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Part 4 in "Village of the Dammed," a blog mini-series from Turkey, on the country's controversial Ilisu Dam.\r\rBefore heading to Hasankeyf, the focus of the Ilisu Dam controversy, my traveling companions and I visited the small shiite village of Örtülü, in eastern Turkey, on the southwest side of Mount..\n
09.22.08
Part 4 in "Village of the Dammed," a blog mini-series from Turkey, on the country's controversial Ilisu Dam.
Fourteen kids, ages six to 11, darted around the grounds in nationally mandated blue smock uniforms. They were all beautiful and, while they recited the Turkish alphabet for me with zeal, they were obviously way more interested in our presence (particularly the presence of my video camera), and the fleet of donkeys the boys had wrangled, than in the classroom. The majority of girls will attend school until the age of 11 or so when they'll then settle into domestic responsibilities. About half of the boys attend the middle school in a neighboring town while they other half stays to work on the farms. I chatted (via one of my travel companions Tamer, who translated) with Gokhan Güney, the only school teacher for a total enrollment of 32 students (though we never caught a glimpse of the missing 18). He mentioned that the population of the area has been steadily decreasing. Tamer later explained to me that Kurdish separatists come into the village and ask young Kurdish boys to join their cause, and boys who refuse are killed. Many pack up and leave the region out of fear and frustration. Since this visit, I've been thinking hard on the presence of the Kurdish nation in Turkey (which populates the region from here south to the Iraqi border) and their long and deeply rooted history of oppression.An estimated 15 million Kurds, more than half of the world's Kurdish population, live in Turkey, the rest divided between Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The small but loud extremist sect of the Kurds-that which casts the shadow of violence over Örtülü-began fighting with the Turkish government in 1984 for an autonomous Kurdistan, and since then, the conflict has taken between 35,000 and 40,000 lives. A couple days ago, 16 Turkish military guards were killed on the road from Van to the Iranian border by PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) violence-a road I'd traversed earlier that very day, complaining how many security checkpoints we were forced to shuffle through. Our accommodations near Ararat, the glorious Hotel Nuh, also accommodated a group of 13 German tourists in July, three of whom were kidnapped off the slopes of Ararat by the PKK and rescued by Turkish forces one week later.
Fourteen kids, ages six to 11, darted around the grounds in nationally mandated blue smock uniforms. They were all beautiful and, while they recited the Turkish alphabet for me with zeal, they were obviously way more interested in our presence (particularly the presence of my video camera), and the fleet of donkeys the boys had wrangled, than in the classroom. The majority of girls will attend school until the age of 11 or so when they'll then settle into domestic responsibilities. About half of the boys attend the middle school in a neighboring town while they other half stays to work on the farms. I chatted (via one of my travel companions Tamer, who translated) with Gokhan Güney, the only school teacher for a total enrollment of 32 students (though we never caught a glimpse of the missing 18). He mentioned that the population of the area has been steadily decreasing. Tamer later explained to me that Kurdish separatists come into the village and ask young Kurdish boys to join their cause, and boys who refuse are killed. Many pack up and leave the region out of fear and frustration. Since this visit, I've been thinking hard on the presence of the Kurdish nation in Turkey (which populates the region from here south to the Iraqi border) and their long and deeply rooted history of oppression.An estimated 15 million Kurds, more than half of the world's Kurdish population, live in Turkey, the rest divided between Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The small but loud extremist sect of the Kurds-that which casts the shadow of violence over Örtülü-began fighting with the Turkish government in 1984 for an autonomous Kurdistan, and since then, the conflict has taken between 35,000 and 40,000 lives. A couple days ago, 16 Turkish military guards were killed on the road from Van to the Iranian border by PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) violence-a road I'd traversed earlier that very day, complaining how many security checkpoints we were forced to shuffle through. Our accommodations near Ararat, the glorious Hotel Nuh, also accommodated a group of 13 German tourists in July, three of whom were kidnapped off the slopes of Ararat by the PKK and rescued by Turkish forces one week later.