The first day on my 7th grade, when I first came to Istanbul, I met this boy in my English class. We were introducing ourselves and since I was the new one, I became the center of attention. I told the class where I came from, a small city from the east of Turkey; I didn’t know much English so my pronunciation was very poor. Everyone in that class started to laugh and I smiled too, guess I didn’t understand what kind of “ha-ha” was that. Then this boy wiped out the smile on my face with one single word. “Kurd!”. Everyone in that class laughed again, yet this time with a different “ha-ha”.

In these days, many people don’t want to accept the existence of Kurds nonetheless they use the nation’s name a swear word. I wanted to learn how they got this power and I saw it was nationalism. I saw how leaders slaughtered thousands of Kurd-Alevi civils for their country’s unity and safety: Dersim genocide, I saw how Turkish government banned the Kurdish language and Customs, and I saw how the government covered the massacre they did with the flag of nationalism. The sad part is that we can’t see how it is been used to shed blood of our own folks. We can’t see how our government waves the flag of nationalism to avoid us see the bloody-sky. We can’t see; under the name of nationalism, leaders exploit folks for their ulterior motives.