Connection Is Not Radicalisation
Kurdish people love connection. This isn’t a political statement, it’s just a fact. It’s something you can see at every Kurdish wedding, when everyone’s dancing in a circle with their hands and shoulders linked together. It shows in the fact that a Kurd in Edinburgh can do business with a Kurd in Duisburg whose brother-in-law is a Kurd in Duhok who once went to a barber who is a Kurd in Nashville. It shows in our Facebook groups titled “Kurdish Friends Across The Globe” and “Kurds Of The World Unite”. There are no “strangers” in the Kurdish culture. There are only new friends.
When I was younger, the only Kurd in my entire school, I lacked connection. I knew one family, who ran a fashion outlet near my school, but I couldn’t really relate to them. The parents sought connection through Islam and the eight- and ten-year-old boys found it in Fortnite. I’m Alevi and video games make my eyes hurt.
So my quest for connection ultimately led me to the Facebook groups. We called each other Heval, shared Youtube links to Kurdish songs, and commiserated over our occupying governments’ awful actions. Whether you were under 15 or almost 105, you were welcome. Having started this “journey” at an age where most Kurds have a similar awakening but that most white people consider “too young” for “getting political”, I was welcome. All I wanted was to feel welcome. I’ve been to some in-person meetups too, at my city’s Kurdish centre, and I met some friends who I’m still in touch with today. I know a Zilan, a Dilan and a Silan.
And that’s about when the Kurdophobic smear campaigns about radicalisation kicked off. Teachers, family members and a motley crew of non-Kurds who thought they knew more about Kurds than Kurds know about themselves, banded together in an anti-Kurdish mob, sorry, I mean an “anti-radicalisation intervention”. Finding Kurdish friends became the cardinal sin of “talking to strangers”. Merely saying “I am Kurdish” became “I promise I’ll never do it again”. Overt anti-Kurdish sentiment was justified through “concern”.
The logic was that since Kurds are Middle Eastern, and there is lots of conflict in the Middle East, Kurds equalled conflict. My loved ones would spread the myth that all Kurds wanted nothing more than to drug me and rape me and sell me as a sex slave. The myth that all Kurds received special training from Ocalan himself, to recruit children into the PKK. These myths were created by the Turkish state. Every day I was hearing Turkish state propaganda from my loved ones — but no, it was me who was brainwashed with propaganda.
My self-esteem absolutely tanked. I experienced what is known as internalised racism. I started asking myself, if all Kurds are rapists, then am I a rapist too, because I’m Kurdish? If all Kurds recruit children into the PKK, what was the point of continuing my education when I could just become a child recruiter? No one ever associated me, and Kurds, with courage or creativity. My ethnicity was only ever associated with shame and blame. I wasn’t a “good Kurd” who sucked it up and knew their place. I condemned injustice, therefore I was called radicalised.
Now that I think about it, some of the groups did feel a bit like echo chambers. But that’s what I needed when everyone around me was saying how evil I was, calling me a ticking time-bomb of a security threat, on track to die for Kurdistan before I’d even done my GCSEs. Out of curiosity, I wrote down the ages of 49 children known to have been killed by the Turkish state and calculated the median age of these victims of Kurdophobic murder. It’s 13. I was 13. I was not dangerous. I was in danger.
Yet I went from being viewed as a victim, to a perpetrator, and back again, in an endless Newton’s Cradle of Kurd-shaming. I felt like I couldn’t do anything about it. I’m not oppressed, but I almost felt like I was. I’d complain about asshats at school calling me a terrorist. “That’s completely self-inflicted,” the mob would say. “Choices have consequences.” The Newton’s Cradle was in full swing , turbocharged by the rhetoric of “choice”.
Somewhat ironically, the only way I’ve been able to get off the hamster wheel of exist, resist, repent, repeat, is through choice. The choice to continue to seek connection and deliberately surround myself with Kurdish friends just to show that connection is not radicalisation. The choice to make a conscious effort to keep my existing connections, and to show up fully for opportunities that create new connections. I go to as many protests as I can. It’s at those protests that I’ve rekindled my friendship with the girls I met at the community centre. The only thing I’ve promised is that I’ll never miss another Kurdish language class again. We do sing revolutionary songs in that class though — is that radicalisation? Where is the line drawn between connection and radicalisation? I haven’t the foggiest idea! Which is why I’ve made the choice to let go of the fear of being radicalised. If I am? So what? It’s hella rad!
There isn’t even much evidence for “Kurdish recruitment” — it’s mostly founded on fear. It’s been very difficult to find a study on “Kurdish recruitment” that isn’t completely anecdotal or funded by Turkey. Yet according to an American NGO’s findings, 80 percent of people who join the PKK are unemployed adults. According to a thesis on Researchgate, less than 30 percent of Kurds under the Turkish jurisdiction have consistent internet access. Minors who join the PKK generally do so as a result of academic underachievement and youth unemployment. All this means unemployment is almost three times as much of a factor for joining the PKK than internet use. So if the people railing against my perceived radicalisation were fully informed, and if it really was about “concern” and not fear of Kurdish people being themselves, they’d have given me a job, not a never-ending sequence of punishments. I’m still unemployed and there seems to be an unsolicited “intervention” for every protest I turn up to.
The belief that Kurdish people are made Kurdish, or more Kurdish, through radicalisation, not connection, is like the belief that Kurdish babies are brought onto this earth by falling out of the sun. Which is another belief founded on fear, of “demographic replacement” of Turks by Kurds. It’s not too different from Freud’s belief that gay people are made gay by overbearing mothers, or Andrew Wakefield’s belief that autistic people are made autistic by vaccines. It’s just that. A widely held belief about a misunderstood minority group. Maybe there’s correlation. Maybe there isn’t. All we really know is that the one subject has dropped out of the study, conscientiously objecting to how the concept of radicalisation was being thrown around willy-nilly to make Kurdish people’s lives miserable.
