Brakuji on The 15th Anniversary of The Murder of Kani Yilmaz

Sheri Laizer | Exclusive to iKurd.net

Torture, killing, assassination, massacres and disappearance remain prevalent across Iraq and inside the confined space of the semi-independent region of Kurdistan. These crimes are still accomplished with relative ease and impunity depending on the perpetrator’s grip on power.

Political revenge killings, blood feuds, ‘honor’ killings, and death threats carried out against the critics of the main groups and powerful political, and feudal figures haunt the divided Kurdish space.

In the fifteen years since the brutal murder by car bomb of Kani Yilmaz on February 11, 2006, there has been no progress whatsoever to identify or prosecute the murderers – opponents of Kani’s vision of a political solution to the Kurdish issue without arms. No further steps were taken to bring the perpetrators to justice.

This fact alone set a poor precedent: that someone as well known, widely admired and respected as Kani, could so easily be snuffed out. There would be no fall out.

Kani had devoted his life to the hope of the Kurdish people to be masters of their own house – only to be murdered by Kurds he trusted. For the first time in more than thirty years, just into his fifties, he was finally tasting liberty from prisons and the emotional and ideological straitjacket of the PKK.

The crime of his murder left his aged mother bereft of her eldest son – just three weeks after the loss of her husband to illness – and deprived his sisters and brothers of their loved and respected sibling. After his murder, the Kurdish community was lied to, the motive and manner of his death distorted and the truth covered up. [1]

The killing of Kani Yilmaz was a senseless act of treachery that achieved nothing except mourning for all those that cared for him and his values.

Since that grim winter’s day in February 2006, thousands more have lost their lives in Iraq and Kurdistan. Thousands have been sacrificed in acts of betrayal and as victims of feudal ideologies. Hundreds of thousands have fallen in the slaughter of ISIS, through the strafing and shelling of blameless Kurdish villages by despotic rulers next door like Recep Tayyib Erdogan, and by Iran’s clerics, as well as suffering from widespread corruption and score settling.

For the survivors of ISIS in Mosul, Mt. Shengal, across Syria and worldwide, the scars will remain tangible for the rest of their lives…

But Brakuji carries an especially dark blemish and that stain spreads red upon the character of Kurdistan, undermining the just quest for unity and achieving the goals of a United States of Kurdistan.

Such sorrow and loss are best expressed in songs or poems and these short lines are written on the 15th anniversary of Kani being taken from us, lost from this physical world, but ever present.

Kani Yilmaz poem — The painting is by Rebwar from his Word and Colour project, London, 2000. Photo: Sheri Laizer

An Elegy for Kani

Daisies and drifting leaves

visit your grave –

But I have heard

your voice

wandering through

this shining

wilderness…

11.02.2021

Kani Yilmaz freed by a German court in Celle, Germany, 11 February 1998 c Sheri Laizer

1 https://ikurd.net/pkk-assassination-kani-yilmaz-2016-11-12

Sheri Laizer, a Middle East and North African expert specialist and well known commentator on the Kurdish issue. She is a senior contributing writer for iKurd.net. More about Sheri Laizer see below.

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.