National Press Club/Washington, DC/May 2, 2024

We are here to honor and remember the journalists of Turkey today. Most of us happen to be Turks or Kurds or their friends who are alarmed that our reporter friends are persecuted in Istanbul and Ankara or Van and Diyarbakir—or as we Kurds fondly call it, Amed.

Let me first state the obvious, I am not a journalist. I am, however, an avid consumer of news. The reporters do for their societies what doctors do for their patients—they help them live healthy lives. They are often targeted, but they are essential for democracies.

Thomas Jefferson knew this and stated it in a letter to a friend, Edward Carrington, as early as 1787, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

America—those of us who have sought refuge on its shores would be quick to note—has both—a government and a free press. We gather here with impunity and share our views with one another without worrying whether we would be visited by the police later tonight or in the future.

Can we say the same about Turkey—the country of our births? Turkey has a government, for sure, but does it have a free press? Americans living in France don’t hold panel discussions with titles, “Media in Turmoil”. Turks or Kurds living in the United States do.

Perhaps one day, the Middle East will be blessed with the likes of Thomas Jefferson as well and we too will enjoy a free press. For now though, our work is cut out for us—we have to talk about the unfree press—the preoccupation of leaders like Erdogan, Putin and Modi.

Their handiwork is disturbing. But like the bitter medicine that a doctor might prescribe to her patient, we have to take it, meaning thoroughly study it, enable our peoples to separate the wheat from the chaff, and wait for the emergence of healthy societies in our corner of the world as well.

This is what happened in America after its liberation from the Great Britain. It can happen in Turkey too after its emancipation from its dictators.

I have been asked to address the subject of raising the voices of the voiceless. I have chosen the stories of Tulay Acikkollu and Medine Oncel. Tulay is a Turk from Konya. Medine was a Kurd from Diyarbakir. Tulay lives in exile now. Medine jumped to her death from the seventh floor of her apartment on July 14, 1999.

Why is Tulay in exile?

Why did Medine commit suicide?

Tulay Acikkollu would have been happier if she had never become a news item in 2016. She was living in Istanbul, minding her own business, and raising her two children with the support of her husband, Gokhan Acikkollu.

Tulay and Gokhan were teachers. Fatih and Zeynep—their children, were students.

Then there was a political earthquake in Turkey on July 15, 2016. Eight days later, Gokhan Acikkollu was arrested. Two weeks later, his lifeless and tortured body was handed over to his wife, Tulay Acikkollu, like a lost luggage.

We know more about the Acikkollus because Mina Leyla has written a book about them. We learn that they were members of the Hizmet movement, the brainchild of Fethullah Gulen. Hizmet means service in English. Tulay is one of its ardent followers.

Here I can’t help but remember my Dr. King. Tulay makes no references to him, but, speaks his language. She calls herself and her fellow Hizmet members, the hoarders of books, the guardians of love and the disciples of tolerance.

Tulay is not among us, but perhaps she will read this testimonial of mine and reflect on my association of her name with Dr. King. She would, I am sure of it, benefit from knowing the American cleric. He too was a great believer of the word, service. Here is what he said of it,

“Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

America is a better place because of these prophetic words!

Dr. King, of course, knew how to make his subjects agree with his verbs. Blessed with a baritone voice, radiating unconditional love, he dared to oppose America’s war in Vietnam and didn’t shy away from declaring his country, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

While America had its Vietnam; Turkey has its Kurdistan.

Tulay and I share a common language, Turkish. A few years ago, I had seen a video in which she described the wrongs she had endured as a member of Hizmet movement. Her pain was palpable—I made room for her in my heart and kept an eye on her and her children in the news.

Last week, I had a chance to spent two days reading Mina Leyla’s account of the Acikkollus. I know quite a bit about the Turks. I also know persecuted people notice other persecuted people. I was curious to find out if she would say anything about my hapless people, the Kurds.

Would she, for example, say or imply, the Kurds are a people apart and should enjoy their political rights, the way, for example, the Scots in Scotland do—right next to their English neighbors in England!

Would she, for example, say or imply, real love is indivisible, tolerance implies universality, violence is a treason to civilization and if I ever run into her in person, would she consider joining me in urging her beloved leader Fethullah Gulen to issue a statement denouncing the war in Kurdistan the way Dr. King did in Vietnam!

Yes, I would.

Violence is like an earthquake. It has no winners—only losers. For forty years now, Kurds and Turks have been fighting one another while the children of other nations have invented smartphones, edited genes, crafted Artificial Intelligence (AI), and dared to look for signs of life in distant planets.

Why aren’t our youth crazy about science or its parent freedom, but are easy prey to those who play with us the way a cat plays with a mouse?

One woman who never held a smartphone in her hands, or heard of gene editing in America or France, or thought of robots that could think, or imagined visiting other planets was Medine Oncel. The English speaking world owes Amberin Zaman, an exiled Turkish journalist, a debt of gratitude for sharing her story with the world.

I first read about Medine back in 1999. Like Tulay’s story, it left an indelible impression on me. If I were a novelist, I might have captured her world in print—describing her pain and that of the Kurds—barred from speaking their Kurdish language by misguided leaders of the Turks—from Ataturk to Erdogan.

Medine Oncel was born in Diyarbakir. The year of her birth, 1978, would also coincide with the birth of a political party, Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, the PKK. In 1975, America took a beating in Vietnam. The PKK, thinking it could do the same in Western Asia, attacked Turkey in 1984.

Not all trees bear fruit, and the PKK’s plans to liberate Kurdistan have come up empty—so far. Its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was forced to abandon his sanctuary in Damascus in 1998. By then, Medine was in her twenties—her soul belonged to Ocalan—for her body’s sustenance, she laid bricks.

There is a passage in Mina Leyla’s book, in which Tulay entertains a hypothetical. What if she were given a choice—that she could go back to her pre July 15, 2016 life—on a condition that she forgoes her relationship with the Hizmet movement. Would she take it? No, she says, “I would never accept that offer.”

From what we know of Medine Oncel, she had a similar relationship with the PKK and its leader Mr. Ocalan. Apparently, when Mr. Ocalan was forced to seek refuge outside of Syria, Medine and her friends undertook a hunger strike in November 1998 in Diyarbakir.

It was a futile gesture—it was like Don Quixote fighting the windmills.

For her troubles, she was arrested and horribly tortured. What else did the Police do to her? We don’t know is a good answer. The thought of it forced Tulay to abandon Turkey with her children. After her death, Devran Oncel, her sister, told Amberin Zaman, “Medine always said she would kill herself rather than go through the same hell again.”

But the fiends of hell, on the payroll of the Turkish government, would not leave her alone. They paid her another visit at 3 am on the morning of July 14, 1999. They said they had come to take the sisters in for questioning. Devran went to her room to get dressed. Medine went to the window and jumped to her death.

I started my talk with a quote from Thomas Jefferson, America’s first Secretary of State. I would like to end it with another quote this time with that of Condoleezza Rice, its 66th. After taking her oath of office, she went on a tour of foreign capitals in February of 2005 and paid a visit to Abdullah Gul, her Turkish counterpart in Ankara.

Years later, she wrote her memoirs, No Higher Honor, and told her readers what she thought of her Turkish colleague.

Mr. Gul welcomed me at the airport. In the car ride to my hotel, we talked about the issues confronting our respective countries. The Kurds came up too. Mr. Gul told me, unlike the previous governments, we intend to treat them better: we will “awaken [the] Turkish identity” of our Kurds.

What does it mean to awaken the “Turkish identity” of the Kurds? Is that like Moscow trying to awaken the Russian identity of the Ukrainians? Or like when Berlin tried to awaken the German identity of the French from 1870 to 1945—through three cataclysmic wars?

If you are rolling your eyes here, wait until I share with you what Ms. Rice thought of Mr. Gul’s nonsense. “I saw nothing to dislike about my colleague’s [views]—and that holds to this day.”

There was, of course, a lot to dislike about Mr. Gul’s absurd belief in that car ride to her hotel. What if instead of celebrating their common ignorance, Ms. Rice had echoed her famous predecessor and said something like, a free press is a better medication to the Kurdish question than all the weapons of the world put together!

Such a course of action would have been too late for Medine Oncel, but it might exposed Erdogan for what he is—a menace to free societies, and allowed Tulay and her family to live unmolested lives in Turkey.

Notwithstanding Rice, Gul, Erdogan, Putin and Modi, we have to stand for free speech—the happiness of humanity depends on it.

Thank you,

Kani Xulam