Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

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Turkey's War of Words
Ya,sàr Kemal; author of 36 books, is
Tur~ey's pre-eminent man of letters
and,a perennial candidate for the Nobel'
Prize in Literature. He went on
trial yesterday in Istanbul on charges
of .\liolating Turkey's antiterrorism
laws.' The charges stem from an.article
.~llout the oppressi9n of Turkish
Kur4~ ~at he wrote for the German
mag~{ne Der Spiegel. If convicted, he
,face$;ifj; to five years in prison.
1lûS'tÏ,,,ticle is adapted from a long-
.er o~, i~.the January-February isslJe
of Index:on Censorship, published in
London.
By Yasar Kemal
O .... .ne of the greatest trage-
..' dies in Turkey's history
is happening now.
Our Kurdish brothers
. are being slaugh-
.• tered, and apart from
.a couPJe.'~f hesitant voices, no one is
stan_.up and demanding to know
what tfie' Government is doing. No
one is 'saying, "You are riding towards
dOomsday, leaving the earth
scorched in your wake." What will
come of all this?
Fearing that Kurdish nationalist
spirit threatens. Turkish sovereignty
over its eastern regions, the Government
has resolved to drain the pool to
catch afew fish. The world is aware of
il Only the people of Turkey have
been kept in ignorance; newspapers
have apparently been forbidden to
write about the drainage. Or maybe
there is no need for censorship: maybe
our press, with its sense of patriotism
and strong nationalist sentiment,
chooses not to write about it, assuming
the world will neither hear nor see
what is happening.
Our Kurdish brothers are at war to
win their rights - to save their language
and their culture. During the
War of Independence of 1919to 1922we
fought shoulder to shoulder. We established
this state together. Should a
man eut out the tongue of his brother?
Alreal,lyover 1,700,peoplehave been
murdered. The houses of nearly 2,000
villages have been burned. People and
animals have been burned inside
them. The Government has burned
almost all the forests of eastern Ana-
By silencing
critics, it hopes to
destroy a culture.
tolia to find the guerrillas hiding out in
them. Not much that could be called
forest is left. Turkey is disappearing
in flames along with its forests -
anonymous acts of genocide - and 2.5
mUlion people have been exiled from
their homes, in desperate poverty,
forced to take to the road.
Last fall, the village elders of the
eastern town of Ovacik saidthat .
soldiers had burned their village;
they were found dead in the burned
forests nearby a few days later. The
Minister for Human Rights, Azimet
Koyluoglu, at first admitted that soldiers
werp. burning villages, but
quickly went back on his word, blaming
the Kurdish separatists.
The Government has also put an
embargo on food' in the eastern regions.
One must get a certificate
from the pOlice station in order to
buy food (because some villagers
have been feeding the guerrillas).
Intellectuals in the West have begun
to debate whether this is a new
genocide; the possibility of a human
rights court for Turkey's politicians
and of an economic boycott against
the country are being discussed.
Turkey's leaders have gotten so
carried away that intellectual
crimes have been regarded as
among the most serious; people have
rotted away in prisons, been killed
and exiled for writing or speaking
their minds. Over200 people are
serving sentences for crimes of
thought; hundreds more are on trial.
Among them are professors, journalists,
writers and union leaders.
As if a racist, oppressive regime
were not enough, there have been
three military coups in our 70 years
as a nation. Each coup has made the
Turkish people a little more debased.
They have rotted from the root -
their culture, their humanity, their
language: There is no reason at all
for this inhuman, purposeless war.
This world is a' graveyard of
wrecked languages and cultures.
How many societies whose names
and reputations we have never even
heard of have come and gone in this
world? As a cultural mosaic, Anatolia
has been been a sourêe of many
.modern societies. If Turkey's leaders
had not tried to prohibit and
. destroy othp.r languages and other
cultures people, Anatolia would still be a fountainhead
are a country half-famished, its creative
power draining away.
than those of the Turkish
of civilization. Insteadwe
Thesole reason for this
war is that cancer of.
humanity, racism.
Otherwise, would it be
possible for rightwing,
racist magazines
and newspapers to declare that
"the Turkish race is superior to 'everyother"?
Another popular saying is, "Happy
is he who calls himself a Turk." When
1first went to eastern Turkey in BI51,
this slogan had been written on the
mountainsides everywhere in enor-.
mous letters visil;>lefrom five miles
away. Even the slopes of Mount Ararat
were so embellished. The entire
mountain had become happy to be
Turkish. Each morning, they made
the children declare: "I am a Turk, I
am honest, I am hard-working."
Throughout historyall cultures
have fed one another, been grafted
onto one another, and in the process
our world has been enriched. The.
disappearance of a culture is the loss.
of a color, a different light. Anatolia
has always been a mosaic of flowers,
filling the world with flowers and
light. I want it to be the same today.
If the people of a country choose to
live like human beings, choose happiness
and beauty, their way lies first
through universal human rights and
unlimited freedom of thought.. The
people of countries that have. opposed
this will enter the 21st century
without honor. 0