Asking One for the Right of the Other – We are ashamed of our identity!
According to unofficial figures, there are 5 million Gypsies in Turkey. Some Romani associations reduce this number to 3 million, while others put it up to 8 million. They are deprived of everything. When there is a problem, they pack up their ‘tents’ if they have them and leave, or they hide behind ‘walls’ if they don’t. They don’t like the word organization.
They became ‘visible’ like a frame in a movie… They were remembered with the streets where the sounds of the tambourine and violin were heard, dogs barking at night, drunken cries, untold stories and young men with switchblades who were forced into poverty roamed in the middle of nowhere… They could not go further than being the tinsmiths, sieves, basket makers and florists of Turkey…
According to unofficial figures today; there are around 5 million Gypsies in Turkey. While some Romani associations state this number as 3 million, others put it up to 8 million. It seems that they have no connection to the system other than taxation and military service. They are deprived of basic education and job opportunities. When there is a problem; if there is a problem, they pack up their ‘tents’ and leave, if not, they hide behind the walls. They don’t know what organization is…
We learn all of this othering; Elmas Arus, who lives as a woman, an Alevi and a Roma, but breaks the routine of all Roma with the question “Who are we?”, turns the camera in her hand into a tool to voice the problems of Gypsies…
Arus travels to 38 provinces for 9 years and ‘records’ all the Roma in this geography in the documentary called ‘Half’. This work she did on the Roma, Lom, Dom and Abdal people defined as Gypsies also earned her an international award.
Gypsy is negative
Why do we call them Roma and not Gypsies? She gives the following answer to my question: “Because they experience discrimination as Gypsies. The meanings attributed to the word Gypsy are so derogatory that it bothers Gypsies. However, if you scratch the Roma, you will find Gypsies underneath. Unless you cleanse the negative perception attached to the word Gypsy, you can’t change the outcome by hiding behind any word you want.”
He talks about the work of the Zero Discrimination Association, which he founded in 2009 with the principle of fighting against all kinds of discrimination based on race, language, religion, color, gender, political views and similar reasons. He tells how even Romani people were surprised when he announced that he was a Gypsy after graduating from two universities. He tells how Gypsies are alien to the idea of an association and how they are hesitant to organize and voice democratic demands. So much so that they can oppose even the simplest research done about them by saying, “You will have us deported with these researches”: “In a neighborhood in Gaziantep; the mukhtar said to collect signatures for a barrier to be put on the road to slow down the speed and let the municipality do it. They refused by saying, “Signing against the state is not acceptable, this would be opposing the state”. That’s how dire the situation is!”
Alus reminds us that even those who founded the first Romani Association in Turkey were not Romani, and says, “But they were so affected by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Romani initiative that today they are voicing their problems through 210 associations and 11 federations. However, some of them are far from civil society organizations regarding rights and freedoms, they function like a party office.” A few years ago, in the neighborhood of Selendi where Romani citizens lived, cars were burned and houses were stoned, and even when around 70 families fled to Gördes, some of these associations were able to remain silent…
They don’t like the word organization
İzmir Roma Association President Abdullah Çıstır explains this situation with the following words:
“The number of Roma associations is increasing, but the number of these associations that demand rights and freedoms does not exceed 15. In 2003, the path to association was opened within the framework of European harmonization laws, and Yakup Çardak, the President of the Roma Culture and Solidarity Association, a friend of ours who founded the Roma Association in 1996, was tried for discrimination and separatism. When you say organization, some Roma people are still very scared and say ‘Oh, what an organization, we don’t want an organization.’”
The word ‘belly dancer’ hurts
According to Çıstır, who says that it hurts them to be viewed as only “belly dancers”; Roma people also want to be politicized but don’t know how to do it: “The prevailing thought is that ‘they won’t give it to us anyway.’ We have associations that have this understanding. Ignorance and democracy don’t go together. We should discuss how much we are involved in democracy, to say that we are here now, to raise awareness, but let’s say I walk and go to protests and meetings, but we cannot include the Romani community in this… They say, ‘You are surrendering us,’ and they do not come.”
They are different from the Kurds
Çıstır explains why they cannot be organized with the following words:
We do not find what the Kurds are doing right, we do not like it, but we must accept that they are an organized society. One day, when we discussed, “Why can’t we be organized like these Kurds?”, one of us said; “We cannot. Even the games of the Kurds are different. Even when they play, they hold hands and play side by side. Are we like that? We always play opposite each other.”
The Romani cannot enter large markets, they do not leave their neighborhoods, they cannot go to school or work, but in this geography, the state of being “invisible” does not manifest itself like the Armenians, Assyrians or Greeks who hide their identities. Çıstır expresses this with an incredibly striking statement:
“We, like the Armenians and the Greeks, hid our identities. But we hid it because we were ashamed of our identity and were made to feel ashamed, and we still do, but the Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians hide their identities because they are afraid of being killed. We were also aware that we were being marginalized, but we did not reveal it because we were ashamed of that identity, because they made us feel ashamed of our own identity.”
The invisibles of Turkey
Is there a difference between being marginalized by being humiliated and being marginalized by being killed and destroyed? Çıstır says the following in response to the question, “I don’t know, but because we were made to feel ashamed, we always ran away from the Gypsy culture and language, and that’s why we couldn’t learn it. But now that I have reached this point, I believe that I need to learn it and keep it alive. Because we are now aware of ourselves.”
The answer to this question by Hacer Foggo, Human Rights Observer of the European Roma Rights Center and Advisor to the Turkish Roma Rights Forum, is quite striking:
“When we ask in Turkey, ‘Is it harder for Roma to be forgotten, ignored, humiliated or to be killed?’ you should know that; you are also asking for the “untouchables” of India, the “invisibles” of Turkey, the “expelled” of France, the community around which a “wall was built” in Slovakia, in other words, you are not asking for those who were forgotten and ignored later, but for the community that was humiliated from birth. Being ignored has stuck to the lives of Roma like a tick. They produce and multiply their lives in this absence anyway. In other words, their entire lives are spent forcibly taking the rights of life that have been condemned to your hands. Because there is absolutely no place for Roma in people’s lives.”
SOME NGOs PREJUDICE THE LGBT MOVEMENT
In Turkey, “others” are generally perceived as “minorities” rather than “victimhood”. Therefore, in the regions I have visited, women, Gypsies and homosexuals are among the groups that even the others do not remember, despite experiencing severe victimization. The victimization of women is not described as the other, but as a “social problem”. The most forgotten of the “others” are the Gypsies.
Homosexuals, on the other hand, cause ‘discomfort’ even within democratic civil organizations. Kaos LG Foreign Relations Coordinator Murat Köylü explains this situation with the following words: “In fact, homophobia or transphobia exists in every structure in one way or another. There is a historical and deep lack of knowledge and prejudice on the subject. Of course, similar forms and contents are also gained from the discrimination and violence stemming from this prejudice as in other “minority-majority” “powerful-weak” issues. When we look from this perspective, it is not easy to say that these civil structures are alienating and those civil structures are not; when we look at the current situation, we see that the structures that are most distant from the LGBT movement are from the segments that define themselves as conservative and/or religious. Of course, there are also those from those segments who react to the discrimination and violence, isolation and exclusion experienced and voice this.
Tuğçe is a trans person… She believes that no right should take precedence over the other, but she believes that the most humiliated and alienated are trans people and Roma people. He states that they are treated like a ‘bird in a cage’ for both families and society, and that ‘as long as you don’t get out of that cage’. He thinks that civil society organizations are also in a vicious circle.
Those ignored: Saturday Mothers
12 o’clock Beyoğlu: Saturday Mothers have gathered for their losses. ‘There is a scream there’ but people passing by don’t even stop to ask ‘what is happening’…
Two women whose fathers were victims of unsolved murders… Nüket İpekçi, the daughter of Milliyet Newspaper Editor-in-Chief Abdi İpekçi, and Aylin Tekiner, the daughter of former CHP Deputy Nevşehir CHP Provincial Chairman Zeki Tekiner…
They both draw attention to the actions of Saturday Mothers by stating that even our dead who were victims of unsolved murders in Turkey are ‘competed’, some are always made visible in some way, for different reasons, while others are ignored and never remembered.
Translator Nüket İpekçi believes that civil society organizations contribute to democracy in this country, albeit insufficiently:
“Is it possible for Turkey to internalize democracy? Or in other words; it should be possible to build a new social project that will save us all from being ‘others’ and make us ‘Us’. It has to be.”
Aylin Tekiner, the author and sculptor of the book ‘Atatürk Statues, Cult Aesthetic Politics’, is one of those who try to make this possible…
She sets out with the idea that the screams of mothers who have lost their children in custody have been covered up, covered up, and intimidated by the people passing by Beyoğlu for years, but that in reality, the walls of Beyoğlu are a place of memory:
She buys 40 scarves, and pins those scarves to the walls, thinking that the walls have witnessed the screams of mothers who have been asking where their children are for years and screaming. She wanted people to see something under those scarves and chose two sentences:
The first of these sentences is I have to believe that you will return and the second is I am always here…
And she wrote these in four languages, Spanish, English, Kurdish and Turkish… She prepared large banners and gave them to people…
Tekiner left a large envelope, one meter long, in front of the Galatasaray Post Office where the Saturday Mothers sent petitions to authorities such as the Presidency that they considered their interlocutors… And she hung a large scarf from the envelope and these two sentences in four languages appeared on that scarf…
Tekiner says: “Every Saturday there is a scream there and the people passing by do not even stop to see what is happening here. I thought a lot about this and watched the struggle of the mothers in Argentina; the discourse of one of the pioneer women of that great movement in Argentina. She defined herself and the movement with the discourse of ‘We’, which we are not very accustomed to and cannot quite fit into our political culture. I found the definition of a struggle that has been growing stronger in a movement that has been going on for 35 years, giving up its own story, very meaningful. Maybe this was what we were missing… Even when we come together, we tell our pains not through ‘We’ but through ‘I’…”
Tekiner, who reminds us that he is also the child of a father who was the victim of an unsolved murder, says something else very important: “We were also left alone, but they separated us from the Saturday Mothers, made us more visible. Their losses were not as important as our losses. If the dead are going to be competed, they are far behind. That is why I attach great importance to this unity. Why couldn’t the number of supporters be 300 but 1,000? I think the day we answer this question will mean that we have established a tradition of confrontation both politically and socially…”
Belma Akçura
27.02.2014
