Yol: A monument to human endurance By Jalal Jonroy*/ December 1983 / Azadi / San Francisco When shown at the Cannes Film Festival ’82, YOL received a standing ovation and won the coveted first prize. YOL is a Kurdish drama made by Yilmaz Guney –a Kurd- while serving 19 year prison sentence in Turkey. Y. Guney escaped prison and now lives in Paris where he and other Kurdish artists in exile have formed (The Kurdish Institute) to help save the Kurdish culture – a much neglected and maligned treasure of mankind’s cultural heritage. On the surface, YOL relates the sufferings, the loves, and the hope of five Kurdish prisoners while on temporary leave. On the way –YOL- to their homeland Kurdistan, occupied by fascist military Turkey, the film slowly and sensitively reveals the terrible operation and hardships of the Kurdish nation. YOL is a long harsh road into Kurdistan –deliberately kept backward socially and economically, by successive Turkish governments. Poverty, bad transportation, luck of schools and hospitals (witness the dentist’s scene), deprived children smoking cigarettes, villagers crammed in tiny mud houses, and farmers still having to work with antiquated tools are all shown in dramatic contrast to the purity and natural beauty of Kurdistan. The only signs of 20th century progress the Kurds see daily are the machine guns of Turkish soldiers!
more oppressive prison of Kurdistan. Through lack of education, the Kurds are held under and old feudal system with its blood feuds and complex codes of honor –for example with the respect to adultery. Today, this medieval web coupled with religious ignorance, and compounded by Turkish political and economic oppression, reduces much of Kurdistan to a rigid backward social structure with both men and especially women husband and wife who had “betrayed” him martially.) To ease its exploitation, Turkey dupes the people with confused brand of religious and archaic moral standards, hence, for example, the mass hysteria and the tragic scene of the train. YOL is a compassionate journey through Kurdistan kept under a permanent state of siege by Turkey since the dawn of this century. Here, over one and a half million Kurds (and similar numbers of defenseless Armenians) have been massacred. Persecution, tortures, gallows, mass deportations, aerial bombardments, napalm, poison gas, mass trials, organized terror, forced assimilations, and total destruction of towns and villages are marked in blood on Kurdish mountains as the unwritten history of Kurdistan. To talk about basic human rights would be futile, when Turkey, in order to add insult, calls the Kurdish nation “Mountain Turks”. To this date, mere speech in Kurdish or Kurdish costume carries a mandatory prison sentence! Of course, since twelve million Kurds in Turkey are not supposed to exist, any mention of even the word Kurd is banned, let alone Kurdish culture! (Last March, a non-Kurdish sociologist, Ismail Besikci, was sentenced to ten years for merely describing the Kurds as a separate ethnic group.) Turkey, a member of NATO, receives over one million dollars a day from the United States as military aid. The corrupt fascist Turkish junta uses much of this to destroy Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, and liberal Turkish people. As recently as last May, Turkey in conspiracy with Iraqi military fascists staged a back-handed attack on Iraqi Kurdistan, and burned Kurdish villages. Two thousand Kurds were captured, most of whom are now under torture in the already over-crowded Turkish prison camps. Robbed of its oil, food produce, and other natural resources by its more powerful neighbors, Kurdistan lies in a singularly strategic position –between the Middle East, Russia, and Europe. Due to this quirk of fate, Kurdistan has always been the battlefield of aggressors with Kurds used as worthless pawns in a brutal game of greed and power. Today, the fascist governments of Iran, Turkey, and Iraq are shamelessly ganging up to exterminate the Kurdish nation –something no one has been able to do for 3000 years from Alexander the Great, the Mongols, the Persian and Ottoman empires, to the British. The Kurds are some 40 million people. Descendants of the ancient Medes, they have lived in Kurdistan long before the Turks existed.
and wounded in Kurdish mountains; to thousands of lost orphans and homeless families. YOL is a poem of tears and flowers dedicated to the bereaved women and weeping mothers of Kurdistan.
of El Salvador, Vietnam, South Africa, Afghanistan, Palestine and Poland, it may not equal the plight of the Kurdish nation whose very existence is endangered. Yet ironically because Kurds are being massacred by Iran, Kurdish cause, though a unique tragedy, does not get the media exposure of the support automatically given to other national causes. How apt, even today, is the sad, age old proverb: “Kurds have no friends”! YOL is hymn to the unsung heroes of the Kurdish nation, who against all odds and modern destruction machines, fight alone for the preservation of their dignity, and identity. Form the heart of Kurdistan, YOL is a gift of spirit and hope to the oppressed people everywhere in the world. December 1983/Azadi Kurdistan/page: 3 San Francisco. Jalal Jonroy's other articles: Yol Suspension of disbelief Why write? |
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