Turkey struggles for balance - National Geographic May 1994

The article is written by Thomas B. Allen, photographs by Reza

              Along the coastal highway Turkey's Black Sea towns are awakening to a sunny fall day. The roadside blurs by: moustachioed men and kerchiefed woman, car wrecks and donkeys, chickens and cows, mosques and concrete mixers, laundry drying on line, tobacco drying on a fence, bus shelters full if kids going to school and adults going to work. Then the traffic knots up, and we sit in the fumes and honkings of cars, trucks, minivans, tractors, buses, and motorcycles. Now Ümit Niron, my interpreter of Turkisch words and sights and smells, can turn his eyes from the road and tell me what I see.  The schoolkids wear uniforms, blue smocks for the little girls and boys; shirts and ties, blue blazers, and slacks for the older boys. Most of the older girls wear white blouses and plaid skirts. Others are buttoned into long, dark blue coats, and they hide their brows under pale blue kerchiefs. "Religious school", Ümit says. "That is what the girls must wear". Stuck in the traffic with us is a grimy, battered bus, its windows smeared with yellow paint. The Turkish buses I have seen all sparkled, inside and out. This one, Ümit explains, is not Turkish. It is a Russian bus, the rolling home of traders from former Soviet republic. Men and women are climbing into tractor hauled wagons. They are harvesters, heading to the mountains for tea, to the orchids for hazelnuts, to the fields for corn and sugar beets. "We must go to a wedding," Ümit says. "The end of harvest is the time for weddings." Journeying through the rich weave of history and geography that is Turkey, I did go to weddings, and to mosques, and to Russian bazaars. In villages, cities, and factories and on farms and waterfronts, I found a nation on the move, led by Tansu  Çiller, the first woman to become prime minister of the Muslim nation. She intends to build on the economic boom of the eighties, and, looking toward the future, she promises her people: "We will not walk, we will run." As ever, turkey is a bridge between Europe and Asia, between West and East. Today the bridge strains against waves of change. Jobless villagers pour into cities already packed with people and problems. New nations emerge where the mighty Soviet Union once loomed. Militant Muslims, within and beyond Turkey's borders, challenge Turkey's long-held determination to be a secular nation. And in the bloodstained  southeast corner of the country the government hopes to win a guerrilla war against Kurdish separatist, using the energy and opportunities created by hydroelectric dams and irrigation canals. Here the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party has been fighting since 1984to form a Kurdish state. "When I meet someone, I wonder in the back of my mind, is he a Kurd?" a government official in Ankara told me. "This is a sad by product of the struggle." Another is criticism of Turkey's human rights record in the southeast. A 1993 U.S. congressional report accused Turkey of acting under a "broad and ambiguous definition of terrorism" that authorized torture, permitted "use of excessive force against noncombatants," and restricted "freedom of expression and association." Officials try to play down the troubles, preferring to talk about Turkey's role in the post-Cold War world. Home of ancient Greeks and Romans, heart of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, Turkey is claiming the right to lead a new economic domain stretching into Central Asia. ...