Can Kurds and Turks Really Be Brothers?

Rastinews — During one of the bloodiest periods of the conflict, a folk song was heard again and again: "We are all brothers, why this rage?" The line echoes a parent breaking up a fight between children. It's a familiar refrain: "You're brothers, kiss and make up." But that voice reduces a political conflict to a family squabble. It treats structural inequality, historical violence and collective trauma as things that can be dissolved on command. It assumes "let's forget" can erase what happened. It assumes forgetting is simply a matter of deciding to draw a line under the past. It isn't. The human psyche doesn't file its experiences away and shelve them. Trauma encoded into a culture, wounds passed down through generations, don't vanish because someone calls for brotherhood. What is suppressed returns. What goes unspoken changes shape. What goes unnamed erupts somewhere else. Because the issue was never just anger. The issue is memory. And memory does not fall silent on command. Yet for years the pattern has held: structural problems, inequality and hierarchy in this society have never been resolved by "brotherhood" rhetoric. And still, a method proven useless time and again keeps getting put back into circulation. If declaring Kurds and Turks "brothers" is supposed to resolve the conflict between them, then it's the brotherhood itself that needs examining first.

I was a child, back in my hometown. Two boys were fighting. I stepped in. "You're brothers, stop fighting," I said. Something strange happened. The two of them dropped their fight instantly and turned on me. It was as if a truce had been declared between them. They'd found an outsider, an opponent they could unite against. I was suddenly the problem, not each other. "Why are you butting in?" they said. "This is our business." Years later, that small childhood scene came back to me as the political language of a whole country. "Our internal affair." "Our business." "We are brothers."

The same reflex shows up both in Kurdish-Turkish brotherhood rhetoric and in debates over the Armenian Genocide: internal tension suddenly turns into shared defense the moment an outside perspective appears. When aggression between siblings gets redirected outward, a temporary peace settles in at home. That's the dynamic of brotherhood laid bare: rivalry and aggression between siblings can be discharged onto a third figure, and the system relaxes. Once a common "other" is found, the internal cracks close, for a while. That peace is not genuine reconciliation; it's tension that has changed direction. The aggression doesn't disappear, it changes address. That may be why brotherhood rhetoric so often runs together with the need to manufacture a common enemy. When siblings can channel the anger they feel toward each other outward instead, an image of "unity" appears at home. But that unity is fragile. Once the enemy disappears or loses its force, the deferred conflict comes back. So the question is this: is Kurdish-Turkish brotherhood turning into a temporary alliance built around a shared sense of threat? If brotherhood is only possible in opposition to a third party, that isn't peace, it's a defensive coalition. And defensive coalitions don't produce equality. They only produce redirected aggression. Real reckoning demands something far harder: siblings who can face each other without needing a third enemy.
Brotherhoods that never learned to be brotherhoods are dangerous…

A woman told me this through tears: "My father's body hadn't even been taken out yet. My older brother said, 'Since everyone's here, let's settle the inheritance too.'" She was deeply hurt. I wasn't surprised.

While parents are alive, the relationship between siblings is largely regulated by them. Who speaks and how much, who stays quiet, who protects, who defers, all of it. Parents set each child's position in the family and keep it in place. The hierarchy between the older and younger siblings is policed by parental authority. As long as the parents are alive, being siblings is a tradition, a system of duties, a division of roles. It's usually the family that guarantees the younger child's respect for the older, and the older child's protection of the younger. But once the parent dies, that regulating center disappears. Oversight vanishes. There's no referee left. And that's when siblings can find themselves unsure how to relate to one another, because until then the relationship ran mostly through roles. Now everyone is an adult. Everyone is autonomous. They're equals under the law. But the emotional shift to that equality doesn't always follow. Without the parents, sibling relationships can run on feeling and shared memory instead of duty, on common childhood memories, shared vulnerability, the bond grief creates. But if the relationship was held together only by hierarchical roles, it collapses along with the parent's death. That the inheritance comes up in the middle of mourning shows something: the bond was less an emotional one than a system of assigned duties. We hear a certain claim often: "Kurds are our brothers." Brotherhood gets presented as the ideal relationship, as though it were the only way to build a good one. "We are all brothers," people say. And then comes the question: "So what more do these Kurds want?" That's how the story gets built. But it isn't only Kurds who need questioning here. It's the form of brotherhood being offered.

In nature, the stronger eagle chick can push its weaker sibling out of the nest, while the parents watch. Some brotherhoods mean death. Brotherhood on its own is no guarantee of anything. The strongest version of a positive, egalitarian brotherhood appears in the French Revolution. The slogan "liberty, equality, fraternity" was an objection to the king and nobility seeing themselves as sacred and set apart. Fraternity, in that language, meant pulling those standing above down to the level of the people. It argued for horizontality against condescension.

But the revolution devoured its own children too. As a slogan, brotherhood can produce equality, but if the relationship itself doesn't change, the slogan empties out. Brotherhood is born of relationship. The quality of that relationship determines how brotherhood gets lived. Peoples cannot be made brothers from above, through laws or speeches telling them to "act like brothers." Brotherhood cannot be ordered into being. It cannot be sustained through surveillance. It cannot be kept alive through fear. Real brotherhood is only possible when two adult subjects recognize each other, not through assigned roles but through rights, not through duty but through mutual responsibility. If brotherhood is only possible under the supervision of a higher authority, whether the state, religion or tradition, then once that authority weakens, all that's left behind is suppressed tension. And suppressed tension surfaces at the most fragile moment. That is why brotherhoods that never learned to be brotherhoods are dangerous. A brotherhood that hasn't internalized equality produces either hierarchy or an enemy. Without equality, brotherhood is a romantic metaphor. Without mutual recognition, it's just another form of domination.

Brotherhood can be a murderous relationship too…

The first story of brotherhood in the Muslim narrative is that of Abel and Cain. And it ends in murder. Not only in Islam but across the whole Abrahamic tradition, the first account of brotherhood is written in blood. Brotherhood is remembered, from the very start, not for love but for rivalry, jealousy and killing. The story tells us something: love is not the only thing that exists between brothers. Where there is no parent, no regulating authority, no "third party," rivalry between brothers can turn deadly. At a point where control is absent, where even the sacred cannot police it, two brothers can kill each other. Brotherhood is not a romantic union; it is also the terrain where narcissistic injury runs deepest. Because a brother is not "the other" — he is "the same." Difference within sameness breeds intolerance. This is not confined to the Abrahamic tradition. In Roman mythology, the story of Romulus and Remus, the city's founders, also ends in tragedy. The city's founding becomes possible only through a brother's blood. In Egyptian mythology, Seth kills his brother Osiris. Here too, the struggle for power runs between brothers. Ottoman history records sultans killing their own brothers. The fight for the throne erases brotherhood. A brother is a potential rival. These examples come from different cultures and different geographies, but the story is the same: brotherhood is as much a site of rivalry as of love. When narcissism and power seep into a sibling bond, when equality is absent, when recognition has not been established eye to eye, when control collapses, violence follows. Because a brother is the closest mirror there is. And the difference glimpsed in that mirror triggers narcissistic injury. If brotherhood is not built as an equal, subject-to-subject relationship; if one side is cast as "naturally older" and the other as "naturally younger"; if the distribution of power is sanctified without question, then brotherhood can turn into the most dangerous form of relationship there is. Perhaps this is why, however much the discourse of "brotherhood" gets romanticized, it always carries within it this possibility: murder is as possible as love. The problem is not brotherhood itself; it is the absence of equality.

Brotherhood: Equality or Hierarchy?

So brotherhood can be an ideal relationship, but it is also one of the most fraught. Seen from outside, it evokes equality; within the family, though, the sibling relationship is often hierarchical and conflict-ridden. The positions of older and younger brother, older and younger sister, place every child in a defined role. These roles encode not just age difference but also the distribution of power and responsibility. What exists in a sibling relationship is not equality, but position. And position produces obligation and boundary.

A stranger is not simply someone we do not know; it is someone whose intentions we cannot read. Uncertainty runs through any relationship with a stranger. And uncertainty breeds anxiety. It is exactly at this point that we try to manage that anxiety by placing the stranger in a familiar position. We call him "brother," her "sister," him "uncle." In doing so, we expect him to act like a brother — to protect, to look after us. This is what is meant by symbolic kinship: an attempt to neutralize the stranger's danger by folding him into the family. But family relations are not equal, not eye to eye. They are hierarchical. Asymmetric. An uncle-nephew relationship forces both sides into a fixed posture. Position determines behavior in advance.

The Village, the Stranger, and Making Family

John Berger writes somewhere that "you cannot lie in a village, because everyone knows everyone." Lying requires the unknown. In a village there is no stranger; everyone knows everyone. Someone who comes to the village without staying is a "guest." Most villagers are not just acquaintances to one another but relatives. A village is like one large family. In the city, by contrast, we encounter strangers. To ease that unfamiliarity, we place the stranger in a family position. The vendor at the market becomes "brother"; the woman next door becomes "aunt." This is not merely a form of address; it is a way of turning the relationship into a family one. This familial framing also desexualizes the relationship. It inserts the incest taboo into it and builds walls of honor and shame around it. Boundaries are set this way. But these boundaries produce not equality, but roles. In modern society, public forms of address — madam, sir, ma'am — establish a symmetrical relationship. They render hierarchy invisible. They create distance at eye level. The language of family, by contrast, is not symmetrical; it produces duty and obligation.

What Does the Rhetoric of Brotherhood Conceal?

When social unrest rises, there is a ready-made formula people reach for: "Let's strengthen the discourse of brotherhood." As if the way to ease internal tension were simply to repeat "we are brothers" more often. Yet one of the most basic problems with this discourse is that it frames brotherhood almost entirely as a bond between men, neglecting the dimension of "sisterhood." When brotherhood is invoked, what usually comes to mind is brotherhood among men. The figure of the sister either stays symbolic or turns into an object of exchange. This blind spot is not unique to us. There is a phrase heard often: "We have exchanged daughters between us." A young woman from Yozgat falling in love with a man from Dersim can set off all kinds of tension; but once the same story is told through the language of "exchanging daughters," it is presented as though no power asymmetry exists at all. Yet here the woman is not the subject of peace; she is the intermediary.
In Die Gabe (The Gift, 1990), Marcel Mauss describes human relations as built on reciprocity and exchange. Giving a gift is not merely an economic act; it is a way of forging a political and symbolic bond. The "giving" of a woman in marriage can be read as part of this economy of the gift. Claude Lévi-Strauss, in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Die elementaren Strukturen der Verwandtschaft, 1993), argues that kinship systems are built on the exchange of women. The prevention of incest and the forging of kinship ties become possible through the exchange of women between groups of men. As men build solidarity among themselves, women become the figures circulated to enable that solidarity. Seen from this angle, the language of "exchanging daughters" is not a romantic narrative of peace; it is a marker of alliance between men. The woman looks like a symbol of peace, but she is not its subject. It is therefore no accident that the emphasis on brotherhood between Alevis and Sunnis, or between Kurds and Turks, is so strong. The discourse of brotherhood presents itself as a way to calm conflict; but it often renders inequality invisible. Worse, while it builds a ground for solidarity among men, it either symbolizes or instrumentalizes women.

Brotherhood is not equal citizenship. Brotherhood erects a symbolic roof, but it does not address the distribution of power. This discourse assumes: we are inside the same family. The problem is not external, but internal. Therefore the matter is not political, but moral. Yet once the inequality of power is hidden inside the metaphor of family, a demand for rights can be made to look like "breaking up the family." Once someone has said "we are brothers," a demand for equality can be cast as ingratitude.

What is missing from this story is the sister. Social science research shows that people who have sisters tend to build more empathetic and balanced sibling relationships. The reason given is that women tend to be more caring and attentive within relationships. If this is true, one could speak of a "missing sister" in the Kurdish-Turkish relationship as well. The conflict plays out on thoroughly masculine ground: competitive, honor-centered, built on displays of power. Because masculinity so often codes a feminine posture as weakness, the possibility of reconciliation is wounded from the very start.

Look closely at the discourse "Kurds are our brothers," and it becomes clear that Turks nearly always speak from the position of the older brother. But this older-brother role is one assigned to Kurds without asking them, without their consent. The claim to "natural elder-brotherhood" breaks equality from the outset.

In The Age of Fitness (Das Zeitalter der Fitness, 2019), Jürgen Martschukat writes that after the American War of Independence, Americans described their break from the British through the metaphor of "leaving adolescence to become a full-grown man." Citizenship rights were initially granted only to white men. The newly independent subject limited equality by excluding its own "others" — Black people, women — from citizenship. In other words, the language of "becoming a man," "gaining independence," and "sovereignty" are intertwined. Seen in this light, the rhetoric of brotherhood is not merely a call for unity; it is also a positioning of power. Who is the older brother? Who is the younger? Who is the subject? Who is the gift? Perhaps the real issue is this: when brotherhood is spoken of without equality being discussed, what gets reproduced is not peace, but hierarchy. And brotherhood, while speaking the language of love on the surface, speaks the language of power underneath.

A Common Womb: Religion?

Talking about brotherhood assumes a shared origin first. Brotherhood rests on the idea of emerging from the same womb. Biologically, it begins when a man and a woman conceive children who share the same parents. Before brotherhood, then, comes a couple, a birth, a shared womb. In myths and sacred narratives, this origin often crosses biological boundaries. The story of Adam and Eve does not rest on ordinary sexual reproduction. Creation is not a biological process; it is a symbolic beginning. Jesus's birth, too, falls outside the normal order of reproduction. These narratives produce a symbolic origin rather than a biological one. The shared womb becomes a ground of belief rather than a historical fact.

People often say the shared "womb" of Kurdish-Turkish brotherhood is Islam. Religion gets presented as the common cultural bond, the shared ground of origin. "We face the same qibla," they say, "we believe in the same book." But a basic problem sits here: shared origin does not produce equality. Belonging to the same religion does not mean holding the same position of power. Believing in the same God does not mean holding the same political rights. When someone says "we are brothers," the question to ask is: which brother? The elder? The younger? A sister or a brother? Is the inheritance shared equally? Or is one treated as naturally "senior," with obedience expected from the other? When the language of brotherhood replaces the language of equality, hierarchy disappears from view. Once the family metaphor replaces equal citizenship, a political matter shrinks into a moral one. The issue stops being about rights and law; it becomes "shameful," "hurtful," an act of "breaking up the family." A political demand can then be cast as ingratitude. A call for equality can be framed as "damaging the brotherhood." That is why this piece asks a question that is simple but heavy: can a Turk and a Kurd be brothers in a symbolic sense? Perhaps. But brotherhood is not equality. And brotherhood built without equality is, more often than not, just hierarchy speaking the language of love.

Types of Brotherhood and Kurdish-Turkish Brotherhood

Élisabeth Badinter, in her work examining the history of motherhood — especially in Die Mutterliebe.
Geschichte eines Gefühls vom 17. Jahrhundert bis heute (= Mother Love: A History of a Feeling from the 17th Century to the Present, 1987) — draws attention to an important point: in 18th-century France, noblewomen often handed their newborns to a "wet nurse." The children grew up in the countryside, at another woman's breast. The mother, meanwhile, separated herself physically from her child so she could carry out her "wifely duties" (?) and keep up her social life. Wet-nursing was also an economic relationship. Women who had given birth earned income by nursing another woman's child. Biological motherhood and emotional care thus split apart. We know a similar tradition prevailed in 6th-century Mecca. Muhammad, too, was raised for a time by a wet nurse after his birth. In the desert setting, growing up within a different family was preferred for reasons of health, language, and social prestige.

Milk is the first nourishment a human receives. First contact, first satisfaction, first sense of trust arrive through milk. The first bond with the mother forms, more often than not, through breast and milk. Milk is not merely a biological fluid; it is a symbol of care, tenderness, and being kept alive. Brotherhood is not limited to being born of the same mother… Those who nurse from the same mother are also brothers. The human relationship to milk is worth pondering in its own right… Every milk-fed creature stops nursing once it becomes independent. Only humans keep drinking milk, keep feeding on milk, into adulthood. In a sense, humans never fully shed the milk-fed infancy on one side of themselves… Milk-siblinghood carries a different symbolism from blood-siblinghood. Blood evokes power, lineage, and purity; milk evokes care, dependence, and tenderness. Blood can produce hierarchy; milk evokes, more than anything, the idea of mutual feeding and sustaining life.
Milk-siblinghood is a form of kinship built through nursing. Under Islamic law, milk siblings cannot marry; the bond, in other words, counts as strong as biological siblinghood. But an interesting fact sits here: though nursed children are raised almost like "twin siblings" in infancy, they usually return to their own families before reaching an age where the relationship could deepen emotionally, where the bond could be consciously built. Milk-siblinghood, then, is a bond that is not biological but is symbolically strong; yet it may not gain emotional continuity. It is a form of brotherhood where early contact exists, but no shared memory forms to sustain the relationship into adulthood.
Another form of brotherhood is the blood-brotherhood forged in adolescence. Here there is no biological bond; young people make a conscious choice and declare one another siblings. They draw blood and form a symbolic blood tie. This is the deliberate will to choose a "stranger" as a sibling. Yet this does not produce an entirely new kind of bond. What comes into play here are the brotherhood concepts we already know: the idea of sharing the same parents, or the notion of building kinship through blood ties. So the young people, in effect, produce a symbolic imitation of biological brotherhood. Blood, here, stands in for lineage and shared origin. The ritual symbolically rebuilds biology. That is why blood-brotherhood is not simply a declaration of friendship. It borrows the emotional and social weight of biological brotherhood. The metaphor of "being of the same blood" brings with it an expectation of loyalty, solidarity, and sacrifice. The chosen bond is thus constructed as though it were as strong as a bond by birth. Blood-brotherhood, in other words, has two layers: on one hand it is a conscious choice, on the other it is a symbolic reproduction of biological kinship. That is exactly why it is powerful. And that is exactly why it can be dangerous. Because the blood metaphor does not only produce closeness; it also produces exclusion. The discourse of "the same blood" builds a strong bond on the inside while drawing a line against the outside. Perhaps the real question here is this: does chosen brotherhood grow stronger when it imitates biology, or does it move closer to equality when it breaks free of biology? A brotherhood built not on blood but on mutual recognition and acceptance may be less romantic, but it could be more egalitarian.

Blood-brotherhood reflects the adolescent's desire, amid a search for identity, to build an attachment outside the family. This bond is not a brotherhood arranged by parents; it is one the subject builds for themselves. It is a brotherhood chosen, not imposed by authority. Adolescence is a period of gaining independence. The young person begins to separate emotionally and intellectually from the family. They question the family's values, put distance between themselves and it, and try to build their own identity. In this process, they do not want to end up entirely alone. They look for a "backup family" to replace the safety net the family once provided. This is exactly where the peer group steps in. Blood-brotherhood is a symbolic expression of that need for a backup family. A chosen sibling differs from a biological one; they are the product of a conscious choice. Bonds this intense, built on mutual trust, make it possible for the young person to move away from the family. Separation, after all, can only hold up once a new ground for attachment exists. Through the sibling they choose, the young person does two things at once: they separate from the family, and they build a new sense of belonging without breaking away entirely. In this sense, blood-brotherhood is a safety mechanism for gaining independence. It is a symbolic alliance built so as not to be left in a void while stepping out from under the shadow of authority.

But a critical threshold sits here: the blood-brotherhood formed in adolescence is symbolic; the ritual of drawing blood carries no real claim of shared lineage. On the political plane, though, brotherhood built on "blood" takes on a different meaning. Phrases like "blood tie," "same blood," "same lineage" are core concepts of nationalism and biological racism. To define belonging through blood is to tie rights and equality to biological origin. And that is one of the clearest features of fascist ideologies: producing purity and entitlement through blood, lineage, and offspring. The critical question here is: can Kurds and Turks be blood brothers? If "blood" is used to mean biological purity, shared lineage, and superiority, this is not brotherhood; it is an exclusionary identity politics. Unity built on blood produces purity on the inside while drawing a line against the outside. It produces hierarchy, not equality. Blood-brotherhood in adolescence, by contrast, is symbolic; it is not biological. It involves choice. It involves will. But once political discourse turns "blood" into a biological category, what emerges is not chosen brotherhood but a closed ideology of lineage. So should brotherhood be built on blood, or on rights? Belonging built on blood leans on a primitive claim of ethnic purity. Belonging built on rights leans on equal citizenship. Real equality is possible not in biology, but in law and mutual recognition. Not a brotherhood imposed as fate, but a partnership built through will and equal rights… Perhaps this is exactly where the matter knots together.

Alevis don't need blood brotherhood or milk brotherhood. They have musahiplik. A similar structure appears in Alevi tradition as "musahiplik." Musahiplik is when two individuals, or two families, form a lifelong companionship on the path. This bond produces responsibility not only between individuals but between families. Musahips are morally, economically and socially responsible for one another. A stranger outside the family is chosen as a sibling through a deliberate ritual. Musahiplik is not biological, but it is not arbitrary either. It is a chosen bond — but the choice is bound to a serious regime of responsibility. It involves not just emotional closeness but a lifelong obligation.

Milk brotherhood, blood brotherhood and musahiplik are all non-biological forms of kinship. But the strength of these bonds lies not in symbolic declaration, but in continuity, mutual responsibility and equality. Saying "we are brothers" is not enough. Brotherhood needs a practice, a law, an ethic. If brotherhood remains mere rhetoric — a word recalled in a speech, a rally, a moment of crisis — the bond stays weak. But if it involves ritual, mutual responsibility and equality, it can turn into real solidarity.

Perhaps the real question here is this: what kind of brotherhood does Kurdish-Turkish brotherhood resemble? An early contact with weak emotional continuity, like milk brotherhood? A symbolic but strong choice, like blood brotherhood? Or a conscious, egalitarian companionship burdened with responsibility, like musahiplik? Because brotherhood is not one single thing. What matters is how it is formed, how it is sustained, and who determines it. And perhaps most important of all: an unchosen brotherhood is not the same as a chosen one. An imposed brotherhood is not the same as one built on equality. Real brotherhood arises not merely from shared origin, but from shared responsibility.
An older brother, in truth, is trouble

I don't know whether Kurds are looking for a big brother, but in their relationship with Kurds, Turks often place themselves in the position of "big brother." But being a big brother is not only about protection. Big brothers don't just protect their younger siblings; sometimes they become trouble for them too.
Picture a family. The first child is born. That child holds the entirety of the family's love. If we think of love as a cake, the whole cake belongs to that child. The mother's attention, the father's love, the center of the household… Years pass, and a second child is born. For the second child, sharing exists from the very start. Splitting attention with the mother and father is a given from birth. That child grows up sharing love. Sharing is its natural state. For the first child, though, things are different. It encounters sharing for the first time. It experiences, for the first time, its love being divided. And most importantly, it realizes something: this is not temporary. It is for life. For the first child, a sibling's birth is often a narcissistic injury. It is the experience of being "dethroned." It is the loss of a once-absolute central position. This is why many older siblings carry ambivalent feelings toward younger ones: love and jealousy, protection and aggression sit side by side. Being the big brother is the position of the first loss. When this dynamic is carried, metaphorically, into the Kurdish-Turkish relationship, an interesting picture emerges. If Turks position themselves as the "big brother," this is not merely a claim to protection; it is also a desire to preserve the central position. The big brother both protects and sustains the hierarchy. But within the big-brother position, a concealed hostility toward the younger sibling can also lurk. Because the younger sibling is a reminder of sharing. A reminder of loss. A reminder of equality. When someone says "we are brothers," a hidden assumption often lies beneath it: we are the elder, you are the younger; we protect, you adapt. Yet equality requires the big-brother position to dissolve — for the elder to step back from the center, to accept that the cake no longer belongs to anyone alone. Perhaps this is exactly where the matter gets knotted: can being the big brother ever consent to equality?

Because as long as the big-brother position seeks to preserve itself, brotherhood never becomes more than a hierarchy speaking the language of love.
Isn't this where the whole fight actually comes from? "We want the same rights as you. Because they are already our rights." What others demand is, most often, not a demand for privilege but a demand for equality. Yet within a hierarchical order, a demand for equality is perceived as a threat. Because equality shakes the existing distribution of power. When someone says "I am the same," it means "you are not superior." This is exactly where the fight begins. For the subject in the big-brother position, others' demand for rights can feel like a second trauma. The first trauma was the cake being divided. The second trauma is the declaration that the cake never belonged to just one person in the first place. When someone says "we too have rights," the drawn boundaries are called into question. These boundaries may have been set historically, established by the state, or legitimized culturally. But the demand for equality refuses to recognize them. From the big-brother position, this refusal looks like disobedience. Yet what is often really happening is this: the younger sibling simply wants to rise to eye level. When a demand for equality is suppressed, that suppression is usually justified with concepts like "reasons of state," "unity," "brotherhood," or "survival." But structurally, the issue is this: a refusal to accept the drawn boundaries. Persecution is often the answer given to a demand for rights. As long as the demand for rights doesn't disappear, pressure increases. As pressure increases, the demand for equality becomes more visible. And so a vicious cycle begins. Perhaps the hardest question is this: is it possible to hear a demand for equality without treating it as betrayal? Because when someone says "I have the same rights as you," it does not mean destroying brotherhood — it means, for the first time, pulling it onto the ground of equality.

As I close this piece, I want to mention two books…

Christina von Braun is a scholar who writes meticulous, comprehensive and deeply researched books. If you come across her work, don't be put off by its length; it rewards patient reading. One of her books is titled Blutsbande (Blood Ties, 2018). In it, she examines kinship across different cultures and historical contexts. We tend to tie brotherhood to being born of the same mother, to blood ties, to biological origin, as though this were the one natural form of brotherhood. Yet in other cultures, kinship and brotherhood can rest on entirely different principles. In some communities in the Amazon, kinship is defined through a shared enemy. As an Arab proverb puts it: "The enemy of my enemy is my relative." Kinship, in other words, is built not through blood but through political positioning. In the Philippines, people who share the same house, the same living space, can be counted as relatives. By that definition, Alevis, Kurds, Turks and Armenians who share the same geography, the same land, are already relatives — a kinship built not through blood, but through living together. In some cultures, two people working the same land determines brotherhood, not being born of the same mother. In certain communities in northern Alaska, kinship is not biological but chosen. In some Inuit groups, children born on the same day are considered siblings. In parts of Kenya, people living in the same house are counted as relatives.
So kinship and brotherhood cannot be reduced to a single model. My reason for citing these examples is this: to question our tendency to assume our own concept of brotherhood is absolute and universal. Exalting brotherhood purely through blood, lineage and a common mother, and presenting it as a magic formula for solving social problems, can be misleading. In some cultures, blood ties are deliberately set aside; the whole of society is considered one family. What matters there is not biological closeness but shared life and mutual responsibility. My point is roughly this: should we build brotherhood on blood, or on living together, shared responsibility and equality? Blood ties are a powerful metaphor — but like every powerful metaphor, an exclusionary one too. Living together, sharing the same land, the same home, the same fate, can also be a form of kinship. Brotherhood is not a natural given; it is a cultural choice. And perhaps social peace can be built not in the language of blood, but in the language of living together.
While reading Ulrike Guerot's Wer schweigt, stimmt zu (Silence Means Consent, 2025), one line stopped me: "When real peace comes, there will be a great deal we need to forgive one another." That sentence stopped me in my tracks. Because people heal from wherever they bled. Healing begins right where the wound is. Madımak. September 6–7. Further back, 1915. Berkin Elvan. Hrant Dink. Tahir Elçi. Eren Bülbül. I read a letter once. A young soldier, shortly before he was killed, had written a message to his fiancée. A young man whose dreams were left unfinished. Can we apologize to his fiancée? Can we say, "We failed to protect the one you loved"? Can we say, "We begrudged you love, happiness" … "We are the culprits"? Can we take on moral and political responsibility?

We have piled up so many crimes that need forgiving… Will a state that pulled down the underwear of children killed in the mountains to check whether they were circumcised, and reported this as news, ever step forward one day and apologize? Will the state that was both perpetrator and bystander in the Madımak Massacre ever be able to say "forgive us"? Will those who celebrate a holiday every year for driving the Greeks into the sea ever throw a carnation into the Aegean?
It is hard to expect this from those who make heroism series about national killers. But my real question is this: can there be forgiveness without awareness of the crime? How can healing happen with a state that never apologizes, a society that never confronts its past? Forgiveness is not forgetting. Forgiveness is never denial. Forgiveness first requires naming the crime. If real peace is wanted, before demanding forgiveness from each other, we must do this:

Name the wound. Recognize the perpetrator. Take responsibility. Brotherhood cannot be built without confrontation. Equality cannot be built without an apology. We cannot heal our wounds without forgiving each other. But forgiveness cannot be decreed from above. If we truly want to be brothers, let us first be able to say to each other: "We hurt you." "We looked away." "We did wrong." Maybe then brotherhood can be discussed for the first time on the ground of equality.

Psychoanalyst Paul Bischoff (Bruch mit dem Versprechen der Moderne = A Break from the Promise of Modernity, 2025) points to the central importance of "blood" in the fascist definition of the nation. The rhetoric of "noble blood in the veins" refers not only to biology; it also carries a claim to rights based on historical continuity and lineage. Here, blood means both biology and historicity. The most distinctive feature of fascism is its rejection of equality. Any attitude that glorifies inequality and presents hierarchy as natural and inevitable carries a fascist potential. Fascism does not accept different ethnic groups as equal in value. An outlook that considers its own lineage, history, blood, culture and language superior struggles to grant others the same rights. Because a claim to superiority perceives equality as a threat. When a demand for equality arises, it reads this not as a search for rights but as "defiance of the order." In this way, the discourse of biological and cultural superiority overrides political equality. The banning or belittling of Kurdish, the devaluing of the culture… the mockery of Alevi rituals… These are not merely prejudice; they are the practical results of a hierarchical design of the world.
One of the most important features of fascism is that it sees the right to define solely in itself. Who is who? Who believes what? Who is how acceptable? It unilaterally assumes the authority to answer these questions. It defines Kurds, Alevis, "others"; moreover, it tries to make this definition unquestionable. The defining subject is powerful; the defined is objectified. Yet equality begins when everyone has the right to define themselves. Where the right to define becomes a monopoly, there is no brotherhood — only domination.

This piece has run long, I know. But the story of the piece has itself become a story of brotherhood.

Perhaps the most important feature of brotherhood is this: it is the longest relationship in a human life. Our mother and father leave one day. They leave us, through death or through the natural course of life. Our lovers, friends, spouses enter our lives later. But brotherhood begins at birth and mostly ends only with death. It is the longest relationship there is. That is why brotherhood is not just an emotional metaphor; it is a long-term way of living together. We grow up in the same house, carry the same memory, share the same traces of childhood. We know each other's firsts and each other's rawest states. Perhaps that is why brotherhood is either very strong or very destructive. Because it is the longest relationship, when it is not built justly it can open the deepest wounds. But when it is built equally and justly, it can also become the safest ground for solidarity. To value brotherhood is not to romanticize it, but to equalize it. It means making it just. It means keeping it eye to eye. Because the longest relationship does not have to be the best relationship. But it holds the potential to become the best one. Perhaps that is the point: brotherhood may be inevitable. But how it is lived, how it is arranged, whether it is equal or hierarchical, is our choice. If we can make the longest relationship just, perhaps we will have accomplished the hardest thing of all.