Can this be called state reason?

At one point in the analysis report titled "The Kurdish Question: Problems and Proposals for Solution," published last month by SETA and written by Taha Özhan and Hatem Ete, there is the following observation: "Although the AK Party's share of votes and number of deputies from the region in the last elections were greater than those of the DTP, at the discursive and psychological level the DTP is still pointed to in the Southeast as the 'legitimate' representative of the Kurds. Whether the DTP can make a positive contribution to the solution of the Kurdish problem depends on the performance of Turkey's political mind in managing the DTP, as well as being closely tied to whether the DTP will (or can) assume an independent political position in the coming period."

The report, which tries to draw a framework for the Kurdish question with comprehensive and apt observations in the national, international, current and historical senses, contains many more observations worth underlining.

It can be said that the DTP has more than obtained this position in return for aspiring to be a Kurdish party while remaining entirely indifferent to the country's other problems, and even to the other problems of the Southeast and the Kurds.

The findings of a field study that Mazhar Bağlı of Dicle University recently conducted in Diyarbakır also largely confirm the observation in the SETA report.

Bağlı's research also finds that the DTP is the leading party in Diyarbakır. But Bağlı adds that "one should not think that the DTP has this share of votes because DTP municipalities do municipal work that is very brilliant and because DTP administrators speak the same language as the people of the region."

Indeed, largely because of Prime Minister Erdoğan's approach to the matter, the March 29 elections will go down in the Southeast not as a municipal election but as an answer to an extremely simplified question, like the acceptance or rejection of the Kurdish question. For this reason, even if a significant part of the people of the region gives the DTP municipalities the worst possible mark on services, it will prefer to defer that mark and meet the question with the simplicity of a referendum.

When the problem is brought to this point, a maneuver of high political profit emerges for the DTP, which has managed to market itself as a Kurdish party: taking the initiative to set up the game and writing for the AKP the role of "its party." With this maneuver the AK Party, partly through its own incautiousness and political miscalculation, finds itself in the position of taking on, in the name of the state, all the bills of an 85-year policy of denial. Yet no party had come this close to delivering the country from those very policies that are the source of the problem.

The SETA report finds the basic axis of its treatment of the subject in the distinction between the "Kurdish question" and the "terror problem." We must now free ourselves from the position that to solve the terror problem one must solve the Kurdish question. We are not obliged to solve the Kurdish question only in order to be rid of the terror problem. As long as we look this way, we still cannot free the question from the sphere of influence of terror. Today there is a level of democratization, human rights and citizenship that we badly need, and even if we had no terror problem at all, we should have a goal of bringing the Kurdish question up to this standard. Moreover, despite all good-faith efforts, the terror problem may continue, and even increase. Even this should not hold us back from solving the Kurdish question. What is more, it is time to stop basing the solution of this problem on a bargaining axis such as "rescuing it from being a field of exploitation," and to look further ahead.

Undoubtedly, in the SETA report the DTP appears as the most important actor for solving the Kurdish question. However, the DTP's playing this role is seen as depending on the space that the political mind governing Turkey will open for it. Yet, as far as can be seen, there is neither consistency in the political mind governing Turkey nor any willingness on the DTP's part to play this role. By its performance so far, the DTP has amply shown that it hopes for political profit not from the solution of the Kurdish question but from its non-solution.

The political mind governing Turkey, for its part, presents an utterly confused picture. The children whom the DTP drove into the field for violent street demonstrations, who burned vehicles and threw stones at windows, were arrested as a result of the demonstrations they took part in, and are now being tried with sentences several times their present ages. You can be sure that these child protesters regard what they did as nothing but a game.

What can we say if the state mind does this while knowing the recruitment tactics of PKK terror? And what can we say if it still has not heard of these tactics?

In this case alone there are several possibilities, each worse than the other.

Can a state mind be like this?