We are on the horizon of a common future, brotherhood and social peace

A great deal of ground has been covered in the process that began exactly one year ago with Devlet Bahçeli's call to Öcalan at the group meeting of the Grand National Assembly. In parallel with the ground covered, many changes have occurred in the world. In the world in which the call was made, there was the Assad dictatorship in Syria, which, although it had committed genocide against its own people and every kind of crime against humanity, had, after a war lasting 14 years, and although efforts had been made to bring it down with significant support from the international community, not fallen, and had renewed its status as the sole actor in Syria's future. So much so that even for Turkey, Syria's future had come to be unthinkable without Assad.

A NEW HORIZON HAS FORMED WITHIN A YEAR

Assad constituted, alongside the US and Israel, one of the two arteries that gave life to the PKK (PYD) structure in Syria. But whatever happened happened, and only a month and a half after Bahçeli's call, the bloody and criminal regime in Syria collapsed, at a completely unexpected moment, with a final push in the 14-year war of the Syrian people. Today in Syria there is a regime very different from a year ago. This regime's view of the Kurds and its view of the question of Syria's territorial integrity are also very different. Unlike Assad, who regarded the Kurds as second-class citizens yet thought of using them merely as a strategic trump card against Turkey, the new regime, which sees the Kurds as first-class and equal citizens of the country, is not willing to allow any element of the country to be used to weaken the country in line with Israel's wishes. The division of Syria into 4 parts, with regions allocated to the Kurds, the Druze and the Nusayris, is a strategy that Israel has devised for itself.

It is very clear that here the Kurds face a choice as to whether or not to be part of Israel's plans. It is also clear that the matter is not one of the Kurds' independence or self-determination.

In this one year the Israeli genocide in Gaza has deepened further, and the feelings, perceptions and thoughts of the whole world toward Israel and Palestine have changed in parallel. Today Israel is an accursed country, and standing beside it means taking one's share of this curse. Some Arab rulers who maintain their alliances with Israel in one way or another, and the actors in Syria who make room for Israel's plans and lend a shoulder to them, will not be able to escape being subjected to this curse either.

On the day the PKK announced, as part of the new process begun in Turkey, that it was withdrawing all its armed elements in Turkey, a symposium titled "Common Future: Kurds in Turkey, Brotherhood and Social Peace" was being held in Diyarbakır by Özgür-Der.

Ali Bapir of the Kurdistan Justice Society Party, Erdal Eker, faculty member at Muş Alparslan University, İbrahim Özcoşar, Rector of Mardin Artuklu University, Hasip Yokuş, writer for Haksöz magazine, Ramazan Tekdemir, Diyarbakır provincial chairman of Memur-Sen, Rıdvan Kaya, General Chairman of Özgür-Der, and Vahdettin İnce, columnist for Star newspaper, took part as speakers in the program, in which quite comprehensive assessments and discussions were held.

The participants stressed that the essence of the matter is not limited merely to "identity" or "cultural rights," but is rather a moral, political and civilization-scale crisis. This perspective offered the possibility of re-questioning both the secular limits of the nation-state and the fragmentation within the Islamic world itself.

THE PROBLEM IS NOT THE KURDS BUT THE SYSTEM ITSELF

Although the matter is always, by a commonly accepted error, called the Kurdish Question, in my own speech at the symposium I tried to emphasize the wrongness of this: in Turkey it is not the Kurd who is the problem, it is not the Kurds. The problem is the system itself, and this problem does not stem only from Turkish nationalism. It is the nationalist ideology that invented Turkishness for the Turks and Kurdishness for the Kurds as a distinguishing, exclusive identity and tried to impose it on Turks and Kurds separately.

THE GREATEST VICTIMS OF THE SYSTEM ARE THE TURKS

Viewed in this way, the greatest victim of the nationalist ideology established in Turkey is not, as is supposed, the Kurds or the other ethnic groups, but the Turks themselves. Because Turkish nationalism, which began to be worked out from the second half of the 19th century, toward its final phase invented a concept of Turkishness that had nothing to do with the Turks and imposed it on the Turks. To fit into the molds of this invented ethnic identity, the Turks had to cease being Turks. For this purpose they had to give up their languages, their religion, their cultures, their histories, their memories.

That is exactly what happened. Today it is not the Kurds but the Turks who should be speaking of assimilation. For the sake of Turkification, which ran in parallel with the project of Westernization, the Turks, before anything else, renounced their Turkishness. A non-Islamic Turkishness, which was the target, could have had nothing to do with Turkishness. Efforts to separate on this path a Turkishness that had been fused with Islam for a thousand years would have left nothing of Turkishness. They succeeded so well among certain masses that today many people, though they have no connection left with authentic Turkishness, can regard themselves as Turks in their Western, secular, racist form.

In the assimilation process against which the Kurds rebelled at a later time, the accounting of what the Turks in fact lost was never done. If it were done, should it be counted as a consolation to the Kurds, or should it remind the Kurds too of a similar process to which nationalist Kurdishness is subjected today? The Özgür-Der symposium tried to seek an answer to this question as well.

Ali Bapir, leader of the Kurdistan Justice Society, placing the Kurdish question in its historical context in his speech, recalled that the Sykes-Picot borders drawn a century ago permanently fragmented the Islamic geography. According to him, the dispersal the Kurds experience today is not only being divided among four states but a manifestation of the spiritual and political fragmentation of the ummah, and in this he explained the role of the borders the imperialists carved out for us 100 years ago, and that a solution can be conceived only by transcending these borders.

KURDISH NATIONALISM CAN SAVE ITSELF NOT BY IMITATING TURKISH NATIONALISM BUT BY MIGRATING (HIJRA) AWAY FROM IT

To summarize the pithy observations of Rıdvan Kaya as well as Hasip Yokuş and Vahdettin İnce, I jotted down this note: "Nationalism is a virus that colonizes the minds even of oppressed nations. Kurdish nationalism can save itself not by imitating Turkish nationalism but by making hijra, migrating, away from it."

İbrahim Özcoşar explained that although Islamists are equally, even more, victimized in the resolution of the problem that has emerged as a systemic problem in Turkey, they have not refrained from placing this problem too in their own solution programs. At this point, the language that criticizes Islamists for not being sufficiently sensitive on the Kurdish question is a very unjust and inappropriate language.

Islamists have their own definition of the problem, and the politics produced by this definition has always been more inclined in Turkey to actually resolve both the Kurdish question and all other human rights problems. Indeed, the Kurdish question has today reached a certain point of resolution thanks to the political vision of the Islamists. In doing so, the Islamists did not come to a Kurdist line; on the contrary, they have in practice shown that the resolution of this problem too is possible with an Islamic approach. For those who can see, of course.

At the point reached by a problem that has cost Turkey a full 40 years, a completely new horizon lies before Turkey. Essentially, no ground remained on this horizon that would require the guns to speak. In fact the process that began with Bahçeli's call has in a way constituted a quite suitable justification for the organization, which had no other option left, to close this chapter. May God bring it to its continuation.