We Want Peace in Iraq, our Neighbour

İmren Tüzün

The invasion of Kuwait by Iraq suddenly changed the focus from the dissolution of the eastern block in the early 1990s. America took Kuwait’s side and Iraq was forced to withdraw. Turkey suffered great economic damage in this process and a number of people were left unemployed. Years have passed and Iraq is still troubled. Iraqis oppressed by the Saddam dictatorship looked for a way out. America, claiming on the one hand that Saddam has “Chemical Weapons”, while on the other promising the Iraqis freedom, looked for ways to legitimise invasion of the country. For months, the invasion date and what was at stake were discussed. Suddenly, one night in 2003, America went into Iraq. With the state of the art technological communications and visual possibilities available nowadays we started watching this attack blow by blow like some kind of horror film. The Iraqis took sledgehammers to statues of Saddam in their delight at being liberated from him. Our memories still hold pictures of the telephone poles disappearing before our eyes, of the statues being demolished, of people who welcomed the invasion together with those who resisted it. It was like a brief, illusory moment of peace coming to Iraq.  

At this point, as a country we were delighted when the Turkish Grand National Assembly voted against sending troops to Iraq. Admittedly Saddam was a dictator, and the people were very oppressed. However, this shouldn’t have been a reason for the future of Iraq to be determined by other countries.

Five years have passed. Those first few days of delight in Iraq did not last long, and those Iraqis who became conscious of the fact that this was a military occupation gave themselves over to resistance. The price of this resistance was death, homelessness, hunger, or even being forced to flee from their country for hundreds of thousands of people.

Not a day passes without news of an explosion or a death.

On the other side, I think that there can be no one who feels the pain of American soldiers losing their lives hundreds of thousands of miles away from home than their families.

As an artist from a country very close to these events I wanted to participate in the “hand to hand” project of Cecelia Kane, who I met in Atlanta. We had a very hot summer from 30th July to 4th August 2007. I was deeply upset by the written and visual news coming from Iraq. It became part of everyday life to think for a moment about such news items as “Several people have been killed in an explosion in Iraq”, and then to forget, immediately. However, the events of those days left a deeper impression on me. I tried to get over the distress I felt by praying each day for a flower to open on the Hibiscus on my balcony for peace in Iraq. 

I hope that the art gloves produced by all the artists participating in this exhibition, above all Cecelia Kane, will have a part in securing peace in Iraq. And I also wish that strong countries would take their hands off weak countries and allow them to determine their own fate. I want everyone in the world to live in peace, free from anxiety.

Translation : Valerie Needham