The Karachi slum of Lyari was exultant after the 2008 election that toppled military ruler Pervez Musharraf. Populated largely by migrants from the state of Balochistan, where a separatist rebellion has been going on for decades, it is notorious for its poverty and gangsterism, which has also seeped into the cities politics. On a brief visit I met some interesting individuals, whose political activism could have been linked to other interests.
Containers in the port of Karachi Photo: Tony Cross
Karachi, 19.02.2008
Lyari is a traffic-choked slum near Karachi’s port. Piles of rubbish fester underfoot and flies settle on anything that doesn’t move. Blocked drains spill sewage into the street, leaving puddles of filth which will become breeding-grounds for disease-bearing mosquitoes.
But many people in Lyari are exultant today. Unofficial results show a humiliation for President Pervez Musharraf and his allies. The politicians have rushed to Islamabad, as the People’s Party tries to form a government.
The PPP has come out in front, although some of the sympathy generated by Benazir Bhutto’s assassination seems to have evaporated in the polling booths. The party doesn’t seem to have lived up to the most optimistic predictions, while Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N is believed to have done a bit better than expected, mostly in Punjab where it rules the roost again.
Boys sells offal to feed the birds on a bridge overlooking Karachi’s port Photo: Tony Cross
Karachi is in the PPP’s strongest province, Sindh. But the giant city’s politics are complicated by the existence of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the MQM, whose vote-base is the mohajirs, Urdu-speaking immigrants who fled India at the time of partition.
There have been many other groups of immigrants since then, both from other Asian countries and from Pakistan’s poorer provinces.
The biggest group in Lyari is from Balochistan province. In an empty shell of a building, which should probably be a shop, I meet Khuda Baksh and Mahmoud Yacub.
They’re Baloches and they worked for the PPP. Baksh is clearly somebody around here. He’s tall, walks with a swagger, wears flashy wrap-around sunglasses along with more traditional Pakistani clothes and speaks passable English.
I don’t know whether he unduly influenced voters but he certainly tries to influence my interviewees. After agreeing to translate, he leans over and whispers to them, apparently anxious that they may fail to mention to his party favourably.
He doesn’t have to put words in the mouth of Air Bibi, who lives up to the reputation of Baloch women for forthright assertiveness. Without waiting to be asked, she explodes into praise of Benazir –“Benazir is in our hearts! Benazir is our star! Benazir is our daughter!” and condemnation of Musharraf “He will be out, insha’allah!”, punctuated with “aah! aah!”, “upurroopurroopurra!” and finger-clicking.
Air Bibi finishes with a declaration of Baloch pride. Further down the street, Zahid, one of a group of young men who gather around me, mixes Baloch nationalism with resentment of the poverty around him.
“Look at this area! We are not having each and everything, especially Baloch nation. And also Punjabis are providing each and everything by the government.”
He gestures to the grimy buildings. “See our areas? Nothing has been providing our nation. We are jobless and everything. If PPP governs, it gives each and everything to Baloch nation.”
Baksh and Yacub are clearly annoyed that the MQM, which allied itself to the PML-Q in Sindh and at a national level, seems to have resisted the anti-Musharraf wave in this election and won about 20 seats.
In one of those they-say-we cheated-we say-they-cheated declarations, Baksh claims to have been swindled out of votes in his ballywick.
Karachi is a violent place and in this election the city was up to its previous bloody form. Party workers have passed from polemic to shoot-out on several occasions. Five activists have been killed, the latest being a PPP member killed in a gunfight with MQM supporters on Friday.
A young couple enjoy the late afternoon Photo: Tony Cross
The PPP accuses the MQM of vote-rigging and kidnapping some of its workers. The MQM accuses the PPP of using “the mafia” to improve its chances of electoral success.
Elsewhere in the city, Karachi residents amuse themselves. On the bridge by the port, crowds buy lumps of lung from ragged boys and throw them to scavenger birds. The birds swoop and catch them in their claws, never letting a single morsel fall into the water below.
Camel ride on Seaview Beach Photo: Tony Cross
On Seaview beach no-one swims. Here boys sell ice-cream and corn-on-the-cob and offer to take your photo. Families mount on camels and young men ride beautiful white and brown horses across the dark mud as night falls.
Sunset approaches on Seaview Beach Photo: Tony Cross
On the day before Turkey’s 1 November election I and my colleagues visited a vast “security zone” where the Turkish army has been fighting PKK guerrillas since the end of recent peace talks … and for years before they started. We saw fields burnt by military operations, a cemetery whose mosque was destroyed by soldiers, met a young man who appeared to be a guerrilla and the mayor of a village accused of collaboration with the state.
Faik Magar and his wife on their way to Diyarbakir Photo: Tony Cross
Dicle, 31 October 2015
I don’t really want to talk to the man on the donkey – I want to press on to the village where NGO activists in Diyarbakir are supposed to have arranged contacts for us – but it turns out he has plenty to say.
“Look around you!” he says, indicating a huge plane nestling between mountains. “You can see for yourselves. All the land you can see to your left and to your right has been burnt. That’s what they call a security zone! Everywhere you can see there were vines and all our vines have been burnt. Even the houses that were on this land.”
He’s called Faik and he’s on the way to Diyarbakir with his wife because she is ill. Although she’s the one who’s ill, he’s riding the donkey, we comment afterwards, although we ourselves neglected to ask her name.
A house destroyed by firebombing at Arikli, Diyarbakir province Photo: Tony Cross
The fields around us are bare. A house nearby has been destroyed. This area several kilometres north of Diyrabakir city, has been declared a security zone by the Turkish army and in July helicopters firebombed the area, destroying crops and homes, as Faik points out.
Although he doesn’t volunteer the information straight away, the firebombing followed a battle with PKK fighters in the nearby mountains and, apparently, the guerrillas dig tunnels in which to shelter, as did the NLF during the Vietnam War.
As we talk a helicopter flies overhead. As experienced radio journalists, we point out microphones in the air to record the sound. Experienced as he is in life in a zone of interest to the Turkish military, Faik tells us not to, in case they think we’re pointing weapons at them.
We press on to our destination – Sise in Kurdish, Yolçati in Turkish – driving through fields and past the occasional building.
After a couple of wrong turns we find an isolated farmhouse. But where is Sise?
Ebru Ökmen, the French-language interpreter and fixeuse working with my colleague Nicolas Falez, phones our contacts. Turns out where there.
A man comes to greet us. He’s Zeynel, the farmer’s brother, and he’s on a visit from Izmit, where he has lived and worked since leaving the area many years ago. There was a lot more to Sise then, he tells us, but it emptied after the military launched air raids and military operations against the PKK in 1993.
So the area has long experience of combat. According to the rights activists who sent us here, the European Court of Human Rights ordered the Turkish state to pay damages for the effects of its operations in the 90s.
“Only people have no other way to survive still live here,” Zeynel says.
Last night there were two drone strikes on the mountains, he tells us. “We weren’t frightened, we’re used to it.”
Mohammed (L), Zeynel (R) and a bag of watermelons (C) Photo: Tony Cross
Zeynel’s brother; Mohammed, arrives, pushing a wheelbarrow full of watermelons – the local speciality – ready to be kept in the cellar for the winter.
Ten days ago the military bombed the mountains six times. Local people found the bodies of eight PKK fighters afterwards and took them to the “martyrs’ cemetery”, where local guerrillas are buried.
“Twenty-four hours after the aerial bombardment the army arrived by road and placed mines around the cemetery and set them off,” he says.
“They claimed their were munitions hidden under the graves but it’s not possible that there would be munitions hidden in a cemetery,” he goes on. “They did it because they {the people buried there] were PKK. If there were weapons or munitions hidden it would be in the mountains, not in a cemetery.”
The army has taken advantage of the PKK ceasefire to attack the area, says Mohammed. He advises us to visit the cemetery, saying that there could be fighters there.
Pestil sucuk dries in the sun on Mohammed’s farm Photo: Tony Cross
Before we leave he shows us around the farm. Rows of what look like sausages are drying in the sun. It’s not pork but walnuts wrapped in dried grape pulp. The Turks call it pestil sucuk (fruit pulp sausage). I first came across it in Georgia, where it is called churchkhela. My interpreter, Tayfik, tells me that Armenian women often sell it in Diyarbakir, where it is more widely available than in Istanbul, so this is apparently a Persian-influenced or Caucasian recipe.
One of Mohammed’s sons is in Kobané, the Syrian town seized by Kurdish fighters from Isis, IS, Daesh or whatever you prefer to call it.
The “martyrs’ cemetery” at Sise Photo: Tony Cross
The central part of the cemetery, where the graves are laid out in neat, white rows, is intact. But there is wreckage on three sides of it. A lorry has brought a portakabin that is being installed by a group of about 20 people.
They are relatives of the fighters buried here and the wreckage is where they were camped out to protect the site from the army, they tell us.
The wreckage of shelters where relatives of the PKK fighters were staying at the cemetery Photo: Tony Cross
If we want to interview someone, we must wait for a “spokesman”.
He arrives a few minutes, later a short, quietly spoken but authoritative young man – he’s 22-years-old, he tells us later, adding that we can’t take his photograph and, at first, telling us not to record but relenting when we point out that this is for radio and that his voice will be dubbed by a translation.
He takes us through the graves to some more twisted masonry and metal – the ruins of the mosque, destroyed by the military who claimed it was an arms cache, he says.
A young woman joins us. She was present when the military arrived.
The relatives brandished the Koran and asked the troops how they could defile the cemetery if they were Muslims, the pair tell us. The soldiers responded by claiming that there were crosses on some of the graves and calling them Armenians, ie Christians.
“We were supposed to be offended but why should we be?” she asks.
Sensing that these two are more than just relatives of the deceased, I ask if the PKK ceasefire will continue after the election.
“That depends on the attitude of the AKP,” the young man replies. “If the AKP says it will continue to fight then obviously the PKK will defend itself. This is the policy of the presidential palace, not of the state. The people here are demanding peace. The mothers, whether they are the mothers of PKK fighters or soldiers, say that we must stop this war.”
Place of death, Kobane – a grave in front of the ruins of the “martyrs’ cemetery” mosque Photo: Tony Cross
Some of the graves are freshly dug and awaiting headstones, presumably the fighters killed the other day are buried there. Others inform us that the place of death was Kobane.
Men transport a solar panel at Tepebasi Photo: Tony Cross
A few kilometres away is Tepebasi, a village that overlooks a ravine whose rocky sides lead down to a reservoir made from a dam on the river Tigris.
A couple of men transport a solar panel on a donkey – what Lenin would have called combined and uneven development – and a man with a rifle stands outside the mayor’s house. He’s Mehmet Bozkurt, and the mayor, Mehmet Yasar Bozkurt, is his brother. The rifle appears to be for hunting, although the mayor, who soon arrives and invites us to sit in the sun outside his home, might need some protection.
Tepebasi is the home of the candidate for the ruling AKP in this election. Since the 1990s it has had poor relations with some neighbouring villages, whose inhabitants accused its people of being “village guardians”, a militia funded by the government and viewed as collaborators by the PKK and its supporters.
In the 1990s the PKK attacked the village and kidnapped some villagers for ransom, Mehmet Yasar Bozkurt tells us, as we eat figs and dried grape pulp from his garden and sip bitter Turkish tea.
Tepebasi mayor Mehmet Yasar Bozkurt with one of his sons and his wife, whose name, again, I neglected to ask Photo: Tony Cross
The village receives government subsidies for the organic vines that produce the grape pulp but, despite the dam on its doorstep, sometimes suffers power cuts because the power goes to a nearby town first.
The mayor and his family are Zazas, a minority of a minority that speaks its own dialect of Kurdish. He has nine children – four boys and five girls – several but not all of them present as we speak, as is his wife, who hovers in the background as her husband speaks to us.
He won’t be voting AKP, he says. Not quite. It turns out that the AKP candidate’s uncle was squeezed out of the running and left the party to stand as an independent. He’ll be getting Mehmet Yasar’s vote, it appears.
Mehmet Yasar criticises both the government and the PKK for the breakdown of the ceasefire and presents a front of studied neutrality when discussing the conflict, citing a Kurdish proverb, “Keep your mouth shut in the day and the doors shut at night.”
Diyarbakir is the largest city in Kurdish-majority south-east Turkey. The region has seen the PKK’s guerrilla war and successive governments’ harshly repressive responses. I first visited the city during the 2007 presidential election and talked to political and rights activists who still had vivid memories of the dirty war, as well as the era when the Kurdish language and culture suffered severe discrimination. I returned in 2014, when a peace process was under way and the city seemed to be becoming a better place to live. Some of the improvements have lasted but this year the city has seen military repression of liberated zones and shootouts between police and the Islamic State armed group.
Hasan Pasa Hani, Diyarbakir, a former caravanserai that now houses restaurants and coffee shops Photo: Tony Cross
Diyarbakir, 28 October 2015
My work in Diyarbakir gets off to a slow start. I get up at 4.30am to catch the flight from Istanbul, only to find that it has been put back an hour and the airline hadn’t bothered to tell me. My SMS to my fixer, Tayfun, fails to go through, so he has been waiting for an hour when I arrive … not a good start
We land at Diyarbakir’s spanking new airport, which isn’t actually quite ready yet. No problems on the runway but when we go to hire a car they can’t give me a receipt because there is no electricity to run their printer.
The café in Diyarbakir’s market area where I met Abdullah Demirbas and Kevin Miller Photo: Tony Cross
Once we start work we wait for ages in a charming courtyard café for Tayfun’s contact in the left-wing, pro-Kurd People’s Democratic Party (HDP) to turn up. He is supposed to introduce me to the former mayor of this part of Diyarbakir, the historic centre, and that means even more waiting.
The café is playing distinctly unturkish music, accordions feature in some tracks, meaning that if I record an interview here listeners are liable to suspect I conducted it in Paris and am only pretending to be in south-east Turkey.
After chatting for a while it finally occurs that our contact would actually make quite a good interviewee.
He is a Kurdish-American who has a Turkish name but prefers to be known as Kevin Miller. He has served in the US military and is to stand for Congress, the first Kurd to do so, but has come to Turkey for the election and its aftermath.
Kevin Miller with collaborators at the former Armenian house he is restoring Photo: Tony Cross
Kevin takes us to see a former Armenian house in the old city that he is restoring in order to establish a research institute. Concrete has been chipped off Diyarbakir’s dark basalt and lighter stone with Armenian inscriptions and traditional wood interiors are being constructed, although recent rainfall has done some damage.
Then we take a walk through Sur, Diyarbakir’s old city.
A street in Sur where Kurdish youths dug trenches and erected barricades Photo: Tony Cross
A streak of rubble scars a narrow street that joins another one that is similarly disfigured.
This is where young Kurds dug trenches and erected barricades to keep police and other representatives of the Turkish state out of a two-kilometre-square “liberated area”, arming themselves with what weapons they could lay their hands on.
A Kurdish assembly was organised and sat in a historic building nearby.
Graffitied on the walls are the initials “PKK” for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party guerrilla movement that has been fighting first for a Kurdish state and later for autonomy since 1978 but also “YDG-H”, for the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement, which a PKK leader recently admitted has escaped PKK control.
The YDG-H seems to have taken seriously a change in the line of the PKK and its Syrian allies, the YKD, that has meant renouncing Maoist-influenced centralism and encouraging bottom-up “administrative autonomy” in defiance of the state, establishing self-administer areas as the Syrian Kurds have done in the region, known to the Kurds as Rojava, that they have liberated from the Islamic State armed group and Bashar al-Assad’s government.
The Turkish government responded forcefully.
Ten days ago it sent 4,500 special forces into Sur, deploying snipers and heavy weapons in the narrow streets and declaring a 24-hour curfew.
In five days of fighting 15 people are reported to have been killed and one wounded and dozens arrested.
The building where the assembly met is now a charred ruin, despite its Unesco-protected status.
The former seat of the Kurdish autonomous area’s assembly after the military offensive Photo: Tony Cross
The government has used similar tactics, including the use of snipers who are alleged to have targeted civilians to enforce curfews, in the towns of Cizre, where 22 were killed, 21 of them civilians, and Silvan, parts of which are now reported to be in ruins.
We do finally get to meet the former mayor.
Abdullah Demirbas has been arrested three times, twice this year and once in 2009, and is late for the interview because he had to report to the police station.
He was in jail for eight months in 2009 and was finally released on health grounds. He spent two months in prison pending trial for “financing the PKK” earlier this year and was released after he suffered a stroke and a campaign for his release won the support of US Secretary of State John Kerry.
But he doesn’t know the reason for the latest one because it was declared a state secret.
About 1,000 HDP members and 18 mayors belonging to its municipal wing, the BDP, have been arrested in the government crackdown that followed the end of the peace process with the PKK.
Former mayor of central Diyarbakir, Abdullah Demirbas Photo: Tony Cross
“The 7 June election result was a disaster for the government,” he comments. “They didn’t get what they wanted. Of course, there was a price to pay and the people have paid the price. It was the breaking of the ceasefire and the restarting of the military operation.”
Demirbas accuses the government of cheating when it agreed to join US-led airstrikes on IS because it also launched air strikes on PKK positions in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Anyway, Erdogan and his friends have aided and supported IS in the past, he says, and are terrified that the areas liberated by Kurdish fighters in Syria will inspire Turkey’s Kurds to emulate them.
“In Rojava the Syrian Kurdish people making democratic autonomy by themselves is not something that is wanted by this regime,” he says. “Because they don’t want this, everyone knows this regime is supporting [Al Qaeda affiliate] Al Nusra and IS. Many people are coming through Turkey from Europe and the rest of the world, everyone knows that they are joining this group. Despite the decision that they were going to bomb and make operations against IS with coalition forces, Turkey has attacked the PKK but not attacked IS.”
Eyse Gokkan of the HDP-aligned women’s group KJA Photo: Tony Cross
Earlier we drove out of the city centre to meet two HDP activists, Cüneyt Aslam, a youth leader, and Eyse Gokkan, of the women’s group, KJA.
They, too, accused the government of complicity with IS, Gokkan stressing that the Islamists – from the AKP to Boko Haram in Nigeria – share an anti-women agenda.
“There are documents showing that the Daesh terror organisation is being supported by the Turkish government, that weapons are being sent to this organisation by the government,” saidAslan, referring to IS by the Arab acronym Daesh. “The government is making an environment for this group to expand and kill us.”
As we drive past one estate, I noticed Turkish flags draped on the sides of several blocks of flats, a bit of a surprise here.
These estates are occupied by police officers and their families, Miller explained.
More on my visit to Diyarbakir during Turkey’s October-November general election campaign to follow.
Given the exciting outcome of Turkey’s parliamentary election, I’m taking my accounts of assignments out of sequence and publishing this from last year’s presidential election. Erdogan won with a satisfactory majority but Selahattin Demirtas’s HDP – the left-wing, pro-Kurdish party that has upset the parliamentary apple-cart in 2015 – was already doing well. And there were signs of trouble ahead for the AKP, as RFI’s perspicacious French service correspondent Jérôme Bastion pointed out to me.
One of Istanbul’s pasajes Photo: Tony Cross
I had forgotten how East-meets-West Istanbul is – the pasajes, the domed mosques, the shots bars, the mackerel sandwiches, the beautiful women, some wearing cover, others wearing very little, parading along Istiklal, the travel posters, reproduced Persian miniatures, bibelots and ageing furniture in my determinedly quaint hotel.
And sophisticated, basking in its history but modern in its own way. Istanbul is unlike anywhere else in the world that I know and totally different to the rest of Turkey.
The former headquarters of a French ottoman-era company Photo: Tony Cross
In the August heat families stroll along the sides of the Bosphorus, the banks not much higher than the sea, as oil tankers head for the Black Sea. Men fish off the bridges joining historic and modern Istanbul. A boy scarcely in his teens plays a hand drum incredibly fast in a passage cutting through a modern office building.
And banners, posters and bunting urge Turks to vote for Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the presidential election, first round on Sunday.
Leeches on sale near the bird market Photo: Tony Cross
Erdogan, prime minister for the past 11 years, leader of the Islamic, conservative, pro-business Justice and Development Party (AKP) started his rise to the top as mayor of Istanbul and hopes to be elected and reelected as president, staying in power until 2024, the year after the centenary of the modern Turkish republic.
The Erdogan campaign office in Kasmipasa Photo: Tony Cross
He can’t bear the thought of taking a political back seat, which the presidency should be, being largely ceremonial according to the constitution, so he also hopes to make the position more powerful and remotely control the AKP, despite the constitution’s requirement that he resign from his party if he wins the election.
All of which gives rise to suspicions of megalomania, suspicions that are confirmed by his fondness for megaprojects, including the stadium recently built in Kasmipasa, the district in which he was born.
The Recep Tayyip Erdogan stadium, Istanbul
The RecepTayyip Erdogan Stadium. sits on the side of the hill heading down to the Golden Horn from Pera, the touristy, Istanbuli bourgeois heart of the modern city, on streets that become more like the rest of Turkey as you approach the sea.
On narrow streets men sit drinking tea or Turkish coffee, playing board games and chatting, following the occasional woman who passes by with their eyes, regardless of how well covere she is.
The men all say they support the native son.
Men sip tea as women walk by in Kasmipasa Photo: Tony Cross
“I will vote for Erdogan because we are from the same place and he’s made good jobs and he has brought Turkey growth,” explains Tolga, a new technology worker.
He points to the infrastructure projects – roads, metros, tramways and airports that have been realised under AKP rule.
Erdogan’s opponents accuse him of an Islamist agenda of undermining Turkey’s secular constitution, of authoritarianism and of corruption.
But Turkey has experienced over five per cent growth every year since 2002, so jobs have been created for working-class people, social services have improved and the middle class has seen its living standards rise.
At the AKP’s local campaign office, housewife Rukiye, her hair tightly wrapped in a dark scarf, speaks up for her candidate.
“He is with the poor people and he keeps his word,” she declares.
The party doesn’t have to do much campaigning around here, she says, “Five-year-olds show love for Recep Tayyep Erdogan.”
The AKP organised a massive rally for Erdogan in Istanbul at the weekend and claims, perhaps a little boldly, that over a million people attended it.
Rukiye dismisses alleged proof of corruption on leaked tapes that appear to show Erdogan, his family and allies trying to cover up dodgy dealings.
“It’s all lies,” she exclaims with some vigour. “They say it is a montage – they cut them and edited them. All I can say is it’s all rubbish.”
An Erdogan supporter in the Kasmipasa campaign HQ Photo: Tony Cross
Most Turks are patriotic to the point of paranoia and Erdogan’s backers claim that, as prime minister, he has put the country on the world’s diplomatic map, declaring support for the Palestinians – although continuing to trade with Israel – backing revolt against Bashar al-Assad in Syria and proposing a model of democratic Islamism for the Muslim world.
“For our country a powerful leader means a powerful country,” Erdogan-voter Hakan Photo: Tony Cross
“He is leading Turkey very well and in the last 12 years the international view of Turkey has changed and we’re so grateful to our prime minister,” says Hakan, an self-employed man sipping tea by the Golden Horn. “For our country a powerful leader means a powerful country.”
Turkey is a politically polarised country and Erdogan supporters are as fervent as his opponents.
If the opinion polls are to be believed, they’re likely to win him the presidential election.
Mustapha Kuleili Photo: Tony Cross
“It’s a weird situation to be in Taksim right now,” says Mustafa Kuleli, as he looks at the square from the terrace of Starbucks. “You walk into the park or you walk into Taksim Square and you remember. That was a turning point for journalists, and also all citizens, everybody agrees that was a historical moment to be here, to feel that solidarity facing the police, water-cannon, teargas … everything.”
Kuleli is the general secretary of one of Turkey’s journalists’ trade union, elected after he took part in last year’s Gezi Park protests.
They started as a campaign to stop the construction of a mosque and a shopping mall, disguised as an Ottoman-era barracks, on one of central Istanbul’s few green spaces and blossomed into massive anti-Erdogan protests and clashes with the police.
Those heady days are over now and politics is being played out in the electoral arena with Istanbul festooned with banners for the three candidates – Erdogan, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu and Selahattin Demirtas, but mostly for Erdogan.
Despite the millions who opposed him on the streets last year, opinion polls show the outgoing prime minister has widespread support and could even win the election on the first round.
So were the protests a waste of time?
“Personally I didn’t tie Gezi Park and daily politics,” says Kuleli. “I think it’s more than that. I think it’s like May ‘68 movement in France. After ’68 a right-wing party gained more votes. But that movement affected 40 years everywhere … all over Europe.”
Ender Imrek Photo: Tony Cross
Sitting in a neat office up several flights of stairs, Ender Imrek, a socialist activist who is being prosecuted for his leading role in the protests, explains how the force of the law descended on him an his fellow miscreants.
“The police entered our homes by force,” he recalls. “We were kept at the police station for four days and they mistreated us. They took our hard disks and our notes and our writings.”
He and four codefendants are accused of masterminding the protests across the whole country.
“I said that I would be very proud to have organised them but millions were on the street and it would be discourteous to them to say something like that,” is Imrek’s reply. “The court wanted to jail us but there was a huge public protest so they didn’t do that. But on 21 November our case will go to trial.”
His Labour Party is supporting Selhettin Demirtas of the left-wing Kurdish-based People’s Democratic Party (HDP) for president – in a “democratic bloc” against what they see as Erdogan’s growing authoritarian tendencies.
“Erdogan wants to declare his dictatorship in this election and he wants everything to continue as it was in the past,” he says. “We don’t want that, we want democracy and we don’t want things to go as they have in the past.”
Erdogan’s supporters don’t seem too worried about his tough reaction to the protests.
Cernil is a driver working in Austria who is back in Turkey during the election.
Sitting with his wife on Gezi Park, only partially paved over thanks to the protests, he says it was right to break up the protests.
“Yes, it was a little harsh but who cares?” he asks. “They had gone on for too long so they needed to be punished and, if you look at Europe, if there are any protests the police will intervene.”
Istanbul residents in Gezi Park on a sunny morning Photo: Tony Cross
There is a mixed crowd on Gezi Park on a sunny weekday morning.
A Kurdish labourer brandishing a beer can says he saw police stop campaigners put up posters for Demirtas, who is a Yazidi Kurd himself, and another Kurd also declares his support for the left-winger, explaining that he has encountered discrimination during his 30 years living in Istanbul.
There’s also concern about sectarian divisions in Turkey – both between Kurds and Turks and between majority Sunni Muslims and the Alevi minority, many of whom joined anti-Erdogan rallies.
Whose fault that is changes according to your political and religious affiliation.
“I was not on the side of Erdogan, I used to vote for left-wing parties,” says Ismir, a Sunni textile worker. “But it turned into something sectarian. Alevis started to make a lot of noise and they started to insult us, the Sunnis. That’s why I didn’t like the protests.”
But Feda, just back from studying in the Netherlands, supports the secularist Ihsenoglu and blames Erdogan.
“Rather than supporting the population in Turkey, he is trying to divide them in terms of their religion, their nationality,” she says.
If elected president, Erdogan will “get all the power and do whatever he wants according to his beliefs”, she thinks.
The caravanserail in Diyarbkakir Photo: Tony Cross
Diyarbakir is a very different city.
The temperature is higher – “38° today, we start to complain when it gets into the 40s,” says my fixer Hasan, passed on to me by the amiably roguish-looking Samet, who was in turn recommended by local journalist Yimlaz Akinci – but the heat is a dry heat, so you’re not drenched in sweat all the time as you are in Istanbul.
The historic town walls are in ark stone and extremely solid, evidence of centuries of conflict, and the street-life is unmitigatedly Middle Eastern, unless you count a superabundance of mobile phone shops as agencies of Western influence.
A tea seller in Diyarbakir Photo: Tony Cross
Tea sellers, some in traditional baggy trousers and colourful waistcoats, patrol the pavement, as do fruit sellers, bread sellers and shoeshine men, there’s a caravanserail and a bazaar, complete with courtyard for meeting, chatting and sipping çai.
Diyarbakir is the biggest town in the majority-Kurdish south-east and a bastion of Demritas’s HDP, which was the Peace an Democracy Party (BDP) when I was last here in 2007.
The BDP was a lot keener to cooperate with journalists back then, it seems – or maybe we prepared our visit better – and a first visit to their headquarters in a modern building in a residential district out of the centre of town leas only to a vague promise to fin us someone to interview tomorrow.
Meanwhile, I struggle unsuccessfully to use the wifi in my hotel, we visit the Human Rights Association, where Demirtas started his career and discuss the Kurdish question with a local lawyer.
A jeweller in the Diyarbakir bazaar Photo: Tony Cross
Slightly perturbed by our unannounced arrival, Abdusselam Incebren, the assistant secretary of the Diyarbakir Human Rights Association, reproaches us gently but agrees to talk about the organisation’s work.
Formed in the 1980s, following the establishment of a human rights association in Ankara, the organisation has had its work cut out ever since, especially during the state’s attempts to destroy the Kurdish Worker’ Party (PKK) guerrilla movement, which led to the abuses and atrocities associated with such dirty wars.
“The worst time was in the early 1990s,” he recalls. “Why? Because many people were killed, many people were tortured, many people they left home and just didn’t come back. So we are still investigating what happened to these people.”
That was under a secularist government, committed to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s vision of a monolithic Turkish nation, a project that the Kurds have always disrupted.
“If you compare today to the past you cannot say that we have those problems,” Incebren points out.
That’s because of one of the many ironies of Turkish politics – the right-wing, Islamic AKP has proved more open to making concessions to Kurdish national sentiment than the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the social-democratic party that is the largest group in the secularist camp.
Not that there isn’t still a heavy and sometimes heavy-handed police and military presence in the south-east.
“It’s not like it was in ‘95-‘96 or up to 2000, people are not lost, tortured,” Incebren goes on. “But one thing we do see is on the streets and in meetings the police abuse their power and that’s a kind of torture.
“With the peace process, if you compare AKP with before there is an improvement in human rights. But if they don’t kill, they don’t torture, they’re still putting people in jail today. The techniques have changed.”
Incebren and his fellow rights workers have fond memories of Demirtas.
“People will never forget him. He was really very good. In the Human Rights Assocation he showed how to be human, how to develop the organisation. We want to take that further. He did a great job, really.”
Edip Yigit Photo: Tony Cross
Edip Yigit is defending several Kurdish activists arrested in 2009 and the ensuing years.
They are being released now because of parliament has finally got around to passing a law banning detention without charge for more than five years.
Although they were members of the PKK’s political wing, he says they posed no threat to security.
Öcalan has declared a truce and, as disciplined cadres, they toe the party line.
“These people had clean records,” he says, sipping çai in a café in the caravanserail. “In court they could find no crime to charge with them.”
The cases are a late example of the dirty war against the PKK even as the PKK government is negotiating with Öcalan.
“Today there is a peace process between the Turkish state and Kurds and, so, to me, this was a big mistake,” comments Yigit.
He blames the arrests on “parallel structures” in the Turkish state, a phrase often used to describe followers of Erdogan’s former ally Fehtullah Gülen, whom he is now purging after a breach that led, among other things, to the corruption scandal.
Kurds welcome the peace process but remain suspicious of the Turkish state’s intentions, notably because of the heavy military presence throughout the country, especially in the south-east, leading them to suspect that the army remains ready to start a new anti-PKK offensive.
The AKP’s openness to negotiations is usually attributed to several factors – pressure on human rights from the European Union, which the government was trying to join, a less firm commitment to Kemalist nationalism and Öcalan’s capture putting the government in a strong bargaining position.
But the narrative in the south-east, which Yigit appears to agree with, is that Öcalan took the initiative.
Kurds who intend to vote for Demirtas sum up their aspirations in a call for “democracy”, by which they tend to mean equal treatment by the state and an end to discrimination.
They are deeply suspicious of Ankara-based parties.
“In the past even the Kurdish language was forbidden, because of one word you could be put in jail for 20 years.” recalls Kasri, a labourer hanging around in Dyarbakir’s bazaar. “Not only this, they killed people, they tortured people for many years, so how can I believe these parties are democratic?”
He’s happy about the peace process but wants it to bring change.
“For about one year nobody is dying. It means a lot that people can sleep, people can be happy, people can work. But one thing, we want democracy – for everyone, not only for Kurds or Turks, for everyone who lives in Turkey.”
The situation in Iraqi Kurdistan, now practically independent as local peshmerga and Syrian Kurd fighters fight the Islamic State (ex-Isis) armed fundamentalists and the Iraqi state loses ground to the south, might be expected to strengthen Turkey’s Kurds.
But that would be to discount the Kurds’ long history of internecine squabbles.
The regional government President Massoud Barzani, who is reported to have been acting as a facilitator in contacts between the PKK and the Turkish government, has proved an inconstant ally to the PKK and seems to regard Öcalan as a rival rather than a comrade.
Economic considerations may also undermine his status as an honest broker. Iraqi Kurdistan is now more than solvent thanks to exports of oil to Israel that must pass through Turkey.
Little wonder then that Barzani has promised Erdogan to “play a pacifying role in eastern Turkey and […] help the Turkish Kurds to take their place within the Turkish nation” and that Turkey has granted legal recognition to a new Turkish branch of Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP-T).
“Today the Turkish state understands that it cannot challenge the Iraqi state and so they had to accept these people any more,” comments Yigit. “On the other hand, it was very good for Turkey to have trade with these people and get a warm relationship with them. Why? Because of petrol.”
Even with Barzani’s Kurdish Regional Government security forces reportedly trying to prevent fighters opposed to the peace process passing into Turkish territory, there have been sporadic clashes between the Turkish military and armed groups of unclear affiliation, undermining confidence in the peace process in the eyes of some Kurds and even elements in the Turkish general staff.
Erdogan has not hesitated to use divisive rhetoric during the election campaign, pointing out that Demirtas is from the Yazidi minority as well as lashing out at Alevis, Armenians and Jews, indicating that change of tack on the Kurdish question is possible if he is elected president.
Inside HDP headquaters in Diyarbakir Photo: Tony Cross
A Kurdish channel is broadcasting live interviews with Syrian Kurd fighters battling the Islamic State (ex-Isis) in northern Iraq as we wait to speak to an HDP official at the party’s Diyarbakir headquarters.
They think the peshmerga are a bunch of sissies, according to Hasan, who admires the fight they have put up against the Sunni fundamentalists, who are currently driving Yazidi and other minorities out of the area they control.
It is the election campaign that is on the mind of Meral Damis Bestas, a brisk, trouser-suited woman who, strangely, introduces herself as the wife of HDP president Mesut Danis Bestas.
Meral Damis Bestas Photo: Tony Cross
It’s going well and not just in the south-east, she claims.
“Mr Demritas has already extended his support in Turkey,” she says, “In all of Turkey, wherever he goes, people are giving a lot of sympathy to him because he says new things. He is not saying what people said before. He is guaranteeing no discrimination between people.”
In the aftermath of the Gezi Park protests, Demirtas has garnered the support of the hard-left parties who mobilized against Erdogan, boosting his chances of winning votes outside the BDP/HDP’s traditional Kurdish base.
But, despite that and the HDP’s long-standing left-wing credentials, his campaign seems to have focused on fighting discrimination – not just against Kurds but against Alevis, Armenians, women and even, unprecedentedly for Turkey I believe, gays – rather than wider issues of social and economic justice.
“The HDP is left-wing but that does not mean that it rejects other ideas,” is Bestas’s answer when I raise this question. “It’s open to everyone, from any ideology, it doesn’t matter. The main thing is that there are a lot of laws in Turkey that hamper human rights. Beside this there is poverty, in some parts of Turkey people are living in poverty and others they are rich. This is not social justice. Other parties come from a nationalist perspective but Demritas is a man of the people.”
The party does not hide its sympathy for the PKK – posters calling for Öcalan’s release decorate their HQ’s the walls – rather presenting itself as an essential go-between in the pace process.
“I can tell you that we are the guarantors of this peace process,” says Bestas. “Because if there was no Mr Öcalan or HDP fighting for this peace process it wouldn’t work on its own.”
Erdogan is dragging out the process, she claims.
“He wants to make it longer all the time but we are struggling against him.”
She accuses the outgoing prime minister of abusing his position to help his election campaign, a charge that is echoed by OSCE observers.
“It is not an equal race. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a lot of advantages,” Bestas says. “There is no fairness in this country. We can only work with our people because we can’t spend millions on our campaign. For Mr Tayyip Erdogan every state organisation, every mayor is working for him. Fifteen or 16 TV channels are supporting him and they are reporting his every word, every speech. So how can we be equal?”
Javed, a fervent Demirtas supporter Photo: Tony Cross
Seated in his carpet shop in the Diyarbakir bazaar, Javed, is a fervent Demirtas supporter because he believes he stands for real democracy.
“Turkish people, Kurdish people, every people working together, working in one country. Before many people in Diyarbakir … Turkish people, Kurdish people, Arabic people also, working together. Democracy like this.”
But one thing Javed will never do is vote for the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), who are supporting Ihsanoglu.
“Second round I’m giving to Erdogan.”
“Why?”
“I am not giving to CHP other parties with Ihsanoglu.”
Although some street traders and a civil servant tell us they will vote Erdogan in the first round, Demirtas’s campaign has plenty of support in Diyarbakir and he hopes to pass the 10% bar, a performance that, if repeated in a general election, would mean the HDP could have an official group in parliament.
But that won’t put him in the second round, if there is one, and many Kurdish voters are likely to vote Erdogan, if faced with a choice between him and Ihsanoglu.
“This is not our policy,” the HDP’s Bestas, told me. “The AKP is not supporting our principles, so we are completely separate. We will not call on people to vote Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the second round.”
But that doesn’t deter many Kurds – Cengiz Aculca, whom I met in Istanbul, for example.
Aculca, a Kurdish building worker who has lived in Istanbul for 30 years, is going to vote for Selhettin Demirtas but, if there is a second round and Demirtas is eliminated, he will transfer his vote to Erdogan.
The CHP and its enemy-turned-ally, the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), are beyond the pale, so far as he is concerned.
“They dealt us a great blow during the ‘80s and the ‘90s, especially in the south-eastern part of Turkey,” he says. “Lots of things happened there, so I don’t support them.”
“With my last drop of blood I will support Mr Demirtas,” Bayram, who says he was forced to leave Bersim because of his politics
On the city’s main street we run into Bayram.
“I will speak Kurdish,” he announces determinedly and launches into a paean for Demirtas
“With my last drop of blood I will support Mr Demirtas,” he declares. “And Kurds who do not vote for him, they are dishonest because, whether he wins or not, Demirtas is against discrimination, against any people living in Turkey – Armenians, Jewish, Christians and any ethnic group.”
Bayram’s views do not come as a huge surprise since Bayram, a balding but impressively moustached middle-aged man, sports a T-shirt decorated with several portraits – among them those of Öcalan and Che Geuvara – an arm band with the PKK’s symbol and what look like effigies of bullets and an Abdullah Ölan watch.
It appears he was just as open about his political affiliations when he lived in Mersin, a Turkish-majority town on the Mediterranean, where they did not go down to well in certain quarters.
First, he says, he was visited by CHP members who told him in no uncertain terms to get out of town.
Then he was visited by a group of toughs, who knocked him about about and smashed the Öcalan watches he had been selling on the streets, and delivered the same message.
Finally, a message to the same effect came from the mayor and he fled to Diyarbakir.
Lunch in the caravanserail in Diyarbakir
Hasan and I take lunch in the caravanserail at a stand bearing the name Kamer.
It is run by the women’s rights group that I visited last time in Diyarbakir and provides an income to women who cook at home and come here to sell it. Very good food it is, too.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and friends, commemorated on Taksim Square Photo: Tony Cross
The management of the Marmara Hotel were “very good” during the Gezi Park protests, Binnaz Toprak assures me as we make our way to the first floor lobby for our interview, I having vetoed the Kitchenette café, where we met, on the grounds of noise.
The hotel opened its groud floor to protesters who had been teargassed or manhandled by the police, she recalls, as the guests, presumably watched the show from their luxury suites.
It’s calm now, apart from the occasional raised voice of an excited client, and the guests loiter in the lobby – many of them Gulf Arab women in niqab or their husbands, some whom are wearing hairnets following hair transplant operations that are apparently not available at home.
Looking out onto Taksim Square and Gezi Park, Toprak, a former academic and CHP MP, is disarmingly frank about the chances of the candidate her party is backing in Turkey’s presidential election, Ekmeleddine Ihsanoglu.
“Unfortunately all polls show that he doesn’t have too much of a chance,” she admits.
It shouldn’t be that way, according to Toprak.
“Normally his chances should be high because the other major candidate, the Prime Minister Erdogan has been using hate speech against people with different identities, he has been screaming on the [TV] screen for the last I don’t know how many years, he scolds people, there is this tension in the country, whereas Ihsanoglu is this quiet man, who is a gentleman, who won’t even answer him.”
But being a gentleman doesn’t seem to be paying off.
The latest poll shows Ihsanoglu at 34%, with Erdogan 57% and left-wing Kurd Selhattin Demirtas 9.0%.
Toprak says Erdogan is primarily responsible for the intense political polarisation in the country today, although she admits that her own camp has contributed to the bitter tone of polemics that turn to vitriol on social media.
“We have been divided into two or even three groups of people – the Kurds, the secularists and the Islamists – and the more he polarises, the more he consolidates his own supporters,” she complains, adding the she fears that “it could come to a civil war between these groups”.
She is not alone in her fear of the future. There’s widespread fear of the secret services snooping on conversations, several cases of phone-tapping have been exposed their, journalists fear for their jobs after Erdogan has picked out colleagues for public criticism – indeed, some have already been fired, allegedly due to government pressure. Several people have mentioned to me or to colleagues that they are thinking of leaving the country of Erdogan wins.
The secular camp has supported military coups to prevent Islamist-led governments in the past but Toprak hopes those days are over, praising Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) for forcing the military out of politics.
The CHP, often described as a social-democratic party, has formed an alliance with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) behind Isanoglu in this election, a pro-secular bloc that has come together over recent years despite the fact that the MHP is a hard-right party, whose members used to fight in the streets with left-wingers a few decades ago.
It’s just an electoral alliance, Toprak insists, saying that for her the CHP is still a left-wing party.
In 2007, when I accompanied CHP members campaigning for support in Istanbul, I was shocked by the Kemalist dogmatism of its members.
That seems to have changed, if Toprak is anything to go by, although it is difficult imagining this amiable woman ever having been anything other than polite and reasonable.
The secularists may have been too doctrinaire in their defence of Atatürk’s legacy, she admits, looking back on their insistence on banning women wearing head cover in education and public service and regarding religious conservatives as vulgar provincials.
“Maybe it was too radical, the understanding of the party in the past but I think that the party has come to an understanding where it’s willing to accept people who want to live and Islamic way of life, let them live that way of life. Nobody should interfere with the others’ choices.”
That doesn’t mean dropping the fight for women’s rights, however, particularly in the light of AKP leaders’ statements on the matter that lead feminists to fear the worst.
Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arinç aroused equal amounts of concern and derision recently when he said that women should not laugh in public, prompting a flood of selfies of immodestly happy females.
Erdogan has expressed shock at the state of dress at Istambuli women, said that women should have three or five children and threatened to criminalise caesarean sections and abortion.
Other party thinkers have said that pregnant women should no go out in public and that it is natural for men to have a number of wives.
“The women’s issue is an important issue,” comments Toprak. “Because I think it’s at the gist of the Islamist project anywhere in the world.
“What’s going to be different if the Islamist come to power? They adjust themselves to new technologies, modernity, buildings, roads, new phones and the modern economy. What would radically change is gender relations and the position of women.”
But don’t the polls show that the majority of the country agree with this conservative religious agenda?
“Yes, they do.”
So what will the CHP do about it?
Again that disarming frankness.
“I have no idea. Despite all that has happened his [Erdogan’s] supporters still support him.”
Polling day in Istanbul
Voting is brisk at polling stations in Sisli, a middle-class area that is a stronghold of the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), shortly after polls open at 8.00am.
Most voters ready to speak to the media have cast their ballot for Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the independent supported by the CHP, citing his honesty and his academic qualifications as reasons for backing him.
But not many are enthusiastic.
Ihsanoglu was secretary general of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation until he decided to stand and some secularists find him a strange choice for their party to support.
“His past is more Islamic thoughts and I am not the right for that thinking,” comments Canzu, a finance worker, adding that she doubts he would stand up for the secular values of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
In Eyüp, a more socially mixed and politically divided area, Ihsanoglou voter Sacettin, a jeweller, found Ihsanoglu’s campaign lacklustre but blames the CHP and MHP.
“I think that the parties that support him should have been campaigning and it seemed as if he was alone,” he comments.
But he has turned out to vote anyway, afraid that Erdogan’s election would mean “fascism and dictatorship”.
Protective of their right to a secret ballot or discouraged by the men hovering and listening to people talking to the media, many voters decline to comment.
But a number are far from shy of saying that they had voted for Erdogan.
“It’s obvious, we have a leader and we vote for him,” says public employee Erdal. “We love him and so I voted for him.”
“He is a world leader, he cares for Muslims,” declares Mustafa a recent graduate, who seems on very friendly terms with the hoverers.
Okmeydani Photo: Tony Cross
The run-down Okmeydani neighbourhood is home to members of Turkey’s minorities – Kurds, members of the Alevi sect, recent immigrants from central Asia and Africa.
Here the police are more aggressive, chasing me and my companions, Ugur and Ilyas, off the premises of one school where voting is taking place.
Ihsanoglu has supporters among the Alevi, who feel that Erdogan has stirred up Sunni Muslims against them, while many Kurds back left-winger Selhettin Demirtas.
Some of the Alevi accuse Derirtas of being prejudiced against them, an accusation that Ugur says comes from the Ihsanoglu camp.
HDP campaigners in Okmeydani, Istanbul Photo: Tony Cross
His party, the HDP, has a stall manned by volunteers, mostly young although housewife Maryam must be twice the age of her coworkers.
“I am here for peacs the interview is taking place, demanding the identity papers of all the activists and telling them they must pack up their stall.
“The police said they were Kurdish too,” HDP member Aytan says afterwards. “They were talking the Kurdish language with us. They sell their honour in working for the state. We have advice for such people, ‘Police sell simit (cakes) and live honourably.’ ”
Ekmeleddin Mehmet Ihsanoglu arrives at his Istanbul HQ after polls have closed Photo: Ugur Demir
On the outside chance that we might snatch an interview with the only candidate who speaks good English, we wait for the result outside the Ihsanoglu headquarters, where a gaggle of cameras point at a podium from which the candidate is expected to address the media.
It’s a long wait, during which I meet Koray Caliskan, a professor I enjoyed interviewing in 2007 and who I am surprised to learn is now moving in CHP circles, given how critical of the dogmatism of the Kemalists on questions such as the headscarf back then.
His clothes seem to have taken a step up the career ladder, too, but he’s still very friendly.
When Ihsanoglu finally arrives there’s a scrum in which I almost lose my mike but his only message, affably delivered, is that it’s too soon to comment.
Despite biscuits and sandwiches provided for the press, we eventually give up.
Victor – a pro-Eedogan banner in Diyarbakir Photo: Tony Cross
Erdogan has won. With 52% of the votes, compared to Isahnoglu’s 38.3% and Demirtas’s 9.7%.
After learning of his victory he went to pray in the Eyüp Sultan mosque, built after the 1453 conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans, and the place where the Ottoman sultans were crowned.
He then flew to Ankara to meet his ecstatic fans,
“I will not be the president of only those who voted for me, I will be the president of 77 million,” he told them from the balcony of AKP headquarters.
But his idea of uniting the country seems to involve the opposition falling in line behind his agenda.
He called on them to “review their policies” to make them compatible with his “new Turkey” ideal.
“Those who accuse us of one-man rule … should please question themselves sincerely,” he said, an appeal that is likely to fall on deaf ears.
Erdogan can have two terms as president, meaning that he could remain at the head of the country until 2024, allowing him to preside over the centenary of the foundation of the Turkish republic in 1913.
He hopes to strengthen the presidency and is likely to succeed in that task, having purged much of the state apparatus of opponents afer falling out with US-based cleric Fehtullah Gülen, whose supporters appear to have been behind the leaks of evidence of corruption in his family and entourage.
And soon, as president, he will appoint new members of the constitutional council, further consolidating his power.
That election is likely to be brought forward, meaning another no-holds-barred election campign.
The largest opposition parties, the CHP and the MHP have suffered a severe blow in failing to force Erdogan to go to a second round.
Their morale was low ahead of the election result but may have received a small boost from the fact that opinion poll predictions of an Erdogan win of 58% or more proved excessive.
Demirtas’s vote was higher than the HDP has ever won under any of its previous names.
Meanwhile, Turkey must find a new prime minister and the AKP a new leader, since the constitution stipulates that the president must not be a member of a political party.
Foreign Affairs Minister Ahmet Davurtoglu is tipped as the most likely new premier, although Transport Minister Binali Yildriim’s hat is also in the ring.
Outgoing president Abdullah Gül can now return to party politics but there is speculation that economist Numan Kirtulmus, not currently an MP, may be brought in to head the party.
The AKP being a coalition of religious conservatives, business interests and political right-wingers and not immune to personal rivalries, divisions may appear in its ranks.
Its Islamist predecessors have always relied on a strong leader, which is also much of Erdogan’s appeal, and broken up when the leader exits the scene.
So, despite a conclusive presidential election result, a return to the turbulent normal for Turkish politics is on the cards.
Sunset over Istanbul Photo: Tony Cross
Victory is no sooner announced than crisis comes knocking for the AKP.
Erdogan, who must resign from the party to become president, makes no secret of his wish to keep a deciding influence on it and, apparently impressed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s arrangement with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, wants replacement who will be very much under his shadow.
Foreign Affairs Minister Ahmet Davurtoglu seems to fit the bill, although Transport Minister Binali Yildirim’s name has also come up.
Erdogan also wants to keep tight control of the party.
But, as Erdogan’s supporters were recovering from the victory party, Gül, who cofounded the AKP with Erdogan, announced that he would be rejoining the party when he quits the president’s job and there is little doubt that he would seek the party leadership.
Later in the day the party’s executive then announced that the special conference to choose a new party chief will be held the 27 August, the day before Erdogan is sworn in, meaning that Gül will still be barred from party membership, unless he resigns early and that may well be his next move.
Not everyone in the AKP is happy with Erdogan’s plans to run the party by remote control and Gül may be able to muster significant support for a leadership bid, which could even become a stepping stone to the premiership if he returns to parliament after the next election.
The former comrades-in-arms are believed to have had their differences over recent years.
When the government tried to ban the use of Facebook and Twitter during anti-Erdogan protests last year, he declared that he would continue to tweet.
The brewing crisis is not a good sign for a party that will soon have to fight a general election.
Nor does it bode well for Erdogan’s plan to strengthen the president’s powers.
To do that he must change the constitution, which would require votes in parliament than the AKP can currently muster even if it remains united.
He may hope that an early general election will bring more MPs, although his own election win was less convincing than some polls had predicted, a result that weakened his standing in the party.
If there’s also a revolt in the AKP that could mean electoral victory leads to political crisis, undermining Erdogan’s enormous ambition and even giving new heart to his depressed and demoralised opponents.
Aceh was the first war zone I visited and I wrote this account at the time. Although the dirty war that had lasted a decade or so was winding down in 1999, villagers were still fleeing soldiers and guerrillas, rights groups were uncovering mass graves and it seemed unwiste to go out at night. Following the 2004 tsunami, the government and Gam reached a peace agreement that has meant a higher degree of autonomy for Aceh than for other provinces. That has meant enforcement of a stricter form of Islam than in the rest of Indonesia – no more flirting now, according to reports. Aceh is known as the “Gateway to Mecca”, both because it is the westernmost tip of the archipelago and thus a good starting point for the hajj and because of its long association with Islam. Ismail, the Gam representative, vanished a couple of years after we met him, apparently a casualty of the war. Lawyers involved in a case against Exxon Mobil recently contacted me about this piece, which I posted on a now defunct site some time ago. So it appears it may be cited in court one day.
With Gam members, and our interpreter, in a village they used as a base
A crescent moon and a single star shine in the sky above the mosque at Kandoeng. Evening prayers are finishing. We’ve just driven through a village whose wood, corrugated iron and bamboo shacks are empty, apart from just one home. The villagers are camped out at the mosque. They fled 12 days ago because the army arrived on their doorsteps and they feared that they would be killed. During the day, the men go and hide in the jungle to avoid being questioned by the army.
Their fears aren’t unfounded here in Lhockseumawe, a coastal town in the Indonesian province of Aceh, on the north-western tip of the huge island of Sumatra. Throughout 1999 tens of thousands of refugees will leave their homes, caught in a struglgle between the Indonesian army and a guerrilla group which has been fighting for an independent Aceh since 1976. The army has just ended a particularly intense decade-long counter-offensive, known as the Dom, in which thousands of people have disappered.
French journalist, Marie-Pierre Vérot and I have already visited two other refugee camps. We stumbled upon the first as we drove through Peureulok on the way from Medan, a major town which is down the coast from Aceh.
On 12 June they fled their homes in Alue Nireh, because the tyre of an army vehicle burst as it was passing the village. At least, that’s what they say happened. The soldiers believed they were being fired on by Aceh Merdeka (Free Aceh) guerrillas. They leapt to the ground and sprayed the village with bullets.
A moustached and denim-shirted man called Hosseini tells us that his young son, Jurmadil, ran into the house to avoid the shooting. But that didn’t save him.
Somebody brings us a pile of photographs. In one of them Hosseini is leaning over his son’s small body, lifting it slightly so that the camera can see a gaping red hole in the boy’s right shoulder. Another shows an even younger girl laid out on a bed. She too was killed, as were three adults, two of them women.
The refugees seem clean and well-fed. Children play happily around the mosque and cooking pots prepare a meal under an improvised tent. We walk through what appears to be the living quarters, where hammocks containing babies hang from the struts that hold up the cloth roof.
A young woman wearing an Islamic headscarf has welcomed us to the camp. She’s from the host village and is in charge of the Islamic solidarity that is feeding and housing the villagers of Alue Nireh. Later a man who speaks a little English arrives. He tells us that everyone here is for Aceh Merdeka, which is a phrase we’re going to hear a great deal over the next few days. We ask if the Free Aceh Movement guerrilla group, often known as Gam, is active in the area.
“You want to meet with Gam?”
We say yes and there’s an uneasy giggle.
When we stop for coffee in another village, we’re soon surrounded by villagers, as those who can speak a little English tell us that they hate the Indonesian army and want a separate state. The word “exodus” keeps leaping out of Acehnese sentences. It refers to the villagers who have fled their homes.
At the refugee camps, a commonly-agreed spokesperson is always summoned and he or she finishes almost all his answers with a call for “Aceh Merdeka”. It begins to seem too well-rehearsed. But at Utenkot Cunda a woman whom Marie-Pierre picks from the crowd does the same, even though she seemed unwilling to speak at first. There’s a rustle in the crowd, as Marie-Pierre gets out her camera, and suddenly a flag appears. It’s red and white with a crescent and star, the Islam-inspired flag of the Free Aceh Movement. The refugees press close to be photographed with the flag. In front of it stands an old woman whose face … high cheekbones, gold-brown skin, no teeth, a sudden silly grin … is framed by a delicately sown white shawl.
The province has the reputation of being Indonesia’s most strictly Islamic area. In neighbourung North Sumatra province, Guinness signs hang outside the many wood-shack coffee-shops. When you reach Aceh they disappear and alcohol is difficult to find except in hotels. Your progress is often slowed down by oil-drums in the middle of the road and young men and girls in headscarfs collect for the local mosque, a practise which takes place throughout Indonesia on Sunday but seems to take place on more than one day per week here. The usual Indonesian greetings are replaced by “Salaam Alekum”.
Every village has a banner calling for a referendum on independence, a call which has been launched by the separatists since Jakarta conceded that East Timor could vote on its future. The same slogan is painted in huge letters on the roads but less so by the population. When asked if they want a vote, most reply that they just want merdeka.
One name often crops up. It’s that of Hassan Di Tiro, the historic leader of the Aceh Merdeka movement who lives in exile in Sweden. Relatively obscure outside his homeland, he’s known throughout Aceh.
According to local journalists, his movement now has about 20,000 guerrillas under arms, mostly hiding inland in the jungle. When the army’s counter-insurgency campaign supposedly ended in August 1998, many leading rebels returned, apparetly mostly from Malaysia or Libya. Gam spokespeople won’t admit what states are backing them, apart from saying that they receive support from the Middle East, but they’re believed to receive arms and money from Tripoli and from sources in Afghanistan.
The separatists are credited with wanting an Islamic state. But the Acehnese seem more laid-back about their Islam than their reputation would suggest. Most women wear headscarves but they’re otherwise colourfully dressed. A great deal of flirting seems to go on wherever young people gather. Although we arrived at Kandoeng at prayer time, a fair number of people paid no attention to the muezzin and suffered no apparent censure from the faithful when they finished their worship.
There’s a pattern to our visits, whether to refugee camps or just to villages. We start asking questions. A small crowd gathers and swells to a large one. Someone who speaks a certain amount of English turns up. Then maybe another person arrives, who has a certain air of discreet authority, and sets about finding out who we are and why we’re asking questions. This person is usually pretty insistent on Aceh Merdeka.
Once arrived at the cavernous and almost empty Lido hotel at Lhoksemauwe, we call Gam’s spokesperson, Ismail.
He says he’ll meet us later. We have to drive to a village outside the town, stop at a road-junction and his men will meet us. By the way, what sort of car are we driving?
The afternoon sun is scorching when we reach the junction. Villagers sitting at a road-side stall and in scruffy workshops watch us pull up.
A man in a white shirt asks: “Where are you going?”
Impressed by the elaborate security arrangements, I don’t answer him.
A minute later he comes up again and says: “I know where you going. Follow,” and jumps on a motorbike with another man.
We set off down a dusty road out of the village and through paddy-fields. Afer a while, another bike approaches and our original guides pull off the road. We follow the second biker to a hamlet, where, in the shade of a giant tree, a sort of monument stands, surrounded by a metal fence. It appears to be a tomb.
As a crowd of men gather around, Ismail arrives. With his glasses and whispy beard, he has an educated look and a boyishly charming manner. His English is very good, with a delicate, slightly sing-song, accent. His LAPD baseball cap seems inappropriate for an Islamic freedom-fighter. He also has a mobile phone, which rings as he leads us into the enclosure that surrounds the tombs.
When he finishes a conversation in Acehnese, he says: `So you know Mr Basri?’
We are mystified.
`Mr Basri at Peureulak.’ This is the village at which we met the refugees from Alue Nireh and it emerges that the helpful man who met us there is a Gam member and has phoned to pass on the information that we’re in the area.
That impressive organisational capacity again.
After the grubby town and the busy villages, the place where Ismail is to explain the pinciples of civil war is calm. Birds sing. The tree shades us from the equatorial heat.
The graves belong to Sultan Malikusaleh, the first man on the Indonesian archipelago to convert to Islam, and his son.
The Acehnese are proud of their history. As a maritime kingdom, they did deals with England’s Queen Elizabeth I, controlled the west’s gateway to the Moluccas Spice Islands, were converted to Islam by Arab traders and were the last of the so-called East Indies to hold out against Dutch colonialism.
Would an independent Aceh be an Islamic state? we ask.
“First we want Aceh to be free then we will ask the Acehnese,” is the reply. But Ismail seems to want his movement to follow the example of other independence movements in calling in the big powers to broker a deal with the enemy. The analogies with which he predicts Gam’s final victory are a mixture of traditional liberation-speak and anti-communist Islam.
“How strong the Americans are but they lose with the Vientamese guerrilla. And how strong the Soviet Union but they lose with the Afghanistan guerrilla. And how strong the Indonesian military, maybe they will lose with the Acehnese guerrilla.
Ismail’s at pains to distance himself from Islamic regimes which get such a bad press in the west and says that Acehnese Islam is relatively relaxed and tolerant: “We have to respect other religions in the world.”
An independent Aceh may be democratic, too, he adds, since democracy works well in countries like the United States.
“May be?” I ask.
“Maybe.”
On the road through the Sumatra jungle
There’s another player in the Acehnese conflict, whose presence is, at first sight, surprising.
On the outskirts of Lhokseumawe lies a vast compound, where lush green lawns are protected by long, high fences and well-guarded gates. Its staff have their own sleeping-quarters, their own restaurant and their own recreation facilities.
This is the Mobil Oil compound. Or more accurately, it belongs to PT Arun, a partnership between the American energy giant (35%) and Indonesia’s state-owned oil company, PT Pertamina (55%).
PT Arun has exploited the vast natural gas reserves in the area for the last three decades. These reserves make Aceh rich … but not the Acehnese.
Lhokseumawe people grumble that even PT Arun’s Indonesian employees aren’t recruited in the area. Naturally, Mobil plays to capitalist rules and takes its share of the profits home. PT Pertamina’s share helps swell the Jakarta bank accounts of a company that was ordered to crack down on nepotism and corruption as part of the International Monetary Fund’s deal for Indonesia.
Most controversially, during the 32 years of deposed President Suharto’s highly-centralised rule, only 17% of income from local taxes stayed in the provinces. That meant resource-rich regions like Aceh provided a vast subsidy to the Indonesian state, not to mention the Suharto family and cronies who plundered it.
After the trauma of East Timor’s independence, the two post-Suharto governments have desperately tried to keep Indonesia from falling apart. They’ve proposed autonomy for some provinces, especially Aceh, and say that they’ll allow them to keep more of the wealth that they generate.
Predictably, that’s not enough for Gam.
‘The reserves in Aceh belong to the Acehnese,’ says Ismail. ‘When we get independence, all our own reserves will go into our own pockets, not to the Javanese.’
He goes on to accuse Mobil of complicity in the murder and torture which the army has practised in the area.
“They give land to the military to condemn us. For example, they give land to the military and make detention camp there, Rancong military detention camp. So many people, thousands of people, have been killed by the military in that place. The Mobil Oil Company still cooperates with the Indonesian government. Last week they gave 10 cars to the Indonesian military to make oppression in Aceh.”
Technically the land and all that is on it belongs to PT Arun and not to Mobil. But such niceties don’t convince Ismail, who says that he’s ready to forgive the company but only if it packs up and leaves right away.
“If Mobil stop their operation now and leave this country, we will invite them when our country becomes independent. If they don’t stop now and still cooperate with the Indonesian government and if they have brought the military to guard the company, we will make war and we will fight the Indonesian military. If they put the military to guard their company, if Mobil Oil employees are working there, we cannot avoid stray bullets and we aren’t responsible if someone dead or hurt.’
Would Gam attack Mobil installations?
“No, not exactly … I can say not now.”
The interview over, Ismail says that he’ll take us to another historic site and climbs into our car. As we pull out of the village, one of our escorts drives into the village with a chubby child of about three in his arms. “My son,” says Ismail and takes the kid into the car. “He was born in Malaysia.”
We drive past fields and shrimp-pools to an enclosure, looking out onto water.
Here is a larger graveyard, including a fair-sized tomb carved with Arabic lettering and fronted by an exquisitely decorated marble slab.
“This was the Sultan’s queen,” Ismail says. “The stone was imported from Turkey”
As children arrive from who-knows-where to stare at us, he points out other graves, including that of the alleged nine-foot man, marked out by stones at a considerable distance from each other. Unsurprisingly, the occupant played a military role in the sultan’s entourage.
“They tried to move it once,” says Ismail. “But it moved back …Yes, it’s true!”
Fauziah Ibrahim still weeps when she recounts how the army shot her son, Saddam Hussein, dead. He was among at least 41 civilians killed when troops fired on a demonstration near Lhokseumawe on 3 May 1999.
Fauziah’s account of her son’s death begins like an Arabic poem: “I still have pity on Saddam Hussein … He was born on a Monday and he died on a Monday … “
We sit on rattan mats in her wooden house, whose blue paint long ago faded and parts of whose walls are papered with old newspapers.
Eight-year-old Saddam sold cakes to add to the family’s income.That must have been reduced by the fact that his father had left his mother, although the man’s picture still hangs on the wall. Both Fauziah and Saddam, whose name apparently has nothing to do with the Iraqi president, were at the demonstration.
Neither of them seems to have known why they were. A mysterious “somebody” went round the area telling people to go and they did.
Soldiers fired on the crowd as they got to a crossroads known as Simpang KKA, after a company which owns the land there. The military say that the demonstrators were heading for a base where a missile is kept and that they intended to seize the weapon.
Fauziah wasn’t with her son when the shooting took place. She went home afterwards and someone arrived to tell her that Sadddam was in the hospital.
She starts keening again and wipes her eyes with her shawl.
When she arrived at the hospital, her son was already dead.
By this time a dozen or so people have joined us in watching Fauziah’s distress. It’s difficult to know what to say. My foot is getting cramps from sitting on the floor.
Yacob Hamzah is short and square, a box of dynamism. He walks with a crutch and one of his legs dangles above the ground. He looks older than his 32 years.
Hamzah runs the Lhokseumawe Legal Aid Foundation from a small office in front of his home on a noisy street.
On the walls a photo of President Yusuf Habibie, for appearances, and a banner depicting former president Sukarno with former US president John Kennedy, for sentiment. Also photos of him receiving an award in the US from the executive director of the Human Rights Watch super-NGO, Sidney Jones, whom he regards as a friend.
Having worked with the widely respected Legal Aid Foundation in Jakarta, Hamza returned to Lhokseumawe to do the same kind of work here.
There was plenty to do. He has been among the first to make public the existence of mass graves in the area. He says that two that he has visited this morning contain up to 2 ,000 bodies.
Who’s responsible? He doesn’t hesitate to blame the Indonesian military, known as Abri.
“Violations in this area are done by Abri,” he says. “Abri kills people by shooting them in front of us, in front of our eyes. That’s one characteristic form of human rights violations in Aceh. Then the second is the illegal arrest of people without any legal papers. Once someone is arrested, he or she can vanish forever. They never return home.”
“There are many more examples, if you want a very long list,” he adds.
The graves he visited before seeing us are some distance from the town at Bukit Tengkorak and Bukit Sentang.
The people buried in them were arrested between 1990 and 1993, he says. The army arrested anyone suspected of involvement with Gam or campaigns against the Indonesian state.
“These people were interrogated and then transported to Bukit Tengkorak and Bukit Sentang. In these two bukits (hills) they were shot and buried in mass.”
He says that he’s had eyewitness reports of Mobil’s complicity.
“We heard that too and it was confirmed by eyewitnesses that Mobil Oil lent tractors and bulldozers to Abri for digging the mass-graves for the Acehnese.”
Hamzah says that he has evidence of 8,139 people killed by the military during the Dom security operation. Since the military declared the end of the operation in 1998, he says about 200 more have died; 60 in Idicut”‘killed and thrown into the Arakundo river”, 53 in the Dewantara sub-district, 12 in Manasablang … and so on.
There were more deaths before 1998, he concedes. “But now we can see with our own eyes that people are being killed. Can you imagine the people’s terror with the killing being done in front of their eyes, as it is practised now by military men? Before there were no people fleeing their own villages but now there are more and more refugees. They take the mosques as places of security and protection.”
Hamzah sees no solution unless the army is withdrawn from Aceh and he believes that soldiers of non-Acehnese origin can’t understand the area’s culture or its religious outlook. “Their presence on Acehnese soil will only bring the Acehnese genocide.”
Colonel Syafnil Armen – correct military bearing, haircut and uniform – is all smiles when he meets us. He took over command of the army here two days ago. The colonel says that he would like to see development here on three fronts: political, cultural and social. Social conditions are “relatively good”, he says, compared to the impression he had received from the Jakarta press.
He also believes that the security situation has improved and is not unduly worried by the ever-present graffiti demanding a referendum on whether Aceh should remain part of Indonesia.
He believes that Mobil’s activities are an asset, but, because he’s just arrived, he can’t comment on the charges of cooperation with atrocities. Nor does he know what happened six days ago in Alue Nireh. Nor can he give an opinion on the number of deaths over the last 10 years or the last few months, although he does seem to accept that all has not been as it should be.
As we turn to leave his office, we’re faced by a huge display cabinet. On it his predecessor, Colonel Johnni Wahab, has left a plaque … donated by Mobil Oil.
Mobil’s press officer, Bill Cummings, is heading for a helicopter when I call. He, too, has just arrived in Lhokseumawe and he’s having trouble with the side-effects of malaria tablets. He has to put the phone down at one point in our conversation because of a short blackout.
Despite these difficulties, he manages to tell me that the company has no comment on what he calls “insinuations” about Mobil’s activity here.
In the building next to Colonel Syafnil’s office there are more refugees. But they’re not Acehnese. These are peasants who have been moved here from Java under the government’s “transmigrasi” project and they have thrown themselves on the army’s mercy because they believe that Free Aceh guerrillas want to burn their homes.
The Gam say that they are tools of the government’s plans to “contaminate the Acehnese, in other words to water down their identity. They also say that they’ve stolen Acehnese land.
“The Javanese must leave this country by free means, peacefully,” Ismail told us when we met him. But it seems that, like Mobil, the transmigrants could suffer from stray bullets. “We don’t responsible if they are hurt or dead because of our fighting between Indonesian military and the national liberation front. So before that we have to inform them that better they leave this country for their safety.”
Assembled in a disused assembly hall under the watchful eye of five or six young soldiers, these people look poorer than the Acehnese refugees. Although they too are Muslims, the charity of the mosques is not for them.
They show us a letter which purports to be from somebody called Darwis Jeunies of the “Islamic State of Aceh Sumatra”.
It tells them they are pawns of former president Suharto and his notorious son-in-law Prabowo Subianto, who used to be head of the Kopassus special military force.
For all the apparent threats, they seem most resentful of the government in Jakarta … which has sent them to a land which doesn’t want them and which doesn’t want to be part of Indonesia.
