Why did the PKK claim Tokat?

The PKK's claiming responsibility, after waiting three days, for the attack in Tokat, which was carried out as an assassination attempt against the peace process, is in my view likely to produce consequences as effective and important as the attack itself.

For three days it was stressed that the PKK did not have the capacity to carry out an action requiring this kind of logistics and intelligence in a place like Tokat, which can be regarded as a fortress of nationalism. Moreover, it was said that it could not have risked such open opposition to the opening, and that, given the possible effects on the day the closure case before the AYM was being heard, it was logically impossible to link it to this action. Yet it was seen once again, within a short time, that there is a problem in the logic attributed to the PKK. The assumption that the PKK would want the opening or genuinely wants a solution to the Kurdish question forms the basic premise of this logic, and it should have been seen many times before that these premises were problematic from the very beginning.

Now, to take the PKK's claiming of the action as having explained the incident creates a far more problematic situation. Let us not forget that the PKK has merely claimed responsibility for an action that every sensible person regards as senseless in terms of its own rationality or capabilities. It has not yet been proven that it carried out the action itself. Even if it did, the outcome does not change, but its claiming an action that had been left hanging for three days amounts to nothing other than an open confession of the kind of alliance the PKK is in, and with whom, within this process.

By claiming the incident, the PKK has shown that it could carry out such an action; but by claiming an action it most probably did not carry out, it has done something even worse than that. By suddenly standing like a shield in front of everyone's questions about the matter, it has ensured that the incident is covered up. In doing so it may have cut off the questions temporarily, but over the course of the process it also provides evidence that could not have been obtained in any other way about what kind of set-up the PKK is a part of. If in 1993, in the martyrdom of 33 unarmed soldiers in Bingöl, the PKK rushed to the aid of certain circles and ended the peace process out of nowhere, today it has rushed to the aid of the same circles in an even greater hurry. That action, which did not fit the context at all and was frankly carried out in a rather senseless way, was likewise claimed with a very timid statement. There was nothing defensible about it, but what can one do, it was just a simple action carried out "on the initiative of some guerrilla groups that could not be controlled."

Even the argument that this attack was simply a reaction to Öcalan being left out of the process is, in my view, unrealistic. Öcalan has in any case never been a part of the process since the hour he was arrested. His so-called "leadership" is nothing but a ghost behind which others run rampant. If you wish, listen from Ümit Fırat to how, from the hour Öcalan's leadership was captured, it was reset through a series of debates on the "dysfunction of a captive leadership," and, in return, by what will and how this captive leadership was re-established within a short time more effectively than before. When you look at the role Öcalan has played in Turkish politics since that day, you clearly see the signature of those who created a "leader" out of him.

As Ahmet Altan also rightly emphasized yesterday, ever since it began its actions the PKK has rushed to the aid of militarism in Turkey whenever it needed it. With all its actions it prepared all the psychological or actual conditions necessary for the military bureaucracy to establish tutelage over politics. None of the PKK's actions served to further increase freedoms in Turkey, or even for Kurds to become stronger and more accepted citizens in Turkey. Today, in an atmosphere where everyone has set sail at full speed toward the democratic opening, it is not at all surprising that it should attempt to sabotage the process for 17 cm of space, at the cost of giving away its allies, who have been more or less hidden until now.

This haste, this panic, shows that the target of the politics of the opening has been hit exactly.

Ever since the opening debates began, one of the opposition's strongest arguments has been the possibility of Öcalan being treated as an interlocutor in the process. Those who oppose with that argument today are falling into line with the strange resistance the PKK has displayed against the opening, using the Tokat massacre and prison conditions as pretexts. In fact they are obliged to make a serious statement to the public in the face of this.

On the other hand, both the street actions and the Tokat attack undertaken in order to sabotage the process have exposed these relationships, and this has created a broad political space that will open the way both for the opening and for Kurdish politics.

Whichever way the decision of the AYM comes out, a historic opportunity has arisen for Kurdish politics, which will continue in one way or another, to free itself from the PKK's armed tutelage and to put distance between itself and the organization.