The mothers who ask the HDP for their stolen children

In times when truths and falsehoods are mixed up with one another, the mothers' cry is the soundest yardstick for assessing a course of events, and the most revolutionary voice. Against the PKK, which for years has acquired great skill in deceiving Kurdish children by the most insidious means in the squares it has found vacant, and in using them as fuel for its own war, no voice could have exposed more fully the treachery, the betrayal and the child abuse of what it has done.

In fact, this is not a truth that is being displayed in such a striking manner by mothers for the first time. About five years ago, in the most effective period of the resolution process, we encountered a similar incident. As is well known, in exchange for the state halting its operations during the resolution process, what was expected of the organization was to bury its weapons and withdraw its militant elements abroad. The state kept its word and showed its sincerity by refraining from operations for a long time.

The state's attitude was in fact the result of the compassion it showed toward the lives of the children. The organization, however, preferred to treat this compassion of the state as a sign of weakness and as an opportunity. It used the period in which the state suspended its operations not to disarm and transfer its armed components abroad as it had promised, but to draft more Kurdish children into the mountains.

The PKK had long been recruiting people to the mountains, but it exploited this period with treacherous opportunism and drew the largest number of young people in its history to the mountains, with the logistical support provided by HDP organizations and municipalities. HDP organizations worked like recruitment centers for the mountains. The cultural centers affiliated with HDP municipalities were likewise busy providing all the necessary material infrastructure to those who would go to the mountains.

In the end, the age of the young people taken under arms had dropped to 13. Under these conditions, in which thousands of children under 18 were taken under arms, it had become impossible to make any calculation about the end of terror. On everyone's lips were the preparations for a great war that was about to begin. In fact, the power the organization used was not its own power; it was nothing other than a very bad abuse of democratic institutions and processes.

Democracy was on the tongues of the HDP members, while weapons never left their hands. The line between the PKK and the HDP had also been thoroughly erased. The HDP worked like the political arm of the PKK, and the PKK like the armed arm of the HDP. According to the democratic discourse they tried to pass off, the power of terror was seen and presented almost as the gain of a political party. Of course this process was not normal, and could not be.

The HDP's veteran politicians, ostensibly pro-peace, were showing the PKK's weapon from under the cloak, saying to the state: "Whether you establish peace with us on the terms we want is up to you; if you don't, a generation is coming after us with which you will not be able to sit down and talk. We are the last generation with which you can talk and reach an agreement."

Yet it was precisely these veteran politicians who ran the system that abused these children and drew them to the mountains. From the Kurdish children they poisoned at a young age, they were creating generations with whom no one could talk. Then they would come forward and, shamelessly, as though making a sacrifice, as though doing a favor, assign themselves the role of mediator between these generations and the state. Yet the root of the problem was none other than these veteran politicians. The greatest part of what we call the Kurdish problem was nothing but the abuse of Kurdish children by these veteran politicians, who lean on the PYDs, the JPGs, the EUs and the USAs.

Yet those Kurdish children had mothers and fathers. Right during the resolution process, a mother started a protest in reaction to her 14-year-old child, who had been taken on a picnic on April 23, being abducted from there to the mountains. As the mother's protest directly addressed BDP deputies and the municipality, the organization handed the child back to his family. On that day too, the BDP members, who were first expected to object to this themselves in order to help the resolution process, had brazenly gone so far as to say to these mothers, "Be proud of your children, your children have joined the struggle for Kurdistan," and the mothers reacted by saying, "If you are so fond of it, go to the mountains yourselves with the children you never let out of your sight, and wage that struggle."

The story of Hacire Akar, who some time ago, with the same reaction, went to the Diyarbakır HDP provincial headquarters and managed to get back her child abducted by the PKK, is truly very meaningful. It was learned that another child of Mother Hacire had also been forcibly abducted by the organization years ago and executed in the mountains. Other mothers whose children had likewise been deceived and taken to the mountains joined this new revolt that she started yesterday. The words of one of them were like a slap in the face of those who have for years tried to present PKK terror as a sociological problem.

The words spoken by one of the mothers in an argument with HDP members: "To hell with your Kurdistan cause! Let your son go to the mountains; do you care that we have lost our loved ones? You left no young people in Diyarbakır; they are either in prison or under the ground. The children of the poor go to the mountains, while you sit in your armchairs," lay bare the terror phenomenon that has been going on for years with all its sociology, politics, psychology and economics.

The mothers in Diyarbakır are revealing the great secret everyone has known until now, because the mother's heart exposes one by one the huge lies presented as truth by great national or international powers. Those lies cannot form a curtain between their hearts and their children. It shows that the PKK's ideology of claiming to look after the Kurds is a huge lie. Scratch the name HDP and the PKK beneath it is revealed; scratch its claim of devotion to the Kurdish problem and what emerges from underneath is the most disgusting child abuse for their own power.

So it turns out that in times when lies and truths are mixed up, the voice of mothers illuminates like a flare that points to the truths.