Fréderike Geerdink
Quite some anger and scornful laughter in my Twitter mentions this week. I had made a connection between the Turkish army making very young kids familiar with and enthusiastic about the military, and the often heard accusation against the Kurdish armed movement that they recruit child soldiers. “Turkey again does what it accuses PKK of”, I tweeted. A bit of a short cut, sure. Then again, it’s more of a column than a Twitter subject – so here we go.
The reason I said something about this topic, was an event at an army base in Amasya, North-Turkey, where children were getting explainers about weapons by Turkish soldiers. Judging by the footage, they were roughly between four and eight years old. Big eyes, open mouths, the kids were clearly impressed and in awe. It sent the chills down my spine because this is where recruitment starts, at such an incredibly young age.
Welcome
Of course, these children are not actually enlisted in the army yet. That’s what drew anger towards me: how could I compare kids just being familiarised with weapons to young people actually joining the PKK? That’s something totally different! And why was I targeting Turkey for this? Don’t many if not all formal armies organise days on which the public is welcome at military bases to see their work, and don’t children often join? What Turkey is doing is, in other words, perfectly normal, while young people, under 18 years old, joining the Kurdish armed movement is bad, wrong and terrible.
Shall we take a closer look? Of course, it’s true that the Turkish army is no exception. But Turkey is a fascist state, and a very strong militarist tradition is part of that. Recruitment for the army doesn’t begin at such events at army bases, it begins even earlier, namely at birth: every Turkish boy learns from the earliest age on that he is ‘born a soldier’, like every Turk. This lesson is combined with an extreme nationalism, which you could boil down to the omni-present slogan, ‘How happy the one who can call himself a Turk’. Everybody in Turkey is a Turk, also if you’re not a Turk.
Sacred
The unity of the homeland is sacred. Of course, no country wants to fall apart in pieces, but in Turkey ‘unity’ goes much, much further than territorial integrity. You are also violating the unity of the state if you, for example, demand rights based on another identity than the one the state prescribes. If you are a Kurd demanding to live as a Kurd, with your own language and culture, for example. That’s ‘separatism’, and separatism is terrorism.
No, Turkey is not literally enlisting 10 year-olds into the army, or even 15- or 17-year olds. How about the PKK? They have underaged members for sure. When I was embedded with the PKK in 2016-2017 to research my book about the organisation, ‘This Fire Never Dies’, I met several fighters who had joined before they had reached the age of 18. One man halfway his thirties had joined as a 14 year-old in the 1990s, a 19 year-old had joined two years earlier, I met a young Kurd from Syria who fought for the YPJ to literally defend her own house and village against jihadists when she was just 16 years old, in 2013 – some time after she was sent home again by her commander when the siege of the village was over, she had decided to join the PKK.
Breath
Turkish fascism and associated militarism make Turkey and Kurdistan very unsafe for Kurds. What the kids at that military base were learning, is part of a package that leaves Kurds no space to breath in their own lands. If they resist that mindset, they are bullied, they are forced in line, they are beaten up, prosecuted, jailed, tortured, raped, suppressed, murdered. If they see that any effort to change things for the better in a democratic, non-violent way, is punished severely, they sometimes take the decision to take up arms. That’s legitimate self-defence.
Taking small kids to a military base and showing them weapons from up close as part of moulding and shaping a militarist mindset for the rest of their lives, is seen as totally normal, even adorable. The Kurdish movement isn’t telling Kurdish kids that they are born as soldiers, or as guerrilla fighters, for that matter. It is Turkish fascism that eventually makes part of the young Kurds decide to go to the mountains and take up arms. Sometimes at an age younger than 18, because fascism and militarism don’t wait till Kurds are 18 before they start targeting and hurting them. It kills at every age.
Saying that having ultra young Turks at a military base is fine because they are not actually enlisted yet and not yet fighting, and accusing the PKK of being the bad guy because part of its members haven’t reached the age of 18 yet, is the world upside down.
Fréderike Geerdink is an independent journalist. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her acclaimed weekly newsletter Expert Kurdistan.
