Daily Lesson from Life 05 May 2009

"44 killed at Turkish wedding
Eight people have been arrested for the blood feud. -Tue, May 05, 2009 AFP

BILGE, Turkey - Masked gunmen stormed a wedding party in Turkey's Kurdish region firing machine guns in an attack which left 44 people dead -- most of them women and children, officials said on Tuesday.

Eight people have been arrested over what Interior Minister Besir Atalay said was a blood feud between rival families in the village of Bilge in the southeastern Mardin province.

Four masked men entered the village square from different directions late on Monday, just after a Muslim preacher had completed the wedding ceremony, and opened fire on the crowd, witnesses told AFP. They then stormed several houses, continuing to shoot, they said.

The bride, the groom, his parents and four-year-old sister as well as the village's imam were all killed in the attack, authorities and witnesses said.


One 19-year-old woman said the attackers herded women and children into a room in one house and sprayed them with bullets, according to a witness account relayed by a local official.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said six children, 17 women and 21 men were among the dead. Three other villagers were wounded, he added.


The interior minister said: "An initial assessment suggests that the attack was triggered by enmity and dispute between families. We are still working on the case so I do not want to speak in definite terms," Atalay told a news conference before going to Bilge.

Feuds are frequent in Turkey's Kurdish-populated regions, where medieval traditions persist, illiteracy is high and many see the gun as a legitimate tool to settle scores.


Anatolia quoted anonymous villagers as saying that the attackers had a feud going back some 20 years with the groom's family, and had objected to the marriage.

"The attackers wanted the girl to marry one of their own relatives. We learned that there was an argument recently between the family of the assailants and that of the bride," the agency quoted a villager as saying.


The village guards, who are armed by the state, have been linked to drug smuggling, rapes, kidnappings and murders, putting pressure on the government to disband the force."

This is something quite incomprehensible by many Singaporeans or people of other cultures. How can a feud resulted in killing indiscriminately of mainly women and children at a wedding? How can men with guns be so cowardice as to kill unarmed women and children?!

Lessons for me are:

1. it is sometimes very difficult to understand what another culture means to us. Also within that culture, sometimes their own people may not understand why certain things happened the way they did!;

2. tradition and hatred is very hard to resolve and forgive and forget! Tradition sometimes set people back by a few hundred years or a few thousand years! Available of guns and the right to bear guns are almost sacred for some culture. Resolving dispute by guns is also widely accepted. If this is the case, then those who live by the swords die by the swords! By then when the women and children?;

3. for the silent majority who do not subscribed to these so-called 'traditions'. They better speak out and up! If the silent majority did nothing, things will stay as they are. They need to understand the power they wield within themselves and consciously exercise it to change tradition that they don't think is relevance now!

May those killed find peace and those killers be brought to justice and the silent majority starts a revolution to abolish guns! And the custom of solving disputes with guns!!

Any 7e Leader waiting to do this?