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In a Town That Knows War
An Online Report from the Turkey-Iraq Border
This essay was filed for npr.org by NPR correspondent Guy Raz from Silopi, on Turkey's border with Iraq.
March 28, 2003 -- There are two English words the shoeshine boys here know: "money, war."
They swarm around me, clutching bottles of dirty black shoe polish and thrashed brushes. Some grasp scales, their tiny fingers curling around the vintage measuring devices, hoping to take my weight. "Abi, money!" "Brother," they say, "money."
There are nearly a dozen of these boys and they now know me because I pass out pencils. The mayor of this gritty border town told me the schools don't have money to give the students pencils. So my translator and I bought a case.
Mahmut, a small boy with patches of hair on his singed head accepts one. He asks my translator if we can give him money instead. "Take the pencil," I tell him. "But I don't need it," he answers. "I don't go to school."
Nearby the Habur Hotel, a dingy spot where rooms are at a premium these days, dozens of men pass the time fingering prayer beads and drinking cup after cup of sweet tea. Many of them are out-of-work truck drivers. For the past 12 years, Turkey's government has managed to maintain some limited trade with Iraq and these truck drivers managed to earn some kind of living.
Today this town is scattered with rusting big-rigs waiting at the border. All transit between Turkey and Iraq was suspended last month. Nothing, except for small numbers of Turkish troops and vehicles, go in or out.
Most of the people here are ethnic Kurds. Almost all of them have family on the other side of border in Iraq. While their ethnic brethren may support the war in Iraq, the people here do not.
"Bush and Saddam, they are the same for me," says 38-year-old Sevgiz. He has two children and no job. It's hard for me to believe this chain-smoking, rough-faced man is so young. He appears to be nearly 60. "If the war goes badly in Iraq... we will see it here too," he says.
The Kurdish villagers here are wary. They experienced war here... up close. For 15 years, Kurdish separatists fought a bloody campaign against the Turkish armed forced. Thirty-thousand people died in southeastern Turkey -- soldiers and civilians alike. Both sides are said to have committed gross human rights violations.
Reminders of that war are everywhere here... in the pockmarked buildings and on the road into town where foundations of Kurdish homes stand like gravestones.
When the day ends, I go back to my hotel room. Rooms are at a premium. Many journalists are two to a room. I share mine with Daniel Rubin from Knight Ridder. The floor inside the room is muddy. Maybe tonight I'll get a shoeshine.
In Depth
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NPR News Special Coverage: War in Iraq
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