Middle Eastern tales

Persia Disappeared

2011-11-27T14:03:00.014+01:00

It's astonishing what sort of books you can find in free shops. Recently, I have found a great German book on the Hittites dating to the 1970s, a nicely poetic one on the Indian-Pakistani nuclear question in English, then one on gender in rural Anatolia (also English). You'd think you'd have to go to Paris, the capital city of a country, track down the Middle Eastern store of a specialized publisher (I am thinking of l'Harmattan, obviously), and rummage through their "Turkey" or "Pakistan" shelf for that sort of thing - before, of course, paying through the nose for it.
Instead you just walk up to the squat down the street and grab it from their boxes.

If I have enough time (and boredom) on my hands, I will blog about at least a couple of those found books. For now, let me impart on you some information about another one, handed to me by friends who found it among bulky rubbish on the street. It is a travelogue entitled "Adventures in Persia" by someone called Reginald Teague-Jones. Intriguingly, the name is a pseudonym, adopted by the writer in 1918, -so the short bio in the front instructs me-, after being accused by the Russians of the murder of 26 Baku commissars (one of the most bizarre and bloody incidents of the Russian Civil War).

His work getting published in 1988, Reginald Teague-Jones achieved notoriety as the oldest man ever to publish a first book. The actual story however dates to 1926, when the man was in his thirties, travelling from Beirut to Baloochistan by car. Bang on to apprise us of some first hand information about public opinion of the 1925 Constitutional Revolution in Iran, one would think. In 1921 the leader of the Persian Cossack brigade, Reza Khan, had started a rebellion, marching his troops to Teheran and overthrowing Government. In 1923 Ahmed Shah left for a prolonged holiday to Europe, a move which effectively ended the Qajar dynasty. And only in 1925 had the mejles decreed that the constitutional sovereignty of the realm was entrusted by the people to Prime Minister Reza Khan, thereby crowning him His Imperial Majesty Reza Shah, the first ruler of the last of Iranian dynasties, the Pahlavis.

Unfortunately Teague-Jones reports that people were skittish about talking about politics, and comments would rarely pass their lips. It is interesting to note that the atmosphere of fear described in the 1920s can still be sensed ninety years later - under a totally different regime.
Instead it was the advent of motorized transportation, supplanting camel and mule, which was on everyone's lips.
Probably the funniest thing he remarks on this frequent topic of his comes around fairly early on, in chapter two: "Motor transport is a transient thing, and one day, if there remain any human survivors from our scientific 'progress', men with bows and arrows may tell their children of ghostly horeselss chariots careering madly along the ancient coastal highway."
Teague-Jones could hardly have had foreseen the Islamic Revolution, of course, - instead he foresaw the Primitivist one.

Himself he travelled in a light-weight car marked 'Zobeida', like the queen of Palmyra, the desert town in Syria through which Teague-Jones also passed.

Before this, when still in Beirut, the following interesting bit of expat prattle is noted: "You should not hurry - Persia will not disappear overnight. You'd better spent a little more time here and buy a car, instead of in Baghdad." - "Well", Emil interjected, "Your friend may be right about Persia disappearing. I hear that Reza Shah is seriously planning to give the country back its ancient name of Iran, banning the use of the word Persia and Persian and expunging it from all maps and public notices".

Upon entering Persia, Teague-Jones has to pass through Iranian Kurdistan, a job he gets done woefully quickly, if you ask me. The reasons, however, are made pretty clear: "The friendly official at the Iranian customs post advised us not to loiter on the road, and to make sure of reaching Kermanshah before nightfall. 'Is there any trouble on the road?', I asked. 'Che arz konam, what can I say? This is not Europe, this is Kurdistan, and after all even a Kurd must live."
Later, in Kermanshah, we learnt that the official's concern for our safety had been justifiable. Only two days previously cars had been fired upon and passengers robbed, while a few days before that a whole party had been ambushed and several killed. Yes, indeed, the poor Kurds must live!"

At the end of the book, he comes back to street robbers, this time describing their punishment: "We stopped and reversed, got out and walked to the pillar. It was built of the usual sun-dried mud bricks, and originally it had been about the height and girth of a London letter-box, but had become weathered with the wind and rain of many seasons.
Abdul began to explain that these things were called adam-e getch (literally, 'plaster-man'). It was the good old way of dealing with highway robbers. [...] The Iranians immured them by building a brick wall round them up to their neck, and then cementing them in with quicklime, leaving only the head uncovered and thereby ensuring a slow and extremely unpleasant death.
The top of this particular pillar had crumbled away, but Abdul grubbed about with his fingers in the powdery dust and lime, and extracted what looked like a section of vertebrae. He held it out to me in the palm of his hand, then threw it on the ground and spat on it. 'Pider-i sukhte! He probably killed many people!'"

I could ramble on quoting other bits of the book, but I'll stop here.

Qaddafi versus Osama Bin Laden

2011-10-22T18:27:00.009+02:00

Last night, the drunken conversation turned around how Muammar Qaddafi was killed, instead of being captured alive, and then, how his body was dragged through the streets. The judgement how shameful this was must have come from the media somewhere.
May I just remark to those Western journalists, and heads of states etc. condemning what happened, that maybe you live 25 or 35 years, or however old you are under a dictatorship like Qadaffi's, live under constant fear, have maybe one or two of your extended family members "disappeared" during this time, and then come back and tell Lybians how to act?

I am basing this consideration on an experience when in Iraqi Kurdistan. My local guide for the day took me up an extremely steep, increasingly tighter growing hairpin road scaling a mountain that faced the famous village Amediyah. Up there, we shuffled around in the rubble of what had once been a luxurious castle, made by Saddam Hussain. I could imagine vividly how the tyrant's castle had been hovering threateningly over the fairy tale landscape to the other side.
"But why did you destroy the structure?", I asked, rather naively, "You could have 'squatted' it, made something else out of it." The man answered: "Yes, but you don't understand. After so many decades living under constant fear, when we were finally rid of Saddam, we could not help but take to our sledgehammers and clobber away at the thing. It felt liberating, it was cathartic."
Of course, Muammar Qaddafi should have been taken to court, tried according to the rules of international law, his crimes should have been exposed so as to avoid repetition. But then let's remember what happened to Saddam. Yes, he was taken to court, but instead of sitting through his entire trial like a good man should, the proceedings were aborted, he was executed as quickly as possible. This happened out of Western fears that their nations' parts in selling him the chemical weaponry he used in his genocidal attacks would come to the light.
And executed he was in an abominable manner, on an Islamic holy day, on which such things are forbidden by religious as well as Iraqi law. Even Iraqi non-Muslims felt offended. Could there have been any guarantee that things would have turned out better in the case of Qaddafi?

The West criticizes the act of killing Qaddafi, but how about what happened to Osama Bin Laden? A military operation in a foreign country on a private house, killing a man, then dumping his body in the sea? How about this man gets a trial, like he should?
I mean, at least Qaddafi got killed by Lybians. As I blogged before many citizens of the country where OBL resided at the time of his death, did not believe he was a criminal (or that he even existed, for one). "Conspiracy theories", Westerners may scoff. But who is to judge? How about an impartial international tribunal? This chance has been foregone.

Arrested by Iranian police

2011-10-12T19:21:00.007+02:00

This time around, in my six weeks in Iran I did not really have that great of a time. One of the reasons for this is that I got taken into custody by the Iranian several times. Usually this was for a few hours only, which nontheless each time made for a stressful experience. With all the news of human rights violations you hear about those guys, you feel like you never really know what to expect.

One time I had trouble with police was in a town usually transcribed from Persian as Ilam, or Eylam, a town less than a hundred kilometers from the Iraqi border and roughly on the same latitude as Baghdad on the other side. I arrived in the city from Lorestani Khorramabad, where I had not been able to find public transportation and since then had passed two veritably difficult days of hitchhiking for the roughly 150 kilometers distance. All the more pleased I was to realize that I had finally arrived in Kurdistan. Comfortable baggy shalwar trousers are worn elsewhere in Iran, too, but it was the particular combination of thick moustaches and Kurdish wear on the local population that were the clear indicator of this happy fact.

Although the town centre of Ilam ressembles nothing so much as any other random Iranian city, it is surrounded by especially attractive mountains and the last day of travel arriving there had been rewardingly beautiful. It took me through a truely unique scenery of green, fertile canyons cutting rashly through an arrested sea of red earth stretching out into the distance. After a while these barren, dune-like hummocks abruptly stopped to yield to domineering, soaring rockfaces begirding the plain, and from then on it was yet another hour and a half until we arrived at the outskirts of the city.

Ilam does not have an entry in the "Populous Planet" travel guide, but as a town being the last stop in Iran for pilgrims to Kerbala and Nadjaf, it certainly sees its share of travellers. Town and region boast some sights of their own: Apparently a castle sits somewhere on an outcrop in the city, and many Sassanian and or historical ruins dot the province around. Apparently, the town even sports some ridiculous kind of luxury hotel on a hill top with a spiral path winding up to it for all the upper class pious people.
In any case, I thought nothing much out of the ordinary of my coming to Ilam that hot July afternoon. Having spotted a green-turquoise tiled dome of a mosque down a sidestreet in the town centre somewhere, this is where I turned, looking for a place to relax a little bit. In knew mosques in Iran to be places where people come to eat ice-cream, play backgammon, read short stories to their kids or even just sleep. I walked in with my heavy bag, sitting down, leaning to the wall. Soon I was ringed by friendly women. Two 20-year olds invited me to come and see the castle with them later on.
One lady in her forties slowly talked to me in the local variety of Sorani Kurdish, whereas I responded in Persian. I was delighted to find out we could have a simple conversation this way. I do not remember her name, but she said she had six children and was married to a carpenter. What happened then, I will sum up in one short sentence: Policemen came, lured me out, and arrested me. Under the pretext that I would be taken to the Miras Farhangi, the statal tourist office present in each and every Iranian city, I was transported to the local police station where I was to spend a few hours talking to a surprisingly nice police woman. (In Islamic countries, if having to deal with police, I always refuse to speak to policemen, insisting on a woman, a simple way to refuse to cooperate which is well adapted to their culture.)
At some point during our long exchange, even the police woman beamed at me and informed me, "In this region, we are not Persians, we are Kurds!" It was funny, but even she, the police officer, did this in exactly the same way Kurdish people, often tending to be immoderately proud of their origins, are wont to impress on you anywhere else in the world, really.
In the evening I was forced to take a shared taxi through the dark to the nearest touristic town, Kermanshah.

Now, why-oh-why did I get arrested? The only possible explanation I could find is because of PJAK activity in the surrounding mountains. They are certainly present in this particular zone, and this summer was a hot one on the warfront. Not that I had planned on chancing out into the mountains by myself, but maybe I was lucky nothing worse happened than the stint with the police. It is interesting to note that, the population in and around Ilam are Shiite Kurds (the police woman informed me so, too), yet the PJAK insurrection is taking place here. The other area of Iran where there are Shiite, not Sunni, Kurds, is the region of Kermanshah, whose inhabitants are often denounced as traitors and collaborators by other Kurds.

Opium

2011-09-27T13:35:00.012+02:00

We'd stopped the car somewhere in the dessert, but glistening drops of sweat formed and dropped down Amar's forehead not only from the 50 degree heat that invaded the interior of the vehicle now that we had switched off the air conditioning together with the engine.
Between his lips, the handsome, 30-year old Khuzestani Arab was balancing a thin, sort of joint-shaped paper funnel rolled up from a page of the palm-sized miniature Koran which was now again stowed away in the glove compartment. "That is the only thing the Koran is good for", he had joked when tearing out the sheet. Right now, Amar was sucking in greedily through its medium the creamy white whirls of smoke wavering up from the piece of opium he held before it. He had transfixed the smaller than fingertip-sized, roughly triangular morsel of the lightly earth-coloured drug on one sharpened end of a short piece of steel wire, a folded open paper clip. Holding it with a piece of tissue in front of his face, he used the other hand to heat up the second end of the wire with his lighter. Rubbing it over the surface of the chunk of drug sent up diminutive streams of thick white mists to be inhaled.
Of course Amar had offered me too to smoke, but I had declined.

I remarked that in Europe you would never be able to smoke opium like this. Even though the stuff retains some of the taste of the actual poppy plant, its consistency changes over the thousands of kilometers it has to travel from Central Asian Afghanistan. Opium has a texture a little bit like half-dry clay, which you can knead a little bit, but which can also fall to dust. Of course, opium is too precious, so you don't play around with it too much. While the drug retains the chlorophyll taste of the poppy plant all the way to the West, the texture of opium in Europe is drier, more brittle, more on the side of dust than wet clay. But here in Iran, its consistency was still gummy enough to pierce it on a tiny skewer without it falling apart.

It was the first time I saw someone smoke opium this particular way, although it was by far not the first time I came across this drug in Iran. A few times I had seen it on the countryside, being consumed by respectable, middle-aged men, smoking themselves pinhole-eyed before or after dinner, -or even lunch, actually. All over the country, whether North-East or Centre-West of Iran, I saw them using a bit shorter than underarm-long, dark wooden pipes with elegant ornamental carvings.

Before the revolution of 1979, Iran itself was an important producer of opium. Apparently in the 1950s still it was a perfectly acceptable practice to drink opium-spiked coffee or tea.
In today's climate, where much more effort is invested in repression of the traffic of alcohol, Islam's ultimate haram substance, Iran, as a transit country, has become invaded by drugs from Afghanistan. The drugs find a ready market among Iranians of all ages bored stiff by Islamic laws.

2011-09-26T14:01:00.003+02:00

At the tender age of 12, I named my cat (the first I ever had), "Mallory", as in "Mickey and Mallory" from that Robert Rodriguez film, "Natural Born Killers".

Last time I watched it I was still early pubescent and before seeing it again now I thought there were probably some things I did not understand yet at that age. Just watched it again, and must admit that is not strictly speaking true. The main attraction of the movie remains the random, outrageous violence, with a bit of irony about popular culture thrown into the mix.

One of the few things that did escape me back in the day was the ingenious use of music. At the moment when Mickey and Mallory are walking down the stairs into the "lion cage" of police armed to the teeth all out to get them, the two of them using that TV show host as a human shield, scenes of a prison riot are cut in to be flashing past. These scenes are first being accompanied by some rather solemn, typically Islamic "Allah, Allah" sing song music, then by a more refined, but equally calm Sufi piece.
Turns out both are by Pakistani Qawwali superstar Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

One of them is this song.

Of Yellow Babies and Khamenei's Catamite

2011-08-18T16:33:00.014+02:00

We had a great day walking a lot between lifts, first on the parched heights of the mountains around the city, then in the verdant green valley that was our destination. We arrived in the first of its khaki-coloured, stepped villages right at friday prayer time, when the streets were solemnly swept empty of life, except for a stray dog or two. Soon though the mosque emptied itself, and the men of this and all the surrounding villages who had gathered for the occasion streamed out and down the narrow streets in their wide shalvar trousers tied together with cummerbunds. Quite some of them were of the most beautifully furrowed respected elders. One teethless, completely white-haired old man heaved himself on his completely white donkey, clutching onto the saddle pommel with gnarled, fragile hands, sitting slumped as he rode home.
As the village emptied again, we decided to walk on. By the end of the afternoon we had been given handfuls of sour cherries and plums by people along the road, we had had lunch in one house, tea in another, and fought off several other invitations. A man who invited us for tea in the shade of his orchard’s trees offered to spend the night in his family’s house, and for me that seemed like the logical consequence of the lovely day I had had.
Maher however had to trek back home. He openly admitted to me that, as for his family, if he was a girl he would not have been allowed to come and spent the day away in a village somewhere with a foreigner. In the same vein, some restrictions also apply to him as a guy – it was okay to come and show a girl around, but the night he would have to spend in his family’s house. Believe it or not, in these countries men also are considered to have some sort of honour as concerns sexual matters, although one much less fetishized than that of women.
How much easier would it be if Maher could just come out to his family and confide to them that he is gay anyway?
But in this Iranian provincial town none of his support group’s friends are out to their families or even their closest friends, except the ones who are gay, too. “I could never tell my sister!”, Maher explained to me, “ In Iran having a gay brother is the sort of thing you wish for your worst enemies. Not that they get a terrible disease, or that they bear a one-eyed, yellow baby, no -that their brother is gay!”

The day before he and his friends had shown me pictures of members of their group, some of them wearing pink T-shirts, and some of them in seductive poses, throwing kisses or hugging each other, in the town’s parks or on its squares. “These are Iranian gay”, they said to me, as if it was a joke. One picture was a group picture, taken in an office. Maher pointed to a poster of the country’s spiritual leaders Khomeini and Khamenei hanging on the wall and said to me: “These are the most famous Iranian gay." Jadi completed the information: "Yes, it is common knowledge Khamenei and Khomeini had a relationship before Khomeini died." And we chuckled at the implication hanging in the air that Khamenei only really got nominated as Khomeini's successor because of sexual favours.
“Anyways, this one", eighteen-year old Ferhad put his finger on grand-daddy Khamenei, "he was my boyfriend for a year, but then he ditched me for someone younger”.

“And do you like Ahmadinejad?”, they asked me about their country's ultra-conservative president of army general background who famously claims that Iranian gays don't exist. I negated, for various reasons. “We do!”, Jadi exclaimed, “we think it’s obvious he is gay, too. He and everyone in the military!"

Reading Lolita in Lebanon

2011-08-15T19:19:00.038+02:00

The other day I delightedly came across the novel 'Lolita' in Persian translation at an illegal bookseller's on an overhead pass on the streets of Iran (and yes, it was in Teheran). The young lad had arrayed the selection of Persian and English classics on offer on two open sheets of newspaper. The copy of Lolita he had appeared to have been professionally printed and bound and, as such, to date back at least to the seventies (picture to the right; someone who reads Persian better than me will be able to make out the editor).

And this will get me to blog quickly about my favourite author's most famous book and its incarnations in the Middle East.

Now, according to what my research yielded, Lolita was first rendered in Persian by Zabihollah Mansouri in a weekly journal called “Art and Cinema” around 1958, almost immediately after the novel's publication in the US. Since then no other complete legal or illegal translation of Lolita has appeared, although parts of it are translated in translation journals and books. Today of course, the book is only available on the black market.
Mansouri’s translation is almost always considered as an example of unfaithful translation by Iranian translators and critics.

As for the Arabic translation of Lolita, it seems to have actually been published in Iraq, before (in 1988) being published in Beirut, Lebanon, which would have been my first guess. That gives a clear message about the degree in which Iraq was progressive in the Arab world after one-and-a-half decades of paradoxical Ba'ath dictatorship, by the way.
The terminus ante quem for first publication in the Arabic language thus can be given as 1984, when 'Lulita' was published by Baghdadi editor Maktabat al-Nahdah.

The Arabic version is not based on the English original, but on the first and flawed French translation.

And after all those technicalities, let me quickly slap a thought about something quite obvious onto the page....

Is it permitted to wonder to what extent the Islamic world gets the perversity of this story at all?

In the book Humbert Humbert is twenty-five years old (and of "brutal good looks"), when he meets Lolita of twelve.

Now, one of my Pakistani friends, the lovely Sajjad from Lahore, was thirty when he married his wife of fifteen. A group of Iranian Azeri women with whom I spent a few days this summer had been married off by their families in the years before the revolution each of them at the tender age of 13, and saw nothing strange about that now, thirty years later on. Roya, one of the daughters of one of these women, had been married to one of her cousins two years ago at the age of fourteen, and is now a housewife. (The second daughter, Yasaman, is twenty and studying agricultural engineering. Which was the decisive difference in the fate of these two sisters? "Well, Roya at a young age already was a beautiful girl, and since it was a member of our extended family proposing we could not refuse her hand", her mother explained to me. What a curse it is in those countries to be pretty...).

A few years ago, at the age of 22, I was hitchhiking through Mauritania with my two friends Kati and Kinga, when a group of men around fifty-five or sixty years of age took us on. One of them proudly let us see a photograph of his youngest son, born to him by his sixteen year old wife of three years, the last in a row of three spouses. I remember how all I could think of, with suppressed disgust, was that nothing worse could possibly happen in my life than to have to sleep with a guy like that.

Examples, in the rural areas of Middle Eastern countries, abound, I believe. The primeval precedent of course was set by the prophet Mohammad himself, when he married nine-year old Aisha.

Stating the fact that these practices are common, is not to banalize them. Women greatly suffer under them. This article gives "age difference in marriage; premature marriage" as the second reason for female suicides in North-Western Iran, where these kind of suicides are especially common.

[EDIT:] Interesting addendum. I did not know I would be so timely, but apparently this blog post hits right into somewhat of a vein of Nabokov publications in Iran (legally, thus):

As of the 5th of September, the short story "The Vane Sisters" was released. I do wonder how any translater into any language is going to handle the acrosticized last paragraph, but I think that was a tough nut especially for the Persian alphabet... !

As of the 17th of September, Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire" appeared, as translated into Persian by Bahman Khosravi.

2011-07-29T17:45:00.002+02:00

Arriving in Iran from Pakistan is like arriving in a totally different world. All of a sudden there is more tar than potholes on the roads, there is electricity a luxurious 24 hours, there is shops selling more than one type of ice-cream. The abrupt onslaught of modernity makes you almost feel like you have arrived in super-consumerist America.
Albeit in the guise of phantoms all draped in black, there is groups of women on the streets everywhere here (after Quetta, the super-conservative last Pakistani town before the border this almost comes as a surprise!), women go to work or even keep their own shops, while some of their young husbands help do the dishes. And –believe it or not- as long as I have most (/some) of my hair covered as the state wants, no one finds much reason to be shocked or perv about the fact that the outline of my breasts through a long-sleeved shirt can be seen.

(Given the fact that I have blogged already three times until now about the tits-in-shirts issue, this seems to be to me the point that, no matter how negligeable in practical significance, epitomizes just how repressed and in consequence crookedly mysoginist Pakistani society really is…)

The Staring Disorder

2011-06-18T09:26:00.008+02:00

Apparently it is a general subcontinental thing, but at least for Pakistanis I can attest to it - they just love to stare at you.

One instance was when on a Sufi festival a group of I should say almost a hundred people crowded around me, and just stayed there, staring. If I hadn't taken refuge behind the counter of street vendor, they would have probably put their feet exactly where my shoes ended. An organizer of the festival finally came and beat the crowd away from around me, brandishing a stick.

Female trekkers in the mountain areas are advised to urinate into plastic bags inside their tents, otherwise, if spotted by someone behind a bush, male villagers will find nothing odd in rubbing shoulders around the person watching her relieve herself. (At the rate that Pakistani men are pissing in public, I do wonder how they'd react if only one time women joined in in a game of pointing at their wieners...)

My acquaintance Khan Khattak from Islamabad thought it was a common feature of human nature: "If I came to a town in Western Europe, dressed in a Chitrali hat and with a Kalashnikov in hand, of course people would also crowd around me!" I assured him that would not be the case -please correct me if you think I'm wrong on this, Westerners-, people in the West would, for sure, individually look over their shoulders to follow with their eyes where this strange appearance would be going, but never ever ever, would they make it this communal sport of just standing around you, not going anywhere.
Except, of course, you put yourself immobile onto some sort of pedestal and they will think you are trying to busk for money.

However, it did turn out, there is one thing common to human nature when it comes to dealing with starers: When in the hotel garden in Chilas, a group of ginks goggled at me without so much as batting an eyelash for the entire half-hour of breakfast. Nasha's reflex it was to go inside. I refused with the words, "In this culture we are the weirdoes if we stay outside while being such a curiosity to these men. But in my culture, it is the starers who are the weirdoes, and I am not going to go inside and sit inside that stuffy, lightless room, when I have shady garden to sit in the breeze just outside the door!". So I dealt with the cohort of kooks in the way we do in the West and stared back at them with about as idiotic an expression on my face as they had mustering me.

It only took a few seconds and surprise, surprise, the treatment had worked wonders. The guy who'd had the most pronounced goggle eyes even felt embarrassed enough to turn his chair the other way from me.

Being a guest in Kohestan

2011-06-18T08:57:00.010+02:00

I was trying to settle my bill, but the receptionist just wouldn't heed me.
This was probably because I was basically naked by local standards, having forgotten to take my dupatta (headscarf) from my room, so the guy had to try to avoid his eyes being caught by all that hair on my head and -worse- the outline of my breasts through my already quite thick kameez (long sleeved local shirt), when looking at me.

The night before we had been a guest in a family home. Having placed us in the luxurious guest room, the young men of the family chatted for hours to my male companion, Ahsan, but avoided even looking in my general direction. This, in this part of the country, counts as politeness. One after the other coming into the room, they did not even respond to my As-salaam Aleykums and only spoke to me when telling me what to do or not to do ("Sit", "Eat", "Don't go out", "Come back!").

I tried to go outside to spend time with the women instead, but we were deaf-mute with language barrier to each other. While this can be the case in other parts of the country, elsewhere at least the women smile at you, offer you tea and invite you to sit next to them, so you can strive to communicate somehow with hand and feet and the few words of Urdu you can rummage out of the back of your mind. But not here, they just stared at me for a minute -not unfriendlily, mind you- then gestured me to go back to the guest room.

Wearing Jeans in Pakistan

2011-05-30T07:14:00.012+02:00

One thing I will not miss when I leave Pakistan is being surrounded by a crowd of off-putting males staring at you who misunderstand everything you say.
One of these young men came forth and asked me: "Why aren't you wearing shalvar kameez?". This was probably the first or second time in my three weeks in Lahore that I put on jeans to go with a traditional kameez top and a headscarf. I showed my long-sleeved top and said that at home in this heat I would just wear a T-shirt, so I was already trying to respect their culture, wasn't that maybe enough for today? And I was wearing this heavy shawl around my shoulders so the outline of my breasts could not be seen, because this was what Pakistani culture expected. "In my culture", I explained, "it is the guys who are staring at other peoples' body-parts who are seen as the weirdos, not the women who do not go to extremes to cover themselves".
This of course was too much, no Pakistani villager could ever grasp this concept. So the guy seemed to take the fact that I had talked about wearing a T-shirt and showing my breast as a clear indication that I was one of those total sluts fabled to exist in the West - I could see his smile grow lewder as I was talking about clothing. And then, when I gave him a floppy fish for a handshake, he squeezed it over-warmly as we bid good-bye.

A bit later the same evening (I was still wearing the same clothes, needless to say): Tariq was introduced to me by my great local friend Sadjad, so Tariq of course would not hit on me dumbly like many other Pakistanis, no. Instead he used the entire half-an-hour rickshaw taxi ride to bore my brains out trying to convince me how liberal a husband he would make : "My wife can work if she wants, or she cannot. She can be from another country or religion. We can live in Europe if she wants, or we can live here." etc. pp. Then the next thing he asked me was: "But why are you wearing jeans today? Wouldn't it be nicer if you wore shalvar?"

(Context: University campuses are fabled to exist in Pakistan that are just teeming with girls wearing jeans and shirts more outrageously tight than in Europe, but being anywhere else in the country this can be hard to imagine: Hanging out in the rich parts of Lahore, the country's so-called most progressive city, I have to admit I spotted girls in jeans and T-shirt the grand total amount of twice. Most male family members simply not allow their women to wear anything but traditional clothing.)

2011-05-16T13:58:00.010+02:00

Pakistani involvement with the US goes back a long way to the times of the Partition when the separate states of India and Pakistan were created out of what before simply was the Subcontinent. India went on to play a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement, which, as was an open secret, was actually a pro-Soviet leaning organization of states, rather than the "Neither East-Nor West" movement it professed to be. So Pakistan saw itself cornered into a gradually tightening relationship with the United States, yet to become a world power.
Pakistan may have missed out when it was not present at the 1954 Bandung conference of Non-Aligned countries, important in its momentum as the first congregation that brought together virtually all countries from what today is called the Global South.

In 1979, in a still bipolar world, Soviet Russia invaded Afghanistan and Pakistan got even more bogged down in its alliance with the US, as Pakistan was at the front-line of the US effort to support the war effort of any opposition to the Communists, including the Taliban. Ultimately Pakistan pays a heavy price for this, since thirty years on the Taliban are still active in the area. When, angered by occasions such as the killing of Osama Bin Laden, they cannot reach the American superstate to avenge themselves, they blow up the targets of the collaborating Pakistani government instead, claiming civilian lives. The first bomb blast ten days after Osama Bin Laden's death killed 15 in Peshawar.

While "Death to America" graffiti abound in Pakistan, and seeing outside forces as the originators of all that is deficient in one's country is a short-cut logic all too often applied, the general climate has been more and more wary of foreigners for the past few years. Local journalist love to snap a picture of international correspondents talking to police (this can happen for any reason, even asking the way), and publish them the next day with a headline saying "Potential spies interrogated by Police" or something similar.
But the reputation of foreigners in the country has already been especially low since January 2011, when CIA agent Raymond Davis killed two civilians in the Pakistani city of Lahore and was subsequently shipped out into his home country without trial or punishment. Most Pakistanis' longing for a sense of justice can only be satisfied with an extradition of the man, a step the US is unwilling to take.

Behind this background, the Pakistani public feel more indignation at the violation of their national sovereignty that the US operation represents, than joy at the fact that a great terrorist has been caught.
Since Osama Bin Laden's death, outside "agencies" are now definetely in the minds of many Pakistanis, and even ordinary tourists get to feel this.
If I just may compile anecdotes: Hotel owners seem to be visited by agencies demanding details about their clients daily now, and because of this extra-hassle I even got turned down by two of them. When haggling for a student price I apparently got so badly insulted, my local host talked for two days about how outrageous their behaviour was (luckily for me, my ignorance of Urdu made me feel less offended than him...).
On a Sufi festival my local companion said he had to repeatedly tell the crowd gathering around me I was German, not American, in order to appease them, and never in former years, he said, had the crowd been like this disagreeable with other foreign friends of his. I don't know, he may have been exaggerating...

As for anecdotal evidence, the only American traveller I met hated Pakistan after a week here, "not just officials or police, even just the people on the bus were really hostile".

Prison Break

2011-04-09T16:34:00.004+02:00

Just as I was flying out of Malaysia a few days ago, reading the English language daily handed out on the plane, I found out some interesting news had broken: The headline read "105 escape from detention depot, 25 nabbed".
Around 10 a.m. the previous morning, a large group of detainees of a deportation centre outside of Kuala Lumpur rioted and 105 persons subsequently managed to escape as the barbed wire fence surrounding the incarcerating institution was torn down, overwhelming the guards by their sheer numbers. Police set up roadblocks, but hopefully many of the run-aways managed to hide in the jungles and palm oil estates around that area.
Most of the escapees were Myanmar nationals, but others also from Iran, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal and Vietnam.

The difference to Western Europe is of course the difficulty presented by a break-out from prison (hired helicopters, anyone?), and the fact that our mainstream media would not be allowed to report such an incidence...

Göbekli Tepe

2011-03-23T19:07:00.004+01:00

About a month ago I found a book, “Rätselhafte Religionen der Vorzeit” ("Mysterious religions of prehistory") by theologian Ina Mahlsted, which I found immensely interesting and devoured in one gulp in two consecutive days.
It seems in several ways to corroborate the view that humans were in many ways worse off after the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to sedentariness and farming (not necessarily that we go back to the former ;) ).
The following blog post, a commentary on the book, is more a general text about prehistory and early farmers, than one about the Middle East. The general introduction to religions of prehistory of the first part may provide a good key though to understanding Mahlsted's description of Göbekli Tepe in South-Eastern Turkey afterwards, where the basic keywords and keynotions pop up again.

Human beings are 'biologically free', that is genetically open to various behaviours, lifestyles and social structures. Before monotheistic religions with their divine commandments and demands of service and obedience arose, pre-historic peoples were forced to use their cognitive capabilities to understand the world they lived in in a way as to create focal points and patterns of order out of an infinity of possibilities around them, the 'truths' they needed to find a sense of security in their world. These religions did not oppose an unfathomable God of creation to the humans down below, but formulated the relationship of the human being to life, nature and earth.

Hunter-gatherers lived in a world in which animals and human beings, and often also plants or spirits, were of equal value. Life and death were seen as an endless, organic, self-recreating cycle, 'the rising and setting of the sun a daily heartbeat, […] life and death a protracted breathing rhythm'. Death was seen as an organic part of the whole; indeed, as a necessary precondition for life to recreate itself. There could be no healing without total annihilation first. Death was not the opposite of life, but contained the dynamic that carried life on. The analogy of sleep is an obvious one. As such death did not carry a true emotional shock for the hunter.

Grasping the creative power ancient people saw invested in death helps to understand the human sacrifices we today see as barbarian, or even the animal sacrifices, which live forth in Islam. Death was seen as a period to be passed through by some in order to re-new life-bringing powers for the community left behind.
This thought is also contained in the symbol of the holy stone. Stone is not only fascinating for its infinite oldness, but it is also the only really lifeless matter on earth through which no life pulses. Think of all the menhirs and megaliths we have in Europe, and that even Allah reveals himself in the qibla, a blackened meteorite. In that death holds within itself the impulse for life, the cairns of Brittany or the Hypogeum of Malta are the opposite of graves, Mahlstedt writes. These dark, inner sanctums made the spiritual world touchable, created a space where humans could participate in the re-creation of life.

When the huge cataclysm of farming came about, there was henceforth only one source of food – the earth. Instead of trying to make sense of the entire world around them, humans started to focus on the earth alone. This was the beginning of dichotomies that finally led to monotheism. The first, fundamental dichotomy was that of earth, which yielded the foodstuffs that nourished humans, and the sky, nourishing the earth through its sun and rain. This eventually lead in many cultures to a sky-god, as or for example the ancient Turks had, and to which Judaism, Christianity and Islam are still attached in this day. From the primeval dichotomy of earth and sky sprang other dichotomies such as concepts of 'good' and 'bad', 'life' and 'death', 'the spiritual' and 'the material'. Maybe this influenced also an exacerbation in the division of people into 'male' and 'female'. For other reasons, gender relations certainly changed with the onset of agriculture. And as we will later see, the earth was often associated with feminity, heaven with masculinity.
As a hunter-gatherer, the human being had been part of a living, breathing world complete in itself, with the onset of agriculture, the human being with its needs and interests started to be at the centre of a world, incomplete without the redeeming here-after. The road to monotheism with its duality of promise and punishment, and concept of obedience, was open. The moral notions of 'good' and 'evil' are intrinsically monotheistic representations.

A friend of mine once said “Sowing something and watching it grow is one of the most powerful things there are.” Indeed it must have been fascinating to early farmers that life that disappeared and returned so mysteriously in its steady rhythm. Who or what caused the return of life, what exactly happened during death? So they found representations for how life renewed itself. In the Neolithic the first farmers created a world of spirits and demons, which on the one hand are immanent in all living things (which is a remnant of hunter-gatherer thinking), but on the other necessitate human beings' participation. Just as the earth needed the humans' physical participation to yield, the spiritual world needed human participation in form of holy rites. Negligence of these rites was seen as cause the cause of disease, drought or epidemics.
Monotheistic thinking finally centres all power to create 'good' and 'evil' on the human being. It promises deliverance after death from the dull, material world beneath. All circular thinking is gone. This is linear thinking also ultimately led to the pathological obsession with 'progress' we live in in the capitalist societies of today, by the way.

The writer of the book travelled to Urfa in South-Eastern Turkey to visit the 12,000 year old sanctuary of Göbekli Tepe. She described the area around it like this: “The dry land is only animated by rain from November to March, and in the seasonal death of summer stiffens under a cover of dust of which the Sumerians said it lay down paralysing the earth like a pall. [..]The barren plain, on which between the lime stone and under the constant rough wind and brutal sun grass grows only sparsely, is no place of this world.”
Research has shown that in Eastern Anatolia people were already in 10,000 BC cultivating wheat from which they could nourish themselves sufficiently. This hill rising abruptly out of the total flatness, with four springs being located at its ridges may have been seen as the centre of their world by already partly sedentary farmers who created there a holy microcosm of how they saw the world at whole. Still today, Göbekli Tepe actually means 'Hill of the Navel' in translation.
The strong symbolic of the four life-giving rivers as an image of paradise maintained itself until it was formulated in the Torah, and thus made its way into the major monotheistic religions of today.
On top of the hill, stelae with animal depictions stood, on which fertile earth was heaved until they were entirely covered, swelling the holy 'belly'. All over the hill in the rock tiny basins are found. They are thought to have come about by farmers ritually touching and circularly rubbing the rock. Water and stone dust were spilt or blown over the earth, symbolically fertilising it. Any kind of vegetable or cereal the locals had down on the fertile plain was let to grow wildly here.

On the stelae hidden under the earth, among other animals cranes, wild boars and snakes were depicted. The animals carved into the stones were not entirely congruous with the fauna present around. They seem to have had ritualistic character. Since here water seems to have been associated with male fertilising potency and the earth with the female power to give life, snakes are interesting in the sense that they were seen as hermaphrodites, representing both male and female together, and as such symbolising self-regenerating power. Their strange shedding of skin was seen as a symbol of renewal. They belonged to the earth, but were brought into connection with water: “Winding their way across parched earth like small waterways” snakes were fascinating and “mysterious, because soundless, and at the same time dangerous creatures” all of which brought them closer to the 'other-world' of death that was so important in the circle of life.

A history of Iran

2011-02-24T12:21:00.007+01:00

These past weeks a lot of pressing matters were at hand, so I did the logical thing, and stayed home and read books. One of the books I read was recommended to me by Sahand of the Mezrab as the best single volume history of Iran to read. Written by someone who states things 'Iranians themselves even don't want to hear', the work he was on about was Michael Axworthy's 'Empire of the Mind'. Axworthy works at the university of Exeter, which incidentally also, has had a department of Kurdology for a few years now.
I admit I skipped parts of the usual what Shah fought what battle where, but the analytical parts of the book made up greatly for the periods of tedium any history book is bound to inspire. Axworthy makes parallels of ancient and modern times, strives to point out red threads and consistencies in history. So he writes of the rebel Gaumata of the 6th century BC, who was put down by Darius: “An Iranian revolution, led by a charismatic cleric, seizing power from an oppressive monarch, asserting religious orthodoxy, attacking false believers, and drawing support from economic grievances […]. How modern that sounds.”
It is an unlikely history Axworthy relates in that it is spiced with quaint detail, such as episodes of Safavid binge-drinking, or the cannibalism of Shah Ismail -ordering his soldiers to eat a kebab made of beheaded rebel leaders. In contemporary history, it was a story from the last year of Ayatollah Khomeini's life I found most striking: In the months before his death, Khomeini wrote a letter to Gorbachev, extolling to him the virtues of a conversion to Islam as an antidote to the disappointments of communism!

In the end what makes Axworthy's book good, is, to my mind, not that he is seeking out those 'red threads' throughout history (these may be contrivances of the human mind), but his analyses, and the fact that he puts personal opinion into it. So, about Manicheism he opines, “it would be foolish to attribute all the evils of religion to Mani, but he does seem to have done a remarkably good job of infecting a range of belief systems with the most damaging and depressing ideas about impurity, the corruption of material existence and the sinfulness of sexual pleasure that anyone could have ever come up with", and goes on to state: "Of course, [Mani's] notions (especially those about the corrupt and sinful nature of sexual relations) were useful also to those with a wish to elaborate metaphysically upon misogynistic impulses. To those with a deterministic bent too. His thinking was a kind of Pandora's box of malignity, the particles of which went fluttering off in all directions on their misshapen wings.”

He makes useful side-spurts out of Iranian territory to describe episodes such as the first contacts between Jews and Mohammedans. In fact, the relations between Muslims and Jews in the days when Mohammad granted them and Christians minority rights in the Constitution of Medina in 623, were not as simple and smooth as as I believed earlier:
"In Medina there were three important Jewish tribes. Early on, Mohammed had given Jerusalem as the direction of prayer and had made other provisions that apparently conciliated Judaism. The earliest, most essential provisions are strikingly congruent with Judaism in content and significance. But the Jews rejected Mohammed's revelation, and relations between the two religious groups deteriorated. The jewish tribes were accused of treacherous contacts with the Meccans, and in successsion they were ejected from Medina; their property was confiscated and the males of the last tribe were massacred after they attempted to betray the Medinans in the Battle of the Trench. As the remaining inhabitants were converted, Medina became the model of a unified Muslim community -the umma."
Numbering around 30,000, Jews in Iran are still today the most numerous in any country in the Middle East outside Israel. Throughout history they underwent much oppression, even episodic pogroms (somewhat more so than the Christians, it seems from the many pages of Axworthy's descriptions).

The chapter about Persian poetry I found fairly enlightening. Myself, I am under the influence of my Kurdish friend Hero. Her name translates as the name of a flower, so despite the qualities its English homograph evokes, it is a very female name (also Mr. Talabani's wife's given name incidentally). Hero is from a Kurdish Iranian family, who fled Iran in the seventies, many of her extended family's members having been tortured and killed by the regime. You cannot hold it against her if she hates all things Iranian. For her, the Persian language is 'like, the gayest language ever' (I can see what she means), 5000 years of Persian statehood epitomize nothing less than 5000 years of torture and oppression (again, I see where she is coming from), and the so much vaunted Persian poetry she likes to ridicule with the words, “but what is it all about? Flowers! I mean come on, couldn't they find something better to rhyme about?”. I have a similar view.
Axworthy counters this kind of talk by quoting directly (in Persian transcript, so people like I, with basic notions of Persian, can skim over the original before turning to the translation) the greatest poets, a bit of Ferdowsi, a bit of Sa'di etc. Hafez is quoted as inviting the reader to drink love down to the bitter dregs, 'because love demands full commitment'. In his ghazals "the familiar images of wine and the Beloved (a common Sufi term meaning 'God', but also one's lover...) ripple, interfere, overlap, reflect each other and thereby transcend the immediate eroticism to point beyond desire to the world of the spirit":
'Again the times are out of joint; and again/For wine and the Beloved's languid glance I am fain […] 'Tumult and bloody battle rage in the plain/Bring blood-red wine and fill the cup again.'
Maybe I am a wino, but I liked it.

To me, one of the most important things Axworthy explains are the coming about of religious hierarchies in Shi'ism and the eventual emergence of Khomeini's concept of Velayat-e Faqih ('Regency of the Islamic Jurist'), on which the Islamic Republic is founded. I am going to summarize this in quotations:
“The old argument between tradition and reason, which had rolled back and forth in a Sunni context between the Mu'tazilis and their opponents in the time of the Abbasids, resurfaced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in a different form, in a dispute beetween what came to be called Akhbari and Usuli schools that was not to be resolved finaly until the nineteenth century. The Akhbaris asserted that ordinary Muslims should read and interpret holy texts for themselves, without the need for intermediaries. The traditions (hadith) -especially the traditions of the Shi'a Emams- were the best guide. The Usulis rejected this doctrine, saying that authoritative interpretation (ijtihad) on the basis of reason was necccessary; and required extended scholarly training, which could only be achieved by specially talented scholars among the ulema, called mojtaheds. Almost all areas of human conduct were open to ijtihad (the Akhbaris had taken the view that disputes that could not be resolved by the precedents in the holy texts would have to be referred to the secular powers).
The Usulis eventually won the argument, thanks largely to the leardership of the great mojtahed Aqa Mohammad Baqer behbehani (1706-1790), though the Akhbaris, whose views were closer to the orthodoxy of Sunnism, had a moment of near-triumph during the reign of Nader Shah, supported by Nader's ambiguous but broadly pro-Sunni policy. The dispute was not fully resolved until the early Qajar period. In time a theory of interpretation and a hierarchy developed on this basis. Each Shi'a Muslim had to have a marja-e taqlid, an 'object of emulation' or religious role model. This had to be a living person, or mojtahed. In practice […] this helped to create a hierarchy of mojtaheds, the senior, more authoritative among whom were later given more exalted titles: hojjatoleslam (proof of Islam), ayatollah (sign of God), and later still, grand ayatollah.
In this way, a religion that formally still asserted the illegitimacy of all authority on earth, in the absence of the hidden Emam, paradoxically came to give a few religious scholars great potential power. This power came to flex its muscles not just in religion but also in politics. The position of the ulema was further strengthened by the fact that the leading marjas often lived in Najaf or Karbala in Ottoman Iraq, beyond the reach of the Persian authorities (remark that Khomeini himself was later in exile in Najaf...). Shi'ism acquired a hierarchical structure, comparable to those of the Christian churches, but markedly different from the less hierarchical arrangements of Judaism and Sunni Islam. The combination of beliefs, in the illegitimacy of secular authority, in the righteousness of the oppressed, and in the legitimacy of an organised hierarchy of clerics, looks with the benefit of hindsight like a recipe for eventual religious revolution.”
Jumping to modern times, Axworthy relates that, when Khomeini came into power, “he was something of a parvenu among the senior ulema, and the Islamic regime he created reflected his highly individual personality at least as much as the nature of traditional Shiism.
For example Ayatollah Montazeri, who later became a dissident voice looked to for advice by many 'who seek a certain distance from the regime', initially was 'a loyal supporter of Khomeini and an important theorist for the principle of velayat-e faqih', before he fell out with Khomeini (which is generally believed to have happened in a dispute over the massacre of political prisoners in the second half of the 80s, although 'some believe the real rift was the Iran/Contra-affair', which, by the way, I can imagine is one of the things Sahand meant, when he alluding to the 'things Iranians themselves don't want to know...') . 'At the time of the revolution there were other senior figures that commanded great respect, but were pushed aside by the enormous popularity of Khomeini immediately after his return from exile. The most prominent of these was Ayatollah Shariatmadari who argued for a more moderate line and was quickly silenced. (An ayatollah from the region of Azerbaijan, he was in fact struggling against the instauration of central power around the Velayat-e Faqih, and demanded autonomy rights for all the minority nationalities) […] The principle of Velayat-e Faqih was still a dubious novelty for many senior Shi'a figures, several of whom spoke out against it in 1980-1. But they too were intimidated into silence. Khomeini and his supporters succesfully consolidated their control, based on the principle of Velayat-e Faqih, but it never commanded universal support among the Iranian ulema.”- “Ascent through the ranks of mojtaheds had before the revolution been an informal process, but through the 1980s it became much more structured; policed and controlled by Khomeini and his followers. As the hierarchy of Iranian Shi'ism came under control, so did doctrine, attempting to create out of the previous plurality a conformism to a single idea of Sh'ism. In the 90's this develop,ent went further, with examinations set up for aspiring mojtaheds, and political loyalty more important than piety, depth of religiooous understanding, intellectual strength and the approval of a loose group of senior clerics, as had previously been the case. A new group of political ayatollahs, selected in this new way, proliferated; while others, more deserving in traditional terms, remained mere mojtaheds.
Directly after the revolution, 'the execution of old regime members shocked moderates and liberals... But the young Islamist radicals were Khomeini's weapon against the rival [mostly Leftist] groups that had participated in the revolution'.

2011-02-08T13:04:00.010+01:00

Why did the Iranian revolt fail, where the Arab one(s) succeeded?

We remember June 2009. Pictures were brought to us from Iran of cars overturned, dustbins burning and people's faces streaming with blood in the clashes with the regime. And this continued for months. Yet, two years later, fraudulently elected president Ahmadinedjad is firmly in his saddle. Benali left.

One of the most foremost reason of a complicated situation seems to be, irony of ironies, the weight of the voice of the West.
Whereas Iran has undergone decades of embargo, and international ostracism on all levels, economical and political, the armies of Mubarak and Benali have been subsidized by the West. Especially the Egyptian military since the Camp David accords of 1979 has been able to modernize itself substantially with American money. So if President Obama of the States hardens his rhetoric on Egypt, this resounds with a significant part of the state machinery.

Secondly, despite it all, by comparison with Tunisia or Egypt in Iran there is still more popular support of the regime. Large parts of the population, especially the families of the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war of the 80s around whom a state-sponsored cult still flourishes to this day, live well with the heavy subsidies allocated to them. There are two different armies, additionally to the Artesh, the military of the Shah's time, there are the so-called "guardians of the revolution", the pasdaran, which includes a vast voluntary section, the bassidjis. The bassidj were those in civil clothes responsible for the worst human rights abuses on the streets of Teheran in the repression of the uprising. The professional branch of the Pasdaran in their turn are heavily implicated in the Iranian economy, building high-ways and owning supermarket chains, and so have enriched themselves extensively over the past years without being corrupted.
These two armies together alone are so numerous that they constitute a powerful basis for the regime. But Ahmadinedjad also rallies the poor and religious segments of the population around him with his "messianic", millenarian discourse of the hidden Imam. In Tunisia or Egypt, no legitimating discourse was being produced at all these past years. The balance between the discontented population and the completely corrupt bourgeoisie and the dictators was one of a "pact of non-agression": As long as the populace kept quiet, the state did not kill or torture too much, with the threat poised that this could change any minute.

The first Arab revolts of the 21st century

2011-02-02T17:05:00.020+01:00

Since mid-December, Tunisia was in revolt. There were mass demonstrations, mass strikes and finally riots. By the 14th of January, the news was out: President Benali and his family had fled.
For days after the president's downfall, snipers were on the roofs in Tunis and at least one other coastal city. No one knew who they were exactly or how many they were, but they were fighting those of the troops who still defended the fallen government.
A German newspaper showed pictures of teenagers carting away shopping trolleys of luxury goods with big smiles on their faces to a background of devastation: The villas of president Benali's clan and his family-in-law, the Trabelsi's, were looted and burnt down, every other house in the rich quarters of Tunis being spared.
An apocryphal story of the president's wife -whose family hold the biggest banks and businesses of the country - kept coming up: She was said to have taken out as many goldbars of the National bank as she could carry before flying out of the country. An episode which epitomized her and her clan's avarice.
Political prisoners were freed, whereas those members of the Ben Alis and Trabelsis who could not flee now sit imprisonned.

There were hopes of the events inspiring Arabs beyond the borders of Tunisia and the riots spilling over to other countries.

I am glad it was Egypt that took over from Tunis. Geographically and historically the centre of the Arab world, and also its most populous country, Egypt has many times played a leading role to other Arab nations in modern history, although it has considerably faded in importance in the past decades.
Already industrializing in the 19th century, it was one of the first Arab countries to acquire a working class, which through the inflow of European ideas was rapidly radicalized, ushering in a phase of strikes at the turn of the 20th century. By the 1940s, under the monarchy, Egypt's was among the strongest of Arab Socialist movements of the Arab world. Yet, Nasser and his 'Free Officers' were not sparing in their treatment of the Egyptian communists and likewise dismantled the Egyptian workers movement completely, executing some of its leaders. It was never to recover.
The liberalisation under president Sadat only allowed the social democrat movement Tagammu, which was never again to achieve the political importance that the workers’ movement had attained thirty years earlier.
Yet, the past decade has seen its moments: From 2006 onwards, Egypt saw the largest wave of worker's strikes in recent history. After the economically inspired so-called "Hunger Riots" of 2008 which sent Egyptians onto the streets in masses, these new mass uprisings are for the first time in decades explicitly political.

A couple of friends of friends I met friday night in Paris just came back from Egypt, where they made a radio documentary about political activism in that country. They had not even hoped to ride the tide of current affairs so right on as this!

Florent and Elodie mostly interviewed activists of the "6th of April" movement, which is a pro-democracy movement whose aim it is to bring people onto the streets, without a prescription for after the revolution, their idea being to bring about free elections in a pluralistic democratic system.
Other activists they met still said they belonged to Kefaya! ('Enough'), a platform that united all sorts of dissidents, be they liberalists, secularists or Islamists. Kefaya! originally took shape in 2002 in solidarity with the movement against the wall in Palestine, but today can formally be considered a dead letter, many individual members continuing their activism in their own way however.
Many of the other people they met and interviewed were individual bloggers, the internet being the one space where freedom can blossom to a certain degree. The fact that Facebook and Twitter play important roles in the mobilization of the masses, as they did in Iran and other countries in revolt, is by now a battered cliché of a truth.

According to Florent and Elodie, the turning point for Egyptians certainly was the 14th of January, when, in the late afternoon the slogan "Ben Ali has fled!" resounded on the streets of Tunis, being chanted by the crowds. Within a day the public opinion in Egypt changed from a shared resignation in the face of three decades of oppressive power, to a sense that everything is possible. The movement of the 6th of April suddenly became very active, and the day Florent and Elodie left Egypt, they were busy preparing the 25th of January, Police Day under Mubarak.

During the previous years this public holiday was honoured by thousands of people watching a police parade waving pennants, with a counter-demonstration of not more than a hundred people completely circled in by police and unable to move, typical of any demonstration before this January. As we have seen, this year's Police Day was spectacularly co-opted by more than 10,000 protestors taking to the streets.
Florent's prediction for the following weekend of the 29th/30th of January was one of total repression. Indeed the death toll rose by many dozens that weekend. But there were also moments when the military intervened to protect the protesters from police violence. Have you seen the photographs of people climbing onto the tanks?

In Egypt, like before in Iran, many months of rioting may ensue. By comparison, the positive aspect for Egypt is that the presidential elections take place in September and may well constitute the culminating point of a sustained uprising, and events may be swayed in a positive way. In Iran, as we have seen, the revolt fizzled out after many months at a great human price, with at least 122 deaths and the prisons overflowing with prisoners undergoing torture and rape. In Egypt the human cost has already shown to be of no less tragic proportions (an 'unconfirmed UN report' speaks of 300 victims during the course of the protests thus far), but there is hope for concrete outcomes of this.

Looking at the other "revolutions" (and inverted commas should indeed be used with this term more often) of the past decade does not make me optimistic however. In Georgia and Ukraine, quite frankly, not much has changed at all after the US-backed Orange and Rose 'Revolutions', corruption and cronyism still rule supreme. In Kirgistan, things went so badly out of hand after the 2005 Tulip 'revolution' that another coup d'état followed in 2010.
But: If anything, the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt right now are genuine expressions of the people, and they provide badly needed puffs of fresh air for the citizens of these autocratic regimes.

Dersim

2011-01-03T20:13:00.011+01:00

This beautiful region is host to a grandiose and tragic history of rebellion and repression, the most famous being the massacre of 1938, also known as the ' Seyid Riza Rebellion'. Seyid Riza was the spiritual leader of the Assaban tribe. This year at the festival was indeed inaugurated a statue of the man. A sign of more liberal times dawning on the country.
The rebellion started when villagers burnt down a bridge connecting their village to an army garrison, whose soldiers were harassing them. Under the leadership of Seyid Riza, his tribe, the Abbasan, as well as the Haydaran, Demanan and Yusufan tribes took up arms. Negotiating with the Turks, Seyid Riza said, they would only put down arms if the Kurds were granted national rights.
So far so good. Unfortunately, in the face of the army, newly equipped with bomber-planes and other modern equipment, they did not stand a chance. And when the response came by the Turkish military, it was overblown beyond all proportions. Villagers were rounded up in caves and summarily executed. Women and children were barricaded inside sheds which were put on fire, or immured alive. 10s of 1000s lost their lives.
1938 was one of the three times the Kurds got bombed with chemical gas. The most notorious, and tragic instance was Halabja in 1989 under Saddam Hussein, but before that, there was the British RAF in the 1920's putting down Sheikh Barzinji's revolt in Northern Iraq. Winston Churchill at the time praised the effectiveness of gas in a rugged territory like Kurdistan with its many caves and ravines and said he did not understand chemical gas was not used more often. There are also rumours of contemporary use, such as in the winter of 2008, when the Turkish army bombed PKK hide-outs across the border in Northern Iraq. (Not properly equipped for the harsh, snow-rich mountain winter, this military campaign turned out a minor catastrophe. The Turkish state however refused to acknowledge this, and the media were full of praise for the heroic actions of the Turkish army afterwards.)
Back in 1938, one of the most sadistic bombers was a woman called Sabiha Gökçen, Atatürk's adoptive daughter. Today she has Istanbul's second largest airport named after her. The putting down of rebellions such as the one of the Koçgiri tribe in the Sivas region in the 1930's, or the one of Sheikh Said, where armed insurgents marched onto Diyarbakir in order to liberate it, or indeed the one of 1938, formed an important vector for the development of the Turkish army, who gained invaluable experience in putting their new equipment to use.
At the end of the campaign, Turkey changed all the Kurmanji, Zaza or Armenian names of towns and villages to Turkish ones, which is why I will be mentioning two names for many of the places I am going to mention. The name of Dersim city itself was changed to Tunceli, which can be translated as 'Iron hand', indicating the grip the state intended to have over this place from now on. No one from around here uses the new name much, although when the AKP government proposed to let this rebellious, traditionally intellectual and left-wing region have its old name back, many rightists got into a fluster, and Prime Minister Erdoğan had to quickly take back the offer.

In the run-up to the last elections, Erdoğan's Islamist AK party tried to buy people's votes by distributing free gifts such as fridges in this and other poor regions across the country, especially the East. Oftentimes simple villagers are easily influenced. They are happy when someone nattily dressed appears on their doorstep and deigns to talk to them. That year however, frustration hit a boiling point, and villagers made a pile on their village squares and burnt them. Some of them are said to have come from villages that had been left out the main campaign providing electricity at the end of the 80's and beginning of the 90's, and still have no electricity today. The electricity campaign, by the way, was not out of a belated desire of the Turkish state to develop the Eastern regions, but because the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) guerrilla war had taken up seriously by this time, and the military needed these infrastructures.

The PKK have privileged this territory and made it one of Turkey's most intense warzones, not so much because of the rebellious history of this region, but simply because of its geography, its many ravines, escarpments, hidden caves, which lend itself most readily to guerrilla warfare. First this started back in the 70'S with Ibrahim Kaypakkaya's Maoist insurgency, who are still active here today.
Back in the seventies the guerrillas would come and spend the nights with the village youth in their houses. Many a future activist was inspired by these long hours of song, dance and stories. A militant from a Maoist organisation I met was 12 years old when she first assisted such nights in the over 30 years ago. The guerrillas who came were mostly in their 20's, but some were up to 50 years old. There were a very few women among them.
From the eighties on, many more young Kurdish women were going to take to the mountains. Oftentimes, for them taking up arms was a liberation from a life of forced marriage, hard work and submission in the arch-patriarchal society of Eastern Turkey. The mountains became the burgeon of freedom, a promise of a brighter future for the women back in the village, too.
In the 70's radical Leftist organisations had always subordinated the question of women's liberation to the class struggle of workers against capitalists, delayed its resolution until after the revolution. Only the PKK, since its very inception, put the women's question at the forefront, stating this has to be resolved now, in connection with the Kurdish question, to which former Leftist organisations had had the same stance as to the liberation of women, supporting the principle but seeing it as subordinated to, and automatically resolved with the workers' revolution.
Today, the PKK has separate women's sections of its armed branch, where everyone down to the commanders is female, and which also conduct actions on places that epitomize the oppression of women, such as nightclubs.

Whole story here.

Eti

2010-12-14T16:26:00.006+01:00

I have a keen interest in prehistory and very early history and in my time, I have visited a number of prehistoric sites in Turkey and in some of the surrounding countries. They are usually unattractive to the eye, leaving much to the imagination. Yet I cannot get enough of them and everywhere I go I seek out and make it a point of checking them out. I have paid the symbolic visit to Çatal Höyük, the feminists' favourite. I have been round Mari, the Sumerian city in Syria (with my friend Mari who wanted to visit her homonymic place...). And I have equally visited Boğazkale and Alacahöyük, the Hitite sites near Çorum, where funnily named kings (Suppiluliuma, anyone?) worshipped a thousand gods, fought the Egyptians, and spoke and wrote the world's earliest attested Indo-European language. They even had typical Indo-Europea myths, like their own version of the Indian myth of Indra and Vritra, a different kind of Siegfried Drachentöter, the German guy who kills a dragon in the Niebelungenlied: The skygod Tarhun who slayed the serpent Illuyanka with his triple thunderbolt.

And before you can even pronounce "Suppiluliuma"'s name, I find myself blogging about the Hittites:
Hittite civilisation and its myths formed an important vehicle through which ancient Babylonian and Sumerian myths, passed on to the Hittites via the Hurrians, eventually influenced Hellenic mythology.
The most interesting myth of Hurrian origin found with the Hittites is the one of Kumarbi, the father of all gods.
Before Kumarbi there was Alalu. But Anu fought him and won. Alalu fled to the underworld and Anu took his place on the throne of the heavens. Kumarbi, the son of Alalu, came back to face Anu. What happened in the fight is that, in short, Kumarbi bit off Anu's wiener. In this way he became pregnant of the Storm God Teshup, and his brother the god Tashmishu, as well as the River Aranzah (the Tigris!).
In Hesiod's "Theogonia" parallels to Hittite texts are obvious: Hierarchically, the gods Anu, Kumarbi and Teshup can be equated to Uranos, Kronos and Zeus.

Whereas the Kurds have the story of the snake-shouldered king Zahhak as their myth of origin, the Hittites myth of origin is something like what follows: The queen Kanesh bore within one year thirty male children. She did not know what to do with them, so she put them afloat on a river. They drifted until the land of Zalpuva, where the gods took them out of the floods and raised them. That is how the Hittites came about.

The Hittites were a prudent bunch, and instead of angering the gods of the people they conquered and subjected, they just adopted them as their own. That is why their territory was also called "land of the thousand gods" in their times. In worship, they drank wine, danced and sang songs, accompanying them with harp- and lute-like instruments, but also types of flutes, horns and drums.

Written in the Akkadian cuneiform script (the Akkadians were one of the people the Hittites invaded), the Hittite language was deciphered in 1906 in Istanbul by a Czech solider. "Nu NINDA-an ezzatteni nu watar-ma ekutteni", is the famous phrase that first was deciphered.
"Ninda" was the only word known at the time, Sumerian for "bread". Bedřich Hrozný, the man who deciphered the language, was a lieutenant from Austro-Hungary and although he grew up in Bohemia, bilingual in German.

I don't have to explain that it is a known fact that to subsist, humans relie on food as well as drink, ... - and the word following the Sumerian loan, "ezzati" ressembled the German "essen", "to eat", very closely. "Watar" in its turn looked much like German "Wasser", or obviously, the English "water" for that matter. The word that was thought to mean "to drink", "ekutteni" called to mind the Latin "acqua", also meaning water. " -teni" was henceforth understood to be a verb ending.

Apart from cuneiform, another writing system found in Boğazköy is hieroglyphs, although the language deciphered turned out to be Luwian, which, along with Palaic, constitutes the third Indo-European language known to be spoken on Asia Minor at the time. The remains to be analysed don't get anywhere near the amounts of scripture that remains to us of the Hittite language though.

Compared to the vast empires that were to follow in the region, the Roman and Byzantine ones, the realm of the Hitites seems minuscule to us, but we have to understand, that for the standards of the time, the Hitite Empire was a force to be reckoned with. At the end of the Hittite period, their state power was on an equal footing with the Assyrian, Babylonian and Egyptian empires.

The underground silos of Hattuşa bear witness to the economical power that the Hittites wielded. The economy was maintained mostly through the spoils of war raids. Because of this, the art of war was naturally given great importance in Hittite culture. At the times of Hatuşili I and Murşili I, their military power was so strong that they could advance all the way to Babylon and conduct a raid on it.
Their eclectic culture reflected these contacts with other nations: Their writing system and diplomatic language was Akkadian. The sphinxes at the gates of Hattuşa were probably inspired by Egyptian art. The swords and helmets their warriors used seem to come from Mycenaean Greece.

The National Geographic Turkey had a special about Hitite laws in some 2006 issue. There are mistakes in other parts of the article, so I do not know whether all the information is reliable. For what it's worth, the information seems interesting: For example as opposed to the Babylonian king Hammurabi's codex of law which provides that "the one made blind by someone, may blind that person", the Hittites were more progressive and only saw for material reparation, even in the case of murder. Punishments of mutilation were only applied to slaves. Prisons were only used for what today would be remand - the time that a culprit's crime was being examined. The death penalty however did exist, for crimes such as incest, rape and the use of black magic.
Other than that they had some of the lovable rules still today in use in the most rural parts just East of that region: The punishment for a woman (not a man, remark) committing adultery was death, although, summit of all charitableness, he could forgive her so she could stay alive. After a man's death, it was granted that his father or brother would take his widow for a wife.

The "Eti" of my title by the way is the name of a chocolate brand in Turkey. It is an older word for what today is called "Hitit", the ancient Anatolian people the Hittites, the Biblical sons of Heth.

The Kerkûk question

2010-12-09T16:18:00.010+01:00

Sometime late spring this year the renowned Dutch Kurdologist Martin van Bruinessen was asked to do a lecture for the Kurdish students association Netherlands. He is an old man now with white hair. Asked to pick a subject of his choice, I must say I was disappointed that Bruinessen chose the question of Kerkûk. At the lecture only Kurds or people with a long-standing interest in Kurdistan were present, and I think everyone who came already knew quite a bit about this topic, and most of them would have their own ideas what kind of history is the "right" one. Whatever Bruinessen was going to say was bound to draw objections from the crowd.
A short history of the place goes as follows: As far back in 1974, the city of Kerkuk was already one of the reasons the war between the Barzanis and the central government broke out, when Saddam Hussein refused to assign the territory of the city and its surroundings to the Federal Region the Kurds had hewn out for themselves in the contract of 1971. Since then until the nineties, the Iraqi Central Goverment applied a cruel politics of Arabization to the city, changing the delicate balance of populations in the multi-ethnic, yet formerly predominantly Kurdish city (Arabs and Turkomans, and very few mostly Assyrian Christians also live there).
Since 2003, this policy was reversed by the new authorities in the city who now try to re-Kurdify the place.
Yet, if people apply vocabulary like "Kerkûk - the heart and soul of Kurdistan", few are to admit that the reason this is so is, to a large, if not exclusive degree, because of the enormous oil reserves under the city.

I'm going to add my two cents: Guys, I think you would be better off if you don't get the city of Kerkuk. The link between huge state income because of oil (or similar natural ressources) and authoritarianism is proven. The term commonly applied is "a rentier state". The central administration of a country becomes not only distributor of funds to government agencies, but also allocates sustenance to its citizens. The opposite of what happens in a "normal" economy, where the citizens of a country fund the state via their taxes and therefore exert an at least theoretically powerful control over it. Iraq before the US invasion was a prime example of this: since the oil-booms of the 70´s Saddam Hussein used oil money to blow state security (military and secret services) beyond all proportions.

As for president Barzani, he makes no secret out of his wish to transform Kurdistan into a country/region on the Arabic Emirate model. When he talks to you of Dubai, you see the chimera of modern high-rises and a strong economy, he sees the promise of a political system close to a monarchy.
Actually, I might add that to me, the inhabitants of the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq did not seem honestly that very keen on the idea of a degree of citizen responsibility via elections and freedom of speech in their country. It was not entirely uncommon that people would say to me, a German-passport holder, stuff like "If Hitler had won the war, Germany would be a very beautiful country now", meaning that it would be even richer, and dominate the neighbouring countries, probably in a way that I personally would call anything but "beautifully".

In any case, Barzani has not, in the past, hidden the intention that, if a referendum turns out not to its favour, the Regional Government of Kurdistan would invade and capture Kerkuk in a military raid.

Hungerstrikes, here and there

2010-11-14T18:06:00.009+01:00

Not long ago I talked to a lawyer from Belgium. "After so many years of studies getting my doctor in law", she sighed, "there is still only one thing I can recommend asylum seekers in order to get a residence permit: Go on a hungerstrike".

She admitted that some people, after 60 days of hungerstrike, were like you and me, showing no signs of weakness or emaciation. As for the most hardcore group of people, she admitted, they were the Kurds, some of whom even refused to take sugar in their water. There were cases of people going through with their hungerstrike to the point where they fell into a coma.

Personally, I have known a handful of people who went on hungerstrikes in deportation centres in the Netherlands, including an Antifa guy from Belarus, and also a couple of Kurdish men, usually for a few days. However, the Dutch authorities do not want people to engage in this hard-core kind of protest, so their policy is opposed to what happens in Belgium: they mostly make it a point to refuse to take action in such cases. Yet, hungerstrikes remain more common than one might think, maybe because this information is not passed on, or because people are sufficiently desperate despite this. A reliable source estimated that each year there are 1000 people on hungerstrike in the Netherlands alone.

One of the most interesting cases of people on a hungerstrike I personally met was a man called Heydar (I can´t retrieve his full name). He was sitting in front of Parliament square in The Hague when I saw him, handing out leaflets to the public: This was his first day of hungerstrike, after many months of having tried other avenues to acquire political asylum to no avail. He had already spent three years in Iranian prisons, then six months in a deportation camp in the Netherlands.

He said he was from the Iranian town Kamjaran where he had been a member of the local government council which he had entered as an independent candidate. It was not until it emerged that he was actually a member of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDK-I), illegal in Iran, that he was sentenced to five years prison. He had two years left when he managed to escape; first to Sulaymaniya in Northern Iraq, then on to Western Europe, he told me. I was with friends that day, who were calling me to catch up with them, so I had to leave.

It took a long time to get to hear the continuation of the story, and it only came round to me months later. It happened when I went to the court case of the occupation of the Iranian embassy where I started talking to a man who turned out to work for Prime95, a large immigrant organisation. The man's name was Ahmed Pouri, and in his time at the organisation he had worked with people on hungerstrikes a lot. In fact, he had taken care of Heydar as well, having met him outside the parliament building the same day as me. Apparently putting Heydar's full name in Persian script into internet search machines washes up a website of a human rights organisation dating from 2005, stating that Heydar along with another prisoner were hospitalised and their health in critical state from the torturing inside the Kamjaran prison. This to Ahmed seemed sufficient prove Heydar's story was true.

In Belgium churches have been the venue for several succesful long-term occupations of hungerstrikers who eventually managed to get legalized. In France there even was a case of the police prying open an occupied church´s doors in order to deport those protesting within, to much public outcry. But in the Netherlands, churches do not wish to get involved, so since it was impossible to find a place to sleep for Heydar near the centre of town, Ahmed offered him to stay in an immigrants' home, away from The Hague in a small village. It was too expensive for Heydar to travel every day, so he continued his hungerstrike without being able to inform the public about it, and maybe mobilize some sort of support behind him. After 49 days, the IND -the Dutch Government Service for Immigration- offered him a court case, so Heydar stopped his hungerstrike. This turned out to be a mistake.
It is a tragedy, Ahmed said to me, that immigrants do not see behind the manners of IND officials when they talk to you, putting on their hypocrite face, making you believe they are doing things for you, when really they aren´t: Heydar lost the court case and now again, he is imprisoned in the deportation centre already for a few months. If he gets deported to Iran, there is only one thing that will happen to him: He will get thrown into jail once more and probably tortured heavily.

Heydar's story of course is only one out of many shocking stories Ahmed has worked on. A few years ago, there was that of three Kurdish PKK activists who, despite their being on a hungerstrike, were deported back to Turkey. "The state does not want to work with people on hungerstrikes, but if you go to such extremes you are clearly serious. To me, these are the people I will work with first!", Ahmed said. Once back in their home country, the men got conscripted into the army and sent to Kurdish areas, to fight against their ethnic brethren. It did not take long before all three had died under shady circumstances: One was found beaten dead outside of the military barracks where he was staying, one "fell" off a bridge, and one was found dead with a rifle in his had. In the first two cases, "accidents" were claimed, in the third one suicide, despite indicators against it. For one, the rifle was physically too long for a person to shoot himself into the head with it.

Kurdistan in Prehistory

2010-11-08T17:00:00.022+01:00

The onset of agriculture was one of the strongest cataclysms in human history. It set a series of possibilities and events in motion which led to ever bigger settlements, ultimately to the first cities. These occasioned a need for much greater degrees of organisation, and new techniques were invented, including the use of numbers and letters, in a long process which finally led to what we call civilisation.

However, the transition to a settled lifestyle showed its reverse side very soon, too. Through sedentarism and the constant contact with animals, diseases, such as small pox, came into being, at the time still deathly, and completely unknown to nomad societies. Division of labour and specialisation as well as the accumulation of goods led to hierarchies, and ultimately slavery, which was essential in the expansion of the juggernaut civilisation. In order to make bridges and roads you needed to have a society that included slaves. The first Egyptians may have made pyramids for their gods, but if you are not brainwashed by religion, there is no way you would agree to work that hard, unless you were a slave and had no choice.

Fredy Perlman in his seminal anarcho-primitivist book "Against His-Story, Against Leviathan", fictionalizes the Sumerian cities Ur and Uruk, south of today's Baghdad, where civilisation first emerged. He describes how irrigation techniques are expanded, and how, in the process, the first hierarchies spring from that, drawing a rather somber picture of this pivotal period in human history.

Reading him, he makes the earlier hunter gatherer societies seem like heaven on earth. He talks of the !Kung, the African Khoisan people who still live a nomadic lifestyle today: "If the !Kung visited our offices and factories, they might think we're playing. Why else would we be there?", he writes, and subsequently cites Marshall Sahlin's "Stone Age Economics", a milestone work from back in the 60's arguing that hunter-gatherer societies were societies of abundance.

He talks only in passing of the transition from hunting and gathering to sedentarian agriculture, citing Jericho in Palestine, Shanidar in today's Iraqi Kurdistan, and Hacılar and Çatal Höyük, both in central Anatolia, modern Turkey.

Shanidar certainly is the most illustrative example for the period from the Middle Paleolithic (when people were nomadic hunter-gatherers) on to the beginning of the Neolithic (when sedentariness started) in Kurdistan, or anywhere in the world.
This was a period in time when humans moved about from campsite to campsite, after having exhausted the resources in one place. Only in the richest zones people could dwell for the period of a whole season, or even get settled thanks to the discovery of conservation techniques such as drying, smoking or salting food products. This is the Mesolithic, the period just before the Neolithic -which entails the onset of agriculture. We are about 12 000 years before the present. In this time people also started to use polishing techniques on stones, and finally metals.

Yet Perlman passes quickly over Shanidar, with one single sentence: "At Shanidar the whole community shared a cave as a winter shelter; the cave dwellers used metals."
What is most remarkable about that cave archeologically, is that it sheltered what is perhaps the first case of a ritualistic burial in human history: A 30-year old man with an amputated arm was buried lying on a bed of flower blossoms. (Although it is still not finally determined whether or not the flower blossoms were maybe carried inside by the wind.)

The world's most ancient agricultural community, dated by archeologists to 7000 BC, is also in Iraqi Kurdistan, in Jarmo. It shows us a culture which has accomplished the neolithic revolution, despite the absence of pottery, which attests to its great ancientness. Remark that usually only pottery makes possible the storage of foodstuff, and thus constitutes the true beginning of the accumulation of goods.

How come we find these sites in the Middle East, predating sites in Europe several thousands of years?
The science behind it is simple: The Middle East was the first stop on the route that Homo Sapiens took out of Africa, via the south of the Red Sea (not as earlier thought across the Sinaï), then crossing the Persian gulf. It was an era when the ice caps at the poles were so large that the sea level was much lower than today and a land route now submerged was provided.
For a long time scientists were looking for the exact regions where agriculture first began, without conclusive evidence. They were always looking in the area of Palestine, until, some time in the 60's, an American team of researchers (Braidwood & Howe) were inspired to look elsewhere, and soon evidence began to emerge: After all, the foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan, with its four rivers tributary to the Tigris, lend themselves naturally to agriculture; the importance of seasons and their precipitations -rain, snow- cannot be underestimated. The Encyclopaedia Iranica goes on to state, that this is also precisely why the great Sumerian, Babylonian etc. civilisations sprung up down in the arid plains of Ur and Uruk, and not in the rugged territorry of Kurdistan: “The practice of irrigating crops …required a larger work force and a greater investment in the land (Bernbeck, 1995). Irrigation, in turn, favored larger populations and more administrative organization, which ultimately led to the first cities and literate civilizations."
Which brings us back to what Fredy Pulman described in his Leviathan.

As for the region of modern Kurdistan, until the times of the Assyrians (900 - 700 BC) the culture of the mountains remained confined to itself. The mountains formed a natural fortress, hard to penetrate for the plain-dwellers, who, in turn, were to live in constant fear of incursions by the barbarians from the highlands.
The precise points where remains of the neolithic age can be excavated today, are the few passage points that the Kurdish mountains concede: The passage of Raiat, near Rawanduz, where the famous Hamiltan Road passes, the passage near Halabja, where Iranian pilgrims are wont to pass on their way to Kerbala or Nadjaf, and, further south, the place where the river Diyala (called “Sirvan” by the Kurds) slashes a gash into the Hamrin mountains.

In these passages it is that we find thousands of mounds called “Tell” (a word that come from the Akkadian “tîlu”!) that cloak unto this day the remains of ancient times: The oldest discoveries in the region were undug on the shores of the Tigris, upstream of Mosul, where stone tools discovered are dated back to the Lower Paleolithic, that is between 500 000 and 11 000 years before today. But since they are located in a remote location in the Middle East, a lot of these tells remain unprobed: Any traveller to the region will be surprised that neither the one in the centre of Hewlêr(/Erbil), nor in Kerkûk have been researched yet. In any case, Erbil, along with Kerkûk, is clearly one of the longuest continuously inhabited places on earth.

By the way, since research has shown that the spread of farming was intimately linked to the spread of modern language families, the great mystery of the origin of the Indo-European language group may one day be revealed as lying in Kurdistan. Another theory is that Indo-Europeans, or at least their language, may have originated from Scythia.

Terrorists?

2010-10-30T15:06:00.031+02:00

European juristic associations from 16 countries have begun a campaign to get the PKK taken off the Europe wide blacklist of terrorist organisations, the logic being that, "in the face of decades-long political and cultural oppression, displacement, torture and extra-judicial executions, the internationally recognized right to resist is being denied", as was written in the appeal to Brussels last week. (From Junge Welt)
If this goes through, this may get us a step closer to a proposed regularization of PKK-fighters as security forces on the model of the Peshmerga in Iraqi Kurdistan (as proposed by Ismail Beşikçi, about whom I blogged earlier).

But we must not stop there. The second largest leftist resistance organisation of Turkey, the DHKP-C, is currently also submitted to harassment in several European countries, the most well-known being the case of Fehriye Erdal, Bahar Kimyongür, Musa Asoğlu and others in Belgium. Starting with the arrestation of three activists in 1999 for possession of weapons and false passports, the court procedure came to a head after the 11th of September 2001, when security measures as regards "terrorism"(real or imagined) were tightened all over the European Union. Ending with acquittals in 2008, by then the courtcase had become a veritable "saga", including a prison escape and a kidnapping attempt.

Unlike the PKK who fight in the mountains, the DHKP-C have urban guerillas. To my knowledge a few quarters of Istanbul, the most famous one being the predominantly Alevite Gazi, are completely under control of DHKP-C militias where police or other state forces do not venture.

In Germany two court-cases were opened in spring 2010 under the framework of the expanded anti-terrorist Article 129b. A couple of weeks ago, I assisted a sitting of one of them.

For me it was the first time I went to a court-case on charges of terrorism. With metal detectors at the entrance and several doors to pass through that could be closed and locked automatically, the courtroom alone had prison-level security. The smoking area was a small square outside, with the sky above being partitioned into small oblongs by a metal grid overhead to round off the jail-like atmosphere the visitor experienced.

In the courtroom, the three defendants: Effaced in the corner, Ahmed, with the headphones on because he only speaks Turkish.
Then, Cengiz, the tall, stately man with the long mustache typical of Turkish 70's revolutionaries. Despite the deep furrows in his cheeks he still had a young face.
Finally Nurhan, of youthful appearance with her auburn, curly hair, and the round glasses she was wearing. She was the gang leader, as the police think they found out so astutely: "From telephone conversations it emerged that her opinion is asked, her consent is sought. She requires to see others, stipulating time and place, and not vice versa."
Each of these three was surrounded on either side by a policewoman or -man. Because, you get the idea: These people are highly dangerous.

There they were. Veteran Leftist extremists whose "careers" had run their course to their natural end: on the defendants' bench facing a judge? A case of insurrectionists who had lived their lives prepared for long years behind bars, finally meeting their destiny?

I am going to be blunt about this: This organisation has done actions such as bombing a McDonalds, bombing a judges' residence and a military officers' transport, as well as attacking a right-extremists' den, all in Istanbul and other Turkish cities. Yet, as for this session, everything was talked about except any form of violence.

"Bin ich im falschen Film gelandet?", a sympathiser asked from the spectator's rangs, "Is this really happening?!"

The State Attorney's metally voice formulated the accusation as based on above-mentionned expanded article 129b (I paraphrase): "Any individual engaging in activities supporting an organization listed as a terrorist one, that includes as much as selling the organization's magazine, agrees to represent this organization in all its aspects in Germany and abroad, and can therefore be persecuted with charges of terrorism."
In the break afterwards we acridly joked: "So from today on, freedom of opinion is also abolished".

Earlier sittings had consisted of a playing of telephone conversations to the judges. Taking into account that Nurhan's, Ahmed's and Cengiz's phones had been tapped for eight years, and that every single call is seen as potentially incriminating, you can imagine how drawn-out their analyses were. Apparently what was talked about were mostly the organization of music evenings (!) or family camps (!!). There was a part when it was discussed with the authorized expert called in as a witness whether a "bus" that was talked about was really a bus or some sort of codeword. In the end the judges concurred, it probably was just that, a bus for a crew of musicians.

The evidence looked into this time were photographs. A handful of photos showed a gleamingly bald man working at a desk -that was Dursun Karataş, the deceased leader of the organization who had been exiled in the Netherlands until his death in 2008. But mostly, what we were looking at were personal memories sadly turned courtroom evidence: The earlier slides dated back to the nineties. We saw the accused eating ice-cream, picknicking in the sun, standing at tables during concerts. "Do longstanding friendships now qualify as "terrorist consortiums"?", someone in the spectator rangs satirized.
Some of the pictures of people smiling and holding hands were also a juvenile Nurhan and her future husband, way before they got married.
The pair tied the knot only two or three months before Nurhan got arrested. Since then she had not seen her spouse. The photos on the overhead projector were, ironically, the first time she got to see his face again in all this time. In visiting hours she is only allowed to see her female relatives, her mother and sister, neither her husband nor her father have been able to see her for so long.

The three activists are already two years on remand. That is two years that they are in solitary confinement. This is a worrying situation, given the fact that scientific research has brought to light consequences of solitary confinement that set in already after three weeks. Effects include a considerable impairment of perceptual processing and cognitive abilities: Concentration capabilities can be impinged on to the point where prisoners can lose the ability to read or write (agraphia). Loss of mental capabilities such as mathematical skills are sometimes irreversible.
The nervous system can be affected in such a way that captives can feel hot flashes, experience a lose of thirst; hormonal balance can be so much disrupted that menstruation fails to appear in women. Even somatesthesia (awareness of one's own body) can be severely restricted.

Cees, with whom I came on a train, has known Nurhan for a few years. Now they can only write letters, and he can show his face only from a ten metre distance and behind two panes of glass. "We should both start learning sign language", he sadly jested.

EDIT from the 16.12.2010: The verdict was announced today. 8 years for Nurhan, 6 years for Cengiz, 4 years for Ahmed.

Down with Turkey's last Êzidîs...

2010-10-22T18:54:00.042+02:00

My friend Murat, a self-designated anarchist from Diyarbakir, likes to tell the story of his great-grandmother, an Êzidî princess from the picturesque mountain village Muradiye, East of lake Van. She lived at the beginning of the 20th century, and eloped with her lover, a commoner and a Muslim, to the area Murat lives in now - which, at a 400 kilometer distance, was very far away at that time. Doing so, in the world of cruel traditions of blood and honour by which they were surrounded, they were risking death for both of them. "I am the descendant of a true love story", Murat likes to muse contentedly.

In any case, even if his great-grandmother had not married a Muslim, it was within a couple of generations that Murat's entire clan had converted to Islam.
"Look", Murat had said to me, "there are Êzidîs in the Caucausus, Êzidîs in Iraq, even some in Syria, but next to none left in Turkey; isn't that strange?"

Worldwide, Êzidî Kurds still number about 800,000. Iraq has the most numerous population of Êzidîs, especially in the region of Sindjar. Iraqi Kurdistan also hosts the village of Lalish, in Êzidî belief the place where the universe uncoiled from a pearl at the beginning of all times.
In Armenia, Êzidîs constitute the country's largest ethnic minority. It is often forgotten today that at the beginning of the century the country had an equally large amount of Muslim Kurds, but those were tragically deported by Stalin in 1938 and 1941, and this population was never able to reconstitute itself.

Strange, of course, is nothing about the fact that there are so little Êzidîs left in Turkey. In Ottoman times the Êzidîs were known as inveterate rebels against the centralized state, and bloody repression was also frequent. The violence reached its apogee in 1915, nowadays mostly remembered as the year of the Armenian genocide, but which equally touched Assyrians and Êzidîs. The bulk of Êzidîs living in the Caucasus today fled there from the Ottoman empire in the wake of the atrocities committed at this time (although there had been earlier historical episodes involving Êzidî protagonists in both Georgia and Armenia...). Shortly afterwards, Turkey's independence war was famously fought uniting Turks and Muslim Kurds under the Islamist banner, before Mustafa Kemal, the ingenious general, committed a treacherous volte-face by turning to Turkification as his instrument in forging the modern Turkish nation. And from then on, discrimination was not to abate for many decades to come. These hardships did their thing to the Êzidîs, pushing them either into conversion, or into emigration. The final exodus of the Yezidis was a relatively precipitous event - another casualty of the 1980's and 90's war in Eastern Turkey. The Yezidis got caught in the crossfire and anecdotally suffered more at the hands of the PKK than the army.
Today, few of them are left on Turkish soil.

Indeed, it was a bit of a mission trying to track the last ones down. Finally, it was Azize's uncle, an elderly man with flaming white hair, who said he knew all the surrounding villages by heart from back in the 1960's when he was working on the anti-Malaria campaign in the region, who could point out the remaining Êzidî villages to me. The following day his son drove me to one of them.
This was a very rich village constituted of only four houses (villas, more like it) and I was to pass the following days lounging in the wandering shade of the pine trees the family who hosted me had planted in their garden, reading, and keeping the herd of gazelles company that the owners had judged a good idea to coop up behind the tall walls that surrounded their premisses.

The only human company I had was the grand-mother of the house. She stayed in the shade next to the house, reclining on a mattress.
Her head was covered with the soft violet headscarf that Arabs and Kurds alike wear in this region. Whereas men throw it over their heads in the style of a kaffiyeh, women wear it like a hejab, showing only at the temples skeins of henna-dyed hair, whose orange colour stands in pleasing counterpoint to the colour of the garment. The frail old lady spoke only Kurdish and we had to communicate with hand and feet. But she had the most beautiful tattoos on ankles, hands, cheek, forehead and chin. The fact that she was in such a way typical of the region's elders probably goes to show that Yezidis were always culturally closest to the Muslims living around them, taking the wind out of the sails of 'satanist' denunciations. The tattoos are simple, rather coarse patterns of around thumb-big points, lozenges or crosses, done with blue, or, most probably, originally black ink faded over time. The first time that I saw (and admired) chin tattoos must have been on Fulani women in West Africa, and for some reasons I have wanted one ever since. When I expressed my admiration to the house's matriarch, however, the woman did not accept my compliments, she even retreated bashfully inside the building. Times and fashions have changed in these latitudes -but my praise was meant sincerely!

About the many things I learnt in my three days with the family you can read here (...for the moment in German only, sorry.)

Procrasti-blogging

2010-10-20T18:23:00.006+02:00

Just made my way down to smoke a fag in the Dutch rain that fogs the day these autumn hours, right there in front of the central library, and heard two guys speak what must have been Kurdish on the lift. I asked, and it was Sorani. One of them was a Shabak from a village that sounded like "Çaldani", the other one a guy from Hewlêr. The former guy most likely came to earn money in the Netherlands. His family is active in the PUK. The other guy seems to be a refugee, his life being under threat, because his family has an outstanding blood feud: "My dad was an active member of the Ba'ath party, working for Saddam. Now they want to kill me too, even though I was a tiny child back then."
Neither my Kurdish, nor their English sufficed to get more details out of them.

A Storming

2010-09-17T17:17:00.045+02:00

The timing could not have been better. The same morning of the courtcase, the Iranian embassy of another country was in the news for an entirely different reason: The ambassador had defected and was now asking for political asylum. Not only that. As the article stated, he was already the Iranian 3rd ambassador this year resigning from his post. In the accompanying photograph he was shown holding the letter from the Iranian government that was sent around to ambassadors everywhere in the world, soliciting them to avoid talking publicly about the 2009 Iranian elections, because -as the government openly admitted in this letter- it had tweaked its results.
Yes, those very same 2009 elections that, as we all remember, became most famous for the protests they sparked, that were so violently repressed that 122 people died.

It was a motley assemblage of activists there in the front row, on the defendants' bench. They ranged from a group of white-haired, dignified Iranian immigrants to a gang of young 'uns in hoodies and with dreads sprouting off the back off their heads. First impressions, of course, may well deceive. When the judge read out everyone's identities, and what was known about them all, it was one of the decorous elder ones who had a previous conviction for shop lifting, while the only thing that that 20-something, long-haired hippy in the corner had been formerly accused of was putting a rubbish bag onto the open street. What was worse, he even went into denial: "It wasn't me, it was my underage brother!".

One detail that did not get read out was that the tall man with the flaming white hair had actually occupied the Iranian embassy once before. It had been back in 1984 and together with Sahand's dad and the People's Fedai of Iran, a communist organisation of which they were members. Except that time, they had gone about it the proper way: They had beat up the embassador and stolen 10s of 1,000s of dollars in travellers'cheques and blank passports in order to finance their revolutionary struggle. They got away with it pretty lightly -they only spent one week in prison before being left free.
Times have changed, and today, the stakes were higher. In the Netherlands, using violence to attack an international property can be penalized with 7 years detention. And apparently, things like breaking locks and trampling on a national flag legally do count as "violence".
Before the suspense grows too high, let me put your mind at rest: In the first break already jokes were made about how the accusants weren't taking the activists seriously, since the prosecutor had only demanded six weeks of incarceration.
He had made an elaborate 20 minute speech, using formulations like this: "They switched out and took down a security camera, and they walked over the Iranian flag -they even seemed to do so on purpose. This in Dutch law constitutes a use of violence." Legally, this may have been the correct definition, but it still sounded funny sitting in the back there.

To be honest, it was actually a very good thing that it did not emerge that someone of the team had actually pinched that very Iranian national flag the group had taken down to hoist their own one. And to boot, that someone had actually brought the incriminating evidence to the courtcase. You might call this a sort of bravery,... or thoughtlessness.

The defendant lawyers had done their work well, and they talked for a good half hour without ever repeating themselves. The obvious parallel to draw was, of course, the occupation of the American embassy 30 years ago, an action that put the workers of that embassy through a 444 days long ordeal before liberation. An action which at the time, ironically enough, was approved of by the Iranian authorities. The occupiers -and hostage takers- were celebrated as heroes.
This time around, even though the main gate was bolted, the ambassador could have left the building through a back exit, although he decided to sit the whole thing out inside.
The defendant side had quite a bit more material to highlight the hypocrisy of the Islamic Republic. The last year saw a string of scandals concerning the harassment of foreign countries' embassies in Iran itself: While Germany called embassy workers back in time, since they were being threatened by the Iranian secret service, French and British workers were actually taken to trial and sentenced on unjustified charges of spying for their countries. As for the Italian embassy in Teheran, it has been the object of attacks by Baseedj militia.
At the end of their long, eloquent speeches, the defense lawyers pleaded for a verdict of not guilty.

What concretely happened that day, that the activists could be charged with, was climbing across the fence, barricading the gate, going up on the roof, replacing Iran's national flag with one with the face of Neda Agha-Soltan (the most famous of those who died in the aftermath of June 12th), and then not leaving for about 1,5 hours before the police came to arrest them.
As someone spoke in defence: "Some countries want to name streets after Neda, how can it be a crime to put up her picture?"

There had been a first court session almost two months earlier, which had mostly been a hearing of all witnesses, that is the policemen who had stood outside the gates the day of the occupation.
It is indicative of the peacefulness of the action that one main point which was discussed without end was whether or not a shattered flower pot had been broken on purpose. In the end, it had become a sort of joke that each of the witnesses was asked as the very last question: "And did you see anyone break the flower pot?".
No one had, of course.

At the end of many hours, the judge asked if the defendants had anything to add, to explain why they had engaged in this "symbolical act of protest", and we took a break so each of them could prepare a little speech. There were testimonies of all kind. There were the long and rambling, the ones that reached back into the history of the Islamic Republic, stating the fact that it was embassies like this one who were implicated directly in the murders of the Kurdish leaders Ghassemlou and Sharafkandi, for example. There were the personal ones -"Kasra Vafadari was beheaded in a plot most likely spun by the Parisian embassy five years ago. In my dreams he still dies every night. Do you know what our nightmares are like?"; but there also were the funny, and the curt. On the whole it made for a good mixture, and an indeed quite powerful endpoint. Sahand's testimony was among the most emotive: "I was born in Teheran in 1980, right in the thick of the revolution. My first memory of my mother is that of cuddling up to her warm body riding on donkey back across the mountains between Iran and Turkey.
My first memory of my father is that of visiting him in a Turkish prison where he stayed for three months when he was picked up in Turkey as an illegal immigrant. Since then I have tried to grow up as a normal Dutch boy, but how can this be so, if I can never go back to the place where I was born and I will never have the right to meet my grandmothers again?"

To tell you the end of the story: The 10 activists were sentenced to four days behind bars... -on two years probation.

That is, if they don't storm another embassy too soon, they should be just fine and stay free.

2010-07-24T17:29:00.002+02:00

Urfa. The barren plains of Kurdistan lie panting in the heat. When you step out of the house, the hot air wells up around you like in a furnace. The temperature is far over 40 degrees Celsius. The people here stifle not only under the heat, but also under the oppressive traditions they live with. Here, in these regions, the tribes call the shoots. Unmarried girls have to stay indoors or leave the house only in groups, lest they risk getting abducted. The last time that happened was only two weeks ago. What then usually happens is that the council of elders comes together and decides what will be done. Either the tribe of the perpetrator of the crime agrees to pay a large sum of money, as well as a quantity of weapons, or the kidnapper and the girl must be married. As a last option to recover the honour of the victim's family remains only the murder of both kidnapper and kidnapped.
In this region there are Kurds as well as Arabs, but the prevalence of tribes is a feature of both cultures. "Without a tribe in this region, you don't stand a chance", they said to me. The only difference is that Arabs are even more extreme in their demands for gold, money and arms.

Weapons in any case play a big role here. The house in which my host Azize lives with her husband İbrahim has a large, partially shaded court yard. They rent it of the son of the actual owner, since the latter was incarcerated with a life sentence ten years ago for hiding guns and ammunition in den walls and under the floor of this very house, in order to help the Kurdish Workers' Party in their struggle.

Azize is in her early thirties, and she has her smallest daughter with her. A pale, fragile child, seven months old, a wheezing chunk of warmth with a flutter of eyelashes that would fit into any mascara advertisement.
"My daughter was born very small and weak. After her birth she was weighing only one kilogramm and she was as long as my underarm. A few months later she had pneumonia. We brought her into the hospitals of the big cities. One week we were in Adana, three days in Istanbul. I was like paralysed within. I could not sleep one minute for three days. 'My daughter is dying, my daughter is dying', I thought all the time. The doctor said to me, 'You really want to go blind, don't you?', because I was crying so much."

With Azize and some other women we were lounging on the kilims on the floor, hot air from ventilators awash around us, except when there was one of the frequent electricity cuts. The women, all Kurdish, either wore comfortable Kurdish sharwals or long, Arabic-style dresses reaching down to their toes, which are unusual elsewhere in Kurdistan. To pass the time, we were drinking iced water and eating baked sweets. But not all of us.
It is the eve of the Regaip night, the night of the conception of the prophet Mohamed, on which it is optional for believing Muslims to fast. Alevites once told me that when they fast they are also not allowed to shave or wash, or even look into the mirror. For the Sunnites here this cannot be true: The lady who had chosen to fast today keeps going outside to pour water over her face and torso, completely wetting her clothes in the process, so hard it is to endure the abstinence.

The Меzrab

2010-01-26T18:13:00.016+01:00

Fox news may call Amsterdam a den of iniquity, and a city of crime and anarchy, those who have been to the city know it is calm and agreeable, with quaint architecture and picturesque houseboats lined up on its many canals. I came here Sunday last week to help a couple of acquaintances with a squatting action, then leave after the first night, but events caused me to get stuck for longer: The following day the owner came with a group of 15 hit men to force down the door and physically set us, now the lawful residents, in front of it... Matthieu had to walk in his socks through the snow in order to call the police, and a solidarity group was also duely called in. Our lawyer, a slender and attractive man named Uppal, knew the ropes and he definetely had the gift of the gab. It took him a mere hour to get us back into the house.

"Whenever there are confrontation between squatters and the police, there is an underlying class conflict perceptible. As anyone knows, squatters are really a bunch of middle class kids, and the police are not. Once the squatters actually start thinking, they have the upper hand pretty quickly", he put it afterwards.

But let me not get sidetracked on the way to my actual story:

The same night that we got back into the house, a neighbour came to check out the new squat on his street.

He was middle-aged and had long beautiful hair streaked with grey that gave him the airs of an Indian. After locking his bike outside he sat down with us. He spoke of spirituality and showed us the colourful and intrigate surrealist drawings that he had made into the pocketbook he carried with him. His name was Mehmet and he was a Kurd from Şanlı Urfa (""Tu ji ku yî ?" I asked. "Ji Rojavayê", he said."Sûriye?"-"Nexêr, Urfa...").

I was a little surprised at how life threw me back onto my Mesopotamian road.

A few days later Mehmet invited me along to a cafe going by the name of Mezrab, I had heard much about from some Iranian friends already. A mezrab is a kind of dulcimer, the Persian version of the instrument that I got to know and love last summer as played by Pedro in Ukraine. The café in question was to move house the following day, so it was the last night in its old place, much beloved by its regular visitors. I was lucky to catch it.

It was a tiny location in a side-street of the city, with worn out timber-flooring, its walls adorned by prints of Persian miniatures and an enlarged photography of the landlady, red hair ablaze, singing on stage, much like she did stepping forth from behind the bar that evening. The whole night, red hot poetry (...tea!) flowed freely from glass to gorge.

As more musicians and listeners flowed through the door, the room filled with heat and melody.
In they came, covered in icy glitter from the whirl of wind and snow outside, into a whirl of sound and poetry.

On the chairs and benches musicians crowded with their Oriental instruments on their lap. Sometimes five or six of them played at the same time. There was Babak on guitar, Sahand on clarinet, Diyar on the bağlama. There was a Dutchman playing Spanish guitar, a Marroccan and his oud, a Hungarian and his fiddle, a Venezuelan with a ukulele and an imposing voice. One guy came and squatted on the ground, adding his bit with a wide range of rattles coming out of a turquoise rucksack. One guy even was throbbing with fists on the table as the energy in the room mounted. Sometimes half of the room raised their voices to sing along, when the song was a well-known one. At other times the whole room joined in when asked to softly hum a refrain.
In the silence between the songs the hiss of the samovar could be heard.

...and 'Ali is God's friend

2009-12-12T14:28:00.077+01:00

One very rainy sunday morning in Istanbul at Eminönü I asked a guy selling phone cards on the streets the way to a record store, and after he'd shown me how to get to the shop, for some reason he decided to stick with me. So he stuck, like a limpet, for as long as I would not tell him unpolitely to eff off. Strange though it may be, the boy amused me, so I never did.

His name was Hassan and his family traded in car parts. His nose had something cubist-style about it that told me it had been broken at least one time. He was born in the Eastern town of Maraş, which has a minority of Alevi Kurds of about 25 %, and he was one of them, as his name indicated.

The year of his birth was 1978, the year of the terrible Maraş Massacre, in which Sunnite city-dwellers assaulted Alevite migrants from the East, and over a hundred people died. Although it is sometimes said that the clashes at the end of the 70's in Turkey were a replay in miniature of the Cold War at a larger scale, a clash of Leftists and Rightists, the Maraş events were caused by an enmeshment of many facets, and represented as such a clash of religious sects as much as of one class of economic competitors and another. After Malatya in April 1978, these events in December triggered a period of mayhem and violence that got out of hand to the point where in the last year of the 7th decade of the century, 20 to 30 people were killed daily in the East of the country. The extreme right had the upper hand in this. They were better organised and more united than the Left (which had a number of deaths to deplore because of internecine strife), and rightist hit squads were seen as useful by the state which so condoned their actions.
Only the 1980 coup of general Evren and its ensuing mass arrestations was to reinstore a degree of order.
Today the Maraş massacre has entered Alevite historiography as one of the modern chapters of the concatenation of grief-laden tales that Shi'ism typically employs to construct its own image in the eyes of its adherents.
The last of these terrifying events happened in 1993 in Sivas, when hostile Sunni inhabitants of the city barricaded the doors of the burning Madimak hotel from outside and stood cheering as 37 Alevites, among whom some prominent intellectuals, perished in the flames.

Hassan and I in the meanwhile, were taking a bus. Mischievously he leaned over and asked me outright, "Will you come to my hotel and sleep with me tonight?". Unfazed, I told him, that wasn't actually how it worked with us Western girls, whatever his preconceptions. To this he said, "Yes, it does. I saw it on the television", and then he chuckled. After this he volunteered: "Do you want me to go? If I bother you I will leave." "No, and I know", I laughed and patted him on the back. It was true, he had already grown on me, and so we continued our day together.

Over a year earlier I had assisted a cem, an Alevite "mass", for the first time. Alevite prayer is carried out by a group of people facing each other, moving in a circle, each person turning around when they pass in front of the dede, their saz-playing eldest conducting the congregation, so as to never turn their back on him. This prayer to the Western eye may ressemble a dance, although some Alevites may take offence if that is what you will procede to call it. Other than this ritual use of music, further similarites with Christianity are striking.
Things such as the ritualistic use of candles, the ceremonial custom of confession, and the famous absence of an interdiction of alcohol or the veiling of women, may lead one to think of a synchretic religion, containing strong elements of Christianity while being nominally Islamic. The Alevites who invited me to dinner in Hacı Bektaş even said grace before eating, murmuring a prayer while pressing their thumbs down on the table for half a minute.
One way of interpreting their religion is indeed that, after centuries in the border region between the Shi'ite empire of the Safavids in Persia and a Byzance reaching out as far as Cappadocia to the West, the Alevites ended up concocting their own mixture of the two large faiths in the region. Another way of looking at them is that they are perpetuating pre-Islamic, thoroughly Anatolian customs in their faith. The burning of candles as well as the drinking of wine and dancing during religious ceremonies go as far back as to the Hittites of the second millenium BC.
There are certainly some parts of secular Turkish nationalists who hail Alevism as the supreme Anatolian incarnation of Islam.

Other, similarly fascinating small religious faiths in nearby Middle Eastern countries include the Ahl-e Haqq of Iran, at whose religious gatherings music and head-banging combine to transport the faithful into a sort of trance, or the Shabak of Northern Iraq. The interesting thing is that links and parallels between all these heterodoxies can be found easily.

Although the Alevites greatly suffered at the hands of the Turkish state later in time, when, in 1925, Atatürk destroyed most religious institutions, Sunni as well as Alevi, some view the period immediately after the incipience of the republic as a sort of golden age, some even speak of Atatürk as a 'messiah'.
After the conference of Sivas, Atatürk certainly did a tour mobilising Alevite leaders in Central Anatolia, knowing well he could not completely neglect this substantial segment of the population. In many parts of the country, Alevites took up arms to fight for the nascent republic, especially in the East; before, in times when religion was the prime identifier for people, Alevites had traditionally been the lowest layer of society after Muslim Kurds and Armenian Christians. Now they saw their chance to turn the tables.
It first comes as a surprise, but parts of Dersim, the main region for Kızılbaş Alevites, traditionally have always voted CHP, the party founded by Atatürk, and do so unto this day. And there are for example even conspiratic suppositions that there is a secret network of Alevites at the highest echelon of the military.

It seems to be an Alevite tradition to give out free food on a sunday, so with Hassan we went to have lunch together at the Cem evi (the Alevite prayer house) in Yeni Bosna. After that we made an incursion for tea on an acquaintance of mine living down the road, whom I know through an exiled ESP'li friend of hers in Paris. She is a lipstick lesbian and was doing her curls as we dropped in on her. She asked us if she looked cute.

Hassan and I finished the evening drinking Efes beer on a parkbench somewhere. The week after I looked for him on a busy friday and saturday afternoon down at the traffic lights where I had initially ran into him, and where he had told me he would be working every day.
But it was to no avail. I never saw him again.

Of Wavelets, Goblets, and the Slugletts

2009-12-01T18:57:00.065+01:00

Earlier on this blog, I had it about books you pick up solely for their titles. Here is a book I almost picked up solely for the authors' name. To tell you about it in a roundabout way: In his novels the writer Vladimir Nabokov lets loose a riot of different kinds of "-lets": "wavelets", "roundlets", "faunlets", and, even, "goblets" (in the sense of a little "gob" [that is, "mouth"]!), ... *
Anyway, something tells me that "sluglet" is just another word Nabokov was waiting to discover and put into use. For the sole fact that they chose my beloved Iraq as a subject, I may forgive Marion and Peter the extra "t" they have attached at their surname. The book I picked up was their seminal history of that country. And because I know you have all just been dying to learn about the topic, here a rough account of what I reckon are the most interesting parts of it. The book is nominally about independent, republican Iraq from 1958 on, but it consecrates an introductory section to the era preceding this, coinciding with the end of the Ottoman period in the country, and the few decades under British mandate.
Separate sections are put aside for the two largest political movements of the country -the Iraqi Communist Party and the Kurdish movement-, as well as the economy (in short, the Iraqi variants of all this blogger's nerdy inclinations...).

In fact, at the beginning, when the borders had been drawn by the West, and actually even long before this, the main reason why the three parts of Iraq did not form a natural administrative unit, as for example Syria or Egypt did in a relatively comfortable way, was that economically they had never really been integrated with each other at all, but with the geopolitical neighbours -Basra traded with the Gulf and India, Baghdad connected Syria and Iran by the land route, and as for Mosul, it was turned toward Aleppo and Anatolia.

It was actually with the onset of industrialisation that, somewhat paradoxically before it's final fall, the Ottoman central power came round to make itself felt at all, in far away regions where local administrations had heretofore subsisted with an almost perfect degree of autonomy, being only nominally Ottoman.
The onset of globalisation of trade also meant that Iraq could become a major exporter of grain (and dates), mostly to the Gulf and India. The rise in exports was accompanied by an almost exponential expansion of the cultivated areas. The situation so created was one of many landless and destitute fallahin working for a few handfuls of large landowners. This great inequality was to be a major problem for Iraq until well into the 20th century.
With the Ottoman land code the Ottomans made a last ditch, but disastrous effort to develop the order of private land property in Iraq, which before had been dominated by tribal custom.

As for the Brits, they were to continue, and improve on, the practice of appointing "useful" shaykhs in administrative positions, as had done the Ottomans. *(2) From the beginning of British occupation, it even had been a cardinal principle of British policy to bolster the powers of tribal shaykhs and landlords by creating a separate legal system specifically for the tribes which was to remain in force until the Revolution of 1958.

Until that time the immense and ever increasing polarisation of rich and poor characterised this same, entire period. The first person to try to do something about it was general Abd al-Karim Qasim. Especially his land reform -just one of the measures he inaugurated that had widely been demanded throughout the monarchy period- to a large degree succeeeded in destroying the political and economic power of the great shaykhs and landlords.
Equally unexceptionable was his construction of housing for the sarifa (slum) dwellers around Baghdad in the Al-Thawra district (which today is known Sadr City, after Muqtada, the head of the Mehdi army...).
Although he genuinely cared for the poor and laboured to improve their condition and enjoyed substantial support among the masses, the political oppositions in society polarised more and more throughout his regime. His greatest mistake may have been that he did not recognise where his real power base lay, which was with the radical Left, and that, subjecting the Communists to repression, he tried to woo the other side, that is the Arab-nationalists, at a point when it was already too late to gain their favour.
Although not free from reproach, his regime was figurative miles away from the wanton savagery of the regimes that had preceded and were to succeed him. He even showed himself indulgent toward his enemies, and it was probably to his own disadvantage that, when Abd al-Salam 'Arif fell into his hands in 1962, he commuted his death sentence. It was 'Arif himself who was to replace him, when, in 1963, Qasim's regime was brought down by a military coup. It was a combination of over-confidence and excentricity that spelt his end. Quixotic quests such as an attempt to conquer Kuweit made him fall into disrespect not only with neighbour states, but also internally in Iraq. At the very moment of the '63 coup, he still felt so self-assured that he did not acquiesce to the masses gathering on the square in front of Parliament clamouring to be armed to defend him. He was executed by the new regime the next day.

The months succeeding this coup was the period in time that the Ba'ath came out to play at light for the first time. They made themselves known to the public in what most Iraqis old enough to recall remember as the period that made the Ba'ath to be associated with reckless cruelty and terror. They turned onto the Leftists for revenge. Some statistics say that each extended family in Baghdad had at least one of its members die at the hands of the Ba'ath and sport stadiums were transformed into ad hoc prisons, as in Pinochet's Chile a decade later.
This is because the Communist party at this time had been at the height of its power -since the late 1950's a time began where a Communist cult was flourishing in Iraq, with the party not only controlling the streets through its mass organisations, but even making good business of selling merchandise such as key rings and breakfast mugs, as I read elsewhere.

In general, the main failing of the Iraqi Communist Party seems to have been that they always had built their party as a body ready to rule in a functioning democratic system and not in a place like the Middle East where the rules were set differently. In 1958 for example they could have easily assumed power, had they wished to take it the "usual" way it was done in their country, and resorted to a coup.

The Ba'ath at the time, which was so lavishly drenching its hands in the Leftists' blood, was less a proper political party than a loose network of social and kin relations. Ideologically they were steeped into the sort of exuberant, but balmy "neo-romantic" discourse, Michel Aflaq, the founder of the Ba'ath, had been engaging in since the 1940's in Syria, but they lacked any real substance. Once they came into power, their main interest was to stay in power at the expense of other political forces, and any talk of ideology can be seen as pure instrumentalisation to this end.

As for the Kurds, their story seems to be one of shifting alliances, not seldom paradoxical ones, within and without Iraq, to oppose, not at last, each other. The main fault line already was the division between the tribal Barzanis and the more liberal urbanites of Ibrahim Ahmed and his son-in-law Djelal Talabani.

To come to the economy, given the weakness of private capital in Iraq, and the fact that oil was its main source of income, at the time it was generally accepted knowledge that the way forward on the road of industrialisation was a strong state powering development. Large scale nationalisations were carried out in 1964. This stayed this way and was only reversed partly in the early 1980's when the war forced Iraq to open its economy (which had the virtue of "promoting efficiency" and, by the same token, disencumbering the regime of the massive state sector).

For some reason, for me reading through most of the 60's turned out a muddle, and the roaring 70's -rushing past a couple of oil booms, Ba'athist socialism as well as the perfection of its repressive apparatus, and Saddam's rise from head of the intelligence service to Prime Minister and sole dictator- a drag, and I skipped right to the end of the novel: The Iraq-Iran war of the 80's and Saddam's compromising invasion of Kuweit. However, I cannot regurgitate all that here though, I can scarcely find my own words, after having absorbed so recently only the relevant chapters.

So for the nonce, there you have it; now, who is going to actually read through this blog-post past the whacko introduction is a mystery to me, but I'll leave that to you guys.

See youse all later.

*(1) not to speak of "laundalets" and, the most excentric of all, "radugalets" (raduga meaning rainbow)
*(2) This was not always succesful. In Iraqi Kurdistan traditional clan rivalries prohibited not only an over-archign movement toward Kurdish unity, which spoilt their claims for autonomy, but also made the game of the British harder: for example they instated Sheikh Mahmud, but had to remove him in 1919 because he was unable to command and control over areas reaching out more than 20 miles around Sulaymaniyah.

2009-11-25T11:06:00.019+01:00

Earlier this month, for the 30th anniversary of the hostage taking at the American embassy in Teheran, the German newspaper taz started off an article writing: "When Barack Obama was elected the first black president of the United States almost one year ago in November 2008, the Islamic Republic prided itself of having freed after a few days already, all those hostages who were black or of the female sex in a sign of solidarity with America's oppressed minority, and because of the "special role of women in Islam". As if not keeping them hostage for the entire 444 days had been a humanitarian act."

The hostage taking at the American embassy was so momentous an occurrence that my teacher of Iranian history even called it "a second revolution". It catapulted Iran into the international isolation that it still finds itself in today. Even though in an interview with a French daily (Le Figaro?) I picked up straying lonely about the Parisian metro about this time last year, Khomeini's daughter, Zahra Mostafavi, claimed that her father had at first been taken aback at the news of the hostage taking, but was then wheedled into acclamation by some of those surrounding him, the general view is, I believe, that Khomeini represented a fanatical anti-Americanism from the beginning, and knew how to manipulate groups of people for his ends.
For one, the hostage taking coincided with an internal leadership crisis -a conflict between prime minister Bazargan and spiritual leader Khomeiny. Bazargan, who was educated in France and very pro-American, even wanted to tighten Iran's ties with the superpower. During the course of the hostage taking he resigned from office. It is not unlikely that Khomeiny instrumentalised events to achieve this.

One of the hostage takers was a young, 19-year old woman named Masoumeh Ebtekar, who made herself their spokesperson. This youthful venture into the world of terrorism of hers visibly gave her a good headstart on the career ladder, since less than 20 years later, under reformist president Khatami, she was made Iran's first female vice president. Paradoxically, she had grown up in the United States, where she was given the nickname Mary.
In similar fashion, it can only be called ironic that conservative president Reagan, who was electioneering at the time, also had a hand in this all. In a complicated affair of drugsale and arms trade, the hostage situation was protracted until elections were over and the hostages were poignantly liberated on the very day of his inauguration (January 20, 1981). All this was debunked in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair seven years later, in 1986.

These facts can be seen as crystallisations of the long love-hate relationship the United States and Iran have had, starting at the beginning of the 20th century, well before the USA became a superpower. At the time it was simply seen as a far away ally, willing to genuinely help with the process of democratisation. American individuals even fought and fell on the sides of the constitutional movement of 1906 against the Shah of the time.

2009-11-19T00:09:00.014+01:00

Recently, the (distinguished) newspaper Taraf published a pretty interesting interview with sociologist Ismail Beşikçi. Born in Çorum, some 200 kilometres east of Ankara, he was for many years -that is to say, decades-, the only Turkish voice in the struggle for Kurdish rights. Sentenced to something like 100 years behind closed bars by the Turkish state, he sat 17 years for his activism. The large majority of his books are forbidden in Turkey to this day.

The great topic of the day in Turkey is the current "demokratik açılım" ("democratic opening") undertaken by the party in power; in the beginning it was even programmatically called "kürt açılım", but Turkish society being fairly prudish and not quite ready yet to have this dirty word bandied about quite so liberally in public, the name soon was changed. When interior minister Beşir Atalay made a speech going into the details of the "democratic opening", he did not pronounce the word "Kurd" once. So far, results seem to be not much more than mouthsfull of hot air and concrete changes, such as the sanctioning of using old, Kurdish placenames instead of the Republican era Turkish ones, and the teaching of Kurdish as a foreign language in universities, cosmetic. The nationalist CHP and MHP, as well as the military, staunchly oppose a real solution of the Kurdish question. Beşikçi in this interview actually goes farther with his demands than the DTP, the pro-Kurdish party, themselves.

Broadly answering to the question "will the weapons be silent when the "democratic opening" begins to show its results? Will then come peace?" Beşikçi explains that he thinks that the Kurds should obtain "self-governance in a federal system. That is school teaching in their mother tongue, their own local administrations, their own security forces... They say there are 2,000 members of the PKK in Turkey, and 3,000 in Iraq. It is important to pose oneself the question what these PKK members are going to do when they leave the mountains. [...] The same problem existed between Israel and the Palestinians. It was solved in 1993 in the Oslo Accords. The Palestinians were given self-governance and the PLO laid down their weapons from this point on. This military power became the Palestinian National Security Forces.
We had the same situation in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. The peshmergas laid down their weapons, but were integrated into society by the Regional Government of Kurdistan as security troops. At the time when Turkey will be turned into a federation, the PKK must also be transformed into a body of security forces.
But the Turkish state ideology is very strong and as of now, such steps are incompatible with it. Colossal transformations of mentalities are needed."

Several times in the interview he calls on the Kurds to go back and study their own history. Finally, he jumps on the occasion to explain himself in detail: It is especially the duration of 1919 -21, the preparation periods of the Sèvres and the fateful Lausanne treaty, that are still largely in the dark today. Especially the Turkish state mystifies the machinations behind the going ons of the epoch, the cutting up and dividing of Kurdistan. How could they go through with such a division of Kurdistan at a time when the autonomy rights of the peoples of the Soviet Union were so constantly talked about? [...] Thing is, they probably did talk about these rights, behind closed doors, and all this is today being hushed up. Great Britain wanted to include Mosul under its mandate in Iraq because of the large oil reserves that had been found there in 1908. Mustafa Kemal at the time also laid claim on the province with the argument "We had have ruled over this region for 400 years. Our ancestors rode horses here. This is our region." The confrontation was the basis for a diplomatic crisis. [...] In my opinion this diplomatic discord between Great Britain and Turkey over Mosul led to Mustafa Kemal coming up with a deal along the lines of "We'll let Mosul go, if you leave us in peace with the claims for autonomy of the Kurds". When you look at the ex-colonies of Great Britain, you find the same scenario everywhere, be it in India, South-Africa, Kenya, Central Africa or Somalia: everywhere Great Britain granted their former colonial regions autonomy. Just not in Kurdistan! " (blogger's note: I do wonder what India's Manipur would feel they'd like to add to that affirmation, to note but one little-known example) -"So, according to you the Kurds did not get the right for self-determination because of negotiations with Atatürk? -"Yes, for sure, that is what I deduce from what I have read. [...] If the Kurds in the South would have been given the right to self-determination, that might have given the Kurds in the North ideas and endangered [Mustafa Kemal's] republic project."

GAP Projesi

2009-10-01T18:30:00.004+02:00

We drive along Atatük Barajı. The moon throws a puddle of light into the dull, perfect flatness that is this artificial lake, the moon throws a road that shines our way. The silver glitter of a thousand tears. In the country of contradictions, another contradiction is elevated to great heights, and it will plunge this region's richness to great depths. Livelihoods and heritage, submerged and swallowed up.

Destroyers

2009-09-10T18:41:00.021+02:00

I have a tall beautiful friend whose name is Kyrill. He has perfect skin and slightly slanted black eyes and maybe it is because of his partial Tatar heritage that he does not look his 26 years of age. But the fact that he dyes his long hair, which he shaves at the temples into a broad mohawk, into a metallic black, does not hide the fact that his beard grows a light titian red. I see him in a certain light. When he sits by the campfire with his face spasmodically illumined by eerie orange brightness, and talks to me about war, blood and revolution, he can't fool me, I understand who my friend really is: a Scythian.
It is what I call his "hippy-punk" confusion that makes him very much his own character and dictates his attire -an almost feminine black top and persimmon-coloured Indian shalwars. Shalwars are comfortable Indo-European leg-wear that today is worn from Kurdistan to Maharashtra, and that goes back to olden times. All in all his pair, on which simple ornamental embroideries snake their way from shin to thigh, looks very similar to the trousers I saw on the reconstructed fiberglass Scythian in the ethnographic museum in Yevpatoria.

We are on Crimea, that roughly rhomboid-shaped bit of land that juts out into the sea like the hand of a Scythian gripped around his bow -the Black Sea being said in Antiquity to have the shape of one of the Scythian's bows. The Scythians lived from hunting and banditry and they had acquired the reputation of being invincible warriors. "Their raids strike with the force of lighting... in number they are stronger than springtime bees, ...they empty the countries of others", a Byzantine writer of the 11th century wrote about the Pechenegs, one of the successor nomad peoples of the step, but the concept was the same already a thousand years earlier: The first thing you'd notice if you were to near a horde of Scythians was a cloud of dust at the horizon, which would come flying into your eye before you even could make out the details of their chuck wagons or individual animals of their herds of cows and sheep. At first the thunder of a hundreds of hoofs pounding the earth would overwhelm your senses, then a penetrating stench that would make it difficult to breathe. They were light-skinned, tall men on horseback, with spears in their hands and double-edged swords at their waists. At the bits of their horses they fastened the scalps of their enenmies, which they used as towels to wipe their hands, and at their belts they carried drinking cups made out of the skulls of whom they'd killed. Some even used human skin to make saddles. Their own skin certain of the Scythian tribes adorned with intricate, highly stylized tattoos, sometimes ones that covered their whole body.
Despite the fact that they were nomads, their society had a high degree of specialisation, and they had many different kinds of professions, manufactureres of different sorts and even blacksmiths. You have to imagine their galloping hordes as nothing less than mobile cities.

In the collective consciousness of the Russian people a special place is set apart for the memory of this great nomad nation who at the threshold of history lived on their southern steppes. It is by their bias that they like to explain all that is not European, but somehow, mysteriously wilder and more Asiatic in that Russian soul they so love to fuss about. And while some say searching for a connection is ridiculous because 100s of years lay between the demise of the Scythian state, and the appearance of Slavs on the pages of history, other scholars bend over backwards to attest at least a high probability that in the multi-ethnic confederation that was Scythia Slavic tribes did live and mingle.
At the time of the revolution the great Russian poet Aleksander Blok wrote a famous, strangely ambiguous poem entitled "The Scythians", that expresses all the contradictons of a Russia at the same time rejecting and embracing this barbarous heritage. It speaks of ravenous eyes, raging steel machines, and passion that destroys:
"Russia is a Sphinx. In joy and in sorrow, bathed in black blood, She gazes at you with hatred, with love."

Reading "Legitimation Crisis" in Teheran

2009-09-10T12:10:00.013+02:00

Let's own up to it, there's books you pick up solely for their title. For me, the heavy-handed, moralizing "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?", a 1999 book about the Kurds, was one. I read it sometime in the mid-2000's and it triggered memories from back in the day, when the Manic Street Preachers hit the top of the charts with a song improbably called "If you tolerate this, then your children will be next". The book was almost as good as the song, although a bit more longwinded.
Another one that took my fancy this way was the thin booklet "Reading "Legitimation crisis" in Teheran". I had read one of the books this title alluded too, as, it goes understood, any Nabokophile with an interest in Iran would have had to pick up Azar Nafisi's bestseller sooner or later. I read it in sleepless nights at friends' houses, through the prisms of foreign languages I don't perfectly master, partly in Dutch, partly in Spanish, and wasn't displeased with it as a way to kill time. On the other hand, "Legitimation Crisis", which is the English translation of Jürgen Habermas' 1975 title "Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus", is a work I haven't read, although of course I would have liked to. I sometimes joke that if I could have my way in life and wouldn't have to get involved with such irksome things as, *sigh*, work or study, all I would ever do would be read neo-Marxist literature and drink Earl Grey tea.
Anyway, what point in time more apt than three months after the fateful June 2009 elections, to pick up again the Legitimation crisis in Teheran?
I'm off to do that right now, and will give you a summary later.

Much later.

An Eastern Tale

2009-08-24T14:35:00.008+02:00

On 7 August, a month long ecological protest camp organized by an Anarchsit group intriguingly called "Activated Charcoal" has opened in the Crimean town of Sevastopol. Focus of the protest is the local company Avlita, who want to build four coal terminals not far from the very centre of town. Together with the town administration, who give profit and investment in the city precedence over its citizens’ health, Avlita are in cahoots against the local population who are almost unanimously opposed to the project, despite the employment opportunities it brings.
The building of the coal terminals infract on various laws. The degree of pollution the construction of the terminal alone will cause should be proscriptive in Sevastopol, which is a UNESCO site of world heritage. For the construction 350 cube metres of earth need to be excavated, which will cause the pollution of the water of the bay to a point where it leads to the death of all fauna in it, and this is without mentioning the subsequent degradation of air quality that four coal terminals in one city imply for its inhabitants.

The construction of such a terminal may seem a mere parochial concern at first sight, but in reality it offers an excellent snapshot view of the political processes of Ukraine as a whole, a country wearing the cloak of a democratic regime, but de facto reigned by concerns for profit.
Since a 2008 census Rinat Akhmetov, the owner of the company Avlita, is officially the richest man of Europe. He has long been the most important of Ukraine's “oligarchs”. “Oligarchs” are those individuals who during the de-nationalisation process of the Soviet state economy of the 1990's were close to power centres and as a result got criminally rich. In today's Ukraine, the three largest political parties are all being supported by their own network of oligarchs. As the richest and most influential oligarch of the country, Mr. Akhmetov is by some considered the most powerful man of the country as such. The political party Mr. Akhmetov is close to is the “Party of the Regions”, headed by his personal friend, Ex-president Yanukovich. This party traditionally dominates in Crimea, and the incumbent mayor in Sevastopol's townhouse is indeed a representative of it.

The decision to build the four coal terminals was made public in 2007, and construction has begun since. The local population’s indignation about the terminal has already been instrumentalised by political parties, who try to improve their rating with the Crimeans especially in view of the on-coming presidential elections. However, locals are painfully aware that these parties are part of the same political system under the sway of businessmen. People are now coming to realise that the development of civil society, and not the least the ecological movement, is crucial to assure the exertion of public rights (and this not only after it has become clear that the Orange Revolution's promises of a more democratic society were hollow ones). Since 2007 a citizens’ committee formed, whose conflict with the company has lasted for almost the entire two years. The struggle has also drawn in regional ecological organisations, but their activities are continuously undermined by the authorities. The participants of the ecological camp that is organised this August already get to feel what this means. Undercover police are present at each of its informational pickets and demonstrations, and the tent camp where the activists lodge already had to move location twice because of police harassment.
None the less the atmosphere is relaxed and the prevalent outlook over the following weeks among the participants is positive : “We do this for the people of Sevastopol, and we know that the large majority of residents support our cause”, as one participant said.

Iran - The Hizbullah Connection

2009-06-17T08:47:00.005+02:00

Yesterday Jadi twittered with astonishment about an instance at the Djam-e-djam rally where "motorcycle riding hardliners attacked the people, but police arrested them".

Then, early this morning, the following hearsay was twittered by persiankiwi:

# - military has refused orders to shoot protesters - #Iranelection

# - only baseej militia and Etellaat folowing orders - they cannot contain country without Army - #Iranelection

# -in azadi sq the killing was by baseej ONLY - military did not react - #Iranelection

# - several Generals have been arested - #Iranelection

Indeed in the past, it has not been uncommon for police on place in minority regions to defect in conflictual situations and for the centre to decide to move around exolingual police from other regions that can be used more effectively. When dealing with a nationwide insurrection, this of course won't do the trick. So what the Iranian authorities have long been suspected to be up to is using members of the allied Lebanese movement Hezbullah to engage in repression (the most conspicuous indication in the past having been a lost Lebanese ID card at a rally a few years ago which was picked up by activists).

The Lebanese Shiite organisation indeed was initially fostered by the Iranian militant movement that toppled the Shah throughout its early years in power, when the official line was to export the Islamic revolution. Lebanon with its strong Shiite minority seemed obvious starting point.

As Persian kiwi twittered yesterday: "[There are] rumours that some of the motorbike riders are Arabic speakers - cannot confirm if Hezbollah from Lebanon."

A new colour revolution?

2009-06-15T12:14:00.016+02:00

Observers have already called the electoral fraud "the end of the republican era". Others agree to call it a "coup d'etat". What we are observing now might be the revolution countering it. Throughout the campaign and more and more towards the end of it, Moussavi supporters have showed their support by clipping green ribbons to their clothing or wearing green shawls or wristbands. As seen in my earlier posts, the demonstrations have been gaining momentum over the weekend. Although the colour is not quite as widespread as was orange in the Ukrainian revolution what is in the making now might be the "Green Revolution".
Indeed, in an echo from the days of the Islamic Revolution itself, people are on the roofs again, shouting "Allaho Akbar". Equally can be heard: "Down With the Dictator" and "Mousavi/Karroubi where is my vote?"

But even if Ahamedinedjad can be ousted and someone else can claim presidency, could the change provoked really live up to the qualifier "revolution"?
As I glean from the Iranian blogosphere, and as an Al-Jazeera journalist worded it, Moussavi seems to be "the man of the day". Although of course, Iranian political activists still find many a nit to pick with this man. He has a dark spots in his resume as he was in power as Prime minister during the mass executions of 1980s and some of the liberal measures he now advocates are incoherent with his past policies. In any case he is more moderate in his reformist demands than the preferred candidate of the activists, Karroubi, who personally acted against the arrests of political activists this year and who ran on a platform that included a promise to "ensure equality of men and women".

But even though green bands can be seen worn everywhere by demonstrators, this doesn't mean the protests are strictly speaking pro-Moussavi. They are riots against the system itself. And with the sweeping support of the people, maybe Moussavi, the moderate reformist who never even claimed the label, would be pushed to making changes that go further than he originally intended. It would not be unheard of in regional regimes.

2009-06-15T02:57:00.020+02:00

"Today Ahmadi Nizhad tried to show that country is completely calm and nothing is wrong. There were riots yesterday (saturday), but that was NOTHING comparing to what happened tonight (sunday)! Last night only some parts of the city were rioting but tonight there wasn't a quarter in Tehran without demonstrations of people! We have burnt too many of their motorcycles, cars, buses, all the streets are separated with fires! They can only disperse us with tear gas and pepper spray!! But tonight people used hand made Molotov cocktails!! This situation is nationwide. All the big cities are rioting!! I have seen the videos and the riots are as good as Teheran. Tomorrow there is going to be a big demonstration of people with Mousavi and Karoubi on the front line. I hope that the movement is on the right path now.

best wishes,
Pouriyah"

There is a few things I am not sure about. For example, as for "tonight there wasn't one quarter of Teheran that didn't riot", I do wonder whether this was the case in the spread-out working class south for example. Also about the alleged known number of deaths from the first mail I have my reservations. It may well be smaller; many people without experience who see someone who has just been shot in the throat for example simply assume that he or she will die, even though she may get out alive of this.
And obviously Pouriyah, like anyone in Teheran, can only perceive a splinter of the great confusing mosaic of events that has flown up around them. There is simply too much information whirling about to disentangle, order, and fish the meat bits out, whereas it is surely also inevitable that misinformation of various natures is also intermixed in it.
But it sure is an impassioning e-mail to read.

News from Teheran

2009-06-14T20:27:00.020+02:00

"It is now 10:06 in the morning and though my house is far from the center I hear ambulances and fire engines moving in the city" started off a mail I got from
Pouriyah today, a guy I contacted through the noble institution of the Anarchist Yellow Pages in 2007 and at whose house I subsequently stayed when I was in Teheran. Maybe Pouriyah is not really a thoroughbred libertarian, because it seems he cares about the elections. The tone of the mail speaks of the anger and frustration the youth of the country is going through; it called what happened yesterday a coup d'état and was peppered with swear words (unusual for my soft spoken friend). It also provided information I haven't been able to confirm through the official news, notably that "they have killed more than 10 boys and girls yesterday". Another friend of mine in Teheran said about this: "I also heard these rumours, but they are not confirmed". There are videos on youtube showing the Iranian police beating a man motionless.
Pouriyah went on: "They have imprisoned Mousavi and Karoubi in their houses, disabled mobile communication, disabled SMS, filtered all the news agencies website, hacked Mousavi's website, shut down universities and schools and they're saying in their news agencies that everyone in Iran is happy about the results and they are celebrating as if nothing had happened!!!!!! Also, they are not validating expired VISAs of foreign reporters, and they have suggested to other reporters to leave Iran immediately!
As far as I know same movements have been in Shiraz. I hope today other cities also join us and finish off these mother fuckers!"

For pictures from the riots yesterday scroll down here.

2009-06-14T05:38:00.011+02:00

For someone who professes to take interest in only two things in life -beer and politics- I am usually prone to an astonishingly complete indifference towards all that regards elections and their corollaries. But these ones seem to be at the beginning of somewhat of a new era: The Iranian regime has reached yet another level of illegitimacy.
The hand that was offered to the West throughout the nineties with the moderate presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami shall not be stretched out again (and into the bargain this obviously comes at an important juncture when the USA, for once, were actually willing to hold out a hand in their turn), and the citizens of Iran shall be locked into another cycle of four years into conservative moral policing and devastating foreign policy.

Despite being conscious of all the limitations of their reformist movement, there was genuine enthusiasm among Iranian political activists and the youth at large. Even the most chronically disaffected went out to vote on Friday. The results of these elections came as a shattering blow to their hopes.
This youth constitute the first generation of Iranians born into the system, not yet having gone through the full cycle of insurrection and repression and worn out by it, and they are willing to fight again.
There was the hope (although coupled with fear for repression) that this may cause significant riots. But street fights are reported to have been scattered and to (have) fail(ed) to coalesce into a cohesive uprising, organisation having been made difficult by the shutting down of the SMS system a day before the polls and by the riot police having a new efficacious technique of catching up with rioters through being extremely mobile on "small nimble motorcycles" (Al-Jazeera). The BBC reports a couple of these have been joyously put on fire during the protests.

Recent Readings

2009-05-26T19:44:00.028+02:00

This may be the perception of an outsider distending the importance of what locals perceive to be mere details, but the Netherlands seems to be the European country where public debate about Islam is the most contentious and most polarized (I am thinking of such public figures as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders).
The Dutch blogosphere has already abundantly taken notice of a neologism the "Groene Amsterdamer" made up earlier this month - "Polderislam". The word is untranslatable, but self-explanatory once we clear up the first two syllables: "Polders" are those areas of the Netherlands which were claimed from the sea in defiance of natural law and which up to this day are protected by dykes and picturesquely dotted with windmills.

As part of the collection of articles about the phenomenon, an interview with the Moroccan economist Fouad Laroui was published. Educated in Casablanca, Paris and the United Kingdom and living in the Netherlands for twenty years now, he has not only academically published in three languages, but is also a French-language novelist whose novels are bestsellers in Morocco. The article made heard pretty critical opinions about Muslim society in the the Netherlands that probably only a Muslim himself can put forward without slithering into controversy (the article is actually entitled "I'm going to end up getting a fatwa for this").

The article represents a two-page race through 1400 years of history, beginning with Mohammed's times and ending with the Palestinian question, giving a glimpse of many an interesting topic and particular view (Mr. Laroui sure is opinionated on some points), but obviously (brevity obliges) leaving much to be desired in terms of depth. Along the way, Laroui philosophizes about Islam and science (name-dropping Ibn-Rushd), Islam and igtheism (assimilating the Mutazilites' philosphy of a god "without attributes" to modern atheism), and Islam and politics ("The division of religion and state in Islam started with Abu Bakr. He was the political successor of Muhammad, but not his spiritual one. How, in god's name, could you be the spiritual successor of a prophet?!").

I have no intention of copyfighting, but for those who can't read Dutch I'll translate just a couple of thought-inspiring passages:

"«The kind of oumma that is now being propagated in Europe is an aggressive one. [...] It is important -and with this I am not making myself popular among muslims- that we distance ourselves from the idea of an "international religious community", membership of which is more important than all other identities. Something is fundamentally wrong if a Dutch Muslim feels he can relate more closely to an imaginary Pakistani ten thousand kilometers away from him, than to his neighbour who happens to be Christian or atheist...»"

"«Islamism was born in the 19th century as a reaction to colonialism. For hundreds of years muslims were the ones who subjugated others, and now suddenly it was the Christians who subjugated the Muslims! Where had it all gone wrong?! One explanation was: We've been led too far astray from the path of our forefathers.» [...] Given the bad reputation that the Salafist movement has now, Laroui is pretty straightforward when it comes to the origins of the movement. Muhammad Abduh the 19th century founder of Salafism considered that a return to pure Islam was perfectly compatible with modernity. For this man rationalism and scientific positivism were the only way through which the Muslim world could overcome the backwardness that was at the root of what subjugated the Muslim world to the West. This progressive kind of Salafism however was supplanted by a "reactionary" kind of Salafism, thought up by the Syrian Rashid Rida, Mohammed Abduh's disciple. It took the return to the past literally and represented the kind of utopianism that almost automatically had to turn into extremism."

2009-04-09T20:48:00.000+02:00

Because of last year's economic crisis, over 500,000 workers have been made redundant across Turkey. One group affected were the metal workers of Sinter Metal, a company located in Ümraniye, one of Istanbul's largest working class districts. On December 22, upon the annoucement of the redundancy of 400 employees, the workers climbed over the gates and occupied the factory for two days. Over the past three months their struggle has continued and it reached its 100th day today.

You can sign the petition here.

2009-03-29T12:29:00.001+02:00

Another one of those posts. Discussing things with myself again on the internet because I have no other outlet.

The idea of there being an enlightened and open kind of Islam present in Iran is one of the most irritating clichés out there. What we see in Iran with the wide presence of women is the articulation of women in resistance, women against the system. Iran, if you permit, is a horrible place for women.
The fact alone that Iran sports around 60% of female enrolment in universities doesn't make for anything. Even for the most mysoginist and devious Islamist, there is no way of denying women education, the basis for this is given in the Koran in the most unequivocal way.

From what I have heard and read, despite the fact that I don't have the statistics, even in Saudi Arabia women in higher education make up at least the 50% they are entitled to. They are often outstanding students and on the whole excel their male counterparts. Now some person who loves Saudi Arabia will come and tell me off, but the reason basically is that these girls, as opposed to young male students, have nothing else to do to kill time with other than study.
Interestingly, when the first women graduated in that country, sometime back in the 70's, the few handfuls of female graduates were not mentionned in the university's brochures at the end of the year. In Saudi Arabian culture it is just not done -under whichever circumstances-, to talk about women. An uproar of outrage had the university print their brochure a second time.

In Iran they never hesitated about making explicit their policies of offering mass education to females, but this alone hardly warrants calling Iran an enlightened and liberal place.

On "the Russian threat"...

2008-08-21T14:08:00.000+02:00

The point I was trying to make with the previous blog post was that the situation in South Ossetia was a very specific one. That by no means Russia's and Georgia's intense love-hate relationship, which goes back a few hundred years in history and has been especially fierce over the past few years, can be compared to Russia's political relations with any other country in the world (not even Ukraine). And that when Condoleezza Rice compared this war to the putting down of the Prague spring forty years ago this was just an expression of how little the US understand of this war. Actually I think the US are simply being their hawkish old selves (they invaded Iraq, remember?) and have ulterior motives; but let's give them the benefit of doubt. That a lot of newspapers picked up the Prague Spring comparison doesn't make it any less glaringly inept in any case. It just goes to show again that some journalists are simply johnny-come-latelies trying to analyze a conflict in a far away place they actually know little about. And in this way are in fact creating damage themselves.

Because the press have a huge responsibility in the coverage of the conflict. And as I am trying to explain, they are not living up to the task. Much to the contrary even; they are pouring oil on the flames: In our newspapers always and again pictures of the two or three shelled houses of Gori, Gori, Gori are shown -but (almost?) never the completely flattened townscape of Tskhinvali. They could have shown Ossetian youth trying to withstand Georgian tanks with Molotov cocktails -but showing Russian tanks turned out to be what was on the agenda.

On the part of the US (that far away country which, for obscure reasons [electioneering?] seems to fear the Russian threat most), starting talks about putting up missile defense in Poland was an act of provocation in and of itself. Now, there have been discussions of this in newspapers and the general end-point was that Russia knows pretty damn well that the missiles aren't really targeted at them; but my first gut reaction was that it was an act of provocation. A continuation in fact of the humiliating treatment the US subjected Russia to after the fall of the Soviet Union, considering Russia as the "defeated", the loser of the Cold War; whereas the Russians had reason to feel themselves as winners, too. They themselves broke up the "evil empire", ready to start anew. The renewed imperialist discourse that has been manipulated in the Kreml since Putin must also be understood in the context of a country where a harsh plunge into destituteness after the implementation of "wild west"-capitalism with the end of the Soviet Union mean a lot of nostalgia for the easier old days among the general population.
And of course, it was an allergic reaction to over fifteen years of being taunted by the NATO and America.
And now, talks of excluding them from the G8 or boycotting the Olympic wintergames are more provocations.

And so today the Russians have pushed forward to Poti, although they signed an agreement to leave until tomorrow night. I'm in no way excusing them. I'm just explaining a different viewpoint.

I think that in view of the fact that Western countries have hundreds of years of histories in their back during which their states evolved, some countries with young, imperfect democracies like Russia's can be understood if you see them like pubescent teenagers (I often think this when looking at Turkish politics for example). I think it was Douglas Hofstadter in "Gödel, Escher, Bach" who in the effort of explaining collective, so-called "emergent" intelligence, cited the example of aunt colonies: Even though all the components (that is, individual animals), "change" over time (they die away and are replaced by "new-borns"), aunt colonies that existed over a relatively short period of time compared with others, do, during a certain period, display the sort of moods and fickleness that we commonly associate with human teenagers. I don't see why "collective intelligence" should not be applied to states as well. So this seems to underscore my point of view.

So while the hoary US and Western European states see themselves as global teachers of democracy and nationhood who have to disciplin the young lout, the Russians are having a dance around Georgia, thumbing their nose at the West, just because they can. And because they want to teach their old blood-brother-slash-enemy Georgia a lesson they will remember in a while.

And not, mind you, because we have to fear an invasion of Estonia as the next step.

(This blogpost btw started off as a reply to the comment I got on the post below, but then grew a little bit longer than I had thought...)

A view on the war... Reconsidered

2008-08-14T21:30:00.002+02:00

As every one knows, summer is a good time for war.
And so this summer in Georgia's two renegate republics Abkhazia and South Ossetia started off like all the previous summers with mystery bombs going off and shoot-outs here and there that were not claimed by anyone in particular. In Tbilisi, the muggy city under grey oppressive skies, life flowed on quietly in the heat; pop-songs with jokes about the incompetence of Kokoyty, the president of South Ossetia, may have made it onto the radio, but not too many people seemed to be seriously worried about the prospect of fighting breaking loose -the news of growing tensions just seemed summer business as usual.

But then, war erupted, full-blown.

Western Adam Averages (this included journalists) started hastily reading up on the topic in those three days that Tskhinvali was burning, focusing on going back dissecting time-lines trying to find out who cast the first stone, Russia or Georgia. I certainly will leave the hair-splitting argumenting over who cast the first stone to the journalists of renowned newspapers not only because I am rather disqualified for the job, but also because I think that the endeavour is entirely beside the point. And in a way the articles delving into such details are just pawns in the game of trying to blur the traces that both Russia and Georgia are engaging in.

To me it seemed clear all along that a letting the two renegade republics peacefully simmer out of focus was definetely neither Russia's nor Georgia's intention. Both sides wanted a war, sooner or later, but of course it was also in the interests of both sides to be able to blame the other one for 'aggression'in order to save face in front of the international community. Hence every year again the taunting of each other, little bombs and mystery killings in order to keep the tension up -this was not a new thing this year, there's simply not much point examining time-lines for the first bomb planted or the first jet-fighter flown. Instability in the renegade republics was a summer child both parents, however deeply parted in dispute, always mutely agreed on fostering well.

For me the fact that the war erupted is not so much of interest as much as what was the spark, why this year?
Some newspaper argue it may have been the independence of Kosovo. Declarations of Independence of new states certainly don't happen every week these days. And while Russia was trying to hinder any forward steps of Kosovar nationalism in solidarity with its long-time ally Serbia for years, when the 'impreventable' had happened, it decided it might as well reap the fruits of the unwished-for turn of history: Its actions vis-a-vis Abkhazia and South Ossetia from February onward are traced back to have became more and more agressive(at first lifting sanctions, then flying war-planes...). The reason given is pounded on about at length in some Western publications: Imperialism.

And although today's developments with Russia's move toward Tbilisi only seem to underline this, I still hold the conviction that this conclusion is beside the point.
Why? Because this war was predictable for several reasons. I would go so far as to argue that both Russia and Georgia spent a long time working toward an escalation. And although the world may only be opening its eyes to Russia's re-awakened interest in "imperialism", this tendency has been pursued by Putin less as a foreign policy strategy than a way to win the hearts of voters within Russia for a long time. This war only really occupies a small piece in the bigger picture of this tendency.
Some people have gone so far as to call South Ossetia itself a "red herring" -it is not.

Yes, the Russian press disseminates information to its own people, white-washing the truth: They are making Russian citizens believe that Russia's intervention was purely an altruistic gesture necessary to save the Ossetians from genocide. But if this is to be pure "propaganda", and not part of the truth (some people in North Ossetia who have directly spoken to refugees do passionately believe this), then the same can be said of our Western press.

I'm not saying that the Western press (the 'free' Western press, god forbid!) is doing it on purpose. The culprit, in my eyes, is an ideology that -similar to Free Market Ideology in an 'Economist'-article-, hovers blindly accepted above Western political assumptions of how the modern world is to be run.

The ideology I mean is nationalism; and I do not mean the really ugly, extremist kind. Because whereas some articles I read wanted to portray Georgian nationalism as being of a particularly fierce kind, I must say that by regional standards, compared to neighbours like Turkey or famously fascist infested Russia, Georgian nationalism struck me as pleasantly un-obnoxious.In the few months that I spent in Georgia I did not see much blind nationalistic bigotry. For example at the football match Netherlands-Russia the family I lived with, as well as other acquaintances of mine, openly supported Russia. This was only one occasion for Georgians to say to me 'Russia is our political enemy, but not the people', or to admit 'Despite it all, we feel culturally close to them'. Now, in Turkey I only have to blink an eye in direction of Armenia to risk reaping hate-inspired tirades.

What I ultimately point at is that here it is nationalism in what today is considered to be one its softest form, the doctrine -the dogma, I should say- that defending ones borders is right. Even to defend completely irrationally stipulated borders -which so obviously applies in the case of South Ossetia. Even if it means to claim an area of land where more than 60% of the population are vehemently opposed to living as part of the state they were allotted to, as it is the case here.
And let's remind ourselves that what exactly Western governments are defending in backing Georgia in this conflict is a mere whim of Stalin.

Because it is nationalism, that ugly brew confectioned in the West and sold to the world in a two-for-one package together with 'democracy', which coupled together with Georgian violence-glorifying culture made for an eagerness for war. Some people who resisted accepting the prevailing persuasions of the Western media consider Saakashvili a berserk warmonger. Personnally I think he is just an average Georgian on this account, the problem being that he is in power.

The CNN, doing their usual job of turning serious topics into scandal journalism, recited the statistics of Georgia having 62 tanks, Russia thousands, but stated that Georgia could justifiably feel that they had the moral high ground. Most (all?) other Western media came up with the same logic supporting Georgia.

In my eyes, both countries fought a war in a different country. To state the obvious: In an ideal, but as of now unattainable world, the status of South Ossetia (and Abkhazia) should have been resolved long ago in a peaceful referendum by its people, and not through war (there have been referenda, but they stayed without consequence). It is not so much Russian imperialism, as the Western imported doctrine of nationalism that made that world so unattainable. So I think maybe it is time to re-think nationalism as a concept on the whole (a train of thought for example Murray Bookchin embarked on).

And also realize that the European Union is going in the wrong direction: Ever fortifying its fortress as it is, it should not really be in the right position to lecture Russia about neo-Imperialism, should it?

(This blog post has become one of fluctuating thoughts ever taking new shapes... If I may just seem to be thinking aloud, I apologize)

Tea is poured out into 12 glasses

2008-06-27T13:35:00.001+02:00

Tea is poured out into 12 glasses. A few pair of hands distribute the scalding hot liquid slopping onto the carpet into the round. My gaze lowers, plunges into the undulating red, eyeing the cluster of tea leaves on the ground that are waving like a patch of algae. When I lift my eyes and let them wander over the faces in the room, I smile to myself thinking that in Europe we don't have such names of sheer poetry: 'Dimple' is sitting next to 'Soft Breeze', 'Wish' next to 'Trust', 'Fountain' next to 'Spring', and yes, apart from 'Peace' we even have 'War'!

The people in this room are political radicals. They call themselves Socialists. No, that was no typo: In Turkey, as a Socialist, you are already a radical. Most of them are part of a minority, Alevi or Kurdish.
The walls bedeck trivia that their people made in prison: Clocks braided (sic!) out of crassly coloured nylon strings, pictures of Caucasian dancers "tattoed" on the back of the yoghurt lids. Also -obligatorily, ubiquitously- commercial posters of Che Guevara smoking his cigars.
Accordingly jokes about homosexuals are made, by the way.
Genderstructures however are hard worked at: Everyone cooks and does the dishes together (something which, among other young Turks who consider themselves 'progressive' is not necessarily the case).

Indeed, they also all crowd together in the kitchen to light cigarettes and smoke out the tiny room. "Why not on the balcony?", I ask naively, not yet sufficiently acquainted with Turkish culture. "It would be inept for the girls", I get the answer.

At another moment, among themselves, the girls complain about the on-coming university holiday which they are going to spend at their native places: "In the village you never really have time to do something for yourself. All your thoughts are controlled by is what you are going to cook next and how you are going to get the dishes washed."

This group of young Leftists has taken on drugs, but they are vegetarians only because they are hard-pressed for money. It is to that effect that they also consider it fit to have capitalists zapped.

Bağlama, that most Turkish of string instruments, is played, eleven voices are raised in song (minus mine)-guerilla ballads are sung.

I must say the irony of listening to this bunch of people vocally considering armed resistance in their country and the next moment see them hesitate to smoke in public makes me smirk to myself another time.

Everything bespeaks the fact that you can't escape culture: Indicative of this is also their vocabulary which employs the term "shehit" abundantly - except that here the term does not denote soldiers fallen in action, but the victims of the hunger strikes in Turkish prisons.
I voice my perception of this, my opinion that they, like the Turkish state who sees the sole honour of its soldiers in their demise, value death too much, more than other forms of resistance. I argue that some of the almost 130 people who died during the prison strikes, could have lived and continued political activism in a different way.
"You don't understand; we don't want to die, we want to live. But they kill us every day: with their laws, with their authoritarianism, with their torture.
Minorities in this country have no rights, no life, we are already dead."

In a village, remote, Turkey

2008-06-18T19:20:00.001+02:00

It is Sadenur's main activity to cultivate her thighs. Shortbread is dunked into milk and pasted over with cream and chocolate. Round bland cookies are cooked in honeyed water. Apples are strewn with sugar and baked a crispy brown.

The family house -which with its large oak framed windows, the stone-coloured fassade and wooden oriel is situated picture perfect on a rugged hillside of lacerated red rock-, does not even have a proper lock, but only a latch to keep the door closed from the inside. It is thus practically 'by definition' that one of the women has to sit inside all day.

'We can go walking through the gardens, can't we?' asks Sadenur, whose name translates as 'pure light'. The mother's nod is hesitant, a hint of a nod only actually, and -accordingly, probably- Sadenur does not really wait for it before she tucks her fiery red-dyed hair under the headscarf in flowered imitation silk. In the presence of the foreigner the nod would have had to be interpreted as such even had it actually been a shake of the head I guess. Correspondingly, it seemed to me, it only may have actually turnt out a nod at all because I was there.

We amble over uneven narrow paths winding their way in the shade of tall trees, snatching snow-white and extremely sugary mulberries of the branches that are obstructing our way. Sade tells me that she could never be friends with a man, because the guys here only think about one thing as soon as you start to even talk to them (and I think to myself that I spent the past week with the local boys and am indeed kind of glad I am rid of them). But apart from that her father or elder brothers would not allow her as much as to sit down next to a 'foreign' man (not a member of the family).

But Sade tells me there is a way to break away from tradition, and it is quite simple: Go and study -you'll have to move to another city away from the control of your family and your emancipation will happen all by itself. ''I would have loved to go to university, but they -'' she says pointing one finger up -'devlet', 'the State'- ''don't allow it''. What she alludes to of course is the headscarf ban that also extends to academia in Turkey.
''Apart from that I graduated from an İmam Hatip school -that makes everything doubly as hard''

We continue ambling about the garden plucking of fruit here and there and gradually make our way down to the brook when suddenly, as if we were in Saudi Arabia, the 12-year old brother, the sweet blonde boy with the almond-white, translucent skin through which the veins shine blue, is sent after us by the mother who has been peeping at us through the lace curtains.

To get rid of him after a while, Sade asserts that we are just heading for the bend in the river over there, and then are going to be on our way home, definetely home, again...

Friendship between the nations

2008-06-07T14:11:00.000+02:00

At first the Xerox Café next door let me use a computer in a claustrophobically tiny, inumbrated side-room without lamp or light bulb, where my only luminary source was the flux and reflux of natural light that reached me from the main door. As customers engaged in their daily game of come and go, they obstructed or gave free my gateway to the sun, and I worked doused in an ever fluctuating Chiaoscuro.

Then, when the monitor of that computer failed, I was promoted of sorts to the small room in the house facing it; the place, in fact, where Avto, the guy who manages the Xerox shop, eats, sleeps and shits. His little abode is of typical Georgian character. The lightless frontroom most closely resembles a box room full of junk from which the toilet is seperated by a man-sized chunk of paper-maché trying as hard as it can to function as a door. Since we are in Georgia, the land of the ever-running water faucets, the tap is cranked open 24/7 -no matter how much force you apply to it, the stream of water pouring forth does not diminish. Inside the often chilly main room the obligatory leaflet-sized copies of icons are pinned to the mossy wallpaper which is curling off in most corners of the room. Next to the keyboard lie palm-sized prayer books. Somehow appropriately, and very typically of Georgian funereal culture, most work that comes through here is the printing out of photographs of the recent dead, so the make-up artist can make them look like themselves for the open coffin funeral.

Disadvantageous to my working habits though it may be, it never gets boring here. Mtvarisa usually hangs out in the back, studying Italian when she has nothing to do(economically motivated emigration is planned in the near future) and generally chatting with me more than Avto, her employer, can approve of. And once in a while, friends are bound to drop in. Today Kristina and Arthur come, a young couple with whom I converse in Dutch. Whereas studying languages may seem pure intellectual indulgence in the West, in a country like Georgia, even a relatively obscure language like Dutch can secure you a relatively very well-paid job at out-sourced Dutch companies. Kristina, whose Dutch is fair but whose English remains rudimentary, sells bird seed over the phone to customers in Utrecht or Antwerpen. Arthur, whose English is near fluent, was able to get a prestigious job at the Dutch embassy. The two of them come with a kilo of strawberries which we empty into a big tin bowl and smother in sugar. We hand out forks to everyone and start impaling the little red devils' heads rolling around in fairy dust. They are devoured in no time. As we still prattle lightly about nothing in particular over our afternoon snack, Avto calls through the door that he may have a job for one of us: A man in a jeans, leather boots and the sort of irremovable sun-glasses that make him look like a modern-day Mkhedrioni agent, wants a translator. He needs to have a phone call done to the U.S., from where he is going to import a car.

It's an easy job for Arthur who was lucky enough to have the occasion to learn fluent English when he was drafted: He shared his military service with some of the division of 200 U.S. American soldiers that George Bush sent to Georgia in 2005 as a symbolic interchange of favours for those Georgian troops that were deployed in Iraq (and who are to be "shipped" back in a hurry after the Russian "invasion" into South Ossetia in August).

"You say it will take less than a week? Are you sure about that? We are in the country Georgia, the Ex-Soviet Republic, not the American state..." Arthur explains over the phone. It was a quick, easy job, but for the expedient execution, Mr. Mkhedrioni lays down two crisp new ten Lari bills on the table.
As soon as we are alone again Arthur laughingly proposes: "Let's have a party and spend it all!"

And so, off we traipse into the dusk of day, across Tamar Mefe Bridge and into Tbilisi's historical old town, to a nice, atmospherical basement restaurant, well hidden from tourists.

As a starter we order Kharcho - a tasty concoction of soft farmer's cheese meshed with thinly cut pieces of mint, all rolled up into funnel-shaped bags of razor-thin Sulugumi cheese, which stems from the area around Zugdidi (accidentally, Arthur's home town). I must admit to a natural propensity for all dairy products (I could never be vegan) and the same kind of weak spot for mint as a spice. So, as I slowly suck on the soft, succulent foodstuff, my predilections combine, and I feel like transported straight into some culinary heaven -this is like, the best dish ever. When I am to talk of our dinner the next morning I am to say "This happened yesterday, but I am sure I will speak of it like that even in ten years time!".
We accompany the main dish, the eternal, but still incredibly tasty Khinkali, with a bottle of Borjomi mineralwater and some Georgian wine -both products which used to be among Georgia's strongest exports, famous far beyond that city on the Volga or even the Ural. But during the "diplomatic crisis" with the giant of a neighbour to the North in the winter of 2005-6, Putin banned these products from exportation, ostentatiously "on grounds of hygiene".
"We,on the other hand have no calms consuming Russian imports!", says Arthur merrily and opens a bottle of "Stol'ovskaya Vodka". And down goes the first toast on "Mezhdunarodnuyu Druzhbu"-"Friendship between the nations"...

Riot Shields, Voodoo Economics...

2008-05-15T14:31:00.000+02:00

In Chukhureti, one of the oldest quarters of Tbilisi, the dodgy district around the train station, electioneering is on the agenda. A member of the Unified Opposition, a coalition of nine different opposition party, is said to come round the corner any moment now and talk to his prospective voters. A police man is already in position, surveying the street. Another one ambles over non-chalantly to join him. People from the neighbourhood have trickled in and are waiting. I chat to the crowd, trying to get a general idea of what people are expecting from the following brief presentation in particular, and the elections in general. So far it seemed to me, people were unhappy with the status quo because of high taxes, and the unpopular, strict methods of enforcing their payments. Now I get to hear the wildest stories of police men dealing in drugs and the extrajudicial executions of children. Forgive me if I hesitate to take these stories at face value, but I have only been in the country for three weeks, and have thitherto been subject only to the Western digested press versions of what's going on in this country.

Then, finally, a young man walks over, energetically shaking hands with everyone he can grab from the flock of people along the side-walk. He is dressed entirely in black,ressembling a Protestant priest to my eyes in that only a spanking white collar breaks the arrangement, neatly tucked out over his slightly washed-out sweater. The talk begins.
"What is he saying?", I ask the woman next to me, hoping for a translation. "He is talking about the bad state the pension system is in, that parents of handicapped children now receive nothing from the state. And that all this will change when the opposition is elected", she explains to me in Russian. She waves him over, and he grants a minute for an interview with the foreign journalist, lays his arm over my shoulder and walks away a few steps from the crowd. "What were you talking about? What is your party's program?" I ask, laconically. "We must bring down this criminal government, if this will not happen through democratic elections, there will be another revolution!", out spurts the propaganda. "So, what in particular is your criticism of the current government?" I nod at his winding explanations, and although the word "privatization", as I mumble in comprehension, goes not understood, that seems to be what he is on about. "What is the name of your party? Do you consider yourself to be left-wing or right-wing?" I eventually conclude with one of my naive, Western queries. He answers: "Excuse-me, but that is a non-sense question. First we must make the courts independent, we must decentralize power in this country, then we can speak of a Left, or a Right!" He soon returns to spread his word among the multitude. Women dominate the scene, peppering him with questions, while the gathered men stand stoically in the back. On scrutinizing the crowd I discern the hint of an interested mien on one or two of the assembled faces there in the background. In typical Caucasian fashion the colloquy soon gets out of hand and degenerates into several pairs of people taking turns shouting at each other, their faces lit up with the fever of argument.
As if it hadn't been possible to get more Georgian still, it all came to a natural end when a scuffle between two drunks at the end of the street attracted the general attention and the crowd dispersed in favour of watching that spectacle, children running down the street shouting "Chkhuby! Chkhuby!" (Fight! Fight!).

Earlier version also published at the Georgia Messenger

Dreams are only surrogates, or riddles of the past...

2008-05-07T12:17:00.001+02:00

At night I dreamed I was riding a gigantic fairy tale dragonfly with multi-coloured wings and a furry blue face out of which large immobile eyes the colour of polished rosewood peered into the world. Like being airlifted, we were vertically flying up the iridescent surface of a waterfall that in breadth seemed to stretch for a mile. At the beginning I kept thinking we must swoop over the edge and enter a river landscape any second now, but the distance to the white spume and the roar of the water breaking at the rocks on the ground kept growing, and we kept flying higher and higher to dizzying, frightening heights. I wanted to reach the top so badly, but the higher we flew, the more scared I got at the same time. I woke up feeling dejected, feeling I will never reach my goals, will never live up to any of the challenges that enter my life.
I woke up feeling I wanted to set myself free from a great great height.

A few hours later, I tell this dream to Mtvarisa, the girl at the internet cafe whom I have begun to befriend over the fancy peach and mango tea I share with her. "Hmm, doesn't that make you want to live?" she smiles when she sniffs my tea-packages before pouring hot water over them.
Mtvarisa is Mingrelian, and originally from Abkhazia, the war-torn non-nation in North-Western Georgia that once was a holiday paradise for Soviet nomenclatura, and the one place in the Soviet Union where estates were the most coveted, land prices the highest, but which now, after tides and tides of "internally displaced refugees" have drained it of its life-blood, has become a practically deserted stripe of land, one of the emptiest places in the world. Russian tour groups from Sochi can from time to time be seen wandering on its empty beaches, wistfully searching for the glory of days past in the ravaged beauty of the present.

Mtvarisa's forefathers were invited to settle on the marshland along its shoreline as part of Stalin's larger plan to create an agricultural belt of citrus and tea plantations along the Soviet Union's Black Sea coast, when Abkhazia was first lured into integration into the USSR in the 1930's. Ethnic Abkhazians had been in the minority on their land even before those days, ever since the Muhajir, the great, forced exodus of Caucasian Muslims into Ottoman Turkey, when Russia conquered the region, piece by piece, through a strategy of "divide and rule". Mtvarisa is Mingrelian, and considers Abkhazia, as part of Georgia, her homeland: “You can't imagine how beautiful Sukhumi was, it was paradise on earth”, she has previously said to me, “I so long to be back there again!” Because her brother fought on the side of the Georgians in the war, and records are kept of all surnames, it is impossible for her to even visit her former home city. Only through hear-say Mtvarisa's family found out that their three large houses had been sold and re-sold already three times.

Her family is one of artists. When the war broke out, Mtvarisa was a student at the musical academy, training to become an operatic singer; her father is a professional dancer, who performed Georgian traditional dances at the theatre in Sukhumi back in the day. And still, they haven't recovered their lives, they still only fight to survive, she lets me understand through side-remarks that slip into conversation ("Главное -бороться за жизнь").
In September 1993, when the capital Sukhumi, Mtvarisa's birthplace and home city, was sieged by the Georgian army and virtually razed to the ground in the fighting between the two sides in only 11 days, her entire family had to flee, becoming part of the statistics that lists 250 000 Georgians as internally displaced refugees from that short period of time. "We came to Tibilisi. For 13 years we had to live in a hotel, eight people in one room; can you imagine? I still need Valerian to go to sleep at all." She has told me in detail what she saw happening in Sukhumi and she is lucky to have got out alive. In a mass migration of refugees tragically reminding the Iraqi Kurds' flight into their mountains some 3 years earlier, Mtvarisa and her family, with their belongings bound up in bundles of bedsheets, joint the long lines of hikers that made their way up devious mountain paths obstructed by several metres deep snow, and fled into what Thomas Goltz named the vertical world of Svaneti.“I am 32, but because of what I’ve lived, I feel like I am a centenarian.”

"I, too, saw a dream last night", she now tells me, "it is a recurrent dream I have every week or so. I always dream, I fly home, to Abkhazia. I am flying high in the sky, with my arms spread out as wings. It is night time, but on the ground I can discern the dark-green hills, the meandering rivers and streams of my homeland and I rejoice at seeing it all again. Because it is a dream the snow-covered mountain tops' silvery glow in the distance is brighter than the moonlight itself. As I fly over my country, and I approach the coast, the capital, I get near my house. I can descry the outline of each leaf of the walnut tree in our back-garden, their arteries are translucent and their surfaces gleaming, as if waxed.
But always the same thing happens: Just as I approach my house, they shoot me down with a sling –you know a sling, that boy’s plaything- they shoot me down with it like a bird. They hit me at the neck, always at the neck; I feel a tendon snap as my head is being flung back, I feel the vertebrae of my neck crack, feel a cool splash of blood on my face, and then I spiral downward, taken over by an overwhelming emotion of helplessness. As I find myself on the ground, they surround me, a group of soldiers with their guns. I cry and I beseech them to let me get up on my knees. I want to sing to god. Just as I struggle to straighten myself up, place my hands on my knees and lift my voice - they kill me.”

Mosul

2008-04-06T11:01:00.001+02:00

"When Saddam Hussein was in power, Iraq was paradise. A paradise for everyone in it, I swear to you", the boy in the hotel in Dohuk tells me. His name is Moayed. The day before yesterday, he also told me that he sent out 300 text messages in support of the Iraqi girl on the Arabic version of Pop Idol, so in some cases I allow myself a certain reserve in taking his views entirely seriously. The rest of his story is worth a listen though: "I am a new immigrant here. I used to work in the hospital in Mosul. That was when the 101st Airborne was still there. You don't know about the 101 Division? We know. That's for sure.” The French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique briefly analyzed the situation in Mosul in a way as to put precisely the 101st Airborne’s policies at the centre of the reasons for the outbreak of war there. They were one of the sole critics of the otherwise generally accepted version that General Petraeus knew exactly what he was doing in getting involved so intensively with the Sunni majority in that place: “When they left, piece by piece, hell started to break loose. I had to leave my job at the hospital, it became too dangerous. I saw collegues of mine die. My darling died, too."
Moayed shows me the picture of his dead girl-friend which he keeps in his wallet, showing a kindly smiling face neatly framed by a shiny grey headscarf. "Have you seen the US army in Mazi market? They don't even carry a gun here. In Mosul they go to the supermarket in bullet-proof vests carrying machine guns behind their shields. But they still get blown up."

Immediately after the US invasion in March 2003, Kurdish peshmerga, acting to all appearances according to a long-formulated plan, captured Mosul and Kerkuk. Although they never managed to assert their control fully, they strove to integrate both cities into the autonomous region of Kurdistan. "It is preposterous the Kurds claim Mosul now. Arabs make up 60% of the population in Mosul and we always used to have a certain nationalist pride in that place. We felt we were the last Arab outpost, the last Arab bastion in the North", a Sunnite lady once said to me.
Under the former regime Mosul indeed had been a nationalist centre of support for Saddam, a large source of military recruits and other high officials. It thus was one of the places in Iraq where resistance was most likely to be expected. Only General Petraeus’ sound policies kept it at bay.

The turning point for Mosul came in November 2004 when U.S. troops (and media coverage) focused on the siege of Fallujah. The fact that US troops were withdrawn from it to fight in the battle further south was astutely exploited by fundamentalist groups like Ansar al-Islam which now overtook the city.

Even though Paulos Faraj Rahho, the Moslawi Archbishop , was said to be respected by everyone in the Christian community and local Muslim clerics alike, his kidnapping and killing last month does not seem unsurprising in the light of the stories I heard from local Christians about what Mosul was like in the past; that even as far back as the 1950s, a Christian would have never dared to walk through a Sunni Arab quarter on his way to work for the fear of being welcomed by a hail of stones. The modern day “insurgents” of course display more of a mafia-like character than anything else, since Sunni Muslims endure the same daily risks of being killed or kidnapped if they find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
From the beginning of the US occupation of Iraq, multi-ethnic institutions such as hospitals and universities were singled out for targeting by insurgents. This is best illustrated by the examples of Moayed, the former nurse, although a Sunni Arab himself, who now has to work as a hotel clerk in peaceful Dohuk, or Hiwa, the young lad who runs the narguilé shop down the road where I wile away my evenings. Hiwa used to be a hard-studying undergraduate in informatics, but nowadays he has taken to being stoned from about 9 A.M. every day, lamenting the war, desperate to drown out the hopes he once had to take up his studies again.

Places like Hiwa’s, small saloons to smoke hookah pipes, abound in Dohuk; places to consume alcohol however are rare. So sometimes I hang out in Hotel Jihan, Dohuk’s only five star hotel that has a public bar. The security guard lets me through the gate that you have to pass to get behind the several metres high wall surrounding the building with a big smile, “Ameriki? Fermo, Fermo!” –“You’re American? Just go ahead!”. I’m not American, but he does not have to know that. Contrarily, I am here to meet some Americans. Most of the time the bright, large lobby is fairly empty, but sometimes it is peopled with soldiers having come back from their missions in the south, drinking their day away, bored enough to share their lives with whomever sits down to have a beer with them. And so I get to hear some of their observations.
Mosul may well have been feted as the paradigm of well-implemented stabilising policies in the beginning, but the situation has now reversed itself. While the rest of Iraq has undergone a slight transformation to the better, those who were stationed Mosul attest that the war rages on unabated there, and that the place feels most like what Baghdad and Ramadi felt like a year ago.

Also published here: http://www.allvoices.com/
(If their site weren't sop damn slow I could link to the exact article but you can read it here anyway so what the heck)

Rus-Turan

2008-03-28T19:48:00.002+01:00

Vladimir Zhirinovsky is the screamingly funny kind of political persona that probably only Russia can spawn. He has been called an ''eccentric'' by the BBC, and ‘the poster boy of paradox and scandal’ by the Moscow Times, but these are certainly among the milder epithets accorded to him.
This ultra-nationalist who has the kind of gift of the gab that at least at some points in the past drew the masses, is not one to shy away from trouble. Persona non grata in his country of birth Kazakhstan for his disparaging statements about the Kazakh people, he is notorious for hurling contumely at his opponents and even getting into not infrequent fist fights with them. He is responsible for such astute political analyses as ‘"Being an MP is not a profession; it's a form of political activity," or his finding that Condoleezza Rice needs to get laid as a response to her criticism of Russia’s foreign policy.
Yesterday he visited Turkey's capital, adding a pinch of spice to the NATO meetings.

As easily laughed at a personality as Zhirinovsky is, it seems that as the Kreml's emissary in Ankara he was able to demonstrate some of the skill that once made him a top player in Russia, hitting exactly the nerve of those Turks who are disenchanted with the EU process.

In line with Putin’s political direction which over the past couple of years has become more and more akin to the path taken during Soviet times, pushing for alliances according to a global dichotomy that opposes Russia to the US, Zhirinovsky exploited the low US-Turkish relations are heading into again and tried to woo Turkey into "changing camps".

During his talk he not only struck out against the U.S., but also against other allies of Turkey, including NATO itself : ‘Nothing of NATO ‘s former influence or power persists. NATO cannot even protect itself anymore, so how will it protect Turkey?’ As an alternative he pledged Russia would always ''stand by Turkey's side''. Elaborating on Turkey’s and Russia’s long history as neighbours and ‘buddies’ he rounded off this promise with the following proposition: ‘Russia, Turkey and Iran should stand shoulder to shoulder and conjointly create ‘Rusturan’!’

He added that ‘once we have founded Rusturan, we will overcome problems such as the Kurdish question side by side.’ Here Zhirinovsky’s wording subtly revealed his fascist streak, since this announcement could be seen as a direct response to the long address that Turkey’s deputy Prime Minister Cemil Çiçek had delivered to the NATO delegates in which he complained that Western members of the organisation not only failed to live up to the promises that had been made to Turkey in fighting the PKK, but even in various ways abetted this organisation classified as terrorist by most of them.

When the dance of the tea leaves settles...

2008-03-22T22:50:00.001+01:00

Gingerly, with my fingertips, I pick up one plump little sugar cube after the other and drop them into my tulip-shaped tea glass, watch as piece by piece they add up to form a shaky tower at the bottom. I wait as the dark red tea that shrouds my sight of them eats away at their corners and makes my neatly assembled tower crumble, reducing it to pure glitter.
The brim of the tea glass emits its usual delicate melody when I stir my silver spoon and as the piping-hot bitter-sweet brew runs down my throat, I feel right back at home in Turkey.

I am chatting with an old acquaintance from Ankara in the Mesopotamian Cultural Centre near Taksim Square in Istanbul. The fact that this Kurdish Cultural Centre is named so equivocatingly may be a relic from 20 years ago when the use of the word 'Kurd' was officially prohibited. Still today not few Turks positively flinch when they come across it. Kurdish new year celebrations just went over relatively peacefully though and other news have gripped the country:

The cultural centre's large windows open a view onto Istanbul's largest shop-lined highstreet, Istiklal avenue. Our window directly faces two large and beautiful residential houses on the other side. Between them runs a narrow alleyway at the end of which the entrance to the office building of the TV station Ulusal Kanal is seen. This alleyway, and indeed Istiklal avenue itself, is obstructed by scores of police cars between which the usual crowd of pedestrians are left to weave their way. The police are conducting a raid on the TV channel's head quarters because of the so-called Ergenekon scandal which is right now shaking up the Turkish political landscape.

Ergenekon is the name of a shady underground organisation whose plans for a 2009 coup d'etat in 2009 have just been thwarted. Apart from being assumed of being intimately interwoven with the almost mythical Turkish 'deep state' forces, it is also linked to the military and state bureaucracy. For the taste of some, too many members of the political opposition went to jail during the inquiry into this affair. And so, according to different view points, the government's investigation into Ergenekon was either the last straw that broke the camel's back, or, in the eyes of others, the recent law suit filed against the AKP by the Constitutional Court is simply an effort in obstructing investigations in the Ergenekon case.

If this law suit goes through, it only proves what observant outsiders take for granted any way: that Turkey is nothing but a military dictatorship dressed up as a democracy. Ümit, my interlocutor at this tea table, laconically analyses the situation in the following way: 'In the 70's the same members were part of a party called the MSP which finally got closed down with the 1981 putsch. They reformed in the Eighties as the Refah party; and not much later they got closed down again for being anti-constitutional. Now it happens all over again to the AK. Simply, nothing much has changed in Turkey. '

Despite this rather pessimistic perspective I have heard another, much contrary, opinion: Eventually the main beneficiary of this 'scandal' may turn out to be the AKP itself. Why bother putting through reforms after all, if they'll be able to portray themselves in the glorious light as 'defenders of democracy'? They are very well placed to argue their way out of the whole thing by sounding off about democracy, comfortably resting on the 46% majority they won in the last elections -the sort of results which could make almost any Western European governing party green with envy.

And of course this is only the latest in a row of scandals -the past months were pregnant with them. Such a steady flow of dirty linen certainly helps divert the public's gaze from the issues that are supposed to matter this year: Economic progress, and advancing with the EU accesion.

I blog here now also: allvoices.com

The veil

2008-02-28T11:56:00.000+01:00

I don't really presume there is anything new I can say on this old hat of a topic. But last night I assisted a podium discussion about UK identity politics and it was a lady called Claire Fox who, in my opinion, said the most memorable, funny and thought-inspiring thing [I paraphrase]:

"[...]When we talk to these young, Asian-originated, second-generation Muslim women with the thick Brummy accents under their veils why they choose this attire, the answer does not come in the guise of a pious devotion to the prescriptions of an ancient text, but as an agressive assertion of their freedom of choice: "Who are you to tell me what to wear?". These girls are claiming their individuality, not bowing to a hoary set of rules. In fact these statements have more in common with 70's feminist tracts rather than the Koran.

Their mothers, by the way, are outraged.

As a teenager when I went through that phase, I was posturing as a punk, shaved mysef a mowhawk, made it a point of drinking in public, clamouring for attention, but no one paid me any. Yet these girls, they get invited to TV shows, they are talked about in newspaper columns, they even appear on the cover of magazines. It is safe to say that in terms of teenage rebellion they are doing pretty damn well!"

Ludwigshafen and Erdogan in Germany -a summary

2008-02-14T11:59:00.001+01:00

Antifa Ludwigshafen reported the town is a particular stronghold of the German extreme right with racist graffitis all over, and that a few years ago only there even was a Neo-Nazi café in the very same building that burnt down last week. And yet certainly the first claim I heard when the event was reported was a firm "It was not a hate inspired crime" by the German media, which some of them have been insisting on even though conclusive evidence apparently still has not been found.

In a climate where claims as peremptory as they were overhasty had been promulgated by the press (both German and Turkish), Erdogan's appearance was a neat political move that helped pour oil over troubled waters. And it was in front of a crowd of 20,000 cheering fans that Erdogan pronounced that sentence that by now has become famous, "Assimilation is a crime against humanity".
Actually, the fact that he had come and spoken comfort to the disconcerted masses was interpreted by some to be indicative of progress in and of itself; the victims were Alevites, and from the South-Eastern town Gazi Antep after all. And yet it was no wonder that it was an Alevite representative in Germany who worked himself up in a fuzz calling Erdogan’s speech "barefaced" and “outrageous”. He elaborated with the words "He comes here playing the role of the great democrat, but he didn't even do his homework." I don't really have to point out the ironies of Erdogan's pronouncement, do I? If I was in jesting mood, I might say that he seemed to be having a little tongue-in-cheek fun up there.

The day after the speech, the newspaper "taz" headlined "Germany's new Minister of Integration" next to a picture of Erdogan against the backdrop of a German flag on their front-page. His speech had not been translated (except for journalists), and even the advertisments had been almost exclusively in Turkish. To aid integration, Erdogan had made the suggestion, Germany should establish Turkish-medium primary and highschools. It is a observation anchored in learning theory that you cannot learn a second language well without knowing your first one perfectly; and it is a real problem that a large part of Turkish immigrants know neither German NOR Turkish very well. However, the arguments against it are obvious. It is hardly in Germany's (or the immigrants') interest to establish Turkish-medium schools, with teachers ”flown in from Turkey", as Erdogan suggested, and thereby create parallel societies. The newspapers have been full with discussions about this, but I must say the controversy to me seems like a lot of hot air for nothing. I’d simply recommend heads of state think before they talk next time around.

Among the heaps of otherwise unexciting articles debating the pros and cons of this proposal, just one short analyses caught my eye: "In Germany optimising integration means doing everything to offer the best possible chance to the individual; in Turkish culture integration means offering openings into society for the whole community".

Newspapers write that some ministers conceded a bilingual Turkish-German university as being within the realm of the conceivable for the future. Personally, I can't wait for the realisation of that. But might I also suggest a bilingual university in Ankara, a Turkish-Kurdish one?
I wonder for which one we'll be waiting longer.

Final Post (I think)

2008-02-04T19:47:00.000+01:00

The real purpose of this blog was not blogging so much as using this blog as a playing and training ground for my literary gymnastics: I think it may have sometimes been apparent by the way my posts were jumbled, incoherent and unfinished!

In other words: I used this blog to expose some "chapters" of a work in progress, move them around, amend, shorten or lengthen them, and thereby let the whole thing mature over time.
Really, I was aiming for a book. I now finished it.

I'd like to get it published, but of course it's a tough world out there and it's hard to even attract the attention of editors.
So for the nonce anyone who would be interested in reading it could send me an e-mail (note the careful use of the conditional!) on aristide575@narod.ru and I'd forward it to you.

The topic is, as I may or may not have made clear, Iraqi Kurdistan. Even though it takes the form of one, it is NOT a travel story, it aspires to be something much deeper.

[It may not have escaped you that there are a lot of posts that I put up which are not about Iraqi Kurdistan at all. I reckon they've been something like byproducts of the writing process, nothing really to do with the book, just here to molder away in their respective corners of the blog. That's it.]

Atheism, Women's Rights, and Cultural Coherency...

2008-01-23T23:30:00.000+01:00

"Well at first you try. You are always told you are a Moslem, and so you try being one. But, inevitably, you are bound to fail here or there. You get bored at the Mosque, you never do the right amount of prayers, and in any case talking to God in Arabic, that difficult foreign language, alienates you. Then at some point you just decide that you won't further bother. And you feel relieved." Jadi recounted his experience of growing up. I assured him that that matched my experience of trying to be a Catholic to the T.

"If they'd ever arrest me and be made to fill in one of their questionnaires, I would not hesitate to call myself an atheist though. The only thing I could not do is say that originally I come from a family of good Moslems. Being a recantor, that is ground for execution. It is written in the Koran.", said Jadi. "So are you from a family of 'good Moslems'?" I asked. "Well, my family always considered themselves to be good Moslems. They didn't always go to Friday prayer, and they didn't really do the fast, but they were good people and the Koran was always on their shelf. If anyone asked them they would call themselves Moslems. Then this regime came on and actually made them take the book into their hands and read the Koran. That's when they realised they weren't really Moslems", he stated matter-of-factly.

When I made it to Iraqi Kurdistan the fact that a large part of the people avowed themselves to be atheist had surprised me. In Northern Kurdistan, and in other neighbouring countries as well, the people are fiercely religious, after all: When I admitted to being atheist in Erzurum people looked at me as if I had just admitted to grilling babies for breakfast. Talking about this with Jadi, he opined that larger segments of the Kurds than other nationalities in Iran tend to be atheist because they are more prone to being politically active, and these two things tend to reinforce each other. He also extended that explanation to Iraq.

But of course, if you want to analyse the Kurds, borders, despite it all, do count. You have to approach them all seperately from each other according to their national affiliation. What may be true for the Kurds in Iran is most certainly untrue for the Kurds in Turkey in many cases. The Kurds in Turkey may be as ardently religious as they are, because they simply have nowhere else to turn to. They are neglected economically and culturally by the state, and the one thing they can find direction in is the mosque. I don't have enough information to go into great detailed conjectures about the Iraqis, but as one factor for an explanation for the Iraqi Kurds I might propose that, as specific as their as their circumstances have been as opposed to the rest of Iraq, as cut off as they have been for one and a half decades, they still in some ways are part of a country with a sectarian war going on between different confessions of their own faith. Atheism just might seem like an obvious reaction to that.

Maybe you've noticed that sometimes I refer to what is "Iraqi Kurdistan" on my entry stamp as "Kurdistan" and sometimes simply as "Iraq". As much sympathy as I may or may not have for Kurdish nationalism, it is pure expediency most of the time to call the place the former, and sometimes: the latter, yes.
There is nothing inherently Kurdish about the abject way I was treated as a woman sometimes. Since the Kurds just over the border in Iran were just as gentlemanly as the rest of the Iranians that I met, and the Kurds in Turkey just as regular dodgy as the rest of their countrymen, nothing over the top like just a little South.

The state of feminism in the rest of Iraq with the war seems to have gone back to zero. Women activists down there are said to experience "constant harassment by thuggish Iraqi men who thrive on humiliating and intimidating women." Some videos I watched on youtube also illustrated this very well. For example this one, in which the brave women's rights activist Yanar Mohammed is shown in a meeting making the following address to the mixed group of men and women present: ''I want to live in an Iraq where I can be a complete human being. I want to live in an Iraq where I can talk to men without being afraid. I want to live in an Iraq where I can walk down the streets without having to hear harsh words.'' The shocking thing is that this implies that right now a woman in Iraq has reason to be afraid just by talking to a man. After this the commentator goes on to say 'Do you see her talking to men as if she was their equal? It may seem normal to you, but in this culture, she might as well be poking them in the eye.'
It is for her self-assured demeanour as well as her message that she is on certain insurgents' death-list.

And take tribalism for instance. Yes, Kurdish society anywhere is a tribal one, but compared to Iraq the tribalism in Iran and Turkey has become considerably watered down. That is because the whole of Iraqi society is still organised along tribal lines. Maybe I am belabouring the obvious here, but Iraqi Kurdistan has been so cut off and has such a seperate feel to it that I felt like pointing it out. I don't understand the mechanisms in which such "cultural" traits wander across the invisible, yet very much extant border, but somehow they do.

1991 II –A trip into history

2008-01-21T09:27:00.007+01:00

One evening, wandering down the street back to my hotel in Dohuk I could not help but keep lifting my eyes to the sky. An enormous cloud had built up staggeringly high, palpable, like a heavenly sculpture over Dohuk's main street. Parts of it were snow white, but essentially, its beauty was enhanced by the sun setting softly behind it. The lowered galactic fireball threw the echo of its dying colours back onto the billowed canvas of the cloud like a powerful floodlight pouring its light from beyond the horizon. This lent the pneumatic leviathan a supernaturally beautiful platinum tinge. I stopped for a moment. I had to fumble my camera out. Only to, the second after I had put it back in my pocket, shake my head in disbelief at my own comportement :"What the hell am I doing?! I just took a photo of a cloud!".

Walking on however I realised I was not the only person whose eyes were riveted onto the colossus in the sky. People walking my way were turning their heads after the monster, even walking a few careful steps backward in order to take a closer look at it. Shopkeepers stepped out from behind their counters and onto the pavement to watch the spectacle. Some even joined the youths balancing on the kerb blinking into the upheld screens of their mobile phones taking photographs.

Finally, silently electrified by the jerks of immanent lightnings, the thing wandered past Dohuk, like an animal entirely separate from the rest of the sky which still was swept entirely empty, limpid like a spring morning. It may be a strange memory to share, but it really was one of the most impressive natural spectacles I ever saw.

The reason I tell this story is because Maher, a charming man in his late 30's who just finished translating for me and Bahar, has been sharing with me his reminiscences about the time he spent learning the language we are conversing in. He has just enthusiastically imparted on me that in the British capital, he is member of some sort of cloud club; oh excuse me, not "some sort" of club: a club that bears the lofty name of "The London Cloud Appreciation Society"! Maher's stories send me time travelling, not only to the year I spent pulling pints in a pub on Frith Street, but even further, way back to the time when I was laughing over cartoons with Samira, the Kuwaiti kid.This is because 1991 was not only the year of exiled Kuwaitis, it was also the year of the great Kurdish exodus from their cities into the mountains. It was an event that was hyper-medialised in our media; the pictures of colourfully clad Kurdish women trudging through waist-deep snow with toddlers on their arms flooded the TV screens of the West.

After the Kurdish uprising had been succesful for something as short as two weeks, a time during which not few Kurds had already bathed in the heady waters of believing themselves on the cusp of an era of independence, Saddam had sent his troops up to reconquer the territory. Mass panic broke out and everyone, but really everyone, packed their bags and headed into the moutains for the borders. After Saddam had in the recent past used gas against the Kurdish population, the simple sound of helicopter wings rotating overhead terrified the population to such a degree as to leave everything behind. It is safe to say during those days no one, absolutely no one stayed in the cities.No one, but Maher and his family; "My brother is mentally handicapped. We said to each other, 'It is impossible to travel across the mountains with him, but we also cannot leave him behind.' " Living in the West of Arbil, they would at first have to traverse the city, and even that they would not have know how to manage. So they stayed.
"The city was a ghost town. There was not a soul on the streets or even in the houses! Except maybe a stray cat here and there", he laughs, waving his hand in a symbolic gesture for wind-swept emptiness.

The UN's No-Fly Zone was in place, so Saddam could not send warplanes; instead he sent helicopters. "We cowered in the house until the choppers came. We heard bombs explode outside; the sound was hellish. We were afraid they would bomb our house, but we were lucky, they didn't." After everything had become quiet again, they ventured outside. A bomb had been dropped over their street and left a crater right in the middle of it. "It has been levelled out since then of course; but you can see its trace until this day. I'll show you later on when we drive through town." Maher says to me."But hang on, that is not the end of the story!" he adds soon after with a conspirative smirk."Years later, in the end of the nineties, my father and my uncle went on a shopping trip to Baghdad." The two were looking for something as mundane as a car. At the car dealer's they started talking with the salesman and after a while, feeling they could trust him, they admitted to being from Arbil when asked. "You know, I was a pilot in the air force in '91 and I was assigned to bombing the Western parts of your city that spring. But my heart wasn't in it. I made sure I only touched down on a couple of places, so I could not be accused of dereliction of duty, but otherwise I dropped the bombs well clear of any houses!"

Later I learnt that if the streets of the cities were swept empty during this exodus, this was also because the situation was politically exploited by the parties. A couple from Sulaymaniyah told me that PUK peshmerga practically chased them out of their houses. They had three little daughters and the risk of going into the mountains with them seemed greater than the risk taken by staying, but they were left no choice. Even when they were on the road driving out of the city, they were contemplating ways to make it back to their house, but PUK peshmerga surveyed the road and made it impossible for anyone to turn round without being escorted straight back onto the road in the right direction.

Alex

2008-01-16T00:29:00.001+01:00

One afternoon at the internet café in Arbil I receive a mail from an unknown e-mail account. I almost delete it as spam. The name field very curtly just reads "Alex" and the mail itself is entitled "I hope you accept me as a friend". Luckily I open it, because it is a local man writing to me: "My cousin in Sulaymaniyah told me of you. I invite you to come to my home. I am physically handicapped and cannot leave the house, so I enjoy visits very much!"

'Alex' turns out to be a gentle young man in his early thirties who takes delight in making beautifully detailed black and white pencil drawings with his right hand, the only part of his body that is not paralysed. Islamists regularly threaten him and tell him he'll be going to hell for this, since painting people is regarded a sin in orthodox Islam. As I get to talk to him more, he also turns out to easily be one of the most intelligent people I meet during my stay in Kurdistan. At the slightest incitement, with sober, lucid judgement, he starts rolling out complex international political analyses at a speed that I cannot even follow. He eloquently introduces me to Ali Al-Wardi, the 'god-father' of Iraqi sociology, praising his 1951 "Glimpes in the Social History of Modern Iraq" as the best book to break into understanding modern Iraq.
He reads everything he can put his hands on, novels, plays, philosophical and political tracts. "No one can tell me this or that is forbidden. I think for myself."

I can't believe it when his relatives, grouped around us in the living room, tell me he never went to school. I see that he still does not have a wheelchair, so how would he though? "So your family taught you how to read and write?" I ask. "We just taught him the alphabet. He teaches us everything else!" laughs his aunt.

Alex lives with his extended family, a group of some 14 people sharing the house. His mother and he are writers, his brother is a web designer and one of his female cousins who is a little younger than me is studying to be a surgeon. A family of a lot of bright heads who suffer under the indigence they have to live in they attest. "We could work for one of the main parties to get out of poverty. But we cannot. We'd lose our dignity."

For one, they don't share the prevalent ideology: "We love our country. 'Iraq' is an ancient word that means 'root'. And it is our roots, too. We are not just Kurdish, we are Iraqi. We don't want our country to be divided", urges me Alagaz, Alex's mother, almost if entreating me. Then Alex takes the queue: "Unfortunately we are in a minority with this view. The authorities encourage Kurdish nationalism." -"They don't 'encourage' it, they instil it in people", Alagaz cuts him off. "And they don't like it if you don't think like them. Because of articles we wrote, they even came and searched our computer, our house", she confides in me. "And they took my husband to interrogation afterwards."

Since she is a woman and her son is handicapped, they did not consider either of them mature human beings and found it appropriate to take her husband and his father to speak out for them instead. "Who allowed them to write?" he was asked.
"Idiots", I laugh at their foolishness, although I am not sure whether I should not be more indigned than amused.

Before I leave they ask me for a picture with them on the couch. "The Islamists call us infidels, the Kurds call us traitors, but we believe in democracy and free speech. That is what we dream of. We don't only want your picture because you're beautiful, we also want it because you come from a democratic country!"

1991 I

2007-12-27T08:13:00.001+01:00

It was 1991, and I was in one of the first years of primary school when one morning I entered my classroom, and the room was almost entirely filled with unfamiliar faces. There were maybe 15 of them. They were all of strangely swarthy complexion and spoke in a guttural language undecipherable to my or my classmates' ears.

Our school teacher tried to clear up our confusion and explained it to us this way: Those kids came from a far, far away kingdom whose name means "fortress on the sea" and which was hardly bigger than than the head of a fixing pin (on a worldmap, she meant).

Because the sky over the tiny kingdom was always as blue as a summer day's, the kingdom's entire expanse was dried out like parchment paper. Even though its people lived under these unrelentigly empty heavens, on that land that was as flat as the sky itself, in houses whose roofs were flat, even eating bread that was flat, and not round and grainy as our Eastern European bread, they were generally reasonably happy, told us our teacher.

There was a reason that now these families had had to flee and join us in our damp and hilly environs: Their kingdom had been invaded by an evil man with a thick moustache, a great tyrant who lived many many kilometres north of them, and who ruled over a country a hundred times their little kingdom's seize.
His country was not all dessert but was traversed by two great, mystic historical rivers that sliced open the parchment ground and, soaking the hostile dessert land on its banks, invaded it with a green so lush it had nothing to envy to the greens of the meadows that reposed down in our valleys. The river's churning waters were pregnant with fish as big as one of us kids ourselves, and they made waves and spat white spume as their surfaces were travelled up and down by freighters "as big as the school building you are right now sitting in!"

Our school teacher may have been exaggerating a little bit, but that way she made sure we had a lasting picture in mind of that world beyond our grasp yet.

She also must havemade a pohone call or two, because the next morning only three of the large group of Kuwaitis came back to take a seat at the back of our classroom, the others probably equally spread out over other schools in the region.

Most of the kids in the class didn't much heed the foreigners and just kept going on their rambunctious games like any other day while those three little figures sat lost alone in their corner. I however, had always been attracted by the unknown and it was I who invited one of the girls to come sit next to me. Although we lacked words to communicate we shared some giggles as we fingered through one of my comic strips and in return she taught me funny ways to snap my fingers.
In contrast to me who wore a short blond bob, she had thick dark hair all the way to her elbows. Her name was Samira.

Not long after (days? weeks?) she, too, disappeared from our school. I think for a short while I saw her around my little town a few times, at a bus stop maybe, me on the bus the other direction, unable to ask her again how she was.

...
Now, I send that kid that I was climbing on the sofa to take down her parents' living room clock, open the glass dial and with the tip of her index and shove the hands forward another 16,17 years.
I see her start feeling a little queasy, but that was expectable: after all she’s be growing almost as rapidly as Alice after she ate from the magic cake that she found under the table.

Now, when she has shaken herself, ascertained for sure that she is not Ada, and has a little recovered from her trip across time, she is bracing herself for quite a different one:

It is 2007, and I am preparing to go to that country that had invaded Samira's. The evil man with the moustache that tyranised the neighbouring country and its own population has by now gladly been destroyed. But once again the country is being convulsed by a war. Not being a humanitarian worker, nor a journalist, why was I going there? On a holiday, really?

Well, "Iraq" of course does not simply equal "Iraq". We all know there is a mountainous enclave in the north that is as good as its own country where, far from the dessert and the riverplains, pretty blue hills deck out the distance as far as the eye can see. I'd done my research and expected nothing but a perfectly tranquil few weeks.

In preparation for the trip I prepared a folder with 3 different envelopes:

One containing a letter from my friend Juan who had visited Iraqi Kurdistan two years ago. He told me about where exactly he had gone and gave me a couple of touristic tips. He had also included a letter written to his friend Serbest that I was to deliver in one of the villages.

The second envelope was to contain a map. Good ones were hard to come by, so I ended up with the best I could find: a generic map encompassing the Middle East from Istanbul to Teheran which also included at least some of the roads and villages of Northern Iraq.

I thought acquiring a little of the language of my destination would come in handy, so, in the third envelope, I intended to prepare a sheet with a few Kurdish words and phrases. Kurdish phrase books were rare in the book shops back home anyway, so all I had to do was to go online and type "Kurdish" and "phrases" into a search engine. What I ended up with was a vocabulary list characteristically arranged with a neat middleparting, with English combed to one side, and Kurdish to the other. It lent itself perfectly for printing out as it was and I decided to keep it for a little reading on the road.

Thus, a couple of weeks later in a bumpy bus from Diyarbakir, I unfolded the sheet and began the perusal:

After teaching me the words for road, car, and shotgun, my sparsely printed A4 page proceeded to teach me some sentences the author had deemed useful:

"Wene ke!" -"Don't shoot!"
"Xo bi çemîne! Ye ji çep ê hêrish diken!" -"Duck ! They're attacking from the left!"

"Bi reve! Ye hêrishê diken bi rexê rastê!" -"Run! They're attacking from the right!"

Hmm... was I still so sure I wanted to go there?

Süleymaniye

2007-12-08T13:32:00.000+01:00

In the shared taxi out of Koisanjaq the lady seated next to me pushes an open Marlboro Svelte packet in my face and smilingly persuades me to pick one up. Even though I actually am a non-smoker and hate cigarettes, I accept; I realise it is meant as an act of female bonding, the two of us delicately sucking on the end of these fags, smoking out the rest of the passengers -all men, who wouldn't dare to complain.

Once I climb out of the vehicle I start looking for a place to drop off my baggage. I could stay in the five star Palace Hotel, owned by Talabani himself, but since I am on a somewhat different budget I stride straight past it and continue hauling my bag along the crowded streets, looking for a cheaper place. Just after the bazaar I pass a scratchy sign announcing a "hotel" which looks about as run down as I usually like my flophouses to be. Once I get inside and in quick sequence remark the bars on the windows, the fact that the door has only a locking bolt but no keys, and that the toilets don't even have doors, I grab my bag and head straight back out. Only when turning back for another glimpse of the castle off the street, I read the little neon sign on the opposite door in the hallway -the first sign announcing a "bar" that I've ever seen in Kurdistan. "So maybe something is freer here, for the better, or for the worse", I muse to myself and head on.

I am in Sulaymaniyah, the much hyped town where girls wear shorts out on the open street, and young men pinch their wives' bums in the Luna Park.

Later that evening both of them, husband and wife, smiling broadly, tell me that she's been pregnant for 7 months, 4 days, 5 hours and 25 minutes exactly, thereby letting me know in passing that they have been screwing in the middle of day. Uh-oh, I twitch uncomfortably, too much information. The wife is 24, like me. For some reason all the 24 year olds I meet those few days I spend in Sulaymaniyah are pregnant. She comes into the room balancing a shiny tray that is about the size of a millstone with a mountain of fruit on it, while her man just darted round the corner with a torch in his hand to crank on the generator. To be quite honest, if I was seven months up the pole, I'd prefer my husband to carry the fruit platter and I'd go and switch over the lever to make that engine rattle and spit out the electricity for the night. "To my eyes it all seems funny, strange and sad all at the same time", I am to mention to the head of the pedriatic unit at the local hospital a couple of days later on. As an answer she laughs defiantly: "We women here are very strong. We are stronger than you Westerners!" she emits assuredly, although not without a resigned tip of the head.

Don't Call Me Daughter

2007-12-06T08:14:00.007+01:00

Just having checked in into the DimDim, a 4 star hotel in Erbil, I fall on the bed and switch on the telly. Interestingly, on channel 1 I have three heavily pierced individuals of both sexes boisterously involved in a threesome on Hustler TV, whereas zapping on to channel 4, the Crazy Frog's dickie is thoughtfully blended out so as not to hurt my sensitivities.

Usually, let me remark, 4 star hotels are out of my budget.
But this time a friend of Kazim's, Shahab, had ended up paying three nights for me. Shahab was a balding, pot bellied idiot whom Kazim had assigned to drive me round the city and keep me company for a few hours that day. Despite my remonstrances, he insisted to buy me a mobile phone (I'd forgotten mine at a friend's house in far away Istanbul) and even talked about lending me his Mercedes for driving to Sulaymaniyah later that week. I sensed what was coming on, but I stuck it out until the third time he'd made a move on me to call up Kazim and indignantly tell him that his friend was "not a gentleman at all". "You don't understand Kurdish culture", Shahab had started off that time, "I can have a wife, and I can have a girl-friend, too..." Whether I was actually interested in being his girl-friend hadn't crossed his mind, however.

Because Shahab wanted to save face in front of his friend, he ended up trying to buy his way out. By the end of the night as I was relaxing in front of the TV in my hotel room, I had made a mobile phone, dinner, and three free nights in a luxury hotel, plus a crisp new one hundred dollar note out of it.
"If I were you, I'd have asked for at least a couple of hundred more!", Kazim laughed at the story. "If every guy who indecently accosted me here (in Iraqi Kurdistan) gave me a hundred dollars, I could give up my day job", I dryly remarked. Stories like the following had been piling up: In a shop, buying a phone card, some fat old fart would enter behind me, see me, and say "Let's buy some beer and go to my motel!". On the street when having a snack of white beans, some guy would walk up, give the street vendor the money for my food, and ask me "Where is your hotel? Can I come?". When a family gave me a lift out of their village, the rickety old grandpa on the seat next to me started making signs whether I was going to sleep with him, all with his wife seated on the front seat. The list of insults just kept going on, and on, and on.

The trapfalls for a single Western woman in the Middle East abound. I honestly wish I could just treat men and women with equal smiles and kindness, but experience bore that out to be a mistake. After a while I came around to always overplaying a little distrust toward men, which was a tactic that turned out to serve me well over time. Still sometimes it really could be despairing that I had to manoeuvre every simple gesture of mine. Once I hesitated for a minute before answering the question what I do for a living, and the guy I was talking to interpreted this without hesitance into thinking I had something to hide, and, hence, must work as a prostitute.

When hitchhiking around Turkey on my own, it could be disillusioning to be taken for a prostitute all the time. I mean, more than once the man asking to pay me for sex was a father with a toddler strapped to a safety seat in the back, or even with a child old enough to understand that something dubious would be going on there. Once a man started basically asking me the price in German all the while with two women (one probably his wife) in the backseat.

I found the old cliche of a woman either being considered a saint and wife and baby machine or a whore to be more true in Iraqi Kurdistan than anywhere else. In other country's in the region as a Western woman you are considered as some sort of third sex it is understood that you will be doing things a local woman can only dream off. In Iraq however, a country that hadn't seen any Westerners in a good 25 years, they were having none of that. Either, as described above, the insulting behaviour toward me knew no bounds, or red carpets were being rolled out for me at every step I took. The Kurds bestowed their legendary Middle Eastern hospitality on me, and I got invited left and right, sometimes having so much as to fight off invitations. Indeed, by the end of my trip I came to see it as a kind of luxury to be indulge in the freedom to pay for my own accomodation. That was because every time I interacted with the locals the clutches of the golden cage unrelentingly would close in around and ended up sitting stifling and as tight as my own rib cage. If I did as much as stop by someone's house for tea the family would suddenly feel responsible for me and not only were taxi rides on my own seen as the greatest danger to my security there could be, people would not as much as let me walk unescorted in the town centre, but instead felt obliged to chauffeur me around inside their flashy four-by-fours. If I was invited in a family for a night, they wouldn't let me travel to the next town without knowing exactly someone would pick me up from the bus terminal.

One of those days, when riding around Arbil with one of my personal "chauffeurs" again, we got caught up in another traffic jam. Red headed and fisting down on the steering wheel Çerkez cursed, "Fucken hell, it never stops! It's rush hour from 4 to 4 here!"."Calm down", I tried to pacify him, "They're just being polite, 'Honk if you hate people, too', ya know". We were practically parked in the middle of the street with a crowd of noisy wedding celebrators around us. I stole a glance into the Mercedes decked out in flowers at our side: "Lucky bride!", I thought: her brand-new-directly-off-the-shelf husband was cuter than her.

It probably was tell-tale though that, when asked by a small family that had invited me for lunch in Iranian Kordestan, when I was going to marry and I answered that I never will, all of them broke out in cheers. A wife is still somewhat considered her husband's property and her freedoms might be significantly curtailed after her marriage. For one, she will usually have to leave her old house and go and live with the family of her spouse, not all members of which might be so welcoming. There is also still such a thing as (in Turkish) kaynanalık, that is, that a wife's family-in-law will expect her to clean and cook for them, serve them, and generally be their slave. Thankfully this tradition is getting lost in the more advanced part of the Kurdistans, but in the most remote areas, it is impossible for a young woman to just refuse this.

Having a girlfriend in Iran or Iraqi Kurdistan means nothing more than asking one of the girls you meet at a place like Dream City (the Dohuk amusement park) for her phone number and subsequently spend long hours talking goo on the phone with her. It may seem like commitment for a while, but if two years later a rich cousin of hers comes along and proposes, well that might just be too bad for you. That is what happened to one of the boys in the narguilé shop where I used to hang out.

Constantly feeling kind of groggy from all the alcohol deprivation in that Muslim country and doing the best I could to avoid sobriety nevertheless, it was to that place I turned and so I spent many an evening in this rolling blue smoke filled place where the glow of the embers never extinguishes, getting stoned with a bunch of red-eyed, slow-mannered youth (all male, of course). Sometimes they used to chat in English so I got to hear their stories. Hiwa, whose eyes had started to slant cat-like as he smoked narguilé after narguilé, leaned back into his high like into an expanding easy chair: "Tomorrow my dad is going to ask Sozan's father for her hand", he said of his girlfriend, a distant cousin of his, "God, I hope he says yes. If he doesn't, it would be too horrible. I love her too much!" What he meant was "I am 25, I can't live another year without sex!". Hiwa had told me before that she was already the third girl he proposed to. The other ones had rejected him, because, as a teacher, he wasn't making enough money. His mother had kept dishing up new prospective brides for him, he had had to make up his mind another time over again. Even though the last instance it all depended on was her father, he had been calling up this girl every day for a while now.

In any case, anything more than sneaky text messages are out of order. If you so much as dare to walk on the street together, the gossip might start. And once the gossip starts, your darling might run the risk of having her family at her heels. The least thing they might do, is keep her locked up from now on. The worst thing they might do, is murder her.
No exaggeration: In one of the women's safe houses I visited I heard the story of a teenage girl who was running from her family for as much as having been seen around a good-looking man who lived down her street one too many times. She had a crush on him, but all they did was talk. Now, she'll never be able to return to her family.

Of course, even more horrible stories are easily come up with. A friend of mine did a course on the Baluchi minority in Iran (praise Parisian schools that such a course is possible...). He swears he'll never want to go to Baluchistan or anywhere near it, since he considers this area the "true asshole of the world". The "anecdotes" his teacher taught were indeed doubly gruesome in their elaborateness: For example, when two young women fled because they did not want to be forcibly married, it was not enough to just go get them and kill them, no they had to be buried alive. And even that was not enough, all their bones had to be broken before doing so. And in which way? The families actually pooled their money to rent a mecanical digger with which the women's bodies were smashed into pulp, before throwing them into the pit they'd dug for them.

As to Iraqi Kurdistan, honour killings were condoned by the law until the beginning of this millenium. There seem to have been provisions in the law that if the hymen of an unmarried victim was broken, the delinquent was to get away with punishments as short as between one and three years! The laws seeing to such benevolent sentences for the perpetrator of a murder if committed "out of honorable motives" weren't abolished until 2000 and 2002 in PUK and KDP territory respectively. It took a lot of long and hard lobbying all throughout the 90's to change that.

In Iran, the law still today overlooks the topic. It does not provide for leniency toward a perpetrator as in Iraqi Kurdistan, but in most cases the perpetrators of honour crimes are de facto protected by the legislation, since it is the father or husband of a murdered woman who needs to take any such issue to court. The same in Pakistan, where the law stipulates that the close family of a victim can grant forgiveness to a murderer, which boils down to the fact that if a father kills his own daughter, his son and even his wife will probably forgive him.

I had a conversation about this topic with Kazim, my host in Hewler, a guy whose adoration for his little daughter shines through in every word he speaks of her, and is apparent in every loving glance he casts her way. One of the rare Middle Eastern fathers who will be caught changing diapers, he is also easily one of the most Westernized people I met in Iraqi Kurdistan. Having lived over 10 years in Copenhaguen, when our friend Juan first came to his house, he invited him to sit down and make himself as comfortable "as if you were in Cristiania". He'd also offered me something to smoke, and one evening he brought over some cannabis folded up in newspaper freshly smuggled over the Iranian border which I'd subsequently roll into a joint for the both of us.
It was that evening, sitting cross legged on the rug opposite Kazim who was leaning on the sofa with his legs stretched out, passing around that spliff between us, that I enquired with him about the Du'a killing that was so much talked about at the time. A heart-wrenchingly awful occurrence, it was just one out of the honour killings that still take place daily in Kurdistan. This particular one had received a lot of media attention at the time, because of the extraordinarily cruel way the girl was killed (2,000 men standing cheering around her), and because the government had started a bit of an awareness campaign recently, as Kazim told me.

It goes without saying that to me it was impossible to fathom how anyone could be capable of such barbaric an act. It was only with time spent in the Middle East that I came to slowly be aware of the role that gossip plays as a tool for social control, and that I began to recognise that in a society where gossip is the "mainstay" of society's pastimes, killing your daughter may simply be the only way to shut up the talk.
It is a morbid, but simple equation.

Trying to make me understand the processes of society Kazim said "You know Alaa is my daughter, whatever she did, I would still love her. But the forces of society are strong. Society will push me to do it”

2007-11-28T19:48:00.000+01:00

A surprising, or should I say, strange, article from Texas claims that leaflets have been dropped over pathways used by PKK rebels to sneak into Turkey from Kuzey Irak that invite them to render themselves to the nearest military outpost and be "welcomed with love".
Thing is, after such promising, "loveful" acts as locking up their own soldiers for the heinous crime of not readily offering themselves up for martyr, but instead surrendering, the PKK would be a pretty gullible lot if they trusted the Turks so easily.

And on the other hand, the article's affirmation that "the amnesty program has existed for 17 years", makes me doubt the trustworthiness of the author.

Journalism

2007-11-28T06:49:00.000+01:00

Invited to do a seminar on journalism in Russia at one of the universities in Hewlêr. I improvised and did a talk about things like the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, and about how my friend Ukrop, the most outspoken anti-fascist activist in Russia, had had to exile himself because of the death threats he received by Neo-nazis.

At the time I was blissfully unaware of the harsh repressions against critical, independent writers and newspapers in Iraqi Kurdistan.
I had already met a few writers that had been silenced by the regime, but in the semi-public places I had encountered them they had been too scared to communicate clearly. Only later when I was back in Europe reading up about the matter, their obfuscating evasions suddenly started to make sense in the greater context. It was a bit like the pieces of a jumbled mosaic moving into place before my inner eye.

One of those writers I had met for example had obviously been trying to insinuate something to me by pounding on about a story of a couple of young men who'd disappeared without making it clear to me why they were so suddenly nowhere to be found. Then he juxtaposed this story to admitting that he used to be a reporter, but now had had to stop, and impressing on me that the government did not like him too much. "Even though they should. Every government needs critics, it is only good for them", he had said meekly, conciliatorily. If someone else hadn't later spelt it out for me clearer, I might have never got his hint: Critique the President or speak out against Kurdish nationalism , and you may well be threatened with "disappearance". All in all, it's not that much unlike good old Saddam days.
To only note that newspapers are practically paid for writing advertisements of the parties, is to understate it.

Understanding these things later on, I was glad I said exactly the things I had during my short session with those students. Drawing on the example of Austria where the monopolisation of the press by one right-wing newspaper had helped a nationalist government get into place at the end of the nineties, and acting from my personal do-it-yourself convictions, I enjoined them: "If you cannot find an employer whose positions you agree with -make your own newspaper! Don't rely on others in order to have your say-make your own!"

At the end of my talk the students were invited to ask me questions. "How do you feel as a woman in such a dangerous profession as journalism?", asked me a young man. I shook my head, "What do you mean? Here," -I pointed to my arms- "I may not be as strong as a man. But, here" -I laid a hand on my heart- "I am none weaker than you are"

Depending what you write about of course there is nothing inherently "dangerous" about being a journalist, even though my talk may have made it sound a little differently. The real problem in the Middle East for women in a profession like journalism, or any job outside the house really, are the men they work with, pure and simple.

One of the few women who were all grouped in the front rows of the class, ended up asking me for an interview for the cultural magazine she worked for. We made an appointment the next morning. Her name was Sozan Baban and it was a little incongruous that I should have been "lecturing" in her class, since she already worked 17 years at her paper. Her co-worker who jumped in to translate for us was a real sweet heart and made an impeccable impression on me. After the interview, Sozan, who was to become a friend at whose house I'd pass a great many times later on, said to me in broken English "He is the only decent guy at the office". She was the only woman at the magazine and all the other people she worked with she had to carefully calculate her every action: not look into their eyes for too long when talking with them or they would come on to her; not say this or that thing or they would not treat her with respect.

Long way to go for feminism.

Faith lies in, ...the ways of sin

2007-11-25T01:00:00.001+01:00

In Europe, when we hear the word "Sharia" we flinch. Whenever it comes up in European parlance it is basically equated with lapidation and chopping off hands. So it must seem obvious that the first time I found myself seated in front of a Muslim woman in her mid-thirties whose glossy curls were falling way into her deep decollete and she pronounced herself in favour of the Sharia, I was a little baffled. "The sharia is advice, not coercion", is how she put it.

Interesting post on FPW

-

Nine Parts of Desire

2007-11-14T06:13:00.000+01:00

While, hence for a spell of a couple of months, this blog will lie dormant with its arms folded underneath its rosy-cheeked head, now and then I can be caught leafing through this or that book on the Middle East. One or the other inspires a comment, like this one, a book called "Nine Parts of Desire" by Geraldine Brooks.

Even though it was written over ten years ago it retains its timeliness. It seriously slumps in a few chapters, but the good parts of it are so good that I slurped up most of the book as quickly as that little kid with the pony tail across the table from me has just slurped up her strawberry milk-shake. And it finally answered some long-standing questions I had about Islam and feminism.

Mrs. Brooks claims that Islam, if implemented not by the letter of the Koran but in the spirit of the prophet, would be a very progressive religion. It's a fact for example that in the seventh century Mohamed instituted property rights for women that Great Britain did not catch up with until the end of the nineteenth.
I haven't done my own research to support this, but she portrays Mohamed as something close to a feminist of his times and says that a lot of the outright mysoginist traditions of Islam come from Omar, who was the second caliph that succeeded Mohamed as ruler of Arabia.

And of course, some of the aspects of the religion really have to be seen through a lense of relativity: The decried polygamy laws were actually setting a serious limit on the Arab society of the day where powerful sheikhs build harems for scores of brides, and it also has to be considered that these laws were actually put into place in war time, a time when for a society burdened with widows polygamy seriously makes sense. Mohamed himself married at least a part of the number of his wives in order to take care of them because they had lost their husbands in one of the many tribal wars of the time.

When looking for a role model in the modern world how to implement Islam in a more women-friendly way it is stunning -and incredibly sad-, how comparing Iran with Saudi Arabia, Mrs. Brooks comes around to portraying Iran as some sort of feminist paradise: An Islamic country where women can drive, make up the majority of students at universities and even have members in parliament. However, she fails to note that things aren't all that rosy and that, to name an example, those very female Iranian government deputies she mentions were so harshly discriminated against that for many months their "office" was equipped with neither chair nor table.

In her Conclusion she makes the valid observation that the international community imposed sanctions on Apartheid South Africa, because more than half of its population was denied basic rights on account of their colour, so logically there should be ground to argue that sanctions should be imposed on a country like Saudi Arabia where half of the population is foregone basic rights on account of their sex.

She also proposes to expand the right to asylum on the grounds of persecution to women from any country where honour crimes are an issue.

I think we should all scurry off and start lobbying our governments now.

Rubbing up to Iraq

2007-11-06T09:23:00.000+01:00

(...)
At the end, the far far end of the canyon, Uludere is an enchanted village whose houses have latched onto the carapace of the rock like oysters to the underside of an old boat on anchorage. We stop for lunch here and step outside into the fresh air. The mountains above us jag the sky like natural battlements. It is warm already, but on the top snow still lays, as if out of pure inertia, too damn lazy to transubstantiate into water and trickle away.
When the signs for restaurants have spelling mistakes in Turkish that even a foreigner can see, you know you are in deep deep Kurdistan. We enter the “lukanta”. The man heaping quivering hot rice onto plastic plates for us wears his thick cummerbund (in whose folds, I've been told, tobacco can very conveniently be hidden for smuggling) around that traditional Kurdish suit sewn out of one single piece whose name I still haven’t found out and that I keep calling "rompers" in my mind.
We take our time to savour sucking the meat out from between the hot, drippy cartilage and bony segments of spine that has been topped onto our rice, before heading back out into the day.

Uludere may be one of the most endearing villages I’ll ever see, but in 1991 it was the venue of humanitarian crisis. It was in this and neighbouring village where millions of Iraqi Kurds sought refuge, fleeing the Iraqi troops backlashing after the Kurdish insurrection 3 weeks earlier. Uludere certainly feels like the end of the world, but we still find an accentless German speaker here who, increduously that we should have come to this of all places exclaims: “You got lost! You should go to Antalya, that is what tourists come to Turkey for!”. And ten minutes later, even an equally accentless French speaker, a policeman who tells us to leave as quick as we have come, alarmedly -and surely with cause- telling me „C’est dangereux ici mademoiselle, c’est dangereux!”. Somewhat naively perhaps I just turned round to Igor not bothering to translate and said “Let’s get going!”.
(...)

Read the whole story here

A Spook's Story

2007-10-31T21:15:00.000+01:00

Back in the eighties the Ba'athists would send emissaries to do the round of the schools and test the young people's faith in the system. Kazim was sitting in the back row one of those days, and did not utter a word, perfectly sunk in the collective silence that had taken hold of the class as the answer to the question who was part of the Ba'ath party. To his detriment an involuntary twitch traversed his face which was interpreted as a depreciative smirk by the officials, so he was called to the front of the class, and asked what he'd done that for.

"I didn't care about politics at the time, I was just 16, all I wanted to do was smoke cigarettes and look good for the girls" But what was to happen to him then politicized him. For three days he was kept in an a few metre wide prison, with a mat as a bed, a tin can as a toilet and not even a fissure in the wall to leave the slightest shred of light through. He was in complete darkness, could not see a thing.

As soon as he was left back out, he started to look into whom they might have taken him for when putting him in there. He had only vaguely heard of the KDP before that. Now he became a member. He did not proceed to finish off his school degree, but went to live in the mountains. Not as an armed fighter, but as part of the political branch. They'd send him from village to village to do lectures about resistance politics and Kurdish culture with the villagers. He and others would smuggle the mountain newspaper down to the towns by folding each page to thumbsize and shoving them down their underpants. Even being found with one page of it was to entail sure execution. In the beginning they had been copying that newspaper by hand, but by that time they had a very basic printer up there, being carried from camp to camp. One time they almost went into an Iraqi army ambush and Kazim was hit by the splinters of a mortar. He could not be brought to hospital, but had to be treated by a doctor travelling with them.

Twenty-five years later Kazim has become just another member of the “stasi army” that hides its components in every nook and cranny in that country. Of course he hadn’t told me so, but I put one and one together, and after a while the information trickled in to me. They don’t quite go round schools arresting innocent teenagers yet, but they sure make certain that opposition doesn’t organise too well.

Feminism 101

2007-10-27T20:34:00.000+02:00

"It is not only that the men here wouldn't let a woman travel like you do. The women from here also simply could not do it", says Ferhat to me, acknowledging my bravery. "That's because they are raised in a way to make them dependent. If you raised the girls the same way as the boys,... I mean, if everyone was raised the same way, they would be just as independent as us Western women", I have to spell out the obvious to him.
"But don't you think we are right? Don't you think it's dangerous out there?"

By his logic, exemplifying the dominant logic of the Middle East, rates of violence committed against women should be lower here than in the West, where women go out alone at night and travel freely on their own all the time. In fact, of course, more violence against women is perpetrated in the Middle East rather than in Europe.
Not only are rates of domestic violence in these countries here much higher. Overall rape rates are higher, too. What I should have explained to Ferhat is that this is for the simple fact that the picture of the "masked man in the bushes", waiting to assault a woman, is a (reassuring) myth. In reality, the men closest to women, their fathers, uncles, brothers or friends of them or their families, are the ones most likely to abuse and rape women -by which ever statistic you run it, across all cultures. Conciously or not, what the men name "protection", is nothing but a way to keep women in their place. And, in effect, amounts to the opposite.

I wish I had had the words to express this in that moment, but, whereas I understood all those things in an intuitive way, the formulation didn't assemble to lay it out for him. Maybe I didn't have the guts, neither.

Ferhat's brother, Serdar, at whose house we are, points over to his wife, with their little son on her lap. "If she went travelling like you...", then he makes throat cutting signs to indicate what would happen: "I would kill her".
Here there is nothing of even pretending that it is about caring about the female members of their family. This is pure control on show.

Addendum

2007-10-27T05:44:00.000+02:00

About a month or more ago someone looking for encouragement to travel on her own (and hitchhike) in the Middle East, asked me about my experience (I attach an excerpt from her letter below). I thought I might publish my answer here.

Some of the questions I could go into much more elaborate detail according to the different countries, but with the following guidelines any female one should receive the basic information:

Hitchhiking is no problem, very easy, I'd almost say any car coming past will stop. I personnally chose (mostly) to accept only lifts with women in the car (and was showered in hospitality and generosity). When you see a car approaching only stick your thumb out when there are several people in the car. The probability that there will be a woman is much higher with this technique, since women rarely drive on their own over thee. If it turns out that there are only guys in the car, you can just refuse the lift. Not like they aren't usually going to be perfect gentlemen though. The likelyhood of a guy on his own being prone to accost you is much higher, to be honest.

As a traveler you don't usually have to be super paranoid about this, it is more for living in the middle east as a western woman, or doing unusual stuff like hitchhiking: In general in the Middle East, I found it expedient not to be too friendly with "new" men, to show my distance in the beginnning. When hitchhiking and inside in a car, make it a point to converse with the wife even if she doesn't speak a foreign language (you won't get round learning a bit of the local lingo anyway).
With accumulated experience I can say for sure in any of those situations a lot of the men will come on to you. But if you behave in this way they'll be gentlemen and superhospitable.

"Based on the specific of the area I felt forced in a way to do this with a guy…."

Actually, I strongly disrecommend this.
If you travel with someone else I recommend you to travel with another woman. Travelling with a guy in most Muslim parts of the world and Africa, Muslim or not, results in the locals basically ignoring you. For them, this is a way of respect, but for us Westerners it can be infuriating. If you just want to go and see the stunning historical places and landscapes, by all means, go for it, take your man with you. But if you want to learn about the culture and experience hospitality, leave him at home, seriously.

Yes, it is absolutely unusual for the local women to travel on their own or even in pairs, but make no mistake: the local women harbour such dreams, so they will understand (and envy) you. No small number will ask you if you'll come along on a future trip!
There are some practically insurmountable cultural differences, like telling them that you live with your boyfriend without ever thinking to marry. That is definetly too much for them (even the women); but, yes, men and women in the Middle East understand that Westerners have a different culture and if you explain it in a sensible way, they understand your solo trip (especially when you keep complimenting their beautiful country).

When hitchhiking, I actually oftentimes pretend that this is not the general way that I travel. I make something up along the lines of "I'd take the bus, but the next one is only in an hour". Feel free to tell people about your tactic of only hitching with women. They will understand your precautions and fall over themselves trying to show you what nice people they are.
In case I have been in any way ambiguous, let me make it very clear that I absolutely encourage you to go.

Also check out girls.hitchbase.com for hitchhiking tout court.

Andreea wrote:

Hi Iris,
….I mean I was planning to HH in that area and based on the specific of the area I felt forced in a way to do this with a guy….and I never meet somebody to change my opinion. But if YOU did it…Is great!!! Now probably will be useful to know if you recommend this to other female to do it? I mean of course I’m interested to know how this experience was for you; the positive and the negative parts and also how easy was. How long did you travel? How was with the religious aspects; how the man or the people related to you and your choice for travelling? (did you know the language?) ...

Through the "South-East" II

2007-10-11T00:20:00.000+02:00

Three years later when I am to be back in the region, I come from the other direction, from a small place on the Syrian border called Nüsaybin.
The road that leads to Sirnak from there still palpably makes you feel like you have just crossed some invisible, but almost official border into the "Third World" -whether you are coming from Western Turkey, or Syria. The potholes are steadily becoming bigger than the disintegrated blotches of tar they are supposedly eating their way through, and the ride suddenly becomes horrendously more uncomfortable, especially if you have to share your seat with another person (Igor and I just got a lift in an already rather overpopulated lorry cabin, where four backup drivers have made space for us by squeezing onto the bunkbed in the back). A little further north from here a parallel road goes through the ancient towns Midyat and Mardin. They both sport beautiful medieval architecture, old madrassas with Arabic calligraphy carved into the sand-coloured stone, but the region between them still is one of the emptiest places in Kurdistan, vacated almost entirely during the war twenty years ago. The villagers were forcedly deported, or killed, their homes were burned down.

This year military presence has quadrupled because of renewed PKK activity, helicopters circle daily over the region, and the calm police outposts I was sipping tea in three years ago have become crowded places. The Sirnak that I encounter this time has visibly changed. It is a town which, as I call it, has finally entered puberty. It is finally starting to be developed, a town in the ugly early throes of transformation. Pink and turquoise painted new tower blocks having recently shot up jut out among the naked skeletons of yet newer ones, deface the place like pimples. But the make-shift barracks I had wandered through a few years before are now being abandoned.

On a spurt into the landscape in the following days, I am to be witness of a strange spectacle in one of the same hamlets I was already going through back then. It is an incongruous, almost disturbing ceremony that the villagers have to undergo under the watchful eyes of the armed forces. The sexes seperated, everyone dressed in black, the men flag-waving, every person wearing a name badge and the photo of a dead soldier pinned to their chest, a commemoration ceremony for the military victims of the guerrilla war is being carried out. Nowadays this kind of ceremony has lost much of its humiliation, since the Kurds' situation has much improved in that country. Still the ceremony resembles more a farce than a heart-felt commemoration, and perfectly epitomises the sickly obsession with military cult Turkey is infested with.

A short thought about Turkey

2007-10-08T22:22:00.000+02:00

A month in Turkey. A month that I spent paddling up and down the brackish back waters of the country, hitching rides down winding roads into wind-swept great canyons with rattly old janoplies, sharing meals of beans, spinach and thick sour yoghurt with people who invited me from by the wayside, and sleeping in fields under a bony milky way stretching across the sky above me. And in that month I made myself a picture of the state of affairs there.

A country so torn, that the Westernised big city dwellers are more islamophobic than the regular European. Not necessarily more islamophobic than any European I have ever met, but less circumscriptive in their verbalisations. A direct line from the headscarf, which surely should, and mostly is, a personal choice, is drawn to fundamentalism. The introduction of an Islamic regime like in Iran is the most commonly expressed fear, surely blown completely out of proportions. Turkey's "secularism" (I put the inverted commas because Ataturk has become like a god to them) is modelled on France's. Even in France these days there are heated arguments about the headscarf issue (or already, not anymore), but at least in France the instauration of this sacred (hehe) secularism was more or less a bottom-up process, not something shoehorned on so removed from people's reality, that Ataturk's own wife was covered head to toe.

Concerning EU entry one shopkeeper stated the generally shared opinion in the following way: "Maybe the poor people would live a little better, but it is not good for the state." Himself, with a small business selling fastfood, what else is he than part of the people? But still he expresses himself in favour of the state. Nationalism in the heads of people. What is this devotion to an abstract entity, I wonder. And as repressive an entitiy as the Turkish state at that.

People are so self-deceived as to believe that not only Turkey can sort out these things on their own (fair enough), but that then it can become a superpower second only to the US. Hello -you still live in a where child work is nothing out of the ordinary, worker's rights are unheard of, higher education is an elite thing, human rights issues need to be solved... But all these things wane in the minds of people constantly, delusionally, thumping on their military might.
They are simply all so weaned on nationalism that they are blind to the fact that their politicians would never attack Turkey's real problems out of their own impetus, just as Inönü, Atatürk's successor after his death, would have never conceded to a multi-party system had it not been for the lure of NATO accession. I don't think any of the secularist Turks considering themselves defenders of Atatürk's ideology today regret this step.

The Cold War seems to have given Turkey a hiatus of some fifty years to tend to problems not of their own making, at the end of which the country found itself catapulted straight back to that rigid mindset of the thirties. The young people today should be starting to understand that by crampedly clinging to a literal "Atatürkism" advanced by their Armed Forces they are not being progressive, but exasperatingly backward.

When I once honestly answered a young student's question as to what I thought about Turkish politics, namely that I found the people of Turkey to be slightly brainwashed in that matter, she proceeded to produce exactly the kind of warmed up soup I was complaining about: "Oh yeah, the only way we can sort ourselves out is by going back to what Ataturk did..."

And I just love to see them flinch -still, today-, when you whip out that four letter word, starting with K.

Usually, I have learned to just avoid the hairy topic. But sometimes my argumentative side still comes out, when I spark up a conversation because someone is introduced to me as a "radical", or once, when I talked to a gay guy -the logic behind it being, that as someone who must have lived oppression, he would be more prone to be understanding about other people's oppression. Even in those situations time and again my desire to have an open discussion was dissappointed and countered by painfully irresponsible hogwash: "See, the Kurds are still there. That means we are not guilty of genocide", or, "See it that way: What would you say in Germany if the Turkish minority would suddenly start an insurrection and demand their own country?".

Through the "South-East" I

2007-09-25T09:57:00.000+02:00

At every new bend, at every new vista that opens up behind it, I can barely contain my rapture. I have to constrain myself not to emit a tributary sigh to the beauty of each single hill. I am all but mesmerised by the natural spectacle, and have to call to mind that these were the areas where in the past Turkish state repression hit the locals hardest. Many of the villages here had at one point been the object of the Turkish military's plundering, raping or killing the inhabitants , some of the villages here were entirely subjected to mass deportation. Correspondingly, it is in the small town called Eruh a little further down this very road that in 1984 the PKK carried out their first action: an attack on a local jandarma station.

Even these calm times, along this road control is tighter than elsewhere. The all too familiar game of a concatenation of police stops unfolds, starting just after the sign announcing the Sirnak region. At each one I will be interrogated by the wary and playful police and I have to reassure them that I am really just -a botany student (my new chosen incarnation in the endless mutations of the minor mythomaniac that I am).
At the first base I get taken off the bus, ushered onto a chair in the office, and hastily offered some tea, while they send my details through the radio to their head officer who will check them through and finally give permission to let me go on with the journey. "Mehmet, Ahmed, Ramazaan..." they spell out my freaky christian middle name. "Mehmet, Ahmed, Günel, Dünya..."
One sweet looking older soldier is called, ambles over, his gun flopping over his shoulder, takes a chair and asks "you speak English?". I confirm his assumption and am prompted into explaining who I am, what I do at home and my reasons for travelling in this region. "You know this region is terror?" I calculate making a half surprised, half knowing face. "You think it is dangerous?" I reply. Nah, not really seems to be his answer.
After exchanging a few words with one of the other soldiers and the guys on the other side of the room still having problems with my middle name and Mehmet, Ahmet, and Günel loudly being called for a meeting along with numerous friends of theirs, he casts an intent glance at me, then asks "Are you like terror?" and I laugh a negative response. He gets up seemingly contented, I get offered some more tea and ten minutes later the message has come through and I am handed my passport and waved out. At the entrance of Sirnak town, another barbed wired garrison, another kimlik control and this time one of the blue capped darlings walks around our van with something that to me looks like a metal detector. I can't really think what else this might be but the idea obviously seems slightly absurdist, since the entire exterior of the vehicule of course is made of nothing else than metal. The true nature of the apparatus will have to stay obscure to me at the moment, but later I realise it is a mirror-device to see if there is anything surreptitiously tied to the underside of the motorised beast.

The depressing assembly of concrete houses that is Sirnak is rather an anti-climax to the natural beauty that has chauffeured me here, but still I go for a walk around town aiming to use the two hours I have before the dolmus moves on to get lost in the back alleys and scrutinize the architecture. Unfortunately all I can remark while ambling along with the plastic bag munching cows -who generally look like they've just scrambled out of bed without even checking their coiffure- is that makeshift just looks the same everywhere, whether here, in the shanty towns of Sierra Leone, in the hidden backyards of Yerevan or the gypsy outskirts of Madrid. I walk past the school which has just opened ist gates for lunch break and has about 400, 500 white shirted, blue tied kids streaming out into ist yard. I see only three girls- here two bowing over a book, and over there one down with the boys.
Finally I'm on the bus, a big air conditioned tour bus with rectangle windows on which the landscape shifts past like on cinema screens, making my way out of town. Going down into the valley many of the hills turn out to be actual sand dunes with green pimples on them. Slender deep red riverines meander in tight S-curves between the hills. They are slowly making their way toward the Tigris, that rumbling unglittering moloch of a river that will relentlessly suck in their beautiful terra cota meandres and blend them into its all engulfing muddy murk.

(A modified version of this was earlier published on http://www.solotravel.org/ )

Persuasion

2007-09-23T18:00:00.000+02:00

"It is one of the greatest gifts a parent can give to their offspring. Being bilingual expands the mind. And your son will be able to learn foreign languages, such as English, much easier."
I can slowly see that Serdar has started to think about it at least, now that Ferhat's arguments have supporting comment coming from a second person, and a foreigner at that. It is unfortunate and does not help that Zahra, the young mother, has also stopped to speak Kurdish, pretending she never knew how to. "But I know she used to -I knew her as a kid. And when her mother-in-law tells her things in Kurdish she can carry them out without having to ask twice!"
We are on the outskirts of Kurdistan, in a mixed region of Kurds, Loris and Persians. "It is common here that young women refuse to speak Kurdish, even thought they know how to. They don't consider Kurdish a "real" language, or a "proper" one. It is in fashion to speak Persian."
For Ferhat, getting Serdar and Zahra to teach his nephew Kurdish is a question of giving him identity, not letting him lose the roots he has in an ancient culture. I try to make my point by being more pragmatical. Eager to convince the parents, I even catch myself repeating Barzani's pretentious blubber: "In 20 years Iraqi Kurdistan may be as rich and thriving as Dubai. If your son speaks Kurdish this might open the doors for some very good opportunities in life for him!"

Ferhat sucks on his moustache

2007-09-06T10:36:00.000+02:00

Like a kid playing with the end of her ponytail, Ferhat sucks on his moustache. In fact, he is not sucking on it. He is cutting it. Putting its ends through his teeth and filing them off that way is the only manner of shortening his moustache accepted by his religion. The Yarsan believe that using a razor to cut your moustache makes you unpure. "Of course I don't believe it.", he exclaims. "Living in this world we live in today you cannot anymore. But in a society as closed as this one, I can also not just shave it off, even if I want to. If I do, the tittle tattle starts on all sides, and I will not only be discriminated against by the Muslim majority as I am now, but even by my own people."

Some comment he had made had stirred me to ask him whether he was Muslim. "Unfortunately not", had come his sighing reply. I had never heard of the religion he professedly belonged to, the Yarsan, although when he mentionned that the name "Ahl-i Haqq" is synonymous, he received an acknowledging nod, because some kind of memory was triggered in the back of my mind there. It is a somewhat syncretic religion with elements such as rebirth, and which also accredits its origins to an immaculate conception, similar to the Midas Cult, or Christianity. Judgement day they believe will take place across the border from here, on the Sharazur plains above the Kirkuk oil fields.
It is an ancient religion with roots from before Islam and even Christianity, Ferhat tells me. However, when I look up a little more information online a few days later, this does not prove to be true. In fact it seems to be a sect created no sooner than the 16th century. Interesting how one can be so misinformed about one's own religion, that in this case is such a big part of one's identity.

Originally Ferhat is from a small, predominantly Yarsan town a little east from Kermanshah where life is easier for them, but here in the regional capital with a large mixture of ethnicities and religions, Ferhat says he now dissimulates his true faith. The current Iranian regime spreads defamatory propaganda about small faiths like the Yarsan, or the Baha'i for instance, in the mosques through friday imams, or on television where there is always space on a soap opera for a corrupted Baha'i an idiotic Yarsan, or, even, some avaricious Jew. He is a schoolteacher and he already got expelled from his job once before. "Now, if someone asks about my religion I lie. If I tell them anything about it, they will only use it against me"

Looking for Lalish

2007-08-19T09:48:00.000+02:00

I thought it would be effortless
To find this famous place,
But the mostly Muslim city-dwellers
Shrugged their shoulders at my quest.

But finally the eagerness
Of the locals to please
The foreign traveler
Took its fateful course

And a red carpet was rolled out all the way
To the endearing village in the hills,
Where God sat with his angels,
When the world was but a pearl.

Barefoot you tread the ground,
And kiss the steps in front of you.
Am I a Yezidi now
That I have waded through
The nether holy spring?
No, -conversion is impossible.

"So how do you express your faith?"
His English's bad
But also, he equivocates
The question.

The mystery is that
Their own rituals
They do not know
-to themselves they are obscure.

After a while I realize
The Yezidis are not
A culture cohesive and alive
But nothing but
A fossil of other times
That only in chat rooms now revives.

2007-08-18T09:15:00.000+02:00

We also briefly talked about the two Kurdish journalists on death row. "If they get executed, everything changes" says Jadi "I mean,right now if I am asked I will openly say that I believe that men and women are equal for example, but if I might have to pay with my life for such things, maybe I am going to think twice." And then he adds: "But they are not going to execute them".
Still, maybe it is not a bad idea to help exert some international pressure for this abstruse idea: petition

2007-08-16T18:19:00.000+02:00

Assisting a human rights and pro-democracy activist gathering in Syria meant finding myself in a room of people comfortably at least one generation older than me. “Where is the follow up generation?” I had found myself asking, incredulously, only to be answered “there is no younger generation; unfortunately, they have been bypassed by activism”.

In Iran however, partaking in an activists meeting means being in a room animated by the chatter of two handfuls of 20 year olds. What they are abuzz about is the last tittle-tattle of the 1 Million signature campaign. The campaign was instigated about a year ago by a loose network of women’s groups to raise awareness about the discriminatory Iranian laws. These groups do not dare to call themselves officially ‘feminist’ because a few years ago feminism was declared one of the three forbidden “–isms of the enemy”, the other ones being secularism and nihilism. The Marxists it seems were rather piqued at the fact that they were not mentioned, that could only mean they were doing something wrong.

One of the only two men in the room is Amir, who only a week before was released from precisely 666 hour (28 day) in prison for “activity putting national security at danger”. This activity had consisted of collecting signatures in a park.
His 20th birthday was spent in prison, most of the time on isolation ward. His arrest marked somewhat of a crucial moment, because he was the first male arrested for this campaign and this attracted more public attention. The judge can be said to have been rather confused, even irritated, by Amir's gender. Increduously he kept asking him "But you are a guy, what do you want with these women? ...And you don't even get paid??".
The police are regularly befuddled at arrests when the questions “who is your leader?” and “where does the money come from?” receive the answers that there isn’t one and that there is need for none, respectively.

Two girls kneel down next to me on the huge beautiful kilim that is part of every Persian home. They celebrate the fact that I just called myself a feminist by shouting it across the room so that every one knows. The answer that I don’t have a boyfriend receives the same treatment and again the room greets it with cheers. Righteously proud, the two confide in me that they will be excluded from university next semester because of their activism.
We accept glasses of tea from Leyla, the hostess, who is serving the third round for the day, and is wearing a shirt reading “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty”. It was printed by “Bedune Marz” (without borders) a “semi-anarchistic” grouping she was a founding member of and that has existed for a few years. It started off as a handful of people with a manifesto that denounced any kind of oppression meeting regularly to chat in the park. This was an endeavour which seems more innocuous than it is. It was effectively the first time in Iran any activists dared to move outside the protective walls of their own homes, claiming the right to gather publicly (which in fact is provided by the Iranian constitution, but often ignored by police action). The group attained rather absurd fame for the first demonstration of 14 people in front of the football stadium to which women are usually not admitted. A German radio having had wind of the goings on called them up, expecting something close to mass demonstration.
Today “Bedune Marz” is active supporting prisoners of conscience and working to improve the rights of Afghan immigrants.

The same evening we switch on the television. "That's Delaram" says Jadi. Delaram was the girl in the beautiful Indian clothes who had been sitting on the sofa and made everyone laugh by telling excited stories from marriage preparation class in a Persian incomprehensibly rapid to me. On "Voice of America", an Iranian channel broadcasting from the States, she is shown lying on the ground receiving beatings by 4 batons coming out of chadors (the uniforms under which female police are "hiding''). The picture was taken two years ago on a large demonstration in favour of a change of Iranian laws concerning women. It was after these events that the women realized it was too risky to try to change laws by taking the streets, because the regime was clearly indicating that it would not shy away from using violence even against peaceful protestors. As we know, it took one more year for the idea of the one million signature campaign to cristalise clearly.
The sideline story appertaining more concretely to the picture, is that it was taken by an alert journalist jumping to the occasion, but that as a result of this it was Delaram herself who was sentenced to two years for "propaganda against the state".

Read more on the following blog: jadi.civiblog.org

2007-06-17T09:22:00.001+02:00

Another night at Friyad’s office. I get to talk to an ideally bald (shaven) guy who is an adviser to the president. “So what is the strategy for Kurdistan?” I ask. “Nationalism, basically. Being Kurdish is better than being Arab, is better than being Muslim, better than anything else”
These are the precise words he uses. In Ankara even young, otherwise relatively progressive thinking students flinch if they even have to name the Kurds by name, and down here you are confronted with the worst kind of nationalism. For sure this guy speaks good enough English to differentiate between “better” and a more diplomatic or circumscriptive turn of phrase. But he does use “better”. I am confirmed in the belief that nationalism is an ugly thing.

“In the eighties in the caves we used to discuss the Second International” Friyad had confided me. So since Mr. Egghead here seems to be quite on his wits, despite it all, and has started mentioning Marxism, I enquire with him if he read any modern Marxist theory. Discussing Marxist theory is my hobby too you know. Personally I read volumes of modern Marxism less because I “buy” the stuff, but because it keeps my mind busy. However whereas the guys here can practically by heart recite the Communist manifesto from 1848, 21st century Marxist theorists like Wallerstein and Toni Negri fall on deaf ears. Absurdly, the president’s advisor (even whose first name I finally have to admit I cannot remember), picks out the most obscure of names off the list I off-handishly asked him whether he read - the Mexican John Halloway. He says he reads his books from time to time and it is such a good exercise because “whatever arguments he brings forth, I know what to say against.” In my head I think “I bet you’ve never heard the name before”.

No real Western arrogance here though. It is not like I think you have to have read that kind of literature to stage decent grassroots-movements. Or know your way through Western feminist literature to be a feminist. Although I can hardly stop raving about the merits of Valery Soranos when I have to do with the ceaseless harassments of men here. One thing to be learned here is that the international language of horny moronity is possibly the only language that men around the globe have in common.

2007-06-12T09:08:00.002+02:00

Three years ago, when I had that first time so closely rubbed up to Iraq, and was musing with the thought of hitching a lift down, there were still stories of truck drivers having their throat cut on their way across the Southern border. In “exchange” for this risk a truck driver received 3000 dollar for each trip to Iraq. Nowadays they only make half a thousand, but drive in full security. In the border area in Northern Kurdistan every family except the poorest -who are nomad and guard sheep as an occupation- has made the investment of buying a truck. In a way, the commerce over this southern border is what keeps most of the entire Turkish region adjacent to it alive at all.

So it is just logical that sitting in Sami Abdulrahman Park in Hewlêr I meet a couple of truck drivers from the North. Everyone who comes to Iraqi Kurdistan over the Turkish landborder sees the long queue of lorries on either side of the frontier and the two very friendly drivers mention that they have to wait for 10 days on their way in and about a week on the way out pretty much just to fill the void in our conversation.
They tell me they have been driving down for ten years now. Soap, potatoes, washing powder, anything goes down. But back up, they always go empty.

Fair enough, when Kazim and I did the round of the supermarket rustlingly turning over the corn flakes packs trying to find one local product we find Coco Pops from Qatar, melted cheese from China, plastic products from Pakistan, and about everything else from Turkey, but not even the signs next to the carrots read “made in Kurdistan”.
You know I would sell my soul for an alliteration, but to put it another way: the only non-imported good I was to encounter during my stay was brown bread bagged in plastic packaging saying “made by Mazi Market, Duhok”.
And the devil snickers evilly with my soul clutched ever so tightly between his claws.

In 1989, after bombing all those villages, Saddam burnt all the fields and orchards and mined them generously. De-mining is a slow process and still going on to this day, and agriculture has only slowly begun. As I saw in Barzan village for example, everything was done by hand, because there have been no subsidies for farmer’s equipment.
The only thing that is making money in Kurdistan is oil. The Kurdish government still receives 17% of oil revenues from the central Iraqi government (although no one seems to know what the exact number in dollars that would be).

The women's prison

2007-06-03T17:16:00.001+02:00

I must say it struck me as strange that an Iraqi prison should be more comfortable and freer than a European one. I had imagined I was going to enter a filthy stiffy place stinking of urine,
but peeking behind the high walls I discovered an enlivened, large courtyard and airy, nicely swept rooms. Compared with prisons in, say, France, I can honestly say I felt like I was entering a Hilton hotel.

I had actually talked concretely to my Russian acquaintances who innocently spent time in Kurdish prisons and it should strike anyone as strange, to say the least, that there should be such a discrepancy between the male and female prisons (they had reported regular beatings, other people's heavy scars of torturing and people sitting indefinite time without a trial or some much as an idea of why they had been arrested for). But of course the whole endeavour was just one neat little example of how the Kurds think we outsiders are naive enough to believe everything as they spoon it down our throats.
Later on I researched the Internet and found some rare articles on the internet (see the translation further down), I talked to a french woman who works in prisons in iraq, also kurdistan, and when, now a week ago, the human rights watch report came out, it hardly surprised me: http://hrw.org/reports/2007/kurdistan0707/

--------------------------
The woman’s prison in Hewlêr is a sunny place. Kids play between the laundry waving colourfully in the courtyard and the women are sitting in the shade on the steps. One elderly lady walks up to us and kisses each on the forehead. “She has been here for 18 years” says my guide from the Ministry of State Women Affairs.
We just arrive for lunch time however and everyone is moving inside. So are we.

The large rooms with ten to twenty beds are a little more austere, but better equipped than the student residences here, in as much as they have the generators needed to provide round the clock electricity for the TVs and fans. Out of politeness the women all stand up when we come, like pupils in a primary school, but I smile and ask them to make themselves comfortable.
In the room with the long-term convicts (ten of them), there is a girl in heavy make-up of whom I intuitively understand that she was a prostitute. I like her best at once. She is the most talkative, too. When, pretty much as a matter of course, I enquire how the food is and how they are being treated she uses the few words Sorani that I understand to answer both questions: “zor baş, zor zor baş”- “very good, very very good”. Afterwards back in the office my intuition about her gets confirmed “this one liked her job, but there is a different girl who has a horrifying story. After she slept with her “boyfriend” who promised to marry her, she was passed on to a souteneur. At that point, she was not a virgin anymore and had no choice but to do it.”
One woman is in there for plotting with her new boyfriend to kill her husband. In order that they could be together, his death was the only way in this culture.
I remember the grey-haired woman with facial tattoos on chin and around the mouth who sat on the ground. She said she did not want to answer any questions because “We are too worried about the people who were in the explosion today. They are our brothers and sisters, too, you know”
Talk about hypocrisy -now I am told that precisely this woman has to sit 23 years together with her husband and son for a series of contract killings.

There are no activities or any kind of rehabilitation programs going on, but it is something they are working at at the Women's Ministry. The female guard showing me around said, the cities needed women's refuges. There are cases where women have preferred to stay in prison or custody than to be released and to face tribal justice.

Suicide bomber

2007-06-02T23:25:00.003+02:00

Arbil, second week of May, 8 o'clock and seven minutes in the morning: I am cleaning the table after breakfast as Kazim says "Leave it, I'll be late for work" and his telephone rings. He talks for a minute only, but I immediately see that something is not right. "My friend says they have no window-panes left in the house. There was an explosion in the city centre."

My translator today calls in to tell me he won’t come to our appointment at the women’s prison and I decide against driving to town right now -when bombs go up in Kerkuk, they often have a pattern of several ones a day, too. I pass the morning on the veranda of the neighbours in the growing heat that is getting more impregnated with the whirring of flies by the minute. I am in the company of the house's woman and daughters, listening to the radio. Trying to find another translator I do a round of phoning some of the people on my list of contacts, but most have their phones switched off. I ring up Kazim and we talk longwinded and unconcentratedly in circles, because neither of us is thinking straight in this situation. When the news come on again, I silence myself. The girls click their tongues, shake their heads and make long „oohs”. Then they translate the Kurdish news into Azeri for me which I understand a little bit because it is close to Turkish:

Suicide bomber.

800 kilos of TNT in a lorry.

„Ooh” indeed.

The death numbers go up as the heat rises and flies that seem to be hatching out every minute now are gathering buzzing around us. Four dead and 85 wounded at first. Then six dead. Then eight. In the afternoon it will be sixteen.

I briefly am taken by the thought of wondering how such a suicide bomber feels that day. Can he sleep the night before, serenely brainwashed into believing 74 virgins await him on the other side? Or is he nervously tossing and turning in bed before his „big day”? Will he want to get it over with as early in the morning as possible, because he’s on the edge?

I read about Baghdad that the morning hours between seven and ten a.m. notoriously are the most dangerous hours of the day, which seems to bear out this idea. Some officials are said to make it a habit of waiting till after ten for going to work.

Had this guy waited for just one more hour, the street vendors would have trickled in to work and the area would have been packed with them - he would have taken over one hundred more people with him to the other side.

Five times' a charm (-arrested in Iraqi Kurdistan-)

2007-06-02T18:04:00.004+02:00

When one day all the little boys that spend their days polishing shoes in Duhok grow up, and their smaller brothers will have taken the places on the little lined up stools in the town centre, the easiest way for them to make an easy living will be joining the peshmerga that is recruiting the young in masses.
And for half of those who go to school it will be profitable to join the Secret Service, also bloated in numbers. To me and other travellers it happened more than once that some acquaintance of our local friends would approach them, maybe simply when walking on the street with us, and probe them about details of our personality and our reasons for travelling –that was the Secret Service.

A school teacher once said to me, with a pinch of hyperbole -I mean, hopefully-, that "almost everyone here is an agent for the Secret Service." If something looks fishy, it is very quickly going to be reported. In a country with a war as it is going on in Iraq this of course is a good thing. The problem however is this same Security System not only could but actually is used in order to suppress the Kurdish people themselves, and of course everything is heavily soaked in clan-politics.
From my own observations I could almost say that in Kurdistan you either are a part of the Secret Service, or you are afraid of it.
In Iran, undercover agents are commonplace, but fear is not that pervasive: At least you take the taxi and everyone is fuzzing about how stupid those mullahs are, in Iraqi Kurdistan in my experience, people are too deeply scared.

At the outside of each town in Iraqi Kurdistan there are police stops that are occupied by throngs of those young, semi-literate police men. My friend Juan described them as a nuisance when hitch-hiking. To a couple of Russian guys, one British guy and me –all of us travelling at separate times - they were more than that: We got arrested.
The four males spent 2 to 8 weeks in prison, I was only detained for a few hours at most.
-Although had I not had my relatively high-up contacts whose talking did its little bit coming from the phone, and had I not had a foreigner appear by near magic another time, at least twice out of the five times they seemed decided enough to keep me exactly where I was –“in a safe place”. At first I thought it all had happened because the police were bored, and I, as a lone female traveller was a big curiosity. But then I thought back to my Russian acquaintances's fate and my idea transformed.

Part of the explanation why those travellers had to sit in prison is certainly a serious misunderstanding of cultures –for the Iraqi police force there are simply no reasons that any person would go on a holiday to countries like Pakistan or Afghanistan, or Iraq, for that matter. So if you have come all the way via one of those countries you can only have come to join the jihad it seems to them.
And women of course are fragile creatures, forever underage, who would never take up the discomfort of travelling out of their own volition, so the questions I was perpetually asked by the police were “Where is your husband?”, with the implication "so we can ask him what the hell you are doing here", since I myself could not possibly have anything to say about that. When I insisted I did not have one, I was asked “Who told you to come?”, because that a woman can possess the faculty of decisionmaking on her own seemed out of the realm of the possible to them. Or were they hoping I told them of Al-Quaeda's training camp in Afghanistan which organised my trip here?

At the most light-hearted the police in Arbil thought there must be some kind of mistake that I was in their country and they insisted to give me a lift straight to the airport so I could fly back home as soon as possible. It was a hassle but not impossible to get rid of them in this instance.

The curiosity, and the genuine intention to protect the fragile woman-creature, and even the Jihad element, may have just have been elements of the truth though. Another element was, as I came to believe in retrospect, that they did not want me to see the village with its dust-swept unasphalted roads and barefoot children –hence their insistence I get back to the capital which all its shiny high-rises at once.
This trying to prevent me from seeing to much was adequately matched by people within the cities going out of their way to chauffeur me around from one shiny institution to the other and making sure I only saw the town centre out of the seats of immaculately polished 4-by-4's after all.

The startling thing is that I got "arrested" every single time I went out of the beaten path -I am talking, real out of the way villages, without a local escort, and not in a taxi.
An explanation as to why Juan did not get arrested was that one of the first days he was in the country he passed on the Television, absurdly giving a show of the “art of hitch-hiking” by which he had passed through 25 countries thus far. As an effect, wherever he went after that, people –which includes the peshmerga- recognised him from the screen and he was a little celebrity.

The first time the police stopped me I simply went with them as they told me -later when I knew what was going on I refused to enter their cars though. Their reactions were as follows: They would usually say they would just take my passport details and then they would let me go (which was absolutely not what they were actually going to do). At one time they twisted my arm when I refused to get in the car, another time (after a few words of one of my contacts on the phone probably telling him not to apply any force) the head of the local police told me that he was the head of the Cultural Centre of this village which was quite a beauty of a lie considering that that hamlet did not even have a school.
And of course they invariably kept telling me they just wanted to take me “to a safe place”.

The first time I got arrested (in a Assyrian village of maybe ten, fifteen houses in the Duhok district) I was driven to the next town and put into a small room in the town hall there. One by one six or seven men filed in, one my translator, another one of them with pen and paper, set to take notes of everything I was going to say. I ended up staying 2 hours in that room, answering questions. I was finally driven back to Duhok where I stayed another 2 hours at the police station, answering more questions, before they told me I should register with the police every day from then on, and I was driven to a hotel (by a driver who made a twenty minute detour driving in circles and kept touching my thigh, asking me to sleep with him).

Another time my translator –who was a chance English speaker passing through- told me the police seemed to genuinely believe they had just “saved my life”. Since a lot of them are illiterates who have never seen a woman as much as ride a motorcycle, let alone travel alone, this may even be what they genuinely believed. I may point out the irony though of being taken off a village street out with shopkeepers who had just sold me lemonade and their customers who included women, and being shuffled into a building closed off behind barbed wire and high walls faced with 50 guys all staring at me, with whom I did not speak any shared language, at least 30 of them with guns, and being told that this was “for my safety”.

I cannot say I appreciated that my contacts whom I phoned to get me out of these situations lied to me repeatedly in order to justify the police’s behaviour. They were very forthcoming and hospitable and 100 % correct in other ways, but I am neither blind nor stupid, and I found out pretty easily that there had not “disappeared a woman in the area here the week before”, or that the area was one where “terrorists from Mosul roam”.
If I start getting cynical, lying seems to be some sort of inherent trait of their culture as long as it makes things go smoother. I am sure I am just being unnecessarily Western with such details.

To get back to the other travellers –the Brit was released after two weeks and had to sign a paper that he would never come back to Iraq again. One of the Russian, after being picked up for as grave a deed as walking the long kilometres out of Duhok in order to hitchhike, languished in prison for almost two entire months until the Russian consulate found him after his parents had started looking for him.

Women in Prison

2007-05-29T19:07:00.000+02:00

During the past four years more than 10.000 Iraqi women were imprisoned. Most of them have undergone rape, be it by the local police, or by the occupying forces.
The secretary general of the Union of political prisoners and detainees in Iraq, Mohamed Adham, explained “that the recently uncovered cases of rape of Abir Janabi and Sabrine Chamari, do not represent more than 1% of the crimes of this kind against the women in the prisons. Despite the cases made public by the courts, many detainees in prisons are held there as fresh meat for members of the Police and sectarian militias.”
In his declaration to the newspaper Al Khalij, Mohamed Adham further said: “Never since Medieval times have in a war so many rapes and crimes against women taken place.” (Note: this unfortunately seems to be a false estimation to the disadvantage of the female victims of this kind of “war-waging” in the world.) These crimes were committed by the occupying forces as well as by agents of the puppet government. The latter seem to have acted a lot more vilely than their employers.
The overcrowding of Iraqi prisons and other places of detainment has reached its high point. Certain prisons such as the one of Khadimia or the secret camp for women and children at the airport of Mathna, near Baghdad, are full to the brim and inadequate, since they partially already have served as stables. The same is going on in the camp of Shikhan, governmental district of Mosul (Kurdish Autonomous Area), and in numerous other prisons in the South. In many cases the women’s and men’s areas are seperated only by curtains.
Mohamed Adham draws attention to the fact that AIDS has spread dangerously among the detained women. The Directorate for Health in Nadjaf has recently published an information sheet in which they alert about “the rapid and severe progression of this disease since the occupation of Iraq through the anglo-american troops”.
Concerning the number of women detained since the occupation in 2003, the general secretary of the Union of Political Detainees explained that “the calculations of international organisms, the information from human rights organisations and the National Centre for Research and Arabic Studies, agree with our own estimations of a quantity of 10.000 women”
In Bezug auf die seit der us-amerikanischen Besatzung 2003 inhaftierten Frauen, erklärte der Generalsekretär der Union Politischer Gefangener und Verhafteter " die Kalkulationen internationaler Organismen, die Infos von Menschenrechtsvereinigungen und dem Nationalen Zentrum für Untersuchungen und arabische Studien, stimmen mit unseren eigenen Schätzungen einer Quantität von 10.000 Frauen überein, die im Verlauf der letzten vier Jahre inhaftiert worden sind."Mohamed Adham finally reminds us „that all these crimes against the Iraqi people are not becoming time-barred and that the offenders and responsible ones must be condemned by international courts for war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

translated from the French http://tunisitri.net/lette-appel/appel25.html
which in turn was translated from the original Arabic http://www.iraqirabita.org/index3.php?do=article&id=8087/

A Doctor in Sulaymaniyah

2007-05-26T11:29:00.000+02:00

One and a half years ago, on his way to work at the hospital in Baghdad, Dr. Ali was stopped by a black car driving onto the road in front of him in a right angle from the left. He told his driver to hit that car and then turn around and drive a different way.
Dr. Ali had lost a lot of his collegues before this, so he knew what he was up against that day. The Muhjahideens came to his clinic later that day and deposited a threat that unless he pay a large sum of money they would kill him. It only took a few days till he and his family had packed their bags and left for Süleymaniyeh, a city in the secure north of the Country. „You know, it is not like paying the money would help. Then someone else would come next and threaten me.” „What is their reasoning in threatening doctors? You treat the wrong people?” I ask, incredulously. „ It is anti-humanism,that is the only thing I can say. They are against life, Iris.”

Dr. Ali is the head of the oncology department in the clinic in Süleymaniyeh, in Northern Iraq’s Kurdish Autonomous Province.
Süleymaniyeh is a significant place in so far as that it is near Halabja, the place of the biggest of Saddam Hussein’s Al-Anfal campaign in which in 1989 all 5000 inhabitants got killed by chemical bombs. The town was re-inhabited only two years after the tragedy and an over-average amount of people in this area today suffer from leukaemia and other cancerous diseases.
But it is mostly because of the beginning of the war that patient numbers have become overwhelming. Since 2005 onwards the amount of new cases has skyrocketed from 500 per month to 1250 today. “It is no good to have a good reputation”, laughs Dr. Ali.
People travel up for treatment from Bagdad, and from as far away as the South. Even in peace times the country did not have an adequate number of Radiotherapy machines. Saddam used to just say „Cancer is because of the West”. By World Health organisation standards a country like Iraq should have 27 radiotherapy machines –one for each million of inhabitants – but right now the country is just constructing the building for the second one, right here in this clinic.

Because of the war in Baghdad, the only staff now working there are newly graduated young doctors. All of the experienced doctors had to go abroad, to Syria, Jordan, or the West. “I could be paid twice as much in Jordan. Or five times as much if I went back to the UK to work. But the people here need me. Five years ago in Baghdad a US journalist came and asked me how I could cope with the stress. Now I have three times as much work. I don’t have one free minute. When I get home my work is not finished: I keep reading my patients’ portfolios until the night. But if I do not do the work here, no one is going to.”

“What are the obstacles you are facing with your work here?”, I ask “The staff here are not trained well enough and simply do not have so much experience as the staff in Baghdad used to have. For example when you work with children especially you have to have very good skills–children’s veins can easily be punctured through and once a mistake is made you may even have to make a skin graft in some cases. My greatest wish for this clinic to have my staff educated in Europe or by nurses and doctors from Europe”.
In the back of the room, behind the folding partition a child is screaming: The boy is having a bone marrow examination done. All the medication is coming from the West, but they don’t have enough money for all the right medication, so they have to do it with a local anaesthetic.

I close my interview: “What are your dreams for the future?” “We have to get that radiotherapy machine, get better medication, and get our staff trained abroad.”
I nod, but what I meant was: “How about personal ones?” Dr. Ali shakes his head: „You know, I have a big house, three cars, a family. But you watch the news so many times and you feel so sorry for these people who die every day, and you feel so sorry for their families, and for yourself. These terrorists, the way they learned was from Saddam. UK and US rehabilitation plans cannot work here, these men will only stop if they themselves die...”
He rambles on. He does not use the word, but other people I have talked to here have used it so generously in expressing their wishes for the future that I know its presence even when it goes unspoken. It is „SALAM” - Peace.

Into Iraq

2007-05-01T07:34:00.001+02:00

The road curves left and right like a mountain stream, my driver drives like a madman, and I am glad I am not prone to motion sickness. The landscape makes me feel like I am on a little boat rocking in an ocean of heaving and sinking green slopes, shook about by the hills.The Kurdish landscape continues as beautifully as on the Turkish side, but the hills swing on a different rhythm here. They rise heavy with vegetation, build up like green, lush waves, and then abruptly tumble and crash in steep cascades of rock. When the landscape finally sinks down into a valley the last row of hills stands proud like pyramids.