Fréderike Geerdink
It is good news that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and former defence minister Gallant. After all, it’s not often, or actually never, that a friend of Europe and the US is wanted by the ICC, or taken to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It’s ominous though that it takes a full-blown genocide to make it happen. That’s not good news for Kurds.
A genocide, we all know, doesn’t just suddenly happen. There are stages, including classification, discrimination, dehumanisation, organisation, polarisation. The mass murder isn’t a sudden outburst either. The first signs of the Armenian genocide, for example, were visible already in the late 19th century. The Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany was in 1938: a clear start to what we now know as the Holocaust. When did the first signs of the genocide of the Palestinians show? Some would say in 1948, when the state for Jews was founded. It excluded non-Jews from the very beginning. Palestinians, in other words, would have to be dealt with one way or the other to keep the state Jewish.
Let’s say it as horrendous as it is: the extermination of Palestinians is woven into the design of the Israeli state. It comes to a climax now, more than 75 years later.
Berserk
Apparently, as a state you can smoothly go through all the initial stages of genocide and apply violence on a smaller scale, and only get into medium trouble when you go fully berserk. Medium trouble, because well, for now, Netanyahu and Gallant are not arrested yet and Israel continues the genocide. Fully berserk? Look at it. Every single day the genocide fills our screens, and the soldiers committing it and the politicians ordering it are celebrating their crimes.
Meanwhile, Turkey has been killing civilians on purpose and destroying civilian infrastructure in Northeast-Syria for years. It is guilty of ethnic cleansing there, of abducting people and illegally transporting them to Turkey, of looting. All war crimes. Also in Kurdistan in Iraq, Turkey has been violating international humanitarian law for many, many years. Turkey has invaded and occupied parts of Başur (Kurdistan in Iraq) and Rojava (in Syria).
I have been drawing attention to it in this column, in my weekly Kurdistan newsletter and on social media for years. So have the Kurdish movement and a lot of international friends of Kurdistan. But it has been feeling a bit weird since the genocide in Palestine is going on. I share pictures of body parts of children in Gaza, followed by ‘Turkey destroyed an electricity pole’. I share pictures of dozens if not hundreds of Palestinian men lined up dressed only in their underwear to be transported to death or torture dungeons, and proceed to share the photo of a burning car in Rojava, targeted by Turkey with a few victims.
Identity
As if crime smaller than genocide is suddenly insignificant. Small potatoes. Asking for attention whining. But the longer I think about it, the more I am convinced that the opposite is true. From the very first beginning of the Republic of Turkey, in 1923, Kurds have been excluded if they wanted to fully live their identity as Kurds. From day one, crimes have been committed against them that would be classified now as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. And Turkey has always been able to do this with full impunity.
Turkey isn’t just ‘destroying an electricity pole’, ‘bombing a water station’ or ‘targeting a car with fighters of civilians’, it has persistently worked to erase Kurdish identity, and those actions are part of that plan. Just like Israel wasn’t just ‘cutting down olive trees’ (as Turkey is doing in Syria, actually) but making Palestinian life impossible. Just like Israel isn’t just ‘engaged in urban warfare’ but erasing Palestinian city life to take it over.
It is, in other words, absolutely crucial to keep demanding attention for ‘small potatoes’, which aren’t small potatoes at all. They are part of a bigger crime. They are in themselves war crimes that Turkey could very well be prosecuted for at the ICC or ICJ. I am not talking about the legal details, which are complicated. Turkey, for example, never ratified the Rome Statute and Iraq and Syria, where Turkey’s crimes take place, aren’t signatories to it either, but that doesn’t absolve us from the duty to see reality clearly.
Shredder
Turkey wants to obliterate Kurdish life, just as Israel wants to obliterate Palestinian life. The backgrounds and dynamics differ in many ways, of course. Palestinians can’t be forcibly assimilated into Jewishness like Turkey tries to forcibly assimilate Kurds into Turkishness, so Israel resorts as a main tactic to mass murder and Turkey to forced assimilation. Arabic can’t be suppressed the way the Kurdish language is, so Israel kills Palestinian intellectuals and Turkey locks them up and pulls their books through the shredder. But the point is: the crimes have to be stopped. Before there are no Palestinians or Kurds left anymore.
So let me draw attention to Turkey’s crimes. Turkey cut off thousands of people from clean water. Turkey destroyed electricity infrastructure. Turkey’s bombs forced civilians to leave their mountain villages for good. Turkey cut down olive trees in Northeast-Syria. I hope I made myself clear: these are no small potatoes.
Fréderike Geerdink is an independent journalist. Follow her on Twitter or on Bluesky, or subscribe to her acclaimed weekly newsletter Expert Kurdistan.
