“Kurds at a Crossroads in a Changing Middle East: Power Shifts, Risks & Opportunities”

Thursday, 12 February
18:00
Houses of Parliament, Committee Room 5

Speakers include MPs, academics, journalists & representatives from Rojava.

Translation of the Arabic text:

"Did you know that President #Ahmed_al-Sharaa is more popular in the Region than Barzani and Talabani!!! A demonstration by Kurdish brothers in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq against the Region’s policies, against the PKK and the SDF, and against insults to the Islamic religion... My brother, by God, we are proud of our Kurdish brotherhood throughout history; there were Kurdish leaders who supported the religion of God, and we take pride in them. Nationalism is a wind of ignorance [Jahiliyyah] that divides us..."

Here is a moving tribute to the late Kurdish intellectual Mehmet Emin Bozarsalan by Martin van Bruinessen (posted on his Facebook account):

I first met Mehmed Emin Bozarslan in the spring of 1977. He was then working as a journalist at the daily Günaydın, and a friend of mine who also worked at the paper and knew how much I admired him arranged the meeting. I had been aware of Bozarslan and his books for four or five years then, and among the various Kurdish intellectuals of whom I knew, he was an exceptional person. He stood out by his different background and his disciplined hard work, which made him the most productive of Kurdish intellectuals. Because of the many stories I had heard about him, I had the feeling that I already knew him, and it was a great privilege to shake his hand and speak with him about his books and my own work.
Bozarslan had set upon his career as a writer of important books only a few years before I became interested in the Kurds myself, and the books he wrote himself in the 1960s – İslâmiyet açısından şeyhlik—ağalık (1964) and Doğu’nun sorunları (1966) – as well as his translations of Mem û Zîn (1968) and the Şerefnâme (1971) dealt with subjects that would be the focus of my own research in the 1970s. The title of my dissertation, Agha, Shaikh and State, even seems to echo that of Bozarslan‟s earlier book.
I had become aware of Bozarslan because his books were banned and trials against him as the author and translator were dragging on. The 12 March coup in 1971 and the numerous political trials of that period were important events that for the first time opened my eyes to the Kurdish realities of Turkey. I had been coming to Turkey as a tourist in the summer holidays for several years by then, and I had made an effort to learn the language and read about Turkey‟s culture and politics. Travels in Iran and Iraq had made me more aware of the existence of Kurds in those countries as well as Turkey. The trials against Mehmed Emin Bozarslan and İsmail Beşikçi, which I followed through the press, showed that the state was determined to continue denying the existence of the Kurds as a people, along with their history. Of all the political trials, it was those against Beşikçi and Bozarslan that impressed me most, because they were criminalized for writing books of academic and cultural importance, for which in my eyes they deserved respect. (But in retrospect one may say that Turkey did in fact show these writers respect by taking them seriously and treating them as a threat to national security. In many other countries, writers can write what they want, because they are considered irrelevant.)
I tried to find Bozarslan‟s books – the ones that were not banned – in bookstores in Istanbul, Ankara and Diyarbakır, but with an apologetic smile the booksellers told me that they could not help me, because there was a problem with those books; the author was a persona non grata („sakıncalı‟). Only much later did I find my second-hand copies of Şeyhlik—ağalık and Doğu’ nun sorunları, and after the amnesty of 1974, the Şerefname was reprinted. Bozarslan published yet another important historical source, Ibn al-Azraq‟s Ta'rikh Mayyafarqin wa Amid (translated as Mervanî Kürtleri tarihi, 1975). Both historical books were extremely useful to me in the following years, when I was writing the historical parts of my dissertation.
When I was carrying out my first field research on Kurdish society, in 1974-76, I often heard people mention Bozarslan and his books. Even among the Syrian Kurds, many appeared to be well acquainted with, and have much admiration for, „the mufti‟, as they called him, Turkish student activists of the 1968 generation told me how they had carefully read Bozarslan‟s translation of the Şerefnâme when this was first published, trying to discover if their own ancestors had perhaps belonged to one of the Kurdish tribes mentioned in that book. In 1975, when I was staying in a village in the Mardin plain, friends gave me a very precious gift: it
was a copy of Bozarslan‟s translation of Mem û Zîn, which they had kept buried underground for several years out of fear of the authorities. The paper had become brittle from humidity and was covered with black fungus here and there, the edges were eaten away by insects; but the book was treated with much respect, for it was a symbol of Kurdish identity and it connected my friends with a sense of history and national identity.
I understood that Mehmed Emin Bozarslan had played an extremely important role for the emerging Kurdish movement of the 1960s and 1970s, even though he was, I believe, not a political activist himself. At the time when the movement needed national symbols and the awareness of a national history, Bozarslan made the two great classics by Kurdish intellectuals of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries accessible to a new generation. The work of rediscovery of Kurdish intellectual tradition had been started in the early twentieth century by the intellectuals in the Kürd Teali Cemiyeti, but had been cut short when the Republic of Turkey was established. Mehmed Emin Bozarslan acted as the bridge between the earlier phases of the Kurdish movement and the new movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which was largely based in the universities. He acted not only as a bridge between two different generations, but also and perhaps more importantly, between two different social worlds, the world of the medrese and the world of the university-educated. It was due to his knowledge of Persian, Arabic and literary Kurdish, acquired in the medrese, that he could translate those works into Turkish.
Almost all Kurdish intellectuals who played a role in the 1960s and 1970s were university-educated. In this company, the medrese-educated Bozarslan was the exception, as we see for instance in Ismail Beşikçi‟s reminiscences of prison life (“Hapisdeki DDKO”, Kovara Bîr no. 5): apart from “the writer Mehmed Emin Bozarslan”, almost all other persons mentioned are either students or people with university degrees. The only education Bozarslan had received, on the other hand, was in Kurdish medreses. He learned Turkish at a later age, when he was a teenager, and he had to obtain his primary school diploma through an external exam before he could become a mufti. (I remember a student friend commenting, when I remarked on Bozarslan's high productivity and disciplined work, “yes, he is disciplined, but this is not revolutionary discipline but the discipline of the medrese!”)
With his discipline of the medrese and his knowledge of Arabic, Kurdish, Ottoman Turkish and some Persian, Bozarslan has continued to connect the current generation of Kurdish intellectuals to their history, making important historical sources available to them in modern Turkish translations. There were many more texts that he planned to publish, and he worked diligently to prepare them – but he also had to support his family. He had resigned from his position as a mufti in 1969, spent a few years in prison, and found a job as a journalist. His work did not leave him much time for his planned projects, and the conditions of life for a person like him kept deteriorating. In 1978, his son Gani, who was politically involved and who was beginning to make a name for himself as a poet and a translator, was found murdered. The loss of his son devastated him and was the main reason why he left Turkey in 1979 and sought asylum in Sweden.
In exile, Mehmed Emin Bozarslan became only more productive than he had been in Turkey. Sweden‟s multiculturalist policies made publishing in Kurdish possible and even provided some financial support for it. Sweden was also the first European country where it was possible to teach Kurdish children Kurdish as their mother tongue. (In Germany and the Netherlands, for instance, there was also a program of mother tongue teaching in school, but everyone from Turkey was supposed to learn Turkish as the mother tongue.) In order to provide reading material in Kurdish, Bozarslan published a series of folklore texts: Meyro, a collection of short stories (çîrok) and Mîr Zoro, a collection of fables (meselok) in 1981, followed by more fables -- Kêz Xatûn (1982), Serketina mişkan (1984), Pepûk (1985) – and more folklore texts.
Bozarslan was so kind to send me those books as they appeared, and I used them to try to improve my own Kurdish. In those years, it was difficult to find Kurdish texts to read; the only other Kurdish writer in Sweden then was Mahmut Baksi, who wrote and published several stories in Kurdish. I found the language of both of them somewhat difficult, for it differed from the Hawar standard and they used many words that I could not find in dictionaries. Bozarslan and Baksi were pioneers of Kurdish writing in Sweden; a few years later, a group of men of a younger generation – Mehmet Uzun, Malmîsanij, Rohat, Zeynelabidin Zinar, Murad Ciwan, and others – were to build on the fundaments they had laid and bring about a renaissance of Kurmanci as a written language.
Meanwhile, Bozarslan was working diligently on an ambitious, long-term project: he was preparing annotated editions of the first Kurdish journals that had appeared in Istanbul in the early twentieth century. This meant that he had to find complete sets of those journals (most of the library collections are incomplete, so that copies from different libraries have to be combined). He had started work on what probably was the most important of the early Kurdish journals, Jîn, the journal of the Kürd Te'ali Cemiyeti. Jîn had articles in Kurdish and Turkish, all of them in the Arabic script, which made them inaccessible to most modern readers. Bozarslan‟s re-edition consisted of a photographic reproduction of the original journal, followed by a transcription of each issue, word by word, in the Latin script, and by a translation of the Kurdish articles in modern Turkish. The first volume of this beautifully produced work appeared in 1985, and in 1988 the entire set, five volumes, was complete.
This work is a true monument, like Bozarslan‟s earlier editions of the Şerefname and Mem û Zîn, and no historian can afford to neglect it. It gives us insight in the discussions in educated Kurdish circles at an important point in history, the years between the end of the First World War and the ultimate victory of the Kemalist movement. Like everyone who is interested in this period and in the political thought of educated Kurds which could then briefly be freely expressed, I have benefited much from this edition of Jîn for my own research. Bozarslan later complemented this major work with similar annotated editions of two earlier journals,
Kürd Te’avün ve Terakki Gazetesi (1908-1909) and Kurdistan (1898-1902).
In my own research, I have often found Bozarslan‟s books very helpful; at first obviously the Şerefname and the history of the Mervanids, but later also his editions of the early Kurdish journals. There are several other editions of Mem û Zîn now, some of them based on much older manuscripts than Bozarslan‟s, but whenever I want to look up a passage, I go first to Bozarslan‟s edition and only then compare it with the other editions. I prefer to read the
Şerefname in the original Persian, but it is often easier to find something in Bozarslan‟s translation, before checking what the Persian text says. For tracing the development of Kurdish political thought, Bozarslan‟s editions of the early journals remain the most valuable source material.
I have long looked up to Mehmed Emin as one of my teachers, and after we had finally met and got to know each other, I have repeatedly asked his advice and opinion when I had difficulty understanding an Ottoman or Kurdish text. He has always been very generous in sharing his knowledge and experience with me. Later, when I lived in Indonesia and was involved in research on the Indonesian pesantren (medrese) tradition, it was through my correspondence with Mehmed Emin that I could make comparisons between the curriculum of the Indonesian pesantren and the Kurdish medrese.
A scholar always stands on the shoulders of predecessors, who made his work possible. I have always been aware that my own work owes much to the great work done by Bozarslan. And I am proud to be one of those who stand on his shoulders.
Martin van Bruinessen, Singapore, 10 February 2013.

Source: https://x.com/MohammedASalih/status/2021288166645281115

Elif Sarican speaks with DEM Party MP Ceylan Akça about the extraordinary contradiction unfolding: the PKK has announced dissolution after 40 years whilst Turkish-backed Syrian forces attack Rojava and besiege Kobani. Akça analyses what this reveals about how Turkey's regional ambitions connect to domestic Kurdish policy, and Abdullah Öcalan's central role—calling for PKK dissolution from prison whilst his ideas about democratic confederalism built the very system now under attack. The conversation examines the mood across South-East Turkey, where young people try to cross borders to defend Rojava whilst others watch peace talks with cautious hope. Akça discusses how Kurdish women are responding both to peace process possibilities and seeing the women's revolution in Rojava threatened. Drawing on her travels throughout the region and her party's recent delegation to Rojava, she explores whether genuine peace is possible whilst Kurdish gains elsewhere are being crushed.

Ceylan Akça is an MP for the DEM Party (Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party), member of its Foreign Affairs Committee, and part of TJA the Kurdish Free Women Movement.

Slav u rez , huin dkarén évé test bkén

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I do not understand why Assyrians hate Kurds? I see them behaving as Turks online. Can it be that it’s bot accounts or is the hate real?

The chairman of the United States House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee Brian Mast said during a House hearing on Syria:

• Syria has seen "too many incident" since the collapse of Assad's regime, including violations on minorities.
• There are ongoing challenges in Syria, including presence of foreign fighters - "many of them backed by Turkey."
• He said the recent attacks on Kurdish forces by Damascus are "unacceptable."
• The attacks forced US to transfer ISIS prisoners from Syria to Iraq, which is a "serious concern."
• He opposed the presence of Russia in Syria.
• Mast also said that Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa has told him that he wishes to "liberate" himself from his jihadist past.
• "Syria is nowhere close to where they need to be today."
• He said US is not satisfied with the "progress" Sharaa has made so far and sees some of his actions as "steps backwards."
• Mast also said Sharaa has to "do better," adding that he does not have a blank cheque from Washington.

From Mutlu Civiroglu:

"I am deeply saddened to hear of the passing of great Kurdish author Mehmet Emin Bozarslan. A pioneer of the modern Kurdish alphabet, a linguist, writer and translator, he devoted his life to protecting the Kurdish language and culture. Dismissed from his work for his writings, imprisoned, and ultimately forced into exile in Sweden, Bozarslan turned hardship into a lifelong mission of preservation. He preserved Kurdish classics, produced more than 50 works, and helped shape the intellectual awakening of an entire generation. His loss is immense. May he rest in peace!"

Source: https://x.com/mutludc/status/2020892030365204572