For Islamists in Turkey, what matters is not whether civilians are killed in wars and conflicts, but the identity of those killed, journalist İrfan Aktan wrote in an article for the ArtıGerçek news website on Friday.
In his article, Aktan focuses on the contrasting reactions of Turkish Islamists and nationalists to conflicts and wars, particularly in relation to the Palestinian conflict and the Kurdish question. He argues that Islamists tend to support the state, the powerful and the ruling elite rather than taking a truly humanitarian approach.
According to Aktan, the Kurdish and Palestinian issues serve as litmus tests for the world’s response to oppression, testing the values and principles of different groups.
Aktan argues that the ‘Islamic world’ has often remained silent during atrocities against the Kurds, and that Kurdish identity is often marginalised or delegitimised.
Noting that support for the Palestinian cause in Turkey has traditionally come from socialists and Kurds, Aktan also highlights the pro-Kurdish Green Left Party’s (YSP) balanced response to the Israel-Hamas war, which advocates a peaceful solution. However, the article goes on to discuss the hesitation of some Kurds on social media, possibly due to the lingering effects of past Islamic State (ISIS) atrocities and the dual stance of Turkish Islamists.
Here are some highlights from Aktan’s article:
This is the summary of the hypocrisy of the Islamists who take a stance in favour of the state in Turkey’s bombing of Rojava and in favour of the so-called “Palestinian children” in Israel’s bombing of Gaza. According to the Turkish Islamists, the bombs of their own regime do not harm civilians, let alone Muslims, but only “terrorists” and “infidels”.
Moreover, the Turkish Islamists never take any risks when it comes to oppressed peoples. If the government were to take a pro-Israeli stance tomorrow, if the police were to be used against the pro-Palestinian supporters in Turkey, they would not make a peep in favour of Palestine, but they would start saying: ‘But what Hamas is doing is also un-Islamic, it is terrorism’.
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New generations do not remember the silence of the “Islamic world” and even its support for Baghdad while Saddam Hussein was committing genocide against tens of thousands of Kurds with chemical gases bought from the “civilised West” during the Anfal campaign. Similarly, new generations may not know that when the US invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled the “Kurdish butcher” Saddam and the Kurds gained relative autonomy, Turkish Islamists and nationalists joined forces to launch a “Jewish origin” campaign against Massoud Barzani, and that as part of this campaign Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf” was distributed in bus stations for 1 Turkish lira and became a “bestseller”. Whenever the rulers try to oppress the Kurds, the first thing they do is to exclude them from Islam. Identifying the Kurds with Judaism, Armenianism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity is a hint, even an announcement, of the treatment they will receive.
The Islamists, who only recently tried to legitimise ISIS, which has made a name for itself by cutting off the heads of Kurdish girls, as a reflection of the persecution of the Sunnis (as if the Kurds, who were already being persecuted, had committed this persecution), have not yet been forgotten. During this process, Turkish Islamists hardly said a word against ISIS. Moreover, right after the Ankara train station massacre by ISIS on 10 October 2015, during the Turkey-Iceland match in Konya on 13 October, the footballers’ moment of silence in memory of those who lost their lives was protested with shouts of “takbir” from the stands!
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On the one hand, the YSP’s approach in its statement, in which it expressed its condolences to both Palestinians and Israelis who had lost their relatives, was actually in line with its proposals for the solution of the Kurdish question: “We believe that nationalist and religious divisions in the Middle East pave the way for endless suffering. The best way to restore peace in this geography, where peoples have lived together peacefully for thousands of years, is based on a democratic and peaceful solution. We are on the side of the peoples and peaceful coexistence in the Middle East, not on the side of violence, death and domination.”
On the other hand, there is more than one factor behind the “delay” in the YSP’s statement, as well as the hesitant attitude of the Kurds as reflected in the social media (some of them were openly pro-Israel).
The first of these is the lingering effect of the ISIS atrocities on Kurdish memory, the other is the hypocritical attitude of Islamists in general towards the persecution of Kurds, and finally the most recent is the AKP’s efforts to build a kind of “Kurdish Hamas” against the existing secular Kurdish movement in Turkey.
As it will be remembered, former Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu said in a TV speech shared on his Twitter account on 23 May: “The most important step taken by the state of the Republic of Turkey and Turkish politics in recent years is the HÜDA-PAR step. Look, you will see in ten years from now, you will see with which strategic angles the HÜDA-PAR step was taken, who paved the way, and how conservatism will re-enter the eastern and southeastern policy in Turkey, just like some part of Turkey… Some steps are steps of quality, not quantity, for states and countries… Here, the Republic of Turkey has taken a very important and strategic step. And ten years later in Turkey, they will say ‘this was said by a mortal named Süleyman Soylu’. But Tayyip Erdoğan did it.”
If HÜDA-PAR, which organised a mass demonstration in Diyarbakir in support of Hamas’ “operation” against Israel, but did not say a word against the government’s military operation in Rojava, is the AKP’s “Kurdish Hamas” project, as pointed out by Soylu, then it can provide a glimpse of the kind of Kurdish community and regions in Turkey will face in 10 years. This can be foreseen by looking at the example of Palestine-Hamas.
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In sum, an important reason why the Kurdish movement, unlike the socialist movements in Turkey, did not make a hasty or rote statement on 7 October can be seen as the resurrection of the strategic goal announced by Soylu in the memories. One of the factors that put the brakes on the YSP at the first moment may be the images that emerged in the first hours of the Hamas “operation”, which reawakened the horror of ISIS in the Kurdish memory. In addition, the fact that the “Islamic world” is silent while Rojava is under Turkish bombardment also plays a role in this cautious approach.
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From the Kurdish perspective, Turkist Islamists, Arab Islamists and nationalists, Hamas (and even Yasser Arafat, unfortunately) and Israel sided mainly with the rulers in the persecution of the Kurds.
Bashar al-Assad, the first Syrian president to visit Turkey after 57 years on 6 January 2004, attacked the Kurds in Qamishli (Qamişlo) on 12 March as soon as he returned to his country. When the Assad administration massacred 37 Kurds in the stands during a football match in Qamishlo, it was cosying up to the AKP…
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When Kurdish cities were bombed after the resolution process, Hamas leader at the time Khaled Meshaal came to Istanbul on 24 June 2016 and had a warm meeting with Erdoğan but he did not say a word about the Kurds whose cities were under bombardment.
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The Islamists, who did not say a word against the bombardment against Rojava, and moreover sided with their government, showed the same attitude on 7 October when they sided with Hamas against the massacre of Israeli civilians.
Jews were excluded from being civilians by the thesis that no Israeli can actually be “civilian”, and the killing of women, children and the elderly was legitimised by “militarising” them. The same window already exists “institutionally” on the Israeli side and according to the Netanyahu administration, no Palestinian, including children, is “civilian”, they are all terrorists. In the neo-Nazi rhetoric of Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, they are “humanoid animals”.
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“One can fight against oppression, but not as an oppressor,” said Green Left Party MP Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, drawing a very important line. “Israel is a cruel occupying power, a state that does not recognise humanity. However, a war cannot be won by becoming like the enemy. Victory cannot be won by slaughtering children! We are against the oppressor whoever the oppressor is and in favour of the oppressed, whoever the oppressed is!”
Time flies. We are no longer on 7 October and the climate has changed. The blood that flowed on the streets of Israel on that day has since turned into a lake on the streets of Gaza. However, it was possible to defend both the Jewish children massacred yesterday and the Palestinian children massacred today, while at the same time taking a “side”. The “right side” is therefore, in the words of Mehmet Eroğlu, “taking sides and remaining human”.
But in an age when opposition to war is denigrated as a “pink-bottomed liberal attitude” and the political and revolutionary power of the struggle for peace for the oppressed is rendered invisible, the blood of Palestinians, Rojavalis and Israelis is on everyone’s hands.
