by ED EMERY
Thousands of Kurds celebrated Newroz in Diyarbakir, southern Turkey, this March.During the celebrations, the jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan’s peace message was read out to the crowds. PHOTO/© Mehmet Masum Süer
At the “Syrian” camp on the harbourside in Calais, good-humoured young men gather, en route from the horrors of their countries to what they hope will be a new life in England. In 2014 the police bulldozed their first camp, and then evicted them from a second camp, but they are still there; their small tents stand on the loading bay of a disused warehouse, and a little iron stove burns bright with scavenged timber. They make sweet tea and we discuss politics, religion, music, song, war, and ways of entering Britain illegally, because that’s what they spend their days trying to do.
We come here regularly. We’re musicians. Music is a bond of solidarity. Back in November we brought Arabic instruments from London so they could play their music — songs full of nostalgia, yearning, and hopes for the future. But tonight it’s their turn to do the musicology. They pull out their mobiles and struggle to get a WiFi signal. One of them finds a soulful muwashshah from Aleppo — the wrecked city once home to that musical genre — and they sing along. Another shows us a clip of a master of the Kurdish saz (apart from one Moroccan, they are all Kurds). A third hunts for a clip of a song from (and for) his hometown of Kobane, in Syria near the Turkish border, with photos of its devastation in the Kurds’ 131-day war against the so-called Islamic State (IS).
Under the stars the talk turns to nationhood. Will the Kurds ever be able to create a single nation from entities divided between Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria? The philosopher, speaking from the depths of a salvaged armchair, admits the difficulties: “We have the problem of what will be the national language. Among the Kurdish travellers in Calais, we all speak different Kurdish languages. We don’t understand each other. So we have to talk in either English or Arabic.” He uses the word “traveller” — not refugee, migrant or asylum-seeker.
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