“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
-- Elie Wiesel, Nazi concentration camp survivor
I wish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk had clutched those arresting words of someone who had suffered unspeakable horrors to his heart while writing his book, Istanbul, about the city and himself.
If he had done so, we might have learned something new about pogroms that were committed against Greeks when he was a child or the Armenians that were simply wiped out when his grandfather was alive.
Maybe atonement doesn’t suit Turkish literature. But its cousin, compassion, does find its way into Pamuk’s pages. “Let me be straight with you,” he writes in the first chapter, and in return asks for our “compassion.”
That’s a tall order for me, a political Kurd—given the long-lasting, abominable domination of Turks over the Kurds. It is not the first word that pops to mind when I read anything from any Turk—on any subject.
Foremost in my mind are the horrible Turkish political crimes against the Kurds.
Fairness, however, compels me to acknowledge that Pamuk, a Turk, did at least face the truth about some things. This contrasts sharply with the flagrant lies shoved down my throat during eleven years in Turkish schools, flowing as naturally as a fish in water.
I am pleasantly surprised to hear Turks like Pamuk speak from the heart. That brings a smile to my face, but compassion from my heart—no, not at all. 
In Istanbul, Pamuk describes how he grew up in a rich family, living in an apartment of “unplayed pianos,” which he first “assumed were stands for exhibiting photographs.”
Why did the Turks of Pamuk’s generation spend a fortune in musical instruments to use only as stands for photographs? Better yet, why do the Turks of our generation—on pain of death—not want Kurds to be Kurds?
I once asked a variation of that very question of Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, only to be told the Turkish-Kurdish “friendship” was “ancient” and that he felt more at home in Mardin, a Kurdish city, than in his Turkish hometown of Konya!
Hogwash!
That was a big lie, of course, and I can smell a Turkish whopper a mile away. The Turkish minister’s propaganda is merely vinegar hyped as wine.
However, I am pleasantly surprised to hear Turks like Pamuk speak from the heart. That brings a smile to my face, but compassion from my heart—no, not at all.
Pamuk, as readers of Rudaw can attest, doesn’t need my compassion to enjoy his life, or savor his 2006 Nobel Prize for literature, or tell the world about the prose of his wayward people.
Unlike Pamuk, I have suffered nothing but absolute and unrelenting cruelty from the Turks, both physical and intellectual.
For an outsider looking at Kurds inside Turkey, we are like the “unplayed” pianos of Orhan Pamuk. But for an insider reflecting on our sorry lot, we are like worn-out drums asked to sound like Steinway Grand pianos.
That’s quite an anomaly for a Nobel laureate. You would think he would have rolled up his sleeves to write a new book, titling it, “Unplayed Kurds,” perhaps! Is that asking too much of an honored man of letters?
For an outsider looking at Kurds inside Turkey, we are like the “unplayed” pianos of Orhan Pamuk.
Instead, we have this esteemed Turkish writer struggling to relate to the Kurds and in the process belittling us with greater subtlety than his prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, could ever cunningly muster.
In an interview to Das Magazin, a Swiss publication, he said, “Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands [meaning Ottoman Empire and Turkey] and nobody but me dares to talk about it.”
Wait a minute, Mr. Pamuk!
Those 30,000 Kurds spoke for Kurds and Kurdistan long before you took up our noble cause. They shed their priceless blood; you merely uttered words to generate ink in a magazine!
Freedom needs both, of course. But please don’t equate the precious blood of deliberately murdered Kurds with the routine printer’s ink from a casual magazine interview.
You are young and Turkey is nowhere close to addressing the Kurdish Question. You could still honor the Kurds and with real compassion, for a change. If you do, it might help the hapless Turks to discern the difference between the sounds of a piano and that of a drum—as well as the stark contrast between costly Kurdish blood and inexpensive printer’s ink.
When you were making that grandiose statement to the Swiss magazine, the prime minister of Turkey was pathetically trotting out his own pretentious statement about another dark chapter in Turkish history—the wholesale destruction of Dersim and its more than 30,000 inhabitants.
You chose a distant venue, Switzerland, to make your statement; your prime minister did too. He traveled back in time—our times are too complicated for him—to tackle the Kurdish Question. At a party gathering in Ankara, in front of giant pictures of Ataturk and himself, he pretended to make up with the Kurds.
A government had simply gone berserk and attacked a defenseless population without provocation, he said. He didn’t say it, but I will: Turks used poison gas—reminiscent of Nazi horrors—to execute helpless Kurds who had sought refuge in the caves. But instead of blaming Ataturk, mastermind of the Dersim operations, he blamed Ismet Inonu, his lieutenant.
Then he added: “If somebody needs to apologize, [if] there is a literature for apology, I apologize, I am apologizing.”
If? If?
If you truly meant what you said, you would have said it in the Turkish parliament, or better yet visited Dersim and bowed respectfully before the cherished memory of those who were mercilessly wiped out for simply being Kurds.
Can there be any “if,” or any doubt whatsoever, as to whether an apology—and a lot more—is called for when innocent people are horrifically slaughtered with poison gas?
Yes, Mr. Erdogan, there is a tradition of apology. There is also a proper way to make one. If you truly meant what you said, you would have said it in the Turkish parliament, or better yet visited Dersim and bowed respectfully before the cherished memory of those who were mercilessly wiped out for simply being Kurds.
Elie Wiesel was indeed right. Forgetting the dead is like to killing them again.
So was Cicero: “The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”
Acclaimed author Lois McMaster Bujold, four-time winner of the prestigious Hugo Award for best novel, said it all: “The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is the duty of the living to do so for them.”
The hoarse voice of this fairness-seeking Kurd still cries out for justice!
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