After a full night of travelling on what was possibly the hottest flight ive ever been on i spent the better part of the night trying to sleep in Istanbul airport with feet which had swelled up to the size of melons due to the extreme cabin temp from London. Not sure whether if it was hot to try to acclimatise cold Britons to turkey's heat or just to reinforce the fact that British weather in October is rubbish!
My boss and i decided that the only way forward was to consume some beers at 5 am, which as we boarded the red eye to Diyarbakir seemed to reinforce the slight weirdness of travelling through the night. The flight was full of Kurdish businessmen heading back to the city which is the focus of the current political struggle of the Kurdish people for recognition and freedom. We are flying out as part of the UK delegation to observe and monitor the mass trial of 152 Kurdish people by the Turkish state for charges of crimes against the state.
In order to have a little time to ourselves we have travelled out a day earlier, we are later travelling over the border into Kurdistan and researching business opportunities and offering our services to the KRG government, so being able to get a understanding of the Kurdish region this side of the border is a big help.
On arrival at Diyarbakir it is immediately obvious of the massive military presence in this city. The few commercial flights which land use a shared airstrip with the military and as i strode across the airstrip we are surrounded by high chain link fences with razor wire and an array of armed military personnel who are strolling giving the passengers the look over. We seek out a taxi driver to take us to our hotel which is in the newer part of Diyarbakir. Diyarbakir has seen massive economic growth in the last ten years with a massive splurge of high rise apartment blocks and suburban spread.
One of the things my nicotine lungs have been desiring is a cigarette and it is fine to smoke in the taxi, as my time in the east of turkey goes past i realise more and more that they operate a very lax approach to seat belts and road traffic rules and like my other trips east ... the horn is king. The roads' traffic is a mix of shiny new four by fours and family cars, older style taxi's and agricultural vehicles and man pushed handcarts laden with goods for sale on the roads side or in the tiny winding streets of the old town sur. Very occasionally we swerve to pass a donkey with an older Kurd in traditional dress astride seemingly oblivious to all the kafuffle behind him.
In order to avoid the main drag traffic our taxi driver runs a small detour round some back streets, small children play in the rubble strewn streets, women wash down their front steps, and beat out carpets and young Kurdish boys send footballs arcing through the spray. It is interesting to later learn that there was a project to give out a lot of footballs to young people to encourage sport playing instead of rock throwing at the Turkish military which had resulted in over 7000 youths being arrested and put in jail. Surprisingly the footballs did not really work, the young people are still angry at their lack of political freedom, a football is not going to replace a sense of justice and acknowledgement! The majority of Kurdish people live a long way below the poverty line, a lot of the residents of Diyarbakir are the children of those which were forced into the city by the government endorsed resettlement plans, and some are refugees come over the border in the the 90's fleeing Saddam's persecution. Others are simply the ethnic Kurdish population who have always resided in this area of Turkey and are yet to be given the recognition or a semblance of equal rights in their native country.
We are staying at what is one of the newer hotels in Diyarbakir, in a fairly newly built district bursting with Turkish brand shops and coffee bars and places to eat along with various bars catering to those who do drink in this district. It is incredibly hot as we disembark and rearrange ourselves in the room, but luckily we have air conditioning and i finally get feet which have returned to the actual size they should be! Our delegation is not arriving till late in the evening so we have the day to explore the city.
We head off on foot through this new district to the go within the city walls into the old town known as Sur. Walking along the streets can be a bit precarious as son much is still a building site and pavements finish and potholes arrive without any warning. Building is haphazard and seemingly occuring without much thought to planning or impact. We pass several rusty and decidedly bent scaffold system where young men shimmying up and down with no rope harness or safety systems in place. Young boys of around 7 or 8 push hand made sacks on wheels and collect rubbish from the streets, plastic bottles and such like, weaving in and out of the congested traffic and narrowly at times avoiding getting squashed by all manner of road traffic. We walk down one of the more formal boulavards and pass by a military encampment with sentries in pill boxes at each corner and rifles pointed out into the street. The military operate a very large base here, and they live the army lifestyle contained completely within base, with all their families housed in the compounds and all facilities within. They have very little to do with the city or with its residents as people other than in their military role.
We pass through one of the municipal parks, green and lush but with a slightly disused feeling, the fountains are not running and a big bronze of attaturk looks solemnly down on all within the park boundaries. Eventually we reach the walls of the old town and one of the four main gates into the city. The walls are built out of black and white stone and have been much restored over the last few years, but they still create an impressive physical barrier as well as a mental barrier.... the city inside remains little changed since medieval times with twisting tiny streets running between the houses and covered bazaars with all the traders selling their wares. They is a vast aaray of produce on display from dried fruit to nuts and the heady aroma of spices. We walk down the streets and as it is saturday people are in a playful mood, little children run and skip in the alleyways from doorway to doorway and occasionally a child will turn to say a shy hello or how are you in broken english. We pass the oldest mosque in Diyarbakir and its cylindrical stone carved muezzin tower. There are workshops for the metal working and black smithing, dark and black interiors that emit deep amber sparks and the loud crash of an industry little changed for millennia.
It has now been a tumultuous and busy few days since our arrival in the heat of Diyarbakir, The trial has attracted a lot of national press coverage but the international coverage has been muted at best and misinformed and prejudiced at best. Their are representatives from various European delegations including Sweden, Germany, France, Switzerland and representatives from the EU including several MEP's. As for the compilation of our delegation we are 2 MP's, three lawyers and human rights campaigners and one Kurdish PHD student resident in the Uk and of course little old PA me...
Our daily activities start early with the struggle to get into court each day, organisation is a chaotic, the struggle and crush around the court gate provides the perfect bottle neck so that the media can get its shots of differing people arriving each day. Family members have come down and large numbers of people gather to watch and mark their protest, their is a heavy police presence, with armed and riot geared police standing around, as well as air surveillance in the form of helicopters and snipers posted on every tall building in the vicinity.
The Italian delegation are loud in protest, colourfully demonstrating via the use of a brightly coloured banner proclaiming 'free everybody' in Turkish, Kurdish, English and Italian. They have been the most proficient at grabbing the media's attention each day. However this is to the dissent of the Turkish riot police, who eventually decide they have had enough of this flagrant media circus and show of free speech and decide to enclose and shift the protesting group away from the court entrance. They force the protest down the road to group together on the outside of the Diyarbakir town hall plaza. Eventually the protest manages to close off more then one street lane to except the growing amount of protesters.
