Spoiling the cheese ships with empty talk

When Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu presented, with evidence and documents on a television channel, that an HDP deputy had organized taking a young Kurd to a terror camp, the scandal behind the curtain was exposed once again. The scandal behind the curtain is that an incident of this kind is not an out-of-the-ordinary activity for an HDP deputy.

It showed once more to those who did not know that the HDP, with its deputies, its organization buildings and its municipal administrations, has worked from the start like units recruiting militants for the PKK and providing finance for its activities. Indeed, the mothers who have for a long time been demanding from HDP officials their children whom the PKK armed and took to the mountains in Diyarbakır show to the whole world that this relationship can no longer be concealed. All the children of these mothers stopped by HDP buildings just before going to the PKK, and from there vanished without a trace. That those who have been deaf and blind to the cries of some 200 families, all of them, for so long, are now so fond of the freedom of Selahattin Demirtaş, who is under arrest for the incitement and provocation that cost 55 people their lives, is the height of the scandal.

One of the mothers whose child was delivered to the PKK through the mountain-recruitment operations organized by HDP members said the following words, containing the deepest and most meaningful lessons, to the mother who was demanding the release of Selahattin Demirtaş: "Selahattin Demirtaş is held in the state's prison to be tried for the crimes attributed to him. Instead of Selahattin, who has every legal right under the state's guarantee, let his mother demand from the organization Nurettin, who is a hostage in the hands of the PKK and has no guarantees whatsoever."

Whether Nurettin is a hostage in the hands of the organization, or an organization executive responsible for abducting thousands of innocent Kurdish children to the mountains and putting them under arms, let us not go into that at all. But the message of the mother in Diyarbakır reveals the contradiction at hand in all its starkness.

Let alone against the state, the fascistic violence it applies against its own comrades, all in the name of democracy, rights and law, has become legendary. Aytekin Yılmaz's books "Son Diktatör," "Yoldaşını Öldürmek" and most recently "Yüzleşerek Barışmak" are the most direct and striking testimonies of this fascistic violence. The indifference these books, which also point to countless similar testimonies and events, have been met with actually shows how deep the networks of aid, abetment and collaboration that HDPKK violence has within Turkey's media and politics.

The most tragicomic side of the matter is that a party whose discourse contains an abundance of anti-violence, freedom and democracy claims is a movement consisting of violence and fascistic practices in utter inverse proportion to these claims. PKK violence emerges as a serious terrorist movement not only against human bodies but also against speech, meaning and the human mind. Thus the fascistic practices that have turned into an ordinary culture beneath the HDP's discourses of democracy, law and freedom have an effect that renders the value of speech and discourse utterly meaningless, a murderous effect.

Yet it is quite clear that the PKK's surplus, with no shortage, of emphasis on democracy is nothing but the symptom of a problem. In fact, on this point one cannot help recalling perhaps the general rule. Excessive emphasis on something not only dilutes it and renders it meaningless, but the emphasis itself has a side that conceals something. For those who begin every word with an oath, not only do their oaths lose credibility after a while, but it also becomes quite visible that so many oaths arise only from the urge to conceal lying. Gradually, excessive emphasis on democracy can begin to be read as a measure of distance from democracy. A cheese ship is not run with talk; now it is made to stink so much that it makes the nostrils ache.

Even in the middle of the resolution process it offered to Turkey, saying "democracy" over and over, there was a strange "self-rule" practice. It filled the content of a concept that might even be considered a higher model of democracy with its practice of forcibly seizing people's homes, digging ditches in cities, building fortifications in these ditches for months in preparation for war, meanwhile bringing the life of cities to a halt and making their inhabitants live hell. In some theoretical circles, this practice was named "the restoration of politics against authoritarianism." Again a stinking word, a shameless definition that sinks the ship.

I wonder what kind of democratic procedure the PKK ran while carrying out this practice. For example, was it running a referendum process asking the city's people whether or not to enter such a war against the state? Did it ask, for example, the residents of the neighborhoods where it dug the ditches to be used in its war against the state? Did it involve in a democratic process the residents of the houses it used as shelters and whose bedrooms it turned into arsenals, while knocking down walls to make passages from the bedroom of one house to the bedroom of the next? Undoubtedly there was no trace of democracy, self-rule or politics anywhere in this situation created by the organization's unilateral decisions and seizures. There was only the arrogant, rude and utterly disrespectful rule of violence.

Those who were the perpetrators of such a practice would normally be expected not to utter the word democracy at any period of their lives. For the systematic crimes they committed against democracy and human rights are out in the open. What they did to the war they sanctified, by taking thousands of children away from their families by force and deception, taking them to the mountains, putting arms in their hands, and throwing them into environments in which they would be abused in every way, falls within the scope of crimes against humanity.

The domestic and foreign aiders and abettors of these crimes against humanity have become accustomed to this smell of cheese that has infected their own noses. With heads spinning from the stench, they do not even notice in which direction their ship is sailing.