A Chance Encounter with a Turk

Kani Xulam

June 7, 2003

Last Sunday, I walked into a local restaurant to pick up my dinner. A waiter smiled at me and then noticed my t-shirt with a picture of a woman’s face and caption that read, “Free Leyla Zana”. The grin disappeared. He came within hearing distance of me and asked, “why should Leyla Zana be free?”

I have a few of those “Free Leyla Zana” t-shirts. I wear them often and usually on the weekends, the days that I let go of my rituals and catch up with what I was unable to do during the grueling weekdays. It is the women who invariably notice my politically loud and correct t-shirt, and frequently come to me and ask me, who is she, or sometimes, where is she in jail? I do, what some of the most vocal Washingtonians often do for a living, engage them in sound bites, make the best of my few minutes with them, and leave them with our website address, to get to know Leyla better, and perhaps get involved with the Amnesty International’s effort to free her. More than a couple of times, I have had people write me and thank me for guiding them in the right direction.

Now this fellow’s question, uttered in Turkish, was hostile in tone and different in nature. At first, I thought I misheard him and urged him to repeat what he had just said. No, he had not misspoken, and I had heard him right, and now I had to call on my education to aid me in responding to this what amounted to an insult that political Kurds should not be in view of the one of the most important pillars of politics, the freedom of speech.

I said, mustering enough strength not to lose my temper, “she should be free to enjoy her political rights.”

Thinking that this would provide him with some political food for thought, and enable me to pick up my own food for dinner, I handed the cashier a $ 20.00 bill and waited for my change. The person who stood right in my face, and spoke in suave and smooth Turkish, reached into his own bag of prejudices and shot back, “do you think she would know how to enjoy her political rights?”

The restaurant was full and noisy. I heard the hostess tell one patron that the wait would take at least 30 minutes. The cashier was helping some of the other waiters who were anxious to fill their tables with new patrons. This neophyte somewhat oblivious to his obligations was obviously having fun badgering me about the Kurds who knew not, according to him, how to use their political rights.

For a split second, I thought I was dreaming. His smirk bordering on ugliness jolted me back into reality, quickly I hasten to add, and my eyes glared on his new grin and I realized that he was wallowing in what he thought was his victory over me who had dared to wear a t-shirt that had brought an aspersion on his country.

I went closer to his ear, prayed that he would hear me well, and said, “do you know what the words, ‘political rights,’ mean?”

“Yes”, he snapped back, without thinking, giving me the impression that he was a pro in this and must have had a lot of practice on the hapless Kurds, probably in Turkey proper, or in the Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, and now he wanted to rehearse the same on me thinking that my reaction would be a silent nod of an enslaved Kurd, or perhaps even, “I am very sorry.” And he went on, “I have a master’s degree from a university”, I missed the name, but it sounded like an American institution -- Turkey does not have that many universities, and I know them all, but it has more jails, and more of my generation of Kurds have graduated from the latter’s torture chambers than the other’s faculties -- “in International Relations.”

Wow, I said to myself. This is the specimen of an educated Turk. What is the ignorant one like? Imagine the sampling of its dregs? Turkey often brags about sending its best and brightest to the west to learn, or should I say copy, but in reality all it does is to color its oriental despotism with a superficial brush of the occident, if you will. The man equated going to school with knowing one’s political rights. That was akin to saying I know how to swim because I have been to a pool, or I know how to think because I have a master’s degree from an American college. True, the chances of someone learning how to swim in a pool or how to think at a school are higher, but as statistics after statistics have proven, the results are not waterproof. Also, a modestly intelligent person would not dangle his credentials from his or her alma mater when one is confronted with a simple question like, do you know what the words, political rights, mean?

I was in an ugly fight and there was no going back. I did not ask for the challenge; and I felt, I could not walk away from it. I had made the mistake of letting him know that I spoke his language, I should have pretended that I did not, his contempt for the Kurds would not have found refuge and expression in the English language -- bigots, often, are not good students -- subjecting me to harassment in the middle of a restaurant in the heart of Washington, DC. But since I had exposed myself to his contemptous language, I felt like I had no choice but to defend myself, and the people I was representing in the nation’s capital.

“If you and your leaders knew what the words political rights meant, foreigners would be coming to Turkey to wait on tables instead of you doing it here,” I said.

His mouth foaming with saliva, his foot stomping the floor, he responded, “the Kurds are waiting on tables in Europe.”

So this was it. His balloon punctured, he was finally, inadvertently, conceding defeat, that there was no difference between him and the Kurds. He was waiting on tables here; the Kurds were doing so, according to him, in Europe. The Kurds did not know how to make use of their political rights, he had said; the Turks were in the same boat, they too were clueless, this is what his admission was amounting to, but his hatred of the Kurds was preventing him to see his sorry state. He did not want the light of political science to shine on the Kurds, because he did not know what it was himself.

That science does not yield itself to those who have perfected the art of copying the west into a fine art but not its substance in terms of accepting the realities of life and working with them. That science will never have true adherents in Turkey when some of the highest ranking American officials read bedtime lullabies to the Turks, as Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz did, on Turkish national television, on July 14, 2002, “I think a real test of whether a country is a democracy is how it treats its minorities. And actually it’s one of the things that impress me about Turkish history -- the way Turkey treats its own minorities.” That science cannot be gifted to a people; a people has to make a choice to live by its dictates, practice its tenets and unleash the energies of its children away from the family of hatred and its offspring towards the family of truth and its kin.

I motioned the Turk to keep quiet, picked up my food, left a tip on the counter, and walked out. Honestly, I felt sorry for him as well as for myself. The match was uneven. There was no glory in beating down a petty disciple of intolerance.