TURKEY: People in south-east Turkey fear the apparent inevitability of another war. Lynne O'Donnell reports from Silopi, near the border with Iraq
Ankara's decision to co-operate with Washington in its determination to punish President Saddam Hussein for disobeying UN orders to disarm has angered many people in south-east Turkey. Locals trace their destitution to the last Gulf War and what they say were Washington's broken promises of financial aid in return for bases then.
On the fertile flats of the border regions, towns that once thrived on cross-border, long-haul transportation have become grim outposts of poverty and sky-high unemployment as a result of trade embargoes on Iraq.
Record snowfalls across the area this week have turned the main roads of cities like Kiziltepe, Civre and Silopi into muddy, potholed quagmires, many of them lined on either side by rusting petrol tankers and cargo trucks parked and unused for years.
The locals call them graveyards - huge lots jam-packed with what were once brightly-coloured prime movers bearing the biggest names in the trucking business: Scania, Mac, Mercedes. In some cities, the rusty hulks of cargo carriers are lined up like sardines at what used to be thriving truck stops. Along the major highways, the empty shells of petrol tankers lie upside down in fields, reminders of good times long gone and hard times that many residents believe are here to stay.
"In this area, whole families sold everything they had, their farms, their houses, to pool their money and buy a truck," said Ahmed Yilmaz, a Kurdish tanker driver, as he lined up outside a refinery in the military town of Batman to unload petrol he'd brought from the northern Iraq town of Mosul.
"If they were lucky they bought a couple of trucks. But for the past five years, there's been no money coming in except for a few, and so whole towns and villages are full of people with no work and no money coming in," he said. "People have nothing and war isn't going to change that. It will only make things even worse." In many of the cities in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish south-east, child labour is a daily reality as many families must send their children out just to earn the price of the bread they eat.
"They do anything they can because the families are big and terribly poor so the children essentially have to feed themselves," said a shopkeeper in Kiziltepe. Outside his dimly-lit general goods store, small boys in tattered trousers tried to peddle tissues for a few hundred Turkish lire.
"It's not exactly begging," the shopkeeper said as he looked on. "But it's not far off." Since a recent government crackdown on petrol smuggling, truck drivers who form the backbone of the economy here must rely on the UN food-for-oil programme, which brings fuel out of Iraq's oilfields in return for UN-distributed essentials.
As war edges inevitably nearer, however, the flow of petrol has slowed to a trickle in the past three weeks, drivers said. Iraqi authorities had begun restricting the flow of petrol from Mosul's pumps as Saddam Hussein's military forces dug in in preparation for attack.
"I used to be able to go and come back once a week, now it's once every 15 days," said Wahid Aslan as he and a couple of mates took a break outside Silopi.
There is little optimism among the people here that a war in Iraq will bring any short-term relief. "We have to eat and feed our families today and tomorrow and the day after that. And if there is war, that will just get harder," Mr Aslan said. "Whatever money comes in will stay with the government to pay off its debts, we won't see it down here." In recent weeks, the military build-up in this region has escalated.
Villages close to the border have been sealed, and the Turkish army is said to be building bridges and roads through the Cudi mountains into northern Iraq. The Harbur border gate into northern Iraq, 15 km outside Silopi, remains closed to all but the few truck drivers working under the auspices of the UN programme.
The Turkish military, according to one government source, has already quit some of its bases in the area to allow the Americans to move in. Major highways outside some of the base towns like Batman and Marden are often choked by long convoys of armoured personnel carriers, tanks, and trucks carrying generators and anti-aircraft guns towards the border.