Fréderike Geerdink
When I was relatively new to the Kurdish issue, at least new at looking at it from a Kurdish perspective, I asked villagers why they thought the state had killed dozens of their relatives and neighbours. “Because we are Kurds”, was their basic answer. It came to mind again when I read an article about Palestine in which a man was quoted as saying: “The Israelis relish in killing us.” There is wisdom in such quotes.
At the time, in early January 2012, when a villager told me the state killed “because we are Kurds”, the quote seemed a little shallow to me. It was a couple of days after the Roboskî massacre had happened. In this bombing on 28 December 2011, the Turkish Air Force dropped bombs on a group of Kurdish border traders, killing 34 of them, 19 of whom were underaged. The villager’s quote was his answer to the question I asked several people that day: “Why did this massacre happen?”
Heart
For me that wasn’t enough of an answer. What I wanted to know was: what were all the circumstances around the tragedy? Why did it happen that night? Was there a specific reason the state bombed the group of traders? What were all the facts we didn’t know yet? I made it a long-term investigation, spending a lot of time in the village where most of the victims were from, learning about their lives and their view on Turkey and their position in the country as Kurds living in the heart of Kurdistan.
I went on to write a book about the massacre. You know what I eventually concluded after I had put all the pieces of the puzzle in place? That the people were massacred because they were Kurds. There was a whole historical, political, cultural and economic dynamic behind it explaining why it had happened on that night and that location and in which political dynamic, but the villagers had summed it all up chillingly accurately with that short sentence: “Kürt olduğumuz için”.
To reach that conclusion, you need to look from the perspective of the people who are suppressed, without neglecting a deep dive into the ideology of the suppressor. In other words: you can’t explain the Kurdish issue without properly understanding Turkey too.
Father
The article about Palestine and Israel that I was reading perfectly explains the same principle. The piece is called Running Amok ,and the author, Mary Turfah, quotes her father. She writes: ‘My father, raised during the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, shook his head when I asked if Israel’s actions in Gaza surprised him. He responded in Arabic, “The Israelis relish in killing us.”’ It may seem a very basic view without much depth or nuance, but it is actually the exact opposite: it’s painfully precise. The whole piece meticulously answers the question posed in the beginning: ‘What is wrong with the Israelis’? The depth of the essay and the insights it provides, are summed up in those few words of her father.
You can’t explain the suffering of the Palestinians without taking a deep dive into the Israeli settler-colonial state and really understand it, just like you can’t explain the Kurdish issue without explaining Turkey.
What strikes me too about the quote from the Palestinian man, is that his knowledge is again rooted in his experiences several decades ago, which are again rooted in the experiences of earlier Palestinian generations, back to the Nakba of 1948 and further back. The same of course applies to Kurds.
Dersim
The first time I came to Gülyazı, the village where most victims of the massacre were from, there was a huge banner hanging by the road: ‘Dersim 1937-1938, Roboskî 2011’. Roboskî is the Kurdish name of the nearby village from where the border traders always left on their route across the border into Kurdistan in Iraq. I wasn’t sure at the time why people made that connection to the biggest slaughters of Kurds in Turkish Republican history. In Dersim province, officially called Tunceli, the Alevi Kurdish population had refused to fully submit to the state that denied them their autonomy, resulting in a state massacre in which tens of thousands of men, women and children died.
I delved into the history of Dersim, reading books and research and interviewing experts. The more I understood what had happened there, the more I understood the comparison the people in Roboskî made, and the better I started to understand the ‘because we are Kurds’. They as a people had lived this suppression for decades and decades. They knew very well why they were killed.
The suppressed know the suppressor better than the suppressor knows himself. Want to understand suppression, and learn about it from the perspective of those suffering from it? Take their short, chilling wisdoms as your starting point.
Fréderike Geerdink is an independent journalist. Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/fgeerdink or subscribe to her acclaimed weekly newsletter Expert Kurdistan https://frederikegeerdink.com/expert-kurdistan/.
