Zehra Doğan/JINHA

MÊRDÎN – In the town of Nusaybin, where Kurdish residents have maintained a resistance and begun to build a new life in the face of state attacks, Rukiye and Semawi Baran say this is just the latest oppression they have seen and that today, they will continue to resist.

The Turkish state has now declared brutal 24-hour curfews six times in the last few months in the town of Nusaybin. The resistance that first began in the neighborhoods of Fırat, Dicle, Yenişehir and Abdulkadirpaşa has now spread to the neighborhoods of Kışla and Zeynelabidin.

Now, in Zeynelabidin, the oldest site of settlement in historic Nusaybin, a new barricade goes up every day. As an armored vehicle waits in the Hacılar cemetery, blockading the citizens in their neighborhood, hand trucks zip back and forth with cobblestones. In this neighborhood, a single street may have dozens of barricades.

Among the residents who have made the decision to stay in their homes, resist the assaults and build a new life behind the barricades are Rukiye and Semawi Baran. As the winter sun warms the tiny gardens of the neighborhood, the couple receives us with their sofa set: portable chairs set up in their garden. We begin our conversation over the sound of the barricade-building children emptying their loads from their hand trucks. The couple say that they decided to stay in this home in the name of its tradition of resistance.

50-year-old Rukiye Baran lost the sight in one eye during the period of martial law in the region following Turkey’s 1980 military coup.

“It was like this back then too. Every day an explosion, every day a massacre. We’d never know where the attacks would come from. One day, there was a big explosion at the marketplace,” Rukiye says. “Since that day, my right eye can’t see. They may have put out the luster in my eye, but the real light is in my heart.”

Rukiye grew up on the side of the district known as “binxet” or “below the line”—that is, the Rojava town of Qamişlo, divided from Nusaybin one day by a roll of barbed wire and a few mines on the order of those in power, when the nation-state border between Turkey and Syria cut the town in two.

“I’m a child of a contraband people, who never leave their divided lands, whose passports aren’t recognized,” says Rukiye. “The state saw us as foreigners who can only enter our own lands with a passport, but we never gave up on this place. Our shopping, our mourning, our weddings, our organizations, we always did together.

“Then I married my husband, a relative of ours. The oppression continued, of course. My child was just one year old when my husband was put in jail for selling cassette tapes. For years, we didn’t even know where he was. Every day, there was a raid and torture…. Only I know what we went through. The soldiers and police raiding our home came through our door with their combat boots.”

65-year-old Semawi, who has a disability in his left arm, relates his side of their story from those days.

“We would sell Kurdish songs under the table. Listening to Cegerxwîn was a reason for death,” says Semawi, referring to the Kurdish poet. “Drivers would hide the cassettes under their hoods; every night, people living here would dig up those cassettes from where they’d buried them, listen to them, then bury them again. It was illegal, but still everyone had those poems by Seydayê Cegerxwîn memorized.

“Then I got caught. I was tortured all the way to a cell in Diyarbakır prison. First off, they shaved my head. I shared my bread with that swarm of mice for years. The mice would gnaw on my nose; look, I still have the scar,” says Semawi, indicating his nose. “I went through a lot of torture: being forced to eat feces, the bastinado, the rack, and more. After I stayed on the rack for days, my left arm got gangrene. My bones broke. Now I can’t use this arm.”

Semawi describes staying in the same barracks as Mehdi Zana, the jailed Kurdish politician whose wife, Leyla Zana, was politicized by his imprisonment and rose to become elected to Parliament. Because Semawi and Mehdi’s families spoke only Kurdish and guards enforced all-Turkish rules during family visits, they could only sit looking at one another for minutes at a time.

“One mother couldn’t stand to see her child like that and broke out with a Kurdish dirge. The soldiers began kicking her right in front of our eyes. Leyla Zana was there as one of the visitors, and she took off the slipper from her foot and brought it down on the head of the soldier, shouting ‘aren’t you ashamed, scum?’ What she did was the biggest reason for me to struggle,” says Semawi.

Semawi brought his case to Turkey’s Constitutional Court last year, but the case was closed despite the continuing evidence of his arm and his scarred nose.

“As you’ll understand, the same oppression is continuing,” says Semawi. “And if oppression continues, so does the resistance against it.”

(fk/cm)