Ali Doğan Yıldırım, Halil Çavgun, Salih Kandal, Edip Solmaz, Delil Doğan, Sakine Kırmızıtaş, Veli Geçit, Ahmet Marangoz, Zeki Yıldız, Baki Kahraman, Mustafa Ayçiçek, Salih Kılıç, Nuri Elaltunkara, Mehmet Salih Şahin, Vahdettin Kıtay, Kazım Kulu, İsmet Özkan, Şıxo Özkan, Ahmet Özkan, Tekin Kışın, İbrahim İncedursun, Ahmet Dizin, Erdiven Bozkurt, Emel Çelebi, Lezgin Bilgin, Mustafa Gezgör, Şıxo Dirlik, Erdal Gedik, Hüseyin Özbey, Süleyman Alıcı, Vahap Geçmez, Selim Ülker, Zeynep Kınacı, Leyla Kaplan, Yılmaz Uzun, Abbas Yokuş, Gurbetelli Ersöz, Engin Sincer, Filiz Yerlikaya, Orhan İlbay, Berzan Öztürk, Ahmet Kılıç, Sinan Dersim, Leyla Agirî, Atakan Mahir, Egîd Civyan, Rıza Altun, Ali Haydar Kaytan, Nûreddîn Sofî, Koçero Urfa, Berfîn Nûrhaq, Aryen Arê, Masîro Kobanê, Sabrî Tendurek, Munzur Stêrk, Emine Erciyes, and Mordem Çewlîk…
Names our paths crossed in one way or another; names we heard, whose stories we listened to; names in which everyone can find something of themselves. Each carries within them a memory that represents a distinct period. There are figures who have shaped the memory and life trajectories of all those who, in one way or another, came into proximity with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Moral continuity that builds the future
What sustains memory is not the individuality or magnitude of pain, but the reality of how it is carried. One of the clearest historical examples of this can be found in the deep memory practice of the Jewish diaspora and the State of Israel, established in 1948, following the Jewish genocide carried out during the Second World War. There, pain was not turned into a competition. Memory was not reduced to slogans. It was not abandoned to oblivion. Names were not anonymized. Losses were not reduced to numbers. Names were written one by one, read aloud, repeated, and carried into language, education, and public space. In this way, memory ceased to be a mourning bound to the past and became a moral continuity that builds the future.
For us, this is precisely the point. Not leaving memory to emotional outbursts or silent acceptance. Not surrendering it to others’ narratives, others’ calendars, others’ shadowing, or others’ pace of forgetting. Memory must be kept alive through names and places, but memory is not made up of names alone. There are historical ruptures that produced those names, and moments that return like a boomerang, repeating themselves. This is why memory also has a timeline:
* 1925 – Sheikh Said
* 1930 – Ararat–Zilan (Agirî–Zîlan)
* 1938 – Dersim (Dêrsim)
* 1943 – The killing of 32 Kurdish people in Qelqelî (Özalp), Van (Wan)
* 1960s – The re-emergence of Kurdish identity
* 1978 – Maraş Massacre
* 1980 – The 12 September coup and resistance in Diyarbakır Prison
* 1984 – The 15 August Initiative
* 1990s – State of Emergency rule, village evacuations, and “unsolved” killings
* 2011 – Roboski Massacre
* 2013 – The Dialogue Process
* 2015 – Declarations of self-rule and organized state terror
* 2025 – A new threshold of peace?
Human agency in shaping destiny
One list reveals the cost; the other shows the direction. One speaks through names, the other through dates, yet both belong to the same memory, because one is the continuation of the other.
The poet Cemal Süreya, also known as “Kurdish Cemo,” once described his own story in a television interview broadcast by TRT in 1986, said: “What we are nourished by inevitably conditions us. I was born in 1931, my mother died in 1937, I read Dostoyevsky in 1944, and since that day, I have never known peace.”
This piece was written from within precisely such a restlessness. Here, restlessness is not a deficiency, but the very name of a form of awareness. They say geography is destiny, yet a person intervenes in their destiny to the extent that they can choose which memory they carry. As we leave behind the first quarter of the new century, this year has been neither a year of reckoning nor a time when answers multiplied. Rather, it has marked a threshold at which we once again felt the weight of memory on our shoulders. Losses were not counted; they were felt in depth.
To carry memory as a trust
This piece was not written to assert a political claim, nor to extend endless debates. It was written to carry memory not as an ornament, but as a trust. Some people enter our lives not with memories alone, but with measure. When they leave, what remains is not merely an absence, but a standard for how life should be lived. That standard does not grow lighter with the passing of years. Listening to someone like Atakan Mahir, a figure who embodied measure and intellectual depth, can unsettle even the body itself. This is not simply admiration; it is also a confrontation with oneself. The shame of having settled for less. This is not a degrading feeling, but a sustaining one, a shame that keeps a person upright.
The necessity of reconciliation and seeking a shared path
A people exist not through numbers, but through the people they are able to cultivate. For this reason, losses are not merely a reduction; they stand as a warning to us all. It is in this sense that the Kurdish Freedom Movement must be remembered. The high moral standards built over the years have revealed not only its own internal coherence, but also the condition of the structure standing opposite it. The gap between the political and moral positions of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and the Republic of Turkey has widened to such an extent that the decay being discussed can no longer be concealed. This is not a claim of superiority, but rather the exposure, plain as day, of measurelessness by a line drawn through measure.
This elevated moral benchmark confronts a person not only with the past, but also with the stark reality of the present. On one side stand those who carry this memory and this measure; on the other stands the reality of a Republic of Turkey whose decay has become impossible to deny, its intellectual veins dried up, its intelligentsia evaporated; a country sliding step by step into “Mexicanization” through gangs and a normalized spiral of violence; surrendered to fascist and racist sentiments that are funded and sustained by the state; a state and a social reality trapped within this order, giving the sense of standing on the edge of an ending. Between these two realities lies an unavoidable necessity: to sit down, to reconcile, to speak, and to seek a shared path.
An extremely difficult moral test
This is not a simple political issue; it is an exceptionally demanding moral threshold that wears a person down from within. When one sits at this table, it is not only demands that are brought, but also the dead, gravestones, missing bones, and lives left unfinished. When a person sits at this table with such memory, they carry not only hope but also anger and silence. Remaining at this table is not merely a matter of political will; it is an extraordinarily heavy and exhausting moral test for everyone involved, including the representative power that takes a seat there. Memory finds life not in grand texts, but in small, stubborn acts of resistance where morality is put to the test, sometimes in a gravestone that is not allowed to be placed, sometimes in the fear of being forgotten, sometimes in the persistent effort to preserve dignity.
As Fadime Karakaya said: “My son used to say he would come back if there was peace… Whether there is peace or not, if I do not place that inscribed stone on my Erdal’s grave while I am alive, I will die with my eyes open.”
As Nesim Bilgin said of his journalist daughter Cihan:
“My daughter pursued the truth. Let her name not be forgotten.”
The story of Nuriye Turan shows how memory turns into a measure of morality. Her son, Fedakâr Turan, was tortured, burned, and buried in 1994. Years later, in 2017, his remains were exhumed by the state from Garzan Cemetery. Along with 267 other bodies, his bones were stolen and buried beneath pavements and next to public toilets in Kilyos, Istanbul. A mother was forced to bury her son not once, but many times.
It is precisely here that the following questions stand before us:
* How will these two realities, names and moments, live on in the next century?
* Where will they be placed in a shared curriculum to be built together with the Turkish people, in history textbooks, in public language, and in our common future?
* And perhaps most importantly, will we be able to pass this memory on at children’s eye level, without frightening them, without distorting it, transforming it not into a burden, but into a solid ground on which to stand?
What conscience tells us
As we move beyond the first quarter of the new century, conscience speaks to us like a call, saying this:
I am memory.
I am the price that has been paid.
I am a moral stance.
And I am us, before I am myself.
I am the mother holding her son’s gravestone in her hands.
I am the father who conveys, through a silent cry, the demand that his daughter not be forgotten.
I am the dignity of the mother forced to bury what remains of her devoted son once again.
I am the brother, the sister, searching for their siblings’ bones with DNA test results in their hands.
I am the memory carried for all of this, so that a free Kurdistan, able to stand at children’s eye level, may be left behind.