Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

This mustached man tapped the air with his finger and said to me, "Not a single person in this room is in favor of what America is doing in Iraq." Perhaps self-conscious of his generalization, he turned to look at the hundred or so people in the room he had just characterized, and noticing some Americans, he added, "The Turkish ones, anyway. All of us are against it."

"We were a Turkoman family in Iraq," a woman said to me, and introduced herself as Professor Emel Dogramaci of Çankaya University. "We were powerful in Kirkuk." By powerful, she meant wealthy. The family had become philanthropic in Ankara, having departed Kirkuk, a Kurdish area now. "We left because we were not happy with Saddam."

"Were you glad to see him overthrown?"

"Of course, but not at the cost of this war," she said. "This war is dreadful. It will not help. We don't see when or how it will end. The only certainty is civil war. Well, that is happening now, isn't it?"

I said, "The depressing thing is that it could go on for years."

"I dislike Bush. I prefer Clinton, for all his failings," she said. I admired her confidence, her fluency, her style. She was a woman of a certain age, well dressed, glittering with jewels, opinionated and forthright. "Bush doesn't know anything, but who are these people who are advising Bush? They gave him very bad advice. Did they know what they were doing?"

"Rumsfeld was one of them."

"We know Rumsfeld!" the woman said, snorting at the name. "He was supporting Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. He was supporting Saddam! He was telling us to do the same!"

From their home in Kirkuk her family had observed Donald Rumsfeld paddling palms and pinching fingers with Saddam, and selling him weapons, among them land mines. The Iranian response was to send small children—because children are numerous, portable, and expendable—running, tripping into the minefields to detonate the bombs with their tiny feet, to be blown to pieces.

"This is not political. It is not about oppression. It is a religious war—Sunnis against Shiites," Professor Dogramaci said.

"Which one are you?" I asked.

"I am a cultural Muslim," she said. "I don't go to mosque. But Islam is in my past and my personal history."

"Maybe Iraq will just break up into separate states—Kurdish, Shiite, Sunni," I said.

"That could happen—a sort of federation. But I tell you this," she said, and she faced me full-on, looking darkly at me, and her dress of watered silk, her lovely necklace, and her glittering rings only made her more menacing. "The oil does not belong to the Kurds alone. It belongs to the people of Iraq. If there is a Kurdish state and they claim the oil, and the others are left behind"—she raised her hand, her sparkling fingers—"then I tell you there will be trouble."

"What kind of trouble?" I asked.

"I cannot be specific," she said, and looked like a fierce grandma. "But we will not stand aside and watch it happen."

Inclining her head, listening to this conversation, was Mrs. Zeynep Karahan Uslu, a member of parliament for the ruling AKP, the Justice and Development Party. She was attractive, in her mid-thirties, and had the same independent air as the professor.

Noticing her, the professor's mood lightened. She said, "You see? This woman is a parliamentarian. She has a child. She is from Istanbul. That is her husband, Ibrahim." Ibrahim, watching us, began to smile. "He follows her here to Ankara and looks after the child. Zeynep is a modern Turkish woman. I knew her father, a great scholar. I am so happy to see her!"

"Yes, it's not easy," Zeynep said. "Sometimes we sit in parliament until two or three in the morning. I leave and the police stop me. They see a woman alone in a car. They say, 'What are you doing?' I have to say, 'I have parliamentary business!' This would never happen in Istanbul, where people are up all night. But Ankara is a big, dull city."

Not dull at Hacettepe University, though, where I was to speak the next day. Big posters greeted me: "ABD! EVINE DÖN!"

"'USA—Go Back Home!'" my translator said.

"Is that meant for me?"

"No, no—it's for the demonstration on Saturday," he said, intending to reassure me. "The AKP is organizing it."

Zeynep's party—and she had intimated that the city was dull?

The foyer of the building where I was to speak was hung with posters of Fidel, Che Guevara, and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. It was all like the sixties in the United States: inflammatory posters, yet the students were militant in a Turkish way, polite but firm.

Gory photographs along one wall showed Israeli atrocities in Palestine and massacres in Iraq—bombing victims, mass graves, blown-up houses, shrieking women, mourning families, children with arms and legs blown off, bloody bandages. And in large letters a declaration.

"What does that say?"

"'It is in our hands to stop all this!'"

At one table a pretty girl and a well-dressed boy, obviously students, were selling paper badges, disks trimmed in black ribbon, with a motto in the center.