The problem of Kurdish nationalism

We are in Abant to discuss our problems related to democratization in the context of political parties, along a line drawn from 12 September to the EU. This time the Abant platform, after quite a tour, has stopped by Abant again, and continues as a brainstorm held on the shore of Lake Abant itself. As always, many representative participants from different segments are trying to express our problems related to democratization in the light of their own experiences or perspectives.

The meeting, in which the legal, historical and sociological situation of political parties is addressed, proceeds amid the echoes of the document about the plan to finish off the AK Parti, published in the Taraf newspaper.

However, leaving the details of this meeting to be taken up later, God willing, for now I would like to relay, while still fresh, my impressions of Diyarbakır and Batman, which I visited before coming to Abant. In both of our cities, where we went to give one talk each, there was a side to the approach of the people I met, especially to the Kurdish question, that was striking and should be dwelt upon. That is the discomfort felt at the Kurdish question being attributed to the DTP or the PKK.

There is undoubtedly a significant mass of sympathizers of the organization in the region, but the whole framework of the Kurdish question being drawn with the DTP or by the DTP is giving other elements in the region ever greater discomfort. An important source of the discomfort is the belief that the DTP, which is thought to be increasingly making itself accepted as an interlocutor in resolving the problems, has achieved this thanks to the PKK's armed terror. In the end it is thought that the DTP's pushing other elements in the region out of the equation of the solution, one way or another, is a strategy and that it is being rewarded in a sense.

The DTP, for its part, does not hold back from running the propaganda that suggests all the openings the government has made or will make on the Kurdish issue are gains won thanks to the self-sacrificing struggle of "those in the mountains." In this way it sets up in front of the government's Kurdish opening a minefield that is hard to cross unscathed, while further consolidating the PKK's military tutelage. In doing so it makes ever more evident that its goal has ceased to be the solution of the Kurdish question and has increasingly become a Kurdish nationalism whose political profit is secured under control.

In fact, from this point on, that is, with the positive participation of the government and important elements of society having clearly emerged, there is no longer any meaning in insistently calling "the Kurdish question" a problem that has entered the path of solution. For the problem is indeed beginning to turn not into a "Kurdish question" but into a problem of Kurdish nationalism. It is quite clear that a Kurdish nationalism that ties all its justifications to a Turkish nationalism that denies Kurdishness neither contributes to the solution of the problem nor will benefit the Kurds. Moreover, it has no meaning beyond imitating its own other step by step, but badly, in wickedness.

There is no doubt that the vote shares the DTP received in the region in the last elections, compared with other parties, have to some extent made it easier for the DTP to present itself as the sole interlocutor of the Kurdish question. But it is clearly seen that the DTP owes this success in part to the AK Parti, identified with statist policies, othering the DTP on a regional scale.

When politics is set up with a bipolar distribution of roles, the AK Parti did not calculate that the role of statism would inevitably fall to it against the DTP in the Southeast. The DTP, for its part, played the role of the region's aggrieved and "one of us" quite well against the angry and aggressive discourse of the AK Parti, which it had succeeded in making look statist.

How the AK Parti managed to become identified with statist policies in the region is, of course, a subject that needs to be dwelt on separately. That it could regress to this point despite both its extremely opening-minded approach to the Kurdish question and the level of its organic relationship with the people of the region must truly be counted, ironic though it is, as an achievement.

In both Diyarbakır and Batman, the high level of people's political consciousness strikes one at first sight. So much so that this level of politicization feels like something imaginable only in very good democracies. That most of the participants express dissatisfaction with the political system forms an interesting contrast with this situation, of course.

Turkey is truly a country with very interesting potentials.