Funeral director looks to end blood feuds

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey

Locals call him Diyarbakir’s Kofi Annan. The comparison to the former U.N. secretary-general arguably does Sait Sanli a disfavor.

The 65-year-old funeral-home director has brokered more than 500 peace deals in the past decade — even though his success is bad for his business. His specialty is 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,” Mr. Sanli says, sitting in the funeral parlor 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 in April, five brothers were shot 20 years after their family had fled their village because of a feud.

A 73-year-old man who declined to give his name and was among the constant stream of visitors to Mr. Sanli’s makeshift office, described how he spent 14 years hiding in the mountains after he shot and injured six members of a neighboring family in 1983. He turned himself into the authorities after Mr. Sanli intervened to dissuade the family from seeking revenge. “We’re best of friends now,” he said.

Asked to explain his success, Mr. Sanli laughed and said, “It’s certainly not my looks.”

Barely 5 feet 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 explained. “I kiss hands. I berate, I shout. Sometimes I cry. Above all, I listen to everybody involved, even the children.”

He gave the example of a feud he helped to end in 2002. After moving 500 miles west to the tourist city of Antalya after her husband was killed, 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 exact revenge.

“In many ways, she was rebelling against her in-laws’ attempts to impose their solution on her,” Mr. Sanli said. “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 Mr. Sanli told the woman he had persuaded the killer’s family to pay $15,000 directly to her, she called 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,” Mr. Sanli explained.

Mr. Sanli has worked with local leaders and government officials in his fight against blood feuds. His latest brainchild is to set up village committees to resolve the feuds before blood is spilled.

Mr. Sanli is particularly keen to enlist the help of religious leaders in his efforts.

“In a sense, his plans are a reworking of traditional structures,” said Mazhar Bagli, a sociologist at Diyarbakir’s Dicle University. “But traditional structures do sometimes have a persuasive power their modern equivalents lack.”

He mentioned 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,” Mr. Bagli said.

Most observers, Mr. 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 government policy of arming about 70,000 local militiamen in the 25-year war against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has paved the way for disorder.

Hazro, a town north of Diyarbakir, is an example. In 2005, militiamen belonging to a clan being investigated for corruption by Mayor Hamit Ergin shot him in the shoulder as he sat in a tea shop. His brother returned fire, killing one of the assailants.

Mr. Ergin now visits Hazro only twice a week, under police protection.

Recuperating in the hospital, Mr. Ergin turned to Mr. Sanli to solve the feud, but Mr. Sanli failed.

“I respect Sait hugely, but he failed to make the correct diagnosis,” Mr. Ergin said. “This is more than a feud. It’s about how hard-liners on both sides - the state and the PKK - use violence to hold onto the benefits war has given them.”

Formerly a member of a pro-Kurdish party ideologically linked to the PKK, Mr. Ergin resigned in disgust at the way his party tried to politicize his shooting. “They make politics with blood,” he said.

Many visitors to Mr. Sanli’s funeral parlor say Turkey would do well to copy Mr. 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,” said Ahmet Ant, a friend of Mr. Sanli since childhood. “But talking takes courage.”