In a City Called Batman, War Fears : Turkey: Shops are closed and streets quiet as many flee area near Iraqi border.

The countdown to a gulf war Wednesday found this city in southeastern Turkey with empty streets and palpable fear.

War hysteria sweeping across the region had humbled this area about 80 miles from the Iraqi border that once gallantly resisted the advance of Alexander the Great.

“Batman is dead today,” said Nizamettin Izgi, publisher, editor and star reporter of the weekly newspaper in this petroleum center and railhead of 180,000 people. “The mayor says 80% of the people have left, but I think it’s only about half. The rest are just staying home.”

Most of Batman’s fugitives had fled to nearby villages, or to live with relatives in cities far from the border. About 20 families, though, are living in caves that were once the home of ancient man at Hasankeyf, about 20 miles outside of Batman, according to Yasin Ahmet, a commercial traveler who said he had driven past modern man’s bomb shelters early Wednesday.

In Batman itself, at least half the shops and businesses were shuttered Wednesday. Banks, seeking to discourage withdrawals, told anxious customers that they were temporarily out of Turkish lira.

Of 34,000 schoolchildren in Batman, only 25,000 were in class Tuesday, and many fewer Wednesday. At Batman College, a private junior high school for the children of well-to-do parents, only 85 students out of 225 came to school Wednesday, and many of those drifted away before the school day ended.

“If you lived here would you leave?” Ebru Oksuzler, a bright 14-year-old, asked in impressive English. When a discomforted visitor said he thought it was probably safe to stay, she rejoined: “If it is so safe, why has a foreign reporter suddenly come to Batman?”

Even as the U.N. deadline for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait approached and negotiations floundered, the prospect of war never seemed real to Batman, residents said Wednesday. Now it is an overwhelming fact of life--and flight. Burglary is a growth industry. With so many empty houses, there is much to rob in Batman.

The only lively spot Wednesday in a normally bustling provincial capital was the railroad station. Dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers crawled from flat cars onto transporters that would ferry them to join a 100,000-man Turkish army already entrenched at the border.

There is to be no fighting role for Turkey in any allied action against Iraq, the government in Ankara promises. But a few hours before the deadline, Iraq closed its last border crossing to Turkey without warning, reinforcing the conviction of hundreds of thousands of Turks in the fortified southeast that the farther they got from the border the better. War is bound to bring many thousands of Iraqi refugees into the southeast, Turkish newspapers warned.

More people left Batman on Wednesday, among them Kahram Ak, a worldly and witty farm worker who had loaded bedding, food, rugs, seven children and one wife on a cart behind his tractor to seek refuge in a country village.

“Maybe it’s foolish to leave, but everybody’s going, so I am too. This city may be called Batman, but I’m no hero,” said Ak, whose first name means “hero” in Turkish.

Batman, which takes its name from a nearby branch of the Tigris River and an old unit of weight, usually doesn’t make news. “Batman Comes to Batman at Last,” said a Page 1 headline when the film arrived not long ago. It was not a very popular movie in Batman, said editor Izgi, whose newspaper sells 1,500 copies and last summer headlined the visit of an Iraqi provincial governor, who spent $400 in town on seven pairs of shoes.

Since Turkey joined the embargo against Iraq, Batman has been hurting, a reflection of economic distress throughout Turkey.

Said truck owner Sait Tunc, drinking tea and clicking worry beads Wednesday with similarly unemployed friends at the Batman Transport Co., “I used to drive to Iraq regularly to bring oil to the refinery. Not since August, though. Now I am in debt and cannot make payments on my truck.”

What is particularly cruel in a city where people tell visitors that they have nothing at all against Iraq or the Iraqis but would cheer the death of Saddam Hussein, is that it is precisely the same laboriously acquired municipal assets that are now Batman’s liabilities.

Nearby oil fields, a refinery and a North Atlantic Treaty Organization air base make Batman a prime and early Iraqi target, residents fear.

But it is not all gloom. Life goes on. At a recreation center for oil workers, preparations were under way simultaneously for a basement bomb shelter and a bingo-like game optimistically scheduled for Saturday night.

In Batman’s one-man newspaper office, where the only desk and the only press are separated by a yellowing print of the “Mona Lisa,” it occurred to one wag that the evacuation of families had its positive side.

“We are all bachelors again,” he said.