The Kurdish issue returned violently when the Turkish government decided on October 9th to launch a military operation in northeastern Syria under the euphemistic title "Source of Peace".
The aim of Ankara's intervention was to repel Kurdish fighters, whom it called "terrorists", and to clear the border area of forces fighting Islamic State with the assistance of the US military.
The operations lasted almost a week, with civilian casualties in the area, Kurdish fighters and Turkish soldiers, and were suspended when Ankara agreed to a ceasefire and a 120-hour "freeze". after the intervention of the US leadership and Pence and Pompeo's visit to Turkey.
On October 22 and after almost 7 hours of negotiations in Sochi between Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin, it was decided to withdraw the foreign forces deployed in Syria and to develop joint Russian-Turkish patrols in the region.
"Turkish government has an allergy to Kurdish"
The Kurdish it is not new, nor is it for the first time occupying world public opinion. In fact, in Greece the issue has a relatively long history.
We wanted to know what her policy means Turkey for the people most affected by it. So we spoke with a woman who was born in the Kurdish areas of Turkish territory and has lived in Greece since she was a child, giving her own fight for the rights of her people.
Mordeniz Bertsem has been in Greece for 20 years.
"I have been here since '98, for the same reasons we are doing this interview today, about the Kurdish genocide. I grew up in the camp of Lavrio. I graduated as a babysitter, then I enrolled in a journalism school and at the moment I am working as an external consultant at the Kurdistan Cultural Center in Athens ".
Bertsem told us about the "Source of Peace": "The Turkish government has an allergy to Kurdish, listening to free Kurdistan. They did not even accept us living under the same flag for so many years. We accepted, we abandoned the idea of a free Kurdistan and we said to become a democratic federation. They did not accept that either. As long as we have called for peace for so many years in Turkey and Syria and in Iran and in Iraq, we were bombed more and more. I am not just talking about Erdogan, I am talking about the whole Turkish regime. This is their mentality. It starts with Mohamed. "Whoever kills Christians, whoever kills giants will go to paradise."
The Kurdish struggle against ISIS remained proverbial: "This is what the jihadists are doing today. I do not say "oh what did the jihadists do", because that is what Islam says. Just so many years ago the Kemalists went a little more European, a little further west. Erdogan came and kept what the Qur'an says. He could not accept the idea of Kurdistan for years, especially in Syria. And let us not forget that Kombani, Rozava, was not only liberated from the hands of the Kurds. What crushed him was their agreement USA with the Kurds, of Assad with the Kurds, the YPG forces, the international guerrillas found from France, Switzerland, Greece, from Scandinavian countries.
What he feared came true. And he prepared the ground for many years to invade Συρία. He did, he did not find in the beginning an obstacle from the West. But he found a great obstacle from the people. Everyone says the Kurds are leaving. No, the Kurds are not leaving, it is just that the Kurds did not bomb anyone's village. The Turks came and spread out as if it were their own country, put up the flag, and even Erdogan said that the flag where it entered will not come out again. As if the country is his. It makes a lot of sense for the Kurds to bow down because they did not want a war anyway. There were 200.000 civilians in an area whose homes were suddenly bombed and they do not know where to go. And not just with simple weapons, with chemical weapons, with prohibited weapons. "Babies were burned."
And it continues: "How do the Kurds fight for so many years? The PKK, the YPG forces were not founded by the Americans. The Kurds are doing well and leaving because above all for the organization, for the PKK, it is the people, above all for the civilians to leave. The guerrilla is the guerrilla, the civilian is the civilian. Women came to leave the children to the grandmothers, to take up arms and to fight alone the conquerors, the rapists who sold women in the bazaars. They killed children by raping them. They sold them to 70-year-olds. And they did not only do it to the Kurds. They did it to the Christians, to the Armenians. Now everyone understood what Rozava was. Today, the people of the West understand what the Kurdish people are living. We have been living this for 100 years. "For millennia, from Zarathustra, from the Yezidis who have suffered 74 genocides."
"We had a demon in front of us"
"If Europe had stood up to the jihadist attack 3-4 years ago, instead of blaming the Kurdish people, I would not say the Kurdish guerrillas, because my friend, my brother who took the mountains and said he would become a soldier, was fighting there. . I saw grandmothers fighting, I saw 15-year-old children fighting. "Europe has accused the Kurds of colluding with the Americans," Bertzem told us.
"Then I was very tired of giving her the following answer in very simple words: you had a demon in front of you, not in the sense of bad energy, demons with the worst knives, the worst you can imagine. It's his right, so says his religion. You had these demons who had decided to convert the whole of Europe to Islam, to cross all the borders, but first by the Kurds, by the Assyrians, first by Armenians and Christians. Who would we have agreed with, did anyone have a better idea? In fact, we gave 70.000 witnesses, some say 11.000. If we put journalists, because they are also witnesses. Do you know how many Greek or German volunteers went to cook for the people without belonging to any NGO?
We even had to agree with the other demon to keep some areas safe. Again, we did not succeed. The struggle continued, the guerrilla war continued, and the Europeans said why the Americans gave up their weapons. "They gave us weapons and we did not accept it?"
"The war was not only in Syria, we live it every day"
As for the attitude of the Turkish people, he told us:
"We did not fight for borders, we did not say that Diyarbakir is ours, Istanbul is yours. We compromised under the same flag. Do you understand what it means for a man who has lost parents and siblings, whose childhood has been ruined? The Turkish flag is made with our blood. Because even soldiers are forcibly taken by Kurds.
The Turkish people did not stand up properly, as always. Even children greeted militarily. From their stadiums to their schools ".
The daily life of the Kurds in Turkey is in many cases stressful and lifeless. Bertzem explains:
"In the first years I was in Greece, I said why not be there to study in Diyarbakir? To have relatives, to have friends. But growing up and knowing the Kurds who came here, I made my cross, raised my hands to Allah, to the Buddha, everywhere and said happily that I grew up here. For the wood I would eat. I went to Istanbul first grade and ate a lot of wood because I did not speak Turkish. I had a classmate who was a Kurd and whenever the teacher approached, he peed on him and also ate wood. Because she peed on him. That's how I would grow up. And necessarily I would either go to the mountains or I would be in prison or I would say: "Oh no, I am a Turk". And I would be ashamed of who I am.
This is today's Turkey. The Turkish people have never stood by the pacifist because both he and my child are dying. And the children of rich Turks do not die. 25 million are Kurds, Kurds send to the mountain. For years now there are the "Mothers of Saturday", the mothers of the missing who since '96 have the images of children in their hands. A Turkish mother did not stand next to them to say that her grave should be found. From the '60s, from the' 80s until 2019, history repeats itself. Nothing has changed, they just pull their hair, they beat them the same. And half of them are 60 or 70 years old. "The war is not just in Syria, we live it every day."
The village where the PKK was born
Bertzem also remembers how her grandmother lived:
"80, 90 years ago my grandmother was sleeping with her gun. Because the village of Litze, where the PKK was founded, has been burned more than 50 times with people inside. In this village it was forbidden to go and even drink tea. And people who resisted and stayed there are now dead. Even today you are not allowed to enter Litge. Because they believe that the village fed the guerrillas and the army counted the flour they took. He had a family of three children, he used to get so much flour ".
But the Kurds are not only being tested in Turkey.
"The Kurds of Iran are no different from those of Turkey. What Turkey is doing, Iran is doing twice as bad. Iran executed a 27-year-old teacher the other day for teaching children their mother tongue. Last summer 3 poets. They were not executed because they had taken up arms, they were executed because they were writing. They went to jail and all over Europe we collected signatures to save them. We just managed to delay it. Suddenly one morning at 6 o'clock they were all executed together.
It is not just Syria. See in Iraq when Saddam killed them. In a village where 5.000 Kurds lived, a strange substance was thrown by helicopter, like soil. And that smelled like apple pie. The children ran: "Mom, did you make apple pie?". Eventually it was chemical and everyone in the village died.
It is not the people's fault for Ocalan's tradition
"I have never believed in governments and I have no illusions. If I had I would have to hate the Greek government that gave him Ochalan. Governments are pawns. People took to the streets in '99 and cried. The Greeks, the grandparents cried and shouted "Shame". I was here but I did not know Greek yet and it was imprinted in my mind. These people ate wood from the PASOK government. They said, "What did we do?" I say you did not. We are very similar to the Greek people. In the struggle and in the pains and in the genocides ".
Bertzem also spoke about her own family:
"It simply came to our notice then. One of my brothers has been a political prisoner since '99, two others stayed behind and changed their last names. We are here and we are fighting. The struggle of man does not stop ".
As for how many Kurds there are in the world, he told us:
"I hear about a number of 75.000.000 Kurds around the world. Both in the Diaspora and in Kurdistan. If you consider that only my mother had 10 children. Another woman made 15, especially then. There should be 20 to 25 million Kurds in Turkey and in Iran about 11. In Iraq there must be more because they are more liberated. Everyone else in the diaspora.
The Kurdish guerrilla war started in Iraq about 100 years ago. It was started by Barzani's father and Talabani's father. The women's guerrilla movement started with Talabani's wife. The first rebel was Leila Qasim, from Iran. They executed her. "
The Kurdish people have a long history in the region and their roots are even mentioned in ancient Greek texts.
"We have a long and distinguished history. The Cardouchoi, as Xenofontas mentions. A few years ago no one listened to us. In Germany we were terrorists. The PKK is considered a terrorist organization. The PKK but kept the border safe. And I thank them for that. "
Bertzem is a dynamic activist with a flame for her struggle. But she is not the only one. So she analyzed the role of women in Kurdish society.
"If we take it mythologically, the God you say, to us the junta is a female name, the goddess. We women have a goddess. Ever since Kurdistan was divided into 4 parts (Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria) there has been terrible oppression and the Kurds have been refugees in the country where they live. As is the case with Christian populations that have been forced to embrace Islam, so it is with the Kurds.
In Islam you must wear a headscarf, otherwise you are an infidel. In Islam you should not throw away bread crumbs, because you are a sinner. You can be sold to 3 men but you can not talk.
Then came Kemal who brought the fashion of the hat and wanted to make Turkey Europe. He introduced a law that said that even women farmers should wear hats in the field. Then Kemal died and conservative Islam returned. The Kurds were forced to adopt Islamic customs. Agas was pressuring the father, the father and the brother were pressuring the daughter. Remember the red sheet on the first night of the wedding. "If the hymen had been broken, the little brother should have killed his daughter because she was unfaithful."
He told us about the rebel from Iran: "Leila Kassin first took the weapons, raped her and then executed her. Before the execution, he sang the national anthem of the Kurds. This became an example for the Kurdish woman. In Kurdish societies there has always been matriarchy.
The Turkish army in its attacks in Diyarbakir and elsewhere raped women in front of the man and her children and then killed the man. But they lived and were forced to take up arms. This officially started with the PKK and with the help of Ocalan. Not only did he give women freedom, he reminded them who they were. It reminded them of their story.
He told them: "Either you will fight for your beliefs or no man will do that for you". Women have proven to be dynamic. If you remember the Company was released mainly by women. His jihadists Islamic State they believed that if a woman killed them they would not go to paradise ".
