While the Turkish army is continuing its aggression against Iraq and some forces in Syria are organizing terrorist attacks in the Kurdish- and Armenian-populated provinces of al-Hasakah and Aleppo, the recently suppressed “Sirnak Republic” in Turkey is facing a bloody tragedy. While Kurdish activists in Sirnak are being arrested and beaten, locals in Cizre (20 km away from Syria and 40 km away from Iraq) are being massacred.
According to Verelq, this is the city where during the last parliamentary elections as many as 85% of people voted for the pro-Kurdish HDP. On Sept 4, Cizre was blockaded by Turkish troops. The Kurds call this a siege, while the Turkish authorities say this is just a special operation. But both sides confirm that dozens of people have been killed in the city over the last week. Simply, the Turks call them PKK fighters while the Kurds say they were civilians. On Sept 11, the leader of HDP and the mayor of Diyabakir Selahattin Demirtas said he had a list of the killed Kurds. “If just one of them proves to be PKK fighter, I will resign,” he said.
The Turkish authorities are silent. They say they are fighting terrorists, that is, PKK, who is killing Turkish soldiers because they support Erdogan, who is backing up ISIS terrorists, who are killing Kurds in Syria, Iraq and Turkey.
Most of the western and Russian mass media are also silent. In fact, Erdogan’s regime is massacring Kurds all over Turkey. In the biggest Turkish cities, it is arresting Kurdish activities. Almost 200 HDP offices have been burned over the last two weeks. Demirtas attempted to enter Cizre but was not let by the police. The Interior Ministry explained that their key task was to protect the lives of their citizens, including MPs. “If MPs arrive in Cizre, they may face provocations and we will not be able to guarantee their security. So, we can’t let them go there,” the Ministry said. This means that the massacres in Cizre are not yet over and the Turkish army needs some time for covering up its tracks. A group of Kurdish MPs have reacted by a sit-down strike at the gates of the city. The only news we are receiving today is posters in social networks. We can’t check if they are right but what they say is really shocking.
No less tragic is the situation in the Kurdish-populated town of Yuksekova. There is a video picturing Turkish soldiers shelling apartment houses with “hiding Kurdish separatists” inside. It is hard to say how many Kurds have been killed in Cizre and Yuksekova but obviously there are lots of kids and women among them. Turkish Interior Minister Selami Altinok says that 30-32 terrorists have been killed. BBC reports the same figure. The authorities say that 11 police officers and 4 civilians have been wounded and 30 barricades have been destroyed. The Kurds are publishing long lists of killed civilians, the Turks have admitted just one.
One more sign that something bad is going on in Cizre is the Kurdish National Congress’s call on the peoples of Kurdistan, Turkey and Europe to protest against the massacres in Cizre. “Just like Kobani, a symbolic place where the ISIS was defeated, Cizre must become a place where we will see the defeat of the dirty policy of the ruling AKP,” says the call. Today the Kurds are building their own model of self-government and self-defense against the state of AKP, who does not want to solve the Kurdish problem and prefers resorting to the policy of the dirty war of the 1990s. This call is interesting from the diplomatic point of view: while denying the Turkish state, the Kurds recognize the principles of political inter-party struggle. This wise tactical move cancels the inviolability of the Turkish borders.
The key point here is that everybody is silent. The silence of the West, Israel and their Gulf satellites is clear as they cannot accuse their anti-Assad ally of organizing a Kurdish genocide. For the West Erdogan is not Assad but a great democrat assisting it in reformatting the Middle East and the Muslim world. And nobody cares for the evidence that while killing Kurds in Dizre and Yuksekova, Turkish soldiers often say: “Kurds, now let Armenians be proud of you.” According to Kurdish anthropologists Adnan Celik and Namik Kemal Dinc (the authors of the book entitled “100-Year Groan: Diyarbakir of 1915 in the Footsteps of Collective Memory” – edit.), this proves the Kurdish proverb that emerged after the suppressed Kurdish riots in Turkey in the 1920s and said “Armenians for breakfast, Kurds for supper.”
What the Turks’ allies, ISIS terrorists, did in the Kurdish-populated towns of Ayn al Arab (Kobani) and Ras Al Ayn, the province of al-Hasakah and Aleppo is a genocide of Kurds in Syria. The tragedy of Yazidis in Iraq proves that the ISIS has a specific plan to annihilate the Iraqi Kurds. The events in Cizre and Yuksekova are also a genocide. The next may be Igdir, a Turkish town near Armenia and Iran. On the pretext of a pursuit of terrorists, the Turks keep invading Syria and Iraq. The local authorities are too busy fighting the ISIS to care for the Turkish games with Kurds. Recently Syrian President Bashar al Assad said that Kurds living in Syria, like Druses, Armenians, Alawites, Christians, Shias and Sunnis, are Syrians, so, Syria is ready to protect them. But as long as Turkey is backed up by NATO, the US and Israel, Syria and Iraq will hardly dare to oppose it. The silence of the West is natural – Turkey is doing to the West has planned.
The worst thing here is that Armenia is also silent. The local authorities are saying nothing, while experts prefer commenting on everything but the things happening very close to the Armenian border. In the meantime, the Kurds have realized that history is recurring. Something like this already happened in the early 20th century. Simply, this time served for breakfast are Kurds. It is not befitting Armenia to close its eyes on new massacres in the year of the Centennial of the Armenian Genocide, especially as those massacres are occurring in the territory of Western Armenia. Logically, the Armenians should have been in the vanguard of the people who would use this incident to make the world community to sit up and to look once again at the problem of the Armenian Genocide.