Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
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idea where he wanted to go or what he wanted to do. His brother clearly hoped Mehmet would settle down and stay at home.
“We have a summer place in Arsuz,” Aboush said. “A lot of people, let’s say the rich, of this area go there. It’s more comfortable. I mean, you can meet a lot of people, see girls in bikinis, everything. It’s easier there. In town here, it’s more difficult.”
“Do most young people who go away to be educated find they want to leave Antioch?” I asked.
“Most of them don’t come back at all,” Aboush said, glancing at his younger brother. “People who go to college in Istanbul, especially girls, usually get married there and settle. If they can marry here, they stay.”
“What is there to do at night here?”
“Nothing,” Mehmet answered.
“Usually,” Aboush said, “we get together with a few friends. We have a lot of business talks with my father. That’s it. It’s mostly business.”
“No movies?”
“In the last five or six years, going to the cinema is almost nothing, because of the video business. Some ten years ago, Antioch was more interesting. We had a lot more concerts. In the early eighties we had some terrorism, and people were afraid to go out to public places. Also, in the last four or five years, they’re not making good money in agriculture.”
“Are you going to stay?”
“Yes,” Aboush said firmly.
Mehmet said, “I don’t know yet. After I graduated, I came back here for seven months. Then I went to the States for a few weeks, but didn’t come back for nine months.”
I asked them about their education in Turkey. They had gone to an American secondary boarding school in Tarsus. “The school textbooks here do not mention the Armenians,” Aboush said. “There is nothing on the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. They go straight from the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk. They talk about Westernisation, but they don’t teach Western ideas.” He then told me what it was like to try to run a modern agricultural business in Hatay. “I went to a neighbouring province to discuss buying wheat from a farmer there. We had to sit outside on the ground. All the time we talked, the farmer had a rifle lying across his lap.”
When their father came in, the differences between the generations in Antioch became apparent. Although the father and his sons were close and respected one another, the boys had no interest in or recollection of the Ottoman period. Kemal Sehoglu had spent time in Alawi villages, where he had learned Arabic. He had studied under the French Mandate and spoke good French. His sons spoke Turkish and English. The things he mentioned – the Armenians, the resistance to the French, the mixed communities of Turks and Arabs, the changes wrought by Atatürk – meant nothing to his sons. In the same way, Mehmet’s anxieties about finding girls for casual relationships, discovering what he wanted to do with his life and deciding where to live, were alien to the father.
That night the Sehoglus took me to dinner at Antioch’s City Club, whose members were landowners and businessmen, in a spartan 1960s building trimmed in Oriental gilt. The dining-room was full when we arrived, nearly a hundred men at different tables, all in suits and ties, eating European-style food and drinking wine. Almost all the men were middle-aged or older and wore moustaches. There was only one woman, who sat at a table for two with her husband.
Mehmet talked again and again about his life in the United States and his worry about the future. He didn’t know whether to make films, work in journalism or television or go into business. All but the last meant leaving Antioch. Aboush talked about his fiancée, about settling down and, if the family business did well, moving it to Istanbul. A friend of theirs, who had joined us for dinner, had just completed his national service. When I mentioned a radio report that Turkey was blaming Syria for Kurdish attacks on military posts near the border, the friend said, “Don’t believe it. Those Kurds come from Turkey, not from Syria or Iraq. The government here won’t admit it, because they don’t admit there are any Kurds here.”
Whether or not the schools taught the young generation history, they would never escape its hold.
The grocer weighed each bag of vegetables in turn. He wrote the price of every item with a pencil on a crumpled bit of paper, the corn, beans, spinach, courgettes, aubergines, the flour, noodles and rice. He then added the figures on a pocket calculator. Not satisfied, he added them again by hand. This took even longer than that first calculation by machine. When his own arithmetic confirmed that of his calculator, he wrote the total. He could not have found a more time-consuming method, but on the barren stretch of road between Antioch and the Syrian border, he did not keep many customers waiting.
The driver loaded the bags of groceries into the back of his car, next to other provisions we had bought in town – razor-blades, soap, toothpaste, paper plates, a chess board and backgammon set. Sister Barbara and I sat in front next to the driver, a young man who lived near the chapel and hired out his battered old Mercedes from time to time. He turned the ignition key, pumped the accelerator, pulled the choke, swore under his breath and, after a short resistance, the car started. He put it into gear and drove onto the tarmac road, leaving the ramshackle grocery behind in a cloud of black smoke.
“I promised the children I would bring them news from their parents,” Barbara said, “but they have no word yet.”
The “children” were two Iranian refugees, boys aged eighteen and seventeen. They were living in the five-kilometre stretch of empty land between the Turkish and Syrian frontiers. Turkey used this border area to dump the people it did not want. Its other border posts, on the uncontested frontiers with Iraq, Iran, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and Greece, lacked sufficiently large “no-man’s-lands” into which to deport people. If those other states would not accept the deportees, they would have to return to Turkey. At Cilvegözü, the Turkish authorities could leave people indefinitely in a no-man’s-land where the Syrians could not touch them, international aid agencies would not bother about them, and the world’s press was unlikely to see them.
“Are you a journalist?” an English-speaking border official asked me suspiciously.
“No,” I answered – truthfully in that I was not there in my capacity as a journalist, but as a travel writer.
Barbara negotiated with him in Turkish to permit us into the no-man’s-land to see “the children”. Our driver followed him in his official car through the border post, past the soldiers who guarded the gates that marked the end of Turkey. A dozen yards further on, at the left-hand side of the road, there was a small camp with a makeshift tepee of poles and plastic sheets, a wooden lean-to behind the tent, an abandoned rusting car with Syrian number plates and an open fire on which several men were boiling water in an old bucket. There were no trees and little other vegetation in the limestone hills. The place was, legally at least, nowhere.
When we stepped out of the car, I saw why Barbara had referred to the boys as “children”. The two brothers ran up to her like expectant puppies, excited to see her and running around both of us, ignoring the provisions we had brought, grateful we were there at all. When Barbara showed them the groceries, they lifted them out of the car and led us to their camp.
Ernest and Antonio Panusi had been living there for fifty-six days. A year earlier, they had fled Iran for what they said was religious persecution against Christians and to avoid military service in the war against Iraq. They had walked over the mountains into Turkey, which at first permitted them to remain without passports in Istanbul pending a British visa. Because they had twice visited England and had a sponsor there, they felt they had a strong case for entry. The British Consul in Istanbul denied the visa, so the boys were sent to this no-man’s-land. Their father and mother had gone to Ankara to find a country to accept their sons. “Now we are waiting,” Ernest said.
Two weeks earlier, three young women from Dominica had been living in the camp. Although the border guard said the women were prostitutes, it seemed the most the “children” did with them was play frisbee. The women had been there three months before they finally left.
It