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Mehmed Uzun, the defender of Kurdish in
Turkey
18.11.2007 |
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Mehmed Uzun, writer: born Siverek, Turkey 1953;
married (one son, one daughter);
died Diyarbakir, Turkey 11
October 2007.
November
18, 2007
Mehmed Uzun, pioneer of the Kurdish novel in Turkey,
will be best remembered on the international stage
for the controversy surrounding his novel Roni mina
Evine, Tari mina Mirine ("Light as love, Dark as
death"), an allegorical treatment of the situation
of the Kurds in Turkey published in 1988, which
features a passionate love affair between a young
female guerrilla fighter and a high-ranking army
officer who embarks on a search for his own origins.
Translated into Turkish, the book was reprinted 10
times and sold some 20,000 copies.
However, in 2001 Uzun was accused by the Istanbul
State Security Court of "having supported terrorism
and incited rebellion leading to separatism". These
accusations evoked strong protests worldwide; an
appeal made to the Turkish high authorities on
Uzun's behalf was signed by Nobel Prize winners such
as Nadine Gordimer, Günter Grass and Elie Wiesel,
and members of the Royal Academy of Denmark and the
Swedish Royal Academy en masse.
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Kurdish novelist Mehmed Uzun,.died in
Turkey after battle with stomach cancer |
Uzun was also supported by the government of Sweden,
where he had long lived in exile; Anna Lindh, the
foreign minister, publicly reproached Turkey for
bringing a case against Uzun because of his
writings. Uzun himself always maintained that the
novel was a love story, with nothing to do with
terrorism or separatism.
www.ekurd.net
On 4 April 2001, Uzun stood trial. Before an
international audience which included Yashar Kemal,
Orhan Pamuk, Akin Birdal and representatives of PEN,
he delivered a speech defending human rights and the
right of writing Kurdish in Turkey.
Despite the gravity of the accusations, Uzun and his
publisher, Hasan Öztoprak, were acquitted.
For the people of the Kurdish region of Turkey, Uzun
represented far more. He was the first person from
Turkey to write novels in Kurmanji Kurdish, a
language forbidden for most of the 20th century in
Turkey, and which even now has no official presence
in the state education system, and is often decried
as a "patois", a farrago of mutually
incomprehensible subdialects. Uzun's books
celebrated Kurdish culture and focused on such
themes as love, conflict, political struggle,
statelessness and democracy, and memory and
forgetting, always suffused with the nostalgia of
exile. His protagonists were for the most part the
Kurdish intellectual activists who had devoted their
life to the revival of their nation. Uzun's books
were banned in Turkey for many years.
In April 2000 the State Security Court in Diyarbekir
confiscated four of his titles from all bookshops.
This was cancelled after the application of
international pressure, especially a press
conference by Uzun in Stockholm in which many
Swedish writers and cultural activists took part.
Mehmed Uzun was born in the town of Siverek, in
Turkish Kurdistan, in 1953. After graduating from
the local high school, he continued his studies in
Ankara. In 1972 he was arrested and condemned to two
years' imprisonment. In 1976, after issuing the
Kurdish journal Rizgari ("Liberty"), he was arrested
again, imprisoned and released after six months. In
1977 he went to Sweden as a political refugee; there
he remained until 2006, writing six novels and a
number of other books about Kurdish literature, in
Kurdish, Turkish, and Swedish. He was also active as
a journalist and chief editor of the Kurdish
journals Rizgariya Kurdistan ("Liberty of
Kurdistan"), Hevi ("Hope") and Kurmanji. From 1989
until 1992, he was on the editorial board of the
Swedish literary journal 90-tal (The 90s).
www.ekurd.net
In 2000 he was elected to the International
Parliament of Writers, a worldwide organisation for
freedom of speech founded by Salman Rushdie. In 2001
he received the freedom of expression prize from the
Turkish Association of Publishers.
Upon learning in 2006 that he was suffering from
incurable cancer, Uzun decided to go back home, and
was received by the people of Diyarbakir as a hero.
Hashem Ahmadzadeh and Christine Allison
independent co.uk
**
Kurds are not recognized as an official minority in
Turkey and are denied rights granted to other
minority groups. Under EU pressure, Turkey recently
granted Kurds limited rights for broadcasts and
education in the Kurdish language, but critics say
the measures do not go far enough.
The use of the term "Kurdistan" is vigorously
rejected due to its alleged political implications
by the Republic of Turkey, which does not recognize
the existence of a "Turkish Kurdistan" Southeast
Turkey.
Others estimate over 40 million Kurds live in
Big Kurdistan (Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Armenia),
which covers an area as big as France, about half of
all Kurds which estimate to 20 million live in
Turkey.
Turkey is home to over 25 million ethnic Kurds, some
of whom openly sympathise with the Kurdish PKK for a
Kurdish homeland in the country's mainly Kurdish
southeast of Turkey.
Before August 2002, the Turkish government placed
severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish language,
prohibiting the language in education and broadcast
media.
The Kurdish alphabet is still not recognized
in Turkey, and use of the Kurdish letters X, W, Q
which do not exist in the Turkish
alphabet has led to judicial persecution in 2000 and
2003
The Kurdish flag flown officially in Iraqi Kurdistan
but unofficially flown by Kurds in Armenia. The flag
is banned in Iran, Syria, and Turkey where flying it
is a criminal offence"
Southeastern Turkey:
North Kurdistan ( Kurdistan-Turkey)
wikipedia
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