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Turkish state not helping Kurds dying from
flue
10.1.2006
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Due
to extreme poverty, many have chosen to eat their
sick animals rather than bury them in lime pits.
Several residents said Turkish authorities had
failed to properly inform the Kurdish-speaking
community about what bird flu is and how it spreads
to humans.
"Do you know what we can do against bird flu?" three
students from a vocational medical school asked an
AFP photographer on the mud-covered streets of the
town, where donkeys compete for space with motorised
vehicles.
"People are trying to learn what is going on from
television, but most do not know Turkish fluently,
they speak only Kurdish," said a high school student
who only identified himself as Erhan.
Some, meanwhile, appeared to have taken official
warnings to heart. "I do not eat poultry. I stay
away from poultry and I do not let passengers with
live poultry in their hands into my car,"
30-year-old taxi driver Hakan Capan said.
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Vladimir van Wilgenburg
Student/Journalist |
Others took a more fatalistic aproach to the threat.
Nuri Akatar, a 35-year-old self-employed father of
eight, said two of his children fell sick after his
wife cut up sick poultry and cooked them, but
underlined that he was sure it was not bird flu.
"We went to the doctor who said we were not in
danger. If something happens to a member of my
family, there is nothing I can do, I will leave it
up to Allah," he said.
Farm minister said bird flu had been detected in two
wild ducks near the capital, Ankara, nearly 1,000km
west of infected areas. "The disease has been
identified in two wild ducks near a dam at Nallihan
(about 100km west of Ankara)," Agriculture Minister
Mehdi Eker told a televised news conference called
to brief reporters on the situation in eastern
Turkey [ Nort-Kurdistan].
The discovery suggests migratory birds may be
spreading the disease across the large country, as
experts had warned.
Kurdish family in vain
Wails echoed from the home of the devastated
Kocyigit family, a simple concrete structure built
high above this Kurdish town. Beneath snow-covered
mountains nearby, an open grave awaited.
The family has lost three of its four children this
week to bird flu or suspected bird flu: 14-year-old
Mehmet Kocyigit and his sisters 15-year-old Fatma
and 11-year-old Hulya. The fourth was hospitalized.
The doctor who treated the Kocyigit children said
they most likely contracted the virus while playing
with the heads of chickens who had died of bird flu.
The children had reportedly tossed the chicken heads
like balls inside their house.
As teams dressed in protective suits went home to
home rounding up poultry for destruction, mourners
trekked up the hill to the Kocyigit house. They took
off their shoes before entering to sit with the
children's grieving mother. The father stayed at the
hospital with their last remaining child until late
afternoon, when he came back to bury his third child
in a week.
Hulya was buried later Friday in a simple, small
grave in the corner of the cemetery beside her
siblings. An imam wearing a mask and rubber gloves
presided.
"We're suffering," said an uncle of the children,
Hasan Kocyigit.
The Kocyigits were a typical Dogubayazit family
-- Kurdish, poor, dependent on and living closely
with their livestock.
Bird flu does not easily infect humans, experts say.
Eating cooked chicken is not considered risky.
Health officials have said only those who had been
in close contact with poultry were at risk. In
Dogubayazit, that's nearly everyone.
On the main streets of this town of 56,000 near the
Iranian border, cars and trucks compete with carts
bearing live animals and with flocks of sheep.
The people of Dogubayazit, 1,200 kilometers (750
miles) east of Ankara, are accustomed to living near
their animals, and often it is the children who deal
most with them. The people have seen their animals
sicken before, but until now never thought it could
put them in danger.
"They knew the animals were sick, but who knew it
would kill them?" Hasan Kocyigit said.
Language Barrier
Education is key to controlling the spread of the
virus. That is hampered here by poverty and the
inability of many in this largely Kurdish town --
especially women -- to speak Turkish.
Less than three months ago, Turkey tackled a large
outbreak of the same deadly virus in a village in
the west. No one there got sick, and the country was
praised for its effective response.
Here in the east, things have been different.
[Reference to the Kurdish area]
Trudging over the hilltops toward other houses of
brick, concrete and stone, neighbor Ahmet Tastan,
father of nine, translated from Kurdish to Turkish
for his wife and other women worried they or their
children would become sick.
They said they did not speak Turkish well enough to
deal with doctors, and complained that the local
hospital could not do anything for them, and that a
larger one in Van where the Kocyigit children were
treated was too far away.
The road from Dogubayazit to Van runs nearly 200
kilometers (120 miles) through a craggy,
snow-covered chain of mountains that includes Mount
Ararat, where Noah's ark is said to have landed
after the Biblical great flood. It is across this --
at times barely visible -- road that ambulances have
been carting the sickest patients for treatment.
Emine Sokmen, mother of eight, told Tastan that 20
or 25 of her chickens had died of bird flu, but no
one had yet come to disinfect the coop or check on
her family's health.
"If there were a hospital here, if they could
have diagnosed it, maybe it would have been
different," said Hutfetin Kocyigit, another uncle of
the children who died
The Kurdish blogger Rasti said: "If H5N1 makes the
transition to a human-to-human transmitted disease
in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan as a direct result of
Ankara's policies toward its occupied Kurdish
population, will international health officials and
the international community continue to refuse to
criticize Ankara?"
A Kurdish person said on a forum: “This is very sad,
I hope that they can control this before it could
take anymore lives. But turkey will not try its
best, because this is going to be an easy way for
them to kill Kurds without wasting their bullets.
God help the north kurdistanies.
There is no trust among Kurds for the Turkish state
and their policies.
Read more here of the Kurdish blog Rasti about this
item: Turkish state bears responsibility
Sources: Daily news Centre, Peninsula On-line, Rasti,
Forum of Vivakurdistan
posted by Vladimir
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