Kenan Ayaz was able to continue his plea in the §129b proceedings before the Hamburg Higher Regional Court. He analysed the resistance of the Kurds over the last 100 years and asked about Europe’s responsibility in the Kurdish question.
The courtroom was once again well filled with around 20 people. Supporters had even travelled from Copenhagen and Berlin to hear Kenan Ayaz’s trial statement. In it, the 49-year-old spoke about the Kurds’ resistance against their forced assimilation and expulsion in the 1920s and 30s. He described the cruel war against the population of Dersim: ‘In the years 1937 to 1938, one of the largest and cruelest massacres in human history took place in Dersim with the genocidal attacks by the Turkish state. Tens of thousands of Kurds in and around Dersim were massacred with guns, bayonets and chemical gases.’
‘The name for this is genocide’
Ayaz proved that the pogrom in Dersim was by no means the suppression of an uprising, as Turkish historiography claims, but a long-planned massacre. Time and again, the Turkish state has used the suppression of alleged uprisings to legitimise pogroms, which were almost always acts of resistance against extermination attacks.
‘If genocide is understood as the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, religious, political or ethnic group, then this is the very definition of genocide,’ says Ayaz. ‘All the characteristics of colonialism are applied, but there is a practice that goes beyond colonialism and aims to eradicate Kurdish existence. By the way, the characteristics of this practice are defined in all universal laws. The name for it is genocide,’ he continued.
NATO, which Turkey joined in 1952, supported this genocidal policy, as well as the establishment of counter-guerrilla units that systematically terrorised the Kurds. Ayaz described the pogrom in the Zîlan Valley, the suppression of the Ararat uprising and the occupation of Cyprus. ‘Between 1960 and 1970, the Turkish state founded paramilitary organisations such as JITEM, organised them against the Greek Cypriots and carried out secret actions and massacres. They turned the island into a bloodbath,’ Ayaz continued. The European hegemonic powers, especially Great Britain, supported this occupation policy, which will have lasted 50 years in September.
Kenan Ayaz then went on to discuss the situation in Turkey and the world in the 1970s and the emergence of the PKK. ‘The worldwide crisis of the capitalist system was reflected in Turkey as a crisis of white-Turkish fascism. The crisis of capitalist modernity meant the crisis of the Turkish nation state.’ In this context, an increasing irrationality of Turkey’s rulers can be observed, particularly with regard to Kurdish identity, he said.
The coup of 12 September
‘Turkey had the most powerful operational units of NATO, which were part of the stay-behind organisation Gladio. It controlled all political organisations. Any form of limited deviation from control was either suppressed by civilian fascist units or, if these measures were not sufficient, the entire army was mobilised,’ Ayaz described this phase. Racist nationalism sought to strengthen the nation state.
The military coup of 12 September 1980 revealed the militaristic face of the state in its entirety. There was no form of oppression, violence, torture and massacre that was not carried out by Turkey, also with the approval of NATO. The founding of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was a direct consequence of the rejection of this situation. Although the Kurds had fought for recognition of their existence rather than for their freedom, they had always been labelled as ‘terrorists’. According to Ayaz, legitimate self-defence is the reflex of defending life and existence, which is inherent in nature and all living and non-living things, and is a legitimate and sacred right.
PKK legitimate self-defence
‘The PKK was officially founded on 27 November 1978. One month after the proclamation of the PKK, on 24 December 1978, a systematic massacre began in Maraş by the state and civilian fascist militias. First, the houses of Alevis were marked with an X days before fascist militias carried out cruel attacks on defenceless people. Countless people were massacred and forcibly driven out of their homes,’ Ayaz described the pogrom in Maraş.
The military coup less than two years later was the most comprehensive junta intervention in the history of the Turkish nation state, said Ayaz. The country was in a deep economic crisis. Bülent Ecevit, as prime minister of a coalition government, needed the support of the world powers and loans from the IMF to overcome the economic crisis.
‘The military coup of 12 September initiated the construction of the Second Republic, which was based on ‘Turkish-Islamic green Turkish nationalism’ instead of the ‘secular white Turkish nationalism’ of the First Republic, due to the growing resistance of the population at home and the changed situation in the Middle East (Islamic revolution in Iran, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). Democratic and socialist Turkish oppositionists as well as members of the Kurdish national movement became the main targets of this construction,’ Ayaz said. He pointed out that the USA, which had taken over the leadership of the system from Great Britain after 1945, had developed the ‘Green Belt’ project since the 1970s, i.e. the support of fundamental Islamists, in order to weaken the socialist movements supported by the Soviet Union.
Politics of the ‘Green Belt’
The Islamist movement developed as a variant of capitalist nationalism. Its main goal is to prevent the democratisation and socialisation of societies in which Islamic culture is widespread and to integrate Islamic culture into capitalism. Islamism is one of the instruments used by all hegemonic powers for this purpose.
Ayaz then went on to explain that the Turkish nation state is driven by a policy of denial and annihilation that stands in the way of a political solution to the Kurdish question. For the Kurds, the long and brutal oppression had at times led to self-denial and alienation from their own identity, he emphasised. But with the resistance that the Kurdish movement began on 15 August 1984, a renaissance of Kurdish identity had begun. However, the major powers had authorised the deployment of the Turkish section of NATO’s secret army Gladio during the war, leaving the Kurds alone and isolated in their struggle for existence and freedom. Without the support of the hegemonic powers of capitalist modernity (including Soviet Russia), the genocide of the social culture of Anatolia and Mesopotamia could not have taken place.
NATO’s green light for fascism
Ayaz went into the possibilities that existed in the following decades to solve the Kurdish question. Turkish President Turgut Özal had been convinced that a solution was possible, but he had been murdered by forces that wanted to prevent precisely this solution. With the ‘green light’ from NATO, the fascist government headed by Tansu Çiller then came to power, in which paramilitary gangs such as Hizbullah and JITEM took over the state.
‘I believe that the chance for peace and a political solution that the Kurdish movement hoped for through dialogue could not be realised because Gladio and the internal and external forces behind it did not want a solution,’ said Ayaz. He went on to describe the efforts of PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdish movement to find a solution to the Kurdistan question.
Conspiracy instead of solution
According to Ayaz, a dialogue was sought with Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan and the military in the years 1997-1998. The search for dialogue was the result of an untenable situation. On 1 September, World Peace Day, Abdullah Öcalan declared a ceasefire in order to give the political solution to the Kurdish question and democratisation a chance. Instead of honouring this, however, an international conspiracy was initiated involving 23 countries, coordinated by the UK and the USA, to liquidate these efforts. Syria was threatened with war, the government of Hafez al-Assad bowed to the pressure and Mr Ocalan was asked to leave Syria as soon as possible.
‘Mr Öcalan left Syria to avoid triggering a major war in the Middle East,’ Ayaz continued. ‘His intention was to solve the Kurdish issue on a democratic platform. […]. If Mr Ocalan had been supported when he came to Europe, the Kurdish issue would have been solved.’
Ayaz said that Europe had refused to resolve the Kurdish issue and stop the war. This is because resolving the conflict would not have been in line with the strategy of the West – including the USA. The West had recognised that the unresolved Kurdish question would benefit it more in the long term.
Ayaz explained: ‘The European Kurdish policy of the last two hundred years has essentially been maintained. The core of this policy is to use the Kurds as a threat to subjugate the Turks, Iran and the Arabs. Mr Öcalan wanted to solve the problem peacefully by travelling to Europe. Europe, on the other hand, wanted to keep the problem as a trump card that it could play again and again. It was not at all in its interest to give up this weapon. They did not want to give it up because they regarded it as the dirtiest remnant of traditional colonial policy. For them, a strategic solution to the Kurdish question was an issue whose time had not yet come. The attitude of keeping the Kurdish trump card up their sleeve until they had fully settled their accounts with Iran, Iraq and Turkey was clearly recognisable. This attitude is similar to that of some in Turkey, who see their interests in the continuation of the problem without a solution. For the Kurds, this is a policy of ‘neither die nor live’. It is a brutal approach to embrace the Kurds so that they do not die and keep them on the brink so that they do not live. If they had been helped a little, the conditions would have been very favourable. Europe had left the First and Second World Wars behind and was on the way to a solution. The greatest bloody wars in human history had been overcome and resolved. If Europe had insisted on finding a solution to the Kurdish question, just as it had found a solution to other problems, the current situation would not exist. There would be peace in the Middle East. There would not be so much migration to Europe. Fascism would not have been able to capitalise on this and would not have become an alternative in today’s Europe. On 15 February 1999, the plan was put into action when Mr Öcalan was kidnapped and taken to Turkey in violation of international law.
Ayaz described the great anger that the Kurds felt when they heard about Mr Öcalan’s abduction. ‘The great anger against the plot turned into a social force and prevented the international plot from achieving its goal,’ Ayaz said. He described the angry demonstrations and self-immolations.
‘In this process, Mr Öcalan was the only one who acted with common sense. At his first meeting with his lawyers, he explained that he was abiding by the ceasefire he had declared on 1 September, the World Day of Peace, and that the way he had been handed over and the aims of those who had played a role in it were aimed at deepening the foundations for a conflict in order to then address Öcalan’s proposed solutions,’ said Ayaz.
Paradigm shift
‘He carried out a major theoretical transformation. He developed all the philosophical and political arguments in favour of peace and the conditions of the problem through a political solution. He emphasised the uniqueness of the democratic political solution. What followed was one of the greatest intellectual revolutions. It liberated the libertarian movements from the paradigm of power and the nation-state and led them to the paradigm of democratic community, women’s liberation, ecological and democratic society.’
Ayaz described how both the Kurdish and the Turkish public gained hope and the guerrillas ceased their armed struggle and withdrew from Turkey.
Öcalan calls on people to lay down their arms, EU declares PKK a terrorist organisation
‘At a time when the guerrillas had withdrawn from the borders, the conflict was largely over and there was no more military activity, the EU put the PKK on the terror list. It is significant that the PKK was not put on the terror list when it was still waging an armed struggle, but only after it had given up the armed struggle,’ Ayaz commented on the mendacity of the West.
The cessation of the armed struggle, the withdrawal of the PKK across the borders, the ceasefire and the attitude of legitimate self-defence did not represent a tactic but a strategic change. However, those circles that had profited from the war, as well as the profit and corruption economy, would have lost their function if the war had ended.
‘Terror list’ led neither to the dissolution of the PKK nor to the democratisation of Turkey
At this point, Ayaz criticised the EU’s inaction. It had sacrificed the Kurds for its own interests. ‘Euroa has sent the message to Turkey that the Kurdish question can be solved with blood, violence and oppression. 22 years ago, the EU put the PKK on the ‘terror list’. The ‘terror list’ has neither led to the dissolution of the PKK nor to the democratisation of Turkey. […] By reducing the centuries-old problem to the PKK and the PKK to terrorism, it is causing the current damage and tragedies. The inclusion of the PKK in the list, which was updated on 2 May 2002 at the request of the United Kingdom, legitimises and condones the genocide and occupation attacks of the Turkish state. The term terrorism, which was used during the Kurdish genocide, is a term that covers and legitimises the Kurdish genocide.
The EU’s ‘terror list’ is mainly responsible for the fact that the Turkish Republic has been waging a genocidal war for 40 years, tens of thousands of people have lost their lives and millions have been forced to migrate. If the EU had not declared the PKK a terrorist organisation and denied the Kurds their legitimacy, the Kurdish question would have been resolved long ago. The Turkish state has abused the exclusion of the PKK as a terrorist organisation by the US and Europe. […]
The EU should have said to Turkey: Why don’t you come to an agreement and make peace with the Kurds instead of spending billions of dollars on this war that is costing lives, poisoning the democratic environment and institutionalising fascism, causing the collapse of law and justice, the migration of millions of people and so much destruction and death. […] The Kurdish question is a problem created by the world capitalist system. Therefore, it is a problem linked to the world system and capitalism. Therefore, it is a problem that concerns everyone, and everyone is responsible for the fact that it remains unsolved. Without a paradigm shift on this issue, it will therefore be difficult to solve this problem,’ Ayaz concluded the trial day and announced that he would summarise the genocidal attacks of the so-called Islamic State (IS) and the solution process from 2013 to 2015 in his further remarks.
Next hearing on 2 September
Kenan Ayaz will continue his closing statement on 2 September 2024 at 9:30 am. The trial will take place on the first floor of the Higher Regional Court of Hamburg at Sievekingplatz 3, either in room 237 or 288. kenanwatch.org provides information in Greek, English and German about the trial and the protests in Cyprus and Germany.