Sara: Prison Memoir of a Kurdish Revolutionary

357 Pages·2019·1.386 MB·English

by  Sakine Cansiz

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Sara
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Also available:
Sara
My Whole Life Was a Struggle
Sakine Cansız
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“Surrender leads to betrayal, resistance to victory”: Cansız with photos of Leyla
Qasim and Mazlum Doğan on the wall behind her, Çanakkale prison, 1990.
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Sara
Prison Memoir of a Kurdish
Revolutionary
Sakine Cansız
Translated and edited by Janet Biehl
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Published in German 2015 by Mezopotamien Verlag as
Mein ganzes Leben war ein Kampf (2. Band – Gefängnisjahre)
First English language edition published 2019 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © The Estate of Sakine Cansız 2015;
English translation © Janet Biehl 2019
The right of Sakine Cansız to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission
for the use of copyright material in this book. The publisher apologises for any
errors or omissions in this respect and would be grateful if notified of any
corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3984 9 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3983 2 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0492 1 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0494 5 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0493 8 EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and
sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to
conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
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Contents
Translator-editor’s preface viii
Sara 1
Notes 332
List of people 334
List of political names and acronyms 337
Timeline 339
Index 342
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Translator-editor’s preface
This is the second of three volumes of the memoir of Sakine Cansız, a
remarkable Kurdish revolutionary woman leader. In the first volume,
as readers already know, she described her childhood in Dersim, and
her escapes from marriage in defiance of Turkey’s patriarchal gender
system. She recounts how she became a dedicated organizer for the
group UKO, also known as Kurdistan Revolutionaries, advocating a
socialist revolution in Turkey’s southeast, where many Kurds live. In
November 1978 she attended the founding conference of the UKO’s
successor organization, which would come to be known as the PKK some
18 months later. Sakine moved to Elazığ, a city near her hometown, to
specially focus on organizing women. But in the spring of 1979, Turkish
police began a crackdown on the nascent party, carrying out a wave of
arrests of leading cadres as well as rank-and-file members. On May 7,
in an early morning raid on a movement apartment, police arrested her
along with two other members of the Elazığ group, Hamili Yıldırım and
his wife Ayten. As Volume I ends, the three of them are in a police van
en route to prison, in a state of shock and bewilderment.
At the opening of Volume II, no time has passed—they are still in
the van, which takes them to a prison in Elazığ. That will mark the
beginning of Sakine Cansız’s 12 years of incarceration, the period
covered in Volume II.
She entered the Turkish prison system at a perilous moment. A year
and a half after her arrest, on September 12, 1980, Turkish generals staged
a military coup and declared martial law. They abolished parliament,
suspended the constitution, and banned all political parties and unions.
Most significant for this memoir, they took control of Turkey’s prisons
and militarized them. Prisoners would now be overseen, not by guards
and wardens, but by soldiers. In the days before and after the coup, PKK
leading cadres, including central committee members, were arrested en
masse.
viii
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translator-editor’s preface
Surely the most notorious post-1980 military prison was in Diyarbakir,
the largest Kurdish city in southeastern Turkey. Within four months of
the coup, more than 30,000 people were jailed here. PKK leadership
cadre, as well as rank and file, were concentrated here. Sakine Cansız
was taken here around March 1, 1981.
The goal of the militarizing prisons was to strip prisoners of their
rebelliousness, and especially, to strip Kurdish prisoners of their Kurdish
identity, and transform them into obedient, soldier-like Turkish
nationalists. To this end, prison administrators (“the enemy,” as Sara
called them) showed no scruples when it came to violent torture.
Conditions at the Diyarbakir “dungeon,” as the prisoners accurately
referred to it, were the most dire of all. It was not simply that Diyar-
bakir was severely overcrowded. Between 1981 and 1984, the Diyarba-
kir dungeon became notorious for its barbaric cruelty, a “hellhole,”
as it was often called. The military administration inflicted horrific
systematic torture on the prisoners on an unprecedented scale, with
unparalleled methods, both physical and psychological. When detainees
were admitted, for example, they were beaten until their skin was raw,
then thrown into vats of excrement, so that their wounds would become
infected. Then they were made to sing Turkish military marches.
The reader might well set this book down in horror, but that would be
a mistake. While Sara refers to the barbarism, she does not dwell on it.
Other survivors have written memoirs testifying of the barbaric torture
(alas, rarely translated into English), but Sara prefers to focus instead on
the dialectic of capitulation and resistance.
For in the spring of 1979 the nascent PKK had been blindsided. Its
members had not yet had much experience in prison, and its ideologues
and theorists had given scant if any attention to the subject, should its
members ever be imprisoned. They had developed no theory of prison,
no policy for how PKK members were to behave there—not even a clear
analysis demarcating resistance from surrender. As a result, many of the
young Kurdish detainees were understandably terrified and capitulated
under torture, naming names, becoming informers, betraying the
organization.
Sara wanted no part of capitulation, and she herself did not yield under
torture. Instead, she closely observed the behavior of her comrades (or
“friends,” as the Kurdish movement calls them) and tried to discern
the nature of their “weakness,” as she calls it. From the outset she was
ix
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