How productive can death be? Kurdish politician and antropology doctor Hişyar Özsoy who states that the answer to this question lies in the 40 years of practice of the Kurdish movement, said: "Biological death is not an end in Kurdistan anymore. Those who die do not get lost in nothingness.The Kurdish movement have changed the meaning of death." Özsoy, pointed out that the violent attacks of the government against the dead and the cemeteries and funerals will not give results.

 

We talked with HDP Diyarbakır MP Hişyar Özsoy, about the attacks on Kurdish language, national colours and graves that emerged in Van and spreaded to other cities.

 

We know that death is two-dimensional, biological and social death. After biological death occurs, the influence of the person that died, continues in life. How can we express the meaning behind the attacks on the graves in this respect?

 

This is a historical situation. We have to evaluate this in the current conjuncture. This is a historical state policy. The state wants to reduce the Kurds they killed to biological entities. This is the real issue. With these attacks, the government tries to prevent Kurds from coding these deaths as social and symbolic deaths. In this respect, the government is trying to kill the social death.

 

Considering the political conditions and the Kurdish struggle for freedom, what kind of a connection is established between the dead and the society of the Kurd? What kind of power does the Kurdish funeral have?

 

 In all beliefs and religions in the world, death is attributed a sacred meaning. People don't sing while they are passing through a cemetery for example. They pay their respects. But the deaths we are talking about, are political deaths. Political deaths have an important role in the national construction of the Kurds. The national Kurdish ideology is almost like a collective funeral seromony. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people who lost their lives in the Kurdistan national liberation struggle. Death is a very central point in the creation of the national Kurdish ideology. Because the Turkish state sees and understands this, they are trying to rip the death from its political image, in fact ripping the dead away from the living, they are trying to put boundries between them and control those boundries strictly.

 

How successful can this intervention be?

 

This is a futile effort. Let me give you one example. Sheikh Said. He was taken to the gallows in Dagkapi in 1925 and has no grave. They also buried them together with others in a mass grave. They poured concrete over that mass grave. We don't know where it is. It is a lost grave. A mass grave. Almost 100 years have passed since then. But the memory is still alive. 

 

You say that the Kurdish movement have changed the meaning of death in the Middle East in the last 40 years. Can you elaborate?

 

The Kurds have a very organic relationship with the dead. This is why I think of it as a collective funeral seromony. Death is so creative in the creation of the national Kurdish ideology! Death is basically very personal. A person dies and the society codes this death with symbolic rituals. Some burn the dead and spread the ashes, some bury them. But there is always a transition process. And this is universal. From this world to the other.  Now when people die in Kurdistan, people are buried with a number of rituals. It also depends on the place. Everyone has to farewell their dead from this world to the other. When you look at the Kurdish movement you see that they were able to create a mechanism that produces a political life from death. If we put it simply, they have changed the meaning of biological death. Now, in Kurdistan, biological death is not an absolute end. Your influence in life continues after your biological death. Kurdish movement was successfully able to create its 'symbolic economy'. Death is no longer biological in Kurdistan. The struggle of the Kurdish movement is now considered to be an attempt to overcome the fear of death.

 

At what level is the state's power of violence against the power of symbols and images, can it stop the production of the value you are talking about?

 

It attacks physically, tries to destroy the physical traces. Production of value does not only consist of finding the deceased bodies and bringing them back. As long as the state continues to kill the Kurds, the symbolic world will grow so much so that, just like in the famous poetry Musa Anter reads regarding how productive death can be: "Hangman woke up in his bed one night, oh God, he said, such a difficult puzzle, these men mount up as they die but I am wasting away killing them". I think these verses express the whole 'symbolic economy' quite right. The hangman kills continuously, but the number of men he kills increases as he kills and they mount up symbolically.

 

There is no chance the state wins this war merely by attacking to the cemeteries, the deceased. They are fighting with the ghosts. This is such a pity. The state is amid the anxiety of the hangman paradox. That is why it attacks this much. If the state were in it's right mind, it could have seen this: the less it kills, the less it feeds this economy. Such an interesting dialectic here is in question. The state is stuck in such a practice that the more it kills, the opposite party grows.

 

Rênas Cûdî has recently wrote an article in "Yeni Özgür Politika" (New Free Politics) concerning the neo-colonialism. In this article he addresses to the fact that the state, now, focuses rather on how to Kurds should "die", rather than how they "live". I believe that to continue this discussion on various dimensions is beneficial. What would be your commends on this suggestion?

 

I wrote that article and I recommend it.One of the most efficient ways to understand how the political power operates in this country one should always look at how people die. If you look at how the Kurd dies, you will not only see a violation of rgiht, but also a political circumstance of a complicated nature. In my belief, th reason why the state attacks so furiously to the bodies of the Kurds is its desire of sovereignity. Sovereignity means the domination over the territories and death. The way that the state kills the Kurds is indeed the expression of the Kurdish question.

 

I formulated this as follows: There is another question in Turkey and in the Middle East just as important as the questions of living in a dignified way any human being deserves, and that is the question that Kurds can not die in a dignified way any human being deserves. When you look at the amputated dead bodies, at the dead bodies that were kept in the kitchen freezers, at the dead bodies left in the middle of the streets, at Cemile's body, Mother Taybet's body... There is the reality of the 90s, there is Sheikh Said... You built your national ideology with what you have in hand. All the turning points that constitute the national ideology of the Kurds is about the massacres and the dead bodies. Halepçe, Dersim, 1925... In the near past, Rojava, Kobanê... The vilages burned down, the dead bodies lost... this is such an ideology that death is so rough and central.

 

The discussion of the death is central to the discussion of sovereignty and identity. One should think beyond the simple conceptions of 'violations of human rights', 'cruelty', 'immorality'. These are the calls targeting the conscience and moral values of people. However, the matter of death should be placed in the center of the actual Kurdistan-Turkey relationship. 

 

The question is death is tightly related to the question of identity, sovereignty and the territory. What we call the sovereignty of the state is the state's legitimacy of killing on a certain, limited piece of territory that are are defined politically. In the four parts of Kurdistan, the state wants to dominate the way how Kurds die. It is not just the killing, but there is a intervention on the relationship of the dead and the living to prohibit the symbolical, political values. These are not arbitrary. It is not just a matter simple as a few hooligans go and attack the dead bodies, no. This is a systematical and historical approach, I think, the most central point of the Kurdish question.

 

Attacking the cemeteries and dead bodies is the attempt to erase their existence from the surface of the space and time. But death is such a thing that you can do anything you like to the dead body when the spirit leaves. However, no power has won a war against the souls.

 

 In an interview with our agency a few days ago, political scientist Kemal Can said: "The government presents every 'abnormal' as the 'new normal'." Is there a danger that the attacks against graves and funerals, which we can consider as one of the new norms of the government, are accepted as the new normal? What can politicians, journalists, intellectuals, democrats, that is, all opposition groups do, to avoid such danger?

 

Getting used to something means to accept it. But I do not think there is any acceptance here. There is a very serious social anger against these attacks. How can this anger express itself? If some 10- 20 people go out to protest the attacks against the graves, they are surrounded by 50 soldiars. As the HDP our deputies are trying to reach everywhere and everyone possible.

 

MA / Deniz Nazlım