“Right now we are waiting for death. With the fall of this building, humanity will also be caught under the rubble. They should calculate how they will answer for this in the face of history. The people of Cizre haven’t knelt down for 60 days, despite the cold, the hunger, the thirst. That is why those who remain should be proud of us. But right now, there is an atrocity in progress in Cizre, there is a massacre in progress. But we will not kneel down.” These were the last words of Mehmet Tunç. He was with his comrades, they hadn’t been murdered yet, in a time when everybody was blind and deaf.

The streets and buildings where hundreds of people were burned alive in Cizre don’t exist anymore. The basements constitute an important landmark in the Kurdish collective memory, they can’t be considered just heaps of stone, concrete and steel.

These basements are places where a great massacre took place, and people were burned alive, youths, children and women. In freedom struggles, places like these are the compass over which you remember and call people to account.

Memory is not individual, it has a collective character. And Cizre for us has such a meaning.

In fact, all our lives are hidden in these moments. Both the past and the future are there. Tearing down those buildings and streets won’t change the fact that people were burned to death in Cizre. The small children screaming “People were burned alive in Cizre” in İdil will one day get their hands on the murderers.

The powerful never tolerate the oppressed having a collective and lively memory based on their own independent self struggle experience. They attack the places and symbols that this memory crystallizes in and try to destroy them.

They are constantly trying to destroy places of importance for the collective memory by tearing down guerrilla graves, banning symbolic spaces and prohibiting memorial services.

In Cizre, they want to erase the signs of the past and act like it never happened, to make people forget. We murdered you, but don’t remember that and live on with that trauma, they seem to be thinking.

Nietzsche says “man remembers the painful first”. Our painful moments are also the corner stones of our long path to freedom and beauty. Because the powerful try to actualize themselves by making us forget as well.

The latest bombing in Antep, and the dozens of children who died. How many of us mourned for how long for the dozens of young bodies scattered by the bomb? For how many days did we speak of it?

Did you know that the Antep municipality painted the street white after the massacre? As if it holds beautiful memories, that street is snow white right now. But that street is where the precious children of that neighborhood were killed.

The powerful build their hegemony over a common crime of murder. What holds them together is the complicity. The things that separate us from them, also unite us. Everywhere in the world, the murderers who attack humanity have always been of the same family.

Just like when Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, with a chief position in the exile and massacre of the Jews, was caught in 1960 in Argentina and was put on trial in Jerusalem, he said “I did my duty to get a promotion”, those who ordered the massacre in Cizre and those who complied will one day try the same defense: “I had orders, I carried them out.”

What about us? What will we say when faced with the question, “Why couldn’t you save Mehmet Tunç”? Is it only the murderer who is at fault? Where does the duty of the bystander stand in Cizre?

Isn’t every massacre encouraged by the one before that goes unpunished?

Places are critical for the collective memory and struggle. The self-memory of the society is under attack together with all of its structure. We must expose, commemorate and hold to account.

One of the people who died in the basements was Mahmut Duymak, 51 years old and father of six. We will always remember him with the white flag in his hand and his giant heart.

His son Fırat Duymak lives in Cizre. He said the area where the basements were has been torn down. He stated that he was a witness to the massacre the state committed in Cizre and that he would never forget, adding: “I won’t let people forget what was done. They are trying to cover up the massacre they committed in the basements of atrocity. We will not let them. They want to tear down the buildings and make people forget the massacre. We won’t let them forget. The last words of Mehmet Tunç, killed in one of those basements, are given to us as his will. No power can keep us from holding these massacres to account and putting the murderers on trial. We will never forget, and we will keep pursuing it. Lastly, they will never make the Kurdish youth forget the historic resistance by tearing down the basements and plundering them.”