Perception management in the opening process

If the images of the PKK members entering their hometowns, saluting tens of thousands of people who had come to welcome them in guerrilla uniforms and with victory signs, had disturbed only the state, we could have got out of it, as we always do, by saying that the state has no right to grumble because of its wrong policies, which until now have been the main cause of the Kurdish question.

Yet this time, at a moment when both the state and a significant part of the public have, for the first time since the beginning of the problem, "reluctantly" though it may be, come to a point of "solution" and "peace," the reaction to this image that emerged came not from the state but from broad sections of the public.

That these sections of the public are probably very alien to the heart of the problem, do not know the hardships the Kurdish people have suffered, and cannot look at the matter from Diyarbakır is of course not wrong, but none of this requires saying that the feelings and sensitivities of this public are entirely empty. Families who sent their children to the military during the 25-year war have become acquainted with the thing called the "Kurdish question" through the funerals of "martyrs" that have been arriving all over Turkey for years. Rightly or wrongly, they perceive those coming down from the mountain as the murderers of their own children. This perception, for all its simplicity and all its "shallow" quality as a product of official propaganda, is a perception that is in effect valid. However wrong it may be, no language of communication can be built by ignoring this perception.

In the end, if this is the perception of the side with which you will make peace, you cannot keep playing your own tune. You must also make it your concern to manage the other side's perceptions. If you have given up fighting and decided to make peace, you cannot say "what do I care how the other sees me, I am right anyway!" To be able to make it understood that you are really right, you cannot squander a once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity for dialogue for the sake of an "uncontrolled joy." Especially if this uncontrolled joy is heard on the other side as a complete "insult," as a "victory cry"...

Ahmet Türk and other DTP leaders try to explain the demonstrations as shows of joy expressing the people's weariness of war and the end of this war, and they ask that "a people who have suffered so much pain not be begrudged this much joy."

Many commentators have to a large extent joined these words within the framework of a kind of positive discrimination applied, vis-à-vis the state, to the DTP and even to the "PKK youths who were forced to go up to the mountain." In the end, the highest possible public support and understanding regarding the possible requirements of the democratic opening has been mobilized. Since the descent from the mountain is one of the most important stages of this process, presumably no one expected this process to take place in a "happy-ending scene" all the same; after all it is obvious that so much pain over children and tails (sic) leaves little room for people to long much for one another. Moreover, both the parties involved in the event are by now far too many, and the management of the spontaneous perceptions and impressions that form on this matter constitutes the most important stage of the process.

How, one wonders, are the demonstrations that the DTP leaders say should actually be met with understanding as a "joy of peace" perceived in the other part of the country? Is it too much to ask Ahmet Türk and his friends, who say "let them not begrudge this much joy," to take this into account too?

Is it possible that these friends do not know that even ending the simplest tribal quarrel in the Southeast requires an extremely delicate diplomacy and language of behavior?

If they do not know, then we must say that they have really fallen far behind even the language of "feudalism" that PKK or DTP discourse belittles at every opportunity. As far as I know, when Kurdish tribes decide on some occasion to end a quarrel between them, they know very well that peace is a very careful and laborious process. During the process they are extremely sensitive about the slightest word and behavior that would recall the past and could undermine the process.

If the welcome scenes had really been a spontaneously developing reaction of the people, they could still have been understood to a degree. Yet people were called to these "needless" rallies, which can mean nothing other than sabotaging the process, by leaflets distributed all over the region by the DTP organizations days in advance.

Let the DTP members who say that this "much" of a show of joy should not be begrudged try watching this show from Yozgat, from Balıkesir, from Bursa, from Trabzon... Because during the process far too many people who are not Kurds tried looking from Diyarbakır, and this was not bad at all. Thanks to this, more people now accept the existence of the Kurdish question and can behave far more empathetically and openly regarding its solution. There are many reasons now to ask the DTP members too to try a similar approach. If the aim is really peace, of course...