Free From The Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple Page A

roots. The Ottoman Empire was administered by a system which allowed, and indeed thrived on, diversity. Each millet or religious community was internally self-governing, with its own laws and courts. The new Turkey of Ataturk went to the opposite extreme: uniformity was all. The vast majority of Greeks were expelled, and those who remained had to become Turks, at least in name. The same went for the Kurds. Officially they do not exist. Their language and their songs were banned until very recently; in official documents and news broadcasts they are still described as 'Mountain Turks'.
    It is this ludicrous - and deeply repressive - fiction that has led to the current guerrilla war. Because of it the rebels of the PKK are now involved in a hopeless struggle to try and gain autonomy for the Turkish Kurds, something Ankara will never allow. More than ten thousand people have been killed in the south-east of Turkey in the last five years, and great tracts of land and around eight hundred villages have been laid waste in an effort to isolate and starve out the guerrillas. At least 150,000 Turkish troops are tied down in the mountains of the south-east, fighting perhaps ten thousand PKK guerrillas. At the moment the government seems to have the upper hand, and it is said the average life expectancy of a guerrilla is now less than six months.
    Hugh says that the fighting, though currently intermittent, is expected to reach a new climax in the coming weeks: summer is the fighting season.
    I plan to set off to the south-east next week. Antioch - modern Antakya - is on the edge of the trouble. Once there it should be easier to judge how bad things really are: it is virtually impossible to gauge the difficulty of getting to the Syrian Orthodox monasteries from here, and the situation changes from day to day. Inshallah it should be possible to get through without taking any unreasonable risks. Hugh has given me the name of a driver in Diyarbakir who last year was willing - for a price - to drive him into the war zone.
    He also raised the question of whether I should get a press card. On the one hand, he says, the authorities in the south-east hate all journalists: last year his wife was beaten up by the police in Nusaybin when she produced her card. On the other hand, he says that no one will believe me if I say I'm a tourist - no tourist has gone anywhere near the south-east for three or four years now - and if I have no Turkish ID he tells me that there is a real possibility that I could get arrested for spying.
    On my return from supper I asked the advice of Metin, the hotel receptionist, whose home is in the south-east. He seems to think my plans are hysterically funny. 'Don't worry, you'll only get shot if you run into a PKK roadblock, and only get blown up if you drive over a landmine. Otherwise the south-east is fine. Completely safe. In fact highly recommended.'
    Becoming serious, Metin said that if the police did not arrest me, and if I did not drive over any landmines, there was always the delightful possibility of being kidnapped by the PKK. This happened last year to three British round-the-world cyclists. They were not in the least harmed, but as the guerrillas cannot light fires - that would reveal their whereabouts to the army - the hostages were forced to live for three months on snake tartare and raw hedgehog.
    'The tourists should consider themselves lucky,' said Metin. 'If it had been Turkish soldiers that had fallen into the PKK's hands, they would have had their dicks cut off. Then the PKK would kill them. Roasted them over a fire or something. Very slowly. Chargrilled them.'
'And this sort of thing still goes on?'
    'These guys are committing mass murder right now,' answered Metin.
'But they only do that to Turkish soldiers, right?'
    'You can't be too careful in the east,' said Metin, twirling his moustache. 'As they say in Ankara: Kurdistan is like a cucumber. Today in your hand; tomorrow up your