Turkish outpost: how war workers see the conflict.

EVERY OTHER DAY, United States Air Force F-15 Strike Eagles and F-16 Fighting Falcons roar aloft over the Kurdish quarter of the city of Adana, about an hour's drive inland from the Mediterranean coast of central Turkey, to patrol the skies over northern Iraq.

I arrive in Adana on Christmas Eve to check out the Incirlik military base, where the jet pilots are housed, seven miles outside the industrial metropolis of one million people.

Adana is mostly off limits to the thousands of British and American troops and reservists who are pouring into Turkey in preparation for possible war. Instead, the soldiers' main source of entertainment is the mile-long strip of shops immediately outside the base gates. Restaurants, gun dealers, carpet sellers, tailors, and bars offer goods ranging from burritos to pirate copies of the latest James Bond movies on DVD to homesick Americans. Along the strip, local women often leave the Cheers bar or the Happy House restaurant holding onto soldiers' arms to make a quick trip back to a cheap hotel in town before curfew closes the main base gate at 11 P.M.

On Christmas Day, however, the strip is quiet. At the Happy House, the only customers from the base are a group of older soldiers eating hamburgers and a fresh-faced twenty-something Texan who is struggling to converse with a middle-aged Turkish woman.

Mustapha, a Happy House regular, a.k.a., Tony Montana, greets us as we walk in. "What would you like, my friend? A car for the week or how about a girlfriend? All of these women are my bitches, my `ho's. Just say the word."

Over several beers, he glumly explains that business has been bad for a while. "It's the war. The Americans are afraid of terrorist attacks, so nobody is allowed to spend the night in town, and many would rather celebrate inside the base," he says. "In the past, the American soldiers were very friendly and we had great times together. One of the guys gave me my name, Tony Montana. Then I found out that another Turkish guy had taken the same name, so I went over to him and said: Listen, there can only be one Tony Montana, so you better change your name to something else like Joe. Now he's Joe Montana."

At 9 P.M. the bar owner decides to give up and close shop, so we wait outside for a "dolmus" shuttle back into Adana with Mustapha. During the ride back, he tells us that he applied for a job on the base with no luck. "That's what everyone here wants to do. Work at the base exchange, the bowling alley, the movie theater, or the post office," he says.

A company named Vinnell, Brown & Root (VBR) controls jobs on the base. The company is a joint venture of two U.S. multinationals--Vinnell of Fairfax, Virginia, and Kellogg Brown & Root of Houston, Texas. Kellogg Brown & Root is a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney headed up before taking his present position with George W. Bush in Washington, D.C.

Soon after VBR won its contract in 1988, Incirlik provided a major staging post for thousands of sorties flown against Iraq and occupied Kuwait during the Gulf War in January 1991. These planes dropped more than 3,000 tons of bombs on military and civilian targets.

Today, the U.S. Air Force and VBR employ 1,450 local workers at the base. They must belong to the Harb-Is (war workers) trade union. The union's office is on the second floor of a building in central Adana, where a group of workers wearing smart business suits are careful not to criticize the United States.

Yurdal Yavuzcan, a supervisor in the mess and a union officer, says he loves his job. "We feed 2,000 soldiers, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I have no complaints against the company or the air force," he says.

His boss, Orhan Sener, current president of Harb-Is, explains that the war has been a profitable business for his members.

"We were working overtime during the Gulf War," he says. "I was working at the fire department as a fire inspector. A lot of airplanes landed, and we had to support them twenty-four hours a day."

Despite the fact that more than 80 percent of the Turkish public is against the war, Harb-Is says its workers will do whatever they are asked.

"Nobody can say that war is good. It is bad," says Sener. "But whatever our government decides, we're just going to support them despite the fact that I don't know what is going to happen as a result of the war. As you know, they might use nuclear weapons like Hiroshima or Nagasaki."

A couple of blocks away, his counterpart at Petrol-Is, the oil workers union, expresses a different opinion. Mehmet Oder, the president of Petrol-Is, said that the Gulf War had an adverse impact on the members of his union, many of whom lost their jobs when the United Nations imposed the food-for-oil program on Iraq.

"This was one of the most important industrial regions before the Gulf War," he says. "The textile industry completely collapsed. Another Gulf War may result in even more problems for us. I think that the situation should be resolved peacefully."

Most of the members of Petrol-Is in Adana work an hour's drive away on the coast at the Yumartalik oil terminal, which is the main port for North American oil tankers to load up Iraqi oil to ship across the Atlantic. Oil arrives here from Kirkuk and Mosul in northern Iraq via a pipeline that is strictly monitored by a Dutch company called Saybolt International on behalf of the United Nations.

Botas, the state-owned Turkish pipeline company, runs the terminal under tight security. Thirteen oil tanks, each of which can hold 130,000 cubic meters of oil, are located on the Mediterranean coast on a hillside that is off limits to all except a few with special clearance.

I drive up the hill with Turan Cham, a former ship captain who is in charge of the jetty. At the top, it is hard to decide which is more awe-inspiring--the wintry Mediterranean that fills the horizon or the huge tanks below, most of which are empty.

Over at the control room for the pipeline, I meet Adem Malci, the man in charge of the "tank farm."

"I've worked here for more than twenty-five years, ever since the pipeline opened in 1975," says Malci. "But it is quiet now because we are only shipping one million barrels a day, half of what we used to ship before 1991 ."

I ask the two men what they think of the war. Malci shrugs, smiling politely, but Cham is more willing to voice an opinion. "I would definitely prefer that there is no war even if it means that we don't have more jobs," he says. "This war is only about oil. Too many people will die. We have to think about this. Maybe thousands of children will die. Maybe I will earn more money but think about the people in Iraq who will lose their lives. For more than ten years they have not been able to buy anything, not even milk. Human rights shouldn't just be for Americans or for me and my children but for everyone, including Iraqis."

On a bus ride to Malarya, the apricot capital of the country, which is expecting to house a small contingent of U.S. troops in the event of war, I meet a textile engineer who works for the Gap's outsourcing department. He explains that his job is contracting workers to produce jeans for Old Navy and Banana Republic to be shipped to the United States for sale. "Nobody can afford to buy the real thing here. In fact, in Istanbul, you can buy Gap knock-offs in the very same building that our head office is based in," he says, laughing.

When I broach the issue of war with Iraq, he turns serious. "The day that the war begins, the day that Turkey gives American ground troops a base, I will be out in the street protesting. My brother is in the Turkish army doing his military service, and my mother is already sick to death worrying about what will happen to him if there is a war."

Throughout eastern Turkey, I hear the same opinion over and over again. In Batman, a refinery town which processes Iraqi oil, the workers overwhelmingly oppose the war, just as they do in Diyarbakir, the biggest city in eastern Turkey, the heart of the Kurdish community.

I go east from Diyarbakir along the Syrian border to Habur, the last outpost in Turkey before the Tigris river and the northernmost mountains of Iraq. At Habur, my journey ends after I fail to persuade the border guards to allow me to cross into northern Iraq. At a truck stop just before the bridge that straddles the Tigris and leads to the Iraqi town of Zakho, I meet Recep Yilmaz, a trucker from Ankara who made the journey from Iraq shortly after the new year.

"What does George Bush want from Iraq? If somebody gave me a chance I would definitely go to Washington and tell him, don't go to war with Iraq. It would be better if we could trade with them than bomb them," he says. "Turkey has lost $30 billion in the last ten years because of the American sanctions. It is time to make peace."

Pratap Chatterjee, an investigative journalist, is based in Berkeley, California. He recently spent three weeks traveling through eastern Turkey in the border region of Iraq. Sasha Lilley, an independent producer and correspondent for Free Speech Radio News, provided research and support for the trip.