The Atlantic and Its Enemies (81 page)

The State responded as it had done since the first Kurdish rebellion in 1925, nominating ‘village guards’, who were given weaponry. These tactics were dangerous, in that the guards themselves might hand over the weaponry, and the PKK specifically attacked them - sometimes wiping out entire families or even villages. The army could hardly defend each and every mountain hamlet, and in the later 1980s it was outmanoeuvred: in much of the south-east, the PKK controlled roads as soon as night fell, and it took the military some time to work out proper tactics. These were harsh - the forced evacuation of hamlets, the population being despatched to towns, especially Diyarbakır, which doubled and trebled in size, with hastily erected tower blocks and tent cities. Foreign journalists, seeing the resultant overcrowding and misery, blamed the Turkish state, and its officials, in turn, were sometimes clumsy in handling this - expelling critics or even putting them on trial. Martyrs were created. The wife of the mayor of Diyarbakır, Leyla Zana, demonstrated upon taking the oath in parliament: she used Kurdish and created an uproar (though she went on to take the oath formally in Turkish). She received an eleven-year sentence, and the European parliament took up her cause. All of this allowed the PKK to make the running when it came to propaganda in foreign countries, particularly in Germany (which tolerated the PKK networks), France (where an Institut kurde was set up) and Belgium, which stood host to a Kurdish parliament in exile that was in effect controlled by Apo (though in the end he worked against it). In Sweden there was an ostensibly enlightened policy, of allowing immigrant children education in their own languages. Absurd preaching teams from Sweden then arrived in south-eastern Turkey, with a view to standardizing Kurdish, in a country where basic textbooks were lacking.

But there was also an ostensibly non-terrorist Kurdish political element, which gained parliamentary representation in the early 1990s when it struck an electoral pact with a left-wing party. It itself was promoted by the leader of the Türk tribe, Ahmet, using the tribal patronage machine as his brothers had earlier (1967) been involved with the Republican or Justice Party, depending upon the swings of local patronage. Twenty-four members of the ruling family had been killed in vendettas, and Ahmet Türk was himself imprisoned on suspicion of concealing a member of the PKK. However, he resurfaced as a purportedly moderate, culturally oriented, would-be politician. Through a political group that called itself variously ‘People’s Democratic Party’ or ‘Democratic People’s Party’, demands ostensibly of a purely cultural nature could be advanced - arguments for education in Kurdish, for instance, which appeared to be entirely reasonable but in practice would have required the creation of a standardized Kurdish with a far bigger vocabulary,
i.e.
almost the same creative effort for a Kurdish State that had gone into the making of the Turkish Republic itself. Why, thought most Turks and Kurds, bother? The party operated summer schools in Romania. There was a further problem, in that a good part of the Kurdish population of the south-east was strongly religious, and there was fighting between militant Islamic groups and the PKK, which was, at least in the first decade, very strongly secular, and dedicated to the emancipation of women. One prominent Kurd, Abdülmelik Fırat, grandson of Sheikh Said, might have served as overall spokesman for the cause, but the secularism of the PKK put him off. In the later 1990s the Turkish Kurds in the south-east divided between nationalists, with PKK connections of this or that depth, and Islamists; elsewhere in Turkey their votes simply went to the existing Turkish parties. In all of this, Greece was well to the fore. There were training camps on Greek soil, and Greece was the favoured place for PKK people to be smuggled through, via Belgrade, to Syria. Rich businessmen, army officers and politicians all took a hand and in the end Öcalan was kidnapped by Turkish military intelligence from the Greek embassy in Kenya. Western Europe played its part. The Kurdish cause was taken up by some French people, including Danielle Mitterrand, in 1989, in connection with the revolutionary bicentennial. In Italy the Communist network could be used, as was shown when Öcalan in 1998 was forced out of Syria and tried to find refuge among allies in Italy, the government of which, for a time, was craven and would not expel him, despite Interpol most-urgent arrest warrants. There was an element of smuggling of people and of drugs into western Europe which made the PKK merge with existing criminal networks, and a constant barrage of propaganda put the Turks on the defensive. They themselves did try manfully to respond to such Western criticism. For instance, one result of the film
Midnight Express
was for Turkish prisons to be run on liberal, reformist lines, the prisoners assembling, running much of their own life, and equipped ultimately with e-mails or cellular telephones. In the outcome, they became little Marxist universities. Eventually, the authorities felt strong enough to decree a change of regime, with single cells, where prisoners could not be intimidated. There followed hunger strikes by people whom the terrorists simply nominated. Later, as the cause became more desperate, there was a similar attempt at suicide-bombings, and various girls would again be nominated to pretend to be pregnant, and then blow themselves up against a state target. These were not in fact successful - the girls lost their nerve, blew themselves up in the wrong place, or simply could not go along with it. Of a dozen suicide bombings, only two succeeded. There had been a moment, in the early 1990s, when Turgut Özal appeared to be suggesting some sort of Turkish-Kurdish confederal arrangement and there was even a long wrangle in the cabinet, when the
éminence grise
of Turkish politics, Kamran İnan, himself of prominent Kurdish origin (he was related to the Bucaks), argued the cause. Özal’s suggestion, if in fact it was seriously advanced, was very unpopular. But it would have been a good thing.

For Turks, and great numbers of Kurds, the answer was assimilation in Turkey. This was very far from senseless, but the bad feeling that had developed since the 1960s was difficult to overcome. For Turkey there appeared to be two solutions - one, the assimilation of millions of Kurds in the more prosperous west and south; two, the advance of the GAP project, the bringing of water and hydro-electricity, on an enormous scale, to south-eastern Turkey, through a project of endless dams and hydro-electrical works, to bring prosperity and hope to an area beset by dry agriculture, a demographic nightmare, and endless throwing away of rubbish. A whole team of social engineers was attached to this project, to bring education to the children and enlightenment to the women, to remind them that polygamy and chadors (the word means ‘tent’) did not have to be their lot in life. Which would win: Kurdish nationalism, or a modern Turkey, following the European patterns? Özal’s success was to make Turkey prosperous enough for this problem to have a worldwide dimension. His failure was not to see it through, with a strategy. And that was the verdict on the eighties as a whole.

26

Chichikov

What
was
Moscow to make of 1983? Three things were clear enough. The economic crisis in the West had not proved deadly, for a start: quite to the contrary, the eighties boom was under way, and the most interesting Russian comment was a question, why, with an education system five times better, do we have an economy five times worse (a question still not answered: perhaps the answer is that real mathematicians are not interested in arithmetic). Then again, there was China, which, having made an enormous and murderous mess of her version of War Communism, was now flourishing mightily with her version of the New Economic Policy. Finally there was the Middle East and its oil. Blundering into a quagmire in Afghanistan, the USSR had lost all around, and her outstations in the Third World were liabilities.

But so too were the satellites in eastern Europe. None of these countries was an asset, and the exports of Comecon, put together, amounted to about two thirds of Mexico’s. They took Soviet oil on cheap terms, and in public relations terms were headaches. The worst case was Poland’s. Historically, the relationship had been a poisonous one, of bullying and self-pity, a sort of permanent
vierge folle
and
époux infernal.
Rousseau had told the Poles: you cannot stop them from swallowing you; make sure they cannot digest you. Balzac had offered different advice: get on with practical life and make yourselves indispensable to the Russians. The Poles in a sense did both, because they did develop a first-rate intelligentsia, but instead of being loyal Communists, or even, like Czechs or Slovenes, just progressives of the sort that Communists could use, they marched off in a different direction altogether and produced the most vibrant political Catholicism in the world. Frenchmen, trained from earliest infancy in anti-clericalism, could not believe the crowds they saw in Poland welcoming the Pope. ‘Like the Ayatollah,’ sniffed one of those Frenchmen.

There were great differences between Poland and the other ‘bloc’ countries. In the first place she had a ‘mass of manoeuvre’, a population coming on for 40 million, and still, in the 1960s, expanding, and that because of a second considerable difference: a large peasant population, still set in the old days, with hay-carts trundling along on the roads. That in turn reflected another great difference, that the Western Allies had had some sort of formal rights as regards Poland, and even Stalin shrank from applying the full-scale Soviet formula there. Some version of due process had to be gone through, and collectivization of agriculture, the expropriation of private peasant plots, would have excited resistance. A consequence of all this was that the Catholic Church remained powerful - much more so than in Hungary, where there was a strong Protestant tradition, or Czechoslovakia, where anti-clericalism was also strong. Poland was different.

The Communists after the war had attempted ‘modernization’, the development of big industry, and, in the areas taken from Germany, that was not unpromising. There already was substantial enough mining, and a steel industry was built up. The old Kattowitz - Katowice - was a grim nineteenth-century barracks of a town, and it now acquired a Communist overlay. An enormous stadium was put up in the centre, as an open challenge to the Church that would otherwise have dominated the area. In Cracow, which was very Catholic and proper, a gigantic steelworks, Nowa Huta, went up, and the general idea was that with sport, women’s emancipation and a healthy proletarian work-day rather than mindless peasant agriculture, a new Polish version of ‘Soviet man’ would emerge. But the early, Stalinist, programme was carried through by a small group of mainly Jewish Communists, and they were broken when Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956.

A ‘native Communism’ took their place, under Władysław Gomułka, himself to a limited extent their victim, and he was prepared to co-operate with the Church and the peasants, and the intelligentsia as well, on the understanding that, with ‘modernization’, matters would go his way. This did not happen: on the contrary, the intelligentsia resented the censorship, and encouraged student revolts. The regime fought back, identifying the Jewish origins of many of the people involved, and drove some of them out. A characteristic victim of that moment (1968) was Leszek Kołakowski. Interwar Poland had crashed, especially with the failure of the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis in 1944, and a good part of the intelligentsia, seeing the Red Army coming in, became, if not Communist, then at least sympathizers. It was a version of a fairly old Warsaw problem: Russia, whatever her appalling features, worked, and Poland, whatever her admirable ones, did not. Kołakowski, philosopher and historian of ideas, went along, and even helped falsify electoral returns in 1946: why bother accurately recording the votes of the Polish peasantry, obstinate clowns (the original of ‘clown’ is a Dutch word meaning ‘peasant’) and boors (ditto). A sojourn in Moscow caused some shock; but he was an enthusiastic supporter of Gomułka and the promise of a new Poland. Then the 1960s brought disillusion. He wanted to answer the central question of why reform Communism was not working. This was not a subject that he could openly address. He therefore addressed it in ingenious disguise: in
Religious Inspiration and Church Link
he wrote what purported to be a work of history, about the Dutch Calvinist Church of the early seventeenth century, when the (Arminian) effort to humanize it had failed, against the Counter-Remonstrants, who were enthusiastic about damning people. He had learned Dutch more or less on the train in order to write this book, a long one, hardly penetrable by the censors or for that matter anyone else. But it was enough to predestine him to exile, the more so as his wife was Jewish, and there followed the sort of distinguished career that put Poland back on the world’s intellectual map for the first time, in effect, since Copernicus in the sixteenth century. The three-volume
Main Currents in Marxism
is a classic. But in his disillusionment Kołakowski was in good company. Student revolts saw Gomułka off.

In the seventies the opposition gradually built up. As elsewhere in the ‘bloc’, intellectuals were a main element, and in ordinary circumstances this could be a ticket to nowhere: ‘daring arguments, tame conclusions’, as A. J. P. Taylor had said of Vienna in 1900. Beards talked ‘civil society’, and Thomas Aquinas was much brandished in the wind. Among the intelligentsia of western Europe, and especially in Italy, there was a desperate desire for some connection with the real proletariat. This was generally a hopeless cause, and so it also proved in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Marx had said that ‘the conjunction of the proletariat and the intelligentsia’ would bring Communism; he had gone on, to the effect that ‘philosophy cannot become reality without the abolition of the proletariat and the proletariat cannot abolish itself unless philosophy becomes reality’. In Poland these words came to mean something; and of all revenges on Marx, through the medium of the Catholic Church. The French observer who dismissed the masses’ religious enthusiasms as Ayatollah-like had it entirely wrong: the Church, historically, had been adept at raising the cause of the poor, and besides, in Poland, it was
the
national institution. Workers could be mobilized by priests, and this was to happen again and again as the seventies went ahead. The intellectuals went along, and found themselves having to talk common language with priests in a way that had no counterpart elsewhere. But it mattered also that the workers were galvanized by other factors: an industrialization that worked out very badly. In that decade the Communist Party (it had a different name in Poland) had also embarked on a supposedly unifying and national strategy, economic growth.