From the Book THAT DAY:
The “Wise People” come to Kavar
The “Wise People” come to Kavar
Today is the fifteenth of
May 2013. I set out from Tavan to Çorsin
just before noon. Today we have
important guests. I get to Çorsin just
after the Wise People Committee is about to arrive at the villages. Clearly the Wise People are not the only ones
to arrive, for I can see several vehicles from the Office of the Prime Minister
as well. It is not easy to find space
for these vehicles in a place as small as Çorsin. The women of Kavar greet the Wise People with
pictures of their dead children. They do
not put these pictures down throughout the two hours of the meeting. The Committee is taken to the house of
mourning where the meeting will be held and seated at the chairs and tables
hung with cloths of yellow, green and red.
I quietly find a place to perch at the side and begin watching. Quite a number of people have been stuffed
into a room of one hundred-square meters.
Women sit on one side and men on
the other, with several people from the Prime Ministry wandering around in the
center. The Committee Head briefly
explains the goals of their visit and then various residents of Kavar describe
what they experienced THAT DAY. How
Çorsin was burned down on the twenty-eighth of December 1993, who it was that
gave the order, what all happened to the people of the village THAT NIGHT, all
of it is described in detail. As the man
from the Prime Ministry runs his video camera over the faces of the people of
Kavar I am once again awed by the villagers’ bravery.
Then
THAT woman begins to speak. Sometimes
she speaks Turkish, sometimes Kurdish.
It is obvious that she speaks Turkish well, but like my mother, when she
begins to weep and moan she slips into Kurdish.
She speaks of THAT DAY:
“On the evening of 28 December 1993 the
soldiers came into our village. They
took my husband out of the house. They
martyred my husband. He had done
nothing. My husband was a building
contractor. They sprayed us with
ammunition. With tank and cannon. Three of the soldiers were wearing
masks. They beat me and I fainted. First they broke my husband’s legs, in front
of the children. Then they took him out
of the house. They murdered him savagely. Then they drove over him four or five times
with a panzer tank. I ask you: WHY did
they do this? After all these years I
still have not found an answer.
WHY? WHY? They burned everything. I was left alone with my six children. No one helped us. My husband had no weapon, he was a
contractor. WHY did they do it. WHY? I
scraped my husband’s flesh off the ground.
Pieces of him were stuck on the ground, I picked them up one by
one. WHY? The next day they wrote in the newspaper: ‘A
terrorist was killed.’ WHY? What had my husband done, what was his
crime? WHY did they do this to my
husband?”
The woman pointed to her
twenty year old son standing beside her: “This
boy has no father. WHY? WHYYYYYYY?” she shrieked at the Wise
People.
“What is it that you expect from the
government?” asked the Committee Head coldly.
“First of all Öcalan’s freedom, then our
language and identity,” she answered.
“What has that got to do with what happened
to you?” answered another on the Committee, and the Committee Head added, “If you want your human rights, you must
demand them. A person must always have
the right to demand.”
The
woman seems a bit distracted, as if she were addressing them from another
world:
“For twenty years I have been asking myself the same question. WHY did they do this to my husband? ÇİMA? ÇİMA?”[1]
Then she paused and thought for a
while. “In fact there is no answer to this WHY” she mumbled,
trembling. “I know that the WHY has no answer.
I try to make myself believe that my husband died fort he sake of a
struggle, that he died for us, fort he Kurdish people. In fact the WHY has no answer,” she
moaned.
After
a little while she looked at her son again, pointing to him for the Wise
People’s benefit: “So where is his
father? I will keep on struggling till
the end. They committed an outrage
against us, an outrage, they murdered him savagely. An OUTRAGE, an OUTRAGE,” she shrieked.
OUTRAGE,
OUTRAGE... the word rings again in my ears.
How often over the years have I heard this word from the villagers of
Kavar. How many an OUTRAGE did I hear of, like: “They
drove us out, they committed an outrage against us,” “They skinned my son
alive, they committed an outrage against my son,” “They tore up our dead, they
committed an outrage against them,” “They burned down our houses, they committed
an outrage against us,” “They shattered my dowry chest, they committed and
outrage against me,” “They put my father in the earthen stove, they committed
and outrage against us.” It showed that
the Kurds think of the cruelty perpetrated against them during these years of
war as a question of “honor.” The Kurdish
question was a question of Kurdishness, and Kurdishness was now a question of
honor. I return to the hotel. For the sake of the villagers of Kavar, for
the sake of all Kurds, I seek an answer to the WHYS. I can find no answer…
***This is a small part (page: 308) from my book O GÜN (THAT DAY), published by Iletişim Publishers, February, 2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment