By Dr. Adnan Bozan

In every moment that people pour into the streets, carrying their hopes on their shoulders and their cries in their throats, freedom stands as a witness between hope and betrayal.

Freedom — that word raised high by revolutionary flags and crushed under the boots of power in the alleys of authority — was never a sincere promise on the lips of regimes. It has always been a pretext for further bloodshed, a mask behind which the deep state hides the face of tyranny.

Since the inception of the modern state, when maps were drawn on the tables of emperors and colonizers, the project of freedom has been broken from birth.
States were born from the womb of violence — from the ink of treaties and the knives of partition. So how can we expect such entities to grant freedom to their children?

The “nation-state” in the Middle East has always been, in essence, a distorted replica of external will — a modern façade concealing sectarian, military, and ethnic agendas that exclude, domesticate, and annihilate.

In this wounded geography, the dignity of freedom is broken at every turn — not because it is weak, but because sectarian, military, and religious powers understood from the very beginning that the most dangerous threat to their existence is not armies, nor sanctions, but the awareness of humans of their right to be free.

In this torn East, freedom has never been a constitutional value but rather a charge — the first word of the martyrs, the final dream of prisoners, and a crime unforgivable in the records of intelligence agencies.

The dignity of freedom is broken when the revolution is stabbed — not just by its enemies, but by its own sons who sold its blood for positions, replacing the voice of the people with the rhetoric of creed, nationalism, or foreign loyalty.
It is broken when public squares turn into cemeteries, demands become fatwas, and revolutionaries transform into leaders drafting constitutions with the ink of betrayal.

Our modern history — or rather, its very structure — was written in the blood of those who dreamed of a state of humanity, not of sect, ethnicity, or the military.
It was written in blood because ink was censored, paper monopolized by ministries of propaganda, and language forged by the ruling party’s bulletin or a band of thieves, warlords, and terrorists — not by the pulse of the street.

In every square of revolution — from Tehran to Beirut, from Kobani to Khartoum, from Tunis to Gaza, and from Baghdad to Damascus — freedom was lifted on shoulders, only to be thrown into cells.
It smiled from the faces of martyrs, then was assassinated in reconciliation conferences.
And history, as always, was written by the victors — but when it is written in the blood of martyrs, it becomes alive, painful, honest... unforgettable.

The dignity of freedom is broken when the dictator sits with his Western makers, bargaining for their security in return for their silence over his people's blood.
It is broken when Western newspapers speak of "stability" while throats are silenced in prisons and the free are buried in mass graves.

It is broken when the homeland is reduced to a leader, the constitution to a sermon, and identity to a single color — erasing all other hues through displacement and cultural genocide.

As for Kurdistan, it remains an open wound — embodying the broken dignity of freedom since Sykes–Picot.
The Kurdish homeland was carved into four maps, stripped of its language, its history, its right to exist.
In Rojava, when the Kurds tried to write their political experience in the language of democratic pluralism, they were besieged by all: the defunct Baathist regime, extremist opposition forces, Turkey, and even the international community that applauded their victory over ISIS, then abandoned them in the face of the storm.

And in Başûr (Southern Kurdistan), the 2017 referendum flag was a mature expression of the desire to let freedom speak through the ballot box rather than the barrel of a gun.
But the dignity of freedom was broken there too — at the hands of “brothers” before enemies, under international complicity that guarded maps drawn on the skulls of peoples.

Even Kobani, the city that became a global symbol of resistance, did not just defeat ISIS — it overcame a global will that wanted to bury freedom in the depths of geography.
There, history was written in blood.
But the world read it as a fleeting headline — and turned its back.

Freedom is not only broken when it is suppressed — but when it is betrayed.
When it turns from a people’s project into a deal sold in foreign conferences, when it is reduced to a leader or assassinated in the name of religion, nationalism, or “security.”

And when the dignity of freedom is broken, history writes itself in a single color: blood.

Blood cannot be forged. It cannot be falsified. It cannot be censored.
It writes the names of martyrs in the open air, screams at the face of official history, exposes deals of oil and weapons, and points to those who shook hands with the killer in the name of “political realism.”

Yet, freedom never dies.
It returns with every generation — a generation that knows how to dream amidst the ruins, dares to question in the face of silence, and screams in the face of threats.
A generation that knows freedom is not granted, but seized.

In this East, the dignity of freedom will continue to break every time it rises.
But every time — it rewrites history in the alphabet of blood, in letters that cannot be erased.

Yes... it breaks.
But it does not die.
It writes.

It writes history not as the victors wished, but as it truly happened — on walls, in cells, on the foreheads of grieving mothers, and on the bodies of those who only wished to live with dignity.

Freedom does not emerge from ballot boxes crafted by regimes to fit their own mold.
Nor is it born from U.N. statements that manage crises to perpetuate them.
Nor from the promises of politicians who trade it in backroom deals.

Freedom emerges from the streets, from the throats of the hungry, from the rifle of a rebel who realizes that his very existence is a threat to the architecture of old maps.
It rises from a farewell kiss before execution, from a child throwing a stone at a tank, from a writer scribbling by a yellow light during a night of pursuit.

It rises... and writes.
Not in official history books — but in the memory of peoples.

And every time the dignity of freedom is broken, history is written once more — in truer blood.