The Kurds who unmasked the PKK and its patrons

The heinous terror attack on Istiklal Avenue is ending up like a suicide attack for the organization, if not for the perpetrator. The investigation launched immediately after the incident exposed, at a record-breaking level, those who carried out the attack along with all their connections, and apprehended the great majority of those directly or indirectly involved in the act. In the meantime, all the possibilities behind the organization's carrying out such an act were also assessed, and the international powers supporting a terror organization that savagely targets the lives of civilians and children were exposed in the full sense of the word.

Of course, the centers that dared to order this terror act are receiving the answers to the messages they sent through the Turkish Armed Forces air operations that have continued for two days. Türkiye is showing that, to the messages terror acts may send, it gives the most effective answers, in the language they understand, not only to the carriers of the message but also to the owners of the message.

Another relationship exposed after the terror attack is the discursive support that the Western media has given to terror from the start. Upon the PKK connection that emerged following this incident, the German, French and British media began to await Türkiye's response more than anyone. But in the news language they used in expressing this expectation, they were saying that this savage act had been "committed by the Kurds" and that they were curiously waiting to see "what kind of response the Republic of Türkiye would give to the Kurds" in retaliation.

This news language alone exposes with complete clarity who is trying to set up what kind of game against Türkiye and the Kurds through the PKK.

Frankly, the Western media makes an identification between the PKK and the Kurds, and moreover, while doing so, while attributing to the Kurds the act that savagely slaughtered babies on Istiklal Avenue, it tries to present this act as an ordinary step in a war between Turks and Kurds. In the news language there is a sly invitation openly to treat with understanding, even to justify, the PKK's acts against civilians.

However much we try to explain against this that the PKK has nothing to do with the Kurds, our persuasiveness disappoints them most of all. The real truth of the matter is that they have made all their investments regarding Türkiye in this identification. Unfortunately, there has also always been an understanding within Türkiye that unconsciously supports their efforts in the name of so-called nationalism, and what brought the Kurdish problem as a calamity upon this nation in Türkiye was nothing other than this narrow nationalism. Discourses and policies of denial worked for a long time to push the Kurds out of the body of the nation.

The initiative that Mehmet Metiner and his friends launched through the organization of the Democracy and Unity Association and the Democracy and Unity Foundation has therefore been a very meaningful and valuable initiative against these efforts at identification. A team made up entirely of Kurds, who know their real position within this nation despite the narrow ultranationalist understanding, who see their destiny as one with Turks, Circassians, Arabs, and all the colors that built this country, address the whole world with the most solid conception of the nation on which Türkiye can rely.

Against those who for years have wanted to hear the far more primitive racist, separatist understanding of the PKK in the name of the Kurds, they cry out as the most authentic Kurds possible and proclaim to the whole world:

"We Kurds are never in favor of separation. We Kurds are against every kind of ethnic and political separatism. We regard the Republic of Türkiye as our own state. We are not the Kurds of others; we are the Kurds of Türkiye. Türkiye is our motherland. In an ethnic/racial sense we are of course not Turks. Just like the brotherly nations such as Turks, Arabs, Circassians and so on, we are a nation with a language and culture.

Our belonging and our loyalty are to our own state"

Is it possible for this approach to look agreeable to its owners, who want to use the PKK as a weapon against Türkiye?

The Kurds who embrace this approach are not unaware of the policies of denial experienced in this country for eighty years. Indeed, part of the political struggle of all of them has been to end that denial and to bring Türkiye to a level of a more livable democracy and freedoms, not only for the Kurds but for all elements. Under the roof of the AK Party, this struggle has found a very strong expression and chance of realization.

When they did not regard as their own those who take ethnic/racial belonging as the standard of value, they saw beside them the Turks, Circassians and Arabs who share the same consciousness. They did not regard as their own, all together, either the Turk or the Kurd who raises the banner of the ideology of racism. These Kurds, who say that this is what lies at the foundation of both their understanding of democracy and unity and their conception of the nation, now bear witness that the periods of denial, assimilation, oppression and persecution are behind us.

They also see very well the connection with jahiliyyah of persistently harvesting a grudge from history to the present over a denial and persecution that lie in the past, and of falling for provocations of hatred and revenge, and they reject this. Some may persistently want to impose that jahiliyyah on the Kurds, to keep them at that level. Muslim Kurds want to remember, to revive, the stance of the Prophet, whom they love passionately, against revenge and blood feud.

The Mothers of Diyarbakır exposed to the whole world the reality of the Kurdish children whom the PKK recruited by means of the HDP and put weapons in their hands, the reality of the PKK's child abuse. No reaction came from the Western media, which would raise the world to its feet if a girl of that age were married off, to thousands of children being abused in this way and driven into terror. The Mothers of Diyarbakır reversed the story that the PKK and the powers behind it tried to tell the whole world, and took down their masks.

The initiatives of the Democracy and Unity Association and the Democracy and Unity Foundation are no different from what the Mothers of Diyarbakır did against the powers that target this nation: dropping the masks, correcting the discourse.