|
|
|
|
|
‘‘By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls into the category of Kosovo.’’3. The Analogy by the Ideology: Kurds and Kosovar-Albanians
The theory about an ethnic cleansing of the Kurdish people in Türkiye—a theory maintained by the leftists such as, for instance, American anarcho-socialist and columnist Noam Chomsky and his associates—has been asserted as a collateral-argument for no other purpose than adding more moral strength to the efforts of the leftist camp to condemn the NATO intervention to prevent another attempt of mass destruction by the Serbs in Kosovo. And it certainly has also been designed to portray the intervention as yet another imperialist conspiracy, with all sorts of illicit grounds and corollaries. This premise and the comparative conclusion drawn from it by Mr. Chomsky, that Türkiye too must be blown up, say something about the extent of the distortion reality must undergo in order to be a perception fit to the leftist intellect. Mr. Chomsky once again displays his familiar pattern of analysis fashioned by his elementary logic. Just as in the case of Kosovo it was not the Serbs but the NATO countries which were responsible for the mass murders by the Serbs themselves, and just as it was not the Pol Pot regime but the US imperialists which were responsible for the mass killings by the Khmer Rogue in Cambodia, once more it is not a Marxist-Leninist organization, the Kurdish PKK, but the Turkish government which bears the responsibility for the massacres committed by the PKK itself. It is obvious that if we can accept the hatred of government per se as an ideological principle, then there can’t be any difficulty at all to follow the grotesque logic of Noam Chomsky even in his most ambivalent commentaries when he tries to apply his ‘principle’ to the different realities. In his elementary logic—which is a very fortunate choice of word on his part—, we don’t need to bother ourselves indeed with the irrelevant and complicated questions like the nature of governments, their relationship with the peoples, the meanings of the law and constitution and state. Any elementary idea of them will do. That very elementary logic also makes him at once a friend of all anti-government, anti-law, anti-state thughs, gangs, and organizations—whatever their crimes may be. To modify the Kurdish reality according to his ideological parameters, what Noam Chomsky needs first is an ethnic cleansing which is not difficult to devise for a man who sees any government a priori hostile to the people. His method makes any further acquaintance with the situation unnecessary. Secondly, he needs a leftist gang struggling for an alleged national liberation and an international revolution in one, although without any legitimacy, but with the help of such countries, for instance, as Syria, Libya, and Iran, of such methods as drug-trafficking, extortion, and kidnapping, of such institutions as the ex-Marxist-Leninist parties of Europe. For fantastic commentaries of Noam Chomsky, there is already an abundance of right and voluntary audience. But as to the millions of very healthy and wealthy Kurds of Türkiye, they themselves reject the Marxist-Leninist hate gang as a bunch of murderers who have all along been systematically killing also the Kurds themselves, and who have absolutely no positive thing to do with their rights, their culture, their language, their freedom. Nothing can be farther from truth than the facile equation between systematically butchered, battered, raped, and ethnically cleansed Kosovar-Albanians at the hands of Serbian army and paramilitary forces and the generally prospering Kurdish people in Türkiye. This fact alone provides a measure of the lies of the leftists who, sadly aware of the fact that the ideology has lost the last traces of its deceptive legitimacy and corrupted completely in itself, need nothing but a false reality not to be extinct. The degeneration of the intellectual to the liar finds its parallel in the degeneration of the leftist movements to sheer barbarism, terrorism, and sadism. The more the ideology loses its naiveté and becomes less illusory, the more the intellectual turns into an agent of conscious hatred. That slander of an ethnic cleansing of the Kurds in Türkiye is indeed not a particularly embarrassing one for Noam Chomsky. He is already well trained about the requirements of logical flexibility for his intellectual impostures. He is already an expert in the evasiveness about any conclusions which may seem to be scandalous to the naive beginner. He is number one in the arena of arguments involving the most ticklish cases. All just because there is left in him absolutely no trace of intellectual honor. After all, wasn’t it also Noam Chomsky who passionately tried to defend the Khmer Rogue just because the Marxist-Leninist mass murderers were antagonistic to the equally murderous US? Wasn’t it he who, with a heroic consistency, defended the neo-Nazis just because they were persecuted in their exercise of their right to the free expression by the authoritarian, repressive, even ‘Stalinist’ institutions in the democratic countries? Who else could have defended the FARC in Colombia simply on the ground that the murderous drug-gang was hostile to the US backed corrupt governments? And, finally, who else could have led the defense of Milosevic the convicted criminal just because he too was anti-imperialistic so long as his plans of ethnic cleansing are prejudiced by the imperialists? For such a perfectly disciplined ideological point of view it would certainly be no problem at all to be in favor of the Marxist-Leninist PKK with its comparatively small record of murders—just ‘5000’ civilians—in its allegedly anti-colonialist cause.
Through the
ideological filters, the world appears not as it actually
is in itself. Through the categories of the ideology, the reality is always
painted so as to be agreeable to the ‘morality’ of the ideological mind.
For a fair observer, it becomes a lie. In it, any fact can be given any
attribute according to wishes of the subjective intellect. It can be transformed
into a deception which elevates what is sheer hatred to political dignity,
sublimates what is pure violence into Marxist-Leninist liberation struggle.
1) The Reality for the PKK: Türkiye is a colonialist country occupying the Kurdish lands, destroying the Kurdish culture, and assimilating entire Kurdish population. The PKK is a socialistic workers party, fighting for the values of equality, freedom, and fraternity of the workers of the world, conducting a national liberation war against Turkish fascism. The PKK is the legitimate representative of the entire Kurdish people, recognized as such by Syria, Greece, signore D’Alema, Madame Danielle Mitterand, and the Norwegian Parliament. 2) The Reality for Türkiye: The PKK is a mob organized by the gangsters intent on an absurd dream of dismantling one third of the country, a terrorist organization responsible for the deaths of 35,000 people in 15 years, both Kurds and Turks. 3) The Reality in itself: The PKK is an enemy of Freedom. The gang is one of the last enactments of the ideology. It stands for— 1) the materialism
with its total disrespect for the human life;
As a Marxist-Leninist ‘party’ liberally sanctioning the use of absolute violence for any and every purpose, the PKK promises and actually delivers only oppression to the people it flagrantly claims to represent. The party has absolutely nothing to do with the cultural autonomy of the Kurds who live in any part of whole country with exactly the same freedom as any citizen of the country enjoys, who have now countless tv and radio stations and newspapers and journals, and who were never repressed in any form of their cultural expression, let alone the use of their language. The 1983 ban on the use of Kurdish in public was no more than an artificial and ungrounded decision among other restrictions imposed by a military regime as remedies in a very critical and painful period for the Turkish society which was paralyzed by the fights of the Soviet Union and CIA backed armed gangs in the country. And to the extent that Kurds assert their Kurdishness, they see that old taboos are broken usually without much commotion, and that the Kurdish cultural development is not only a matter of external oppression but also of an internal inertia, that it is a matter of education as much for the Kurdish as the Turkish people. The absolutely plain fact is that, as the PKK is a Marxist-Leninist party in the full sense of the word, it must, by definition, destroy whatever culture the Kurdish people has created and preserved during their devastated history. Its program aims officially at a proletarian (or better, peasant) dictatorship which would abolish all freedom for the sake of the absolute domination of the party, a tyranny which would certainly have been no less ruinous to the Kurds than the feudal landlords whose stony resistance to change killed any and every possibility for the birth of any modern Kurdish state in history. The explicit goal of the gang is to establish an independent state by splitting a sovereign country, to put the Kurdish and Turkish population under the rule of a despotic bunch. With all these inconceivable intentions, the gang is the crystallization of hatred, the fanatical negation of everything civilized, pacific, rational.
For an ideological squad intent on terrorizing the whole people, for an uncivilized bunch annihilating the law and freedom and peace wherever it enters, for a political program promising nothing but the tyranny and oppression to the people, for a gang knowing not to articulate itself except by way of violence, for such a gang the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has only a short rational answer. We’d better not to spell it here. Yet the leftist mentality, with its normal lack of consciousness of freedom, sublimates those feudal hoodlums to freedom fighters, takes what is in fact nothing but sheer tribalism as inter-nationalism, and perceives the right of defense against terror as government oppression. That is the elementary logic of the ideology. From a point of view which does not mind to understand the nature of the Law and regards it simply as a repressive tool of the ruling classes, every and any government is an oppressor against its own people. But the logical fact is that, like in all democratic countries, in Türkiye the government is people—, including the Kurds themselves. It is just their rational will. There is absolutely not a slightest trace of ethnic discrimination against the Kurds in Türkiye. They are first class citizens of their own country and state, in their own country and state—like everybody else. Their ethnicity does not prejudice to their political stature. The Turkish state, like every state which is based on the freedom of the individual will and conscience, has absolutely no ideological paraphernalia, except from the point of view of the leftist intellectual who regards every state as an embodiment of an ideology, as a tool of class dominance—, and for whom every political and cultural institution, even the religion, is a superstructure determined by the so-called material forces, but not by the will and conscience of the people, by their education, by their common sense. For the ideologue, there can’t be such an absurd concept as freedom in a state. For him, the state is bondage, not freedom but exactly the loss of freedom, not the will of the people but always of a particular class. For him, the will is not free but only a metaphysical reflection of a repressive reality, a copy, an impression from the external world of injustice. It is not a power to determine but is itself determined by a social reality which somehow exists by its own out of peoples’ minds. This is the perception of the ideology which absolves the people from their political responsibility, paralyses their will to educate themselves for the purpose of making the state itself educated, works for keeping the people hostile to the state, and resists to their full education for full democracy. State can exist nowhere but in the wills of its citizens. Even the worst states, the totalitarian, despotic, fascistic, communistic ones must be able to enjoy a substantial degree of consent from their subjects. Their institutions, constitutions, laws must be accepted by the masses—be it through lies and propaganda and indoctrination—, and any persistent opposition must be taken care of through force. So-called proletarian state could admittedly have been established only through violent repression of the human will, and what was founded on force could have been kept functioning only as long as the will of the people was kept in a state of permanent subjugation. The less developed the consciousness of freedom, the easier is the way to total repression of freedom. In any form of despotic government, the innocence of the masses about freedom is the precondition. They must know only how to obey to the authority. Accordingly, communism, that is, state capitalism, could have taken root only in those cultures in which the individual will and conscience were always being educated to mere submission to the arbitrary authority of the few, in which only few were free but the majority were permanently kept under spiritual and traditional bondage. As such, as representing the destruction of the will, so-called socialist state was already dead at its birth, totally collapsed in its despotic expanse. It was the unequaled oppression of the human will and conscience to make them turn backward, to make the human reason progress only toward its atrophy, the total eclipse of human freedom. As in the case of every and any attempt of the ideology to get hold of the state, to determine it by any principle other than freedom of the law, it was a waste of history. But as long as the citizens know and recognize the law as their freedom, that is, as long as they determine their law themselves as the expression of their own will and conscience, then fascism, communism, theocracy, in brief, no sort of tyranny has the slightest chance to take root—except in the primitive will of the ideologue. Also, in a state founded on this inflexible and irreversible will of citizenship, any ethnic conflict can be neither logical nor possible—except in the mad reality of the nationalist hoodlums. The Turkish intellectual too with his vanity regards his state simply as authoritative, ruled by an elite bureaucratic class without the acceptance of historical, cultural, social, ethnic or other diversity. Although this is a gross misperception due to his inability to differentiate his mind from what is most commonplace and worthless, to create any diversity in the most usual sense of the word, he has an abundance of ‘facts’ supporting his inductive interpretation. On his conclusion, he feels that he is excluded from such a state which is for him nothing but the sheer negation of his particularistic will, which therefore demands nothing but obedience from him and confronts him only as a repressive power over him. With his characteristic lack of the understanding of the nature of the state, he feels only the pain of his impotence. He feels the hunger for power. He is always within the quarters of the hatred. His abstract/analytical intellect always separates his individualistic will from the universal, his individualistic pathos from the universal ethos, and makes the law seem as a hostile power against him. He takes the power of the state as not the power of justice but only as irrational power of brute force. Whether he is on the left or right, his hatred of law leads him to the fanatical conclusion that since his state is essentially based on power it can be overthrown only by more power. That is the main ingredient of his world view.
But as a mere
intellectual who has fixed his mind on certain abstract concepts, he is
unable to see the concrete Idea of the state which is universal
power
working in the minds of the citizens, shaping every determination,
every institution, every component of their national existence, combating
mercilessly every deviation from its goal of full actualization. That all-powerful
idea
is nothing but the Law of the citizen, the will which is secular, supra-ethnic,
supra-class. It can be attacked. It can be damaged. It can even be buried
for some time under the debris of tyrannical assaults. Or, the individuals,
parties, even the governments which imagine they represent it may not know
its real import and breach it, turn to unlawful methods in the name of
it. But as an idea in the mind of the nation, it can not be erased.
The consciousness of freedom cannot be reversed, just as it is impossible
for the human reason to return back to paganism once the true concept of
God has been won. That very concept of the objective, universal Freedom
in which man is equal to man, in which men are united only through what
is their own will, in which the very possibility of the world peace and
all-embracing justice lies, this concept is what determines the meaning,
the rationality, the goal of whole world history. It is the hidden, unconscious
aims of billions which still live without the dignity and the taste of
it in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, and under the despotism which
is nothing but their lack of consciousness of freedom.
In view of
the prospect of an unbounded existence, not a single self-conscious
individual of the Kurdish people is ever ready to give up Türkiye
as his/her own country and to withdraw into an isolated land of
despair, poverty, gloom, hopelessness under the historical-materialist
tyranny of the PKK. It is unthinkably irrational. The majority of the Turkish
Kurds very wisely know that it is only in such a prospect of collective
development that every single individual has the best possible conditions
to improve his/her lot unboundedly, even though what they eventually will
get will be no more than an unpleasant condition of living in a world of
modern inequality, legal injustice, and capitalistic rivalry.
With a state which is nothing but their own Right, nothing but their own Law, nothing but their own Justice, no ideology can stop their further education, progress, and development towards full actualization of their human capabilities. It is only up to them to make their state perfectly equal to their will, the laws perfectly adequate for their conscience. The modern
Turkish state was founded on the principle of freedom for all—not
on the principle freedom for some ethnic group, or for some theocratic
caste, or for a certain social class. In its fundaments, there is absolutely
no social and political impediment for any citizen, no trace of repression
over ethnic identity, no amount of pressure on the will and conscience
of the individual except his/her own rational will and conscience. It is
not founded upon the will of all but on universal will. It is not
founded upon an ideology as against the claims of the irrational ideologue
for the contrary, but against the very ideology itself. So it contains
absolutely
no obstacle for its people to educate themselves forevermore towards what
is free, right, and just. The Turkish nation which is a supra-ethnic unity
of millions who trace their origins to Bosnia, to Albania, to Georgia,
to Abkhazia, to Circassia, as well as of Lazs and Turkmans and Arabs and
Kurds and Turks, a nation with its unbending institutions against any form
of tyranny, is the only self-dependent, free, self-consciously peace-loving
nation in a region which was devastated and turned into a field of warfare,
poverty and misery as a result of the corrupt policies of the West and
Soviet Union in the last century.
All countries which feel no tangible threat to their sovereignty, peace, and order from the parties and individuals tolerate the latter even in their praising the use of violence, preaching the abolition of the state and government, proposing the establishment of despotic forms of government. As long as Marxist-Leninist gangs do not act violently to establish their goal of tyranny, as long as they do not attempt to breach the law of the land actually, that is, as long as their battle ground is that of mere speech, they can talk and write and express whatever content they see fit in praise of the bondage, tyranny, and despotism. Common sense is not a bit disturbed by that freedom to produce and disseminate that garbage. That is the secret of the right of expression. Universal will is not the will of mob, and is infinitely superior to the latter. Yet what the PKK and its legal extensions has been doing all along was not the practicing of the peaceful speech but an indiscriminate terror—against Kurds as well as Turks, civilians as well as security forces. What it aims at is to beat the Turkish nation militarily, to make it abandon a huge portion of its land and leave its population under the Marxist-Leninist tyranny of the rabble. That absurd dream could have been dreamed only out of Türkiye, shared only by the delusions still visible in the despotic residues of the world. In spite of all hardships they suffered in their long neglected land, the Kurds never saw the gang as their own. But Greece did. Syria did. And Madame Mitterand and signore D’Alema and Norwegian Parliament did. And all the other terrorist organizations of the world did. But not the Kurdish people. In spite of the strong feudal tradition which kept the Kurds under bondage for centuries, millions of Kurds have already fully learned that freedom is something over and above the ethnicity, that they have infinite value and full personal recognition just by being citizens, that the primitive concept of race has nothing to do with their Kurdish cultural heritage, that the tribalism of the PKK is simply uncivilized.
The PKK is a contradiction in terms, a contradiction of an independence that could have been gained only through a real dependence on the despotic powers of the region, of a ‘freedom’ only through a program of tyranny, of an anti-imperialism begging recognition from the very imperialists themselves. As a contradiction in life, it has always been only a waste of life. With a blackened mind unable to think rationally, incompetent to set forth any demand through peaceful dialogue, it has always resorted to the violence as its only means of expression. As expected, the materialist gang never felt itself in possession of a rational demand to declare. And as a dumb contradiction, it has had only an illusory existence—in the recognition granted to it by Syria, Greece, Norwegian Parliament, Madame D. Mitterand, and the likes of anarcho-socialist Noam Chomsky. For Noam Chomsky the anarchist thug and his associates, the efforts by the Turkish security forces to stop this fury of destruction by acting within the rules of law, to curb a guerilla army claiming to have tens of thousands fighters and always fresh reserves without violating the human rights, this emotionally infinitely painful, morally and economically devastating dirty job is no different from an ‘ethnic conflict,’ or an ‘ethnic cleansing,’ or a ‘genocide.’ The same man who denied the Communist massacres of millions in Cambodia and Vietnam, who had no objection to the mass killings of the civilians in Kosovo by the Serbian security forces now declares the fight against a Communist gang in Türkiye to be an ethnic cleansing, a genocide. Quite consistently. The plain fact is that in the struggle against terror in Türkiye for 15 years, absolutely not a single expression of hatred has been heard against the Kurds—not even from the Turkish families who had lost thousands of their loved ones in the war. The world needs a cleansing indeed, an mental cleansing for the sake of Freedom, Peace, and Justice—a cleansing from the ideological hatred which destroyed the happiness and freedom of countless nations for decades, made the world infinitely more dangerous place than ever, distorted the progress of the world history, and made almost a whole century a waste in time. The same ignorant hatred still keeps a good portion of humanity in bondage, still tortures millions mentally and physically, destroys the chances of rational and moral development of countries like China and North Korea and Cuba, and of individuals like Noam Chomsky and the likes of him. The world still needs a cleansing of the feeling of hatred which so firmly clings to the intellectual mind that, through energizing his will to power, will to violence, will to destruction, it renders the greatest service to justify the existing state of injustice in the world, makes the greatest greed humanity ever created seem as legitimate, the meanest motives to be the principle of freedom and equality. The PKK is
the enemy of the entire civilized world as well as the Kurdish people.
Even a shamelessly biassed organization like Human Rights Watch
couldn’t help demanding that its leader be tried for his terrorist crimes,
like Ta Mok of the Khmer Rouge.
1) A note on the Kurds in Türkiye As against the ideological pictures given by the pro-PKK sites, we’ll sum the data which may also be found in several NGO sites on Internet: The Kurds are first class citizens in Türkiye. Nothing in the Turkish Constitution or laws discriminates against its citizens of Kurdish ancestry. Nothing in the hearts of Turks prejudices the friendship between the Kurds and Turks. They are in no way inferior to the rest of the citizens, never treated like e.g. the Tornedalians and Samis in Sweden whose culture and heritage have virtually always been connected with feelings of shame and inferiority; like the Jews in all Christian West; like the indigenous peoples confronted with the Europeans anywhere in the world and any time in modern history; and like Blacks in the US. Turkish Kurds are over-represented among the corridors of power and wealth considering their some 20 percent of the Turkish population. More than 25 percent of National Assembly members, some 150 in the total of 550, are Kurds including the Speaker. They are always prominent in the Cabinet and judiciary. Three out of seven Presidents of Türkiye have had Kurdish ancestry. Kurds are also eminent among the of bosses of industry and finance (some with billions of dollars of worth), and the average income of Kurds generally comes close to that of average among the entire Turkish population. Turkish is the official language of Türkiye, as many states in the world have made the majority language their official language. The Kurdish language, songs, and culture are left undisturbed outside of official public matters and life in Türkiye. A Kurdish political party, HADEP, furnished a full list of National Assembly candidates in the elections (although just because of its ties to the PKK it was rejected by the Kurdish electorate). And Kurds serve without discrimination or disinclination in the armed forces.
2) Some facts about the Kurdish people in Türkiye: The data presented here is borrowed from the Turkish Democracy Foundation which can be found at this adress: Turkish Democracy Foundation. i) The Number: Since the latest population census which contains data on population by mother tongue was conducted in the year 1965, today it is impossible to give the exact number of the Kurds living in Türkiye and their percentages according to the different regions. Encyclopedia Britannica (1987) gives the percentage of the Kurds living in Türkiye as 9.5%. One of the highest percentage is given by the CIA is 20% in 1995. For 1996, McDowall gives it as 23% and that is 13 million. Ford Foundation gives for 1990 the numbers as 12.6% and 7,046,150. On the whole, today two thirds of the entire Kurdish population lives in Central and Western Anatolia. In the general elections held on December 24, 1995, the alliance between pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HADEP) and extreme leftist parties could gain 4% of the total votes. [More precisely: 4.17% in 1995, and 4.73% in 1999.] ii) The Kurdish Heterogeneity: In a survey conducted in some provinces of Eastern Türkiye in 1995, 7.9% of the respondents identified themselves as Zaza, but not Kurdish. It is acknowledged that 30% of Kurds in Türkiye are Alevite and their affinities with Turkish or Zaza speaking Alevis are greater than those with Sunni Kurds. In addition, including the people called as Kurds outside Türkiye, it is seen that there are various dialects such as Sorani, Gurani, Kurmanji, Lorani with major differences that impede someone speaking one dialect to understand one speaking another. They also include subdialects and their locally spoken forms, e.g. Buhtani, Garmiyani, Baban and so on. iii)
The
Kurdish States: The only state Kurds ever
had was the Kurdish Republic in Mahabad founded
in 1946 and lasted only for one year. The Republic was formed under the
Soviet influence and not supported by Kurdish tribes in Iran. It was destroyed
easily by the Tehran government since Soviet influence ceased to exist.
The Treaty of Sevres
signed on August 10, 1920 but never put into effect is commented by pro-Kurdish
circles as a great opportunity toward statehood. Article 64 of the Treaty
stipulated as follows: "... If Kurdish peoples within the areas defined
in Article 62 (Southeastern and some parts of Eastern Turkey) shall address
themselves to the Council of the League of Nations in such a manner as
to show that a majority of the population of these areas desires independence
from Turkey, and if the Council then considers that these peoples are capable
of such independence and recommends that it should be granted to them,
Turkey hereby agrees to execute such a recommendation, and to renounce
all rights and title over these areas. …" The Treaty of Sevres was imposed
on the government in Istanbul by Allied Powers who won World War I and
who by then occupied the city. The Treaty was never put into effect as
occupying forces in Anatolia were expelled with the support of the Kurds
under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
|
|
What
leads the leftist intellect to invent a theory of an ethnic cleansing
or
of a genocide regarding the Kurdish people of Türkiye
is the simple materialist logic that as the PKK is a Marxist-Leninist organization
any action against it is state oppression while its crimes are committed
for the sake of national liberation, carried out with as much right as
those of the Bolsheviks, the Chinese Red Guards, the Poll Pot guerillas
and countless others.
