The Kurdish Beritan Tribe - Nomads on the Way to Europe

5:00 Min., n-tv - Auslandsreport, September 2005

This short program gives a brief overview of the daily live of the Beritan Tribe in South East Anatolia; it describes the social living conditions and the expectation of the nomads regarding the European Union.

The summer camps of the Beritan nomads in Turkey are located in the Taurus mountains between Bingol and Erzurum in South East Anatolia.

At the moment only few families are going to the mountains to put out to pasture their cattle during the summer period. It looks impossible that the Beritan nomads will reach their living standard and property of the nineties. They don't expect help from the state to get their cattle herds back.

We are going to meet Sait and Izzet in front of their tents. In the old days - before the fight of the militant PKK and the Army in the region - they had thousands of cattle but today only few cows are left. They are telling us how the war had change their life and living conditions during the last 18 years.

Only since tow years they are allowed to come back to the mountains; the years before the alp was a prohibited region....

Sait says the nomadic tradition in Turkey is threated completelyand may disappear without support from outside.

Approximately 20.000 Beritan nomads are still living in Turkey and are watching the negotiation between Turkey and the European Union with hope and many expectations.