A road to Diyarbakır via Erbil

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu visited Northern Iraq last week and met with Barzani, and on this occasion work was begun to open a consulate in Erbil. After the Syrian border was opened just two weeks ago with the enthusiastic participation of both sides and a brand new and close period in relations was entered, the launch of such an initiative with Northern Iraq as well amounts almost to a small-scale revolution. But talk of it lasted at most a few days. Yet, considering the course of our relations with this region over the last ten years, wherever we may have come from to this point, this is a very big event.

Frankly, in the face of this great opening being talked about for so short a time, instead of displaying pessimism, I want to say that this is about gradually getting used to great openings. The simultaneous intensive relations with Syria, Northern Iraq and, before them, Armenia, the EU, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries are each a great opening in its own lane, but the effect of each opening adds to that of the others, so that on the one hand each pushes the other off the agenda, and on the other hand they have a total effect. In this respect, the bar for opening in foreign policy has been set so high that steps that in the past would have shaken the ground are now experienced and passed over as an ordinary agenda item.

Being in zero problems with our neighbors, being in intensive regional relations, seem like raw fantasies that could have no place in the deep rote patterns of traditional Turkish foreign policy. It is possible to see that those who still maintain the traditional understanding of foreign policy can make no sense of what is going on. It is seen that even when they see with their own eyes that those raw fantasies are about to come true, their discourse slips back into its old rote patterns.

There are those who try to understand Davutoğlu's Erbil trip and his meeting with Barzani by reducing it to an effort aimed solely at ending the PKK issue. These comments, made on the basis of Barzani's giving a kind of intimidation message to the PKK in an interview after the meeting, point out that within the tangled map of Iraq, Barzani has enough trouble of his own with his own security. Hence they conclude that Barzani, even if he wanted to, cannot help Turkey on the PKK matter.

Yet Davutoğlu's trip, or the new level of relations started with Northern Iraq in general, is not exclusively about the PKK. Turkey's relationship with the region whose name we cannot even say as it is named (Kurdistan) is a relationship far beyond the PKK problem, and unfortunately since the PKK emerged this relationship has been kept under its blockade, and this feeds a host of our complexes.

On the other hand, to say that developing relations with Northern Iraq will be of no benefit to the terror problem is also a meaningless pessimism. Of course this benefit will not take the form of Barzani taking up arms and chasing the PKK. On the contrary, this benefit will be about accepting that the problem is no longer only about terror, and the normalization of relations with Northern Iraq is entirely an expression of this paradigm change. Davutoğlu's words during the trip, "In Erbil I feel at home," echo in Erbil, and perhaps even more in Diyarbakır.

The aim is not to end terror or the PKK but to remove the conditions of emotional division that make the PKK a refuge or a hope. An important one, if not all, of the paths that will remove these conditions passes through Erbil. The events we have lived through have unfortunately made going to Diyarbakır via Erbil a shorter route.

Having come to the point of seeking help from Barzani for the solution of our problems is of course not acceptable, and that is not what is being done anyway. On the contrary, this approach appears to be only one of the subjects the politics of opening has taken up as its turn has come. It can be expected that this politics of opening will overall make the terror problem increasingly insignificant for Turkey.

Having been freed from a foreign policy outlook that avoids almost even admitting the existence of Erbil is no small thing. Let us not forget that this outlook itself is one of the most important obsessions feeding the Kurdish question as a problem in Turkey.

While fights were going on inside Iraq, the discourse of Turkey claiming only the Turkmens there as "our kinsmen" and taking up only their troubles gradually distanced Diyarbakır from Turkey, carried it even beyond Erbil. Yet however much Ankara excludes it, Erbil's face is turned not toward Baghdad or Diyarbakır but toward Istanbul.

What can we do, cultural and emotional geography does not always correspond to the borders of physical geography.