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All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

                                                                                      Ellen Glasgow

Quote of the Week

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"We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves.

 -- Lynn Hall

Quote of the Week

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Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.

--Thomas Carlysle 

Quote of the Week

Be the change you wish to see in the world. 

--Ghandi 

An Inheritance of Anger: The Oppressed Becomes the Oppressor

Turkey: Kurdish Youth Losing Faith in Peaceful Protests 

April 18, 2011 - 11:52am, by Alexander Christie-Miller

Amed cannot recall the day 19 years ago when the Turkish army drove his family from their burning village, but the Kurdish teenager has many other memories to explain his anger.
 
He particularly remembers, as a small boy, asking about a row of faces hanging on the wall in his grandmother’s home. “She said they were my uncles and relatives. She told me they were killed by soldiers or disappeared or were tortured. How else could I have grown up, other than wanting to break heads with stones?”

Accused by prosecutors of throwing a Molotov cocktail at a demonstration in his hometown of Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkey’s primarily Kurdish southeast, Amed is one of the so-called “stone-throwing kids,” a generation of angry youths whose clashes with riot police have become a symbol of the simmering unrest gripping the country’s 15-million-strong Kurdish minority.

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Last month, Kurdish leaders announced a campaign of civil disobedience in the hope of winning from the Turkish government their long-sought goals of greater autonomy and cultural rights. Meanwhile, Kurdish nationalists are already enacting a program of “democratic autonomy,” forging institutions of self-government without the approval of Ankara.


But a growing number of analysts fear that the younger generation of Kurds, radicalized by a cocktail of violence and urban poverty, may be losing faith in peaceful activism.


If reform does not come soon, some believe, the growing disillusionment of these young people could herald a dangerous new phase in a conflict that started 26 years ago when the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas first took up arms against the Turkish government.


“If there’s not much effort to solve Kurdish demands, then things can potentially become really nasty,” said Henri Barkey, a specialist on Kurdish issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. The current young generation grew up following the early 1990s, when the army burnt some 3,500 villages, triggering a massive demographic shift in which more than a million Kurds fled or were driven to Turkey’s big cities.


“Their parents had always lived in Kurdish villages by themselves, distant from the streets and distant from the Turks,” said Barkey. “They have been transplanted into cities where there’s a massive police presence. They’re the ones who are most violent and the most politicized in a negative sense -- almost anarchical.”


Barkey believes the situation in the cities, where angry young Kurds are living at close quarters with far-right Turkish nationalists, could ignite a new kind of “inter-ethnic conflict.”

Politicians from the main Kurdish political grouping, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), blame the Turkish government for the growing radicalism among Kurdish youth.


While the government has eased restrictions on the use of the Kurdish language, Kurdish politicians, journalists, lawyers, and activists are still routinely prosecuted for what are often little more than “thought crimes.”


Currently, 151 prominent Kurds, including eight mayors, are being prosecuted for alleged links to the civilian wing of the PKK in a high-profile trial that critics claim is an assault on peaceful political activism.


“Because of the arrest and punishment of politicians, hopelessness is spreading and young people that are getting more radical are refusing our proposals for a solution,” said Abdullah Demirbas, the BDP mayor of Sur district in Diyarbakir.


Demirbas has firsthand experience of the struggle to hold on to the younger generation of Kurds. Two years ago, his own son, then 16 years old, took to the mountains to join the PKK after being sickened by a string of prosecutions launched against his father.


“I was trying to tell him that the democratic policies would work,” Demirbas told EurasiaNet.org. “But he said to me: ‘You haven’t killed anybody, you haven’t stolen anything. You’ve just made policies and they’ve punished you. The system only understands weapons.’”


If progress does not come soon, some believe Turkey may miss its best ever chance to settle the so-called “Kurdish Problem.”


“Right now, everything would be perfect for Turkey,” said Aliza Marcus, a Washington-based expert on the Kurdish issue. “You’ve got an experienced Kurdish leadership, and a PKK movement that wants a solution and wants to do it within the Turkish national borders.”


But she fears this will not remain the case for long. “There’s a real danger that when the original generation of the PKK and Kurdish politicians leave the scene, you will have a more radical and a more fractured movement and a generation less able to speak to the Turkish politicians and less able to control their followers . . . It’s not easy to make peace with people who have only known war.”


The Justice and Development Party government has promised to overhaul Turkey’s constitution following the June 12 general election, which it is tipped to win comfortably. Some view this as a last chance for the country’s leaders to deliver on nearly six years of rhetoric about addressing Kurdish grievances.


But the prosecution of their politicians has left Amed and his friends deeply pessimistic about the prospects of accommodation with the Turkish state. They nonetheless acknowledge that violence cannot lead to lasting peace.


“It’s easy to pick up weapons, and if they want it to get worse, we can make it worse,” said 18-year-old Rohat. “But there’s no solution that way. Civil disobedience is the only chance we have.”
 

 

Post Secret Sunday: Adonis DNA Inspires Change

Quote of the Week

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All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

--Anatole France 

TEN THINGS MEN CAN DO TO PREVENT GENDER VIOLENCE

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Approach gender violence as a MEN'S issue involving men of all ages and socioeconomic, racial and ethnic backgrounds. View men not only as perpetrators or possible offenders, but as empowered bystanders who can confront abusive peers.  If  a brother, friend, classmate, or teammate is abusing his female partner -- or is disrespectful or abusive to girls and women in general -- don't look the other way. If you feel comfortable doing so, try to talk to him about it. Urge him to seek help. Or if you don't know what to do, consult a friend, a parent, a professor, or a counselor. DON'T REMAIN SILENT. Have the courage to look inward. Question your own attitudes. Don't be defensive when something you do or say ends up hurting someone else. Try hard to understand how your own attitudes and actions might inadvertently perpetuate sexism and violence, and work toward changing them. If you suspect that a woman close to you is being abused or has been sexually assaulted, gently ask if you can help. If you are emotionally, psychologically, physically, or sexually abusive to women, or have been in the past, seek professional help NOW. Be an ally to women who are working to end all forms of gender violence. Support the work of campus-based women's centers. Attend "Take Back the Night" rallies and other public events. Raise money for community-based rape crisis centers and battered women's shelters. If you belong to a team or fraternity, or another student group, organize a fundraiser. Recognize and speak out against homophobia and gay-bashing. Discrimination and violence against lesbians and gays are wrong in and of themselves. This abuse also has direct links to sexism (eg. the sexual orientation of men who speak out against sexism is often questioned, a conscious or unconscious strategy intended to silence them. This is a key reason few men do so). Attend programs, take courses, watch films, and read articles and books about multicultural masculinities, gender inequality, and the root causes of gender violence.  Educate yourself and others about how larger social forces affect the conflicts between individual men and women. Don't fund sexism. Refuse to purchase any magazine, rent any video, subscribe to any Web site, or buy any music that portrays girls or women in a sexually degrading or abusive manner. Protest sexism in the media. Mentor and teach young boys about how to be men in ways that don't involve degrading or abusing girls and women. Volunteer to work with gender violence prevention programs, including anti-sexist men's programs. Lead by example.

Copyright 1999, Jackson Katz. www.jacksonkatz.com
Reprint freely with credit.

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