A peacemaker strives to end blood feuds plaguing his region with a listening ear and a sweet tongue, writes Nicholas Birch in Diyarbakir, Turkey
LOCALS CALL him Diyarbakir’s Kofi Annan. The comparison arguably does Sait Sanli a disfavour. A former butcher, the 65-year-old has brokered more than 500 peace deals in the past decade.
His speciality are the blood feuds that have long been a feature of life in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast. In a region where poverty is widespread and land at a premium, disputes over issues as seemingly petty as grazing rights cause the deaths of dozens of people every year.
“So much blood is spilt over problems not even big enough to fill a walnut shell,” Sait Sanli says, sitting in the funeral parlour he runs in Diyarbakir’s old town.
“But feuds are like a snake – they bite for nothing.” They can also drag on for years. In one notorious case this April, five brothers were gunned down 20 years after their family had fled their village because of a feud.
One of the constant stream of visitors to Sanli’s makeshift office, a 73-year-old man who declined to give his name described how he spent 14 years hiding in the mountains after he shot and injured six members of a neighbouring family in 1983. He turned himself into the authorities after Sanli intervened to dissuade them from seeking their revenge.
“We’re best of friends now,” he says. “And Sait is the crown on our heads.”
Asked to explain his success, Sanli laughs: “it’s certainly not my looks.” Barely five-foot tall, he has the slight stoop and cough of a former heavy smoker.
“Around here they say that ‘a sweet tongue can even persuade a snake out of its hole’,” he explains. “I kiss hands. I berate, I shout. Sometimes I cry. Above all, I listen to everybody involved, even the children.”
He gives the example of a feud he helped to patch up in 2002. Moving 500 miles west to the tourist city of Antalya after her husband was murdered, a Diyarbakir woman spent the next 15 years laying an extra place at table. It was her way of reminding her two sons, toddlers at the time of their father’s death, of their obligation to avenge him.
“In many ways, she was rebelling against her in-laws’ attempts to impose their solution on her,” Sanli remembers.
“The job of revenge should have fallen to them. To avoid that, they tried to get her to accept derisory blood money.” A day after Sanli told the woman he had persuaded the murderer’s family to pay $15,000 directly to her, she rang him to say she had slept soundly for the first time since her husband’s death.
“She had been mourning her husband, but she was also mourning her children’s ruined future,” Sanli explains.
Widely respected, Sanli has worked both with local leaders and government officials in his fight against blood feuds. His latest brainchild is to set up village committees to resolve them before blood is spilt. Islam explicitly condemns feuds, and Sanli is particularly keen to enlist the help of religious leaders.
“In a sense his plans are a reworking of traditional structures,” says Mazhar Bagli, a sociologist at Diyarbakir’s Dicle University. “But traditional structures do sometimes have a persuasive power their modern equivalents lack.” He mentions a 19-year-old girl who fled to the police early in October to escape an arranged marriage. The police took her back to her family, who killed her. “If she had gone to the imam or a tribal leader, maybe she’d be alive today,” Bagli says.
Most observers, Sanli among them, say that the dwindling influence of tribes in Kurdish areas has led to a decrease in blood feuds. Others say the Turkish state’s policy of arming 70,000 local militiamen in its 25-year war against the former separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has paved the way for future disorder.
Mayor of Hazro, a town north of Diyarbakir, Hamit Ergin is one of them. In 2005, militiamen belonging to the clan he was investigating for corruption shot him in the shoulder as he sat in a teashop. His brother returned fire, killing one of them. Ergin now visits Hazro only twice a week, under police protection.
Recuperating in hospital, Ergin turned to Sanli to solve the feud. Sanli failed.
“I respect Sait hugely, but he failed to make the correct diagnosis,” Ergin says. “This is more than a feud. It’s about how hardliners on both sides – the state and the PKK – use violence to hold on to the benefits war has given them.”
Formerly a member of a pro-Kurdish party ideologically linked to the PKK, Ergin resigned in disgust at the way his party tried to politicise his shooting. “They make politics with blood,” he says.
Meanwhile, after the bloodiest months of fighting since the PKK went back to war in 2004, the men sitting in the Diyarbakir funeral parlour think Turkey would do well to copy Sanli’s “sweet tongue”.
“If only this country’s leaders could take a page out of this gentleman’s book, they would transform this country from a lake of blood to a lake of peace,” says Sanli’s childhood friend Ahmet Ant.
“But talking takes courage.”