THE COLOR OF RESISTANCE IN RABAT, DERSIM!
The date is 30 December 2011, and Rabat has gone mad with the sound of gunfire.
For three days, shots have risen without pause in this rebellious valley wrapped in a snow-white cover. They echo from Rabat’s sheer rocks and vanish into its bottomless ravines!
Rabat is accustomed to swallowing the sound of gunfire, just as it has grown accustomed to swallowing the heavy pain of the years. The ravines of Rabat, which swallowed the screams of dozens of women in the 1938 massacre, now swallow the cry of resistance of seven brave men!
Rabat has nearly disappeared beneath meters of snow. The white quilt it has drawn over itself will soon be dyed red by the blood of seven brave men. Rabat will soon pour abundance into its fertile soil resting beneath the whiteness. Its abundance, nourished by blood, will feed its seven children, and a new legend of resistance will be written! Faced with this resistance, the hunters of human beings will shrink, cower, abase themselves and disappear!
The resistance of Aziz Dersim, Îsa Cihat, Sason Zagros, Mahsum Çayan, Zînar Siirt, Özgür and Dijwar Batman will become a new voice of freedom in Dersim. It will become a song of freedom and travel throughout Dersim, bringing relief to the sorrowful, angry, stubborn, rebellious, resilient and wise heart of its elderly people. It will sow honor, virtue and nobility in the hearts of its brave youth. Through the resistance of these honorable men, Dersim will recover its own resistant identity. This resistance will reunite Dersim with itself, reconcile it with itself once more, and raise it again to its feet, to revolt and resistance!
The seven brave men will call out to Dersim with slogans of freedom, with their honorable and courageous hearts and their resounding voices:
‘‘Dersim, the bleeding wound of our heart,
Now release the pain that fills you,
Pay no heed to pain,
Fix yourself upon resistance,
Resistance
Calms the force of pain,
Sets your spirit aflame,
Brings relief to your heart,
Turns pain into a passion for freedom,
Gives birth to light,
Let go of pain, Dersim,
Do not remain at the precipice of pain,
Take wing,
The edge of the precipice is the place to take flight,
Fasten your pain to the tip of your wing,
Leave it in the passages of the ravine,
Ravines swallow pain,
Sharpen your heart,
Make it strong,
And sow once more within it,
The seed of freedom, honor and courage,
They carry you to hope,
They carry you to resistance,
They carry you to freedom,
They carry you to truth,
As they carried us, Dersim!’’
When the calendar shows 30 December, the seven brave men write their own legend in Dersim. On 30 December, another new legend of resistance is added to Dersim’s history of resistance.
As Aziz walks the paths of his lost history, he meets his truth. He turns into action the words he spoke to me in the summer of 2009: ‘‘I am going to meet my truth and complete myself.’’ Aziz completes himself by leaving in Rabat’s ravines the great pain that his history had placed upon him.
Whenever I think of Aziz, I try to give meaning to the human search for COMPLETING oneself. It seems to me that always feeling a part of oneself to be missing is indispensable to being open to development and change and to walking in the footsteps of truth. That feeling of incompleteness draws the human being into nature, the universe and life. It brings one together with the truths of life and introduces the human being to their humanity. It enables one human being to discover another! It adds an eye to the eye, a heart to the heart and a mind to the mind; it opens the endless flow of life before a person and helps them find their own current!
Whenever I think of Aziz, I try to give meaning to the human search for COMPLETING oneself. I think and feel that the children of a country whose truth has been stolen and plundered always live with a sense of incompleteness—especially if that country is one of continual massacres. Aziz is the exiled child of a country filled with massacres. He is one of the last cries of resistance of a people that endured a great massacre.
Aziz’s family was exiled from Dersim to Kayseri in 1973, when Aziz was only three years old. Like thousands of families from Dersim, this family too was driven from its land under the resettlement law after the fascist coup of 1971. In Aziz’s own words, ‘The exiles of Dersim built a little Dersim in a marginal neighborhood resembling a refugee camp.’ It was an inward-looking neighborhood of roughly one hundred households, distrustful of the outside. Surrounded by fascists, it constantly witnessed violent clashes and fights. On many nights there were armed confrontations; by day, young people fought with stones and sticks. The Maraş massacre was held over the neighborhood like the sword of Damocles. When fresh memories of the Dersim massacre merged with the Maraş massacre, the people withdrew still further into themselves and began to see every Turk as a fascist and every fascist as a perpetrator of massacre. They feared leaving the neighborhood, stood guard at night and secretly kept pistols in their homes. Aziz grew up under the intense pressure of national, sectarian and class contradictions. He was the third of four children in an honest, simple and modest family devoted to its social values. Aziz was an exceptionally honest, unassuming, intelligent and courageous child. Raised within a strict Alevi culture, he deeply absorbed the Alevi principle ‘master your hand, your tongue and your loins,’ nourished his heart, mind and spirit with socialist publications throughout his school years, and inspired admiration around him through his way of life and understanding. His university years in Bolu, when he encountered the PKK, would become the years of his journey toward his truth.
Aziz joined the guerrilla in October 1993. He continued the adventure of completing himself through a breathless struggle. After joining, he spent a period in Botan, followed by many years in Mardin, and then remained and struggled for long years in Qandil and Behdinan. He served at company- and battalion-commander level. All his comrades knew him for his modesty, his profound comradeship and love of people, his honesty, diligence, intelligence and breadth of knowledge. Everyone loved him deeply and held him in great respect.
Throughout his long years of struggle, Aziz nevertheless always felt partial and incomplete, and he set out toward Dersim. He believed with all his heart that he would become complete in the lands where his people had been massacred and exiled, and he reached Dersim with immense longing.
Truth is the place and time in which the human being finds and completes themselves. Completion is truth. A person who reaches truth overcomes the fear of death and becomes free. Incompleteness is the reality of the person who is not liberated; it is the side closed to freedom, the side that has been killed. By liberating his murdered side, Aziz completed himself and reached truth together with his six comrades! Thus, in the truth of my seven comrades, Dersim and Kurdistan once again found their own truth!
I bow with respect before their memory!
Code Name: Aziz Dersim
Full Name: Mehmet Güneş
Date and Place of Birth: 1970, Dersim
Mother’s Name: Azime
Father’s Name: Tillo
Date and Place of Joining: 26 November 1993, Istanbul
Date and Place of Martyrdom: 30 December 2011/Dersim
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