What Happens When
Your Oppressors Are Next-Door Neighbors?
A Story Out Of
Kurdistan
Part One
World Affairs
Council of Ventura
Ojai, California
Kani Xulam
June 9, 2006
[A slightly
altered version of this statement was also delivered at the World Affairs
Council of Maine in Portland on May 24, 2006]
In 1886, Leo Tolstoy published a book titled Twenty-Three
Tales. One of them was about,
"The Three Hermits". It
is a story of grace and humility, rarities in an increasingly violent and
arrogant world that has come to characterize our times. It is a long tale, but I have shortened
it for the purposes of this lecture.
I offer it as a teaser, an appetizer if you are into food, to prepare
you for the main course, which is Kurdish. But I need to warn you in advance that the Kurdish fare will
be heavy, and some of you may even leave this hall thinking, boy, I wish he had
also told us, it was going to be raw and bloody. I guess all I am trying to say is that, don't blame me for
the repast; consider me in the light of the charming English expression,
"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." That is what I have tried to do with
our neighbors who have now become our oppressors. It is a heartbreaking tale in need of masterful storytellers
like Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Dickens, and Sophocles. But tonight you are stuck with me, a tormented soul, with a
dull pen and an accented tongue, whose love for truth has forced him to become
a reluctant storyteller of his people, the Kurds.
First let me pay homage to a person who is not present
among us, but responsible for my presence among you. She has the name of an American, but I call her the guardian
angel of Kurdistan. At the beginning
of this year, I got an email from her, saying, "I want to know how I can
be of some help to the Kurds."
It was music to my ears, oops, my mistake, her email was a piece of
sublime art before my eyes, and I wrote her back immediately, thanking her in
earnest, quoting her the inimitable observation of Voltaire, that, "The
worst kind of hanging is to be hanged obscurely", and urged her to put me
in touch with the children of Jefferson.
I won't bore you with the details of our ensuing emails, but suffice it
to note that she reached out to the World Affairs Council of Ventura and
convinced your officer, in charge of programming, that I should be given a
platform to offer you a perspective on the children of Kurdistan. The decision was made; I was
invited. It goes without saying
that I am grateful for the invite and look forward to befriending some of you
later tonight. But now, I have a
duty to perform and that is to pay my dues and to acknowledge my hosts. These kind Americans, respectively, are
Amy Howard and Jay Berger. Please
join me in giving them a hearty round of applause.
The story of "The Three Hermits" in Tolstoy's
Twenty-Three Tales begins with an epigraph. It consists of two verses from the Bible, the Book of
Matthew, Chapter 6, verses 7 and 8.
If heeded, they can instill a little bit of modesty into our lives not
to mention some sanity into the conduct of the states. They read, "And in praying do not
heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be
heard for their many words. Do not
be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask
Him." The tale itself
chronicles the encounter of a Bishop with three hermits. It takes place in the course of a sea
journey from Archangel, a city on the coast of the White Sea, to the Solovˆ©tsk
Monastery in Russia. On the ship,
the Bishop hears the story of three hermits who live on a desolate island for
the purposes of saving their souls.
Bested by his curiosity, he convinces the captain for an impromptu
visit. On the ground, he greets
them warmly and engages them in a conversation. At one point, he asks them, "Tell me, what you are
doing to save your souls, and how you serve God on this island." One of them says, "We do not know
how to serve God. We only serve
and support ourselves. ..."
The Bishop then asks, "But how do you pray to God?" "We say", another says,
"three are ye, three are we, have mercy upon us."
A smile crosses the Bishop's face. He then decides to teach them the
prayer, "Our Father". By
the time he is contend that they have mastered it, it is almost dark. He bids them farewell and returns to
his ship. He can't help it, but go
to the deck and look in the direction of the island. As the night progresses, the full moon casts a shining path
on the sea. Suddenly, he notices
something white on the lighted path nearing the ship. Upon closer inspection, he sees the three hermits, holding
hands, and gliding on the water.
When they reach the ship, they say in unison, "We have forgotten
your teaching, servant of God. ... We can remember nothing of it. Teach us again." The Bishop crosses himself and, leaning
over the ship, says, "Your own prayers will reach the Lord, men of
God. It is not for me to teach
you. Pray for us
sinners." The three hermits then
go back to their island. The ship
continues with its journey to the monastery.
I wish I could stand before you tonight and recount for
you our own encounters with such humble men of the cloth, or of the state, that
would let us keep our prayers, speak our mother tongue, sing our songs, and
maintain the tradition of giving our children the names of our ancestors. The ones that fate has sent our way,
without an exception, have been unaware of the word sinner among their own
ranks. They have given us no
choice but to submit to their faith or race, yes, there are people out there
who want us to change our race, or face consequences that should not be, if
life were gentle, uttered in polite circles such as this one. But life has been anything but gentle
to the Kurds, and I have been asked to put into words, what it means to be a
Kurd at the dawn of the 21st century.
It is akin to asking a lion born and raised in a zoo to tell those who
were born in the wild how it is to live in captivity. Historians who have actually observed this phenomenon
ominously note that very few ever adjust or survive in the wilderness. That also happens to be the master plan
of our keepers who wish to do away with our presence from the face of the
Middle East. They work around the
clock to make sure you will never hear from us, or if you do, it will be in the
form of artifacts in the museums.
Perhaps one day some of you will visit one of those museums to learn a
bit more about the Kurds. If you
do, this Kurd will not begrudge you at all if you say, thank God, I was not
born a Kurd.
Now that I have alarmed you as such, let me also share
with you a little bit of guarded joy, yes, that is all we can afford these
days, and that is, we are still rejoicing in the news of the toppling of Saddam
Hussein. Although your loved ones
have paid, and are still paying, a heavy price, it has not put an end to our
status as subjects just as your independence in 1776 did not bring liberty to
the Blacks. The Middle East of
today has only one use for its Kurds and that is, we can live in it all right,
but we have to assume the identities of our masters, the Turks, the Arabs and
the Persians. The proper name for
this plan is cultural genocide over time.
But you will never hear such honesty from the lips of our self-appointed
rulers. And while I am at it, let
me say something else, and that is that your own government is in full
agreement with our foes and vehemently opposes the liberation of Kurdistan and
the emancipation of its children.
It is indeed no exaggeration to say, we, as a people, numbering some 30
million souls, living on a track of land as large as France, are now staring
death in the face. When nations as
old as the dawn of history become expendable, because of someone's greed or
someone else's sense of entitlement, it is time, at least this lover of
humanity believes, someone pulled the emergency brakes in our spaceship
earth. So far, no one has bothered
to even register our complaints.
Unless God intervenes, or people of goodwill such as yourselves decide
to stand up for the Kurds, the end of Kurdistan, which had its greater
dismemberment sanctioned on July 24, 1923 in Lausanne, Switzerland, imagine
someone partitioning your country in Tokyo, Japan, may become a reality on your
watch or those of your children.
But before you consider the possibility of pulling down
the emergency brakes for the sake of the Kurds, let me expand a bit on the
dirty work of our adversaries who enjoy diplomatic relations the world over and
pass as friends of humanity among their own bewitched societies. When people say, inside the souls of
the most vociferous champions of democracy lurk some of the most implacable
despots of the world, I raise my palm for Turkey, Syria, Iran and even Iraq to
be on that list of God forsaken states that are misruled by people who speak
out of both sides of their mouths.
But the saddest part of this proverbial charade has to do with the
shameless claims of these hypocrites that they are the disciples of
"Western Civilization", and in the case of Iran,
"Islam". Reflecting on
their nonsense, I have been found to mutter, where are you Mahatma Gandhi to
set these Godless misfits aright?
As some of you may know, that great emancipator was once asked what he
thought of the "Western Civilization". He had responded by saying, "I think it would be a good
idea!" He had tried to say
you couldn't have a "master race" and also "liberty" in one
state and consider yourself on the right side of civilization. Not Just Ankara, Damascus, Baghdad,
Teheran, but also Washington is filled to the brim with delusional people with
PhDs no less who are bent on proving the old of man of India wrong.
But that great soul, that magnificent apostle of
nonviolence, that gift of India to the whole world, that role model of humanity
for the good has, thank God, left us a treasure trove of his observations that
we could tap into for the thankless task of clearing the wheat fields of the
world from its rank weeds. It was
him, for example, who said, "Be the change that you want to see in the
world." What does this mean
for the Kurds? Should I share with
you my take on it, in the form of a to do list, the one you Americans often
place on your fridge doors, and this Kurd keeps it on the wall above his
computer monitor? My list,
usually, is a long one, and I often fine-tune it, but there are four items on
it that hardly change and have been staring at me for years now. One, do not compromise on
self-determination, mobilize every cell in your body, every penny in your
pocket, every friend in your rolodex, and every house of worship in your
adopted city for the emancipation of the Kurds and liberation of
Kurdistan. Two, tell the Turks,
the Persians, and the Arabs, if possible after sharing with them a bottle of
wine, oppression is like cancer, it affects the inflicted as well as the
administrator. Three, remind the
same folks of Dr. Freud's famous observation, "The man who first flung an
epithet at his enemy instead of a spear was the true founder of
civilization." In plain
English, exchanging words is better than exchanging bullets! Four, if the knuckleheads, well, remain
knuckleheads, pray that they will commit follies, like what Saddam Hussein did
when America asked him to come clean, and he refused to do so.
It is but with a heavy heart that I am here to tell you
that so far, in spite of everything that Kurds, like me, have done, Kurdistan
remains beyond our reach. It has
been very, very hard, without help from outside, to outfox, outmaneuver,
outsmart, and outrun the devils that have cornered us from all sides. The fact that the world has turned its
back to our struggle, or worse, aids and abets our oppressors, has made the
situation even worse. Iran, for
example, has been shelling the Kurdish villages inside Iraqi Kurdistan this
past month, has anyone here heard of a condemnation from the United
Nations? Turkish police killed
sixteen Kurdish demonstrators and bystanders two months ago, five of whom were
children, one of them, a toddler; did your government even issue a rebuke? I used to think if 300,000 Arabs of an
artificial construct called Kuwait can tap into the goodwill of this nation, 30
million of us, the children of a real country, with some diligence and luck
could expect it as well, but after spending thirteen years in your capital, I
am beginning to have doubts. Am I
that bad to have my faith shaken in your country? One thing I have learned and here is the difficult part of
my job, the bigots speak for the Middle East and they have turned the cradle of
civilization into one of the most frightening places on the face of the
earth. Would someone care to
contradict me here? I would love
to make use of my ears and not just my tongue.
You have already heard me make a reference to a Kurdish
toddler. He was knocked down with
an American bullet in his head. It
happened on March 29, 2006. A day
before, thousands of Kurds had taken part in a funeral ceremony for four Kurds
who had been killed on the mountains of Kurdistan. The Kurds, who had started the day by picking up the bodies
of their fallen fighters, were shocked to find them not only riddled with
bullet wounds, but also discolored.
Not knowing what could be the source of such an ominous thing -- but suspecting, deep in their hearts, that chemical weapons
were used on their loved ones
-- they demanded an
investigation. No one, in this
world of six billion people divided into some two hundred countries, took up
their petition. Even the
international bodies, like the United Nations, the European Union, and the
Organization of the Islamic States have had no use for the Kurds or their
concerns.
It was then that the dejected Kurds licked their gashing
wounds and got to work to bury their youth. Some ten thousand people showed up for the sacred
ritual. But the Turks would not
leave the grieved alone, harassing them, taunting them, and provoking them on
the road to the burial grounds.
Turkish piloted F-16 fighter planes, courtesy of your government, flew
overhead to cow the mourners. The
police on the ground did not need help to compound the problem. According to the eyewitnesses, the
Kurdish fathers were indeed cowed with such overwhelming display of force, but
not their children. They picked up
rocks and attacked the torturers of their fathers. Up until five o'clock, it was the fight of the little Davids
against Goliaths with minor injuries on both sides. Then orders were given to the Turkish police to fire live
ammunition. Two Kurds were
critically injured who later were pronounced dead in the hospital. The stage was set for a series of
simultaneous demonstrations across Turkish occupied Kurdistan that lasted
several days. By the time they
were over, a toddler, four kids, and eleven adults would be killed. Scores were injured, thousands arrested
while hundreds are still in custody.
While most people have expressed shock or offered
explanations for the rage of the Kurdish youth, I have had trouble getting the
Kurdish toddler out of my mind. I
have, for example, wondered what kind of child was he at the age of three. What kind of boy would he have become
in a farcical state like Turkey?
Would his teens have been trouble free? Would he have ever made it to a Turkish university, a slim
possibility, given the state induced poverty and lack of opportunity that
prevails in the Turkish occupied Kurdistan? What would he have done about his mandatory military service
in a country that would have prepared him to fire, yes fire, on his own people
not just in Iraqi Kurdistan, but also in the city of his birth, Elih? If asked where he was from, would he have
given that foul and impolite answer, "southeast Turkey", or the
polite but the prohibited one, Kurdistan?
Now that he is in high heaven, what is he doing with his time? Can he take that bullet that the
Turkish soldier lodged in his tiny head to Thomas Jefferson, your third
president, a man who had the fear of God in his heart, and say that it was
fired from an American gun, an M-16, when he was playing with his toys by
someone who was allergic to his Kurdish identity? What would Jefferson tell him? What can you as his offspring tell me about the murder of
the Kurdish children by American weapons?
Do you believe in something called atonement? Would you consider removing your blessings from an evil
design called the cultural genocide of the Kurds by the Turks?
As I was mulling over these and similar questions,
something else occurred to me, and that was that the little toddler never
actually knew he was a Kurd, never really understood why he was targeted, never
really grasped the hatred that enabled a twenty year old Turkish Rambo wannabe
to snuff life out of him. I
thought perhaps I should write him a letter and explain to him the
circumstances of his death, note the essential as well as the circumstantial,
and say, for example, how his hapless mother coped, or is coping would be the
better word, with his absence, how his dad is taking the news, and how his
playmates are adjusting to life without him. I also wanted to tell him a little bit about life outside of
Turkey, how other nations resolve their differences, and why the Turks and the
Kurds haven't been able to put an expiration date to their conflict. Finally, I wanted to see if I could get
him to lobby God to work on his "contrary and wayward" Turkish
offspring, to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare, so that they could be smart
like President Vaclav Havel of old Czechoslovakia who listened to the concerns
of the peoples in his care and oversaw an amicable divorce between the Czechs
and the Slovaks and not dumb like Slobodan Milosevic who tried to force a
marriage on peoples who didn't want to live together and lost in the process
not just his freedom, but also life and the moribund state of Yugoslavia as
well.
I did actually write that letter. I would like to read it to you. I ask for your indulgence.
Dear Fatih,
72 days ago today, you bid farewell to the known
world. I was numbed when I saw the
news. A soldier filled with hatred
had pulled the trigger on you. You
died instantly, but your frantic parents would not and could not accept the
truth. They rushed you to the
hospital. They wanted you
alive. The doctors knew you were
gone, but felt compelled to occupy themselves not for you, but your mom. They were seriously afraid that she
would pass away in their hands.
She just wouldn't stop pulling her hair, making deep and bloody furrows
with her nails on her face. I
don't know what went through the doctors' mind, but I can tell you about mine:
a nation that cannot protect its children is already half dead. You are its most blatant proof. I pray that the Kurds and their friends
who have eyes that see will never close them to the evidence.
Hatred has been with us, at least, since the books were
written. It has an uncanny ability
to travel around the world. It
flourishes, especially, in shallow minds.
People, who think highly of themselves, like the Turks, the Arabs and
the Persians, or the Germans when Adolf Hitler was around, are particularly
vulnerable to it. In Turkey, where
you opened your eyes, and then closed them for good only after, what, one
thousand days, it is not uncommon to be consumed by it as early as you
were. I guess all I am trying to
say is that, when the die was cast for your presence on this earth, God had
chosen the wrong place, the wrong race, and the wrong neighbors for you. If he ever decides to send you back,
ask to be a Dane. Yes, these
children of Vikings, once the scourge of the known world, are now the most
faithful observers of the Biblical injunction: "To those much is given
much is expected." I have
always had a soft spot for the friends of humanity in this world. They are now ranked the best in our
merciless globe.
Down here in the city of your birth, you were buried
right away according to the rituals of Islam. Kurds raised their trembling hands over your tiny grave and
prayed that you would make it to heaven.
I had no doubts that you would.
To begin with, you knew nothing of hatred, the surest sign of a one-way
ticket to hell, and its debilitating effects on the societies that are afflicted
by it. Your good heart, although
didn't beat very long, was free of ill feeling towards anyone including those
who couldn't stand your name. Yes,
Fatih, of all Kurds who have died for Kurdistan with a bullet wound, and God
knows our brave fighters have been generous on this score to a fault; you
probably have the cleanest record.
If you agree, can you please take it upon yourself to ask God for a
special audience? If he grants you
one, will you be so kind to raise a question with him that has been bugging me
for the past several years now?
You see, I have been telling the Americans to help us,
the hapless Kurds, but I don't have much to show for all my efforts,
demonstrations, vigils and even a hunger strike on the steps of the their
Capitol. I have been imploring
people all over this country that Turkey can pass as a carbon copy of South
Africa and that Apartheid didn't just melt away on its own, but required the
people of goodwill to call it with its proper name, evil, and then fought,
fearlessly and selflessly, for its extirpation from the face of the earth. The same, I have pleaded, needs to be
undertaken relative to Turkey, good people need to divest from it, stop buying
its products, block its participation at the International Olympics, and
censure it at the United Nations.
So far, only my closest friends have bought into my arguments. The question I have for you is really a
simple one. Would it help if I
color myself black and urge all the other Kurds to do the same? I guess all I am trying to say is that
I will do anything to help the good folks see what evil has done to the
Kurds. Many, for example, tell me
upfront that they can't tell a Kurd from a Turk. That is like saying the Italians look like the Greeks. They do, but that doesn't mean one
should dominate to the other. The
same should apply to the Kurds as well as Turks. Let me also make you privy to a secret, if God says yes to
my question of going black, with the price of a single Kalashnikov, we Kurds
could paint the inhabitants of an entire village. In other words, freedom is worth every trick in the book or
outside of it save murder. Please
let me know as soon as you can.
Yes, Fatih, we definitely need HELP, and I am writing the
word help in bold and block letters, to bring the Turks to their senses. In the aftermath of your death, in case
you are wondering, the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep T. Erdogan, never bothered
to send your family his condolences and did not say anything like he will
undertake procedures to court martial the soldier that murdered you on that
fateful day, March 29, 2006. I am
not a vindictive person by nature, but I can't help thinking what if, let's
say, a Russian soldier had murdered his grandson with a single bullet, just as
it happened to you, in cold blood.
Would he have then made that indecent, that reprehensible, that
blasphemous, that abominable remark that you had asked for your death? Is it possible that he might have then
understood your grandpa's pain?
I have one other thing to tell you before my parting
words. In the days after your
death, I read pretty much everything that was written in the Kurdish and
Turkish dailies about you and your friends. One paper noted that 563 people were arrested and 202 of
them were kids in Amed alone.
Another one said 182 individuals were treated for wounds in its
hospitals. Weeks later, still
another noted 116 children might be facing jail times of double digits. None of that was news to me as someone
who follows Turkey closely. But
what the Turkish police had announced on their PA systems, in the course of
demonstrations, did take me completely by surprise. They had taunted the Kurds in the city of Amed with the
following words, "Your children are outside, and you are inside; if you
are man, come outside and fight us!"
Can you ask God what he made of the scene? Ask him also if the Turks would have done the same thing if
America had given its weapons to the Kurds? I dare say they would have run away, all the way, to Ankara,
bag and baggage, as they say. I am
dying to know what he is going to tell you!
I have saved the best for the last. On the day of your death, the Turkish
prime minister was not in his country; he was in Sudan. After delivering a speech titled, the
"Dialog of Civilizations" to the delegates of the Arab League, please
don't ask me who suggested his name for the topic, he visited Darfur and
thumbed his nose to the world by saying that genocide was not taking place in
the country of his hosts. He then
flew home and blamed you and your mom for your predicament. In his words, "The security forces
will intervene against the pawns of terrorism, no matter if they are children
or women." I remember
muttering to myself, he can't be saying so. But then I hadn't yet heard of the most grotesque. It came on April 10, 2006. The head of Turkish military, Hilmi
Ozkok, visited Amed, the center of the Kurdish uprising, and said, "We
love all the people of this region."
And without missing a beat added, "The Turkish Armed Forces are
doing their job."
When love, that noblest of all human sentiments, is
mistaken for hate, when duty is equated with your death, and when security
forces are used not to protect but to uphold the cultural genocide of the
strong over the weak, I can at least be sure of one thing, and that is, I am so
happy that you did not get to hear these most fiendish of all fiendish
pronouncements in the short life that you had. I can barely take them from a distance of five thousand
miles. I guess all I am trying to
say is that our work is cut out for us Fatih. You have got to get God, who is supposed to love all his
children equally on this tortured world, to see what is happening to the Kurds
and Kurdistan; and the Kurds like me have got to do their best with the
Americans and America. As it
stands, Washington is not siding with the right, and the Kurds. If or when it does, beginning in
Iraqi-Kurdistan, we too can take possession of our lands, raise our own flag,
issue our own coin, and take our empty seat at the United Nations. It will be a glorious day indeed. You can be sure of one thing: untold
bottles of champagne will be uncorked to celebrate the event.
Be well,
Kani Xulam
This was my letter to the Kurdish toddler. Thank you for hearing it out. I am now ready for your questions.