Children in prison (4th August)
BASQUE–Forced by the critics and the pressure from Europe, the Turkish Parliament amended two weeks ago the law that allowed children to be imprisoned. Around four thousands minor have prison condemns, and about two hundred were in jail when the amendment was voted. Some of them have been released. But the conflict has not finished, and more children were arrested in recent demonstrations. Youths in Yuksekova said “enough”.
At the Human Rights Office in Hakkari, we see protest placards, like the one showing prisons and handcuffs for 23rd April, Children Day in Turkey. In another placard we see a policeman checking children’s hands to see whether they threw any stone, as they usually do before arresting minors. We are shown a video where a plain clothe police breaks the arm of the child he just has arrested. Another video outraged Kurdish people recently: a mother begging to the Police not to arrest his son, taken away from her hands some minutes before. “Erdogan is a heroe in some Arab countries, for the things he said about the children in Gaza, but nobody reminds him his hypocrisy. At the same time that he is denouncing Gaza, here children are being detained, tortured and imprisoned, and many were killed in the streets by the Police” says Leyla, an activist in the Human Rights Center. She is happy to have her son back at home.
The headquarters of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) are heavily watched over in the city. They are the second political party, but they get very few votes. The provincial head of the party, Adnan Hatiboglu, is hopeful about the new law: “God willing, it will have a good effect. It is true that children throw stones, but if this happened in Belgium, they would have to do some social works, they wouldn’t be sent to prison. Now, with the reform, children will be free. I hope all of them will be soon at home”. With a different speech from that of Ankara or Turkey overall –basically, that the exclusion and the idleness provokes the riots, Hatiboglu admits the political issue as the ground of the problem. “The most important is to find a solution for the conflict. Without it, there would not be stone throwing children”. The deputy major of the city Abdullah Kiliç is more critic: “It is a mere effort to clean-up, they were forced to do it. Children’s imprisonment was a consequence of the reform of 2006, then they hardened the law, now it seems that it has been softened, after European pressure. Where in the world happens that a child gets the double of his age as prison sentence?”
Lemons as evidences
Hakkari is a small city, surrounded by the mountains that form the narrow valley of Zap. We meet Recep is a neighborhood formed by displaced people. He takes us to a field with a beautiful view of the hills, to talk about his experience. We hear a gunshot far away. “Look, everyday is the same, shooting all time. And then they call us terrorists. A friend of mine has been condemned to 13 years. The only evidence was a lemon”. After the arrests during the demonstrations, police check their hands and pockets, since lemons are used against the tear gas. Recep was arrested that way: “On 6th December there was a demonstration for our leader. Fire was set, Police started to shoot and use tear gas, and people threw stones”. The young admits he was in the demonstration, but not to have thrown stones. “I was captured and hit with the butt of the gun, they also hit me with the door of the car, then they put me some mask and kept on beating me in the car. I thought they were going to kill me. I had two deep wounds in my head”. Instead of being taken to the Minors Center, he was brought to the Anti Terror Police Station, like many other children. “There were hundreds. They insulted us, they spoke about our mothers, they shouted calling us terrorists and separatist”.
“My family came to visit me but they were not allowed, because my face was swollen, full of bruises”. Next day he was taken to the judges. “They took my fingerprints. I had many bruises in my arms, my fingers also provoked a huge pain. The judge sent us immediately to prison, accused of terrorism. He had no evidences, but it didn’t matter”. He spent two and a half months in jail. “When I arrived there were about 20 more youths, prisons were packed after the protests”. He remembers the trauma of the 14-15 year old teenagers. “It affected most of us psychologically, when they set us free we were shattered. But with so young people, they are playing with their future. They are threatened, they are told they will never go back to school”. Recep was brought to trial in February and condemned to eight years, later downed to five because of his age. “Yes, we are free, but if we are captured again we will have to serve the full condemn”.
More arrests
A girl called Berivan has been the symbol of the imprisoned children. Today she is 15 and lives in Istanbul. She was arrested last year while visiting her relatives in Batman, and has been in prison since then. The letter sent by Berivan to her family, telling the terrible conditions of prison and asking them to free her, moved all Kurdistan and Turkey, and protests reached even London. Becoming a symbol didn’t help the girl, however, since she has spent 10 months in prison. She was released shortly after the Turkish Parliament voted the new law.
But just as many advanced, new arrests happened soon. Some of the first detentions took place in Yuksekova, in the province of Hakkari, when four children between six and twelve were arrested, accused of throwing stones to the Police. The citizens that tried to stop the arrests were attacked with gas and water by the agents, and that very same night two more children were arrested. Next day the town protested closing down the shops, and the Police attacked again.
Children have been imprisoned in Batman, Cizre, Diyarbakir, and in Turkish cities with big Kurdish populations. But Hakkari shows one of the hardest faces of the conflict. It is difficult to believe all the suffering that this small and mountainous province hides. During the 90’s hundreds of villages were destroyed as a tactic against the Kurdish resistance. Children and teenagers born in those years, have grown up as displaced people: no jobs for their parents, and continuous harassment by the police and the army. Most of them have relatives in prison or even martyrs, and, just like some of their brothers and sisters before them, many of the youths have taken the way to the mountain recently. The border is close, and the guerrilla is strong.
“Hakkari is like an open air prison. We are surrounded by beautifulness, but we can’t even approach there, the military has taken all of it, and we are forced to identify ourselves all the time”. According to his friend Sacit, “when something happens on the mountains, all the people pays for it”. Some of their friends have joined PKK, “of course, they have been suffering the pressure of the police for ages, they were beaten, and at the end they took the decision. They are up there for us, they are our relatives. Soldiers are said to be here to protect us as well. Therefore, we want the end of the war”.
Sacit is 19 and jobless. “Here none can employ you. The only option is to go to the west, but even there, they don’t love Kurds”. Recep wished to do something for his people, “I would like to be a doctor, here there is a hospital, but no doctors. At the end, you have two options: studying and going to the university, or to the mountain”. Recep has it clear: “My family, my parents are ill, and here they don’t have many chances of cure. When they came to visit me, I saddened, seeing my mother weep. I don’t want anyone’s mother to cry, I want the end of the war”.
Empty villages to fight guerrillas (5th August)
Hakkari is a Kurdish city, a rebel one, local people have suffered many of the consequences of war. Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) gets over 87 of votes, being BDP the last of the many parties created by the Kurds, after Turkish Justice banned all the former ones.
Even the secretary of the governor is looking the site of Firat, the news agency blamed by Turkey of being owned by guerrillas. She receives us agreeably, but says governor cannot meet us. At the municipality of Diyarbakir, things are different. As a first daring step, we see mull containers with bilingual signals. At the entrance of the town hall we see a mural of the Guernica of Picasso. According to deputy major Abdula Kiliç, “people here is terrorized, they hardly leave home as night comes”. No secret for the recent escalation of violence: “this is the result of not solving the conflict. There are thousands of militaries, there is guerrilla, police attacks don’t end, they attack with gas against demonstrators, they arrest members of the party and of the municipality… and some youths took the way to the mountain…”
There are only two villages left in the area of Çukurca, the rest were emptied. They did not give any alternative to the people, no investment was made. In Iraqi Kurdistan 80 % of the companies, are Turkish, they could have invested here as well, we have beautiful mountains over 3,000 meters high, great opportunities for tourism, but they chose to punish the people”. The deputy major knows the conflict is not only economic: “We need a political solution, this is basic. If Allah had made me born in Istanbul, I would be Turkish, but I was born here, I am Kurd, the state should accept this. Villages and towns must get back their Kurdish names, we must be allowed to live in Kurdish, to study in Kurdish, for instance”.
Adnan Hatiboglu, member of the ruling AKP in Hakkari, is also a journalist and he owns a small newspaper in the city. He admits that Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party’s support is very low in this part of Kurdistan, so heavily beaten by the war. And it would be lower wasn’t it for the votes of many policemen and soldiers. He knows about the suffering of the people, and he admits the conflict won’t be solved by military ways. “The war must finish. Both the government and the PKK have to make steps. Only by deepening in democracy will the problem be solved”. He claims to have good relations with the municipality ruled by BDP, “we meet very often, recently a minister came. The government also met Mr. Ahmet Turk, but BDP should have given us a bigger support. And the attacks by the state, like the arrests of politicians, should stop, too”. Hatiboglu support that Kurds obtain cultural rights, “so that Kurdish can become an optional lesson in the schools”. Studies in Kurdish are totally unthinkable for all parties except BDP. And the key is economical, according to AKP: “We are making pressure to the ministers in order to open the border, in Semdinli or Çukurca, which would have a big impact and development”.
Çukurca
Çukurca is about 75 kilometers from the provincial capital Hakkari, right on the border that the British colonialism drew to mark Iraq’s border. “It is right there, about hundred meters from here”, says Ayhan, the police offer that “invites” us for a tea as soon as we come in the town. He admits that emptying villages and displacing people in the 90’s was a mistake, but not in the sense we expected. “We committed many faults, and many of the actual problems come from then. A guerrilla war is always very difficult to fight, it is a must to have a buffer zone so that the guerrillas can’t feed themselves. But the evacuations weren’t well planned”, he says as if he wasn’t speaking about the displacement of two or three million people. “This reinforced PKK. No economic chances were given to the evacuated people, even if you allow them to come back, the youths that got to know Van, Diyarbakir or Istanbul will not come back”.
The police officer seems an illustrated Jacobin, he shows a few books to support his ideas. “When we go to the villages we speak in Kurdish, since many people don’t speak Turkish. We only punish them when they use the language for separatist purposes”. He says that private schools in Kurdish are OK, “like Spanish language schools in the USA”, and he thinks they are better than in America: “even if Turkish nationalists are called racists, the truth is the opposite, they support that all are Turks, and all have equal rights as Turks”.
We leave the barracks by noon. At the end of the town there are stone houses, it is the former Armenian quarter. On the way, we find more traces of villages above the hills. Residents of Çukurca seem wary at the beginning, once we talk around tea they start to talk where everyone comes from. “Sometimes they informed us that the village would be evacuated, and we had a few hours to collect things” they remember. They show us where the border is, and they remind us that on the other side they have their relatives and friends, with whom they always had relations, “but these mountains are closed to us, the army took them for them”. Two weeks ago seven soldiers were killed in Çukurca by guerrillas coming from South Kurdistan.
We go down to the Zap River from Çukurca. My colleagues drive to Van, the closest airport is about 3-4 hours from here. I decide to stay on the roads of Kurdistan, but the most strategic places are controlled by the army. This crossroad where I stay alone, for instance, waiting for a lift. The soldier speaks good English, and he offers me some place under the shadow. His name is Recep, he comes from Istanbul. “55 days to go back home”. He is been here for three months. Those whose destiny in the military service is Kurdistan have the choice: 15 months as official or just five as a soldier. Recep studied computer engineer, he has a shop at the Bosporus. I remember our friend Murat: he is a modern man that has frequently helped some of the journalists working in Istanbul. He spent a summer in Gasteiz (Vitoria, Basque Country), and he likes our country. But today I remember another story: in some party at one the friends, someone played the Oramar video, and the usually quiet man got angry. “Why do they have to kill me, but have I done to them? Well, this is what it might happen to me if I am sent to the South East”. Such a difference, to make the military service in an office in Ankara, among tourists in Antalya, or here, in the middle of a war. What would you do in order to finish the terror attacks?” wonders Recep, while he stops another car, requesting for papers and asking if they would take me. Kurdish hospitality is huge, not infinite. I probably wouldn’t take anyone recommended by the military, either. “I don’t know” I tell him. “But military operations have been carried for years, and look how strong the PKK is”. His sight is far away. I have been for two hours in this single shadow in the middle of the valley. Once Recep retired, I have asked to a driver myself, he has taken me immediately.
The road goes sibling along the Iraqi border, with breathtaking landscapes and huge checkpoints. Villagers smile at a single greeting in Kurdish, some make the symbol of victory with their fingers. I spot Cizre on the map, getting down from the mountains. It is the capital of the historic Botan. Local friends invite me to stay overnight. Good end for today, we will talk tomorrow about Cizre.