The Exchange

The blood feud goes back centuries and is not unknown in this part of the world. It is a scar on the conscience of the people the majority of whom oppose it in the Kurdish region of Turkey. But tragically, as rare as it is now, it has not been eradicated in the isolated parts of the country and amongst the traditionalist powerful clans and dynasties who wish to preserve and expand their power. It almost functions like the mafia.

What makes the recent massacres labeled as ‘Blood Feud’ in the village of Bilge near the ancient citadel city of Mardin where Christians, Muslims ,Jews and Zoroastrians have lived harmoniously for centuries in a civilized fashion, is the sheer size of the number of dead, the arms used and the masked perpetrators.
No other blood feud in the history of this region was of this nature and scale. The families do not make secret their intentions, nor their target. Perversely, the person who commits the act often claims credit and certainly he/she do not wear masks. They find their target, and try to find a good moment to commit their cowardly and callous act. They are not worried about being arrested. They are usually law unto themselves. These acts however, always target adults and male members of the family as they are the ones who are expected to head the dynasties/families. They never target children and rarely target women as vicious as the acts themselves are. They have pistols and quite conventional guns which are often licensed.

The massacre committed on the 4th of May does not bear any of these hallmarks. In fact it is extremely different. Amongst the casualties there with many children and women, at least 6 children and 17 women. These acts were perpetrated in a village where all the males are subscribed to the Turkish State Militia to fight against the Kurdish insurgency. These men are highly armed by the state. They are not powerful families either. These men subscribe to the state militia, often because the state pays them well, out of desperate poverty, They do not have the profile of a ‘Blood Feud’ families who are usually rich and would not subscribe to such schemes.

These men were armed by the state aggressively and their murderous acts sanctioned by the state. The state exploited the poverty in the village to arm uneducated, desperate and unskilled men into their brutal armed militia against the Kurdish rebels. Furthermore, their murderous acts against innocent Kurds went unpunished because they were given a blank cheque by the state to do as they wished. They were above the law.

And now this massacre by the very weapons and bombs provided by the state ended up taking the lives of so many innocent lives. This is not a blood feud, this is state sanctioned murder. Whoever these masked men end up to be, one thing is certain that these weapons belonged to the Turkish armed militia who were employed by Turkey. They were not ordinary villagers - They were the armed militia of a heavily fortified village whose residents were at the mercy of the Turkish state and its military. Turkey has failed them.

Subscription to the militia itself can be tricky. Once you subscribe you are stuck - if you attempt to resign you have to leave your village because you become a suspect and a target .

Without the full facts and the background it would be extremely difficult to know what resulted in this indiscriminate massacre by the state militia. We will probably never know.  The Turkish media and state labeled it ‘Blood Feud’ - The world media has accepted it with few questions. Was this really a blood feud?