ARDAHAN, Turkey ?€” Former boxer that he is, Ozcan Uygur has no plans to give in, but the end of the sex trade here is just killing him.
Five years ago Uygur saw a beautiful investment opportunity, here where Turkey runs up against the former Soviet Union, and started building Ardahan's finest hotel, with a waterfall in the restaurant, pink seashell wall sconces, and hot water at least some of the day. But most of his 200 beds go empty every night, and the lobby is lucky if it can boast a few glum business travelers from Istanbul, quietly watching television.
The way he sees it, the police, for some unfathomable reason, have taken it upon themselves to choke off the best business this dusty town could ever hope to see ?€” the once-flourishing trade of "Natashas," the prostitutes who made their way here from Russia or nearby Georgia or one of the other former Soviet republics.
But Ozcan's younger brother, Ozkan, has a different take on things. Once they were partners, running a bakery and a modest little run-down hotel here. And yes, Ozkan acknowledges, "It was wild." But it was small, too, and Ozcan, at 50, was a man of dreams. And so he overreached himself, his brother believes; he got greedy and he forgot that Turkey is, after all, a Moslem nation where sometimes you can go too far.
What happened to Ozcan Uygur's dream hotel is that it opened last year just as Hasan Ozdemir had come to town. The corruption-fighting police chief of Istanbul, Ozdemir was appointed the new governor of the province, and he quickly let it be known that he saw as his main task the crackdown on the Natasha trade.
Today, Uygur is hurting, and so are others. The owners of 32 hotels in the border town of Posof have protested the governor's policy and have asked that the anti-prostitution law be repealed, arguing that tourism has collapsed and much of their investment is lost.
They're hoping to press their case now that Ozdemir has been recalled to Istanbul in a governmental shake-up, but the signs are against them.
In nearby Giresun province, and in Igdir province, the authorities are bringing the same weight to bear against the sex trade and not wasting much effort on subtlety. Last fall, Governor Mustafa Tamer of Igdir threatened to shave off the beard of any man caught with a prostitute and then to parade him through the main square.
The main square? "If I were the governor of Ardahan," says Ozcan Uygur, "and a businessman wanted to build a hotel like this, I would put up a statue of the man in the main square."
Who else, he asks, has invested $1.5 million in private enterprise here and created 30 jobs and brought travelers to this hard-pressed region? No one, he answers. No one but Ozcan Uygur. And they're trying to run him out of business.
For 10 years Turkey has been a center of international sex trafficking, as thousands of young women have been recruited or lured out of the former Soviet Union to work as prostitutes. Reliable numbers are impossible to come by, but in Ukraine alone the government calculates that 100,000 women went abroad to work in the sex trade in the 1990s.
In Istanbul today, Russian prostitutes are still in abundance, but in the east the crackdown is having an effect.
And it has come at just the wrong moment for Ozcan Uygur.
He was 40 when the Soviet Union broke up, working in Istanbul and not enjoying it. He has roots in Georgia ?€” his grandparents moved from there to Ardahan before World War I, when Ardahan was primarily an Armenian city and part of the Russian Empire. The family stayed when Turkey took the territory in 1918 ?€” "Thank God they did," says brother Ozkan ?€” but old ties and curiosity and an eye for the main chance took Ozcan to Tbilisi nine years ago.
He went to work in a bakery and met Liya. Soon they were married and on their way back to Turkey.
The Uygur brothers grew up in a country village where for three generations their family has raised cattle and made cheese. But they opened a bakery in Ardahan, and pretty soon, with their new Georgian connection, they had opened a raucous little hotel upstairs.
Liya Uygur, who once studied at a meat and fish institute in Moscow and misses the big city terribly, still goes back to Georgia once a month or so. She finds Ardahan, where the houses sport verdant sod roofs and the two-story buildings downtown are covered in dust the color of old cement, an acutely "uncultured'' place. She is a sad and nervous woman in a head scarf and long skirt, and, if it was her role to be the madame, that may have been just another one of the prices she had to pay to be free of the squalor of her own country.
Five years ago, her husband decided he wanted to build a new and glorious hotel. That was too much for his brother to stomach, too brazen, and they parted ways. Ozcan plunged ahead, and over the years raised the five-story Grand Ardahan Hotel on the main road into town.
The Tourism Ministry gave Uygur a license, but quickly the police were coming around demanding he get one from them as well. When buses from Georgia pulled up in front of the hotel, the police wouldn't let the guests out. Early every morning, the police come and knock on every door of the hotel to confirm who's inside.
Five years ago Uygur saw a beautiful investment opportunity, here where Turkey runs up against the former Soviet Union, and started building Ardahan's finest hotel, with a waterfall in the restaurant, pink seashell wall sconces, and hot water at least some of the day. But most of his 200 beds go empty every night, and the lobby is lucky if it can boast a few glum business travelers from Istanbul, quietly watching television.
The way he sees it, the police, for some unfathomable reason, have taken it upon themselves to choke off the best business this dusty town could ever hope to see ?€” the once-flourishing trade of "Natashas," the prostitutes who made their way here from Russia or nearby Georgia or one of the other former Soviet republics.
But Ozcan's younger brother, Ozkan, has a different take on things. Once they were partners, running a bakery and a modest little run-down hotel here. And yes, Ozkan acknowledges, "It was wild." But it was small, too, and Ozcan, at 50, was a man of dreams. And so he overreached himself, his brother believes; he got greedy and he forgot that Turkey is, after all, a Moslem nation where sometimes you can go too far.
What happened to Ozcan Uygur's dream hotel is that it opened last year just as Hasan Ozdemir had come to town. The corruption-fighting police chief of Istanbul, Ozdemir was appointed the new governor of the province, and he quickly let it be known that he saw as his main task the crackdown on the Natasha trade.
Today, Uygur is hurting, and so are others. The owners of 32 hotels in the border town of Posof have protested the governor's policy and have asked that the anti-prostitution law be repealed, arguing that tourism has collapsed and much of their investment is lost.
They're hoping to press their case now that Ozdemir has been recalled to Istanbul in a governmental shake-up, but the signs are against them.
In nearby Giresun province, and in Igdir province, the authorities are bringing the same weight to bear against the sex trade and not wasting much effort on subtlety. Last fall, Governor Mustafa Tamer of Igdir threatened to shave off the beard of any man caught with a prostitute and then to parade him through the main square.
The main square? "If I were the governor of Ardahan," says Ozcan Uygur, "and a businessman wanted to build a hotel like this, I would put up a statue of the man in the main square."
Who else, he asks, has invested $1.5 million in private enterprise here and created 30 jobs and brought travelers to this hard-pressed region? No one, he answers. No one but Ozcan Uygur. And they're trying to run him out of business.
For 10 years Turkey has been a center of international sex trafficking, as thousands of young women have been recruited or lured out of the former Soviet Union to work as prostitutes. Reliable numbers are impossible to come by, but in Ukraine alone the government calculates that 100,000 women went abroad to work in the sex trade in the 1990s.
In Istanbul today, Russian prostitutes are still in abundance, but in the east the crackdown is having an effect.
And it has come at just the wrong moment for Ozcan Uygur.
He was 40 when the Soviet Union broke up, working in Istanbul and not enjoying it. He has roots in Georgia ?€” his grandparents moved from there to Ardahan before World War I, when Ardahan was primarily an Armenian city and part of the Russian Empire. The family stayed when Turkey took the territory in 1918 ?€” "Thank God they did," says brother Ozkan ?€” but old ties and curiosity and an eye for the main chance took Ozcan to Tbilisi nine years ago.
He went to work in a bakery and met Liya. Soon they were married and on their way back to Turkey.
The Uygur brothers grew up in a country village where for three generations their family has raised cattle and made cheese. But they opened a bakery in Ardahan, and pretty soon, with their new Georgian connection, they had opened a raucous little hotel upstairs.
Liya Uygur, who once studied at a meat and fish institute in Moscow and misses the big city terribly, still goes back to Georgia once a month or so. She finds Ardahan, where the houses sport verdant sod roofs and the two-story buildings downtown are covered in dust the color of old cement, an acutely "uncultured'' place. She is a sad and nervous woman in a head scarf and long skirt, and, if it was her role to be the madame, that may have been just another one of the prices she had to pay to be free of the squalor of her own country.
Five years ago, her husband decided he wanted to build a new and glorious hotel. That was too much for his brother to stomach, too brazen, and they parted ways. Ozcan plunged ahead, and over the years raised the five-story Grand Ardahan Hotel on the main road into town.
The Tourism Ministry gave Uygur a license, but quickly the police were coming around demanding he get one from them as well. When buses from Georgia pulled up in front of the hotel, the police wouldn't let the guests out. Early every morning, the police come and knock on every door of the hotel to confirm who's inside.
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