December saw 45 Kurdish men and women in Turkey declaring their conscientious objection 'in order to remember the 34 young men killed in the Roboski massacre two years ago', through the Roboski Conscientious Objection and Amed (Diyarbakir) Conscientious Objection Initiatives. The death of 34 young men occurred at the Turkish-Iraqi border, when two Turkish F16 jets fired at a group of villagers, claiming to act on information that PKK (Kurdish Workers' Party) militants were crossing the border. Faruk Encü, making a statement in the name of the Roboski Conscientious Objection Initiative, said “Here we are calling once again on those village-guards that have been made into a part of this militarist process, to those who are sending those close to them and their children to do military service, and to those people who are part of this war-making machine to make a few cents. Reject taking up arms for a sexist structure that has his turned this region into a graveyard of peoples, and if you have already taken up arms immediately correct this wrong.
Here we are shouting out one time that this ‘war game’ is over. Here we are declaring to the entire public that we will never under any circumstances be a piece in this sexist, racist, militarist system, neither as a village-guards nor as soldiers. We reject being a piece in a war and spilling the blood of a brother.”
Source: The Rojava Report, 45 Declare Themselves Conscientious Objectors To Remember Roboski Massacre, 29 December 2013.
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