You can find the Turkish version of the article here.
prolog
On September 1, 2016, 4:55 p.m., my plane landed in Berlin. It was cool. I was alone. I only had two small suitcases with me. I left behind a country in which a “witch hunt” took place after a coup attempt. Before me lay dark uncertainty.
My family, my home, my friends, my library, my country were behind me. I didn’t know if I would get through passport control and, if so, what to expect in the new city. I didn’t know my way around, didn’t know the language and the way of life. Would we like each other, understand each other, get along well?
I thought I would stay a while and then go back. The grandchildren of the first immigrants in 1961 laughed: “That’s what our people said back then, and now we are the third generation to live here.” This fall I’m “celebrating” my fifth anniversary here, 60 years of her grandparents’ migration.
The “visit” of around one million “guest workers” lasted much longer than expected. Today, 60 years later, a new wave of migrants from Turkey hits the German shores. Unlike the first, the main motive of this wave is not economic, but rather political and social. Now there are no Anatolian workers as they did then, but academics and politicians, writers and journalists, artists and students. Well-educated elites in Turkey who had an influence in parliament, on campus, in the media and in studios. People who have been subjected to reprisals for a word they uttered, a signature they put under a campaign, a picture they made or a text they wrote and who, voluntarily or by necessity, fled to freedom .
Berlin is increasingly becoming the exile capital of the Turkish diaspora. These days, as 60 years of migration from Turkey are being committed, I would like to introduce you to “DIE NEUEN / SONGELENLER” (Turkish: “Those who came last) using six examples In Turkish, plants means “sürgün.” Will we, those who have been displaced from their homeland, be able to sprout again here in the new earth?
Leyla Îmret:
When Leyra Îmret came back to Germany in 2017, she believed in déjà vu. In Bremen she immediately looked at the house that she had left four years earlier. Alley, house, district and train station, everything was as it always was. She thought, “Only I have changed.”
The people in the neighborhood know Leyla well. She was seven when she first came to Bremen. Formally escaped from hell, she sought refuge in Germany. She was barely five when a special squad stormed her home in Cizre and shot her father, a PKK activist. Fortunately, Leyla wasn’t home. But she remembers the mourning that followed, the escape from the armored vehicles that stormed the narrow streets of the town like iron hyenas, how her pregnant mother was brought to torture and the youngest uncle was imprisoned at fifteen.
After the disaster, the family moved to Mersin. Leyla’s older uncle emigrated to Germany. The mother did not want to leave her imprisoned youngest brother alone, but sent her daughter to see her uncle in Bremen. That was in 1994. She arrived in Germany with the pain of losing her father, the longing for her mother and the death trauma in the bundle. Bremen was good for her. She quickly got used to it, learned German and took Kurdish lessons so as not to forget her language. The phone calls with the mother became less frequent. The childhood nightmare was fading. Leyla made German friends, finished school and got a residence permit at eighteen. This made a visit to Cizre possible again.
Geography is fate, they say
Once a plane brought a shy seven-year-old to Germany, now it flew her back home as a young woman of 21 years. At first the mother’s scent, whom she had not seen for 13 years, was there again, she hugged her brother who was born after the torture, and visited the uncle in prison. She turned to Cizre, saw the hellfire of her childhood gone out, everything had changed: the alleys, the house, the district, the train station.
Geography is fate, they say. No matter how far you go, at some point the earth you were born on will call you back. So called Cizre Leyla too. She traveled back and forth for five years, and in 2013 she decided to return home.
I ask her why. When she answered, her gaze became obscured: “I was with my mother at my father’s grave. It was then that I realized for the first time that we are a family. My inner voice said: Leyla, this is where you belong.”
Cizre was partially destroyed in 2016 during fighting between the Turkish army and PKK fighters.
(Photo: ILYAS AKENGIN / AFP)
It was the year in which the brutal 30-year war with the PKK was suspended and a peace process was initiated. The silence of the guns increased the hope for peace. Leyla wanted to take part in ending the war that had torn her father and her from their country. She wanted to match her birthplace with the place where she grew up. She packed the bags and went back to Turkey.
Back from Germany, the young woman from Cizre joined the strongest organization in the region, the Party for Peace and Democracy (BDP). She easily won the preliminary round of the local elections. During the election campaign she went door to door, people told her about her father and she explained her projects to them.
She left Cizre as the deposed mayor of a destroyed city
“The night of March 30, 2014, when we won the election, was the happiest of my life,” says Leyla. “It was like an award to compensate for all the suffering of the past. 83 percent had voted for me. I was 27 and thus one of the youngest mayors in Turkey.”
Unfortunately, luck only lasted six months. When ISIS besieged Kobanî in October and Ankara was drawn into the Syrian war, the ceasefire ended. The PKK fighters, who withdrew from Turkey during the peace phase, returned. They dug trenches in the cities and there was fighting. Leylas Cizre became a battlefield. All too soon after her happiest night, the bitterest phase of her life began. Now she was the mayor of a city under curfew, babies of three months were shot as well as eighty-year-olds, corpses that could not be buried were put in freezers, hundreds perished. Powerless and desperate, Leyla was in the middle of a terrible war.
Arrived in Germany on September 1, 2016, at 4:55 p.m .: the publicist Can Dündar.
(Photo: Regina Schmeken)
When the press issued a statement in August 2015 Vice News reproduced in the wrong translation, she was first removed from office and then repeatedly arrested. When a special detachment brought her to the police station in handcuffs, she feared being tortured like her mother had done. That did not happen, but when another arrest was imminent at the end of 2016, she saw that it was time to go: “I had to go abroad and make it clear to the world what was happening here.” She left Cizre as the deposed mayor of a destroyed city whose residents had fled. She went into hiding for two or three weeks, then walked the long way to Iraq accompanied by escape helpers. From there she called home: “Mom, I’m gone.”
When Leyla returned to Bremen in 2017, she was no longer the same as four years earlier. It felt like a movie that had lasted four years. She had happily entered the cinema, when the lights came on, everything was the same all around, but it was broken.
But she recovered quickly. Now she is studying political science in Bremen and is co-spokeswoman for her party in Germany. She is doing her best to make known what is going on in her country. She says that as much as she loves Germany, if there was any hope of peace she would go back immediately. Lately, however, the planes are not bringing people like them from Germany to Turkey, but rather from Turkey to Germany.
Can Dündar (60) was editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet. He was charged with espionage and “insulting the President” following an article about arms deliveries from Turkey to Syrian Islamists. In 2016 he fled to Germany.
Translated from the Turkish by Sabine Adatepe.