Is trench politics fit for the Kurds?

What the whole struggle of the PKK, which claims to defend the rights of the Kurds, wage their identity struggle and liberate them, means for the Kurds has found its most concrete expression in the trenches dug in front of their own homes, in their streets and avenues. The HDP, which has found a political ground on which it can express in the most radical manner everything it could promise the Kurdish people, squanders this freedom by singing the praises of the trenches dug by the PKK youth.

Beyond the praise, wherever there is trench activity and a measure taken against it by the security forces, HDP deputies turn up on the other side of the trench and set about defending those trenches. HDP deputies have drawn up a trench-watch rota among themselves. Their real work is not in parliament but in the duties they undertake at these watch posts.

The HDP members continue to glorify under the heading of "trench politics" these terror incidents that have turned cities into battlefields and made life unbearable for the Kurds. Yet the trench is in itself a deep obstacle that destroys politics.

Democracy in Turkey has put up with all of the HDP's impudence and all of its ties with the terrorist organisation until now, perhaps in the hope that it would close these trenches and persuade it that weapons are no longer needed. The HDP's institutional existence and its representation in the TBMM should in themselves have been a factor persuasive enough to convince the PKK to disarm. Yet with each passing day the opposite relationship is displayed more and more. The HDP does nothing other than operate under the leadership of the PKK, which regards armed force as the thing in hand, and represent all of its war activities in the Assembly. The HDP is nothing but a propaganda facility for the PKK, which behaves as the real boss.

The HDP, for its part, has no serious complaint about this role written for it. What can be expected of a deputy in a democracy is, above all, a stance against weapons and violence. Far from preventing the digging of trenches or filling in those that have been dug, HDP deputies are busy going to cities where there is no trench activity and starting such activities there as well. They do not refrain from displaying an approach that virtually declares places in the Southeast where no trenches are dug to be traitor cities.

Despite all their efforts, and despite the joint work of the PKK and the HDP, the trenches cannot be spread to the desired extent. The Kurdish people in particular see that this policy is not politics, and they leave the PKK alone in this action and abandon the HDP in this policy.

With all this trench politics, it is impossible for either the HDP or the PKK to persuade anyone that they are pursuing any gain for the Kurds, for the Kurds' benefit. Against the state's approach to the matter over the last ten years, this reaction displayed by the HDPKK is distancing both the HDP and the PKK from Kurdish politics by leagues with each passing day. But this distancing increases the PKK's irritability even more. Trench politics is in fact a distorted effort by the PKK to hold on against this ground that is increasingly slipping away.

Resorting to force as it loses the hearts of the Kurds is the typical "either you will be mine or the earth's" psychopathic reaction. It is already seen that at least 200 thousand people have migrated from the region solely because of the trenches. It is also noted that the HDP feels no problem whatsoever about this, and even regards it virtually as a gain of its struggle.

Meanwhile, the more meticulously the state distinguishes between civilians and terrorists while fighting the trenches, the more the PKK's frenzy grows. The propaganda performance it puts on, writing all the deaths it has caused into the state's account as a massacre, is of the kind that drives one to fury. But a credibility inversely proportional to the height of this performance emerges, because it is the Kurdish people who experience, feel and pay the price of trench politics first-hand.

The Kurds now see very well into what kind of "mafia organisation" the demand it expresses as "self-government" and "democratic autonomy" has turned for the Kurdish people. They see that self-government has made their city unlivable by digging trenches in front of their homes, and those who can flee from it do so anyway.

The Kurds experience first-hand that there is not a crumb of democracy in Democratic Autonomy. They also see that those who are autonomous are not the people but the armed organisation that has set out to rule them. The PKK was demanding both democratic autonomy and self-government from the state. The concrete meaning of what it said was this: leave the Kurdish people to me and let me rule them. Frankly, this was not a demand for a right but a demand for a privilege. A demand for an iqta' by force from the state over the Kurdish people. And it was expressing this in the language of armed terror, thinking it could obtain this privilege by wearing down the state and the people of Turkey.

So when the PKK demanded the Kurds from the state in order to rule them, how was it going to obtain the Kurds' consent? At this point Orhan Miroğlu's observation explains the situation well enough: "The PKK has no matter of persuading the Kurds. The PKK's relationship with the Kurds is a master-slave relationship. The PKK thinks and acts, the Kurdish people's part is to give support, to sacrifice their sons and daughters, and it has been so for years.

The trench wars have already forced 200 thousand people to migrate. This is a problem for the state but honey and cream for the PKK! Those who go, go; those who stay, stay; let those who stay show loyalty to self-government, that is enough! There is anyway nothing those who stay can do other than loyalty."