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Legal Terrorism:
the Zana Case
18 April 2008
By: Sabah Salih
Not too long ago, in the official annals of Turkish nationalism, the Kurds were
not even supposed to exist. But the denial proved to be the mother of all
paradoxes: pretending that the Kurds did not exist while at the same time going
through all the trouble trying to fight them made the whole effort seem so
ludicrous. Grudgingly, by the early 1990s denial gave way to an officially
sanctioned phrase, “people of Kurdish origin,” which, despite its falseness,
continues to be used widely, especially by those weary of the Turkish state.
Naked terror in all its forms, from the burning of villages and bombing of
bookstores, forcible relocation, the creation of an entirely Kurd-free national
discourse, and even trying to see if through so-called “scientific means” the
Kurd could finally be persuaded that he/she was actually a Turk not a Kurd were
all tried and failed. Erasing a nation was just not going to happen.
But the campaign is still ongoing. These days it is spearheaded by the combined
powers of Islamism and the law, the first working by stealth to try and dilute
Kurdish culture in a sea of pathetic dogma aimed at robbing people of the
ability to think, with legal terrorism doing the rest. Injustice has many forms,
but when the aim is the elimination of the very vocabulary through which a
person’s initiation into life begins, nothing is worse; and the law that
legalizes such injustice is not a law at all but a continuation of oppression by
other means.
The principle target in recent years has been Leyla Zana, admired the world over
for her brave stand against oppression. She has already spent ten years in
prison for using both Turkish and Kurdish in her swearing in ceremony as a
onetime Kurdish parliamentarian, and now stands to spend another two for saying
at a 2007 Newroz celebration in Diyarbakir that the Kurds regard PKK founder
Abdullah Ocalan, PUK founder and Iraq President Jalal Talabani, and KDP head and
Kurdistan Regional Government president Massoud Barzani as their national
leaders.
Factually, the statement cannot be proven to be false. No matter how one feels
personally about these men, they are among the most recognizable faces in the
politics of contemporary Kurdistan; the world knows about Kurdistan primarily
through them. One can debate endlessly the merits and demerits of each man, but
there is no denying that these men have spent the better part of their lives
trying to advance the Kurdish cause, just as Zana has done. Without them—and
Zana—the history of the Kurdish struggle cannot be told.
But let me not get off track: the absolute goodness or badness of the men is not
the issue here. The issue is, does the Turkish state have the right to act as
the gatekeeper and decider of Kurdish history? The Turkish authorities want
Ocalan to be portrayed strictly as a terrorist, even as they realize that in his
case the term is an obvious misnomer. Zana’s refusal to go for that is an act of
courage, for what could be more courageous than to take a stand against an
oppressor trying to prevent you from narrating the history of your nation?
That’s why Zana’s fight is our fight too.
Dr. Sabah Salih is Professor of English at Bloomsburg University, USA.
