Violence and politics

The DTP members' decision to give up resigning and remain in the arena of politics is a positive decision in that it shows common sense has prevailed. In any case, anything else was a dead-end road that would bring benefit neither to themselves nor to the country. The reactions displayed against the party closure decision, which is wrong in every respect, had begun increasingly to establish a climate that could put them in the wrong when they were in the right.

In fact, if we take the story back to before that, it can even be said that, setting aside the political arena's inability to tolerate the DTP, it subjected it to positive privileges from the hour it entered the Parliament.

The DTP's quality of being political has steadily declined, as its presence in the Parliament, initially accepted and desired even by the MHP for playing its political mission, has by its own hand been reduced from a mission regarding the Kurdish question to merely the representation of Öcalan and the PKK. The effort to establish the PKK as the sole interlocutor for all questions concerning the Kurds both made itself unnecessary and, to the extent it succeeded, tended to make dominant a "discourse of blackmail" about what armed force can do over politics. And when the DTP was closed, the reaction displayed by party officials, with street demonstrations, means nothing other than showing that they can play, whenever they wish, as a trump card, the uncontrolled violence displayed all at once across Turkey. Even though Ahmet Türk tried to present the actions with stones and Molotov cocktails as "a democratic reaction displayed by the people's masses against the closure of their party," this in fact also contains an open threat that rubs in their faces what they can do if their demands are not met.

All this insistence on taking the PKK as an interlocutor rests on no argument or rightness other than the potential for violence the PKK is capable of. Within the opening process the PKK cannot accept being sidelined as an armed force, and so with its reactions it shows that it wants an opening in which only its own existence can continue. This means placing a mortgage, because of the armed power the PKK has, on the political will of the people of the region. Whatever its own movement program is, it does not hold back from displaying every kind of violence to make the people of the region comply with this movement plan. Because of being strong enough to use violence, the rights demanded have long since moved beyond a demand for redress of an injustice and are turning into complete pressure and oppression over the majority of the region's people.

When the channels of democratic representation are blocked, the masses' becoming disaffected with the system, alienated, radicalized is always an expected development. When a struggle for rights chooses violence, what is generally opposed is not the injustice itself but who commits the injustice. A movement that regards it as legitimate and inevitable, in the name of opposing the injustice done by the state, to target the lives and property of people related and unrelated cannot be said to be against injustice or to promise freedom to its target masses. At most it regards its mass as a soulless instrument of power.

In her article titled "The Fabric of the Kurds" in the newspaper Taraf, Hilal Kaplan compared Gandhi's nonviolent struggle for rights with the Kurds' struggle for rights. In the struggle against the occupying British, Gandhi showed that resistance was possible by not consuming British cloth and consuming only their own native cloth, and that this resistance was the most effective protest against the British occupation. Gandhi, who subtly worked the idea of civil disobedience through his creative actions, also has his famous salt action. When, after his historic march, he showed the Indians he had invited not to consume the salt over whose production and sale the British held a monopoly the salt he had produced with his own hands on the seashore he reached as an alternative, the Indian independence struggle had crossed a very important threshold. In waging this struggle Gandhi made maximum effort so that not a single drop of blood be spilled, and even in return for violence directed at him he did not display violence even for the sake of justice. Through this Gandhi won respect even in the eyes of the British he was fighting. Yet today the PKK, which prefers violence as the only valid way of its own rightness, wins neither rightness nor respect in the eyes of anyone other than those "convinced" among the people of the region. Can the fact that the "Kurdish movement" evokes no feeling in the rest of society other than hatred and revenge be attributed only to the state's propaganda?

It is very fitting that Kaplan, on the basis of this example, invites the Kurds to produce the "fabric" or perhaps the "salt" of their own struggle.

Why should a party closure in Turkey require people to take to the streets immediately, let alone resort to violence? There are a number of other political channels that can render this move invalid and ineffective. Had it not been so, the AK Parti, which some centers today regard as far more dangerous than the DTP, would not have emerged much stronger after a series of closed parties.