Stupid, Stupid, Stupid!

Hopefully I am not alone in this, but I am severely worried about the state of Diyarbakir (Amed)....violence has increased in the region and the PKK (or whatever their name is this week) is more active and causing "problems". Here are just a few of the most recent headlines:

Kurdish rebels take police officer hostage, rob motorists

Kurdish rebel killed in eastern Turkey while placing bomb

Bomb blast at Turkish resort leaves 20 injured

Five civilians, three police hurt in Kurdish unrest

Three Turkish soldiers killed in landmine blast

The scary thing is that all of these are from this weekend, only this weekend! I admit that I am a hard-core pacifist (and I realize how oxymoronic that statement is), but I think that the 1980's in Turkey proved one thing...that violence in trying to promote Kurdish rights does not work.

This begs the question...why then is the PKK active again? Why is the violence starting again? The answer is that the Kurds in Turkey are backed against a wall...they see their brothers to the South gaining more independence and noteworthiness in the world media, they have the government of Turkey making ridiculous "concessions" of cultural rights which make little or no difference in the grand scheme of things, and they have a younger generation growing up with the belief that no matter what they do they will fail...and so they do nothing and just stay angry...they are trapped in a corner and believe that they have no other outlet then to resort to violence. It appears faster and more affective than diplomacy, but if my Kurdish brothers and sisters want any long-term change they have to use the diplomatic route. Yes, it is a long road, and patience is very hard to keep in those types of circumstances, but it is the only sure-fire way of achieveing independence.

What needs to be done is a region-wide campaign of empowerment to the Kurds of Turkey. They need to know exactly what their rights are according to Turkish law, they need to learn how to operate within that system...They need to educate themselves, they need to educate the village women who raise their children to believe that they have no rights because that is what they have been told when they were young...lack of education is "keeping them down". The Kurds need to unify themselves in what they want (if we were unified in the aftermath of WWI, imagine what could have been done)...there are too many groups off doing their own thing (the PKK is fighting the Turkish Army and TAK is supposedly wounding tourists), without a unified path of resistance nothing can be accomplished. The Turkish government lumps all Kurdish groups into the same category as the PKK...let's look at Leyla Zana, nothing to do at all with the PKK, yet for her belief in a diplomatic approach to gaining more rights for the Kurds she was still tried and imprisoned for being a PKK sympathizer...How much could have been accomplished in the name of diplomacy if the PKK did not exist? In my opinion, a hell of a lot more than what could have ever been imagined.

I can only with certainity speak for myself, but I believe that all Kurds should condemn any and all violence committed in their name. Violence is not nor ever will be the answer to our freedom.