I was 26 years old in April 1991 when I climbed the Isikveren circus, a remote place in Anatolia at 2,000 meters that served as the border between Iraq and Turkey. The United States had just defeated Saddam Hussein in Kuwait and encouraged the revolt of the Kurds and Shiites once morest the dictator. When they did, Saddam crushed them. The Kurds fled and took refuge in Isikveren, where they arrived first by car and then on foot, from Erbil, Mosul, Dahuk and Zakho, across the eastern plains of the Tigris and up the southern slopes of the Hakkari range.
The first day I went up there I met a Turkish army corporal with an assault rifle across his back and a stick with which he was beating children, women and men who were kneeling on torn sacks of grain, holding the punishment while collecting all the humanitarian aid they might. The luckier ones had gotten their hands on bundles of blankets and food weighing more than forty pounds. When the rods were not enough, the soldiers threw stones or shot into the air.
That morning I noticed a young man who was on the ground, on his knees, protecting what he had achieved with his arms. He looked back at me and stood up, smiled at me and just then a bullet pierced his chest. He collapsed instantly, eyes wide, hands clutching cookies, chocolate, and powdered milk.
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A very thick silence then fell on us, the refugees and the soldiers. No one moved or spoke for a few seconds that seemed like hours. A Turkish officer finally gave the order to fall back and his men obeyed.
The recumbent young man was still smiling, or so it seemed to me. It was the first time I had seen a downcast person. I didn’t dare move and mightn’t stop looking at him. The wound was the size of a coin, but it was not bleeding. It was a dark hole in a dark sweater. His eyes shone, his hands were very dirty, his hair matted, and his right foot badly crooked. Three men took him away, and then the women came with high-pitched, long, sustained ululations.
The next day I met Ursh and Fuad, two surveyors who had been working until the time of the flight. They did not think that the tragedy would reach them. They had relied on routine. They believed that as long as they might do the same they would be safe. They said that without work they might not live, that they had no savings to emigrate. They insisted that routine is life and consistency is good. What little dignity they had left was used to offer me tea, to speak to me with English words learned at the University of Baghdad and to transmit to me the pride they felt for having drawn maps for mining and oil companies.
“Without ideas or logic, there is no peace,” Fuad reflected as he tried to count the days he had been trapped in Isikveren. “We left Dahuk before the artillery hit the center. We saw the bodies of four or five children in a ditch. They were next to his mother’s. No one stopped to bury them, and we kept going too. We were the whole family, sixteen people, ten children. The youngest is eight months old. We walked for two days. When we reached the Turkish border, the soldiers did not let us continue. They fired into the air. She rained and snowed. It was very cold. The blankets were soaked. We mightn’t take shelter because we weren’t allowed to set up tents. With us we had brought some bread, flour, tea, milk and sugar. It was for the children. We have patience, but they don’t. On the second day they let us enter Turkey. We walked for three more days. We only carried what we might carry. The cold prevented us from sleeping. The rain and snow made our way difficult. Arriving here we feel miserable, abandoned and helpless. We set up a tent with blankets, sticks and plastic for the women and children. We continue to sleep in the open. You don’t know what it means to sleep on this floor, in this cold. You think you will have to bury your children, that you will not survive either.”
Isikveren smelled and tasted of what the world smells and tastes of, mud and honey mixed with putrefaction. Force and chance bent us down and lifted us up. We were at his mercy, and perhaps no one was more so than Magid, an eight-year-old boy burned by a chemical agent, probably napalm. His store was next to one of the cemeteries that sprang up spontaneously in that refugee camp. I visited him for several days, he hardly got up, I never heard him speak, the graves grew around him and one morning he was gone. They buried him before I got there.
“The young man was still smiling or so, at least, it seemed to me. It was the first time he had seen a downcast person.”
Inside the family tent, an old man was rolling a cigarette lying on the blanket that served as his bed. He told me that he was Magid’s grandfather and that he would accept anything, even starvation and the death of the children, if in exchange for that suffering the Americans would assassinate Saddam Hussein and transform Iraq into a country that was at peace with itself. “They have forced us out of our homes and you cannot live here,” he said, exhaling smoke. I nodded, and he looked up, smiled at the sky with his few remaining teeth, and made a wish. At that moment, two warplanes made a pass over the field. It was more of a coincidence than a miracle because the US Air Force had been patrolling the area for days, but the old man had words of thanks to the merciful god of him.
Tens of thousands of Kurds died during those spring weeks in the Hakkari mountain range, victims of US foreign policy. They believed in a cruel god and learned that there is no such thing as geostrategic mercy. The leaders who go out of their way to save one man are the same ones who accept the annihilation of many. Grace is the culmination of tragedy, something very rare.
Alexander, Napoleon and Stalin might murder and forgive, be cruel and magnanimous. Stalin said that killing one man is very difficult, but killing a million is very easy.
Large magnitudes reinforce the abstraction in which barbarism flourishes, while small ones confront us with the much greater challenge of killing with our own hands. Nothing seems to have changed much since Troy.
Many times I have had the feeling that Isikveren is a beginning, a story that contains the others that I have written throughout my career. He taught me, for example, that man, very often, has no choice but to live between betrayal and suffering.
It also taught me that the more you look at the world, the more you understand that its foundations are sustained by defeats. I believe that the defeated, the free defeated, not subjected to slavery, to the vassalage of the victors, have always been the great architects of the present. The world is much more of them than of the victors because, being genuine children of defeat, they are also children of peace.
The victors, on the other hand, to accept peace, must also recognize the part of defeat that lives in them. Perhaps for this reason, following all, we can all recognize ourselves in a defeat but not many can do it in a victory.
Isikveren is also a paradigm of the force that twists our soul. It might have been an episode of the Iliad , one more passage of men who destroy themselves oblivious to the whims of the gods. It was the first tragedy I witnessed, and all the others have resembled it.
“The more you look at the world, the more you understand that defeats sustain it”
Isikveren shows the subordination of man to force, but also the rebalancing and continuation, and I think that historical time shows us that the world works like this, without definitive answers, but neither with eternal ruptures.
