John -- Torture, Beyond Saddam
From the NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/opinion/14KRIS.html
March 14, 2003
Torture, Beyond Saddam
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BATMAN, Turkey
A middle-aged Kurd took me on a lonely hillside near here to point out the
isolated police station in whose basement he had been beaten, subjected to
electric shocks and sexually humiliated. We stood half a mile away as he
recounted his tale, and then the police spotted us - and a tank rushed
toward us.
I fled. But the Kurds in Turkey cannot flee, and many here worry that the
war in Iraq will set off more of the savagery that marked the 1980's and
1990's in "Turkish Kurdistan" (a phrase that, if I were Turkish, might lead
to my arrest).
The world has turned its back on the Kurds more times than I can count, and
there are signs that we're planning to betray them again. The U.S. was so
desperate to bribe Turkey into our coalition that it was willing to allow
tens of thousands of Turkish troops into Iraq's Kurdish areas. And we still
seem ready to acquiesce in this. The Turks, having broken the back of
Kurdish resistance within their borders, plan to expand their efforts and
"disarm" Iraq's Kurds to block their control of oil fields.
How can we allow this? Aside from the sheer immorality of presiding over
what is in effect a Turkish invasion of peaceful Iraqi Kurdistan, such an
incursion risks warfare between Kurds and Turks that could spill into Turkey
as well.
"The Turkish government has been far worse to the Kurds than Saddam has,"
one well-educated Kurd said bitterly. His comment stunned me, for Turkey
never used poison gas or conducted mass executions as Saddam did, but one
Kurd after another said the same thing. They described past Turkish military
techniques like raping wives in front of husbands, or assembling villagers
to watch men being tied and dragged to their death behind tanks, and they
noted that Turkey had been less tolerant of Kurdish language and culture
than Saddam.
President Bush is motivated to invade Iraq partly, I believe, by a deeply
felt horror of Saddam's repression. But if our claims to be acting on behalf
of the people of Iraq are to have credibility and moral legitimacy, we must
try to stop Kurds from being slaughtered not only by our enemies in Baghdad,
but also by our friends in Ankara. And we should certainly not acquiesce in
such steps as a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq, which could trigger a new
spiral of clashes and repression in Turkey.
How could a warm and friendly country like Turkey, which has made genuine
progress on human rights and deserves a place in the European Union, be so
harsh to its Kurds? Turkey's horror of a flourishing Kurdistan derives from
its "Sèvres syndrome," named for the French city where Western powers tried
to dismember Turkey after World War I. Ever since then, Turkey has seen
accommodation as a slippery slope toward national disintegration. There had
been progress toward reconciliation in recent years, but now the prospect of
war in Iraq has revived old suspicions and hatreds.
While President Bush has been eager to take note of Iraqi atrocities against
the Kurds, the West has never been so outraged by similar Turkish
atrocities. More than 30,000 people died during the years of fighting
between the Turkish government and the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers
Party, or P.K.K.; both sides were brutal, murdering civilians and engaging
in torture and terrorism.
Turkey also forced at least 500,000 Kurds to leave their villages at
gunpoint. Excellent reports on Turkey by Human Rights Watch say that some
refugees who have tried to return to their homes recently have been shot by
government-armed thugs.
Southeast Turkey still feels like a police state. I traveled to one remote
town to interview a Kurdish man who had been beaten by the police in front
of neighbors, doused with gasoline and then set on fire (he survived). The
man's family was so terrified to see a foreign reporter and risk another
police nightmare that they sent me packing.
Only one Kurdish man was not afraid to be named: Abdurrahim Guler, 37, who
has endured repeated bouts of torture and death threats. In one brutal
session, he says, the commander called out, "Bring in the stick," used to
rape men.
"You can use your stick," Mr. Guler says he shouted back. "I still won't
talk even if you use a minaret!"
Now something even grimmer is bearing down on the brave Kurds: Turkish
tanks, like the one that sent me fleeing, but waves of them. I feel sick at
the thought that we're about to betray the Kurds, again.
