PM Barzani Inquires After Health of Famed Turkish Sociologist and "Friend of the Kurds" İsmail Beşikci

ERBIL (Kurdistan24) – In a gesture of profound respect and personal concern, Kurdistan Region Prime Minister Masrour Barzani on Sunday inquired after the health of Dr. İsmail Beşikci, the renowned Turkish writer and sociologist celebrated for his fearless and lifelong defense of the Kurdish people, after Dr. Beşikci suffered a medical emergency while speaking at a film festival in Diyarbakir.

The Prime Minister placed a phone call to the İsmail Beşikci Foundation to receive a direct update on his condition and, expressing his deep wishes for a speedy recovery, conveyed his readiness to provide any assistance necessary for his treatment.

The incident occurred on Saturday, September 27, when Dr. Beşikci, a towering intellectual figure whose work has cost him nearly two decades of his life in Turkish prisons, was delivering a speech at the 9th FilmAmed Documentary Film Festival.

According to a statement from the İsmail Beşikci Foundation, the esteemed scholar, known affectionately as "our dear teacher," suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and was immediately rushed to the hospital. "He is currently being held in the Intensive Care Unit of Dicle University Faculty of Medicine," the foundation announced, adding that his "health condition remains serious."

Following the Prime Minister's inquiry, the İsmail Beşikci Foundation thanked Prime Minister Barzani and said, "His health is improving."

İbrahim Gürbüz, the head of the İsmail Beşikci Foundation, told Kurdistan24, "Beşikci thanks Masrour Barzani, the Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, for inquiring about his health and for the offer of assistance with his hospitalization."

Gürbüz also said, "Beşikci's health is improving, the bleeding in his brain has now stopped, and he is conscious. For a week, there was a risk of high blood pressure, but now the pressure is good and has been controlled."

He also indicated, "Professor İsmail Beşikci was transferred to the hospital yesterday evening. In the initial examinations, it was revealed that he could not move his right side and his speech was slurred. In the tomography scan, it was revealed to us that blood had hemorrhaged in an important part of his brain, but it has now stopped."

The news sent waves of concern across Kurdistan and among intellectuals and human rights advocates worldwide who have long admired his unwavering commitment to academic freedom and the Kurdish cause.

İsmail Beşikci, born in 1939 into a Turkish and religious family, has forged a unique and courageous path in modern Turkish intellectual history. As detailed in a comprehensive academic analysis by Deniz Duruiz for the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), Beşikci is the first social scientist in Türkiye to systematically analyze the oppression of the Kurds through the incisive concept of the "international colony."

His groundbreaking thesis argues that Kurdistan, partitioned between the modern states of Türkiye, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, exists in a state of subjugation that is qualitatively different and more intense than classical colonialism. While anti-colonial struggles in other parts of the world were typically waged against a single state, Beşikci posited that the Kurdish struggle is uniquely complex, waged against four states, each with its own distinct interests and international alliances. This, he argued, has historically placed the Kurds in a uniquely vulnerable position, a nation that "could not even be a colony," since even a colony possesses a recognized, albeit lowly, political status.

His work, as explored by Duruiz, delves deep into the spatial and subjective dimensions of this colonization. He distinguished between overseas colonies and adjacent colonies like Kurdistan, where the proximity of the colonizing state allows for oppression and violence that is "much more intense and penetrate[s] into the capillaries of the [colonized] society."

He documented how these states implemented not just "divide-and-rule" policies, but "divide-rule-and-annihilate" policies, targeting not only the people but also the very animals, villages, and forests of Kurdistan.

Mirroring the work of anti-colonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Beşikci's analysis extended beyond material exploitation to the profound psychological effects of colonization, highlighting the experiences of humiliation and shame on the subjectivities of the colonized.

In a poignant passage cited by MERIP, he wrote of the Kurds as "a nation whose name has been banned. A nation whose honor has been usurped... a humiliated nation." The Kurdish struggle, in his view, is therefore not just for political rights, but a "struggle for equality with all nations and peoples," a fight to "live in dignity."

This unflinching academic rigor and moral clarity came at an immense personal cost. His decades of writing and speaking out against the state's official narrative of a unified, homogenous Turkish nation led to a relentless campaign of persecution.

As reported by Agence France-Presse (AFP), he faced a seemingly endless series of charges for "separatist Kurdish propaganda." An AFP report from October 1997 detailed how a Turkish court sentenced him to an additional year in jail on top of his already lengthy prison terms.

By the time of his release in September 1999, as reported by AFP, he had spent a total of 19 years in prison and had accumulated 51 more sentences amounting to another 79 years. Even the law that secured his release was a form of continued suppression; it was a parole law that suspended sentences for authors for a three-year period, a measure Beşikci himself sharply criticized upon leaving prison as amounting to a "three-year ban on thinking."

His courageous stance made him a hero to the Kurds and a revered figure among dissenting intellectuals in Türkiye. In December 1998, as reported by AFP, the internationally acclaimed Turkish author Orhan Pamuk publicly rejected an official "state artist" award in protest of Türkiye's treatment of its writers, specifically citing Beşikci's imprisonment.

"This state has thrown Ismail Besikci... into jail," Pamuk declared. "As a writer I cannot accept this title under those circumstances."

In a detailed essay for the online journal Jadaliyya, scholar Bülent Küçük further explored the core of Beşikci's thesis: the concept of institutional racism as the foundational logic of the Turkish republican regime.

Beşikci, Küçük writes, argued that the Turkish state's denial of the very existence of Kurdish identity and the Kurdish language, and its erasure of Kurdistan from maps and memories, constituted a form of "ideological-cultural slaughter."

This was a system in which Kurds could be "everything," as long as they denied their own identities, but could not be "anything," not even a "janitor," the moment they asserted their difference.

Despite the profound intellectual divergence between Beşikci's insistence on an independent Kurdish state and the democratic confederalist model later adopted by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), his work provided the foundational academic and moral argument for the Kurdish national liberation paradigm.

As the Kurdish political movement in Türkiye has in recent years turned back to the discourse of anti-colonial struggle, his work has found a renewed and powerful relevance.

Prime Minister Barzani's personal phone call on Sunday is a reflection of the deep and abiding respect the leadership and people of the Kurdistan Region hold for Dr. Beşikci. It is a recognition of the immense sacrifices he has made and the profound intellectual contribution he has offered to the understanding of the Kurdish cause.

As "our dear teacher" lies in intensive care in Diyarbakir, his life's work—a courageous and unwavering pursuit of truth in the face of relentless persecution—continues to resonate, a powerful testament to the indomitable spirit of a true friend of Kurdistan.

This news has been updated, adding comments from İbrahim Gürbüz, the head of the İsmail Beşikci Foundation, at 02:17 PM, Sunday, Sept. 28, 2025.