Where do mothers stand in all this?

Now that the effects of a new and positive climate on the path to a solution of the Kurdish question have emerged, the need to keep away from every kind of approach that would sabotage the process by pushing it into an atmosphere of revenge and provocation reminds us of itself at every opportunity.

Let us accept that the picture that has emerged as a result of a conflict environment sustained for 25 years shows that the taking of sides has not remained limited to only two opposing actors, and that the continuation or ending of this process cannot result from the consent of only one or two actors.

No one should be deceived by looking at those who pose before the cameras as the sole interlocutor of the problem. It is also evident that an approach that picks for itself a flawless interlocutor to its liking in solving the problem yields no result. The interlocutor, the problem and the solution all, as a "reality," impose themselves after a point. After that point no one has the luxury of disliking a reality. You may be forced to meet with those you hate for the solution of a problem.

Indeed, how plainly the wisdom of not letting go of moderation in enmity and in hatred shows itself at such times! Unfortunately, both as a society and as state discourse, we cannot express either our love or our hatred in a measured way. While our patriotism or nationalism cannot help producing a kind of megalomania and sociopathy, we do not want to think at all that the enemy is, in the end, a human being, and that what produces the enmity between us is, in the end, a cause that can change and can disappear. One must seek refuge in God from this kind of enmity, from hostilities based not on principles but on an essentialist-racist, fixed cause...

One of the side effects of the conflict that went on in the open for 25 years was the mothers of those who died in these clashes. "Martyrs' mothers" were a result of this conflict process, but after a point they began to be presented as one of the strongest causes of the war. There seemed to be no one whom the tearful pains of mothers with eyes full of tears, their cries desiring revenge, could not persuade to war.

For the war lobby of both sides there could be no better propaganda material than this. Meanwhile, for those who kept the war going, the pains of these tearful mothers were presented as the sacred excuse for helplessly sustaining a war environment that would sanctify other deaths even further and produce other deaths. The victims of the war suddenly became the owners of the war.

This was of course a propaganda paid for dearly, and for those who kept the war going, although they could in fact have produced the solution, the tears of mothers had no importance whatsoever. If they had really cared about a mother's tears, they would have made it their concern not to make other mothers cry.

Mothers were always resorted to as a material that complicated the solution by adding emotional intensity. Not to encourage love and peace, but to bring hatred and revenge to the fore, that is, to make those not directly concerned with the war believe in the sanctity of the war...

Yet the mothers were only the victims of this affair, and the compensation for this victimhood could never be revenge. That the opening is nevertheless supported today with this emotional dimension should once again remind us how widely the matter has ramified within the process.

The process has indeed ramified far more than is supposed. In our article the other day we tried to explain what demographic and sociological change Turkey has gone through in the 25 years since the problem began. That everyone takes the process lightly and handles it from his own narrow angle is both a result and a cause of this complexity.

Meanwhile, although Bahçeli and Baykal's acting with a populist discourse instead of helping the process that Turkey has to live through and will in the end live through may seem politically and in the short term profitable, it will not be a sustainable political profit.

Even at this stage, Bahçeli and Baykal, although they could produce something better, take the easy way out and, by producing this merchandise, this populist peddler's discourse, refrain from assuming a progressive-developmental mission before their own political bases.

This is the political marketplace, of course; it should work with a libertarian logic, and whoever wishes should be able to produce and sell whatever goods he wishes. And of course in the political marketplace a buyer for the goods they offer today may turn up, and will turn up, but it will not take long to understand that these goods have no usefulness at all, indeed that they are poisonous and consuming.