WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR OPPRESSORS ARE NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBORS?
By Kani Xulam
Kurdish Media, UK
Oct 4 2006
A story out of Kurdistan: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore,
Maryland, September 30, 2006 (Slightly altered versions of this
statement were also delivered at the World Affairs Councils in Santa
Rosa, Anchorage and Juneau)
I live in Washington, DC. Like most of its residents, I take the
preoccupation of my city seriously, which means follow its politics
closely. Now, Washington isn’t what it used to be, when, say,
Mr. Roosevelt first arrived at the White House as the first citizen
of the republic. Then, isolationism was the policy of choice; today,
such a course is not within the realm of possibility. For better or
worse, with the end of the Cold War, the refuge of beginning with the
religiously persecuted in Europe, later politically or economically
disenfranchised all over the globe, the place the school children
learn to call "the land of the free and the home of the brave" has,
whether one likes it or not, become the most important country in
the whole world with potential to do good as well as ill never before
seen or heard in the history of humanity. One hundred years from now,
what will the judgment of historians be about this new development?
Will they say, Washington used its awesome power for good, regulated
liberty with order, sought peace with justice, and bridged the
gap between its expressed ideals and its actual policy, or blew it
all away, squandered it badly and proved to be the proverbial bull
in the china shop that made the world an unsafe place for all its
inhabitants? An optimist by nature, I am not so sure if those who
speak on your behalf have what it takes to be the role models for our
tortured world. This evening, I want to take you to a place called
Kurdistan and show you a page out of its history. Perhaps it can offer
you a clue as to where you stand. I will be content if it helps you
conduct a better foreign policy; I will be the happiest ever if it
makes you a friend of my people’s everlasting struggle for liberty.
But first let me start with your capital. In the city on the Potomac,
the newspaper of note is the Washington Post. It measures the pulse
of the city as well as of the country and some days doesn’t even shy
away from doing the same for humanity and its turbulent journey on
our common home, the earth. I read it religiously. Have done so for
the past 13 years. Because my lapses have been few and far between,
I have a very good feel for my morning companion. I am, for example,
no longer startled by its opinion and editorial pages. It is liberal on
some issues and conservative on others. It was pro-Israel in the recent
war between Hezbollah and the Jewish state; it is pro-Chechen when
the recalcitrant nation thumbs its nose at Moscow. Darfur, thank God,
has never been without coverage in its pages. The Kurds, my people,
have had a checkered history with the Post. Some five million us,
who live in an artificial construct called the state of Iraq, have
received an okay coverage. Close to twenty million of us who live in
a dysfunctional one called Turkey have not been as fortunate.
I am a Kurd from Turkish occupied Kurdistan. I don’t have a good
relationship with my Post. Because it is an important newspaper,
because you are a critical audience, I thought perhaps I should
relate to you my dissatisfaction with it through a story about the
Kurds. It goes without saying that I would very much appreciate your
feedback. If it is negative, I will be wiser for it; if it is positive,
I will tell my supporters to take heart, their investment in me is,
to use a business term, paying healthy dividends.
I want to begin with an example of what I think is too frequently
taking place on the pages of the Post. On the last Sunday of last
month, its Outlook section printed an article, "A Father’s Ode to His
Lost Son", by David Grossman, an Israeli novelist and peace activist.
Not accustomed to reading a funeral oration in its pages, and this one
about an Israeli soldier killed in Lebanon, I found myself teary-eyed
and also puzzled. I was, to be sure, happy to see such heartfelt
prose greet me in the morning. It was better than reading the story
of a group of heartless Shiites who had murdered 14 hapless Sunnis
in Baghdad just because it was their misfortune to have Omar as their
first names. His 2000 or so words were carefully chosen, appropriately
placed, beautifully arrayed, and interspersed with more than a few
anecdotal tidbits that could only come from a close relationship of a
father with his son. After reading the piece, I felt like thanking him
for making me privy to his shattered world. I did so in spirit. But
thanking the Post never crossed my mind. To the contrary, I thought
the Post was failing its readers when it was honoring the dead of the
Jewish state, but neglecting the unseen, the obscene and the grotesque
stories of other lands. A paper aspiring to be the voice of humanity
must, even if only on occasion, make room for the dead of, why not,
Kurdistan as well. Am I wrong to assume so?
Is it not right for an American newspaper to use the principal of
proportionality in its coverage? If the Post can’t do it, who could?
Would the New York Times consider the honor?
Assuming that there might indeed be one paper out there, that might
actually want to print a Kurdish ode to a fallen Kurdish woman
or man, I took to my keyboard to compose one, just in case. It
took me several days. If you don’t mind, I would like to read it
to you. Mine is a bit longer, about 2500 words. Like Mr. Grossman,
I am a peace activist. Unlike him, and this one is an important one,
I am no novelist. There is, in other words, a small chance you will
not be disappointed with my musings. But if you are, please don’t blame
Professor Croatti, my kind host, who has absolutely nothing to do with
my failings. The children of enslaved nations are unequal, often,
to the challenges facing their peoples. "Fear", Cicero once noted,
"is of all emotions the most debilitating." Your own history provides
ample examples of it. It wasn’t Uncle Tom of Harriet Beecher Stowe
who freed the slaves; it was honest Abe. According to John Adams,
your second president, General Washington won the revolutionary
struggle not with flying colors, but through a war of attrition
that came very close to being lost to the Brits. Across the ocean,
in Europe, Poland owes its liberation to the blood of Red Army in
spite of reeling under its virtual domination for the next fifty
years. Had Allies won the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915, the greater
Kurdistan would have been a colony of Russia, and I won’t be the
first nor the last Kurd to remind this audience or our neighbors,
the Turks, the Arabs and the Persians, that such a turn of events
in history might have resulted in our freedom as well, just like it
happened with the Georgians, Armenians and Azeris in 1991.
But as fate would have it Kurdistan became the spoil of war for
the newly minted tyrannies of the Middle East: Turkey, Iran, Iraq
and Syria. It was like entrusting an orphan to four habitual child
molesters. None knew of their obligations to a subject people under
the laws of nations. All adopted policies to do away with the Kurds and
Kurdistan, once and for all. That is why many surviving Kurds, today,
are the most vociferous supporters of President Bush’s Iraq policy,
not because we want America to have colonial possessions in the Middle
East, but because the American domination, barring Kurdish freedom,
is more palatable to us than what has been our lot for the last 85
years. But there is more to this intervention than the demise of a
single tyrant who was once known as the Butcher of Baghdad. The Middle
East that was conceived in Europe is, thank God, being dismantled
one brick at a time and gravitating towards its natural parts along
linguistic and some even may say confessional lines. A couple of
things are crystal clear at least to this activist. Sleep has left
the bedrooms of local dictators and their bloodthirsty thugs; hope has
become the predominant sentiment among the disenfranchised populations,
such as the Kurds. The challenge facing my people is not the enmity
of our neighbors, that is a given, no one needs to lecture us on it,
but your own faith in democracy and whether it will have a closed
or open auction for the equivalent of 30 silver coins. As Kurds as
well as democrats of the region, we are not waiting for our friends
in the West to make up their minds or provide us with cues. We are
plodding onward to change the face of the Middle East because it is
our home and because we are the children of those who once sparked
a civilization and gave directions to the world.
Now is perhaps the best time to tell you about my own ode to a
fallen Kurd. It is about a young man who was found dead under a pile
of burning books in a place called Shemzinan, in Turkish occupied
Kurdistan. No one has been able to determine the exact time of his
death, but the day, November 11, 2005, when written in Turkish,
reads 9/11/2005, the Turks put the day before the month, and makes
an eerie comparison to what happened here five years and nineteen
days ago today. Then nineteen angry and ignorant men assaulted and
insulted a happy go lucky nation on its shores. Then thousands of your
loved ones died, some vaporized in the inferno of burning jet fuel,
some buried beneath the rubble. In the attack on Kurdistan, we know
of one turncoat Kurd who was used, the Turks are too "civilized"
to bloody their own hands, to murder the subject of my talk. In
the attack on Kurdistan, in addition to the murdered young Kurd,
hundreds of books were burned; a few were the works of Dickens,
Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Freud and Steinbeck. I don’t know about you but
the juxtaposition of these two events, even if you just consider their
identical yet discordant dates, has brought to my mind the mournful and
immortal line of the German writer, Heinrich Heine, who once noted,
"Where they burn books, they will burn humans." For the life of me,
I cannot tell the difference between the mindsets that were behind
both events. Can you? And yet one, Al-Qaeda, is hunted the world
over, while the other, the government of Turkey, the evil system that
feels entitled to condemn an entire people to perpetual subjugation,
is hailed as a respectable member of the international community. Is
this what Goethe had in mind when he said, "Nothing is as frightening
as ignorance in action"?
The time has come for me to read you my funeral oration. As is often
the case in situations like this one, I ask for your indulgence.
Dearest Zahir,
I am paying my respects to you at Shaffer Hall on the campus of Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. It is against the law to
do so where you were born and met a violent end. 326 days separate
us from the moment of your death. I will start with those dearest
to you, your daughter — your darling, your son and the mother of
your children. All are fine. I will not say they have gotten used
to your absence; they have not. I will say this though your children
are at school, and given the circumstances, are doing as good as they
are able to. They are, to quote an expression popular with Aussies,
keeping their "chins-up", and are missing you just the same. Oh,
one other thing, since no one has come back to earth from heaven to
report, in case there is no concept of time there, your girl, your
Fatima, is eight now. She is in second grade. Your boy is seven and
started school this month.
I don’t know whether God has told you of the events surrounding your
death in Shemzinan. He seems to develop blind spots for certain peoples
from time to time. The Kurds of Kurdistan feel that way, as did the
Jews of Europe in the 1940s and the Armenians of Ottoman Empire in
the 1910s. I guess, all I am trying to say is that, there are a lot of
disappointed and angry believers down here. I know there is something
called Judgment Day, both the Bible and the Koran attest to it, and
you will get your redress for the attack on your life. But today,
I am with the students of Professor Croatti who have kindly accepted
my request to let me share with them your story and its aftermath as
an example of what it means to be a Kurd in these cruelest of cruel
times in the life of Kurdistan.
Because I know you are watching us from your room in heaven, I also
want to tell you a little bit about my audience. When Thucydides said,
"We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as
a harmless character; but as a useless one", he was referring to the
Athenians of his day who took to the affairs of the city-state the
way a duck takes to water. Today, he would have said the same thing
for this audience. They are the flower of this nation, the key to its
hopeful future, and most importantly for the Kurds and Kurdistan,
interested in not only expanding freedom and liberty at home, and
please pay close attention to me here, but also abroad.
Yes, Zahir, I used to say, Americans worship freedom at home and
money abroad. Not anymore. Do you really want me to tickle you with
some good news about the Kurds in America? The presidential hopeful,
Joseph Biden, openly says he is for the Kurdish freedom and in plain
English. I am praying for this Irish Catholic to become president.
Please, you do the same.
Coming back to your death, when freedom came under a merciless attack
on 9/11/2005, and I am using the Turkish way of reading the calendar
here, you were not its intended target. Seferi Yilmaz, the owner of
the Hope Bookstore, and his subversive books were. Two officers of
the Turkish military together with a Kurdish turncoat, all working
undercover, had taken it upon themselves to assassinate him in the
midst of his books going up in flames for dramatic effect. These
"romantic" killers were so sure of themselves that they had come to the
scene of crime in their own civilian car, with their own identification
cards, and you will not believe this, 361 bullets in their trunk
together with three Kalashnikovs and several lists with names of
Kurds and places too, one of them a mosque, all marked with bright
red markers, to be murdered or blown up from the face of Kurdistan!
But as "luck" would have it, fortune did not fully cooperate with
them this time. I am dying to know whether God had a role in it. Can
you please ask him when you get a chance? Although these murderers
had done their homework well, mishaps haunted them from the very
beginning. They had intended to go for the kill between the hours
of 11:00 am and 11:30 am, a quiet time in the business district,
since it coincided with the daily prayer time of the some of the
mosque-going Kurds. Mr. Yilmaz, these assassins had discovered, was not
a regular in the house of prayer and thought, correctly it turns out,
would be waiting in his shop like a sitting duck. With his death,
the authorities later revealed, they would have accomplished their
15th deed in 118 days in three neighboring districts. Who knows, their
higher ups might have then considered them for some promotions perhaps!
That morning you woke up like any other day, according to your wife.
You were in good health and only 29. Your day job was driving a taxi
and when the business was down, you visited the only bookstore in town
to fortify your mind. When I related this story to an American friend
of mine once, he was curious to know if the bookstore had a Starbucks
in it and, as you know, it didn’t. But there was something better than
the Starbucks in that store. That was the owner, Seferi Yilmaz, who had
spent fifteen years of his adult life in Turkish jails, from 23 to 38,
and seemed to know everything, and I underline the word everything,
about the books on his shelves. When you talked to him, I am just a
tad curious, did he ever bring up the stories of 420 inmates, mostly
Kurds, who were tortured to death in primarily Amed Military Prison
where he had been an inmate with some of the brightest and bravest
Kurdish activists? Like them, you had a painful end, but were clueless
that the appointed hour was approaching fast.
When it came, you were at the Hope Bookstore. I can’t get over the
fact that you lost your life in a place named after hope. Seferi, the
shopkeeper, was preparing lunch; he was making an omelet of sorts,
cooking some tomatoes with eggs in the back. He had asked you to
partake in his repast, together with your cousin, Metin Korkmaz,
who was visiting from the village of Altinsu, a Turkish name, since
the Kurdish names for villages, towns, cities, mountains, rivers and
valleys have been prohibited by law. Imagine Americans changing the
name of Baghdad, Iraq, to Crawford, America! The good folks around the
world would march in the streets, including thousands here in Baltimore
and many more in Ankara, and call it a scandalous act; and yet when
Kurdistan and its people go through a forced name-change in Turkey,
it is called "progress." If I were you, I would ask God if he still
considers his children bright! Back in the shop, as lunch was being
served, two hand grenades were thrown inside. Seferi was the first
to see them. Later, he told reporters that he had shouted, "Bombs",
"Run", and hurled himself head first out of the door.
You became history at that very moment. Your cousin saved himself with
the help of the dining table, which he had the presence of mind to
turn it into a shield. Seferi, the shopkeeper, once outside, noticed
a man running away from his shop. He followed suit. He also called
on his neighbors to do the same. They were too happy to oblige. In
97 days, their town of 14,000 had been bombed six times.
In addition to destroyed property, both Turks and Kurds had been
killed. No one had claimed responsibility for these deadly attacks.
Some dimwitted Turks up until then had blamed the Mosad, the Israeli
Intelligence Agency. Some terrorized Kurds were equally perplexed
thinking that it might even be the work of Al-Qaeda. But the killers,
the undercover agents of the Turkish military, were enjoying this
greatest spectacle of all spectacles and giving each other high-fives
for not only bewitching their sworn enemies, the Kurds, but also, the
Turks, their very flesh and blood, one of the most cursed peoples on
the face of the earth. But now a man was running away from the scene
of crime, and if caught, might shed some light on the mysterious bombs
that had been rocking not only Shemzinan, but also two neighboring
towns since July 15, 2005.
You will be glad to know that your killer was indeed caught. He proved
to be the biggest catch of all times. It was like Americans catching
Osama Bin Laden. The fact that he turned out to be a Kurdish turncoat
shamed us all including our friends all over the globe. At the time
of the chase, he had run towards a civilian car parked on the main
street. The undercover Turkish officers were waiting for him. Had they
known what was afoot; they would have, I have no doubts in my mind,
just deserted him. He was after all an expendable item, a member of
one of the most despised professions. But as he reached the backseat
of the parked vehicle, the Kurdish crowd surrounded it from all
sides. A heated argument ensued. When the word got out that you had
not survived the attack, the multitude began pelting the parked car
with rocks, kicks as well as sticks. One of the Turkish officers,
Ali Kaya, told them that he was an undercover police officer. He
even managed to get into the trunk of his car and grabbing one of
the Kalashnikovs aimed at the assembled crowd.
Now here I need to take a break, yes, a break, and dwell on the
mentality behind a so-called police officer’s decision to protect the
killer and threaten its victims. If you think this is unthinkable
in a country that goes by the name of a democracy, wait till you
hear the accolades he got from Yasar Buyukanit, the highest ranking
Turkish military officer, the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, who,
when questioned about the blatant attack that involved his officers,
chided the reporters by saying, "I know Ali Kaya. He was my soldier.
He wouldn’t do such thing." It turns out he had. But Ferhat Sarikaya,
the Turkish prosecutor, who indicted him, was dismissed from his job.
Sabri Uzun, the head of Turkish Security and Intelligence Office, got
axed as well. He had told an investigating committee of the Turkish
parliament, "When the thief is inside the house, the lock has no use."
Mr. Uzun, to his credit, had correctly diagnosed the nature of the
crisis facing Turkey, but not its extent. It is not just one thief
that is inside the house, the place is "a den of robbers" to borrow
a colorful expressions from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 11, verse 17.
The bandits, for now, proudly go by the name of Turkish military and
run not just Turkey, but more than half of Kurdistan as well, and here
is the saddest part of my work, with the enthusiastic blessings of
the international community. Now most of the states in the world have
armies that take their orders from the elected civilians. In Turkey,
it is the other way around; the army has a state and its politicians
are its gofers. All this, unfortunately, goes to the beginning of the
Turkish experiment in state building in 1920s. It was its greatest
misfortune to be saddled not with a caring-man or a wise one, but a
monster that delighted in calling himself the father of all Turks,
Ataturk, and played with the Kurds the way a mean-spirited child
plays with his toys. When Euripides said, "Do not mistake for wisdom
the fantasies of your sick mind," I have no doubts that he had his
likes in mind.
Now if you want me to expand on this evil man’s handiwork, or of those
of his cohorts, who are now running the county as his carbon copies,
suffice it to say that it was him who said all Kurds are Turks and thus
sowed the seeds of hatred between these two unhappy peoples. Never in
the history of humanity has a fraud so big, a pretension so atrocious,
a theory so inimical to human nature, and a crime so grotesque ever
been conceived by even the greatest ignoramuses in the world. His
name will forever be remembered as a proverb of infamy, depravity,
immorality and outright stupidity. Just as by ordering a cow to be a
horse will never make the bovine a pony, so will no amount of force
or stratagem turn the Kurd into a Turk!
This inanity was what swept you away on 9/11; and it is what we must
fight now so that at least your children will be safe when they are
grown ups.
The time has come for me to put an end to this still blood-dripping
tale and say goodbye to you. I was going to part with some good news,
but there is also the bad kind. Because this is a solemn occasion,
and because these students deserve unequivocal truth, I have to tell
them, and it is with the heaviest of heavy hearts, of the latest
between Turkey and the United States. On July 5, 2006, not even nine
months after your death, the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
the Foreign Minister of Turkey Abdullah Gul signed a "Shared Vision"
statement. It had the following choice words in its preamble: "The
relationship between Turkey and the United States is characterized
by strong bonds of friendship, alliance, mutual trust and unity of
vision. We share the same set of values and ideals in our regional
and global objectives: the promotion of peace, democracy, freedom,
and prosperity."
Regrettably, I am at a loss as how to interpret this document. It is
above my pay grade as the expression goes. What falls within it though
is to finish telling you what took place at the scene of standoff on
the main street in Shemzinan. It was initially resolved.
The Turkish officers and their Kurdish assassin were arrested. The
assembled crowd was asked to disperse. But word got out that only
your killer was imprisoned while his Turkish conspirators were
set free. It was then that a fight broke out, extending into days,
spreading to several cities both in Kurdish east and Turkish west,
between the Kurds and anything that had the word Turk in it. In the
city of your birth, the statue of Ataturk was one of the first items
to go with its head being decapitated. A few of the Turkish flags were
lowered and burned. I was in Washington, DC then and all I could think
of was the Yankee tribute to liberty in New York City, in 1776, and
how it too had resulted in the beheading of another tyrant’s statue,
this time, King George the Third.
The Kurds, I avidly read in the reports, had thrown the severed head
of Ataturk on a dumpster. The New Yorkers of 230 years ago were much
more imaginative; they had placed theirs on a stick and positioned
it by the entrance of a bar in lower Manhattan to lure in more
customers. It is, of course, with a profound sense of sadness that I,
an admirer of American Revolution, have to tell these students, the
children of Jefferson, including Dr. Rice, that they have lost their
revolutionary fervor and cannot even tell a tyrant from a freedom
fighter. The torch of freedom has definitely changed hands. We are
now vying for it, dying for it, taking up humanity’s thankless task
to lighten up the Middle East, to free the Kurds, and to proclaim to
the world Victor Hugo’s undying observation, "Nothing is more powerful
than an idea whose time has come."