ELMABACHE, Turkey -- A slow breeze steals through the deserted village and stirs the smell of arson. The Turkish soldiers burned every third or fourth house last month, the villagers said. Three of the peasants were shot. Anyone who resisted was beaten.
The hundred families were given four hours to leave. They were )) warned not to return.
Elmabache is one town of many in southeastern Turkey where a brutal war between the Turkish government and Kurdish guerrillas they call terrorists has turned the pastoral countryside into a place of ghostly villages, a place of murder and fear.
While Western countries mostly ignore it, the conflict has grown more fearsome. More than 5,400 already have died this year, the highest annual toll in a decade. Those who have not fled are too frightened to speak of it.
Their whole life seems defined by fear. Few people go outside after dark. Villagers are reluctant to talk to reporters. They refuse to give their names, certain trouble would follow. Traffic is slowed by military checkpoints that turn back foreigners and other strangers.
"We can say nothing, or we will be taken away. We cannot even say a stone is a stone," says one villager, refusing to acknowledge a burned and deserted village within sight of his house.
The proportions of the Turkish government's 10-year war against its separatist-minded Kurdish minority are staggering: By government and private accounts, more than 1,400 villages have been razed or evacuated, 13,000 people have died, and 2 million residents have fled the conflict and become internal refugees.
The violence knows few bounds. Kurdish guerrillas have killed nearly 100 schoolteachers, and often execute whole families suspected of collaboration with the government. The government engages in widespread torture and political oppression, according to human rights accounts.
At least 100 journalists and writers are in prison. More than 1,200 human rights workers, lawyers, journalists and trade union officials have disappeared mysteriously, allegedly at the hands of right-wing death squads.
The United States, which acts in the name of human rights elsewhere, has applied minimal pressure on Turkey, a key NATO ally that receives more U.S. foreign aid than any country except Israel and Egypt.
U.S. warplanes take off daily from Turkish bases to patrol a "no-fly" zone over neighboring Iraq to protect Kurdish villages from attack by Iraqi forces. But at the same time, U.S.-equipped Turkish forces and airplanes make identical attacks on Kurdish villages inside Turkey.
"We blame the Americans and the European countries," says a Kurd in Diyarbakir. "Americans give Turkey helicopters. Americans give guns and bullets and Cobras and Phantoms."
The conflict is one of ancient ethnic pride. There are 20 million Kurds. Mostly Muslims, the rough mountain tribesmen have historically been caught in the struggles of the countries they inhabit: Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, each of which has suppressed them. They have never had a country of their own.
Until recently, for the 12 million Kurds in Turkey, it was illegal to speak Kurdish, a fundamentally Iranian language. The government tried to stamp out their culture in the name of a unified, modern Turkey.
The result was a backlash that flared in 1984 with attacks by the Kurdish Workers Party, known by its Turkish acronym PKK. From elusive camps in the mountains, the PKK wages a guerrilla war that has survived yearly onslaughts by government troops.
By some estimates, the government has about a quarter-million soldiers -- nearly half its army -- in eastern Turkey trying to eradicate the PKK. A huge area of 10 provinces is under emergency rule, run by the military with increasing harshness.
Caught in the middle are the Kurdish villagers. The army pressures them to become "Village Guards," armed to fight against the guerrillas. If they refuse, they may be killed or forced from their village. If they accept, they become targets of the PKK.
"We are scared. What can I do?" laments one villager. "Most people have no choice but to be a guard. They are forced. But if we agree to be guards, the PKK will kill us. We have no options."
Unel Erkan is the "super governor" of southeast Turkey. At his huge office in Diyarbakir, he blandly denies reports of what is happening in his domain. The flight of peasants is exaggerated, he says. Evacuated villages? "This is all propaganda." Burned towns? "The terrorist organization burns them."
Torture? "In my country, there is nothing called torture. It's a crime." Besides, he adds, "Who says it? Would a terrorist say he was treated grandly in prison?"
The offices in his headquarters contain posters of gruesome murders committed by the PKK. More than 128 teachers have been killed since 1985, most by the PKK alleging that they were agents of the state. In 1994 alone, the PKK killed 200 Village Guards and 900 civilians, the government claims.
Governor Erkan asserts this year's record casualty toll is a mopping-up operation. "The PKK is defeated," he says, a boast made each year by the government.
'Our people'
Three men and a woman who spent their lives in Elmabache's fields know the price that's been paid. They have come in from the mud-slick streets of Diyarbakir, a rough city in southeastern Turkey. Tentatively, they enter an office to speak to a reporter. Inside, they feel clumsy around the sharp angles of the rooms. The men smoke rapidly.
The three men sit uncomfortably in the chairs. They wear heavy trousers and thick sweaters underneath the suit coats required of a formal visit.
A month earlier, they say, Turkish troops had come at 4 p.m. to their village. Gather your belongings, they were told.
Three men from the village were ordered to point out PKK hide-outs. The men led the soldiers around, showing them nothing, but the soldiers caught on to the charade.
The villagers were told they had to stop harboring guerrillas and join the government's Village Guard. Of course, they refused, say the men in the office.
"These are our people, the PKK. We all support the PKK. Who wouldn't?" asks one.
The townspeople were loaded onto three big buses. The troops doused some houses in the village and set them afire. The buses drove away and evicted the villagers on a roadside.
The soldiers shot the three men who misled them.
Little to lose
Elmabache is down a road that squishes for four miles in mud. The driver is nervous as he wrestles his car around pools of brown water. Many people -- guerrillas, the army, wary villagers -- are inclined to open fire on strangers on back roads here, the driver says.
The village finally emerges through the thick winter fog. Elmabache is ghostly and silent.
The houses were handsome for the poor countryside: made of fieldstone and concrete, and stacked neighborly upon the ridges. The homes had timber and earthen roofs that surrendered to the blaze and collapsed upon the living quarters below.
The villagers had little to lose. The Spartan instincts of their nomadic ancestors served them well. When the army said they had four hours to leave, most families carted away all they had: a few blankets and thin cushions for the floor, a box of sugar for the tea, a bag of lentils for food. Flour. A bag of chopped firewood.
In a $20-a-month, one-room flat in Diyarbakir, the Kurd who will only give his name as Yuel now sits on a thin carpet he brought from Elmabache. His wife, three children and mother stay at the flat as he prowls the city for work. His mother, 65, buys a large bag of sunflower seeds and then sells them a cup at a time to children from her doorstep.
"When we lived in the village we had a big house. I had land. We grew everything we needed," he says. His father and grandfather had lived in the village. Now he struggles as a refugee in Diyarbakir, already swollen by others from the countryside.
"There are no jobs. If I can find the bus fare, I will go to Istanbul or Ankara to work," he says. "I'll shine shoes if I have to."
'The target is civilians'
"In the last two years, the situation has gotten tremendously worse," says Mahmut Sakar, an attorney at the Human Rights Association office in Diyarbakir. "Until 1992, it wasmostly a war between the guerrillas and the army. In the last two years, it seems the target is civilians."
The Human Rights Association workers do not go out to document cases. That is too dangerous -- and business is so brisk, their offices are filled every day with victims coming to them.
"Lots of our members have been killed, detained, tortured," Mr. Sakar says. "All the offices in this region -- in 15 towns -- have been closed except this one."
There really is little the association can do for victims. Mr. Sakar uses his own experience -- he was detained three times -- to illustrate the difficulties of pressing a case.
"When I was tortured, I had wounds on my lips and face. It was obvious I was beaten. The doctor wrote out a report, but when the police got it they just tore the report into pieces.
"They threatened to kill me, and then took me back to the doctor. The doctor begged me, 'Don't make me sign a report.' But I insisted, and then the police tore up the report again. I am a lawyer, and even I cannot prove I was tortured. How can a peasant prove it?"
'Died becoming ill'
The war is often fought by the young. Husein Uzer's son was 16 when he was killed. He had joined the PKK just 45 days earlier and did not yet have a gun when he was caught in a firefight.
He joined, his father says, out of revenge. Mr. Uzer was in prison, serving a 1 1/2 -year prison term on charges of treating Kurdish guerrillas secretly at the hospital where he worked. The father did not know his son had been killed until he was released.
"He was so young. So naive. He didn't know about anything. I knew he would die in the PKK," Mr. Uzer says.
"All our young people are in prison," says Fatma Dugan the day after her 19-year-old son was sentenced to 36 years in prison. Like virtually all "security" cases, he was convicted on the basis of a confession, which his mother says was obtained by torture.
"He was 17 days in detention. When I saw him, his tongue and gums were burned from the electric shocks. He could not use his hands for a month -- they put long needles under his fingernails. They burned all up his arms with cigarettes. They squeezed his testicles and put electricity on them," she says.
Her story is numbingly identical to hundreds of other such reports of those taken to the Turkish prisons.
Some prisoners do not live to give their accounts. The Turkish Human Rights Federation has compiled a list of 302 prisoners who died in detention in the past 10 years.
The official explanations of these deaths seem absurd. "Committed suicide by jumping out window" is a favored cause. Prisoners seem to have ample ties, belts, scarves and even guns in their cells to kill themselves, according to the official accounts. Other samples: "Died from falling down steps. . . . Died becoming ill. . . . Cut his own throat with iron stick. . . . Killed by unknown assailants."
A commission of the Turkish Parliament is supposed to investigate allegations of human rights. Its chairman, Sabri Yavuz, said in an interview in Ankara that the commission must accept whatever the police say about a case.
"We write down what we are told," he says. "If they tell us there is no torture, we write down there is no torture."
Child named Kurdistan
The turbulence of the east has propelled a flight westward to the big cities of Istanbul and Ankara.
Melek Czihan came when the soldiers burned her village last year. Her husband protested, and they beat him. With nothing left but their clothes, they boarded a bus to Istanbul, joining hundreds of thousands of other Kurdish refugees.
She lives now in a cluster of houses on the far outskirts of Istanbul. A rutted road leads to the simple homes built of concrete, stones and wood in a sea of mud.
A small electric heater barely warms the small room. There is no water. The women -- always the women -- carry two jugs of water, balanced on the ends of a long wooden pole, from the single well at the bottom of the hill.
Melek Czihan has knitted brows and a baby at her breast. At 25, she looks much older. Even in the room with the heater, the children wear winter coats. She named them after her politics: "Kurdistan," "Wellat" (Country) and "Hewat" (Proletariat).
Her husband leaves every day to try to find work at the construction sites of Istanbul. When he finds it, he earns the equivalent of $7 for the day. It is not enough.
"Nothing is getting better," she says. "We are just waiting here for the war to end so we can go back to our country."
The price of truth
Most of the Kurdish war has been in the isolated east, a backward and hard place. But the stain of political murder has spread to cosmopolitan Istanbul and Ankara.
Earlier this year, Behcet Canturk, a prominent Kurdish businessman in Istanbul, was slain in his car. Then Usef Ekinci, a Kurdish lawyer in Ankara, disappeared mysteriously. A Kurdish hotel owner and two friends in Istanbul were taken late at night. The hotel staff said they heard the abductors identify themselves as police. The men's bodies were found three days later.
On Nov. 11, Medet Serhat, a respected Kurdish lawyer, and his wife were returning from a wedding to their home in an Istanbul suburb. A white Peugeot cut off Mr. Serhat's Mercedes. A man calmly approached the car, shot Mr. Serhat's driver once in the head and pumped a stream of automatic weapon fire into the back seat.
Mr. Serhat was shot eight times in the head and died. His wife tried to shield his body and was severely injured by 12 bullet wounds.
"Now they are starting against us," says Yavuz Onen, chairman of the Human Rights Foundation in Ankara. "We don't know when and where there will be an attack. Each morning, when I turn my car key I expect an explosion."
In March, the Kurdish political party "Dep" was officially banned. Eight elected Dep Parliament members were charged with advocating a separate Kurdish state and imprisoned. They await trial on the capital offense.
Mustafa Ayzit handles human rights cases in Istanbul. He is a Kurd.
"When I leave my home, I really from my heart say goodbye to my mother and my brothers. I know I may never see them again," he says.
Mr. Ayzit grew up in Diyarbakir, in the heart of Kurdish country. From the first grade on, he was told that to be a Turk was ideal. He competed with his classmates to learn flawless Turkish. Only when he came to Istanbul after high school did he begin to wonder what he had given up. "I realized I have an identity," he says.
"I read Greek philosophy. I read English literature and French literature. But I never read anything about Kurds," he says in a rush, as if in a race to make his point before his time runs out. "I have to find my history, my culture. I want to give it to children -- not to use against anyone else -- but for themselves."
Others work to expose their government's abuses. They seem fearless, like the staff of the Ozgur Ulke (Free Country) newspaper, a pro-Kurdish daily based in Istanbul.
Portraits of eight of the newspaper's murdered correspondents hung on the wall of its guarded offices -- until yesterday, when a bomb demolished the offices. No one has claimed responsibility for the explosion.
Gulsen Yuksel is a reporter at the newspaper. She is slim, 31, and a trained anthropologist. On a recent assignment, she had to hide her notes in her boots. She kept no names of those she interviewed: "If you take their names, you order their death," she says. "Anybody who talks to the media is lost."
If the soldiers had discovered she was a journalist, she says casually, "they would have broken my bones."
"We're the only newspaper that prints clearly the news about the BTC burning of villages, the attacks. We make things known," says a colleague, Karem Ozdemir.
"Once you close your eyes, you can't open them again," he says. "We haven't closed our eyes."
Peanut punishment
The war against the Kurds is no secret. There have been many foreign press accounts and human rights reports, despite the army's efforts to limit movement of reporters. But those reports have aroused little worldwide interest.
"The danger is there is a war going on here and nobody cares," says Turkish Human Rights Association founder Murat Celikkan.
There are a few recent signs of change. European countries are voicing concern. Germany is cutting off all of its foreign military aid. And the U.S. Congress this year withheld 10 percent -- about $40 million -- of military loans to Turkey, in part because of human rights violations.
But the United States is not eager to alienate Turkey, the easternmost NATO member. The United States operates out of air bases in southern Turkey, the closest permanent bases to the volatile Middle East.
The United States this year provided Turkey with $405 million in military equipment loans and $120 million in economic aid. It has been reluctant to try to use that aid to pressure Turkey to $H improve its human rights violations.
"The fact of the matter is, the Turks react very badly to external pressure," says a Western diplomat in Ankara.
Indeed, Turkey scoffed at the 10 percent withholding this year.
"It's peanuts," says Ecvet Tezcan, an official in Turkey's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Turkish officials argue hotly that the PKK is a terrorist organization intent on breaking apart the country. They argue that Western nations have taken similar extreme measures against internal threats.
"They want a certain region of my country, to tear it apart and get control of it," Prime Minister Tansu Ciller said at a news conference recently. "That is something to which we will never -- not in my time, nor in the future -- agree."
U.S. diplomats in Turkey refuse to talk publicly about the conflict with the Kurds. In Washington, the answers are couched in cautious diplomatic language.
"As a NATO ally, a major power in both Central Asia and the Middle East, and a secular democracy, Turkey is a significant ally of the United States with which we share a number of strategic interests," John Shattuck, assistant secretary of state for human rights, says in response to a question from The Sun.
"We well recognize Turkey's human rights problems," he adds. "We have regularly and publicly voiced our support for appropriate efforts to stop criminal acts of terrorism, but we've made clear as well that basic human rights must not be abandoned in the fight against terrorism and that doing so risks further problems down the road."