Newroz Celebration in Turkey!
BY: Ara Alan
Celebration of Newroz in Atlanta had us,
the organizers, very busy with little details of the programs. However,
throughout the preparation time our focus was to make sure that
everything was going right and trying our best to give the Kurdish
people, and our guests a great time celebrating. Newroz is the Kurdish
New year, but many other nationalities celebrate it as well. Like all
other nations Kurds celebrate their New Year with picnics, dancing, and
partying all filled with joy and love. In Atlanta, we did not short
ourselves from partying. In fact we danced passed 1:00 o'clock of that morning. Dancing so hard most of the attendees were soar the next day.
After
a joyful night I went over to a friend's house to spend the night. When
we got home his roommate was on the Internet watching a just released
videos of Newroz from Turkey. There are close to 20
million Kurds in Turkey. Like all Kurds they too celebrate the Kurdish
New Year with dancing and joy. The video which can be seen on this link (http://www.kurdishyouthclub.com/AboutMe.aspx) did not show Kurds dancing this year.
Unlike the
promise of progress given just weeks earlier by Erdogan the videos
showed Turkish intelligence officers breaking a 15 years old Kurdish
boy's hand for celebrating the New Year. Newroz celebration was turned
to a bloody event throughout Turkey from the Kurdish cities to the
metropolitans such as Istanbul. Another clip containing women and
children being beaten and attacked, tanks and military vehicles roaming
the streets, tear gas gunfire and kidnapping are all the different
contents of the video shed light on the Newroz celebration in the
Democratic Republic of Turkey. We urge the international community: as
they stand for Tibet and the beatings that they receive from the
oppressive Chinese forces to also stand for the Kurdish boys and girls.
To stand for those Kurds who are being run over and tortured in the
same manner as the Tibetan demonstrators do.
Another Day at the Office
by Gordon Taylor | 3/30/2008 02:15:00 AM
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or
just walking dully along;
~W.H.A., "Musee des Beaux Arts"
Once
again, my apologies. You probably didn't enjoy your first "Day at the
Office," and now here I am putting you through another. Never fear. I
will be as gentle as possible. No self-righteous rhetoric. And no
photos--links only. This isn't because I want to shield anyone else
from unpleasantness. It's because I want to shield myself. I simply do
not enjoy the sight of naked human suffering, especially that of a
child, and I couldn't stand having the photographs in front of me as I
wrote the piece.
And in spite of my revulsion, this will be a
composed--though short--piece. For there is a lot for an historian to
glean from this incident, concerning both the past and a very
instructive present.
First, the
incident itself. It evidently happened on March 22, the day after the
equinox, when Newroz (New Year) would have been in full swing in all
Kurdish cities. In Hakkari, a mountain town near the Iraqi and Iranian
borders, the Turkish governor had banned celebrations. They happened
anyway, and when the police attacked, violence ensued. As expected,
there were plenty of Kurds on hand to voice their support for the PKK,
which has been fighting against the Turkish government for about 25
years.
The first photograph
tells you the facts. Note especially the satisfied look on the face of
the Meatman [my own coinage, based on the Turkish MIT, or National
Intelligence Organization, for whom he probably works]. This follows
his previous expression, in the third of the series of photos I
published yesterday, in which he looked like a man straining at the
reluctant lid of a pickle jar. The second photo is the boy himself.
His name is Cuneyt Ertuş (joo-nate air-toosh), and he is 15 years old.
By God I hope he survives this and regains the use of his right arm.
But as far as I can tell he is still in jail, and there's no telling
what--if any--medical care he is getting. The incident took place right
in front of representatives of the press (whether pro or amateur we
can't tell), and both still photos and video have been published from
several angles. Cuneyt may have been throwing rocks, or he may have
just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing justifies what
you see. He was taken in on a charge of "resisting an officer of the
State," and no word was given about his medical treatment or the
charges to either his family or to attorneys.
Cuneyt's father
related his own story to DIHA, the Dicle Haber Ajansi (Tigris News
Agency), a pro-Kurdish outlet which publishes in Turkish from Europe.
Zubeyir Ertuş told DIHA that his son went on a shopping trip to the
center of Hakkari (formerly Julamerk, or Colemerg), the capital city of
Hakkari province, on March 22. After the events of that day he didn't
hear from his son, and he thought that Cuneyt had been detained. "At
last," he said, after two days of searching, "I found him on Roj-TV."
If only he hadn't. Zubeyir: "The police were breaking my son's arm
right in front of the representatives of the press. I looked away in
horror. I didn't want to believe my eyes."
It's a wonder that he
saw anything. For Roj-TV is not a Turkish channel. It is not an Iraqi
channel. And it certainly is not Syrian or Iranian, two other
dictatorships with sizable Kurdish minorities. Roj-TV is a
Kurdish-owned satellite channel that broadcasts out of Denmark, and the
Kurds of Turkey use satellite dishes in order to get it. During this
year's Newroz festivities in Diyarbakir (permitted by the State),
Roj-TV managed to broadcast the whole thing live--a first. This under
the noses of the Turkish government, which is trying to shut them down.
So far the Danish government has resisted. The Turks claim that Roj-TV
is a terrorist organization. (But of course they do. If the Turks got a
sunburn, they'd claim that ultraviolet rays were part of a terrorist
plot.) The Danes have asked the Turkish government for more
information, and in the meantime several Kurdish websites are gathering
signatures to urge the Danish government to do the right thing. But if
they don't, the Kurds will simply go elsewhere.
In the meantime,
we have Zubeyir Ertuş and his son Cuneyt, who because of a satellite
channel and the sharing of photos on the Internet, are suddenly not
alone. In a past posting about the Turks' recent invasion of northern
Iraq, I talked about another pro-PKK news outlet, Firat News, and the
dozens of reports that they constantly get in detailing the movements
of Turkish government forces. Here we see the same thing, as the Kurds
have constructed their own "virtual Kurdistan" from the reports,
videos, and digital photos of their own people.
Not that the
father and son would really have been alone. For the family's surname,
Ertuş, indicates a very strong attachment to the local population. It
is a tribal name; in fact, it is the name of what was traditionally the
biggest tribe in the Hakkari region and beyond. In old travel books
about Kurdistan it is variously spelled: Ertoush, Hartoushi, Ertushi,
etc. When Asahel Grant, M.D., of Utica and Waterville, NY, arrived in
Julamerk in 1839, it was these same Ertushi Kurds and their emir,
Nurullah, that he dealt with. The story remains unfinished. In the
cities of Turkey's southeast, hundreds are wounded, or in jail, or
both. Cuneyt's father, meanwhile, says, "My economic situation is not
good. But I'm going to the bar association and I'm going to find a
lawyer."
for direct link please visit
www.progressivehistorians.com
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