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  • Executions of Kurdish Women in Paris Burn Deep

    Executions of Kurdish Women in Paris Burn Deep

    Huffington Post
    01/15/2013

    by Kani Xulam

    Ever since three Kurdish women political activists were murdered in
    Paris last week -- shot in the head execution-style -- my phone has
    been ringing off the hook from anxious loved ones. As a Kurd and the
    director of the American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN), I wish I
    could explain why these three advocates -- who were so alive with the
    hopes of freedom, struggling for peace for their Kurdish sisters and
    brothers in the face of a repressive Turkish state -- now lie icily
    cold and lifeless in a dreary French morgue.

    Before their lives were cut down, these women were promoting the
    enduring Kurdish cause of basic human rights and dignity with their
    tongues and pens. I am trying to do the same in Washington, DC. One
    person who called me this week urged me to take extra precautions
    about my safety. Another person asked if I owned a gun for
    self-protection. My answer was that when it comes to the right to bear
    arms, I side with the non-violent efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
    whose birthday is today. Did Dr. King ever own a gun?

    As to whodunit, I reject the absurd suggestion from Turkish Prime
    Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the killer was someone the women
    knew, since a code was needed to enter their building -- as if a
    trained assassin could not learn something so elementary. It is hardly
    a coincidence, to me at least, that the killings coincide with "peace"
    talks that were underway between imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah
    Ocalan, the founder of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), and Turkish
    officials. To anyone familiar with the decades-old conflict between
    Turkey and the PKK, which has claimed 40,000 lives, the attempt to
    paint these murders as the result of an internal feud among Kurds
    falls flat.

    How does one address the Kurdish Question in the Middle East, a region
    saturated with guns and led by rulers who equate liberty not as a
    universal right, but one belonging to some at the expense of others?
    Impartial observers speak of 20 million Kurds in Turkey (the place
    where the murdered women were from), and yet these women and others
    aren't allowed to identify themselves as Kurds. During a recent 68-day
    hunger strike by Kurds in Turkey, Kurdish politicians and other
    activists called for Turkey to authorize Kurdish language education in
    schools and allow defendants to speak Kurdish in legal proceedings,
    among other rights that are currently outlawed in Turkey. To date, if
    a Kurd fromTurkey wins a medal at the Olympics, as one did in Athens,
    he is hailed as a Turk. The three murdered Kurdish women were part of
    this struggle for freedom.

    Growing up in Kurdish Turkey, my late father used to tell us not to
    lift even a stick against the "government." His generation had grown
    up in the ominous shadow of the hideous Armenian genocide -- and he
    didn't want us to suffer a similar ghastly fate. But freedom, like
    life, blooms even in the most inhospitable terrain, and I have become
    a part of a peaceful Kurdish resistance notwithstanding Turkish
    cruelties. We yearn to breathe free -- drawing inspiration from Thomas
    Jefferson's ideal that "all men are created equal" -- and we believe
    that such basic human rights come from God, not earthly persecutors.

    But as my father might have put it, the price of liberty has been
    high. The village he knew as home and became its head, or muhtar in
    Turkish, has been destroyed, the same fate as thousands of settlements
    in the Kurdish countryside in Turkey. Turkish pilots, who are equipped
    with American-made helicopters, rained death and destruction on my
    father's village on a cold November day in 1993. The only consolation
    I had, when the news reached me in the U.S., was that my father, who
    had built our house with his own hands, was spared the distressing
    report. He had met his maker four years earlier in Santa Barbara,
    California.

    What he didn't see has become our heritage today. The Turkish
    government still believes force and state-sponsored violence can solve
    the Kurdish Question. What is missing in Ankara is respect for a
    culture of criticism, the bedrock of representative governments the
    world over. If you apply, as I do, the canons of Western classics to
    Turkey, it dawns on you right away that Turkey still has yet to accept
    the true meaning of a free, civil society, where rights are granted to
    all.

    The Kurds of the Middle East need help. The Internet has given us a
    powerful tool to break through the censorship walls of those who
    oppress us. The Arab Spring may yet inspire a Kurdish
    awakening. Although they were not related, the emancipation of the
    serfs in Russia and those of African Americans here in America, within
    the same decade, added enormously to the total sum of justice in the
    world. Perhaps the new trend of putting an end to family dynasties in
    the Middle East will usher in another new: nations will no longer be
    able to own other nations or speak on their behalf.

    A child of tyranny, I am in awe of what started in Tunisia -- but
    without the revulsion of Benghazi, Libya. And I am all for the peace
    talks between Turks and Kurds. But the rhetoric originating from
    Ankara, even if you set aside what happened in Paris, is not
    encouraging. Turkish leaders see "peace" differently, thinking it
    offers them the best chance to disarm Kurds without considering a real
    and enduring offering of rights and freedoms for Kurds.

    After a terrible week for three Kurdish women, and for Kurds around
    the world who were shocked by their deaths, the way forward lies in
    the path that was traveled by the likes of Gandhi and Dr. King.


    Kani Xulam is the director of AKIN, the American Kurdish Information
    Network. Follow AKIN on Twitter @AKINinfo

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