Turkish Town Their Largest City : Kurds a Fractured People in Search of a Homeland

The Diyarbakir Rotary Club meets on Wednesdays at 6 p.m., a model of civility and hospitality. That puzzles some people.

“We had 50 Rotarians out from Istanbul, and they gaped to find us in suits and ties. What did they expect? Funny hats and baggy pants?” asked Musa Ekinci, a young Diyarbakir contractor who once managed a Long John Silver’s restaurant in Virginia.

Even for some Turks, there is mystery and a shiver of foreboding about this distant, dusty “Wild East” metropolis of 600,000 near the border with Syria and Iraq. Over its 3,000 years, Diyarbakir has acquired sundry bits of municipal distinction: an awesome encircling wall of black basalt begun under the Roman Emperor Constantine in AD 348; 100-pound watermelons fertilized with pigeon droppings and grown in holes along the sandy shores of the nearby Tigris River, and a $5 bordello that one tourist guide calls the raunchiest little whorehouse in Turkey.

Most pertinent, Diyarbakir, a key regional center for Turkey’s backward southeast, is also the world’s largest Kurdish city. Just now it is a weeping ground for two separate groups in the latest chapter of a long, never-win struggle by the Kurds for their own homeland.

Restively awaiting a move to better shelter from a tent city outside town are several thousand of the 60,000 Iraqi Kurds who fled into Turkey this fall after attacks by the Iraqi armed forces that may have included the use of poison gas.

Held at the Diyarbakir prison are hundreds of Turkish Kurds accused of supporting a Marxist guerrilla insurgency inside Turkey that has claimed more than 1,100 lives in the last four years.

Together, the cousin Kurds, refugees and prisoners, exemplify the pride and pain of a search for self-rule that seems a quixotic long shot to many analysts.

Semi-nomadic, poor and tribal, the Kurds are a fractured people. About 20 million Kurds live in a mountainous arc they call Kurdistan that includes border regions of Turkey (8 million to 10 million Kurds), Syria (500,000), Iraq (3.5 million), Iran (5 million) and the Soviet Union (200,000).

Although they have maintained their cultural traditions and 32-letter Indo-European alphabet since biblical times, the Kurds have never united under one ruler, and their frequent contemporary uprisings--all failures--have been aimed at establishing separatist homelands within existing countries rather than a Kurdistan carved from pieces of each.

“Tribal divisions have always been deep, and central governments have been able to exploit these as well as political differences between conservative feudal leaders and left-wing radicals,” said a 1986 study prepared for Britain’s Foreign Office.

Among Kurds willing to fight for their beliefs, passions run deep. On a recent evening in Diyarbakir, one Kurdish nationalist--a tall man with a fierce mustache and angry black eyes--hunched over a tiny glass of tea.

‘Colonized Country’

“Palestine is an international issue. Why not Kurdistan? We are a colonized country,” he said, the delicate glass clinched in a massive fist.

“This you must write as if it came from Allah; no names,” he commanded, “or else, for me. . . . “ He drew a finger across his throat. “If you talk Kurdish in Diyarbakir today, nobody will arrest you, but if we say we want freedom, then we go to jail. It is freedom that we seek.”

In this decade alone, Iraq has supported three separate, simultaneous rebellions of Kurds seeking autonomy in three Iranian provinces. Iran, for its part, has backed Pesh Merga (Those Who Face Death) fighters under Massoud Barzani who want Kurdish autonomy in northern areas of Iraq, a country where Kurds make up one-quarter of the population.

Barzani’s Pesh Merga insurgents now forced into Turkish exile are politically conservative, as opposed to insurgent Turkish Kurds belonging to the small, violent, Marxist Kurdish Workers’ Party, called the PKK.

Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of a PKK rebellion that is the latest in a century of insurgencies against Turkey, is based in Damascus, where the Syrian government has no affection for Turkey, a NATO democracy with diplomatic ties to Israel. Ocalan’s name means “Revenge Taker.” His 1,000 or 2,000 guerrillas, not widely supported, wage terror largely for its own sake, most recently murdering three schoolteachers in a mountain village.

Last August’s cease-fire in the eight-year Iran-Iraq War freed the Iraqi army to strike Pesh Merga guerrillas in the Iraqi north. In a matter of days, guerrillas and their families, more than 60,000 in all, streamed into Turkey, claiming that the Iraqis had used poison gas. The Iraqi attacks badly hurt the insurgency, although last week the Pesh Mergas, apparently regrouped, claimed to have killed 40 Iraqi soldiers in overrunning an army base near the Turkish border.

The Iraqis denied using chemical weapons in the August attacks, but the Reagan Administration, for one, seemed convinced that they had. Turkey, with no other options, gave the Pesh Mergas refuge, disarming the fighters and settling the refugees in tent cities away from the border.

“We are offering temporary sanctuary as a humanitarian act while encouraging the refugees to resettle in a third country,” said Gazne Soysal, an official of the Turkish Foreign Ministry in Ankara.

Three months afterward, there is no visible evidence here to support the allegations that poison gas was used, although the refugees insist that it was. Otherwise, they say, as veteran guerrillas accustomed to conventional counterattack, there would have been no reason for them to flee Iraq.

In recent weeks, thousands of Pesh Mergas have gone to Iran, and a relative handful have cautiously returned to Iraq, leaving about 40,000 in Turkey, which so far has paid all the bills but is now seeking international help. Soysal says caring for the refugees will cost at least $38 million over the next year. Few countries seem willing to accept the Pesh Mergas, and no one imagines they will be returning home soon.

“We walked out of Iraq, leaving everything, including our worst wounded. Many people had no time to get out,” said Akram Maji, a 32-year-old agricultural engineer-turned-guerrilla-turned-refugee. “People have come from the U.N., the Red Cross, places like that. They say they will help, but until now none have.”

One recent morning at the Diyarbakir camp--population 12,817 refugees, 7,180 of them children--trucks came to begin moving two-thirds of the Kurds to better housing. The Pesh Merga bounded happily aboard, few possessions to encumber them. Ironically, they were bound for newly completed low-cost houses near Diyarbakir originally commissioned by the government for homeless Turks. Furious at the loss of shelter they had awaited for years, the intended owners--many of them also Kurds--are suing the Turkish government.

Restored Iraqi military vigor along the Turkish border also complicates the struggle of the PKK. Hard-core PKK guerrillas are thought to have been trained in Syria and to infiltrate into Turkey through Iraq. Diyarbakir, headquarters of a special regional government created to crush the guerrilla threat, aches from the PKK insurgency.

Of about 1,800 PKK sympathizers in Turkish jails, more than 600 are held here. About 270 launched a hunger strike last month to demand better treatment and the right to speak Kurdish in jail meetings with their families. About two dozen relatives on a hunger strike of their own jammed the Diyarbakir headquarters of a center-left Social Democratic Party one gray afternoon this month.

The Kurds clustered agitatedly around a visitor, demanding “justice and freedom” for loved ones they call “political prisoners.” The relatives echoed charges of jail tortures raised by national and international human rights groups but denied by the Turkish government.

‘Many Murderers’

“There are no political prisoners in the Diyarbakir jail,” said assistant regional governor Nafiz Kayali in an interview at his heavily guarded office here. “They are prisoners because of their actions, not their ideas. Many are murderers.”

Thousands of Turkish troops are tied down in the southeast by the PKK struggle, but the level of violence is low, and the revolt by young Kurdish Marxists to create a Soviet-aligned state lacks wide support and appears to have slight chance of success, according to Turkish and foreign analysts.

Since Kemal Ataturk carved a Turkish nation from shards of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the central government has steadfastly denied the existence of any Kurdish minority.

“For a Kurd who calls himself a Turk, there is no limit in this society; general or prime minister, the sky’s the limit,” said a Turkish journalist, himself a Kurd, who asked not to be identified. “By contrast, a Kurd who insists on first being a Kurd, of asserting his Kurdishness, is apt to have a lot of cell time in which to reflect on his mistake.”

There is now some nascent sympathy on the political left for a modest autonomy that would protect Kurdish linguistic and cultural traditions, but the more typical view among mainstream politicians is that there is no Kurdish future in Turkey.

“For 1,000 years there has been a Turkish state. There has never been a Kurdish state. Kurdish is spoken in 18 of our 67 provinces, but Turkish is the national language,” said conservative former Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel in an interview in Ankara. “A small portion of educated people respond to calls for an independent Kurdish state, but not the masses. I don’t think separatism is an issue. If they want to be called Kurds, OK. But they are citizens of this country. They are Turks.”

At present, there is no public instruction in Kurdish, although many Kurds, particularly rural women, speak almost no Turkish. There are no Kurdish publications or broadcasts. Speaking Kurdish is not against the law, but it is impossible to transact business with the government in Kurdish, or, as prison hunger strikers make plain, even to talk with jail visitors in Kurdish.

“The sensitivity among government officials is incredible. Only last year for the first time did I actually see the word Kurd in a Turkish newspaper headline,” said Dankwart A. Rustow, a professor of political science at City University of New York. “In the 1920s, when Turkey was a new nation-state and nationality was a new concept, there was a serious separatist threat. Today, I think the ban on public instruction in Kurdish is wrong-headed.”

21-Dam Project

Counterpoint to Kurdish trauma in the Turkish hinterlands today is an unprecedented development effort that will permanently alter the face of the southeast. A 21-dam hydroelectric and irrigation project for the Tigris and Euphrates rivers will bring more than a million acres under cultivation for the first time and produce hundreds of thousands of jobs.

In the last few years before the project comes on line, complementary development schemes are slowly snaking roads, electricity, telephones and schools through the wild mountains to Kurdish clans living in thousands of backward hamlets.

For millions of Turkey’s Kurds, an end to their historic isolation seems in sight. That may mute violence that is as old as the Kurds themselves.

“The new dams and the social and economic development will do more for integration than a 60-year policy of pretending there is no such thing as a Kurd,” Rustow predicted.