Kurtuluş Tayiz
The Turkish original of this article was published as Kürtlere kurulan ölüm tuzağı on 14th November 2015.
How to describe what the Kurds have been living through at Cizre, Sur, Lice, Yüksekova, Nusaybin or Silvan? Are the PKK and the HDP really waging a struggle for freedom? Were all these deaths, sufferings, shattered lives really inevitable?
It is unclear just when the Kurds fell into the grip of the PKK and the HDP; you could either go way back in order to understand it, or else begin with much more recent history. But in both cases, we are going to come up against this salient fact: the PKK and the HDP have brought and given to the Kurds nothing but death, pain, and tears.
Think of an organization that for nearly forty years has been only killing and ordering to kill. The fıınction of the parties or circles that constitute its political extension has therefore been reduced to nothing but finding pretexts for all these deaths. Kurdish politicians who have chosen to support the PKK have spent their entire lives looking for ways to defend the blood shed by this organization. And they are still at it. The PKK’s struggle is actually nothing but a death-trap, and those who are backing it are charged with the mission of taking more and more lives to be sacrificed at this mill that is running [not on water but] on blood.
I do not believe that there is a single Kurdish politician who has an answer to why the PKK and the HDP does not want to make peace. Just when the Solution Process had opened the door to a democratic self-government, why did the PKK and the HDP turn their backs on this opportunity? When the organization’s “baby-killing” leader penned a 10-point letter as the state’s partner in dialogue that was read out at Dolmabahçe, why did Selâhattin Demirtaş and Mustafa Karasu immediately seek to subvert it and bring it to nought? Why, in your view, did the PKK and the HDP not move closer to peace?
Is there any Kurdish politician who can explain to the people why the PKK has always been marking the bloodiest options available over the past forty years?
Any politician with an average intelligence who has the courage to pose these questions can easily grasp that all is not what it seems, that there are other sides to the game. He or she might come to understand that what the PKK and the HDP are after is not to be able to gather and eat grapes but to beat up the gardener. Or else, he or she could perceive that the reins of this organization and its political wing are outside in the hands of other forces.
For those that find these questions too complicated, they can be put in simpler form: Why have the PKK and the HDP always been leading the Kurds on the road to death? Why have they never ever pointed out the way to live and let live? Can this be an accident, nothing but a coincidence?
There is a whole machinery of death that has been set up for the Kurds; for forty years, it has been recruiting Kurdish boys and getting them killed all over the countryside. Or else they are using them to kill others. They have latched on to these Kurdish children as a source of cheap soldiers and are mining, exploiting it to the utmost. This machinery of death is not turning and turning to the benefit of the Kurds. Over the past forty years, young Kurdish men and women are being wasted, crushed between its cogs and wheels. And unfortunately, a section of the Kurds feel nothing but awe for these traders in death. The Kurds do have more than enough grievances, sorrows and pains. The PKK and the HDP have been exploiting this Kurdish victimhood for forty years in order to recruit fighters on the cheap. But in whose interest? The interests of the Kurds?
Of course the Kurds have every right to resist and to revolt — but against the death-trap that has been set for them. If not, they stand on the verge of losing their children, their grand-children and all their tomorrows to this machinery of death. I am aware that it is a difficult trap to evade. But it is still not too late; they can help prevent the wasting of so many young lives as cheap soldiery. They simply need to refuse to heed the death incantations of Figen Yüksekdağ, Selâhattin Demirtaş, and the Kandil warlords. The PKK and the HDP are calling the Kurds to death and servility, not life and freedom.