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Ahmet Kahraman
“T
oday is the resumption of Zilan. They surrounded Sur, the ancient centre of Diyarbakır (Amed), and 10 cities in Botan Valley, just as they had surrounded the river of Zilan in 1930,” writes Ahmet Kahraman for Özgür Politika.
The Kurdish struggle for honour against the Turks since 1920 has never been “a valiant battle of equals”. The latter has never directly confronted the Kurds. They have set ambushes. They have resorted to tricks and lies.
Recently they sat at the table with the Kurds, on the pretext of seeking “peace”. They’ve built up their forces to earn time for the big strike. They have constructed fortresses. They surrounded Botan as they previously surrounded the river of Zilan.
Last week was the 91st anniversary of the Zilan genocide. Nobody knows exactly how many people were massacred in Agri, Mus, Zilan, Bitlis, Igdir, surrounded after the resistance of Ibrahime Husiké Tellé of Bazîd from 1926 till the end of the year 1930. Nobody has an exact figure.
But all the Kurds in the hinterland were enemies. His/her identity was his/her document of crime. The hunter batallions raided the villages, burning them down after pillaging and massacring everyone.
Whether or not a person was a part of the resistance didn’t matter. Nobody held an account, nobody asked any questions. They attacked driven by the motto, “A good Kurd is a dead Kurd.”
Under the headline “Cleansing of bandits starts in Zilan” in the daily Vakit newspaper (a publication of the Atatürk-Inönü regime) dated 13 July 1930, the following information was given:
“The rebels were destroyed in five days. The ones around the Zeylan river have been totally annihilated. Not even one of them was able to escape. The Zeylan River is filled with hundreds of corpses.”
What they referred to as “rebels” were babies, those still in the wombs of their mothers and crippled old people.
At the time, the Turks had not yet discovered the French word “terrorist”. So the Kurds were “bandits”. And when the newspaper said “bandit”,they were talking about babies, children. Not even one among them was armed.
The villagers, hearing the news of the massacres carried out by the advancing Turkish batallions, tried to take refuge around the river of Zilan, which they thought would provide security for them. But they were wrong. The river of Zilan would be their grave. It would be filled with corpses. According to the newspaper, 15,000 were killed.
In another daily newspaper, the Cumhuriyet, the following was reported:
“The villages sheltering the bandits have been burned down, the villagers taken to Ercis to be settled.”
This is true insofar as it goes, but there is more. In the dark of the night, the villagers “settled” in the mosque of Ercis were tied to each other and taken to “Asé Dawud“, David’s Mill.
The rest is told by one of the witnesses, Ehmed Yildiz, a mullah:
“Asê Dawud was full of corpses. I took provisions to soldiers camped there a few times. I saw it with my own eyes. They had piled the corpses on top of one another like a tower. I can’t ever forget how the soldiers came to rape the corpses of beautiful women and girls once in a while.”
This befits someone who rapes his own daughter. I don’t know if there are other armies of soldiers in the world raping the dead. There is no such registry in the universal history of degeneracy.
We always tend to identify brutality with animals. But even the most fierce beasts like wolves, hyenas and crocodiles do not rape the dead.
Anyway, everyone has their own animal nature.
The Zilan genocide is not that long ago. The 1990s and 2015 are but yesterday. Today is the resumption of Zilan. They surrounded Sur, the ancient centre of Diyarbakır, and ten cities of Botan, just as they had surrounded the river of Zilan in 1930, holding them under siege. Using the threat of death, they stopped entrance to and exit from the circle of death. Then they hit the cities with tanks, rockets and heavy artillery, from planes in the air, and snipers from inside.
They set up slaughterhouses for humans before the eyes of the whole world. There they shot a child, Cemile, too. They carried out a massacre, preventing any escape. The executioners from ISIS were there. They shot everyone who tried to run away. They burned 177 people alive.
The Turkish public didn’t even turn and look as humanity died in the person of the Kurds. The Turkish fundamentalists, together with the ISIS gangs, were the racist murderers in Cizre. The political parties, referred to as the opposition, were the spare tyres, supporting beams, successors of the murderous power; they were the future murderer candidates. They praised the army and the police while they repeatedly referred to the destruction of human values as “fight with terror”.
It is shameful. The future murderer candidates who couldn’t find it in themselves to send condolences, to even look at the households in mourning, are today beggars at the door of the Kurd. They are begging for votes. The Republican People’s Party CHP is playing it cute; they’ve even set up an “east desk”. The murderer of Cizre and Sur, the occupier of Afrin, Rojava and Southern Kurdistan is now trying to look friendly.
Pervin Buldan, on behalf of the Kurds, replies to all of them.
“Away with you!..”
