What does Kandil's "no" campaign promise the Kurds?

It is well known that on the presidential system the HDP stands on the same line as the CHP. It has opposed the change from the very beginning. Although in the TBMM it could not say "no" to these changes for the sake of "not harming" the CHP, it is preparing to run the "no" campaign in the referendum in the harshest way.

Co-Chair Selahattin Demirtaş, who is now in detention over cases opened on the grounds that he has never managed to keep a distance from terrorism and has even openly supported the terrorist organization with his actions and rhetoric, had, on the road to the 7 June elections, and moreover right in the middle of the resolution process, stepped up at the group meeting and said, with the strange self-confidence lent by his inflated ego, "O Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as long as the HDP exists you will not become president, we will not let you become president." By keeping his entire speech to just this one sentence, he showed that he cared that this message not be mixed with any other message before or after it.

Of course, the matter back then was not about whether Erdoğan would become president or not either. The presidency issue is simply the issue of a system of government that can carry Turkey's weight and size. But reducing the matter solely to Erdoğan's presidency was nothing other than a provocation in itself. Truth be told, even so, there was no justification whatsoever for tying the whole of Kurdish politics to opposition to Erdoğan. This should not have been what someone who claims to speak on behalf of the Kurds says to Erdoğan, who among all the rulers there have ever been has made the greatest improvements for the Kurds in Turkey, has ended the unsolved murders, ended the state of emergency on the day he came to power, and eliminated all the state-side justifications of the Kurdish problem.

There was a very clear incongruity between Erdoğan's Kurdish policy and Demirtaş and the HDP basing all their politics on opposition to Erdoğan. How and with what arguments this incongruity would be explained to the Kurdish people was a serious question. Truth be told, this question found its answer quickly in the HDP's election campaign, supported from all sides. In the HDP, whose election campaign in the east was run by the terrorist organization itself, there was no one who did not rush to its aid in the west. While the Doğan media group, with all its staff and all its media turncoats, supported the election campaign of the HDP, which was being used in those days as a battering ram to topple Erdoğan, the CHP, in an election in which it was itself competing, committed the oddity, unseen in Turkish political history, of directing a portion of its votes to the HDP.

Moreover, an attempt was made to manufacture a romantic revolutionary hero out of Demirtaş, who played a role in the deaths of 54 people, Yasin Börü among them, through his open incitement in the Kobani events, by putting a saz in his hands. They thought they could create a SYRIZA out of the HDP, which with great shamelessness declared and confessed that it leaned on terrorist organizations, and a Tsipras out of Demirtaş. But even this mask they tried to fit on the PKK and therefore the HDP did not stay on its face for long.

Demirtaş and his HDP showed the Kurds no reasonable justification on the ground, and did not even try to. After all, in the east the most persuasive method of propaganda, namely the gun, can make even the most absurd claim very convincing. A great many slanders and nonsense, from the sentence "Kobani is about to fall" to the slander that Erdoğan is an enemy of the Kurds and cooperates with DEAŞ, were successfully (!) propagated. Whose option was it not to believe this nonsense? The alternative to believing and obeying was known anyway.

Two years have passed since that day. The HDP, instead of using the democratic politics opportunity it had seized after 7 June to roll back Kandil's tutelage and open the way for politics, squandered it terribly by surrendering further to that tutelage. It surrendered to the policy of armed violence that Kandil consolidated by abusing the resolution process. Instead of saying stop to that violence, it surrendered to it and took on its political representation.

Instead of saying to the PKK, which occupied the homes of the Kurds from whom it got its votes and started an urban war, "Stop, what are you doing, these are our friends who gave their votes trusting us, who expect us to improve their lives even further, what right do we have to destroy their homes and barns!", it continued, like the PKK's propaganda machine, unconditionally to blame the state that defended the Kurdish people against those terrorists, and to protect and shield those who carried out this urban terror.

There was nothing understandable or explicable, from the standpoint of its own political discourse, in the HDP's agreeing to play the role of battering ram against Erdoğan, who was conducting the resolution process with it and who had solved the Kurdish issue by overcoming it through openings. But the politics of violence in the east, because of the de facto support it received in the west too, did not need an explanation.

Today too there is nothing understandable in its opposition. But the voice coming from Kandil evidently leaves it no trouble of constructing an argument, and promises that it will again deliver the might it needs from the end of the gun barrels.

The prominent names of the PKK, who while carrying out the most murderous terrorist activities against Turkey have made a thousand of the crimes against humanity they committed into one penny, Cemil Bayık, Duran Kalkan, Mustafa Karasu, expressed their stance on the process of the popular vote on the presidential system in the answers they gave in an interview.

What all of them say is that the presidential system will bring one-man rule and dictatorship to Turkey. And what they all agree on is that the referendum offers a historic opportunity to get rid of Erdoğan's dictatorship and that, for this reason, the PKK will work with all its elements to bring out a "no" in this referendum...

What kind of conception of democracy does the PKK terrorist organization, which accuses Erdoğan of dictatorship, have, one wonders? What is the concern of the most murderous, most single-voiced terrorist organization the world could ever see regarding the change of Turkey's system of government?