Earlier this today, I passed a military checkpoint in the outskirts of Hakkâri. I was in a bus on my way to Van with mostly seasonal Kurdish workers who were travelling to nearby cities for work with their families.

Here is how it went:

The bus was stopped at a checkpoint randomly picked out of passing cars. A few moments later, the door opened and a military officer came in holding a large gun with his fingers resting on the trigger. After briefly scanning the bus, he shouted “Get out!”.

Once everyone rushed out, he told all women to go another area. Couple of elderly women didn’t understand what he was saying as they couldn’t speak Turkish so they didn’t move. He then began shouting and repeating himself in Turkish to the point of making them shake from panic.

Once their children translated them what the soldier was shouting, they walked towards the other area where I couldn’t see them anymore. (I assume they were searched in private.)

He then yelled the men to open our bags and put them on the floor front of us as if he was giving orders. He began going through the bags hardly checking the items just lifting things and then throwing them back down.

When he came up to me, he looked at my ID card and said it was fake. I said “that’s impossible, I’ve been using for 10 years”. He insisted it was and I insisted it wasn’t. He then called over another soldier & told him to check the card because “there was something funny with it”

The other soldier seemed decent. He looked at my ID card for a moment then gave it back to me and said “it’s fine”. Meanwhile the laud soldier moved towards the guys beside me and continued his searches without any attention on what he was looking at.

When I began packing back my stuff, he rushed back up to me and took the small plastic bag I was packing from my hand and held it between me and him “what is this?”.

It was a bag of tobacco I bought from a local producer from Şemdinli which is famous for its tobacco.

I mixed up the Turkish words & instead of saying “It’s tobacco” I said “it’s weed”. Before I could correct myself, he dropped the bag onto my stuff & walked away. He didn’t even listen to what I said.

As he was walking away, I noticed the Greywolves symbol printed onto his gun.

I then watched people repack their bags. Nobody was speaking, even the children. I saw the elderly women carefully reorganise their bags shaking out the clothes to get rid off the dust and then neatly folding them back into their luggages as if this was a long established routine

But their silence and the expression on their faces spoke volumes. It was impossible not to hear it. It was impossible not to feel that humiliation they were mindlessly subjected to front of their children and friends for no reason.

We got back into the bus. As it was driving away, I looked back and saw another bus being stopped and that soldier getting ready to go inside it.

I looked front of me and shook my head. One guy behind me tapped my shoulder and said “this wasn’t so bad, it’s usually much worse”.

The driver turned on the radio. Ahmet Kaya’s ‘Nereden Bileceksiniz’ (How could you know) started playing, the volume went up, everybody went quiet and listened.

I listened to this track countless times before but never did it cut through like this before.

For rest of the 2.5 hour journey, the bus was stopped 3 more times in military and police checkpoints.