January 3, 2000

Five hundred years ago, Turkey enjoyed a mixed reception in Europe. Martin Luther's Germany, with Ottoman armies looming on the horizon, prayed: "God save us from the Turk!" The great Dutch scholar and friend of religious tolerance, Desiderius Erasmus, however, wrote that the Turks were better Christians than the Christians of Europe.

Both views had a basis in reality. When Spain expelled the Jews under pain of death in 1492, they found refuge in Islamic Turkey, lending weight to the words of Erasmus.

More negative views, however, did not merely reflect ignorance or anti-Islamic prejudice. In 1514, for example, Selim the Cruel slaughtered 40,000 followers of Shi'a Islam simply to send what we might now call a "signal" to the rival Persian Empire.

On the brink of a new millennium, we hope that Turkey's acceptance as a candidate for membership in the European Union will lead to the triumph of its best traditions. To ensure this happy prospect, however, Europe must help Turkey confront the deadly shadows of official terror expressed not only in the mass murder of the Shi'ites almost 500 years ago, but during this century in genocides against two peoples: the Armenians and the Kurds.

When the Young Turks seized power in 1908, many Armenians supported what they thought to be a movement for a modern and open Turkey. In April of 1915, however, with the First World War providing a cover, War Minister Enver Pasha issued orders for the systematic deportation of the Armenian people into the Syrian desert, where they would starve, if they had not already succumbed along the way to hunger, disease, or outright murder. Over the next few years, 1.5 million Armenians were killed.

In 1933, a German-speaking Jew from Prague named Franz Werfel published a book in Berlin called The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, based on the true story of an Armenian community of villagers near Musa Dagh or "the Mountain of Moses". In the summer of 1915, they had decided to resist the deportations, and organized a successful armed resistance on the mountain for 40 days until rescued by French and British warships. This book, ironically, would be a warning to the Jews of Europe of the Holocaust they themselves would soon face.

The Armenian Genocide, still denied by Turkey, led to another adventure in ethnic totalitarianism which continues to this day: the 75-year genocide against the now approximately 20 million Kurds who live within Turkish borders.

Like the Armenians in 1908, many Kurds in 1923 hoped that having supported the Turkish nationalist movement, then led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later given the title Ataturk, "Father of Turks"), would bring them progress and a joint comity with the Turks. In 1924, however, the very Kurdish language was outlawed. A bloody cycle of uprisings and repression followed. The Kurds in Shaykh Said's revolt of 1925 and at Dersim in 1937, like the Armenians at Musa Dagh, fought to defend their basic human dignity.

The brutal Turkish military coup of 1980 led to the imprisonment and torture of nonviolent Kurdish leaders such as Mehdi Zana, then Mayor of Turkish Kurdistan's cultural capital of Amed or Diyarbakir, and the murder of many others. In 1984, another Kurdish uprising followed, led by Abdullah Ocalan and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). In the name of "fighting terrorism," Turkey has continued its campaign of terror against the Kurds, with the acquiescence of the United States and European Union alike.

The destruction of Lice and over 3400 other towns and villages in Turkish Kurdistan over the past 15 years, like the destruction of the Czech town of Lidice under the Third Reich, stands as a symbol of physical and cultural genocide. The continued imprisonment of Leyla Zana, a Kurdish Member of the Turkish Parliament and winner of the Sakharov Prize of the European Parliament, like the persecution of Andrei Sakharov himself, remains a symbol of totalitarian oppression.

The lesson of this century is that we cannot idly stand by as genocide takes place -- we must unite for the human rights for all. I hope that the European Union insists on human rights for the Kurds before taking Turkey completely into its fold.

Bob Filner is a Member of the United States Congress representing the residents of 50^th district in the state of California. A former Freedom Rider, who spent several months in jail as a student of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he remains a champion of those who are wronged in America and abroad. Raising the mantra of political liberties in the Congress, he has been a friend of the Kurdish quest for self-determination since mid 1990's.