January 15th is the 123rd anniversary of the famous Turkish poet and writer Nâzım Hikmet who was a great friend of the Korean people . When the US imperialists started the Korean War (or Fatherland Liberation War ) Nâzım Hikmet campaigned against it even though he was suffering the repression of the Turkish fascist regime and later forced into exile .Turkey , a vassal state of US imperialism sent troops to fight against the Korean people on behalf of the American imperialists, Nazim wrote a poem calling for Turkish soldiers to surrender to the DPRK , a truly revolutionary action.
Who are you going to kill, Ahmet?
Your own yearning, which was realized in this land?
Does it rain in Korea?
Does the child cry under the rain
over the dead body of his mother
whose house you have burnt?
Or don’t you see this anymore?
Or did you get used to it?
[…]
Ahmet, my brother
Surrender to your brothers
[from “Letter” 1952]
The Turkish reactionaries decided t o deprive the poet in exile of his citizenship, after this poem was thrown from Korean airplanes onto the Turkish troops during a battle. His books were already forbidden by that time. He would never live to see his books republished in Turkey.
Nâzım Hikmet had fought in the Turkish War of independence in the 1920s . He had become a supporter of socialism and the new born USSR . The Turkish fascist regime imprisoned him many times for his poetry . Eventually he left Turkey and went into exile in the USSR where he died in 1963.
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