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In the summer of 2007, I was able to return to Turkey for three months. Politics in Turkey has always been very lively, and at this time when a general election was being held, even more so. There were many heated discussions about PKK terrorism, the Kurdish case, Turkey’s involvement in Northern Iraq, and entry into the European Union. After two eventful weeks in Istanbul, I travelled to the area by the Black Sea in the north of Turkey where my sister and most of my relatives live. The city, called Ordu, where my family is from, is a small and serene place located by the Black Sea. Ordu is well-known as a centre of hazelnut production. I have childhood memories of picking the family crop with other members of my family. Occasionally we employed local workers to help us. In those days (almost 20 year ago), only local workers were available to help families with the harvest. However, in recent years, there has been a flow of Kurdish workers coming to the region for seasonal agricultural labor. These migrants are seen as cheap labor that will work for less money than local workers will. Since the 80s, Kurdish families have been displaced from the rural Southeast by many years of civil war between Turkish security forces and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). However, there is also a strong bias against them since the PKK carried out a number of terrorist attacks within the region in the last decade. Every year in August, many truckloads of Kurdish workers arrive in the region to find work. There were many road accidents that year, due to overloaded lorries carrying the Kurdish families from the east to the north coast of Turkey. Many Kurdish people lost their lives . When they arrived in the region after a long and dangerous journey, the camp conditions were less then welcoming. The local council housed them in tents in a camp with no proper sanitation ; washing was done using a standpipe and food cooked over an open fire. When they needed a toilet, they had to go to a local Mosque some distance away. I spent three days visiting the Kurdish workers’ camp in August 2007. I listened to their stories and they listened to mine. They welcomed me to their tent and offered me tea and food. There were many children playing around giving the impression that nothing was really out of the ordinary for these people. Nevertheless, when I talked to them, they were not happy with their conditions: as more and more migrants came to the region there were not enough jobs for everybody, and the money that they earned was hardly enough to cover their travel expenses. Before the end of the season, I witnessed many families having to uproot once again to look for work elsewhere. I went there because I wanted to understand their situation. Since I was not there as ‘a photographer’ I did not take photographs on the first day. However, I could not resist when I saw a little boy playing in an old Hoover - and asked permission from his mother to take a photograph of him. I was conscious of my position as an outsider and did not want to appear to be intruding into their lives. However as they came to know me better over a period of three days many of the people welcomed my interest. I explained that I was a photography student and told them that, if they liked, I could take their portraits. I was able to make prints and give copies to them the next day. I wanted to give something back to them in return for their kindness and realized that such photographs are still special, unlike in more settled societies were such images are taken for granted. As a result, the photographs that I took are individual and group portraits rather than a journalistic documentation of camp conditions. I met many Kurdish families the first day and made some friends. I found it especially easy to communicate with the young Kurdish girls. They were bright and hard working but had received very little formal education. When I spoke with them, they told me that there was no school in their village when they were children. Even though some villages had a school, families weren’t so keen to send their daughters there since they could work in the fields and the house. Furthermore, many girls marry very young, if there is someone willing to pay their parents a good sum of money. There is State discrimination against Kurdish people, and Kurdish women in particular find themselves at the sharp end of the emergency regime in the South East. One result is the high rate of suicides among Kurdish women displaced to live in poor conditions in Turkish cities. Basic medical and social services were hard for them to access because many did not speak Turkish, but they were still not permitted to use their mother tongue of Kurdish. I met many Kurdish people during my visits and have thought about them a lot. I was astonished by their strength as human- beings despite the problems they have. |
