“Thanking” The United States – A Piece By Veysi Sarısözen

 

The following article – Stalin: Spasiba Mr. Roosewelt Müslim: Spas Mr.Barack Obama – was written by Veysi Sarısözen and appeared in Özgür Gündem.

Yes…it seems that way looking from Suruç as well. Like Erdoğan sung in his “famous song.”

“Everything reminds me of the Second World War.”

Even if it’s like a song there’s nothing to be done. Reality is this way. Let’s remember:

The German Nazi armies attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. Then Japan hit the United States at Pearl Harbor. The war became a world war. In 1942 there emerged an agreement among the “allied forces” that the United States and Great Britain would open up a second front in Northwest Europe.

However the United States and Great Britain did not immediately open up a second front.

They waited. The goal of this “waiting” was to wait until the Soviet Union was as damaged as possible.

And that’s how it went. The Soviet Union, which had lost 10 million people by ‘42, had lost another 10 million by ‘44. Then the second front was opened.

After it was opened not even the most extreme leftists accused the Soviets of “fighting with American support.”

The similarities regarding the United States ends here. That is to say the issue of waiting.

Certainly the US does not resemble the US of that day, nor Kobanê Soviet Russia. But there is this: If the United States had gone into action the day ISIS occupied Mosul there would have been no Battle of Kobanê. They waited and now Kobanê is in ruins. It has been depopulated and suffered an enormous loss of life.

But it resisted. And this resistance against ISIS made the world rise up. Actually “the Kurds of the World” made the world rise up. Nothing more could have been expected. Nor was it.

Was it a bad thing? No. It was as good as the second front.

The day the second front was opened Stalin, a pipe in his mouth, gave Roosevelt a half-sarcastic “spasiba.”

Now Salih Muslim has probably said  “spas.”

Look at the situation: The similarities between events are such that even the Russian and Kurdish words of “thank you” resemble each other as two twins.

And Turkey?

Turkey, which was singled out for blame by the US for opening its borders to ISIS, is now deciding to open its borders to military aid coming from South Kurdistan. That is to say it is “changing course” at the last minute. Just as its behavior began to change slowly following the Battle of Stalingrad. Just like its “declaration of war” against Nazi Germany following the opening of the second front and the entrance of Soviet armies into Germany in 1945…

Let’s take another good look at the world. Let no prosperous eyes be blinded! Right now in Mosul ISIS is sitting on a trillion dollars worth of oil and gas wealth.

He who relaxes, loses.

“We Will Not Wait Until Tomorrow”

As we celebrate every little momentary “victory” in this war, suddenly we heard another piece of good news from the free media headquarters:“the hostages from Kobanê had been set free…”

We ran together with our friends from the media headquarters to the Suruç municipal building where the “free hostages” were located. We met with them. The Co-President of the Kobanê Canton’s People’s Assembly Ayşe Efendi was also there sharing the joy of the HDP members with them.

When one of [HDP members] told them “tomorrow we will celebrate victory together in Kobanê” a half-angry youth turned and said smiling:

“We cannot wait until tomorrow…”

Yes! In Kobanê they were waiting for them the day before tomorrow.

And those present were recalling the call which Ayşe Efendi’s had made to the youth in exile just a short while earlier: “Don’t wait at school, in the tent, at the mosque or on the corner. Come to the front!”

“Perhaps I Will See Him”

I had known about war which people are made to watch. The last two Iraq wars were broadcast to the people on their TV’s.

But until I came to Suruç I had never heard of or seen a war which the people watched in person.

Right now the people of Kurdistan are “watching” the battle of Kobanê from the minarets of mosques and the roofs of houses in Suruç. Everywhere, on every hill, dozens of people with binoculars – as if they were captains or colonels – are observing Kobanê over hours and hours.

And there are those among them who you would think are watching the enemy on the front and sending off their coordinates to the army.

Even if it is not quite like that these “binocular” people are in possession of an extraordinary deterrent. Neither the army nor the police have been able to drive them from the “positions” they occupy.

And they tried but they couldn’t. Those keeping vigil on the border resisted. And right now this battle has been won by the Kurds with binoculars.

The tactics of the battle are more important that one might think. As I said, these binocular people have actually set up a border around the military zone along the border. The binocular people on the roofs and hills immediately notice any ISIS infiltration or permission for them to infiltrate.

And as soon as they see them they use their organization to inform the long-lensed cameras of our free media.

And as as soon as they are informed they catch the Erdoğan-Davutoğlu team in the act and make the ISIS fighters regret the day they were born.

And you watch the crimes being committed on your television broadcasts as if they were TV broadcasts.

I am speaking with one of those “standing guard” on the border with his binoculars. From the moment he hears the sound of mortar round leaving its tube to the moment it hits its target he begins to count “a thousand one, a thousand two, a thousand three…” and if the second explosion strikes at “a thousand six” it means ISIS fired that mortar from exactly six kilometers away.

To watch a war live with your own eyes is not as “entertaining” as one might imagine. Because the men and women who are watching with binoculars and trying to guess where the mortar rounds have fallen in Kobanê are actually trying to understanding where their relatives, children and siblings are serving on the front.

I asked a middle-aged man: Where are you looking so intently?

“At my son…” he said.

I was surprised…”Can you see your son?”

“No” he said, “but perhaps I will see him.”

Some MP’s On The Border

In the Battle of Kobanê I didn’t have the opportunity to cover the resistance “to defend against ISIS infiltration and government support along the border” for our paper.

But for a couple of days during my trip to Suruç I had the opportunity to listen to the details from those who took part in these events.

One of the dozens of these was the HDP MP Ibrahim Ayhan.

Ayhan has not left the area since the first days of the resistance. Sometimes he slept in the fields wrapped in a blanket, sometimes he woke up in car, and was together with the people day and night. He endured the attacks by police and soldiers together with the people.

Like Ibrahim Ayhan many HDP MP’s and many elected mayors and city council members organized an alternative to our Turkish parliamentarians in the course of the border resistance and the great serhildan (uprising). Many of them threw of their MP costumes and made themselves equal with the people then resisting.

Ibrahim Ayhan explain the parliamentary group’s mission in the Battle of Kobanê with its determination still in his mind: “We undertook all kinds of “war diplomacy” on this side of the border. We represented the common interests of both Turkey and Rojava and the entire Middle East and we did everything possible in order to stop the advance of ISIS as quickly as possible and to hold the AKP government responsible. One of these things was to stop the inhumane obstacles that were in place on the border: 12 severely injured people lost their lives because they were made to wait along the border. We showed great effort and finally after 10 days were able to bring an end to these ‘delay’ policies and since those days not a single person has died for want of blood [on the border].”

“Of course we tried to develop an environment and the circumstances in which the ISIS attack would be defeated and the Turkish state would be made to open a corridor. I think that what we did in the name of our party helped to create an environment in which a corridor will need to be opened.”

“Even if things are still very difficult and there are intention obstacles and pressure the situation is much better than it was.”

Without making a show in front of the media Ibrahim Ayhan continues to carry on official contact with the both the Turkish Republic and the Kobanê Canton, not in the lobby of some five-star hotel but in Suruç, right on the border which has been engulfed with clouds of gunpowder that burn our nostrils.

In this way did the “war diplomacy” and “revolutionary parliamentarians” take on their real substance in the days of life and death.

How In The End The Bombs Began To Fall And The Corridor Was Opened

With the confirmation of the news that the YPG has received weapons and the announcement from the Turkish government that it opened a corridor to allow Kurdish national aid to come from the South, a great and unbelievable joy has spread among the people in Suruç who have been keeping guard for over a month.

As everyone was adding their own commentary to the developments, a youth shouted out:

“It means that the whole world has understood that we will win in Kobanê” then adding “if we had fallen they would not have been our friends. We didn’t fall. And now the world is forced to win our friendship…” I ran after this youth. But for whatever reason I lost track of him. It was as if that youth had caught my eye from some other place. Where was it? Out on the plane? In the orchard? Or was it in the mountains? My old memory couldn’t place him. But his words at that moment struck a clear chord within my own conscious and the conscious of the crowd. The resistance of Kobanê brought out bombs. Rojava and the Ağırnaslı’s resisting shoulder to shoulder with it opened that corridor.

That is to say that corridor on which the bodies of YPG-YPJ fighters are now being carried out, that corridor which they opened so that aid could get in and no more bodies would be carried out of Kobanê…