In my formative years, when my worldview was developing, I was still in high school. On one hand, our class teacher, trying to make us Turkish nationalists, would say, "There are no Kurds and Turks, we are all brothers and Turks," and he made efforts to make the Kurdish students in the class say they were Turks. On the other hand, we had our sharp realities. We were Kurdish children who were almost brought to a point of believing and cursing our own people.
It didn't take long for us to face our own sharp and painful realities alongside this false reality. A few questions were enough for this confrontation, and I'm lucky or glad that I could ask myself those questions. For example, "Why do I speak Kurdish with my grandparents, and why do my parents speak Turkish?" or "Why was I always subjected to humiliation, exclusion, and scorn by White Turks throughout my primary school life because I am Kurdish?" or "How could a 10-year-old child be exposed to the narrative, learned from their family, that Alevis 'put out candles' and 'organize incestuous relationships within the family'?"
The answers were very difficult to articulate but very simple to answer: Racism, Fascism, but not just any racism. It was nothing but racism ingrained into the very bones of a country's society, every single blood cell in its veins.
Now, the Kurdish Movement, the PKK, and the leadership institution, which we see as the only way to freedom and liberation from this racist-fascist mentality, are telling us that Turkey will be democratized, that Kurds do not have a nation-state objective, and that the weapons must be silenced.
How can such a thing be possible? Perhaps it's possible on the condition that I forget my entire memory. How will I forget those who killed people with torture, our missing whose bones were never found, those massacred in Dersim, those burned in Sivas, the scene in Maraş where a fetus was taken from its mother's womb and its legs were torn off? How can I erase that from my mind? How can I forget that?
What we're talking about here is not a broken heart, a grudge, or a resentment! Someone massacred us, someone burned us, someone beat us, tortured us. This is not something that can be forgiven by saying "I forgive."
Turkish nationalists and ultranationalists say, let's make peace with the Kurds without hurting their own martyrs and veterans. But we were massacred by the TURKISH state because our very existence was being annihilated. What will happen to our martyrs, our veterans? How will you convince their mothers? I am writing this text not in the language my grandmother and grandfather spoke, not in the language that was made to be forgotten by my mother and father, but in the language of a nation taught to me through torture, pressure, burning, and beating. How will you make me forget this?
That's why this won't work! This meaningless peace won't work, because our war has meaning, value, and importance, and we are sure that this is the only salvation. The Turkish state is a murderer and a nation that has boasted about its massacres throughout history. We cannot be like them; we can never be with them. Even if this world is destroyed and rebuilt, a KURD can never be a brother/at peace with a Turk.
Ünal Zeray
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