Someone had written this article; someone had set up a computer on another table before, making the internet and electrical connections.
Somebody had read the article, someone else had edited it, somebody set it on a page, and somebody sent it to the printing house.
After controls and pre-printings had been completed at the printing house, the final set-up version had been published.
Laborers had baled it, then it had been loaded on the trucks, and just before the morning, they were in front of the convenience stores.
The shopowner had opened his store; a customer had entered and bought one of the printed copies.
Now he or she has opened the paper and is reading it right now.
I don’t know about your ethnic roots, Mr. Reader.
Are you Kurdish or Turkish? If you are Kurdish, are you Zaza or Kurmanç? If you are Turkish, from which tribe?
Maybe you are Azeri… Maybe Uyghur or Tatar…
Did your family migrate from the Balkans or Caucasus? Maybe you have Arabic or Georgian roots.
Are you an Alevist or Sunnist? If you are a Sunnist, then from which sect?
Similar to how I don’t know the ethnic roots of the people, who had worked, labored and taken part in many phases starting from the person who had written this article until this article had reached your hands.
I’m not even interested.
After all, nobody is interested in anyone’s ethnic roots.
Despite all the oppressions we have been subjected to, in order for us to pay interest, we don’t care who we are, what we are or where we came from…
What interests us the most is: where we are going.
Similar to how we were not interested in the ethnic roots of the 18 people, who are under 10,000 tons of water at Ermenek.
Similar to how we never think about from where the family of Sergeant Necdet, who bought a pear for his pregnant wife at Diyarbakır, migrated.
Or, like the soldier, who had returned to his mother, not with a cell phone gift, but rather inside a coffin.
We are not pursuing such things.
Making the cover of international magazines with the women at Ermenek doesn’t even pass from the corners of our minds.
We are not even dreaming of making stylized posters from the torn out clothes of old women, widowed young women, fatherless young woman; from the lines on their faces; from the tears in their eyes; from their hopeless hands that are trying to decrease the slope of the hoses that are draining the water in the mine.
We are not classifying each person, driver, medic, miner in the rescue squad and the people that are dragging on their cigarettes with sorrow and looking to the nothingness, depending on their ethnic, religious, political views or on their roots.
We don’t see any difference in the remorse we feel towards the mother at Roboski (Uludere), who is groaning about whether her deceased child is cold or not, and the mother, who is sighing, “But my son doesn’t know how to swim”.
Both of the incidents thrust our hearts at the same rate and at the same way.
We are not making an ethnical separation between disasters, accidents, murders, abuse or anything that ends up with death…
When we go to Edirne or Diyarbakır, we don’t see other differences than our disparities that add to our wealth. The grocery store’s owner, or the person we stand next to at the mosque, or the imam, or the coffee maker, or the bus driver, or the other customer we ask to pass our money to the bus driver… We don’t think about who is who or what.
Who is interested in that? Who is classifying people and putting the disparities in our faces as a reason for separation? Who pays attention to these?…We don’t know that much… however…
….
We know that foolishness doesn’t have a race; we know this quite well.
You might not understand about autumn or cloudy weather.
Tomorrow, spring will come again, tomorrow we will be looking at the white crescent and star on the red platform that is waving at the blue sky all together without being interested in each other’s race.
We didn’t miss other countries’ flags. From now, we won’t be missing them 'till the doomsday after all.
At what cost?
That will be designated by the depth of your foolishness.
Your acts of putting a mask on and then shooting people from the back, neck and head, in other words, the counter-guerilla tactics you had transferred will be designating that.
The price of your transfer, your obstinate attitude, and your obliviousness about history will all be designating that.
Your cunningness that says, “This is the opportunity”; the great gamble you make, will be designating that.
Unfortunately….
If this course of events doesn’t come to a halt, then the price of this “imported invoice”, whatever it is, will be paid “all together”.
