It is not often that I encounter someone who makes me think that peace and justice in the hardest of contexts can be more than just quixotic ambitions. Tahir Elçi, the president of the Diyarbakir Bar Association, was one of those rare people for me.

Tahir spent his life advocating for Kurdish rights in Turkey and defending victims of human rights abuses, against the many odds of Turkey’s unjust justice system. On Saturday, just after delivering a speech calling for peace, he was shot dead by an unknown gunman.

Too many people in southeast Turkey have lived all their lives in a near constant state of grief and alarm. A cessation of hostilities in the 31-year-old conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) cannot, on its own, bring them peace of mind. To achieve that, any peace package must be accompanied by nationwide recognition of, and making amends for, the unspeakable pains suffered by victims of the conflict. This is something Tahir understood more profoundly than anyone I know.



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Today, I am mourning the loss of Tahir as a friend, but also as an irreplaceable promise that such an essential process is possible in Turkey.

On Nov. 24, four days before his death, he hosted me at his home in Diyarbakir for dinner. We talked about the transitional justice accord recently reached in Colombia, and compared it to the glaring lack of justice for victims on the agenda of the Turkey-PKK peace process. He updated me on the Roboski case, involving the survivors and families of 34 civilian villagers killed in a Turkish airstrike on the Iraq-Turkey border in 2011, warning me that full reparation was impossible, “because you can’t repair the loss of someone’s relative.” He encouraged me, as he always did in our meetings, to closely read Benzer and Others v. Turkey, a landmark case that he worked diligently on and took to the European Court of Human Rights. Turning to more recent events, he said both sides — the PKK and the state — were all too eager to return to war this past summer. He also told me about the death threats he had been receiving, some of which, he said, described in graphic detail exactly how he would be killed.

International media attention on the Kurdish issue in Turkey has faded since the Nov. 1 election despite recent developments that mark the slow but steady return to civil war. State security forces and the PKK’s armed youth wing have moved their fight into cities, leading to weeks-long curfews and sieges in urban hubs including Cizre, Silvan and Nusaybin. Dozens have died under these curfews, and the fighting has wrecked countless homes. Pictures of these places surfacing on social media depict scenes that look more like Aleppo than cities in a NATO country that just started a new round of European Union membership talks.

Meanwhile, Turkish authorities have continued the practice of unlawful mass arrests of Kurds on sham terrorism-related charges. Tahir himself was a target of such a probe. Last month, he was arrested (and later released pending trial, set for April 19, 2016) on charges of “making propaganda of a terrorist organization.” The indictment pointed to an interview he gave on CNN Türk, in which he said that the PKK is not a terrorist organization but rather an armed political movement with a popular support base. He sent me an English translation of his indictment, a truly Orwellian document. “Ethnic terror when compared with other varieties of terror is the most dangerous one,” it claims, pointing to Woodrow Wilson’s principle on self-determination as the reference point for such “ethnic terrorism.”

Most Kurds I interviewed across the southeast over the past week told me that they are more afraid now than they were during the 1990s, the infamous decade during which the conflict reached its peak of deadly violence. Back then, they told me, there was some logic to the violence. Now, nothing is predictable.

I didn’t understand what they meant, and assumed they must be exaggerating, until Tahir’s murder.

Tahir was an exceptional figure because he could coherently translate the Kurdish issue to Turks in the western part of the country. It feels inadequate to describe him as a moderate, but that is what he was in the finest sense of the word — sober, tolerant, and thoughtful. In each deadly conflict, there are only a few precious bridges like him. His death is now part of the history of this conflict, and will play a role in shaping its future.

Rest in peace, Tahir.

Cale Salih is an MSt Candidate in International Human Rights Law at Oxford University writing her dissertation on the Roboski airstrike.