TYG Fall 2011: Turkey

GLOBALIST The Yale

Fall 2011 / Vol. 12, Issue 1

TURKEY:

A MODERN MOSAIC

The ethics of bullfighting 9 * Chinese entrepreneurs in Cape Verde 7 * A look inside a French ghetto 38

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR 3

GLOBALIST The Yale

An Undergraduate Magazine of International Affairs Fall 2011 / Vol. 12, Issue 1 www.tyglobalist.org

This magazine is published by students of Yale College.

Yale University is not responsible for its contents.

Send comments, questions, and letters to the editor to sanjena.sathian@yale.edu.

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JOURNALISM ADVISORY BOARD Steven Brill, Yale Dept. of English Nayan Chanda, Director of Publications, MacMillan Center Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Foreign Affairs Jef McAllister, Time Magazine Nathaniel Rich, The Paris Review Fred Strebeigh, Yale Dept. of English

ACADEMIC ADVISORY BOARD Harvey Goldblatt, Professor of Medieval Slavic Literature, Master of Pierson College Donald Green, Director, Institution for Social and Policy Studies Charles Hill, Yale Diplomat-in-Residence Ian Shapiro, Director, MacMillan Center Ernesto Zedillo, Director, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

DEAR

www.tyglobalist.org

GLOBALIST

READERS,

T

his May, I had the opportunity to join 21 Globalist staffers on a research and reporting trip to Turkey, where for two weeks we explored Istanbul, the southeastern province of Sanliurfa, and the nearby island of Cyprus. Turkey has long been seen as a bridge between East and West. Istanbul, literally spanning both Asia and Europe, nurtures its ancient history and traditions while seeking to progress into the modern age. Today’s Istanbul brought our team of reporters face-to-face with some of the central struggles of both today’s modern Middle East and today’s modern Europe. As we watched the country gear up for its summer elections, we found ourselves in the midst of a turbulent and changing nation (the conservative AK Parti later swept the elections).

Turkey’s quest to become a European Union member state is a well-known story. Equally well-known, perhaps, is the politically-loaded issue of headscarves and the famous tagline Turkey carries of being the only secular Muslim-majority nation. But Globalist reporting trips are about pushing beyond these oft-repeated catch-phrases of countries and finding the human face—the true narrative behind it all. Our reporters this issue are telling stories of a Turkey faced with an identity crisis, caught between East and West, conservative and progressive forces, as it seeks to make sense of itself as both a Muslim and a European nation. Diana Saverin’s tale of a dying tradition of Turkish carpet-weaving shows the complexities of what happens when ancient practices meet modern economic and industrial forces. Jessica Shor’s reporting on a Kurdish resistance group and Erin Biel’s portrait of unsettled homosexual Iranian refugees both tell the stories of what and who is being sacrificed in the midst of Turkey’s modern progress.

From beyond Turkey, Globalist staffers reported, blogged, and wrote articles this summer from all over the world—from Thailand to South Sudan to Patagonia—reporting on everything from the ethics of Spanish bullfighting to the burgeoning presence of Chinese storeowners in Cape Verde.

This year’s Globalist trip would not have been possible without support from the Turkish Cultural Center of Connecticut, the Turkish Coalition of America, the Yale Council on Middle East Studies, and local New Haven merchants Brick Oven Pizza, Alpha Delta, and Zaroka.

I am honored and excited to be overseeing the Globalist’s continued growth this year in conjunction with Executive Director Jessica Shor. We now have an enormous and expanding online presence in addition to our print magazine, with blogs and online exclusive content going up weekly. I hope you will take time to visit our website at www.tyglobalist.org, and to consider supporting us by purchasing a subscription. Like all magazines, we could not exist without support from you, our readers.

I am proud to present our first issue of the year: “Turkey: A Modern Mosaic” Yours,

Sanjena Sathian Editor-in-Chief, The Yale Globalist Production & Design Editors Jay Pabarue, Anisha Suterwala Managing Editor for Online Raisa Bruner

ON THE COVER:

A crowd approaches the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey.

Director of Online Development Lauren Hoffmann

Editor-in-Chief Sanjena Sathian

Executive Director Jessica Shor

Managing Editors Jeffrey Dastin, Nikita Lalwani, Charlotte Parker, Adele Roussow

Publisher Jason Toups

Associate Editors Marissa Dearing, Cathy Huang, Diana Saverin, Emily Ullmann, Maggie Yellen Copy Editor Sophie Broach

Directors of Development Conrad Lee, Margaret Zhang Events Coordinator Julie Kim

(Photograph courtesy Sanjena Sathian) Pictures from CreativeCommons used under Attribution Noncommercial license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Editors Emeriti Raphaella Friedman, Uzra Khan, Sibjeet Mahapatra, Angela Ramirez, Eli Markham, Alexander Krey

Editors-at-Large Rae Ellen Bichell, Jeffrey Kaiser, Catherine Osborn, Diego Salvatierra

www.tyglobalist.org

CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

Fa ll 20 1 1 / Vo l . 1 2, Issue 1

9

35

6 19

FOCUS: Turkey 14 | Youth in Revolt

25 | An Underground Escape

A Turkish youth group’s radical response to majority parties.

By Ali Friedman

15 | Changing Tides

38 | All Quiet on the Northern Front

The lifestyles and practices of small fishermen in Istanbul are threatened.

By Sera Tolgay

17 | Four Men and a Muse

19 | Untying the Knots

In Japan, destruction from the earthquake is still being felt.

By John Hayashi

35 | Not Just a Game The Homeless World Cup aims to integrate the homeless into society through soccer.

By Marissa Dearing

Turkey lifted a ban on the Kurdish language, but struggles for rights continue.

By Jessica Shor

38 | A Conversation with Bedri

A look at traditional carpet weaving in the industrial age.

By Diana Saverin

4 | Hitting a Wall

Does the last divided city in Europe have a peaceful future on the horizon?

By Sanjena Sathian

38 | Struggling to Speak

Turkish rock band Multitap hopes to inspire an increasingly melancholy industry.

By Charlotte Parker

GLIMPSES

Iranian LGBT refugees face prejudice in Kayseri, Turkey.

By Erin Biel

Baykam

A Q&A with one of Turkey’s most well known artists and political activists.

By Adele Rossouw

FEATURES

7 | China in Cape Verde Chinese shopowners dominate a small island town’s economy.

By TaoTao Holmes

9 | The Death of Bullfighting The Spanish tradition of bullfighting is dying slowly as towns enact new bans on the game.

By Chris Peak

36 | A Common Divide Arab and Israeli tour guides give different accounts of shared historical sites.

By Anya Van Wagtendonk

LETTER FROM

36 | Letter from... Paris A look into a Parisian underbelly.

By Jack Newsham

The Yale Globalist is a member of Global21, a network of student-run international affairs magazines at premier universities around the world.

66 GLIMPSE

the yale globalist: fall 2011

Hitting a Wall Troubled recovery in Tohoku, Japan

T

By John Hayashi

he first tremor came as Toshiko Kobayashi walked into the kitchen of her Tokyo apartment. Earthquakes are a fact of life in Japan, but this one was unusually strong. She clutched a table edge as pictures fell off the wall. Her nine-floor apartment building swayed, and sirens whined in the distance.

“We were very lucky,” said Kobayashi.

Thanks to Japan’s earthquake warning system, her six family members living in the northeastern seaside town of Kitaibaraki had time to escape to higher ground. They were safe there but now face a lengthy rebuilding process: Their house and ryokan, or inn, suffered significant damage. “Repairs, and everything that goes along with them—finding people, money, tools—have taken longer than we expected, so we’ve had to push back reopening to November.”

Her family has taken out millions of dollars in loans to rebuild and refurnish the ryokan, so even after it reopens they will face an uncertain future. Coastal inns rely on fresh, local fish to attract customers, but the fishing industry has been devastated by the tsunami. Many predict that catches will not return to previous levels for at least five years.

Kobayashi’s hometown was not among the hardest hit, but the tsunami was still strong enough to destroy the concrete breakwater built to shield the town from the ocean. This barrier provided some modicum of comfort and safety for those living on the coast, but now all that remains is an earthen slope peppered with debris. Although the federal government quickly repaired the national highway running through Kitaibaraki, rebuilding the breakwater is the responsibility of the city—a city bankrupt from the loss of so much of its tax base. Most of Kobayashi’s upper-middle-class neighbors in Tokyo

Wreckage from last March’s earthquake still litters Tohoku’s shores (Courtesy Flickr Creative Commons)

have both money to spare and little direct connection to the disaster, so she did fairly well collecting donations. She then drove several hours to Kitaibaraki city hall to donate the proceeds directly. Still the city struggles to provide basic services, let alone rebuild defenses around the ocean.

Most affected by the disaster were less fortunate and have relied on makeshift shelters in gymnasiums or trailers, with little prospect of starting work soon.

Donations have poured into charity organizations ever since the earthquake struck, but the allocation process is lengthy and convoluted, so a vast majority of donated funds accumulates in bank accounts. This severe lag exacerbates the poverty in the Northeast , which has long been one of Japan’s poorer regions. Much of the burden to rebuild infrastructure and clear debris, that is often toxic, falls on tiny city governments like that of Kitaibaraki. Before it could begin such projects, however, Kitaibaraki’s municipal government had to recover decades of vital census, residence, and tax data stored in computers and file cabinets damaged by the tsunami. Volunteers provide more direct help than donations, but progress is slow while the entire coast remains vulnerable to earthquakes and typhoons.

“Recovery is progressing, although not evenly and not for all.”

Still, recovery is progressing, although not evenly and not for all. “At the ryokan, we have four generations living together, a whole family to pitch in. But many houses in the neighborhood have elderly people living alone, people with no way to rebuild on their own,” Kobayashi said. Nearly 40 percent of Kitaibaraki’s population is over 60 years old. Kobayashi and her relatives still have the resources to support her 90-year-old father, but many children living far away do not. The stress of displacement, combined with still-lacking medical service in some areas, means that many may never live to see their hometowns free of wreckage.

Kobayashi’s family and thousands like it face harrowing emotional and financial challenges, but they continue to show resilience and determination. Kobayashi drew a line on a map, tracing the path from her hometown to the irradiated ruin of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, only 50 miles away, and sighed heavily. She said, “I can’t speak for those who lost their families, but for us there’s no question of whether or not to rebuild.” She gazed from the parking lot, strewn with mud and debris, out towards the calm Pacific. “It will be hard and take time, but what else does it make sense to do?”

JOHN HAYASHI ’14 is in Branford College.

Contact him at john.hayashi@yale.edu.

FEATURE 7

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China in Cape Verde Is the recent influx of Chinese shop owners disrupting a small island’s economy ?

By TaoTao Holmes

F

eathered headdresses whirled about shimmering floats, while the fuzz from pom-poms began to drizzle onto sweaty arms and thighs. It was 3:00 a.m. on the fourth night of Carnaval in Ribeira Brava, Cape Verde, and all the shop owners had closed down to go celebrate the parade—all except for two tireless workers, for whom Carnaval holds no special value. In one of Ribeira Brava’s “Loja Chines,” a pair of short, Chinese women doled out cheap goods into eager fingers.

Since the emergence around 15 years ago of Chinese stores, or “Lojas Chines” in Portuguese, the Chinese presence has mushroomed in Cape Verde, a country just off the west coast of Africa’s Mauritania. These private enterprises now pepper the country’s ten islands, offering Cape Verdeans the best prices on the market.

Estimates of the total number of stores across the country reach up to 200, with about 3,000 Chinese nationals currently in residence. And, despite burgeoning inter-competition, these store owners are continuing to arrive. Instead of setting up establishments on the more developed islands, Santiago and São Vicente, newcomers are choosing more rural and remote areas. The dynamism and influence of this type of small-scale, private investment is growing increasingly evident in the local economy, an economy of a population of a mere 500,000––more Cape Verdeans live abroad than in the country itself.

I

n contrast with the density and scope of similar stores back in China, the opportunity to take advantage of Cape Verde’s largely untapped market is un-

questionably a good one. A store owner from Zhejiang Province staked out in a small coastal town on the island of Sao Nicolau seemed to have a “why not” sort of attitude. “If I came, the transportation would be paid for, and I wouldn’t have to cause an economic burden on my family,” he said.

For most of these immigrants, it’s all part of a package deal with the Chinese boss: a five-year stint set within an includ-

years of operation. As Chinese stores multiply, Cape Verdean stores, which must pay government taxes and tariffs, struggle to compete.

The Chinese workers generally come alone and are then followed by family members. They often hire local Cape Verdeans to help arrange store shelves offering everything from oven mitts, shoes, and candleholders to garlic graters, icing sets, “Gellisey” (Gillette) razors, and Han-

Estimates of the total number of Chinese stores across the country reach up to 200, with about 3,000 Chinese nationals currently in residence. ed round-trip ticket. Store owner Nana Reis Zeng explained, “the boss arranges the visa, food, housing, clothes, and then at the end you can personally decide whether you want to continue. Most people after five years go back to China and then decide whether to come here again to open shop.” Zeng, short, slim, and bubbly, had lived in Cape Verde for eight years and was engaged to a Cape Verdean working in television in Praia, the capital. Unlike most of her Chinese compatriots, Zeng is settled for good. Her Chinese store is one of at least five or six in Espargos, a small city of 6,000 made up of countless cement buildings abandoned mid-construction.

It’s not coincidence that the round-trip tickets of these Chinese shop-owners all cut off at five years, and not a day more.

As it turns out, foreign investors in Cape Verde recieve tax exemptions to all dividends and profits during the first five

nah Montana satchels. Workers are paid 50 dollars per month, in contrast to the average annual income of 2,000 dollars.

Though Zeng said it isn’t hard to set up shop, (“If you have local residence and a little capital, you can do it”), it isn’t easy to stay afloat, especially with the recent surge of stores. Without special features or attractive products, a store will go bankrupt, she said, since the locals’ expectations have also risen. “You can only wait for Christmas, and then hold steady,” she laughed.

F

irst Secretary of the Cape Verde Embassy in China Jorge Nobre explained there is no fixed limit on the number of visas he hands out. He makes his decisions based on whether or not candidates display the correct conditions. The embassy dealt out about 700 visas this

88 FEATURE year ––“for a small country, not a small quantity,” he added.

The embassy accepts no responsibility for the economic impact of its provision of visas. Housed in an office in Beijing the size of a two-bedroom flat, the embassy was established in 1976 and was Cape Verde’s first in all of Asia. Government relations between the two countries have significantly expanded since, with Cape Verde accepting the donation of projects such as the Parliament buildings, national library, and Cape Verde’s first dams.

“China has the know-how and networking capability to help develop our economy by matching our needs with its capabilities,” said the embassy’s Second Secretary Sonia Barros.

Perhaps in conjunction with the millions in Chinese aid Cape Verde has received, the government stance on the presence of China’s small-scale investors remains supportive. Cape Verde’s Minister of Labor, Sara Lopes, said that Cape Verdeans must accept the rules of foreign investors and businesses if the nation wants to compete with much bigger countries.

But the impact of small-scale investors is disputable. Zeng said that the rapid

the yale globalist: fall 2011 emergence of stores like hers has forced many of local shops to close down. Still, she defended, the average consumer benefits. As one local acknowledged, the stores make it possible for everyone to buy basic things, removing previous purchasing inequalities; poorer Cape Verdeans no longer have to go barefoot or depend on one pair of underclothes. In addition, many of the stores now sell condoms, the result of a 2009 effort by U.S. Peace Corps workers and a local NGO to promote safe sex, with packs of three selling for ten U.S. cents each.

Nobre appeared either oblivious to or uninterested in the economic effects of the Chinese in Cape Verde. “Are there problems between the Cape Verdeans and Chinese? No. Cape Verde is a mix of people,” he said firmly. In fact, 70 percent of the population is mixed race. “We don’t have this kind of question––Chinese/Cape Verdean or black/white. It is a very open and welcoming people.” Nobre, however, has lived outside of the country now for over five years.

D

espite Cape Verdeans’ welcoming, easy-going attitudes, the impact of the current economic regulations

has recently begun to stir up discontent.

“The Chinese don’t pay taxes, but a Cape Verdean store owner has to pay taxes and tariffs, so they can’t sell for cheaper than the Chinese,” said Tania DaGraca, a Cape Verdean who moved to the United States two years ago. Many locals now choose to close down their stores and rent the space to Chinese, she explained, because it’s a more lucrative business option.

“People say that the Chinese are the best thing to ever come to Cape Verde, especially here in Sao Nicolau,” said Joao Livramento, a high school student from Ribeira Brava. “However, others say that they are opportunists who sell low quality products.” He added, “In my opinion, the Chinese exploit their workers, they don’t respect employees’ rights, and [they] underpay them.”

Lenise Soares, a young Cape Verdean from the capital of Praia, was less concerned. “I don’t think it’s a problem,” she said frankly. “Those with more money go to the Cape Verdean stores, and those with less go to the Chinese.”

But while the five-year tax exemption policy remains, Zeng says that Chinese are only continuing to set up shop. And with the local government receiving generous financial support from China, it may be loath to turn a critical eye to Sino-Cape Verde relations at the local level.

“I have nothing against the Chinese, but if they would leave and go back to their own country, or if they paid half of what a Cape Verdean pays to run a store, Cape Verde would be a better place for Cape Verdeans,” DaGraca said. But that possibility seems unlikely. “I don’t know of anyone who has never shopped at the Chinese stores,” she admitted.

In a tiny economy where the number of tourists each year exceeds half the national population, the impact of Chinese store owners is growing impossible to ignore. Despite the aid recently received from China, Cape Verde’s government will have to address the issue—or choose to disregard an increasing threat to local livelihoods.

TAOTAO HOLMES ‘14 is a prospective Political Science major in Branford college. Contact her at taotao.holmes@yale. edu

Cape Verde is a small, dry, and isolated place that imports 90 percent of its food and boasts no exports besides suntans and kitesurfing trophies. (Holmes/TYG)

FEATURE 9

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The Death of Bullfighting

By Christopher Peak

I

paid 30 euros to watch six bulls die. There are less expensive seats available at the Plaza de Las Ventas, Spain’s largest bullring located in Madrid, but I wanted a good view and a place in the shade. The total came to five euros for each time the trumpets announced the matador; five euros for each bull; five euros for each death in the late afternoon.

Known in the country as the fiesta nacional, Spain’s controversial practice of bullfighting may be nearing its end. On July 28, 2010, the Catalan parliament voted on a bill to ban bullfighting. The vote was close: 68 voted in favor and 55, including Catalan President José Montilla, voted against. Many speculated that animal rights offered a neutral field from which Catalans could rebuke the central Spanish government and assert themselves as a unique nation with its own set of unique traditions. Indeed, the ban passed two weeks after the Spanish Constitutional Court struck down a statute intended to make Catalonia more independent from Madrid. In their ruling, the court declared that Catalonia was not legally a nation.

According to local police, 1.1 million protestors gathered to protest the court’s decision. El Periódico, a daily newspaper

in Barcelona, reported that the protest was “undoubtedly one of the largest that has taken place in Catalonia, possibly the largest.” In the wake of the ban, Spanish nationalists have mounted a campaign to protect the bullfight as one of the nation’s most important traditions.

An hour before my first bullfight, or corrida de toros, began, I met two Canadian tourists named Jesse and Andrew. They sat in a narrow strip of shade and drank beer from 40-ounce bottles. Jesse hoped the bullfight would be like the movies, saying, “It’s the closest you get to Gladiator.”

Andrew agreed: “Passion, blood, pain.” I left them to finish their cervezas.

The crowds and I pressed through a narrow gate and into the stadium.

Trumpets announced the beginning of the bullfight. Wearing the traditional gleaming gold outfits known as trajes de luce, or suits of light, three bullfighters strutted across the sand of the arena.

Shade eclipsed half the stadium.

The day’s first matador (Spanish for “killer”) was Serafín Marin, considered to be Catalonia’s best bullfighter. With 10 years of experience killing bulls, Marin killed one more bull that day: a 4-year-old named Huelvano. He weighed 545 kilo-

grams, or 1200 pounds.

The red bull Huelvano charged into the stadium. With knife-like horns, it ran at bright pink capes waved by the matador’s team. During the first part of the bullfight, the matador determines the bull’s speed and daring. In the process, the bull tires and often stumbles to its knees. By the end of this, Marin’s bull was panting, its ribcage heaving in and out.

In the second part, members of the matador’s team weaken the bull: Picadors, men on horseback, use long lances to pierce the bull’s neck muscles, and three banderilleros stab brightly colored barbed sticks into the bull’s sides. After this, the bull began to slow as blood flowed freely down its front legs.

The third part, the one most often associated with bullfighting, involves only the matador and the bull. Using a cape dyed the same color as the bull’s blood, the matador makes the bull charge as close as possible to his body.

After a few minutes, the matador lures the bull towards him and plunges the sword into its exposed neck.

The bull will often stand for some time, the handle of the sword protruding from its back. The banderilleros wave capes on either side of the bull, turning its head

For every bullfighter that dies, 200,000 bulls die.

10 10 FEATURE from left to right. In the process, the sword slices the bull’s lungs and other organs.

One of the banderilleros stabs the bull in the back of the head with a short dagger, known as a puntilla, to ensure it is dead.

The mouth of Marin’s bull foamed red.

Tourists’ cameras flashed. The carcass was hooked up to a pack of four horses and dragged out of the stadium to be butchered and sold as a delicacy in the hotels. The fight was over: Vendors continued to sell their sodas; the band played a cheery musical interlude; people stood up, to stretch or to slip down to a better seat than they had paid for; blue-shirted workers swept away the blood and smoothed over the sand like the dirt at a baseball game.

As I left the stadium, I walked past a large bronze monument dedicated to Jose Cubero “Yiyo,” a bullfighter from Madrid who died from a goring in the heart. A plaque reads, “Murió un torero y nació un angél.” A bullfighter died and an angel was born.

For every bullfighter that dies, 200,000 bulls die. There are no monuments for the bulls at Las Ventas: There isn’t enough room.

J

osé María Baviano, Director of Communications at Plaza de Las Ventas, believes each bullfight continues an important tradition. “The ritual of the bullfight, the specific language, the music—all part of the tradition.”

Depicted in Goya’s prints, García Lorca’s poems, and Picasso’s paintings, bulls have held an important place in Spanish culture for thousands of years. Historian Pedro Romero de Solís said archaeological evidence from the Iberian Peninsula shows “the importance of bovine creatures in

the yale globalist: fall 2011

Bullfights in Madrid are considered both an important tradition and a tourist “must-see.” (Peak/TYG) the main tourist attractions: Forty million tickets are sold each year at bullfighting rings across the country. During the two-week Festival of San Isidro in May, 86 percent of the 24,000 seats in Madrid’s bull ring Plaza de Las Ventas are reserved in advance. Despite the ban in Catalonia, ticket sales in Madrid have remained high, Baviano said.

In response to the ban, Esperanza Aguirre, the head of Madrid’s regional government, announced in March 2010 that bullfighting would be given protected status for its important cultural value. Aficionados of the corrida are currently lobbying UNESCO to declare bullfighting part of the world’s cultural heritage. Even Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa has publicly supported the efforts, in the hopes that Spanish citizens have the freedom to choose for themselves whether to visit a bullring or not.

“There is no cruelty, no cruelty in bullfighting,” Baviano said. He argued that unlike other animals, the value of the bull is in the fight, not in its ability to produce meat or milk: “The bull has the sole purpose of dying in the arena instead of dying in a slaughterhouse.” Through the utility of the bull’s death, a successful bullfighter creates a primitive, visceral experience. The matador is an artist, and the bull is his medium.

“If we are mistreating and killing an animal for fun, then how can we dissuade people from mistreating animals for food or other purposes?” human civilizations since the Paleolithic Age.” But by the sixteenth century, “what at first was mere hunting was transformed into a spectacle.”

Today, reviews of the week’s bullfights are published in El País’s Culture section, not Sports. Bullfighting remains one of

J

ennifer Berengueras, Project Coordinator at Foundation for Adoption, Sponsorship, and Defense of Animals (FAADA) and one of the 11 members of the commission that spearheaded the bullfighting ban, disagrees.

“We never say that it’s not a tradition or that it’s not culture,” she said. “However, traditions and cultures should be flexible and adapt to the current times and knowledge. We think [bullfighting] is not something of this day and age.” Berengueras would prefer for the Ministry of Culture to advertise the Picasso Museum rather than bullfights. “They sell it like the Spanish thing to do,” she said, “but real culture doesn’t involve the killing of an animal.”

When Berengueras initially began working in animal welfare, she believed bullfighting was only a minor issue. “With the years, I realized it was the most important [concern],” and protecting animals exploited for entertainment became her priority. “If we are mistreating and killing an animal for fun, then how can we dissuade people from mistreating animals for food or other purposes?... There is absolutely no justification, no excuse for this.”

In August 2008, Berengueras created a commission with ten other animal rights activists to begin a Popular Legislative Initiative (PLI) to ban bullfighting in Catalonia. Though there had been protests against bullfighting as early as 1900, previous legislative attempts introduced by members of parliament had proved unsuccessful. The commission decided the ban had to come directly from the people. To

FEATURE 11

www.tyglobalist.org bring the PLI to Parliament, the commission needed the certified signatures of 50,000 Catalan residents over the age of 16.

They brought 180,000 certified signatures to Parliament. “It was quite a process,” Berengueras said. “The whole animal rights movement mobilized to carry it out.”

The Canary Islands is the only other region in Spain that has banned bullfighting.

In 1991, the ban quietly passed. “No one even realized,” Berengueras said. “This most recent ban was so polemic because it was Catalonia.” From the 1950s through the 1970s as Francisco Franco ruled Spain, more bullfights occurred in Barcelona than in any other city in Spain. “They thought it was symbolic. If they close down Barcelona, there will be a domino effect and others will shut down,” Berengueras said. “But now they will, by law, be forced to close.”

C

arles Móra sat in a large recliner in his tiled living room below a series of watercolors by Monet and other French painters. Móra was the mayor of Arenys de Munt, a small town outside Barcelona that passed the first referendum for Catalan independence in September 2009.

He spoke in Catalan, a language banned in public places under Franco’s dictatorship only 30 years prior There is still “residual fear” after Franco’s dictatorship, especially in the older generations, Móra explained. “Grandparents won’t speak about politics. ‘Leave this for the politicians and stay away from that,’ they say.” But for the first time since Franco’s rule, the Catalans have begun

to express their desire for independence.

“There is a feeling in Catalonia that the system failed. Now people want to change the system,” Móra said.

Many traditions have been revived: Catalan is now an official language in Catalonia, taught in schools and spoken by over three-quarters of the population, and Catalan celebrations feature joining of arms in the circle dance of the sardana and building of human towers known as castells. (In 2010, the tradition of building castells joined the list of UNESCO’s Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.) “They are all symbols of people working together,” Móra says, “of people helping each other go farther.”

Catalans reject the corrida de toros and flamenco as foreign Spanish traditions.

“We have a different culture. We have other traditions, other habits,” Móra said.

“There is really a feeling of not belonging to Madrid.”

While advertisements in Madrid announce which matadors will fight each Sunday, banners in Barcelona declare new productions of “Romeo and Juliet” and Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Already, one bullfighting stadium in Barcelona has shut down due to declining ticket sales: Las Arenas, or The Sands, is now a shopping mall. “The ban of bullfighting is a way to distinguish, to say we do not have this as a part of our culture,” Móra said.

Many Spaniards see this reasoning as dangerous. “The Separatist parties are trying to erase the cultural traits that identify Catalonia with Spain,” Baviano argued.

Bullfighting aficionados point to the uniquely Catalan tradition of the correbous as evidence of the separatist forces behind the ban. Variations of the correbous involve tying ropes around the bull’s horns and dragging it through the city’s streets or attaching fireworks to its horns. Though the animal is not usually killed, many bulls are left blind or physically harmed. Some die from heart attacks caused by stress. In December 2010, only a few months after voting to ban bullfighting, the Catalan Parliament voted overwhelmingly to protect the tradition of the correbous in a vote of 114-14, though communities in Madrid, the Basque country, Castile-La Mancha, and Andalusia have all prohibited the correbous. An article in El País claimed the Catalan vote was “an example of hypocrisy of the Catalan political class.”

Berengueras maintained the bullfighting ban is an animal rights issue, not a political issue. She pointed to the fact that the 11-person commission consisted entirely of animal rights activists, not political separatists. Indeed, only four members were Catalan. Berengueras also highlighted a Gallup poll from 2008: Though the poll showed that the highest disinterest in bullfighting came from northeastern Spain (Catalonia), the second highest was the south, where places like Seville and Cordoba are thought to be notoriously pro-bullfighting.

“We work on a national level. We work on a global level,” Berengueras said. “[Bullfighting] was banned in Catalonia, and we are happy with it, but we believe that animals suffer everywhere,” The bullfighting ban will take effect in January 2012. Until then, 180 bulls will be killed in Barcelona, Berengueras said.

Across the rest of Spain, 72,000 bulls will die. Since the ban in Catalonia, five other regions in Spain have attempted to bring popular initiatives to their respective parliaments. None has succeeded.

CHRISTOPHER PEAK ’13 is in Morse College. Contact him at christopher.peak@yale.edu.

The death of the bull is the standard and expected conclusion for bullfight audiences. (Peak/TYG)

A City Divided

Turkey’s blend of ancient and modern runs through the veins of the entire country—from the skyline of Istanbul, where domed mosques stand side-by-side with sleek office buildings, to Antep’s combination of quaint baklava shop owners and cosmopolitan businessmen. The country is a collage of the old and new.

The forces clash at times, but they also blend together in symphony… they make

TURKEY

a MODERN MOSAIC

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the yale globalist: fall 2011

Youth in Revolt A Turkish political youth group reacts to the conservative AK Parti majority.

By Ali Friedman

M

ost people do not think that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan resembles Adolf Hitler. But Adnan Türkken certainly sees him that way. He proudly held his student political group’s magazine with Hitler’s face superimposed on Erdogan’s.

Below the provocative image, the Turkish headline reads: “High Democracy or Fascism?”

Adnan founded and presided over Turkey’s largest student political group, Türkiye Gençlik Birligi, or Turkish Youth Union until 2010. The Union formed in 2006 to oppose Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, called AK Parti. The Union has rejected the AK Parti, known for its strong ties with the West and its social conservatism, and finds political inspiration in Turkey’s first president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whose portraits cover the walls of the Union’s Istanbul headquarters.

“AK Parti is really a fascist party,” said a Turkish student known as Çenk, who recently joined the Union. Indeed, most Union members distrust Erdogan’s government, which has lifted a ban on head-scarf wearing in state offices and universities, and raised the drinking age to 24. Yet despite the anger felt by student group members at such social restrictions, AK Parti dominated the latest elections in June, increasing its support by 3.5 million voters.

E

ven in light of the AK Parti’s recent success, the Union has steadily increased its visibility, distributing thousands of copies of its publication each month and organizing highly public demonstrations. According to most recent figures, the Union boasts 40,000 followers in total, including active members as well

“The more oppressive the government, the more revolutionary our group becomes.”

Recep Erdogan speaks at the World Economic Forum. Erdogan is Prime Minister and the head of Turkey’s AK Parti. His government has come under criticism recently as fascist and oppressive.

(Courtesy Creative Commons)

as students 18 years and younger who are banned from officially affiliating with political organizations.

“The partial struggle against AK Parti and the West was not enough,” Türkken

said of the time before the formation of his group. “We felt the need to respond to their unjust policies.”

Erdogan’s government has noticed their discontent. Adnan spent a day in jail on charges of terrorism after leading a peaceful protest. Union members Burak Ünlü and Erdem Özdemir of Celal Bayar University were suspended for a term for shouting “Atatürk’s youth on duty” while protesting Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç’s visit to campus. Last December, members of the Ankara chapter were beaten, tear-gassed, and detained by police during a public demonstration. Measures like these have been counterproductive, said Çenk.

“We’re working against AK Parti,” he explained. “The more oppressive the government, the more revolutionary our group becomes.”

The question that now remains is whether or not student political groups will regain the power they once had in the 1970s and 80s, before student groups were banned outright in 1980 in response to thousands of violent outbreaks on university campuses. Whatever the case, it is clear that the full impact of these radicalized youth on national politics has yet to be seen.

ALI FRIEDMAN ’14 is in Pierson College. Contact her at alexandra.friedman@yale.edu

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Clusters of fishing boats along the Bosphorous are a common sight in Istanbul. (Tolgay/TYG)

Changing Tides Worsening environmental conditions in the Bosphorus Strait redefine the struggles of small fishermen.

F

ishing rods line Istanbul’s Galata Bridge, the fresh smell of the sea breeze permeates the city’s fish markets, and the waterfront bustles as boats, ferries, and tankers travel back and forth along the Bosphorus. Istanbul is a city defined by its connection to the waters of the Bosphorus Strait and the Marmara Sea. But the average buyer at the fish market, the tourists having a bite from their fish sandwiches, and the customer at a typical fish restaurant simply enjoy their meals, unaware of the hands and tides that have brought the fish to their table. The seeming abundance of fish and the vibrant atmosphere of Istanbul’s markets conceal the darker reality of overfishing and lack of regulation in the city’s fishing industry.

A new buzzword is floating around environmental and academic circles: “Fisheries Depletion,” referencing the decline of the fishing stock available in Istanbul’s waters as a result of overfishing and environmental degradation. Like all far-reaching environmental problems, these issues also have a local effect, as they cripple the independent fishermen of Istanbul, whose livelihoods move in flux with the changing environmental fabric of the Bosphorus.

By Sera Tolgay

A

s the first rays of the rising sun hit the thick fog above the waters of the Bosphorus, small boats scattered along the Kandilli-Cengelkoy route between the European and Asian sides of Istanbul. In small boats with primitive equipment, the fishermen sat, busy with their rods while occasionally conversing about the weather and their daily catch.

For these fishermen, the turquoise waters are their workplace, and extracting a living from the depths of the sea is their way of life.

“See that old man over there?” asked Arslan Yaras, a military veteran who has been fishing and supporting himself off of the Bosphorus’ bounty for two decades.

“He is homeless; he lives in that tiny boat and makes a living off of what he can catch from below these waves,” Yaras lamented as he steered his seven-meter-long wooden boat, big enough to fit a small cabin with a mattress and a teapot.

Yaras lives on land, but he wakes up every morning at 3:30 am and climbs on board to travel up the Bosphorus for two hours. He plows through the harsh currents to reach Bebek, a busy fishing spot, before sunrise.

“It started as a hobby, but soon it became my occupation,” said Yaras as he pulled back his rod, lined with silver sardines, a rare catch in the Bosphorus nowadays. “I am a retired army officer, and our

government does not do much to support the elderly and the retired, so I was forced into changing my hobby into a way of living.” Yaras stressed that although making a living from a pastime might seem quaint, the reality of fisheries depletion makes fishing a wrestle for life as the supply and range of species has plummeted over the past decades.

After fishing for five to six hours every day, Yaras takes his fish, usually around three carts’ worth, to the small fish markets in Kadikoy, on the Asian side of Istanbul, saving some to sell to friends. As a small fisherman in possession of his own boat, he has established a personal relationship with customers in the Kadikoy region where he lives. These people who know and trust him find his fish more valuable than commercially caught or farmed fish, making him immune to competition from commercial fishermen who are restricted to bigger wholesale markets where they cannot directly engage with buyers. In Istanbul, eating fish from the sea is a matter of culture, and people are willing to pay the price. Most fish restaurants serve both farm-raised and freshcaught sea fish, which can cost as much as three times the price of farmed fish.

Despite the advantages of reeling in highly valued, hand-caught sea fish, the overfishing caused by larger operations threatens Yaras’s traditional way of earn-

16 FOCUS: TURKEY

Yaras showed off his latest haul of fish. (Tolgay/TYG) ing his livelihood. According to the records of Karekin Deveciyan, who was the director of the Istanbul Wholesale Fish Market in 1910, there were about 41 species of fish that year. In the twenty-first century, the fishermen of Istanbul have to rely mostly on five species of fish, namely bluefish, bonito, seabass, mullet, and horse mackerel, which they call “the five masters of the Bosphorus.”

T

he poor regulation and widespread popularity of trawling and seine fishing in the Bosphorus have contributed greatly to fisheries depletion by producing vast amounts of undersized or undesirable types of seafood known as “by-catch.” Seine boats use large walls of netting to encircle schools of fish, often entrapping unwanted fish in the process.

Yaras drew attention to the fact that both methods, despite their environmental drawbacks, are much more profitable than his way of fishing. Nonetheless, he and many others choose to rely on their small boats and unsophisticated equipment because they prefer the freedom of being in charge of their own boat. According to the Fisheries Department of the Istanbul Agriculture Ministry, the majority of licensed fishermen own small boats; 1,324 fishermen use boats shorter than eight meters, among a total of 1,986 boats. Yaras, one of 6,049 licensed fishermen in Istanbul, also

the yale globalist: fall 2011 has his philosophical reasons for preferring the sustainable approach of being a small fisherman.

“You have to respect the prey, as a hunter,” Yaras said as he plucked out a mackerel from his rod’s hook. “The fishing rod allows for that natural law of hunting and being hunted. But the trawlers, they completely ignore that relationship.”

While the by-catch is thrown back into the Marmara Sea, most of the fish caught by large-sized enterprises travel to the Kumkapi Wholesale Market Hall for Fisheries, Istanbul’s biggest fish market.

Normally the hustle and bustle of largescale seafood sales would overwhelm, but silence filled the cavernous space on one day in June. A prominently posted sign explained: “Fisheries Act 1380 will begin on April 15, 2011 and will expire on August 31, 2011.

Taking into consideration the reproductive cycles of fish and other scientific, environmental, economic and social issues, the current fishing ban is targeted for the protection of fishery resources and sustainable operation of fishing practices.”

Almost dismissive about concerns related to the preservation of species for future generations, Murat Uzunel, an official at the Wholesale Markets Fisheries Directory, a government institution next to the market hall, pointed at the announcement on the bulletin board. He asserted that the ban was enough effort “for now” towards tackling the fisheries depletion problem.

The ban is a promising first step, but in practice, issuing such a temporary measure will not be sufficient to solve longterm problems and restore the ecosystem of the Bosphorus and the Marmara Sea. According to Professor Nurhan Unsal from Istanbul University’s Fisheries Faculty, this is mainly due to the absence of a quota system that would establish standards to minimize by-catch.

Quota systems in both the European Union and the United States have played an essential role in creating a sustainable environment for the fishing industry.

Alaska manages its fisheries through a model of public decision-making blended with government initiatives that have es-

tablished a regulatory system with annual catch quotas for every species. Yet instead of putting catch quotas on sardines or establishing a federal agency that would oversee fisheries regulation, the Turkish government has chosen only to enact a fishing ban. In a similar vein, the Ministry of Agriculture has stopped issuing commercial licenses to fishermen, as a step towards limiting the fishing fleet.

However, these measures are not targeted towards addressing the long-term goals of restoring the Marmara Region’s biodiversity and ecological balance. The lack of permanent measures is the result of insufficient resources allocated for fisheries research, which disables professionals from making up-to-date seasonal measurements and mapping the migratory patterns of different fish in the Marmara Region. As Unsal emphasized, without an initiative from the government to establish an extensive regulative system, fisheries depletion will remain a problem in the Marmara Sea. Although the 56th amendment of the 1982 constitution includes a clause promoting “environmental rights,” the lack of administration and enforcement has rendered sustainability simply a word on the bulletin board, its meaning lost in bureaucracy. As governing institutions overlook the importance of long-term consequences, Yaras’s way of fishing continues to be regarded as an outdated occupation, representing the remnants of a romanticized way of life at sea, rather than a plausible model for sustainable fishing.

For the fisherman, inconsistency and expectation are inseparable from daily work. Nevertheless, the erratic life at sea, even when coupled with fisheries depletion, is bearable for Yaras.

“I guess there is a spirit of optimism that comes along with the life at sea. When I gaze along the horizon, I forget about my worries.”

“You have to respect the prey as a hunter. The fishing rod allows for that natural law of hunting and being hunted.”

SERA TOLGAY ’14 is a sophomore in Branford College. Contact her at sera.tolgay@yale.edu

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Four Men and a Muse Faced with a melancholy music industry, Turkish rock band Multitap wants to give Turkish youth the sound of choice.

By Charlotte Parker

T

he heart of Tünel, Istanbul’s music district, beat with the tentative sounds of customers testing out instruments and the rhythms from hundreds of radios. Goatskin drums and electric guitars of Hendrix vintage hung over the sidewalk on the main street of shops. Amidst this jumble, Selim Sümer, the lead singer and guitarist for a young Turkish electro-rock band called Multitap, was noticeable wearing cantaloupe-colored skinny jeans and a purple plaid shirt. He carried a plastic bag full of cold beers,.

Sümer’s brightly colored attire gave off an air of creative power. He had a whimsical way about him—his eyes crinkled at the corners, and when he spoke in English his words were poetic. At Multitap’s studio above one of those Tünel music stores, he introduced the band’s keyboarder Sertaç Ozgümüs, who has a firm handshake and a haircut spiked like a triceratops’s spine.

Both men were initially reserved, but they spoke with excitement as soon as Ozgümüs hit play on a sample of their music.

That music is an explosive popsicle of electric guitar, synthesizer, and keyboard, led by Sümer’s energetic vocals.

Most of the tracks from their 2010 album, Takim Oyunu, meaning or Team Game in English, have the echo-y tinge and power chords of an updated ‘80s ballad. The simplicity of the lyrics, all in Turkish, have something of the Beatles to them, and Sümer cited synthesizer-rock giants Phoenix and MGMT as other favorite influences.

In Brooklyn, Paris, London, or any other global city known for its alternative music scene, Multitap’s electro-pop would not be particularly groundbreaking. But in Turkey, their bright music is different.

The cover of the band’s 2010 album, Takim Oyunu, pays homage to their coming together over a four-person soccer videogame. (Courtesy Multitap)

The band has a fiercely hopeful vision for their songs.

Any musician aiming for a wide audience in Turkey must deal with the specter of arabesk music, a melancholy synthesis of Turkish folk, Egyptian bellydance, and Western pop music that became popular in the early 1970s.

According to Sümer, the majority of albums released today by big production companies bears an arabesk influence on the beat or the emotional register of the lyrics. Arabesk music can be found both in restaurant kitchens and at the swankiest clubs along Istanbul’s Golden Mile, and singers of arabesk are national personalities with business interests and politi-

cal connections. In March, when Ibrahim Tatlises, the “godfather” of the genre, was shot through the head in a drive-by assassination attempt, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited him in the Intensive Care Unit.

“Arabesk is by now very embedded in the music we listen to,” said Didem Acar, manager of Edessa TV, a local news and music station in Tatlises’ southeastern hometown of Sanlıurfa. “But the interesting thing is that arabesk is defined in very specific ways, so some people wouldn’t like to be seen as listeners of it.”

Impressions of the genre from a wide variety of people were spectacularly onedimensional, almost always accompanied

18 FOCUS: TURKEY by a laugh or roll of the eyes.

“It is a specific type of people that listen to arabesk music,” said Aziz Yildis, a performer of folk and arabesk songs in Sanlıurfa. “They are not college educated. If you have a good motivation and are a happy person, you will not listen to arabesk music. If you are alcoholic and depressed, you will.”

This sort of hyperbolic stereotype stems from arabesk’s origins. The genre emerged from the gecekondu, or squatter settlements, of Istanbul and other expanding cities. Ethnic Kurds and predominantly Arab Turks from the rural southeast of Turkey were discriminated against for their lack of education, guttural accent, and traditional religious practices. Arabesk began as an expression of these inequalities, and its widespread success has been paradoxical.

S

ümer and Ozgümüs joked about arabesk, also associating it with old men slouching around shady bars.

They both played back-up instrumentals for arabesk artists, however, and they became serious when discussing the genre’s impact on the direction of Multitap’s own music.

“Almost all the words in arabesk songs relate to how the singer is suffering because of a status out of his control,” Sümer explained. “So in arabesk there is always an idea of self-demising, which really affects the culture and the people who listen to the music in any form.”

the yale globalist: fall 2011

they could feel.

“It’s much easier to listen to a song that talks about how we’re all suffering from this common pain than it is to put on a song about how beautiful it is to be around with your blanket,” Sümer said.

M

ultitap does, in fact, have a song called “Blanket,” and it addresses the stresses of modern life without a hint of complaint. Instead, Sümer sings about how nice it is to take a day off and watch a movie under a checkered blanket. In the music video, the four band members jump around a garage studio, a fluffy golden retriever at their feet. Both the song and the video give off a feeling of campy but honest joy, the direct opposite of anything expressed in a Tatlises song.

This lightheartedness runs through Multitap’s own story, starting with their name, which they take from the device used to connect more than two players to a video game console. The four men came together after playing FIFA soccer, a videogame, at Sümer’s and bass player Taçkın Bilal’s apartment. “We have a lot of fun,” Sümer said. “We’re four guys living together with a muse.”

Nonetheless, their musical play has serious intentions.

“We’re making a war to give people a choice of something other,” Sümer said, closing his eyes in search of the right phrasing. “Something other than the traditional, than what has been given, what has been done and re-done and re-visited.”

“We’re making a war to give people a choice of something other.”

“In Turkey, the biggest market is reserved for those who are self-victimizing,” added Eset Akgilad, a scriptwriter and friend of Multitap. He referred to arabesk superstars like Tatlises, a multi-millionaire, who still sings about being a victim of discrimination. Sümer and Ozgümüs agreed that arabesk has perpetuated a culture of easy self-victimization, where people feel that they have no agency and no choice in their lives. They added that its dominance in Turkey’s musical landscape has also left the public with little sense of what else they could listen to, or how else

This perpetuated status quo, he explained, is exemplified by arabesk and its various incarnations of self-deprecating melancholy. Multitap hopes that by giving an alternative music, they can remind people that there are alternative paths in any aspect of their lives. They write their music with the hope of giving a new sense of agency to Turkey’s youth—a sense that they can choose, for example, what political party to back, or whether or not to wear the headscarf.

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ince 2008, the band has been building momentum and gaining recognition across Turkey. Their first breakthrough came when they won an award for “Best Dance Music Production” at the Miller Music Factory, a Battle of the Bands-type event in Istanbul. Four months later, a movie studio asked them to score the soundtrack for one of the biggestbudget movies in Turkey that year, “Vay Arkadas.” When the commission came, followed by similar offers, they realized the desire within the industry for their sort of music and felt confident enough to begin recording Takim Oyunu.

Multitap released the album and its music videos in 2010 through an Istanbulbased multi-media cooperative, Multi-Arts Production. The company remains small and is run by friends of the band, but Sümer and Ozgümüs said that there is a growing tide of other bands and small labels with similar philosophies. Multitap’s popularity has grown within their target audience: In June, they won an award from Istanbul’s Bogazici University for the year’s “Best Electronic Music.”

B

y late evening, the streets around Multitap’s studio in Tünel turn into a sunny honeycomb of bars buzzing with young people. A few blocks over from the guitars and drums, dark haired women with bright lipstick and their male friends with piercings and colorful sneakers chat animatedly over drinks. This cosmopolitan crowd is Multitap’s current audience, and in some ways it is hard to imagine the band’s music immediately appealing to youth outside of Turkey’s biggest cities.

But just as the spirit of arabesk spread from slums to mainstream in a period of economic and social depression, in this hopeful moment, a brighter musical narrative could make its way from Tünel to Sanlıurfa and beyond. Multitap is offering that new soundtrack, and Turkey, looking forward, is ready to listen.

CHARLOTTE PARKER ‘13 is an American Studies major in Berkeley college. The majority of the interviews for this article were conducted in Turkish, through translators.

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Untying the Knots

By Diana Saverin

Ramazan Can’s shop in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar is world-famous for its traditional Turkish rugs. (Saverin/TYG)

“B

eautiful lady! Would you like a beautiful carpet? They’re traditional!

Hand-made only in Turkey, only with natural dyes. Here, come into my shop!”

I kept my head down and walked briskly past a grinning salesman leaning against the door of his shop, his hand gesturing inside. When I looked back, I saw him wiping dust off the top of a five-foot pile of folded carpets, waiting for the river of tourists to start flowing through the market.

Fifteen carpets hung from the shop’s walls— one deep red with a thick blue border, another circular and tan with small motifs dotting the pile—and countless others lay stacked on the floor. As soon as I continued on my way, the owner of an adjacent store addressed me. He also sold carpets.

A Look into the Decline of “Traditional” Turkish Carpets

The same interaction replayed itself as I wandered down Halicilar Caddesi, the Carpet Avenue, in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. The complex is the world’s oldest indoor market, dating back to the fifteenth century. Each street houses shops of a different trade: jewelry, clothing, shoes, lanterns, spices, instruments, soaps. Salesmen speak near-perfect English to accommodate foreigners, their primary customers.

I finally ducked into a carpet shop, Adnan & Hasan. The owner, Hasan B. Semerci, a lean man with gray hairs in his mustache, welcomed me. Over Turkish cay, I asked about authentic, naturally dyed Turkish rugs, like the ones the men on the street hailed as I passed. He smirked, shifting his weight before speaking. As he unfolded various carpets, Hasan unraveled the story of a dying art: Cheaper, foreign-made rugs have begun to overtake ones made in Turkey, and

2020FOCUS: TURKEY industrialization has made natural dyes obsolete; yet a group of connoisseurs, artisans, and scientists have struggled to keep the tradition alive.

Over the next two weeks, I travelled from stores to factories to weaving workshops to learn the fate of the Turkish rug.

Though the dying tradition threatens many foreigners’ dreams of taking home a piece of an Ottoman palace, the change means something different to weavers.

For them, it could mean the birth of a new way of life.

H

asan gestured to the shops in the market beyond his door. Each seemed to sell similar rugs. But to my surprise, he said that many weren’t made in Turkey.

“The liberal economy is choking everything,” Hasan said. “Over the past decade or so, due to low labor costs abroad, there are many Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani rugs in the market. I feel sad about that because the Turkish market has gotten so much smaller.”

The cost of labor abroad is not the only factor endangering traditional Turkish rugs. Hasan threw his hands up at the mention of machine-made rugs.

“I wouldn’t call them carpets,” he said.

“You feed the design into the computer; ten minutes later, it’s done. They have already replaced the handicraft… Handmade carpets are slowing down. People need floor coverings, and now machinemade rugs are filling that gap.”

The Turkish method of hand-weaving rugs dates back to the sixth century. Women commonly wove for two or three hours

the yale globalist: fall 2011

Factory production makes more rugs available at low prices—at just one of the Ufuk Akkus’s company’s 718 branches, he said they could cover more than twenty-five soccer fields with the rugs. per day as a social activity and a way to pay their dowries. Although traditional rugs are deemed “timeless,” the industry has adapted to meet the needs of the lower and middle classes. Factory production makes more rugs available at low prices.

A seller, Ufuk Akkus, guided me up and down the 18 floors of carpets he sells at the warehouse, Sark Hali. At just one of the store’s 718 branches, he said they could cover more than 25 soccer fields with the rugs. Such mass production has put the slow and costly handicraft in danger.

But the danger was hard to imagine.

Ramazan Can owns a store, the Carpet Inn, in the Grand Bazaar with three high ceilinged rooms where shelves of carpets cover each wall from floor to ceiling. One of his employees spread out carpets with different designs on the floor in front of our chairs.

“I sell art,” Ramazan declared, flipping through his prayer beads. “Most of the people here don’t sell carpets; they sell a dream. They tell stories.”

Abruptly, the worker unfurled a 7-by-11foot rug with a deep red color and a series of intricate borders enclosing each other into the center of the rug. Ramazan got up from his chair, pacing towards it. I did the same, letting the silk pile shift under

Weavers at work at Woven Legend’s factory in Malatya. Most store owners claim that the carpets they sell are both hand-woven and hand-dyed. (Saverin/TYG)

my fingertips. It was Hereke, or silk warp woven onto a silk weft, the pinnacle of the Turkish tradition. Ramazan muttered the price: $100,000. His store offers the second of two markets for rugs. The first market offers cheaper rugs for the masses; the second caters to the wealthy, treating carpets as art rather than floor coverings.

An exchange in Hasan’s shop soon demonstrated this dichotomy. A group of five women arrived to pick up a carpet bundled in brown paper. As they headed for the door, one whispered to me that the buyer was Michelle Bachelet, former president of Chile.

Such high profile customers are not new to the market of Turkish carpets.

Since the thirteenth century, Turks have exported their rugs around the world.

Many European paintings depict Turkish carpets under the feet of aristocrats; Henry VIII, in particular, craved the double-knotted tradition. Today, the allure remains. At another shop in the Grand Bazaar, the owner turned the pages of his scrapbook of customers’ business cards and showed one of Baba Bush.

But many sellers in the market complained that demand for hand-woven rugs has decreased over the past decade among such connoisseurs as well, leaving Herekes on the floors of their stores instead of living rooms of the wealthy. This shift is a result, no doubt, of the suffering global economy.

Despite this, most customers in Istanbul, even those who can’t afford it, demand the more traditional and expensive means of production—vegetable dyes and village women with quick fingers. The three questions customers ask repeatedly in each shop are: “Was it naturally dyed?”, “Was it hand-made?”, and “Was it made in Turkey?” This formula for authenticity reveals a nostalgic demand for a relic of the past, and to meet it, salesmen claim the industry has remained immune to the forces of time and progress.

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S

ome have attempted to salvage one aspect of authenticity—natural dyes.

For centuries, dyes from plants such as daisies and madder were used to produce the brilliant colors in ancient rugs.

But the advent of chemical dyes around 1850 offered a simpler and easier process that replaced the old method. Weavers stopped teaching the natural dye method to their children, and it eventually was forgotten.

In the 1970s, Dr. Harald Bohmer, a German chemist living in Istanbul, discovered a passion for collecting rugs. He noticed that carpets made before 1850 contained rich colors that would not pale, while newer ones faded after several years. To find out why, he took threads of different colors from the older carpets, distilled them to separate the dye from the fabric, and traced the source of the colors. He soon put together “recipes” of flowers, plants, and bugs that created variations of red, yellow, and blue. He created the Natural Dye Research and Development Project, or DOBAG. Through the DOBAG project, Bohmer aimed to re-teach ancient methods to weavers through cooperatives in Turkish villages.

Since, some have tried this method.

Musa Kazim Basaran, the best maker of kilims, or flat, woven carpets, in the world according to the Muscat Festival in Oman, has made countless mixes from his home in Istanbul. I visited Musa to get his opinion. In his back patio, Musa picked plants of a red dye and stirred crushed bits of their roots with water.

“Only five or six people use natural dyes in Turkey,” he said, using a long stick to stir what looked like thick, brown mud

economic project, the weavers are now able to design their own destiny by buying livestock or moving to cities—in other words, choose occupations other than weaving. Even a project aimed at institutionalizing “authenticity” is subject to the changes putting it in danger across the country.

F

Sellers like Ramazan Can offer a wide variety of carpets for shoppers to peruse. (Saverin/TYG) tion that only five or six people mix natural dyes in Turkey was startling. This number may be off—the closest thing to accountability in the Grand Bazaar is word of mouth—but it reveals the contrast between reality and its presentation in the market. Every shop I visited claimed to sell only carpets with natural dyes. Everyone except Hasan, that is.

“Whoever tells you [they’re using natural dyes,] that’s another nonsense,” Hasan said. “It’s a problematic and difficult process to make vegetable dyes… maybe 90 percent of my stock is manmade dyes, not natural, which applies to all production in Turkey. Whoever tells you that his rugs are vegetable dyes, he either doesn’t know what he is doing, or he’s lying to you, which is worse.”

While dyes are only one ingredient of a carpet, the changes in their use reflect how the recipe of “traditional” Turkish carpets is transitioning on a broader level. DOBAG’s attempt to resurrect the ancient way is struggling to have staying power as Turkey changes.

“If not dead, it’s dying,” Hasan remarked about the project.

Its death, though, is a marker of its own success. Because it has succeeded as an

“Those carpets are walked on every day in fivestar hotels by rich men who don’t even think of these girls, of every stitch.” in a bucket. “It’s just not efficient or effective. Chemical dyeing is easier, shorter.

See, I have to dye it, then dry it, then dye it again, then dry it again. It prolongs the process. Chemical dyeing is one process; it takes half an hour, and it’s done. But a few years later, it fades. It lasts ten years, maximum.”

Musa poured the thick mixture in a large tin box of steaming water. His men-

ar from Istanbul and the Grand Bazaar, Nuri Aslan, the production manager at Woven Legends in Malatya, led me to his factory. Three rugs lay baking in the morning sun outside. Inside, he stood in an open room while men around us kneeled on the floor, scraping the pile of large carpets with metal combs.

Here, they repair the rugs woven in villages before exporting them to the United States and Europe.

“We have roughly 500 weavers right now,” Nuri explained. “But it was more in the past. Just last year we had 2,000... Less and less people are interested in learning the craft.” I nodded, noticing the worry in his face. For him, this widespread disinterest threatens business.

Travelling two hours through farmland to the southeastern city of Adiyaman, I met Sonmez, a bearded man with crinkled eyes who managed weaving workshops nearby.

He planned to take me to the people I had heard so much about: the weavers.

As I sat crammed next to my translator Onder Sali in the truck, Sonmez pointed to the hills rising and swelling on the horizon.

“There,” he said, tracing them with his finger, “we used to have hundreds of weavers. Now those are all closed.”

Then we veered off the paved roads onto the space between the houses in the first village. I hesitate to call that rocky land “road.” Onder looked around and asked, “Can’t you smell that, the smell of naturality?” We laughed as we swung helplessly into each other until Sonmez parked outside a cube of concrete—the first weaving workshop.

Wandering into a dim room with fluorescent lighting, we saw four weavers working on benches under brilliantly colored loops of yarn dangling from loom tops. The weavers’ fingers moved so fast I could not see what they were doing in between the taut strings, each like a harpist playing on silent strings.

22 22 www FOCUS: .org TURKEY 22.tyglobalist FOCUS: TURKEY Each month, these weavers make 450 Turkish Lira, the equivalent of $300. More and more, their trainer told me, young people are choosing to go to high school instead of working here. Those who do weave sit in that same room from 5:50 in the morning until 8:00 at night, they explained. The older ones have developed problems with their eyesight, and their rounded backs stay rounded, even when they are not leaning over the looms. They nodded in unison when I asked if their backs hurt.

“We get breaks, though,” one of them, Zeynep, chimed in before we left, looking up from her loom.

We let them return to work and piled quietly back into the truck. “Were you affected by that?” Onder finally asked from next to me. “Me, I was affected. Those carpets are walked on every day in five-star hotels by rich men who don’t even think of these girls, of every stitch.”

I nodded, looking out the window at fields of red tulips passing by. The concern I had felt at the imminent decline of the traditional carpet industry had grown more complex. Could carpets only be produced at the expense of these young women, working through the winter for wages barely sufficient to support any family?

The next village had a workshop with 11 women—girls rather. One was thirteen years old and had come to weave with her older sister after school. She did not want to be a weaver, she assured me. She wanted to be a doctor.

I wished her good luck and sat down on the bench at the next loom next to Zehra Gurbuz, who was 27 years old and had been weaving for the past 12 years.

“In the past there were more weavers than now,” she said, hitting the knots she had just tied down. “It was so crowded, but now they’ve moved to the city center because there aren’t enough working facilities in the village, so now they work in the factory.”

Leaning against one of the looms, Sonmez joined in: “Before, in these villages, girls were getting married at early ages.

But now that they’re earning their living at factories, there’s no pressure to marry at an early age.”

The same stories rang off the looms at the next workshop. Young women between the ages of 15 and 20 giggled from their benches, their fingers moving quickly as they talked of their neighbors who had

POLITICS &theECONOMY 222011 yale globalist: fall moved to the “city centers.”

Yildiz has been working as a weaver for seven years. “I would prefer to work there, in a factory,” she said. “It’s a more secure job. Many of my neighbors have gone.”

The shift away from production of tradition in Turkish rugs seemed clear at each stage of the process: the bazaar, production site, and weaving workshop. The sentiment was different in the villages, though. No longer were men lamenting the lost carpet. Instead, women who had been weaving since their early teens spoke about friends having the opportunity to do other, better work.

As I left my last stop, Yildiz pointed to a radio in the corner. All of the weavers started shouting and pleading, pointing at it with her. The radio had broken because the dust was so thick in the air when they worked, and they wanted me to ask Sonmez for a new one.

“Whatever McDonald’s or apple pie or baseball is to American culture, carpets are to Turkey… Now how would you feel if baseball were in decline?”

T

he decline of weavers has taken place in a larger context of change throughout southeastern Turkey.

The Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) has created thorough programming on irrigation and development in the region, centered even further south than the villages in a city near the Syrian border, Sanliurfa.

Mehmet Baysal Emin, director of geotechnic planning and underground irrigation of GAP, walked through his office in Sanliurfa, pointing to various maps of Turkey covering his walls.

“Small factories have opened,” he said, waving his hand in a circle around the southeast. “Previously in the community, we were only doing farming—we learned it from our ancestors. With the help of the GAP project, though, we are getting more educated and doing more industrial jobs.”

I asked if there was any downside to the change. “Of course there are a shortage of people doing old, traditional jobs,” Mehmet said. “There are many changes. I don’t see any disadvantage. Economically, this is better.”

The combination of industrialization with a change of education policy in Turkey from a required five years of primary school to eight years has contributed to the decline of weaving. The change is par-

ticularly clear among the typical weaving demographic—young girls: the government finds and punishes parents whose daughters do not enroll.

T

ales of irrigation projects, broken radios, and hunched backs made traditional Turkish carpets seem like one casualty of a larger societal improvement. Back in Istanbul, I met with Guliz Ger, a professor of marketing at Ankara’s Bilkent University who researches carpets and globalization. I asked her: If the decline in traditional carpet making means the country and its citizens are doing better, why should we care?

She took her sunglasses off and looked at me. “We are losing a part of our culture,” she said urgently. “Whatever McDonald’s or apple pie or baseball is to American culture, carpets are to Turkey… Now how would you feel if baseball were in decline?”

With this threat in mind, I wandered back into the Grand Bazaar’s labyrinth of cobbled streets during my last days in Istanbul, nodding at the sellers I had spoken with as they gesticulated to passing customers and tipping my chin up to gaze at the items filling each narrow path. The carpets among them were still striking— each contained thousands of tiny knots that dissolved into velvety colors undulating with the moving light. The beauty remained real to the senses, but the abundance of these carpets seemed like an uncertain reality. The intricate designs constructed an illusion—their age and tradition masking Turkey’s unfolding story of modernization.

DIANA SAVERIN ’13 is an English major in Berkeley College. Contact her at diana.saverin@ yale.edu. Research for this article was supported by a Berkeley Richter Fellowship.

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From the sketchbook of Rae Ellen Bichell

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the yale globalist: fall 2011

RAE ELLEN BICHELL ‘12 is an Anthropology major in Davenport College.

Contact her at rae.bichell@yale.edu

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An Underground Escape A twenty-first century “Underground Railroad” helps LGBT Iranian refugees in Turkey navigate an obscure resettlement system.

By Erin Biel

At the end of May 2011, Parsi took a large group of LGBT Iranian refugees and supporters to Ankara, where they proudly walked in the “March against Homophobia and Transphobia” for the first time. This young Iranian man exuded pure pride and elation. (Courtesy Arsham Parsi)

J

ust the other day, a boy ran past here, yelling, ‘top, top’ (‘faggot, faggot’) at me. It would have been slightly better if it had been a father doing the yelling, but a little boy?” asked Iranian refugee Ardeshir. Arsham

Parsi, founder and executive director of the Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees, translated Ardeshir’s words from Farsi into English as he pointed to an empty parking lot that served as a marketplace during the week. Ardeshir’s face, normally marked by a convivial smile, had turned grim. The confidence he had exuded

throughout the day, complemented by his Adonis-like physique, tight blue shirt, fitted pants, and diamond earring, suddenly disappeared. The 22-year-old gay man from Iran had suffered much worse during his life, but every day was a reminder that he still could not live his life openly.

Ardeshir fled to Kayseri, Turkey from

26 26 FOCUS: TURKEY Iran in November 2010 after men from the Basij paramilitary militia kidnapped him from his home. They raped him, filmed it, and blackmailed him, threatening to show the film to his family and others. “[The Basij] have connections to the government, so they could have had him jailed, if he was lucky, or worse: killed,” Parsi conveyed. Iran is one of seven countries

the yale globalist: fall 2011

was meant to provide communal support in countering LGBT oppression. There were a total of 50 participants, the majority of whom operated under aliases to avoid government detection. A few weeks later, the Iranian secret police raided a party held for the queer community in Shiraz that Parsi had attended. Several of Parsi’s friends were arrested, tortured,

“‘You are gay, and you are Muslim, just don’t go outside,’ and so for months I didn’t go out.” in the world that maintains the death penalty for consensual same-sex acts among adults. Since 1980, the Iranian government has executed well over 8,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals, according to a 2008 U.S. State Department Human Rights Report.

The Basij followed through with its threats; just days later, members gave a copy of the video to Ardeshir’s brother.

Ardeshir recalled hearing other gay men in Shiraz talk about the Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees (IRQR). The IRQR, based out of Toronto, Canada, could help Ardeshir obtain refugee status in Turkey and then potentially secure him resettlement to a third country. Ardeshir decided to leave Iran and crossed the border into Turkey to begin his own journey on this “underground railroad.”

Turkey would appear to be a safe haven for an LGBT Iranian individual seeking asylum. A visa is not required to cross the border between Iran and Turkey, and buses, trains, and planes run regularly between the two countries.

Moreover, Turkey does not legally criminalize homosexuality. Unfortunately, Turkey’s policies toward refugees make life very precarious—if not outright untenable—for LGBT refugees in particular.

A

rsham Parsi, the 31-year-old founder of the Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees, had no one to assist him with the refugee resettlement process when he fled to Turkey via train on March 5, 2005. Parsi had been a major target in Iran as an outspoken activist and vanguard of the Iranian LGBT rights movement. In October 2003, he organized a clandestine Yahoo chat group for queer Iranians called “Voice Celebration,” which

and coerced into providing information about other LGBT individuals in the city.

The raids only increased over the ensuing months, and Parsi knew that he had to leave the country for his own and his family’s wellbeing. Parsi told his parents that he needed to go to Turkey to further his education. But he had no intention of returning. Instead, Parsi would spend the next 13 months in Kayseri, located in central Anatolia, before being resettled to Canada. Unfortunately, those 13 months in Turkey offered little reprieve from the harassment he had experienced in Iran.

Turkey is a party to both the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, as well as its 1967 Protocol. However, the country entered a reservation to the Protocol that declares it will only recognize refugees coming from Europe. Of the estimated 22,000 individuals who seek refuge in Turkey, most are non-European; they are therefore denied long-term or permanent residency. While the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) facilitates their resettlement, most are temporarily accommodated in small towns in Turkey’s interior. These satellite cities tend to be far away from the UNHCR headquarters in Ankara and are more religiously conservative than the larger cities—not an ideal environment for a queer individual, as Parsi soon found out.

“This is where it happened,” Parsi stopped abruptly in front of a small kebab restaurant in Kayseri. “I was beaten up in the streets, and I had my shoulder dislocated. I called the police, but they said, ‘You are gay, and you are Muslim, just don’t go outside,’ and so for months I didn’t go out. I asked friends to buy food for me.” Although homosexuality is not illegal in Turkey, police and private indi-

viduals continue to persecute LGBT individuals with impunity. Refugees are also reluctant to come forth and speak about their vulnerabilities, because UNHCR interviewers, who are generally hired from within the local Turkish population, have been known to ridicule LGBT refugees for their sexuality, according to the Organization for Refuge, Asylum, and Migration.

LGBT refugees experience doublemarginalization; they are ostracized both for being refugees and for being queer.

This discrimination makes it difficult to integrate into the local community, and resettlement to a third country tends to be the only viable solution. However, countries must voluntarily accept resettlement cases, and consequently less than 1 percent of all refugees in the world are ever granted the opportunity to be resettled— generally in the United States, Canada, Australia, or Europe. The entire resettlement process can take a year and a half to two years, on average, and the process is fairly difficult to navigate, especially for an individual who cannot speak the language of the country of first asylum, in this case Turkish. Once Parsi was safely resettled to Toronto, Canada in 2006, he vowed to make the resettlement process easier for future LGBT Iranian refugees.

P

arsi founded the Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees in 2006, choosing the name as homage to the nineteenth-century Underground Railroad in the United States that served as an informal network to help black slaves escape to freedom.

The city of Kayseri has since become the common hub for LGBT Iranians as they seek resettlement, following Parsi’s lead. Although the IRQR is based in Canada, Parsi is in constant contact with the Iranian queer community in both Turkey and Iran via the computer and phone. Five volunteers work with Parsi in Toronto, and another 10 colleagues are in Iran, Turkey, and some of the Western resettlement countries, assisting Iranian queers with various aspects of the resettlement process. The IRQR office in Toronto fields over 100 emails per day; those seeking help range from Iranian LGBTs who are still residing in Iran and preparing to flee, to those already in Kayseri who need help understanding the UNHCR and other re-

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settlement forms, which are generally in English. Perhaps most importantly, Parsi maintains direct contact with the senior protection and refugee status determination officers at UNHCR Ankara, who have come to trust his ability to flag particularly vulnerable refugee cases. As UNHCR Ankara assesses roughly 8,000 new asylum cases each year, the UN entity generally welcomes Parsi’s detailed knowledge of the LGBT Iranian caseload.

Refugees seeking resettlement are not rightfully entitled to legal counsel; therefore, having an advocate like Parsi who is well-versed in the resettlement process is a unique advantage—and some would say a necessary one—given the particular vulnerabilities that LGBT refugees experience. In looking at the numbers, it is evident that Parsi has a very strong track record. Out of the 400 individuals whom he has assisted since 2006, 185 of them have been resettled to a third country, generally either Canada or the United States, far exceeding the 1 percent resettlement statistic for refugees worldwide.

Another 72 have been granted asylum and are currently waiting to be resettled.

W

hen Parsi traveled to Kayseri in May 2011, Armaghan and Fereshteh were two of the refugees still awaiting resettlement. Parsi paid the lesbian couple a visit while on one of his four annual trips to Kayseri to personally check in on his resettlement applicants. The two women were living in an apartment that consisted of a dim and oppressively hot seven-foot by five-foot living room/bedroom and an even smaller kitchen. Gaunt and exhausted-looking, the women explained that they had been assigned a date to leave for the United States.

However, just days before they were set to depart, they received notification that their case had been put on hold. No additional information was provided. The women had already promised their place to another incoming lesbian couple, so all four women were now sharing the small, dank space.

Armaghan and Fereshteh explained that they had been in Kayseri for two years and three months. They were in dire financial straits, and they had no opportunities for employment. As Parsi later explained, “According to Turkish law,

refugees can apply for work if there are no Turkish people who could do the same job. In other words, they can’t work.” This forces refugees to live off of whatever money they originally came with, but they do not know how long it will be before they are resettled to a third country, if at all, leaving them in a very precarious state. Armaghan had worked illegally for a short while at a tailor’s store but quit after her boss made sexual advances toward her. Now the women rarely left the apartment unless absolutely necessary. They looked worn, mentally and physically.

Armaghan displayed her wrists, palms up. They were covered in scars. She had made more than one suicide attempt. So had the other three women. Parsi chimed in forlornly, “Without a doubt, 100 percent of Iranian queer refugees need a psychologist.” The constant threats, sexual violence, family rejection, and other trauma that Iranian queers experience commonly result in severe bouts of depression only exacerbated by the anxiety caused by the unpredictable resettlement process.

P

arsi acknowledges that much of the resettlement process is outside of his control. For instance, the United States, which accepts more refugees annually than all other countries combined, has numerous security checks that generally prevent timely resettlement.

In Armaghan and Fereshteh’s case, Parsi later learned that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had introduced an additional set of security checks, which was why the women’s cases were unexpectedly put on hold. Given the vagaries of the resettlement process, Parsi’s dual role as an advocate and as a source of support is key in offering LGBT Iranians a semblance of hope during the long and tedious process.

In May, Parsi took a large group of Iranian refugees to Ankara, where they walked in the fourth “March against Homophobia and Transphobia.” It was the first time that an Iranian queer contingent was present at the march, and they chanted: “Ahmadinejad, we’re here!”

The following month, Parsi led a group of over 35 fellow Iranian queers for the first time in the Toronto Pride march.

It is evident that the oppressive laws and social stigma associated with sexual

orientation in Iran will not fade away any time soon. But Parsi’s vocalism has helped to foster some more pragmatic advances.

A number of Western resettlement countries, including the United States, are placing more focus on LGBT refugee protection issues. These governments, along with numerous refugee-related NGOs, are working in conjunction with UNHCR to train all UNHCR employees how to interview and interact with LGBT refugees sensitively.

While this sensitization process will take

“Without a doubt, 100 percent of Iranian queer refugees need a psychologist.” a few years to become firmly entrenched within the UNHCR system and trickle down to all levels of the organization, Parsi stated that over the past year he has heard significantly fewer complaints from LGBT Iranians after they undergo their UNHCR refugee status determination interviews.

Since Parsi’s visit to Kayseri in May 2011, there have been other positive developments in his caseload. Ardeshir was referred to Canada for resettlement; Fereshteh and Armaghan left Turkey for the United States on June 21, 2011; and 20 other LGBT Iranians started their new lives primarily in the United States or Canada, all thanks to Parsi’s help. This long and winding “railroad” to freedom is nearing its final destination for some of the 200-plus refugees whom Parsi continues to oversee in Turkey.

“They are in urgent need right now,” Parsi said. “Just as when you have hundreds of starving people, a food aid agency can’t just say, ‘You are hungry today but we cannot help you.’ These people are hungry right now. Similarly, refugees need help right now. Every day is life or death.”

ERIN BIEL ‘13 is a Global Affairs and Ehnicity, Race, & Migration double major in Ezra Stiles College. Contact her at erin. biel@yale.edu

Cyprus:

An Island Divided

Nicosia is the only divided capital city in the world—split between the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and the southern Republic of Cyprus. Turkey’s stake in the island is impacting her attempts to join the European Union and gain acceptance from the international community.

Sanjena Sathian investigates.

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29 29

All Quiet on the Northern Front

H

ey cousin!

Which way do you want to go?”

Mustafa Tunçbilek calls his best friend, Marios Epaminondes, “cousin.” The two could be related—their voices betray a similar calm demeanor, and both have the tall build and tan skin common to residents of the sunny island of Cyprus. As they walk, they fall into step with one another, Mustafa’s graying hair and beard next to Marios’s still-boyish smile and dimpled face, two sets of broad shoulders bobbing through the city next to one another. They meet several times a week to walk together, exploring side streets and old buildings in their native city of Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus.

This is a divided city, and they are walking through a war zone. But to Marios and Mustafa, it is just an evening stroll.

T

hough Marios, a southern Cypriot, and Mustafa, a northern Cypriot, have both lived a few miles apart from each other in Nicosia for most of their lives, they met by chance only seven years ago, a week after the border splitting the divided city in half was opened in 2004.

“My friend called me at 11:00 one night and said, ‘tomorrow they will let us cross,’” Mustafa recalled of the border opening. “I went the first day on my cycle. I lost ten kilos in one month cycling back and forth so much.”

Today, they are inseparable, and their friends say their familial titles for one another are fitting.

They are members of the 20 percent of Cypriots who reportedly have a close relationship with someone from the other side of the island. The two men have become amateur tour guides of Nicosia, letting visitors from abroad, friends, and friends of friends join on their walks around the city.

The streets of northern Cyprus are reminescent of those of small Turkish towns. (Bruner/TYG) “We are just friends, nothing formal,” Mustafa explained with a shrug. He stood in front of an old inn from Ottoman times just over the border into the north.

“Some people hear, other people hear—word of mouth. And we just walk.”

His demeanor matched his insistence that his walks are casual, as he leaned on his elbow and scratched his graying stubble, one knee slung up on a bench.

“I one day realized, I don’t know so much about the north,” Marios added.

“People started to go for a walk with me—they wanted me to escort them to the north, some of them going to the north for the first time. Then other people wanted to come.”

As casual as their walks are, not everything is normal, and Marios is not the only southern Cypriot who had little to no knowledge of the mysterious other side of the island.

Even today, some southern Cypriots whose old villages are in the north call themselves “refugees.”

A

t just under 3,600 square feet, smaller even than the state of Connecticut, the island of Cyprus is burdened by a single line drawn down its middle: the Green Line, or the United Nations buffer zone, which divides the island in two.

On an evening in early May, Marios and Mustafa arrived at one of the pedestrian crossings that allows Cypriots to cross between the north and south. The two men showed identification twice: once to leave the southern Republic of Cyprus, and once more, mere feet later, to enter the northern “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (TRNC).

The TRNC in the north is an illegal entity, recognized only by Turkey. The border crossing is technically meaningless by all standards of international law. To the outside world, the entire island is de facto the Republic of Cyprus: a wealthy, E.U. member state. On the island, however, the divide between north and south is pronounced. Crossing the border, no matter how casually Marios and Mustafa do it, means entering another world.

30 30 FOCUS: TURKEY

O

ne evening, Marios and Mustafa walked aimlessly through the southern part of the city together until Marios had to depart, leaving Mustafa in foreign territory. Mustafa continued the walk on his own, stopping outside museums to examine maps of the old city and pausing by historical monuments that document the Cypriots’ independence from the British in 1960.

Mustafa stopped at a sign demarcating “The District of Kythrea.”

“That district is in the north,” Mustafa said. “They put this sign up here to remember it. But in the north now it has a new Turkish name, Degirmenlik.”

These strange, haunting districts are all over the southern part of Nicosia.

When the bloody partition forced Greek Cypriots to the south and Turkish Cypriots to the north, families abandoned their old villages. Even today, some southerners whose old villages are in the north call themselves “refugees.” History operates on this island with layers of writing and re-writing and coat after coat of anger.

T

here are plenty of reasons for anger stemming from this conflict. The legacy of war has left no shortage of

The sign of the Turkish Resistance Movement (TMT) signifies glory in the north, but terrorism the rest of the world over. (Sathian/TYG)

the yale globalist: fall 2011 loose ends to be tied up. The approximately 180,000 southerners who were forcibly evacuated during the partition want their property back; they refer to the northerners as illegal occupiers of their land and to themselves as refugees. Mustafa and Marios find themselves today working on opposing sides of this very dispute. In their day jobs, they are both civil servants.

Marios works to help restore Greek Cypriot land lost in partition; Mustafa’s job is to allot unoccupied northern land, considered stolen in the south, to farmers and immigrants. Their daily lives are a constant reminder of what they have been told to hate. And yet they shrug off the burden of their respective histories each day to walk side by side through the city.

Negotiations between both sides continue, and the international community keeps trying to lend a hand. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) runs a project in wealthy Cyprus; resources are devoted to funding NGOs with a wide variety of missions—some bring together young filmmakers in bicommunal activities, while others target history teachers or architects—in the absence of any real development work to do. The United Nations also maintains a peacekeeping mission in Cyprus, and has since 1964: Its official mission is to maintain the status quo. The job for peacekeepers is quiet, and islanders joke that they should be called “beachkeepers.” Yet the operation, one of only 15 drawing from the UN’s limited pool of 100,000 peacekeepers, costs 56 million dollars a year. Cyprus and Greece shoulder a little less than half of the financial burden together, while the rest comes from the pockets of U.N. member states.

The international attention focused on this island is heavy. But for the islanders, there is little sense of urgency. Many southerners live as though the north doesn’t exist; they travel to Greece and the United Kingdom for expensive educations abroad, but they won’t cross a few miles to the north. And many northerners enjoy the advantages of having E.U. passports, not to mention health and social security benefits, without paying taxes to the south. The “conflict” is on everyone’s tongue, but in the languid summer heat, time moves like molasses, and a solution seems always to hang just out of reach.

“Forty years of a U.N. mission, and

for what?” Mustafa asked Marios as they stopped to gaze at a large gold-bronze statue of a wolf in the north commemorating the Turkish Resistance Movement (TMT), a group of freedom fighters who are idolized by the north but known as terrorists in the rest of the world. He listed the members of the international community whose peripheral vision always includes sunny Cyprus: The United States uses British bases on the island as a strategic way to have access to Syria. The E.U. cares more and more, now that Cyprus is a member and Turkey wants to join as well.

The U.N. Turkey. Greece. “This is the most militarized piece of land on earth when you think about how small it is,” Mustafa said.

The conflict continues inertially. Violence seems unlikely, but resentments remain intact, and they continue as younger generations are taught to hate the other side by angry parents, grandparents, even history teachers. On this strange island, full of stubborn, impossible hatreds, Mustafa and Marios share some kind of tranquility that seems to make them impervious to the passive hatred surrounding them.

O

ne evening, Marios and Mustafa settled along a stone ledge in the north and looked down into the buffer zone. The hot summer day was beginning to cool a bit, and they turned to look at the line dividing their lives: They could see, in the distance, the abandoned Ledra Palace Hotel, at the central crossing point of the buffer zone, and closer, a wide soccer field with a thick running track around it. Blue berets, the uniform of the U.N. peacekeepers, dotted the field, pacing in smart, crisp step. But their pomp and ceremony seemed strange against the quiet of the evening. A child of six or seven, playing soccer in the street, lost his ball as it catapulted over the wall into the U.N. territory. With a laugh, he scampered down the steep wall, retrieved the ball and hurried back to his side. The blue berets turned to watch and then continued their march.

All was calm in the war zone.

SANJENA SATHIAN ’13 is an English Major in Morse College. Contact her at sanjena.sathian@yale.edu .

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Struggling to Speak Recent reforms ended the longtime ban on the Kurdish language in Turkey. But some Kurds continue the struggle to gain full language rights.

By Jessica Shor

T

hough only steps from Taksim Square, the bustling heart of modern Istanbul, the office of the Kurdish Culture and Research Foundation feels grim, empty, vaguely threatening. The ground floor consists of a single dusty, unfurnished room. The white walls display not Kurdish art, but photographs of Kurdish refugees fleeing Saddam Hussein’s chemical attacks, mutilated corpses of Kurdish children killed by the Turkish military, and grinning Kurdish guerrillas clutching machine guns.

The foundation’s walls are a testament

of the Kurds’ longtime struggle against Turkey—a struggle that continues today.

In their effort to “Turkify” the state, different regimes have denied the existence of the Kurds as a distinct ethnic group An estimated 378,000 Kurds have been forcibly relocated and the Kurdistan Worker’s Movement (PKK), which has been deemed a terrorist organization by the United States, European Union, and Turkey, has faced violent suppression. To reinforce Ataturk’s united Turkey, the state also enacted a policy prohibiting the use of Kurdish language in business, government, and education.

While oppression of Kurds has waxed

“You can’t speak that here. This is Turkey, and the only language here is Turkish. There’s no such thing as a Kurdish language.” to the Kurds’ violent past in Turkey. Kurds, who comprise nearly a fifth of the population of Turkey, are an ethnic group of Iranian descent who speak an Indo-European language related to Persian. In Turkey, they are concentrated in the southeastern region, and their traditional homeland also spans nearby areas in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. During Ottoman times, Kurds intermittently governed semi-autonomous states, but when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Turkish Republic in 1923, he based it on an ideology of a singular Turkish ethnic identity and a staunchly secular state. This alienated Kurds, a devoutly Muslim group who wanted the right of self-determination, and marked the start

and waned, the prohibition of Kurdish language has remained as a constant obstacle to the preservation of Kurdish culture. Though the majority of Kurds in Turkey can speak their language to varying degrees of fluency, as a consequence of the longtime ban, most are illiterate in Kurdish, unable to read the X’s, W’s, and Q’s that set their language apart from Turkish. This prevents them from understanding works of Kurdish literature or news published by Kurdish media organizations and also hampers communication between Kurds in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, each of whom uses a different written script.

That history, and its immense chal-

lenges, hits close to home for Rengin Elci, a Kurdish author who works at the Kurdish Research and Culture Foundation. In the foundation’s ominous Taksim Square office, surrounded by photos of his people suffering, he sat in a plastic lawn chair with a cup of tea in hand. He took a sip and leaned back.

“In 1995, I was in Ankara working as a bodyguard for a Kurdish politician,” he began. “We went to a cafe and started speaking Kurdish, but someone came up and asked what language we were speaking.

He said, ‘You can’t speak that here. This is Turkey, and the only language here is Turkish. There’s no such thing as a Kurdish language.’ We fought. It was two versus seven, but I had a knife. I never wrote in Turkish again after that.”

For nine years after that incident, Elci went underground with his writing. With the threat of imprisonment or worse looming for publishing in Kurdish, Elci only shared his work with a group of close Kurdish friends. But things changed in 2004. In 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) swept into power with a populist and religious agenda. Largely prompted by pressure to improve Turkey’s human rights record in order to be considered for E.U. membership, the AKP government in Ankara has worked to bring greater freedoms to Kurds in Turkey. This process included the 2004 reforms that reversed a decades-old ban on Kurdish language, legalizing broadcasting and writing in Kurdish, as well as Kurdish language lessons.

T

he reforms were heralded as groundbreaking. The international media waxed poetic about the

32 32 FOCUS: TURKEY sweeping changes for Kurds, and human rights watchers cautiously posited that the language reforms would begin a new, freer, more peaceful chapter of Kurdish history. Today, few Kurds would dispute that language rights have indeed improved.

Several TV channels broadcast in Kurdish, Kurdish-language newspapers are available at convenience stores in predominantly Kurdish neighborhoods across the country, and a few universities in Istanbul, Ankara, and southeastern Turkey have begun offering Kurdish language courses for credit. Last year, Mardin University, in southeastern Turkey, unveiled a Master’s

the yale globalist: fall 2011

Kurdish language lessons. The government shuttered the Kurdish Foundation for conducting illegal lessons before the ban on Kurdish was lifted, but the foundation has remained open since 2004, and Elci claimed police intimidation and surveillance has decreased. Still, in late 2010, Elci resigned in protest from his job at TRT6, the state-run Kurdish TV channel established after the language reforms.

He claims that the channel banned the use of some 60 Kurdish words, ranging from ‘êrîs’(army) to ‘wêje’ (literature). TRT6 declined to comment on Elci’s resignation or allegations of censorship, but Elci had

“Mother tongue education, without any discussion, is an inevitable right for everyone, and of course for Kurds as well. Without it, it is domination of a nation over another.” degree program in Kurdish language and literature. Michael Gunter, professor of Political Science at Tennessee Tech University and an expert on Kurdish politics, described these developments as “inconceivable 10 years ago”.

Unprecedented as they may be, the 2004 language reforms are not enough for many Kurds. For the reform-minded, mother tongue education—that is, public school conducted primarily in Kurdish—is still the ultimate goal. When language lessons take place during their precious free time or when tuition for private lessons is high, young Kurds often must choose between English, the language of the future, and Kurdish, the language of their ancestors. To the chagrin of many older Kurds, enrollment in Kurdish language lessons has shown that many young Kurds are trading their ethnicity, with its troubled past, for the possibility of a prosperous future. Mother tongue education, their parents hope, will eliminate that trade-off and preserve Kurdish culture in a quickly modernizing world.

For Elci, mother tongue education is not only about maintaining Kurdish identity in the age of globalization, but also about fortifying it against the government’s stealthy yet continuing attempts at integration. Elci conceded that the AKP’s language reforms have made it easier for him to publish his writings and teach

plenty to say.

“They want to kill Kurdish language

by Kurdish language,” he claimed bitterly.

“If you forbid one word, you forbid them all. All of the AKP’s solutions are doubleedged swords. There are things hiding behind their faces. They wear a good mask, but we Kurds know what’s behind it…

That’s why we need mother tongue education, but they won’t give it to us.”

F

or Elci, the so-called “mask” of the AKP is the series of policies that have won the party widespread support across Turkey and persuaded many Kurds to give up the fight for independence. In Southeastern Turkey, economic development has done the most to bolster AKP approval ratings among both Turks and Kurds. Through the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), the government has invested heavily in infrastructure and irrigation, to the tune of more than U.S. $13 billion. GAP has come under fire from a number of Kurdish, Turkish, and foreign human rights organizations for its displacement of rural families, who are mostly Kurdish, and the destruction of Kurdish historical and religious sites as the reservoirs fill. Nevertheless, numbers show that unemployment is down in southeastern Turkey, and opportunities for education and job training are increasing. This is significant when 40 percent of Kurds

cite unemployment as the most important problem currently facing Turkey, according to a survey by Turkey’s Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research.

“Kurdish opinion is not monolithic.

Some Kurds think it’s more important to push for economic rights,” Professor Gunter explained. “They’d rather have that than greater [human] rights that you can’t eat off the table.” Gunter believes that many Kurds choose to support the AKP for its broad-reaching agenda, rather than vote for the staunchly pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), which focuses almost exclusively on political autonomy as a way to bring greater social and political rights for Kurds.

Still, not all AKP supporters have traded Kurdish rights for economic development. Many believe that each right Kurds secure from the AKP-led government brings them closer to full language freedom, which bolsters their hopes that that the final change, mothertongue education is within reach. This gives rise to what Gunter described as a “revolution of rising expectations.” He summarized, “Although the Turkish government has made some reforms, they have also whetted the Kurdish appetite for greater reforms.” This desire for greater freedoms has united Kurds from across the political spectrum, from radicals like Elci to self-proclaimed “wellintegrated” Kurds like Nevzat Keskin.

Keskin is a producer at Dunya TV, a privately run Kurdish-language channel that, like TRT6, began broadcasting after the 2004 legalization of Kurdish television programming. The Dunya offices occupy a large, modern building in Gaziantep, a predominantly Kurdish city 50 kilometers from the Syrian border. Its cavernous studio holds four sets, from which Dunya broadcasts talk shows, music, soap operas, and Kurdish language lessons. The channel is headed by Remzi Ketenci, the ethnically Turkish general director, who spoke grandly of the channel’s programming and mission.

“With this TV channel, we want to display Kurdish rights and show the rich Kurdish culture to the world... Because of the ban on language, they were speaking Kurdish as a street language, so they can’t read or write. Now, they want to increase literacy, and we help them. This channel shows the world that the Kurds are not just about violence,” he proclaimed.

FOCUS: TURKEY 33

www.tyglobalist.org But for Keskin, who has achieved success in both Turkish and Kurdish media, a TV channel is not enough. When Ketenci finished his speech and left the conference room, Keskin opened up: “Mother tongue education, without any discussion, is an inevitable right for everyone, and of course for Kurds as well. Without it, it is domination of a nation over another. Here, it is domination of Turks over Kurds. This is unjust, and it has gone over for years.”

I

n their quest for greater rights, the Kurds who choose to work within the Turkish political system have pinned their hopes on constitutional amendments, promised during the campaigns in the lead-up to the June 12, 2011 general elections. What currently stands in their way is Article 42 of the Turkish constitution, which forbids using any language besides Turkish as the primary language of instruction in public schools. This article has been on the books since 1923, but after nearly 90 years, change appeared to be in sight. Summarizing the dreams of many Kurds, Gunter explained, “There is real hope that after the elections the AKP will have a serious process of constitutional revision… But even if we don’t have a new constitution, we will have a number of new amendments.”

The AKP received nearly 50 percent of the vote in June, as expected. Among those ballots was Keskin’s, who said his vote was swayed by the AKP’s willingness to support constitutional reforms. In Turkey’s Kurdish areas, BDP-supported independent candidates won 36 seats, more than expected. Unfortunately, what was initially a Kurdish triumph quickly became a renewed fight, as the government barred Hatip Dicle, one of the BDP-backed winners, from taking his seat, and the other Kurdish winners boycotted the assembly. They have yet to enter the parliament, and tensions are rising. The leader of the PKK has announced that he will no longer negotiate with Turkey, and on July 14 a Kurdish youth set himself on fire to protest Kurdish oppression, dying in the hospital several weeks later.

Language reforms allowed for limited campaigning in Kurdish language during the June 2011 elections.

In Sanliurfa, the BDP exercised its right to speak to its supporters in their mother tongue. (Shor/TYG)

It now appears that two solutions remain, neither of which involve cooperation with the Turkish state. In mid-July, the Kurdish Democratic Society Congress (DTK) unilaterally proclaimed democratic autonomy for Kurds in southeastern Turkey. However, nobody is sure how such a system would work, or whether the proclamation will bring about changes at all.

Turkey is a highly centralized state, and many Turks still hold tightly to Ataturk’s ideal of a “Turkish” identity. Although democratic autonomy within Turkey has been on the agenda of Kurdish activists for years, it is unlikely that the central government will permit it.

With political routes to Kurdish rights blocked, a more sinister solution waits in the wings. The Kurds who support mother tongue education include many extremists, like Elci. Out of other options, these pro-independence, radical Kurds are now willing to turn to violence. Elci explained, “I am Kurdish, and for Kurds our language and our culture are like religion… I am willing to die and to fight for that.” Although the PKK has yet to embark on the “all-out war” it pledged to wage against the Turkish state if reforms were not forthcoming, violence has increased since the elections.

In one of the deadliest attacks in years, the PKK killed 13 Turkish soldiers in July.

In its August 8 edition of its weekly press release, the PKK declared that Kurds who support a ceasefire or negotiated solution are “not supporting the success and unity of the Kurdish people but instead the annihilation policies of the AKP government.”

The only thing left, they say, is for “all the patriot-militant youth of Kurdistan to join the guerrilla forces and develop a form of struggle that is fit for success and victory.”

The Kurdish situation in Turkey is at a tipping point, one that could prove explosive. Underneath the surface of the highly touted 2004 language liberalization policies, reform-minded Kurds have not only refused to give up on mother tongue education, but also become more vocal as that right increasingly seems within reach.

The question that remains is whether this group of Kurds can bring the fight back into the political system before the armed struggle intensifies further.

JESSICA SHOR ‘13 is an Anthropology major in Ezra Stiles College. Contact her at jessica.shor@yale.edu

34 FOCUS: TURKEY 34

Q

A Conversation with Bedri Baykam

A &

the yale globalist: fall 2011

Bedri Baykam is a Turkish artist and political activist for the Republican People’s Part (CHP). He was a candidate for the presidency of his party in October 2003. This interview was conducted by ADELE ROSSOUW.

Q: You have been a prominent artist from a very young age. Why did you decide to enter politics?

A: It started with my father [Dr. Suphi Baykam]. He was a famous politician in the fifties and the sixties, and I lived through the very important things he went through.

This seed of political experience stayed in me and lived with me. [Then] after I came back in 1987 from living in the United States and Paris, the first thing I saw was that Turkey was going downhill towards Islamic fundamentalism. I wanted to start warning society against [this] danger. As an artist, I don’t do politics because I have extra time.

I don’t do it because it’s fun. I do politics because it’s unavoidable. As an artist and writer and thinker, I need to live in a free society.

Q: What were the “seeds of

fundamentalism” you recognized upon your return to Turkey in 1987?

A: The Iranian prime minister visited

Turkey right after I came back in 1987, but I read that he refused to visit the mausoleum of [Mustafa Kemal] Atatürk in Ankara.

I thought that the Turkish government would send him right back to Teheran on the first plane. But instead the Turkish prime minister, Turgut Özal, said it was no problem. I panicked because a government that gave the right to a visitor to make such an open offense towards the creator of the secular Turkish republic could do anything inside the country from that moment on. On that day, I stopped being a caring intellectual and became an activist.

Q: Prime Minister Erdogan of the AK

Parti draws significant support from nonsecular Turks. He won a great victory in the last election. What does this mean for Turkey?

A: Erdogan is a very self-centered man

who does not try to develop democracy in the country. There’s growing pressure in most of Turkey to conform to Islamic laws, including not selling alcohol or donning the veil. The government has the power to ban films or theater pieces or exhibitions.

The press is also losing all of its freedom—there are only about four opposition papers left—and is at times forced to fire its writers on the government’s demand.

Some of my journalist friends are in jail and have been there for three or four years.

Q: But Turkey is often praised in the

West as a successful Islamic democracy.

A: Theoretically, it is one. It has free

elections and a plural party parliamentary system. It has an “independent” press and a spirit of free enterprise. People can dress as they want and can drink alcohol.

Tourism is alive, and the country attracts foreign investments.

But in reality, it is not. The country doesn’t have a bright future. Turkey drifts more away from democracy and freedom and human rights every day. The government also tries to enact middle-of-theroad policies in every critical field, from the Kurdish question to the Armenian issue, so its policies shift all the time. The masses that are not AKP voters are being pushed aside. A real model would not simply give the illusion of being a free society.

Q: You have been a candidate for the

presidency of the CHP party. What policies would you have enacted if you had won elected office?

A: I would have made the party much

more open to women and youth. I would have designed a more democratic constitution in which candidates are elected by members of the party instead of nominated by the president. I would have led a Turkey where culture and education and

(Courtesy Flickr Creative Commons) science were the main facets of society, giving full freedom to any religious groups but enforcing a clear separation between religion and politics.

Q: You have been described as one of

the pioneers of multi-media and photopainting oriented political art. What does the concept of “political art” mean to you?

A: To me, it is art that has a politi-

cal goal but that does not forget that it is above all a work of contemporary art.

[It can be a way of] immortalizing some shameful moments of Turkish politics. I make [viewers of my work] face undemocratic atrocities lived in Turkey. I make them experience the bravery of those past generations.

Q: Does the political value of this type of art detract from its artistic one?

A: No, I think they complete each other.

The artistic experience of aesthetic pleasure melts with the [political] information coming from the show, which you might agree with or contest. But it’s becoming more and more difficult to make shows like this in Turkey. The artistic and intellectual freedoms of expression are decreasing at a shameful speed in this country.

ADELE ROSSOUW ’13 is an Economics major in Trumbull College. Contact her at adele. rossouw@yale.edu.

GLIMPSE 35

www.tyglobalist.org

Not Just a Game

By Marissa Dearing

D

avid Duke is a survivor. After his father’s death and a breakup with his girlfriend, Duke developed an alcohol dependency. At 23, he found himself homeless in Glasgow. But then Duke came across an article about the Homeless World Cup and soon made the Scottish national team, an accomplishment that would spur many others. The Scots came in fourth in the 2004 Gothenburg Homeless World Cup, and David Duke’s life began to change. Soon after, Duke returned as the team’s assistant coach, and later as manager, leading the Scots to victory in the 2007 Cup held in Copenhagen.

The Homeless World Cup is an annual international soccer tournament co-founded in 2003 by Mel Young, a prominent Scottish social entrepreneur who also co-founded the Big Issue in Scotland, a weekly street paper sold by homeless people. The Homeless World Cup Organization aims to raise awareness, unify the homeless, and foster their integration into society, with the ultimate goal of a world where everyone has a home. The Cup also works to fight the stigma of homelessness by showcasing the players’ determination in sport. Eighteen national teams participated in the first Cup in Graz, Austria, and this August, 64 teams competed in Paris, France, 16 of which took part in the Women’s Homeless World Cup. Soccer is a universal language that all people regardless of creed or nationality can appreciate emotionally. As Duke attests, “You don’t need any money to play football. It is inclusive; everyone is part of the same game. The social exclusion that homeless people feel most of the time does not exist on the pitch.”

The Cup affords players the pivotal experience of belonging to something. “You understand that you are not alone, that people who live on the other side of the world are actually in the same situation as you,” said Duke. The crowd’s applause and

A female soccer player, given a chance to turn her life around, participates in the Homeless World Cup. (Courtesy Homeless World Cup) media attention also encourage and inspire players; accustomed to distance and distaste, they are energized by the positive attention.

A great deal of planning for the Cup occurs on the national level, where each team is affiliated with a program in its home country, for example Street Soccer USA in the United States. Founder Lawrence Cann explained that this organization “delivers a curriculum of life and job skills through on-the-field and off-the-field activities. The curriculum drives toward outcomes in self-efficacy, emotional selfregulation, increased social network, physical and mental health, teamwork, and life skills such as financial literacy.”

Members of Street Soccer USA and similar organizations affiliated with the Cup actively recruit each year’s partici-

pants. The homeless who earn a place on the national teams find financial support from private donors and foundations including Nike, the European Soccer Federation (UEFA), and the United Nations, among many others.

“Everybody needs to wake up in the morning with a goal. The Homeless World Cup brings this opportunity, to undergo training, to change your life,” said Eric Cantona, a former Manchester United striker and now a Homeless World Cup Ambassador. The Homeless World Cup boasts that an impressive “70 percent of players change their lives for the better; they get jobs, find a home or a partner, come off drugs or alcohol, or fix up their previously damaged relationships.” This was certainly the case with Duke.

Now founder and CEO of Street Soccer Scotland, Duke has come a long way from the days when he was homeless in Glasgow. “I am a social entrepreneur myself. I have set up Street Soccer Scotland to use football to help homeless people in my country.” As an ambassador for the Homeless World Cup, David Duke, like many of the Cup’s participants, has been able to translate the success he found on the field into the rest of his life. Although the Homeless World Cup is by no means a cure-all for homelessness, a problem whose eradication must involve broader economic and educational initiatives, the organization seeks to inspire the homeless to achieve all the positive change within their means. Duke spends his days working to make that positive change a reality for as many of his homeless countrymen as possible, and to that end, he spent much of the last year preparing to take the first ever Scottish National Women’s Team to the 2011 Cup. MARISSA DEARING ‘14 is in Berkeley College. Contact her at marissa.dearing@ yale.edu.

36 36 FEATURE

the yale globalist: fall 2011

A Common Divide

Student tours of sites holy to both Jews and Muslims impact tensions in a partitioned Hebron

E

ach year, thousands of Israeli schoolchildren are handed bagged lunches, packed into school buses, and sent on field trips around the country. They recall biblical stories at the edge of the Red Sea, study ancient history at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, and learn about the formation of the State of Israel at Tel Aviv’s Independence Hall.

These trips are meant to unite students over their national heritage, like a visit to Washington D.C. for American students.

But in a country whose heritage includes territorial disputes, a newly proposed program to finance trips to holy sites in Israeli-occupied Hebron has left some wondering whether a deeper political agenda is at play.

Hebron is one of four cities holy to both Judaism and Islam, and each faith reveres the city for one reason: the Tomb of the Patriarchs, which is believed to be the burial place of their common ancestor Abraham. Today, the site is both a synagogue and mosque, the only such shared house of worship in the world. But rather than signifying their shared heritage, He-

By Anya Van Wagtendonk

The Tomb of the Patriarchs is one of many sites holy to both Muslims and Jews in Hebron. (Courtesy wikiCommons) ered in recent years. Although Israelis can easily access the historic Old City by bus or car, few find reason to do so. The once-bustling downtown area is largely deserted. Hundreds of homes and shops stand vacant, their boarded windows littered with anti-Arab graffiti. The shuk, or marketplace, was permanently shuttered in 2001 when Israeli soldiers found a teddy bear containing an explosive device outside its gates. Down the center of the main street runs a concrete barrier separating Jews from Muslims.

The Hebron Rehabilitation Committee (HRC) seeks to revitalize the ailing city and welcomes any visitor. “Hebron is a tourist area without tourists,” said Walid Abu Alhalaweh, HRC’s public relations director. “When more people start to come and visit the city… it will develop the commercial life, which is very needed.”

Israel’s new plan to fund field trips into Hebron for elementary school students,

Hebron has become a symbol of the historical divide between Jews and Muslims. bron has instead become a symbol of the historical divide between Jews and Muslims. The city is split between Palestinian and Israeli governance. Jews recall the 1929 massacre and expulsion of the city’s Jewish population, while Arabs recall the 1994 slaughter of unarmed Muslim worshippers. And a Jewish settlement in the center of the Old City, sprung up in the wake of the 1967 War, invites some of the strongest sentiments on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

No wonder this ancient city has with-

proposed by Minister of Education Gideon Sa’ar, aims to emphasize the historical, cultural, and emotional importance of the Tomb of the Patriarchs to Jewish visitors.

“Most Israelis consider [the Tomb of the Patriarchs] a Jewish heritage site,” said Eddie Fraiman, an advisor to Knesset member Yossi Peled.

The concern, then, for Alhalaweh and his colleagues, is that these field trips will focus so exclusively on the area’s Jewish heritage that its young visitors will leave without considering the lives of the thousands of Palestinians who also live, work, and pray in the Old City.

Others fear that these field trips will bolster sentiments sympathetic to the city’s controversial Jewish settlement.

“The [Israeli] government is now bringing students and children… to build the settlements,” said Arafat Abu Ras, who works in the Palestinian Authority’s office of public affairs. Every new emotional connection built between a young Israeli student and this land, Abu Ras maintained, strengthens the roots of a community—one which

FEATURE 37

www.tyglobalist.org

Extricating the political from the spiritual and historical is not an easy task: If the field trips only describe the biblical history of the tomb, omitting the problems of military occupation and the Palestinian perspective will appear political.

But including these topics also invites the possibility of a narrative that is biased toward one side or the other. many blame not only for Hebron’s economic stagnancy, but also for its human rights abuses.

“Soldiers in Hebron often have to work just as hard at keeping the Jews away from the Muslims as keeping the terrorists away from the Israelis,” said one former Israeli soldier, who wished to remain anonymous. Israeli human rights organizations, such as B’Tselem, report frequent instances of settlers abusing or harassing Arabs.

Salah Abu Laban, a freelance journalist and blogger from Bethlehem, believed the field trips will also increase security measures around the city. “We [already] must wait for hours at the checkpoints,” said Abu Ras. But that security must be in place because of Hebron’s unique structure, argued the anonymous Israeli soldier. “Hebron is the only place in the West Bank that has Jews and Arabs live across the street from one another. Every other town or village is either Jewish or Arab. It’s the reason for more security [in Hebron] close proximity means danger.”

At the crux of the debate, and the city itself, is the Tomb of the Patriarchs, whose walls and monuments were built around the caves believed to hold the remains of Abraham and his family. Passed between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish hands for centuries, the tomb was a mosque for 700 years, off-limits to all non-Muslim visitors.

After falling under Israeli control in 1967, the building was opened to Jewish visitors for their High Holy Days.

The controversy surrounding the building’s new structure was enormous, culminating in the infamous 1994 massacre, when a fundamentalist named Baruch Goldstein entered the mosque and opened fire on Muslim worshippers as they

prayed. Twenty-nine were slaughtered; the resulting chaos led to the tomb’s closure for months. When it reopened, heavy security separated the mosque and synagogue.

Today, worshippers from one religion cannot enter the other’s section, and the building dedicated to two people’s common link is unparalleled in its tension.

Elisheva Goldberg, an American college student who has visited the tomb on multiple occasions, spoke of this divide: “You can’t talk to [those across the barrier] or interact with them, but they’re there, and you know that.”

Goldberg also pointed out the effect that the message of the field trips and the tour guide’s agenda, rather than the mere fact of the field trips’ occurrences, will have on the debate. When Goldberg visited the tomb on a tour organized by Breaking the Silence, an Israeli human rights group that collects soldiers’ testimonies about the Palestinian territories, the tour guide argued that Israel’s presence in Hebron strained military resources. “Breaking the Silence shows what it means to militarily occupy a place,” she said. “[It left the impression that] the settlers shouldn’t be there because it burdens the army.”

By contrast, when Goldberg took a tour sponsored by “Hebron Tours,” a settler organization, the guides discussed the metaphysical importance of the land and Jews’ biblical claim to the tomb. They emphasized the 1929 massacre of Hebron’s Jewish population and argued that the Goldstein massacre had been preempting a terrorist plot.

So when Israeli students are bused to the tomb, the choice of who leads them around the ancient building will be crucial to their experience. But extricating the political from the spiritual and historical

is not an easy task: If the Sa’ar field trips only describe the biblical history of the tomb, omitting the problems of military occupation and the Palestinian perspective will appear political. But including these topics also invites the possibility of a narrative that is biased toward one side or the other.

Dan Jacobson, a father of school-aged children living in the Gush Etzion settlement outside Jerusalem, believes students will be able to study the tomb’s history while saving the political discussion for the classroom. When his children completed their studies of Genesis in school, they held a celebration in Hebron, where much of the book took place. “The goals [of those celebrations] were not political,” he pointed out, “just religious and cultural.”

“In Israel, 7-year-old kids walk around in school discussing political issues,” he said. “Things strike very close to home.

But there’s a way for people… to be balanced and nuanced in their thinking, rather than dogmatic.”

“The politics need to be discussed and will be discussed,” he added, but that discussion can take place elsewhere. “A person who politically thinks that the settlements are a bad idea… but nevertheless understands that Hebron is a critical part of Jewish history can say, ‘Tomorrow we are going on a trip that means a lot to us and our heritage. Yesterday we discussed the politics, but tomorrow we are studying the culture and religion,’” he said.

Despite the controversy surrounding the field trips, the program will likely commence this autumn. One hopes that, where the purview of the tours focuses on Jewish religion and history, the trips will invite considered and nuanced discussion of the area’s tenuous political landscape.

A long wall divides the tomb’s synagogue from its mosque. Windows pepper these walls, allowing worshippers on one side to see into the other. One Jewish visitor recalled the first time she peered through a window and happened to catch the eye of a Palestinian woman. The woman waved. She waved back.

ANYA VAN WAGTENDONK ’12 is an English major in Timothy Dwight College. Contact her at anya.vanwagtendonk@yale.edu.

38 38 LETTER FROM

the yale globalist: fall 2011

Letter From Paris

By Jack Newsham

“A

uthority,” I said.

“Father. Uniform,” my French host brother Balthazar responded.

We sat in the kitchen of the family’s apartment after dinner, playing a word association game.

“Suburbs,” I said, thinking of detached homes and manicured lawns. But Balthazar’s association was less rosy: “Riots.”

From the northern reaches of Paris, you can just start to see them: the towering suburban housing projects where much of the city lives. These northern suburbs, which align closely with several of 751 state-designated “sensitive urban zones,” or ZUS, aren’t a stop on many tourists’ itineraries. While outsiders like Balthazar view these projects as volatile riot sites with high poverty and unemployment, many first- and second-generation

The Rue Saint-Luc, in the Goutte-d’Or neighborhood of northern Paris. (Newsham/TYG)

French immigrants call them home.

Rarely trafficked by non-resident French, much less by foreign visitors, the ZUS are somewhat of a sociological frontier. I felt compelled to visit. But after I told my host family what I planned to write about, they were apprehensive.

I had a hunch what they would say. The few English-language online resources I had found about these places were largely Islamophobic, and several were affiliated with far-right movements in France and the United States. According to such sites, the suburbs are “dangerous to whites and non-Muslims,” and resolutely “in the hands of drug traffickers, gangs, and imams.” According to one dispatch, ZUS are “microstates... governed by or under the influence of Islamic Sharia law.” Conservative commentator Daniel Pipes labeled them “Dar al-Islam: the place where Muslims rule.”

Mathieu, an English-speaking friend of the family, sat with me after dinner one evening and voiced his concerns.

“There are some places where you don’t want to go, where you aren’t welcome,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “When you’re on the Métro and you’re trying to find out where you’re going, they know you’re an outsider.”

Two weekends later, I found myself stepping out of the Métro into the northern suburb of Aubervilliers. Following my teacher’s advice, I had dressed to blend in: plain white tee, jeans, no camera. Nonetheless, after Mathieu’s description, I was prepared to have everyone’s eyes on me, to witness street crime, or worse. But after walking a few blocks, I noticed that despite a higher-than-average concentration of halal meat vendors, the city wasn’t that foreign.

Venturing further into Aubervilliers, down its dirty streets and past its rundown storefronts, I found a small playground amid several apartment blocks.

The equipment was mostly new, and unlike most Parisian playgrounds, completely untouched by graffiti. A diverse group of kids played with their parents looking on: Asians, Eastern and Western Europe-

ans, Africans and Middle Easterners, all of them speaking French. Where was the hotbed of violent Muslim separatism I had been told to expect?

My expectations were similarly toppled elsewhere in Paris. The Goutte-d’Or, a ZUS, sits at the base of Montmartre, home of the majestic Basilique Sacre-Coeur and its mobs of tourists. Amid the bustle of the neighborhood, between the street vendors and money order shops of the Rue Doudeauville, sits a shop called Dar alSalaam that advertises cut rates for longdistance phone calls. Dar al-Salaam, or “house of peace,” is another term for Dar al-Islam, the term used disparagingly by Pipes to suggest Muslim dominance of the ZUS. But if this store suggested anything, it was that to the residents of the Goutted’Or, where beefy police patrols stroll through the market and the ornate Wallace fountains of Paris dot the sidewalks, Dar al-Islam is confined to a street corner, only accessible by long-distance phone calls. The residents of this neighborhood don’t feel like they run things at all.

In one regard, Mathieu was right: I was an outsider. Though I wasn’t mugged or shoved off the Métro, rundown projects and signs that pointed to the welfare office had never been a fixture of anywhere I have ever called home. In the words of community organizer Isabelle de Rambuteau, the residents of neighborhoods like the ZUS are “isolated at every level,” caught between disunited families, a disunited city, and difficulties communicating with the established power structures.

Their social advancement, she relates, will not be easy, but will require politics of pragmatism and character.

A week later, I would return home to lifelong friends and family, a relatively stable living situation, and a system I felt I understood and could navigate. And in that regard, I was different: Somewhere else, I was an insider.

JACK NEWSHAM ‘14 is in Morse College. Contact him at john.newsham@yale. edu