From the window the mothers opened: the story of 50 years

The mothers in Diyarbakır who demand from the HDP their children kidnapped by the PKK are not merely revealing the great secret that everyone knows. They are at the same time inviting us, as it were, to rewrite all the experience of the last 50 years on the Kurdish issue and the fight against terror.

The lifelong lingering grievance of the mother who went back without being able to say a word to her son whom she visited in prison because speaking Kurdish was forbidden, or who was struck with a gendarme's rifle butt for attempting to utter a word or two of Kurdish, and the accumulated anger of the other children to whom she recounted this grievance...

The feeling of revenge nourished in the minds of children and young people by the insults and arbitrary violence inflicted on everyone, women, elderly, children, without distinction, when security forces entered homes in their boots during a raid on the village in pursuit of terrorists.

The resentment accumulated by the unforgotten and constantly recounted scenes in which security forces arrived suddenly one night, said "you are harboring terrorists in your village", and forced everyone to migrate at once without allowing even an hour to gather themselves.

When all these experiences of the period were added on top of a forbidden mother tongue, an identity and culture that could not be expressed, and humiliated selves, they provided the most suitable environment for terror to flare up and for these flames to be constantly fed. This environment provided the most basic material for those who wanted to invest in terror.

There was also an entrepreneurial organization ready for this job with its international support, and it made very good use of this environment for its own investment. It took the state apparatus several generations to notice this and to think of taking effective measures. Until then the investor organization set up mechanisms to constantly produce and reproduce its human resources, and worked in a way that determined the ideology of several generations.

Meanwhile the state gave the organization a far more strategic support by trying also to block its own possible ways of turning back after self-criticism and reassessment. In the nineties, as the state entered the 28 February process, by also banning the Islamic education of new generations it condemned the Kurdish generations entirely to the PKK's profile of the irreligious, valueless, racist and hedonist human being.

Without doubt we are today far from the environment in which the state committed these terrible mistakes against the Kurds. It is no longer possible to provoke any Kurdish young person with feelings of anger, revenge and resentment caused by the mistakes the state made.

However, in that hedonist, racist-nationalist environment created over three generations, young people are still exposed to a certain process of ideological identification. Even without any mistake by the state, a serious feeling of ethnic nationalism has formed in at least a significant part of the Kurdish youth.

To be sure, as long as it is not involved in violence, ethnic or regional nationalism is a legitimate factor in politics. Of course nobody can interfere with which identity anyone wishes to express themselves in politics. But the problem for Turkey is that this ethnic nationalism regards even expressing itself through terror as a "democratic right" for itself. Yet violence cannot be considered a right for any democratic element anywhere.

We can say that today all the problems of terror stemming from the state's wrong practices have been eliminated. Despite this, our Kurdish citizens above all must reflect very well on the fundamental reason why terror has not ended. Unfortunately, for the last fifty years the Kurds have been wanted as a card in all the international dirty games that are wanted to be played over the region. Although this is in fact known, the criminal dimension of the state's mistakes, which for years practically served these games on a platter, makes itself felt even more.

Now we see very clearly that the non-ending of the PKK terror, which has occupied Turkey for years, is not related only to the state's policy. The ABD stands behind the PKK with all its superpower, with its enormous arms aid, its intelligence and logistical support, and its international political solidarity. We also now see clearly that the organization that has not been dealt with for years is not a problem arising from Turkey's own internal dynamics, its sociology or its political imprudence. Even if it displayed the greatest prudence today, there is at least one world superpower that does not refrain from continuing to support this organization.

So does the ABD give this support to the PKK out of love for the Kurds? Does it do all this to support the one poor Kurdish people left stateless in the region? Unfortunately there are those who fall for the three and a half interests the ABD will provide, and for the benefit that the ABD thinks it will provide the Kurds, even at the price of mercilessly oppressing other peoples.

If there is a Kurd who thinks so, I doubt his mind, his faith and his Kurdishness. The ABD can have neither mercy, nor humanity, nor aid to show to any people of the region. To the extent that we have had the chance, after all these years, to know it as we know our own child, the ABD only uses peoples. While doing so it is merciless to other people, and then it turns around and is merciless to the very peoples it used as well.

It was not the PKK that Turkey has been fighting for years but the ABD supporting it. That is why the matter has no connection either with the Kurdish issue or with Turkey's own internal dynamics.

Unfortunately, it is also the risks created by this situation that prevent deepening further the process that Turkey has launched since 2002, in which it has taken the most radical democratic steps regarding the Kurds. For even the democratization process is being thwarted not so much because of ordinary Kurdish citizens as because of these risks with international dimensions, which exploit it for their own strategies.

Let no one presume to reproach Turkey for not being more democratic under these open threats. Least of all let them think themselves very clever and Turkey a fool.