I take back what I said in my previous post, as the Turkish army has announced it bombed 31 targets inside northern Iraq since October 4. I guess I was too busy packing to check the news properly. The seventh air raid took place yesterday, although, as a caveat, I must note that many believe this to be state-organized propaganda, with the possibility of zero targets having been hit or even aimed at.

This morning as I was heading out of my hotel, the man at reception asked me how long I would be staying in Istanbul. “Not long,” I said, “I’m heading down towards Diyarbakir.” He looked at me strangely. “Diyarbakir? What are you going to do there? It’s not a very nice place. I went there to do my military service but there is nothing there really.” (Diyarbakir is the capital city of the Kurdish territories in the southeast) I told him that I was not really here for tourism, but rather had come to document Turkey’s different cultures. He looked perplexed and frowned as I walked out the front door in search of a restaurant.

A friend of mine who is half Turkish half Kurdish warned me before coming not to even pronounce the word “Kurdistan” once inside Turkey. “Tensions are so high right now,” she said, “people are capable of killing a Kurd in the street if he admits his origins.” I climbed the stairs to a rooftop restaurant with her words on my mind. My waiter brought me the menu and some tea. After I had eaten, he came to chat for a bit and asked the usual questions. “Diyarbakir?!” he exclaimed, and leaned in closer. “I am from Diyarbakir.”

“You are Kurdish?”

” Yes”

“I have come to document the conflict,” I said.

“Oh thank you. My name is Akim,” he said, his eyes growing moist, and proceeded to tell me of his family’s struggle.

20 years ago his father’s house was bombed by Turkish forces in Diyarbakir and he fled with his family to Istanbul. But work was hard to come by and all his brothers and sisters left to Germany or London in search of a better life. “Here in Istanbul, you can go to factory and ask for job, but they say, ‘where you come from? Diyarbakir? Sorry, no work.’ It’s big problem. There is no work in Kurdistan, no schools, no money. We cannot advance.” (An aside: these statements have not been fact checked)

Akim, like many Kurds in Turkey, would like to see Kurds living in peace and able to thrive culturally,  but he would not go so far as to say that he supports the PKK, The Kurdish Worker’s Party, which is considered a terrorist organization by the US, NATO and the European Union. Many Kurds believe there is too much corruption inside the party and that at times, the PKK and Turkish military act in collusion in order to continue receiving funds, further fuelling the conflict at the expense of civilians. The PKK’s violent tactics have earned Turkey’s Kurds an unfavorable reputation in recent years, and while Kurds are united in their struggle to keep their cultural identity, they don’t necessarily appreciate the party’s methods. (The likelihood of Kurds admitting openly that they support the PKK is pretty slim for fear of persecution). It’s something of a catch 22 situation with no apparent end to the conflict in sight, though the Turkish government did say last week that they have engaged in diplomatic talks with Northern Iraq in the hopes of finding a solution. That’s a step in the right direction at least.

While Turkey aspires to join the EU, they have a long ways to go in dealing with this conflict as well as affording basic freedoms to their people. Youtube is banned here, for example, which really annoys me because I can’t watch the latest Sarah Palin media gaffs!