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.

Chris apol­o­gizes for the lack of updates over the past few days, but he’s been hav­ing some tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties with the sat­phone he’s using. He is work­ing on fix­ing these prob­lems, but is hav­ing lit­tle luck so far. He is healthy and safe, though, and thanks you for your under­stand­ing.
On a lighter note I don’t guess he will give this model of sat­phone a very good review.
Michael