If
Kurdish society surrendered to its pain, it would not be able to live
on. The Kurdish resistance draws strength from pain and life from death.
Thus in Kurdistan “resistance becomes life”.
We
all know Halime Aksoy now. The mother who fought for three years to
have the body of her fallen son and guerrilla fighter Agit Ipek (Nom de
Guerre: Kemal Berxwedan) handed over. Agit had fallen in 2017 in Dersim.
His remains were finally handed over to her: in a box and by mail –
sent by the General Prosecutor’s Office in Dersim. Even if we should
forget her name, it will be difficult to forget the picture on which she
is pictured with the postal package. Halime Aksoy commented on this
situation with the words: “I cannot say anything about it, I cannot find
the words for it…”.
This
box will remain in our memory as truth from now on. It contains both
the truth of Kurdish society and the character of the Turkish state.
All
this happened very “normally”. Cahit Özkan, Vice-Chairman of the AKP
parliamentary group, said in the Turkish Parliament that it was ‘a few
pieces of bone’ and that it was a normal procedure. How much does this
statement of the AKP politician Özkan remind us of the words of a Polish
man who was able to flee from a Nazi concentration camp: “They were
able to kill people and behaved quite normally, I could not understand
that”[1]. The state of this “normality” has taken on a different
dimension in Kurdistan in the last five years.
Defending the Kurdish society
Through
the resistance of the Kurdish freedom movement led by the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK) for more than 40 years, the events in Kurdistan
have attracted international attention. The Kurdish question has become
an international issue in the 21st century. Moreover, the social
awakening in Kurdistan has long since become a positive point of
reference for leftist, progressive movements worldwide. Especially since
the successful struggle for Kobanê by the self-defence forces of the
YPG/YPJ, the revolution in Rojava with its pillars of radical democracy,
women’s liberation and ecology inspires people worldwide to work for a
just world without oppression and exploitation.
For
these activists, a holistic approach to the Kurdish freedom movement
and developments in Kurdistan is needed. Already in a previous article,
we spoke of the “dialectic of revolution in Kurdistan”, and wrote
“Because the resistance strategy of the Kurdish movement is a holistic
one, political offensives in Northern Kurdistan support processes in
Rojava. Backlashes in Southern Kurdistan can effect Rojava. The struggle
is conducted on several levels. This is the dialectic of the revolution
in Kurdistan, and within this framework, a holistic approach to the
Kurdish freedom movement is needed, through which an effective
solidarity can develop”[2].
Since
the successful resistance in Kobanê in Western Kurdistan/Rojava, the
focus has been on the social construction of an alternative social
system oriented on the concept of “democratic confederalism” and its
defence. Meanwhile, the geographically largest part of Kurdistan, namely
Northern Kurdistan, is exposed to a real campaign of annihilation by
the Turkish state. In this sense, the Kurdish freedom movement led by
the PKK considers it as its main task to “defend (Kurdish society) under
the threat of genocide”.
With
this article, we want to take a closer look at this understanding of
the Kurdish freedom movement. How does the Kurdish freedom movement
evaluate its mission and task? What does it understand by the concept of
“cultural genocide”, which for it is the central concept of the Turkish
state? What does this mean for Kurdistan solidarity?
The box with the mortal remains of Agit Ipek was sent by the public prosecutor’s office to his parents in Amed (Diyarbakir)…
The defence of the “Kurdistan thesis” in the courtroom of Diyarbakir
The
military prison of Diyarbakir is today best known for its role as a
notorious torture centre after the fascist military coup of 12 September
1980 and the hunger strikes and resistance of PKK prisoners. The prison
later became known worldwide under the name of “Diyarbakir’s hell”. The
prisoners were systematically tortured and humiliated with brutal and
fascist-motivated methods. Books and films like “14.Tîrmeh (July 14) –
The Hell of Diyarbakir” describe the inhumane conditions in prison.
In
the prison of Diyarbakir, alongside the resistance of the political
prisoners, the political defence of PKK members like Mazlum Doğan or
Mehmet Hayri Durmuş took place. This defence represents an important
point in the history of the struggle for political self-determination in
Kurdistan. The main PKK trial began on 13 April 1981 and was held
against 591 PKK members. Despite five years of severe torture, at the
trial a defence of around 20,000 pages was presented. This is the
largest defence in the history of Kurdistan on this scale and holds
great significance. Mazlum Doğan later said, in reference to the main
trial, “the struggle for independence and freedom was settled in the
court protocols.”
Let’s take a closer look at these logs:
Mazlum Doğan: If it wasn’t for the Kurdish question, we wouldn’t be here.
Kurdistan
was characterized by colonial oppression, denial and self-denial. The
existence of a Kurdish ethnic group was simply denied. At the beginning
of his defence, Mazlum Doğan declared: “In the light of the present
reality, I will not testify here either for myself or for the other
persons who are on trial for the party cause, but I will testify as it
is my responsibility to history.”
He
then addressed terms and definitions in the indictment and explained,
for example: “It is not called East and Southeast Anatolia, but
Central-West-North Kurdistan”[3].
This
introduction by Mazlum Doğan is significant in the context of
colonialism and the relationship of oppression. Because the rulers
define: they give the names. The relationship established with the
defining power is important. It leads to objectification where there is
no equal relationship. Instead, in court, the accused is prevented from
forming his own sentences. The practice of power is legible and palpable
in the protocols.
Mazlum
Doğan picked apart the incorrect passages of the indictment piece by
piece: “Here it says ‘independent, united, democratic Kurdistan’ and in
other passages, it says ‘a Kurdish state based on Marxism-Leninism’. I
must emphasise that the PKK’s programme does not say ‘Kurdish state
based on Marxism-Leninism’, but as I explained. It is about building an
independent, democratic and united country and a state which will be
national and democratic and in which society will be self-governing.
That is what the programme says.”
At
the end of his defence, Mazlum Doğan entered the discussion about
“Kurdish history”. He explained his knowledge about the Middle East,
Kurdish society and Kurdistan: “The Middle East today is the centre of
the contradiction between capitalism and socialism. Kurdistan is in a
very strategic place in the Middle East. The geostrategic importance of
Kurdistan must be properly understood. If you want to expel imperialism
from the Middle East, to separate the Middle East from the
imperialist-capitalist bloc, you have to make a revolution in Kurdistan
where the reactionary of the Middle East is gathering. (…) I myself have
read every publication about Kurdistan and the Kurds. I have not been
satisfied with this, but I have also read texts in which there is only
one sentence or word. If there was no problem called Kurds or Kurdistan,
there would not have been people who deal with this topic. Social and
societal phenomena are those that impose themselves at a certain time.”
Mehmet Hayri Durmuş: The existence of Kurdistan is no longer in question
Mehmet
Hayri Durmuş, then a member of the PKK Central Committee, began his
defence in court on 19 June 1981 after 45 days of hunger strike. Durmuş
wanted to resolve one thing in his defence: The question of the
“existence of the Kurds”. This issue was provocatively raised by the
court again and again with racist and fascist questions. Some questions
of the judge in this context were for example: “Where do you take this
Kurd from, why do you fragment the Turkish nation? Where do you take it
from without knowing the history? What is your source? What historical
documents prove this? Where should this Kurdish language come from, it
is only a mixture of 90 per cent Persian and 10 per cent Laristani? A
mixture of Arabic, Persian and English is Kurdish after all. Have you
done any research on the language?” Against this colonialist practice,
Durmuş responded in a certain sense with the defence strategy of rupture
(défence de rupture), which was theorized and practised by the French
lawyer Jacques Vergès. He thus refused to accept the implicit consent
that characterises conventional pleas, saying: “We do not have a racist,
nationalist and chauvinist understanding and we do not have an eye for
the land of others. The areas that are historically inhabited by Kurdish
society are considered by us as Kurdistan. … I don’t want to go into
this subject, I don’t want to make it a subject of discussion, but I see
that the delegation of the court is always debating this subject, the
existence or non-existence of the Kurds and Kurdistan. This situation is
strange for us. This topic is so clear today that there is no need to
discuss it …”[4]
On
14 July 1982, Mehmet Hayri Durmuş announced the start of a death fast,
because the “right to political defence is prevented”. In protest
against the unbearable torture, Mazlum Doğan had set fire to his cell
and hanged himself more than three months earlier.
“A fight to clarify the question of whether the Kurds exist or not”
The
basic goal of the PKK has so far been to make the Kurdish question
visible. The fact that the Kurdish reality was being denied during its
founding phase forced the question of existence. Therefore, the PKK
first tried to prove the existence of this question. The current PKK
programme, which was adopted at the 11th Party Congress in 2014, states:
“Through its struggle, the PKK, whilst not achieving full national
freedom, has seriously smashed the system of denial and annihilation and
guaranteed the existence and free life of Kurdish society.
On
this basis, the construction of a democratic nation on a certain level
has been developed in Northern Kurdistan, the society of Western
Kurdistan has been brought into a process of building social freedom and
democratic nation, the society in Eastern Kurdistan has been brought
into a process of creating awareness and organising the democratic
nation, in Southern Kurdistan an indirect effect has been applied to the
statist solution of the Kurdish question and the Kurdish diaspora has
been brought into a position to support the freedom struggle of
Kurdistan with the awareness of the democratic nation. Thus, Kurdish
society has completed the first stage by making its existence, identity
and reality visible and by the actualisation of the PKK. The second
stage is now the democratic solution process of the Kurdish question.
This will be developed and realised essentially within the framework of a
solution based on a democratic nation”[5].
In
his fifth defence paper, Abdullah Öcalan deals with this role of the
PKK[6]: “The struggle carried out by the PKK in the last 30 years has
been conducted only for the question of existence with regard to the
Kurds. This struggle was in a certain sense a struggle to clarify the
question of whether the Kurds exist or not. While one side declared that
the Kurds exist, the other side denied it. (…) Without a doubt, it is a
very dangerous and pathetic situation for an individual and a society
to discuss its own existence. It shows the thin line between life and
death.”
While
the existence of Kurdish society and Kurdistan is taken for granted
today, even if there is no recognised political status yet, the
above-mentioned discussions in the courtrooms of Diyarbakir prison about
the being or not being and the death of numerous PKK members clearly
show this “thin line between life and death”.
The Turkish state as a regime of “cultural genocide”
The
handing over of the mortal remains of Agit Ipek can be seen as a peak
of the brutalisation of violence and the decline of morality in Turkey
towards the Kurds. This event should not be seen in isolation from the
developments in Northern Kurdistan since 2015. The achievements of
Kurdish society have since then been exposed to a broad and
multidimensional attack of the Turkish state. The Kurdish Freedom
Movement summarises this state policy under the term of “cultural
genocide”, which aims at a long-term and painful destruction of Kurdish
life. In a certain sense, we can observe a process of recolonisation of
Northern Kurdistan by the Turkish state after the breakdown of the
so-called peace negotiations in 2014/15.
This
policy of “cultural genocide” extends on the one hand to the political
level with the repression of the Democratic Party of Peoples (HDP), half
of whose members and sympathizers are in Turkish prisons. The regime of
forced administration, under which democratically elected Kurdish
mayors are removed from office and replaced by state representatives,
also falls within this framework. However, the forced administrations
are not only an attack on the democratic will in the Kurdish
municipalities but also on culture. For example, the first official act
of the forced administrators was to remove the Kurdish inscription
plaques hung on the town halls. They changed the Kurdish names of parks,
streets and avenues. For example, a memorial to the victims of the
Roboskî massacre, the Tahir Elçi Park named after the human rights
lawyer who was shot, as well as the names of the Kurdish poet Ehmedê
Xanî and Uğur Kaymaz, the young man executed by Turkish security forces
with 13 bullets, all disappeared from the streets of Amed. In this way,
the state tries to erase the social memory of its massacres and the
values of the Kurdish population.
Instead
of the monuments of the murdered people, monuments for killed soldiers
and policemen were erected. This was accompanied by a wave of closures
of women’s centres and community centres. Kurdish schools were
transformed into police bases. Multilingual theatre schools and dozens
of theatres, art and cultural centres were closed or all employees were
fired so that the centres are de facto inoperative. Religious schools or
Koran courses are now being established in many of the closed art and
culture centres.
Besides
this cultural level, the attacks also have an economic dimension. The
forced administrators have manoeuvred the local authorities into a debt
swamp. Moreover, historical-cultural assets are also the target of this
policy. The flooding of the 12,000-year-old city of Hasankeyf (Kurdish:
Heskîf), which is one of the most magnificent cultural and natural
treasures on our planet, is a symbol of this. Kurdish cities were also
targeted by destruction in recent years. The greatest physical
destruction of the historic old town of Sûr in Amed took place after the
end of all armed conflicts from March 2016 onwards. Since then, the
houses of 25,000 forcibly displaced people have been completely
demolished. About 175,000 people in other destroyed places such as Cizîr
(Cizre), Nisebîn (Nusaybin) and Şirnex (Şirnak) experienced the same.
In these places and in Sûr, several hundred civilians were deliberately
killed.
These
are only a few examples of the Turkish state policy, which is called
the policy of cultural genocide on the Kurdish side, according to the
motto: “The best Kurd is a dead Kurd”. The anti-Kurdish policy practised
today by the AKP government even outshines the policy of the years of
the military dictatorship and the dirty war of the Turkish government in
the 1990s. While in the 1980s and 1990s the state had Kurds who stood
up for their identity first kidnapped by paramilitaries, policemen or
soldiers, then killed and then thrown into mass graves or onto
roadsides, today the state murders publicly, without cover, before the
eyes of the world public. As if the killing of Kurds was completely
legitimate and right.
By
posting the mortal remains of killed PKK fighters, the aim is to
increase the effect of the state brutality and to maximise the pain and
anger of the relatives and Kurdish society. A collective feeling of
helplessness is to be created. The aim is to extremely traumatise the
relatives and thus force them to surrender by breaking their will to
resist and their fighting morale.
Despite
the multidimensional state terror, Kurdish society has been resisting
ceaselessly for decades. This resistance continues despite all the
massacres that have been committed, because Kurdish society does not
surrender to its pain. It knows how to turn pain and anger into a source
of resistance. If she surrendered to her pain, she would not be able to
live on. And so in Kurdistan – in the words of Mazlum Doğan –
“resistance becomes life”. The Kurdish resistance draws strength from
pain and life from death. That the Kurdish people are forced to draw
life from death and defend the right to live is terrible and awful. That
a society must die so much in order to live is unimaginable. But this
is reality in Kurdistan. And it is a shame for those who watch it. The
only way to lift this shame and stop the killing in Kurdistan is to
actively defend the right to life. And life is not just about survival.
It means being able to live a life worth living. The resistance in
Kurdistan is exactly that.
[1] Arno Gruen: The Madness of Normality
[2] https://anfdeutsch.com/hintergrund/rojava-wie-verteidigen-12967
[3] http://www.saradistribution.com/mazlum_dogan_savunma.htm
[4] http://www.saradistribution.com/hayri_durmus_savunma.htm
5] Translated from http://www.serxwebun.org/arsiv/385/files/assets/common/downloads/publication.pdf
6]
The book was published in Turkish in 2011. It was written by Öcalan on
the prison island Imrali. The title is roughly translated to: The
Kurdish Question and the Solution of the Democratic Nation. An English
translation is not yet available.
*Ali Çiçek is an employee of Civaka Azad – Kurdish Centre for Public Relations
