ALI HAYDAR CAKMAK (VEYSEL)
The commander of the unit, born in 1973 in Malatya/Arguvan, Kurdish origin, born into poor peasantry. Because of poverty he moved to Istanbul with his family. He grew up in the Gazi slum area. There he got to know every aspect of the system: he recognised what had to be done against it and he was conscious of the need to become a revolutionary. He understood that a dignified and honourable life was
only possible if one was a revolutionary.
To be able to go to school he was forced to take on work on the side. In 1989, when he was in secondary school, he got to know the movement. The revolutionary movement was the answer to very many questions for him. He was trained by outstanding comrades like Ekrem Akin Savas, Faruk Bayrakci and Veysel Beysuren.
Aged 17, he was a committed Dev Genc militant. In 1992 he took on tasks in the Dev Genc militia. He always felt hatred towards the enemy.
This hatred pushed him on, the demand he made on himself for the revolution became greater and greater. Even when his connections to the movement were interrupted and he was completely on his own, he knew what had to be done and acted independently.
After the June 12 operation, he did not even need an order to tear a weapon from the enemy’s hands and call him to account. He was arrested and tortured on 20 occasions. Each time he came back out with his head held high. He knew captivity but he always returned to the struggle.
He was in the struggle, he was tortured, he was a prisoner. He, Ali Haydar, who grew up in Gazi, carried out the tasks allotted to him and was connected to the people and his comrades as befitted a supporter of the Party-Front who was the target of the enemy’s attack.
He experienced the attack of fascism on march 12 and a peoples upprising.
WE WILL CALL THE ENEMY TO ACCOUNT: “THE POLICE STATION IS A
TARGET”
“The police station is a target” was the slogan used in an uprising by thousands of inhabitants of Gazi, the slogan of the demand for justice. Ali Haydar collected his comrades together with all speed and urged the people to rise up. Ali Haydar was at the head of the rebellion whose participants yelled “the police station is a target”. On the first day that the committee was formed, he represented the Party-Front.
From the start of the uprising to the finish he ran from barricade to barricade. At every point of the people’s uprising his efforts, diligence, courage and leadership skills were obvious.
He buried his fallen comrades on the spot where they had grown up, where they had come to know the struggle and the enemy. Then he took up tasks in the Ibrahim Yalcin armed propaganda unit. He fought under commander Sibel Yalcin.
In August 1995 he became acquainted with the struggle in the mountains. There he learned to be a rural guerrilla. He saw commanders, martyrs and traitors. But he lived gripped by the desire to spread and make greater the struggle. He fell with the joy of knowing that he had reached the mountains of the Black Sea region. He kept his word to his armed friends in the Party-Front, the martyrs of Gazi.
He wrote a page in the history of his fallen comrades in Gazi who he buried with his own hands, a history that stretched from Gazi to central Anatolia and from central Anatolia to the Black Sea.
