Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Tel: 99 966518
Today I want to share with you an unpublished real life story written by Dr. Dervish Ozer… He has interviewed a person (his name remains anonymous with us) and has written down from his mouth, his experiences from a prisoners of war camp from 1974… The person he interviewed is a Turkish Cypriot who had been in charge of a camp where there were hundreds of prisoners during 1974…
Here is what Dervish Ozer wrote from the mouth of this Turkish Cypriot:
"I never talk about such things… How come you appear now? You gonna give me a few drinks of cognac and write down what I say? No way… You gonna wait a long time for that. The war is left behind 40 years. Those who died have died, those who remained have remained.
Actually let's talk a bit so they would know. Because when I die, it will be all one sided what they would say, they would say about me, he did this and he did that. Let me tell you so that it will not remain a secret, everything should be spilled out so it would be known who did what…
They had put me in charge of the prisoners' of war camp because I could speak Greek. The camp with 600 persons was under my command…
Of course… Under my command…
One day an old woman came, all in black. I had just walked into the camp, hadn't even sat down. The woman came crying… I asked her what happened, she gulped… `The child is sick vre kiriye... They took the child from the mother, she is serving food… Please, please take my daughter and come… This child has fever… And her husband is in the church, he saw her going… It is a shame both to him and to my daughter…`
I was so angry that I forgot about my rank! I put a new magazine on my Thompson and controlled the second magazine. I set up my gun and without listening to what anyone would say, I entered the room where four high ranking commanders were eating and drinking. My finger on the trigger, I rushed into the room.
`All women back to the wards!` I shouted!
There appeared an unwilling smile in the faces of women serving food and drinks… But I was shaking with fury and did not smile back at the women… My finger at the trigger of the Thomson gun, I was simply waiting for them to say a single word… But that word was not uttered. I had prepared myself for that word before I had rushed into that room.
I was waiting for them to say `What the hell are you doing, stand to attention!`
The only thing I heard them say was, `Okay, the women can go… We were leaving anyway…`
And they got up and left.
They went and complained about me.
Higher ranking commanders came and made an investigation.
`Were you gonna shoot them?` they asked me.
I did not say anything, I just stayed silent.
But if it was today, I would shoot them. Even if they opened their mouths or not…
Those days were tough and difficult… Hundreds of women and children, old and young, and soldiers, all of them were under my control. They were honourable people. All of them prisoners of war. They were in need of clothes, hungry people. But honourable people. Humans like human beings… All of them having been betrayed by people with whom they grew up and all of them having seen the ugly face of war… Some of them caught in their homes or from their gardens and taken here. They had their houses further up but could not go there. For days, they are hungry and no one would open their mouth to say anything. Children crying from hunger and each time they would cry, they would be given water…
Some of them were alone, not knowing where their husbands and children were. Did their husbands die? Where were their children? Does the outside world know anything about them? The women and children would have to endure their husbands and fathers being beaten up and would be helpless in trying to console them afterwards…
There were newborn children, babies who needed milk. As though the war was their own fault, there was no milk in the breasts of their mothers. Children crying… Women desperate, newborn children don't drink water but two days of hunger made them drink water.
The wounded ones on the one hand, desperation on the other…
At first I had thought I would not be able to succeed… I was crying together with each woman crying, I was crying together with each child crying.
Afterwards I stopped crying, the pain in my stomach was gone and I pulled myself together.
Those were difficult days. You had to do it. Just do it. And I did. I got milk for children with my money. In the beginning, I spent all the money I had on me, every piastre that my mother had saved for canned milk. And then the children stopped crying. Then I started looking around…
It smelled of blood… All around us smelled of gun powder and burned human beings… Life was like the hole of a key; it was at the end of a black hole. The pretext for death was that you had eyebrows over your eyes. And betrayal to the house you ate bread from, the water you drank from was holy… It was such a time…
Really what was it like killing a human, the one you worked with, the one you asked work from – the one who had surrendered to you… What was it like raping the wife of the guy in whose house you used to drink together zivania in the past… Believe me I could never understand how a human could do that…
`Kiriye this… Kiriye that… Kiriye… I am pregnant…`
I did not understand; I could not understand…
The men with so much anger who had been let free from being prisoners, whose wives and daughters were prisoners and these men had done nothing to them… During times of peace the only thing these men offered them had been food and drink zivania together… How can you rape their wives and daughters, how can you kill when their husbands had never hurt you, had never done anything wrong against you, that the only thing they offered you had been food and zivania before the war…
How do you rape and how do you kill… I could never understand and I am now above 60 years old and I still do not understand…
And how do you endure a woman taken from her baby and taken for rape…
How do you allow a man to be beaten up next to his wife…
I did not do it.
I did not allow the babies to stay in need of milk… I found milk for them…
So it was such a moment when I put my finger on the trigger and take the women from those who had been drinking inside.
I did not become the manager of the prisoners of war camp willingly, they had put me there. I wish they did not. It was the worst days of my life. I saw the best, most honourable people there, whom I had known before the war. I saw girls so beautiful…
I saw desperate fathers; I saw mothers who would take every risk in order to be able to give a drop of milk to their small children.
I saw the war, I saw the people, the honourable people put in a position of need under the craven.
I saw people who had fed people in their homes before the war, being raped by hungry people during times of war…
…
...
...
Now go away, it is enough for today…
Do you know what war is?
You know nothing, you saw the war but you did not realize what it was. You were such a little boy of ten…
I don't say that you did not see the pain or did not understand the humiliation of a human being. But you did not know rape. You did not understand what raping is. Now don't you come and tell me I am writing about war. You understand nothing. Because you don't know what rape is… How old were you that you come here and ask me about war… Go on' leave now…
...
You tell me not to drink…
How can you endure those days without drinking…
Did you ever fill your lungs with the smell of blood?
Or did your ears ever fill with the cries of a raped woman? Or did you ever see the desperation of a man whose wife or daughter was being raped and he could not do anything? Did you ever feel that pain in your heart?
Go away now, I will never speak to you again about anything…
...
May your children and wife be in peace. May no one can approach and harass them, may no human being become the slave or another and may God prevent you from being an accomplice for the slavery of other humans.
May he never show you times where people would be raped due to their religion, ethnicity or political views… And may you never become a commander in a prisoners' of war camp where fascists had been ruling… May God never make anyone a prisoner of war and may God never make anyone desperate the ruler of such a camp… May God never make you think all night long what you will do to find milk for the children in that camp – that camp where milk had stopped flowing from the breasts of the women. May God never make men desperate in that camp in front of their wives and daughters. May God never allow submission to fascists who wanted women and girls to rape them from that camp.
You may remove the word `God` if you like, just a matter of saying if you like…
I did not bend and bow to the fascists. I did not give women to fascists. I dared being killed and took women from the hands of the fascists and gave them back to their children. I was the one taking women from the hands of the fascists during the war, I the one who stopped rapes, I the one who protected women, I the one who bought milk for children with my own money from supermarkets selling looted goods – that's what kind of man I am…
And now? I am drinking in order to forget some things but I can't forget. I became a drinker in order to forget the deaths, the rapes and the pain… Nowadays they know me as someone who drinks. They don't know why I drink. Those who have done all these evil things, sleeping soundly in their beds at night, I am living with the nightmares they had created. I hear the voices of those women… I hear their cries and I see them giving their babies water instead of a drop of milk… I see the puffed faces, puffed hands and feet of men who had been beaten severely…
...
Hey, look at me kid.
Who are you?
You think with two glasses of cognac, I would tell you these things?
Who are you that I would tell you about those days?
I did not do anything.
I did not save any women from being raped.
I did not bring any milk to any children.
I did not prevent any killings.
You are making these up…
Now I am only drinking. Only to forget…
Forget what?
I don't know… I don't know nothing…
I only lived as a human being.
…
You made us live in the camp with death and blood. Even our dreams were about war… In the coffee shops our conversations were about war… I saw on the face of my children hunger, being without a mother and a father… Each time I looked at the faces of my own children I saw the camp, I saw the children in the camp… When I looked at the face of my wife, I saw the desperate mothers from the camp…
Now if you write these down as always,
I will say I was drunk. I will say he made me drink…
I will say he tricked me…
Hade vre…
Write what you want…
Write whatever you want…
They destroyed our lives…
We collected bones from the fields… We lived with crying and begging children and women for years… Still we have a shitty life… These fascists are they putting mortgages over our lives?
They have done as much as they could.
They destroyed our generation. They did not allow us to live.
Now go and write. Write as I say… If you don't write it the way I told you, don't come to this village again…
Go away now, I have nothing else to say to you…`
Photo: Dr. Derviş Özer…
(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 1st of January 2017, Sunday.
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