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Istanbul's Karayollari: Big Trouble in
Little Kurdistan
10.1.2012
By Piotr Zalewski / Istanbul - TIME |
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Turkish Kurds flash the V-sign as they gather to
celebrate Kurdish new year, Newroz, the Kurdish New
Year, on March 20, 2011 in Istanbul. Photo: Getty.
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January
10, 2012
ISTANBUL, — In Karayollari, a
Kurdish-majority neighborhood in Istanbul, the
locals are seething. On Dec. 30, Turkish warplanes
flying over Uludere, close to the Iraqi border,
rained bombs on what pilots believed to be a column
of militants from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK),
a Kurdish separatist group. It turned out to be
civilians smuggling diesel. Thirty-five people
lost their lives
in the attack. Karayollari might be over a thousand
miles away from Uludere, but the impact of the
tragedy on local Kurds is palpable. Since the
beginning of the year, protests have erupted here
and in surrounding neighborhoods on an almost daily
basis.
The recent surge in fighting between the Turkish
military and the PKK — punctuated by the Uludere
massacre and the killing of 24 Turkish soldiers by
the Kurdish rebels two months earlier — has revived
fears of an imminent return to the bloody 1990s,
when civil war ravaged Turkey's Kurdish-populated
southeast. Today, not only does the violence
threaten to intensify, it also threatens to spread.
With interethnic tensions and clashes on the rise
across the country, there is increasing evidence
that Turkey's cities, home to millions of Kurds, may
be becoming a new front in the conflict.
"Unless the government can manage the situation,
there is a risk of ethnic tension at the societal
level," says Nihat Ali Ozcan, a retired army
officer. In Istanbul, the Turkish city with the
largest population of Kurds — with an estimated 2
million to 4 million out of the city's total of 12
million — the risk of conflict appears more acute
than anywhere else.
Mustafa, like many residents of Karayollari, hails
from Siirt, a city in the southeast. He arrived in
Istanbul about 20 years ago, he says, part of an
entire generation of Kurds displaced by the Turkish
military's scorched earth tactics. We meet at a
local teahouse among men in plaid sweaters and
leather jackets playing backgammon, fingering
Islamic prayer beads, and blowing vast rainclouds of
smoke from contraband cigarettes. Roj TV, considered
a PKK mouthpiece, banned in Turkey and broadcast via
satellite from Denmark, blares in the background.
Conversation is sparse. If and when it takes place,
it is almost exclusively in Kurdish. (As late as two
decades years ago, speaking that language in public
was considered a crime.) The choice of programming,
and the men's blissful disregard of Turkey's
two-year old smoking ban, is telling. Karayollari,
an hour's bus ride from the city center, is
something of a world onto itself. "The cops don't
venture here," Mustafa says, "unless it's to arrest
activists or to crack down on protests."
In the past few months, dozens of Karayollari locals
have been detained in raids against the Union of
Kurdistan Communities (KCK), which the authorities
regard as the PKK's urban wing. (The PKK itself is
considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the
US, and the European Union.) This has not deterred
other residents from staging protests. With stations
like Roj reporting non-stop from the Kurdish areas
of Turkey,www.ekurd.net
says Mustafa, "people here are more aware of the
Kurdish problem. Whenever we feel our people are
being suppressed, we react." A young man sitting at
our table helpfully points out that the streets
around the teahouse make for good getaway routes
during battles with the police. "If something goes
down in the southeast today," Mustafa says,
"something will go down in Karayollari tomorrow."
On the other side of a highway overpass that
separates Karayollari from Gazi Mahallesi, an
ethnically mixed neighborhood reputed to be one of
Istanbul's poorest and most dangerous, signs of
tension are rife. On the road leading up to the
local police station, ATMs belonging to the local
branch of Ziraat Bankasi, a state bank, have been
vandalized in protests that have united Kurds,
radical leftists, and anarchists. The police station
itself — perched atop a hill overlooking the
neighborhood, an enormous Turkish flag raised
overhead — looks like a fortress. Anti-government
graffiti is everywhere. "Revolution or death, the
only solution for Kurdistan," reads one sign,
spray-painted onto the side of a building. Municipal
buses have been pelted with stones so often, says
Mazlum Poyraz, a student, that the transport
authority no longer routes its modern,
air-conditioned vehicles through the area.
Here, as in the southeast, poverty and unemployment
help nourish the cycle of violence. So does urban
displacement. Gazi, these days, is buzzing with
rumors that a neighboring shantytown, home to Turks
and Kurds, may soon be leveled to make way for an
upscale housing development. In Karayollari, this is
already fact. Within a short walk from the teahouse,
a large slum area has been razed, its Kurdish and
Roma residents evicted, to make way for Avrupa
Konutlari, a gated community comprising more than 30
high-rise buildings.
To the Kurds of Karayollari, the adjacent
high-rises, home to mostly middle-class Turks, have
become something of a symbol. "Avrupa Konutlari, for
us, is the state," says Mustafa. On some occasions,
the buildings themselves have come under attack.
When Turkish soldiers die in combat against the PKK,
"many of the Turks living there hang national flags
from their balconies," says Sercan, an abbreviated
version of his name tattooed in ink across his
knuckles. In response, he says, Kurdish protesters
from Karayollari "sometimes throw stones or Molotov
cocktails at their windows."
"With these buildings, once again they're uprooting
the Kurds," says Mustafa. "When the state does this,
when it creates these kinds of divisions, people
from our part of the neighborhood, they get upset.
So if you're in a protest and you have a stone in
your hand, you'll throw it at one of the
skyscrapers."
More unrest may soon be in store. On Tuesday, a
Danish court will rule on whether to shut down Roj
TV, the Kurds' biggest television station, on
account of its links with the PKK.
The conflict in the southeast, which began with a
PKK insurgency in 1984, has so far claimed around
40,000 lives, victims of armed battles, terrorist
attacks by the Kurdish rebels, and often savage
reprisals by the Turkish army and security forces.
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