DIYARBAKIR -- Sunday night in Diyarbakir is actually a lot more entertaining than it sounds. Emre has become our constant companion, translating for us, joking with us, showing us around. And while J. and I wait for our press passes, Emre decided to cheer us up by taking us to a Kurdish bar. Leading us down rickety wooden stairs, as soon as he opened the door, the zinging sounds of the saz and the wailing, eerily beautiful singing style of the musician swirled around us.
Emre and I sat and talked while J. luckily found a friend in a Kurdish engineer. While they happily discussed Diyarbakir's building codes and earthquake preparedness, Emre told me about the music.
The singer played a saz, a lute-like 7-stringed instrument with a long neck and deep body. With the addition of electronic distortion on the sound, the strumming and picking took on a droning, trance-like sound, almost like a bull-roarer but higher pitched. A backdrop of green and red fairy lights, the Kurds' national colors, framed him. The bar itself was low, covered in Kurdish weavings, the walls covered by muslin. Above my head hung an ancient rifle.
"As I walk over the snows..." sang the musician, and groups of young men rose to clasp hands, link arms and joined in the traditional circle dance called the halay. They jumped and stomped in complicated unison, as the performer sang of love, fun and freedom.
"This is a song of freedom," Emre told me. It sounded sad and longing. Only the men danced and sang on this one, and some in the audience even held their lighters aloft. I giddily thought of rock and roll shows in America. On the other songs, women joined in.
Freedom for Kurds seems always to be a dream for this people, and it's a sad one for seemingly being out of reach. There's a wistful tone when they speak of northern Iraq, which they never call Iraqi Kurdistan, as if they can't bring themselves to say the word for fear it will disappear in a cloud again. The Kurds of Iraq have created something wonderful the Kurds in Turkey feel, but it is a fragile thing, protected only by the United States and Britain for as long as it's useful to them. After Saddam is gone, what then?
Turkey has massed thousands of troops on the border, and every day seems to bring new confusion from Ankara as to whether Turkey will or won't reinforce its troops in Iraq -- said to number between 3,000 and 17,000, although Mehmet, the journalist, told me 13,000.
If the Iraqi Kurds are allowed some measure of autonomy in a post-Saddam Iraq, some Kurds in Turkey worry that the Turks will move in after the Americans leave, to "preserve security" as the government says every day.
And so they sit in a smokey bar in Diyarbakir, drinking chai, surrounded by the smells and sounds of a nation without a country. Their songs of freedom are songs of mourning, both for what never was and likely will never be.
Love your writing!
I can almost smell the ‘chai’, and I don’t even know what it is; thanks for bringing that moment alive, and let those folks know that they are prayed for daily.
My son-in-law Meran, native of Bigdowdi, a small Kurdish village in northeran Iraq, will be leaving to work with the coalition forces as interpreter and translator tomorrow. Recruited by the Titan Corporation, I hope all goes well for him there…
Mon dieu! - that reminds me of my younger days. Also reminds me of something I heard on an independent radio station from Boulder, CO a few days ago; a caller was saying that the people he knew in Iraq were so much like Americans that he thought we would be fantastic friends if we could live more closely and didn’t happen to be “at war” … Keep safe, Chris, your writing is stellar and we need more of it.
US Marines Turn Fire on Civilians at the Bridge of Death
That title you gave to the article is so misleading. I don’t even know if the story is even true, for there isn’t any link or reference(s). But, I will assume the story is factual. This is a war, and people die. Our troops do not intentionally want to kill innocent people. The blame lies with the Feda’yeen and other thugs, who hide in civilian clothes and use human shields…pretend to surrender and then attack like the cowards they are…begging for help from our soldiers, and then blowing themselves up…and et cetera. If you were one of these soldiers, you would know how it feels.
See through the lines, Mark. These people died because they didn’t stop at a checkpoint when many men with large guns told them to stop.
It is sad and regrettable, but its never intentional.
“Trigger happy grunts of Vietnam”?!?! Most of our boys sent over there were draftees and wanted none of the action.
I know where you got these stories, and the source is less than respectable.
Chai is Turkish style tea, me thinks
when the war is won, our duty to the hopes and fears of Iraqis will be just beginning…
Chay means tea in almost all asian languages.
Note that the Kurds and Turks have been living together for so long now, traditions such as “Halay”, “Saz”, “Cay”, etc. are common among both and are not exclusively Kurdish in origin. In fact, it is said that many of those traditions date back to the times when the Turks were still in mid-Asia (around today’s Mongolistan), from where they supposedly migrated west into Anatolia in the 11th century.
Surely the Kurds have many traditions of their own, but the fact that Turkey is such a melting pot (and has been for 10 centuries now) just make me think that, while having preserved the individual cultures and even languages / dialects, people in Turkey are more alike than they are different. They certainly live together more harmoniously than factions in other countries such as Iraq (Kurds/Sunnis/Shiites/Turkmens), Afghanistan (lots of tribes), Pakistan (tribes), etc. On a large scale, it just doesn’t seem that their culture has eroded, “melted” much over the years.
I just wanted to post you “the mother of all links”. PLEASE GO AND CHECK THIS SITE: www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/iraqwarru018.htm You will find the reports of the sowiet intelligence translated to english. The truth after all?
Regarding US Marines Turn Fire on Civilians at the Bridge of Death:
Mark Franchetti is an award winning reporter for the Times of London. His disturbing account was an absolutely amazing piece of writing. It was written from the heart by someone who has been to the hell of war. I thank him for reminding us of the true horror of it all. Given the sanitized news we often get from our traditional sources I am thankful to be awakened.
We all hope that there is a swift victory and our troops will come home soon … but so long as the fighting continues I am pleased that reporters like Mark Franchetti can bring us a different perspective which isn’t tainted with propaganda.
The human perspective should never be cast aside. His reporting is not political commentary. It was an eyewitness account of horror.
Mark’s article was moving and honest. It brought tears to my eyes several times while reading it. Above all it shakes your soul, it illustrates the horrors of war we so easily lose sight of when we listen to the sanitized news through our regular sources.
That title you gave to the article is so misleading. I don’t even know if the story is even true, for there isn’t any link or reference(s).
It is from the Times, UK and was all over the Blogs in the last few days. This of course isn’t Mark Franchetti, since he still is in Iraq.
I just read a really good article about you and your site in Montreal’s presse. You are listened to. Continue your good job!
[url=http://www.islamonline.net/english/Views/2003/03/article16.shtml] censorship [/url]
“Trigger happy grunts of Vietnam” is a terrible label to hang on the young men who went to that terrible place. Remember, some 55,000 did not return to live out their young lives. In times of war you do what you must to follow orders and keep your buddies and yourself safe. I wish some of our young people had been a bit quicker on the trigger when the so-called civilians were ambushing them. Maybe more of our soldiers would be coming home, alive.
I was in an nasiriyah and mark did not report accurately what transpired. It is hard to report what is going on when you are hiding with your head between your knees under the protective fire of United States Marines. Mark is a fraud.
The article was very well written but very misleading. Iam English and have lived in D.bakır for almost two years now. It is wrong to describe D.bakır as in Kurdistan, it is infact in Eastern Turkey, there are alot of Kurdish people here, but also alot of Turkish people. The few bars in D.bakır are not only for Kurdish people but Turks as well, the reference to the ‘green and red’ lights is also quite misleading as green, red and yellow are the colours of the kurdish flag, green and red symbolise D.bakırs famous watermelons. The text makes D.bakır sound like a romantic little town full of deprived Kurdish people who live under the oppression of the Turks - this is far from the truth, both Turks and Kurds live here in peace and happiness. In every street in D.bakır you can find Kurdish newspapers, you can hear the lively sounds of Kurdish music, people speak Kurdish freely as they walk the streets. The Kurds here live happily, to say it is ‘a nation without a country’ is ridiclious, that opinion doesnt reflect the view of the kurdish people here at all, and there is no mourning or sadness in their songs, they are simply songs of celebration. Iam also suprised that you discussed earthquake preparedness, seeing as nobody in D.bakır worries about earthquakes, they tell me the foundations of D.bakır are sat on solid rock, and that an earthquake has never happen here. The çay you drank, the saz you listened to and even the woven rugs you admired, none of them belonged to ‘Kurdish’ culture, and it would be wrong to say they belonged to Turkish culture, thats the beauty of Eastern Turkey, its both a mix of western Turkish culture and the culture which has gradually filtered in from the Kurds. I would love to contact the person who wrote the article.
I agree with the Anonymous Englishman who lived in Diyarbakir for 2 years COMPLETELY. I am from America, and I was in Diyarbakir for 6 months, and his observations are consistant with what I observed as well! You can do anything you like culturally, and many of the cafe’s that I went to people requested all sorts of songs. In fact, many Kurds request Turkish songs because the cultures are so intertwined. Aside from language differences, it is difficult to see the difference between Turks and Kurds.