Integration

For example, if today the people of Moldova were to rise up, hold a referendum and decide to join Romania, no one would have any doubts about such a situation. Because throughout history, the people of these two countries have also lived together, have had very similar cultural and local traditions, have gotten along well throughout history and have established very strong economic relations.

Romania, for example, has not colonized Moldova; it has not taken away its rich resources, has not ignored its language, and has not continuously terrorized its people. Therefore, the unification of these two peoples, one wanting to join the other, creates a situation that can fully correspond to the meaning of the word “integration.”

So, can the Kurds, even though they do not even have a country, even though they have been divided into four parts and occupied by four different colonial powers, integrate with the Turkish state and the Turkish people?

Throughout its history, the Turkish state has built its existence on the nonexistence of the Kurds and on the terrorization of the Kurds. The Turkish state and the Turkish people have seen and embraced the killing of Kurds as heroic stories for themselves. While the Turkish people are disturbed even by Kurds speaking their own language among themselves, the Turkish state has defined the Kurdish language as an “unknown language,” banned it, tortured those who spoke it and, by beating millions of Kurdish children, including me, distanced them from their mother tongue.

The Turkish state changed the names of Kurdish villages and replaced them with Turkish names. It burned tens of thousands of Kurdish villages that it could not assimilate by changing their names and exiled their people.

The Turkish state has killed hundreds of children in the streets of Kurdish cities by hitting them with police vehicles; it has bombed shepherds tending sheep and shot children playing in the head.

The Turkish state has always turned Kurds into enemies and, through these policies of hostility, gained the support of its own racist, fascist and blood-fed population. The more Kurdish blood the Turkish state has spilled, and the more it has spilled, the more support it has received from the Turkish people.

The Turkish state and its colonial companies have made Kurds work as slaves in construction, agriculture, cleaning and service sectors; they have neither given them the compensation for their labor nor recognized their right to a humane life.

It has bombed the land of Kurdistan from above and below, exploited its resources, dried up its rivers and burned its highlands; by forcing Kurds to migrate to the western borders of the Turkish state, it has condemned them to slavery under the Turkish population in the west.

I can present you with millions more examples, stories, cases and pieces of evidence like these. I am not even mentioning the methods of torture, the systematic assimilation policies that have been implemented, or the way some Kurds have been made to destroy others through different ideologies and interests.

So, under these conditions and with this past, is it possible for the Kurds to integrate into the Turkish state?

Or will this be called voluntary assimilation?

There is nothing about the Turkish state and the Turkish people that has changed, improved or become democratic, and they show at every opportunity that this is not the case. At the same time, when there has not been even a single day in which Kurds and Turks were equal, lived equally or were regarded as equals, is this integration?

Is it a form of assimilation that has been forcibly made voluntary?

Is it the Kurds being deceived once again?

Or is it a separation operation carried out by the Turkish state before a new massacre?

Is it normal for the Kurds to be one and independent state in every age and under every circumstance?

Or is it normal for them to try to integrate with their colonizer, to surrender to their colonizer?

In history, our elders actually explained something to us very clearly. As long as the Kurds do not listen to this advice, they are condemned to be deceived, exploited, massacred and destroyed by colonialist murderers.

And that advice is this:

If you do not become one, you will disappear one by one...