The boys are dead: Turkey's Kurdish question

'The Boys are Dead: The Roboski Massacre and the Kurdish Question in Turkey' by Frederike Geerdink (Gomidas Institute, $22, 196 pages)

On the evening of Dec. 28, 2011, 34 villagers were killed in an air raid in Uludere near the Turkey-Iraq border. Mostly children, the Kurdish villagers of Turkish nationality were returning with loaded mules from a regular cross-border smuggling trip when the Turkish Air Force jets struck, leaving all but four of them dead. 

The bombing is at the center of this book by Dutch journalist Frederike Geerdink. Based in Istanbul from 2006, shortly after the attack Geerdink moved to the southeastern city of Diyarbak?r, where she focused more closely on Kurdish matters. Digging deeper, she made countless trips to Uludere ("Roboski" in Kurdish) trying to shed light on the incident, staying for extended periods with families of the victims. "The Boys are Dead" describes the tragic history and present of Turkey's Kurdish issue through the Uludere bombing, which Geerdink says "encapsulates the Kurdish question in a single square kilometer."

Geerdink reported from southeast Anatolia for the international media until she was deported by Turkey after a trial in September 2015. The authorities accused her of aiding the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and violating a security zone in the Hakkari province, but in truth she had long been annoying them and the decision to deport her didn't come as a big surprise. Critics always accused her of pro-PKK partiality; they are unlikely to change their mind after reading this book.

But she is certainly more courageous than many of her critics. Hugely intrepid, she traveled around the region, staying with and listening to locals caught up in the conflict, negotiating...