How can what begins with coups and terror end in democracy?

Looking at the recent policies of both the EU countries and the US toward Turkey and toward the Middle East in general, the following picture becomes perfectly clear. The Westerners' preference in Turkey and across the entire Islamic world is not democracy but dictatorship. That they label genuine democratic experiences as they please, presenting them as incompatible with democratic values and keeping them under legitimacy pressure, is recorded as nothing but a performance of hypocrisy.

In this performance Germany is seen to have surpassed itself by far. While complaining about democracy in Turkey, it does not even shrink from openly playing the role of a new Bekaa for every kind of terrorist activity against Turkey. Turkey has not drifted from democracy in the slightest; it is evident that the outcomes they desire for democracy in Turkey are outcomes that can just as easily be replaced by terrorist activities. Those terrorist organizations that they have not hesitated to support openly these days, in order to pull Turkey onto the line of democracy they imagine, are the perpetrators of coups and terror processes that directly target Turkey's democratic order, the will of the people, their peace, their safety of life, their freedom and their tranquility.

Today we have truly come to wonder about the answer to this question: is there, among Europe's democratization strategies, a place for supporting military coups against a country that has moved away from democracy, or for trying to weaken it through terrorist activities to render it ineffective?

Does FETÖ, which says "every means is permissible to reach the goal," take this principle, this yardstick, from Europe itself perhaps? If so, then at the root of the democracy that Europe demands of Turkey lie coups, fascism, massacres, murders, terrorism and every kind of savagery. How can what begins with coups and terror end in democracy?

The line of democracy that Turkey has adopted today is a process whose beginning and end are clear. It is a process that is democracy at the start, democracy in the middle and democracy at the end. There must be an explanation for Germany's sheltering on its own soil, with safety and comfort assured, Adil Öksüz, the most important name of an organization that carried out a military coup to destroy democracy in Turkey. This cannot simply be handled under the right to humanitarian asylum afforded to people fleeing a repressive country that has deviated from democracy. Germany is a country that has tied to a standard of law and humanity the principle that a Nazi officer, even sixty years after the crimes he committed, cannot find shelter anywhere in Europe today. Without forgetting the facilities that the same Germany has given to all the members of an organization that committed crimes against democracy and humanity in Turkey, to PKK terrorists, we are not unaware of the justifications and standards by which it provides this harboring. In fact, Germany's attitude these days sheds more light with each passing day on the background of all the attacks this country has faced from FETÖ and PKK since the Gezi events. The stubborn harboring it carries out of FETÖ, PKK and DHKP-C terrorists in effect makes it appear as their owner. Perhaps it is not alone in this ownership, but Germany seems to have made this ownership a little more obvious.

This situation is a clear picture showing that especially the activities of PKK terrorism have in fact nothing to do with Turkey's own internal problem. Had they had, then given the many steps taken on the Kurdish question in the last decade, the PKK, which has been left without any justification or pretext, should have come to an end. Yet the closer Turkey has come to a solution on the Kurdish issue, the more the PKK has intensified its terror and has, as it were, become even more provoked against Turkish-Kurdish-nation fusion in the country.

It is better understood that in fact it is not the PKK but its owners behind it who are provoked. The owners of the PKK are never Kurds, and of course the PKK as it is never serves the Kurds and does not represent them. On the contrary, the PKK, which makes life even more unbearable for the Kurds with each of its actions, knows very well in whose name and at what price it does this.

Unfortunately, at the academic and intellectual level, the PKK, with the strong PR support of its Western owners as well, is subjected to a separate treatment, together with its terror or despite its terror.

The dynamics of this at the level of discursive power relations are not incomprehensible. The Western perspective serves as a good curtain for our academic-intellectual eye and makes it possible to look at it sympathetically. When long-haired, carrion-eating girls carrying Kalashnikovs are used like page-three girls to adorn their newspapers, it shows that the labeling of terrorism is not a matter of principle but ultimately merely a matter of presentation. Those who are against "some terrorists" rather than against "terror" can of course never put an end to the terror problem.

In this respect, attitudes toward terror in the world have become an interesting field where hypocrisy is on display. Those who move against DEAŞ as terror, but hold back from labeling the PKK as terrorist, show that their problem is not terror but only the obstacles before them. This hypocrisy of course feeds terror further. It prevents, overall, its complete elimination.

One must stand against terror without falling into this contradiction.

The declaration published in recent days by some academics, intellectuals and civil society activists against the hegemony of this Western-academic-intellectual discourse that supports terror should be taken seriously. The text of the declaration and the full list of signatories can be found at http://www.teroredurde.com/tr/. The declaration underlines in particular that the PKK terror's attacks, especially in recent months, on teachers, security personnel, civilian politicians and workers amount to obstructing the right to life and the right to work. It also emphasizes what kind of sabotage the organization, which raids construction sites to abduct and kill workers and burns construction machinery to prevent services from reaching people in response to the Kurdish people's demands for roads, bread, jobs, health, services and a good life, commits against working life and the development of the regions where Kurds live in large numbers, and it says the following:

"We want the terror that obstructs our nation's right to free enterprise, right to life, right to work and right to engage in politics to stop immediately. Violence against teachers who want to educate our children, civilian politicians, the civilian population, and all workers who build dams and roads and provide education and health services also targets our entire people. We curse the PKK terrorist organization, which does not want Turkey's development and progress, a life worthy of human dignity for workers, and civilian politics to be pursued …

"… We note for history the silence of some labor and professional organizations, and of some academics, who never stop talking about democracy and human rights, in the face of the PKK's massacres.

"We invite international trade union organizations, human rights organizations and the EU to act with sensitivity toward these massacres, which are not taken up in the agendas and reports of international trade union organizations and the EU."