Helpless strategies for the HDPKK

Following the appointment of trustees to municipalities that have been entangled in terror and have supported terror, the HDP's female co-chair made a statement: "We will poison the holiday for them too." Then, on the first day of the holiday, at a moment calculated to be the most crowded because of the holiday greetings, the PKK detonated a vehicle loaded with more than a ton of explosives near the AK Parti building in Van, wounding some 50 civilians.

Because of the barricade previously set up in front of the AK Parti building, the vehicle could not be brought up to the front of the party building, and because the holiday gathering at the party had been postponed to a time different from what had been calculated or predicted, the bombing missed its target. Otherwise the aim was to cause the maximum number of deaths. In that case the holiday would indeed have become a far more bitter poison, just as the HDP co-chair had threatened.

Then, on the 2nd day of the holiday, in Şemdinli, two terrorists knocked on the door of the house of Ahmet Budak, who had been a candidate from the AK Parti in the elections, giving the impression of a holiday visit; when he fell for their ill intent and came to the door, they brutally murdered him in front of his house and before the eyes of his children.

The holiday truly became poison here.

Doesn't the situation seem twisted and improper enough?

The HDP co-chair threatens to poison the holiday, and the PKK terrorist organization carries out the threat.

What kind of challenge is it, for the relationship between the HDP and the PKK to be exposed in this way?

The co-chair's threat in this form is in itself a challenge, but the immediate, hasty carrying out of this threat is a different kind of challenge altogether. It is a challenge that reveals a relationship that is insolent if ever there was insolence, brazen if ever there was brazenness, perverse if ever there was perversity.

They oppose the appointment of trustees in the name of democracy, yet they bring their answer to it from the place farthest from democracy, from terror and violence. Thus, with their own hands, they show that they do not deserve to draw even a breath within the limits of democracy, and that they have no right to remain even one day within the limits of legitimate politics.

In fact, they are not resorting to terror because trustees have been appointed to their local administrations.

Let us recall the sequence once more.

Trustees are being appointed in place of their municipalities because they have engaged in terrorist activity or supported terror.

But because they are accustomed to terror, they give their answer to this too with terror again.

That is, they have grown so used to conducting their own political activity intertwined with terror that they suppose this habit has turned into a right, or they want it to be accepted as such through a fait accompli.

Don't these two incidents show clearly enough how the HDP gets its votes in the Southeast, and how it has been able to establish such a hegemony over the votes in many regions?

In the last elections, all of the HDP's election campaigns were run by the PKK.

The PKK's armed elements, going from village to village and house to house, put great pressure on people not to run as candidates from the AK Parti.

This threat was in itself enough to deter, but if it was not enough, that is, those who somehow showed the courage to run as candidates were taken to nearby camps that were actively operating in those days, tried there, and sentenced. Many politicians, businessmen and opinion leaders were forced to pay heavy prices because of their membership of or sympathy for the AK Parti, or their candidacy, or even because they were not giving enough support to the HDP. These prices took the form of extortion, exile, being toyed with in their honor, or death.

What the HDPKK promised or offered the Kurds was never freedom. For freedom it left the Kurds only one option: submitting to the PKK.

A Kurd who does not submit to the PKK is tried and sentenced, in a single word, as a "Traitor Kurd."

That is why the first-degree victims of the PKK are the Kurds too.

The PKK is in effect the enemy of the Kurds not only because the political vision it offers them is incompatible with the Kurds' culture, custom and faith. On the contrary, the PKK in practice every day attacks the lives, property, children's future, dignity, honor and freedom of the Kurds.

The PKK is fighting the state in order to take guardianship over the Kurds.

As it sees that it cannot persuade the Kurds to attach themselves to it by democratic means, it exerts heavy pressure on them.

In truth, this is nothing other than the resolute application of a tactic that Abdullah Öcalan recommended to the PKK, saying that the Kurds understand no language other than the stick.

After the trench politics ended in fiasco, after the great opportunity seized on July 15 was also wasted from their point of view, and after Turkey's Jarablus intervention shattered the corridor dream they were trying to bring together,

the PKK has begun to wield its stick once again over the Kurdish people, whom it has thoroughly lost.

It is in a rush to bind the Kurds to itself again in this way. But now both that deeply insulting analysis Öcalan made about the Kurds no longer holds, and the option of demanding and obtaining from the Turkish Republic state the right to govern the Kurds, even if it cannot persuade them, has also been left out of the calculation and remained nothing more than a raw pipe-dream strategy.

Let us see how far the PKK will keep thrashing about in these desperate strategies.

At the end of this thrashing nothing is visible but sinking completely and perishing. The PKK has no choice but to see that a new conjuncture has emerged for itself too after July 15, and that in this conjuncture, in terms of violence, terror, ambush and treachery, no place is left for it.

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On this occasion, I wish urgent recovery to those wounded in the PKK's attack in Van, God's mercy upon our brother Ahmet Budak, who fell a martyr in the treacherous attack carried out in front of his children on the second day of the holiday in Şemdinli, and condolences to his relatives.