Editorial of December 1999

Between the monts of Armenia and the low plain of Irak, between the Taurus Plateau and the eastern spurs of Zagros, there is a country where words are outlawed and for that reason run cold and freeze in men 's mouths.

This country is the Frozen Words' Country and its inhabitants, the Kurds have today a quite strange existence. They were and were not here, they live here but they are very offhand to do it, for it had been always planned and decreted that they never existed. Never. Kurds do not exist, this people is a sheer invention, a firebrand for agitators, and since the most ancient time there is nothing in this land, but desert. The tumulus, the buried palaces, the domed churches, the stonebuilted monasteries, the mountains' shepherds, the nomads in their tents, the traders, the corsairs, the drogmans, the weavers of kilims, the lords of castles, the redoubtable warriors and their beautiful horses, all were and did not were because from the beginningand for ever there are no Kurds in this land. And all that affirms the contrary must be destroyed. And as words are more indiscreet than men, it happened that the language of this country was outlawed, though its users had officially never existed. Frozen words, run cold, forbidden, shameful and clandestine words out of non-existent mouths.

Then, in this land, words spring from rocks, monts and towns (towns never inhabited nor built as is right and proper) : Amadiya, declaims its legend on its peak, by its fine stoned door, with interlaced dragons, bulls and lions face to face, warriors half worned away on the wall. The monsters, the warriors seem to figure the story of Zohak and Kawa (story never red, never written, never told), imposing and distorted shapes that talk, talk instead of men ; Mosul and the mosque with its minaret, bend like the Pise Tower, Mosul, the town that is not Kurdish, nor Arabian, nor Turkmen, nor Muslim nor Jews nor Christian but all of that in a same time ; Diyarbakir the Black and its brave and sad people, persecuted by the secret policy and arrests ; and Mardin the White, the so sulptuous Artukids' court, the ghost of al Jazari, the automaton's maker. Stones are talking and men are silent.

To hang or not to hang Öcalan, Turkey in Europa ?.... separatism, islamism, human's rights, mafia, "pacifical and political resolution of the Kurdish question", words, words and noise for suppressing a shadow country, OMC, UE, OSCE, much abbreviations that, opposing the the hurufi letters, do not mention but hide, lost country, sometime a paradise, sometime the Hell, Kurdistan, the economists and strategists' nightmare.

Sandrine Alexie