Turkish City Has Bitter Memories of Hussein : Alarm: A tenth of the population flees from Kurdish stronghold. Those remaining fear an Iraqi chemical strike.

At dusk Tuesday, for reasons nobody really understood, there was a run on sidewalk sales of plastic sheeting outside the covered bazaar in this ancient city in eastern Turkey. Prices quadrupled to about $1 per yard.

“It’s been like this for two days. The sheets and this stuff are supposed to be good for sealing doors and windows against war gas,” said Mahmut Nasrullah, selling armfuls of sturdy weatherstripping. “Tomorrow, I suppose, it’ll be all over.”

Overhead, Turkish and Belgian jet fighters with missiles slung beneath them swept purposefully through clear, cold skies, observed mutely by thousands of travelers heading west, away from Iraq, and thousands more, too poor to flee, who consigned their future to sheets of plastic.

Thus, with popular alarm that belied official reassurance, did eastern Turkey, which has a 200-mile frontier with Iraq, count down toward possible war.

All 64 gold shops in the Diyarbakir bazaar were padlocked Tuesday, their owners having moved out of what they imagined to be the range of Iraqi chemical weapons. Buses carried about 5,000 refugees away from a city that most of its residents consider a war target.

“There’s a real panic here,” said Mehmet Bingol, a manager for the Diyarbakir Bus Co. “In four days, business has tripled; there’s a four-day wait now to go anywhere west.” Five stowaways were pried from the luggage compartment of one of the 100 scheduled buses that left Diyarbakir on Tuesday, 80% of their seats filled by women and children.

According to Mayor Turgut Atalay, perhaps 50,000 people--a 10th of the population--have fled black-walled Diyarbakir, once a Roman city and now the world’s largest Kurdish city, in the past few days.

“I myself don’t think there will be a war, but it would be irresponsible for me to make a speech to calm the people. There is too much I don’t know, that no one knows,” the mayor said in an interview.

A squadron of Belgian interceptors, part of a 42-plane North Atlantic Treaty Organization rapid-response force, has reinforced Turkish fighters at the big military air base here, about 200 miles from the Iraqi border. At the base Tuesday, jets in camouflage dress, armed and fueled, canopies open, waited at high alert. Outside the city, a U.S. Air Force listening post has an electronic front-row seat for everything that moves in Iraqi skies.

Diyarbakir’s fighters are for defensive purposes, and the government of President Turgut Ozal has repeatedly promised that Turkey will take no part in any fighting. But Turks are nervous.

To help reassure them, in the aftermath of a visit to Ankara last Sunday by Secretary of State James A. Baker III, the United States has pledged to double the number of its warplanes in Turkey from 48 to 96. It is also pledging new missile defenses, air-to-air missiles and at least $75 million in equipment.

The additional 48 planes, from U.S. bases in Europe, will join fighters and bombers already at the big Turkish-American Incirlik Air Base near the city of Adana by late this week, according to Western sources.

Turkey promises to allow Incirlik to be used for logistic and medical purposes in the event of war, but Ozal’s government says it will not be used to launch strikes against Iraq.

What worries Diyarbakir, though, is what Iraq might launch at Turkey.

“It is not war that we fear, but the chemical weapons,” said Hasan Celik, an office worker trying to decide whether to flee. There are 34 apartments in his building, Celik said, only about one-third of them still occupied.

Diyarbakir lives with the memories of 60,000 Iraqi Kurds who fled into Turkey in the fall of 1988 after President Saddam Hussein followed up his cease-fire with Iran by gassing their villages. Many of the refugees have settled among the Kurdish majority in Diyarbakir.

“We asked the refugees about the gas. They say not to worry, it’s not so bad. They say Saddam has only a few rockets,” Celik said. “We are frightened though. There are not even any gas masks to buy, and the government does nothing.”

Diyarbakir’s Social Democratic mayor says the city is functioning smoothly. Most shops are open; there are no shortages, he says, except of planning and information.

“We have not laid in any stocks of food or medicine, and we have made no planning for any new refugees,” Atalay said. “The central government is telling us very little. Not even I have a gas mask. I guess what happens is a little bit up to God and a lot up to Saddam Hussein.”