AntiNote: Peter Schaber was part of a small crew of writers, photographers, and activists who visited Bakur (North Kurdistan or eastern Turkey) last month amid some of the worst escalations of the Turkish state’s panicked and racist repression of Kurdish populations there since the 1990s. Due in part to other horror scenarios continuing to blossom elsewhere in the region, and in part to the Turkish government’s nearly unique levels of media suppression, on-the-ground information about the ongoing massacres being committed by fascist state militias all over Bakur has been limited and largely regarded with (also racist) disinterest or skepticism.

The following is a set of reflections Schaber wrote in an attempt to re-inject humanity into our regard of the situation in Bakur. As such it fits the Antidote frame in its lyricism, honesty, and rage—however it does not stand alone; naturally Schaber and his crew were there long enough and got deep enough to have written several information-rich articles and interviews, which provide much context for these short parables. They are all available in German at Lower Class Magazine, and some will be appearing in English here in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

Life Is Beautiful

Peter Schaber for Lower Class Magazine
28 January 2016
(deutsche Originalversion ist hier einzusehen)

Six Short Stories from the War in Kurdistan

In North Kurdistan, busrides that you would normally endure as irritating, boring necessities become reflective journeys through your own head. For the countryside in Bakur, of such surreal beauty, takes you captive: roughly cloven bluffs and hillsides upon which cows, sheep, and donkeys stand so motionless it’s as if time does not exist here; precipitous crags, brutally massive, sometimes bare, sometimes clothed thickly in snow; rivers and streams cutting their paths through the stone, breaking it down and reshaping it. The urge is palpable to simply strike out into it: break off a branch, fashion a walking stick, go and touch everything, hold it; the snow, the stones, the water, the bushes and trees.

But the mountains calmly and immutably presiding over it all, in their unfathomable grandeur, repel you back into yourself: how can you possibly describe what you saw here? Sure, we can write from the perspective of observers about the Turkish state’s barbaric war, about the strategic interests of Western countries that mutely tolerate it, about the battles and the killed, about the desperation and the hope. What we experienced here, how it feels and how it will change us, is much more concrete than that, though, as it has to do with real people and their stories. With the press of their hands, the sounds of their voices, with the minute changes in a young man’s facial expression as he says: “Living here is simply waiting for death.” Continue reading Life Is Beautiful →