19 Kasım 2015 Perşembe

Kurds caught at crossfire

Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Kurdish people dispersed between Iraq, Syria and Turkey (divided into four parts together with those in Iran) and experienced various pressures and difficulties. Saddam in Iraq and al-Assad in Syria, or Ba’athist regimes in other words, implemented repressive policies aimed at eliminating the Kurds. Saddam inflicted mass killings by the use of chemical weapons, while al-Assad refused to grant the Kurds their rights and freedoms, refused to give them identity documents and regarded them as non-people. In Turkey, meanwhile, at times when the deep state mindset was ascendant, Alawites, devout believers and conservatives as well as our Kurdish citizens were all harshly repressed.
The 1990s were one of the most difficult periods for the Southeast of Turkey, when the PKK terror organization threatened and oppressed our Kurdish brothers. Everyone also knows that this was a time when the deep state apparatus replaced the official state authority in the Southeast and inflicted terror through practices that were never put down on paper. This was a time when even tribes fighting against the PKK came under suspicion, when village guards appointed by the state were suspected of being PKK agents and tortured many times by deep state officials, and when people with brothers, sons or daughters up in the mountains were persecuted, even though they were themselves opposed to the PKK.

Left: 1988 The Halabja Massacre












The Kurdish people have suffered gravely in the region for years. While Saddam was slaughtering the innocent Kurdish people with chemical weapons in Halabja, al-Assad in Syria was oppressing the Kurds that were not given even a birth certificate through brutal coercion.
This was a time when even the families of the village guards who were constantly harassed by the PKK, being targets of PKK bullets, were also being targeted by the deep state apparatus although they were risking their lives for the country and for God’s sake. Some of the many Kurdish citizens who were taken from their homes without due process were never heard of again, while others underwent horrendous interrogations for days on end. This was a time when brother shot brother, when countless unsolved killings took place and when Turkey suffered billions of dollars’-worth of material losses.
Illegal organizations set up by deep state services by making illicit use of state powers, engaged in constant oppression and mistreatment of the people of the region. These gangs that wormed their way into the body of the state literally behaved like the state itself, but they used the authority of that state for their own interests and engaged in all kinds of illegal activities in the region. So much so that, according to village guards of the time, it was these individuals and organizations that inflicted the worst damage on the fight against terror. In one sense it was the activities of these organizations that made it impossible to put an end to terror.

Bedran Akdağ, Dağın Ardındaki Gerçekler (The Facts behind the Mountains), Ozan Yayıncılık, 2012, p. 35

From the past to the present, Turkey has embraced our Kurdish
brothers, who were forced to flee from their countries, with great
honor and love.
On the left: A Kurdish child who fled from the
tyranny of Saddam in 1991 and took refuge in Çukurca refugee
camp in Turkey.
On the right: Today, a Kurdish child who fled
from Syria and took refuge in Turkey.
There was no state presence in the Southeast of Turkey at that time. The innocent Kurdish people were caught between a rock and a hard place. There was no institution to which they could complain of the mistreatment and injustices they suffered. Those seeking redress were faced with threats and maltreatment. Public offices had become places of bribery and corruption under the auspices of the deep state apparatus. Yet people had nowhere to complain even about that. The freedom of the media was tightly circumscribed under pressure from the deep state apparatus in question, as a result of which the murders, unsolved killings, illegitimate detentions, persecution and other problems in the region all remained hidden.
Deep state organizations then began raiding villages in the region under various pretexts. Inhabitants of villages would be gathered in the main square, threatened, and often taken away for no reason. The same villages would also be raided by PKK militants at night, suffering another sort of persecution at the hands of PKK. The ruthless members of the PKK would spread the organization’s propaganda, collect money through intimidation and execute people they regarded as spies or agents. The state was not there for our devout Kurdish people at the very time when they needed it the most, when they were subjected to the worst injustices.
The Ergenekon terror organization was capable of declaring a state of emergency in whichever region it chose by keeping Turkey a place where turmoil could break out at any moment. Villages were evacuated and burned by the Ergenekon terror organization under the pretext of the war against terror, and hundreds of thousands of our Kurdish citizens were forced to leave their places of residence. The fact that Kurds were forced to live under primitive conditions in cities such as Mersin, Adana, Ankara and Istanbul, to which they migrated, was also a ready tool for PKK propaganda and played a significant role in the PKK organizing itself in the cities.
Several Kurdish intellectuals or opinion leaders were illegally detained or assassinated. It is a known fact that the majority of these incidents were organized in collaboration between Ergenekon and the PKK.
While the deep state apparatus was deliberately neglecting the region it was the PKK that appeared under the guise of a savior of the people offering work and other opportunities. The region had deliberately been left in a backward socioeconomic state, and its people had knowingly been abandoned to poverty, wretchedness and ignorance. As a result, the people of the region were deceived by “black propaganda” using the limited means of communication available and the state was literally portrayed as “a fascist power that wants to annihilate the Kurdish people”.

Ibid., p. 36
Ibid., p. 37

Innocent Kurdish mothers, fathers, and outstandingly beautiful
Kurdish children never deserved any of the oppression or tyranny
they have faced throughout history. We are aware of the difficulties
that our brothers are living through in this period. But now time has
come for recovery. Rather than bearing the anger of the past, our
Kurdish brothers should collaborate with the ones that
ask for brotherliness.
Right from the very outset the objective of the Ergenekon terror organization has been to break Turkey up, split our beloved Kurdish brothers away from us and establish a communist Kurdistan separate from Turkey. It therefore sought to alienate the Kurdish people by pressuring them, and it expected that they would demand to break away from Turkey because of that pressure. However, this sinister deep state apparatus underestimated the Kurdish people’s faithful character and loyalty to the country and the nation. Even when they were being most neglected by their own state - under the influence of the deep state apparatus - these fine people never lost their belief in that state and never even considered breaking away from it. The Ergenekon terror organization’s intended plans for the Kurdish people thus ended in failure, and it suffered a grave defeat it had never envisaged.
Our Kurdish brothers need to know that we are not unaware of what was going on in the Southeast at that time. We are well aware that our Kurdish brothers were exposed to severe pressures, subjected to extraordinary injustices, unjustly lost members of their families, and had to deal with the triggermen of the deep state at the same time as struggling with the sinister scourge of the PKK. We are also aware of the poverty to which they were subjected, of the pressures within their families and tribes and of the sufferings caused by the feudal system. We are cognizant of the efforts to eradicate the Kurdish language and that a fierce war was waged against Kurdish culture and traditions. In proposing solutions for our Kurdish brothers and speaking out against the PKK, we are acting in the full knowledge of all these truths.
We are similarly aware that it was the injustices they suffered more than communist propaganda that influenced young people’s decisions to join the PKK, and that after heading up into the mountains some of these young people were never able to return because of pressure. Many young people say that they only subsequently realized that the terror organization is Stalinist, communist and atheist. We are also fully aware that there are some young Kurds living in the Southeast and various other parts of the country who harbor a great anger and resentment against the state and Turkishness because of the way they or their parents were maltreated by the illegal bodies of the deep state apparatus. Unlike some people, we have not closed our eyes or disregarded all this. Our Kurdish brothers must not forget this very important point – our aim here is to find a solution to all these problems.

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