CPTnet
20 May 2009
IRAQ REFLECTION: “These people.”

By Chihchun Yuan

The Turkish President Abdullah Gul revealed recently to Euronews his solution to the conflict with Turkey’s Kurdish minority: "Those who want to fight to [the] death and not give up their weapons, then our military must tackle that and fight these people to the end.”  I got the impression that the Turkish government has no other strategy to make people lay down their weapons except to fighting them.  I also know that Gul’s determination to subjugate Kurds is directed, in part, at another country.

Turkey has used its military power to chase the Turkey Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) into Iraq.  Justifying its actions by saying it is fighting “terrorism,” Turkey has destroyed Iraqi farmers’ houses, orchards, animals, and lives for more than fifteen years.

Every Iraqi Kurdish friend CPT has met has told us the same thing: we once were self-sustaining but have fallen into poverty now.  They asked for material aid, blushing and avoiding our eyes while doing so.  Only one farmer had something positive to share, telling team members, "I bought my own truck just from selling apples in my orchard."

One time, I had a chance to talk to a skinny young Kurdish girl with long hair.  She said she had to learn how to use a gun when she was thirteen-years-old.  She told us, "What can you do, when you have seen enough innocent people killed or disappeared by your own government since your childhood?"  On her face, there were old burn marks from some kind of torture.  She sighed because life has given her few choices.  If a child was given a ball to play with, a chance to attend school, and a life devoid of threats from armed groups, would she chose to carry weapon?  Would you?  

My favorite Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami spoke on the occasion of receiving the Jerusalem Prize: "If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg.  Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg.  Each of us confronting a high wall.  The high wall is the system."  Why can’t governments respect the unique soul of every person?  How can a government turn its own citizens into rebels?  How can a government point its people to the way of death and not life?  These are some of the many questions in my mind.

I wish it were easier for a government to become a machine that spreads love instead of one that distributes death.  I wish Turkish leaders would choose peaceful solutions to end this long-term ethnic political rights struggle inside Turkey, and leave Iraqi Kurdish farmers to farm their land in peace.