here - Armenian Weekly

Gunaysu
The celebrations everywhere . . . were spectacular. It was for
the first time a real celebration with enthusiastic festivities. Hundreds of
thousands of people came together, with women dressed in bright colors,
and children dancing and singing joyously.
movement are not one and the same. There
is the Kurdish political movement, with its
political party, its armed units in the
mountains, and the millions who protest
courageously at the risk of being shot; and
there is Öcalan, who has been confined to a
solitary cell for 14 years, disconnected from
realities on the ground.
After all, it is the Kurdish people who
lost family members in unsolved murders;
who cried after their children joined the
guerrilla movement, and were later found
dead, half burnt, with their eyes scratched
out; and who stood totally armless against
tanks and panzers in revolt against repression.
And it is the guerrilla fighters who
put their lives at risk for so many years in
the mountains.
Karayılan, one of the chief commanders
of the PKK, in an interview with the journalist
Hasan Cemal, repeatedly confirmed
that while they are loyal to their leader, they
had some reservations:
“There will be no withdrawal without
the state doing its share.”
“Mid-level command elements especially
have some concerns; we have to persuade
them.”
“Yesterday I talked with 250 mid-level
people. They say, ‘We came here to wage
war, and we’ve been here for 10 years. We’ve
come to the point of accomplishing a result,
then you ask us to stop.’”
“At this point, leader Apo [Öcalan]
should get involved in the persuasion
process, and for this reason direct contact
between Öcalan and the Qandil headquarters
should be established.”
Karayılan’s criticism of the BDP co-chair,
Selahattin Demirtaş, was very unusual.
Demirtaş had recently said that 99 percent of
the armed campaign of the PKK was over,
and that the resolution of the remaining 1
percent was up to the government. “This is a
shallow approach by the BDP,” commented
Karayılan. “This shows that they cannot
comprehend the retreat process in depth.
Complete finalization of the armed campaign
is not such a simple issue.”
KURDS: BOTH PERPETRATORS
AND VICTIMS
Now the crucial point: Many local
Kurds in Western Armenia, not only
the chieftains but also ordinary villagers,
were, alongside with the Turks and
other Muslim peoples, the perpetrators of the
genocide of the Armenians and Assyrians.
They were not only “tools” that were “used”
by the Progress and Union Committee
(CUP), as some of the Kurdish political
leaders have put it; in many places and in
many instances, they were quite conscious of
what they were doing. They were not the
decision-makers but the implementers,
unaware that soon they would fall victim to,
and be forced to revolt against, their accomplices
in the genocide—the successors of the
same ruling power they cooperated with in
exterminating their Christian neighbors.
The history of the Turkish Republic is the
history of Kurdish uprisings and their violent
repression through bloodshed. The last uprising,
which was the longest, was not based
purely on nationalistic aspirations, but
involved leftist, even Marxist, elements, with
much emphasis on freedom, equality, and
human rights, not only for Kurds but for all in
Turkey. And it was the first and longest-lasting
radical opposition movement in the history of
the Republic, and was not only able to undermine
at least the ideological and moral
supremacy of the establishment, but also to
challenge with some success the “invincible”
domestic image of the Turkish military.
Those in the Turkish media, then, who
criticized Abdullah Öcalan’s statements,
both in the meeting minutes and his letter of
cease-fire, were calling on the Kurdish opposition
to not enter into a deceitful truce with
this system of annihilation and denial.
CAN THEY ALSO BE PEACEMAKERS?
Of course, the responsibility rests on
the shoulders of the Kurdish oppositionists
to lead the way for the
acknowledgment of the Kurdish people’s
complicity in the genocide of the Christian
peoples of Anatolia—the Armenians,
Assyrians, and Greeks—and take steps
toward the restitution of the immense
losses they suffered.
Without fulfilling this responsibility, the
Kurdish side of the conflict cannot possibly
pave the way for, and urge the Turkish state
to agree to, a real peace—the ultimate sovereignty
of justice throughout the country.
The Kurds are both perpetrators and victims,
the victim of their own comrade-inarms
during the genocide. In order to be the
peacemakers now, they must refuse Öcalan’s
offer of a so-called “peace” between Turks
and Kurds based on the common denominator
of Islamic brotherhood, the driving
force behind the genocide. a
48 | THE ARMENIAN WEEKLY | APRIL 2013
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