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
French tax services netted a record 21.2 billion euros from tax dodgers last year. And the biggest culprit was big business, a result that should lead the government to dissolve the units responsible since, like most governments nowadays, practically its sole job-creation strategy is to let companies off paying their fiscal share.
More than a quarter of the tax-evasion haul – 5.8 billion euros – came from corporate tax fraud, up from 4.2 billion euros in 2014.
Individual tax-dodgers with secret bank accounts abroad, no doubt panicked by Luxleaks and the UBS investigation, fessed up to the tune of 2.65 billion euros.
“We have to lay to rest this idea that income from tax inspection comes from hammering small taxpayers,” Budget Minister Christian Eckert pointed out in a rare counter to the right-wing – sorry, “centrist” in establishment-speak – offensive against the state collecting its due. “It’s not true! Income from tax inspection comes essentially from big companies.”
The indiscreet junior minister probably won’t keep job for long if he carries on in that vein.
Because France’s Socialist government has pursued an energetic policy of cutting taxes to business, on the pretext that boosting profits will persuade bosses to take on more workers, with only a minor deviation this year in the form of a labour law pretty much drafted by the Medef bosses’ union.
The share of dividends in French companies’ operation profits
It’s a strategy that has proved startlingly unsuccessful. Unemployment remains at 10 per cent as companies have paid out the tax handouts in dividends, an international tendency to short-term gluttony that is particularly virulent in France.
Given that the 2014 Socialist government contained no fewer than eight millionaires, one can imagine that it feels more collective empathy towards those struggling to maximise their wealth than those struggling to survive on the breadline – even if the cabinet’s net worth must have taken a hit with the departure of the fabulously wealthy Laurent Fabius.
So the DVNI, the division responsible for chasing up companies with a turnover of more than 154.2 million euros at whose headquarters Eckert and Finance Minister Michel Sapin announced the good tax news, would be foolish to aspire to longevity.
If we follow the government’s logic, following the current economic orthodoxy, it should be closed down and those companies allowed to carry on fiddling their tax returns in the hope that they will be kind enough to employ a few more members of the lower orders with the gains made from their accountants’ creativity.
Indeed, the tax windfall, which has been one of the only positive contributions to the EU-ordered effort to reduce the deficit, seems to have been pretty much an accident.
The unit to pursue holders of secret foreign accounts was set up after budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac was found to be guilty of that very offence and forced to resign. His case opened last month and, the defendant having arrived lawyered up, been put off until September.
Successful though the tax inspectors have been, unions have complained that they could do better with more resources.
That’s certainly true if estimates of the level of tax fraud quoted by the ministry are true. They put the figure at 60-80 billion euros, so 20 billion should be just the beginning if ministers were serious about tackling white-collar crime.
Eckert’s statement is important – and not just in France – because campaigning against taxation has been the right’s most effective weapon in winning middle and working-class support for policies that have actually shifted wealth away from most of the population.
Tax is the Achilles’ heel of collectivism. Most of us want good public services but we’d all rather somebody else pay for them. At the very least, we’ll take any opportunity to reduce the amount of tax we personally have to pay. The right has played on that conflict between immediate individual interest and delayed collective gratification with enormous success.
An important component of most right-wing campaigning issues – benefits fraud, migrants, “wasteful” public spending – is an appeal to the wallet. And, although there seems to be growing scepticism about capitalism and a revival of some form of collectivism among the young, Donald Trump, or France’s Front National, are evidence of the kind of mass reactionary movements that will be whipped up and manipulated if the interests of the wealthy are ever seriously challenged.
Panic in the cafés! Outrage in the offices! Furore on Facebook! France’s education minister has banned the use of the circumflex (^), decreed that oignon must be spelt ognon and sent out the language police to enforce 2,400 changes to the French language. Except she hasn’t. And the reaction to this non-revolution speaks volumes about our collective conservatism and social media’s power to reinforce it.
St Bernadino organises a bonfire of the vanities, Agostino di Duccio
A shocked nation heard of the orthographic auto-da-fé on Wednesday, thanks to an article on the website of TF1 TV.
By Thursday Facebook, Twitter and all other social media accessible to agonised Francophones were abuzz with protests. A hashtag #Jesuiscirconflexe was launched – a hyperbolic comparison to mass murder that would have set the Twittersphere tutt-tutting in other circumstances.
Right-wingers, who are far from the reform’s only opponents, were quick to blame Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, a frequent target for vilification who can look forward to even more now Christiane Taubira has left the government.
She “thinks she has the right to turn the rules of French spelling on their heads”, according to a statement rushed out by the hard-right UNI students’ union.
“It is no surprise that what was a speculative discussion a quarter of a century ago among 40 rather civilised, snobbish and reliably silly old men has been made into a sharp edict under the most ideological education minister France has known since the early 80s,” declared Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in the Daily Telegraph.
Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good scare
Cardinal de Richelieu, who set up the Académie française, by Philippe de Champaigne
Now who are we to believe here? UNI and Anne-Elisabeth Moutet or the nearest thing France has to the Daily Telegraph, Le Figaro?
Because Le Figaro explains that Vallaud-Belkacem had nothing to do with it. The changes were discussed at the end of the 80s – by a committee of representatives of French-speaking nations and communities – agreed by the Académie française – whom I take to be Moutet’s “civilised, snobbish and reliably silly old men” – 29 years ago and declared officially acceptable seven years ago. But it has taken France’s schoolbook publishers all that time to catch up. Although some of them incorporated the changes in earlier editions, the beginning of the next academic year will be the first time they all recognise them. Without any edict being signed.
Le Figaro’s article, and all other informed pieces on the subject, also explain that the changes are limited, affecting only 4% of French vocabulary, and optional. The circumflex may be dropped on “I” and “u”, except in certain cases, for example when it makes a difference to the meaning. But they don’t have to be. The effect will be that pupils who spell coût (cost), oignon (onion) and extra-terrestre (extraterrestrial) as they sound – cout, ognon, extraterrestre – will no longer lose marks.
To see more examples of the changes, click here for my article on RFI’s English website.
The conservative paper also reports that the reform “isn’t working so badly for our Belgian and Swiss neighbours” and links to a report of its adoption Quebec … in 2010.
So the first lesson of all this that it’s always a good idea to read a little further than the headline.
Politics and the French language
An Ottoman-era pavilion – with the now abolished Arabic script – in Istanbul Photo: Tony Cross
Then we get to the politics.
Florian Philippot, who wants to render the far-right Front National fit for human consumption, texted a rhyming couplet that described the reform as “vile and stupid”, while the only slightly less right-wing Eric Ciotti, of Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republicans, declared it a “race to the bottom”.
Moutet believes Vallaud-Belkacem has a nefarious plan to stamp out elitism in education and help the disadvantaged. In the 15 months since she was appointed, this has apparently reduced the majority of French students to a state of “near illiteracy” (not my experience with the students I teach at Paris 13 university).
“You don’t need to be George Orwell to see that there is something sinister in any regime that sacrifices the memory and structure of the language to convenience and political fiat,” Moutet writes, a bad choice since Orwell was an advocate of plain English and an enemy of archaisms. http://www.plainlanguage.gov/whatisPL/definitions/orwell.cfm
But I see nothing particularly sinister in Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s switch to the Latin alphabet from the non-indigenous Arabic alphabet, whatever criticism one might have of the Young Turks’ identification of Europeanisation with progress. And it’s worked, although it necessitated the use of diacritics for the purposes of pronunciation that cause a certain confusion to foreigners. By the way, the sinister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to be trying to bring Ottoman Turkish back, comparing its abolition to cutting Turkey’s jugular.
Nor did the Vietnamese adoption of the Latin alphabet, switching from the non-indigenous Chinese, wipe their history or culture from their memories or impair their ability to fight off French colonialism and the US war machine.
So the argument that France’s historical memory will be erased along with the accents does not really hold water. Yes, the circumflex tells us that there used to be an “s” in the word in old French and in the Latin that it came from. But, interesting as it is, linguistic history is not essential to communication, which is the function of language. If it was, why not have diacritics to indicate the words that came from Greek or Arabic? That would interest me but I wouldn’t want a kid to fail an exam for not dropping a diacritical hint to that effect.
The human brain is a conservative organ
Shakespeare – the Chandoes portrait, although it may not be he
The argument that the changes are ugly seems misconceived to me, too.
Languages certainly have properties particular to themselves, as Moutet points out. But it is the use to which those properties are put that are beautiful.
Shakespeare was not a great playwright and poet because he worked in English but because of the skill with which he used the language and the ideas and feelings he expressed.
We can be sure that General Christian Piquemal, recently arrested for taking part in a banned Pegida demonstration manages to make French sufficiently ugly when he wishes to humiliate a subordinate or insult a migrant, although one imagines he will adopt a mellifluous tone in court.
When confronted with change, we tend to confuse aesthetics and habit.
We have had to learn these spellings. We were happy to please teacher when we got them right, devastated by the red ink on our homework when we got them wrong. Me too. I’m fond of the circumflex, proud to know its history and afraid of being thought ignorant if I use it wrongly. But that doesn’t make the damn thing beautiful.
In general, we think that what we’ve been taught is the Right Way of Doing Things and that what we’re used to is just and beautiful. We find change disconcerting and dismiss the new as ugly. Just look at the history of art.
Our brains learn from experience, they conserve information and, when circumstances change, they take their time adapting. This makes us conservative creatures. Some of what we wish to conserve is worth hanging on to. Some needs to be adapted or dumped because it has become redundant.
The worldwide web has been a tool for innovation but, being a reflection of ourselves in all our glory and infamy, it has also been a means of propagating conservative prejudice. It has vastly increased our capacity to get our facts right. But it’s also vastly increased our ability to spread misconceptions and misinformation. With its facility of publishing and the hysterical tone it encourages, a moral panic can travel three times round the world before the truth has got its facts checked.
Mes chers #Jesuiscirconflexes, the experts are laughing at you.
Linguists and lexicographers know that languages evolve, that even two centuries ago the rules were much more fluid, that every language was a dialect, slang, dog Latin or creole when it was young.
“It’s vanity,” lexicographer Marie-Hélène Drivaud comments toL’Obs on the circumflex hooha. “People like the fact that they had to work hard to learn it, so future generations have to learn it too.”
Spelling was “much more flexible and dynamic” before the 19th century, she points out.
Will the language reform work?
Beautiful or ugly? Nymphéas or Nenufars? Claude Monet’s Water Lilies
Of course, if she does want to really enforce the reform, Vallaud-Belkacem could emulate the ancient Chinese emperor who is supposed to have burnt all the books, apart from two copies of each one that he kept, and buried 460 scholars alive in an attempt to impose his cultural reforms. But you know how it is these days. The usual politically correct bleeding hearts would kick up and we’d never hear the end of it.
Judging by the reactions of citoyens of all political persuasions and personal outlooks to the circumflex scare, I doubt if many people’s spelling habits will change – in the short term, at least – if no such drastic action is taken.
But the language will evolve, with or without permission from the Académie, the pedants or you or me, and what serves no purpose will eventually die out.
Nor do I believe the chanves will encourage more foreigners to learn French, which was apparently the chief reason for initiating it. English is the global language principally for geopolitical reasons, not because of its properties, many of which are not at all user-friendly. (Anthony Burgess tells a hilarious joke in Language Made Plain about a Frenchman trying to learn English who committed suicide after reading the headline “Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap pronounced a success”. Think about it.)
The reform can be criticised for being a pretty complicated form of simplification, circumflexually speaking at least. Indeed, one could complain that it doesn’t follow its own logic to a conclusion, both with the circumflex and with some words that it neglects to change. “Nénuphar” (water-lily) can be spelt “nénufar” – why not? – but “nymphéa” must stay the same. Why? Because “nénufar” – let’s be modern here – comes from Arabic, while “nymphéa” comes from Greek. Since Greek has only one letter for the sound (Φφ) the logic escapes me.
What about English? Bring back thorn!
Anglo-Saxon king with his witan. Biblical scene in the Illustrated Old English Hexateuch
Finally, an appeal for a modest reform of my own mother-tongue. I believe with all my heart that we should revive the letter thorn (þ). It was the Anglo-Saxon letter for “th” but was killed off (I suspect the Normans). It’s why you see signs saying “Ye Olde Tea-Shoppe” – that “Ye” is really “þe”. There’s obviously no reason why “th” should be used for this sound and using it this way means we can’t aspirate after a “t”. OK, we don’t do that in English but some Asian languages do, so it might come in handy.
We also can’t aspirate after a “p”, so, while we’re at it, we might want to emulate the French reformers and replace “ph” with “f”. It’s logical. And it could avoid some confusion when going to Phuket.
It’s difficult to write frankly about Charlie Hebdo – it was difficult to do so in the aftermath of the massacre and it’s only a bit easier now. In France there was shock, of course, a kind of solidarity and, let’s be honest, a lot of self-righteousness. But the French don’t have the monopoly on self-righteousness, as the debate on Charlie abroad has shown. I think the experience has much to say about France – and the world – today.
Tributes to police officer Ahmed Merabet, killed protecting the Charlie Hebdo staff Photo: Azurfrog/public domain
Do I have to say I was horrified by the massacre at Charlie Hebdo and the murders in a kosher supermarket that followed? Maybe I do. It’s easy these days to find oneself accused of holding opinions one doesn’t hold and entertaining sympathies one has never entertained, of advocating when trying to analyse (for the record this piece doesn’t aspire to neutrality).
Last January Charlie Hebdo suddenly found millions of passionate defenders – many of whom had clearly never read it or, so far as the more famous among them were concerned, only done so in search of grounds for legal action. Of course, they had the right to be angry at the violence and to defend their perception of freedom of expression. But it was exasperating to be lectured on the nature of a paper one had once read regularly in formulations culled from press coverage rather than formulated from personal experience.
Then the debate took a different turn, in the English-speaking world at least, and I got exasperated with critics who had also clearly never read Charlie. No, anglophone friends, the paper is not entirely devoted to Islamophobic and racist bile. While there’s no defence for some of its cartoons – Riss’s latest on Aylan above all – others were satirising the attitudes many of you believed they were propagating. Like lots of things in life, it can be good and it can be crap.
Here’s my confession of a Charlie reader who gave up.
When I came to France 22 years ago I soon discovered Charlie Hebdo. And I loved it.
The schoolboy humour naturally struck a chord, me being a Brit. The politics was anarcho-leftist-Jacobin, which mostly suited me. And it is true that its contributors mocked everyone, although not equally, as some of the never-read-its claim. Not very much humour on the Holocaust, happily. And lots of scurrilous attacks on the Front National and its then leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, also happily.
But, after a while, it seemed to change.
There were more and more sneers at Islam. I didn’t analyse how many cartoons and articles were devoted to each religion or set of political beliefs – I just stopped reading it – but Islam seemed to me to be becoming an obsession and I found it a distasteful one.
After the Charlie attacks a TV journalist became a French YouTube hit by showing that Charlie Hebdo’s covers over a given period of time featured few cartoons attacking Islam. This quite literally superficial analysis has no pertinence whatever.
Firstly, there was plenty on Islam inside.
Secondly, as former Charlie Hebdo contributor Olivier Cyran pointed out in 2013, attacking a minority religion, associated with an immigrant-origin population that is disproportionately underprivileged, is not the same as attacking the Catholic church, “which had – and still has – newspapers, MPs, lobbies, salons and enormous property holdings”.
Catholics, one might add, never have their very right to live in Europe challenged, nor is their religion declared foreign to European culture, despite its provenance.
I can’t put a date on when I gave up reading Charlie. Cyran says it took a radical turn for the worse after 9/11. And he tends to blame Philippe Val, an ardent supporter of Israel who was later appointed director of Radio by Nicolas Sarkozy (not so iconoclastic as all that, eh?), and Caroline Fourrest, a hypersecularist who is rarely absent from TV, radio and the written press these days, thanks to her support for gay marriage, her opposition to hijab and her penchant for sniffing out Salafist conspiracies.
An idealised version of a sans-culotte during the French revolution, Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845)
But this hypersecularism is not unique to Charlie. It is very widespread in France – in its arrogant rejection of religion and the religious it was a sort of New Atheismavant la lettre.
It turns out that secularism is one of those container words that you can fill up with any number of meanings, like Liberté, égalité, fraternité or democracy, for that matter.
And, when a term becomes a sort of dogma, no longer examined critically, it lays itself open for exploitation by all sorts of cynical demagogues and authoritarians manqués. We know that from the history of religion, don’t we?
You can see secularism as a truce between non-believers and believers – you keep religion out of my state and I’ll keep my state out of your religion – or you can see it as a more aggressive measure to keep religion completely out of the public eye. That view tends to segue into an apparent desire to wipe religion off the face of the earth. In which case it’s not really secularism, is it? It’s state-sponsored atheism, which hasn’t worked very well.
France’s 1905 law on religion is in fact the first of these alternatives – a more aggressive anti-clerical faction lost the argument – but many French people interpret it as the second, with a tinge of the third, increasingly so these days.
When I first went to Turkey, to cover the 2007 parliamentary elections, some supporters of the secular parties used the French term laïcité to distinguish what Mustapha Kemal Atatürk had put into practice in Turkey from mere secularism.
Like the French version, Turkey’s secularism was born from a violent rupture with the past.
It was an attempt to break the hold of religion on the minds of the masses and end habits regarded as backward according to the Young Turks’ identification of modernity with Europe.
You can understand this zeal in the context of the French revolution. The revolutionaries needed to break the power of a Catholic church that was a powerful part of the ancien regime and, if we bear in mind today’s revelations of clerical child abuse in countries where the church went unchallenged, there must have been an awful lot of residual bitterness over priestly abuses of power, which may explain the violence of some anti-clerical exactions.
Post-Ottoman Turkey, too, had to replace a regime of which religion was an integral part and create a state capable of standing up to the Islamic clergy, although, if we look at Turkey’s current political and social condition, we would have to conclude that it has been a mitigated success. The largest secular party, the CHP, seems to have recognisew this and is revising its hardline position.
But where is the relevance for France today?
When right-wing Catholics and assorted bigots turned out en masse to oppose the Socialist government’s same-sex marriage law – singularly failing to mobilise Muslims, by the way, despite some efforts to do so – there were few appeals to secularism. Indeed, right-wing politicians who have seen fit to call for pork-only menus to be served in school canteens were happy to play fast and loose with the god-botherers.
Because, excuse me for stating the obvious, it’s all about Islam. Nobody thought to ban “ostentatious signs of religion in schools, until a couple of Muslim girls turned up in hijab. (In that debate, which is now being recycled as a debate on cover in universities and workplaces, there is a strange confusion between those in authority and those over whom authority is exercised. Of course teachers should not proselytise, they represent the state, but why shouldn’t their pupils manifest religious convictions? Is it even realistic to expect them not to? In this respect the French are as prudish about religion as the British are about politics.)
That explains why many right-wing ideologues can one minute invoke Europe’s Christian or Judeo-Christian roots and the next pose as ferocious defenders of secularism, just as many of the political successors of the late 19th-century and early 20th-centur anti-Semites are now ardent defenders of Israel.
This form of secularism has become an assertion of the superiority of the Occident over the world it once colonised, tinged with class hatred, given that many of its exponents will happily mix with well-off, “integrated” persons of foreign origin, but like to whip up fear of a lawless mass in the banlieue.
Of course, Muslims are equal in France. Secularism applies to everybody just as “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread”, to quote Anatole France.
As Emmanuel Todd says in Qui est Charlie? – the book that earned him the singular privilege of a reply from the prime minister in the august pages of Le Monde – they face a pressure to conform from people of Catholic culture, who tell them “I have the right to blaspheme against my former religion, so you have to the duty to blaspheme against yours.”
The feeling of cultural superiority takes a distinctive form in France and has infected the left in a way it has not, in my experience, infected the British left.
To go back the two decades to my arrival in France I was struck by how in our globalised world – less globalised then, but still – national attributes continued to exist.
In my new home appreciating good food and drink was not considered elitist snobbery, it was not generally considered necessary to make room for other people when walking in the street, the arts were considered important enough to merit a slot on TV news bulletins, the customer was very definitely not always right, intellectuals felt under no obligation to pretend they were not intellectuals … and every French person was a bit of a patriot.
No matter how left-wing and in principle internationalist they were, they treasured in their hearts a certain conviction that French culture was superior to all others.
Of course, we all assume to some degree or other that what we’re used to is the natural order of things and I know that my new friends often found me quaintly British.
But I think France is the only country where former interior minister Jean-Pierre Chévènement could found his own little party to propagate a bizarre leftish form of nationalism, where the hard-left candidate in the last presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, could this year wax indignant about the Corsican regional council taking an oath “in a language I don’t understand” and where Prime Minister Manuel Valls … well I was talking about the left, so let’s leave Manuel Valls out of it.
It’s partly the fault of the French Communist Party, which at the time when it was France’s biggest party in terms of membership took the popular front accommodation with nationalism very seriously, played a heroic role in the resistance to German occupation, which inevitably led to a certain nationalist, even xenophobic, contagion, and after the war just couldn’t get out of the opportunist habit.
And, of course, there’s the revolution, without which the modern world would not exist.
The legacy of the revolution legitimises popular revolt. The slogans of the revolution represent a promise that is sufficiently vague to serve as justification for the established order and rallying cry for those who wish to overthrow it. The revolution has served as example, case study and inspiration for every generation of revolutionaries since.
And its centralist, nation-building aspects sometimes morph into the secular ultimatums, sneering and prejudice that find expression in the pages of Charlie Hebdo, which, despite its affection for the slogan “No god, no masters”, seems to have found it easier to come to an accommodation with the latter than with the former.
Because, despite the naughty words, the routine impertinence, the tits, bums and dicks, Charlie Hebdo is a bit of a court jester these days.
Viewed from the banlieue, as academic and journalist Andrew Hussey points out, Charlie is part of the establishment.
“What is seen in the centre of Paris as tweaking the nose of authority — religious or political — is seen out in the banlieues as the arrogance of those in power who can mock what they like, including deeply held religious beliefs, perhaps the only part of personal identity that has not been crushed or assimilated into mainstream French society,” he wrote in the New York Timesafter the attacks.
Indeed, one of the main reasons that Islam is resurgent is that the left has lost the leadership of the anti-imperialist and antiracist struggles. Secular nationalist and left-wing anti-colonial movements degenerated into corrupt dictatorships or neo-liberal democratic plutocracies. Mass socialist parties voided themselves of their class content.
The spectre haunting the world today is the spectre of fundamentalist jihad, violent, divisive, frightening, supported by a tiny minority of Muslims but filling a demand created by the arrogance of the West and the inadequacy of the left.
Left-wing activists face state harassment and threats from Islamists. When I met two of them during the 2008 election that put an end to President Pervez Musharraf’s rule, they pointed to creeping Islamisation of both the military and civilian life and seemed isolated as previous anti-Musharraf allies dropped calls for a boycott.
Activists, including Pervez Hoodboy, protest at police brutality in Islamabad during the 2008 election Photo: Tony Cross
Lahore 17.02.2008
As Shahbaz Sharif addressed several thousand people in Sheikhapura yesterday, an umbrella group set up by his party held a smaller rally in Lahore – to call for a boycott of the election.
The All Parties Democratic Movement, APDM, was never an entirely accurate name. The PML-N formed it along with the religious alliance, the MMA, and some secular parties when their previous alliance with the People’s Party broke down.
During the political turbulence that followed the firing of the Chief Justice and the declaration of the state of emergency, the APDM declared that the election couldn’t possibly be fair and launched the boycott call.
But PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif never seemed 100% committed to the idea, especially when the PPP refused to commit itself thus threatening to take most of the PML-N’s seats in a newly-elected parliament.
When the PML-N finally threw itself into the election campaign, its offspring turned Oedipal and expelled it, along with the Jamaat-Ulema-Islami, one of the two largest parties in the MMA, which also stood candidates. A revision of the group’s name seems in order, as the country’s three biggest parties devote all their energies to the election campaign. Among the relatively few parties left in the APDM, the best known are Qazi Hussein Ahmed’s Jamaat-e-Islami and former cricket star Imran Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf.
Still, an alliance of left-wing parties came to comfort them in their solitude and this shell of an alliance managed to muster a couple of thousand at the Pakistan monument in Lahore.
Farooq Tariq Photo: Tony Cross
Farooq Tariq is the leader of the Labour Party Pakistan, a small group which is part of the People’s Democratic Movement, the AJT, a newly-founded coalition of former (?) Stalinists and Trotskyists who seem to be happily coexisting, for the moment at least.
Sitting in his garden in a quiet suburb of Lahore, he seems to be having second thoughts about participation in the APDM. Yesterday’s rally was smaller than expected, he says, and most of the movement’s activities have been dominated by the Jamaat-e-Islami activists. But he claims that there have been successful meetings in Baloochistan, where’s there’s a powerful, armed independence movement, and the APDM has been the only organiSation that has managed to hold meetings in all areas of the country.
There will be a successful boycott in Baloochistan, he thinks, and a low turnout elsewhere, except, perhaps, in Punjab.
“There is no enthusiasm in the election. It’s the most colourless election in my political life of 30 years. No mass meetings; no street meetings; only the media campaign, most like in the developed countries where the media is the main part and that has come to Pakistan in this election.”
There was no choice but to boycott, says Tariq, because the election was intended “to legitimiSe President Musharraf’s rule” and without an independent judiciary or election commission there will be no check on fraud and manipulation.
The left is already thinking of quitting the APDM, although he describes its platform as liberal and progressive and claims that the alliance is dominated by progressive nationalists.
“We can’t work with the fundamentalists, that’s very clear.”
His party has clashed with the Islamists on many occasions and he has received death-threats by SMS. One claimed to be from Osama ben Laden’s son, Hamza, and told him that “If Benazir Bhutto can be killed, the leftists must pay attention;” Musharraf’s régime hasn’t been too kind to him, either, arresting him 12 times and obliging to go into hiding for 18 days during the state of emergency.
Tariq expects the PPP to form the next government and PML-N to do well in Punjab. But “it doesn’t make much difference, only really the faces change.”
He says that representative of the three major parties all attended a seminar in Washington before the election, he says, and assured the US government and the International Monetary Fund that there would be no change in economic policy.
The PPP will be sharing power with Musharraf, “which is contrary to the consciousness of the voters who will go to the polls tomorrow” but was “Plan A of the Americans”, bringing Benazir Bhutto’s party together with the president to fight the fundamentalists.
Tariq and other left-wingers were invited to visit Bhutto shortly before her assassination. She asked for their advice but doesn’t seem to have paid much attention to it. Tariq notes that Benazir opposed the restoration of the judiciary.
Also on the secular left is Pervez Hoodboy, whom I met in his office at the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad a week ago.
Hoodboy is a nuclear physicist who has opposed Pakistan’s nuclear arms programme, worked for normalisation of relations with India and taken up causes such as the campaign for the reinstatement of the sacked judges.
He believes that the election leaves Pakistanis with few choices and that it is unlikely to be free and fair.
“There’s a very strong opinion that these elections should not be held at all. On the other hand, there’s a very strong opinion that, unless these are held, the country will simply break apart and all hell will let loose.”
Hoodboy believes that the opportunities for rigging are limited because Musharraf and his allies are “deeply unpopular” but also that a coalition government would be divided, thus leaving great power in the president’s hands.
But it’s in his own field of expertise that Hoodboy is at his most gloomy. He doesn’t believe government assurances that the military’s professionalism and security safeguards keep the country’s nuclear weapons in safe hands.
“My concern is that technology ultimately is operated by human beings and soldiers over here in particular and the fact is that within the army there are a growing number of people who disagree seriously, severely, with the position the government has taken in fighting the Islamic militants.”
He believes that many soldiers are more sympathetic to the Islamic militants than to the people fighting them, so the “insider threat” is growing.
“Look at the fact that we’ve had numerous suicide-bombings done by insiders, guided by other insiders, and one cannot really be confident that these nuclear weapons can be kept out of the hands of the extremists.”
Earlier this month, he says, a convoy of ammunition and equipment were hijacked, just two days after the president claimed that it was impossible to steal even one rifle from the armed forces.
To the argument that Islamism has spread among lower ranks but not among higher offices, Hoodboy replies: “The lower matters more than the top because it’s the lower ones who have to do the fighting. We’ve seen hundreds of soldiers surrender without firing a shot in Waziristan, in the tribal areas.”
According to Hoodboy, the jihadists, who have been used as an instrument of foreign policy for a quarter century, have now infected the whole of the country’s culture.
Most female students at his university now feel obliged to cover their hair, he says, while photos on his computer show that this was not the case 20 years. About a million students now attend the country’s madrassas and even state education has been Islamised. As an example he produces pictures used to teach the Urdu alphabet. Knives and guns illustrate one letter, while kites and musical instruments are part of the image chosen for “an obscure Urdu word which not even I knew” – the plural form of the word “sin”.
As I write French voters are casting their ballots in the first round of regional elections, although turnout will be much lower than in presidential or legislative elections, so a sense of proportion is needed when analysing the results. Nevertheless it looks almost certain that the Front National (FN) will do well, possibly even taking control of one or more regions after the second round next week. Why is the FN’s vote rising and what does it actually represent these days?
The main difference between the FN and the mainstream right is not racism or Islamophobia but hostility to the EU. A short quiz. Who said the following?
“There is no Islamophobia in France. There aren’t any anti-Muslim acts — or no more than acts against women . . . or short people. But there is a rise in anti-Semitism.”
”Someone who comes to us must assimilate, adopt our lifestyle, our culture …. Do you keep your shoes on when you visit a mosque when you’re abroad?”
The first is FN leader Marine Le Pen, the second is Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of the ex-UMP now rebaptised the Republicans. But it could have been the other way around, couldn’t it?
True, some members of the Republicans – Sarkozy’s rival for the party’s presidential nomination Alain Juppé, for example – are alarmed by Sarkozy’s appeals to Islamophobia, which this year have included the proposal to drop alternative meals for religious minorities in school canteens and to extend the ban on the hijab already enforced in schools to universities. It’s also true that Sarkozy can hardly be accused of consistency, sometimes trying to create a state-sponsored Islam or cultivate Muslims who will toe his line, and that the party from time to time reins in individuals like the slightly deranged Nadine Morano. But the appeal to prejudice in the name of a selective laïcité is now as likely to be heard at a Republicans rally as in one of Le Pen’s almost incessant radio and TV interventions.
What makes further rapprochement between the two parties impossible is not racism, Islamophobia or any other prejudice but the FN’s hostility to the EU, stance that is unacceptable to the French establishment, the Republicans, the Socialist Party, François Bayrou’s Modem and all the other mainstream politicians.
The FN is no longer a fascist party. The FN plays on prejudice, is authoritarian in office and, like the fascist movements of the ’30s, has stolen aspects of the left’s social policy to consolidate a popular base. But, although it was in its origin a far-right coalition dominated by fascists, it is not really fascist now, unless you are one of those people for whom “fascist” just means “nasty”. In fact, the mainstream right – sometimes risibly called the “centre right” – now shares many of the attributes listed above. The FN has no militia, does not physically attack or murder trade unionists or left-wing activists, does not appear to have a plan to create a corporate state. No reasonably sized party in Europe has these characteristics today because it is no longer necessary to atomise the working class, as Trotsky, in my view correctly, described the task of fascism, because that has already been accomplished democratically, thanks to globalisation, the decline of heavy industry in western Europe and the US, the weakening of trade unionism and the labour movement, consumerism and the brand in individualism that goes with it, the ideological offensive against collectivism and the rise of neoliberalism, and the confusion on the left that followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The FN would certainly be authoritarian and whip up intolerance if it ever formed a government. How authoritarian I don’t know and I don’t think it does, either.
Support for the FN is a perverse revolt against the establishment. Obviously, the 13 November Paris attacks have boosted the FN, part of the polarisation that Isis wants to take place in Europe. But the FN’s steady growth in areas that were once strongholds of the left are a sign that an atomised working class believes that the mainstream parties have failed to defend their interests and, in fact, despise them. The Nord, which could fall to the FN, has seen its heavy industries destroyed over decades. Mining, steelmaking and other heavy industries have been destroyed, sometimes deliberately thanks to EU policies based on economic projections that failed to foresee a rise in world demand for steel that led to the Chinese buying, dismantling and importing entire abandoned steel plants. The main parties leaders live comfortable lives, insulated from the daily problems that assail most of the voters, they are frequently caught with their hands in the till or breaking the very laws they or their predecessors have passed and they and much of the media lecture the petit peuple on morality and “republican values”. FN voters are certainly conscious of the party’s racism and mean-mindedness but many, especially the new ones, see their ballot as a poke in the establishment’s collective eye.
The Socialist government has betrayed its voters. If any French party is centre-right, it is the Socialist Party, even if its voters and some of its members are left-wing. The first-ever public declaration of ministers’ wealth revealed that eight cabinet members were millionaires. And their policies have protected their and their fellow Croesuses’ interests. The government has stuck to the austerity line, combined with massive tax cuts for businesses, despite their manifest failure to reduce unemployment or revive the economy. The only time it has faced down the right has been over same-sex marriage, a measure that proved perfectly acceptable to Britain’s Conservative Party. One of the main reasons for the FN’s increased share of the vote is that left-wing voters are completely demoralised and have stayed at home.
To read my article on Marine Le Pen’s efforts to clean up the Front National’s image on the RFI English website, click here.
Turkey’s election this month may have been pushed out of the spotlight by the attacks in Paris and Bamako but the surprise result will have a long-term effect, not just on the country itself as an increasingly authoritarian president gathers more power into his hands by legal and illegal means but also internationally, since Isis is on its doorstep and active on its soil. You can’t ignore Turkey and you can’t ignore the Kurds, including the PKK – officially terrorists to Washington and Brussels – and its sister organisation the KYD – among the few effective allies in the fight against the armed Islamists.
A woman votes in Diyarbakir Photo: Tony Cross
Diyarbakir on 1 November 2015
Voxpops on polling day indicate a landslide for the HDP in Diyarbakir.
“And why? Because of the democracy of the HDP,” explains the first person we ask, a student called Suna, who is translating for international observers. “Because I find them serious about all of the problems of Turkey … Now I’m not happy to be in this country because of this government and I want them to go.”
‘’HDP, HDP, HDP, PKK, HDP, PKK!” chants Mehmetcik, a pensioner, at another polling station, going on to chide us for the duplicity of the great powers, who betrayed their promise of an independent Kurdistan after the breakup of the Ottoman empire.
A statue of a weary traveller heading for Diyarbakir and a showcase of musical instruments at the city’s arts school, a polling station for the day Photo: Tony Cross
Taner, an electrical engineer who has come back to vote from Iraqi Kurdistan, where he’s working, used to support the AKP. “Then we saw that they had a very exclusive way of governing. So we saw that the situation was very bad and we understood that this way of governing is very bad.”
True, a few people refuse to say how they are voting and some are reluctant to express their opinions because of police officers hovering near the entrance to polling station.
The AKP wins an absolute majority and, while the secular nationalist CHP’s vote has held up, the HDP’s has fallen, as has the right-wing national MHP. The AKP has gained a seat in Diyarbakir.
Police and special forces are everywhere as we make our way to the HDP’s Diyarbakir offices.
A roadblock looms ahead of us in the dark, forcing us to change our route. As we drive down a wide streets, a group of young men is lined up against a wall, special forces’ guns trained on them. Another special force members has his gun in the face of a driver, who is half in, half out of his car.
Youths light a fire on the road outside the HDP headquarters in Diyarbakir Photo: Tony Cross
Groups of youths are hanging around the street, leading to HDP HQ. We park at a distance and, as we approach, they collect branches and rubbish and set it alight.
An excitable kid of no more than 16 berates journalists in Kurdish. He looks at my recording equipment and, although he seems unclear as to its function, says that I shouldn’t show it to the police.
Inside the offices no one wants to be interviewed. Young activists seem to be in shock at the result.
From a balcony we watch the youths outside drag rubbish and tyres onto the road and set them alight, creating a roadblock that doesn’t stop the traffic – the cars just drive around it – but does attract the police, which seems to be the purpose of the exercise.
A few rounds of gunfire echo through the surrounding tower blocks.
The police fire teargas, which floats into the building before people shut the windows, and a police water cannon arrives.
A police water cannon retreats after being attacked by youths in Diyarbakir Photo: Diyarbakir
The kids, very young but apparently well-practiced in tackling these lumbering monsters intifada-style, scatter and then regroup behind it, coming up close where the water can’t reach, and stoning it.
They do this persistently and with some effect. Eventually it leaves, to cheers from the HDP office, then a special forces armoured car turns up and the police water cannon returns. Someone fires several rounds into the air from a dark corner just off the road.
As the kids disperse, some of them surround a photographer and start shouting at him. They believe he has photographed them with their faces uncovered – most of the time they’ve had scarves and hoodies hiding their identities – and are extremely unhappy about the prospect of them being published or falling into the hands of the police. An HDP activist goes out and places himself between them and the photographer, calming the kids down and bringing him into the building.
As we leave an HDP MP, Ziya Pir, does comment on the result. The rise in violence pushed some voters into the arms of the AKP, he believes, and the HDP leadership lulled their supporters into a sense of false security by predicting a rise in the vote.
The rest of the town is calm, if gloomy. Customers in restaurants watch PM Davutoglu deliver a triumphant victory speech at AKP headquarters in Ankara.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s gamble has paid off. His AKP doesn’t even have to find a coalition partner, although it doesn’t have a sufficiently large number of seats to change the constitution, as Erdogan would like, in order to transfer power from the prime minister to the president and, incidentally, let a number of AKP MPs and hangers-one off the hook in several corruption investigations.
The violence that has flared up with the end of peace talks with the PKK and attacks by Isis seems to have driven a substantial number of voters into the arms of the AKP, attracted by Erdogan’s tough-guy image and his increasingly nationalist and Islamist rhetoric. That would account for the MHP’s decline, the AKP has stolen its USP, while adding a dose of assertive Islamic identity. Maybe some HDP voters were demoralised or frightened by the revival of violence, although nobody indicated that was the case at the polling stations or on the street.
Erdogan and his acolytes waste no time in making the most of their triumph. The day after the vote police raid the premises of the weekly magazine Nokta, seizing all copies of the latest issue as it rolls off the presses.
The cover, which read “Monday, November 2: The Beginning of Turkey’s Civil War”, was deemed an incitement to crime.
A previous issue of Nokta was seized for insulting the president and making propaganda for terrorists because it published a montage of Erdogan taking a selfie in front of the coffin of a soldier killed fighting the PKK.
In the three months running up to the elections, according to media freedom campaigners, 21 journalists, three media houses and one printworks have been attacked by mobs, some of them including AKP activists, 61 people – 37 of them journalists – have been charged with insulting a public figure, 19 have been charged with insulting the president and 168 articles, 101 websites and 40 social media postings have been censored.
There can be little doubt that war and repression will continue in the south-east and that tolerance will not be the watchword when dealing with opposition throughout the country.
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.”
When I visited the devastated houses that were the scene of a Turkish police raid on hideouts of the Islamic State (IS) armed group it never crossed my mind that I would be visiting the scenes of IS attacks in Paris less than three weeks later. The Paris attacks cost at least 120 lives and have sparked a wave of sympathy across the world. IS has claimed more lives in Turkey – 135 in the Suruc and Ankara bombings, which appear to have been targeted because of their links to the Kurds, alone – but, although those attacks received plenty of media coverage, there was not the same outpouring of grief worldwide. The story of the IS and the Turkish state is a complicated one, as I found on my visit to Diyarbakir, in the Kurdish-majority south east.
The damage caused by a booby trap that killed two police officers and the police assault at the IS hideout in Diyarbakir Photo: Tony Cross
Diyarbakir 29 October 2015
There’s a gaping hole where the house’s front door used to be. That’s where a booby trap went off, killing two police officers trying to enter and capture or kill the house’s occupants.
The windows are blown out, the interior is a charred shell, there are bullet holes in the walls and a hole in the garden where a jihadist detonated a suicide vest. The trunks of trees in front of the house are splintered and torn by shrapnel.
Seven IS fighters were killed and a significant haul of weapons and explosives seized in the this house and another nearby. They buildings in a residential area of the city served as an IS commando’s base in Diyarbakir.
Police have done nothing to prevent access to the scene of the fighting Photo: Tony Cross
Although the raid was on Monday, the house still attracts the interest of a group of men and youths. There are no police present and the site had not been cordoned off, so kids and adults go in and clamber among the ruins, oblivious to the possibility that there might still be undiscovered explosives inside.
The police were not particularly diplomatic with Fatma, who live in the house next door, either. They told her and her family that they would fire on their house if they failed to leave the lights on before evacuating them and starting their assault.
Fatma didn’t have much to do with her young neighbours, their main contact being when they put up a tarpaulin in the garden and she asked them to take it down because it interfered with her family’s satellite TV reception.
“We didn’t expect Islamic State to be our neighbours!” she comments.
The pink house around the corner is in almost as bad a state of destruction and also excites the interest of neighbours, both adults and children.
Sinan, who is taking photos on his smartphone, lives in a block of flats over the road.
His family was woken be the fighting.
“Of course I was frightened,” he says. “My children woke up and they were frightened.”
Before the attack, the occupants, all young Kurdish men, gave lessons in religion to local people.
“I didn’t go and I didn’t send my children,” Sinan says.
Children explore the ruins of one of the houses raided by police in Diyarbakir Photo: Tony Cross
The government and the security forces insist they are taking the threat from IS seriously and are even issuing alarming reports of possible further attacks.
Police told the media today that a commando of 10 women, four of them foreign, is at large and planning suicide bombings. They are said to be part of the Dokumacilar group, to which those who were living in these also belonged.
Yesterday Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu slammed Selahattin Demirtas, the leader of the left-wing, pro-Kurd HDP, for accusing him of legitimising IS.
His office says that 285 IS suspects have been arrested in the first nine months of 2015.
But he quickly changed the subject to the Syrian Kurdish YPG, an armed group allied to the Turkish PKK that has proved the most effective force in fighting IS, most famously by recapturing the town of Kobane.
The military have bombed the YPG recently and Davutoglu says that is justified because they represent a threat to Turkish territory.
An indication that he and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are more worried about armed Kurds than armed Islamists came when Ankara agreed to join US-led air strikes on IS … and then proceeded to bomb PKK positions in northern Iraq, having broken off peace talks with the guerrillas following the inconclusive 7 June election.
The government is believed to be worried that the autonomous area, known as Rojava to the Kurds and established by the Kurdish National Council (KNC) and the PKK-linked Democratic Union Party (PYD), could serve as an example to Kurds in Turkey, as, indeed, it has. Autonomous zones have been declared in parts of Diyarbakir itself, as well as in towns like Silvan, since the peace talks were broken off.
The HDP and other opposition parties accuse the government of more than sitting on the fence, however.
They claim that it has helped the armed Islamists in Syria – firstly the al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra front and then IS – party because a part of the electorate and membership of the ruling AKP sympathises with them ideologically and partly as a counter to the Kurds.
Evidence of the state’s complicity appears to have been brought to light in 2013 when a convoy heading for Syria was stopped and searched.
It was found to be carrying arms and agents of the secret services, the MIT.
The five prosecutors and one military commander responsible for stopping the convoy were rewarded for their vigilance by being charged with seeking to overthrow the government and revealing state security information.
A secrecy order has meant that their trial, which began earlier this month, is being held behind closed doors.
Kurdish activists believe that the state facilitated two bombings – one in Suruc in July that killed 33 young left-wingers and injured 104, the other at a peace rally in Ankara on 10 0ctober that killed 102 and injured 400 – for which IS has claimed responsibility.
“There are hundreds of cameras in Ankara. They knew there was going to be a demonstration. Why wasn’t there any protection?” asks HDP youth activist Cuneyt Cihan.
On the day of the Ankara bombing, after Erdogan called it an attack on Turkish unity and equated it to PKK attacks on Turkish police and soldiers, Demirtas came right out and accused the state of involvement.
“This attack is not targeting our state and national unity, it is perpetrated by the state against the people,” he said
Davutoglu is in town to officially open the airport – now we know why it’s operating although not exactly fully functional in all details – and hold an election rally.
“Turks and Kurds, brothers,” he has the crowd shout in a fine example of Erdogan’s conception of unity. “The separatists are traitors!”
When I came here in 2007, many Kurds found the AKP readier to listen to their discontents than the secular MHP and CHP, whose nationalist agenda had vigorously supported a dirty war in the south-east while in power.
The AKP had no Kemalist axe to grind and a certain amount of support among conservative Muslims in the region. And its supporters among the rising bourgeoisie of central Anatolia were keen to do trade with the European Union and eventually to join it and so ready to concede to concede to its criticisms of Turkey’s human rights record.
Two things appear to have changed.
Firstly, Erdogan has become increasingly authoritarian, casting himself as the heir to the Ottomans, whose legacy in the field of minority rights leaves a little to be desired.
Secondly, ending the peace process seems to have been a calculated attempt to heighten a feeling of insecurity and rally the nation around a strong ruler – himself, in this case.
AKP Diyarbakir regional councillor Nejla Uysan Photo: Tony Cross
That’s not an analysis that shared by AKP regional councillor Nejla Uysan when we meet her at the party’s regional office on Friday.
“The government and the state doesn’t support Daesh. Definitely not!” she declared. “This is a barbaric organisation and, as Muslims, how do you think we could support such an organisation.”
She accuses the PKK of breaking the ceasefire and claims that the “liberated zones” punished the local population.
But she surprises me by saying that she thinks her party should work with the HDP.
A woman pays tribute to victims at the Belle Equipe restaurant in Rue Charonne, 11th arrondissement Paris Photo: Tony Cross
The Islamic State (IS) armed group has claimed responsibility for yesterday’s bloody attacks in Beirut and Paris. Since I live in the Paris area, I’ll comment on the question many people are asking – why these attacks on the French capital?
The targets appear to have been chosen by people who knew Paris well. Two teams from “crusader” countries- France and Germany – were playing at the Stade de France, the statement said, and President François Hollande was present. The attackers did not manage to mix with the crowd, however, limiting deaths to the attackers and one bystander. “Hundreds of idolaters gathered in a festival of perversity” were at the Bataclan, according to the statement, and dozens paid the price. The other targets were in areas full of bars and restaurants, where crowds were guaranteed and where the likely victims were guilty of the sin of enjoying life in ways not approved by fundamentalists of any stripe. The statement says there was an attack in the 18th arrondissement, which there wasn’t, so a member of the commando could still be at large. IS says that all its victims were “crusaders”, although it obviously can’t know their identities, whether they were customers of bars and restaurants, staff or passersby. Not does it know how many of the victims were Muslims, which some of them almost certainly were.
IS seems to be stepping up attacks abroad as it comes under pressure in Syria and Iraq, with the loss of Sinjar and air strikes on its positions. Shia were targeted in Beirut, presumably because of Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria, and one reason for targeting France was probably its recent decision to join air strikes on IS in Syria (one shouldn’t forget that the French army has been fighting jihadists in Mali and the Sahel for some time now and has intervened in Muslim-Christian violence in the Central African Republic). French leaders’ statements about “acts of war” might imply that the country’s military involvement will become more intense, possibly with ground troops being sent in. That might not displease IS, which wants a confrontation with “Rome” at Dabiq, to fulfil an “end-times” prophecy.
France’s interpretation of secularism, as represented by Charlie Hebdo and the the public reation to this year’s massacre there, as well as by measures by successive government, particularly the banning of Islamic headscarves in schools, angers fundamentalists but also alienates many Muslims, who are not tempted by violence or even Salafi-style rigour.
France has the largest Muslim population in Europe – although we’re not allowed to know its exact size due to France’s interpretation of secularism. A tiny minority is tempted by violent fundamentalism, partly for religious reasons, partly because of the social exclusion they have experienced in France. The government estimates that more than 500 are fighting in IS’s ranks and has boast s of almost certainly killing some of them in air strikes. Others can’t get there, partly because of a clampdown on people wishing to go by the French authorities, leaving them available to murder at home. Only eight suicide-attackers were needed to commit Friday night’s carnage. More attacks are entirely possible.
A TV repoter outside the Bataclan, where there was the heaviest death toll on Friday night Photo: Tony Cross
Update 17.45 Paris time
I’ve just visited the scenes of three of the attacks.
Despite the declaration of a state of emergency, police and military presence seems fairly restrained. There were far more TV crews that security forces members outside the Bataclan, although the scene was heavily cordoned off.
There and in the rue de Charonne, people are arriving with flowers to lay at the scene or lighting candles. Since the government has banned all public gatherings, there will be no Charlie Hebdo-style demonstration, for the moment at least, and the mood doesn’t seem to be at quite such a pitch – more shock, less indignation.
“Death to the illiterate barbarians” this handwritten poster declared Photo: Tony Cross
A couple of shops in rue de Charonne have hung up French flags – one also has a piece of paper bearing the #PrayforParis hashtag, a no doubt well-intentioned but curious choice given that a fair proportion of the victims and their families undoubtedly don’t believe in God while the attackers invoked his name to perpetrate their murders.
So a certain amount of nationalism. The crowd at the Stade de France apparently sang the Marseillaise – but what do we sing about when we sing the Marseillaise?
Someone has stuck a rose into bullet holes in the front of Sushi Maki restaurant, next to La Belle Equipe. And, since hate engenders hate, a piece of paper bears the legend “Death to the illiterate barbarians”.
