The Kemalism Cycle haunting the Kurds

As the HDP politicians' collaboration and tête-à-têtes with the Nişantaşı left, whose votes they have set their eyes on, develop, the Kemalist Baathism within them has begun to surge and gush forth. They no longer even feel the need to suppress the Kemalist Baathism within them. That is why the Kemalist discourse and feelings that cannot be suppressed spill from their tongues as gaffes.

Whatever Turkish Kemalism saw fit to inflict on Islam and Muslims in Turkey, the HDP now wants more. Moreover, I do not think at all that this is only a kind of Nişantaşı populism for votes. They pour out what is inside them, because they are beside themselves with pleasure as they pour it out.

TAKING FROM THE DIYANET TO GIVE TO THE CEMEVI

Just look: during the presentation of the HDP's election manifesto, the co-chairs stood side by side, passing the ball back and forth in their own smarmy way, and they show no sign of strain. With great appetite, the female co-chair, Figen Yüksekdağ, says "the state will be made to withdraw its hand from the field of religion and belief by abolishing the Presidency of Religious Affairs," and applause breaks out in the hall. Demirtaş, the other co-chair, joins this applause with all his smarminess and asks, "Then what will we do with the official car of the head of the Diyanet?" Yüksekdağ, taking it up from the same smarmy position and without batting an eye, answers "We will donate it to the Cemevi," and gets another round of applause from the hall.

What this premium paid to the Cemevi discourse against the Diyanet will bring to Demirtaş, who bears the name of the East's most beloved sultan, Saladin the Ayyubid, is unknown, but it is plain that it takes away a great deal from him and from Turkey. If the Alevis in Turkey have problems, will you solve them by instilling in them even more hatred, or by fanning the hatred that some Alevi organizations already have enough of? If you are not aware that this approach deepens the already existing problems of dialogue, that is one trouble; if you are aware and you do politics on this basis, you have an entirely different trouble.

Is the aim in abolishing the Diyanet to devote all its resources to the Alevis, or to let the Alevis also benefit equally from the Diyanet's services? Is the solution to take from the Sunni and give to the Alevi? Why do you lack the generosity of heart to demand the same service for both and to tolerate it?

The great majority of the Kurds, the main target of Demirtaş's politics, are Sunni Shafi'i. What would the Shafi'is say, I wonder, to having it cut from them and given to the Alevis? As a minimum requirement of the democracy you never let drop from your tongue, how much have you considered this issue with the Kurdish people? As far as I know, the Kurds would of course say nothing about the Alevis receiving the most natural rights they demand, but they would never give credit to such a discourse, which in essence reveals hostility to Sunnis, as taking from the Sunni and giving to the Alevi.

HAVE THE KURDS COMMITTED GENOCIDE AGAINST THE ARMENIANS?

All the HDP members, the co-chairs first of all, also supported the "Armenian Genocide" campaign that last week set off like a veritable crusade. It is no secret, of course, that this support is the payment of a debt to their European friends who have supported them in every way until now. But there is one thing they overlook. Kurds are also at the center of all the events that took place in the history in question concerning the Armenians.

If what the Armenian gangs planned, in accordance with the road map laid before them, before and after 1915 had come to pass, not a single Kurd, not a single Arab, not a single Muslim would have remained in the region. The measure of suppression taken by the Ottomans saved, above all, the Muslim Kurds of the region from genocide. Let them listen to their somewhat older elders; let us see what they will hear and what they will learn. With the support given to a campaign that arises entirely from Muslim-Turk hatred today, how will the HDP find its way to becoming a party of Turkey?

IS DEMİRTAŞ SEEKING ANOTHER QIBLA, ANOTHER KAABA, FOR THE KURDS?

While the HDP members are in search of a separate qibla and a separate Kaaba for the Kurds, they seem to be inspired by Kemalism's attitude of "let the Kaaba be the Arabs', Çankaya is enough for us." This thesis the Kemalists worked on, of severing the Turk from the Kaaba and seeking another qibla for the Turk, perhaps was not enough to sever the Turks from Islam, but without doubt it severed, distanced and alienated the Kemalists thoroughly from Turkish society. It made them go about among the Turks like foreigners.

Now, representing Kurdish Kemalism, which is going down the same road, Demirtaş says "just as Jerusalem is sacred for the Jews and the Kaaba for Muslims, Taksim is sacred for us, it is a temple." He has no goal other than seeking, for Kurds who are blended with their Muslim identities, a qibla other than the Kaaba and a religion other than Islam, and severing Islam and the Kurds from each other.

Yet those who want to learn the result of these ventures can look at the result of Kemalism's Turkishness cause. In the end, like the Turkish nationalists who became thoroughly alienated from the Turkish people, Kurdish nationalists, going down the same road, first of all become alienated from the Kurdish people. This makes them irritable, steering them to the idea that they have no instrument to persuade the Kurds other than the weapon and force in their hands.

Worse, with the skill of the weapon and force in their hands, they try to impose their own alienness as a norm of Kurdishness on the Kurds to whom they are foreign. This completes the Kemalism cycle as an assimilation policy haunting the Kurds.