A Refugee'S Story
Shortish, with sandy brown hair, soft-spoken Rizgar lived alone in a tiny apartment in Berlin, paid for by the German state under its liberal asylum laws.
Delighted to find an Indian on the bus to Munich, he said Amitabh Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor were great actors and hummed songs from Awaara while the Germans around us stolidly focussed on sausage and dark lagers.
Rizgar had several days' travel ahead of him: from Munich he would take a bus through Switzerland to Milan, where he planned to change again for another that would speed down to Italy's port city of Brindisi. From there he'd get passage on one of the Mediterranean trampers in Athens.
A brother lived there, and with him Rizgar's wife and daughter, now ready to enter Germany. It wasn't legal, and he didn't elaborate, but I gathered the idea was for the family to cross a quiet part of the German border, head for Berlin and then hope their Turkish papers would bail them out.
Saddam is shaitan, he said softly. Four years ago, he fled the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, which also borders western Iran. His is a refugee's story; moving only in darkess, in fear of Iraqi patrols, and surviving on grass and wild fruit till he reached Istanbul.
I do not like the Turks. They do not want to see an independent Kurdish homeland. But when you want to protect your family, you must agree with them and wait, he said. He'd worked in Istanbul for two years, studying English and then teaching it. He also spoke Arabic, Greek, Turkish and was now learning German.
Rizgar favoured Jalal Talabani, the leader of the Patriotic Union of his Kurdistan Democratic Party, over Massoud Barzani and his Kurdistan Democratic Party. Barzani had invited Saddam Hussein, with 30,000 troops and 400 tanks, to help oust Talabani, who is apparently being helped by Teheran.
Do you know there are thousands of Kurds in Turkey, but the government will not allow us our own radio or TV station. And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the news broadcasts about us, he said. Rizgar seemed to find an expression of pan-Asian sensitivity in my asking him about Halabja.
In 1988, Iraqi troops nerve-gassed Halabja, killing several hundred Kurds there alone as part of an orchestrated terror campaign that wiped out thousands. Halabja was more terrible than you can ever imagine, he said, but remember, that was only one. There were so many more. So many. Every Kurdish family has lost one or more.
He didn't particularly like living in Berlin, but it was a far more comfortable life than he had known in Istanbul or Athens. He talked with particular distaste about shopping for food, being immersed in giant supermarket halls festering with sausage, and not a gram of halal meat in sight. He thought the Turks were too crude