NINE STORIES OF THE MOUNTAIN fragment

This is a fragment of a longer video piece: an American's journey through North Kurdistan, and a confrontation with Turkish nationalism.

Interview with Abdullah Demirbas

http://www.gopetition.com/online/33128.html

Abdullah Demirbas' letter from prison:

Dear Sir/Madam,

First of all I would like to tell you about my health problems that really give me unbearable pain in my legs which this illness called (deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and need to be controlled by my doctor all the time. If I will not be controlled by the doctor that it may cause bad illness while I am in the jail."


As you may know I have been arrested and jailed with another 23 members of the BDP political party including 7 mayors. The Turkish state have started a new war against the civilian Kurdish political movement in 11 provinces from Diyarbakir and neighboring cities to İstanbul and İzmir.

Homes of prominent DTP (the Kurdish party recently banned by the Constitutional Court) leaders houses were broken into 5 a.m. and around 60 party members, including mayors of Kurdish provinces and districts and the human rights association chairperson in Diyarbakir were arrested. Also these party members and mayors brought up to court building with handcuffs on their hands. All the media were recording and taking pictures of this shameful scene. I would like to point out an important fact to you that those party members never use a gun or never connected with the violence acts. All we have been trying to do to solve the Kurdish problem in a democratic ways.

The Turkish court has charged 23 Kurdish officials, including eight mayors. This was the third operation during this year. More than 100 people have already been charged in the investigation led by the chief prosecutor’s office in Diyarbakir. 54 party members got arrested and jailed on the March 2009.

Unfortunately they haven’t brought up the court or Turkish Court hasn’t opened a case against these jailed party members. As you can see that the government categorically rejects dialogue with the Kurdish movement. The Kurdish question cannot be resolved without recognizing the will of the Kurdish people and holding dialogue with its interlocutors. I believe that Turkish government refuses to recognize its Kurdish population as adistinct minority.

I believe that Turkish government refuses to recognize its Kurdish population asadistinctminority. The European Union, which Turkey wants to join, has praised Turkish Prime Minister R. T. Erdogan’s efforts to end the conflict. His so-called democratic initiative. But as you see the government instead of making dialogue with the Kurdish, they make these operations. The Turkish Government cannot endure the Kurdish people and their party as a free decision so this operation is against the Kurdish free volition and they want to break the Kurdish free volition.

As I mentioned above that I also have a seriously bad medical condition which I have to be under the doctor control all the time. Therefore I cannot stay in the jail with any conditions. Even Turkish law agreed that it was inappropriate for me to stay in the jail. But still they put me in jail with (POLITICAL) reasons.

Therefore, I kindly wish from you dear friends;

• We are waiting considerably your quick reaction for this unjustice act,
• If you take this act and shared in international arena which you connected with society, associations and etc.. and If you request from them to respond about our situation that we will be really appriciated,
• I hope to see you soon in a near future together in our free live days. All best wishes to you,

Yours Sincerely.

Abdullah Demirbas
Mayor of Sur Municipality Diyarbakir

info below if from Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_Demirbaş

Abdullah Demirbaş (born 1966, Diyarbakir, Turkey) is mayor of the municipality of Sur in the city of Diyarbakir, Southeast Turkey, of the former Democratic Society Party (DTP).
After graduating in sociology at Firat University in Elazig, Abdullah Demirbas worked as a philosophy teacher from 1987 to 2007, contributing to setting up the Mardin Branch of the Turkish Union of Teachers. [1]
When he was elected as Mayor of Sur in 2004, he made a commitment to his electorate to serve them in their own languages. [2] In 2007 he was removed from his functions, together with the entire municipal council, for using the Kurdish language in official business. [3] He was accused of the misuse of municipal resources, having printed a children’s book and tourist brochures in Kurdish. [4] The Congress of the Council of Europe took up his case in its 2007 report and Recommendation 229 on Local Democracy in Turkey. [5] [6]

In the Turkish local elections in March 2009, he was re-elected with a stronger majority. However, the prosecutions against him continued and in May 2009 he was sentenced to 2 years in jail for language crimes. [7]
He is a campaigner for minority languages and has called on Turkey to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. [8]
His latest project - "A Story for each night and every house is a School" - aims to publish 365 stories for children in Kurdish and other minority languages. [9] A court case against him concerning this project was dropped in September 2009. [10]
On 24 December 2009 he was detained as part of a widespread crackdown against members of the former DTP party. On 30 December he issued an open letter from prison pleading for medical treatment and drawing attention to the political nature of his arrest. [11]
[edit]References

^ "Abdullah Demirbas". World Conference on City Diplomacy. 2008. Retrieved 2009-09-21.
^ "Dismissed Turkish Mayor Continues Quest to Make Kurdish Language Official". Kurdish Academy. 2008-07-30. Retrieved 2009-09-22.
^ "Multilingualism as a Separatist Crime". Quantara. 2007. Retrieved 2009-09-21.
^ "Minority Rules". New York Times. 2008-02-17. Retrieved 2009-09-21.
^ "Local Democracy in Turkey". Congress of the Council of Europe. 2007-09-18. Retrieved 2009-12-31.
^ "Recommendation 229 - Local Democracy in Turkey". Congress of the Council of Europe. 2007-11-21. Retrieved 2009-12-31.
^ "Kurdish mayor Abdullah Demirbas sentenced to jail". Transnational Middle East Observer. 2009-05-05. Retrieved 2009-09-21.
^ "Former Kurdish mayor Demirbas blames Turkey for everything". Kurd Net. 2009-01-19. Retrieved 2009-09-21.
^ "Transforming Every House into a School". Kurdish Herald. July 2009. Retrieved 2009-09-21.
^ "No Trial for Teaching Kurdish". Bianet. 2009-09-11. Retrieved 2009-10-27.
^ "Open letter of Abdullah Demirbas". United States of Kurdistan. 2009-12-30. Retrieved 2009-12-31.

What's in a word?

Human rights lawyer Eren Keskin was aquitted yesterday of "inciting the public to hatred and animosity." when she used the word "Kurdistan" during a panel discussion in 2007. Two years ago, a court in Viranşehir sentenced her to 10 months in prison and a 3,300 Turkish Lira cash fine, but the case is under appeal.

How strong is a country that would send someone to prison for the use of one word? A few days ago, it was Osman Baydemir, being convicted for saying "guerilla" instead of terrorist. The use and control of language is one of the best tools of a totalitarian state because control of language becomes control of thought. This is not a democracy.

Here's a link to the story in Hurriyet:

and here's a link to a documentary about Eren Keskin:





Another news item that is not a surprise is headlined: Thousands of People Wiretapped in the Last Three Years

Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Şahin has stated that in the last three years the phone conversation records of nearly 13,000 people have been disposed of as their content does not constitute a crime, once again placing wiretapping debates in Turkey under the spotlight.

“As far as I know, the number of individuals whose phone conversations are wiretapped is around 70,000. Some are claiming that 70 million Turkish citizens are being wiretapped. Such allegations have nothing to do with reality,” Şahin remarked.

According to the data as to the individuals whose phone conversation records were disposed of in the past three years, İstanbul residents were subjected to wiretaps the most. The phone conversations of 494 people in İstanbul were disposed of in 2006, while this figure climbed to 736 in 2007 and fell to 684 in 2008.

Phone conversations in the southern and southeastern regions are also closely wiretapped, according to the same data. The conversations of 395 people were disposed of in 2008 in Adana, while this figure was 864 in Diyarbakır, 411 in Mersin and 618 in Van.

Control of lanugage, control of thought, ... it makes me laugh to read that these conversations were disposed of because their content did not constitute a crime. So there are criminal letters, there are criminal words, there are criminal conversations that a state must defend itself from. Sometimes it just seems so laughable.

The Errorist

This made me laugh so hard, but at the core its very serious:
Click on the link and it will take you to a website where you can upload a picture of yourself sticking out your tongue. I think its one of the most appropriate responses to the absurd treatment of language I've ever come across.




The ERRORIST

Our medium is our message!
errorist wanted

„With a single glance at the underside of my tongue the teacher would control if I had spoken the forbidden language at home. When I was a child I still spoke my native tongue“ H.K., Diyarbakir

To stick out your tongue is more than a universal sign of disobedience.
The Errorist project is centred on the search for failures. Its art project „qwx - show ur lingua“ aims to counter the politics which homogenise the subjectivity of people living within the boundaries of Turkey, people who have a variety of ethnic and cultural identities. By prompting people to upload images of their tongues sticking out „qwx - show ur lingua“ aims to create a space of resistance.

Within Turkish society subjects who resist and who live in opposition to the politics of homogenisation are regarded as traitors and are demonised by the Turkish state and by society at large. This demonization is not only a recourse to a mythical being to shape the political and historical perception of the other but also a symbol embedded into everyday language that invokes the unknown, the threatening, and the unintelligible.

Kurds are still being FINED for speaking Kurdish.

"How can language be an enemy?" Someone once said to me. "I remember I was sent away to boarding school in Turkey, and I went to call my mother on a payphone in the school. I was speaking to her in Kurdish, she didn't speak Turkish... suddenly the principal was walking by, and when he heard me speaking Kurdish, he just took the phone and hung it up. 'You cannot speak that language in this school.' he told me. Then he walked away. And I was standing there, tears just went down my face, because there was no way I could talk to my mother. But at that moment for the first time I understood that I was Kurdish. Looking back, I thank that man because he taught me WHO I AM, and that I am NOT A TURK."

So many Turks have told me the Kurdish language is not illegal in Turkey. So many Americans can't even imagine what it would be like to live in a country where your own language is against the law. Even today people are attacked in various ways for speaking their language. The following letter was written by head of the Human Rights Association in Turkey. I discovered it at KURDISH ASPECT:


We are waiting for the answer to the question: Isn’t Kurdish free in this country?

Human Rights Association

Although Anatolia is a multi-linguistic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious community, practices in Turkey reject multi-culturalism and multi-linguist and every passing day, bans are given legitimacy. Despite the fact that law no 2932 banning Kurdish language was abolished in 1991, practices that are against the law and the legislation are still continuing.

On May 23, each of the two Kurdish citizens in a leisure park in Konya were imposed a fine of 62 YTL on the allegation that they were “making noise” speaking in Kurdish on the mobile phone with their families.

A university student in Erzurum was detained because he was reading the daily paper “Azadiya Welat”, and [therefore] he was dismissed de-facto from school. The school and dormitory administrations accompanied him when he was being discharged –in the format of lynching- from the dormitory; and he was told that he could no longer accommodate himself in the town, so he should leave immediately.

In many prisons in Diyarbakır and the region, delivery of the Kurdish paper “Azadiya Welat” by the prison administration too many inmates is on arbitrary basis. The right of these citizens for information has been confiscated and also, “Freedom of Press” enshrined in article 3 of Press Law no 5187 published in the Official Gazette of 24 June 2004, has been clearly violated.

Article 3 of the Press Law says “The Press is free. This freedom encompasses right to have access to, disseminate, criticize, interpret information and create works.” which clearly indicates that distribution of the paper can not be prevented.

Along with the EU process, political representatives in our country continuously have been saying that many legislative amendments have taken place; however, in the recent years, almost everyday, rights have been stepped on. Speaking Kurdish language, reading a Kurdish paper, publishing a Kurdish paper, news in Kurdish are practices that are continuously curbed.

Article 22 of the Press law entitled, “Prevention, Destruction and Distortion of Printed works” says “…will be given imprisonment penalty up to one year and imposed heavy fine from one to five billion Liras.”

However, for so long now, access to Kurdish daily paper “Azadiya Welat” from within many prisons in Turkey is being prevented; and no investigations have been launched against those who perpetrate these arbitrary practices, and people are being deprived from having access to information and news in their mother tongues.

In such a case, the grievance is both for the reader and the paper; and the legitimate rights of (both real and legal) persons are being violated.

Article 28 of the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey regulates Freedom of Press. It says,– “The press is free, and shall not be censored. The establishment of a printing house shall not be subject to prior permission and to the deposit of a financial guarantee. The State shall take the necessary measures to ensure the freedom of the press and freedom of information.”

Again it is the same article, laying down the conditions applicable to prohibition. In fact, it is incomprehensible that prevention is made without the decision of a judge.

Article 29 of the Constitution says that the publication of periodicals or non-periodicals shall not be subject to prior authorization but only to notification.
The editor and honorary owner of Azadiya Welat -Vedat Kurşun- has been kept under arrest for quite a long time due to the news he prepared. At the end of the trial, he was imprisoned for a term of 3 years 11 months for making the propaganda of the organization via the news he prepared.

We know it very well that the penalty imposed on Kurşun, editor and honorary owner of Azadiya Welat, being the only daily printed in Kurdish language in Turkey, has actually been imposed on the Kurdish language. We also know it very well that dismissal of students from universities, their dormitories as well as the prevention of Kurdish papers into prisons, are again stemming from the Kurdish language.

We consider it a severe human right violation that access to information is curbed and demand that the restrictions on the Kurdish language be immediately eliminated; thereby, requirements stemming from being a democratic country be fulfilled.

Head of Branch
Muharrem ERBEY, Attorney at Law

HUMAN RIGHTS ASSOCIATION
Ali Emiri 1.Sok. Yılmaz 2004 Apt. No: 1/3 Yenişehir/ DİYARBAKIR Tel : 0.412. 223 30 33- 229 58 66
Faks: 0.412. 223 57 37 E-mail: diyarbakir@ihd.org.tr

Serhado & Books as Bombs

I love this video. This is exactly how life is in Diyarbekir. For people who don't know, the guys in the white car are "civil" police, which doesn't mean they are civil, just that they are ubiquitious in their nasty pursuit of civilians: they follow, photograph, eavesdrop, "investigate" the most ordinary interactions. One time I was with a friend in Diyarbekir and she started to take photos of man sharpening knives in front of a Kebab shop. It was such a funny innocent scene. Suddenly we were surrounded by 15 FIFTEEN civil police demanding our ID and barking questions at us. We-- two middle aged American women were baffled... what had we done to provoke such an outpouring of the Turkish Emergency Defense Forces? Then one of them asked why we were taking picutres of a police station. We turned and yes, behind us half a block away, there was an ugly nondescript building covered with barbed wire. Only after my friend showed picture after picture on her digital camera, of her family, her dog and a few shots of the Kebab seller did they relent and release us but only after running our ID and questioning us for a half hour in the street. I remember one of these goons seeing a book sticking slightly out of my bag.

"What book is that?!"

He barked as if he'd found the crucial evidence of an imminent attack against the state. I pulled the book out of my bag. It was "Turkish Grammar".

"Why are you studying Turkish?"

"Uh, because I am traveling in Turkey. Merhaba."

Books are treated like bombs by the police. Here's another item from Info-Turk:

Gift Book Became a source of trouble for Beşikçi

Sociologist İsmail Beşikçi spent months to receive a box full of books sent from Sweden. Books were first sent to the Security Centre, some books were confiscated. Beşikçi wanted to take the rest then the post office asked to produce a receipt. Books were a present to him so he did not have a receipt. Beşikçi convinced that he would not able to get the books wanted to send them back to Sweden yet he was told that the two books were missing so the post office could not send them back.

Beşikçi’s two readers from Sweden sent sociologist İsmail Beşikçi around 80 books. Beşikçi received a note from the post office on 19 February. Beşikçi went to the Post office to collect the box but the workers opened the box in front of him and seeing that there were books in it decided to send the books to police to see if they were banned. Two weeks later he was called from the PO and was asked to collect his books.

Beşikçi was told that two books were confiscated but he could take the rest but was asked to produce a receipt for them. As he did not have a receipt he could not get the books and he was told that he could not send them back since two of them were missing. It took Beşikçi two months to get the books sent back to Sweden. (antenna-tr.org, June 10, 2008)

To read some of Beşikçi's brilliant writing check out Hevallo's blog.


The first time I ever went to Turkey, in 2004, things seemed so hopeful for the Kurdish situation. In that time, people wanted to believe that things were getting better. I met a Kurdish carpet dealer in Istanbul who was earnestly telling me how much things had improved. His example was this: The photographer Susan Meiselas had sent this man her book "Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History" as a gift. The man never got his book though, instead, the police came to his door in the middle of the night and took him to the police station. They interrogated him, why did he have this book sent to him? He had to prove to them that he did not ORDER the book, but it was sent without his knowledge. He told me he had to call Susan Mieselas on the phone and have her tell the police she had sent the book as a gift, he hadn't known she would send them, hadn't requested a book with the word "KURDISTAN" in the title. After the police heard her say this, they let him go home. "You see, they did not beat me, they did not keep me in jail. Things are better. But today I wish I had that book!"

I have heard endless stories of villagers who were used to burying their books and cassettes on a regular basis to hide them from the Jandarma. Word would come that the jandarma was approaching the village, and the scramble would be on to bury any item that could cause a problem. Books, Kurdish music cassettes... these things had to be buried. The army would come into the houses and "make terror", going through everything. Even an extra bag of flour, or extra tennis shoes were suspect.

When I look at this Serhado video, it is so true, the people in it are not "actors" although enlisted to act. The Kurdish mother looking out the window, wondering if her son will come back-- the smallest expression of life, of identity, provokes an overwhelming reaction of violence from the authorities. When I hear people talking about Turkey as the "model Muslim democracy" I know they haven't got a clue about reality. No "democracy" fears books, punishes people for their thoughts, punishes people for their language.

Its been claimed that Turkey will allow 24 hour broadcasts in Kurdish as an effort to appease the EU. I'll believe it when I see it. This is a state that has never stopped lying for 80 plus years. But of course, I want to have hope.

Kurds welcome Kurdish broadcast bill
Sezgin Tanrıkulu - Nebahat Akkoç
The adoption of a bill that allows full-time state broadcasts in Kurdish has been mostly welcomed by Kurdish activists and intellectuals, but they say it is hardly enough on its own.

Jiyar Gol- Filmmaker/ Halabja

This documentary on Halbja is being featured on youtube, in two parts. It records the West's complicity and continuing neglect. This is a very well made film, shocking even for me. There is not a single NGO in Halabja, no investment from outside except in the military and "security". Poisoned water, broken bodies. This is an important filmmaker (he also made the doc. on Leyla Zana) working out of Canada. One of the saddest things in this documentary is a shot where some children in Halabja say to the camera "Nothing will change. Why are you going to show this in Canada? We have been filmed hundreds of times. Nothing will change here."

"Denial is like being killed again."

This is a picture taken in Kurdistan, inside the borders of Turkey. All over the mountains in the Eastern parts of Turkey, land is stripped of it's vegetation and these huge signs are carved into the mountains with sayings like "We are ready and we are not afraid. Jandarma Kommando", or "One Country, Jandarma Kommando" etc. Around Dersim I remember thinking, that if they were really "not afraid" why do they have a tank on every hillside? I never saw these signs in the west but in all the Kurdish areas the military had to carve these messages into the mountains to reassure themselves that they are really still in Turkey. Huge sums of money go into this self reassurance and image control, and a lot of this money is spent in the US.


There's a very good article from the Southern Poverty Law Center's website about the Turkish government's INDUSTRY of denial about the Armenian genocide. The same tactics are used to deny the ongoing genocide of the Kurds as well. The Kurdish issue is sometimes referred to in the Turkish press as "The Kurdish Question" or the "Kurdish Problem". It's my experience that whenever you see an ethnic or minority group with the word "Question" or "Problem" after the the name of the group, the real "question/problem" at hand is "how do we get rid of these people." It's worth noting that the mission of The Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project is: dedicated to monitoring hate groups and extremist activity in the U.S.

The article goes on to document the millions of dollars the Turkish government spends on it's propaganda and genocide denial machine, including paying off congressmen and US scholars.

Early this year, the Toronto District School Board voted to require all public high school students in Canada's largest city to complete a new course titled "Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Implications." It includes a unit on the Armenian genocide, in which more than a million Armenians perished in a methodical and premeditated scheme of annihilation orchestrated by
Gul
Turkish president Abdullah Gul warns of severe repercussions to the relations between the United States and Turkey if the "Armenian allegations are accepted."
the rulers of Turkey during and just after World War I.

The school board members each soon received a letter from Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, rebuking them for classifying the Armenian genocide in the same category as the Holocaust. "The tragic fate of the Armenian community during World War I," Lewy wrote, is best understood as "a badly mismanaged war-time security measure," rather than a carefully plotted genocide.

Lewy is one of the most active members of a network of American scholars, influence peddlers and website operators, financed by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of Turkey, who promote the denial of the Armenian genocide — a network so influential that it was able last fall to defy both historical truth and enormous political pressure to convince America's lawmakers and even its president to reverse long-held policy positions.

The article goes on to describe the funding of the "Institute for Turkish Studies" in the US by the Turkish government.

In 1982, the government of Turkey donated $3 million to create the Institute for Turkish Studies, a nonprofit organization housed at Georgetown University that pushes a pro-Turkey agenda, including denial of the Armenian genocide. Three years later, in 1985, Turkey bought full-page advertisements in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Washington Times to publish a letter questioning the Armenian genocide that was signed by 69 American scholars. All 69 had received funding that year from the Institute for Turkish Studies or another of Turkey's surrogates like the Ankara Chamber of Commerce, a quasi-governmental agency in Turkey's capital city.

The Institute for Turkish Studies has since received sizable donations from American defense contractors that sell arms to Turkey, including General Dynamics and Westinghouse. Turkey continues to provide an annual subsidy to support the institute. In 2006, the most recent year for which tax records are available, the institute awarded $85,000 in grants to scholars. Its chairman is the current Turkish ambassador to the U.S., Nabi Sensoy.

The most important and moving point in this article lies in this statement:

"Denial is the final stage of genocide," says Gregory Stanton, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. "It is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of their relatives. That is what the Turkish government today is doing to Armenians around the world."

Last year, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter condemning Armenian genocide denial that was signed by 53 Nobel laureates including Wiesel, the famous Holocaust survivor and political activist. Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey's 90-year-old campaign to cover up the Armenian genocide a double killing, since it strives to kill the memory of the original atrocities.

He was hardly the first. As long ago as 1943, law professor Raphael Lemkin, who would later serve as an advisor to Nuremburg chief counsel Robert Jackson, coined the term "genocide" with the Armenians in mind.

The denial of memory, the erasing of narrative-- this is what my first "Turkish Teacher" meant when he talked about "cleaning". This article is worth reading in detail, as well as a separate section detailing all the "denial" web pages which often include the names, photos and home addresses of American scholars who speak openly about the Armenian genocide.

Taner Akcam, Robert Fisk, - Armenian Genocide

Taner Akcam at Columbia University on his book "A SHAMEFUL ACT"

part 1



part 2



part 3



part 4



part 5



part 6



part 7



part 8



part 9



part 10



part 11



part 12



I was told by the person who shot this video that during this talk there were people from the Turkish Embassy, photographing people as they went into the talk, and if you listen to the question and answer section you can hear the staged "provocative" questions, which reveal and absurd lack of logic and wind up being simply an embarrasment: for instance one young woman asked "If the Turks committed genocide, why are there still Armenians living in Istanbul, and they are living there happily!" The Turkish government aggressively monitors all intellecutal and academic talks, they send representatives to photograph participants, write down the remarks of people, try and find out their names, harrass and intimidate them. At a preious talk at a New York University, Taner Akcam was actually roughed up as assailants rushed the stage. The aggressiveness on behalf of the Turkish government shows a kind of desperation to control the terms of the historical narrative.

Below is a video of Robert Fisk speaking about his book THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILIZATION which inclueds a chapter about the Armenian genocide. In his account he discovers a mass grave of Armenians in Syria, where they'd been driven by the Turks. He discovers it after interviewing and old Armenian woman who remembers seeing her mother and sister being dragged away to be killed.

Musa Anter's Memoirs

I have been able to read very little of Musa Anter's writing because so little of it is translated into English, however there are three web pages with excerpts from his memoirs that reveal this gentle, intelligent man and his observations of both a lost world and the formation of a new brutal regime. This man had a remarkable life and tragic death. His mother, although iliterate, became the Mayor of their village near Mardin, and he became a witness to many pivotal events in the formation of the new Repbulic of Turkey. A "Republic" which based it's existence on the denial of history and the presence of many cultures that lived within it's boundries.

This is from excerpt 1. Link to the full excerpt is here.

He was shot dead in 1992. Musa Anter was killed by gunshots on 20 September 1992 in Diyarbakir, where he was attending a festival, organised by the local council, to which he had been invited. Orhan Miroglu, a friend who was accompanying him, was seriously wounded. The police found 13 cartridges at the scene of the shooting. An autopsy carried out on the day of death showed that Musa Anter had been hit by five bullets and had died as a result of his injuries.

He was shot dead in 1992. Musa Anter was killed by gunshots on 20 September 1992 in Diyarbakir, where he was attending a festival, organised by the local council, to which he had been invited. Orhan Miroglu, a friend who was accompanying him, was seriously wounded. The police found 13 cartridges at the scene of the shooting. An autopsy carried out on the day of death showed that Musa Anter had been hit by five bullets and had died as a result of his injuries.

The village I lived in was called Zivenge which in Kurdish means "winter place". This was no sports and leisure area the like of which people from rich nations frequent. The caves were where the flocks were kept in the winter. There are many places in my country named Zivenge, but each takes its tribe's name as well. So ours would be called Zivenge Tamika, while others were called Zivenge Habizbinya, Zivenge Bohtan etc. There have always been some people from the caves who were interested in education. The famous Kurd, Mele Ehmede Cizri's literature was translated from Kurdish into Arabic by Mele Ehmede Zivinge. He later became a religious leader for the Syrian town of Kamisli. For 7,000 years our caves were known as Zivinge but now without consulting the inhabitants the brutal government, just as if they were naming a cat or a dog, renamed our caves Eski-Magara (Old cave ). So after 65 years I suddenly became a resident of Old-caves. It is interesting to reflect that when Bulgaria allegedly started changing Turkish names to Bulgarian there was an uproar as being against human rights. I wonder if the Bulgarians learnt this trick from the Turks? It was not just the caves that changed names, but again without asking the Kurdish inhabitants, village were given Turkish names as were cities, so that, Diyaribakir became Diyarbakir, Elaziz- Elazig, Dersim-Tunceli and Samrah became Mazidagi etc. Some cities were allowed to keep their original names but Turkish names were added to these. I do not know why but they forgot to change the name of Mardin city, I suppose they could have called it Poor Mardin! The village of Old-cave is situated in the middle of the plain where the mountains of Tur Abdin meet the plain which stretches to Iraq and Syrian. It consisted of 20 houses and this area had been inhabited by humans through four geological ages..

Some parts of the caves are natural while others are man made. There is no drinking water but rain water which is collected in tanks for use. An attempt was made to pipe water from Stelile (new name Akarsu) but it was unsuccessful. Even as a child I can remember whenever the water ran out, people going to neighbouring villages to collect water at standpipes. The village's income comes somehow from an agriculture sans water. Lentils, wheat, chick peas and barley are grown. Some land grows hairy cucumber. melon. water melon, but one of the most important crops is Soya-bean (gene and oil from this plant is used for lighting as it has been for centuries. Our village has very big caves, making it suitable for cattle breeding. There are no strangers in the village. Our farm was the village. When the Ottomans first came our village was registered in my great grandfather's name Antere Mihoteze. Since then the family has grown and divided between our relatives. The village is 25 km north-west of the town of Nusaybin. There.are signs that this area once had vineyards but today you would not be able to find a single grapevine. There are still 8 barrels for squeezing grapes and the discovery of so much broken pottery around indicates that wine was made here even before Islam. After the arrival of Islam, people changed to making heavy syrup (grape juice boiled to a sugary solid grapemolasses) Other people living here who were not families were allowed any land that we had no use for. These people would work for us and take orders from us and would also give us one tenth of whatever they produced. It was all done in an agreeable and happy way. When the tractor arrived everything began to change, with people becoming more selfish and leaving the area. We called the people who worked for us neighbours. Our neighbours went to the towns and cities to work and found suffering there, but because they are still our friends whenever we meet we hug and talk about the good old days. My experiences with my family and our life together helped me be successful at school and that was perhaps the reason I wanted to become a writer; my family were small landowners. Traditionally a landowner's income is like a family charity and my father and mother, like their ancestors, carried on this tradition. We used to have an area with a room just like an hotel. Whoever came to visit the village stayed in this room free of charge. As well as visitors, troubadours or religious people would call regularly and were provided for. Some of these visitors played traditional Kurdish music on traditional instruments and also told stories, while the religious singers would have their own special instruments to accompany their singing. They would also sing the classical songs of Kurdish poets. I now know that these songs were taken from the poetry of Melaye Cizire and Feqiye Teyran. These songs told of the brutal treatment and the genocide that the Ottoman and later on the Republic (Turkey) inflicted on the Kurds. They told of the 1925 Sheikh Said uprising and of the women losing their husbands, children and possessions. People came from the towns of Lice, Kulp, Dicle and the city of Diyarbakir to take refuge in our caves. My mother and the other villagers fed them. Amongst the refugees was an old women called Xeco who had lost her husband, two sons and two son-in-laws in the Sheikh Said uprising. 65 years later I can still hear her tell her story with a voice full of bitterness and choking with tears. It left a lasting impression.

Excerpt 2 describes the effect of the ban on the Kurdish language on ordinary people around Mardin.

To help you understand the situation, I will give you another example of the difficulties arising from the prohibition of speaking Kurdish.

The villagers used to take wood to the city to sell. They transported it by donkey. They would sell the firewood for about 5060 kurus (pennies). If the donkey and the saddle was in good condition, they could sell it for 5-6 lira. To make the donkey go while riding it, a Kurd would say 'Co'. Villagers speaking nothing but Kurdish when they arrived at the city would say 'Co' and the soldiers would stop them and fine them on the spot for speaking Kurdish. Unable to speak Turkish, the Kurdish villager would attempt to explain to the soldiers in Kurdish and thus the fine built up and up.

A relative of my mothers was set up by the soldiers and in order to pay the fine he sold his firewood and donkey. He received five Turkish lira for them but his fine was 12 lira so he was beaten up and put in a cell for two days. Three and a half months later. when the tax collectors came to our village, they demanded the remaining seven lira outstanding on the fine. If he did not pay up, they would seize his house and belongings. My uncle managed to pay the fine by selling some of his sheep. Such incidents were part of our ordinary, normal daily life. If records of fines had been kept in Mardin city, it would be possible to find many such cases as this. I have many memories of those five years. But the one that really impressed me was  this: In our school were the sons of Eliye Ehmed tribal leaders called Ehmed and Senanik. In 1932 in Omeriyan town, there had been an incident and a squad of soldiers arrived in the town from Diyarbakir city. They had been sent on a clean up operation against the Kurds. Most of the men of the village ran away to the mountains. Eli agha, his two brothers and 14 men were confronted by the soldiers in Tuxip mountain. The soldiers opened fire and at the end of the conflict had killed and wounded the Kurds. The soldiers then proceeded (regardless oi whether they were dead or alive) to chop off the Kurds' heads leaving the bodies.

The story goes that when Ehmede Drei was arrested and then his head was chopped off, he managed to run a short distance without his head!

The soldiers put all seventeen heads into a bag and proceeded to display them to the people as if they were melons. The heads were finally taken to Stelile (Akarsu) where a priest (imam) washed all the heads and put the landowner with his two brothers into one bag and the rest of the 14 heads in another bag and buried them in the graveyard next to our garden.

The third installlment is here. This is a description of Musa Anter's murder taken from the web page of the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights:

He was shot dead in 1992. Musa Anter was killed by gunshots on 20 September 1992 in Diyarbakir, where he was attending a festival, organised by the local council, to which he had been invited. Orhan Miroglu, a friend who was accompanying him, was seriously wounded. The police found 13 cartridges at the scene of the shooting. An autopsy carried out on the day of death showed that Musa Anter had been hit by five bullets and had died as a result of his injuries.

The Musa Anter Peace Train

I came across this video on youtube but later discovered it's orginal source (link below). It was made ten years ago but it's still relevant today. It documents the journey of the Musa Anter Peace Train.

A quote from Joseph Cooper's web site :

In the summer of 1997 I went along to a planning meeting held by a group of activists and politicians planning to visit southeast Turkey. I was invited to document the journey. This video of the journey of a group of politicians and peace activists who gathered from around the world to meet in Brussels.

From Brussels the peace train delegates intended to travel to Diyarbakir in southeast Turkey to attend a cultural festival to celebrate International Anti-War day on September 1st 1997. An estimated crowd of 200,000 people were expected to greet the peace train delegates in Diyarbakir.

However, the “Peace Train” delegates encountered a series of obstructions and were finally stopped by a blockade of armoured cars 40 kilometres short of their destination.

Produced by Joseph Cooper and commissioned for broadcast by Med TV, a London based satellite TV Channel. 47














The Peace Train was named in memory of Musa Anter, the Kurdish author and journalist who was born in Mardin in 1918 and killed by the Turkish death squad in Diyarbekir in September of 1992. Musa Anter published a play in Kurdish in 1965-- it had been written while he was in jail. He also created a Kurdish- Turkish dictionary, as well as writing his memoirs he wrote for the Kurdish newspaper Ozgur Gundem, Yeni Ulke, and Welat.He was influential to many other Kurdish writers including Mehmet Uzun.

Here is also a personal account of the "Peace Train" journey by William Clark. I'll quote a couple of sections- the whole peice is really worth reading.

I think most people were sleeping when we came into Kurdistan. High Mountains were to the left and right of us with a low mist filling the desert ground of the valley. Higher and higher into the mountains and about eight in the morning we were stopped at a military check point at Gazi Antep2, near the Syrian border. Previously we had heard of deportations from Diyarbakir including Musa Anter's widow and daughter, several HADEP party members and our 'special guests'. They had also stopped us entering Ankara and driven away the people who had gathered to meet us, so there was no telling how things would go: from here on in we were in the Emergency Zone, under Martial Law. At the checkpoint, the soldiers start to take off one of the 'Musa Anter Peace Train' banners and set fire to it in front of all our cameras and all of us, obviously in an effort to get some kind of reaction thus 'justifying' some bloodshed. Eventually after they have had their fun they let us proceed.
As the people along the way, in greater and greater numbers, wave us on with peace signs; we could also on occasion see them being harassed by the police. At about ten thirty we are escorted into a large and notorious military compound at Urfa and more or less held under arrest. The organisers and MPs and so forth start to negotiate with the Army while the rest of us wander around the compound trying to find shade from the radioactive sun. It is beginning to look like a dead end, but I arrange a bet with Francis D' Souza of 1,000,000 Turkish Lira that we get to Diyarbakir, just for the sheer hell of it. A few moments previously Francis told Joe she was going to find out if we were free to go out of the compound by slowly walking out the main entrance and seeing what happened. He agreed to film her. No sooner had she set one foot in the open space when the click of machine guns signalled that this was a bad move and she quickly turned back. Inadvertently Paul and I began talking to one of the Turkish soldiers, a huge guy obviously in Special forces or something: he is armed with about ten fragmentation grenades, a powerful machine gun with a grenade launcher attached. I notice a little Turkish flag on the butt of his automatic hand gun--nice to see a bit of individualism flourishing, but it turns out to be quite common. He looks down at us and quietly asks us why we have come to Turkey: "Why not Bosnia or Palestine or..." "Ireland," I interject. "Yes Ireland" he murmurs, "why don't you go there?" "I've been" I reply. "All we want is peace" Paul tells him, and gradually the conversation tails off. It is a bit tricky talking to man who is equipped to annihilate all of us without breaking into a sweat.

By the end of his journey, after a brilliant description of the mayhem that ensued when the Turkish police attacked the group for having a press conference, violently beating and arresting many people, Clark writes:

As tears well up in your eyes there is a fleeting moment when, if you are as short sighted as I am, the tears make a lens and you can see with perfect clarity, but it is difficult to speak. Looking through tears and emotion--compassion--one sees clearly: but only perhaps if the eyes you meet can feel; feel what you feel and see. The Turkish authorities, the National Security Council, the small group of men who run the country have lost all humanity, and I mean all. With the Mothers of the Disappeared they profess willingness to look them in the eye and still brutalise them. The sacrifice the Mothers of the Disappeared make and will make this Saturday is for peace.
Is the struggle for peace in Kurdistan about land? The possession of land? The Kurds are not a possessive people. Astonishingly they bear no enmity towards their Brothers the Turks--this is not a sectarian struggle. They are not separatists either: how could they become separate from Turkey which has only existed in its present 'unchangable' form since the 1920s.
I have in my pocket some little stones, stolen from the road to Diyarbakir, which mean something to me, but I have given most of them away. Will the Turkish NSC prevail? As Ramos Horta5 said: "The Kurdistan region is one of the most important in the world with possibly the largest oil reserves in the world...but empires built on armies and oppression will not prevail."
One point on the Peace Train. The accusation was made in the Turkish press that the Peace Train was a front for the PKK, and a tactic to cause redeployment of large numbers of armed forces, while the PKK regrouped. This does not stand up to any analysis. If the NSC knew this, why did they then so enthusiastically and overwhelmingly fall for it. Am I smarter than the head of Turkish Intelligence? Seven buses of minor political activists, teachers, students, MPs and (it must be said) a few idiots somehow needed, what--20,000, 30,000 police, Jandarma, army, secret police, special forces, tank crews, riot police etc.--to follow, obstruct, intimidate, arrest, brutalise and attack them? And they do this to avoid bad publicity; they arrest MPs and Ambassadors of a European delegation as a sign of good faith towards their prospective joining of the European Union? This is one simple lunacy amongst many and one cannot help feeling that Turkey needs new leadership. The Kurds seem to me to be asking for little more than I brought back in my pocket--a handful of stony arid land, they probably don't even want the oil.
Peace in Kurdistan is far off. It may require a solution for the whole Middle-East. Ramos Horta described Kurdistan as "possibly the most strategic region in the world."

Ramos Horta, by the way, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996, was a founder of the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (FRETILIN), served as the exiled spokesman for the East Timorese resistance during the years of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor (1975 to 1999). He is the second President of East Timor since independence from Indonesia, taking office on 20 May 2007. In February of this year he was was shot but survived the attempted assasination.

Leyla Zana