In Turkey, Kurdish HDP politicians face legal annihilation. The punishment for leading a legal political party is now removal from office via trustee appointment and lengthy prison sentences. In January 2024, lawyers for dozens of Kurdish politicians argued that their clients’ "crime" was merely winning elections.
Understanding crime and punishment in a Kurdish context requires abandoning the Western notion of the state’s monopoly on violence. Instead, we must look at three distinct legal universes: the traditional tribal system, the oppressive penal codes of host nations, and the revolutionary "Community Defense" system pioneered by the Kurdish freedom movement. Long before modern borders were drawn, Kurdish society in the rugged Zagros and Taurus mountains was governed by customary law, known as Tore or Urf . The Lex Talionis of the Mountains In tribal zones where central government was absent, the punishment for murder was almost exclusively blood feud ( xwûn bekirî ). If a man from the Berazi tribe killed a man from the Milan tribe, the Milan tribe was honor-bound to kill a male from the Berazi tribe—not necessarily the killer, but a male of equal social status. This system ensured collective punishment but also collective responsibility. Tolî : The Price of Forgiveness Unlike Western justice, which focuses on rehabilitation or imprisonment, traditional Kurdish justice focused on restoration of tribal honor. The alternative to the blood feud was Tolî (blood money or reconciliation). A council of elders ( Rûsipî ) would negotiate a payment—historically livestock, gold, or land, today tens of thousands of dollars in cash. crime and punishment kurdish
The phrase "crime and punishment" immediately evokes Dostoevsky’s psychological drama, but in the context of the Kurdish people—a stateless nation of roughly 40 million spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria—the concept carries unique weight. For Kurds, justice has never been monolithic. It is a layered tapestry comprising ancient tribal codes ( Qanûna Eşîrê ), Islamic Sharia, brutal state security laws in the Diaspora, and the radical democratic experiments of the autonomous cantons of Northeast Syria (Rojava). In Turkey, Kurdish HDP politicians face legal annihilation
Introduction: A Justice System on the Crossroads Understanding crime and punishment in a Kurdish context
As the PKK’s imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan writes in his Sociology of Freedom , "Punishment is not the solution; the solution is eliminating the conditions that create the crime." Whether in the mountains of Qandil or the prisons of Ankara, the Kurdish story forces the world to ask a difficult question: If you have no state, how do you maintain order without becoming the very oppressor you fight?