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On December 23rd, one of the pioneers of the Kurdish Women’s movement, Evîn (Emine Kara), artist Mir Perwer and Abdurrahman Kızıl, a regular at the Center, lost their lives following an attack perpetrated against the Ahmet Kaya Kurdish Center in Paris. Witnesses state that the murderer was dropped off from a car on the street of the Cultural Center and headed straight for his target.
Images from the security cameras also show that the murderer entered purposefully in the Cultural Center and in two establishments where Kurds were located. Evîn was executed, the assassin shooting her twice.
This is unacceptable and raises questions, with the French media treating the assassinations from the onset as “individual attacks by a mentally unstable racist”, this theme being picked up two hours later by the French Minister of the Interior and repeated in a press release by the French judiciary two days later, after the assassin was placed under psychiatric observation. How did these talking point find themselves conveyed to the media from the very beginning ? Is this what is called “journalism”?
Both the French government and the quasi totality of the media considered the matter as a racist attack and classified the affair in that category, refusing to widen the inquest with the means available when an event is characterized as terrorist. The French police was not there when the attack took place, and the aggressor was neutralized by witnesses at their own risk. Forty minutes went by before the police arrived. They were much quicker on the scene with tear gas against the legitimate protests from Kurdish people. This provocative attitude is now a source of anger and suspicion.
The fact that someone commits such a crime in France, a country that self-defines as the “land of freedom and democracy” shows the extent to which nationalistic and provocative policies against the system have become frightening. The fact the murderer has a history of racist attacks and that the police and the French government thus “simplified” his crime, reducing it to an “infraction” allowing the lifting of the murderer’s blame for his crime, since the wounded migrants were threatened with expulsion at the time, only demonstrates that racism is alive and well in France, and not only in the mind of a so-called unbalanced person, making the management of such attacks a “simple matter”. For instance, the attack of a mosque in Bayonne, the racist murder of a sportsman in the heart of Paris by extremist right-wing activists, are treated as common law occurrences.
How did the administration in France let racist murderers grow among its citizens, how did it lead to thought patterns ever more to the right because of poverty, hunger, health problems, sexist and aggressive policies ?
In such a context, the intelligence services of fascist States or of those with terrorist leanings have no trouble contacting persons with altered and unbalanced views. MIT, the fascist Turkish intelligence organization operating in Europe, always concentrates on this type of personality, using them as the “trigger” to their own cause, by exploiting their weakest features. This has been the case in a number of manipulations that led to political assassinations in Europe against the Kurdish movement these past few years, and even for “attacks” in Turkey.
On the day of the massacre, a meeting was to be held at the Ahmet Kaya Kurdish Cultural Center. The aim of this meeting was to organize actions and upcoming activities, calling on the French government to condemn the Turkish State at long last, on the 10th anniversary of the assassination in Paris of the leaders of the Kurdish Women’s Movement, Sakine Cansız, Leyla Şaylemez and Fidan Do?an. For this reason, presenting the murderer as an “unbalanced individual” with “racist feelings”, as someone unaware of his actions, is the same as covering the repetition of the crime, and opening the doors to any number of future events of the same kind.
With this second attack in France against the Kurdish people, the Turkish State committed a crime using the hand of a French citizen this time. In acting this way, via a French trigger, it maintains its invisibility, in my view, by directing the arrow toward the French State. Recent MIT policy follows this trend. It uses the same approach in Southern Kurdistan, which is a part of Irak.
Thus, the Turkish State has Kurds eliminated who were forced to leave Northern Kurdistan in Turkey for political reasons, by training and using as hired killers persons whose weaknesses they have identified. Sometimes this consists of a person’s psychological instability, sometimes their poverty and, of course, fascist and fascist feelings allowing for this behavior. This is how my friend Nagihan Akarsel was riddled with bullets.
Is it still necessary to underline that the Turkish State applies all its forces against the Kurdish people on all fronts ? It carries out a war called “military operations”, a euphemism… It attempts to annihilate Kurdish culture, through prohibitions placed on the mother tongue and its music, its literature, the closing of cultural associations and centers. It attempts to silence the intellectuals, politicians, activists, Kurdish journalists and their supporters, through threats, raids, imprisonment… It attempts to break the prisoners through ill treatment, isolation, deportation, denial of liberation. It goes so far as to eliminate Kurdish personalities, especially combative and determined women, even outside the country…
In Turkey, where the MIT is a structural element with its own administrative system in a fascist society, most of the ’trigger’ recruits were either mentally unbalanced, or poor and shaped by a fascist ideology. The regime chooses them “in the name of the Country and the Nation”. It does the same thing in the foreign lands where its opponents have found refuge.
The assassin of academic and journalist Nagihan Akarsel, a member of the Kurdish Women’s Movement, who fell in Sulaymaniyah last October, also had this profile. In his confession, one could see how the MIT had taken advantage of the killer’s fascist feelings. Ogün Samast, who killed the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul in 2007, was a young man who also exhibited a racist, nationalist and State-leaning profile. One cannot consider Hrant Dink’s massacre solely as “a murder committed by a young nationalist”. Ogün Samast was nothing other than a hired gun, behind which one found a terrible, terrorist State organization.
Still last year, again in Sulaymaniyah, Ferhat Bağışkondu survived an attack. Its author, Zımnako is a schizophrenic, and he is not a Turkish citizen. Considering him solely as a “schizophrenic” and shutting one’s eyes to the fact he was trained by the MIT for a long time, would mean falling into the trap set up by the Turkish State to cover its actions. Generally speaking, all attacks of this type include racist rants, but the fact that the person is a “designated killer” should not be forgotten.
Racism is the general motivation to all these crimes. Here, it is anti-Kurdish. But dismissing the problem solely on these grounds is a faulty and totally incomplete political reading that ignores all precedents and allows for all its future consequences.
The Turkish fascistic structure, set up in Europe as an extension to the successive Turkish government, has been implicated since the 70s in numerous crimes, ranging from drug trafficking to arms smuggling, from crimes of hatred to murders. The aggressions, assassinations and attacks organized by the MIT have occurred in a number of European countries since the 80s. The Turkish intelligence services that carry out a number of criminal and terrorist actions through their own fascist citizens, are currently carrying out major activities in numerous European countries. Benefiting from such a large network, it it not too difficult for them to identify useful profiles and groom them to carry out attacks such as the one on December 23 in Paris…
By classifying an investigation from the very onset under the heading of “murder committed by a racist unbalanced person” spreading talking points to that effect, not affording the crime the benefit of means available for an investigation on terrorism, all this allows the French State to avoid geo-political and diplomatic concerns.
This is not the first time in its history that the French State covers up political assassinations committed on its soil and involving an allied foreign hand. Examples abound.
France did not investigate decisively in order to resolve the assassination of Sakine Cans?z, Fidan Do?an and Leyla Şaylemez. These activists for women’s freedom who were forced to flee the oppression to which they were subjected in their own country and who came to other lands to continue their struggle freely, were again confronted by death. If a second assassination was committed on December 23, this for me signals that these killings of Sakine, Rojbin and Leyla were not resolved, through a lack of political courage. In fact, in my view, the French government shares in its responsibility through wilful blindness that leads it not to take seriously alerts coming from the Kurdish community.
The whole world has eyes turned to this situation. France sends a signal to its allies, but in doing so, it opens the door to further cimes, by refusing to investigate and find the source of the sponsors.
Last months, Emmanuel Macron met with a group of women at the Elysée to offer “support” to the women’s revolution in “Iran”. He doesn’t seem cognizant of the fact that the slogan “Jin Jiyan Azadî”, chanted all over the world these days was created precisely by the Kurdish Women’s Movement, much earlier and rightfully picked up by the opponents in Iran. At the same time, the French State “supports” the women’s revolution in Iran, and closes its eyes on the assassination of three activists, among whom were some of the creators of this slogan. This has allowed for the assassination of another Kurdish woman, our comrade Evin (Emine Kara) who fought against ISIS in Syria.
A Kurdish artist, musician Mir Perwer, was also assassinated in Paris, “the capital of art and freedom”. Mir Perwer, tortured by the Turkish State, was in exile. An artist, assassinated in the capital of art…
Thousands of Kurds, their friends and supporters took to the streets in Paris, in Marseille and in other towns to raise their voice against fascism, and not only for the Kurds but also for all peoples.
With these past assassinations and this attack on December 23, the Turkish State struck in Europe with aggressions and attacks that constantly intensify against the Kurdish people and all of the oppressed in Kurdistan. The Turkish State, to this day, has not condemned the murders but has instead pointed a finger at the PKK for the demonstrations in Paris. It demonstrates in this way that Kurds calling for freedom constitute a target, no matter where they may be.
News of the intensification of attacks against the Kurdish people in Syria and in Irak, of the continued use of chemical weapons against the guerrilla, of the pursuit of the occupation policies, is accompanied by this Turkish policy of terror.
The Copresident of the PYD, Salih Muslim, published the following tweet after the attack in Paris:
“We remain in our villages, on our plains, they destroy, they burn, they kill, we flee toward our mountains, they kills us with chemical weapons. Is there nowhere in this world for Kurds?”
European countries who want to find a democratic answer to this question must quickly show their sincere reactions agains the war that has been ongoing in Kurdistan for long years.
European leaders who criticize the fascist Turkish regime in the media, showing angry faces, should also stop selling weapons to the Turks through the back door. They should stop feeding the fire of war, simply because the exploitation of the gas, water and lands of Kurdistan are in their own interest. They should urgently remove the PKK from their list of terrorist organizations, the PKK having led a legitimate struggle for years, from the mountains.
But, unfortunately, the Europe of democratic speeches continues criminalizing Kurds. A number of politicians and Kurdish activities are “returned” to Turkey, media, Kurdish associations are shut down, harassed. Editions Mesopotamia, who published Kurdish books was raided on March 8 2018, in Germany whose history is already blemished with the black stain of books burnt on squares during the Hitlerian period. The fact that raid coincided with the visit of the Turkish Foreign Affairs minister, Mevlut Çavuşo?lu, who went to Germany for talks, was certainly not accidental. On February 2nd 2019, another such date, yet more raids and confiscation of goods on the premises of Editions Mesopotamia and of Mîr Müzik. On January 31 2022, their activities were officially prohibited in Germany, by decision of the Federal Administrative Tribunal. Today in Germany, there is not a single publishing house that can publish Kurdish literature.
When one hears French media denouncing the presence of Kurdish flags, qualifying them of “flags of a terrorist organization” carried in demonstrations, one can expect a similar policy from the French State which has already forgotten that these flags are those of people who gave their lives to eliminate the authors of the attacks that led to mourning in the French population.
A number of Kurdish policies are criminalized. The slogan “Jin Jiyan Azadî” resonates everywhere in the world, particularly in Germany, which is the largest terrain of action, but the Kurdish women to whom this slogan belongs, who fight for freedom, are arrested, taken into custody, held under tight surveillance, their passport confiscated.
Not a single day goes by without similar news coming from different Western countries. Only a few days ago, on December 22, in Nuremberg, a number of Kurds had their homes raided and an activist, Tahir Koçer, was arrested.
The Realpolitik orchestrated by Western States, accommodating itself of doubtful allies when its interests are involved, forgetting and sacrificing those who saved them only yesterday, abandon ing them with the children of ISIS, erecting walls and borders against the refugees and interfering with justice being done for the cessation of the crimes.
In this situation, the well-known Kurdish saying takes on even more meaning: “The Kurd has no other friend than the mountains.”
Zehra Doğan
Berlin, December 25 2022
Translation, edit: Naz Oke, Daniel Fleury, translation from French by Renée Lucie Bourges
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