In a speech delivered abroad in 1982 at a meeting of the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DISK), Kurdish filmmaker Yılmaz Güney drew attention to the stance of leftist movements in Turkey regarding the Kurdish people’s tendency toward separate organization.
French director Claude Weisz’s 1984 documentary ‘They Called Him the Ugly King’ portrays the life of exiled Yılmaz Güney and the political climate in Turkey during that period. The film includes excerpts from an interview conducted with Güney in prison, as well as segments from his speech at the DISK meeting.
In the part of the film featuring his speech, Güney defends the Kurdish people’s right to organize independently and stated: “Since their inception, leftist movements in Turkey have viewed the Kurdish movement as a subsidiary one, always considering it merely a specific part of the broader Turkish revolution. As a result, today, the Kurdish people have chosen a separate organization. The issue should not be seen in a narrow national sense, but rather from the perspective of the shared interests of the peoples of Turkey, Iran, Kurdistan, Syria, and Iraq.”
The fascist constitution will be torn down
In the same speech, Güney said: “Today, Turks in various parts of the world and some of our comrades in Turkey are debating the constitution prepared by the fascists. The constitution prepared by the fascists is not open to debate. If the constitution prepared by the fascists is being imposed on the people by force of arms, then we too will tear down the fascists’ constitution with our weapons. The overthrow of fascism is not merely the primary goal for us against fascism; it is a particular form of our revolutionary struggle. We will establish people’s democracy in the country and move toward socialism. That is our aim. The fundamental condition for turning defeats into non-occurrences is to accurately determine our attitude toward our own reality and mistakes. If we do not want to mourn for a long time those who remain outside, let us now accept mourning those who die inside and embrace the blood of those who die inside.”