Öcalan: The test ended, it’s time for negotiation

Öcalan saluted the people of Kurdistand and Turkey as well as all of the people of the Middle East in this which is the New Year Day…

Öcalan said:

To all those friends whose heart is ablaze with the fire of Newroz for peace and freedom! Merhaba!

I greet our people who have transformed the Newroz fire into an awakening and a festival of democracy in Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilisations.

I convey my love through you to all the youth and women of the country.

I call on all those whose heart has room for peace and hears our voice, to all Turkey, to unite in the spirit of the solidarity of centuries.

I celebrate the festival of the fraternal peoples of the Middle East and Asia that have nourished the history of civilisations.

I send you all heartfelt greetings: Merhaba!

A year ago at Newroz we extinguished the fire of war that destroyed young lives and loves, and ignited a great torch of resurgence for peace.

Dear people of Turkey!

History has shown us that unless there is a determined vanguard of peace, historical problems will generally continue to evolve with serious losses. The most critical question confronting us is this: are we to continue with recurring coups, or else to choose the path of a whole, radical democracy?
The current period which we have gone through since last Newroz exactly expresses this parting of the ways. Either the despotic 200-year-old regime based on capitalist modernity will restore itself to power, or this will be ended by a system with a genuinely democratic constitution based on historical Turkish-Kurdish relations which implements comprehensive democratic reforms. All other stop-gap measures and temporary fixes have completed their life spans.

“The process of dialogue that continued until today was important and witnessed both sides testing the other’s goodwill, reality and genuinity. Both sides have passed this test with determination despite the government’s delaying practices, and running the process one-sidedly, avoiding the establishment of a legal ground”.

Öcalan added:

“Processes of dialogue are important but they still do not achieve binding. This is the reason why they cannot ensure sufficient guarantee for a lasting peace. At the current state of affairs, it has become unavoidable to form a legal frame for the negotiation systematics.

Peace is more difficult then war, but in every war there is peace. We were not afraid while resisting and we will not be afraid while making peace either.

Our resistance has been against the hegemonic system of denial and cruelty that ignores and kills, not against our brother peoples.

Therefore, our peace serves not governments or states vut the peoples of Anatolia, Kurdistan and Mesopotamia that internalize the thousands of years old ancient values of these lands and the world’s cultural heritage. The government and state are responsible for developing seriousness in line with this truth.

Our great journey to peace has been subjected to numerous cruel approaches and attacks from Oslo to Paris, from Gever to Lice and KCK operations. It is this movement, i.e. you, who are defeating all these dirty games, shaking the dominance of the International Gladio and will make it fail.

The struggle we have been waging has a great role in the inactivation of the systems of protection in the entire region. It is our historic responsibility to pay the required attention against the international conspiracies that we face in various shapes. On the other hand, an amenable language and approach will not only defeat a number of racist psychological methods of war but also be the main character of our great peace.

This peace will become stronger only through democratic constitutional resolutions in the entire region, Rojava in the first place.

Bearing the great potential of freedom and equality they have gained, women will be the major bearers of this peace with the new ethic and esthetic values they have added to the democratic social development.

Our movement started out as a youth movement and it has always remained young. It will once again be the youth that will persistently defend peace against the attacks and provocations targeting peace.

Our people dispersed around the world, Europe in particular, will be our voice to speak out peace and a dignified free life to the world.

All our comrades who have unblinkingly given their life, health and freedom and displayed an unprecedented will everywhere where hopes faded will be the basis of our struggle.

Bearing the thousand-year-old advanture of brotherhood, the peoples of Turkey will be the most efficient answer to racist, discriminatory, disparaging and blood-smelling discourses.

I salute all of you with my my revolutionary greetings and confidence in an entirely free and democratic land where all beliefs, peoples and cultures will feel free.

I call on everyone who assumes responsibility for his age and the humanity to be the building stone of our great peace.

I salute all those who take responsibility for the brotherhood of peoples.

Long live Newroz!

Long live the brotherhood of peoples!

Abdullah Öcalan
İmralı Prison

Turkey blocks use of Twitter

Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had said he would “root out” the social media network where wiretapped recordings have been leaked, damaging the government’s reputation ahead of local elections. And indeed Twitter was blocked a few hours after the statement by the PM.

Some users trying to use Twitter were taken to a statement apparently from Turkey’s telecommunications regulator (TIB).

The statement cited four court orders as the basis for blocking the site, where some users in recent weeks have posted voice recordings and documents purportedly showing evidence of corruption among Erdoğan’s inner circle. It said that action had been taken against Twitter as a “protection measure”.

Meanwhile Twitturk, which records the statistics of Turkish Twitter users, said that over half a million tweets were posted in just 10 hours, despite the ban.

That number would mark no sharp fall from the average number of tweets posted in the country, which is around 1.8 million per day.

Erdoğan said the government undertook such measure “for the sake of its citizens”, adding: “I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic’s state.”

Dengbej Feleknas (video)

One of the few women Dengbej, Feleknas performs in Diyarbakir/Amed at the Dengbej house established by Diyarbakir municipality

The Kurdish Music

In the cultural life of the Kurds, split up as they were in ancient times by feudal barriers, today by State frontiers, music came to play the role of a privileged, let us say unique medium: it filled a precise and basic social function. From historical chronicles to lyric poetry and from epics to literary works, all are sung, everything is put to music in order to be better or more easily memorised and thus handed down to posterity.

Kurdish music is, then, principally folk music and “anonymous”. The circumstances of its origins and development are, in fact, very diverse and difficult to establish with accuracy. originally purely vocal, a song was often composed by a woman wishing to express her feelings of sadness or, more rarely, of joy. It might also break forth in the course of the poetic contests the young men and women indulged in on their return along mountain paths or at other gatherings of young people: nocturnal meetings in the village square, New Year’s celebrations, marriage ceremonies which might last from three days to three weeks. or, then again, a song might be created from the blow of tragic events.

once the song is created, an instrumental accompaniment is added and it achieves anonymity through the intermediary of the dengbêj (bards) who disseminate and popularise it in the course of their travels from village to village, from encampment to encampment.

A dengbêj is a peasant endowed with an exceptional memory, possessing a voice of fine quality or possibly mastering a musical instrument. The dengbêj is not content merely to make known from one end of the Kurd territory to the other the local creations of others, thus acting as an effective agent in the development of a Kurdish national culture: he is also, himself, a creator, poet, composer. on the other hand, there are the mitrib (entertainers) or cengene, semi-professional musicians of “Bohemian” origin, specialised in playing the def (bass drum) and the zirne (oboe), who enliven the local festivals as well as wedding parties, and who are often simply performers on the instruments.

Transmitted orally from generation to generation, the song, as a general rule, retains quite faithfully its original words. But the melody is only a very supple frame, subject to constant modifications and to continuous renewal a renewal which helps to perfect the music and provides a guarantee of its perennial quality. The interpreter is rarely a simple performer; he puts great effort into his task, showing the nature and richness of his adaptation, recreating each work in his repertoire, accompanying them with instruments which were not used in previous interpretations.

The role of instruments is relatively secondary. As in the case of the other folk musics of the Near East, that of Kurdistan is monodic; the melody itself has a fundamentally vocal character; the instrumental accompaniment is intended above all to put the listener in a certain mood to make him more receptive to the vocal message. Furthermore, hearing the same song sung differently, with the accompaniment varying from one region of Kurdistan to another, one would be inclined to believe in the priority given to the words over the melody, the latter serving above all as an aid to the memorisation of the words. This is true, but only partially so.

The nomadic way of life had a profound effect on cultural life and especially on music. The songs of the nomad shepherds, the melodies sung in olden times on the occasion of festivities marking the departure for the Zozan (high mountains) or the return to the plains, or in the course of celebrations over the birth of lambs or the shearing of the wool, all of these still have an important place today in the repertoire of Kurdish music.

on the southern plains of Kurdistan, watered by the Tigris, the Euphrates and their tributaries, a civilisation of farmers developed. The demarcation between the mountain culture (of nomad origin) and the sedentary culture of the plains is rather clear in the field of music. While the music of the mountain people makes use particularly of wind instruments, some of which, such as the dûdûk, have a special capacity for creating echo effects, in the instruments of the plains stringed instruments predominate and especially the tenbûr, a six-stringed lute.

However, whether from the plains or the mountains, the valleys or the plateaus, the Kurdish songs have a number of traits in common: the “long” songs, dramatic and nostalgic, with the exception of the dilok, dance tunes and music for entertainment, which are numerous and spirited.

The traditional Kurdish song has a repetitive structure whose unity is provided by a strophe; this generally consists of from three to seven musical phrases. A strophe contains in itself the whole melodic line, and from one strophe to the next only the words change. The phrases do not necessarily have the same length since the lyric, which is free, only occasionally contains an identical number of syllables. Furthermore, if a song is “long”, it continues in the same mood from beginning to end: gay or animated passages of another mood or, stimulating rhythm do not enter the picture or intrude on the single ambience of the song.

This structural scheme is the same for religious songs as well as for the dilok.

Dengbej, or the epic of Kurdish people

Dengbêj are traditional Kurdish storytellers reciting long epic songs, generally without musical accompaniment. Their epics contain a variety of Kurdish history, love stories, and the struggle of Kurds against suppression. Dengbêjs do not sing for entertainment only. They have also played a vital role in transferring oral Kurdish history to the new generations, especially against assimilation policies of the sovereign states ruling the Kurdish land. Not many Denbêjs, however, remained. Seyîtxanê Boyaxcî is one them and considered to be one the best dengbejs of our time.
Seyîtxan has lived a life which could be a film. He worked as a carrier, trashman and for the last 25 years as a shoeshine man which later became his name: Seyîtxanê Boyaxcî (Seyîtxan the shoeshine man). His name is Seydo Şimşek in his Turkish identity card.
Seyîtxan was born in 1933 in Lexerî village of Ergani district of Diyarbakir. He lost his mother when he was 2 and his father when he was 4 years old. He was raised by his paternal uncle.
Seyîtxan has never been to school and worked as shepherd and farmhand. Then he moved to Diyarbakir where started shining the shoes. He says he started singing when he was 15.
Such a great talent had to work with a piece of velvet cloth and almond oil with which he was shining the shoes, sometimes under insulting glances of rich men and their spoiled children.
Later Seyîtxan was recruited as trash man by the mayor of time Mehdi Zana. Now he was an employee of the city hall and had a regular income, does not matter if it was from garbage. He also continues shining shoes in the evening, after the shift.
In 1980 the municipality offers Seyîtxan a fulltime job. However, he does not want to quit shining shoes which he thinks gave him a reputation. Eventually, he gets retired.

Freemuse petition for dengbej Raziye Kızıl

Freemuse (the world forum on music and censorship advocating freedom of expression for musicians and composers worldwide) has launched a petition for dengbej Raziye Kızıl (also known as Gazin). The woman storyteller (dengbej) was sentenced to one year in prison for having sung two Kurdish songs and thereby “making propaganda for an illegal organisation”. A second trial against her now carries an extra five-year prison threat.
On 7 February 2010, Raziye ‘Gazin‘ Kızıl, who is a singer and president of Komela Jinen Dengbej (House of Women Singers), sang the two Kurdish songs ‘Megri’ (‘Don’t Cry’) and ‘Lo Lawo’ upon request at an event held at the Tatvan Municpality Culture Centre in south-eastern Turkey.
The event was recorded on video by the police, and based on Article 7/2 of the Anti-Terror Law, Kızıl was later sentenced by Van 3rd High Criminal Court to one year imprisonment on charges of “making propaganda for an illegal organisation”, reported Oktay Candemir for BIA News.

In court, the Tatvan Police had put forward that in these two songs Kızıl praised two members of an illegal organisation, Mesut and Mustafa, who were killed in armed conflicts in the Gabar mountains.

Mistakes in the translation

Kızıl said that the police made mistakes in the translation of the lyrics. She pointed out that the words “Gabar” and “Mesut” as mentioned by the police did not even occur in the songs. The court did not accept the related objection.

“This song is about two students called Mustafa and Mahsun who were killed in the course of the Amara demonstration in 2009 as the result of the military intervention. The word ‘Amara’ was translated as ‘Gabar’. The name ‘Mahsun’ was translated as ‘Mesut’. And these two people were depicted [in the translation] as terrorists killed at ‘Gabar’. However, the court did not even take my defence seriously. They gave me a one-year punishment based on the wrong lyrics as translated by the police”, Kızıl told BIA News.

Kızıl criticized the fact that people like her are still being punished for Kurdish songs: “Turkey has to overcome this. What are they trying to do? What we are saying is just a work of music. In any case, what is the benefit for the country to open a case by reasons of supposed meanings. It is impossible to understand this anti-democratic application against a local artist like me while TRT6 is broadcasting in Kurdish. I wish we did not have these issues in this country any more. These trials are sad for all of us. We are artists. It does not matter if you are a Turk, a Kurd, a Laz or a Circassian — everybody should be able to sing songs freely in their mother language. It cannot be a crime to sing a folk song”, Kızıl stated.

Five-year prison threat

Kızıl is facing another five-year sentence in the scope of a trial based on a song she sang at the Newroz festival in Erciş / Van in 2010. She is tried before the Erciş High Criminal Court under allegations of “singing a song with separatist contents.”

Metin and Kemal Kahraman – INTERVIEW PART 1 (video)

Sahmaran, the latest work of Dersim born artists Metin and Kemal Kahraman who achieved a durable musical course with former albums Ferfecir and Deniz Koydum Adını, has met with music-lovers as a rich oral history. Compiling different versions of the Sahmaran legend, Kahraman brothers signed under a classical study. Metin Kahraman tells that the Sahmaran is the oral cover of Gilgamesh and the meeting cradle of four sacred books.

With Metin Kahraman, we talked about the Sahmaran album, which is a harmony of epic stories and music, about the Sahmaran legend and its various parameters in religions and cultures, the Kurdish music, oral cultures, the modernism theme and the effects of modernism on Kurdish music and culture.
* To start with, which needs directed you to the idea of harmonizing the Sahmaran legend with music and releasing an album inspired by this legend?
– For about 20 years, we have carried out an oral history research work in the whole Anatolia, in Dersim in particular. We have a relation with all oral narratives and we give an effort to record these stories. In this age, a language is extincting in front of our eyes. If you ask us the reason why we perform this work, we can say that it is the conscientious scruple of us to see the extinction of a language. The album Sahmaran is also the result of such an effort.

Treasures buried in memories, say musicians Part 2

We publish the second part of the Metin and Kemal Kahraman interview.
*And how long did it take to complete the oral part of the work, where did you go and whom did you visit during that process?
– We looked into the local sources and listened to oral sources in Dersim, Erzincan, Mardin, Hakkari, Diyarbakır, Hatay and Tarsus. Our workfellows met with researches in those places and we tried to reach the former records of researchers. However, our work hasn’t finished yet and it will progress until all these works are gathered and published into a book. We will give the information in original languages as it will be comprehensible for the people searching this subject.
* Your brother Kemal lives in Germany and you in Turkey. So, how did you progress this work from separate places?
– Our workings were performed at  Istanbul Technical University (ITU) and mostly in Germany where 90 percent of the recordings were made. Kemal had to take refuge in Germany 20 years ago and he is not allowed into Turkey. So, we made a task sharing; he dealt with recordings while I was gathering the sources. And with Alisan Önlü, we put the work on the stage in Germany, Vienna and Berlin. We don’t interfere in the original telling of the tales, we just tried to create a poetic expression for each song which are fostered with Kemal’s poems.
* In the album, music falls behind the oral narrative and lyrics. The position and duration of music seems to serve for the oral narrative in songs.
– The musical fiction and the array of the album were arranged in accordance with the tale told by Mirisai Süleyman but the booklet of the album was designed basing on the sources which use several languages. The fiction of the album is the fiction of the tale in Zazaki.

Dengbej take the stage again

The Dengbêj House was added to the tourist travel program of Diyarbakır four years ago. For those who don’t know Kurdish, Dengbêj means Kurdish bard, storyteller.
We translated Nilay Vardar’s article, first published in bianet (http://www.bianet.org/biamag/diger/133689-dengbejler-yeniden-sahnede)
The Dengbêj culture was silenced for a long time when the Kurdish language was forbidden, it continued only in houses, among the people themselves. Although accompanied by an instrument in some regions, dengbêj generally sing without an instrument and they are described as those who transmit the Kurdish language, literature and history.
Dengbêj restarted to sing their stran (ballads) in recent years. The Dengbêj House with its 28 dengbej, who perform a musical ceremony once a month, was opened by Diyarbakır Municipality to keep this culture alive and increase the tourism potential. Reviving long-unvoiced traditions may sometimes make these traditions “exotic” and denaturalise them, however the process of reviving a silenced tradition contains different dynamics; only time can show that.
I knew that I was going to feel like an outsider in the Dengbêj House where I went with all these question marks and listened to stran sung in a language I don’t know.
The feeling of alienation I felt was a little bit eased by listening to variety of adventures of two dengbêj, one of them was Seyîdxanê, the eldest among them, and the other was Feleknaz, the only woman dengbêj in the Dengbej House.
“Diyarbakır’s Nightingale”, as Seyîdxanê is called, continues singing stran at his home now, after working as a municipal worker for long years.

Seyîdxanê, who sings in both Turkish and Kurdish, once appeared on a TV channel and announced the nonpayment of his salary to the Mayor singing a stran.
Seyîdxanê laughing tells that he was able to get his salary the week after, while at the same time telling the compliments made by women for the strans he sang while cleaning the ground.
“Women wouldn’t sing near men at old times” says Feleknaz who sings since she knew herself-she says- but sang in the public for the last ten years.
When I ask her what the reason of this change is, she answers “Kurdish struggle”.
I could no doubt have talked to Feleknaz more if I knew Kurdish and wasn’t obliged to a translator to understand her. Feleknaz exerts herself and begins telling word by word;
“Villages were evacuated and we moved to a city. The responsibility of all things was shouldered by women; to send children to school, to earn living and other things. Men left us alone when they saw the courage of women.”
“Stories of love and bravery” she answers when I ask her what she loves singing the most. As she keeps telling, she confesses that she in fact doesn’t like singing about love and starts singing a stran which tells the Kurdish struggle. “It would lose
all its meaning if I translated it into Turkish”, she says.
Feleknaz is a Peace Mother, as well as a dengbêj. She is one of the women who went to Çukurca district of Hakkari and left their white scarfs for nine soldiers who died there. “I can walk day and night and to everywhere for peace”, she tells.
Feleknaz gave concerts in France, Germany and Denmark but she could hardly escape from the police in Turkey on March 8, International Women’s Day. We may perhaps have the chance to listen to Feleknaz and other dengbêj on mainstream television channels and not know beans about this tradition, who knows…