I am talking about our efforts to understand what happened in the village of Bilge in Mardin. Actually, the only thing that we know is that on Monday night, during an engagement ceremony in the village, some masked assailants killed 44 people, including children and three pregnant women. The rest are assumptions, claims and rumors.Although they were arrested, the suspects have denied committing the heinous crime. We don’t have any real idea about the motivation behind the attack: Some people are talking about a blood feud; some say there was no such thing. Some are talking about a disagreement over a bride exchange, a tradition in the region; some have mentioned a land dispute. Some have claimed the wife of one of the attackers had a relationship with some of the murdered men. The ones who claim this are unconsciously, or maybe even consciously, trying to legitimize the massacre. We don’t know yet which guns were used in the attack, despite all the rumors. We don’t know the history of the guns; we don’t know the owners of the guns. In short, we don’t know that much about this crime. We are blind.
We don’t know the stories of the people who have been killed or the stories of the alleged killers -- despite the fact that an army of journalists is reporting from the village -- since asking them what they were dreaming about and what they were eating, drinking and feeling does not occur to the journalists over there because they have this idea that they are just Kurdish peasants and their individual stories are all the same. We are blind to humanity and individual stories.
Some of us are not even brave enough to touch the thing that we are trying to describe. They did not extend their hands, but just from the smell of the blood, claimed that this is the nature of the Kurds, or they just blamed illiteracy. Some were so quick to underline that the school in the village was closed but the children knew how to read the Holy Quran in Arabic and pointed to this as a reason behind the massacre.
Some have raised questions about the dark points; for example, why the security forces came two hours later although the gendarmerie station is just four kilometers from the village. Some talked about feudal traditions but forgot the fact that in feudal tradition it is strictly forbidden -- forget about killing women due to a blood feud -- to even kill a man in front of his wife. Plus there is no place for masks in blood feuds.
Not only are we blind in describing the thing in front of us, but politicians are so gifted that they have gotten into quarrels over it. It is very interesting that the subcommittee of the parliamentary Human Rights Commission that was supposed to go on a fact-finding mission to Mardin did not include any pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) deputies.
The attack brought the village guard system into the spotlight, which is something very positive. This system led not only to the perpetuation of the feudal system in the region but also to the destruction of the social fabric of the region at the hands of the state. This system, which is the main source of many evils, should be abolished, no doubt about that, but is it wise to blame only the village guard system for the massacre?
What about discussing the perception of violence? What about thinking about how most of us, depending on our own positions, have a tendency to legitimize violence on the basis of its sources? If the source of violence is the male-dominant culture, it is mostly legitimized; if the source is the state and its apparatuses, partly; and if it is the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), barely.
As I said in the beginning, I am afraid that the thing that we as blind people are trying to describe might not be an elephant, but worse than this, we might not be blind but just too cowardly to open our eyes.
