Free Magic Bus by Rory Maclean Page A

Ölüdeniz.’
    â€˜That’s…’ I search for the right word ‘… impressive.’
    Each development marked a turning-point in the growth of Turkish tourism, transforming – in most cases – wild coastline into resort conurbations.
    â€˜I’ve been a planning officer, a copywriter of brochures. I’ve advised Kuoni, Thomson, Abercrombie and Kent. As soon as the holiday-makers arrive, with their sun-cream and condoms, I leave the place to them. You’ve heard of the Arab traveller al-Muqaddasi? In the tenth century, he wrote that cities on the sea are hotbeds of fornication and sodomy. Nothing’s changed in a thousand years.’
    â€˜Overdevelopment has changed Turkey.’
    â€˜Tourism is the factory without a chimney,’ he insists, again in a unemotional tone. ‘It’s good for the economy, and thriving economy improves lives.’
    â€˜So why are you travelling east?’ I ask him. As far as I know, the next mainstream tourist stop is Goa, 5,000 miles ahead in India.
    â€˜Let me tell you a story,’ says Oscar, ‘about two brothers from Bingöl.’
    I unfold my road map.
    â€˜It’s a Kurdish town, poor of course, with red clay, lavender honey and so little work that men must look elsewhere for things to do. There are Koranic schools, soldiers on the street and wolves in the mountains. In truth, this is a story about wolves; about running from wolves, fighting with wolves, becoming a wolf.’
    Bingöl lies to the south of the overland route in Turkey’s impoverished hard-baked south-east, where a vicious guerrilla war raged for sixteen years.
    â€˜These two brothers were brought up alone by their mother for, I’m sorry to say, they had seen their father shot dead.’
    â€˜Shot?’ I repeat, because there is no sorrow in his voice. He simply recounts the facts of a tragedy.
    â€˜He was a songwriter and a prominent member of the PKK.’
    Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, the Kurds have aspired to nationhood. The outlawed PKK – or Kurdistan Workers’ Party – led the insurgency throughout the 1990s.
    â€˜But these details aren’t important to the story. What is important is that the brothers – so good, so calm – grew up in a kind of isolation, because their mother kept them indoors, fearful that the Nationalists would come next for her boys.’
    While western Turkey prospered, Oscar goes on to explain, with rapid economic growth and mass urbanization, the Kurds as a whole were cut adrift, forbidden to teach and broadcast in their own language, isolated because their aspirations threatened Turkish unity. Their guerrilla war unfolded far away from television cameras, claiming over 30,000 lives.
    â€˜The brothers dreamed the dreams that boys do, of becoming pop stars or inter-city bus drivers. But when they grew into young men, the only work available to them, apart from bee-keeping, was heroin-smuggling from Iran. Of course, if you can feed neither yourself nor your sick mother, you feel ashamed, you get angry, you look for someone to blame. Then, in your feeble fury, the wolves come after you.’
    Again I’m unsettled by Oscar’s cold calm, by his chilling talk of revenge without a trace of emotion.
    â€˜Violence begets violence. No Kurd can sit on the fence. He must decide to run with the wolves or to run away from them.’
    Bingöl was a divided town, he tells me, a stronghold of both the PKK and a shadowy Sunni group called Hizbullah; same name, same mentality, but separate from the Lebanese Hezbollah. Together, the PKK and Hizbullah shared a hatred of the Nationalists.
    â€˜The first boy ran to the west, away from his beloved younger brother. He changed his family name. He sold himself, and Turkey. Every month he sent home money.’
    â€˜And the other brother?’ I ask.
    â€˜He fell in with the wolves, running east with them,