If we are to bear witness to Demirtaş and the DTK…

Selahattin Demirtaş, the former Co-Chair of the HDP, is giving testimony in court in the cases in which he is being tried in detention. I have no intention of going into the content of the defenses he has made in those cases, or into their consistency or inconsistency. As a matter of principle, I believe in the sanctity of the right of everyone on trial to defend himself, whatever the apparent charges and however apparent they may be. However much the judiciary in Turkey is from time to time criticized for politicization, in the end it functions.

However much I may be opposed politically, I refrain from voicing opinions in a way that would interfere with the defense rights of those on trial. The possibility that people on trial will turn out to be innocent should be, above all, more gladdening for the sake of humanity. Innocence should always be given a greater chance of winning, wherever it is and whatever ideological or psychological constraints it may be under.

That said, we all watched Demirtaş's performance in bringing people out into the streets, particularly during the events of 6-7 October, and how, as a result, 53 of our citizens, Yasin Börü foremost among them, lost their lives through a process of lynching. We also watched the open support Demirtaş himself gave to the trench terror that the PKK's youth organization unleashed in the cities of the Southeast under the name of self-rule, which led hundreds of people to their deaths, and his steering of the HDP youth toward it... Demirtaş surely has a defense regarding these events too; I will not meddle in that.

What makes me meddle now is that he has mentioned my name in defending himself. In one of the tweets in which he summarized his defense, he said: "Some of the DTK meetings that are the subject of the charges – see the irony of fate – we attended together with AKP deputies Galip Ensarioğlu and Yasin Aktay. All of them were legal meetings open to the press."

If there is a criminal side to the activity in question, it seems he has denounced us too not as "witnesses" but as "accomplices." If there is not, and if there is a crime, our attendance of course would not save it from being a crime. But I think it gives us the right to defend ourselves.

In the name of that defense I ask right away: For God's sake, is Demirtaş's participation in the DTK organization or its activities the same thing as my attending just one of its meetings from outside, along with many other invitees? Perhaps Demirtaş too was really invited from outside as I was, and has no organic relationship with that structure; or perhaps he has one, I do not know, let him defend himself. But what is the meaning of putting our names this way?

Throughout my life my stance on the Kurdish question has been clear. I stood for the Kurds attaining their rights as equal citizens in Turkey, but I never gave the slightest concession either to Kurdish nationalism or to the armed terror of the PKK. As a responsible citizen, I tried to make whatever contribution I could, for the benefit of Turkey and of the Kurdish people themselves, toward the PKK laying down its arms and a normalization taking place in Turkey. In those days such a process was under way. There was the prospect of the PKK laying down its arms and of a field opening up in which the issues could be politicized. The DTK had just been announced and had invited many politicians, academics and intellectuals to discuss the issues. At that time I was not a deputy, nor even a member of the AK Parti. I attended in my capacity as an academic, newspaper columnist and president of the Strategic Thinking Institute.

Contrary to what Demirtaş says, I attended not "meetings" but "only one meeting," and not "together with him" but "on my own," and I expressed my own views. Demirtaş also quoted from the article I wrote after that meeting. Yet the same article contains the continuation of the paragraph he quoted, and it expresses what I said at the meeting I attended once, upon invitation, that day, and my impressions of that meeting. Not in order to put Demirtaş's defense in difficulty in any way, but in order to express myself accurately against misunderstandings that may arise about me, I reproduce it verbatim.

"...Yet an attitude such as the unilateral declaration of Democratic Autonomy is not democratic at all. Moreover, perhaps the only thing incompatible with declaring such an autonomy from the center of an organization, dimensioning its content in its own detail, is democracy.

The BDP members want the city councils, communes, and neighborhood and village organizations they are trying to implement in the Southeast to be regarded as examples of 'the people organizing themselves' and of direct democracy. Yet when one looks closely at these examples, what is clearly seen is nothing other than a thoroughly professionalized and armed organization ruling the people, rather than the people organizing themselves. How this form of administration, which replaces a state that has become democratic, for better or worse, with an authority-hungry organization, turns into a totalitarian interim regime over the people is a separate reality.

Meanwhile, even in the region, no credible argument can be put forward as to whom the self-defense units they have brought onto the agenda as part of the democratic autonomy project would defend against whom. Galip Ensarioğlu rightly warns that, let alone any concern about separation, these units will produce no result other than the armed domination of Kurds over Kurds.

Different tendencies stand out in the approaches of those who have taken up Kurdish politics toward the process. Some are aware that the state's change in the direction of democratization played an important role in the development of the process in this way. But it is seen that some believe that the softening in the state or the recognition of the Kurds was achieved thanks to the armed struggle. With a feeling of having won a victory over the state, they seem not to discuss their demands but to declare an action plan. In doing so they are in fact drifting toward a point that rejects politics as a negotiation. What they probably do not take into account is that the state, which today has come to the point of 'recognizing the Kurd' and increasingly of 'seeing all his demands,' has come to this point not by force of arms but through law and politics. It follows that they still have not understood that the state, accustomed to speaking with arms for thirty years, will never tire of dying and killing.

Yet there is still a layer of the state that wholeheartedly desires that armed conflict start again even today, and that does not shrink, in this cause, from weaving all manner of intrigue when necessary, and this layer sees war as a necessity for its own vitality. Therefore, no one has the right to fall into the error of perceiving peace as a victory in the name of Kurdish politics. Especially in the Turkish case and in the context of the Kurdish problem, we must never forget that war is seen by some as 'a profitable field of investment.'

In that case, other than those who have a calculation of taking a share of this profit, who else could insist on keeping this field open?"