Sarah Glynn
Delal Aydin is a visiting scholar in Turkish Studies at the university of Duisberg-Essen in Germany, who works on the political mobilisation of Kurds in Turkey. In this podcast interview, she describes how Newroz evolved from a spring equinox festival, celebrated for thousands of years in Iran and the surrounding region, to a focus for Kurdish resistance.
She explains how, within the last hundred years, as Kurds developed their self-understanding and political demands, Newroz became linked to the myth of Kawa the Blacksmith, who led a people’s uprising against a cruel king. How, in the 1970s, Kawa was regarded as the ‘Spartacus of Kurdistan’; and how the Newroz fire became a symbol of existential struggle for the tortured PKK prisoners in Diyarbakir, after Mazlum Doğan killed himself as an act of protest on 21 March 1982, and became known as a modern Kawa.
She describes the huge – officially banned- Kurdish Newroz celebrations of the 1990s, when the Turkish media struggled to comprehend the mass mobilisations that drew in everyone across the generations, and the state responded with violent crackdowns that, in 1992, left over a hundred people dead. And she notes how the state tried, without success, to co-opt Newroz as a Turkish festival; and how by the 2000s it was forced to concede that the Kurdish celebrations were unstoppable, and lift their ban.
She observes that, today, pressure put on those celebrating varies with year and with place and can be seen as a barometer of wider politics, and that the Newroz stage is used not only for singers but also for politicians. At the Diyarbakir Newroz celebrations of 2013, two million people heard, read out, a speech from the Kurds’ imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan. Delal Aydin expresses her belief that the hope for a peace settlement that was raised in Öcalan’s speech cannot be destroyed.
Newroza we pîroz be!
