Borders of Love, Borders of War

Over dinner of delicious lamb kebab and lentil soup (Gaziantep is also known as the kitchen of Turkey), we discuss 2013’s fragile cease-fire in the 20-plus years of Kurdish armed struggle, and how it was recently broken. Many Turks have been trying to come to terms with the terrorist attacks in Suruc and Ankara, which left 130 dead, deeply polarizing an already divided country. With the government pointing the finger at the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), accusing it of collaborating with Islamic State, and pro-Kurdish groups pointing right back, we are faced with yet another impasse of understanding. “How else do you reverse the majority vote in your favor, six months after the people have rejected you?” Gulnaz asks. “You do it by planting fear in their hearts, and suppressing the media.” An eerie foreshadowing of the Paris massacre and Russian plane tragedy is buried in the subtext of these discussions. Turkey’s complicity by allowing a porous, uncontrolled border, along with the U.S. and French coziness with Erdogan, is alarming to my hosts. They have learned to put their trust in little more than what they see immediately in front of them, which, frankly, is the Kurdish opposition. Together with the YPG (People’s Protection Units) in Syria, and the PKK in Iraq and Turkey, the Kurds are the most credible and effective on-the-ground forces currently posing any resistance to Islamic State. Our journalist speaks of the PKK’S imminent plans to capture the last border crossing between Syria and Turkey, Jarabulus, which is currently controlled by Islamic State. Kurdish control of the border would certainly spell trouble for Erdogan, who is already frustrated by the West’s softening stance on Syrian President Bashar Assad. While in the past, Turkey has invested heavily in the Syrian opposition, including radical factions, to topple the Assad regime, the latest Islamic State attacks on European soil spell a major wake-up call for Erdogan and his position toward Islamic State and the entire Syrian conflict. One only need look at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights’ exhaustive list of Turkish support for Islamic State to see the kind of bind Erdogan is in now. Despite Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s protestations to the U.N. that describe Western allegations against Turkey as media smear campaigns, there is growing evidence of Turkish aid to Islamic State, including transcripts of Turkish truck drivers ferrying weapons to Islamic State and reports of Turkish border guards being bribed by hopeful jihadists, who call the border the “Gateway to Jihad.” Our stay in Gaziantep ends with a flourish: We’re invited to a Kurdish wedding. I watch as the young couple, no older that 22, enter a packed wedding hall and take their place center stage, dancing shyly, as a Kurdish band blares through damaged loudspeakers. Guests, mostly men, approach the stage with wads of American bills and throw them at the couple, a signal of hoped-for prosperity. We drink Orange Crush from plastic cups (this is a Muslim wedding, after all) and watch the dollars flutter like snowflakes around the newlyweds and settle to the floor, only to be swept up by a young boy and recycled for another well-wisher to toss at the couple. Then all the young men are called to the stage and they line up, locking pinkie fingers to begin the slow, deliberate Kurdish men’s wedding dance, their grim faces broken only by a few halfhearted grins. The entire time I’ve been in Turkey, now about nine days, I have been trying to figure out why so few people smile here. Watching the dance as it slowly gathers momentum and the drummer picks up the pace, I can’t help thinking of the Kurdish insurgency and the thousands of young men and women still fighting, the millions of displaced Syrians and the precariousness of borders, drawn by proxy wars, brutal extremists, corrupt leaders and careless foreign policy. Less than a week later, I am back in my guest house in Tunis, watching with horror as a television reporter on France 24 reports a shooting at a popular restaurant in Paris, then starts fielding reports of a bomb at a soccer stadium and hundreds taken hostage at a rock concert. I stay up through the night, glued to the TV and, like so many others, madly typing on Facebook and Twitter to see if my friends in France are safe. Then, a week later, as I am attending the Carthage Film Festival in downtown Tunis, a bomb explodes less than three blocks from where we are, in the host hotel, packed with festivalgoers. I get the distinct sense that I am living in a horror film, and that my own screenplay has suddenly turned real. I feel dizzy, disoriented. Where am I? Whose story really is this? I call Essma and she tells me she has not heard from her sister in Raqqa for two weeks. She may never know if Leila perishes in the unrelenting carpet bombing that has started there. As the aftermath of these attacks starts to settle into our collective conscience and these same social media channels are flooded with the posting and reposting of attempts to process our frustration and pain, I keep thinking of that little Syrian girl in Turkey, clutching her torn spiral notebook. She had a red pencil in her hand and a sweet smile on her face. I watch and listen as our somber world leaders, mostly men, address bodies of even more somber, mostly male politicians, amplified by the media, wielding a language of unremitting revenge, annihilation and war. How I wish they could sit for just one minute on those concrete blocks in that back alley in Gaziantep in front of this little girl. Perhaps she could teach them how to pause and listen, perhaps she could tear a sheet from that tattered spiral notebook of hers and help them learn her own language in order to write an entirely different story. For now, I live under a 9 o’clock curfew in Tunis, trying to finish my own narrative. Do I want it to be uplifting, defiant, a story of hope? There’s a saying in Tunisian, “Elli yestena, khir melli yetmana”—waiting is better than hoping. So for now, I wait. Amie Williams is an award-winning producer/director specializing in documentary film for broadcast, nongovernmental organizations and political campaigns. Her work has appeared on PBS, Al-Jazeera English, the BBC, Current TV and CBC Canada. Her feature documentaries include “Uncommon Ground,” “Stripped and Teased: Tales From Las Vegas Women,” “No Sweat,” “Amasan: Women of the Sea” and most recently “We Are Wisconsin.” The nonprofit she founded, GlobalGirl Media, trains young women from marginalized communities around the world in citizen journalism. Your support matters…

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#asylum #human rights #islamic state #istanbul #refugee #refugee crisis #syria #td-original #turkey #war