SOCIETY FOR THREATENED PEOPLES APPEAL
SOCIETY FOR THREATENED PEOPLES APPEAL to the Frankfurt Book Fair 2008 Frankfurt /
Göttingen, 17th October 2008 After the attacks of Turkish chauvinists on the third largest language group of the Near East the GfbV appeals to the Book Fair Make Kurdistan, the country with 40 million Kurdish speakers, and its writers the Guest of Honour in 2011! Turkish nationalist groups are continuing on German soil the merciless suppression and persecution of the Kurdish language, literature, institutions, societies and democratic parties which have been practised since 1919. Following the call of the Turkish TV station Ulusal TV the three Kurdish stands at the Frankfurt Book Fair were attacked, the staff were insulted and threatened. One of the stands was partially destroyed. Unfortunately the police arrived too late. The General Secretary of the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV), Tilman Zülch, appealed to the Book Fair after China (2009) and Argentina (2010) to make Kurdistan in the year 2011 the Guest of Honour of the Book Fair. This would mean an honour and recognition for Kurdish literature, which is not only interesting but growing rapidly. The GfbV has published many books and documentaries on the Kurdish question. “We cannot understand that the Kurdish language, which is after Arabic and Turkish the third largest language of the Near East, is to be discriminated”, said Zülch. Millions of children in Turkey are against the wishes of their parents taught at school only in Turkish. While in Catalonia and in the Basque country, in South Tyrol, in Wales, in North and South Schleswig and many other parts of Europe children are taught in the regional languages, but in Turkey the mere mention of the terms “Kurdistan”, the “Kurds” and “Kurdish” means persecution. This permanent witch-hunt leads to such extremes as the confiscation of the Karl May book “Durchs wilde Kurdistan” (Through wild Kurdistan) or the constant proceedings taken against the Turkish sociologist and writer of many books on the Kurds, Ismali Besikci, who was released in 1999 after nearly 17 years in prison. Hundreds of Kurdish writers have been sentenced in Turkey or have been charged because they wrote about their own stories, their culture or language. Following the setting up of the autonomous federal state of Kurdistan in North Iraq Kurdish has become the official language for about five million people. The result has been a blossoming out of Kurdish literature. At the same time comprehensive lexica, school-books and scientific publications have been published in Kurdish. Some GfbV books published by the GfbV on the Kurdish problem:Völkermord an den Kurden, Luchterhand, Hamburg / Zürich 1991, HG T. Zülch Kurdistan und die Kurden, Reihe Pogrom, drei Bände - 1988 ff., HG Ismet Chérif Vanly Für Menschenrechte. Weltweit. Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker / Society for Threatened PeoplesP.O. Box 20 24 - D-37010 Göttingen/GermanyNahostreferat/ Middle East Desk Dr. Kamal Sido - Tel: +49 (0) 551 49906-18 - Fax: +49 (0) 551 58028E-Mail: nahost@gfbv.de - www.gfbv.de
A question remains unanswered...
Ayse Karabat
A question remains unanswered…
Communicating with these two mothers was difficult because they spoke broken Turkish and I knew no Kurdish. I had the opportunity to meet them last weekend while in Diyarbakır to cover a 48-hour sit-in accompanied by dancing and organized by the Democratic Society Party (DTP) as a protest of the government. I stood at the entrance to a tent and began to remove my shoes before entering. The tent was the scene of the sit-in, but since protesting by sitting sounded weird to everyone here, most used the opportunity as a social occasion at which they could see their friends and talk about politics. Now and then those present would shout out slogans and dance.
While trying to untie my shoes, the long shoelaces proved to be a problem and one of the women in the tent helped me out before I could even ask for help. She then took my shoes, put them together and very neatly placed them at the end of the carpet laid out in the tent. She held my arm and helped me get into the tent, all the while smiling with her cloudy eyes. All these gestures told me one thing: She is an experienced and compassionate mother.
We started chatting, and one of her friends joined us. Whenever we had trouble understanding one another, those around us helped out. In Turkey, if you start a conversation with someone you do not know, before asking for their name, we usually ask where they are from. I did the same. She told me the name of a village I had never heard of before. She then told me the village's Turkish name, but seeing that I was still clueless, she said, "It's better that you know its Kurdish name, anyway."
When our conversation became more serious, I learned more about who she was and why she had come to the tent that day. Her village was evacuated and her family moved to Diyarbakır. One of her daughters studied accounting and worked somewhere, but was then arrested and jailed for a year. While in jail, she was tortured, her mother said. When she got out, she told her mother that she would go to Europe. Although her mother opposed this, she promised that upon establishing a new life for herself, she would bring her mother to Europe, too. To help, her mother gave her a gold bracelet to defray the costs of the passport. A week later the bracelet returned to her; her daughter did not go to Europe. Instead, she joined the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
This was eight years ago. Her daughter sometimes called her, but she hasn't heard from her in six years -- at least this is what she told me. "But I feel my daughter is alive and safe," she said.
Her friend's story is similar. One of her son's high school teachers was a brutal "national security" teacher, an army officer. According to this mother, the teacher regularly humiliated the Kurds and one day her son spoke up. That same night, the police took him into custody and beat him up. When he was released, he came home and could not move for a couple of days. He then asked his mom to wash his head and prepare some clean clothes. "Right then and there I knew what he was going to do. I begged him not to go, but he didn't listen," she said.
Since then she has only been able to see her son twice. It has been eight years since she heard from him last. "I watch Roj TV [a Denmark-based TV station affiliated with the PKK] every day when they show the PKK fighters and hope I might catch a glimpse of him," she said.
When our conversation turned even more serious, I realized that these two women go everywhere together -- including to the place where dead PKK members are brought for identification after clashes. They tried to explain to me how difficult it is to do so, but could not find the words to define how they feel when they look at the faces of those young people. They are sad to see the young die, but relieved to see that they are not their children.
One of the women turned to me and said: "I, too, watch the funerals of the soldiers. Their mothers say they will not cry so that the enemies will not be happy. My daughter is not a monster and I am no monster. I feel the soldiers' pain, too. But why do those mothers say this?"
While trying to find a proper answer, another woman approached us. She said something in Kurdish to the women I was speaking with. Then the women started telling me they wanted a "democratic republic." I asked them what they meant by this. They paused for a second and then began mumble about peace and cultural rights. The third lady intervened once more and began repeating memorized lines of propaganda, an endless speech I hear every day from the parties involved in the conflict. The content may be different, but the aim is the same: to turn the pain of mothers into political nonsense.
The time came for me to leave, and the woman I first spoke with put my shoes in front of me and gave me a very big hug, as she would have done for her own daughter.
As I walked away, a question lingered in the air: What would the real feelings of all the mothers who lost children to this conflict be if they were free of propaganda? What would they tell each other? Surely it would not be tainted with hatred…
Source: Sunday's Zaman09.11.2008
