities between the army and the Kurdistan Workers' Party can flare up at any time.

The locals in this heavily rural part of Turkey are clearly resentful of the heavy handed military presence in their towns and villages. The residents are Kurds, many of them sympathetic to the PKK, while the soldiers are ethnic Turks.

"Turkey. Problem," Kemal explained to me with a disgusted shrug after a soldier had given my dirty laundry a thorough examination. Kemal was stretching the limits of his early-career-Schwarzenegger English, but I got the point.

Turkey most definitely does have a problem here.

Quote of the week

"George Bush is our friend now. He is adopting Communist solutions to the financial crisis."

- Rahman Gharib, journalist with the Communist Party of Kurdistan.

Iraq's only tourist

Irbil, Iraq - Thursday, Oct. 23

I spent today wandering around the semi-restored remains of the Irbil citadel, a UNESCO world heritage site that overlooks the modern city from atop a hill in the centre of town.

Obviously once majestic – parts of it are believed to date back to the 6th Century B.C., making Irbil one of the oldest human settlements in the world – the vast citadel is unsurprisingly in desperate need of work. While the Kurdish Textiles Museum at its heart is worth a visit, there's little to see in large swathes of the ancient fortress beside graffiti-covered stones. The building that should be the citadel's centerpiece, the former Ottoman pasha's palace, looks like a hurricane blew through it, leaving behind only trash and a few walls for local teenagers to scrawl their names on.

Which raises the question, does the citadel need to be restored in order for tourists to consider coming to Irbil (let's pretend Iraq's security situation isn't an issue here – it's relatively calm in the Kurdish north), or is it a sad fact that no on will rebuild it until they see the first trickle of tourists and the colour of their money?

As I wandered the deserted remains, I bumped into a lonely guard. He confessed that other than the occasional group of Kurdish schoolchildren, there wasn't much for him to do most days.

"Sometimes the Americans come here on their day off. But sometimes there's nobody, or just one person," he said, giving me a sympathetic look.

For dinner, I travelled to the nearby Christian town of Ainkawa where a German restaurant – Der Deutscher Haus – does booming business serving premium Bavarian beers and authentic goulash and schnitzels.

Who says there's nothing for tourists in Iraq?

A short sojourn in Kirkuk

Kirkuk, Iraq – Wednesday, Oct. 22

I briefly ended up in the violent city of Kirkuk today, completely by accident.

When I arrived in Sulaymaniyah this week, I casually asked Miran, The Globe and Mail’s genial longtime driver/fixer in Northern Iraq, whether it would be possible to visit the city that has become the frontline in the struggle between Kurdish and Iraqi nationalists. No, he chuckled, “there are still kidnappings and murders all the time there.” It was the same answer he had given me on my last two visits to the country.

Even as a relative calm has returned to other parts of Iraq, Kirkuk has gotten worse as simmering, decades-old tensions over whether the city is Kurdish, Turkoman or Arab (Saddam Hussein forcibly tried to make it the latter during his reign) bubble towards a full boil.

So the journey today was supposed to be along the safe route. My translator and I boarded the bus to Irbil thinking that it would take the northern road, avoiding the potential trouble on the southern one. Straight out of the station, it went south to Kirkuk, a city I hadn’t visited since the summer of 2003.

Despite some nervousness among the other passengers about having to travel with a trouble-magnet foreigner (there was a long conversation between the driver and passengers before it was agreed that I could come along for the drive), nothing happened. The city I saw was one that divided and scarred by years of fighting – an oil-rich place where electricity is still a luxury that most homes experience for only a few hours a day – but one that was functioning, at least on the Kurdish side that we drove through.

The roads were packed with cars and the shops were open, including a few Christian-owned stores in the city centre that openly advertised the Turkish and German beers they carried in stock (liquor stores have long since disappeared in Baghdad and the Shia south, chased away by the militants).

As we drove through his hometown, Abbas Khorsheed, a 33-year-old dentist with neatly combed-back hair and dark, intense eyes, told me that, economically, the post-Saddam era has been good to Kirkuk. Where he was once paid a state salary of 3,000 Iraqi dinars – a paltry $1.50 (U.S.) – a month as a dentist, he said he now makes upwards of $12,000 a year.

He’s taken some of that money and is studying on the side to become an orthodontist. He advised me that braces would straighten my crooked bottom teeth.

But while most Kurds are big fans of the United States and President George W. Bush for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, Mr. Khorsheed is less sure the sacrifices have been worth it. A pessimist, he sees either unending war, or unending American occupation in Iraq’s future. Kirkuk will remain a dangerous frontline city in whatever happens next, he predicted.

“There is no agreement between the different groups, Arabs, Kurds, Turkomans, Christians. The situation has been like this for centuries. It will not get better,” he said, his quiet voice barely audible over the bus’s squealing engine. And while he’s thinking of leaving the city, he’s convinced the Americans will stay, no matter who wins next month’s U.S. presidential election.

“Iraq will become like Japan. The Americans will stay forever, I think.”

By bus from Sulaymaniyah to Irbil, Iraq – Wednesday, Oct. 22

When I lived in Canada, a road trip meant piling with friends into my green Ford Escort, the windows down and the radio loud as we set off from my hometown of Ottawa to Montreal or Toronto for the weekend. During the years I lived in Russia, a “road trip” usually meant taking the train, speeding between Moscow and St. Petersburg or rolling slowly across the awe-inspiring distances to the east.

In the Middle East, a road trip means military checkpoints. Whether you’re driving between the holy cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, heading to the scenic south of Lebanon, or doing what I did today – cutting across the north of war-torn Iraq by bus – hitting the road means spending a large chunk of your journey having your documents and belongings checked by nervous soldiers.

For the three-plus hours the 17 other passengers and I sat crammed into a decades-old Toyota bus, we hit six checkpoints. Two of them were manned by Iraqi army soldiers, the other four by the pershmerga (ready-to-die) militia that is the de facto army of the autonomous Kurdish region in the north of Iraq. By the last of them – when I was asked to get out of the vehicle so that I could be more closely examined by a swarthy soldier with kebab breath – I was even thinking fondly of the Ontario Provincial Police and their nefarious speed traps. Yes, the checkpoints were that aggravating.

The bumpy, 205-kilometre drive from Sulaymaniyah to Irbil was nonetheless as exhilarating in its own way as those weekend rips to Montreal. For the past five years, reporters like me have had to skulk around this country, fearing car bombs and kidnappings. The last time I was in Baghdad (back in March), a colleague and I used four cars between us, hoping that switching vehicles often enough would keep the anonymous bad guys from tracking our movements too closely. Other journalists travel with their own security detachments.

But today my translator and I simply headed down to the main Sulaymaniyah bus station, found a driver who was hollering out “Hawler! Hawler!” (the Kurdish name for Irbil) and hopped aboard. I grabbed a seat between a gregarious 22-year-old peshmerga fighter heading home to Kirkuk and an intense 26-year-old economics graduate going to Irbil. We sat back and chatted the afternoon away as though we were travelling through a completely normal country somewhere else on this planet.

But this wasn’t that other country, as the jolts to our spine that we experienced each time the bus bounced off a pothole reminded us. Saifeddin Shamseddin, the recent economics grad, was bordering on depressed. His degree, he said, meant nothing in a country where there was no work of any kind for young people like him. He had been in Sulaymaniyah filling out the necessary documentation to go to police college – another Iraqi intellectual forced to pick up a gun because there’s nothing else to do.

“No one is happy here. There are thousands of young students who have just graduated and are now sitting at home jobless” he said, his long legs curled up almost to his chin because the bus seats were so close together.

Mohammed Amin, the young peshmerga fighter, nodded in agreement. He confessed that he was saving up money to pay a smuggler to take him, along with his wife and infant daughter, out of Iraq, to London if they could manage it. “It will continue to get worse here day after day,” he predicted. “I’ve lived here 22 years and I have yet to see one happy day in Iraq."

Dreams, and nightmares, of Baghdad

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq – Monday, Oct. 20

The situation in Iraq is getting better, the statistics say (though the daily blow-by-blow is still mind-numbing to read). By most accounts, Baghdad, an all-out war zone for most of the past five years, is becoming almost livable again.

But don't try telling that to the 300-plus people - almost all of them former Baghdad residents - living in miserable conditions in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Sulaymaniyah. Such rosy talk is nonsense, they say. Returning to their old homes in Baghdad, for them, remains an impossibility.

The stories they tell paint a very different picture than the one emerging of late in the Western media. They don't see an Iraq that's beginning to heal, but instead one where the divisions have become irreparable.

All of the refugees here are Sunni Arabs (Sulaymaniyah is in the Kurdish autonomous region, the majority Kurds are Sunnis) and most of them were driven from their homes by Shia militias during the worst of the sectarian fighting in 2006 and 2007.

It's safe to go back to Baghdad, they say, if it is in a Sunni neighbourhood. If your old home was in a Shia area, there's still no going back.

“I will never go back to Baghdad, It’s impossible for me,” said, Layla Shalan, a widowed 48-year-old mother of six. Wrapped in a head-to-toe black abaya, she told me how she remained in the mixed Dora neighbourhood of Baghdad even after her husband disappeared in 2004, leaving for work one morning and never coming home. She finally fled Dora with her children after Shia gunmen came to her door shortly afterwards and kidnapped her one-year-old daughter Nora, saying they'd return her only when Ms. Shalan and her family vacated their house.

There are dozens of stories like hers in this ramshackle collection of tents in the eastern corner of the Kurdish Autonomous Region. This is a place where optimism is even scarcer than decent food or shelter. Despite the steady stream of good news coming from Baghdad in recent months, the tent city remains home to more than 60 families – making it slightly larger than it was when I last visited here in early 2007.

“If they gave me all of Baghdad, I wouldn’t return. People who say it is getting better are media liars,” Iyad Manfi, the camp's leader, or mukhtar. He moved into one of the shoddy tarps-and-wooden-pole tents here in 2006 after his house near the infamous Abu Ghraib prison was hit by a mysterious explosion. He says he returned to Baghdad once already, believing the security situation had improved, but returned here shortly afterwards after receiving more threats.

Mr. Manfi, whose tense face makes him far older than his 32 years, says returning was a mistake he won’t make again. “When I leave this camp, it will not be to go home. It will be to leave this country.”

That sentiment is common across this battered country. Unsurprising new statistics released by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees today show that while the number of Iraqis seeking asylum in the West has dropped by more than 10 per cent since the same time last year, Iraqis still lodge far more asylum applications than any other nationality.

My own Iraq war

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq - Monday, Oct. 20

This morning, after five years of covering the war here in Iraq – and managing to largely stay clear of the fighting – I finally became a participant in the violence. Upon arriving in my hotel room here in Sulaymaniyah, exhausted after a journey from Kish Island that included two flights and a long drive, I was confronted by a real live terrorist. A cockroach almost the size of my closed fist. The Osama bin Laden of the insect world.

I won’t drive you off the website with all the gory details, but suffice it to say that this was a real this-room-isn’t-big-enough-for-both-of-us battle that lasted upwards of half an hour. The fall of Baghdad didn’t take this long.

The plastic slipper I found in the bathroom did nothing but tickle this behemoth of a bug. I swear he was giggling as I slapped him with it repeatedly. Next up, I tried a shock-and-awe campaign using the sole of my shoe that at least managed to irritate my many-legged nemesis. Finally, borrowing from the U.S. Army’s overkill playbook (think air strikes and wedding parties), I lifted up the minibar fridge and dropped it on the offending roach, ending his one-bug intifada against my occupation of room 207.

Surely there’s some metaphor for the entire “war on terror” somewhere in that story.

The Battle of Room 207 was a bloody end to an exhausting journey from Kish Island in southern Iran to the eastern corner of northern Iraq. The plan had been to get from there to here overland across the Islamic Republic, but after the mullahs decided I wasn’t worthy of even a transit visa across their country, I had to abandon that plan and travel to Sulaymaniyah – the next stop on my itinerary – the long way (answering the question posed by Dion Nissenbaum over at McClatchey newspapers). Two flights and a three-hour drive later, I was face-to-face with Osama the Cockroach.

More geopolitically relevant than my discovery of new uses for a minibar was the reception I got upon landing in Northern Iraq. Walking into the pre-fabricated airport at Irbil, the effective capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, is always a reminder of how detached from the rest of Iraq this place has become.

The fact that I had no Iraqi visa didn’t matter to the blue-uniformed guard who marked page 17 of my passport with a red-and-blue “Kurdistan Regional Government” stamp. There was no sign of the Iraqi flag anywhere inside the terminal – in fact, Arabs from the rest of Iraq were the only people on my flight who received serious scrutiny when they landed in Irbil.

The growing independence of Iraqi Kurdistan is fraught with problems. The Kurds aren’t content with the three northern provinces they currently control, and a conflict with Baghdad is looming over the future of oil-rich Kirkuk, a city Iraqi Kurds refer to as their “Jerusalem.” An independent Kurdistan of any size is also anathema to neighbouring Iran and Turkey, who each have their own large and restive Kurdish populations. Fighting between the Turkish army and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, has escalated along the Turkish-Iraqi border again in recent days, and Iran has also taken to shelling Northern Iraq, targeting Iranian Kurdish groups who use Iraqi Kurdistan as a rear base.

But being here and seeing the determination with which the Kurds have gone about building their own mini-state over the past five years, it’s clear that a point of no return has been passed somewhere along the way. The Kurds will never accept the return of Baghdad’s authority over this land they’ve fought so long to call their own.