In the Gazi neighbourhood during the funeral of three of the people who died in Suruc. Several HDP party members and politicians hold the banner with the portraits: Figen Yuksekdag, to her right Sebahat Tuncel, to her left Ertugrul Kurkcu, and on the far left, Pervin Buldan. Photographer: Ulas Yunus Tosun.
It has been not much
more than a couple of weeks since 31 young activists were killed in a suicide
bombing in Suruç on the border between Syria and Turkey. On July 20 2015,
around noon, our social media was suddenly flooded with uncensored images of
torn bodies. It took some time for friends and families to identify those who
had died and those who had survived.
In such recurrent
moments of trauma in Turkey, it has become habitual to share photographs and
information about the lives, the dreams, and the ambitions of the lost
ones. Those who died and those who survived had in common a belief in the
radical democratic autonomous movement in Kobane and it was a joyful sense of
human solidarity.
The inhabitants of
Suruç already know how to deal with emergency situations. Over the past
year, they have seen waves of men, women and children flooding through their
small city. They have seen the building of three refugee camps filled with
people waiting to go home, young and old Kurdish and Arab Syrians waiting
behind barbed wires at the border after having walked through arid lands for
days, fleeing for their lives.
Then there are the
visitors – the Italian, Dutch, French,Turkish, Kurdish, American activists and
journalists interested in the radical political project which is the making of
Rojava; and the jihadist as well as anarchist fighters on their way to fight
and possibly die for their cause, whether it is the consolidation of an Islamic
State or the creation of autonomous democratic zones.
On July 20, the people
of Suruç opened their houses to the wounded and drove them to nearby hospitals
in their cars as ambulances were slow to come. Being scrutinized closely by the
local Turkish police forces for no comprehensible reason did not stop them from
helping their fellow human beings.
The 300 people who had
set out on a journey to create a park, set up a theatre, and help with the
reconstruction of Kobane were searched many times on their way to Suruç. The
man who killed and wounded them were never searched. As in other numerous
deadly attacks in Turkey, there is still no attempt to track down
responsibility, complicity, or negligence on the part of the local and national
security forces.
This culture of
impunity is not new to Turkey. Right before the elections, the explosion
that took place during the Diyarbakir meeting of the HDP was only the most
recent of a long series of politically motivated crimes that remain unaccounted
for. Dead people became a convenient cause for the immediate illegitimate
military action. The victims suffered the attack while the perpetrators went
unremarked.
Violence in the region
is multi-faced. In the days before and after the attacks, forests and
mountains were set on fire in Kurdistan. Local people with no resources tried
to rescue animals and stop villages from burning down. The state helicopters
omnipresent in the region were nowhere to be
seen as the fires continue to rage. Once again, the Turkish state was
involved in destroying its own human and natural resources and failed to
protect its people, simply because it sees some of its citizens as threats and
targets.
In this
unbearably raw tiny stretch of time we have seen Turkish warplanes take off to
bomb obviously pre-determined locations that had no logical relation to the
suicide bombing. Meanwhile, since the Suruc massacre, more than a thousand
people have been arrested, and every day, we see more people arrested, wounded,
and found dead. Particular neighbourhoods have been subjected to heavy
military operations; all of them created as a result of the mass internal
migrations of the 1990’s, when Kurdish villages were burned and emptied of
their population by the Turkish state.
Today, as forests
continue to burn, we know that anyone might be beaten up or arrested at any
time and we are told that there are potential bombs that might kill more of us
as we go about our daily lives.
All this is no
surprise; since February 2015, the setting up of the Internal Security Law had
been paving the way to restrictions on the right to assemble and manifest
opposition, while extending the rights of the security forces to detain,
search, and harass the population. Just like it was in the case of the gag
law enforced in Spain in June 2015, civil society actors and lawyers have
written reports about the undemocratic aspects of the law, protests have been
held in the streets, and independent members of opposition in parliament –
mostly future HDP members – have occupied the assembly with their faces
covered, all trying to stop the disaster that we knew was coming.
War talk has invaded
our lives in the past fortnight. Suddenly we found ourselves closer to war
than to peace. The narrative of war came along with questionable quantitative
data about the AKP government’s alleged tracking and extradition of ISIS
members. The claim that the AKP now considers ISIS a terrorist organization
came as a surprise to many of us. It did not make much sense, since we had seen
photographs of Turkish military officials hanging around happily with ISIS
members on the border, and AKP representatives arguing that since there was no
discrimination in Turkey, wounded ISIS members had, as Turkish citizens, the
right to be treated in Turkish hospitals.
The journalists that
had unveiled information and photographs of trucks full of arms going from
Turkey to Syria were fired from their jobs and put on trial. While the military
power of Turkey has been set in motion without going through the procedures
laid down in the Constitution, the motives and actors of this war are still
unverified.
The killing of young
activists was condemned by AKP representatives in passing; but the focus on
self-defense and the mention of ISIS procured them a rapid international blessing.
Then, PKK strongholds were bombed and people were arrested all around the
country.
Yes, there is a missing
link. International relations experts will tell you that the aim is to create a
safe ‘buffer zone’ between Turkey and Syria, erasing once more all the Kurdish
people living in the border region. But what this truly exposes is a total lack
of interest in trying to stop a conflict that has been raging in Syria for
years.
Yes, there are many
other missing links, but after all, Tayyip Erdogan wants to be president, and
it is the success of the HDP in the June elections that has stopped him in his
tracks. The AKP and the President of the Republic, Tayyip Erdogan, are making
it clear that more people will be arrested and punished. Those who are directly
and openly targeted in public speeches are not ISIS members or whoever it is
who killed all those people in Suruc. The targets of their ire are civil
society actors, journalists, intellectuals, and members or supporters of the
HDP. The Turkish state has already started waging a war against its own people.
Peace walks are being
organized in many cities in Turkey. Security forces, silent and absent
during fires and attacks, were everywhere once this began. Men and women
were hurled aside on pavements, handcuffed, and kicked in the back and in the
face. In a new performative twist, 10 to15 heavily armed police officers
(along with non-matriculated civil police and their unidentified friends)
isolated 1 to 5 protesters, beating them up in public, stopping onlookers from
intervening while making them watch. These images, in social media, circulate
together with those of a few ISIS members being respectfully escorted to police
stations on foot, without handcuffs. These juxtapositions are reminiscent of
images circulated by media activists in America in the past year. We too
have seen the images of black people being thrown to the ground, getting beaten
and dying for minor offenses, while the young man who killed 9 Black people in
the Charleston Church Shooting was politely escorted by the security forces.
Before all this
happened, a week ago, we were on the brink of a real peace. Many people,
particularly politicians, researchers, and lawyers involved in the larger
Kurdish movement for rights and freedoms have been working hard for peace for
years. They have studied peace processes around the world, trained
themselves, established timelines, developed strategies and a new language for
negotiation.
All those involved in
the movement never stopped working diligently even though their children have continued
to be beaten and killed, their offices burned and attacked, their political
representatives physically assaulted and lynched in the media.
Many Kurds have been
supporting the AKP since it came to power, attracted by its religious discourse
and its courage in officially starting the peace process. However the
politics of the AKP in Kobane, and its insistence on continuing to build
military facilities in the region have motivated many Kurds to turn towards the
HDP in the latest elections. The Kurdish armed struggle started in the
1980’s with a Kurdish nationalist discourse aimed at the creation of an
independent state and inspired by Marxist ideals. But today the actors in
the movement have diversified and are defending a post-national project made up
of democratic autonomous zones that would be multicultural, multilingual and
community based, environmentally friendly, post-capitalist and feminist.
All the actors involved
in the Kurdish movement do not always agree on methods and strategies. Although
this creates tensions within the movement, not agreeing and developing
multifaceted strategies to solve societal, political, and military issues seems
to strengthen rather than weaken the movement; all the actors insist that they
are collaborating with each other but that they take their decisions
autonomously. Abdullah Ocalan, from his prison cell with irregular access to
visitors and lawyers, continues to be the much loved and respected leader of
the people.
After the June 7 elections, during a meeting organized in Bakirkoy to celebrate the electoral success. Ulas Yunus Tosun.Meanwhile, the HDP has
been leading the efforts to participate in party politics. They have
successfully overcome the 10% threshold to enter parliament in the June
elections, after seeing their political parties being closed down and their politicians
jailed for years. Civil society actors, journalists, mothers, filmmakers,
writers, musicians, poets continue to work as they have always done, despite
threats to their lives. As more and more people from all walks joined the Kurds
in their efforts to built up theoretical knowledge and democratic practices,
the HDP made us see for the first time the potential for a country based on a
culture of debate, critical thinking and reflexivity.
There was a lot of hope
and fear before the elections in June 2015. The lack of trust in the electoral
system led to massive civic engagements to monitor the elections. We knew
that there could be fraud, corruption and bullying during the elections, but we
did not how much of it there would be. There was a gigantic disparity in
the financial and material resources available for the electoral
campaign. HDP representatives were harassed and lynched in the media, some
of their members went around on bicycles distributing pamphlets that might have
cost them their lives while the AKP representatives monopolized municipal buses
and television channels, their big cars taking them from massive meetings to
the big illegal palace of the President of the Republic.
Despite all there was
hope. The HDP allowed us to imagine the possibility of having a parliament
with representatives of all sexual, ethnic, and religious minorities and large
numbers of women. Throughout the years, the Kurds in Turkey have gained the support
of a limited range of civil society actors and individuals bit by bit. Small
bits of the history of oppression and humiliation of minority peoples in Turkey
have begun to be discussed, with the dates and places where massacres and
tortures took place and the names of those who had been killed.
There was hope that we
could finally recognize catastrophic events in our history and that we could
finally start a collective process of healing and reconciliation. Moments of
empathy multiplied in small sections of society, and individuals from all walks
of life had to deal with the reality that they had not known, not seen, or not
wanted to see – the racism that fellow citizens had been subjected to.
Today it is from the
collective efforts progressively built around and with the actors of the
Kurdish movement that we are learning what a society made of free individuals
might look like in Turkey. We never came this close to seeing democracy at
work. The old secular Turkey with only Turks is gone, and we do not yet agree
on what we want the new Turkey to be. But we have all been unleashed, all together,
in this terrifying space.
In Bakirkoy, celebrating the electoral success. Ulas Yunus Tosun.