The HDP's election campaign: if you vote for the AKP…

For many circles, emphasizing the HDP's policy of showing mutually alien and mutually false faces in the East and in the West has no cautionary effect whatsoever. Just look: it conducts an armed election campaign, and in this context, entering a village to do its campaigning, when it meets a little objection and resistance it can seize its weapon and carry out a massacre.

In the incident that took place only a few hours after I wrote and sent off my last article, two HÜDA-PAR members were killed and six wounded in the raid on the village, a small-scale massacre on this road, bullying from whatever angle you look at it. Even graver than the gravity of this incident is the indifference displayed toward it by a section of the media and those who pass themselves off as intellectuals. They performed a thousand somersaults so as not to say that HDP members attacked HÜDA-PAR members in their own village and killed a man. Like the maxim of the Demirel of old, "you will not make me say that rightists are killing people," some circles, from its parallel to the Doğan media group and others, now seem to have agreed on the attitude "you will not make us say that the HDP members are continuing terror." So much so that some did not even hesitate to publish the news turned into its exact opposite.

In this election, especially in the Southeast, in the regions where Kurds live more densely, the HDP is not doing politics against the AK Parti with any political argument or thesis. Nowhere is there a thesis that it has developed, voiced and defended against any AK Parti politician. Frankly, it feels no need for this. It feels no need whatsoever for confrontation, facing up, debate. And in any case, when a chance encounter does occur, they do nothing but chant slogans and curse.

Because a political side that could be debated has been erased from minds and feelings. The AK Parti is the side of the state, and the state is the sworn enemy. Any Kurd on the side of the enemy, anyone who will vote for the enemy's side or lend an ear to them, is a traitor in advance, in cooperation with the enemy. This language, which the PKK uses in its crude propaganda discourse, is now directly the language that the HDP teaches or has spoken most intensively at the lower levels.

It never conducts its propaganda or election activity as explaining to people the problems, the solutions, its theses. How could it explain? How can it explain to the Kurds, and how can it persuade them of, the abolition of the Diyanet, of religion classes, of the 4+4+4 system, the recognition of the Armenian genocide, the satisfying of the demands of homosexuals, which it states in its election manifesto? What can it say in front of a conscience that listens and perceives what the AK Parti has put forward on the Kurdish issue?

That is why the HDP members prefer compulsion to debate. They do not trust the arbitration of the Kurdish people. They do not allow the Kurdish people to make their own decision on any matter and in the face of any option. Again for that reason, they force every person among the Kurdish people they can get hold of, one way or another, to choose them. The courts set up on this matter in Kandil, Çemi Kare and other camps are not mere farces. The stories we hear in the villages we visit, from those who experienced them firsthand, show that no one has been spared these threats. Whatever weakness someone has, they go at them from there. We listen to the story of a village where, because only 25 of over two hundred votes had gone to Erdoğan in the presidential election, first one and then two of the village notables were taken to the camp and tried in a court set up there, and because no verdict could be reached, their file was sent to Kandil as a higher court.

While the HDP conducts its election campaign in the East entirely through the force of arms and threats like this, its elements in Şırnak İdil may have had small election accidents. In any case, its friends in the West will surely not refrain from promptly applying another layer to the heavy makeup, with its democracy-sweetheart look, that it has applied over its true face.

Meanwhile, perhaps the HDP's armed election campaign's only alternative, that is, the only generally applicable argument it can sell, is the slogan "We'll go to Parliament" ("Biz'ler Meclise").

The slogan "Biz'ler Meclise," used to present the HDP as a genuine intellectual and middle-class movement exempt from every kind of criticism, in fact reveals the forces pushing the HDP toward the threshold and the HDP's racist chauvinist face. It hardly needs saying that the category of "Biz'ler" ("Us") that the HDP has created spontaneously creates a category of "Siz'ler" ("You") as well. Who are these "Biz'ler," and therefore the resulting "Siz'ler"?

Without prolonging the matter, let us say it: the HDP is doing politics founded on Kurdish racism, at the level of a fascist discourse, especially in the East and the Southeast. Moreover, the HDP's racist discourse is shaped around a defined Kurdish nation. This defined Kurdish nation is a Kurdishness that is secular, without Islamic sensibilities, and adorned with a set of pagan beliefs that might please Westerners too. If one looks at the Kurdish-language channels broadcasting along the HDP-PKK line, one will see that the people of this geography would need an interpreter to understand the Kurdish used on these channels, but for the HDP this is the real Kurdish. Accordingly, a Kurd who does not live as the HDP defines, does not believe as the HDP defines, does not speak as the HDP defines, is not a Kurd; he needs to be Kurdified.

Do you suppose Kemalism, which assimilated the Kurds for eighty years, did more than this?