“I run toward the immortality within your beauty; I run toward Zîlan-like times.”
To meet our Leadership in the greatest bonds, in a union of hearts and sacred devotion; to feel the fire of freedom in all its intensity and to create oneself in struggle. Self-sacrifice is a delicate bond between hearts. It is a warm breeze reaching toward the Leadership, a union of hearts. A self-sacrificing life. In this union, we enlarge our feelings and elevate ourselves through emotion. We grant one another the honor of living with a self-sacrificing person. When the aim is to meet around principles on the Leadership’s line and to create the new life, every act of sharing gains still greater meaning. Comrade Harun was one of the strongest links in the chain of meaning. I had met Heval Harun during a period when we were experiencing very intense emotions. News about our Leadership was being broadcast on the radio. The Leader had said that “there were many swellings on his head, his lips were wounded, he could not sleep even an hour at night, he had difficulty breathing, and he woke every minute.” We were all somewhat angry and indignant. Yet there was another meaning in his gaze. So much anger had accumulated in his eyes, and his feelings had grown so intense, that they could not go unseen. It was necessary to halt this course and intervene. Only later did I understand that the resolution Comrade Harun had reached was reflected in his behavior. Comrade Harun said that this process required Zîlan-like participation and action. He aimed to join, in Zîlan’s way, a people’s struggle to create itself. Against the imposed annihilation and denial, he sought to create life and resistance by tearing his body apart. “I am Zîlan’s son,” he said. He never betrayed the mother who was an exalted comrade. In the lesson where we discussed self-sacrifice, Comrade Harun shared the level of his determination with all his comrades. With a heart beating in hope and a voice reflecting his courage, he looked lovingly at each comrade and developed his pledge of self-sacrificing participation. He was now a traveler toward immortality. As though thirsting for the thought of the Leadership, the spirit of freedom took wing, found the goal it would reach, and was nourished by the love of comradeship.
He had said, “THROUGH MY ACTION, I WANT TO BUILD BRIDGES OF MY DEVOTION TO YOU AND TO IMMORTALIZE YOUR LIFE AND ALL THE BEAUTY THAT IS YOUR WORK.” With these words, he expressed his relationship with the Leadership in the simplest form.
As he purified himself, he became love and flowed into our lives like a sacred river. This river will forever keep self-sacrifice green in our spirit, heart, and mind. “LEADER APO” likened himself to an oak tree. If we describe the self-sacrificing militants as a tree’s fruit, they are the fruit of great maturation. They nourish their people morally. Little time remained before the journey to immortality. The legend of meeting Zîlan was coming true. He was very happy, excited, and full of enthusiasm. Yet sorrow was also present in his eyes… He was parting from his mountains and these beautiful comrades, though he carried them all away within his heart… He ate his evening meal for the last time. He had stopped eating meat on November 27, treating this as a struggle against the self. Thus, on his final evening, he ate at a table where no meat was served. He also attended the assembly for the last time. He went with devotion to fulfill the oath, “WITH SOUL AND BLOOD, WE ARE WITH YOU, O LEADER.” He could not remain still for even a moment. He photographed all the comrades. The images he wanted to make lasting were, in truth, the love and devotion he carried within him. No one knew he had set out on his great journey. He drank tea with his comrades for the last time, gathered the glasses from before them, and did not neglect even this service. These were his final minutes before leaving. The magnificent radiance in his gaze found its reflection in his comrades’ eyes. In the persons of the comrades he embraced for the last time, he embraced the boundless hopes of a people and began his journey. As he approached the place from which the camp would no longer be visible, he surveyed his mountains one last time and looked at his comrades in the camp. Here life continued again in its natural course. Yet his heart and his love had grown so vast that they almost drove him running toward Zîlan. Who knows what he said to himself in his heart at that moment… It is here that Comrade Harun attained the secret of the moth in the flame. We will reach the knowledge and virtue of this only when we burn like Harun in those flames. But now we tell of his love for the fire, his run toward the fire, and his search for something within it. For this reason, one can speak of coming into being in the moment of knowing, because the one who knows it is the one who lives it. Every self-sacrificing militant creates and lives their own secret. Just as the fourth moth burns in the flames, attaining this secret means living and fighting like them. Yet despite everything, none of us can express the moment when Zîlan detonated her body. None of us can describe the moment when Viyan became one with the fire. Nor can we tell the moment when Harun tightened the rope around his neck. That sacred historical moment is the moment they lived and in which they created themselves. To understand that moment, we too must come into being within it. We are still those who draw circles around the fire. But they are those who attained consciousness and lived within the fire.
Every moth tells of what comes before the moment it will live. And every self-sacrificing militant explains why they threw themselves into the fire. But they know what it is to burn and explode within the fire and to glide down from cliffs, because they lived that moment in its first letters. By acknowledging our ignorance before them on this matter, we realize that the love which created them is the attainment of the secret of self-sacrifice.
What moth has ever told what burning is after it turned to ash! Burning is the greatest meeting between them and time, between them and the moment. Only those who live it know the meeting’s greatest secret. Thus, self-sacrifice is the act of attaining its own love and secret. The love within Harun was so great that it broke the enemy’s cold doors and shackles and flowed into the sacred lands of Kurdistan. Harun now courses thunderously through Kurdistan. Like a river, the love of self-sacrifice overcomes the barriers before it and reunites with Him, with the land of Kurdistan. His true longing was to be illuminated in Zîlan’s way. This had not happened. For that reason, in the samurai manner of honor, he struck the enemy once more with himself.
Saying, “DO WHATEVER YOU WILL; I HAVE ATTAINED THE SECRET OF FREEDOM. YOU CANNOT SEPARATE ME FROM MY LOVE,” he now waits, in his soil as warm as a mother’s heart and with a child’s purity, for the day when we will all see him, as though awakening history. He is now the definition of a great love. It is the legend of the love of becoming self-sacrificing; the legend of an honorable people who live and grow in the ways of Zîlan, Harun, and Dengtav—the people of Kurdistan created by Leader Apo.