NOTTINGHAM, ENGLAND
Kurds have lived across Europe for over fifty years. They are second in population density in Germany.
The migrations, which began in the 1990s are the direct result of a dirty war which is being waged in Kurdistan by the fascist Turkish state. After committing countless genocides in cities in Turkey-occupied Northern Kurdistan, the fascist Turkish state opened its doors for its victims, the entire Kurdish population, to flee. In doing so, entire Kurdish communities were pushed away from their villages and towns into the liberal hands of European states. So the physical massacre was followed by demographic change and a cultural genocide.
Assimilating the Kurds is a hundred-year-old unchanging policy of the Turkish state. European states have always been supportive, either vocally or through silence, of the Turkish state and its hostility towards the Kurds. In fact, it would not be unfair to say that such states have developed hostile policies towards the Kurds themselves. Slashing the rights of European Kurds to protest, every form of disagreement and rejection by the youth is treated as a potential threat of terrorism. By using the assassination of Olof Palme as an excuse, the western world didn’t only criminalise the will of the Kurdish people, the PKK. They criminalised the entire Kurdish population.
Kurds living in Europe offer all kinds of support and contributions to their hosting European state, working harder than most nationals, to break the feeling of shame and inferiority of not belonging. Many times, the Kurdish youth who join the PKK join on the basis of this shame and the cultural alienation, which once they start to realise they cannot unsee. This awkwardness of not fitting starts turns from an inconvenience to an excrutiatingly unbearable pain. Still, European Kurdish youth wear the shoe until their feet are swollen, and only realise once their wounds are bleeding that not every shoe fits everyone.
İn Europe, Kurds are not able to maintain their own identity and culture, because they simply do not know what their culture or identity is. Otherwise, it would be impossible to slave away in retail or spend days waiting for the mercy of the government to be able to buy food. Because the situation of the motherland is quite clear, while there is so much to be done, a more meaningful life to be lived, young people look up to their local gang leader. As if the situation of being jobless alone was not against every societal value in Kurdistan, Kurdish youth are fulfilling the duty of becoming cadres of the states which tore their country.
İn the UK, hundreds of young Kurds in London are wasting their lives, admiring to become a famous rapper or drug dealer. On the other end of the spectrum, their age-peers are living on the mountains of Kurdistan protecting their country from the rapist, terrorist occupiers. Instead of embodying the ideology which has been created especially for their people, an ideology which the academics of Europe are constantly studying, the Kurdish youth are choosing to sell drugs.
Undoubtedly, the formation of gangs within Kurdish communities is the product of being an ethnic minority. This formation which started as a form of self-defence against the outside, a way of building a community regardless of how immoral their jobs may be, shows the desperacy of our Kurdish people. Still, this has pushed the Kurdish communities especially in the UK, into a state of isolation and rejection against anything from the outside. This includes their motherland.
Kurdish families in Europe spend most of their time making money, to be able to visit the motherland for a month every summer, where they act like and are treated like tourists. They then end their summer by visiting a 5-star hotel in Turkey, very aware that this money will later be used to kill the young people fighting to liberate their country. Still, they are unaware of how far they have drifted from being Kurdish. They are also unaware of the resentment which is created between the youth who have not abandoned their country and the spoilt, orientalist Kurds driving expensive cars waiting for the motherland to be liberated only to visit at their next summer holiday.
NC// Kemal Söbe
