Investigate Killing of Kurdish Human Rights Activist and Lawyer

[Tahir Elci. Image via Wikimedia Commons.] [Tahir Elci. Image via Wikimedia Commons.]

Investigate Killing of Kurdish Human Rights Activist and Lawyer

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[This statement was released by Project 2015 on 29 November 2015.]

Apparent Assassination Latest in Spate of Targeted Attacks against Kurdish Peace Activists

Project 2015 today condemned the apparent assassination of Tahir Elci, a prominent lawyer and Kurdish human rights activist who headed the Diyarbakir Bar Association. An unknown assailant reportedly shot Elci with a bullet to the head while Elci was delivering remarks at a press conference in Diyarbakir calling for an end to the ongoing clashes between PKK armed groups and Turkish security forces.

“We join the international community in mourning the murder of one of Turkey’s leading human rights activists, who advocated not only for Kurdish rights but also for the rights of the Armenian community in their quest for justice for the genocide,” said Nancy Kricorian, Project 2015 Board Member. “We hope the Turkish government will do a better job investigating and prosecuting those responsible for this crime than they have the murder of Hrant Dink.”

Elci led the first commemoration of the Armenian Genocide in Diyarbakir in 2013, remarking at the time: “Today, we commemorate the genocide in Diyarbakir for the first time. This is a very important day for us. We bow respectfully before the memory of our Armenian brothers who were murdered in 1915, and condemn the genocide.”

The murder of Elci is the latest in a spate of targeted attacks against Kurdish political leaders, activists, and journalists. A suicide bombing in July targeted Kurdish activists in the city of Suruç, killing thirty-four. The Turkish government referenced that attack as a pretext for a major crackdown against the Kurdish community in Turkey, leading to the collapse of peace talks between the PKK and the Turkish government. In October, another suicide bombing targeted a peace rally in Ankara killing more than one hundred Kurdish demonstrators. The government’s policies of inflaming tensions with the Kurds and its turn to ethnonationalist politics in the lead up to recent elections have created a permissive environment for acts of violence targeting pro-Kurdish groups and their supporters.

Government authorities had detained and were prosecuting Tahir Elçi for “making terrorist propaganda,” after he called for the PKK to be treated as an armed political movement. As a human rights lawyer and peace activist, Elçi was a long-standing critic of violent attacks committed by both the PKK and the Turkish government. In the days before his assassination, he had received death threats that were the predictable ultra-nationalist response to the charges against him by the government.

“Elçi’s death today highlights the Turkish authorities’ duty to protect opposition groups and their supporters, especially pro-Kurdish leftist activists who are under constant threat,” said Asli Bali, Project 2015 Board Member. “Turkish authorities should ensure that those responsible for Elçi’s killing are brought to justice.” 

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412