The Dark Cloud Over Turkey

[kurd-l at burn.ucsd.edu]

Reply-To: kurd-l at burn.ucsd.edu
From: Arm The Spirit <ats at etext.org>
Subject: The Dark Cloud Over Turkey

Forwarded from: schism at schism.aps.nl (schism at schism.aps.nl)

From: Index on censorship 1-1995

YASAR KEMAL

The dark cloud over Turkey

One of the greatest tragedies in Turkey's history is happening
now. Apart from a couple of hesitant voices, no one is
standing up and demanding to know what the Turkish goverment
is doing, what this destruction means. No one is saying:
`After all your signatures and promises you are riding towards
doomsday, leaving the earth scorched in your wake. What will
come of all this?'

Turkish governments have resolved to drain the pool to catch
the fish; to declare all-out war.
     We have already seen how it can be done. The world is
also aware of it. Only the people of Turkey have been kept in
ignorance; newspapers have been forbidden to write about the
drainage. Or maybe there was no need for censorship: maybe our
press, with its sense of patriotism and strong nationalist
sentiment, chose not to write about it assuming the world
would neither hear nor see what was happening. The water was
being drained in so horrendous a fashion that the smoke
ascended to high heaven. But for our press, deceiving the
world and our people - or, rather, believing they had
succeeded in doing so - was the greatest act of patriotism, of
nationalism. They were not aware that they had perpetrated a
crime against humanity. Their eyes bloodshot, their mouths
foaming, they were shouting with one voice: `We will not give
one stone, one handful of soil.' Cries of `Oh God' rose upon
the air. Dear loyal patriotic friends, no one wants a single
stone, nor a handful of soil from us. Our Kurdish citizens
want their language, their language and culture are being
slaughtered.
     Our Kurdish brothers are now at war to win their rights.
Those Turkish brothers with whom we have always been together
in sorrow and in joy. During the War of Independence we fought
shoulder to shoulder. We established this state together.
Should a man cut out the tongue of his brother?
     Oh friend, is there anything in those declarations you
signed - the UN Bill of Human Rights, the Council of Europe,
the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe and the
Helsinki Final Act - to say that if I give my people human
rights they will demand their `independence'? Did you lay down
such a condition? In those declarations you signed did it not
say that every nation, every ethnic community should determine
its own destiny?
     The water has begun to dry up. The house of nearly 2,000
villages have been burned. Many animals as well as people have
been burned inside them. The world press has written about
this, as well as our so nationalistic newspapers. Our
ostriches still bury their heads in the sand. The country is
awash with blood and how can our illustrious media remove its
head from the sand? They burnt people too in many house...
     The draining of the waters has cost Turkey and humanity
much. And looks like continuing to do so. Already over 1,700
people have been the victims of murder by persons unknown.
Intellectuals in the west have begun to debate whether a new
genocide is taking place; the possibility of a Human Rights
Court for Turkey's politicians and an economic boycott against
Turkey is being discussed. Choose between these delightful
alternatives!
     The most horrific aspect is the inhumanity of outright
war for the sake of a few fish. They have burnt almost all the
forests of eastern Anatolia because guerrillas hide out in
them. Turkey's forests have been burning for years. Not much
that could be called forest is left and we are burning the
remainder to catch fish. Turkey is disappearing in flames
along with its forests, anonymous act of genocide, and 2,5
million people exiled from their homes, their villages burnt,
in desperate poverty, hungry and naked, forced to take to the
road, and no one raises a finger.

Turkey's administrators have got so carried away that
intellectual crimes have been regarded as among most serious;
people have rotted away in prisons, been killed and exiled for
such crimes. Today over 200 people are serving sentences for
crimes of thought in our prisons. Hundreds more are on trial.
Among these intellectual criminals are university lecturers,
journalists, writers and union leaders. Conditions in the
prisons are so fearsome that a country, a world, could sink
into earth in shame.
     As if a racist, oppresive regime were not enough, there
have been three military coups in 70 years. Each coup has made
the Turkish people a little more debased, brought them a
little lower. They have rotted from the root, with their
culture, their humanity, their language. There is no reason at
all for this inhuman, purposeless war in Anatolia. I repeat,
the Kurds want nothing but human rights. They want to use
their language, to have their identity restored, and develop
their culture to the same extent as the Turkish people. You
will ask if the Turkish people have these rights themselves.
If things themselves. If things continue as they are, it will
not be long before we encouter waves of resistance from the
Turkish people. These 70 years have crushed all the people of
Anatolia like a steamroller; not a blade of grass has grown in
its path. For the moment, all we can ask is that all the
Anatolian people be granted full human rights.
     These things I speak of have a single cause: to
appropriate the liberty of the Anatolian people. This
government has done everything it can to exploit the
Anatolians, humiliate them and leave them hungry. There is
nothing they have not suffered for the last 70 years. If they
have managed to survive such a wind for so long, that is
because the soil of Anatolia is so rich in culture.
     This world is a graveyard of wrecked languages and
cultures. What cultures whose names and reputations we have
never even heard of come and gone in this world? As a cultural
mosaic, the cultures of Anatolia have been a source of modern
cultures. If they had not tried to prohibit and destroy other
languages and other cultures than those of the Turkish people,
Anatolia would still make major contributions to world
culture. And we would not remain as we are; a country half
famished, its creative power draining away.
     The sole reason for this war is that cancer of humanity,
racism. If this were not so, would it be possible for right-
wing, racist magazines and newspapers to declare that `The
Turkish race is superior to every other'? The brother of this
statement is `Happy is he who calls himself a Turk'. I first
went to eastern Anatolia in 1951, and saw that on the mountain
sides everywhere they had written in enormous letters visible
from a distance of three, five and ten kilometres, `Happy is
he who calls himself a Turk'. They had embellished the slopes
of Mount Ararat, too. The entire mountain had become happy to
be Turkish. And worse even, they made the children declare: `I
am a Turk, I am honest, I am hard-working', every morning.

And much more is happening in Turkey! Having exiled 2,5
million people, now they have put an embargo on food in
eastern Anatolia. No one who does not get a certificate from
the police station can buy food, because the villagers give
food to the guerrillas. The crops, nut and fruit trees of
villagers who prefer exile to taking up arms to protect their
village from guerrilla attack are burned along with the
forests. Their animals are slaughtered. Why are the villages
being burned and razed? So that they may not harbour
guerrillas and be a source of food for them. From what we hear
in Istanbul, the guerrillas receive their needs from the
village watchmen. A few days ago the newspapers reported that
guerrillas had stolen 700 sheep belonging to the village
watchmen, the bastion of the state. There are 50,000 paid
watchmen in eastern Anatolia; it is the slave of these people.
They are the state in eastern Anatolia, they are everything.
They can kill, destroy and burn. They recognise no rule of
humanity and no law.
     What else is happening in Turkey? The village elders of
Ovacik who said that soldiers had burnt their village were
found dead in the burned forests nearby a few days later. The
government minister [for human rights] Azimet Kyl
oglu who
had claimed that soldiers were burning villages went back on
his words a few days later: `How can anyone say that the army
is burning villages? It is the PKK.' And our `free newspapers'
reported this.
     What else is happening in Turkey? I swear that the
newspapers wrote this too. I was dumbfounded. Listen, in a
district of Van they woke up one morning and found the town
covered with red crosses. How could the newspaers resist such
a piece of news? The SS had done the same.
     And there are no shepherds left in the mountains. They
have killed the adult shepherds, and now they send children on
the assumption that they won't touch them. But a few days
later they gather up the dead bodies of these tiny shepherds
from the mountains.
     What else is happening in Turkey? God damn them, one is
ashamed of being human. I will write this too. One morning a
journalist friend of mine rang. We had worked together as
journalists for years. `Do you know what is going on? he
asked. `What?' I replied. `The police have taken away everone
who works for zg
r G
ndem newspaper.' I immediately went to
the newspaper offices and saw that the police cordoned the
building. I asked to go in but the police wouldn't let me.
There was no one left to produce the newspaper. They had taken
all 120 employees in custody. They has even taken the poor tea
boy. If it had been summer they would probably have been
ordered to arrest the flies at the newspaper.
     That is enough. I cannot bring myself to talk longer
about the historic achievement of the Turkish Republic. To
battle against oppression in Turkey today is a challenge not
everyone can take up. There is a risk of going hungry. It is a
strong tradition in the Turkish Republic to make a mockery of
its opponents. And, and, and, it is only at the risk of your
life that you oppose the state today. The cost of opposing the
Turkish-Kurdish War is heavy. What can we do but keep silent?

The coup of 12 september 1980 not only forced intellectuals to
keep their heads down, not only threw hundreds of people into
prison and tortured them. The entire country cowered in fear,
was made degenerate and driven further from humanity. It made
informers of ordinary citizens, created bloody wolf-mouthed
confessors, and totally destroyed human morality. A country
where universal morality has become atrophied is a patient in
a coma.
     The Constitution which the leader of the coup Evren
Pasha passed in the shadow of his weapons and bayonets was
ratified by 90 per cent of the population in a referendum. For
exactly 12 years Turkey has been governed according to this
Constitution. Yes, Turkey has a parliament. Its
parlementarians are like kittens, even when they catch them by
the neck at the door of parliament and take them to prison.
There is even a Constitutional Court. A Constitutional Court
that, according to the Military Constitution, decides whether
a law shall be enforced or not.
     Some people here are scared stiff of the military
lauching a new coup. What difference does it make? A new coup
would not lead to the abolition and repeal of the Evren
Constitution.
     There will be no coup. There is no need for a coup.
     Some of my friends, my old journalist colleagues,
friends whom I love and who don't want anything to happen to
me are anxious. Some say I am taking sides.
     What is more natural than for me to take sides? As long
as I can remember I have been on the side of the peoples of
Turkey. As long as I can remember I have been on the side of
the oppressed, those treated unjustly, the exploited, the
suffering and the poor.
     I am on the side of the Turkish, the language in which I
write. I feel the obligation to do what I can, and what I
can't, to enrich and beautify Turkish. My greatest cause of
anger against Kenan Pasa is his closure of the Turkish
Language Institute.
     Of course I take sides. For me the world is a garden of
culture where thousand flowers grow. Throughout history all
cultures have fed one another, been grafted onto one another,
and in the process our world has been enriched. The
disappearance of a culture is the loss of a colour, a
different light, a different source. I am as much on the side
of every flower in this thousand flower garden as I am on the
side of my own culture. Anatolia has always been a mosaic of
flowers, filling the world with flowers and light. I want it
to be the same today.
     If the people of a country choose to live like human
beings, choose happiness and beauty, their way lies first
through universal human rights and then through universal,
unlimited freedom of thought. The people of countries that
have opposed this will enter the twenty first century without
honour.
     Saving the honour and bread of our country, and the
cultural wealth of its soil is in our hands. Either true
democracy or...nothing!


              **************************************************                
                           Infogroup Schism
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