Emails from the Edge (22 page)
Read Emails from the Edge Online
Authors: Ken Haley
DAY 289 (25 FEBRUARY): QAMISHLE, ON THE SYRIANâTURKISH BORDER
They have lived in the Middle East for 5000 years, probably longer than the Arabs themselves. They are a people with their own language and culture, yet have never had a nation to call their own. Today 65 million strong, they are a substantial minority in four lands, but say the word âKurdestan' and shivers run down spines all the way from Baghdad to Washington, not to mention Tehran and Ankara. To the media they are a âproblem', even the UN won't encourage their hopes of nationhood. In the âliberation' of Iraq, they were an afterthought. Who are the Kurds? And what do they want? I am here to find out.
Here in the heartland of their âhomeland', âauthorities' cannot ignore them, only try to subdue them. As I am way out of tourist bounds, I have to be very discreet in seeking out the half persons of Qamishle, or my rough welcome to Syria's southern border may turn out to be a modest prelude to what awaits me on its northern frontier.
Force is more obvious in such places: it wears a uniform; is armed; it struts and swaggers. Trying to make myself inconspicuous as a waiter brings my thick Levantine coffee, I bend over the book I have brought with me. It is the 19th-century explorer Sir Richard Burton's translation of
Arabian Nights
and he is writing about Aladdin. âSoon he entered a coffee house, a fine building which stood in the marketplace, and which attracted many people to play at dice, backgammon, chess, and other games.'
I look up. Facing each other, a metre in front of my face, are two ancient men. At their elbows lie their coffees, steaming, forgotten, as one raises a playing card tremulously for a moment before slamming it on the table, face up, in triumph. His opponent grunts in admiration.
This could be 2002 or, if my name were Aladdin, 1002.
My reverie is broken by the presence of an earnest-looking man of about 40 years. I throw out what I hope will be a hook that doesn't impale the fisherman by saying, âI am just here looking for a Kurdish person.'
âI am a Kurdish person,' he replies. âMy name is Hussein Ahmad.' Bait taken.
Two hours later, I am seated cross-legged on the floor of a house in Hellalia, surely the poorest suburb of Qamishle, in the company of Hussein Ahmad and friends. We sip cardamom tea, and dine on goat and rice prepared by Hussein's sister, Shamsa. When the main course is finished, she presents us with a plate of
kulitcha
, a Kurdish shortbread.
Over the border, no more than a kilometre away, we can see a Turkish hillside. Kurds are also numerous there, where power flaunts itself even more menacingly, because that is where guerrillas of the PKK (Kurdish Workers' Party)âterrorists or freedom fighters, depending on how you view themâlurk.
It is not news to me that the Kurdish world is divided into two camps. The first subscribes to Lawrence's philosophy that âfreedom cannot be given; it can only be taken'. The other believes that the path of violence cannot lead to liberty.
Hussein refills my cup, and assures me that Syria's not-so-secret police would never dare disturb any gathering in this neglected, unsewered quarter of town. Opposite me, nibbling on his kulitcha, is a one-eyed âterrorist', Hussein's younger brother Abdul Latif Hussein Younis Ali.
âHow did you lose your eye?' I venture, hoping my curiosity will not be taken for impoliteness. During a gun battle in the Lebanese civil war, he tells me. âYou remember the bombing of the US Marines?'
The death of more than 200 Americans in a single blast in 1983 is not something a journalist is likely to forget. I nod. Younis Ali smiles toothlessly: his mouth has closed.
Now in his late thirties, Younis Aliâhead wrapped in red-and-white kaffiyehâsays he remains an active member of the PKK. He looks classically volatile, out to impress. At one point, without warning, he reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulls out ⦠a wallet. With another deft movement he proffers a small photo of Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader sentenced to death by Turkey. Suddenly he is on his feet, pumping the air like Atlas on speed. âI love him too much,' he gushes with the excessive zeal of the single-minded.
Younis Ali's English is threadbare. âDo Syria's Kurds feel better treated than their brothers and sisters in Turkey?' I ask his brother.
âIf a Kurd try to open a business [here], they will take away the permit,' he says. âHere they don't make this' (Hussein gets to his knees and looses off an imaginary Kalashnikov volley), âthey make do like this' (he now leaps across the refreshments to play-act at strangling me). I get the point.
âYouths I have spoken to hereâKurds who live in Canada and England, home for the feast of Eidâsay that the refusal of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey to give up any territory for Kurdestan means you have no alternative but to fight for it. Is that how you see things?'
âIf other people don't give you this, you must be fighting, the same for any country. Any people will fight for their freedom: you see Cuba, you see Vietnam. Too much talk, they give you nothing. If fighting, I think this is better.'
âAnd if you die fighting â¦?'
âDie together.'
Time to confront the fighters. âThe world calls you terrorists. How can you win through terror?'
âWe are not terrorists. If this is your house, and someone can come and stay in your house and not go away, where is the terrorism? This is our home, not for another people, not Turkey, not Syria. Three thousand years ago in this land you call Medea, we Kurds live here â¦'
LEBANON: 1â17 MARCH
Bad reputations cling to disaster zones like the lengthening tails of comets. Today your chances of being blown up in Beirut are probably less than those of being shot on the streets of America, but the 1980s civil war still makes this a no-go zone in the minds of most tourists. However, countries that have been to hell and back, like people who have been through the fire of experience, have stories to tell. And, even if we couldn't learn from them, perhaps it would deepen our sense of common humanity to make their acquaintance.
Time was when I flattered myself that, since we are born on the same planet, anywhere we go should feel like home. The experience of passing through many places has made me somewhat more discriminating. Now I would add that it is in the aftermath of human upheaval, where the local inhabitants have come face to face with what ultimately counts in life (shared human experience, not lost traveller's cheques), that the visitor with an open mind and heart feels most at home.
Like any civil war, Lebanon's was a struggle for power. But somewhere along the line the car bombs and hostage-taking diverted Western TV viewers from the root causes, and the mercenary motives of the warlords who posed as politicians.
Oddly enough, the fratricide ended with the unity of Lebanon but under a pro-Syrian government so that, for many Christians, the country when I visited was regarded as a colony of Damascus by the sea. But Beirut, with its openness and pumping neon nightlife, couldn't be less like Damascus if it tried.
Psychologists know that aggression stems from insecurity, and there we have a clue to Lebanon's volatile recent past. Within their own communities of belief, the dominant Muslim and Christian groups (Shias and Maronites) are regarded as minorities, with tales of persecution to tell. So are the Druze, the mountain-dwelling Muslim sect that even most of the other Muslims have little time for. Lebanon is a small, fragmented country. About the only thing fiercer than the forces pulling it apart is the attachment each of its minorities feels to the âidea' of Lebanese unity. After a few days here, Lebanon appears to me like a priceless Chinese vase that has been cracked but, because of the brilliant scenes depicted on it, no one wants to replace.
For most of its history, Lebanon has been a successful example of the âlive and let live' philosophy. To remember it at its worst is unfair.
DAY 293 (1 MARCH): BEIRUT
The early morning bus from Damascus pulls into Masnah, the Lebanese border post, soon after 9 am. I stay on board in Seat 3, while an obliging fellow passenger, a Lebanese doctor, takes my passport into the immigration building, together with a request. I've heard that Australians get fourteen-day visas on arrival but, as I hope to stay sixteen days, could I have longer?
Ten minutes pass, and a blue-jacketed official approaches the bus, my passport in hand. Here comes trouble, I think. He smiles, keeps me in the merest moment's suspense, and tells me how I'm in luck arriving on today's bus rather than yesterday's. From 1 March, Australians get a month-long visa upon arrival. He hands my passport up. âWelcome to Lebanon.' I thank him, and when he is gone turn to the doctor and say, âAren't I lucky 2002 isn't a leap year!"
Beirut is as I imagined it, one never-ending housing project sited between pine-forest cathedrals and that turquoise jewel, the Mediterranean. The search for an accessible downtown hotel takes time, and pauses only long enough for me to take in the somewhat unbelievable sight of the portly Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri, waddling into a seaside restaurant, flanked by a bevy of bodyguards.
Two years later, Hariri's bodyguards won't be able to save his life from a bomb detonated near this very spot. An old score will be settled, but not an old war revived.
The sensible response will not be to cancel travel to Lebanon. When the IRA let off bombs in London randomly during the early 1980s, tourists still flocked there. When shadowy Muslim immigrant groups brought carnage to the streets of Paris, no one seriously advised travellers to avoid the city of love. And when home-grown terror came to London in July 2005 the shock was palpable, yet life went on. But, of course, differentâdoubleâstandards apply to the Middle East.
The best accommodation option I come across is a âcheapie'âthe Hotel Regisâone block in from the beach and, although up a brief flight of stairs, staffed by friendly receptionists. The place is run by Syrians (like hotel, like country) and my chair is such a tight fit in the lift that a staff member must run upstairs and joggle the backrest until I shoot out of the elevator like a cannonball, nearly crushing him in the process.
The Hotel Regis's greatest drawback turns out to be its chief asset: it sits alone on a large urban block that would be known in Belfast as a âbomb site'. Down at heel, it must once have been down at hell: anyway, its splendid isolation means I am simultaneously in the heart of a vibrant city yet shielded from the worst of the noise.
Come evening, it's time to explore the neighbourhood I've just moved into. Only a couple of minutes away is the
corniche
, that LebaneseâFrench pavement where lovers stroll by the Mediterranean, their gaze on the winking light of an oil tanker out to sea. Peanut-and-cool-drink vendors solicit custom, while old men smoke shishas under a balmy night sky.
DAY 295 (3 MARCH): BEIRUT
After pushing through West Beirut, from the dowdy but still fashionable district of Hamra, I emerge on a road that takes me to the coast. Rearing over the road, confirming the guidebook map, is Luna Park. Will this be too strange for the gatekeepers at the palace of fun? I ask whether it will be possible for me to ride the Ferris wheel. No trouble at all: my wheelchair is carefully moved clear of the apparatus as I settle myself in the wire cage.
At the top of the ride, the operators stop for a full minute and I go snap-happy photographing the high-rise apartments, the Mediterranean, the football stadium protruding like a green lozenge beneath my feet and the entire expanse of Luna Park beneath me.
In an open-air café a few metres away, half a dozen patrons are kicking up their heels this Sunday afternoon in a collective dance step, to the rapt attention of not only myself but everyone else present. Recorded music it may be, but the sense of a people who know how to enjoy themselves, and are gobbling up life by the hungry mouthful after years of denial, is inescapable.
DAY 297 (5 MARCH): BEIRUT
Afif Abdul Malik has a low opinion of travel agents. âIn this business you have to be a liar,' he says as if speaking to an apprentice. With 53 years of satisfying other people's wanderlust, he should know. We are sitting in the CLTCâCentre Libanaise de Tourisme Culturelâin the quarter they call Ras Beirut, just up the hill from the American University. The once raffish neighbourhood became a cockpit of urban jungle warfare in the early '80s. However, Abdul Malik's agency has been on this (highly exposed) corner for 44 years and it will take more than a civil war to shift him.
âThere's not enough business here, you cannot make money. The Lebanese are called good businessmen not because they are geniuses: they are liars and opportunists,' he tells me, as thick coffee arrives in two small cups. âIt is a matter of ethics: you have to choose the low road.'
âAha! Then Abdul Malik, as you are still in business after all these years, you must be an exceptional travel agent, or else you are lying to me.'
âNot at all,' he chuckles. âBelieve me, I lose much work because of my ethics.'
Abdul Malik's office has two computers, but he seldom turns them on. At 76 he is not lapping up every new gadget that comes along. Anyway, he is devoted to real customer care, not the god of speed. For flight information he telephones the airlines, taking care to get the name of the person who handles his call; he totes up considerable distances walking to their offices, collecting and checking the tickets in person. Arduous as that is today, it must have been downright hair-raising during the civil war, which he touches on as if it were a trifling inconvenience rather than a catastrophe.
In May 1984, when Ras Beirut was turned into a free-fire zone, Abdul Malik was offered 150 000 Lebanese pounds to sell up, âleave the area', as it was put to him. He refused point-blank. âWhen the street fighting started to get very heavy I had to close down some days, but when it died down I opened for business again.
They have lived in the Middle East for 5000 years, probably longer than the Arabs themselves. They are a people with their own language and culture, yet have never had a nation to call their own. Today 65 million strong, they are a substantial minority in four lands, but say the word âKurdestan' and shivers run down spines all the way from Baghdad to Washington, not to mention Tehran and Ankara. To the media they are a âproblem', even the UN won't encourage their hopes of nationhood. In the âliberation' of Iraq, they were an afterthought. Who are the Kurds? And what do they want? I am here to find out.
Here in the heartland of their âhomeland', âauthorities' cannot ignore them, only try to subdue them. As I am way out of tourist bounds, I have to be very discreet in seeking out the half persons of Qamishle, or my rough welcome to Syria's southern border may turn out to be a modest prelude to what awaits me on its northern frontier.
Force is more obvious in such places: it wears a uniform; is armed; it struts and swaggers. Trying to make myself inconspicuous as a waiter brings my thick Levantine coffee, I bend over the book I have brought with me. It is the 19th-century explorer Sir Richard Burton's translation of
Arabian Nights
and he is writing about Aladdin. âSoon he entered a coffee house, a fine building which stood in the marketplace, and which attracted many people to play at dice, backgammon, chess, and other games.'
I look up. Facing each other, a metre in front of my face, are two ancient men. At their elbows lie their coffees, steaming, forgotten, as one raises a playing card tremulously for a moment before slamming it on the table, face up, in triumph. His opponent grunts in admiration.
This could be 2002 or, if my name were Aladdin, 1002.
My reverie is broken by the presence of an earnest-looking man of about 40 years. I throw out what I hope will be a hook that doesn't impale the fisherman by saying, âI am just here looking for a Kurdish person.'
âI am a Kurdish person,' he replies. âMy name is Hussein Ahmad.' Bait taken.
Two hours later, I am seated cross-legged on the floor of a house in Hellalia, surely the poorest suburb of Qamishle, in the company of Hussein Ahmad and friends. We sip cardamom tea, and dine on goat and rice prepared by Hussein's sister, Shamsa. When the main course is finished, she presents us with a plate of
kulitcha
, a Kurdish shortbread.
Over the border, no more than a kilometre away, we can see a Turkish hillside. Kurds are also numerous there, where power flaunts itself even more menacingly, because that is where guerrillas of the PKK (Kurdish Workers' Party)âterrorists or freedom fighters, depending on how you view themâlurk.
It is not news to me that the Kurdish world is divided into two camps. The first subscribes to Lawrence's philosophy that âfreedom cannot be given; it can only be taken'. The other believes that the path of violence cannot lead to liberty.
Hussein refills my cup, and assures me that Syria's not-so-secret police would never dare disturb any gathering in this neglected, unsewered quarter of town. Opposite me, nibbling on his kulitcha, is a one-eyed âterrorist', Hussein's younger brother Abdul Latif Hussein Younis Ali.
âHow did you lose your eye?' I venture, hoping my curiosity will not be taken for impoliteness. During a gun battle in the Lebanese civil war, he tells me. âYou remember the bombing of the US Marines?'
The death of more than 200 Americans in a single blast in 1983 is not something a journalist is likely to forget. I nod. Younis Ali smiles toothlessly: his mouth has closed.
Now in his late thirties, Younis Aliâhead wrapped in red-and-white kaffiyehâsays he remains an active member of the PKK. He looks classically volatile, out to impress. At one point, without warning, he reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulls out ⦠a wallet. With another deft movement he proffers a small photo of Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader sentenced to death by Turkey. Suddenly he is on his feet, pumping the air like Atlas on speed. âI love him too much,' he gushes with the excessive zeal of the single-minded.
Younis Ali's English is threadbare. âDo Syria's Kurds feel better treated than their brothers and sisters in Turkey?' I ask his brother.
âIf a Kurd try to open a business [here], they will take away the permit,' he says. âHere they don't make this' (Hussein gets to his knees and looses off an imaginary Kalashnikov volley), âthey make do like this' (he now leaps across the refreshments to play-act at strangling me). I get the point.
âYouths I have spoken to hereâKurds who live in Canada and England, home for the feast of Eidâsay that the refusal of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey to give up any territory for Kurdestan means you have no alternative but to fight for it. Is that how you see things?'
âIf other people don't give you this, you must be fighting, the same for any country. Any people will fight for their freedom: you see Cuba, you see Vietnam. Too much talk, they give you nothing. If fighting, I think this is better.'
âAnd if you die fighting â¦?'
âDie together.'
Time to confront the fighters. âThe world calls you terrorists. How can you win through terror?'
âWe are not terrorists. If this is your house, and someone can come and stay in your house and not go away, where is the terrorism? This is our home, not for another people, not Turkey, not Syria. Three thousand years ago in this land you call Medea, we Kurds live here â¦'
LEBANON: 1â17 MARCH
Bad reputations cling to disaster zones like the lengthening tails of comets. Today your chances of being blown up in Beirut are probably less than those of being shot on the streets of America, but the 1980s civil war still makes this a no-go zone in the minds of most tourists. However, countries that have been to hell and back, like people who have been through the fire of experience, have stories to tell. And, even if we couldn't learn from them, perhaps it would deepen our sense of common humanity to make their acquaintance.
Time was when I flattered myself that, since we are born on the same planet, anywhere we go should feel like home. The experience of passing through many places has made me somewhat more discriminating. Now I would add that it is in the aftermath of human upheaval, where the local inhabitants have come face to face with what ultimately counts in life (shared human experience, not lost traveller's cheques), that the visitor with an open mind and heart feels most at home.
Like any civil war, Lebanon's was a struggle for power. But somewhere along the line the car bombs and hostage-taking diverted Western TV viewers from the root causes, and the mercenary motives of the warlords who posed as politicians.
Oddly enough, the fratricide ended with the unity of Lebanon but under a pro-Syrian government so that, for many Christians, the country when I visited was regarded as a colony of Damascus by the sea. But Beirut, with its openness and pumping neon nightlife, couldn't be less like Damascus if it tried.
Psychologists know that aggression stems from insecurity, and there we have a clue to Lebanon's volatile recent past. Within their own communities of belief, the dominant Muslim and Christian groups (Shias and Maronites) are regarded as minorities, with tales of persecution to tell. So are the Druze, the mountain-dwelling Muslim sect that even most of the other Muslims have little time for. Lebanon is a small, fragmented country. About the only thing fiercer than the forces pulling it apart is the attachment each of its minorities feels to the âidea' of Lebanese unity. After a few days here, Lebanon appears to me like a priceless Chinese vase that has been cracked but, because of the brilliant scenes depicted on it, no one wants to replace.
For most of its history, Lebanon has been a successful example of the âlive and let live' philosophy. To remember it at its worst is unfair.
DAY 293 (1 MARCH): BEIRUT
The early morning bus from Damascus pulls into Masnah, the Lebanese border post, soon after 9 am. I stay on board in Seat 3, while an obliging fellow passenger, a Lebanese doctor, takes my passport into the immigration building, together with a request. I've heard that Australians get fourteen-day visas on arrival but, as I hope to stay sixteen days, could I have longer?
Ten minutes pass, and a blue-jacketed official approaches the bus, my passport in hand. Here comes trouble, I think. He smiles, keeps me in the merest moment's suspense, and tells me how I'm in luck arriving on today's bus rather than yesterday's. From 1 March, Australians get a month-long visa upon arrival. He hands my passport up. âWelcome to Lebanon.' I thank him, and when he is gone turn to the doctor and say, âAren't I lucky 2002 isn't a leap year!"
Beirut is as I imagined it, one never-ending housing project sited between pine-forest cathedrals and that turquoise jewel, the Mediterranean. The search for an accessible downtown hotel takes time, and pauses only long enough for me to take in the somewhat unbelievable sight of the portly Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri, waddling into a seaside restaurant, flanked by a bevy of bodyguards.
Two years later, Hariri's bodyguards won't be able to save his life from a bomb detonated near this very spot. An old score will be settled, but not an old war revived.
The sensible response will not be to cancel travel to Lebanon. When the IRA let off bombs in London randomly during the early 1980s, tourists still flocked there. When shadowy Muslim immigrant groups brought carnage to the streets of Paris, no one seriously advised travellers to avoid the city of love. And when home-grown terror came to London in July 2005 the shock was palpable, yet life went on. But, of course, differentâdoubleâstandards apply to the Middle East.
The best accommodation option I come across is a âcheapie'âthe Hotel Regisâone block in from the beach and, although up a brief flight of stairs, staffed by friendly receptionists. The place is run by Syrians (like hotel, like country) and my chair is such a tight fit in the lift that a staff member must run upstairs and joggle the backrest until I shoot out of the elevator like a cannonball, nearly crushing him in the process.
The Hotel Regis's greatest drawback turns out to be its chief asset: it sits alone on a large urban block that would be known in Belfast as a âbomb site'. Down at heel, it must once have been down at hell: anyway, its splendid isolation means I am simultaneously in the heart of a vibrant city yet shielded from the worst of the noise.
Come evening, it's time to explore the neighbourhood I've just moved into. Only a couple of minutes away is the
corniche
, that LebaneseâFrench pavement where lovers stroll by the Mediterranean, their gaze on the winking light of an oil tanker out to sea. Peanut-and-cool-drink vendors solicit custom, while old men smoke shishas under a balmy night sky.
DAY 295 (3 MARCH): BEIRUT
After pushing through West Beirut, from the dowdy but still fashionable district of Hamra, I emerge on a road that takes me to the coast. Rearing over the road, confirming the guidebook map, is Luna Park. Will this be too strange for the gatekeepers at the palace of fun? I ask whether it will be possible for me to ride the Ferris wheel. No trouble at all: my wheelchair is carefully moved clear of the apparatus as I settle myself in the wire cage.
At the top of the ride, the operators stop for a full minute and I go snap-happy photographing the high-rise apartments, the Mediterranean, the football stadium protruding like a green lozenge beneath my feet and the entire expanse of Luna Park beneath me.
In an open-air café a few metres away, half a dozen patrons are kicking up their heels this Sunday afternoon in a collective dance step, to the rapt attention of not only myself but everyone else present. Recorded music it may be, but the sense of a people who know how to enjoy themselves, and are gobbling up life by the hungry mouthful after years of denial, is inescapable.
DAY 297 (5 MARCH): BEIRUT
Afif Abdul Malik has a low opinion of travel agents. âIn this business you have to be a liar,' he says as if speaking to an apprentice. With 53 years of satisfying other people's wanderlust, he should know. We are sitting in the CLTCâCentre Libanaise de Tourisme Culturelâin the quarter they call Ras Beirut, just up the hill from the American University. The once raffish neighbourhood became a cockpit of urban jungle warfare in the early '80s. However, Abdul Malik's agency has been on this (highly exposed) corner for 44 years and it will take more than a civil war to shift him.
âThere's not enough business here, you cannot make money. The Lebanese are called good businessmen not because they are geniuses: they are liars and opportunists,' he tells me, as thick coffee arrives in two small cups. âIt is a matter of ethics: you have to choose the low road.'
âAha! Then Abdul Malik, as you are still in business after all these years, you must be an exceptional travel agent, or else you are lying to me.'
âNot at all,' he chuckles. âBelieve me, I lose much work because of my ethics.'
Abdul Malik's office has two computers, but he seldom turns them on. At 76 he is not lapping up every new gadget that comes along. Anyway, he is devoted to real customer care, not the god of speed. For flight information he telephones the airlines, taking care to get the name of the person who handles his call; he totes up considerable distances walking to their offices, collecting and checking the tickets in person. Arduous as that is today, it must have been downright hair-raising during the civil war, which he touches on as if it were a trifling inconvenience rather than a catastrophe.
In May 1984, when Ras Beirut was turned into a free-fire zone, Abdul Malik was offered 150 000 Lebanese pounds to sell up, âleave the area', as it was put to him. He refused point-blank. âWhen the street fighting started to get very heavy I had to close down some days, but when it died down I opened for business again.
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