Rick Steves’ Travel Blog

I’m in Aurora, Illinois, back in the USA and midway through a seven-cities-in-seven-days lecture tour. I’ve given eight talks in two days in Minneapolis and Chicago, and am swimming in memories of the fun meetings I’ve had with travelers at all these gigs.

The group I’m talking to later this morning has put me up in an exquisite little “French Colonial” hotel, which I have no time to appreciate (as is generally the case when I’m on the road in the USA).

I’m lying in bed wondering why I won’t go for this opportunity to get a full eight hours of sleep. Three things are on my mind: I’ll be talking to a gang of a thousand in a sumptuous old theater. I have two hours to talk and I’m debating how light and happy versus how edgy and political to be. And I’m reminiscing about a 1993 trip to Russia.

My five events in Minneapolis were all jammed with travelers — huge, enthusiastic groups. My three events (bookstores and a luggage store) in Chicago were small and relatively disappointing. Even so, I met fascinating people. Because they were small groups, we kept things intimate and casual…with lots of Q&A.

One man asked about honeymooning in Ireland…in December. That seemed comical to me and the entire group, so we had fun with that.

A couple — the woman with harsh orange lipstick and the man with Borat hair — came up afterwards and showed me their “Rick Steves prayer cards.” The size of playing cards, they were laminated with goofy photos of me happy in Europe. One said, “Don’t be a grouch.” The other said, “Ricardo says ‘Though shalt not be grumpy.’” They explained that when they traveled, whenever one or the other was complaining or getting in a bad mood, the other would play their card…and they’d get back on track.

That reminded me of the American Girl Scout group I once met in the Swiss Alps (at Walter’s hotel in Gimmelwald). I dropped by one evening as they were eating dinner. As they had based their trip on my material, they were happy to meet me.

The woman leading the group had clearly worked hard and creatively to help make the girls good travelers. To show off, she demonstrated how they had taken a line from the Back Door travel philosophy I lay out in each of my guidebooks as a group motto.

She called the group to order and said, “If it’s not to your liking…” All twenty girls responded enthusiastically in unison, “CHANGE YOUR LIKING!”

Sorry for the delay in getting an entry up on this blog. I’ll finish this with the 1993 Russia trip (flames were coming out of the parliament building in Moscow, where Communist hardliners were holed up during the Boris Yeltsin stand-off)…on my next entry. But right now, I have a talk to give.

I’m wrapping up my take on three thorny Turkish issues. (For the Turkish perspective on the “Armenian Holocaust” and the Kurdish question, see my last two posts.)

Today’s topic: Turkey in the EU.

Governments, corporations, people…so often, they all have a different agenda. That goes for Turkish membership in the European Union, too. Here’s what I picked up last month in Istanbul from Turkish friends:

Though more than 75 percent of Turkish people oppose joining the European Union, the Turkish government and Turkish corporations are making a strong drive to join the EU.

The idea of being a member of a union where nearly 30 member states are represented by a 15-star flag makes skeptical Turks think of the EU as a club of “elites,” where some are more “equal” than the others.

Turks who oppose EU membership are concerned about what they see as European double standards on economics, social issues, and ethnic diversity. Though one of the main assets of being an EU member is free circulation of each member’s citizens throughout Europe, this right will apparently not be granted to Turkish citizens even if the EU accepts Turkey as a member.

To help pave the way to EU membership, since 1995 Turkey has been pressured into allowing EU countries to export their products to Turkey duty-free. But many Turkish products destined for Europe are still restricted by EU quotas.

Though Turkey is a secular state (as required by its constitution), Europe insists on considering it a Muslim nation. Europeans — mindful of the challenges Europe already faces with its Muslim minority — are concerned about admitting into their union a Texas-size country with 75 million people, 90 percent of whom are practicing Muslims.

The “400-pound gorilla in the room” is Europe’s demographic shift. The Continent’s declining birth rate is making it an old folks’ continent. Europeans know that if their population is not infused with fresh immigrant blood, it will start to wither away. But the inability of white Europe and its Muslim minorities (currently 10 percent of the Continent’s population) to assimilate comfortably is a serious problem that won’t just disappear.

It’s no wonder that both Europeans and Turks are split on whether Turkish membership is in their best interests.

What do I think? I can understand Europe being reluctant to suddenly admit such a culturally different group which overnight would amount to nearly one-fifth of its total population.

I also think Turkey would do more good looking east rather than west. Potentially, it can be such a positive link between Christendom and Islam. Geopolitically, I believe the world would be better off if Turkey — which tends to be “Western,” democratic, and moderate — didn’t turn its back on the troubled Middle East and the “-Stans” beyond (opting for the affluence and stability of being a member of the EU), but worked as a leader within its own ethnic, linguistic, and religious world.

I’m offering the Turkish perspective on three hot-button issues that are in the news lately. (See my last posting for their take on the “Armenian Holocaust.”)

About the Kurds:

Turkey is sensitive to issues relating to its 10 million Kurdish people. When we took tours through southeastern Turkey, the Kurdish colors (red, green, and yellow) were the most politicized colors I remember encountering in my travels. (Our guide forbade us to endanger our tour by picking up simple knickknacks with these powerful colors in the villages we stopped in.) Later, I spent a week filming a TV show in Eastern Turkey. It seemed every time we pulled out the camera, military police zoomed in on their jeeps and stopped us. We once even got taken into a commander’s tent to (sip tea and) explain that we weren’t working with the Kurds.

With the seemingly imminent breakup of Iraq and the virtual autonomy of a Kurdistan now just over the Turkish border, the issue is back in the news. Here’s how my Turkish friends explain it:

Turkey’s citizens are officially called “the Turks” — there are no other ethnic groups or minorities recognized by Turkish law. (On paper, every citizen shares equal privileges and responsibilities.) Among the country’s various “unofficial” ethnic groups, the Kurds are significant, making up about 20 percent of Turkey’s population. They live mostly in the southeast, just across the border from their ethnic cousins in Iraq and Iran.

In Turkey, a militant Kurdish separatist group — the PKK — has fought a bloody campaign against the government off and on since 1984. While the PKK had been fairly quiet for the past decade (even agreeing to some pretty successful truces), the prospect of Iraq falling apart — and Iraqi Kurds forming an autonomous nation — has reignited PKK activity.

While my Turkish friends claim (perhaps correctly) that the majority of Kurds in Turkey do not support any separatist movement, the PKK has found fertile ground to reorganize in Northern Iraq, and now the Turkish government wants to send its troops across the border to eliminate the “terrorist threat.”

And speaking of 400-pound gorillas in the room, Turkey fears that a potential Kurdish State of Northern Iraq will tempt otherwise happy Kurds living in Turkey to become Kurdish Kurds rather than Kurdish Turks. Turkey has made it very clear that it will go to war rather than allow that to happen.

I hope the nightmare brought on by the break-up of Iraq–as predicted (before the Iraq War) by people who understood the complex ethnic situation in the Middle East–is not approaching.

Having just been in Turkey, I’m tuned in to three thorny issues that are in the news about Turkey these days: The “Armenian Holocaust,” Kurdish separatists in Turkey, and Turkish membership in the European Union. I’m less clever than our Vice President on these matters. But I thought I’d pass along how my Turkish friends explain them.

About the Armenians:

I have a personal affinity for Turkey, and whenever I rave about the place as a travel destination, I get…”flack” is not quite the right word…from Greeks and Armenians about the ugly history of that troubled region. Armenians insist that I make Turkey admit to committing, specifically, “genocide.” Turks don’t want me to talk about Armenia and would never put those two words in the same sentence. (I filmed at a ruined Armenian church on Lake Van and tried to deal constructively with the issue in one of my TV episodes…and I angered both my Turkish friend and Armenians.) Even though I know I just can’t win on this issue, let me try to explain what I’ve picked up on this in Turkey:

From 1915 through 1917, while Britain, France and Russia were trying to divide up the Ottoman Empire, hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenians and Turks were killed in what was seen by many at the time as an effort to stop a rebellion of separatist Armenians.

Like the Muslim Turks and non-Muslims in the region, the Armenians had lived in relative peace and prosperity for centuries under the Ottoman administration. But starting in the late 1800s and escalating during World War I, the Russians and British — eager to undermine the pro-German Ottoman regime — enlisted Armenian groups to rise up against it. As a consequence, the Armenians suffered the bloody wrath of a dying empire.

Today, many descendants of the survivors (the Armenian Diaspora) live in France and the USA. An independent country of Armenia has emerged in what was once Soviet territory…while many of that civilization’s historic treasures lie ruined and desolate, just across the border in eastern Turkey.

Some of my most poignant travels have been wandering through ancient buildings deserted or destroyed in the early 20th century…lasting reminders of the slaughter of Armenians and the tragedy that the ethnic group that once thrived there will never return.

To this day, the government of the Turkish Republic (which didn’t exist until 1923, several years after the slaughter of the Armenian people) has never officially admitted to any wrongdoing. Armenians are mourning an almost Nazi-like genocide. But the Turks see something more analogous to the American Civil War: the South insisted on seceding and fired the first shots, so they are the ones who could have prevented the disaster from ever happening. Turks I’ve spoken with have no problem with having the truth investigated and debated on the world stage. But they want historians — not politicians — to do the assessment.

Coming up: Turkey and the debate over small Kurds and large Kurds.