The Özal years split the country. The foreign trade element had done enormously well, and continued to do so; and this was far from being just a matter for Istanbul and İzmir, as there were places far to the east, such as Antep, that were lifted off, and the new motorways through Kayseri, the chief town of Cappadocia, to the east and south became arteries of European trade. The perennial question, as to whether Turkey could become a member of the European Union, was debated endlessly at ministry level, but it was in effect being settled by voting with feet, or at any rate wheels. Maslak, where once, during the Crimean War, the French army had trained on the European shore of the Bosphorus, saw one Manhattanish skyscraper rise after another, and the multinational hotels also built. It meant the ruin of parts of the city, an especially scandalous instance being the destruction of the old Park Hotel, next to the former German embassy in Gümuşsuyu. It had been a Pasha’s house, had been turned into a grand hotel, and in its place half of a gruesome car park went up until it was stopped. The counterpart was that, as the money poured in, so did migrants. The city became, like Mexico City, a megalopolis, and although old Stambul survived, it was squashed in with concrete or clapboard suburbs, each taken over by a region in the east. It was a demonstration of the trickle-down effect, in that the crumbs from the tables of Maslak rolled down into Sütlüce, and the parking arrangements of Galata were taken over by a Kurdish mob from Bitlis, near Lake Van.
The later years of Özal have a shadowy resemblance to the later years of Margaret Thatcher, when the machine ran beyond the monetarist desert and entered upon richer and much more intractable soil. The real parallel for this is Italy, in the Christian Democrats’ blue period: a veneer of piety, and the sound of the till. ‘Social control’ was maintained by Islam, but the ANAP itself split, on religious matters: at a conference, the culture minister even fought a very large minister of state as to whether the Aya Sofya should become a mosque again. Özal, putting in his wife as chairman of the Istanbul branch, distanced himself from the kutsal ittifak element, the ‘holy alliance’. There had always been an element of Islam to the Özal mixture, and it sometimes seemed to be taking over — for instance, in 1988-9 the old question, whether women should be allowed to wear head-coverings in universities, came up, a matter of vast symbolic importance that Özal himself preferred not to take up: he said, just leave the question alone, dealing with it is for later. His supporters wanted their girls to be virgins when married, and (in theory) thought drink the mother of all evils. There was another side to this, perhaps Iranian in origin: secularists were assassinated, and even Moslem modernizers. By 1989 the ANAP was down to one fifth of the vote in local elections, Inönü’s (renamed) SPP taking nearly one third; the ANAP majority was now artificial. By 1991 new elections put Demirel ahead of ANAP by under a quarter, and bizarrely he struck up an alliance with another old dispossessed party, the SPP (‘Socialist’ etc.), now renamed Republican (CHP), and this introduced a period of political kaleidoscopes, governments of various coalitions succeeding each other until 2002, when a sort of Islamicized (and American-leaning) version of ANAP appeared, as the Justice and Development Party. Özal had really failed with the resumption of inflation in 1986, and the clash of the external and internal economies. The same had happened with Margaret Thatcher, and, like her, he now made his reputation in foreign affairs. However, Turkey had some real weight, not least as the only Moslem country in the world, apart from Jordan, with serious credentials (as a wise historian, Hasan Ali Karasar, remarked, ‘Islam, politics, economics — choose two’). How would she use it? The most imaginative answer would have been the annexation of northern Iraq, on the lines of the National Pact that had been pushed by Mustafa Kemal sixty years earlier.
Iraq came up. Saddam Hussein was possessed of megalomania, and the country that he ran, an artificial creation from the First World War, contained dissident elements, held together by oil money. He stood between Turkey and Iran, which, run by megalomaniacs, was Shia, from a branch of Islam so different as almost to constitute a different religion. The key factor was that, in northern Iraq, there were Kurds. That opened up, for Turkey, an enormous problem, the greatest that she had had to deal with. The Kurds are a people who never took off as a nation. There are perhaps 25 million of them, spread over Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, where they formed the bulk of the population of the south-east, bordering Iraq. Kurdish, like Iranian or Hindi, is an Indo-European language, and some of the words are recognizable to a western European (‘new’ is nu; ‘me’ is min; ‘two’ is du; ‘four’ is char, cf. French quatre; ‘valley’ is dal, cf. German Tal; and the grammar is fairly familiar). In Xenophon’s Anabasis people called Curtaroi are mentioned. His 10,000 Greek mercenaries, unpaid, unwept and unsung, were finding their way back home from fifth-century BC Persia, came to a river in some mountains, and found Curtaroi offering attitude on the opposite bank. They wondered what to do, encamped. Next morning, they found the Curtaroi engaged in fisticuffs, and crept past towards the sea. Nearly two millennia later, at the time of the Crusades, the Arabic Ekrad (plural for ‘Kurd’) were well-documented as mountain warriors, of whom the great Saladin was one (‘Selahattin’ in Turkey is generally a Kurdish name). But they were split up over various states, and the language was never standardized. It has divided into several variants, and though a specialist can recognize what is being said, people on the ground have to communicate in Turkish or Arabic once they leave their home area. There were historical differences noticeable even in the sixteenth century, as Kurdish emirates fought; and there was even rivalry between the two chief Moslem brotherhoods of the area, the Kadiri and Nakshibendi. One of the chief Kurdish elements in Iraq, the Behdinandi, simply refused, under the British Mandate, to use the Sorani Kurdish that was expected, and preferred Arabic. The outstanding pioneers of these matters were Russian and British, in this case D. N. McKenzie. In Turkey the chief Kurdish language is called Kırmanç, but it is split into dialects (Dimili) and there is another version, possibly a different language altogether, called Zaza. There are theories to the effect that the Zaza-speaking Kurds are not even of Kurdish origin. Some may even have been Armenian, and when the Turkish army found PKK — Kurdistan Workers’ Party — corpses, these were sometimes not circumcised. At any rate, regardless of the linguistic divisions, many Kurdish parents did not want their children educated in anything other than Turkish, so that they would get on in life. In Van, in the 1960s, there was the moving sight of young men studying in the street lights, with a view to just getting on. Most did: there was intermarriage, and, whatever was said about the Kurdish question later on, most Kurds voted for ordinary Turkish parties and, if they went into politics, shot up that tree. Turkey was simply so far above Iraq or Iran in terms of interest and development that no Kurd in his senses would have wanted to live anywhere else. However, something went badly wrong. A terrorist movement, the PKK, developed, and made the running for the latter part of Özal’s reign.