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Why do people become terrorists?
October 24, 2003
The New York Times
Kurds Are Finally Heard: Turkey Burned Our Villages
By DEXTER FILKINS
One after another, the villagers stepped forward in their tattered clothes, took the courtroom oath and spoke of a previously unutterable crimes.
One of the first was Emine Toprak, an elderly Kurdish woman whose cracked and withered face hinted at her story to come.
''I was sitting in the house with my children, and they came and said we are going to burn your house, and so we got out,'' Ms. Toprak told a row of silk-robbed Turkish judges seated before her.
''Who burned your village?'' one of the Turkish judges asked.
''The government forces,'' Ms. Toprak answered.
So it was in a third-floor Turkish courtroom last week that a handful of Kurdish villagers broke the silence that has prevailed in this country over what human rights groups here say was one of the most violent secrets of the 1990's: the systematic campaign by Turkish security forces to burn down villages of Kurds suspected of harboring separatist guerrillas.
Turkish policy toward the Kurds has since become conciliatory. But the courtroom scene was a powerful reminder of how much bad history hangs over Turkish plans -- initially encouraged by the Bush administration -- to deploy troops in Iraq, where four to five million Kurds live in the northern part of the country.
Human rights groups here say Turkish security forces destroyed as many as 4,000 villages and hamlets and displaced hundreds of thousands of Kurds. The villages were burned during the ferocious war between the Turkish government and Kurdish rebels. More than 30,000 people died.
But until last week, according to Kurdish lawyers, the scorched-earth practices of the Turkish government were too sensitive a topic to speak about in Turkey itself. Claiming that Turkish forces had burned a Kurdish village, they said, was often tantamount to a death sentence.
Kurdish people who filed claims for their burned homes often disappeared, said Selhattin Demirtas, the chairman of the Human Rights Association of Diyarbakir, as did, sometimes, the lawyers themselves.
Nusret Miroglu, the governor of Diyarbakir, denied the accusations. ''The Turkish army does not burn villages -- this is a lie,'' he said ''We are a country of laws.''
''It is quite possible,'' Governor Miroglu continued, ''that the terrorists burned this village.'' He was referring to Kurdish rebels.
The climate between the Turks and Kurds has changed sharply in recent months, as the country's leaders have eagerly pushed for entry into the European Union. At the insistence of the Union, the Turkish government has enacted measures to expand the rights of its 14 million Kurds, who have long been denied the legal and cultural freedoms enjoyed by other Turkish citizens.
Since last year, the Turkish Parliament has passed laws allowing Kurdish parents to give their children Kurdish names, Kurdish teachers to hold classes on the Kurdish language, and Kurdish broadcasters to set up their own television station. Earlier this year, the government lifted emergency rule in the areas where it remained in the southeastern part of the country.
The changing relationship between the Turkish government and its Kurdish subjects was evident in the very fact that the court hearings took place. ''What you saw today could never have happened four years ago,'' Meral Bestas, a Kurdish lawyer, said after last week's court hearing. ''People were too afraid.''
But the new Turkish policy extends only so far. Despite the testimony of 20 villagers, each of whom told much the same story, the judge in the case, Mithat Ozcakmaktasi, ruled that more time was needed for a verdict.
The story, as recounted by the villagers, began on March 6, 1993. The troops of the Uzman Jandarma, a paramilitary force active in the region, entered Derecik at around midday and told the occupants of about half of the village to leave their homes immediately.
Once the villagers had filed out, the troops began pouring what some villagers described as a flammable powder, perhaps phosphorous, onto the wooden roofs and furniture inside.
''The men from the Jandarma came to my house and told me to get out,'' Omer Fidan, a 56-year-old fruit farmer, told the judges.
Someone struck a match, he said, and 28 homes went up in flames.
Mr. Fidan, a proud but haggard-looking man, said he managed to gather a few of his sheep before his home disappeared in the flames. Then he piled his wife and 10 children into a flatbed truck and drove them toward a new life in Diyarbakir.
''I would not wish on anyone what I went through that day,'' Mr. Fidan said in a quiet moment after the court hearing.
By many accounts here, burning villages was part of a Turkish strategy to deprive the rebels of sanctuary. It was true, Mr. Fidan said, that Derecik's villagers often gave food to the guerrillas when they came through.
Two years ago, a Turkish parliamentary commission concluded that more than 3,000 villages had been destroyed and some 378,000 people displaced. But the commission reached no conclusions about who had set the villages afire.
It is still not easy to uncover the details of what happened in Derecik, situated 50 miles northeast of Diyarbakir, as it remains closed to outsiders. An American reporter who tried to go there last week was detained at a military checkpoint, ordered to turn around and followed for several miles by Turkish intelligence agents.
Along the way, wreckage abounded from the war that once raged. On the roadside, some 30 miles outside Diyarbakir, stood the remains of what had once been a small village: piles of old bricks, charred wood and a few pieces of rusty furniture.
A road sign, still standing, announced its name: Angul.
''The military came and said get out, and we got out, and then they threw some powder onto the house, and suddenly we saw that our house was on fire,'' said Cicek Dagtas, a native of Angul.
Ms. Dagtas and her husband, Hussein, now make up Angul's entire population. After living a decade in an apartment in Diyarbakir, they returned two months ago to start again. They were found on a roof of the village school, one of two intact buildings, trying to repair the roof.
''We couldn't stand the life in the city, and we decided to come back,'' Mr. Dagtas said.
Not far away stands the remains of Fis Restaurant, the very place where, in 1978, Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the main Kurdish guerrilla group, called his first meeting. The restaurant is closed now, its walls blackened and charred.
Mr. Ocalan himself was captured in 1999, and since then, his group, the Kurdish Workers' Party, has drastically scaled back its operations.
It was only through great persistence that Mr. Fidan, the Derecik fruit farmer, and the others were able to tell their story at all. Consumed by his loss, Mr. Fidan reported the torching to the police and, waving away warnings from friends, demanded compensation. He got nowhere. Eight years later, he said, he decided to sue the government.
The suit, taken up by the president of the Diyarbakir Bar Association and three other lawyers, led to countercharges from prosecutors that the lawyers had made up the story. The prosecutors charged each of them with abusing their legal responsibilities, a felony under Turkish law.
''The villages in the province were not set on fire and destroyed by the security forces,'' the government's indictment read.
Sezgin Tanrikulu, the president of the bar association, said he was not surprised. Detained several times by the security forces himself, Mr. Tanrikulu said he planned to call witnesses like Mr. Fidan to contest the government's charges.
And so the villagers, one by one, took the stand.
When it was over, Judge Ozcakmaktasi said he would hold another hearing on Dec. 4, possibly to make a decision.
''I have been a very patient man,'' Mr. Fidan said.
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maybe on kuweit 
