When,
in 1963, the remains of Hamabour Mohammed Haj Saleh were taken out of Suleimaniya's
pauper's grave where he had been lying with other Kurds executed by the
Iraqi army, one of his parents was watching the exhumation. He told the
man who was trying to photograph the massacre with a little Kodac: “I don't
have any pictures of myself with him, please, take us together”. The picture
shows an old man standing at attention, a long barracan, staring the camera.
The decomposed body of his son is lying on a makeshift stretcher, his head
at his father's feet...
In 1992 the beautiful Yildiz
Alpdogan, a student, was 21. The Turkish officials arrested her for complicity
with the Kurdish guerrilla. When she was sentenced to 12 years and six
months by the tribunal on that July day she was wearing a white blouse
and a white polka dotted skirt. Behind her were four soldiers with their
camouflage combat suits and machine-guns but they looked like poor fellows
with respect to the determination of her face and the pride of her gait.
A photographer of the National Geographic took her like this. When the
magazine was published, it was seized and the picture forbidden.
Just as beautiful and proud
was the Turkish deputy Leyla Zana when she held her defensive pleading
in December 1994. A grey suit, a scarf around her neck, her long and wavy
hair on her shoulders, she spoke in a crowded room, a row of policemen
behind her back. “I reject the Court's accusation. Our ideas are recognised
by everyone. We fight respecting democracy for human rights and peoples'
brotherhood. We will continue to do it until the end of our life”. Fifteen
years of jail was the answer: complicity with the dissolved and outlaw
Kurdish Workers Party. She was given the Sacharov prize while in jail.
Sixty years previously Hasan
Hayri, with his national Kurdish costume on, got in Ankara's Chamber. He
had been convinced by Kemal Ataturk, the head of the government. In Lausanne
the European powers asked guarantees for the Kurdish minority in Turkey.
“The Kurdish and Turkish people have decided to live together”, said Hayri
in Kurd at the deputies. He also officially wrote about this issue to the
Old continent's delegates. The document was read and the agreement with
Turkey signed. “You are a separatist, you want to break away from Turkey
and make an independent Kurdistan”. “No, you know I am not. You know this.
I'm Hasan Hayri, I held a speech at the Parliament, I wrote to Lausanne:
how can you say that I am a secessionist?”. They answered: “The sure thing
is that one day, wearing Kurdish clothes, you went to the Turkish Parliament.
So you are a secessionist”. He was sentenced to death, he was asked what
his last wish was: “To be buried in a place where the Kurds can walk and
spit on me for my betrayal”. A portrait-picture on a liberty background
made of marbles and flowers shows him in full glitter, a riding whip in
his hands, boots on, trousers with puff, sash, a ribbon with decorations,
the shirt collar in velvet. He looks like someone who believes in his neighbour.
These pictures, these stories
are but some which have been collected in the extraordinary “Kurdistan.
In the Shadow of History” (Random House) by Susan Meiselas. Susan was a
photographer of the Magnum agency and went to Kurdistan for the first time
in 1991 when Saddam Hussein launched the Anfal campaign in order to officially
eliminate all of them and close a game which had been lasting for half
a century. She had been in Central America, she was used to massacres.
Yet: “I had never seen such a complete and systematic destruction work...”.
While photographing the dead, the destruction, she began to question about
the living, about what they had been in the past. She found some old prints
of weddings and baptisms together with some cruel executions pictures in
a small optical goods shop in Paveh, Iran. She came into contact with families,
photograph albums, oral memories, documents during other journeys in Turkey,
at Dyarbakir. She began to collect them, to classify them, to comment them.
A Kurdish student in New York gave her the address of a Kurdish photographer's
son from Arbil, Iraq. The joy and pain of a people reached her studio between
the two world wars: celebrations, funerals, anniversaries, meetings, political
and religious leaders, common people... Susan re-photographed everything
in a rented apartment: the past came back to life from small orange boxes
which had been buried in a safe place until then.
 Then
news spread and sealed packages began to arrive in the woman's New York
studio. The documents of the Europeans and of the Americans who had visited
Kurdistan arrived: explorers, missionaries, journalists... They contained
letters, journals, notebooks. Statements, official deeds, public and private
events eventfully reached the United States from Baku, Azerbaijan... With
the help of Martin van Bruinessen, a Dutch anthropologist who taught Kurdish
history and language at the universities of Utrecht and Berlin, Susan began
to give a finished sense to the huge amount of material she had collected.
It lasted six years but the result - 400 large-size pages, hundreds of
pictures and interviews, an endless documentation - is greater than all
expectations. The story of the largest people without a State now unfolds
under our eyes for the first time.
The Sharafuddin emir tells
that, after the great Persian king Jamshid's death, the tyrant Zahahak
took his place. He wasn't just cruel in his soul: two snakes got out of
his shoulders and made him suffer. To calm them he had to feed them fresh
human brains every day. Two young men had then to be sacrificed every day
to answer such needs. The executioner, however, was sensitive and so, after
a while, he began to kill only one man and replace the missing human brain
with sheep's and sent the survivor to the most inaccessible mountains.
The young who had been saved in this way grew over time without any contacts
with the external world, they set up a community, created their own language,
got married within the community. They were called Kurds.
The legends dates from the
sixteenth century and tells a lot about the nature, the pride and the originality
of this people. In his “Esquisse Historique et Etnographique”, published
towards the end of the nineteenth century, the French anthropologist Ernest
Chantre wrote: “The physiognomy of the Kurds expresses savagery. The features
are harsh, their brilliantly proud eyes are small and deep-set. Men are
dark, tall, thin and have an uncommon strength. Their gait is confident,
they hold their head erect with pride, their glance is arrogant”.
Freya Stark, an untiring
and romantic English traveller, more prosaically commented: “They are the
most handsome. I have never seen men like these, so slender and strong,
their naked legs to the thighs, red turbans hiding their long hair, an
almost intoxicating attractiveness. My only desire is to portray all this”.
That's what people said back then. The English knew that they had a guilty
conscience with the Kurds. Iraq was one of their theoretical inventions
in contempt of all the promises made to the Kurdish independence. Gertrude
Bell, another exceptional traveller, wrote in 1923 to Sir Percy Cox after
the Raf began to bomb all the Turkish enclave of the sheik Mahamud at Suleimaniya:
“To tell the truth, I would define your policy towards them as opportunistic.
That's the only word I can think of”. Five years before she was an enthusiast
for the war-like qualities of the men who were considered as the allied.
In his journal, major Edward Noel wrote: “Bedr Khan has ninety children.
This big family has always been identified with revolutionary movements
against the Ottoman government. There is a special record on them in the
archives of the Turkish secret services. All its members experienced exile
and jail”.
The first Kurdish newspaper
was published on April 22, 1898. The editorial said: “The Kurds are more
sensitive and intelligent than other people, they are chivalrous, strong
and religious. But they are neither educated nor rich, they do not know
what happens in the world. Well, this newspaper will deal with the beauty
of knowledge and of education, it will show where people study and what
the best schools are, it will explain where the wars are and what the great
powers do”.
It was taken at its word.
When Mark Sykes, the English whose name - along with the French Picot's
- is linked to the division of the Middle East, met the Kurdish leader
Ibrahim Pasha in 1906, he was asked: “Has the Algesiras' conference really
failed? What is your situation like in Ireland? Is it true that Sarah Bernhardt
owns a bigger tent than mine when she moves from one place to another for
her work?”. In 1930 “Paris Midi” published an interview with Leila Bedirkhan,
a Kurdish dancer and princess: “When I was a child, dancing to me was a
pastime. When my father the emir passed away I fled from my country at
war and dancing became my raison d'être. I looked for old rites,
oriental dances. I chiefly use my arms and my body”. We have a picture
of her at La Scala in the “Belkis” ballet. There also are intellectual
women, a rarity in a warlike and male community. Hapsa Khan, the daughter
of the sheik Abdul Kadir was one of them. After her father's death she
became the leading figure at home, she gave hospitality to artists, argued
with poets... When she entered a room, her husband stood up. Her brother-in-law
commented: “Thank God you are not a man, it would have been a real challenge”.
Betrayed by everyone, betrayers
of everyone, even of themselves, the Kurds in the twentieth century allied
with other countries and then revolted against them, even with the Russians,
both czarists and Communists. Even because, as William O. Douglas remembers
in “Strange Lands and Friendly People”, when a mother wanted to stop her
baby crying she told it: “Shut up or the Russians will hear you”. In 1946
Mustafà Barzani sought refuge in the USSR after a short period in
the Kurdistan Republic. They asked him the reason for such choice: “We
could choose to fight and surrender in Iran, fight and surrender in Iraq,
being hanged in Turkey. We went to Russia. They did not welcome us but
they did not send us back. We were dispersed. I stayed there for 12 years
and did not become a Communist”.
Among repression, insurrections,
autonomies, independence, resistance, armed fights, exoduses, pacification,
imprisonment, massacres, the Kurdish adventure had taken place within the
middle-eastern scenario whose borders were Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran
until then. The exotic and wild scenario of the “great game” of the western
powers at the end of last century up until the post-war period to the Gulf
war. A nice novel by J.J. Langendorf entitled “A challenge in Kurdistan”,
perfectly explains the mental, individual and collective mechanism that
moved the power strategy of the various states that participated in that
game. The idea of being able to act in corpore vili on still feudal
and pre-modern situations, the taste for adventure neglecting all controls
of right behaviour or diplomatic agreement, the distance that justified
oversights, influences, haughtiness. There were and still are strong economic
interests at stake, but outside, the European action theatre seemed unreal:
spy networks, training, marches, inviolable peaks, topographic maps, the
mysterious east, the tea in the desert...
The year two thousand seems
to fling that scenario in our homes for the first time in its emaciated,
less fascinating, more complicated and less understandable aspect. The
Kurds risk not being a good problem for international organisations and
for some lovers of lost causes.
The story, amused, seems
to want to give us tit for tat, to find what was shattered in other people's
lands in the old continent. Europe does not seem to have understood this
yet: worried for its well-being and tension, it believes that it is a question
of borders, and that closing and controlling them would be enough to keep
serenity, whereas it is what Europe established more than half a century
ago that has now come to an end as well as the remains and the shreds of
an idea of power that arrive on makeshift boats, among shipwrecks, cheats,
Mafia and damnation. If things do not change radically, if scenarios are
not rewritten, if there are no geopolitical attention and alliances to
give Europe a new role and meaning, these exoduses, these migratory pressures
will not stop. And it will be increasingly impossible to keep them in check.
As far as today's situation is concerned, Europe's sleep is begetting monsters.
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Italian
Mensile di scienza medica e attualita`
