North-Press Agency
Hussein Jemmo
During his years in power since he assumed the presidency, and especially since the presidential system came into place in the summer of 2018, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s obsession in waging wars on all forms and aspects of Kurdish existence raises many non-political questions. Before asking questions, it is necessary to recognize the meaning of the aforementioned, that is, his obsession in waging wars on Kurdish existence. Some of those who consider themselves intelligent will refer to the fact that there are Kurds walking in the streets of Istanbul daily, in continuation of the long historical trick about the continuation of Christianity in the East. He intends to wage these wars wherever he can, but undoubtedly, a series of wars based on social oppression and transgressing political goals is rippling inside him. His statement last Monday that “in the new phase, we will build a large and strong Turkey” can only be understood as an indication of the expansion of open wars to a more brutal and ambitious depth, given that the existing social structure of the Turkish state realizes that it is a state of complete spoils, population uprooting, and extermination.
Throughout the last century, Kurds have fought dozens of wars and ignited dozens of revolutions, during which ruling countries committed atrocities whose most brutal chapters are still undated. But it is possible to infer the template of the story narrated by the tyrannical regimes to justify these wars, despite the fact that the criminal outcome is the same, which is the political story that has a beginning and an end. Usually the war would stop when the declared danger disappeared. So it was during the era of Saddam Hussein, the bloodiest and most openly criminal, that the leaders of these countries found agents among the Kurds to remove the charge of genocide from themselves and put it in a political framework against a party. This is what Saddam Hussein did when he relied on mercenary teams, and this is what Turkey has done since the 1980 coup in forming village guards, and likewise what Iran did after the Islamic revolution.
In addition to the declared wars, Turkey has conducted its secret war on the Kurds under the cover of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the latter contributed to this war through equipment provided to Turkey as long as the matter was secret and as long as Turkey is committed to killing without establishing ceremonial appearances. In all previous cases, Kurdish agents granted the occupying countries a cover for waging genocidal wars. The gains of these groups were preserved and exported, and this agent class has, over time, transformed into a Kurdish social demand, as its existence sets limits to the war.
In the worst genocidal wars that the Kurds suffered in the 19th of the last century in northern Kurdistan (within Turkey), and before that in southern Kurdistan (Iraq) during the Anfal campaign in 1988, part of society was escaping thanks to the agent class accompanying military campaigns against liberation movements from nationalist colonialism. This phenomenon maintained the drawing of the boundaries for the war and the fabrication of a political story for it. On the other hand, this fabrication of these stories was a passage for the survival of the post-war society, i.e. the surrendered society.
Only Turkey in Erdogan’s era refuses to use the Kurdish agents who are orbiting it. He did not resort to covering up with agents like all the leaders of the occupied countries of Kurdistan did, starting from Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to Muhammad Reza Pahlavi and subsequent rulers. His friend Ahmet Davutoglu, during his time as foreign minister and then prime minister, was keen on this front, and he has had frequent appearances in Amed and other Kurdish cities during the revival of Sufism.
Erdogan does not launch his wars under political slogans like what his ancestors and comrades did in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. Rather, he is conducting a type of an unfamiliar war based on mysterious reasons, which is likely to be psychological in most cases, such as his wars against Kurdish existence. Classifying Erdogan’s wars as psychopathological is supported by the continuation of the war after the termination of what the state considers the “Kurdish Threat”. Even if the opponent is defeated, the war keeps going on inside the civilians’ houses and in the streets, among the fields and the olive trees in Afrin, and in empty mountain caves. This is what is happening in Afrin after being handed to a class of Syrian fighters who form a strange Syrian continuation of the Cossack battalions in the Russian and Iranian armies during the 19th century. Erdogan orders them not to stop the war, even after its stoppage more than a year and half a year ago. He demands they continue torturing society. Men are kidnapped every day and taken to detention centers by the new Cossack battalions to negotiate on an arbitrary ransom to spare their lives. In order to appear more serious, they torture them and send photos to their families or throw their corpses on the road in the case of no response. Stories of kidnapping women and girls are still not spoken about, and most families avoid revealing the matter hoping that the kidnap is temporary and is solved by a ransom. This war is not political. Previously, during the pre-Erdogan Turkish era, the war used to stop after a military defeat, when the society’s members said “We are Turks”. Erdogan does not allow such kind of surrender. He does not believe them, nor does he want them to surrender. He demands the continuation of the war on the poor, who are not able to leave their villages.
This barbaric military image that lies behind “the shepherd civilization” that produces the Bayraktar mini UAV and takes part in producing military Mercedes vehicles for the army should deal with the stage it reaches now within the march of the Republic on the skulls of the peoples of Anatolia, Kurdistan, and Armenia. To summarize, not one of those who are described as Turkish dictators and Turkists by the Kurds, and who are themselves the heroes of the “nation” for the Turkish institution, has achieved what Erdogan has achieved – a regular smashing of the Kurdish society.
Since the first Turkish-Kurdish war more than a thousand years ago (1042 AD), there have always been agents on both sides who benefit. With them, the battles stop at a certain point. In this sense, the Ayyubids kept the states of Mardin, Sinjar, Amed, and Hasankeyf in the hands of the Turkic Artuqids. Later, when the Turks seized Kurdistan after the Ayyubids, states such as Hasankeyf and Badlis remained in the hands of the Kurds. Likewise for the Armenians, who maintained their existence in the physical and geographical sense thanks to the acceptance of the ruling authority of the surrendered group, or in collusion with the state, either as a result of fear or a desire for influence and money. Agents throughout history have been social disgraces, according to the narratives of the national currents. It has been useful in maintaining the demographic composition in a relative way, and alleviating the bloodiness of the authoritarian revenge on society. Regimes say that the Kurdish people are great, but their leaders are agents and traitors, and this speech is the result of that historical legacy of the relationship between employment and power. What happened to the Armenians in 1915 was the authority’s decision that they would not accept the surrendered segment, the agents, or their loyalists from the Armenians. The genocide took place on this theoretical basis.
Because of this, Erdogan is the most dangerous and criminal leader, more so than Mustafa Kemal and other leaders of the Republic.
For the first time in the contemporary history of the Kurds, an intensive comprehensive social war is completed within one year and not during years of population engineering, as was customary to other Turkish leaders. An organized genocide, which is not only killing, but rather subjecting Kurdish societies to continuous daily humiliation. This type of naked warfare was transferred from Amed, Nusaybin, and Jezir to Afrin, Serekaniye (Ras al-Ain), and Tel Abyad (Gre-Spi). One of the supporters of the Cossacks in the Turkish brigades does not hesitate to write publicly: “We will tie their women naked on the road of Suluk” (Suluk is a town located in the Tel Abyad region bordering Turkey). Even with poor Turks who were once with his former friend Fethullah Gulen, he targets them in their lives and their livelihoods despite the uprooting of all his opponent’s institutions from the country. However, he does not stop punishing them, and he probably cannot stop. This is a psychological obsession with mutilation.
This is what makes Erdogan’s war against the Kurds a “sub-political” war. It is a war in which he does not accepttohe granting of any role even to his agents. Agents themselves do not play their traditional role as mediator between the enemy and the defeated society. They have lost the conditions of employment and have turned into road “guides” for the enemy to their own countries.
At such a level of existential danger, there is no way but comprehensive resistance, which is not the resistance known in the liberal political and partisan literature, but a unique resistance. It is not a war in its depth, but a systematic retreat to avoid fighting the “final battle” in the current time, and a comprehensive escalation culturally and socially.