It is only possible to make sense of what is going on in Kurdistan today by way of its homology with the American occupation of Iraq. Because in Kurdistan, the state and resistance to the state do not share any legal or social foundations whatsoever. We are in fact discussing two entirely separate worlds that can only be related to one another through the field of violence and that otherwise function according to entirely different logics. Tahir Elçi’s death brings together the grief of losing someone we all loved dearly with the pain of bearing witness to this kind of disjuncture.
It is not easy to get over any death. But the death of Tahir Elçi became a death that seared itself into us by producing its own knowledge through the video cameras that recorded it. Such a death was only fitting for Tahir Elçi’s working life, for his unparalleled pursuit of the truth. The heart-rending speech delivered during his funeral by his wife Türkan Elçi, the unparalleled grief of the MPs from Kurdistan, the silent marches of the people, and the exhausted figures of his long-time comrades in human rights advocacy alongside whom he struggled for many years, embodied as much the mourning of the singular death of a genuinely singular human being as they did the fate and the sense that an era was ending. All of us undoubtedly apprehend Tahir Elçi’s death—the fact that he was shot in the back of the head and fell facedown on the ground—within a historical totality. We lost another person we loved in this procession of people who fall facedown. Vedat Aydın, Hrant Dink….