The Roboski massacre is one of the starkest examples of state crime in Turkish Kurdistan and an enduring document of the repressive, racist, and fascist nature of the Turkish government.
On December 28, 2011, the fascist Turkish army, using advanced air force fighter jets, bombed a group of Kurdish Kolbars in the border region of Roboski (Uludere), in Şırnak Province. In this attack, 34 defenseless people were killed, 19 of them children, and most of the victims were members of a single family or close relatives. Erdoğan’s fascist government, in line with its usual logic, labeled these Kolbars “smugglers” in order to justify the killing of poor civilians.
Kolbari is not a choice, but the direct result of impoverishing policies, national discrimination, class inequality, and underdevelopment imposed on Kurdistan. The fascist Turkish government, by destroying livelihoods, blocking paths to dignified work, and enforcing permanent militarization, has pushed thousands of people into kolbari and then, under the pretext of security, targeted those same victims of poverty with bullets and bombs. In Roboski, people were forced to carry the dismembered bodies of their children down the impassable mountains on mules, an image that forever etched the true face of Erdoğan’s government and its fascist army into the collective memory of the Kurdish nation.
Fourteen years later, the fascist Turkish government has not only refused to accept responsibility for this crime, but by closing all judicial avenues, has prevented the realization of justice. No independent or transparent investigation was conducted, and the complaints of the victims’ families were either shelved or deliberately driven into a dead end. Even the right to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights was taken away from the families. The silence and complicity of both official and unofficial Turkish political parties in the face of this crime demonstrate a structural consensus among both the ruling forces and the opposition in defense of the state’s repression machine.
For Kolbarnews, Roboski is not merely a human tragedy, but the embodiment of the link between national oppression and class exploitation within the framework of a fascist government. Kolbars are the victims of a system that concentrates capital, power, and security at the center while condemning the peripheries of Kurdistan to poverty, death, and deprivation of rights. As long as Erdoğan’s fascist government and the logic of the fascist Turkish army remain in place, Roboski will not be an exception, but a recurring rule. Justice for Roboski is possible only and solely through the collapse of this fascist order.
