CEMIL BAYIK ABOUT THE RESETTLEMENT OF “ANCIENT LAND” IN MODERN TIMES / WILL YOUNG KURDS FROM EUROPE REALLY GO BACK TO THEIR ANCIENT SOIL ?

Bayık calls for return to villages

ANF – NEWS DESK 08.07.2013  – Writing in his column “Ancient lands waiting for us” in the Kurdish daily Azadiya Welat, Kurdish Communities Union (KCK) Executive Council member Cemil Bayık called on the Kurdish population in Turkish metropolitan cities and Europe to return to their villages. Bayık said this return would be the greatest step for the achievement of democratic nation building.

Bayık reminded that the Turkish state forced millions of Kurds to migrate to Turkish metropolitan cities and Europe during the years of the war in Kurdistan, with an aim to complete the cultural genocide of Kurds. Bayık said this was a deliberate policy of massacre, remarking that the Kurdish people’s return to their homeland would be the best answer to be given to the policy of cultural genocide. He said the return was one of the basic duties required by the current process and that it should be considered as an uprising.

Bayık underlined that the domination of capitalism in Turkey forced Kurds to leave their villages, where they have the roots of their culture, and to become slaves working for peanuts in Turkish metropolitan cities. “Kurds have been sentenced to lead a half-dead life in the suburbs created by the capitalism in Turkey. Drifted away from their homeland and villages, Kurds were buried alive into the grave of cultural genocide”, he said. He remarked that thousands of villages in the Kurdish region are in dead silence now, and that they have witnessed a very a slight increase in the number of the people who have returned to their villages in recent years. He said these villages need to re-have populations with enough capacity for agriculture and animal husbandry.

Bayık stated that the Turkish state consciously evacuated the villages in the region of Maraş, Malatya, Sivas, Adıyaman and Dersim in 90’s with an aim to dominate the turkification policy in this area. Kurds in this region were forced to migrate to either Turkish metropolitian cities or to Europe, he said and remarked that the majority of the Kurdish people living in Europe now was formed by those displaced from Maraş, Malatya, Sivas, Adıyaman, Erzurum and Dersim. Even a physical genocide would not be enough to make away with that many Kurds, he added.

Bayık indicated that around 5-6 million Kurds in Maraş, Malatya, Sivas and Dersim were forced to sever all their ties with their villages as a result of the deliberate pro-war migration policy the state imposed on this region. One third of the entire Kurdish population was displaced from their land in this period, he said and noted that several millions of Kurds, mainly assimilated, are currently living in Turkish metropolitans.

If this is not a deliberative genocide, then what is it?, he said and indicated the 1926’s Reform Plan as the planning of a genocide. An independent international court would sentence Turkey for the document of this plan, he said and remarked that this reform plan even justified the Armenian emigration and ordered genoocide.

“Returning to villages and giving importance to villages means being recovered from working for peanuts in many regions of Turkey, from being subjected to insults and poor conditions, from the illnesses all these lead up to, and from deaths in traffic accidents on the ways to seasonal working areas. Being subjected to these circumstances is a great tragedy for the people of Kurdistan which fed the humanity in the history”, he said.

Bayık indicated that the return to villages would be a true step in the struggle for national liberation. He said the return would be the first step to create a free and democratic life and society in a new Kurdistan as the reward of the pains Kurds suffered and the prices they paid for the achievement of a free and patriotic environment during the forty years of struggle. He remarked that the return to villages should be performed in a patriotic manner and aim to claim the history and the land. He said the return also meant the construction of a democratic society and a democratic-socialist life basing on the development of the social life.