Turtles Can Fly: Distortion Of Facts and Negative Image  For Kurds

Dr.Nazhad Khasraw Hawramany

nhawramany@yahoo.com

July 10, 2005

At last we did have the chance ( me and my wife) to see the film " Turtles can fly" in Europe, this is an Iranian film by  the Kurdish Iranian director and script writer Bahman Qubadi, the film did get some awards in some international film festivals and was widely discussed and hailed in the Kurdish media as a successful Kurdish film, written and directed by a Kurd from East Kurdistan and  was also generously sponsored by the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraqi Kurdistan (South Kurdistan). The director did acknowledge the support of the Kurdistani authorities as the scenes were filmed in locations in Iraqi Kurdistan . The film did have the chance to be shown in some small film theaters across Europe and  to my surprise even in some cinemas in Istanbul ( the reasons why Turkish authorities allowed it , will be clear later in this article).

I must say at the end of the film, instead of being elated for seeing a Kurdish film shown in Europe, we were rather shocked and annoyed how damaging this film could be for the image of Kurds as a nation and the portrayal of Kurds as  illiterate lazy people, without any of the kurds being able to speak a word of English or understand what is going on around them, where there were no Kurdish women in public and only men who only know radios as means of getting information and the whole villages and refugee camps are relying on a 14 year old boy who murmles few words in English which he really doesn't understand, to tell them about the looming war ( the process of liberation of Iraq March 2003), which they don't understand and have no means to protect themselves.

The Kurds are portrayed as primitive people, who send their children to pick up mines from fields and sell them in the Kurdish markets of  the Kurdish capital Erbil (Hawler), where children can buy and sell all kinds of weapons and ammunition in open  weapon markets and you don't see any other shops for ordinary  goods and food articles.

There is a total distortion of realities and historical facts and deliberate portrayal of Kurds as uneducated people who live in tents  in an imaginary refugee camp along Iraqi-Turkish border ( actually there are no refugee camps now in Kurdistan for Iraqi Kurds, the only refugee camps are for Iranian Kurds who fled the despotic Islamic regime in Iran!) and earn living through trading with mines, weapons and military scraps.

The events of the film is supposed to represent the  time period preceding the outbreak of the American-led war on Iraq to topple the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein ( Spring of 2003),and the location is a fictive refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan on the Iraqi-Turkish border,  in reality the Iraqi Kurds have been enjoying an unprecedented freedom and stability since the establishment of the safe haven in Kurdistan by allied forces in 1991, and following  national elections in 1992, they have established following open democratic elections a regional parliament and a regional Kurdistan de facto government, which has been running the affairs of the region  since then successfully ( albeit some unavoidable shortcomings), the region has prospered , the countryside flourished and most of the 4500 damaged villages and hamlets (  demolished through Anfall genocide campaigns of Iraqi army 1987-1988) were rebuild, there are three big universities in Slemani, Hawler, and Duhok and dozens of technical institutes and colleges in other Kurdish cities, overall many thousands of doctors, engineers, teachers, lawyers, and other specialties are graduated every year from those Kurdistani institutes, Master and PH.D. degrees are awarded by Kurdish universities. The teaching languages are Kurdish, Arabic, English and many other foreign languages and almost all graduates can speak  some English language. The Kurdish ministries, NGO`s are working efficiently to build a civil society and to promote democracy and tolerance in Kurdish society with respect for rights of women, elderly and children and allocating subsidies for families of martyrs and Anfall victims.

There are two satellite TV stations broadcasting from Kurdistan even before the last war ( the subject of the film concerned) in many languages including Kurdish, English, Arabic, Turkish, Persian in addition to dozens of local TV  and radio stations all over Kurdistan.

The Kurds have free uncensored access to Internet and satellite dish receivers (an unprecedented situation comparing it to neighbouring countries).

These  TV stations inform the Kurdish people through news and open debates in their mother tongue (Kurdish), so the Kurds were very much aware of what was going on just before the war, in fact the Kurdish defense forces ( the Peshmerga) were providing security and control all over Kurdistan and the participated actively with American forces in liberating Kurdistan including the oil rich city of Kirkuk and the city of Mosul from the grip of  the criminal Baath regime. the Kurdish Peshmergas were the beacons of liberating forces in Kirkuk and Mosul, and the American forces did only a supporting role, in short the Kurds replaced Turkey as the closest ally of America in the region, to the dismay of Turkish and Islamist Iranian regimes.

In Kurdistan nowadays and also before the war, the Kurdistan national flag (stripes of red, white and green with a yellow sun in the middle) are flying in every corner of Kurdistan, none of those flags were seen any where in Qubadi`s film. So the primitive ways of life and the illiteracy and ignorance of Kurds  as portrayed in this miserable film were far away from the real situation in Kurdistan at the outset of  war of liberation in March 2003.

The  female Hero of the film, a young girl about 12 years old, was supposed to come from Halabja, the Kurdish town which was bombed with chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein in 1988, she was allegedly raped by Iraqi Arab forces and did give birth to a blind child which she took with herself and her brother, whose both upper limbs are amputated following a mine explosion ( the hobby of Kurdish children as portrayed in Qubadi`s film), so that she can dump him somewhere in this imaginary refugee camp on the Turkish-Iraqi border, because she considers him a bastard and a disgrace for her. Again here one should see the historic fraud in this story, the girl was raped in Halabja in 1988 when she was not younger than 14( otherwise she couldn't have been pregnant) and now in 2003 , the child is only about 3 years old and she is still 14 years old! What a dumb discrepancy!

The occupiers of Kurdistan ( Arabs, Turks and Persians) have always tried to cancel the identity of Kurds as a unique nation and cast doubts about the authenticity of their language and culture, with Iraqi Arabs calling them Arab tribes, Turks calling them Mountain Turks and Persian claiming a Persian ancestry of Kurds, in general those occupiers are trying to cultivate an image of Kurds as primitive, rebellious, illiterate Nomads who can't get accustomed to modern ways of life and who are in dire need of Turks, Arabs or Persians to teach them civilization and modern life  and to reach that purpose they must assimilate in the culture of those occupying nations and abandon their many thousand years old culture, language and traditions.

The film of Mr Qubadi did exactly managed to portray this stereotype image of Kurds and it did a great favour to the chauvinistic ideologies of the Arabic, Turkish and Iranian states, and to my discretion this is the reason why Turkish authorities gladly allowed this film to be shown in Turkish cinema theatres, because it has been telling its people for the last 80 years how primitive and uncivilized Kurds are and that is the origin of the infamous  Kemalist official state slogan in Turkey ( I'm happy that I was born as a Turk!).

The other aspects of the film is clearly anti-American ( this falls in stream with other Iranian films produced under the eyes of Mulla`s in Islamic Iran) and it has suggested that first thing the Americans did as they entered the country is to see pornography TV broadcasts with the Kurds.

My advice to Mr Qubadi that in the future he should stick to historic facts when he is trying to portray events in Kurdistan ( even if some aspects of the film are fictive) and avoid being fallen as an easy propaganda mouthpiece for Iranian and Turkish  regimes.

My advice to Kurdistan Regional Government is that they should be more careful in sponsoring such projects in the future and that they should give the Kurdish intellectual and academics from Iraqi Kurdistan the chance to review the scripts and correct any historical and political fallacies which will spoil the real image of Kurdish nation both regionally and internationally.

In short, the film of Mr Qubadi did portray Iraqi Kurds in a very negative and unrealistic way, and if I were a European who doesn't know the Kurds, and this was my first encounter with any information about Kurds,  then the impression I will certainly have about Kurds will be far from positive.